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

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

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

Holy smoke! I've made the Church retreat

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

Paintball plod taking on the wrong enemy

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

 

Goodbye Christianity, hello multicultural wasteland...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If you want to wreck the country, get some grandiose people to sit on a panel. Make sure you don’t choose anyone who disagrees with your aim. Then write a pamphlet demanding the destruction of something good, and call it a ‘report’.
And most of the media, especially the BBC, will oblige by treating your propaganda as if it is some sort of impartial study.
The latest example is from the self-proclaimed ‘Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life’, whose demands were published last week, masquerading as the conclusions of a balanced study.
Would you believe they want to make state schools even less Christian than they already are – accusing our many excellent Church schools of being ‘socially divisive’ and of promoting ‘segregation’ – and to revise the Coronation and services of remembrance to make them more inclusive?
Of course, there are luminaries of the poor, bewildered Church of England among this report’s ‘patrons’ and on its ‘steering group’. Its chairwoman is a jolly nice church-going baroness. But what purpose do they serve in such things? They do not necessarily stand for the established order, even if they belong to it.
This may be a clue: among those who paid for this ‘commission’ were the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which until recently funded the rather militant Islamic rights group CAGE (about as far from a vicarage tea party as you can get) and the Open Society Foundations, backed by the ultra-liberal billionaire George Soros, a keen supporter of relaxing the drug laws.
Now, these modernisers have a point of view. I have a lot of time for atheists, humanists and members of other religions from my own. At least they’re interested in what seems to me, more and more, to be the most important question we face – what sort of universe is this? (Full disclosure: I am an old-fashioned Broad Church Anglican, 1662 Prayer Book, King James Bible and all.) But the idea that we should carry on adapting Britain and England to ideas and religions from elsewhere seems to me to be a mistake. All we have and are is based on the Christian faith, which has shaped law, government, morals, music, landscape and education here for a thousand years. Abandon it, and what holds up the trust which keeps us from chaos?
I accept that Christianity is dying fast in this country. I know that many schools teach religion badly, if at all, and that ignorance is everywhere. But there is more than one response to this. You could say, as this ‘report’ does, that we should accept that this isn’t a Christian country any more, and adapt it to become a sort of religious salad of all faiths and none.
You could give up trying to teach Christianity as a living faith, and instead get children to study it as a quaint, eccentric curiosity. Or – and the weeks around Christmas are a good time to say this – we could say that we still have a chance to rebuild and restore what has been lost.
Why do we so lack the confidence to do this, and readily abandon a heritage of such power and beauty, which has brought us so much good, for a multicultural wasteland in which a dozen competing faiths squabble in the ruins, and everyone else bows to the neon gods of consumerism?
Perhaps there is a multibillionaire out there somewhere who would fund a ‘commission’ that would be pretty much bound to come up with such a conclusion (I could pick the members). We could call the resulting propaganda a report. Then everyone would have to take it seriously.

 

******

Donald Trump is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the death of real political conservatism: a cool, intelligent reluctance to believe that all change is good, a love for the established, the particular and the well-worn.
During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism, actually a wild form of liberalism, for conservatism. They lapped up the temporary riches it provided and now find themselves yearning for leaders to take them back to a world of secure jobs and secure borders.
Mr Trump, Olympically stupid and ignorant in many ways and virtually thoughtless, has the low feral cunning to spot this need and to pretend to meet it.
Of course, he hasn’t a clue how to go about it. But it’s not impossible that such a person will gain high office before long.

*******

Tom's spy trial reveals the secret that keeps us free

My friend Jason Rezaian, my guide and interpreter during a captivating visit to Persia some years ago, has now endured more than 500 days as the prisoner of Iran’s secret state, arrested on absurd charges, subjected to a closed trial of which we can know nothing and now sentenced to a secret punishment. Pray for him if you can. Think of him, unable to see the sky, at some moment of your free day, if you will.
I thought of his case, and of our own gradual erosion of justice here, as I watched the fine new film Bridge Of Spies, in which Tom Hanks plays a real-life lawyer who took on an unpopular case in Cold War America.
His client was the British-born Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel (real name William Fisher). At the heart of the film is the contrast between Abel’s trial, basically orderly and restrained by the rule of law, and that of the American spy pilot Gary Powers in Moscow.
In the communist courtroom, there is no presumption of innocence, no jury, no true defence, just shouting prosecutors and an orchestrated crowd yelling its support for verdict and sentence.
In the end, this was what really divided the two sides in the Cold War, not the economic system or even the democracy (which wilts and dies where there is no rule of law).
It is what divides good societies from bad ones. Its absence from Iran has put my friend Jason in a nameless dungeon. It is an incredibly precious possession. I cannot understand why we care so little about it.

****

This is all I’ll say about this because it seems to me the facts are so devastating. But in all three recent cases of dangerous public violence, yet again, mind-altering drugs are involved. Robert Dear, suspect in the killings in Colorado Springs, was a cannabis user. The flat of the culprits in the San Bernardino shooting, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, contained bottles of a benzodiazepine – whose ‘paradoxical reactions’ include rage, hostility, aggression and mania – plus amphetamines, which can produce delusions and paranoia. And the alleged culprit of the Leytonstone knife attack, Muhaydin Mire, was a normal young man until he started smoking cannabis, after which he became mentally ill. Please may we have an inquiry into this correlation?

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

 

Abolish the Lords and replace them with a House of Wisdom and Experience

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

 

The appointment of Michelle Mone as a Tory peer is at least funny. The new baroness has an enjoyably complicated private life and has had what I believe is politely called a chequered business career, selling beer, bras and fake tan – a substance that might be a fitting symbol for modern Toryism. 

 

To the extent that she has ever cared about politics at all, which I suspect isn’t much, she was until recently a Labour supporter.

 

Which isn’t unreasonable, given that the Tories are now interchangeable with Blairite Labour, and really ought to be asking Peter Mandelson to join them too. It would be good – and educational - to see him voting alongside Lady Mone in the division lobbies.

 

But the Prime Minister’s obvious contempt for the House of Lords is not funny at all. Who now, viewing this chamber crammed with Olympic expense claimers, millionaire political donors and veteran creeps, does not long for the return of the old hereditaries?

 

But alas, it cannot be done. Ancient marvels which took centuries to create can be undone forever in five minutes, and cannot then be restored – as we keep finding.

 

So it is time for all reasonable people to support the abolition of this ruined, discredited chamber, and work for a replacement that will protect the country from the immature careerists who now dominate the House of Commons.

 

The lower house is not a good example to follow. It is bought and paid for. Most of its members owe their seats to the endorsement of centralised party machines and their rich backers. MPs do not work for you. They work for the lobbyists who have bought their parties.

 

So the new Senate, which I now propose, should ban anyone who is a current member of a political party, or has been a member for the last five years.  It should also ban anyone who has ever given more than £100 in any year to any party.

 

Nobody under the age of 55 should be able to stand for election, and nobody under the age of 30 should be able to vote in those elections. Nobody under 55 knows anything much about life. Nobody under 30 knows anything.

 

There should be seats reserved for women who have chosen to bring up their own children rather than go out to work, and quite a few seats for men and women who have served in combat and seen the face of battle.

 

I am sure you get the picture, and can think of other groups of people who need special representation.  What we need and have not got at Westminster are real experience or wisdom, possessed by people who do not view politics as a career. We have had about 50 years of the other sort and if we don’t soon do something to restrain them, England won’t survive to mark the thousandth anniversary of 1066.  

********

Kremlin Privilege Comes to London

Just after 11 o’ clock on Friday in Kensington High Street, motorcycle policemen appeared, blowing whistles and blocking the traffic at a busy junction.

 

Soon afterwards a small convoy came barreling down the wrong side of the road, headed by a car with blacked out glass and finishing with a large van from whose rear window  the words ‘POLICE –STAY BACK!’ glared in illuminated letters.

 

It reminded me of my days in Moscow, when similar convoys would growl and thunder along the special lane (heated in winter to stop ice forming) down the middle of my street, bearing the leaders of the Soviet Union to and from their fenced-off country estates.

 

Why do we have this sort of thing in Britain?  Who among us is so important that he can’t wait for the lights and has to have the traffic stopped for him.?No doubt the excuse of ‘security’, that pretext for all sorts of high-handedness, will be advanced.

 

But I suspect the occupant of the car would have attracted less attention, and less danger, if he had taken an ordinary taxi. If he’s really so worried about being recognised (I suspect he was probably in more danger of not being recognised) he should buy a bicycle and one of those silly anti-pollution masks that cover most of your face.

 

*********

Christian Europe's lost its nerve and its future

So, the transformation of this country by mass migration, begun by New Labour to rub the right’s nose in diversity, has now moved up a gear. One in eight of us was born abroad and how long before that’s one in six, and then one in four?

 

These people are not (as I am) the children of British subjects born while overseas.  They are people who have grown up in a different culture. Never before in our history have we faced the task of integrating a minority so large. Never before have we had such a feeble idea of what being British is.

 

And yet people ask me, as if the idea were absurd, why I think this will be a Muslim country within a couple of generations. I can think of no force or idea or movement or faith more likely to prosper in the state to come.

 

Like all other civilisations which lost their nerve and the will to live, European Christianity is destined to become a minority in its own territory.  By the way, if you don’t like this, and voted Tory at the last election, you have no business complaining. I told you repeatedly that the Tory concern about immigration was faked. They don’t want the power to stop it.

 

***********

They haven't gone away, you know

Great turmoil over in Northern Ireland because the police have suddenly discovered that the IRA still exists. Of course it does, along with its power to kill and maim. It is that unspoken but real threat which prevents the prosecutions of terror suspects, which prevents the flying of the British flag on public buildings in Belfast, which has ripped the British crown off police badges in the province, and which forces the Royal Family to consort with Sinn Fein godfathers. And it will go on existing until Sinn Fein rule a united Ireland from Dublin. Then the threat will become the government. And we call this disgrace ‘peace’.

 

********

Another 'lone wolf' turns out to be a dope user

 

Forgive me for mentioning it, but the latest ‘lone-wolf terrorist’ (just like almost all the others) turns out to be a cannabis user – arrested three times on hashish charges. One of those on the Amsterdam-Paris train who bravely subdued Ayoub El Khazzani, British IT consultant Chris Norman, said afterwards he was ‘concerned that he was on drugs of some sort’. Please, please, please can we have an inquiry into the drug use of violent criminals, even if it does upset the Big Dope lobby?

The Difference Between Computer Experts and The Rest of Us

My recent observation that there are no keys for commonly-used fractions on my computer keyboard (whereas the typewriters I used to use all had such keys) produced some kindly-meant comments from computer experts, such as this one from Mr Main:

'If you are using a Windows computer, there is a vast array of additional characters and symbols that can be used by calling up symbol sheets from within the standard editor and then selecting the required symbol using the computer mouse. ' 

Help!

 

This post beautifully illustrates a truth about the world which I think many computer buffs will never grasp. Most of us have no idea what they are talking about.

 

Those who can happily use computers can write or say things such as :'There is a vast array of additional characters and symbols that can be used by calling up symbol sheets from within the standard editor and then selecting the required symbol using the computer mouse.' and imagine that all readers will know what they mean and follow them easily.

But to me, and those like me, such instructions are almost as terrifying as the idea of trying to perform a complex surgical operation according to expert instructions given to us over a crackly telephone. I have no idea what any of these instructions mean. I could as well 'call up symbol sheets from within the standard editor' as I could successfully call spirits from the vasty deep.

 

To me this is more impenetrable than the Finno-Ugric group of languages. (Actually, when I lived in Moscow, I was rescued from my many computer disasters by a wonderfully calm and reliable Finn, whom I begged never to try to explain to me what he was doing, in case the attempt drove me round the bend). In total emergencies, experts in London would talk me through the cure, step by painful step, over a faint international telephone line. I have always felt very sorry for them.

The Presumption of Guilt - the case of Boris Nemtsov

Since the shooting of Boris Nemtsov (may he rest in peace) in Moscow on Friday, the assumption behind almost everything written and said in British media has been that Vladimir Putin is in some way responsible. Nobody actually says it outright, but you cannot miss the tone. Our Prime Minister, the Hero of Libya and the Guardian of Our Borders, the Great Reformer of Schools and the Man Who Saved the Economy (by borrowing even more money than before) found time to demand an investigation of the killing.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11441729/David-Cameron-says-callous-murder-of-Boris-Nemtsov-must-be-rapidly-investigated.html

 

I should have thought that, with this country awash with uninvestigated, let alone unsolved,  crimes, he might have more pressing concerns.

 

And, if he is so hot on expansionist, repressive police states, perhaps he should be summoning Prince William home from Peking, where the heir to the throne is currently consorting with one of the world’s most intolerant and ruthless police states, which can disappear and kill its opponents through the use of utterly subservient courts, police forces - all unexamined by a press so controlled that it makes Russia’s look free.  Prince Charles ought also to be quietly asked to reduce the frequency of his visits to Saudi Arabia, but, whoops, I am applying consistent principles here, which always leads to trouble.   

 

What does an ‘uncallous’ murder look like, by the way? Is there even such a thing?  The incessant deployment of adjectives by modern politicians and media is causing grave strain at the adjective mines in Turkmenistan where (in a little-known but grave, pressing, menacing and indeed possibly terrifying crisis) , adjective-miners are threatening to strike if they are not more richly rewarded. The price of ‘despicables’ has risen to unprecedented heights, and ‘cowardlies’ can now only be obtained on the black market. The only other major adjective mines are in Siberia, under Russian control.

 

This weblog is taking part in a voluntary rationing scheme, under which we seek to limit the use of adjectives to essentials only.

 

Now, back to the murder:

 

First of all, does anyone really think that, when news of Mr Nemtsov’s death reached the Kremlin offices of Mr Putin, that despot whooped with joy and said ‘That is just what we need!’

 

 In what way would Mr Nemtsov’s death help Mr Putin? With all due respect to the dead, Mr Nemtsov was, like his whole generation of Russian politicians, almost totally discredited in the eyes of most Russian voters by his association with the Yeltsin era of gangster privatisation. Though not himself an Oligarch, he was friendly with some of them (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/01/boris-nemtsov ). This absence of effective and convincing leaders has greatly limited the power of the anti-Putin opposition.  Moscow liberals tend to blame this problem on Mr Putin’s repression, which is partly true, but it is also much to do with the general awfulness of the Yeltsin years.  

 

 

Interestingly,  Mr Nemtsov’s foreign policy appears to have been not that different from Mr Putin’s. Mark Almond wrote in the Daily Telegraph today that he  ‘remember[s] Nemtsov pleading with Margaret Thatcher to use her influence to stop Nato expanding into Russia’s backyard because it would revive anti-Western nationalism. He didn’t see the West as a threat, but knew Russians saw its defence wing as one. Because Russians are well aware of the hostility of the Baltic States, for instance, to their old masters in Moscow, the Nato expansion to include Soviet territory was seen as the vanguard of a potential war of revenge by the ex-subject peoples.’

 

Mr Almond’s article (here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11443566/With-the-murder-of-Boris-Nemtsov-Vladimir-Putins-attack-dogs-have-slipped-the-leash.html )

 is interesting and subtle compared with most of the stuff appearing on this subject at the moment. His point, that Mr Putin is not at one with the wilder Russian monarchists and ultra-nationalists who have joined  the rebels in Donetsk and seek to entangle Russia in war there, is neglected by crude anti-Putin writers, but valid. All modern Russian strategists are very wary of foreign entanglements, after being drawn into the mantrap of Afghanistan by Jimmy Carter, the decision which more or less finished the USSR.  Towards the end of an article to which I refer below, Edward Lucas also engages in similar speculation about these ‘thuggish paramilitaries’  , which is much more worthy of his intelligence than the stuff about Kirov and Stalin.

 

One has to ask how these ultra-nationalists became important.  I have my own theories, and it is not the Kremlin I blame (the Kremlin would much rather not have to deal with these people).

 

The picture caption in the Telegraph article makes the same amusing mistake as so many others do, confusing the ice-cream domes and curlicues of St Basil’s Cathedral with the very different  towers of the Kremlin itself, which is nearby but not the same thing.

 

This trivial but startling error, made by so many news outlets in the last few days, symbolises rather well the sketchy ideas of most Westerners about Russia, its nature and history. Mixing up St Basil’s with the Kremlin is , in British terms, like mistaking the Houses of Parliament for Westminster Abbey. And if you saw a Russian TV or newspaper reporter opining weightily on British politics, while making that error, you would wonder about the rest of what he or she said.

 

In any case, do we really think that the killers zoomed out of a secret gate in the Kremlin wall, drove up to Mr Nemtsov, murdered him and then drove back in to the famous fortress, there to be congratulated by the authorities who of course would have revelled in this action on the eve of an anti-government demonstration in Moscow? I mean, wouldn’t they? No.  The idea that the crime was done by anti-Putin provocateurs is indeed ridiculous. But it is no more ridiculous than the idea that it is Mr Putin’s work.

 

But if we don’t think that the killers came from there,  why has almost every news account stressed the closeness of the killing to the Kremlin?  Most of Moscow is close to the Kremlin, a  vast and sprawling city-fortress.

 

In fact, it happened there because Mr Nemtsov lived nearby and, unlike most prominent Russian public figures, was walking rather than in a car, and had no bodyguards. In a city where gangsterism is far from unknown (though I think it is less bad than it was in the Yeltsin boom years), and in which a flashy fat car is a symbol of importance,  this is unusual.

 

But alas, it made it much easier for any murderer to strike, succeed and vanish unscathed.

 

Mr Almond’s speculations are interesting , though (like everyone else’s) speculation is what they must remain until we have facts. Many things are alleged against the Putin state, and aren’t deemed to require much proof because everyone thinks he’s guilty anyway.

 

I personally think Mr Putin would have been mad and stupid to order or countenance the killing of Mr Nemtsov, who was much less of a threat to him alive than he is dead. The same goes for the journalist Anna Politkovskaya. No doubt she was a grave nuisance to the Kremlin, but, as a martyr, she does far deeper damage to the Russian state.

 

On the other hand,  the most unanswerable case against President Putin, and the one which leads me to classify him unequivocally as a sinister tyrant, is the crime against Sergei Magnitsky, mistreated to death in a prison cell while under the direct authority of the Russian state which Mr Putin heads.  

 

 

Interestingly, the phrase ‘sinister tyrant’ was used in this article today by my old friend and adversary Edward Lucas http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2974971/My-friend-s-murder-chilling-echoes-Stalin-Edward-Lucas.html

 

But, much as I love Edward (and I will be debating against him in Cambridge on Friday week http://www.sid.cam.ac.uk/life/news/762/poland-between-russia-and-germany.html ) I don’t buy his parallels between Putin and Stalin, or between Sergei Kirov and Boris Nemtsov.

 

The Stalin comparison seems to me to utterly misunderstand both Stalin, an ideological dictator on the edge of megalomania, invested with absolute power in a closed society, and Vladimir Putin, a surprisingly precarious minor despot, much more comparable with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, where a repressive government is,  even so,  tempered by pockets of free media, an openness to foreign scrutiny, and even legal protest on the streets. Boris Nemtsov could not have existed in a Stalinist system.  As for the Russian media, no doubt they tell many lies and descend to crude propaganda.

 

But their view that the country is now under a sustained western attack is not wholly unfounded.

 

The catastrophe of western policy towards Russia, and its accelerating drive towards what may be actual war, is very well explained in a powerful new book by Professor Richard Sakwa, (Frontline Ukraine, Crisis in the Borderlands, published by I.B.  Tauris).  This book, interestingly, has been reviewed in only one newspaper, the Guardian,

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/19/frontline-ukraine-crisis-in-borderlands-richard-sakwa-review-account

I plan to review it here shortly. My main difficulty with it is that its author’s position is perhaps too close to mine. I would almost rather it was more hostile to my arguments.

 

But I will provide a couple of quotations which I think are rather apposite to our current mood:

 

‘In the end’, Professor Sakwa writes, ‘NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage the security threats provoked by its enlargement….This fateful geopolitical paradox – that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence – provoked a number of conflicts. …by treating Russia as the enemy, in the end it was in danger of becoming one’.

The Arithmetic of Alleged Aggression

Phoney outrage over Russia rumbles on. So I thought I would set out some facts on the issue:

 

Bear in mind that before it lost huge portions of its contiguous land empire, Moscow was not defeated in war, and in fact (with some small exceptions probably inspired from within the KGB) barely lifted a finger to retain its control.

 

Compare this with the Chinese People’s Republic, which engaged in a severe massacre in its own capital, followed by widespread repression,  rather than relax its rule, in the same period, and which despite this still enjoys warm diplomatic relations with the NATO powers. China could also be accused of severe aggression in Tibet.

 

Such an enormous transfer of territory from one power to another as took place between Russia and the EU after 1989 is, as far as I know, unknown in history, except as the result of humiliating defeat in actual war.  I simply cannot think of another example of such an event having taken place without such a defeat. 

 

I might add that both Manfred Woerner, then in charge of NATO, and James Baker, then US Secretary of State and spokesman for the entire Western alliance, gave undoubted assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time that NATO would *not* extend its jurisdiction eastwards. I think it fair to say that it was on that understanding that Mr Gorbachev peacefully dismantled the Soviet empire. Without those guarantees, it would not have been so peaceful. Yet they have been utterly broken.

 

There can be no doubt that this understanding has been breached. There can be no doubt that Russia has complained clearly about this for years, while refraining from any action. President Putin said in Munich , at a major security conference, in February 2007, seven whole years before the February 2014 revolution in Kiev : ‘It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all.

 

‘I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Manfred Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?’

  

NATO forces now exercise close to the Russian border in the Baltic states

 

http://www.stripes.com/news/nato-wraps-up-major-exercise-in-poland-baltics-1.252512

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10802516/British-troops-fly-to-Estonia-as-tensions-with-Russia-rise.html

 

 

Aggression generally means advancing your force and power into the territory of others, or (and this is important in this case) into non-aligned and neutral territory bordering rival countries.  Ukraine, since 1991, had been non-aligned, retaining economic and political links both with both Russia and the EU bloc.

 

 

Aggression is not always achieved by direct military intervention. It can be done by economic pressure, by sheer menace, by stirring up ethnic or other discontents in the territory of the targeted country (examples, Germany’s overthrow of the Russian provisional Government by employing the Bolsheviks in 1917, the Anglo-American overthrow of Iran’s leader, Mohammad Mossadeq, by a stage-managed putsch in 1953).

 

I fail to see how it was anything but an act of aggression to encourage Ukraine ( a bankrupt, corrupt, ill-governed and poorly-defended state which in normal circumstances would not be considered for membership of these bodies for an instant) to dream of EU and NATO membership.

 

This was done, as can be demonstrated easily by recourse to published figures and reliably reported facts, by scattering EU largesse in hundreds of millions of Euros across Ukraine

 

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/04/EU-millions-paid-for-Ukrainian-groups-behind-Yanukovych-overthrow

 

plus the active intervention on foreign soil of prominent NATO and EU politicians, an activity not in any way concealed from public view:

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-victoria-nuland-wades-into-ukraine-turmoil-over-yanukovich/

 

 

http://eastbook.eu/en/2013/12/uncategorized-en/two-days-in-the-hottest-scene-catherine-ashton-visits-ukraine/

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10518859/John-McCain-in-Kiev-Ukraine-will-make-Europe-better.html

 

 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/12/04/uk-ukraine-idUKBRE9B20BV20131204

 

Ukraine was thus encouraged to seek EU association. In the lught of these preliminaries, the West's acceptance of the resulting unconstitutional regime change as valid, and its acceptance of the resulting government as a legitimate negotiating partner, could possibly be described as ‘defensive’, or ‘passive’.  

 

In any allegation of assault, self-defence is generally regarded either as a mitigation or as an actual full defence against the charge.  In this case, the expanding power, aggressively pushing its desires, ignores protests made over a long period, and overrides a peaceful attempt by Russia to resolve the quarrel.

 

It may then be reasonably assumed to have taken more serious, perhaps covert steps to reinforce its earlier encouragement

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/john-brennan-kiev_n_5147799.html

 

 

Arithmetic again: Just before the Kiev putsch Ukraine had asked for €20 billion (US$27 billion) in loans and aid. The EU was willing to offer €610 million in loans, one 16th of what Kiev wanted.  Russia offered $15 billion in loans plus cheaper gas prices, far closer to what Kiev was asking for.  In addition to the money, the EU required major changes to the regulations and laws in Ukraine. Russia did not. Thus the EU sought power over Ukraine which it had previously possessed, in return for wholly inadequate financial promises.  Russia offered a large bribe to maintain the status quo, under which Ukraine remained non-aligned.  It was hardly unreasonable or irresponsible of President Yanukovych to decide that the Russian offer was preferable.

 

 

The Arithmetic of Alleged Aggression:

 

 

Territories and populations in Europe which have ceased to be ruled from Moscow since 1989 (NB, these figures are approximate, and do not include Central Asia or the Caucasus, in which case they would be much larger):

 

Former Warsaw Pact

 

GDR 16 Million people 41,800  sq m

Poland 38 million 128,000 sq m

Czechoslovakia 15.6 million 49,300 sq mi

Hungary 9.9 million 36,000 sq mi

Romania 20 million 92,000 sq mi

Bulgaria 7 million 43,000 sq mi

 

Former USSR now in EU and NATO

 

Lithuania 3 million, 25,000 sq mi

Latvia 2 million, 25,000 sq mi

Estonia 1.3 million, 17,000 sq mi

 

Former USSR now non-aligned

 

Belarus 9.5 million 80,000 sq mi

Ukraine 48 million 238,000 sq mi

 

Thus, Moscow has lost direct control over roughly 180 million people, and roughly 700,000 square miles.

 

The EU (and its military wing, NATO) have in the same period *gained * control over more than 120 million of those people, and almost 400,000 of those square miles.

 

How many times is a sovereign power, clearly the defensive and losing force in this change, expected to watch its protests being ignored, and former agreements being broken, before it is entitled to respond?

 

I thought we were all supposed to believe that appeasement in the face of threats and force was a bad policy, to be despised and mocked? Yet, not merely do we condemn President Putin when he refuses to appease the ‘West’ any further and says, after many clear and patient warnings ‘thus far and no further’.  We actually accuse him of aggression.

 

I am accused, in this debate, of being an apologist for Mr Putin, or of ‘siding’ with Russia. I have even been slandered by people claiming I take money from Russia in some form. This is not so.  I regard Mr Putin as a sinister tyrant, and am happy to repeat this ad infinitum, because it is true. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the Ukraine dispute. The blindness of so many commentators to the extremely nasty side of the Ukrainian elite and its allies is a symptom of their infantile view that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ countries and that we should pick our side on this basis. Such babyish views always lead to exaggerating the ills of the one, and concealing from yourself the wrongs of the other.

 

I think the same (sinister tyranny) is true (as I shall explain in a later post) of our NATO ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and of the Chinese Politburo. My response to tyranny abroad is to defend liberty and law at home where and when I can, not to imagine that I am some sort of caped crusader who can go round the world biffing despots.

 

My engagement in this conflict is simply an attempt to set the record straight. This seems to me to be justified when I read unhinged calls for *us* to threaten Russia with sanctions or military action, to halt Moscow’s wicked aggression.

 

As we have learned several times in recent years the recruitment of the ignorant populace into such crusading fantasies is the first step towards actual war. Much later, the duped and deluded shouters of ‘tough’ slogans  realise that they have been humbugged by politicians, and pretend they never supported the wild adventures for which they once cheered.

 

But by that time, the bereaved, here and there,  have been forgotten, the mounds of rotting human corpses have been bulldozed into the mass graves by men in  gasmasks, the ruined towns clumsily rebuilt,  and the limbless, blinded  children have graduated to adult begging.

 

It is the truth I support in this conflict, and it tells me that this country and its people have no reason to support a historically-tainted and dangerous interference by outsiders in a part of the world where it is very likely to do serious harm. At the very least, Britain has no reason to support this adventure. And if we stand aside, we make it less likely that it will turn into a full-scale war. Otherwise….

Theresa's right, we DO face a dire new threat - from people like her

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

For years there was a site on Facebook called ‘Peter Hitchens Must Die’. I thought it was funny, and I miss it now it has gone. Hardly a week goes by on Twitter without some Left-wing oaf going online and wishing I was dead. Sometimes I write back and ask if their mothers know they are doing this, but I haven’t hired a bodyguard yet.

In short, the internet is crawling with stupid people saying moronic things they do not really mean, like the man who said he was going to blow up an airport because it was closed by snow.

Dealing with this is a simple matter of proportion. The ludicrously over-rated Home Secretary, Mrs Theresa May, obviously has no such sense. She claims to think that the terror threat to this country is now ‘greater than it has been at any time before or after 9/11’, a comically wrong belief.

Actually, the greatest terror threat this country ever faced came from the IRA, as some of us remember well. But we got rid of that threat by surrendering to them, which is perhaps why everyone now forgets it.

If this country is now a target for terror, it is largely because the terrorists know that we will eventually give in to their demands, just as we gave in to the IRA.

There ought to be a museum in which politicians’ bombastic statements after terror outrages, vowing revenge and justice, are displayed beside the eventual shabby outcomes of terrorist pressure.

Yet these same two-faced cowards are constantly trying to pretend that they are our noble protectors against a shadowy foe. They do this especially when they are trying to steal our liberties.

Now, because the drug-crazed killer Michael Adebowale made an unhinged threat on Facebook, we are asked to support the secret-police surveillance of the internet.

On the same logic, we might as well allow MI5 to open all our letters, listen to all our telephone calls and bug our bedrooms, and for this creepy snooping to be allowed in evidence in court.

I don’t see how this differs from the powers given to the East German Stasi.

Not merely is this response crass and wrong, it is based on a total, wilful misunderstanding of the murder of Lee Rigby. We are looking in entirely the wrong direction, and so not seeing the blazing, illuminated signs which show what is actually going on.

Adebowale was obviously crazy when he committed his crime. An eyewitness, Cheralee Armstrong, told police he ‘looked mad, like he’d escaped from a mental hospital’.

During the trial of Adebowale, and of his accomplice Michael Adebolajo, newspapers received a very unusual warning from the judge that they must not report ‘the demeanour of the defendants’ on the video link from prison. What was it about their behaviour that prompted this strange instruction?

It wouldn’t be odd if they had behaved weirdly. Both killers were habitual users of cannabis, a drug increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, especially in young users. It was after Adebolajo began smoking the drug in his teens that his character wholly changed. Many sad parents of ruined teenagers will know about this process.

Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor.

A psychiatrist found him ‘paranoid and incoherent’, and said his symptoms were worsened by ‘heavy use of cannabis’.

Most people don’t even know this, as it doesn’t fit the ‘Al Qaeda plot’ storyline and has barely been reported.

Yet how can these gibbering, chaotic husks have been part of a disciplined, intricate terror organisation?

It’s very strange. Our Establishment sees proper enforcement of the laws against the dangerous drug cannabis as an infringement of liberty. But it is ready to place us under totalitarian surveillance, never before seen in our history, in pursuit of terrorists it will probably give in to later. 

Despite the invariable claims of the adults involved that everyone’s fine, there just isn’t any serious doubt that divorce damages children. 

Last week’s report from the family lawyers’ group Resolution confirmed it. So why isn’t it harder for couples with children to get divorced than it is for the childless? 

Dozy Fred holds the secret to improving our private schools

The British Left is working up a new wave of spite against private schools. Following a wrong-headed speech on the subject by the fashionable historian David Kynaston, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt has joined in.

He threatens them with tax penalties if they don’t do more to help nearby state schools. Actually, such a measure will only make private schools more inaccessible. Their fees are now so high that soon only Russian oligarchs will be able to afford them.

It’s difficult anyway to see quite what form this help will take. But here’s a suggestion.

Mr Hunt claims to be a historian. In that case he should know that there was once a superb system called the Direct Grant. Under this scheme, many of the very best private schools in the country opened up their classrooms to boys and girls from poor homes, selected on merit.

What happened to it? Why, it was shut down in 1975 in an act of egalitarian spite by Fred Mulley, then Labour Education Secretary, later notorious for falling asleep while sitting next to Her Majesty during a very noisy air display. Labour had then – as it has now – a special loathing for selection on merit.

While Mr Mulley is fated to be recalled mainly for his ill-mannered nap, his decision to slam the educational door in the faces of the poor was a far greater offence. If Labour really loved the people, as it claims to do, then Mr Hunt would want to reverse this crime, rather than win cheap applause from dim MPs for sniping at private schools. I suspect he’s just afraid they’ll notice he went to one himself.

Unvarnished truth from Moscow

If only Anna Chapman, the glamorous Russian ex-spy, were the Kremlin’s Foreign Minister instead of the much less attractive Sergei Lavrov, people might pay more attention to what Moscow says.

Even so, Mr Lavrov’s speech last week, in which he warned that sanctions directed against the Russian people are blatant, unprecedented bullying and won’t work, is worth searching out. Those who read it might learn quite a lot they didn’t know they didn’t know.

My local newspaper heralds the approach of Christmas by welcoming the opening of a mobile A&E unit to ‘treat drunk and injured people’. 

It will be a ‘safe haven for those who have been found in the street too intoxicated to stand or speak and who cannot find their way home’. Actually, there are plenty of these when it’s not Christmas, but it’s nice to see that the season of goodwill hasn’t entirely been drowned out by commercialism. 

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

Mourn the victims... but don't turn one tragedy into a global catastrophe

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

One thing we should have learned in the past 100 years is that war is hell. We might also have noticed that, once begun, war is hard to stop and often takes shocking turns.

So those who began the current war in Ukraine – the direct cause of the frightful murder of so many innocents on Flight MH17 on Thursday – really have no excuse.

There is no doubt about who they were. In any war, the aggressor is the one who makes the first move into neutral or disputed territory.

And that aggressor was the European Union, which rivals China as the world’s most expansionist power, swallowing countries the way performing seals swallow fish (16 gulped down since 1995).

Ignoring repeated and increasingly urgent warnings from Moscow, the EU – backed by the USA – sought to bring Ukraine into its orbit. It did so through violence and illegality, an armed mob and the overthrow of an elected president.

I warned then that this would lead to terrible conflict. I wrote in March: ‘Having raised hopes that we cannot fulfil, we have awakened the ancient passions of this cruel part of the world – and who knows where our vainglorious folly will now lead?’

Now we see. Largely unreported over the past few months, a filthy little war has been under way in Eastern Ukraine. Many innocents have died, unnoticed in the West. Neither side has anything to boast of – last Tuesday 11 innocent civilians died in an airstrike on a block of flats in the town of Snizhne, which Ukraine is unconvincingly trying to blame on Russia.

So PLEASE do not be propagandised by Thursday’s horrible slaughter into forgetting what is really going on. Powerful weapons make it all too easy for people to do stupid, frightful things. Wars make such things hugely more likely to happen.

In September 1983, the Soviet air force, inflamed by Cold War passions and fears, inexcusably massacred 269 people aboard a Korean Airlines 747.

In July 1988, highly trained US Navy experts aboard the cruiser Vincennes, using ultra-modern equipment, moronically mistook an Iranian Airbus, Iran Air Flight 655, for an F-14 Tomcat warplane. They shot the airliner out of the sky, killing 290 innocent people, including 66 children. All kinds of official untruths were told at the time to excuse this. In October 2001, bungling Ukrainian servicemen on exercise were the main suspects for the destruction of Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 over the Black Sea. Whoever did it, they killed 78 passengers and crew en route from Israel to Novosibirsk – though Ukraine has never officially admitted guilt.

Complex quarrels about blame for such horrors are often never resolved. I am among many who do not believe that Libya had anything to do with the mass murder of those aboard Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988, very likely an Iranian-backed retaliation for the Airbus tragedy. All the evidence points to a terror group operating from Syrian-controlled territory, and none points to Libya.

But at the time of the prosecution, we were trying to make friends with Syria, which has since gone back near the top of our enemies list but may soon be our ally again, against the fanatics of Isis. Confused? You should be.

So, let us just mourn the dead and comfort the bereaved, and regret human folly and the wickedness of war. Let us not allow this miserable event to be fanned into a new war. That is what we did almost 100 years ago, and it is about time we learned something from that.

Dave, the high-five federalist
See how quickly the Government’s fake hostility towards the EU has vanished?

This picture of David Cameron performing a high-five with new European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker shows the truth about the relationship.

Both men understand Mr Cameron has to do a bit of play-acting now and then, to try to whittle away the Ukip vote. Next, they’ll be sharing a bottle of something agreeably federalist.

Finally, Fry gets it right
I CAN’T stand Stephen Fry – smug, vain, tedious Leftist that he is. When we met, at my late brother’s memorial service, he forced his company on me then went away and insulted me on Twitter.

So it gives me no pleasure to praise him for saying at a New Labour gathering that accused persons are innocent until proven guilty. This is never more so than when the accusation is child sex abuse, a charge so horrible it makes people forget their duty to be just.

Shame on those who have since attacked him. The presumption of innocence is never more vital than when only a few people will stand up for it. On this, we’re shoulder to shoulder.

Police fiddling of crime figures is exposed. A few months later, crime figures go up.But what does it matter? We then discover that police probes into 52 per cent of crimes don’t even manage to identify a suspect.

Female politicians won't help real women
Why do people think that women in politics will help ordinary women lead better lives?

Political females are almost all ambitious careerists who have decided, of their own free will, to work outside the home and spurn the task of raising children.

Such people have no time for those who think it better to stay at home and raise the next generation. And they think all women are like them, actively preferring the office to the home. But, in fact, millions of women go out to work because they have to, not because they want to.

The great paradox is that, in many cases, male MPs will be more sympathetic to the real problems of most women.

Personally, I think the public relations-driven cynicism of Mr Cameron’s reshuffle is so blatant that it will disgust rather than inspire. Not merely has he opted for cheap, superficial cosmetic change but, by firing Michael Gove, the Prime Minister has shown himself a disloyal weakling in the face of polls and focus groups. I think Mr Gove’s reforms were greatly over-rated, but he got himself disliked by the right people.

David Cameron pretended to be Mr Gove’s friend and ally. Mr Gove has now found out just how much that was worth. I doubt they’ll be sharing the school run much longer.

Text cop's clear message

Stronger penalties for texting while driving will never work because nobody enforces them.

Worse than that, I clearly observed a police officer texting while driving a van emblazoned with ‘community policing’ in large letters.

If even the police won’t obey it, the law is dead.

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

Were the Cambridge Spies just a Noisy Diversion from the Real Operation?

The famous Cambridge Spies – two of whom are once again exposed as unreliable drunks in accounts from the interesting Mitrokhin Archives published today - are, in my view a complete diversion, and one of the KGB’s most successful operations precisely because they are a diversion.

 

On and on we go about these louche old boozers. National Treasure Alan Bennett even managed to write a sympathetic and much-praised play about one of them which still seems to me to be quite revolting. How would a sympathetic TV play about defectors to the Third Reich  – such as John Amery or ‘Lord Haw Haw’, William Joyce (yes, I know his British nationality is open to question) – have gone down with the critics,  who laughed along with a drama that made Guy Burgess likeable, highighted his isolation and loneliness etc, and rather skated around the minor fact that he took the side of a monstrous, murderous secret-police tyranny?  I’m told that John Amery and William Joyce both had redeeming features, but so what, given whose side they took? And wasn’t there a stupid BBC series about the Cambridge lot, which was needlessly kind to their supposedly tortured consciences?

 

I greatly doubt that Philby, Burgess and Maclean ever supplied much that was of any real use to the KGB, or even that they provided anything that the KGB hadn’t already got from someone else. It may be that their main KGB purpose was to provide noisy cover for the real (and discreet)  spies and traitors who remain undetected to this day.

 

They did love showing them off. When I was in Moscow at the end of the Communist era, it was clear that the KGB loved parading them . I and other British reporters were actually invited into the KGB Club, a brown, high-ceilinged marble annexe to the Lubiyanka, for the unveiling of a Philby exhibit in the KGB museum, which I suspect had been created solely for us.  

 

They also displayed to us the special, ultra-macabre funeral wreath which had been wrought for the KGB’s founder, the sinister Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. It was fashioned out of bayonets and was rather like the Iron Throne in ‘Game of Thrones’, made of swords. Philby was buried prominently in a fashionable elite Moscow cemetery. They even put his corrupt face on a (rather low value)  postage stamp . I sent several letters stamped with twenty or so of these portraits of Philby to friends in England who foolishly didn’t keep them. I still wish I’d held on to them for myself. They would have made a good wallpaper pattern or perhaps a mug design.  I suspect that the less –trumpeted, soberer Melita Norwood,  ‘The Spy who came in from the Co-op’ , and the nuclear spies Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, between them did far more damage.

 

But more interesting even than these are the scores, probably hundreds of agents who, by my guess,  worked throughout the British establishment for long undetected decades. They weren’t so much spies as people who made sure that the interests of Communism and of revolution were constantly served, in the civil service, in the military, in politics, in the academy, why, perhaps even in the Church and presumably in the broadcasting, newspaper and publishing industries.  Evelyn Waugh hints at their prevalence and power in wartime Britain in his autobiographical ‘Men at Arms’ series, most especially the final volume ‘Unconditional Surrender’.  One shadowy but prominent establishment character in that book always reminds me so strongly of Anthony Blunt that I sometimes wonder if Waugh knew about him all along.

 

We know from Peter Hennessy’s book 'The Secret State’ that Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, told Communist students in Cambridge (in the late 1940s) *not* to join the CPGB but to work themselves into positions of influence in the establishment.  We can assume that he made similar speeches in other places.  This one happens to have been picked up. It often seems to me that this might well explain the near-suicidal policies adopted and followed by this country in the subsequent 70 years, that they were actually being directed by KGB agents. But what did they all do after 1990? Become Eurocommunists and join New Labour?

 

 

The Left Weren't Right in 1980. The RIght Were. Rambles Down Memory Lane with Denis MacShane

I have a small riposte to offer to the former Labour MP Denis MacShane, who has (along with a TUC official, writing on Twaddle) challenged my version of the TUC’s response to Polish Solidarity, and its challenge to Communist despotism, in 1980.

 

My original article can be found here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/solidarity-forever-the-british-left-and-the-polish-uprising-of-1980.html

 

 

 

Mr MacShane’s retort can be found in full here:

 

http://epi-c.net/?p=210

 

 

Mr MacShane opens:

 

‘For some reason I cannot fathom, Peter Hitchens started Twitter hares running by asserting that the Trades Union Congress failed to support the Polish union, Solidarity, after its creation in August-September 1980.’

 

The reason was an earlier exchange on ‘Twaddle’ between me and the Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, in which I felt it necessary to point out my personal position on the clash between the Polish people and Soviet power in 1980. I thought it was important to show that I had a consistent record of supporting those who stood up against *Soviet* power, something I distinguish sharply from modern Russia. I also thought it worth recalling that much of the mainstream western left of the time was sympathetic to Communism, and hesitated to support Solidarity in Poland.

 

I did not say that the TUC ‘failed to support’ Solidarity. That would have been false. A formula to support Solidarity was eventually arrived at after some delay and dissension at the top of the TUC.  What I actually said is best summed up in this passage.  ‘ …the TUC hesitated and mumbled through its false teeth, taking a fortnight to offer a grudging formula of semi-support’.

 

 

Mr MacShane gave the events a different character, saying: ‘ There was a strong post-1968 anti-Soviet leftism that had considerable presence amongst younger trade union activists many of whom were delegates to the TUC Congress.

‘So they burst out with cheers and applause when the ‘fraternal delegate’ from the AFL-CIO (the American trade union centre whose international activities were accused of being piloted and paid for by the CIA) at the TUC praised the Gdansk strikers. ‘I think that we are on the eve of a small miracle, namely the right of workers to choose unions of their own, uninhibited by the interference of government or government-controlled trade unions,’ the American trade unionist said.’

 

And

 

‘But most British trade unionists realized instinctively that something important and wonderful was happening as the glorious prize of freedom.’ 

and

 

‘From then on despite moans and mumbling from the TUC’s communists and pro-Soviet apologists the official TUC line along with the ICFTU, the AFL-CIO and the trade unions of the democratic world were strongly in favour of Solidarity.’   

 

Mr Macshane also urged me to consult his 1981 book on the subject ‘Solidarity: Poland’s Independent Trade Union’ Spokesman Books, 1981.’

 

And so I have, and what did I find in Chapter 11 ‘Poland and the Workers of the World’ on pages 114 and 115?

Here are some samples: ‘When the thousand delegates assembled in Brighton for the 1980 TUC meeting they found the TUC’s leadership in a thoroughy embarrassing position over Poland. ‘

 

There then follows a description of the foolish mess the TUC had got into over a long-planned visit to Poland’s state-controlled Communist ‘trade unions’.

 

He rightly refers to the official Polish unions as ‘irrelevant and discredited’.  He also describes the intervention of the delegate from the American AFL-CIO (equivalent of our TUC, but, unlike the TUC, pretty much free of Communist penetration and strongly anti-Soviet).  This is quoted above.

Mr MacShane describes the response: ‘There was a burst of applause from delegates seated in different parts of the hall at this condemnation of official trade unions in Poland.’

 

Sherlock Holmes, reading this description, would note that it is a clever way of saying that lot of delegates did *not* in fact applaud, and that the applause was not sustained. The words ‘seated in different parts of the hall’ could not and would not be used if the applause was general. It is a way of saying the applause was scattered. In his 1981 book, more or less contemporary, does not seem to me to mention any cheers. Yet Mr MacShane’s more recent version says: ‘‘So they burst out with cheers and applause when the ‘fraternal delegate’ from the AFL-CIO (the American trade union centre whose international activities were accused of being piloted and paid for by the CIA) at the TUC praised the Gdansk strikers."

 

In his 1981 book, Mr MacShane also contrasts the TUC’s ‘lack of certainty about how to handle the workers’ revolt in Poland’ (his words in the 1981 book, and more or less precisely my accusation) with the responses of other bodies, including the Socialist French union federation CFDT, and the International Metalworkers’ Federation, who sent either money or clear messages of support.

 

Mr MacShane helpfully explains that ‘Western unions that had tried to build relationships with official trade unions in eastern Europe under the détente policies of the 1970s were confused as to how to make contact with the striking workers…’

( Aaah, diddums. Actually, it was quite easy. Go to Warsaw and turn left for Gdansk).

 

‘…and did not know whether the existence of Solidarity meant that all relations with the CRZZ [official] unions in Poland should now be broken off’.

 

(That’s one way of putting it. Another perhaps cruder explanation appears below, in Mr MacShane’s book at the bottom of page 115. I shall come to it).

 

Mr MacShane interestingly continues : ‘Unions that had supported Polish workers, KOR, and efforts by workers in Russia , Rumania and Czechoslovakia to build independent trade unions now felt that support to be fully justified’

 

 (I would really, really like to know which unions he means here. I am guessing that few of the major ones were on the list).

And then he adds: ‘Other unions whose international policy was chiefly conditioned by a fanatical *anti*-communist rather than a *pro*-workers position (Mr MacShane’s emphases) hailed the Gdansk Agreement more as a blow against the Soviet Union than a victory for the Polish working class’.

 

Gosh. This belongs in a museum of leftist language. Wasn’t it possible that a blow against the USSR was automatically a victory for the Polish working class, and all other working classes?  The thinking behind this gymnastic passage, in which the people who are right are wrong because they’re on the right,  is richly funny. I love the use of the word ‘fanatic’ too, remembering as I do the nature and mood of the 1968 student Left from which Mr MacShane springs.

 

I remember those contortions we student revolutionaries used to have to make, to cope with the infuriating fact that actual working-class people in the Labour movement,  such as Frank Chapple,  understood what the Soviet Union was really about, and what Marxism was really about, and loathed us just as much as they loathed the official Communists.

 

What about the non-fanatics? Mr MacShane resumes:

 ‘Well-intentioned pro-détente union leaders from Western Europe who had stayed in the plush Black Sea resorts provided for the favoured guests of east European trade unions, now had to ask themselves some awkward questions about the nature of official trade unionism in those countries, and how far their hosts were genuinely representative of the workers’.

Didn’t you enjoy the phase ‘well-intentioned’?  One sees here that in Mr MacShane’s universe, the ‘fanatics’ were ranged against the ‘well-intentioned’. What a pity for him that the ‘fanatics’ were wholly right, and the ‘well-intentioned’ shamefully wrong.

Anyway, no 'awkward questions' were necessary on this subject, or ever had been. The misnamed ‘Trade Unions’ of the Communist world were wretched tools of the Communist Party and the state, a one-party state which sustained itself through censorship and secret police repression.  

 

Nobody tried to disguise it. Even in the days before Specsavers, the NHS provided TUC leaders with adequate eyewear to correct any myopia or tunnel vision. No great examination or reflection was necessary to discern this.

As Mr MacShane so rightly says :’Trade union officials who were members of, or close to, Communist Parties, kept their mouths shut at the sight of workers so decisively rejecting communist-run official trade unions’.

He asked me to look up his book. I have done so. It shows that my analysis is right. I have also taken the opportunity to check the archives of ‘The Times’ for the period. The reports of its distinguished and well-informed Labour staff, beginning in late August and continuing to the end of the conference in early September, entirely confirm those from the Daily Mail’s equally reliable industrial reporters which I quoted earlier. The story is consistent – TUC delay and reluctance to give unequivocal support to the Gdansk strike, embarrassment over the planned visit to Poland, the near-total moral superiority of the minority of ‘right-wing’ unions which pressed for clear TUC support for the Gdansk strike.

 

I am amused that I now find so many of the old Left, who used to be at least equivocal about the USSR,  lining up in hostility to Russia. I can think of few better ways of making my repeated point, that Russia is not the USSR.