They are generally pretty good at hiding their feelings, but there are some topics that will earn me noticeable stares of hatred and loathing in the Corporation’s corridors. One (and you’ll have to work out why this is) is my view that the laws against possessing cannabis should be enforced properly. The other is my belief that heinous murderers should be hanged. This opinion, in the judgment of BBC types, along with most people who consider themselves to be educated, makes me a barbarian and unfit for civilised company. Yet I believe, even more this week than last week, that the gallows is much more civilised, and far less barbaric, than keeping such murderers alive for long years in prison. I completely disagree with people such as the Left-wing Daily Mirror columnist Brian Reade who wrote, after the killing of Sarah Payne, that capital punishment was ‘civilised society stooping to the level of the depraved’ and then added: ‘If they catch whoever did it, hanging is too good for him. A life spent dodging razor blades in his food, needing an armed guard whenever he takes a shower, fearing every night if he will get his throat slashed tomorrow is more fitting punishment.’ Well, in the case of the child-killer Ian Huntley, Mr Reade has got his wish. Is he pleased that the task of justice has been handed over to some low-life with a home-made knife? Did he hear the news of Huntley’s slashed throat with satisfied joy? Did he wish the attacker had finished the job? Or did he (I hope he did) feel a slight qualm at the actual fulfilment of his boasted wishes? In either case, how on earth has he the nerve to call me ‘depraved’, because I believe that the State can in rare cases take life, after a fair trial held in public with the presumption of innocence, a jury and the possibility of appeal and reprieve? How is this ‘depraved’, especially in comparison to the hellish lynchings he advocates, in which the low deal out retribution to the even lower? [related] Even so, I’ll say this for Mr Reade and the rest of the ‘hanging is too good for them’ crowd. At least, unlike the pious Guardian readers, who have no conception of what liberal-run prisons are like, they understand the consequences of their beliefs, and are prepared openly to defend them. ********************************************************************************************** Professor David Nutt, that ninny-brained menace to the nation’s young people, is now advocating state-regulated handouts of mephedrone and ecstasy in nightclubs, on the grounds that this would be safer than a legal ban. It is a reflection of the state of our education system that people like Professor Nutt are chosen to advise the Government on drugs policy. These substances can never be safe. The young need a good reason to resist peer pressure to take them. Their parents need all the help they can get, as they plead with their children to stay away from the horrible risks of drugs. I do hope that, long before the end of his smug life, Professor Nutt wakes up one night in a cold sweat and realises what it is that he has done, and is still helping to do. And I hope it is soon. These people are not actually evil, only too stupid and self-satisfied to realise that what they do is evil. ********************************************************************************************** I don't much like UKIP or its ex-leader Nigel Farage. I’ve called UKIP a ‘Dad’s Army’ party for years. So I was quite flattered to see that ‘Interviewer of the Year’ Camilla Long used my phrase in her extraordinary interview with Mr Farage. But I was then puzzled to see that she spent a great deal of energy on the fact that Mr Farage once suffered from cancer and had a testicle removed as a result. She even rang him up afterwards to ask which one it was. He took this in good part. But should we? Can you imagine what would happen to a male journalist who interviewed a liberal female politician who had lost a breast to cancer, made that the jokey theme of the resulting article, and rang her up afterwards to ask which breast it was? Can you picture the outrage of the cancer charities, the wild storm of fury on Twitter, the pink-ribboned crowds gathering outside the newspaper’s office? But because Mr Farage is male and his cause is ‘Right-wing’, you can do what you like. The first proper study of these hideous, intrusive things shows that it is only subsidies that make them viable. And those subsidies, which are pushing up all our electricity bills, are based on warmist fanaticism, not on reason. Only the very best of the land-based farms operate at 50 per cent of their supposed capacity. Many others produce only 25 to 30 per cent. One, in Blyth Harbour in Northumberland, produces only 7.9 per cent of its maximum capacity. Wind power is, was and always will be a fantasy. Yet it is the official policy of all the major political parties in this country, as we head towards a Third World electricity shortage not many years ahead. ********************************************************************************************** I’m proud to say that Gordon Brown’s Labour machine still hates me as much as Anthony Blair’s lot did. My timely application for credentials to attend the Premier’s Election Press conferences has been rejected by some functionary ‘due to extremely high demand’. High demand? At a General Election? What a surprise. In Blair’s day, two Press office lackeys tried to close the doors in my face at the launch of the 1997 manifesto, squealing falsely ‘It’s full!’ In that case, I just pushed past, but in these despotic days ‘security’ will now prevent that. It’s nice to know that these supposedly gigantic figures are still so scared of hostile questioning that they are prepared to behave in this moronic, Stalinist fashion. ********************************************************************************************** * Where are they now, all those people who told us we must join the euro? Now that it is plainly the German ramp it always was, now that the countries trapped in it cannot devalue their way out of trouble, and Greece is sent off to beg from the IMF, where are Kenneth Clarke and Lord Heseltine and that impartial BBC chap whose name escapes me, who once denounced me in print for my opposition to the single currency? Time to say sorry, any of you? ********************************************************************************************** * The alleged poet Sir Andrew Motion (can anyone quote a single line of his work from memory?) claims, amid huge publicity, to be writing a sequel to that great book Treasure Island. I doubt it very much. It will be for readers to decide if Sir Andrew’s work is a ‘sequel’ or just an attempt to follow a great writer and cash in on his deserved fame. I shall be interested to see just how politically correct this new work is, as almost all children’s books published these days are – and as Treasure Island is not.
The noose - or a low-life with a knife? I know which form of justice I think is the more barbaric
More drugs nonsense from Professor Nutt
The joke’s on you if you’re male and Right-wing
13 years on, and still I scare them
Sunday, 28 March 2010
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
When I am allowed on to BBC premises, I always feel sorry for the person who has to escort me to the studio. I can feel her discomfort at being seen speaking to, and walking next to, a horrible Right-wing monster.
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* Tear down those windmills. Those of us who have long argued against the national plague of ugly wind farms, ruining huge areas of our loveliest landscapes, were right all along.
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