Personally I think this interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjLmw4bgq0
sounds better without vision. I should have noticed the curious up-the-nostrils angle of the camera, which generally means the person employing it wants to make you look stupid. I doubt if it was intentional in this case, but even so, it's no fun to watch for any length of time.
Today , for the second time in five months, a left-wing elite paid the price of ignoring, for many years, the warnings of civilised and tolerant conservatives. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been, when trying to debate politics with readers of the Guardian and the New York Times.
To suggest to them that mass immigration is risky and destabilising; to urge that the married family needs to be supported, not dissolved; to say that education needs more rigour, discipline and selection; to advocate the deterrent punishment of crime rather than its indulgence; to suggest that pornography and swearing may damage civility; to object to attempts to abolish national borders and sovereignty; to say that violent liberal intervention in foreign countries is dangerous and wrong… any or all of these things has earned me a patronising sneer, a lofty glance, a dismissal as if I am some sort of troglodyte who has got into the room by mistake.
I said (as I recorded here a few weeks ago) to such people that they should listen to me while they could. I was content if they would only listen to me and moderate their policies. I did not even seek to wrest power from them, if they would only moderate their dogmatic revolutionary drive. I believed (and still believe) that they had made a mistake even on their own terms, that they could not possibly want the consequences of what they were doing. In the end, this was the Weimar Republic and they were courting a grave risk that they would eventually drive people too far. The response was sometimes personal abused, sometimes total, frozen indifference, very, very occasionally a brief, fairly uncomprehending attempt to see my point which came to nothing.
Well, now we have what I warned of. I don’t like these deep and increasingly spiteful divisions. I don’t like the crumbling of old constitutional conventions and the increasing treatment of opponents as enemies. I fear where this might lead. I have no desire to fight my fellow countrymen.
But all I can say is that I told you so. I cannot see what I can actually do, except try not to make things worse. Actually, my willingness to listen sympathetically to some of the worries of the Remainers has met with total indifference too. I doubt if one in a thousand of them even knows that I disapprove of the Referendum and that I think they had a case at the High Court. Even now they are so self-righteous they cannot imagine any opponent giving them the consideration they would never give in return. People who think their own opinions make them virtuous have the most closed minds of all. But I’ll carry on trying.
Sick as I am of this behaviour, it has not sent me over the edge of rage and into unreason. I refused to be beguiled into supporting Donald Trump, a yahoo and braggart whose views possibly coincide with mine on two or three things. It seemed absurd to be expected to support Mr Trump because I also did not support Hillary Clinton, a woman lost in a sea of money and liberal delusions, who has somehow persuaded herself that war is good. The same process works backwards. Neither will do. I have said it before, but it bears saying again. I don’t buy goods I don’t want, just because the shop involved has nothing I do want.
Voting is not a duty in such circumstances. If only people had the sense to see it an d act accordingly, not voting is a much higher duty. If neither of these terrible candidates had achieved more than 15% of the vote, how could they claim any serious mandate for the things they want to do. Yet, without resistance, the two halves of America agreed on one thing, That it was better to vote for disaster than not to vote at all.
Disaster? Hillary’s war policy in Syria would certainly have been one. Mr Trump’s economic policy, such as it is, which we don’t really know, and his general lack of respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers, threaten a different sort of catastrophe. I cannot see this ending happily. His other promises may also prove hard to keep. Those old stories about wicked necromancers raising demons, and then not being able to send them back where they came from, seem to me to be metaphors for modern-day political alchemists who raise huge hopes which they know they cannot satisfy, so summoning into being crowds which can all too easily become mobs, and will not go home when asked. What then?
Catastrophes happen in real life. I have seen them in Russia and elsewhere. Jobs gone, homes gone, savings wiped out between supper and breakfast, shortages of everything from milk to electricity. People survive. But it’s not very nice. Just because your entire life hitherto has been lived in peace, stability and security, doesn’t mean this is guaranteed to last forever. It could be you, ten years’ hence, selling your worldly possessions at the roadside (as in the opening scenes of ‘The Third Man’) to stay alive.
Someone has cut the ropes, and we are adrift on a strange, sinister, powerful current towards an unknown destination which it might be better never to reach at all. The liberal democracies have exhausted their form of government, which is increasingly using democracy to reject liberalism, but in an angry and impatient way. This, no doubt, is due to the policies pursued by our existing rulers for 50 years. But I do not think that will make the experience any more comfortable. Anger and contempt for your opponents are poor foundations for civilised government.
There is little we can now do to change this fate. It would be like paddling with your hands to fight the force of the Gulf Stream. Maybe Mr Trump will turn out to have been kidding us. Maybe he will surround himself with advisers of brilliance and subtlety, who will prove to have mastered the problems of reintroducing protection in a world governed by open borders and increasingly dominated by China. Maybe all that stuff about jailing his opponent was just talk. Maybe, despite all those years of, er, locker-room behaviour Mr Trump will turn out after all to be a Christian gentleman in office upholding the ancient virtues. I do hope so. But forgive me if I decline to be optimistic.
Some readers my find this interesting
http://www.disrupter.media/peter-hitchens-gone-wrong-western-politics/
Some of you may enjoy this interview I gave to 'Conservative Woman'. Some of you may not:
My prophecy department has suggested that I should write about the fall in the Pound Sterling. I feel very much entitled to do so as have been standing on the platform with my watch in my hand, drumming my fingers and waiting for this particular long-expected event to come steaming in, for some time now.
Rather more than three years ago, I wrote the following:
‘..One of the things which constantly strikes me about modern Britain is that there must be many people who would actually quietly like to see the collapse , or at least the shrinkage, of the currency. They cannot hope to pay off their debts in any other way .The same is true of the government, which has no idea how it will manage its deficit, and borrows more each day, an action no less stupid than Weimar Germany’s incessant printing of worthless money. How convenient a large inflation would be for them.
‘Could anyone do such a thing deliberately? Possibly. The book (‘When Money Dies’, which I was reviewing at the time) quotes but does not endorse suggestions that both the Bolsheviks and some of the Warsaw Pact states deliberately used hyperinflation to destroy the hierarchies, the certainties and the middle classes which stood in their way. I have seen no proof of this, but it is not incredible, and we all know John Maynard Keynes’s attribution to Lenin of the (justified) belief that if you wish to destroy a nation, you first debauch its currency. It is also a very good way of destroying the power and influence of the independent middle class, who are the mainstay of any truly free and law-governed society, and the reliable regiments of conservatism.
‘But of course those who are in charge of all these things are not Bolsheviks.
‘They are ordinary politicians, far too stupid to be so well-organised or directed. It is just an accident, a bungle, an unintended consequence by people too dim and short-sighted to understand that bills have, in the end, to be paid somehow. I am not sure whether that makes it any better, though. The results will still be very bad.’
For full article see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/when-money-dies-the-horrors-of-inflation.html
…
And also this :’ It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness. Why do they do it?
It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a government which never had any ideas in the first place. As far as I can find out , Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t actually say ‘The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency’. Maynard Keynes rather hesitantly attributed it to the old monster. But it’s true, whoever said it. Since Gold-backed currencies gave way to paper, man has had to have faith in banknotes – so much faith that perhaps he hasn’t had the strength to have faith at the same time in God, who is considerably more credible than the average Cabinet or Central Bank.
He has to believe absolutely that the pretty blue, green or pink beer-token in his wallet is worth the goods which he purchases with it, and so does the shopkeeper who accepts it in return for those goods. He has to believe with all his heart that the columns of figures in his bank account stand for real value, along with the price he thinks he can get for his house if he sells it.
Once he ceases to do so, then money dies.
For full article see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/inflation-the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings-speak.html
Well, this is coming to pass, and it is most provoking to be told that it is ‘caused’ by the referendum vote to leave the EU. No doubt this event was the trigger for the rapid slide of Sterling. But that was because the markets were waiting for such a trigger, and no doubt a lot of currency dealers, by gambling on a ‘Leave’ vote, did well in the money markets by betting on a post-referendum drop.
Sop now it has become established wisdom, and it may even be that, because the media are used by the markets to bring about little jumps and falls in the ratings of stocks or currencies, we will now see a constant link between the two, with each stumble and shudder along the road to exit being followed or accompanied by a lurch in the currency.
But this is correlation, not causation. Those with savings have known for years that inflation has been eating into their carefully hoarded stores of wealth, pensions included, thanks to the virtual abolition of interest and the repeated raids on pension schemes by Labour and Tory chancellors, which have nearly killed off what was once quite a solid sector of the economy, and left a lot of people wondering if they’ll die before the money runs out, or the other way round. . The message from investment advisers has been ‘put your money in something risky if you want to earn anything’. The old idea, that you could make a steady if modest income by just leaving the money on a reasonably safe deposit, is gone, I think for good.
But now those without savings, those living from hand-to-mouth and those (almost everyone under 60) with non-mortgage debts, must experience it too. For them it is a much more mixed experience. Their debts will visibly shrink, which they (and the government, whose debts will also shrivel visibly) will enjoy. But a lot of prices will rise, because we now import so much, and foreign holidays, which so many now regard almost as a right, will become swiftly costlier (perhaps it is time for British holidaymakers to sample the cheaper joys of the Crimea) . Our few export industries will be delighted. Those which rely on imported goods for their raw materials and fuel will not be. My guess, on the basis of what I think I know about our economy, is that a lower pound will hurt us more than it helps us.
Having experienced Harold Wilson’s famous 1967 devaluation (from $2-80 to £2-40) I am trained to laugh at political claims that it won’t hurt the money in your pocket. But in those days the government took direct responsibility for it, and was blamed for it. I wasn’t born in September 1949, when the Attlee government devalued from $4-03 to $2-80, it was a much more savage loss. But the country was well aware ( as it isn’t now) that it had run out of money and credit, and the humiliation just had to be absorbed. Fear of an even more humiliating repeat forced the Tories to abandon the Suez adventure seven years later.
Almost exactly 18 years before, in September 1931, Britain had come off the Gold Standard, Winston Churchill’s disastrous equivalent to the ERM crisis, unsustainable because we were broke and in debt, which we had not been in 1914 when he had helped get us into the Great War that ruined us financially. At that time the Pound sold for $4-87, roughly the same as the just under Five Dollars standard before 1914 (it is amusing to recall that transatlantic travellers reckoned in those days that the old English shilling was the exact equivalent of the American Quarter, which it also closely resembled in size and weight). During the US Civil War, in 1864, the Pound brought in almost ten dollars, peaking at $9-97. That’s war for you, so it is surprising that during World War One, while Britain was piling up a huge unrepayable (and still unrepaid) debt to the USA, the rate did not sink below $4-76, and fell only to $4-43 when hostilities ended, reaching $3-66 in 1920 before being dragged up again by the return to the Gold Standard.
During the 1930s the dollar-pound rate fluctuated between about 3-15 to above 5-00, but in 1940 was fixed at just above four dollars for the rest of the war.
These figures, like the old rate between Sterling and the abolished Deutschemark, always seem to me to give a true idea of how we were really doing against comparable economies in these periods. The answer is, increasingly badly. But the current account deficit, not the same as the trade deficit or the Treasury deficit, is now about as bad as it has ever been, and I can think of no peacetime circumstances when the fundamental features of the economy have ever been so bad, and had so little hope of sustained recovery. To blame the pound’s fall on the referendum is absurd.
This recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZIL2Y0QtYI&feature=share
features a discussion I had last month one evening in a pleasant bar and grill in my favourite US small town, Moscow, Idaho.
Moderating the discussion is my friend Doug Wilson, the former US Navy submariner, now a Calvinist pastor, educator, author and blogger whose debate on same-sex marriage (with Andrew Sullivan) I moderated in the same city a couple of years ago.
On both occasions I fell ill on the way there and was in danger of losing my voice, which is why I am chewing something in a rather preoccupied way before this discussion begins. If I'd realised my mastication was on record, I'd have swallowed whatever it was.
The other participant is the very interesting American writer, Walter Kirn, whose latest book 'Blood Will Out' has just achieved a great success, and whose novel 'Up in the Air' was filmed starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. I hope his lecture on the art of essay-writing, given the next day at the same festival (called 'Wordsmithy') , is also available on YouTube. It was very good indeed. If you want to read a good example of Mr Kirn's style, an autobiographical essay 'Lost in the Meritocracy' (later lengthened in to a book) is a good start. It is easily available on the web.
A lot of people are writing and talking as if the latest revelations of oafish coarseness, both about women and about the rule of law, have finished Donald Trump’s run for the Presidency of the United States. I am, alas, not so sure.
I have no special access to the mind of the American masses, but in occasional brushes with Trump supporters I have found them armoured against almost any criticism of the Republican Candidate. If all else fails (and it does) they can point wordlessly at Mrs Clinton, and ask me if I really want her in the White House. Indeed I do not.
But I respond to this false choice by saying that there is no moral duty to vote in such a contest, and that in fact a large-scale refusal to vote would rob both candidates of much of the legitimacy they will need to push their worst policies through Washington.
If either is elected, then we must hope for a weak Presidency and a strong Congress, and a strong Supreme Court. This is not because I am especially keen on the composition of any of the three Houses of the US Parliament (though the highest, and happily unelected House, the Supreme Court, does contain some conservative thought). It is because it is the best hope that we will get through the next four (or, horrors, eight) years of Trump or Clinton without too much damage being done.
Last week a group of conservative thinkers and writers (possibly with the worst timing in modern history) publicly endorsed Mr Trump. I know and like some of them, and am baffled that they could do such a thing. Yet that is precisely the problem. There is a gulf between us that cannot be crossed, as far as I can see, by reason or facts. They (and I) are against the left’s subversion of Christian society. They have decided that Mr Trump is in fact an ally in that struggle, however awful he looks.
Well, it’s their country. But I think the problem of Mr Trump’s personality is just as strong as the problem of Mrs Clinton’s politics.
Yes, I know Mr Trump has sprayed out a number of positions on freed trade, borders, migration and foreign policy which, if taken by someone else, I might find interesting. Some of them may even be his genuine opinion. But because he is an oaf, apparently unrestrained in private by any recognisable code of civility, they do not excuse him. If his understanding of the proper relations between men and women (surely one of the most important tests of a human being) are so utterly wrong, and if he has also no clear grasp of the rule of law, the very basis of liberty, how can he be expected to conduct relations between states, or be chief magistrate, in a proper way?
His counter-criticisms of *Bill*Clinton are indeed powerful. My late brother Christopher looked into the behaviour of the supposed ‘Man from Hope’ (in fact he was the man from Hot Springs, a very different and less folksy location) and found him gravely wanting. At one stage I spent a lot of time chatting on the phone to a lady called Paula Jones, whose hilarious accounts of an informal encounter with the then Arkansas Governor are still fixed in my mind. Mr Clinton did not rise in my estimation. But actually these things are not the point. Bill is not running for President - and those of us who believe in lifelong marriage, forgiveness, forbearance, patience etc cannot really attack Mrs Clinton for enduring her husband’s decades of errant, greedy behaviour. What exactly would we have preferred her to do?
Set beside this Mr Trump’s apparent threat to use Presidential power to influence the judicial process("If I win, I am going to instruct my Attorney General to get a special prosecutor to look into your (missing email) situation,") , and you see two different kinds of danger. I have written here that I fear Mrs Clinton’s warmongering instincts ( So, I think, does Vladimir Putin, which is probably why he hopes to destroy the anti-Assad Islamist militias in eastern Aleppo before she has the chance to take office).
But isn’t a man who doesn’t properly understand the separation of powers even more frightening? States in which prosecutors are directed by politicians are surely not free. Does Mr Trump really not know that this is a breach of the principles that the USA is based on? I suspect not. I suspect, in fact, that he knows very little. Sure, he has various paper qualifications. But this country, likewise, is full of ‘university graduates’ whose grasp of the most basic principles of liberty and law is terrifyingly poor (the public response to the George Bell case, many times mentioned here, and the Church of England’s own total misunderstanding of English law, are examples of this).
So whatever apparent gifts he bears, I must continue to insist that it is quite wrong for conservatives, especially Christians, to be beguiled by them. Isn’t this also the great lesson of Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’, that earthly power blights and blasts those who hold it, and that pursuing good ends by using bad means will never work?
And yet, I still feel I am shouting into a room where everyone’s back is turned on me. Maybe this is just wise pessimism, but Mr Trump’s supporters have already endured and excused so much, I cannot see even this putting them off. Do not be surprised if he wins on November 8th and is inaugurated before an appalled capital in January. And just because the Washington establishment (whom I do not love) are appalled, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be too.
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
Here in my favourite American small town, I detect a strange, ominous feeling of approaching danger. Something has gone wrong with the USA.
I first came to Moscow, Idaho, eight years ago when the great Obama frenzy was at its unhinged peak. This is a divided place, traditional rural conservatives living alongside a Left-wing university campus, but in 2008 they coped with their deep divisions in the usual way.
People disagreed, but they did it politely and openly, and were ready to accept the result even if they did not like it. Almost every front lawn had its partisan placard.
Now politics has gone underground in an almost sinister way. I searched the town’s pleasant suburbs for a Trump or Clinton poster and found none, only a single defiant declaration of support for America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Left-winger Bernie Sanders, who long ago quit the race.
Republican headquarters in Main Street until recently contained posters supporting lots of the party’s candidates for local office, but none at all for Donald Trump. Last week they finally managed to mention his name, but you have to look carefully for it in their window.
Democrat HQ, almost directly opposite, is nearly as coy about Hillary Clinton.
In private conversations (the only sort where people will say what they really think), you find out what this means. Democrats are holding their noses over Hillary because they despise her and wish she wasn’t their candidate.
But many Republicans are stifling their genuine enthusiasm for Trump, because – in small towns like this – they don’t want to annoy or alienate neighbours who may also be customers, clients, patients or employers.
Of course there are conservatives, usually serious Christians, who loathe and mistrust Donald Trump and see him for what he is – a balloon of noise and bluster which will one day burst in a terrible explosion of disappointment and regret.
But they have been swept aside by the great carnival of resentment and revenge which has carried Trump past all the obstacles and restraints that are supposed to prevent such people getting near real power. For Trump is the anti-Obama – emotional, irrational, a spasm.
Those who had to sit, grinding their teeth, through all the long-years of Obama-worship, now hope for their own matching hour of gloating.
And we really ought to recognise that rejoicing over the woes of your enemies is one of the greatest sinful pleasures in life. Few will turn down the chance.
I can see no good outcome of this. Adversarial politics are a good thing, but only if both sides are ultimately willing to concede that their rivals are entitled to win from time to time. But that attitude seems to have gone. Now the rule is that the winner takes all, and hopes to keep it if he (or she) can.
A narrow defeat for Trump will poison the republic. Millions of his supporters will immediately claim fraud at the polls, and nothing will convince them otherwise. The bitterness of the Florida ‘hanging chad’ episode of 2000 will seem like brotherly love compared with that fury.
A victory for Trump – decisive or narrow – will give astonishing powers to a lonely, inexperienced, ill-educated old man who (I suspect) is increasingly terrified of winning a prize he never really intended or expected to obtain.
A clear victory for Hillary Clinton would create even greater problems. Educated, informed people here believe that there are serious doubts about her health. Even if they are wrong, her militant interventionist foreign policies are terrifying.
I lived through the Cold War and never believed we were in real danger. But I genuinely tremble at the thought of Mrs Clinton in the White House. She appears to have learned nothing from the failed interventions of the past 30 years, and scorns Barack Obama’s praiseworthy motto: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’
She will do stupid stuff, and drag us into it, you may rely upon it.
How odd it is, to hear on the air the faint but insistent sound of coming war, here in this place of sweet, small hills, rich soil and wistful, mountainous horizons.
Men came here in search of what we all really desire, to be left alone to get on with the really important aims of life, to build a home and raise a family, to see the fruits of their labour, to believe what they wish to believe.
I cannot quite work out how the good, sane impulse that gave birth to the USA could possibly have led us to this nightmare choice between two equally horrible outcomes.
I shall just have to carry on hoping that I am wrong.
Syria's 'WMD moment': Don't be duped again
Almost everyone (barring a tiny knot of deluded losers) knows that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. Most people now grasp that Colonel Gaddafi wasn’t planning a massacre in Benghazi or ordering his troops to engage in mass rapes.
How long will it be before we also grasp that neither Russia nor Syria bombed a UN aid convoy in Aleppo?
This incident, about which almost no independently testable, checkable facts have yet been produced, is the WMD of Syria. If we all fall for it, then we shall very soon find ourselves embroiled in the most dangerous international confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis.
Under immense pressure from the despots of Saudi Arabia, the USA will not give up its efforts to overthrow the Syrian government. It is clear that it is now prepared to risk an open confrontation with Moscow to achieve this. Why? Who do they think they are, and how can their cause be so good that they take such risks?
The deliberate sabotage of a workable peace deal in Syria (opposed from the start by the Pentagon) is one of the scandals of our age. There was a chance we might end the misery of millions, and it was thrown away.
We in Britain must resist being dragged into a Syrian war, not least because, if we are, it will not be long before any troops we send there are being hounded in their own country for alleged war crimes. We’ve been fooled enough by this propaganda. Don’t be bamboozled again.
We'll beat Corbyn with reason - not abuse
Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it, including Corbyn.
Look, there are plenty of good arguments against Jeremy Corbyn, the best one being his absurd thought-free loathing for grammar schools. Some of the greatest socialists in this country, notably the 1930s Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson, and that fine teacher and socialist Eric James, realised that such schools helped the poor.
But please can people stop proclaiming that Labour cannot win an Election with Mr Corbyn at its head? It is such a stupid thing to say, that every time I hear it I want to beat my head against the nearest wall.
Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it. It is dead in Scotland and the South of England. And why on earth, after the 13-year catastrophe of the Blair government, do so many people seem so anxious to back the ghastly, dishonest Blairites against Mr Corbyn, who is at least open and honest about what he intends?
I personally prefer that to the conscious fraud practised by the Blairites and their Tory equivalents, the Cameroons, who pretended to be patriots and friends of the family, and turned out to be neither.
Mr Corbyn, as well as being generally right about foreign policy, actually confronts the issues that worry many people. His answers may be wrong, but if we listened to him and debated with him, instead of abusing him, this country and its people would benefit.
Freedom is all about being forced to listen to people we disagree with, and to defeat them (if we can) with facts and logic. The Corbyn abusers should try it.
**
*******
When will we learn that making new laws is useless unless we enforce them? It is no good having ‘tough’ laws against texting while driving unless lots of people are caught, prosecuted and punished for this.
Now car manufacturers, with breathtaking cynicism, are marketing new models with dashboard internet screens. This will undoubtedly mean more pointless deaths. My suggestion is that such cars should only be sold if the driver’s seatbelt and airbag are removed first, and that they should not be permitted to have any insurance apart from third party cover. Too many drivers think they are invulnerable. That is why they kill.
*
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
There is such a thing as good television, and most people will, on Sunday night, have missed one of the best programmes shown here for a very long time.
But you can still see it here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07v3vzz/a-very-british-deterrent
This was a dramatized documentary ‘A Very British Deterrent’ which , with actors impersonating several leading figures, examined the events leading up to the Nassau Agreement, basis of our ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent.
The programme was made by BBC Scotland, and plainly has a strong interest in the siting of nuclear forces in Scotland, very unpopular there then and since, for understandable reasons. But I must confess (and here open myself to the jibes of better-read readers) that I had not previously heard many of the details of the dealings between Harold Macmillan and Dwight Eisenhower, and then between Macmillan and John F. Kennedy.
The hopeless failure of the foredoomed Blue Streak rocket is broadly known. So is the failure of the air-launched Skybolt missiles with which the USA offered to supply us to cover our nuclear nakedness in the post-Sputnik era.
But I have never before seen details of the pressure placed on the British government to allow the basing of US nuclear missile submarines in the Holy Loch, never heard of the RB-47 incident(similar to the U2 incident which is world famous, but different because the plane was based in the UK, see here http://sw.propwashgang.org/rb47.htm ) and had never seen anything like so much detail of the Nassau talks themselves, in which the Anglo-American alliance very nearly unravelled altogether, and Harold Macmillan more or less admitted that it was ridiculous for Britain to try to maintain itself as a nuclear power. I suppose so many of these things are *known* to specialists and close readers of memoirs and official histories, but not to the rest of us. It is rather shaming.
What little I did know about Nassau had always puzzled me. How had we managed to get something so large – American Polaris missiles, which we would fit with warheads and house in our own submarines, out of the Americans? I didn’t know they tried to fob us off, even at that stage, with what they themselves described as a turkey, the failed Skybolt project, nor how direct Kennedy was in trying to make it explicit that we would have no real control over Polaris missiles.
I also note the involvement of US Admiral Arleigh Burke, who long-term readers here will have met before in 1956, advising the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, that if he really wants to stop the Suez operation, then he will have to order the US Navy to ‘blast’ the Royal Navy.
The programme is a bit CND-tinged for me, though this gives the excuse for an annoyingly short clip of Bertrand Russell speaking, a sight and sound I can never tire of. But it is a fine piece of historical documentary work, illustrated with some rare, evocative film, and some intelligent and (so far as I can see) truthful dramatisation of real events, only undermined by needless music trying to tell us to be alarmed, excited, suspicious, etc.
This is an expanded version of a response to a comment on my MoS column item about Donald Trump. Like almost all pro-Trump comments it was couched in the form ‘So you think Hillary Clinton is better, then, do you? Are you a warmonger or what?’
Well, of course I am not a warmonger and I believe I may have been one of those included in Mrs Clinton’s long-ago denunciation of a supposed ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ against the Clintons. I do not like or love the Clintons and have many criticisms of them. But this does not oblige me to like or support Mr Trump either.
Why cannot the defenders of Mr Trump avoid the 'Hillary is worse' argument? Is it because it is all they really have?
I have never said she was better. I would have an absolute objection to Mr Trump on the basis of the kind of person I think him to be, as a result of his own undisguised, unconcealed public behaviour and his unembarrassed, even boastful chosen statements.
As it is absolute, I would maintain it if he was standing against the Devil Himself.
And, as I should not have thought needed pointing out, it is not compulsory to vote for either candidate. Perhaps Mr Trump cannot be stopped, but at least American voters are free to be morally clean of the act of voting for him.
There are times when there is a stronger duty not to vote than to vote. This could be one of them .
And I am shocked at the willingness of American 'conservative' voters to fall so flaccidly, fawningly and sycophantically for Mr Trump's crude pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap propaganda skills, and his muscleman machismo, like one of those body-building advertisements from a 1950s comic. When a campaign is aimed at inadequates and weaklings, as this sort of thing always is, surely it is a sign of maturity to reject it?
By doing this it was they who eliminated all alternatives, to secure him the Republican nomination.
They did this while his unlovely personal characteristics have been on full display. There were other possibilities, by no means as bad as Hillary. They destroyed them all in the adulatory frenzy of Trumpoid worship.
They are the ones who have created the choice between him and Hillary, which I would blame nobody for turning away from.
Now they have the nerve to tell us that , by rejecting their idol, whom they have worked so hard to turn into the only alternative to Hillary, we must automatically become Hillary supporters. It is not so.
Even if it were, it was a choice they must have seen coming, which they actively worked for, which they have themselves created and can’t blame others for disliking.
I am also puzzled that people are so readily persuaded by Mr Trump’s adoption of some supposed ‘policies’, which they like. I might like some of them too, but I am not so easily bought, thank you. What if he has, in the manner of quite a few political figures in history, adopted them because voters like them, not because he does, or because he has any real interest in them or in implementing the?
I believe he has been consistent in his view of global trade, though it is hard to see how free he will be to do anything about this if he is elected. But all else seems to me to be adopted for the moment, in some cases quite deliberately to shock and distress one group, thus pleasing and wooing that group's enemies. There's a word for this, one associated with the Clintons as it happens, but I can't quite recall what it is.
In short, having chosen him as the Republican nominee, they now try to argue that anyone who didn't and doesn't agree with them is a Hillary supporter(implication : get with the programme, buster) .
This is the behaviour of people with totalitarian minds. Those who are not with us, they believe, are against us. When this combines with the (always worrying) belief that a majority decides all things, it scares me. It should scare you too.
