An Interview with PH, on Donald Trump, the EU and Emigration
This interview resulted from a chance meeting on the London Underground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knd81qhbRiQ&feature=youtu.be&a
This interview resulted from a chance meeting on the London Underground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knd81qhbRiQ&feature=youtu.be&a
Follow Peter Hitchens on Twitter @ClarkeMicah
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This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
I think the man who murdered Jo Cox MP should be hanged. I think it a great pity that we no longer have this powerful deterrent against cruel violence.
So let no Leftist propagandist try to smear me as an apologist for her killer, whose dishonoured name I shan’t even repeat here in case he relishes his notoriety.
But I am repelled and disturbed by the attempt to pretend that this deranged, muttering creep was in any way encouraged or licensed to kill a defenceless, brave young mother, by the campaign to leave the European Union.
Of all the low, dishonest tricks used by Remainers in this continuing contest, this slimy innuendo is the worst. Of course cheap Left-wing propagandists always like to insinuate that anyone more conservative than John Major is a secret Nazi, longing to massacre people in death camps.
Two could play at that, and it wouldn’t work out well for the Leftist smear-merchants, if two did play at it.
A lot of very prominent people on the mainstream British Left, in politics and the media, have never properly apologised for their many years of sympathy with the Soviet cause. Even fewer have regretted their slurping admiration for the homicidal, torture-prone Castro regime in Cuba.
Sick Leftist monster-worship of this kind is, amazingly, quite respectable. Listen to them still talking about ‘Fidel’ today as if they were old mates.
Admiration for Nazi killers and torturers is, quite rightly, restricted to such people as the Moors murderer Ian Brady and Jo Cox’s attacker.
I do not know why Jo Cox’s killer did what he did. I am told that, despite his supposed ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder’ (he washed his hands until they bled), he was not prescribed any of the potent mind-altering pills that doctors like to dish out for these things. Likewise, there is no evidence that he took illegal drugs.
But the same is true of Brady. Some people just do step outside the normal limits of humanity. It cannot always be explained. But this was not a person with any serious political interest. Had he been, he would have known that the cruel murder of a young mother would help the very cause he wanted to damage.
But one Blairite commentator wrote last week: ‘Deep down they [opponents of the EU] feared that aspects of the language or direction of the Brexit campaign they legitimately supported had emboldened extremism. While they themselves were in no way permissive of the act, might they in some way have been permissive of the motive? Or even of the mood?’
The politest word for this is ‘cobblers’, but ‘tripe’ will do as well. More or less deranged people turn violent all the time, whatever the ‘mood’. Jo Cox’s attacker was not officially classed as mentally ill, but (and here I am absolutely not trying to excuse his act) I am not sure where the boundaries of mental illness run.
Officially mentally ill people (those actually classified as such by the NHS) attack – and often kill – dozens of innocents every year, alas.
Sometimes they give their acts grandeur by saying or yelling political things. But it doesn’t mean their motive is political. The Leytonstone knifeman shouted ‘This is for Syria!’ but not long before, he had told doctors (seriously) that Tony Blair was his guardian angel.
When I heard of Jo Cox’s death I simply felt grief at such a loss, as any normal person did. Only later did I realise that some people would take this opportunity to smear the ‘Leave’ campaign. And so they have.
What is much worse, the authorities entered into the same spirit. The killer was tried, absurdly, as a ‘terrorist’. Terrorists, like the IRA who actually did murder another MP, Ian Gow, are horribly rational. They saw Mr Gow as a fierce and influential opponent of the ‘peace process’, by which they would eventually defeat the British state and obtain its surrender.
They didn’t shout anything. They just put a bomb under his car and stole away, later collecting their reward – victory – from the Blair government. I don’t recall anyone, at the time, blaming Left-wingers who openly sympathised with Irish republicanism for creating a ‘mood’ in which this sort of thing was more likely.
Jo Cox, a shiningly good person, was foully murdered. Her killer has been justly tried and convicted but alas cannot be justly punished. Let her family mourn, and let her rest in peace. Do not turn her memory into cheap propaganda.
A fantasy full of REAL danger
I have been puzzled for years about the extraordinary appeal of the Harry Potter industry. The books aren’t that good, and the films aren’t either.
Can it possibly be because they confirm the soppy self-satisfied groupthink of the post-Blair generation?
In search of an answer, I went to see the new J. K. Rowling film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. I still have no idea what it was about. An angry pudding terrorises New York City, but it can’t be all bad because it occasionally kills ‘Right-wing’ politicians and puritanical religious leaders. These are portrayed as killjoys, witch-hunters and child-beaters, with terrible hair and clothes.
Meanwhile, the Magical Community is full of funky, Multiculti, understanding, liberal types, sparkling with equality and diversity. Eventually, they manage to understand the pudding, which only wants to be loved. But then they kill it.
Have I got this right? I am not sure, and do not care. But too much of this must certainly soften the brains of those exposed to it.
****
A major military power on the edge of Europe, which illegally occupies a neighbouring state’s territory, is sinking into tyranny.
Its increasingly megalomaniac leader has built himself a huge new palace and is systematically eliminating all opposition as he prepares to become an unchallengeable supreme ruler.
Journalists at the only remaining major opposition newspaper have been arrested on ridiculous charges. They are among thousands of others scooped up in an enormous purge, flung into prison or removed from their jobs.
No, it’s not Russia, the economic cripple with a navy even more decrepit than ours, which you’re constantly being told to fear.
It is Turkey, still an unchallenged member of the supposedly pro-freedom alliance Nato. Turkey, in actions very similar to the Russian seizure of Crimea, grabbed North Cyprus by force in 1974 and has been there ever since, still our welcome ally.
Turkey’s President Erdogan, a passionate Islamist who regards democracy as a means to an end, is at least as repressive as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and has certainly locked up many more journalists.
So, if all those media who attack Mr Putin the whole time are really so worried about Russian repression, why do they say so much less about the ruthless extinction of freedom in our Nato ally? Could it be their anti-Russian outrage is phoney?
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Personally I think this interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjLmw4bgq0
sounds better without vision. I should have noticed the curious up-the-nostrils angle of the camera, which generally means the person employing it wants to make you look stupid. I doubt if it was intentional in this case, but even so, it's no fun to watch for any length of time.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
This is what happens when you call in the cowboys to do an important job. It goes wrong and you can't afford to fix it. You thought you could trust the Tory Party. You thought you could ignore our rather good constitution and bypass it with a referendum. I did warn you.
In May 2013, I pointed out the dangers of a referendum, asking: 'Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?
'I've heard no such proposal, and can't see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.
'It's certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important for any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.' And so it was.
Now you find out you were wrong, who are you going to call? For years I explained that the only way out of the EU was to replace the Tories with a genuinely patriotic conservative party that could win an Election. The referendum proves that the votes were there.
In October 2011, I said: 'Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it… it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a General Election to be won by a party committed to secession.'
We would then have had an actual government determined to do what the people wanted, without any need to hurry to prove itself, and with a good idea of how it would use our new-found independence once we regained it. Instead we had a cynical campaign led by people who still cannot escape the suspicion that they never intended to win and were shocked and dismayed when they did.
And we have a pantomime horse – a policy being ineptly and half-heartedly implemented by people who don't support it. And we have a constitutional crisis, as I said we would on June 12 when I also correctly predicted that 'Leave' would win.
So I can't join in the bizarre and rather lawless squawking of rage at the High Court's ruling that Parliament must vote on Article 50. It is a perfectly reasonable judgment, based on my favourite bit of the Constitution, the 1689 Bill of Rights which guarantees our freedom far more surely than any human rights rubbish.
Actually this doesn't mean that Parliament will block our formal exit from the EU. Only a small coven of kamikaze MPs would dare to do that. The elite have other, cleverer plans.
But it does mean that Chairman May will now have the excuse she needs to fudge our exit. Parliament, and the Civil Service, will 'take back control' of the process. And what we will get will almost certainly be the Norway option – continued access to the Single Market and very little control over our borders.
We will move from being halfway into the EU to being halfway out of it. The referendum's simple requirement, that we leave the EU, will be fulfilled, beyond question.
But of course that wasn't all that millions of people voted for. If we want the rest of it, especially border control, we simply cannot rely on the existing parties or the establishment to get it.
A monster created by 007
This is why it matters when films and TV series make things up and tell lies for effect – like the ghastly King's Speech and the new Netflix series that claims to portray the private life of the Queen.
Reality nowadays copies what is on the screen. Poor Mexico City must now endure annual macabre, pagan Day Of The Dead parades, because the James Bond film Spectre showed such an event taking place there.
It didn't until now. But the Mexico City government thought it would bring in the tourists, so now they have to have it. I'd travel a long way to avoid this creepy, ugly event, but, as I know well, I'm out of touch.
Even weirder than the effect of movies and TV on truth is their effect on fiction. My favourite example of this is Inspector Morse who, in the original books, drove a Lancia but acquired a Jaguar in the later ones to fit in with the screen version.
How long before all the classics are rewritten and crammed with panting sex and incest, so as to make them conform with Andrew Davies's ghastly adaptations?
**********
Sheer bleeding nerve department. One of the noisiest campaigners against new grammar schools is a body called the Education Policy Institute. It declares that it is 'independent, impartial and evidence-based'.
Oh, yeah? Here's some evidence-based research on it. It started life as a Liberal Party think-tank called the Centre for Reform and its main benefactors are often Liberal Democrats.
Among its leading figures are the former Lib Dem Minister David Laws, and the Blairite factotum Sally Morgan (neither known for their support of grammar schools).
Two of its major figures (one a donor to the Tories in the Cameron anti-grammar years) are also connected with 'Academy' schools, which tend to see grammars as rivals. Impartial? Independent?
Last chance for useless cops
The jailing of a Polish lorry driver for slaughtering a family while looking at his stupid phone is only partly just. Millions of British people have come close to doing something similar and have only been saved from it by the grace of God.
Using your phone while driving is about as sane and sensible as throwing knives at your children while blindfolded. The trouble is that people are so selfish and complacent that they do not find this out until they kill or maim someone.
And they don't believe they will. Nor are they in the least impressed by calls for 'tougher sentences' for this crime. Because they know –as one driver I upbraided recently told me – that the police don't care and will do nothing about it.
Indeed they won't. I continue to be amazed that anyone still defends our police against the charge of uselessness which I ceaselessly level at them.
What is it that they do, apart from monitoring Twitter, festooning the place with tape and racing to crimes after they have happened and it is too late? When did you last see an actual traffic patrol? I'd guess 1987.
The solution may well be to sack the police and start again. But let's give them one last chance. Get out there now and arrest everyone you see using a phone at the wheel. The CPS can join in by actually charging them.
Only when everyone knows someone who's in jail for this moronic offence will it cease. That's how drunk driving was stamped out and how seat-belts became standard. Enforcement.
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Leave aside whether you or I are annoyed by the High Court’s judgement on Article 50, or think it perverse according to law. Are you really surprised by it?
I am not.
Below are links to various more-or-less prophetic articles (wrong in some respects, especially my belief , later revised a fortnight before the vote, that the anti-EU cause was most unlikely to win the referendum; strikingly right in others) in which I explained to impatient and tetchy readers why I did not want a referendum, and was not convinced that such a vote could get us out of the EU:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/the-referendum-mirage.html
The oldest, here, from October 2011, a trifle more than five years ago http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/10/referendum-no-thanks.html
is perhaps the most telling.
I wrote : ‘Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it – near impossible without at least one major party calling for a vote to withdraw - it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a general election to be won by a party committed to secession. And with the Tory party in the way, bed-blocking the position that ought to be occupied by such a party, that will never happen.’
In May 2013, I wrote: ‘Why is there such a fuss about a referendum on British, sorry, I mean Ukay, membership of the European Union? Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?
‘I’ve heard no such proposal, and can’t see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.
‘It’s certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important for any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.’
It was absent, as I several times said at the time.
This is why, when I correctly predicted that ‘Leave’ would win the referendum (on 12th June) http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-british-people-have-risen-at-last-and-were-about-to-unleash-chaos.html
I also prophesied the constitutional crisis which is now developing. I said:
‘I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.
‘If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?’
The other point I made *after* the result was that the EU itself, and its supporters in this country (no shortage of them in positions of influence in politics, law, diplomacy and media) would act tough to begin with eventually offer us a compromise under which we will, in effect, stay inside the EU.
This isn’t exactly wishful thinking, of the sort which guides many of the reactions to the High Court ruling on Article 50. I have been committed to national independence for many years. But I have infuriated and failed to persuade most of my readers by repeatedly saying that the destruction of the Tory party, and its replacement by a genuinely patriotic and conservative formation, were the essential preliminaries to achieving this.
Well, instead of working hard and saving up to buy my well-crafted, effective if antique device, with its polished brass hinges, well-oiled mechanisms and chased silver decorative bits, they went down to the industrial estate on the edge of town, and maxed out their credit card to purchase a cheapo, bodge-it-yourself instant exit kit – the referendum. Then they hired a plausible man with a grubby white van to install it. It seemed to work to start with. Now it’s giving out alarming knocking and whistling noises, and shuddering in a worrying way. But where’s the man who installed it? His mobile phone seems to have gone dead.
Well, this is what happens when you get the cowboys in. I really did tell you so. We’ll end up in the European Economic Area before this is over, you mark my words – halfway out of the EU instead of where we were, which was halfway in.
I return briefly to the topic of the Pound Sterling. Some people derided my article on how it would have fallen anyway, on the basis that I’m not an economist, a FOREX trader or a financial journalist.
Well, I’d only say that journalists working in this area, like traders and economists, are not immune from fashion or politics. I’d also point out that Sterling did in fact fall very sharply on the 4th August, following the Bank of England’s announcement of another bout of Quantitative Easing ('QE', creating funny money out of thin air) and a cut in interest rates. Nothing to do with the EU.
Historically, before the QE era and George Osborne’s long and disastrous reign, it was falling in December 2008 (the ‘Economist’ said in that month that it was ‘plumbing new depths’) and suffered an even greater drop in the final months of 2009, leading ‘The Daily Telegraph’ to record in March 2010
‘Fears about Britain's public finances mean the pound has lost about a third of its value against the euro and a fifth against the US dollar during the past three years, creating misery for holidaymakers, retired expats and those with property abroad.
But last week the pace of this decline accelerated, prompting fears of a sterling crisis. By midweek the pound was worth just $1.50, its lowest level for 10 months. It also lost value against the euro – which has been struggling itself in recent months. This volatility has resulted in the pound dropping to €1.11 in a matter of weeks.’
Nothing to do with the EU. All to do with the underlying weakness of our economy, which still persists and is now worse than then.
The bizarre decision of almost all commentators to rally round George Osborne in May 2010, and pretend he was succeeding in curbing spending when he wasn’t, while he inflated a housing bubble as a substitute for real growth, may explain the relatively calm years since. Few of those commentators had much to say when the May government swiftly buried Mr Osborne's failed policies in July.
The great avalanche of June was slowly building up on the higher slopes for years, billions of baseless funny money, the rape of savings by destroying interest rates, a terrible trade gap. No longer bridged by invisibles as the oil and gas reserves run down, more and more public and private debt, and higher and higher ratio of foreign debt to GDP (This is the ‘Current Account Deficit’. If the economy were a nuclear power station, this is the gauge you’d watch most closely for signs of meltdown. Britain’s has never been so bad in peacetime).
Then, the thunderclap of the referendum set it moving, as it was bound to do sooner or later under its own weight. It is said that when a the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at his finger. This is a case of the wise man seeing that the avalanche was caused by the snow, and merely triggered by the bang.
By the way, the Bank of England has in the past spent huge sums of hard currency to prop up the Pound Sterling on behalf of the British government. This was a feature of my younger years, and reached its apogee in the ERM crisis of 1992, misnamed ‘Black Wednesday’ when the government hurled billions of pounds into the sea in a useless effort to save Sterling from a 15% devaluation it badly needed.(Years of prosperity and growth followed until Messrs Blair and Brown came along and went wild with the national Amex Card).
But I can find no trace or report of any such effort by the Bank last June. If the fall was not fundamentally just, in economic terms as well as being, in many ways, necessary and beneficial, why not? On the contrary, the bank’s actions in August caused a further fall.
Finally, I draws readers’ attention to this excellent article in the Guardian by that fine writer, Larry Elliott, in ‘The Guardian’ :
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/16/let-the-pound-fall-and-the-economy-rise
He disagrees with me about the timing of the inevitable fall in the Pound (how can we possibly resolve this?) but read this passage especially (my emphasis) :
‘Britain has discovered a way of living beyond its means. Assets are sold to overseas buyers bringing capital into the country to offset the balance of payments deficit. It is the equivalent of a once well-to-do household that has fallen on hard times pawning the silver to keep up appearances. At some point, referendum or no referendum, the financial markets were going to say enough is enough and it is delusional to think otherwise.
'Running permanent balance of payment deficits amounts to borrowing growth from the future. Sooner or later, it has to be paid back and Brexit means it will be sooner. A weaker pound works by making exports cheaper and imports dearer. The effect, as after all the other devaluations and depreciations of the past 100 years – 1931, 1949, 1967, 1976, 1992 and 2007 – will make the economy less dependent on consumers and more reliant on producers. Lord Mervyn King, a former governor of the Bank of England, thinks the latest fall in sterling is a good thing and he is right.’
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
The pound sterling would have fallen hard and fast if we had voted to stay in the EU. I am amazed it did not do so long before. More than three years ago, before the referendum was called, I advised you to keep an eye on the value of sterling as a true measure of our huge economic difficulties.
Since then they’ve grown worse – enormous state debts, enormous private debts, a disastrous balance of trade and a devastating current account deficit, which measures how much we owe abroad.
Add to that the £435billion of funny money pumped into the economy by the Bank of England since 2009 in so-called ‘quantitative easing’, the smooth modern way of printing cash which is backed by thin air.
If you do these things, the currency must shrink in value, as surely as water will wet you, and as surely as fire will burn.
And now it has. I suspect it will get quite a lot worse, and the day when the dollar is worth more than the pound is now in sight. But currency markets like to wait for their opportunity. My guess is that, on the eve of the referendum, quite a few currency dealers bet heavily on a victory for the Remain campaign (as others did) and bought sterling in the belief that it would rise on the news. But others, more cunning or better informed, wagered the other way.
The resulting turmoil of rapid selling set off the avalanche which followed.
If the vote had gone the other way, then roughly the same thing would have happened by now, perhaps on the announcement of bad economic figures (there are so many, if you’re paying attention).
Everyone who understands the issue knows this. So they should stop saying – and you should stop believing – that the fall of sterling is your fault for voting for national independence.
This decision will have its costs – nothing worth having comes free – but a weaker pound isn’t one of them.
****
Thanks to a 1950s childhood I like my gravy thick, salty and dark brown, best mixed to a background of Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. So I’m sorry to see the decline of Bisto and Oxo sales, which fell in September supposedly because of hot weather. They’ll be blaming global warming next.
Of course, the real problem is that nuclear families eating meaty meals around tables, such as the one portrayed by Lynda Bellingham in the famous old Oxo commercials, are disappearing faster than hedgehogs. I doubt anything can save them.
But there’s something a bit wet and defeatist about the new Oxo TV advertisements, in which a horribly correct modern family (the man looks terrified) are shown cringing to some ghastly female bully brought home for a meal by their daughter. The creepy interloper shows her approval of her meatballs not by eating them but by taking a photograph of them.
Advertising is such a slave of trends. Someone called Helen Warren-Piper, a marketing director for Oxo’s parent company, has actually said: ‘Those advertising scripts where the mum is literally tied to an oven just don’t work any more. It’s clear advertisers need to think beyond mum and do a better job at representing the whole of the modern family or consumers will reject them.’
Ah, yes, you’ll remember those days when mothers were literally tied to the oven, then briefly released to gulp down some gravy before being chained to the kitchen sink. It happened to Lynda Bellingham all the time. No it didn’t. What is she talking about?
And yet this rubbish dominates the world of business and commerce, which now peddle ideas once found only in seething, enraged ultra-feminist magazines.
****
My favourite ghost stories, by the genius M. R. James, usually involve someone being a little too curious, and so releasing from its hole or tomb a nasty force he wishes he could put back but can’t.
Pornography is like this. In my wild 1960s days I thought it would be clever to read Last Exit To Brooklyn (which had just escaped prosecution) as a gesture of support for freedom of expression. It poisoned and polluted my imagination, irrevocably. To this day, I wish I hadn’t read it.
The best thing to do with pornography is to keep it out of reach by the forces of shame and law. The claim that legalising it would be a great liberation has turned out to be one of the greatest lies of our time. It has enslaved millions.
It is not a passive, dead thing that can be examined in a classroom. It reaches out and leaps into your mind. Jenni Murray could not be more wrong in saying that children should study it.
****
What a pity that Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a man of great historical knowledge, blessed with a sense of proportion, has become a Russophobic warmonger madly suggesting that we start a conflict with Moscow in Syria.
Mr Johnson knows perfectly well that fighting Islamist fanatics in densely populated cities is hard, especially when they hold the population hostage, as the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra is doing in east Aleppo now.
The West and its allies had similar difficulties last Christmas in Ramadi, where the RAF (among other forces) dropped bombs in and around that city to defeat ISIS. I suppose it’s possible that no civilians died, but I somehow doubt it.
The difference is that, unlike their close cousins in the Al Nusra front in Aleppo, the Islamic State fanatics in Ramadi don’t have access to a slick PR operation in the West, skilled at producing emotive, perfectly composed atrocity pictures of wounded children, and in manipulating Western news organisations who (for the most part) have no actual staff reporters or photographers on the scene.
So almost all the things you hear about east Aleppo are one-sided, carefully controlled propaganda, not news. One way of dealing with one-sided propaganda is to check it against the stuff put out by the other side.
In a rare moment of balance, the BBC recently transmitted this, from Fares al-Shehabi, who represents Aleppo in Syria’s ‘People’s Council’.
He said: ‘More than half of the city is occupied by Islamists, many of them foreigners…
‘Just go and check for yourself who is ruling eastern Aleppo, who is really issuing the laws there, it’s Islamic courts, it’s exactly like Kandahar and Kabul before the coalition intervened to get rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it’s exactly the same thing, they don’t have any democracy, they don’t have any civil rule, they only have people with long beards with fundamentalist ideology running the show, and a lot of foreigners.’
If this is even partly true, what on earth are we doing rushing to the aid of these hairy-faced fanatics and infiltrators? Or are we, as we did so regrettably in Libya, once again backing the worse against the bad?
I am happy to help Mr Johnson on this, and respectfully remind him that my team beat his when we clashed on University Challenge. He’s not the only know-all in London.
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My prophecy department has suggested that I should write about the fall in the Pound Sterling. I feel very much entitled to do so as have been standing on the platform with my watch in my hand, drumming my fingers and waiting for this particular long-expected event to come steaming in, for some time now.
Rather more than three years ago, I wrote the following:
‘..One of the things which constantly strikes me about modern Britain is that there must be many people who would actually quietly like to see the collapse , or at least the shrinkage, of the currency. They cannot hope to pay off their debts in any other way .The same is true of the government, which has no idea how it will manage its deficit, and borrows more each day, an action no less stupid than Weimar Germany’s incessant printing of worthless money. How convenient a large inflation would be for them.
‘Could anyone do such a thing deliberately? Possibly. The book (‘When Money Dies’, which I was reviewing at the time) quotes but does not endorse suggestions that both the Bolsheviks and some of the Warsaw Pact states deliberately used hyperinflation to destroy the hierarchies, the certainties and the middle classes which stood in their way. I have seen no proof of this, but it is not incredible, and we all know John Maynard Keynes’s attribution to Lenin of the (justified) belief that if you wish to destroy a nation, you first debauch its currency. It is also a very good way of destroying the power and influence of the independent middle class, who are the mainstay of any truly free and law-governed society, and the reliable regiments of conservatism.
‘But of course those who are in charge of all these things are not Bolsheviks.
‘They are ordinary politicians, far too stupid to be so well-organised or directed. It is just an accident, a bungle, an unintended consequence by people too dim and short-sighted to understand that bills have, in the end, to be paid somehow. I am not sure whether that makes it any better, though. The results will still be very bad.’
For full article see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/when-money-dies-the-horrors-of-inflation.html
…
And also this :’ It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness. Why do they do it?
It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a government which never had any ideas in the first place. As far as I can find out , Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t actually say ‘The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency’. Maynard Keynes rather hesitantly attributed it to the old monster. But it’s true, whoever said it. Since Gold-backed currencies gave way to paper, man has had to have faith in banknotes – so much faith that perhaps he hasn’t had the strength to have faith at the same time in God, who is considerably more credible than the average Cabinet or Central Bank.
He has to believe absolutely that the pretty blue, green or pink beer-token in his wallet is worth the goods which he purchases with it, and so does the shopkeeper who accepts it in return for those goods. He has to believe with all his heart that the columns of figures in his bank account stand for real value, along with the price he thinks he can get for his house if he sells it.
Once he ceases to do so, then money dies.
For full article see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/inflation-the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings-speak.html
Well, this is coming to pass, and it is most provoking to be told that it is ‘caused’ by the referendum vote to leave the EU. No doubt this event was the trigger for the rapid slide of Sterling. But that was because the markets were waiting for such a trigger, and no doubt a lot of currency dealers, by gambling on a ‘Leave’ vote, did well in the money markets by betting on a post-referendum drop.
Sop now it has become established wisdom, and it may even be that, because the media are used by the markets to bring about little jumps and falls in the ratings of stocks or currencies, we will now see a constant link between the two, with each stumble and shudder along the road to exit being followed or accompanied by a lurch in the currency.
But this is correlation, not causation. Those with savings have known for years that inflation has been eating into their carefully hoarded stores of wealth, pensions included, thanks to the virtual abolition of interest and the repeated raids on pension schemes by Labour and Tory chancellors, which have nearly killed off what was once quite a solid sector of the economy, and left a lot of people wondering if they’ll die before the money runs out, or the other way round. . The message from investment advisers has been ‘put your money in something risky if you want to earn anything’. The old idea, that you could make a steady if modest income by just leaving the money on a reasonably safe deposit, is gone, I think for good.
But now those without savings, those living from hand-to-mouth and those (almost everyone under 60) with non-mortgage debts, must experience it too. For them it is a much more mixed experience. Their debts will visibly shrink, which they (and the government, whose debts will also shrivel visibly) will enjoy. But a lot of prices will rise, because we now import so much, and foreign holidays, which so many now regard almost as a right, will become swiftly costlier (perhaps it is time for British holidaymakers to sample the cheaper joys of the Crimea) . Our few export industries will be delighted. Those which rely on imported goods for their raw materials and fuel will not be. My guess, on the basis of what I think I know about our economy, is that a lower pound will hurt us more than it helps us.
Having experienced Harold Wilson’s famous 1967 devaluation (from $2-80 to £2-40) I am trained to laugh at political claims that it won’t hurt the money in your pocket. But in those days the government took direct responsibility for it, and was blamed for it. I wasn’t born in September 1949, when the Attlee government devalued from $4-03 to $2-80, it was a much more savage loss. But the country was well aware ( as it isn’t now) that it had run out of money and credit, and the humiliation just had to be absorbed. Fear of an even more humiliating repeat forced the Tories to abandon the Suez adventure seven years later.
Almost exactly 18 years before, in September 1931, Britain had come off the Gold Standard, Winston Churchill’s disastrous equivalent to the ERM crisis, unsustainable because we were broke and in debt, which we had not been in 1914 when he had helped get us into the Great War that ruined us financially. At that time the Pound sold for $4-87, roughly the same as the just under Five Dollars standard before 1914 (it is amusing to recall that transatlantic travellers reckoned in those days that the old English shilling was the exact equivalent of the American Quarter, which it also closely resembled in size and weight). During the US Civil War, in 1864, the Pound brought in almost ten dollars, peaking at $9-97. That’s war for you, so it is surprising that during World War One, while Britain was piling up a huge unrepayable (and still unrepaid) debt to the USA, the rate did not sink below $4-76, and fell only to $4-43 when hostilities ended, reaching $3-66 in 1920 before being dragged up again by the return to the Gold Standard.
During the 1930s the dollar-pound rate fluctuated between about 3-15 to above 5-00, but in 1940 was fixed at just above four dollars for the rest of the war.
These figures, like the old rate between Sterling and the abolished Deutschemark, always seem to me to give a true idea of how we were really doing against comparable economies in these periods. The answer is, increasingly badly. But the current account deficit, not the same as the trade deficit or the Treasury deficit, is now about as bad as it has ever been, and I can think of no peacetime circumstances when the fundamental features of the economy have ever been so bad, and had so little hope of sustained recovery. To blame the pound’s fall on the referendum is absurd.
This recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZIL2Y0QtYI&feature=share
features a discussion I had last month one evening in a pleasant bar and grill in my favourite US small town, Moscow, Idaho.
Moderating the discussion is my friend Doug Wilson, the former US Navy submariner, now a Calvinist pastor, educator, author and blogger whose debate on same-sex marriage (with Andrew Sullivan) I moderated in the same city a couple of years ago.
On both occasions I fell ill on the way there and was in danger of losing my voice, which is why I am chewing something in a rather preoccupied way before this discussion begins. If I'd realised my mastication was on record, I'd have swallowed whatever it was.
The other participant is the very interesting American writer, Walter Kirn, whose latest book 'Blood Will Out' has just achieved a great success, and whose novel 'Up in the Air' was filmed starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. I hope his lecture on the art of essay-writing, given the next day at the same festival (called 'Wordsmithy') , is also available on YouTube. It was very good indeed. If you want to read a good example of Mr Kirn's style, an autobiographical essay 'Lost in the Meritocracy' (later lengthened in to a book) is a good start. It is easily available on the web.
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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