PETER HITCHENS: All that's missing from this sorry line-up is a seat for Humpty Dumpty

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

There this feeble Politburo hunches, squeaking amid the Elizabethan grandeur of Chequers, a government committed to a task most of them hate. Even Boris Johnson doesn’t really want to leave the EU.

‘Brexit means Brexit,’ intones the Prime Minister. But this slogan seems to have escaped from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where Humpty Dumpty proclaims that words mean what he says they mean.

If I were her, I’d be scared of the months to come. France, our ancient rival, has spotted that nobody in London has decided what we really want. 

As we dither, they will undermine us. Before long it will be clear that either we exit the EU single market and take our chances, or do a deal under which we stay, more or less, under Brussels rule.

France wouldn’t be able to bully a government committed to departure, backed by a parliamentary majority. 

Such a government could be genuinely tough in talks, because it had a real, much desired aim.

But this lot? As Winston Churchill said of a similarly soggy Cabinet in 1936, they are ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity’.

From behind them come the endless whispers, especially from the USA, which drove us into the EU in the first place, that we might ‘walk back’ the decision. 

Plus there are the mutterings of the Civil Service, the diplomats, and the BBC.

These are tricky times. Chairman May, who claims to admire the first Queen Elizabeth, may find that she faces nearly as many foes as that cunning monarch did, at home and abroad. 

But the most dangerous ones will be among the smiling faces round the Chequers table. 

She is not there because she is strong but because – for the moment – nobody else is stronger.

Cowardly truth about Oxford's state school 'success'

Oxford University boasts of increasing its state school intake to 59.2 per cent. How cowardly of it. On the same day we learned that most boys (50.46 per cent) leave state primary school without reaching the Government’s pretty basic standards in reading, writing or maths. Many will never catch up.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, it’s either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives, surrounded by expensive houses or open only to churchgoers; or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools; or they have private tutors; or they have been given special treatment and are not really up to Oxford’s standards.

In the days before ‘comprehensive’ schools, Oxford’s non-public school intake was rising fast without any of these tricks or reduced standards – from 38 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent by 1965. 

If grammar schools had survived, many reckon it would soon have reached 70 per cent, and maybe higher. Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars. 

But we are at the mercy of crude egalitarians. The supposedly Tory Government continues to employ Alan Milburn, the Blairite former Cabinet Minister and (so far as I know) unrepentant student Marxist.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, regularly attacks the privilege of private education, though never that of the socially exclusive pseudo-comprehensive state schools favoured by well-off Leftists.

As head of the creepy quango the Social Mobility Commission, he cranks out regular reports claiming that public school toffs rule the world. He’s just got lots of headlines by claiming that City bankers still discriminate against applicants who wear brown shoes.

His evidence for this? A 15-year-old book about the death of the traditional banking industry, by a man whose name his report misspells, and another book on the City by a Dutch expert on the Middle East.

People do believe what they want to believe, I find. 

It's official: The British bobby IS dead

My ‘I told you so’ department is now back from a much-needed holiday, after a long summer of full-power gloating and smirking. Immediately it has new work to do. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has (after 50 years) finally grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished.

Congratulations, HM Inspector! Well spotted! Even so, he buried it in his complacent survey report, where among all the politically correct stuff, it reveals on page 38 that one third of us have not seen a uniformed police officer on foot in their area in the past year – in the past two decades, in my case. 

Even this fact is turned into a PC lecture about ‘more deprived areas’. One in four say they see one once a month. If so, he was probably nipping into Costa Coffee for a flat white.

So what are they doing instead? As we learned again last week, car pursuits seem to appeal far more than plodding the pavement deterring crime and disorder. Are these pursuits – which in some years have led to as many as 20 innocent deaths – even remotely worth the risk?

But while resources are available for such chases, what of shopping centres such as The Stow in Harlow, where a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was violently (and fatally) attacked? Gangs of menacing youths smoking cannabis, that peaceful drug Sir Richard Branson wants to legalise, have been patrolling The Stow for months, promoting fear and disorder.

But police – as everywhere – seem to have paid little attention to either the menace or the illegal drug abuse. Now, too late, they are present – for a while. And there is a lot of grandiose stuff about a ‘hate crime’. 

Maybe, maybe not, but it might also be ‘Dope Crime’, that growing category, and also a ‘Neglect Crime’, the sort of thing that happens on streets which the police have quietly ceded to the violent and lawless.

Can there be any simpler way of putting this? Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity that can just be withdrawn. 

People living with pain and fear cannot be deliberately ignored by those trained and paid to help them.

 

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It's no Surprise that Police have Joined the Defeatists on the Issue of Drugs

Most people don’t understand the state’s policy on drugs and so are baffled and impressed when police officers call for weaker drug laws. There is in fact nothing surprising about this. The police have not, for many years, been the tough moral force we imagine them to be, and the law has not been the uncompromising boundary between good and evil which we imagine it to be:

In reply to an article by the former undercover policeman Neil Woods, calling for surrender to the drug legalisation lobby, I wrote the following for the Mail on Sunday:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3761724/I-ve-seen-brutality-gangs-close-attempts-life-s-time-draw-line-undercover-cop-makes-controversial-plea-end-war-drugs.html

There’s no reason to be shocked by police officers who want to give up on fighting drugs by concentrating on dealers alone. They’ve been wasting their time doing this futile thing for 40 years. They’ve failed utterly. Who can blame them if they’re sick of it?

But that doesn’t mean that surrendering to the drug legalisation lobby is the right response. All this macho undercover stuff misses the point completely.

Why are the dealers evil in the first place? If they were selling soap, who would care? The things that make them wicked are their products, which ruin the lives of those who buy them, and the lives of their families. Drugs do their damage when people buy and then use them.

Yet for decades the courts have been treating the major crime of drug possession as unimportant. And the police have got the message and seldom even bother to arrest anyone for it. Why plunge into the ghastly paperwork of an arrest when the result will be a discharge or a tiny fine?

Some forces openly say they cannot be bothered to act against possession. Others undermine the law by permitting the open ‘testing’ of illegal drugs for ‘quality’ at festivals. In April this year a BBC Freedom of Information request showed that arrests for cannabis possession in England and Wales had dropped by 46% - almost half - since 2010.

This weakness comes from the very top, despite frequent noisy claims by politicians to be ‘tough’. The Tory Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, told magistrates in October 1973 to stop sending people to prison for cannabis possession.

This approach has been going on by stealth since the Wootton Report recommended it in 1969. As long ago as February 1994, John O’Connor, former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad, said ‘Cannabis is a decriminalised drug.’

Nor is it just cannabis. In July 2008 the Tetrapak heir Hans Kristian Rausing and his wife Eva were arrested and charged with cocaine and heroin possession after Mrs Rausing tried to take the drugs into the US Embassy in London. Two weeks later, all charges were dropped.

It was claimed at the time that the pair had been given privileged treatment, but there is no evidence that this is so. Figures obtained by Nicola Blackwood MP showed that fewer than one in ten Class ‘A’ drug users are imprisoned for possession.

Real toughness does not involve hanging out with violent gangsters. It involves resisting the huge media and political power of the drugs lobby and punishing the

people who really drive the global drug trade – the selfish, law-breaking users who supply the money. This policy once worked well here, and still works well in both Japan and South Korea, where possession is prosecuted and firmly punished and drug abuse is far lower than in Britain. What a pity that the subtle, oily spokesmen of the drugs legalisation lobby have now succeeded in demoralising the police. 

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

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

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

Holy smoke! I've made the Church retreat

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

Paintball plod taking on the wrong enemy

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

 

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

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roll up for Theresa's street theatre! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A solution to 'terror' that no one cares about

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one ever trusts a Robocop

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

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

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

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Shock New News - Another Blazingly Obvious Thing is True

The University of the Blazingly Obvious (Cambridge branch, this time) has once again produced evidence that what we all know is true. A visible police presence on the streets changes the way people behave

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3641248/What-surprise-Putting-bobbies-beat-really-does-cut-help-cut-crime.html

Actually,  nobody ever denied this. The people who together arranged for the abolition of preventive foot patrolling in this country (in the late 1960s, and described in detail, in my 2004 book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’) had no evidence that their changes would make things better. Rather the contrary. They just did it anyway.

Given that police manpower was much *lower*  in total and per head in those days, it is quite paradoxical to note that one of the main reasons they advanced for abandoning foot patrols was a supposed shortage of manpower.

Here’s a shorter version of the manpower chart I provide on p.59 of ‘The Abolition of Liberty’ (Home Office and NSO sources):

1901: Population (England and Wales)  32.5 million; Police strength(England and Wales) 42,484

1911: Population: 36 million. Police 51,203

1921: Pop 37.9 million; police 56,914

1931: Pop 40 million; police 58,656

1941: Pop (estimated) 41.75 million ; police 56,193

1951: Pop 43.75 million; police 63,116

1961: Pop 46.17 million; police 57,161

1964-70: Preventive Foot patrols largely abolished by Home Office diktat.

1971: Pop 48.56 million; police 95,759

1981: Pop 49 million; police 118,081

1991: Pop 49.9 million; police 125,294

1995: Population figures not available; police 124,710

1999: Population figures not available; police 123,051

I have compiled the following update from current and recent newspaper and official reports: In 2014 the estimated population of England and Wales was 57.4 million : police 128,351

Police officer numbers peaked in September 2009 at 144,353. But despite a fall from that peak, numbers are still greatly higher, in total and per head, than they were in 1965, just before the police gave up preventive patrolling and adopted a reactive, fire-brigade policy towards crime. In fact this wrong-headed policy seems to have been accompanied by a huge increase in officer numbers. The more there are of them, the less we see them.

I should note here, as I always do, that the police, since the 1960s, are not just much more numerous but have also been relieved of several onerous tasks. They no longer enforce parking rules. They have closed scores of police stations, and have ceased to staff many of the remaining stations outside normal working hours. They no longer escort prisoners to and from court. They are no longer responsible for checking the security of commercial premises. They have handed over their prosecuting role to the Crown Prosecution Service. What’s more, they have been supplemented by many thousands of non-uniformed back office staff, who did not exist before the 1960s.

Liberals have a habit of claiming their demands are based on ‘evidence-based’ policies (which unusually only true if you don’t examine the alleged evidence, which is often of Frummish standards) . I cannot think of a policy (apart from the restoration of grammar schools)  for which there is more evidence than the crying need to get the police out of their cars and offices, and back on the streets and on preventive regular foot patrol.

Stealing your Freedom

In that wonderful mysterious way, a programme about diminishing liberty which I made long ago for Channel Four's 'Dispatches' series has (almost wholly) re-emerged on the Internet. The beginning, in which I and Maya Evans together read out the names of soldiers killed inn the Iraq War, is sadly missing. The rest is here

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4fDi1733XY&feature=youtu.be

 

Some of it is out of date. The campaign to get us to accept identity Cards has (for the moment) been beaten. Much of the rest remains true.

 

 

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

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jailed... for a very odd non-crime 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One more lie in the drugs 'war' 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

*****

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

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

******

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The Origins of Political Correctness in the Police Force

After getting the usual wave of silly, resentful attacks from police officers, for daring to criticise their complacent and liberal nationalised industry, I looked out this old article from the Mail on Sunday of 27th July 2004, written nearly 12 years ago. This is before discontent with modern policing was as widespread as it is now, and also before the police had been wholly revolutionised by the post-Macpherson inquisition and many officers from the old tradition were still in positions of responsibility. It explains a lot. 

 

You may sometimes wonder why modern police officers are so word-perfect in the language of liberal political correctness. You may be puzzled as to how a generally conservative organisation, which once chased thieves and bad people in a fairly straightforward way, has suddenly become so keen on pursuing racism, homophobia and the other thought-crimes that obsess political radicals. Here is part of the answer. They have been carefully and systematically trained in the Newspeak of the New Left, who know very well just how influential the trusted blue uniform of the British police constable is. I have been shown a document that has for some years been used to train officers in what is called 'Community Awareness'. It smacks of the re-education camp and the thought police, and about half the people of this country would find it quite disturbing. The other half, who have grown up since ultra-liberal ideas took over the schools and most of the media, may not be so surprised. The progress of the cultural revolution over the past two decades is so gigantic that the whole idea of what is shocking and what is not has altered. One part of our country barely understands what the other one thinks any more. But where the two nations clash in any state-controlled body or big company, it is the new thinking that always seems to win. See what you make of it. The booklet, originally produced by Kent Police in 1999, has been copied by some other forces and, I'm told, is typical of the sort of course officers must undergo. It is currently being revised to take account of - you've guessed it - European Union directives on religion and sexual orientation. It is clever and subtle. It is what it does not quite say that is most worrying. I believe the assumption behind it is that many police officers - too young to be retired or otherwise easily got rid of - are guilty of crude prejudices and must be made to feel ashamed of them. If they bridle at a course such as this, then they will wreck their careers because their chief constables have plainly put their authority behind the ideas in it. But if they submit to it, they will ever afterwards be tamed and neutered. It opens with a 'self-assessment' quiz. The student is invited to agree or disagree with such statements as 'The UK is a multicultural society', 'Everyone has some prejudices', 'I will always challenge inappropriate language or behaviour', and 'We must adapt our policing practices to suit various cultures'. The instructions say: 'Answer as honestly as you can.' At the end of the booklet, the quiz is repeated. There is a suggestion that the student should go back and look at his original answers. You would have to be a prize fool not to realise that you are expected to have shifted from one end of the spectrum to the other as a result of ploughing through the pages in between. It is courses such as these, I suspect, that have led to the new climate of fear in which officers are afraid of speaking openly even among formerly trusted colleagues in case they are denounced for some incorrect slip-up, and so lose their jobs and even their pensions. Certainly, I am amazed and distressed by the number of serving police officers who write to me about the state of the force and beg me not to identify them in any way. Yet it is so hard to pin down the insidious nature of this material. You catch it on the edge of a remark, passing by so fast that - if you are not paying attention - you don't realise the importance of it. Take, for instance, the section on Britain as a multicultural society. All the facts are correct, but the way they are presented is thoroughly questionable. Yes, Romans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans and Jews all came to or lived on these islands in the previous 2,000 years. But from 1066 until very recently, there were very few immigrants of any kind to this country, and Britain developed its own distinct national character - to which those immigrants adapted. But the booklet tries to suggest this has always been a diverse, multicultural country. 'The whole history of Britain's population is one of ebb and flow of different peoples and tribal groups,' it claims. For the most important 900 years of Britain's history, from 1066 to the Sixties, this simply was not true, and is the reason for our unique language, customs, institutions, religious opinions, laws - and our unique ability to sustain policing by consent, by unarmed officers. It is only since the Sixties that the reformers have sought to change the country to suit the supposed wishes of migrants, rather than requiring migrants to conform to local customs. What would happen, I wonder, to an officer who had the nerve to point this out to the 'Community and Race Relations Training Department'? The booklet then asks, 'Is there any such thing as a "True Brit"?' and replies that 'the historical background and cultural diversity of Britain suggests this is an impossible question to answer'.This quiet demolition of a cherished loyalty to a proud and rather enviable civilisation seems to me to be as cruel as it is untrue, and the very heart of what is wrong with this creepy brainwashing. Much of the rest of it seems designed to demonstrate that there is almost no way to avoid being racist, however hard you try. The use of the expression 'non-white' is allegedly 'felt to be offensive and racist' by unnamed persons because it 'defines people by what they lack and implies that being white is normal/superior'. Perhaps for those baffled as to why a Black Police Association is encouraged whereas a White Police Association would be (rightly) denounced, the pamphlet asks: 'Can minorities be racist?' The answer appears to be: 'Not really.' It says: 'Minorities may of course have prejudices relating to the majority group and may sometimes act on these. Whether it is appropriate to refer to this as racism is debatable (remember that Racism = Prejudice + Power). If it is so referred a more appropriate term would be "reactive racism". 'In this sense the minority is reacting to majority power or dominance . . . by possibly using derogatory remarks for whites and promoting the image "black is beautiful", for instance.' The experienced constable or sergeant confronted with this knows one thing for certain - that he can never be sure, for the rest of his time in uniform, that he will not commit some sort of speech crime. He may also quietly conclude that the really wicked aspect of racism - hate and fear based on skin colour - is not actually being challenged here. Such emotions are excused if they are felt by anyone apart from white English people. But what can he do, by himself? Inch by inch, piece by piece, the world he grew up in has been dismantled and replaced by another. The same thing is happening to almost everyone he knows. And so, the very people who would once have complained loudly about 'political correctness gone mad' find themselves enforcing exactly that.

 

What's the point of the police if they're scared of the dark?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What would happen to an electricity company which failed to supply power? What would happen to a water company whose taps ran dry? What would happen to a phone company whose lines were dead?
They’d all go out of business and be replaced by better competitors. But what happens to a police force that fails to enforce the law? Nothing at all.
Last weekend the people of the pleasant Somerset market town of Frome were kept awake all night by the selfish thumping and yowling of an illegal rave party. Plenty of people called to complain, an estimated 400.
But they were wasting their time. The Avon and Somerset Police decided it would not be ‘safe and proportionate’ to do anything about it. Under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, the inconsiderate event was (rightly) illegal and the police had powers to shut it down.
But the paid guardians of the peace only managed to bring it to an end at 9.30 the following morning, by which time even the selfish morons taking part must have been sick of the racket they were making.
A police spokesman whined that they could have acted if they’d known in advance, but ‘if it has already started and there are a large number of people on the site, an assessment has to be made whether safe and proportionate action can be taken at that moment.
‘There were a large number of people in attendance and we needed to have the right number of resources in place to make sure they could leave without putting themselves or others at risk.’
Another spokesman snivelled later: ‘Our decision not to disrupt the rave earlier was based on a number of factors, not least of which was a concern that this was a very large, densely wooded area inside a former quarry with very uneven terrain, that was unknown to us.
‘There were more than 200 people at the rave, many of whom were intoxicated. It would not have been possible for officers to enter the site and seize the sound equipment in the darkness without serious risk of injury to those people at the rave and to police officers.
‘This decision was not based purely on health and safety grounds but also common sense – it was safer and more practical to enter the site during daylight.’
In other words, there were 200 people who were drunk, there were lots of trees, and it was dark. Someone might have got hurt. I am sorry, but my response to this is ‘diddums’.
Consider the grim-jawed face which the police now turn towards us, the public. They stand around scowling with sub-machine guns, stomp about in big boots, stab-vests and baseball caps, display their clubs, Tasers, pepper-sprays and handcuffs to let us know who’s boss, and generally act as if the high street is a war-zone, on the rare occasions when they bother to visit it.
They love to dress up like Star Wars stormtroopers in body-armour and big helmets. They even have their own air force, which enjoys flying round in the small hours, blazing its searchlights into people’s gardens from 1,000ft.
But confronted with 200 boozed-up ravers in a West Country wood, they won’t face them in the dark.
We pay for this non-service. Avon and Somerset police’s annual budget for 2016/17 is £276,075,000. They employ 2,759 officers who cost us £146,383,000 in pay each year. They spend more than a million a year on their share of the ‘National Police Air Service’.
From July 2009 to May 17, 2016, they spent £51,000 on CS Spray (pepper spray) – that’s 5,180 canisters at £9.86 each. They also spent £31,000 on batons at £25 each, and another £1,249,000 on body armour.
BUT despite all this clobber they won’t go into the woods to enforce the law and keep the peace. I’m honestly not sure what they do do. They always say that if people like me, who criticise them, were in trouble, we’d call on them. But would they come when we did? Or might it be too dark?
They’ve all sworn an oath that they will ‘to the best of my power, cause the peace to be kept and preserved’. Do they think they’ve kept it? And if they won’t fulfil their contract with us, why should we continue to pay billions for this unresponsive, arrogant bureaucracy which doesn’t need us, and expects the same in return? The country’s full of decent, dutiful ex-servicemen and women who have proved they don’t mind taking a few risks to serve their country.
Perhaps we should hire them instead.

Another question for dope to answer

Was the terrible killing of 79-year-old Don Lock by the clearly unhinged Matthew Daley avoidable? He was once a gentle, kind young man. What caused his collapse into persecution mania, and hearing voices in his head?
One answer could be cannabis, the potent mind-bending drug which many so wrongly believe to be soft and harmless.
Its use is strongly correlated with mental illness. And a growing number of violent crimes have been committed by known heavy cannabis smokers. It is unofficially decriminalised, and frighteningly easy to obtain in schools and colleges, just when the developing brain is most vulnerable. I have tried to find out if the police even investigated his drug abuse. Their answers are non-committal. His defence lawyers will not even respond to my repeated phone calls and emails.
But if there is a connection between cannabis and this sort of crime, we need to know.

There's no heroism in suicide

Why do BBC bosses love suicide so much? Every hard case of a sick or injured man or woman wanting to end it all gets sympathetic top billing on BBC bulletins. And now the propaganda soap, EastEnders, has treated the fictional suicide of the fictional Peggy Mitchell (played by Dame Barbara Windsor) as a moment of heroism and dignity.
How can I break it to them that this is only one opinion on a contentious subject, and that they are yet again breaching their obligation to be impartial?
Suicide leaves many hard wounds behind, and many people still believe it to be wrong. Much can be done to prevent the dying from suffering, the hospice movement needs all the help it can get, and the BBC could do a lot to promote it.

A risky sales ploy

General Sir Richard Shirreff, until 2014 Nato’s deputy supreme allied commander in Europe, has written a daft pulp thriller claiming that Russia wants war with the West and this might happen next year. He appears to believe this is true.
Well, he’s a red-tabbed general and I’m a middle-aged scribbler who has spent a bit of time in Russia, but I think he’s ludicrously wrong.
Moscow is responding rather cautiously to years of childish, pointless aggression by Nato, which he is encouraging. Should someone with his status really be whipping up war fever like this, especially to promote a novel?

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Lefties are spot on, their precious BBC IS at risk... it may have to lose its bias

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

As I have actually been to North Korea, and lived in Russia, I feel qualified to comment on some stupid remarks by a Leftist BBC favourite, Peter Kosminsky.

Mr Kosminsky, a much-garlanded film-maker, absurdly compared government plans to reform the BBC with the control of the airwaves in North Korea and Russia.

Here’s the thing I noticed about North Korea, and which was true of all the communist states in their pomp (which I saw). Those ridiculous slogans you see everywhere, urging praise for the Great Leader, or acclaiming the Party’s wise rule, have a hard purpose.

What they say to the people is: ‘You are powerless. We can put this insulting, arrogant rubbish on the wall in 8ft letters, and you can do absolutely nothing about it.’

It is a deliberate humiliation of all thinking people.

And the only thing comparable to this in modern Britain is the BBC. Here, it ceaselessly transmits material which many of us believe to be false, propagandist or contentious. Mr Kosminsky said the BBC’s main job is to speak truth to power. But the BBC is power. Who can speak truth to it?

We are compelled to pay for it under the threat of imprisonment, it decides which opinions are approved and which are not. It can and does utterly ignore the views of about half the population.

On many occasions I have spotted clear instances of bias, complained in calm, well-marshalled detail about them, taken them through stage after stage and at the end been told – by the BBC themselves – that they have done nothing wrong.

Many of you will have had similar feelings of powerless fury as you have listened to the Corporation’s presenters, and its dramas and soap operas, despising your morals and tastes, ignoring things you know to be true and important, and treating things as uncontested fact which, let us say, have not been proven.

If you doubt this bias, then listen to the words of several prominent BBC people. Mark Thompson, the then director- general, said in 2010 that the BBC had suffered a ‘massive bias to the Left’.

The distinguished presenter Andrew Marr said the Corporation was ‘a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large’. 

All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’. The equally distinguished John Humphrys has also said: ‘The BBC has tended over the years to be broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative.’

There’s no real dispute about it, and it is quite unjust and wrong. But last week’s White Paper on the BBC offers a tiny spark of hope. The BBC is soon to lose the power to be judge and jury in its own cause. If you pursue your complaint hard enough, it will go to Ofcom, an outside regulator.

I urge you to do as I shall do, and – as soon as it is in place – use this new freedom to the full. My only fear is that Ofcom itself is infected by the same establishment Leftism as the BBC. It will have to prove me wrong. But such small changes can sometimes bring about revolutions.

As much as I mistrust all optimism, I am entitled to hope. Let us all speak truth to BBC power.

 A clear message from Moscow

The Prime Minister’s daft claim that a British exit from the EU could lead to war is not just panic-mongering, but wrong.

The real fault-line in Europe lies between Germany and Russia. It’s amazing how many call the EU ‘Europe’ when it excludes Russia, the biggest country in Europe. In fact, the EU is the continuation of Germany by other means, swelling and spreading eastwards, abolishing frontiers and gobbling up territory as it has so many times before.

Russia, meanwhile, has begun to make it plain – by increasingly spectacular celebrations of its 1945 triumph over Hitler, including a Victory Day parade in Red Square last week – that it will not take much more of this.

After decades of putting up with Western expansionism, and the scandalous transformation of Nato from a defensive alliance into an aggressive one, Moscow’s had enough. If there is a new war in Europe, the EU will be the cause of it, and all its members will be dragged into it.

Contrary to what Mr Cameron said, Britain was far safer when it stayed aloof from these continental quarrels. All our present misfortunes began when we foolishly took sides in the great Russo-German war of 1914.

 

****

Should senior police officers grizzle to the Queen about how a state visit was ‘quite a testing time for me’? Is Her Majesty much interested? She is the Head of State, not some counsellor or grievance expert. 

Do members of the Armed Forces likewise inform her that combat was ‘quite a testing time for me’? I do hope not.

I was more shocked by ‘Gold Commander’ Lucy D’Orsi’s apparent belief that the Chinese state visit was all about her, than by the Monarch’s obvious distaste for the way the Government had made her suck up to the appalling waxworks of the Chinese Politburo.

However ‘testing’ Ms D’Orsi found her dealings with the despotic Chinese goon squad, her Metropolitan Police colleagues seem to have found a way of working happily and willingly with them. Some of us will not forget the shocking way they arrested peaceful protesters and searched their homes, while allowing fake pro-Peking crowds to drown out dissent and block it from view. If this was a test, they failed it.

*****

By the way, I am not a ‘Brit’ – a dismissive term used by Irish- Americans, and am surprised to see David Cameron using the word in a serious speech.

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