Subversive Thoughts about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race

The nearest I ever got to rowing was (unbelievable as it seems to me now, with a BMI of 27.4) as cox of the Leys School, Cambridge’s sixth VIII. They only had six of them. And I was only doing it  to get out of playing hockey (what North Americans call ‘field hockey’).

 

I had always thought of this as a girls’ game, and no school I had ever attended had played it. Suddenly I was confronted with it.   A couple of experiences on freezing fenland fields in January persuaded me that it was not for me in any way – a great deal of ridiculous boredom plus the lurking danger of a rather hard ball in the face.

 

How to escape? I would later pay people to play cricket for me (two shillings seemed to me to be a small price for avoiding an entire afternoon of tedium, and nobody ever noticed that I wasn’t there). But this was Cambridge, where there was another Spring term sport, rowing, and somehow there was a shortage of small, slight persons to be coxes.

 

No, I wasn’t especially good at it, not least because my voice was half way through breaking and would veer from a boom to a squeak , and perhaps back again, in mid-bellow. But I can still recall the set of commands necessary to turn a thin-skinned and fragile boat round in the middle of the Cam, with a large gin-palace pleasure cruiser bearing down on us. (‘Hitchens!!’ a voice from the bank still echoes in my head,  ‘Do you have ANY idea how much that boat COSTS?’ ) . The procedure for lifting the thing out of the river, which I usually managed flawlessly,  has by contrast vanished from my mind.

 

Eventually, we won a race, thanks to the boat in front sinking (one of the crew had put his foot through the bottom and an attempt to stem the leak by stuffing sweaters into it had failed, badly). Still they manfully struggled on, and even as they filled with water we struggled to catch up with them. We just managed to bump them the moment before they went under, which apparently counted.

 

So I  know the difference between bow and stroke, what a slide is and various other arcane things which make me slightly more interested in the boat race than I would otherwise be which, in truth, is not very much.

 

But on Sunday, during an appearance on the Andrew Marr show on BBC1, in which , together with Lesley Riddoch, I reviewed the newspapers,…

 

(The programme can be viewed here,

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05rjst7/the-andrew-marr-show-12042015

the paper review begins at about six minutes into the programme)

 

…the subject came up once again. This time it was because of the decision to row the women’s Oxford-Cambridge race on the same day, and on the same course,  as the men’s, thus giving it parity with the male version.

 

I remarked  ( as I said, subversively) that the winning women’s crew had taken rather longer to finish the course than the winning men’s crew. The difference was about two minutes, which may not seem much, but is quite a bit in a race (imagine if the Cambridge crew in either race had come in two minutes behind Oxford).

 

That was all I said, but it didn’t take long for the protests to begin on Twitter, boring, unresponsive, and baseless as they were. Leftist ultra-feminists instinctively understood that what I had said was indeed subversive of their orthodoxy, but didn’t choose to ask themselves why. For to do so is to admit something about modern ultra-feminism that they do not wish to admit,  that it is no longer a reasonable quest for reasonable equality, but a dogma-driven attack on the married family and on the historic division of labour between men and women, based fundamentally on the fact that women bear children ( and nourish small babies) and men don’t.  

 

It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this argument, whether you think that this attack is a good or a bad thing.  I think most readers here know that I think it a bad thing, and know why I think it a bad thing. What does matter is that it is advanced under a false flag, and that many of those who give in to it do so without understanding what it is that they are giving in to. This must surely be wrong. If we wish to make deep and radical reforms in our society, then we should call them by their proper names.

 

Instead, they accused me, quite falsely of arguing that the women’s crews didn’t deserve any praise ( I don’t think this ) or of misogyny (I am not a misogynist). I suspect they don’t even know what the word means, and use it as a grandiose substitute for ‘sexist’.

 

Now of course, it is difficult for anyone, in practice, not to be a ‘sexist’, as men and women have many important differences, and if we did not treat them differently in many ways, all the time, we would run into all kinds of trouble. Everybody knows this, but, so that the word can be used as if it were the exact equivalent of ‘racist’, everyone pretends not to know it and feigns shock or outrage when it is pointed out.  By confusing ‘sexism’ with ‘racism’ one also avoids any real examination of the claim that is being made. Racism (or racialism as I still prefer to call it) is repulsive precisely because it is unreasoning and stupid. To treat someone differently from someone else *when he or she is not different* is the essence of unreasoning stupidity.

 

That is also why it is ridiculous to have denied women education, equal pay for equal work, legal autonomy, property rights  or the vote. The differences between the sexes simply do not affect such things.

 

But the next stage of feminism seems to me to have moved out of the area of reason and fact, and into the zone of dogma.

 

There is a new belief, that the evident and undeniable differences between women and men  must henceforth be treated as if they did not exist. This seems to me to be more or less the reverse of late 19^th and early 20^th century feminism, which rightly pointed out that women were being denied the freedom to do things they were perfectly capable of doing, because *in such matters* there was no difference between the sexes.

 

This stage of feminism was, I think,  content to accept mid-20^th-century restrictions on women serving in the armed forces, or the police, or the fire service, or in heavy industry. It did not regard such restrictions as irrational or as unfair discrimination, but as reasonable distinctions between the sexes based on undeniable generalities. These generalities were that women, on average, have far less upper body strength than men; and that women alone are capable of bearing children. Indeed, to this day, many low-prestige occupations demanding physical strength – the crewing of dustcarts and the building trade being the obvious examples, though one might think also of deep-sea fishing and what remains of coalmining  – remain almost totally male-dominated and face no campaigns to alter this, no quotas or anything like them.

 

The armed forces, the police and the fire service are under pressure to change because they are high-status occupations, much admired by children looking for examples.  

 

It is true that some women do have as much upper body strength as most men. It is true that some women cannot bear children, and that some do not wish to do so.  But in general, these facts are a rational basis for generally different treatment –provided that rational exceptions are made when justified by the facts.

 

Why depart from this reasonable view, and move to the dogmatic position that all discrimination, even when it has a rational basis, is in itself wrong?

 

Did we, in fact, do so? I believe we did, in the interesting case of Gillian Maxwell,  pursued and won by by then then Equal Opportunities Commission in  1996-1997.

 

The story was as follows : 5ft 3in Mrs Maxwell applied to be a firefighter. She was turned down by the Northern Ireland Fire Authority because she was not tall enough, under the provisions of Fire Services Act of 1947 which stipulated a minimum height of 5 feet 6 inches. With the support of the EOC, she took them to an employment  tribunal, arguing that the existing height rule discriminated against women *because it excluded 60 per cent of the female population*.

 

(I first wrote about this case and its implications many years ago, in this 2002 article:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-124076/Why-I-believe-women-brigade-danger.html

 

I notice, looking back at it, that I use the word ‘extremists’, a mistake I regret, would not now make and which I would correct if I returned to the subject. )

 

This argument was enough to overturn the 1947 Fire Services Act.   

 

Note the reason for the ruling. It wasn’t  that anyone had established that it was a good idea to lower the height restriction, but that the height restriction was axiomatically wrong *because it ‘discriminated against 60% of women’*. That is to say, it made it impossible for 60% of women to join the Fire Service. How many of those women under 5’6”in height actually wanted to join the fire service it is very hard to say. I doubt if there are any records that could be usefully studied, especially now, 18 years after the rule was lifted. But I would guess that it was not very many. I imagine it also prevented quite a large number of men from joining. But that was not ‘discrimination’, in the sense in which it is used here.

 

How do we know? Because no man could have successfully brought this case. He could not have maintained that the rule discriminated against him *because he was male*. Nor could he have said it discriminated against him because he was short, as the EOC and its successors have never made physical height a protected status (an attribute through which one could be ‘discriminated’ against in the modern sense).  Discrimination is merely a long word for ‘choice’. We discriminate when we choose one pizza instead of another . A discriminating person used to be a person of good judgement.  But in its modern meaning it is automatically wrong and a tort in law. But only in certain defined matters, chosen for political reasons.

 

Oddly enough, it is quite possible that the main effect of this ruling has in fact been to stop ‘discrimination’ against weedy men by the Fire Brigade.  It doesn’t really matter to those who pursued the case. Theirs is an ideological aim, not a practical one.   

 

The number of women in the brigade (and there were significant numbers of women firefighters before this decision, who had passed the old physical tests with ease) is still quite small . In 2009, the latest year for which I have figures,  it was said to be 3.3 per cent, well short of the 15 per cent target set by the then Home Secretary  Jack Straw in 1999.  This is despite incessant government campaigns for female recruitment, and a general reduction in physical demands for the job . In the period after 1997 the entry requirements changed considerably.  They did not get tougher. Chest expansion and lung capacity tests were dropped. A simple trial - carrying a 12-stone man for 100 yards in less than a minute -  was scrapped.

 

I do not believe any studies have been carried out on the effect of this on the fire service itself. How would one tell for certain without an incredibly detailed and intrusive investigation? My own suspicion would be that, as in the police, greater height and upper-body strength may well be an advantage in certain specific circumstances.   

 

As it happens, thanks to the decline in smoking, the greatly increased use of fire-retardant materials in buildings and furniture,  huge improvements in electrical wiring, the virtual disappearance of open fires and the mass introduction of smoke alarms, much of the Fire Service’s work is now preventive (the opposite of what has happened to the police, who have become almost wholly reactive). What’s more, even after 16 years of pressure, the Fire Service still contains a large number of old-fashioned firemen. No doubt, in emergencies, all work together as hard as they can to ensure the safety of the public. Maybe they have to work harder to achieve this than they did under the old rules. But outsiders would never know.

 

Another formerly male-dominated service, the morale and discipline of the seagoing Royal Navy, were ( according to a huge amount of anecdotal evidence, occasionally supported by lurid courts martial) damaged by the decision to allow women to go to sea in warships. But the political view was that this had to be done, and done it was. An in-depth study of the outcome would not be welcome. In my experience, the modern Navy is far more reluctant than it used to be to allow journalists to spend time aboard HM ships at sea.

 

It may well be that the image of the Fire Service and the reality are now so far apart, that its old role as a rough tough brigade of big strong men who could carry an unconscious fatty out of a running building and down a ladder, is as outdated as the idea of a train driver being a soot-stained bloke leaning out of a rain-swept cab while his fireman colleague shovelled coal into a roaring furnace. You don’t get much fuss these days about women drivers of trains, do you? Though I’m not sure how many there are.

 

But as long as that image persists, I suspect the ultra-feminists will have the Fire Service high on their list as a target for politically-driven change. Likewise the police and the armed services will never be free of this pressure. At all costs the old Ladybird-book idea of the division of labour between men and women must be erased and replaced by one in which every high-status job can be and is done by women exactly as men do, and the raising of children must not be assumed to have any effect on this at all. Indeed, it must be assumed *not* to have any effect on it.   Any mention of real differences between the sexes is subversive of this dogma, and will become increasingly frowned upon until it is impossible.

The Truth Shall Make You ... Very Cross

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday Column

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Brilliant movie... shame it ignores the truth

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

But once again an American film has badly distorted history.

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

 

At last, the cracks are showing in the racism con

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

That is because there isn’t any.

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

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

 

 

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

I Demand Female Dustpersons Now!

It’s plainly time to revive my campaign for more women on dustcarts, and on those huge, terrifying lorries that deliver and remove skips. Have you noticed that you never see female persons doing these jobs?  Likewise, when gangs turn up to dig holes in the road, you never see any women wielding pneumatic drills. And when was the last time you saw a woman driving a bulldozer? I mean to say, what have Britain’s feminists been doing about this major sex imbalance for so long?

 

Where are the trumpeting leading articles in ‘The Guardian’ on this failure of our society to adapt to the 21^st century?  Where are the bitter interviews of garbage disposal chiefs (that coven of reactionary thought) and of whoever is in charge of road gangs? Why hasn’t the Prime Minister opined? Where, for that matter, has the BBC been? Let us brook no more delay! Let us have women driving dustcarts now! And delivering skips!  

 

 

Of course, we know the answer. Very few women are interested in doing such jobs, and most people would be surprised if they applied for them. But if there really is some sort of overriding moral principle which says that all jobs should be done equally by men and women, that shouldn’t matter. Special training schools should be set up now for female skip-deliverers, bin-emptiers and pneumatic drillers. Mr Slippery should speak out.

 

I don’t imagine anyone would object much (especially employers, who would be able to keep wages in that sector lower if their workers came from a wider pool).

 

 

But that isn’t really the point.

 

The campaigns to feminise various highly important and symbolic jobs are far more to do with annoying people who do have objections to this dogmatic equality, and with dethroning older ideas and conventions, than they are to do with female equality.

 

As someone who is a member of the Church of England (and incidentally couldn’t care two hoots about what sex a Minister or a Bishop is) ,  I laugh to hear BBC reporters getting excited about this subject. They know, of course, as a matter of immutable principle that it is wrong to deny anybody a post on the grounds of sex. But as secular people who’ve probably never entered a church and certainly wouldn’t worship in one, how can they really care about it? The poor things, for instance, have no idea even how to address or refer to the various grades of cleric in the Church of England.

 

They call vicars ‘Reverend Jones’  and address them as ‘Reverend’, which sounds illiterate and ignorant both to an Anglican and to a properly trained journalist.  

 

(Note for the curious:  a vicar is referred to as ‘The Rev(erend) Andrew/Angela Smith’ (Christian name required) the first time he or she is mentioned, and thereafter as ‘Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms Smith’. He or she can be addressed , according to how well you know him or her, and according to his religious opinions, as ‘Vicar’ , ‘Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss Smith  ‘, ‘Andrew’ or ‘Angela’ .Or he may prefer to be addressed as (and written about as) ‘Father Smith’ if he is a bit of an Anglo-Catholic, as quite a few male clergy are, but not many female clergy, as Anglo-Catholics in my experience don’t think women can be priests, or priests can be women –  so a ‘Mother Angela’ is about as unlikely as a ‘Father Angela’ – though don’t get me started on what used to go on at a certain Anglican Theological college where all the ordinands adopted female names).

 

 

Yet, knowing little of the subject,  all these Godless or indifferent outsiders have fervent opinions on the matter of mitres. In many cases, they have much stronger opinions than I do. As a Broad Church Protestant, I see no reason why a woman shouldn’t be what I call a minister (in my part of the Church, we have Ministers, not Priests, and tables rather than altars). But good friends of mine, both Anglo-Catholics and strong evangelicals, disagree. The Catholics think that the Mass doesn’t properly take place if it is celebrated by a woman, and argue from tradition – that Christ himself picked no women as apostles, and the priesthood derives from the apostles and can’t deviate from Christ’s example. Mrs Lindsay Newcombe, who is not some sort of religious doormat but has a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering and is married to an Anglican Priest, thinks like this. You can watch her here, explaining why she thinks what she thinks. http://www.4thought.tv/themes/is-organised-religion-sexist/lindsay-newcombe

 

 

If you believed that, and they do (though I don’t), then it seems to me that you’d be entitled to carry on behaving as if you did,  in the Church that has until very recently treated your ideas as both normal and predominant . As discussed here at length, religious faith goes beyond provable facts and reason, and seizes people by the heart as much as it enters their consciousness through the brain. I’m unmoved by relics and see the service of Holy Communion as a potent remembrance of the greatest event in the world’s history, but no more. But I have friends who feel differently, and I respect them for it.

 

Likewise I have evangelical friends, at the opposite end of the Anglican spectrum,  who believe that the Bible is quite firm on the idea that men and not women should lead the church. I won’t go into that, simply say that if you are to have a Church which pays any attention to the Bible at all, then people who have such views cannot rightfully be excluded from it, or shouldered brusquely aside by it. 

 

As far as I can make out, the argument in the ludicrously-named General Synod ( a body I would cheerfully dissolve tonight) has not for years been about whether there should be female Bishops. That was accepted long ago. The problem has been over *how those who could not in conscience accept the authority of such Bishops could be accommodated*.

 

The supporters of women bishops, had they been prepared to allow small separate jurisdictions for the Catholic and Evangelical dissenters, could long ago have got their majority and there would be women bishops by now. But ( as I found in a TV debate with some of them a few years ago) they regard such compromise restrictions as irksome and unacceptable. So the provisions for the dissenters, on offer on Tuesday, were rather vague. And as we all know, vague protections are subject to the iron whims of men and women who are charged with policing them, but do not respect them.

 

What seems to me to be going on here is a dogmatic march to total victory at all costs (the costs may well be substantial walk-outs by clergy and people). It crosses my mind that quite a lot of people making passionate statements on this matter (many of them not themselves Christians, let alone members of the C of E) want there to be women Bishops *precisely because they have noticed that the idea gives pain and grief to their opponents*.

 

It’s my view that many of the campaigns for the feminisation of various professions and institutions have had this aim – the humiliation and sidelining of conservatives - as their underlying purpose. I’ve discussed here and elsewhere, and at length, the bizarre campaign to feminise the Fire Brigades, the chief practical effect of which has been to open this job to weedy men who would once have been excluded because they weren’t strong or fit enough to a job requiring …strength and fitness.

 

The decision to send women to sea in warships, likewise, was driven by dogma and has caused immense problems of on-board discipline, recruitment and retention, which occasionally reveal themselves in lurid courts martial.

 

The conversion of the Police from a force which needed to use physical presence to achieve peace on the streets, into a bureaucratic crime-reporting and social work body has concealed the enormous effect of feminisation there. Some might suggest that this alteration in the nature of the police might have been one of the aims of those who abolished male-female distinctions in police work.

 

The Army and the Marines are still permitted to maintain firm barriers to women in combat, because at this point dogma clashes so fiercely with reality that dogma has to give way…for now.  But I can see a time when the forces of correctness will triumph over the needs of national defence.

 

In fact, I suspect we will have female Marines in this country before we have female dustpersons , pneumatic drillers or drivers of skip trucks. It just doesn’t annoy anyone enough to pursue equality in that sector.

Keep on kissing the Tory frog if you like - but he's never going to turn into a prince

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I have looked hard and long for any grounds for hope in the votes that took place on
May 5. So far I have not found any. The cynical liberal David Cameron is still very much in charge of his Unconservative Party.

He may even be able to save it from the collapse it has so long and so richly deserved by actually winning the next Election outright. If so it will be by luck rather than judgment.
But Mr Cameron, alas, is almost as lucky as his mentor and model Anthony Blair, whose prosperous, grinning survival is bitter proof that fortune doesn’t necessarily favour the good.

First, I’ll deal with the massacre of Liberal Democrat councillors. There was some justice in this. We have a Liberal Government, and it was right that Liberals should be punished for its failings – the terrible schools where learning takes second place to social engineering, the mad foreign policy where we intervene cluelessly in other people’s countries while disbanding our armed forces, the pitiful justice system which refuses to protect the good from the bad, and instead makes excuses for the bad.

But alas, this was not what the voters meant to do. They believed the comical media fiction – the exact opposite of the truth – that this is a conservative Government being propped up by imprisoned liberals. And so they sacked a lot of Liberal councillors in revenge for this imagined crime.

I do wish these people could find me one scrap of evidence that this is in fact a ‘Right-wing’ Government. It would cheer me up. Please don’t tell me about the alleged ‘cuts’, which when finished will still leave us as one of the highest-taxed and most state-controlled, politically corrected countries on earth.

The people who should have been punished, who stand for election as Conservatives and then govern as Liberals, were let off.

I do not know if this can last. It is quite possible. I suppose that Tory voters may believe that if they carry on voting Tory, their party may one day turn into a proper conservative pro-British movement. This is a bit like going down to your nearest swamp, pond or bog and kissing all the frogs you can find in the belief that eventually one of them will turn into a prince.

It didn’t work the first time because it is never going to work. But hope seems to override sense in the polling booths when party loyalties are involved.

It is striking that if people forget party loyalties they actually start to think. Millions for once actually used their brains in a polling booth when asked to decide on the AV referendum.

The huge majority against AV was a flickering vision of what might happen if we had a party that wasn’t the Tories, and which stood for common-sense policies on crime, mass immigration, education, the family and national independence.

The sad part of this is that our clear dislike of constitutional reform will not actually make much difference. I suspect we will now get something much worse than AV as a consolation prize for the Liberals. This will be a ‘Senate’ to replace the House of Lords, elected by proportional representation. And there will be no referendum on that because we might reject it.

Then, as the Election approaches, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories will stage a noisy trial separation.

It will be much like the largely faked bickering of the past few weeks, only more so. And it will end with the Liberal Democrats pretending to walk out of the Coalition in a huff over some carefully chosen row.

And then David Cameron will be Prime Minister of a minority Government which is made up entirely of Tories, but which still follows the Liberal policies Mr Cameron likes. The excuse this time will be that it doesn’t have a majority.

He hopes that thanks to the revolutionary boundary changes due to come into force soon that he will then win the next Election outright. And then he will be able to govern as a Liberal because nobody in his feeble party will dare to challenge him. If that doesn’t work, he can always try another coalition.

Or it might all go wrong, if George Osborne’s economic policies plunge us into another recession and things get so bad that even Ed Miliband can win an Election – by no means impossible. So there you have it – Left-wing government stretching out ahead till the crack of doom, while the country slowly breaks up, and nothing you can do about it, as long as you carry on kissing the Tory frog and hoping he’ll turn into a prince. As I said, not much to look forward to, but quite a lot to laugh at, if you have a bitter sense of humour. Luckily for me, I do.


What’s really important, ‘equality and diversity’ or the lives of firefighters?

The dogmatic madness of the Cultural Revolution marches on, screaming abuse at its critics as it destroys good institutions
and people.

More than eight years ago I wrote in this newspaper warning of the foolish sex quotas being imposed on Fire Brigades. I have nothing against any fit, strong women who want to work as firefighters. Good luck to them.

What I warned against was a lowering of standards to raise the quota of women in the fire service. Minimum height rules were abandoned, chest expansion and lung-capacity tests abolished. A test which involved carrying a 12-stone man 100 yards was scrapped.

I suspect that the main result of this will have been more small, unfit men in the Fire Service, which doesn’t strike me as a good thing. The numbers of women have remained obstinately low. But the equality zealots have not been put off. I have heard from a firefighter who (as they all do) begged me to keep her or his sex, name and location secret. He or she writes that the watered-down fitness standards of only six years ago have now been weakened further still. ‘They’ve reduced the standard to the point where, if you can walk, you can probably pass it. I know of a woman, weighing 26 stone, who smoked, drank and had done no physical exercise since she left school 16 years before, and she drove everywhere. She came down and took the “official national fire service fitness test” and passed. She only failed to get in because she was scared of heights.’

Could these reduced standards, combined with a reduction in training and a pursuit of ‘equality and diversity’, have anything to do with the alarming rise in deaths in the fire brigades, especially since 2003? Something is certainly wrong. The Fire Brigades Union and the Labour Research Department – both Left-wing bodies – say that more firefighters are dying on duty now than for 30 years.

Time for an inquiry, before it gets worse, and before the public are affected as well. Surely the saving of lives comes before equality and diversity? Or does it?