The inconvenient truths Mr Gore and his fanatical friends DIDN'T tell you about climate change

As it happens I was Green before the word came to mean what it does now.

From a very early age, I hated the ploughing up of this country for the motor car, and grieved at the mad closure of the railways, a view that has now become much more widespread than it was then.

I began bicycling to work before bike lanes had been invented, when Boris Johnson was still at Eton.

To this day I get a sort of red mist when I see great trees being cut down by over-cautious councils, and I gaze with limitless regret on the bleak prairies of Southern England, where hedgerows once grew.

If I can take a ship and a train rather than a plane, I will do. So it’s no use trying to dismiss me as some kind of petrolhead polluter who wants to cover the planet with runways and motorways, nor to allege I’m in the pay of Big Oil, when I say that I doubt the existence of man-made global warming.

I just doubt it because I am not convinced it’s true. Actually, now that Big Oil has bought into the man-made warming scare itself, I generally get even cruder abuse, being called a ‘denier’ as if I were some kind of Nazi.

And if I mention my doubts at public occasions, I can feel the swelling wrath of the unreasoning mob gathering against me.

There’s seldom time to make more than a few points before you are howled down by righteous zealots. And that is why I, and anyone seriously interested in this subject, owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book that will no doubt be either ignored or abused.

It would be very sad if, as a result, it fails to reach a wide audience. I think anyone remotely concerned about this huge controversy should read this courageous piece of work.

I am not asking you to agree with everything in it, or assuming that you will. I am asking any reasonable person, who is influenced by facts and logic, to consider the case made here. 

If you have had doubts but suppressed them for fear of being drowned in anger or contempt, buy this book to arm yourself. If you know any global-warming fanatics, buy it for them for Christmas and ask them, even beg them, to study it carefully.

At the very least, it should allow the debate on this subject to be conducted with more fairness and without such expressions as ‘denier’ being used.

What you will find out is this. That much of what passes for accepted truth is not. Facts have been ruthlessly twisted, suppressed or invented. Scientists are greatly divided on the subject.

Many people – and bodies – presented as experts actually have little or no knowledge of the science involved. Gullible politicians and gullible media men and women have repeatedly fallen for it.

Hucksters, profiteers, world-government fanatics and, of course, the EU (always searching for an excuse to increase its power) have latched on to it.

Huge public subsidies, including the carbon-trading racket and the tragicomic building of hideous, worse-than-useless windfarms, now depend upon it.

But take, just for example, the famous picture of polar bears on a melting ice-floe, supposedly doomed victims of global warming.

The USA’s ex-Vice President, the propagandist Al Gore, got audiences going ‘Aaah!’ by saying the bears had ‘nowhere else to go’. Really? The picture was taken in August, when the Alaskan ice always melts. The polar bears were fine. Think about it.

They can swim and they weren’t far from land. Recent studies show that most polar bear populations are rising.

The world was warmer than it is now in the early Middle Ages, long before industrial activity increased CO2 output, a fact that the warming fanatics have worked very hard to obscure.

Oh, and the most important greenhouse gas by far is not CO2 but water vapour, which is not influenced by human activity at all.

Meanwhile, an English court of law (despite buying the CO2 argument) has identified nine significant errors of fact in Gore’s Oscar-winning alarmist film An Inconvenient Truth, ludicrously being inflicted on children in British schools.

Among these: sea levels are not going to rise by 20ft any time soon; there’s no evidence that atolls in the Pacific have been evacuated because of rising waters; the Gulf Stream is not going to shut down; the drying-up of Lake Chad, the shrinking of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and Hurricane Katrina were none of them caused by global warming; the only polar bears that have drowned were four that died in a storm.

Booker also reminds us that even if all the measures demanded by the warming zealots were put into action, according to their own calculations this would only delay the effects they fear by six years.

In my experience, people who employ alarmism, and who turn with rage on their critics, do so because they lack confidence in their case. Watch their behaviour at the coming Copenhagen climate conference, a festival of panic and exaggerated woe.

This particular frenzy, if not checked, could end by bankrupting the West and leaving us sitting in the cold and the dark whistling for a wind to power our dead computers – while China and India surge on to growth and prosperity because they have had the sense to ignore the whole stupid thing.

* The Real Global Warming Disaster, by Christopher Booker, Continuum Books, £16.99.

An army of dupes is winning the drugs war

A terrifying new conventional wisdom is growing up – a belief that drugs such as cannabis, heroin and cocaine should be legalised.

Advocates of this nightmare don’t yet use that word – since international treaties prevent it at the moment. They speak of ‘decriminalisation’ or ‘regulation’.

You might expect this sort of rubbish among the mumbling, frazzled relics of the Sixties.

The ones who insist, between long vacant pauses, while they struggle to remember who and where they are, and look round the room for enemies, that dope never did them any harm.

But now it has spread to the respectable world of Tory MPs and businessmen’s magazines (the sort smart executives carry about but don’t read), and semi-official reports by members of the Great and the Good who ought to know better.

Some of these people are that worrying combination, simultaneously stupid and clever, trying to prove their brilliance by saying something outrageous.

Some have suffered moral harm by secretly breaking the law themselves. Lacking the courage to confess or regret their misdeeds, and fearing exposure if they now support the law they once transgressed, they fall in with the fashion.

Others continue to take drugs, permit their children to do so and would find life more convenient if the law were relaxed.

All these I regard as contemptible degenerates and/or dupes, though many of them are wicked as well as gullible.

The power I really fear is the one that lurks in the shadows behind these useful idiots.

Someone, somewhere sees the chance of making serious money out of drugging the millions who are now protected by law from such terrible exploitation.

And that someone, by slippery propaganda, is on the brink of success.

Mr Clever Dick should leave this little old lady alone

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Why do some people hate the Monarchy? It is a strange form of bitterness.

What harm has Prince Philip ever done to the alleged comedian Ben Elton, that Mr Elton should call him a ‘mad old bigot who wishes it was still the war’ and then describe the Queen as a ‘sad little old lady who lives in state-sponsored accommodation’?

Both these jibes lack wit, style or substance.

Nobody who actually served in the war has any illusions about it.

The Duke of Edinburgh is clearly one of the most level-headed and drily humorous people in public life.

What is wrong with little old ladies, without whom our lives would all be much poorer?

And this is a fairly mild version of the sort of abuse that a certain type of person thinks can be rightly aimed at the Sovereign and her consort.

Now, I’m all in favour of abusing politicians and other voluntary public figures.

And in idle moments I can Google myself and study the wide (though unimaginative) range of personal insult that is hurled at me by my critics.

I can’t say I enjoy all of it, but I have to learn to take it.

But it is different when it comes to the Queen.

With two notable exceptions, for which I have criticised her and always will (no gongs for me, thanks), she has stayed out of politics for her entire reign.

Where she has intervened - on Northern Ireland and political correctness - her view has been a good deal closer to Mr Elton’s than to mine.

She did not choose to be Queen, and would clearly have preferred to have been spared the crown until much later in life.

She took it on as her plain duty, a word Mr Elton probably thinks is laughable.

Mr Elton neither knows nor cares about any of this. He is just a creature of fashion who has made a lot of money by telling modish jokes to people like him, who think their opinions are terrifically advanced, nonconformist and clever.

In fact these opinions are as nonconformist as jeans and trainers.

They have got them off the television, from their teachers and their rock-star heroes. They have never thought about them for an instant.

They instinctively hate the Monarchy because they have been brainwashed by the cultural revolutionaries.

They claim falsely that the Queen lives an extravagant life. Piffle. She breakfasts out of Tupperware, while modest, unassuming republican Air Force One costs £390million.

They pretend she is powerful, when the seat of absolute power in this country is Downing Street.

They seem to think that a republic is automatically more free than a monarchy. Tripe.

North Korea is a republic and East Germany and apartheid South Africa were republics. Yet of the seven longest-lasting law-governed free nations in the world, five are constitutional monarchies.

Republicans are ignorant, stupid, thoughtless and malign - and it is time they were subjected to the mockery they mete out to the blameless couple in Buckingham Palace.

Better body armour is not the answer to this futile war

Media outlets that support the futile Afghan war have developed a weaselly way of trying to get out of responsibility for the deaths that inevitably result from the policy they back.

They go on and on about the lack of helicopters, or - as last week - they highlight an alleged problem with body armour.

Reading the headlines, you might think that Rifleman Michael Fentiman, who died bravely doing his duty in Helmand, was killed because he had not been issued with new body armour. 

This isn’t so. The new armour would not have saved him. Nor, I suspect, would extra helicopters.

What would have saved him would have been an earlier end to this war, which has no purpose and which is already destined to finish in withdrawal.

The only question is when. Make it soon.


Easy ride from the oily BBC

Guess which one of the following tough questions a BBC reporter didn’t ask the Opposition leader on Wednesday morning.

1) Why are you so popular, Mr Cameron?

2) Will the Queen’s Speech really lack substance, Mr Cameron?

3) Can I oil your bike chain for you with my tongue, Mr Cameron?

The answer is, she asked only number two. Here’s my question. When will the people of this country grasp the significance of the Corporation’s love affair with the Tories?

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More on the media tail wagging the political dog.

Just how grovelling is the relationship between the Tories and the Murdoch empire, which for years supported Mr Blair and Mr Brown?

I hear that a Shadow Cabinet member penned a pamphlet about broadcasting earlier this year, but was told by one of the Cameron inner circle: ‘We have to show it to James Murdoch first.’

No pamphlet seems to have followed. Further details welcome.

No mystery about Pullman’s mission

People who write about the anti-Christian children’s author Philip Pullman - now apparently rewriting bits of the Bible - have oddly taken to saying that he ‘reportedly’ said: ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.’

Why the use of this cautious word? Has the sensitive Mr Pullman cast doubt on this?

I don’t think so, though I suspect widespread knowledge of his agenda may damage Christmas sales of his kiddies’ stories.

He said it in an interview in the Washington Post, one of the grandest and most reputable newspapers in the world, given to a lady called Alona Wartofsky and published on page one of Section ‘C’ on February 19, 2001.

I have a copy for anyone who’s interested, including Mr Pullman.

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Interesting, isn’t it, that David Cameron rolls over instantly and gives up when faced with a real battle against the EU, but fights like a tiger, putting forth all his strength, to install a marriage-wrecking anti-monarchist London liberal as one of his candidates?

Tory loyalists who continue to support this man - and get angry with me for telling the truth about him - are asking to be trampled underfoot.

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Barack Obama has been criticised for his deep bow to Japan’s Emperor Akihito. I disagree.

The bow was simple good manners, and good manners are one of the many wonderful things about modern Japan.

Much more significant was his kowtowing to China later in the week. Mr Obama is the first U.S. President to have gone to China as a supplicant, aware that power and wealth are passing from Washington to Peking.

Western statesmen no longer deliver lectures on human rights and Tibet to the Chinese leadership, because they are afraid to do so.

This is only the beginning.

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Why are cultural trendies so keen on prostitution - a violent, wretched and miserable way of life?

Joanna Lumley famously played an apparently happy and successful tart in that odd film Shirley Valentine.

Whose fantasy is this?

And now we are told that ‘Belle de Jour’ is a supposedly happy and successful academic. I’ll wait for the full story, thanks.

Meanwhile, the National Gallery, meant to display art, hosts an exhibition devoted to prostitution in Amsterdam.

Why?

The truth is, for all its noisy feminism, the cultural revolution is really about self-indulgence, and it ends in the brothel, the opium den and the gutter.

Some reflections on hanging, and a few general remarks

Grateful as I am to those who seek to make my life easier by making up opinions for me, I must ask them to stick to forming their own. This particularly applies to Mr Neil Saunders (19th November, 11.34 pm, on the 'Prison' thread) who wrote that: ‘[Mr Hitchens] is prepared to execute the occasional innocent person (unavoidable in any inevitably flawed, man-made system) for the sake of the greater peace he believes that capital punishment brings to society. He would therefore be unperturbed had, say, Colin Stagg been brought to trial and executed for the murder of Rachel Nickell in 1992, even though Stagg has subsequently been completely exonerated and another man convicted.’

This is a subtle (and subtly slimy, and slimily subtle) falsification of my actual view. I would strive with all my might to avoid the execution of any innocent person. I believe that modern forensic techniques, combined with a free press, the restoration of unanimous verdicts and either a property or educational qualification (and certainly a much higher minimum age than 18) for juries, and the unvarying availability of both appeal and reprieve, would make wrongful convictions extremely difficult. Having campaigned for capital punishment to be restored under these (and only these) conditions, I would be specially personally concerned to expose any miscarriage of justice. I also happen to believe that juries, and courts in general, would take the cases in front of them far more seriously if the death penalty were a possible outcome.

What I do say is that it is impossible by any stretch of human ingenuity to guarantee utterly that such a miscarriage could never take place. So I do not do so. But to use this remote possibility as an excuse (as many Tory politicians do) for opposing the death penalty under all circumstances is a feeble evasion which, applied to almost any major policy, would paralyse the state before its enemies. The same dim logic would also require the outlawing of several means of transport, whose use is far more likely than capital punishment to lead to the wrongful deaths of innocents. It would also require the disarming of the police (a measure which is increasingly essential in a society without the death penalty). The suggestion that I would be 'unperturbed' by the wrongful execution of anybody is astonishing, nasty and of course false. Happily, the inclusion of this ad hominem smear reveals the nature and level of Mr Saunders's argument more clearly than the first part, where the slur is more elegantly deployed.

I am asked to comment on the proposed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial. What can I say? The legal and evidential difficulties are obvious. I would certainly welcome a proper and open examination of the claims made about the origins of the 11th September crime. It is interesting that the accused has often made it plain that the issue of Israel was foremost in his mind, thus (were he to be convicted) tending to support my thesis (set out in my recent book 'The Broken Compass') that the Middle East, not some Islamist rage against our 'way of life', lies behind these actions.

I am glad to see that many contributors have decided to discuss the prisons posting seriously. Those who wish to explore the facts and my views on them are urged to obtain either 'A Brief History of Crime' or 'The Abolition of Liberty' (a reissue of the former, with two chapters removed and one added) where many of their queries will be answered. This is not a sales plug. Any good library should be able to get them for you. The chapters removed from 'A Brief History' concerned the issues of guns and hanging, on which it is virtually impossible to have a reasoned debate with any modern liberal, who descends almost instantly from reason to spittle-flecked, self-righteous abuse.

Mr Saunders, who so lightly dismisses my arguments on the death penalty, and appears not to understand them, would benefit particularly from a reading of the chapter on hanging.

After a fairly intense period of posting and debate, I plan to be travelling during much of the next two weeks, and will be posting only my Mail on Sunday column during this period. I hope to resume normal services round about the second week in Advent, my favourite season of the Christian year.

What's the point of prison?

Prison is actually a great advance on what went before. Before modern prisons there were gallows, gibbets, pillories, mutilation and transportation. The idea of imprisonment as a punishment in itself, rather than as a nasty interlude while awaiting something worse, is really quite modern.

Nobody has thought about it very much for rather a long time. The horrible imposition of total solitary confinement (a liberal idea, based on the fatuous but persistent belief of such people in reforming the characters of the criminals) had to be abandoned because it both drove people mad, and did not work.

The great reformers, Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, were concerned to end the squalor, neglect and moral depravity of the old gaols. My guess is that they would regard today's prisons as ludicrous caricatures of the idea of imprisonment, designed to fail.

Retribution (1880), by William Powell Frith

By the end of the 19th century, thanks to wise reform and the abandonment of the wilder liberal ideas, the Victorians had arrived at rather a good compromise.

The police deterred crime in cities and countryside,  the Churches and the Temperance movement worked constantly to improve morality. Heinous murderers were hanged, so there were very few of them. The municipal reformers sought to clear the slums.

And the declining numbers who committed crimes went to prisons which were austere and harsh but not cruel or chaotic or diseased.

Prisoners had to work. They were kept under strict discipline, they lived in single cells and every moment of their lives was governed by hard rules. They could associate with each other only in very limited circumstances. Food was basic. Heating in winter was minimal. Contact with the outside world was very limited. Tobacco was not allowed (let alone drugs). Remission had to be earned by consistent good behaviour, as did privileges - access to books, visits, letters, better food.

In short, the authorities had the upper hand, all the time. Prison terms were not usually particularly long, but few who had undergone them wished to sample the fare again. Word got out that a spell in prison was to be avoided. People avoided it.

The prison buildings themselves (still visible at Armley, Strangeways, Durham, Peterhead, Wormwood Scrubs, Winson Green, Pentonville and above all Dartmoor) were intended to overawe and alarm potential law-breakers. In those days, the insides of these places were pretty much what their exteriors promised  - punitive, grim, chilly, uncomfortable, overpowering.

Wormwood Scrubs Prison, inside and out:

People avoided crime. In the year 1900-1901, the prison population for England and Wales was 17,435.

Nor did it increase with the population. With the Victorian system still more or less in full operation, the prison population for England and Wales in 1930-1931 was 11,346. In 1950-1951, it was 20,474. In 1960-61, it was 27,099.

It was then that it began its accelerating upward curve, hitting 39,000 in 1970, 42,300 in 1980, 45,000 in 1990, almost 65,000 in 1999.

Last Friday it was at 84,593 (This is well above the official limit of 72,000, in operation in 2002).

And remember this is despite the automatic halving of most sentences (regardless of good behaviour), introduced by the Useless Tories in the infamous 1991 Criminal Justice Act, mass releases of prisoners on tags, and the new dodge of sending more prisoners on home leave, which emerged at the weekend).

We are often told that we imprison more people than any other European country (though in fact the gap isn't that big, as careful study of the figures shows). But this endlessly repeated liberal whine fails to notice that we also have many more crimes and criminals than any comparable European country.

If we imprisoned at the rate they do, we would have even more people inside. But we do not. We either don't send them to prison in the first place or we let them out as fast as possible.

What happened to produce this enormous increase? Well, the sixties happened. The death penalty was abolished, requiring the growing incarceration  of murderers for long periods, and a general inflation of sentencing because there was now no distinction between property crimes and killing, and because serious violence grows more common when murder isn't punished by death.

Reward was separated from effort by a bloated welfare state, illegal drugs were encouraged by rock music,  the authority of parents and teachers was weakened, the police were taken off the beat.

What also arrived, largely thanks to Roy Jenkins, was the culmination of a long liberal campaign to relax prison conditions.

This actually arose from the experience of two groups of middle class radicals with the prison system - the Suffragettes and the 1914-1918 conscientious objectors. We now have prisons perfectly designed to cope with stroppy Philosophers, militant feminists and determined pacifists. But these are not generally the sorts of people who go there.

These nice, middle-class people were appalled by what they found when they were imprisoned in the 1905-1918 era. Rightly so. It had not been designed for them, and should never have been used against them (Liberals at work again).

Alas, their disquiet turned into a general campaign to soften the prison regime, which culminated in the 1960s. Those interested in the full story should read the chapter "Making Bad people Worse" in my book 'The Abolition of Liberty'.

For my own description of an existing modern British prison, they might like to Google "Peter Hitchens" and "What happened to punishment?" This described a visit to Wormwood Scrubs (the time and place were chosen for me by the authorities).

My suspicious speculations about what I saw, mentioned in the article, were interestingly confirmed afterwards by private letters and phone calls from ex-inmates and serving prison officers. (I might add, since it influences the numbers, that the cynical closure of mental hospitals under the despicable 'care in the community' policy of both major parties has left the prisons holding alarming numbers of severely mentally ill people who should not be in jail.) .

The basic point is that prison, once 'the due punishment of responsible persons', now has no such aim.

Liberal start: Roy Jenkins

Beneath the oft-repeated chant that imprisonment is itself punishment, the government hides a complete cluelessness about what prisons are supposed to achieve. Punishment is not approved of because we have abandoned the idea of right and wrong, and regard crime as the result of deprivation, child abuse etc.

There is no such thing as rehabilitation. No evidence exists of it ever having happened (though criminals do grow old and give up crime). The famous 19th Century Millbank experiment in rehabilitation, one of the most ambitious ever attempted,  ended in utter failure (This is also described in my book).

Yet the authorities persist with the fancy. Or, when required to appear 'tough', they pretend that they do good simply by locking people up. Michael Howard's silly idea that 'prison works' by keeping bad people off the streets is of no value when those bad people return to the streets, unchanged, and carry on where they left off.

It would only work if you locked them all up until they were old and feeble, which is impracticable and lawless. It also fails to consider that, when potential criminals are pondering whether to break the law, a weak and non-punitive prison system largely run by the inmates (the worst example of this was at HMP Wymott several years ago, but I don't doubt it still continues at a slightly less outrageous level elsewhere) will not deter them.

A severe prison system deters a large group of people - those who have rationally considered crime,and decided it is not worth the risk - from committing crime. It locks up a rather smaller group of people who are too stupid or wicked to realise that they will be punished for it.

It is that rational group of people who have taken to crime in the modern era, realising that the benefits (to them) outweigh the risk (to them) under the new rules.

And this group of rational criminals grows all the time. There is no earthly point in building more and more prisons of this failed type to house the results of abandoning punishment. First, without punishment they won't deter.

Second, without punishment, there will never be enough of them, as the class of criminals grows as punishment weakens. That is the main source of the difference between the prison population of 27,000 in 1961, and of 82,000 now. In 1961, people who committed crimes went to prison  and many more people decided on reflection not to commit crimes(so the number of crimes and the number of prisoners was much closer in the past.

The number of recorded crimes in 1961 was 807,000 , when there were 27,000 in prison - a ratio of 29.89 to one. In 2001 it was 5.2 million, a figure which may well be an underestimate, and 65,000 in prison - a ratio of 80 to one).

 

Now, the pool of offenders from which the prisoners are taken is far, far bigger, the gap between crimes committed and numbers in jail far wider, the chances of going to prison for committing a crime far smaller. 

This is not to say (as I will be accused of saying by thoughtless contributors) that the prisons are nice places to be. As long as the prisons are warehouses, they will be squalid, fearful and ineffectual. Readers of this weblog would hate prison. It is not a 'holiday camp', but a sort of hell, where the worst rule, and so do not suffer.

Actual criminals, men of violence, cruelty and guile, flourish in the anarchy of the modern prison. God help the poor innocent person thrown into one of these places. In a disciplined prison, such a person would at least be safe from violence, pressure to take and supply drugs,  and extortion, and have peace in which to read or study.

In our lawless warehouses, he will be victimised and denied any peace or solitude. It is these awful institutions that are regularly condemned by HIM Inspectors, who do not seem to realise that it is the liberal policies they support which lead to the results they condemn. The fact that it never gets any better should be a clue, but apparently not for these people.

The figures invariably show that rates of re-offending are very high. The liberal explains this by claiming that prisons do no good, and instead actually teach prisoners how to be criminals (Hence the famous 'making bad people worse' claim, actually made by a fairly sensible Tory Home Secretary, David Waddington, perhaps after having been got at by his officials).

They ignore the blindingly obvious fact that it is now very hard indeed to get sent to prison. Offences which would once have resulted in quite severe sentences now lead to no more than a caution, as we saw last week. And that is if the police can even be bothered to investigate them and pursue the culprit, which they often cannot, or the CPS is willing to proceed, which it often isn't.

The crucial point in this argument is as follows. By the time a man gets sent to prison, he is already a multiple repeat offender, who has learned over many years that authority is weak and who sees a prison sentence as a tolerable career risk at worst and a badge of honour at best.

So the fact that there is a high rate of reoffending amongst former prisoners does not reflect the failure of the prisons. It reflects the long, earlier, failure of the criminal justice system to deter crime. Grasp this, and you will have the key to the matter. Fail to grasp it, and you will remain forever bamboozled by conventional wisdom.

The real problem, as with most of our other crises, is a philosophical one. The modern secular state, with no belief in right and wrong or in ultimate authority, does not and cannot work indefinitely. It survives only on the legacy provided by the Christian state which existed before it, which still maintains just enough moral restraint among the people, and just enough vestigial fear of justice among wrongdoers, to keep things more or less in order.

When the middle classes decide to stop bothering being good, and the criminals grasp that there is in fact no law any more, the world of 'Clockwork Orange' will be upon us. And then it will be either chaos or despotism, and probably a mixture of the two.

NO! The most important word that a child will ever hear

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Every so often our new Marxoid ruling class make an exciting discovery. There’s a long way to go (probably too long) before these smug, dogmatic dimwits realise that conservatives were right all along about everything. But we must always welcome even the smallest glint of intelligence among such unfortunate, delusional people.

For they are in charge of almost the whole country, including the Tory Party, and if they don’t find a way to admit that they have been wrong all along, nothing will ever change for the better. Now a Leftist think-tank, Demos, has realised that ‘tough love’ is the best way to bring up children. This revelation of the blindingly obvious is hidden in a porridge of Latin verbiage, but it is there and we should be pleased.

But it is useless without the next step, which must be the end of the 50-year war against the married family. For here is a simple point. A child’s own parents, and this means a mother and a father, have to work in concert. And they have to care so much about the children in their charge that they are ready to say ‘no’ to them, and mean it. ‘No’ is the most important word a child will ever hear, and if he doesn’t hear it often enough then he will be well on the way to a feral adulthood.

Statistically, ‘no’ is much more likely to be said in a stable, married family, the kind we are fast abolishing. Divorced parents and step-parents can be manipulated into undermining each other. Paid strangers will do anything for a quiet life.

As a result, there is a disastrous and widespread model of child-rearing that combines soppy indulgence with neglect. So many children now come into the schools who have not been civilised (or even house-trained in some cases) that it is quite unreasonable to expect teachers to fix the problem. It is too big.

The children of today are paying a horrible price for the selfishness that led to off-the-peg divorce and the dismantling of all the forces that kept the family together. But we are paying it too, because bad parenting creates bad citizens, and as the self-indulgent Sixties generation age, they will have to live surrounded by the merciless products of the bad society they made.

Lynn’s ‘moronic’ parents...the real heroes of this ingrate’s tale

Much praise is being given to the film An Education, starring Carey Mulligan and based on the teenage memories of the Left’s favourite celebrity interviewer, Lynn Barber. Miss Barber is not responsible for the screenplay, which is by Nick Hornby. She also tellingly admits in her book that she is ‘a deeply unreliable memoirist whose memory is not to be trusted’, and ‘never exactly a slave to facts’.

Well, the film is clever enough, and holds the attention, but I hate it. It seems to me to reinforce the nasty, snobbish suburbophobia of the modern liberal elite, their ungrateful contempt for the material security, the education and the love provided for them. This is combined with a scorn for parents and most teachers, and unwillingness to take responsibility for anything.

The attractive, clever heroine is shown living under the tyranny of near-moronic parents, portrayed as unworldly simpletons, and a headmistress, traduced as a Judophobic bigot (is there independent proof of this?).

In fact, Lynn Barber’s father, born in Lancashire milltown poverty, won a law degree by studying diligently at night school, while working by day, having been too poor to take up a place at Manchester University. He is, by her own account, ‘formidably intelligent’. Her mother, likewise risen from hard-scrabble beginnings, won a scholarship to grammar school and became deputy head of a sixth-form college.

These two should be the tragic hero and heroine of this film. But the glamour is given to their ingrate child, and her parents are even blamed for her long and squalid affair with a man she quickly realised was a particularly nasty type of criminal. It is they, not she, who are blamed for being beguiled by this skunk. That sums up my generation. It’s never our fault, but we always take the credit.

Quietly, we create a Stasi of our own

In the week when we rather emptily celebrated the Berlin Wall’s fall, Britain’s own Big Brother state grew slowly in strength. Plans are advanced to keep records of our private communications. Our journeys at home and abroad are monitored. We are followed home by police officers, and placed on file, for threatening our children with a smack.

And free speech has just had a very narrow squeak, thanks to the remaining independent voices in the House of Lords – voices who will disappear once this House is elected and so chosen by the party machines. Lord Dear, a cross-bencher and former chief constable, spoke powerfully on Thursday in defence of a clause guaranteeing freedom of speech on the subject of homosexuality.

He warned that without this clause, militant homosexuals, by complaining about expressions of opinion they did not like, could ensure that religious and other conservatives were arrested, fingerprinted and DNA-swabbed for saying what they think.

The Government is furiously determined to get rid of this safeguard, and has made repeated attempts to do so. Its arguments, that allowing freedom of speech will somehow increase violent attacks on homosexuals, are fact-free, baseless rubbish, close to a smear on everyone who dares to doubt or oppose the sexual revolution. The law rightly demands serious punishments for such attacks, and all civilised people support that law.

I do not think Mr Cameron’s rainbow Tory Party, which now grovels and apologises for Section 28, can be relied upon to hold the line against these intolerant fanatics. The Stasi is quietly being created here in Britain, now.

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The Sun newspaper is, as I have said, like the Germans in Churchill’s famous description – ‘Always either at your feet or at your throat’. If it were your pet, you’d have it put down before it tore your face off.
I’m not that sorry for Gordon Brown having to endure its attacks, because he spent years watching that newspaper slurping at his toecaps till its tongue was black and sore. But even he probably never imagined that any friend could be so absurdly fickle.

I remember the Sun saying Mr Brown was part of ‘an inner circle of some of the brightest people we have seen in government in recent years’.

Oh, a warning to Mrs Jacqui Janes. Her new pals at the Sun wanted the war in Afghanistan and now pretend, nauseatingly, to care about the deaths that result. If she ever differs with that policy, they won’t be her friends any more. David Cameron, who now thinks he has the Sun at the end of his leash, will sooner or later find out who is taking whom for a walk.

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The ghastly figure of John Major has been seen hanging round Westminster, looking for work. Business must have slipped on the lecture circuit, but those thinking of voting Tory next May should be grateful for this warning that what they will get is a rerun of the Major years. You can still avoid this. Don’t vote for them. Join the 61 per cent who aren’t going to.

The fake threat from Afghanistan, and do eagles really drop tortoises on people's heads?

A number of correspondents took me up on my (though I say it myself) refreshingly frank admission that I don't know what will happen in Afghanistan if (or rather when) we leave that country, and by implication that I don't think that outcome, whatever it may be, will make much difference to us anyway.

Edward Doyle made a number of statements and assertions which I would ask him to substantiate. First, he refers to something called 'Al Qaeda', on the assumption that there exists a defined, centralised organisation going under this name. Can he tell me: a) where I can find AQ's statement of aims, as opposed to baseless journalistic and political assertions of what those aims are; b)where and when it was founded, and by whom; c) how does it raise and where does it bank or store its funds, and how and to whom does it disburse them? d) what specific aims, methods, etc allow an analyst to decide whether an Islamist terror group is or is not affiliated to AQ, as in ‘such and such an action “bears all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda” ‘. What precisely are these 'hallmarks'? In what way are they different from the modus operandi of any fanatical Islamist terror group, and what reason do we have to assume that they are linked, except in the vaguest sense, with the actions of any other such group, Islamist fanatics existing in places as distant and different as Bosnia, Leeds and the Philippines, and often being from differing and even hostile types of Islam? e) what its political front organisation is, and how we can tell objectively that statements or actions attributed to AQ by journalists or intelligence organisations or governments are in fact connected with it?

Just asking.

Mr Doyle then says that AQ has 'relocated to Somalia'. From where did it do this? How does he know? Who relocated? What does he think about the people who claim it is in fact in Pakistan's tribal areas? Are they mistaken? If so, on what basis are we to judge between him and those who disagree with him, and decide that he knows better. Or does it just depend on which paper he read most recently?

I really don't know what the increased use of the burqa (or more often in this country the hijab and niqab) has to do with this. It is undoubtedly so (the burqa is also almost universal in those parts of Afghanistan we claim to have liberated from Taliban oppression, I might add). That seems to me to have more to do with a general revival of the stricter versions of Sunni Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia during the last 30 years.

And then there's this statement: ‘To be sure, Afghanistan won't turn into a Westminster look-a-like democracy. But it could function in its own way as one, bringing stability to that part of Asia and the prospect of economic development. All this might lead to far better influences being exported from the region.’

Really? How, exactly? This is an enormous 'but if', around about the size of the Himalayas. Yet he skips lightly over it as if it were a sand-castle. Mr Doyle is arguing that men - his neighbours and mine - should be sent to fight and die for a cause. The burden's on him to show good reasons for this. This is a wishful and wholly unrealistic claim of the type I've mentioned before, which falls into the category I've previously mocked, that of ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn't for the houses in between’. Indeed you could, if you had the ladder and the glasses, and it wasn't for the houses. But you haven't, and the houses are there. So you can't.

For example, if Afghanistan functions 'in its own way' which is as a village-based patriarchal clan system, then it won't be a parliamentary democracy. The two are mutually exclusive. See the recent laughable 'elections'.

He then says, quite reasonably: ’There is a real danger, in at least some parts of Britain, that they come to resemble Northern Ireland - opposed community groups with totally different values living cheek-by-jowl, presided over by a liberal elite who understand neither (and of course allowing the BNP to get a foothold all the while).’

But he follows this with a complete non sequitur: ‘Afghanistan is not a liberal war. It's about establishing or maintaining community cohesion over here.’

I am sorry. I simply and genuinely do not understand the connection. I cannot reply to Mr Doyle's reasoning, by which he presumably links his fear for the Ulsterisation of Britain and his belief that our military presence in Afghanistan will prevent this. I cannot reply to it because he appears to have left it out. Has he left it out because he forgot to put it in? Or has he left it out (as I rather suspect) because he has no idea what the connection is? If so, let me reassure him. Nor have I. But in that case, what is his point?

I am asked if anyone has ever been killed as a result of an eagle dropping a tortoise on his head. The Greek classical dramatist Aeschylus is said, by some accounts, to have died in this rather unpleasant and annoying (in that it is so unlikely and rather ridiculous) way. But I am not sure where the database is, that gives statistics on this risk in the present day. When I say that I am as likely to die by this method as I am to die by the hand of a terrorist, I am simply making a point that we are much too scared of terrorists, and that most of us are at no risk whatever of being killed or hurt by terrorist attacks, to which we over-react unreasonably and ludicrously. Compare the stoical response of the British population to the much greater risk from German bombing raids and guided missiles.

Dermot Doyle meanwhile rebukes me as follows: ’We would let so many people down, if we abandoned them to the uncertainty of a future controlled by a bunch of medieval hairy savages, with more wives than teeth, and the eventual consequences for ourselves. Islamic terrorism apart, the single issue of Taliban treatment of females of all ages is worthy of our intervention. We surely cannot sit back and allow a repeat of what we saw in Afghanistan, after the Russian propped regime collapsed.’

It is amusing to see him using the same excuse for our intervention in Afghanistan (emancipation of women) as was employed by Leonid Brezhnev's USSR in the 1970s, for their equally doomed intervention. It is also based on a misunderstanding of reality. Mr Doyle should look into the treatment of women in the non-Taliban areas of Afghanistan (including NGO-infested Kabul) run by our current 'friends', the corrupt and violent warlords who control the country under the figurehead presidency of Hamid Karzai. It does not differ much from the treatment of women under our former 'friends', the Mujahidin whom we financed and armed in their war against the 'progressive' Soviets, and whom we now call 'The Taleban' or 'Al Qaeda'. (People should get hold of the profane but clever and disturbing film Charlie Wilson's War to see the contradictory mess we have got ourselves into with our fantasies of intervention in this part of the world).

The age of imperialism is over. I might regret that, and in fact often do, but it is so. It is none of my business, even if I had the power to do anything about it, how other people wish to order their countries. Unselfishness and neighbourliness are of no worth if they are not effective. As the other Mr Doyle rightly points out, we have more urgent concerns, not being addressed, close to home (where charity begins). What's more, those aims would be achievable, if we tried, whereas cleaning up Afghanistan will be as easy as draining the Pacific with a teaspoon. Do these advocates of war ever look at a map, and see how tiny our presence is, in what is a small part of this rather large country? Do they notice how much of our time is spent in first taking, then abandoning, then retaking the same places?

We intervene in these countries not to do good, but to make ourselves feel good about ourselves. This is why I recommend idealists, who think they can liberate the womenfolk of Afghanistan, to form a volunteer international brigade and go and do it themselves. Actually, only two political figures have ever succeeded in de-Islamising any society. One was Kemal Ataturk, whose work in Turkey is now being busily undone by the AK party, with Western support. The other was Josef Stalin, who banned the veil and brought female equality across Central Asia and the Caucasus. Both men were utterly ruthless. Both, in the long term, failed in their objective. Do we wish to follow their examples? Do we think we shall succeed where they ultimately failed?

In a charming and civilised post, Tom Bumstead says that a linking organisation can be identified which connects terrorist actions in Britain with Afghanistan. Well, I'd subject such claims to the questions I ask above about 'Al Qaeda'. Those in the intelligence business both love constructing these spider's webs (usually post facto) and often need them to get the US government to finance and support their work (this is the fundamental reason behind the adoption of the name 'Al Qaeda' by American intelligence organisations). But let us assume that Mr Bumstead's connections are correct. He goes on: ‘Every real attack on the UK has a link with this group and the UK will not be safe from this particular threat until Al Mujahiroun has been shut down in the UK and in Afghanistan/Pakistan. You ask why a British presence in Helmand is required - the answer is that now that Pakistan is no longer so safe a haven for terrorism as it once was - Afghanistan could take its place unless protected. The forces of civilization need to be on both sides of the border to make this area safe. There is no other area in the world which could breed this kind of terrorism - this is not an idealistic swing in the dark against evil - it is surgically precise.’

Did you spot the sleight of hand? Yes, Mr Bumstead has rather cleverly invented a country . It is called ‘Afghanistan/Pakistan’. It is necessary for his argument because, if there are such 'training camps' and if they are important, and if they do play a role in terrorist actions in this country (an argument for another time) then the trouble is that they are in Pakistan, a member (I think, currently, though this comes and goes) of the Commonwealth with which we have diplomatic relations, and with which we are not at war, and to which we gave independence in 1947. We're not sending British troops there, I think. Pakistan is also incidentally a nuclear power, and would not take kindly to our invading it. Further, Pakistan was also until recently under the control of a military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who we appear to have helped to destabilise (again in the name of 'democracy') in favour of a government which seems far less capable of controlling such things than he was. But that's by the way.

By pretending that Afghanistan and Pakistan are the same country, Mr Bumstead hopes to avoid my question, which he knows perfectly well is coming: ’How does the presence of our troops in Helmand province in Afghanistan in any way influence the existence or operation of Islamist training camps a long way away in Pakistan, a different country? Helmand, according to my map, is a good deal closer to Iran than it is to South Waziristan, the scene of Pakistan's battles with the Taleban (alias the Pashtuns). And that battle is all about the (British Imperial) misplacing of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, leaving large numbers of Pashtuns in a country they don't want to be in, a problem worsened in recent years by the many Pashtun refugees from the Russo-Afghan war, who have settled in Pakistan and so wield political influence there. I need from him simple, easy-to-follow factual explanations as to how this process - of British troops in Helmand preventing terror attacks on Britain - works. I can't make it out myself. And, once again, the burden of proof must rest on those who propose and defend this very bloody and costly military action. I don't have to prove it's futile (though 95 percent of military operations are) .They have to prove it's rational and effective.

One small non-Afghan point. A person styling himself 'Geraint' writes: ’Mr Hitchens's logic is rather faulty. He says the Tories should be destroyed but then says that the obvious successors like UKIP or the English Democrats are Cravat and Blazer brigade or too small. Yet a party starting from scratch would suffer the exact same problems. Besides which he lambasts UKIP yet at the same time praised Norman Tebbit for telling people to go vote for them at the Euro elections. Which is it Mr Hitchens you cannot have it both ways!’

I dealt with this only last week (Google the November 5 posting ‘Please stop trying to get me to endorse UKIP’. Or find it in the archives). UKIP is not 'the “obvious successor” ' to the Tories. As long as the Tories remain unsplit, no serious rival can develop. Any new party will be built out of the ruins of the Tories, and will have to win a large part of the vote which the Tories have hitherto counted upon. It will not be 'starting from scratch'. It will be reordering the conservative forces in this country which exist, but are currently trapped in impotence, or reduced to abstention. They are either too disillusioned to vote, or they are chained by habit and misplaced loyalty to the Useless Tories. That loyalty can only be shaken by a further Tory failure at the election, a real possibility (The last Tory score in the polls was 39 percent, of 67 percent of the electorate, which in reality means the support of about 25 percent of voters as a whole).

Two minutes without silence

This morning I walked across the street to the Kensington War Memorial for the Two Minute Silence, the proper one, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was all very seemly. A row of tiny children from the Church primary school, a small crowd of perhaps 200 people, an Anglican parson, a brave little girl sounding the last post on her bugle, to signal the start of the ceremony. I'll come back to this in a moment.

I am lucky to be free to do this sort of thing, and glad that amidst my office business I remembered in time (I have in the past forgotten to observe this small commemoration, and quite understand how easy it is to do). There's no doubt that such events have grown more intense than they were ten or 15 years ago, and are better-attended.

I also went to a Remembrance ceremony in a small Berkshire village on Sunday. These things are done best either in the capital, with massed bands, sonorous Bishops and the crash of great guns, or in the countryside where memory lasts longest, and there will still be descendants of those whose names are on the memorial, looking on, and where kindly neighbourliness, the blessing of the clean, cold country air and the noise of rooks in ancient trees, more than make up for the lack of the gilded splendour of Whitehall.

And on Tuesday evening I stood on a dreary suburban road in Oxford, in the drizzle and the dark, as six coffins were driven by, the latest casualties from Afghanistan. As I live in Oxford, I tend to think it's an obligation to be there if I am in the city on the chosen day. This is not Wootton Bassett. The crowds are substantial but not huge (in my view they are too small for a place the size of Oxford, which contains far too many middle-aged graduates like me, and a rather lower proportion of proper people doing real work in the real world).

Here there is no ceremony save the lowering of standards by men and women from the British Legion, and the brief closure of the road to normal traffic by the police. As a result it is very raw, not softened by the sweetness of hymns or the reassurance of prayers, music and poetry, but going direct to the heart. In these cars, beneath those flags are dead men who a few days ago were more alive than most of us will ever be, now returning home for good in a way nobody would wish to come home, but home all the same, back in this small, chilly, damp country, away from Afghanistan's scorching days, frozen starlit nights, where gunfire is almost as normal as traffic noise. Quite a lot of people, heads bowed at the roadside, unexpectedly find themselves weeping.

It's important that we care and show we care. I'll touch on the subject of Gordon Brown's famous letter of condolence in my column on Sunday, not here. But the act of mourning and remembering the dead is one we otherwise rather neglect in modern Britain. The old ceremony of All Souls, itself a festival Christianised when pagan times ended, used to be a major festival. All civilisations have such a thing. The Mexicans famously have their day of the dead. When I visited North Korea I was lucky enough to be there for the festival of Chuseok, probably the only occasion when North Koreans follow their own ancient traditions rather than taking part in Kim-worship. Everyone in Pyongyang, by foot, bicycle or cart, headed out into the autumn countryside for a commemorative picnic at the graves of their ancestors.

We, who used to have elaborate customs for mourning the dead, including strict rules as to how much black to wear, and when it could be laid aside, now do not know how to behave (or what to sing or say) at funerals, or have any agreed response if funerals pass by. The significance of much of Wilfred Owen's poem. 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' is probably lost by many of those who read it. They have never heard a 'passing bell' rung. They have never seen the blinds in a whole street drawn down in respect for the dead. Many of these customs, paradoxically, faded away during the First World War precisely because there were so many deaths, all of them eventually enfolded in the Two Minute Silence, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Cenotaph.

But back to Kensington. While a substantial group of people paused and prayed and held silence, the great busy city did not stop. The buses and cars growled on by, the horns honked, the shoppers hurried along the pavements. It was not a general act of mourning, but a minority action. I wasn't angry with those who didn't take part, just sorry that they had missed an important experience, and full of regret that they somehow hadn't ever had it explained to them.

Could it be otherwise? I think so, if we tried. The modern world can stop as easily as Britain did in the 1920s. I remember being in Jerusalem for the funeral of the murdered Yitzhak Rabin. At an agreed moment, the air-raid sirens sounded briefly and the city (or at least the Jewish western half of it, where I was) completely halted. Cars pulled into the roadside and the people in them got out and stood still. Buses likewise stopped and emptied. Everyone stopped what they were doing and kept still and silent. Perhaps it is easier for Israelis, used as they are (especially in Jerusalem) to a serious Sabbath observance. But not that much easier.

I assume throughout this that such commemoration is a good thing. And so it is, though - as I argue in my forthcoming book - the cult of war has to some extent become the national religion in this country, or was for many years its official religion. Now that is fading, I wonder what we shall live by in the future.

A couple of comments

I am asked what I think might happen if the NATO nations pulled out of Afghanistan. The answer is that I do not know, but that this is really a matter for the Afghan peoples. In general, given full responsibility for their own fates, people reach sensible settlements eventually because they need to. Even Somalia was on the point of regaining some sort of order until the West's most recent crass intervention against the Islamic Courts movement. I am hard put to see how Afghanistan could be much worse than the mess of corruption, rule by warlord and ethnic hatred which we are propping up. At the moment we are both responsible for the mess and unable to influence it. At least if we pulled out we would not be responsible for it, nor would we be taking heavy casualties for a purpose nobody can define. I am utterly unconvinced by the idea that Afghanistan seethes with people who long to attack us, but are somehow prevented from doing so by the presence of our soldiers in Helmand province.

And until someone can explain to me, in detail and with concrete examples given how our Helmand deployment prevents terrorism in Britain, I shall remain unconvinced.

Similarly, I am taken to task yet again for not being able to promise a detailed salvation of Britain in the event of a Tory failure to win the next election. This is not idle speculation. I think Mr Cameron's shameless u-turn on Lisbon has revealed his true nature to quite a lot of formerly loyal Tories, despite most of the media's pathetic and shameful downplaying of the event. The latest Populus poll, not very prominently featured in The Times, showed a fresh Tory drop in the polls, to 39 percent, and a growing belief among voters (and analysts) that a hung parliament was quite a likely outcome. Let me say it again, Labour are unpopular, but that has not made the Tories popular.

I reply to such critics, as I have so many times, that I cannot know what will happen next, exactly when it will happen or the detailed course it will follow. I am not a prophet or an astrologer.

I only say that such a defeat is a *necessary*, but not a *sufficient* condition for changes that will have to be achieved by men and women concerned for the future of the country. To put this still more simply: Unless the Tories lose, nothing can be done. If they lose, something can be done, but to a great extent it will be up to us to ensure that it is done. Here's the paradox. I am accused of pessimism and negativity all the time. But when I actually propose a positive course of action, I am told I am being silly. Such is life.

This always reminds me of the story of the Liverpool docker, told to me by (of all people) the late Jack Jones.

The docker, working late and almost alone on a tricky cargo on a dark afternoon, slips on the dockside and falls into the dock, but with his hook manages to stop his fall about halfway down to the deep, cold water. He cannot climb up. He cannot hold on for long. If he falls, he is sure he will die. He calls out in anxious hope: ‘Is there anybody there?’ A booming, rather celestial voice replies from above ‘Yes, my son, I am here’. The docker yells: ‘What shall I do?!’. The celestial voice calmly responds: ’My son, you must let go.’

The docker thinks for a moment, and then yells: ‘Is there anyone else up there?’

Piety about the Berlin Wall

Actually I am tired of all this fake joy. When the Berlin Wall went up, the 'Free West' did precisely nothing, just as it had done precisely nothing when the Red Army put down the East Berlin workers' revolt of June 1953, precisely nothing when the Red Army crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and just as it would do nothing when the Warsaw Pact invaded what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968. It would later do precious little when the Polish state moved against Solidarity in the early 1980s. In fact, apart from some brave freelance activity by a few committed conservatives, notably Roger Scruton (of whom more later), nobody really did very much at all to give practical aid to the forces of liberty in the Soviet sphere of influence. Speeches about ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ and ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall’, were just rhetoric for home consumption.

Why was the piety a fake? Why is our joy at reunification largely synthetic (while that in Germany is real, but accompanied by severe mixed feelings)? Because the Cold War was largely about our accepting Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, in return for peace, stability and prosperity on our side of the fence. Who, of those millions who benefited from this deal, can say he would personally have opted instead for frequent war and everlasting tension, given the choice? We supported change over there only when the Kremlin gave us permission to do so. West Germany was actually rather annoyed by the Polish wave of revolt because at one stage it threatened their curious tango with East Germany, a forgotten era when East German leaders were welcomed in Bonn with all the panoply accorded to normal heads of government, huge subsidies flowed quietly eastwards into the puppet state, and political dissidents were bought for hard cash, straight out of East German prisons.

This was the same era when Western leftists often made excuses for East Germany. Jonathan Steele's book Socialism with a German Face is worth obtaining for an insight into this era. Mr Steele is, in my view, a fine and courageous foreign correspondent, whose professionalism and bravery I witnessed and admired when we were both working in the old USSR. And I think he was expressing the honest feelings of many western leftists when he wrote that book. I'd even agree with them, that there were admirable aspects of East German society, as many former East Germans will now tell you. The trouble is that the price paid for them was much too high, and that the East German system, which is well described in the book Stasiland and the film The Lives of Others, was cruel, often to the point of being actively murderous, intrusive, corrupt, wholly dishonest and power-worshipping.

Well, there are lots of governments like that, and ours is slowly but alarmingly turning in that direction. Would that have happened if the Cold War had continued to keep the domestic left out of political office, and if the warning of the real existing Big Brother state over there had continued to exist? I wonder. I have often thought that the best solution for East Germany would have been for it to be taken over by Disney, and run as a vast theme park in which people could see the otherwise unbelievable operation of socialism in action. I saw East Germany at first hand, and even I find it difficult to believe what I know to be true. How will the next generation learn from this awful mistake? They won't credit that it actually happened.

What's more, the new liberated territories in the old Warsaw Pact zone are in many cases a severe disappointment to those who hoped and worked hardest for change. As Roger Scruton wrote recently, and very movingly, in The Times (in an article entitled ‘The Flame that was snuffed out by Freedom’), many of the East European dissidents were highly moral and courageous beings wedded to truth, principle and high culture. And they suffered in many unpleasant ways.

As Scruton notes, ‘There was a heavy price for opposing communism, and only a few were brave enough to pay it...

...The people that I met were imbued with a more than ordinary gentleness and concern for one another. It was hard to earn their trust but, once offered, trust was complete. Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.’

When the oppressor left, Scruton hoped that such people would be in power. Alas. ‘For a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State. It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and real-politik — without which it is impossible to stay in government.

‘They sat in their offices for a while, pityingly observed by their staff of former secret policemen, while affable and much travelled rivals, of the kind with whom German Social Democrats and French Gaullists could both “do business”, carefully groomed themselves for the next elections.’

Read the article to see his explanation of the extraordinarily rapid triumph of the European Union, which has become the new power in this region. I have a great deal of admiration for Roger Scruton and some others known to me who, unrecognised here, took considerable risks in those sinister places to try to bring freedom. All I did was observe, at no risk to myself. But I share his sadness at the lost opportunity. The hopes that flared like fireworks in the autumn of 1989 fell all too swiftly back to earth.

Shirley hits out

‘Shirley’ writes (8th November, 3.48 pm): 'Peter, as you are telling people not to vote for Cameron, I take it you would like another five years of Labour government, well I certainly would not, let's hope people will not take any notice of nutters like you.'

It's always good to welcome skilled debaters here. But it's even more fun to welcome really bad ones. 'Shirley' does have a point, but it's not the one she thinks she has. I certainly would not like another five years of Labour government. But then nor would I like five years of Cameron government. And that would be for exactly the same reason. I don't want to be run from abroad. I want us to end the Afghan adventure. I want an end to political correctness. I want selective state schools. I want a criminal justice system that deters and punishes wrongdoers rather than chasing women who threaten unruly children with a smack. I want unequivocal support for the married family, and an end to state subsidies for any *future* fatherless families. (We'll have to keep the existing ones, as they acted rationally on the basis of a state promise to support them, but a nine months warning of the end of these subsidies for new claimants will have an amazing effect on the behaviour of young women.) I will get none of these things from Mr Cameron, who has made it quite clear that his government will be a continuation of Blair by other means.

So what sort of 'nutter' would want to swap one Blairite government for another? Perhaps (though, alas, I doubt it) Shirley will return among us to explain.

But there's another point here too. While I don't positively want another Labour government, is it really such a bad alternative to a Cameron government? A Cameron government would mean the final crushing of the remaining conservatives in the Tory Party, who would be told 'Liberalism won this election, you would have lost it. Like it or get out'. A Cameron government would have a honeymoon of unchallenged power, during which it could do many things virtually unopposed, all of them liberal.

By contrast, a minority (or even small majority) Labour government would be a limping, powerless and demoralised mess, with no hope of a honeymoon, too weak to do very much except survive. And, faced with a new opposition arising out of the ruins of the Cameron project, it would have little chance of recovery or survival over the long term. In fact, if Labour wins the next election, and the Tories collapse and are replaced by a proper pro-British party (neither bigoted nor PC) then I suspect that the election after that will mean the end of the Labour Party for good.

Whereas Labour back in opposition would have the opportunity it seeks to rebuild, and return re-invigorated in five years or so, for another dose of PC cultural revolution, constitutional vandalism and high taxation.

People seem to imagine that senior politicians are punished by the loss of office. Those who think this should notice the infuriatingly smug and self-satisfied appearance of Sir John Major and Anthony Blair at Sunday's Remembrance Day parade. Do they look broken, demoralised, rejected? No they don't. Both are wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, and blissfully free of care. A far greater punishment for the current Cabinet would be to make them stay on and clean up the mess they have made, preventing them from going off in search of Quangoes, broadcasting careers, directorships or the lecture circuit, where they all now long to be. Why don't people think about these things, instead of assuming that the obvious is always true?