Jumping the traffic lights... and leaving our conscience behind

The big black car swept straight through a red light and on to the pedestrian crossing, just in front of me.

It was only thanks to luck and providence that nobody was hurt or even killed. The steady green man, which is supposed to mean that it is safe to cross, was clearly showing.

I called out to the driver, who looked guilty but drove on.

Then I saw, 20 yards away, a red police van, containing three officers in uniform. I tried to get their attention. By the time one of these surly public ‘servants’ had grudgingly wound down his window, the offender was well on his way down the road.

‘We’re doing something,’ the scowling constable said, with the air of an important person diverted from his important duties. It was true. They were doing something. All three of them seemed to be sending text messages on their mobile phones.

As it happens, this was one of three instances of drivers jumping red lights at pedestrian crossings which I saw last week.

One was a toffee-nosed Kensington lady (no doubt a stalwart of the Conservative Party) who was angry with me for catching up with her and rapping on her window. ‘How daih you touch my cah!’ she shrieked. Not a hint of shame or regret. How were these people brought up?

I can’t for the life of me see any difference between her and the foul-mouthed White Van Man who (later the same day) ploughed heedlessly through a different pelican crossing and swore unoriginally at me when I simply pointed at him.

Pedetrian crossings (and traffic lights) seem to me to be rather wonderful things. By stopping at them, we recognise that we are all subject to the law, and that other people are just as important as we are. By not stopping at them, we scorn the law and assert that we are special.

And these days lots of people do not stop at them, and I think it matters a great deal.
 
We are slowly becoming barbarians, even in Kensington, but not just there. It was the same week in which a teenage girl was mauled to death by a pack of dogs that no civilised person could possibly have wanted to own. It was the same week when the actor Clive Mantle had half his ear bitten off in a Tyneside hotel. Why? He asked some people in the corridor outside his room to make less noise.

And it was the same week the Government came up with its solution for the problems of the NHS. Make nurses do some actual nursing (you know, washing the patients). Make it a rule that hospital staff tell the truth (!). And set up yet another Stalinist inspectorate to check up on everyone.

Of course it won’t work. Like the useless police, the inspectors will always be ‘doing something’. The rules won’t be enforced. More people will die in filth and pain.

Because there is only one thing that really keeps us safe, on the roads, when we are ill, everywhere – and that is conscience. Conscience is what makes us observe red lights, what makes nurses do the dirty, smelly jobs, and tell the truth, and look tenderly after the helpless, querulous beings that most of us will one day become.

And conscience is dying among us, among Tory ladies and foul-mouthed White Van Men alike.

By a strange coincidence, conscience is dying more or less at the same time as the Christian religion is dying, and Easter is becoming just another chance to shop. Are these things connected? I suspect they are. While you wonder, take care crossing the road and don’t fall ill or get old, or ask anyone to be quiet.

 

A Word in the Ear of Mr Jacubs

For some time I have ignored the intemperate, aggressive posts of Mr Jacubs, in which he repeatedly misrepresents my position on the bombing of German civilians. I am grateful to those other contributors who have defended me against his assaults. But I now feel the moment has come to respond. As I have said, some contributors here are no more than background noise. I have tried to engage with them and found it a waste of time. In the interests of trying to maintain standards of civility, generosity to opponents, logic and behaviour, I now turn to Mr Jacubs. Let us see whether he can defend himself, whether he can learn from argument,  or whether he, too, can be dismissed hereafter as background noise. It’s up to him.

 

I shall deal, piece by piece, with his  latest contribution:

Mr Jacubs writes :”Here we go again. Mr Hitchens and his absolute loathing for all things to do with Britain’s contribution in winning both world wars.”

 

I reply: What is this ‘absolute loathing’ of which he speaks? ‘Absolute’ is a pretty powerful word, and it means what it says. Absolute.  I have expressed, on many occasions, my admiration for the individual courage and sacrifice of soldiers, sailors and airmen during both these wars, a body of men and women which includes my own father and grandfather, and my mother. I here do so again. Thus, there is no ‘loathing’ and it is not ‘absolute’.  I might add that I am unequivocally glad that, having entered these wars, we were not on the losing side in either of them. Will Mr Jacubs therefore withdraw these words (I know he cannot possibly justify them)?

If he will not, can he tell me why he repeatedly makes this baseless suggestion? 

Mr Jacubs continues “Just let us assume the worst of Bomber Command and Churchill and Harris.”

I reply: Who assumes this or is asked to assume it? Bomber Command can be taken to include all those who served in it. Once again, I stress my admiration for the men who flew, and my sorrow at their loss, and my refusal to blame them for the decisions of their superiors.   

Here are the words I used on 30^th June 2012, in my Mail on Sunday column reproduced here:

 

‘Now that we have a memorial at last to the thousands of men who flew and died in Bomber Command, can we please cart away the ugly statue of that unpleasant man Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, GCB, OBE, AFC?

I am lost in admiration for those crews. I do not know how, night after night, they left all that was dear to them, climbed into a cramped and freezing death-trap and set off into the dark. Nearly half of them would die horribly, and they knew it.

The death rate was an appalling 44 per cent – 55,573 of the very best, brightest and bravest young men in Britain, the Commonwealth and the Allied countries gone for ever, and our ill-led, sloppy and declining country has felt their loss every day since. Heaven knows it is time their sacrifice, and the equal bravery of those who survived, was marked. A medal would be nice, too.’

 

So I ‘assume the worst’ of people whose courage I praise, for whom I say I am ‘lost in admiration’  and for whom I urge the award of a medal? (see also ‘absolute loathing’ above).

 

Even in the case of Sir Arthur Harris, I am not ‘absolute’ but commend his (undoubted) bravery when he was a fighting flyer, and his honesty. (‘Absolute loathing’ would surely not permit such feelings).

 

My views on Churchill (many times stated, here repeated) are that he was quite right to continue the war in June 1940 and deserves his place in history for doing so. This is a completely separate question from whether we should have entered the war when we did.  A surrender at that stage in 1940(after the defeat of France, and Dunkirk) would have been very wrong and disastrusly dangerous. Once you have started a war, you have to keep fighting until you win.

On this particular subject, the ‘Area Bombing’ policy I think most dispassionate observers would accept that Churchill was less than straightforward about it, and Harris himself felt let down by his Premier, who originally supported the policy but later rather sidled away from it.  But as it was not his central or supreme achievement ( as it *was* Harris’s central and supreme achievement) it would be wrong to judge Churchill solely on this episode, so I do not. It certainly detracts from the absurd worship which has been accorded to him, but so do lots of things. He was not perfect.

 

I think the evidence is growing that Mr Jacubs does not actually read what I write, or hear what I say - but misreads and mishears it through a mist of fury. This, as in so much misunderstanding, is caused by his own grave doubts (which any decent person must have) about the deliberate bombing of civilians in their homes. He needs to suppress these doubts so that he can continue to adhere to our great national pseudo-religion ‘We Won the War’ and its central belief in the ‘Finest Hour’ an in the unalloyed goodness of 'our sde' which inconveniently included the mass murderer Stalin. And it is very common for those who suffer from doubts, and fight agaisnt them,  to become very angry when others express those same doubts. I understand this. I even sympathise with it. But I cannot allow him, on this basis, to misrepresent me here unchallenged. 

 

Mr Jacubs continues: ‘ Let us believe they [by which I assume he means Bomber Command, Harris and Churchill] were the murdering monsters he says they were.’

 

I reply: Where have I used the expression ‘murdering monsters’ or anything like it? If Mr Jacubs is going to say that I *said* this, he needs to substantiate the attribution, or withdraw it.

 

Mr Jacubs continues:  ‘When one thinks of atrocities committed by most other countries why does he keep picking on the one devastating campaign by the Allies which I don't doubt considerably shortened the war?’

 

I reply: ‘Does he really not grasp that it is precisely because this wrong deed was done by my own country’s government and armed forces that I have a duty to acknowledge and criticise it, if I think it to be wrong *on principle*, as I do?  It is on the basis of that same principle that I condemn all such things. What would he think of a modern-day German (or Russian) who refused to condemn the long list of misdeeds he produces below? Do these wickednesses in any way cancel out the wrongness (if it was wrong, and I believe it was, and I haven’t seen him explain why it wasn’t) of our deliberate killing of German civilians? How does this happen? What is the moral system which enables them to do so? If they don’t, and if each deed stands on its own, then the wrongness of the others has no effect on the wrongness of our bombing. In general, in working out what my position is, he may assume that I am against the deliberate killing of civilians in war on principle, whoever does it? If he is not on principle against this (and he appears not to be) then what is his objection to these deeds when done by others? On what consistent moral code (there is no other sort) is it based?

 

As for his saying he doesn’t doubt that the Harris campaign significantly shortened the war he may not doubt it, but plenty of other people (many of them military historians) do. His assertion is of no value without justification. What is his evidence for this effect? By how long does he think it shortened the war, and why? He must, in considering this question, ask what the effect on the length of the war would have been if (for instance) Bomber Command resources had been switched to the Battle of the Atlantic, or switched earlier than 1944 to the targeting of military and industrial targets rather than to killing civilians? Or if proper efforts had been made to develop long-range fighter escorts allowing effective daylight bombing, as was eventually done?  

 

He asks :’What about the more than twenty million Soviet civilians massacred by Germans during operation Barbarossa? The Russian massacre of over 20,000 Poles at Katyn Forest? The massacre of thousands of German civilians by the Poles in 1939? The German massacre of over 200,000 Poles in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The German massacre of more than 200,000 Czechs during the occupation. The more than 30,000 German civilians massacred by the Czechs in reprisals. The German massacre of French civilians at Tulle and Oradour village France 1944. The German massacre of Serbs to please their Nazi Croat friends. I nearly forgot the unimportant massacre of 67,000 Brits by the Luftwaffe. Last but God forbid surely not least the brutal murder of six million Jews and Gypsies in the Holocaust. As well he knows I could go on for ever quoting German atrocities in WW2. Where does one stop?’

 

I reply : I have partly answered this above. Is he suggesting in some way that I do not condemn these dreadful killings?  He had better not be suggesting that. (Though I am, as it happens,  unaware of the massacre of Germans by Poles in 1939 which he includes in his list, or of the massacre of 30,000 Germans by Czechs, unless he is referring to the Potsdam expulsions. Perhaps he could provide a reference).

 

Mr Jacubs continues: ‘As far as I know he's not yet lambasted the US for their B29 bombing of Tokio which killed four times as many as died in Dresden. He does of course love to mention everyone's pet war subject namely the atom bombing of Japan's two cities which together killed less civilians than the all the B29 raids.’

 

I reply : What is the significance of the numbers here?  I am unequivocally against all deliberate killing of civilians. The Tokyo bombing just hasn't happened to have come up.  I don’t ’love to mention’ any of these things. As I grow ever closer to my own grave, and what lies beyond it,  I am increasingly troubled by all these things, some of which I blithely accepted when I was younger.  I responded to a question on my attitude ( as I respond to his implied question above). In fact I write about this matter as a reluctant duty, knowing full well that I shall receive letters and attacks of the kind he produces, often in very wounding terms, and knowing that, if I attempt to discuss the matter with the authors of these epistles, I will seldom encounter reason or generosity in return. I don't have to do this. I do it because it is the truth.

 

 

Mr Jacubs continues:  ‘Twenty two million German military plus millions more in war industry and the civil service equalled about half the German population and he criticises us for doing our best to annihilate them? They tried to kill me and my family and nearly succeeded when they destroyed 3 neighbouring houses killing all the occupants.’

 

I reply : This passage is quite incoherent. What I clearly criticise ( and what George Bell clearly criticised) is the deliberate policy of targeting German civilians in their homes. I do not attack the deliberate killing of enemy soldiers in battle. It is vital to war.  I sadly accept the inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war. I accept the legitimacy of attacking German command centres and ministries.

 

I would criticise anyone for trying to ‘do their best to annihilate’ the population of  any nation. The annihilation of peoples is plainly in and of itself wrong. I think there is a word for it. Does Mr Jacubs really know what he is saying, or has the emotional mist of his intolerant, doubt-filled fury become too dense?

 

He says ‘they’ tried to kill me and my family’. Who is this *they*?  A woman and her children in Hamburg or Dresden, baked, suffocated or burned to death? Did they try to kill Mr Jacubs and his family?  Hardly. The people who tried to do this thing were Hitler and Goering, and the airmen they ordered to do it. We can argue about the responsibility of the airmen, but even they would not have disputed the fairness in war of our trying to kill them and shoot them down when they acme to bomb us. But how in any way does that justify the killing of civilians in their homes in a distant German city?

 

Mr Jacubs is (in my view rightly) appalled by the method of war which was used against him and his neighbours.  He says :’ They tried to kill me and my family and nearly succeeded when they destroyed 3 neighbouring houses killing all the occupants.’

 

I agree with him that this was a horrible thing. That is exactly why I think it was wrong for us to do the same. (And not just the same. We did far more. There was no equivalent of the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden in England, thank Heaven) . I cannot see how he can simultaneously become emotional about the horror of this attack, and not see that if it is wrong for others to do it to us, it is wrong for us to do it to others.

 

Mr Jacubs asks: ‘ Also at war's end who did the survivors rush to be with? The Soviets or the British and Americans? ‘

 

Well, what of it? What does it prove?  The Soviets were our allies, without whom we could not have defeated Hitler, and whom we consciously permitted to undertake the main invasion of Germany and the consequent occupation of its lands, and of the rest of Eastern Europe., in some cases handing to Red Army control areas which the Americans had in fact captured. 

The fact that refugees preferred to rush into the arms of us rather than of our allies says little about our cause. The refugees from our bombing simply rushed away from it (sometimes carrying the baked corpses of their children with them in suitcases, as they had gone mad during the bombing we had inflicted on them). The German refugees from the Red Army, likewise, were fleeing, from something, not to something. Civilians caught in war would all rathr be able to stay in their homes, if only they could. It is hardy a great testimonial that they flee in misery and woe in one direction or another. Some of those refugees, including the Cossacks, we handed to the Soviets, knowing they would murder or enslave them.  

 

And he concludes with a series of charges: Mr Jacubs: ‘He and all the other bloody re-writers of history make me sick to my stomach.’

 

Me: I have ‘re-written’ nothing’ . I have reproduced reputable historical accounts of events, in support of my arguments about contemporary events, principally the opening of the Bomber Command memorial.

 

Mr Jacubs :’He waits until years after the war when nearly all surviving combatants are dead then sets about denigrating those that gave him the gift of life and the freedom to be a journalist.’

 

Me: The suggestion here is that I have secretly harboured this view and waited till men are dead before daring to say it. This is not true. I have written openly of my view on this, since I formed it. I have, as a result, been subject to a great deal of anger and abuse by survivors of the war.

 

 

Mr Jacubs finishes with this suggestion :’  He should go back to the States and pull their veterans to pieces. He will have a harder ride there.’

 

Me: Once again he returns to his falsehood that I have criticised ‘veterans’. It is the politicians and commanders that I have attacked, and quite specifically and explicitly not the veterans. I think he knows this, but is too consumed with anger to recognise it.  But he has absolutely no excuse for repeating it in future. By the way,  I don’t quite know why he urges me to go ‘back’ to the USA. Does he think I am an American?

 

 

Could We Manage Without Cars?

The debate about gun laws threw up an interesting side issue. Anti-gun campaigners say that there is no true, good use for guns in society, and that therefore their risks cannot possibly be justified. I disagree with this on three grounds. The first is that, by their nature, guns can easily be owned illegally, and that those who purport to ‘ban’ them will only ever ban their ownership by the law-abiding, so any discussion about gun bans must start at this point. The guns you are banning will not be those held and used by criminals and terrorists,  who use illegal guns and who would almost all be banned from gun ownership even in a free society, on the grounds of felony (hardly any crimes committed with guns are first offences). They will only ban gun ownership  by free law-abiding persons.

 

Second, guns, or rather the freedom to own them, can be said to have a good effect, which is stronger in a society with high levels of crime than in one without them – namely the deterrent effect of the knowledge (in the mind of the would-be criminal) that his victim, at home or on the street , may well be armed. The great difference between the USA and Britain in the proportion of burglaries that are ‘hot’  (that is, those committed while the victim is in his home) suggests that this deterrent effect may be operating in the USA. The proportion is much higher in Britain.  

 

The other good effect, of emphasising that the government trusts the people and of giving warning (when systematically attacked) that the government is ceasing to do so, is also worth mentioning. The initial (and at first small) restrictions on the Bill of Rights freedom to possess firearms in Britain were enacted because the Lloyd George government of 1920 was afraid of the British people.

 

By the way, the *fact* that Max Weber *advocated* a monopoly of force by the state does not answer the question I put to Professor Self – namely, what is the origin of the idea that the state *should* have such a monopoly, in philosophy or morality? Anyone (especially a servant of the state) may advocate this.  But what theory of government is he serving, apart from autocracy?  Among those who are unfamiliar with (or not keen on) Anglosphere ideas of freedom under the law, it may well be appealing, as are jury-free trials and lengthy pre-trial detention, which are the norm in many officially ‘democratic’ nations). But why should anyone listen?

 

Third, a comparable product in the modern world is the motor car.  There is nothing that it does that could not be done by some other means. Yet the careless use of the motor car results in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries. There is also the problem of poor health (heart disease, depression, back problems)  in those who use cars carefully, but who depend upon them as their main means of transport and so give up natural exercise.  Yet we tolerate these ills without much protest.

 

I have been told off for making this suggestion, notably by Mr Jerry Owen, who wrote ‘Self-employed plumbers, carpenters, electricians, painters and decorators, mobile hair dressers, mobile dog groomers, property agents, quantity surveyors, architects, midwives etc etc etc etc etc would no doubt agree with you that the private car isn't needed at all and a far better way of getting round with all of your equipment from house to house is a.....bus or train plus a long walk either end. In some cases maybe just to price a job up! In the real world of the self -employed that figure nowhere and receive scant support in the tough times in fact none, time is money and public transport is an impossibility. Your view isn't compatible with millions. The quiet suffering millions that just get on with it because there is no alternative. No safety net. No state freebies. I cringed when you brought that one up in the debate...did you notice the muted response from the audience?’

 

Well, as it happened, I didn’t notice it. But as I grow older and wiser,  I am seldom reassured by audience enthusiasm and often take it as a warning that I have said something unwise.  Likewise, I am not discouraged by a muted response.

 

In any case, Mr Owen makes two classic errors, regularly made by car advocates. He equates car with ‘privately-owned car’, and he assumes that the sort of society created by mass car use is inevitable.

 

I am, for instance, very happy with the idea that there should be taxi-cabs , and also that there should be such things as ambulances, delivery vans for small loads etc (though see below).  I think it quite likely that anyone who could show a need to move heavy tools regularly might also be licensed to own a van . Anyone living in a rural area so remote that it was uneconomic to provide effective public transport might also be issued with a licence. No doubt there are other possibilities (shift-workers who are compelled to travel long distance in the middle of the night, for instance).

 

But the presumption should, in my view, be against the issue of driving licences. The applicant must prove a specific need. . And those who possess them should have to pass a stringent test, and should face the certainty of losing that licence for a long time if they drove dangerously or irresponsibly. Such restrictions, though obviously wise when permitting people to hurtle about in a  ton of steel, rubber and glass, are impossible once you have permitted mass car ownership as the officially-approved means of getting about.

 

The privately-owned car is a particularly ludicrous object. In almost all cases, it spends most of its existence depreciating motionlessly in car parks, occupying valuable road space (and increasingly to occupy pavement (sidewalk) space too, as British local authorities increasingly permit this) as it does so.  

 

It has become ‘essential’ only because it exists.  The shape of the modern city (and countryside) has, since the 1930s, been determined by the needs of the car-driving minority ( a segment of the population which always excludes the young and the old, and many of the poor).

 

Instead of clustering round railway stations and interurban or tram stops, housing sprawls in endless ribbons. The need for the flow of individual traffic (especially but not exclusively in older countries where the street pattern is determined by past settlement), is used as the pretext to scrap trams, interurban trolleys and other fast, efficient means of short-distance transport. Los Angeles and Kansas City are prime examples of this. Many US cities had elaborate systems of public transport until pressure from the motor industry and the road construction industry forced their destruction.

 

An urban shape is created which actually compels many people to use cars if they are to work, shop or get their children to school in such circumstances (one effect of universal car ownership is universal heavy traffic, hostile to children walking or cycling to school, and hostile in general to walkers or cyclists.

 

Rural communities and medium sized market towns have their rail-borne public transport withdrawn (as was done under the Beeching-Marples changes in Britain), substitute bus services are unreliable and easily cancelled,  and so their inhabitants become dependent on cars . And their goods must also be delivered by lorries (which often do not break loads, giving rise to the cynical use of enormous trucks to deliver a series of small loads to mini-supermarkets, which most inhabitants of Britain will have noticed).

 

While this is going on, governments, lobbied by oil and construction interests, embark on the building of vast nationalised superhighway systems (comically claiming that these gigantic Pharaonic state enterprises are in fact some sort of celebration of the free spirit of capitalism) . These inevitably destroy railways, which are far less generously subsidised, as the nationalised superhighways undercut railway passenger charges and railway freight charges.

 

The superhighways having created a demand for, and an expectation of fast dual-carriageway road systems in all places, these are extended into cities and towns, and into areas of countryside not populated enough to justify full-scale superhighways. In cities, these system discriminate fiercely against pedestrians and cyclists (and of course against children and the old in general) .

 

Generally they are too dangerous for cyclists to use, or for pedestrians to cross except via inconvenient bridges or unpleasant tunnels.  They rely heavily on sweeping engineering and lengthy one-way systems which are no major inconvenience for drivers with powerful engines, but hugely unfriendly to cyclists.  Anti-personnel fences are erected on the edges of roads to prevent adventurous humans from trying to cross at unregulated points. Drivers, sued to speed, become increasingly reluctant to stop unless ordered to do so by lights. The old Zebra crossings are thus made generally obsolete, and replaced by light-controlled crossings, which greatly reduce the freedom of walkers to cross the road.  Road engineers approach hills with the minds of drivers, creating straight, steep approaches rather than the curving, gradual routes which are friendlier to humans without engines.

 

After about 40 years of this, the idea that anyone should travel by anything other than a car becomes positively eccentric. Employers feel entitled to assume that their employees can and will drive. They provide benefits to drivers on that basis.

 

This was, in fact, the state of affairs in Britain when I began using a bicycle to travel round London in 1977. There were no cycle lanes. If you rode through the island at Hyde Park corner (now an official cycle route) the police would actively stop you and say it was for the Royal Family alone. Too bad if the alternative involved risking your life.  Cycle parking  if it existed, was rudimentary and in unsafe places were your lights would certainly be stolen. There was no attempt to co-ordinate tickets on different parts of public transport. A railway link connecting north and south London rusted unused beneath the City.

 

I agree that some of these things have been changed for the better since then (though I cannot begin to describe the scorn and amazement with which my strange habit was treated back in the late 1970s) . But in general this is still a country almost wholly based on the belief that car ownership is normal, if not actually required,  designed round the requirements of the car and hostile to the needs of anyone else. Under those circumstances, it is true that a car or van is often necessary. But it does not have to be so, and pre-1914 Europe and North America, one of the highest levels ever achieved by civilisation, made very little use of motor cars and could, in my view, have functioned entirely without them. Why, if Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not been in a motor car, he might never have been assassinated.

 

 

 

 

 

More Details on 'Great Lives' BBC Radio 4 Tuesday, 4.30 pm

There are now more details available about the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Great Lives’, in which I nominate George Bell, sometime Bishop of Chichester. The programme, presented by Matthew Parris, is to be broadcast on Tuesday 2^nd April at 4.30 pm and again on Friday 5^th April at 11.00 p.m. I believe it will also be more or less permanently available to download on the BBC player.

 

Bishop Bell was one of the few prominent people who opposed the deliberate bombing of German civilians during World War Two, at the time it was taking place, and so remains controversial to this day. As I know very well from my correspondence, many people continue to defend this action( some on the bizarre grounds that the German bombing of Britain was so terrible and barbaric, which is surely an argument against anyone using this appalling method of warfare).

 

None of these defences actually stand up. Britain was not under any serious threat of invasion, nor did bombing German civilians lessen this danger in any way.  The huge resources devoted to the bombing campaign could have been used to fight the genuinely dangerous German U-boat offensive far more effectively; they could also have been used in developing, much earlier than eventually happened, the long-range fighter escorts which made accurate bombing of German strategic targets possible.  The diversion of German resources away from the Russian front could have been achieved by attacking military and industrial targets, which would also have shortened the war , as attacking civilians in their homes did not do.

 

But they are advanced because many people are, even now, unwilling to concede that we did anything wrong. George Bell, not a pacifist (he lost two brothers in the First World War)but a Christian, did now, and said so when it mattered  at some cost to himself.

 

He had many other merits, some of which emerge in the programme, and some of which don’t (his role as midwife to T.S.Eliot’s great play ’Murder in the Cathedral’ is one example of his adventurous and enlightened ideas about how the church should open itself to the people and ally itself with the arts to spread its message). I think it was a pity he didn’t become Archbishop of Canterbury, and I’m pretty certain, from studying his biography in detail, that he was denied this post because of his stand. Anyway, listen to the programme. You can find out more about it by going here.

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rl8n8

 

Among other things, this will eventually lead you to a rather amusing photograph of me, Matthew Parris and Andrew Chandler, an expert on George Bell who also plays a major part in the programme.

 

Out of the Barrel of a Gun - an evening with Professor Self

My debate against Professor Will Self on the subject of ‘gun control’ was both frustrating and satisfying. (As he is  Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, perhaps I should be appointed Professor of Non-Contemporary Thought at the University of Fleet Street, where I have been doing a remedial course for the past 36 years).

 

It was frustrating because the format made it difficult for either of us to engage directly. Google, no doubt, wants its funky ‘hangouts’ and other web interventions in these debates, but there really is no substitute for being present in the flesh. The two other main participants, both in the USA,  did not stick to what I had been told was their main aim- which was to question Professor Self and me in an adversarial manner. They just prosed on , on their own account. There was no real point in the Professor or I standing at the lectern while that went on.

 

It was rewarding because Professor Self was actually rather tentative, did not take the cliché-strewn path of the standard liberal, took the argument seriously and scrupulously avoided demagogy or appeals to the emotions. I could have dealt with the cliches if he had decided to use them, but it was largely thanks to his restraint and responsibility that I was able to make a serious case rather than just defend my position against propaganda and violins.

 

I was only sorry that we didn’t have time to examine his curious contention that the state had some legal claim to possess a monopoly of violence. I should have thought that in a free country, the state , embodying the people, would share that ‘monopoly’ with the people ( as happens in Switzerland). So it wouldn’t then be a monopoly. It does strike me that the two countries on earth with the greatest respect for freedom, the USA and Switzerland, have the most relaxed gun laws. Britain, when it had more respect for liberty, also had relaxed gun laws. And the 1920 restrictions which led to our current disarmed state were, without doubt, enacted because the executive had come to fear the people. The 1920 Firearms Act could never have got through Parliament in pre-1914 Britain.

 

My case was not for an American-style position. It was for the much older English Bill of Rights and Common Law position, which entitled free British people (Scotland has its own, similar but not identical, Claim of Right) to own arms for their defence (there’s nothing about a militia in *our* Bill of Rights, or in Blackstone.

 

Also I thought that the two crucial points – that banning guns by law does not take them out of the hands of criminals, and that criminals ought not to be able to assume that their victims are disarmed – were for once given a reasonable airing.

 

I find many anti-gun liberals are rendered quite thoughtful by the figures about ‘hot’ burglaries (burglaries of homes which are occupied at the time). These are a much smaller proportion of burglaries as a whole in the USA than they are in Britain, and they are virtually unknown in some US States which have positive laws supporting ‘defence of habitation’. Criminals simply assume that the householder will be armed, and stay away.

 

I was only sorry I couldn’t mention the ‘Second Amendment Sisters’, an organisation of feminists, with chapters in many of the United States,  who argue for gun ownership as a protection against assault and rape. The idea of a British militant feminist carrying a gun is so unlikely that it is almost comical, and this illustrates one of the deep differences between our societies.

 

I stick to the analogy with cars. I would argue that the freedom to possess a gun, for a law-abiding adult, can fulfil a purpose. Even if he or she never owns a gun, the criminal’s fear that he does own one may well prevent or deter many crimes. To withdraw that freedom is also a demonstration of mistrust between states and individual, and a withdrawal of the presumption of innocence on which all justice depends.

 

Privately-owned cars, on the other hand, perform no function which could not be performed in some other way, in most cases more healthily, more quietly and more cleanly.

 

Yet, while we unprotestingly accept the accidental carnage caused by cars, especially when under the control of young men, we use the accidental abuse of guns (also usually by the young) as an absolute argument against free gun ownership by law-abiding adults.

 

Readers may not know that (as far as I could find out) the voting in the auditorium quite closely reflected the voting online. What this might mean, I do not know. It is interesting, though.

 

 

 

 

A debate on modern feminism, Peter Hitchens versus Linda Grant

I'd like to give advance notice here of a debate or discussion (I'm not wholly sure of the format yet) between me and the novelist Linda Grant (about some of whose interesting and thoughtful books I have written here in the past). It will be in Bristol on Sunday 19th May. What I hope to discuss is whether the sexual revolution which began 50 years ago has benefited women.  

 

Personally, I regard this revolution, based on the works of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer above all, to be entirely separate from the 19th and early 20th-century battles for legal, educational and political equality (for instance, I don't think there's a word in Virginia Woolf's manifesto' A Room of One's own' with which I would disagree). I don't think that there's any organic link between those campaigns and the post-Greer campaigns for an equality that actively denies the real and fundamental differences between men and women.  

Ms Grant and I are both of the same generation and were at the University of York at around the same time, so we have, more or less, seen the same things happen.

 

 

Details are here

 

http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/2013/events/linda-grant-and-peter-hitchens/

 

Where to Watch the Gun Control Debate

This evening's debate on gun control, in which I argue for the freedom to own firearms,  against Professor William Self of Brunel University, can be watched live here:

http://www.youtube.com/versusdebates

 

 

'The motion for debate is 'The right to bear arms is a freedom too far'

It begins at 7.00 pm Greenwich Mean Time. Because much of North America has already shoved its clocks forward for alleged 'daylight saving', this means it will run at 3.00 p.m. on the American East Coast, and at noon on the West Coast. Midwesterners, prairie and mountain dwellers will, being independent persons, be able to make their own adjustments. There's also a chance to record your vote on this site.

Mr Slippery Bangs On about Immigration. Do I hear a Dog Whistle?

I suppose we shall now have to get used to Tory Politicians incessantly pretending to care about the EU, about mass immigration, about crime and about education. Labour have already begun to do the same (it will be harder for the Liberal Democrats, but even they may get in on the game).

 

Mr Cameron’s latest supposed ‘pledges’ will, I suspect, swiftly clear away like mist on a sunny day. But by then, no doubt guided by Mr Lynton Crosby’s ‘dog whistle’ techniques (in which parties signal to voters that they hold populist views they haven’t actually expressed and – in my view – don’t actually support either), Mr Cameron will have moved on to another, different but equally vaporous pledge. Mr Crosby is an Australian election genius, who will be well aware of the challenge once offered to Australia’s fake right-wing (‘Liberal’) party, their equivalent to our Tories, by Pauline Hanson. Her One Nation Party had some similarities to UKIP.   

 

For a British government to do as Mr Cameron suggests, it would pretty certainly have to declare independence from the EU, from the Luxembourg Court of Justice and from the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. These are desirable aims, but we know perfectly well that Mr Cameron and his Cabinet not only won’t take such steps, but actively oppose them.

 

It would also have to take dictatorial powers over local authorities, and introduce some sort of identity card scheme, which are not desirable.

 

Stringent border control is the only real answer to this.  Once people arrive in this country legally, it is difficult, verging on impossible, to close the welfare system to them. Mass immigration and open borders are, always have been, and always will be incompatible with a free-at-the-point-of-use welfare state, and they’re also pretty hard to manage alongside a system of subsidised public housing based on need. Serious left-wingers really ought, all along, to have been the most stringent opponents of mass immigration, and of the demolition of national border control which EU membership demands.

 

The odd thing is that Labour has hardly ever, since the death of Hugh Gaitskell, taken an explicitly left-wing line on these issues, instead following fashionable metropolitan liberal opinion, which is quite uninterested in the problems of the British poor. On the contrary, it quietly realises that mass immigration is a powerful force pushing wages down. Imagine how much the minimum wage would have had to rise without Labour’s deliberate importation of hundreds of thousands of eastern Europeans prepared to work very hard for very little. It’s amazing how this very interesting subject is never examined. Yet the often-asserted claim by Labour politicians that the minimum wage has not, as its opponents predicted, destroyed jobs, is taken at face value by people who ought to know better.

 

Modish metropolitans also benefit personally from mass migration.  It makes servants (mainly nannies and cleaners) affordable for the professional middle classes for the first time since 1939 . It also cuts the cost of restaurants and takeaways, essential to a lifestyle in which both the adults in the household go out to work all day, and can’t be bothered to do proper cooking when they get home.

 

But why is all this banging on about crime, human rights and immigration happening now? Because we are rapidly approaching the Period of Empty Promises, during which the Coalition will break up, and the two Coalition parties will pose, posture and grandstand till they are puce in the face, trying to pretend that they loathe each other,  when the truth is that they are indistinguishable. Soon I expect a Tory minority government endlessly ‘banging on’ about all the things UKIP bangs on about, and which Mr Cameron once claimed to despise.

 

As I wrote back on 25th September 2011, both Tories and Lib Dems have never intended to maintain the Coalition till the end of this Parliament. I said  : ‘But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Death of an Oligarch

What should we think about Boris Berezovsky?

 

The strange fuss over the death of Boris Berezovsky reminds me that I’m planning to offer a defence of Vladimir Putin to an Oxford student society in late April. This will without doubt be similar to the articles I have written here in the past, that is to say, fully accepting all the criticisms of Mr Putin and his methods, while pointing out that he is by no means unique in these faults, but that Western governments, diplomats and media are surprisingly uninterested in the comparable wickedness of the Oil and Gas states of the former Soviet Empire, such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, and indeed of those countries which have offered us base facilities and other help in the alleged ‘War on Terror’, such as Uzbekistan. As I say so often, selective moral condemnation is not in fact moral condemnation at all, it’s propaganda for the gullible.   If a principle isn’t universal, it’s not a principle. So you’ll have to look for another reason.

 

But I was struck by the near-assumption that there *must* be something fishy about Mr Berezovsky’s death. Maybe there was. But given the uninterest of the police in investigating so many deaths (and the blank inability of the media to spot the growing correlation between the taking of so-called ‘antidepressants’ and suicide, a correlation so strong that even doctors and drug firms warn that some of these pills cause suicidal tendencies) , the huge concentration of state resources on this one (without any apparent material justification) was striking. I’m always glad of police thoroughness. But when it’s selective, one has to ask why.

 

Anyway, I’ve provided links here to a selection of my past articles on this interesting subject, here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/02/if-not-putin-who-fashionable-sneering-at-russia-is-contradictory-and-hypocritical.html

 

 

here

 

 http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/02/dialogues-of-the-deaf-part-two-russia-and-the-fellow-travellers.html

 

 and here

 http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/02/morals-mr-putin-and-grand-juries.html

 

and, for an examination of the Western media’s skewed and selective reporting of Russian misdeeds, here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/pussy-riot-versus-georgia-prison-rapes-why-some-things-get-reported-a-lot-and-others-dont.html

 

I obviously have no idea how Mr Berezovsky died, and a Christian must regret the death of anyone, all having the chance of repentance and grace up to the very last moment.

 

But I think it fair to say that Mr Berezovsky did a lot of things that really were not very nice. The allegations  published today about his sexual life are, how shall I say, unattractive. Nor can they be said, if true, to have been victimless.

 

But these are not the reason why Mr Berezovsky, and people like him, are unloved in modern Russia, and will be unmourned by most people when they die. He is closely associated with the riot of theft and corruption which overtook that poor country in the years of Boris Yeltsin (how I now regret being taken in by Mr Yeltsin when he posed as the great foe of corruption and tyranny, one of the sternest lessons of my life. I learned how easy it is to be taken in, if you want to be). Millions of Russians regard him as a straightforward thief. I will leave readers to study his obituaries and see if those Russians have a case. Those years are the reason why so many Russians turn the Russian word for ‘Democracy’ (‘Demokratiya’) into a bitter, obscene snarl (‘Dermokratiya’) which translates, unprintably , as ‘The Rule of ****’. The asterisks conceal a word normally used to refer to excrement. They were also the reason why, in 1996, six years after throwing off the Communist yoke, the misgoverned and in many cases impoverished Russian people came very close to electing Gennady Zyuganov, a Communist, as their President.  Mr Berezovsky and his fellow-oligarchs spent huge piles of money to save Boris Yeltsin from defeat by Zyuganov, and of course collected their rewards afterwards.

 

Yeltsin was grotesquely corrupt, his regime was incompetent and brutal, not least in Chechnya. Unlike the Communist coup plotters of August 1991,  who crumbled rather than actually use serious violence, Yeltsin did in fact order tanks to fire on the Russian parliament building in September 1993. But the Western world, regarding him as a friend, overlooked these problems because he did not assert Russian national pride or sovereignty abroad. It is because Mr Putin has asserted these things, and in fact become the most significant defender of the concept of national sovereignty, that the modern globalist elite loathe him so and work so hard for his overthrow (as achieved in Ukraine and Georgia), probably by a smiley-face mob of manipulated ‘idealistic’ young people, who have no idea whose interests they really serve .

 

 As I wrote more than a year ago:

 

 ‘Nor is Putin’s frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin – a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive. It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin – whose devastating documentary “We Can’t Go On Living Like This” helped end the communist era – is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was "a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust". But, now, he says, "we have returned to 'normal', 'civilised' corruption."

 

 

‘This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word "Voruyut" – "They steal".'

 

In the light of this, British policy towards Putin’s Russia seems more than a  trifle odd. We seem almost to want to pick fights with the Kremlin despite having  (as far as I know) no major national conflicts of interest with Russia – rather the contrary, as if we ever do decide to quit the EU, good relations with Russia will be rather important. Not to mention our ever-growing need for imported gas.

 

My old friend Edward Lucas, of ‘The Economist’  speaks incessantly of a ‘New Cold War’ . I might, in retaliation, refer to this belief as ‘a dismaying lapse’ by an otherwise admirable and perceptive commentator, as he once used this phrase to describe an article by me which challenged the ‘New Cold War’ thesis rather directly  (read it here   http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/09/as-ukrainians-force-russians-to-turn-their-back-on-their-language-and-change-their-names-i-ask-is-th.html ).

 

But I won’t do that. Russia has many faults, but they don't mean that Russia is our enemy. If we disapprove,  rightly, of Russia's lawlessness and lack of freedom, we should show our superiority by fighting to defend the rule of law, and liberty, in our own country, where they are directly threatened and we can by our own actions save them.

 

I just think that, like many conservatives left stranded by the end of the Cold War, like fishing boats in the dried up Aral Sea, he finds the idea of a continuing conflict with the wicked and sinister Kremlin reassuring, and the alternative possibility - that our supposed ‘allies’ may not in fact be our friends at all - very hard to contemplate. I know how he feels,  and often hate the conclusions towards which fact and logic drive me - but I still think he’s wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Old Controversies Revisited

Here are a couple of links to items which discuss topics often dealt with here. The first is an article which I have written for the Guardian’s ‘media’ section. The Guardian  is  actually rather good about allowing me to respond to criticisms of me in its pages.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/media-blog/2013/mar/24/peter-hitchens-abuse-bbc-radio-4

 

The second is the outcome of a clash (on Twitter) with a person who challenged my view of ‘addiction’.

 

I think the person involved behaved very thoughtfully and honourably. The episode is, in a way, a justification for my habit of challenging, quite aggressively, those who attack me on Twitter. (My most recent contribution to the thread is slightly confused by my failure to delete the final paragraph during the cut-and-paste operation).

 

 

http://citizensane.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it-youre-addicted-to-peter-hitchens/#comments