A few Comments on the EU, Railways, Love, Truth, T.S. Eliot and Liberty

As the world at last wakes up again, and the crisp mornings and sharp evenings signal the end of the strange period of sloth and  suspense that has endured since the referendum, I thought it was time for some general correspondence on many different issues.

First I am amazed at the way in which Chairman May’s speech to the Tory conference has been greeted, as if it truly cleared the air. As my friend and ally Christopher Booker pointed out yesterday (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/01/this-is-the-only-way-brexit-wont-plunge-us-over-the-cliff/ )

Ministers till seem to have very little idea of just how difficult it is going to be to negotiate complex trade agreements with the EU from scratch.

Note that Mr Booker and I are longstanding enthusiasts for a British departure from the EU, have longed for years for us to leave and still hope for a genuine restoration of national independence. We have every reason to hope for a so-called  ‘hard Brexit’ and to want one. But both of us fear that the practicalities are insurmountable. If that is so, aiming for such a target can only end in tears, and worse, the ultimate blocking of our true departure.

Why then is the government acting as if the matter is so simple? Perhaps Messrs Fox and Davis are right and we are wrong, in which case I shall be delighted. But I wish they would explain how.

This is the constitutional crisis of which I have been warning since it became clear that ‘leave’ would win the referendum, my most recent accurate prediction.

Do some in the government actually *hope* it will go wrong? Do they think they can wing it? Are they just naive? Do they imagine ( as David Cameron did) that our EU ‘partners’ will rescue us? Or is Chairman May hoping that the difficulties will allow her to propose a permanent compromise, under which we more or less remain in the EU in all but name (the most likely outcome in my view).

For me, the problem remains that the mandate from the referendum is both so vague and so narrow, and so lacks any serious representation at the top of British politics, that the gap between promise and fulfilment is too wide to be crossed.

Voting to leave the EU, without first creating a party committed to doing so and versed in what it wants to do with the freedom gained, was a dangerous short cut, like building the roof before building the walls. It was too easy. And like all things that are too easy, it will become difficult in time.

*****

Why do supporters of Rail Privatisation continue to jeer at British Rail. Before privatisation, BR was an extremely well-run organisation, running a surprisingly good service on a much smaller subsidy than the one now given to the privatised operators. It successfully completed the electrification of the London to Edinburgh line (compare with the delayed over-budget mess of the current electrification of the Paddington line), its track maintenance was of a high quality( not maintained after privatisation, as well found to our cost at the turn of the century). Railtrack, or ‘Failcrack’ as I dubbed it,  has now, in effect, been renationalised as Network Rail. But it’s still not as good as BR was at maintaining track and at big modernising projects.

There’s no reason to believe that the increase in traffic which happened after (but not because of) privatisation would not have happened under BR. And if BR had received the subsidies given to private train operators, much more of the money would have spent on railways and trains, and much less on making various individuals rich. I cannot see how a franchise to run a system based on taxpayer subsidy is real risk-taking business. If it were, I doubt if anyone would step forward to run it. Many have indeed walked away from their franchises.

One thing I do associate with privatisation, and suspect is linked to it, is the cramming of passengers into smaller and smaller spaces. The habit of shoving in as many seats as possible, and no longer lining them up with windows, seems to have begun around the time that privatisation happened. So does the provision of shorter, smaller trains of three, four or five coaches on routes which used to be served by trains of eight full-sized Inter-City carriages.  I wonder if it saves fuel and other costs, so directly increasing revenue.

*******

On Sunday evening I provided a short prologue to a dramatised reading of the final part of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ in the Friends’ Meeting House at Chichester, beautifully situated near the lovely old Priory, now the Guildhall,  where William Blake was once put on trial.  The reading was of very high quality, and I found myself riveted both during the rehearsal and the actual performance, by Eliot’s apposite words, full of power and truth.

There was a good and attentive audience, most of whom stayed for a while afterwards to discuss the case of Bishop bell, in whose cause the reading was held. I always gain a special pleasure from voluntary, civic occasions such as this, when individuals band together for a good purpose. Chichester itself is an intensely civilised corner on England since Roman times, every stone and brick, and every tree, lawn and garden evidence of the long and peaceful existence of a prosperous society of free, independent men and women. But none of this will survive forever if we do not resolve to defend it. I regard the George Bell campaign as part of the battle to keep free civilisation alive, because it is entirely about disinterested justice and truth. I visited Bishop bell’[s memorial in the Cathedral early this morning, and found it surrounded by flowers. This contrasts with the occasion  a year ago when I laid a small posy there and wit was swiftly snatched away. At that time the memorial was obscured by a large notice about ‘safeguarding’, which has now gone.

A few feet away lies the lovely ‘Arundel Tomb’ of which Philip Larkin write,  moved by the way that the effigies of a knight and his lady are shown holding each other’s hands in death. ‘What will survive of us is love’, he concluded, reluctantly and conditionally. I think he was righter than he knew or wanted to be. I must now go to the special service (to be held at St Michaels’s Church at Cornhill in the City of London)

to remember Bishop Bell, whose life and work are commemorated today (the 58^th anniversary of his death) in the Anglican calendar.  

The Continuing Campaign for Justice for the late Bishop George Bell

It’s almost a year now since an allegation of child abuse against the late Bishop George Bell was publicised by the Church of England and the Sussex Police, ably abetted by three national newspapers, two local newspapers and the BBC.

The resulting headlines, in which it was stated as fact that Bishop Bell ( who died in 1958) had been a paedophile more than 60 years ago, are still on the record, though the BBC has commendably pulled back from its initial certainty and the newspapers involved, in their various ways, have mostly learned to be a little more cautious about presuming the Bishop’s guilt.

For what we now know is this. The complainant, who remains anonymous, made her allegation many years after the alleged events and many years after the death of the Bishop.

Her claim was uncorroborated. No other similar claims have been made by anyone else.  

A living witness who worked and lived with George Bell and his wife at the time of the alleged crimes (but who was neither found nor consulted by the Church of England, though it must have had records showing that he had been Bishop Bell’s chaplain, and he could easily be traced through Crockford’s Clerical Directory) strongly disputes the accusation and regards it as impossible. Others, familiar with the buildings involved, have identified apparent inconsistencies in the accounts given by the accuser in an interview she provided to one local newspaper.

No details have been given of the procedure by which the Church (wholly in private) decided to accept that Bishop Bell was guilty. Indeed, from public statements made by the Bishop of Durham it is not even clear that the Church did accept his guilt, though the Church, after the Bishop of Durham’s remarks in the House of Lords were widely publicised, tried to say that he had not meant what he had said.

 

There is as yet no evidence that the Church asked anyone to defend Bishop Bell at this secret hearing, or that it even considered such a defence necessary. The C of E described the payment it made as a civil settlement (to distinguish it from a criminal case in which the burden of proof is greater and the presumption of innocence is explicit).

 

But civil causes also require the court to hear both parties in any dispute, and require the plaintiff to prove his case, while being opposed by the defendant’s advocate. No such thing happened. There has been no civil case and no criminal case either, just a marsupial committee meeting, in which guilt appears to have been presumed. The law does not provide any way of protecting a man’s reputation once he is dead. But morals seem to me to demand that we are careful about such things, and I’ve been astonished to see reputable media, and the Independent Press Standards Organisation, totally unmoved by the idea that a dead man is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Nobody was demanding money or any other costly reparation from them – only an admission that they’d treated allegation as fact and that this was wrong.

The C of E’s amazing statement that it ‘found no reason to doubt’ the claims was a demonstration that it does not understand English law. So was its use of the police and their meaningless declaration that had he been alive, Bishop Bell would have been arrested. There is always a reason to doubt any accusation of wrongdoing until it has been proven. It cannot be considered proven if it has not been tested in an adversarial courtroom in which the defendant has a voice. The trouble is, millions of English people those days don’t understand the law of the land, either.

The C of E has repeatedly stated that it had to publicise the matter because, had it not done so, others would have done. It has never explained who these others are, or why. Given the long delay and the solitary nature of the accusation, it is hard to see what purpose was served by publicising it, save to give the impression of decisive action. But if it had to do so, why could it not have scrupulously said that it was only an allegation, rather than producing a statement so worded that media felt (in my view wrongly) justified in reporting it as a fact?

By dint of much campaigning I and several others have managed to establish that the accusation is just that, an accusation. It may never be proven. It may, equally, never be disproved, and indeed I find it hard to see how we shall ever know for certain either way. But the smear, as I regard it, remains smeared, the memory of George Bell is still defaced, his name has been removed from schools and buildings, and there is no reason to assume that the unpersoning campaign will stop there.

This Monday, 3^rd October,  the 58^th anniversary of his death, sees the day in the Church calendar on which his life and work are commemorated. No doubt there will be some who will wish to put a stop to this, in the spirit of the Church’s behaviour so far.

Others feel differently. At 4.00 p.m. on Monday there will be a special service in his memory (Prayer Book choral evensong) at the City Church of St Michael’s , Cornhill.

This Sunday, 2^nd October,   supporters of Bishop Bell in Chichester itself plan a brief reading of the last act of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, in which I hope to take part, at 6.30 p.m. at the Friends’ meeting House in Priory Lane, Chichester. Some of you may know that George Bell (a vigorous promoter of all the arts, unusual for a Churchman of his era) played a great part in encouraging Eliot to write this play, and in arranging for its first performance in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, where he was Dean. It is a  fitting way of marking the event, and of insisting that hasty judgement, in any age, is a mistake.

PETER HITCHENS: Charmer Cameron put us on the slippery slope to disaster

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

So, Mr Slippery has finally slipped away, just before he was found out. I wish David Cameron lots of money in his future life, so much of it that he at last begins to wonder if that is what he really wanted.

But can we pause for a moment and ask how it was that this charming but pointless person rose to such prominence in our country?

His single most important action was to lend Western air forces and other assistance to Islamist fanatics in Libya. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee last week explained just how clueless and irresponsible this was, though it is a pity that so many of the MPs on this committee supported the Libya folly at the time. 

The same goes for much of the media, which reported the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi more or less as if it was a sporting event, and the fanatical rebels were our team. They also gullibly repeated the most ridiculous atrocity propaganda, something any knowledgeable journalist is trained to treat with suspicion.

I have checked my own writing and broadcasting at the time and find I warned clearly against it, for example this from March 2011: 'Who are the Libyan rebels? What do they want? Why do we love them so? I've no idea, and nor has Mr Cameron… Some of the longest wars in history started with small-scale intervention, for a purpose that looked good and achievable, and ended up ruining millions of lives.

'The Soviet takeover of Afghanistan in 1979 ended with countless innocents driven into refugee camps, and the collapse of the Soviet state itself. It also left Afghanistan as a worse snake pit than before.'

I did not know the half of it. David Cameron's war created the appalling, unstoppable crisis of mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa, a gigantic movement of people unknown in previous history, which will in the long run transform the economic and political fortunes of our continent.

This catastrophe was his most notable act. He ought to be remembered for it. Many of you will be able to think of others, some deliberate (such as his daft energy, education, migration, economic and aid policies), others exploding cigars, such as his incompetent and contemptuous handling of the European Union issue.

He was one of the worst prime ministers we have ever had, but have we – have you – learned from this experience? Will you continue to turn to the smooth, the well-spun, the expensively suited and rehearsed, the ones endorsed by the same media who gushed over the Blair creature?

Already the forces that put David Cameron in power are uniting in a dishonest spasm of hatred against Theresa May's grammar school policy and the referendum result.

Will you be fooled by them again? Or will you learn that there is no such thing as 'the centre' and that those who claim to stand there are driven by nothing but personal ambition and vanity? And that they do not offer safety, but danger? 

*****

 

Late last year a strange new law came into force in this country, making it a crime, punishable by prison, to use repeated ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ in the home.

You might think there’s nothing wrong with that. 

But what if it becomes one of the many offences in family law where social workers, police and courts assume that the accused is guilty, and he or she has to prove his innocence?

The growing numbers who have fallen into this pit simply do not get fair trials. No doubt some of them are guilty. But in many cases this simply is not proved beyond reasonable doubt. They lose homes, families, children, livelihoods, reputations and – sometimes – liberty.

And if we stop caring if they’ve been properly tried, we forge a weapon that may one day be used against us.

That’s why I really dislike the great fuss recently made about the BBC Radio 4  soap opera ‘The Archers’.

In this programme - which I have many times explained is openly intended as propaganda for ‘progressive’ ideas -  two actors pretended to be a married couple. This long drama got under way as the new law came into force.

For months, the male actor pretended to be a perfect example of the ‘coercive control’ which extreme feminists claim is so common. Again and again he bullied and belittled the female actor, as if he were a Victorian squire who had her imprisoned in a cottage miles from civilization.

She submitted to it meekly for months in a way I doubt any modern woman would do for more than about five minutes. Then, in a bizarre and incredible scene, the male actor pretended to goad the female actor into pretending to stab him.

There was then a pretend arrest, and a pretend trial. There was even a pretend jury, made up of celebrity actors. And the nation was supposed to be terribly engaged, anxiously hoping that the fictional jury would pretend to acquit the female actor, so she could pretend to go back to her fictional home.

This rubbish had two propaganda aims. The first was to make more people willing to believe that this kind of thing is common, when we have no way of knowing.

The second was to give the audience information it never normally has, in any proper courtroom drama. Listeners thought they already ‘knew’ what had ‘really happened’. They ‘knew’ the male actor was ‘guilty’. Actually, they didn’t. They just knew what the scriptwriters had decided to portray, a fictional wicked man, fictionally coercing and controlling, and fictionally trying to get away with it.

But in any real trial on this charge, without solid evidence, and where the only two witnesses disagree, I am sure that some real jurors’ minds will be influenced, by this programme, towards convicting. As a result, an innocent defendant might go to prison for years. I think the BBC has done a wrong and shameful thing. 

******

The story of the Prague assassination of the SS monster Reinhard Heydrich is a thrilling and bitter one, and has now been made into a major film, for the second time, or perhaps the fourth, if you count 'Hangmen also Die' and the Czech film 'Atentat'  The new version ‘Anthropoid’, which stars Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, gets closer than before to the savage horror of the Nazi reprisals, and made me wonder, yet again, if this sort of assassination was justified.

The evil of the Third Reich continued all too efficiently without Heydrich. But the torture and collective punishment visited on the Czechs (whose subjugation we couldn’t and didn’t prevent) were frightful. Was any good really achieved? I grow less sure year by year.

**********

Why do suckers always fall for the claims of ‘medical cannabis’? Its advocates are invariably mixed up with the lobby for general legalisation. America’s leading campaigner for legal dope, Keith Stroup, said in a candid moment in 1979 that he was using medical cannabis as ‘a red herring to give marijuana a good name.’ Cannabis may make some people feel better, but so did Thalidomide. A drug correlated with severe mental illness may just not be the ideal miracle cure.

 

 

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Send Not to ask for Whom the Bell Tolls. It Tolls for Thee. Thoughts on a Injustice

Wait for it - a new disclosure on the Bell case

 

I shall explain here two recent developments in the George Bell affair, a disclosure by the Sussex Police (you’ll have to read to the end to find this)  and a retreat by the Church of England itself, both brought about by sustained and persistent pressure. But first, a bit of background:

I know that my campaign to win justice for a long-dead Bishop is a cause many of my readers find obscure and incomprehensible. I can only say that, when I first engaged in it last year, it pretty much took over my life during a short holiday in Paris and Amsterdam late last October. It continued to occupy much of my waking time for many months afterwards, invading my thoughts whenever I finished a task.

Around noon each day I would go in search of a railway station or similar place, in the hope of finding the latest edition of ‘The Times’ (to which I do not have an electronic subscription)  to see if they had printed my letter protesting against their report.  I was so furious when I realised that several newspapers and the BBC had treated an allegation against Bishop George Bell as a proven charge that I had to act. I thought ‘The Times’ which still at least claims to be a journal of record, would feel obliged to publish my brief epistle. They didn’t.

 

The best way to Annoy Me

This,  as my regular readers might guess, only served to increase my determination. I kept at it. Fraser Nelson at the Spectator, a courageous and individual editor, greatly helped the cause by publishing an article on the case. Eventually,  articles defending George Bell and the presumption of innocence (some by me, some by others)  appeared in every newspaper, national and local, which had carried the original story. The BBC accepted that it had wrongly imputed guilt to the Bishop.  But none of the papers has ever corrected the original stories, which I still regard as inaccurate, describing Bishop Bell as a child molester without qualification. The Independent Press Standards organisation (IPSO) and the Scott Trust (which claims to be the independent tribunal governing The Guardian) have completely failed to enforce what I regard as proper standards of reporting. The simple principle, that nobody is guilty of a crime until he has been proven to be before an independent jury, just doesn’t apply to the dead – even as in this case when the accusation is solitary, ancient, uncorroborated and anonymous. My quest was never for compensation, was entirely disinterested personally. Yet I could get nowhere, however clearly I made the point that the distinction between accusation and conviction was absolute and a matter of fact, and that several papers and simply ignored it.

I can see why in some cases the cloud of witnesses against the accused is so great that it is at least reasonable to act as if some sort of trial had been held. I would never wish George Bell or his case to be linked in the public mind with such a person as ‘Sir’ Jimmy Savile, a person whose reputation, such as it was, was of no great value to the country. But abusers seldom have only one victim, and the Bell case has been so widely publicised – locally and nationally - that I think there is some significance in the absence (so far)  of any other accusation against him in the 10 months since the charge was first revealed.

 

A Prickly Occasion

Why did I bother with all this? I had, a few years before, nominated Bishop Bell for BBC Radio 4’s ‘Great Lives’ series, a slightly prickly occasion as I was then on rather poor terms with its presenter Matthew Parris.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01705q9/p01704t1

I think both of us simply decided to put the issue behind us, Matthew probably because he had forgotten about it and me because I can seldom keep up a grudge for very long (I had thought that Matthew had misrepresented me on a public occasion. I still do. But it matters less now).

George Bell is important to me for two reasons.

 

Not a Pacifist

 

First, because I have come to be more and more convinced that the bombing of German civilians by British forces in the Second World War was morally wrong and should not have taken place. In the course of many arguments with readers about this, I am often chided with the words ‘You weren’t there at the time!’. To these, I could reply that George Bell was (indeed, bombs fell close to his Brighton home during the war, and he was no pacifist. His chaplain in the late 1940s, a decorated Naval veteran, has attested to this, and two of his brothers died in the trenches in the 1914-18 war) .

Bell is also innocent of being any kind of Nazi sympathiser. He had loathed and known about the foul actions of Hitler far longer than most, and more effectively than many. He was one of the most enduring friends of the German resistance to Hitler, a constant help to those seeking refuge from Nazi persecution, including many Jews who had converted to Christianity. He was also in touch with those who eventually tried to assassinate Hitler in the ‘July Plot’, and secretly told Anthony Eden of this plan.  He had first tasted unpopularity when, in the early months of war, he spoke up for German refugees from Hitler, many of them anxious to fight against their own country, who were stupidly interned by Winston Churchill in a frenzy of suspicion and war panic. Bell always knew the difference between a German and a Nazi, however high emotions were running.  And, at the time, knowledgeably, rationally and at some cost to himself, he opposed the bombing of civilians. Thus I could say to my pro-bombing critics: ‘George Bell was there at the time. And he was against it’.

Secondly, he matters because, in an era when the Church of England is regarded as a shambling relic, unclear on any major issue, George Bell showed how an established, Broad Church could and should speak with an uncompromising moral voice, and how even its comfortable leaders, lapped in the peace and tranquillity of ancient cathedral closes, could speak uncompromisingly for justice against injustice.

But I think his old Church, with its modern political obsessions, has forgotten him. I also think it does not understand English law. This is common. Until I researched my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’, I only had a sketchy grasp of the working of the jury system and the significance of such things as the presumption of innocence. I knew the effect of these things on reporting rules, as all trained journalists must. But then again, I was never involved in publicly accusing (let alone condemning) anyone for a serious crime.

 

Bishops don't understand the Law

 

 

The C of E seem genuinely to have thought that it was personally offensive and cruel *to the accuser* to question an accusation. They seem genuinely to have the idea that an accusation of child abuse has a special status in law,  such that the accused has to prove his innocence.

This is quite understandable. You could easily get that impression from the actions of the police and the courts.

This was the origin of the Bishop of Chelmsford’s untrue statement in the House of Lords in this debate

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2016-06-30/debates/16063032000573/HistoricalChildSexAbuse

that ‘some in the George Bell Group ​had made hurtful comments about [George Bell’s accuser]. None had . The claim was untrue. But it took weeks of correspondence with the Bishop and questioning of the C of E press office, which joined in uninvited by me,  to achieve the following:

 

 

Shifting their Ground

The press office began to shift their ground when they said ‘In answer to your question, I can clarify that when Bishop Stephen said in the House of Lords that ‘some in the Bell Group had made hurtful comments’  about ‘Carol’,  it would have been more precise to say that these were comments that she found hurtful. I know Bishop Stephen is happy to be quoted as such, and also happy to acknowledge that he did not intend to suggest that legitimate questions about this case could not be posed by all sides. I hope that was apparent by the tone and content of the rest of his speech where he endeavoured to take seriously and listen carefully to the concerns being raised. Of course in this process people get hurt, even if no hurt was ever intended.’

This was obviously untenable. To say that somebody was allegedly upset by the impersonal challenging of her testimony by others is utterly different from saying that those others had made objectively hurtful remarks about her. It is not a ‘clarification’ to shift from one to the other, but a complete alteration in meaning, which by implication reveals that the words spoken were not true.

And it did not stand. Soon afterwards I received this communication ‘ [The Bishop of Chelmsford] acknowledges that what he actually said was mistaken, hence the clarification explaining what he meant to have said but he stands by everything else in the speech. He is happy to be quoted on all of that.  When the new parliamentary term begins he promises to look into how a proper clarification can be produced.’

 

I shall, all may be sure, be looking out for this ‘clarification’ at the earliest practicable moment. The Hansard account badly needs to be corrected.

The other things he said were expressions of opinion, and standard Lambeth Palace boilerplate (which mainly consists of a refusal to discuss the details of the secret kangaroo court which condemned George Bell without hearing any defence of him and then decided to publicise this condemnation.

The C of E, I noted, was highly sensitive about the way I approached this episode. Yet I have never seen it complain about the way that media reported its October 22 document as if it had declared George Bell guilty – when it had not done so. I defy anyone to find an unequvocal declaration of guilt in the document : https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/10/statement-on-the-rt-revd-george-bell-(1883-1958).aspxhttps://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/10/statement-on-the-rt-revd-george-bell-(1883-1958).aspx

Indeed, the Bishop of Durham again speaking in the House of Lords http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201516/ldh, said at one stage ‘In fact, if noble Lords read very carefully the statements that have been put out, they will see that there has been no

declaration that we are convinced that this took place.’

 

 

Not Very Noble

Having read it carefully, despite not being a Noble Lord, I absolutely agree with him about this. There was no such declaration in the October 22 statement, even though it was mysteriously reported in several different places as if there had been. How on earth did so many people reach the same wrong impression?  Coincidence Theory helps here. Not much else does.

When I publicised this, the Bishop made a strange episcopal U-turn, described here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/in-tywo-minds-the-strange-position-of-the-bishop-of-durham.html

Lo, it was a ‘clarification’! ‘Clarification’ seems to be this particular office’s favourite euphemism for backtracking.  : ‘'Recent media comment regarding Bishop George Bell has focused on my recent contributions made in the House of Lords in response to a question on the Church’s actions in this matter. On reflection I believe my words were not as clear as they could have been and I welcome this opportunity to provide further clarity.'(my emphasis).

As before, the words to be ’clarified’ are perfectly clear already. This is in fact a murkification. It runs : ‘Almost three years ago a civil claim was made, raising allegations of abuse by George Bell, the former Bishop of Chichester.

‘In response to the claim independent legal and medical reports were commissioned and duly considered. The evidence available was interrogated and evaluated. This led to a decision to settle the claim and to offer a formal apology to the survivor. This decision was taken on the balance of probabilities - the legal test applicable in civil claims.' (PH notes, this is twaddle, the procedures fell far below the level of a civil case, see below) .

'The church therefore, having evaluated the evidence before them, accepted the veracity of the claims before them.' (my emphasis). (PH notes, if this is so, they did not say so anywhere in the October 22 statement). It is also worth noting that the Bishop’s U-turn was announced in his name by the C of E press office, not by the Bishop himself, whose own press office seemed to know nothing about it at the time and referred queries to Lambeth. The C of E, despite knowing of my interest in this matter, and of my direct interest in the Bishop of Durham’s original statement, did not send the release to me. I found out about it from other journalists to whom it had been sent.

I also asked at the time :

‘If the decision was taken on a civil basis why (and how) were the Sussex police recruited to say publicly they would have arrested the late Bishop? The police do not arrest the objects of civil tort claims, even when they are alive.’

This was in response to the Church’s claim, made defensively some time after the original denunciation, that their finding against George Bell was on a civil basis (‘balance of probabilities’) rather than the criminal one (‘beyond reasonable doubt’). This wasn’t true anyway. A civil hearing requires the judge to hear both sides of the case, and the defendant or his lawyer can cross-examine witnesses against him. Bell had no lawyer representing his sole interests at the hearing. And the burden of proof still rests on the plaintiff. The secret judges in this case who ‘found  no reason to doubt’ the claims against George Bell disqualified themselves by this statement. In English law there is *always* reason to doubt any accusation.

 

Why Were the Police Involved at all - in a civil case?

 

But if it *was* a civil case, why were the police involved?

Almost every time I took the case up with neutral observers, or with media who had reported accusation as fact, they cited the police statement that they would have arrested George Bell as crucial in persuading them that there was a serious case against him.

This is so in terms of propaganda. But it simply isn’t so in law. An arrest is proof of nothing and is worthless as evidence. Alas, far too few people know this.

So I began to ask how it was that the police were involved at all, in a case alleging crimes committed more than 60 years earlier, against a man who had been dead for more than half a century, and (even if guilty) was no longer any danger to anyone, his ashes having been long ago buried. As far as I could discover, their only statutory duty in the case ( and the Police are a statutory body, who exist by virtue of law) was to record it. Also, had George Bell been alive, they would not have been allowed to name him for fear of prejudice. Practice would have dictated something along the lines of ‘Sussex Police last night notionally arrested a 132-year-old Chichester man on suspicion of child-abuse’. But they did name him. They were allowed to, or rather they would not have got into trouble if they had, because he was dead. But they didn’t have to and they could easily not have done so.  I have never really got an explanation of this.

I had resolved by this time that I would pursue everyone involved in this business by any lawful or official method available. I put in an official complaint to Sussex Police, on behalf of Bishop Bell’s niece, Mrs Barbara Whitley, who was and remains extremely annoyed by the way in which her uncle’s name has been dragged through the mire . The complaint was rejected - by the Sussex Police, and I was flatly informed (and this is, infuriatingly and surprisingly correct) that this sort of complaint could go no further, and certainly could not be referred upwards to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Now, I am not an enthusiast for Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). But I felt there was nothing to be lost in approaching Katy Bourne, the PCC for Sussex, and I have to say that she impressed me by her interest and sympathy. And eventually she achieved the remarkable statement that has been partly reported , amongst other places , here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-36986118

It is all quite accurate as far as it foes, and I can quite see why ther BBC and local newspapers, and ‘The Times’ (which briefly noted the event) have taken this line:

Sussex Police is to "apologise" for distress caused to the niece of Bishop George Bell by a media release about alleged abuse by the cleric.

It follows a complaint by journalist Peter Hitchens about the revelations.

The force said it was apologising to Barbara Whitley because police did not contact any living relatives of the bishop to let them know an inquiry was to be made public by the Church.

It said it was not apologising for the investigation or the statement itself.

In a letter to Mr Hitchens, Det Supt Jeremy Graves, head of the force's professional standards department, said the force would apologise to Ms Whitley.

"The distress caused to Barbara Whitley is of course regrettable and I know that Katie Perkin [head of corporate communications] plans to personally write a letter of apology to her," he wrote.

He continued: "With hindsight the matter could have been managed more sensitively but it was complicated by the fact that the release was generated by the diocese with whom we should have been working more closely."

He said the issue of the impact of media statements on people connected with suspects was difficult to manage.

But he said: "I am satisfied there was no intention to confuse or cause distress."’

 

They missed the story. Here it is 

 

 

But the actual letter, which is in an awkward format and difficult to transcribe in full, contains a *much* more interesting segment. It is quite clear that the police involvement was drive not by their desire but by the Church, in the shape of the Chichester diocese:

‘My understanding’, wrote Detective Superintendent J.D. Graves,

‘is that the Diocese of Chichester notified Sussex Police that they planned to release a statement to the media. It was never our intention to be proactive (my emphasis); in other words, there was no intention to release a police statement about the alleged criminality of Bishop Bell (my emphasis). However, we were asked by the Diocese to make a statement as they had decided to make this information public and so we provided them with a statement for inclusion in their press release on the basis that once the Diocese published their statement a natural consequence would be a media request to the police for comment’.

It later repeats ‘the press release was driven by the Diocese’.

 

I leave it to readers to draw what conclusions they may wish to from this revelation. All I can say is that it makes me all the more determined to pursue this matter until justice is done. Other cases of injustice have other pursuers, and that is good. I have gained and found many allies in this pursuit, several of whom have done huge and sterling work. I am by no means alone. But I am uniquely committed to this cause. Something is very wrong here.

 

 

Silenced... by our boot-faced commissars of thought crime

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

As I strolled through the frozen winter streets of Moscow a few years ago, a worrying idea came to me. Were speech and thought now more free in Russia than in what we used to call the West? I rather think that they are.
Last week, Kevin Roberts resigned as executive chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi for publicly questioning ultra-feminist beliefs.
He is not the first. A similar wild frenzy of persecution burst around the head of the Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt, shamefully driven from his position as an honorary professor at University College London.
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with these men’s opinions or not. Can it be right that they have been treated in this way for expressing them?
Of course, neither of them has been marched off to a gulag for his thought-crime. But so what? Isn’t loss of employment and position a very serious punishment?
Despite the smears of many, I have no illusions about Mr Putin’s Russia. It is a sinister tyranny where those who challenge the president’s power or expose his wrongdoing suffer very nasty fates.
But in public, in private, in offices, on public transport, you have no need to guard your tongue as you did in the communist days, when a poem could get you executed and a joke could send you to an Arctic labour camp for 20 years.
I saw all that filth end, in person, and rejoiced to see it go. And I recall the brief few years when I thought foolishly that the world had been cleansed of a great evil for ever.
And then I began to notice that the nasty totalitarian ideas that had once been trapped behind the Iron Curtain had now escaped into the once-free West. You couldn’t say this and you couldn’t say that. You had to be careful about writing certain things, especially if you worked in the public sector.
There was a genuine fear behind all this. It was worst of all at universities, where boot-faced commissars patrol the minds of the young, enforcing speech codes – and the wrong ideas can get you marked down in more ways than one.
This simply isn’t so in Mr Putin’s Russia, now astonishingly the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.
Orthodox religious icons were found among the debris after the shooting down of a Russian helicopter in Syria, and Russian airborne forces last Tuesday celebrated the feast day of their patron, the Prophet Elijah.
People who think that Russia is still the Soviet Union, or that intolerant, militant Marxism died when the USSR fell, don’t understand Russia or Marxism. And they’re not paying much attention to what’s going on here, either.

Holy smoke! I've made the Church retreat

As the vast Goddard inquisition lurches off the rails, are we finally recovering our sanity about child abuse? Terrible as this crime is, it is not an excuse for losing our heads and trampling on justice.
This week I record a small victory in one such case of injustice, that of the late, saintly and much-loved Bishop George Bell. He was publicly smeared as a paedophile without a hearing by the Church of England – on the basis of a single, ancient uncorroborated accusation.
I am pleased to say that, under cover of a cloud of holy smoke, the C of E has retreated.
The Church doesn’t understand English law (hence the kangaroo court) and has a nasty habit of using the anonymous complainant, an elderly lady known as ‘Carol’, as a human shield. Any criticism of the Church’s injustice is falsely alleged to be an attack on her.
The current Bishop of Chelmsford, The Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell, recently said in the House of Lords that defenders of George Bell had ‘made hurtful comments’ about ‘Carol’. It was a nasty thing to say, and it was not true. I have been pursuing Mr Cottrell, helpfully pointing out to him what the Bible says about bearing false witness, and about owning up to wrongdoing. He is, after all, a modern sort of Bishop and can’t necessarily be expected to be well-versed in such things.
And now I have wrung out of his spokesperson a pathetic, grudging so-called ‘clarification’. By this word, the C of E actually mean ‘admission’, but they obviously don’t believe that confession is good for the soul.
It runs ‘when he said in the House of Lords that “some in the Bell Group had made hurtful comments” about “Carol”, it would have been more precise to say that these were comments that she found hurtful’.
More precise! They mean ‘true’. And of course the two things are totally different. When I derided this formula, they retreated a few more inches, saying: ‘He acknowledges that what he actually said was mistaken, hence the clarification explaining what he meant to have said… When the new parliamentary term begins he promises to look into how a proper clarification can be produced.’
When I said I would report this as ‘the Bishop now admits that what he said was untrue, and that he intends to correct it in the Lords at the earliest opportunity’, they moaned this would be inaccurate.
You may judge for yourselves. I’ve been fairer to them than they ever were to George Bell.

Paintball plod taking on the wrong enemy

I am not even slightly reassured by the weird fashion show staged by the Metropolitan Police, in which they paraded in face-masks and comic-strip tough-guy outfits, with macho motorbikes, sniper rifles and sub-machine guns. They looked, as they posed self-consciously, like Walter Mittys on a paintballing day out.
How absurd. Sometimes I think some people in our Government actively want us to be the kind of country where a big-booted, heat-packing, masked militia of this kind is needed.
But we are not. Anxious as they are to believe our streets are perpetually threatened by an octopus of evil directed from Islamic State by a turbaned and bearded mastermind, it is not so. The danger, as I have often pointed out, has more to do with the mind-altering drugs whose use the police do nothing to stop.
For instance, the supposedly IS-inspired Muhiddin Mire, the Leytonstone attacker, was so mentally ill that he was first sectioned in 2006. And he then smoked so much cannabis that he genuinely believed (I am not making this up) that Tony Blair was his guardian angel.
I noticed also that the new militarised rapid-reaction police boasted they were on the scene of the (non-political) Russell Square killing in London within six minutes. This is nothing to boast of.
Dreadful things can happen in six minutes. When we had proper foot patrols, such a busy tourist area would have had a constant police presence.

 

PETER HITCHENS: Want to see who started the Iraq War? Look in the mirror

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Oh, for goodness’ sake leave the pathetic Blair creature alone. He will never understand what he did and probably didn’t understand it at the time. 

He isn’t very bright and now lives a lonely, meaningless life of empty speeches delivered to bored businessmen in return for money, which will have to be penance enough.

If you want to blame anyone for the Iraq disaster, look at yourselves. I opposed it at the time, and remember how few others did. I don’t really count the Leftist demonstrators, who oppose all wars, just or unjust.

I mean the great mass of patriotic Middle Britain, normal decent people, who were so willingly misled. I mean those scores of MPs of both parties who scuttled, bleating, through the war lobby and now claim, falsely, that they didn’t know the facts.

I mean my media colleagues, who have been trained from their earliest years to doubt what they are told, yet swallowed Alastair Campbell’s great dish of steaming tripe without a thought. 

Come on, how hard was it to see that the danger was invented, that the war was illegal and that it was none of our business? I have no prophetic powers but I could see it.

And yet, diddled so blatantly that even an official report now confirms it, you still don’t learn. How many supposedly responsible voters are currently being fooled by today’s attempt to spin us into a stupid conflict with Russia, a country almost nobody in Whitehall knows anything about or understands?

At least as many as were misled by claims of a fictional massacre into supporting the Libya disaster. At least as many as were persuaded by a media chorus to admire Hilary Benn’s feeble, poorly argued speech urging us to bomb Syria.

Is there no idiocy you can’t be gulled into by a bit of atrocity propaganda or the endlessly recycled claim that the chosen target is the new Hitler, who must not be ‘appeased’? A word of advice: if you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. Wars are the mother and father of atrocities, and one day they will come home to us, if we keep launching them against others.

Vladimir Putin is already being turned into the new Hitler. Nobody who knows anything about Russia thinks this is true. But a couple of weeks ago we more or less secretly sent British troops to Ukraine, a country with which we are not in any way allied, and which is a war zone. Was Parliament asked about ‘Exercise Rapid Trident’? I can find no record of it.

We have just made the daft decision to send 650 scarce troops to Poland and Estonia. This is supposedly in response to a ‘Russian threat’ to these countries for which there is no actual evidence. Apart from the tiny exclave of Kaliningrad, Poland doesn’t even have a border with Russia. As the wise academic Professor Richard Sakwa, whose father served in the pre-war Polish Army, has rightly said: ‘Nato grew to meet the threat it had itself provoked.’

If we are not careful, we shall once again create a war out of our own exaggerated fears and by believing our own propaganda. Any of you who are taken in by this have no right to attack Mr Blair. You are as bad as he is. He and his like couldn’t do what they do without your help.

Baffled by the barmy NHS 

A member of my family had to hurry to a major hospital casualty department at the weekend. It was the usual NHS mixture – dedicated, overworked and kind doctors and nurses cunningly concealed behind a barrier of wooden bureaucracy bad enough to make you scream, even if you weren’t already in pain.

All ended quite happily. Soon afterwards she received this ludicrous text, which I at first thought was a joke: ‘We would like you to think about your recent experience at the **** **** hospital. 

How likely are you to recommend our Emergency Department to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment today? Reply 1 for extremely likely, 2 for likely, 3 for neither likely nor unlikely, 4 for extremely unlikely, 5 for don’t know.’

How does one begin to respond to this? She was in considerable pain and distress. She did not consult the Good Hospital Guide (not that there was any choice, given the sparseness of A&E facilities in modern Britain). It’s not a market. It’s organised mercy, and it would be better if it concentrated exclusively on that.

The campaign for justice for the late Bishop George Bell goes on. Bell has been denounced by Church and media as a child abuser without the semblance of a trial. 

This was recently the main subject of a powerful debate in the House of Lords. The Church’s response, as ever, was to use the alleged victim as a human shield. 

Arrayed in his flowing clerical robes, in a chamber where all speak ‘upon their honour’, the consecrated Bishop of Chelmsford asserted that campaigners for justice for George Bell had ‘made hurtful comments about her’ (the alleged victim). 

Have they? I have challenged him to say who these people were and what these comments were. He has not replied, though the Church press office has emitted some irrelevant and evasive guff. 

******

A florid face we should save for the nation

How we shall all miss Ken Clarke. This week, while looking like some hedge-dwelling creature roused early from a comfy hibernation, he accurately summed up modern British politics in a few very funny words uttered when he thought the TV cameras weren’t rolling. 

Typically, he hasn’t complained about the recording being leaked. I disagree with almost everything he thinks, though he was dead right about Iraq and gets too little credit. 

But he is a modest, thoughtful and funny person, with a real life outside politics, whose wisdom we badly need. Can’t he be saved for the nation?

 

********

Look, I am resigned to the coronation of Mrs Theresa May as our next Prime Minister. In a cynical way, I am quite pleased by it, as she is so Left-wing that she may well achieve my main aim in life – the final and utter destruction of the Useless, Fraudulent Tory Party.

But spare me the suggestion that she is the new Margaret Thatcher. I’m not actually a Thatcherite, and disapprove of a lot of what the Iron Lady did. 

But I did meet Mrs Thatcher, and talk to her, and watch her in action. And Mrs May is no Margaret Thatcher. She is in fact the new John Major.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

 

The George Bell Affair is debated in the House of Lords

Last Thursday, the great day of Tory Turmoil, I was invited by Lord Lexden, the noted historian, to be one of his guests in the gallery for a House of Lords Debate on ‘Historical Child Sex Abuse’, in which he planned to bring up ( among others) the case of the late Bishop George Bell, often dealt with here.

It is always a treat to visit the Upper Chamber, the only legislative body in the world that I have ever thought it might be fun to belong to, which is also a paradise of Pugin design, hierarchy,  red leather and monarchist and Christian symbolism (you can see why radicals hate it).

Lord Lexden is one of several prominent figures, including members of both Houses, lawyers, retired judges and police officers, churchmen and women, who believe the Church of England’s public condemnation of Bishop Bell without trial – and its subsequent attempts to turn him into a sort of unperson – is mistaken.

The Church now says, absurdly, that it acknowledges his great acts of selflessness and courage, which are proven,  but that these have to stand equally beside the unproven claim that he abused a young girl, many years ago based upon a single ancient, uncorroborated and anonymous charge investigated in secret by persons unknown.  And because of the unproven claim, his name has been removed from many institutions and buildings which it once adorned, because of the proven truth. Work that out, if you can.

My view is that such an act is wholly inconsistent with all that is known of George Bell, by people who knew him personally and by those who have made his life their study,  but that if it were proven to be true beyond all reasonable doubt then his reputation would be at an end. Good is done in minute particulars. If a man can cruelly and dishonestly ruin a child’s life, using his authority to conceal his crime,  then his other public deeds are dust.

The debate is mentioned briefly on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today in Parliament here (the passage begins at about 22 minutes into the programme, with the George Bell issue reached after 24 minutes)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hj3xm

and can be read in full here

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2016-06-30/debates/16063032000573/HistoricalChildSexAbuse

Two days before the debate, the Church rather suddenly announced  that it planned a review of its handling of the case. It says the review is routine, but at least one national media journalist was alerted by the church to the review, which is odd if it is routine.

https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2016/06/independent-review-into-handling-of-george-bell-case.aspx

Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, described the Church’s procedures as a kangaroo court, a phrase which clearly stung the C of E’s spokesman on the spot, the Bishop of Chelmsford, The Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell. I have written to Bishop Stephen about part of his speech and expect to return to the subject here when I have seen his reply.

I was most taken by the contribution of Baroness Butler-Sloss, a distinguished lawyer and judge. I think she was very right to say that ‘I suggest that a distinction should be made between the management of allegations against a living person and those against one who is deceased.’

She added (and I have emphasised one passage) “The more improbable the event, the stronger must be the evidence that it did occur before, on the balance of probability, its occurrence will be established”.

‘Of course there will be cases where there is a strong body of evidence against a deceased person, but the words of the noble and learned Lord should be carefully considered.

‘The issue that causes me considerable concern is where the balance of probabilities is applied to historic cases of child abuse in which the alleged perpetrator is dead. I was taught as a young barrister “audi alteram partem”—that is, one has to hear both sides. Jimmy Savile may have been an exception because the volume of evidence of many, many victims built up to a horrifying degree, and there are other cases, but in general, with a few or particularly only one person making the allegation, however convincing, the authority or organisation dealing with the allegation has a duty to recognise that it may be able to get the story only from one side.

‘Consequently the authority, organisation or agency with the unenviable and difficult task of dealing with allegations against a person who may have died many years ago needs to have a policy and indeed a formula. In particular, it needs wording which makes it clear that it should listen to and recognise the seriousness of the allegations and give appropriate support to the person making those allegations, but that generally—I should perhaps say always—it should resist the temptation to say that the account is convincing and is to be believed. Even on the balance of probabilities, if one side cannot be heard, that in my view is a step too far.

‘The authority also has to be absolutely aware of the media’s ability to elaborate and distort the statements. Great, great care must be taken not to allow the media to convict the deceased alleged abuser based on the loose language used in the authority’s statement. ​I understand that the Church of England did not actually say that Bishop Bell was a sex abuser but it appears not to have taken steps to correct the media impression.’

I think this goes back to the beginning, and it si fascinating that a really fierce and sharp legal mind has identified exactly the same problem as the one that first struck me when this whole business started. The original statement  in October 2015 https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/10/statement-on-the-rt-revd-george-bell-(1883-1958).aspx did not state anywhere that George Bell’s guilt was proven. It couldn’t, because it wasn’t.  So how did three national newspapers, two local papers and the BBC end up saying so?

PETER HITCHENS: Nutrition 'experts' are stuffing us full of low-cal baloney

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Whenever I see a ‘low-fat muffin’ in a coffee shop, I have to control an urge to pick it up, jump on it and shout rude words. I am myself an expert in getting fat, and know that this evil blob of sugar and starch is a rapid route to a bigger waistband.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Butter is good for you. So is cream. Skimmed milk is a futile punitive measure, not a foodstuff, a way of making ourselves needlessly miserable which has taken over the world on the basis of an illusion.

This is because almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong. In an unending struggle to get this across, the National Obesity Forum last week made a renewed attack on these mistaken attitudes.
Sugar, not fat, is the menace to our lives. And this has been known since 1972 when a brave scientist, John Yudkin, wrote a book – Pure, White And Deadly – showing it was so.

He and his unfashionable message were buried in abuse. It may be that some in the sugar industry might have been involved. These days he would have been called a ‘fat-threat denier’, or something of the kind. He died in 1995, too soon to see his ideas rescued and taken seriously again.

Even now, people are getting needlessly fat and dying of horrible diseases because the anti-fat (and pro-sugar) lobby still hasn’t been completely routed. It will be, but these things take time. I mention this not just because it’s true, but because it’s an example of how thoughtless worship of scientists gets us repeatedly into trouble. Doubters like me are told not to dare criticise the sacred men in white coats.

But scientists disagree among themselves and are often wrong. In fact, science progresses by exploding dud theories of the past. And laymen are perfectly entitled to apply facts and logic to what these people say. The obvious argument against the skimmed-milk fanatics is that decades of this policy have left us with more fat people than ever. But we should not have had to wait so long.

There is powerful evidence against many other things now accepted as true, and often very weak evidence for them. I’d name ‘antidepressant’ pills, ‘dyslexia’, ‘ADHD’ and ‘man-made climate change’.

Those who criticise these things are angrily hushed, with righteous cries of ‘How dare you!’, and if they won’t shut up, they are punished – as was John Yudkin. Yet I believe in all these cases the critics will be proved right, as Professor Yudkin was. The miserable thing is that so much damage will be done while we wait for the truth to get the upper hand.

Be less trusting of all fashionable ideas, is my advice.
Gullibility and conformism never advanced civilisation by a single step.

Jailed... for a very odd non-crime 

In the same way that we have to allow free speech to those we despise, we must be most careful to ensure justice for those who are different from us, and with whom we can’t easily sympathise.

So a nasty shiver ran up and down my spine when I saw that Lorna Moore, a convert to Islam who married a Muslim, has been locked up for a very odd offence.

In fact, I know of no other offence like it in English law. This young mother has been imprisoned for not informing on her husband. I’ve yet to see any conclusive proof that she actually knew he was planning to join a terror group. Somehow or other, a return ticket to Majorca was taken as evidence that she was planning to run away to Syria with a husband she loathes.

And my English heart revolts at the idea of a wife being forced by law to inform on her husband. This is sinister, totalitarian stuff, alien to everything we stand for. 

Those who drafted the 2000 Terrorism Act should be ashamed of enacting it. Can they have meant to lock up this person, so undangerous that she was allowed to be out on bail for three months between conviction and sentence?

Will it be children next, snatched into custody for not sneaking to the police about their parents’ conversations? This reminds me of the nauseating cult of Pavlik Morozov, whom Soviet children were taught to revere because he reported his father to the secret police.

There used to be a statue of this little monster (who was promptly and understandably murdered by his grandfather) in the middle of Moscow. 

But while even Vladimir Putin doesn’t encourage such things nowadays, we in Britain are moving towards the all-powerful state, on the excuse of combating terror.

As it happens, Lorna Moore had every reason to do her husband harm if she had wanted to. She went into the witness box (a dangerous thing for a guilty person to do) to say convincingly that she hates her husband, who was given to shoving her head down the lavatory.

To make the matter even more odd, the husband involved hasn’t actually been convicted of doing the thing his wife didn’t tell the police about. 

Indeed, he has sent an email to British media saying he isn’t actually in Syria, but in Turkey. Are the rest of us truly free when people can be locked up for such things? I don’t feel so.

One more lie in the drugs 'war' 

The trumpeted ‘ban on legal highs’ is a fiction, like the rest of our drug laws. The new Act imposes no penalties at all for possessing these dangerous poisons – except for people who are already in jail.

This is an amazing giveaway of the Government’s real drugs policy, which is to look the other way while pretending to be ‘tough’.

In fact, simple possession of cannabis, heroin or cocaine is now hardly punished at all, even though it is illegal.

Claims that this ‘frees up’ the police to pursue ‘evil dealers’ are not backed up by the figures. Prosecutions for these offences stay about the same each year.

It makes no sense. The thing that makes the dealers, importers and growers evil is the damage that the drugs actually do to their users and their families.

The final, crucial link in this wicked chain is the purchase of the drug by the user. Yet this is the one thing we don’t punish.

Users are let off, or treated as if they are the victims of an irresistible disease.

 

*****

One of the reasons why too few people criticise the feebleness of the modern police is that they know they will then be bombarded with spiteful and abusive letters and tweets from workers in this arrogant and unresponsive nationalised industry. 

If the police responded to calls for help from the public as quickly, persistently and numerously as they react to justified criticism, they’d be a lot more use.

******

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

 

 

At last - a small victory in the rehabilitation of George Bell

Here is a picture of the portrait of Bishop George Bell, now restored to its rightful place in the elegant old Council House (town hall) at Chichester, where he was Bishop for many distinguished and courageous years.   

This follows the wise decision of the Town Council to put it up again, and is the first small victory in the campaign to resist the Stalinist unpersoning of Bishop Bell, which followed unproven, uncorroborated  charges being laid against him by a solitary and  anonymous complainant, long after the alleged offences and long after his death - and wrongly treated as proven by the Church of England.

His name has already been removed from a school named after him in Eastbourne (to which he travelled, in his last dying weeks, to show his appreciation of the tribute); from a ‘house’ in a Church secondary school in Chichester itself, and from George Bell House, a guest house in the grounds of the Cathedral, named after him in a ceremony conducted by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams(there is a  detail of this removal which is especially shocking, which I hope to reveal very soon) .

A Chichester art gallery has placed another portrait of the Bishop in temporary ‘storage’. His main memorial, in Chichester cathedral (where his ashes are buried) was until recently marred by a nasty notice about ‘safeguarding, and it is whispered that it may eventually be altered or removed.  Anglican churches have largely ceased to sing the hymn he wrote ‘Christ is the King’, though I was happy to hear it sung in Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral, where Bell’s memory is still revered and he has a fine memorial, last Sunday. There are suggestions that hjs name may be removed from the Church’s calendar.

The Cathedral itself, whose illustrated guide book contains about a dozen mentions of George Bell, struggles now to avoid mentioning his name. the Bell-Arundel Screen, rebuilt in the early 1960s as a memorial to him, is now known as the Arundel Screen.

This behaviour has always reminded me of the Stalinist habit of removing the images of disgraced ex-comrades from actual photographs, and of erasing monuments to them if they fell out of fashion. Trotsky was famously wiped from pictures  in which he appeared alongside Lenin, the GPU chief Yezhov was wiped from pictures where he stood alongside Stalin. In more modern times,  a plaque to Leonid Brezhnev was removed from the façade of the block of flats where he (and later I ) lived in Moscow. It is a sort of official lie. It says ’This piece of history never happened’.  

If you find this sort of thing objectionable in an English institution, please find it in your heart to sign the petition here

http://bit.ly/1rq31vQ

Many more signatures are need to make it effective. Yours is one of them.

For those without UK postcodes who want to sign the George Bell Justice petition

I have now had this advice from the petition organisers, 38 Degrees:

 

 

'Unfortunately, at the moment 38 Degrees petitions can only take signatures from people based in the UK because the software relies in part on the UK postcode database to ensure that each electronic signature comes from an individual. 

People outside the UK who feel strongly about this issue could contact Richard Symonds who started the petition and ask him to add their names manually to a printed version.

You can contact him by clicking the black envelope icon by his name on this page:

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/justice-for-bishop-george-bell-of-chichester '