A postcard from Brighton

I am at the Labour conference in Brighton, inside the security cordon, so in many ways I am more abroad than I was when I was in Canada or Central Europe, on my recent travels. The strange fenced-off enclosures in which these gatherings take place are concentrations of wholly untypical people - political activists, lobbyists and the media. Only a special pass will get you in. Outside, normal people peer through the fence, as if at a zoo, and are perhaps puzzled to see how uninteresting and ordinary the occupants are. They also get a chance to see some police officers, who stand around the conference in yellow battalions. For many, this must be a unique opportunity to find out what one of these legendary creatures looks like. The absurd cordon is yet more evidence that the police now serve and protect the state, as is usual in despotic and absolutist countries, rather than the law, which is what they are supposed to do here. After their recent failure to protect a victimised family against long-term mob persecution, I struggle to see how their defenders can continue to insist that the police in this country serve any useful purpose for most people.

What makes the Labour rally most amusing for me is the way that so many people claim that they are perfectly happy with Gordon Brown as party leader. A year ago, the opposite was the case, the Manchester Labour zone swirled with rumour and plot, and then nothing happened. I wonder if, this time round, the silence is actually an indication that a serious plot is under way, so well-organised that nobody is blabbing about it, and that Mr Brown will be gone within three weeks. I also enjoyed Peter Mandelson's speech, in which he finally decided to speak in public roughly as he speaks in private, and actually squeezed genuine applause out of an audience which has loathed him for years.

It was one of those moments, like the astonishingly swift transformation of Princess Anne from grumpy horsewoman into respected patroness of charity, when you see how easy it is for an image to be altered if the circumstances are right. In both cases, the audience had probably grown a little tired of disliking the person involved, and found it more amusing to like them. I think that the time has passed when this trick could be worked for Gordon Brown, though he nearly managed it during the great floods two years ago.

I have been neglecting readers' comments, thanks to being away, and I'm still not fully back, but I'd like to make a few general responses to some things that have been said in the last few weeks. I was scolded for referring to atheists as dogmatic, with the critic saying that this was unfair. Didn't I think that Christians were dogmatic too? Actually, I do think Christians are dogmatic. In fact, that is what they are, and I don't think any serious Christian would reject the label. My only point was that Atheists are dogmatic too, and have a structured, ordered belief. Theirs is a kind of faith. I was merely placing the two beliefs, as they should be, on an equal footing. The odd thing is that they deny it, notably my brother in his 'God is not Great', in which he declares ‘Our belief is not a belief.’ I disagree. In fact I suspect there is nobody who has no opinion at all on the existence or non-existence of God, and that all our opinions on this are based upon our desires, hopes and deepest wishes. But in all cases, because there is no proof available, we must proceed by faith, and by belief.

Once again, partisans of Darwinist orthodoxy seek to corral their critics in the enclosures of Bible literalism, so that they can ignore them. Those of us who refuse to be herded in this way are just told that we think things that we don't think. And I am told that a belief in evolution by natural selection is compatible with Theism. But by definition it is not. The idea that a creator or designer proceeded through evolution is in fact more compatible with the implications of the 'Intelligent design' position. A proper evolutionist holds the theory precisely because he believes (and in my view hopes) that there is no intelligent design. This is just another version of the old 'irresistible force' and 'immovable object' problem. If one exists, the other cannot exist, by definition. So the question 'did God proceed through evolution?’ is as meaningless as 'what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?’

I suspect that this rather common get-out is common only because of the very limited understanding of what evolution is, resulting from its dismal teaching as an acknowledged fact (with no serious discussion of its history, nature and process) in schools. The use of 'evolution' in normal speech is almost invariably wholly wrong, so widely and consistently wrong that it must betoken a deep and broad failure to grasp what is being suggested. When social changes, or cars, are said in normal speech to have 'evolved', this invariably means that they have been deliberately altered by intentional human agency. A computer software company recently produced a series of advertisements featuring people wearing rubber dinosaur heads, and the slogan ‘Microsoft office has evolved.’ No it hadn't. It had been redesigned. How can such an elementary mistake be made so often?

I am also told that accepting adaptation (an observable fact) is tantamount to accepting evolution (a speculative theory about the past). I think this is simply mistaken. The whole point of the evolutionary theory is that adaptation accumulates to such an extent that new species arise. Adaptation within species, again by definition, is simply a different thing. As for Karl Popper, it is famously said that he 'recanted', and I would hope that any free-minded person would feel at least a faint shudder of dislike and disquiet at the use of this word. Don't they? I have also heard that in post-recantation editions of the book involved, he actually left the offending passage unaltered. I would be grateful for chapter and verse on either or both of these incidents, not being well-placed to track them down at the moment.

More recently, I am chided for 'comparing' Marie Stopes to Hitler. I did no such thing. I pointed out, as is well known, that the eugenics movement was seriously damaged by the National Socialists' enthusiastic adoption of its views. I happen to think this was just. Eugenics seems to me to be an ugly and arrogant belief, which appeals to ruthless utopians. Eugenicists in the 1920s and early 1930s were about as common, and as popular, as man-made global warmists are now, and they were generally on the left. Mrs Stopes wasn't very nice, and I think her fanaticism for contraception was misguided, but of course she wasn't a Nazi. The fact is that she was given pause when the National Socialists adopted some of her ideas. I am also told off for using strong language about abortion. To those who think that this is not a massacre (and perhaps I am influenced by having seen in recent weeks three great paintings of Herod's massacre of the innocents, one in Toronto and two in Vienna) what else would they call it? Bear in mind that the reality of abortion is one of the few things which the liberal establishment still tries to censor. It cannot be shown on mainstream TV. Why? Because it would be obvious that it was the violent destruction of a human person. I often feel that my references to this horrible slaughter are an inadequate and feeble response to a crime I ought to do more to prevent. But the same impulse which leads me to believe that abortion is wrong leads me to a belief in the supremacy of law.

Will Keir Starmer still think like this when HE’S old and gaga?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We seldom know exactly when we cross the border between good and evil. Normal, gentle, kindly people discover too late that they have become collaborators with wickedness, and dare not condemn crimes they have themselves committed.

This is the reason for the hatchet-faced defence of abortion by the liberal elite. They took part in the massacre of the unborn in large numbers before mass immigration provided them with legions of cheap live-in nannies and so made parenthood compatible with the two-career lifestyle.

Very often we start to do dreadful things because we are convinced that they are in fact good. Everyone now recoils in disgust from the German National Socialist eugenics and euthanasia programmes.

Hitler, being composed of almost pure evil, simply took the filthy idea to its logical conclusion. Non-German supporters of eugenics – like the contraception fanatic Marie Stopes – were embarrassed into silence by finding themselves in company with such monsters.

But the problem has not gone away. The killing of the inconvenient is always attractive to some, either because they think they can make a perfect world, or because the old, the demented and incontinent are expensive and unproductive. Not one of us, if we are honest, is safe from this temptation.

There is only one reliable barrier to getting rid of them – an unalterable moral law which says such things are always wrong and a criminal law which takes the same view.

Without that, we slither into mass murder. I will predict it for you. Within a few years of the law’s relaxation, we will all – doctors and relatives alike – slip across the boundary.

Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, gave it all away when he said that as a society we had ‘moved on’ since the days when it was a crime to assist a suicide. Indeed we have, just as we have ‘moved on’ from the days when most people could read and write, mobs were not allowed to persecute people to death, and Saturday night streets were not full of drunks and puke.

By the time Keir Starmer is old, and his children are wondering what to do with him, we may have ‘moved on’ further still, largely thanks to his extra-parliamentary law-making. But will it be in the right direction? And if by then he has a different opinion on the subject, will anyone listen to his feeble whispers of protest?

Spot on Colonel, the UN is useless

Colonel Gaddafi’s comical rage at the United Nations ought to remind us that the UN is obliged to take unhinged despots of this kind seriously, and provides them with a surprising amount of power and influence. This is one of many reasons why the UN should be swiftly wound up.

Then again, we might recall how the fatuous supporters of the Iraq War (some still exist, amazingly) claimed that his decision to abandon his completely non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction showed that toppling Saddam had put the fear of Uncle Sam into the hearts of all Islamic tyrants.

The same people now rave in a lunatic way about attacking Iran and Pakistan, countries which actually learned the opposite lesson – that Washington will leave you alone only if you have the Bomb.

Then there’s the ridiculous claim America is somehow angry with us for letting Abdelbaset Al Megrahi (who plainly had nothing to do with the Lockerbie outrage) out of jail. This is supposed to be behind Barack Obama’s unwillingness to meet Gordon Brown for more than five minutes.

If this were true, it would be monstrous. Those who are desperate to blame every bad thing in the world on Gordon Brown seem to have let political partisanship cancel out patriotism. How dare Mr Obama snub us over the release of one innocent man – when more than 200 of our soldiers have died fighting America’s war in Afghanistan?

Actually, that’s the real problem.

Mr Obama snubbed Britain, not Mr Brown. To him, we are an unimportant European country which has nothing to offer him. He’s probably forgotten we even have troops in Afghanistan – another reason we should pull them out.

Czechs know all about Tory piffle, Dave

Davd Cameron is said to be encouraging the Czech President Vaclav Klaus to hold out against signing the EU Constitution (alias the Lisbon Treaty) if the Irish vote for it this week. Apparently Mr Cameron has let Mr Klaus know that Britain will stand by him if the going gets rough.

Oh, really? How can anyone be fooled by this piffle? First, I should have thought Mr Cameron wants
a referendum on Lisbon about as much as he wants a bout of malaria or a broken nose. If Britain then votes ‘No’, what will he do?

The EU would make us vote again and say ‘Yes’. Or we would leave the EU. Mr Cameron is clearly in favour of staying in the EU. In that case, he ought to be honest and admit it and – along with many other Tories – stop pretending to oppose something he in fact supports.

As for the heroic President Klaus, I suggest he recalls a previous occasion when a British Conservative leader promised to help the Czechs against a continental empire. Chap with a moustache and an umbrella. Neville something. Didn’t work out.

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Dispersing the migrant camps at Calais will do nothing to stem the problem. Our daft laws and benefits system are magnets for alleged refugees, and our frontiers are half-open. Many of them will get here in the end.

But this is nothing to what is coming. Far too few of us are aware of the revolution which has swept the European continent in the past few years. I know because I frequently travel across European borders, and I can tell you that they no longer exist. Recently, I travelled from Berlin to Vienna via Prague by train – a journey that would once have required two visas and five passport inspections. Now there is nothing at all.

From the old Russian frontier fortress of Brest, all the way to Calais, there are no frontiers. Even Switzerland and Norway, non-EU members, have been strong-armed into abolishing their border posts in a devastating assault on sovereignty.

Sooner or later – I give it five years – Britain will be compelled to submit as well. And then the camps at Calais will disappear because their inhabitants will all be here.


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Nine-year-old Steven Cheek didn’t know what ‘racism’ was until he was reprimanded for playing soldiers. Now he knows it’s a word used by the ignorant and conformist to control thought and speech. Some dimwit teacher knew nothing about history and even less about boys, and so concluded that for Steven to say

‘We’ve got to shoot the German army’ to a Polish boy was ‘inappropriate’. Why? I imagine such thoughts are often expressed in Polish schools, most of which had to be rebuilt after the German army passed by in 1939.

Defeated? The unions are still running Britain

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

One of the many falsehoods about Margaret Thatcher is that she defeated the trades unions. They have never been so powerful. But their power takes a new form.

Stringent employment laws, enforced by tribunals, compel all employers – from hairdressers to oil giants – to act as if they have armies of militant shop stewards permanently breathing down their necks.

This is especially tough on the small businesses that used to be largely union-free. Break the rules and you can face huge penalties. Keep them and it will be hard to compete.

The big difference between then and now is that the main questions are all settled – there is no need for walkouts or pickets because the major aims of the unions have been won, often through EU regulation. Our unions memorably fell in love with Europe when Jacques Delors came and wooed them back in 1988. They grasped that Brussels would force the British Government to bow to their wishes.

The other big difference is Mrs Thatcher put paid to almost all our major industries, the ones where noisy, old-fashioned union militancy used to happen.

She and John Major left behind an enormous public sector, the gargantuan NHS, a multitude of questionable new ‘universities’, hundreds of thousands of dubious jobs in local government and the uncontrollable jungle of quangos. All these remain heavily unionised, and bound by union rules and demands.

But what about the pitifully diminished TUC, which used to hold a monstrous annual rally in Brighton or Blackpool, with ferocious old socialist warhorses thundering from its platform, and now can barely fill a medium-size hall?

Where now are Jack Jones and Hughie Scanlon, Alan Fisher, Mick McGahey, Arthur Scargill and Ray Buckton?

Well, most of them are gone but their work is done. Their ideas have conquered Whitehall. Their successors are in positions of power in the civil service, or in the EU bureaucracy, or are Ministers in the Government. The unions themselves, left with little to do, are generally headed by third-raters, as we see on the railways or in the Post Office.

Many of the old union barons were actually considerable men who would have risen to the top in any field they chose. Not this lot. Their job, if only they understood it, is to collect money for the Labour Party, lobby for Labour policies and be grateful.

Problems arise mainly when EU regulations – which are driving the destruction of the Royal Mail – turn out to hurt particular groups. This is yet another way in which conventional wisdom about our recent history is completely wrong. I do wish people would pay more attention.

The Nazi movie with a message for the Left

Nazis are a good Hollywood stand-by when film-makers run out of ideas. A hint of jackboots and a few swastikas will generally pull in the punters.

This helps to explain the costly making and release of two feeble films this year – Valkyrie, a woefully thin account of the plot to kill Hitler, and The Reader, squirm-making, incredible drivel about a woman who seems more embarrassed about being illiterate than having been a guard at a concentration camp.

 

Another rather more interesting film did not get this sort of backing, was made on the cheap and has gone straight to DVD. Good, starring Viggo Mortensen and Jodie Whittaker, is about a nice, civilised academic who is slowly seduced into the Nazi Party and then the SS by ambition, flattery and his own anti-Christian moral liberalism.

He betrays his wife for an Aryan floozy and supports euthanasia, to the joy of Hitler and Himmler alike. Fashionable Leftists wouldn’t want to be reminded that the National Socialists shared quite a few of their views.

Trapped in a web of bogus security

We all think that the cobweb of silly regulations which require criminal record checks on anyone who so much as comes within 10ft of a child are in some way justified by the Ian Huntley case.

Chris Stevenson, a senior officer in the Soham murder investigation, has now utterly demolished this idea. This law would not have saved anyone.

Huntley did not work in the school attended by Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. If his record had been discovered, and he had been banned from that job, it would not have saved the two girls.

As Mr Stevenson says: ‘Huntley was appointed a school caretaker in Soham. Did that give him access to children? Yes, hundreds. Did he abuse them? No. What Huntley did to Holly and Jessica was as bad as it gets but did he come into contact with them through being a caretaker? Not exactly – he was caretaker of Soham Village College, a school for the over-11s. The two girls attended St Andrew’s Junior School. Different building, different caretaker. Huntley had contact with them because Maxine Carr was employed at St Andrew’s as a classroom assistant. She worked in a class with Holly and Jessica, who both liked her.

‘Out for a ramble around Soham, they stopped outside Huntley and Carr’s house to ask after Carr. Tragically, she was away, visiting her family.’

Huntley could have been a lorry driver, anything, and the girls would still have gone to the house because they liked Maxine Carr, who had no record of any kind.

Like the ludicrous gun ban implemented after the Dunblane massacre, these intrusive regulations look to me like a state using any excuse to increase its power over us, often after its own incompetence has been demonstrated.

We have plenty of ‘security’, yet we are not safe.

So how’s this for moral panic?

Those who accuse me of spreading ‘moral panic’ about the breakdown of our civilisation might care to study the inquest on Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Frankie, described as having ‘severe learning difficulties’.

Fiona Pilkington appears to have burned herself and her daughter to death in utter despair, after enduring years of stone-age, merciless persecution from children and youths. If you have an imagination, you will feel sick at the thought of what this must have been like. The police, you will be unsurprised to learn, had ‘no resources’ to help them. And I would guess that Fiona Pilkington feared that our feeble criminal justice system would only manage to bring more trouble on her house.

Mind you, if she’d shot an empty airgun at the pavement to scare the louts away, she’d have been sent to prison, like Linda Walker.

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It is now clear that Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi who threw his shoes at the pitiful George W. Bush, was severely and shamefully tortured while in custody. Leave aside the question of whether this man should even have been prosecuted for a justifiable and harmless protest. Where are all the smug advocates of the Iraq War, who told us it would bring ‘democracy’ to Baghdad? Why are they not protesting angrily against this mistreatment? Yes, I know Saddam was worse. But nobody pretended he was a democrat and Western soldiers did not die to install him in power.

 

In haste

I shall be travelling next week and so will not be posting anything except the column. Normal service should resume during the party conferences. Meanwhile, a few small points and responses. Those who call for the abolition of the BBC show a strange faith in the ability or willingness of commercial broadcasters to attempt serious reporting of news, high culture or religious broadcasting. Without the BBC such things will vanish from the airwaves. They also seem to assume - for reasons I don't grasp - that privately owned monopoly or oligopoly broadcasters will be inclined to support conservative positions. There is no evidence of this. The three main (commercial) networks in the USA are relentlessly liberal, and Fox is neo-conservative, that is to say uninterested in the great moral and cultural issues.

Of course if you want broadcasting to be a howling wilderness, then abolishing the BBC will certainly produce that result. But the BBC will in any case defeat such a campaign, precisely because it is true that commercial broadcasters can't and won't produce broadcasting of the quality of Radios Three and Four, or even that of the old (not current) BBC2 or the better bits of (publicly subsidised) Channel Four. Reform, such as I propose, is both more credible and more likely to succeed in the long run. Of course, you may say that it is unlikely (it is) or impossible (it may be) but these are counsels of despair, and if you really believe there is no hope then why bother to enter the debate? Better to cultivate your garden and seek shelter from the coming storm.

What is it that sympathisers of the BNP want to achieve by pestering me? I have not, as they claimed, described all supporters of this organisation as knuckle-draggers. It certainly contains knuckle-draggers, but the ones who write to me could more generally be described as gullible dupes, who associate with knuckle-draggers and either don't know what they are doing, or don't care. They don't deal with that, because they cannot, hence the pretence that I have called them knuckle-draggers, and the assumed air of wounded innocence.

I will never endorse or encourage their squalid party. I have made my differences with it perfectly clear (though they often misrepresent my position). My disagreements with it are real and I am actively hostile to it. I do not secretly support it but suppress my views out of fear, as some seem fondly to imagine. Others falsely suggest that I support, or do not oppose, mass immigration when I am repeatedly on record as believing that it should be immediately halted. And they distort and caricature my argument that no new conservative party can be created until the Tories collapse and split, hoping to spread the idea that there is no alternative to them. Well, anyone who says 'there is no alternative' should be treated with great caution. More often than not, these words really mean: 'There is an alternative. I just hope you don't notice it.’

If Mr Griffin wishes to disown, specifically and unequivocally, the words he spoke to an American audience, about concealing his true objectives for advantage, reproduced here: ‘There’s a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas. And the BNP isn’t about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them. That means basically to use the saleable words. As I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas. They are saleable.Perhaps one day, once by being rather more subtle we’ve got ourselves in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, the British people might change their mind and say, “Yes, every last one must go”. But if you offer that as your sole aim to start with, you’re gonna get absolutely nowhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.’

Also, don't you love that word 'control'?

Likewise if he is ready to apologise for, retract and disown, specifically and unequivocally, his remarks at his trial about the Holocaust, in which he compared the belief that six million Jews were murdered to a belief that the earth is flat, then I might be prepared to believe that he has broken with the tradition from which his organisation came. Otherwise not. He has had plenty of chances to do so. Why doesn't he?

It should have been verboten. The untold story about German reunification

What we think is going on, and what is actually going on, are two different things. Whatever politicians say they are doing, whatever they say their motives are, it is often otherwise. Usually we cannot prove it. But here's an astonishing example, in my view the most interesting fact to emerge into public view for weeks. Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told Mikhail Gorbachev -contrary to her public position - that she did not want Germany to be reunified. Here is the crucial extract from Michael Binyon's amazing story in the Times last week. Mr Binyon explained that Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) sought to make sure that her plea stayed private.

He wrote: ‘She trusted Mr Gorbachev. She trusted him to keep her secrets. She asked him to stop the tape recorders and the notetakers. Then she began. “The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe,” she said. Forget what you have heard or read in Nato communiqués. “We don’t want a united Germany.” It would lead to a change in Europe’s postwar borders. “We cannot allow that, because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”

‘Unfortunately for her, the notetakers did not forget what she said. They performed a service to history. We now know that 1989 was almost as traumatic for the West as it was for the East.’

It is one of those subjects that is hugely important but just does not get discussed. I remember, back in 1982, travelling with the future Mrs Hitchens on the old-gold push seats of a first-class compartment in an East German train. The East German railways were amusingly called the Deutsche Reichsbahn, a name which the country's Communist rulers didn't seem to see anything embarrassing about.

We were riding back to East Berlin from a weekend in the (then unrenovated) Elephant Hotel in the lovely, haunted old city of Weimar. The Elephant, which had survived the war and Communism, had bathtubs as big as swimming pools, ancient wireless sets in the rooms from which you could conjure the BBC World Service, and communal dining tables in the cellar restaurant. Weimar, being a cultural treasure, was also preserved from much of the filth and decay of the rest of East Germany, though the air was still full of the grit and stink of lignite brown coal which pervaded everything.

It was also the perfect German paradox. Buchenwald concentration camp was a short bus-ride from the station. Rather dishonest tours of the camp were available, which barely referred to the persecution of the Jews (generally assumed to have been mainly done by West Germans) and which failed to mention the economically-minded use of the buildings by the Communists as a prison for their opponents after the war. There were romantic parks and pictures by Lucas Cranach. Goethe's house was round the corner, as was Schiller's.

We were passing the East Berlin airport at Schoenefeld, which lies quite close to the tracks. I remarked that, when reunification came, Berlin would have two excellent airports. (As it happens, I was wrong. The unified city's single new airport will eventually be an extension of Schoenefeld). The officer of the People's Navy sitting opposite me, and the official with the prominent Socialist Unity Party (Communist Party) badge sitting next to me, both failed to conceal that a) they were listening and b) they understood English perfectly, which most East Germans didn't, as the comprehensive schools taught only Russian. I had uttered a taboo word. A shocked silence followed.

A few years before in Hamburg, I had discussed unity with West German acquaintances. They had said it was a fantasy, and that East Germany was a joke, not to be taken seriously. Their view was that it was more like the country portrayed in the film 'Good Bye Lenin', in which some genuine true believers lived amid the apathy in a kind of comical failed paradise, than in the other cinema portrayal of the 'GDR', 'the Lives of Others', in which the Other Germany is shown as a poisoned and menacing hell of wholly cynical betrayal and surveillance.

I didn't believe them. I didn't believe that it was trivial and I was sure that unity would come one day and I was not sure that it would be a good thing for Britain when it did, however nice it might be for the Germans. The fact that my country had received the rough edge of Germany made me more complacent about leaving the East Germans living under an oppressive state. I now recognise that this was just an excuse.

The French writer Francois Mauriac memorably said: ‘I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them,’ and I suspected he had a point. Germany, unified, was just too big. Since Bismarck unified it by crushing France in 1870, it had caused nothing but trouble. Was it perhaps possible to undo Bismarck? Lord Ismay equally famously said that NATO (when it was still a proper alliance instead of a Neo-Conservative globalist army) was to ‘keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out’ - though nobody seems to agree on the order in which he listed these desirable objectives.

I had also been much influenced by John le Carre's second best book, 'A Small Town in Germany', (his best is 'The Spy who came in from the Cold'). There are many good things about this novel. One is that George Smiley's tedious love affair with the deeply unattractive and irritating Ann Sercombe (why does he bother?) does not feature at all, because Smiley isn't in it - so the reader is also spared intrusive memories of Alec Guinness from the old BBC series and can use his own imagination. Le Carre's pretentious side is kept reasonably under control, though it escapes from time to time.

It is set in an imaginary time in the late 1960s, just off the path of true history, but not very far. A bankrupt, disintegrating Britain is desperately trying to save its bacon by getting into the Common Market. Germany's attitude is decisive. But somehow, we have made the Germans angry with us. The negotiations are threatened with abject failure. And at the same time a diplomat has vanished, presumably bound for Moscow, with a parcel of ultra-secret documents. A security officer - a memorable pig of a man called Alan Turner - has been sent to find the defector. The scene is the British Embassy in the then West German capital, Bonn - an institution well-known to Le Carre himself. A nasty movement is abroad in Germany, a mixture of left-wing students and nationalist lower-middle-class types, led by a sinister scientist, who favours a rapprochement with Moscow. ‘The Road West has failed. Let us open the Road East’, say the movement's banners.

Through it all runs a sad undercurrent of British failure, of the contrast between our poverty-stricken weakness and the apparent grandeur of our 1945 victory and our days as an occupying power. The British Army of the Rhine has gone home, mainly to save money. It is startling how politically incorrect much of it is, only 40 years after it was written, and given that Le Carre no doubt thought he was pretty liberated at the time. He has the language of the British official classes - as it then was - perfectly (a gift he has lost in his more recent books, in which diplomats in the Blair era talk as if they were from an age of handmade shoes and croquet). There are some rather fine portraits of diplomats and politicians in action. It is also a reminder of the rather desperate, demoralised place Britain was in the 20 years after Suez, a desperation which sent us off down the route of European unity. But what remains really striking about it is the unfashionable awareness of the looming issue of German reunification, a change in European direction which continues to affect us daily, and which we still pretend to like.

Our children can’t hold a knife and fork. So what does UNESCO teach them?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

And still we will not admit that we have made a terrible mistake. This week we learned that growing numbers of children arrive at school unable to hold a knife and fork. I wonder what else they cannot do.

I suspect that, if anyone measured it, we would also find that a lot of them can’t listen or speak as they should be able to because they have spent so much time in front of glowing screens that mesmerise them, but don’t respond to them or care about them.

If we looked further, we would discover that many of them have no manners to speak of, do not understand different tones of voice, have trouble obeying instructions or settling to any serious task.

As they grow older, large numbers of these children, especially the boys, will be drugged with powerful stimulants because it is claimed they are suffering from syndromes or disorders – fancy words for subjective and unproven diagnoses, used by doctors and others who ought to know better.   

Later still they will form a solid, unteachable, disorderly mass at the back of scores of secondary-school classrooms, texting (if they can read enough) during lessons, or simply ignoring or insulting their teachers, uninterested in learning and unable to do so, and preventing others from learning, too.

Then, released on to the streets, they will frighten us all with their blank, pitiless faces and their inability to understand things we take for granted. Consideration for others? What’s that? Restraint? Never heard of it. Manners? What are they? Patience? Who needs it? All classes are affected.But we were not born with these blessings. We learned them in thousands of tiny steps, from parents who were present in our lives from our earliest moments, not for a brief few months before everyone had to go back to the grindstone.

Our schools are terrible, and have been for years – so terrible that even the authorities are beginning to admit it. But the teachers are right when they say that the real problem is in the home. And the problem of the home is actually the problem of an unhinged society that decided to try to change human nature. Women, it said, had to work outside the home to be fulfilled. Raising children was something that would just get done in the intervals between work and sleep.

This idea came from a wild, Leftist coven whose members long ago grew up and got rich. But it just happened to suit a lot of businesses which find women cheaper and more reliable than men, and so it took off. And it has done limitless damage. And it is time that it was reversed. And nobody will do anything.

But comfort yourselves. Children may not know how to handle cutlery, but if UNESCO has its way they will soon be instructed, from the age of five, in the joys of masturbation.

Thus do we make progress. That’s why I’m against it.

Chris Evans, a change too far

Harriet’s always been the real face of Labour

I am baffled by the howls of rage against Harriet Harman’s plans to make us all equal and attack the middle class. This is what Harriet Harman does, and has always done. She doesn’t make any secret of it. Labour did not stop doing it just because it was led by a sort of male Princess Diana with a disarming grin and a trembling lip.

Honestly, I do increasingly think that it is absolutely true that we get the governments we deserve. Anthony Blair’s good fortune was that he didn’t look like his government. Gordon Brown’s misfortune is that he does look like his government. But are we so gullible that we vote on the basis of facial features? Looks like it.


How much are you paying back, Dave?

Rich politicians who announce austerity plans for MPs should be questioned very carefully. Do their plans affect them personally? If not, they don’t amount to anything. If David Cameron is sincere about reducing the public tax burden caused by politicians, two questions for him: Will he pay back the gigantic subsidy we have given him to help him buy his large country house, which he could perfectly well afford himself? And, given that he is now surrounded by dodgy millionaires fluttering cheque books and hoping for favours, will he stop taking taxpayers’ cash to finance the Tory Party? This subsidy is called ‘Short Money’, by the way, but there’s nothing short about it.


* I’m as keen as anyone on not being blown up while flying. In fact, as a moderately frequent flyer, I’m keener than most. But wasn’t there something a little odd about the repeated prosecution of the Lucozade Bombers? It seems to have been aimed much more at justifying the irritating and disproportionate liquids ban than putting wicked people behind bars. We’ve seen lots of demonstrations of what would have happened if the bombs had gone off. I’d also be interested to see a demonstration of how easy, or hard, it would have been to manufacture the bombs in an aeroplane lavatory. Oh, and how did our military presence in Afghanistan affect this crime? We’re always being told it’s supposed to stop such things.

* Just a word on the death of Keith Waterhouse. The news caused me to re-read, for the first time in decades, his beautiful and moving first novel There Is A Happy Land. I could go on about it for pages if there was room. But all I can say here is that everyone should read it.


My questions for the BNP bigot

Yes the BNP leader Nick Griffin should be on Question Time. A few suggestions: The first question should be about his attitude to the Holocaust. The second should be about why his party’s constitution is bigoted. And the third should be about his interesting appearance next to a one-time stalwart of the Ku Klux Klan.

After that, I’d love to see him asked for the details of his economic policy and given all the time in the world to explain it. Oh, and please make sure he is not on a panel with identikit liberal elite politicians from the New and Blue Labour Parties.

It is their silence and evasion over mass immigration, disorder and the EU that have made the BNP as strong as it is. The best way to head off the BNP is for the BBC to give more of a voice to legitimate, civilised people who don’t share the Left-liberal consensus.

* In response to plans to let all kinds of organisations sponsor academy schools, I see a teachers’ union spokesman has said: ‘I defy anyone to suggest that a football club can know more about the running of schools than a local education authority.’ Oh, I don’t know. For a start, football clubs know that it makes sense to select on merit.

Why did the BBC think Chris Evans was the best replacement for Terry Wogan? It is all very well saying that society is changing, and recognising that. But moving from Wogan to Evans is not just accepting that change has happened. It is trying to speed up that change, and taking sides over deep cultural and moral matters.




What on earth did people think they were voting for when they put New Labour in office in 1997, 2001 and 2005? Good weather?

Putting Nick Griffin on Question Time

I suppose it had to come. I believe the BBC have been worrying about this for ages. But since they must base their idea of what is legitimate on the party voting strengths, and it is hard to see how they could avoid this, they really do not have all that much choice about giving Mr Griffin a seat on the Question Time panel.

This need not be a disaster, especially if it is preceded by proper TV and radio grillings of Mr Griffin, by interviewers who have briefed themselves properly about his past, not least his remarks about the Holocaust. I am travelling at present and need to be brief, but I'd like to make a couple of points. First, I suspect Mr Griffin would relish being on a panel with the usual bland robotic party spokesmen and women, who would make his point that the establishment is dominated by elite liberals with no idea of what the world is like. He would have a much harder time against outsider Labour and Tory MPs, ones who have been prepared to speak against multiculturalism and uncontrolled immigration, and, for instance, Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch, who has for years made an entirely respectable and untainted case for migration control.

I also think his appearance with David Duke, and the words he used there, should be calmly and firmly put to him - the event is available on YouTube, and he should not be allowed to avoid explaining what he meant. That done, I suggest that he should be put on the spot on all the policy areas on which he has little to say, or his policies are mere slogans.

Again, the difficulty here for the BBC is that it is peopled by staff who think the case against Mr Griffin is already obvious and does not need to be made. They have very few interviewers and presenters who recognise that the failure of the establishment to speak or think about immigration, culture and disorder leaves space in which such people can operate.

One other thing. I suspect the current efforts to force the BNP to admit people whose ethnic origins it doesn't like are misguided. The BNP's openly bigoted constitution is the best evidence that we have of its true nature. Forcing it to change its membership rules will not make it into a multi-ethnic party, nor alter what is in the hearts of its leaders, but will make it harder to attack.

Iain Dale's Diary

I was touched to see that Iain Dale, the Conservative blogger, agreed with every item of my column last Sunday. Such a pity that he disagrees with so much else I say, though I live in hope that he'll come round in the end.

I'm also waiting, with growing anticipation, for his response to my book 'The Broken Compass', which I sent him some time ago. It would be the first review the book has had from any conservative blog, magazine or newspaper, apart from the Mail on Sunday, even though my previous books were widely reviewed, and 'The Broken Compass' was reviewed (and of course ritually attacked) by several left-wing organs.

Windfarms? We might as well use hamsters on treadmills

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

A weird and irrational cult has us in its grip. If the Mormons or the Moonies started taking over the BBC and the Government, which then harangued and persecuted us into wearing funny underwear or getting married in mass ceremonies, we would – I hope – rise in revolt.

But the ‘Man-made Climate Change’ fanatics are applauded and praised, even as they force us to abandon perfectly sensible electric lights, and instead subject ourselves to strange, flickering substitutes, simultaneously worse and more costly than the ones they replace.

There is worse to come. The same people wish to compel us to rely for our power on windmills, million upon million of them, as if we had never discovered more efficient and reliable ways of generating electricity. And they are succeeding. Few areas in Britain are now unthreatened by deranged projects to install intrusive, gigantic wind-farms on prominent sites.

This must be one of the first instances of a civilisation voluntarily and consciously going backwards. We might as well rely for our economic and industrial future on tens of millions of hamsters pattering frantically round treadmills. Hamsters only do this by night. Windmills only make electricity when it is windy. See the problem?

For most of us, the truth has yet to sink in. Our old lightbulbs still function, or we have stockpiled a few. And the nuclear and coal-fired power stations which keep our country going have some years yet to run before they wear out or a Brussels decree shuts them down for ever.

But the time is not far away when we will find the irrational opinions of these maniacs being forced upon us unpleasantly in our daily lives. The lights will be too dim to read by. Then they will go off for long periods of the day or night. Our computers will be down much of the time. The well-off will buy expensive generators and our suburbs will be like Baghdad, with smelly, noisy, petrol-driven motors bursting into life every few hours as the central power shudders and fails.

Even if the prophecies of the man-made global warming cultists were proven, which they aren’t, these measures would be an idiotic response to the problem. Nuclear power, as the French well know, produces no carbon emissions and also ends dependence on Russia for gas and the Middle East for oil. And it works in a dead calm, too.

The lightbulb purge will have a piffling effect on energy consumption, nothing like enough to justify the expense and inconvenience forced upon us. I suspect that it has been designed specifically to advance the cult, to make believers feel good about themselves rather than to do good – the main aim of all false religions.

Why don’t we resist? Partly because, once again, there is now no major political party which speaks for common sense.

The deal with terrorists that truly was squalid

As if to commemorate the original Phoney War of 1939-40, we are now having another one about Libya and Colonel Gaddafi. You normally see posturing like this only at a Paris fashion show, all strutting, pouting and striking attitudes.

Look, there was a real occasion in this country when we did a squalid deal with terrorists. We didn’t even get any oil concessions in return.

In fact we got nothing and they got everything. It didn’t involve the release of one ill and doubtfully guilty person, but the release of hundreds of healthy, wholly guilty criminals and the wrongful elevation of various bloodstained ruffians to taxpayer-financed public office.

This was sanctified at the time as The Good Friday Agreement. I opposed it, almost alone in the British media (perhaps I was also the only journalist who read it) and have ever afterwards been told off by pious persons for being against ‘peace’.

Interestingly enough, Colonel Gaddafi was involved in that too, having given the IRA training and explosives with which it murdered lots of innocent people. But we seemed to have forgiven him for that, without any fuss.

The political party now raging against the release of the supposed Lockerbie Bomber, demanding inquiries and the rest, was prominent in actively supporting the Good Friday surrender.

The government of the USA, likewise, pushed hard for its acceptance. For these bodies to complain about the release of Megrahi is worse than ordinary hypocrisy. It is a special kind of brazen humbug, deserving of total contempt. Anyway, Megrahi was freed to prevent an appeal, which would have shown he was innocent and exposed the reasons behind the whole disgraceful cover-up of the real culprits.

Meanwhile, the truly important national controversy – Afghanistan – goes undiscussed while good men die.

YouTube video every teenager should watch

Personally, I’d impose a mandatory six months’ hard labour, followed by a long stint as a cleaner in A&E, for anyone convicted of texting while driving, and three months for people who use hand-held phones at the wheel. These cretins are consciously taking a heartless risk with the lives of others, and if reason won’t work, then fear will have to do.

But in the meantime, I think all TV channels should give primetime space to the powerfully grim Gwent police video about an airheaded, giggling teenage girl who texts while driving, and so propels herself into a world of horror, misery and lifelong remorse. It is an astonishingly effective piece of realistic film-making.

As an 18-year-old, I caused a serious road accident by my own stupidity. Thank God, I didn’t do major damage to anyone but myself. But I can tell you that this film accurately portrays the appalling speed with which normality turns to disaster and also the strange disturbing peace which can come halfway through the horror, before it starts again. Watch it on YouTube if you can. Make sure any teenager you know watches it too.

* There now seems to be an orchestrated campaign by architects against Prince Charles. Hardly a week goes by without another one attacking him. I think we should all side with the Prince. He is the nearest thing we now have to the great John Betjeman, who saved many fine buildings from being destroyed, and spoke up for beauty against barbarism. Charles may be wrong about many things, but he is right about buildings, and his interventions against ugliness have been a proper use of his influence.
These architects, all glinting efficient types who seem unable to design anything except boxes, go on about democracy. But who chose them, or the hideous and un-British styles they force on us?

* I suspect that many of those who now claim to ‘hate’ Gordon Brown really hate themselves for having voted New Labour two or three times, after being fooled by the Blair creature. After all, why wait ten years to get so enraged with this terrible Government? Some of us knew from the start how bad it was. What will all these people do for a hate-figure if Mr Brown quits, as I think he will probably do on ‘health grounds’ before the Election?

Anniversary Waltz with Michael White

Once again I'm criticised in another, left-wing, blog. Michael White of the Guardian (Google Michael White, Guardian and 'honourable road to ruin'). And, oddly, Mr White makes the same mistaken criticism of my alternative history as did several people who posted comments on the article or here. He seems to think I am advocating a peace with Hitler *after* Dunkirk. Anything but. By then we had to fight, as any terms would have been intolerable. I am saying we should not have entered the war in the first place.

He says what fun it used to be having a good row with the Tory MP and mischief-maker Alan Clark, adding :’It is less fun having one with Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, whose version of this thesis (“If we hadn't fought, would we still have a British Empire?”) was published at the weekend. It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez...The list goes on, and it is foolish. If we had done a deal with Hitler from a position of weakness he would have come back for more. Had he gone east to finish the Russians first, who knows what might have happened, but he could not have held on to his conquests for long. Empires rarely do and, Hitler or no, the curtain was already falling on ours.’

Well, I've no idea what would have happened if we'd let Hitler fight Stalin, though I find it hard to believe it would have been any worse than the hell that actually did take place. But what I principally remember about Alan Clark was taking him to lunch, and being told by his secretary that he was a vegetarian. After scouring London in vain for a suitably grand vegetarian venue, I rang her up and explained the problem. ‘Oh’, she said, naming a stately Covent Garden eatery famous for its game, ‘Rules will be fine. When he says “vegetarian” he means he won't eat anything that's been killed in a slaughterhouse. He doesn't mind if it's been shot in the open air’. When I teased him about this over his well-shot pheasant (I think), he muttered something about how Hitler, too, couldn't abide slaughterhouse meat. He loved to do this sort of thing. He told someone else I know that he was a bit of a 'national socialist', just to shock. Of course, he was nothing of the kind. Silly stuff, in the end. He was a reasonably entertaining diarist, but not much of a politician.

But back to Mr White, whose glum and increasingly policemanly demeanour has obviously prevented me from realising that he is, in fact, in search of fun. Mr White, whom I meet from time to time in radio and TV studios for adversarial conflict, always looks as if he wants to arrest me for showing insufficient respect for David Cameron, the Guardian's new best mate. Nor is he terrifically forthcoming with the jokes.

I was not in any way suggesting that we 'did a deal' with Hitler. In fact, I was suggesting that we avoided putting ourselves into a position where we very nearly had to. Declaring war, inadequately armed and prepared, in 1939 meant that we had either to win the war, or do a deal. Few could then have guessed the third possibility, of handing over conduct of the war to Roosevelt and Stalin, while going slowly bankrupt.

Had Hitler wanted to force us into a deal after Dunkirk (which I don't believe he did), he could have massed his forces in France rather than on the Soviet border in the spring of 1941, and launched an invasion of this country. I think, given our state at the time, that we would have been at least in serious danger of being overwhelmed. Nothing in Hitler's behaviour in June 1940, after we had been driven off the continent, suggests that he was particularly interested in doing any such thing. We were left in a sort of belligerent limbo in 1940, from which we were eventually rescued by the USSR and the USA, who then conducted the war according to their goals.

Let me make this point again. There is no evidence, in word or deed, that Hitler had any special interest in the British Empire, or in destroying it. Sad as it is to acknowledge it, Britain did not figure greatly in his calculations or seem to be much of an obstacle to his plans. If we had 'given' him Poland (which we actually had no power either to give or withhold) as we had 'given' him the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia (which we also had no power to give or withhold) what was the 'more' he would have come back for? Would our willingness to let him seize chunks of Central Europe, where we had no interest or possessions, have somehow fuelled a German desire for Burma, Malaya or Nyasaland? Hitler wanted a German Land Empire stretching into the east, into Ukraine for the wheat, and the Caucasus for the oil - probably something like the territory seized by the Kaiser at the 1917 Brest-Litovsk Treaty. I don't follow the logic that leaving Hitler to fight his twin, Stalin, would have fuelled in him a desire to seize Delhi or Nairobi. The threat to the British Empire came from the USA, which wanted it broken up, and from Japan, which wanted to steal large chunks of it. Though Japan was powerless as long as we and France were militarily strong in the Far East.

It is perfectly true that an Anglo-French stand against Hitler when he reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 might have brought him down. But this is much more fantastical than my essay. By 1936, we had already trashed our good relations with Italy and nobody in democratic Europe, nobody - not even Churchill - actually favoured the military action which would have thrown the then-tiny German army back over the Rhine bridges.

After that, you have to ask, what exactly would Britain have done had we 'fought' over the takeover of Austria in 1937, another genuine turning point. With what army? With what air force? Come to that, how would we have saved Czechoslovakia?

Look at a map. Central Europe is more interesting and complex than you think. Prague is not some remote Slavic outpost, but a long way west of Vienna. In September 1938, Prague was perhaps an hour's flight from the Luftwaffe airfields near Dresden. Bratislava, then the second city of Czechoslovakia, is practically in the suburbs of Vienna, where Hitler was free to station enormous forces. The territory of Hitler's Reich embraced the Czech lands from North, and Southern flanks. However gallantly the Czechs might have fought in their mini-Maginot line in the Sudetenland, what would have become of them, while we gallantly dropped propaganda leaflets on Mannheim and Stuttgart from our bi-planes, and the French polished their belt-buckles in the Maginot Line, as they did while Poland perished in September 1939? They'd have gone the way of the Poles. We didn't fight in 1937, 1938 and 1939 because we couldn't. The silly part of Munich was not our realistic failure to stand up for people we couldn't actually help except with words, but our misleading and dishonourable pretence that we could help the Czechs, the pretence that we were their 'friends' at Munich and the pretence that the inevitable climbdown was 'Peace with Honour’.

It was this deluded, idealistic piffle that was exposed when Hitler grabbed Prague in March 1939, and we then gave our inexplicable - and wholly worthless - guarantee to Poland. What good did it do? It took away from us any freedom to decide when or whether to go to war. It didn't save an ounce of Polish sovereignty, or a square inch of Polish territory, let alone a single life or building. Having been useless and idealistic over Prague, we were then to be useless and militant over Warsaw. It has been said many times how much worse it was to be a 'saved' Pole than it was to be a 'betrayed' Czech. Who can deny it?

No, the question is not what sort of a deal we'd have had to make with Hitler. My reading of 1940 tells me how very, very close we came to making such a deal after Dunkirk left us bankrupt and without an army, a state we were in entirely thanks to the beliefs that 'something must be done to stop Hitler' and 'you have to stand up to bullies', neither backed by any considered thought. Well, if you do stand up to a bully, experience suggests that you knock him down with the first blow, or he'll still be a bully. You certainly don't let him knock you down.

My reading of 1945 tells me that we ended up making a shameful deal with Stalin, under pressure from Roosevelt to do so, giving the Soviet tyrant the very 'free hand' in central Europe that we had impotently sought to deny Hitler. The difference was that by then we had sacrificed huge numbers of lives, all our wealth and our Empire. For what? If we had stayed out of power struggles in which we had no power, there'd have been no need to make a deal with Hitler, or Stalin either.

The USA, which stayed out of the conflict until December 1941, acted much as Britain used to behave in European conflicts, supplying and paying others to fight on its behalf until it had to intervene directly. This sensible policy, which made us rich and powerful in the 18th Century, did the same for the USA in the 20th.

In his jocular mockery, Mr White derides me for listing some of the things we would have escaped if we had stayed out in 1939. ‘It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez.’ Well, let Mr White tell us, which of these avoidable developments does he think were good things?

It was the people who wanted war in 1939 who exposed us to the terrible danger of having to make a deal with Hitler as a beaten nation. Had we stayed out, why would we have had to negotiate with him at all? He simply wasn't interested in us until we declared war on him.