Some Reflections on Flying Flags at Half Mast

And so with a loud ‘clunk’, it all falls into place. Britain’s apparently mad foreign policy of the past few years now makes almost complete sense. It had seemed to me that a slavish desire to please the Saudi government lay behind our government’s desire to attack Syria.  Well, I can see why we, as an increasingly indebted country with very few flourishing export industries apart from weapons and aircraft, might want to be on good terms with Riyadh, a limitlessly wealthy oil state with a large appetite for… weapons and aeroplanes. It may be an old excuse, but it’s perfectly true that if we didn’t sell them these things, someone else would.  

 

 

Now, I would much rather fly a  flag at half mast from time to time, or get Prince Charles to struggle into a burnous again, than despatch British service personnel into another stupid war. And I prefer British workers to be employed. 

 

But we cannot really square this with our claims to be the apostle of liberty, democracy etc. etc. in the Arab world.  So let’s not do so. Be polite to the Saudi Royal Family by all means. It wudln't be the first or the last despotism with which we have cheerfully done business.

 

Send any number of royal princes and politicians to Riyadh to be nice to them if it saves British jobs.

 

But please, please stop pretending, at the same time,  to be the apostles of liberty, democracy and the rule of law, in the Arab world or anywhere else. It's tiresome, stupid, an insult to the intelligence and it only gets us into conflicts for which we are (to put it mildly) not equipped. 

 

As I wrote nearly a year ago (23^rd February 2014)  ‘I was filled with admiring wonder by a  picture last week of Prince Charles in full Lawrence of Arabia gear. Could his trip (one of several in recent  years) have been connected to the  finalising of a contract under which BAE  is supplying 72 Typhoon fighter aircraft to Riyadh? I do hope so.

 

‘BAE is one of our few remaining real industries, because (though nobody admits this) we protect it against foreign competition, and work hard to keep it in orders. The Prince is right to help.

But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism sit very oddly with our windbaggery over ‘democracy’ in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. One or the other. But not both.’

 

I’m not sure now sustainable this Saudi policy is if we just carry on being ncoe to the, but don't join any more wars. But quite possibly, it is practicable.

 

Does it really require us to attack Saudi Arabia’s enemies in the Arab and Islamic world, as our leaders seem to think?

Personally, I suspect that Saudi Arabia doesn’t much care whether Britain tags along in American operations against Saudi Arabia’s foes. I think it’s just as happy to get the Royal visits, and forget the airstrikes and the ground troops. Likewise, I think Washington is less concerned than we are told it is, about whether a British contingent joins the US armed forces on any of these adventures. The USA does not need our help physically, and don’t think it really needs it diplomatically either. Anyway, these days France seems very happy to act as chief sidekick and is, after all, the home of the poodle.

 

The British government cannot openly explain what I suspect is its reasoning. It is rightly unsure that Britain is willing to pay in lives for Saudi orders. Our leaders would never dare say ‘Saudi Arabia will buy lots of things from us if we attack Syria, so that is what we are going to do’. Because most British people would object to Britain, behaving in this way. They think we’re still an independent, solvent, sovereign country which keeps armed forces to defend itself. (They were also, encouragingly, unfooled in the end by the propaganda campaign for the Syrian war, though they seem broadly fooled by the anti-Russian public relations campaign.)

If Mr Cameron or anyone else were to say such a thing, apart from anything else,  the pretence that the government has solved, or is anywhere near solving, our economic problems would immediately be punctured, quite fatally.

 

But it’s even worse if it isn’t even true – that the Saudi and American  pressure to do these things is small or non-existent, and the real problem is the self-important vanity of our politicians, who like to imagine that they are still significant figures in the world and enjoy almost any excuse to start ordering armed forces into action and watching the resulting pretty explosions (pretty if you’re not nearby)  on 24-hour TV.

 

 

And so we had the ridiculous pretence that we wished to support ‘democracy’, liberty etc etc etc’ in Syria, or wherever it is, is maintained, with a straight face, by Mr Cameron and by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague. At the same time, of course,  Saudi Arabia was using British made armoured vehicles to support the government of Bahrain in its efforts to prevent ‘democracy’ or liberty from breaking out there. And Britain has been silent about the violent military putsch that has put an end to ‘democracy’ in Egypt.  Also, though they never mention it, some of our governing class must be having some misgivings about the disastrous outcome of our ‘democratic’ intervention in Libya, which has turned that country into a circle of Hell from which no easy escape is visible.

 

By the way, there’ve been some interesting revelations recently about the closeness between the Blair government and Colonel Gaddafi. But can anybody tell me what the initial policy of the Cameron government was towards Libya?

 

I will tell you.  Archives reveal ( as I first pointed out some years ago) that the 'Minister for Africa', Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as 'Brother Leader') at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair 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'.

 

Something mysterious happened after that. I wonder what? Perhaps Libya suddenly stopped being ‘democratic’, but I doubt it.

 

It’s so complicated. Sometimes I wonder if the British government actually wanted Parliament to reject the Syria war plan, having realised ( after learning a bit more about the Syrian ‘rebels’) that it had ignorantly talked itself into a disastrous policy but having no other way of telling the Saudis that we couldn’t now take part. The immediate collapse of the government’s efforts to get its war was remarkable . Even more remarkable was the collapse, days later, of President Obama’s desire to bomb Syria.  Seymour Hersh put forward another theory in the New York Review of Books here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin and here http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line, which is interesting if impossible to prove.

 

Of course, our leaders still pretend they wanted to fight, and blame Ed Miliband for getting in the way (I only wish he had done so more vigorously).   But they would, wouldn’t they?

Theresa May - is she the new Maggie Thatcher or the new Harriet Harman?

Politics loves some people and hates others. It’s usually reasonably obvious why particular MPs prosper, and others don’t, especially if you meet them first by seeing them on a TV programme, as most of us do.

 

These days, you absolutely have to look and sound good on TV,  above all other things. This has created a new type of politician, one who often looks odd and seems odd off screen, but is touched with magic on it. Anthony Blair is one such. Youth is usually important or at least the appearance of being youthful, so fat, ugly or even awkward people, or intense and thoughtful people, or people with big eyes, or people who don’t smile all the time, are cursed with disadvantages before they even begin.

 

Looking back at the political figures of my own youth, most of whom looked either like tortoises or like sausages, it is hard to imagine any of them rising to prominence now.

 

And looking at the politicians of today, often barely out of their teens, in most cases unable to deliver a speech with force or elegance, Olympically ignorant of history, geography and morals (they have an obsession with man-made global warming where their morals ought to be) , untouched by hard experience, it is impossible to see any of them even being MPs in, say, 1955.

 

Mrs Theresa May doesn’t quite fit in with this pattern. Born in 1956, she’s of an older generation than David Cameron (born 1966) than George Osborne (born 1971), Michael Gove (born 1967) and even of William Hague (born 1961). I can’t offhand recall the names or faces of any other Cabinet members, though I’m sure that with an effort I could do so. I find it easier to remember the names of the Duke of Marlborough’s four great victories (Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, since you ask).

 

And it’s a significant gap. Someone born in 1956 would have grown up at last partly in pre-revolutionary Britain, consciously living in a world before supermarkets, ring roads and colour TV were universal, and before modern music, with its unending drumbeat and guitar jangle, had become the default background noise of life. She’s a clergyman’s daughter, so quite possibly her upbringing was untypically old-fashioned.

 

But there’s no sign of intellectual ferment. Asked to choose (in one of those website quizzes) between Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ and a novel by Louise Bagshawe (now Mensch), she said she wouldn’t read either of them, adding ‘sorry’. She won her way to Oxford in the mid-1970s, from a grammar school which she tends to describe as a comprehensive (which it became after she had been there some time). That betokens some cleverness. But her subject of choice was Geography, not the politician’s degree of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I know I often say that politicians don’t know any geography, but I think most readers will know that by that I mean they don’t know historical geography, the faultlines of power.

 

Even so there are clear signs, early on, of political ambition, a desire (confessed by her) to be a Tory MP from the age of 12, membership of the Oxford University Conservative Association, (through which she met her husband, an investment banker of whom we know pretty much nothing at all),  a willingness to stand in hopeless seats(Durham NW 1992 and Barking in a 1994 by-election).

 

Then there was a long zone of non-excitement working for the Association for Payment Clearing Services, a name so unglamorous that you might almost suspect it of being an MI6 front,  from 1985 to 1997, and a councillor in the London borough of Merton from 1986 to 1994.

 

She’s a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She lists among her interests education, disability and local government, and her recreations as walking and cooking.

 

Everyone knows about her famous ‘nasty party’ speech, which paced her firmly on the side of those who wanted to deconservatize the Tory Party in the Hague, IDS and Michael Howard eras. This is the faction now very much in charge. Now she’s supposed to be engaged in a punch-up with Michael Gove. This is to some sort of contest to see who’s tougher on ‘Islamist militants’. Those favourite bogeypersons of our age. Being ‘tough’ on these bearded persons is a useful distraction when you have entirely lost control of the national borders, and of crime.

 

 

 

She recently had a well-publicized brawl with everybody’s  least favourite pressure group, the Police Federation, which apparently impressed many of my fellow scribblers, though it left me quietly muttering the word ‘triangulation’ to myself.

 

I’ve written before (in March 2013) about the attempt to turn her into the New Iron Lady. I thought this might be a good moment to reproduce that article. I’m told she’s the new Maggie Thatcher. I’m no admirer of Lady Thatcher, who doesn’t seem to me to have been especially conservative in practice,  but this still seems to me to be more or less delusionary.  

 

You might just as well call her the new Shirley Williams, or the new Harriet Harman, it seems to me. :

 

The Mystery of Theresa May

 

 

Now that the Cameron Delusion has exploded in a miniature mushroom cloud of dead ducks, rusty wind farms, broken promises,  and the bristling moustaches of infuriated activists , the doomed Tory Party are once again looking for a new false hope. They have got the sticky-backed plastic and the old washing-up bottles out, plus a few bowls of papier-mache, and are trying to construct a new hope out of the Rt Hon Theresa May MP. The media voices that once told us that Mr Cameron could lead the Tories out of the Wilderness of Zimmer, or wherever it is they have been wandering since the fall of Mrs Thatcher, are now proposing Mrs May as the New Mrs Thatcher. This would be very funny if it were not also very sad. 

 

I suspect this has a lot to do with Mrs May’s attractive, resourceful and hard-working special adviser, Fiona Cunningham, who in my limited experience is a good deal more animated and adventurous than the Home Secretary.  I have noticed Ms Cunningham appearing recently in news pictures with her boss. This is a development frowned upon in the civil service. Officials who get into the picture generally have to buy cakes all round for the whole private office. But I applaud it.  We should know more about these important figures. Special advisers (Spads for short) are often hugely significant people, whose influence is often forgotten. They are also, in many cases, the Cabinet Ministers of the day after tomorrow. This is partly because they are often the main link between senior politicians and the national media and so understand very well the important relation between these two elites, explored in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ but largely unknown to the public. 

 

I cannot say if this is the case with Ms Cunningham, since I have not made any great efforts to ( as the phrase goes) 'get alongside' .  I have the impression Mrs May doesn’t much like me, and I can quite understand why that might be so. Fortunately, I have no great desire to be liked by politicians. 

 

I have often pointed out that Mrs May is in fact hugely politically correct. I have compared her to Labour’s Harriet Harman, and pointed out that the two women got on rather well during the passage of Labour’s Equality Act, which Mrs May was meant to be opposing. The Act pretty much set in concrete European Union directives on ‘Equality and Diversity’ which have turned this slogan (a polite expression for Political Correctness) into Britain’s official ideology. This profound change has led very quickly to the official dethroning of Christianity in English law, as the ultimate source of law, and the ultimate test of good. 

 

 

It is not just me saying this. In ‘The Times’ of 24th November 2011, we read (in an article by Anushka Asthana) :

 

‘Britain's equality chief has praised Theresa May, the Tory Home Secretary, arguing that she fights just as hard for women's rights as Labour's fiercest advocates on the issue.’ 

 

The article said that Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, had (like me) compared Mrs May to Harriet Harman . It recounted ‘But Mr Phillips said that he was just as impressed by the Tories' most senior female figure. “Theresa May, in my opinion, is just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women's equality,” he said. “Equality is an issue that can transcend politics, and we should judge people not on their political label but what they are doing and what they deliver.” Mr Phillips is also recorded as having praised Mrs May for resisting pressure to do a U-turn on the Equality Act and fighting off attempts to remove workplace protections for women.’

 

 

Somehow or other this person is now being portrayed as a ‘New Iron Lady’, because of some neo-liberal stuff on privatising health and education (which, whatever it is, is not conservative) and because she is making promises (on which she must be pretty sure she will never be tested ) to repeal the Human Rights Act.

 

 

 

Is this credible?  Back in December 2009, Mrs May was puffed by the Guardian in an admiring interview, during which she let slip that she now favoured all-women shortlists for the selection of Tory candidates This was the same Mrs May who, in an earlier incarnation, had said (in 2002): ‘: 'I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.' 

 

I would also like to harp on here about Mrs May’s curious portrayal of her own education.  She repeatedly says in official reference books that she went to Wheatley Park Comprehensive School, a reasonably well-regarded rural comp, based on an old manor house outside the small town or large village of Wheatley, a few miles to the East of Oxford. 

 

Actually, it is not quite that simple. She attended a private convent school till she was 13. Then in 1969, she went (presumably after passing a selective exam) to Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school. In 1971, two years later, this was merged with Shotover School, a nearby mixed sex secondary modern, and became Wheatley Park Comprehensive. It was normal practice, during such mergers, for the existing grammar school pupils to continue in a ‘grammar stream’ until the end of their education.  I cannot say for certain that it was the case during Mrs May’s schooling, but it is highly likely. 

 

Now, I know of at least one former Labour MP who described his school (in reference books)  as a ‘comprehensive’ even though the city in which he was educated had no comprehensive schools at the time, and the school involved was a secondary modern. He was so keen to emphasise that he had undergone this egalitarian baptism, that he overcame this little detail (and in truth there’s not much difference between most comps and most secondary moderns). I can see why a committed socialist might want to blur the boundaries. 

 

But why would a Conservative MP, in describing her schooling, choose to describe it so? The Tories say emphatically that they won't build any new grammar schools, but they sort of acknowledge they were a good thing and won't (for now) destroy the few remaining ones.  I think it is at least interesting, and not very encouraging to those who fancy that Mrs May is some sort of  saviour from the right.

 

 

 

Then of course there is her description of the Tories in 2002 as ‘The Nasty Party’. Few doubted that she intended to strike at those who were resisting the moral,  social and cultural revolution launched by New Labour, then very much under way. As for the praise she gets for avoiding the political traps into which previous Home Secretaries have fallen, let us note here that the main source of those traps was always the old Home Department’s responsibility for prisons , Judges and courts – which has now been handed over to the Ministry of Justice. (Just as all countries which have Ministries of Culture tend to be cultural deserts, countries with Justice Ministries tend to be pretty short of justice, but that’s a discussion for another time).  

 

Now, what has such a person got against the Human Rights Act, or the Court? In my view, I can’t see why she should quarrel with it on any principle. 

 

What did she actually say? I haven’t so far been able to obtain a full copy of her speech. But this is one key passage : ‘We need to stop human rights legislation interfering with our ability to fight crime and control immigration. That's why, as our last manifesto promised, the next Conservative government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and it's why we should also consider very carefully our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights and the Convention it enforces. When Strasbourg constantly moves the goalposts and prevents the deportation of dangerous men like Abu Qatada, we have to ask ourselves, to what end are we signatories to the convention? Are we really limiting human rights abuses in other countries? I'm sceptical.’ 

 

She also said : ‘By 2015 we'll need a plan for dealing with the European Court of Human Rights. And yes, I want to be clear that all options - including leaving the Convention altogether - should be on the table.’ 

 

Now, those who were diddled by Mr Slippery’s ‘pledge’ of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty should recall how important the detailed language turned out to be. The Slippery Team managed to argue that Mr Cameron’s pledge was annulled by the fact that the Treaty had been ratified (I always note here the very interesting fact that this ratification was not achieved until after the Tory conference of that year, so sparing the Slippery Team from having to make this rather tattered defence in front of a hall full of actual Tory Party members). 

 

Now, Mrs May here speaks of ‘The next Conservative Government’. Well, when will that be, say the Bells of Old Bailey? Even if Mr Nigel Farage is silly enough to offer the Tories some kind of pledge in 2015 (and if he does this he will drive his party straight over a cliff), the Tories cannot win the next election (or the one after, or the one after that). As I have been pointing out now for at least seven years, the Tories will never again form a majority in a United Kingdom Parliament. So pledges of this kind are not just post-dated cheques. They are cheques signed in invisible ink, drawn on a non-existent account. We all know what happened to Mr Cameron’s ‘British Bill of Rights’ (he seems not to know we already have one) and the commission set up to look into it. Mrs May’s pledge is from the same dodgy shop, the sort which, when you take your wonky goods back a week later, has whitewash smeared on the window and a sign saying ‘Closed!’ upon the door. 

 

As for the ‘option’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, an option is presumably a choice. Thus, what she has actually said is that a *choice* of leaving or not leaving the ECHR (in which she might take the choice of staying in) will be *on the table* (which does not mean that it would be adopted, or that she would adopt it, or that it couldn’t also be snatched *off* the table at a later stage) and all this would only happen  *if the Tories win the next election*, which of course they will not do. 

 

My goodness, this is not tough talk. Cloud Cuckoo Land, or the summit of Kanchenjunga, seem accessible by comparison with these remote and unattainable conditions, as does a nice slice of Pie in the Sky, and an attractive  holiday in a Castle in the Air (paid for in full, in advance).  Anyone who is taken in by it deserves everything he gets. 

 

We are back with my favourite derisive rhymes – ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’,  and ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’. Indeed we could.  I think it is best summed up by pointing out that, if Mrs May were a verb, she would be no more definite or reliable than her pledges. Why do people take this sort of thing seriously? For the same reason people believe all kinds of daft things – because they want to.  Why do they want to ? Because they’d rather not realise how bad things really are.  And so on. Thus universal suffrage democracy marches onward to the cliff-edge, singing as it goes.

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is an excuse for bad teachers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I doubt there has ever been a society so easily fooled by pseudo-science and quackery as ours is.

Millions of healthy people take happy pills that  do them obvious harm, and are increasingly correlated with inexplicable suicide  and worse.

Legions of healthy children are drugged into numbness because they fidget during  boring lessons, and countless people are persuaded that they or their children suffer from  a supposed disease called ‘dyslexia’, even though there is no evidence at all that it exists.

A few weeks ago I rejoiced at the first major cracks in this great towering dam of lies. Dr Richard Saul brought out his courageous and overdue book, ADHD Does Not Exist.

I also urge everyone to read James Davies’s book Cracked, on the inflated claims of psychiatry since it sold its soul to the pill-makers.

Now comes The Dyslexia Debate, published yesterday, a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics – Professor Julian  Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University.

Their book makes several points. There is no clear definition of what ‘dyslexia’ is. There is no objective diagnosis of it. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. The widespread belief that it is linked with high intelligence does not stand up to analysis.

And, as Parliament’s Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: ‘There is no convincing evidence  that if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.’

 This is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as the book’s authors say: ‘Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.’ These include extra resources and extra time in exams. And then there’s the hope that it will ‘reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility’.

I think that last point is the decisive one and the reason for the beetroot-faced fury that greets any critic of ‘dyslexia’ (and will probably greet this book and article). If it’s really a disease, it’s nobody’s fault. But it is somebody’s fault. For the book also describes the furious resistance, among teachers,  to proven methods of teaching children to read. Such methods have been advocated by  experts since Rudolf Flesch wrote his devastating book Why Johnny Can’t Read almost 60 years ago.

There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of ‘dyslexia’ does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught.

It also does nothing for  that great majority of poor readers. They are robbed of one of life’s great pleasures and essential skills.

What they need, what we all need, is proper old-fashioned teaching, and who cares if the silly teachers think it is ‘authoritarian’? That’s what teaching is.

The sign of an honest butcher

I wondered when the Soppy Lobby would get  round to trying to ban butchers’ shops displaying the recognisable carcases of dead animals. The first attempt, in the Suffolk town of Sudbury, has failed. But it won’t be the last. How sad.

Now that most meat is  sold ready packaged in supermarkets, many children grow up with no idea where  it comes from. Proper butchers are rarer and rarer. My own view is that you shouldn’t eat meat if you don’t know what it is and how it came to be on your plate.

The spread of cheap, unrecognisable hypermarket meat has helped to create hideous meat factories, where animals are imprisoned and tortured in unspeakable conditions before being cruelly massacred. I’d rather eat lentils than support such methods.

Proper butchers know the names of the farms that supply them, and can tell you where the animals were humanely slaughtered. It’s the hidden cruelty we should object to, not the honesty of the remaining butchers.

Here's the real IRA scandal

What a lot of twaddle we have heard about the  dropping of the case against the alleged Hyde Park bomber, John Downey.

On page 56 of the judge’s ruling, point 32 states ‘even  if convicted of all the offences he [Downey] would, in consequence of the 1998 Act, serve no more than two years in prison’. So, even if a jury had found him guilty of that ghastly crime, two footling years would have been his lot.

The 1998 Act was part of Britain’s grovelling  surrender to the Provisional IRA, made under fierce American pressure.

I said at the time that this was a total and unmitigated defeat, but I have been told over and over again by  pious persons that it is the price of ‘peace’.

Well, we have not got peace. We have been utterly humiliated by a criminal gang, at the behest of our supposed allies in the ‘War on Terror’.

And what do you think will happen if we ever dare prosecute another IRA man, let alone put him in jail? They haven’t gone away, you know.

How’s the ‘liberation’ of Ukraine going  for you? Gullibly welcomed by 99.9 per cent of the British media, it doesn’t look quite so simple now, does it?

Beginning to have doubts about Britain taking sides? You should. Apart from all the worrying developments in Crimea, which are no surprise to any informed person, it comes to something when that old class warrior, Dennis Skinner MP, speaks for Britain.

But his brief outburst was the most telling thing anybody in Parliament has said about  this. He asked William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign Meddling: ‘Have I got it right, or not, that a Tory Foreign Secretary has come to the House to take money out of the pockets of people in Britain – flood-ravaged and austerity-riddled Britain – to hand it over to the EU fanatics in Ukraine?’ Yes, he has got it right.

More from Mike Barton, Chief Constable of Durham and advocate of free heroin for abusers. I suggested his job was to enforce the law. He retorted: ‘When you say that my job is to enforce the law, between 18 and 22 per cent of my work is law enforcement and crime-fighting. Fifty per cent of my work is concern for safety. That’s what I’m in, so when you accuse me of being a social worker, I’m proud to be a social worker as well as a tough law enforcer.’

What odd figures, and what a strange sort of pride. And I think the people of Durham should be the judges of whether he is a ‘tough law enforcer’.

If you wish to comment, please scroll down

 

Don't blame immigrants – they aren't the ones wrecking Britain

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The Government’s pretence of being resolute and decisive on immigration is a lie. It is almost as bad as New Labour’s secret decision to transform the country with migrants.Do they really think that hiring a couple of stupid publicity vans, fraudulently claiming that illegal migrants are in serious danger of arrest and deportation, will fool anybody? Alas, they do.Will you be fooled? I beg you not to be. I beg you, instead, to be angry and vengeful, and to make that revenge hurt, to vote UKIP as often as you can, to destroy the wretched ‘Conservative’ Party which so insults your intelligence.

It is because he knows that you are rightly worried about immigration that David Cameron is engaged on his slippery and dishonest propaganda campaign. He personally couldn’t care less about the problem.
It doesn’t threaten his job or push his wages down. It doesn’t alter his neighbourhood beyond recognition, trapping him in a place where he no longer feels welcome or at ease.
As he doesn’t know what Magna Carta means, and has never heard of the Bill of Rights, I think we can safely say he’s not that worried about the disappearance of our once-beloved culture of law and liberty.

He's even got a Minister – Nick Boles – whose job it is to destroy the countryside. If Britain becomes a featureless concreted-over province in a Multiculti Euroland, he won’t care.
He’ll still be rich enough to afford peace and space, when they have become impossible dreams for the rest of us.
For him, and those like him among the Relaxed Rich, immigration means cheap nannies and cheap restaurants.
For his friends in business it means cheap and easily bullied workers. For his friends in New Labour (whose heir he is and whose seat in power he is  keeping warm), it means even more.
Unlike Mr Cameron, the Blairites knew what they were doing when they opened our ports to all who came.

A secret government paper, circulated among Ministers in October 2000 (but censored before being released a year later), revealed their aim was to ‘maximise the contribution of migration to the Government’s social and economic objectives’.
What were those objectives? It’s easy to guess, looking at this collection of 1960s campus revolutionaries, spiced up with unrepentant ex-Trotskyists and ex-Communists, and cheered on by the anti-British London media classes.
But in fact we know. A typical London liberal and New Labour speechwriter, Andrew Neather, boasted about it  in October 2009  and then wished  he hadn’t.
He burbled about how immigration had been ‘highly positive’ for ‘middle-class Londoners’. He wrote: ‘It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners – although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.’
He was even franker: ‘But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London’s attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.
It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it’s pretty much unimaginable for us to go back.’

That’s an interesting use of ‘us’, there. He didn’t mean you, I don’t think. But above all came this admission from the heart of government, where Mr Neather once worked.
Controversial: Adverts have been driven around London on vans to encourage illegal immigrants to go home
The opening of our ports had ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.
Even this apostle of modernity was a bit worried. ‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
‘Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing .  .  . there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.’
I happen to think this brief glimpse of the truth was the most important political revelation of our time. I believe the ideas behind it still rule.
And in case you’re still fooled by Mr Cameron’s disgraceful pretence, take a look at the Commons Public Administration Committee report on the Government’s noisy claims to have cut immigration. It is devastating. It shows that the figures used by Ministers to claim they are closing the doors are little better than guesswork.

Migration into this country, legal and illegal, continues apace. The transformation of Britain into somewhere else accelerates.
The official propaganda about economic benefits is mostly tripe (see an excellent analysis in Ed West’s powerful new book The Diversity Illusion). The pressure on schools, GPs, hospitals, housing and transport is huge and growing.
We have been betrayed. It is not the fault of the migrants, with whom we must seek to live in harmony. But those responsible, in all the major parties, must be punished for their lies.

We were fooled once. It  will be our shame if we are fooled again.

***************************************************
 
At last... Prezza's found a job he's good at

Now we know what John Prescott was born to be – a big fat PC Plod, directing the traffic.
His performance on point duty the other day – pictured left – was obviously the fulfilment of a lifetime dream.
What a pity he ended up in the Cabinet instead, for him and us.

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

Please let this latest grievous murder of a defenceless child not be used – yet again – as an excuse for snatching children from innocent families without evidence.
Social workers who repeatedly miss real cases should be treated with caution when they level charges, not assumed to be right.

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

Have you noticed how many public figures have started ending their sentences with the meaningless phrase ‘going forward’?
Is it a coded signal to their alien controllers? Listen out for it and you’ll be amazed how common it is.

Be very afraid.

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

Why don’t the windbags target Cairo?

If we admit that the Egyptian military coup IS a military coup, then the US, by law, has to cancel its multi-billion-dollar subsidies to Cairo.
Politicians and diplomats simply refuse to state the  truth, which nobody in the ‘West’ is allowed to acknowledge.

The Egyptian junta is a murderous military regime installed  by violence. It kills its own people in very large numbers. The generals had a good long look at the Arab democracy we all said we wanted, and snuffed it out. Secretly, the West was pleased.
I couldn’t care less, personally.  But where now is William Hague, the scourge of Syria? And David Cameron, the man who overthrew Colonel Gaddafi?
Or come to that, the capering, grinning Blair creature who overthrew Saddam? And the BBC, many of whose journalists wildly applauded the Arab Spring?
I hear no talk of a British intervention in Egypt, and I am glad. But a great deal of self-abasement is called for from these moralising windbags, and we should demand it every time they show their faces.

 

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Nick Clegg claims his son's new school is a comprehensive? That's like calling No 10 an inner-city terrace!

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Almost all scandals have consequences. The law is changed or people are punished. Only one enormous scandal goes on happening again and again, and nothing is ever done about it.

It is the way in which our new elite seek selective education for their own children, while ruthlessly denying it to everyone else. Nicholas Clegg is the latest of these revolting hypocrites, and he too will get away with it.

So have Anthony Blair, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman and Ruth Kelly, and several others who have never been publicly found out.

This unpunished disgrace has been going on since the political class abolished the grammar schools, a terrible act of vandalism which is still damaging  the country every day, 48 years after it began. I cannot understand why the British people have put up with it for so long.

You might think the elite did this because they at least thought it would produce better schools. On the contrary, the idea’s inventor, Sir Graham Savage, admitted from the start that it would hold back the ablest children.

He just thought it would be more ‘democratic’. That has always been the point of it, to create a more socialist society, to impose compulsory equality of outcome.

It is a million times more important, in the Left’s armoury, than nationalisation or even taxation. It is Labour’s real Clause Four, never abandoned and now adopted by the Tories and the Lib Dems as well, as their pledge of loyalty to the socialist state they all support.

Why else is it that a perfectly sensible idea – selection by ability – is actually banned by law from our state schools? Imagine if businesses, or the Armed Forces, football, cricket or Olympic teams were also barred by law from choosing on the grounds of ability. Everyone would think it mad. Yet, when the same unhinged rule is applied to schools, all the major parties agree that it should be so, and remain so for ever.

The barmy idea – that egalitarian state education is in some way noble – infects the Tories too. The grimly politically correct Home Secretary, Theresa May, tried to pretend she had a comprehensive schooling, when in fact she went to a private convent school and then to a grammar, which went comprehensive later.

And the Prime Minister and his Education Secretary – quite able to afford school fees – wangle their children into an oversubscribed and distant Church primary. This is supposed to make them look like men of the people. In fact all they have done is to deprive some poor families of places at one of the few genuinely good state schools in the area. How is thatnoble, exactly?

The same is true of Mr Clegg, who last week more or less got away with announcing that he would be sending his son to the London Oratory, a Roman Catholic school which is a comprehensive school much in the way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terrace house.

Being hugely oversubscribed, and having a religious character, the Oratory is really a selective school. It has to be. But the selection is subtle and hard to penetrate. Most who are rejected will never really know why others were preferred to them. And so it benefits the well-off, the influential and (it seems) the politically well-connected.

The same is true of several London schools favoured by the Left-wing elite, superb, unofficially selective academies with tiny catchment areas that most people cannot possibly afford  to live in. Some of the smuggest leftist power couples in this country have spent fortunes buying their way into these catchment areas, while pretending that they have not bought privilege for their young.

Did Mr Clegg’s spin doctors soften us  up for this shabby moment? You decide. We were told that  Mr Clegg was thinking of schooling his children privately, nowadays regarded as a terrible sin.

So, when he didn’t do that, it was reported as a sort of anti-climax. It is nothing of the sort. It is a contemptuous smack in the face for tens of thousands of families who have to take what they are jolly well given, a bog-standard comprehensive which will offer their children no way up.

I lived for a while in the Soviet Union, an officially equal society. It had exactly the same system we now have – official equality and secret elite privilege. In the end, everyone became so disgusted by this arrangement that they refused to tolerate it any more. Why do we continue to stomach it?

We promise freedom – and deliver chaos

Two years ago, Syria was an imperfect but reasonably happy place. Most people got on with their neighbours, went to work, raised their children and – almost uniquely in the Middle East – there was harmony among rival religious groups.
 

Now it is a war-ravaged hell, in which blameless people have been bankrupted, had their homes destroyed and been forced to become refugees. The red-eyed monster of religious hatred has been awakened  and stalks the streets and villages doing  dreadful crimes, which will of course be avenged with new crimes.

We, that is to say the British Government, helped to achieve this filthy thing. I suspect we did it because we expect some sort  of favours in return from the fanatical  despots who run Saudi Arabia, and who hate the Damascus government for being the wrong sort of Muslims.

Now the abject William Hague plans to make it even worse by stepping up our supplies to the rebels. Mr Hague’s pitiful performance in government is so hard to bear precisely because he is an intelligent and informed person who ought to know better.

But once again, are there no MPs willing to defy the official line, to say that, however bad the Assad government may be, war and chaos are worse for the Syrian people, and that we cannot possibly claim to be the friends of freedom in the Arab world if we ally ourselves with the Saudis?

Speak now, please, before it grows any worse.

A big dose of drug firm hype

In a way it is a surprise that there are not more Hollywood films about ‘antidepressant’ drugs, a huge revolution in American and European medicine which has changed the way people think and behave, and which is one of the most lucrative industries in human history.

Now comes Side Effects, which at first seems to be sceptical about these controversial pills and their, er,  side effects. But (plot spoiler here) the drugs end up  being vindicated and the doubters end up looking silly.  How interesting. How did that happen?

You might like to know that The New York Times wrote back in January: ‘From the beginning, Side Effects was constructed to avoid potential conflicts with the giant companies that make and sell real drugs.’

The writer of the script, Scott Burns, told the NYT: ‘I spent more time on the phone with my lawyer on this than on all my other movies combined.’ I can believe that.

If drug ‘addicts’ can give up their drugs by using self-control, then ‘addiction’ doesn’t exist. They can stop if they want to. Obvious, isn’t it? Not to my old foe Russell Brand, now pontificating grandly on the subject in the Spectator, the Guardian and the Sun. This alleged comedian, in his designer rags, is fast becoming the voice of the Establishment. Perhaps the Tory Party – in its endless quest to be fashionable – could skip another generation, and make him its next leader.

 

Syria and Bahrain – what’s the difference?

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, is very fond of taking a high tone with the Syrian government, as is the BBC. For them it’s a ‘regime’, though they have only quite recently discovered its regimeness, if that is what this quality is called. For decades, when Western liberal opinion had no interest in the Middle East, except in attacking Israel for its many wickednesses, Syria was ignored.

Even after the appalling Nezar Hindawi episode, in which a grisly attempt was made to use a pregnant woman to (unwittingly) take a bomb aboard an Israeli passenger jet, which would probably have blown up over London if the ploy had been successful, Syria was never really regarded as specially wicked.  We broke off relations for a bit, but eventually restored them. Syria was even welcome to US-sponsored attempts to broker a peace deal with Israel over the Golan heights, a more or less hopeless diplomatic waste of time.

Syria stayed out of the West’s bad books even after it was pretty clear that Syrian-sponsored terrorists had been involved in the Lockerbie mass murder. That line of inquiry was dropped because Syria was ‘helpful’ to the West during the first war against Saddam Hussein. It is this but of politics that is the origin of the bizarre and evidence-free subsequent claim that Gadaffi’s Libya was behind that bomb. Amazing what people will believe and continue to believe, when it suits them.

Now, as far as I can make out, Britain and the USA, driven on by Hillary Clinton in a strange emotional spasm which is very hard to square with her militant feminism and youthful leftism, have decided to take the side of Saudi Arabia in the developing division of the Muslim world. That seems to explain why we regard Syria’s repression of anti-government rebels with rage and scorn, and why we regard Bahrain’s repression of its anti-government rebels with complacency and sympathy – Mr Slippery had the King of Bahrain in Downing Street for talks on Thursday, though there was very little fuss or publicity,  six days after Bahrain police beat an unarmed teenager to death . The Bahrain interior Ministry said the dead youth was a ‘terrorist’.

Bahrain is much smaller than Syria, but at least 50 people are believed to have been killed there in street clashes in the last 18 months or so. Some of you may remember, in the early days of the supposed ‘Arab Spring; quite a lot of coverage being given to the demonstrations at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama. Since then there have been credible allegations of torture by the government, hundreds of arrests and what looked to some people rather like an invasion by neighbouring Saudi Arabia, whose forces arrived in British-built vehicles.  A  particularly unpleasant aspect of the repression has been the punishment of doctors for simply treating those wounded in street clashes.

I make no particular judgement on this myself. I don’t hold out much hope for any of these societies becoming law governed or free any time soon. What strikes me is the inconsistency of our own government, and the American government. Note also that the new Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian government recently embarked on some pretty bloody repressions in the Sinai, yet were not accused of ‘killing their own people’ . This odd charge (would it be worse or better if they killed other people’s people?) is usually made against governments which have been selected by the ‘west’ for destabilisation.

The USA’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is very old and very interesting, dating back to a bizarre summit between Franklin Roosevelt and the Saudi King, Ibn Saud,.  aboard an American warship, USS Quincy, in the Great Bitter lake, while Roosevelt was on his way home from the Yalta conference in February 1945. Arab carpets were laid on the Quincy’s steel decks, to make the King feel more at home.

But quite why it should now apparently lead to Britain and the USA supporting the overthrow of governments unsympathetic to Saudi Arabia (while ignoring the defects of Arab governments which are more to Saudi taste) I am not sure.  It may have something to do with our obsessive concern with Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, many, many years from operational capability. Or it may run deeper. Either way, we need to drain the propaganda and the emotion from this debate, and to have parliamentarians and journalists asking ministers exactly what it is we think we are doing, and why it benefits our national interests.

Meanwhile, several reports from newspapers hitherto sympathetic to the Syrian ‘activists’ have this week recounted how many ordinary and uncommitted Syrians loathe and fear these ‘activists’, who by provoking government retaliation on peaceful neighbourhoods, ruin contented and reasonably happy lives. What for? Why do we think this tragic price is worth paying?

What matters most... the right of the Rock Gods to make a racket - or YOUR right to a quiet life?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If a man burst into your house and started painting the walls, you’d throw him out and call the police. You wouldn’t care if he said: ‘But I really like this colour. So should you.’

If a stranger bustled into your kitchen and cooked a meal for you, then ordered you to eat it, you’d think he was mad, even  if he said: ‘But I really like this sort of food. So should you.’

The same would go for anyone who made you watch his choice of TV programme, or compelled you to read the books he liked.

Why is it, then, that some individuals are allowed to force their taste in noise not just on their neighbours, but on thousands of people? Lovers of rock music may think that everyone shares their liking for screeching electric guitar chords, shouted lyrics and a perpetual factory thump. They are mistaken. Millions actively loathe this form of entertainment.

But these days they have to listen to it. It throbs from passing cars. It pervades cinemas.  It is the chosen background of TV advertising and is almost universal in shops. I might add that the USA sometimes uses it as a form of torture, sorry, persuasion, and I can quite see why.

Increasingly, it also howls and roars from city parks. Thanks to a change in the law a few years ago, parks have ceased to be islands of peace and have instead become the frequent location for so-called concerts, often sponsored by local authorities who need all the money they can get to service the huge debts they have run up in 30 years of spendthrift excess.

Those living nearby must, on several nights of the year, endure someone else’s bad taste. You may have planned a peaceful evening or an early night. But you can’t have one, thanks to the monstrous selfishness of the rock cult.

Because of this problem, the authorities have been slowly fumbling towards an attempt to limit the invasion of noise into millions of private night-times.

So it was that last weekend, in London’s Hyde Park, Bruce Springsteen and Sir Paul McCartney, those omnipotent demigods of rock, were – amazingly – compelled to shut up. No doubt there were sighs of joy in thousands of homes nearby.

But the petulant, inconsiderate cult of rock didn’t get it. The audience booed. Members of Springsteen’s band moaned that Britain was a ‘police state’ because the freedom to enjoy peace was – for once – elevated above the freedom to make a loud noise.

London’s populist mayor, Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a supposed conservative, sucked up to the guitar cult. He brayed: ‘If they’d have called me, my answer would have been to jam in the name of the Lord.’

Who then speaks for those who want a quiet life?


Tories worshipping at The Master's feet

Prepare to be shocked. Recently that grand insider’s magazine The Economist said as follows, not expecting people like us to read it: ‘The politicians now at the summit of the Conservative Party have expressed an ardour for Tony Blair .  .  . that might shock anyone overhearing it.’

What do these Tory potentates say about one of the worst Prime Ministers we have ever had? They call him ‘The Master’, ‘the great man’, even ‘our real leader’.

Chancellor George Osborne is ‘the biggest fan of all’. I have warned before about the Tory Party and I hope you’ll listen in future.

But perhaps this adulation is one of the things encouraging Mr Blair to clamber out of his grave, like a mummy in a horror film.

And perhaps it has something to do with the behaviour of the Civil Service in refusing to give key information to the Chilcot Inquiry into Mr Blair’s war on Iraq.

This means the inquiry, which Mr Blair fears will condemn him for misleading Parliament and people, is stalled.

Would senior officials dare act like this if they weren’t confident their political bosses agreed with them? Remember, those political bosses, Mr Slippery and his colleagues, regard Mr Blair as their real leader and a great man.


The BBC, biased and revelling in slaughter

Are Western special forces already operating in Syria? We now know such troops played a much greater role in Libya than was ever admitted at the time.

And the violent but ineffectual buffoons of the Free Syrian Army, who mainly shoot at the sky and yell ‘Allahu Akbar!’, have suddenly begun to do real damage to the Syrian authorities.

Could this be why the BBC, which has cast aside all impartiality over the Syrian crisis, behaved so repellently when a terrorist bomb killed several leading Syrians on Wednesday?

There was an exultant tone in its coverage of these killings, summed up by the phrase ‘a stunning development’ to describe the murders on Radio 4’s The World Tonight. The tone of voice used was not coldly neutral, but excited.

I thought we were against Islamist terror. Not so long ago we were engaged in a war against it. I also thought we were against assassination as a weapon of war. I also thought the BBC had admitted it got carried away over the Arab Spring. It’s doing it again now in Damascus, but there’s still time to grow up and calm down.

The same goes for Foreign Secretary William Hague, who seems weirdly anxious to abandon the Christians of Syria to some horrible Islamic regime, probably preceded by some real massacres.

You read it here first. ‘The main purpose of the Crown Prosecution Service,’ I wrote on July 7, ‘is to save money by pretending that crime and disorder are not as bad as they really are.’
And, lo, its boss, Keir Starmer, last week openly called for the cost of a trial to be taken into account when charging an offender. Believe me, it already is.

I don't recall being asked in the 1997 Election if I wanted the country to be more crowded. I don’t recall anyone saying they wanted it to be more crowded.
I don’t recall any political party saying they planned for it to be more crowded. Yet, as this week’s census returns show, that is what we got. Why?

 

Mr Slippery says he wants to stay under the Brussels thumb, because Britain outside the EU would be like a Greater Switzerland.
What on earth would be wrong with that?

In the Eighties, the unions were over-mighty subjects. Now, supermarkets have taken that role.
Thanks to their excessive power, Britain’s dairy farmers are being forced out of business by absurdly low milk prices. Who will curb the superstore barons?

 

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Psychiatrists snatching our children? That's Stalin's trick

I must continue to warn, as long as I can, against the threats to our freedom now massing on all sides.

My blood ran cold at the story of a psychiatrist who is alleged to have labelled parents with mental ‘disorders’ so that their children were snatched away from them. One has been exposed, and thank heaven for that. But how many others continue undisturbed?

Such ‘disorders’ are 90 per cent jargon and ten per cent guesswork. There is no objective test for them. If a qualified person says you have one, you have one, and goodbye to your children for ever. How can this possibly be permitted in a supposedly free country?

Like the secret family tribunals, in which parents struggle in vain against loaded accusations, from which they are not permitted to defend themselves, these are growing signs of the State’s power to burst in on private lives and wreck them.

The abuse of psychiatry is a symptom of tyranny. I have no doubt that many psychiatrists are honourable and thoughtful people. But their discipline, which largely lacks any objective measures, can all too easily be used to crush individuals for the purposes of the State.
If it can be deployed to snatch children, then there is not far to go before it is also used to terrify or subdue opposition.

The old Soviet Union employed it for this purpose. I once met (and I will always be proud to have shaken his hand) Dr Anatoly Koryagin, the fantastically brave Russian psychiatrist who spoke out against this perversion, and who was then himself locked away without trial in conditions so vile that his own wife could not recognise him.

When the USSR was still there, we always had before our eyes a great glaring warning of where the seemingly nice ideas of ‘progressives’ and reformers can so easily lead.

Since its collapse, we have assumed that the danger is gone. Far from it. Our homegrown revolutionaries were liberated by the fall of the Soviet Union. No longer were their weird anti-family, anti-patriotic views associated with treachery and oppression.

And so they fanned out into the schools, the Civil Service, the newspapers, the universities, the BBC and even the medical profession. And those of us who experienced Soviet power and remember it are endlessly reminded, in the politically corrected one-party state that is modern Britain, of that miserable place.

Gone to pot
Unsurprising facts from the non-existent ‘war on drugs’. Far more people are prosecuted for not having TV licences than for possessing cannabis. The number of offences is similar. It’s not that they don’t have the time to punish drug-takers. It’s that they lack the will.

How fitting... a joke uniform for a joke Navy
Is there anyone in the world who looks better with a baseball cap on his head than he does without one?

British policemen and women put them on when they wish to look tough, shoot people, or at least pose on rooftops with guns. I always hurry from the area when I see this. So should you.

Prematurely bald men seek to hide beneath them (a mistake. Perhaps this is why William Hague suffered his fatal headgear malfunction).

There was a period, happily past, when teenage boys seemed to have them surgically attached to their heads.

But now they are to be imposed on what is left of Her Majesty’s Navy. Captains on the bridges of destroyers have been photographed, looking understandably grim, in this revolting headgear.

It makes them resemble Florida boatmen, taking rich, fat New Yorkers on a shark-fishing expedition. This is not a good look for the heirs of Nelson, Rodney, Hawkins and Drake.

Once, I would have bridled at this deliberate humiliation of what used to be a great fighting service.
But now, as I accustom myself to being an exile in my own country, I just laugh. If Britain is a joke, it might as well look like one.

Who's the 'man who stole our pensions' now?
How's it going for you now, all the gullible ones who voted for the Useless Tories because ‘We have to get Gordon Brown out’?

Who now is ‘the man who stole our pensions’? And how are you liking the slow but steady emergence of 40 per cent as the new standard rate of Income Tax?

Sinking in Mr Slippery's sea of concrete
If any of us was challenged to explain the roots of patriotism, he would not think of flags or wars, but of some small, beloved landscape. It probably wouldn’t be anything special, much like the way Rupert Brooke described a friend’s sudden sense of England on the outbreak of war in 1914: ‘Grey, uneven little fields and small ancient hedges rushed before him, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses.’

Well, not any longer. In the midst of the Budget, Mr Slippery has slid through new planning laws that mean all that unassuming gentleness can be bulldozed by developers, to build nasty supermarkets and ugly houses for all the immigrants our Left-wing rulers keep letting in.

Old Slippery even boasts about it: ‘I can see the furious objections – the banner headlines – already.’ But he’ll ignore the sentimental old fools who want to save the countryside. ‘We will take difficult decisions, we will risk short-term unpopularity,’ he proclaims. How very brave. Well, I wish him long-term unpopularity, so that he is remembered for centuries to come as the man who concreted over Britain.

Mr Slippery speaks about ‘tough’ community sentencing. There is no such thing. The phrase is as absurd as ‘diet pizza’. If ever this man promises anything good, you may be sure it will not take place.

Ode dear, they just don't care any more
Each year the once-enjoyable quiz programme University Challenge becomes more politically correct and more boring, stuffed with kilometres, ‘Common Era’ instead of AD, and endless science questions nobody can answer. And each year, at the final, Jeremy Paxman argues the show is proof that education isn’t being diluted. Not this year, though.

Even he looked pretty tight-lipped when not one of the winning team from Manchester University could identify well-known lines from Keats’s Ode To Autumn, one of the greatest and best-known poems in the English language. To anyone properly educated, it is like not knowing that water is H2O, or that Paris is the capital of France.

Not only did they not know the poem. They didn’t know they didn’t know, and they didn’t care. It’s the not caring that pains me most.

Pension strikes: You might as well protest against rain

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We are all going to get poorer and poorer for the rest of our lives. This is because this country long ago chose to live beyond its means, and the  blazing red Final Demands  are now cascading on to the national doormat.

What is it, exactly, that we do to justify our comfortable way of life? Is it our world-beating export industries, supported by wise energy policies and a modern transport system? Or our superbly educated population, whose knowledge and skills are sought worldwide? Or our renowned work ethic?

No, that’s somewhere else. We are living on a reputation we long ago ceased to deserve. All our luxuries are bought on tick.

But our creditors have run out of patience, and we cannot pay them, so the bailiffs won’t be long. They will take the shape of severe inflation, already getting under way.

My guess is that most of the pensions we are now squabbling about will be worth little more than a box of matches by the time they are paid.

That is why last Wednesday’s petulant, self-righteous strikes were daft as well as wrong.

Anyone with ears to hear has known since the great balance of payments crisis of the Sixties that we were in bad trouble (we solved that problem by ceasing to care about it. It’s worse by far now than it was then).

But, led by empty and self-seeking politicians from all three parties, we have hidden the truth from ourselves.

Unlimited credit? Yours for  the asking. Government borrowing? If we hide it in off-the-books fiddles, who’ll notice?  Launching stupid invasions of other people’s countries? Count us in. We’ll pay somehow.

Like all swindles, the fruits of this have been rotten ones. Oceans of money were poured into the NHS, and it still can’t keep its wards clean or look after its patients properly. 

And then there are all those Lego schools and ‘universities’, churning out mountain-ranges of certificates and diplomas which are for the most part direct tickets to the dole queue.

And in the middle of this there are actually people who are ready to go on strike because their pensions aren’t going  to be as good as they thought? You might as well hold a strike against the annoying fact that it’s colder and wetter in winter than in summer; or against the fact that the pound in your pocket is worth less with every minute that passes.

The real question is how much longer we can afford to employ so many people who don’t actually make anything that anyone wants to buy.  

Knowing in their hearts that they were striking against their  fellow countrymen, who will have to fork out if they win, the public-sector militants claimed that they were shutting down the schools, hospitals, crematoria, swimming pools and the rest because of a deep, unselfish desire to make these services better. Oh, please. And they talked as if they were morally superior simply because they worked in schools and hospitals. Is that so? Funny, if they do it so selflessly, that they accept payment for it at all, let alone squabble about how much.

It strikes me that a milkman who rises before dawn to deliver reliably to his customers is just as moral as a teacher or a hospital cleaner.

So is everyone who gives a fair day’s work in return for a fair day’s pay, the forgotten side of the ancient bargain on which all riches depend.

A joint effort to lie about dope...

Sex ‘education’ for children was followed by more sex among the young. What do you think will follow drug propaganda for children? 

Well, we shall soon find out. For now there’s a children’s picture book about dope, called It’s Just A Plant (so is tobacco, so are opium poppies, so is deadly nightshade). 

It’s full of the usual hogwash about ‘medical cannabis’, and the usual propaganda against the drug laws. It’s obviously aimed at irresponsible parents who, like so many modish British liberal elite types, smoke dope at home and want to lie to their children that this unpredictably devastating poison is perfectly safe, ‘soft’ like a soft drink. 

I say, let it go on sale, provided the author adds a scene in a mental hospital where one of the characters ends up irreparably insane because he believed the cannabis lobby’s selfish lies.

...as BBC backs a career in sleaze

A gruesome little film on the BBC website profiles Gemma Massey, pictured, who calls herself a 'porn star'. The horrible thing about this is that it looks like career advice. It treats her ‘job’ as if it were normal, like nursing, bus driving or accountancy.

With her curiously distended lips plastered in some sort of slime, Gemma, smilingly explains that she’s very well paid and that her plastic surgery costs are met. If she wants a new car or a new house ‘they’ will buy it for her. There’s even a discussion about sexual diseases. Apparently you are safer in ‘the industry’ than ‘if you go on a night out and pull somebody’.

As for her parents, they were shocked at first, but when she told them what she was paid, they said: ‘We get it now.’ Well, quite.

This is bad enough in itself, but why is the BBC using public money to display it on the web?

* * *

Yet again one of our TV stations is trying to make us sob over the death penalty imposed on a convicted killer  in the U.S.

I wish an American  TV channel would come over here and make a programme about one of the hundreds of people who have had to watch the murderers of their husbands, wives, sons or brothers being let off and let out. The BBC and Channel 4 never will.

* * *

Hague is dancing to the mullahs' tune

All of a sudden, the sad cargoes  of coffins from Afghanistan are increasing again.

I had thought that the Government, ashamed of this pointless war, had told the Army to keep its men safe from danger until they could pull them out. Plainly I was wrong. These new deaths are even more intolerable, now that our defeat has already been announced.

But it is worse than that. We seem to be preparing ourselves for yet another war – this time in Iran.

How crass. Iran’s nuclear programme is a game. Iranian technology would have difficulty in delivering a pizza, let alone an H-bomb. It is aimed at riling silly, ignorant warmongers in the West, like our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, pictured. I seem to remember  Mr Hague once mocking people who threatened more than they could deliver with the telling Texan phrase ‘Big hat, no cattle’.

Given that the Coalition has reduced our Armed Forces to little more than a couple of cabin cruisers, an old pushbike and a spotter plane, doesn’t he think this might now apply to him?

The mullahs who rule in Tehran are hugely unpopular with Iran’s young, enlightened and civilised people.

But if they can claim that they are standing up for their country against foreign interference, they can shore up their support. It’s a very old trick, but it still works.

Britain should be especially careful about poking its snout into Iran. Every educated Persian still knows about and resents MI6’s idiotic and short-sighted overthrow of the popular Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. It was this greedy and lawless action that led in the end to the  1979 revolution which put the ayatollahs in power.

We should be very modest and cautious in our dealings with  this proud and ancient people.  And we have sent quite enough  soldiers to their deaths in dubious interventions in the past ten years.

A period of silence from Mr Hague would be welcome.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unrepentant

I have mentioned an argument that has been going on in another part of the forest, and various people here have wanted to know more about it. Well, we've held our own discussion here on second hand smoking, which was my reason for intervening on a hostile and critical site. I defended my doubts here and there. Others are able to judge if I did so successfully. I don't link to such sites for legal reasons. But they are not hard to find.

But an important secondary discussion arose out of my statement some months ago that our political class were incapable of acting effectively against illegal drugs, one of the major causes of crime in our society. I said "So many of our leaders now are unrepentant illegal drug-takers themselves that they shouldn’t be trusted near the making of laws."

This was misrepresented as 'most of our elected leaders are "unrepentant illegal drug-takers" ', wholly changing its meaning and import, and derided on the basis that , had I said what I was misquoted as saying, I would have said something stupid. Which I would have, had I said it. But I hadn't.

Now, since the site's host has rightly and honourably apologised for this severe and illegitimate distortion, my prejudiced critics ( who would in general oppose anything I favoured, and favour anything I opposed) have begun to say that the undoctored statement is itself absurd. Is it, though?

Let me waft readers back, past days, weeks, months and years gone by - to the sleepy seaside town of Bournemouth in October 2000. William Hague is leader of the Tory Party, slowly climbing out of the ditch after the car-crash of 1997. Ann Widdecombe, one of the party's few recognisable national figures, then Shadow Home Secretary, has just made a fierce speech calling for the laws against drugs (especially cannabis) to be properly enforced, which you might have thought was a Conservative policy.

Now read on, the account of what happened written by my former colleague Jonathan Oliver, then political reporter for the Mail on Sunday:

'It was the small hours of Thursday morning and the bar of the Swallow Highcliff hotel was heaving. MPs and activists queued six deep to buy beer at £2.80 a pint and wine at £4 a glass to toast the final night of the Tory conference.

Some noisily voiced their views on the leader's upcoming speech which would bring the Bournemouth conference to a close while others sealed plans to travel home together later. But for one or two the week's business was far from over.

A senior party aide had a message to impart.

Placing his glass of champagne on the bar, he leaned forward and quietly explained how half the Shadow Cabinet were furious at the controversial plan by Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe to target cannabis smokers.

'Ask some of them whether they smoked dope when they were younger. I promise you will receive some fascinating responses,' he murmured before disappearing into the crowd.

Later that morning, The Mail on Sunday, acting on his suggestion, set about contacting William Hague's frontbench team.

The result was astonishing. Over the next 36 hours there followed the most extraordinary series of revelations, which could tear the Tory Party apart and have major implications for Britain's drugs policies.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Francis Maude is the bluest of the present Tory bloodline. A merchant banker, he is the son of former Minister Angus Maude, one of Margaret Thatcher's closest confidantes. The use of drugs, even marijuana, would be intolerable in such a dynasty, and such matters would have been a taboo subject for public discussion. Until now.

Yet Maude, 47, although initially uneasy with the question, told The Mail on Sunday that he had taken the drug: 'I suspect like many people of my generation, it was quite hard to go through Cambridge University in the Seventies without doing it a few times. It was an extremely long time ago.' The MP for Horsham said he stopped smoking cannabis before he entered Tory politics as a Westminster City councillor at the age of 25.

Maude studied history at Corpus Christi College between 1972 and 1976 and said his days there were 'a lot of fun'. His Cambridge contemporaries included fellow Shadow Cabinet members Michael Portillo and Archie Norman.

Maude served as a Treasury Minister in the last Tory government and would be a front-runner for the leadership if Hague quit.

His admission was hardly one of wild drug abuse. Yet within the hierarchy of the Tory Party, even today, it is something of a bombshell. Such a statement could be a disaster in a party whose membership is predominantly over 60 and who find drug use anathema.

It is not the first time Maude's personal circumstances have had a profound effect on his politics. Two years ago his gay brother Charles died of AIDS, prompting the father of five to call for more tolerance for homosexuals.

Shadow Transport Minister Bernard Jenkin was the next to come clean. Jenkin, 41, is another member of a long-established political clan: his father Patrick, now Lord Jenkin, was Environment Secretary under Margaret Thatcher.

'I really only used cannabis a couple of times,' said Jenkin. 'I would not want to give the impression I was doing it all the time. It was in my early 20s. It was miles before politics. I was working at the Ford Motor Company in Essex at their Brentwood head office.

'If the enforcement policy had been more rigorous maybe the temptation would not have come my way. I have children and I don't want them to try it.' Coincidentally, Mr Jenkin also went to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, but he insists he never took drugs while he was a student.

Within hours other members of the Shadow Cabinet were opening up about their drug experiences. They denied colluding, but as they talked more freely to The Mail on Sunday it became obvious that this was more than just a chance to get a bit of youthful excess out in the open.

Personal reputations and political career prospects were being laid on the line as well as possible opprobrium from the party faithful, friends and even family.

But such was the feeling of deep antagonism against 53-year-old Widdecombe and the way she had proselytised on the need to clamp down on those who use cannabis that these senior party members were willing to admit that they had broken the law - albeit some three decades ago.

The rebels, while giving their individual stories of cannabis use, were singing from the same song sheet. All are Right-wing monetarists to a man with no-nonsense views on the need for low taxation and prudent spending, but libertarians on issues effecting individual conduct.

Widdecombe's plan to fine cannabis users infuriated the group who saw it as dangerously undermining the party's attempts to move towards a softer stance on social issues needed to win back support among younger voters.

Their decision to speak out now is a way of mocking a woman they consider out of touch. More seriously it is a challenge by a third of the Shadow Cabinet to Mr Hague, forcing him to choose between them or Widdecombe who they now want removed from the law and order job.

The third Shadow Cabinet member to speak out on the issue was Archie Norman, 44, the Tory spokesman on the environment, transport and the regions.

He went to Charterhouse and said he took cannabis while a student at Cambridge, Harvard and the University of Minnesota in the United States.

Norman, who made his name as chief of the Asda supermarket chain, said: 'I don't regret having done it. It didn't do much for me. I turned to drink instead.

I was just a normal student like anyone else. It was fairly commonplace.' 'It doesn't worry me at all what people think. I think you expect human beings to explore and experiment. If you don't you haven't been young.' Peter Ainsworth, 43, the Shadow Culture Secretary, described how he tried cannabis and the chemical 'upper' amyl nitrate at Oxford University parties in the Seventies.

'There were lots of parties,' recalled Mr Ainsworth. 'I wasn't majorly involved in a set that was taking drugs heavily. But from time to time, actually very infrequently, these things would come round at a party. I didn't want to live my life without discovering what it was like.' He went on: 'It did nothing for me at all. It made me feel slightly sick. Someone once stuffed a handkerchief drenched in amyl nitrate in my face. I thought I was going to die.' But he said he had no regrets. 'The fact is that young people are going to experiment. But it is potentially dangerous. A great friend of mine died from drugs some years later.

It was one of those awful accidents.

I would advise everybody to steer well clear.' Social Security spokesman David Willetts, 44, nicknamed 'Two Brains' by his colleagues for his fearsome intellect, admitted trying marijuana. 'I was once offered cannabis at university,' he said. 'I had two puffs. I didn't like it and I have never had any experience of drugs since then.' Lord Strathclyde, 40, party leader in the Upper House, who is also a member of the shadow team, admitted to experimenting with cannabis. 'I tried it when I was at the University of East Anglia 20 years ago,' he said. 'I haven't done it for two decades.' Rising star Old Etonian Oliver Letwin, 44, a former Thatcher aide promoted to the Shadow Cabinet two weeks ago, said he had smoked pot - but only by accident.

'At Cambridge I was a very pretentious student,' he said. 'I grew a beard and took up a pipe. On one occasion some friends put some dope in a pipe I was smoking.

It had absolutely no effect on me at all. I don't inhale pipes or cigars. When I discovered I was extremely angry.' Of the 14 other Shadow Cabinet members, nine denied they had tried drugs, two were unavailable and three - Shadow Chancellor Michael Portillo, Shadow Agriculture Secretary Tim Yeo and Ulster spokesman Andrew Mackay - refused to answer.

'I think I have given enough information about my younger days. Don't you?' Portillo said.

Yeo said: 'It's very kind of you to ask, but I don't participate in Shadow Cabinet surveys because they rarely reflect well on those that participate.' Mackay said: 'I don't answer surveys.' The openness displayed by such senior political figures on their drug-taking pasts will shock some Tories. Traditionally they have boasted of being the party of law and order but these 'confessions' indicate the way social issues dominate today.

Hague seems to have brought most of the party together in opposing the euro for the immediate future. Now it is issues of behaviour and morality that are threatening to tear the it apart.

The Tory leader recently admitted to heavy drinking as a teenager but has denied taking drugs, while Portillo has talked about his homosexual experiences as a young man.

But the Shadow Cabinet's collective confession about their drugs past is far more political than either of these. The response to The Mail on Sunday's blunt questioning on cannabis goes against the norm. Ministers have been asked about personal drug use ever since President Clinton responded that he had 'smoked but did not inhale'. Labour's response is to decline to answer surveys with only Mo Mowlam, the outgoing Cabinet Minister, ever admitting taking cannabis.

The concerted anger at Widdecombe - an Oxford graduate - is also due to the view that she nearly wrecked the Tories' most successful conference for years while the Shadow Cabinet is miffed at not being consulted over the cannabis policy.

'If we were told about it, we could have pointed out the flaws straight away,' said one. 'It would never have seen the light of day.

We all know that the big problem is the hardcore addicts not the millions who have the occasional joint.' But behind the row lies a bungled attempt by Widdecombe to dominate the conference and undermine Portillo, her arch rival.

On Tuesday afternoon the Shadow Chancellor gave a barnstorming performance leaving Widdecombe furious. Portillo was set to dominate the headlines and eclipse her own speech the following day.

Drastic action was required.

Minutes after the Shadow Chancellor sat down, Widdecombe waddled into the cramped Press area and began briefing the drugs policy to selected journalists - to the consternation of Central Office spin doctors who had not been consulted.

But the next morning her strategy unravelled with alarming speed. The police immediately condemned her plan for fixed penalty fines for cannabis users.

Peter Williams, secretary of the Police Superintendents' Association, said: 'Our priority is not to punish people for possession but to divert them from drugs.' That afternoon Widdecombe returned to the Press room where, standing alone and surrounded by around 40 journalists, she struggled to defend her crumbling position to the delight of a small group of Portillistas.

As the sun set behind Bournemouth pier, Hague's plan to show the Tories as a united party fit for government was in tatters.

He now faces the biggest test of his leadership. He can hardly sack the seven members of his frontbench team who admitted taking drugs, immediately after the Tories promised to impose tougher penalties on drug users.

On the other hand how can he possibly order a U-turn? It would amount to personal humiliation for him and almost certainly provoke the resignation of Widdecombe.

This may well be what the seven drugs rebels want.'

That's the end of Jonathan's interesting, thorough, enterprising ( and widely followed) report. But it's not the end of the matter. Note not just what was said here, but also the manner in which it was said, the official encouragement of the reporter (such things are seldom revealed, though not unknown) and the remarkable willingness of MPs to discuss tricky questions.

Now, this is the most comprehensive survey of the kind ever done. But I think many of us can recall similar confessions, seldom particularly repentant, from many other politicians of (I think) all major parties in the years since. Though the MoS survey actually made the Labour Party (where I guess drug use among MPs is certainly no less than among the Tories) rather nervous of talking about the subject.

I'll see how many I can locate over the next few weeks. Not all of those quoted in this survey are wholly unrepentant. But some certainly are. The Prime Minister notably refuses to discuss his own past drug use (though as a member of the Commons Home Affairs Committee in 2002-3 he voted - though another Tory MP on the committee did not - for a highly radical report which bought all the arguments of the drugs liberalisers and called for the relaxation of the drug laws).

I certainly think it quite wrong to suggest that my use of the words 'so many' in this case was unfounded or absurd. I am, in fact, unrepentant.