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.

 

 

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BBC Sunday Morning Live - Doctors' Strikes, Homosexual Clergy and 'Migrants, or Refugees?'

Some readers may be interested in this programme, in which I discuss the Junior Doctors' strike, the recent controversy about clergy in same-sex marriages, and the continuing argument about how we should treat migrants who wish to enter this country. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vcrzw

 

Some may not. 

 

 

 

Look out! They're sneaking up on you with a chemical cosh

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week’s revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug troublesome teenagers in the 1960s – and we have only just found out.

One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles.

This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was given to boys at a Yorkshire ‘Approved School’ (a state-inspected home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were told of this experiment.

To qualify for the secret chemical cosh, you had to be ‘impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive’, which for teenage boys is more or less a description of being alive and awake. Both schemes were endorsed by the Home Office’s own in-house psychiatrist, Pamela Mason. How many other such horrors happened – are perhaps still happening – without us knowing?

I have long suspected that the Home Office – and much of our elite – are quite keen on doping the population. Despite making various militant noises over the years, this secretive department has quietly filleted the drug laws so that they are now the boneless wonder of the western world.

And for many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars. I suspect the authorities hoped prisoners would be so stupefied that they would not riot, or escape in large numbers – things the Government greatly fears, and which have destroyed many Cabinet Ministers.

This policy is now going badly wrong, as cannabis is not in fact the peaceful drug some claim. Many of the drugs readily available in jail, such as the synthetic ‘Spice’, make their users more violent, not less.

The Government has also been quite happy to allow pharmaceutical companies to run huge experiments on adults and children with sketchily tested and unproven tablets that I would not give to a dog, even if I disliked it.

Astonishing numbers of people are now regularly taking mind-altering drugs – Ritalin for children who get bored in school, ‘antidepressants’ for unhappy adults (and sometimes both together, as adults now have ‘ADHD’ and children are allegedly ‘depressed’). Having wrongly feared that George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of drabness and surveillance would come true, we missed the much more accurate warning in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Huxley didn’t just foresee the state rummaging about in the womb, the abolition of parents, the family and private life, the cheery disposal of the old and ill, and the distraction of a wage-slave population by flashy entertainment and sex.

He predicted the invention of an all-purpose happiness drug called ‘Soma’. It would keep the middle classes content, and could be used in spray form to quell riots by the poor. He said it would have ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects… there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’.

They haven’t actually invented it yet. Huxley’s Soma was harmless, which today’s drugs somehow never are. But they are working on it. And you might like to know the name of the brilliant, subtle, well-funded campaign to legalise marijuana launched almost half a century ago by the late Steve Abrams (I discussed it with him at length before he died). It was ‘Soma’.

Rewriting our history? That's hard to Swallow

As a child I never took to Swallows And Amazons. 

I had a boarding school headmaster who drove us ceaselessly out of doors, made us accompany him on to the heaving, open sea (without lifejackets) in an ancient ketch, taught us to make fires, camp in the rain, gut fish and endure more than our fair share of mud, wet and cold.

I had no idea how lucky I was, and I am sure it was very good for me. But as a result I didn’t much want to read about such things, let alone do them on my holidays. And I only came to know Arthur Ransome’s books when I read them to my own children.

I instantly recognised the children and adults in them, the way they thought and spoke, and the lives they lived. I could guess in detail what their homes or schools were like, though they were never described. I knew (I still do) what a country station platform felt and sounded like on a summer afternoon just after the train had steamed away. I also knew (as the film-makers don’t) that British Railways didn’t exist in 1935. And I knew that pemmican (a joke in the books) was never on sale in tins in British grocers’ shops; and that telegrams came in khaki-yellow envelopes.

But the new film suffers from the constant problem of modern people. They can’t begin to imagine the recent past and know almost nothing about it.

One thing that struck me is that the children in the film (pictured above) seem to be much ruder to each other than I remember from the books. The girls are also a lot screamier. Of course, hardly anything really happened in most of the books. It was all imagination, a thing which has died in the age of TV and computers. And you can see why they inserted an absurd plot about Russian spies. Odd that it blames Russia for coming up with the idea for the atom bomb, when this was from the first a scheme dreamt up by Western idealist scientists horrified by Hitler.

People keep telling me these things don’t matter. But they do. If we get the past wrong, we will get the future wrong, as we prove every day.

The real scandal of Corbyn's empty seats

Actually, I can quite see why Jeremy Corbyn thought that train was full. Rail companies punish anyone who just wants to travel when he feels like it.

So we’re all forced to make reservations we don’t want, and dozens of seats are blocked by this and festooned with silly labels.

Then there’s the strange urge to make train travel even worse than going by plane, including nose-to-tail seats crammed close together, cunningly arranged to obscure the windows.

It’s increasingly hard to spot a vacant place. I suspect most of those having a go at the Labour leader haven’t done much second (sorry ‘standard’) class travel by train recently.

*********

I see we now have flashily painted ‘Border Force’ cutters with go-faster stripes, just like the US Coastguard.

I detect the hand of Chairman May and her clever PR team when they were still at the Home Office. But what use is all this? It will be worth checking in six months what has happened to the six migrants picked up by HMC Valiant off the Kent coast on Thursday.

Your guess is as good as mine, but unlike Australia, we have no remote islands where we can put such people.

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PETER HITCHENS: Sorry, but I won't be saluting the dimmest Cabinet in our history

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why is it supposed to be a good thing that the new Cabinet are worse-educated than the old one? Half the media trumpeted on Friday that Theresa May’s new Government was full of state-educated Ministers, as if this were a cause for rejoicing.

But why should it be? It is a regrettable fact that this country’s private schools are vastly, incomparably better than all but a very few of its state schools. All figures and results confirm this. All employers know it.

And almost all the good state schools are academically selective grammar schools, a tiny, hugely oversubscribed remnant of survivors, utterly untypical of the state sector. And they must remain a pitiful few dozen, besieged by desperate parents – because it is against the law to open any new ones.

Most of the other good state schools select just as ruthlessly, judging pupils by their parents’ ability to afford expensive houses, or to fake religious belief, or both at once.

So what is there to celebrate about all these new Ministers? Either they have taken advantage of a rare privilege just as unfair as that used by fee-paying parents, and more secret. Or they have been poorly educated and are not going to be very good at their jobs as a result.

This very odd cult of state education among politicians used to be confined to the Labour Party, where the worse the school was, the more virtue points you scored. Private education was a matter of shame. A grammar school education was often concealed. 

I once caught a Labour MP pretending to have gone to a comprehensive when he hadn’t – because none had existed in his home city at the time. Then, the Tory Party turned into the Labour Party.

The transformation is now complete, which is why the Labour Party is biting its own tail trying to work out what on earth it is for.

And Tory politicians started bragging about sending their children to state schools, as well as looking embarrassed about having been privately educated themselves.

Mrs May seldom mentions her time at a private convent school, and tried for years to keep quiet about her grammar school days, though she now seems to have decided to trade on it as it suits her new image as the woman from Middle England.

But none of this changes the fact that in the 50 years since most grammar schools were abolished, state education in this country has been in decline – and that the continuing existence of private schools has shown it up again and again.

So let’s have no boasting about having the worst-educated Cabinet in modern history.

Instead let’s restore the lost grammar and direct grant schools that were taking on and beating the private schools at their own game, until politicians destroyed them.

Roll up for Theresa's street theatre! 

There is lots of talk about a supposedly ‘brutal’ reshuffle. But actually the fall of David Cameron is much more like an old-fashioned General Election than a reshuffle.

My generation were quite used to the rather satisfying sight of Alec Douglas-Home’s sofa, or Harold Wilson’s desk, or Ted Heath’s piano being carted out of Downing Street by whistling removal men. They lost. They went. Government really changed, in character and policy.

It was our great triumph that we had peaceful revolutions in which the beaten party were actually turned out, and accepted it. It was good and healthy and I miss it. 

But in recent years the true changes are all inner-party putsches – Lady Thatcher stabbed in the back by her own Cabinet in 1990, the long march of the Blairites in the Labour Party, the ejection of Iain Duncan Smith.

Despite all the flag-waving fuss in 1997, when Labour Party employees were bussed into Downing Street and told to pretend to be a crowd, we’ve had more or less the same government since 1990 – pro-EU, high-spending, politically correct and broadly approved of by Michael Heseltine.

If the millions who voted to leave the EU had had a party, it would have been the opposite of all that, and we’d have had a huge political change.

As it is we have to make do with Mrs May, who personally opposes her government’s main aim of leaving the EU.

And, knowing she is unlikely to deliver what the Leave majority wanted, she has cunningly provided some satisfying street theatre – plenty of heads rolling, some new faces, a furniture van in Downing Street and poor old David Davis, who she no doubt hopes will fail to get us out of the EU, so that she can sack him and do a deal with Brussels that keeps us in, in all but name.

A solution to 'terror' that no one cares about

Thought is the first casualty of terror. Nobody ever actually applies reason to the subject. And so we flounder on, uselessly doing the wrong thing.

In general, we end up doing whatever the most powerful lobby, or the Government, wanted to do anyway. Those who are not thinking ‘This is a good day to bury bad news’ are saying: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

In the US, mass murder is blamed on relaxed gun laws, though other countries with strong gun laws have mass murders. And mass murders are new, as is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, while America’s gun laws are very old.

Over here, mass murder is blamed on Islamic radicalisation – though the killers are almost invariably drugged-up low-lifes with criminal records for violence and theft. I can already be sure that this is what the Nice murderer will turn out to be, once all the facts are in. By definition, devout Muslims wouldn’t live such lives.

And in all cases, politicians reach for blunt instruments, such as France’s state of emergency – which has just been proved useless by the events in Nice, or more surveillance (likewise it failed to find the culprit of this outrage), or stupid travel restrictions, which treat us all like criminal suspects.

And they make pious speeches in which they growl and thunder against terrorists in general. Is this because they feel guilty about the fact that they have negotiated with terrorists in the past, or that they will certainly do so in the future, or how is Martin McGuinness getting to meet the Queen and how is Algeria independent? Either way, I find it unconvincing. So should you.

The best solution, if there is one, lies elsewhere. But there is no lobby for it, so it is never considered. Can you work out what it might be from the words above?

No one ever trusts a Robocop

If you ever wondered whether the growing transformation of police forces into heavily armoured riot squads was a good idea, this picture of protester Ieshia Evans confronting a phalanx of Louisiana cops will confirm your doubts.

The whole point of police in free countries is to be on the side of the people against crime and disorder. 

Once they climb into armour, and rely on menace, they are bound to lose a great deal of our friendliness and trust.And that will mean more armour, more clubs and more guns.

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The Big Questions on Migration, Forgiveness and The Sabbath

Some of you may be interested in this edition of BBC TV’s ‘The Big Questions’, broadcast from Southampton on Sunday 7^th February, in which I play a  small part.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b070nm4w

Some of you may not

You need Dinosaurs to Defend the freedoms liberals love

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Every educated and intelligent person glories in the freedom of women in Western societies to exercise their talents to the full, and their freedom to walk safely in the streets of our great cities.

So what are the enlightened minds of the Left to do when news comes of revolting assaults on women in front of Cologne Cathedral, one of the jewels of European Christian culture in one of Germany's proudest cities? And how are they to react when growing evidence suggests that at least some of the culprits are newly arrived migrants from the Muslim world?

With mumbled embarrassment and nasty jibes against those who have long opposed uncontrolled mass migration, that's how.

 

 

Police drive back right-wing demonstrators with a water cannon in Cologne in the wake of the sexual assaults around Cologne's main station on New Year's Eve

As an illustration, I had a radio clash with the Guardian writer Gaby Hinsliff on Friday (details here http://dailym.ai/1K6xp0W )

 

after she admitted that 'liberals like me are reluctant to talk about it'. While rightly chiding her own side, she couldn't resist dismissing opponents of mass migration as dinosaurs and their views as 'frothing rage'. Here is the news, Ms Hinsliff. Those who for many years warned against non-selective mass immigration (and were dismissed as bigoted dinosaurs by people like her) were concerned about just this sort of problem.

If migrants from other cultures arrive too fast and in numbers too great for society to absorb and integrate them, they begin to impose those cultures on the host country. Germany is witnessing this now, and so are we. 

The louder our governments shout about their dedication to fighting Islamist extremism, the readier they are to Islamise our own society. The sheer size of the Muslim population compels them to do so.

 

 

 

 

 

That is why exams in England are to be moved to accommodate Muslim pupils taking part in the Ramadan fast. And it is why the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, reacted to the first reports of women being molested in her city by advising them: 'It is always possible to keep a certain distance that is longer than an arm's length.'

Of course she has now been mocked so much that she has backtracked. But the point is that it was her first instinct, and what she really felt.

Radical multicultural types will in the end destroy the things they claim to like, because they don't understand that liberty and reasonable equality are features of stable, free, conservative societies based on Christian ideas, which guard their borders and are proud of their civilisation.

The people who really want to defend our enlightened society, in the end, are dinosaurs like me.

****

 

Where's the fury about these beheadings?

I have endured endless pious lectures about the wickedness of Vladimir Putin and Syria's President Assad from supporters of the Government's wild and ignorant foreign policy.

So how startling it was to see the same people mute themselves when Saudi Arabia, now seemingly Britain's closest ally, killed 47 people on one day, many by beheading.

Some of these victims were no doubt real criminals, though the expression 'Saudi justice system' is a grim and bloodstained joke, so we cannot be sure of the guilt of the condemned. But some were political dissenters.

Yet a government that squawks mightily over every Islamic State death video was strangely measured over these very similar events, which incidentally menace the peace of the Middle East.

I took a careful look at Government statements. They all had the same odd, weak theme. We condemn the death penalty, whoever carries it out.

David Cameron said: 'We condemn and do not support the death penalty in any circumstances and that includes Saudi Arabia.'

The Foreign Office said: 'The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.'

So, as far as Mr Cameron and the Foreign Office are concerned, the beheading of a political opponent after a jury-less, unfair trial in a country with no free press is just the same as the execution in Texas of a bloody murderer convicted after due process by an independent jury of free men and women under the scrutiny of a free press. And we condemn them both equally. And that's all we're going to say. Now, would you like to buy some aeroplanes?

Well, they don't speak for me. I'd much rather hang convicted heinous killers than bomb foreign countries (there's less chance of killing innocent people).

I have used the word 'feeble' so many times to describe this Government that the poor thing is quite exhausted and I have had to send it on holiday.

 

 

Dave and the invisible Tory disaster

Both our big political parties are badly divided, but somehow or other David Cameron's splitting pains get much less attention than Jeremy Corbyn's.

For instance, a BBC News programme last week arranged for some Blairite nobody to resign from his non-job, live on air. This event, plainly aimed at damaging Mr Corbyn, hardly fits in with the Corporation's duty to be impartial.

The fact that most Labour MPs can't stand Mr Corbyn isn't news. Next they'll be revealing to us that Ted Heath couldn't abide Margaret Thatcher. We know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr Cameron is an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal

What seemed like a century of speculation on whether Dave Who had been sacked to make way for Fred Whatsit wasn't really justified. But of course the BBC isn't impartial and its idea of what is news is tinged with pink. It's crammed with shameless Leftists from cellar to chimney. So if the BBC is actively helping the Tories, which it does these days, then that must mean the Tories are now the main party of the Left.

And that's Mr Cameron's problem. He's an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal.

His MPs are mostly the same, though they do a bit of pseudo-conservative braying at elections. But his voters and his remaining party members are patriotic real conservatives. He hoped to bandage this rupture by promising the EU referendum. But now he has actually been forced to keep this promise, it isn't helping much.

If he does let Ministers campaign on both sides, it will quickly be clear that hardly any of the Tory top brass, and not many of the bottom brass, genuinely want to leave the EU. They don't mind criticising it a bit, but they won't quit, and they won't fight to do so.

Most of them would rather be gagged, so they can pretend to be straining against the leash. How long can the Tory Party stay in one piece, when its leadership and its core vote are so utterly divided?

 

Democracy? That just means being ruled by secret cliques

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

 

It is grimly funny to listen to leaders and supporters of a supposedly ‘Conservative’ party using the word ‘unelected’ as a form of abuse. I know the Chancellor is peeved that he failed in his dismally planned and badly executed attempt to make a lot of poorly paid people worse off. But I think that he and his media toadies speak from the heart when they rage against the House of Lords.

I suspect that David Cameron and George Osborne are thoughtless and fashionable republicans, who can think of no good reason to keep the Queen – though at the moment they dare not admit this. It’s not that they actively want to set up a guillotine in Trafalgar Square. It’s just that they wouldn’t waste any tears if the Crown were abolished. Knowing little and caring little about the past, they see no merit in it.

Real conservatives are in favour of all kinds of unelected power and authority.

 

As well as the Monarchy, there’s the Church, the judges, not to mention the chiefs of the Armed Forces, parents, privately owned media companies, the BBC, school heads – and the thousands of strivers who have won the freedom to hire and fire through hard work and business success.

Democracy plays little part in these things, and a good thing too. To say that you are an elected politician in modern Britain isn’t much of a boast.

It means mainly that you have been picked by a narrow selection committee of politically active careerists and fixers to stand in a safe seat. Backstairs-crawlers, flatterers and obedient conformists naturally do well in this process.

These days it also means that you have been approved by some secretive group of whisperers clustered round the party leadership, who can also remove you if you show any signs of independence.

And we see the results in the Commons every Wednesday, when the backbenchers of both main parties show all the wit and independence of football hooligans, braying mindless applause for their own leaders, and equally mindless abuse for the other side. And then they humiliate themselves by asking tame, planted questions handed to them by the whips.

These whips have power over them because they, not the voters, are their real employers. They can give them well-paid jobs if they are obedient and get them deselected if they cause too much trouble.

That is why the House of Commons was so useless over the tax-credit row, and why the Lords, for all their faults, spoke for the people. Any proper conservative would have known that all along.

 

 

No blood, no gore... but truly terrifying

So often I want to watch a film or a TV series, and hesitate to do so because of the violence. I expect I will eventually go to see the new Bond movie, though I shall hide behind something during the eyeball-squeezing bit. And I’m not sure I can face the new Jekyll And Hyde.

 

Above: Deborah Kerr in the 1961 film 'The Innocents'

 

I suspect there are millions like me, who’d watch more willingly if we were spared grisly scenes. I enjoy being frightened by films, but not by explicit gore. 

The most terrifying thing I ever saw in a cinema, thanks to the carefully built-up drama, was in the ancient black-and-white film The Innocents, based on Henry James’s The Turn Of The Screw. My skin actually crawled with horror. But it was just a woman in black, her pale face filled with despair and grief, glimpsed across a lake in broad daylight.

 

 

Fighting to get into my own country

As our population climbs towards 70 million thanks to unrestricted immigration, it gets steadily harder and nastier to get back into my own country. I sometimes think the ‘Border Force’ work on the principle that if normal British people want strict frontier controls, then they can jolly well have them, hot and strong, and serve them right.

While alleged Syrians (whose passports have somehow vanished) leap unhindered from the backs of lorries all over the Home Counties, and vanish promptly into the low-wage workforce, actual documented British citizens must queue for ages to pass through poorly manned passport control.

There, we have no more right to enter the country than a Lithuanian retired secret policeman. And we are treated with unjustified suspicion. On Thursday a ‘Border Force’ person wearing pseudo-military shoulder insignia glowered at my wholly valid passport before asking me where I had come from, which is my business, not theirs.

 

  Above, migrants moving north in Denmark

 

 

 

I have a Chinese friend who bravely resists his own country’s arrogant authorities by challenging such officiousness. And in tribute to him, I replied politely that I was not obliged to answer such questions.

My decision to behave like a free Englishman rather than a potential suspect caused a startling amount of shock, tooth-sucking and frowning, and led to the appearance of a supervisor who told me I should learn the law (as it happens, I have done, and the question was not justified). I said he could detain me if he liked, but he didn’t.

I wonder how many illegal migrants fanned out across the country while I and others were subjected to the stone-faced, suspicious inefficiency of the Border Force? Should I take my holidays by lorry in future, if I want to be treated with respect and courtesy by officials whose salaries are paid by my taxes and yours?

 

 

At last, the clocks of Britain are telling the truth again. Noon is at noon, dusk falls at the proper time and I can see my garden in daylight before I leave for work. Enjoy it while it lasts. The Eurofanatics still want us on Berlin Time all year round.

 

 

 

 

The Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Suzette Davenport, says she wouldn’t ride a bicycle in London because the roads are too dangerous

Police put us on the road to ruin

The Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Suzette Davenport, says she wouldn’t ride a bicycle in London because the roads are too dangerous.

Ms Davenport is the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman on roads. I ride a bike in London (and in many other places, too) so I feel justified in assuring her the danger to cyclists is real, and largely the fault of the police.

My readers will know that the police long ago abandoned foot patrols (despite repeatedly claiming that this non-existent ‘beat’ is threatened by cuts). But my observations as a cyclist all over the country suggest to me that they have also stopped patrolling the roads by car. Since cameras became common, police patrols have become a rarity. The result is plain to see – much more risky driving, many more lights jumped, zebra crossings ignored, blatant speeding on suburban roads, far more generally rude and inconsiderate behaviour, and a return of the drink-driving that had been greatly reduced by the breathalyser.

It’s all made even worse by the growing number of drivers who have taken illegal drugs, whose possession Ms Davenport and her colleagues do so little to discourage.

If she and her fellow officers did their job, it would be safe for her – and millions of others – to ride a bike. And this healthy, clean and quiet form of transport would become normal, as it is in Holland, rather than the choice of eccentrics like me, or of self-righteous, lawless fanatics in Lycra.

 

Some Further Thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn and the Borders Crisis

I thought I’d post a few further thoughts on the great Corbasm, and the events in Germany over the weekend.

 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the obvious rage and discontent among political journalists (who have spent the last five years and lots of money taking Blairites to lunch, all now wasted) who are appalled at the cheek of the Labour Party in picking a candidate they don’t know and don’t like. This isn’t much to do with politics. In my experience few political journalists have any interest in politics or any interesting views on the subject. They’re all ‘modernisers’ or ‘centrists’, meaningless expressions which (being interpreted) mean that they unthinkingly accept whatever conventional wisdom is until it changes, whereupon they accept the new conventional wisdom. 

First Corbyn wouldn’t win. Then he did. Then there would be a putsch against him. Then his majority made that rather difficult. Then he wouldn’t be able to form a Shadow Cabinet. Then he did.  Then there weren’t enough women in the new Shadow Cabinet (fat lot I care, not believing that someone’s sex is, by itself, either a qualification or a disqualification for political office). Then there were more women in it than men. Then none of them was Shadow Chancellor. Well, there aren’t that many women in great offices of state (so-called) in the real Cabinet, and I don’t recall Mr Cameron being quizzed very hard on this, or anything else much.

The reporters have seldom been so out of the loop. Perhaps that’s why, on the BBC at lunchtime, Mr Corbyn was interviewed with the camera practically shoved up his right nostril,  an angle that could reasonably be described as unflattering. Gosh, how one wishes that all this suspicion and hostility had been unleashed on the Blair creature when *he* was first elected, amid much adulation and almost no questioning, back in 1994. 

 

I still think those who dismiss Corbynism as a purely leftist upsurge need to explain the very large public meetings which took place wherever he spoke. My own solitary experience of one of these did not suggest that those attending were solely battle-hardened old Bennites yearning for their lost youth. Many were simply curious, and indeed enthused by a feeling that they were being asked their opinion, and doing something that they had been told not to do. 

 

What is so great about the other politicians, exactly? Can someone tell me? What are they good at? What do they stand for? What do they know?  What are their great qualifications? I agree that Mr Corbyn is undistinguished, academically or in life. But that would be a more powerful argument if he weren't up against the veterans of various Bullingdon club offensives in the restaurants of Oxfordshire, heading a Cabinet of forgettable nonentities whose names and deeds few can recall.  It's not as if the Cameron Cabinet is full of decorated warriors, brilliant businessmen, academic giants or anything else much. 

 

There is a malaise abroad in this country and it is not confined to left-wingers. Anyone with any memory knows that this is a worrying and uncertain time, full of signs and portents.  The glass is falling, hour by hour, if you care to look.

 

Where will the young find proper jobs? How will they pay the enormous debts they are contracting? How will the British government pay the enormous debts it is contracting? Historically, the only way out of indebtedness on this scale has been the debauched horror of hyper-inflation, which destroys the middle class, and so destroys stability and responsibility.

 

How will they find places to live that they can afford? Where and how will they educate their children? Are these claims of brilliance in non-selective academies true? If they are, why don’t Michael Gove, who created and talked up so many of them, and the Prime Minister, who is always saying how wonderful they are, send their own children to them?

 

 

For the middle-aged, there is a different set of worries.  In many former industrial areas, jobs have vanished,  shops are boarded up and houses unlet and unsaleable. How long can society endure in such surroundings? Can nobody stop my neighbourhood being devoured by cars and traffic?  Or, in the countryside, is there now to be no limit on the expansion of what were once compact, pleasant villages into ugly sprawl, composed of cardboard hutches too small for civilised life, whose occupants can hear their neighbours breathing? Who will replace the doctors who have served me all my adult life and who are now retiring in increasing numbers, or going abroad for better conditions?(this is an even greater problem in country practices, where in many cases they will simply come to an end when the current generation retire).

 

Why must we submit to the growing retreat of supposed services – so that we cannot contact our town halls, our banks, the police,  our utility companies or anyone else, especially when problems arise and when we need them most? I think it also fair to say the welfare system has a habit of making life hardest for those who need it most, while turning a blind eye to many who are abusing it.

 

Must we endure the replacement of so many unskilled workers, especially in shops,  by robots? Whom does this benefit?

 

There may not be much official  inflation, but there is a form of inflation targeted on the thrifty - the prices of valuable assets, especially housing, are soaring out of reach, while savings accumulated over decades are quietly but relentlessly shrinking because of near-zero interest rates. And none of us can guarantee that the only assets most of us own - our houses – will not have to be sold for ‘care’ at our lives’ ends.  It is not much comfort that few of us could now afford to buy the houses we own, when much of this fairy gold will be snatched away before we can hand it on.

 

And for all, of course, there is the great uncertainty of mass immigration, which I discuss below. Much has already taken place. How much more will there be? How will it affect our lives? 

 

***

Look at the amazing reversal in Germany. Just days after declaring that migrants were welcome, Germany has slammed shut its borders and halted trains from Austria and Hungary.

Germany, whose hoity-toity adoption of the Schengen no-borders agreement was always very pointed, now wishes to suspend that very agreement, having found that open borders work in several different ways. The last time I flew to a certain German airport from London, I noticed the ill-tempered way in which, as non-Schengen passengers, we were treated.   The immigration desk was set up so close to the bridge which led off the plane that the passport queue stretched back into the aircraft itself. The German passport officials scowled at us with a sort of Iron Curtain ferocity.  I had the strong impression, though of course I cannot prove it, that we were being punished for our irritating nonconformism. The distant facility-free corrals in other continental airports, used for non-Schengen passengers waiting to depart, do tend to give the same impression.

 

Germany wanted a free flow of cheap labour into its territory, and a free flow of goods outwards. I’ve for years been astonished at how little attention has been paid to Schengen and its political implications. Perhaps that’s because I travel quite a lot on the continent, in my xenophobic, Europhobic way, and still can’t get over the way things have changed since the borders were enforced.   How can the countries involved still claim to *be* countries when they’ve renounced any real power to decide who enters and leaves their territory (this question should also be asked of the UK which has gone most of the way to borderlessness by accepting the EU passport and abolishing its own). Yet the external border of the EU is still vigorously enforced. And they say it isn’t an empire. Like, hello? Amusingly, it is Germany which on this occasion has closed *its* frontiers against its subject nations, which makes it easier for them to do the same.  

 

But the multitudes who arrived over the weekend at Munich railway station (many of them, judging by films I’ve seen, not from Syria or anywhere near it)  have put a stop to that. Has Germany’s regularly over-rated Chancellor, Angela Merkel, now grasped the simple point that an unquestioning open door to economic migrants will increase the numbers of such migrants? News of this kind travels very fast in the modern world. I gather there is a growing market for real and faked Syrian passports.

 

While reasonable weather lasts, all who can will try to cross from Turkey to Greece, and from Libya to Italy, to get to Germany and Sweden. Some will fail, horribly.  Many will succeed.

 

But that’s only a small part of the reality.  This will not end when the weather turns bad at the equinox. It will return next year and the year after, and for decades to come. Migrants become citizens. And most of the migrants now arriving here come from societies where the clan is strong, where every man has an obligation to his many cousins. Once they are citizens, they will become a potent and irresistible lobby for ‘family reunification’,  an unending process by which they will bring family members into EU territory, much as Hispanic migrants have done in the USA, transforming the culture of that country in 25 years, and continuing to do so even now. It is a fact, whether you approve of it or not, that we are talking about transformation, not a minor adjustment.

 

I stress that this is, on the migrants’ part, a perfectly reasonable response to EU governments which have resolved to welcome them.  I don’t blame them, or criticise them. As I have said before, I admire their enterprise and courage. Moving to another country, even in good circumstances, is a hard thing to do.

 

I criticise the many European governments which have acted to encourage migrants to act (perfectly rationally) in this way. This is what they decided to support, when they resolved on the policy of welcome. That is what the campaigners support, who urge a policy of welcome. 

Labour has a real lefty...so can we have proper conservatives?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake. Tory Blairites such as David Cameron might be wise to learn from this, especially given last week’s dismal, shrinking manufacturing and export figures, which were pushed far away from front pages by other stories, but which cast doubt on the vaunted recovery.

If (like me) you have attended any of Mr Corbyn’s overflowing campaign meetings, you will have seen the hunger – among the under-30s and the over-50s especially – for principled, grown-up politics instead of public relations pap.

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s Blairites lie dead and dying all over the place because they made that mistake

 

Mr Corbyn reminds mature people of the days when the big parties really differed. He impresses the young because he doesn’t patronise them, and obviously believes what he says. This desire for real politics isn’t just confined to the Left. Ken Livingstone is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour’s Nigel Farage. Ukip appeals to a similar impulse.

Millions are weary of being smarmed and lied to by people who actually are not that competent or impressive, and who have been picked because they look good on TV rather than because they have ideas or character.

Indeed, ideas or character are a disadvantage. Anything resembling a clear opinion is seized upon by the media’s inquisitors, and turned in to a ‘gaffe’ or an outrage.

Actually, I dislike many of Mr Corbyn’s opinions – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU. Oddly enough, these are all policies he shares with the Tory Party.

But I like the honest way he states them, compared with the Tories’ slippery pretence of being what they’re not.

My hope, most unlikely to be realised, is that a patriotic, conservative and Christian equivalent of Mr Corbyn will emerge to take him on, and will demonstrate, by his or her strength of conviction, that there is an even greater demand for that cause than there is for old-fashioned leftism. In any case, I think any thoughtful British person should be at least a little pleased to see the PR men and the special advisers and the backstairs-crawlers of British politics so wonderfully wrong-footed by a bearded old bicyclist.

 

 

On Wednesday the BBC marked the moment when the Queen became our longest-reigning Monarch by broadcasting (on Radio 4’s The World Tonight) a weird, portentous three-minute republican diatribe by the idiosyncratic feminist Beatrix Campbell, who in 2009 accepted an OBE from what she called a ‘horrible imperial regime’.
The attack was personal as well as political, criticising the Queen as a parent and accusing her of ‘deceiving and disrespecting’ her daughters-in-law. No doubt Ms Campbell has a legitimate point of view which ought to be heard. But an uninterrupted harangue during a flagship news programme? How can the BBC claim to be impartial when it does this sort of thing?

 

Death by drone is not justice

I would cheerfully bring back the death penalty tomorrow, as long as it came with unanimous grown-up juries and a restored right to silence.

But I’d never seen David Cameron as an ally in this. When it comes to defending us against actual heinous murderers in Britain, Mr Cameron (like most politicians) is an excuse-making anti-gallows liberal softie.

How does he square this with his enthusiasm for executing people without trial in the middle of someone else’s desert, using a remote-controlled chunk of high-explosive?

No doubt the victims of this are not very nice, though nothing resembling evidence has been produced against them. But that shouldn’t blind us to the principle involved. If we think killing people we don’t like with drones in other countries is legal and OK, we have licensed everyone else to do the same, even to us, here.

It is all part of a confused and delusional policy towards Syria and ISIS. George Osborne, the Chancellor, still seems to want to attack Syria’s President Assad, whose army is now one of the main barriers against an ISIS victory.

Last week he said Parliament’s vote not to bomb Assad in 2013 was ‘one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made’.

On the contrary, if we had bombed Assad then, we would have helped the people who soon afterwards became ISIS. Given this confusion at the highest level, Parliament should be very careful not to allow Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron to make the same mistake again.

**

The people who want to make life coarser never, ever stop. A bookmaker has just got away with using a partly-asterisked F-word in a newspaper advertisement. The gutless, useless ‘Advertising Standards Authority’ rejected a complaint, saying it was ‘light-hearted’. It won’t be long now before the whole word is allowed, everywhere. Those of us who think that is a pity will be derided for caring. And so the cultural revolution goes on.

**

 

At long last, feminism has found a wise voice

 

Feminism has many faces. Compare and contrast Charlotte Proudman, the censorious Thought Policewoman who publicly denounced an internet bore when she could have slapped him down in private, and the singer Chrissie Hynde.

Ms Hynde lived the entire dream and nightmare of 1960s liberation, and is impressively honest about the bitter depths to which this took her, and the sadness this caused her parents.

Last week she was questioned on this by the high priestess of po-faced British feminism, Jenni Murray. The exchange didn’t go quite as Ms Murray expected. Chrissie Hynde’s thoughts about feminism and knicker-displaying rock stars have been much publicised. But this was the bit that really impressed me: ‘I don’t think it’s liberating at all to think that you can behave like a man… When this false commodity of sexual liberation came along which made us think that we could act like them – actually women don’t act like men and they also respond emotionally very differently to men. It took me a long time to find out, and I don’t think it was any kind of liberation. I think it was more enslavement.’

Jenni Murray immediately changed the subject.

A TV discussion of the Syria crisis and its origins

Some of you may like to watch this discussion on the Syrian crisis, in which I make my first major contribution about five minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzegRfKImUw&feature=youtu.be