Times tables? No, the only maths we teach children is 'go forth and multiply'

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

There are three months to go before the Election and we are already chest-deep in ludicrous partisan drivel. Funny that the more alike the parties are, the more slime they chuck over each other.

But education is a special case even in this miserable apology for a national debate. For instance, the Prime Minister is now promising an all-out ‘war on mediocrity’, which will be waged by nationalising as many schools as possible.

I suppose that means that all our children will be above average, yet another example of Mr Cameron’s strange arithmetic.

We already know he can’t tell the national debt from the deficit. He revealed in a TV documentary last week that he thinks three halves make a whole. His increase in school spending turned out to be a cut.

And, along with his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, he didn’t dare answer a question on times tables.

Political maths, I suspect, work on a completely different principle, and have more to do with how much money you can squeeze out of a hedge-fund billionaire in a tax shelter.

Yet Ms Morgan had begun the political week by promising a new emphasis on the ‘three Rs’, and saying that all children leaving primary school should know their times tables.

Sound familiar? Possibly. Who ‘ordered a curriculum review to boost grammar, classic literature, traditional methods of learning to read and spelling’?

Why, it was the forgotten Tory Education Secretary John Patten, in September 1992. In November 1994, another one, Gillian Shephard, launched a ‘school blueprint aimed at putting the “three Rs” at the centre of lessons’.

In January 1996, Shadow Education Secretary David Blunkett urged teachers to concentrate on the ‘three Rs’. A few days later Anthony Blair, then Opposition Leader, condemned the ‘appalling’ levels of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren. By January 1998, these two were in office, and Mr Blunkett was demanding, yes, a return to chanting times tables.

Apparently nobody was paying attention, because a year later it was revealed that ‘schoolkids will be going back to learning their times tables tomorrow as David Blunkett scraps 30 years of trendy maths teaching’.

In September 2004, they still weren’t listening, as an academic study demanded that ‘schoolchildren should be made to chant their multiplication tables in class’.

By August 2006, the Labour Education Secretary was Alan Johnson, who proclaimed that children would be fast-tracked through their times tables in a string of reforms to the way the ‘three Rs’ were taught in primary schools.

But by December 2010 it was reported that ‘one in four 11-year-olds leaves primary school without a proper grasp of the three Rs, according to detailed Government data released yesterday’.

And lo, in June 2012, Ms Morgan’s forerunner, Michael Gove, was reported to be planning to ‘tear up the rules’ about what must be taught in primary school. Among his plans, yes... times tables were to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at school ‘for the first time in decades’.

There’ll be another Education Secretary along soon. Just wait for him or her to make the same pledge. And then laugh.

The only times table that actually applies to these people is the nought times table. A thousand times nought still makes nought. The only multiplication our children are reliably taught and encouraged to do is sexual reproduction.

And as long as our political leaders jointly refuse to restore order, authority and selection in the state schools, the result will be the same.

Don't fall for the sex education myth

People still mistakenly think that there is an important difference between the Tory and Labour parties over sex propaganda in schools.

On the contrary, both parties are entirely wedded to the radical sex-liberation policies of the 1960s, now the iron-bound law of the land, which it is dangerous to question, let alone disobey.

Mr Cameron, when he was still Leader of the Opposition in April 2010, had this exchange with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight:

Paxman: ‘You’re in favour of faith schools being able to teach sex education as they like?’

Cameron: ‘Not as they like. That’s not right. What we voted for was what the Government suggested in the end, which is proper sex education...’

Paxman: ‘Should they be free to teach that homosexuality is wrong, abortion is wrong, contraception is wrong?’

‘No, and the [Labour] Government discussed this and came up with a good idea, which is to say that we wanted a clearer path of sexual education across all schools, but faith schools were not given any exemption, but they were able to reflect some of their own faith in the way that this was taught.

‘But no, you must teach proper lessons in terms of gay equality and also combat homophobic bullying in schools, I think that’s extremely important.’

I’d be interested to see evidence that such teaching does actually reduce bullying.

But in any case, it’s quite clear that the ‘Conservative’ Party has no serious differences with Labour on this.

If you don’t like Tristram Hunt’s latest plans for talking about sex to tots, don’t expect any help from the Tories.

I wonder what God makes of Mr Fry

My old adversary Stephen Fry (he calls  me a ‘slug’) has been attacking God on TV, calling the Ancient of Days ‘capricious, mean-minded’, 'selfish’ and  ‘a maniac’.

Obviously Mr Fry, left, gets to meet God quite a lot, being so important and all, but it would be good if someone could get the Almighty to let us know what He thinks of Mr Fry.

Falling into the Islamic State trap

I absolutely decline to watch horror videos showing fanatics murdering their prisoners. I am sure it is morally wrong to do so.  

I am still haunted by my decision, when I was younger, to witness two lawful executions of heinous convicted murderers.

But aside from that, I believe these zealots hope we will watch this obscenity and as a result lose our reason and launch unwise and stupid attacks on them, which will end in our moral and physical defeat. Some people are already falling into this trap.

Arming Kiev

I have never doubted for a moment that Russia is aiding the rebels in Ukraine with men and munitions, though this is difficult to prove.

What puzzles me is that so many do not seem to suspect that the USA and other Nato countries are likewise helping Ukraine’s shambolic army fight the war we urged them to start. How naive can you be? The American threats to arm Kiev’s forces may already have been carried out, but by deniable and indirect routes (as happened  in Afghanistan).

I continue to be amazed at the enthusiasm in this country for getting involved in the third major European war in a century. What do we hope to gain?

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Scorn for One - Quivering Obsequiousness to the other

On Sunday I noted that the heavy-handed enforcement of ‘religious tolerance’ (so-called) in this country by Mrs May’s planned new Strong State would not in fact favour Christianity. I argued that it would instead work on the side of the very Islam whose ‘extremist’ branches we claim to be trying to combat with surveillance and speech restrictions.

 

I wrote: ’Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice’. 

Oh, my prophetic soul. Before the day was out, two stories had erupted into the newspapers. The first, in my own paper, the Mail on Sunday, concerned a Christian magistrate who   remarked that he thought a child would be better brought up in a traditional family than by a same-sex couple.

 

Whatever opinion you hold on this, Richard Page’s opinion is legitimate and based upon Christian teaching, until quite recently the basis of this country’s morality and system of government, and ostensibly its Established Church, to this day.

 

 

Mr Page was then reported, suspended, found guilty of ‘serious misconduct’ (by a supposedly Conservative minister) and sent on an ‘equality course’, to get his mind right . He was found to have been ‘influenced by his religious beliefs rather than by the evidence’.  This was defined as ‘serious misconduct'.

 

Is it not possible that those who disagreed with him were influenced by their political and moral beliefs, rather than by the evidence?

 

It is only necessary to imagine the reaction to this event in the Britain of even 30 years ago, to grasp that this country has in fact undergone a vast moral and cultural revolution in that period, in which Christian beliefs have been entirely dethroned, without the population fully understanding that this was taking place and certainly without any such plan being openly avowed in the manifesto of any major political party.

Is it wild speculation to suggest that the old beliefs have not been replaced by nothing, or by a commitment to view matters entirely on the evidence without any consideration of moral attitudes? 

Might it be that magistrates are now expected to be guided by an alternative and radically different set of beliefs, beliefs which 50 years ago were held only by social revolutionaries (and not even by all of them),   best summed up in the phrase ‘Equality and Diversity’?  

 

(What, in any case, is the impartial science-based evidence on this matter which might be seen as actual unbiased evidence in this matter? It seems unlikely to me that same-sex parental couples have existed long enough or in sufficient numbers for any serious and balanced research to have been completed into the comparative outcomes, but I’m always ready to listen to evidence.)   

 

What particularly struck me was that Mr Page was accused of breaking his oath, which required him to ‘do right to all manner of people’, ‘without fear or favour, affection or ill will’. For a religious believer, such an accusation is very painful, as oaths are promises made before God.  I cannot for the life of me see how his concern breaks that oath, especially since, as he points out, the oath ends with the words ‘So help me God’.

 

No doubt those words won’t feature much in future, indeed I shouldn’t wonder if we don’t see a proposal to ban them pretty soon (just as those subversive terms  ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ were erased from many official documents recently).

 

But they were a permissible part of the oath when he swore it, and the God worshipped in this country by its Established Church, whose Supreme Governor is the Monarch, crowned in an explicitly Christian ceremony, is the Christian one. This is also a country whose Parliament opens its sessions with Christian prayers.

 

That Christian God seems to me to have been fairly clear in thinking that marriage was between a man and a woman. The Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service, still legally (by Act of Parliament) the basic standard of the rules and nature of marriage in England, and still a legally recognised form of marriage not requiring any endorsement by any other body,  is quite clear on this.

 

The new idea about marriage comes from a different tradition. If we are, as Mrs May claims, committed to ‘mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths’  Mr Page is surely entitled to the ‘respect and tolerance’ of his fellow magistrates.

 

According to paragraph 5 of Mrs May’s horrible guidelines (read them here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/388934/45584_Prevent_duty_guidance-a_consultation_Web_Accessible.pdf )

 ’vocal and active opposition’ to ‘mutual respect and tolerance’ is ‘extremism’.  Well, can you get much more ‘vocal and active’ in ‘opposition’ to another faith than by reporting an adherent of a religion you don’t like to the authorities, for expressing his sincere opinion, in such a way that he is suspended from his duties and compelled to be ‘re-educated?

 

Please grasp that I am not here seeking to enter a debate about whether Mr Page was right or wrong. This discussion has been had to the point of tedium, and will presumably continue for ever. People don’t agree. Generally, this is because they adhere to different moral system. They’re not going to persuade each other.

 

What interests me is that the non-Christian side no longer *has* to persuade its opponents.  It can simply use the state to crush them. The force of law (in my view stretched to the limits of its meaning)  is now being used to silence people in the judiciary who hold Mr Page’s view. This has been done by an allegedly ‘Conservative’ minister.  How long before the law is used to silence private citizens for doing so?

 

So that’s the bit that deals with the state’s ‘general scorn for conservative Christianity’, as I mentioned. Now, what about its ‘quivering obsequiousness’ to Islam?

 

Well, first of all I ask you to wonder if a Muslim magistrate, expressing the same opinion, would be in the same sort of trouble?  You only need to ask, to know.

 

Of course, such a  non-event, in which somebody was not reported, not suspended and not sent for re-education would not be recorded and we would not know anything about it (The Mail on Sunday had to fight hard to report the case of Mr Page, in which several recordable events did take place) .

 

But lo! The sun had hardly begun to climb into the Sunday sky before this story emerged:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915253/Christian-nurse-37-says-sacked-harassment-bullying-praying-Muslim-colleague.html

 

A Christian nurse has been disciplined for alleged ‘bullying and harassment’ . Again, can anyone really imagine a case in which a Muslim nurse gets into trouble for praying for a Christian colleague, inviting her to visit events at her mosque and for giving her a book about a Christian who converted to Islam?

 

Under ‘Equality and Diversity’ all religions are equal.  What people don’t seem to grasp is that this is, in effect, the downgrading and disestablishment of Christianity. For if Christianity in Britain is ‘equal’ to Islam, or any other religion (and that has been the explicit law since 2010) , then it is no longer entitled to the standing it once had.

 

This is a simple matter of fact. And of course, in the early years of the cultural revolution, that will involve repeated slapdowns for Christians, until they stop imagining they have any special claim on government or the courts, and at last learn their new and very humble place in multicultural Britain.  

 

Meanwhile, we all know that Islam won’t put up with being treated like that.

 

And Mrs May’s daft ‘anti-Islamist’ laws will end up  strengthening the power of Islam in our country, laws, society and government. You wait and see. 

Here's absolute proof mothers are better off staying at home

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

In our increasingly mad and dogma-driven country, most political slogans mean the opposite of what they seem to say. The best example of this is the phrase ‘family-friendly’. This describes measures to ensure that most parents hardly ever see their children, who are instead brought up by paid strangers.
One ‘family-friendly’ policy is taxpayer subsidies for the network of day orphanages where abandoned children are detained without trial for long hours, while their mothers are chained to desks miles away.
Yes, I’m laying it on a bit thick here, but nothing like as much as my opponents, who claim that mothers who stay at home to raise their own children are ‘chained to the kitchen sink’.
This stupid expression is at the heart of a long and furious propaganda campaign against real family life, waged by weirdo revolutionaries since the 1960s. Originally doomed to failure, it suddenly succeeded when big business realised that female staff were cheaper and more reliable than men.
But our near-totalitarian propaganda machine, which pushes its views in school PSHE classes, TV and radio soap operas and countless advice columns, has succeeded brilliantly in making young mothers feel ashamed of being at home with their small children.
And here is the absolute proof of that. A significant number of homes – four per cent – lose money by having both parents at work. Many – ten per cent – gain nothing from this arrangement. Yet they still do it. Many more gain so little that it is barely worth the bother.
The most amazing statistic of the past year (produced by insurance company Aviva) shows that thousands of mothers who go out to work are, in effect, working for nothing. The cost of day orphanages, travel and other work expenses cancels out everything they earn.
Many more barely make a profit on the arrangement. One in four families has a parent who brings home less than £100 a month after all the costs of work have been met.
How strange. When people ignore their own material best interests, it is a clear sign that they have been deluded by propaganda or fashion, or both.
How much better it would be for everyone involved if these mothers stayed with their children. Both generations would be immensely happier, the children would be better brought-up, neighbourhoods, often deserted by day, would revive. Yet, because of a cynical alliance between Germaine Greer and the Fat Cats of the Corporations, and because almost all women in politics are furious believers in nationalised childhood, we spurn this wise policy, even if it costs us money.

The midnight train to disaster

The ridiculous scenes on the railways over Christmas were in fact the result of 60 years of official hatred of rail transport.
The ‘major engineering works’ involved are being done in a rush, decades too late, as overcrowding forces even Britain’s train-loathing rulers to modernise a decrepit system. 
Passenger railways in this country survive only because so many people continue to prefer them to roads, despite the painful fares and crammed coaches. The Treasury, the Transport Department and the mighty roads lobby would have killed them off if they could have done, as has almost happened in the USA.
Huge and powerful interests – oil, construction, car manufacturers, domestic airlines – have always seen efficient, affordable railways as an obstacle to their growth.
I’m always amused by the way everyone remembers the piffling Profumo affair, in which nothing actually happened. But the far greater scandal of Transport Minister Ernest Marples is virtually unknown.
Marples ran a company that built roads. While he was Transport Minister, he continued to own shares in this firm until public outrage forced him to sell them – to his wife.
This charmer, who was really responsible for the smashing up of railways usually blamed on Lord Beeching, ended up by fleeing the country on a midnight train (of all things – it’s assumed he couldn’t have got so many of his possessions into a car or on to a plane) bound for Monaco.
Marples’s 1975 moonlight flit was a successful bid to escape a gigantic tax bill. He lived out his remaining years among vineyards in Beaujolais. Hardly anyone knows this.

So how much did dinner with Claudia cost, you Dave?

How much did we spend on David Cameron’s Chequers dinner with Claudia Schiffer, right,  that titan of global politics? We shall never know.  The British Government  – usually profligate with your money and mine – finds one activity too expensive. Oddly enough, the thing that is too costly is telling us how much we have paid for hospitality  at Chequers, the Premier’s official country house. Perhaps they could tell us what it would cost to compile the information? Something tells me it would be a lot less than the Chequers drinks bill.

Putin's foe is not our friend

THE supposedly serious Times newspaper describes Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny as a ‘dissident’, so putting him in the same class as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov or Vaclav Havel. Mr Navalny is in fact a pretty pungent Russian nationalist, whose views on migrants to Russia from the Caucasus make Nigel Farage look like Nick Clegg.
The Times – like so much of the Western media – is so wildly, simple-mindedly prejudiced against the Putin government that it garlands a man it would despise and attack if he were British, just because he’s an enemy of President Putin. One misjudgment has led to another. Mr Putin is not Hitler or even Brezhnev.
And Mr Navalny is not Solzhenitsyn either.

********

Cabinet files reveal the pitiful excuses Margaret Thatcher gave for introducing the GCSE exam, a dismal cocktail of hard slog and compulsory ignorance which has made secondary education such a futile misery for so many. Apparently, she didn’t want to upset poor old Keith Joseph, who was keen on it.
Well, Sir Keith was a tortured soul, but I’d still rather upset him than ruin the education of millions.
Then she didn’t want to look weak in the face of union protests. Again, couldn’t she stand a bit of loss of face in a good cause? I am amazed her ‘Iron Lady’ reputation still endures. The more we learn about her, the less it is justified.

********

I think that we could save a lot of honours heartache on New Year’s morning, as those who think they are great and good mutter in fury at the awards given to others and not to them. Let’s have a comprehensive, mixed-ability honours system.
Give a bauble to everyone, but reserve the best ones for those who can pay, or who live in nice postcodes. Our elite is happy to have this daft system in our schools, so how can they object to it in the giving of honours?

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Why do refugees drown? Because liberals like Dave keep starting wars

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Whose fault is it that so many of our fellow creatures have drowned in the Mediterranean on the way to Britain? Whose fault will it be when many more do so, crying out for help that will not come, in the future?

As usual, I first wrote about this subject long before it was fashionable to do so.

The great migration of the poor and desperate towards the rich north is one of the most troubling and frightening things happening in the world today.

If all those who wanted to enter the rich world managed to do so, they would destroy the thing they sought. We cannot let them all in. If we did, our economy and our society would collapse under the strain, and so would most of civilisation.

So only the stupid and self-righteous – usually people who live far from the areas where mass immigration has changed our country – can pretend that border controls are somehow wicked. The only real question is how strict they should be.

One thing is quite certain. Completely avoidable actions have made this crisis much worse. Surrendering our border control to the EU was one. Destroying parental authority and wrecking our state schools was another.

By making so many of our young people unemployable, we created huge numbers of jobs for hungry, self-disciplined migrants.

But in many ways the worst action of all was the unforgivably stupid decision by David Cameron and others to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi’s state in Libya. I am still amazed that this blunder did not destroy Mr Cameron, as it should have done.

Like all shallow modern politicians, he wanted a cheap and victorious war to make him seem more important than he is. Libya and its people were the unlucky victims of his childish vanity.

Not only did this bird-brained action turn Libya into a hideous, bloody chaos without hope, it removed the single most important barrier between Europe and the Third World.

Without Gaddafi’s stringent control of his coastline, the economic refugees of the whole of Africa and much of the Middle East (many of them fleeing wars and conflicts begun or encouraged by us) can clamber into coffin ships and set out across the Mediterranean.

Their normal lives are so terrible that the danger of death seems worth it to them. Their poverty is so great that our threadbare welfare state glitters on the horizon like a mythical city of gold and jewels.

As long as they think they can get here, they will risk death. And those who have failed to discourage them in their crazy quest will be to blame for those deaths. It is as simple as that.

Liberal vanity kills and goes on killing. And it is all the worse because the culprits continue to have such high opinions of themselves.

Pied piper who peddles poison

Societies at the ends of their tethers follow strange leaders and have peculiar heroes.

Having been brought up in another age, I’m immune to Russell Brand. I don’t think he’s funny, and he is not as clever as he believes he is. 

I’ve had a couple of clashes with him, in which he was first evasive and pretentious, and then insulting. He dislikes being subjected to the mockery he happily inflicts on others. On one occasion he threatened to kiss me (no kiss took place).

But there’s also no doubt he has a potent effect on women – I watched him, in less than a minute, charm two pretty young Olympic medal winners into taking off their medals and draping them over his scrawny, naked chest. 

The sad thing was that they acted as if they were the ones being honoured by the encounter.

And he has the automatic adulation of student audiences. Watching the Pied Piper dance away with the children of Hamelin must have been something like watching Mr Brand, left, run away with the hearts and minds of so many people. 

Magic isn’t always benevolent, and charisma is seldom given to good men.

Since we can’t leave a memorial to the British dead in Afghanistan itself, I suggest a looming granite pillar, deeply incised with the names of the dead, in the middle of the House of Commons.

It's sad to learn that starlings are suffering from antidepressants, apparently because they eat sewage-farm worms that have ingested the drugs from human waste. 

But isn’t it rather more important that so many people are still being persuaded to take these dubious, risky tablets – increasingly linked with inexplicable suicide?

Hated - just for telling the truth on drugs 

Every single part of the latest row about drugs is phoney. The Tories are no better than the Lib Dems on the subject – their supposed ‘firmness’ is an empty pretence, concealing the laxest drug regime in the advanced world. Laws that are not enforced do not exist.

This has been the trick worked for years by Britain’s active and skilful pro-drug lobby, much of it based in the Home Office itself, where senior civil servants have long favoured the soft option.

They realised that Britain could continue to fulfil its treaty obligations by keeping harsh laws on the statute books, while encouraging the police not to enforce them.

This ploy also fools much of the electorate, who constantly see Tory and Labour politicians make grim-faced declarations that they have no plans to repeal the drug laws. They don’t grasp that – at the same time – the police and courts are not applying those laws. There is no ‘war on drugs’. There hasn’t been one for 40 years.

It is taboo to say it – for daring to do so I have been permanently taken off the invitation list of at least one major radio programme, and will never be able to publish another book. That is because our political and media elite are themselves hopelessly corrupted by widespread illegal drug abuse – by themselves and their children.

I experience a great deal of personal hatred for saying unpopular things, and am used to it. On Thursday night I was screamed and sworn at, at one of our ancient universities, for daring to dissent from the conventional view of Russia.

But the special loathing I encounter for telling the truth about drugs is so virulent that it sometimes comes close to frightening me.

This is an enormous campaign for selfish pleasure. If it succeeds in achieving the legalisation it dreams of, and which is the real aim of this relentless lobbying, there are gigantic profits to be made and huge taxes to be raised. So you can see why businessmen and politicians might want it so much.

It’s a pity about the rest of us, who will have to live with all the ruined lives that will result.

This winter, industry may well be paid to shut down factories to avoid power cuts. This is the sort of madness you might expect in a crazy country such as North Korea. 

When will we see that green dogma is as barmy as communism? Too late, I suspect.

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These vainglorious fools will march us into another inferno

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

A century ago, stupid and vainglorious politicians dragged us into war. We started it as a great, rich empire and ended it as an indebted husk. 

Soon afterwards, America’s President Woodrow Wilson told aides he would wipe Britain ‘off the face of the map’ in another ‘terrible and bloody war’ unless we ceded our naval supremacy.

And US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes raged and shouted at Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Auckland Geddes, that America had saved Britain’s bacon and we had better be grateful from now on.

In a voice rising to a scream, Mr Hughes declared: ‘You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all! 

'It is the Kaiser who would be heard, if America – seeking nothing for herself but to save England – had not plunged into the war and won it!’

These little-known but important facts should be borne in mind as we look back on this dreadful episode. I for one have had enough of war poets and trench memoirs. Let’s have some proper history – who did what to whom and what it cost. 

As Simon Heffer explains on the previous pages, the war was the greatest event in modern history, its aftershocks still persisting even now.

By the way, we didn’t even go to war to save Belgium. The Cabinet had already decided on war before a single German jackboot had crossed the Belgian border. 

The rape of Belgium – which we weren’t actually obliged to defend – was a pretext invented afterwards to soothe readers of The Guardian.

Have our leaders learned anything from this episode of folly, mass death and waste? Absolutely not.

They still reach for war at the slightest opportunity. Everyone knows now (I did at the time) that our Iraq adventure was stupid and wrong, and that we had no business in Afghanistan. 

But I can well remember being told off sternly for not supporting David Cameron’s war in Libya, supposedly waged to prevent a fictional massacre and some fictional rapes. Only a few weeks ago I was still being told the same story.

Well, Libya is now in flames, British Embassy staff are fleeing the country and the place is far too dangerous for anyone to go there and report on it. Massacres can proceed with impunity, and refugees head unhindered to Italy – and eventually here – in their thousands.

Let me remind you that Mr Cameron was quick to claim an easy triumph. He told the Commons on September 5, 2011:

‘Some people warned, as Gaddafi himself did, that the Libyan people could not be trusted with freedom; that without Gaddafi there would be chaos.

‘What is emerging now, despite years of repression, and the trauma of recent months, is immensely impressive.’

Compare and contrast what I said here that same week:

‘Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better… The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like.’

I warned that our Armed Forces were aiding ‘a farcical yet sinister army in pick-up trucks whose aims we don’t even know’.

You might note that, at the time, hardly a voice in so-called mainstream, grown-up media or politics was raised against the Libya folly. 

Few (but happily, enough) spoke or wrote against Mr Cameron’s even madder scheme to overthrow the Assad government in Syria. 

If we had supported that, we would have found ourselves on the same side as the Islamist fanatics of Isis, now murdering, persecuting and mutilating their way across the Middle East to the terror of all.

It might just be a good moment to wonder if our united national leadership, utterly wrong on every foreign policy issue they have ever faced, are also wrong now, as they march towards what may well end up as war with Russia.

People still don’t grasp how dangerous the conflict in Ukraine already is, or how powerfully Russia believes it has been wronged by an arrogant, aggressive West.

Ukraine’s armed forces, like Israel’s in Gaza, are ruthlessly using artillery and bombs on densely populated areas and will soon be fighting in the million-strong, close-packed city of Donetsk.

The UN estimates 800 civilian deaths and 2,000 civilian wounded so far. The region is riven by the sound of guns, the Guns of August thundering yet again. 

It is no mere skirmish. It is a war in the making. Do you really want to join in? This is a dangerous time of year. It will be less dangerous if we refuse to trust our leaders.

Let us have no more moves towards conflict with Moscow without a full recall of Parliament. And let us pray that our MPs are reading some history on their holidays.

Don't paint over Rolf's crimes 

I can see why people might want to destroy or blot out paintings and murals by Rolf Harris. But they shouldn’t. Wiping out evidence of past mistakes makes us more likely to repeat them.

Communists do this – the wonderful Café Sybille in East Berlin still preserves half of Stalin’s moustache, which is the only remaining trace of an enormous statue of the monster that was smashed to pieces by order of the state when he fell from favour.

Better by far to remind ourselves that we idolise our fellow creatures, in politics and show business, far too easily, and that the fashions of today often look worse than stupid a few years hence.

 

Some railway companies are shamefully abandoning quiet carriages, where mobile phones are banned, ‘because they cause rows’. 

They cause rows because such companies have always been feeble about enforcing them. Now they use their own feebleness as an excuse to give up altogether. 

Perhaps, if they could make us pay for peace and quiet on trains, they might actually see that the rules were observed.

 

Does the Tory Party still exist? Subscription income is now lower than Ukip’s. They haven’t published up-to-date membership figures.

My information is that so many have quit in disgust at David Cameron’s liberalism that in many seats there will be no troops to fight the General Election.

Good riddance. I could carve a better party out of a banana.

 

As a cyclist, I can’t wait for all cars to be driverless. Even the wonkiest driverless car would be safer for the rest of us than the thousands of vehicles whose homicidal drivers are texting or yammering on their mobiles, while the useless police look the other way.

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Beware of this nation steeped in blood and carpeted with graves

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

A month ago I warned that simple-minded Western intervention in Ukraine risked provoking civil war  in that dangerous, unstable region.

Now I repeat the warning. Our encouragement of this post-modern putsch now threatens the worst civil violence  in Europe since similar lobbies sponsored the break-up  of Yugoslavia.

Worse may be on the way. Ukraine is steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves. Twice in the past century it has been the scene  of terrible wars, and also the site of a hideous man-made famine and of genocidal slaughter. It is also a great strategic prize – fertile wheat  fields, coal mines, the crucial warm-water naval port of Sevastopol.

Now it is the gateway for the colossal new gas and oil fields around the Caspian Sea.

Most Western politicians and commentators seem to assume that the Kiev mob are democrats. Are they? In what way?

They demanded the resignation of the Ukrainian government, because they said so. They wouldn’t go home until they got their way.

How is that democratic? President Yanukovych is certainly no saint. But he came to power legitimately.

In 2010, Yanukovych won office for five years with 12.5 million votes (48.9 per  cent) against 11.6 million votes  (45.5 per cent) for Yulia Tymoshenko. That’s rather better than David Cameron (10.7 million, 36.1 per cent) did against Gordon Brown (8.6 million,  29.0 per cent) in our 2010 poll.

So what precisely is ‘democratic’ about demanding the immediate removal of a lawfully elected head of state, who has a year of his mandate still to run? It sounds more like mob rule to me.

And yet, on the BBC’s supposedly enlightened and thoughtful World Tonight radio programme, an academic was allowed to describe this government as a ‘regime’ without challenge, and a series of politicians from Eastern Europe were brought on to demand sanctions against Ukraine, while no voice was heard from the other side. Anyway, who are these demonstrators? There is no doubt that police have been injured by petrol bombs thrown from the crowd, and shot at with guns. Yet the reports seldom seem  to ask who is doing the throwing and the shooting.

Nor do they often mention the Pravy Sektor (Right Sector),  a nasty formation of violent football fans, prominent in the riots. These ‘democrats’ consider the larger Svoboda party as too namby-pamby. But you wouldn’t. Svoboda (Freedom)  is led by Oleh Tyahnybok. He was once expelled from the Kiev parliament for claiming that a ‘Muscovite-Jewish Mafia’ controlled the country. Charming, eh? Kiev was the scene,  in 1941, of the Babi Yar massacre of 30,000 Jews by German troops.

Many of the more fervent Ukrainian nationalists, especially those from the Western city of Lviv, are keen worshippers of the memory of a character called Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis on and off between 1941 and 1945.

 It is these people who  have been receiving the support of the United States. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland  is famous for her ‘****  the EU!’ statement in a bugged phone conversation in which she discusses naked intervention by the USA in Ukraine’s affairs.

But last December she trotted round the main square of Kiev with a little plastic bag, handing out biscuits and buns to demonstrators. Other outsiders  who have sided with the anti-democratic mob have included German foreign minister  Guido Westerwelle, and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton.

Didn’t these people realise what effect their endorsement might have? Do they know what ghosts they may raise? If they don’t, they are ignorant and rash. If they do, they should remember what happens to children who play with fire.

Smart move by our Arab Prince

I was filled with admiring wonder by a  picture last week of Prince Charles in full Lawrence of Arabia gear.

Could his trip (one of several in recent  years) have been connected to the  finalising of a contract under which BAE  is supplying 72 Typhoon fighter aircraft to Riyadh? I do hope so.

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

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

I must Speak up for Bercow

John Bercow is one of  the best Speakers the House of Commons has had in modern times. I don’t like his personal opinions (and he doesn’t like mine), but that’s not the point.

The ancient purpose of Parliament is to question and discomfort the Government. It is not the job of an MP to be a loyal footsoldier of his leader, or of the Commons to be an echo-chamber for the executive. By forcing Ministers to come to the House to answer Urgent Questions, Mr Bercow has, for the first time in decades, made Parliament live again.

It is a good thing for Britain, and a good sign  that Downing Street loathes the Speaker.

Mr Bercow is also dead right to attack the organised barracking of certain politicians. This sort of  thing might have been acceptable in the German Reichstag in the early 1930s (when a third of the deputies turned up in uniform). But it’s wrong here and now.

As for Mr Bercow’s wife, Sally, and her problems,  I just think we should all remember that these  people have young children. Certainly this has no  bearing on her husband’s role as Speaker.

Drug defeatists have taken over our police forces

Why do so many senior police officers want to give up enforcing the law against drugs? Because the police force has been taken over by social workers and defeatists. And because the courts are so feeble towards drug abusers it’s not worth arresting them.

But of course the increasingly powerful drug lobby always whoop and yell whenever a chief constable muses about weakening the laws he  has sworn to enforce. They know that such pronouncements help Big Dope’s campaign, which will one day unleash legal drugs on the high street.

Mike Barton, Chief Constable of Durham, is the latest. He calls for ‘decriminalisation’.

Not long ago, the BBC invited me to argue the matter out with Mr Barton in the debating chamber of the Durham Union. It wasn’t a gentle encounter.

I told him: ‘When people like you call for the laws to be further weakened, you’re taking precisely the wrong direction. You’re giving aid and comfort to the worst people in the world.’

You can see how he answered that, if you live in the North East and Cumbria, on BBC1’s Inside Out on Monday at 7.30pm.

 If you wish to comment, please scroll down

Our Duty to Oppose the Warmist Inquisition

Sometimes it’s well worth arguing about arguing. In my silly student days we used to mock philosophy for its apparently footling approach, asking caricature questions such as ‘what is the meaning of meaning?’, which now seem quite sensible to me.

 

Many of the Warmist responses to the previous post about Anthropogenic Global Warming seems to me to miss the point of what I said, almost completely.

 

Most bizarre of all is Mr Stephenson’s strange rejection of my assertion that the use of the word ‘denier’ is intended as a smear. Having said that I’m wrong, he then provides a detailed argument in support of my point. Is this comment for the sake of comment?

 

Then there is the inevitable dud-grenade from the anti-religion faction, this time in the shape of ‘Oscar’, who writes ‘Funny how, on the one hand, Peter Hitchens is eager to moralise and extol the virtues of faith - Christian faith - and yet, on the other hand, uses faith to criticise the hugely evidential and well-supported theory of global warming - opposition towards which, whether he forgets it or simply does not care, garners universal scientific mockery, disdain, and suspicion. And quite rightly. In using faith both as a virtue and a vice, he creates an embarrassing rod for his own back.’

 

Mr ‘Oscar’, who we shall probably never see or hear of again , at least under that name, hasn’t troubled to read what I say about religious faith, repeatedly, emphatically an unequivocally . I say that it is a choice. That it must be a choice *precisely* because objective science cannot determine the answer to the question of whether there is a God, let alone the further questions which arise for those who believe.

 

I make no attempt to condemn anyone for choosing to believe there is no God. It is a reasonable choice which any intelligent and educated person is free to make, as is belief in God.  I say - repeatedly – that the interesting part of the disagreement is not *what* people believe, but *why* they believe what they do. This is just as true of AGW.

 

And it would remain true, regardless of ‘universal scientific mockery, disdain, and suspicion’, even if there were such a thing. I think Mr ‘Oscar’ will find – if he troubles to look – that scientists are divided on questions of faith and of AGW. Even if every scientist on the planet agreed on the subject, and mocked, disdained and suspected dissenters, it wouldn’t matter a farthing, *unless* those scientists  possessed an objective,  testable, falsifiable proof of their contention. The fact that they *are*  scientists does not give them any more right to ignore the rules of scientific discover than it gives to anyone else. In fact, it gives them an even stronger obligation to keep to those rules.

 

Once the hysteria has faded (as it undoubtedly will over time), our descendants will find it strange and shocking that scientifically trained people allowed themselves to be conscripted into this majoritarian attempt at mob rule. Even if its members are all wearing scientific lab coats,  a mob is still a mob, and is to be distrusted by any serious person.

 

It is interesting that Mr ‘Oscar’ has in fact not grasped the point I am making, and has simply answered that point (or rather, utterly failed to answer it) by doing exactly what I have criticised the AGW fanatics for doing – namely, trying to resolve scientific questions by non-scientific methods.

 

I’ll allow myself a very slight digression here in the hope that at least one Warmist will, for once, attempt to answer it.

 

It is about the practicality of the carbon control, windmill-building programme, as a solution to the problem they claim to have discovered. I won’t name the very prominent BBC broadcaster on this subject who has said to me in conversation that the measures being taken to control carbon emissions are – if he is right – far too small and far too late to do any good. It wasn’t clear that the conversation was on the record. But he was quite unflinching about this. The world has simply failed to reduce carbon emissions anything like enough to ward off the crisis which he believes we face.

 

I tried to make this point in my first article. What is the point in our closing down (as we have ) Didcot 'A’ Power Station, because it burns coal, when China, in the same period, has opened several similar stations each of which which alone probably emits rather more carbon than Didcot 'A' each, and all of wehich emit far, far more collectively? All we are doing is pointlessly crippling our own energy grid (and just wait for the power cuts) in the pursuit of an irrational, unscientific faith.

 

A civilisation which behaves like this cannot jeer at peoples who sacrifice animals in the hope of a good harvest. There’s no fundamental difference, except that sacrificing  sheep probably causes less total harm(if that’s your measure of goodness)  than the needless closure of a power station in a country with a shortage of power.

 

I now turn to David Linacre, who calls me ‘purposefully contrarian’. Well, I’ve always objected to the word ‘contrarian’, as it suggests a person disagreeing for its own sake. I don’t do this. I scorn those whom i suspect of doing so.  I can’t imagine anything more pointless.  The best riposte to such an accusation is to show that there are good reasons for disagreeing. These are, that I am very worried by the measures being taken by our government (the EU) in response to the alleged crisis. They are immensely economically damaging, both in the form of taxation and the form of crippling power generation. They are also very damaging to the countryside and the seascape, planting them thickly with useless windmills and with the power lines needed to carry their pitiful, intermittent electrical product into the national grid.

 

He then goes on to assert :'In simple terms, there is a consensus on AGW which goes beyond the 'consensus' on many other issues in science (such as vaccines, ADHD etc.) where again I admire Peter's scepticism. To believe that despite the undoubted biases, perverse incentives and groupthink which may exist on this matter, the consensus view is mistaken, is hubristic and naive. I don't know climate science and nor does Peter. Unless he is going to publish a paper arguing against the consensus I don't really see how he can claim any credentials.’

 

In what way does the ‘consensus’ go beyond the equally bogus ‘consensus’ on many other issues? Where is the objectively testable proof that climate change is caused by human activity? How could any scientist disprove it? One can have no opinion on whether it is mistaken or not, unless it exists. It doesn’t exist. In that case we are simply not obliged to believe in it, or act accordingly, and are entitled to protest at attempts to make us believe it through derision or other forms of pressure, and to object to costly and damaging government actions taken on the basis that it is true.

 

 Once such testable proof exists, if it ever does, it won’t matter what the consensus is (just as it didn’t matter what the consensus was once Galileo had shown objectively and testably that the Sun does not move round the Earth, or John Snow had shown that Cholera was not spread by a miasma of ‘bad air’ ).

 

 It is not for me to publish a paper ‘’arguing against the consensus’, because ‘consensus’ forms no part of scientific proof. There is no proof against which, or anyone else, can argue.  It may *follow* scientific proof. But it cannot substitute for it.

 

To pretend that it can is to return to the intellectual conditions of the 16th century, when it was wise to believe that what authority said was true, and experiments which might show otherwise were ill-advised.

 

And this is what we are increasingly doing, with AGW, ‘ADHD’, ‘Dyslexia’, and ‘antidepressants’  (to name a few) . Consensus, a polite name for fashion or mob rule, is cited as a sufficient argument for believing in something which has not been proved.

 

I find this disturbing and frightening, a regression in the human mind, away from the hard austere search for truth of the past four centuries, and towards faith in matters where faith really ought not be employed. This is because we already have considerable objective knowledge which enables us to act rationally on the subject. It is rational to avoid pollution by minimising the use of cars ( as I try to do), because pollution is itself bad, because of the measureable damage it does to air quality and health.  But in this age of superstition, I receive no credit for my action. A person who drives a powerful car on short-distance journeys when he could have walked or bicycled - but who believes in AGW - is deemed morally superior to the walker or cyclist (such as I am) who does not believe in AGW. This small contrast demonstrates the absurdity of our beliefs.

 

Worse, these modern faiths often lead us to act irrationally on a very large scale – crazy economic and power generation policies;  dosing healthy people, even children,  with chemicals whose supposed good effects we do not understand, cannot explain and cannot reliably measure,  but which can be shown, by correlation to be associated with many very worrying side-effects; avoiding the need for major school reform;  reintroducing parental discipline and protecting children from excessive stimuli from TV and computer games etc.

 

What drives these measurably damaging faiths? What and who protect them? In the late middle ages, the Church was afraid of science because it feared that it threatened its monopoly of knowledge.  Kingly power was afraid of anything which weakened religion, because it relied on religion for its legitimacy.

 

Now, what do we see? Huge lobbies, which want state funding for their projects, or state contracts for their products, or simply want their failures protected from scrutiny, now seek to steer us away from hard, testable scientific truth, and substitute cloudy, foggy, untestable ‘consensus’ .

 

It is our duty not to be frightened into joining this shameful retreat from knowledge into conformism. If these people admitted that theirs was a faith, and went to Warmist conventicles each week to sing Warmist hymns and say Warmist prayers, and listen, rapt, to Warmist sermons, who would mind, if it made them happy? But they do not do so. Instead, they ceaselessly attack (often in very nasty terms, such as ‘denier’), those who don’t share their faith.  We wouldn’t allow any church to do that in 21^st century Britain. Why then do we allow this Warmist faith to behave in this way?

 

 

There is nothing ‘contrarian’ about opposing this new intolerance. It is deadly serious. And the most shocking thing is that the principles of science are being attacked in the name of science. Mind you, it was ever thus. Those who want to destroy freedom have always claimed to be its apostles. Those who bring war generally claim to be in favour of peace. And those who offer us prosperity are in fact the harbingers of bankruptcy. 

Warmism versus Science

I have said for some time that there really isn’t any fun in Atheism any more. It’s so fashionable that religious believers are beginning to look like exciting dissidents.  The Churches, meanwhile, have long ago abandoned the thumbscrew and the stake, and have resorted instead to the cup of tea and the biscuit. Approach the average Christian priest or pastor with Atheist sentiments these days, and he (or she) will welcome you with a smile, delighted to find someone who is even interested in God, even if they hate Him and simultaneously say he doesn’t exist. For them, hostility makes a pleasant change from the usual shrugging indifference.

 

If you want to run up against real, hard,  brainless faith-based intolerance, there are other things which offer far more of a challenge. Last week I was subjected to a personal finger-wagging by the new Statesman’s resident Headmaster figure, Peter Wilby (I picture him running one of those alleged Comprehensives, crammed with the children of left-wing middle-class parents who imagine that their  offspring are undergoing  a genuine egalitarian experience) for failing to make any comment on the recent bad weather. The assumption is that, having occasionally wondered if the failure of the temperature to rise casts doubt on the warmist orthodoxy, I have a duty to say that a lot of rain confirms it.

 

 

I then noticed lost of other leftist commentators, scientists, leaders of the opposition and even cartoonists, writing or daubing away on the similar assumption that the current wetness is prima facie evidence that man is wrecking the climate.

 

This is very odd. There is no proof that this is so.  Why have the Warmists exposed their soft underbellies in this daft fashion?  

 

The greatest and most intolerant faith-based orthodoxy of our time  is the movement which propagates and relies on the theory of Anthropogenic Climate Change . On its basis, national governments and supranational bodies, huge companies, schools , universities, local authorities, quangoes and the rest have all embarked on vast, expensive courses of penal taxation, and the construction of startlingly ineffective means of generating energy without the use of carbon-based fuels. Recently they began to close down perfectly good operational coal-fired power stations in this country (an act mad in itself, but madder still when set beside the unending increase in the use of such coal-fired stations in China, whose carbon emissions pour into the same atmosphere, and cancel out the trivial effects of our self-harming gesture many times over).

 

 

 

This Faith (for such it is) used to be called Global Warming, but had to be rechristened when the Globe stopped getting Warmer. Then it became Man-made Climate Change, but that (I think) turned out to be Sexist. So we have AGW.

 

Now, my own view on this is quite straightforward and reasonable. It is obvious that the climate is changing. It has always done so, as history shows. Whether it has done so in my lifetime, I am not sure. My childhood winters seem to me to have been colder than the ones we get now, and the summers seem to have been wetter. Whether this is because I lived through the Big Freeze of 1962-63, when I lived near the sea and it froze, or whether it is because I spent a lot of my childhood in the famously soggy South-West, or whether it is because I grew up largely deprived of central heating, I don’t know. If your summer holidays took place in Fife, Devon, Cornwall, the Sussex Coast and the Isle of Wight( with one very adventurous trip to Jersey) you would have better reason to recall the disappointments of rainy days. I also remember with extraordinary clarity the unbroken summer of 1959, day after day of temperate blue skies, not too hot thanks to cooling breezes, still in my memory the acme of English summer weather, which I was lucky enough to spend in a high-ceilinged Edwardian house on the edge of the Sussex Downs and close to the sea at West Wittering (later to be made famous by Keith Richard – as he then was – and Marianne Faithfull).

 

But, even if things have changed since then,  does this short period of planetary history betoken a real change? In my Bolshevik days, I  remember being warned against an error called ‘opportunism’. Like most Marxist categories, this is not what it sounds like. It meant, more or less,  mistaking a very gentle curve for a straight line, and assuming that a brief and apparently observable development would continue in the same direction forever.

 

Climates, it seems to me, change over very long periods. You’d have to have a long,  consistent observed pattern to be sure that such a thing was happening, and what its nature was. Even then, another century or two might show you were mistaken about the direction of things. Weather changes hour by hour, and week by week. And we forget it, or remember it wrongly. No doubt the recent heavy rain has been exceptional. But it is not unique (I’m told the winter of 1929-30 was considerably wetter) , and it has an immediate cause (the shifting of the Jetstream) , whose greater cause we do not know. This is similar to the phenomena known as ‘El Nino’ and ‘La Nina’ which have had great effects on weather elsewhere on the planet during the past 20 years or so.

 

So it is just plain silly to call me  a ‘Climate Change denier’, as I don’t deny that climate changes.  It is also a trick and a smear. The trick is to mix up disagreement with a contested theory about causation (a disagreement which I happily acknowledge) with  disagreement with the idea that climate is changing (which I don’t challenge at all). The smear is to equate reasonable disagreement about the validity of a speculative and unproven theory with an evil attempt to pretend that a recorded and undoubted historical event never took place.

 

As the expression ‘denier’ was first used to describe, and for many years used for no other purpose than to describe  those people who do actually deny the known recorded historical fact of the German National Socialist massacre of the Jews between 1942 and 1945, its application to dissenters from an unproven theory is especially repellent and a menace to free thought and speech.

 

The other thing that is going on here is to try to pretend that a majority view among scientists is the same as objective, demonstrable proof. Scientific majorities have repeatedly been wrong, or science would never progress. Every really major discovery in science, from Galileo to Einstein,  has overthrown an orthodoxy held by a majority. It has done so by the compulsory process of disproof of one theory, and the substitution for it of another theory, which is both capable of disproof by future experiment, but has yet to be disproved.  This does not mean that majorities are always wrong. But it does mean that they are not always right, and that they prove nothing in themselves. We don't know what is causing the climate change that we are experiencing. We should not pretend we do, or base policy on speculation.

 

In fact, given the increasing political and commercial pressures on science, and the bizarre admission into the Scientific pantheon of  diluted disciplines such as ‘neuroscience’, the lay person has all the more right and cause to demand objective testable proof for any statement made in the name of science. 

Facts, Opinions and Conformity - on Being Proved Right

A further reply to Mr Platt, who claims that I choose my opinions first and my facts afterwards.

 

What exactly is a fact, in a matter of controversy? Can facts be arranged to mislead? Can authority so arrange them, consciously or unconsciously? Can supposedly sceptical journalists, academics and politicians accept (for political reasons) misleading arrangements of facts?

 

It is perfectly true that when an idea is conventional wisdom,  there will be a great array of journalism, broadcasting and academic writing supporting it. And so the sceptic will be portrayed as mad, stupid, factually incorrect, or a number of other things. 

And so the person who finds that what he is being told does not accord with his own experience, or runs counter to historical experience - or has other good reasons to challenge orthodoxy -  will lack the backing of the academy or of the state. And of course he will be doubted and criticised by the regrettably large number of people who take the side of authority against scepticism.  And so he may need to fight Goliath with a sling.

 

Goliath (and the conformist, conventionally wise crowd which stands behind him) will usually laugh with scorn, and denounce his challenger with lofty disdain.

 

And yet , this morning, as I sat on my delayed train (which the train company involved will no doubt massage into punctuality before it reaches the Passengers’ Charter statistics) , I encountered no fewer than three newspaper stories in which positions which I took against orthodoxy were vindicated by later events. Did I choose these opinions before I chose my facts, as Mr Platt says?  Or was it rather that my broad understanding of history, politics and society equipped me to doubt the propaganda I was being fed?

 

On all of these matters I was subjected to something very close to personal abuse for raising them at the time when orthodoxy was different. On the Euro, I was called rude names (‘Little Englander’ being the most common), for simply pointing out that it was a political, not an economic measure. I remember my brother Christopher, in the shadow of whose brilliance I am supposed to cringe, making a great fool of himself on the issue on the only ‘Question Time’ in which we appeared together. I also remember my then fellow-columnist on the then ‘Daily Express’, Andrew Marr, writing a full-page denunciation of my reactionary folly in opposing the Euro.  Mr Marr later became impartial, when he was appointed the BBC’s impartial politics editor, and later its impartial interviewer on its impartial Sunday Morning political interview show.  Dozens of supposedly expert businessmen were endlessly paraded, claiming that British membership of the single currency would be of great benefit.

 

On the grade inflation in examinations, I was repeatedly attacked for being cruel and horrible to the hard-working children who had received their absurdly high grades. I remember this nasty, cheap line of attack being followed by a senior impartial BBC journalist on impartial Radio 4, whose name I do not give because I have no access to the recording.

 

As for crime figures, to this day I still meet people who believe them, and regard me as borderline insane for suggesting that they may not be entirely accurate, or that there might be a reason for that. And in our current controversy, over the dangers of cannabis and the feeble enforcement of the laws against it, I comfort myself that Truth is the Daughter of Time, and that being unfashionable isn’t the same as being wrong.

 

 

Hitchens’s Law, that all politically sensitive figures are fiddled, and Otto von Bismarck’s injunction ‘Never believe anything until it has been officially denied’, are far better servants than open-mouthed acceptance of whatever the establishment happens to think at the time.  The truth is not always the same as the facts, and the facts are not always the same as the truth

 

 

Here are the three examples of which I wrote:

 

THE EURO.

 

‘ONE of the world's leading economists will today admit he was wrong to back the creation of the euro - and call for it to be dismantled.

Sir Christopher Pissarides, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2010, was once a passionate believer in the benefits of the single currency.

But in an extraordinary change of heart, today he will warn the euro is creating a “lost generation” of unemployed youngsters and is “dividing Europe”.’

 

EXAM INFLATION

 

Sir Michael Wilshaw, distinguished former headmaster, now OFSTED chief  and an education establishment figure  told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: ‘There is no question that grade inflation has been operating in our schools. We have been fooling ourselves.’

 

 

CRIME FIGURES

 

THE fall in crime levels has been "overstated" because of mistakes and dishonesty in the way offending is recorded by police, MPs were told yesterday.

 

Prof Mike Hough, of the Crime Statistics Advisory Board (CSAB), told an all-party committee it was impossible to say how much crime was dishonestly recorded by officers trying to improve clear

 

And…

 

The police force that reported the largest fall in crime in England and Wales last year failed to follow Home Office guidelines on recording crimes, an internal review has found. Half of a sample of incidents reported to Gwent Police were not recorded in line with proper procedures.

 

The disclosure came as MPs and academics cast doubt on the accuracy of police figures showing crime falling in England and Wales. Members of the Crime Statistics Advisory Committee said that there were questions to be asked about the extent to which police were "manipulating" crime figures.

 

 

  

"Neither a Follower nor a Trender be..." My reply to John Rentoul's Remonstrance

I’ve been distracted from worthier tasks by a strange article about me in today’s ‘Independent’ newspaper, which in all probability very few of you will have seen (though for reasons that will become obvious, it’s attracted quite a lot of attention from the Twitter mob).

 

I’m told off for not ‘following’ anyone on Twitter. My response is to misquote poor Polonius’s (excellent) advice to Laertes in ‘Hamlet’ , and advise everyone else ‘Neither a follower nor a trender be…’

 

As readers here well know, I regard Twitter as a left-wing electronic mob. I go there to respond to the stupid and ignorant attacks made on me, and to publicise this blog. I have plenty of ways of keeping up with the opinion of others, such as reading books, reading the papers and the weekly reviews, listening to the radio, conversing with family, colleagues and friends, speaking in debates. How 'following' someone on Twitter can even begin to compare with, let alone be better than, or supplement these things. I cannot think.

 

Here, anyway, is Mr Rentoul's Remonstrance:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/peter-hitchens-oneway-tweets-8950285.html

 

I’ve said here before that Mr Rentoul is a very useful writer, because he embodies the true spirit of Blairism, and his warm love for David Cameron, and his dislike for Ed Miliband,  tell us much of what we need to know about what we must now (thanks to Nick Boles) refer to as the National Liberal Party. Tony Benn would say of him, I think, that he is a signpost rather than a weathercock, a man who sticks to his positions whichever way the wind blows, and doesn’t mind a bit of derision.

 

Even so, he is a bit young (born in 1958) to understand my political positions, and has perhaps lived in too rarefied a world. I read in Wikipedia that he worked for the small-circulation left-wing weekly ‘The New Statesman’ before going to the BBC, and then to the Independent, perhaps a rather restricted encounter with the University of Fleet Street. He also wrote a biography of the Blair creature, which I would describe as broadly sympathetic.

 

Anyway, to Mr Rentoul’s article. I really don’t know how he can claim I’m ‘not very interested in other people’s opinions’. For a start, I’ve *held* most other people’s opinions in my time, having been a supporter, in the mid-1960, of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and later of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the Anti-Apartheid movement, then a member,  in turn, of the International Socialists (1968-75), Hampstead Constituency Labour Party (1977-1983) and the Conservative and Unionist Party, Oxford East Association (1997-2003). I still belong to Amnesty International (despite its absurd involvement in campaigns to save murderers from execution in the USA), which I must have joined about 30 years ago. I am also a member of Liberty, and was in the late 1970s a member of Friends of the Earth, not to mention various organisations for the promotion of cycling (an enthusiasm, from which I have never shifted). I have been a member of the National Union of Journalists for about 40 years. All these things cause me to pay frequent and constant attention to the opinions of people who disagree with me.  I am a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England. I might add that since my university days I haven’t considered a day complete unless I have read at least four national newspapers, and preferably more. I’ve chosen twice to live abroad, once in the USSR and once in the USA, and in both places sought to immerse myself in the local culture and to learn, as deeply as possible, how they do things differently there.  I’ve visited 58 countries, and have there sought out the opinions of prominent and influential people.

 

But I have never joined a club, despite two kind invitations to do so. In the end, despite the lovely Edwardian surroundings, the cosy bars, the warm feeling of being in a  John Buchan thriller or an Evelyn Waugh novel that such places provide, I could never quite bring myself to do it.

 

I think that may be what irks Mr Rentoul - my unclubbableness and unwillingness to be part of any committed faction. I did sort of try this during the late 1990s, and found it didn’t suit me, though I also learned from it just how hopeless the Conservative Party really is. 

Some of us are and always will be cats that walk by themselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t like other people, or aren’t interested in them, just that we’re happy on our own and uncomfortable in crowds or gangs.

 

His little sneer about book reviews shows how uninterested he is in *my* opinions.  I’ve explained a thousand times how an occasional appearance on the seat on the edge on ‘Question Time’ is actually a confirmation of my marginal position in broadcasting, not evidence of my acceptance by the BBC mainstream.

 

As I sought to explain to him (though he plainly wasn’t listening) , the key to influence in British politics is to have an audience that stretches beyond your natural supporters. I don’t need to persuade Mail on Sunday readers of the virtues of patriotism and faith, or of the disadvantages of the cultural revolution. I badly need to persuade the others, and for that, I need at least a hearing. The drowning of my books in silence or ignorant abuse is, in my view, a conscious refusal to allow me that hearing. Most of the Left do not even know what *kind* of book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ is. They think it is a sort of nostalgic ramble, imagine it is of no possible interest to them, and would mostly be amazed if they ever opened it.

 

Likewise, the point of the conversation about social democracy has passed him by. He misunderstands my reasons for not being on the Left any more . I’m sure he hasn’t read my book ‘the Broken Compass ‘ (republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’) in which I explain this . As it mostly wasn’t reviewed, he’s probably never heard of it. If he has, he probably has a skewed idea of what it’s about.

 

He also probably doesn’t know how important Arthur Koestler, who identified strongly with the German Social Democrats in later life,  was to ex-revolutionary socialists, as a bridge from Bolshevism into civilisation.  Koestler had been hated by the Nazis. Now he was hated by the Communists. That, in the century of the Stalin-Hitler pact, was about as big an honour as a man could hope for.

 

People like me didn’t abandon Bolshevism because we wanted to grind the faces of the poor, leave the sick untreated and roofless, trap the poor in ignorance,  or force half-starved peasants to work 90-hour weeks in sweatshops.  Nor did we abandon it because it didn’t suit our careers to be seen as openly declared revolutionaries. We abandoned it because we loved liberty and hated lies, and because we saw that Bolshevism actually did grind the faces of the poor, smashed independent trade unionism, destroyed freedom of thought and erected citadels of privilege as bad as anything in the capitalist world, if not worse. I might add that it was often guilty of racial discrimination.

 

In my long, slow progress from what I was to what I have become, one of the key moments (it’s in ‘The Broken Compass’) involved paying attention to the opinions of the British TUC, and then travelling to Gdansk, to pay attention to the opinions of Lech Walesa, then the incredibly courageous leader of Solidarity.  I still remember with total clarity that foggy, dankly cold morning in the scruffy Hotel Morski, the interview interpreted by a young student to whom I remain everlastingly grateful, who had happened by great good luck to be in the building at the time. That frozen, thrilling, frightening journey was made by me not as a foreign reporter but as a Labour Correspondent, because I had gone to my then editor, a wonderful, modest and generous man called Arthur Firth, and said that the most important industrial story of the age was the Polish shipyard strike against Communism. ‘You’re right. Go there. Get the visa’, he replied.  I went. It changed my life. Here was the right to strike, as contentious and as menaced as in the days of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, being wielded by a poor electrician who was a blazing radical for liberty, and a solid religious conservative on every other issue you cared to name. He tested this combination in action – and it worked. That seemed good to me, and still does.

 

I was gripped, from then on, by the huge melodrama unfolding in the Warsaw Pact countries (I’d already had a much gentler taste of it on holiday in Prague).  I was amazed at how uninterested most people were in this vast convulsion. I paid attention to that paradoxical part of the world, of ‘real existing socialism’, of what it really involved, and I weighed everything and everyone by their attitude towards it. Marxism had not failed because it had been tried in the wrong place by the wrong people, as the Gramscians and the Euro-Communists (who are the intellectual fathers of Blairism) believed. It had failed because it was fundamentally wrong.  I knew, from my own adventures with Trotskyism and from my own hard experience of that lost world of the Evil Empire, exactly why. Very few people had both these experiences.   My great failure is that I cannot seem to explain this to my own generation, possibly because it is just too obvious to me. Or possibly because they don’t want to know.

 

Mr Rentoul is right that I don’t think the Blair creature is in the Koestler tradition. He isn’t in any tradition, so far as I have ever been able to discover (and I did have some slight access to him before he was famous) . He was valuable to the New Labour project precisely because he was not that interested in politics, while his wife was a worry to them because she was, and could (if you looked carefully) be identified with the cultural and moral struggles which now define the New Left. That’s why I got into such trouble for taking such an interest in *her* opinions, and daring to research her forgotten campaign as a Labour parliamentary candidate in Margate in 1983.

 

Pretty stodgy, eh? You can see why someone like me might not be that worried that he was missing Chris Heaton Harris’s Twitticisms.

 

One other small thing. Micah Clarke ( as Mr Rentoul would find if he read that rather good and neglected book) was never a sectarian and always viewed these matters with a broadminded good humour (thanks to his interesting upbringing and childhood).