A Narrow but Important Victory - the Exeter Debate, and some other matters

I am not yet sure if there will be a filmed version of Thursday night’s cannabis debate in Exeter. It was streamed live by XTV, the Exeter University TV station, but I cannot find out if they plan to put a version on the web.

 

Nor do I know of any independent accounts of it, or of accounts by people hostile to my position. Organised by the University of Exeter Debating society, the contest took place before an audience of about 240 people in a large modern lecture theatre. The proposition was ‘This House would legalise Cannabis’, proposed by Peter Reynolds, my old adversary and leader of the Cannabis Law  Reform party CLEAR. I spoke against. Mr Reynolds was seconded by Stephen Davies, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and I was seconded by David Raynes, a former senior Customs officer who now works for the National Drug prevention Alliance, one of the few bodies which does not accept the fashionable doctrines of ‘harm-reduction’ , appeasement and retreat, and which as a result is rather short of establishment cash and also of publicity.

 

Others who were there may wish to give accounts of the exchanges. All regular readers of this blog will know the arguments well enough by now.

 

 

I’ll only record what indisputably happened. A vote taken at the beginning showed a fairly strong majority in favour of the motion. At the end (the society, in my view rather sensibly,  forbids abstentions on final votes, and urges members to vote according to the quality of debate rather than because of their opinions, though of course this is impossible to enforce or measure) there was a narrow majority against – so narrow that the chairman asked those present to vote a second time. But even so, it was a majority.

 

I think this shows that, where the arguments against legalisation are strongly and clearly put, rather than ignored or treated as if they are already defeated and no more than a historical curiosity (which is the attitude of most of the media to this debate), people can see their merits. And that when people have the moral courage to ignore fashion, they can reach interesting decisions. Had the students of Exeter voted the other way, it would have been a great boost for the rich and powerful forces which seek legalisation. Their decision to divide almost equally, with a  small majority on my side, will be an annoying defeat for those forces, who thought some time ago that they had captured the British national consensus and have been frustrated by the insistent , undaunted opposition they still face  

 

This debate, a rematch after a rather poorly-attended clash between me and Mr Reynolds, will probably be the last I shall do for a while on this subject. I have now argued this topic so many times, often but not always while promoting new book, that I plan to give it a rest.  

 

It is interesting to note that the organisers had to struggle very hard to find an establishment figure prepared to speak alongside me, and Mr Raynes, who swims hard against the tide, is not really an establishment figure any more.  I am not as surprised by this as they were. Most of the British establishment have gone soft on this issue, for reasons many times discussed here, and you can certainly expect little help from the ‘Conservative’ Party.

 

I would like to add here a small personal footnote about Steve Abrams, one of the originators of the campaign to legalise cannabis, particularly of the famous advertisement in ‘The Times’ of 1967, which led to the Wootton Report and to the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act which gradually and unofficially decriminalised cannabis use in this country.

 

Mr Abrams is the author of a number of interesting historical essays on this matter, quoted and referred to in my book, and I was much struck by his crisp writing style, his humour and his considerable honesty. During my research for the book, I spoke to him on the telephone and exchanged e-mails with him (he was by then quite seriously ill) and he drily discussed the matter with me, knowing me to be an opponent. I sent him a copy of the manuscript, and very much hoped that he might at some stage review it.

 

Alas, Mr Abrams has died before he could do so, and I wish to record here my sorrow at the passing of a generous and thoughtful opponent. I have reason to believe (from a person who spent some time with Mr Abrams during his final months, who has very kindly written to me)  that he largely accepted the historical analysis of my book (while of course not agreeing with me about other matters).  I regard this as a great compliment as he was very much there when the reforms were under way. It is not necessary for opponents to dislike one another. I have always thought this one of the most important facts about life, and I wish more people realised it.

 

Why, I don’t even dislike ‘Bert’, though I must say I am irritated by him. He still doesn’t get the point about bins. It’s nothing to do with my (undoubted) irritation at having to endure less frequent and more complicated rubbish collections. I can cope with that. It’s to do with the unwillingness (probably better described as ‘inability’) of ‘Bert’ to accept that he comprehensively lost an argument over facts.  He just can’t do it. The cause of the infliction of fortnightly collections, slop buckets and the rest of millions of people is without doubt the EU Landfill Directive, and the huge fines it imposes on those who continue to use landfill to dispose of rubbish.

 

 ‘Bert’, like many people, didn’t know about this. He hadn’t read Christopher Booker’s articles about it, or looked into it. But rather than saying he didn’t know, he asserted it was not so. When I established, in detail, that it was, he faded form the scene, returning alter to pester me in his Olympian way about a completely different subject. But I shan’t let him forget it. When he said that he had ‘never heard’ of any huge campaign to feminise the Fire Brigade, I was reminded of this. The statement seemed to me to suggest that if ‘Bert’ hadn’t heard of it, it was the campaign’s fault, not the fault of ‘Bert’.  This is, it seems to me, his general attitude to facts of which he has not heard. And then, if, when he has heard of them, he doesn’t like them, he thrusts them down the memory ole and never mentions them again, or changes the subject when anyone else does.

 

Now he complains: ‘On teaching Christianity as a truth you say that I wrote that ‘it would be an assault on their freedom to teach it to them as if it were the national religion, and foundation of the civilisation in which they lived’. This is ridiculous – I never wrote, nor implied, any such thing’.

 

 Ah. Well, first he wrote : ‘You write 'I strongly believe others should be free to believe what they wish'. How do you square this with your statement (you will correct me if I've got this wrong) that Christianity should be taught as a truth to our children in schools?’

 

I took this – quite justifiably, I think - as a claim that my proposal was a threat to freedom , and replied,  pointing out that those who objected would be guaranteed exemption.

 

But this (to me, a complete answer to any suggestion that my idea threatens freedom of conscience) did not satisfy him. He wrote: ‘Thank you for your reply, but it has not answered my question since most parents will be pretty apathetic on this. My question referred to your apparent support for the indoctrination of children’.

 

When I said that the freedom to opt out, whether exercised or not, was still available, and it could not be dismissed on the grounds that people weren’t as fervent about it as ‘Bert’, he narrowed his point to thing that had been the issue all along. He thought that the teaching of Christianity to children, in a country in which Christianity was the established and historic religion and the foundation of law, morality, art, music, architecture etc. a s a religion in which they should believe, was wrong. He thought it was wrong because he didn’t like it. He dressed this up as a campaign for ‘freedom’ and pretended that a state neutrality on the subject was not (as it obviously is in a Christian society) an active measure to dethrone Christianity and popularise secularism.

 

He said ’rant and bluster all you want but I still don’t think that you have addressed my point. You seem to say that belief in Christianity is a personal matter: it’s up to each individual, in the absence of evidence to ‘choose’ whether or not to believe. Fine. But given this is such a significant decision, surely it should be taken by adults, whose minds have matured, who are able to think and reason for themselves? The state should have no role in telling children that one particular side of the choice is correct. To be clear, of course schools should teach children *about* Christianity – it’s a very important aspect of who we are. My issue is with your desire that they should be taught that it is true. Let them make their own minds up when they’re grown up. ‘

 

I think the details of the exchange above demonstrate that he did indeed imply that it would be an assault on freedom to teach children Christianity as truth.

 

A footnote to this, in a very tricky post, in which my views are subtly misrepresented (it’s also claimed that ‘I don’t believe what’s written in the Bible’ as if my selective reading of its varied and very different  books is a general rejection of everything in it) a contributor who says he is called ‘Mr White’ writes : Peter Hitchens admits that if people are taught about Christianity objectively (the facts, rather than the propaganda), they will not believe its claims. Unless we continue to indoctrinate people at a young age, Christianity will die out.’

 

Well, I don’t know about ‘admits’ It seems to me to be obvious that what one encounters in one’s formative years is what leaves the deepest impression, and what is most remembered. No civilisation which intends to last fails to instruct (the word ‘indoctrinate’ is pejorative and slanted) its young with the truths it hopes they will carry through life. Why, our own society instructs them (or ‘indoctrinates’ them if you are hostile to its message) in equality, diversity, sexual liberation, multiculturalism and so forth.  The same goes for history, national geography, poetry, songs, literature, landscape, tastes in food.  This is not because children are easy targets but because they are receptive, interested and inquisitive about matters which adults, once past their early twenties, cease to care about until they are sick, destitute or in danger.

 

We are all free to reject what we are taught in childhood. Many do, and when they do at least they know precisely what they are rejecting, rather than the embittered caricatures of religion which so many of our cultural leaders like to spread.

 

 But if a child is taught no religion, it has nothing to reject later, and far less chance of discovering faith if it has never encountered it.  In an atheist society, such as the old USSR, this is a readily understandable policy (though in my view a cruel and horrible one). The trouble arose, in the USSR, when the materialist gospel which the state *did* seek to teach broke down utterly (as such things do) leaving Russia the moral wasteland which  it now is.

 

In any case, you would think from the tone of the attacks that I were some sort of panjandrum sitting here issuing decrees which would instantly be obeyed, whereas I am merely arguing for a policy which, alas, is being negated as I write.

 

My critics, on the other hand are defending the policy of those now in power, and disingenuously pretending that it is in some way ‘neutral’ and ‘free’ to deprive children of their religious heritage, and to expunge from the national consciousness the beautiful, moving and unselfish precepts of the faith that has created our civilisation ( and without which our civilisation will, in my view, slowly perish).

 

But, as such people usually do, they lack the courage to admit the true nature of their destructive plan.                                                                                      

The Truth Shall Make You ... Very Cross

 I am grateful to those who responded with interest , or otherwise welcomed my review of ‘Orderly and Humane’, a book which I do very much hope will be widely read and discussed. I am even grateful to those who wrote to point out the typographical errors in the posting . I would just ask them, rather than to make this a genuine expression of disapproval, to tell me what the errors are so that I can put them right. I have no sub-editors here to rescue me from my own bad typing. I learned from the age of eight to type badly and fast with four fingers, which is how most journalists type,  and computers, for reasons I have never fully understood, make me even more error-prone than I was in the days of ribbons and paper.  actually it is, alas, impossible to correct your own work properly, even after five readings I will still fail to spot glaring errors, as the writer sees what he hopes and expects to see, a microcosm of the problem of knowledge, belief and understanding which we would do well to heed. We need other people to help us get things right.

 

I am also grateful to one stern critic,   ‘Frankz’ , who writes :’I generally respect your opinion but what can be said here? I must admit you wore me down about half way through. In a war that cost 56 million lives by some estimates the list of atrocities is endless. How easy to make a catalogue of them and thereby conjure a historical road block. Another war to end all wars even as the seeds of the next one are sown by those who fervently spread this illusion and think they can give it substance by the force of their character and the humanity of their concern. There is so much here that is lacking. Those that fought did not die in vain unlike the millions rounded up like cattle and exterminated like vermin in the camps. To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka. I feel that almost all of your points could be easily refuted or shown to be narrow in focus but to what end? It would change nothing. I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

 

I am always a little discouraged when people appear to sigh, as if their opinion was obviously right (‘what can be said here?’) . It betokens an unwillingness to alter a long-held view. First, the atrocities I listed followed the war and did not take place during the war. Secondly, they were planned and approved at the highest level.

 

I made no comment about whether people died ‘in vain’ , not myself being qualified to judge the circumstances in which a death is ‘in vain’, but suspecting they are known elsewhere, by authorities more knowledgeable, and more highly-placed, than us.

 

But I am not sure what he means by ‘To those that toss and turn at night over the bombs dropped on the cultured and impeccably European inhabitants of Dresden, I say first consider the bombs not dropped on Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka’. Perhaps he could elaborate?

 

If he means what he thinks I mean, it is indeed an interesting indictment of the allied war effort, widely believed by those educated since the 1970s to have been principally a rescue operation to save persecuted Jews, that the allies made no effort of any kind to help Europe’s Jews or hinder the industrial murder of them .  Professor Douglas provides a partial explanation of this. The Polish wartime leader Wladyslaw Sikorski told Anthony Eden (p.24) that it would be ‘quite impossible… for Poland to continue to maintain 3.5 million Jews after the war. Room must be found for them elsewhere’ (any serious historian knows that pre-war Poland, our future gallant ally,  was a hive of rather vicious Judophobia, though it’s not done in fashionable circles to stress it these days). I might add his mention of remarks by the then British ambassador to Warsaw, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, ‘The slaughter of Jews in this country has made the towns a good deal cleaner, and has certainly decreased the number of middle-men’ (p.182, taken from British Foreign Office files, exact reference in the book). Professor Douglas says that anti-semitism in Poland remained ‘ at ‘pathologically high levels’ even after the slaughter of most of the country’s Jews. 

 

But it seems unlikely to me that a failure to act to save the Jews in any way excuses the slaughter of German civilians.  The logic of that simply escapes me.

 

He then adds :’ . I will only point out that that England did not go to war to defend Poland as you very well know. England went to War to preserve her own Identity. If she had compromised it the liberty you defend would be a worthless sot granted to a vanquished and ethnically cleansed people.’

 

Well, if her aim was to preserve her identity, then she made a pretty poor job of it. Any normal person transported from the Britain of 1939 to the culture and civilisation occupying the same space today would find it so transformed as to be baffling and frightening. Much of that transformation , the Americanisation, the destruction of historical landmarks, the changes in manners and diet, the debasement of  language, morals, manners and of educational standards,  the assault on privacy, the overcrowding, noise , state interference, crime and disorder, are directly traceable to our incompetent participation in the war, which we entered at the worst possible moment and then promptly  lost, only to be subsumed in the strategic schemes of the USA and the USSR, neither of which had any interest in preserving us as a major independent power(the sine qua non of keeping one’s identity).

 

So if that was our aim it was a very poorly pursued aim, which we failed to achieve,  and the timing of our entry, wholly dictated by the ludicrous and empty guarantee to Poland, was the principal reason for our failure.

 

Now , a few words about ‘Bert’, our most pretentiously-named contributor, who once again speaks out from his solipsistic mountain top. And what a  delight it is to see what he says (in this case to Paul Noonan) :’ I don’t know why you’re babbling on about ‘huge campaigns’ in the fire brigades (I’ve never heard of them).’

 

Now, poor old Bert misses quite a lot of developments. He’d also never heard, for instance of the EU Landfill Directive. And when it was explained to him that it had a profound effect on rubbish collection in this country (is indeed the principal reason for the spread of fortnightly collections) he was unable to acknowledge this and has yet, to my knowledge, to admit that he was mistaken and inadequately informed on this subject.

 

Bert is never wrong, for if it looks as if he might be , he changes the subject . Recently he accused me of denying freedom to non-believers by recommending the teaching of Christianity, as truth, to children. When I pointed out that I advocated the continuance of the existing freedom for parents to opt out of such teaching, he said that didn’t count because parents were apathetic. Then he changed the subject, to say that it would be all right to teach them *about* Christianity (i.e. as an anthropological peculiarity of others, rather than as a faith they might be reasonably expected to embrace and follow in their own lives), but it would be an assault on their freedom to teach it to them as if it were the national religion, and foundation of the civilisation in which they lived.

 

Well, that’s just slippery.  How can a national religion survive if the schools don’t endorse it? It’s not as if any mechanism exists to force those taught it in this way to accept that it *is* true. They can disbelieve it when they’re taught it, or renounce it later, as many do. Indeed, they then know what it is they disbelieve, and can criticise it more effectively.

 

But if they’re never taught it as truth, at an age when they are interested in such questions ( and the young are more interested in the great questions than anyone else, except perhaps the dying) the they will be denied the chance to decide to believe it at all. And this will gradually cease to be a Christian country.

 

So what ‘Bert’ is actually saying is that we should follow a policy which will provide the ‘freedom’ to believe in nothing, or to have no belief, but not offer the freedom to believe. Meanwhile the state schools teach( as truth) the ideas of sexual permissiveness and egalitarianism, in PSHE classes and ‘Bert’ has not, to my knowledge offered any objection to this, or described it as an abridgement of freedom that it is so. If he does so now, he will at least have achieved a sort of consistency. But his real purpose, the deliberate secularisation of a formerly Christian country, cannot be cloaked as a struggle for ‘freedom’.

 

As to the campaign top recruit women into the Fire Service, I refer him to an article (reproduced below) which I wrote for the Mail on Sunday of 7^th April 2002, which describes the official measures. I suspect ‘Bert’ of not himself being in the Fire Brigade, which would explain his unawareness of this campaign:

 

Were the Government to announce that within seven years 15 per cent of nannies would have to be male, everyone would think they had gone mad. Yet an equally absurd plan - to feminise the fire brigades of Britain - is quietly under way, and many in the fire service fear it will one day lead to needless deaths. They believe it has already done severe damage to discipline and morale. However, a creepy censorship prevents them from speaking their minds. With employers and union united in the anti-sexist cause, honest doubt is being stifled by a totalitarian refusal to admit there might be a problem.

 

Fighting fires is as masculine as nannying is feminine. This is not just because it has always been done by men, but because physical strength is at the very heart of it. Firefighters do many things but the job we really pay them for is the one that nobody else can do: bringing human beings out of burning buildings or cars before they die. Some women have proved they can do the job: a small group who have earned the respect of their fellows by working hard and well. They have also survived the bullying, insults and 'practical jokes' which tight-knit groups often inflict on newcomers.

 

However, their hard-won position will actually be undermined by the Government's 15 per cent quota, because all firewomen are now bound to be suspected of having slipped through the selection process because of their sex.

 

Even when the tyranny of political correctness grips almost every field of life, most sensible societies recognise there are limits. But the ultra-feminist movement besieges the strongest outposts of a male society, precisely because such outposts remind everyone that sex discrimination is often sensible in real life.

 

Get rid of them and you are halfway to destroying the old male role of husband, father and provider, which is the real target of these extremists.

 

The current campaign became possible in 1997, when 5ft 3in Gillian Maxwell was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough. She took them to a tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population. In these strange times, this suspect argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act which had set a minimum height of 5ft 6in for all UK fire brigades. Since then, many more women, and incidentally large numbers of small men, have tried to join up.

 

Fire services found it hard to defend their sensible policy of hiring big, strong men, not because the policy was wrong but because of the boorish stupidity of some firemen, who deliberately persecuted female colleagues. This obscured the intelligent arguments against having large numbers of small female firefighters. It is not much use saying you have nothing against women if you deliberately foul the ladies' loo, order female colleagues to make your tea and noisily watch pornographic videos when women are around.

 

There have been other changes, too. Discipline is now derided as 'militaristic'. The proud name of 'brigade' is being phased out and replaced by 'service'. More graduates are joining, and veterans wonder - with reason - what use a degree is in a fire. They say the new mood has led to a decline in the old team spirit, which they believe is vital in the heat, danger and potential panic of a serious fire.

 

There is also a nasty, totalitarian atmosphere in which people are afraid of speaking. All the firemen - and firewomen - who wrote or spoke to me begged me to keep their identity secret. Complaining publicly about the new policy is death to a career and can even lead to disciplinary action.

 

As ever, the TV soap operas have joined the 'progressive' cause. Though most fire stations remain all-male, London's Burning features feisty fire officer Sally Fields played by Heather Peace. Reality, however, is different. Ms Peace has admitted she could not be a firefighter in real life. 'Of course not. I'd be a gibbering wreck,' she says.

 

Just as the police have been suffocated by political correctness since the Stephen Lawrence case, fire brigades also face a relentless campaign to change their conservative, traditional culture.

 

In March 1999 the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, declared that the fire service's equality record was unacceptable and that the Government wanted a service that 'looked like Britain in all its diversity'. He then set the target of 15 per cent women in the brigade by 2009, a giant increase on the current 1.4 per cent. Six months later a Home Office report rammed home the message: the service was ' institutionally sexist'.

 

Yet there is no evidence that the fire service's male domination has cost a single life. The report admitted: 'Exceptionally high levels of satisfaction and support are reported from the public at large.' The truth is that the fire service works well and is popular and respected. Its male culture helps keep morale and efficiency high. But under this Government, politically-driven sexual equality is more important than firefighting itself.

 

Is this wise? Medical experts agree that absolute strength - the maximum amount of weight that can be lifted - is far higher for men than for women. The average woman has between 50 and 60 per cent of the upper-body strength of an average man. Training and exercise can partly overcome this, but why go to all that trouble? The fire service is such a popular job that it has dozens of strong, fit applicants for every vacancy.

 

Yet more and more women are being chosen. How is this?

 

There is no standard national test for firemen, but everywhere the entry requirements have changed in the past 15 years. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests have been dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute - has been scrapped. Now there are fitness checks that might have been designed to gloss over the differences between men and women.

 

Everyone from the Government downwards insists there is no sex bias. Widespread claims that women are slipped through on the nod or given special advantages are flatly denied. But in the London Fire Brigade, this boast of freedom from bias turns out not to be entirely true. Women can repeat fitness tests if they fail, without having to go back to the beginning.

 

This is said to be part of a 'positive action programme'. If the Government really wants to hire an extra 6,500 firewomen in the next seven years, there is going to have to be a lot of such 'positive action'.

 

And positive for whom? I have spoken to many experienced firemen who are convinced that more women in the fire service will mean needless deaths in the future, either of members of the public or of firemen whose colleagues cannot rescue them. To be fair, I have also spoken to union officials and firewomen who say we have nothing to fear.

 

There is, sadly, only one way to find out, which is to follow the current policy and see what happens.

 

But why should a successful and effective service be revolutionised, and why should the public be guinea pigs in a social experiment driven by militant feminism? Is this extremist campaign worth a single human life? ‘

 

A footnote. A contributor asked to which system of thought Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill subscribed. Well, Attlee is on record as saying that he did not believe in a deity, though tought the Christian ethic very fine. Winston Churchill's private religious beliefs are, so far as I know, a matter of controversy among those who have studied his life and work. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with knowledge on this. 

Thumbing My Nose

One or two contributors seem to think they are entitled to demand that I assent to some sort of oath of purity, to satisfy them that I am not a 'racist', whether on or off my bicycle.

Well, my response is similar to that of the American general in charge of defending Bastogne, Anthony Clement McAuliffe,  during the 'Battle of the Bulge', when called upon by the Germans to surrender, which was 'Nuts'.

Not merely do I have no need to prove my innocence of this charge. I have a positive need to thumb my nose at people who think they are(yet) in a society in which people are under any obligation to make public assents to the ruling ideology. We are not. And those who think that they can behave in this way are helping to bring closer the day when we shall have real Thought Police among us, examining our words and probably our facial expressions (FaceCrime!) for keys to our inmost thoughts, and making windows into our souls.

They ought to be ashamed of themselves. One of the worst things about them is that they're not ashamed of themselves, but zealous and confident. Not merely do I not care if they wish to believe bad things about me. I am actively anxious to court their disapproval. They are the harbingers of totalitarianism, and while I cannot keep them away from this place as long as they abide by the rules, I can treat them with the open contempt which we shoudl all show for enemies of liberty.

 

***A small footnote. One of my critics on 'Twitter' says that, by reading comments about me on that site, I act like a person who goes around searching lavatory walls for scribbled, insulting comments made about him.

This person therefore states that he believes that making such comments is the equivalent of scrawling rude messages on lavatory walls. I don't actually agree. It's reasonable and normal for people to seek to know what others are saying about them on a site that is frequently quoted on mainstream media and which plainly influences the current of opinion. As Lord McAlpine has shown, there are other reasons for doing so, too.  But this person himself comments on Twitter, and yet believes that it is like a lavatory wall. What does that make him? I asked him. He didn't answer.

It is interesting that when I have tried to make rational and polite (and, as I believed, private) responses to those who have posted hostile comments about me on Twitter, the retorts have almost invariably been infantile and/or unresponsive, and sometimes combined with public jeering at me for getting in touch at all.

 

I obviously haven't bothered with the people who write 'Peter Hitchens is a ****ing ****', or who say, imagining this is original and clever, that I should have died instead of my late brother - a version of this appears about once every ten days, or more often if I have recently been broadcasting.

But it seemed worth trying some of the others.

So far, not much use. There's an element of surprise that I am prepared to communicate with them at all, and also of mistrust, perhaps born out of their own half-hidden or wholly hidden identities.

Even so,  I thought that, where there was some sign of a reasoning mind, I might see if I could discover what motivated their attacks, and perhaps take them on in debate (as I do here, and indeed in general). Should I bother?  I am unsure. I think there is something about Twitter which encourages a sort of hit and run verbal mugging or happy slapping technique. And of course it is easy for anyone who is challenged to run away and hide, or to attack me , to their electronic friends, for responding at all. Can it be effectively challenged,  or is its nature such that reason and politeness must lose?

 

 

 

 

 

Orderly and Humane?

Some time ago I decided to write a book about the damaging and deluded cult of national victory which has done this country so much damage since 1945. No doubt it will receive the usual mixture of abuse and  silence which most of my books receive. But I shall write it anyway, as it seems to me to be a truth urgently in need of being expressed, especially as we shall soon be marking the 70^th anniversary of the end of the supposedly ‘Good’ Second World War. It is now possible to have more-or-less grown-up attitudes towards the First World War, whose last remaining justification – that it was ‘The War to End All Wars’ - crumbled into dust and spiders’ webs in September 1939. But the 1939-45 conflict is still wreathed in delusions, delusions often employed to try to justify modern wars which are alleged to have comparably ‘good’ aims.

 

The belief in its goodness is in fact ludicrous. Our main ally (rejected at the beginning with lofty scorn, embraced later with desperate, insincere enthusiasm) was one of the most murderous tyrants in human history, whose slave empire we helped him to extend and consolidate, and to whom we afterwards handed thousands of victims, to whom we owed at least a life, though we knew he would murder them.

 

Our purpose in joining the war was not only not achieved, but the country whose independence we claimed to be ‘saving’ sank under successive waves of horror, cruelty, lawlessness, murder and despotism, to emerge 60 years later and many miles from where it had been when we ‘rescued’ it.

 

The main effect of the war on life in Britain (apart from the physical damage done by bombing, considerable though far less than the damage inflicted by us on Germany)  was to bankrupt our economy,  raise taxes to previously unheard-of levels, make state interference in all aspects of life more prevalent, wreck countless families, popularise divorce, weaken families,  engender crime and delinquency, and subject the native culture to an invasion of American customs and language from which it has never recovered. The main effect of the war on Britain as a state and as an economy was to destroy her hold over her Empire, permanently weaken her currency and end her status as a first-class diplomatic and naval power.  In the process, in Singapore at 1942, this country suffered the gravest defeat of its armies at any time in its history, a defeat so disastrous and irreparable that to this day most British people are – at best – dimly aware of it, though they are reasonably well-informed about the horrors which befell the captured armies.

 

During and immediately after the war, as I have discussed here, we employed methods which would have disgusted our forebears and which ought to disgust us, but which were so frightful that we still lie to ourselves about them, or hide them from our consciousness.  Nobody who truly understood them could defend them, which is why the critic of these policies has first to confront a great wall of ignorance, sometimes wilful, sometimes not.

 

The first was the deliberate bombing of the homes of German civilians, not just in the famous incidents at Hamburg and Dresden, but all over Germany for many months, which has morally inexcusable and , as it happens, remarkably militarily ineffective. Most British people are either unaware of this operation, greatly underestimate it or refuse to believe that it was an act of deliberate policy, wrongly believing that the bombers were seeking to destroy military and industrial targets and only accidentally killed or mutilated civilians. The undoubted bravery and sacrifice of the aircrews in this operation, acknowledged unconditionally by me, has no bearing on the guilt of the politicians and commanders who authorised and executed it.

 

The second was the atrocious but still largely unknown ‘ethnic cleansing’ of perhaps ten million Germans from their former homes across Eastern and Central Europe, authorised and planned before the war’s end, approved by the victorious allies at Potsdam, and falsely portrayed – then and since  - as ‘Orderly and Humane’. Those who ordered and authorised it knew perfectly well that it would be nothing of the kind. Those who carried it out made little effort to mitigate its chaos and cruelty, which well served their purpose - of driving their neighbours from their ancestral lands by mass terror and robbery.

 

These words,  ‘Orderly and Humane’ which featured in the Potsdam document which authorised the atrocity, also provide the coldly bitter title of a new book by R.M. Douglas, recently published by Yale University Press.

 

Cold bitterness is the first reaction of any person who reads it, who claims to be in any way civilised. I have , night after night, sat in my homebound train reading this catalogue of horrors, unable to find any way of expressing or properly articulating my emotions.

 

The book takes us through several stages, the first being the deliberate planning of the expulsions, by civilised civil servants and politicians, who found very quickly, as they looked into the matter, that the thing could not be done without cruelty.

 

What of those who were there at the time? Many protested, notably the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, that fine journalist Eric Gedye, and our old friends from the campaign against bombing Germans in their homes, Bishop George Bell of Chichester and Richard Stokes MP.

 

But as usual when something wicked is going on , the ‘mainstream’ consensus was complacent and defensive. Winston Churchill, who had urged the plan for years, and had ignored warnings of its dangers,  started making hypocritical noises about its cruelty long after it was too late. There is a fashion these days for according sort of sainthood to Clement Attlee, the post-war Labour Prime Minister. Well, Saint Clement, confronted with advice that the plan would run into grave problems, notably severe human suffering, said: ‘Everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat is worthwhile in the end.” Winston Churchill, who had urged the plan for years , started making hypocritical noises about its cruelty long after it was too late.

 

Everything? We shall see.

 

I have removed the nationality of the victims and of the soldiers from the following description. See if you can guess who they were, before I tell you, further down:

 

‘In a single incident, 265 *********** , including 120 women and 74 children, , were killed on June 18 by ****** troops, who removed them from a train at Horne Mostenice near Prerov, shot them in the back of the neck , and buried them in a mass grave that they had first been forced to dig beside the railway station.’

 

Well, if I tell you that the year was 1945, when by June 18 the war was over, perhaps you will be able to work out first of all who the killers were *not*. Yes, you are getting warm, they were not ‘the Nazis’ or even ‘The Germans’. The dead (mostly women and children) were Germans. The killers were supposedly disciplined troops of the Army of nice, friendly Czechoslovakia.

 

Two points emerge here. One, which Professor Douglas drives home repeatedly, is that these disgusting slaughters were not (in general) the result of enraged civilians taking their revenge, which might at least mitigate the crime. They were state-sponsored and centrally controlled, and are to this day defended by the states concerned, rightly nervous of any suggestion that they might be subjected to legal investigation, or demands for compensation.

 

The second is that the authors of these filthy inexcusable things were the ‘decent’ Czechoslovaks and ‘gallant’ Poles,  for so long treated with sentimental admiration by Britain (perhaps to make up for the fact that we betrayed them in 1938 and 1939).

 

I will also deal here with the muttering I can hear at the back, that ‘the Germans had done this first, and were being paid back in their own kind’, coupled with catcalls of ‘Wot are you then, some sort of Hitler apologist?’ and (no doubt) thought-police insinuations that I am a closet racialist.

 

Well, some Germans certainly had done such things and worse  (though we let most of them off as we needed them to run the country after the defeat of Hitler) , but most of the victims of these incidents were women and children, and some of the others were (for instance) Czech German Social Democrats who had themselves resisted the Nazis. This was a racial purge, combined with a colossal mass theft of property, money , houses and land (those refugees who survived could take almost nothing with them), horribly comparable to German National Socialist Actions. Anyone who (rightly) condemns the German National Socialists as barbarian murderers cannot really, in all conscience, fail to condemn the authors of these actions too. (This point is addressed later).

 

Professor Douglas accepts that the expulsions did not sink to the level of the extermination camps (though on occasion, as we will see, they got remarkably close to it).

 

But he argues ‘Nonetheless the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe West of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention - one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.’  

 

By the way, one of the reasons why this monstrous action went ahead was because of a widespread belief that the (bloody and chaotic, and economically and socially disastrous) compulsory population swap between Greece and Turkey, after the cession of Smyrna to the Turks by defeated Greece (1922), had been a success.  The silence about the post-1945 expulsions must not be allowed to create the same false impression. It was sheer hell, and anyone who proposes to repeat it should be told so.

 

Out of the many pages of notes I took from this hugely important book, I shall reluctantly set out only a few of the most striking, while urging all readers to buy or order from their local libraries this necessary work of compelling historical truth.

 

At Linzer-Vorstadt, close to the Budvar brewery, a camp for Germans had inscribed on its gate the words ‘Oko za Oko, Zub za Zub’, which being translated means ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’.

 

New inmates were stripped, compelled while naked to run a gauntlet of guards who beat them with clubs, shorn of all their hair and forced to don humiliating uniforms. The experience of a Catholic priest, Josef Neubauer, in this place of misery, is too long to recount here, but it is simultaneously moving and shocking.

 

At Auschwitz, there was less than a fortnight between the departure of the last surviving Jews and the arrival of first ethnic German inmates.

 

One Czech opponent of the persecution, Dr Bedrich Bobek,  is quoted as warning in a letter ‘Let nobody fall back on the excuse that the Germans have done the same things. Either we are qualified to stand as their judges, in which case we cannot conduct ourselves as they do, or we are no different from them, and give up the right to judge them’, a sentiment with which I heartily concur.

 

A few more episodes, often involving slovenly callousness which amounts to murderous negligence. A train arrived in Germany in December 1945 from Czechoslovakia, a period of predictably freezing weather. It carried 650 people. When the doors were opened, it was found that 94 passengers, including 22 children, were dead of cold.

 

Another description, this time of a train from Poland: ‘….Most of the passengers, after their stay in Polish camps, were emaciated to the point of starvation, covered in lice, and suffering from a variety of infectious diseases.’ Thirty-nine passengers ended the journey as frozen corpses.

 

The description of the fate of a train from Luben, on page 196, simply has to be read in full to be believed.

 

As always happens, the intense darkness of these events (during the entire time I read this book I felt myself to be surrounded by a sort of dusk, and imagined every event  described, even those I later realised had happened in summer daylight, to have gone on in conditions of smog and dusk, night and fog) is sometimes illuminated by the blazing light of individual good deeds, done against the tide.

 

 

The story of the Czech Premsyl Pitter (who had laboured to save Jews from Nazi murder during the occupation) shows that small individual acts of human courage and kindness can counterbalance enormous weights of state necessity and cynicism. After rescuing a thousand German detainees from a secret prison in Prague, Pitter recounted: ‘As we brought emaciated and apathetic children out and laid them on the grass, I believed that few would survive. Our physician, Dr E. Vogl, himself a Jew who had gone through the hell of Auschwitz and Mauthausen,  almost wept when he saw these little bodies. “And here we Czechs have done this in two and a half months!”, he exclaimed.’

 

Readers are invited to guess to which system of thought and belief Premsyl Pitter subscribed.

 

The Czech, Polish and Yugoslav authorities knew what was resulting from their policies (just as the Allies, who planned and permitted it knew what  would happen in general, and had been warned by their own officials of the perils of such action). They did almost nothing about it. To have spared the women and children from internment would have been to undermine the whole programme. I might add that when the refugees arrived in Germany, everything was made a thousand times harder and more miserable by the colossal destruction of housing, by British and American bombing.

 

You might not wish to know that at the Postoloprty camp in Northern Bohemia, in June 1945, five ethnically German children were first whipped, then shot by firing squad, for trying to escape.

 

I could go on quoting from this book for hours. But you must read it instead. I will end with two other moments from it that left me feeling intensely ashamed of the human race, and immensely grateful that I live on an island which has for many centuries been safe from invasion, subjugation and arbitrary rule.

 

The first is this account of the conditions of life of Germans in occupied Berlin (by then crammed with refugees from the East,  many of them seriously ill and/or starving) in autumn 1945. ‘…Women could be seen straining the waste water from the kitchen sink of a house where there was an Allied mess, to save from the drain small scraps of grease which could be used again in their own homes.’

 

You may be sure that, even a year before, none of those straining the drain water for scraps of grease would have had the remotest premonition of what would later befall them. Nor would they , in their police state, have had any serious say in the events and policies which brought this fate about. Those in free societies such as ours, who promote or permit wars,  have much to answer for. They should certainly cure themselves of any smugness about whether ordinary Germans ‘deserved’ what happened to them.

 

The second is an extract from a (literally) suicidal letter written by Gertrud Kostka to her husband Johannes, a conscript soldier in the German Army who had been taken prisoner by us. Their baby daughter, Barbara,  had died in the chaos of the Red Army advance across Poland. Gertrud had then been raped  by a fellow refugee and had become pregnant. Johannes Kostka tried to get first the American and then the British government, at least, to speed up his wife’s deportation from Poland so they could be reunited. The British authorities replied that any such action might well be used in propaganda against us, and could make her position worse (both of these were of course genuine fears) and  that the deportation was ‘an internal Polish matter in which we have no right to interfere’, which I think is more dubious, given that we had sanctioned it and co-operated with it. We did nothing, understandably. I cannot find out what happened, in the end, to the Kostkas. I can guess, though.

 

She wrote:

 

‘I feel void and dead. But just as honest as our mutual life has been, may these last lines be. I have no guilt to confess. I have no tears to shed. I have only this belief that the Lord will help you to trust my words. After a short pain you will find happiness again. For me there will be bleak despair and the hope that the Lord will not leave me, and will call me to Him in my dark hour, uniting me with my child. Trusting upon His help I take farewell form you, and my life. I cannot write any more. I can only beg you, please, believe me, I am without blame.’

 

This tiny scrap of utter human misery, blowing across the desolate wasteland of the post-war world, together with the certainty that this is just one of thousands of personal woes about which we shall never know anything, and our knowledge that the pleas of the sufferers went unanswered, seems to me to contradict any claim that war can be ‘good’. Necessary, possibly, but be careful to be sure. Just, maybe at a pinch, though not as often as we like to think. But good? Never. 

Who are the Bigots Now?

As I smiled my way through this weekend’s harvest of attacks on me on Twitter (ranging from people wishing I was dead, apparently without any feeling of guilt or trepidation at expressing this view, to crude swearwords, via unreasoning assumptions that everything I say must axiomatically be wrong, because I write for ‘The Mail’, to a woman who, gathering that her son would be attending a talk by me at his school sixth form, sought to inoculate the poor child against me by showing him YouTube films of my late brother. I wonder if she also hung a clove of garlic round his neck. Heaven forfend that he might think for himself), I thought this was a good moment to examine the question of bigotry.

 

I am ceaselessly accused of this fault. Well, any reasoning person, with access to the facts, can reach his or her own conclusion about the justice of the charge, though I’m not sure how many reasoning persons interested in facts there are these days. I’ll just have to hope they’re on the jury (if there is one) when I’m eventually hauled before the Thought Court on charges of WrongThink.

 

I note that at least one long-term contributor here (who skulks behind a juvenile pseudonym, not having the courage to put his own name to his own opinions) has recently attempted to smear me by association, by suggesting (incorrectly) that I have never rebutted, rejected or criticised the racially-prejudiced contributors who sometimes post comments here.

 

The words used were cunningly formulated to contain the charge without nakedly making it and ran ‘If you are concerned that some people believe you are racist, why not try distancing yourself from those who use your blog to express what are blatantly racist views? If you don't challenge contributors who argue that people of different races actually belong to different species, it might send the message to others that you agree.’

 

Might it send that Message? How, exactly? And as for distancing myself, why not try it, eh? Why not try it? And how does he know I haven’t ‘tried’ it? Oh, no need to *know*. Let’s just *assume* that it is the case.

 

I’ve warned before against presuming that I (or anyone else) haven’t said, written or done certain things, unless the person making the statement also has total knowledge. Perhaps it would have been wiser to make some enquiries, or to seek knowledge on this matter first, before making this insinuation. If the accuser can’t be bothered to look back through several years of my writings, perhaps it would have been more prudent to stay quiet. But no, the innuendo must be produced anyway. Out of such slack-minded, and if I may say, bigoted folly is totalitarianism born.

 

Anyway, the affair of the UKIP foster parents, and the affair of the female bishops, both give us an insight into the intolerant fury of the modern left-wing mind.

 

I should say about the Rotherham fostering case that I am surprised that so many people are surprised, and see it as an individual case or scandal that can be corrected. No, this is simply what Britain is now like. Get used to it. It isn’t going to change. Most such cases never get into the papers and never will.

 

Look at the Prime Minister’s own long-ago dismissal of UKIP members as (amongst other things) ‘fruitcakes and loonies and and closet racists’. Rotherham Council’s social services department and Mr Slippery both share more or less the same view.  Despite what they now say, I should think the front benches of all three ‘centre’ parties, and the senior editorial staffs of the BBC and several newspapers do so too. They are closet bigots.

 

(By the way, it is amazing the way people delude themselves about politicians of all sorts. For instance I have been getting letters telling me that Alexander (Boris) Johnson is some sort of new Churchill. But as Mr Johnson showed on Sunday during his trip to India, his fabled ‘Euroscepticism’ amounts to two parts of nothing at all in practice. In any case, as I have often warned here before, a referendum on the EU is a worthless promise. What we need is a party committed unconditionally to secession from the EU, winning an election on the basis. Any government can ignore a referendum, or wriggle out of it, always assuming the BBC doesn’t rig it in the first place. I so wish people would grow out of demanding this dubious vote, and see ‘Euroscepticism’ for the worthless fence-sitting that it is).

 

But back to the bigotry of the Left. For a start, the left have increasingly embraced the racial determinism that (to their credit) they rejected back in the 1960s. Those who once saw the racial categories of National Socialist Germany, or later of Apartheid South Africa, as sinister and offensive , have now adopted the most elaborate schemes of racial categorisation ever seen.

 

You cannot apply for any sort of state service, let alone employment, without being confronted with questions about your ethnicity ( I always refuse to answer these, but how much longer will this be permissible?) . And the police, since Macpherson, have been instructed that ‘colour-blind’ policing is actively wrong and that people must be treated differently according to the colour of their skin. There have been dozens of attested stories about fair-skinned, middle-class, conventionally-married heterosexual couples facing insuperable problems over being allowed to adopt or foster, especially if they gave any sign of having socially conservative opinions, or of adhering to the Christian religion.

 

Since the reasoning, informed human being knows that (as Martin Luther King so powerfully put it) what matters about someone is not the colour of his or her skin, but the content of his or her character, these questions, and this behaviour are grotesque insults to reason. And surely bigotry is just that, the denial of reason, the refusal to use it, the dismissal of people , institutions, ideas on the grounds of a reasonless prejudice.

 

Now how does this apply in the debate about women’s ministry in the Church?  I am (reasonably) chided here for my feeble wishy-washy approach to this matter. But I’m sticking to it. The truth is that I think the Christian church is so essential to civilisation, unselfishness, kindness and justice, as the Embassy of the Kingdom of God on Earth, that I judge the importance of religious issues on that basis. Things which do not seem to me to be crucial for the survival and success of the Christian gospel , even if they trouble me personally, are relegated to the second or third order of importance.

 

The last thing I want to hear in church is some sort of sectional whining about who gets what job or under what conditions. I want help in discovering how we should live and die, not office politics with added stained-glass windows.

 

I am, as I keep insisting, very uninterested in theology. My religion can easily be summed up,  understood and either rejected or accepted, by anybody who listens to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ , who reads the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and who has seen the great English cathedrals.

 

My instincts (which oppose needless change) might suggest to me that the campaign for women ministers ( I don’t call them priests) might well have been some sort of egalitarian project designed to strike at the roots of the Church. But, as a favourite (male) parson in my part of the world is fond of saying, the Church of England is a tough old goose. And it has turned this change very much to its advantage.  In practice I have found that many women ministers are more persuasive, reverent, thoughtful and devoted, and perhaps less given to fussy fiddling with things best left alone,  than many of their male equivalents. It seems plain to me that the Church, short of good clergy as it is, and very short of money, could not have coped without them, and should admit that.  

 

I can’t see why the same thing shouldn’t go for Bishops. If they believe what they preach, and are on fire with the beauty of it, then let them be Bishops.

 

But I also know that plenty of my fellow-worshippers take other views. For them, women cannot be truly ordained. I disagree with them, but I understand that they believe this to be hugely important, and that it is not motivated by loathing of women. A recently-retired vicar of my acquaintance, who held to this view, was living, breathing proof of that, being amongst other things very happily married, saintly in his person, and ( as Anglo-Catholics often are)  rather left-wing politically. To keep him and others like him in his post, the church set aside a small corner where there would be no women ministers. Why not do the same with bishops?

 

You tell me. But when (as on the BBC programme ‘The Big Questions’ on Sunday, still available on i-player) I found myself facing the champions of change, it rapidly became obvious that they were not interested in having women bishops *as such*. They could have had that years ago. They were interested in having women bishops at all costs, without any conditions or limits, and with no binding concessions to  (perhaps) a quarter of Anglicans who, for one reason or another, are deeply unhappy about the idea. Well, as we know from history, if you want unconditional surrender,  you condemn yourself to a much longer and crueller war than if you are prepared to make terms.

 

Always suspect a cause that does not present itself straightforwardly as what it is. It has something to hide.  And always mistrust any movement which has universal approval.  It is precisely when ‘everyone’ thinks something that the thoughtful person needs to cry out ‘wait!’ and demand time to consider.

 

When the General Synod failed to agree on the specific proposal for the introduction of women bishops, last Tuesday evening, it absolutely did not reject the principle of appointing women as bishops, only the particular version of it under discussion.

 

An earlier version of the plan, containing much stronger protection for dissenters, was about to be voted on last July, during the normal meeting of the Synod at York. An amendment, drawn up by the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury in consultation with other bishops, was designed to deal with the concerns of traditionalists. Had it gone through then, there would have been women bishops by 2014 and possibly sooner.

 

The traditionalists wanted to have the undoubted right to be supervised by male bishops , even if they lived in an area headed by a female bishop. This wasn’t very different from the time-worn arrangement for parishes which didn’t want female clergy.

 

But Kaboom! A wave of  supposed ‘outrage’ swept through the meeting.  A petition with 5,000 signatures denounced Archbishop Rowan’s plan. One campaigner said (in what in my view is a ludicrous exaggeration) that it would ‘entrench discrimination against women in the established church and place a permanent question mark over the validity of women’s orders’ A whole phalanx of female clerics, announced that they were ‘dismayed’, that the concession ‘undermined’ women, and Christina Rees (whom you can see in action on the ‘The Big Questions’) said ‘the amendment has proved controversial because it puts on the face of the measure that people in the Church with certain views on women would have been protected in English law. It would have the effect of discriminating against people who believe women and men were equal’.

 

This is the same sort of logical judo-plus-origami which is used to transform kindly, hesitant old sexual conservatives, who wouldn’t ever be cruel to anyone,  into foaming, cruel homophobes.  It’s not that you have principles different from mine. It’s that you want to *discriminate* against a *minority* (voice rises).  After which, of course, you’re not fit for human society.

 

The Church is a very odd institution. Judged by purely worldly standards, it is absurd and pointless, and its rules and concerns necessarily barmy. But it shouldn’t be judged by those standards, or subjected to worldly rules. You might as well try to introduce equality and diversity into the editing of the Oxford Book of English Verse (what have I said?), or issue decrees on where bluebells and forget-me-nots should grow. 

 

The Sermon on the Mount is a pretty unfashionable doctrine, important because those who try to abide by it think (to the horror  and scorn of  materialists)  it came from the mouth of God himself, and many similar Christian beliefs, from the Virgin Birth upwards, are derided or greeted with sighs and groans by the majority of fashionable society.  I would argue that unless people were prepared to believe these odd things, there’d be no Church and much good would be left undone, which is currently being done.

 

But for many loyal sons and daughters of the Church these beliefs come in inconvenient, but internally logical packages. And among them are the passionately convinced opponents of women bishops, both Catholics and Bible Protestants. Note that these people no longer seek to prevent female ordination or women bishops. They simply ask for an accommodation, so that believers in absolute Biblical authority, and believers in apostolic tradition, can be given a small space in which to stay in the Church of their birth, baptism, upbringing, the church where they were married and expect to be buried.

 

But rather than approve that accommodation, the other side irritably deride their scheme as ‘discrimination’ against ‘equality’, which is near enough to a thought crime.

 

So instead of getting women bishops through compromise, the militants deliberately postponed the vote in July, and agreed instead to spend £210,000 of scarce church money on holding a special meeting in November – at which they expected to win.  

 

And then they lost, narrowly, but they lost - because their opponents have picked up a  trick or two about organisation and rule books.

 

They lost entirely according to rules they would have accepted, had they won.  The radicals would have been quite happy if their proposal had triumphed under the same constitution with the same narrow majority.  Those who complain about rules that they would willingly have benefited from, when others benefit from them instead, are surely inviting suspicion about their respect for the rule of law.

 

The original vote to allow women to be ordained was won by quite a narrow margin, and the Synod system is designed to protect minorities from majority tyranny.

 

What’s more, Parliament, 40 long years ago, gave up interfering in Church government. Parliament used to have the right to vote on measures put forward by the Synod’s forerunner, the Church assembly. But this led to a great crisis in 1928, when the Commons refused to approve a new Prayer Book. It was the memory of this crisis, among other things, which led to the creation of a more independent Synod. As one of the participants in ‘The Big Questions’ said,  it’s all a bit like Devolution. Once you hand over such powers, you cannot complain when they are used.

 

In any case, I look forward to Parliament legislating for total non-discrimination between men and women in the appointment of religious leaders.  The Roman Catholic Church in England might be resistant, and the spectacle of the British state insisting on the appointment of female Imams , and female Rabbis in Orthodox Jewish congregations, fills me with a strange satirical delight.

 

But that’s only a small part of the point I seek to make.  There have long been branches of the Christian church which accepted female leadership.  If this is a matter of overwhelming importance to you, might you not consider changing churches? If not, then what should you do? Well, you might seek to persuade your own church to change its mind.

 

But a church is not just a club or society , or a political party, where you can thump and shout your way to success by winning votes, briefing the media and forming factions to drive your opponents out. If you deliberately (or also in my view unintentionally) hurt people by winning, you have broken the fundamental rules of the whole institution.

 

For the Church is a mighty force for good, consisting of people who believe (or say they believe) above all things In unselfishness, forbearance, forgiveness and kindness.  I might add that it is a place in which the last shall be first and the first shall be last, where high office is deep service (the word ‘minister’ means ‘servant’). ‘Who sweeps a room as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine’, as one of the greatest of all Anglicans, George Herbert, wrote.

 

The pursuit of high position for its own sake is axiomatically disallowed. Any victory must be mitigated by magnanimity , generosity and consideration.  Those who become Bishops should really be those who least wish to become bishops, and when they do attain the mitre, they should be the servants, not the overlords, of those in their flock. Likewise, the winning faction in a struggle for change must show great consideration to the defeated.

 

Those who set out to change the church were surely the ones who needed to show such consideration to the other members of that church,. But when you watch the radicals, in the debate on ‘The Big Questions’, do you see any sign of magnanimity, generosity or consideration? Or do you see dogmatic campaigners seeking the unconditional surrender of their cornered and outnumbered opponents? I know what I see,  a contest between the ancient dogmas of unworldly Christianity, and the modern dogma of worldly power.  And while I still couldn’t care less what sex the bishop is, and I am not *for* the opponents of women bishops, I am certainly *against* their militant supporters. They remind me of some other people I don’t like, I can’t just now remember who.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Audio of Debate on Cannabis with Tim Wilkinson

Alas, it's a bit broken up and the end is missing, but anyone who wishes to hear an audio version of my recent debate with Tim Wilkinson about cannabis (organised by the Long March Forum), it can be found here

 

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLiJTouwr8zUxOpSJ1q2Xlg

If the zealots truly cared about equality, they'd fight for female dustmen

 

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday Column

All sorts of people who don’t believe in God and wouldn’t know one end of a canticle from the other have suddenly developed bilious, enraged opinions on bishops.
Now that (as universally and inaccurately reported) women have been told they can’t be bishops, the country is aflame with simulated rage.

I have to confess here that I am actually a member of the Church of England who goes to church more or less weekly, skulks at the back behind a  pillar, sings like a donkey and occasionally reads the lesson.  And I couldn’t give two hoots what sex the bishop is.
I strongly prefer them to believe in God, and it’s good if they’re educated, intelligent and not too oily (oiliness is, alas, common among these functionaries).
But in the end, they’re just area managers, who wear increasingly peculiar hats, often yellow for some unexplained reason, and who tend to follow a rather soppy political line in the House of Lords.

What’s really going on here is  a frenzy of dogmatic equality, part of a general campaign to abolish the old idea that men did some things, and women others.
Funnily enough, it only applies to certain jobs. I’ve never seen a campaign for male dinner-ladies, or for female dustcart drivers. It’s the traditionally male preserves, with a high standing, that get the treatment.
The most absurd of these has been the campaign to have female quotas in the fire brigade. The main result of this hatchet-faced dogma has been the lowering of strength and fitness standards so that lots of weedy men now get in.
The number of women (several of them admirably fit and strong, I might add) remains tiny.

If you’re interested in the truth rather than the propaganda about the Church, the critics of women bishops don’t actually oppose them being appointed.
The radical campaigners (who seem to me to put ideology before God) could have had their mitres years ago if they hadn’t insisted on unconditional surrender from the small but significant group who don’t agree with them.

All these dissenters want is some firm safeguards for two groups of Anglican Christians who, in all conscience, can’t accept the authority of a female bishop in their own lives.
I know some of these people. They are serious and devoted servants of the Church, some very Catholic, and so loyal to ancient tradition, and some very Protestant and so bound by the words of the Bible.
Several of them are women who have risen high in male-dominated professions. It is precisely because they are so devoted and serious that the Church should not drive them away.

My Church, yours too if you choose to make it so, is mocked for its wishy-washy ways and its mildness.
But in many parts of the country it is the only remaining force living in the midst of poverty and crime, and standing up for goodness.
Places where the police don’t trouble to go much, and where Social Services go home for the weekend, still have a C of E vicarage, open night and day.
And it is wishy-washy precisely because in the end it preferred compromise to cruel, murderous purity.
It is that wise willingness to respect the sincere and honest disagreements of others, in the cause of goodness, that is really under discussion here.

Do not be stampeded by fashion into supporting a bunch of impatient zealots.

 

Brilliant movie... shame it ignores the truth

One of the best films of  the year is Argo, about the amazing rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran at the height of the Ayatollahs’ revolution.
The heroes are Canadians, who are rightly praised  for sheltering the six and probably saving their lives.

But once again an American film has badly distorted history.

At one point a character actually says that Britain and New Zealand refused  to help the US fugitives.
This is flatly untrue. At great risk to themselves, New Zealand and British diplomats most certainly did help the six.
It seems that the truth has been traduced to make the film a tighter drama.
If you are dealing with factual events, you can obviously leave things out, and perhaps invent a scene or two to get over the fact that real life is often dull  or hard to explain.
But in dramas about real events, direct historical untruth which makes good people look bad is surely wrong.
As with that dreadful, rubbishy film The King’s Speech, many will come  to believe what they see.

 

At last, the cracks are showing in the racism con

For many years I have pointed out that the word 'racist' is an insulting slander, designed to smear good people and drive them out of public life.
I have myself been charged with ‘moral racism’ by an enraged and hysterical book reviewer in The Guardian, for daring to dissent from the establishment view that cannabis is cool.
I have even been accused, on Twitter, of riding my bicycle in a racist fashion through the streets of Cambridge.
As with the good and selfless foster parents, persecuted and insulted by snivelling, insolent officials because they belong to UKIP, the accuser cannot produce any evidence that the accused is a racial bigot.

That is because there isn’t any.

What the word means is ‘someone who doesn’t agree with the politically correct, multicultural consensus’.
What it also means is that the new establishment will not even argue with such people.
It will try to crush and silence them, by scaring them and smearing them, and lying that they are unreasoning bigots. In truth, many of the worst and most unreasoning bigots in this country are the Left themselves.
They hate anyone who dares to disagree with them, and their policies have led to deep and lasting ethnic divisions which could easily have been avoided.
They long ago stopped thinking, believing they were secure in power. But  perhaps they have been too complacent. People are beginning to understand their lies, and they may not work much longer.

Police with pistols strapped to their thighs have begun to appear at Paddington railway station in London.
The excuse, as always, is terrorism. But I’m far more scared by the actual presence of people carrying these inaccurate weapons than I am by the theoretical danger  of a bomb.
If we’re going to have an armed police force, shouldn’t Parliament pass a law permitting it?

 

 

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

Covenant with Death

With some books you never wholly forget the first time. In this case I recall a fattish Pan paperback, with the lurid cover that publisher liked to provide, and I remember sitting with it in the dusty corner of an old-fashioned railway compartment, with its sagging red seat cover and its pictures of seaside resorts. This was some time in the early 1960s, rambling and rattling behind a wheezing black steam locomotive, from the South Midlands down towards Devon and a holiday by the sea.

 

I think our destination was Budleigh Salterton, now long robbed of its station, whose platform had – as they often then did – little gardens, on which the words ‘the West is Best with Budleigh Salterton’ were picked out in white stones. It was, I think, the last time we went to the beach by train. It was hot. And it was slow. They were taking down the old-fashioned semaphore signals and replacing them with the coloured light ones that have been going wrong ever since.

The fact that I can’t recall much else of the journey is because I was lost in the book, which I’ve since re-read twice (the last time, last week, finishing it around midnight because, although I know the end all too well in more ways than one, it would have been painful to leave it till another time). The last line ‘Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history’, ought to be carved in stone somewhere.

 

It is ‘Covenant With Death’ by John Harris, and I’m always surprised that it is not better known. Firstly because it is a sparely but superbly written book, the fruit of a great deal of careful, detailed research and a fair amount of passion. And secondly because it concerns one of the most important historical events of the last 100 years, the destruction of the flower of British manhood ( and plenty of Irish manhood too) in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Thirdly, because of the very grim and harsh title, itself taken from a ferocious passage in Isaiah which I once caused to be read at a school Remembrance Service, where I had been invited to preach.

 

It runs :’ Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.’ It’s Chapter 28, if you wish to see how the covenant with death works out. Not well. ‘Hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies’. The narrator of the book, a newspaper reporter alone in the world, roots out his father’s old Bible as he prepared to go overseas for war, and finds that this was the passage the old man had been reading just before he died.

 

Harris, a journalist and cartoonist in Sheffield, went out to find men from that city who had volunteered to fight in the great rush of patriotic feeling in August 1914 and who had survived the Somme. He listened very carefully to what they told him. As a result, I suspect this is one of the most authentic accounts of what those volunteers actually experienced, but it is all bound together with a rapid, intelligent narrative in which we meet believable young men of that era, from well-read university men to unlettered petty criminals. They are portrayed as they were, utterly different from us and yet wholly like us, far more English (or Scottish, or Irish), more Christian, more innocent more individual, yet with much the same sort of humour.

 

I could spend hours summarising it. I won’t, because you’ll have to get hold of it and read it. It is shocking to me that it doesn’t seem to be in print, though the second-hand shops must still contain legions of old copies. These things leap into my mind: the description of the great legions of men, so full of certainty that they were about to win a righteous victory that they spontaneously sang in their bivouacs, as they never would again ; then the dawning realisation, as they gather for the assault, that the Germans know they are coming, even know which units they belong to, and that the barbed wire has not been cut, as the staff have promised. The men know it. The officers know it. But nobody will do anything about it. Everyone knows it will go wrong. They know that they will die. But they go forward anyway.

And then afterwards, the desolate sound made by thousands of wounded men, a few hours ago in their happy prime, now become in effect small boys again and weeping terribly for their mothers. And the dawning realisation, in the rear echelons, as the broken units return, that hardly anyone has survived whole. For that restrained age, the descriptions of wounds, and of the manner of men’s deaths, is remarkably graphic. I’d go so far to say that this book does for Battle of the Somme what ‘The Cruel Sea’ did for the Battle of the Atlantic. Find it. Read it. You’ll be a better person for having done so, and less inclined to believe revisionist twaddle about how Douglas Haig was all right really. He was a bloody fool, and so were his political masters. Funny that I’ve carried the same version of this event in my head , unaltered, through so many different political opinions.

Am I a Rubber Dinghy?

I accept that the title of this posting sounds like one of those Radio 4 programmes about Psychiatry, or the title of a painting by that fascinating Belgian, Rene Magritte.

But actually it is a reference to an attack on me by Tim Montgomerie, of 'Conservative Home', which readers can find here. http://conservativehome.blogs.com/majority_conservatism/2012/11/trust-in-polling-not-punditry.html#idc-container

Alas, I lack the facilities to retaliate with a drawing of the Tory party as a foundering tramp steamer, streaked with rust and very low in the water as its captain stands, wreathed in beatific smiles and apparently wholly unware of the ominous sloshing and gurgling from below, , on the bridge, (perhaps marrying two men as he keeps one languid hand on the wheel), while the crew and passengers either plunge overboard in despair or stand shivering on the bulwarks, trying to persuade themselves that the poor old bark will reach port one day.

 

Of course, Mr Montgomerie has failed to register, as so many Tory loyalists do, that I am way ahead of him. I understood long ago what reality will make clear to him in 2015 - the Tory Party is finished and cannot be saved. The only question is what we should do about that.

 

A summary of my position can still be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/the-tories-are-.html

 

 

Millican, begin again? No thank you, if it's all the same

I reproduce below a long posting from Professor Millican, which some of you may have missed, on the  ‘The Millican Brief’ thread. I shall accept the Professor’s invitation to draw stumps and go home.

Why?  It was not an argument I sought, as I have long believed this sort of disputation to be both futile and tedious. I was only ever interested in getting him to discuss his reasons for believing there to be no God, and, though I have repeatedly made this clear,  he has declined to engage me on this ground, preferring subjective claims of ‘probability’ which simply push the question ‘why?’ further away.  As for there only being two types of universe, a suggestion he airily dismisses, it seems to me that on this question there is indeed such a straight choice and I can see no escape from it .

 

Much of modern materialist thought consists of finding ingenious ways to deny the possibility that something which appears to have been designed, has been designed. Why would that be?

 

I have no doubt that he had a nicer time with Professor Lennox, a much better person than I am, a more learned person than I am or could ever be, and a man interested in theological disputation in a way that I will never be, and one who, being a bit saintly,  does not share my impatience with the arrogance and smugness of many atheists (a charge I did not and do not direct against Professor Millican, who has always been perfectly polite, but which I did direct against his allies in the Oxford debate).

 

My part in this debate is - as I explain in my book, a copy of which I sent to Professor Millican during our exchange – to rebut and trouble that arrogance and smugness. This is darkening counsel by words without knowledge. We do not know. We do not even probably know. Therefore their belief is a choice, and so is mine. Much of the ‘New Atheist’ approach consists of scornful, intemperate and in some cases (see my book) totalitarian dismissal of believers.  It is only by keeping company with such people that Professor Millican came into contact with me, their enemy. If he is not among them, and disapproves of their approach, then he and I have no quarrel, as I strongly believe others should be free to believe what they wish.

 

Comments on this blog are (despite frequent complaints and allegations) not censored, though they are subject to English law, which prevents certain things being published and to some clear rules, well-known and cautiously enforced. I long ago learned to ignore or laugh off many of the hurtful things said about me here by my critics and detractors. I can see that an Oxford academic might find our hurly-burly pretty intolerable, and I regret that he has been exposed to it. Perhaps their authors might consider, in future, the feelings of gentler guests here. As for my own approach to the Professor, I think I have been quite fair, though robust. Of course he is very welcome to reply to this if he wishes. But unless he wants to tell us why he is so anxious for there not to be a God (roughly as that paragon among atheist philosophers, Thomas Nagel, puts the question, as discussed in my book), I think I’ve said all I want to, and will end as I began in Oxford with the words of God, speaking from the whirlwind, in Job, Chapter XXXVIII

 

 ‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.

 

‘Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof?’

 

Professor Millican’s words (which I have divided up a bit, perhaps not as he would have done, for ease of reading) are as follows:

 

 

 'This week has been so busy with teaching, organisation of the admissions process, and other College business (including a genial and informative but frank debate on theism with John Lennox) that this discussion has been completely out of my mind. On reviewing the blog this morning after waking at an unseemly hour, however, I find it rather depressing to see that my silence has been interpreted by some of your bloggers as motivated by weakness in my position, with the same sort of unpleasant confidence that you show in claiming to know the motivations of others better than they do themselves. I have no idea where this confidence comes from (certainly I've seen no serious evidence provided), but fear that Mick (19 Nov, 07:14 PM) may have summed up the situation quite well.

 

Before signing off, and to avoid repeating what has gone before, I shall make some relatively brief (but necessarily numerous) points on your long post: (a) I note that you say that you would continue to believe in God even if the odds against His existence were massive - say 1,000,000 to 1. This, to me, seems almost definitive of a form of irrationality: a person who forms beliefs like this is - obviously - overwhelmingly likely to have a false belief. (b) In saying that "there is no comparable choice" (to that about God), you do seem to me to be making exactly the same mistake as Pascal in his Wager: namely, assuming that there are only two possible theories about the Universe. (c) You insist on a certain hypothesis about my motivation - a *psychological* hypothesis (since motivation is a psychological phenomenon). I call this hypothesis "gratuitous" because you has given no evidence for it. I'm baffled that you seem not to understand this. (d) The following passage could serve as a nice illustration for a class on logical fallacies: "No ‘psychology’ is necessary to divine why someone might choose what is, on the face of it, by far the less attractive of the two options, namely that our lives have no point, purpose or meaning, and that ‘what will survive of us’ is not love, but nothing. If someone doesn’t want justice for himself or anyone else, it really doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, or Sigmund Freud, to work out why. ... If Professor Millican has other motives for preferring meaningless chaos to purpose and justice, then I am only too willing to hear them."

 

Here you simply take for granted the entire point at issue - namely, that my own belief is indeed based on a choice (i.e. your own psychological hypothesis, which is not supported by anything that I have said). For the avoidance of doubt, I would indeed prefer a just world, as you would, but my beliefs do not simply follow my preferences: I aim to conform them to reality and probable truth rather than fantasy and potential million-to-one-against improbabilities. (e) You say: "There is indeed a great deal of evidence for God’s existence. But it is not of the type which can be ‘confirmed’ or ‘disconfirmed’ (which I assume are synonyms for ‘proved’ and ‘disproved’)" This is a misunderstanding, because when I talk about potential "confirming or disconfirming evidence" I simply mean evidence that would tend to increase or decrease the probability of God's existence (this usage is quite standard in technical discussion). And I have never said or implied that I would accept the existence of God only if it were proved by some manifestation "which can be explained by the existence of God *and in no other way*" (your words). It would be quite enough to lead me to believe if I assessed evidence as making God's existence more probable than not, but sadly I don't think probability tells that way.

 

Moreover you are the one who has said openly that you would believe what you do even if probability were massively against you - so *you* are the dogmatist here, apparently refusing to countenance any objection short of logical demonstration. (f) You say: "Either the Cosmos was designed and created by a rational force with intent (let’s call it ‘God’) or it just happened. If it wasn’t deliberate and planned, then it was an accident." You seem to be using the word "accident" to cover *anything at all* that doesn't involve a cosmic designer. That's a perverse usage. A theory of cosmic evolution, for example, wouldn't imply that the development of the universe was an *accident*, any more than the evolutionary process whereby predator and prey co-evolve to run faster is an accident (even though random factors will presumably have played some part in the precise outcome). It's not an *accident* that prey animals which can run faster are more likely to survive longer and have more offspring - it follows from the logic of the probabilities involved. Some people think that universes can evolve too - I'm not committed to this, but it serves as an illustration of a third way between "design" and "accident". (g) I am not a dogmatic materialist, partly because I think the notion of "material substance" is very unclear and ill-defined. The same problem infects the notion of an "immaterial soul", but in so far as sense can be made of this, it seems to me that ordinary experience casts serious doubt on it. This is not "dogma", but based on evidence (e.g. from drugs, alcohol, brain injury, tiredness, Alzheimer's etc.) that our thought depends on the state of our brain, so it therefore seems unlikely that our thought could survive the death of our brain.

 

 

 (h) The three-sentence argument I gave was entirely logical. You seem to be confused because you apparently take for granted that within a discussion of the existence of God, *any* part of *any* argument presented must have that same focus. In fact, this short argument was not to do with God directly. It simply appealed to the very commonplace fact that human expertise is valued (at least in part) *precisely* because it *cannot* be reduced to formulaic rules. In other words, as I repeat and repeat again: "lack of precise 'objective' measurement is no obstacle to the application of rational judgement; nor to the recognition that some answers are better warranted than others". You say that you agree with this, so what's so difficult about noticing that my little argument was designed precisely to support this proposition, just as I said it was? It should also then be fairly easy to see why this proposition is pertinent to what you had said was an accurate summary of your position on God. If you really can't see this, then I think we'd better give up trying to have any sort of rational engagement. (i)

 

 

Last Monday's debate with John Lennox, with the participation of most of the Hertford College philosophy students, proved by example that "rational engagement between the two sides" is perfectly possible. Rational engagement does become well-nigh impossible, however, when one of the sides insists on an indifference to probabilities and on interpreting all of the opponent's views in terms of wish-fulfilment rather than a genuine attempt to provide rational evidence. (j) The fact that an issue has not yet been resolved to the satisfaction of all reasonable people gives no proof - and barely any evidence - that rational engagement is impossible (would you say the same about political questions, I wonder?). It just indicates that the question is a difficult one, like most of those that philosophers concern themselves with. Incidentally there are cases of ex-theists who have been persuaded by the arguments. I am one. (k) I acknowledge that it's *possible* that the universe could be wonderful in a way that completely transcends our understanding. But this mere possibility is not evidence. We are stuck with the evidence that is accessible to us, and my point was simply that one could reasonably expect this to reflect, at least to some extent, the supposedly supreme wonderfulness of an infinitely perfect Designer. (l) In response to my question: "But are you also denying that there is a rationally significant balance of evidence either way, such as might determine a reasonable person's belief (independently of his or her wishes)?" you say: "Yes. I have always taken this position." But you also say: "I thought, in this passage : ‘Hence it is hard to combine your view that there is no rationally significant evidence for or against theism, with your view that it is vital to make a decision on the matter in line with what we apprehend to be theism's practical consequences.’ that he had substituted the word ‘evidence’ for ‘proof’ and that this was a bit naughty."

 

This is ridiculous! I was interpreting *your* view as claiming a lack of "rationally significant evidence", and you have acknowledged that this interpretation was *correct* (for you "have always taken this position"). Yet in the very passage where I presented this interpretation, you now accuse me of having illicitly introduced the word "evidence" in place of "proof"! *I meant evidence*, and you have acknowledged that in saying this, I got *your* meaning right too! I have set out in this debate to try to represent your views fairly, to ask for your confirmation that I have done so, and then to engage with them rationally. It does not seem to me that you, in return, have been much interested in rational engagement, since you so insist on misrepresenting what I have said, and trying to score points rather than addressing my own with any care or precision. Hence, sadly, I fear that any further discussion will probably be a waste of time. I have found this, in its way, an interesting learning experience, but I doubt whether any more enlightenment is to be had from it. The contrast with my debate with John Lennox - in which points made for and against the existence of God followed a comprehensible logical progression in which both parties had plenty to say (to the great interest of my students, and without a hint of insult or psychological deconstruction on either side) - is rather striking.'