An Analysis of my Thoughts on the US Election

Some readers my find this interesting

 

http://www.disrupter.media/peter-hitchens-gone-wrong-western-politics/

To the Trumpoids: It is You Who Made This a Choice Between Trump and Clinton

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.  

PETER HITCHENS: Sorry, but I won't be saluting the dimmest Cabinet in our history

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why is it supposed to be a good thing that the new Cabinet are worse-educated than the old one? Half the media trumpeted on Friday that Theresa May’s new Government was full of state-educated Ministers, as if this were a cause for rejoicing.

But why should it be? It is a regrettable fact that this country’s private schools are vastly, incomparably better than all but a very few of its state schools. All figures and results confirm this. All employers know it.

And almost all the good state schools are academically selective grammar schools, a tiny, hugely oversubscribed remnant of survivors, utterly untypical of the state sector. And they must remain a pitiful few dozen, besieged by desperate parents – because it is against the law to open any new ones.

Most of the other good state schools select just as ruthlessly, judging pupils by their parents’ ability to afford expensive houses, or to fake religious belief, or both at once.

So what is there to celebrate about all these new Ministers? Either they have taken advantage of a rare privilege just as unfair as that used by fee-paying parents, and more secret. Or they have been poorly educated and are not going to be very good at their jobs as a result.

This very odd cult of state education among politicians used to be confined to the Labour Party, where the worse the school was, the more virtue points you scored. Private education was a matter of shame. A grammar school education was often concealed. 

I once caught a Labour MP pretending to have gone to a comprehensive when he hadn’t – because none had existed in his home city at the time. Then, the Tory Party turned into the Labour Party.

The transformation is now complete, which is why the Labour Party is biting its own tail trying to work out what on earth it is for.

And Tory politicians started bragging about sending their children to state schools, as well as looking embarrassed about having been privately educated themselves.

Mrs May seldom mentions her time at a private convent school, and tried for years to keep quiet about her grammar school days, though she now seems to have decided to trade on it as it suits her new image as the woman from Middle England.

But none of this changes the fact that in the 50 years since most grammar schools were abolished, state education in this country has been in decline – and that the continuing existence of private schools has shown it up again and again.

So let’s have no boasting about having the worst-educated Cabinet in modern history.

Instead let’s restore the lost grammar and direct grant schools that were taking on and beating the private schools at their own game, until politicians destroyed them.

Roll up for Theresa's street theatre! 

There is lots of talk about a supposedly ‘brutal’ reshuffle. But actually the fall of David Cameron is much more like an old-fashioned General Election than a reshuffle.

My generation were quite used to the rather satisfying sight of Alec Douglas-Home’s sofa, or Harold Wilson’s desk, or Ted Heath’s piano being carted out of Downing Street by whistling removal men. They lost. They went. Government really changed, in character and policy.

It was our great triumph that we had peaceful revolutions in which the beaten party were actually turned out, and accepted it. It was good and healthy and I miss it. 

But in recent years the true changes are all inner-party putsches – Lady Thatcher stabbed in the back by her own Cabinet in 1990, the long march of the Blairites in the Labour Party, the ejection of Iain Duncan Smith.

Despite all the flag-waving fuss in 1997, when Labour Party employees were bussed into Downing Street and told to pretend to be a crowd, we’ve had more or less the same government since 1990 – pro-EU, high-spending, politically correct and broadly approved of by Michael Heseltine.

If the millions who voted to leave the EU had had a party, it would have been the opposite of all that, and we’d have had a huge political change.

As it is we have to make do with Mrs May, who personally opposes her government’s main aim of leaving the EU.

And, knowing she is unlikely to deliver what the Leave majority wanted, she has cunningly provided some satisfying street theatre – plenty of heads rolling, some new faces, a furniture van in Downing Street and poor old David Davis, who she no doubt hopes will fail to get us out of the EU, so that she can sack him and do a deal with Brussels that keeps us in, in all but name.

A solution to 'terror' that no one cares about

Thought is the first casualty of terror. Nobody ever actually applies reason to the subject. And so we flounder on, uselessly doing the wrong thing.

In general, we end up doing whatever the most powerful lobby, or the Government, wanted to do anyway. Those who are not thinking ‘This is a good day to bury bad news’ are saying: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

In the US, mass murder is blamed on relaxed gun laws, though other countries with strong gun laws have mass murders. And mass murders are new, as is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, while America’s gun laws are very old.

Over here, mass murder is blamed on Islamic radicalisation – though the killers are almost invariably drugged-up low-lifes with criminal records for violence and theft. I can already be sure that this is what the Nice murderer will turn out to be, once all the facts are in. By definition, devout Muslims wouldn’t live such lives.

And in all cases, politicians reach for blunt instruments, such as France’s state of emergency – which has just been proved useless by the events in Nice, or more surveillance (likewise it failed to find the culprit of this outrage), or stupid travel restrictions, which treat us all like criminal suspects.

And they make pious speeches in which they growl and thunder against terrorists in general. Is this because they feel guilty about the fact that they have negotiated with terrorists in the past, or that they will certainly do so in the future, or how is Martin McGuinness getting to meet the Queen and how is Algeria independent? Either way, I find it unconvincing. So should you.

The best solution, if there is one, lies elsewhere. But there is no lobby for it, so it is never considered. Can you work out what it might be from the words above?

No one ever trusts a Robocop

If you ever wondered whether the growing transformation of police forces into heavily armoured riot squads was a good idea, this picture of protester Ieshia Evans confronting a phalanx of Louisiana cops will confirm your doubts.

The whole point of police in free countries is to be on the side of the people against crime and disorder. 

Once they climb into armour, and rely on menace, they are bound to lose a great deal of our friendliness and trust.And that will mean more armour, more clubs and more guns.

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Why the applause? Goodbye Mr Cameron, and don't come back

Whatever has happened to Britain? It seems as if the whole day has been taken up by the elite congratulating each other. But about what? A Prime Minister who destroyed his own government because he would rather play clever games than develop any principles, but who wasn’t as clever as he thought he was.

Ships’ captains who run their vessels aground in broad daylight are not, in general, piped ashore with much ceremony, let alone surrounded by applauding crewmen and passengers. They slip away out of sight, while others quietly appear on the bridge to see if they can salvage anything from the wreck.

Indeed, Prime Ministers who lose elections or retire have traditionally slipped quietly away, without Huw Edwards on the BBC describing their uninteresting journey down the Mall as if it were  a great state occasion, or BBC helicopters clattering overhead.  

The great thing about this country used to be that a change of government was *not* a great state occasion, but a routine matter, without expensive armoured cars and grandiose police escorts. Real authority resided with and derived from the Monarch, who granted it to those who had been blessed by the electors, for as long as they could keep it.

I loathe this change. We do not have a president. We do not normally permit applause in Parliament, which is supposed never to forget that it contains an opposition, and that many in this country have not given their votes to the government. Why couldn’t he just go?

Mind you, as the man who chivvied his (pathetically pliant) MPs into applauding the Blair creature on his last appearance in the House of Commons he so disliked, he must have hoped to get the same.

The Prime Minister is so only because he or she can command a majority in the Commons (it is by no means sure that Mrs May can count on maintaining such a majority, for various reasons, including known unknowns and unknown unknowns). He or she has no popular mandate (I am glad to say) . We do not have to love or even like him or her. Rather the contrary. 

These sentimental speeches in the Commons and Downing Street (the only street in London which normal human beings are forbidden to enter)  are just not constitutional.

Anyway, why the applause? What is it for? Mr Cameron gave up his job because he realised that he had struck himself such a blow that he could no longer claim to have a mandate, despite his bought-and-paid-for ‘victory’ in the 2015 election, perhaps the most cynically-achieved election result in the modern era.

Having gone, he should have made a resignation statement to the House and departed quietly.

What is there to applaud?

A 1.5 Trillion public debt, matched by a private debt nearly as large, and a budget which continues to require heavy new borrowing every minute, to bring it into balance . A debauched currency, now finally showing the effects of years of printing money through ‘quantitative easing’. A total failure to control mass immigration. A total failure to achieve significant improvement in state education. A total failure to get a grip on crime and disorder (the prisons are bursting and restive). Two utterly disastrous foreign interventions, in Libya and Syria, with the second one less bad than it could have been only because Parliament for once had the sense not to vote for war. National defences (especially the Army and Navy) in tatters.

And a successor who is personally associated with the government’s greatest failure, and disagrees profoundly with her government’s principal aim, an absurdity which still causes the mind to boggle.

 

Applause? What is it for? 

I Told You So

Yes, I told you so.

First of all, we seem to have the constitutional crisis I predicted here :

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-leave-campaign-may-well-be-winning-.html

and here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-british-people-have-risen-at-last-and-were-about-to-unleash-chaos.html

and , as it began to unfold, here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-british-people-have-risen-at-last-and-were-about-to-unleash-chaos.html

I was confident of this because the referendum had always seemed to me to be a violation of the supremacy of Parliament. How can you have two rival democratic mandates competing for supremacy over an issue of vital national importance? Who will decide which one is in charge? The political bog into which we are now squelching is a result. The pro-EU faction are determined, with the support of the BBC and many others, to de-legitimise the anti-EU majority. Supposedly, we didn’t mean to do it, we were misled, and we didn’t really vote for what we thought we were voting for etc. I said things of this kind would happen,as they did when the people of Ireland voted against the EU constitution - and they have, and they will.

The initiative launched this week by Mishcon de Reya http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-law-idUKKCN0ZK0HZ is just part of this effort, combined with squeaky Europhile demonstrations (where do they find them, people actually enthusiastic for this lumpish, disastrous thing?) mutterings from MPs, leftover former ministers, and other grisly creatures released for the moment from the Cupboard of the Yesterdays saying that Parliament must have its say, especially if that say means the decision is overturned. Meanwhile EU supporters seek to regain full control of both corpse parties, so that the struggle is properly one-sided and there is no danger of the corpses being declared dead and buried (there is some interesting speculation to be had, in future, about what might happen if the establishment fails to regain control over Labour in the weeks to come. I hope to turn to this soon).

It was disastrous that the ‘Leave’ campaign was not a party, yet (thanks to our traditions) had to conduct itself much as if it was one, more or less issuing a manifesto. And yet there is now no-one responsible for implementing that manifesto, who is in a position to do so.  Those who might be are busy trying to strangle each other. That’s why we needed a new party. That’s why we needed to destroy the Tories in 2010, and all those of you who helped miss that opportunity must now ask yourself whether you did the right thing in ‘Getting Gordon Brown out’ (did you really get him or his ideas, out of anything?) by saving the Tories. I blinking well *told* you so.

The disintegration of the ‘Leave’ campaign high command, shredded like a burst balloon into rags and tatters, may well have something to do with the fact that it was a strange and rather unprincipled coalition, made up in unequal parts of personal ambition, and with no permanent base or organisation. Did all its members really want to win? Just think how different this would be if we had got rid of the Tories when we had the chance, and a new political party determined to leave the EU, and with a clear stated idea of what it would do with our regained freedom, had won a general election. None of this rubbish would now be happening.

Elements inside both the two corpse parties have used the outcome as the pretext for things they had long wanted anyway.  Scores are being settled, and ambitions pursued. I am still puzzling over being asked by a BBC presenter on the day of the result about something she seemed to think was a ‘collapse’ of the Labour vote. The word itself derailed my thoughts. Far from collapsing, the Labour vote had poured in multitudes into the ‘Leave’ camp, expressing a sentiment, long known to me,  that metropolitan liberals never understood or acknowledged, and now spitefully and childishly deride.

By the way, as I am in general making the point that I told you so,  I ought to mention here those contributors who have over many years told me that my belief in a majority coalition of voters from both parties united round a socially conservative platform was fanciful. I think we have now established that it is not, though how it will ever be assembled again I am not sure. The party which could have contained, led and consolidated it does not exist and is not likely to do so.

 Others have also made sure that the crisis does not go to waste. I had suspected that a sort of stage-managed crisis would be inflicted on us by the markets, and so it has been. No doubt they have done reasonably well out of it, though most of the falls and rises have no objective cause.

I note that the Chancellor who has now abandoned his ludicrous and impossible commitment to balance the national books, and the currency markets who have seized the chance to achieve at least part of the long-awaited devaluation of sterling, which I have long predicted

Secondly today’s events (the BBC seem to think that the resignation of a TV presenter is more important) have rather underlined the wisdom of my repeated refusal to take UKIP seriously as a political force. The one party which surely does not need to bite its own tail at the moment is UKIP which can claim(I’m not sure if this is true, but they can claim it) to have brought about the referendum.

Hasn’t Nigel Farage  resigned at least twice before ? I think he first quit in September 2009, and then in May 2015. I shall wait and see how long this one lasts.

There has always been something fundamentally unserious about Mr Farage, epitomised for me by his foolish attitude towards the decriminalisation of illegal drugs (see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/what-did-nigel-farage-say-about-drugs.html ).

And this has very much affected my view of UKIP, its tacky purple-and-yellow pound sign symbol, which always makes me think of a Pound Shop, its unfortunate Thatcherism, which has learned nothing from and forgotten nothing about that questionable and far from conservative era.

My repeated view that UKIP would never get anywhere has met with a lot of hostility here, so I open my barrage of ‘I told you so’  with the latest news from the Blazer-and-Cravat-Belt. It would be hilarious if it were not so sad that, having managed to elect just one Member of Parliament at Westminster, Mr Farage cannot stand that MP, and that MP cannot stand Mr Farage.

But now to the main point, I have been irritating people ( I have even irritated myself) for months by carping about the referendum. For example : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/why-i-wont-be-voting-on-referendum-day.html

And http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/no-we-have-not-escaped-from-the-eu-and-we-may-not-ever-do-so-.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/the-eu-is-our-own-hotel-california-we-can-check-out-but-well-never-leave.html

I thought initially that the ‘Leave’ side were bound to lose, and in that I was wrong.  I explain this in two ways. I never imagined that two politicians of the stature of Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson and Michael Gove would actually side with ‘Leave’. (This (be warned) very profane and mischievous parody suggests that Mr Johnson, at least, never intended actually to win : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a6HNXtdvVQ

Who can say how much truth there is in such speculation? The chaos which followed the ‘Leave’ victory is suggestive.

And I foolishly believed that David Cameron had a coherent plan for the referendum which he himself created. After all, it was his choice, made deliberately some years ago. You would have thought he had some sort of idea a) how to conduct it successfully and b) what to do if he lost.

But when he came back from Brussels with a ‘deal’ so worthless even his own supporters couldn’t think of anything nice to say about it, I knew for sure (having previously suspected it ) he hadn’t ever intended the referendum to happen, but assumed he would be spared it by a second coalition with the Liberal Democrats.  Until that naked failure, I had still been prepared to believe that Mr Cameron had a plan. They only plan he seemed to have was to scupper Labour by changing the electoral registration rules, a plan which backfired quite badly when it led to many younger voters finding they weren’t on the register any more at referendum time. If Mr Cameron had really expected a referendum, would he have pushed this legislation through Parliament in 2013-14?

I can’t begin  to speculate in what will happen next. Much depends on the behaviour of the Tory Party membership, who were massaged (mainly by a sycophantic media chorus) into choosing David Cameron last time.  Will they be as biddable when offered Mrs May? It is at least possible to imagine that they may not be, just as Labour’s members may refuse to be bossed about by the same forces. I am not sure such rebellions will do any good, though I hope they happen anyway.  

Why We Need a General Election by mid-September

Out of the froth and fog of the last few days, something is beginning to emerge. I’m not surprised at all by the unlovely shape of it. You may not like the look of it. But first I thought I’d make a brief tour of some of the more interesting (and perhaps unexpected) commentary in this morning’s newspapers.

Let us start with this fascinating and (in my experience) wholly accurate article about the state of modern England – betting shops, payday loans, mobility scooters and all - from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum, a good piece of left-wing journalism in the tradition of Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier' and Priestley’s ‘English Journey’. The closeness of this devastation and demoralised despair to London itself will surprise many, who think it is confined to the West Midlands and the North. I fear it will surprise a lot more who have no idea that it exists anywhere. I think the destruction it records can be blamed on many other things as well as the thatcher era. But BBC Remain types need to read this, by one of their own(though perhaps he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s, I don’t know) .

They may then begin to grasp what happened last week, and even start to sympathise with it.

Next, from the same paper, is this typically perceptive analysis by Larry Elliott:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/26/brexit-is-the-rejection-of-globalisation

He correctly notes that Britain’s self-image as an economic success story is batty self-delusion, saying:’ To be sure, not all Britain’s problems are the result of its EU membership. It is not the European commission’s fault that productivity is so weak or that the trains don’t run on time. The deep-seated failings that were there when Britain voted in the referendum last Thursday were still there when the country woke up to the result on Friday. Evidence of just how unbalanced the economy is will be provided when the latest figures for Britain’s current account are released later this week. These show whether the country’s trade and investment income are in the black or the red. At the last count, in the final three months of 2015, the UK was running a record peacetime deficit of 7% of GDP.’

Then  he points out that the EU (the same is true of the post NAFTA USA) has failed to protect its working population from the ferocious downward pressures of globalisation: ‘In the shiny new world created when former communist countries were integrated into the global model, Europe was supposed to be big and powerful enough to protect its citizens against the worst excesses of the market. Nation states had previously been the guarantor of full employment and welfare. The controls they imposed on the free movement of capital and people ensured that trade unions could bargain for higher pay without the threat of work being off-shored, or cheaper labour being brought into the country.’

He adds : ‘Europe has failed to fulfil the historic role allocated to it. Jobs, living standards and welfare states were all better protected in the heyday of nation states in the 1950s and 1960s than they have been in the age of globalisation. Unemployment across the eurozone is more than 10%. Italy’s economy is barely any bigger now than it was when the euro was created. Greece’s economy has shrunk by almost a third. Austerity has eroded welfare provision. Labour market protections have been stripped away.’

He is very good on the implications of this for left-wing parties which have blithely backed open-doors immigration policies.

Many people, once they understand what free trade really means, are beginning to wonder whether protection is really quite such a bad idea as the modish economists keep telling them.

Finally there is this from the distinguished and original-minded Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the ‘Daily Telegraph’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/26/parliament-must-decide-what-brexit-means-in-the-interests-of-the/

The shape of a compromise, miles from what many in the ‘Leave’ campaign want, but acceptable to the current Parliament, is here very accurately and credibly set out. Something of this kind may very well happen. Just as we are not now fully in the EU, but pretend we are,  we could end with a position where we are not fully out of it, but pretend we are.

This is why anyone who seriously wants a thorough break with the EU that will restore our control of our borders needs to realise that a referendum was never going to be enough to achieve this.

Something – perhaps yet another petition – needs to be done to encourage and record public support (if there is any now people are beginning to realise what's at stake) for a swift general election,  held to cement and confirm the decision of the referendum. In my view, the referendum cannot possibly take full effect( and will have been waste of time) unless the composition and the balance of forces is irrevocably altered now in the Commons.

If an election is held soon enough (certainly before October) then all candidates can reasonably be asked to state without equivocation whether they support or oppose the verdict of the referendum, and how they will vote on the matter if elected. This must then be more important than their party allegiances. It will compel local alliances which could make almost all ‘safe’ seats unsafe. And it would also compel the elected members in such a Parliament to seek new allegiances, refusing the old Labour or Tory whips. It could be the first step towards the complete realignment our political system so badly needs. If it does not happen, then some sort of Norwegian arrangement under which we remain in the Single Market and lack full control of our borders, will be what we will get. It will resolve almost none of the problems described above.  Good luck with that.

.

The British people have risen at last - and we're about to unleash chaos

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.

If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

I am genuinely unsure how this will work out. I hope it will only destroy our two dead political parties, stiffened corpses that have long propped each other up with the aid of BBC endorsement and ill-gotten money.

I was wrong to think that the EU referendum would be so hopelessly rigged that the campaign for independence was doomed to lose. I overestimated the Prime Minister – a difficult thing for me to do since my opinion of him was so low. I did not think he could possibly have promised this vote with so little thought, preparation or skill.

I underestimated the BBC, which has, perhaps thanks to years of justified and correct criticism from people such as me, taken its duty of impartiality seriously.

Everything I hear now suggests that the votes for Leave are piling up, while the Remain cause is faltering and floundering. The betrayed supporters of both major parties now feel free to take revenge on their smug and arrogant leaders.

It has been a mystery to me that these voters stayed loyal to organisations that repeatedly spat on them from a great height. Labour doesn’t love the poor. It loves the London elite. The Tories don’t love the country. They love only money. The referendum, in which the parties are split and uncertain, has freed us all from silly tribal loyalties and allowed us to vote instead according to reason. We can all vote against the heedless, arrogant snobs who inflicted mass immigration on the poor (while making sure they lived far from its consequences themselves). And nobody can call us ‘racists’ for doing so. That’s not to say that the voters are ignoring the actual issue of EU membership as a whole. As I have known for decades, this country has gained nothing from belonging to the European Union, and lost a great deal.

If Zambia can be independent, why cannot we? If membership is so good for us, why has it been accompanied by savage industrial and commercial decline? If the Brussels system of sclerotic, centralised bureaucracy is so good, why doesn’t anyone else in the world adopt it?

As for the clueless drivel about independence campaigners being hostile to foreigners or narrow-minded, this is mere ignorant snobbery. I’ll take on any of them in a competition as to who has travelled most widely, in Europe and beyond it. Good heavens, I’ve even read Tolstoy and like listening to Beethoven. And I still want to leave the EU.

Do these people even know what they are saying when they call us ‘Little Englanders’?

England has never been more little than it is now, a subject province of someone else’s empire.

I have to say that this isn’t the way out I would have chosen, and that I hate referendums because I love our ancient Parliament. And, as I loathe anarchy and chaos, I fear the crisis that I think is coming.

I hope we produce people capable of handling it. I wouldn’t have started from here. But despite all this, it is still rather thrilling to see the British people stirring at last after a long, long sleep.

Two more victims of the Great Terror Panic

Our state-sponsored panic about the exaggerated terror threat is driving us mad. Recently I wrote about Lorna Moore, a young woman ripped from her children and flung into jail because she didn’t warn the authorities about something her husband (an alleged terrorist) probably didn’t even do.

Now we see an organic farmer, John Letts, and his wife Sally Lane, both in their 50s, remanded in custody on charges of sending money to their son. He may be up to no good in Syria, but that (unsurprisingly) hasn’t stopped them loving and caring for their child. Remanded in custody? From what I can see from court reports, the country is crawling with gaunt young men out on bail for violent crimes. So why are these two gentle people (who have another son at home) banged up in the cells and denied bail, while scores of dangerous louts roam the streets?

It is because of the magic word ‘terror’. It stops us thinking. Look at the Leytonstone knifeman, Muhaydin Mire. Back in December his crime – a horrible, bloody, random attack on a passer-by in a London Underground station – led the news. He was thought to be a terrorist. A man who called out ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv’ was much praised.

But he wasn’t no terrorist, either, bruv. When he was convicted on Thursday, the case was relegated to inside pages.

The attack was just as severe, the wounds just as deep, the crime just as bad.

But it’s now accepted by almost everyone involved that Mire was mentally ill. His family believe that this was caused by his use of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug cannabis – the one Richard Branson and Nick Clegg want to decriminalise. In fact, his family very responsibly tried to warn the police that he was a risk before the crime, and the police passed the buck, because nobody mentioned ‘radicalisation’.

Well, perhaps if the police and the courts were more interested in cannabis (which remains illegal, though they don’t enforce the law) than in terrorism and ‘radicalisation’, we’d actually be safer from the real and growing threat of unhinged young men wandering about in our midst. Some hope, but I thought I’d mention it.

 

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What are British troops doing in Poland? Taking part in a ridiculous exercise in which we pretend that we would go to war in the event of a Russian attack in the region – which is about as unlikely as a Martian invasion. Actually, we’d be hard put to defend the Isle of Wight these days, let alone Warsaw or Riga. This folly creates the very problem it pretends to deal with – tension and fear. Why?

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Sorry Meryl, I can't laugh at a man who's so scary

How odd that Meryl Streep, dressing up as Donald Trump last week, looks more like that noisy businessman than Mr Trump does himself. I am tempted to laugh. And then I stop myself.

Mr Trump’s rallies increasingly attract violence – by his opponents and his supporters. I actually find this terrifying. Any fool can start civil unrest and fan a populist bonfire by saying what he thinks the masses want to hear. But it is far harder to restore calm. I gasp at Mr Trump’s irresponsibility, and fear for the USA.

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The 'Leave ' Campaign may well be winning.

Some of you will have noticed that I have tried to stay away from the EU referendum debate for most of the past few weeks. Firstly, I think the campaign is far too long. Secondly, I mistrust the main spokesmen for exit. Thirdly, I did not desire a referendum, which I think is unconstitutional, politically dangerous and open to manipulation and emotional spasms. So I have not really been involved, heart and soul, in what many might expect to be ‘my side’.

I have done a little light debating since the campaign began – once at meeting (supposed to be non-contentious) at the House of Commons organised by Cambridge University, once at a bookshop squabble with Dennis MacShane and last week at Buckingham in a debate organised by the Speaker, John Bercow.

This took place at the Royal Latin School, a marvellous, thriving state grammar school in an ancient country town in the handsome but unpretty heart of England – a place whose very existence makes my heart ache for the lost land of acres, dark, quiet pubs, hedgerows and the certainty of liberty, whose final years I watched all unaware that it was about to disappear forever. I noticed as I sat in the hall before the debate that it had once been called St John’s Royal Latin School, and I wondered how and when that had gone, and what might be next.  . It reaches back to before the Reformation and is one of those astonishing quiet survivals, like the ancient school and almshouses at Ewelme, which connect us so completely within our forebears that anyone who stops to think about them, that pondering on it makes it difficult to breathe.

I was constrained in the Buckingham debate, as I am now, by my dislike of the referendum and my growing fear that it will create a dangerous constitutional crisis, the worst since the Abdication 80 years ago, and actually probably deeper than that over David Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, which led to a huge change in the way we were governed - the hobbling of the House of Lords. This crisis may well do a great deal of damage without achieving the result the voters desire.

I suspect that the next step *may* have to be an early general election, in which both the existing large English Parties may face severe realignments or even splits. The alternative, in which the ‘Leave’ campaign splits into diehards and compromisers, and a new ‘negotiation’ is proposed ( and possibly another plebiscite), will of course appeal far more to the political class.  That is why it is more likely. Michael Gove and Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson never let their supposedly urgent desire for British independence show before a few weeks ago. Nor did Lord (Michael) Howard. Maybe they will be able to suppress it again in future,  if conditions require.

This interesting story on the BBC website …..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36457120

….illustrates some of the possible problems of a vote to leave, in a country whose parliament, civil service, judiciary , academy and broadcast media are largely in favour of remaining.

I suspect the whole thing has gone utterly wrong, an unsurprising result of what was in any case a wholly irresponsible promise made by one of the most unprincipled and inexperienced people ever to hold the post of head of government.

Mr Cameron promised a referendum out of utter cynicism. To head off UKIP (which foolishly accepted s referendum as desirable, which, as is now clear, it wasn’t). The circumstantial evidence that he didn’t want or expect a parliamentary majority (a manifesto full of rash and unredeemable pledges, his own genuine fear that he would lose outright, George Osborne’s incredulity (I’ll French-kiss you if we win!’ when told by Lynton Crosby that a majority was what they were going to get) is overwhelming. His affronted attitude towards the idea of a British exit is further evidence. If he thinks it is so dangerous for us to depart,  then why did he create an opportunity for us to do so?

Several straws in the wind suggest to me that the vote is now swinging towards exit .  One reason is that the fear campaign has blown up in the faces of those who designed it. It was so overdone that it became a national joke. It involved too many foreign potentates and officials telling us what we should do. And it has no answer at all to the immigration question, which is the only other big issue in the vote. As it happens, the leave campaign don’t really agree among themselves or know what to do about this either, but nobody’s interested in that just now.

 One conversation, with a bus-driver from a very ordinary middle-England town who told me that everyone in his depot (except him) is planning to vote out, persuaded me that the old working-class Labour vote will go heavily for exit, which may well be enough to get the Leave campaign across the line. In elections, Labour tribal loyalty keeps such voters from having anything to do with any anti-immigration party. A referendum breaks that barrier.

PETER HITCHENS: Think extremism's a crime? You'll change your mind when they come for YOU

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

As an extremist, I am very worried about the planned Extremism Bill, which our Prime Minister is about to ram through Parliament.

So should you be. You are probably extremists, too, or will soon become extremists.
You may well remember when many opinions now viewed as despicable and more or less criminal were freely expressed – often by the same people and media who now condemn them.
I certainly do. Much of the conservative patriotic Christianity which my parents’ generation saw as normal has now been driven underground, and those who express it – especially in the public sector – face discipline or the sack, and are sometimes prosecuted.
Many of the current establishment’s attacks on Labour aren’t disagreements among free people in a free society. They are demands for abject recantations expressed by people who clearly think such views should not be allowed.
And the expression ‘extremism’ doesn’t mean anything objective or measurable. It just means a view that is out of favour with the current government and establishment.
What’s more, new and startling evidence from France (barely noticed here) suggests strongly that all these ‘anti-extremist’ strategies are wholly useless anyway for their main stated purpose.
It’s not the robed and bearded Islamist zealots we need to fear at all. An undercover French journalist, who infiltrated a jihadi cell in Paris, described those he found there as ‘fast-food Islamists’ who knew nothing of their supposed religion.
‘I never saw any Islam in this affair,’ the reporter told Canal+ TV. The cell members had ‘no will to improve the world’ but were ‘lost, frustrated, suicidal, easily manipulated youths’.
This is what I have been pointing out for many months. Track the backgrounds of the perpetrators of these crimes, here and abroad, and you do not find fanatical Wahhabi hard men, trained in the arts of death.
You find, almost invariably, low-life drifters in a haze of dope, on the borders of mental illness (and sometimes beyond it), capable of murder because they have fried their brains for so long that they no longer know right from wrong, or fantasy from reality. Some of these commit crimes which they then justify with a political purpose; many just commit crimes.
This is where we should be looking – and what we should be discouraging by enforcing our criminal laws properly.
Yet, instead, we waste our time and destroy our freedom by futile attempts to control what people think.

Poor Maxine’s not shocking anyone

Someone should tell the BBC that nobody is actually shocked any more by lesbian kisses. They’re so common now, verging on the compulsory, that I’m surprised
when they don’t feature in the weather forecast. I absolutely decline to be shocked.
So poor old Maxine Peake, who has to perform one of these osculations as Titania, left, in a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is wasting her time.
The desire to shock us has taken over drama. So, apart from the same-sex snogging, Richard III (or Julius Caesar, or Henry V, or Coriolanus) dresses in Nazi uniform, Hamlet’s a girl (Maxine Peake again), War And Peace has incest in it, Sherlock Holmes is a bad copy of Doctor Who, and it can’t be long before someone stages a version of Peter Pan played entirely by pensioners, or A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge is the hero and Christmas never happens.
Is it possible that the people who do these things haven’t understood that the books and plays they spoil were perfectly good and interesting before they meddled with them? It is. They’re taking a free ride on top of someone else’s talent and genius.
The really shocking thing these days is a production of anything which sticks to the text.

Butchering our lovely language

I had a proper old-fashioned education, and I have forgotten almost all of it, apart from the times tables and poems learned by heart, which I still use every day, the passable French vocabulary, which sometimes comes in handy, and a bit of geography.
My mother taught me to read, using what I now know was synthetic phonics. The Latin has almost all gone. The history was a good starting point, but I loved it anyway and have carried on learning it ever since. I must be one of the last people alive who had to sit for hours doing parsing and analysis of English sentences. It has never been any use to me at all, and I make my living by writing.
But until last week, I had no idea what a digraph is. Having found out, I have now deliberately forgotten. English is not Latin, and its beautiful, flexible, living architecture is best learned by being read to, and then by reading.
Yet many children never learn to read properly and are never read to. This is what the schools should be doing, not pestering the poor things with wearisome fronted adverbials and dreary trigraphs. You might as well try to explain the beauty of a goldfinch by killing it, pickling it and cutting it up on a slab – when all you need to do is to see the lovely bird in flight, full of grace and truth.

As I write this, news has just been brought to me that the Conservatives have retained control of Basingstoke, which fails to thrill. But the word ‘control’ is important. A small number of votes can decide whether someone keeps or loses enormous amounts of power over money, lawmaking, people, war and peace.

So our voting system should surely be absolutely fair and beyond reproach. I think it used to be. But apart from recent sordid scandals over postal voting, which never got the attention they should have done, we now have major new worries.
One is the very serious accusation that the Tory Party broke legal spending limits by bussing supporters into target seats. If big money is to be allowed to decide elections, then we are absolutely lost. And the other is the Third World chaos on Thursday at polling stations in one part of Greater London, with properly registered voters turned away by officials. I foresee worse problems in the EU referendum, especially as so many people have yet to realise they are not on the new voting roll, thanks to a major change in the registration rules, which has been poorly advertised. If this happens, and there is a close result, will the losers respect it? And then what?
A broken voting system can poison the whole country. Severe reforms are needed, and fast.

 

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More Thoughts on that Very Odd Election Result in May

There is much wisdom to be found in the letters pages of newspapers.  Some of you will recall how some months ago I wondered if the election was that much of a Tory victory, or if the majority reflected a real swing:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/05/i-thought-i-would-try-some-amateur-election-analysis-here-partly-for-my-own-amusement-and-instruction-and-probably-not-at-a.html

Now, Mr Kenneth Jarrett, from Bournville in Birmingham, stimulated by recent stories about the Electoral Commission looking into Tory election spending,….

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3452815/The-Tories-probed-elections-watchdog-allegations-wrongly-declared-hotel-bills-election-battle-stop-Nigel-Farage-entering-Parliament.html

 ….wrote yesterday (Tuesday 26^th April 2016)  in the Daily Mail’s letters page: ‘THE special investigation (Mail) into the Conservative Party's campaign funding is all the more revealing when one notes that the Liberal Democrat Party's seismic collapse to 6.8 per cent occurred between 2010 and 2014 — the EU Parliament Election — and flat-lined after that until the 2015 UK Parliament Election.

‘The returns of the 2015 election reveal that the Conservative Party was rejected by 75 per cent of registered voters, and that of the 26 seats gained by Conservative candidates from Lib Dems, many fell as 'windfall fruit', five of them being so marginal that their combined increase in support from 2010 to 2015 was only 1,794 votes: Eastbourne (+ 289), Lewes (+ 805), Sutton & Cheam (+ 184), Torbay (+ 503) and St Ives (+ 591). So that's the margin of Conservative 'success'.

‘If one accepts the view that the absolute majority consisted of windfalls gained by the Conservatives, and discounts them, in the rest of the election the Tories suffered a net loss of two seats from 2010: UKIP retained one and Labour gained one. The Conservatives gained nine seats from Labour, which gained ten from the Conservatives. It's clear that the Liberal Democrat Party candidates entered the election like deflated blow-up dolls. The party paid the price for having entered into a Coalition arrangement with the Conservative Party, while the Conservatives paid the price for misleading eurosceptics in both parties by claiming it could change treaty obligations and reduce migration. Of the 26 seats the Liberal Democrats lost, the swing to UKIP accounted for roughly 43.7 per cent of the party's collapse, to the Green Party 23.4 per cent, to Labour 20.2 per cent, but to the Conservatives only 12.6 per cent. This indicates that the absolute majority achieved by the Conservatives was largely due to the performance of the opposition parties rather than the campaign put together by election 'guru' Lynton Crosby. The majority appears more like a mirage of nil substance than a mandate for’Government.’

I’d say Mr Jarrett was almost right. But what if Mr Crosby and the Tory strategists understood that this was roughly what was going to happen (I think they underestimated its effect, as I am sure they never really meant to get an overall majority) and concentrated on winning a very small number of votes in a few crucial seats?

In any case, the oddness of the result still requires a full-scale academic analysis, and I long to see one. I shall also be watching with interest to see what the Electoral Commission does.