Some readers may be interested in my appearance on this edition of The Daily Politics - topics covered include UKIP, Grammar Schools, Trident and the Labour Party
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0725m33/daily-politics-26022016
Some may not be.
Shortly after a now-retired (but then active) senior general criticised our involvement in Iraq (which I rejoiced over) I ran into an old acquaintance , a very senior former diplomat, who was spitting teeth and blood over the general’s performance. The man was a complete fool to step so far outside his own responsibilities. It didn’t matter what he had said (the diplomat was inclined to agree with him). Generals just didn’t make political statements in a law-governed country run by the Queen in Parliament, and that was that.
Chastened, I realized I’d been guilty of one of the great sins of politics – forgetting principles for a temporary advantage.
So I moderated my sympathy for the general (who later turned out to be a bit of a disappointment in other ways). In the end, constitutional rectitude was more important than hearing something you agreed with from an important person, especially from a senior soldier.
There’s an argument for saying that this country last underwent a major military intervention in politics in 1688, when John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough rather trickily helped Dutch William remove James II from the throne. Then there was the so-called Curragh Mutiny against the Liberals’ Irish Home Rule policy (which was quite serious) , and there were various wild mutterings during Harold Wilson’s years, but I don’t think these can be taken seriously.
So when General Sir Nicholas Houghton, head of the Armed Forces, Chief of the Defence Staff, appeared on TV on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday ( a transcript can be found here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08111503.pdf ), I must admit I wasn’t sure he should be there at all. This is a programme on which politicians are interviewed. The general isn’t one. Very important questions arise. Does anyone know the answers? What was he doing there? Who had authorised him, if anyone? Had he consulted with Ministers or other officers before agreeing to do this? Whose idea was it? Is there a precedent?
Sir Nicholas is, ultimately, the employee and subordinate of the Queen in Parliament. There are other countries where this does not apply, but that is their problem. Here, it is so. The government decides what he must do and what policy he must follow. If he does not like it, he can protest to ministers, up to the Prime Minister, to whom he has access. And if they ignore him, he can either do as they say, or resign.
That’s it, and that’s as it should be. As for his private politics and beliefs, he may be, if he so wishes, a nudist, a vegetarian or a Warmist, a socialist or a liberal or a conservative. It would be interesting to see if he could, even in private, be a Muslim or a UKIP member in practice. I can see either causing difficulties. . He couldn’t be a pacifist because it would make it impossible for him to do his job. By the way, id not think Jeremy Corbyn, who will feature in this post later, is an actual pacifist, just a man very reluctant to support war (as I am). If I am wrong, I should be grateful for chapter and verse.
The general (though he isn't) might well be an opponent of the replacement of Britain’s (to my mind ridiculous, unusable and absurdly large) Trident nuclear ‘deterrent’. I qualify the word ‘deterrent’ because for some years I have been unable to answer the question ‘Who or what does Trident actually deter, who is a) interested in a nuclear attack on Britain and b) capable of mounting one?’
Quite a few senior officers in all three services are, I believe, privately against this renewal, as they are aware that this country’s conventional armed forces are a shell - an array of ageing equipment, in diminishing quantities, manned by shrinking numbers of servicemen and women who increasingly lack the necessary training to handle them well in times of need, as the most experienced are most likely to leave, and the pressure this places on those who remain then drives more away.
I noticed (it is alas behind a paywall) the retired Major-General Sir Patrick Cordingley (he retired 15 years ago and so is free to speak as he wishes) wrote an article in ‘The Times today (11th November) making the case for getting rid of Trident. We don’t really control it, in effect it is part of the US Fleet. Its running costs are £4,000,000,000 a year and the replacement costs could run to £100,000,000,000 over thirty years, a strange expenditure for a country with an annual deficit of billions and an accumulated state debt of £1,500,000,000,000. I think these noughts are right. We could make much better use of this money.
Plainly, Sir Nicholas Houghton doesn’t agree with this, as I’ll discuss in a moment. He’s also very onside with the Cameron view of ISIS as an ‘existential threat to this country ( a view I think questionable. How much do they really care about us?) , saying: ‘And I think when the Prime Minister speaks like that, I don’t think he necessarily means in terms of they’re going to come and take our territory off us, but I think in terms of to undermine our way of life, our freedoms, our liberty, you know the values we stand for. I think that’s the true nature of the existential threat that a threat like ISIS does or has the potential to present.’
An interesting opinion but should we know he has it? If so, why? What would happen if he didn't have it, and instead said that he thought further interventions in the Middle East were a silly and dangerous waste of time? Would it be all right for him to say that on the BBC on Sunday morning?
Then there’s this :’ And if you’d indulge me, I think from a national perspective the only thing that we can unilaterally own as a country is a strategy about ISIS that keeps the country and the people of this country safe, and that’s why our national strategy is all about border security, the remarkable work of our intelligence services in intelligence led operations within the country, reaching out through the Muslim society within the country to assist them in deradicalising and delegitimising ISIS.’
This also sounds like the normal talk of a Tory cabinet minister – but is it right that it should be said by a senior serving general? Why should we know he thinks this? Would we be any worse off if he kept quiet?
What’s interesting is how vague and roundabout he becomes as soon as the really hot issue of his job – military spending – is discussed.
For example, this passage:
Sir Nicholas ‘…but I think the domestic situation has changed. I think we do have to sort of base as we look forward to this defence review, which should be one that is primarily about confidence and optimism and a reassurance to the people of the country, that there’s got to be a bit of realism in the fact that the world has become a somewhat more dangerous place. If you like, the latent threats have become patent ones.
ANDREW MARR: ‘So on defence spending George Osborne has promised you the NATO 2 percent, the extra spending, but are you concerned the Chancellor and the Treasury might start to kind of nibble away at that by adding things like military pensions into it?’
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well I think it would be a miracle if the Defence and the Treasury did not submit to NATO those things that it is permissible under the NATO rules to claim as national defence expenditure. My concern is that however the figures are done, there is real additional spending available for defence, and that is absolutely the case. And so if you like for the first time in a long time, probably 25 years, what this forthcoming SDSR is about is not the management of decline but the management of betterment.’
This hesitancy and qualification ( be honest - it''s not exactly a headlong charge in the general direction of the Treasury, is it?) slightly fade away when the subject of Trident and Jeremy Corbyn comes up.
ANDREW MARR: ‘...Of course we now have the leader of the opposition who says quite openly he would never press the nuclear button. Does that worry you? ‘
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well it … it would worry me if that, er, thought was translated into power as it were because … ‘
ANDREW MARR: ‘So if he wins, he’s a problem?’
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well there’s a couple of hurdles to cross before we get to that.’
ANDREW MARR: ‘Of course’.
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘But the reason I say this – and it’s not based on a personal thing at all, it’s purely based on the credibility of deterrence. The whole thing about deterrence rests on the credibility of its use. When people say you’re never going to use the deterrent, what I say is you use the deterrent you know every second of every minute of every day and the purpose of the deterrent is that you don’t have to use it because you successfully deter.’
ANDREW MARR: ‘So no point at all in spending billions and billions of pounds if our enemies think we’d never use it?’
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Yeah because deterrence is then completely undermined. And I think people have got to … You know politic… Most of the politicians I know understand that and I think that, dare I say, the responsibility of power is probably quite a sobering thing and you come to a realisation “I understand how this thing works”.’
Well now: First of all there’s that ‘When people say you’re never going to use the deterrent, what I say is you use the deterrent you know every second of every minute of every day and the purpose of the deterrent is that you don’t have to use it because you successfully deter.’
Really? Once again, who and what are we deterring? Why do we need this vast American-controlled apparatus to do so, a complex and vastly technical thing whose main purpose is to bomb Moscow, which we no longer have any need to do, since the vast Soviet Army has been disbanded, the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist and Moscow no longer dominates Europe in the absence of nuclear deterrence. as it so definitely did before 1989? By all means (here I differ with Sir Patrick Cordingley’s vapourings about the UN and setting an example, which are absurd) hang on to a few free-fall atomic bombs and fit our submarines with submarine-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. But Trident? What is it for? Whose is it? Whom does it deter? How?
But then there’s the deep unwisdom of being drawn into political discussion. When asked about Mr Corbyn (or ISIS, or anything else) Sir Nicholas could perfectly easily have said that these were matters for politicians, about which he, a simple soldier, was not entitled to comment.
But this exchange :
ANDREW MARR: ‘So no point at all in spending billions and billions of pounds if our enemies think we’d never use it?’
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Yeah because deterrence is then completely undermined’
And this one:
ANDREW MARR: ‘...Of course we now have the leader of the opposition who says quite openly he would never press the nuclear button. Does that worry you?
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: Well it … it would worry me if that, er, thought was translated into power as it were because …
ANDREW MARR: ‘So if he wins, he’s a problem?’
GENERAL SIR NICHOLAS HOUGHTON: ‘Well there’s a couple of hurdles to cross before we get to that.’
...are serious breaches of the wise rule that generals stay out of politics. Andrew Marr has a story to get, and knows how to get it. The general, who could no doubt outfox a pincer attack in the field, fell straight into Field Marshal Marr’s trap and gave him the headline he wanted. 'Top General attacks Corbyn’s pledge not to use bomb.' Etc etc.
Of course a lot of pro-Tory Blairite politicians and media were really relaxed about this. But that’s because they think the public is right behind Trident (a thing most of them barely understand, and worship as a sort of fetish of machismo).
But what if the General had said instead that Trident was a colossal waste of money, was bleeding the defence budget dry, and served no observable military purpose.
Why, then the air would have been thick with yells about political generals speaking out of turn, and demands for his sacking. Well, if he’s allowed to say what he said on the Marr show, then he (or his successors) should equally well be allowed to say that Trident is a heap of worthless junk. You can’t have it both ways. Me, I still think generals should keep out of politics, always. Once you breach that principle, you endanger the constitution.
I also wonder what Mr Cameron really, really thinks in those long dark nights, when he ponders what he would do if he had to decide whether to retaliate to a nuclear attack ( I can’t think where it might come from, but never mind). I’d like to see someone press him hard on that.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Does anyone miss the British Sunday, when our cities were like vast, well-ordered cemeteries, the sky always seemed to be black with impending rain, and a deep quiet fell on the land?
Actually, I do. I chafed at it as a child, because children don’t grasp the point of such things. Now that I know what it was for, it is too late.
I know this partly because of the experience of being in Cairo on a Friday morning, or Jerusalem on a Saturday, cities where a universal day of rest still exists, in defiance of all the racket and commerce of the 21st Century.
Before you have even opened your curtains or fully woken from sleep, you can sense that the day is different from all the others. You can feel the peace in your bones and blood.
Does anyone miss the British Sunday, when our cities were like vast, well-ordered cemeteries, the sky always seemed to be black with impending rain, and a deep quiet fell on the land? (Above, Oxford Street in London)
Resting from work and routine on your own is one thing. Doing it in company with millions of others is quite different.
Work, especially if you’re lucky in what you do, is one of the great pleasures of life, but – like all pleasures – it can become selfish. We need to stop.
In fact, we have probably never needed a day of rest more than we do now that we have become the slaves of the alluring hypnotic electronic devices we carry about everywhere with us.
The So-Called Conservative Party would know and understand all this if it were what it claims to be.
But as the amoral mouthpiece of commercial greed and globalisation, it prefers to see us scurrying from workplace to shopping centre every waking minute of every waking day.
Relaxation is a few hours of drugged sleep, preceded by a bout of ‘entertainment’ thickly laced with advertising and propaganda. Then it’s back to getting and spending.
Even atheists have begun, in recent years, to see the virtue of gathering weekly to read and hear poetry, think, sing songs and celebrate the joys of being alive. And there’s also this simple point. If you want a day free of work, you must expect others to have the same privilege.
If families are ever to gather, then that free day must be on the same day of the week for everyone.
And if that means a lot of things are closed, it’s a price worth paying.
A world without a proper day of rest is like a landscape without hedgerows, trees or landmarks, a howling, featureless wilderness in which we incessantly seek pleasure because we cannot find happiness.
Farewell to fiery Yanis, a reminder of how politics ought to be
There’s something enjoyably piratical and breezy about the ousted Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, riding off on his motorbike with his lovely wife for a post-resignation beer.
These scenes, and Mr Varoufakis’s general irreverent and non-servile behaviour, remind me of what I once found attractive about politics.
It’s also worth noting that the Syriza government in Athens has pretty much done what it promised voters it would do, and has fought its corner with nerve and style, and with a fair bit of the patriotic feeling that has been missing from British politics for quite a while.
Perhaps it’s time for me to change sides again. It’s a joy to see Europe’s Leftists, from Guardian writers to Greek politicians, finally realising that the European Union is a German-dominated imperial bully.
Maybe conservative patriots should now infiltrate the Left, its media and its political parties. There’s more future there than there is in the dehumanised, passionless, corporate wastes of Cameronism.
It’s quite obvious that the Left-wing candidate for the Labour leadership, Jeremy Corbyn, is a principled and uncorrupted real human, quite unlike the bland cybermen and cyberwomen he is standing against, whoever they are. I hope he wins, not because I think he’s a loser but because it would be good to have someone in front-rank politics who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, as Englishmen are supposed to do.
A combination of fiery Leftism and Ukip-type patriotism could be the very thing to sweep away the So-Called Conservative Party which represents nothing except the careers of its MPs and the interests of its donors.
In Greece, an alliance of Leftism and patriotism demolished the rich established parties in months. I’ve wasted years trying to do it the other way. Well, the last time I owned a motorbike, it ended badly, but I’m thinking of getting another one.
Facing the truth about a legend
Now at last we have absolute confirmation that Graham Sutherland’s ruthlessly honest portrait of Sir Winston Churchill was indeed burned because the great man’s wife, Clementine, couldn’t bear to look at it. You can see why. It’s not flattering. But no good portrait is flattering.
By the time it was painted, Sir Winston, like the country he had led, was failing, weakened by disappointment and fearful of the future. The picture showed that truth. We still do not like to admit it.
I seldom agree with the Children’s Commissioner, whoever he or she is, but Anne Longfield is absolutely right that children in care should not be shoved out to fend for themselves at 18.
Being ‘in care’ is pretty terrible, but it’s the only stability these poor, abandoned teenagers know. And 18 is a ghastly age.
I remember Harold Wilson giving me the vote and telling me I was an adult when I was 18. I spent the next three years showing him how wrong he’d been. Not that he took any notice.
How can students be expected to pay for their time at university, an increasingly impossible burden?
Here’s a wise suggestion from a reader, Mrs Sylvia Langley. Offer them the chance to look after the elderly in care homes (or their own homes).
In return for doing this, their fees could be reduced or even cancelled altogether. In my view better still, idealistic young people could regain contact with the old, who are rapidly becoming a separate and despised minority, the Untouchables of our time and place.
I see the plans to expand grammar schools in Kent have been strangled by lawyers, as I always thought they would be. But why are we still messing about with this?
Thousands of parents want new grammar schools, all over the country. The only thing that prevents this is a brief, easily repealed clause in David Blunkett’s 1998 School Standards Act.
But there’s no sign of that. The new So-Called Conservative majority is more interested in relaxing the laws against foxhunting, which is obviously so much more urgent than a good education for children whose parents aren’t rich.
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Some of you may have noticed, in a recent debate on the election at Hay-on-Wye, a reference I made to John le Carre’s first-class novel ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’. I spoke of the ‘very clever knot’ described by le Carre and untangled by George Smiley, by which everything was made to appear the opposite of what it was.
It worked like this. The KGB agent who was actually debriefing the mole inside British intelligence was believed by MI6 to be a Soviet Traitor, the exact opposite of the case. Those who went regularly to meet this KGB man in a secret safe house in North London (surrounded by elaborate precautions) believed they were running a deep-penetration agent inside Soviet intelligence. One of this team of debriefers (you’ll have to read the book to find out which) was in fact an MI6 traitor, who thus managed to hold meetings with his KGB controller, on MI6 premises, at the British taxpayer’s expense and under the protection of MI6. His senior colleagues helped to provide cover for this traitor. The very boldness of the deception made it all the more effective. When it was exposed, the disbelief and fury of the duped was enormous. Had it not been for the detective genius of George Smiley, it might never have been exposed at all. Nothing is, but what is not. Everything is the opposite of what it seems to be. In that way, those who might act against it become its active and committed defenders.
Some remarks on Monday by James Harding, the head of BBC news, brought this to mind again.
The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday : ‘THE boss of BBC News has denied any trace of Left-wing bias despite a series of rows over its coverage in the run-up to the election.
James Harding insisted that the Corporation is always 'scrupulously impartial' and rejected as 'fable' claims that it is prejudiced against Right-wing parties.
However, he did admit to some failings, saying that the BBC had allowed political polls - which predicted some form of coalition - to 'infect [its] thinking'.
As a result, he said, they spent too much time examining which parties might do deals with each other instead of analysing their policies.
Addressing the accusation of bias, Mr Harding told a conference in London: 'I find this increasingly hard to take seriously.
'In the light of the Conservative victory, what's the argument? That the BBC's subtle, sophisticated Left-wing message was so subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by.'
Gosh, how witty.
But it depends entirely for its force on the idea that the Conservative Party is in some way ‘right-wing’. What if it’s not, and the BBC’s behaviour helped that party into office? Perhaps it was quite subtle. Then everything’s upside-down, and everyone’s doing the opposite of what they seem to be doing, aren’t they?
Now, as we have discussed here, the modern Tory Party is not conservative, and has not been for many decades, if it ever was. It is all but impossible to believe that it once contained, at its heart, such people as Janet Young, a committed and determined foe of the sexual revolution.
It is certainly *liberal* in economics, in culture and morality. Many politically unlettered people think of this position, associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as ‘right-wing’. It certainly conflicts with the pre-1989 ideas of the political left, which until the end of the Cold War was still devoted to state ownership of large chunks of the economy.
This devotion, while essential to Soviet Communism, doesn’t actually have any particularly strong connection with Social Democracy. States which are largely Social Democratic, Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries spring to mind, seem to me to be quite pragmatic about state ownership of the economy, certainly more pragmatic than the 1945 Labour government were. For the Labour Party under Alastair Campbell to pretend to abandon (which they didn’t really) Clause Four of the old Labour rules, wasn’t a great step. In effect, Harold Wilson had abandoned nationalisation as a policy in the 1960s. I still meet people who think New Labour was ‘right-wing’, when in fact the ideas of New Labour came out of Eurocommunism, social and cultural radicalism stripped of Soviet impediments, and was crammed with former Marxists who weren’t all that former, which is why they don’t like it mentioned to this day.
The modern Labour equivalent of Clause Four is in fact comprehensive education, something David Blunkett repeatedly pledged never to abandon during the Blair years, and which he legislated to make compulsory in all new schools. This is because it is the absolute key and foundation of Labour’s commitment to ostensible egalitarianism, a position it will not abandon. Of course, its own leaders and rich supporters don’t believe in this, and are very skilled at avoiding it in their own lives. But they do very much want to impose it on the fast-declining independent middle-class, the main opposition to the strong state and the main defender of common sense against dogma.
Now we come to the very clever knot in British politics, the one which you must undo to grasp what is actually going on. For this, readers are strongly recommended to get hold of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, or its earlier hardback version. The Broken Compass’ (they are broadly the same but ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was brought up to date to deal with Cameron Toryism).
Read especially the early chapter ‘The Power of Lunch’ (the index, itself a work of art, will find the passage if you look up the name ‘Goslett, Miles’).
It recounts the failure of a Freedom of Information request, pursued doggedly by Miles Goslett, to obtain details of a meeting at the Palace of Westminster on 28th February 2008. The location is important because who went to see whom is also important in working out who was setting the agenda.
What we *do* know about this meeting is that it was hosted by David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, and his visitors were Mark Thompson, then Director-General of the Corporation, and Caroline Thomson(no relation – though ‘Thomson and Thompson’ reminds one of the two hopeless detectives in the Tintin books), at that stage the BBC’s chief political commissar. Caroline, whom I know slightly, is very well-connected in the left liberal establishment, especially its pro-EU wing. Her father was the former Labour MP, later Social Democrat peer Lord Thomson of Monifieth, her husband Roger Liddle, Eurocrat extraordinaire ( from 1997-2004 special adviser to the Blair creature on EU matters), who in turn became Baron Liddle of Carlisle in 2010 (his supporters were Lord Mandelson and Lord (William) Rodgers).
This was not a meeting about Tory policy on the BBC (Licence fee, Charter etc). BBC officials were having other meetings with the relevant Shadow Cabinet members about that.
This was, I believe, a meeting about the BBC’s policy towards the Tory Party. And that is why they won’t talk about it.
The BBC, as Mr Thompson has frankly accepted, had been institutionally hostile to the Tories in the Thatcher era http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/09/lecture-thompson-bbc-interview , though he asserted that this was now all in the past.
A more general admission of cultural liberal bias was made by Andrew Marr at a famous ‘impartiality summit’ recorded here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-411846/We-biased-admit-stars-BBC-News.html
Round about the same time, some will remember, the conservative media were rather sceptical of Mr Cameron’s re-engineering of the Tories, and concerned that they had been cowed into liberal policies by a fear of the BBC as we see here in a (BBC) report of a rare speech by the editor of the Daily Mail:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6289751.stm
The full text of this speech can be found here
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Media/documents/2007/01/23/CudlippDacre.pdf, and contains this passage;
‘I recently had lunch with the BBC’s Director General and I don’t think it’s breaking a confidence to reveal that he told me that their research showed that the BBC was no longer perceived as being anti-Tory. “That’s because you’ve broken the buggers”, I said laughing.’
He added : ‘Cameron’s cuddly blend of eco-politics and work-life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee – a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for but is a totemic figure to the BBC – his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and Euro scepticism, are all part of the Tories’ blood sacrifice to the BBC God.’
This is very perceptive. The re-engineering of the Tory brand in this period might have been (in my view almost certainly was) aimed at placating the BBC, the arbiter of orthodoxy and the gatekeeper of government. Suddenly the Tories were Greener than Green, metrosexual, Euro-friendly, comprehensive-friendly, equality-friendly, immigrant friendly. For many of them this was no great effort. The private opinions of the Tory upper deck have for many years been left-liberal, with concessions made at conference-time and during elections, during which these people try to appear to be conservative, by talking tough on crime, immigration, the EU, drugs, human rights, schools etc, in non-specific, non-committal ways which will never translate into real policy.
Even odder, in this instance, was that Mr Cameron (whose leftish sexual politics I explored and recorded in my lonely way in 2010, to the interest of nobody,
see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/the-lisbon-scandal-and-other-cameron-matters.html
went ahead with the legalisation of same-sex marriage without putting it in his manifesto, a very clear sign that his real, true views are further to the left even than he confessed in his BBC-wooing period before 2010.
There’s also the excellent point made by my old adversary David Aaronovitch, in ‘The Times’ of 29th April 2008, that ‘Tony Blair's mission, unexplained even to himself perhaps, was to make it not matter whether the Tories came back, as they would be hemmed in by Blairism just as Labour was by Thatcherism’.
This may also have helped the BBC come round. But come round it did. In 1997 and afterwards, the BBC did not of course openly shout ‘Vote Labour’. It just used a lot of energy reporting on Tory ‘splits’ and rows. All parties are split, always, and generally these splits and rows remain minor unless exploited by active media coverage.
It also virtually ignored everything they said that wasn’t to do with a split or a row. Then the ‘split’ reporting faded, and indeed the splitometer was directed instead at Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Tory speeches and policy initiatives were reported more fully and more respectfully. The Tories had in short, been presented with the cloak of electability and Gordon Brown had been robbed of it. Only incredibly expensive, day-to-day, hour-to-hour monitoring across all the channels for years could actually demonstrated this, and who can afford that. It was done on the edge of a remark, or by nuance, timing. It wasn’t organised or directed. It was just permitted, when it previously hadn’t been, and everyone knew it. Conventional wisdom understood that the Tories were on their way back, and indeed went so far as to believe they could actually win in 2010, which *was* a physical impossibility. All this was helped by Gordon Brown’s unfashionably conservative manners and style of dress, his rejection of Blairite style, things that made BBC liberals less bothered about whether he won or lost.
The election of Ed Miliband, a second Brown, ensured that the Tories would continue to receive the blessings of BBC patronage. I wonder if, had David Miliband been picked instead, things would have been the same. I suspect not, though we shall never know. John Rentoul, of the Independent on Sunday, is a useful Blairite barometer on such things. I don’t get the impression he is especially grieved by the Labour downfall last month.
But that chance to reconnect the BBC with a Blairite Labour Party has gone. Labour is almost certainly done for now, because the Scottish loss has destroyed it as a national party, probably for good, while the Tory party has become New Labour. David Cameron truly is the heir to Blair, and UKIP can scrabble for the Noisy Minority which is all that is now left of a supposed ‘Silent Majority’ that, by staying silent and indeed endorsing its own destruction by voting Tory, allowed itself to be marginalised and defeated.
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
I recently visited a ‘head shop’, one of many totally legal establishments now flourishing on British high streets, where users of officially illegal drugs may buy the equipment they need to enjoy their criminal habit.
I didn’t buy anything. But one of the items on sale was a wall-clock, especially designed to be used to store drugs. ‘Hide your stash in plain sight!’ said the little poster next to it.
It is good advice. If you really want to conceal something, leave it lying about where everyone can see it.
This is what the Prime Minister has done with his supposed promise to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union.
The dishonest trick at the heart of the offer is so blazingly obvious that nobody notices it.
Let me explain. If Mr Cameron really believed that he would win a parliamentary majority on May 7, he would not make this promise.
He loves the EU so much that he has said that he wants to extend it to the Ural mountains. He absolutely does not want this country to leave it.
But because Mr Cameron knows perfectly well that he will not win such a majority, and that no possible coalition partner or ally would support such a referendum, he feels safe to make a pledge that will never be redeemed.
The purpose of the pledge is to win back some of those voters he and his Blairite friends have long derided as fruitcakes and closet racists. He despises them, but he wants their support to ensure that the Tories are the largest party, and that he stays in office.
It would be disastrous for him if they all took him too literally. He needs some of them, but not all of them.
This is perhaps why the Tory Party’s campaign is so crude, narrow and awful, almost designed to repel thinking and decent people.
The interesting thing about all this is that it is so blatant, yet nobody seems to notice it, just as they don’t notice the perilous state of our economy (another disastrous balance of payments deficit was announced last week). And just as it is obvious that, while we are supposed to have ‘tough’ and ‘draconian’ laws on drugs, shops which help people take drugs thrive all over the country. I sometimes wonder if, one dark and tear-stained morning, all these many lies will be brutally exposed in one dreadful awakening.
Winning at any cost? It's the only Game in town
When I rather guiltily read the books on which the TV series Game Of Thrones is based, I was struck by one thing. The whole point of this saga is that ruthlessness pays, that evil generally wins, that justice is non-existent, and utter cynicism the only wisdom. It is the Middle Ages without the saving grace of Christianity.
The whole idea is symbolised by the ghastly Iron Throne for which the various factions and clans compete, and which, once gained, eats into the souls of all who sit on it.
I won’t watch the TV version because I very much do not want to see a slick and well-acted portrayal of such foul behaviour. But the success of this drama suggests that this sort of merciless immorality now has a wide and receptive audience. Gleeful, unembarrassed ruthlessness, once rightly kept in check, has become normal among us, and Game Of Thrones is a success because this change is now more or less complete.
Political campaigning has played its part in this. I first noticed really dirty tricks in the 1997 campaign, when New Labour screened a particularly vile anti-Tory broadcast personally mocking Tory politicians and conference representatives, and falsely alleging a plan to ‘abolish the old age pension’.
Once, this sort of thing was left to underlings and backstairs-crawlers who could be disowned. But now it seems to have become central. The Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, is a senior Cabinet Minister and an experienced grey head in the Tory Party. I rather like him. But his outburst against Ed Miliband, accusing him of stabbing his brother in the back, and planning to do the same to the country, was a departure from the old rules of gentlemanly combat.
It was also inaccurate, as Mr Miliband stabbed his brother in the front, openly campaigning against him in an election – more than can be said for the Tories, who deviously overthrew Iain Duncan Smith in a cruel and personalised putsch.
But perhaps the most tricky and ruthless political act of the week came from the Blair creature, who ‘supported’ Mr Miliband on the European issue. How can this ghastly, discredited man not know that his kiss is the kiss of death? Of course he does.
Compared with Blair’s embrace, a stab in the back would be an act of kindness.
You shouldn't make it up
The story of how the young Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret mingled incognito with VE Night revellers is a moving and very British episode.
So why must the makers of a new film, claiming to be about the event, fabricate falsehoods about the King’s daughters going to brothels and gambling dens, and Princess Margaret getting drunk?
I suppose that having got away with the multiple untruths in The King’s Speech, the movie industry felt that invention was better box office than truth.
And yes, I know Shakespeare made things up, too. But this stuff isn’t Shakespeare.
The devastating attack no one heard
In a grown-up campaign, last week’s attack on David Cameron by a former British ambassador to Syria would have been devastating. As it is, it seems to have passed almost without notice.
Here’s a flavour of the indictment levelled by Peter Ford, Our Man in Damascus from 2003 to 2006. ‘If Cameron had his way, the jihadists could have been in control of Damascus by now,’ and, ‘To call for the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, to demonise it out of all proportion… to predict its imminent fall… and then to wail as though it was nothing to do with them when British Muslims set off to help hasten said overthrow is inconsistent and nonsensical.’
I couldn’t agree more, and still can’t understand how he gets away with it.
Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Cameron go around the country eating bacon sandwiches and hot dogs with knives and forks to avoid embarrassing photos.
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This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else.
We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre.
Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs.
Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation.
The Prime Minister, whose government was busy exploiting the tragedy to shore up the (already vast) snooping powers of the State, said it was not the day to make political arguments.
Why ever not? What could be more political than discussing how to defend ourselves against this sort of crime? If it is not political, then why is he talking about it at all, instead of leaving the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury?
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, a hungry headline-seeker and reliable sucker for any scheme to diminish freedom that her civil servants drop on her desk, said Mr Farage was ‘irresponsible’.
Why? Was he any less irresponsible than the chief of that sinister organisation MI5, who seized his chance to make our flesh creep with scare stories, and simultaneously apologise in advance for not actually being able to protect us?
Dame Tessa Jowell squeaked that the Ukip leader’s remarks were ‘sickening’. Why? Ed Miliband, whose very job as Leader of the Opposition depends on the belief that disagreement is a good thing in a free country, moaned that Mr Farage was ‘seeking to divide us’.
The Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg said Mr Farage was ‘making political points’ on the ‘back of bloody murders’.
Well, who wasn’t? A sanctimonious unanimity descended on politics and the media. ‘Je suis Charlie,’ everyone said. It was an issue of liberty, we all said. They can’t silence us, stop us drawing cartoons, etc etc etc.
Great mountains of adjectives piled up on every corner, much like those hills of flowers and teddy bears we like to place at the scenes of tragedies.
You can feel the presence of the snarling conformist mob, waiting for some dissenter on whom they can fall, kicking and biting. So-called social media, in fact an intolerant and largely brainless electronic mob, has made this much worse since the sad death of the Princess.
We should stand up to them. It is especially strange that this conformism claims to speak in the name of freedom, when in fact it doesn’t much like freedom at all.
I suggest that we actually think about this. Of course, we all deplore the murder and grieve for the dead and the bereaved. I don’t need David Cameron or Tessa Jowell to tell me that, thanks.
But for the rest, there’s quite a lot of posing going on. Very few newspapers, magazines or TV stations have published or ever will publish the cartoons of Mohammed that Charlie Hebdo printed.
Let us be frank. One major reason for this is fear. We know that Muslims take this very seriously, and that some of them take it very seriously indeed.
Let us agree it was brave to publish these images. That’s easy for me. I know I wouldn’t do it, and I readily acknowledge that I am a coward.
But it also required compulsory bravery on the part of others, especially the police officers, some of them Muslim, laudably and selflessly guarding people they may not have liked or approved of. Not to mention all the others caught in the crossfire.
As for freedom, here’s an interesting thing. The French Leftist newspaper Liberation reported on September 12, 1996, that three stalwarts of Charlie Hebdo (including Stephane ‘Charb’ Charbonnier) had campaigned in their magazine to collect more than 170,000 signatures for a petition calling for a ban on the French National Front party. They did this in the name of the ‘Rights of Man’.
You, like me, may dislike the National Front greatly. But lovers of liberty simply do not seek to ban parties they do not like.
This is a double paradox. The French National Front exists mainly because a perfectly reasonable concern about mass immigration was sneeringly dismissed by the mainstream French parties. Something similar is happening in Germany, where large demonstrations against ‘the Islamisation of the West’ in many cities have been scornfully attacked by that country’s elite.
If reasonable calls for restrictions on immigration had been heeded when they were first made, right across Europe, would we now be in the mess we are in? If it is officially regarded as irresponsible, or ‘exploitation’, or ‘sickening’, or ‘divisive’ to say this, then we do not live in freedom, and those who claim to speak in its name are not telling the truth.
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If Frau Angela Merkel’s Germany does not dominate Europe, then why does everyone else in the EU toady to her and beg her for favours? The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means. Stop pretending otherwise.
*****
A fond farewell to an old friend and colleague of mine, the great industrial reporter Barrie Devney, who died recently.
In the days when the whole country was convulsed by strikes, he was liked and trusted by both sides in many bitter disputes.
Barrie’s father was a bus conductor and his mother ran a sweetshop, but he ended up on first-name terms with Cabinet Ministers. I think that’s at least partly because he grew up in the age of grammar schools, that great open door which our politicians shut and sealed.
Secret justice isn’t justice. Whether in the family courts or in the criminal courts, it is time it came to an end.
The law that allows a person to allege rape in secret, and remain unknown for ever, is particularly intolerable. The case of Mark Pritchard MP is just the latest ordeal faced by an innocent man whose accuser has lifelong anonymity.
Those who seek this protection should be asked to apply the same rule to themselves. They should be told that, if their accusation is dismissed by a jury, they will then face automatic prosecution for perjury, in which they will be named if convicted, while the alleged rapist will not.
If they are happy with this arrangement, then they should keep their anonymity. If not, not. Perjury, in its way, is as foul a crime as rape.
The simpler solution is to stick to the laws of natural justice, and have everything in the open.
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This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
I do hope that more councils will be switching off their horrible street lamps. George Osborne’s economic crisis (known bizarrely as a ‘recovery’) is as good an excuse as any for this.
Modern street lamps, like petrol stations, all seem to have been designed especially to offend and outrage the eye, as brutal and unsuited to their surroundings as can possibly be managed. A not-very-busy road near me is adorned with 30ft monstrosities that look as if they were the brainchild of the East German Stasi.
Bare, overbearing and deliberately hideous, they vomit a cloud of unpleasant light which can be seen from half a mile away. Ideal as they might be for spotting escapers to the West, they are ludicrously excessive for the place in which they stand. You can (I’ve done it) read the small print on an insurance policy by their bile-coloured glow.
You can imagine the conversations in the design studios, where the boss rips up each drawing, grunting, ‘Not ugly enough, Hermann!’ until they attain the desired standard of offensive, arrogant hideousness.
Evidence that glaring street lamps reduce crime is, to put it mildly, inconclusive. And the most affluent and privileged street in Britain, the lovely Kensington Palace Gardens, is beautifully lit by lovely Victorian gas lamps, of the kind that most of us wish had never been uprooted from our own streets. If its rich and powerful residents believed that such lamps put them at risk, they wouldn’t be there.
What they have, of course, is the police presence that was withdrawn from the rest of us nearly 50 years ago, without a word being spoken in an election or in Parliament.
It’s not just the nastiness of the modern street lamps. The diseased light which pours from them blots out the stars. And people who never or seldom see the stars begin to have an exaggerated idea of their own importance, which is one of the main problems of modern life.
It is now a rare privilege to escape them. The overpowering, humbling blaze of the constellations in the desert sky over West Texas is almost physically shocking to a victim of British urban planning.
But this delight is also available in rather surprising, less romantic places. I’ve seen the beauty of Baghdad’s palm-shaded streets by starlight, thanks to the absence of electricity following our moronic invasion.
And I’ve seen the serenity of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, so broke that its despots cannot afford to leave the lights on at night. I was confused. Why, in this dreadful place, did I feel so unexpectedly serene? It was because I could see the forgotten beauty of the night.
Don’t listen to the lobbyists for turning night into blazing artificial day. It is their money, not your safety, that really worries them.
A master in the art of proper policing
Since I grew up, I have hated the crude and menacing scribblings pretentiously known as ‘graffiti’. When they first appeared on the street nameplates in the London district where I lived in the late Seventies, I used to go out on Sundays and clean them off.
It was a losing battle. They multiplied like dandelions. And when the Marxoid local council began holding classes for ‘graffiti artists’ at ratepayers’ expense, I realised it was a lost battle. Since then, most of the affluent world has got used to this selfish, spiteful and disturbing display on every available wall and train.
So this Christmas I think we should all rejoice at the diligent labours of Detective Constable Colin Saysell, now of the British Transport Police.
I have little time for the modern police, who have forgotten who pays them or what they are for. But I make an exception for Mr Saysell.
He grasps that the appearance of this ugliness in a neighbourhood is the first step along the road to disorder, and he fights it like a terrier.
He would arrest the celebrated Banksy if the property owner objected and reported him. And why not? If Banksy wants to paint on a wall, let him ask permission. Artists, be they never so great, buy their own canvases.
Perhaps it’s Mr Saysell’s choice, but it’s interesting that this devoted officer remains a constable after three decades, when ‘diversity and equality’ enthusiasts and sociology graduates with grandiose theories about ‘offender management’ and restorative justice rise to become chiefs covered in silver braid. For 30 years now he has been tracking these people and catching them.
He bases his commitment on the proven ‘Broken Windows’ theory, which says that when authority neglects the little things – litter, illegal cycling, vandalism – much worse disorder follows.
He says his targets are ‘bullies – they are imposing their will, their views on everyone else’.
‘It leads to other forms of urban decay and it creates a climate of fear,’ he adds.
I wish him a happy Christmas and a successful 2015, and I invite you to ask our political class why police officers like him have become so rare.
I have been waiting for someone to condemn the notices put up by police in London’s Covent Garden, warning in Romanian that plainclothes detectives are on the lookout for pickpockets.
Surely if anyone from Ukip had done something similar, it would have been denounced on a dozen front pages and the BBC as ‘racist’?
My fears of war over Ukraine grew greatly last week when I came under attack from David Frum, one of the keenest supporters of the stupid Iraq War in the George W. Bush White House.
The same people and the same techniques are involved in drumming up this needless, dangerous conflict as were employed in fooling us last time. The big difference is that Russia really does have Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Jailed, ill treated - but never forgotten
Some months ago I asked you to write to the Iranian authorities about my friend Jason Rezaian and his wife Yeganeh Salehi, good and gentle people seized and held in nightmare conditions in Iran. Many of you kindly did so, and perhaps this helped secure the welcome release of Yeganeh.
But Jason is still being forced to sleep on the bare concrete floor of his cell in Evin prison, especially disgraceful given that he is far from well, suffering as he does from high blood pressure, a painful groin inflammation and eye infections.
I cannot imagine that any Islamic scripture justifies this treatment. I know that there are many decent people in Iran who loathe their government’s behaviour towards him and seek to have him released. How can we help them? I am not sure.
Most of the time Jason sees nobody but jailers and interrogators. They seek to persuade him that he is forgotten. Of course he is not, and never will be by anyone who has experienced his decency, personal kindness and generosity.
But given where he is, perhaps you could all pray so hard to the God that we share with all Iranians, that he will know he is not forgotten, and those who hold him will also know that God will not forget what they do.
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My fears of war over Ukraine grew greatly last week when I came under personal attack from David Frum, who was one of the keenest supporters of the stupid Iraq War in the George W. Bush White House. The same people and the same techniques are involved in drumming up this needless, dangerous conflict as were employed in fooling us last time. The big difference is that Russia really does have Weapons of Mass Destruction.
*********
I have been waiting for someone to condemn the notices put up by the police in London’s Covent Garden, warning in Romanian that plain-clothes detectives are on the look-out for pick-pockets. Surely if anyone from UKIP had done something similar, it would have been denounced on a dozen front pages and the BBC as ‘racist?
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Some of you may enjoy this reasonably intelligent assessment of me by a left-wing person.
http://livinginphilistia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/why-i-respect-peter-hitchens.html?spref=fb
The fault in it is the universal fallacy among my critics that I examine the past out of a sense of nostalgia, rather than as source of lessons for the future.
The writer even notices that I excuse the modern left from having desired the ends its policies have led to. But (and this is invariable so far with left-wingers) he doesn’t pause to wonder if there might be something in this.
He observes (quoting me) : ‘the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. "It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers."
But he doesn’t say whether he accepts or rejects this, or even what he actually thinks about conscience (can he be against it?) or the other things I list as virtues undermined by the strong modern state.
he just asserts: ’ He's wrong on almost all cultural and social issues’.
Well, that is plainly what he thinks, but it would at least have been interesting to find out why, or if he actually knows why he thinks this, or has just been taught to do so.
Then he says irrelevantly: ‘Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race.’
He cites no call by me for the turning back of any clock. This is because I have made none. He makes no distinction ( as any thinking person must) between the many different areas of life, morals and custom covered by ‘sexuality, gender and race’, a subject to which I have devoted many pages. What does he think I think about these things? Or is he just not interested, being in too much of a hurry to distance himself from me in case anyone thinks he might have been influenced by me?
In fact, the Left may now be finding that much of its once-reliable voter support will soon disappear into the SNP in Scotland, and UKIP in England. I don’t think the British Labour party can survive for long as a major force if it relies for its votes on metropolitan bourgeois bohemians and retired Eurocommunists. In both cases it will be because it has utterly ignored, for at least 20 years, the warnings of people such as me. And it has slandered people such as me as ‘fascists’ ‘homophobes’, ‘sexists’ and ‘racists’.
The Left will find that the SNP simply supplants them while UKIP are, in general, far less thoughtful and sympathetic to their concerns than I am. Am I being unfair to UKIP here? I don't think so. The crudity and incoherence of its general policy-making are a real problem, and one of the many reasons I keep my distance from it. Alas for us all, these forces are a response to the cloth-eared attitude of the Labour Party towards its voting base, as much as they are a response to the Tory Party’s similar scorn for its supporters. The longer you ignore justly-discontented people, the more radical and intolerant their ultimate response will be.
It's never a question of going back to the past. Only Dr Who can do that. It's always a question of choosing the future.
This account of a recent visit to Rochester and Strood appeared in the Mail on Sunday of 6th November:
Modern England comes as a shock to most Westminster persons. The former Tory MP Matthew Parris was so appalled when he visited Clacton that the resulting article was used in UKIP propaganda in the by-election there. Mr Parris appeared to be looking down a very long nose indeed at that town’s people and their lives. It didn’t seem to cross his mind that he – as a politician, broadcaster and influential journalist – might have helped to make it like that.
Rochester – at first glance – is not much like Clacton. It is an ancient cathedral city you might have glimpsed and wondered about as you took the Eurostar to Paris, or the M2 to Dover, and saw its Norman keep and ancient spire in the middle distance.
Its High Street is a glory of old-fashioned Englishness, a chapter from Charles Dickens in brick, stone, timber and plaster. Almost every enterprise is named after a Dickens character. At this time of year, when the dusk begins to fall quite early, and the yellow lights come on behind the small panes of glass, it is so moving and evocative that I almost stopped breathing at the sight of it.
But then Dickens and his books are real to me. The place must be as mysterious as Japan to most modern English people, for whom Dickens is a firmly closed book. It is also, like so much of picturesque England, a museum where you can buy and eat the exhibits.
Strood lacks these luxuries. While Rochester is steeped in history and literature, Strood is just there, an unremarkable place where English people have lived in reasonable prosperity and freedom for centuries. It is possible that Dickens was thinking of ‘Strood’ when he named his last, unfinished book ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ (which rhymes with Strood) . But he actually set it in Rochester.
It certainly has a past. Its people must have seen the smoke and heard the guns in 1667 as the Dutch Fleet sailed up the Medway to nearby Chatham and burned or seized the pride of the British Navy, a national humiliation now almost completely forgotten, but once considered a grave warning to any British government which neglected the Navy, as Charles II did then, and we are doing now.
Cross the now-peaceful Medway to Strood and you are in the real world of Fast Food, cut-price supermarkets, charity shops, a pound store, amazing numbers of hairdressers (does Britain have enough hair to go round all these establishments?) the usual riot of architecture-free concrete shops, anti-pedestrian fencing and wide fast highways whose Pelican crossings are so slow to change that you could easily forget, while waiting, why you wanted to cross the road in the first place.
This is just standard semi-urban southern England, a few ghostly older buildings surviving amid the post-sixties modernization which turned so much of the country into a pallid and unsuccessful copy of the less appealing parts of the USA, with a hint of East Berlin thrown in.
In Rochester the UKIP office had been full of optimism and busyness. People were coming up to UKIP candidate Mark Reckless in the street to offer encouragement.
But in Strood, despite the lovely autumn sunlight, I found a curious angry apathy. A few weeks ago, in Scotland, everyone I spoke to about the Referendum had an articulate opinion on ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. All planned to vote, None resented the process.
In Strood, my wholly unreliable and unscientific sample was the polar opposite They were a very English sample – not a Pole or a Somali to be seen. After a while I began to dread asking anyone his views, and to wonder if I was the victim of an elaborate trick, and they were all actors hired by Downing Street to confuse me.
Almost everyone I talked to in Strood (I took up station close to KFC and not far from Morrisons) was disillusioned to the point of cynicism. I can’t really disapprove of this on principle. I am a hardened non-voter, and can’t remember when I last bothered to cast a ballot in the safe Labour seat where I dwell. But if I lived in Rochester or Strood I should certainly vote next week, because it seems to me that, on this rare occasion, it would make a difference.
If the Tories can’t hold this seat, politics in this country will change deeply and forever. If they do hold it, politics in this country will remain the same. That’s quite an incentive to vote whatever way you feel. I’m still amazed by the Prime Minister’s direct appeal to Labour supporters to vote Tory, which they are as likely to do as they are likely to tandoori and eat their grannies.
But in many cases this is a crossroads that ordinary human beings aren’t even interested in visiting. People told me they were sick of immigration, sick of low wages, sick of false promises. I said that in that case UKIP was their ideal party, but they said that no, it wasn’t. They had heard of it. They knew what it was, but they didn’t trust it. Some thought the whole election was a waste of money.
Others were just hopelessly confused, the most perplexed being an enthusiastic Green Party supporter who suddenly launched into a diatribe of dislike against Eastern Europeans. It was a reminder that, for many people, politics is as baffling, distant, pointless and uninteresting as sport is to me.
Now, I respect opinion polls. They are generally right, provided you read them carefully and remember that they are a device for influencing opinion much more than a way of measuring it. And I respect the judgement of political professionals on the spot whose unvarying view is that the Tories are not doing well in Rochester and Strood.
So I expect that UKIP will win, not least because I personally will be glad if they do. I am amazed that it has taken so long for ordinary Tory supporters to see through their party and particularly through David Cameron, an unusually transparent snake-oil salesman, even for these times.
But the polls can’t really cope with the kind of people I talked to in Strood. These are the great unmoved, the people who neither speak nor vote, the biggest political party in Britain if anyone could mobilise them. I am surprised that they remain unstirred.
Yet others are stirred. If UKIP win next Thursday, it will be first because the Tory circle cannot be squared. The Tories cannot win new voters without driving away just as many old ones. And they cannot shake off the hatred which clings to them from the Thatcher years.
Second, it will be because those who pinned false hopes on Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and then pinned equally false hopes on Anthony Blair in 1997, are turning once again to someone who looks and sounds as if he knows what to do about a country in deep trouble.
If that is so, then next May’s general election will mark the boundary between the long, settled Labour-Tory era and a new period of groping and uncertainty. Political parties take a long time to die, and they can still kick and bite quite hard while they are expiring. Rochester and Strood won’t mark the end of this long process, but it might well accelerate it quite sharply. I daren’t go further than that. I have no great expectations. But as all readers of Charles Dickens know, such expectations can turn out to be deeply misleading, or worse.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
For anyone who can count, the constant claims that Britain has recovered from its economic woes are almost physically painful.
For years I’ve had to listen to people saying from public platforms that George Osborne is a successful Chancellor, and being applauded for it – when the truth is that Mr Osborne is actually deepening Britain’s debt every second.
Claims of falling unemployment and industrial recovery are much the same. As so often in modern Britain – and especially in education and crime –the statistics are the only things that are getting better.
But the truth can’t be concealed from everybody for ever. Last week, when the rest of the media were chasing after Ed Miliband like a flock of mad sheep, the Financial Times published the real national accounts.
Safe in the knowledge that very few people read the Pink Paper, our governing elite held their breath and hoped that nobody would notice until after the next Election (when it will be too late).
Here is what the figures said. Whoever is Chancellor at the end of next May must make budget cuts at double the present rate, to meet existing austerity targets.
The utter absurdity of Mr Cameron’s talk of tax cuts, when in reality taxes are bound to rise while spending is massacred, is here revealed.
If the Government continues to protect spending on the NHS, schools and foreign aid from cuts, all other government departments face reductions of one third in their budgets.
Such cuts would devastate what is left of the Armed Forces, the police, transport, pensions and other welfare. They would also be very bad news for crisis-stricken and collapsing parts of the State such as the prisons and border control.
On past performance, the response would be to free more prisoners far too early, and relax our frontiers even further.
As the Financial Times said: ‘Short of an economic miracle in which Britain embarks on sustainably faster economic growth than expected for many years, whichever party wins the next Election will have to implement these spending cuts or something similar.’
All thinking and informed people in Parliament, the media and the Civil Service are broadly aware of this state of affairs.
And while far too many in our supposed elite don’t think and are astoundingly ignorant and gullible, that doesn’t excuse the general silence about this grave prospect. Nor will it excuse the way in which they will reveal it, in tones of pretended shock, about ten minutes after the new government is sworn in next May.
Here’s my theory. Every few years, our new ruling class decides whose turn it is to enjoy the fruits of office. That person is then pretty much spared all criticism. You will never see pictures of him eating messily, or walking through a door marked ‘Exit’. For a decade, that person was the Blair Creature.
Now, all those who fawned over him when he was in power agree that he was a ghastly disaster. But then, he could govern as badly as he liked and no scandal or failure would ever hurt him, even one of the most ill-judged wars in human history.
Now, the heir to Blair is David Cameron, who must be protected against his many bungles and flops by a bodyguard of flatterers. In a few years’ time, when Labour once again has a suitably Blairish leader, everyone will admit that the Cameron years were a buffoonish disaster.
These people haven’t a clue. A cabinet of garden gnomes would have more idea how to fix the nation’s problems. Why wait till after the next Election to punish them all for it?
A sacred moment of history...defiled to sell us chocolate
To me, the Christmas truce between British and German soldiers in 1914 is, literally, sacred. It was the last hour of Christian Europe, a tragic failure.
If only they had continued it by throwing down their guns and walking away in their thousands to their homes and families, their proper work and their peaceful, happy lives, we would have been spared so much loss and ruin.
The more I study that war, the more I am convinced we should not have taken part in it, and that it destroyed European civilisation, which has never recovered and never will.
So I am revolted by the use of this tragic moment by a supermarket chain in a Christmas advertisement. The Sainsbury’s short film is beautifully made and initially very moving.
But as the swelling music sought to seduce me into buying bars of chocolate, my gorge rose.
Some things are too solemn to be turned into commercials, even under the cover of charity.
Another 'drugs tragedy' ignored
Still no answers about whether the killer of Leeds teacher Ann Maguire was a user of mind-altering drugs. But there is a fascinating new sidelight on the death of the actor Robin Williams, which came as a great shock to those close to him.
Mainstream reports of the autopsy said Mr Williams had no alcohol or illicit drugs in his system when he died. Some accounts incorrectly said there were no drugs at all. Actually, his body contained ‘therapeutic’ levels of the ‘antidepressant’ Mirtazapine.
In the USA, this drug carries a ‘black box’ warning that it can promote suicidal thoughts in those who use it. Could this possibly be significant? We won’t find out if we don’t look.
You might also have noticed reports last week that the obviously unhinged Deyan Deyanov was ‘inappropriately’ diagnosed as feigning his mental illness and released from a Welsh psychiatric unit, after which he went to Tenerife and beheaded British grandmother Jennifer Mills-Westley.
Deyanov, like the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby, was a long-term heavy user of supposedly ‘soft’ cannabis. Why won’t we have a proper inquiry into the dangers of mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal?
Quite possibly, the biggest medical scandal since Thalidomide is incubating in our midst. Do we always have to wait for the tragedy before we seek the remedy?
The Blair creature, along with all other ex-Premiers, is allowed to claim a special allowance of £115,000 a year, mainly for office expenses. Receipts are required, and the payments are all above board.
But given the giant income which he receives from private sources, should the Victor of Baghdad really expect taxpayers to keep him in staples and printer cartridges?
I’m glad to see they’re going to bury a tiny few of those hideous high-tension cables whose pylons spoil so many of our loveliest landscapes.
Too little, too late. And, alas, you can’t really bury wind turbines, though, come to think of it, they wouldn’t be much more useless if we did.
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