On Monday night I was the guest of the Durham Union for a debate on whether the nation state is outdated. Few will be surprised to learn that I spoke against this proposal. More will be surprised to learn that my side won the vote handsomely.
Here's my speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piOGd4qaPwA
The rest of the debate is easily accessed on YouTube
My contribution to this debate, perhaps two years old, at the Cambridge Union, has appeared on the world wide web.
Some of you may find it interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUHNFY1ksPw
The whole thing is here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3HXNgsl8Yo
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
How odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.
Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.
Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.
One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?
It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.
The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.
Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.
You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.
There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.
What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.
I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.
But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve.
His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.
I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.
IT WAS full of what I will politely call terminological inexactitudes. Of these the greatest was his pretence that he hates being in coalition with Liberal Democrats. All the rest flowed from this falsehood.
Let me remind you of what he said on September 20, 2009, long before he was allegedly ‘forced’ into this arrangement: ‘On so many progressive issues, there is strong agreement between our parties.’ By ‘progressive’, he means left-wing.
The next greatest falsehood was his pretence that he fears Labour more than he fears Ukip. The opposite is true. His Blairite project would be quite safe under Labour.
Only a Ukip breakthrough offers the poor, betrayed British people any hope of real change. The others must lie, because they know their real aims are hateful to us.
No happy ending for story time
How sad to hear that BBC radio is ending its last children’s programme – because its audience is mostly made up of over-60s.
For me, the words ‘It’s a quarter to two’ and ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’, which began the old programme Listen With Mother, are still infused with magic. I actually did listen to it with my mother, and there were plenty of others who did the same.
We make a lot of fuss about how adults should read to children, but I’m not sure we really do very much about it. It’s difficult. Children are incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere around them, and our age is too noisy and frantic to listen to stories.
It only works if you can see the story unfolding in your head. And modern children face so many distractions – and have their imaginations hoovered out of their heads by TV and computer games at incredibly early ages.
And language gets cruder and coarser every year. I was enraptured when teachers read Conan Doyle’s great historical romances to us on dark afternoons, and John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights. But how many eight-year-olds can cope these days with their richly embroidered English?
A brave attempt to revive the lost art is being made in Oxford now, by the extraordinary new Story Museum, which should get more attention. It has a real wardrobe, through which you can reach a snowy forest, and many other wonders and surprises.
But above all it is devoted to the idea that children who know stories will grow up happier and richer in spirit than those who don’t.
My homebound train slowed, then halted meaninglessly in the middle of some post-industrial wasteland. Late again. In fact, at least a dozen trains were held up by about half an hour, on a major line.
This happens so often that I wouldn’t mention it, except that the delay was blamed on a mysterious ‘object’ on the line, which announcers were careful not to name.
My mind raced. What could it be that was so bad they couldn’t mention it? A dead sheep? A lavatory? A coffin? A Human Right?
By diligent enquiry, I found in the end that it was... a solitary plastic traffic cone. Instead of hooking it off the track with a pole, or jumping down and picking it up, or just letting trains biff it out of the way, now legally perilous, those in charge launched a major alert, as signals switched to red for miles around.
Of course they knew it was silly – that’s why they wouldn’t reveal what the object was. But this is the state of our country since the Thatcher and Major Governments allowed no-win-no-fee lawyers to operate – in the full knowledge of the misery and stupidity they had already brought to the USA. Next time I’ll ring the Cones Hotline – if it still exists.
The Prime Minister says he prefers pounds, pints, yards and miles to litres and metres. Perhaps he does, or perhaps he is just saying that because he knows it plays well with people like me.
If he really means it, then he can do something about it. For many years, the Government – and increasingly the BBC – have acted as if Parliament abolished our traditional measurements.
It never did. Nor was it ever discussed at a General Election. What’s more, these measures are still used in the USA, a successful and efficient country with which we do a lot of trade.
Yet schools and officials act as if feet and inches, yards and acres are antiquated and subversive, coldly refusing to use them. There’s no warrant for this. Mr Cameron has the power to stop it. Everyone in this country should know how many inches make a foot, and how many pounds there are in a stone.
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This should provide a link to a debate on Russia in which I took part on Wednesday evening, in New York City. My hosts were the excellent New York operation of 'Intelligence Squared', which has met a great need by organising debates on important topics in London and the USA.
: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy2YnAYn08Q&list=PLf0rUf4fp_RZ4m0GPiUEYMTQVmTzc3UXn
There are now more details available about the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Great Lives’, in which I nominate George Bell, sometime Bishop of Chichester. The programme, presented by Matthew Parris, is to be broadcast on Tuesday 2nd April at 4.30 pm and again on Friday 5th April at 11.00 p.m. I believe it will also be more or less permanently available to download on the BBC player.
Bishop Bell was one of the few prominent people who opposed the deliberate bombing of German civilians during World War Two, at the time it was taking place, and so remains controversial to this day. As I know very well from my correspondence, many people continue to defend this action( some on the bizarre grounds that the German bombing of Britain was so terrible and barbaric, which is surely an argument against anyone using this appalling method of warfare).
None of these defences actually stand up. Britain was not under any serious threat of invasion, nor did bombing German civilians lessen this danger in any way. The huge resources devoted to the bombing campaign could have been used to fight the genuinely dangerous German U-boat offensive far more effectively; they could also have been used in developing, much earlier than eventually happened, the long-range fighter escorts which made accurate bombing of German strategic targets possible. The diversion of German resources away from the Russian front could have been achieved by attacking military and industrial targets, which would also have shortened the war , as attacking civilians in their homes did not do.
But they are advanced because many people are, even now, unwilling to concede that we did anything wrong. George Bell, not a pacifist (he lost two brothers in the First World War)but a Christian, did now, and said so when it mattered at some cost to himself.
He had many other merits, some of which emerge in the programme, and some of which don’t (his role as midwife to T.S.Eliot’s great play ’Murder in the Cathedral’ is one example of his adventurous and enlightened ideas about how the church should open itself to the people and ally itself with the arts to spread its message). I think it was a pity he didn’t become Archbishop of Canterbury, and I’m pretty certain, from studying his biography in detail, that he was denied this post because of his stand. Anyway, listen to the programme. You can find out more about it by going here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rl8n8
Among other things, this will eventually lead you to a rather amusing photograph of me, Matthew Parris and Andrew Chandler, an expert on George Bell who also plays a major part in the programme.
On Wednesday evening ( 7.00 pm London time) I expect to take part in a debate on the subject of legal gun control, and so of the USA’s Second Amendment, protecting the right to bear arms from such control. The topic for debate (which I , the Hated Peter Hitchens, shall be opposing and Professor William Self proposing) will be ‘The Right to Bear Arms is a Freedom too Far’ . I believe it will be streamed on the Internet. Tickets for seats in the small London auditorium long ago sold out. The encounter is sponsored by Intelligence Squared, who have organised many excellent debates on important subjects, and by Google, who also staged the debate on drugs in which I had one of my more amusing clashes with the Rt Hon and Most Rev Russell Brand, probable next leader of the Conservative Party and establishment spokesman on the drugs issue.
Basic details can be found here.
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/versus-right-to-bear-arms/
I particularly draw readers’ attention to the quotation from Thomas Jefferson ‘Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.. they make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants.’
In my annoying way, I checked the origin of this and apparently these are not Jefferson’s own words, but were first written by Cesare Beccaria (a liberal Italian jurist of the 18th century, and an early opponent of the death penalty) and were included in Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book.
A fuller extract reads : ‘Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.’
Given Jefferson’s role in creating and enshrining the US Bill of Rights, which includes the Right to Bear Arms, I think we can assume that he broadly agreed, though James Madison was probably more involved. Amusingly, another person of Italian origin, Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, an American Mafia turncoat, made the same point more pithily two centuries later. Mr Gravano told ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1999: 'Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always going to have a gun.’
It’s ten years since I wrote this account of my position, based on the relevant chapter ‘Out of the Barrel of a Gun’, in my widely unreviewed book, unavailable in all leading bookstores, ‘A Brief History of Crime’ .
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-173487/Why-I-demand-right-carry-gun.html#ixzz2ONWCAgfI
Since then, the alarming incidence of gun massacres has changed the debate by raising the (unanswered) question ‘ If guns are the principal cause of these massacres, why are there more of them when, if anything, guns are more restricted in the USA than they were before, they happen not only in the USA but in gun-controlled countries such as Britain, Germany and Finland, and they were almost wholly unknown anywhere until the modern era, which just happens to be the era in which the use of illegal drugs and the prescription of legal psychotropic drugs, became common?’
The question also has to be asked about why, given the widespread availability of guns in Switzerland, the number of massacres there (though they are no longer unknown) is absolutely and proportionately rather low.
I have dealt with an important aspect of these massacres here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/index.html
and here
and (this contains an interesting new note about one of the Columbine killers) here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/usa/page/2/
I believe it is intended to be a fairly brief and concentrated debate.
Britain’s media pundits make sheep look like rugged individualists. There’s nothing they like so much as bleating the same thing in unison – even if it’s the opposite of what they bleated last night.
This week, as if a switch had been flicked in their brains, they suddenly abandoned David Cameron, around whom they had been fawning loyally for years. And they transferred their loyalties to Edward Miliband.
It’s always more or less the same. The favoured one makes a speech and the word goes out ‘That was a great speech!’, and everyone says and writes that it was. It happened to Mr Slippery in Blackpool in October 2005.
Nobody can now remember what he said (because he didn’t say anything), but if you dared to suggest (as I did) that it wasn’t actually very good, other journalists would turn on you in impatient wrath.
The implication was that I should get with the project. ‘Can’t you see, you fool, that this is the line?’ I was duly punished, in various subtle ways, for my dissent.
I’d seen the same thing with Neil Kinnock and his over-rated attack on the tiny sect called Militant, hailed as if it were one of Churchill’s finest. I’d seen the ceaseless, abominable, shameful praising of the Blair creature and his windy, rather nasty orations.
And I’d also witnessed the moments when the sheep turned feral, rending William Hague, destroying Iain Duncan Smith, ganging up on Gordon Brown as if he had been a war criminal, rather than just another not-very-good politician.
I’d watched with interest their failed attempts to turn Edward Miliband into a second Gordon Brown. I’ve met Mr Miliband. I don’t have any time for his politics, but he’s a normally likeable human being and he was quite right to say clearly that the Iraq War was wrong. That’s why he’s leader, and his pro-war brother isn’t, as anyone who understands the Labour Party knows.
Well, smearing and mockery having failed, let’s try smarm. If the Tories couldn’t win the last Election with Gordon Brown as their opponent, how can they possibly hope to win the next one, after five years of failure, and with no Gordon to kick around?
It’s pretty obvious that Mr Miliband will be the next Prime Minister, and, in the end, our political media are power-worshippers.
That’s why a vast lake of drivel, slopping lazily backwards and forwards in the autumn winds, has been portrayed as a great speech, and why Mr Miliband will from now on find he has more and more friends he never knew he had. He shouldn’t expect it to last.
He asked for this
Mr Miliband likes to go on and on and on about how he went to a comprehensive school. He even had the nerve to say: ‘I wouldn’t be standing on this stage today without my comprehensive school education.’
Is that so? Actually, people educated in such schools are rare at the top of politics.
But in any case, does he owe his all to his school? Or did his ultra-Left parents, like so many other dogmatic socialists who are ‘committed to state schooling’, hire private tutors to get him up to Oxbridge standard?
On Wednesday afternoon, I asked Mr Miliband’s office if he had received private tuition. At the time of writing, I have had no reply.
‘One Nation’ was always a fake
The slogan of the washed-up Tory wets who were happy to implement Labour policies for ever. It’s also not true. Britain is plainly several nations.
Above all, there is the gulf between those who work and save, and those who don’t work, don’t save and who live off those who do.
Then there is the gulf between those who make things that people want to buy, and those paid by the state to provide compulsory ‘services’ that are often poor, and frequently actively undesirable. Then there’s the gulf between those who are sick of mass immigration, and want it stopped – and those who actively wish to transform the country with more immigration.
It isn’t one nation. That’s why it isn’t and shouldn’t be a one-party state. But, looking at the policies of all three major parties, you could be forgiven for thinking that we do have only one party, all the uglier for having three heads.
The future of rail, locked in a dusty cell
There is no excuse left for railway privatisation. Sweeteners paid to train firms mean private rail has cost far more to run than nationalised lines ever did. All rail travellers know that it has meant higher fares, and more crowded, slower trains.
Its defenders mistake changes that would have happened anyway for the results of private ownership. BR would have banned smoking too. Higher passenger numbers are caused by rising population and road congestion in the crowded South East.
And I could do without the huge increase in apologies. As a regular rail user, I generally receive a minimum of 20 apologies a week, mostly made by computers, and none of them involving any genuine intention to behave differently in future.
Now, the costly mess of the West Coast franchise – for which we will pay – shows that the whole system is misbegotten. It’s not just that Richard Branson has been mistreated (I never thought I’d say that). It’s that the public have been mistreated. If British Rail came back from the dead, I for one would embrace it with tears in my eyes as a long-lost friend.
But wait. I have discovered that British Rail is not dead at all, but does in fact still exist, and is kept locked in a basement of the Transport Department, just in case. Let it out. Bring it back. All is forgiven.
A footnote to the laughable Channel 4 programme on ‘ecstasy’ last week.
One expert invited to take part, but for some reason not asked to speak, was Professor Derek Moore of the University of East London.
He has completed work that suggests ‘ecstasy’ may damage children in the womb. It found ‘poorer infant mental and motor development at 12 months with significant, persistent neurotoxic effects’ in those whose mothers had taken it while pregnant.
This strikes me as very important, and certainly something all young women should know.
I couldn’t stand Jimmy Savile. But at least his death has helped uncover one of the grossest pieces of hypocrisy in modern times.
Compare and contrast: two great and respected institutions do nothing about child molesting in their midst.
When the institution is the conservative Roman Catholic Church, the BBC cannot shut up about it. When the institution is the liberal, secular BBC, the Corporation mumbles feebly, and cancels its own programme on the subject. It wasn’t the children they cared about, you see.
Two weeks before Christmas, Britain’s conservative media went into a collective swoon of admiration for David Cameron. He had ‘stood up to the EU’. He had ‘wielded the veto’. Suddenly, after years of rather embarrassing temporising, wriggling and retreating, and of shattering ‘cast-iron’ guarantees on referendums, the Mere Leader had become a new Thatcher. Not of course that Lady Thatcher was really ever the great champion of British independence that her worshippers believe her to have been. But let that pass.
I did try to point out here on 12th December (‘David Cameron’s Phoney War’) and again on 17th December (‘Don’t forget they cheered Chamberlain’s ‘Victory’ too’) that the triumph was not as advertised.
Unwelcome as these facts were, I explained that Mr Cameron had not wielded the veto, not least because there had been nothing to veto. I also pointed out that his action was greeted as a blessing by a senior aide of President Sarkozy, and didn’t much displease Berlin either.
But there’s no swoon like a media swoon. Perhaps it’s my Marxist-Leninist background in mass manipulation, but I have several times found myself (usually at party conferences) alone, or almost alone in the press room, being unhypnotised by some ‘great’ speech. Neil Kinnock’s attack on ‘Militant’, all Anthony Blair’s supposedly ‘superb’ speeches,(yuk) David Cameron’s ‘brilliant’ speech at the Tory conference in Blackpool, (can anyone remember what he said?) all left me yawning and unimpressed. The only really great speech of my lifetime was, I think, Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ oration, crammed with the thrilling cadences of the Authorised Version of the Bible and delivered by a master of the art of preaching. By comparison with that, these measly offerings were just straw.
Oddly enough, one of the few others who was immune to the Blair magic was Matthew Parris, and it was because we would sometimes exchange haggard looks of dismay at the mass adulation around us that I once invited him to lunch, in an attempt to form a small Club of the Undeceived. Alas, the relationship failed to blossom, as history records. Mr Parris (the moment reminded me of ‘The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’ as modern Britain so often does) turned up one day looking exactly as before, but mysteriously converted into a loyal Cameroon. Maybe they’ll get me in the end, too. Don’t be fooled, if they do.
But once the line has been fixed (and see Peter Oborne’s bravely self-critical and revelatory remarks on this in my book ‘the Cameron Delusion’) it is almost impossible to resist.
And so, when the alleged ‘veto’ shrivelled into a yellowing heap of dust and bones, like ‘She Who Must be Obeyed’ when she steps for the second time into the flame in Rider Haggard’s wonderful book ( was it in ‘She’ or ‘Ayesha’, can anyone recall?), it was barely noticed. Gosh the European Court of Justice can after all be used to enforce limits on state spending. Gosh , the institutions of the EU can after all be used in this cause. This was the very thing Mr Cameron was said to have ‘vetoed’. In fact, last week he telephoned Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the EU Commission, to say that the United Kingdom will *not* block the plan. That is to say, there is no veto. There never was a veto, and now there certainly isn’t. We were told that in some mysterious way the Luxembourg Court’s powers (which apply to this country) have been watered down.
Well, any reader of Christopher Booker and Richard North’s ‘The Great Deception’ ( and anyone who hasn’t read it isn’t qualified to take part in discussions about the EU at all) will know what that sort of safeguard is worth. (NB I originally mistakenly posted the title as 'The Great Delusion', which is, as a contributor pointed out, mistaken. Apologies to those looking for the book, and to the authors).
And this colossal retreat (well, it was colossal if the veto was as big a deal as was originally claimed) was blamed, as all Mr Cameron’s liberal actions are, on the Liberal Democrats. ‘Nick Clegg Made Me Do It’ has become the Useless Tory Party’s equivalent of ‘The Dog Ate My Homework’.
Who really believes that Mr Cameron couldn’t simply say (if he wanted to to) to Mr Clegg ‘What are you going to do about it? Resign and break the coalition? Have an election?’ Mr Clegg would lose his own seat, his party would all but disappear and he would miss the chance of becoming Britain’s next EU Commissioner (a post I predict for him, soon after he leads his party out of the Coalition, in a supposedly bitter but in fact planned split that miraculously does not cause the government to fall, or lead to an election, in 2014).
The excuse is pitiful and unbelievable, so why does anyone believe it? As for the fabled ‘Tory Eurosceptic Right’ what are they going to do about it? Well, what do you think?
Why do people believe all this stuff? Why, because they choose to and want to (the reason people always believe things, as I keep saying).
Oh and by the way, another mention of the ‘Sunday Times’. In my edition of it, there’s a very curious event on page two. There’s a news item about the NHS. There’s a news item about bankers, carried over from page one. There’s a (very small) news item about Mr Cameron’s climbdown on the EU. There’s a news item about tax-cuts.
And in the middle of all these, without any accompanying text or headline that I can see, is a full-colour (though quite small) bar chart of the paper’s latest YouGov opinion poll, sitting there on its own, a bit like a weather chart.
I have never seen a poll displayed in this way. In my long-ago days as an industrial reporter Page Two was regarded as the place where good stories went to die, as they were unlikely to be followed up, or noticed by any but the most diligent readers. It was irreverently referred to as ‘The Elephants’ Graveyard’.
Oh, you’ll want to know what the poll said. It gave Labour(at 40%) a one-point lead over the Tories, put the Liberal Democrats at 8% and others at 13% . This isn’t significant in itself . But it does clash a bit with the accepted media belief that Mr Cameron has achieved a lead over Labour thanks to his ‘toughness’ over the EU etc. It is true that there were three other (rather unsurprising) surveys about people’s opinion on taxation. But the neighbouring story , on tax cuts, does not refer to them.
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
The gruesome carnival of the party conferences is now over, so I can stop taking my nausea-suppressing pills at last. Do you have any idea how fraudulent these things are? They are sealed off from the people by police guards and high fences.
The applause is phoney and stage-managed. Even the arguments are faked. The vast halls are half-empty, and reached through bazaars of lobbyists for various forms of greed and folly.
The speeches themselves are seldom written by the people who obediently deliver them. There is no real life. All three major parties are living corpses, kept walking by transfusions from the taxpayer, dodgy billionaires or trade-union funds.
Meanwhile, the media coverage has mostly degenerated into pathetic partisan bootlicking of the party in power, matched by equally pathetic partisan savaging of the one that is out of power.
No doubt, Edward Miliband made a pretty dreadful speech in Liverpool the week before last. But it was nothing like as bad as the hogwash that gushed and gurgled out of the Prime Minister’s smirking mouth on Wednesday. As an exhortation to slackers and grumblers in some public-school football
team, it would have been average. As a statement of policy and aims from the Prime Minister of a middling nuclear power, it was pitiful.
Nor did it see fit to mention that the very next day the Bank of England would embark on a desperate plan (for once the word ‘desperate’ is justified here) to deliberately provoke yet more inflation.
Let me remind you of what one of our greatest economists, Lord Keynes, once wrote about this awful thing: ‘Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency.
‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.’
This colossal, unfair stealth tax on the prudent, to pay for the folly of the imprudent, is what we are reduced to. This is, as it turns out, Plan B. We have driven the country and the people deep into debts that can never be paid. So we will shrink the debt by shrinking everyone’s money.
So much for the careful, the thrifty, the provident who foolishly thought the Tories were their friends.
Their savings, their pensions, their long years of caution and restraint all shrivel to a handful of change in a surprisingly short time.
This crisis wasn’t made yesterday, or even in the Blair-Brown years. It has been in the making for decades, as supposedly Conservative politicians have refused to get the Welfare State under control, refused to release this country from the chains loaded on to it by the EU, and risked all on the bubble of the housing market.
Of these people it has been rightly said that: ‘They could not dig, they dared not rob, and so they lied to please the mob.’ I hope I live long enough to see it carved on their tombstones.
Thought Police are still feeling collars
Much more should have been made of the amazing treatment of the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, a thoughtful and distinguished man. Mr Tyrie made the bad mistake of believing that free speech still exists in his party, and criticised the leadership. He was then taken into custody by a pair of Downing Street thought police officers, and soon afterwards emerged with his mind completely changed. Humiliating pictures of this event then found their way to the newspapers. This is how Blairism operated – and still operates.
Knox deserved to go free – just like ‘Lockerbie Bomber’
As it happens, I don’t think the Italian state ever came close to proving beyond reasonable doubt that Amanda Knox was guilty of murder. So, in a general way, I am pleased that she has been freed.
But compare the frenzy of interest over this rather unimportant case with the strange silence over the equally dubious – but far more important – conviction of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber, the Libyan Abdelbaset Al Megrahi.
One of the key witnesses against him has since admitted to lying in court.
Another, described by a senior judge as ‘an apple short of a picnic’, shockingly received a $2 million (£1.28 million) reward after giving evidence that many experts regard as highly dubious.
I suspect Megrahi’s release had more to do with the fear of a final, successful appeal revealing inconvenient facts than it did with British oil interests. If the US had wanted to stop him being freed, they could have. After all, they made us surrender to the IRA.
** DOES Richard Dawkins exist? The noted foe of religion seems set to be absent (despite many requests that he take part) from a planned debate with William Lane Craig, a leading American Christian philosopher (a number of other anti-God blowhards have also declined to debate with Craig).
To tease Professor Dawkins out of his Oxford lair, organisers of Craig’s tour plan to put advertisements on the city’s buses next week proclaiming ‘There’s probably no Dawkins.’ In the age of BCE and CE, it’s nice to see the other side hitting back.
** IN the supposed ‘Catgate’ row between Theresa May and Kenneth Clarke, who won? I don’t know, but I know who lost. We lost. This country is still subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, and to the views of judges on how it is to be interpreted.
Plenty of people who should never have been here in the first place will continue to be allowed by the courts to stay, even if they behave very badly.
But a lot of voters have been given the entirely fake impression that Mrs May is going to do something significant about this. I very much doubt it. I advise you to check on progress a year from now.
** MEET the new young MPs of the Labour Party and the Tory Party and you would find it very hard to tell the difference between them, if they weren’t actually wearing badges.
They’re not very interested in politics, though they know what views to adopt to get them up the ladder of ambition most quickly. They certainly have far more in common with each other than they do with a normal British person of any class.
Searching for any differences between the Labour and Tory parties this autumn, I can come up with only one. I don’t think Labour would have dared to devastate our Armed Forces with the disastrous and irreparable cuts visited on them by Mr Cameron.
** IF I have to read another word of praise for the magazine Private Eye on its 50th anniversary, I think I shall feel ill. It was, long ago, part of the cultural revolution that turned Britain into what it now is. These days it is a smug and very profitable organ of the new establishment, made all the worse by a pretence that it is still brave and dangerous.
In my Trotskyist days, I recall, one of our smarter senior comrades once sneered at elaborate plans we were all making for some demonstration. I think it was the TUC's enormous march against Ted Heath's industrial relations laws in (was it?) 1971, around the time the currency went decimal. We were all excitedly booking coaches, making placards, dreaming up slogans and generally getting ourselves into a state of heightened revolutionary fervour.
'Demonstrations are demonstrations of impotence', he intoned. 'If you need to show your support by shambling through central London for hours in the cold, then you plainly don't have any real power. You never see demonstrations by the British Road Federation (in those days the major lobby for motorway building) , do you? And when I do see such a demonstration, then I'll look out for a major expansion of the railways'.
His words spoiled the occasion for me, because they were so obviously true. But in those days I liked demonstrations for their own sake. They appeal to the boy scout in all of us, in the same way that muddy pop festivals do today. Togetherness, shared discomfort, a feeling of being a part of something bigger than yourself, are all rather enjoyable. Not to mention the self-righteous feeling of parading your certainties.
I'd been on lots - a rather small CND Easter march against the Bomb in 1966, a pale shadow of the original Aldermaston marches of the early sixties, an even smaller procession through drenching, freezing rain (I've never been so wet before or since) to the Polaris warhead factory at Burghfield outside Reading, several Vietnam War demonstrations, including the astonishingly violent and bitter one outside the American Embassy in March 1968, and the celebrity replay (do I recall Vanessa Redgrave in a headband, or is it my imagination?) in October of the same year. Then there was the protest against Enoch Powell in Oxford, where I led a charge against the Oxford constabulary outside the Town Hall, and was appalled and flummoxed when their line broke and the way into the hall was open. I didn't know what to do next - another telling realisation that helped me, ever so slowly, to think my way out of leftist politics. But that was also before I badly injured myself in a motorbike accident, an event that robbed me of much of the physical bravado I'd had before, and also began a long, long process of thought that eventually helped me grow up.
Then there was the protest against the Bloody Sunday massacre in York in 1972 - one of the few that I don't really regret. Our behaviour was a bit over the top, and I don't defend that, but the shooting of several fellow-subjects of the Queen by our own armed forces was a grave event( and a major political error , too). If we hadn't protested, we'd have been neglecting our civic duty. Not that it did any good.
Talk about governments killing their own people.
But I think the last I attended was a counter-march directed against the National Front in Leicester. They were trying to stir up trouble over the admission of Asian refugees, fleeing from racial bigotry in East Africa. We were trying to make left-wing capital out of that. It was thanks to that particular march that I found out what the words 'laughed off the stage' actually mean (just as,. years later,, I would understand the expression 'I wished the ground would swallow me up', but that's another story).
I made a speech at the York Students' Union in which I tried to link the Leicester affair with a dock strike we were then busily supporting ( If you held a strike of any kind in those days, you had to fight off eager Trotskyists coming to help you) .
There was no link at all (except our Bolshevik opportunism) and I stumbled. Someone called out accurately from the back of the room 'There are no docks in Leicester!', and I was , yes, laughed off the stage. Ouch. I can't recall going on any marches after that, but I think I've done my share.
Two things come to mind. One that in those days the media were pretty much universally hostile or indifferent. The crustier and more port-inflamed pundits of the Daily Telegraph would come out on to the balcony of their Fleet Street building to jeer as we went by, and we would merrily jeer back at them. Only the Communist 'Morning Star' (which nobody read and which we derisively referred to as 'the Daily Employee' because of its cowardly decision to stop calling itself 'The Daily Worker') would mention most of these things at all. TV might show a few seconds.
The sort of friendly, prominent and sympathetic coverage given to the TUC march by the BBC on Saturday would have been unthinkable.
Two, that most of the causes we marched for triumphed in the end, but not because we marched on the streets. They triumphed because the university generation of 1967-73 went on to work in the media, teaching, the law, the police, the church and the civil service, and marched instead through the institutions. And in many ways the less noise they had made in the raucous days of Grosvenor Square and Ho! Ho! Ho chi Minh!, the more effect they eventually had. I was amused to discover, a couple of years ago, that among my fellow-marchers on March 17 1968, protesting against America's conservative war in Vietnam, was one John Scarlett, who would become the head of MI6 and be central to Britain's liberal war on Iraq. I find this a very telling fact.
