In Defence of Council Housing

‘Paul P’ submitted a comment on 21^st September. I strongly disagree with it, having come to see the sale of (some) council properties as a social disaster and a severe economic mistake, not in the least conservative. I wince every time I hear ‘right-wing’ people thoughtlessly praising this action.

 

For clarity and immediacy, I have interleaved my responses in the original comment ,marking them ***

 

Mr ‘P’ began :

 

‘In the 1980s the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher began the sale of council houses to their tenants. The socialists squealed in horror, as well they might for the Achilles Heel of state control was about to be severed.’

 

***PH responds.  Socialists certainly protested, often for reasons of self-interest (control of housing stock, possibly resulting in influence on voting patterns) and it was a pity (see below) that nobody else did.  Was state control ‘severed’, though? The state certainly intervenes far more in housing than it did in the 1980s, not least through the payment of Housing Benefit, last year almost £24 Billion, roughly a third of the entire welfare bill and greater than the cost of the entire Royal Air Force.   The effect of raising and spending this sum on the economy, the housing market and on individuals is huge, though I must accept that the state gets very little in return for its money. It does not own the land or the stick, and it victimises itself by stimulating the growth of high rents for low-quality rentals, thus raising the housing benefit bill to the taxpayer.

 

The very large empire of ‘social housing’ owned and operated by Housing Associations is also very heavily state-subsidised, though( again) not controlled by anyone much. Is this good, or sensible? Is this country’s housing policy a model for the world?****

 

Mr ‘P’ continued: ’You may or may not be familiar with council houses and council estates, but in the pre-Thatcher years they were known for their uniform drabness.’

 

 

***PH writes. I am not sure this was so. I was myself a council tenant in Swindon in the early 1970s, and knew others who were. I rented, for a reasonable but not tiny sum,  a sensitively-converted flat in Brunel’s old Railway Village, which I seem to remember won a design award for good restoration.  Other council houses varied, many being indistinguishable from private speculatively built houses, generally well-proportioned and with reasonable sized gardens. I had sent a good deal of the period 1968 to 1975 delivering copies of the ‘Socialist Worker’ to buyers (I won’t say they were necessarily readers) on council estates in York, Oxford and Scarborough. I was more than once invited to stay overnight in the council homes of members of the International Socialists.  I’d hesitate to generalise about them. The old Parker Morris standard, mandating a minimum 775 square feet, meant they were in many cases more spacious than modern private homes.  There was almost always a lot of green space and a reasonable number of trees. Schools, shops, pubs and bus stops were conveniently placed.

 

I’d have to stress that this couldn’t be said of some of the new high-rise housing going up at the time (there was, mercifully, very little of this in Oxford and, I think, none in York). But, as we shall see, the high-rise housing and flats in general were the parts of the public housing estate that nobody much wanted to buy and which have often remained in the public sector.

 

The quality of building in that era wasn’t especially good in private or public sectors. From my experiences around that time, which involved some house sharing  in the private rented ‘sector’,  I’d say there was little to choose between bottom-end private housing and modern council houses.

 

AS for the ‘drabness’, etc, no doubt there was plenty (there is plenty in some forms of private housing too, I think Mr ‘P’ will concede, especially those long terraces, flat-fronted or bow-windowed, which were thrown up by speculative builders in the 1890-1914 period in many English cities)  but for many people the 1950s and 1960s council estates offered a new world of space, greenery and brightness. See this passage from the obituary, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/mar/23/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries

in the left-liberal ‘Guardian’ newspaper, of Harry Wingfield, who himself lived on council estates and drew them, as clean, neat, green, pleasant, orderly and spacious for the ‘Ladybird Books’ series:

 

‘Wingfield's pictures did everything to bolster this aim (encouraging] parents to help their children learn to read, and [perhaps to foster] better family relationships), and it was only a slight embellishment of what he saw around him. While he dismissed the idea that there was a particular girl on whom he had modelled Jane, he certainly drew from life, which gave his early pictures, especially, their characteristically clean-lined look.

 

‘His work was based on photographs he took of children playing on the new West Midlands council estates around where he lived. He drew what he saw, and his pictures showed the realities of these children's lives. The offspring of respectable workers, they dressed neatly, were obedient, and conformed to the stereotypes of the time, with Peter helping Daddy and Jane giving Mummy a hand in the kitchen.’

 

I would say these estates, by mixing skilled and unskilled working-class families, created workable communities in which 'bad elements' could be discouraged by the great mass of responsible and law-abiding people, aided by the council and the police. Once the better-off were able to sell up (and in many cases leave) this balance was destroyed. I would be interested to know if there is any research on the decline in order since the sale of council houses became general. Since it happened at a time when so many other malign influences (family break-up, the withdrawal of the police from preventive patrol, the abolition of the old 1915 alcohol laws, the widespread availability of technically illegal drugs,  the breakdown of school discipline) were going on  ****

 

Mr ‘P’ continues:

 

‘They generally comprised terraced rows of identical housing 'units' of a most basic kind, their guttering, windows and doors all painted the same, usually drab, state colours. These estates were depressing in the extreme. They were 'worker camps'.’

 

***PH writes: I’ve no doubt there’s some justice to this claim, especially on the very big old estates in large industrial cities, where the job of managing and maintaining a huge housing stock must have tended towards drab uniformity by its very nature.  It would have been an unusually imaginative and wealthy council which, before the modern era, would have tried to achieve variety and brightness.

 

But as readers of George Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier’ will recall, these estates were intended by their builders to transform the lives of people who up till then had been used to incomparably worse conditions. There was a disagreeable bossiness about them which Orwell noted, and which made him shudder.

 

But then again, the lofty intentions often led to greatly improved conditions, health and welfare and to handsome, enduring design. The 1930s design adopted by Oxford city council with which I am very familiar, has lasted extremely well. many have been sold, though some remain under council ownership. Many were in pleasant suburban or even central locations.  The building of an estate in Cutteslowe, North Oxford, led in the 1930s to the astonishing episode of the ‘Cutteslowe Walls’ in which the owner of a neighbouring(and pre-existing)private estate actually built brick walls, topped with revolving spikes across two roads where council and private estates met.  Despite various ‘accidental’ demolitions (including one by a tank during the war) the walls stayed up, with the support of the courts, until 1959. Buses were routed round them, and the roads changed their names where private and council territory met. They still do, though I suspect only the postman notices now. In my childhood, a small section of one of the walls, spikes and all, was still visible but it seems to have been demolished in the 1980s (it should, if not actually preserved, have been placed in a  museum, for , like East Germany, the whole episode is becoming unbelievable).

 

An illustration here  http://www.oxfordshireblueplaques.org.uk/plaques/cutteslowe.html

clearly shows the considerable difference between inter-war council and private housing, much of it being a matter of style rather than solidity or space -though the council house windows are of course not the original ones. ***

 

Mr ‘P’ continues:

 

‘After the tenants had bought the houses remarkable changes took place.’

 

***Indeed they did. What he does not mention is that the new owners had been given very large subsidies of up to 50% of the normal market price. In recent years (See ‘Guardian 12^th September) these have been up to 70% And that the more desirable properties were quickly sold on to new buyers or to property companies.

 

This account in ‘the Guardian’ by Andy Beckett  http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy-margaret-thatcher-david-cameron-housing-crisis

is a counter to the optimistic and problem-free version believed by most Thatcherite or Heseltine Tories (Lord Heseltine, in other respects Mrs Thatcher’s perpetual antagonist , was in this issue at one with her)/IT also makes the point that flats sold poorly, while buyers were given a vast state subsidy, and there was a rush of cash into state bank accounts, those who continued to rent now experienced large increases.

 

 

Mr ‘P’ rhapsodises :’ The windows, doors and gutterings were re-painted in the colours of their tenants' choice. Roofs were improved or re-laid. Some tenants, now owners, clad the exteriors with ersatz stone tiles, then fashionable on many private houses. And the gardens, too, became better cultivated and vibrant with colourful planting. You could see what was happening. It was as if the council house tenant, now owner, had taken a new interest in life.’

 

 

***PH replies: Well, yes, and I suppose many of us, if handed a large free gift by the taxpayer, like a huge unexpected legacy, might lavish some of it on improving surroundings in which we had a stake. We might even have to. All homeowners also know how quickly their property also becomes a demanding and hungry eater of money. Roofs, walls, pointing, windows, wiring, woodwork need constant and costly attention, which tenants were of course spared by the council’s policy of drab uniformity, paid for and controlled by the town hall.  I am also told that many of the houses were swiftly sold on to property companies which then rented them out to tenants (with no stake in maintaining property or garden) , but at market rents far higher than the old council rents. I have seen no figures on this****

 

 

Mr ‘P’ notes And that was the significant marker. It did not go unnoticed by Tony Blair.

 

***PH writes: Well, it probably did go unnoticed by him, actually. He told the Sedgefield Labour Party that he’d grown up on ‘an estate’ (which was true) in Durham, not mentioning that it was a private estate. I doubt he had very much experience of council housing , then or later, except as he scampered form door to door grinning and shaking hands. I wonder if he even knew which door to knock on.  But his advisers did.

 

 

 

Old Labour, he divined, was state drabness. New Labour was private colourfulness. Blair divined that old socialism was dead and that new socialism, i.e. New Labour, was the new banner of the new working-class. And he was right. New Labour went on to win, more or less with landslides, the next three general elections. You may think it all tasteless pap, shallow showboating from an opportunistic Blair who, unlike Brown, was essentially un-tribal and in it for fame and fortune.

 

****PH writes. Or you may think that nobody ever lost votes by giving large sums of taxpayers’ money to the voters, whatever party they were.. There was no obvious loser at the time. It became clear more recently that we had sold off a major national resource, council land and council housing, and now had to cope with the large number of poor people needing to be housed and unable to afford market prices or rents,  through the (far more expensive) system of Housing Benefit, which does not purchase any new assets for the taxpayer, just pours the money down an enormous drain, highly profitable for private landlords. Most private housebuyers have never realised that the ’right-to-buy’ released an inflationary tidal wave of money into the market in the mid-1980s and onwards, which pushed all housing prices relentlessly upwards. This was fine for those already on the ladder – but not so good for those who had saved to get on to it, and found the ladder being pulled up out of reach again, just as they were about to reach the bottom rung. 

 

 

 

Mr ‘P’ writes: ‘ Many of the council estates looked, and still do, discordantly ridiculous with one terraced 'unit' covered in Cotswold-stone tiles and with a red roof, and the one next door, still in council hands, still drably Orwellian. But working-class aesthetics is not the point. The point is that the working classes were on the move, and the move was away from state socialism. Blair in the end had run his personal course and with premier Brown there was a brief hiatus and a tilting once more at traditional working-class tribalism, but it couldn't last, and it didn't. The Conservatives in the meantime had taken up the mantle of Blairism and, though forced into coalition, were the party of working-class choice. With Corbyn taking the Labour Party back to state drabness and the 'working-class camp', the Conservatives will be in power for evermore. Blairism, then, is the privatisation of socialism. It is the merging of capitalism and welfare statism. It is, at its root, giving the working classes what in the era of Blair and Cool Britannia the Spice Girls would chant 'what they really, really want'.

 

***PH responds. Well, this is of course the great political question of the coming decade. Leave aise Mr ‘P’ and his vapourings ion taste. And it might be sensible for him to realise that the ‘working class’ was destroyed about the same time by the annihilation (by being exposed to  EU competition and by Geoffrey Howe’s economic genius) of manufacturing and extractive industry.

 

But is Mr Cameron’s world view, of ever-increasing prosperity etc, the one which most voters will share in May 2020? Or is the Corbyn view, of a country of housing shortages, low wages, poor public services, shuttered shops and few opportunities, what they see, or will see? Will the general economic state of the country change this perception towards the Corbyn view in the next few years, or more towards the Cameron view? I’m not wholly sure.  I think the Tories would be unwise to assume that everyone is as happy as official statistics suggest they ought to be. Or that chickens, even rather old one’s never eventually come flapping home to roost. It’s odd that a party that allegedly stands for sound money is so proud of  the magic creation of billions of pounds out of nothing. I can hear a grim Scots voice intoning ‘Nothing will come of nothing’, and I can also hear it being repeated, tight-lipped and cold, by a voice in an austere Grantham household, many years ago.

 

Three verses of that fine poem ‘The Gods f the Copybook Headings’, spring to mind.

 

They are:

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

 

And…

 

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; 
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." 

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

 

To which I would add Housman’s briefer statement of the same truth:

 

‘To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man hath long been sore, and long is like to be’.

 

Oh, and in Stalinist Moscow they did actually at one stage put up posters declaring

‘2+2 =5’.

This referred to an official claim that a five-year plan had been achieved in four years. The statistics, rather as George Osborne's figures show that we live in a booming economy, showed that it had been.

Eric Ravilious

This country is blessed with a number of small galleries, often well-hidden in suburbs, that contain powerful concentrations of great art. They’re easier to handle than the great city-centre monsters, where the eyes and brain eventually become too tired to absorb any more beauty.

 

I am thinking here partly of the Barber Institute at Birmingham University, Lady Lever’s gallery at Port Sunlight, and of Kenwood and Dulwich in London. The Christ Church picture gallery in Oxford is also (whenever I have been there) secluded and  tranquil.

 

Dulwich, close to the school that produced P.G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Nigel Farage, always seems quite astounding when you arrive. Here amid the expansive Edwardian suburbs of the better part of South London sits an extraordinary piece of architecture crammed with Old Masters.

 

One expects such things in the midst of cities. In such a setting it is an incongruous surprise, and all the better for it.  I have only ever visited it three times, because it requires a bit of extra effort to take a train deep into the SE postal districts and, as I work but do not live in London, I’m normally busy during the daylight hours when it’s open.

 

But last Tuesday I had to go to London when I normally wouldn’t have done,  and so I decided that,  since the day was interrupted anyway, I’d visit the Eric Ravilious exhibition which Dulwich is holding for the next few weeks. If you are anywhere within range, then it is a very pleasant (if quite costly) excursion. The gallery is a pleasant destination anyway, ten minutes on foot from the nearest station, with its own restaurant and a café in the rather serene gardens. On a clear sunny spring day, it is especially pleasing, London as one might wish it to be.  If you are not in range, a very fine selection of his pictures has now been published in book form, though it will set you back £25.

 

You’ll almost certainly have seen at least one Ravilious picture – the famous one of the chalk white horse on a hill, viewed through the windows of an old-fashioned railway carriage. Cricket enthusiasts will have many times seen and half-noticed his woodcut of Victorian cricketers, displayed every year since 1938 in the cover of Wisden.

 

Ravilious’s painting is intensely English, in what I might describe as an Orwellian way. Many of his pictures would make good cover illustrations for an edition of Orwell's essays.  I assume, as I look at his pictures,  that he liked strong tea, bitter beer, apples,  country walks, sea-winds and birdsong. His paintings almost radiate Englishness, the consciousness of being an islander, of being quieter, more modest and more determined than our neighbours, the deeper, quieter sense of humour that’s not always obvious. There’s also a feeling that one could be cultured, well-read and informed without intellectual pretension, and when it was not yet necessary to be left-wing to be considered intelligent. The work of that rather different genius, Edward Ardizzone, comes from the same era and gives me a similar sensation (Ardizzone was also a war artist, and his rather unsparing studies of the aftermath of battle come as a shock if you are used to his children's books).

 

I think this sort of Englishness reached its peak in the 1940s, during the early, worrying years of the war  and died away thereafter. You could still find it in odd corners in my childhood, a wistful look, a cadence in the voice, a certain way of smiling, none of them to be seen or heard now. I say all this though I know very little about Ravilious’s life, or even the origin of his unusual name, which sounds a bit as if it comes from Lithuania. They are simply thoughts brought into my mind by looking at his work. 

 

He would be better-known had he not died in the war. He was an official war artist, and was lost somewhere off Iceland in August 1942. He had chosen to fly in a group of aircraft searching for a lost plane, I do not know why. He was apparently very used to flying and had spent long hours in biplanes, sketching other aircraft in flight from the co-pilot's seat. His own machine did not return.

 

Thus his work is poignantly and abruptly cut off, at the age of 39 when he had so much left to do. This consciousness of loss hangs over the little exhibition, with its evocative and powerful studies of warlike things, often from surprising and thoughtful angles (I was especially moved by a view from a camouflaged warship leaving Scapa Flow, where my father was based a few years later).

 

These are all very interesting and full of wartime seriousness endeavour, though in or two cases probably technically a bit odd (it is pretty clear that he did not understand how artillery worked) . But the peacetime work is if anything even more fascinating, bathing machines (already obsolete) in a the pale seaside sunshine of Suffolk, a lifeboat pulled up on the beach, its propellors showing, the famous railway view, studies of those two bizarre and puzzling chalk figures, the (very rude) Cerne Abbas Giant and the Long man of Wilmington. He obviously greatly enjoyed painting amid chalk downs , and there are hints, in or two works, of that other small-scale genius, Samuel Palmer, whose ‘White Cloud’ I especially love.

 

If you do go, be careful not to miss what I think is the loveliest thing in the whole collection. It is a woodcut of a boy birds-nesting, that country activity which is now not just forgotten but illegal. It is very small, and in a flat glass case, not on the wall.  Beside the beautiful, intricate print of the boy taking an egg from a perfect nest as outraged birds flutter round him  is the actual block in which the image was cut, and next to that are the tools with which it was done. It made me gasp to imagine the skill and patience with which it must have been achieved, and the mind which could take what his eyes saw and make such a lovely image of it with his hands. I wish I could do that. But I can’t. and can only rejoice that he could. And be glad that these things survive and can be seen.

A defence of heavier coins and bitterer beer

I’m always intrigued by the rather spiteful mockery which follows any suggestion that decimal currency may not, in fact, be the ideal or only possible sort of currency. I’ve never been sure that a counting system based on the number of toes we all have is so fantastically superior, and so obviously more modern than the far more sophisticated system of shillings and pence which existed until I was 20 years old, during an era when the finances of this country were rather better run, at state and individual level, than they are now.

 

These jeers often include witless jibes about ‘ bringing back the groat’, which were also common during the equally stupid ‘progressive’  campaign to introduce the Euro.  I have no idea what a groat was, and couldn’t care less, nor is it relevant to either discussion. There’s nothing specially modern or ‘progressive' about decimal systems. They’re simpler than the alternative, but so are the strip system of cultivation, architecture without arches, engines without gears, wattle and daub, septic tanks and cooking over an open fire. In fact, the earliest major country to decimalise its coinage was that heart of black reaction, superstition, autocracy and backwardness, Tsarist Russia,  in 1704.  The French revolutionaries associated the idea with 'progress’ but only because one of their main desires was to smash all bridges to the past.

 

They even tried to decimalise the calendar, but had to give this up when the universe, and suffering humanity which likes a rest more often than every ten days,  refused to adapt themselves to their toe-counting ten-day weeks and ten-month years .Ten-week months were too ludicrous even for the Jacobins, as was the cubic metre, or stere, as a liquid measure. This was far too huge to be of any practical use. The current ‘litre’ is a cubic decimetre, like the centimetre a non-standard use of the  metric system, employed to get over the fact that it is so cumbersome and inhuman. Even then, no decent French wine is sold by the litre, 200 years after its introduction in that country. Until recently, French wine bottles were sold by the wholly irregular measure of 72 centilitres, more or less exactly equivalent to that fine old English wine measure, the ‘bottle’. Now they’ve been rounded up to 75 centilitres. But they still haven't been forced to conform to a system that is based on ideals rather than on life. 

 

The interesting thing (to me) is the inability of so many people to imagine any kind of world different to the one we now live in; and the equally great difficulty many people have in believing that any former system could be superior to what we now have, or that anything at all in the past was better than what we have in the present.

 

This attitude of shut-minded mockery is well summed up in the episode in ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ where Winston Smith, on an illicit walk through the poorer parts of IngSoc London, visits a proletarian pub, and witnesses this exchange: ‘‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?’

‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

‘‘Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’

‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and half litre — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.’

‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ’a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.’

‘When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.’

 

The author of this passage,  George Orwell, famously noted that one of the first things that you noticed when you came home from the continent was that ‘the beer is bitterer and the coins are heavier’.  He knew these things mattered not just for themselves, but because they represented something else that was different about this country, its ancient, polished-in-use institutions, laws, customs, made by and for its people, not imposed on them by neat-minded rulers.

 

When we hear people sneering about this subject,  we observe two interesting and not very creditable forces at work. One,  a shut mind that refuses to think; the other a prejudice against the past which prevents any lessons being learned from it. Groats, indeed.

 

I have long thought that the old British currency was destroyed for two reasons, both foreseen by Jim Callaghan (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) when he made the announcement that decimalisation would proceed, in the midst of a pre-election mini-budget on 1^st March 1966. The first was that he anticipated the severe inflation which was about to burst on the British economy, and which would be to some extent disguised by a new currency whose smallest unit was almost two-and-a-half times the size of the existing smallest unit (in 1966 any typewriter keyboard would have had keys for fractions, which have now completely disappeared. I am not sure if early computer keyboards in fact contained them. An interesting unnoticed change). The second was that the establishment had made up their minds to join what was then the Common Market, where a single currency was already foreseen, and a decimal pound would be more easily merged with it. I believe, but cannot find the reference, that our Common Market 'partners' placed actual pressure on British governments to take this step.

 

The prejudicial establishment of a committee which was not even allowed to discuss the issue of whether decimalisation would be good or bad, came at a time when the establishment was all but pleading to be allowed into the supposedly glorious Common Market.

 

 

As far as I know ( I have not been able to obtain a copy) , the September 23 1963 Halsbury Committee which investigated the introduction of Decimal Currency into Britain (Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Decimal Currency) was specifically not asked to discuss the issue of *whether* Britain should have a decimal currency, only to look into ways by which it could be done.  

 

As with metrication, there does not ever seem to have been any actual Bill before Parliament on the matter. It was just done. The committee was divided between those who thought the pound should be retained, for reasons of national prestige, and those who thought we should follow several Commonwealth countries, and base the new unit on ten shillings, as half a pound was in those days. There was also a problem about what we could call the new, smaller currency. ‘Dollar’ (though chosen by Australia and New Zealand) would be too obvious a surrender. But if we called it a ‘pound’ people would think it was a form of devaluation.

 

 

Certainly nobody did anything about it at the time. Gordon Greig, of the Daily Mail, reported ‘Sir Miles Thomas, the industrialist’ had asked ‘Would someone tell me what benefit Britain will achieve by this hysterical plunge towards continental standards? Surely we can use £100 million in ways better than confusing ourselves and our export customers by changing to a decimal system?’.

 

Nor did Callaghan seem to be in a hurry, when he announced the change on 1^st March 1966. The implementation of the decision (which cost about £4 billion at today’s prices) was to be in five years, in 1971 (by which time Mr Callaghan would be in opposition)  . In any case it was overshadowed by a new betting tax and the usual pre-election gimmicks of help for poorer mortgage-holders and attractive new ways of saving.

 

And so it just went, as things do in a world where everyone is either seduced by the new or unwilling to fight for the old.

 

The old system was better in practice because it was immensely more flexible. It was divisible by three into whole numbers and exact sums, which decimal systems are not. The different values represented by pounds, shillings and pence were appropriate to the things they were used to buy – pennies for sweets, milk or a newspaper, shillings for books or bacon, pounds for the bigger, more permanent things (something similar is true of inches, feet and miles, of ounces, pounds , stones, hundredweights and tons).  Nobody who was brought up with it ever had any problem with it . You just had to learn your times tables in those authoritarian schools we used to have. I get short-changed (and, more worryingly, long-changed)  much more often now than I did when we still had proper money.

 

Prices went up more slowly, and it was more noticeable when they did.

 

I *liked* the old coins for all those reasons. But I *loved* them because they were full of history – a pocketful of change would contain portraits of Queen Victoria, both as a young woman and an old veiled widow, some of them polished almost smooth, some miraculously unworn, Edward VII, George V, George VI, and our present Queen. The older silver coins, which really contained quite a lot of silver, shone when you rubbed them on your sleeve.

 

A couple of half crowns clicking together in your pocket,  and you felt both rich and English.

 

They went not because there was anything wrong with them,  but because the country they represented so well – an educated, self-disciplined and serious place - had vanished, along with the old-fashioned, solid wealth and hard work that stood behind them and made them feel so reassuringly heavy. What a strange thing it was in those days to go abroad and feel in your palm the featherweight, inflated, laughable coins of less happy lands, only fit for buying poor, thin beer. Now we have those here.

Hurry. There may yet be time to prevent this latest folly

I see no evidence that the planned bombing of Iraq is a Just War

 

I sense that tomorrow’s Parliamentary debate on bombing the Middle East has been rigged in advance at the top. But it can't be rigged at the bottom. Individual MPs are still free. There is still time for you to telephone or e-mail your MP to let him or her know that you see no reason to rush into yet another stupid conflict in the Muslim world. And indeed that it is precisely because of the emotive, hurried, propaganda-driven decisions to go to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (and the West’s unwise support of the ‘Arab Spring’) that we have already lost so many lives, and made the Muslim world so much more unstable and dangerous than it would have been had we done nothing at all.

 

 

But you can’t just do nothing!

 

 

Why not? Nothing is often the best thing to do, especially if you are a stony-broke, hopelessly indebted former imperial power which has all its work cut out trying to stay in one piece at home.

 

One thing is surely plain from our moronic, zig-zagging , contradictory failures in the Islamic world year after year, that those in charge don’t know what they are doing, and that nothing, in all cases, would have been a better course of action than the one they chose.  

 

The obedient ‘reporters’ who reproduce government thinking in the media are telling us that the Prime Minister is ‘confident’ of ‘cross-party’ ( i.e. Labour) support . They are also telling us that the Prime Minister believes that this war against the ‘Islamic State’ will last for many years. Has anybody asked him if this is wishful thinking? Is it perhaps the case that the ‘security’ establishments of this country and the USA actually want us to be engaged in yet another unending conflict? George Orwell knew all about that, and also about how the enemy could switch overnight. He'd have been sourly amused by the fact that the people we now want to bomb are the people we wanted to support a year ago (and yes they are- and we helped to create them too. The claim that if we'd given more support to the Syrian opposition it wouldn't have been taken over by Sunni fanatics is a fantasy. They always dominated it, and would always have pocketed all our support).   

 

In any case, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, will act with cautious responsibility, as he did last year when faced with Mr Cameron’s absurd demand for a bombing war on Syria.  The initiative collapsed with amazing speed, and Mr Cameron accepted his defeat without quibble (though his press mouthpieces have ever afterwards denigrated Mr Miliband for actually doing his job and leading the opposition).

 

A couple of days later, Washington abandoned its plans for an attack on Syria as well.

 

One explanation of this extraordinary change of mind, one of the swiftest and most total policy reversals I have ever seen in long years of reporting, was provided by Seymour Hersh in the fascinating article to which I link below. Mr Hersh is a distinguished and well-connected journalist, but he is by the nature of his work compelled to rely (as in this case) on sources he cannot ever identify, and which we cannot check.  

 

 

But history shows that far odder things than this have happened. I have no way of knowing if his suggestions here are correct, but mention them to make it plain that this thesis has been advanced by serious people. I might also add that the Syrian state has since then got rid of its remaining chemical weapons with unexpected speed and efficiency, an event that has tended to be covered, if at all, on the inside pages of unpopular newspapers, because it does not fit the narrative.

 

  

 

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line

 

Few now remember that there was never any objective proof of the claims that the Assad state had used poison gas on its people. Efforts to produce such proof rather dried up after the clamour for war came to an end. I remain unconvinced.

 

This is not a question of simple wickedness. The Assad state is clearly capable of terrible actions, and nobody – least of all me – would ever dispute that. But its savagery is rational.   It would have been self-destructive madness on the part of the Assad state – especially in defiance of a specific statement by Barack Obama that such an action would trigger the very US intervention which would have doomed the Assad state -  to have used poison gas on the people of Damascus, the city in Syria most easily investigated by outside agencies and  media.

 

Nothing in the actions of that state suggests that it is that crazy.

 

There is a poignant footnote to this controversy in Patrick Cockburn’s excellent, timely short book on the rise of the Islamic State ‘The Jihadis Return’, reviewed here.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-jihadis-return-isis-and-the-new-sunni-uprising-by-patrick-cockburn-book-review-9697453.html

 

I’ll leave you to find it.

 

But back to War and Peace.

 

1.Why should we intervene at all?

 

Atrocity stories, always a bad guide to action, have been vital to the case for war. The world, alas,  is full of atrocities. Many of them are taking place now in Libya, largely unreported because it is far too dangerous for Western media to go there any more. These horrors are happening because we intervened there ( as we plan to do now in Iraq and Syria) without having a clue about what we are doing. But (rightly) there's no serious clamour for a return. Mr Cameron wants us to forget Libya completely, and no doubt wishes he could. So I hope he'll be asked about it a lot in tomorrow's debate.

 

Many more horrors will take place in Afghanistan shortly, when the fragile and unsustainable government we have left behind falls apart, as it must. These horrors will be our fault, as have been the years of violence, sectarianism, injustice and needless poverty in Iraq since our misguided 2003 intervention.

 

I would argue that the recent horrors visited on Yazidis, Kurds and Arab Christians by the Islamic State are also our direct fault. Because we backed away from bombing Syria last year, we often forget the active part which Western (and Gulf) diplomats played in undermining the Assad state for some years before that , actively encouraging rebellion and winking at the flood of foreign fighters, most of them Salafist fanatics, who were allowed into Syria (especially through Erdogan’s Turkey, whose part in these events has been especially irresponsible). The people we now propose to bomb are exactly the same people we proposed to support a year before. Western (and Gulf)  intervention created the Islamic State.

 

By the way, if we so dislike intolerant fundamentalist Islamist regimes that cut people’s heads off in public, then why are we on such good terms with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of our main trading partners and the frequent scene of high-level visits from the British Royal Family? We have learned to live with them. We never helped to destabilize them, preferring for some reason to destroy the (relatively) secular regimes of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and cheering on the overthrow of the (relatively) open and easy-going government of Egypt.

 

Now that we have completely smashed up the post-1918 order in the Middle East, what is it that makes us think we can now decide what kind of government is going to dominate the region?

 

I don’t myself understand why we can’t just accept that we no longer rule the world, and must simply put up with the fact that other countries are run differently from ours. My main concern is to retain our liberties and civilisation, not to indulge in failed attempts to bring enlightenment to others by bombing their cities.

 

It’s not a new idea. We have in our time made accommodations with the Bolshevik murderers of the Tsar and his family, and with the Chinese Communists (who this week shamefully jailed a Uighur professor for the rest of his life, and confiscated his savings, leaving his young family destitute, in a shameful unfair trial . No wonder his poor wife howled with hopeless grief when the ‘verdict’ of the court (if this tribunal deserves the name) was read out.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11115613/China-sentences-Uighur-professor-to-life-in-jail.html

 

2. What about the Hostages?

 

A good question. We must all wish and hope and pray for their release. We know that several Western governments have paid ransom for hostages held by the Islamic State. Well, why don’t we?  We say it’s against our principles. But it isn’t .  Our pretence that we don’t pay ransom was exploded in 1998 when (under heavy American pressure to do so) we released huge numbers of convicted criminals, and handed over a large part of our country to rule by terrorist organisations.

 

We did this in return for promises that the IRA would no longer attack mainland Britain, especially the City of London.

 

Some would say that the elevation of the late Yasser Arafat to the role of world statesman, and the support of the ‘West’ for a Palestinian State, is likewise an example of a ransom being paid.

 

As George Bernard Shaw almost said ‘We have established what we are. Why quibble about the price or the details?’

 

If the hostages held by the Islamic state were my relatives, I would be infuriated by the government’s pretence of puritanical probity. They’ve paid and paid to save their own skins, and would do it again. The terrorists of the world know that our toughness is so much macho bluster. Why not then pay to save a taxi-driver or a journalist from a horrible death? The market for hostages is already flourishing. By standing aside, we won’t reduce it. We’ll just leave people to their fate for a pretence.

 

3. What about the terror threat to Britain?

 

Good question. What about it?  Why are we so willing to be persuaded by media folk and politicians adopting serious voices and citing ‘security sources’ to make our flesh creep? How can these sources ever be tested or held to account? Why don’t we ever wonder if these huge expensive security organisations we pay for feel the need to puff up their importance, so as to secure their enormous budgets at a time of cuts?

I have seen  no serious evidence that there is any such threat. I doubt if the leadership of the Islamic State spends more than a second a day on wondering what we think in London (though they may be more concerned with us if the RAF starts bombing them) .  Even if there were such evidence and we could see it for ourselves, terror’s main power in the West comes from our own governments’ readiness to panic and pass repressive laws in response to terror actions which would not have been prevented by such laws, and which are designed to create the very panic we then indulge in. IMost of us, when we beocme adults, ahve learned not to repond to those who goad us into fights. If someone actively wants a fight, it's usually a good reason not to provide him with one.  Why do governments still respond to such goasing with the emotional spasms of six-year-olds. Are we in fact governed by responsible adults, or by childish fantasists who have seen too many action movies? 

 

Personally, I should have thought it mathematically more likely for there to be terror attacks on London if we take part on the raids on Iraq, than if we don’t.  Islamist terrorists tend to attack countries prominent in attacks on the Islamic world. I can’t recall a terror attack on Zurich lately.

 

This same wretched argument was used to sustain, years after it should have ended, our ludicrous and now obviously pointless and futile intervention in Afghanistan. In fact terrorists had no need to come to Britain during that period,  if they wished to kill British citizens. They were able to do so, in horrible numbers, in Helmand.  Have we already forgotten the sad processions through Wootton Bassett? Do we want them to begin again? In a rare example of foresight and planning, the government, who didn’t like the attention these events attracted, have quietly routed such processions away from any urban areas, in the hope that future wars won’t get the same publicity. But the good people of Carterton have so far frustrated this plan, going in large numbers to the route of the corteges, even though it avoids the centre of their town.

 

4. Will bombing work?

 

There’s very little reason to think so. Very few conflicts in modern history have been resolved without infantry.  But once we start bombing, we are so committed that- if it fails – the pressure to commit soldiers will become relentless and hard to resist. Why start down a road whose end is so obvious and so bad?

 

The ostensible pretexts for this action are transparently feeble. I am sure that the response of the war party to articles such as this will be smears (as they were when I opposed bombing Syria on behalf of the Jihadists last year). I was slandered then as an apologist for the Assad state.  Let us see what they come up with this time. But whatever it is, it will show either that they have no real reason for doing what they plan to do, or that they are not prepared to say in public what that reason is.

 

Either way, it will do no harm if you put some or all of these points to your elected representative. The election is quite close, and MPs will be readier to listen than at other times. All history shows that wars are easy to start, and very hard to finish. We really ought to learn from this. It is also worth remembering that war is not a video game, that those ‘smart’ bombs you see on the news still dismember, scar and rend, and cannot actually tell an innocent person from a guilty one. And that if you license their use on others, you are, at some point in the unknown future, licensing others to use them on you and yours.

 

If this is a just war, I have yet to hear the justification.

I never dreamed I would say this... Stop being mean to Tony Blair!

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Let me put in a word for Anthony Blair. I despise the Blair creature so much that words long ago failed me, and I have even run out of scornful facial expressions and rude noises to use when his name is mentioned.

I long for the day when the mystery of his rise to the highest office in British politics can be documented and explained, with all the culprits exposed.

But this week I must rally to his defence. It has now become fashionable to deride him (which it certainly wasn’t in the old days) and he got a nasty reception when he was given some award at a London dinner.

Yet the people who despise him mostly continue to support the policies that destroyed him – the babyish, grandiose warmongering and demands to impose ‘democracy’ on all corners of the world.

What a burden it is these  days to be well informed, well travelled and to know a little history.

It is almost physically painful to listen to our political leaders as they jut their chins, do their Churchill imitations, and march towards yet another disaster.

And it is nearly as bad to listen to weighty commentators demanding that other people’s sons, brothers and fathers go  to war.

It is even worse to watch chirpy, dim TV war reporters exulting on screen at the latest fashionable insurgency and chumming up with gangs of smiling murderers, whose cause we have thoughtlessly chosen to back.

I ask all these people to see  if they can arrange a weekend break in Libya, the country they ‘liberated’ a couple of years ago. The Tripoli airport, alas, long ago closed and seems to have been burned down.

But perhaps they can hitch a ride on one of the pirate boats that criss-cross the Mediterranean, bringing uncontrollable legions of migrants to Italy, bound for Calais.

That filthy business, too, is the fault of our Prime Minister and those who supported his Libya adventure. Gaddafi, whose murder by brigands caused Hillary Clinton to cackle, prevented that.

The disturbing scenes at Calais, as migrants battle to board British-bound ships, are David Cameron’s direct responsibility, and the responsibility of all those who uncritically backed his adventure. We hear quite a lot about the horrors of the Islamic State, and rightly so. Brave reporters have ventured into the zones where it is taking power, though it may soon be unwise for them to do so.

But nobody goes to Libya,  now a cauldron of blood and screams where no sane person will venture, a horror caused entirely by us.

And I read very little from Donetsk and Lugansk, the Ukrainian cities which have  for months been indiscriminately shelled by the Kiev  junta whose violent, lawless seizure of power we so stupidly backed last winter.

The Kiev regime has been ‘killing its own people’ in their hundreds, and sad columns of refugees are fleeing from its guns and rockets, and from the cruel ultra-nationalist militias which fight alongside it.

But the sort of people who normally complain about such horrors, and demand the overthrow of those who do them, are silent.

They prefer to say lofty and noble things about wicked Vladimir Putin and the nasty Russians – who did not start this war and who warned for years that they had had enough of EU and Nato expansion into neutral territory.

No doubt, if Mr Blair had  not gone off to spend more  time with his money, he would be taking all the same wrong sides as Mr Cameron is taking now. But so are most of the people who now affect to despise Mr Blair.

It’s no good damning the  man, and continuing to support the policies.

No Ransom for terrorists (unless they are the IRA)

The Prime Minister says very emphatically that this country does not pay ransom to terrorists. I am very sorry, but this is not true.

Our leaders somehow forget  that they paid, and continue to  pay to this day, a huge ransom to the Provisional IRA.

It doesn’t just take the form of money, though many former terrorist killers now live at ease on the British public payroll.

It takes the shape of power, privilege and acceptance, a vast, lawless amnesty for convicted criminals – and in allowing them to keep a huge and menacing arsenal while pretending to have got rid of it.

Once, long ago, I was rather proud of our policy of never  paying ransom.

Now I think it’s dishonest and inconsistent, and if it affected  me personally I would despise  it utterly.

Are the lights about to go out once more?

The threat of severe power cuts is now even worse than I have long feared and warned. EDF has unexpectedly shut down four nuclear reactors because of cracks in key parts of their structure. One of our remaining coal-fired stations has been damaged by a fire. A key gas-fired station is threatened with shutdown because of high gas prices.

A serious country would have planned for  such contingencies. Mad, Soviet Britain, where  swivel-headed Green fanatics rule and their opponents are shouted down, has not.

On the contrary, we recently blew up the cooling towers of Didcot ‘A’ power station, and will soon demolish its perfectly good generating hall, in obedience to mad Green diktats.

I recommend panic-buying candles now. If you don’t, you will find out in detail how useless wind-power is when the wind isn’t blowing.

The treatment of Ashya King’s parents proves once again that the modern police do not enforce the law – they enforce state power.

Ashya’s parents committed no crime. But they defied  the state, which retaliated by arranging to have them flung into jail. The same state, we learn from HM Inspector of Constabulary, responds to many crime complaints by telling the victim to investigate it himself. I am not joking when I  say it is time to disband the police and start again.

Is he stupid or just Selfish

No surprise that Will Self, former druggie, liberal  bigot and BBC favourite, has attacked George Orwell.

Mr Self, whose twirling, pretentious sentences are like a tangle of wiring in a dusty drawer, calls the author of Animal Farm a ‘mediocrity’. Well, if Orwell was a ‘mediocrity’, I don’t know where that leaves Mr Self.

Orwell was a patriotic, liberty-loving socialist who learned to loathe most of  his Leftist comrades. His writing – unlike theirs – was as clear as a newly cleaned windowpane. That is because he, unlike them, refused to lie for the cause, and admitted its faults. They loathed him for it when he was alive, and they always will loathe him for it.

I am ashamed to admit that I was selfishly resentful when I heard that William Pooley, the courageous British nurse, was being flown home to be treated for ebola.

I grumbled to myself that it was stupid to risk others in this country in this way, though I lacked the courage to say so publicly.   I was completely wrong. 

Not only that, Mr Pooley’s cheerful bravery, and the cool competence of those who have successfully restored him to health,  have been a bright light in otherwise dark times. I was very wrong. I am very sorry.

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Orwell Banned in Putin's Russia Shock? Or not? We Seek the Truth

 Many of you will, like me, have been enjoying the contributions here of Mark or (Marc) Jaremko, a strong supporter of the Kiev Maidan movement.  Some of you may like me, have wondered where he gets the facts , or alleged facts, with which he so confidently packs and peppers his comments.

 

It’s hard to say. But the other day he made a claim that made me stand bolt upright at my desk. The works of George Orwell are, he says, banned in Russia. Here is the sequence which followed

 

 May 9^th:

 

Mr Jaremko :

‘Orwell (whom incidentally, is still banned in Russia, but not 'fascist Ukraine).’

 

Me : ‘Mr Jaremko says that 'Orwell' (not naming any particular works) is 'still banned in Russia'. Can he please provide a reference for this assertion? Which works are banned? By what means?

 

May 10^th

 

Peter, You ask what my source is for 'Orwell being banned in Russia'. My answer is very simple -- your brother. Now granted, maybe things have changed during the enlightened rule of Putin since your brother published the statement.’

 

Me: Mark Jaremko now attributes the suggestion that 'Orwell' is 'banned' in Russia to my late brother, Christopher. Where and when did Christopher say this?

 

And then Mr jaremko's msot recent traceable reponse at ther time of writing (4.00 pm GMT Monday 12th May) :

 

Mr Jaremko: 'Peter, If I am falsely attributing something to your brother, I'll take it back but as far as I see right now, I don't think I am. Currently, I don't have the exact quote at my disposal. I have read and listened to much of both of you, bought both of your books, but I do not have an archive of everything you as journalists and authors have ever said. However, if for example, I said that 'Peter thinks SSRIs are dangerous', I would not be way off. As far as I can recall, you have never said those exact words, or perhaps you have, but in general I think it is fair to say 'Peter Hitchens has asserted that anti-depressants have many negative consequences' -- anyone roughly familiar with your work knows were you stand on this issue (and one that I fully agree with you on). Christopher wrote and spoke a great deal about Orwell, as well as his opposition to totalitarianism. My recollection is that he made the attribution to certain authorities around the world continuing to stymie and suppress Orwell publications, teachings, and discussions in one of two possible places: 1) his frequent discussions on Animal Farm, or 2) his early warnings of the growing totalitarian tendencies of Vladimir Putin (and how we in the West were perhaps not paying enough attention). What I think is relevant though, is whether or not Russian authorities suppress Orwell's work and whether or not Christopher was aware of it. The answer is that they did, relaxed a bit during Perestroika, Yeltsin, and early Putin, and then started suppressing again. That being said, I think its fair to say your brother was aware of it.’

 

And my most recent reply: ‘Mr Jaremko should realise that the problem is quite simple. The claim that 'Orwell is banned in Russia', is, if true, of immense importance and indicates a very serious level of repressive stupidity in that country. It must therefore be taken seriously. It must therefore be *made* seriously that is to say, the person who introduces it must be able to provide evidence for it. The same would be true of my brother, had he said this. All Mr Jaremko has to do is produce his evidence, or say he was wrong. Mr Jaremko makes many assertions here. Some are hard to test. This one is easy. If a government bans books, it cannot escape doing so publicly and there will be evidence. Several international organisations, such as PEN and Amnesty will certainly have protested and drawn attention to it. Let us please test it. Mr Jaremko, having made the statement, is the one who must do the work.’

 

I have to say I’m really keen to get to the bottom of this. Can anyone else help?

Neither Stalin nor Mussolini

Roger Boyes of ‘The Times’ has now returned from Waitrose (whither he went when he was losing an argument with me about Ukraine) and has drawn to my attention an article he has written for that newspaper, under the restrained and judicious headline ‘The new Mussolini and his axis of the macho. Europe’s nationalists see Putin as an ally. But, as Ukraine shows, he has no respect for borders’.

 

Lackaday, I cannot link to it for it is behind Mr Rupert Murdoch’s paywall. I can’t even quote any more than small bits of it. But I can mention that it is adorned with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, posing with fists on hips in a stance of greater-than-usual arrogance. The caption beneath this study runs : ‘Vladimir Putin is a post-fascist, heir to Benito Mussolini, not Joseph Stalin’.

 

How odd. Why would a caption to a picture of Mussolini *begin* with the words ‘Vladimir Putin’? I can’t think of another example of this practice.

 

But then again I suppose we must welcome the open-minded, nay, even-handed thinking which has led Mr Boyes or his editor to concede that Vladimir Putin is not Stalin. This is a major step forward, I suppose. For me, it’s simple.  Mr Putin has not yet opened a vast archipelago of homicidal labour camps, nor crammed millions of his citizens into them, nor launched a great terror on his people under which anyone may be seized without pretext, and tortured into confessing non-existent crimes before being shot in the back of the head or despatched to a living death in Norilsk. Mr Putin has not deliberately caused a gigantic famine in which millions have died. Mr Putin has not murdered many of his close associates. He has not signed an unscrupulous alliance with Hitler, partitioned Poland, or established an iron secret police despotism over the whole of Central Europe. Nor has he persecuted legitimate scientists, nor has he embarked on anti-semitic purges of doctors. Nor has he encourage a pharaonic personality cult, requiring the erection of thousands of images of him. Nor has he encouraged a cult around a boy (Pavlik Morozov) who betrayed his own parents to the secret police, nor has he compelled his own immediate colleagues to endure in silence the cruel imprisonment of their close family members..

 

But many at ‘The Times’ and elsewhere in Murdochworld seem to have bought their political telescopes from some strange Iraq War surplus shop. Viewed through these instruments, almost everyone looks like either Stalin or Hitler (depending on the particular crisis involved) .  And all kinds of other strange objects can also be seen. Readers of M.R. James’s ghost story ‘A View From A Hill’, will be familiar with the idea of a sinister telescope or field glass which shows the user what dead men’s eyes have seen. The Murdochscope, by contrast, shows you what other men’s minds have mistakenly imagined. Far, far off it can also descry weapons of mass destruction somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

 

As for ‘respect for borders’, I’m not sure that the neo-conservative globalist movement is very troubled by borders, or entitled to get hoity-toity about them. Apart from supporting their total abolition in continental Europe through Schengen, what about (here I go again) Kosovo and Cyprus, anyone? Or, come to that, Iraq, now shorn for all intents and purposes of Iraqi Kurdistan, a ‘western’ protectorate. If   airspace counts as a border, Libya also deserves a mention.

 

Mr Putin, as often discussed here, is no paragon. He is indeed a man of many very bad faults, and his state is corrupt and violent. But to mention him in the same breath as Stalin is simply to betray a complete lack of the sense of proportion.

 

And Mr Boyes is intelligent enough not to do that, just as he really ought to know that Moscow has referred to itself as the third Rome for many centuries.  But Mussolini?  According to Mr Boyes, Mr Putin is a ‘post-fascist, an heir to Benito Mussolini’. But apart from using such phrases as ‘right wing’ and such expressions as ‘nationalist’, which thought-free left-wingers employ to win the plaudits of their friends without actually having to explain the assumed wickedness of these positions, there’s really very little to justify either headline or picture. Mussolini and Putin really do not have that much in common and nor (alas for Russia) does Russia have much in common with Italy.

 

Instead, he speaks darkly of meetings between Mr Putin and various nationalist parties of the anti-immigration  sort, which left-wing 1968 types like to call ‘fascist’ long after George Orwell rightly dismissed the word as having no real meaning.  Once again I reproduce his words from ‘Politics and the English Language’ : ‘The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. This is even more true than it was when Orwell first wrote it in 1946, and I am amazed at the number of members of my trade who are either unaware of it (which is shameful), or who ignore it (which is lazy).

 

I agree that this is itself interesting, though I have to say that I personally wouldn’t give the time of day to any of these nationalist formations, and I would add such meetings to my criticism of Mr Putin. But it’s interesting because it does tend to underline my point that what separates Mr Putin from any other major political figure is that he is  a supporter of national sovereignty. It is the single characteristic of the man which separates him from all other major figures in world politics. Others are despots. Others run corrupt states. Others are secretive. None defends sovereignty. And modern euro-politics has turned sovereignty( see below) from a mainstream opinion to an eccentric heresy.

 

This, above and beyond all things, is what really riles the forces of Blairism and Murdochism, in whose newspaper Mr Boyes writes. They are revolutionary internationalists, open-borders enthusiasts, scornful of national sovereignty , of protection of national industries and of immigration control. They search for pretexts to invade and overthrow states of which they do not approve, for whatever reason.

 

That is why (and they never answer this point) they were quite happy to put up with the gross misbehaviour of Boris Yeltsin, from rigged elections to shelling his own parliament to savage war against the Chechens. This of course is because Mr Yeltsin let the ‘West’ plunder his country without restraint, and because he did not get in the way of its various Blairite adventures.

 

But they won’t forgive Vladimir Putin for sins which are in many cases rather smaller. I am told this is ‘whataboutery’ , whatever that is. Well, if it is, then ‘whataboutery’ is a very powerful argument, just as ‘Tu quoque’  (‘You did it too’) has always been. If you claim to act out of principle, and you can be shown not to be doing so, then your claim is destroyed. And a principle, by its nature, applies in all cases. I am sorry I need to explain this, but it seems necessary. If you attack Mr Putin , the questions ‘Why then do you not similarly attack Messrs Yeltsin, Erdogan, Sisi, Xi Jinping for the same faults?’ must be answered. In fact can I put in here a very loud plea for someone to say *something* about Egypt, the last place where all right-minded people naively backed the Utopian mob, so plunging a moderately unhappy country into the pit of misery and hysterical repression where it now wallows, uncriticised by us.

 

 

 

The answer may lie in words written by Zbigniew Brzezinski( Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and the unsung architect of Moscow’s doomed intervention and eventual downfall in Afghanistan. He wrote in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ : ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’

 

I have no doubt that similar words could be found (if we could read them) in the textbooks studied by trainee Russian diplomats, at the great elite MGIMO university on Vernadsky Prospect in Moscow.

 

 

Machine-gunning the Russian President with words such as ‘Faustian’ ‘Far Right’, ‘macho’ and Mussolini is no substitute for a grown-up analysis. Nor does it begin to cope with the problem of Russia, a huge and important country, released from its Soviet prison and trying to find its place in a world utterly different from the one in which it last existed.

 

Remember, when the Russian empire fell, the German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires still existed, not to mention the British and French global empires. But Russia, even without Ukraine, remains one of the biggest land empires in human history. It has a huge task of repair, recovery and rebuilding, moral as well as physical. It will look at the world in ways different from ours a bankrupt empire turned into a client of another empire, and largely ruled by yet another empire.  And who is to say it is wrong to do so?

 

One key to the current problem may be found here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html

In a little-noticed but fascinating story in which Vladimir Putin resisted both threats and inducements, from the country which has the *real* special relationship with the USA, to drop support for Syria.  One explanation for this behaviour might be, er principle, even if in the end it is a self-serving one (for without sovereignty, Russia can expect to become a globally-run oilfield  and source of cheap labour, much of its territory surrendered de facto to the EU and to China.). But the Putin of the caricature couldn’t possibly possess such a quality, could he?

 

What I find most interesting is that a desire for national sovereignty, which I was brought up to believe was normal, creditable and sensible, even desirable,  has now been relegated to being a disreputable fringe position, held only by dodgy Poujadist parties. By the same principle, patriotism has become a form of bigotry,  and mild social democracy, a mixed economy, reasonably strong trades unions, protection of strategic industries from foreign purchase or competition,  have apparently become comparable with Venezuelan Communism.

It makes no sense to me. I must have been away when they held the briefing, which is why I still don’t think that Mr Putin is a modern Mussolini. He is just what he is, and needs to be understood as such.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Thoughts on Ralph Miliband

This article by me about the Miliband controversy appeared in the Mail on Sunday on 6th October.

When I was 17, I was a Trotskyist, a bit like Ed Miliband’s father but with many fewer excuses. I never had to flee for my life from an advancing army. I had grown up, unlike him, in the safest, richest, gentlest age in history. I said and thought  and did things I now remember with embarrassment and shame.

But I long ago made up my mind to be honest about my past. And that is partly because I would not hold the views I now hold, or be the person I am now – conservative, Christian, patriotic – if I had not examined the alternatives and found out what they were really like.

Born in a colonial outpost, the son of a Royal Navy officer, I heard the last faint farewell trumpet calls of Empire and grew up among adults who still spoke in its confident accents. I found out in my adolescence that it was all a shell, indebted, enfeebled, rackety, demoralised, shrivelled from ‘Finest Hour’ to ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ in a few years. 

Where could all that homeless  love go now? I needed a new outlet for my loyalties and found it, for good or ill, in revolution.

So let us say I’m not especially shocked to find that others have similar pasts. It’s what they’re like now that interests me. I’ve seldom seen or met anyone less revolutionary than Ed Miliband. By contrast, I find it quite funny watching the modern Tory Party adopting policies, especially on family matters, greenery and immigration, that we Trotskyists would once have thought rather far-fetched.

Then again, I have another reason for feeling a bit sorry for the Labour leader when his father is attacked.

I’m unusual among journalists in having been on the receiving end of my trade when it’s not at its kindest. It’s nearly 40 years ago now, so I feel I can mention here that it was no  fun being called by the News of the World after my poor mother, God rest her soul, had been found dead by her own hand in an Athens hotel room. I knew they were only doing their job, but I can’t say I liked it, even so.

Since that day, I’ve been pursued by a press pack more than once. The first time was after I helped derail Neil Kinnock’s 1992 Election campaign. The second  time was when I dared to research Cherie Blair’s little-known attempt to become an MP.

On both occasions, it was comically impossible to get my fellow reporters to accept I was telling the truth about what I was up to. This was because what they believed  was so much more interesting, and made a better story. 

 

Since then I’ve grown used to being called silly names, and to having my character, mental health and appearance analysed, not always in a flattering way, by other journalists. I almost enjoy it. I might as well.

Yet after all that I’m still completely in favour of a rough-edged, untamed press, because in my journey from Marx to The Mail on Sunday, via communist Moscow and quite a few other places, I’ve learned to love liberty with my whole heart. And you can’t have that without unchained newspapers.

So here we come to the article in the Daily Mail headlined ‘The man who hated Britain’. Much of life is a paradox. It seems quite obvious to me that the more you love your country, the more critical you must be of it when it has gone wrong. The test of loyalty is elsewhere. Perhaps it’s because it involves the Navy, in which as a small boy I used to long to serve, but the picture of the young Ralph Miliband (the image of his younger son), touchingly engulfed in the ill-fitting wartime uniform  of a petty officer, just makes the accusation fade away, for me.

There’s no doubt that people ought to know and care more about the influence on our national life of Marxist politics, wildly out of proportion to the numbers of people involved – though it’s important to grasp that Trotskyists hated Stalin and the Gulag as much as anyone. I myself spend quite a lot of time warning against the penetration of our politics, media, schools and universities by people who really do hate Britain, desire to carve up our kingdom and feed the slices into the Euro-blender, meanwhile burying our traditions under a bland pile of metricated political correctness.

If only they all carried big red labels saying ‘I hate Britain’, how simple things would be. But several of the worst of them are Blairites whose politically correct, multiculti, anti-Christian ideas come from 1980s Euro-communism, and who hate and despise Ed Miliband. And quite a few are in the high councils of the Tory Party. Who, for instance, said, back in 2004: ‘The nation states have had their day as powers. The world must be more ordered and centralised .  .  . it’s unstoppable and irreversible’? Why, Lord Heseltine, David Cameron’s valued mentor, in the midst of explaining why Britain should have abolished the pound without a vote, because Fleet Street would have ‘pandered to the worst and basest instincts of the mass of people’.

To me, that’s a lot more worrying than Ralph Miliband’s dislike of the pre-1945 British class system. He wasn’t alone in that. It wasted many good lives. The conservative, patriotic novelist Nevil Shute loathed English class prejudice so much he went to live in Australia.

George Orwell, who wrote with lyrical love of ‘the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows .  .  . and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings’ was another Trotskyist, who spent 1940 hoping to see Red militias billeted in the Ritz Hotel.

The American poet Alice Duer Miller concluded her 1940 love-poem to England, The White Cliffs, much treasured by many English people (including my mother) in the last war: ‘I am American bred. I have seen much to hate here, much to forgive’, and then added, as so many of us do, this final line: ‘But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.’

By all means, let’s have as much hurly-burly and hard knocks as we can manage. Our politics are bland enough without the press going soft and soppy as well, and how wretched it is that this row has given aid and comfort to the Polly Toynbee tendency, who for years have longed to yank out the teeth of the conservative press. But let it be to the point, and about real live issues.

Our opponents may well be wrong but it does not make them bad. Even revolutionaries sometimes have a point, and many of them – though not all of them – grow up and turn into people like me.

Nick Cohen, Owen Jones and Me

Last week, the Leftist journalist Nick Cohen (who has, for reasons which escape me, won the love of several conservative journals), used a column in the Spectator to call Owen Jones the 'Peter Hitchens of the left'.

I don't think either of us exactly welcomed the comparison.

Mr Jones, a youthful left-winger, is the author of a book called 'Chavs' and now a columnist for the Independent. At his age I was still toiling away in the stokeholds and engine-rooms of journalism, and many years from having my own column.

He gave his own rebuttal of this in the Independent. I wrote a letter to the Spectator, which is published in this week's issue, and reads:

 

'Sir: Nick Cohen (‘Forget “militant” atheists’, 24 August) presumably seeks to injure me by calling Owen Jones ‘The Peter Hitchens of the Left’.  Mr Jones - who also did not take the equation as a compliment - has offered his own response to this elsewhere.  I am mainly mystified. Mr Jones and I are both human, and both write for a living, but this doesn’t seem to me to amount to an important resemblance.

 

But I recall that Mr Cohen has never sought to rebut, with facts or logic,  some serious criticisms I once made (in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’) of his support for the invasion of Iraq. I also scolded my fellow-conservatives for imagining that this stance made Mr Cohen in any way their friend or ally. He seems to me to remain a committed enemy of conservative opinions, especially mine. I also recall with some amusement a rather raucous and personal public attack which he made on me at an Orwell Prize event some years ago.

 

I think it would be civil of Mr Cohen, whose past support for selective state schools shows him to be a man of intelligence,  to argue with what I say, rather than attacking me personally.

 

Peter Hitchens'

 

I really would be interested to hear Mr Cohen's response to the critique I make of his position on the Iraq war, and of the welcome he received among conservatives when he supported that war. I believe there is a YouTube version of his Orwell Prize attack on me, for those who enjoy that sort of thing. Anyone who does watch it should know (because I think it has some bearing in the incident) that the year before I too had criticised the Orwell Prize judges, for shortlisting Alastair Campbell for the prize. I thought, and still think, that Mr Campbell is absolutely not in the Orwell tradition.  

  

Musings on a Sultry Friday Afternoon

Leafing through contributions during a rare tranquil moment today, I found this from Mr Nigel Falls, who has been besieging me with peremptory tweets about drugs and ‘addiction’. I can’t think of a worse medium than Twitter in which to hold such a discussion (for some reason Paul Embery, of whom we now see so little here, has turned up there too, anxious to re-engage me on the subject of God, another subject unfitted for 140-character snippets, as it has proved.) .

 

So I am pleased to welcome Mr Falls here, where facts and logic can be properly deployed, an index is available, and books can be recommended and even read.

 

He writes : ‘I am proud to say I am one of the tedious people besieging Mr Hitchens on Twitter about his infuriating belief that addiction does not exist. I must add that I am from Northern Ireland so the intransigent, siege mentality is second nature to me. Mr Hitchens puts absolute faith in the misanthropic musings of Theodore Dalrymple whilst scornfully dismissing the majority opinion of clinicians and the anecdotal experiences of former addicts on this matter. All Dalrymple's book ‘Junk Science’ proved to me was Mr Dalrymple was in great need of a career change as he so obviously despised the people he dealt with on a professional capacity but that is just my opinion. The crux of Mr Hitchens's argument seems to me a semantic one as addiction cannot be objectively defined by scientific tests its existence amounts to an absurd piece of conventional wisdom. Mr Hitchens frequently cites Orwell's brilliant Essay "Politics and the English Language" as a major influence in his highly readable (I grudgingly concede) journalistic style. In it Orwell says "Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this" Mr Hitchens is doing exactly what Orwell warns us against by reducing the argument for the existence of addiction to the absurd on semantic grounds. Anyway thank you for the interesting debate Mr Hitchens. I do apologise if I may have bored you almost to sleep with my arguments but then again some people pay good money for narcotic substances which have the same effect.’

 

Almost all of this, apart from the empty, ad hominem attacks on Dr Dalrymple, is dealt with in my exchange with ‘Citizen Sane’ , which is recorded here: http://citizensane.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it-youre-addicted-to-peter-hitchens/

 

I’m amused by the attempt to use Orwell against me here . The relevant passage (right at the end of that incomparable  essay, which can be found in full here  https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm )

 

 

Is as follows :

 

‘I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs. ‘

 

Well, I don’t claim that abstract words are meaningless, only that they cannot be used to describe material things, and that abstract concepts cannot be treated as if they had material existence. And I certainly don’t advocate quietism.  If addiction is abstract, as Mr ‘Falls’ seems to concede, then it cannot be a disease of the human body beyond the control of the person suffering from it, and so cannot be ‘treated’ as if it were .  It must be (as it is ) a concept. And a concept of what? Why, of a certain moral standpoint which denies the existence of free will. As this is fundamentally a religious question, one chooses whether one accepts the existence of free will or not, depending on what sort of world one wishes to inhabit.

 

This is the beginning of a sensible discussion of what it is, in that case.  But such a discussion can only be held once Mr ‘Falls’ has accepted the need to argue on the basis of evidence and fact, rather than on the basis of his passions. And, where evidence and fact run out ( as they do in questions of faith) to concede that certain things must, this side of the grave, remain a matter of opinion. Next, to see that a rival opinion cannot necessarily be classified as ‘wrong’. It must be admitted as a legitimate possibility to be considered.

And on what grounds should we consider it, and on what basis will we choose whether to believe it in preference to a rival idea? Here's why teh God argumnet matters so much.  The choice between them is then a moral or theological one. What the ‘addiction is a disease’ faction cannot accept is that their standpoint is a questionable opinion about free will, not an undeniable fact about physiology.

 

By the way, I have seen ‘Citizen Sane’ criticised for having in some way surrendered to me thanks to an alleged awe of my celebrity. Well, I see no evidence for this. he retains his indendence through our exchange. As for overaweing anyone,  I’m not that majestic a figure (5 feet nine inches in my socks, overweight, big nose,  bad typist etc ) and it’s amazing how many of my other Internet opponents manage *not* to be overawed by this effect., and address me as 'you ****'.  

 

To return to Orwell, ‘Fascism’ has actually become meaningless because of the abusive and lazy use of the word as an all-purpose insult or denigration by left-wing propagandists. Its only serious meaning now is ‘to do with the Fascist government of Italy under Mussolini’.  At the root of this problem was the difficulty which the Comintern, and later the Cominform, had with the expressions ‘Nazi’ and ‘National Socialist’ . ‘Nazi’ always called into mind ‘Nazi-Soviet Pact’, an event the Left wish to forget or (increasingly) have never heard of and would rather not hear of, thank you kindly.

 

 ‘National Socialist’ has obvious problems for any left-wing propagandist who wants to pretend that barbaric authoritarian despotisms are  conservative in origin. In fact it's utopian 'enlightenment' ideas that usually inform them. 

 

 I won’t even begin to discuss the problems of matching the NSDAP and Mussolini up to General Franco, or Salazar, or Marshal Petain. It would be as time-consuming and useless as trying to draw up a street plan (with bus map) of the Lost City of Atlantis.

 

But if one wishes to deal with the abstraction ‘Totalitarianism’ all one needs to do is to introduce such things as :

 

‘National Socialist Party’ , or ‘Gestapo’,  or ‘OVRA; or ‘Fascist Party’ , or ‘Pravda’ or ‘Voelkischer Beobachter’ or ‘People’s Court’ (and how like Judge Jefferys’ Bloody Assize was to Roland Freisler’s horrible trials, or Andrei Vyshinksy’s Moscow equivalents, can be seen in Conan Doyle’s tremendous description of Jefferys in action in ‘Micah Clarke’) , or SS, or Gulag, or NKVD; or in the modern day, the Chinese Lao Gai.

 

And then one can see that these things have actual objective, material and human manifestations which are far from abstract, can be measured, studied,  in many cases photographed, always documented.

 

Addiction has no such characteristics. It remains both physically unmeasurable and logically and verbally slippery, meaning one thing at one time, and another at a different time, depending on which part of the argument is being advanced. It was (as the record shows) through this question of definition that I managed to persuade ‘Citizen Sane’ of the (very simple) point that I repeatedly make. He was able to concede it because he was able to subordinate his passions and his desires to his reason.  Far from being a  demonstration of weakness or subservience, it was a considerable demonstration of character and intelligence.