On being a gun nut

Well, I said I would be misrepresented when I voiced doubts about 'gun control', and I duly was, by a contributor who seems keen to legalise a drug that destroys the brains of the young, but regards it as unthinkable to allow individuals to own guns. He says I am a 'gun nut'. Does that make him a 'dope nut'? Perhaps, though I doubt he will see it that way. Well, I don't see it his way either. Here's why.

Presumably he imagines that my house is crammed with firearms and ammunition, and that I salivate over gun porn in my bullet-proof bunker. I'm sorry to disappoint him but I neither own any guns nor wish to do so. I find proper firearms as alarming as I find powerful motorcycles. In both cases you need to know what you're doing before you use them. In both cases they give you more power than you might want to possess. In both cases, they are too easily capable of inflicting pain and injury. Having nearly killed myself (and someone else) on a motorbike when I was 17, I would be reluctant to ride one again. I can, without any effort at all, recall in vivid detail the screaming of metal on Tarmac as my machine tipped over, sparks flying, and the first sight of my very badly broken ankle after I had hopped to the roadside. I can also remember that, after a dreamlike interlude when I was unaware of how badly I was hurt, it was very painful but (fortunately) have no actual memory of the pain itself, which was just short of the level needed to pass out. I hope this helps to explain why I am also not anxious to keep a firearm.

I don't even like being near motorbikes any more. I am more aware than most people of what severe physical injury looks and feels like. And I suspect I should be just as cautious with a loaded gun of any kind. Handling unloaded ones, as I did for some posed pictures in Moscow, Idaho last October, is of course another matter.

The only firearms I ever possessed were a couple of childhood airguns, once common but now - I suspect - more or less banned. The righteous frenzy against toy guns (including those which are unmistakably and obviously toys) is now so great that toyshops often don't stock them any more. All I desire is my lawful freedom, as guaranteed by the 1689 Bill of Rights and lawlessly whittled away by the civil service and dim politicians, to own a gun if I choose to do so. I suppose it's possible that, as our anarchy deepens, I might reluctantly want to take advantage of this. But that's the point. The choice should be mine, not that of some boot-faced politically-correct police officer anxious to maintain his monopoly of force - and anxious to ensure that his idea of the law should be the only one available.

As I argue in my book 'A Brief History of Crime', it's the great gulf between police and public over how the law should be enforced that lies behind two important features of modern Britain. The frequent arrests of people for defending themselves or their property are not accidents or quirks. They are the consequence of the Criminal Justice system's abandonment of old-fashioned ideas of punishment; also of that system's social democratic belief that crime has 'social' causes and the ownership of property isn't absolute. Most law-abiding people don't really accept this. They think criminals do bad things because they lack conscience or restraint, not because they were abused as children or their dole payments are too small. And they don't see why they have to barricade their houses or hide their worldly goods from view on the assumption that some unrestrained low-life is otherwise bound to steal them. So they regard it as legitimate to hurt and punish those who rob them or otherwise attack them. If they were allowed to enforce the law as they see it, they would quickly show the police and courts up as useless and mistaken. One of the most important jobs of the police is to stop us looking after ourselves, in case we do a better job than PC Plod.

Guns simply take this to a higher level. Since we foolishly abolished the formal death penalty, imposed after a careful trial, we have transferred the power of capital punishment to an increasingly armed police force (though no legislation has ever actually been passed to arm them, and the pretence is still maintained that they are unarmed). That police force is now the arm of the liberal state - rather than enforcers of conservative law (which is why it is nowadays called a 'service') - and so has a much wider licence to use (liberal) violence than ordinary conservative citizens. Contrast the police force's zealous efforts to stamp out private gun ownership with its own rather poor efforts at responsible gun use, as a result of which quite a few people (one stark naked in a well-lit room) have been shot by mistake or as a result of over-reaction by armed officers. As it happens, I find these mistakes and over-reactions quite easy to pardon. Which of us, in such situations, could be sure he would do the right thing? I've never joined in the frenzy of criticism over the de Menezes case, for instance. It is terribly easy to see how such an error could have been made under the circumstances. But if we didn't have an armed police force, and left executions to the hangman, then these things would be a lot less likely.

But what concerns me is that members of the public in the same situation are judged so much more harshly if they make such mistakes. And, perhaps more important, how police shootings are widely accepted, though they are summary, often erroneous and inadequately investigated. Whereas a society which finds this summary execution acceptable gets into a pseudo-moral lather about the idea of lawful execution after due process, jury trial, the possibility of appeal and reprieve.

This brings me back to the USA. Americans are not so infantilised as we are. For many reasons, mainly the fact that it is still possible to live genuinely rural lives in large parts of the country, Americans are less likely to rely on others to protect them or their homes from danger.

This used to be true of us too (again I must urge those who are interested to read the relevant chapter in 'Brief History'). It's evident from a lot of English fiction, written not for propaganda but by people who simply recorded life as they understood it, that until quite recently we had a more American view of things. In fact until 1920 English Gun Law made Texas look effeminate. Read, as nobody now does, Captain Marryat's 'Children of the New Forest' set in the days of Cromwell, and observe the wholly different attitudes towards self-defence against crime that are casually described there.

Read, as fewer and fewer people now do, alas, the 'Sherlock Holmes' stories, and see how often Holmes and Dr Watson venture out carrying firearms. This was perfectly legal, and unsurprising, in the late Victorian and Edwardian era in which the stories are set. And pre-1914 attempts to control guns were resisted by MPs much as the US Congress resists them now.

My suspicion is that the guts were knocked out of us British by the First World War, in which the best people of all classes died by their thousands in the great volunteer armies which marched off to Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme. Those who survived lacked something of the spirit that a free country needs, and we never fully recovered, just as Russia has yet to recover from the fourfold blow of the First World War, Civil War, Great Purge and Second World War, each of which destroyed the best and brightest of their generations. The USA - a society, for the most part, of volunteers and pioneers, has never had a comparable experience. Let us hope it never does.

May I endorse the kind things said about Canada by some correspondents? British people are often given to making lofty and scornful remarks about various countries which they decry as 'boring' - Canada, Belgium and Switzerland usually being the chief victims. Canada is anything but boring. On the contrary it is a fascinating and intensely civilised society, made all the more so by the survival of a French-speaking province (and I admit to having been too diffident about the monarchism of the Quebecois, who were sensibly allowed by Protestant Hanoverian Britain to maintain their Roman Catholic faith without restriction - though I was sorry, on my last visit to Quebec City, to find the handsome Anglican Cathedral there closed and locked. Still, I was pleased to see that - like the Anglican church in Sark - it offered services in French as well as English. How I wish the 1662 Prayer Book could be translated, and I mean properly translated, with all the poetry, into every major language of the world).

Belgophobes also need to travel a bit more. Among the many delights of that country are a comprehensive railway system that puts ours to shame, several treasure houses of some of the best paintings in the world and a rather better record in resisting German invasion than they are generally given credit for. As for Switzerland, the determination of its people to remain free is very far from boring, and continues to this day.

One contributor asks why I don't go to live in the USA, since I like it so much. Why should I? This is my country, where my ancestors are buried and where I hope and intend to be buried myself, where I grew up, whose landscape, climate, music, poetry and architecture are in my bones, whose battle-honours are my battle-honours and whose history is my history. Nowhere else is like it. It is precisely because I know and like so many other countries that I know and love my own best of all. Given the way things are going, I don't completely rule out the possibility of becoming an exile, but that will not be because I want to be. It never is.

Oh, and by the way, those who object to being called 'dimwitted' by me have a simple remedy. Don't say dimwitted things, and especially spare me any repetitions of the 'what about alcohol and tobacco, then, eh?' attempted defence of cannabis. If I urged the unrestricted sale of alcohol and tobacco, they might just have a small point. Since I support legal restrictions on both (both for reasons repeatedly given on this site - I do not believe that legally banning their possession would work, whereas it would with cannabis), they have no point at all. This argument annoys me especially because it is so dishonest, given that those who use it have no actual interest in curbing the use of any poison, merely in preventing serious action against the poison they favour. It also annoys me because its proponents did not even think of it themselves, but bought it retail, ready made in easy-to-swallow capsules.

I suspect (because it is so common) that this non-argument is being widely taught it in school in 'PSHE' indoctrination sessions, and that those who advance it have never thought about it all, because it suited their own interests to swallow it whole. I think it is good for such people to realise that others regard them as dimwitted - for parroting weak and wicked arguments foisted on them by irresponsible teachers. They and these teachers ought to be forced to do weekend shifts in the cannabis wards in our mental hospitals. Meanwhile, the jibe that they are 'dimwitted', a mild one under the circumstances, might make them think about the subject, perhaps for the first time in their sheltered lives.

On returning from America

I have spent the past two weeks in the United States, not working but travelling on my own account, revisiting some favourite places and coming up for air. It remains an exhilarating and beautiful place, wrongly sneered at by too many British people who simply haven't experienced enough of it to know how good it can be, and how much worse off we would be if it weren't there. But it is also a foreign country, not some kind of special friend - but a foreign country to which we have unique access because we speak a similar language. Only fluent French or German speakers could ever know as much about those countries as any British visitor can swiftly learn about the USA - if he wants to.

Rather than re-immerse myself in the small-scale squalor of British politics, which seems even less appealing or interesting than it was when I set out, I thought I would muse a little on what an English person experiences in the great republic, and what it means (or might mean) for us.

It is now many years since I lived in Bethesda, Maryland, an idyllic suburban settlement just North-West of Washington DC. I still remember with a faint smile English acquaintances and colleagues gulping in dismay when I said I was going to live 'in Washington' (the distinction between DC and Maryland was a mystery to them, so I didn't trouble them with it) . Several - having read sketchy reports about Washington being the USA's murder capital, as it then indeed was - thought I would swiftly be murdered, mugged or just gunned down by some firearm-crazy person. Others imagined a howling wasteland of vast distances, given this idea by the fact that my house number had four digits instead of the two or three more usually found in Britain.

As it happens, my road (many miles from the national capital's drug-infested crime zones) was shorter than most English suburban equivalents, overhung with huge trees and wonderfully intimate and neighbourly. The American system of house numbering is a sort of postcode, and only the final two digits tell you anything about the length of the street.  Children ran in and out of everyone's houses. Parents patrolled the street in the evening to slow down or stop the (rare) cars that drove through. We hung a Union Flag on the pole which was fitted as standard over our front door (my landlord had said I could fly anything there except the Confederate Stars and Bars, which I didn't want to display anyway), to the often-expressed pleasure of everyone else on the road. One of my neighbours took my education in hand and insisted I went with him to a football game ( Baseball was on strike most of the time I was there, or he'd have taken me to that too). Doors and cars were left unlocked, Democrats and Republicans mixed happily, I never saw or heard a gun there or within miles. Our local ambulance service (which was well-equipped and excellent) was run by volunteers, financed by contributions from thousands of us, and by a spectacular annual lobster feast - and free of charge to those who needed it. A dozen preconceptions died within minutes.

The only sad truth was that Montgomery County, the lush district where we lived, was almost entirely white, whereas Prince George's County, a few miles to the East and more or less as peaceful and prosperous, was almost wholly black, reflecting a more or less voluntary racial division that nobody likes to talk about but which persists despite fifty years of civil rights.

There are dozens of other things that don't quite fit the English prejudice. Where I lived, and in many other US cities, public transport was if anything better than in Britain, especially the clean, safe, spacious and well-designed Washington Metro. Manners were almost always better than they were here. There is intelligent broadcasting, not on the BBC but on doggedly liberal radio stations financed by subscription and contributions ( we helped raise money for our local station, despite its politics, because of the way it upheld standards of language and debate, which is roughly what I do for the BBC, though a bit more voluntary). There was also free medical provision for the truly poor, while private medicine as then and is now in a crisis not wholly unlike that which grips the NHS, with the insurance companies pressing hospitals and doctors to keep costs down.

Other paradoxes in this supposedly 'right-wing' country were the pervasive political correctness in broadcasting journalism and education, the gigantic welfare state created mainly by Lyndon Johnson, and the laborious efforts to make Spanish an official language, far more costly than it would have been to insist that everyone spoke English.

But what I found most fascinating was the feeling that, despite all this, you really were much more on your own, for better or worse. Oddly enough this would come home to me when I took trips across the Canadian border, the only frontier in the world which exists to separate two different ideas about how to be free. I was both reassured and somehow constrained by the sight of St Edward's Crown on Canadian police badges (and also by the evocative little signs by Ontario main roads, with the same crown and the legend 'The King's Highway', a haunting phrase which is now of course being removed on the pretext that it might upset bilingual fanatics, though why they can't just have every other sign saying 'Le Chemin du Roi', or 'Chemin Royal' I do not know. Plenty of French Canadians seem to me to be closet royalists, far from keen on the 1789 revolution).

Up there, I thought, I was a little safer from the consequences of my own (or other people's folly) and a little less free to fail or succeed on my own. The idea that authority proceeds from the Crown, and the Crown's authority ultimately flows from a benevolent God) still persists in Canada. I suspect this is at the root of the idea that the state has duties towards its citizens, which produces things unknown in the USA, such as a comprehensive national health system and a state broadcasting network. Which do I like more? The more I think about it, the more I can't make up my mind.

In the USA, authority is supposed to be vested in the free people, and if you want to have a relationship with God then you must have it directly. This also has something to do with the issue of guns. Though I believe Canadian gun law is much less restrictive than Britain's, it isn't as relaxed as the USA's. I've written at length about gun laws in my 2003 book 'A Brief History of Crime'. I argued that it's clearly demonstrable that restricting the ownership of guns by law-abiding people doesn't actually make anyone any safer, and in some cases may actually put them at risk of becoming victims. If that is so, then the desire of the state to restrict gun ownership (which disarms everyone except criminals) needs another explanation. This was of course misrepresented by my opponents, and will be again now. But the survival of personal gun ownership in the USA seems to me to be a sign that it is a more grown-up society, both permitting and requiring more responsibility from individuals than we do. The only gun owner I knew personally when I lived in Washington was a (female) prosecutor who was allowed to carry a gun in her handbag in Virginia, a remarkably peaceful state, but had to leave it behind when she went into the risky parts of Washington DC (which certainly do exist), where guns are denied to the law-abiding but owned by thousands of drug gangsters (who exist, by the way, not because drugs are illegal but because people stupidly take and buy illegal drugs). Her husband, a magazine editor, kept a squirrel gun by his desk as he worked in his suburban home, surrounded by dense woodland. This could be disconcerting for visitors as he would sometimes seize the firearm in mid-conversation, and blast at a nearby rodent through the open window. He never seemed to hit anything at all.

Here's another example of how America treats its people as being more responsible for their actions and lives than we do, and what that can mean in practice. On a visit to Alabama to write about the reintroduction of chain gangs I asked one shackled convict, clearing weeds from beside a motorway, what he was in prison for. The answer - writing cheques without the cash to back them. Now, if that got you put on a chain gang in Britain, we wouldn't have enough chains to go round.

The USA still more or less believes in punishment for people who commit crimes, and those who break the law can find themselves flung into a grim world of the lost, quite terrifying and implacable. I shudder for any innocent person who drops through that trap door, though it seems to me that Britain's penal system is fast becoming as savage, but without being punitive towards the criminals themselves. If the USA ever abandons its Bill of Rights and becomes the authoritarian state which Dick Cheney and his accomplice George W.Bush seemed intent on creating, then it could rapidly become a very frightening place. I'm never sure how deeply rooted the old English principles of presumed innocence and Habeas Corpus actually are in the USA, and there are incidents - Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus, Woodrow Wilson's imprisonment of objectors to World War One, the 1920s Palmer raids, Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans - which suggest that lawful liberty is quite fragile there in difficult times (not that we have much to boast about these days).

There's another thing I always love about being in the USA - that unmistakable symptom of a society of genuinely free men, the continuing use of miles, yards, feet and inches, ounces, pounds and pints, not to mention quarts and gallons. And the temperatures still in flexible Fahrenheit, where the difference between being dead and alive (or between a warm spring day and a cold one) is a lot more than two degrees.

Arriving back in the vast liberal prison reception area that is Heathrow, with its officious 'UK Border' (which it isn't, as it is controlled by the EU) and its metres and litres, makes the heart sink. And yet I remember long ago how I used to experience a comforting feeling of homecoming when I stepped off the Channel steamer at Newhaven or Folkestone, and was embraced by the quiet, green, unconquered smallness and individuality of England.

They rave about the peril of sunbeds... then let us fry our brains on cannabis

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The great puzzle of our time is why some pleasures are official sins, while others are smirkingly condoned by authority.

Understand why and you will know what is wrong with our degenerate ruling class.

In theory, the idea is that we all have a stern national duty to take lots of care of ourselves so that we do not become a burden on the holy, wonderful NHS. We guard ourselves from self-inflicted illness or injury for the sake of others.

Since my childhood I have been ceaselessly lectured about how to stay safe and healthy, with varying degrees of success.

The simple slogans of the TV campaigns still echo in my memory, and no doubt in millions of others. ‘Don’t ask a man to drink and drive’, ‘One for the road? None for the road!’, ‘Clunk Click every trip’.

Propaganda isn’t enough on its own. Law and fear are needed too.

Listen to an Englishman whinge when his driving licence is taken away, and you will see that there is still such a thing as punishment in our society, and it works.

I can remember the measurable change in the national atmosphere when the police began serious breathalysing.

Similar determination made us all wear seat belts. If only they’d do the same about the arrogant, murderous cretins who use mobile phones while driving.

The authorities also quite clearly know that advertising and the behaviour of actors and presenters on TV and in films affect behaviour.

That is why they have banned tobacco commercials and why it now seems astonishing that Joan Bakewell used to smoke while presenting the BBC’s Late Night Line-Up in the Sixties.

Nobody ever said during any of these campaigns that it was all right to drive a bit above the alcohol limit, or that just a few cigarettes a day were safer than none, or that you could leave your seat-belt off for short trips.

The reason was simple. If you soften your message, you spread doubt about whether you really mean it.

I’ll stay out of the savagely comical area of ‘sex education’ here because it’s just too big.

But look at the revelations that a Government-funded agency, supposed to discourage the use of illegal drugs, has been doing the exact opposite.

Callers have been told, apparently by giggling lunatics on ‘helplines’, that various forms of lawless brain-frying are really all right.

No surprise to me. Some years ago I emailed this outfit, which claimed to answer any questions about drugs, with the query: ‘Is it wrong to take illegal drugs?’.

I received an answer of bottomless uselessness, when ‘yes’ was all they needed to say.

Then there’s the endless shifting of ‘classifications’ of drugs.

Anyone who knows anything about the subject realises that cannabis is among the most dangerous drugs in existence, laying waste to young minds and rotting any society where it takes hold.

But the establishment, notably including Mr David Cameron and various joke policemen, make it almost impossible to get this message across by falling for the well funded and brilliantly directed global campaign to ‘decriminalise’ this poison.

Many of them would like to make it legal and are prevented only by the international treaties which forbid them to do so.

Instead they sap, weaken and confuse the law until it is a dead letter. Some even lie that cannabis has medical benefits.

Why are they so feeble in stamping out a major and rapidly growing mental health threat when they fret about the amount of salt in hamburgers, try to frighten us into drinking disgusting skimmed milk, rave about the danger of sun-tan parlours and would rather shut down all the pubs in Britain and Ireland than let even one of them allow people to smoke inside it?

Simple. Their generation has been, in the direct sense of the word, corrupted by the drug culture, one which believes profoundly that pleasure is the highest law and that reward should be available without effort.

This trumps any concern for health or safety. No civilisation can last long based on such sick principles.

We have to choose, and soon, between the self-serving, twisted lies of the soft-on-drugs lobby and the truth - which is that if you don’t ban cannabis with stern laws, you will get epidemic mental illness hand in hand with irreversible moral decay. You know it makes sense.

Zuma gets his machine guns but Mandela forfeits his halo

The sad picture of poor Nelson Mandela giving his endorsement to the unlovely new South African President Jacob Zuma ought to (but won’t) force Mr Mandela’s simpering and uncritical admirers to reconsider.

Zuma, whose signature tune is Bring Me My Machine Gun and who is surrounded by a fog of unresolved allegations of corruption, is ultimately the product of the African National Congress, for which Mr Mandela provided such good public relations for so long.

Zuma would not be possible without Mandela. Mr Zuma has his machine gun, in fact he now has thousands of them. Please take away Mr Mandela’s halo.

A closet Marxist, but I liked Jack

Actually I rather liked the late trades union leader Jack Jones, who was friendly and helpful to me when I was an apprentice labour reporter long ago, and who performed acts of personal kindness to people known to me.

He was a big man in all senses - the old stern, incorruptible type of revolutionary, who lived a genuinely austere life and had demonstrated great physical courage in the Spanish Civil War.

But in the years to come I hope people will come to realise that he and many like him, who were hugely powerful in the Labour Party and in government in the Seventies, were far closer to Marxism and the Kremlin than the public ever imagined.

This country never had a proper Communist Party, unlike France, Italy and Germany. Instead, there was a potent and influential faction in Labour - and it is still there.

* I am glad speed limits on major roads are to be cut. Many existing limits are absurdly high.

I just wish police would stop relying on speed cameras (though these make it easier for the law-abiding, who are no longer hooted and menaced for keeping within the rules) and go back to patrolling the roads and looking for bad drivers.

Our driving test is now so easy that a well-drilled wombat could pass it, many drivers are high on drugs, and the standard driving style, learned from car chase movies, seems to be violent acceleration followed by violent braking, punctuated by swearing and rude gestures.

* There is no point at all moaning about tax rises or the huge new deficit unless you are ready to reconsider the whole basis of modern British politics - that government is a machine for giving handouts to the people, and employing its friends.

Unless and until the enormous welfare state is reduced to what is really necessary, and the giant state payroll is brought under control, we live on the edge of national bankruptcy.

We CAN turn back the clock and make our schools places of excellence. Here's how ...

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

All the solutions to all our problems are obvious but shocking. They have also been ruled out in advance by the miserable pygmies and parasites who have taken over both sides of Parliament.

The breakdown of order in our State schools is a grave example of this political trap, in which everyone knows there is something wrong and nobody dares do anything effective about it.

This is now a severe national crisis. Like the desperate state of our exam system, it is also a State secret, buried under a monstrous heap of official lies and twisted statistics.

A teacher who exposed it by filming undercover was not thanked, or invited to share her evidence with the authorities. She was disciplined more severely than another teacher convicted of smoking crack cocaine. I know of others who fear to speak out because they do not wish to damage their careers.

The teachers’ unions know perfectly well what is happening, though they are really interested only in getting more money for their members and gaining more recruits – since they are nowadays all in the hands of the Sixties Left.

But because they need to let off steam at their annual conferences, we get a yearly outbreak of stories about how schools are hiring bouncers to keep order – or even that teachers are going to work in body-armour.

Of course there is some exaggeration for effect here. But nobody seriously doubts that many classrooms are now so chaotic that even the most determined pupil and the most dedicated teacher must fight to get any work done at all.

What is worse, many excellent teachers are more than weary of having to be policemen first, social workers second and teachers third. Some schools now actually have real police officers on the premises.
This is all completely ridiculous and unnecessary. It could be reversed in a matter of months and put right in a few years.

Only a few things need to be done. Teachers need to be given back the power to use corporal punishment. We should leave the European Convention on Human Rights and other treaties which prevent the operation of commonsense British laws.

The school-leaving age should be reduced to 15. Secondary schools should be divided between the vocational and the academic, with selection on merit. The law permitting ‘no-win, no-fee’ lawsuits should be repealed. So should the Children Act 1989 and the other social workers’ charters which have robbed sensible adults of authority for two decades.

Then we should embark on a Restoration Of The Married Family Act, which would end the many-headed attack on stable married families and restore the lost position of fathers in the home, one of the major causes of bad behaviour by boys.

Divorce should be difficult. Every social institution, every law, tax-break and benefit, should discriminate clearly and unapologetically in favour of those parents committed to each other by the marriage bond.
None of these things is actually outrageous, though if a frontbench spokesman for any party dared embrace them, he would be met with cries of rage and fake expressions of shock and be quickly driven from his post.

There are plenty of people still living who can testify that when such rules operated, millions of British people lived free and happy lives, learned useful things in orderly schools, did not need to be under police surveillance, pass through metal detectors on their way to classes or be watched by CCTV cameras.
Yes, there were disadvantages and difficulties. Who denies it? Perfection isn’t possible. But they were nothing compared with the horrible mess we have made with our good intentions.

Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that a headmaster would be knifed to death at the gates of his school, thousands of children would be forced to take powerful drugs to make them behave and the only ‘powers’ available to besieged teachers would be either to keep their charges in for a few hours or force them to go away for a few weeks?

And who would have believed that people would say this was freedom and progress and that Conservative politicians would declare they were happy with this country as it is?

The supposed freedom is a new slavery, enforced by social workers, lawyers, the BBC and PC police. The alleged progress is an accelerating slide back into the Dark Ages.

Nobody's free of the poison that pullutes politics

Can anyone tell me what was important about the great email crisis of last week?

Today’s political parties are so similar that, like rival supermarket chains, they can only compete with stunts, better advertising – or price cuts. Wherever you go, the same mass-produced goods are thrust at you, and choice is just a flashy illusion.

Does anyone really think that the Tory Party is incapable of smearing its opponents?

David Cameron is leader of that party thanks to a contest in which the media played a decisive part and his opponent David Davis got a startlingly raw deal from newspapers and TV.

Was this an accident? Did nobody drip poison into anyone’s ear? Ha ha.

Is it morally superiorto do this sort of thing without being found out? Or does it just mean that you are even trickier than those caught in the act?

Can it really be that the next Election will be decided on the basis of such stuff?

Increasingly, I believe that we get the politicians we deserve, because we cannot be bothered to care about what really matters for more than two minutes at a stretch.

Jack goes mad but justice is unhinged

A person called Jack Tweed has been sent to prison for a few weeks for a near-insane attack on a wholly innocent taxi driver.

Plainly he should instead be doing several years on a chain gang. He could easily have caused the deaths of several other innocent people.

There are many points about this case which suggest that our entire society has come off its hinges.
The first is that, under rules pioneered by the Tories in 1991, Tweed’s comically brief sentence is automatically halved, so it is even briefer and even more ridiculous than it first appears. Why do newspapers, radio and TV continue to report this serial fraud with a straight face?

A greengrocer who did this with his scales would be found guilty of a criminal offence.

The next is the fuss that his penalty was reduced because his girlfriend, later his wife, fell ill and died. So? Surely her condition meant he had even more reason for being considerate and kind.

But even without this nonsense, he would only have served another three weeks, though the Government and the media would have pretended it was six.

* If we didn’t have the United Nations or the EU Navy and we did still have the British Empire and the Royal Navy, do you think there would be any pirates operating from Somalia today?

The week that proved we have forgotten every lesson of Easter

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Two children are savagely mauled in a place where they ought to be safe, a man is dead after being unjustifiably roughed up by a masked robocop – just a typical week in modern Britain.

I could add plenty of medium-sized similar horrors from my local paper. No doubt you could come up with similar tragedies from your own home towns. Moronic, life-ruining violence is now so common that it attracts little national attention. Our police are no longer wonderful, because they are very like the people they serve.

And yet another Good Friday is ignored by a nation that mostly does not even know what Easter is about, except an opportunity for shopping and the start of a holiday.

I have no doubt that these things are connected. Easter is almost entirely about human evil. The story we no longer teach our children is full of fierce drama, in which the human race shows itself at its worst. It could easily take place in our own time. Some say it does so, all the time.

There is a fickle mob, cheering its hero on Thursday, demanding the cruel death of the same person on Friday. There is paid treachery. There is cowardice – friends who pledge lifetime loyalty and break their promise before the next dawn.

There is a smooth politician who knowingly does the wrong thing to please the crowd and save his career.

An innocent man is falsely convicted and rendered into the hands of spiteful torturers. You can easily tell the story is true. We have seen all of these things in our own lifetimes.

And it all ends in utter despair, the hero dying in hopeless agony, not rescued at the last minute, the despicable crowd mocking him to the end.

And if that is the end of the story, then what else should we expect but the ceaseless repetition of the same themes in our own lives – lies, betrayal, mistrust, violence, injustice, impunity, cynical power-worship, government by crude force? That is what we are like.

It is only if it does not end there, and if we believe that it does not end there, that we can construct a society where we can hope for something better.

It seems to me that when Easter was still a great festival, and Good Friday a sombre, silent day of reflection, we were kinder to others, less kind to ourselves, and – in a good way – afraid of a higher justice than can be provided by the Crown Prosecution Service. Is there any good reason why we cannot restore what has been lost?

Eliot Ness couldn't stop booze, but he would win today's war on drugs

Another parcel of garbage from the pro-drug lobby has been given the soft treatment by the pro-drug BBC.
Radio 4’s Today programme first gave a suspiciously sympathetic introduction to a ‘report’ from an organisation called Transform, which rails against what it claims is the ‘punitive, prohibitionist’ approach of the State to illegal drugs.

Then presenter Evan Davis, who seems strangely unable to give a hard time to any liberal cause, allowed a spokesman for this outfit a free run in an ‘interview’ so feeble they ought to have been charged advertising rates for it.

If only our policies were actually punitive. But drug use and possession are almost entirely unpunished, which is why they carry on growing.

As for ‘prohibition’, the drug lobby uses this expression to mislead the gullible into comparing the winnable struggle against narcotics with the doomed war against booze fought by the ‘Untouchables’ and others in Twenties Chicago.

Alcohol had been legal for centuries, part of the culture of Christian civilisation. You might as well try to make breathing illegal. But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.

Actually, US Prohibition recognised that the cause was lost before it began. Congress never made it illegal to drink or keep alcohol, only to sell, transport or make it. Our most important drug laws are utterly unlike Prohibition because they rightly ban possession.

And if our cowardly courts and bureaucratic police would only enforce the existing law, we would see a swift decline in the use of illegal drugs.

They don’t, because our establishment – including the BBC – was itself introduced to drugs in the Sixties and still cannot see why they are wrong.

RSPB should stick to birds

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds sounds like an organisation for protecting birds, doesn’t it? But it turns out also to be a campaign for more wind farms. These ludicrous, ugly things are not especially good for birds.
And even if you believe the daft, unscientific propaganda about man-made global warming, they make precious little electricity. Only the Green Taliban fanatics favour them.

It’s just one of many supposed charities that have joined the mass army of political correctness in one form or another and – often using taxpayer subsidies – campaign for the Government to be even more Left-wing and daft than it already is.

Check up on your favourite charity. In many cases, you will find that it no longer does what it claims to do, and is instead a part of the Busybody State.

Also, you may discover that it takes fat grants from Government departments and the EU. If so, I advise you to switch your gifts to one of the many small, effective charities that really do good, and don’t waste your money on propaganda.

*  It's time for the Church of England to hold a thanksgiving service for the departure of the ludicrous Blair creature from its pews. The poor Pope must now put up with Princess Tony’s excursions into theology, and try to bite back the natural response to being told what to do by this gore-bespattered fake statesman.

Mr Blair wants the Vatican to adopt New Labour’s line on homosexuality. Couldn’t he have raised this before he joined? And they may not be especially impressed with his record on big subjects.
The Holy Father should recall that our worst Prime Minister ever likewise lectured Pope John Paul II, telling him he was wrong to oppose the Iraq War.

The trouble is that Mr Blair is one of the two dozen or so people who still think that war was justified. Presumably when the penny finally drops, he’ll be along to the nearest mosque, with Shia and Sunni vying not to have him.

*  The unlovely Bob Quick ought to have resigned after his indefensible arrest of the Tory MP Damian Green. The police are not supposed to get involved in politics and should be smacked down very hard when they do, or we are well on the way to a police state. So what was Mr Quick doing in Downing Street  with plans for ‘anti-terror’ arrests?

I am amazed that everyone concentrates on the exposed documents rather than on this curious fact.
Operational matters of this kind should have nothing at all to do with Ministers, and in a proper free country they wouldn’t.

The police enforce the law, not Government policy. This incident increases my suspicion that these ‘anti-terror’ operations are in fact political propaganda, aimed at increasing police power rather than making us safer.

Travels without my aunt (or my blog)

I shall be travelling for some weeks, and will post only my Mail on Sunday columns during that time. I may occasionally swoop down from remote parts to comment on the debate, but not as much as usual.

Conservative liberty and left wing liberty

Some years ago I harangued a meeting on the threat to liberty, and found myself sharing a platform with John Wadham, then the director of Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties). I teased him by saying that he was only interested in left-wing freedoms and rubbish about human rights. He said that in that case I should join his organisation and try to steer it in the directions I preferred.

I did join, and I still remain a member, but have little time to attend meetings, especially on Saturdays when normal people are free but Sunday newspaper journalists are at work, so I have made little impact. No impact, in fact. No thanks to me, Liberty is now much more friendly to politically conservative people, recognising that some (but not all) of us are allies in the battle against the security and surveillance state. That is because our current left-wing government has set itself up as the greatest enemy of English liberty in modern times, under the pretext of the 'War on Terror.'

What is the difference between conservative liberty and left-wing liberty? Does it matter? (Yes) Can they be reconciled? (Not for long.) I'm grateful to Lord Hoffmann for an interesting and clever speech last week, which made this much clearer than before. Leonard Hoffmann is no fool. He knows his stuff. A lot of the speech, which you can find on the web by Googling "Universality of Human Rights" and "Hoffmann" is perceptive and clever. I am specially grateful to him for quoting Jeremy Bentham's enjoyable savaging of the ghastly French 'Declaration of the Rights of Man', the founding scripture of several gory tyrannies.

This vicious document, a series of foggy statements of the obvious, qualified with sub-clauses making them useless when most needed, actually contained one rather clear section (article 27) which would eventually allow its own authors to have their heads sliced off by the Guillotine they had themselves set up. Should we be sorry about Robespierre and the rest of them being devoured by their own revolution? In my case, not very - though nobody ever seems to learn from these events, and the Russian Bolsheviks ended up in the same fix, devoured by their own revolution.

Otherwise the French declaration was more or less like all the other scrolls of atheistical, grandiose blethers about 'rights' which have been endorsed, acclaimed and adopted all over the world since then, culminating in the United Nations Universal Declaration and the European Convention - and now rivalled by the EU's own Charter of 'fundamental' rights, soon to be used to interfere still more in our lives. Some might also draw attention to the Soviet constitution of 1936, acclaimed by many Western leftists as the finest ever drawn up, just in time for the mass purges and the Moscow Show trials.

The problem with these declarations, with their 'rights' to private life and their 'rights' to a fair trial and their 'rights' to everything else is that it all depends what you mean by private, and fair, and so forth. And what if these 'rights' come into conflict with each other? Who decides which is supreme? Here I quote Lord Hoffmann: "Bentham’s third criticism was that even if the Declaration had been legally enforceable, the various rights were stated in terms so abstract as to be meaningless. The practical application of the rights needed trade-offs between individual rights and the general public interest, sometimes between one individual right and another. The Declaration gave no guidance on these points, established no hierarchy of rights, contained no concessions to the realities of government, law and order. Such decisions involve the application of practical and political judgment.

Observe, said Bentham, how nice, and incapable of being described beforehand by any particular marks, are the lines which mark the limits of right and wrong in this behalf - which separate the useful from the pernicious, the prudent course from the imprudent - how dependent upon the temper of the times, upon the events and circumstances of the day.

"Bentham praised the traditional reluctance of the English Parliament to enact abstract propositions. Everyone in Europe agreed that in England was a free country; that there was, for example, freedom of speech although there was no law which expressly said so. To say that we enjoyed freedom of speech was a descriptive generalisation of particular English laws which limited the circumstances in which publications were actionable or the government could suppress them. It was these specific laws which gave people their rights.

It is in England, rather than in France, said Bentham, that the discovery of the rights of man ought naturally to have taken its rise: it is we - we English, that have the better right to it...Our right to this precious discovery, such as it is, of the rights of man, must, I repeat it, have been prior to that of the French. It has been seen how peculiarly rich we are in materials for making it. Right, the substantive right, is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights.

Well, I agree completely with that. But Lord Hoffmann doesn't. He thinks these gas-filled documents are valuable because they "provide a standard for political criticism of institutions and officials". His only objection, as it emerges later, is to the abuse of such documents by foreign judges. He thinks the English courts, staffed by nice liberals like his good self, should have the exclusive right to rule on 'human rights'.

But why should such documents provide a standard? Who says that these ideas are right? How do we know what they mean anyway? Who decides what they mean when we disagree? This is why I described them as "atheistical." They are an attempt to replace the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as the main texts by which right and wrong should be judged. And they raise the point, so tirelessly made by Theists such as me, that unless you have a set of founding rules which are universally believed to be divinely ordained, and which cannot be tampered with by governments, you have no reliable basis for deciding between right and wrong.

Despite this flaw, "Human Rights" have in effect become a replacement for religion. Why is that? I think it is because their supporters see that the problem of deciding what they mean will give them power. The elite increases its power by keeping the right to interpret and enforce these vague laws. It becomes the replacement for God, which is what it has always wanted to be.

Just look at the bizarre constructions placed even on the relatively clear bits of the US Bill of Rights by the American Supreme Court, which manufactured an abortion right out of nothing, drove prayer out of the schools on spurious grounds and for a while abolished the death penalty on an equally feeble pretext, then decided the penalty was all right after all. It is really hard to see how the same document can be read to say that execution is right one year, and wrong the next. It's clear that the real power comes not from the document, but from the court - and of course from those who appoint it.

Then there are the weird rights for prisoners and others discovered nestling in the European Convention or its cousin, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The largely English drafters of these documents did not intend them to be used as they have been. They intended only to remind continentals (after 1945) of the basic rules of civilisation - which had so recently been abandoned or suppressed from Calais to Minsk (and also East of Minsk, but we stayed out of that because Stalin was our ally).

That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse language of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and its Scottish Equivalent the Claim of Right, and in the grand simplicity of the 1628 Petition of Right, concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.

Listen carefully to most left-wing liberty campaigners, including Lord Hoffmann, and you will see and hear no sign that they even know these documents exist. Indeed, you often hear them (and David Cameron too) calling for a 'British Bill of Rights' as if such a thing had not already been written. It has. Treasure it. I once held it in my hands, during the filming of a TV programme on liberty for Channel Four. It is still there. More people should read it. These are real guarantees, clear, enforceable and effective. And as long as we have cared and known about them, we have been able to benefit by them.

The problem today is that too many people know nothing of the real source of our freedom - and they are confused by the idea of 'Human Rights' into believing that a perfect society can be created by everyone endorsing a document. They're wrong. In the end, I suspect I can be only a temporary ally of 'Liberty' and of its new chief Shami Chakrabarti. But in the long run we'll have to disagree about what liberty is, and what it is for - in a civilised fashion.

The worst generation

I notice that (as I expected) some contributors are angered by my assertion that the baby-boom generation are the worst that ever walked the earth. They point out that other generations have been more violent, ignorant, intolerant etc etc. This may well be so, though the baby-boomers are responsible for a society in which violence is rapidly reaching the levels of the barbaric past, intolerance is officially encouraged and ignorance is epidemic. What I object to about my generation is not just that we are so greedy, incompetent, selfish, and short-sighted. It is that we are also so incredibly pleased with ourselves. It was the self-satisfaction and vanity which I sought to puncture.

May the Lord protect you in the checkout queue - the law certainly won’t

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I would like to dedicate this column to the memory of Kevin Tripp, struck down by a single merciless blow aimed at his head by a violent convicted criminal. He was not, in that infuriating, stupid cliche, ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

He was where he was entitled to be – standing in a supermarket queue.

Mr Tripp – who was the same age as I am – left his home happy and content one day, and suddenly found himself in an earthly hell. It could happen to you today. It began when a row broke out about queue-jumping.

A woman involved in this squabble called her ‘boyfriend’ on her mobile phone. The boyfriend, wearing a tag because he was on bail, stormed into the supermarket.

The woman pointed at the person she had been arguing with. The boyfriend wrongly thought she was pointing at Mr Tripp, strode over to him and hit him with demonic force. Mr Tripp, mortally wounded, endured for a little time in hospital, full of tubes, ‘bruised, yellow and so very, very, cold’, until he died.

As usual, bad enough. It is painful even to think about the killer, Tony Virasami, and his accomplice, Antonette Richardson. How do such people happen? I don’t know. What I do know is that every year there are more like them, and we are all in danger of meeting them.

I’d like to think that they were now both in chilly, austere places where they could reflect in shocked silence on their wrongdoing. I’d like to think that others of the same type were looking at the fate of Virasami and mending their ways.

But that would be silly of me. My generation – the worst ever to walk the earth – hasn’t the courage or the resolve to punish anyone. We think we’re too nice for that sort of thing. Our marshmallow consciences will not let us employ the gallows, or hard labour.

We are too weak to believe we have any right to punish anyone. Oh, dear, no. That would be ‘judgmental’. That might involve us in taking personal moral risks perhaps one hundredth as big as the risks our fathers took to keep us free.

Between the crime and the courtroom, the charge was watered down from murder to manslaughter (not that we punish murder very much any more). It was judged that the killer had only hit Mr Tripp hard enough to merit ‘four years’, meaning two years.

Richardson may well be free by the time you read this.

During the short time Virasami is inside, he will be among people like himself, addressed respectfully by powerless warders, allowed to watch TV and make phone calls, given a choice of food, not forced to work. He will have easy access to drugs. I might shrug at all this if it weren’t for the remarks of His Honour Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, author of (among other things) First Steps In The Law. He said as he handed out this Toytown penalty that it ‘reflected’ the ‘revulsion and concern’ felt by Mr Tripp’s ‘nearest and dearest’.

Does this booby really think his tariff bears any relation to the evil done? Does he think that a future Tony Virasami will hesitate before striking, pondering the mighty wrath that will fall upon him if he does? Does he think he has assuaged the burning grief of Mr Tripp’s family?

And if, as I will no doubt be told, he ‘had no choice’ because the Ministry of Injustice has set ‘guidelines’ on the matter, then shouldn’t ‘His Honour’ consider that the only honourable thing for him to do is to resign rather than take part in the shady fraud that is our criminal justice system.

Meanwhile, may God protect him, and those he loves, whenever he happens to be queueing down at the supermarket. Because the law certainly won’t.

How many Muslim women really want to be ‘firepersons’?

Ever wondered why there’s no campaign to have a quota of female dustcart workers, or dustpersons? Well, I have done the wondering on your behalf. And the reason is simple. The mad ultra-feminist movement is only interested in attacking high-prestige bastions of conservatism, to make a political point.

It’s not happy if a few exceptional women make it (as they do). The task itself has to be feminised. The last thing they care about is how well the job gets done.

These days, of course, the quotas must apply to Muslims too. Hence the fetching uniform pioneered by Lincolnshire for female Muslim firefighters, if there ever are any.
 The waste of time and money involved in this sort of thing is huge. Hundreds of buildings and fire engines have had to be expensively adapted. So is the damage done by the general lowering of the strength and height requirements. And it doesn’t work.

Ten years ago, Jack Straw, as Home Secretary, said that by 2009 – now – 15 per cent of firefighters should be women. The actual figure is said to be 3.3 per cent. Why? Most women don’t want to be firepersons, any more than they want to be dustpersons. But the great effort to change human nature carries on at all costs.

Police deciding when we can laugh? Bring on the red mist

I tried to get the West Midlands police to explain why they scolded a Wolverhampton councillor for making a joke about transsexuals. I spoke to two perfectly intelligent, pleasant people there. But I don’t think they understand that they did anything wrong.

For me, brought up on tales of Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, the idea of a police officer telling me what I can or cannot say,

or what is or isn’t funny, is close to red mist territory. Although most police officers don’t yet realise this, the (Tory) 1986 Public Order Act does actually give them the legal power to act in this way.

But what really drives them is that all police officers nowadays are trained on the assumption that political correctness is right. Those who aren’t PC themselves (and many of the younger ones are) know that they can wreck their careers by offending against PC, or failing to support it noisily enough.

And it is this politicisation of the police which is so sinister, and which poses a deadly danger to freedom of speech.

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While I’m glad that teachers’ union leader Mary Bousted has condemned the awful crime of letting children have TVs in their bedrooms – a feeble abdication of parental responsibility – it really comes a bit late, now that this is virtually normal. Why do we fret so much about what children eat, and so little about what goes into their poor, vulnerable minds?

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Soviet Britain continues to grow around us. Now you’re going to need to have your identity checked before you can board the Isle of Wight ferry. I am often wrongly accused of nostalgia, but among the few things I do feel genuinely nostalgic about are the trips I used to take from Portsmouth to Ryde on the old yellow-funnelled BR paddle steamers. They’d mostly been at Dunkirk, and bore plaques proclaiming this. The country in which these things happened, in which our freedom was unquestioned and treasured, now seems impossibly remote.