07 August 2010 7:31 PM
Halfwitted leniency failed again...yet still Mr Injustice Ball thinks he’s right
I do not know how or why the honest people of this country continue to tolerate the insults thrown in their faces by the establishment. Take the case of the career burglar Bradley Wernham, now 19, who has been thieving since he was 12 years old, targeting everything from churches to expensive cars.
The grief, anger and distress of his victims – about which our Criminal Injustice System cares nothing – can barely be imagined.
What happened to him would be ludicrous in any other country. But in this mad nation – under rules which the current Government has no plans to change – a deluded judge gave this creature a ‘last chance’ after hundreds of robberies.
Three months ago, in defiance of all common sense, Judge Christopher Ball arranged for Wernham and his girlfriend to live rent-free at your expense, in a town where he was until then unknown, while he supposedly did ‘community service’.
To the surprise of nobody except that judge, Wernham learned the only lesson possible from this treatment – that the police and the courts are pathetic and feeble and can safely be laughed at. So he carried on committing his crimes.
Mr Injustice Ball has now sentenced Wernham to what is officially called ‘five years’ in prison, but which will, in fact, add up to 18 months. These daily lies from the lips of judges should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act.
No wonder the thief smirked as he was told his fate. During his imprisonment, Wernham can relax, play pool and watch TV among people just like himself. If he wants to, he will also be able to take illegal drugs, which our prison regime tacitly permit in the hope of keeping the convicts quiet.
Maybe if he had been sternly dealt with at the age of 12, Wernham might have been turned into a good and useful person. But strictness and severity have been made illegal, so that chance was lost. Now, all the rest of us can hope for is that he eventually grows too old and unhealthy to be a menace and contents himself with being a parasite on the welfare system.
But save your handkerchiefs for later. The real shame of this case is not the arrogance of a system that puts its own tender conscience above the welfare of the people. Nor is it the outrage of the wicked deeds unpunished. It is that those respons ible are so utterly convinced of the rightness of their folly that they have not one regret.
Note what Mr Injustice Ball said afterwards. Praising the Essex police for ‘standing by the alternative to jail’, he def ended his policy of halfwitted leniency and announced that he would continue with it.
‘The fact that it has not been successful in that Mr Wernham (note that use of ‘‘Mister’’) has chosen to reoffend must not discourage the police from continuing to employ this approach to selected offenders,’ he said.
So that’s it. It doesn’t work, it is self-evidently stupid, and the criminals laugh at it – but we, the ruling liberal con servative elite, will continue to do it, because we think we are too good and kind to dirty our hands with the punishment of evil.
Nanny knows true cost of having it all
Every few months, another successful career woman plunges into the debate about motherhood versus paid work. Now, the author Fay Weldon and the actress Emma Thompson are tussling over ‘having it all’. Neither of them has anything particularly interesting to say, because the truth cannot be spoken openly among such people.
That truth is that children suffer terribly from the absence of mothers – and fathers – from their lives. Most of the social problems of our broken society stem from my generation’s selfish pretence that we can follow our own pleasures at the expense of our offspring, and nothing bad will happen.
The lie is so pervasive that when research proves the hurt is genuine, new research has to be commissioned to contradict it. Hence the ridiculous American survey, much trumpeted by the Left-wing BBC last week, which says the damage done to young children by the absence of their mothers is outweighed by higher family income and better ‘mental health’ among their mothers. In other words, adult riches and pleasure cancel out childish loss and grief. What a repulsive calculation.
But I will forgive Emma Thompson her vagueness because she is personally responsible for one of the year’s best films. This is Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang, in which – with the delightful Maggie Gyllenhaal – she makes a gripping case for responsible, non-indulgent parenthood and an equally strong case against divorce.
Who’ll winkle Dave out of his mansion?
David Cameron, let us not forget, has a heavily subsidised and rather large country home in Oxfordshire. We all helped pay for it. I doubt if anyone will be able to winkle him out of it to make way for someone more needy when his children have left the nest.
So he is not well-placed to offer lectures to council-house dwellers about how their tenure is too secure.
In fact, if he really had any big ideas, it might cross his mind that the great sale of council houses wasn’t in fact the mighty success that Tories (who have generally never been further inside a council house than the doorstep) still imagine it was.
It broke up many settled and well-mixed communities. It hugely inflated the national housing market. It made it virtually compulsory for young couples to go into debt if they wanted a home.
And it created the vast, unfair corrupt morass of housing benefit, one of the costliest mistakes ever made by a British Government.
Instead of prating meaninglessly about a Big Society, a serious Government concerned for the British people would be thinking of ways to bring back council housing: proper houses with gardens for young families, priority given to those with roots in a town or village, offered at reasonable rents to tenants willing to look after their homes and behave decently to their neighbours.
Pull the plug on Huhne
This week my train was once again badly delayed because thieves had stolen the copper signal wire. Dozens of churches are claiming insurance for lead ripped from their roofs.
Towns are losing their manhole covers overnight. This hunger for metals, actually eating at the vitals of our civilisation, is one of the many disturbing consequences of the surging rise of China as an economic power – and the resulting world shortage of industrial materials.
Instead of rattling a rusty sabre at Pakistan or Iran, our Government should be urgently working out how we will survive in the new Peking-dominated world that is coming. The rising demand for metals is matched by a growing competition for oil and gas, a competition we are already losing.
Start by sacking Chris Huhne from the Cabinet and ordering two dozen nuclear power stations, as soon as possible, so that we can be sure to keep the lights on, the computers working and the wheels turning during the next 40 years.
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05 August 2010 12:38 PM
Travelling
I expect to be travelling during much of the coming week, and so will not be posting anything apart from my Mail on Sunday column. Nor do I expect to be intervening in debates.
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An Anniversary We Don't Mark Properly
The French have a holiday and a parade on Bastille Day (though they long ago buried the horrible ideas which were unleashed on that occasion, and are now among the most conservative peoples in the world, striving for the attributes of a not very constitutional monarchy while calling it a Republic). The Americans, now a mighty empire, do the same on 4th July to mark their departure from another empire. The USSR used to commemorate the Bolshevik Revolution on 7th November and countless countries have national days to recall notable events in their pasts.
But the most significant event in modern history passes by without a whisper. Yesterday was 4th August, the 96th anniversary of Britain's entry into the First World War. Other countries could mark the same thing slightly earlier or later, but this date was the moment one world ended and another began. In 1914, I believe, every country in Europe was a monarchy save one.
Soldiers went to war much as they would have done in 1815. The British state amounted to little more than a few thousand policemen and postmen. Many of the glories (and horrors) of modern science were unknown and unthought of. The world was much quieter, and much smellier, than it is now. Millions were alive, living what they thought of as secure and ordered lives, who would die violent deaths or be forced form their homes before the war's end. Christianity was the accepted religion of the European continent, practised and understood by almost everyone.
Shouldn't we commemorate this momentous day, not just at its approaching centenary, now four years away, but always - and devote at least an hour of it each year to considering how we made such a terrible mistake, whose damage is still not repaired?
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.
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04 August 2010 1:25 PM
Some Constructive Responses - the greatest pleasure in debate
In the past few days I've received some interesting and constructive responses here, civil and wise, which illustrate the way in which serious debate among people with differing views and principles can bring us closer to the truth. This doesn't necessarily mean that people have agreed with me (though in one case it does). It's the nature of the disagreement that's important - actually taking account of what has been said, responsive to it, prepared to consider it.
What a change from certain contributors, including one who now posts mechanically contrary and absurdly rapid reactions to my articles - whatever the subject - under two different names, but appears to be the same person. I don't think this behaviour is legitimate, and am considering various measures to deal with it.
The first came from Benjamin Wakefield: ‘Very occasionally I have read your column and had my opinions swayed, in this instance over the merits of empires – particularly the British version.’
Mr Wakefield makes it plain he doesn't agree with me about much. Well, exactly. Most of the people who agree with me about most things will mention that they don't agree with me about everything, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who had no quibbles or qualms.
Next, and most gratifying, came this from Mr Storke:
‘Sorry I didn't get a chance to reply on the earlier thread, I have been away and it is probably too late now.
‘I just wanted to say that, believe it or not, you have inspired me to think twice about my opinion of the criminal justice system, and you are certainly the most thoughtful and interesting right-wing writer I have read.
‘I can now understand the conservative argument for tougher penalties for crime, with more clarity, than I did before. I have had a chance to read some of your book The Abolition of Liberty, and I must say it is a well-argued and brilliantly-written book, judging from the chapters I have read.
‘I don't and never will support capital punishment, but I find your argument that a soft prison regime, actually makes life worse for the weakest and most gentle prisoners, a persuasive one. (However, surely if we only locked up violent/sexual offenders, and kept minor offenders out of jail this would rectify this situation).
‘I am now prepared to concede that perhaps we do need a more punitive prison regime, for serious offenders, (with a hard labour regime, for example) and that punishment can act as a deterrent to reoffending.’
‘But can you not concede that, if we were to spare the mentally-ill, and minor offenders, jail terms, then we might be better able to afford to rehabilitate and educate the hard-core of violent offenders who do need to be in jail, so that they are less likely to reoffend when they get out?
‘Can you not concede that, if our probation services were to help ex-prisoners find work and housing when they get out of prison, once they have been adequately punished (and stay in touch with their families while in prison), instead of abandoning them when they get out of jail, then we might give them something to aim for in life, besides drifting back into crime?
‘What I am saying, is could we not find a middle ground, and combine both our approaches to criminal justice (liberal and conservative) in order to produce a truly effective system, which both punishes criminals properly, but also does not simply release them, homeless and illiterate?’
Well, it's not at all too late, and I would say it's never too late for anyone to write a contribution as generous in spirit as this one. I am not sure if we could compromise on the areas which he suggests. My view of 'minor offenders' is that they become major offenders if they are treated too laxly at the start. Far from being spared prison, they should be given one genuine caution, not the worthless non-warning they now receive, when they first transgress (if the offence is not so outrageous that immediate prison isn't required).
And if they then offended a second time they would face six months at hard labour in an austere prison, with a maximum of six weeks remission allowed for those who earned it by genuinely good behaviour, hard work etc. That would certainly reduce prison numbers, once people began to realise that the courts meant business.
I'm sure it would make sense to put those newly-released after such sentences under the strict supervision of a toughened probation service, including help with finding work and housing. But only once. If they are helped, and return to crime, then they must feel the full weight of a stern justice system until they are so scared of it that they behave themselves. And they can find their own jobs and houses.
The only 'rehabilitation' I believe in is the sort where the free individual understands that he must change his ways or go back for ever-longer and ever-tougher stays with Her Majesty. Once that is understood, I think we will see many more people ready to go straight, and many, many more never going crooked in the first place.
If we reduced illegal drug taking, there'd also be much less mental illness. But the real problem here is the destruction of the mental hospitals, which urgently need to be rebuilt.
Next, and I hope Mr 'Crosland' finds this treatment acceptable, I'd like to reproduce here a comment he sent in, in answer to one I made on the 'House I Grew Up In' thread. I'd rebuked him for bringing up the circumstances of my mother's death, as described in my brother's recent book (and in quite a lot of other places before that, as it happens). I'd also wondered about the process by which Mr 'Crosland' had transformed his opinions from what they used to be to what they now are. I found (and find) it difficult to work out how such a complete change could have happened.
He responded: ‘I apologise to Mr Hitchens if he found what I said to be tactless or flippant. I was actually rather uneasy about posting those remarks, since it’s not my business and I had no involvement in the events described and only know those details which your brother related. On the other hand, Peter Hitchens did assent to his brother publishing his memoir, warts and all, and so cannot be wholly surprised that someone has referred to it or that it has elicited interest. But I am sorry if, through what I now see was an error of taste on my part, I have caused any upset. It was not my intention and I regret it.
‘As for my change of mind, it has been *relatively* rapid, but perhaps not as quick as Peter Hitchens and Kyle Mulholland seem to think. It began over a year ago, when I realized that evolutionary theory is indisputably, unarguably, incontrovertibly, ineluctably, true. That the *crux* of evolutionary theory is true simply cannot be denied, gentlemen, no matter what you might tell yourselves. Much else ensued from this realization, primarily that I am basically an insignificant primate whose existence has no wider meaning beyond that which I give myself.
‘Moreover, since we are the products of an ultimately goalless – though non-random, an important point - impersonal biological process, then it also probably means that this is the only life we can expect to enjoy. And there was another corollary to this. Since it’s most likely the only life we have, then we must live it with as few vindictive, petty, man-made restrictions as possible. Life’s hard enough as it is, for Pete’s sake, without other people piously disapproving of, say, homosexuality (which is at least partly genetically determined) and snootily telling others how to live their lives, thereby usually ruining those lives in the process as well. So it’s about human solidarity.
‘Of course, there still need to be rules and we still need to follow our innate morality. But it’s tragic to think that many people’s lives have been needlessly ruined by man-made humbug and hypocritical piety.
‘And what of the Iraq War? I have not yet come out in support of that venture, and still have some major reservations about it, but let me say that Christopher’s chapter on it very much made me think. *Very* much so.
‘I was, for example, brought up sharp by the following comment: “How strange it was to see a million liberal-minded people marching *against* the overthrow of a fascist dictatorship.” In light of the aforementioned and what I have come to think about life and of human existence generally, I have come to realize that my opposition to the Iraq War is not as solid as I had assumed, and may well be quite misplaced. Has the same thought really never occurred to either Mr Hitchens or Mr Mulholland? I suspect it may well have done so to Hitchens, since he originally considered supporting the invasion. Well done Christopher for his steadfast and eloquent stance over this conflict. None of that business - or indeed any other business - is black and white. It's just a shame this realization never dawned on obtuse little me rather sooner.
‘So these are my ‘workings’, Peter Hitchens. I have not yet fully embraced secular liberalism, but I suppose I’m well on my way to doing so. I’m as surprised as anyone to find myself in this position, but, through a combination of evolutionary biology and the writings of the elder Hitchens, it has come about. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say...‘
Well, whatever else that may or not be, it's an honest answer to a serious question. Though I'm baffled, for instance, that Mr ‘Crosland’ could accept such a hopeless caricature of the Christian view of homosexual acts and the persons who do them or wish to do them. I also recommend the relevant chapter of my book 'The Cameron Delusion', which answers the silly propaganda claim that the anti-Iraq marchers (whom I didn't join, as I had many quarrels with them) were demonstrating 'against the overthrow of a fascist dictatorship' (not least the use of the word 'Fascist' which no serious person can really do since George Orwell pointed out the meaninglessness of the word).
So I'm grateful for it. It also demonstrates just how important the issue of evolution by natural selection is, in our thinking. And why people choose to adhere to it, or don't (a choice which I insist is open, not prescribed). It further illustrates why arguments about evolution (like arguments about the existence of God himself) are in fact arguments about something else. That is the crucial dividing line of our age and all ages, between those who believe that man is a fallen creature in need of his maker for forgiveness and instruction, or an independent and accidental being, ultimately capable of perfection.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.
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02 August 2010 11:42 AM
Empires - Have Your Own, or Be Part of Someone Else's. And the Everlasting Church Schools Question
I was struck by a comment from Stephen Squires on 27th July, after I cast doubt on the 'Special Relationship' and noted that the USA had used World War Two to bring about the end of the British Empire.
Mr Squires wrote: ‘Hitchens, you can't be serious? Churchill-like, do you REALLY pine for “lost” colonies after WWII (I don't mean America!). Long before 1940, you Brits couldn't even afford your so-called “empire,” upon which sun never set. Colonialism repressed legitimate movements for self-determination, which your wiser leaders recognized at the end of the war. Try this one on: USA in 1940 did not just act in its own interests since it was not yet at war with Germany, and had to fig-leaf a basis for legitimate national self-interest. That ‘fig-leaf’ we rightly now see as in the interests of Britain's and the later allies war effort...do GET REAL!’
And (apart from enjoying, as I always do, exhortations such as 'Get Real!', I felt the answer to it was really rather interesting and so will concentrate on that for now. But first, a brief diversion.
On other subjects, I feel that I have exhausted the possibilities of the discussion with Mr Storke. We have reached bedrock, namely the discovery that we differ not on facts but on our views of mankind.
I also feel that we have reached the end of any serious discussion about the religious education questions on which some readers continue to nitpick. On church schools, the point is quite simple. I think we should retain and urgently reinforce the Christian nature of our society, which means that I would use the law to ensure that the schools taught (Anglican) Christianity as truth. I use this phrase 'as truth' to distinguish this from the secular technique of teaching children *about* religion, not as a living thing, but as a historical or anthropological curiosity, to be 'respected' when ethnic minorities practise it, but to be dismissed as fatuous, false and doomed when it is our own.
If those who are interested in this discussion wish to maintain that there will be no disadvantages (and haven't been any) thanks to the death of Christianity among the British peoples, then we might get somewhere. We might at last get these passionate, aggressive atheists to tell us why it is that they so much want there not to be a God (or is that 'don't want there to be a God'?). This is of course the heart of the argument. It is also the subject they mostly seek to avoid. I think I know why - they don't like admitting that they wish, in their private lives, to be free of any moral restraint apart from their own choices, moderated by their own self-generated view of right and wrong. If we could only establish this, then we would see what the argument had been about, all along.
By doing so I don't intend to pre-empt the insoluble question (this side of the grave, where we all are at present) of whether religion is in fact true. I simply urge our society to recognise that unless it's taught as a living thing it will die, and that we will suffer, as individuals and a society, if it does die.
Under my proposal, schools in the state system would teach Christianity. This would be the normal position, from which dissenters would be free to opt out, either as individuals or as groups establishing schools of their own (as some already do, including Roman Catholics, Muslims and Jews. As I have said, I would be happy for the state to set up specifically Atheist schools if parents petitioned for them in reasonable numbers. I would be most interested to see how they got on).
The point of argument is not over the truth of Christianity, on which I have already made it clear I believe there can be no resolution. But over society's agreement that the Christian ethos is specially beneficial to the country, and is culturally established in our laws, morals, music, family structure, politics, architecture, landscape, calendar, literature, painting, diet, sculpture, sports, cityscapes and language, and so should enjoy advantages over other faiths and over those who believe there should be none. Mr 'Un' has as much difficulty grasping that this is the point on which he disagrees with me as Mr Storke has in grasping that he and I differ over human responsibility.
But back to Mr Squires and his agreeably frank bit of American triumphalism. I wonder what Mr Squires would think of the suggestion that the United States is itself an empire. There is of course the question of the original settlements, which involved taking land and the freedom to roam from the indigenous peoples. Then there is the period of 19th century expansion. What was the Louisiana Purchase if not a colonial acquisition? Then there's the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), as colonial as anything we British ever did in India or Africa.
The differences are these. One, the USA had the sense to have its empire concentrated in one landmass, rather than scattered across the globe. Two, it had the sense not to call its empire an empire. Three, by setting up this empire in the isolated continent of North America, with vast oceans to East and West and weak neighbours incapable of rivalry, the USA assured itself of that great essential of all successful civilisations - physical safety from invasion or encroachment. Four, the American Civil War put an end to any serious idea that the USA was a voluntary assembly of individual states, and made it plain that it was in fact a federal, centralised nation which granted some local limited autonomy but which did not, in practice, permit any of its members to leave. The enormous growth of the Federal state and its agencies (look at the huge federal buildings now to be found in any major city) has both confirmed and strengthened this.
Now, Mr Squires (who I think must be a US Citizen) produces the following standard propaganda position: ‘Colonialism repressed legitimate movements for self-determination, which your wiser leaders recognized at the end of the war.’
Well, have there been no 'movements for self-determination' in the imperial possessions of the USA? Yes, there have been, and they are so well-known that they are part of the American national myth, but also somehow forgotten in discussions such as these. But Washington's response to them was far more ruthless and repressive than anything the British Empire ever contemplated in, say, India. I am of course talking about the 'Native Americans', whose resistance was utterly crushed in a series of campaigns of extraordinary cruelty. (I always find the treatment of the Nez Perce nation particularly poignant.) Well, you could say - the Marxists certainly would - that these actions 'had' to be done to secure the future of the USA. And Asia and continental Europe are full of the ghosts of extinguished nations and forgotten peoples, overwhelmed by greater civilisations.
I am also told that many Mexicans resent to this day the confiscation of about a quarter of their country by the USA in 1848, and some see the Mexican migration into the lost lands of Texas (a slightly separate question, I know), Arizona, New Mexico and California as a way of regaining what was taken away. Certainly I noticed, during a visit to the border city of El Paso, just across the ditch-like Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, slogans painted on the concrete sides of the canalised river, pointing out the contrast between the USA's outrage over the seizure of Kuwait by Iraq, and the lack of American consciousness that their country had also seized territory by armed force.
I'd only say that those who condemn British 'colonialism' and 'repression' of 'movements for self-determination' really ought to be careful to ensure that they know their own history - and, crucially, recognise it for what it is (for many colonialist oppressors have no idea that this is what they are) - before making such grandiose statements as Mr Squires has made.
I willingly concede that the British Empire often behaved with cruelty and stupidity. Why deny the obviously true? My view is that it was, even so, a good deal better for its subjects than many other empires that have come and gone, and sustained at its peak one of the most beneficial national civilisations ever to have existed. I really cannot say that I am pleased that it has gone, and more than I wish the USA to be supplanted by China. The interesting Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (who knew a thing or two about empires), once famously said of Britain: ’Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just , boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him’ ('Soliloquies in England' - The British Character, 1922).
So I have reached this conclusion. That there will always be empires, that they vary immensely (compare and contrast Tamerlane the Great and Stanley Baldwin, or Stalin and FDR) and that on the whole it is better to have your own than to be in someone else's.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.
05 August 2010 12:37 PM
An Anniversary We Don't Mark Properly
Soldiers went to war much as they would have done in 1815. The British state amounted to little more than a few thousand policemen and postmen. Many of the glories (and horrors) of modern science were unknown and unthought of. The world was much quieter, and much smellier, than it is now. Millions were alive, living what they thought of as secure and ordered lives, who would die violent deaths or be forced form their homes before the war's end. Christianity was the accepted religion of the European continent, practised and understood by almost everyone.
Shouldn't we commemorate this momentous day, not just at its approaching centenary, now four years away, but always - and devote at least an hour of it each year to considering how we made such a terrible mistake, whose damage is still not repaired?
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