Why I mistrust too much anger in politics

I mistrust too much anger in politics. A bit is all right, especially when the other side are telling lies or refusing to listen. But not too much.  And not too much self-righteousness either, please. None of us is right all the time. That’s why we have a Loyal Opposition and an adversarial Parliament, and the presumption of innocence, come to that.

Perhaps I am just too conscious of the horrors of Civil War. I am drawn to historical depictions of these wars,  by a fearful fascination. How did men of the same nation end up slaughtering each other? Could this happen among our gentle hills and woods? Yes, it could, and has. Start treating opponents as enemies, and there is no telling where it might end.

I live in a city that was besieged in such a war, and where you can still, if you look carefully, find traces of old fortifications in now-peaceful suburbs.  I have read, in history and in fiction, depictions of these events, of the horrible relentless inevitability with which the two sides have first ceased to listen to each other, then turned their backs on each other and finally begun killing each other. The past, as Evelyn Waugh once said, is the only thing we possess for certain. We should pay close attention to it.

Here is Kipling’s ‘Edgehill Fight’, (read it in full here http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_edgehill.htm )

… full of pain and regret at the turning of Englishman against Englishman:

‘And the raw astonished ranks stand fast

To slay or to be slain

By the men they knew in the kindly past

That shall never come again’

You might find something a little similar in Gore Vidal’s rather beautiful description (in his novel ‘Lincoln’) of Abraham Lincoln visiting wounded Confederate prisoners of war. One of the badly-injured young men, unlikely to survive and in some pain, turns away from him in loathing and disgust. ‘Son, we are all the same at the end’,  says the unhappy President, quietly. The reader alone knows how true this will be, and how soon. It is in this book that Lincoln, driven to misery and self-loathing by the carnage he must pursue to the end, rages that the very rooms in which he works and sleeps seem to have filled up with blood.

And these episodes are nothing to the Civil Wars of Russia and Spain, both in our times, adding modern weapons to pre-mediaeval cruelty. Not to mention the merciless wars of Ireland in the early part of this century, and their more recent sequels.

So I sicken a little when – in a country divided almost equally on a contentious issue – my own side takes such a scornful view of my opponents. When I wrote my Mail on Sunday column http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/12/we-crushed-the-remainers-now-we-must-be-kind-to-them.html

at the end of last week, I did not know until I was at my keyboard how very much I felt that some sort of generosity was called for. If you love your country – and this is the only real motivation for wanting its independence – then you also love your fellow countrymen and your fellow countrywomen. Therefore if you disagree with them , you seek to do so with patience,  kindness and tolerance, and a readiness to listen. So what if they don't do the same? 'Render unto no man evil for evil'.

 

To me, for many years, the most moving part of any election has been the victor’s declaration (not always made) to serve *all* his constituents, whether they voted for him or not – and my own (Labour) MP has been an exemplary follower of this principle, to my personal knowledge.  Heaven help us if it is ever otherwise.

Most sensible pro-EU people now recognise that the vote went against them and that we must therefore leave the EU.

I have mocked those who did not recognise the outcomeof the referendum and fantasised about frustrating the result, reminding them of Brecht’s joke about how, the people having failed the elite, the elite would like to elect a new people. Too bad. Once you accept the democratic principle, the majority is the absolute decider.

They, like those who wanted to leave, took part in the campaign on that basis. But of course it was never quite as simple as that , especially in a free, plural society with a de facto separation of powers, adversarial newspapers, law courts, a powerful civil service and the BBC,

Would leavers, had we lost, have accepted the vote? Yes. Would we have sunk back and given up all hope of leaving forever? I somehow doubt it. We would also have continued to seek to block many aspects of EU membership, such as Schengen and the Euro, Turkish or Ukrainian membership of the EU and any plans for a European Army.

Remainers are now doing the approximate equivalent. Do I blame them? No. What is more, they have quite a lot to work on. It is silly to pretend that they don’t. Let me explain.

Be in no doubt that there are many and varied ways of achieving the apparently simple aim of leaving the EU. And that if that aim is badly messed up, there could one day even come a campaign to rejoin the EU, which will undo all you have achieved.

One of the many odd, unsatisfactory things about the referendum is that the movement which won it dissolved itself at the point of victory. We did not elect a new government (though we destroyed the old one, which has been replaced by a pale ghost of its former self). We cannot turn to the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign and say ‘what exactly did you mean to do next?’, because they are scattered to the winds, some in internal exile, some hidden inside the government, some fulminating in UKIP factions.

If we could ask them, what would they say? How deeply had they thought about the matter? Did they even have a unified position? Weren’t some of them globalists who wanted Britain out of the protective embrace of the EU so it could be more open to the keen winds blowing from the far East?

Weren’t others more my sort, who value Britain’s special unique nature and didn’t want to see it absorbed or erased or diluted either by the EU or by globalisation?  These aren't really allies. they have a single negative desire - to get out of the EU. But their positive plans are hostile to each other.

Then there’s the question of responsibility. Victory in an election (as those who take part well know) means that you are now personally in charge of keeping the promises you made. Victory in a referendum has no such automatic price. We did not elect a new government last June. We just robbed the existing government of the central pillar of most of its activity, and forced it to do something it didn’t want to do and will do as slowly and unwillingly as it can. There is no force in British politics which can change that. 

The Leave campaigners then either went home quietly, or began writing rude memoirs about their allies, or embarked on wild political manoeuvres, only to be rolled flat by the bizarre juggernaut of Theresa May, who inherited Downing Street because she had been vague and rather cowardly, and who was given the job of implementing a policy she opposed -presumably because she had opposed it more feebly than most.

We must also wonder, given their performance for many years before in front-line politics, whether *all* the major figures in the Leave campaign were in fact wholly committed to the cause they espoused; or whether they ever intended to win. I was utterly amazed when Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson and Michael Gove declared themselves in favour of leaving. It was at that moment that my former certainty, that ‘Remain’ would win the vote, began to evaporate. I had actually argued with Mr Gove, many years before, that the main reason leaving the EU was unpopular was  hat no leading politicians were in favour of it. The public therefore assumed that it was a dangerous policy. At the time, as I recall, he took the David Cameron view, that it was a marginal subject we shouldn't 'bang on' about. 

Of course both sides were unscrupulous. But that's not worth worrying about. As so often, Larry Elliott of ‘The Guardian’ makes the key point very well. He disposes of Remainers’ moans about the untruths told by the ‘Leave’ campaign here 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/04/brexit-debate-post-match-interview-football-arsenal-arsene-wenger

But this frivolous disregard for truth (on both sides) was partly a consequence of the irresponsibility I mention above. As soon as the campaign was over, both sides bolted back to their normal homes and loyalties, like vandals discovered in mid-crime by the police, scattering down every available dark alleyway, never to meet again.

I also have to mention the amazing predicament of the Labour Party, whose leader was ideally positioned to do as little as he could to discourage his party’s voters from registering a huge protest against mass immigration - one millions of them had been longing to make for years.

So, we have a narrow victory, based on unique circumstances, obtained largely by people who didn’t know (and hadn’t thought very hard about) what they were going to do next. Is this really a sound basis for a triumphalist parade? Not everyone on our side is brilliant and good. Not everyone on the other side is stupid or wicked. Fight them, by all means, but with reason and facts, not self-righteous rage. If the vote were held again now, it might just as easily go the other way. Is it wise to pretend to be unaware of that, or to think it just doesn’t matter?

And now, as a nation and an economy,  we are up against an EU in which at least one very skilful and dogged rival, France, will do all she can to do us down. France has several reasons to do this. Her establishment wants to squash Marine le Pen’s Front National, and making an exit from the EU look hard and painful will help this process. Then there’s the little matter of the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, and French resentment (shared by Germany)  of the continuing dominance of the City of London in European finance. Do you think they’re going to be nice to us?

And is it really not worth noting that figures such as Christopher Booker, the most sustained and well-informed campaigner against British membership of the EU, are genuinely worried that we might damage ourselves if we seek too much, too fast? The attitude of some on this blog has been close to Stalinist in their empurpled unreasoning wrath. Any minute now I expect to hear voices accusing me and Christopher Booker of wrecking railroads and sabotage, and of being secret agents of Brussels.

Sure, economic logic dictates that they want our markets. But the EU has always been a political body, with economics coming second to politics, or how could they have agreed to merge their currencies? Politics comes first. They cannot make it easy or cheap for us to leave. There will be a price of some sort.

Finally, I’d mention (as I did in my Sunday article) the fact that the ghastly embodiment of cynicism, the Conservative Party is still in office in this country. This is a party which is very good at political murder, as Margaret Thatcher and Iain Duncan Smith could readily attest. Those Tories who push now for a hard and fast departure may find that Mrs May and her inner circle give them all the freedom they want, wait for them to fail, and then destroy them.

 

What might the result of that be? Let’s speculate wildly.  A catastrophic failure of negotiations, a British walk-out, or a an EU refusal to concede another inch,  a run on Sterling (which is waiting to happen again anyway), a humiliating return to talks (on worse terms) and then perhaps that long-threatened election, fought as a second referendum on the half-hearted deal we eventually get?

I don’t know, and nor do you. All I know is that I find the noisy, chest-thumping over-confidence of some Leavers increasingly hard to take. I think it is dangerous for the country and, regardless of whether anyone likes what I say or not, I am going to point this out.

PETER HITCHENS: This isn’t a revolution – it’s New Labour in a blue frock

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

British politics has finally vanished up its own pretensions. The old signposts and measurements have all been removed. We have no idea who stands for what or where we are going. Who would have thought to see a Tory conference applauding a Prime Minister for vowing to raise more tax and weaken employers’ rights? Surely that’s the job of the other lot?

In fact most of Chairman May’s speech could have equally well been written and delivered at a Labour conference. She may have derided Jeremy Corbyn personally but she has noticed quite a lot of his ideas are rather popular, especially with the young, and stolen them.
Who can blame her? She faces nothing but uncertainty and danger. The Labour Party is very nearly dead but her own Tories seethe with intrigue, rivalry and suppressed dissent.

The landscape before her is like one of those lakes covered in bright green water weed that looks – at a first glance – like a smooth lawn. In fact it conceals slimy depths. Only a fool would try to walk on it.

Her inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence.
I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals. And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us.

I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step. As for her Great Repeal Bill, it is nothing of the sort. Until we actually get out, it just confirms 40 years of EU laws and regulations.

Already her Cabinet is openly divided about keeping access to the Single Market.
And if anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.

Given all these perils, it is only wise of Mrs May to blow kisses in the general direction of Labour voters, while also trying to persuade refugees from Ukip to come back to mummy. The 2020 Election seems far away, but its result will probably be decided during the next two years.
You may not like any of this. I certainly don’t. But it comes, as so many bad things do, from taking short cuts and trying to bodge complicated bits of carpentry with a few swift strokes of the hammer.

Millions of voters thought they could have a policy without a government to implement it. They thought they could leave the nation’s fate to the political class rather than taking a hand in it themselves.

They fell for David Cameron’s promise of a referendum, which he never expected to keep because he intended to continue the Coalition with the Lib Dems until 2020.
They thought they could rely on the Tory Party to take them out of the EU, even though it had let them down on so many other things.

So, deep down, they changed nothing. A few toyed with the Dad’s Army party of Ukip, now once again enjoying ripping itself to pieces, its main activity. But they wouldn’t see that the Tories had become a blue-tinged version of New Labour.Now there’s a new collective delusion, that Theresa May is the new Margaret Thatcher. Actually she’s the new Harriet Harman. I’ve charted her embrace of political correctness here over many years.

Even her increasingly vague promise to maybe, just possibly, open one or two new grammar schools, provided the middle class cannot get into them, will probably trickle away into the damp sands of compromise where truly good ideas end up in our system.

*****

I know I’m not going to like Netflix’s The Crown, the new drama about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact I think it should not have been made, and should not be made for another 20 or 30 years when the actual facts are known and the papers available.
Even then, it would probably be nearly as bad. Like all such productions, it exploits the real people it pretends to portray. If it were about fictional royal figures, and did not claim to be their real lives, nobody would watch it.

But it cannot possibly be true. Above all, like the misleading, over-rated film The King’s Speech, it tries to see people through the distorting lens of present-day prejudice. My parents and their friends were more or less of the same generation as the Queen and Prince Philip, and my father was a naval officer.
And it seems to me that even the faces of Claire Foy, who plays the Queen, and Matt Smith, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, are wrong. They lack the depth and grief and sense of duty carved into the faces of that generation by their stern upbringing, and by the war. They are too knowing about trivial things, and too innocent of important ones.

Their attempts at the accents of the time sound as if they have been laboriously taught them and they long to burst out laughing, not as if they think it normal to speak like that, as such people really did.

And the odd thing is that they spoke like that while enduring danger, pain and fear and, in a way, saving the world. There wasn’t anything funny about it
I am told King George VI, that improbably decent monarch, is shown using the c-word. I doubt he did. Naval man though he was, and so familiar with the whole range of filthy language, I think he would have regarded it as impossibly crude.

And if they can get that wrong, it is like a clock striking 13. All that went before, and all that comes afterwards, is in doubt as well.

*****

I am not sure that the alleged comedian David Baddiel was trying to be nice when he urged the BBC to give me a ‘Right-Wing Hour’ on Radio 4.
The last time we met, on a TV review programme, I said that I was pleased and relieved when his dreary film, The Infidel, came to an end. He may not have forgotten.

But even so he now joins many other BBC types, from Andrew Marr to Mark Thompson, in admitting ‘there is generally a centre-Left, liberal bias to its output’.
And this is getting worse. As this newspaper revealed last Sunday, diversity commissars are culling BBC performers on the grounds of race and sex. This is a mad outcome.

When I was a Leftist in the 1960s, we at least believed that discrimination of all kinds was wrong. To this day I write ‘human’ when asked for my ethnic details by some busybody.

Even an hour a week in which such wicked ideas could be attacked and mocked would be better than nothing.

*****

One of the saddest sights in the university town where I live is ‘Freshers’ Week’, which means nightly pathetic processions of bewildered teens, clad in uniform joke T-shirts, being led off to bars to be taught how to get drunk. I really hope that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference was right when it said today’s sixth formers are sick of the Olympic boozing that has become so universal.

It is the drinking, of course, that also leads to so many of the rapes and alleged rapes that cause so much misery of so many kinds. I wonder why we treat this sad business as a joke.

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PETER HITCHENS: This farcical witch-hunt will drag British justice back to the Dark Ages

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Countries on the brink of madness are riven by whispered scandals about the powerful - some of them true, most of them not. Four years before the French Revolution, some tangled rubbish about a diamond necklace was used to smear Queen Marie Antoinette. Pre-1917 Russia seethed with obscene rumours about the monk Grigory Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra.This tittle-tattle helped to discredit the existing regime, and opened the way for a new order which was far, far worse. With us, there is a strange belief that a vast sex-abuse scandal, reaching high into the establishment, is being hidden by the powerful. The great thing about such claims is that they can neither be proved or disproved. And so those who doubt them can be condemned as part of the cover-up. You cannot be neutral. In a reversal of the normal rules on slander, an accuser can allege the vilest things about an alleged culprit, and yet not suffer at all.

He or she can also shelter for life behind legally-enforced anonymity. Meanwhile the accused are publicly humiliated, their homes absurdly searched – for what, exactly? This unjust lunacy reached its peak in 2014 when the then Home Secretary, a Mrs Theresa May, responded to a media frenzy by setting up an ‘Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’. It was a very silly idea. If crimes have been committed, we have a huge and expensive police and justice system which, to tell the truth, isn’t half as busy as it likes to pretend. This is because it has decided that so many things that used to be crimes aren’t crimes any more, so it ignores them. And immediately, because of the wild and fantastic nature of the claims, almost nobody could be found who wasn’t in some way disqualified to lead it. Ridiculously, that fine lawyer and judge, Baroness Butler-Sloss, was ruled out as chairman because she was ‘part of the establishment’. I bet the Baroness is relieved to be out of it now, but isn’t it ridiculous that the joke MP, Simon Danczuk, later to gain fame for his sexually explicit text message habit, was allowed to influence the matter? Now on its fourth chairman, this gigantic, foggy inquisition has just lost its chief lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, amidst a barrage of leaks and counter-leaks. Meanwhile most of those involved in the original scandal-mongering have suffered various embarrassing setbacks and aren’t quite as chipper as they were when they stomped around the land demanding a state-sponsored witch-hunt.

And Mrs May, who wants to be thought of as open-minded and willing to review the decisions of the Cameron government, now has the chance to review and reverse her own mistake. I do hope she does, and shuts the whole thing down. This gigantic kangaroo court, which is, incredibly, allowed to hear evidence against accused individuals without allowing any defence, is an embarrassing hangover from a bout of national lunacy. We are slowly recovering from it. The Metropolitan Police Chief who joined in far too keenly with the hunting pack has quit his post early.

A powerful new Channel 4 Drama, ‘National Treasure’ –in which Robbie Coltrane plays a showbiz giant brought down by abuse claims - is at least toying with the possibility that some of these accusations may actually be untrue and that some accusers may be hoping for gain more than for justice. About time too. For far too long media, police and – shamefully – the courts themselves have forgotten the rule which stands between us and tyranny – that an accused person is innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It is no good saying that the crimes are terrible. Locking up an innocent person, or destroying his life with anonymous smears, is terrible too. And if we don’t stop doing it, we will soon cease to be a free country.

**********

If a small army of Islamist terror fanatics makes its base in a crowded city, and will not let women and children leave, it is very hard to know what to do. For instance, the Iraqi army was faced with this problem in 2014 when it sought to recapture the city of Fallujah from Jihadists. Nouri al-Maliki, then President of Iraq and so the West’s ally, used barrel bombs to fight ISIS terrorists in Fallujah. Pro-ISIS propaganda made much of the civilian deaths, but I don’t recall the USA, or the BBC, or the moralizing choir who now emote over Aleppo and shout ‘war-crimes’, saying much. Nor do we hear at all from these moralists about Saudi Arabia’s rather savage little war now going on in Yemen (using British munitions) in which more than 2,000 civilians are said to have died. There’s a similar problem over the severe criticisms of the Syrian government made by the USA’s diplomats and their mouthpiece, the BBC.

Near-identical repression of dissent in Bahrain and Egypt (currently our allies) passes with barely a mention. Their governments aren’t called ‘regimes’. Why is this? For instance, on a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s over-rated ‘Today’ programme, the presenter, Justin Webb, stated as a matter of fact that Russia ‘has no obvious interest’ in bringing the Syrian war to an end. How does he know? He then used that interesting phrase ‘some who think’. There are some (namely me) who think this is a BBC way of sliding an opinion into a place where it shouldn’t be. Anyway, according to Mr Webb ‘There are some who think they (the Russians) want it to go on and on and on in order to damage Europe with the flows of migrants’. No doubt there are, but who are they, and are they right, and why is Justin Webb smuggling this opinion (especially if it isn’t his) into a major news programme?

A BBC spokesperson says feebly that this is ‘news analysis’, but it looks to me like taking sides. From the start I have been shocked by the BBC’s partial coverage of this issue, and its willingness to be a conduit for war propaganda in Syria, as it was in Libya. This is important because we are being softened up for a war far more risky than that in Libya or Iraq. In Syria, western forces might actually find themselves in direct combat with Russian troops and planes. Can you begin to imagine how dangerous that could be for Europe and the world?

Please don’t be rushed into supporting such a thing, even by the BBC.

***

I am sorry that Jeremy Paxman has gone into the memoir business. Surely he doesn’t need the money, and, whenever anyone attacks his or her dead parents in public I always wonder what those parents would say if they were still alive. But I am glad of this confession from the man who so loftily looked down on so many interviewees: ‘It is not necessary to be an expert — why bother interviewing someone if you already know it all? ‘The presenter is there merely as the representative of the average, reasonably alert viewer. You only need to know enough not to ask spectacularly stupid questions.’ Really?

*****

Tories attack Jeremy Corbyn for wanting to renationalise the railways (in my view, his best idea). Well, they can hardly accuse him of too much state interference while simultaneously demanding government control over pudding portions in restaurants. Nice big sugary puddings in old-fashioned British Railways dining cars, that’s my policy.

Some thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn's Liverpool Speech

What are we to make of events in the Labour Party? I have now read Jeremy Corbyn’s speech http://labourlist.org/2016/09/united-we-can-shape-the-future-jeremy-corbyns-speech-to-conference/

to the Labour conference in Liverpool.

Unlike my old friend Peter Oborne here http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/according-british-media-class-last-week-has-been-unmitigated-disaster-labour-lead-1488108898, I am not moved to extravagant praise.

It is true that Mr Corbyn has now twice won the leadership of his party, another example of Marx’s dictum about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This has been quite funny to watch, especially the swollen, puce entitlement of the Blairites (victims of the tragedy and butts of the farce), who cannot accept their defeat and don’t understand it (much as David Miliband could never understand why he didn’t beat his brother to the leadership). The answer’s easy: Iraq.

Now they can’t understand that their project, wholly taken over by the Tories, is finished. With or without Mr Corbyn, it no longer has the votes or the organisation to win a national election.  Mr Corbyn can save a traditional leftist rump, which can certainly survive *as a party* and might re-enter government as a coalition partner if we ever introduce proportional representation. But without Scotland, it cannot get a majority in our existing system.

If they want political careers, they need to find a back door into the Tory party, True Home of New Labour. But can they admit this? And can the Tories admit it by accepting them?

Meanwhile Mr Corbyn really has no real answer (nobody does) to the questions he rightly raises as important to millions and ignored by the mainstream  – insecure, poorly-paid jobs, impossibly expensive housing, the devastation of industrial employment, the inability of this country to afford either the welfare state or the NHS in their current shape, as it grows comparatively poorer.

He is right to raise them. But which British political leader is going to say, ever, that Britain – having been so badly governed for so long, and having lived far beyond its means for decades -   is just going to have to get used to a lower standard of living, poorer public services, more crowded housing and schools, longer queues for the doctor, and higher prices and taxes on top of it? Not one of them. They’ll just quietly get on with devaluing the currency (the referendum provided a fantastic pretext for starting that long-delayed process) and hope we won’t notice that they’re responsible.

The speech is often banal and packed with clichés and pieties. I cannot find in it a single mention of the Trident nuclear weapons system which Mr Corbyn fiercely opposes and which he declares he would never use if he came to office. It is an odd omission .His attitude towards education is woeful and foolish (though his use of the term ‘National Education Service’ is interesting . I have long pointed out that the ‘Academy’ programme now adopted by both major parties is resulting in a wholly nationalised state school system, controlled by a distant and fogbound quango called the Education Funding Agency, monitored by the Stalinoid inquisition OFSTED  and now also patrolled by equally remote regional commissioners).

I think references to the death of the late Jo Cox MP which speculate on the alleged killer’s motive are plain wrong. The trial, when it comes, will establish the truth. Until then,  best to just mourn the loss of a much-loved, much valued human being.

His strongest sections are on foreign policy, where he is rightly opposed to foolish foreign adventures. But even there Mr Corbyn’s low-grade unadventurous 1960s leftism gets the better of him. A foreign policy based on ‘peace,  justice and human rights’ was more or less the ‘ethical foreign policy’ pursued by the Blair government, and which led to the crass interventionism Mr Corbyn rightly now denounces.

When will people grasp that a cynical, self-interested foreign policy, based upon the prosperity and safety of this country alone, is invariably less lethal and cruel than an idealist  and utopian policy, the surest route to war known to man?

But Mr Corbyn’s head is still full of the slogans he no doubt shouted on long-ago marches and vigils in the London of the 1960s and 1970s, to him the dawn of political time. What fun it was to take sides in the great global quarrel and feel good about ourselves. Sweet was it in that dawn to be alive, etc. We were against so many bad things.  Down with this, boycott that, victory to so and so. I was there too. I shouted them too. Then I saw what happened next. Pol Pot. The Cuban dictatorship. The African tragedy. I also noticed that the supposed bad guys achieved the peaceful defeat of the USSR, by ignoring our foolish pleas to disarm.  And so on.

Still, I did like the bit about re-nationalising the railways. And, in an era when borrowing money is virtually free of charge, I have to admit that an economic regeneration plan based on borrowed money does not seem to me to be the disaster it would have been in earlier eras, where interest charges were huge.

And, while I totally disagreed with the passage about immigration, it was refreshing to see the leader of the Left openly advocating this policy, rather than pretending to be surprised and discombobulated by the huge numbers of migrants arriving here ( as New Labour and the Cameroons always did). What, us? Nothing to do with us!

This is what I have long wanted – an openly left-wing party , standing up for what it really believes in. I want this for two reasons. 1. There are plenty of people who believe these things and they ought to be represented in Parliament. 2. I still harbour a faint hope that such a party will call into being its opposite,  an equally candid conservative rival, unashamedly arguing for socially and morally conservative policies.

And that is why, from the start of Mr Corbyn’s unexpected rise to prominence, I have refused to join the chorus of execration against him.  I also had another motive. I could not see why any conservative should weep for the Blairites Mr Corbyn so hilariously defeated. Those Blairites who are far more dangerous than Mr Corbyn but somehow seldom get identified as such by the media, as I have many times pointed out, quoting the arch-Blairite Peter Hyman https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/20/labour-party-directionless-political-future

as evidence that New Labour was never (as dupes and suckers imagined) a version of Toryism, but was from the start a deeply revolutionary project, whose key ingredient was stealth, designed to lull and deceive voters into choosing the most radical government since Cromwell.  

As Peter Hyman wrote (and I couldn’t have put it better): ‘New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. The idea of New Labour was not to be a good opposition party, to protest loudly or have an “influence” over events, but, rather, to take and hold on to the levers of power. New Labour sought political hegemony: winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values in contrast to a Tory-dominated 20th century.

The scale of that ambition, in a country dominated by a stridently rightwing press and the quiet conservatism of large swaths of the British people, was breathtaking. If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.’

 

By contrast with this, Mr Corbyn is a return to a much older, more modest, more British form of change, back to the days of Robert Blatchford’s bicycling socialists and Clem Attlee’s seizure of the commanding heights of the economy. He says what he wants to do. His opponents can disagree and explain why this has, for the most part, been shown to be mistaken. A proper socially and morally conservative party would have no trouble beating him. The trouble is that so many of the policies he backs are also backed (in truth) by Mrs May’s Tories, or will in the end be adopted by them. Has immigration been controlled? Will it be? Is there any real plan to get rid of the comprehensive education Mr Corbyn loves and which Mrs May showed no signs of opposing until three weeks ago? Where now is George Osborne’s supposed austerity?  Is there any threat to the great raft of ‘equality and diversity’ legislation which imposes ultra-left political correctness on most of public life and much of private life as well?

In fact, I suspect it will be a Tory government that eventually gets rid of the unaffordable Trident system, taking advantage of the unavoidable economic crisis that is approaching, to do so.

That’s why I suspect the Tory response to Mr Corbyn next week will be much more in the form of frenzied abuse and name-calling, of claims that Mr Corbyn is a wild Bolshevik, than in the form of reasoned response to him. A reasoned response would involve admitting that very little actually separates them, and that both major parties are motivated by egalitarianism and liberal social policies, and are clueless about our economic problems.

The world's fixated on Trump. But Hillary could drag us ALL into a catastrophic war, writes PETER HITCHENS in America

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Here in my favourite American small town, I detect a strange, ominous feeling of approaching danger. Something has gone wrong with the USA.
I first came to Moscow, Idaho, eight years ago when the great Obama frenzy was at its unhinged peak. This is a divided place, traditional rural conservatives living alongside a Left-wing university campus, but in 2008 they coped with their deep divisions in the usual way.
People disagreed, but they did it politely and openly, and were ready to accept the result even if they did not like it. Almost every front lawn had its partisan placard.
Now politics has gone underground in an almost sinister way. I searched the town’s pleasant suburbs for a Trump or Clinton poster and found none, only a single defiant declaration of support for America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Left-winger Bernie Sanders, who long ago quit the race.
Republican headquarters in Main Street until recently contained posters supporting lots of the party’s candidates for local office, but none at all for Donald Trump. Last week they finally managed to mention his name, but you have to look carefully for it in their window.
Democrat HQ, almost directly opposite, is nearly as coy about Hillary Clinton.
In private conversations (the only sort where people will say what they really think), you find out what this means. Democrats are holding their noses over Hillary because they despise her and wish she wasn’t their candidate.
But many Republicans are stifling their genuine enthusiasm for Trump, because – in small towns like this – they don’t want to annoy or alienate neighbours who may also be customers, clients, patients or employers.
Of course there are conservatives, usually serious Christians, who loathe and mistrust Donald Trump and see him for what he is – a balloon of noise and bluster which will one day burst in a terrible explosion of disappointment and regret.
But they have been swept aside by the great carnival of resentment and revenge which has carried Trump past all the obstacles and restraints that are supposed to prevent such people getting near real power. For Trump is the anti-Obama – emotional, irrational, a spasm.
Those who had to sit, grinding their teeth, through all the long-years of Obama-worship, now hope for their own matching hour of gloating.
And we really ought to recognise that rejoicing over the woes of your enemies is one of the greatest sinful pleasures in life. Few will turn down the chance.
I can see no good outcome of this. Adversarial politics are a good thing, but only if both sides are ultimately willing to concede that their rivals are entitled to win from time to time. But that attitude seems to have gone. Now the rule is that the winner takes all, and hopes to keep it if he (or she) can.
A narrow defeat for Trump will poison the republic. Millions of his supporters will immediately claim fraud at the polls, and nothing will convince them otherwise. The bitterness of the Florida ‘hanging chad’ episode of 2000 will seem like brotherly love compared with that fury.
A victory for Trump – decisive or narrow – will give astonishing powers to a lonely, inexperienced, ill-educated old man who (I suspect) is increasingly terrified of winning a prize he never really intended or expected to obtain.
A clear victory for Hillary Clinton would create even greater problems. Educated, informed people here believe that there are serious doubts about her health. Even if they are wrong, her militant interventionist foreign policies are terrifying.
I lived through the Cold War and never believed we were in real danger. But I genuinely tremble at the thought of Mrs Clinton in the White House. She appears to have learned nothing from the failed interventions of the past 30 years, and scorns Barack Obama’s praiseworthy motto: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’
She will do stupid stuff, and drag us into it, you may rely upon it.
How odd it is, to hear on the air the faint but insistent sound of coming war, here in this place of sweet, small hills, rich soil and wistful, mountainous horizons.
Men came here in search of what we all really desire, to be left alone to get on with the really important aims of life, to build a home and raise a family, to see the fruits of their labour, to believe what they wish to believe.
I cannot quite work out how the good, sane impulse that gave birth to the USA could possibly have led us to this nightmare choice between two equally horrible outcomes.
I shall just have to carry on hoping that I am wrong.

Syria's 'WMD moment': Don't be duped again

Almost everyone (barring a tiny knot of deluded losers) knows that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. Most people now grasp that Colonel Gaddafi wasn’t planning a massacre in Benghazi or ordering his troops to engage in mass rapes.

How long will it be before we also grasp that neither Russia nor Syria bombed a UN aid convoy in Aleppo?

This incident, about which almost no independently testable, checkable facts have yet been produced, is the WMD of Syria. If we all fall for it, then we shall very soon find ourselves embroiled in the most dangerous international confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis.

Under immense pressure from the despots of Saudi Arabia, the USA will not give up its efforts to overthrow the Syrian government. It is clear that it is now prepared to risk an open confrontation with Moscow to achieve this. Why? Who do they think they are, and how can their cause be so good that they take such risks?

The deliberate sabotage of a workable peace deal in Syria (opposed from the start by the Pentagon) is one of the scandals of our age. There was a chance we might end the misery of millions, and it was thrown away.

We in Britain must resist being dragged into a Syrian war, not least because, if we are, it will not be long before any troops we send there are being hounded in their own country for alleged war crimes. We’ve been fooled enough by this propaganda. Don’t be bamboozled again.

We'll beat Corbyn with reason - not abuse 

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it, including Corbyn.

Look, there are plenty of good arguments against Jeremy Corbyn, the best one being his absurd thought-free loathing for grammar schools. Some of the greatest socialists in this country, notably the 1930s Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson, and that fine teacher and socialist Eric James, realised that such schools helped the poor.

But please can people stop proclaiming that Labour cannot win an Election with Mr Corbyn at its head? It is such a stupid thing to say, that every time I hear it I want to beat my head against the nearest wall.

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it. It is dead in Scotland and the South of England. And why on earth, after the 13-year catastrophe of the Blair government, do so many people seem so anxious to back the ghastly, dishonest Blairites against Mr Corbyn, who is at least open and honest about what he intends?

I personally prefer that to the conscious fraud practised by the Blairites and their Tory equivalents, the Cameroons, who pretended to be patriots and friends of the family, and turned out to be neither.

Mr Corbyn, as well as being generally right about foreign policy, actually confronts the issues that worry many people. His answers may be wrong, but if we listened to him and debated with him, instead of abusing him, this country and its people would benefit.

Freedom is all about being forced to listen to people we disagree with, and to defeat them (if we can) with facts and logic. The Corbyn abusers should try it.

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*******

When will we learn that making new laws is useless unless we enforce them? It is no good having ‘tough’ laws against texting while driving unless lots of people are caught, prosecuted and punished for this.

Now car manufacturers, with breathtaking cynicism, are marketing new models with dashboard internet screens. This will undoubtedly mean more pointless deaths. My suggestion is that such cars should only be sold if the driver’s seatbelt and airbag are removed first, and that they should not be permitted to have any insurance apart from third party cover. Too many drivers think they are invulnerable. That is why they kill.

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Why I'm Sort of Slightly Sympathetic Towards Emily Thornberry

I have no reason to love Emily Thornberry, a Labour blowhard whose explosion of phoney outrage I once had to wipe away and then denounce during a BBC Question Time appearance in Stockton-on-Tees, when we were on the same panel.

Perhaps that’s why I stood by when Ms Thornberry, whose interesting background is worth studying, was oddly pilloried for a not especially outrageous tweet during the Rochester and Strood by-election.

 

I could never see that this really deserved the level of criticism it received. It appeared to reflect an attitude which I would have thought was shared by most of the people who then attacked her. The fury of the left-wing elite towards Corbynistas is a very odd thing. I’m fascinated by the ‘anti-Semitism’ charge against the Corbynites, which certainly has some justification, given their sympathy for anti-Israel factions. But those who make this charge have in many cases for years swallowed and repeated anti-Israel propaganda which I have always regarded as being selective criticism founded in an unacknowledged Judophobia. Put it like this. I've never been able to find another explanation for their special concentration on the undoubted faults of Israel, and their lack of interest in the parallel faults of other countries.

 

 

But now she’s been caught out not knowing the name of the French Foreign Minister, I feel I must speak up for her. I do not know the name of the French Foreign Minister, even though I read it this morning. It  just hasn’t stuck. I’d have to look it up, or write it on my sleeve if I were, by some sort of nightmare chance, Shadow Foreign Secretary.  And no wonder. I will be unlikely to need it.  Once, I would have  done (especially when it was the gloriously named Maurice Couve de Murville, whose comings and goings were incessant in the 1960s) . And for ages I could also confidently have identified the German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dieter Genscher.

Long ago now,  I tried to maintain a pretty close interest in the politics of the main continental countries, closely studying the relevant pages of the FT and The Times. I thought this was the sort of thing an informed person ought to know. When I visited France I could usually pick up the thread of French politics by reading Le Monde,  but it’s all gone now.  The end of the Cold War, and the death of truly independent countries caused by the EU, has made foreign governments as interesting as district councils in faraway bits of the West Midlands.

There was a time in the mid-60s when I could confidently have identified every British MP by his or her constituency, especially enjoying the fact that Frank Hooley was MP for Heeley, then a division of Sheffield.  Now I stare blankly at pictures of the Cabinet, wondering who they are and not feeling much more informed when people give me their names. (‘Who? Who?’ I ask, echoing the Duke of Wellington’s querulous, bellowed response to Lord Derby’s 1852 Cabinet of unknowns).  For years I struggled to remember that George Osborne was the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Something in my mind wanted to reject this information. It still does.

So Ms Thornberry seems to me to have a point when she complains that she’s being singled out when she’s asked to name the French Foreign Minister on live TV. Yes, I know she is actually planning to meet the nameless Frenchman. But I’m sure she’d have got it right in time for the meeting. And, despite considering myself well-informed, I can easily imagine being caught out on such a thing. Also, like her in her Shadow Defence Secretary period , I didn’t know what a Defcon was, though I could identify a CEP, know roughly what Tritium is (and where you might just encounter it) , can  tell a SLCM from an SLBM, know the difference between a warship and a battleship and can distinguish an air-superiority fighter from a strike aircraft and a tank from a self-propelled gun.

And I have to ask, did her interrogator know who the French Foreign Minister was, much before he asked the question? And how would he do on a quickfire quiz on leading continental politicians or, come to that, the names of Barack Obama’s Cabinet? More important, what do most political journalists really know about history, foreign affairs or anything much?  All they need to know is the line of the day, who’s in and who’s out - and they’re safe.

This sort of failing isn’t quite the same as not knowing the price of a loaf or a pint of milk or a stamp. Such things (which politicians now rehearse frenziedly at election times) are tests of whether you have entirely lost touch with the world of normal people. I’m glad they feel they ought to know. Though they don’t mean much if you don’t also know what the average household’s take-home pay and average debts are, what it costs to rent a house or flat in the South-East, or the outrageous price of a two-mile bus ride.

And so, Emily Thornberry, you sort of have some of my sympathy today.

Look out! They're sneaking up on you with a chemical cosh

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week’s revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug troublesome teenagers in the 1960s – and we have only just found out.

One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles.

This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was given to boys at a Yorkshire ‘Approved School’ (a state-inspected home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were told of this experiment.

To qualify for the secret chemical cosh, you had to be ‘impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive’, which for teenage boys is more or less a description of being alive and awake. Both schemes were endorsed by the Home Office’s own in-house psychiatrist, Pamela Mason. How many other such horrors happened – are perhaps still happening – without us knowing?

I have long suspected that the Home Office – and much of our elite – are quite keen on doping the population. Despite making various militant noises over the years, this secretive department has quietly filleted the drug laws so that they are now the boneless wonder of the western world.

And for many years our prisons have pretended not to notice the epidemic use of illegal narcotics behind bars. I suspect the authorities hoped prisoners would be so stupefied that they would not riot, or escape in large numbers – things the Government greatly fears, and which have destroyed many Cabinet Ministers.

This policy is now going badly wrong, as cannabis is not in fact the peaceful drug some claim. Many of the drugs readily available in jail, such as the synthetic ‘Spice’, make their users more violent, not less.

The Government has also been quite happy to allow pharmaceutical companies to run huge experiments on adults and children with sketchily tested and unproven tablets that I would not give to a dog, even if I disliked it.

Astonishing numbers of people are now regularly taking mind-altering drugs – Ritalin for children who get bored in school, ‘antidepressants’ for unhappy adults (and sometimes both together, as adults now have ‘ADHD’ and children are allegedly ‘depressed’). Having wrongly feared that George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare of drabness and surveillance would come true, we missed the much more accurate warning in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Huxley didn’t just foresee the state rummaging about in the womb, the abolition of parents, the family and private life, the cheery disposal of the old and ill, and the distraction of a wage-slave population by flashy entertainment and sex.

He predicted the invention of an all-purpose happiness drug called ‘Soma’. It would keep the middle classes content, and could be used in spray form to quell riots by the poor. He said it would have ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects… there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’.

They haven’t actually invented it yet. Huxley’s Soma was harmless, which today’s drugs somehow never are. But they are working on it. And you might like to know the name of the brilliant, subtle, well-funded campaign to legalise marijuana launched almost half a century ago by the late Steve Abrams (I discussed it with him at length before he died). It was ‘Soma’.

Rewriting our history? That's hard to Swallow

As a child I never took to Swallows And Amazons. 

I had a boarding school headmaster who drove us ceaselessly out of doors, made us accompany him on to the heaving, open sea (without lifejackets) in an ancient ketch, taught us to make fires, camp in the rain, gut fish and endure more than our fair share of mud, wet and cold.

I had no idea how lucky I was, and I am sure it was very good for me. But as a result I didn’t much want to read about such things, let alone do them on my holidays. And I only came to know Arthur Ransome’s books when I read them to my own children.

I instantly recognised the children and adults in them, the way they thought and spoke, and the lives they lived. I could guess in detail what their homes or schools were like, though they were never described. I knew (I still do) what a country station platform felt and sounded like on a summer afternoon just after the train had steamed away. I also knew (as the film-makers don’t) that British Railways didn’t exist in 1935. And I knew that pemmican (a joke in the books) was never on sale in tins in British grocers’ shops; and that telegrams came in khaki-yellow envelopes.

But the new film suffers from the constant problem of modern people. They can’t begin to imagine the recent past and know almost nothing about it.

One thing that struck me is that the children in the film (pictured above) seem to be much ruder to each other than I remember from the books. The girls are also a lot screamier. Of course, hardly anything really happened in most of the books. It was all imagination, a thing which has died in the age of TV and computers. And you can see why they inserted an absurd plot about Russian spies. Odd that it blames Russia for coming up with the idea for the atom bomb, when this was from the first a scheme dreamt up by Western idealist scientists horrified by Hitler.

People keep telling me these things don’t matter. But they do. If we get the past wrong, we will get the future wrong, as we prove every day.

The real scandal of Corbyn's empty seats

Actually, I can quite see why Jeremy Corbyn thought that train was full. Rail companies punish anyone who just wants to travel when he feels like it.

So we’re all forced to make reservations we don’t want, and dozens of seats are blocked by this and festooned with silly labels.

Then there’s the strange urge to make train travel even worse than going by plane, including nose-to-tail seats crammed close together, cunningly arranged to obscure the windows.

It’s increasingly hard to spot a vacant place. I suspect most of those having a go at the Labour leader haven’t done much second (sorry ‘standard’) class travel by train recently.

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I see we now have flashily painted ‘Border Force’ cutters with go-faster stripes, just like the US Coastguard.

I detect the hand of Chairman May and her clever PR team when they were still at the Home Office. But what use is all this? It will be worth checking in six months what has happened to the six migrants picked up by HMC Valiant off the Kent coast on Thursday.

Your guess is as good as mine, but unlike Australia, we have no remote islands where we can put such people.

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An Interview on Current Politics

Some readers may wish to watch this recent interview I gave to Sebastian Cheek of New Media Central. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOkemziqWPQ

My conversation with Ken Livingstone - the night before his latest disgrace

The day after I had this on-stage conversation with Ken Livingstone, he made his infamous remarks about Hitler and Zionism. I apologise for the sound quality, but some of you might find it interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i10cLvgdIcA

PETER HITCHENS: A British Trump... the catastrophe Theresa May could inflict on us all if she fails to regain control of our borders in negotiations with the EU

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

It will be good for Britain if Jeremy Corbyn wins his fight to stay as leader of the Labour Party. I agree with the late Queen Mother that the best political arrangement for this country is a good old-fashioned conservative government kept on its toes by a strong Labour Opposition.
There’s no sign of a good old-fashioned conservative government. But Mr Corbyn speaks for a lot of people who feel left out of the recovery we are supposed to be having, and they need a powerful voice in Parliament.
There is nothing good (or conservative) about low wages, insecure jobs and a mad housing market which offers nothing but cramped rooms and high rents to young families just when they need space, proper houses with gardens, and security.
I only wish the voiceless millions of conservative patriots had a spokesman as clear and resolute as Mr Corbyn is for his side.
The truth is that both major parties have been taken over by the same cult, the Clinton-Blair fantasy that globalism, open borders and mass immigration will save the great nations of the West.
It hasn’t worked. In the USA it has failed so badly that the infuriated, scorned, impoverished voters of Middle America are on the point of electing a fake-conservative yahoo businessman as President.
So far we have been gentler with our complacent elite, perhaps too gentle. Our referendum majority for leaving the EU was a deep protest against many things. But it did not actually throw hundreds of useless MPs out on their ears, as needs to be done. They are all still there, drawing their pay and expenses.
So the Establishment has yet to realise just how much fury and impatience were expressed in that vote. Now we are in a very dangerous place. Theresa May’s back-to-normal Government has no idea how much disappointed rage it will unleash if it fails to regain control of our borders in the coming negotiations with the EU.
Mrs May thinks she can fudge it, delay it and bog it down, so that at the end we can move from being half in the EU to being half out of it. She thinks she can outfox the anti-EU figures in her own party.
Maybe she can. But she cannot outfox the angry people who have demanded something and still hope and intend to get it. And if she tries, she will risk the appearance of a British Trump, a disaster for all of us.
If Mr Corbyn wins, our existing party system will begin to totter. The Labour Party must split between old-fashioned radicals like him, and complacent smoothies from the Blair age.
And since Labour MPs have far more in common with Mrs May than with Mr Corbyn, there is only one direction they can take. They will have to snuggle up beside her absurdly misnamed Conservative Party.
And so at last the British public will see clearly revealed the truth they have long avoided – that the two main parties are joined in an alliance against them.
And they may grasp that their only response is to form an alliance against the two big parties. Impossible? Look how quickly this happened in Scotland.
The Prime Minister may come to regret her vain, boastful behaviour at Question Time last Wednesday, when she bragged about how big her party was and how it was united behind her.
These things can change, and very fast. I think she will know these words: ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.’
It may not be very long before she sits on the Opposition benches, with a broken and hostile party behind her.

You don't look much like a 'Royal basher' now, Liz

I greatly enjoyed seeing Ms Liz Truss, the new Lord Chancellor, in her majestic Tudor-style robes of office, redolent of old England, tradition and deference.
It is amusing to recall Ms Truss’s radical anti-Monarchy speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in 1994 (she was once on the national executive committee of that party’s youth and student wing) when she proclaimed: ‘We do not believe people are born to rule.’ Her target was the Queen.
She found out soon afterwards that Oxford graduates in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, such as herself, are indeed born to rule, and it doesn’t much matter which party they are in.
I’m sure she’ll enjoy the many conversations with Her Majesty she’ll now have, thanks to her new high office.

Trident blows our defence apart

How sad that the argument about replacing Trident submarines is always expressed as Trident or nothing. The insane cost of this weapon is destroying the Royal Navy and the Army. I’ve said before that spending £100 billion on Trident and neglecting conventional forces is like spending so much on insuring yourself against alien abduction that you can’t afford cover against fire and theft. And so it is.
But it’s worse than that. Trident was designed to deter the USSR, a state that ceased to exist 25 years ago. The system isn’t independent. The USA owns and services the missiles and knows where our submarines are. To be really independent, it would have to be usable even if the USA didn’t want us to use it. It isn’t.
Sir Michael Quinlan, the brilliant civil servant who strove to maintain a British nuclear deterrent, said before he died in 2009 that even he wasn’t in favour of Trident at any price. The truth is that nuclear weapons are a giant bluff. I don’t believe Mrs May, whose Christian faith I don’t doubt, would ever actually order a nuclear strike on a populated city. But she has to pretend she might and we have to pretend to be able to.
All we need to do is to hang on to a few H-bombs and the planes to drop them and we can have all that Trident gives us, for 100th of the cost. We might also be able to afford a Navy and an Army again, not to mention boats to patrol our coasts, which we haven’t got at the moment.

Broken Windows Theory

 

Remember that window in Angela Eagle’s Labour party office in Wallasey, that was supposed to have been broken? Remember the insinuation that this had been done by wicked Corbynites? Well, I asked Merseyside Police, and they told me that the window wasn’t that of Mrs Eagle’s office, which wasn’t broken. It was the window of a stairwell and hallway, in an office building which Wallasey Labour Party shares with several others. Bear this in mind when reading coverage of this contest.

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