Bombs and Morals

Slipping out of the Labour conference for a break from politicians, I tried to look at some of the less obvious parts of Liverpool – not the sparkling new waterside developments or the majestic, endlessly astonishing Anglican Cathedral, but the bits in between.

It is obviously still a city in some difficulty. A favourite café, which used to serve a rather good breakfast, has closed for good. Even in the renovated centre there are streets of shuttered shops, or downmarket pubs once grand, now melancholy. There are also traces – not obvious at first glance – of the terrible bombing which Germany perpetrated here in the Second World War.

I believe that about 2,600 non-combatants died in this homicidal, criminal fury, deliberately aimed at civilian morale. But to this day it is not as well-known as it should be because strict censorship kept it hidden from the rest of the country and the world, whereas the London Blitz was impossible to hide and was instead turned into a propaganda victory of sorts, one which still succeeds, though the extent of its misery, fear and horror is beginning to become clear.

My mother, who spent her teens in Liverpool, did speak of the bombing once or twice, but only in that ‘Oh, we just managed. If it had your number on it, then that was it. If not, then you got on with your life and enjoyed what you could’ way. This was the defiant response to mortal terror of many of those who were young and unattached in those days. I rather admire this jaunty view, compared with our solemn self-congratulation over how calm we stayed when terrorist bombs went off in London a few years ago. Actually the authorities came close to panic, and we now know that the emergency services, penetrated by the fear of lawsuits and the absurd caution which accompanies political correctness and the culture of rights, in many cases failed to respond as well as they should have done.

But I am not sure that anyone with children or the responsibility for a family could have been quite so jaunty about bombs. As soon as you have anyone else to care for, this doesn't work.  Also, the young think they are immortal, and proof against injury. When I was young, I lacked the imagination or the  knowledge  to work out what it must have been like to be in a city subjected to repeated night bombing. Until I managed to injure myself in a motorbike crash soon before my 18^th birthday, I believed that wars and injuries happened only to others.

Oddly enough, one of the most telling descriptions of aerial bombing from the receiving end is entirely fictional and was written before the bombing even began. It is Nevil Shute’s 1938 novel,  ‘What Happened to the Corbetts’ (published in the USA under another title that I can’t recall) . This dwells on the dislocation , squalor and selfishness that follow bombing of advanced civilisations, as well as on the devastation caused by bombs in the happy, ordered homes of normal people, and the almost casual death they bring to previously happy, safe people. Len Deighton’s ‘Bomber’ is also helpful in understanding such things.

Anyway, in the course of getting deliberately lost in central Liverpool, I found myself looking at a series of window displays , near the shell of a bombed out church. These were, I think, in an abandoned department store, and provided many distressing pictures of the dispiriting destruction of decades of human endeavour by aerial bombing. The scenes were of parts of the city that are still quite recognisable, and – as so often in bombed places – fill the heart with grief that so much carefully ordered beauty was lost, as well as so many lives. How often local authorities failed to restore what was destroyed, but instead just filled in the empty space with replacements not nearly as good. Some even took advantage of the wreck to destroy old buildings that could have been saved. Coventry, until 1940 a miraculously preserved English city, as lovely as anything in Europe, was the victim of this sort of opportunism. Only in tiny corners of it can you see the lingering traces of lost beauty.

As well as these pictures, there was a revelation which was somehow more striking than the destruction itself.  We are inclined to forget the gloomy practical details of war. And here was one. What was to be done with the rubble?

In Berlin, they piled it up into miniature mountains, the only high ground in the city. In Liverpool, they carted it to the coast to bolster the sea defences against tidal erosion. On certain beaches, you can find yourself walking on smashed pillars, pediments, broken sculptures, doorsteps and other recognisable fragments of the buildings blown to pieces by German high explosive 70 years ago. They are all washed clean by the sea now, but I should not care to swim or picnic anywhere near them. These are smashed lives and hopes beneath your feet.

There were also descriptions of orphaned children weeping on top of the piles of bricks that had been their homes (one who saw this said he hoped that he might be able to forget this, above all the other terrible sights he saw in those times). There is much more, understated as you might expect from the England of seven decades ago, but scorching the heart all the same. How angry it still makes me that anyone could have considered it right or just to do this to the modest homes of the powerless.

Some way away from this memorial, in the waterfront churchyard of Our Lady and St Nicholas, there is another poignant and disturbing monument to those black, cold, frightening times - ‘The Spirit of the Blitz’, a sculpture by Tom Murphy.

I am not sure I like it as a work of art. But it delivers a great punch to the mental solar plexus. A young mother, with an infant in one of her arms, is following her small son up a spiral staircase. Her other arm is flung out, as if to try to call or pull him back. He, oblivious to the irony, is playing with a toy aeroplane. I think it is meant to express above all the howling, inconsolable pain of a parent who has lost a child (Rudyard Kipling expresses something similar in a verse in the ‘Just So’ stories about how his lost daughter has run ahead of him in the woods, ‘too far ahead to call to him’. When the true meaning becomes clear, it strikes you as hard as a ten foot freak wave on a quiet beach).  The father, of course, is absent at the war, not even able to be sure that his family and home are safe, as would have been the case in almost all previous wars.

Now, some of you will know what is coming next, and some of you won’t. But I said, a few lines above, these words : ‘How angry it still makes me that anyone could have considered it right or just to do this to the modest homes of the powerless.’

And it does. And I absolutely cannot see how I can feel that about Liverpool and not also feel the same about the cities of Germany and Japan. Plenty of people have come up with ‘strategic’ justifications of this filthy and unChristian method of warfare, which they would reject in an instant as the casuistry they are, were they used to justify or excuse similar obliteration of Britain. Liverpool’s destruction, though appalling, was as nothing compared to the fate of its German equivalent, Hamburg – see A.C. Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’ for the German casualty figures. And Hamburg was one of many. 

Others will say of the Germans (or the Japanese) that they somehow deserved to be baked alive, suffocated, disembowelled, slowly incinerated in front of their families, shorn of their limbs and so forth , because they had ‘supported’ the awful regimes which had led them to war. This has always seemed to me to lack historical knowledge or understanding. Many in both countries disliked, even hated,  their governments. the working class areas of Germany which endured most of the bombing were the strongholds of the Social Democrats who offered the last principled opposition to the national Socialists until they were savagely destroyed and suppressed as a party.

 

They were compelled by terror to be silent. Would the makers of this excuse, that they deserved to be bombed,  be prepared to furnish us with a guarantee that under the same circumstances they would have spoken out? 

And what about the German children, so many of whom died in ways too distressing to describe? Was Hitler their fault? Our country will not have grown up properly until it can admit that this form of warfare was wrong. I am all in favour of commemorating the aircrews who went out into that war. It was not their idea. They believed the assurances of their political leaders and commanders that the task was necessary. Their bravery is unimpeachable. They faced a horrific death themselves if shot down. Nor was such a death unlikely. The casualty levels tolerated by the unlovely Sir Arthur Harris (known to his men as ‘Butcher’, not ‘Bomber’)  were comparable to Earl Haig’s profligate expenditure of other people’s sons, fathers, husbands and brothers on the Somme in an earlier war. It is the men in charge who must be criticised, and ought to be.  

Please Use The Index - plus The Long, Odd Silence of ‘Wesley Crosland’

I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to do much cut and thrust here lately.  I have been spending quite a lot of time attending the party conferences (not yet over) and nearly as much time reaching them via Britain’s endlessly torn-up rail network with its ‘engineering improvement work’ that leaves the trains slower and more unreliable than before, its fragmentation and its padded timetables, which cause travellers to spend long minutes sitting at stations for no other reason that the rail operators aren’t willing to risk being late, and being fined.

Once these are over I plan to return to responding in some detail to those comments which merit it (some just don’t – and may I ask some contributors, who manage to comment perhaps five or six times a day, generally saying very little, and that incoherent and ill-spelled, to restrain themselves a bit, or I shall have to consider a daily maximum number of comments from anyone person to avoid it? Such things bore and repel other readers, and they bore and repel me too. The British Boring Board of Control has been in touch, and I do so prefer self-regulation).

I’ll only take this opportunity to point out that ‘Wesley Crosland’ has still failed to reply to the personal letter I sent him on 1^st August (about which he went public, jeering that the questions in it were childlike in their simplicity). The letter concerned his belief that everyone who doesn’t accept the vague speculations of the evolutionists about the distant past as unchallengeable fact is obviously stupid and ignorant. Before anyone tries to bracket me as an ‘ist’ or a ‘phobe’ or a ‘denier’ or some other sort of outcast in our supposedly tolerant society, I should say that in the letter I merely asked him to justify and explain certain statements he had made, in his usual confident manner, on this subject. I myself, as I often have cause to say, have no idea of the truth of the matter, believing we have insufficient data on which to theorise.

In the subsequent two months, despite the allegedly childlike simplicity of these questions, Mr ‘Crosland’ has not found time to answer, though he has found plenty of time to sneer loftily and rather repetitively at evolution sceptics with extraordinary frequency. He has generally done this without any real pretext,  on threads where this subject has little or no relevance to the matter under discussion.

The childishly simple phrases ‘All mouth and no trousers’ or ‘Big hat, no cattle’ spring to my mind.

 In the meantime, may I make a plea, especially to new readers who come here, as it were, in the midst of many long-running debates

This blog is unique, as far as I know, in having a full index of topics discussed, going back to its very beginning in February 2006.  Perhaps that is why people don’t expect it to be there, and so don’t use it as much as they might. I spent many laborious weeks compiling this, and the subjects are helpfully listed on the right hand side of the page. New readers wishing to know my view of the Tories, or my advice on voting or on UKIP, or on grammar schools, or the Iraq War (for example) may look them up here. I acknowledge that there are inevitable imperfections, but it is still a very useful archive.

In many cases they may also be able to look up reports I have sent from various countries around the world. Also available are the subsequent discussions I have had with readers. I am willing to answer questions about such things, but only after readers have searched the index.

 

 

 

 

 

What Labour won’t do, and ought to do

It’s impossible to believe it now, but many members of the Labour cabinet voted to retain the death penalty when there was an attempt to abolish it in 1948.  Good for them. They were being true to their voters, and protecting them from harm. That was when Labour was still a working class British party, and had yet to be taken over by modish cultural revolutionaries.  Even as late as 1970, all the working class members of the Wilson Cabinet voted against the effective decriminalisation of cannabis that would end up as the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It was a close vote. A pity they lost.

Richard Crossman noted this in his diaries, as the only occasion when the 1964-70 cabinet split entirely along class lines, with the working class members of course being the social conservatives, and the Oxbridge snobs the let-it-all-hang-out liberals. There had been other moments, during the Roy Jenkins/Tony Crosland cultural revolution, when working class ministers objected, but these were almost all  dressed up as ‘Private Members’ Bills’, on which the cabinet had no need to decide.  Roy Jenkins just got on with it and ensured that they had plenty of time and drafting help. They got through, but Labour couldn’t be punished for them at any election, since the government had officially been uninvolved.

Labour’s Drugs Bill fell because of the June 1970 election. But – and this is such a telling detail of modern British politics - the Tories passed the planned law almost unchanged, an amazing piece of bipartisanship. If there’s one thing the two party leaderships can always agree on, it’s debauching the morals of the nation.

There’s nothing specially socialist about this debauching stuff, though it does fit in with a certain type of Marxism. One of the most articulate and ferocious defenders of morals and justice in recent times was the great sociologist Norman Dennis, who sadly died a few years ago. His denunciation of the absurd Macpherson Report was devastating and pungent. I also still relish the memory of his confrontation at a think tank lunch with a bunch of ‘conservative’ free market drug legalisers, who seemed to think John Stuart Mill would have supported the decriminalisation of dope. They had to be scraped off the walls afterwards.

Yet he remained an active Labour Party member till his dying day.

With facts such as these in mind (not to mention R.H.Tawney’s support for Grammar Schools, and the Christian self-discipline of so many Labour people when our country was going through very hard times)  I feel that social conservatives should never entirely rule out the possibility that
salvation may come from the left as well as the right.

Oddly enough, it could be Labour’s salvation too.

I am not sure if ‘Blue Labour’ has now been wholly buried. But if I were in the Shadow Cabinet ( and , yes, I know I’m not)  I would say to Ed Miliband  (or more likely to Ed Balls, who seems to me have a real seething desire for power)  that Downing Street could be his in 2015 if he returned his party to its patriotic, Christian roots.

Labour already has a better record on the European Union than do the Tories – Gaitskell’s great ‘Thousand Years of History’ speech was prescient and right. The party campaigned for an exit in 1983 (the only one of its pledges that year that hasn’t since been enacted in one form or another, despite the conventional wisdom that the 1983 manifesto was ‘the longest suicide note in history’) .

There’d be nothing outrageous in returning to that position.

On law and justice, I doubt if they could get the death penalty past the existing MPs. But a return to the  principle of punishment, and a real war on the use and possession of drugs, would be of huge benefit to Labour voters in the big cities, who suffer most of all from the horrible crime and disorder which now go unchecked.

As for immigration, it’s once again Labour’s supporters who suffer most from the huge numbers of migrants now arriving from Eastern Europe. Its their public services that are overloaded, their communities that are altered, their wages that are lowered.

It’s also Labour’s supporters who would most benefit from a Divorce Reform Act that made it harder to break up a marriage, especially one with children, than it is now.

And of course it’s Labour supporters who would gain most from the return of discipline, rigour and academic selection in state schools. I was talking the other day to someone who lives in Kent and one of whose children has just won a place at a grammar school.  It’s a marvellous school, offering a fine education to all its pupils. And you get into it by passing a fair examination. Imagine if every town, every county in the country had such schools, how it would transform so many lives.

We’ve established quite clearly in recent years that the Tories don’t love Britain, or even England. We’ve established that their voters will carry on voting for them however many times their hopes are betrayed and their concerns mocked by their ‘own’ leader.

Is it even remotely possible that a combination of ambition and desperation will persuade Labour to try to prove that it really still loves the poor?

You’re right. It’s most unlikely. But forgive me for dreaming. The idea, though far-fetched, is no more so than many of the turns in the other direction which our political leaders have taken in recent years.

Dave vs Nick: As fake as Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks

This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday column

There used to be a sport called ‘all-in wrestling’ which was funny because it was faked.

Despite all the grunts, squeals and crashes, as huge bodies were slammed, gasping, on to the canvas, we all knew it wasn’t serious. Of course, it must have hurt a bit. And occasionally the giant grapplers must have truly lost their tempers. But the louder it was, the phonier it was.

I do hope people realise that the same is true of the current alleged row between Nicholas Clegg’s Liberal Democrats and David Cameron’s Liberal Conservatives.
Mr Cameron is far closer to Mr Clegg than he is to his own voters. He loves being manacled to him, and much prefers Coalition to governing alone.

Mr Clegg helps David Cameron ensure that the Government remains pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-tax, politically correct and pro-immigration. But he suffers from the bottomless stupidity of his Left-wing members and voters, who can never see when they’re well off.

Anthony Blair had the same difficulty. The Left were too thick to see that New Labour were the most revolutionary Leftist British Government since Cromwell. They thought – and still think – that Mr Blair was a traitor. Stupidity explains a lot in modern British politics. But that’s democracy for you.

So we have the ludicrous position we have now, where the real traitor, Mr Cameron, still commands the loyalty of his party.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who have allowed Mr Cameron to ignore his voters and run a Leftist Government, have lost most of their Leftist support.

This is the reason for the silly fake fight, in which Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron pretend to be at odds about the 50p tax rate, or Human Rights, and various senior Liberals call the Tories rude names.

The Tory conference in Manchester next week will contain quite a few matching attacks on the ‘Yellow B******s’, which will be just as empty.

But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.

There will be some pretext or other – probably spending cuts. The idea will be to make the Liberals look like principled Leftists and the Tories look like principled conservatives. The media will, as usual, play along.

The Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of 'confidence and supply’.

Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission – a seat falls vacant in 2014.

If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few ‘Right-wing’ measures through Parliament.

And at the 2015 Election, voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.

The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored.

Unlike the wrestling, this fraud isn’t funny.

It is deadly serious, and we shall all pay for it.

Words that have no place at Downton

I have finally forced myself to watch Downton Abbey. Oh dear. It’s the usual problem, of microscopic attention to cars and clothes and no attention at all to what people were really like.

Edwardians did not use the phrase ‘as if’ to express scorn for a suggestion. Nor did they say ‘ta da!’ when they successfully baked cakes. As for the much trumpeted realism of the trenches (pictured right),I’ve seen children’s play areas in urban parks more menacing and squalid than these neat, dry diggings.

But at least Downton is entertaining. This cannot be said for the awful, miserable cadaver that is the new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I have explained just how bad this film is, and why, on my blog.

Anyone who has read the book or seen the Alec Guinness TV version will be deeply disappointed. And anyone who hasn’t will be baffled.

Advice nobody needs

We learn that David Cameron has been entertaining Anthony Blair at Chequers, supposedly to get his advice on foreign policy.

Several questions arise. First, how did he get him to leave once he arrived? Gordon Brown spent ten years trying to evict him.

Second, of all the people in all the world to ask about foreign affairs, Mr Blair is the last counsellor any sane person would choose. Not only was he responsible, personally and deeply, for the worst British foreign policy blunder of the past 50 years, the Iraq War, but he is so ignorant he doesn’t know they speak Portuguese in Brazil. He has been the despair of foreign policy experts brought in to brief him, and recently revealed he had never even heard of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the leader of Iran famously overthrown by a joint MI6-CIA putsch in 1953.

Mr Cameron’s self-promoting speech about his Libya intervention is another worrying sign that he is turning into another Blair. Could Libya be Mr Cameron’s Kosovo – an apparent success (actually not as nice as it looks) that gives him a taste for bombs and bullets? 

                                                        * * *
My article last week on mass immigration in the lovely old town of Boston in Lincolnshire was denounced as ‘insulting’ and ‘inaccurate’ by the town’s council leader, Peter Bedford. I hadn’t, as it happened, criticised either him or his council and I stand by every word in the article. Mr Bedford has made a great palaver of ‘inviting’ me to revisit Boston, as if he in some way owned it or controlled access to it. He doesn’t. I’ll come and go as I please, thanks. But perhaps the people of Boston – several of whom have contacted me to endorse what I wrote – might ask whether Mr Bedford and his officials have better and more urgent things to do than issue silly public denunciations of truthful articles.

                                                        * * *
War on Drugs Latest. Despite the alleged savage persecution of cannabis users, I observed a book of recipes for cannabis cakes on sale, very prominently displayed, in Blackwell’s highly respectable bookshop in Oxford. Believe me. There is not, and never has been, any war on drugs.

                                                         * * *
I am grieved to have to tell you that the plan to make us all live by Berlin Time is not yet dead. The horrible scheme, apparently buried by the Government many months ago, has escaped from its coffin and thrust its stiffened fingers through the earth heaped upon its grave.

Millions of people would have their lives made worse by this plan to make us go to
work and school in the dark in winter, and postpone darkness till 11pm in summer.

Yet parliamentary opposition has come only from Scotland, where the problems would be even worse than in England.

Are there no English MPs prepared to defend our freedom to set our clocks by our own meridian, instead of a German one?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Travesty

In a minute, I will say why the new film of  'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is absolutely unforgivably awful, giving full details. But first I will give some background (and those who don’t want to have the plot spoiled can safely leave off reading here).

When John le Carre (David Cornwell) first began to write about the secret world, I was among millions who were overwhelmed by the power of his writing.

These books were thrillers, but also thrillingly potent ‘state of the nation’ novels about the decay of a country , the doubts of its governing class, the illusions of greatness which still clouded the minds of so many.

He knew exactly how his people spoke. He was a trained listener, and his conversations in dusty Whitehall attics, basements registries, safe-houses, committee rooms and clubs are so spot on that you can hear them in your head (though I should add that he cannot do male-female relationships).

I reckon he gained his amazing powers of observation during the alarming, chaotic, hilarious and tragic childhood which he more-or-less describes in ‘A Perfect Spy’, which I suspect is as near to his autobiography as we are going to get.

I have always loved his use of the word ‘actually’ in conversation. He had spotted that when a British public servant employed this word, he was (actually) saying ‘Oh, shut up, you blasted fool’.  It has gone now, and Mr Cornwell’s continued use of this device in some later books rings false, rather like the extraordinarily formal speeches which P.D.James gives some of her modern characters.

In those days, when someone ended a statement with ‘actually’,  it was a very bad sign, as it is now when an American official addresses you as ‘Sir!’ (when this happens, freeze).

His bottomless scorn for deluded sorts who could not see how much we had declined is savagely expressed in ‘The Looking Glass War’, a book so sad and full of rage that is painful to read decades after its targets retired and went to their graves.

‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’, likewise drawn from the life, explores the matching cynicism of East and West, and first introduces us to Cornwell’s conviction that a country’s spy services are microcosms of its whole society, and that there is an alarming equivalence between the secret services of East and West. There’s some truth in this. Much of the Cold War was a choreographed dance in which both sides told their peoples that things were worse than they were. But it was not as true as Mr Cornwell thinks it is, in my view. It is this conviction which has gradually turned him into a rather silly anti-American and which has made several of his more recent books disappointing and flat. I still buy and read them. But only once.

Whereas I could not say how many times I have read ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, or seen the superb film which was based on it. Or ‘The Looking-Glass War’. As for what is in some ways my favourite, ‘A Small Town in Germany’, if I had a long journey to undertake, I’d pick up my tatty old copy of it and read it with joy yet again - holding my breath as the long-jammed lift ascends from the basement with its cargo of unwanted memories. It’s not in the Smiley sequence and is only marginally about spying. But it is marvellous about British embassies, diplomatic dinners, British decline, the aristocracy, the failed hopes of 1945 and the black German past. Mr Cornwell is that very rare thing in modern Britain, someone who knows and likes Germany and understands it. I often wonder if he privately thinks this book is his masterpiece.

As for ‘Tinker, Tailor’, I was thrilled when I learned that it was being made into a TV series for, as sometimes happens, I longed to know if others shared my own imagined idea of what the people were like. I was also annoyed, because I had for some years refused to have a TV set in my home, and knew that I couldn’t really watch the whole series by going round to friends’ houses (I tried, but it obviously wasn’t polite or sensible).

And the makers of the BBC series did share my imagined idea. In fact their pictures were better than mine. This is most unusual for me. The only other instance I can think of is David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’, which I think Charles Dickens himself would have loved. My re-reading of the book since it was televised has always been enriched by what I saw back in 1979.

So when I heard that a new film of ‘Tinker, Tailor’ was to be made, I knew that I would have to see it, but expected I would be at least mildly irritated by it. I love going to the cinema for its own sake. I sometimes walk out of really bad or unexpectedly violent or coarse films, but in general the experience is pleasing enough to make for an enjoyable evening. There’s a bit of ceremony about it, and an audience to share the drama with (I’ve written a little about this, and its difference from TV, in ‘The Abolition of Britain’).

When I saw the trailers, I was a bit peeved to see the (to me) familiar vista of Budapest, a rather dull city whose charms are over-rated and which doesn’t feature at all in the book ‘Tinker, Tailor’ (from now on, when I say ‘the book’, I mean ‘Tinker, Tailor’, and when I say ‘The TV series’ I mean the Alec Guinness version).

Also I couldn’t work out what they were doing on an airfield. And Istanbul was a bit of a shock, though as I shall explain later, there are excuses for this.

Still never mind. Let’s see what they have made of it. (By the way, though I came out of the cinema muttering imprecations, and may have upset those sitting nearby with various groans and snorts, I am greatly encouraged in my apparently isolated view by a gloriously excoriating attack on the film in Tuesday’s  ‘Times’ by Roger Lewis - sorry I can’t link – who said among other things that it was ‘absolutely terrible’).

First of all, they have *needlessly messed it up*.  Of course there couldn’t be another Alec Guinness. But Gary Oldman? Smiley is famously described as being owlish and fat with short legs and ill-fitting clothes. Gary Oldman just has heavy glasses. And also he wastes great portions of valuable time swimming in Hampstead Ponds, something the Chelsea-dwelling, bookish, unathletic Smiley would never have dreamed of doing. Why? You might as well show him doing Pilates.

Then the sequence is tossed about all over the place. As I know the story backwards, it didn’t trouble me too much, but I don’t know if a newcomer would have been able to make it out at all.

For no reason I can think of, the crucial entrapment of Jim Prideaux is shifted from a forest in Czechoslovakia to a café in Budapest. The whole point of this event is that it should go spectacularly wrong, in a remote and inaccessible place rather than slap in the middle of a relatively open city, and be misrepresented as a British attempt to kidnap a Czech general. The book also contains a terrifying sequence during which Prideaux becomes keenly aware that he is being closely watched, but goes ahead with the mission anyway. All we get in Budapest is a walk through the streets of Pest and a very sweaty waiter. Plus, we see some of the gore that the makers seem to think is necessary. I might add that the pointless transformation of Jerry Westerby from Fleet Street old-timer to furry-faced junior spy (a merger of two different figures in the drama) is a sad waste of a character. In the time spent by Gary Oldman ploughing up and down the weedy waters of Hampstead, this gap could have been rectified.

Then there’s the vital scene in Istanbul. Actually (that word again) the original event on which this story is based did happen in Turkey, when the atrocious Kim Philby told his Kremlin masters about a Soviet defector in Turkey, and the man was last seen being carried on a stretcher into a Soviet transport plane. And, though in the book the events take place in Hong Kong, they could happen in any cosmopolitan major city. The TV series set them in Lisbon.

But you do just wonder if the crew didn’t fancy a few weeks in Istanbul, the way they let the cameras linger on the night clubs. The supposedly exotic city on the Bosphorus, much of it in fact quite banal and some of it rather grim,  has a strange charm for film-makers, as shown in the more or less idiotic scenes set there in ‘From Russia with Love’.

The meeting between Ricki Tarr and Irina is actually much more interesting in the book than it is in the film (check it out) and would have made better cinema. And it happens without any need for a long-distance shot of Russo-Turkish Rumpy-Pumpy. As for her delivery of the vital secret, I’d be amazed if any newcomer to the story had the faintest idea of what was going on. But while we don’t get much of an explanation, we do get gallons of wholly unnecessary gore, including the incomprehensible murder of Tufty Thesinger who, despite being a  retired officer of the King’s African Rifles speaks with an Oop North Accent (hardly anyone in the film speaks as such people really did). Perhaps Karla killed him for not speaking proper. I don’t know.

Sorry about all these details, but it sometimes looks as if someone has gone through the book changing things for their own sake. Smiley’s London refuge is moved from Paddington to Liverpool Street (where as far as I know, faintly shady hotels are uncommon). Peter Guillam has his orientation changed from sturdy heterosexual with a lovely, enigmatic musician girlfriend to clandestine homosexual. Why? The comically appalling meal, during which flakes of white fat congeal on the ghastly food, is transferred to a Wimpy Bar. Why? Jim Prideaux is made to be needlessly cruel to Jumbo, the unhappy boy he befriends. Why? Prideaux is also supposedly listed as dead, while teaching *under his own name* at a prep school in England. Why? Prideaux shoots Bill Haydon in broad daylight with a rifle, rather than climbing into Sarratt aftr dark , sharing a bottle of vodka with him and then breaking his neck. Why?  Irina is murdered by a KGB interrogator during the interrogation of Jim Prideaux, who couldn’t conceivably have met her or know anything about her. Why? Ricki Tarr, a cynic, hoodlum and trickster so hard-boiled he once passed as a gun-runner and then shot all his confederates, is turned into a sentimental idiot who thinks Irina can be rescued from Karla, and is in love with her. Why? He would have known perfectly well that she was dead and never greatly cared for her anyway.

Oh, and Smiley claims he ‘can’t remember’ what Karla looks like. Is this because they’re hoping to make a sequel ‘Smiley’s People’ (more swimming?) and haven’t cast Karla yet? Smiley remembers very clearly what he looked like, and describes him.

Oh, and that’s another thing. Does Smiley really say that Karla had been ‘tortured by the Americans’ and that they had pulled out his fingernails? Or was I dreaming? This is such an absurd departure from the book, and so far from all likelihood, that I hope I was dreaming.

Percy Alleline, the smooth and pompous Secret Service Chief, cruises his way through Whitehall, associating with ‘golfers and Conservatives’,  speaking orotundly of ‘My brother in Christ, the Chief of Naval Intelligence’(to give a sample of his speech).  He simply has to be tall, pin-striped and slightly well-padded, with the trace of an Edinburgh accent. Instead he is a short ginger baldie who sounds and looks as if he has recently given up being a Glasgow bus conductor.

As for Control, is it possible to believe that the director of the Secret Intelligence Service (at one point Cornwell says that he was so secretive that his own wife believed till the day he died that he worked for the National Coal Board) would have left his London flat full of charts and notes about a mole hunt in SIS, and that it would all still be there, untouched, months after his death?

That’s just an example of the unlikleiness ofthe re-worked plot, and of the miscasting. There’s a problem in general with casting. Colin Firth is technically old enough to play Bill Haydon who, having been up at Oxford in 1939, would have been in his mid-fifties at the time the action is set. But like so many people of the post-war generation, who escaped wartime privation, post-war rationing and the age of cold baths and suet puddings, he doesn’t look old enough or ravaged enough. This applies to lots of the cast, but perhaps it only matters to those of us who know what the past really looked like.

As for Connie Sachs, well, what can I say? Not many women would want this part, basically an enormous squeaky, gushy schoolgirl, fat, lachrymose and boozy, but also brilliant, a hangover from wartime in more ways than one.  But the idea that she would tell George Smiley that she is ‘un****ed’ is just absurd. Her voice is, once again, hopelessly wrong.  And her amazing piece of detective work on Poliakov, the Soviet mole-runner, is hopelessly skimped.

As for the final, churning scene in the safe house as the Mole is uncovered, I cannot for the life of me work out why the director has removed all the drama from it. But he has. I’ll leave it at that for now, but might say more in response to comments.

Boston Lincolngrad: The troubling transformation of a sleepy English town after mass immigration from Eastern Europe

 

**Note: The following article was published on Sunday 18th September in the Mail on Sunday. It has aroused a certain amount of controversy in Boston itself. The leader of the Borough Council has attacked it as 'cliched, jaundiced, inaccurate and one-sided'. I have also received messages from Boston residents endorsing its message.

Obviously it has a wider application, as many parts of Britain are now experiencing very large scale migration. I have posted it here so that it can be more easily found by those who are interested in discussing this important subject.PH **

You cannot get much deeper into England than you do under the huge skies of Lincolnshire, where land and sky and water meet and the impossibly beautiful tower of Boston’s ancient church reaches towards the clouds.

I came here first nearly 30 years ago and had a sense of penetrating a sleeping, utterly undisturbed part of the country. The Sixties had not really happened. There were no motorways. Life was slow, a little shabby, but untroubled by the fake urgency of more modern places.

I half-expected to meet Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers’ aristocratic detective, on his way to solve the mystery of The Nine Tailors, set in this haunting countryside of fens, dykes, floods and bell towers.Respectability was still strong, and so was the sense of belonging. Because I was from outside Lincolnshire, they rather charmingly called me a ‘foreigner’.

How shocking it is, then, to return and find Boston so strangely and unexpectedly transformed. In the past few years this place has seen drunken street battles between locals and migrants, some nasty assaults and a continuing air of suspicion and dislike that it is hard to miss – yet which cannot be openly expressed.

At one major road junction, a huge poster demands a ban on the public drinking of alcohol. Knowing that rowdy street-drinking (and public urination) is one of the main local complaints against migrants, I cannot help wondering if this is not some sort of covert protest against their presence.

If you look carefully as the train from Grantham rolls into the station, you can see the blasted, scorched lock-up garage where, a few weeks ago, five men died in an explosion that could be heard five miles away across the great fields of leeks, sprouts and beetroot that surround the town. We may say with some certainty that they were trying to make illegal vodka, and that they came from Eastern Europe. Police investigations are still continuing into the background of this nasty business.

But another, slow-motion explosion has also hit Boston. Here, of all the unlikely places, a somnolent and kindly town has been upset, alarmed and riven by mass immigration in its hardest and most uncompromising form.

Note here that I use the word ‘immigration’, not ‘immigrants’. All the people who have been hurt, uprooted and upset by this rather cynical piece of social engineering are pretty much free of blame. Who can honestly disapprove of the poor person from Lisbon, Riga or Bucharest, with a family to house and feed, tempted to uproot his or her life by the promise of wages unthinkable at home? There is something brave and commendable about their willingness to live in crowded, shared lodgings, eating cheaply and saving hard; an experience we should all go through at some time or another.

Who can frown on the farmer who welcomes the fact that he suddenly has a reliable source of hard-working young men and women ready to lift his crops for long hours without complaint? And who can blame the people of this ancient place, nervous, baffled and disquieted by the sudden arrival of hundreds of people who do not speak English, who are ignorant of our customs, who move among us like interplanetary visitors, so cut off that they could not even understand a shout of ‘Help!’, let alone laugh at our jokes?

If you seek a villain, you’ll need to look elsewhere, in warm and comfortable rooms occupied by complacent, powerful people whose only experience of immigration is cheap, exotic restaurants and cheap servants. Here in the English fenland, everyone involved is a victim of enormous, irresistible powers. Those abstract ideas called ‘market forces’ and ‘free movement of peoples’, so beloved of academics, politicians and journalists far away in London, come to life and stalk the streets.

Like most grandiose ideas, they are not as nice as they sound. In Boston, what they mean is this. On a 20-minute walk from railway station to bed-and-breakfast, I meet and see almost nobody who speaks English. Most of the few I do see are the kind of people nobody wants to employ: the only players in this sad melodrama who might conceivably have chosen a different outcome. In the shadow of the great church, big enough to be a cathedral and now absurdly large for the mainly Godless town at its feet, the home-grown English youths are there with their cans of lager and their hoodies, shouting and cackling. I have to mention this because there is also no shortage of young Eastern Europeans who end up in court here charged with urinating in public places, obviously drunk.

The difference is that the British louts are the end-product of decades of social tenderness, child-centred education and welfare. But the newcomers, emptying their bladders where they stand or driving drunk and uninsured after an evening of illegal hooch, are the end of 70 years of miserable communism, deliberate demoralisation and a culture of desperation and drunken oblivion. Both systems have more in common that you might suspect.

I came to Boston at the invitation of a man I shall call Ted. He wanted me to see at first hand a place that cannot really cope with what is happening to it. He tells a disturbing story about strange events soon before the migrants arrived, around the turn of the century. A small advertisement in one of the local papers asked people who were worried about immigration to contact a phone number. Ted did. He describes what happened.

‘The advertisement read, roughly, “Are you concerned about large numbers of migrants arriving in Boston?” with a mobile phone number to contact. I felt very concerned with the number of immigrants being talked about at that time, 5,000 Portuguese! We little knew that was only the beginning of a much greater number from all over Eastern Europe, Iraq and Russia who would be arriving in their thousands.

‘I phoned the mobile and was only given a Christian name, “John”, I think. He was quite vague and would not give more information, only to say he was a concerned resident and was looking to meet anyone who felt the same. He said he was going to organise meetings etc and would be in touch and asked for my contact details, which I gave.

‘As I had not heard from him or seen anything in the paper, I rang the mobile again. He suggested we meet up in the Red Cow pub in the town at midday. He was about 5ft 10in to 6ft, short fair hair (not skinhead), looked fit, casually dressed but smart. He definitely did not have a Lincolnshire accent.

‘He bought half a pint of bitter and we sat in a quiet corner. He asked me what I did, and would I be prepared to go on a demonstration march through Boston; what were my thoughts on the proposed mass immigration into Boston and how far would people be prepared to go to register their disapproval.

‘I told him how I felt, that a small community like Boston should not be swamped with immigrants. It is not about race, it is about keeping things in proportion. Nothing materialised, no leaflets no demonstration, nothing. So I rang him again, and got a very short answer that “he would be in touch”. After that, the number was not in use.

‘I am fully convinced the guy I met worked for the Government and was sent to Boston to see what the public reaction would be. Not long afterwards, there was a public meeting on the subject. Among the listed speakers was a representative of the BNP.’

As Ted, a mainstream, conservative-minded businessman, says: ‘If you want to kill off any political opposition to any issue you invite the BNP.’

I include this story because I have long been haunted by the extraordinary and astonishing revelations of Andrew Neather, a former New Labour speech writer who worked for, among others, Jack Straw. He wrote in a London newspaper in 2009 that the huge immigration increases in the past ten years were at least partly caused by a desire in government to change the country and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. He said Labour’s weaker border controls were a deliberate plan to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’ but that Ministers were nervous about discussing this openly, for fear of losing working-class votes.

So instead, they just went on and on about the supposed economic benefits of welcoming more migrants. Boston, interestingly, is a mainly Tory area, where Labour did not need to worry about lost votes. Well, as Boston shows, there definitely are benefits to immigration. Thousands of hard-working young men – no one seems to know how many thousands – are helping to harvest the dull but necessary vegetables that Lincolnshire grows. Local landlords have no trouble in renting property, and Boston is going through a small housing boom, with lots of new blocks of flats and housing estates, as well as some pretty dispiriting caravan encampments close to the farms.

Officially, Boston’s population is 61,000, but the borough council believes the true figure is more like 70,000. The immigrants are paying their council tax and their income tax, and spending a bit in some of the local shops – but I’ll come to that. Their children are now arriving in the schools. At one, Park Primary, just over half the pupils do not have English as a first language.

We might expect this in London’s Tower Hamlets or parts of Manchester or Bradford. But in Boston? I’ve spoken to teachers who are actually quite pleased by the new arrivals. Their presence has forced the local authority to pour money into schools that were previously at the back of every queue and at the bottom of every pile. In some classes there are now as many as four expensively hired adults trying to overcome the language barriers caused by the presence of children who speak Russian, Polish or a Baltic language at home.

Teachers insist that all is well. How would you prove it wasn’t? Parents may suspect otherwise but they will have learned, like everyone else in Britain, that it is all too easy to be dismissed as ‘racist’ if you make a public fuss about such things.

And as usual, the parts of the town most affected are the poorest streets, where people are least equipped to protest. Of course ‘race’ has nothing to do with it. Boston’s migrants are white-skinned Europeans. What separates them from us is culture: upbringing, manners, tastes in food, history and language. A few dozen such people in any place would be easy, even beneficial. But thousands of them, all at once, in a small town, mean the creation of a great invisible barrier, snaking down every street and cutting through every district and many lives.

On West Street, known by locals as ‘East Street’ for obvious reasons, there are half a dozen independent shops selling Baltic, Polish and Russian food, an internet cafe used mainly by Eastern Europeans and a Polish restaurant. Nearby there’s a rather inviting Latvian pastry and cake shop. Almost certainly, without the migrants, these places would be boarded up, or charity shops.

But what consolation is that to born-and-bred Bostonians who see parts of their home town transformed into a foreign zone? Enter these shops and you will find them selling vodka (one brand rather tactlessly named ‘Boom’), and the pickles, spicy salami and smoked meats that are the staples of the Baltic diet. The brands of cereal, biscuits, beer and sweets are all unfamiliar. They are a little piece of Eastern Europe. I suspect I am the only English-speaking customer most of them have seen. In one shop I find a middle-aged Polish businessman who is happy to talk to me. I ask what brought him here. His answers may surprise you.

‘Britain is the best country in Europe to work in. You are more open-minded, more helpful, more friendly to newcomers than anyone else in Europe.

‘I like this country . . . I like to live and work here.’

He compares us most favourably to the unwelcoming, prejudiced Germans who are far closer to his home region in Western Poland. But – and I have to press him to talk about this which he says is ‘a very delicate matter’ – he is baffled by the unwillingness of the British to take the jobs on offer.

‘Many of you just don’t want to work. You take incapacity benefit [he knew the exact English phrase]. You just assume you’ll get money from the Government.’

He finds this attitude unbelievable. It wouldn’t be possible in Poland.

‘It’s just not true that we take your jobs,’ he says emphatically, ‘I’ve been working here for a long time now, and I know this – that all businesses want reliable, friendly, helpful workers. That is all we do. You can do it too.’

Of course, there are British workers who complain with justification that they have been undercut by cheaper East European rivals – and are then asked to go round and fix the mess that they have made. But in the end such people face the horrible truth, well known to the British Government and the EU, that one of the purposes of mass immigration and open borders is to push down our wages.

Perhaps if TV presenters and MPs could be replaced by cheaper Polish immigrants, they would be more concerned about this. As it is, they just rejoice that nannies cost less than they used to, and restaurant meals are cheap. But there is another reason the locals may be failing in this competition. It is summed up in a smart and obviously well-financed little establishment, paid for by taxes, itself not far from a flourishing business specialising in providing interpreters.

Slip inside this ‘Resource Centre’ and you find it full of advice on how to poison yourself with illegal drugs. There is information on nine different types of syringe, and warnings not to mix your drugs with lemon juice; to rotate your injection sites, and to angle the needle correctly. There are posters threatening unconvincingly that, if you sell the methadone provided to you by the taxpayer, you could face penalties ‘up to life in prison’.

The very existence of this establishment, with all that it implies, helps to explain why young men and women growing up around here have been so easily supplanted by strangers who do not even speak the language of our country.

No, it is not that they are all drug-takers. It is that our welfare state assumes that any weakness, any failing, any bad habit, requires help and public money rather than moral guidance and stern limits to behaviour. The same is true in the classrooms, and in thousands of homes. The newcomers have been in a harder school. They have grown up in a cold grey world where if you don’t learn, you fail your exams, if you don’t work, you go hungry, and where if you don’t obey the law, it lashes out at you with a club. Offer such people free entry to Britain, and they will think they have come to paradise, even if they have to sleep ten to a room and work until their backs break for the minimum wage.

Sooner or later they, too, will be corrupted by it. There is nothing here for our comfort. I came away from Boston wanting to tell the truth about it, without making it worse. It is easy to understand the frustrated resentment of decent people whose friendly, known world has been destroyed by distant politicians. It is not hard to sympathise with a young man or woman with the guts and energy to come hundreds of miles to find work that locals do not much want to do. But it is impossible not to be angry with the politicians who either couldn’t imagine what their policies would bring in practice, or did not care.

The destruction of familiarity and security cannot be measured in money. And I suspect they encouraged this vast migration because they lacked the courage or the will to confront the huge problems of broken families, feeble schools and welfare dependency: the real causes of the so-called labour shortage.

By doing so, they have done deep and lasting damage which has already led to bloodshed and hatred, and which could easily lead to more in the years to come. Yet nothing will bring them to admit it, or to change their minds. They never visit their own country and I do not think they give a damn about it.

An Orwell Pilgrimage

Among all the many festivals and gatherings that now make British life so much more entertaining, it is rather surprising that –until now – there has never been one devoted to George Orwell, incontestably one of our greatest and most influential writers.

This year that has been put right. There’s a very good Orwell Festival, or rather was, as it has just finished, in and around Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire. With a bit of luck, there will be another one in two years. I do hope they repeat the performance of ‘The Last Man in Europe’, a one-man show about Orwell’s life that I didn’t have the chance to see.

I like Garden Cities, mainly because of their slightly Edwardian art-and-crafts feel , relics of the age before the First World War, high-minded and benevolent, usually teetotal.  The paternalism is slightly worrying (though it’s much stronger in company towns such as Port Sunlight). But there are, as we all now know, many worse things than paternalism.

Letchworth had a raw deal from Orwell himself. His famous explosion against sandal-wearers, polysyllable-chewing Marxists, escaped Quakers and bearded men in shorts is supposed to have been written after he encountered just such a group on a bus in Letchworth. He thought they gave socialism a bad name (alas for him, they were true representatives of the cause, a fact he couldn’t quite cope with). Garden Cities are also mocked as centres of weedy pacifism by John Buchan in one of his least satisfactory Richard Hannay books, ‘Mr Standfast’ . This name is also used by George Smiley in ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier , Spy ’, though I wonder how many modern readers realise it comes originally from ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, a book once known and read in almost every English home, and now almost completely forgotten. (So, by the way. Does ‘Vanity Fair’ , which most people think is a magazine or, if they are reasonably well-educated, a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. They are right. But they are also not right, just like people who think that ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ is a novel by Ernest Hemingway).

So when I was invited to talk about what Orwell would be writing about now, at the Orwell Festival in Letchworth, I very willingly said ‘yes’. This wasn’t one of those speaking engagements I sometimes lightly undertake, months in advance, and then regret later. It was fun to do, especially because among my fellow-panellists were Gordon Bowker, author of a biography of Orwell, and the Ukrainian journalist Vitali Vitaliev, who has embraced England so thoroughly that he has become a keen student of Orwell and is deeply knowledgeable about him and his writing.

Vitali kindly offered to drive me out to Wallington, the village where Orwell lived (and ran the village shop) before the war, and where he wrote ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Coming up for Air’ – and where he is also thought to have had the original idea for ‘Animal Farm’. But I was able to take my old bicycle up to Letchworth on the train, and rode out there myself. I had wrongly thought the landscape was flat, but still managed to wheeze my way up and down the chalk downland (beautiful in the clear early autumn light, which gives a pinkish glow to these low hills as evening approaches).  The  village is still  much as Orwell knew it - though far more prosperous, and of course far less truly rural, its pubs and its farm labourers and its school all gone. The great barn, in which a key scene of Animal Farm takes place, is still there. So is Orwell’s house, now attractively restored and thatched. In his day it had a corrugated iron roof, and the doors and windows didn’t fit, so it was freezing cold and his weekend guests couldn’t wait to get back to London, so uncomfortable were the arrangements.

There is also a particularly lovely church, one of so many beautifully proportioned, light-filled churches still to be found, tragically under-used, in village England, full of the Holy Ghost and populated by centuries of prayer and song now coming, it seems, to an inevitable end. Not that Orwell would have thought that, even though he was married there. He claimed to be Godless, as men of his type and era so often did, though he was in a way quite fond of the Church of England.

Copies of his marriage certificate are on sale, if you like that sort of thing. There is, I am glad to say, no Victory Tea Shoppe (or should that be ‘The Chestnut Tree Café?), just a modest plaque and feeling of being very deep in the England Orwell loved above all things. If you do visit it please go, as I did, by bicycle, or on foot (there are good bridleways all around) so you won’t wreck the peace you’ve come to experience.

Then I headed back to Letchworth, to what I believe is Britain’s only vegetarian school, St Christopher’s, to take part in the debate.

I did say at the beginning of my contribution to the discussion that I thought Orwell would have seen straight through the humbug of man-made global warming. And I also suspect , not just because it suits me, that he would have been very suspicious of the European Union’s secretive and authoritarian nature. And we covered a lot of other ground, from toads and tea to the Internet. But what follows, is more or less what I said that night, for those of you who are interested.

What George Orwell would write about today.

There’s a temptation here to say that Orwell would have been just like us.  Or, to be more specific, just like me, me,  me.

Many modern writers would greatly like to consider themselves to be the New Orwell.

However, reputation, like truth, is the daughter of time. Best not to make any hasty judgements.

In any case, there were many Orwells. There was the pacifist Orwell, now forgotten. There was the nostalgist Orwell of ‘Coming up for Air’, in my view by a long chalk his best novel, once you have excluded the mighty works of ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ and ‘Animal; Farm’.

Then there was Orwell the policeman and anti-imperialist, Orwell the tramp and the Paris  plongeur,  Orwell the voluntary slum-dweller of the ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ Orwell the literary reviewer and admirer (bafflingly to me) of Henry Miller and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

And then there was the Orwell of the POUM Militia, who discovered at first hand the horrible truth about official Communism – and the even more creepy truth about how many people, from Victor Gollancz to T.S.Eliot, would find it politic to suppress criticism of Moscow.

And on top of that there was Orwell the Old Etonian, and Orwell the author of ‘Politics and the English Language’, a sermon on purity of writing so severe that no honest scribbler can read it without recognising some of his own recent faults in it.

And finally there was Orwell the lover of England, paradoxically revolutionary, with his batty dreams of Red Militias billeted in the Ritz, but his view of this country as a family, with the wrong members in control, of railway cuttings choked with wildflowers, red pillar boxes, blue policemen, all of them sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England – and a capital so peaceful and civilised that a blind man could cross it from side to side without being molested.  There’s the Orwell who instinctively disliked the metric system, who liked proper pubs, strong brown tea and the magical appearance of toads in the English countryside in the early spring. And the Orwell who couldn’t abide Scotsmen.

Finally, there’s an Orwell I have always objected to – the Orwell who completely misunderstood the relationship between sexual freedom and real freedom, and who imagined that a future left-wing dictatorship would have an Anti-Sex League and raid illicit lovers in their bedrooms.

 

To give an honest answer to this question, I have to consider which of these Orwells would have most disliked me, if we both lived at the same time.

 

Might he have approved of liberal intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya?

I suspect he might. After all, he himself took part in the prototype liberal intervention in Spain.

Might he have approved of the sexual revolution? I am sure he would, at least to begin with.

Would he have looked down his nose at conservative popular newspapers such as mine?

I am more or less sure of it. An Etonian revolutionary could hardly be expected to do anything else.

Would he have supported comprehensive education? Yes, I think the man who wanted London’s squares stripped of their railings would have seen this as a liberating measure.

Would he have favoured large-scale immigration into this country? Very possibly. He would have instinctively sided with the person he regarded as the underdog, perhaps not seeing that when mass immigration comes to a country, both migrants *and* hosts are underdogs.

Would he have supported relaxed drink licensing laws? I think so. He viewed such things as silly and puritan.

Would he have fervently opposed smoking bans? Without a doubt. His generation viewed smoking as a normal human activity.

In all these matters, it is only right to consider him as a whole, as a man of his place and time, the very things which forged the steely core of him.

But there are one or two issues on which, willy nilly, we would have found ourselves on the same side. I believe that the man who wrote so cleverly about Newspeak would have seen the speech codes and inclusive language of political correctness for the sinister linguistic prisons that they are.

I believe he would have loathed the attempt to introduce identity cards.

I believe he would have supported Steve Thoburn and the metric martyrs against concrete-headed attempts to prosecute them for selling bananas by the English pound.

And I think he would have hated motorways, and the devastation of the railways, and the grisly new liturgy of the Church of England, and the insane massacre of healthy trees by health and safety fanatics.

And he would have absolutely loathed Anthony Blair.

None of us here would ever have found him entirely convenient, or comforting, or a certain ally. He had that genuine independence of mind whose unfailing magnetic north is a love of truth and a loathing of humbug and which scorns all conventional wisdom. That’s why, knowing that he would probably have scorned me and everything I ever wrote or said, I’m still very proud to be associated with his name here today.

 

Read the awful story of Fiona... THEN accuse me of ‘moral panic’

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Many modern radicals sneer that my warnings of coming chaos are ‘moral panic’. They say that I exaggerate the problem, that Britain remains a perfectly civilised country with nothing much to worry about.

This is the politically correct view. Yet it cannot easily be squared with a dispiriting report this week on the treatment of disabled people.

The survey was made by the HQ of Political Correctness, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It concerns a group of people that Political Correctness claims to care about.

And it shows that our treatment of many such people, especially those who look or sound a bit different from the rest of us, is as cruel and cold as the Stone Age.

More importantly, it shows that the authorities, for all their phoney concern and oily mission statements, couldn’t care less if some poor creature is persecuted and driven mad by scorn and mockery.

It deals at length with the unspeakably nasty case of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Frankie Hardwick.

Fiona Pilkington appealed more than 30 times to the police for help as her house was besieged and attacked, and her poor child mocked and terrified. 

There was no place of safety where they could feel secure, let alone happy. In the end, she went mad with grief and fear, and incinerated her daughter and herself in her car - a death so horrible that we can only wonder how ghastly their lives had been.

That is all bad enough. The uselessness of the police in such matters is well known to anyone who really needs them.

But most striking are the words of one of their leading tormentors: ‘We can do anything we like and you can’t do anything about it.’

He was quite right. The evil are always quick to realise it, when authority has departed.

For what the report adds is that the general attitude of our many officials, agencies, helplines and services towards this problem is one of total defeatism.

Perhaps most telling of all are these words from the EHRC’s report: ‘Public authorities sometimes focused on the victim’s behaviour and suggested uncalled-for restrictions to their lives to avoid harassment rather than dealing with the perpetrators.’

Once again, our system lacks any moral distinction between right or wrong.

It is not outraged by human cruelty and filled with a burning desire to end it.

It sees its job as negotiating between the victim and the ‘offender’, whose behaviour is explained and excused by poverty or abuse.

This never works. Its failure was on show to the world when the feral multitude swarmed on to the streets of England a few weeks ago. 

The people who hounded Fiona Pilkington and Frankie Hardwick to death would do the same to anyone who appeared different, or weak.

They have already begun on the old, a category to which most of us will sooner or later belong.

There are more of them every day, thanks to our unchanging and hopelessly wrong policies on family, education and justice.

This is not moral panic. It is the sober truth.


How about a blockbuster lauding full-time mothers?

The blitzkrieg against full-time mothers continues. Now we have a greatly hyped film, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, of the greatly hyped book I Don’t Know How She Does It, about some businesswoman or other who holds down an office job and has children, and they miraculously don’t starve or freeze to death or burn the house down in her absence.

I think we are supposed to admire this. But actually we do know how she does it. She hires a foreign nanny (or if enormously rich, a British one).

Politicians whose wives go out to work do this, too, but media organisations, likewise crammed with wage-slave mothers, never refer to the presence of an expensive servant. All that is supposed to have gone out with Downton Abbey. The wives involved are written about as if they do it all themselves.

No doubt this is all very well for the super-rich. Many children of such households develop enviably close relationships with the nanny, whom they see far more than their actual parent.

High-flying office work is fun, and it pays enough for tolerable childcare. But for hundreds of thousands driven to boring work to pay the bills, the work is not fun and the childcare, in crammed day-orphanages, is inadequate and sad.

I don’t know why we put up with it. Why is it still considered shaming and bad for a woman to bring up her own children?

A stroll through modern Britain

It is a sunny morning in a modest suburban shopping street I have known for years. I open the door of one of the newly refurbished public lavatories and find a couple busy together on the floor. I close it gently, wondering why they didn’t even bother to bolt it.

Further down the street, a group of young women with pushchairs are screaming furiously at a menacing young man who looks as if he is going to attack them.

The staider citizens simply walk round this scene. They long ago learned not to intervene. Scowling teenagers whizz aggressively up and down the pavements on bicycles. There is no sign of authority; in fact I haven’t seen a police foot patrol there since the Eighties, if then.

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It is funny that many other countries have a more special relationship with the USA than we do. If you fly to the USA from Dublin airport, you can go through U.S. immigration before you board your plane (a service also available in Canada).

This saves you getting stuck behind 500 suspected Colombian drug smugglers at Miami or JFK. If we’re so special, why can’t we have this too?

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The BBC’s Chief Commissar for Political Correctness (whom I imagine as a tall, stern young woman in cruel glasses issuing edicts from an austere office) was hard at work again last week.

On University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman referred to a date as being Common Era, rather than AD. This nasty formulation is designed to write Christianity out of our culture. Given the allegedly ferocious Mr Paxman’s schoolgirlish, groupie-like treatment of various prominent atheists in recent interviews, maybe he favours this far-from-impartial view.

Then on Thursday morning, the Today programme’s Justin Webb referred to a ‘multi-billion-euro’ project to build a space telescope.

It’s touching, in a way, that deep in the BBC they still believe in the wretched and disastrous single currency. But why couldn’t he have used pounds?

The figure wasn’t precise; the meaning would have been the same. I expect it was for the same reason that the BBC now incessantly uses the metric system instead of customary British measures, often making hilarious mistakes as a result. My favourite remains the day when Lionel Kelleway, distinguished presenter of natural history programmes, announced that some cliffs (actually 600 feet high) were 2,000 metres high (6,560 feet).

 

Civilised Conversation – at least I hope so

In a way, September is the real New Year, not the futile dead zone of early January, or even the Spring.  The first crisp clear autumn morning of the year, which always makes my blood flow faster,  usually means a return to welcome routine after many months when the world was half asleep.  I’ve been away or otherwise engaged for much of the last six weeks or so,  the trains have been half-empty and the streets wonderfully clear of traffic. But what passes for normality is now back, with all the same crises and problems as before, unresolved. And I’m a little late in responding to comments this week because I spent Sunday and Monday in Ireland, coming down from Belfast to Dublin on one of my favourite train rides, the Enterprise, which in less than three hours takes you from one world to another, and crosses Britain’s only land border, as well as passing through some of the loveliest countryside anywhere in these islands. As I said to my Dublin host, the two cities are still immensely different, but the differences are not the same as those which existed when I first made that journey 30 years ago. In those days, Dublin was probably the most Edwardian place in our archipelago (making a phone call was a cumbersome business usually involving the operator) whereas Belfast was a city in the midst of war. Now both cities have been utterly transformed by money, and I’m not sure whether hostility to the Roman Catholic church is now stronger in the North among militant protestants, or in the South among former Catholics.


Now, to your comments. As always, I shall set out trying to answer them all, and will inevitably fail. Let me stress, though, that I do read them all. If yours isn’t singled out for comment, it may be because I feel I’ve dealt with the matter elsewhere, or because it’s not central to the debate. But I have read it.

Mr Oliver wantas to know why I think his training was ‘Marxist’ or ‘radical’ as if these words were interchangeable. I don’t think they are. And I don’t think I said his training was ‘Marxist’. If I did, where did I do so?  I do think it very likely that it was radical, but that is because I am an educational conservative.

I would doubt, for instance, that any of those who trained him would reject, as I do, the idea of ‘child-centred’ or ‘discovery ‘ learning. I suspect they would regard as reactionary and outmoded my belief that:

Children should sit in ordered rows facing the teacher(this very much includes primary schools) chant times tables relentlessly until they know them by heart (learning by rote’, as the radicals contemptuously say); be taught customary English measures (the ones they’ll really use all their lives)  as they were taught times tables; be taught to read using synthetic phonics and nothing but synthetic phonics;  made to take dictation, have their spelling corrected when it is wrong;  made to do repeated exercises in addition, subtraction and multiplication, made to do bad work again;  taught factual geography – names, locations, capitals, populations, principal rivers, mountains, industries and produce etc of the countries of the world, starting with their own, rather than propaganda about global warming; taught the principles and essential scriptures of the Christian religion, not as an anthropological curiosity but as the established and living religion of this country (those whose parents do not wish this can opt out) reinforced with a daily assembly of a predominantly Christian character (opt-outs again available) ; taught narrative history of their own country, not confused with conflicting ‘sources’ dealing with disconnected episodes usually chosen for politically correct reasons or overlaid with futile attempts at empathy with the peoples of the past.

Now, if this is how he has been taught to teach, then I withdraw my suggestion that his training was supervised by radicals. But I suspect the sort of teaching he (and his trainers) regard as normal is what I would regard as an authority-free egalitarian catastrophe. For of course all the things I mention above require not merely a belief in the authority of adults, but a belief in the existence of a body of knowledge worth passing on, and in our right and duty to do so.

I have no doubt that many of those radicals have been influenced by Marxist teachings and movements, some consciously, some not. Marxist are all for deconstructing educational order in the societies they wish to undermine, and all for rigour, authority and so forth in the societies they have taken over.  Many of our educational problems result from the fact that this country has been in a permanent cultural upheaval, heavily influenced by Gramscian ideas of cultural hegemony,  for half a century.  But other intellectual currents, notably Deweyism, are also involved.

I am as usual baffled by Tim Lemon, writing once more from his fastness on one of the moons of Jupiter. He thinks Mr Blair trashed British comprehensives. I suspect he may be relying on that extraordinarily unreliable measure, the OECD PISA survey, in which ‘evidence’ is gathered in entirely different ways in different countries , but is then presented as if it is comparable. Mr Blair certainly did little or nothing to improve Britain’s state schools, and he knew how bad they were, hence his use of the London Oratory rather than the secondary schools near his Islington home. But then since the comprehensive experiment was launched in 1965, the one sure method of curing the disease has been the one course nobody will take – a return to selection by ability. I might add that a lowering of the absurdly high compulsory school leaving age, allowing the non-academic to start work earlier, would also be a pretty good idea.


Mr Robinson comments : ‘During the golden age of selective education from 1945 to 1965 Britain was comprehensively economically thrashed by its main economic competitors . Whatever its merits that system was not able to deliver the goods economically.’

Firstly, I am not sure this is true. Britain’s economic performance in the immediate post war era was pretty good, in terms of exports, and we managed to survive as a major manufacturing country, despite the abuse of Marshall Aid to found a lavish welfare state, and the heavy burden of Cold War military spending. We did begin to fall behind as the rest of the world retooled.

Secondly,  quite how this can be blamed on the actions and behaviour of boys and girls who entered grammar schools between 1945 and 1965 I am not sure. Someone who was 11 years old in 1945 would have been 31 in 1965, nowhere near the levers of political or economic power, and a very short way up the rungs of any of the old professional ladders. What I do remember from this era was the worry about the ‘Brain Drain’, especially of scientists and engineers, to the USA, whose high schools were simply not producing people of the quality turned out by the British education system. You don’t hear much about that now.


The failure of Britain as an economic power results much more from policy decisions taken by men educated before the war (such people as Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas Home, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Ted Heath, most of whom were at Oxford before 1939). In their cases, I don’t think the quality of their schooling can be blamed, so much as the persistence of various wrong ideas. 

In answer to Mr Gray, the new grammar schools would, as they did before 1965, push private school products out of Oxford and Cambridge. They would just have to go elsewhere.  Accurate figures for the high and rising numbers of state school entrants reaching Oxbridge before the comprehensive revolution  *with no special provisions made to help them*  are given in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’. It is my belief that if Crosland’s measures had never gone through, and if Scotland had not engaged in comparable vandalism of its fine state academies, many British private schools would by now have gone out of business, or partially entered the state system as Direct Grant schools. Those who genuinely oppose educational privilege should surely therefore support selection. Odd that they don’t.

Of course people are right to be concerned for those who don’t get into grammar schools. But the idea that they are damaged by the existence of grammar schools, or that they benefit from their abolition, is simply false. These are two separate questions. I am very interested in proper technical education, and wish the money squandered on futile new ‘universities’ had been applied to this end. A tougher problem is what to do about those in the middle, neither academic nor technical. I recognise the difficulty. I just don’t accept that it is solved or even eased by the comprehensive system. By the way, it is silly to summarise my view as ‘all comprehensives are bad’. Any classification of a school must be comparative. Also many officially comprehensive schools are in fact nothing of the kind, and are reasonably good as a result.  Comprehensives tend to be better , the more they defy the comprehensive ideal. That is because this ideal is political, not educational. . These better comprehensives would be far better in an openly selective system with more demanding examinations

I will end my comments on the selection issue by saying how very grateful I am to Mr Embery for his contribution. Regular readers here will know that Mr Embery and I rarely agree on anything. His clear-eyed account of the real state of affairs in the schools suffered by the children of the poor is therefore specially valuable, as it is not advanced to serve any cause, simply stated as the truth that it is. What he says has been confirmed to me many times by serving and retired teachers who often fear to speak out because of concern for their jobs or pensions.


The Twin Towers


A comment on the 11th September has wandered on to the education thread, but is a good starting point for one part of the argument.

Mr Crawford writes: ‘it looks rather silly to complain that Israel (the only military superpower in the Middle East) is too small to give away any territory.’

This is a nonsequitur. Military power and territory are two different things. Even the most enormous military power cannot provide defence in depth, nor can it protect a country against (for instance ) rocket attacks from closely neighbouring territory. Were the West bank to be a sovereign state, it would be perfectly possible for its inhabitants to rain missiles on many Israeli cities and on the country’s only international airport. As has been quite clear from the moronic Israeli attacks on Gaza, retaliation and incursion are poor defences against such things. It is also worth noting how the heavily entrenched forces of Hezbollah were able to inflict a defeat on Israel in the recent clashes on the Lebanese border.  Israel is well-armed against a conventional invasion(though it lacks defence in depth, as I say) and well-equipped against a nuclear threat. But against many forms of disproportionate warfare it is stumbling, muscle-bound  and inept. I might add that it has lost the propaganda war in advance. And that the Arab and Muslim nations taken together – especially Egypt, Iran  and Saudi Arabia, are not far short of military superpower status themselves. And they have much more territory.

He adds :’ The Palestinian people have no homeland! They, alongside the Kurds, are the largest dispossessed peoples remaining in the world.’

Is it in fact correct to equate the Palestinians, a nationality largely invented for propaganda purposes, with the Kurds, a wholly distinct language and culture in existence for centuries? I should say it was questionable. Palestinians are Arabs. They speak Arabic, have an Arab heritage and are predominantly Muslim (In fact Christian Arabs in the region are often treated quite badly by the Palestinian authority, as I have myself witnessed in the area round Bethlehem. That is why they are emigrating in large numbers) .  They have in the past attempted to settle in Arab countries, and have often done so successfully but have on occasion been driven out (notably from Kuwait) for political reasons, or denied proper citizenship and rights by their Arab brethren. Compare them with other victims of the many hideous and bloody mass expulsions of the 20th century.

Turks and Greeks who were victims of the great population exchange of the 1920s have settled successfully as citizens in Greece and Turkey
Indian Muslims expelled from their ancestral homes in the 1947 partition have settled as citizens in Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs who were expelled from their ancestral homes  in Pakistan have settled in India.
Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in East Prussia, Poland and the Czech lands under the Potsdam agreement in the 1940s have settled successfully as citizens in Germany.
Greek and Turkish Cypriots driven from their ancestral homes in the partition and Turkish invasion of 1974 have settled successfully as citizens in their new homelands.
And hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled  from their ancestral homes in Arab and Muslim countries after 1948 have settled as citizens of Israel.

I accept that none of these population movements has been free of problems, and stress that none excuses the horrific brutality of the population exchanges themselves. But it does seem striking that alone of all these events, all many decades ago, this one remains unresolved, and the victims, their children and grandchildren, of the expulsions of 1948, remain in political limbo and in physical squalor – despite the enormous wealth of the oil-rich Arab world.

As for the question of having no homeland, it is in fact the case that the original Palestine Mandate (whose inhabitants can presumably be called ‘Palestinians’) included the whole of what is now Jordan, designated, by the Sanremo accords for ‘close Jewish settlement’. So again, is this statement technically correct? The history of land title in this area is endlessly complex,  and most dogmatic statements made about it, don’t work. Until 1918, it was a mess of Sanjaks and Vilayets of the Ottoman Empire (which had acquired it by force long ago) . It was then seized by Britain by force. Later the UN-approved state of Israel then seized more land by force. So did the emirate of TransJordan, which conquered the West Bank in 1948 But I have little doubt that, had the Arab armies of 1948 won their war, it would have been the Jews who would have been the refugees(as indeed they were elsewhere in the Middle East at that time). 



He asks :’ Why does everyone think the Jewish people uniquely deserve a homeland (which I agree they do)’

Everyone doesn’t think this. Many Jews are very much against it, for varying reasons (some think the restoration of Israel is blasphemous, some think Jews should assimilate in the countries of their birth). Nor would it be in any way ‘unique’. On the contrary, practically everyone wants a homeland these days. Scores of new nations have been created since World War Two, often at the expense of minorities within them (see Africa above all). The thing that is unique about Jews is that so many people have an irrational and occasionally murderous hatred for them, as people – not on grounds of religion, or any outward characteristics, but because they are Jews. It was the most concentrated expression of this feeling so far, in the modern, scientific, advanced, civilised 20th century which convinced a lot of Jews that Zionism, previously reviled as an eccentric folly, might have a point. They’d ignored the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus affair, and the casual Judophobia of much of  Europe. But the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht took things a little further.


‘but the Palestinians and the Kurds do not?’

I don’t know about the Kurds. It appears that for the moment, George W.Bush has given them a semi-official homeland in Iraq, though I wonder how long that will last. As for the Palestinians, see above.


‘And comparing surrender to the might of Hitler's Third Reich with attempts to give self-determination to the impoverished and powerless Palestinians (first evicted from their homes by Jewish settlers half a century ago, and still being evicted from their homes today, in a slow-motion version of that earlier mass cleansing) just makes you look silly.’

First, that’s not the comparison I made. I compared the behaviour of the European and North American powers in the face of aggressive demands, in 1938 and now.  Secondly, Israel does not just confront the local Arab population, but also the entire armed might of the oil-rich Arab world. It is propaganda genius on the part of the Arab world to have managed to portray the conflict in this way. 

He adds ‘ Apart from the fact that, as I said in my earlier post, Israel is only being asked to give up land it is holding illegally in the first place.’

Must I do this again? The question of the rightful ownership of the West Bank is not actually clear, unless you think it should be returned to the Ottomans, who at least held it for hundreds of years.  I personally think Israel made a grave mistake by occupying it, as a reasonably friendly Kingdom of Jordan on its Eastern frontier was a better defence by far than the current arrangements. But people who go on about illegal occupation must be asked to be consistent in their condemnations, or be suspected of partiality. Jordan occupied the west bank illegally from 1948 to 1967, and nobody cared a bit. If the Arab world’s demands stopped at the pre-1967 border, that would be all well and good. But those of us old enough to remember 1966 can tell you that the Arab world did not love (or recognise)  the pre-1967 border when it was there, and launched frequent attacks across it. Nor did they love the Jewish state envisaged in the  1947 UN Partition Plan (much smaller than the present state of Israel) . They loved it so little that they invaded it.  Nor did they love the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan  (with an even smaller Jewish territory than in 1947).

To this day, maps of the area used in Arab schools, displayed on Arab TV stations, used in Arab history books, and pinned on the walls of Arab politicians do not show the existence of Israel at all. And significant parts of the Palestinian movement never have recognised ( and at this rate never will recognise)  recognised Israel’s right to exist.

 

I don’t believe I said anything about ‘rights’ beyond a right to exist as a Jewish state. But there is plenty of evidence that the Arab world feels there is no need to give unequivocal recognition to that right. And I am not surprised, given the confused and weak approach of the powers who are supposed to guarantee the stability of the world’s national borders (who went, for instance, to war to restore Kuwait, without making any attempt in the interim to suggest that Saddam should be content with a portion of Kuwaiti territory, or that Kuwait should buy peace with him by conceding such a thing).

 

I repeat here a response I placed on the comment thread to various contributions:

‘Mr Search raises an interesting point about the process through which George W.Bush began to *consider* support for a 'Palestinian' state. The absolutely fascinating and astonishingly furious letter which he received from the Saudi King a very short time before the 11th September attacks is indeed very important - and please note that it was almost exclusively devoted to the subject of American support for Israel. Likewise the enraged treatment of Israeli ( and American) delegates to the UN conference on 'racism' at Durban, which immediately preceded the 11th September.

But would that decision (in normal times a very tricky one for which the American nation and Congress would have had to be very carefully prepared) have been made with such speed and with so little fuss in other circumstances? Indeed, would it have in fact have been made at all?

The anti-Israel lobby go on endlessly about America's special relationship with Israel. They spend a lot less time examining its even more special relationship with Saudi Arabia. In my view the Bush administration inclined much more towards Riyadh than towards Jerusalem. That can also be said of the previous Buish administration, which sought to humble Israel at the Madrid conference.

The reason for the September 11 attacks was (as is obvious to anyone who knows the region) primarily Arab and Muslim fury at the USA's alliance with Israel (the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, also ended by George W.Bush, was a secondary but significant reason stated by those involved).

However, *and this is crucial* it has never, to my knowledge, been referred to as the reason for the attacks by any major US political figure, nor by the 9/11 Commission (for reasons explored by the authors of 'the 11th Day' and noted by me). That is why I make such a production out of pointing this out, something I am criticised for elsewhere.

The official explanation, adopted by the entire neo-conservative and liberal interventionist choir, has always been that the attack was motivated by 'Hatred for Our Way of Life'. 'Islamism' etc, and that it was the work of a specific organisation called 'Al Qaeda' with these priorities. One effect of this has been the swelling of 'Al Qaeda' from a nebulous concept into a vast bogey overshadowing the entire world, whose hand was seen behind every terrrorist act . This is obviously misleading, but is still clung to by many people who ought to know better. Why? Because the alternative (and correct) explanation has such worrying diploimatic and political consequences for so many people and countries.

This explanation suited the neo-cons and liberal interventionists who wished to make anti-Islamic points by attacking the Taleban in Afghanistan (almost wholly irrelevant to the issue) and who wished to spread 'democracy' to the Middle East by attacking Iraq.

It suited Saudi Arabia, from whose shores most of the murderers had come (and whose other connections with the 11th September are, I believe, explored in the 28 censored pages from the Congressional report on 9/11) .

And it suited the Palestinian movement, which initially badly underestimated the wounded fury of the people (as opposed to the government) of the USA. Had the American people identified the Manhattan massacre with the 'Palestinian' cause, there would never again have been any chance of a US intervention on behalf of their cause in world diplomacy. This is another reason why the US government might not have wanted to stress the 'Palestinian' aspect of the matter. It wanted to be free to negotiate more 'Land for Peace' deals with the PA.

It also appeared to suit supporters of the US-Israel alliance, who thought that the USA would abandon its support for them if it became clear that this was the price America would now pay for that support. My own view is that this was a short-sighted mistake. That is why I say what I say.

 

Mr Search says that the 9/11 Commission report mentions Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s animus towards Israel. Yes, but it does not in its general conclusions about the crime state the obvious and blatant fact that the entire attack was motivated by an desire to punish the USA for its support of Israel. Instead we are diverted into the nebulous ‘Al Qaeda and the meaningless ‘war on terror’, which has followed - and got us worse than nowhere, because it is a wholly mistaken approach.  Nor has the US government acted (in public at least) as though this was the case (see my charting of its less-publicised actions, in ‘The Cameron Delusion’, the chapter ‘A comfortable hotel on the road to Damascus’ attacking the neo-conservative/liberal interventionist view of the event) . It is not to be mentioned, for reasons I explore above.

 

Mr Crosland rightly raises the rather belated claims of responsibility from Bin Laden and KSM. Perhaps Bin Laden’s involvement was more marginal than has been believed, but it eventually suited him (as it suited the US government) to accept that he was the principal author. KSM was, I believe, repeatedly tortured. That casts some doubt on his testimony.

Why I hope Free Schools fail

If the English middle class will not fight for the return of grammar schools, then they should be given fully comprehensive schooling, hot and strong and unavoidable.

Two years of that, and they’ll all be whimpering for grammar schools.

For far too long, a clever minority of smart left-wing parents have found loopholes in the horrible egalitarian state school system, while preaching its virtues to others. The last thing we need is any more such escape hatches or safety valves. After a long mental drought when the thinking classes would drone that ‘you can’t turn the clock back’ or ‘grammar schools can’t be restored’ or ‘we couldn’t have the eleven-plus again’, the country is turning.

There is a great weight of opinion which now favours new grammar schools in large numbers  – and those who say it cannot be done need only look at the former East Germany, where dozens of new grammar schools have been successfully established since Communism (which was fully comprehensive, of course) collapsed. Germany, in all its states,  also tells us that you can have selection by agreement, and late switches between schools. with no need for a rigid exam at age 11.

The other need that has still to be addressed is providing good secondary schools for non-academic pupils. One vital part of this argument is that comprehensive schooling has utterly failed to fill this gap. The decision to go comprehensive in 1965 destroyed the only part of the state system that was actually working, apparently in the belief that the goodness of grammar schools, slightly diluted, would find its way into all schools.

Nothing of the kind has happened. All state schools have grown worse. That is why all exams have had to be devalued, to hide the decline.  The ones which are comparatively better are largely reserved for the privileged, the strong and the savvy, and closed to the children of the poor, ill-informed and weak. Instead of grammar education for all, we have secondary modern education for all. The old 1944 aspiration to provide technical schools has been entirely forgotten. And huge numbers of pupils who can barely read (thanks to other misguided 1960s reforms) are compelled to endure a pseudo-academic education which is of no use to them,  at the end of which they are awarded certificates of no use whatsoever.

A selective system gives us the chance to repair this damage, while rescuing academically gifted children from the wasteland of mixed-ability teaching and devalued examinations.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, knows this perfectly well. But he’s allowed himself to be diverted into the usual activity of a modern Education Secretary – stunts and gimmicks, plus Stalinist exhortation (‘we must all work harder!’) . These actions and speeches give the illusion of great change, while actually doing little more than alter appearances. Why, for instance, the big fuss about academies?  As Anastasia de Waal of Civitas has shown, there really isn’t any proof that they are significantly better than other schools.  Or we have the lionising of heroic, charismatic heads, who can by the sheer force of their enormous personalities transform bad schools into good ones. But what happens when they leave? And what happens to the many schools which lack such leadership and always will?  Not all heads can be exceptional, any more than all our children can be above average. What we need are schools which are institutionally designed to succeed, and will do so even if the head and staff are merely competent.

The comprehensive system is anti-education, having as its main aim a political target -  the promotion of equality.  Why should schools be run on a principle which is designed to damage them? No wonder only giant personalities can make them work at all. Think what those giant personalities could do in schools that were designed to be good – grammar schools.

It is time for a return to selection, and all it needs is for a major political party to adopt this policy for it to happen. The current absurd position, under the School Standards and Framework Act of 1998, is that it is actually against the law for any local authority to open a new grammar school.

This rubbish would have been swept aside long ago if the elite classes really had to experience comprehensive schooling. But they don’t.  Tories have been able to escape by paying fees, which is why that party has been so indifferent to this grave problem for so long. Well-off dwellers in market towns have been able to use rural comprehensives which, while inferior to grammar schools, do not suffer the discipline problems and high staff turnover of their inner-city equivalents.  The Roman Catholic Church has managed to preserve some standards in many of its secondary schools.  But now the education disaster, with all its social, cultural and economic implications, has begun to threaten the security of well-off people far from urban squalor.

Labour grandees – more importantly, for it is their party which ferociously insists on comprehensives, whereas the Tories merely meekly comply – have been able to escape through loopholes. They get their children into schools which, through small expensive catchment area or religious preference,  have escaped the worst features of the all-ability bog-standard comp (which is still a bog-standard comp even after it has been renamed ‘The Burger Queen Academy, a specialist school for astrophysics and hairdressing’, or whatever it is).

Until now these escapees by fiddle and dodge have mostly been left wingers –  above all Anthony Blair who wangled his young into the London Oratory. Many more obscure leftists , some of them almost Leninist in their fervour for comprehensive schools,  have made sure that their own heirs and successors were protected from it. It is interesting that such people will be rude about almost every form of education wangle except the one that they use – the catchment area dodge.

There are several schools, mainly in a certain part of North London, where early and careful attention to the borders of catchment areas can assure young Karl, Leon and Rosa a place at a school which is actually subtly, elusively selective, but officially comprehensive. It is quite expensive to do this, but New Labour apparatchiks are often rich these days, and it is not as if they are saving to pay for school fees. Those involved may then, if they choose, deliver lofty lectures to the rest of us on how wicked we are to pay fees, go to church or favour selection, while their young breeze into Oxbridge on the state schools quota. This interesting state of affairs is dealt with in detail in the chapter entitled ‘The Fall of the Meritocracy’ in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’,  the most, er, comprehensive examination of this issue ever published in this country.

Now, thanks to ‘Free Schools’ and to David Cameron, this hypocritical pestilence is spreading into the Tory Party. Mr Cameron seems to see some virtue in sending his children to state schools, declaring in February 2009 that he would ‘like them to go through the state sector’ and adding ‘I think it’s crazy that we should pay lots of money for private schools. We all pay our taxes. You should have really good state schools available for all.’

As a statement, this is incoherent. What is the automatic virtue of a school being run by the state?  And if there were truly good state schools available for all, then he wouldn’t need to say this. If there aren’t (and there aren’t, which is why so many people pay lots of money in fees) then why does he want to send his children to them? And by the way, does he think it was ‘crazy’ of his parents to send him to the hilariously opulent Heatherdown prep school (special lavatories for chauffeurs at sports day) and then to Eton? Does he think they should have sent him to the local primary and a reasonably civilised rural comp, as no doubt they could have done? I doubt it.

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that Mr Cameron is acting and speaking for political advantage. He was doing the same when he proclaimed himself to be in favour of ‘elitism’ in schools on Friday. If that is really so, he must choose between two different kinds – a meritocratic elite, based upon academic selection, or what we have now, based on money and privilege.  The people he hopes to win round to his Liberal Tory project are egalitarians, and so they ’believe in’ egalitarian, secular comprehensive schooling, at least as a slogan. You can’t really believe in it for any other reason, or in any other way, as it doesn’t actually exist and never will.

I’m sure Mr Cameron personally doesn’t believe in this. He doesn’t (and I have this on good authority from his first boss at Tory Central Office)  believe in anything.  But he sees advantage in it and lo! Wonder of wonders! A charming and old-fashioned Church of England primary school lies a short drive from his London home (or what was his London home until he was confined in Downing Street) and also that of Michael Gove.

Even more happily, both men, in this secular age,  turn out to be that rare thing in their generation,  enthusiastic members of the Church of England, and their wives, likewise keen church supporters in this era of unbelief, do sterling work  on the parish magazine of the church to which this school is attached.  So when the highly oversubscribed little school picks its pupils, it is entirely right and just that the children of these pious couples should be among the lucky ones. Why, they even shared the school run.

Had things turned out differently, and had this school turned them away, I wonder what the Camerons and the Goves would have done.  Likewise, I wonder what they will do when their children turn eleven, and they face the desert of London secondary education. Funnily enough a solution to this problem may be at hand, if Toby Young’s West London Free School manages to succeed, and others follow suit. After all, London is full of middle-class parents who have to choose between Bog Lane Comp or enormous fees, and hate it.

Mr Young’s school, of course, has to fulfil the requirements of the 1998 Act. It cannot select by ability. That is against the law.

The same is true of a number of ‘comprehensives’ in North London favoured by New Labour persons. Yet these are famed for their excellent Oxbridge entry.  I shall be very interested to see, seven or eight years hence, what the West London school’s  pupil profile and university entrance record turns out to be.

Can you really have, as I think Mr Young has suggested, ‘grammar schools for all’? I do not think so.  I am told that streaming or setting can recreate forms of selection, and -  while accepting that these are better than nothing-  I note that the whim of a head or a governing body can end or alter them, whereas a school that is openly and clearly selective from the start will remain so unless it is closed down.  Many teachers (and heads), influenced by decades of radical teacher training, strongly  disapprove of streaming and setting, and have dogmatic reasons for wanting mixed-ability classes. I’d also point out that the ethos and atmosphere of a school entirely populated by pupils who are able to benefit from academic education are quite different from the ethos and atmosphere of one where such pupils are a segregated minority on the same site.

But you can have a school that is officially comprehensive in its constitution, but isn’t in practice.

However,  the one group of people who will never benefit from such institutions are the children of the poor and powerless and ill-informed parents, who do not understand the deceptive maze of modern state education and cannot play it to their advantage.

It is these whose lives are ruined and wasted by our national hypocrisy. It is these who are being betrayed by all the leading political parties. Because Free Schools will not help them, and because they will reduce the necessary pressure on the establishment to restore grammar schools, I hope they fail.