A few Comments on the EU, Railways, Love, Truth, T.S. Eliot and Liberty

As the world at last wakes up again, and the crisp mornings and sharp evenings signal the end of the strange period of sloth and  suspense that has endured since the referendum, I thought it was time for some general correspondence on many different issues.

First I am amazed at the way in which Chairman May’s speech to the Tory conference has been greeted, as if it truly cleared the air. As my friend and ally Christopher Booker pointed out yesterday (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/01/this-is-the-only-way-brexit-wont-plunge-us-over-the-cliff/ )

Ministers till seem to have very little idea of just how difficult it is going to be to negotiate complex trade agreements with the EU from scratch.

Note that Mr Booker and I are longstanding enthusiasts for a British departure from the EU, have longed for years for us to leave and still hope for a genuine restoration of national independence. We have every reason to hope for a so-called  ‘hard Brexit’ and to want one. But both of us fear that the practicalities are insurmountable. If that is so, aiming for such a target can only end in tears, and worse, the ultimate blocking of our true departure.

Why then is the government acting as if the matter is so simple? Perhaps Messrs Fox and Davis are right and we are wrong, in which case I shall be delighted. But I wish they would explain how.

This is the constitutional crisis of which I have been warning since it became clear that ‘leave’ would win the referendum, my most recent accurate prediction.

Do some in the government actually *hope* it will go wrong? Do they think they can wing it? Are they just naive? Do they imagine ( as David Cameron did) that our EU ‘partners’ will rescue us? Or is Chairman May hoping that the difficulties will allow her to propose a permanent compromise, under which we more or less remain in the EU in all but name (the most likely outcome in my view).

For me, the problem remains that the mandate from the referendum is both so vague and so narrow, and so lacks any serious representation at the top of British politics, that the gap between promise and fulfilment is too wide to be crossed.

Voting to leave the EU, without first creating a party committed to doing so and versed in what it wants to do with the freedom gained, was a dangerous short cut, like building the roof before building the walls. It was too easy. And like all things that are too easy, it will become difficult in time.

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Why do supporters of Rail Privatisation continue to jeer at British Rail. Before privatisation, BR was an extremely well-run organisation, running a surprisingly good service on a much smaller subsidy than the one now given to the privatised operators. It successfully completed the electrification of the London to Edinburgh line (compare with the delayed over-budget mess of the current electrification of the Paddington line), its track maintenance was of a high quality( not maintained after privatisation, as well found to our cost at the turn of the century). Railtrack, or ‘Failcrack’ as I dubbed it,  has now, in effect, been renationalised as Network Rail. But it’s still not as good as BR was at maintaining track and at big modernising projects.

There’s no reason to believe that the increase in traffic which happened after (but not because of) privatisation would not have happened under BR. And if BR had received the subsidies given to private train operators, much more of the money would have spent on railways and trains, and much less on making various individuals rich. I cannot see how a franchise to run a system based on taxpayer subsidy is real risk-taking business. If it were, I doubt if anyone would step forward to run it. Many have indeed walked away from their franchises.

One thing I do associate with privatisation, and suspect is linked to it, is the cramming of passengers into smaller and smaller spaces. The habit of shoving in as many seats as possible, and no longer lining them up with windows, seems to have begun around the time that privatisation happened. So does the provision of shorter, smaller trains of three, four or five coaches on routes which used to be served by trains of eight full-sized Inter-City carriages.  I wonder if it saves fuel and other costs, so directly increasing revenue.

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On Sunday evening I provided a short prologue to a dramatised reading of the final part of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ in the Friends’ Meeting House at Chichester, beautifully situated near the lovely old Priory, now the Guildhall,  where William Blake was once put on trial.  The reading was of very high quality, and I found myself riveted both during the rehearsal and the actual performance, by Eliot’s apposite words, full of power and truth.

There was a good and attentive audience, most of whom stayed for a while afterwards to discuss the case of Bishop bell, in whose cause the reading was held. I always gain a special pleasure from voluntary, civic occasions such as this, when individuals band together for a good purpose. Chichester itself is an intensely civilised corner on England since Roman times, every stone and brick, and every tree, lawn and garden evidence of the long and peaceful existence of a prosperous society of free, independent men and women. But none of this will survive forever if we do not resolve to defend it. I regard the George Bell campaign as part of the battle to keep free civilisation alive, because it is entirely about disinterested justice and truth. I visited Bishop bell’[s memorial in the Cathedral early this morning, and found it surrounded by flowers. This contrasts with the occasion  a year ago when I laid a small posy there and wit was swiftly snatched away. At that time the memorial was obscured by a large notice about ‘safeguarding’, which has now gone.

A few feet away lies the lovely ‘Arundel Tomb’ of which Philip Larkin write,  moved by the way that the effigies of a knight and his lady are shown holding each other’s hands in death. ‘What will survive of us is love’, he concluded, reluctantly and conditionally. I think he was righter than he knew or wanted to be. I must now go to the special service (to be held at St Michaels’s Church at Cornhill in the City of London)

to remember Bishop Bell, whose life and work are commemorated today (the 58^th anniversary of his death) in the Anglican calendar.  

Look out! They're sneaking up on you with a chemical cosh

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week’s revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug troublesome teenagers in the 1960s – and we have only just found out.

One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles.

This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was given to boys at a Yorkshire ‘Approved School’ (a state-inspected home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were told of this experiment.

To qualify for the secret chemical cosh, you had to be ‘impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive’, which for teenage boys is more or less a description of being alive and awake. Both schemes were endorsed by the Home Office’s own in-house psychiatrist, Pamela Mason. How many other such horrors happened – are perhaps still happening – without us knowing?

I have long suspected that the Home Office – and much of our elite – are quite keen on doping the population. Despite making various militant noises over the years, this secretive department has quietly filleted the drug laws so that they are now the boneless wonder of the western world.

And for many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars. I suspect the authorities hoped prisoners would be so stupefied that they would not riot, or escape in large numbers – things the Government greatly fears, and which have destroyed many Cabinet Ministers.

This policy is now going badly wrong, as cannabis is not in fact the peaceful drug some claim. Many of the drugs readily available in jail, such as the synthetic ‘Spice’, make their users more violent, not less.

The Government has also been quite happy to allow pharmaceutical companies to run huge experiments on adults and children with sketchily tested and unproven tablets that I would not give to a dog, even if I disliked it.

Astonishing numbers of people are now regularly taking mind-altering drugs – Ritalin for children who get bored in school, ‘antidepressants’ for unhappy adults (and sometimes both together, as adults now have ‘ADHD’ and children are allegedly ‘depressed’). Having wrongly feared that George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of drabness and surveillance would come true, we missed the much more accurate warning in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Huxley didn’t just foresee the state rummaging about in the womb, the abolition of parents, the family and private life, the cheery disposal of the old and ill, and the distraction of a wage-slave population by flashy entertainment and sex.

He predicted the invention of an all-purpose happiness drug called ‘Soma’. It would keep the middle classes content, and could be used in spray form to quell riots by the poor. He said it would have ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects… there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’.

They haven’t actually invented it yet. Huxley’s Soma was harmless, which today’s drugs somehow never are. But they are working on it. And you might like to know the name of the brilliant, subtle, well-funded campaign to legalise marijuana launched almost half a century ago by the late Steve Abrams (I discussed it with him at length before he died). It was ‘Soma’.

Rewriting our history? That's hard to Swallow

As a child I never took to Swallows And Amazons. 

I had a boarding school headmaster who drove us ceaselessly out of doors, made us accompany him on to the heaving, open sea (without lifejackets) in an ancient ketch, taught us to make fires, camp in the rain, gut fish and endure more than our fair share of mud, wet and cold.

I had no idea how lucky I was, and I am sure it was very good for me. But as a result I didn’t much want to read about such things, let alone do them on my holidays. And I only came to know Arthur Ransome’s books when I read them to my own children.

I instantly recognised the children and adults in them, the way they thought and spoke, and the lives they lived. I could guess in detail what their homes or schools were like, though they were never described. I knew (I still do) what a country station platform felt and sounded like on a summer afternoon just after the train had steamed away. I also knew (as the film-makers don’t) that British Railways didn’t exist in 1935. And I knew that pemmican (a joke in the books) was never on sale in tins in British grocers’ shops; and that telegrams came in khaki-yellow envelopes.

But the new film suffers from the constant problem of modern people. They can’t begin to imagine the recent past and know almost nothing about it.

One thing that struck me is that the children in the film (pictured above) seem to be much ruder to each other than I remember from the books. The girls are also a lot screamier. Of course, hardly anything really happened in most of the books. It was all imagination, a thing which has died in the age of TV and computers. And you can see why they inserted an absurd plot about Russian spies. Odd that it blames Russia for coming up with the idea for the atom bomb, when this was from the first a scheme dreamt up by Western idealist scientists horrified by Hitler.

People keep telling me these things don’t matter. But they do. If we get the past wrong, we will get the future wrong, as we prove every day.

The real scandal of Corbyn's empty seats

Actually, I can quite see why Jeremy Corbyn thought that train was full. Rail companies punish anyone who just wants to travel when he feels like it.

So we’re all forced to make reservations we don’t want, and dozens of seats are blocked by this and festooned with silly labels.

Then there’s the strange urge to make train travel even worse than going by plane, including nose-to-tail seats crammed close together, cunningly arranged to obscure the windows.

It’s increasingly hard to spot a vacant place. I suspect most of those having a go at the Labour leader haven’t done much second (sorry ‘standard’) class travel by train recently.

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I see we now have flashily painted ‘Border Force’ cutters with go-faster stripes, just like the US Coastguard.

I detect the hand of Chairman May and her clever PR team when they were still at the Home Office. But what use is all this? It will be worth checking in six months what has happened to the six migrants picked up by HMC Valiant off the Kent coast on Thursday.

Your guess is as good as mine, but unlike Australia, we have no remote islands where we can put such people.

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The British bobby is long dead - but we have one last chance to bring him back

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country.

We are all less free than we used to be. We have to be careful what we say, especially if we work in the public sector. We are under constant surveillance, from CCTV cameras, and thanks to snoopers who monitor our calls and internet use. If, for some reason, the authorities take against us we can be plunged, in an instant, into an unexpected underworld of highly publicised suspicion that can last for years and ruin us with legal fees, even if at the end they sullenly drop the charges.

Nobody is safe from this. If a field marshal in his 90s can be raided at home by 20 officers at breakfast time, and subjected to questioning and searches on the basis of the wild fantasies of an unhappy nobody, then so can you. And though the police themselves will insist they have not released your name, don’t be surprised if this Trial By Plod somehow becomes very public, very quickly.

The police are too powerful. They are also too feeble. Unless we put both these things right very soon, this will become a very dangerous country

Yet, at the same time, ordinary crime and bad behaviour – the things the law now regards as trivial – grow unchecked around us. Who now lives in a town free of graffiti and vandalism, or one where Friday night has not become menacing, drunken and loud?

Years ago, when I first noticed that something had gone badly wrong with the police, readers would write in and chide me for being rude about a force they still trusted. I get very little of that now. Respect for the police has largely disappeared among the law-abiding classes, and seldom survives any actual contact with them. Now I brace myself for apparently organised abuse from police officers themselves. I should warn them that this behaviour only helps to make my point.

Their ‘I’m all right Jack’ mentality and refusal to accept just criticism is as bad as anything trade unionists used to do and say back in the 1970s.

I have to say, because I hope it is true, that not all police officers have this mentality, but a distressing number do.

 

The police have been subjected to a 30-year inquisition and revolution, in which old-fashioned coppers have been pushed aside (and into retirement) by commissars of equality and diversity. Deprived of their proper occupation, preventive patrolling on foot (long ago abolished), they have become officious paramilitary social workers. These new police are obsessed with the supposed secret sins of the middle class, and indifferent to the cruel and callous activities of the criminal class.

They are also in the grip of a dogma that excuses ordinary crime by blaming it on bad housing and ‘poverty’ (in one of the world’s most advanced welfare states).

Only a small part of this crime even reaches the courts any more. Much of it is dealt with, if at all, by empty ‘cautions’ and laughable ‘restorative justice’. The police can then concentrate on what really bothers them. Yet when they turn sternly on the middle classes, they act like continental examining magistrates, who assume everyone is guilty before trial (and sometimes even say so) and demand that suspects co-operate in their own prosecution.

They can arrest, noisily and in large numbers and at miserable times of day, to punish people who have never been found guilty of anything. In most cases, these people would have come willingly to an interview. They can seize property vital to people’s livelihoods, and hang on to it for months. They can grant supposed ‘police bail’, so allowing them to keep their chosen victims under suspicion for years.

When these things mysteriously become public, they can deny responsibility, and who can prove otherwise?

This is oppressive, dangerous and scandalous. The treatment of Lord Bramall may be the last warning we get that it has gone too far, and the best chance to turn the police back into the friends of the public, and the enemies of crime and disorder.

******

Picking a fight we cannot win

Do you really think the Russian deep state couldn’t have murdered Alexander Litvinenko secretly, in such a way that we could never have traced it to them?

The oddest thing about this case is the use of a violently radioactive, totally traceable poison, and the conduct of the two alleged killers, whose revolting deed was mismanaged in a way that would be comic if a man had not died as a result.

Meanwhile, the two suspects prance about in public (I once met a smirking Andrei Lugovoi in Moscow, as he strolled through an expensive hotel).

This is surely a gesture of angry contempt, against which Moscow knows we are more or less powerless to react effectively. We might wonder why. Maybe it has something to do with our courts refusing to extradite people such as the Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev, regarded in Moscow as terrorists, and then giving them political asylum.

Whether this decision was right or wrong (and I don’t know enough to say), you can see why it might annoy them. Despite being an increasingly insignificant country, we have got ourselves involved with some big and nasty people in a rather rough neighbourhood. I hope it’s worth it.

******

At least poor Leo's not on the 6.22 from Paddington

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s not as good as they say. I longed for subtitles and the only character whose dialogue I clearly understood was the grizzly bear. She said ‘Grrrrrr’ as if she meant it.

But if you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot. After what seems like about nine hours, unable to get to the lavatory, confronted with incessant cold, revolting meals of raw offal, charmless travelling companions, your uncomfortable journey frequently interrupted by unexplained disasters or pure spite, the 6.22 from Paddington begins to seem like paradise. Even when, as recently happened to me, you are turned out of the train by ‘Great Western’ on to a freezing platform halfway through your journey home and told it is for your own good.

There’s one good reason to see the overrated new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. If you are a regular railway commuter, this immensely long movie will reconcile you to your lot.

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The Government wants you to support the renewal of the absurdly elaborate and huge Trident missile system. I see that the Defence Ministry organised, as a complete coincidence, a press trip to show off the red Scalextric-type nuclear trigger I was allowed to play with aboard HMS Repulse 30 years ago. Well, Israel, a more fearsome nuclear power than us, facing a greater danger, doesn’t waste its money on such a luxury item.

Spending £100billion on Trident, and neglecting your conventional forces as a result, is like spending so much on insuring yourself against abduction by aliens that you can’t afford cover for fire and theft.

*******

My thanks to all of you who remembered my friend Jason Rezaian, unjustly imprisoned in Iran, in your thoughts and prayers, and who wrote to the Iranian authorities urging his release. After more than 500 days in a Tehran prison, and some nervous final hours as diplomats ensured his wife was able to leave the country with him, Jason is now free again, and recovering in a US military hospital. I am sure that you played your part in securing his release.

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This isn't a just war - it's 'recreational bombing' by our Churchill wannabe

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Once again, as a patriotic Englishman from a Naval family, I stand amazed to find myself so lonely in my doubts about a foolish war.

I am no pacifist. I supported the retaking of the Falklands, national territory illegally seized by foreign invaders. I was thrilled to see that the Royal Navy could still do the hard tasks for which it is paid too little. Could it now?

Yet, on the basis of an emotional spasm and a speech that was illogical and factually weak, we are rushing towards yet another swamp, from which we will struggle to extract ourselves and where we can do no conceivable good.

Heaven forbid that it will lead (as other such adventures have) to more melancholy processions, bearing flag-wrapped coffins, from RAF Brize Norton; or to quieter convoys, carrying terribly injured men to special hospitals. Why must good, brave, dutiful men and women die or be maimed for life because our politicians are vain and ignorant?

But there is no knowing the end of this, especially given the Prime Minister’s absurd belief that we have 70,000 ‘moderate’ allies just waiting to help us in Syria. Among these scattered ‘moderates’ are those who last week murdered a Russian pilot as he parachuted to earth, and mauled his corpse.

When this phantom army turns out to be non-existent, or hostile, how long will it take Mr Cameron to return to the House of Commons, pleading oh-so-reasonably for ground troops to follow?

It is all such rubbish. I have yet to see conclusive evidence that the Paris murders were organised by or in Islamic State. France has plenty of home-grown hatred and (despite strict gun laws) is awash with illegal Kalashnikovs and ammunition.

Nor can I see why bombing Raqqa will defend us or anyone against such murders.

France’s President Hollande, a failed politician in bad domestic trouble, mired his own country in Syria months ago. I can’t see what good reason we have to follow him there. It will not help to bind up the wounds of the people of France.

Only three weeks back, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee advised, in a carefully argued report, that intervention in Syria is not a good idea. The pathetic cave-in of that committee’s chairman, Crispin Blunt, who now supports Mr Cameron’s latest war, merely makes Mr Blunt look irrational, weak-minded and easily led.

The UN Security Council resolution (of which Mr Cameron makes so much) actually offers no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which authorises the use of force.

David Cameron is already suffering from galloping Churchill syndrome (the patient growls, denounces his critics as appeasers, and starts wars). Now he seems to have contracted Blair’s disorder, an irresistible desire to pose alongside military hardware. On Monday he managed to have his portrait taken next to a very macho-looking Typhoon fighter jet at Northolt RAF base on his way back from Paris. Odd, that. Typhoons are not normally stationed at Northolt, and I haven’t been able to get a coherent explanation of what military reason it had to be there, so convenient for a photo-opportunity.

The Prime Minister might have been better employed looking up Syria on a map, reading the relevant documents, or consulting with our former ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford – who energetically opposes what he denounces as ‘recreational bombing’.

In all these modern wars real experts are impatiently pushed aside, while flatterers and yes-men take over. But it’s not decided yet. There’s still just time to write to your MP, if you agree with me that this is folly. I beg you to do so.

Reaping a feminist whirlwind

On Thursday night I witnessed the ugliness of the new student intolerance at the Oxford Union, where I was taking part in a debate on marriage (I was in favour). I had never before seen burly security men stationed around the hall, or had to watch as screeching hecklers – having ignored pleas to put questions in a civilised way – were hauled from the room.

It was Germaine Greer they were mainly after (though they handed out leaflets at the gate slandering me, too). I like Germaine, as it happens, and think she is often a lot more sensible than people think she is. But does she ever wonder if the militant feminism she launched has some responsibility for the new generation of self-righteous would-be censors who would rather silence an opponent than listen to her?

 

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I travel a lot by train, and have begun to notice that the ride is getting much rougher. On a recent journey from London to Edinburgh I had to move seats because I was over the wheels and being jolted about so much. It reminded me of the Mandalay-Rangoon express (though in its grimy way that’s more comfortable than Virgin).

The worrying thing is that I noticed a similar worsening in the track at the end of the 1990s, just before a terrible series of crashes caused by track failure. Is Network Rail maintaining our lines properly?

 

****

The turmoil of the past two weeks has buried two pieces of bad news which the Government really doesn’t want you to know.

The first was Thursday’s record net immigration figures, showing that Mr Cameron has completely lost control of our borders.

The other was a huge and unexpected increase in Government borrowing in October, when it was supposed to have fallen. This passed almost entirely unnoticed.

No wonder the Chancellor seems to have put the economy in the hands of Doctor Who. The mythical £27 billion that he miraculously discovered in time for his Autumn Statement is even more non-existent than the Prime Minister’s imaginary army of 70,000 Syrian moderates.

Doctor Who will be needed to get hold of this money, since it does not yet exist, and is to be found (if at all) only in the future, and then in small annual dribs and drabs.

If George Osborne were a company, he would be heading for bankruptcy. As it is, I confidently predict very severe tax rises within three years. Perhaps Doctor Who will by then have replaced Mr Osborne at No 11 and will be able to escape the voters’ wrath in his Tardis.

*******

 

 

 

All the four main unpopular newspapers had virtually the same page one headline on Friday morning: The Times’: ‘Labour at war over vote to bomb Isis’, The Telegraph:  ‘Labour at war over Syria air strikes’; ‘The Guardian: ‘Labour in Syria Turmoil as PM makes the case for war’; ‘The Independent’ : ‘Labour at war over air strikes in Syria’. The BBC’s headlines were very similar.

 

 

 

None of these stories contained any clear facts, just anonymous briefings. If it had been a plane crash, or a verdict in a major court case, this sort of unanimity in supposedly competing media would have been normal. But in this case it looks much more as if we have a controlled press.

 

(This last item was accidentally omitted when the column was first posted)

 

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Warmists armed with windmills are the REAL threat to Britain

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

As we squeak and gibber about the distant danger of terrorism, this country stands on the brink of a real threat to its economy, its daily life and its order.

It is a threat we have brought on ourselves by embracing an obsessive, pseudo-scientific dogma, a dogma that is also destroying irreplaceable industries and jobs week by week.

Last week we came within inches of major power blackouts, though official spokesmen claim unconvincingly that all was well.

Experts on the grid have for some time predicted a crisis of this sort, but had not expected it anything like so soon, or in such warm weather conditions. It is the fact that they were taken by surprise that warns us there may be worse to come.

Though Wednesday was mild for the time of year, the National Grid had to resort to emergency measures to keep Britain’s lights on. These included paying industries to reduce their power consumption and giving electricity generators up to 50 times the normal wholesale price to produce additional supplies – plainly emergency measures.

Forests of hideous, useless, vastly subsidised windmills predictably failed to help – because there was no wind. Acres of hideous, useless, vastly subsidised solar panels predictably failed to help, because it was dark.

Several perfectly good coal-fired power stations failed to help because we recently shut them down and blew them up. We did this in obedience to European Union regulations that prevent Britain from generating power from coal.

Meanwhile, China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks and fills the atmosphere with soot and carbon dioxide. If man-made CO2 really does cause global warming, then this policy of destroying Britain’s coal-fired power stations is not affecting that.

Even on its own terms, the action is mad.

Craziest fact of all: if things get really desperate, the Grid will resort to banks of back-up diesel generators, perhaps the least green form of energy there is. And if they can’t cope, a country almost wholly dependent on electrically powered computers will go dark and silent, as our competitors laugh.

You will not be comforted to know that two more perfectly good coal-fired British power stations are already doomed by Euro-decree. They will be shut and irrevocably destroyed in the next six months.

And our last deep coal mine, at Kellingley, sitting on a huge reserve of high-quality coal, is to be shut for ever.

The UK’s exceptionally high electricity prices, forced up by green taxes to pay for useless windmills and solar panels, are destroying manufacturing industry. Having closed much of what remains of our steel industry, high power charges last week claimed their latest victim, the Michelin tyre plant in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.

As I have pointed out here in the past, the world has seen this sort of madness before, when dogma has been allowed to veto common sense.

This is what happened to the Soviet Union, which destroyed its economy and its society by trying to create Utopia. As usual, the result was hell.

The inflexible, intolerant cause of Warmism is not as bad as Leninism. There is no Gulag, only a lot of self-righteous spite for any who dare to dissent. And who cannot sympathise with those who genuinely think they are saving the planet? But they aren’t.

Do they really think, once the free Western countries sink into decay thanks to their policies, that a mighty China will pay any attention to their cries of protest?

They are just hustling us into the Third World, while saving nothing at all.

The State shouldn't poke its nose into my emails - or yours

Actually, I don’t at all see that terrorism gives the Government an excuse to sift through all our private activities.

Most of the cases of so-called terrorists picked up as a result of such surveillance involve groups of loopy fantasists and/or dope-smokers who talk about committing various dreadful crimes but haven’t really got very far.

The evidence against one such group included the devastating information that they had spent some time looking at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

Maybe they would have done something terrible. Maybe they wouldn’t. Experience suggests that our huge, expensive ‘security’ services aren’t actually that good at detecting or preventing serious outrages, despite their boasts. This is mainly because, however much power we give them, they’re not clairvoyant.

Terror works by surprise. It learns to go off the grid, and can afford to do so, unlike most of us.

It also works by driving societies mad, like a wasp at a picnic. Terrorists are overjoyed when we shut down our freedoms and turn ourselves into a police state, and when we retaliate, swatting the Middle East with useless bombs, or rounding up the wrong suspects and locking them up without charge.

This is what they want us to do, because in the end we will make ourselves so miserable that we end up by giving in to them – as we always do. As we did in Cyprus, in Kenya and in Northern Ireland.

Mrs Theresa May’s most interesting revelation last week was that, thanks to hidden provisions in a 1984 law, her officials had for years been trawling through our phone and email records without our knowledge. What similar provisions are hidden in her vast new Bill, or will be by the time it becomes law? Call me old-fashioned. I am old-fashioned. But I still think the presumption of innocence is vital, and that the police and MI5 should stay out of my business unless they have a good reason, which they can explain to an independent judge, to do otherwise.

If all coppers looked like this, maybe they'd get more respect

The funeral of PC Dave Phillips in Liverpool’s majestic Anglican cathedral was a very moving occasion in many ways, the dignity, eloquence and bearing of his family in particular, and one just hopes that all those who witnessed it will now understand just how much grief a single, callous action can cause.

But one unexpectedly affecting part of it was the sight of so many police officers in the dignified and very British uniform of helmet and tunic, which used to be so familiar and has now almost vanished, replaced by high-viz yellow, baseball caps, stomping boots, tasers and belts hung with menacing equipment.

Did any of us ask for this change, or approve of it? Wouldn’t most of the police, as well as most of the public, prefer to return to the times – not long ago – when we respected each other, rather than (as is so often the case now) mistrusting each other? And wouldn’t a return to the old uniform be a major step towards this?

I’ll regret this, I know I will. I always do when I try optimism. But I do feel something approaching joy that my home town, Oxford, has just acquired a new railway station and a new route to London.

For decades I’ve watched the thoughtless building of new roads, and the ripping up of perfectly good railway lines, a grave policy mistake that has messed up our landscape and wrecked a great British industry. Could this serial blunder at last be over? I doubt it. But for a few weeks, I’ll hope so.

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I don't Believe the 'Pig's Head' Story - but Anyway Cameron's Libya Mistake is Far More Imporrant

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

If you know something damaging about a major political figure, then, in a democracy, it is surely your duty to tell the voters before they go to the polls.

 

So I am puzzled by Lord Ashcroft’s motives for emptying a huge bucket of slurry over David Cameron’s head just after the Prime Minister has safely survived a fiercely-contested general election.

 

I have met Lord Ashcroft briefly a couple of times. He gives off an enjoyably sinister whiff of brimstone. He has a smile like the winter sun glinting on a coffin-plate. You wouldn’t be surprised to find he had steel teeth. 

 

He was known in his years of influence as ‘The Man Who Bought the Tory Party’, or alternatively as ‘Blofeld’, and I don’t imagine he minded.  I was never sure what he wanted in return for all his money.

 

Was it just a ministerial red box? Well, he didn’t get it and now he’s annoyed, and who can blame him? If they hadn’t planned to give him anything in return, the Tories shouldn’t have taken his cash. The same applies to those who bankrolled their 2015 victory.

 

 

I wrongly thought the Tory Party was impossible to save, a task as hopeless and morally wrong as reviving the popularity of Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. I still think we’d all be better off if it collapsed and died.

 

But money and lies eventually revived the ghastly old monster. Alas for Lord Ashcroft, it was somebody else’s money. He’d been five years too soon.

 

So what good came of his expensively-compiled book in the end? I’ve never doubted that Mr Cameron, like most of his generation, was disastrously soft on drug abusers, but that’s true of all the major parties, the media, the legal profession and the police, and he took this view openly. I don’t believe the story about the pig.

 

One important thing remains. Mr Cameron is not fit to be in charge of our foreign policy. His performance over Libya and Syria, the two biggest reasons for the mass migration crisis now menacing all Europe, was historically, politically and militarily illiterate. In a serious country he should resign and vanish into obscurity.

 

Yet he survives undamaged, which is the true scandal, that is never pursued and will never be punished.

 

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I don’t at all mind George Osborne sucking up to the ghastly old waxworks who run the increasingly aggressive and sensitive Chinese police state.

 

And it is a police state. Peaceable professors, such as Ilham Tohti, are locked up and mistreated after lawless show trials. 

 

Communist activists have recently torn the crosses from 1,200 churches across the People’s Republic, claiming with cynical grins that they are acting to preserve ‘safety and beauty’.  People disappear into the night and fog of a vast Gulag. Human rights lawyers are arrested for defending dissidents.  

 

I don’t mind us canoodling with this awful regime because I can’t afford to.  Thanks to the batty self-defeating foreign policy we have followed since 1914, we are a minor debtor nation in danger of turning into a beggar nation.

 

Well, this is the sort of country we are now. It’s a shame, and a warning against joining wars when you don’t need to, the root of our fall from power and wealth to our current status.

 

Talking of which, let us examine anew Mr Osborne’s righteous wrath against the Assad government in Syria. Recently Mr Osborne said Parliament had been wrong to veto the planned attack on Syria two years ago. He seems to want to try again.

 

This can only mean that he still thinks we should have bombed President Assad’s forces in 2013, an action which would have hugely bolstered the factions which soon afterwards became the Islamic State. Given our furious hostility to IS, this seems to me to be very nearly clinically mad.

 

Indeed, the Cameron-Osborne policy towards Assad has from the start been based on a righteous condemnation of that regime. How can these two men spend so much time seeking favour from the cruel, intolerant despots of China, and imagine that they have any moral right of any kind to condemn Syria? It is a nonsense, and they should grow out of it. We certainly aren’t the world’s policeman any more, and we’re not the world’s vicar either.

 

********

 

Do good books die when nobody can understand them any more? Today’s children would never stand for most of the Victorian and Edwardian books I loved (and still love). The world in which they were written has gone forever.

 

But how strange to see this happening to a 20th century classic, ‘The Go-Between’. I was amazed by the favourable reviews of a dreadful BBC TV adaptation of this bitter, brilliant little book. I don’t think the makers or the reviewers can properly have understood it at all.

 

Apart from the silly, cheap decision to portray one of the main characters naked (when the book makes it quite clear he wasn’t),the main problem was (as it so often is) the faces.

 

The two lovers looked like models, aching for their smartphones, with nothing going on behind their eyes. It was impossible to see these people as the Victorians they were supposed to be.

 

Instead, they were modernised. A needless bit of class-war resentment (about a handkerchief!) was inserted. And the child at the centre of the drama, son of a bank manager and book-collector from Wiltshire, was given a northern accent and asked ‘can I get a cup of tea’, as he would never have done.

 

Look, people, manners, customs, belief and language were all different then. Which bit of ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ don’t you understand?

 

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I don’t normally mention my daily struggles with the railways, as most train commuters have it far worse than I do. But I did laugh when the company which tows me back and forth each day, ‘First Great Western’, tired of being called (with much justice)  ‘Worst Late Western’ and grandiosely changed its name to ‘Great Western Railway’, after Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s matchless enterprise of superb engineering and inventiveness.

 

On the very day of the fanfared change, I was of course held up for ages behind a ‘broken down train’ (You never actually see these, but like ‘signal failures’ and ‘track circuit failures’ you are told about them a lot. Great Western indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

What Do We Know About The Gunman on the Amsterdam-Paris Train?

Let us see what we know about the violent incident on a Paris-bound Thalys train from Amsterdam, which has universally been classified as a terrorist episode – apart from the heartening fact, shown by the astonishingly brave actions of those who overpowered the gunman and saved the life of one of his victims,  that there are still young men among us who are capable of disinterested courage in the face of mortal danger.

Late Addition:  In 'The Guardian' of Tuesday 25th August, see 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/24/chris-norman-describes-how-helped-overpower-french-train-gunman

One of the brave men who overpowered the gunman, British IT consultant Chris Norman , is quoted as saying: “He was slight, he didn’t appear to me to be very strong ... But I was also concerned that he was on drugs of some sort and who knows what kind of strength that can give? So I was being very cautious.” 

 

Who is the arrested man?

Let us start by seeing what we know, or think we know, about Ayoub El-Khazzani, the man of Moroccan origin said to have initiated the attack on the train.

 

His father Mohammed El-Khazzani, born in Morocco in 1950,  told the Daily Telegraph (24/8, p.10) that his son was one of four children. The father, who ‘recycles materials for a living’ This probably means collecting tin cans and other garbage for a tiny pittance, a way of life I have seen people reduced to in many parts of the world from South Africa to Japan, and which is pretty much the lowest point before utter destitution . He does this in one of Algeciras's poorest areas,  El Saladillo.  The weeping parent said that ‘after a troubled spell in Madrid, when he was arrested twice for selling hashish in 2009’, his son had ‘given up smoking the drug’ and seemed very calm. Quite how his father, hundreds of miles away from Madrid, and across the Straits of Gibraltar from Ceuta (another of his son’s haunts) could know if his son had actually given up the drug, or how calm he was, I don’t know.  Other reports ( see below) suggest that this fond parent may have been misinformed.

 

Then, The Daily  Telegraph reported,  the father blamed a French telecommunications company for his son's apparent transformation. He said that six Moroccan youths from Algeciras were taken to work in France 18 months ago on six-month contracts.

 

‘"Then after one month they were just kicked out. What is he meant to do? What is he supposed to eat?" Other residents of El Saladillo were similarly shocked. "He and his brother were very devout, dressed like Afghans, but I can't believe this," said one young man of Moroccan origin.’

 

Do we know he is a terrorist?

The ‘Independent’ of the same day reported that ‘His (El-Khazzani’s) lawyer Sophie David told French television he had denied attempted murder because the Kalashnikov had jammed and no shots were fired . This does not seem to be quite true. Khazzani also had a handgun, which was presumably the source of the one bullet which definitely hit a passenger, Mark Moogalian. Mr Moogalian had exposed himself to peril when he with great bravery grabbed the AK-47 from El-Khazzani.    In a part of the story which seems immensely moving and impressive to me, and which makes me think I should take a course in emergency medicine, Spencer Stone (who had himself had his thumb nearly severed by the gunman) appears to have saved Mr Moogalian’s life by putting his fingers into Mr Moogalian’s neck wound and pressing on the artery until professional help arrived.  How this wound came about if no shot was fired, I am not sure. How many of us would have known how to do this, or been able to do it when the need actually arose in conditions of great fear and confusion, and when ourselves had been savagely slashed and punched in the eye?

 

The claim that the AK-47 had jammed is, as it happens,  confirmed by Spencer Stone’s account  . He told ‘The Guardian’ ‘It (the AK-47) looked like it was jammed’ .  Possibly it had jammed after firing a burst, or a single shot, as Mr Moogalian was definitely shot. More likely (see below) the bullet came from another gun.

 

Stone’s friend Alek Skarlatos (who has served in the Oregon National Guard) said he thought Khazzani ‘clearly had no firearms training’. He did not say this to claim that Khazzani was not dangerous – he specifically stated that he was and could easily have done a lot of harm had he not been overpowered.  It is just an observation which I found interesting in trying to work out what sort of person Khazzani is.

 

His lawyer said (again in the Independent): "He is stunned that his action is being characterised as terrorism,"   Ms David said Khazzani had said he was homeless, and that despite his impressive arsenal of weapons he "didn't seem dangerous to me" but "haggard" and "very thin… as if he had malnutrition".

‘He has told police he was intending to rob the passengers on the train before shooting a window and jumping out, and that he found the weapons in a Brussels public park near the train station.’

 

I have to say I find it hard to believe his claims that he had ‘found’ firearms in a park (if so, why didn’t he leave them where he had found them?) ,  but quite what terrorist purpose would be served by randomly killing people on a train from Amsterdam to Paris I am not sure.

 

I do know that the Brussels station where he boarded the train is the centre of a notoriously lawless zone of that city in which weapons are on widespread illegal sale for criminal purposes. El-Khazzani’s behaviour sounds to me to be chaotic and irrational, rather than trained, organised and purposeful, and I am still waiting for details about how, on what passport and with whose money he made the visit to Syria which he has been widely reported to have undertaken. If he was trained there, his training does not seem to have impressed at least one person who definitely does have military knowledge, Alek Skarlatos.

 

Also from the ‘Independent’ we have this account: ‘Khazzani was placed on France's watch list in 2014 after Spanish security services warned them he may have links to radical Islam, according to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

‘Spanish security sources said he had a police record for drug dealing, and that he travelled to Syria and first came under their radar after attending a Salafist mosque while living in Algeciras with his parents. The suspect denies travelling to Syria, according to [ his lawyer] Ms David.’

Belgium also confirmed Khazzani was known to their intelligence services. Khazzani's father Mohamed was born in Tétuan in Morocco in 1950, according to El Pais newspaper, and moved to Spain in the 1990s.

 

Is there a Cannabis Connection?

Khazzani was arrested twice in 2009 in Madrid for cannabis possession, and again in 2012 in Spanish territory in North Africa(**PH notes: was this for cannabis possession? It is implied but not stated. See below for strong suggestion it was).   In 2015, he reportedly lost his residency permit.’

 

The Times (which is behind a paywall), also reported that  El Khazzani, who is 25, was arrested three times for drugs offences - twice in Madrid in 2009, and for a third time in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, in September 2012. This suggests that the third arrest noted above was for cannabis, and thus his father’s claims (noted above)  that he had given up the drug in 2009 were mistaken.

 

The Times also noted that El Khazzani was listed as a "religious extremist" by  Spanish security police, which led to his details being circulated ( as it seems, rather uselessly) to police forces across the EU . He seems to have been listed as a "dangerous individual".

 

The Times quoted a ‘counter-terrorism source as saying: ’We think that it was while in Jail that he became radicalised," a counterterrorism source said yesterday. ‘This shows the link between drug trafficking and Islamist extremism. It is a habitual way of financing terrorism.’

 

I have not seen any details of jail sentences served by El Khazzani, though the Daily Mirror says today (p.12) that he served time in a Spanish jail for drug offences ‘soon after arriving from Morocco in 2007’ and the Sunday Telegraph reported on 23^rd August that he was ‘reported to have been convicted for drug offences and to have spent some time in a Spanish jail.’  but I certainly concur that many of those Muslims involved in violent incidents, from Ottawa to Woolwich and Paris,  have been involved in petty crime and drugs, generally cannabis. 

 

 

In all such stories, there is an initial fog of confusion, unavoidable in the rush to compile as much information as possible against deadlines. I shall wait until we know a good deal more before jumping to any conclusions.

The Hated Peter Hitchens writes for 'The Big Issue'

Some of you may enjoy this article, written for that excellent enterprise, 'The Big Issue' (oddly enough at the request of Owen Jones, who was its guest editor last week).

 

http://www.bigissue.com/features/interviews/5182/peter-hitchens-i-am-a-trade-unionist-and-i-favour-nationalisation

 

Some of you may not . 

 

 

The Dave diet: hair gel, snake oil and terminological inexactitudes

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
How odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.

Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.

Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.

One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?

It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.

The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.

Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.

You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.

There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.

What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.

I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.

But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve. 

His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.

I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.

IT WAS full of what I will politely call terminological inexactitudes. Of these the greatest was his pretence that he hates being in coalition with Liberal Democrats. All the rest flowed from this falsehood.

Let me remind you of what he said on September 20, 2009, long before he was allegedly ‘forced’ into this arrangement: ‘On so many progressive issues, there is strong agreement between our parties.’ By ‘progressive’, he means left-wing.

The next greatest falsehood was his pretence that he fears Labour more than he fears Ukip. The opposite is true. His Blairite project would be quite safe under Labour.

Only a Ukip breakthrough offers the poor, betrayed British people any hope of real change. The others must lie, because they know their real aims are hateful to us.

No happy ending for story time 

How sad to hear that BBC radio is ending its last children’s programme – because its audience is mostly made up of over-60s.

For me, the words ‘It’s a quarter to two’ and ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’, which began the old programme Listen With Mother, are still infused with magic. I actually did listen to it with my mother, and there were plenty of others who did the same.

We make a lot of fuss about how adults should read to children, but I’m not sure we really do very much about it. It’s difficult. Children are incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere around them, and our age is too noisy and frantic to listen to stories. 

It only works if you can see the story unfolding in your head. And modern children face so many distractions – and have their imaginations hoovered out of their heads by TV and computer games at incredibly early ages.

And language gets cruder and coarser every year. I was enraptured when teachers read Conan Doyle’s great historical romances to us on dark afternoons, and John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights. But how many eight-year-olds can cope these days with their richly embroidered English?

A brave attempt to revive the lost art is being made in Oxford now, by the extraordinary new Story Museum, which should get more attention. It has a real wardrobe, through which you can reach a snowy forest, and many other wonders and surprises.

But above all it is devoted to the idea that children who know stories will grow up happier and richer in spirit than those who don’t.

My homebound train slowed, then halted meaninglessly in the middle of some post-industrial wasteland. Late again. In fact, at least a dozen trains were held up by about half an hour, on a major line.

This happens so often that I wouldn’t mention it, except that the delay was blamed on a mysterious ‘object’ on the line, which announcers were careful not to name.

My mind raced. What could it be that was so bad they couldn’t mention it? A dead sheep? A lavatory? A coffin? A Human Right?

By diligent enquiry, I found in the end that it was... a solitary plastic traffic cone. Instead of hooking it off the track with a pole, or jumping down and picking it up, or just letting trains biff it out of the way, now legally perilous, those in charge launched a major alert, as signals switched to red for miles around.

Of course they knew it was silly – that’s why they wouldn’t reveal what the object was. But this is the state of our country since the Thatcher and Major Governments allowed no-win-no-fee lawyers to operate – in the full knowledge of the misery and stupidity they had already brought to the USA. Next time I’ll ring the Cones Hotline – if it still exists.

The Prime Minister says he prefers pounds, pints, yards and miles to litres and metres. Perhaps he does, or perhaps he is just saying that because he knows it plays well with people like me.

If he really means it, then he can do something about it. For many years, the Government – and increasingly the BBC – have acted as if Parliament abolished our traditional measurements.

It never did. Nor was it ever discussed at a General Election. What’s more, these measures are still used in the USA, a successful and efficient country with which we do a lot of trade.

Yet schools and officials act as if feet and inches, yards and acres are antiquated and subversive, coldly refusing to use them. There’s no warrant for this. Mr Cameron has the power to stop it. Everyone in this country should know how many inches make a foot, and how many pounds there are in a stone.

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From a Delayed Train - Identity Cards, Bishops and Kenneth Clarke

I must apologize to readers for the absence of new postings here today. I was caught in a typical post-privatization jam-up on the railways this morning (and no it's not rose-tinted glasses.There simply was not so much of this in the days of BR). And then I had a speaking engagement at a school in Watford, so all the hours I had meant to spend blogging were eaten up by waiting in the hope the jam would clear, followed by lengthy re-routing.

 

During a brief period of wi-fi, I managed to write a little on the fiddly keyboard of a portable device:

 

A few responses. Passports and driving licences are not identity cards, unless we allow them to be used as such. Each of these documents is issued for a specific purpose. it is quite possible to have neither and survive quite well.  nobody has any business asking to see them unless you are driving a car or travelling abroad. You are not required to carry them. Even a driving licence does not have to be produced on the spot, but can be taken - on police request - to a police station within a reasonable time.


Personally I have always refused requests from hotels or traders to produce a passport when registering or paying. They have no legal right to request this and if everyone simply says 'no' then it cannot be imposed. The trouble is, of course! that so many people are ready to be pushed around in this way.

It is this misguided meekness that has allowed many of the attacks on our liberty which we have endured during the last century . World War One was the point at which the state in England began to recover powers it had lost in the previous four centuries, simply because states naturally do this, as plants grow towards the light. The supposedly unanswerable pretext of national peril always seems to work, perhaps because the mass media are always so horribly willing to go along with it.

Patriotism, which once included a pride in our unique freedom, was perverted to support the extinction of freedom. The interesting process by which our right to bear arms was whittled away by bureaucratic action is described in my book 'A Brief History of Crime'. The chapter involved was deemed so shocking that I removed it from the book's paperback incarnation, 'The Abolition of Liberty'. I learned during that experience that many modern men and women find actual human liberty too gamey and strong-flavoured for their sensitive taste-buds. I quite understand this. Freedom *is* frightening, and people often don't like it as much as they claim to do - the same is even more true of freedom of speech, hated in fact by millions.

The deepest difficulty for friends of liberty is in fact the attitude of people such as Mr 'Bunker', who can see nothing wrong in being required by the state to 'prove ' who they are.  Of course, the possession of state-issued documents proves nothing of the kind. States can be defrauded and often are. All such people are doing is conceding to the state a weird monopoly on identity, and allowing it to take a power which it ought not to have. If people such as Mr 'Bunker' subscribed to private organisations which offered to provide documents giving their names, addresses, personal details and pictures, it wouldn't  trouble me , as long as such things were entirely voluntary and conferred no advantage. The truth is that we have quite enough ways in which commercial organisations can make reasonable checks on our ability to pay (some would say too many) and anything else really needs to be left to the criminal law. 

....

But it wasn't a day for lengthy reflections on assisted dying, cabinet reshuffles, women Bishops or other subjects I might have got round to.  They'll have to wait (though I would stress once again that the supporters of women Bishops could have had their way *years* ago, had thye been ready to be kinder to those who oppose the idea. the general impression given by media coverage, that the delay is caued by obdurate traditionaists, is misrepresentation. I should also record my regret at the departure of Ken Clarke form the government. I do not agree with Mr Clarke about anything much, but he represents a strand of opinion which deserves a hearing, and he is a human being with a sense of proportion and an understanding of real life.

 

Can I ask readers not to moan about those posts which draw readers' attention to my new book? I have absolutely no shame about doing this - there is no point in a book if nobody reads it, it is in my view a very good book,  and my experience is that you have to keep on adrawing people's attention to something again and again before most people will even notice it. I am also quite enitled to point out that I have difficuties in getting such material published not least to deal with the incessant moans of the other lot, who say annoyingly that they won't buy it until it's in hard covers, which will be at about the same time we get Middle East Peace. Guys, I published it as an e-book only after I was sure it was the only way to do so. The only tiny chance of a three-dimensional book would come if it broke all records as an e-book, which won't happen if people hold off from buying it. A paradox, but there you are. So many true things are paradoxes.