Look out! They're sneaking up on you with a chemical cosh

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week’s revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug troublesome teenagers in the 1960s – and we have only just found out.

One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles.

This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was given to boys at a Yorkshire ‘Approved School’ (a state-inspected home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were told of this experiment.

To qualify for the secret chemical cosh, you had to be ‘impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive’, which for teenage boys is more or less a description of being alive and awake. Both schemes were endorsed by the Home Office’s own in-house psychiatrist, Pamela Mason. How many other such horrors happened – are perhaps still happening – without us knowing?

I have long suspected that the Home Office – and much of our elite – are quite keen on doping the population. Despite making various militant noises over the years, this secretive department has quietly filleted the drug laws so that they are now the boneless wonder of the western world.

And for many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars. I suspect the authorities hoped prisoners would be so stupefied that they would not riot, or escape in large numbers – things the Government greatly fears, and which have destroyed many Cabinet Ministers.

This policy is now going badly wrong, as cannabis is not in fact the peaceful drug some claim. Many of the drugs readily available in jail, such as the synthetic ‘Spice’, make their users more violent, not less.

The Government has also been quite happy to allow pharmaceutical companies to run huge experiments on adults and children with sketchily tested and unproven tablets that I would not give to a dog, even if I disliked it.

Astonishing numbers of people are now regularly taking mind-altering drugs – Ritalin for children who get bored in school, ‘antidepressants’ for unhappy adults (and sometimes both together, as adults now have ‘ADHD’ and children are allegedly ‘depressed’). Having wrongly feared that George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of drabness and surveillance would come true, we missed the much more accurate warning in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Huxley didn’t just foresee the state rummaging about in the womb, the abolition of parents, the family and private life, the cheery disposal of the old and ill, and the distraction of a wage-slave population by flashy entertainment and sex.

He predicted the invention of an all-purpose happiness drug called ‘Soma’. It would keep the middle classes content, and could be used in spray form to quell riots by the poor. He said it would have ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects… there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’.

They haven’t actually invented it yet. Huxley’s Soma was harmless, which today’s drugs somehow never are. But they are working on it. And you might like to know the name of the brilliant, subtle, well-funded campaign to legalise marijuana launched almost half a century ago by the late Steve Abrams (I discussed it with him at length before he died). It was ‘Soma’.

Rewriting our history? That's hard to Swallow

As a child I never took to Swallows And Amazons. 

I had a boarding school headmaster who drove us ceaselessly out of doors, made us accompany him on to the heaving, open sea (without lifejackets) in an ancient ketch, taught us to make fires, camp in the rain, gut fish and endure more than our fair share of mud, wet and cold.

I had no idea how lucky I was, and I am sure it was very good for me. But as a result I didn’t much want to read about such things, let alone do them on my holidays. And I only came to know Arthur Ransome’s books when I read them to my own children.

I instantly recognised the children and adults in them, the way they thought and spoke, and the lives they lived. I could guess in detail what their homes or schools were like, though they were never described. I knew (I still do) what a country station platform felt and sounded like on a summer afternoon just after the train had steamed away. I also knew (as the film-makers don’t) that British Railways didn’t exist in 1935. And I knew that pemmican (a joke in the books) was never on sale in tins in British grocers’ shops; and that telegrams came in khaki-yellow envelopes.

But the new film suffers from the constant problem of modern people. They can’t begin to imagine the recent past and know almost nothing about it.

One thing that struck me is that the children in the film (pictured above) seem to be much ruder to each other than I remember from the books. The girls are also a lot screamier. Of course, hardly anything really happened in most of the books. It was all imagination, a thing which has died in the age of TV and computers. And you can see why they inserted an absurd plot about Russian spies. Odd that it blames Russia for coming up with the idea for the atom bomb, when this was from the first a scheme dreamt up by Western idealist scientists horrified by Hitler.

People keep telling me these things don’t matter. But they do. If we get the past wrong, we will get the future wrong, as we prove every day.

The real scandal of Corbyn's empty seats

Actually, I can quite see why Jeremy Corbyn thought that train was full. Rail companies punish anyone who just wants to travel when he feels like it.

So we’re all forced to make reservations we don’t want, and dozens of seats are blocked by this and festooned with silly labels.

Then there’s the strange urge to make train travel even worse than going by plane, including nose-to-tail seats crammed close together, cunningly arranged to obscure the windows.

It’s increasingly hard to spot a vacant place. I suspect most of those having a go at the Labour leader haven’t done much second (sorry ‘standard’) class travel by train recently.

*********

I see we now have flashily painted ‘Border Force’ cutters with go-faster stripes, just like the US Coastguard.

I detect the hand of Chairman May and her clever PR team when they were still at the Home Office. But what use is all this? It will be worth checking in six months what has happened to the six migrants picked up by HMC Valiant off the Kent coast on Thursday.

Your guess is as good as mine, but unlike Australia, we have no remote islands where we can put such people.

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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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It's astonishing, I know - but once, a long time ago, Oliver Letwin got something RIGHT

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Oliver Letwin doesn’t want to be defended by me. That’s why I’m doing it. How funny it is that he, of all people, should have been the target of the Leftist Thought Police last week for his 30-year-old memo about the Broadwater Farm disorders.

Giggly Mr Letwin, known among Tories for years as ‘Oliver Leftwing’, long ago embraced the ‘equality and diversity’ political correctness that now screams and howls at the slightest whisper of dissent.

He would have been quite capable of attacking his past self as a disgraceful racist, if he had been allowed to do so. Alas, he has an almost magical power to mess up anything he says or does in public, so Government spin doctors hurried him into hiding till the squall was over.

In fact, quite a lot of what he said in the memo was perfectly sensible, if it hadn’t been for the juvenile remarks about discos and drug dealers.

One part of his reviled memo has a lot of truth in it. ‘Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.’

This statement is not racially bigoted. In fact, it is the opposite. It judges people by their characters, not their skins, as Martin Luther King urged us to do. Mr Letwin’s 1985 remarks came at a time when there had been several outbreaks of disorder in areas where West Indians were concentrated. But they were not mass political uprisings. They were outbreaks of individual crime.

The great majority of West Indian migrants to this country were, are, and always have been respectable, hard-working, law-abiding and Christian in a way that sometimes shames the rest of us.

But liberal reformers, who wanted to change Britain profoundly anyway, saw these disorders as an opportunity. They ignored the truth – that the trouble came from a lawless minority in such districts, some of them white, who were disliked and feared by the majority. And, in a deeply racialist policy, they sought to treat all West Indians as if they could not be expected to behave well without special measures.

Those who wanted to live peaceful, honest lives and desired proper deterrence of crime would be abandoned.

From then on proper, old-fashioned policing (there and everywhere else) would be classified as ‘racist’ and ‘oppressive’. The first big step towards this stupid policy was Lord Scarman’s 1981 report into the Brixton ‘riots’ of April that year. The actual evidence, which few have read, suggests strongly that the conflagration was deliberately started by troublemakers who whipped up a mob against police who were trying to get an injured man to hospital. They did this by spreading false rumours of a death that hadn’t happened.

It also suggests that the disorder was not random but directed by leaders, that the supposed rioters (several of them white) rapidly took to robbery, and that petrol bombs were being systematically made, stacked and distributed. Scarman admitted that the hooligans were enjoying themselves, which anyone who has ever seen a riot will know, but which people like me get into trouble for mentioning.

Scarman, a liberal of the woolliest sort, recorded but ignored these facts. He even said that ‘street crime in Brixton was a grave matter, upon which the silent law-abiding majority of residents felt very strongly’. Yet he was against actions which had been intended to stand up for that majority.

He did at least have more sense than to swallow the ludicrous claim that the police were ‘institutionally racist’. That had to wait for Lord Macpherson’s even more liberal report into the terrible murder of Stephen Lawrence. Lord Macpherson also called – quite astonishingly – for the police to treat different ethnic groups differently. ‘ “Colour-blind” policing must be outlawed,’ he said. Yet I don’t remember anyone accusing his report of being ‘racist’. It’s odd what causes a fuss, and what doesn’t.

In Blairite Britain, the old Soviet rules apply to anyone with an independent mind: ‘Don’t think it. If you must think it, don’t say it. If you must say it, don’t write it down. If you must write it down, don’t sign it. If you must sign it, don’t be surprised.’

There are no simple answers to this misery

York is one of my favourite places in the world. I used to attend Bolshevik meetings beneath a set of buffalo horns in an upstairs room in The Lowther, the solid old pub that features in almost every picture of floods pouring through the heart of the ancient walled city.

I knew when I heard the names of streets affected by the latest inundation that something had gone extraordinarily wrong. Such places did not get flooded.

The temptation to fall in with the crowd and say ‘It must be global warming’ was strong. But I also know enough about York and its rivers to be sure that this isn’t so. I’m still talking to the Environment Agency about exactly what went wrong with the barrier that failed. But it wasn’t global warming.

There are so many reasons for what’s happening – the El Nino effect, the deforestation of much of England, which makes the earth much less absorbent, the straightening and canalising of rivers, speeding up the flow, the silting up of side channels that used to take the pressure off big rivers. Not to mention building houses on flood plains.

And then there’s just the slow decay of skills and structures which our forebears handed on to us. When a bridge collapses, after standing for centuries, isn’t it at least partly our fault for not having maintained it properly? Beware of single-cause merchants. Every crisis has many fathers, though they’re not always keen to admit it.

Ugly secret of our 'private schools'

Solid proof that there are now two kinds of privileged private education comes from Tatler, a magazine I bet Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t read. If he did, he’d find from its guide to the top state schools that quite a lot of his beloved ‘comprehensives’ are now besieged by wealthy and influential parents.

They quickly learn the complex admission rules, which religion to pretend to have got, or which tiny expensive catchment area to move into. It won’t be long before such schools – like the Grey Coat Hospital in Westminster, chosen by two Tory Cabinet Ministers – are as socially selective as Eton and Harrow, and sending their smooth products out into the world on gap yahs. Pity about the people who can’t afford the local house prices. But that’s how egalitarianism works.

It’s always nice to see my opponents tying themselves up in knots of their own devising.

Those who claim absurdly that ‘dyslexia’ is a disease rather than the result of bad teaching have now been caught by their own propaganda.

A major sperm bank has been turning away donations from alleged ‘dyslexics’ – and from supposed sufferers of that other invented complaint, ‘ADHD’, the result of bad parenting or boring schools. The simple way forward is to point out that these aren’t real diseases.

They can’t say that, because then a whole industry would collapse. But I can.

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Once Again, Are We Investigating these Mass Murders Properly?

Curious, isn’t it, how the ‘gun control’ campaign is quite incapable of paying attention to any other possibilities? And how it is immune to logic?

I criticise this incessant campaign not because I don’t share its objectives, but because it is so completely illogical, and resistant to fact.

I have no desire to own a gun (though I don’t see why, as a responsible adult,  I  shouldn’t be free to do so if I chose). On the contrary, I dislike being in the presence of guns even when I know them to be unloaded.

I understand that ‘gun control’ is the modern left’s alternative to the death penalty, which the modern left claim to have rejected because it is so ghastly and immoral, and because, well, I mean,  what if you execute the wrong person?  They haven’t, in fact rejected it at all. They are relaxed (that is to say, I have never seen a sustained liberal campaign against this)  about the growing number of extrajudicial killings by armed police (some of these must be the wrong person, no?) in the USA and – now – here. They claim to be unable see any connection between the growth of this form of law enforcement and the abolition of an effective, swift and certain death penalty.

We already know that those US cities which adopted strict gun control (especially Washington DC) actually achieved no significant consequent reduction in gun violence.

We know in ghastly detail that a country with very strict gun controls, France, can suffer the most appalling gun massacres, because it is one thing to enact gun control, and something else altogether to enforce it in a country where there are huge numbers of cheap AK-47s already circulating on the illegal market.

We know that gun ownership alone does not necessarily lead to gun violence, from the example of Switzerland. So we know that gun ownership, by itself, cannot be the cause of this problem and that therefore to concentrate upon gun ownership by the law-abiding is an illogical response.

But, after two recent horrors in the USA, President Obama and the New York Times and everyone else but me are raging either about gun control or about terrorism or about both.

The first of these horrors is the case of Robert Dear, who murdered three people and wounded nine more at a ‘Planned Parenthood’ (love that name!)  clinic in Colorado Springs.

Even the New York Times’s report here http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/us/robert-dear-suspect-in-colorado-killings-preferred-to-be-left-alone.html?_r=0

....eventually gets round to mentioning the strong suspicion that Dear (and look at his mugshots) might be a drug user and out of his mind. The evidence is circumstantial but in a state where marijuana is legal now and has been , er, lightly policed for some time, it rather has to be until someone takes  a definite interest.

You might enjoy the US Cannabis Lobby’s defence to this charge, here

http://www.thecannabist.co/2015/11/30/robert-dear-marijuana-planned-parenthood/44536/

The other is the San Bernardino shooting,  in which 14 people died and 21 were injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. This event was initially reported simply as a gun massacre, but has since been ‘nationalised’, as Sir Simon Jenkins says, by being classified by President Obama as a terror outrage. Is this wise or useful?

Well, maybe. I keep an open mind on all such claims, though continue to insist on testable actual evidence of terrorist connections and motive, rather than unsourced claims and the whisperings of security men and their media patsies,  before accepting that they are in any way centrally directed. There’s also the usual talk of ‘radicalisation’, a speculation that doesn’t explain how even the wildest ideas translate themselves (as they do so rarely) into violent action.

The possibility that we may be dealing with unhinged people, not in full command of themselves, has been pushed into the background by the current preoccupation with Islamic State, which has now wholly replaced the (largely mythical) Al Qaeda, as the Official Octopus of global terror. This of course means nobody is looking into how they might have become unhinged, preferring to trawl through their travel, phone and computer records in the hope of finding some link between Raqqa and San Bernardino, just as we once sought similar links between every terror outrage in the world and an imaginary cave in Afghanistan.

 

Islamic State does certainly exist in Syria and Iraq, but I think we must be free to doubt how closely its distant franchises are linked to the central body. Also, if Islamic State wishes to strike at the USA, why would it choose to do so at a centre for the developmentally disabled in Southern California? I’ve struggled to learn much about the row Farook and Malik appear to have had with another guest at the party at the centre, before leaving to fetch their guns and bombs. Such things, surely interesting to any crime investigator searching for motive, get lost once ‘terror’ is the explanation.

Well, now look at today’s ‘Australian’  

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/san-bernardino-massacre-a-hatred-beyond-reason/news-story/5af7a1b4463bc493a852a0f634a73ab5

This opens : ‘Spilt across their cluttered kitchen counter was the last meal enjoyed by Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook. Along with orange juice and paratha bread were bottles of Adderall and Xanax pills, prescribed to steady the nerves.’

 

Who says they were ‘prescribed to steady the nerves’? Who knows that they were prescribed at all? Who says this was their purpose? Maybe an interview with the doctor involved was cut out at the last minute, but this seems to me like jumping to conclusions. Maybe the pills were prescribed.   But the misuse of Xanax is not exactly unknown. This amazing piece of presupposition allows the story to wander off immediately into all kinds of other directions.

What is Xanax, otherwise known as ‘alprazolam’? Why, it’s a member of the happy, happy benzodiazepine family.   Look it up.  Adverse effects include suicidal ideation, our old friend. And its ‘paradoxical reactions’ (that is, those you might not expect from a drug marketed as a tranquillizer) are aggression, rage , hostility, twitches and tremor, mania, agitation, hyperactivity and restlessness.

As for Adderall,  this is an amphetamine, of all things, mainly prescribed to children alleged to be suffering from the mythical complaint, ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ or its equally phantasmal relative ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’.  No objective diagnosis has ever been established for these complaints yet they are ‘treated’ with powerful mind-altering drugs. Amphetamines are totally banned in some countries, and heavily restricted in almost all jurisdictions. 

Malik and Farook had a six-month old baby, but even American ADHD/ADD fanatics have yet (I think)  to begin prescribing their ‘medications’ to children so young. So we have to wonder what it was doing in their home. I know there is an increasing habit of 'diagnosing' adults with ADD, the child market having become saturated, but some of these drugs leak out of the legal market

Very high doses can result in psychosis, involving delusions and paranoia. A Wikipedia article says ‘Recreational doses are generally much larger than prescribed therapeutic doses, and carry a far greater risk of serious side effects’.

Interestingly, its use is contraindicated in people suffering from severe anxiety, the same people who might be prescribed Xanax.  

I mention these things here, and place them in a proper context, for reasons well-known to regular readers. There appears to be a reliable correlation between outbreaks of homicidal violence (including violence classified as political) and the use of mind-altering drugs, whether legal or illegal. If we don’t investigate it, we will never find out of it is important.

Please don’t tell me I’m trying to excuse crimes, or take the heat of Islamist fanaticism. I am not. Not merely have I not said that I am, which ought to be enough for anyone short of the Thought Police.  I am here saying that I have no such motive. Please don’t tell me I’m offering a single cause. I am not. I just think that here, unlike the irrational emotive futility of ‘gun control’, there might possibly be a way in which we might conceivably diminish the number of these ghastly incidents. Who could possibly object to an investigation into that?

Well, who could?

Which side are we really on in this war of the awful against the evil?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I don’t think the British or American governments really want to fight the Islamic State. They just want to look as if they are doing so.

I judge these people by what they do, not by what they say. And in recent months I have noticed them doing – and not doing – some very interesting things.

The White House and Downing Street both seethe with genuine outrage about Russia’s bombing raids on Syria.

Yet the people Vladimir Putin bombed have views and aims that would get them rounded up as dangerous Islamist extremists if they turned up in Manchester. So why do British politicians call them ‘moderates’ when Russia bombs them?

It’s not as if London or Washington can claim to be squeamish about bombing as a method of war. We have done our fair share of it in Belgrade, Baghdad and Tripoli, where our bombs certainly (if unintentionally) killed innocent civilians, including small children.

Then there’s the curious case of Turkey. Rather like Russia, Turkey suddenly announced last summer that it was sending its bombers in to fight against the Islamic State.

But in fact Turkey barely bothered to attack IS at all. It has spent most of the past few months blasting the daylights out of the Kurdish militias, a policy that Turkey’s President Erdogan has selfish reasons for following.

Yet the Kurds, alongside the Syrian army, have been by far the most effective resistance to IS on the ground. Why then does a key member of the alleged anti-IS coalition go to war against them?

Turkey, a Nato member, is not criticised for this behaviour by Western politicians or by the feeble, slavish Western media. These geniuses never attack our foreign policy mistakes while we are making them. They wait until they have actually ended in disaster. Then they pretend to have been against them all along.

I’ve grown tired of people impersonating world-weary cynics by intoning the old saying ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ as if it were a new-minted witticism.

But in this case, this sensible old rule seems to have been dropped. Instead, our enemy’s enemies – in the case of the Kurds, Syria’s government and the Russians – are mysteriously our enemies too.

Meanwhile the Turkish enemies of our Kurdish friends are somehow or other still our noble allies.

Compare our weird attitude towards Syria’s horrible but anti-IS president, Bashar Assad, to Winston Churchill’s wiser view of Stalin.

Stalin became our ally when the Nazis invaded Russia. Churchill, a lifelong foe of Soviet communism, immediately grasped that times had changed. ‘If Hitler invaded Hell,’ he said ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’

That is because, in body, heart and soul, sleeping and waking, with all the force and spirit he possessed, he was committed to the fight against Hitler above all things. So he would have accepted any ally against him.

Is this true of our leaders, who constantly portray Assad (and Putin) as Hitler, who imagine themselves as modern Churchills and condemn their critics as ‘appeasers’?

No. They play both ends against the middle. Their anti-extremist rhetoric, turned up full when confronting Birmingham schoolteachers or bearded preachers, drops to a whisper when they want to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, the home of Islamist fanaticism.

Things are not what they seem to be here. Russia’s action may be rash and dangerous. It may fail, especially as we are obviously trying so hard to undermine it. But at least it is honest and straightforward.

A new look set to sweep the nation

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

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

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

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

The hard-Left menace we ignored

The continued rage about Jeremy Corbyn’s rather dated Leftism baffles me. Most British journalists weren’t (as I was) members of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In the months before I quit, I used to be angrily called to order by the chairwoman of my local party. She was cross with me for (as she put it) provoking too much heckling from noisily pro-IRA, ban-the-bomb types.

Meanwhile, the real Left worked by stealth. That is why our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction’s ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?

Well I never. Schools that introduce the Daily Mile – encouraging children to walk or run a mile during school time – report more attentive, happier pupils who look as children used to look before we locked them in cars and houses and abandoned them to TVs and computer screens.

This news will be unwelcome to the potent lobby which urges the drugging of children to make them behave in boring classrooms and exercise-free schools, a disgusting barbarity that will one day be looked on with horror. 

I’ve tried many times to set out the case against the wicked fantasy of ‘ADHD’, which usually earns me nothing but ignorant rage in return. But perhaps a rather clever new novel will succeed where I have failed. 

I do urge you to read Concentr8 by William Sutcliffe (Bloomsbury £12.99), set in the very near future in a London convulsed by riots, ruled by a fameseeking mayor with eccentric hair.

Many of the most shocking passages in it – concerning the cynicism of the drug industry and of doctors about the use of mind-altering drugs to control the young – are not fiction but researched fact. Also, you’ll be interested to find out what happens to the mayor’s hair in the end.

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At Last! Doubts about 'ADHD' go mainstream

Readers who have endured my many (rather lonely and much-abused) attempts to resist the unscientific ‘diagnosis’ of huge numbers of healthy children with the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’ may be interested by this article by William Sutcliffe(and the book to which it refers)  in the normally-conformist and conventional-wisdom-infested ‘Independent’ newspaper. Does Mr Sutcliffe know what he has let himself in for? Geysers of slime will be directed at him from the potent 'ADHD' lobby. 

 

My summary of the case against ’ADHD’ and the drugs given for it is here

 

http://dailym.ai/1aWIHmv

 

Mr Sutcliffe’s article is

 

Here

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/thousands-of-children-are-being-medicated-for-adhd--when-the-condition-may-not-even-exist-10509842.html

 

 

Think Greece is in a mess? Wait till the UK's debt mountain explodes in our face

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Would we cope with misery as well as the Greeks? If our great fat cushion of state-backed jobs, welfare payments, tax credits and easy loans were whipped away one morning, how would we get on?

I think we would do very badly. In Greece, the suddenly poor and destitute turned to their strong extended families.

And if those families had not taken them in and supported them, there would have been nothing else. Fortunately, they did.

This country doesn’t have strong extended families any more. In many cases, it doesn’t really have families at all.

In too many places, it has gangs instead. And those that survive are weakest just where they would be needed most in a crisis – among the poor.

This country lives on the edge of serious disorder. The misnamed ‘riots’ of August 2011 were nothing of the kind.

They had no political pretext, no wider aim. I suspect many thought of joining in, but didn’t quite.

They followed the realisation by a large number of people, in a period of good weather, that the forces of order were weak, absent and afraid. Many of them were laughing as they stole, wrecked and burned.

Mostly, they turned on shops rather than private homes or individuals. But this seems to have been a matter of chance.

There were one or two especially frightening moments when the lawless mob came into direct contact with the cosseted middle class, who hid from their hooded attackers under restaurant tables while the kitchen staff, ready to defend their livelihoods with force, beat off the assault with rolling pins.

And almost all of the looters got away with it. It was only the dim stragglers who were caught and whom I watched shuffling through the courts in the weeks afterwards, most of them with criminal records nearly as long as a Hilary Mantel historical novel.

They were baffled to find that, after years of cautions, unpaid fines, suspended sentences, community service and limp rebukes, something might actually now happen to them.

Actually, not much did in the end.

That’s bad enough. But what about the rest of us? Generations of all classes have been taught to expect a comfortable, well-fed existence, a reliable safety net.

How much privation would it take to turn us into beggars, then looters and food rioters? I ask this because we are much closer to a Greek-style crisis than we think.

Our debts, national and personal, are huge. We can never pay them off. Our trade imbalance is just as bad. Our recovery is based entirely on a house-price balloon that could burst in a moment.

The main effort of the Government is to avoid any shocks until the Election is over – but what then?

I feel for the Greeks. I don’t blame them for refusing to endure more collective punishment, though they were foolish – as we are now – to let politicians lead them into a swamp of debt.

But I wonder whether, not far hence, it will be the Greeks who are sympathising with us.

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The riddle behind our Gaddafi disaster

Last week, the BBC rightly but cruelly replayed David Cameron’s ludicrous words from September 2011, when he went to Tripoli to say: ‘Your city was an inspiration to the world as you overthrew a dictator and chose freedom.’

Now it’s an inspiration to nobody. He can’t go there to say so, because it’s too dangerous. Why isn’t he in more trouble over his active destruction of an entire country? It’s all very strange. 

The Gaddafi regime fell because Mr Cameron lent the RAF to various gangs of Libyan jihadis (about whom we knew nothing). 

But less than a year before, in October 2010, Henry Bellingham, a Tory Minister, was referring to Gaddafi as ‘Brother Leader’ at a summit in Tripoli.

About the same time, another Minister, Alistair Burt, told the Libyan-British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’. 

What changed? Could it be the same forces which decreed that flags in Britain should fly at half-mast to mark the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? 

The Saudis always hated Libya’s dictator because he had overthrown a dynasty very like their own.

Do we still have an independent foreign policy, or is it governed by another, richer country?

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Robots are no match for the most beautiful machines of all...

Some of the best films of modern times feature lifelike robots. 

The latest, Ex Machina, starring Alicia Vikander, left, is a clever and cunning mystery story which I’ll say as little about as possible in case it spoils the ending.

But, as I discovered on a recent visit to a Tokyo robotics expert, we are far, far away from developing anything remotely like a human consciousness, let alone a human ability to move limbs and experience pain, pleasure or grief.

The real wonder in our midst is the astonishing complexity, beauty and mystery of the human body, and the insoluble puzzle of where and what consciousness is. 

We fantasise about creating human-like robots because it helps us close our minds to some of the strongest evidence for the existence of God – an idea we dislike.

*************************************************************************

My local police force, Thames Valley, has recently admitted (thanks to a Freedom of Information request) that 54 of its officers, some of them specials, have criminal convictions, including for burglary, arson, drug possession, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and computer misuse. 

I expect other forces have similar numbers. Are the police really so short of recruits that they cannot find people without such pasts? 

Forgiving and forgetting is all very well, but these are the people who come into the homes of burglary victims, and whom we trust absolutely with highly personal details.

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Those who rely on the medical profession’s wisdom should note that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence now says 1.2 million people may have been misdiagnosed with asthma. 

I’m glad someone has noticed the absurd keenness of doctors to classify healthy children as asthmatics. 

How long before they notice that something similar may be happening with some other fashionable ailments, such as the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’? 

Or will the fact that huge drug contracts rely on these subjective diagnoses protect them from watchdogs? 

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Have you noticed that the people most excited about women bishops in the Church of England are those who don’t believe in God and never go near a church? 

Personally, I couldn’t care less what sex a bishop is. I’d like it if they believed in God, preferred poetry and beauty to banality, and didn’t mix up Christianity with socialism. 

Perhaps I should start a campaign.

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The Night a Fleet of Tory Snake-oil Tankers Sailed into Rochester...and Sank.

I wondered how our neutered,  bootlicking, pro-government media would manage to turn David Cameron’s devastating personal and political defeat in Rochester into a disaster for Red Ed.

 

Piles of money, tankers laden with snake-oil, five visits by the Prime Minister himself, even a frantic plea for Guardian readers’ votes, could not save the Tories from what I reckon was the worst  defeat in their entire history, losing a seat to a party which really believes in what the Tories pretend to believe in. 

 

Yet you’d think the main event was the sacking of a Labour nobody by another nobody for doing nothing. 

 

Here’s the supposedly big story: Emily Thornberry MP posted a Tweet in which she wrote the words “Image from Rochester” next to a picture of a house draped with football flags. Gosh.

 

Somehow this non-event has led to her sacking. Admittedly she has been sacked from a non-job. And if I were Ed Miliband I would have relished the chance to get rid of this blowhard and poser.

 

She once tried to attack me on ‘Question Time’, shrieking ‘How dare you!’ at me for making a few mild remarks about the need for welfare reform. She sought (quite wrongly) to imply that by doing so I had attacked single mothers personally. 

 

I suppose it’s fitting that someone who uses phoney outrage against others should herself be destroyed by phoney outrage. Ms Thornberry is a typical modern politician, struggling to fool her party’s remaining loyal voters into believing she is anything other than a careerist professional.

 

Like the former Tory MP and Cameron-boosting media figure Matthew Parris, who sneered at length about Clacton, Ms Thornberry was baffled and amazed when she actually visited modern England. 

 

Presumably, in her smooth daily journey from her rarefied London district to her office, she has never before seen St George’s Cross flags draped on a house. The remarkable thing is that she thought such a sight was unusual and interesting enough to Tweet.

 

But the incident is essentially trivial. Compared to the earthquake of the Rochester result, it is as weighty and significant as a seagull-dropping falling on to a politician’s greasy head.

 

What does Rochester mean? It means that a barrier to real and significant change is crumbling and may yet collapse. Seven years ago the brilliant pollster and Blairite establishment figure Peter Kellner (a longstanding Labour Party member) told me at a public debate:

 

‘I think it's really important that the Conservative Party does survive as a substantial brand, because there will always be a need for a centre-right party.’

 

Need? I wondered as he spoke, who exactly needs it? Why does a lifelong Lefty like Mr Kellner wish to save the Tories?  Mr Kellner read my mind and continued ‘If the Conservatives were to go the way that Peter expects (and I think possibly would relish) I am frightened as to what kind of right-of-centre politics would then spring up...

 

‘One of the great virtues of British politics...is that we have not had a substantial far-right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty.’

 

When Mr Kellner uses terms such as ‘far-right nationalist xenophobic’ he means a party that would be hostile to the European Union’s control of our government, laws and borders. The British left have for many years seen Brussels as the way to turn Britain into the sort of country they want, by the back door.

 

If you doubt the strength of this link, please note that Mr Kellner is married to Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has just retired from the European Commission, where she was its (greatly underestimated and unfairly mocked) foreign policy chief.

 

The Tory party has helped the Left for decades. It has blocked the creation of a strong pro-British parliamentary force.

It has done so by pretending to love Britain when it doesn’t. Its every pose is a fake. All its principal figures are fakes as well. And they have got away with it.

 

For nearly eight years I have been in something close to despair  at the continued willingness of patriotic British men and women to give their votes to the Conservative Party.

 

This weekend, for the first time, I begin to have a very faint hope that they have finally seen through the Tory Fraud.  Rochester has shown that a pro-British rebellion against the Tories could, if properly handled, sweep the country, elbowing Labour aside as it does so.

 

What I hope for is what the establishment fear. That is why they hope you will be distracted by the drivelling fate of a New Labour nonentity. Do not be.   

 

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A Vital Message Hidden in a Laughable Movie

Crowds are flocking to see the laughable new film about the computer genius Alan Turing ‘The Imitation Game’. I think they are  mainly women besotted with Benedict Cumberbatch, though some men may enjoy the sight of Keira Knightley got up as a 1940s intellectual sexpot.

 

It’s the usual hopeless attempt to recreate the past by dressing the cast in acres of tweed, making them all smoke and renting some ancient cars.

 

But the ending is genuinely horrible. The homosexual Turing is shown robbed of his mental powers by hormone drugs supposedly intended to make him ‘normal’.   

 

We can all shudder at this stupid and wrong treatment.  But it is easy to condemn the follies of the past. At the time, fashionable opinion believed Turing’s ‘chemical castration’ was a humane alternative to prison.

 

What similarly stupid things do we believe today? How about this? Despite growing medical doubts (a report this week said it had more to do with drug marketing than medicine), we dope huge numbers of children with pills very similar to illegal amphetamines.

 

This mass-doping is justified by the suspect ‘diagnosis’ of an alleged complaint called ‘ADHD’. If Alan Turing were a child now, I think it pretty likely that his ‘odd’ behaviour would lead him to be drugged in this way, killing his special talents.

 

It seems to me very probable that, as you read this, some potential genius is having his life blighted, forced by smiling adults to swallow pills to make him ‘normal. We can see this was wrong in 1953. Why can’t we see it is wrong now?

 

 

*********

I just thought I’d note that it is now officially recognised that the police have been fiddling crime figures, a fact I was jeered at for exposing some time ago. Mind you, the authorities still can’t quite admit that the reason for this is political pressure. Of course it is.

 

****** 

How can it possibly be balanced for the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme to run an uncritical, near-reverent commercial for cannabis, as it did on Wednesday? This is not a joke. People who take this drug can end up in locked wards for the rest of their lives. Who was responsible?

 

A Civilized Exchange

Here’s an encouraging development in the often sterile battle between sceptics, such as I, and supporters of unproven concepts such as ‘Dyslexia’ and ‘ADHD’.

 

One of my critics, Dr Harold Levinson, originally gave a wrong impression of my opinions in a blog posting. But when I challenged him, he responded in a reasonable and a civilized fashion and was creditably anxious to put the error right. This is , alas, notable mainly because it is so rare. But it is also a straightforward Good Thing, and deserves to be praised. We will never get anywhere if we cannot keep to the civilized rules of reasoned debate.

 

 You may read an account of our exchange here:

 

 

 

http://www.dyslexiaonline.com/blog/apology-peter-hitchens-dialogue-opportunity-advance/

 

Can you spot the difference between these two men? No, me neither

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Do you remember when the Blair creature was still worshipped and glorified? When he smiled his way through elections we all now know he should have lost?

I do. It was very lonely. Now that he has become a swearword, and everyone despises him, I am often tempted to remind these people how they used to fawn on him.

But why waste time on him? His life is now one of deepening sadness as he sits among his huge and useless riches and yet is despised by those whose approval he yearns for.

The important thing is to realise we are making a very similar mistake now. The same sort of people who managed the Blair fraud long ago gave up on him, and started work on the Cameron fraud instead.

These people are like advertising men stuck with a product that is no good, a car that breaks down, a soap that crumbles into powdery grease when it touches water, a foodstuff that tastes disgusting and cleaves to the tongue. Yet they have signed a contract to promote it.

At all costs they must keep the consumer from seeing the truth until after he has bought the merchandise. One way of doing this is to spread negative stories about rival products.

The shameful and childish personal abuse directed against Ed Miliband has now reached a point where honourable Conservatives must be tempted to vote Labour in protest against it.

The reason for this Stalinist destruction of personal credit  is simple. There is no political difference of any significance between the two men. So instead we are supposed to make up our minds on the basis of the size of Mr Miliband’s teeth. Heaven itself cannot help a nation which settles its future on this basis.

The utter falsity of  Mr Cameron’s recent play-acting about the EU is astounding. He is now reduced to issuing bombastic threats of future displeasure over a needless defeat which  he himself sought, to try to fool his stupider voters into thinking he is something he is not. It is we who will ‘live to regret’ taking this man seriously.

It is simply not true, as almost every media outlet obediently parroted yesterday, that Britain is now one step closer to leaving the EU. We are as trapped in it as ever. Not one molecule of David Cameron is hostile to British membership of the EU. His godfather and first political mentor was Tim Rathbone, a sopping wet Tory MP eventually expelled from the party for supporting a pro-European breakaway.

Mr Cameron’s fellow Bullingdon Club hearty, Radek Sikorski, now foreign minister of Poland, and keen on all things EU, thinks of his old friend as an enthusiast for Brussels. Tapes of Mr Sikorski’s Warsaw table talk emerged last week.

Every word of it assumes Mr Cameron is really on the side of the EU: ‘He stupidly tries to play the system… his whole strategy of feeding them scraps in order to satisfy them is just as I predicted, turning against him; he should have said, “Bleep off!” tried to convince people and isolate [the sceptics]. But he ceded the field to those that are now embarrassing him.’

He is only wrong in one thing. Mr Cameron’s critics are not turning against him. One supposedly ‘Eurosceptic’ Tory MP publicly licked the Prime Minister’s polished toecaps in the Commons only the other day.

How sad it is that, given the self-censorship  of the entire London political media, we need to turn to bootleg tapes of a Polish politician to read an honest account of Mr Cameron’s tactic – stupid propaganda, feeding his critics scraps.

Mr Cameron’s famous referendum has been set for 2017 because the premier knows he will be out of office by then. It is a post-dated cheque.

His futile battle against Jean-Claude Juncker is accompanied, again, by low personal smears – a former member of the Bullingdon isn’t well-placed to sneer at someone else’s drinking habits. And it is what is called ‘triangulation’. By appearing to fight against something the public dislike, you pretend that you share the public’s views.

David Blunkett, when Education Secretary and making schools even worse, used to do the same by getting barracked at Teachers’ Union conferences. Home Secretary Theresa May does it by rubbing the Police Federation up the wrong way.

Don’t you see the crude tricks they are playing on you? Don’t you see why they need to hire people such as Andy Coulson? Do you, as you did with Blair, have to wait once again until it is far too late, to recognise this swindle for what it is?

'Mighty' America humiliated again

The collapse of American power in the Middle East is astonishing, especially given that they fought so hard to replace us there.

The indefensible jailing, on evidence-free charges,  of three journalists in Egypt came a few hours after Washington’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, had handed the Cairo junta a huge slice of American taxpayers’ money.

This payment can only be made legal in the US by pretending that the Egyptian military putsch was not a putsch. The dictatorship’s response went beyond scorn. They took the money and jailed the journalists anyway, in spite of Mr Kerry’s personal plea to spare them.

No doubt Mr Kerry was scared that, if he refused the cash, Saudi Arabia would have stepped in with its own large chequebook.

But such weakness, and willingness to be humiliated by this appalling despotism, look especially foolish from a government, which repeatedly bombs other countries for not being democratic.

Diversity in what, exactly?

How does the BBC get away with its blatantly racialist plan to ensure that one in every seven actors or presenters is black, Asian or from an ethnic minority within three years?

When are we going to judge people not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character, as Martin Luther King said we should? Anyway, if it’s diversity the BBC wants, it could start by employing any journalists at all who aren’t fanatically Green or Left-wing.
 
Shock news! Divorce and drugs are bad
When the Pope speaks out for Christianity, it’s to be expected, and in the way of business. The statements you want to watch out for are the ones which come from people who criticise their own side.

There have been two this week – Penelope Leach, the liberals’ favourite child-care expert, says there’s no  doubt that divorce damages children. And Professor Sir Simon Wessely, the new head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warns against the medicalisation (and drugging) of normal children. If they say so, it  must be bad.

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