I suppose we shall have to get used to living in a mad country. We’re alleged to be a democracy and we have a government that absolutely nobody voted for. We’re overcrowded and all our public services are at breaking point, so we encourage mass immigration. Family breakdown is the main cause of social disorder, so we continue with the policies that make it happen. Comprehensive education has failed completely, so we make it illegal to open new grammar schools. Many of our key power stations will soon have to close, so we plan to replace these with futile windmills that only work… when the wind is blowing. Oh, and we try ten-year-old boys, too young to be capable of the sex act, for a supposed rape for which there was no physical evidence. This is disastrous for all the children involved, who are now marked for life by an incident that would have been much better forgotten. But it is also a symptom of what has happened to the official mind. Can you imagine the scared, wooden-headed process that led to this tragi-comedy? My guess is that the police and the CPS were frightened of being publicly martyred by our sex-obsessed culture, which combines an almost total neglect of children with a sickly sentimentalisation of them. They swallowed the conventional wisdom that James Bulger and Baby Peter were the victims of failed state intervention, rather than of unrestrained, fearless human evil. Then there’s the trial itself, the process of justice turned into a nursery game, so as not to frighten the little ones. On this occasion, two other children – too young to face adult justice – were on trial. But it could have been an adult. This foolish episode, rather than being seen as an over-reaction to a nasty but forgettable episode, is now being used as an argument for yet more steps to make it easier for children to give evidence. This is just an attempt by Left-wing reformers to use the trial as an excuse to get what they want anyway. It doesn’t follow at all, and is very dangerous. Children who make criminal accusations – and the adults who encourage them to do so, often for their own ends – should learn very quickly indeed that the law and the courts are utterly terrifying. They should have to stand in gloomy, intimidating courtrooms, in the presence of the person they accuse. They should be cross-examined rigorously. Judges should wear wigs and deliver freezing lectures on the wickedness of telling lies. There should be no teddy bears, video screens or bottles of syrupy fluid for them to clutch and suck. Because children are suggestible and they can lie, even while holding teddies and slurping blackcurrant juice, and those lies can send an innocent person to prison for many years, and how else are they going to understand this? In one particularly ghastly moment in this trial, we learned how a police officer asked one of the boys what he knew about sex. The boy replied: ‘I don’t know what it means.’ Asked how to make a baby, he replied: ‘We need a man there and need a woman and that’s it. I don’t want to tell you this.’ Now, Mr Fry is so busy presenting every programme on BBC Radio and TV that he probably never listens to the wireless, and so doesn’t know what the rest of us know – that digital sound broadcasting is a great big fuzzy, unreliable flop. And if everybody keeps their FM sets, we may yet defeat this scheme. By the way, I am noticing growing resistance to self-service tills at supermarkets. Insist on being served by a human. Or soon there will be nothing but automatic tills, all talking like Stephen Fry. ‘Unexpected item in bagging area. Tee-hee.’ I think enough time has passed since Dunkirk for us to admit the truth about it. It was not a triumph, but a terrible national defeat – surpassed in the 20th Century only by the other Churchillian catastrophe of Singapore in 1942. Having entered a war for which we were wholly unready, for a cause which was already lost, at a time we did not choose and with allies on whom we could not rely, we were flung off the continent of Europe in weeks. Only thanks to a double devil’s pact did we survive as a nation. We sold our economy and our empire to Franklin Roosevelt’s USA, and we handed half of Europe to Joseph Stalin’s homicidal tyranny. They won the war in the end, though we had to contribute many lives to their victory. Then we looked on as they rearranged the world. Sooner or later, the fuzzy, cosy myth of World War Two and our ‘Finest Hour’ will fade. We once needed to pretend Dunkirk was a triumph. If we are to carve our way in a hostile world, we now need to understand – as those who were actually on the beaches well knew – that it wasn’t any such thing. I think that will do for now. The wretched techniques and evasions adopted by the supporters of this scandalous horror seem to me to be yet more reason to call into question the diagnosis. So, as I have pointed out elsewhere, any forum of this kind has to have rules, and telling untruths about other contributors or the host of the site has to be an offence against even the most generous rules anyone could devise. Mr Barnes wasn't 'banned', as one contributor claims. He banned himself, first by telling an untruth about me, and then by refusing the opportunity I offered him, either to substantiate his claims or to apologise and withdraw. I have followed this procedure before. I shall follow it again. I do not think it in any way threatens the freedom of debate here. And I would add, as I have said to others treated in the same way, that a proper unreserved retraction and apology, sent direct to me at the Mail on Sunday for publication, will at any time gain him readmission - if he wants it. But perhaps he would rather pretend to be a martyr. It is his choice. But is it only these evocations? Or is there just something extraordinarily moving about the sight of unconcealed, easily understood power - the red roar of the furnace, the great connecting rods like steel limbs, the exposed wheels taller than a man? I've no idea. But I hope I never cease to be thrilled by it, whatever it is. And last Saturday evening, partly because there were no trains between Didcot and Oxford, I took the opportunity to bicycle through Sutton Courtenay, the rather lovely village where he is buried, and to pay my respects at his properly modest grave, six feet of English earth (no metres for him), under a Yew tree, near the Thames.
29 May 2010
This is the law, not teddy-hugging time at the local nursery
27 May 2010
Trying to blind us with 'Science'
26 May 2010
There have to be rules
25 May 2010
Out of the Past
24 May 2010 12:25 PM
Smelly Little Orthodoxies
Sunday, 30 May 2010
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
This isn’t playtime. It’s a nasty, unforgiving game called ‘Shall we ruin the defendant’s life, or not?’ Those who think this is hard on the children have a simple solution. Don’t pros ecute on the basis of what they say. If a child’s testimony can’t stand up in hard conditions, then it shouldn’t be taken seriously in law.
But above all, this case was about the rape of innocence. There was a time not at all long ago when children knew almost nothing of sex. Now they can’t avoid it if they watch TV, and are incessantly taught about its most loveless aspects in schools.
Those words ‘I don’t want to tell you this’ move me profoundly. Despite all the filth and slime by which he had been surrounded, at school and on TV, the boy had still preserved an essential modesty about things that he instinctively knew should remain private. And what kind of country is it whose police officers think they have to mouth phrases from a sex-education manual? I will tell you. It is a mad country.
Oily Fry and a great big fuzzy flop...
Stephen Fry’s voice and manner generally make me switch off the radio – that strange mixture of hair oil and molasses, bubbling with self-satisfied giggles, is more than I can take at any time of day. But now the BBC’s favourite voice is actively promoting the nasty scheme to make us all scrap our perfectly good radio sets and embrace digital broadcasting.
Dunkirk: Are we finally ready to face the truth?
* Our leaders have never been able to agree on why our troops are – still – dying and being maimed in Afghanistan. Various drivel has emerged from the mouths of politicians from Baron Comrade ‘Dr’ John Reid (‘without a shot being fired’) to Gordon Brown himself. How refreshing, then, to hear Dr Liam Fox accurately describing it as a broken 13th Century country, in which our nation-building is futile. Yet he was disavowed – for telling the truth. Why?
* Listen to the praise heaped on Exile On Main Street and the Rolling Stones by the legions of retarded adolescents who crowd our cultural media. The story of the recording of this crude gibberish is one of criminal squalor – hangers-on using children as drug mules, promiscuity and debauchery. It tells you all you need to know about the nature of rock music. When will we grow out of it?
Once again the sullen, obtuse, obdurate defenders of the absurd and revolting fantasy known as 'ADHD' advance hopelessly, sightlessly, like zombies, across the shell-cratered mud, yelling and droning their unresponsive nonsense and pretending that they know what they are talking about. They don't. Like zombies, they are immune to all the normal rules of argument, especially to facts or logic.
Some of these people come to this site only to disagree with me, and would post a contrary opinion within minutes if I declared that two and two were four or the world was round. Some have interests (we have discussed these) in maintaining that this fictional complaint is true. When they deny having such interests, the rest of us have no way of deciding if they are truthful, since so many of them hide behind false names. By contrast, I defy anyone to show that I have any other interest in this argument apart from a love of truth and a deep, angry pity for the child victims of the 'ADHD' fantasy.
All these critics have a single fault in common. They ignore or try to slither round the glaring fact that the supporters of 'ADHD' themselves have admitted, at the famous 'consensus conference' at the American National Institutes of Health 12 years ago, that there is no objective test for its presence in the human frame.
Some examples of the pitiful attempts made to circumvent this:
1. 'This statement is 12 years old, is “tired” and out of date'
Humbug. Scientific truths are not like supermarket prepared food. They do not go off simply because a certain amount of time has elapsed. This statement will cease to be valid on the day someone produces an objective test of the existence of 'ADHD;' in the human frame. They haven't. So it remains valid.
Likewise, scientific truths are not like athletes. They do not become exhausted by being exercised. The use of these expressions reveals that those who use them, for all their claims of scientific knowledge and qualifications, have departed from their scientific method in this case. We have to ask why they would do that, if they really are scientists.
2. My insistence on an objective test for 'ADHD' is said to conflict with my religious belief in a created, ordered and purposeful universe. This is a simple category error, combined with a failure to pay the slightest attention to arguments often stated here. Anyone who reads what I write will know that I reject the idea that the existence of God or the truth of the Gospels can be proved this side of the grave, which is the side of the grave all contributors to this site find themselves on. I maintain that it is a choice, which rational beings may make on the basis of preference. Nor does Christian belief impel anyone who holds it to ingest anything stronger than bread and wine.
Religious belief is therefore not in the same category as scientific knowledge, and cannot be judged on the same basis, any more than you can measure height with a thermometer, or temperature with a compass.
3. 'You know nothing about science, so you cannot judge a scientific question'. This again is a (rather moronic) misunderstanding of how human knowledge is acquired and organised. Were 'ADHD' to be supported by a genuine scientific proof, then it would indeed be open only to those skilled in chemistry and neurology to debate the validity of such a proof. But it isn't, which is the absolute precise hinge of this argument. No knowledge of chemistry, neurology or physiology is necessary to determine that, if experts agree there is no proof, there is no proof. The definition of 'ADHD' given in the DSM-IV is in clear English and open for any normal human being to read and understand, as he or she wishes, since it is crammed with expressions and definitions for which there can be no objective standard or proof. Any literate adult may form an opinion upon it. Which brings me back to the unalterable fact, that it doesn't have an objective proof. There is therefore no objective scientific dispute about this, and no requirement for scientific skills or knowledge in determining the state of affairs.
And, as I have said time without number, this would not be so important were it not for the fact that in many cases, alleged sufferers from 'ADHD' (usually powerless children in the hands of trusted adults) are dosed with powerful, objectively existing, measurable doses of chemicals. These chemicals are known *to* affect the operation of the human brain, largely because they alter the behaviour of those who take them, making them more docile and able to endure tedious and repetitive tasks (this description of the drugs' effects should give any free human being cause to shudder, in my view). However, there is very limited knowledge about *how* they affect the human brain, an organ of which we know startlingly little. I might add that there are disturbing suggestions that long-term use of these drugs can also result in unpleasant and considerable physical side-effects, for which there is a growing quantity of objective evidence. What is more, once these drugs are ingested, permanent, irreversible changes are effected on the brain of the patient. (Indeed at one stage 'ADHD' partisans grotesquely attempted to claim that these changes, caused by the very 'medication' they had themselves fed to the children, were objective evidence of the existence of 'ADHD'. Fortunately, this outrageous claim was dismissed. The obvious truth was that the physical changes were the consequence of the drugs.)
Further, the chemical involved would have the same effect upon anyone who took them, whether 'diagnosed' with 'ADHD' or 'diagnosed' not to have 'ADHD;' or not diagnosed at all. This makes them different from proper medicines, which will generally affect the symptoms of those given them for specific complaints. Eg, antibiotics, properly prescribed will cure the specific complaint for which they are prescribed. Wrong antibiotics, that is to say, those which are not specific to the disease being suffered (as I can testify from personal experience) will not cure that disease. And a person who has nothing wrong with him at all could take those antibiotics and feel no effect whatsoever. This stark difference between the juju 'medicine' of 'ADHD' in which allegedly sick and undoubtedly healthy are affected in the same way by the supposed 'medicine' - completely different from the normal practice of medicine - should surely give pause for thought to anyone seriously interested in science or medicine. Why doesn't it? Because the partisans of 'ADHD' do not see because they do not want to see. They do not want to see because they are interested parties.
Any proper scientist knows this simple rule. A scientific proposition, to be taken seriously, has to be set forth in the form of a proof. This proof must be clear, demonstrable and repeatable, based upon objective and measurable facts.
Finally (at least according to the great Philosopher of Science, Sir Karl Popper, whose view on this is widely accepted among serious scientists) it must be, potentially, capable of disproof by subsequent discoveries.
It cannot be circular - that is to say, the argument cannot assume its own truth as part of its proof. It has to start from the position that - until the proof is established - the thing which needs to be proved does not exist. 'Proofs', which start by assuming the existence of 'ADHD' and then pronouncing that supposed sufferers of 'ADHD' can be shown to have certain things in common are like a house built without a ground floor. They are impossible.
This process of proof, with the burden upon the supporter of the hypothesis, not on his opponent, is very similar to the presumption of innocence in law. The accuser has to prove that his accusation is founded in fact, in a way that can survive presentation in public, and hostile cross-examination.
So anyone calling himself a 'scientist', or 'doctor', who simply ignores this rule, is betraying his craft.
I promised to explain my decision to forbid Mike Barnes from this site, not least because I suspect it will be misrepresented elsewhere.
I was quite willing (if not exactly delighted) to tolerate Mr Barnes's contributions indefinitely, provided that he stuck to matters of opinion. But I was not prepared to allow him (or anyone else) to make factually untrue statements about me here. His suggestion that I had in any way derived or copied my positions on public policy from the positions adopted by the British National Party was factually untrue.
What is more, it went to the heart of the curious campaign waged here by the supporters of the BNP, who simultaneously denounce me for hating the BNP, and claim that I am in some way a sympathiser of it. There are so many stupid and credulous people in the world that blatant tripe of this kind actually needs to be rebutted and refuted. It shouldn't be necessary, but it is.
And by making this claim explicitly (it was implied by pro-BNP posters previously), Mr Barnes more or less compelled me to respond as I did. Please recall here that he was actually commenting on a thread about the made-up complaint 'ADHD', which had roughly nothing to do with my attitude to the BNP.
I followed my normal procedure. I gave him a set time (one week) in which he was asked either to substantiate his claim or withdraw it and apologise unreservedly for it. I knew he couldn't substantiate it, because I know it to be utterly untrue. I would rather dredge my opinions from the drainage system of (say) Bucharest than take so much as the thousandth part of an idea from the BNP. If my opinions coincide with theirs at any stage, this is purely accidental and without significance for either of us. We cannot be responsible for such accidental, unintended coincidences. But I would much have valued a retraction and apology.
The important thing about the Mike Barnes episode is not that he has chosen to leave us. It is that, given the chance to substantiate the claim he had made, he swiftly turned it down. I state here that this was because it was false and could not be substantiated. If any of the remaining BNP posters here wish to try to substantiate it, they are welcome to make the attempt. I look forward with anticipatory amusement to their lumbering, hopeless efforts.
Here I repeat a posting I placed on the relevant thread on Monday:
When will people grasp this simple point? The BNP is a cynical bandwagon. It adopts policies, without consistency or rigour, in pursuit of the power it seeks to implement its bigoted agenda. That is how its leader has managed to go to Libya in search of support from the Gaddafi Islamic regime, and then to pose as the scourge of Islam. Nothing it says means anything, except its racial bigotry, its Judophobia, and its inability to avoid violence. I have, a dozen times on this site, drawn attention to Mr N.Griffin's US appearance in which his real purpose is stated, by himself.
Some examples of the absurdity of 'Bob, son of Bob’'s attempts to link me with this organisation:
The Late Lord James of Rusholme, Graham Brady MP, and I (and several other principled and thoughtful people untainted by racial bigotry or National Socialist sympathies) all support or supported grammar schools. Each of us arrived at this conclusion thanks to principle and experience. The BNP (currently) supports grammar schools. Why should Mr Brady, Lord James or I give a tinker's curse if a grouplet which once celebrated Hitler's birthday has for the moment adopted a 'policy' which coincides with our opinions? How can it possibly be suggested that we owe this idea to them? The BNP's support for any action or policy would give me pause over that action or policy's validity, and cause me to re-examine it carefully, not impel me to support it.
The BNP could adopt the 'policies' of St Francis of Assisi, or Mother Teresa of Calcutta, or Joan of Arc, or, so far as I can see, of Kemal Ataturk. But that wouldn't make these people sympathisers of the BNP, unless they chose to say they were. Since I have taken a great deal of trouble to say repeatedly and unequivocally that I despise and reject the BNP, this ridiculous attempt to rub up against me and claim my sympathy is becoming wearisome. Grasp this. I hate and despise the BNP, and hope it now tears itself to pieces and disintegrates, and so frees proper patriotic conservatives from the endless tedious burden of having to repel its greasy embraces.
I do really hope that is clear. If any BNP sympathiser remains in any doubt of my scorn and loathing for this organisation, then it must mean that English is not his or her first language.
Anyway, Mr Barnes decided not to take advantage of the week's grace I offered him. He immediately replied, saying:
(21st May, 5.25 pm) ‘Oh dear that really hit home didn't it. As for withdrawing apologising and such. Not a hope old bean.’
I replied: ‘In view of Mr Barnes's direct refusal either to substantiate or withdraw (and apologise for) the falsehoods he has uttered about me, I shall instruct the moderators that his posts should no longer accepted from Monday, under any name. He may, before he departs, be sure that nothing he has ever written here has 'hit home' on any subject, nor is it likely to do so anywhere else. On the contrary, watching his attempts to argue has been like watching a man trying to shoot snipe with a perished catapult and some blobs of congealed porridge.
People don't get expelled from this blog for being rude about me or for besting me in argument. I have acted against him (as I have acted against other contributors a few times before) solely and simply because he has made serious allegations which he cannot substantiate, which he will not withdraw and for which he will not apologise. That is one of the rules here, and he has broken it. He was given the opportunity to stay, and turned it down.’
What is it about steam locomotives? Is it just my generation and the ones before, or does the curious magic of these things affect the young as well? Twice in the past few months I've been at railway stations when proper mainline steam specials have unexpectedly passed through, as opposed to those unsatisfactory, twiddly little branch lines where you can spend a bank-holiday afternoon watching some old shunter mocked up as Thomas the Tank Engine pottering along a few yards of track.
One was pulled by an old Great Western King Class engine, the other by an old Southern Railway Merchant Navy class monster, of the sort that used to haul me backwards and forwards to and from boarding school in my childhood.
Both, of course, were in superb condition - as they rarely were in the final weary days of British Railways. Both emitted immense quantities of steam - the King Class grew a sort of gigantic white moustache before moving off, and looked as if it was pawing the ground. The Merchant Navy class actually 'let off steam', an expression people nowadays use who've never seen or heard what this really means, a deafening white column shooting high into the sky.
On both occasions I felt a curious exhilaration, and actually ran to get a closer look before they vanished, perhaps for good. In the end, they're only machines, so why do some of us find them so captivating? George Orwell (see previous posting) once wrote about the strange uplifting effect that the sight of big guns had on him when some passed by in a station during the Spanish Civil War. It's not all that hard to work out why that should be. But railway engines? Diesel and electric ones just don't do it for me. I could understand trainspotters if they still had steam. But now? Where's the pleasure? It's steam that somehow catches me.
For me I must confess that it's partly the seduction of nostalgia, which I know to be a false comforter. The sight of a steam-hauled train is a door straight into the past. It strikes several senses at once, including smell, the most evocative of all (though the echo of the deep, steady bark of an accelerating express locomotive as it gathers speed through the suburbs is pretty evocative too). If this thing suddenly exists again, then perhaps the lost, demolished streets of handsome houses behind the gasworks have mysteriously reappeared, perhaps the cattle market and the brewery are open again, and the old sorting office where I used to do Christmas shifts has reappeared, and the buses have conductors, and policemen are walking the beat in tunics and helmets and my parents are still alive, and lots of other people to whom I need to offer apologies are available again, and if I reach into my pocket I'll find it full of proper heavy money instead of the poor thin stuff they give us nowadays.
And then the illusion goes again, of course, when you see that the train is not a normal one, but a shiny Pullman with linen tablecloths and cut-glass lamps.
I'll respond to general comments, and perhaps expand on my decision to forbid this site to Mike Barnes, later in the week.
In the meantime, I'd like to indulge myself and post a few mildly controversial thoughts on the Orwell Prize for Journalism, which I am proud to say I won last week. This was the one prize I had always wanted, as someone who has steeped himself in Orwell since the age of 15 and regards him as the pattern of honest writing. Because Orwell was of the Left (though a very troubled and troublesome member of that movement) he is regarded by many on the modern left as their perpetual property. I disagree. I think Orwell belongs to the truth, not to the left. And I think the judges recognised this crucial fact when they chose to quote from Orwell's essay on Charles Dickens in their citation (this was the moment when I, having pretty much assumed that it would be awarded to someone else, began to hope that I might win after all).
By the way, I really do have to thank the judges, Peter Kellner and Roger Graef, for their magnanimity in giving me the award when they must have known that so many of their friends would strongly disapprove. I can hear the aggrieved cries of ‘How could you give it to him?’, which they will now have to endure. By showing that magnanimity, they showed that they - and the Prize in general - understand the spirit of Orwell better than do many of those who resent my getting it.
Orwell wrote of Dickens as ‘a man who is always fighting against something but who fights in the open and is not frightened...a man who is generously angry...a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’
No, it's not that I presume to compare myself with Dickens (though I would cite 'Great Expectations', 'David Copperfield' and 'A Tale of Two Cities' as among the greatest books ever written). But I do think it's the case that - if you do your job properly - you will be loathed by the smelly little orthodoxies of your own age.
My thanks to those who sent kind wishes on my winning it. My thanks also to those who didn't. One of the delights of winning this award, for which I have entered unsuccessfully several times, is that quite a lot of the right, or left sort of people will be annoyed that I have got it. I even like to think that Orwell himself might have enjoyed the sharp intake of breath among London's left-wing mediocracy when they were reminded last Wednesday night that I was on the short-list. (They behaved impeccably when the actual award was announced, I should add). He might also have enjoyed the tiny, tiny mention of my name in the Guardian's report on the award, which dwelt mainly on the Blog Prize given to the pseudonymous social worker 'Winston Smith'.
Soon afterwards there was the comment by Roy Greenslade on his blog: ‘I would guess that some, more than some, leftish-inclined journalists were a little put out by Peter Hitchens having been awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism. The iconoclastic Mail on Sunday columnist picked up the award for his foreign reporting. Evidently, a friend warned Hitchens afterwards to be careful because people would now think he was respectable. “Never”, he replied, “they'll hate me even more for this.” ’
The reported conversation did take place exactly as described, by the way, and I stand by it.
And I will always treasure another Guardian blog comment by legal expert Afua Hirsch, the closest anyone has come to saying openly that they disagree with the judges. Under the headline ‘Some wins more surprising than others’, Ms Hirsch wrote: ‘This year's Orwell prize steered close, as ever, to the most current political issues of the moment. Despite having nominated an array of journalists feted for their coverage of issues including protest rights or social breakdown, the award for journalism went to the Mail on Sunday's Peter Hitchens. The audience – comprised of liberal, political writers and bloggers – struggled to express an informed view on that choice of award because so few of them read the Mail on Sunday.’
And no doubt they're all proud of that, that so few of them read the MoS. And yet I read 'The Guardian' and 'The Observer' and I would be ashamed to be a member of my trade and admit that I didn't.
I think that 'despite' and the tortured grammar that follows it, speak volumes. Oddly enough, I do write about protest rights (on this blog particularly but elsewhere too, see the posting 'It's not debatable') and incessantly about social breakdown, but not perhaps in a way that Ms Hirsch would want me to.
What is it that I like about Orwell? Above all it is the good, clear English and the desire to be truthful even at some cost. Orwell ran into a great deal of trouble with the left (especially over 'Homage to Catalonia') because he refused to be an orthodox servant of his own cause. He once wrote (in a preface to 'Animal Farm' which was then itself not published):
‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
The paradox in this is that 'Animal Farm' itself was very nearly not published, not least thanks to the disgraceful behaviour of T.S.Eliot, a man who really should have known better.
I have explained (well, to some people, anyway) how this orthodoxy works in some ways in an earlier posting on bias in the publishing industry. But I know that Orwell never had a column in a national Sunday newspaper. So again, I am not in any way claiming a martyr's crown here, merely pointing out that I meet hostility and obstruction where a more orthodox writer would not. It is also the case that, in these times, conservative newspapers and magazines are more likely to foster and project unorthodox voices than are the journals of the left, which are bland and smug, while imagining themselves to be exciting and radical.
It's pointless to speculate on what Orwell would have made of the post Cold War world, of the 1960s cultural revolution, or of the controversies of today. We cannot know, and nobody should claim him as their own. But I have absolutely no doubt that, had he lived, he would have continued to annoy people by telling truths they did not wish to hear. There's a quotation I can't properly remember in which he said that a genuinely controversial opinion would always be a dangerous thing, because it would arouse serious fury (any Orwellians out there who can identify this? It was much better put).
And I wouldn't dare claim that I am somehow the inheritor of his mantle. That would be absurd. The point is, the Guardian isn't the inheritor of his mantle either.
But I do think that his extraordinary attempt to combine fierce patriotism with radical politics, in 'The Lion and the Unicorn' is in many ways as upsetting to the radical orthodoxy, who are never patriotic, as is his hostility to Stalinist totalitarianism (which they all excoriate now it's safe to do so, but would have apologised for when it was still powerful and fashionable, as they prove with their attitude towards Cuba).
I would also point to a strong cultural conservatism and dislike for crass modernity in much of his writings, especially in my favourite among his light novels, 'Coming up for Air'. And I always like to tease his modern partisans by pointing out that he specified in his Will that he should be buried (as I hope to be) according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England as set out in the 1662 Prayer Book, about the most uncompromising, raw, earthy and traditional religious service anywhere in any language. He'd also expressed a wish, granted thanks to his friend David Astor, to be laid in an English country churchyard.
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