PETER HITCHENS: No 10 disaster! Minister is caught telling us the TRUTH
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
WHAT fun it is on the rare occasions when a Cabinet Minister tells the truth. It upsets all the right people.
The Government squawks and flaps and tries to drown out the revelation with fresh lies. The semi-official political press starts babbling about how the culprit has made a ‘gaffe’, a word used by nobody else, meaning ‘embarrassing but honest statement’.
And the rest of us can enjoy it. So it is with Foreign Secretary Johnson’s attack on Saudi Arabia’s nasty, violent meddling in other countries, mainly responsible for turning Syria into a wasteland of ruins, full of corpses and weeping mourners.
He was careful – and correct – to level the same charge against the Iranian ayatollahs. But attacks on Iran are politically and diplomatically acceptable, and anyone can make them. Justified criticism of the Riyadh despotism is taboo because this country has crawled so deep into the pocket of Saudi Arabia that it cannot find its way out.
Actually, I understand why we need to grovel quite a bit to the Saudis. We are poor and they are rich. They have lots of oil and ours has almost run out. They buy our aircraft and our weapons, which most people prefer not to do.
So a certain amount of politeness and flattery are necessary. They can have as many Royal visits as they like, and I can put up with us flying flags at half-mast when Saudi royalty dies. Why not? We recently entertained the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Buckingham Palace.
We get a lot in return for such gestures. But in recent years, the Saudis have asked too much. We should never have agreed to support their attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.
It was a policy motivated by spite. It required Britain to back the Al Nusra front, a bloodthirsty gang of hate-filled fanatics. These are exactly the sort of people we warn against in our ‘anti-extremism’ programmes at home, and it is very hard to tell what separates them from Islamic State.
We have been reduced to pretending, to the laughter of all who know anything, that these merciless Christian-hating, church-defiling sectarian brigands are ‘moderates’. Worse, by helping them to destabilise Syria we have created the biggest wave of Middle Eastern migration into Europe in history. Worse still, we picked the wrong side.
Russia, understanding the Middle East far better than we do, bet that Syria’s Assad would beat off the Saudi attack. And the battle of Aleppo has proved them right. Moscow’s prestige and influence in the Middle East is now at an all-time high. Ours is pitifully low.
Even now we don’t realise it. The head of MI6, who was a much more impressive figure when we didn’t know who he was than he is now we can actually see and hear him, made an unwise public appearance last week.
It seemed he had not read the papers or watched the news, as he used the occasion for an ill-timed and particularly ill-aimed attack on Russia. He wrongly blamed the Kremlin for turning Syria into a desert (that was the Saudis, egged on by us, the French, the Turks and the USA). He also attacked Russia for ‘alienating’ supposed moderates in the Middle East.
This from the Chief of Intelligence of the country which has done more to annoy open-minded, pro-Western people in the Middle East than practically anywhere else, from the overthrow in a squalid putsch of Iran’s beloved (and elected) leader Mossadegh, to the Suez, Iraq and Libya fiascos.
Perhaps his agents out there are still telling him what he wants to hear, rather than what is actually happening. Once, all this stuff was far-away and theoretical. But now that the people whose countries we have wrecked can find their way to Calais in their tens of thousands, it isn’t.
And that’s why I prefer Boris Johnson’s gaffes to official falsehoods. Those who refuse to admit the truth cannot protect this country against the many dangers which threaten it.
The search for Sully's enemy
CLINT Eastwood’s clever and engrossing film Sully, about the amazing landing of a passenger jet on the freezing Hudson River, needed a villain. Who could it be?
After all, pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger behaved like the well-trained and self-disciplined gentleman he is, keeping his head and using all his years of experience to land an Airbus on water without killing anyone, after geese destroyed his plane’s engines and turned it into an enormous glider. And the passengers, instead of scrambling over each other and clawing for their possessions as the plane sank (which must have been a temptation), behaved like grown-ups and made their way sensibly to the exits.
All the rescue services did as they should have done.
Who was left to be the bad guy? The government. To put it mildly, the movie plays up the investigations which concluded that Sullenberger might possibly have made it to an actual airport runway, if he’d acted inhumanly fast.
I found all this very believable. But actually the pilot had already become such a figure of admiration that in real life he was more or less above criticism. It tells you a lot about the modern USA, and the victory of Donald Trump, that the authorities are the ones who come out of it badly.
The myth of wind power...blown wide open
THE current mild weather may make us forget that British winters can still be ferociously cold. How will we cope with such cold, once the current plan to shut down coal-fired power stations is complete?
I asked National Grid to tell me where our electric power came from in the mainly chilly week from November 28 to December 4. For most of that time, an average of just above 14 per cent came from coal, while less than six per cent came from wind.
In the Friday of that week, just two per cent of our power came from all those forests of windmills which cost us so much and make such a mess of the landscape.
A surprisingly large part of the rest was made up of nuclear (just over 25 per cent) and gas (just under 55 per cent) with a small amount sent across from France and the Netherlands by undersea cable.
With coal gone, as it soon will be, and as our worn-out nuclear stations close as well, what are we going to do? Solar power, in midwinter? We are not building any new gas generators, new nuclear plants are many years away, and the wind often doesn’t blow much in very cold weather. France’s nuclear systems are getting old and are breaking down more and more frequently.
Any company or householder looking at figures like these would worry, and act. Yet we do neither. It is because our elite’s minds are closed by Warmist dogma. Quite soon, sensible people will be buying their own private generators, as they do in Third World countries.
*******
I’M not sure why the Government is so chipper about the big Commons vote for beginning the process of leaving the EU. One of the rules of politics is that really big majorities, like very long-standing ovations, are signs that people are concealing their real feelings. It is in the late-night sessions, the committees and the lobbies that the pro-EU MPs will try to frustrate the process.
*****
IT’S no good moaning now about the new plan to persecute soldiers for actions they undertook during the Northern Irish troubles, while IRA murderers go free. This is the ‘Peace Process’ you foolishly bought from the Blair creature back in 1998. It was a surrender, not a victory, and it is time we grasped that.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
Steve Shawcross,
Indeed, and we have sufficient estuaries that, when dammed and turbined, could provide every gigawatt of power that we would ever need.
However the infrastructure would need to be a government, tax-paid project, (probably costing less than the proposed nuclear programme) as no private company would be prepared to bankroll such a scheme and that runs against the privateer nature of our successive governments.
The once-installed running costs would be fractional compared to all other forms of power production, the environmental effect on global warming would be indiscernable and, if state owned, the cost to the end user could be as low as they once promised North Sea Gas would be.
The greatest bonus, however, would be that the privateers would find themselves with no excuse to go to war and would be out of pockets - ours!
Posted by: Michael Wood | 16 December 2016 at 01:02 PM
Martin.How I agree with you about Blair.The man is incapable of giving us the truth.
He is such a good liar though,a real professional at it,fooling millions of people in that spring of 1997 with his brilliant speeches.If only he had stayed phoney Tony,i could have put up with that but instead we still have this wretched war criminal roaming freely and threatening some kind of horrible political comeback.
Posted by: Paul Taylor | 16 December 2016 at 10:36 AM
It seems strange to me we don't make more use of hydro-electric power. We have enough weirs and dams that could have turbines build into them, and it certainly rains enough.
When the sun is shining (even in hazy conditions), solar farms can generate a surprisingly large amount of electricity. Though given we have less than eight hours of daylight late autumn/early winter, there's not much scope for it in midwinter, granted.
Posted by: Steve Shawcross | 15 December 2016 at 09:20 PM
How refreshing to see in writing an honest and accurate explanation of what is happening in Syria, Saudi Arabia's true role in the proxy war and our part in it. It is very disturbing to see Theresa May's version of events which is manifestly untrue and blame to be levied on Syria and Russia when they are, in fact, the "good guys", in this affair. Do Theresa May and her misguided acolytes, and one must include David Cameron, sleep easy at night?. How can they knowing that they are, and have supported such monstrous infidels, who with utmost barbarity have killed so many thousands of innocents and helped to destroy a country and made millions homeless. How can they rest easy having taken part in such murderous folly? In what way can we extract retribution for they surely deserve it?
Posted by: R Fairless | 13 December 2016 at 09:27 PM
PH: "treating the disciplined soldiers of a constitutional government in the same way as you treat criminal gangsters is much more of a double standard"
British soldiers were not given carte blanche to do as they pleased on the streets of Northern Ireland. The murder of innocent civilians is just as reprehensible if committed by 'disciplined soldiers' as it is when committed by marauding terrorists.
My argument is a simple one, it is that any leniencies let-offs or mitigations applied to republicans / loyalists should also be applied to British soldiers. If loyalists responsible for the 1993 Greysteel massacre (comparable in nature to the ISIS Orlando nightclub massacre) are to be handed 'amnesties' of any kind along with provos responsible for the likes of Teebane 1992, then the same can apply to soldiers responsible for Bloody Sunday.
PH: "I am often chided for my position by people who wants me to 'move on' "
Indeed, anyone reading Monday Morning Blues can see plainly that you have not budged one inch in twenty years. Even back then you were (by your own admission) a lonely voice on Fleet Street where the NI Peace Process was concerned; how galling it must be that the bombs in London and the ethnic cleansing of 'educated and prosperous protestants' from the west of Ulster (etc, etc) which you predicted post-GFA never came to pass.
***PH writes: There were several bombings in London, most notably at the BBC TV centre in London and the SIS headquarters, after the 1998 surrender to the IRA. The single worst atrocity of the era, the Omagh bomb, also came after the British capitulation. I repeat, there is no equivalence between an illegal murder gang and the army of a lawful state. I do not doubt that the quiet 'cleansing' of Protestants West of the Bann has continued , even if the London media have paid no attention to it. As far as I recall, my reference to educated, prosperous Protestants was a description of those moving to the mainland. The Northern Irish vote over EU membership, in which 'Remain' had a majority, suggests to me that demographic change in the province has gone further than most realise.***
Posted by: Michael Kenny | 13 December 2016 at 06:35 AM
The reason Boris Johnson isn't a very good politician is that he this nasty habit of sometimes revealing a grain of truth. The key attributes on any politician's CV must include the ability to evade questions and be a stranger to the truth. It occurred to me when I heard an extraordinary statement by Greg Dyke, the guy who failed so miserably as FA Chairman, how true this is. He said, ' Tony Blair was a great politician. 'I don't trust him but we need him back'. What do you need him back for? As we know Blair is a pathological liar, he is married to a lawyer which says it all. The reason My Corbyn and others are now failing so badly is quite simple, they are not as convincing liars as Mr. Blair and his army of spin doctors.
Posted by: Martin | 12 December 2016 at 10:37 PM
PH writes:
"Lawful authority is permitted to defend itself against criminal violent acts."
Well, of course it is - lawfully.
Posted by: Mike B | 12 December 2016 at 01:16 PM
PH "Lawful authority is permitted to defend itself against criminal violent attacks."
That very much depends on the nature of the defence - not to mention who is doing the "permitting". During the Northern Irish conflict British state forces were clearly "permitted" to do many things that were clearly outside the law. There's also abundant evidence of British state "collusion" (an unduly charitable euphemism in many cases) with loyalist death squads, and of British state involvement in some of the terrorist acts and criminality of both the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA.
Posted by: Colm J | 12 December 2016 at 11:14 AM
John Main | 11 December 2016 at 04:11 PM :
*** Nobody voted for the UK to extend its influence east of Suez. Nobody voted for the diversion of funds from deserving causes that will be needed to pay for this folly. ***
But it won't be "British" influence, it will be US-neocon and transnational-corporate influence imposed and enforced via their sycophantic puppets at Westminster -- sometimes under the threadbare smokescreen of a 'NATO' flag.
Posted by: C. Morrison | 12 December 2016 at 10:55 AM
Regarding Israel's attitude to the Syrian civil war; there are certainly prominent Israeli leaders who want Assad toppled. Just recently Israel's defense minister Avigdor Lieberman was at the Saban Forum in Washington, insisting that Assad has to go - as must any Iranian influence in Syria.
Posted by: Julian Gurbc | 12 December 2016 at 10:22 AM
@ John Mack
Perhaps you could produce just one iota, one scintilla of evidence, to support your implied contention that Israel bears any responsibility for the Civil War in Syria.
Posted by: Mike B | 12 December 2016 at 09:41 AM
I recently read Whitman's Specimen Days where he beautifully describes the open coal fire furnaces that dotted the night-time American landscape of the 1880s. He was on the left and here he was writing enthusiastically about coal, something unthought of today. The Coal revolution led America to become an economic powerhouse by the 1st World War.
The great irony is that back then they didn't have the tech to scrub the dangerous particles that burning coal produced. Nowadays we do have it and at fairly low cost. So the only particle that coal burning produces now is carbon dioxide, something necessary for life. But we have a far left in power who treat coal like poison.
Posted by: Owen Martin | 12 December 2016 at 09:29 AM
PH: "IT’S no good moaning now about the new plan to persecute soldiers for actions they undertook during the Northern Irish troubles, while IRA murderers go free. This is the ‘Peace Process’ you foolishly bought from the Blair creature back in 1998. It was a surrender, not a victory, and it is time we grasped that."
Does this mean Peter wishes to see 70 year old squaddies in the dock for alleged crimes committed decades ago in what was (effectively) a civil war, or not?
***PH asks in bafflement: Why and how could it possibly mean that? I opposed the surrender to the IRA, and clearly still do. So why would I defend its many malign consequences, That is for the people who advocated and defend this course of action. I am often chided for my position by people who wants me to 'move on' are see the alleged 'advantages'; of the resulting 'peace' (which isn't peaceful). I am simply saying this is what happens when you surrender. So don'tr do it, don'tr advocate it and defend it when it is offered as an option, and if you do, then don't complain. ****
If the prosecution of British soldiers amounts to 'persecution' while the release of convicted paramilitaries / terrorists is unjustifiable, then that looks very much like a double standard at work just like the one Peter is complaining about.
***PH: I should have thought that treating the disciplined soldiers of a constitutional government in the same way as you treat criminal gangsters is much more of a double standard.***
Surely the correct prescription is for combatants on all sides of a conflict who are deemed to have committed illegalities to be treated as equal to one another before the law.
***PH writes: Absurdity. Lawful authority is permitted to defend itself against criminal violent attacks.****
Posted by: Michael Kenny | 12 December 2016 at 06:17 AM
"What has happened to our logic and commonsense that we were once renowned for?"
It was abandoned, Michael, trashed in an unholy rush towards 'progress' and 'liberty'.
We have achieved neither and self indulgence is all that remains
Posted by: Michael Wood | 11 December 2016 at 09:27 PM
Imagine where we would be by now if Hilary Clinton was President Elect.Russian bombing in Syria would be even greater than now and fighting in eastern Ukraine would be intensifying.There would be a massive chorus demanding a no fly zone over Syria and for hi tech weaonry to be supplied to Ukraine which the new administration would be encouraging.In return Russia would be going onto a war footing with a build up on the borders of the Baltic states.We would all be worrying about what the new year will bring.However as Donald Trump was elected we do not have to worry about heading for a Cuban style crisis.We can relax it isnt going to happen
Posted by: Roy Robinson | 11 December 2016 at 09:05 PM
Boris has outflanked May by being bang on.
May discrediting Boris is discrediting Brexit too. (She does not want Brexit.)
Whether I am a coward or not (posting anonymously) is irrelevant. I make no material gain nor gain kudos from commenting.
Posted by: Anonymous | 11 December 2016 at 08:04 PM
PH writes "the wind often doesn’t blow much in very cold weather" ===== It's actually worse than that. Very cold weather is often caused by a very large High covering the entire British Isles. Since wind is essentially air flowing from a High to a Low this also means that there will not be any wind.
Posted by: Bill | 11 December 2016 at 07:52 PM
As much as I don't like Trump isn't it funny how Russia are always the bad guys? Claims now suggest the CIA have evidence that the Russian cyber attack was used to aid Trump's victory by spreading false propaganda in his favour. Isn't it ironic that the Clinton / Democrat / Liberal Elites who have sustained their whole careers on lies and propaganda are now the ones looking to use it as an excuse for why they lost? It's similar to the way they told us here in Britain that they were all in favour of democracy, then as soon as they lose, we see what they really are, the most fearsome opponents of it. It looks like the Liberal Elite have finally been beaten at their own game and I have zero sympathy for any of them. In my opinion, the majority of these fake people are nothing more than organised groups of care salesmen, pitching to buyers who have already left the forecourt.
Posted by: Martin | 11 December 2016 at 07:35 PM
*PH writes: I agree with this. Israel, in my experience, was quite happy with Assad. he controlled his territory, and knew that if he permitted cross-border attacks on Israel, Damascus would be painfully hit. As an Israeli officer conducting me through the Golan Heights once remarked when I asked him about this, and why the Syrian border was so quiet, 'We have an address'.***
Surely President Assad would make a claim to the oil in the Golan Heights? No Peter. Israel, and by that I refer to *certain parties* in Israel (before you become offended) want the rest of the Middle East in conflict with each other. Imagine if the various Middle Eastern countries united? That would mean a serious security threat to Israel and their Western backers in the EU and US.
Also the conflict isn't restricted to Sunni and Shia sects of Islam. Most of Syria and the Syrian army are Sunni. Most of the Kurds are Sunni so it's a lot more complex than you described.
Posted by: JohnMacK | 11 December 2016 at 07:33 PM
Thanks to Mr Hitchens opinion on the Syrian conflict. In the commentary Israel was brought up. I have my own anecdotal examples/ experiences to make a point or ask questions which are little, but recently, I don't know what to think about Israel in re to Syria. In the articles I read, Israel is almost never mentioned in re to Syria ( not I don't mean from this blog but from war correspondent articles who cover only about the conflict) which Im beginning to find a bit weird but probably I'm not reading widely enough. A commenter here mentioned (@Ray Allen) that the conflict is essentially between 2 sides who have in common a hatred for Israel and why would it be in Israels interest to topple Assad. Forgive me if I have that a bit wrong but his point makes sense. I'm pro Israel right to exist. The conservative American friends I have are so pro Israel that you can't question and then there is the opposite.
I was with my socially liberal Jewish friend the other day who is someone who tells me she weeps for the Christians in the ME but after the election (she voted for Trump as she felt he is the pro Israel candidate compared to Clinton was and that's where her primary interest lies), she said to me that 'Assad must go' and that the same thing happened to the Jews in regards to the Christians ( in terms of them getting displaced) she said in exasperation. It was a moment for me when she said this. My stomach sank when I heard it as I took it to be revealing but I hope not. Why did she say that about Assad? It contradicts @ Ray Allen and also Mr Hitchens comment. My friend is just one person like me and both of us could be just fools and this means nothing and doesn't contribute to the high caliber of this blog. But can I not ask if there are at least some Jewish circles who want to see Assad regime lose because it is as far as they think in the interests of Israel?if so, why don't I read about it more just like I read open criticisms of other countries proxy interests? I really would like to know that truth if it is so. To the moderator- if my comments would invite the hard anti Israel opinions then I guess it's not worth putting through for that reason alone.
Posted by: Caroline | 11 December 2016 at 07:28 PM
Peter, we have the potential for UK oil independence with massive deposits under the Weald. so that "they have oil, we don't" isn't strictly correct.
Posted by: Phil Short | 11 December 2016 at 06:19 PM
No mention of the Foreign Secretary’s “Britain is back east of Suez” speech. I thought it a breathtaking departure into uncharted territory for a financially and morally bankrupt country like the UK. Not forgetting also that the UK has just embarked on the process of severing many of the political ties it has so laboriously constructed over the last 30 years.
But most of all, I thought it was yet another example of how the May government is implementing revolutionary policies by comparison to those of the Cameron government. Nobody voted for the UK to extend its influence east of Suez. Nobody voted for the diversion of funds from deserving causes that will be needed to pay for this folly.
Posted by: John Main | 11 December 2016 at 04:11 PM
I cannot disagree with one comment that PH has made here,in fact this article
could have been a precis of the writings of the internet journalists and bloggers
collated over the last few months.These web sites have been derided as "fake news"
outlets and a few are suffering as a result.The so called "non fake news"media
may well suffer from the same "too closeness"and myopia as does apparently the
chief of MI6.What has happened to our logic and commonsense that we were once renowned for?
Posted by: michael savell | 11 December 2016 at 03:22 PM
The reason why there is a Civil War in Syria is because a large portion of the Sunni majority of Syria rose up, initially peacefully, in protest at the Alawite dictator that ruled them. His paranoid security forces opened fire at those protestors, and things escalated.
***PH objects: This is the official narrative, falsley suggesting that external intervention and so-called civil war were the outcome of a concern for 'democracy'. . Odd that almost exactly parallel events took place in Bahrain, our friend and naval base, only with Sunni and Shia positions reversed, and it did not lead to what Mr Allen refers to as a 'civil war'. The Syrian dictatorship had many times previously crushed protest with violence, and the West had looked on indifferently (as it did in Bahrain, where Saudi forces openly helped to crush the Shia revolt) The involvement of outsiders was a good deal earlier than is suggested this account , in which 'Saudi Arabia "got involved" after a supposedly spontaneous rising.I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but, as an ex-Bolshevik I can tell you that spontaneity takes a lot of organising. In this case the early and overt backing of western diplomats, and the rapid arrival of foreign fighters, let Assad's opponents know they could expect help, and in my view Libya made them (wrongly) confident that they would get Western air power behind them. Russia and China felt they had been fooled by the West over Libya, and blocked that. Ever since it has been a matter of getting the rebels to understand they have to compromise, while they have sought, through relentless propaganda and claims of war crimes, gas , etc, , to get the West to make unilateral air attacks on Assad. The West has had more sense, as such an action would risk (amongst other things) a European war. Hillary Clinton os such a warmonger that she might have done this, and her defeat decided the issue.***
Saudi Arabia got involved when they thought they had a chance to overthrow Assad with a Salafist Sunni Islamic alternative.
But what is particularly depressing, when reading through the comments, is the ongoing obsession and sheer hatred that "Harry Savage" and "Tom" have for Israel. The Syrian Civil War is between two (or more) sides who share only one think- a hatred for Israel. What has Israel to gain from replacing Assad with Salafist Sunnis? Only a fool or a bigot would believe that Israel is some kind of puppetmaster in this carnage.
**PH writes: I agree with this. Israel, in my experience, was quite happy with Assad. he controlled his territory, and knew that if he permitted cross-border attacks on Israel, Damascus would be painfully hit. As an Israeli officer conducting me through the Golan Heights once remarked when I asked him about this, and why the Syrian border was so quiet, 'We have an address'.***
Posted by: Ray Allen | 11 December 2016 at 01:31 PM
I agree with PH. If the west stop trying to create false democracies around the world to annex countries like Russia and China then we would not have these wars. The so called Christian faith still want to perpetrate the crusades with a new set of Knights Templar (called the USA / UK / EU army) to bring everyone to heal and the world must all think alike and the CAPITALIST SOCIETY MUST PREVALE. Did anyone listen to that idiot Mensch on QoT on Thursday no wonder she moved to America. . So much for diversity!
Posted by: Nigel McKay | 11 December 2016 at 12:39 PM