They've killed off marriage - and our hopes of a happy life

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Marriage died last week after a long illness. There will still be weddings, of course. But they won’t mean anything any more. They’ll be like those certificates saying you are ‘Lord of the Manor’ which gullible Americans buy.

The whole point of marriage was that it was binding for life – ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us  do part’.

That is what made it such a fortress against other influences. The State couldn’t break into it. It was a small, private place where we were sovereign over our own lives.

Either you like this or you don’t. I believe that raising children as well as we can is the central purpose of our lives. I also think that lifelong marriage is the best way of doing  it, and of ensuring that we do not run away from it, as many of us are inclined to do.

I also think the greatest test of character most of us will face will come when a husband or wife falls ill and becomes dependent on us. Marriage, by leaving us no choice in this, actually makes it easier.

But in the late 1960s, Britain and most other Western countries introduced divorce laws that  hollowed out the  marriage oath.

Since then, if either spouse wishes to break the solemn marriage promise, the State and the law actively take that spouse’s side.

If the other half of the marriage wishes to stay married, he or she can in the end be removed from the home by force, with the threat of prison.

I am still amazed that this totalitarian change came about with so little protest.

Now the very sharp and influential Sir James Munby, senior judge in the English family courts, has said that couples should be able to end a marriage simply by signing a form at a register office, with no need for lawyers or judges.

And, being smart, he has also urged the next obvious step – that cohabiting couples should be treated as if they are  officially married once they have stayed together for a  couple of years.

After all, why not? There’s no important difference any more. Official forms long ago stopped referring to ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, and those who cling to these archaic terms are frequently told by bureaucrats that they are now in fact ‘partners’.

I think Sir James will get his wish. And everyone will be happy, happy, happy – except the growing multitude of children who have never known domestic security and now never will, and the lonely,  confused old men and women with nowhere to turn but the doubtful comforts of the care home, where their lives can dribble away in a medicated haze, perhaps punctuated by slaps and insults.

Another BBC series that needs subtitles (but this time they have a good excuse)

Since even home-made BBC productions need subtitles these days, I am surprised the Corporation hasn’t been making more of its powerful new German-made mini-series on the Second World War as experienced by ‘normal’ Germans.

By the time you read this, you’ll probably have already missed two episodes of Generation War but it’s well worth catching up on iPlayer, or perhaps they could repeat it soon. It convulsed Germany when it was shown there last year.

It also infuriated Poles, who reasonably thought that it wasn’t for the Germans, of all people, to remind them that quite a lot of Poles had been anti-Semites.

But it’s worth seeing for lots of reasons. First, it is simply good TV, never boring, full of incident, some of it horrible, some of it deeply unlikely, but all of it interesting.

If you think modern Germans have fully confronted the horrors of the Hitler era, this drama will show you how very wrong you are. They’ve barely begun.

This helps to explain Berlin’s continuing desire to advance coyly behind the smokescreen of the European Union rather than under its own flag. You might also notice that the film completely ignores the first two years of the war, and only begins with the invasion of, er, Ukraine.

One simple question will tell us all we need to know about drugs

I see that even the slow learners in the media are at last picking up on the mountains of reputable research which show that ‘antidepressants’ are vastly over-prescribed even on their own terms, often have unpleasant side effects, and may not actually be any more effective against ‘depression’ than sugar pills.

Others all eventually follow where this column has led for years, though, of course, they never admit it.

So here’s a new challenge for the slow learners. I cannot see how anyone can oppose it. Can we please now have a  simple rule for all coroners, magistrates  and judges?

Wherever someone has taken his own life, or wherever someone is accused of taking someone else’s life, or of an act of dangerous violence, the police, doctors and pathologists involved should be required to discover whether that person has ever been a user of mind-altering drugs, whether legally prescribed, or illegal.

I believe that if this question is asked, it will become plain that there is a frightening correlation between such drugs and such acts. Then, at last, we can do something.

Have you noticed how the BBC discusses UKIP as if it is a problem rather than a legitimate party? Have you observed the pathetic attempts of Tory spin-doctors (who can think of nothing to say in favour of their own organisation) to smear UKIP from morn till night?

Have you also noticed the slavish obedience of political journalists, who have spent the past ten years ignoring the biggest issues in British politics – the EU and immigration – but now recycle these trivial slanders in the hope that they can save the old, dying parties which have spoon-fed them all their stories?

This sort of ganging up has not worked on the Scots, who understandably grow fonder of independence with every stupid threat and falsehood. I have a feeling it’s not going to work on the English either – and in case you hadn’t noticed by now, Nigel Farage  is in fact England’s answer to Alex Salmond.

If anyone is charged, tried and convicted for the murder of Jean McConville during the Irish Troubles, what will happen to that person? If I  have correctly understood the 1998 Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act, my belief is that he or she would serve a maximum prison sentence of two years. When I asked the Northern Ireland Office if I was right, they issued a panicky refusal to comment.

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White Tie and Terror - Proof that we Gave in to the IRA

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

 

So this is what it is like to live in a defeated country. Your Head of State has to consort with one of the leaders of the most successful terror gang in the world, and pretend she likes it.

 

This grisly person sits at dinner in Windsor castle, nodding and smiling at the great and the good. How witty it was of somebody to seat him next to Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, so opposed to the death penalty when it is carried out by lawful states. 

 

And hardly anyone says anything, except two dignified figures, standing outside the Castle, one robbed of a son and the other of a sister,  who will be unable to forget the IRA’s views on the ‘Right to Life’ until they die, just as many others will never be able to forget their views on torture, habeas corpus and free speech.

 

Bitter, wasn’t it, that the day (stolen by McGuinness from the peaceable Irish President Michael D. Higgins), also featured military bandsmen, like those blown to pieces by the IRA in Regent’s Park, and Household Cavalry, like those blown to pieces, with their horses, in Hyde Park (a crime for which nobody has been punished, or ever will be now)?

 

Nobody ever imagined that President Higgins, or the huge majority of good and honourable Irish men and women, ever supported or endorsed the IRA murder of the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten. Of course they didn’t.   It was Martin  McGuinness who should have been laying a wreath on the Mountbatten tomb. That will be the day.

 

By the way, since this misery was so typical of the IRA’s ruthless disregard for life, we should never forget the other victims of that crime, casually erased from the earth by people who believed their cause was so noble that other people’s sons and mothers should die horribly in the process  - Paul Maxwell, a 15-year old boy from Fermanagh, Nicholas Knatchbull, the Earl’s 14-year-old grandson, and the 83-year old Dowager Lady Brabourne. Three others were terribly injured.

 

At the time Gerry Adams (McGuinness’s close ally and now a frequent guest at the White House) called the outrage an ‘execution’ (Shami Chakrabarti please note) in a creepy statement, while the IRA itself willingly took responsibility for it.

 

There is a silly myth that we somehow ‘defeated’ the IRA. Oh, really. Do the victors withdraw their troops? Do the victors dismantle their surveillance systems and haul down their flags? Do the victors release from just imprisonment scores of the enemy’s worst and most cunning killers and bombers? Do the defeated keep their arms and bombs, and receive what amounts to immunity from future prosecution?  Do the victors install the vanquished in well-paid ministerial jobs? Do the victors entertain the defeated enemy at dinner in Windsor Castle?  Don’t be silly.

 

The whole event gives a strange new meaning to the phrase ‘Her Majesty’s Pleasure’.  Once the whole country would have been enraged by this immoral, humiliating spectacle. It is a measure of what has happened to us that almost all of us just sat and took it. And we still dare to sneer at the French for the way they behaved when they were beaten by a much bigger foe.

 

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My view of Maria Miller is that what she needed above all was a train timetable and a road map. Both would have showed that the journey from Wimbledon to Basingstoke is so brief that she didn’t need a house in both places. The same is true of the journey between David Cameron’s London home and Witney. By the way, is it true he is now renting out that London home? If so, perhaps he could help reduce the deficit by paying back some of the vast housing claims he made in the old days.

 

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The jail book ban that's just fiction

 

In this age of teenage juries, majority verdicts, feeble judges and liberal bigotry, I’m increasingly worried that my enemies will one day manage to lock me up in prison.

 

Reading will be a useful way of getting through that, so I was personally interested in the noisy campaign claiming that prisoners are being deprived of books by the supposedly cruel and ruthless Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling. Should I join the protest?

 

Well, no. I’ve checked the facts and the claim just isn’t true. There’s a new restriction on parcels, which seems to me to be reasonably justified by worries about weapons and drugs. I really can’t see what interest Mr Grayling would have in stopping prisoners getting books. I wonder how many actually want books. 

 

The parcels rule may incidentally prevent the delivery of some books, but it simply isn’t a book ban. If it were, I repeat, I’d protest against it.

 

Prisoners can still get books. Not as easily as you or I can, but they can. The measure isn’t intended to stop them getting books, or having books, or reading books.

 

Heaven knows, I wish we could return to the sort of ordered, disciplined prisons where inmates at least had the peace and solitude to read. The reality, as I’ve seen for myself, isn’t much like that now. Those who claim to be concerned about prisoners should look into that instead.

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Well, now we’ve found out that Tamiflu was more or less useless, does it cross anyone’s mind to wonder if all those expensive much-hyped ‘antidepressants’ do what it says on the box? Given the drug companies’ efforts to hide their own research, it might be wise to be suspicious.

 

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And still people swallow the claim that crime is falling. This week, Parliament’s Public Administration Committee actually produced a report called ‘Caught red-handed: why we can’t count on police recorded crime statistics’ Readers of this column will already know most of what’s in it. 

 

But there’s one new thing. The ‘Crime Survey for England and Wales’, a glorified opinion poll generally treated as little short of holy writ, has quietly cut its sample from 46,000 adults to 35,000 adults, and from 4,000 children to 3,000 children.

 

Hitchens’s Law states that: ‘All politically important statistics will be fiddled’. Crime figures started dropping because they became politically important, so crime was redefined to exclude millions of crimes. The same thing, we now see, is happening with immigration figures where thousands of arrivals were simply ignored altogether. We didn’t log them, so they aren’t here. The Big Society in action.

 

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Heard for the first time, ‘partner’ as a verb. An expert on housing, on the radio, explaining why people were buying houses later in life, because they were ‘partnering’ later, Not long ago, they would have said ‘marrying’. Not long in the future, nobody will say ‘marrying’. It matters.

 

 

 

 

 

Get ready to go to jail - your children will denounce you!

I told you that David Cameron was a continuation of Blairism by other means. Along with all his other mimicry of the Blair creature, his most striking policy is his determination to continue New Labour’s revolutionary plan to destroy the married family, drive women out of their homes into wage-slavery and abolish the whole concept of the father and husband.

This scheme is always disguised as something else. It always means more State meddling in family life. Usually it is called ‘Equality’. But sometimes it is called ‘Children’s Rights’.

Both these expressions are lies. Women are not more equal, but far worse off thanks to the anti-marriage revolution, as they are increasingly finding.

They must work inside and outside the home, spend endless hours driving from home to day-orphanage to work to hypermarket, and then back again, and see less and less of their children

As for children, their supposed ‘rights’ actually mean ever-increasing power for the State to intervene in their lives. Oddly enough, this never seems to diminish or prevent horrible abuse.

The emotional reaction to the ghastly death of Maria Colwell – a little girl beaten and starved by her stepfather – in 1973 led to the vast increase in State power over the family in the Children Act of 1989.

Yet in 2000 we saw the very similar case of Victoria Climbie, pictured below, and in 2007 that of Peter Connelly (Baby P). There will, I fear, be another such horror before long.

Most of these cases have two effects: calls for ‘something to be done’, and personal attacks on the social workers involved. Both reactions are stupid.

The State is no good at childcare, and nothing will ever make it any good at it. Power and bureaucracy cannot create an ounce of love.

The State’s own care homes are notorious scenes of abuse and chaos, from which many children emerge with their lives already ruined, destined for prison or mental hospital.

We need to accept that we simply cannot make society perfect by passing laws, that people who choose to be evil are skilled at concealing their crimes and scaring away social workers and even the police.

It is time MPs realised that these crimes will happen again, whatever they do.

These schemes sold as safeguards for children are in fact power grabs by the State. Yet we are now told that the Queen’s Speech will contain proposals for a ‘Cinderella Law’ under which parents can be imprisoned for ‘emotional cruelty’.

The chief booster of this Bill is a supposedly Conservative MP called Robert Buckland. When I discussed his plan with him on Radio 2 on Monday, I was amazed at his naivety. As a lawyer and part-time judge, he really should know that vague, subjective laws are the tools of tyrants.

Under such legislation, nobody can ever be sure if he is breaking the law or not. No jury could ever be sure who was telling the truth. But the resulting inquisitions into families – the well-publicised dawn raids, the search and seizure of private possessions, the smears in court that will never wash out – will ruin the lives of any who are arrested, even if they are eventually acquitted. In the old communist countries, the regimes also encouraged denunciations by children, who usually had little idea what would follow.

In Soviet cities, until 1991, there were statues of a little monster called Pavlik Morozov, who turned his own parents in to the secret police for hoarding grain. Schoolchildren would be marched to these shrines of evil and told to revere his memory.

And yet the ‘Conservative’ Party is proposing to write childish denunciation of parents into the law of the land this summer, and the poor Queen will have to recommend this ghastly measure to MPs in her speech in June.

When the Tories said ‘New Labour – New Danger’ back in 1997, they did not know how right they were.

Nor did they, or we, know they would be part of the danger.

Playing a dangerous Game

I am worried by the TV popularity of George R.R. Martin’s clever fantasy Game Of Thrones.

Mr Martin’s imaginary world is frighteningly cruel. The society it describes is far worse than the Middle Ages, because its characters are entirely unrestrained by Christian belief. There’s a lifeless, despised religion but nobody takes it seriously.

I fear it will make those who watch it worse people than they were before.

» I often wish I possessed superpowers, which might allow me to help the people who write to me to recount the horrible things that can so easily happen to you at the hands of authority in modern Britain.

Well, I don’t. But perhaps I am developing them. I was crossing the road on foot at a pelican crossing, protected by a red light, when I saw a cyclist, kitted out for the Tour de France, approaching at speed and plainly not planning to stop. I glared at him from a range of about 20 feet. To my amazement, he immediately toppled over on to his side, hitting the road amid the crunch and tinkle of damaged accessories. I was laughing so much, I had to turn away.

By the time I was able to look back, he was up and moving again, fast enough to catch up with me and call me a rude name. I replied that I hadn’t actually done anything to him and that, while he might be right about how horrible I am, people who ride through pedestrian crossings are even worse. Evildoers beware. I might be nearby.

Nigel the peacemaker

Interesting that Nigel Farage, pictured right, easily won the EU debate against Nick Clegg, despite several attempts to smear him.

I’m familiar with most of these smears, especially the ‘living in the past’ one, always used by people who have run out of arguments.

But in many ways the most interesting thing was that Mr Farage’s opposition to foreign wars didn’t cost him any support, and may have gained him some.

What a good thing that patriotism is no longer linked with mindless support for the drums of war.  

It’s the liberals who do that now.

» Why is David Cameron standing by Maria Miller, the pathetic, over-promoted Minister censured for her expenses? Some say it’s because he hasn’t enough women in his Cabinet (enough for what?).

But I think it’s because the Premier is still guilty about his own entirely legal claims for Elite Housing Benefit. Most people still don’t realise how greedily this already rich man milked the system.

 

We're being dragged into a new Cold War by a puffed-up bullfrog (and I don't mean President Putin)

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Stupidity and ignorance rule the world. The trouble is that the stupid and the ignorant think that they are clever and well-informed.

Take Mrs Hillary Clinton, next President of the United States and former chief of American foreign policy. She has directly compared Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. And she has compared events in Crimea to the Czech crisis of 1938.

Dozens of other politicians and grandiose journalists are currently doing the same.

It’s the one thing they think they know about history – that Britain’s pathetic Neville Chamberlain didn’t stand up to evil Adolf Hitler in 1938 at Munich over Czechoslovakia, so making Hitler believe that he could take over the world. And that the brave Winston Churchill then saved the world.

Almost no part of this legend is true. Even those bits that  are true are misleading, with one exception. Hitler was certainly evil. But so was Stalin, the communist mass-murderer who ended up as our main ally in the fight against Hitler.

If we had gone to war to save Czechoslovakia in 1938, we would have been beaten. We had no proper army. Nor did the USA, whose army at that time was about the same size  as Portugal’s.

 When we later went to war to ‘save’ Poland,  we didn’t in fact save it at all, leaving it to be bombed, starved and massacred by Hitler, carved up between Germany and the USSR and later swallowed whole by Stalin. And we were beaten – just not actually invaded.

Churchill was indeed a great man, but his achievement was to secure our bare survival, which came at the desperate cost of our national wealth and our empire. Later in the war, Churchill appeased Stalin by giving him the whole of Poland and Eastern Europe. Just like Chamberlain at Munich seven years before, he had no choice. The Yalta conference, which finalised these arrangements, was as disgracefully self-interested as Munich.

Yet the silly, half-educated politicians of today still like  to pose as tough guys with the following formula, addressed to anyone who suggests that Russia might have a case over Ukraine and Crimea.

It goes: ‘Putin is Hitler. You are Neville Chamberlain. I  am Winston Churchill – hear me roar.’

Apart from knowing nothing about European history, and apart from their bone-headed inability to distinguish Christian Russia from the communist USSR, these people also don’t understand what is going on in Ukraine.

It never occurs to them that Russia has good historical reasons to fear its neighbours. It never crosses their mind that the borders drawn by the victorious West in 1992, like  those drawn at Versailles in 1919, are an unsustainable, unjust mistake.

They never ask why Britain (or the USA) should be hostile to Russia, or what the quarrel between us actually is. What  is it to us whose flag flies over Sevastopol? Yet it matters greatly to those who live there.

They cast every Russian action as evil, and every Ukrainian action as saintly. The world is not like that.

I hated the old USSR as an evil empire. But, having lived in Moscow, I feel a strong affection for post-communist Russia and count Russians as good friends. That does not make me an apologist for Mr Putin. I have repeatedly condemned him for his suppression of opposition and the many evil things done by his state. I can see his faults and do not pretend they do not exist.

 But the warmongers are selectively blind. Hardly any British news media have mentioned an event in Kiev last week. A group of five louts, one of them an MP from the thuggish, racialist ‘Svoboda’ party, forced their way into  the office of Oleksandr Panteleymonov, chief of the main Ukrainian TV station. There they physically attacked him and shouted anti-Russian racial abuse at him.

The MP involved is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on ‘Freedom of Speech’. And the louts were  so proud of what they did that they filmed it and posted it on the internet.

These people are supposed to be our allies and friends.

On their behalf, our Prime Minister is puffing himself up like a bullfrog, and busily creating a new Cold War that will benefit nobody except spies and weapons-makers, for a cause he doesn’t understand and can’t explain.

If this is the kind of statesman it produces, it strikes me that Eton can’t be such a good school after all.

Nazi-obsessed movie world has lost the plot

There’s something about a swastika that captivates film-makers and publishers. But is the effect at last wearing off?

The recent film The Book Thief has a daft plot and an even dafter voice-over, supposedly provided by the Angel of Death. It hasn’t been a wild success, and no wonder. If it weren’t set in Nazi Germany, with plenty of swastikas, would it have been made at all?

Meanwhile, really interesting moral puzzles in the modern world don’t seem to attract film-makers. On a recent visit to New York, I saw the fascinating Israeli thriller Bethlehem, about an Arab youth who collaborates with the Israelis. One of its many themes is how well Jews and Arabs get on when left to their own devices.

How I long for someone to make films out of the fine stories of Matt Rees, set in this part of the world.

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Half a century of liberal crime policies under all parties have utterly failed. As I write, the prisons of England and Wales (I expect Scotland is  much the same) are full almost to bursting. I am not sure why this isn’t a major story.

Some figures: in 1960, the England and Wales prison population was 27,000. By 1990, it had hit almost 45,000. Last week it stood at 85,338, with room for only 568 more. It won’t take long to find them.

Remember, this has happened despite the watering down of  all penalties and the repeated slashing of sentences. Yet nobody learns from it. It will  be ‘solved’ by letting more prisoners out, and sending fewer criminals to prison.

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‘Child care’ actually means child neglect. The Government is bribing us with our own money, to dump our children with strangers. The only thing they won’t subsidise is children being raised by their own married parents. That’s penalised, and despised.

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Why rejoice at the abolition of annuities? It’s just an admission that saving of all kinds is pointless when interest  is microscopic and state-sponsored inflation is debauching the currency.

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Calling Things by their Proper Names

Time for a quotation from Confucius (Or K’ung Fu-tzu, in the sensible old Wade-Giles transcription),  (Book 13, Chapter 3) ‘If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.’

 

This early Orwellian statement, predating the Sage of Wallington by 2,500 years, has seldom been more applicable. I’m not sure if Orwell would have been so interested in the punishment issues, but there is no doubt that failing to call things by their proper names is the beginning of stupidity. 

 

And we don’t call them by their proper names. Look at the recent announcement about ‘Child Care’ , in which ‘the government’ was said to be going to pay future so-called ‘parents’ up to £2,000 a year for something called ‘Childcare’ (or (‘Chowdcare’ as it is more generally pronounced in the public-sector classes).

 

Of course the claim is almost entirely false. The government has no money. It will have to tax you and me to find this money. Nor is it certain to pay it, as it will have left office, probably forever, by the time the plan is due to be implemented. Then there are these ‘parents’. The word, I was always told, derived from the Latin ‘pareo’ meaning ‘I obey’, on the assumption that the parents are those who are obeyed by their offspring, and the offspring obey their parents.   

 

As this relation of authority and obedience has been abolished in law, and cannot be enforced by the alleged parents, whose former power of discipline is now increasingly classified as ‘abuse',  these people are not parents in any case little more than related adults. As they are not required by custom or law to be in any kind of stable or permanent relationship, they aren’t necessarily even related.

 

And then again, since both of them  have been compelled by custom and need to work away from the home, during their children’s waking hours, and further compelled by custom and law to hand them over in later life to supposed 'schools' (no time to discuss this remarkable word here); and as those 'schools' (and the 'universities' to which they lead) follow the desires and aims of the state rather than of the ‘parents’, the supposedly ‘parental’ relationship is pretty much vestigial.

 

As for ‘Chowdcare’, all observant people have shuddered with horror for years at the suggestion that anyone they loved might fall into the ‘care’ of the modern state, and ‘caring’ has become, for the informed, a synonym for ‘hypocritical’. Few mothers are so hopeless that a paid stranger will ever care more than they do for their own small child.

 

And this subsidy, by which we are taxed so that we can pay strangers to mind our offspring during the formative hours of their lives, has yet another significance. For, while it is available to couples with a joint income of up to £300,000 a year,  it is absolutely refused to those households (be they never so poor)  in which one parent remains defiantly at home, 'chained to the kitchen sink'. And I am fairly sure that it is also refused to two-wageslave households who receive childminding help from grandparents or other close relatives. You can have the subsidy as long as both parents abandon their children, and as long as the minders are not relatives.

 

I think this is fairly obvious, don’t you? Once all its elements have been properly described,  it is clearly an incitement to disaffection, a bribe of our own money, offered to us in return for following the repellent and greedy opinion that wageslavery is more important than nurture of the next generation, that motherhood is a contemptible waste of a woman’s talents - all the crazed anti-family Bolshevism that poured from the pens and mouths of the wildest leftist revolutionaries in the 1960s, and is – 50 years later – the settled policy of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

 

And still the Left moan that they have been beaten, sidelined and betrayed. Are they too stupid to see that they have won, or too clever to admit that they are winning, while there is still any work left to do? 

   

Why our grandchildren will say we were as evil as slave-owners

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If I thought the money would go to the right  people, I would be all  in favour of paying huge piles of cash to the descendants of slaves.

I am only against it because we all know that such compensation sticks to the fingers of lawyers and politicians.

The more I know about this terrible thing, the more worried I am that so much of our wealth and safety were based upon it.

The fact that we did not allow slavery on our own soil, and that in the end we abolished the trade, does not wash this away.

Abraham Lincoln wondered, soon before he died, if his country’s gruesome Civil  War might have been God’s punishment for what he termed ‘wringing their bread from the sweat of other  men’s faces’.

Lincoln, being a revered historical figure rather than a UKIP councillor, can get away with this sort of thing, and his words are inscribed in stone in Washington DC to this day.

Do we perhaps pay for it ourselves in various ways? I wouldn’t know. But  I think we should  be careful before dismissing calls for compensation as just another politically correct campaign.

The point about slavery is not the one made in the rather strange film 12 Years A Slave, which lingers over whippings and other cruelties, and portrays slave-owners and slave-drivers mostly as homicidal, sexually repressed maniacs or religious hypocrites.

The film says too little  about slavery’s single worst legacy: the casual destruction of families and the tearing apart of wives and husbands, mothers and children, brothers and sisters.

I am sure that this mass tragedy still poisons the lives of many in the USA.

But the most shocking thing by far about slavery is that so many perfectly normal people thought it too was perfectly normal at the time.

When we rightly condemn our forefathers for tolerating it, and for profiting from it, we should pause to ask this: what are we doing today, which we think is normal, which will horrify our great-grandchildren?

Three things spring to mind, and all are very close to home.

The first is mass abortion on demand. The second is our terrible neglect of the old, either left in chilly solitude or crammed into sordid, suspect institutions where they can be cruelly maltreated. The third is our disastrous treatment of small children – indulged with gadgets and sugar, but denied proper family life, handed over to the care of paid strangers  for long, sad hours.

We will pay for all these things, too, I suspect. But why wait for Hollywood to point out that they are wrong?

Sorrow and a fake drugs war

It is always difficult when grieving relatives enter political debates.  It seems harsh and ill-mannered to contradict them.

But, while I am profoundly sorry for Anne-Marie Cockburn, and offer her my sincere condolences on the death of her daughter Martha Fernback, I must beg  her to reconsider what she seems to think about ‘legalising and regulating’ some drugs.

I must also ask her to look into  her apparent belief that there is some  sort of ‘war on drugs’ going on.

Martha died after taking MDMA, an illegal drug that has claimed several victims in the past. She attended a well-known Oxford secondary school (recently recommended to the hard-up posh classes by Tatler magazine).

Before joining any campaigns to  further weaken the drug laws, I urge  Ms Cockburn to ask her daughter’s schoolfriends the following questions.

1: How easy is it to buy illegal drugs in or near their school?

2: Do they know of anyone in their age group who has been given a serious punishment for possessing illegal drugs?

3: How many of them have parents who take drugs themselves, or allow them to be taken under their roof?

4: Does the school ever say specifically in class or elsewhere  that drug-taking is wrong and against the law?

5: What disciplinary measures does the school take against those caught with illegal drugs?

If Ms Cockburn still thinks there’s any kind of ‘war on drugs’ once she’s heard their answers, I shall be very much surprised.

There is absolutely nothing to be said in favour of the Tory Party.

Its leaders secretly admire the Blair creature but lack the courage to admit it.

I see the Prime Minister is yet again claiming he can’t recall saying he was ‘Heir to Blair’. Perhaps those who were present when he did so might refresh his memory.

Far from fixing the economy (a claim accepted by so many who should know better) they have driven us deeper into debt and created a dangerous false boom that they hope will last until the Election. Their promises to reform the EU are worthless and they know it.

So what can they do to persuade their remaining voters to turn out for them?  Why, they can encourage personal attacks on their opponents.

It is all they have left. And that is yet another reason why any honest, patriotic person should shun them.

Each personal attack on a non-Tory political figure is new evidence of Tory desperation.

Michael Gove poses as the foe of privilege, complaining that Etonians outnumber children from poor homes at Oxbridge. But I’m struck by the way he uses free school meals to measure the level of privilege at our  great universities.

Presumably, the same applies to schools. So it’s interesting that at his local comprehensive, Burlington Danes, 67.6 per cent of pupils are eligible for free meals.

But at Grey Coats Hospital School, the elite academy miles from his home into which he has got his daughter, only 14 per cent qualify  for free meals.

The ghost of Roy Jenkins is walking again. How he would have approved of plans to introduce ‘assisted suicide’, which will in time become mass abortion of the unwanted old.  How civilised!

Like so many of the revolutionary 1964-70 Labour Government, Jenkins concealed the personal morals of an alley-cat beneath a smirk, a drawl and  a suit, and also knew that if you can’t  be good, it pays to be careful.

But unlike the Tory aristocrats whose private lives were equally adventurous, Jenkins and his friends wanted to bring the rest of the country down to their level. They did so by  a slippery trick.

Almost all of their revolutionary changes were achieved by so-called ‘private member’s bills’.

In truth, such things can only get through Parliament with huge help from government lawyers and whips.

But the government of the day can disown them, and the MPs of all parties who vote for them have no fear of being punished at a General Election.

Far from being freedom of conscience, a ‘free vote’ is a dishonest evasion of responsibility.

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The Tory who Says I want Girls to Leave School at 14

Any minute now I expect a contribution here from Charlotte Vere, which I will post prominently and at length, and then (I hope) reply to.  Why?  Who is she? Well,  she has grabbed my attention and I thought a full-scale debate here would be better than any more Twitter exchanges, however pithy.

 

Ms Vere and I have had a squabble on Twitter, which she began by claiming, on the basis of no evidence at all, that I thought girls should leave school at 14.  I should state here (absurd that it should be necessary) that I don’t think anything of the kind. My views on the education of women (as I have said more than once before) are pretty much those stated by Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. What’s more it seems to me that nobody can be too well-educated for the momentous and hugely influential and responsible task of raising the next generation.

 

The idea that full-time motherhood is a matter of kitchen sinks, scrubbing,  and cleaning behind the fridge is a hostile defamation of a vast task of nurturing, teaching, example, moral instruction, protection from danger, patience, constancy, trust and loving discipline, which in each home where it takes place has more power to do real good than almost any paid job you can think of. It is largely thanks to the Greerite and Friedanesque disdain for this noble occupation, and our culture’s unceasing slandering of it,  that the Chief Rabbi feels the need to complain about a society without trust.  

 

Ms Vere constructed this worse-than-baseless accusation (which she has declined to withdraw) in response to my recent column defending full-time mothers. This pointed out that the one form of childcare the government does not subsidise is care done by the child’s own mother. It also explained why so many families gave up great material benefits (so defying the spirit of the age)  to give their children this benefit.

 

You can read it here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/08/since-when-was-saving-your-children-a-lifestyle-choice.html

 

 

Who is Charlotte Vere?  Well, by her own description (if I’ve fathomed the rather odd punctuation of her Twitter biography)  she ‘s executive director of the Girls’ Schools Association, on the Development Board of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and ‘Trustee of something she refers to as the ‘Fatherhood Institute & NYAT’.  Or, as she displays it : ‘Exec Director | Girls' Schools Association, Dev Board | Oxford Mindfulness Ctr, Trustee | Fatherhood Inst & NYAT and VC of Governors. Tweets own, obvs.’

 

Obvs.

 

Make what you will of all that.  I do. But what interests me more about her is that in May 2010 she stood as Tory candidate for Brighton, one of the fabled ‘A- listers’. She came third in the general election behind Caroline Lucas (apologies for getting this name wrong and thanks to the reader who pointed it out) , then leader of the Green Party, and the Labour candidate. She was picked as Tory candidate in a very close vote in an ‘open primary’, though the actual votes were never revealed. Just 80 people attended the selection meeting. It sounds like an interesting evening, with a  cliff-hanger ending.

 

Well, it’s hard to define a Tory these days (look at Louise Bagshawe, as was, now Louise Mensch, the woman who wandered in and out of New Labour before becoming Tory candidate for Corby, winning the seat and then wandering off again, who knows whither, in mid-Parliament).

 

But in what way is she a conservative?

Let’s take a look at some of our exchanges:

 

 

 

She assumed (why? She claims not to be statist) that my article was a plea for state subsidies for full-time mothers, which it isn’t. I don’t, for instance, favour the much-dangled plan for a marriage tax allowance, believing it to be a silly gimmick.

 

My column was just a plea for the government to stop penalising full-time mothers by a) acting as if they’re a stupid nuisance, a feeling actually voiced by Patricia Hewitt (who said they were a ‘problem’) but implicitly endorsed by the policies of all modern British governments for some years, and b) taxing such families to subsidise child-care for double-earners. And on top of that taxing such families to subsidise the many thousands of fatherless families created by 50 years of deliberate state policy. I want the state to stop encouraging rivals to the independent ,free, married family, and to stop making those free families pay for that encouragement. That’s all.

 

It was also pointing out that the present government’s attitude towards women who raised their own children was strikingly similar to that of the old East Germany (I quoted from one of my favourite possessions, a propaganda booklet on the GDR in which that horrible state boasted of its advanced and enlightened policy of cramming women into wageslave workplaces, and simultaneously cramming their children into nurseries.  The GDR, by the way, had a Tory Party (Christian Democrats) and a Liberal Democrat Party, each allowed 52 seats in the 500-seat People’s Chamber, provided they agreed with the Communist Party about everything. Remind you of anything? It also had universal comprehensive schools.  

 

I had also noticed that the old USSR had a very similar policy. In fact, when I lived in Soviet Moscow, this arrangement – under which a single income simply couldn’t meet the budget of a normal household, and there was universal ‘childcare’ so that mothers of young children could be marched into paid work as soon as possible after giving birth, was one of the most striking features of that society. So was mass abortion (abortions –openly practised as a form of contraception -  outnumbered live births in many years in the USSR) and pandemic divorce. When I returned home a few years later, I was struck (and remain struck) by the similarities between this horrible travesty of a human society and the grisly, family-free, privacy free, marriage-free abortionist utopia we are now building in Britain.

 

The intensifying battle between the state and the family (also dealt with in Ferdinand Mount’s work ‘The Subversive family’) was one of the chief themes of my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I am still hoping some of my critics will one day read, rather than assuming wrongly that it is a tract about central heating..

 

(If Ms Vere won’t read my book, surely she can read Ferdinand Mount’s,  as David Cameron’s mother is Ferdy’s cousin (Ferdy is really Sir William Mount, Bart, but is too nice to mention it ))

 

 

 

Of course the point is this – that the state and the family are rivals. In this struggle, any conservative must surely be on the side of the family and private life (and of private property) against the state.  But for those people who confuse economic liberalism with conservatism, there is a confusing new element.  The state has now been joined by a ferocious ally, namely global, corporate business, which – as the cleverer Marxists have long realised -  has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary forces known to man. Both the state and the corporations dislike the close-knit married family. Such a family requires a proper weekly Sabbath of some kind, where both parents stay away from work and the family is together in its own home, undisturbed by work, or commerce, and is in general resistant to regimentation, advertising and demands for long working hours. The state is suspicious and jealous of such privacy. The corporations are jealous of the time which they would rather we spent in the shops or in the workplace.

 

Business also prefers women workers to men –  amongst other things much less likely than men to be unionised (note how many men have ended up unemployed, and indeed unemployable, since the sexual revolution really got under way and the commercial women’s magazines and the popular newspaper agony aunts started spouting the sort of ideas once restricted to ‘Spare Rib’).   

 

This state-family battle, not some forgotten tussle between unions and bosses, or some ancient dead row about nationalisation, is the real clash in our society at the moment. A terrifying alliance of state and commerce is arrayed against the family and is rapidly destroying it.  Of course, this alliance cannot see any virtue in the unmeasured benefits of full-time motherhood, as compared to measurable, GDP-enhancing wage-slavery. Nor would it be interested if it could see any such virtue, despite some politicians’ propaganda claims to be concerned with Gross National Happiness or General Wellbeing. These people have no idea how must of the world actually lives.

 

Individualism and personal autonomy (once known as ‘selfishness’) are major constituencies now, as the post-Christian society takes its grim shape in the second Century of the Self. And individuals, hypnotised by the latest gadget and allowed almost limitless credit to spend, are the ideal consumers, the ideal wageslaves and the ideal passive, compliant citizen in the beehive state.    

 

Many of the advocates of female wageslavery are of course very well-off themselves( I have no idea of Ms Vere’s personal circumstances) and so are spared from almost all its consequences. That’s often why they can’t see any disadvantages in this arrangement.

 

If all wageslave mothers were Nicola Horlick, or Cherie Blair, or Samantha Cameron, well-paid and rewarded with great status, then the position might be different (though to me there is something sad in a child being brought up by an employee, however wonderful, while that child’s mother goes out to an office) .

 

But they aren’t. For most of them it’s a grim job in a call-centre or an assembly plant or a shop, while their child competes for attention in a teeming nursery, what I call a day-orphanage. They do it because they have to, not because they want to. If they had the choice, and if the government stopped pushing them into wageslavery, they’d raise their own young, and do it much better.

 

 

 

Here are some quotes from what Ms Vere (who apparently dismisses any discussion of political theory, its origins and nature, or of the importance of ideas an history in political debate)  has had to say on this general subject . (As to this attitude I recommend that she notes what Maynard Keynes once said ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”)

 

At one stage  (14^th August), she rather enjoyably said that au pairs cost £20 a week ‘cheaper than after-school club’ – later in some embarrassment raising this figure to £20 a day. 

 

Then she declared that ‘Motherhood does not mean out of work and cleaning behind the fridge’ (13^th August)

 

She tweeted ‘Yawn’ in response to my pointing out the similarities between Britain and the USSR, and also referred to ‘constant harking back to yesteryear’ (when and where was this harking?).

 

In response to my characterisation of ‘childcare’ as ‘paid strangers’ she said ‘Strangers! You have never used childcare clearly. These people become part of an extended family’ .

 

She also Tweeted ‘You have given me no hope that you respect a woman’s right to work outside the home’. Once again, I have no idea where she gets this from. I wouldn’t dream of stopping anyone from working outside the home if she wanted to. I just want to stop people being conscripted unwillingly into wageslavery and abandoning her children to the care of paid strangers.

 

Challenged to withdraw her claim that I want girls to leave school at 14,  she did not do so, but repeated it, saying ‘ I still think you would like girls to leave school at 14 to build ‘domestic fortresses’’

 

She declared ‘A dual-income family’s main goal should be financial resilience.’

 

And she gave an example of her rhetoric when she said ‘Pro-family? Absolutely. Why does that have to include the women scrubbing the hearth?’ .

 

Then there was ‘Enough of the ‘bring-backery’ of the Daily Mail . there is a future to seize and 1950s views don’t help’

 

Most of these sentiments could easily have come from the pen of a radical leftist. Indeed, I have experienced most of them from that direction already. The point here is that they are coming from the pen (or perhaps the hand-held device) of a person who has stood as a Tory parliamentary candidate.

 

When I pointed out that the Tory party, for which she had stood as an official candidate, had helped the passage of the Equality Act, the central pillar of political correctness and the work (though originating in an EU directive) of Harriet Harman (with whom Ms Vere  says she disagrees) , Ms Vere responded by saying Theresa May had ‘little option’ but to go along with Ms Harman’s Equality Bill.

 

I should have thought Mrs May would have had little option but to oppose it, had she been a conservative. As it happens, she told  Ms Harman back in 2008 (Hansard, 26^th June 2008 col 501 )  'I look forward to working constructively with them [the New Labour government]on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.' Ms Harman responded (Col 503) 'I thank the right honourable lady for her broad welcome for the package and for our endeavours. I also welcome the fact that she has ignored the cries from her own backbenchers that the proposals are rubbish.’ 

So Much for 'Father's Day' - in a Country Where Fatherhood is Dying Out

By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home.

 

Our 45-year national war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15-year-olds no longer live with both their parents. At the same time we have indulged our neglected and abandoned young with electronics, so that 79% of children aged between 5 and 16 have bedroom TVs.

 

And as we soppily mark ‘Father’s Day’ with cards, socks, sentimentality and meals out, we should remember that in almost all cases the absent parent is the father.

 

There is no doubt about the facts here. Let me list some of them. The cost of our wild, unprecedented national experiment in fatherlessness is now £49 billion each year, more than the defence budget. This figure, currently costing each taxpayer £1,541 per year, is rising all the time, and has gone up by almost a quarter since 2009.

 

The money partly goes on handouts and housing which an old-fashioned family with a working father would not have needed. Partly it goes on trying to cope with the crime, disorder, truancy, educational failure, physical and mental illness and general misery which are so much more common among the fatherless than in those from stable homes.

 

And there is more to come. One in three marriages ends in divorce, while many who would once have married never even bother.  Roughly 300,000 families of all kinds separate every year. There are now three million children growing up in fatherless homes.  Another 58 fatherless families are launched every day.  And be in no doubt that it is the fathers who are, overwhelmingly, absent in these new-style modern households. Only 8% of single-parent homes are headed by a lone father.

 

Four in ten children being brought up by their mothers – nearly 1.2 million - have no contact with their fathers at all.

 

Another 67,000 (In England alone) dwell in the organised despair and neglect which are cruelly misnamed ‘care’.

 

In the last 40 years the proportion of adults who are married has sunk from 70% to fewer than half.  The number of single adults has hugely increased (up 50%). A quarter of a million people each year spend Christmas alone. One in six adults now cohabits, compared to one in 50 in the 1960s.  Cohabiting households, which have doubled in number since 1996, are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the United Kingdom.

 

By 2015, there will be two million lone parents (up 120,000 since 2010); more than 24% of children will be in lone-parent households.

 

It matters. Young people from fractured homes are statistically twice as likely to have behaviour problems as those from stable households. They are more likely to be depressed, to abuse drugs or alcohol, to do badly at school, and end up living in relative poverty.

 

Girls with absent fathers (according to studies in the USA and New Zealand) have teenage pregnancy rates seven or eight times as high as those whose fathers have stayed in meaningful touch with them.

 

By contrast, the link between marriage and good health is so strong that one study showed the health gain achieved by marrying was as great as that received from giving up smoking.

 

In all these dismal statistics of marriage decline and failure, the United Kingdom is one of the worst afflicted among advanced nations.  And in many of the poorest and most desolate parts of the country, the problem is concentrated into certain areas where fathers in the home are an endangered species.

 

From Gosport in Hampshire, to Cardiff, Liverpool, Easington in County Durham, Inner London, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield, there are whole city wards where at least 60% of the households are headed by a lone parent.      

 

And it is in such circumstances that a procession of serial boyfriends, a type of domestic arrangement closely associated with physical and sexual abuse of children, is most likely to exist.

 

This great fleet of hard truths is known in general to those who govern the country, and in hard detail to millions who suffer from their consequences.

 

How, as a country and a people can we manage to be so indifferent to them, when we claim to set fatherhood and fathers at the centre of our culture? The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

 

If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfilment for man, woman and children.’

 

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is,  fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

 

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.

 

I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’.

 

The CSJ is very close to the Tory party, to the government and to Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary. So it is startling to find that the report is coldly savage in its dismissal of the Cameron government’s efforts to fix this problem.

 

‘Conservatives say they would have been more radical on family policy had it not been for their Liberal Democrat colleagues, but even those commitments made in the Programme for Government have been ignored so far.

 

‘So for all of the promises the Conservatives made in Opposition, for all of the gimmick giveaways politicians have unveiled for middle-class families, and for all of the safe ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’ rhetoric ministers have used for decades, hardly anything has been done to resist the tsunami of family breakdown battering the United Kingdom’.

 

The authors continue: ‘Saying that family form is irrelevant is inaccurate and ultimately counter-productive…’ This is true. Someone ought to speak up for marriage. But is it entirely true to say that ‘Backing commitment and setting a goal of reducing instability does not equate to criticising or stigmatising lone parents.’? Doesn’t approval of the one inevitably stigmatise the other? And if you aren’t prepared to do that, will you get anywhere?

 

They also assert that ‘marriage is not a right-wing obsession’, though, speaking as a right-winger I rather think it is. It certainly isn’t a left-wing priority.  They argue : ‘People throughout society want to marry, but the cultural and financial barriers faced by those in the poorest communities thwart their aspirations’.

 

It is certainly true that some benefits actively discourage couples from being or staying married.

 

But it is the ‘cultural’ barriers I want to talk about here. Anyone who dares to discuss this subject is quickly accused of ‘hating’ or wishing to persecute ‘single mothers’. Any article on the subject is supposed (maybe it is an EU regulation?) to contain a disclaimer saying that many single mothers do a great job.

 

 

Well, I neither hate single mothers nor wish to persecute them, and I am perfectly prepared to believe that many of them do a great job. But it isn’t the point. The main problem with single mothers is that they are acting rationally, in a society which actively encourages them with money and approval. Who can blame them?

 

There is a lot of piety about this. Suggest that anyone deliberately gets pregnant (or rather, in this age of morning-after pills and abortion on demand, deliberately stays pregnant) to get a house and a handout, and you are angrily dismissed as some kind of snobbish hate-figure.

 

Well, mightn’t it be true? As far as I know, nobody has ever researched the motives of the young women who accept this sparse arrangement. I wish they would. But is it unreasonable to suggest that if you reward certain types of behaviour with money and housing, and with social approval, then that behaviour will increase?

 

It’s not just me. Adele Adkins once recalled ‘The ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’ Perhaps successful singing stars can get away with saying what others only think.  

 

I don’t myself see that it is a particularly harsh view to hold. A baby is a wonderful thing, and many young women long to be mothers, and good luck to them. Many modern males are a pretty unattractive proposition, so why marry one, if the state will give you a home and an income on your own?

 

Meanwhile men have learned enough about the divorce courts to know that marriage is a big risk. If it goes wrong, they are the ones who have to move out, and yet they will still have to pay.

 

Why not take advantage of the fact that the state - which once demanded the father’s name when any baby was registered, so he could be made to pay for his child - now happily allows us to leave this space blank? 

 

My guess is that doing anything really radical about this scares all politicians too much. For the War on Fatherhood is protected by a great taboo.

 

In every family, every workplace, every school, every pub, every weekend football or cricket team, every political party, every church congregation, there are now large numbers of people who signed up for the Great Cultural and Moral Revolution which was launched in the 1960s and swept through the land like a mighty rushing wind in the 1970s.

 

The fiery heart of this was the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969.  This change was very popular.  It is interesting to note that, just before it began its way through Parliament, Engelbert Humperdinck’s hymn for would-be divorcees, ‘Release Me’, pushed the Beatles off the top of the music charts for weeks on end.

 

The new law pretty much embodied the song’s plea ‘Please release me, let me go/For I don't love you any more/To waste our lives would be a sin/Release me and let me love again.’

Portrayed at the time as a kindness to those trapped in loveless marriages, the new law made it much easier to end a troubled union than to fight to save it.

 

And once this had become general, marriage changed with amazing speed from a lifelong commitment into a lifestyle choice. And from a lifestyle choice it changed into a risky and often inconvenient contract. Divorce wasn’t shameful or embarrassing any more. The country was littered with male divorcees complaining about the division of the property and the child support payments. 

 

Men began to calculate that marriage wasn’t worth it. And the Pill and easy abortion (other parts of the 1960s revolution) put an end to shotgun weddings.

 

Who, in such a society, could condemn the pregnant teenager without hypocrisy? Hardly anyone, especially rackety politicians and flexible churchmen.  The middle classes had abandoned lifelong marriage with a sigh of relief. The aristocracy had never cared for it much. Even the Royal Family was riddled with divorce.

 

The housing-estate poor were simply following the same moral code as those who posed as their betters, and weren’t actually better at all. And the adults of the era have all had a lot of fun as a result. But everyone, throughout this great period of release and revolt, forgot one small thing. What was to become of the children?

 

Now we are finding out. And a generation which has never known fathers, or family life, or fidelity or constancy, is now busy begetting children of its own. What will become of them? How will boys who have never seen a father learn to be fathers?

 

I’d have a moral panic at this stage, if I thought it would do any good. But perhaps it will be the victims of this selfish generation, our children and grandchildren, who – having suffered its effects - will re-establish stable family life in our country.

 

**A Hostile contributor complains about 'a distinct lack of citations' in thjis article. Apart from the fact that newspaper articles are not normally footnoted, the piece clearly states:

"I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’."

 

This document is fully footnoted and can be found here :

http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%20reports/CSJ_Fractured_Families_Report_WEB_13.06.13.pdf

 

 

 

The Great Innocence Robbery: The awful abuse of girls in Oxford is just the latest consequence

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Commentators take what they want to from scandals. Already this is happening to the debate about the mass abuse of young girls in Oxford.

The Left are blaming the law for being too weak on rape. The Right are blaming political correctness. Each has a point. But it goes deeper than that and both sides should admit it.

I have lived in Oxford (with some gaps) for almost 50 years. It is, in many ways, a paradise which has escaped much of the evil and decay which beset this country.

I suspect I may, all unknowing, have gone past the scenes of some of those crimes while they were actually taking place. There’s a particular meadow with a pretty name and a shady reputation that I often ride past on my bicycle, which was the scene of some disgusting crimes.

I have probably rubbed shoulders in the streets, at the station and at the market with both culprits and victims.

It is an education in how little we actually know about what is going on around us. I am a pessimist and tend to assume the worst, but never imagined this.

Yet though it disgusts me, it does not much surprise me. Like everyone who has any kind of public position, I know that an accusation of racism – even an entirely false one – could ruin my life. I know it as I write these words.

If Thames Valley Police or Oxfordshire County Council and its social workers deny that their wretched responses to these crimes were influenced by the same fear, then I simply do not believe them. It would be good if some of the newspapers of the Left would acknowledge this.

In return, I’ll agree with them that the law is a feeble protection for young girls exploited by older men. Mind you, it is bound to be. In a free country, the law needs hard evidence to prosecute and convict, and such evidence is not always easy to get in such matters. So should we relax the rules? How many wrongful convictions and wrecked innocent lives are we prepared to permit in the battle to stop this sort of thing? Plenty, provided of course that it does not affect us personally.

Then there’s the issue that dare not speak its name. When we set the Oxford case beside other recent events in Rochdale, we find that in both crimes the men were Muslims (often mosque-going ones).

How important is it that the convicted rapists and perverts in most cases regarded their victims as barely-human degenerates, ‘kufr’, unbelievers who didn’t count? It matters. But non-Muslims should not be smug about it.

It reminds me of the assertion by Anthony Blair at the start of his Iraq War in 2003 that our Islamic enemies ‘hate our way of life’. Because, as he said it, I thought: ‘Yes, and I too hate our way of life.’ I loathe the outcome of the sexual revolution, the Great Innocence Robbery that has replaced the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

What an opportunity it has given to the evil and the selfish. You don’t have to be Muslim to take advantage of the rape of innocence, believe me.

The thing that haunts me most about the Oxford case is that one of the six victims was not ‘in care’, at least to begin with. I have come to expect that children ‘in care’ are left almost completely unprotected from our modern hell of loveless sex, binge-drinking and casual drug-taking. The very word ‘care’ sounds to me like a yellow, sarcastic sneer.

But one of these girls had a home and parents who thought they were in charge. Those parents begged the police to act. They took her befouled clothes to them and were turned away. Can you imagine their despair? The authorities, whom they had relied on, and who are supposed to stand between us and evil, were not interested.

In one form or another, this despair comes to thousands of parents in this country every year. They find out that a ‘permissive society’ means just that. Their authority over their own children was long ago abolished, and they can get into severe trouble for trying to exercise it.

The law, the schools, the town and county halls are all in on the same arrangement. ‘The kids are all right.’ We are all free now. Restraint is ‘repression’. There is no moral centre, nor any real law, and ‘equality and diversity’ stand high above morality. Sometimes a single, diligent individual fights against it and manages to secure a prosecution. Mostly, this doesn’t happen.

And so, on a filthy bed in a squalid house somewhere near you, these crimes and others like them still go on, and in most cases nothing will ever be done about it.

Moral panic? I long ago gave that up. Nobody listened. Now I just hope that these hellish things won’t come too near me, though they are already nearer than I thought they were.

At last, this rotten pair have done something useful

I don't really care what happens to Chris Huhne or Vicky Pryce, both prominent members of the rotten, arrogant elite who have helped to wreck my country.

I only mention them because – unlike most people sent to prison – their release got as much publicity as their sentencing.

And so even the BBC could not ignore the fact that their sentences – eight months, but they served only two – were actual, deliberate official lies. Almost all prison sentences are.

Nobody seems to have thought about what this means. What sort of state orders its judges to utter falsehoods as part of their conditions of employment?

And what sort of media have let this festival of lying go unchallenged for so long?

Puffed up defenders of the existing order screech at me when I point out (with perfect accuracy, and backed by research) that crime statistics are fiddled by the authorities. These are the same sorts of people who think children are growing cleverer because they get more high grades in GCSEs and A-levels.

Can they now please address their complaints  to Steve Williams, chairman of the Police Federation, who last week revealed that  pressure was being placed on frontline officers to minimise recorded crime? Mr Williams also pointed out that officers are increasingly scared of talking to the press.

Given the disgraceful imprisonment of former Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, accused on the flimsiest grounds of corruption (no evidence was ever produced of money changing hands), but whose real offence was to telephone a newspaper to complain about anti-terror resources being diverted, I am not surprised.

We know that New Labour hoped to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’ by encouraging mass immigration, thanks to amazing revelations by former speechwriter Andrew Neather.

Now former Young Communist Baron Mandelson confirms the plan, blabbing that ‘we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country’.

Does His Lordship have a coat of arms yet? How about an open door?

Today, children, we're teaching underage sex and debauchery

How much easier it is to go after the corpse of a dead villain than to fight a real live one.

If we are all so disgusted by the Savile affair, which is over, why are we not much more revolted by the schools and clinics which, during next week, will be giving contraceptive jabs and implants to underage girls, so they can have underage sex?

If you want to know what a society is really like, you should not judge it by the sort of thing that becomes a scandal. You should judge it by  the sort of thing that does not become a scandal.

The almighty authorities of this country, backed by Parliament, and ultimately by the force of fines, police and prisons, are now forcing their  tawdry sexual standards on an entire generation.

These policies take us back to an age of great cruelty to women, and of dreadful sexual exploitation of the young of both sexes. They are closely linked with the growing number of young people who have no stable family, and the growing number of old people trapped in solitude.

They involve the deliberate violation of innocence, the undermining of family life, and the subversion of parental authority. Schoolgirls as young as 13 are being given contraceptive injections and implants without their parents’ knowledge, hundreds of them actually in schools, thousands more in ‘clinics’.

Aren’t  our children supposed to be safe from predators in schools? Not when the State is the predator, cynically grooming vulnerable children for illegal sex.

‘Patient confidentiality’ forbids nurses from asking parents’ leave beforehand, or from telling them afterwards. This could be happening to your daughter or granddaughter, now, and you would never know.  The age of consent for sexual intercourse is still 16.

Why are those involved not being prosecuted for incitement to break the law, or for aiding and abetting crimes?

Simple. The liberal State approves. And it will get worse. Once you abandon lifelong  marriage, as our elite long ago did, you begin the long journey back to the debauchery of Babylon.

And in the end nothing is wrong any more. It is only ‘inappropriate’, a shifting boundary that alters with fashion and our growing tolerance of what would once have shocked us.

How many years, I wonder, before child prostitution is once again openly practised in this country? Laugh if you like.

Even 20 years ago, could you have imagined the changes which have come to our society since 1991? Do you think they have stopped? The general view of our governors is that  if it is even a little bit hard to prevent any moral ill, they will give up the struggle.

In their perverted, Babylonian way, the authorities have decided that the only bad thing about sex is that it leads to babies. They don’t care about the emotional misery and betrayal of the exploited young.

So as long as they can prevent conception, or obliterate it later with ‘morning-after pills’ and mass slaughter of the unborn, then they believe they are acting responsibly.

They also make a few feeble efforts to discourage the spread of sexual diseases.

This is the morality of the brothel-keeper throughout the ages. When the Government and the law behave like this, what is the good citizen to do? Where is he or she to turn?

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 My parents watched the Coronation of our present Queen from a window in the Admiralty Arch. It was a great privilege given to them because they had both seen hard service in the Second World War, my father on the Russian convoys and my mother in the Wrens in Blitz-stricken Liverpool. So I have always liked the Arch’s solid Edwardian ugliness, whispering the last enchantments of the lost years before 1914. As I passed beneath it, it made me think of the Navy, that confident, competent yet good-humoured institution that kept us safe, happy and prosperous for so many centuries. Not any more. The fact that it is now to be leased out as a hotel reminds me that the grandeur and splendour of London is a shell, concealing emptiness and decline.

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I bit my tongue when I first read of the tragedy of Felicia Boots, her life now a desolation of unbearable grief. As soon as I learned that she had killed her own children and then tried to do away with herself, I was sure that I would find she had been taking ‘antidepressants’. And so it proves. Our courts let many people off because of spurious claims that they could not control themselves. But I believe that in her case the judge was right to say that this unhappy woman, was in the grip of ‘forces beyond her control’. It will be pointed out that she had recently ceased taking these pills, because of a perfectly reasonable fear of passing on the drugs to her children through her breast milk. To anyone who has studied the matter the fact that Mrs Boots became unhinged after ceasing to take her ‘antidepressants will be no surprise. Normal human beings become abnormal, possibly forever, as soon as they first ingest these powerful, poorly-researched chemicals, often prescribed by doctors shamefully ignorant of the growing body of expert criticism of them. The effects of coming off them can be even worse than the effects of starting to take them. I have absolutely no personal stake in this argument. I have simply observed what seems to me to be a pattern, both among several people known to me and in a growing number of news reports. I will be told this is ‘anecdotal’. Very well then. Let us have a proper, fully-funded inquiry that will settle the matter once and for all. It is very urgent. Prescriptions of ‘antidepressants’ grow all the time. If there is the slightest risk that they make good, kind mothers lose their minds and kill their own babies, then I can imagine few more pressing matters on the agenda of any government than to establish the truth and act on it. Please, somebody listen.

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 I don’t mind James Bond plugging beer or watches. What I do object to, in Skyfall, is the creepy message, delivered by Judi Dench, that we need spooks to protect us from unknown dangers. Actually, now the Cold War is over, SIS is almost completely pointless and its main job seems to be doing Saudi Arabia’s dirty work in the Middle East.

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My parents watched the Coronation of  our present Queen from a window in Admiralty Arch.

It was a great privilege given to them because they had both seen hard service in the Second World War, my father on the Russian convoys and my mother in the Wrens in  Blitz-stricken Liverpool.

So I have always liked the Arch’s solid Edwardian ugliness, whispering the last enchantments of the lost years before 1914.

As I passed beneath it, it made me think of the Navy, that confident, competent yet good-humoured institution that kept us safe, happy and prosperous for so many centuries.

Not any more. The fact that it is now to be leased out as a hotel reminds me that the grandeur and splendour of London is a shell, concealing emptiness and decline.