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?

 

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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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Game of Drones

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     It is very sad, but some people may actually be influenced by the argument that a UKIP vote at the 2015 election will put ‘Red Ed’ into Downing Street. Of course it will. That’s the whole point of doing it, a negative action misrepresented by expressing it as a positive one.  You can’t keep Tweedledumber out without putting Tweedledumb in. There is no facility for electing no government at all (though given their performances lately, whyever not?). You do it because you really don’t much care who wins, and why should you? You want to punish someone.

I , for instance, am not one of those who say there’s absolutely no difference between the parties.  I actually think that Labour wouldn’t have dared to smash up the armed forces the way the Tories have done. It’s a sort of Nixon and China point, not a moral plus for Labour. But it’s a fact. And I am astonished that the intervention of two ex-soldiers at the Tory conference on Sunday did not get more coverage than it did.

 

Did those present not see that they were witnessing a gigantic earthquake of Krakatoan proportions? A Tory Defence Secretary heckled by moustachioed and medal-hung ex-soldiers, for cutting the armed forces? And this in the days of supposedly total security, when all dissenting opinion is sniffed out and excluded, and none but the vetted get within a furlong of the conference hall? Lucky for the Tories that these decent old coves went quietly.  If you want to know why the Tories are bound to lose, then there’s your answer. If they can alienate such people, they’ve alienated their deep core. Yet the sketch-writers seemed more interested in a tawdry stall of Thatcher knick-knacks.

 

I was reminded of the curious events at a Tory rally in Blackpool in October 1958, recalled at length in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ (first published as ‘The Broken Compass’).  At this event, supporters of the League of Empire Loyalists were violently ejected from the hall for heckling Harold Macmillan. They were expressing or defending positions (on immigration and the winding up of the empire) similar to views that had quite recently been expressed by none other than Sir Winston Churchill, in the Cabinet Room of Ten Downing Street.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/aug/05/race.past

 

Which raises the amusing question of the Tory party’s incessant parading of Sir Winston as their exemplar and hero for the past 60 years or so, and conjures up the mental picture of the old boy being summarily ejected from a modern Tory Party conference by stone-faced stewards with plastic badges, to be handed over to ‘Security’ staff and then passed on to modern police officers with pepper sprays, Tasers and the usual paraphernalia of baseball caps, sub-machine guns, visible handcuffs and flexi-batons. Never in the field of human conflict, I’ll say.

 

Several distinguished journalists - no friends of the Empire Loyalists (no more am I) -  were appalled at what happened to the Empire Loyalists on that long-ago Blackpool Day. They perhaps didn’t realise the real significance of it.  

 

The Tories have always been ruthless in the pursuit of office, but the late Reginald Bosanquet, then a reporter for Independent Television News, testified later in court that the violence used against the Blackpool hecklers had been ‘excessive’. So did the late Bernard Levin, who said he had seen one of the hecklers marched into a room by uniformed stewards, whereupon  ‘I heard cries and the door was repeatedly banged from the other side. When he came out he was very distressed’. Mr Levin also testified that the man was bleeding heavily from the nose, and his shirt was torn. This was, in a way, the Tories’ version of Labour’s far gentler ejection of Walter Wolfgang from their conference many years later. But it is largely forgotten because nobody much liked the Empire Loyalists, whereas old Walter was quite appealing.

 

This sort of thing really cannot happen now, thanks to TV, and I must admit, thanks to the Internet, which would spread images of it around the country so quickly that it would be politically impossible. 

 

But I think it showed, even then, the truth – that the Tories had entirely accepted, by 1958, the Fabian reordering of Britain between 1945 and 1951, not to mention this country’s epochal defeat and humiliation by the USSR and the USA  at Tehran, Yalta and Bretton Woods, and were prepared to enforce the change with all necessary ruthlessness.

 

Now they have entirely accepted the Blairite (ie EuroCommunist and Gramscian) reordering of the country between 1990 (the true beginning of Blairism) and 2010, and the German reordering of Europe since 1989  . And Michael Howard (the man laughably believed by some to be a ‘right-winger’, who created David Cameron and hugely centralised power in his party) and David Cameron himself were prepared to go to amazing lengths to reinforce this.

 

Their greatest enemies, in this project, are the loyal members and voters of their own party, who must be bullied, cajoled or otherwise persuaded into voting for and supporting governments which are hateful to them. The loathing is mutual, which is why I recently said on television that David Cameron did many of the things he does because he hates his own party. Of course he does. It's his job.

 

There’s only one answer to people who are wholly ruthless in the pursuit of office – and that’s to deny them office with equal ruthlessness. They will suffer far more from this  than the voters will suffer from putting the ‘wrong’ party in office. Who (on either side of the political divide) thinks there has been any vast difference between the Coalition or the Blair-Brown, in their effects on daily life, living standards or human freedom?  Or foreign policy? Or anything else?

 

Those who didn’t like the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock, and so abstained or voted for other parties in 1992, were not so thick that they didn’t grasp what their actions would bring about. Lo, John Major, perhaps the most unlikely victor in British electoral history, became Prime Minister. It wasn't that anyone much actually wanted him. It was that they didn't want the other one (much the same process put Ted Heath into Downing Street in 1970, after the famous 'unpopularity contest' between him and the by-then-discredited Harold Wilson).And the Labour Party was, for good or ill, forced to change, into something rather like John Major. 

 

UKIP voters (and if you feel you must vote, which I don't, that’s the way to do it) can hardly believe that Nigel Farage is the national future. Even Mr Farage (and all credit to him for grasping it) knows that is not going to happen. But he also knows he can do a lot of mischief, and his latest plan, to offer individual Tories UKIP support, is very mischievous. It's absolutely not a pact(which would destroy UKIP) . But it could force a lot of blowhard 'Eurosceptic' Tories to show what they're really made of, or more likely what they aren't made of.

 

These UKIP  supporters may genuinely hope to change the Tories, though the only way to change them is to destroy them utterly and replace them with almost anything else, perhaps a blob of plasticine. I mean, anything, anything would be better than this intellectually and morally bankrupt rump of deeply unattractive, ignorant and not-very-bright persons. Game of Thrones? More like a Game of Drones.

 

There’s a good chance that a Tory failure in 2015, especially if combined with Scotland voting to stay in the Union, will bring about the long-needed split and collapse of the Conservative Party. Scottish secession is in fact David Cameron’s only remaining hope of a Westminster majority. I am baffled and flummoxed by the number of commentators and politicians who claim, with straight faces, that the Tories can win an absolute majority in May 2015. On what polls are they basing this? It is virtually unknown for a governing party to increase its vote or share of the vote after five years in government – the March 1966 election, in which Labour got its absolute majority, followed a sort of probationary period of 18 months in which the voters decided (foolishly) that Harold Wilson was to be trusted after all. The 1983 Tory election triumph was brought about by the Falklands, and the 1987 one by the Alliance splitting the left utterly.

 

UKIP voters, many of whom feel as I do that the whole purpose of their vote should be to punish the Tories, need to go a step further. They should seek to destroy the Tories, so knocking down the great wall of flannel and conventional wisdom that keeps this country from discussing its own future, or influencing it.  So what if ‘Red Ed’ gets in? Or a Lib-Lab coalition? Will you really be able to tell the difference?  But five or ten years afterwards, we might have a proper British government again, which quite possibly may not happen, but will certainly never happen as long as the Tories survive.

Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

 Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).
But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

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A Quick Thought on Self-Defence, and one or two other matters

Mr Bob Aldridge writes to ask: ’If self defence is the sole justification for war, does that mean that both Britain and the USA should have stayed out of the First and Second World Wars? Should the USA not have helped Britain over the Falklands? Where does self defence begin?' 

As I think I have said before, I remain quite baffled by Britain’s 1914 declaration of war on Germany, based on a very generous interpretation of our treaty obligations to Belgium, and not in our national interests.  It had been clear since 1870 that Germany was now the dominant power in central Europe, for solid reasons of population, economic strength, military skill and general inventiveness and energy. British foreign policy, based upon maintaining our global position as a trading empire and naval superpower,  should have been aimed at taking advantage of this inevitable development, not trying to frustrate it.

And, as I have also said many times, our decision to declare war in 1939, for a cause we didn’t care about, for a goal we could not actually attain and had no intention of gaining, on the basis of a promise we had made when we had no intention of keeping it and no forces with which to keep it, with an army we didn’t have, at a time which didn’t suit us and which we allowed to be chosen by others, must rank as one of the most stupid diplomatic decisions ever taken by a major nation.

Both wars left us socially, morally and economically devastated, and neither achieved their objective. The myth created to justify the 1914 war retrospectively - the ‘War to end War’ - has long been exploded, not least by the rather blatant fact that it was no such thing. The myth to justify the 1939 war - that it was a war of principle fought for freedom and to save the Jews from Nazi murder -  remains as yet unexploded, though the mere facts that its main European effect to was hugely to expand the murderous tyranny of the USSR, and that it didn’t directly save, or even try to save, a single Jew from Nazi murder,  directly contradict these claims.  Jews were of course saved by the eventual collapse and defeat of the Hitler state. But the Allies discounted courageously gathered reports of what was going on in the death camps, and declined to bomb the railways leading to them.

The entry of the United States into the 1914 war seems to have been manipulated by propaganda suggesting a German threat to the USA, providing at least a pretext of self-defence, and there was also the complex issue of German submarine warfare and its effect on American citizens and shipping. Personally I think Britain would have been far better off if we’d listened to Lord Lansdowne and signed a compromise peace, thus avoiding the Bolshevik revolution, the great German inflation, the Washington Naval Treaty and many other reverses and disasters. In 1941, Germany declared war on the USA, which had sensibly waited before entering the European war.

I shall be accused of all kinds of horrors for saying this. My motivation is, however, quite simple and unadorned – the interests of my own country and its people.

Mr Henry Noel asks, similarly ‘I hope that by "self defence" one does not mean waiting for the aggressor's knife to be in one's gut before responding.'

Well, my policy remains the sensible one of maintaining strong and effective armed forces, on the assumption that you never know from which direction danger may come. As Switzerland has shown more than once, this is quite effective.

I am not quite sure what the Falklands are doing in this question. Didn't Argentina invade the islands? And sending material help to an ally who's been attacked seems to me to be covered by 'self-defence'.

A reader who complained to the BBC about the handling of my ‘debate’ with Russell Brand has received a reply which contains the following immortal words ‘As impartiality is the cornerstone of our entire programme making process there is certainly no bias against Peter Hitchens’

I am having this sentence stuffed and mounted in a glass case.

Our laws, our freedom and our people... Kidnapped by America

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

What is the difference between extradition and kidnapping? I used to know, but I am no longer sure. Because an emotional spasm about ‘terrorism’ caused us to take leave of our senses, we are all now at the mercy  of foreign governments that take a  dislike to us.

In some cases we can be snatched from our homes and families because we are charged with actions which are not even crimes here.

In some cases we can be hauled away in manacles on the demand of some politically driven American prosecutor.

I used to admire American justice, but since the state-sponsored panic under George W. Bush, I am sadly disillusioned.

The penalty for daring to plead not guilty – certain financial ruin and a possible 35-year sentence – is so savage that the presumption of innocence, and jury trial itself, have been to all intents and purposes abolished. This means that the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution – which guarantees the right to a fair trial, and is one of the glories of America – has been violated and destroyed.

That is bad enough, but we shouldn’t  forget our other, equally unforgivable  surrender of national independence, the EU arrest warrant. Bulgarian justice, anyone? Both the new US-UK extradition treaty and the EU arrest warrant were rammed through Parliament on the basis that they would fight ‘terror’.

Wise and far-sighted questions were raised about this enormous change when it was first proposed. The heartbreaking case of Christopher Tappin (pictured above with wife Elaine), the British businessman extradited to America last week, against whom there seems to be nothing resembling evidence of wrongdoing or guilty intent, is exactly what its critics feared. This episode is so unfair that any proper British patriot must surely be moved to cold fury by it.

What is interesting is that while the problem has been obvious for years, nothing has been done about it.

Worse, authority has pretended that there is nothing to worry about. Sir Scott Baker’s recent report into extradition said complacently that there was ‘no significant difference’ between what the US needs to do to extradite one of ours, and what we need to do to extradite one of theirs.

Is that so?

It was not always the official position. Baroness Scotland, Home Office Minister of State, speaking in the House of Lords on the afternoon of December 16, 2003, made it quite clear that if we tried to extradite an American citizen we would in future be required to meet ‘a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that’.

In short, this is an unequal treaty, of the sort made between colonial powers and their powerless vassals, or between  conquerors and their victims. Now, whenever the United States mounts its very high horse on the subject of terrorism, I think we must recall that it was the US that compelled this country to surrender to the terrorist murderers of the IRA.
IT WAS President Bill  Clinton who laundered the grisly and sinister  Godfather Gerry Adams, giving him a visa and allowing him to spread his soapy propaganda and raise funds across the United States. President George W. Bush, Mr Anti-Terrorism himself, actually altered his schedule to fit in Mr Adams (who was too busy to make the original time) for a jolly St Patrick’s Day chinwag in the White House.

So put that in your Guinness and drink it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. If it’s terror you’re against, you know where to look for its supporters and sponsors.

Britain should – tonight if possible – withdraw from these unequal treaties, which are nationally humiliating, lawless and limitlessly dangerous.

If you must be rude, do it with style

I want to like Adele Adkins, but she is so coarse, I can’t. And if she has to make rude gestures, why does she need  to use the awkward American one-finger salute instead of the traditional British V-sign, as majestically deployed recently in the Lords by Baroness Trumpington, fearsome widow of my old headmaster? Come to think of it, why don’t we order Lady Trumpington  to steam to the Falklands at top speed? The Argentines wouldn’t dare attack if she was there.

Heroic Marie's death isn't an excuse for war

I am very sorry for the death of the reporter Marie Colvin, above, who was a woman of great courage and selflessness. But let it not become a pretext for yet another war of intervention. We have done enough harm in Libya – and I might add that the piteous state of Somalia is entirely the fault of foreign interference.

The question Cameron can't handle

I promised to tell you about David Cameron’s obdurate refusal to answer a simple question, and my long battle  to squeeze the truth out of Downing Street.

My question concerned the Prime Minister’s very public withdrawal from his position as patron of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). He took this post (of course) before the last Election in time to pick up some Jewish votes. Many previous Premiers have held the same title, which involves no work but demonstrates continued high-level support in Britain for the state of Israel.

Pro-Arab and Islamic organisations, plus the usual angry anti-Israel campaigners, have worked hard to break this link. Meanwhile, British foreign policy under Mr Cameron has become quietly but firmly aligned to the needs and desires of ultra-Islamic Saudi Arabia – hence our mad aggression towards Iran, and curiously selective support of the bits of the Arab Spring that suit Saudi aims.

Muslim organisations in this country rejoiced (as, I am sure, did the Saudis) when Mr Cameron pulled out of the JNF.

It was obviously a huge snub to pro-Israel sentiment, and an attempt to grub votes for the Tories in Muslim areas. But  a bland official statement (presumably worried about losing Jewish votes) maintained that it was the result of a routine review of the PM’s charity commitments. Several other charities were said to have been affected.

I simply asked which these charities were. And they would not tell me. After several months of to-ing and fro-ing,  in which I had to involve the Information Commissioner,  I began to wonder if they even existed. To this day, they won’t identify one of them.

But I can now name three estimable but politically unimportant charities affected, The Don’t Walk Away Campaign, United Estates Of Wythenshawe, and The Campaign For The University Of Oxford.

Downing Street wouldn’t tell me because it’s so obvious that these nice people, about whom Mr Cameron had once pretended to care, were casually thrown overboard  to provide cover for a major political switch.

Samuel Hayek, chairman  of the JNF, informs me that during early discussions on  the proposed snub, he was told that Mr Cameron’s continued support caused ‘a conflict  of interest’.

I’ll bet it did – a conflict of interest between sticking to a personal commitment freely made, and a series of unprincipled, sordid needs that emerged a bit later. We all know that kind of person. The instinctive oily slipperiness of this Prime Minister makes Anthony Blair look straightforward and reliable.

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How does the State get away with grooming 13-year-old girls for illegal underage sex?

As the age of sexual consent is 16, what are state employees doing fitting contraceptive implants in 13-year-old girls? Aren’t they colluding in a criminal act?

These sinister devices are a clear admission by the Government. It actually expects these children to have unlawful sexual intercourse, and wants to make it easy for them.

How strange, given that the one crime we all disapprove of utterly and completely is paedophilia. Even convicted gangsters, rapists, burglars and muggers look down on the paedophiles in their midst (they have another word for them, as they cannot spell or pronounce the official term).

Those who engage in paedophilia are often also accused of ‘grooming’, preparing their victims for violation and abuse.

Yet here we have a policy that directly condones and encourages the sexualisation of children, and is at the very least comparable to the ‘grooming’ we are all so shocked by.

What child, equipped with this rather revolting chemical lump or dose, would not grasp that she was expected by the authorities to act accordingly? I would be very interested to know exactly what the victims of this scheme are told, and how they are chosen.

This thing is done by doctors and nurses, supposedly symbols of rectitude and mercy. It often takes place in schools, where our children are meant to be safe from molesters. It is protected by law. It is paid for by your taxes and mine, extracted under the threat of prison.

Perhaps most sinister of all, it is – like all child-molesting – ‘our little secret’. The girls’ parents are not asked their permission beforehand for their daughters to be corrupted by our sick state. Nor are they told afterwards. This is both totalitarian and evil.

The judges are always ready to confirm that this is no longer a Christian country in anything but name, and did so again on Friday – though I do wonder where they think our laws and their powers come from.

But it is much worse than that. We are turning into a sort of Babylon, only with drizzle and sleet. Almost every sexual practice and habit – with the single exception of faithful marriage – is now encouraged by the state.

First, the state poisons young minds with so-called sex-education, which is now unleashed in primary schools. Then, when the poor things act on what they have been told, doctors push chemical anti-baby capsules under their skin. I believe this sort of thing is known as ‘harm reduction’.

It all depends what you mean by harm. Having privatised the telephones, electricity and the railways, we have nationalised paedophilia.

West is making things worse for Syria's victims
The BBC is working hard to get us to go to war in Syria. Its incessant coverage is – as it was in Libya and Egypt – mostly dim, partial and unquestioning. This should cease.

If there is a rebellion against a dictatorship, then it must, as far as the BBC is concerned, be noble. If a government defends itself against rebellion, it must, according to the BBC, be wrong.

Great slabs of history tell us that this is not necessarily so. In this case, I tremble for the fate of Syria’s Arab Christians if the Assad regime falls.
Bad is often replaced by worse. This is already happening in Egypt and Libya, though the BBC seldom troubles to record the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’ it welcomed so simple-mindedly.

Perhaps the Corporation is trying to please our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, an increasingly pathetic figure who seems to have mistaken military intervention in foreign countries for conservatism. Someone should also ask him why he gets so outraged about Syria, and was not outraged by equally bloody repression in Bahrain.

It seems that, having been refused UN permission to destabilise Damascus under the blue flag, we are now looking at running guns to the rebels. What British interest is served by this dangerous policy?

The revolt in Syria would long ago have faded away had it not been for the noisy support of Washington and London. Much of the bloodshed and destruction is, I believe, the responsibility of the ‘West’, which has falsely encouraged naive people to believe that Nato helicopters and bombers are just over the horizon.

ID cards: the spectre's still lurking
Since identity cards were abolished long ago, why do we still have an ‘Identity and Passport Service’?

I asked the Home Office, and they treated it as a silly question and snapped dismissively that it would cost too much to change the name. I said I was sure that the plaque on the Home Secretary’s door didn’t still say ‘Alan Johnson’, but they didn’t get the joke. Then I asked the

Department for Education, as it is now known, how much it had cost to get rid of the stupid New Labour name it used to have. For the entire department (far bigger than the Passport Office), it cost £8,995, small change in Government terms.

So why do we still have an ‘Identity and Passport Service’? I wonder if identity cards have really gone for good.

What the Dickens?
Sad to think, as we mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, that hardly anyone will still read his books 50 years from now.

What with mass ‘dyslexia’ (otherwise known as very bad reading teaching), and the takeover of childish imaginations by TV and the internet, reading books for pleasure will soon be as rare as seedcake and clay pipes.

You can't replace warships with empty words
The more David Cameron rattles his rusty sabre, the more I fear for the Falklands. Margaret Thatcher nearly lost them, by proposing to scrap much of the Navy and withdrawing HMS Endurance. Luckily for her, the Argentinians didn’t wait till we had sold or melted down the ships that formed the Task Force, or she’d be a footnote.

Now, we could not possibly take the islands back if we lost them again, and I am not convinced we are strong enough to hold them against a determined attack.

We also have many fewer friends in the world than we had in 1982. I dread waking up one morning and hearing that Port Stanley is once again in Argentine hands.

Mr Cameron hopes to look tough by boasting about ship deployments. But while I don’t want to give too much away, our ships may not be well suited to the task they face. And they can’t stay for ever.

He should boast less, and try to rebuild the Navy he has cut so clumsily, before it is too late.

Another wrong war . . . and another PM who treats Parliament like a neutered chihuahua

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

David Cameron's war of personal vanity still rages on, its aim and its end unknown. Our ludicrous Libyan allies – who may in fact be our enemies – fight each other as we protect their so-called army from Colonel Gaddafi. If we don’t send weapons and troops to help them, they have no hope of winning.

Will we? Or will we, in desperation, wink at an assassination of the Colonel, an action that will take us close to his moral level?

Or will we, by then, be too busy bombing our way to the Big Society in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Zimbabwe, China and anywhere else where government doesn’t reach our leader’s alleged high ethical standards? Nobody knows.

Ministers, apparently with no idea of the forces they have unleashed, drawl that it’s as long as a piece of string.

Ho ho. Or maybe it’s as long as the rope needed to hang themselves. Yet the House of Commons endorses this leap in the dark with a vote so overwhelming that you wonder if they put something in the water, or whatever it is they drink. What are all these costly people for?

Last year we worried about their expenses. This year we should be worried about their salaries. We hired them to question and watch the Government, not to do what the Prime Minister tells them. Aren’t we still recovering from the gullibility of MPs (and the media) over Saddam Hussein? Do we learn nothing from experience? Are too many of us, and them, just too thick to be in charge of a small nuclear power? It seems so.

MPs should be reminded they are not the employees of Downing Street, but of us.

I am quite sure that a huge number of British people do not want this war, and for good reasons. It is not in our national interests. We can’t even protect old ladies from rapists in our own country, and perhaps we should sort that out before reforming Africa.

They correctly think it is not our affair. After being told that we can’t even afford public libraries, they have to watch Liam Fox burning great mounds of banknotes (provided by us) as he rains costly munitions on Tripoli.

They are baffled to see the remains of our naval power towed surreptitiously to a Turkish scrapyard, because we allegedly cannot afford it. And meanwhile, an obscure public relations man who has never fought in a war poses as the saviour of Benghazi.

Where was the British people’s voice in the Commons on Monday? I don’t care much what the UN, that rabble of torturers and tyrants, thinks. I would cheerfully see it abolished. I have no idea why we still need Nato 20 years after the threat it was formed to face vanished for ever. The fact that it has endorsed Mr Cameron’s adventure doesn’t comfort me.

What really troubles me is that Parliament wasn’t asked its opinion until after the missiles were launched. It was treated, contemptuously, like a neutered chihuahua, a pitiful yapping thing to be pushed about by the Premier’s polished toecap, and patted as long as it fawned. And if it doesn’t now revolt against this treatment, then that is what it will have proved itself to be.

I believe that the Government knew by Friday, March 18 that it was more or less certain it would begin military action on the evening of Saturday, March 19. There was time to call a special session of the Commons. And there was a precedent – the Falklands.

The first motion before the House on Monday should have been a censure of the Government for launching a war of choice without seeking Parliamentary approval.

Yet, while the whole engine of British diplomacy was devoted to getting Mr Cameron’s war past the UN, Nato and (of course) our ultimate rulers in the EU, Westminster was forgotten. And so were we.

This is wrong. Those involved should not get away with it. Later on, I shall say I told you so. Just now, I’m telling you so.

The BBC won’t rest until we’re all talking filth

In the superb recent remake of True Grit, I don’t think there was a single four-letter word.

Yet it was a perfectly credible portrayal of the lives of fierce and often violent men in a cruel, half-civilised time.

In fact, half the pleasure of the film was the almost biblical English, spoken naturally by everyone – slower, clearer and a hundred times more powerful than the slurred, jerky newspeak of our day.

But don’t expect the BBC, that propaganda organisation for avant-garde muck, to learn any lessons from that.

Fresh from ruining Winifred Holtby’s thoughtful classic South Riding on TV, the Corporation now plans to insert four-letter words into a dramatisation of Wuthering Heights on Radio 3.

Partly this is attention-seeking, and I know they are hoping for condemnation from people such as me. But that is because they are immoral and cheap.

Many people still loathe swearing and are made unhappy by it. For instance,
a grandparent trying to listen to this classic with a grandchild could not do so without great embarrassment.

The BBC knows this, thanks to the many complaints it gets about on-air swearing. It still does it because it is biased against the older Britain where swearing was done only under strict rules.

Its executives and journalists use four-letter words in front of their own children, and think it fine to use them in front of yours, too. They think you’re backward and repressed for not doing it yourself.

The same impulse lay behind the needless four-letter scene in that overrated film The King’s Speech. Fashionable liberals despise restraint and take special delight in debauching innocent and kindly things.

It is quite important that this dramatisation fails and is seen to fail, and that it receives a large number of complaints when it is aired. If they can get away with Wuthering ****ing Heights, it won’t be long before we have David ****ing Copperfield, Vanity ****ing Fair, Romeo And ****ing Juliet, Paradise ****ing Lost, Gray’s ****ing Elegy written in a ****ing Country Churchyard, Tennyson’s In ****ing Memoriam, Brave New ****ing World and, before you know where you are, Alice In ****ing Wonderland, Lord Of The ****ing Rings and (of course) Harry Potter And The ****ing Goblet Of Fire.

For goodness sake, we already have Martin Amis if you want this sort of stuff.

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Once again the banks are urged to put fivers in their cash machines. Once again they won’t, because it means extra work refilling them. Yet most people want fivers. If market forces are really so powerful, why can’t we get them?

Mr Cameron Goes to War

No doubt in days to come we'll have several chances to discuss this. But I wanted to give a brief and concentrated response to comments so far on my Sunday column. For those not bothered by our latest war, an interesting debate on whether Atheists choose to be so, and why they do, continues on the 'Red Meat' thread, and probably will do till the sounding of the Last Trump. Intrepid Web voyagers may also be able to find an encounter with me and one of my more virulent critics, in which I have caught him red-handed distorting my words, and he and his supporters insist that this is perfectly all right.

But back to Benghazi. Though I'm never distressed to be in a small minority at the start of any controversy (usually the infallible way to be in the majority at the end of it, though this isn't my special purpose) , I'm amazed at the generally slack-minded support for this action, or at least acceptance of the feeble arguments for it, in the British political and media classes. It was dispiriting listening to Radio 4's 'Any Questions' last Friday night, in which a varied panel of reasonably intelligent people unanimously supported the war.

I suspect that many people outside the London elite, not least those in military families, are heartily sick of the British government's growing delight in launching wars in distant Muslim countries where they don't know what is going on and have no idea what the end of the story will be.


And by the way a wonderful example of the way in which Ministers are utterly insulated from reality emerged at the weekend, when the Mail on Sunday reported that Jack Straw was taking driving lessons because in his long Cabinet years he had more or less forgotten how to drive. I seem to recall him being driven very fast indeed at one point, during his time in office, but I like to remember tiresome things like that.

Andrew Bishop (who kindly reminds of my name, which I am glad to say I have still not forgotten) says: ' We have every right to intervene in Libya. Col. Gadaffi provided arms and money for the IRA and also don't forget the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in London. I could also raise the subject of Lockerbie but enough has been said about that recently. When a foreign dictator is responsible for terrorist atrocities against British citizens there is no doubt that action should be taken against him.'

I am not sure what this 'right' consists of. From 1648 until very recently, countries were sovereign and we didn't intervene in them because of their internal affairs. This was not perfect, but there was a reason for it. It was because of the horrible experience of the Thirty Years War, in which nations asserted their 'right' to intervene in states whose governments they disliked. The consequence was a period of massacre, torture, hatred, woe and depopulation, when the nightmare paintings of Hieronymus Bosch pretty much came true, which still lies across the continent of Europe like a scar (though is sadly little-known in Britain, which escaped it).

The myth that we went to war with Hitler because we didn't like his internal behaviour is a complete falsehood. He murdered and repressed with impunity for six years before we blundered into war with him. And our crucial ally, Stalin, murdered and repressed for decades before, during and after our alliance with him. See index.

The new doctrine, set forth in the mouth of (though not, I suspect , in the vacuous, historically illiterate mind of) Anthony Blair is of 'hard liberalism', or 'muscular liberalism' where we intervene in countries we currently don't like, for idealistic motives. The US invasion of Iraq, I think, was genuinely concocted by people who thought they were doing good. Always a bad sign, a point I will come to.

This is transparent, contradictory piffle. If our guiding principle is a hatred of oppression, then we don't apply it as a principle. in which case it isn't one. We don't intervene in the long term in China, Zimbabwe, North Korea (China massacred its; 'own' people in Tiananmen Square and those responsible are still in charge). We haven't intervened in Iran despite the grisly street massacres last year. We didn't intervene in the short term when Syria shelled its own people in their homes in the city of Hama. We aren't intervening against the Bahraini and Yemeni governments, both of which have been treating their 'own people' with severe violence.

Be warned, by the way. This 'principle' can and possibly will rebound. When, 20 years hence, Chinese or Russian jets, with UN Sanction, are destroying RAF bases and air defences because of some last-gasp British attempt to defend what's left of our sovereignty or suppress indigenous terrorism, they will silkily point out that they got the idea from us. Don't think it can't happen. The 21st century will be full of surprises, as we decline, and China and Russia almost certainly abstained on this so they could watch us destroy what remains of our influence, and because they can see that this new law of war could one day work for their benefit.

Colonel Gadaffi did indeed support and finance the IRA. So did the United States, in the form of NORAID collections, (private but legal), sanctuary for terrorists on the run (impossible without the authorities winking at it) and ultimately by the 'peace process' under which Bill Clinton put the force of the White House behind the ghastly coffin-carrier Gerry Adams, humiliated and sidelined the formerly influential British Embassy in Washington, and forced John Major to begin the surrender to the IRA completed by A.Blair in 1998 (under which the IRA have kept the weapons supplied to them by Colonel Gadaffi, and we have all pretended to believe that they have been destroyed). So does he want to bomb Connecticut and Massachusetts? I doubt it.

He's wise to steer clear of Lockerbie as a Casus Belli. The evidence that Libya was responsible for that atrocity is non-existent, and this account is believed by nobody with any close knowledge of the affair.

I'll deal briefly (because I have other commitments) with two other points. One, that Mr Cameron's eventual fanning of the flames into actual war should make me sorry that I laughed at his initial efforts. Why? My point was twofold . One that such action was foolish and second that Mr Cameron had made a fool of himself.

Mr Cameron's initial efforts were without doubt confused and feeble, and accompanied by the SAS blunder, and at that time there seemed to be enough sensible people in Washington DC, notably at the Pentagon, to prevent a rush into war. The fact that electoral politics in the USA and France, no doubt influenced by the propagandist and simplified coverage of the affair on the TV screens of those nations, have over-ridden the wise and cautious, doesn't change the folly of the action.

My only possible regret is that it may be Mr Cameron's wounded pride, when we laughed at his initial failure, that drove him on to the place where we are now.

Ever since the Falklands, when the Royal Navy saved Margaret Thatcher's bacon, British politicians have wrongly assumed that war is a ticket to popularity and the admiration awarded to statesmanship. Much more often it is a ticket to failure, recrimination (and national decline). Mrs Thatcher was incredibly lucky that she hadn't yet scrapped the Navy.

I am also asked how I square my Christian conscience with my hard-bitten view of foreign policy. Let us call this the doctrine of limited effect, combined with the law of unintended consequences. Good, as I often quote William Blake as pointing out, has to be done in minute particulars. Unselfishness is only really possible at short range, where we have a good chance of rightly predicting the consequences of our actions.

This is why I support the existence of nation states, genuine communities of common interest and understanding in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish. Such communities need to defend themselves against attack. Sometimes this will involve just wars, but aggressive war is rarely if ever just.

It is obviously permissible to fail to intervene in wrong and injustice if we are not aware of it. What if we are aware of it but not truly able to help? The Good Samaritan did not see the robbed man on TV. He saw him on the same road. TV has given us the illusion of closeness to, and ability to act in, places where we do not have the power to be effective. It is relatively easy to insert a TV crew into a famine or a war zone and with luck get it out again. An army (or a relief operation) is a far greater problem. This is why so much charity ends up being wasted, creamed off in bribes or never reaching its recipients. That's not an argument against charity because some good is done, along with the harm and the waste.

The balance sheet for war seems less attractive.

We watch the launch of missiles, the grandeur of warships afloat, the thrill of jets flying low over targets, the pretty orange and black flowering of distant explosions, the flash of missiles landing in cities lighting the night sky. We are not shown what it looks like afterwards. People would rush from the room gagging if the truth came on their TV screens at 10 pm. Most of us have never even seen a corpse, let alone a charred or dismembered one. We have not been powerless and defenceless in a city under bombardment (I am haunted by the fact that during the bombing of Baghdad dozens of women went into premature labour through terror. Who wants to be responsible for that?) My own brief experience of war zones has forever cured me of imagining that there is such a thing as a humanitarian war.

Ultimately, in the sum of human kindness, my view may seem heartless. But it is far more merciful than an interventionist war.

General Sherman told us long ago that 'War is Hell', and he was right. The only mercy in war is a swift victory. No sane, kind person should ever call for it unless the alternative is slavery and subjugation in our own land.

Blog and Counter-blog. The arguments go on

A few responses to points made by contributors over the past few days. Stephen Elliott asks why I believe Mrs Thatcher's (as she then was) alleged triumph in the Falklands was undeserved. Because of the facts. Her government was on the verge of selling (to Argentina) several of the ships which were vital to the Task Force. Her government's bungled diplomacy gave the Argentines the reasonable impression that we wanted to be rid of the Islands (especially the planned withdrawal of HMS Endurance). It was the Armed Forces, and above all the Navy which she had planned to devastate with cuts, which saved Lady Thatcher's bacon by recapturing the archipelago against all odds. Victory wipes out all previous follies, and so she got away with it and was praised for it. It's true that her resolve, and her wisdom in letting military and naval commanders get on with it without interference, made the victory more likely. But she had to be resolute. Surrender, compromise or failure would have finished her government for good. And if she and her ministers had had more sense beforehand, it need never have happened. The details are to be found in the 'Battle for the Falklands' by Simon Jenkins and Max Hastings, and are well-summarised in John Campbell's fine critical biography of Lady Thatcher, now available in paperback. I write as one who supported the war (and still does) and who (thanks to my father having served in the Royal Navy's South Atlantic Squadron before 1939, and having often told us of his experiences in the islands) knew quite a bit about the Falklands and cared about them more than most people before 1982, when they were largely unheard of.

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In response to Mr Barclay, I have found David Blanchflower's commentaries on economic matters quite persuasive. I make a point of not being influenced by letters to the papers signed by lots of economists, businessmen, generals, scientists etc. But I did notice that the IMF seemed recently to take a similar view to Mr Blanchflower's. I suspect Professor Blanchflower's judgements may be pretty objective, and they certainly make some sense to me, not least because of the clarity with which he expresses them. The Tories have in general been confused or wrong or uncertain about how to handle the current crisis, not because they are Tories so much as because they are inexperienced, and therefore indecisive.

No wider issue of policy arises here. It is a matter of crisis management. In my view economics should be made to follow politics as far as possible, but the only solution for the British economy is a slow, long-term withdrawal from welfare dependency, which could not possibly produce rapid tax cuts. Fake Tories are much given to such 'cuts' which of course have to be recouped in a couple of years, or switched into indirect taxation of various kinds. Spending must be reduced first, then tax can come down. And a genuine reduction in spending must be brought about by genuine changes in the attitude of government towards the welfare state, by far the biggest drain on the exchequer and the biggest inhibitor of lasting economic growth. I really don't see why it is somehow unconservative to point out that you can't pretend that NI cuts can be paid for by non-existent efficiency savings. Anyone who says this and means it is too stupid to be in charge of the economy. Anyone who says it and doesn't mean it is too dishonest to be in charge of the economy.

Mike Everett seems to think I know nothing of basic economics, because I don't pretend to any expertise in the subject. Wrong. Like most educated people of my generation, I know the basics. But unlike George Osborne (or the late Jim Callaghan) I don't think this qualifies me to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. As for the NI cuts, you don't need to be a mechanic to be able to work out that the petrol tank is empty.

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David Boycott writes: ‘What a pitiful article! As anyone with any knowledge of economics knows, Cable is at least as riven by contradictions and errors as either Darling or Osborne, despite getting much less in the way of media scrutiny.
Furthermore, only the most naive could suggest that either the Tories or Labour would offer Number 11 to the LibDems in any circumstances. Not only is there no modern precedent, but the next government is going to be entirely concerned with matters economic, so surrendering the Treasury to a third party would be no more than a painful form of suicide.’

Well, so far as I know, Vincent Cable is the only one of the three who is a professional economist or who has any experience of life outside politics. He is also, from my own experience of public debate, extremely popular in the country at the moment. As for not offering Number 11 to a third party under any circumstances, I am simply not so sure as Mr Boycott seems to be. There have been strong rumours, several times over the past year, that Gordon Brown would have liked to offer the Chancellorship to Vincent Cable (who is an old friend of his). Such an appointment might actually get whoever is Prime Minister after May 6th off a difficult hook (neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Brown are happy with their Treasury spokesmen). And the next government will not necessarily be a government of one party. Pitiful? Too harsh an adjective, I think. He may, like another contributor, have mistaken my description of public enthusiasm for Mr Cable for an expression of enthusiasm on my own part. This is a simple misunderstanding. I expressed no such enthusiasm. I find Mr Cable likeable and human, and respect his knowledge in the field, but cannot myself forget his enthusiasm for the Euro.

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A lot of people seem to have missed my point about Mr Grayling - that his expressed opinions conflict with actual Tory policy and with his own voting record. If they are really his opinions, he should resign from his position, or Mr Cameron ought to dismiss him. The fact that this has not happened tells us most of what we need to know. They have largely missed the other point, that the BBC's new support for the Tories (largely brought about by the Tory change on such cultural and moral matters) has survived this episode unhurt.

Stonewall supporters may continue to vote Tory without fear. Mr Cameron is devoted to the sexual revolution. Those who are not Stonewall supporters should look elsewhere.

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I'm surprised by David Martin's apparent anti-Roman Catholic sectarianism. I thought we had got over this sort of thing. I regard Roman Catholics as my allies against those who would make this a Godless society. That does not mean that, as an Anglican, I forget my differences with them, or they forget theirs with me. Any more than, when I ally myself with strict Calvinists (or attend their churches, as I also attend RC churches from time to time), I forget my differences with them. I do not believe that any of us has any claim to know the whole truth, and hope that all of us can learn from each other.

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George Franks writes: ‘You really have to devote rather more thought to your comments about British Summer time. We, as a company, start work early and frankly it is infinitely preferable to go to work in the dark than come back from work in the dark. I do not think that a journalist can have a clue about these matters, especially one who describes the advocates of lighter evenings as zealots and his prime reason being his enjoyment of tea and toast in the dark. I used to think that you had good ideas, but I fear that you have lost the plot.’

Well, I have a fixed prejudice against people who tell me I have 'lost the plot'. This phrase sounds like something enunciated by a person from EastEnders. No proper human being, who speaks his own mind rather than parroting the minds of others, talks like this. What does it mean? What plot? How lost? If Mr Franks disagrees with me (as he appears to do) he needs to tell me why, and offer me reasons. Also, he's ridiculously, demonstrably wrong when he claims that my 'prime' reason for objecting to fiddling with the clock is my enjoyment of tea and toast at dusk, which is obviously just an observation, and a reference to a gentle pleasure which is sometimes forgotten in the age of 24-hour drinking and all-night clubbing. My 'prime' reason, as is clear from the article, is that human beings are happier and healthier if their clocks agree with the actual time of day (thus, when the sun is at its zenith, it is noon).

I do not agree that it is 'infinitely preferable to go to work in the dark than to come home from work in the dark'. Some people might prefer one, others the other. If the clocks remained in tune with nature, both would get their wish for some of the year, none for all of it. The current proposal, to remain on summer time in winter, and move to double summer time in summer, would leave large numbers of people going to work in the dark for far longer than is now the case. Why should we all be driven into perpetual unnatural time by zealots (whom I describe as such precisely because they think that because one thing is infinitely preferable to them, we all must submit to it)?

If schools, or businesses, or government departments, in different parts of the country, wish to start their working day an hour earlier, or two hours earlier, then let them negotiate it freely with their employees and their pupils, leaving the rest of us to carry on with the time God gave us. We are not in the midst of a world war, as we were when this authoritarian idea was originally foisted on us, and we are not slaving away every hour of the day and night to produce munitions for vast battles in Flanders. There is no more need of this regimentation.

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Why invite the Pope to a country that revels in persecuting Christians?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Why did Gordon Brown’s anti-Christian Government ask the Pope here? Is it so that Benedict can give Britain the last rites? The poor country certainly seems to be in the final stages of a sort of national dementia.

The Prime Minister is trapped in Downing Street because his own party is so bereft of talent and guts that nobody dares put him out of his misery.

The Leader of the Opposition taunts his own supporters and sucks up to the Left-wing Establishment – preening at a film premiere in recycled gym shoes and a funky New Labour outfit, while telling readers of The Guardian that he is like Tony Benn.

And, while the economy drains away down an enormous plughole, the political class snatch up every penny that they can while the opportunity lasts. Do they know something we don’t?

The fatuous Jacqui Smith shows no sign of realising that it might be wrong for her to claim £116,000 in tax-free housing expenses. Does this utterly undistinguished person, who has never done anything noteworthy except destroy our ancient liberties, have any conception of how her crafty greed strikes the nurses, firemen and bus drivers who pay for it?

How would she like it if the surveillance methods she advocates for us were used to track her movements and decide, once and for all, where she really lives? It is hard to know how much to pity this woman, and how much to be disgusted by her behaviour.

You might also have noticed that the Tories, so given to lecturing us about the environment and so virtuously politically correct, aren’t interested in pursuing Jacqui Smith’s odd housing arrangements. And we all know why. Because there are plenty on their side who do the same.

The country’s sick, and mainly sick at the top. Millions of honest, hardworking citizens do what they can to be good, to stay out of debt and pay their way, but are dumped into bankruptcy by a ruling elite that laughs at these good old notions of right and wrong.

Here’s a thought. You’ll have noticed that openly Christian citizens are the ones who increasingly get the rough end of this society. The cultural elite jeers at them, militant atheists denounce religious education as a form of child abuse, people are threatened for doing or saying Christian things.

I think there’s a reason for this. The types who run our country and its culture actively hate the idea that there’s an absolute right and wrong because it gets in their way. They think they are so good that they can do what they like. They loathe the thought that there’s a law above them, however high they get. And here, in our post-Christian, post-democratic society, we begin to see what this means in detail.

Lindsay, the Iron Leftie

The BBC still hasn’t shown the ‘Falklands Play’ on either of its main channels, presumably because it shows Margaret Thatcher in a good light and the Corporation’s Politburo refuses to allow this.

Instead, it has commissioned weird dramas which sort of suggest the Iron Lady was a feminist, and so in some ways more or less all right.

The latest – Margaret – is due for an outing on BBC2 on Thursday and stars Lindsay Duncan, who must be worried that her Left-wing friends will shun her for not portraying the former Premier as a screaming, blood-encrusted vampire.

So she has explained that playing the Tory leader is a bit like playing a murderer.

She declares: ‘I loathed her and everything she stood for.’

She doesn’t explain this opinion, probably because she couldn’t if she tried. Then she adds, with a charming insight into the truly solid bone of the knee-jerk Leftist’s skull: ‘But I’ve played murderers and others whom I couldn’t countenance morally.’

This powerful intellect also reveals that ‘of course’ she ‘did’ drugs, though she apparently didn’t enjoy them much and was glad when she ‘could take up alcohol’. Could? What was stopping her?

Perhaps it came back into fashion. Fashion’s plainly important to her, especially fashion in thought. Ms Duncan is a perfect Sixties product. I loathe everything she stands for.

By the way, the drama is preposterous, histrionic and too long, but there is a brilliant impersonation of Geoffrey Howe, and the ludicrous myth of John Major as a ‘decent guy’ is neatly exploded.

Draft Code for teachers is really just a Daft Code

The ludicrous and sinister General Teaching Council will soon doubtless be ensuring that all teachers spout the proper views on ‘Equality and Diversity’ – words that just happen to appear prominently in its PC new ‘Draft Code’ shortly to be imposed after the usual charade of consultation.

I suspect that its real purpose is to be the educational branch of the Thought Police.

To get the measure of this body, compare and contrast two cases that have come before it. First, look at its treatment of a teacher who admitted using crack cocaine and falling asleep in lessons. William Horseman will be allowed to carry on teaching children – maybe yours – though he will be ‘monitored’.

Then recall what happened when an experienced former teacher, Angela Mason, went undercover to record the true extent of disruption and disorder in our classrooms, so doing the country an important service. She was suspended by the GTC for a year.

So snorting crack cocaine gets you monitored. Telling the truth about schools gets you suspended.
If you have ever wondered what the real priorities of our new Establishment are, this should give you a pretty good clue.

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The BBC’s metric obsession doesn’t just involve giving the weights of rugby players in kilograms. As a very early riser, I am often exposed to Radio 4 nature programmes, and monitor them for ridiculous uses of metres, hectares and other foreign measurements, which are frequent. The Corporation denies this is the result of a secret decree, but I wonder.

I don’t think anyone over 40 uses metric measurements naturally. The other day, on
The Living World, presenter Lionel Kelleway (who is in his 60s) spoke about the ‘2,000-metre dramatic cliffs’ on New Island in the Falklands.

Such cliffs would indeed be dramatic, at 6,560ft high. Actually, they’re 600ft high.
This is the problem with the metric system. Being a top-down, inhuman, mechanical thing invented in a laboratory, it won’t stick in the memory. If he’d used feet, he and his editors would have known at once he’d made a mistake.

News of a collision between a French and a British nuclear submarine awoke my memories of a weekend spent submerged in a Polaris boat, and those of you interested can read about it on my blog.