Britons will be 'forced to hand over NI number, date of birth and signature to get voting rights'
Under new Government plans people will be asked to provide 'personal identifiers' when they register to vote, which critics say raises serious privacy concerns.
PETER OBORNE: The Iraq blunder that could finish Brown off
23 January 2010 8:01 PM
What if the horrors of Edlington were visited on cosy Notting Hill?
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
David Cameron was nearly right on Friday. He is right that marriage is far better than non-marriage.
He is right that our society is broken. He is right that our consciences should be shocked by the feral, pitiless nature of so many of the children of our slob nation.
And then you remembered that Mr Cameron and those who surround him are exactly the sort of people who like and enjoy our new relaxed society (he says he likes Britain as it is, remember?), which I shall politely describe as sex and drugs and rock and roll.
There is a lot of thunderous rumbling from the Conservative leader, but when you look back and read the words, you find this: Mr Cameron’s answer to half a century of selfish social vandalism by the elite is a paltry tax-break, which appears and disappears all the time, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
The thing is wretched in itself - as if marriage had been destroyed by the tax system.
But it is worse than that. Its actual fulfilment is now so much in doubt that it has been described by Mr Cameron’s media spinners as a ‘cast-iron pledge’ - oh, you mean, like the ‘cast-iron pledge’ for a referendum on Lisbon? Scrap-metal pledge, more likely.
Let us assume he believes his own rhetoric, which is always conceivable, even in a professional PR man and an Oxford PPE graduate.
He says he wants to fix a society which can produce the children who did what was done at Edlington.
Let us not be in any doubt that this sort of blank-eyed savagery is something new. It is not down to one in a million individuals, but to upbringing and circumstances.
I expect The Guardian and the other smooth, complacent media will be full of claims in the next few days that this sort of thing has always gone on, and we can draw no conclusions from it.
The point they miss is that the culprits in this case are almost certainly not freaks. I do not think they were born without consciences.
I think they have had their consciences shrivelled by the lives they have led. Though they are monsters, they are monsters we have helped to make.
Imagine if the same two boys had been brought up in a stable family, untouched by the drug culture, their minds unpolluted by televised slurry.
Imagine how it would have been if adults always felt able to discipline wayward children in the street, if local policemen had existed at all and felt free to wallop miscreants.
Imagine if the place was full of experienced mothers, whose main task was to raise children, and hard-working fathers with real jobs.
Imagine disciplined children in orderly schools. Imagine pubs governed by strict opening hours.
These things haven’t been destroyed in Britain because they were expensive.
On the contrary, in the days when we had them, people lived much more modest lives than they do now.
They were destroyed because they got in the way of the pleasure principle. We were happy and we didn’t know it.
We thought we would be happier if we threw off all restraint. And we aren’t. We are increasingly miserable and afraid.
We should learn from this that a stable, peaceful, gentle society, such as we used to have, did not come free of charge.
Isn’t it now obvious that we made a very bad bargain when we had our cultural revolution? We didn’t like hard discipline in the classroom.
Is the grunting stone-age chaos of so many modern schools an improvement? We didn’t like the fact that the police roughed up their suspects. Now the suspects rough us up. Is that better? For whom?
We didn’t like having to stay together for the sake of the children. So we broke up for the sake of ourselves.
Are mass divorce, pandemic illegitimacy and the CSA a price worth paying for our liberation?
We didn’t like failing exams. Is an education system where everyone passes, and nobody knows anything, an improvement?
Women wanted equality with men. But women still get pregnant, and men still don’t, so ‘equality’ actually means that women work twice as hard as they used to, and generally have to pay strangers to bring up their children. A good bargain?
Face it, all these changes were stupid (and so were quite a few others I haven’t room for here).
They have done - and continue to do - tremendous, deep damage to our souls and bodies, and if there was ever a time to have a good, full-scale howling moral panic, this is that time.
Yet if anyone proposes real radical measures to put these things right - the end of subsidies for fatherless homes, the reintroduction of hard discipline in schools, measures to make divorce difficult again, the freeing of the police from liberal codes of practice, the restoration of the powers of adults to discipline children - then they are called ‘extremists’, and the David Camerons of this world tell us that we ‘cannot go back to the old days’ .
They don’t say this because they believe it to be true. In their hearts, they know it could be done.
They say it partly because they are defeatists who lack the courage to try. But also partly because they are very comfortable as they are in Islington and Notting Hill, and if that means that fiends from Hell appear in less favoured parts of the country, what is that to them?
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