PETER HITCHENS: Want to see who started the Iraq War? Look in the mirror

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Oh, for goodness’ sake leave the pathetic Blair creature alone. He will never understand what he did and probably didn’t understand it at the time. 

He isn’t very bright and now lives a lonely, meaningless life of empty speeches delivered to bored businessmen in return for money, which will have to be penance enough.

If you want to blame anyone for the Iraq disaster, look at yourselves. I opposed it at the time, and remember how few others did. I don’t really count the Leftist demonstrators, who oppose all wars, just or unjust.

I mean the great mass of patriotic Middle Britain, normal decent people, who were so willingly misled. I mean those scores of MPs of both parties who scuttled, bleating, through the war lobby and now claim, falsely, that they didn’t know the facts.

I mean my media colleagues, who have been trained from their earliest years to doubt what they are told, yet swallowed Alastair Campbell’s great dish of steaming tripe without a thought. 

Come on, how hard was it to see that the danger was invented, that the war was illegal and that it was none of our business? I have no prophetic powers but I could see it.

And yet, diddled so blatantly that even an official report now confirms it, you still don’t learn. How many supposedly responsible voters are currently being fooled by today’s attempt to spin us into a stupid conflict with Russia, a country almost nobody in Whitehall knows anything about or understands?

At least as many as were misled by claims of a fictional massacre into supporting the Libya disaster. At least as many as were persuaded by a media chorus to admire Hilary Benn’s feeble, poorly argued speech urging us to bomb Syria.

Is there no idiocy you can’t be gulled into by a bit of atrocity propaganda or the endlessly recycled claim that the chosen target is the new Hitler, who must not be ‘appeased’? A word of advice: if you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. Wars are the mother and father of atrocities, and one day they will come home to us, if we keep launching them against others.

Vladimir Putin is already being turned into the new Hitler. Nobody who knows anything about Russia thinks this is true. But a couple of weeks ago we more or less secretly sent British troops to Ukraine, a country with which we are not in any way allied, and which is a war zone. Was Parliament asked about ‘Exercise Rapid Trident’? I can find no record of it.

We have just made the daft decision to send 650 scarce troops to Poland and Estonia. This is supposedly in response to a ‘Russian threat’ to these countries for which there is no actual evidence. Apart from the tiny exclave of Kaliningrad, Poland doesn’t even have a border with Russia. As the wise academic Professor Richard Sakwa, whose father served in the pre-war Polish Army, has rightly said: ‘Nato grew to meet the threat it had itself provoked.’

If we are not careful, we shall once again create a war out of our own exaggerated fears and by believing our own propaganda. Any of you who are taken in by this have no right to attack Mr Blair. You are as bad as he is. He and his like couldn’t do what they do without your help.

Baffled by the barmy NHS 

A member of my family had to hurry to a major hospital casualty department at the weekend. It was the usual NHS mixture – dedicated, overworked and kind doctors and nurses cunningly concealed behind a barrier of wooden bureaucracy bad enough to make you scream, even if you weren’t already in pain.

All ended quite happily. Soon afterwards she received this ludicrous text, which I at first thought was a joke: ‘We would like you to think about your recent experience at the **** **** hospital. 

How likely are you to recommend our Emergency Department to your friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment today? Reply 1 for extremely likely, 2 for likely, 3 for neither likely nor unlikely, 4 for extremely unlikely, 5 for don’t know.’

How does one begin to respond to this? She was in considerable pain and distress. She did not consult the Good Hospital Guide (not that there was any choice, given the sparseness of A&E facilities in modern Britain). It’s not a market. It’s organised mercy, and it would be better if it concentrated exclusively on that.

The campaign for justice for the late Bishop George Bell goes on. Bell has been denounced by Church and media as a child abuser without the semblance of a trial. 

This was recently the main subject of a powerful debate in the House of Lords. The Church’s response, as ever, was to use the alleged victim as a human shield. 

Arrayed in his flowing clerical robes, in a chamber where all speak ‘upon their honour’, the consecrated Bishop of Chelmsford asserted that campaigners for justice for George Bell had ‘made hurtful comments about her’ (the alleged victim). 

Have they? I have challenged him to say who these people were and what these comments were. He has not replied, though the Church press office has emitted some irrelevant and evasive guff. 

******

A florid face we should save for the nation

How we shall all miss Ken Clarke. This week, while looking like some hedge-dwelling creature roused early from a comfy hibernation, he accurately summed up modern British politics in a few very funny words uttered when he thought the TV cameras weren’t rolling. 

Typically, he hasn’t complained about the recording being leaked. I disagree with almost everything he thinks, though he was dead right about Iraq and gets too little credit. 

But he is a modest, thoughtful and funny person, with a real life outside politics, whose wisdom we badly need. Can’t he be saved for the nation?

 

********

Look, I am resigned to the coronation of Mrs Theresa May as our next Prime Minister. In a cynical way, I am quite pleased by it, as she is so Left-wing that she may well achieve my main aim in life – the final and utter destruction of the Useless, Fraudulent Tory Party.

But spare me the suggestion that she is the new Margaret Thatcher. I’m not actually a Thatcherite, and disapprove of a lot of what the Iron Lady did. 

But I did meet Mrs Thatcher, and talk to her, and watch her in action. And Mrs May is no Margaret Thatcher. She is in fact the new John Major.

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

 

 

What I said about the Iraq War in February and March 2003

I reproduce this from the Mail on Sunday of 9th February 2003:

 

 

'IF we go to war I shall not stop criticising this folly. Our troops will not be fighting for this country, but for another country and against Britain's interests.

Before the bombs start to fall I will try one last time to deal with the feeble, stumbling case for attacking Iraq.

Yes, Saddam Hussein is a dictator. So is Jiang Zemin, the Chinese leader, recently welcomed here on a State visit and guarded from protesters by British police.

Jiang Zemin's regime constantly threatens its neighbour Taiwan, illegally occupies Tibet, imprisons hundreds of thousands in its Lao Gai concentration camps and possesses weapons of mass destruction by the megaton, plus rockets to deliver them.

China is a much more potent threat to peace and stability than Iraq, and the free world should be taking firmer steps to deter and contain it. But America constantly appeases China. So do we.

Talking of appeasement, the pro-war faction claims that those who oppose the war are the same as those who would not stand up to Hitler in the Thirties. This is historical rubbish. When Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, the democracies did nothing. They did nothing when he swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the West stood up to him, and threw him out. He is most unlikely to do it again, and if he does he knows he will be thrown out again. So why should he? Nobody is appeasing him.

If we know that Saddam has developed dangerous weapons, then we can simply destroy them, as Israel did when it bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981. No war followed though, stupidly, both President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher condemned this wise and sensible act.

This war is part of an ill-thought-out American plan to obtain a strategic foothold in the Middle East. This will only work if America stays in Iraq for decades, and even then will be very hard to manage.

Yet it is already clear that Washington does not intend to hang around in Baghdad any longer than it has to, and that British troops will be given the job of policing the 'democracy' which is supposed to appear by magic once Saddam has gone.

Why? We couldn't afford to do this in 1921, when we invented Iraq by drawing some lines on a map, and we certainly cannot now. In return for this humiliating role, what do we get?

America has already forced us to surrender to the IRA. It wants to shove us into a European federal state. If we are such valued allies, why are we treated like this? It is time we had a Government which stood up for this country's independence.'

 

****

 

And in case any Tories think it's not their fault, this from the MoS on 2nd March:

 

 
'THE worst government in modern British history is trying to hustle this country into a stupid and unpopular war which has nothing to do with us and is against our interests.

It hopes to get away with this even though our armed forces are not fit to fight, thanks to years of neglect and cheeseparing.

So what does the Opposition do at the moment of truth, when the ground is trembling beneath New Labour's feet and there is a real possibility of unhorsing this ghastly regime?

In the most important vote to take place in the Commons for decades, the Tory Party backs the Government.

I just cannot understand why so many Conservatives are in favour of this Left wing war.

Why don't they make the connections? Mr Blair wanted to disarm this country in the face of the Soviet threat, a real threat from a monstrous and bloodstained tyranny. Mr Blair was against retaking the Falklands. Mr Blair has handed Ulster over to rule by terrorist factions. Mr Blair is even now trying to sell Gibraltar to Spain. And, above all, he aches to abolish our national independence and liberty by scrapping the pound and placing us beneath the dingy shadow of a Brussels constitution.

Yet suddenly this serial surrender merchant, appeaser and anti-British defeatist is hot for war against Iraq, a nation which, for all its many faults, poses precisely no threat to this country.

The truth is that attacking Iraq appeals to Mr Blair because it is not in British interests. It is a new kind of liberal imperialism which ultimately threatens the whole idea that countries are free to govern themselves as they see fit.

And what about these vague and grandiose promises of a new democratic Iraq? For Heaven's sake, the Labour Party still hasn't managed to introduce democracy in its one-party heartlands of Scotland and the North East. How likely is it Mr Blair can impose it on Basra?

These excellent arguments have been left to rust by a Tory Party which seems to think war is conservative. Wrong a thousand times. War, for the past century, has been the handmaid and herald of state control, Socialism, inflation and high taxation, doing limitless damage to the Church, marriage and the family, stability, order and morality.'

 

 

 

 

Why Blairites would rather be led by Theresa May than by Jeremy Corbyn

I urge anyone genuinely interested in British politics to set aside the time and quiet needed to read this truly gripping and original article by Rafael Behr from Tuesday’s Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/how-remain-failed-inside-story-doomed-campaign

leave aside its tiresome assumption that all those reading it will sympathise with the pro-EU case. Its portrayal of the deep and committed collaboration between the Tory Party and the organised Blairite Left is superbly telling.

I have long maintained that there is no profound political division between New Labour and the Tories, and that the two are in effect one party. Here are factual details to demonstrate that this is truly so.  

This passage

‘With non-partisan zeal that impressed their colleagues, the Tories on the team agreed to a script aimed at core Labour voters, which included the threat that Brexit would “turn industrial heartlands into wastelands” and “finish the job that Thatcher started”.

'Old party rivalries were largely banished from the campaign “war room” at Stronger In’s Cannon Street headquarters. Researchers and press officers who had been savaging each other’s work for years now collaborated amicably. Residual tensions stayed below the surface. Former Labour staffers, moderate refugees fleeing the hard-left takeover under Corbyn, sometimes bristled at what they saw as unmerited swagger in the step of the Downing Street contingent, who expected to easily replicate their victory in the previous May’s general election. “They arrived like an occupying force,” recalls one former Labour staffer. “They came in with a sense of, ‘Step aside and we’ll tell you how it’s done.’”

'But over the course of the campaign, the most senior remainers found collegiate sympathy in a shared world view. As one put it: “We were the pluralist, liberal, centrist force in British politics.”’ (my emphasis, PH)

 

Followed by this one

 

‘Pro-Europeanism became a proxy for the fusion of economic and social liberalism that had been a dominant philosophy of the political mainstream for a generation, although its proponents were scattered across partisan boundaries. These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer. (My emphasis, PH)

'In the days when the politics of the fringe did not threaten their intellectual security, adherents of New Labour, the Lib Dems and “Cameroon” Conservatives had never seen themselves as a fellowship of moderation. Before Corbynite radicalism seized the left and Ukip’s vinegary nationalism suffused the right, debate was conducted in shades of difference within a broad consensus. But as the referendum approached, Stronger In became the informal party of defensive liberalism – the unpopulists – although that had never been the intention.’ (my emphasis, PH)

And you have the core of it.

In the same issue of the Guardian you can also find this equally fascinating analysis:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/post-referendum-politics-eu-vote

by Andrew (Lord) Cooper, a Tory peer and pollster, who advised the ‘Remain’ campaign

which correctly grasps the real divide in British politics. Again, ignore the petty caricaturing of the traditional conservative tendency ‘nationalist’ instead of patriotic, ‘fearful’ of globalisation rather than damaged by it and therefore rationally hostile to it, ‘preoccupied’ by immigration rather than, once again, reasonably concerned by it . The analysis is broadly, even strikingly right. One should also note that the statements with which they are said to be in agreement (“I hardly recognise the country I live in any more” and “If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would” were devised by liberal elite pollsters, and were not the original words of the people polled, who might well have expressed their sentiments in ways a little less like Polly Toynbee’s idea of what they think. Even so, it is a good analysis of the state opinion in this country,. There’s certainly no ‘silent majority’, but there is a large and vigorous if shrinking, minority, which feels mistreated and left out.

Note first of all Lord Cooper’s point that ‘The research that informs political campaigns is much more sophisticated than published polls. We don’t just want to know who is going to vote one way or the other. We need to understand what perceptions and arguments cause people to come to the voting conclusion that they do. This means looking beyond demographic and regional factors to map the electorate on the basis of attitudes and behaviour. We need to identify our core vote – and our opponent’s – and to define, with as much nuance as possible, the voters who are genuinely in play: what they think and feel about the choice before them and which messages, messengers and modes are the most effective in persuading them.’

And then : ‘The foundational research showed Britain divided into three almost equal chunks. The first chunk – 34% of the population – was internationalist in outlook; socially liberal; positive about globalisation, immigration and multiculturalism; and optimistic about the future. For these voters, the economy was by far the most important issue in the referendum. They were overwhelmingly going to vote remain, regardless of the terms of the debate.

'The second chunk – at that stage, 32% of the population – was diametrically opposed: nationalist in outlook; socially conservative; fearful of globalisation; opposed to multiculturalism; preoccupied by immigration; pessimistic about the future; and very hostile to the EU. For these voters, immigration was far and away the most important issue in the referendum; most of them favoured ending free movement, even if this made Britain worse off. The attitude that most characterised them was “I hardly recognise the country I live in any more”. More than half of them agreed with the statement “If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would”. Their imperative was to shut out the consequences of globalisation and open markets. These voters were overwhelmingly going to vote leave, regardless of the arguments.

‘The third chunk – 34% of the population – was conflicted. These people were the in-play voters: the primary target for both campaigns in the EU referendum. They were very clear that they didn’t like the EU, and why: uncontrolled immigration, the huge direct cost of membership, too much meddling in our laws and lives. They were torn between the appealing idea of insulating the UK from the pressures of an open world, and fear of the idea of a Britain outside the EU, isolated and alone. They were defined by the attitude that “my heart wants to leave the EU, but my head says it may be too risky”.’

Amidst all this, Mrs Theresa May seems to think her main task is to reunite the Tory Party,  an impossible alliance of people with wholly incompatible beliefs, and a major obstacle to intelligent thought or useful action.  Surely that’s the last thing Britain actually needs? Many of her party (perhaps Mrs May herself)  would surely be happier in New Labour, or merging with it, if unity is what they want. What's quite certain is that New Labour would be happier with Mrs May as their leader than with Jeremy Corbyn, which I for one find quite funny. 

 

Then the rest of us would realise we need to start a party of our own, if we're to have any friends at Westminster.

 

 

This Ghastly Planned Exhibition of Blairite Waxworks should ensure British exit from the EU

This richly comic plan, reported by James Macintyre, on the ‘Christian Today’ site,  should greatly help the  ‘Leave’ campaign’s current surge towards victory:

Cameron, Brown, Blair and Major 'to share platform' in last-ditch bid to keep Britain in EU | Christian News on Christian Today

If the predicted event takes place, all the appalling old waxworks of liberal elite Britain, all those to blame for the mess in which we now find ourselves, collectively responsible for disastrous wars in places where we had no business to be, a creepy surrender to criminal gangsters on our own sovereign territory, the accelerating break-up of the United Kingdom, breath-taking economic incompetence, needlessly surrendered sovereignty, spectacular educational failure, a combined assault on private and family life unprecedented outside the USSR, and a frightening decline in law and justice, assembled in one place, all urging the same mistaken course of action...

Here we have it, the modern world in arms, or at least in each other’s arms.

And here, in the Financial Times , we have from Mr Janan Ganesh the underlying explanation of such an event – the elite ranged together to oppose the people. Mr Ganash has spotted the real division in our society today, as opposed to the artificial boundary which cruelly divides Blairites from joining with each other in a single assembly of enthusiastic Tonyites.

Apart from asking ‘Why did it take them so long to spot it?’ I am grateful to the Blairite of Blairites, John Rentoul, for drawing my attention to it:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5c108032-314f-11e6-ad39-3fee5ffe5b5b.html#axzz4BUILaIKk

The core of it is here

‘If there is a lesson from recent weeks, it is that mild Conservatives and moderate adherents to the Labour cause share more with each other than with the rest of their own parties. On Europe, but also migration and globalisation, they want to amend the status quo not break it. In their tone is an absence of anger that my trade habitually elides with a lack of passion.

Against them in this referendum is a party in all but name and formal incorporation, drawn from the Tory right and the Labour left and incubated in the Leave campaign. These politicians are conservative and anti-establishment at the same time.’

Which, without the sympathetic description of the New Labour/Cameroon alliance as ‘mild’ or ‘moderate’( which their actions certainly are not, given their devastating effects on this country and the Middle East over the past few decades), is much what I have been saying for many years now.

He asks :  

‘…take Ms Rudd and Mr Umunna, or George Osborne, chancellor, and his former adversary Ed Balls, or even David Cameron and any of 100 Labour MPs: do they disagree over the size of the state more than they agree over Britain’s place in the EU, its future as an open economy, its indispensability as the liberal thumb on the continental scales? And which of the two sets of issues is now the real stuff of politics?’

And he urges them to get together, thus :  

‘Under the blur of digits, these politicians have the same basic orientation. Scorn it as the Davos consensus but it has done more for British prosperity and self-respect than the admixture of socialism and Tory paternalism ever could — or, to judge by the 1970s, ever did. If this settlement is menaced by forces that will outlast this referendum, it is myopic of its guardians to remain separate out of fealty to a party system that was forged in the industrial age for an empire nation.’

Predicting a ‘different arrangement of forces’ which may not be neat (he’s right), he notes: ‘But at least elections between a Christian Democrat-style party and a Liberal-ish party would correspond to the arguments we are having today. Millions of Eurosceptic Labour voters would have a team, and so would those of us who want more not less of the world as it is. I hear the Tory and Labour moderates newly mingling in the Remain offices rather get on. As a glint of the future, it will have to do.’

 

It just makes me wonder what that other Blairite, Michael Gove, is doing in the 'Leave' campaign, a development that has always puzzled me and continues to do so.  

London is a Republic with a President. Why aren't we more interested?

Why aren’t people more interested in the Republic of London, which tonight (5th May 2016) chooses its next President? Far more attention is paid to Scottish independence from the UK (an inevitability) than to the fact that the national capital has more or less seceded already, and has a republican form of government.

It is all part of an enormous constitutional revolution launched by the Blairite Eurocommunists but unimpeded by the ‘Conservative’ Party at the time, and unreversed by it later.

Let us sum this up:

The expulsion of most of the independent and uncontrollable hereditary peers from the House of Lords, and their replacement by nonentities appointed by party leaders, and so easily biddable by the executive. This did not merely weaken the Lords and strengthen the elective tyranny of Downing Street. It directly threatened the monarchy. If inherited office was improper for members of Parliament, how could it be defended in the case of the head of state. The rapid collapse of Tory opposition to this reform left the monarchy exposed to a future attack on the same lines (which I confidently predict not long after the next Coronation). It also produced a House of Lords whose size and character is now almost entirely indefensible, and which likewise cannot last. No prizes for guessing that it will in time be replaced by an elected senate which will be controlled, like the Commons, by the political parties and their whips and apparatchiks, and so by the executive.  

The creation in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland of legislative chambers which use continental systems of election, designed to abolish the adversarial system which had until recently been such a strong safeguard of liberty in this country.

The creation of a special semi-detached status for Northern Ireland which can at any time be transferred to Dublin sovereignty by a single referendum.

These are big changes, and reflect the struggle for mastery over these islands between the declining and weakening federation known as the United Kingdom and the increasingly powerful rival federation known as the European Union. Two rival federations (as Yugoslavia found) cannot contend indefinitely for the same territory, and the creation of devolved governments in the outlying nations made and makes it easier for them to form direct relationships with the true capital in Brussels, bypassing London more and more. Devolution, so called, is actually part of the Europeanisation of these islands, and cannot be properly understood unless this point is grasped. The EU superstate finds it can digest former nation states much more easily if they are first broken down into smaller sections. Hence its near-obsession with ‘regions’ which are gradually being created in England by a salami-slicing process in which the ancient system of counties is emptied of all real power and becomes purely ceremonial. Functions such as planning, ambulance and fire services and (probably soon) police, have been or will be transferred in fact if not in name to regional authorities.

But back to London, whose form of government draws its legitimacy not from a  Royal charter or anything so foolishly English, but to a referendum, a thing which can only happen if the government wants it to and whose result is usually fore-ordained.  

The Greater London Authority is not elected like any other city or county council, but through a Continental Additional Member system, in which some members are picked from a list rather than sitting for actual wards or constituencies. I think it true to say that every new elected body created since the Blair revolution has spurned the traditional British system of simple first-past-the-post election. I suspect this is so that, by the time they get round to doing this to the House of Commons, nobody will think it odd or strange, or wonder why.

But this is as nothing to the election of its head of state, the Mayor. Even this (though it is bound to be a two-horse race in reality)  is done on a  supplementary vote system rather than on first past the post.

And that is as nothing to the real unexamined point. The head of state of this very large and strategically important part of a supposed Kingdom is elected.  Mayors until this time have been constitutional monarchs, neutral, powerless figures usually chosen as a reward for long service and affability. The Mayor of London is a President, a thing repugnant to our style of government. The post is American. The method of election is European. He is not picked by the majority in the Assembly, as Prime Ministers are (more or less) picked by the majority in the Commons. He is directly elected and his own personal authority derived from direct election. The Assembly may question him, but lacks the power to remove him by a simple vote of no confidence.  

You may like this or not(I do not) but it seems to me that it is quite revolutionary. I note that George Osborne is trying (as Labour once did ) to spread the idea of elected mayors. I suspect this will probably end up by taking a ‘regional’ form, which will of course please the EU. But it also spreads the idea of an elected head of state, who is obviously not a hereditary monarch. I have always said the Tories would guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square if it thought this would help them gain or retain office. But obviously a softer, kinder, gentler sunshinier way to a republic would suit them better. This may be it.

 

How to Report on a Controversy in Modern Britain

A certain newspaper carried on a certain date a very interesting story on its front page, to which I will not refer you or link for reasons which will become clear. The report was about a leading politician. But I won’t name him or her because I have heard that he or she thinks that this story threatens the privacy of one of his or her children, whose sex I will also not reveal. I’d better not say which party he or she belongs to since they’re all the same, so this matters less than you might think) or how leading he or she is, either. No clues here.

The story said that this politician (let us call her or him X) , was considering sending the child (whom we shall call Y) to a leading private school (which I will call Z) in a large city somewhere in South-East England (which I shall call A).

Now, the thing about X (who lives in A) , is that X has said in the past that X hoped to send X’s children to state school. X has in fact sent several of X’s children (I won’t say how many, in case it identifies X) to a state primary school (which I shall call B) and a number of children (whom I shall call D) to a state secondary school (which I shall call C) . Both of these schools (B and C) are in the city of A.  So is the independent school called Z. For reasons I can’t explain, because they would reveal important details about both Y and B ,Y cannot go to C. But D can go to C. And Y can go to Z, though no decision has yet been taken. 

X was careful, very sensibly, to qualify this. State schools in A, especially secondaries, are of, shall we say, variable quality, especially for children of one of the two sexes (let us call this sex E, a sex which includes child Y).  X has made sympathetic remarks about other parents who have been scared off by poor state secondary schools, especially (but not exclusively) in the city of A . Really the issue is about whether X’s decision to consider independent school Z for child Y reflects in any way on the success (or failure) of the school policies of X’s party (which, like all the parties, claims to be sorting out the state sector and making it wonderful) .

I hope you are following me, because I am not sure I am following myself. But I am sure you will agree that this ABC and XYZ method of reporting these matters, not to mention the almost total failure of the rest of the media to follow the original story in the unnamed paper with any vigour or verve,  is far superior to the way in which the media used to report the educational choices of leading politicians whose public pronouncements differed (or seemed to differ) in various ways from their private policies, notably Anthony Blair, who spurned Labour’s beloved local comprehensives for a highly selective Roman Catholic school miles from his home, or Harriet Harman, who spurned Labour’s beloved local comprehensives in favour of a grammar school,  or Diane Abbott, who spurned Labour’s beloved local comprehensives in favour of an independent school.

I’d ask anyone commenting on this posting not to engage in speculation about the identity of X or Y, or about the name of the city or the names of any of the schools involved.

How Thick do they Think We Are? The Trident Argument Continued

Some readers may enjoy listening to this brief, concentrated version of my case against

Trident renewal, broadcast on LBC ( a London independent radio station which also broadcasts on the web) on Sunday. I think it makes quite clear (as does my article) that I’m in favour of this country keeping nuclear bombs in some form. Just not Trident. I stress this because some readers seem to have commented in the absurd belief that I support nuclear disarmament. I can see that this belief makes it easier for them to dismiss my case. But it’s mistaken. Once again, I don’t.

Please listen:

http://www.lbc.co.uk/colossal-pointless-toy-peter-hitchens-lets-rip-at-trident--123315

Arguments about this are of course complicated by the Labour Party’s curious divisions, in which the leader is against nuclear weapons on principle, and the unions support a ludicrous weapon simply because of the jobs it provides. Quite reasonable, even if unprincipled, you may say, and so would I (my father was very fond of Barrow-in-Furness where his favourite ship, the cruiser H.M.S. Ajax, was built, and where the officers and many of the ship’s company lived for some months to supervise her completion)  if it weren’t the case that our economy’s distortion by such things almost certainly destroys manufacturing capacity elsewhere.

Though it is true that our military industries survive because they are the only ones we can protect from foreign competition (nobody admits this, but any government can find ways of giving preference to its own manufacturers for defence contracts, and all do, despite the supposed commitment to total free trade in the EU and elsewhere) .

I am amazed that there is no serious protectionist strand in modern British (or American) politics, given the devastation which has been wrought (and is being wrought) on our mining and manufacturing industries by free trade. Since Ross Perot was defeated by Al Gore’s largely irrelevant comparison of his policies to the Smoot-Hawley laws, there hasn’t been a major protectionist voice in any big manufacturing country. But Germany, by ingeniously using membership of the Euro to effectively devalue the Deutschemark, has achieved a level of protection for its industries ( at the price of reducing its own living standards) without getting into trouble.

Those who laugh at Jeremy Corbyn’s idea of emulating the Japanese, and not actually arming, which he seems to have been a good deal less specific about than you would think (a transcript of the interview is here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/17011602.pdf)  really need to consider just how serious Trident itself is.

Submarine drones, now being developed at amazing speed, present a threat to missile submarines which may render them as obsolete as battleships in the age of the dive-bomber, long before the renewal is complete.  The technical battle between hunters and hunted, in which submarines become ever-quieter and hunters become ever more capable of detecting the slightest noise over vast distances, never ceases.  

Thanks to the known ranges of their missiles, the shallow approaches to their home ports, and other factors of depth, currents and water conditions, major world navies all know roughly where these vessels hide.  If they had detected individual submarines, using passive sonars which themselves make no noise,  they wouldn’t boast about it now. I personally would be amazed if the US Navy could not find one of our Trident submarines if it wanted to, which raises an interesting question (see below).

Then there’s the issue, always dodged by the Trident cultists, of the lack of true independence. Why spend all this money on a weapon which, if it came to it, we might find we couldn’t use? How are these missiles guided to their targets? I can’t help thinking that they need to communicate with satellites for mid-course corrections during their ballistic flight. Who owns and runs these satellites? The missiles themselves are American, and are in effect leased from the US Navy by us. The US Navy maintains them at its King’s Bay facility in Georgia.  The warheads, are built to an American design. If modern technology can take over a car from a remote station then what about a missile, one you made, designed and maintained?

Then there’s the point about how we are not the country we were in the 1940s, when Ernest Bevin decided to go ahead with a British bomb at all costs. Actually the original British bomb was mainly directed at the Americans , who cast us aside like an old shoe as soon as the 1941-45 war( as they saw it) was over. This included total ingratitude for our important role in building the first US Atomic bomb, and the disrespectful; treatment of Ernest Bevin by the US Secretary of State, James Byrnes.

It was Bevin’s fury over this humiliation which impelled him to back the British independent bomb, crippling though the cost was.

But in those days we still had a global empire and pretensions to world power. Countries as significant as us now manage quite well without nuclear weapons. Why do we stick with them , when we are much smaller, much less important and when the Cold War is over? Inertia.

Anyway, New Labour is and was crammed by people (including Anthony Blair himself, who concealed his membership of CND until it was definitively exposed) who campaigned against British nuclear weapons when they actually had a purpose and a role.

The same people who savage Jeremy Corbyn for openly opposing British nuclear weapons, fawned on Blair despite his secret, dishonestly concealed, opposition to them (which is surely far more alarming). The Blairites and their Cameroon heirs support Trident because they think we are too thick to grasp that we don’t need it any more, and that we are so stupid we will think they are patriots for supporting it.

Letting Rip Against all This Reshuffle Garbage

It’s now plain that our supposedly super-accurate RAF bombers have done very little in Syria since the great Parliamentary vote on the subject. If the military need was so urgent, why is this so?

It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now that Parliament and the government’s regiment of media toadies were actually being invited to authorise raids on Jeremy Corbyn. The government also wanted to implicate us in some way in military action in Syria, presumably to make Saudi Arabia happy and to make deeper engagement possible later - if we can find a way of backing the pro-Saudi rebels who have done so much to turn Syria into anarchy and ruins.

But the ridiculous praise for Hilary Benn’s fatuous speech (regarded as Churchillian by the sort of people who think Downton Abbey is great drama), and the Labour applause for it, were the real victory. Had the Oldham by-election (the following day, on 3rd December)  gone the other way, the Blairites in New Labour would have mounted a putsch against Jeremy Corbyn, and tried to recapture their party from its annoying members. This sort of thing has been done to the Tories, when IDS ( a far less competent leader than Mr Corbyn) was overthrown by a supersmooth, pinstriped putsch.

The timing of the Syria debate, in retrospect, looks rather suspicious. There was no special military or diplomatic reason, as is quite obvious now, for holding it that night. The only reason for hurry was the Oldham poll. There was nothing else on the grid that couldn’t be altered. A humiliation for |Mr Corbyn on Wednesday night at Westminster and another one on Thursday night in Oldham Town Hall, and the brave boys of New Labour would have acted.

Alas for Blairism, the people of Oldham didn’t do as the Blairites wanted. This, of course was immediately said to be in spite of Jeremy Corbyn, and not to his credit. If it had gone the other way, it would (I promise you) have been entirely his fault, and the people’s verdict on Corbynism.

David Cameron and his media helpers really, really want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.  Mr Cameron’s attitude towards Mr Corbyn at Question Time is one of real, venomous enmity. He ignores Mr Corbyn’s actual questions (this week those questions were by common consent pertinent and well-asked) and instead fans the undisguised and inevitable hostility between Mr Corbyn and his MPs.

Why does he do this? You’d think he’d want to keep Mr Corbyn there, if he’s as awful and useless as we are constantly being told.

On Channel Four News last night ( a programme which might once have been a good deal more sympathetic to Corbynism than it would now like to admit, having become a Blairite organ like all the rest) , there was speculation after the supposedly disastrous Labour reshuffle that we were heading for a one-party state, as Labour is now so enfeebled.

Again, you’d think the Tories would like that. But they plainly don’t. The identifiable sycophants of David Cameron in the media are dedicated to attacks on Mr Corbyn, attacks so relentless that you would think there was nothing else to write about, that the economy was fine (rather than poised on a precipice) that the NHS was perfect (rather than in increasingly deep difficulties) and that the Prime Minister’s attempts to escape his EU referendum pledge (a hopeless, illogical tangle) were going well. Not to mention disasters visible to me daily such as the hopeless delay on the electrification of the Great Western mainline, miles behind timetable and mountains of money over budget. Let’s forget HS2 and the Heathrow expansion, or the relentless slither towards a Scottish secession, and the utter failure of all attempts to control our borders.  

No, the most important thing in politics turns out to be whether Mike Who swaps jobs with Brenda What, and if Stan Nobody has quit his non-job as deputy minister for Tramways and Fine Arts, in protest at the easing out of Albert Whatsit from his non-job as Shadow Secretary of State for Wind Farms.

Billed for weeks as the ‘revenge reshuffle’,  it was supposed to be a sort of Westminster version of the Red Wedding in ‘Game of Thrones’, with the Shadow Cabinet corridor knee-deep in blood and littered with grotesque political corpses and the weltering, obscene figures of the dying,  crying ‘treachery!’ and ‘murder!’ What, I wonder, was the source for this fantasy? I don’t think Mr Corbyn talks much to the Parliamentary Lobby, who he rightly recognises are not his friends.

The actual event (in which great crowds of reporters hung about stairwells and lift-shafts trying to find something, anything interesting to write about)  involved Jeremy Corbyn boring  a few colleagues half to death with conciliatory, polite conversations, and getting rid of a few people from (unpaid, unimportant) jobs because they disagree with him about major policy issues. Well, I never. A party leader who wants allies in his Shadow Cabinet.

Well,  I never, a party leader whose authority comes from the old-fashioned left-wing party membership clashing with a new-fashioned left-wing Parliamentary Party whose authority comes from their endorsement by the media and the money men who decide who’s top in politics.

For the first time in my life, this country is actually coming to resemble the Marxist caricature of crude money and power, concentrated in a power elite,  versus the disdained people – a caricature that has never hitherto been true at all and which does not prove that the Marxists were right.

For the power and the money are all lined up on the side of the revolutionary radicals of Blairism,  whose origins (even if they don’t know it) lie in the raw pre-Lenin, (and pre-Kautsky) Marxism of 1848  - fanatical egalitarians ready to wreck the education of millions for an ideology , wild, dogmatic warmists ready to wreck our economy for the sake of their faith, flingers-open of borders at any cost, wagers of liberal wars and bombing campaigns, overthrowers of foreign governments which don’t conform to their desires,  servile slaves of foreign authorities which accord with their desires, viciously intolerant promoters of the most all-embracing social and cultural theory since the Reformation.

To these people, now dominating the House of Commons, the media and the academy, Mr Corbyn is (paradoxically) an infuriatingly conservative person, who (for the wrong reasons, but never mind) keeps open the possibility that they might be wrong, and (worse) that they might one day be defeated by discontent. He thinks in categories they have long ago abandoned, nation, class and history. His old-fashioned good manners alone are a reproach to the modern go-getter who has none.

No, no, I don’t agree with him. Don’t get carried away. But they loathe him just as much as they loathe me – and for what is basically the same reason - anyone with a memory is an obstacle to their project

The only opposition they are ready to tolerate is one that doesn’t raise any awkward questions. They expect to beat Labour whoever leads it. But they don’t want the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition  - still an implicitly influential position - to haunt them with memories of when this country had a genuinely two-party system and all that went with that. As Richard Neville said so perceptively right at the start of this revolution 50 and more years ago ‘There is an inch of difference between the two parties – but it is in that inch that we all live’ .

 I think that’s it, anyway.  I just felt like letting rip against all this humbug and garbage.

PETER HITCHENS: Blair's secret victory? He's taken control of the Tory party

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most dangerous falsehood of the past 20 years has finally been exploded. The idea that Anthony Blair's New Labour was 'moderate' and 'centrist', a sort of pink conservatism, still grips the minds of millions.

It certainly grips the minds of the monstrous regiment of political journalists, a vast gossip factory, few of whose toilers understand politics or care about the future of the country.

But one of the authors of the Blairite project has openly confessed the dangerous truth. Peter Hyman, once Blair's chief speechwriter and strategist, has blurted it out.

The Blair project, he declared, was 'infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn'.

Yes, you have heard this from me already, last October, when I wrote here: 'Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left-wing than Jeremy Corbyn.'

But now you needn't take my word for it.

Let Mr Hyman explain. He says New Labour was devised 'to take and hold the levers of power... winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st Century was a Labour century with Labour values'.

The scale of that ambition was 'breathtaking'.

He explained: 'If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.'

As you may have noticed, this was to involve a gigantic increase in spending and taxation, an imposition of radical Leftist dogma in the name of 'equality', the smashing up of the House of Lords and the impartial civil service, plus a sexual revolution – not to mention the growing domination of the EU and open borders.

Some of this remains unspoken, though fairly obvious because of the visible results. Some of it doesn't.

Another New Labour apparatchik, Andrew Neather, famously revealed the driving purpose of mass immigration, 'to rub the Right's nose in diversity'.

The biggest triumph – in fact the main purpose of the Blairites – was to turn the Tory Party into the neutered Blairite clone it now is.

This it achieved, by utterly destroying William Hague (who never recovered from the experience) in the 2001 Election.

The veteran commentator Steve Richards, himself close to the Blair project, recalled that Blair and his entourage were often in 'an exasperated fury' during that contest.

He wrote that they would occasionally scream: 'You don't get it! The Election is a historic referendum on a Right-wing Conservative Party.

If we win a second landslide, we would kill off Right-wing Conservatism for good.' And so they did, starting the progressive collapse that ended with the election of the self-proclaimed 'Heir to Blair' as Tory leader.

There was only one problem. They were too successful. When the Tories seized the Blairite torch, they left the husk of the Labour Party behind, with no real purpose.

Its senior figures are indistinguishable from Mr Cameron's front bench.

They look and sound the same and believe the same things.

They even combined with Mr Cameron against their own leader and their own members.

I suppose they could all just join the Tories. They might as well.

But Mr Cameron wouldn't like that, as his remaining conservative-minded voters might then finally notice that their old party has now become a coalition of radical Leftists.

And that would never do.

Mess with Agatha if you must - but leave mighty Leo alone!

Should we care that the BBC sexes up Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery And Then There Were None? Not much.

Since the book has, quite rightly, been renamed and partly rewritten to remove the N-word, it seems a shame that the Corporation has decided to include the F-word in dialogue (which few respectable people would have used in 1939, even while committing murder).

But Christie is hardly a classic. She was an entertainer, and her text isn’t sacred.

Tinkering with Leo Tolstoy’s mighty and profound War And Peace, on the other hand, is a bad mistake.

I’ve yet to see an adaptation of any book I liked by Andrew Davies that didn’t violate and misunderstand the original.

Tolstoy wasn’t trying to ‘appeal to modern sensibilities’. He was writing for all time.

Banks have created a sneaky new crimewave

Now we find that contactless credit and debit cards can still be used by thieves long after they have been reported stolen. It’s up to us to scan our statements to check.

When these sneaky things first came in, I warned (to the usual jeers) that they were risky.

I tried to refuse to have any – but while my bank rather grudgingly agreed to issue me a non-contactless card, American Express said I had no choice.

Do these people actually care if there is more crime? Or are they prepared to absorb the cost because of the money they make from lending too much to people to buy things they don’t need?

We used to be told that the free market gave us more choice. But I find this is less and less true. Small shops I liked keep closing because of high rents and taxes.

Big shops don’t stock things I like, because there’s ‘no call for them’. And card issuers positively urge me to use a type of card that I don’t want, and which is less secure than it was before.

Are Army generals' requirements of toughness being lowered on the pretext of 'equality'?

Strange that the Government should be talking about allowing women to serve as frontline combat soldiers just as the Army faces a severe recruitment crisis.

I don't doubt that some women can meet the fierce physical demands of hard fighting. Two American female soldiers recently passed a special forces course that would leave most men begging for mercy. The question of whether it is wise for them to fight alongside men is more complicated – Israel's army forbids it.

But I doubt this is the real issue. I suspect politicians and civil servants of planning to lower the Army's general requirements of toughness and fitness, on the irresistible pretext of 'equality'. The result won't be more women in the ranks. It will be more weedy men.

Government using threat of Islamic extremism to snoop on our private lives 

The most subversive thing you can do in the conformist modern world is educate your children at home. In the USA this movement is now unstoppable and its products win major awards at Ivy League universities.

But here the Government, stuck with a 1944 law that still allows home education, and afraid to ban it outright, loathes the idea that anyone (apart from the super-rich) is escaping the indoctrination of the comprehensive classroom.

That's why they have resorted to the ridiculous smear, that home schooled children's minds are being poisoned with Islamic extremism.

This provides the pretext for more snooping on private lives. How dare anybody do anything without State permission! This country reminds me more and more of the USSR, which I saw collapse in 1991 and which is gradually reassembling itself here.

• If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens' blog, click on comments and scroll down

New Labour Insider Confirms it: Blairism Far More Revolutionary Than Corbyn

I have often said that knowing anything about politics is a grave disadvantage if you want to set up as a pundit, especially (but not exclusively) when the Labour Party is under discussion.  Most political reporters think and thought that Michael Howard, an incorrigible liberal, and the man who did more than anyone else to turn the Tories into a Blairite faction, was a hardline right-winger.

They think Blairism was Toryism. They thought Neil Kinnock’s attack on Militant was a right-wing purge of the party. Etc etc.

Alas, as a result, many of their readers, listeners and  viewers also end up thinking these daft and untrue things, and are, as a result, quite unable to understand what is going on. It was to put this right that I wrote my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’.  The effect has been minimal.

Now the conventionally wise all think that Jeremy Corbyn is a wild leftist, steering a moderate and conservative Blairite Labour Party away from the safe centre.  The way in which he is pilloried for his dealings with Irish Republicans is especially funny, given the Blair creature’s direct role in arranging a humiliating and wholly unnecessary national surrender to the IRA, who, having won almost all their demands, were allowed to keep all their guns and bombs, and exonerated for any atrocities which might happen after the surrender was signed,  to make sure that they would be able to squeeze the rest out of us in due time. By their deeds shall ye know them.

I have to point out that I’m not a supporter of Mr Corbyn. He and I don’t agree about much, except the serial stupidity of our military interventions. This is not because we have a meeting of minds. We don’t. Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned 1930s leftist attitude to war (learned from his old-fashioned leftist parents)  accidentally coincides with my wholly different Christian view of it.

Modern leftists (which Mr Corbyn isn’t, but my late brother was, and which the Blairites are) love interventionist war as a means of imposing utopia. For them, the might of the liberal democratist USA, bringing ‘democracy’ to the world by bomb and missile,  has replaced the vanished might of the USSR, and they worship it in the same way.

Mr Corbyn is old enough to recall the days when the left mistrusted the USA, and a kind of inertia keeps him thinking this way. At his age, he doesn’t want to reconstruct his entire philosophy.

There’s a lot of this sort of inertia about, on the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ .  For example, as I make my way in and out of Paddington station, I often have jolly encounters with railway trade unionists, who are friendly towards me largely because of my attitude to Russia, though they also like my support for renationalisation of the railways, and my pluralist belief in union freedoms.

I feel it would be unkind and ungenerous of me to pick a quarrel with these pleasant people over the Russia issue, but I suspect they (just like the ‘New Cold War’ merchants) still cannot really separate Russia and the USSR in their minds (as I can, having seen the USSR collapse, close to) , nor do they distinguish between the USA of the Cold War and the very different post-Clinton USA of liberal intervention. They think my defence of Russia’s behaviour is a continuation of the Cold War. They don’t grasp that I defend Russia precisely because it is *not* the USSR any more, and criticise the modern USA precisely because it is no longer the arsenal of conservative liberty, and has turned instead into a globalist, ultra-liberal ideological state.

Anyway, all this is a preliminary to pointing out that my view of New Labour(and its Cameroon clones in the Tory Party) has been spectacularly vindicated by a Deep Throat from the heart if Blairism.

To the mockery of the conventionally wise, I wrote in the MoS on 9t^h August

‘Today's Tory Party is indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour, and is probably more Marxist in practice than Jeremy Corbyn is in theory.’

And I then wrote on 4^th October, to yet more derision from the massed bands of received opinion: ‘Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction's ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

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

Ha! Sunday’s ‘Observer’ published the following article by Peter Hyman, a close associate of the Blair creature at the height of his popularity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/20/labour-party-directionless-political-future?CMP=share_btn_tw

This is the key passage:

'The [New Labour]“project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters'

The context is below.

I think it entirely vindicates what I have now been saying for nearly 20 years, and makes nonsense of the idea that Blairism was a form of Toryism.

‘New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. The idea of New Labour was not to be a good opposition party, to protest loudly or have an “influence” over events, but, rather, to take and hold on to the levers of power. New Labour sought political hegemony: winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values in contrast to a Tory-dominated 20th century.

‘The scale of that ambition, in a country dominated by a stridently rightwing press and the quiet conservatism of large swaths of the British people, was breathtaking. If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.

‘The project worked at a number of levels. We told a story about Britain that was optimistic, tapped into people’s aspirations, stressed our tradition as a pioneering nation and showed how once again, through knowledge, know-how, new technology and networking, our creativity could help shape the prosperity and success of Britain in the future. We championed a society in which community and solidarity played a more important role – “giving” as well as “taking”.

‘We put forward a practical programme for government and new delivery mechanisms to ensure that policies were actually working on the ground. A plan to get the young unemployed back to work. A plan to end rough sleeping on our streets (now sadly back in big numbers). A radical plan to end child poverty in a generation. A plan to cut huge waiting times in the NHS both for routine operations and in A&E departments. A plan to get the trains to run on time. Through massive new investment and judicious reform, the infrastructure of Britain and the life chances of the poorest families improved dramatically. The case for an active, empowering state was being made. There was a moral imperative too: to rebuild the public realm, to shape a more tolerant, kinder society and to devolve power to the nations of Britain.

‘There were many mistakes, many messy compromises. To those who want to compare this imperfect Labour government with some Aaron Sorkin-scripted, West Wing-style fantasy, it was doomed to come up short. But the real comparison should always have been between an imperfect Labour government and a Tory government. For if Labour holds out for something pure and untainted by reality, if we pretend that there are black-and-white answers to complicated situations, then, as we are finding out now, the left is ruined.

It’s too easy to forget what life was like under the pre-New Labour Tory government or what it would have been like if they had continued in power. It was illegal to talk about gay relationships in schools; pupils still used outside lavatories in crumbling buildings; free-market Tories were urging the end of the NHS; while the government defended apartheid, foxhunting and the massive, unregulated profits of privatised utilities.

It’s also easy to forget just how much the centre of gravity of British politics has moved to the left as a result of New Labour.’