Don't Blame Sliding Sterling on the Referendum

My prophecy department has suggested that I should write about the fall in the Pound Sterling. I feel very much entitled to do so as  have been standing on the platform with my watch in my hand, drumming my fingers and waiting for this particular long-expected event to come steaming in, for some time now.  

Rather more than three years ago, I wrote the following:

‘..One of the things which constantly strikes me about modern Britain is that there must be many people who would actually quietly like to see the collapse , or at least the shrinkage, of the currency. They cannot hope to pay off their debts in any other way .The same is true of the government, which has no idea how it will manage its deficit, and borrows more each day, an action no less stupid than Weimar Germany’s incessant printing of worthless money. How convenient a large inflation would be for them.

‘Could anyone do such a thing deliberately? Possibly. The book (‘When Money Dies’, which I was reviewing at the time) quotes but does not endorse suggestions that both the Bolsheviks and some of the Warsaw Pact states deliberately used hyperinflation to destroy the hierarchies, the certainties  and the middle classes which stood in their way. I have seen no proof of this, but it is not incredible, and we all know John Maynard Keynes’s attribution to Lenin of the (justified) belief that if you wish to destroy a nation, you first debauch its currency.  It is also a  very good way of destroying the power and influence of the independent middle class, who are the mainstay of any truly free and law-governed society, and the reliable regiments of conservatism.

‘But of course those who are in charge of all these things are not Bolsheviks.

‘They are ordinary politicians, far too stupid to be so well-organised or directed. It is just an accident, a bungle, an unintended consequence by people too dim and short-sighted to understand that bills have, in the end, to be paid somehow. I am not sure whether that makes it any better, though. The results will still be very bad.’

For full article see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/when-money-dies-the-horrors-of-inflation.html

…

And also this :’ It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness.  Why do they do it?

It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a  government which never had any ideas in the first place.  As far as I can find out , Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t actually say ‘The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency’. Maynard Keynes rather hesitantly attributed it to the old monster. But it’s true,  whoever said it. Since Gold-backed currencies gave way to paper, man has had to have faith in banknotes – so much faith that perhaps he hasn’t had the strength to have faith at the same time in God, who is considerably more credible than the average Cabinet or Central Bank.

He has to believe absolutely that the pretty blue, green or pink beer-token in his wallet is worth the goods which he purchases with it, and so does the shopkeeper who accepts it in return for those goods. He has to believe with all his heart that the columns of figures in his bank account stand for real value, along with the price he thinks he can get for his house if he sells it.

Once he ceases to do so, then money dies.

For full article see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/inflation-the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings-speak.html

Well, this is coming to pass, and it is most provoking to be told that it is ‘caused’ by the referendum vote to leave the EU. No doubt this event was the trigger for the rapid slide of Sterling. But that was because the markets were waiting for such a trigger, and no doubt a lot of currency dealers, by gambling on a ‘Leave’ vote, did well in the money markets by betting on a post-referendum drop.

Sop now it has become established wisdom, and it may even be that, because the media are used by the markets to bring about little jumps and falls in the ratings of stocks or currencies, we will now see a constant link between the two, with each stumble and shudder along the road to exit being followed or accompanied by a lurch in the currency.

But this is correlation, not causation. Those with savings have known for years that inflation has been eating into their carefully hoarded stores of wealth, pensions included,  thanks to the virtual abolition of interest and the repeated raids on pension schemes by Labour and Tory chancellors, which have nearly killed off what was once quite a solid sector of the economy, and left a lot of people wondering if they’ll die before the money runs out, or the other way round. . The message from investment advisers has been ‘put your money in something risky if you want to earn anything’. The old idea, that you could make a steady if modest income by just leaving the money on a reasonably safe deposit, is gone, I think for good.

But now those without savings, those living from hand-to-mouth and those (almost everyone under 60) with non-mortgage debts, must experience it too. For them it is a much more mixed experience. Their debts will visibly shrink, which they (and the government, whose debts will also shrivel visibly) will enjoy. But a lot of prices will rise, because we now import so much, and foreign holidays, which so many now regard almost as a right, will become swiftly costlier (perhaps it is time for British holidaymakers to sample the cheaper joys of the Crimea) . Our few export industries will be delighted. Those which rely on imported goods for their raw materials and fuel will not be. My guess, on the basis of what I think I know about our economy, is that a lower pound will hurt us more than it helps us.

Having experienced Harold Wilson’s famous 1967 devaluation (from $2-80 to £2-40) I am trained to laugh at political claims that it won’t hurt the money in your pocket. But in those days the government took direct responsibility for it, and was blamed for it.  I wasn’t born in  September 1949, when the Attlee government devalued from $4-03 to $2-80, it was a much more savage loss. But the country was well aware ( as it isn’t now) that it had run out of money and credit, and the humiliation just had to be absorbed. Fear of an even more humiliating repeat forced the Tories to abandon the Suez adventure seven years later.

Almost exactly 18 years before, in September 1931,  Britain had come off the Gold Standard, Winston Churchill’s disastrous equivalent to the ERM crisis, unsustainable because we were broke and in debt, which we had not been in 1914 when he had helped get us into the Great War that ruined us financially. At that time the Pound sold for $4-87, roughly the same as the just under Five Dollars standard before 1914 (it is amusing to recall that transatlantic travellers reckoned in those days that the old English shilling was the exact equivalent of the American Quarter, which it also closely resembled in size and weight). During the US Civil War, in 1864, the Pound brought in almost ten dollars, peaking at $9-97. That’s war for you, so it is surprising that during World War One, while Britain was piling up a huge unrepayable (and still unrepaid) debt to the USA, the rate did not sink below $4-76, and fell only to $4-43 when hostilities ended, reaching $3-66 in 1920 before being dragged up again by the return to the Gold Standard.  

During the 1930s the dollar-pound rate fluctuated between about 3-15 to above 5-00, but in 1940 was fixed at just above four dollars for the rest of the war.

These figures, like the old rate between Sterling and the abolished Deutschemark, always seem to me to give a true idea of how we were really doing against comparable economies in these periods. The answer is, increasingly badly. But the current account deficit, not the same as the trade deficit or the Treasury deficit, is now about as bad as it has ever been, and I can think of no peacetime circumstances when the fundamental features of the economy have ever been so bad, and had so little hope of sustained recovery. To blame the pound’s fall on the referendum is absurd.

'Dyslexia' - a pernicious myth exploded,

The following articles. published in the Mail on Sunday on 2nd March and 3rd June 2007, are for some reason not easily found in the archives of this blog. As I'm currently running into various people who still think this imaginary complaint exists, I thought I would revive them and post them here.

 

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is an excuse for bad teachers By: Peter Hitchens I DOUBT there has ever been a society so easily fooled by pseudo-science and quackery as ours is. Millions of healthy people take happy pills that do them obvious harm, and are increasingly correlated with inexplicable suicide and worse. Legions of healthy children are drugged into numbness because they fidget during boring lessons, and countless people are persuaded that they or their children suffer from a supposed disease called 'dyslexia', even though there is no evidence at all that it exists. A few weeks ago I rejoiced at the first major cracks in this great towering dam of lies. Dr Richard Saul brought out his courageous and overdue book, ADHD Does Not Exist. I also urge everyone to read James Davies's book Cracked, on the inflated claims of psychiatry since it sold its soul to the pill-makers. Now comes The Dyslexia Debate, published yesterday, a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics - Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University. Their book makes several points. There is no clear definition of what 'dyslexia' is. There is no objective diagnosis of it. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. The widespread belief that it is linked with high intelligence does not stand up to analysis. And, as Parliament's Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: 'There is no convincing evidence that if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.' THIS is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as the book's authors say: 'Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.' These include extra resources and extra time in exams. And then there's the hope that it will 'reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility'. I think that last point is the decisive one and the reason for the beetroot-faced fury that greets any critic of 'dyslexia' (and will probably greet this book and article). If it's really a disease, it's nobody's fault. But it is somebody's fault. For the book also describes the furious resistance, among teachers, to proven methods of teaching children to read. Such methods have been advocated by experts since Rudolf Flesch wrote his devastating book Why Johnny Can't Read almost 60 years ago. There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of 'dyslexia' does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught. It also does nothing for that great majority of poor readers. They are robbed of one of life's great pleasures and essential skills. What they need, what we all need, is proper old-fashioned teaching, and who cares if the silly teachers think it is 'authoritarian'? That's what teaching is.

DYSLEXIA? A FANTASY TO EXCUSE THE LIBERAL WRECKERS By: PETER HITCHENS DONNING my stab proof vest and my anti-slime suit, I'd like to praise Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University for daring to state the truth. Dyslexia is a fantasy. This is especially important in the exam season. A bewildering number of students claim extra time, demand differently coloured question papers or are issued with equipment worth up to £10,000 – at our expense – on the grounds that they are sufferers from this fictional complaint. Those who take their exams without these things are, with reason, growing more and more resentful about this special treatment. Like its equally suspect cousin 'ADHD', dyslexia is a symptom of a society in trouble and an education system wrecked by liberals. Rather than admit their policies are wrong, the liberals pretend millions of perfectly healthy, intelligent young people are in some way disabled. Their really clever move is to persuade the victims of this trick to rejoice in their victimhood. The enraged letters and emails I shall now get, claiming to be 'insulted', will come from healthy, intelligent people who actually want to believe they have 'dyslexia', or from their parents. Perhaps a small minority of them really do have something physically wrong with them. If so, their cases are completely different from the majority, and shouldn't be bracketed with them. Most alleged dyslexics have simply never been taught to read properly, thanks to some of the worst schools in the rich world and the dogmatic refusal of many teachers to use the one tried, effective method – synthetic phonics. Instead, even now, many persist in the 'mixture of methods' which confuses pupils. It often also confuses parents who are assured that synthetic phonics are part of this mixture. But phonics must be taught exclusively to work. Meanwhile, TV and computer games have displaced books in most children's lives. Few now read regularly for pleasure. Without Harry Potter there would be fewer still. Professor Elliott, an educational psychologist, points out that there is no clear diagnosis of dyslexia.There are at least 28 different definitions of it. Yet parents, alleged sufferers and teachers actively welcome the classification – as it relieves them of responsibility for the trouble. But in countries where this fad is not indulged, the schools still teach reading properly. And these countries are our rivals in a world where a growing contest for scarce energy means Britain's days of wealthy security may be numbered – and will be numbered if we don't stop making excuses for ourselves.

You voted for a revolution... you got a Blair robot

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

So 17 million people voted for a revolutionary change in the way we are governed, and the result is going to be Theresa May. These ignored multitudes were not, I think, hoping for yet another Blairite robot, a living symbol of everything that is wrong with our political system. But this is what they are going to get.
I am sure Mrs May is a perfectly nice person and an ideal neighbour. But this is not the point. She is completely unfitted to answer the national demand for change.
She is a conventional Left-wing liberal. She wanted, for heaven’s sake, to stay in the EU, though she lacked the nerve to campaign actively for this. Given the growing campaign to overturn the referendum by guile and fear, can she be trusted not to fudge us back in?
Look at her. Trevor Phillips, when he was boss of the HQ of Political Correctness, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said in 2011 that Mrs May was ‘just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women’s equality’.
She is keenly politically correct. She mysteriously converted from opposition to all-women shortlists for parliamentary selections, to support for them. As Home Secretary she has done little to reduce or control the mass immigration which worries so many.
She also prefers not to mention in reference books that she went to a girls’ grammar school, strange behaviour for someone now alleged to support such schools. She is even quieter about having attended a private school.
Her most important political act was her speech in October 2002 in which she described the Tories she now seeks to lead as ‘the nasty party’.
Incidentally, in the same speech, she specifically endorsed Anthony Blair’s Iraq War policy, perhaps the single stupidest act in modern politics. Her only criticism of Mr Blair was about his ability to deliver on policies she supported.
Crucially she demanded that the Tory Party should adapt itself to Blairism. ‘Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered. Soldiering on to the next Election without radical, fundamental change is simply not an option.’
The Blairite insider Steve Richards has written about this era, saying that, in the 2001 Election(NB: I originally referred,erroneously, to a non-existent 2002 election. My apologies for the mistake.), the Blair entourage were often in an exasperated fury. ‘You don’t get it,’ they would occasionally scream. ‘The Election is a historic referendum on a Right-wing Conservative Party. If we win a second landslide, we would kill off Right-wing Conservatism for good.’
To do that, a Blairite fifth column was needed inside the Tory Party – ably aided, as Blairites always are, by media allies.
This first ran the putsch against Iain Duncan Smith. Then it arranged the amazingly prolonged leadership election which allowed the unknown Blair clone David Cameron to defeat the far better qualified David Davis.
You know the rest, in all its ghastly detail. Now it’s going to continue. The Tory Party will be shored up once again by billionaire cash and broadcasting rules which give it airtime worth many millions of pounds and deny it to any rival.
Oh, and if you thought Michael Gove was any better, never let it be forgotten that in 2003, under the headline ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony’, this supposedly ‘Right-wing’ great hope garlanded the grinning Blair creature with words such as ‘right and brave’, ‘impressive’ and ‘resolute’.
Having dug our way out of the dungeon, we find we have merely reached another dungeon, just as deep and just as dark.

***

I will not join in the gang attack on the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. I disagree with much of what he says, but any free Englishman ought to defend, fiercely, his liberty to say it.

This is partly because of my pre-revolutionary schooling, in which I was taught to admire lone figures who stood against overwhelming force. We used to recite Macaulay’s wonderful poem about ‘How well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old’ –  one man defying thousands to save Rome. ‘How can man die better’, it asks, ‘than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?’ A good question, I always thought and still do.

But it is partly because of a growing fury against the whimpering, snivelling legions who won’t accept votes and seek to overturn them.

In this case they are the same people, the Blairites. Not only are they seeking to undo the referendum. They are trying to bypass the awkward fact that the Labour Party, according to its own rules, elected Jeremy Corbyn as its leader by a large majority.

In actions plainly co-ordinated with media allies, Mr Corbyn’s enemies have tried to scare their foe into quitting. I very much hope he doesn’t, and that he beats them because this is now a matter of honour.

These people deserve to be in the fix they are in. They clubbed the Tory Party into becoming just like them. Now that it is, they have no purpose left. If the Tories won’t have them, there’s a vacancy for another futile ‘centre’ party, now that the Liberal Democrats are all washed up. They can fill that.

******

Any fool can break a taboo, and it’s gone forever. In the same way, any fool can cut down a tree that has taken three centuries to grow. Later we find out what we have lost.

And I continue to wonder why there’s so little concern about the  breach of the old taboo against public swearing. The singer Adele Adkins swore repeatedly on live TV, as she performed at Glastonbury last week. What effect will this have?

Those of us who have already lived long enough to see the country transformed, and know that nothing which seems permanent will necessarily survive, are perhaps better able to imagine how far things might go.

Those who are relaxed about this might wonder how they will feel when they start hearing teachers using the f-word in class, nurses using four-letter words to patients, see the strongest words used without asterisks in newspaper headlines, or politicians using them in major speeches. This will happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if some future Archbishop didn’t decide to pander to the spirit of the age by swearing from his or her pulpit.

Some may say they wouldn’t care. But that’s half the point. A thick-skinned society is also a callous society.

******

It is now clear the referendum result is being used as a pretext or cover for many things which would have happened anyway.  Sterling was bound to fall - especially after all that ‘quantitative easing’ inflated our economy. George Osborne’s dropping of his 2020 budget surplus target was simply a recognition of his total failure to control spending, concealed for too long by his many media toadies. There’ll be more. Don’t be scared by it.

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Why We Need a General Election by mid-September

Out of the froth and fog of the last few days, something is beginning to emerge. I’m not surprised at all by the unlovely shape of it. You may not like the look of it. But first I thought I’d make a brief tour of some of the more interesting (and perhaps unexpected) commentary in this morning’s newspapers.

Let us start with this fascinating and (in my experience) wholly accurate article about the state of modern England – betting shops, payday loans, mobility scooters and all - from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum, a good piece of left-wing journalism in the tradition of Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier' and Priestley’s ‘English Journey’. The closeness of this devastation and demoralised despair to London itself will surprise many, who think it is confined to the West Midlands and the North. I fear it will surprise a lot more who have no idea that it exists anywhere. I think the destruction it records can be blamed on many other things as well as the thatcher era. But BBC Remain types need to read this, by one of their own(though perhaps he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s, I don’t know) .

They may then begin to grasp what happened last week, and even start to sympathise with it.

Next, from the same paper, is this typically perceptive analysis by Larry Elliott:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/26/brexit-is-the-rejection-of-globalisation

He correctly notes that Britain’s self-image as an economic success story is batty self-delusion, saying:’ To be sure, not all Britain’s problems are the result of its EU membership. It is not the European commission’s fault that productivity is so weak or that the trains don’t run on time. The deep-seated failings that were there when Britain voted in the referendum last Thursday were still there when the country woke up to the result on Friday. Evidence of just how unbalanced the economy is will be provided when the latest figures for Britain’s current account are released later this week. These show whether the country’s trade and investment income are in the black or the red. At the last count, in the final three months of 2015, the UK was running a record peacetime deficit of 7% of GDP.’

Then  he points out that the EU (the same is true of the post NAFTA USA) has failed to protect its working population from the ferocious downward pressures of globalisation: ‘In the shiny new world created when former communist countries were integrated into the global model, Europe was supposed to be big and powerful enough to protect its citizens against the worst excesses of the market. Nation states had previously been the guarantor of full employment and welfare. The controls they imposed on the free movement of capital and people ensured that trade unions could bargain for higher pay without the threat of work being off-shored, or cheaper labour being brought into the country.’

He adds : ‘Europe has failed to fulfil the historic role allocated to it. Jobs, living standards and welfare states were all better protected in the heyday of nation states in the 1950s and 1960s than they have been in the age of globalisation. Unemployment across the eurozone is more than 10%. Italy’s economy is barely any bigger now than it was when the euro was created. Greece’s economy has shrunk by almost a third. Austerity has eroded welfare provision. Labour market protections have been stripped away.’

He is very good on the implications of this for left-wing parties which have blithely backed open-doors immigration policies.

Many people, once they understand what free trade really means, are beginning to wonder whether protection is really quite such a bad idea as the modish economists keep telling them.

Finally there is this from the distinguished and original-minded Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the ‘Daily Telegraph’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/26/parliament-must-decide-what-brexit-means-in-the-interests-of-the/

The shape of a compromise, miles from what many in the ‘Leave’ campaign want, but acceptable to the current Parliament, is here very accurately and credibly set out. Something of this kind may very well happen. Just as we are not now fully in the EU, but pretend we are,  we could end with a position where we are not fully out of it, but pretend we are.

This is why anyone who seriously wants a thorough break with the EU that will restore our control of our borders needs to realise that a referendum was never going to be enough to achieve this.

Something – perhaps yet another petition – needs to be done to encourage and record public support (if there is any now people are beginning to realise what's at stake) for a swift general election,  held to cement and confirm the decision of the referendum. In my view, the referendum cannot possibly take full effect( and will have been waste of time) unless the composition and the balance of forces is irrevocably altered now in the Commons.

If an election is held soon enough (certainly before October) then all candidates can reasonably be asked to state without equivocation whether they support or oppose the verdict of the referendum, and how they will vote on the matter if elected. This must then be more important than their party allegiances. It will compel local alliances which could make almost all ‘safe’ seats unsafe. And it would also compel the elected members in such a Parliament to seek new allegiances, refusing the old Labour or Tory whips. It could be the first step towards the complete realignment our political system so badly needs. If it does not happen, then some sort of Norwegian arrangement under which we remain in the Single Market and lack full control of our borders, will be what we will get. It will resolve almost none of the problems described above.  Good luck with that.

.

America isn't our special friend. It ruined our Navy, Empire and future

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Now will we grasp that the United States is not our friend, but a foreign country whose interests are often different from ours?

President Obama’s blatant intervention in our internal affairs is not a sudden breach of a soppy ‘special relationship’. The USA’s only real special relationship is with Saudi Arabia, a 70-year-old hard pact of oil, money and power, welded together with such cynicism it ought to make us gasp.

Barack Obama’s open desire for us to stay inside the EU is by no means the first or worst example of White House meddling here in these islands. Bill Clinton forced us to cave in to the Provisional IRA in 1998 and his successor, George W. Bush, continued the policy by making us do Sinn Fein’s bidding afterwards.

Washington came close to scuppering our recapture of the F
alklands in 1982. And with the current state of our Armed Forces, which can nowadays do nothing without American support, I often wonder how the White House and the Pentagon would behave if Argentina once again seized Port Stanley.

If anyone thinks Hillary Clinton is a great friend of Britain, they’re in for a big surprise.

But surely the Americans fought with us shoulder to shoulder against the Kaiser and Hitler? Not exactly. The USA (quite rightly) fought for its own interest in both great wars, not for us.

When we ran out of money after the First World War, Washington seized the chance to force us to limit our Navy, and so began to overtake us as the world’s major naval power. We had feared Germany would do this. It is one of the great ironies of history that it was the USA that ended British sea power.

In the blackest months of the Second World War, just after the fall of France, the US Congress demanded almost every penny we owned before it would authorise the famous Lend- Lease programme.

Secret convoys of Royal Navy warships carried our reserves of gold bullion (estimated to have been worth £26 billion in today’s values) across the Atlantic – mostly never to return. Billions in negotiable securities went the same way, and British assets in the USA were sold off at absurdly low prices.

I don’t blame the Americans for this. In 1934, Britain had defaulted on her giant First World War debt to the USA. This is now worth up to £225 billion in today’s money, depending on how you calculate inflation.

We still haven’t paid it off, and never will, though it’s not considered polite to discuss it and it’s one of those facts so grotesque that most people refuse to believe it when first told of it.

During the Hitler war, the USA gave us enough aid to stay in the fight, but not enough to recover our former economic strength. The eventual peace was made on American terms, and Soviet terms, with us as onlookers. And after the war, Marshall Aid came with strings – open up the British Empire to outside trade, and then begin to dismantle it.

Not wanting to get embroiled in any more European wars, the USA also put a lot of effort into creating a permanently united Europe. Documents came to light in the 1990s, probably by accident, showing detailed CIA involvement in the European Movement.

I regard America’s behaviour as perfectly reasonable. It’s the sort of thing we used to do when we were top nation, and had more sense than to squander our wealth on idealistic foreign wars.

I like America and Americans, lived there happily for two fascinating years, and wish them well. But I never forget that the USA is another country, not a friend or even a cousin. Nor should you.

BRILLIANT HELEN IN THE FRONT LINE OF AN IMMORAL WAR

Best film of the year so far is Eye In The Sky in which Helen Mirren, in beautifully tailored camouflage, plays a British Army colonel trying to decide whether to launch a deadly drone strike on a terrorist safe house in Africa.

The late and much lamented Alan Rickman, in his last on-screen role, plays a red-tabbed general who has to deal with the politicians and their dithering.

The target house is crammed with front-rank terrorist commanders. But just outside it sits an innocent little girl, selling loaves of bread.

What do you do?

I won’t tell you what they do, but I am surprised we’re not much more worried about this form of warfare. Victims of ordinary bombing from the air are famously angered and frustrated by being subjected to an attack to which there is no defence. But this is much more alarming.

A woman at a desk in Nevada, by squeezing a trigger, can (without any risk to herself) obliterate or dismember another human being thousands of miles away, tearing them to shreds or dissolving them in a lake of fire.

An older generation than mine would have mumbled in mild tones ‘That’s not cricket!’ But today’s ruthless anti-terror macho man will reply: ‘We’re dealing with terrorists. The rules have changed. You can’t use chivalry when fighting with such people.’

Bystanders will see these attacks for themselves, or may be scorched or wounded by them. It is more than possible, for it happened to a wedding party in Yemen in December 2013, that entirely innocent people will be vaporised by mistake. Will their relatives be more or less likely to turn against us, once they have witnessed such events?

Precisely because it is so risk-free to us, it is outrageous and infuriating to those who see it on their own streets, who will feel as if we are treating them as insects to be casually swatted.

No doubt it will allow us to kill, by remote control, all kinds of people we don’t like. But is this moral? Would we send someone to walk up to them in the street and shoot them without warning or any kind of judicial process?

And would we accept it if a foreign power launched such attacks on our soil? I find it especially interesting that governments (such as ours) which sniffily refuse to execute convicted murderers, and so defend us from armed violence, are content to support this form of warfare.

How can arbitrary killing from the sky be right, and execution after a fair trial be wrong?

 

*******

Glad as I am to see the long-delayed decision to support some of what’s left of our steel industry, I grind my teeth in fury that nothing was done to help the honest, hard-working steelmen of Redcar, who now miserably face the loss of their homes as their murdered town sinks into enforced idleness.

Here’s a solution. Most members of our Government seem to regard the industrial areas of Britain as a foreign country. Fine. Then let them admit it openly, and so include Redcar and the rest in the swollen, uncuttable foreign aid budget. Simple, eh?

 

*******

Graffiti attacking the regime has begun to appear in North  Korea. This is the beginning of the end. Nothing so undermines authority, stability and order as the appearance of these hideous scribbles.

While visiting the decrepit, bankrupt Hermit Kingdom a few years ago, I concluded (after observing several citizens prone and unconscious in the street) that its people survived mainly by drinking too much rice wine. Perhaps they have now run out of that, too.

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She's done the bank scandal... maybe Margot Robbie can explain the Great Happy Pills Delusion

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

The biggest scandals go on for years because they are so huge that nobody notices them. We stand and watch outrageous things going on, thinking that everything is all right because nobody else is making a fuss.

The new film about the 2008 bank collapse, The Big Short, makes this point perfectly. Anyone who wanted to could see the great lending boom was based on garbage, worthless loans that would never be repaid.

But most people didn’t want to. And even now we shy away from the blatant truth. The film’s makers, realising how easily our attention wanders, hired the Australian actress Margot Robbie to sit in a bathtub, naked except for a few thousand symbolic bubbles, to explain sub-prime mortgages in simple (and very crude) English.

The Big Short’s makers, realising how easily our attention wanders, hired the Australian actress Margot Robbie to sit in a bathtub, naked except for a few thousand symbolic bubbles, to explain sub-prime mortgages in simple (and very crude) English

How I wish I could afford to hire her to explain the equally shocking truth about the vast ‘antidepressant’ scandal that goes on all around us.

But, just as banks and investors were willing – if blinkered – accomplices in the mad folly that ripped the West’s economy to bits eight years ago, many doctors and decent men and women are complicit in the Great Happy Pills Delusion.

Doctors can get plenty of rewards from drug companies for promoting their pills. Invitations to conferences at five-star hotels, with diving, golf and fishing laid on are not unknown. Others are paid to write apparently unbiased articles in medical journals praising a company’s drugs.

But even those who don’t accept this are often relieved to have something, anything, to prescribe to the dozens of unhappy patients who seek their help. If they and the patient believe these pills work, then, in a way, they will. So would inert pills made of chalk, as it happens.

If only Margot Robbie could be hired tp explain the equally shocking truth about the vast ‘antidepressant’ scandal that goes on all around us, in which many decent men and women are complicit

And so the patients, too, are recruited into the ‘antidepressants saved me from misery’ campaign. There’ll be some in every street and workplace, given that more than 53 million prescriptions for these drugs are dispensed in the UK to about four million people every year.

The trouble is that rigorous science, in which they are tested against sugar pills, increasingly doubts that they do work. And, worse still, there is worrying evidence that the side effects of some of these drugs may be very serious indeed.

Now, in the respected pages of the British Medical Journal, comes a stinging report, carefully analysing 70 trials of ‘antidepressants’, which found that some common drugs of this kind actually double the risk of suicide and aggressive behaviour in under-18s.

This, by the way, does not mean that adults are unaffected. The drug companies’ research repeatedly under-reported deaths and episodes of self-harm by tested patients.

A drug that does not really work is one thing. A drug whose users harm themselves (or others) is another.

The vast extent of this problem and the huge sums of NHS money spent on it may make media and politicians think it must be all right. But they thought the same about sub-prime mortgages. And it was not all right. Nor is this.

Those who voted Tory in 2010 to ‘get Gordon Brown out’ might ponder George Osborne’s relentless Brown-style raids on private pension funds

Our crazy war on savers

In Japan now they are starting to charge people for keeping healthy credit balances in the bank. It is called ‘negative interest’ and is part of a vicious war on savers under way all over the world. It’s pretty intensive here too. Those who voted Tory in 2010 to ‘get Gordon Brown out’ might ponder George Osborne’s relentless Brown-style raids on private pension funds, punishing and robbing dedicated savers with extra taxes, to subsidise Google’s tax breaks.

The same goes for ‘quantitative easing’, designed to push small investors into putting their cash into risky places to get any return at all. Those who refuse have their interest-free bank balances slowly drained by inflation (which is supposed to have disappeared, but hasn’t). How long before there’s ‘negative interest’ too? Destroying the savings and hopes of the middle classes is what, in the end, led to Germany’s gruesome descent into fanatical madness in the 1930s.

It helped put Vladimir Putin in power in Moscow. It is deeply irresponsible politics as well as deeply irresponsible economics.

I think I could just about bear it, even so, if people didn’t keep telling me what a great and righteous Chancellor George Osborne is. It is, once again, a lie so huge that they get away with it.

So now all of us must live in the knowledge that a double murderer, with severe psychiatric problems, is living secretly among us. I defy anyone to say with total assurance that it is safe to let him out. His crime is said to have been horrific. But he has been released into the ‘community’. He is in his 40s, but we cannot know his new name, or his old one, or where he is or what he does.

This is thanks to our ‘Supreme Court’ (the name is itself a lie, for it is not supreme at all, but subject to Parliament and also the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg).

These exalted personages overruled four wiser judges, and common sense. If they have made a terrible mistake, how will they be made to pay for it?

Last week I finally underwent root canal dentistry, the lurking ill-defined horror that lies in wait for the middle-aged. Well, I am here to report that it was nothing like as bad as most of the things I have heard it compared to. And it was far less gruelling, protracted and demoralising than trying to extract an apology for wrongdoing from the BBC, or a Left-wing newspaper, or from a railway company – all activities I have been engaged in during the past few weeks.

Not all Gas and Gaiters

The Archbishop of Canterbury has had a nasty surprise. It follows the Church of England’s decision to publicise, in national media, an unproven claim of child abuse against the long-dead Bishop George Bell, one of the C of E’s few genuinely great men.

 

Now Justin Welby has had a stonking letter from Bishop Bell’s niece, Barbara Whitley, telling him off.  Mrs Whitley,91 and with a mind as sharp as a guillotine, wrote to the Prelate: ‘My uncle was an extremely holy, private man. A deep thinker with many engagements and a loving, helpful wife. I am convinced he would not have done any such thing’.

This must have come as something of a surprise, since the C of E’s  bureaucrats had assumed George Bell had no living relatives.  

You would have thought Mrs Whitley, herself the daughter of a Bishop, deserved a swift and personal reply. But Archbishop Welby passed the matter to a subordinate.  Mrs Whitley has written to him again, protesting that her Uncle’s name is being smeared. I do hope he writes back himself, this time.

 

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This isn't a just war - it's 'recreational bombing' by our Churchill wannabe

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Once again, as a patriotic Englishman from a Naval family, I stand amazed to find myself so lonely in my doubts about a foolish war.

I am no pacifist. I supported the retaking of the Falklands, national territory illegally seized by foreign invaders. I was thrilled to see that the Royal Navy could still do the hard tasks for which it is paid too little. Could it now?

Yet, on the basis of an emotional spasm and a speech that was illogical and factually weak, we are rushing towards yet another swamp, from which we will struggle to extract ourselves and where we can do no conceivable good.

Heaven forbid that it will lead (as other such adventures have) to more melancholy processions, bearing flag-wrapped coffins, from RAF Brize Norton; or to quieter convoys, carrying terribly injured men to special hospitals. Why must good, brave, dutiful men and women die or be maimed for life because our politicians are vain and ignorant?

But there is no knowing the end of this, especially given the Prime Minister’s absurd belief that we have 70,000 ‘moderate’ allies just waiting to help us in Syria. Among these scattered ‘moderates’ are those who last week murdered a Russian pilot as he parachuted to earth, and mauled his corpse.

When this phantom army turns out to be non-existent, or hostile, how long will it take Mr Cameron to return to the House of Commons, pleading oh-so-reasonably for ground troops to follow?

It is all such rubbish. I have yet to see conclusive evidence that the Paris murders were organised by or in Islamic State. France has plenty of home-grown hatred and (despite strict gun laws) is awash with illegal Kalashnikovs and ammunition.

Nor can I see why bombing Raqqa will defend us or anyone against such murders.

France’s President Hollande, a failed politician in bad domestic trouble, mired his own country in Syria months ago. I can’t see what good reason we have to follow him there. It will not help to bind up the wounds of the people of France.

Only three weeks back, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee advised, in a carefully argued report, that intervention in Syria is not a good idea. The pathetic cave-in of that committee’s chairman, Crispin Blunt, who now supports Mr Cameron’s latest war, merely makes Mr Blunt look irrational, weak-minded and easily led.

The UN Security Council resolution (of which Mr Cameron makes so much) actually offers no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which authorises the use of force.

David Cameron is already suffering from galloping Churchill syndrome (the patient growls, denounces his critics as appeasers, and starts wars). Now he seems to have contracted Blair’s disorder, an irresistible desire to pose alongside military hardware. On Monday he managed to have his portrait taken next to a very macho-looking Typhoon fighter jet at Northolt RAF base on his way back from Paris. Odd, that. Typhoons are not normally stationed at Northolt, and I haven’t been able to get a coherent explanation of what military reason it had to be there, so convenient for a photo-opportunity.

The Prime Minister might have been better employed looking up Syria on a map, reading the relevant documents, or consulting with our former ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford – who energetically opposes what he denounces as ‘recreational bombing’.

In all these modern wars real experts are impatiently pushed aside, while flatterers and yes-men take over. But it’s not decided yet. There’s still just time to write to your MP, if you agree with me that this is folly. I beg you to do so.

Reaping a feminist whirlwind

On Thursday night I witnessed the ugliness of the new student intolerance at the Oxford Union, where I was taking part in a debate on marriage (I was in favour). I had never before seen burly security men stationed around the hall, or had to watch as screeching hecklers – having ignored pleas to put questions in a civilised way – were hauled from the room.

It was Germaine Greer they were mainly after (though they handed out leaflets at the gate slandering me, too). I like Germaine, as it happens, and think she is often a lot more sensible than people think she is. But does she ever wonder if the militant feminism she launched has some responsibility for the new generation of self-righteous would-be censors who would rather silence an opponent than listen to her?

 

****

I travel a lot by train, and have begun to notice that the ride is getting much rougher. On a recent journey from London to Edinburgh I had to move seats because I was over the wheels and being jolted about so much. It reminded me of the Mandalay-Rangoon express (though in its grimy way that’s more comfortable than Virgin).

The worrying thing is that I noticed a similar worsening in the track at the end of the 1990s, just before a terrible series of crashes caused by track failure. Is Network Rail maintaining our lines properly?

 

****

The turmoil of the past two weeks has buried two pieces of bad news which the Government really doesn’t want you to know.

The first was Thursday’s record net immigration figures, showing that Mr Cameron has completely lost control of our borders.

The other was a huge and unexpected increase in Government borrowing in October, when it was supposed to have fallen. This passed almost entirely unnoticed.

No wonder the Chancellor seems to have put the economy in the hands of Doctor Who. The mythical £27 billion that he miraculously discovered in time for his Autumn Statement is even more non-existent than the Prime Minister’s imaginary army of 70,000 Syrian moderates.

Doctor Who will be needed to get hold of this money, since it does not yet exist, and is to be found (if at all) only in the future, and then in small annual dribs and drabs.

If George Osborne were a company, he would be heading for bankruptcy. As it is, I confidently predict very severe tax rises within three years. Perhaps Doctor Who will by then have replaced Mr Osborne at No 11 and will be able to escape the voters’ wrath in his Tardis.

*******

 

 

 

All the four main unpopular newspapers had virtually the same page one headline on Friday morning: The Times’: ‘Labour at war over vote to bomb Isis’, The Telegraph:  ‘Labour at war over Syria air strikes’; ‘The Guardian: ‘Labour in Syria Turmoil as PM makes the case for war’; ‘The Independent’ : ‘Labour at war over air strikes in Syria’. The BBC’s headlines were very similar.

 

 

 

None of these stories contained any clear facts, just anonymous briefings. If it had been a plane crash, or a verdict in a major court case, this sort of unanimity in supposedly competing media would have been normal. But in this case it looks much more as if we have a controlled press.

 

(This last item was accidentally omitted when the column was first posted)

 

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In Defence of Council Housing

‘Paul P’ submitted a comment on 21^st September. I strongly disagree with it, having come to see the sale of (some) council properties as a social disaster and a severe economic mistake, not in the least conservative. I wince every time I hear ‘right-wing’ people thoughtlessly praising this action.

 

For clarity and immediacy, I have interleaved my responses in the original comment ,marking them ***

 

Mr ‘P’ began :

 

‘In the 1980s the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher began the sale of council houses to their tenants. The socialists squealed in horror, as well they might for the Achilles Heel of state control was about to be severed.’

 

***PH responds.  Socialists certainly protested, often for reasons of self-interest (control of housing stock, possibly resulting in influence on voting patterns) and it was a pity (see below) that nobody else did.  Was state control ‘severed’, though? The state certainly intervenes far more in housing than it did in the 1980s, not least through the payment of Housing Benefit, last year almost £24 Billion, roughly a third of the entire welfare bill and greater than the cost of the entire Royal Air Force.   The effect of raising and spending this sum on the economy, the housing market and on individuals is huge, though I must accept that the state gets very little in return for its money. It does not own the land or the stick, and it victimises itself by stimulating the growth of high rents for low-quality rentals, thus raising the housing benefit bill to the taxpayer.

 

The very large empire of ‘social housing’ owned and operated by Housing Associations is also very heavily state-subsidised, though( again) not controlled by anyone much. Is this good, or sensible? Is this country’s housing policy a model for the world?****

 

Mr ‘P’ continued: ’You may or may not be familiar with council houses and council estates, but in the pre-Thatcher years they were known for their uniform drabness.’

 

 

***PH writes. I am not sure this was so. I was myself a council tenant in Swindon in the early 1970s, and knew others who were. I rented, for a reasonable but not tiny sum,  a sensitively-converted flat in Brunel’s old Railway Village, which I seem to remember won a design award for good restoration.  Other council houses varied, many being indistinguishable from private speculatively built houses, generally well-proportioned and with reasonable sized gardens. I had sent a good deal of the period 1968 to 1975 delivering copies of the ‘Socialist Worker’ to buyers (I won’t say they were necessarily readers) on council estates in York, Oxford and Scarborough. I was more than once invited to stay overnight in the council homes of members of the International Socialists.  I’d hesitate to generalise about them. The old Parker Morris standard, mandating a minimum 775 square feet, meant they were in many cases more spacious than modern private homes.  There was almost always a lot of green space and a reasonable number of trees. Schools, shops, pubs and bus stops were conveniently placed.

 

I’d have to stress that this couldn’t be said of some of the new high-rise housing going up at the time (there was, mercifully, very little of this in Oxford and, I think, none in York). But, as we shall see, the high-rise housing and flats in general were the parts of the public housing estate that nobody much wanted to buy and which have often remained in the public sector.

 

The quality of building in that era wasn’t especially good in private or public sectors. From my experiences around that time, which involved some house sharing  in the private rented ‘sector’,  I’d say there was little to choose between bottom-end private housing and modern council houses.

 

AS for the ‘drabness’, etc, no doubt there was plenty (there is plenty in some forms of private housing too, I think Mr ‘P’ will concede, especially those long terraces, flat-fronted or bow-windowed, which were thrown up by speculative builders in the 1890-1914 period in many English cities)  but for many people the 1950s and 1960s council estates offered a new world of space, greenery and brightness. See this passage from the obituary, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/mar/23/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries

in the left-liberal ‘Guardian’ newspaper, of Harry Wingfield, who himself lived on council estates and drew them, as clean, neat, green, pleasant, orderly and spacious for the ‘Ladybird Books’ series:

 

‘Wingfield's pictures did everything to bolster this aim (encouraging] parents to help their children learn to read, and [perhaps to foster] better family relationships), and it was only a slight embellishment of what he saw around him. While he dismissed the idea that there was a particular girl on whom he had modelled Jane, he certainly drew from life, which gave his early pictures, especially, their characteristically clean-lined look.

 

‘His work was based on photographs he took of children playing on the new West Midlands council estates around where he lived. He drew what he saw, and his pictures showed the realities of these children's lives. The offspring of respectable workers, they dressed neatly, were obedient, and conformed to the stereotypes of the time, with Peter helping Daddy and Jane giving Mummy a hand in the kitchen.’

 

I would say these estates, by mixing skilled and unskilled working-class families, created workable communities in which 'bad elements' could be discouraged by the great mass of responsible and law-abiding people, aided by the council and the police. Once the better-off were able to sell up (and in many cases leave) this balance was destroyed. I would be interested to know if there is any research on the decline in order since the sale of council houses became general. Since it happened at a time when so many other malign influences (family break-up, the withdrawal of the police from preventive patrol, the abolition of the old 1915 alcohol laws, the widespread availability of technically illegal drugs,  the breakdown of school discipline) were going on  ****

 

Mr ‘P’ continues:

 

‘They generally comprised terraced rows of identical housing 'units' of a most basic kind, their guttering, windows and doors all painted the same, usually drab, state colours. These estates were depressing in the extreme. They were 'worker camps'.’

 

***PH writes: I’ve no doubt there’s some justice to this claim, especially on the very big old estates in large industrial cities, where the job of managing and maintaining a huge housing stock must have tended towards drab uniformity by its very nature.  It would have been an unusually imaginative and wealthy council which, before the modern era, would have tried to achieve variety and brightness.

 

But as readers of George Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier’ will recall, these estates were intended by their builders to transform the lives of people who up till then had been used to incomparably worse conditions. There was a disagreeable bossiness about them which Orwell noted, and which made him shudder.

 

But then again, the lofty intentions often led to greatly improved conditions, health and welfare and to handsome, enduring design. The 1930s design adopted by Oxford city council with which I am very familiar, has lasted extremely well. many have been sold, though some remain under council ownership. Many were in pleasant suburban or even central locations.  The building of an estate in Cutteslowe, North Oxford, led in the 1930s to the astonishing episode of the ‘Cutteslowe Walls’ in which the owner of a neighbouring(and pre-existing)private estate actually built brick walls, topped with revolving spikes across two roads where council and private estates met.  Despite various ‘accidental’ demolitions (including one by a tank during the war) the walls stayed up, with the support of the courts, until 1959. Buses were routed round them, and the roads changed their names where private and council territory met. They still do, though I suspect only the postman notices now. In my childhood, a small section of one of the walls, spikes and all, was still visible but it seems to have been demolished in the 1980s (it should, if not actually preserved, have been placed in a  museum, for , like East Germany, the whole episode is becoming unbelievable).

 

An illustration here  http://www.oxfordshireblueplaques.org.uk/plaques/cutteslowe.html

clearly shows the considerable difference between inter-war council and private housing, much of it being a matter of style rather than solidity or space -though the council house windows are of course not the original ones. ***

 

Mr ‘P’ continues:

 

‘After the tenants had bought the houses remarkable changes took place.’

 

***Indeed they did. What he does not mention is that the new owners had been given very large subsidies of up to 50% of the normal market price. In recent years (See ‘Guardian 12^th September) these have been up to 70% And that the more desirable properties were quickly sold on to new buyers or to property companies.

 

This account in ‘the Guardian’ by Andy Beckett  http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret-thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis

is a counter to the optimistic and problem-free version believed by most Thatcherite or Heseltine Tories (Lord Heseltine, in other respects Mrs Thatcher’s perpetual antagonist , was in this issue at one with her)/IT also makes the point that flats sold poorly, while buyers were given a vast state subsidy, and there was a rush of cash into state bank accounts, those who continued to rent now experienced large increases.

 

 

Mr ‘P’ rhapsodises :’ The windows, doors and gutterings were re-painted in the colours of their tenants' choice. Roofs were improved or re-laid. Some tenants, now owners, clad the exteriors with ersatz stone tiles, then fashionable on many private houses. And the gardens, too, became better cultivated and vibrant with colourful planting. You could see what was happening. It was as if the council house tenant, now owner, had taken a new interest in life.’

 

 

***PH replies: Well, yes, and I suppose many of us, if handed a large free gift by the taxpayer, like a huge unexpected legacy, might lavish some of it on improving surroundings in which we had a stake. We might even have to. All homeowners also know how quickly their property also becomes a demanding and hungry eater of money. Roofs, walls, pointing, windows, wiring, woodwork need constant and costly attention, which tenants were of course spared by the council’s policy of drab uniformity, paid for and controlled by the town hall.  I am also told that many of the houses were swiftly sold on to property companies which then rented them out to tenants (with no stake in maintaining property or garden) , but at market rents far higher than the old council rents. I have seen no figures on this****

 

 

Mr ‘P’ notes And that was the significant marker. It did not go unnoticed by Tony Blair.

 

***PH writes: Well, it probably did go unnoticed by him, actually. He told the Sedgefield Labour Party that he’d grown up on ‘an estate’ (which was true) in Durham, not mentioning that it was a private estate. I doubt he had very much experience of council housing , then or later, except as he scampered form door to door grinning and shaking hands. I wonder if he even knew which door to knock on.  But his advisers did.

 

 

 

Old Labour, he divined, was state drabness. New Labour was private colourfulness. Blair divined that old socialism was dead and that new socialism, i.e. New Labour, was the new banner of the new working-class. And he was right. New Labour went on to win, more or less with landslides, the next three general elections. You may think it all tasteless pap, shallow showboating from an opportunistic Blair who, unlike Brown, was essentially un-tribal and in it for fame and fortune.

 

****PH writes. Or you may think that nobody ever lost votes by giving large sums of taxpayers’ money to the voters, whatever party they were.. There was no obvious loser at the time. It became clear more recently that we had sold off a major national resource, council land and council housing, and now had to cope with the large number of poor people needing to be housed and unable to afford market prices or rents,  through the (far more expensive) system of Housing Benefit, which does not purchase any new assets for the taxpayer, just pours the money down an enormous drain, highly profitable for private landlords. Most private housebuyers have never realised that the ’right-to-buy’ released an inflationary tidal wave of money into the market in the mid-1980s and onwards, which pushed all housing prices relentlessly upwards. This was fine for those already on the ladder – but not so good for those who had saved to get on to it, and found the ladder being pulled up out of reach again, just as they were about to reach the bottom rung. 

 

 

 

Mr ‘P’ writes: ‘ Many of the council estates looked, and still do, discordantly ridiculous with one terraced 'unit' covered in Cotswold-stone tiles and with a red roof, and the one next door, still in council hands, still drably Orwellian. But working-class aesthetics is not the point. The point is that the working classes were on the move, and the move was away from state socialism. Blair in the end had run his personal course and with premier Brown there was a brief hiatus and a tilting once more at traditional working-class tribalism, but it couldn't last, and it didn't. The Conservatives in the meantime had taken up the mantle of Blairism and, though forced into coalition, were the party of working-class choice. With Corbyn taking the Labour Party back to state drabness and the 'working-class camp', the Conservatives will be in power for evermore. Blairism, then, is the privatisation of socialism. It is the merging of capitalism and welfare statism. It is, at its root, giving the working classes what in the era of Blair and Cool Britannia the Spice Girls would chant 'what they really, really want'.

 

***PH responds. Well, this is of course the great political question of the coming decade. Leave aise Mr ‘P’ and his vapourings ion taste. And it might be sensible for him to realise that the ‘working class’ was destroyed about the same time by the annihilation (by being exposed to  EU competition and by Geoffrey Howe’s economic genius) of manufacturing and extractive industry.

 

But is Mr Cameron’s world view, of ever-increasing prosperity etc, the one which most voters will share in May 2020? Or is the Corbyn view, of a country of housing shortages, low wages, poor public services, shuttered shops and few opportunities, what they see, or will see? Will the general economic state of the country change this perception towards the Corbyn view in the next few years, or more towards the Cameron view? I’m not wholly sure.  I think the Tories would be unwise to assume that everyone is as happy as official statistics suggest they ought to be. Or that chickens, even rather old one’s never eventually come flapping home to roost. It’s odd that a party that allegedly stands for sound money is so proud of  the magic creation of billions of pounds out of nothing. I can hear a grim Scots voice intoning ‘Nothing will come of nothing’, and I can also hear it being repeated, tight-lipped and cold, by a voice in an austere Grantham household, many years ago.

 

Three verses of that fine poem ‘The Gods f the Copybook Headings’, spring to mind.

 

They are:

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

 

And…

 

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; 
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." 

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

 

To which I would add Housman’s briefer statement of the same truth:

 

‘To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man hath long been sore, and long is like to be’.

 

Oh, and in Stalinist Moscow they did actually at one stage put up posters declaring

‘2+2 =5’.

This referred to an official claim that a five-year plan had been achieved in four years. The statistics, rather as George Osborne's figures show that we live in a booming economy, showed that it had been.

My evening with Jeremy Corbyn

About this time each year I try to ride the 90 or so miles between Oxford and Cambridge on my unspectacular bicycle (no drop handlebars, no space-age alloy frame, but a large and sonorous bell, a basket and a big, soft saddle).

 

I first did it some years ago to see if I could, then to check on the state of the madly abandoned railway line I used to use between the two cities in the 1960s (it’s enough to make you weep, actually. Overgrown or ripped-up tracks, stations obliterated, and in one key stretch, built over so that restoring it is all but impossible). Even Dr Beeching didn’t want to shut it – but Harold Wilson did, an act which seals his reputation in my mind. Now I just do it because it's a beautiful way of spending a September Sunday, and for the triumph of struggling up and over the hill near the village of Orwell (yes, there really is such a place) and seeing the glories of my destination in sight at last,  lit up by the late afternoon sun 

 

Anyway, as I wheezed and creaked into the centre of town (nobody can persuade me that Cambridge is a city. Not least because it lacks a cathedral) I was asked by a passer-by if I was going to 'the Jeremy Corbyn meeting'.

 

Not merely was I not going to it.  I’d never heard of it. I was planning a long soak in a bathtub,  an enormous meal, and hours of profound slumber. But now that I knew, I obviously had to try. Putting all else out of mind, I walked on creaky knees to Great St Mary’s church, to find it ringed  by a shuffling queue of Soviet length. These were the people who’d signed up online to attend. Presumably because the thing was being organised by the unions, they were all being subjected to a minute bureaucratic examination, and the line was barely moving. Tangled up with it was another queue, for people like me who hadn’t signed up in advance. Having sorted out which was which with some difficulty, I joined this (the Biblically learned will understand why I referred to it as ‘the Foolish Virgins’)  on the basis that you never know.

 

And so I spent a pleasant hour or so in the lovely, elegiac Cambridge dusk (gosh, September can be the loveliest of all months when it tries) , with the sky fading from gold to blue behind the pinnacles of King’s College chapel, chatting with the interesting variety of people who’d come along.

 

I think I spotted a social trend. There were plenty of young people, in their early twenties, many in couples. And there were plenty of people of my age-group – late 50s upwards. But I rather think those in between were more thinly represented.

 

Just before eight o’clock, as the light thickened into dusk, we were told we wouldn’t get in – but that ‘Jeremy’, as everyone calls Mr Corbyn,  would come out and speak to us, the improvident casual turners-up,  first. For me, this was a huge stroke of luck. I’d vaguely hoped to get to a Corbyn meeting at some point but there were none near where I lived, as far as I know. I had never been organised enough to locate one somewhere else, and now I was going to attend one without all the tedium of the other platform speakers, the introductions, and without being crammed into a stuffy, overcrowded church, no doubt sandwiched between two people who loathed me,  on one of the loveliest evenings of the year.

 

By the way, it’s interesting to note that Great St Mary’s holds 1,400 people, and was totally full, and that there were at least several hundred outside who couldn’t get in. And that the meeting had been postponed because the original venue had been too small to safely hold the audience who signed up. Apparently it wasn’t possible to hold the meeting in the open air on Parker’s Piece, the great green open space, where Jack Hobbs once played cricket,  that lies near the centre of Cambridge.

 

I warmed to Mr Corbyn personally for two things . One was the unaffected, barely conscious way he bent down to scratch the head of a dog belonging to someone in the crowd. The other was when he acknowledged the majesty of the setting, the beautiful heart of one of the loveliest places in England, at sunset.

 

I suspect that most readers of this blog, if they heard the speech without knowing who was delivering it, would have thought it workmanlike and commonsensical, though obviously of the left. It was not high-flown, it contained a reasonable amount of self-mocking humour, it was proudly free of personal abuse or political invective. It was also (this made it easier for me) free of anything about the wild enthusiasm for comprehensive schools and multiculturalism which Mr Corbyn shares with David Cameron.

 

It was completely coherent,  delivered fluently without notes by a man who obviously still writes his own speeches and understands what he is saying. Every statement in it obviously resulted from a  long and considered examination of the subject, and he could have defended every assertion if he had had to. This was itself a  refreshing change from most modern political speeches, crafted by professional experts in blandness, rehearsed and spoken by the ‘leader’ (what a horrible term this is)  more for effect than for edification.  I simply don’t think any of his rivals could have done this, not because they’re stupid or bad speakers, but because they don’t actually have coherent political positions.

 

They have to supercharge their words with emotive claptrap, slogans and  clichés to get them off the ground at all, and ,while they might briefly soar they quickly sink to earth again. Mr Corbyn’s speech, by contrast, took off in an orderly, well-piloted fashion, flew at a sensible height for the correct amount of time, droning gently, and then landed smoothly at the intended destination. I think this is the sort of thing people used to do in the 1940s, and perhaps the 1950s, when we still had real-live contentious politics in this country. But they have forgotten how since the PR men took over in the 1960s.

 

Its economics, under the circumstances, were quite level-headed. At a time when interest rates are absurdly low and the economy needs revival (the EEF report today suggests the Osborne boom isn’t up to much) , borrowing to spend makes perfect sense.

 

The Private Finance Initiative has been a costly disaster. There’s nothing wrong with public provision either for health or welfare. As he pointed out, much of what he said would be considered more or less mainstream in Germany.

 

Its politics (I noted a repeated assertion that greater equality is good for its own sake, and a clear belief in immigration as a good thing in itself ) are shared by the Tory Party. The only difference is in the detailed method of application, and the honesty and clarity (or lack of either) with which they admit to this.

 

Once or twice I was tempted to applaud the style and the sentiments, particularly his opposition to big money in British politics, a problem which increasingly concerns me.  But I didn’t because there is a  wise convention that journalists don’t . In the end, this is a protection against being *made* to applaud, or being *expected* to do so, which can be much the same thing – and which was important on the day when I declined to applaud a (frankly, terrible) speech which Nelson Mandela once delivered at a Labour Party conference. Whatever views we have, we must maintain a distance between us and power, or those who seek it.

 

Is Mr Corbyn on the way to power? I don’t think so, though a small but significant part of me says ‘Don’t rule it out’. It is impossible to imagine any other politician living who could draw such a crowd . Tony Benn could have done, and they’d have paid, but that was because he had become a holy relic and because what someone once called his ‘lovely, wuffly Children’s Hour voice’ could create great waves of nostalgia for long ago teatimes in the hearts of a certain generation. Mr Corbyn has no such voice, or presence. He wasn’t even famous until recently.

 

There is obviously something going on, but is it going on England, or in a small, particular part of English society, the educated, thoughtful old left who have been disenfranchised by the New labour smoothies? They might look impressive all gathered in one place, but do they add up to much in the total of votes, even in a rather exceptional place such as Cambridge? Or are they in fact outnumbered by the great mass of the indifferent, who either never vote or who can be manipulated and bought, to vote for whoever has been given the Mandate of Heaven (or at least the Mandate of Murdoch)  that year?

 

We will rapidly discover which it is, if Mr Corbyn is elected on Saturday. Either a wider audience will say ‘Actually, we are impressed by this style of politics, regardless of the views expressed, and wish to see more of it. Indeed, it would be good to see all parties adopting it’. Or they won’t. Knowing what we know of modern Britain, from instant mashed potato to comprehensive schools, I fear the answer won’t necessarily be the one that the audience in Cambridge would like to hear. 

Some Thoughts on the Greek Crisis

It’s a shameful gap in my knowledge and experience. I know nothing of Greece.  When I see TV reports from most parts of the world, I know what lies around the corner from the Red Square, Pariser Platz, Tiananmen Square or White House vantage point from which the reporter is speaking.  I know this actually and metaphorically. I have some sense of the history, some acquaintance with the political balance and the level of freedom, just as I know what it smells like, how cold it can get in January and how it feels when a little breeze blows down that little street that is just out of shot, where the reporter and his crew will go for a cup of coffee after the piece to camera is over.

 

But when it comes to Athens, I’m quite blank. I’ve never been there, or to anywhere in Greece, never having come any closer to Greece than Cyprus, which contains a lot of Greeks but is really in the Middle East. Partly as a result, I have a very sketchy idea of Greek politics and history, a sort of kaleidoscope of Costa-Gavras’s film ‘Z’, not seen for at least 45 years, Colonels, an exiled King, and a seemingly endless string of Papandreous. I’m also a little haunted by the Second World War, the miserable scenes in Athens in Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, the even more miserable scenes in Crete in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ , oddly merging in my mind with Mary Renault’s astonishing recreations of Athens in the classical era and the astonishing Elgin Marbles, reminding us in our 21^st century pride that others came before us who perhaps knew *more* than we did about the world, and whose skills we have lost.

 

So I can say nothing remotely authoritative about internal Greek politics, or why Greek voters did as they did, or the influences on Syriza or anything like that.

 

I can only examine it as an EU matter. It seems strange now but during much of the Cold War there were still several Western European countries which did not precisely follow the model of France or Germany. They were all poor – Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland.  They were all socially conservative. Three, or sometimes two of them, depending on the current state of Greece,  were also politically conservative and had openly authoritarian governments.

 

 

 I say ‘openly authoritarian’ because it seems to me that almost continental governments with their Civil Codes, examining magistrates, institutionalised official corruption, national police forces,  identity cards, juryless trials, semicircular non-adversarial parliaments  and gutless newspapers are authoritarian anyway, but have learned in recent years to look as if they’re not. These are improvements, and I’m glad of them, though they seem to me to be superficial. As a visiting journalist or a well-off traveller, I’m always aware of floating on a shiny surface. The real hard nature of these countries is seen only by those who live and work in them. I used to be absolutely astonished, for instance by the contempt which middle-class French people felt for their police force.  Now that our police force has become so much more like theirs, I understand it all too well.  The improvements in continental countries have been matched by a dreadful weakening of my own country’s liberties, so this is not in any way a smug assertion of superiority.

 

It was a bit embarrassing to have such openly authoritarian countries on ‘our’ side, especially General Franco’s Spain, whose survival into the modern age seems increasingly unbelievable.   Greece joined NATO in 1952 ( as did Turkey, the country that never quite made it into the EU and now, I suspect, never will) , Portugal in 1949, Spain in 1982 (Though Spain had quietly hosted large US Naval and air bases since the early 1950s under the ‘Pact of Madrid).  Ireland, of course didn’t join NATO at all because she was neutral.  Greece joined the EU in 1981. Spain and Portugal did so in 1986.

 

There was an assumption that membership, and the resulting dependence on credit and subsidy, would somehow anchor them in ‘democracy’,  or at least in ‘democratism’, the obeisance to the external aspects of government by the people, which is the ideology of the New Europe and indeed of the new globalism, and which is a very different thing from freedom. It seems to me to mean that , if one goes through the required motions, of regular contested elections, one is approved of – provided one does not vote for the wrong people.  The key to discovering who the ‘wrong’ people are is the word ‘centre’. A party may be of the ‘left if it is ‘centre-left’, or of the right if it is ‘centre-right’, but not otherwise.  

 

Until now, the left has been more ‘central’ than the right, because old-fashioned pre-1939 sovereigntist nationalism is pretty much banned on the Continent, where it is associated with ‘Fascism', Falangism and authoritarian government, or with collaboration with the German occupation.

 

In Britain, where it has no such associations (though frequent attempts are made to smear it as if it did) conservative patriotism  is  only tolerated in a symbolic ‘Last Night of the Proms’ and ‘pint-of-bitter’ way in Britain. If it starts making actual demands for independent action, it is derided and marginalised. The single exception to this rule has been the defeat of the attempt (failed so far, but far from over) to get the United Kingdom to join the Euro. By doggedly treating this question as if it is an economic issue (because hardly anyone understands the political issue it really is) , opponents of the Euro have managed to keep us out until now. When economic crisis strikes this country again, as it must, that protection may prove remarkable weak.

 

An interesting test of EU ‘democratism’  was the success at the polls of the Austrian Jorg Haider, whose controversial career ended in a car accident in 2008.  Let’s be clear why the EU’s treatment of Mr Haider was so disturbing.  It’s not because Mr Haider was nice, and the EU nasty.  Mr Haider was horrible. I did not like the look of Mr Haider. I have an unshiftable prejudice against populist right-wing leaders in German-speaking countries. I have a lingering suspicion that Germany’s own de-Nazification was not wholly complete, but there’s no doubt that Austria, having somehow attained victim rather than aggressor status in the post-war settlement, has done significantly  less to confront its tricky past. 

 

But the EU’s boycott of Austria when Mr Haider joined a coalition with Vienna’s more mainstream  ( ‘centre right’?) conservative party, and entered government was also very worrying, a multinational power denying voters the freedom to choose their government.

 

 

Yes, they did this. See, for example http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/01/austria.ianblack .  What was it really about? There was no doubt Mr Haider’s rise was ‘democratic’. The voters had, embarrassingly, voted for him, much as they now vote for the French National Front.  Many bad things are, always have been and always will be democratic, and popular.

 

But the EU still boycotted this freely-elected and constitutional government on its territory,  so making clear that its principles were not in fact ‘democratic’ but something else altogether (‘centrist’?). The easiest word is ‘liberal’, though of course it’s also not very liberal to boycott a foreign country because you disapprove of its people’s choice of government.  Mr Haider’s offence, I think, was to reject by implication the EU’s ideas of open borders and multiculturalism. You do not have to accept Mr Haider’s rather gamey version of Austrian nationalism to be concerned about those. 

 

 

Which brings me back to those fringe EU states, rescued from blatant authoritarianism by the EU, and defended against a relapse by the EU. For their poorer citizens ’Democracy’ was completely associated with a new prosperity, rising standards of living, infrastructure, greater freedom to travel and work abroad.

 

 

Huge amounts of money began to flow into the former fringe states, in transfers and easy loans.  I’d love to know how much, and how much of it, in the end, came from Britain. When I was in Andalusia last autumn, I was amazed to see the pristine white concrete of the new high-speed railway lines, the vast subsidised olive groves stretching from horizon to horizon and the new motorways, far beyond the apparent means of Spain itself to pay for such things. 

 

As these societies were transformed, I didn’t initially connect it with the EU, or the Common Market as it then was. Only later did it seem to be a sort of imperial process, by which these fringe provinces, the loyalty of their elites bought with rivers of EU gold,  were helped to become markets for the manufactured goods of the North, and producers of raw materials and agricultural products, and also suppliers of cheap labour, either in situ or as migrants within the EU.

 

It wasn’t just avuncular generosity. It was a way of buying power, of turning poor, dictatorial or theocratic  but independent countries into affluent but subservient provinces, whose economies and cultures were reordered to suit the rich north of the EU. In all of these countries, religious social conservatism has been routed by waves of apparently easy money. The old hard question, ‘Who whom?’ once again discovers the reality . A loan, like a  gift, can also be a chain and a fetter, even if it is made of gold or silver. Bonds aren’t called bonds for nothing.

 

Old-fashioned conservative nationalists couldn’t fight this on the continent because of the Fascist and collaborationist past.  Even in France I have a feeling that the National Front is unable (for that reason) to break into the second rounds of the Presidential and Parliamentary elections, and so elbow aside the French Tories, currently known as the ‘Republicans’

 

The enjoyable paradox now is that a far stronger threat to the EU’s centralised democratism now comes from the Left, especially from Syriza in Greece and their Spanish equivalent Podemos.

 

So many paradoxes follow.  It is the Utopian Marxist left, not the conservative patriotic right, that has actually come into full-scale national conflict with the imperial power of the EU, even though the EU is, at heart, a leftist utopian project.  The trouble is that, while these movements quite rightly resent the imposition of mad Procrustean economic policies on them, weirdly punitive and deterrent given the liberal relativism that lies at the heart of the EU,  they are fighting against their own globalist anti-national ideals.

 

In fact the purest exposition of modern Greek nationalism is left-wing. The hardline nationalist right is by contrast a sideshow. You might claim this has always been so because of its Byronic, radical origins. But it hasn’t. The last Greek government to say ‘Oxi’ (no!) to an arrogant continental neighbour was that of General Ioannis Metaxas, a monarchist tyrant, who refused Italian demands for occupation rights to parts of Greek territory.

 

The EU’s response to this rebellion has so far been imperial far more than it has been leftist. France has been more willing to see the problem from Greece’s point of view. But Germany, and its many desperately sycophantic self-abasing clients in the ‘new’ formerly Soviet-dominated EU states, whose leaders would have been ready for their people to eat thistles if it was the price of getting into the Euro, continues to support a policy of exemplary punishment for rebels. I think all this gives us a clue as to what the EU really is, deep, deep down.  

 

As I write, I have no idea how or where it may end, but I am reminded of Dominic Cummings’s warning about Britain’s government.

 

‘Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door.’

 

There is no door in Brussels or Berlin either. These people are human, they lack sleep, they don’t understand economics, they let petty ambition or dogma blind them to obvious facts. They may not even have been very bright in the first place.