Why Blairites would rather be led by Theresa May than by Jeremy Corbyn

I urge anyone genuinely interested in British politics to set aside the time and quiet needed to read this truly gripping and original article by Rafael Behr from Tuesday’s Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/how-remain-failed-inside-story-doomed-campaign

leave aside its tiresome assumption that all those reading it will sympathise with the pro-EU case. Its portrayal of the deep and committed collaboration between the Tory Party and the organised Blairite Left is superbly telling.

I have long maintained that there is no profound political division between New Labour and the Tories, and that the two are in effect one party. Here are factual details to demonstrate that this is truly so.  

This passage

‘With non-partisan zeal that impressed their colleagues, the Tories on the team agreed to a script aimed at core Labour voters, which included the threat that Brexit would “turn industrial heartlands into wastelands” and “finish the job that Thatcher started”.

'Old party rivalries were largely banished from the campaign “war room” at Stronger In’s Cannon Street headquarters. Researchers and press officers who had been savaging each other’s work for years now collaborated amicably. Residual tensions stayed below the surface. Former Labour staffers, moderate refugees fleeing the hard-left takeover under Corbyn, sometimes bristled at what they saw as unmerited swagger in the step of the Downing Street contingent, who expected to easily replicate their victory in the previous May’s general election. “They arrived like an occupying force,” recalls one former Labour staffer. “They came in with a sense of, ‘Step aside and we’ll tell you how it’s done.’”

'But over the course of the campaign, the most senior remainers found collegiate sympathy in a shared world view. As one put it: “We were the pluralist, liberal, centrist force in British politics.”’ (my emphasis, PH)

 

Followed by this one

 

‘Pro-Europeanism became a proxy for the fusion of economic and social liberalism that had been a dominant philosophy of the political mainstream for a generation, although its proponents were scattered across partisan boundaries. These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer. (My emphasis, PH)

'In the days when the politics of the fringe did not threaten their intellectual security, adherents of New Labour, the Lib Dems and “Cameroon” Conservatives had never seen themselves as a fellowship of moderation. Before Corbynite radicalism seized the left and Ukip’s vinegary nationalism suffused the right, debate was conducted in shades of difference within a broad consensus. But as the referendum approached, Stronger In became the informal party of defensive liberalism – the unpopulists – although that had never been the intention.’ (my emphasis, PH)

And you have the core of it.

In the same issue of the Guardian you can also find this equally fascinating analysis:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/post-referendum-politics-eu-vote

by Andrew (Lord) Cooper, a Tory peer and pollster, who advised the ‘Remain’ campaign

which correctly grasps the real divide in British politics. Again, ignore the petty caricaturing of the traditional conservative tendency ‘nationalist’ instead of patriotic, ‘fearful’ of globalisation rather than damaged by it and therefore rationally hostile to it, ‘preoccupied’ by immigration rather than, once again, reasonably concerned by it . The analysis is broadly, even strikingly right. One should also note that the statements with which they are said to be in agreement (“I hardly recognise the country I live in any more” and “If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would” were devised by liberal elite pollsters, and were not the original words of the people polled, who might well have expressed their sentiments in ways a little less like Polly Toynbee’s idea of what they think. Even so, it is a good analysis of the state opinion in this country,. There’s certainly no ‘silent majority’, but there is a large and vigorous if shrinking, minority, which feels mistreated and left out.

Note first of all Lord Cooper’s point that ‘The research that informs political campaigns is much more sophisticated than published polls. We don’t just want to know who is going to vote one way or the other. We need to understand what perceptions and arguments cause people to come to the voting conclusion that they do. This means looking beyond demographic and regional factors to map the electorate on the basis of attitudes and behaviour. We need to identify our core vote – and our opponent’s – and to define, with as much nuance as possible, the voters who are genuinely in play: what they think and feel about the choice before them and which messages, messengers and modes are the most effective in persuading them.’

And then : ‘The foundational research showed Britain divided into three almost equal chunks. The first chunk – 34% of the population – was internationalist in outlook; socially liberal; positive about globalisation, immigration and multiculturalism; and optimistic about the future. For these voters, the economy was by far the most important issue in the referendum. They were overwhelmingly going to vote remain, regardless of the terms of the debate.

'The second chunk – at that stage, 32% of the population – was diametrically opposed: nationalist in outlook; socially conservative; fearful of globalisation; opposed to multiculturalism; preoccupied by immigration; pessimistic about the future; and very hostile to the EU. For these voters, immigration was far and away the most important issue in the referendum; most of them favoured ending free movement, even if this made Britain worse off. The attitude that most characterised them was “I hardly recognise the country I live in any more”. More than half of them agreed with the statement “If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would”. Their imperative was to shut out the consequences of globalisation and open markets. These voters were overwhelmingly going to vote leave, regardless of the arguments.

‘The third chunk – 34% of the population – was conflicted. These people were the in-play voters: the primary target for both campaigns in the EU referendum. They were very clear that they didn’t like the EU, and why: uncontrolled immigration, the huge direct cost of membership, too much meddling in our laws and lives. They were torn between the appealing idea of insulating the UK from the pressures of an open world, and fear of the idea of a Britain outside the EU, isolated and alone. They were defined by the attitude that “my heart wants to leave the EU, but my head says it may be too risky”.’

Amidst all this, Mrs Theresa May seems to think her main task is to reunite the Tory Party,  an impossible alliance of people with wholly incompatible beliefs, and a major obstacle to intelligent thought or useful action.  Surely that’s the last thing Britain actually needs? Many of her party (perhaps Mrs May herself)  would surely be happier in New Labour, or merging with it, if unity is what they want. What's quite certain is that New Labour would be happier with Mrs May as their leader than with Jeremy Corbyn, which I for one find quite funny. 

 

Then the rest of us would realise we need to start a party of our own, if we're to have any friends at Westminster.

 

 

A Radio Debate on Religion versus Multicultural Secularism

Earlier this week I recorded a discussion with Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, on Justin Brierley's programme on Premier Christian Radio. Some of you may wish to listen to it. Here it is: 

 

http://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Is-the-UK-s-Christian-heritage-history-Peter-Hitchens-vs-Terry-Sanderson

 

Snake oil and billionaires... Now I KNOW Blair's taken over the Tories

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

The really big political changes in this country take place inside the major parties, not at general elections. Think of the Heseltine putsch against Mrs Thatcher, or the cruel overthrow of Iain Duncan Smith, or the recent desperate recapture of the Labour Party (whatever next?) by socialists.

And last week the Tory Party finally transformed itself into New Labour.

There are a few finishing touches to be added between now and 2020. But after much writhing and struggling, the chrysalis finally burst open to reveal the Heir to Blairism, glistening with snake oil and hair oil and surrounded by trilling choirs of happy billionaires, just as in the old days of Lord Cashpoint and bombing Iraq.

The process will only be complete when Lord Mandelson himself accepts that his life’s work is now being done by David Cameron and George Osborne, who is even starting to look like the Blair era’s Sinister Minister. Perhaps it’s time for a moustache.

The Tories also yearn for the open endorsement of Alan Milburn, whom they already employ as Commissar for Equality.

For the moment, they will have to content themselves with the embrace of Lord Adonis, more Blairite than Blair, who is in charge of concreting over what remains of the English countryside, a long-term New Labour obsession.

Privately, they are on good terms with the Blair creature himself, whose advice is always welcome in Downing Street. He is known there as ‘The Master’ and, with a few very minor changes (mainly the replacement of the word ‘Conservative’ with ‘New Labour’), he could have delivered the Prime Minister’s Manchester speech on Wednesday.

Who said (I have removed any mention of the party name): ‘It wasn’t just me who put social justice, equality for gay people, tackling climate change, and helping the world’s poorest at the centre of our mission – we all did’?

Honestly, could you tell? Where now are all those who thought David Cameron would unleash his inner Tory when freed from the embrace of Nick Clegg? Mr Cameron doesn’t have an inner Tory, and Wednesday’s performance suggests that Mr Clegg is actually the more conservative of the two.

Even the slightly embarrassing off-colour joke about sex, astonishing in the mouth of a serious politician, was the sort of thing that Mr Blair likes to do, along with the mention of ‘the kids’, the tinny business-school English, and the use of terrorism as an excuse for dubious actions.

Though I doubt whether Mr Blair would have had the nerve to make the deeply dishonest misrepresentation of Jeremy Corbyn’s perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The false and cheap suggestion that Mr Corbyn does not regard the events of September 11, 2001 as a tragedy – when he specifically said that he did – was a disgrace for which Mr Cameron should quickly make amends.

This is the thing that is most wrong with Blairism – its instinct is to lie. It is at bottom a nasty mix of greed, Leninist party discipline, advertising slickness and ruthless, intolerant political correctness. It attracts and promotes power-worshippers.

To survive and prosper, it must always pretend to be something else.

And as long as it succeeds in doing so, we are stuck with it.

Finally, a movie that's right to use the awful F-word

I don't generally approve of the F-word, but I must admit that the opening scene of the new film The Martian, about a US astronaut stranded on the red planet, provides a rare example of the wholly justified use of this powerful expletive.

Even I might be tempted to mutter it, under the circumstances.
There are many interesting things about this drama, one of them being that we never see the marooned spaceman’s family, whose powerless pain would normally feature largely in such a story.

But perhaps the most fascinating of all is its oozy, flattering attitude towards China, shown as a noble ally and as a highly advanced country, with no attention paid to its repressive, nasty features.

It’s all rather different to the way the equally despotic Soviet Union used to be dealt with in the movies, when it was America’s chief rival.

Still, at least there isn’t a Russian villain. I suspect they’ll start featuring in Hollywood productions soon.

The face of a REAL politician 

For those who think that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat to national security, how about this fellow, who appeared before the Labour conference in military uniform, denouncing the upper classes of every nation as ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’, and promising they would be dealt with shortly by the coming ‘socialist revolution’ (by which he meant the arrival of Russian tanks).

It was the 1945 Labour conference. And it was Denis Healey, who died last weekend, full of years and honour, having been one of the best Defence Secretaries in modern times, and a reasonably competent Chancellor. Healey was in fact a terrible old Stalinist, an actual member of the Communist Party in the worst gulag days, who may just possibly have stayed sympathetic to Moscow for rather longer than he later admitted.

Yet when it came to it, he showed undoubted courage on the field of battle in his country’s service, and later proved a wise and competent Minister, ending his life fiercely opposed to the succession of stupid wars into which lesser men dragged us.

Proper countries are full of awkward, discontented people who may in fact turn out to be better patriots than the more obvious and noisy flag-wavers. Bear it in mind.

Is there a worse thing than having your child wrongfully snatched away from you by the State, which cannot be bothered to wait to see if charges against you are proven? Are we truly free if such a thing can be done, irrevocably?

The case of Karrissa Cox and Richard Carter is a grotesque injustice. No court should have been able to hand over their child for adoption until the charges of abuse against them had been heard and proved beyond reasonable doubt. In fact, the charges collapsed.

The presumption of innocence is all that stands between us and tyranny, and I hope that some wise judge acts swiftly to restore the lost child to its parents. This isn’t a free country if this doesn’t happen.

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

A Brush with the Hijab Police

My ‘supporters’ and my enemies have one thing in common. Both want to believe I think things that I don’t think.

 

I am amazed at how many readers want me to endorse the absurd UKIP Dad’s Army, despite a dozen articles explaining why I can’t and won’t do this.

A few still believe I am a Tory. More long for me to rush into the futile Stalingrad of the ‘same-sex-marriage’ debate. Some wrongly expect me to be an enthusiast for Enoch Powell, or get angry with me when I object to the display of golliwogs or to the broadcast of the n-word as a dog’s name in the film of 'The Dambusters’. Thousands cannot cope with my repudiation of Sir Arthur Harris’s (and Winston Churchill’s) policy of deliberately bombing German civilians in their homes. Etc.

 

Likewise my enemies believe I am a nostalgist who believes the 1950s were a ‘golden age’, a view I very firmly do not hold, having experienced the 1950s. They think I support wars which I in fact oppose, and above all, they hope that I am a racial bigot, because that would allow them to dismiss everything else that I say. Many hope this so strongly that they believe it to be true.

 

My 4th October Mail on Sunday column, published here, included a short item to accompany an interesting picture, which had grabbed my attention during the week.

 

It read: 

‘A hijab-wearing model, Mariah Idrissi, has been chosen for a new advertisement by the fashion chain H&M. 

I think we will be amazed at how quickly this becomes normal. It won’t be long before we have veiled Muslim Cabinet Ministers, TV newsreaders and judges. It is all part of a slow but unstoppable adaptation of this country to Islam. 

In my view it will eventually mean that non-Muslim women will come under pressure to conform. 

If you doubt the power of this huge change, consider this. There are archive films available showing women in Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East dressed in Western styles. It has taken only 40 years for them to disappear beneath scarves and shrouds. The process may be quicker for us.’

 

While interesting, it was not in any way the major piece on the page, which was mostly taken up with a discussion of the alarming contradictions in our public policy in Syria, and our absurd attitude towards Russia’s intervention there.

 

There was also an all-too-brief review of an important new novel on the drugging of children to alter their behaviour, and a protest against the media’s failure to examine the Marxist pasts of Blairites, compared with their frenzied interest in the left-wing background of Jeremy Corbyn.

 

There was a little (far too little) response to my thoughts on the Syrian crisis. I am one of a very small number of British journalists who does not swallow the official line on this. I am painfully anxious that my dissent reaches beyond those who already know my views. I genuinely fear that we may be on the path to war, and for all the wrong reasons, and like to think that wider understanding of the problem might avoid this. Likewise, I long for a wider understanding of the dangers of drugging healthy children; and I have for years believed that the Marxist background and origins of Blairism, if understood, would change attitudes towards them. If I was hoping to influence anybody into action (or inaction), then my hopes were concentrated in these three pieces. My remarks on the hijab were just that, a commentary on an observable change in our society.

 

I have been saying for years now that this will eventually become an Islamic country, not to raise some kind of alarm, but because it seems to me to be the inevitable result of the policies we have been following for many decades. As one who prefers Christianity to Islam I regret this, but do not think it can be reversed. In particular, I mention this because I think those who have campaigned against the Christian religion are partly responsible for this direction in our national life, and this is a curious paradox.  I have also repeatedly said that mass migration into this country has already reached such levels that all we can realistically hope to do is to find some way of living peacefully alongside our new neighbours.

 

Readers here will know that I abandoned the last scrap of active political engagement last May, when the Tory Party had the election bought for it by the hedge funds. This killed my last hope, that this ghastly, fraudulent party might be defeated so severely and so repeatedly that it would collapse and make way for a properly conservative party. I increasingly recognize this desire as having been a fantasy, far behind its rightful time. Anything of the kind would have had to have been achieved 30 years ago to have had any chance of success.

 

I still have one or two ameliorative projects whose achievement I think might be possible  – the return of academic selection in state schools, inquiries into ‘ADHD’, ’Dyslexia’, ‘antidepressants’ and the correlation between cannabis and mental illness. I would dearly love to see the railways back in public ownership and restored to their pre-Marples extent before I die. I oppose foolish wars as and when others propose them. But that’s it.

 

I certainly have no policy on the hijab, and oppose all schemes to prevent Muslim women (or anyone else) wearing what they like. These are in my view totalitarian and wrong. The law can reasonably say whether we wear anything at all to cover our nakedness, because many, if not most,  people are genuinely shocked and upset by public nudity.

 

The sight of the naked human body is, for reasons we can never fully fathom, a hugely powerful thing (all painters and sculptors know this) and forms a crucial part of the Garden of Eden myth for that reason.  So the law can say that the body shall have a covering. It cannot prescribe what this covering is, a wholly different question. We can ask a woman to lift her veil where we have good reason to do so, just as we can ask motorcyclists to remove their helmets for the same reason. But that’s it.

 

Even so, late on Sunday I began to hear the low, menacing whine of a gathering Twitter Storm, growing slowly into a growl of intolerant rage. There is a curious alliance between Islam and the liberal left in this country which makes no sense at all, given Islam’s pretty stern strictures on many of the things the liberal left holds dear. But in left-liberal-world things don’t need to make sense.

 

And it was mobilizing against me. I was accused of bigotry, racism etc etc, though when I asked for quotations to back these claims, none came. 

 

One of my critics was a person named Nesrine Malik, who wrote on Twitter as follows on Sunday evening (I have cleaned up the Tweet by asterisking a lavatory-wall word):

 

‘Nesrine Malik ‏ Oct 4

Look at how acceptable it is so say clearly rabidly anti-Muslim s*** like you just don't want to see hijabs anywhere’

 

I rebutted this, but as is so often the case with such attackers, could not get her either to substantiate or clarify her charge.

 

She then began to question me on what appeared to be the assumption that I was in fact concealing some sort of hidden message in what I had written. I pointed out that I had written exactly what I meant, and meant exactly what I had written.

 

For example, she wrote:

‘ok - so please - spell it out for me as I clearly cannot read - what is your objection to the hijab advert?’

 

I replied, noting the inquisitorial, sarcastic tone: ‘Who says I have any objection to it? I simply observe that this has taken place, and is significant.’

 

She responded :‘so you're saying that 'a slow but unstoppable adaptation to Islam' is a statement completely shorn of any opinion or judgement?’

 

I responded: ‘It is my judgement that it is significant an[d] interesting. What opinion does it express?’

 

And so it went on. I can now recognise a People’s Court when I see one, and also an obvious attempt to put words in my mouth. Later on we got on to the point about women eventually being compelled to take the veil against their will. 

 

I was urged by her to condemn this. This seemed odd to me. Does anyone defend it? I had begun to wonder.  I thought the matter had gone far enough and so asked Ms Malik what her opinion was on people being told how to dress.  Well, she was against that, though she quickly said it was rare. Well, so it may well be, thoigh that doesn't seem to have any bearing on whether one is against it or not.  I can’t see how we could easily find out how rare or common it is in the rather unfree countries where it is most widespread. I have made no claims about how often compulsion happens now or how often it will happen in the future. I just think that it will do so here, if things continue as they are now.

 

The matter dragged on, eventually involving the Great British Bake-Off, an event which I have managed to ignore completely, and a film-maker called David Baddiel, one of whose films I once slighted. It turns out that he still resents this, though as he is so modish I should have thought he would have regarded my disapproval as an endorsement. 

 

While this was going on, I ranged the country from Oxford to London, where I took part in the ‘Daily Politics’ which discussed the Tory conference, a sample here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gg_VksiEd4

(I expect the whole thing can still be found on iplayer), 

 

...and then to York, where I had a pleasant evening haranguing a group of Politics and Philosophy students, studying very roughly the same course I (sort of) pursued at that University more than 40 years ago, though really I studied Marxism-Leninism, in its strictly practical form.

 

The subject was the incompatibility of multiculturalism with Britain, and once again I had to explain that I am an obituarist of Britain, not a resurrection man trying to dig up a dead country and revive it. Then I took a complicated train journey to Beverley and its glorious undiscovered Minster, one of the loveliest great churches in Europe in a largely unspoilt East Riding town. During this railway Odyssey I was asked by Channel Four news to appear on their programme to discuss the hijab issue.

 

Oh, all right, I said, suspecting that it might not work out well.  I did the usual thing of explaining my opinions to an intelligent and receptive researcher, all too aware that when it reached the studio, the debate would be less satisfying(this is almost always so) . I think the researcher was a bit surprised when I said clearly and emphatically that I opposed any legal restrictions on the wearing of the veil. But I may be mistaken about that.

 

As you may see here:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnlyL5yMTnk

 

 

…the actual exchange wasn’t very enlightening.

 

A few hours beforehand I had learned that my opponent would be Nesrine Malik.

 

Who is she, by the way?

 

Well, here’s an interesting and relevant article about her.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/7896536/Burka-ban-Why-must-I-cast-off-the-veil.html

 

Now, a few things about the Channel Four occasion struck me rather strongly.

 

Matt Frei introduced the item by rhapsodising about the victory of a hijab-wearing woman in a baking contest, saying approvingly this was an ‘extraordinary celebration of multicuturalism’ . No doubt he was being a devil’s advocate at the time, but at the BBC and C4 news, they do always seem to be advocating the same devil. Many people, even in the Liberal Elite, nowadays disapprove of multiculturalism and say it was a mistake which they now oppose. David Cameron is, or says he is, one of them. See this 2011 speech

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994

 

 

Ms Malik began her contribution by asserting: ‘It shouldn’t even be something to comment on in any way other than “This is really cool. It is representing a significant swing of Muslim British people and it’s something we should celebrate.” ’

 

I thought and still think this was an astonishing attitude to take. She appeared to me to be saying (‘It shouldn’t even be something to comment on in any way other than….’) that only one opinion on the matter was permissible.  So I responded by saying that other views were permissible. She took this an expression of opinion about the wearing of hijabs, on my part, which it wasn’t. It was an expression of opinion on free thought and speech. I was now quite sure that this, not a discussion about headwear, was my main aim

 

 

Later on she began her inquisitorial, nay prosecutorial attempt to establish what I was ‘really saying’. The clear implication *here* is that I had some hidden message that I was concealing,  presumably for reasons of shame.

 

Seizing on the words ‘gradual and unstoppable adaptation’ she described this wording as ‘alarmist’. I have to say that in my dictionary the word ‘gradual’ doesn’t really go together with alarm, but that’s just an opinion.

 

This was somehow a ‘warning shot’ (shot?) and the words ‘gradual and unstoppable’ were by clear implication a condemnation. Actually this isn’t so. People often describe their own movements and causes, or those of which they approve,  as unstoppable. The left-liberal anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’, with its uncompromising use of the verb ‘shall’, is a declaration of unstoppabilty, in my view, and has turned out to be much more right about that than it sounded when I first heard it in about 1966.

 

She again suggested that I had said this was something to be ‘alarmed’ or ‘worried’ about it. I had not done so. And under this repeated pressure to be confess to having opinions different from those I had actually expressed, I found it necessary to harden my heart. I wasn’t going to give such inquisitorial behaviour, redolent of people’s courts and Stasi interrogations, any victories.

 

I was then told I should forgive people for readng things that were not there into what I had written. I declined to do so. First, they hadn’t asked for my forgiveness or admitted to doing anything wrong,  the absolute requirements for forgiveness; secondly, these attempts to make windows into people’s souls are plain wrong and must be resisted in  a free society or it won’t stay free for long.

 

Channel Four News’s Matt Frei, a civilised and travelled man, was even so seemingly under the bizarre impression that I am a Tory. Apparently believing that this might wring my withers, he brought David Cameron (‘railing against racism’ – but who until then had mentioned race or ‘racism’? Not I for certain) into the argument, and made the usual liberal error of assuming that opposition to multicuturalism had racial implications. Culture and race are not merely not the same, but the opposite of each other (See Thomas Sowell’s fine book ‘Race and Culture’). Indeed, I would say that the best way to achieve a harmonious multiracial society is to ensure that it is monocultural.

 

Ms Malik could not understand or really register my use of the past tense to describe the long-ago death of British culture (Good heavens, I described this back in 1999 in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ which as it happens makes no mention of race or immigration as contributors that abolition, though it briefly notes the existence of the change) . She seized on it as my longed-for confession of Crimethink.  

She then said : ‘The motif of the hijab makes people like Peter uncomfortable because it implies that the sort of rosy white homogenous culture of British society is now on the wane. That’s what it’s what its all about…

 

'…It’s a figleaf for a dying gasp of monoculturalism in the UK’ .

 

 

Now, there were two key words in this passage.

 

That word, smuggled quickly in at the last moment, is ‘white’. Without it, the statement is quite harmless, apart form the word 'figleaf, which suggests concealment, which indeed has no other purpose outside botany than to suggest concealment. 

 

Note that both Mr Frei and Ms Malik both introduced the question of skin-colour or 'race' into the matter. Yet it was not there until they put it there.

 

In fact the spread of the hijab, niqab and burqa throughout the Islamic world is a matter of controversy among Muslims, some of whom resist it and some of whom welcome it.   And it is a religious, not an ethnic matter. And, as I so often find I need to say, religions (including my own) are matters of opinion, with which people may legitimately disagree.  Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity. A woman with a pinko-grey skin (what Ms Malik describes as ‘white’) can wear the hijab, indeed there are some such whom I occasionally see in Kensington High Street in London, where I work. Pinko-grey British men can and do embrace Islam.

Women with other skin colours can, even if Muslim, decide not to wear hijab or niqab. The matter, in short, has nothing to do with skin colour or ‘race’.  So why did Mr Frei mention 'race' and why did she introduce the word ‘white’.

Your guess is as good as mine.

 

How Impartial Is The Queen?

How politically neutral is Her Majesty the Queen? In my view Royal neutrality is a bit of a myth. Her Majesty’s very public endorsement of the 1998 surrender to the IRA, well-publicised in the weeks between the instrument of surrender and the far-from-fair and far-from-frank referendum which endorsed the surrender, was a direct intervention in contentious politics. When I called the Palace at the time and asked them to explain, they told me to ‘consult a constitutional expert’. I asked them if they had a list of approved ones, and the line went quiet.

 

Of course it did. There is no court of appeal on such things.

 

Then, in her 2004 Christmas broadcast she proclaimed 'diversity is indeed a strength' - a Royal endorsement of the multiculturalism many oppose and dislike. I thought then, and think now, that this was a breach of impartiality too. And I was worried by her apparent intervention in the Scottish referendum. Was this proper?

 

 

What about the Monarch’s apparently warm attitude towards the EU, and her seeming endorsement of its disputed and dubious claim to be a force for peace and harmony,   which many believe was exposed in this Berlin speech on Thursday, delivered to an enthusiastically nodding Angela Merkel? Division in Europe dangerous?  Who says? The safest period of my life was the Cold War, far more peaceful than now, as the EU rampages around the Balkans and the Ukraine.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3137519/When-Angela-met-Queen-Majesty-pays-respects-victims-war-dictatorship-watched-Chancellor-Merkel.html

 

 

Well, what is the monarch’s standing in the EU?  Buckingham Palace’s website makes an interesting statement on this, here

 

http://www.royal.gov.uk/MonarchUK/QueenandGovernment/Queenandvoting.aspx

 

What’s interesting is that under English or United Kingdom law and precedent, the Queen , being part of Parliament (‘The Queen in Parliament’ ) is simply not able to vote for members of another part of the legislature. This is part of the wiring of our ancient constitution, not a rule later invented, but a fact.

 

This is also, as far as I can work it out, why she cannot issue herself with a passport, which (although it is an EU document with a flatulent, vestigial rubric on it about an (unidentified, see below) Secretary of State ‘requesting and requiring’ Johnny Foreigner to do this or that, which these days he generally doesn’t) still  bears her insignia.

 

UK passports are still issued under Royal Prerogative, the simplest source of state authority, rather than under Parliamentary law. This may also be why Her Majesty does not have to have a licence plate on her car, though I’m happy to be corrected by anyone who understands this better. I think it’s also why she used not to pay any tax.

 

However, compare and contrast : ‘Under the Maastricht Treaty, The Queen and other members of the Royal Family would be entitled to vote for the European Parliament, or to stand for election to that Parliament.

‘However, The Queen would only exercise these rights on the advice of her Ministers. Their advice would invariably be that she should neither vote nor stand for an elected position so as not to compromise her neutrality.’

 

But , as she’s not part of the European Parliament, which actually has sovereignty over this country and legislates for it, under the guidance of the Commission , the European Council and the European Court of Justice, her abstention is a choice, not a constitutional fact.

 

This is quite interesting, if you like poking about in the hidden wiring of our constitution. For it turns out(and Buckingham Palace has confirmed this to me today) that the Queen, by virtue of being a British *national* (she is not a British *citizen*, and of course was not, in the days when the rest of us had that lost privilege,  a *subject* of herself) is a *citizen* of the European Union.

 

Though born in the then colony of Malta, I was by right of British parentage a British subject from 1951 to 1982. I did not notice that I had lost this historically rather moving and exceptional status until , trapped in some airport by delays,  I studied my passport more carefully than usual and found that I had at some point become a citizen, with the ‘right of abode’ in my own country.  This happened in 1982. At the same time the passport ceased to say what your occupation was, so anyone who claims that it ‘says in their passport’ that they are something or other ( as people often do) is making up it up. 

 

Not long afterwards, I’d guess 1984 or 1985, I was at a political lunch with the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan, recently deceased, who arrived late explaining that he had been at a ceremony in which the issuing of passports was transferred from the Foreign Office to the Home Office. This was presumably because the passport was about to become an EU document, issued on behalf of the EU by the Home Office, rather than by an independent country declaring that it recognised and protected its people when travelling abroad. The old rubric about ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs’ requesting and requiring all those whom it might concern to afford the bearer all necessary whatsit, etc etc  was altered to ‘Her Majesty’s Secretary of State’, unspecified. For all anyone knew, it might be the Secretary of State for Wales, or Drains. I can remember Leon Brittan explaining that this would now mean him, as Home Secretary.  I think they left that out because it might alert people to the fact that they were now carrying an EU document. One side-effect of this was that the ancient system under which the SIS (MI6) officer in every embassy was officially the Passport officer had to be abandoned and they had to think of a new cover story.

 

In 1988 the old stiff blue passport began to be replaced by the Building Society passbook which we have had since, first bearing the words European Community and then , in 1997, ‘European Union’ (the lettering in which ‘European Union’ is stamped on the front cover grows marginally bigger as the years pass, though you need to be observant to notice this). My last proper blue passport, containing a lovely collection of Warsaw Pact visa stamps and my Moscow residence permit, was stolen from a jacket pocket in the old ‘Daily Express ‘ office soon after I returned from Russia in 1992.

 

Well, now that I and Her Majesty are both EU citizens, whether we want to be or not, What does EU citizenship entail? All is explained here:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/displayFtu.html?ftuId=FTU_2.1.1.html

 

So, at the moment, it’s just a few not especially wonderful rights. But then there’s the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (This began life as the original Treaty of Rome but has been substantially revised over the years. It is the core of the EU’s constitution and can be studied in its ‘ consolidated version’ here

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:12012E/TXT&from=EN )

 

In its Part Two, you will find that Article 20, paragraph 2 reads (my emphasis):

 

1. Citizenship of the Union is hereby established. Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship. 2. Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights and be subject to the duties provided for in the Treaties.

It adds that there are, as yet, no duties. But when they think of some, the Treaty already obliges us to be subject to them. All they have to do is devise them and ram them through the EU’s decision-making process.  So as far as I can see,  the Queen, technically, is a subject of the EU, which, as a Sovereign, she cannot be. A Palace spokesperson told me today that the Queen’s EU citizenship ‘ in no way affects her prerogatives, rights and responsibilities as the Sovereign and Head of State.’

 

But I’m really not sure that can be so. I’ll see if I can find a constitutional expert. 

PETER HITCHENS: Reasonable, peaceful, sober. That's why they terrify me...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Please permit me not to care about ‘Jihadi John’, whose participation in a series of gruesome videos has made him a useful frontman for his murderous accomplices.

They love to provoke us into more futile flailing and squawking about the need to fight back. Most of this fightback consists of adjectives, the only weapons this country now possesses in any quantity. Watch out for them, rolling by like a verbal Red Square parade: ‘Horrific!’, ‘cowardly!’, ‘extremist!’.

Islamic State’s strength depends greatly on its ability to mesmerise Western media.

And the idea of a Londoner presenting the group’s macabre videos might have been designed by a public relations man who understands exactly what makes the British mass media salivate.

Even so, there’s very little we can do about it. Terror is all about nasty surprises, and MI5, for all its poker-faced grandeur, cannot predict the future. Nor will it help anyone to ban Islamist blowhards from speaking at university meetings. It will just make us look silly.

If you’re worried about an Islamist threat to Britain, Jihadi John isn’t the problem. That’s to be found in the astonishing figure of 300,000 net migrants into Britain last year. A fair number of them will be Muslims, reinforcing what is rapidly becoming a highly influential minority in this country.

As we saw in an interesting poll, these Muslim fellow citizens don’t want to chop our heads off or murder us. They are reasonable, peaceful people who make better neighbours than many indigenous Britons.

But they think differently from us about the world. And they believe in something, which most of us do not. That’s the chief difference between us. And bit by bit, as they become more numerous and find their way into our institutions, helped by their competence, self-possession and sobriety, they will change society into one that suits them.

I don’t see how this process can be stopped now. I sympathise with a lot of their concerns, though I greatly dislike their attitude towards women. Like them, I find our way of life tawdry, immoral and often debauched. I just wish we had found our own British, Christian solution to these problems.

But we turned our back on patriotism and the church long ago. And round about the same time, we opened our borders, so wide that I do not think we will ever be able to close them again.

This thing has happened. We are going to have to try to learn to live with it as best and as kindly as we can, for the alternative is horrible. But I for one will never forgive those who allowed this to happen to what was one of the world’s great civilisations.

Bear warning is just hot air 

Liberal leftists love to laugh at Mormons, but the Climate Change Cult, to which leftists all belong, makes Mormonism look mild and undogmatic. In a way it’s lucky that the Warmists (perhaps we should call them the Warmons?) have the BBC to do their missionary work for them, or we’d never get them off our doorsteps.

You can almost see the Warmists’ brains glaze over as they start to make their incantations about carbon dioxide. And, like the Book of Mormon, the Warmist Bible is full of the most obvious twaddle, a yawning trap for the credulous.

Most blatant of all their falsehoods is the cult of the poor little polar bear, martyred symbol of man’s carbonic greed, stranded sadly on a melting ice floe as it contemplates a watery grave.

In fact these rather savage and uncuddly predators are doing extremely well just now, with numbers at record highs thanks partly to the plentiful supply of nice fat seals in Arctic seas (yes, they eat those sweet little seals). As Susan Crockford in a new report on the bears says: ‘On almost every measure, things are looking good for polar bears. Scientists are finding that they are well distributed throughout their range and adapting well to changes in sea ice. Health indicators are good and they are benefiting from abundant prey. It really is time for the doom and gloom about polar bears to stop.’

And I also ought to point out one other thing. Polar bears can swim.

Dr Osborne's dodgy prescription 

If you had stratospheric blood pressure, were grossly obese, lived a sedentary lifestyle and smoked constantly, what would you think of a doctor who told you to carry on as you were? That’s what I think of George Osborne, and of his admirers.

What can one do about those who are fooled by the Chancellor’s phoney boom, with its empty fake jobs, its miserable productivity, its galaxy-sized national debt, its swollen deficit and its dangerous housing bubble? 

Perhaps I could quietly mention the external debt on our current account. This is the measure of Britain’s ability to pay its way in the world. And in the third quarter of last year it hit six per cent, a peacetime record, but not in a good way.

This is partly caused by an appalling trade deficit of £34.8 billion, plus a collapse in earnings on foreign investments, which were in surplus in 2011, and are now heavily in the red.

Have you, too, been forced by your bank to have a contactless credit or debit card which you can use without a PIN? Are you frequently urged by shop assistants to ‘pay by contactless’?

My advice is to object. The contactless system is an invitation to spend more, faster. It is, by its nature, insecure and means a lost or stolen card can be quickly used to make plenty of unverified purchases, while you are still trying to cancel it. And the £20 limit on contactless purchases will start to go up in September. How long before it is much, much higher?

Some companies will relent, and give you a non-contactless card. Others are obdurate. They should be challenged.

There was much trumpeting of a drop in teenage pregnancies last week, hilariously attributed to sex education programmes that frantically avoid mentioning abstinence or marriage, and assume promiscuity is normal.

If this ‘education’ is so effective, it’s odd that sexually transmitted diseases continue to be rampant, and Britain’s teen pregnancy rate remains among the highest in Europe.

Here’s another explanation – the ‘morning after pill’ now available over the counter to anyone who looks 16, and which makes sure that a one-night stand doesn’t lead to pregnancy. This charming treatment, by the way, was originally developed by vets, to stop pedigree poodles conceiving after a street-corner dalliance with the local mongrel.

 

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

Scorn for One - Quivering Obsequiousness to the other

On Sunday I noted that the heavy-handed enforcement of ‘religious tolerance’ (so-called) in this country by Mrs May’s planned new Strong State would not in fact favour Christianity. I argued that it would instead work on the side of the very Islam whose ‘extremist’ branches we claim to be trying to combat with surveillance and speech restrictions.

 

I wrote: ’Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice’. 

Oh, my prophetic soul. Before the day was out, two stories had erupted into the newspapers. The first, in my own paper, the Mail on Sunday, concerned a Christian magistrate who   remarked that he thought a child would be better brought up in a traditional family than by a same-sex couple.

 

Whatever opinion you hold on this, Richard Page’s opinion is legitimate and based upon Christian teaching, until quite recently the basis of this country’s morality and system of government, and ostensibly its Established Church, to this day.

 

 

Mr Page was then reported, suspended, found guilty of ‘serious misconduct’ (by a supposedly Conservative minister) and sent on an ‘equality course’, to get his mind right . He was found to have been ‘influenced by his religious beliefs rather than by the evidence’.  This was defined as ‘serious misconduct'.

 

Is it not possible that those who disagreed with him were influenced by their political and moral beliefs, rather than by the evidence?

 

It is only necessary to imagine the reaction to this event in the Britain of even 30 years ago, to grasp that this country has in fact undergone a vast moral and cultural revolution in that period, in which Christian beliefs have been entirely dethroned, without the population fully understanding that this was taking place and certainly without any such plan being openly avowed in the manifesto of any major political party.

Is it wild speculation to suggest that the old beliefs have not been replaced by nothing, or by a commitment to view matters entirely on the evidence without any consideration of moral attitudes? 

Might it be that magistrates are now expected to be guided by an alternative and radically different set of beliefs, beliefs which 50 years ago were held only by social revolutionaries (and not even by all of them),   best summed up in the phrase ‘Equality and Diversity’?  

 

(What, in any case, is the impartial science-based evidence on this matter which might be seen as actual unbiased evidence in this matter? It seems unlikely to me that same-sex parental couples have existed long enough or in sufficient numbers for any serious and balanced research to have been completed into the comparative outcomes, but I’m always ready to listen to evidence.)   

 

What particularly struck me was that Mr Page was accused of breaking his oath, which required him to ‘do right to all manner of people’, ‘without fear or favour, affection or ill will’. For a religious believer, such an accusation is very painful, as oaths are promises made before God.  I cannot for the life of me see how his concern breaks that oath, especially since, as he points out, the oath ends with the words ‘So help me God’.

 

No doubt those words won’t feature much in future, indeed I shouldn’t wonder if we don’t see a proposal to ban them pretty soon (just as those subversive terms  ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ were erased from many official documents recently).

 

But they were a permissible part of the oath when he swore it, and the God worshipped in this country by its Established Church, whose Supreme Governor is the Monarch, crowned in an explicitly Christian ceremony, is the Christian one. This is also a country whose Parliament opens its sessions with Christian prayers.

 

That Christian God seems to me to have been fairly clear in thinking that marriage was between a man and a woman. The Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service, still legally (by Act of Parliament) the basic standard of the rules and nature of marriage in England, and still a legally recognised form of marriage not requiring any endorsement by any other body,  is quite clear on this.

 

The new idea about marriage comes from a different tradition. If we are, as Mrs May claims, committed to ‘mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths’  Mr Page is surely entitled to the ‘respect and tolerance’ of his fellow magistrates.

 

According to paragraph 5 of Mrs May’s horrible guidelines (read them here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/388934/45584_Prevent_duty_guidance-a_consultation_Web_Accessible.pdf )

 ’vocal and active opposition’ to ‘mutual respect and tolerance’ is ‘extremism’.  Well, can you get much more ‘vocal and active’ in ‘opposition’ to another faith than by reporting an adherent of a religion you don’t like to the authorities, for expressing his sincere opinion, in such a way that he is suspended from his duties and compelled to be ‘re-educated?

 

Please grasp that I am not here seeking to enter a debate about whether Mr Page was right or wrong. This discussion has been had to the point of tedium, and will presumably continue for ever. People don’t agree. Generally, this is because they adhere to different moral system. They’re not going to persuade each other.

 

What interests me is that the non-Christian side no longer *has* to persuade its opponents.  It can simply use the state to crush them. The force of law (in my view stretched to the limits of its meaning)  is now being used to silence people in the judiciary who hold Mr Page’s view. This has been done by an allegedly ‘Conservative’ minister.  How long before the law is used to silence private citizens for doing so?

 

So that’s the bit that deals with the state’s ‘general scorn for conservative Christianity’, as I mentioned. Now, what about its ‘quivering obsequiousness’ to Islam?

 

Well, first of all I ask you to wonder if a Muslim magistrate, expressing the same opinion, would be in the same sort of trouble?  You only need to ask, to know.

 

Of course, such a  non-event, in which somebody was not reported, not suspended and not sent for re-education would not be recorded and we would not know anything about it (The Mail on Sunday had to fight hard to report the case of Mr Page, in which several recordable events did take place) .

 

But lo! The sun had hardly begun to climb into the Sunday sky before this story emerged:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915253/Christian-nurse-37-says-sacked-harassment-bullying-praying-Muslim-colleague.html

 

A Christian nurse has been disciplined for alleged ‘bullying and harassment’ . Again, can anyone really imagine a case in which a Muslim nurse gets into trouble for praying for a Christian colleague, inviting her to visit events at her mosque and for giving her a book about a Christian who converted to Islam?

 

Under ‘Equality and Diversity’ all religions are equal.  What people don’t seem to grasp is that this is, in effect, the downgrading and disestablishment of Christianity. For if Christianity in Britain is ‘equal’ to Islam, or any other religion (and that has been the explicit law since 2010) , then it is no longer entitled to the standing it once had.

 

This is a simple matter of fact. And of course, in the early years of the cultural revolution, that will involve repeated slapdowns for Christians, until they stop imagining they have any special claim on government or the courts, and at last learn their new and very humble place in multicultural Britain.  

 

Meanwhile, we all know that Islam won’t put up with being treated like that.

 

And Mrs May’s daft ‘anti-Islamist’ laws will end up  strengthening the power of Islam in our country, laws, society and government. You wait and see. 

Why I'm worried by the sight of a Pro-Government Demonstration

I have been on a lot of demonstrations in my life. I greatly regret having taken part in some of them – especially the Nuclear Disarmament marches of the 1960s. I still think I was right to go on some of the others, against racial prejudice, and in protest at the shooting of innocent British subjects in Londonderry in 1972.

 

But I don’t believe I’ve ever been on a pro-government march. And I am filled with a  feeling of strange puzzlement over the rather weird events in Paris on Sunday. What were they demonstrating for?  I’ll come to that.  

 

I’ll be told ‘it was for freedom, democracy, free expression’.

 

Are you sure? (See below) But even if that's actually true, these are self-evident virtues. Nobody (even people who secretly had doubts about free speech and democracy,  as many do in fact, see below) would demonstrate against them.

 

And no doubt I’ll also be told it was ‘against terrorism and murder’.  

 

Once again, who would say he was for such things? The people who favour them have other ways of showing their feelings.

 

All you need to do is subject such talk to the late Roy Jenkins’s   rather neat  test of empty banality. Just ask this question: Could anyone conceivably have said the opposite? If not, then nothing of any significance has been said.

 

We are here, once again, in the rainbow-hued, furry-bunny-and tweety-bird-infested land of Tom Lehrer’s wonderful little satirical song from 1965,  called ‘The Folk Song Army’ :

 

Thus:

‘We are the Folk Song Army.
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.’

 

It was partly the people who were teenagers when Tom Lehrer wrote that who advanced, full of grandiose solemnity, down the streets of Paris on Sunday, though David Cameron’s generation, who didn’t even need to try to be soppy because my lot had made it so easy for them in our teens, were also there.

 

My favourite participants in this march for virtue were King Abdullah of Jordan, and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority.  Jordan, where I have spent some happy days,  is indeed far less frightful than most Arab Muslim regimes, in the torture and freedom of speech stakes. But that’s precisely the problem. By any other standard, especially those of Western Europe, it’s terrible.

 

The Palestinian Authority is one of the few entities which has managed to establish a very bad record for such things even before it has attained statehood. It’s not terribly good at religious tolerance, either.    

 

 

Here are some links and details for those interested : Jordan ranks 120^th out of 178 countries in the 2010 Press Freedom index maintained by reporters Without Borders. Amnesty international is concerned about torture in Jordan http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/jordan

And http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-jordan-2013

Torture is likewise not unknown in the prisons of the Palestinian Authority (see P.17 here

http://jij.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hidden-Injustices.-Human-Rights-in-the-PA-7.4.13.pdf )

And freedom of the press, speech, assembly and expression are strongly constrained there as well (see pp 19-22 of the above document), likewise freedom of religion ( see pp 22-24 of the above).

 

Little is done on Palestinian media (though they are far from free) to restrain anti-Semitic attacks ( I put this mildly):

http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=786

 

And before anyone tries to make an Arabs-vs Israel issue out of this, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israel has of course rightly come under heavy criticism for  its often appalling behaviour in occupied territory,  and its unequal treatment of its Arab minority within its own borders, though I think its record on press freedom and freedom of speech is pretty good.

 

Yet these three leaders, plus a platoon of Eurocrats, were in the front line of the Paris March.  So it couldn’t really be called an unambiguous statement about freedom.

 

And then again, who was absent, who might have been expected to be there,  if it was really about democracy?

Well, this is awkward, and I have once again found it hard to pin down the exact nature of the problem (see my article about Arseniy Yatsenyuk, about whose interesting TV interview in Berlin I am also still making enquiries ).

 

But Marine Le Pen, whose National Front party scored 25 % in France’s Euro elections and who is personally running at around 30% in the polls, a bit more than two years before the next presidential election, was not there.

 

Why not? Even if you loathe her, she is a considerable political figure.If the march was truly in favour of democracy, the rule of the people,  she had as much right to be there as several people who were there, if not more.

In fact, Mlle Le Pen ( or is Madame? She’s been married and divorced twice) would beat every major French political figure (including M.Hollande, and M.Sarkozy, who were both present at the forefront of the march)  in the first round of a French presidential election, according to a recent survey

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11078493/Boost-for-far-right-Le-Pen-as-poll-finds-she-would-triumph-in-presidential-election.html

 

So why wasn’t she there? She says she ‘wasn’t invited’, and French journalists seem to agree, some of them saying this was a mistake on the part of President Hollande. I'm not sure it was (see below). I think his mistake is quite different. 

 

Obviously, she didn’t have to be ‘invited’ if she merely wished to turn up as a private individual. Some accounts suggest that President Hollande actually intimated to her that she was welcome to take part as such a private individual.  

 

But this is silly. Of course she was, and so was anyone in Paris that day. So, of course, was President Hollande and so was our Prime Minister. But of course *they* didn’t march as private individuals, because they knew they would be welcome in the front rank. Imagine the scenes of woe and fury if Mr Cameron had been told he was 'welcome' to join the normal, standard-class crowd.

 

I think we may be sure that some sort of official invitation and pass would have been required to get anywhere near the front row.

 

The reports I’ve seen don’t make it clear if Marine Le Pen directly asked to be there, and was directly snubbed, or if she just assumed that the absence of an invitation meant she was unwelcome, or something in between. This being France, I’d suspect it was the third.

 

The fact remains that one of France’s most prominent political figures wasn’t in the front rank, and wouldn’t have been welcome if she’d tried to be there.

 

I’d be interested to know what treatment was accorded to the other French minority parties and their leaders, including the Communists and the non-Communist left.

The problem civilised people have with the French National Front is mainly caused by Marine Le Pen' s father, Jean-Marie. 

He memorably described the gas chambers of the German extermination camps as a ‘minor point in the history of the Second World War’.  In my view, no civilised, Christian person could say or think such a thing. 

 

I think the case against Jean-Marie Le Pen, is quite straightforward. He will carry the burden of such statements to the grave. His daughter, not directly tainted in this way, even so carries the burden of her father, and the party he founded,  which links her and her movement to the unlovely past of the French Right, and its despicable and unexpiated behaviour under the German occupation.

 

I'm emphatically not saying Marine le Pen should have been there. I wouldn’t want to march arm-in-arm with Marine Le Pen in any direction or for any cause. The trouble is that the main opinion she claims to speak for is reasonably held by huge numbers of French men and women, and for good reason. They wouldn’t vote for her if they were offered a more civilised alternative. But they are not offered it, so they do and they will vote for her.   

 

What I want to see is for ‘mainstream’ politicians and media to stop scorning the view she claims to speak for – opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism. They need to admit they have been wrong, and reverse these policies.  Until they do, they feed her and the National Front. By the way, I should note here that France is just as guilty of multiculturalism as Britain. Despite  posing as a stern Republican secular state, with illiberal, unenforceable gimmicks such as bans on face-veils,  in practice France has permitted the growth of separate solitudes, in which an entirely Muslim culture has grown up on the edges of every major city, especially Paris. 

 

The point remains that the exclusion from the march of Marine Le Pen removes one if its main claims – to be representative of the whole of France. It specifically was not representative of perhaps 30% of the French population and would have been very uncomfortable, and possibly noisily divided,  if their representative was there.

 

What else didn't the march stand for? In my view,  the growing clamour for more and better ‘security’ against terror – plus what I suspect will turn out to be exaggeration of the level of planning and organisation in last week’s murders – also removes the march’s claim to be in support of liberty . So, of course, does the presence of heads of repressive states abroad.

 

In fact, the most worrying thing about this march, and the imitators it will no doubt have in other countries where Islamist commit atrocities, is that it will make it easier for government to introduce the renewed attacks on liberty which they itch to implement, and for which such events provide the pretext. In the end, when we have all moved on to something else,  this may be its main legacy.

The sinister, screeching mob who want to kill free speech (And no, I DON'T mean the Islamist terrorists in our midst)

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else.

We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre.

Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs.

Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation.

The Prime Minister, whose government was busy exploiting the tragedy to shore up the (already vast) snooping powers of the State, said it was not the day to make political arguments.

Why ever not? What could be more political than discussing how to defend ourselves against this sort of crime? If it is not political, then why is he talking about it at all, instead of leaving the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury?

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, a hungry headline-seeker and reliable sucker for any scheme to diminish freedom that her civil servants drop on her desk, said Mr Farage was ‘irresponsible’.

Why? Was he any less irresponsible than the chief of that sinister organisation MI5, who seized his chance to make our flesh creep with scare stories, and simultaneously apologise in advance for not actually being able to protect us?

Dame Tessa Jowell squeaked that the Ukip leader’s remarks were ‘sickening’. Why? Ed Miliband, whose very job as Leader of the Opposition depends on the belief that disagreement is a good thing in a free country, moaned that Mr Farage was ‘seeking to divide us’.

The Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg said Mr Farage was ‘making political points’ on the ‘back of bloody murders’.

Well, who wasn’t? A sanctimonious unanimity descended on politics and the media. ‘Je suis Charlie,’ everyone said. It was an issue of liberty, we all said. They can’t silence us, stop us drawing cartoons, etc etc etc.

Great mountains of adjectives piled up on every corner, much like those hills of flowers and teddy bears we like to place at the scenes of tragedies.

You can feel the presence of the snarling conformist mob, waiting for some dissenter on whom they can fall, kicking and biting. So-called social media, in fact an intolerant and largely brainless electronic mob, has made this much worse since the sad death of the Princess.

We should stand up to them. It is especially strange that this conformism claims to speak in the name of freedom, when in fact it doesn’t much like freedom at all.

I suggest that we actually think about this. Of course, we all deplore the murder and grieve for the dead and the bereaved. I don’t need David Cameron or Tessa Jowell to tell me that, thanks.

But for the rest, there’s quite a lot of posing going on. Very few newspapers, magazines or TV stations have published or ever will publish the cartoons of Mohammed that Charlie Hebdo printed.

Let us be frank. One major reason for this is fear. We know that Muslims take this very seriously, and that some of them take it very seriously indeed.

Let us agree it was brave to publish these images. That’s easy for me. I know I wouldn’t do it, and I readily acknowledge that I am a coward.

But it also required compulsory bravery on the part of others, especially the police officers, some of them Muslim, laudably and selflessly guarding people they may not have liked or approved of. Not to mention all the others caught in the crossfire.

 And what was the purpose of this bravery? What cause, anywhere in the world, was advanced by it? Surely the point of bravery is that it is self-sacrificial for a purpose, to save others? Who was saved by this?

As for freedom, here’s an interesting thing. The French Leftist newspaper Liberation reported on September 12, 1996, that three stalwarts of Charlie Hebdo (including Stephane ‘Charb’ Charbonnier) had campaigned in their magazine to collect more than 170,000 signatures for a petition calling for a ban on the French National Front party. They did this in the name of the ‘Rights of Man’.

You, like me, may dislike the National Front greatly. But lovers of liberty simply do not seek to ban parties they do not like.

This is a double paradox. The French National Front exists mainly because a perfectly reasonable concern about mass immigration was sneeringly dismissed by the mainstream French parties. Something similar is happening in Germany, where large demonstrations against ‘the Islamisation of the West’ in many cities have been scornfully attacked by that country’s elite.

If reasonable calls for restrictions on immigration had been heeded when they were first made, right across Europe, would we now be in the mess we are in? If it is officially regarded as irresponsible, or ‘exploitation’, or ‘sickening’, or ‘divisive’ to say this, then we do not live in freedom, and those who claim to speak in its name are not telling the truth.

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If Frau Angela Merkel’s Germany does not dominate Europe, then why does everyone else in the EU toady to her and beg her for favours? The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means. Stop pretending otherwise.

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A fond farewell to an old friend and colleague of mine, the great industrial reporter Barrie Devney, who died recently. 

In the days when the whole country was convulsed by strikes, he was liked and trusted by both sides in many bitter disputes. 

Barrie’s father was a bus conductor and his mother ran a sweetshop, but he ended up on first-name terms with Cabinet Ministers. I think that’s at least partly because he grew up in the age of grammar schools, that great open door which our politicians shut and sealed.

 

 

A SIMPLE SOLUTION TO 'SECRET JUSTICE' 

Secret justice isn’t justice. Whether in the family courts or in the criminal courts, it is time it came to an end.

The law that allows a person to allege rape in secret, and remain unknown for ever, is particularly intolerable. The case of Mark Pritchard MP is just the latest ordeal faced by an innocent man whose accuser has lifelong anonymity.

Those who seek this protection should be asked to apply the same rule to themselves. They should be told that, if their accusation is dismissed by a jury, they will then face automatic prosecution for perjury, in which they will be named if convicted, while the alleged rapist will not.

If they are happy with this arrangement, then they should keep their anonymity. If not, not. Perjury, in its way, is as foul a crime as rape.

The simpler solution is to stick to the laws of natural justice, and have everything in the open.

 

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If Dave and his pals are our 'clever elite' why does Nigel make them look so stupid?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The only interesting things about Douglas Carswell’s switch from the Tory Party to Ukip are that it took him so long and that he has acted alone. Any thinking person has been able to see for years that the Tory Party hates conservatives. It is a roadblock, not a road, championing the elite against the people.

It is kept in being only by the BBC and various dodgy billionaires, who provide it with airtime and money out of all proportion to its real support. It has no actual aims except office at all costs.

It has no actual policies either, only negative smear campaigns, falsely portraying Ukip as mad Nazis, or Ed Miliband as some kind of Trotskyist loony.

The party leader has never pretended to be anything other than he is – the heir to Blair. That is why so much of the Left-wing media prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband.

Mr Cameron’s promise of a referendum on EU membership is worthless three times over. First, nobody can rely on his word after his broken promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Second, Mr Cameron could  not win a Westminster majority in 2010, and there is even less chance of his doing so next May, as he well knows. He could promise paradise and be sure he would never have to deliver it.

Third, does anyone seriously think that a referendum on EU membership could be or would  be conducted fairly in a country whose main source of news is the BBC, and whose whole media establishment is pro-EU?

As I write, I have in front of me the sad relics of the 1975 referendum on the same subject. I had a narrow escape. I had meant to vote to stay in. But I voted ‘No’  (to leave) after my officially impartial local newspaper delayed a story I had written on the eve of the vote because it would have harmed the ‘Yes’ campaign.

Months of brainwashing were cancelled out by this sharp personal experience of the ‘Yes’ campaign’s instinctive and necessary dishonesty. If it didn’t lie about its real aims, it would never get any support. The whole thing was rigged from the start (as Mr Cameron’s would be).

There are no laws to stop this. In 1975, the state used taxes to pay for and send out two pamphlets urging a ‘stay in’ vote – one from the Government and one from  the ‘Yes’ campaign’ – but only one from the ‘No’ campaign.

Read them now and the ‘Yes’ material is often dishonest drivel, including a false claim that the threat of economic and monetary union ‘has been removed’. Not exactly. The ‘No’ pamphlet, by contrast, is prophetic and truthful.

But in 1975, nobody foresaw that the EU would one day abolish British passports and force us to throw open our borders to legions of low-paid workers from the former communist bloc. Nor could they have known that the EU would be aggressively fomenting a new war with Russia, using our money to do so.

Brussels distributed more than £300 million of taxpayers’ money in Ukraine between 2007 and 2013. It went to all kinds of lucky recipients, so it is no great surprise that Kiev blossomed with EU flags last winter during the violent mob putsch which so many idiots in the West supported.

They were generally the same idiots who supported the ‘Arab Spring’, and so helped plunge Libya and Syria into a sea of blood and fire, and to launch ‘Islamic State’. Now these idiots are well  on the way to starting the biggest European war since 1945, and are busy blaming Russia for having the effrontery to defend itself against this blatant aggression.

It really is time that we understood that those in charge of this country have no idea what they are doing. Even Nigel Farage has more of a clue about how the world works than our supposedly clever elite.

And yet those who could make a difference still cling to the Tory nurse for fear of finding something worse. Well, what could be worse than bankruptcy, uncontrolled mass immigration and war?

Volcanic panic was all hot air

Remember the 2010 ash cloud panic,  when thousands of flights were halted by an invisible (and in my view non-existent) volcanic peril?

Well, don’t worry about the latest rumblings in Iceland. Quietly, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Met Office and the airlines have changed their rules so that if it happens again, most planes will fly.

They’ll never admit it, but I suspect this is as close as they’ll come to confessing that they over-reacted wildly in 2010.

Politically correct - and totally wrong

Some credit must go to the ex-MP Denis MacShane for admitting that, ‘as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie’, he may have kept too quiet about the treatment of girls and women by members of the ‘Muslim community’.

But would he have made this confession if he had not been brought low by the expenses scandal and had nothing to lose? I tend to agree he was the victim of highly selective justice, but I also  recall him lecturing me for alleged xenophobia when he was still on the political career ladder.

I am anything but politically correct, but I  freely confess that I am scared of the destructive, unreasoning power of the politically correct lobby. They have prevented the proper exposure of much wrongdoing – and they still do so.

Nick Clegg is the only one confused about sex

We've had sex education in this country since the 1950s, expanding rapidly from coy biological diagrams to funky cartoon depictions of the sex act, and the stretching of condoms over countless bananas by giggling  teens.

The only thing that can’t be advocated in  these sessions is heterosexual marriage.

Hilariously, the original idea was that this would reduce teen pregnancy and sexual diseases.

But these diseases have gone up steadily ever since  sex-ed was introduced, though massacre-scale abortions and taxpayer-funded morning-after pills for all have finally begun to get pregnancies down.

Now Nick Clegg wants more sex education.

May  I suggest an experiment? Let’s try not having any for a few years and see what happens.

There can’t be anyone left in Britain over the age of seven who doesn’t know how babies are made.

British diplomats in Washington have  got into trouble for making jokes about British troops burning the White House  during the War of  1812 between our  two supposedly friendly nations.

Let me say it again: there is no ‘special relationship’. Americans don’t  love us. It’s long  past time for us to declare independence  – from them.

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