Radio 4's Debate on Prison

This debate can now be heard here

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pj2pk

 It lasts 45 minutes, and is obviously edited down from a far longer recording. I make no complaint ( if I cannot take a joke, I shouldn't have joined). I merely point out the difference in nature between my contributions and those of practically everyone else who took part.

 

These are, in my view, twofold. My use of language is incomparably more direct and concise than that of my fellow panellists or of the presenter. Two the principal concern of everyone else on the programme was the effect of prison on its inmates. While this is a matter of importance (and I did not and do not ignore it) this is far less important than its effect on potential wrongdoers, who are deterred from wrong by fear of prison, and on those many people who will become victims of crime if prison fails to deter - and who will be spared this horror if it succeeds.

I continue to be impressed by the lack of self-seeking in Erwin James's attitude towards his past crimes. And I am sorry we had no time to touch on the subject of prison suicides, a dreadful scourge, and a reflection the despair these places create in many of those confined to them for long periods.

 

I have also noticed that my unchallengeable factual statement, that most of those in prison are habitual criminals *long before they get there*, a truth which undermines about 90% of the liberal case in itself is (like my unchallengeable factual statements on the non-existent war on drugs) simply ignored by my opponents and never acknowledged, addressed or rebutted.

 

Such is debate in modern Britain, where moral conservatism is regarded as shocking, counter-intuitive and transgressive (note the point in the debate where my argument about the abolition of the presumption of innocence in many sexual offence cases is dismissed as tangential) .

 

***AS a footnote, I might add that I was telephoned this morning by an arm of the BBC this morning and asked if I would comment on the French ban on 'Burkinis'. When I said ( as any reader of mine would have expected) that I strongly deplored the ban and that he state has no business telling people what to wear, I could feel the researcher's interest waning down the phone line. Oh, actually, no, they didn't want me after all. As a 'right-wing' person, I had been assumed to have a crude and oppressive view. When I failed to provide one, I had no further use for them.

 

 

 

 

PETER HITCHENS: Gold for Synchronised Sunburn and self-delusion goes to...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Imagine a country that isn’t very successful, but wants to boost its image in the world. Its economy is rocky, its cities grubby and run-down. Its education system isn’t much good.
So this country spends huge sums of scarce money and great effort to find young men and women who can win medals in international sporting competitions.
It carefully chooses sports where the competition is weak. It relentlessly drives the chosen athletes. And it works. At home and abroad, its image is transformed.
Its national media go into hysterics over each medal.
The people at home forget for a moment the dreariness of their lives.
The anthem plays and the flag flies high.
The country I am thinking of is East Germany, the self-styled ‘German Democratic Republic’. You may remember the superb figure skater Katarina Witt, who won Winter Olympic gold medals in 1984 and 1988, and a pile of other awards for her ghastly country in the years just before it collapsed in a cloud of rust.
What did her triumphs prove? Nothing much, except that state power can achieve sporting success. In which case, what is so joyous about it?
If sport is about anything, surely it is about individual achievement, not plans, budgets and political prestige.
What could be further from the burning individual talents and grit celebrated in Chariots Of Fire than some Ministry of Sport fulfilling its medal plan?
But what, deep down, is the difference between this episode and Sir John Major’s dash for Olympic gold which has now paid off in Brazil?
In fact, I think our state-sponsored medal programme may be worse in some ways than East Berlin’s because, as a free society, we had the power to question it and we didn’t.
It might also be worth recalling that Sir John’s much-praised initiative was financed mainly by the Lottery – in which a British government for the first time actively encouraged gambling, especially among the vulnerable poor, the main payers of this tax on false hope.
Indeed, Sir John’s legacy of gambling and debt, forced on students in the universities he so wildly expanded, may be his main memorial.
You may say, quite rightly, that I am jaundiced because I couldn’t care less about sport. My sympathies in Rio lie mainly with the empty, wet seats, which beautifully sum up my view of the Olympics.
But even if I were an enthusiast for Underwater Motorcycling, Bovine Ballet or Synchronised Sunburn, or whatever it is we currently lead the world in, I’d still have the same misgivings.
This is what failed and powerless countries do to make themselves feel better.
It is an illusion, and when it ends, things will be worse than they were before.

Tragic Victims of our deal with the devil

Who can fail to be moved and grieved by the sight of a small child in distress? But please do not let your emotions stop you thinking.
The picture of the shocked Aleppo survivor, Omran Daqneesh, like that of the drowned child Alan Kurdi last year, should not be allowed to enforce a conformist opinion on the world.
The death of Alan Kurdi did not mean that it was wise to fling wide the borders of Europe (as Germany’s Angela Merkel now well knows).
The rescue of Omran Daqneesh should not make us side with the bloody and merciless Syrian rebels.
Why is Aleppo a war zone in the first place? Do you know? I will tell you. Syria was a peaceful country until it was deliberately destabilised by Saudi Arabia and its fanatical, sectarian Gulf allies, consumed with hatred for the Assad government and, above all, its ally Iran.
Worse, this monstrous intervention was supported by the USA, Britain and France, all sucking up to the Saudis for oil, money and arms contracts.
In the hope of bringing down Assad, we made a devil’s bargain with some of the worst fanatics in the Middle East, people who make Anjem Choudary look like the Vicar of Dibley.
We know of Britain’s role for certain because of the very strange case of Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish man accused by British authorities of attending a terror training camp in Syria. His trial collapsed in June 2015 because his defence lawyers argued that the terror groups he was accused of supporting had been helped by British intelligence.
The Assad state, as you might expect, defended itself against its attackers, helped in the end by Iran and Russia.
And the war which followed was the ruin of Syria, whose innocent people found their peaceful cities and landscape turned into a screaming battlefield, as it still is.
If you are truly grieved by the picture of poor little Omran, just be careful who you blame.

Anjem Choudary, broadcasting’s favourite Islamist loudmouth, was and is a vain, bloviating, blowhard fraud, another boozy drug-taking low-life posing as a serious person. He found a role and fools to indulge him, many in the same media who now queue up to rejoice at his imprisonment.
But I do not feel safer from terror now that he is locked up. Worse, I feel less safe from Chairman May’s sour-faced surveillance state, which takes a dim and narrow view of free speech and liberty. Choudary has been locked up not for what he did but for what he said. Claims he influenced anyone into crime are thin. Even the sneaky wording of the Terrorism Act, in which he was charged with ‘inviting’ support for IS, is suspicious.
It sounds like ‘inciting’, and is meant to, for incitement to terror and murder is a real crime, even in free countries. But it isn’t the same as ‘inviting’, a much weaker word. You may gloat that Choudary is eating Islamic porridge. But be careful what you gloat over. A law as loose as this could easily be used against anyone the state doesn’t like. I predict that it will be, too.
By the way, I spent several hours last week circling Government offices trying to find out how many such charges there have been – the CPS sent me to the Justice Ministry, they told me to call the Home Office, who sent me back to the CPS. This pathetic pass-the-parcel evasion suggests they don’t care much. This stuff is propaganda, not genuine security.

******

A few days ago I took part in a recorded BBC debate on prisons, What Point Prison?, which will be transmitted on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesday

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07pj2pk

 There was a startling exchange on capital punishment between me and Erwin James, a penitent convicted murderer much admired by liberals, who has now become a distinguished writer on prisons. You may be surprised at what he said.

 

The EU is our own Hotel California: We can check out, but we'll never leave

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I’m sorry to break this to you but it looks as if we’ll have to endure not one but two EU referendum campaigns.
The second one, by the way, will definitely end in a vote to stay in.
The ‘exit’ campaign was last week cunningly taken over by Tories who don’t want to leave the Superstate and will use a vote to leave (if it happens) as the basis for yet another round of negotiations with Brussels.
Boris Johnson and Michael Howard are ancient liberal Europhiles, who have learned how to seduce the Tory Party with speeches that sound Right-wing but aren’t really. It is painful to see this cynical seduction technique at work, and watch the old ladies fall for it.
Neither is what he seems. Lord Howard led a Left-liberal putsch against the genuine EU opponent Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. Mr Johnson is an act, not a politician. He is a keen Europhile, and to conceal it from his fans he will do so many U-turns between now and referendum day that they will look like a series of S-bends.
Both men’s weird declarations of support for Brexit were cunningly hedged.
And the London Mayor was careful to state: ‘I will be advocating vote “leave”... because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.’
Read this carefully (as you always should) and you will realise there’s no clear declaration that he wants our national independence back. But there is a desire for a ‘deal’. Likewise his supposed reversal last Saturday wasn’t really as clear as it looked. Be assured. If there is a majority to leave there will be a second poll and a search for a new deal.
What sort of deal? Lord Howard was more specific. In an article which was lazily reported as a ‘blow for David Cameron’, he explicitly said that he saw a vote to leave as a way of restarting negotiations on how to stay in: ‘There is only one thing that just might shake Europe’s leaders out of their complacency: the shock of a vote by the British people to leave.’
He added: ‘We would be sorely missed. If the UK voted to leave, there would be a significant chance that they would ask us to think again. When Ireland and Denmark voted to reject EU proposals, the EU offered them more concessions and, second time round, got the result they wanted.’
Lord Howard went on to explain how happy he would be for Britain to be a semi-detached part of a two-tier EU – something very much on the cards as the EU moves into its next phase of integration, two or three years hence. ‘We – and others – could say to the integrationists, “We don’t want to stop you doing what you want to do as long as you don’t make us do what we don’t want to do.” ’
You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.
This referendum, which was never supposed to happen at all, is a sham for which I refuse to fall.

What sort of hero condemns women to death?

The BBC’s new thriller The Night Manager must be one of the strangest things ever broadcast. Its apparent hero, played by Tom Hiddleston, is portrayed as a tower of moral purity. Yet the first thing he does is to betray a living, breathing woman (who trusted him with her life because of his honest British appearance) in pursuit of an abstract ideal. Apparently, he hates arms traders so much, this is the sort of thing he does.
Predictably, the woman, played by Aure Atika, is barbarously murdered (in the book, I’m sorry to say, her dog is murdered too, a detail the BBC spared us). The arms dealer, equally predictably, gets away with it.
This skewed moral system in which people claim to be virtuous by having severe, righteous views about foreign countries, seems horribly common among our cultural elite. Is this why our foreign policy keeps getting its head stuck up its own fundament?
Again and again, in pursuit of some supposedly noble goal, we plunge entire countries into lakes of fire and blood, and then stand about looking puzzled and claiming it wasn’t our fault.
Inscribed in stone, above the doors of all government buildings, should be William Blake’s bitterly true maxim: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.’

Country dwellers are often mystified by the appearance of strange little dumps of used fertiliser pellets, which appear now all over  the place by night. I can explain. These are left by the owners of urban cannabis farms (Britain’s most successful and profitable agricultural sector) who dare not use their own bins for fear that even the British police – among the most relaxed in the world on the dope question – might notice and take action against them.

Education that doesn't add up

The reports flood in, as they do almost weekly. The standards of mathematics teaching have plunged disastrously. The professions are dominated by private school products, two years ahead of their state school contemporaries.
Yet nobody ever reaches the obvious conclusion – that we should return to selection by ability in the state system and reopen the great private schools to the taxpayer-funded Direct Grant system which lifted so many poor children to success.
Why are our elite so prejudiced against this obvious remedy? Even on their own terms, their position makes no sense.

Every week I hear more alarming things about our prisons, especially the almost universal availability of mindbending drugs, whose users often become violent. These are now flown into cells, through broken windows, by drones. The authorities seem powerless to stop this.
No surprise there. As we make no effort to stop drugtaking outside prison, it is hardly surprising prisons themselves are even more lawless. Alongside these cases are alarming numbers of mentally ill people, cast out into the non-existent ‘community’ by the wicked decision to close most mental hospitals.
Older, experienced staff are quietly disappearing and turnover among new staff is unsurprisingly high. Huge jails are often left overnight in the charge of tiny numbers of officers.
I predict a major catastrophe soon. And it will be the direct result of decades of liberal penal policy, which uses prison only as a last resort and so ensures that a large number of inmates are hardened criminals, incapable of reform, before they ever get there.

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

 

Prison Doesn't Work - But it Could

I see that David Cameron, the expert of experts on all things, has now swung the brilliant beam of his intelligence towards the problem of our prisons, and the political reporters, also experts on everything, have written about it.

Before we all swoon at his wisdom, I felt a few sceptical remarks might be justified.

I should start this article by pointing out what is widely forgotten, that limited terms in prison, as a punishment for crime, are basically a liberal and progressive idea They only quite recently replaced such things as enslavement or transportation for life, various forms of torture, or slow strangulation in front of a drunken mob followed by gibbeting. It was liberal progressives who designed utopian prisons in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I agree that confinement is, if properly handled, a far better response to crime than such practices.  

But prison can never be nice, and the only question that lies before us is in what way it shall be nasty. Currently, it is very nasty indeed, but for reasons of sloppiness , neglect and thoughtlessness rather than because anyone sees any purpose in this. oddly enough, very nasty people are the best-equipped to handle it and the least afraid of it in its current state. And its effect on our society varies between the dismal and the wholly useless.

Liberals should be more interested in their creation.  Currently it is dying on its feet, and who knows what might replace it when both public and criminals realise that our criminal justice system has pretty much packed up.

Anyone would think there were only two valid positions on prison. The dumb slogan ’Prison works!’, chanted by fake conservatives, and the equally dumb claim that ‘prison is a good way of making bad people worse’, chanted by real liberals.

This is the most complete rubbish. 

Almost nobody who goes to prison in Britain (apart from some homicides) is a first offender.  I have tried and failed to get reliable figures on this, but they are not broken down in a way that allows me to do so. I would calculate that many have committed upwards of 30 crimes before they see the inside of a prison – the first 15 or so completely ignored by the police, the others dealt with by a long, long, ineffectual trail of non-deterrent non-punishments –civil penalties (for shoplifting)  ‘restorative justice’,  cautions, Penalty Notices, probation, fines (unpaid), community service orders (laxly enforced) , suspended sentences (not activated) and finally, in utter exasperation, prison.

 ‘Prison works’ in the sense intended, only during the (often very short) period for which the criminal is confined. After that he is let out again to make life a misery for his neighbours.

Both these slogans, interestingly were first used in this country by Tory Home Secretaries (Michael Howard and David Waddington)  within a few years of each other. I suspect Mr Howard picked it up from the USA, as Michael Gove copied his description of the education establishment as ‘the Blob’ from the American conservative William Bennett.

In this non-debate between two ill-informed and thought-free positions, our prison get relentlessly worse in almost every way – suicides, violent deaths, drug abuse, inmate-on-inmate crime, and overcrowding, squalor and hopeless overcrowding. One report actually admitted some years ago that a prison in Lancashire was, by night,  under the control of criminal gangs. I find it hard to believe that this is not now the case in parts of the system.

There’s also the unending tragedy of seriously mentally ill people (many likely to have become so after their use of illegal drugs whose possession is effectively uncontrolled inside and outside prisons) ending up in prison because our mental hospitals have no room for such people.

A parade of HM inspectors have repeatedly recounted this decline.  Yet nothing ever happens. Governors of prisons, uniquely among public servants are also reasonably free to criticise the state of affairs there, yet it never, ever, gets any better.

And this overcrowding is despite nearly 50 years of kindly liberal regimes, police declassifying huge amounts of crime and ceasing to pursue it, courts declassifying huge amounts of crime and ceasing to try it,  not to mention an increasing reliance on ‘restorative justice’, fines (unpaid) suspended sentences, sentences which are automatically halved as soon as they are passed, and all manner of early release schemes and tagging options, all aimed at keeping the prison population down.

Yet up and up it goes, now around 80,000 in England and Wales. My guess is that if it weren’t for all these desperate measures, it would probably be nearer 250,000, if not more. If all the people whose actions would have been considered imprisonable crimes in 1950 were locked up as they would have been then, we would probably need to turn a remote island into a penal colony to house them. If we had had the criminal justice system of 2016 in 1950, the prisons of that time would have been virtually empty.

14 years ago, while researching my least influential book ‘A brief History of Crime’ (and ‘least influential is saying something, when it comes to my books) I compiled a table of prison populations (it’ s on page 133 of  ‘Brief History’ and page 144 of the revised paperback version ’The Abolition of Liberty’.

It recounts that the prison population first exceeded 70,000 in 2002 (when this figure was thought to be the outer limit of what was manageable).

To make sense of these figures, it necessary note that in 1911-12 the prison population in England and Wales was just under 20,000, fell substantially in the inter-war period, to around 11,000 in 1931 ( a period of great poverty, I might point out to those who claim that poverty causes crime) , and did not reach 20,000 again until 1950. By 1960 it had only managed to reach 27,000.

It is since that date, like most of the more baleful statistics in our society, the numbers have risen with great speed, not explicable by rises in population or other such factors.  By 1970, it had reached almost 40,000. By 1990, it had passed 45,000. In 1999, it was nudging 65,000.

And the key thing in all this is that the greatest rises came in the era when the police and courts were making the greatest efforts to send fewer people to prison, and to let them out sooner.

There will always be talk of ‘rehabilitation’ in these discussions. I know of no evidence that anyone has been ‘rehabilitated’ by prison, a nasty totalitarian concept anyway. Criminals are usually young men, who eventually get too old to fight and run away, and so drop out of crime. This does not represent a change of heart, but rather a change of lungs

Others, often serving long sentences and keen to get out,  win their parole,  and sometimes even job offers, by syrupy conversions to Christianity or similar untestable declarations of supposed remorse and promises that they have mended their ways. Or they become ‘educated’ , not usually in hard subjects. You may take this or leave it. I am not wholly convinced.

To work, prison needs to be rock-hard, punitive, austere, not brutal or callous but a regime of total authority, hard physical work and dull food, deprived of pleasures except when these are allowed as special privileges for the well-behaved, controlled by the authorities rather than by the inmates, drug-free, and encountered early in a criminal’s career.

Long sentences, which I emphatically do not favour, are quite unnecessary in most cases. Six months of a proper prison should be enough to instil a strong desire never to return there in any rational person. I should add that in such a prison the intimidation of one inmate by others would be made virtually impossible.

This regime It might well deter the prisoner(though cannot be guaranteed to do so as some criminals really are incorrigible) but it will certainly deter his criminally-inclined friends, who will see what has happened to him and seek to avoid it. It is these people, deterred by the prisons of the pre-1960 period, who are now not deterred and who are responsible for the great and uncontrollable rise in crime in this country.

Of course, these ideas will not be taken up.  As with all my other sensible prescriptions for this country, I know they are impossible in a country ruled by the egalitarian, relativist dogma which has triumphed everywhere. They conflict with the overriding modern belief that crime is a disease caused by conditions and upbringing, and that we are not responsible for our actions. But I mention them to point out that there is in fact an alternative to the stupid, unproductive pseudo-clash between ‘prison works’ and ‘prison doesn’t work’, which is all you’ll get elsewhere.

Why Do People Get So Worked Up About the Death Penalty?

A glancing reference to the death penalty received more responses than almost anything else I wrote in my MoS column on Sunday. Here and on Twitter people were astonishingly anxious to disagree with me, to trundle out ancient arguments on the subject that have many times been exploded here for anyone who was really interested. Most especially I have disposed of the deeply tedious evasion about unintentionally killing an innocent person, which (as any thoughtful person knows) is not in reality considered an obstacle to any other policy whose general effects are considered good.

 

Why is it that one’s opinion on the execution of a few heinous murderers has become (more or less) the supreme test in our society for who is and who is not a civilised person? There is not the faintest possibility of the death penalty being reintroduced in this country unless and until it becomes a left-wing despotism (it is in such polities that execution is most widely used as a penalty in the modern world – Cuba until recently, the Chinese People’s Republic and Vietnam for example, and of course the USSR ).

 

It is simply not a live issue in our politics and is most unlikely to become one. As I freely admit the conditions under which I would find it acceptable no longer exist in this country, especially proper independent juries whose verdicts must be unanimous.  

I only state my support for it because I refuse to pretend that I accept the feeble, unreasoning, ill-informed and emotive arguments deployed against it, and because (as a former abolitionist) I changed my mind through the study of facts and the exercise of logic. It would be an act of self-betrayal and cowardice to keep my position secret just because it was generally despised. The only parallel is abortion, but the fury on that subject has subsided since the most fanatical  pro-abortionists (young men terrified they might actually have to take responsibility for getting a girl pregnant)  realised that the chances of this happening are now virtually nil. The ritual choruses of women claiming that killing unborn babies is a human right don’t ever have quite the same urgency as the adolescent male’s fear of the nappy, the mother-in-law and the shotgun wedding, now vanished.

 

Asked a little while ago why I described myself as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’ on Twitter I explained that this was because it is in fact the case that quite a lot of left-wing persons (who often have the sketchiest idea of who I am or what I think) do regard me as a hate-figure. Asked to explain why this might be, I concluded that it was because I do not act or speak as if I were ashamed of being a moral or social conservative.

 

I am not apologetic about holding these views, nor am I embarrassed. I regard myself as having a coherent, defensible moral position. I am also quite familiar with the techniques of mockery and raillery used by the left against their opponents, and am happy to use them (rather more fairly and in a more measured fashion) against the Left. Why shouldn’t I?   If I did nothing else but act, speak and think as if I believed what I do believe, and wasn’t ashamed of it, my very existence would still be ‘offensive’ to my critics. I suspect some of them (who say this on Twitter from time to time) genuinely wish I was dead. 

 

For the modern Left is not just about holding left-wing opinions and propagating them in the hope of achieving a socialist society. It is a sort of secular state of grace, in which the person who adopts the full set of ‘correct’ opinions regards himself or herself as morally good, simply by the act of embracing those opinions. It is, I think, a caricature of the Evangelical Protestant belief in Salvation Through Grace Alone, about which I have always had some doubts (well expressed in the General Epistle of St James, especially the Second Chapter, which I once heard read at a memorial service, and which struck me, that day,  so hard in the heart that I could barely think about anything else for some time afterwards). In fact, it is the Left-Wing attitude of ‘Salvation by Correctness Alone’ which has made me wonder all the more about it. But I digress.

 

There’s another religious parallel to this, which is the status known as ‘Dhimmitude’ under which Christians and Jews were in the past permitted to live in Islamic countries.  Though much relieved by the Ottomans, under pressure from Western Christian empires, the rules of the ‘Pact of Umar’ persisted in the Muslim world for many centuries  

I won’t go into the full details of its past enforcement, of dress codes, doorway height, permitted mounts, inferior legal status, the carrying of weapons or the exaction of special and punitive taxes, sometimes accompanied by a ritual public slap in the face. Apart from anything else it varied a great deal from place to place, and many of its victims have left scanty records.

 

Perhaps the most striking restrictions enjoined by this form of tolerance were bans on the repair of existing churches or the building of new ones, or on making noise during funerals. I believe that bells were also removed from churches, and church towers pulled down,  to avoid any kind of challenge, either to the call to prayer from the muezzin or to the height and magnificence of the mosque.

 

Under these conditions, forbidden to convert or to appeal for help from co-religionists abroad,  the Christians of the region were permitted to remain in humble existence, quietly and apologetically practising their rites and ceremonies in crumbling buildings. This was, as anyone with an imagination can work out, a very effective way of seeing to it that the non-Muslim monotheisms shrank and shrivelled under Islamic rule. No wonder few people now realise that Christianity predated Islam in the Middle East , and was once dominant there.

 

The parallel is of course not at all complete or exact, and I would rather by far be a moral and social conservative in modern Britain than be a Christian living in the mediaeval Levant or Maghreb under the Pact of Umar.

 

But there’s still an interesting similarity. Both systems claim to be tolerant, and (to the extent that they do not actually employ violent persecution) they are tolerant.   But both in practice require an acceptance by the dethroned belief system that it acts at all times as a defeated and humbled thing, not worthy of respect.

 

Thus it becomes harder and harder simply to express certain opinions, once universal, such as favouring lifelong marriage over divorce, serial marriage or cohabitation, or (come to that) Christianity over any other religion, or academic selection, or the freedom of parents to exercise authority over children, or national independence, or secure borders, or the blazingly obvious wrongness of abortion on demand.  

 

But the death penalty is by far the greatest of these. And I think the reason for this is simple. It is the keystone of the arch of an former legal and moral system, which regarded people as wholly responsible for their own actions.

 

The stated purpose of the pre-1914 Prisons Commission, for instance, was ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’ . Nobody would dare say that now. Prisons hesitate to punish at all, and the punishment is said to consist solely in the deprivation of liberty, which is why the prisons, being chaotic much of the time, are in many cases far more terrifying than they were when they believed in punishment.  Responsibility has been abolished. And a lot of people are very glad, and hope it will stay that way. Even the faintest hint that it might return disturbs and unsettles them.  

Don't like the PC mob? Well now that makes you a terror threat

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

We are on the verge of founding Britain’s first Thought Police. Using the excuse of terrorism – whose main victim is considered thought – Theresa May’s Home Office is making a law which attacks free expression in this country as it has never been attacked before.

We already have some dangerous laws on the books. The Civil Contingencies Act can be used to turn Britain into a dictatorship overnight, if politicians can find an excuse to activate it.

But the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, now slipping quietly and quickly through Parliament, is in a way even worse. It tells us what opinions we should have, or should not have.

As ever, terrorism is the pretext. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that the criminal drifters, school drop-outs and drug-addled losers who do much terrorist dirty work (and whose connections with vast worldwide conspiracies are sketchy to say the least) will be even slightly affected by it.

In a consultation paper attached to the Bill, all kinds of institutions, from nursery schools (yes really, see paragraph 107) to universities, are warned that they must be on the lookout for ‘extremists’.

But universities are told they have a ‘responsibility to exclude those promoting extremist views that support or are conducive to terrorism’.

Those words ‘conducive to’ are so vague that they could include almost anybody with views outside the mainstream.

What follows might have come from the laws of the Chinese People’s Republic or Mr Putin’s Russia. Two weeks’ advance notice of meetings must be given so that speakers can be checked up on, and the meeting cancelled if necessary.

Warning must also be given of the topic, ‘sight of any presentations, footage to be broadcast, etc’. A ‘risk assessment’ must be made on whether the meeting should be cancelled altogether, compelled to include an opposing speaker or (even more creepy) ‘someone in the audience to monitor the event’.

Institutions will be obliged to promote ‘British values’. These are defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. ‘Vocal and active opposition’ to any of these is now officially described as ‘extremism’.

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. As for ‘democracy’, plenty of people (me included) are not at all sure we have it, and wouldn’t be that keen on it if we did.

Am I then an ‘extremist’ who should be kept from speaking at colleges? Quite possibly. But the same paragraph (89, as it happens) goes further. ‘We expect institutions to encourage students to respect other people with particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010’.

These ‘protected characteristics’, about which we must be careful not to be ‘extremist’, are in fact the pillars of political correctness – including disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, sex and sexual orientation.

The Bill is terrible in many other ways. And there is no reason to believe that any of these measures would have prevented any of the terrorist murders here or abroad, or will do so in future.

They have been lifted out of the box marked ‘try this on the Home Secretary during a national panic’, by officials who long to turn our free society into a despotism.

Once, there would have been enough wise, educated, grown-up people in both Houses of Parliament to stand up against this sort of spasm. Now most legislators go weak at the knees like simpering teenage groupies whenever anyone from the ‘Security’ or ‘Intelligence’ services demands more power and more money.

So far there has been nothing but a tiny mouse-squeak of protest against this dangerous, anti-British, concrete-headed twaddle. It will go through. And in ten years’ time we’ll wonder why we’re locking people up for thinking. We’ll ask: ‘How did that happen?’ This is how it happens.

British values...it's a baffling topic these days

You'd never guess just how few homosexuals there were from the way we go on about it.

In a spot check to make sure their Christian school was teaching ‘British values’, baffled tots in Sunderland were asked by government inspectors about ‘what lesbians do’.

Almost immediately after this revelation, plans were announced in Manchester for an entire school devoted to homosexual, bisexual and transgender children.

I’m not actually against such a school, if enough people want it. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as far as I’m concerned.

Let’s have atheist schools, too, and see how they work out.

But if we can select pupils on the grounds of their sexual orientation, why is it illegal to select on the grounds of ability? Something wrong here, surely?

As for the lesbian question, I was 12 before I even knew what a call-girl was, let alone a lesbian, and look how I turned out – not to mention my grasp of ‘British values’.

Finally a film that's got it right

For once, a film about real events that comes close to getting it right. The Theory Of Everything, a fictionalised but broadly true account of the marriage of Professor Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, is intelligent and profound, irresistibly moving and
surprisingly funny in places. 

The recent past is subtly recreated. The plot pivots on the extraordinary fact that Mrs Hawking – an academic in her own right – maintained a Christian belief despite her husband’s active atheism. 

Their marriage, her selfless love despite his illness, the marriage’s eventual breakdown, the
dreadful contrast between Hawking’s soaring mind and his collapsing, failing body, must
constantly have challenged the deepest beliefs of both of them.

Eddie Redmayne is, of course, superb as he inhabits the professor’s life and becomes him.
But Felicity Jones is even better, and, rather surprisingly, manages to portray Jane as an even more remarkable human being than her husband.

Lethal cost of the great crime lie

Somehow the Government has so far kept the lid on the fact that despite fiddled figures claiming that crime is dropping, our prisons are full, and exploding with violence, gang rivalry and drugs.

Prison officers, the main civilising influence in these dreadful liberal institutions, are in growing danger of severe violence.

Ten are attacked every day. On Radio 4’s File On 4 on Tuesday, Peter McParlin, the chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: ‘I wake up every morning thinking, “Today is the day one of my colleagues will be murdered in their work.” ’

This crisis is the result of 50 years of Left-wing failure, which has ensured that wrongdoers don’t encounter serious punishment until they are already hardened criminals.

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PETER HITCHENS: It's not a Muslim issue. In our modern nation you're an extremist, too

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I think we would be a happier country if we had never encouraged mass immigration in the post-war era. The fact that it is almost taboo to say this simple thing is an example of the problems it has caused.

But I also grasp that the immigration has happened, that we have new neighbours, and that it is our absolute duty to get on with them and befriend them as best as we can.

And this is why I am so scornful of the windbags and panic-spreaders who now seek to make an issue out of the supposed takeover of some state schools by Muslims. 

What twaddle this is. The Government quite rightly allows Christian schools in the state system – not least because it was the churches who took  on the job of educating poor children when politicians couldn’t be bothered to do so.

Well, now we have a large number of Muslim parents, how can we reasonably deny them the same?

I have a lot of quarrels with Islam, but I, and many traditional British Christians like me, have a lot in common with Muslims.

We dislike the pressure on teenage girls to dress as sluts and get drunk, and the pressure on teenage boys to be oafish copies of football stars. We think it’s time the old were respected and cared for, not dumped and abandoned.

We’d much rather our children went on religious pilgrimages than to a Britney Spears concert.

We see nothing shocking in the idea of boys and girls being taught separately – many  people pay good money for  single-sex education because they think it better, and because state schools mostly refuse to provide it any more.

We don’t especially want schoolteachers to undermine our views on marriage and child-rearing in politically radical ‘sex-education’ classes. Not everyone shares the liberal elite’s views of these matters.

We believe – because we’re British and we’ve heard of Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus – in freedom of speech and religion. So when we’re told that this is ‘extremism’, then we tend to think that in that case we, too, are ‘extremists’. The word means nothing except ‘person holding unfashionable views’. It means even less than the foggy, squelchy ‘British values’ Michael Gove says we must espouse.

Both Mr Gove and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, have in practice supported the transformation of this country into  a borderless, multicultural, multi-faith zone. Much of what was left of Christian teaching in state schools was stripped out of them years ago by secular radicals, so that our national faith is now taught as a sort of eccentric tribal cult, practised by other people, especially old people, if it is mentioned at all.

The ‘Conservative’ party, true to its long record of cowardice and retreat, never did anything to stop this. Now it seeks to appear concerned by blurring the border between religious fervour and terrorist crime.How dare either, or both, of these politicians now seek to advance their political careers by posing as the foes of ‘Islamic extremism’? If there is such a thing, their party brought it here and encouraged its growth.

The main thing to note about this pair is their behaviour proves the Tory Party doesn’t believe its own propaganda about winning in 2015.

They know there’ll be a vacancy for Leader of the Opposition next May, when a defeated David Cameron quits. That’s what they’re really fighting about.

Your wars cause rape, Mr Hague

Wars turn men into barbarians, and bring rape. This is a simple, cruel fact known to the many peoples who have had to endure invasion, occupation and subjugation, not to mention ethnic cleansing, in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Just ask all women of a certain age in Berlin what happened to them at the hands of our gallant Soviet Allies in 1945.

Angelina Jolie is an actress and can be pardoned for not knowing very much about the hard, real world.

But William Hague is a historian and politician.  He has no excuse for his fatuous parading about, pretending that bits of noble prose can change the way men act in war.

If Mr Hague wants to see less rape, then he should stop prancing about, fulminating bombastically about Libya, Syria and Ukraine, trying to start wars, which seems to be his main diversion these days.

It is as simple as that. There must be some other way he can get his picture taken next to Angelina. Talk about politics being showbusiness for ugly people.

A fearless force we cannot control

As one who opposed the Iraq War at the time, I must confess to getting some satisfaction from reminding people about it now, as the result of our stupid, predictably ruinous intervention descends from disaster to cataclysm.

Even now, various warmongers are scuttling around urging the futile use of airpower and drones against this great and furious force (which we have aroused) of embittered Sunni Muslim fanaticism.

Face it, we have lost any influence over this part of the world, for many years to come.

When are we going to grow up and realise that we have neither the right nor the power to go round invading other countries and telling them how to run their affairs?

What exactly is it that we have to offer them anyway? Lady Gaga, Facebook, Britain’s Got Talent and Game Of Thrones, plus mass divorce and abortion, legalised dope and Jägerbombs? Oh, yes, and our miraculous multi-party democracy, in which all the parties are the same? And our secret courts, lying statistics and unpayable debts?

If it weren’t for the fact that we are (so far) better-equipped for war, they’d have us by the throat. As Churchill wrote in 1899 after praising Muslims as ‘brave and loyal soldiers’ who ‘know how to die’: Islam ‘is a militant and proselytizing faith.

It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome’.

I don’t agree with that bit about Christianity struggling against science. It’s not true. But the rest of it is so.

We have relied too much on what Kipling called ‘reeking tube and iron shard’ in his great, prophetic warning  of the end of Empire, the poem Recessional.

Now the world is rapidly passing into the control of others, and we had better hope they are kinder to us than we have been to them.

***

When I make jokes, people think I’m being serious. When I’m being serious, they think I’m joking.

For example, people laugh when I say that our governing class don’t believe in prisons and only keep them going for fear of public opinion.

Well, now it’s been revealed that almost 90 criminals (some very violent) have quietly vanished from Ford Open Prison and are living undetected among us, please don’t laugh.

It is deadly serious, and a sign of a much deeper, well-hidden problem.

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What Skull Cracker and his pals reveal about our pathetic jails

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

In the black comedy that is modern Britain, one of the best jokes is that crime is supposed to be falling, yet the prisons have never been so full. The Government ceaselessly begs judges and magistrates not to send anyone to jail unless they absolutely have to.

The ‘police’ (a word which can now only be used sarcastically), and the Crown Prosecution Service (whose title is itself a joke) do their best to ignore them, forget them and let  them off.

But things are so bad that, even so, large numbers of people actually are convicted of crimes. And many of them are so nasty, and have been let off so many times before, that judges do actually sentence them to immediate custody.

Alert people have known for years that these sentences are official lies. ‘Six months’ means ‘out in weeks’, free either to commit more crimes or perhaps to write a weekly column for the Guardian.

But it is only thanks to Mr ‘Skull Cracker’, the ‘Scarborough Slasher’ and various other picturesquely horrible criminals that we have now found out that it is even worse than that.

Such people are officially in prison. But in many cases they aren’t really. They are being let out to wander around. Perhaps one of them is sitting near you as you read this.

Perhaps he has official permission. Perhaps he has just decided to stay out a little longer because the weather is nice today (knowing that he will eventually get a free lift back to prison from the police).

In any case, be nice to any angry-looking men with tattoos you come across. They may only be in the ‘police’, but they could be taking a break from penal servitude. Green trousers are a warning sign. If you spoil their awaydays, they might spoil your whole day too.

This is both grim and funny. But it also tells us an important truth. Britain’s governing elite simply do not believe in punishing criminals.

They maintain prisons only because they are afraid we will be angry if they close them down. That is why the prisons are pointless, anarchic, drug-infested warehouses, most of whose inmates arrive through a revolving door and are spat out the same way a few weeks or months later.

If there is such a thing as ‘rehabilitation’, these absurd token detentions don’t offer enough time to attempt it.

As for the liberal myth that prison makes bad people worse, the truth is more or less the opposite. It is weakness that makes bad people worse.

Apart from actual murderers, almost nobody goes to prison for a first offence, or a second, or, in many cases, a tenth. They’re already worse before they get there, and almost wholly unafraid of the law.

In most cases they’ll be out so soon it won’t be worth absconding anyway.

But the cells are so crammed that open prisons are now being used for people who – in a just society – would be detained on an island surrounded by man-eating crocodiles.

Prison doesn’t work, on any level, because those in charge of it – our political class –  don’t care about you. They care about themselves.

Because they do not believe in any absolute idea of right and wrong, they do not believe in punishment. And so they lack the nerve or conviction to lock up Mr Skull Cracker and Mr Slasher somewhere they cannot crack or slash anyone else.

Has 'unbiased' Beeb got it in for me?

Most of what I have written here for the past ten years has been a warning to our elite that they will not get away with their folly for ever.

So I won’t go on at length about the UKIP vote, an electoral earthquake I have long hoped for and which I cautiously welcome.

But some of you may recall that last week I wrote a short item which – while it criticised UKIP – clearly urged a UKIP vote. On Sunday morning, a press review on BBC Radio 4 quoted only the very short passage which attacked UKIP. It also quoted other genuinely anti-UKIP articles, but none  at all in support of Nigel Farage’s party.

I swiftly complained. I was given an apology which was read out on air at 5.40 this morning (exactly a week after the original offence), so you have almost certainly missed it.

But the BBC completely ignored my wider point,  that this was evidence of institutional bias against me, and against UKIP.

This is the third time I have been the victim of what they insist is an isolated mistake. Fiction writer Ken Follett was not challenged or corrected on air when, on the Andrew Marr Show, he misrepresented words I had written in this column on October 24, 2010. The BBC said ‘sorry’, and I was eventually invited on to the programme to correct this.

Then the Leftist journalist Mehdi Hasan edited a quotation from this column  on BBC Radio 4’s What The Papers Say on July 29, 2012,  in a way that changed its meaning. The BBC swiftly broadcast an on-air apology, saying it was an ‘error’. And now this. Three ‘errors’ about one conservative columnist, all on the same supposedly impartial BBC. Three apologies. Is it just me? If so, it is beginning to look like much more than carelessness.

I have repeatedly asked the BBC if it can tell me of anyone else who has been subjected to even one comparable ‘error’, let alone three.

The response is silence. I shall be pursuing this through the BBC’s wondrous complaints system, whose winding corridors I have  come to know rather well.

Will my generation be the last to remember London as a distinctively British city? As I bicycled down Fleet Street towards St Paul’s, after a long absence from that part of the capital, I was shocked by how crowded with towers the eastern sky had become.

Once, Sir Christopher Wren’s serene dome ruled the horizon from all directions. Now it is thrust into the background by overbearing imitations of Shanghai or Dubai. Do the planners have any idea what they are doing?

I may in the past have been tempted to mock the philosopher Anthony Grayling because of his hairstyle, apparently modelled on that of William Hartnell, the first Doctor Who, and because of his unjustified certainty that there is no God.

But I would like to praise and congratulate him for standing up for that great principle of liberty and justice, the presumption of innocence. His refusal to take part in the modish boycott of the Oxford Union debating society, because its president has been accused – but not convicted – of rape, is right and brave.

It is shocking to see that a police official and a ‘Human Rights’ campaigner have joined the bleating flock.

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Mr Leg-Breaker's Day Out

I suppose we must now all take it for granted that many of the people walking past us on the street, or sitting near us on the bus or train, are convicted  murderers, armed robbers and burglars who are officially serving long prison sentences but are in fact on various forms of day-release from prison. Some of them will be there with official permission. Others (an increasing number, it seems) will have decided to stay out a bit longer, especially in this warm sunny weather.

 

The sensible thing to do is to be even more polite to strangers than you are already . As a lot of these people have nicknames such as ‘Thigh-Crusher’ and ‘Head-Kicker’, and by definition are skilled at killing and injuring their fellow-creatures, and uninhibited about it, you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of them. Since the police have more or less vanished from the streets (except the ones with the sub-machine guns who  go around in twos warring on terror, and obviously don’t want us interrupting their chats and bothering them with our trivial problems) , there’s not much help coming from that direction.

 

So be unctuous, humble and subservient to rough-looking men with shaved heads. Stand aside on the pavement. Don’t complain when someone barges in front of you on the queue or grabs your seat. It might be Mr Jaw-Smasher on an officially-sanctioned Awayday, re-acclimatising himself to life as a free man (so important!).  It’ll be even worse if he’s unilaterally extended it, as he’ll probably be extra-nervous and sensitive.

 

Recent events involving prisoners who have not escaped but been officially let out during their ‘sentences’ , and then just not come back, have rather drawn attention to this problem (just as a fire a couple of years ago at Ford Open Prison alerted us to the fact that such places are almost completely unstaffed outside normal working hours).

 

For me this is all more evidence that we are living in a sort of black comedy, the final years of a once-great country which has now become a bitter street theatre of tragi-comedy, as if someone has decided to demonstrate in detail just why all modern ideas on the running of society are mad, and has chosen to hold his demonstration here.

 

It is when the money turns funny that things will get really serious, and George Osborne and the Bank of England are working hard to bring that about.

 

But I digress. The hilarious thing is that, while it is quite obvious from such events that our prison system is a cardboard pretence, nobody outside or inside the establishment seems able to see it, let alone do anything about it. When the current frenzy over awaydays has quietened down, it will be back to normal.

 

Why is this? The usual answer is the right one. Nobody wants to see it.

 

The elite do not see it because they hate prisons. They lack the self-confidence to punish wrong-doing because their tortured consciences do not allow them to declare any action absolutely wrong. But they also have no real alternative to punishment, pretending to believe in a ‘rehabilitation’ which has never been demonstrated in action anywhere, certainly is not being seriously attempted here (most sentences are so short in practice that officers barely have time to get to know their charges' names, let alone reform their characters) and is in any case totalitarian. Rather than assuming that a free man has done wrong and should be punished, the state seeks to reach into his mind and soul and change them to conform with its wishes (whatever those wishes are).

 

We, the public, do not see it because we do not want to see it. We want to be reassured.  The public want to believe that prison sentences are factual, rather than the gross, fraudulent functions they are. The public want to believe that prisons are places of punishment, rather than warehouses run by the inmates. Look at the continued portrayal of prisons and prisoners in newspaper cartoons, quite out of touch with reality.

 

And the elite, which hates the very idea of punishment and does not believe in free will or human responsibility, encourages the illusion by ordering judges to hand down fictional sentences, most of which they know will not be served. It leaves prison exteriors much as they have always been, giving an impression of grim orderliness and authority which vanishes the moment you get inside the walls and find instead a sinister semi-anarchy.

 

This system fulfils no real purpose at all. It does not punish. It does not rehabilitate. Most criminals only experience it long after they have already become habitual offenders. The Michael Howard argument , that it protects the public from the worst criminals, would only be true if violent crooks were all locked up until they were old and weak. This is not the case. They are out, often very quickly indeed,  because of the pressure on space.

 

Above all, it does not deter. Much of the (enormous) increase in prisoner numbers in the past half-century is made up of people who would have been deterred from crime by the old, punitive prisons, but who now are not. They meet the criminal justice system, find it is made of mush, and continue to break the law for years without real penalty until eventually the exasperated courts finally send them to prison.  By this time it holds no fears for them at all, and in any case they will be out soon. And the more of them there are (as we see),  the less possible it is to build enough prisons to hold them. So they are let out even sooner, deterrence is weakened still further, and there are more criminals.

 

It’s all a bit like that old song ‘There’s a hole in my bucket’.

 

The end of it, like the end of most of our modern sagas of folly and error, will be our full entry into the Third World, with chaotic, savage prisons crammed beyond bursting, occasionally relieved by indiscriminate amnesties, bloody riots or  mass breakouts. And this will be combined, as it is in South American countries, with wild, unrestrained crime in the poorer parts of our cities. No doubt, as all this proceeds, the crime figures will continue to fall year by year.

It Was My Fault I was Booed - an Exercise in Free Speech

On a recent visit to a well-known social media site (What is it called? Twaddle? Something like that), I found quite a few reactions to my appearance on the BBC Programme ‘Free Speech’ last Thursday evening, still, I think, to be found on the BBC iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b041t6r9) but not for long.  BBC3? Not really a place I know much about, but I was asked very nicely to go on the programme, which involved a trip to Nottingham, always an interesting destination, plus a chance to glimpse, on the train there and back, the mysterious, beautiful Triangular Lodge at Rushton. I had not heard of this astonishing work of art and faith (it is all about the Holy Trinity) when I first saw it 45 or so years ago, and could not quite believe that I had in fact seen anything so lovely and unusual just sitting in the English landscape.  Since then I have always looked out for it on the stretch of track between Kettering and Market Harborough. One day I hope I shall actually go and visit the Lodge itself.

 

Also, the train to Nottingham stops at Market Harborough, which allows me to text messages to one or two trusted people saying ‘Am in Market Harborough’, knowing I will receive replies asking ‘Where ought you to be?’. This stretch of country is part of the large area of handsome, unpicturesque England which hardly anyone visits but which I always draw a strong feeling of reassurance

 

Anyway, there I was in a former Courthouse in the pleasantly restored bit of Nottingham just east of the centre, near the new tram tracks, not quite knowing what I had let myself in for, but certain it would not be the same as ‘Question Time’. This, after all, was a Youth Channel.  Two of the panellists spoke for Youth, Archie Bland, of the Independent, and Ava Vidal, a former prison officer, now a comedian.   

 

Perhaps slightly less youthful was Anna Soubry, an unusually interesting and engaging Tory MP (not that I like her politics, as I don’t, but she seems to have independence of mind and a good strong combative streak), former journalist, former barrister, now a junior Defence Minister.

 

I was there to represent age, and reaction, and polished leather shoes, and everything bad. And as I walked into the old courtroom in which the programme was to take place, I was booed by quite a few people in the audience, just for existing. I waved merrily at them.  Alas, this bit was not broadcast, as it might have helped viewers understand what sort of audience it was, more quickly than they otherwise might have done.

 

I received a strongly hostile reception from quite a few of them (nothing to worry about, but there were times when I simply couldn’t make myself heard above the shouts and heckling, which is never good) I am sure it wasn’t universal but it must have sounded sometimes as if it was. It got better later. It was almost impossible to discuss prison (it always is, as any intelligent and informed opinion cuts across the boilerplate and clichés of both tribal leftists and tribal Tories, and gets nowhere). I was also asked (I must do this again at a student meeting in London next month, at 6.30 p.m. on May 7^th at King’s College in the Strand, with the great Theodore Dalrymple as my opponent. ) to discuss the death penalty, a topic that has now become a sort of ritual, as there is not the slightest chance of it ever being restored under acceptable conditions. Yet I think it dishonest to avoid it when asked.

 

Even so, I generally feel, when I make the excellent case for the capital penalty in facts and logic, that most people in the audience regard this spectacle as akin to seeing a dinosaur skeleton in a museum suddenly starting to speak. They are too astonished to hear much of what I say. One audience member misunderstood me so completely that I can only assume she was too shocked actually to listen to a word I had said.

 

Somehow, we ended up discussing circumcision, during which the anti-Hitchens loathing abated because they weren’t absolutely sure that my opinions were criminal, and then rape (a subject I never volunteer for). I stuck to a firm, defence of the presumption of innocence, but noticed that this immediately got me denounced as a supporter of something called ‘rape culture’. Does this mean that anyone who doesn’t agree that everyone accused of rape is a) guilty and doesn’t need a trial and b) should be locked up forever and a day , is a supporter of ‘rape culture’. I suspect so.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, when I ventured on to ‘Twaddle’ the next day I found that quite a few of its contributors were still, in a way, booing. The burden of their message was that I should have felt actually ashamed of what I had said, which in their view was plainly, objectively wrong. The worrying thing was that they really did think something of the kind, that it was morally wrong of me to have held and spoken out loud the opinions I expressed. Who has taught them this totalitarian view? Who has failed to teach them that their opponents are entitled to their opinions? I do not know, but those responsible have much to answer. I have said for some time that many of our more feral young people would make excellent concentration camp guards. But some of these ‘Twaddle’ contributors would make excellent members of some Committee of Public safety, breezily and without a qualm sending dissenters to their doom.

 

My absolute favourite was this one from a  young woman (I have corrected a minor spelling error) ‘You should review what you said, which led to you being booed.’

 

It was my fault, you see, that I was booed. It reminded me of the brave old days in the Hampstead Constituency Labour Party general management committee, circa 1979, then held in the magnificent surroundings of Sir Thomas Beecham’s old house, which had become the headquarters of the train drivers’ union, ASLEF. At these festivals of the higher philosophy, the chairperson would call me to order during my own speeches -  because I was being heckled . This tended to happen if one were too critical of the IRA, or supported the nuclear deterrent, or put in a good word for constitutional monarchy.

 

‘Comrade Hitchens!’ she would snap  ‘You are provoking the other comrades!’ I thought then that this was so unconsciously funny that it wasn’t worth pointing out that it was actually her job to call the hecklers to order. Nowadays I’m not so sure that it’s still funny.