PETER HITCHENS: The falling pound is NOTHING to do with your freedom

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

The pound sterling would have fallen hard and fast if we had voted to stay in the EU. I am amazed it did not do so long before. More than three years ago, before the referendum was called, I advised you to keep an eye on the value of sterling as a true measure of our huge economic difficulties.

Since then they’ve grown worse – enormous state debts, enormous private debts, a disastrous balance of trade and a devastating current account deficit, which measures how much we owe abroad.

Add to that the £435billion of funny money pumped into the economy by the Bank of England since 2009 in so-called ‘quantitative easing’, the smooth modern way of printing cash which is backed by thin air.

 

If you do these things, the currency must shrink in value, as surely as water will wet you, and as surely as fire will burn.

And now it has. I suspect it will get quite a lot worse, and the day when the dollar is worth more than the pound is now in sight. But currency markets like to wait for their opportunity. My guess is that, on the eve of the referendum, quite a few currency dealers bet heavily on a victory for the Remain campaign (as others did) and bought sterling in the belief that it would rise on the news. But others, more cunning or better informed, wagered the other way.

The resulting turmoil of rapid selling set off the avalanche which followed.

If the vote had gone the other way, then roughly the same thing would have happened by now, perhaps on the announcement of bad economic figures (there are so many, if you’re paying attention).

Everyone who understands the issue knows this. So they should stop saying – and you should stop believing – that the fall of sterling is your fault for voting for national independence.

This decision will have its costs – nothing worth having comes free – but a weaker pound isn’t one of them.

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Thanks to a 1950s childhood I like my gravy thick, salty and dark brown, best mixed to a background of Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. So I’m sorry to see the decline of Bisto and Oxo sales, which fell in September supposedly because of hot weather. They’ll be blaming global warming next.

Of course, the real problem is that nuclear families eating meaty meals around tables, such as the one portrayed by Lynda Bellingham in the famous old Oxo commercials, are disappearing faster than hedgehogs. I doubt anything can save them.
But there’s something a bit wet and defeatist about the new Oxo TV advertisements, in which a horribly correct modern family (the man looks terrified) are shown cringing to some ghastly female bully brought home for a meal by their daughter. The creepy interloper shows her approval of her meatballs not by eating them but by taking a photograph of them.

Advertising is such a slave of trends. Someone called Helen Warren-Piper, a marketing director for Oxo’s parent company, has actually said: ‘Those advertising scripts where the mum is literally tied to an oven just don’t work any more. It’s clear advertisers need to think beyond mum and do a better job at representing the whole of the modern family or consumers will reject them.’

Ah, yes, you’ll remember those days when mothers were literally tied to the oven, then briefly released to gulp down some gravy before being chained to the kitchen sink. It happened to Lynda Bellingham all the time. No it didn’t. What is she talking about?

And yet this rubbish dominates the world of business and commerce, which now peddle ideas once found only in seething, enraged ultra-feminist magazines.

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My favourite ghost stories, by the genius M. R. James, usually involve someone being a little too curious, and so releasing from its hole or tomb a nasty force he wishes he could put back but can’t.

Pornography is like this. In my wild 1960s days I thought it would be clever to read Last Exit To Brooklyn (which had just escaped prosecution) as a gesture of support for freedom of expression. It poisoned and polluted my imagination, irrevocably. To this day, I wish I hadn’t read it.

The best thing to do with pornography is to keep it out of reach by the forces of shame and law. The claim that legalising it would be a great liberation has turned out to be one of the greatest lies of our time. It has enslaved millions.

It is not a passive, dead thing that can be examined in a classroom. It reaches out and leaps into your mind. Jenni Murray could not be more wrong in saying that children should study it.

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What a pity that Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a man of great historical knowledge, blessed with a sense of proportion, has become a Russophobic warmonger madly suggesting that we start a conflict with Moscow in Syria.

Mr Johnson knows perfectly well that fighting Islamist fanatics in densely populated cities is hard, especially when they hold the population hostage, as the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra is doing in east Aleppo now.
The West and its allies had similar difficulties last Christmas in Ramadi, where the RAF (among other forces) dropped bombs in and around that city to defeat ISIS. I suppose it’s possible that no civilians died, but I somehow doubt it.

The difference is that, unlike their close cousins in the Al Nusra front in Aleppo, the Islamic State fanatics in Ramadi don’t have access to a slick PR operation in the West, skilled at producing emotive, perfectly composed atrocity pictures of wounded children, and in manipulating Western news organisations who (for the most part) have no actual staff reporters or photographers on the scene.

So almost all the things you hear about east Aleppo are one-sided, carefully controlled propaganda, not news. One way of dealing with one-sided propaganda is to check it against the stuff put out by the other side.

In a rare moment of balance, the BBC recently transmitted this, from Fares al-Shehabi, who represents Aleppo in Syria’s ‘People’s Council’.

He said: ‘More than half of the city is occupied by Islamists, many of them foreigners…

‘Just go and check for yourself who is ruling eastern Aleppo, who is really issuing the laws there, it’s Islamic courts, it’s exactly like Kandahar and Kabul before the coalition intervened to get rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it’s exactly the same thing, they don’t have any democracy, they don’t have any civil rule, they only have people with long beards with fundamentalist ideology running the show, and a lot of foreigners.’

If this is even partly true, what on earth are we doing rushing to the aid of these hairy-faced fanatics and infiltrators? Or are we, as we did so regrettably in Libya, once again backing the worse against the bad?

I am happy to help Mr Johnson on this, and respectfully remind him that my team beat his when we clashed on University Challenge. He’s not the only know-all in London.

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PETER HITCHENS: This barmy 'blitz on toffs' will make us ALL poorer

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

I still struggle to persuade many Tory loyalists that their party has now actually become a rather Left-wing version of New Labour. If only they’d listen, it might help them come round to recognising one of the most important facts about modern Britain.

Here’s some evidence. The Cabinet Office Minister, Matthew Hancock, has announced plans to grill job applicants to find out if they have been to independent schools.

He explains this inquisition by saying: ‘Social justice is at the heart of everything this one nation Government is trying to achieve. 

'Our goal is simple: to make sure everyone has the opportunity to succeed and make the most of their talents, whatever the circumstances of their birth.’

Social justice? This is, of course, top-grade tripe. What Mr Hancock wants is to destroy quality, in the name of equality.

There is a simple and proven way to make the best use of the nation’s talents: restore the 1,000 fine state grammar schools in England and Wales madly destroyed in an idiotic frenzy between 1965 and 1990, and their equivalents in Scotland. 

Then build more of them. And reopen the best independent schools to the children of poor homes by reintroducing the direct grant system, which gave a free, first-class education to thousands of talented children from state primaries, the late Alan Rickman being a good example.

Every time I hear politicians drivelling that the independent schools should do more to help the state sector, I long to shout in their ears: ‘But they did! And it worked! And you abolished it in 1975, and are so pig-ignorant you don’t even know about it!’

Even now those supposed towers of snobbish privilege which are the independent schools do what they can (often through the generosity of parents already paying stiff fees) to take in as many boys and girls from less well-off homes as they possibly can, free of charge.

Meanwhile, huge numbers of children at these alleged Snob Academies come from families where the fees are a giant strain on the family budget, willingly accepted. Many have tried the supposedly improved state education system and found it gravely wanting. They just think education is more important than holidays or new cars or restaurant meals.

They tend not to be rich enough to live in the catchment areas of the exclusive fake comprehensives where wealthy Leftists send their young, pretending to be apostles of equality when to all intents and purposes they have paid for their children to be privileged.

Mr Hancock’s scheme would waft these pampered Leftists into the best jobs, as they are already wafted into the top universities, which are ceaselessly pestered to make them discriminate against independent schools. And it would slam the door of opportunity in the faces of many who would make the most of it. Crazily, it would do this in the name of progress.

How insane this all is. None of these people knows what he is doing. The Left has not only taken over all the parties, but now proceeds to spit on the very people – the poor – it claims to be helping.

I will quote here what that great teacher, headmaster and university Vice Chancellor, Lord James of Rusholme, told the House of Lords in 1976 as he protested against the destruction of all these schools: ‘If I were a High Tory instead of a Fabian Socialist – a Tory of a type that now scarcely exists even in cartoons, one who really believes in privilege and keeping the lower orders down – one of the first things I should do would be to get rid of grammar schools and, above all, I should applaud what we are doing this afternoon, getting rid of the direct grant schools.’

I would like to point this out to Mr Matthew Parris, former Tory MP, BBC favourite and frequent apologist for David Cameron, who wrote last week: ‘The present public mood of sneering at public school toffs is healthy. 

'The brand must be trashed. People must be made to feel sheepish about going to Eton or Harrow. It was welcome news yesterday that the Cabinet Office Minister, Matt Hancock, is drawing up a list of questions that employers may ask job applicants about their socio-economic background.’

He added that he meant this to sound aggressive. Well, I mean my response to sound rude. Mr Parris and Mr Hancock have adopted opinions which are stupid, ill-informed and utterly wrong.

Finally...the great housewife myth is turning to dust 

The nastiest and most dishonest slogan of the ultra-feminists was that women who stayed at home to raise their children were ‘chained to the kitchen sink’.

This unpleasant expression scared many women away from doing the most important and responsible (and rewarding) task which most of us will ever have – raising the next generation to be worthy inheritors of a great free country, hand-reared individuals rather than battery children, the conformist products of TV and mass culture.

And it gulled them into undergoing a real enslavement: wage-slavery. How many really wanted to do this, and how many were cajoled and propagandised into it?

Well, last week Professor Maggie Andrews, of the University of Worcester, told the Hay Festival that the old assumption was that feminism was about escaping the domestic, getting out of the home, getting a job and being financially independent.

But ‘people are more sceptical about that now - they see a much more complex picture. They see the domestic space as one area of women’s power. 

Certain elements of the domestic have become much sexier, much more popular, an  escape from the horrors of society’. 

Well, that’s one way of putting it. I just think many women have discovered that wage-slavery was a false liberation, and that, if there are any chains in their lives, they are the chains of money that keep them from their children.

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A sorry war with nothing but baddies 

News from the supposed liberal democratic paradise of Ukraine, so much nicer than Mr Putin’s nasty Russia. 

According to the United Nations, Ukrainian forces are rounding up and torturing suspected rebel sympathisers. 

One victim had his hand smashed with a hammer and was waterboarded while being kicked and punched in the genitals. 

The UN had to abandon an anti-torture inspection after being denied access to five secret detention centres. The Russian rebels are just as bad, but you knew that. So sorry, but there are no good guys in this conflict.

 

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If the true culprits of the Birmingham pub bombings were arrested, tried and convicted, how long would it be before they were released in the cause of the ‘peace process’? My guess is two years maximum – less than you can get for some driving offences.

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Go ahead and vote Out... but we'll NEVER leave the EU

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Referendums are held for the benefit of politicians, not for the good of the country. Like the super-oily Harold Wilson 40 years ago, the eel-like David Cameron is trying to slither out of an internal party crisis.

He hopes to neutralise for ever the annoying faction of Tory MPs called 'Eurosceptics'. I personally don't know why he bothers.

If these people haven't the guts to leave the Tory Party, the most pro-EU organisation in Britain, then why should we believe that they have the guts to leave the EU itself? Yappity-yap, they have gone for years, occasionally sinking their boneless gums harmlessly into the trousers of one Tory leader or another.

But Mr Cameron likes a tight ship – that is one in which nobody disagrees with him or criticises him. It's what he's like, and he's in charge.

So it's gallons of liquid engineering all round, as he tries to slide out of the ancient problem: the Tory Party loves the EU and wants to stay in it. Most Tory voters hate the EU and wish we weren't in it.

One way to solve this would be for the Tory voters to stop voting Tory and to find another party. But, for reasons which Einstein and Freud themselves probably couldn't fathom, they won't do this. 

They prefer voting for people whose views they don't like, and who despise them back. This is, after all, England, where logic isn't rated highly.

So every few years we have a Tory Eurocrisis, and here's the latest one. You can count me out of it.

I'll be amazed if it results in a vote to leave. I'll be utterly astonished if we actually do leave. The best we can hope for is another round of 'negotiations', followed by a second vote in which we will be expected to come up with the right answer.

Ask the Irish, who were silly enough to reject the Lisbon Treaty. They were told they hadn't understood the question and made to vote again.

If this sort of thing goes on much longer, I might stop being so sweetly trusting of those who rule us, and turn cynical.

At least Dad Dave got something right 

Actually, I think the Prime Minister genuinely hoped to send all his children to a comprehensive state secondary school, at least for a while. I think it was a key part of his reinvention of himself as the New Blair, and I even think I know which school he had in mind.

But I think he lost his nerve, and I don't blame him. The school concerned was run by a superb head, who left, which is always a worry. And I'm also not sure that Mrs Cameron was as keen on the experiment as her husband.

So instead they sent their daughter to a very different state secondary, a wholly untypical girls-only school very similar to the grammars which both parties have more or less stamped out.

And now the Camerons are looking at a private school for their son. Good for them. They can afford it, and by doing so they free a place in a good state school for a poorer family. In this the Premier is commendably unlike the egalitarian fanatic Jeremy Corbyn, who split up with an earlier wife because she wanted their child to go to a grammar school and he didn't.

Mr Cameron wouldn't sacrifice his child for his politics, and quite right too.

But shouldn't he then sacrifice his politics for his child?

If the head of the Government cannot find a state secondary good enough for his son in all of Central London, then what about the rest of us?

Since the Thatcher era, governments have been trying to fix the comprehensive school system without addressing its real problem – which is that comprehensive schools don't work.

They never will. Charismatic heads, piles of cash, freedom from local authority control, every one of these panaceas fails to deal with the problem that selection by ability is best.

The private school system, to which the Camerons have reasonably turned, works entirely on this principle and succeeds for that reason.

So let's bring it back to the state sector, where it worked brilliantly. Did you know that new grammar schools are actually illegal? This must end.

There's nothing wrong with going private – if you can. It's denying to others what you seek for yourself that's wrong.

Don't moan, 50s women were happy with their lot

I quite enjoy these programmes – such as the new series called Back In Time For The Weekend – where families are introduced to the food, clothes and customs of another era.

But the first episode – about the 1950s – annoyed me because the wife and mother moaned so much about having to grapple (briefly) with the housework and about going to church. 

Look, if you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined. Women really did live like this and were often (oddly enough) happy and contented. 

They might not have liked spending their days as wage-slaves in offices. They weren't like us. And our grandchildren may not be like us either. 

Try to understand that the past is a foreign country, and so is the future.

Lord Bramall's defiance over 'absurd' child abuse allegations

Good luck to Lord Bramall, who is giving the police a good biffing for their absurd, credulous treatment of child abuse allegations against him. It's their job to investigate, not prosecute or persecute.

But things have been even harder on another man of courage, the late Bishop George Bell, condemned by many media (with police assistance) following a solitary uncorroborated claim of child abuse first made nearly 45 years after the offence allegedly took place, and 37 years after the Bishop's death. 

Many journalists shamefully reported this allegation as if it were proven fact.

Well, an astonishing admission in the House of Lords by Paul Butler, the Bishop of Durham, shows that they shouldn't have done. He told fellow peers that the Church was by no means sure of Bishop Bell's guilt.

'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.'

If they're not sure, how can the media be?

Smoking in Hollywood films gives free advertising to Big Tobacco

I completely agree with moves to stop people smoking in Hollywood films. It is worth billions in free advertising to Big Tobacco. 

It's all very well going on about how stylish the stars of yesteryear looked as they inhaled clouds of burning paper and vegetable smoke. 

But people died (horribly) from doing just that. Humphrey Bogart was one of them (his ravaged body weighed less than 6st at the end). And the link between cigarettes and glamour is a big reason for keeping this disastrous habit popular among the young.

Yes, we do sometimes have to save people from themselves. It's not their own business. If they hurt or kill themselves, their families suffer terribly.

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Here's absolute proof mothers are better off staying at home

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

In our increasingly mad and dogma-driven country, most political slogans mean the opposite of what they seem to say. The best example of this is the phrase ‘family-friendly’. This describes measures to ensure that most parents hardly ever see their children, who are instead brought up by paid strangers.
One ‘family-friendly’ policy is taxpayer subsidies for the network of day orphanages where abandoned children are detained without trial for long hours, while their mothers are chained to desks miles away.
Yes, I’m laying it on a bit thick here, but nothing like as much as my opponents, who claim that mothers who stay at home to raise their own children are ‘chained to the kitchen sink’.
This stupid expression is at the heart of a long and furious propaganda campaign against real family life, waged by weirdo revolutionaries since the 1960s. Originally doomed to failure, it suddenly succeeded when big business realised that female staff were cheaper and more reliable than men.
But our near-totalitarian propaganda machine, which pushes its views in school PSHE classes, TV and radio soap operas and countless advice columns, has succeeded brilliantly in making young mothers feel ashamed of being at home with their small children.
And here is the absolute proof of that. A significant number of homes – four per cent – lose money by having both parents at work. Many – ten per cent – gain nothing from this arrangement. Yet they still do it. Many more gain so little that it is barely worth the bother.
The most amazing statistic of the past year (produced by insurance company Aviva) shows that thousands of mothers who go out to work are, in effect, working for nothing. The cost of day orphanages, travel and other work expenses cancels out everything they earn.
Many more barely make a profit on the arrangement. One in four families has a parent who brings home less than £100 a month after all the costs of work have been met.
How strange. When people ignore their own material best interests, it is a clear sign that they have been deluded by propaganda or fashion, or both.
How much better it would be for everyone involved if these mothers stayed with their children. Both generations would be immensely happier, the children would be better brought-up, neighbourhoods, often deserted by day, would revive. Yet, because of a cynical alliance between Germaine Greer and the Fat Cats of the Corporations, and because almost all women in politics are furious believers in nationalised childhood, we spurn this wise policy, even if it costs us money.

The midnight train to disaster

The ridiculous scenes on the railways over Christmas were in fact the result of 60 years of official hatred of rail transport.
The ‘major engineering works’ involved are being done in a rush, decades too late, as overcrowding forces even Britain’s train-loathing rulers to modernise a decrepit system. 
Passenger railways in this country survive only because so many people continue to prefer them to roads, despite the painful fares and crammed coaches. The Treasury, the Transport Department and the mighty roads lobby would have killed them off if they could have done, as has almost happened in the USA.
Huge and powerful interests – oil, construction, car manufacturers, domestic airlines – have always seen efficient, affordable railways as an obstacle to their growth.
I’m always amused by the way everyone remembers the piffling Profumo affair, in which nothing actually happened. But the far greater scandal of Transport Minister Ernest Marples is virtually unknown.
Marples ran a company that built roads. While he was Transport Minister, he continued to own shares in this firm until public outrage forced him to sell them – to his wife.
This charmer, who was really responsible for the smashing up of railways usually blamed on Lord Beeching, ended up by fleeing the country on a midnight train (of all things – it’s assumed he couldn’t have got so many of his possessions into a car or on to a plane) bound for Monaco.
Marples’s 1975 moonlight flit was a successful bid to escape a gigantic tax bill. He lived out his remaining years among vineyards in Beaujolais. Hardly anyone knows this.

So how much did dinner with Claudia cost, you Dave?

How much did we spend on David Cameron’s Chequers dinner with Claudia Schiffer, right,  that titan of global politics? We shall never know.  The British Government  – usually profligate with your money and mine – finds one activity too expensive. Oddly enough, the thing that is too costly is telling us how much we have paid for hospitality  at Chequers, the Premier’s official country house. Perhaps they could tell us what it would cost to compile the information? Something tells me it would be a lot less than the Chequers drinks bill.

Putin's foe is not our friend

THE supposedly serious Times newspaper describes Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny as a ‘dissident’, so putting him in the same class as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov or Vaclav Havel. Mr Navalny is in fact a pretty pungent Russian nationalist, whose views on migrants to Russia from the Caucasus make Nigel Farage look like Nick Clegg.
The Times – like so much of the Western media – is so wildly, simple-mindedly prejudiced against the Putin government that it garlands a man it would despise and attack if he were British, just because he’s an enemy of President Putin. One misjudgment has led to another. Mr Putin is not Hitler or even Brezhnev.
And Mr Navalny is not Solzhenitsyn either.

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Cabinet files reveal the pitiful excuses Margaret Thatcher gave for introducing the GCSE exam, a dismal cocktail of hard slog and compulsory ignorance which has made secondary education such a futile misery for so many. Apparently, she didn’t want to upset poor old Keith Joseph, who was keen on it.
Well, Sir Keith was a tortured soul, but I’d still rather upset him than ruin the education of millions.
Then she didn’t want to look weak in the face of union protests. Again, couldn’t she stand a bit of loss of face in a good cause? I am amazed her ‘Iron Lady’ reputation still endures. The more we learn about her, the less it is justified.

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I think that we could save a lot of honours heartache on New Year’s morning, as those who think they are great and good mutter in fury at the awards given to others and not to them. Let’s have a comprehensive, mixed-ability honours system.
Give a bauble to everyone, but reserve the best ones for those who can pay, or who live in nice postcodes. Our elite is happy to have this daft system in our schools, so how can they object to it in the giving of honours?

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You don't have to be like Harriet Harman to be a politically-conscious woman

I’d like to draw the attention of my readers to another blog,  ‘CONSERVATIVE WOMAN’ (I’ve done it in block capitals, as they do,  because I suspect they are trying to avoid calling it ‘Conservative Woman’ in case they put off too many conservatives, whereas ‘conservative woman’ would just look odd).

 

As always, this recommendation doesn’t imply total agreement – for instance,  this interesting piece http://conservativewoman.co.uk/2014/04/drugs-are-illegal-because-they-are-dangerous-not-dangerous-because-they-are-illegal/ about the effects of soft drug laws in the ‘draconian’ USA relies too heavily on the British Crime Survey,  and seems to assume that the drug laws in this country are in fact more effective than they are.

 

But the interesting group of women who are writing and editing this blog have set out to demonstrate a very important thing, that to be female, and interested in politics, is not automatically to be a social revolutionary.

 

Those who campaign for ‘more women in politics/the law/ boardrooms/the media etc. etc.’ don’t actually mean what they say. They only want the sort of woman who believes in the social, moral and cultural revolution. And of course socially conservative women tend to stay off the career ladder because, by their nature, they prefer using their education to perform that crucial and much-despised task, the raising of the next generation.

 

And while they weren’t looking even formerly conservative bodies which used to defend that position have been quietly taken over by the ultra-feminists.

 

Calling Things by their Proper Names

Time for a quotation from Confucius (Or K’ung Fu-tzu, in the sensible old Wade-Giles transcription),  (Book 13, Chapter 3) ‘If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.’

 

This early Orwellian statement, predating the Sage of Wallington by 2,500 years, has seldom been more applicable. I’m not sure if Orwell would have been so interested in the punishment issues, but there is no doubt that failing to call things by their proper names is the beginning of stupidity. 

 

And we don’t call them by their proper names. Look at the recent announcement about ‘Child Care’ , in which ‘the government’ was said to be going to pay future so-called ‘parents’ up to £2,000 a year for something called ‘Childcare’ (or (‘Chowdcare’ as it is more generally pronounced in the public-sector classes).

 

Of course the claim is almost entirely false. The government has no money. It will have to tax you and me to find this money. Nor is it certain to pay it, as it will have left office, probably forever, by the time the plan is due to be implemented. Then there are these ‘parents’. The word, I was always told, derived from the Latin ‘pareo’ meaning ‘I obey’, on the assumption that the parents are those who are obeyed by their offspring, and the offspring obey their parents.   

 

As this relation of authority and obedience has been abolished in law, and cannot be enforced by the alleged parents, whose former power of discipline is now increasingly classified as ‘abuse',  these people are not parents in any case little more than related adults. As they are not required by custom or law to be in any kind of stable or permanent relationship, they aren’t necessarily even related.

 

And then again, since both of them  have been compelled by custom and need to work away from the home, during their children’s waking hours, and further compelled by custom and law to hand them over in later life to supposed 'schools' (no time to discuss this remarkable word here); and as those 'schools' (and the 'universities' to which they lead) follow the desires and aims of the state rather than of the ‘parents’, the supposedly ‘parental’ relationship is pretty much vestigial.

 

As for ‘Chowdcare’, all observant people have shuddered with horror for years at the suggestion that anyone they loved might fall into the ‘care’ of the modern state, and ‘caring’ has become, for the informed, a synonym for ‘hypocritical’. Few mothers are so hopeless that a paid stranger will ever care more than they do for their own small child.

 

And this subsidy, by which we are taxed so that we can pay strangers to mind our offspring during the formative hours of their lives, has yet another significance. For, while it is available to couples with a joint income of up to £300,000 a year,  it is absolutely refused to those households (be they never so poor)  in which one parent remains defiantly at home, 'chained to the kitchen sink'. And I am fairly sure that it is also refused to two-wageslave households who receive childminding help from grandparents or other close relatives. You can have the subsidy as long as both parents abandon their children, and as long as the minders are not relatives.

 

I think this is fairly obvious, don’t you? Once all its elements have been properly described,  it is clearly an incitement to disaffection, a bribe of our own money, offered to us in return for following the repellent and greedy opinion that wageslavery is more important than nurture of the next generation, that motherhood is a contemptible waste of a woman’s talents - all the crazed anti-family Bolshevism that poured from the pens and mouths of the wildest leftist revolutionaries in the 1960s, and is – 50 years later – the settled policy of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

 

And still the Left moan that they have been beaten, sidelined and betrayed. Are they too stupid to see that they have won, or too clever to admit that they are winning, while there is still any work left to do? 

   

The Tory who Says I want Girls to Leave School at 14

Any minute now I expect a contribution here from Charlotte Vere, which I will post prominently and at length, and then (I hope) reply to.  Why?  Who is she? Well,  she has grabbed my attention and I thought a full-scale debate here would be better than any more Twitter exchanges, however pithy.

 

Ms Vere and I have had a squabble on Twitter, which she began by claiming, on the basis of no evidence at all, that I thought girls should leave school at 14.  I should state here (absurd that it should be necessary) that I don’t think anything of the kind. My views on the education of women (as I have said more than once before) are pretty much those stated by Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. What’s more it seems to me that nobody can be too well-educated for the momentous and hugely influential and responsible task of raising the next generation.

 

The idea that full-time motherhood is a matter of kitchen sinks, scrubbing,  and cleaning behind the fridge is a hostile defamation of a vast task of nurturing, teaching, example, moral instruction, protection from danger, patience, constancy, trust and loving discipline, which in each home where it takes place has more power to do real good than almost any paid job you can think of. It is largely thanks to the Greerite and Friedanesque disdain for this noble occupation, and our culture’s unceasing slandering of it,  that the Chief Rabbi feels the need to complain about a society without trust.  

 

Ms Vere constructed this worse-than-baseless accusation (which she has declined to withdraw) in response to my recent column defending full-time mothers. This pointed out that the one form of childcare the government does not subsidise is care done by the child’s own mother. It also explained why so many families gave up great material benefits (so defying the spirit of the age)  to give their children this benefit.

 

You can read it here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/08/since-when-was-saving-your-children-a-lifestyle-choice.html

 

 

Who is Charlotte Vere?  Well, by her own description (if I’ve fathomed the rather odd punctuation of her Twitter biography)  she ‘s executive director of the Girls’ Schools Association, on the Development Board of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and ‘Trustee of something she refers to as the ‘Fatherhood Institute & NYAT’.  Or, as she displays it : ‘Exec Director | Girls' Schools Association, Dev Board | Oxford Mindfulness Ctr, Trustee | Fatherhood Inst & NYAT and VC of Governors. Tweets own, obvs.’

 

Obvs.

 

Make what you will of all that.  I do. But what interests me more about her is that in May 2010 she stood as Tory candidate for Brighton, one of the fabled ‘A- listers’. She came third in the general election behind Caroline Lucas (apologies for getting this name wrong and thanks to the reader who pointed it out) , then leader of the Green Party, and the Labour candidate. She was picked as Tory candidate in a very close vote in an ‘open primary’, though the actual votes were never revealed. Just 80 people attended the selection meeting. It sounds like an interesting evening, with a  cliff-hanger ending.

 

Well, it’s hard to define a Tory these days (look at Louise Bagshawe, as was, now Louise Mensch, the woman who wandered in and out of New Labour before becoming Tory candidate for Corby, winning the seat and then wandering off again, who knows whither, in mid-Parliament).

 

But in what way is she a conservative?

Let’s take a look at some of our exchanges:

 

 

 

She assumed (why? She claims not to be statist) that my article was a plea for state subsidies for full-time mothers, which it isn’t. I don’t, for instance, favour the much-dangled plan for a marriage tax allowance, believing it to be a silly gimmick.

 

My column was just a plea for the government to stop penalising full-time mothers by a) acting as if they’re a stupid nuisance, a feeling actually voiced by Patricia Hewitt (who said they were a ‘problem’) but implicitly endorsed by the policies of all modern British governments for some years, and b) taxing such families to subsidise child-care for double-earners. And on top of that taxing such families to subsidise the many thousands of fatherless families created by 50 years of deliberate state policy. I want the state to stop encouraging rivals to the independent ,free, married family, and to stop making those free families pay for that encouragement. That’s all.

 

It was also pointing out that the present government’s attitude towards women who raised their own children was strikingly similar to that of the old East Germany (I quoted from one of my favourite possessions, a propaganda booklet on the GDR in which that horrible state boasted of its advanced and enlightened policy of cramming women into wageslave workplaces, and simultaneously cramming their children into nurseries.  The GDR, by the way, had a Tory Party (Christian Democrats) and a Liberal Democrat Party, each allowed 52 seats in the 500-seat People’s Chamber, provided they agreed with the Communist Party about everything. Remind you of anything? It also had universal comprehensive schools.  

 

I had also noticed that the old USSR had a very similar policy. In fact, when I lived in Soviet Moscow, this arrangement – under which a single income simply couldn’t meet the budget of a normal household, and there was universal ‘childcare’ so that mothers of young children could be marched into paid work as soon as possible after giving birth, was one of the most striking features of that society. So was mass abortion (abortions –openly practised as a form of contraception -  outnumbered live births in many years in the USSR) and pandemic divorce. When I returned home a few years later, I was struck (and remain struck) by the similarities between this horrible travesty of a human society and the grisly, family-free, privacy free, marriage-free abortionist utopia we are now building in Britain.

 

The intensifying battle between the state and the family (also dealt with in Ferdinand Mount’s work ‘The Subversive family’) was one of the chief themes of my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I am still hoping some of my critics will one day read, rather than assuming wrongly that it is a tract about central heating..

 

(If Ms Vere won’t read my book, surely she can read Ferdinand Mount’s,  as David Cameron’s mother is Ferdy’s cousin (Ferdy is really Sir William Mount, Bart, but is too nice to mention it ))

 

 

 

Of course the point is this – that the state and the family are rivals. In this struggle, any conservative must surely be on the side of the family and private life (and of private property) against the state.  But for those people who confuse economic liberalism with conservatism, there is a confusing new element.  The state has now been joined by a ferocious ally, namely global, corporate business, which – as the cleverer Marxists have long realised -  has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary forces known to man. Both the state and the corporations dislike the close-knit married family. Such a family requires a proper weekly Sabbath of some kind, where both parents stay away from work and the family is together in its own home, undisturbed by work, or commerce, and is in general resistant to regimentation, advertising and demands for long working hours. The state is suspicious and jealous of such privacy. The corporations are jealous of the time which they would rather we spent in the shops or in the workplace.

 

Business also prefers women workers to men –  amongst other things much less likely than men to be unionised (note how many men have ended up unemployed, and indeed unemployable, since the sexual revolution really got under way and the commercial women’s magazines and the popular newspaper agony aunts started spouting the sort of ideas once restricted to ‘Spare Rib’).   

 

This state-family battle, not some forgotten tussle between unions and bosses, or some ancient dead row about nationalisation, is the real clash in our society at the moment. A terrifying alliance of state and commerce is arrayed against the family and is rapidly destroying it.  Of course, this alliance cannot see any virtue in the unmeasured benefits of full-time motherhood, as compared to measurable, GDP-enhancing wage-slavery. Nor would it be interested if it could see any such virtue, despite some politicians’ propaganda claims to be concerned with Gross National Happiness or General Wellbeing. These people have no idea how must of the world actually lives.

 

Individualism and personal autonomy (once known as ‘selfishness’) are major constituencies now, as the post-Christian society takes its grim shape in the second Century of the Self. And individuals, hypnotised by the latest gadget and allowed almost limitless credit to spend, are the ideal consumers, the ideal wageslaves and the ideal passive, compliant citizen in the beehive state.    

 

Many of the advocates of female wageslavery are of course very well-off themselves( I have no idea of Ms Vere’s personal circumstances) and so are spared from almost all its consequences. That’s often why they can’t see any disadvantages in this arrangement.

 

If all wageslave mothers were Nicola Horlick, or Cherie Blair, or Samantha Cameron, well-paid and rewarded with great status, then the position might be different (though to me there is something sad in a child being brought up by an employee, however wonderful, while that child’s mother goes out to an office) .

 

But they aren’t. For most of them it’s a grim job in a call-centre or an assembly plant or a shop, while their child competes for attention in a teeming nursery, what I call a day-orphanage. They do it because they have to, not because they want to. If they had the choice, and if the government stopped pushing them into wageslavery, they’d raise their own young, and do it much better.

 

 

 

Here are some quotes from what Ms Vere (who apparently dismisses any discussion of political theory, its origins and nature, or of the importance of ideas an history in political debate)  has had to say on this general subject . (As to this attitude I recommend that she notes what Maynard Keynes once said ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”)

 

At one stage  (14^th August), she rather enjoyably said that au pairs cost £20 a week ‘cheaper than after-school club’ – later in some embarrassment raising this figure to £20 a day. 

 

Then she declared that ‘Motherhood does not mean out of work and cleaning behind the fridge’ (13^th August)

 

She tweeted ‘Yawn’ in response to my pointing out the similarities between Britain and the USSR, and also referred to ‘constant harking back to yesteryear’ (when and where was this harking?).

 

In response to my characterisation of ‘childcare’ as ‘paid strangers’ she said ‘Strangers! You have never used childcare clearly. These people become part of an extended family’ .

 

She also Tweeted ‘You have given me no hope that you respect a woman’s right to work outside the home’. Once again, I have no idea where she gets this from. I wouldn’t dream of stopping anyone from working outside the home if she wanted to. I just want to stop people being conscripted unwillingly into wageslavery and abandoning her children to the care of paid strangers.

 

Challenged to withdraw her claim that I want girls to leave school at 14,  she did not do so, but repeated it, saying ‘ I still think you would like girls to leave school at 14 to build ‘domestic fortresses’’

 

She declared ‘A dual-income family’s main goal should be financial resilience.’

 

And she gave an example of her rhetoric when she said ‘Pro-family? Absolutely. Why does that have to include the women scrubbing the hearth?’ .

 

Then there was ‘Enough of the ‘bring-backery’ of the Daily Mail . there is a future to seize and 1950s views don’t help’

 

Most of these sentiments could easily have come from the pen of a radical leftist. Indeed, I have experienced most of them from that direction already. The point here is that they are coming from the pen (or perhaps the hand-held device) of a person who has stood as a Tory parliamentary candidate.

 

When I pointed out that the Tory party, for which she had stood as an official candidate, had helped the passage of the Equality Act, the central pillar of political correctness and the work (though originating in an EU directive) of Harriet Harman (with whom Ms Vere  says she disagrees) , Ms Vere responded by saying Theresa May had ‘little option’ but to go along with Ms Harman’s Equality Bill.

 

I should have thought Mrs May would have had little option but to oppose it, had she been a conservative. As it happens, she told  Ms Harman back in 2008 (Hansard, 26^th June 2008 col 501 )  'I look forward to working constructively with them [the New Labour government]on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.' Ms Harman responded (Col 503) 'I thank the right honourable lady for her broad welcome for the package and for our endeavours. I also welcome the fact that she has ignored the cries from her own backbenchers that the proposals are rubbish.’ 

A debate on modern feminism, Peter Hitchens versus Linda Grant

I'd like to give advance notice here of a debate or discussion (I'm not wholly sure of the format yet) between me and the novelist Linda Grant (about some of whose interesting and thoughtful books I have written here in the past). It will be in Bristol on Sunday 19th May. What I hope to discuss is whether the sexual revolution which began 50 years ago has benefited women.  

 

Personally, I regard this revolution, based on the works of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer above all, to be entirely separate from the 19th and early 20th-century battles for legal, educational and political equality (for instance, I don't think there's a word in Virginia Woolf's manifesto' A Room of One's own' with which I would disagree). I don't think that there's any organic link between those campaigns and the post-Greer campaigns for an equality that actively denies the real and fundamental differences between men and women.  

Ms Grant and I are both of the same generation and were at the University of York at around the same time, so we have, more or less, seen the same things happen.

 

 

Details are here

 

http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/2013/events/linda-grant-and-peter-hitchens/

 

We fuss over mothers... then tell them to dump their children in baby farms and go back to work

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.

The view seems to be that it’s just about all right for women to give birth, but after that can we please separate them from their young as soon as possible, for the sake of the economy?

New Labour was frank about it, with that terrifying commissar Patricia Hewitt describing the dwindling numbers of full-time mothers as a ‘problem’.

The Lib Dems’ chief feminist, Lynne Featherstone, says with her usual simple-minded bluntness that having a baby is a ‘bit of a setback’, adding that: ‘One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact women still have babies.’

The Coalition wants 40 per cent of two-year-olds in day care by next year. The shiny Modern Tory Liz Truss (I can’t call her a conservative) hires a costly nanny for her own children but wants the less wealthy to stuff their progeny into baby farms with industrial staff-to-toddler ratios.

Even the Leftist Polly Toynbee, who has nothing in principle against nationalising childcare, describes the Truss plan as ‘warehousing’.

Nobody ever questions the claim that it is automatically good for mothers to go out and be wage-slaves. Once, this idea was widely hated, and every self-respecting man worked as hard as he could to free his wife from the workbench.

Then the feminist revolutionaries began to argue that the home was a prison and marriage was penal servitude, chained to a sink. Most people thought that was nuts – until big business realised that women were cheaper than men, more reliable than men and much less likely to go on strike or be hungover than men.

What’s more, all the really beefy men-only jobs – mining coal, rolling steel, stoking furnaces – had been abolished.

So suddenly the wildest anti-male ravings of the ultras became the standard view of the CBI, the political parties and the agony aunts. And off the women trooped, to their call centres, their offices and their assembly plants, choking back tears as they crammed their toddlers into subsidised nurseries.

They got tax-breaks. Fatherless households got welfare subsidies. So as far as the State was concerned, the one arrangement that was discriminated against – and hard – was the one where one parent went out to work and the other stayed at home.

A selfish upper crust of female lawyers, professional politicians, bankers and journalists imagined that all women enjoyed work as much as they did – when the truth is that most do it to pay the bills.

But this self-satisfied clique was and is very influential. Who, in Parliament, law, business or the media, speaks for full-time mothers? Certainly not the steely, suited superwomen who have done very well out of the sex war.

Does all this matter? Well, I suspect it does. Children need parents, and small children badly need the devoted, unstinting personal attention that only a mother can give. Without it, they will grow physically but they will not flourish as fully developed humans.

If you wonder where those feral teenagers came from, or why so many primary school children can barely talk and are not potty-trained, ask yourself if it might not be connected with the abolition of motherhood.

But surely Scandinavia, the home of mass day care, is a  paradise? Well, not if you believe Swedish sociologist Jonas  Himmelstrand, who last week warned psychological disorders have tripled among children in Sweden since the child-rearing revolution there in the Eighties.

Culture can’t be transferred from one generation to the next when children are left to bring each other up. He says of mass day care: ‘It is at the root of bullying, teenage gangs, promiscuity and the flat-lining of culture.’

As usual, we have been warned. As usual, we will not take any notice until it is far  too late. For no political party stands up for private life or the independent family.

 *******

Every few years a sort of blue mist blurs the vision of the dwindling battalions of Tory loyalists. They persuade themselves that some more or less fraudulent person is the new hope of the future.

Facts are ignored. Blind faith is deployed. From this came the wild and comically wrong belief that David Cameron was a secret patriot, who would rip off his green, liberal garments when he assumed office.

Well, we know how that worked out. But, learning nothing from the experience, the poor old Tory Tribe are now looking for a new delusion to cling to.

Some are beguiled by Alexander (alias ‘Boris’) Johnson. They don’t even know his real name, and have also failed to notice that he is politically correct, pro-EU and, while he is cleverer than his schoolmate and fellow Bullingdon hearty, Mr Slippery, he is the same sort of thing.

But dafter even than that is the cult of Theresa May, now being hawked about as the New Iron Lady.

Oh, come on. Theresa May is the Marshmallow Lady. She U-turned over militant feminism, switching without explanation from opposing all-women shortlists for parliamentary candidates to supporting them.

She worked happily with Harriet Harman over the passage of the horrible Equality Act.

And as for her non-pledge to put withdrawal from the Human Rights Convention ‘on the table’ if the Tories win the next Election, what’s that worth?

‘On the table’ doesn’t mean she will do it. And the Tories will lose the next Election anyway. As a statement of intent, it is like that fine old music-hall chorus: ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.’

 

The awful Huhne case shows how driving cars brings out the worst in all of us.

Perfectly pleasant people, once in control of a ton of steel and glass, become irrational, arrogant, impatient speed-maniacs muttering ‘get out of my way’ and buying personalised number plates.

How much time did Chris Huhne save by his speeding? What did he do with it? He has plenty now.

As I ride my bicycle, I notice the steady worsening of manners on the roads, more hooting, more violent swerving, more red lights jumped, more mad texting while driving.

The people involved are probably saints at home or at work, but become fiends and morons once at the wheel.

 

It's started. The Coalition is breaking up, as I predicted here in September 2011.

Get ready for a noisy Tory minority government, all mouth and no trousers, designed to fool you into thinking they’ve rediscovered their principles.

 

I gather that the wrongly imprisoned police officer April Casburn, convicted on some of the flimsiest evidence I’ve ever seen, will not be appealing.

What a pity. I should have thought the Police Federation would be anxious to  protect its members from the danger of such prosecutions, and would want to press the  matter even if Mrs Casburn is reluctant.

 

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

The Mystery of Breast Cancer

It is distressing to read that many women have been more or less railroaded into surgery and other radical treatments for breast cancer. These are, all too frequently, surgery and treatments which may well not have been necessary.

These operations and therapies (like many of the remedies for cancer) are often vary taxing, painful and disfiguring. Even when fully justified and successful, they leave inward marks and mental bruises which may never go away. No doubt a case can be made for the screening policy, and for erring on the side of safety.

I do not know what I would do in these circumstances. The pressure is great, and the worry that the wrong decision might be literally fatal must be hard to bear. Some members of the medical profession can be quite cold and ruthless when their wills are thwarted, as they have an almost totalitarian belief in the goodness of their actions. Again, this is understandable. But can it be right?

Men can only look on and wonder, and there is a sort of assumption that this is a problem they really ought to shut up about. But I have another worry, and I don’t think I am disqualified from it by my sex. What are the reasons for what seems to be an epidemic of breast cancer? Was there always so much of it? If not, why is there so much now? Shouldn’t we be more interested in preventing it, than in engaging in heroic, but often painfully radical, efforts to deal with it once it has developed?

In the case of several other cancers, it is increasingly recognised that there are lifestyle reasons for their greater prevalence. Yes, you can contract lung cancer if you never smoke, but you are far more likely to do so if you have. Is it beyond possibility that the near-epidemic of breast cancer (and who does not know someone who has fallen victim to this disease) might also have some lifestyle connections? And is it possible that modern medicine does not want to explore them very much, as the implications would challenge one of the most powerful (and intolerant, and angry and repressive) dogmas of our age?

 

I am not here making any simple, crude connection between breast cancer and any one of a number of things that have become much more common in the past 40 years. I would simply point out that the female breast is part of the reproductive organs, and is linked to them in many ways. In an age where the following practices have recently become much more common, would it be unreasonable to wonder if there might not be a connection? Oughtn’t there to be rather more research into this than there seems to have been? And why hasn’t there been such research?

1.Pregnancy is increasingly delayed into later life. 2.The western world has experienced near-universal use of contraceptive pills, pills which cause the reproductive system to function abnormally 3. The prevalence of abortion as a back-up form of contraception, and in many cases of multiple abortions, is a new development 4. The inability of many women to breastfeed their babies for any great length of time, because of the urgent need to return to paid work is anotehr stark difference from the past.

These things all have another thing in common. They are more or less essential to the sexual revolution, by which women have been shifted, in their millions, from their former role as nurturers of children, into their new role as wageslaves, as active in the labour market as men, if not more so.

 

You might add to the above list the general health problems caused by bad diets and obesity, and by lack of exercise in the lives of millions of people, and you might be on to something. But these, too, are essential elements of the sort of society we have been persuaded to believe we want, and which it is risky to question. 

 

Normally, we would be more interested in prevention than in cure, as we are in the cases of heart disease, skin cancer and lung cancer. But in this case, we seem for some reason to concentrate on screening and cure, rather than on probing too deeply into how the disease might be prevented.