Midwich Revisited

A few months ago I mentioned my liking for the novels and short stories of John Wyndham, and have now at last got round to re-reading his ‘Midwich Cuckoos’, (made into a film rather melodramatically called ‘The Village of the Damned’ which I have yet to see – and later there was a remake which I don’t wish to see). This is  in many ways my favourite among his longer books. I can’t recall how long it is since I last read it, but I was struck this time by one wholly unexpected way in which it has dated. PLOT SPOILER WARNING – do not read on if you do not want to have the plot revealed.

 

This shows in the huge amount of the book which is devoted to the reaction of many of the women involved to the fact that they have become pregnant outside wedlock. Some are very young. One is pretty plainly meant to be half of a lesbian couple, though the word is never used.  All but the married are deeply embarrassed and ashamed of their condition. The local vicar, aided by the doctor, have to work very hard to persuade them (and the village) to accept that their condition, not being their fault, should not be a matter of shame.

 

And yet this story is set in what are, more or less, modern times – the post-1945 age of the welfare state, telephones, broadcasting, jet planes and nuclear weapons.

 

The central event of the book is the mysterious isolation of the village, in an invisible dome-shaped force-field in which all living terrestrial creatures instantly lose consciousness.  Aerial pictures, taken at great risk from a considerable height, reveal a large egg-shaped presence in the middle of the dull, uneventful village of Midwich.  After a short period, the force field vanishes, and the object vanishes with it (leaving nothing more than a slight depression in the grass). Not long afterwards, all the fertile woman in the village are found to be pregnant. The resulting babies are strangely beautiful and largely indistinguishable from each other (though some are girls and some boys) . they rapidly reveal that they have extraordinary pwers over the human mind, powers which enable them to compel their mothers (for instance) to bring them back to the village from far away and are later used for much more sinister and frightening purposes.

 

But before we can get on with the main part of the story, the village has to overcome the moral and cultural shock of this mass outbreak of illegitimacy. Many, many pages are devoted to this. One couple, on the verge of marriage, are hugely distressed by the event. The vicar plays a major part in dealing with it.  Now, roughly 60 years later, I think  this would be the least of the village’s problems. The authorities of those times are plausibly shown as seeking to suppress the strange news, and successfully doing so. That, also, would be impossible now.

 

I like the book partly because of its portrait of English middle-class village existence in the early 1950s, which reminds me agreeably of bits of my own childhood, a few years later,  on the edge of Dartmoor, where we had no visitations from aliens but where many of the attitudes and mannerisms were similar to those described by Wyndham. He likes (as I have mentioned once before) to begin in fairly ordinary places and activities, among intelligent middle-class people, and to lead the  reader gradually into terrifying speculations on what really holds our society together, and on what we really believe.

 

The book also impelled me to look up the truth about the actual Cuckoo. Like millions of people, I had grown up in the vague belief that this bird lays its eggs in the nests of others, where its monstrous offspring first turfs out the other eggs and chicks, and then demands that the bereaved mother of its victim feeds it until it grows big enough to fly away and perpetuate its nasty self.

 

I suddenly wondered if this was one of those legends, like the untrue belief that lemmings commit mass suicide ( see this http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp). But no, the story of the Cuckoo is perfectly true, and rather disturbing.

 

And the parallel in this case, of human cuckoos, is actively terrifying once the implications become clear. Without giving away too much, I should mention that the Midwich Colony is not the only such visitation on the planet. There are several. But wherever they take place in ‘primitive’ societies, the reaction of the local menfolk is simple and savage. The babies (and in some cases their mothers) are immediately slaughtered, and so never grow enough to exercise their powers. It is only in the advanced countries that the golden-eyed children are allowed to grow.

 

 

You will have to read it to find out how the ‘advanced’ societies deal with their Human Cuckoos.

 

This book, together with ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Kraken Wakes’, offers a cold-eyed exploration of what actually lies beneath our comfortable society, and of what nice, well-mannered professional middle-class people can do, when the old rules are suddenly cancelled. He is also good on the way in which people find the obvious very difficult to believe, when it conflicts with their prejudices and assumptions – and of the disadvantages, and advantages, of seeing clearly while others delude themselves. He also has a wonderful way of concocting plausible ways in which these great global melodramas begin - small-scale, credible and yet profoundly disturbing. He uses no tricks of language or form, just good, workmanlike prose.

 

I am always surprised that there is not more of a cult surrounding Wyndham (who was also fascinated by the possible outcome of feminism, and wrote intelligently and disturbingly about time-shifts in his short stories). He really rather deserves one. 

 

For those weho haven't yet been there, a visit to Midwich is recommended. I fear that, since Dr Beeching it is hard to get there by rail, but the buses still run from Trayne to Stouch and Oppley. Except on the (very) odd days when they mysteriously don't get there at all.

The Lost Child of Philomena Lee - a 20th-Century Tragedy

My home town is lucky enough to have a proper old-fashioned cinema, built in the Edwardian age and until recently so unmodernised that the projectionist had to climb into his seat by ascending a ladder on the outside of the rather lovely front entrance. I often find that audiences are rather sparse, but  the owners have been fighting hard to re-establish it and I was impressed the other night to find every seat taken for a showing of ‘Philomena’. Anyone who has yet to watch the film (or read the book ‘The Lost Child of Philomena Lee’ on which it is based)  is warned that what follows will reveal almost all the story and the ending. I don’t approve of much of the film’s message, have criticisms of its approach to the facts but must admit that it is well-made, well-acted and worth seeing.

 

I had some slight personal interest in this story. I slightly knew Martin Sixsmith, who is portrayed in it, and I also know Conor O’Clery, who is credited at the end of the film for his help with research. We were all Moscow correspondents in the early 1990s. I’d also met Martin, during his later period as a (civil service) government spokesman (he was working for Alastair Darling, who had come to a dinner at my then newspaper’s office, and we astonished Mr Darling by conducting a brief conversation in Russian, Martin’s notably better than mine, and I should think so too).  I think he was pretty badly treated by New Labour in the incident with which the film begins, his absurd dismissal for saying something completely reasonable.  I was very pleased to see him do well with his radio series on Russia, and with the accompanying book.

 

I wasn’t so pleased to see him being played in the film by Steve Coogan, who doesn’t really resemble him in any important way. But if anyone ever makes a film about me, which will only happen if things get very bad, I suspect I’ll get Timothy Spall, doing a reprise of his 2005 portrayal of Albert Pierrepoint, the hangman.

 

But the film was very easy to watch. Its plot is a clever combination of interesting things. First, there is the sad yet heartening story of Philomena Lee, whose child was taken from her, and whose attempts to find him again in adulthood were wrongly obstructed, as were his parallel attempts to find her. Then there is her indomitable personal generosity (the best thing in the film or the book, an immense willingness to forgive and see the good side, and I’m glad she was played by Judi Dench, which is a sort of reward for that).

 

Then there is the contrived but enjoyable mismatch between the Oxford-educated, metropolitan Martin, and the utterly opposite Philomena, which allows for a sort of ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ tension between the two.

 

For me there is the fascination of watching a cinematic recreation of the era in which I was born and first saw the world.  I’m not sure if it’s the lighting or the cutting, but somehow the scenes set in the early 1950s are made to look gloomy and sunk in backwardness, like a dead historical era.  As one approaches the grave, one can expect one’s own era to look like this to more and more people, especially in an age where all change is worshipped as ‘progress’ and the past must be portrayed as frightening and grim. Heaven knows there were grim aspects to it, though we coped somehow. There were also some rather pleasant aspects. The difficulty, as always is in knowing whether we could have kept the good while reforming the bad ( I think we could) , rather than just erasing the whole thing.

 

Yet people lived in that era and were much like us, happy for much of the time but not for all of it, and it did not seem especially dark.  The film version of the convent itself, with its severe wrought iron gateway, looks a good deal more menacing in the film than it does in the pictures of the real place, in the book.

 

And finally there is the absolutely astonishing story of the late Michael Hess, as Philomena’s adopted son Anthony became, whose childhood, education and adult life provide a miniature social history of the USA since the Eisenhower years. You see, Michael (having been brought up in a prosperous all-American Roman Catholic family in a pleasant St Louis suburb) turned out to be homosexually-inclined, and at the same time had a highly successful career as a lawyer for the Republican Party.  His work, the (just and necessary)  redrawing of Congressional district boundaries (like our constituency boundaries) enabled the Republican Party to achieve the majority in the House of Representatives which it eventually won in November 1996 after decades in the minority. There is a little in the film (and a lot in the book) about the contradiction between Michael’s far-from-conservative private life and his public work. So much so, that I wonder if it really bothered him that much.

 

The book describes his personal life in some detail, and is pretty frank about how he presumably became infected with HIV, and eventually died of AIDS. The story is told from a completely liberal point of view, and in a narrative style which pretty much requires the reader to sympathise unquestioningly with the sexual revolution of the era. I don’t intend to get entangled in that old argument. I’m just saying it’s so. Like any such stories, it is inevitably enormously selective, and leaves a number of things unexplained, and a number of knots untied.  While factual, it is not exactly documentary.  In fact, the book is completely dominated by Michael’s tragic yet impressive life story and is therefore totally different from the film, which is mainly about Philomena herself. In the film, we barely see Michael except as a tiny child, in some family home movies, and in cleverly-recreated photographs.

  
I read the book because I felt so many of the events in the film did not make complete sense. I still have some problems. Philomena herself did make serious efforts to find her son. But she did not know his new name or even roughly where in the USA he was, so the nuns’ repeated refusal to help left her stuck without recourse.  Sympathetic as I am to the Church against its attackers, I really can’t find it in my heart to excuse this.

 

It is true (and well detailed in P.D.James’s book ‘Innocent Blood, referred to here last week) that secrecy about adoptive parents and children was seen as desirable at the time by plenty of people who were not strict Irish nuns. In secular Britain,  until the mid-1970s, adopted children very rarely found out who their natural parents were, as huge legal obstacles were placed in their way. The same, presumably, applied to parents seeking their children. So we should not necessarily use that aspect of the case to make ourselves feel so superior to the allegedly benighted and priest-ridden Irish. In fact, I can see an argument for adopted children never even knowing that they *were* adopted, because of the feeling of ultimate rejection (much-discussed in the book) which the knowledge may well engender in the adopted child.  But that’s not the only issue involved, as we shall see.

 

The book reveals that her son did in fact find out Philomena’s real name, after getting a sight of his original adoption papers, and I have to wonder why this prosperous and well-educated lawyer never put an advertisement in the Irish newspapers, asking for information about her, Ireland being such a close-knit society.

 

There are also all kinds of other peculiarities in the film – the strange failure of Michael’s adopted sister to reveal facts she must have known (this storyline is not borne out in the book), and the even stranger refusal of Michael’s former lover to talk to Philomena until she confronts him on his doorstep (also not borne out in the book).  But you can see why they might be useful as plot devices.

 

Michael’s early life in America  is wonderfully recreated in what appear to be old home movies (I think they are clever reproductions rather than the actual originals, but they are so well done I am not sure).

 

His early life in Ireland, and his mother’s grim plight in the convent, must be influenced by the films, documentaries and books about the ‘Magdalen Laundries’, where unmarried mothers worked for their keep and expiated their sin. I am told, and have no direct experience to bring to bear, that the alleged wickedness of these places may well have been exaggerated, though the whole concept of them is more or less incomprehensible to the modern mind. These days we prefer to inflict cruelty on children and mothers through abortion, divorce, neglect, indulgence, chaos and moral laxity, while congratulating ourselves on having ceased to inflict other more direct and active kinds of cruelty. The real question is what sort of exchange this really is, and whether we will be judged as harshly by our descendants as we now judge our forebears. But the Roman Catholic Church is now so discredited in Ireland that people will believe almost any bad thing about it, including the melodramatic scene at the end of the film in which an ancient, crabby nun is confronted and denounced by Martin Sixsmith. The scene does not appear in the book.   

 

What I find most worrying is the nuns’ former practice of letting a mother continue to see her child for long months after the birth, and *then*, when the two had formed a living bond, to give it away for adoption. This seems to me to be pretty hard to defend. Separation, after love has begun to grow, must be almost impossible to bear.  I should have thought an immediate parting would be better, if the mother or her family cannot support the child and have accepted that an adoption is better. I can see a strong case for adoption as being far better than abortion. I can’t see a case for a punitive regime against unwed mothers, though whether it was as bad as portrayed I cannot say.  

 

The film is worth seeing because it will make you think, and because it contains some excellent acting and writing, and informs the watcher about things he or she might previously never have known. The book, likewise, is worth reading because you will be more fully human after you have read it.

 

But the undoubted heroine of the affair is Philomena herself, whose life has plainly not been especially easy, who was parted from a beloved child and kept from him while he still lived by rigidity and dogma. Yet her forbearance, humour and willingness to forgive are exemplary. One interesting point arises, which is her completely unshocked and uncensorious attitude when she learns of her son’s homosexuality.

 

I think this breadth of generosity is a characteristic of her as a person, but what if, in real life,  she had been distressed and dismayed by the discovery, as some mothers of her generation would have been?  And what if she had not accepted that sexual orientation is genetically determined, and had suggested that Michael’s later sexual choices were perhaps influenced by his treatment by the nuns? That would have been a much more complicated story for modern enlightened persons to tell, and to hear. We all like our morality tales nice and simple, just as so many people want the past to be uniformly bad (or uniformly good). It is not so. There was no Golden Age then, and there is no Golden Age now, and there never will be one. All we can do is to try to to improve what is within our control, and to resist those forces which press on us to behave badly. And for most of us, we shall have to do good in minute particulars, not grand gestures – as Philomena Lee has done in her forgiveness, which was offered privately and personally but in the end turned out to be a mighty deed, and an example to us all. 

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

I’m sure I’ve discussed this here before, but at this time of year, my curiosity seems to sag a bit and I like to re-read old favourites rather than slog through (for instance) important but severe studies of East Germany, as I know I should be doing.  

So one weary evening, in need of the mental equivalent of an old, worn, comfortable armchair, I pulled down from its shelf my disintegrating paperback of ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman’ by P.D.James, as she then was.  She is now very deservedly Baroness James,  and I only wish she had come to prominence earlier, as she has a wise and sane voice on most subjects and is also a great defender of the 1662 Prayer Book, the beautiful and thoughtful founding document of Anglican England, now loathed and cast aside by the Church whose most valuable possession it is.

 

I don’t like all her books. I’m far from keen on her irritating detective, the chilly Adam Dalgleish, whose joint careers as published poet and senior Scotland Yard detective seem to me to be a fantasy too far. We don’t, as far as I know, ever see any examples of Dalgleish’s verse. No wonder.   Imagine Philip Larkin as a seen-it-all Hull Desk Sergeant, or Ted Hughes patrolling the North York Moors on a Velocette motorbike, or Wendy Cope as a feisty Wpc, battling with Millwall fans between bouts of verse. Mind you, Andrew Motion might make a fairly convincing Deputy Chief Constable in the Home Counties.

 

But I do like several of them, and the two best are ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman’, and ‘Innocent Blood’ . Dalgleish flits through the background in ‘Unsuitable Job’ and is absent from ‘Innocent Blood’ (which I won’t discuss here as it is hard to do so without spoiling it for a first reader. Let me just say that, written in an age when adopted children were only just being allowed to discover their true parents, it serves as a warning that such children may possibly get more than they bargained for).

 

Both books are obviously rooted in some bleak personal experiences which Phyllis James must have had , living in pretty tough circumstances, in that largely unvisited wasteland of brick houses on either side of the railway line that runs from London’s Liverpool Street terminus out towards Essex – Forest Gate, Maryland (how bitterly unsuited that name always looked to me on the rather adventurous blue tiled name-plaques which used to decorate stations on that route. You couldn’t be much further from Chesapeake Bay, the Great Falls of the Potomac, Annapolis or the Catoctin Mountains) . In both of them there are evocative descriptions of the bare lives people used to live in the non-golden-age 1950s in un-modernised and uninviting houses (now no doubt knocked-through,  extended, sanded, centrally-heated,  spotlit and IKEA-furnished out of all recognition, and scoured of the smells of cabbage and damp gabardine mackintoshes which used to linger in them.

 

For the Baroness had a pretty hard life of it ( details here http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/03/crime.pdjames ), denied the university education she would obviously have loved by a combination of genteel poverty and a father who didn’t believe in higher education for girls. Having seen her mother hospitalised for a mental illness, she later married an Army doctor who gave her two daughters but returned from the war severely mentally ill, and then died young, at 44. She had responsibility, maturity and hard work (as a Home Office civil servant) forced upon her very young and very intensely ,and I have always been moved by the fact the amidst all these privations and hard thumps from fate,  she managed to become a distinguished and successful author.

 

This may have some bearing on why ‘An Unsuitable Job’ is so very good. Its heroine is Cordelia Gray, a clever and rather literary young woman, wrongly denied a Cambridge education, working in unlikely circumstances as the junior partner of a private detective agency, alongside a defeated but indomitable and cunning ex-Scotland-Yard copper, who dies on the first page, leaving her a business in debt, a gun and the agency’s first really good case.

 

I wish Phyllis James had gone on to write a lot more books about Cordelia (she did try once, in ‘The Skull Beneath the Skin’, but it didn’t, alas,  come off. Adam Dalgleish had by then pretty much taken over her life). She is one of the most attractive women in modern fiction, with her unconventionally attractive face ‘like an expensive cat’, and her combination of physical toughness and personal sympathy. In this book, it is her growing admiration for the personal goodness of a dead young man that impels her to take terrible risks in uncovering the truth of his death, and then covering it up again when that truth releases howling demons into the world.

 

Almost the whole drama is played in and around Cambridge at the end of the 1960s, when it was, as I well remember (I was at school there from 1965 to 1967), very beautiful and as yet unspoiled by the tourist plague which now soils it so in the warmer months. Her longing for what she cannot have is beautifully expressed in a quotation from one of John Donne’s sermons. ‘The university is a paradise, rivers of knowledge are there, arts and sciences flow from thence…gardens that are walled in, wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable counsels’.

 

If only it were really so.

 

(She doesn’t quote the next bit ‘the waters of rest, they flow from this good master, and flow into him again; all knowledge that begins not, and ends not with his glory, is but a giddy, but a vertiginous circle, but an elaborate and exquisite ignorance’.  But I bet she knows it) . The passage always makes me think of the Oxford Botanic Gardens, which Donne must have seen, and of its newer, larger Cambridge equivalent.

 

 

Cordelia, who has been excluded by the folly of others from this Eden, can only enter it as a private detective, a role in which she proves far cleverer than the wealthy, smart undergraduates who try in turn to get rid of her,  to suborn her and to throw her off the scent of what has really happened to their dead friend (oh, and for believers in the non-existent War on Drugs’ I should note here that this book, published in 1972 and written by a Home Office civil servant conversant with the law, refers to dope being openly smoked at a Cambridge party attended by students and dons).

 

There is much more here, about class, about ambition, about the power of money and also about what England was like, and felt like, at that rather shabby and aimless point in its history, yet before it had tipped down the rather steep section of the roller-coaster on which it now finds itself. James ‘s books are very good social history (I made great use of her debut novel ‘Cover Her Face’ in my chapter on the changing attitude towards unmarried mothers in ‘The Abolition of Britain’. The treatment and status of unmarried mothers as portrayed in this book  is now simply inconceivable and unimaginable for most people. Yet it was so then).

 

But it is also a very good mystery, and the final pages, in which Cordelia meets and fears Adam Dalgleish (I won’t tell you why), are gripping to the last word.  People compare her with Agatha Christie, but that’s unfair to Lady James. She’s more in the class of Dorothy Sayers, and sometimes comes close to Josephine Tey. As with many good authors, the earlier and middle works tend to be better than the later ones. 

'Sunday Morning Live' - fatherhood, the Church and Forgiveness

On Sunday 30th June I took part in the BBC TV programme 'Sunday Morning Live', which can be watched by following this link, for some time to come:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b036pq9h/Sunday_Morning_Live_Series_4_Episode_1/

It's some months since I was last on any form of national broadcasting, though people always tell me I'm 'on all the time'(usually on the basis of a couple of appearances - on that basis, judging by the past couple of months, it would be equally true to say that 'I am 'never' on TV and radio. The truth is these things are quite episodic, and are often down to complex formulae of 'balance' on panels, which can and do change at the last minute. I also do quite frequently turn down appearances, or talk myself out of them, because it's a subject I don't care or know enough about.

 

The only way to be 'on all the time' is to achieve the status of BBC favourite which means you appear regularly on panels or as a presenter.

 

I'll say little about yesterday's programme (my contributions speak for themselves) except to say that the format does allow for quite a lot of proper discussion, that the subjects are serious ones, and that it is intelligently produced and presented.  

The Sexual Revolution

Some of you have asked if there is a recording of my discussion of the Sexual Revolution with Linda Grant , which took place on Sunday 19^th May at the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Here it is.My thanks to Luke Major, who sent me this link:

 

 

 

http://soundcloud.com/bristol-festival-of-ideas/linda-grant-and-peter-hitchens

 

Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

 Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).
But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

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We fuss over mothers... then tell them to dump their children in baby farms and go back to work

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.

The view seems to be that it’s just about all right for women to give birth, but after that can we please separate them from their young as soon as possible, for the sake of the economy?

New Labour was frank about it, with that terrifying commissar Patricia Hewitt describing the dwindling numbers of full-time mothers as a ‘problem’.

The Lib Dems’ chief feminist, Lynne Featherstone, says with her usual simple-minded bluntness that having a baby is a ‘bit of a setback’, adding that: ‘One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact women still have babies.’

The Coalition wants 40 per cent of two-year-olds in day care by next year. The shiny Modern Tory Liz Truss (I can’t call her a conservative) hires a costly nanny for her own children but wants the less wealthy to stuff their progeny into baby farms with industrial staff-to-toddler ratios.

Even the Leftist Polly Toynbee, who has nothing in principle against nationalising childcare, describes the Truss plan as ‘warehousing’.

Nobody ever questions the claim that it is automatically good for mothers to go out and be wage-slaves. Once, this idea was widely hated, and every self-respecting man worked as hard as he could to free his wife from the workbench.

Then the feminist revolutionaries began to argue that the home was a prison and marriage was penal servitude, chained to a sink. Most people thought that was nuts – until big business realised that women were cheaper than men, more reliable than men and much less likely to go on strike or be hungover than men.

What’s more, all the really beefy men-only jobs – mining coal, rolling steel, stoking furnaces – had been abolished.

So suddenly the wildest anti-male ravings of the ultras became the standard view of the CBI, the political parties and the agony aunts. And off the women trooped, to their call centres, their offices and their assembly plants, choking back tears as they crammed their toddlers into subsidised nurseries.

They got tax-breaks. Fatherless households got welfare subsidies. So as far as the State was concerned, the one arrangement that was discriminated against – and hard – was the one where one parent went out to work and the other stayed at home.

A selfish upper crust of female lawyers, professional politicians, bankers and journalists imagined that all women enjoyed work as much as they did – when the truth is that most do it to pay the bills.

But this self-satisfied clique was and is very influential. Who, in Parliament, law, business or the media, speaks for full-time mothers? Certainly not the steely, suited superwomen who have done very well out of the sex war.

Does all this matter? Well, I suspect it does. Children need parents, and small children badly need the devoted, unstinting personal attention that only a mother can give. Without it, they will grow physically but they will not flourish as fully developed humans.

If you wonder where those feral teenagers came from, or why so many primary school children can barely talk and are not potty-trained, ask yourself if it might not be connected with the abolition of motherhood.

But surely Scandinavia, the home of mass day care, is a  paradise? Well, not if you believe Swedish sociologist Jonas  Himmelstrand, who last week warned psychological disorders have tripled among children in Sweden since the child-rearing revolution there in the Eighties.

Culture can’t be transferred from one generation to the next when children are left to bring each other up. He says of mass day care: ‘It is at the root of bullying, teenage gangs, promiscuity and the flat-lining of culture.’

As usual, we have been warned. As usual, we will not take any notice until it is far  too late. For no political party stands up for private life or the independent family.

 *******

Every few years a sort of blue mist blurs the vision of the dwindling battalions of Tory loyalists. They persuade themselves that some more or less fraudulent person is the new hope of the future.

Facts are ignored. Blind faith is deployed. From this came the wild and comically wrong belief that David Cameron was a secret patriot, who would rip off his green, liberal garments when he assumed office.

Well, we know how that worked out. But, learning nothing from the experience, the poor old Tory Tribe are now looking for a new delusion to cling to.

Some are beguiled by Alexander (alias ‘Boris’) Johnson. They don’t even know his real name, and have also failed to notice that he is politically correct, pro-EU and, while he is cleverer than his schoolmate and fellow Bullingdon hearty, Mr Slippery, he is the same sort of thing.

But dafter even than that is the cult of Theresa May, now being hawked about as the New Iron Lady.

Oh, come on. Theresa May is the Marshmallow Lady. She U-turned over militant feminism, switching without explanation from opposing all-women shortlists for parliamentary candidates to supporting them.

She worked happily with Harriet Harman over the passage of the horrible Equality Act.

And as for her non-pledge to put withdrawal from the Human Rights Convention ‘on the table’ if the Tories win the next Election, what’s that worth?

‘On the table’ doesn’t mean she will do it. And the Tories will lose the next Election anyway. As a statement of intent, it is like that fine old music-hall chorus: ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.’

 

The awful Huhne case shows how driving cars brings out the worst in all of us.

Perfectly pleasant people, once in control of a ton of steel and glass, become irrational, arrogant, impatient speed-maniacs muttering ‘get out of my way’ and buying personalised number plates.

How much time did Chris Huhne save by his speeding? What did he do with it? He has plenty now.

As I ride my bicycle, I notice the steady worsening of manners on the roads, more hooting, more violent swerving, more red lights jumped, more mad texting while driving.

The people involved are probably saints at home or at work, but become fiends and morons once at the wheel.

 

It's started. The Coalition is breaking up, as I predicted here in September 2011.

Get ready for a noisy Tory minority government, all mouth and no trousers, designed to fool you into thinking they’ve rediscovered their principles.

 

I gather that the wrongly imprisoned police officer April Casburn, convicted on some of the flimsiest evidence I’ve ever seen, will not be appealing.

What a pity. I should have thought the Police Federation would be anxious to  protect its members from the danger of such prosecutions, and would want to press the  matter even if Mrs Casburn is reluctant.

 

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Back to Stalingrad - the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

As some readers have noticed, I have been away for a few days, mostly in France and particularly in the cathedral city of Chartres. I plan to write at some length about Chartres cathedral, and its importance to the human mind, but that will have to wait .

 

Today I will send a dispatch from the Stalingrad front, the terrible, doomed battle into which moral and social conservatives have been lured by the Sexual Liberation Front, on the subject of same-sex marriage.

 

But before I do so, I will deal with a couple of silly comments, which I had hoped long-standing readers here would answer, but they have disappointed me.

 

There is of course no necessary contradiction between believing that the great majority of MPs are no good, and seeking to become one myself. I would behave differently from the existing members, were I to be elected. I am very unlikely to be elected. I do wish people would pay attention to my repeated point, that ‘standing for parliament’ (see the index)  is almost always futile for genuine independents, because the great majority of votes are cast out of tribal loyalty, rather than from a reasoned choice.

 

And, as I point out in this week’s column, the crucial moment of selection is not the election itself, which is merely a sacrament of our new religion of ‘democracy’. The sheep-like voters feebly confirm the choice already made by the political party which owns the seat (most seats are safe, and those which are not are unloved by career politicians, as they are bound to lose them on a tribal swing). Worse still, local parties, in both Labour and Tory organisations, have now lost their freedom to choose their own candidates, and independent persons can be (and are ) vetoed from the centre.

 

When, in 1999, I mischievously put my name forward for the Tory nomination in Kensington and Chelsea, one of the safest seats in the country, I was an experienced journalist who had spent many years covering politics at close quarters. I knew perfectly well that I had not the slightest hope of robbing Michael Portillo of the nomination. So, as I have said before, it is ludicrous to characterise this as a genuine attempt to enter Parliament. It was propaganda, publicity for my (then new) book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, and a chance to point out the failings of Mr Portillo, who was the prophet of Cameronian ‘Modern Toryism’, though many dimmer Tories couldn’t see this, thanks to his Thatcherite credentials.   

 

People who seek safe seats are careful to be selected for, and fight, hopeless ones first, to show their mettle and to serve their time. I never did this. Nor did I ever make another attempt to get a Tory nomination before I left that Party a few years later. This doesn't seem to me to suggest a strong desire to become an MP.

But people frequently urge me to ‘stand for parliament’ having (and isn’t this strange in a  supposed advanced democracy) no real idea of what this action entails, how it is done or how MPs are in truth selected. Which is why the index contains a helpful article on ‘Standing for Parliament’.  

 

As for my mentioning Comrade Doctor Lord John Reid’s (Comrade Baron Reid of Cardowan, to give him his full title) past Communism, when I am myself a former Trotskyist, I will once again make a simple point. Everyone knows I was a member of the International Socialists between 1968 and 1975 because I tell them so.They know that I did a summer job for the Socialist Worker in 1972 because I put it in my Who’s Who entry. I do this to make it quite clear that I am not hiding my past and that it is an issue I can and will freely discuss with anyone who wants to know about it.

 

I do not believe that Comrade Lord Reid has ever been anything like so frank, nor so repentant. I regret my past opinions and actions, and clearly say that what I did and intended was wrong.   In this, he is like Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn  and many other New Labour figures who have been, ah, closer to the revolutionary Left than they like to discuss.  In the cases of Lords Reid and Mandelson, who dallied with official Communism, the problem is in my view greater as, at that time they were associating with an organisation which is now known to have been in the direct pay of the Soviet government, one of the most unpleasant despotisms available in the world at that time.  A recent BBC Radio 4 programme, enquiring what had happened to the so-called  ‘Euro Communists’  of the 1980s, concluded that they had more or less transmuted into New Labour, whose ideas and ambitions were first set out in their journal ‘Marxism Today’. The programme was right about this but, as usual among those who were never themselves on the inside of the far left,  wrong about its significance.

 

It drew the conclusion that principled young men and women had dissolved their fervour in ambition and conventional politics. My view is, and always has been, that these young Marxists wisely adapted their Marxism to bureaucratic and parliamentary methods, and expressed their revolutionary intentions in a long march through the institutions. I always remember, just before a BBC Radio 4 discussion on whether the Left had won or lost, Comrade Dr Reid, then Defence Secretary, giving an interview in which he used the phrase ‘Pessimism of the Intellect; optimism of the will’.

 

I was the only person in the studio who knew that this was a quotation from Antonio Gramsci, the very clever Marxist who realised as long ago as the 1920s that the Bolsheviks had got it wrong, and that the left’s route to power in Western Europe was through cultural revolution. There were plenty of educated, plugged-in people in that studio, of my generation. They just didn’t know the code because, even if they’d been vaguely leftish as almost everyone was, they hadn’t been to the closed meetings or engaged in the intense study of practical revolution which the paid-up members had.  Here’s my point. It is precisely because I was myself a sixties revolutionary that I understand the language, tactics and aims of the movement to which I used to belong, and can see and explain its many and various successes. Creating a world in which nobody was shocked to have an ex-Communist as Secretary of State for Defence was one of those successes.

 

But back to Stalingrad. As it happens, it is the 70^th anniversary of that turning point in the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians still call it and as we in this country still tend to view it. Alan Clark, in his fine book  ‘Barbarossa’ gives one of the most potent descriptions of this hell, far better than in some more celebrated and praised histories. Vasily Grossman’s indispensable novel ‘Life and Fate’ is also a moving account of this horrible war, in which the good person’s feelings must always be torn because of his sympathy for the Russian people and his loathing of the Soviet regime. I must also confess rather guiltily to thinking quite highly of the Stalingrad descriptions in ‘The Kindly Ones’, a rather nasty but very clever novel by Jonathan Littell, written from the point of view of a fictional SS officer. I threw it away after I had finished it,  feeling slightly disgusted with myself, but find that quite a lot of it lingers in the mind anyway.

 

The point here is that I don’t use the expression ‘Stalingrad’ lightly. It is one of the central events of our time, the pivot of the 20^th century, and one which probably ought to feature more in art and literature than it actually does.

 

Perhaps if it did people might learns one of the lessons of it, which is not to be drawn into a trap, especially in search of symbolic rather than real victory, and never to forget one’s ultimate objective in any conflict. It’s nearly a year now since I declined to take part in the great battle against same-sex marriage, explaining my view in an article in ‘The Spectator’ which you can read here

 

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7714553/the-gay-marriage-trap/

 

For me, the most important passage in this article is here : ‘The real zone of battle, a vast 5,000-mile front along which the forces of righteousness have retreated without counter-attacking for nearly 50 years, involves the hundreds of thousands of marriages undermined by ridiculously easy divorce, the millions of children hurt by those divorces and the increasing multitudes of homes where the parents, single or in couples, have never been married at all and never will be. If we are to have a Coalition for Marriage (or C4M as it is modishly called), this would be territory on which it might fight with some hope of success.

 

‘Why should we care so much about stopping a few hundred homosexuals getting married, when we cannot persuade legions of heterosexuals to stay married?’

 

It is only because a long secular revolution has hollowed out marriage that the idea of same-sex marriage is now both thinkable and practicable.

 

Some campaigners for homosexual marriage, such as the British-born American blogger Andrew Sullivan, have successfully persuaded many conservatives that the change simply extends the benefits of marriage (a laudable thing in itself) to more people.  Why should we stand in the way of this fundamentally conservative desire? Michael Gove,  the Education Secretary, writing in my newspaper at the weekend, more or less takes this view.  I am hoping to explore this later this month when I have been invited to moderate a debate on the subject between Mr Sullivan and Doug Wilson, a redoubtable Calvinist pastor and thinker, in the USA.

 

I’d ask such advocates if they think this argument would work if marriage were still the rather fearsome thing it used to be before the 1960s, let alone what it used to be before civil marriage existed at all, and all Wedlock was Holy.

 

The main thing about marriage until about 50 years ago was that it was, in practice, indissoluble. Divorce, though possible, was a major legal hurdle attended with many embarrassing and unpleasant features. If one party to the marriage insisted on continuing as promised, the other could not get out. Betrayal of the marriage vows was a major act of domestic war.  What was more, if you wouldn’t, or couldn’t get married, you were condemned to the fringe of the world.  Living in sin was awkward and unpleasant. People frowned on you. It was hard to get lodgings in respectable places. Any children of such a household would almost certainly suffer in various ways.

 

And I can already hear a lot of people saying ‘Well, quite, and wasn’t this exactly why we needed divorce reform? To which I reply that nothing good comes without a price.  If you value the freedom to divorce, then you must accept that it, too, has a cost.

 

Despite the self-serving litany of so many divorcees (you must have heard it) that ‘the children were far happier once we broke up. Divorce was far better than the constant rows. And now they have two homes instead of one’, we all know in our hearts that in most cases the children hate the divorce and are upset and damaged by it; that rows between grown-up people are not a force of nature, or the weather, but something they can control and prevent if they really wish to; that two homes are not necessarily better than one.

 

We also know that, where marriage is easily dissolved, it is more frequently dissolved, and that where divorce is simple and cheap, it will be resorted to more readily, and be seen as the normal and automatic response to marital difficulty; that the discipline of lifelong marriage, which compels husbands and wives to learn forbearance and forgiveness, can actually strengthen the moral muscles. We must also recognise that , where divorce becomes more and more common, and where the laws on distribution of marital property and custody of the children heavily favour the divorced wife regardless of who is responsible for the break-up (as they do, see my ‘Abolition of Britain’) , many men will become reluctant to marry at all.

 

And so cohabitation will increase, and yet more children will be vulnerable to sudden and devastating break-ups of their parents. Of course, the poorer and weaker the individuals are, the worse the consequences will most likely be, ending at the bottom of the heap with a distressing number of homes in which there is no permanent father in the house, just a succession of boyfriends who may well be hostile to, or exploitative of, children fathered by other men. It is in these households that child abuse, physical and sexual, has been shown by the Family Education Trust (which studied family court reports) to be greatly more common (about 33 times more likely) than in any other sort of ménage.

 

I suspect that it is also from these unhappy homes that so many of the wretched young men and women misleadingly called ‘homeless’ have fled to escape the secret horrors that can be (though obviously are not always) visited on the vulnerable by hostile step-parents.

 

These are considerable evils, which grow among us. It is really up to you to decide whether they are a worthwhile price to pay for the freedom from lifelong marriage which has been bought through this suffering, and the disturbed, distressed and in many cases ungovernable generation which has resulted from it. For me, it is quite an easy choice. I think we were better off when marriage was for life, and generally lasted for life. I don’t deny that this system had its grave disadvantages, but the thoughtful, responsible person must ask if they outweighed the advantages. 

There is another aspect, and that is the great expansion of state power (and the great loss of an important power in the hands of women)  involved in no-fault divorce, in which either party can dissolve the contract whatever the other thinks.

 

In both Britain and the USA, since the 1960s, the divorce law is such that if one spouse wishes to stay married, and the other does not, the state may now invade that house, backed with the force of law and prison, and expel the spouse who does not wish to leave .

 

Once the legal facts are expressed in this bare form, it is obvious that state power has attacked one of the most private areas of human activity, and conquered a crucial piece of territory. You may favour this. I do not. But whichever side you take, it is absurd to pretend that nothing important has changed.

 

Then there is what might politely be called the Lysistrata factor. Lysistrata, in the Aristophanes play of that name, forces the men of Greece to abandon war,  by organising a sex strike by the women of Greece. In a way, the old marriage rule was a permanent sex strike by the women of Christian countries, under which they demanded binding lifelong promises from men,  in return for their favours.

 

Well, this may seem crude and disagreeable to us now, but once again, look at the growing plight of older women in our society, embarking on grotesque plastic surgery, botox etc to stay in the market for male favour; look at the nasty development known as ‘the trophy wife’ , invariably involving the cruel discarding of a previous wife, and look in general at the number of serial divorces and at the Bridget Jones problem of young women who cannot find husbands.

 

These are deep social changes, and they are not in all cases beneficial. They are, as always in this subject worst of all for the children,  who are shuttled around from relationship to relationship and from home to home, for the convenience of adults. We are already paying quite heavily for this, and the bills have only just begun to come in.

 

Since the 1960s reforms, they have never really been revisited, despite the fact that they are almost 50 years old and have led to many serious problems, which weren’t anticipated by their framers.

 

Nobody in mainstream politics has said ‘This law had many bad consequences. Perhaps we could moderate them’. The principle of freedom from a lifelong, faithful bond was the thing, and that apparently cannot be reopened. Yet it seems to me that it should be.   I for one would be very willing to look into ways of reforming marriage, making exits for those who really needed them, while simultaneously making divorce particularly hard where young children were involved.  There could be different degrees of marriage, under which those who wished to could choose, in advance, a form which was much harder to dissolve ( I believe there have been experiments along these lines, of ‘so-called ‘Covenant Marriage’ in some parts of the USA), These would have to be their own reward since, like Nick Clegg, I really can’t see that marriage allowances in the tax system (though desirable in themselves) will influence anyone’s intentions very much.

 

In the midst of this, the contractual arrangements of a few thousand homosexual couples are a tiny matter. My own view was always that wise and compassionate reforms of inheritance law, tenancy transfers and the rules about next of kin, could have increased human kindness without raising a great political storm. But it’s not a battle I wish to fight , when the far more important war, for the survival of marriage itself, is being lost across that 5,000 mile front.

 

As for the political flim-flam of this week, Mr Cameron and his allies, of course, want to destroy *conservatism* while keeping the *Conservative Party* in being , as a safety valve for conservatives in a liberal society.  The same-sex marriage issue is a perfect vehicle for achieving this.  What he desires is a country in which all the parties are in fact the same, but have different names so as to absorb tribal energies and maintain the tragi-comedy known as universal suffrage democracy. As I wrote long ago, Communist East Germany had a multi-party parliament. The only thing wrong with it was that all the parties, though they had different names, agreed on all important matters.  I struggle increasingly to see any serious difference between the old People’s Chamber of East Berlin, and our current arrangements.

 

Mr Cameron does not care about losing votes and members, because (like all rich liberals) he personally has nothing important to fear from a Labour government, which is probably inevitable anyway. He is, as he told anyone who would listen,  the heir to Blair. He meant it. He said it. He has always acted accordingly, as I said he would.

 

The mystery is not why Mr Cameron hates conservatives, which is obvious and easily explicable. Liberals do hate conservatives. It is why so many conservatives still give their loyalty to him, and their votes to his party.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Savile's secret is finally out. But what about all the other lies?

What else are they keeping from you? I now discover that I am almost the only journalist who didn’t know that Jimmy Savile was a child molester.

If they all knew, why didn’t they tell you? And what, exactly, is the point of the police investigating the misdeeds of a corpse? What will they do if they find a case to answer? Refer it to the CPS? Put his cadaver on trial and send it to prison?

Well, let them explain all that. What’s much, much more important is that you now know that there is a lot going on that nobody tells you.

They don’t tell you because they’re scared that very rich men can use the libel courts to ruin those who tell the truth about them.

Remember Robert Maxwell? He’s dead, too. But do you think he has no living equivalents?

They don’t tell you because there are powerful commercial or political interests involved. Or because journalists themselves have bad consciences. Or because a lie is much more comforting and convenient than the truth.

That is why the risky drugging of healthy children, said to have the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’, continues, rather than being exposed for what it is by an angry press.

It is why the myth of ‘dyslexia’, which hides the deliberate refusal of our schools to teach reading by tried and effective methods, is still current.

It is why very senior politicians are not properly questioned or pursued about their own use of illegal drugs, not in their teens or student years, but during their adult lives.

It is why our political parties, fraudulent, bought-and-paid-for and secretly scornful of their own voters, repeatedly betraying their supporters’ dearest wishes, survive long after they should have been used for landfill.

It is why the country is carpeted with worse-than-useless windmills, and why the fanatical false religion of man-made global warming is the faith that nobody dares to question.

If Jimmy Savile’s long and uninterrupted career of despicable crime teaches us anything, it is to hold hard to that old but reliable motto ‘Never Believe Anything Until It Has Been Officially Denied’.


Cameron steals the applause of real heroes

Party conference speeches have always been unfit for human consumption. But the Prime Minister’s performance last week was specially repulsive.

It wasn’t just the repeated lie that he used Britain’s veto in Brussels. It wasn’t his attempt to appropriate the Queen. It wasn’t just the faintly distasteful way in which he referred to what really ought to be personal matters.

The bit that filled me with cold fury, and had me trying very hard not to swear at the TV screen, or to hurl objects at it, was Mr Slippery’s reference to the members of the Armed Forces who have died in Afghanistan.

It should never be forgotten that in 2009, Mr Slippery bought the support of the Murdoch press by fervently endorsing this futile deployment. By doing so, he condemned many people, far better than he, to death or to severe lifelong disability.

If he had not sold his tongue to The Sun, and if he had had the courage to do as Canada did, and put an end to the bloodshed, many of them would now be alive or whole.

So it is a shocking shame for him to have the nerve to use these honoured dead to trigger a standing ovation at a political rally for his dying, divided and discredited party.

When he departs public life in 2015, I hope he devotes quite a lot of time to atoning for this.


I don't want to fight a burglar

The new ‘tough’ Injustice Secretary, Christopher Grayling, promises us the freedom to do horrid things to burglars.

This betrays a doltish misunderstanding of the problem. I don’t know about Mr Grayling, but I’m not that confident of winning a fight with a rangy, drugged-up young thief on the landing in the middle of the night. I simply don’t want him to be there at all.

And that means a combination of swift, severe deterrent punishment in austere prisons (which the Useless Tories don’t believe in), and a police force that patrols on foot again (which they also don’t believe in). These people have nothing useful to say.



Well, I suppose we can be grateful that the EU didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Economics. And, like you, I can hardly stop laughing at the award of the Peace Prize.

But there is a sense in which the EU has brought peace. It has done so by allowing France, and more recently Britain, to pretend to be independent powers, while actually being vassals of Germany.

And it has allowed Germany to be the imperial ruler of Europe while pretending to be a Europeanised, neutered nothingness.



Prescribe this for your GP

You might not expect me and Dr Ben Goldacre to be allies. I think it fair to say that Dr Goldacre, famous for his exposures of ‘bad science’, sees himself as a man of the Left.

But Mr Goldacre’s new book, Bad Pharma, exposes the appalling abuse of our trust by the big drug companies, which suppress unwelcome results from clinical trials, and which market remedies on the basis of myths.

Try this: ‘Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients.’

It gets worse. Analysis is flawed – by design – to make the drugs look better than they are. The results tend to favour the makers. When those makers don’t like research results, they are allowed to hide them. Yes, they really are.

This is an immensely important book, with vast implications for our health – and if your GP hasn’t read it, you should insist that he or she does so, soon.



I am still waiting for Edward Miliband’s office to tell me if the Labour leader was given private tuition during his time at a comprehensive school. It’s now 11 days since I asked. Any former tutors, if they exist, are very welcome to get in touch.



The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, asks: ‘How can we justify giving flats to young people who have never worked, when working people twice their age are still living with their parents because they can’t afford their first home?’

How indeed? Yet as long as the State aggressively subsidises fatherless families, and as long as the Tory Party slanders opponents of this mad policy as ‘persecuting single mothers’, it will go on, and the results will be as bad as they have always been.

A Witness to History - how Justice Decays

Here I reproduce (with the author's permission) another first-hand account of an important truth. The writer was a direct witness of the decline and weakening of criminal justice in this country, during the period when authority was in visible retreat. I don't agree with the author that these changes were 'motivated by economics', though I have no doubt that then, as now, cost was used as a pretext to drive a different purpose. I think it is arresting, fascinating and deeply dispiriting. Please read it:

 

'I joined the Magisterial service in the mid-1960s, qualified as a solicitor through night school and a year at law school whilst in service, spent most of my working life at a busy Magistrates' Court where I acted a clerk to the Court in excess of 8000 sittings . I retired a few years ago but continued working on an agency basis at different courts due to qualified staff shortages for another two years or so.   I feel well qualified to comment on the judicial process and especially Magistrates' Courts.
 
'In 1964 I remember that the offence of using a vehicle without insurance carried a possibility of a prison sentence.

'Driving whilst disqualified could be tried either by the Magistrates or by Crown Court (Quarter Sessions back then) and invariably resulted in a custodial sentence.  Compare those two offences to now when its usually 6 penalty points and a derisory fine because such offenders rarely have sufficient means.
 
'Burglars were always, OK nearly always, imprisoned.  A burglary committed during the hours of darkness could NOT be heard by the Magistrates, it had to go 'upstairs'. So you can imagine the kind of sentences handed down.
 
'Cautions?  In 1964 never heard of them, except perhaps the unofficial ones that right minded traffic officers used to administer.
 
'Magistrates had Licensing Committees that kept a strict control on outlets for alcohol and gambling.
 
'Women were forced by the benefit agency of the day to take proceedings in our court against absent fathers before they would be allowed benefit.  The Courts enforced payment by such fathers rigorously and most men paid perhaps because of the real threat of imprisonment for those who didn't.
 
'Those are just a few random memories, but what does stand out is that Magistrates were usually sensible people and properly advised by a clerk worked well in balancing the protection of the public, punishment of the offender and sympathy where common sense dictated.  Of course there was always a right of appeal
 
'Gradually however, motivated by economics I'm sure, Magistrates' hands became tied.   Precedent from higher Courts, usually restricting imprisonment, became commonplace and then eventually the biggest insult to the Magistracy in living memory, the Sentencing Guidelines Council!!!!!   Virtually ever offence has had its 'tariff' reduced and reduced over the years the Council has reigned over sentencing in this country, and virtually every Magistrate is utterly and completely frustrated, because they sit week in week out and see exactly what goes on in our society and in our Courts and they are powerless, unable to call a halt to the obscene leniency of sentences.
 
'Would I be wrong in thinking that if any political party were to take a real tough stance on criminality (not parking offences and people driving at 32 in a 30) then their votes wouldn't even need to be counted, weighed perhaps, but not counted.  Im talking here of harsh prison regimes, no computers or playstations etc.  Five years inside meaning five years served in a bleak environment to which no one would wish a return. Ok, at the end of the sentence I would offer the opportunity to stay in a kind of probation led half way house where meaningful rehabilitation could take place, but only AFTER completing the sentence.   I could go on and argue the case for capital and corporal punishment, but I fear things are too far gone for those sanctions to be reconsidered , although again I suspect a referendum would provide some interesting results. Having said that of course I realise that politicians no longer represent the views of those who elected them.'

Note to webcrawlers: "Peter Hitchens publishes a sad account of the decline of justice and morality in the English criminal court system"