PETER HITCHENS: Trust judges? I'd rather ask a baboon to carry a Ming vase

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

For many years now I have not always said in public what I think in private. I have never lied about my opinions, but I have sometimes thought it better to leave parts of them unsaid or unwritten. This is because I know that my enemies (who are your enemies, too) will deliberately misunderstand and twist them, and then howl me down when I try to defend myself.

I expect the number of things about which we cannot speak to grow.

Oddly enough, it is dangerous in these thought-policed times even to make such a confession. My enemies will immediately assume I am hiding a collection of savage bigotries and hatreds. This is not true, but it is what they would like to believe.

For instance, I long ago decided that it is no longer possible to have an intelligent or reasonable public debate about the rape laws. Anything I said would be twisted into something else. And so I never discuss them.

From time to time I am faced with opponents who think that I am their prisoner and they are my interrogators. I count myself lucky that, as yet, this is not so. But I know enough history to realise that it might one day be so.

Freedom of speech and thought, such as we still more or less have, are very delicate and easily smashed.

Watching our current elite's treatment of liberty is like watching a baboon carrying a priceless Ming vase across a stone-paved floor.

The latest example of this is the pitifully dim verdict of a Belfast court on the so-called 'Gay Cake' case. I have looked carefully at the facts and at the laws involved.

The judges are blazingly, obviously wrong on the facts and the law. We can only guess what made them rule against Ashers, the rather loudly Christian bakers who declined to make a cake decorated with propaganda in favour of same-sex marriage.

As always, one has to wonder at the coincidence which led to the complainant asking this particular shop to do this particular thing. But life is full of coincidences.

But strip away the circumstances and what have you got? The planned cake is far more than a cake. It is a publication, because it will bear a political message to be displayed in a public place, perhaps to be photographed and filmed and shared on the internet.

If this were a poster, a pamphlet, a newspaper or a book, the problem would be obvious. A publisher is being asked to publish a message he disagrees with. In a free society, he can refuse. In the modern United Kingdom, say these ridiculous judges, he must submit.

They base this on the sexual orientation regulations in the Equality Act. The core of these says: 'A person (A) discriminates against another person (B) if – on grounds of sexual orientation – A treats B less favourably than he treats or would treat other persons.'

Well, I have news for the judges. The bakers did not discriminate on the grounds of 'sexual orientation'. There are plenty of heterosexuals who support same-sex marriage, including, for instance, David Cameron and Theresa May. And there are some homosexuals who do not.

The bakers, or rather publishers, quite rightly, did not ask their customer about his private life. He, quite reasonably, did not discuss it with them.

They declined to publish his propaganda because they disagreed with it on grounds of conscience.

The Belfast verdict has been condemned by Peter Tatchell, a notably brave campaigner for homosexual rights, and lover of liberty, whom I have come to like and admire over the past 30 years. I wrongly failed to stand up against the way he was smeared during his 1983 by-election campaign in Bermondsey, and now wish he had won it. Parliament would be better and wiser for his presence.

Let it be part of my apology to him to say that I think he has more sense, and a greater understanding of what really matters, than a whole roomful of judges.

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Brave Shami is an asset to Britain - so lay off! 

A revolting meeting at the Lords, hosted by the anti-Israel peer Jenny Tonge, has revealed something important. Wild, crazy prejudice against Jews (thinly disguised as wild crazy prejudice against Israel) is not limited to Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

Selective dislike for Israel, oddly similar in some ways to the equally selective and fashionable prejudice against Russia, is common throughout British politics and media. I've been baffled by attempts to suggest it is confined to the Labour Left.

Which prompts me to say that it is time people stopped ganging up on Shami Chakrabarti, the new Labour peer. Whatever her faults (I think she's especially silly about grammar schools) she is a serious person who fought hard for civil liberty when it wasn't a popular cause.

She is a far more worthy addition to the House of Lords than a huge number of David Cameron's dodgy and unqualified creations. Leave her alone and we may be surprised to find that she is an asset to the country.

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Why do we need any more runways? Look at a map of Europe and see how small and overcrowded our islands are, especially the South East.

Perhaps we may lose money by not expanding Heathrow or Gatwick, though I suspect any such money will end up in the hands of foreign-owned business.

But what is that set beside peaceful skies, or compared with people's homes, which we are told must be brutally obliterated to make way for more Boeings and Airbuses? If you wouldn't want that to happen to you, how can you do it to anyone else?

Spend the money instead on improving the absurdly overpriced and underused rail links to Paris and Amsterdam, where they already have huge airports, far from people's houses. What does it really matter if Heathrow 'falls behind' them?

60 minutes of Berlin madness  

After several weeks of miserably, needlessly dark mornings, we at last return to our natural time today. And, as we do so, the usual chorus of busybodies demand that we don't put the clocks back, but move permanently on to the same time zone as Berlin, regurgitating various bogus statistics.

Nobody mentions Portugal, driven almost mad by forcing itself on to Berlin time, which led to black winter mornings and absurdly late summer sunsets. An official study found that none of the alleged energy savings actually happened. Accidents increased, millions slept badly and schoolchildren dozed off in class. Back went the clocks.

Don't listen when they tell you Berlin Time only affects Scotsmen and milkmaids. It would be awful for everyone except sluggards who get up at noon, then it may take years, as it did in Portugal, to get rid of it.

Not learning from History?

I can just remember the Suez disaster, the miserable, demoralised aftermath of no petrol, worried adults baffled and humiliated by national failure, and the spirit of greatness going out of the country. I hope the 60th anniversary of this folly will be properly marked. At the time, our Government and media thought we were more important than we were and actively sought war to make themselves feel big. Now we are doing it again – this time with Russia. If we don't heed this lesson from the past, we will get a harsher one in the future. Russia will be a less forgiving foe than Egypt ever was.

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Notes on the Leadsom matter

I enjoy probing issues that other people think are dead. A comment on the Leadsom affair has stimulated me into penning the following thoughts:

 

 

A contributor (Peter Sullivan)  wrote : 

 - "I have to disagree on The Times/Leadsom issue. I believe she most certainly spoke words which justify the headline 'Being a mother gives me edge on May'. She said ... **genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake. She possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people, but I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next.**" (my emphasis) - Posted by: Peter Sullivan | 12 July 2016 at 10:46 PM

 

I would respond as follows: The Times headline was : 'Being a mother gives me edge on May — Leadsom '

For this to be justified. Mrs Leadsom would have to have said words which actually state that being a mother gives her the edge over Mrs May. This is because this is the undoubted sense of the headline and the added ' - Leadsom' clearly attributes this sentiment to Mrs Leadsom herself, personally.

The Times being behind a paywall, I cannot reproduce the whole article.

However, here are the direct substantive quotes attributed to Mrs Leadsom on this subject, in the page one summary of the interview which caused all the trouble,  in the order in which they appear and as they are juxtaposed by the newspaper (not necessarily the order or the context in which they were spoken, which we do not know as we have no access to any transcript of the complete interview, especially the questions asked):

1. Mrs May "possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people. But I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next."

2. "Genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake."

(Note that the above two are separate statements. We do not know how separate without a full transcript)

The reporters offer this interpretation. : ‘Mrs Leadsom, 53, who has two sons and a daughter with her husband, Ben, said that being a mother meant that the future of Britain was *more important* to her.  

 

(But where in the following words is this comparison 'more important'? "Genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake." It appears to me to be a free-standing statement about herself, probably offered in response to a question, containing no comparison with Mrs May)

They also write: ‘Mrs Leadsom made clear that she intended to highlight the difference over children in the campaign’. I have to say I have been unable to find any quotation which conveys such an intention to highlight this difference. She may have said this, but once again I can find no quotation of her saying so in the published material.

3. *Asked to contrast herself with Mrs May*(my emphasis), she said: "I see myself as one, an optimist, and two, a member of a huge family and that's important to me. My kids are a huge part of my life."

4. '"I am sure Theresa will be really sad she doesn't have children so I don't want this to be 'Andrea has children, Theresa hasn't', because I think that would be really horrible." However, again, we do not know how closely these two segments occurred in the interview itself. Their juxtaposition in the text plainly influences the way in which the reader understands them, but does it correspond with the way in which they were spoken, or Mrs Leadsom's intended meaning.

... she said that having children kept her focused. "It means you don't want a downturn but, never mind, ten years hence it will all be fine. My children will be starting their lives in that next ten years so I have a real stake in the next year, the next two." She suggested motherhood meant that she had *more empathy than Mrs May*(my emphasis). "I think when you are thinking about the issues that other people have you worry about your kids' exam results, what direction their careers are taking, what we are going to eat on Sunday."

I cannot see in this material any justification for the claim, inserted in the headline and in the passage above,  that Mrs Leadsom said at any stage that these things made her superior to Mrs May or gave her more empathy than Mrs May. Perhaps such words were spoken, but they do not appear here. Such a claim would indeed have been crass. But she did not make it in any words quoted. Thus, this is a *possible* interpretation, though it is one which Mrs Leadsom specifically repudiates in quoted words (:'I don't want this to be 'Andrea has children, Theresa hasn't', because I think that would be really horrible.") and one which I would not personally make..

It is not, however, a fact. And headlines on news stories are supposed to be factually faithful to the material below. Indeed, the Independent press Standards Organisation (IPSO), to which 'the Times' belongs, recently revised its code to emphasise this as a requirement of good journalism. ‘i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, *including headlines not supported by the text*.’

 

 

Why Do the British Media Give Such Generous Coverage to pro-Drug-Decriminalisation Advocates?

Here we go again. Another supposedly authoritative body has been captured by the ‘decriminalise drugs’ lobby. This time it’s an outfit I had not heard of until recently -the ‘Royal Society for Public Health’.

They have published a propaganda screed calling for weaker drugs laws,…

http://www.rsph.org.uk/filemanager/root/site_assets/our_work/areas_of_work/tanlod/RSPH-TANLOD-Pages.pdf

 

....referring extensively to the work of my old adversary Professor David Nutt, 

… called it a 'report' and duly received hours and pages of free publicity for their cause

 

By contrast my carefully-researched book on the subject, available from any library or here…

https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-We-Never-Fought/dp/1441173315

… has been almost totally ignored by almost all British media since I published it nearly three years ago, perhaps because it makes the opposite case.

It explains in carefully-researched detail that a policy of de facto decriminalisation has been followed here for nearly 40 years, with dire effects on the country.

Your starter for ten: Why do the British media so readily swallow these thin, ill-informed and ill-argued pro-decriminalisation documents, and ignore my work?

 

Why is There No Balance or Impartiality in TV Drama or Soap Operas?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If you want to change someone’s mind, don’t bother arguing with him. Get control of a major TV or radio soap opera and you are halfway there. I would love to infiltrate the scriptwriters of Coronation Street and insert a storyline about a bright young teenager who starts smoking cannabis and ends up hopelessly mentally ill, stuck on a locked ward as his weeping parents wonder why nobody did anything to enforce the drug laws.

Or EastEnders might feature the misery and disappointment of a bright child from a poor home, who was bullied and neglected in a vast state comprehensive and so had her hopes ruined by egalitarian dogma.

Or the BBC Radio 4 series, The Archers, might tell the story of an innocent couple targeted by social workers claiming falsely that they had abused their child, and snatching that child away forever in secret and deeply unfair court hearings.

If you want to change someone’s mind, don’t bother arguing with him. Get control of a major TV or radio soap opera and you are halfway there

All these things happen in real life. But, of course, the broadcasting organisations, being in the hands of the Left, would not do this.

They are too busy re-educating us into right-on citizenship of our new people’s republic, with lesbian kisses to approve of, incest to be understanding about, a male- to-female transsexual (played by a real woman) and other heroes and heroines of Left-wing mythology to admire.

One recent drama, for instance, managed to make a sympathetic heroine out of an asylum seeker who broke the laws against taking paid work.

The Archers is currently harrowing its listeners with a heavy-handed melodrama about a bullied woman who eventually stabs her overbearing husband. I am not a regular listener, but as far as I could see she could have avoided the whole episode by leaving home before he got back from work. Yet the scriptwriters plainly want us to sympathise with the stabber.

It’s no use saying it’s just fiction. These dramas have a huge influence on national thought. Thousands of people actually mix up their own schooldays with the plots of the ill-disciplined fictional comprehensive school Grange Hill, whose pupils were saturated in modern progressive thought. Back in 1998, when a non-existent Deirdre Rachid was sent to a non-existent prison in Coronation Street, the real Prime Minister and the real Leader of the Opposition vied with each other to call for her release.

If I had managed to work my way into the world of TV or radio soap opera, I might actually have got somewhere with all the causes I have failed to advance in years of public debate. How is it that this amazingly influential sector of broadcasting is not in any way covered by the rules on impartiality? Isn’t it time we took it as seriously as it deserves to be taken?

Payback time for the tax zealots

David Cameron has only himself to blame for the fix he is in. He and his Chancellor have ceaselessly blurred the huge difference between criminal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance.

They have repeatedly referred to them as if they were the same. They have absurdly suggested that they can put an end to avoidance, which will continue to exist in any country which has tax laws and skilled lawyers paid lots of money to find ways around them.

They have also started warbling in the Left-wing choir which caterwauls that paying taxes is somehow a moral duty, rather than a legal obligation.

 
It’s not true. Taxes are in many cases squandered on servicing foolish debts incurred by bungling Ministers who knew the taxpayer would bail them out. Or they are thrown away on the most appalling school system, or the most useless police force in the advanced world.

I will pay what I owe, because I believe in the rule of law. But if I’m offered a legal way of paying less tax I will take it – and so will anyone, including quite a lot of prominent Leftists, especially in the media. Indeed, I believe a prominent Left-wing newspaper (you know who you are) recently managed to avoid a thumping great tax bill by using a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands.

The Left-wing tax zealots aren’t free to do this because they have publicly embraced this idea that tax is a type of goodness. If Mr Cameron disappears up his own anatomy thanks to his offshore fund, I shall laugh quite a lot.

But this has really happened because he is past the peak of his power. Seven years ago, when I tried to work up some interest about his record as one of Parliament’s greediest claimers of expenses (£1,700 a month on a £350,000 mortgage, close to the maximum possible, later dropping to £1,000 a month, plus – of course – council tax, gas, oil and insurance), nobody cared a bit.

Most people still aren’t aware of how their taxes helped a very rich man and his even richer wife buy a rather nice country home, now worth at least a million pounds. What’s moral about forcing a dinner lady or a hospital cleaner to contribute to Mr Cameron’s mortgage?

But that’s the sort of thing tax does in modern Britain. I wouldn’t blame any normal person for keeping what they can.

But Mr Cameron himself, a self-righteous taxation zealot who has personally done very well out of the public purse, deserves everything he now gets. I did try to tell you.

The 'rebels' without a cause

What is it about The Rolling Stones? How is it that they have become one of the most lucrative business enterprises of modern times, and yet still manage to portray themselves as dangerous rebels?

Thanks to the opening of an exhibition about them, we can once again enjoy this picture of the original group (that’s what we called them then) in 1963, wearing… uniform. This was before they discovered that looking a bit dangerous and scruffy was better for trade. It’s evidence of a remarkable flexibility.

There’s also the little matter of a catchy little song called Under My Thumb, in which Mick Jagger exults over how he’s forced a girl who ‘once pushed me around’ into changing her clothes and doing just what she’s told. The ‘squirming dog who’s just had her day’ now ‘keeps her eyes to herself’ while he ‘can still look at someone else’.

This is the sort of attitude that can get you liked by the Taliban or stabbed on The Archers. It certainly doesn’t fit with the feminism of his modern fans. Does he sing it any more? As for rebellion, if the Stones made any gesture towards human freedom during their recent visit to the Cuban tyranny, I haven’t seen it reported. The brand isn’t always the same as the reality.

 

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I am sure Justin Welby thought there was 'no reason to doubt' that his mother's husband was his father. But he wasn't. I hope this revelation also helps the Archbishop realise that there is 'reason to doubt' his unfair condemnation of Bishop George Bell.

Letting Rip Against all This Reshuffle Garbage

It’s now plain that our supposedly super-accurate RAF bombers have done very little in Syria since the great Parliamentary vote on the subject. If the military need was so urgent, why is this so?

It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now that Parliament and the government’s regiment of media toadies were actually being invited to authorise raids on Jeremy Corbyn. The government also wanted to implicate us in some way in military action in Syria, presumably to make Saudi Arabia happy and to make deeper engagement possible later - if we can find a way of backing the pro-Saudi rebels who have done so much to turn Syria into anarchy and ruins.

But the ridiculous praise for Hilary Benn’s fatuous speech (regarded as Churchillian by the sort of people who think Downton Abbey is great drama), and the Labour applause for it, were the real victory. Had the Oldham by-election (the following day, on 3rd December)  gone the other way, the Blairites in New Labour would have mounted a putsch against Jeremy Corbyn, and tried to recapture their party from its annoying members. This sort of thing has been done to the Tories, when IDS ( a far less competent leader than Mr Corbyn) was overthrown by a supersmooth, pinstriped putsch.

The timing of the Syria debate, in retrospect, looks rather suspicious. There was no special military or diplomatic reason, as is quite obvious now, for holding it that night. The only reason for hurry was the Oldham poll. There was nothing else on the grid that couldn’t be altered. A humiliation for |Mr Corbyn on Wednesday night at Westminster and another one on Thursday night in Oldham Town Hall, and the brave boys of New Labour would have acted.

Alas for Blairism, the people of Oldham didn’t do as the Blairites wanted. This, of course was immediately said to be in spite of Jeremy Corbyn, and not to his credit. If it had gone the other way, it would (I promise you) have been entirely his fault, and the people’s verdict on Corbynism.

David Cameron and his media helpers really, really want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.  Mr Cameron’s attitude towards Mr Corbyn at Question Time is one of real, venomous enmity. He ignores Mr Corbyn’s actual questions (this week those questions were by common consent pertinent and well-asked) and instead fans the undisguised and inevitable hostility between Mr Corbyn and his MPs.

Why does he do this? You’d think he’d want to keep Mr Corbyn there, if he’s as awful and useless as we are constantly being told.

On Channel Four News last night ( a programme which might once have been a good deal more sympathetic to Corbynism than it would now like to admit, having become a Blairite organ like all the rest) , there was speculation after the supposedly disastrous Labour reshuffle that we were heading for a one-party state, as Labour is now so enfeebled.

Again, you’d think the Tories would like that. But they plainly don’t. The identifiable sycophants of David Cameron in the media are dedicated to attacks on Mr Corbyn, attacks so relentless that you would think there was nothing else to write about, that the economy was fine (rather than poised on a precipice) that the NHS was perfect (rather than in increasingly deep difficulties) and that the Prime Minister’s attempts to escape his EU referendum pledge (a hopeless, illogical tangle) were going well. Not to mention disasters visible to me daily such as the hopeless delay on the electrification of the Great Western mainline, miles behind timetable and mountains of money over budget. Let’s forget HS2 and the Heathrow expansion, or the relentless slither towards a Scottish secession, and the utter failure of all attempts to control our borders.  

No, the most important thing in politics turns out to be whether Mike Who swaps jobs with Brenda What, and if Stan Nobody has quit his non-job as deputy minister for Tramways and Fine Arts, in protest at the easing out of Albert Whatsit from his non-job as Shadow Secretary of State for Wind Farms.

Billed for weeks as the ‘revenge reshuffle’,  it was supposed to be a sort of Westminster version of the Red Wedding in ‘Game of Thrones’, with the Shadow Cabinet corridor knee-deep in blood and littered with grotesque political corpses and the weltering, obscene figures of the dying,  crying ‘treachery!’ and ‘murder!’ What, I wonder, was the source for this fantasy? I don’t think Mr Corbyn talks much to the Parliamentary Lobby, who he rightly recognises are not his friends.

The actual event (in which great crowds of reporters hung about stairwells and lift-shafts trying to find something, anything interesting to write about)  involved Jeremy Corbyn boring  a few colleagues half to death with conciliatory, polite conversations, and getting rid of a few people from (unpaid, unimportant) jobs because they disagree with him about major policy issues. Well, I never. A party leader who wants allies in his Shadow Cabinet.

Well,  I never, a party leader whose authority comes from the old-fashioned left-wing party membership clashing with a new-fashioned left-wing Parliamentary Party whose authority comes from their endorsement by the media and the money men who decide who’s top in politics.

For the first time in my life, this country is actually coming to resemble the Marxist caricature of crude money and power, concentrated in a power elite,  versus the disdained people – a caricature that has never hitherto been true at all and which does not prove that the Marxists were right.

For the power and the money are all lined up on the side of the revolutionary radicals of Blairism,  whose origins (even if they don’t know it) lie in the raw pre-Lenin, (and pre-Kautsky) Marxism of 1848  - fanatical egalitarians ready to wreck the education of millions for an ideology , wild, dogmatic warmists ready to wreck our economy for the sake of their faith, flingers-open of borders at any cost, wagers of liberal wars and bombing campaigns, overthrowers of foreign governments which don’t conform to their desires,  servile slaves of foreign authorities which accord with their desires, viciously intolerant promoters of the most all-embracing social and cultural theory since the Reformation.

To these people, now dominating the House of Commons, the media and the academy, Mr Corbyn is (paradoxically) an infuriatingly conservative person, who (for the wrong reasons, but never mind) keeps open the possibility that they might be wrong, and (worse) that they might one day be defeated by discontent. He thinks in categories they have long ago abandoned, nation, class and history. His old-fashioned good manners alone are a reproach to the modern go-getter who has none.

No, no, I don’t agree with him. Don’t get carried away. But they loathe him just as much as they loathe me – and for what is basically the same reason - anyone with a memory is an obstacle to their project

The only opposition they are ready to tolerate is one that doesn’t raise any awkward questions. They expect to beat Labour whoever leads it. But they don’t want the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition  - still an implicitly influential position - to haunt them with memories of when this country had a genuinely two-party system and all that went with that. As Richard Neville said so perceptively right at the start of this revolution 50 and more years ago ‘There is an inch of difference between the two parties – but it is in that inch that we all live’ .

 I think that’s it, anyway.  I just felt like letting rip against all this humbug and garbage.

PETER HITCHENS: You wanted honest leaders - so stop whining now that you've got one

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

We say we want politicians who are open and honest. And then, when we get one, we angrily pelt him with slime until he cringes to the mob, starts hiding his real views, and hires a spin doctor just like all the others.

So don’t let me hear you complaining again that our leaders are too smooth and obsessed with their images.

I loathe and despise most of what Jeremy Corbyn stands for, but a reasonably long life has taught me that quite a lot of people agree with him and not with me.

We say we want politicians who are open and honest. And then, when we get one, we angrily pelt him with slime until he cringes to the mob, starts hiding his real views, and hires a spin doctor just like the others

 

I think our wonderful laws and constitution thrive because of this difference. Nobody is right all the time. A fierce and principled opposition stops a fat, complacent government from making stupid mistakes.

We all live in that inch or two of difference that ought to exist between the two main parties, but which recently vanished.

And I might add, these freedoms were what the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots saved when they won the Battle of Britain. Some of them may have been unsure about the Monarchy, if they’d had time to think about it. And I wonder how many of the soldiers who slogged doggedly through the Western Desert, Burma, Italy and Normandy were a bit Left-wing, too.

The world’s full of countries where you have to salute the leader and sing the party song in public. This isn’t one of them, so to hell with all the superpatriots who condemned Jeremy Corbyn for not singing God Save The Queen.

What are they patriotic for, exactly, if not the freedom to dissent, the crown of all our liberties and our greatest achievement?

So don’t let me hear you complaining again that our leaders are too smooth and obsessed with their images

 

And do you really think that the Blairite smoothies, who pretended to be patriots and monarchists, really were? Do you prefer liars to honest men?

I’d much rather have a lone and awkward Jeremy Corbyn, respectfully staying silent during the singing of a song he didn’t agree with, than the ghastly pretence of Anthony Blair’s fake welcome to Downing Street in 1997, when Labour Party workers were bussed into Downing Street and ordered to impersonate a patriotic crowd.

How most of them must have hated waving the Union Jack, a flag such people despise. Yet through such fakery, attacked at the time only by me, Blair came to office and was able to smash up much of our free constitution.

As for the rest of them, I have to note that Mr Rupert Murdoch, owner of the media keenest to harry Mr Corbyn, has pledged his own allegiance to the American Republic and said, in a Sydney lecture in 2008: ‘If I were in a position to vote, it would be for a republic.’

Mr Murdoch, who kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford, declared during Australia’s last referendum on the Monarchy: ‘The British Monarchy has become irrelevant to this generation of Australians.’

Which brings me to Malcolm Turnbull, new leader of Australia’s answer to the Tory Party, and another avowed republican. There’s no organic connection between these careerists and our ancient traditions.

As I survey the smarmy, modernising ranks of Mr Cameron’s Blairite rabble, I feel pretty sure that they would abolish the Crown in a moment if they thought it would help them stay in office.

I want Mr Corbyn to lose any Election he fights, but I want him to lose it to people who really disagree with him, not people who pretend to do so.

 

 

The pills myth finally crumbles

 

 

 

The huge power of the pill-makers, and the potent lobby of influential people who swallow their products, have long prevented a serious discussion of alleged antidepressant medications.

Do they have severe side effects? (Yes.) Are they as effective as their makers claim? (No.)

This is hugely important, as in some parts of this country one person in six is taking such drugs.

Last week, the dam began to break. First, an Oxford University study noted that young people aged 15 to 24 who take certain kinds of ‘antidepressant’ medication are more likely to commit violent crimes, more likely to be involved in non-violent crime, and to have alcohol problems.

They didn’t say the pills caused these difficulties. They don’t know. But they called for further research. So do I. Soon afterwards, scientists writing for the New Scientist re-examined drug trials of an ‘antidepressant’ and found that the original test was dangerously wrong, and that none of the 22 named authors of the resulting report had actually written it.

It was instead penned by a writer hired by the manufacturer of the drug.

This sort of thing stinks, as do the colossal amounts of money made by this industry. Nothing short of a proper Government-backed inquiry will do.

 

 

Beguiling Anna... betrayed by a pathetic ending

 

The ending of the BBC Sunday night drama Odyssey, starring Anna Friel, was an infuriating disappointment.

Instead of tying up its multiple plots, it ended with almost nothing resolved, and a sort of plea for a second series.

I fear this isn’t going to happen – the drama was shoved into a later slot in its final weeks, never a sign of network enthusiasm.

The ending of the BBC Sunday night drama Odyssey, starring Anna Friel, was an infuriating disappointment

 

I suspect many watchers, like me, came to care about the characters despite the often incredible storyline and the ladles full of political correctness.

Can someone please tell us what happened to them in the end?

 

Power cuts are now a real danger.

Mad warmist rules are about to force the needless closure of Eggborough Power Station in Yorkshire, a perfectly sound, coal-fired plant which – until it shuts – can supply electricity to two million homes.

This follows the equally insane destruction of Didcot A last year. I promise you, windmills won’t fill the gap. 

 

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You may have missed last week’s extraordinary double rebellion by David Davis, the man who ought to have beaten David Cameron to the leadership of the Tory Party.

Grammar school-educated Mr Davis grew up on a council estate and had a successful career in business before going into politics.

His eloquent objections to foolishly restrictive trade union laws, and his defiant vote against the abrupt withdrawal of tax credits from working families, were in fact the most interesting political events of the week.

 

*****

Yes, it is disgusting, isn’t it, to call for IRA men to be honoured?

Those responsible for forcing the Queen to invite Martin McGuinness to dinner at Windsor Castle should certainly be made to apologise in public. 

 

Some Further Thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn and the Borders Crisis

I thought I’d post a few further thoughts on the great Corbasm, and the events in Germany over the weekend.

 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the obvious rage and discontent among political journalists (who have spent the last five years and lots of money taking Blairites to lunch, all now wasted) who are appalled at the cheek of the Labour Party in picking a candidate they don’t know and don’t like. This isn’t much to do with politics. In my experience few political journalists have any interest in politics or any interesting views on the subject. They’re all ‘modernisers’ or ‘centrists’, meaningless expressions which (being interpreted) mean that they unthinkingly accept whatever conventional wisdom is until it changes, whereupon they accept the new conventional wisdom. 

First Corbyn wouldn’t win. Then he did. Then there would be a putsch against him. Then his majority made that rather difficult. Then he wouldn’t be able to form a Shadow Cabinet. Then he did.  Then there weren’t enough women in the new Shadow Cabinet (fat lot I care, not believing that someone’s sex is, by itself, either a qualification or a disqualification for political office). Then there were more women in it than men. Then none of them was Shadow Chancellor. Well, there aren’t that many women in great offices of state (so-called) in the real Cabinet, and I don’t recall Mr Cameron being quizzed very hard on this, or anything else much.

The reporters have seldom been so out of the loop. Perhaps that’s why, on the BBC at lunchtime, Mr Corbyn was interviewed with the camera practically shoved up his right nostril,  an angle that could reasonably be described as unflattering. Gosh, how one wishes that all this suspicion and hostility had been unleashed on the Blair creature when *he* was first elected, amid much adulation and almost no questioning, back in 1994. 

 

I still think those who dismiss Corbynism as a purely leftist upsurge need to explain the very large public meetings which took place wherever he spoke. My own solitary experience of one of these did not suggest that those attending were solely battle-hardened old Bennites yearning for their lost youth. Many were simply curious, and indeed enthused by a feeling that they were being asked their opinion, and doing something that they had been told not to do. 

 

What is so great about the other politicians, exactly? Can someone tell me? What are they good at? What do they stand for? What do they know?  What are their great qualifications? I agree that Mr Corbyn is undistinguished, academically or in life. But that would be a more powerful argument if he weren't up against the veterans of various Bullingdon club offensives in the restaurants of Oxfordshire, heading a Cabinet of forgettable nonentities whose names and deeds few can recall.  It's not as if the Cameron Cabinet is full of decorated warriors, brilliant businessmen, academic giants or anything else much. 

 

There is a malaise abroad in this country and it is not confined to left-wingers. Anyone with any memory knows that this is a worrying and uncertain time, full of signs and portents.  The glass is falling, hour by hour, if you care to look.

 

Where will the young find proper jobs? How will they pay the enormous debts they are contracting? How will the British government pay the enormous debts it is contracting? Historically, the only way out of indebtedness on this scale has been the debauched horror of hyper-inflation, which destroys the middle class, and so destroys stability and responsibility.

 

How will they find places to live that they can afford? Where and how will they educate their children? Are these claims of brilliance in non-selective academies true? If they are, why don’t Michael Gove, who created and talked up so many of them, and the Prime Minister, who is always saying how wonderful they are, send their own children to them?

 

 

For the middle-aged, there is a different set of worries.  In many former industrial areas, jobs have vanished,  shops are boarded up and houses unlet and unsaleable. How long can society endure in such surroundings? Can nobody stop my neighbourhood being devoured by cars and traffic?  Or, in the countryside, is there now to be no limit on the expansion of what were once compact, pleasant villages into ugly sprawl, composed of cardboard hutches too small for civilised life, whose occupants can hear their neighbours breathing? Who will replace the doctors who have served me all my adult life and who are now retiring in increasing numbers, or going abroad for better conditions?(this is an even greater problem in country practices, where in many cases they will simply come to an end when the current generation retire).

 

Why must we submit to the growing retreat of supposed services – so that we cannot contact our town halls, our banks, the police,  our utility companies or anyone else, especially when problems arise and when we need them most? I think it also fair to say the welfare system has a habit of making life hardest for those who need it most, while turning a blind eye to many who are abusing it.

 

Must we endure the replacement of so many unskilled workers, especially in shops,  by robots? Whom does this benefit?

 

There may not be much official  inflation, but there is a form of inflation targeted on the thrifty - the prices of valuable assets, especially housing, are soaring out of reach, while savings accumulated over decades are quietly but relentlessly shrinking because of near-zero interest rates. And none of us can guarantee that the only assets most of us own - our houses – will not have to be sold for ‘care’ at our lives’ ends.  It is not much comfort that few of us could now afford to buy the houses we own, when much of this fairy gold will be snatched away before we can hand it on.

 

And for all, of course, there is the great uncertainty of mass immigration, which I discuss below. Much has already taken place. How much more will there be? How will it affect our lives? 

 

***

Look at the amazing reversal in Germany. Just days after declaring that migrants were welcome, Germany has slammed shut its borders and halted trains from Austria and Hungary.

Germany, whose hoity-toity adoption of the Schengen no-borders agreement was always very pointed, now wishes to suspend that very agreement, having found that open borders work in several different ways. The last time I flew to a certain German airport from London, I noticed the ill-tempered way in which, as non-Schengen passengers, we were treated.   The immigration desk was set up so close to the bridge which led off the plane that the passport queue stretched back into the aircraft itself. The German passport officials scowled at us with a sort of Iron Curtain ferocity.  I had the strong impression, though of course I cannot prove it, that we were being punished for our irritating nonconformism. The distant facility-free corrals in other continental airports, used for non-Schengen passengers waiting to depart, do tend to give the same impression.

 

Germany wanted a free flow of cheap labour into its territory, and a free flow of goods outwards. I’ve for years been astonished at how little attention has been paid to Schengen and its political implications. Perhaps that’s because I travel quite a lot on the continent, in my xenophobic, Europhobic way, and still can’t get over the way things have changed since the borders were enforced.   How can the countries involved still claim to *be* countries when they’ve renounced any real power to decide who enters and leaves their territory (this question should also be asked of the UK which has gone most of the way to borderlessness by accepting the EU passport and abolishing its own). Yet the external border of the EU is still vigorously enforced. And they say it isn’t an empire. Like, hello? Amusingly, it is Germany which on this occasion has closed *its* frontiers against its subject nations, which makes it easier for them to do the same.  

 

But the multitudes who arrived over the weekend at Munich railway station (many of them, judging by films I’ve seen, not from Syria or anywhere near it)  have put a stop to that. Has Germany’s regularly over-rated Chancellor, Angela Merkel, now grasped the simple point that an unquestioning open door to economic migrants will increase the numbers of such migrants? News of this kind travels very fast in the modern world. I gather there is a growing market for real and faked Syrian passports.

 

While reasonable weather lasts, all who can will try to cross from Turkey to Greece, and from Libya to Italy, to get to Germany and Sweden. Some will fail, horribly.  Many will succeed.

 

But that’s only a small part of the reality.  This will not end when the weather turns bad at the equinox. It will return next year and the year after, and for decades to come. Migrants become citizens. And most of the migrants now arriving here come from societies where the clan is strong, where every man has an obligation to his many cousins. Once they are citizens, they will become a potent and irresistible lobby for ‘family reunification’,  an unending process by which they will bring family members into EU territory, much as Hispanic migrants have done in the USA, transforming the culture of that country in 25 years, and continuing to do so even now. It is a fact, whether you approve of it or not, that we are talking about transformation, not a minor adjustment.

 

I stress that this is, on the migrants’ part, a perfectly reasonable response to EU governments which have resolved to welcome them.  I don’t blame them, or criticise them. As I have said before, I admire their enterprise and courage. Moving to another country, even in good circumstances, is a hard thing to do.

 

I criticise the many European governments which have acted to encourage migrants to act (perfectly rationally) in this way. This is what they decided to support, when they resolved on the policy of welcome. That is what the campaigners support, who urge a policy of welcome. 

Did Jesus really say 'blessed are the queue-jumping knifemen?'

 

THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN

I’m always a bit suspicious of the sort of person who argues by saying ‘What would Jesus have said?’ They usually mean that they are quite sure Jesus would have agreed with them.
My favourite example of this was always the Blair creature, reproved by Cardinal Basil Hume for taking Catholic communion when he wasn’t a Catholic. The then Labour leader peevishly responded: ‘I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.’
My guess is that Jesus would have told Mr Blair (who converted to Rome once he’d left Downing Street) to decide whether his faith or his political career came first. But it’s only a guess, based on Our Lord’s known retorts to one or two other uppity lawyers. And, of course, it’s what I think.
Now we’re being asked, by the Dean of Durham, what Jesus would do about the migrant camp at Calais. This is because of the BBC’s plan to broadcast in today’s Songs Of Praise sections filmed at a makeshift church in that camp.
This is not by any means the only such lecture from that direction I’ve heard recently.
I’m not bothered much by the broadcast. BBC bias is a fact of life and that’s that. And I can’t say that screening film from such a place on Songs Of Praise is a bad idea in itself. Christians ought to be thinking about such things.
But thinking is what these prelates and preachers are not doing. Is it as simple as they claim? I am far from sure. The founder of the Christian church was not actually a guerrilla fighter or a Russell Brand-type demagogue. He had nothing against people obeying laws or fulfilling their obligations. I’d say, rather the opposite.
He was himself a genuine refugee, hiding in Egypt from the real, murderous wrath of Herod. But when the danger was past, his family didn’t settle in Egypt but returned home.
Nowhere in the Beatitudes did Jesus say ‘Blessed are the queue-jumpers’, trying to gain an advantage at the expense of others. This is what the people at Calais are.
They are not prepared to apply for asylum or seek visas and work permits in the normal way. Their actions make people in this country less willing to grant any asylum, or to welcome any migration.
They force their way into lorries and trains, or break down a lawfully constructed fence, sometimes clutching drawn knives as they do so. Many destroy their passports so that the truth about their origins and claims can never be proved. Why precisely is it Christian to endorse this behaviour?
As the Left-wing media have rightly been pointing out, only quite a small share of the migrants arriving in Europe from Africa and elsewhere actually end up at Calais. They are already out of danger (if they were ever in it) and have chosen to be there.
As for the parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero of the story didn’t tell other people to be compassionate and generous. He did it himself. I am full of admiration for any individual who offers to take such migrants into his own home indefinitely, and to bear the charges (as the Good Samaritan did) of their housing, food and medical treatment.
But I have none at all for the pulpit Samaritan who tells others in our overcrowded country that they must suffer for the sake of his own peace of mind.

Amnesty's now a lost cause 

After what must be at least 30 years, I’m finally going to stop being a member of Amnesty. I joined because I thought it was a good deed in a wicked world, working to free prisoners of conscience from the dungeons of Right-wing and Left-wing despots.
Prompted by Amnesty, I wrote polite letters to such despots, urging the release of people I often disagreed with, because I thought then and think now that nobody should be imprisoned for expressing an opinion.
I must admit it has been a while since I did that (or was asked to do so), but the end of the Cold War did not end the need for such a campaign. China, Asia and the Muslim world still have plenty of political prisoners. But Amnesty seems to have developed other ideas.
A few years ago, it began to campaign on behalf of convicts on death row in the USA.
It’s a perfectly reasonable cause – though I don’t happen to agree with it, being a convinced supporter of the death penalty in free countries. But it has absolutely nothing to do with prisoners of conscience. The USA, for all its faults, does not execute people for holding opinions.
What’s more, it’s politically partisan. Left-wing people tend to oppose capital punishment, Conservative people such as me tend to support it. The whole point of Amnesty was that it was a place where we could forget our divisions in the cause of liberty.
I protested, uselessly, and carried on paying my dues. But now Amnesty has decided to support decriminalisation (they mean legalisation) of prostitution. Once again, it’s a political, partisan position. Even if I agreed with it (which I don’t) I really cannot see what it has to do with prisoners of conscience. I suspect it will make it harder for Amnesty to campaign for such people, its real concern.
Like so many other once-noble charities, Amnesty has lost its way. I’m sure it’s not remotely interested in what I think of its behaviour and I’m sure it won’t make any difference. But that’s enough. I’m very sorry, but I’m off.

*******

An exasperated Sherlock Holmes would often scold Dr Watson with the words: ‘You see, but you do not observe.’
His point was that the clues were all there in front of us, if only we had the sense to see what mattered and what was connected.
Take the horrible stabbing of the teacher Vincent Uzomah by a teenage pupil. Much fuss has been made about the boy’s use of a racial insult.
But far more important is the fact that the knife-wielding child is, at the age of 14, a cannabis user (when arrested for the knife crime, he was also charged with cannabis possession). I more or less knew that he would be as soon as I heard of the crime.
The correlation is incredibly strong. Why is it not investigated?

*******

Given our recent record of pouring  petrol on to the flames of war in Iraq,  Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, may I suggest  we are very careful about training Ukrainian soldiers? There are some pretty sinister  people in Ukraine’s chaotic army. We may  not want to be associated with some of the things they are going to do.

******

Do all the attackers of Jeremy Corbyn  not see that his supporters thrive on their assaults? This is a great revolt by those who  are sick of being told what to do by people like Alastair Campbell.

If the bearded Lefty wins, it's the Tories who'll be a whisker away from disaster

THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN 

Smug Tories who rejoice at Jeremy Corbyn’s seeming march towards the Labour Party leadership should be careful what they wish for.

There are two ways in which this could go wrong for them. One is the constant risk that George Osborne’s supposed recovery finally runs out of luck, and is revealed as the conjuring trick that it is.

In that case, a bearded radical Left party might do surprisingly well, as they have found in Greece and are finding in Spain. A serious dose of unemployment and a spate of bank failures can make the unelectable electable quite quickly.

The other is the risk that Mr Osborne’s alleged recovery doesn’t run out of luck, and the Tories face and trounce a Corbynised Labour Party at the next Election.

That would probably do for Labour as an organisation once and for all. Destroyed in Scotland and flattened in England, it would no longer be able to raise serious money or act as a proper opposition.

And if Labour collapses and splits, as it then well might do, the Tories will quickly be in deep trouble. They will lack an enemy. And as Nato found out after the break-up of the Soviet Union, that is a cruel fate.

NATO has been frantically searching for a new foe ever since, to justify its existence and to hold the alliance together. Luckily, there is always a sinister bogeyman somewhere on the planet, usually with a beard or moustache, who can be portrayed as a menace.

But it is even worse for the Tories. The party’s leaders hate the members and despise their voters. The members and the voters mistrust the leaders. The party’s MPs are a brawling coalition ranging from the Gay Liberation Front and fanatical feminism to the outer edges of Ukip. The only thing that keeps this unprincipled, nonsensical mechanism from flying apart is universal hatred and fear of Labour.

The only slogan that really worked for them in 2010 was ‘We have to get Gordon Brown out!’ The only slogan that really worked in 2015 was ‘Stop Red Ed!’ Something similar will certainly work well against Mr Corbyn in 2020, unless we are all queuing for food banks by then (don’t rule it out).

Imagine the dawn breaking, in May 2020, on a Britain in which there were no Gordon Browns and no Red Eds left, and Labour just a bankrupt rump.

I’d give it six months before the cracks in the Tory Party began to spread and deepen. By 2025, there might well be no Tory Party either. I wouldn’t be at all sorry about that.

Today’s Tory Party is indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour, and is probably more Marxist in practice than Jeremy Corbyn is in theory.

But those Tories who think Mr Corbyn’s rise is just a little joke might be very sorry indeed.

*****

What was it about Camila Batmanghelidjh? She is the most unpronounceable famous person since Eduard Shevardnadze. She dresses to resemble one of those lurid tinned fruit salads that helped to make the 1950s so distinctive.
Her ultra-sweet smile becomes a fierce scowl at the first sign of challenge. A phalanx of Left-wing media people has now formed protectively round her, suggesting that wicked journalists and politicians undermined a saintly figure.
But I have never seen any actual hard, testable evidence that her Kids Company charity was effective in solving the undoubted problems it claimed to address.
One report, published by one of our most respected academic institutions, is prefaced by a torrent of gush: ‘I met Camila Batmanghelidjh in 2007 and was immediately struck by the beauty and profound truth of her simple message: children recover with unconditional and unrelenting love. Holding and listening, containing and never giving them up are practical solutions for all children.’
No doubt. But what did they actually do? Precisely how many children did they help? How precisely did they help them? What exactly has since happened to them? What was all that money – much of it yours and mine, including State grants and a chunky tax rebate – spent on?
Were envelopes full of cash handed out to teenagers? Is it true that, as one ‘client’ told BBC Radio 4’s The Report: ‘It was weed heaven on Friday, it was weed everywhere. You could smell it from down the road, like from London Bridge… they would come into the building high.’
And what about the former worker who recalled angry ‘clients’ ‘going ballistic’ demanding more cash, saying they only came for the money. He remembered one waving a baseball bat and saying he wouldn’t go home until he got his money.
According to Ms Batmanghelidjh, if they made a ‘poor choice’ with the money they were given, that was ‘part of the learning curve’. What did they learn from her?
What do you think would happen to someone who set up a charity in the same part of London, offering abandoned children rules, morals, disciplined education, absolute prohibition of drugs, regular bedtimes, that sort of thing? Do you think millions of corporate and State money would arrive, or that Ministers and media figures would rush to its aid? No, nor do I.
Indulgence is the spirit of our age and as long as you don’t defy it, you’ll be fine. And if it hadn’t been for some determined and courageous reporting, Kids Company might still be carrying on unquestioned, with your money, now.

*****

Is there no way of getting supermarkets to stop their cruel  price squeeze on dairy farmers? The end of it will be that we will destroy such farmers. We will then find ourselves relying on inferior imported milk, and wondering why so much of our once lovely countryside is desolate or concreted over.

*****

Here’s a clue as to why Britain and France have been competing  so hard to please Saudi Arabia, by overthrowing Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and trying to oust Syria’s President Assad. Saudi contracts for projects and aircraft have been pouring into France – and now there’s a feasibility study for nuclear reactors. Where’s the UK’s share? Perhaps we lost it  when Parliament voted to stay out of Syria.

******

It’s interesting how thrillers reflect the times we live in. In the latest Mission: Impossible, Anglo- American relations are chilly and suspicious. 

Rebecca Ferguson, for instance, plays an MI6 agent gone rogue, with an unusually elegant, even musical, approach to assassinating Western leaders. Her boss is even worse, and is, very curiously, called Attlee. 

Will the villain in the next in the series be called Corbyn? 

Times tables? No, the only maths we teach children is 'go forth and multiply'

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

There are three months to go before the Election and we are already chest-deep in ludicrous partisan drivel. Funny that the more alike the parties are, the more slime they chuck over each other.

But education is a special case even in this miserable apology for a national debate. For instance, the Prime Minister is now promising an all-out ‘war on mediocrity’, which will be waged by nationalising as many schools as possible.

I suppose that means that all our children will be above average, yet another example of Mr Cameron’s strange arithmetic.

We already know he can’t tell the national debt from the deficit. He revealed in a TV documentary last week that he thinks three halves make a whole. His increase in school spending turned out to be a cut.

And, along with his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, he didn’t dare answer a question on times tables.

Political maths, I suspect, work on a completely different principle, and have more to do with how much money you can squeeze out of a hedge-fund billionaire in a tax shelter.

Yet Ms Morgan had begun the political week by promising a new emphasis on the ‘three Rs’, and saying that all children leaving primary school should know their times tables.

Sound familiar? Possibly. Who ‘ordered a curriculum review to boost grammar, classic literature, traditional methods of learning to read and spelling’?

Why, it was the forgotten Tory Education Secretary John Patten, in September 1992. In November 1994, another one, Gillian Shephard, launched a ‘school blueprint aimed at putting the “three Rs” at the centre of lessons’.

In January 1996, Shadow Education Secretary David Blunkett urged teachers to concentrate on the ‘three Rs’. A few days later Anthony Blair, then Opposition Leader, condemned the ‘appalling’ levels of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren. By January 1998, these two were in office, and Mr Blunkett was demanding, yes, a return to chanting times tables.

Apparently nobody was paying attention, because a year later it was revealed that ‘schoolkids will be going back to learning their times tables tomorrow as David Blunkett scraps 30 years of trendy maths teaching’.

In September 2004, they still weren’t listening, as an academic study demanded that ‘schoolchildren should be made to chant their multiplication tables in class’.

By August 2006, the Labour Education Secretary was Alan Johnson, who proclaimed that children would be fast-tracked through their times tables in a string of reforms to the way the ‘three Rs’ were taught in primary schools.

But by December 2010 it was reported that ‘one in four 11-year-olds leaves primary school without a proper grasp of the three Rs, according to detailed Government data released yesterday’.

And lo, in June 2012, Ms Morgan’s forerunner, Michael Gove, was reported to be planning to ‘tear up the rules’ about what must be taught in primary school. Among his plans, yes... times tables were to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at school ‘for the first time in decades’.

There’ll be another Education Secretary along soon. Just wait for him or her to make the same pledge. And then laugh.

The only times table that actually applies to these people is the nought times table. A thousand times nought still makes nought. The only multiplication our children are reliably taught and encouraged to do is sexual reproduction.

And as long as our political leaders jointly refuse to restore order, authority and selection in the state schools, the result will be the same.

Don't fall for the sex education myth

People still mistakenly think that there is an important difference between the Tory and Labour parties over sex propaganda in schools.

On the contrary, both parties are entirely wedded to the radical sex-liberation policies of the 1960s, now the iron-bound law of the land, which it is dangerous to question, let alone disobey.

Mr Cameron, when he was still Leader of the Opposition in April 2010, had this exchange with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight:

Paxman: ‘You’re in favour of faith schools being able to teach sex education as they like?’

Cameron: ‘Not as they like. That’s not right. What we voted for was what the Government suggested in the end, which is proper sex education...’

Paxman: ‘Should they be free to teach that homosexuality is wrong, abortion is wrong, contraception is wrong?’

‘No, and the [Labour] Government discussed this and came up with a good idea, which is to say that we wanted a clearer path of sexual education across all schools, but faith schools were not given any exemption, but they were able to reflect some of their own faith in the way that this was taught.

‘But no, you must teach proper lessons in terms of gay equality and also combat homophobic bullying in schools, I think that’s extremely important.’

I’d be interested to see evidence that such teaching does actually reduce bullying.

But in any case, it’s quite clear that the ‘Conservative’ Party has no serious differences with Labour on this.

If you don’t like Tristram Hunt’s latest plans for talking about sex to tots, don’t expect any help from the Tories.

I wonder what God makes of Mr Fry

My old adversary Stephen Fry (he calls  me a ‘slug’) has been attacking God on TV, calling the Ancient of Days ‘capricious, mean-minded’, 'selfish’ and  ‘a maniac’.

Obviously Mr Fry, left, gets to meet God quite a lot, being so important and all, but it would be good if someone could get the Almighty to let us know what He thinks of Mr Fry.

Falling into the Islamic State trap

I absolutely decline to watch horror videos showing fanatics murdering their prisoners. I am sure it is morally wrong to do so.  

I am still haunted by my decision, when I was younger, to witness two lawful executions of heinous convicted murderers.

But aside from that, I believe these zealots hope we will watch this obscenity and as a result lose our reason and launch unwise and stupid attacks on them, which will end in our moral and physical defeat. Some people are already falling into this trap.

Arming Kiev

I have never doubted for a moment that Russia is aiding the rebels in Ukraine with men and munitions, though this is difficult to prove.

What puzzles me is that so many do not seem to suspect that the USA and other Nato countries are likewise helping Ukraine’s shambolic army fight the war we urged them to start. How naive can you be? The American threats to arm Kiev’s forces may already have been carried out, but by deniable and indirect routes (as happened  in Afghanistan).

I continue to be amazed at the enthusiasm in this country for getting involved in the third major European war in a century. What do we hope to gain?

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