You can't hear the jackboots, but this is still oppression
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
We used to think that Communism would arrive in this country on the bayonets of Soviet soldiers, if it came at all. We never realised that it would instead materialise amid our freedom and prosperity, step by tiny step, in the form of bureaucratic interference and political correctness.
As one of the few British people who has actually lived in a Communist country (Moscow in the early Nineties, since you ask), I know better than most what such societies feel like, and how they work. And in the past two weeks I have seen several developments in Britain which seem strangely familiar.
The first was a proposal to refuse school places to children who had not been given the MMR injection. I have no idea if the MMR is safe or not. But I know many thoughtful and well-informed people who believe that it damaged their children, or fear that it might do so. A free country would not blackmail individuals in this way.
The next was a sinister report from the 'Department for Children' demanding that prying officials be empowered to force their way into the homes of parents who prefer to educate their sons and daughters at home.
This is our all-powerful State's angry response to a growing rebellion, by mothers and fathers who are sick of seeing their children bullied, neglected and miseducated in the state education system, and rightly think they can do a better job. How can the commissars in charge of the Western world's worst schools be fit to judge how well a parent is teaching her own child?
The pretext for this invasion of privacy is a baseless suggestion that home education could be used as a cover for child abuse. Well, so it could, and so could piano lessons, dentistry or newspaper delivery rounds. But these are not subject to Comrade Balls's new inquisition. Why not? Because they don't challenge his desire to march all children into egalitarian comprehensive sausage machines, notorious as they are for violence, ignorance and drugs.
Interesting, isn't it, that on the one hand these new Stalinists want to deny school to the children of dissenters, and on the other to force dissenters to send their children to school. I suspect that what they really want to do is to prosecute both groups, and these moves are a step towards that. The common theme is the desire to tell people what to think.
But there's a third development which should also scare us. Two thirds of British pre-school children are now left in nurseries as their mothers are marched off to wage-slavery.
Well, you might like to know that Vladimir Lenin once described such nurseries as 'the germ cell of the Communist society' because they stole children from their parents and placed upbringing in the hands of the authorities.
Private life, the family home, freedom of conscience and action, have never been so menaced. But because this oppression is not accompanied by the crash of goose-stepping jackboots, we don't see it for what it is. It is time we did.
The Tories are EU losers, too
The great mass of political journalists are now committed to a Liberal Tory victory at the next Election - because most of them share David Cameron's pro-EU Blairite views, and because many of them expect favours of one kind or another from him.
That is why they did not tell you the truth about last weekend's election results. They went on and on about how badly Labour did, which was fair enough. But they tried to avoid mentioning how very badly the Liberal Tories did too. Mr Cameron's Unconservative Party got only 27.45 per cent, one point up on 2004. This is miles below the 35.77 per cent scored by William Hague in 1999. Meanwhile, the so-called 'fringe' parties heavily outpolled the Tories with 36 per cent of the vote. My guess is that this means a hung Parliament at the next General Election.
In the same way, the new and startling revelations about the Liberal Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, are so damaging to the Liberal Tory project that (like Mr Cameron's own greedy housing claims) they are being soft-pedalled by the media. In case you missed it, Mr Osborne (very rich in his own right) has been claiming close to the maximum for a tasteful farmhouse in the Cheshire countryside. He disputes allegations that he 'flipped' from one property to another.
I must confess that his property arrangements are so complex and ingenious that I am unable to judge. But the question - as with Mr Cameron - remains. Why does such a rich person need to plunder the taxpayers at all? If these two were Labour Ministers, instead of Liberal Tories, they would be in deep trouble. They should be anyway.
Beginning of the end for Iran's fanatics?
Not long ago I travelled to Iran and reported here that this beautiful, fascinating and complicated country is full of pro-Western people and potentially our best friend in the Middle East.
I think the policy of isolating and boycotting Teheran only strengthens the fanatics there.
The results of last week's election have, in my view, been shamelessly rigged by those fanatics, who know in their hearts that they have lost the support of the people - especially the young.
I do not think they will be able to crush dissent forever, and this crude, brainless manipulation may - with luck - trigger a process that will liberate the country from repression.
Do not confuse Iran's people with their rulers.
• Rattling through Oxfordshire on the way home from Japan, in my non-bullet train, I noticed from the exotic red patches on the Chiltern foothills that Britain's opium poppy crop is once again flourishing. Remind me, somebody, what exactly our soldiers are doing in Afghanistan.
• Because we cannot hang the killers of Ben Kinsella, we may be sure that there will in future be several more murders of the same kind. Such people are not at all afraid of prison, where they are among their own kind and can get all the drugs they want. But fear is the only thing that will restrain them.
• Margaret Thatcher is said to have wept when it was recently pointed out to her that she closed more grammar schools than her Labour predecessor as Education Secretary. I don't wish to be cruel to an old lady, but I think she was right to cry. Their failure to rescue the state education system from the barbarians was one of the worst crimes committed by the Tories, and the one which best sums up their general lack of interest in undoing the damage done by Labour. Interesting that Mr Cameron is now wholly committed to comprehensive education, his Clause Four moment. Except that, rather than dropping Clause Four, he has adopted it.
• I am glad that there has been some sort of justice over the Omagh massacre, but I have never believed there is any such organisation as the 'Real IRA'. Given that we surrendered completely to the IRA - and to the the 'Loyalist' scum - in Belfast at Easter 1998, why should any IRA man want to protest? The authorities have to pretend this fictional grouping exists because otherwise they'd have to admit the truth - that the IRA remains at all times armed and ready to restart its murder campaign if it doesn't get its way fast enough.
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