Why Liberal policies endanger us, plus Mr Slippery, Princess Tony, Peking,My Reply to Mrs Cable, and the real victors of the Falklands War

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

 

Those of us who know what is going on in this country are often derided by smug, wealthy Londoners. They accuse us of ‘moral panic’ and of exaggerating the breakdown of our society. I ask these complacent people to consider the terrible death of Alan Greaves, attacked on Christmas Eve itself. He was on his way to play the organ at Midnight Mass.

 Instead he met evil on a suburban road, as it is now all too easy to do. Our safety on the dark streets does not depend on police patrols, which is a good thing as they have virtually been abolished.

 It depends on an invisible web of goodness and restraint, conscience and courage – all things encouraged by the Christian belief that Mr Greaves did so much to support, and which we celebrate and recall at this time of year. Yet these protections could not be relied upon.

 A gentle, kindly man could not walk safely from his home to his church. His wife’s casual goodbye to him turned out to be a final farewell. The horrible, diabolical injuries he suffered suggest that his assailant’s mind is in some way unhinged, quite possibly by the drugs which we have effectively legalised in our pursuit of pleasure at all costs. Yet no general conclusions will be drawn from this by those who take all the decisions in our society.

 Those who pontificated grandiosely about a school massacre in America will see no lesson in this, because it does not suit their views. The loss of Mr Greaves, a 68-year-old grandfather, has left a great dark gap in the lives of many people who loved, liked or respected him. But it is the manner of his death that ought to wake a feeling of alarm – and shame – in the minds of those who have subjected this country to a vast, 50-year liberal experiment.

We were going to be so enlightened and progressive that we would no longer have to be good. Authority, punishment, morality, self-discipline, patience, thrift, religion were all deemed to be outdated and unnecessary, not to mention repressive, backward and unfit for this wondrous new century. It was, of course, a terrible mistake, though none of those responsible will admit it, so it goes on and on.

And now we live in a country where an organist can meet a violent end on his way to a Christmas service, and the police can explain such an incident as ‘a robbery gone wrong’. Who thought of this idiotic, insulting phrase? Do our modern non-judgmental police think there is ever a robbery that goes right? The trouble is that they probably do.

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THE horrifying undead figure of Anthony Blair is sniffing around the edge of politics again, hoping to revive his old campaign for the presidency of Europe. Presumably the great apostle of democracy has tired of making £4,500-a-minute speeches at power stations in Azerbaijan, that grubby despotism. Or he has made so much money his bank has asked him to stop.

 This reminds me of the many similarities between Princess Tony and his keen imitator, Mr Slippery, our Prime Minister. Both believe in nothing very much. Both loathe their own parties. Both were the future once, but aren’t any more. Old Slippery slipped himself into the papers last week by getting as wet as his policies have become since he failed to get elected on a Thatcherite platform in Stafford back in 1997.

 I have seen rare pictures of his face the night he lost, and his surprised disappointment is striking. But I am told there is evidence, mouldering in the archives of an Oxford freesheet, that it took him quite a while to come round to the positions he now so passionately espouses. He is said (does anyone have copies, from May and July 2000?) to have jeered at Mr Blair’s pro-homosexual policies as a ‘fringe agenda’ and condemned Labour for ‘ripping the last recognition of marriage from the tax system by abolishing the married couples’ allowance’.

What we definitely know is that he wrote to a national newspaper in December 2000, sneering at Shaun Woodward, the Tory defector to Labour who then occupied his Witney seat. Amusingly, he attacked Mr Woodward for supporting a hunting ban, and also for backing ‘the promotion of homosexuality in schools’. Of course, Mr Woodward was behaving quite logically, hoping for a safe Labour seat, which he got.

 But why is MrCameron deliberately riling his own supporters by rushing through same-sex marriage, while forgetting his support for hunting and old-style marriage? My guess is that he knows he cannot possibly win the next Election (he’s right about that). So he is deliberately creating rows with traditional Tories, so that he can blame them for his defeat and general utter failure. You read it here first.

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The Liberal Elite normally prefer to ignore me as if I were a bad smell. So I was rather touched by last week’s letter, published in The Mail on Sunday, from Rachel Smith, who is also Mrs Vince Cable – and probably thinks much as he does. She wrote to criticise my article about how cultural revolution and mass migration have destroyed the country we used to know. She accused me of nostalgia for the Fifties, and argued that independent-minded individuals could flourish without the married family.

She claimed that we need mass immigration, and that a property tax would narrow the gap between rich and poor. First, she needs to know that I have no great affection for the Fifties, which I recall as grubby, smoky and chilly, with bad food and a general feeling of skimping and unacknowledged national decline. I don’t want the past back. I just think we chose the wrong future. The best way of bridging the gap between rich and poor would be to rebuild the old middle class, open to all with talent. But it has been squeezed half to death by confiscatory tax, an expanding State and by the destruction of grammar schools – like the one her husband went to.

 It is in childhood that the stable married family promotes private life, allowing one generation to pass on its morals, faith, language and traditions to the next. These days most children are swiftly indoctrinated either by the TV or by the State, as their parents scrabble to pay the mortgage. As for her idea that we ‘need’ the skills of migrants, who does she mean by ‘we’? Certainly not the British-born people priced out of work by newcomers.

 If Britain does need these skills, then why can’t it impart them to the millions of young people already living here, now idle on benefits? Could it be because of the disastrous failure of comprehensive education, evident to almost every thinking person in the country, except for politicians like her husband?

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Coming from a Naval family, I’ve grown to mistrust the claim that Mrs Thatcher saved the Falklands. It was the Royal Navy that did it. And I’d rather hoped this year’s Cabinet Papers would remind us that in 1981 the Iron Lady had approved the scrapping of the carrier Hermes, plus the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, and the sale of Invincible. If the Argentinians had waited a few months longer to invade, we would not have had a task force with which to win the islands back. As for the ‘special relationship’ with the USA, bitter laughter is the only response to this stupid phrase.

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Good to see the proper English name for China’s capital revived again, in the phrase ‘Peking Pound’. Why did we ever stop using it?  We don’t call Rome ‘Roma’ or Damascus ‘Dimashq’. France’s grandest newspaper, Le Monde, still refers to ‘Pekin’, and Germany’s majestic Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung uses ‘Peking’. ‘Beijing’ is a cowardly cringe to power. 

 

Pussy Riot versus Georgia Prison Rapes - why some things get reported a lot, and others don't

One of my many pieces of great good fortune was the chance to visit the country we rather oddly call Georgia, several times. Actually, in Soviet days its name was ‘Gruziya’ and its own citizens called (and still call) it Sakartvelo. But this doesn’t appeal to the PC fanatics who like to call Bombay ‘Mumbai’ or Peking ‘Beijing’ - on the grounds that ‘that’s what the locals call it’ - which isn’t even true in the case of Bombay.

 

By the way, if you read France’s grandest left-wing newspaper, Le Monde, you’ll find that the Chinese capital is ‘Pekin’. Likewise, Germany’s grand Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, calls it ‘Peking’. The ‘Beijing’ cult is very odd, and needs to be examined more carefully.

I think the PC media choose to call it ‘Georgia’ , in the hope this will influence Americans, who feel a sort of kinship with it because it shares a name with one of the 50 states, but who would be unmoved by the travails of a tiny faraway country called Sakartvelo. We’ll come back to that. It’s a very beautiful place, and its capital, Tbilisi, one of the most fascinating cities in the world, built around a river gorge and – despite terrible destruction in recent years – still handsome and unique. It has its own cuisine, much of it delicious, and makes wines, mostly too sweet for Western tastes, but not all. Try the Mukuzani red if you ever get the chance, a lovely, wistful wine that tastes of rugged valleys and ancient culture. For a good dry white, I recommend Tsinandali , accompanied by Hachapuri, a delicious combination of flatbread and cheese. It is also a rare Christian culture in that part of the world , a form of Orthodoxy, but quite distinct from the Russian or Armenian versions nearby.

 

It lies between the great islamic powers of Sunni Turkey and Shia Persia, and was within reach of the destroying armies of Tamerlane. It is an uncomfortable fact that Russian rule (beginning in the 18th Century) probably saved Georgia’s unique culture, language and alphabet - and rescued its beautiful land from absorption into the Islamic world. There was, as there always is, a hard price to pay for Moscow’s protection, including the absorption of the Georgian church into the Russian, which meant much destruction of art and the imposition of the Russian liturgy.

 

But this utterly fascinating and captivating part of the world ( the Caucasus was once called ‘the mountain of languages’ , as it seemed to be the origin of so many tongues) is also very dangerous. It is incredibly sensitive. In one direction lie the Caspian sea and the great steppes, leading on the China – and nowadays that means Georgia is close to the great Caspian Bubble of oil and gas which is the subject of a fierce diplomatic and political struggle about which the world knows and cares far too little. A vital pipeline from this region crosses Georgia. It is Russia’s southern frontier with Asia, a frontier that until very recently was highly dangerous and much–contested ( and could be again, as the Chechnya wars showed).

 

And it is very close to the explosive parts of the Middle East. Imagine, if you want to see how complex, valuable, dangerous and unstable this region is, how impossible it would be to build a railway line from Moscow to Jerusalem – a journey I for one would love to make before I die.

Those who live in the Caucasus are used to hard choices, though it doesn’t mean they like them any more than we do. When the Russian revolution came, Georgia received special attention from Moscow, because Stalin was of course Georgian by birth – look at that face, not Russian at all. But it was also a place where the hand of the Kremlin always seemed to lie lighter on the land than elsewhere. To fly down from Moscow to Tbilisi was to go somewhere lighter, and more light-hearted, a country of wine rather than of vodka, more than little gangsterish, a little like a sort of Soviet Sicily. There was also a confusing pride in being the birthplace of Stalin. The only remaining statue of the old horror still stood , in those days, in the town of Gori (has it gone yet? I think so).  On the fine classical boulevard in Tbilisi called Rustaveli, there used to be, high on a grand building a carved relief of Stalin’s very recognisable profile. It must have been about 60 feet above the street, and was only visible if you looked for it, or if it was pointed out to you. But everyone in Tbilisi knew it was there. By 1991, when I first visited, someone had managed to throw a paint-bomb at it. It’s gone now, thanks to the furious civil wars which broke out soon afterwards, scarring Tbilisi and beginning a terrible era of instability, refugees and pain.

 

The Communist party and the KGB fought very hard to stamp out Georgian nationalism. In April 1989, Soviet troops attacked nationalist demonstrators with sharpened spades, and also with gas, with indescribably hideous results. Most of the 19 dead victims were young women. So it was hard for the outsider not to sympathise with such figures as Zviad Ghamsakhurdia, the independence leader I interviewed on that first visit – an extraordinary and rather romantic moustachioed figure, whom I remember (perhaps inaccurately) as faintly hysterical, wildly loquacious, and clad in a sort of zoot suit. He died later in mysterious circumstances, and I won’t here attempt to go in detail into the immensely complex struggles which have been taking place in that small (population less than five million) and unhappy country ever since.

 

Turn elsewhere for explanations of Ossetia, Adzharia and Abkhazia (except that Stalin always made sure that there were inconvenient minority populations within the borders of the Soviet ‘republics’. This was so that he could use them to make trouble for those republics if they ever grew restive and independence-minded. And so it has proved) . First there was the unpleasant Shevardnadze era, which more or less destroyed the reputation of the man who had once been Mikhail Gorbachev’s highly respected Foreign Minister. Then came the mob putsch which has since been given the rather sickly-sweet name of ‘the Rose Revolution’.

 

This is a classic case of two wrongs not making a right. I would be amazed if the 2003 elections had not been rigged. You might as well expect the Atlantic not to be wet. But in that particular case, international observers (who often fail to spot the most gross manipulation, or alternatively are completely ignored by the world media when they do) noted that bad things had happened, and were given major publicity for their charges. Kaboom. Supporters of opposition parties burst into the new session of the dubious parliament clutching roses in their hands (who supplied the roses and the idea?), shouted down President Eduard Shevardnadze and chased him from the building.

 

Then it was ‘people power’ all over again ( see ‘Orange Revolution’, etc), big crowds in city squares, slavishly and flatteringly reported by the world’s media, until Shevardnadze resigned. Lo, in new elections, the candidate of the Rose Revolutionaries, Mikheil Saakashvili, won a huge majority. And, would you believe, he promised to fight corruption( who doesn’t) and establish democracy, etc etc.

 

By 2007 things had gone sour, and the police treated anti-government demonstrators quite brutally, and placed limits on freedom of the press (though the Western media were pretty uninterested). Mr Saakashvili also managed to pick a fight with Vladimir Putin, in which the Western media and many Western politicians accepted the simple view of Brave Georgia versus vicious, bullying Russia.

 

Now, entirely mysteriously if you rely for the Western media on your information, Mr Saakashvili has lost a parliamentary election (whereupon he received lavish Western media praise for ….accepting the outcome!) . Actually, he has not been popular for some time, and his ratings took a deep dive a few weeks ago when horrible videos emerged of the maltreatment of prisoners in a Tbilisi jail. One rather graphically shows warders raping a prisoner with a broomstick. It’s on the web somewhere. Don’t watch it, or the accompanying film of prisoners whimpering and shouting with pain as warders beat them up.

But mightn’t such matters attract more attention than, or as much attention as, or even slightly less attention than the trial of three silly women for staging a blasphemous protest in a Moscow cathedral? No, not really. You'd need to be interested to know, and no stars of stage and screen have protested as far as I know.

The ‘West’ is not interested in Russia’s oppression because it is oppression, but because it is Russian oppression. Georgia is part of an absurd American attempt to create client states on Russia’s borders, an attempt which will end in tears, as Russia will always be interested in Georgia, whereas America’s interest will fade with time, because it is so far away. It is also paradoxical, as it involves reliable American backing for the appalling hereditary despotism in Azerbiajan,  next door to Georgia.

Georgia is therefore officially one of the good countries, where a mob putsch is reclassified as a romantic revolution and we don’t take much notice of prison rape, police brutality or attempts at censorship. Just thought I’d mention it, in the unending struggle to promote dissident thought.

On the China Station

For those of you have may have been wondering where I have been, I was in Kashgar, the back of the back of beyond in deepest China, and my account of my visit (partly by rail) to this sad, unique soon-to-be-lost-forever place (which is by the way mentioned in that excellent history book 'Flashman at the Charge' by George Macdonald Fraser) can be found on the Mail on Sunday website. Please note that all Chinese names are rendered in the more easily pronounced and traditional Wade-Giles transcriptions, rather than in the weird cultural-cringe Pinyin versions, in which we are expected (for instance) to pronounce the letter 'Q' as 'ch', which nobody does, and which it would never occur to anyone to do. I'll start calling Peking 'Beijing' (and perhaps Bombay 'Mumbai' though I don't think I'll ever do that given the nasty origins of this name) when we also start calling China 'Zhongguo', Vienna 'Wien', India 'Barat', Croatia 'Hrvatska', Rome 'Roma', Warsaw 'Warszawa', Damascus 'Dimashq', Prague 'Praha' , Hungary 'Magyargorszag', Dublin 'Baile atha Cliath' (how do you pronounce that, by the way?) and Moscow 'Moskva'.

Here are a few thoughts on discussions while I was away. While I enjoyed Mr Lemon's slight discomfiture over his attempt to be clever, I would repeat my original point - which is this, and which several people seem to have missed. I don't ask anyone in this debate to do any more than to recognise that there is an argument. The one position I cannot abide is the one which says that the matter is settled, when it is not. I note I was abused even for this very modest suggestion by at east one Warmist zealot, which sums up the problem.

Somehow or other the old God argument seems to have crept in here. I do wish that people who hold strong opinions on the existence or non-existence of God would recognise that the argument cannot ever be won on facts or logic. (I know my Roman Catholic friends would disagree with this, but their proofs, while intellectually potent, would never convince a determined atheist to shift his position and serve mainly to provide reassurance to intelligent believers). The quarrel, as old as mankind, is in fact about a choice between two different sorts of universe. We can decide, by belief or unbelief, which of the two we wish to live in. What interests me is the motives (usually political, sometimes to do with personal convenience) which influence people to either deny or embrace Theism. The second order argument, as to which theistic system one embraces, is really open only to those who have decided that they prefer a created and ordered universe to an accidental and chaotic one. The Atheists must reject Christianity as well as Islam. Alas, for them, Islam responds to their rejection by ignoring them, whereas Christianity tends to retreat before them. And a weakened church laces a vacuum into which Islam can move. Result? The growing power of Islam in our society, our culture, our government, our political parties and our schools, so that an essentially Atheist state pays increasing obeisance to Islam. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the new Atheists, by attacking Christianity, are simply clearing a space for Islam to establish itself in the space they have swept and garnished.

Catching Up

Read Peter Hitchens only in the Mail on Sunday

This week, I'll limit myself to responding to the debates which have carried on while I've been travelling. I'm afraid it's physically impossible to answer every point and every contributor, but I hope to deal with most of the questions raised. How do I select the contributions to which I respond?  I like to think I pick those which are most seriously critical, and those which carry the argument further. Sometimes I will choose a contribution which I have little time for, but which has not been answered by anyone else - in case anyone thinks there is no answer to it. I don't look for any particular names. I do tend to ignore the incoherent, and it seems idle to say much in response to contributors who write to say that they agree with me. I'm grateful to them, but what's left to be said?

On Prince Charles and the BBC, let's first of all take the rule of law point. At what stage does illegal action become legitimate? I'm not sure, but we certainly haven't reached such a stage yet. By comparison with most countries, we are still ruled largely by law. It is true that the state, and the EU, are undermining this. But that is one of my main criticisms of them, and it would not help my case against them if I joined them in showing contempt for the law.

The well-publicised licence-fee refuseniks are not really engaging in proper civil disobedience, where they accept the legal penalty for breaking the law. They are relying on the publicity to ensure that they are not prosecuted. What would it prove if I refused to take out a TV licence, and the authorities, realising that a prosecution would suit me, did nothing? It wouldn't prove anything. Whereas if, thanks to incitement by me, a less well-known person did the same, was prosecuted and rightly convicted under the law, I would have helped that person obtain a criminal record, while taking no risk myself. I don't regard that as specially honourable.

My prediction of what will happen was just that, a prediction. I think the licence fee will become unenforceable. It wasn't even wishful thinking. In my heart of hearts I want the BBC to reform itself before it is destroyed, since I don't wish to see unrestrained market forces take over broadcasting in this country.

As it happens, I suspect the BBC realises that the licence fee is doomed, and is working on ways of surviving once it has withered away. This may even explain its arrogance. Perhaps its endless investment in websites, local stations and 24-hour news is preparation for an eventual privatisation.

I groaned at my admirer Tony Dodd's cliche-ridden classification of Prince Charles's life as a "privileged yet worthless existence". I was glad to see others take him to task for this boring, ill-informed comment.  If we must have republicans here , can they at least argue sensibly? The Prince's Trust, and many other of Charles's activities, are plainly thoughtful and worthy things, the fruit of a serious and generous mind. The 'privilege' of the monarchy (as any reader of Shakespeare must know) is all about maintaining its mystery and standing. In any organisation or institution, the senior figures are hedged about with various special facilities and privileges, whether they be the key to the executive washroom, the chauffeured car, the corner office, the big desk, the pretty PA, and of course the invariable use of a title "Managing Director", "Prime Minister" etc.

How can informed people continue to imagine that the monarchy is expensive and luxurious?   Why are the same people unbothered by the huge government car fleet, and the flunkeydom and perks which attend the lives of ministers? Why do they snivel about the formal respect granted to Majesty (which stands for our sovereignty over ourselves) - yet  not object to the gloopy sycophancy of the mad, Stalinesque standing ovations given to political leaders for their dire orations?

We know now about the Queen's Spartan breakfast table, the Tupperware and the ancient radio. These people are not the Bourbons or the Romanovs, who were themselves maligned in the same way by revolutionaries. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, usually end up living in gross luxury once they are safely in power. The palatial dachas of the Kremlin leadership, their luxurious special clinics, fleets of aeroplanes, private trains,. holiday villas and hunting lodges and exclusive hospitals, far outreached anything any monarchy has ever had. The old East German leadership had a special secret, walled-off housing estate at Wandlitz, outside Berlin, where they lived in Western comfort sealed off from their subjects. We know nothing - yet - of the true circumstances in which the Chinese leadership dwell, or Punto Cero just outside Havana, where Fidel Castro hides from the supposedly sovereign Cuban people.  You cannot even see into the Zhong Nan Hai compound in the heart of Peking, and leather-jacketed government toughs stand near its gateway discouraging the curious, rather unlike Buckingham Palace. The government quarter in Havana is creepily surveilled by suspicious armed guards, who ensure that sensitive streets are closed to ordinary people.

S.Haworth rightly raises the issue of Charles's speech to the European 'Parliament', or Supreme Soviet as it should more properly be called. I was vaguely aware of this. Does S. Haworth know where a text can be found, or can he provide a full quotation? I should stress that I am not an uncritical admirer of Charles, who was once persuaded by his advisers that it would be unwise for him to meet me. I regard that as cowardice. But I still think that he shows promise.

Andrew Williams wants to know more about my views of monarchy. Easy, Mr Williams. My book 'the Abolition of Britain', now at last in print again, contains a chapter 'Chainsaw massacre' which sets out my views on why monarchy is a valuable defence of liberty.

Where on earth does J. Khabra get the idea that  "The Queen wasn't very silent when she gave Tony Blair the Royal Prerogative to invade Iraq, without a written constitution she is our Constitutional Monarch, and whatever she says goes." How can anyone know so little about the way the country is run?  'Whatever she says, goes' Really? Does he actually think this sums up the relation between the Queen and her ministers?   Does he think that the Queen keeps the prerogative in a box on her desk and hands it over to Prime Ministers when they ask for it? Can he cite a single occasion in the last century where whatever a King or Queen has said, went?  It is a Prime Ministerial or executive prerogative, and it passed from Windsor Castle to Downing Street much more than a century ago. The name 'Royal Prerogative' is used by the political class in the hope of confusing the ill-informed and the left-wing. I had no idea this ploy  was so successful.

Also we do have a written constitution, which includes among other things Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Habeas Corpus Act, plus various Parliament Acts. It is just not all written down in one document, and it can be amended with extraordinary ease.

Now to the 'cheeky left-wing face' of Andrea Riseborough. One contributor was at least smart enough to spot that I had repeated this remark as a tease to those who got so wildly exercised about it last time. I've always disagreed with Shakespeare's  "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face". I think habitual thoughts and beliefs affect the face of the person involved. Any study of photographs of the British people over the past century will reveal that, while small children change surprisingly little, it would be almost impossible to imagine anyone living in the present day having the faces to be found in a crowd of (say ) Edwardian London dockers or 1914 army volunteers, or for that matter of a late Victorian aristocrat.  All kinds of things influence the lineaments of a human face, which is - amongst other things - a set of subtle signals to other humans,  full of clues about what might make that person laugh, or make that person angry or resentful, and about what experiences that person has had, or has never had. I am sure that the assumptions of the modern default leftist affect his or her face.  I really don't see that it's a particularly controversial view. As for being cheeky, I think that's beyond argument.

"Grant" wants 'evidence' that Charles will behave differently from his mother.  This is a little obtuse, I think.  My column comments upon publicly discussed matters, of which this is one. I have no 'evidence', and didn't claim to have any, but my comment was based upon leaks, issuing from journalists who are well-known to be close to Charles, that he plans to be an interventionist monarch. Evidence will only be available if he ascends the throne.

"Alice" ( in Wonderland?) asks why Northern Ireland shouldn't come under Dublin rule. She appears to think this is a penetrating question. Does she really not know about the great political battles ( and bloodshed) resulting from this controversy during the last 100 years, precisely because so many of the inhabitants of that part of Ireland did not wish (and still do not wish) to be ruled from Dublin? How astonishing. How would she respond if I asked with the same breezy, perky  insouciance "Why shouldn't the Irish Republic be ruled from London?" or "Why shouldn't Britain rule India?" Some ethnic groups are fashionable, others not, I suppose.

"HM" points out that the old House of Lords did not rebel as much as the new one. I agree that the old House would have done well to rebel more often,  and might have survived if it had,  especially against Margaret Thatcher. Credit must be given to the Life Peers who have stood up for principle since Labour began to dismantle the Lords (just as shame should descend on those who have toadied to Downing Street). This new House is of course unfinished business. New Labour want a Senate, elected by some form of closed-list system, which will make it wholly powerless and subject to the same party whipping as the wretched Commons. But there is another point. The current post-1997 government has rammed through more contentious and suspect legislation than any of its predecessors, and it is not surprising that it has faced many revolts in the Lords as a result. That's exactly why it wants an elected chamber, with entry controlled by the party machines,  which it can entirely control.

"Joe Blogs" claims that all is lost. Let me commend to him Arthur Hugh Clough's poem "Say not the struggle naught availeth". It is silly to surrender when you have not actually been beaten, as poor General Percival must often have thought while in Japanese captivity, after surrendering to an inferior Japanese army which had almost run out of ammunition at Singapore.

Now to Afghanistan ( or "Af'hanistan' as BBC World presenters now refer to it, when not fanatically calling Bombay 'Mumbai', when almost nobody in Bombay calls it that. Talking of which, I was delighted to see a very grandiose BBC heavyweight flown out to Bombay, where he announced that 'Mumbai' was on the Adriatic. I'm sure he knows it's not really on the Adriatic. The slip probably resulted from the effort of calling it 'Mumbai' when he knew perfectly well it was really Bombay, and perhaps from trying to say 'metres' when he really wanted to say 'yards')

Here is 'Mark' repeating what he has presumably been hearing on 'fair and balanced' Fox News "Get a spine and fight for civilization and light. As we like to say in America, freedom isn't free! You think you're position is morally justified because of some aberrations of justice at home and the deaths of honourable soldiers, all that is is moral cowardice, an excuse to run away from your responsibilities to defend against tyranny throughout the world. Britain knows well the results of appeasement and the U.S. has learned what happens when Afghanistan is ignored. "

There is no logic here. I need no instruction from Americans in the price of liberty, one of our main gifts to our former colony (which fortunately rejected the political ideas of the autocratic French monarchy which secured its independence for it).  Britain is also physically capable of fighting, as it has repeatedly proved in more wars than I can list, and (despite the sneers of another commenter) its army remains among the most effective fighting forces in the world, even after years of neglect and politically correct interference by Tory and Labour governments.

The question is, what is our objective in Afghanistan, and can we achieve it through armed force? Actually we don't know what our aim is, as we repeatedly recast it,  and therefore the second question falls. There is nothing to achieve because we have no coherent idea of why we are there, or what success would be.  We are throwing away lives for a non-policy.

I don't see the relevance of 'appeasement' here. And I'm bone weary of the abuse of this historical parallel to justify all kinds of drivel. But since he raises it, deal with this:  Successive US administrations (including the present one, and no doubt to be followed by the coming Obama one) place pressure on Israel  to give 'land for peace' to Egypt, Syria and the 'Palestinians' . They are the modern world's most active apostles of Chamblerlain-style appeasement.

In fact, if poor dear Neville had only had the wit to call his policy 'land for peace', perhaps he would have got a Nobel Prize instead of eternal obloquy. The approach was identical - buy off an aggressive enemy, and get yourself a quiet life, by forcing a small ally to give up strategically vital land forever in return for worthless paper promises from unreliable interlocutors. Terrific, eh?

Neil Craig ( another Fox viewer?) thunders "We HAVE TO fight al Quaeda & better there than at home."

Sorry, Mr Craig, there is no such thing as 'Al Qaeda' ( see earlier blogs, plus Jason Burke's excellent book which explains that 'al Qaeda' classifies an ideology, not an organisation) and even if there were, how would you 'fight ' it by providing your soldiers as targets for guerillas in Afghanistan?

Assymetric war (originally developed in World War One by the British Arab Bureau to tie down Turkish troops in a war with Arab irregulars) is always hopeless for advanced military powers. They simply become the victims of elaborate torment, lash out at it, incidentally encouraging local civilians to side with the guerrillas, and then go on doing the same thing until everyone at home gets tired of it and they leave. Why waste the intervening five or so years? Quit now, while so many of those fine young men are still alive and whole, who will be dead or maimed if we stay. If you're not prepared to do this, then at least volunteer yourself for the fight you so strongly believe in, and take the risks you urge on others.

If you are genuinely concerned to combat terrorism, here is a simple, wholly reliable method. Stop giving in to it. The USA has hugely encouraged terrorism though its Middle East diplomacy, which has rewarded the PLO's murder campaign with recognition and the acceptance of the (hopeless, unworkable) 'two-state solution. the USA, under Bill Clinton and George W.Bush, has also rewarded IRA murder by forcing Britain to surrender to the IRA, and entertaining the IRA apologist Gerry Adams in the White House, on every St Patrick's day for a decade.

There's another thing you can do. Stop flying into a headless, bed-wetting panic every time there is a terror attack. Cannot you see that this is exactly what the terrorists wish you to do? They long for over-reaction, silly new laws, absurd stable-door restrictions on normal life,  shuffling shoeless, beltless queues at airports, barbed wire on the Bombay waterfront and irksome searches at every public building.  All these things are monuments to their success in, yes, terrorising us.

The terrorist godfathers delight to see them.  Yet all the terrorist organisations in the world lag far behind bad or drunk drivers in inflicting casualties on innocent civilians in advanced Western countries. By exaggerating terrorist outrages, you make the terrorists so, so happy.    Yes, the attack on 11th September 2001 was a disgusting massacre, but it did not render the USA militarily or economically or politically prostrate, nor did it overwhelm its rescue services or destroy its strategic communications or power systems. So why do we act as if it did?

He asserts"The Mumbai (by which I assume he means Bombay) incident makes it worse - this was almost certainly done by al Quaeda with Pakistani government support (or possibly vice versa)". Really? What is the difference between "almost certainly " and "actually" ? Significantly large , I suspect. What is his evidence for these extravagant claims? Even the US authorities, who normally assert that any terrorist action from the North Pole to Tierra del Fuego has 'all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda' have hesitated over making such a claim on this occasion, perhaps because an actual terrorist has been captured who might contradict the claim. As for "Pakistani government support", what would the Pakistani government's motivation be, precisely,  for provoking a war with India?

And he adds:"To quit Afghanistan would merely encourage more." Why would it do so? What is his chain of reasoning for this? Please show details.

He then pronounces " In any case the Taliban cannot win. We know this because even when they were in power & supported by Pakistan they could not beat the Northern Alliance." Actually the collapse of the Taliban government was largely because of a (perhaps temporary) withdrawal of support for the Taliban from Pakistan.

And he says "There is a case for trying to get more sensible Talibans to join the government & reform Afghanistan on a cantonal basis'.

The mention of "more sensible Talibans" gives us a clue as how our withdrawal will have to be managed. We will define the Taliban as being 'more sensible' and then hand over to them,  not because they are actually much different from the other non-sensible Taliban, but because we will recognise that we have lost. This is what we did with the PLO and the IRA, whose grisly killers suddenly became moderates through a mystical process. I believe some talks are under way in Dubai which may lead, eventually,  to this conclusion.

Then, how about this :". There is also a case for not trying to occupy Helmand but just bombing it (& northern Pakistan) whenever something happens or some poppies are seen growing, as Churchill did in Iraq."

It might be worth mentioning that the British policy of controlling Iraq by bombing rebel villages did not end in victory, but in our withdrawal from that country. It was also, alas,  the ultimate root of the horrible method of warfare which is the bombing of civilian targets, which so damages the moral authority of the nations which use it, and which came back to haunt Britain in so many ways. 

As for poppies, why doesn't he deal with my point that Britain allows opium poppies to be grown in Oxfordshire, for morphine production. I'm told the farmers make a decent profit, and the product is entirely beneficial. So why can't we make the same arrangement in Afghanistan? If we in the West jailed heroin users as the criminals they are, instead of coddling them and giving them clean needles and Methadone, there'd be no market for heroin anyway. Why should poor Afghan peasants get bombed and strafed, because our own decadent people cannot control their gross, criminal appetites?

On the grammar/comprehensive issue, why cannot my opponents stick to the subject under discussion, which is that 'comprehensive' schools - whose whole object was supposed to be greater equality - have failed *on their own terms*. They have not just failed educationally (which should surprise nobody, their inventor Graham Savage always admitted they would lower standards) but socially. They have made us more unequal and more unfair, and condemned many more children to failure at 11 than the eleven-plus ever did.

I have no doubt there were bad grammar schools. No human institution is perfect. But a bad grammar school is still a lot better than the best comprehensive. not least because the admission procedure is just.

"Ronnie" will have to explain to me how I would be one ounce less safe here in Britain if we withdrew from Afghanistan than if we stayed. What is the process by which providing our troops as targets for ambushes in Helmand makes me safer in London or Oxford? Or why, if we stopped sending young men to risk death and injury in Afghanistan, I would be in more danger?  Please show your working.

Been to Zhongguo lately? Or perhaps to Bharat? What to say to people who do the cultural cringe to China and India

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

This is about what a clever colleague of mine described as 'Mumbai Jumbo’, the way in which British people absurdly and selectively accept the renaming of foreign cities because they think it is politically correct.  The two most prominent examples are the way we have all (except me, of course) stopped saying 'Peking' and started saying 'Beijing' , and the way we have substituted 'Mumbai' for 'Bombay'.

Let's deal first of all with ‘Beijing’. Yes, this is the real Chinese name of the country's capital. (And the Chinese don't call their country 'China'. they call it 'Zhongguo').  It always has been. But then again, the capital of Russia (or 'Rassiya' as its people know it) has always been Moskva (pronounce it 'Maaskva'). The lovely chief city of the Czech Republic is actually called 'Praha' by its citizens. The country you think of as 'Hungary' believes it is called 'Magyarorszag'.

The chilly capital of Finland ('Suomi', since you ask) is not Helsinki but 'Helsingfors' . If you want to be fussy, the capital of France should be pronounced ‘Paree’.  On the 'Beijing rather than Peking' principle, the book and film of 'The Third man' take place in ‘Wien’.  A lot of mildly adventurous people these days take Mediterranean holidays in a country which thinks it is called 'Hrvatska'. 

But mostly they don't know that, and couldn't pronounce it if they did. And I doubt if many of those who head off for stag parties in 'Baile Atha Cliath' are aware of the official name of the city they pollute with their puking and yelling. They also have no idea that Hong Kong is really called 'Yang Kang'. But I bet they all slavishly call Peking 'Beijing'.

My view is that it's a cultural cringe to a newly powerful China. But most other European countries don't do it (check the headlines of their newspapers next time you're in Wien, Warszawa, Anvers, Nuernberg , Muenchen,  Kobenhavn, Firenze, or absolutely anywhere in Sverige, Norge or Espana, ) , and I really don't see why we should. And are you really offended that Poles call London 'Londyn', that the Italians call it 'Londra' and the French call it 'Londres'?  On the contrary, it's a compliment, that your capital is famous enough to merit its own name in the great languages of the world.

As for 'Mumbai', Indian friends of mine are specially vexed by this. The name-change is in fact the idea of a very nasty Hindu nationalist party, famed for its intolerance and for its leader's admiration for Hitler. It is much disliked by many of the city's own people, who appreciate living in a place so famous that it has a world-famous name.  In Bombay itself, you can still find the Bombay edition of the Times of India, the Bombay High Court and of course Bombay Central Railway station, from which a splendid sleeper express will take you to Delhi, across hundreds of miles of Bharat (which is what Indians call India). 

Then again, there's Cambodia, which is really called 'Kampuchea', but which prefers not to be known by that name just now, because it was the one favoured by the hated mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge. A bit of a problem for the PC movement, that one.

All or nothing, if you ask me. If you call Paris 'Paris' rather than 'Paree', then you really have to say 'Peking' and 'Bombay'. If you say 'Beijing' and 'Mumbai' then you really have to say 'Paree' .  And if you call Paris 'Paree' rather than 'Paris', then you strike me as being a bit of a twit.

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