This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Few things are more wicked than the sort of begging we see so much of today – men who are fit to work, raising money for drugs. They are not helpless casualties. One of them once rose from his grubby blankets, abandoned his miserable dog and violently assaulted me, after I suggested that he was abusing the charity of others. Once my black eye had gone down, I tended to think he had proved my point. These deceivers are taking advantage of good-heartedness, and in the end poisoning the whole idea of charity. I was taught from an early age that I shouldn’t turn my face away from any poor man. That’s easy enough in the suburban subways of Moscow, where shrivelled grannies hold out their hands for a few roubles, or on the streets of Bombay where the filthy children clamour for coins. But can it possibly be justified here in Britain, where authority has so much of our money that it pays for disabled people to visit prostitutes and feeds and houses those who claim that they can’t stop taking heroin, when the truth is that they take it because they like it, and laugh at us for letting them sponge on us? Is there really anyone in Britain who needs to beg? I suppose it’s possible that an honest person, prepared to work and free of drugs, can end up destitute on the street, thanks to some mad bureaucratic Catch-22. But my guess is that those who really need our spare change are the lonely old, dying slowly and silently in chilly homes, far too proud to ask anyone for help. As for the rest, I think we all owe some thanks to the police in the fine city of Lincoln, who have kept a close eye on their beggars and found that many are fakes, and some are ‘threatening and intimidating’. One in particular – who is not homeless – regularly makes more than £50 a day. I’ll bet that many of those who give to this particular crook are themselves on tiny incomes. This isn’t a new problem. In the Sherlock Holmes story The Man With The Twisted Lip, written more than a century ago, a professional young man discovers he can make far more as a fake beggar than he can in his ordinary job. But it is a much worse problem now, and I think the only thing to do is to refuse all the pleas of beggars, and give the money you would have paid them to an effective, realistic charity such as the Salvation Army. But I advise you not to bother explaining, or you too could get a black eye. The great British middle classes love French films because watching them – the elegant women, the delicious meals, the handsome townscapes, the relaxed way of life compared with ours – is a little like taking a holiday in France. Who cares about the story, or the acting? This is the only thing that can explain the absurd praise given to the new Kristin Scott Thomas vehicle Leaving, a yawn-inducing and rather nasty production, full of absurdities, which seems to me to be tinged with anti-semitism. Miss Scott Thomas is, of course, a fine actress, and her ability to perform in French is impressive. But it is not enough to excuse this stuff. Where do these people live? Are they actually conscious? The drug laws have not been enforced for years. There is no ‘war on drugs’. The ‘decriminalisation’ these people seek happened decades ago. But the medical authorities in this country are reluctant to talk about it because most such marriages take place among British Asians, where they have long been a strong part of the culture. They fear – with some reason – that they will be falsely accused of ‘racism’. So much praise is due to Channel 4 for making a cour ageous and moving documentary on this subject (When Cousins Marry, tomorrow, 8pm), which will almost certainly have you in tears if you have any feelings at all. The film goes more deeply, generously and sym pathetically inside Britain’s Pakistani community than anything else I’ve seen on British TV, thanks to a highly intelligent and fair-minded piece of presenting and reporting by Tazeen Ahmad. With a bit of luck, it will at last allow this difficult subject to be discussed openly, and many personal tragedies to be avoided. As usual, the consensus has been proved wrong, and the sidelined dissenters right. Will we learn from it? No. For months, supermarkets have been selling summer fruits at ‘half-price’. This is legalised fraud and should be banned. They sold them at ‘full price’ for a few fleeting days at the start of the season, and will do so again at the end. But the real price is surely the one that lasts the longest time. If only we had realised, when these cynical, chilly shops first appeared, that they would destroy a way of life and put us all at their mercy. Now, as they seek to force us to do their work for them, with Dalek-like, dehumanised tills, we see just how unsmiling and ruthless they are, in contrast to their matey advertisements. Actually, we can stop this by simply refusing to use these tills, and insisting on being served by a human being. It could be the first step in a long-needed campaign to reduce the power of the supermarket monsters. The Second World War had already partly altered the rules, by allowing intervention on the grounds of genocide (as if this had been the reason for the war against Hitler when - as is often pointed out here - the allies did nothing to halt Hitler's genocide when they had the knowledge and power to do so). But this plainly wasn't enough if national sovereignty were to be abolished. The lessons of Westphalia had to be completely ripped up. And now they have been. And I for one don't feel any safer. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down. This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column I once worked out that I was lower-upper-middle-class. I was of course using an old-fashioned pre-metric scale, a fine old mechanism of brass and polished wood which could spot a dropped ‘aitch’ at a thousand yards, and which vibrated angrily whenever anyone put the milk in the teacup first. These days I suspect all you need to do is check the colour of your credit card and the size of your car. Probably there’s an application on one of those flashy toy telephones that everyone seems so keen on which can judge your class status to within a thousandth of an inch. Maybe this is why David Cameron thinks that being middle-class is about having sharp elbows and using them. He is plainly a bit (but not very) guilty about doing this himself. It was back in January 2008 that he first defended parents who used sharp elbows to get their children into church-run state schools, something he could be said to have done himself. Now, while readily accepting that he and his wife are in this group, he seems to be saying that such parents are getting more than their fair share of public services – which is a bit much given the enormous, penal taxes they have to pay. Well, I’m not at all sorry to harp on about this, as most of the supine, power-worshipping media of this country never mention it. But Mr Cameron is personally extremely wealthy and yet was for years one of the greediest claimants of the special MPs’ housing benefit, under which the poor were robbed to give to the rich. And by wangling his offspring into a rare high-quality state school, Mr Cameron has elbowed a poor family out of a good education for their children, when he could easily have afforded to pay fees and leave the places free for someone less fortunate. I do not know why Mr Cameron behaves like this. Maybe it is because he thinks he can get away with it. Maybe he’s just mean. Maybe he thinks it will gain him political advantage. But I don’t think there’s anything middle-class about elbowing other people out of the way. On the contrary, a proper middle class is based on virtues – including patience, thrift and self-denial – that are pretty sharply contrary to that. Go to modern Russia to see what it is like to live in a country where such a class does not exist – just a grossly rich, tasteless, uncultured top layer and the struggling millions beneath. And that is what is coming here. Anybody who follows the outmoded rules of self-restraint will be elbowed out of the way by flashy Cameron types whose tailoring is as smooth as their morals are crude. The middle classes were once a body of people who attained a good life and a modest place – but not riches – through conscientious hard work and honest dealing. Now the expression is abused to mean those who take what they can get, and pay later – if at all. I know a lot of people rather prefer this, thinking the old arrangement was ‘repressed’ and so forth. But whether you like the new way or not – and it is plain Mr Cameron does – it certainly isn’t conservative. I’ve tried to like the BBC’s 21st Century Sherlock Holmes. And I have to concede that the idea is clever and the choice of actors – especially Benedict Cumberbatch – is quite brilliant. But in the end it is wrong. While one or two people may be persuaded to go back to the books, most won’t. The TV version, if it succeeds, will become the accepted one. The authentic detective will fade into obscurity, elbowed out of the way by a funky Dr Who figure – Sherlock Wholmes. And this will be a terrible pity. Because those who still read the originals know that they are in fact works of imaginative genius, which cannot really be separated from the Victorian and Edwardian England in which they are set, in which any suburban villa could conceal a scandalous secret brought back from India, Australia or America. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes is a far more interesting and drily witty person than any BBC scriptwriter could ever be or imagine. Too many of Doyle’s works – Brigadier Gerard, Professor Challenger and the great historical novels, not to mention his marvellous short stories – have already been wrongly forgotten. We mustn’t let this happen to Sherlock as well. And then, if you actually make any money, give it all to charities which help the maimed and bereaved people of Iraq, and the maimed British soldiers and bereaved military families whose grief and loss you caused by your vanity and your inability to stand up to the White House. And then just please go away, where we’ll never have to look at your silly face, or hear your silly voice, ever again. In return, we’ll all pretend that you wrote the book yourself.
21 August 2010 7:02 PM
These beggars are not helpless casualties – as my black eye proves
16 August 2010 4:26 PM
Top of the Class, Liberal Intervention and Other Matters
14 August 2010 6:14 PM
Mr Cameron may need sharp elbows but the real middle classes never did
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Just because it’s French doesn’t mean it isn’t tosh
Abolish WHAT drug laws?
I am awarding this week’s Order of Gullible Stupidity to Sir Ian Gilmore, a senior doctor who has lent his name to the modish and well-financed campaign to abolish what’s left of Britain’s drug laws.
The professor is mouthing the standard line of these people, that the anti-drug laws are the cause of most of the problems connected with drugs in this country.
It is this failure to punish stupid and criminal acts, and the insis tence on subsidising and cosseting wilful criminals as if they were ill, or victims, that is causing our drug crisis.
Tragedy lies in wait when cousins wed
When first cousins marry, they take a terrible risk. In some cases, their children will inherit disastrous, horrifying disabilities. This is a statistical fact, and doctors know it.
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Unusually, I must give unconditional praise to Anthony Blair for his good decision to donate the advance for and proceeds of his memoirs to the British Legion. This is, at last, a sign that he begins to understand what he has done. Next he must find some way of helping the many Iraqis whose lives he ruined.
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Back in the days of John Major it was the consensus that the universities should be expanded. Those who argued that this was folly were frozen out of the national debate.
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There's nothing quite like the subject of class, at least among English people. I don't think it's anything like so important in Scotland, Wales or Ireland - and I have for long believed that the English class system is a lingering result of the Norman Conquest. The three classes more or less correspond to Haughty Conqueror, Proud but Dispossessed Saxon and the 'collaborators' or 'realists' in between the two.
Of course it is no longer anything like as simple as that, especially since Henry VIII created a new aristocracy by dissolving the monasteries and seizing the old Church lands. But it explains a lot, particularly the way in which language and accent are such a crucial indicator of class status.
Quite where 'Wesley Crosland' fits into this, I don't know. Did anyone else notice the really odd thing about his comment: ‘I've never gotten on with middle class people, chiefly because they've always revealed themselves to be very pretentious and tedious.’
Gotten?
Now, this (like many Americanisms) is very old English, it is true. The same goes for the American pint, the American habit of calling herbs 'erbs' and the word 'dime', which is to be found in Chaucer. But it is not current English, unless the Americanisation of our speech has gone further than I thought. It's even worse than the idiocies 'Train station' and 'bored of' (and 'convince' as a synonym for 'persuade, which it isn't) which have pointlessly replaced perfectly good English expressions in the past few years, for no other reason than that so many people are no longer familiar with their own language, seldom read books, and so pick things up off the TV.
Why does Mr Crosland suddenly adopt this form? It adds fuel to the speculation, already in existence, that he has in some way been body-snatched, and is not the original 'Wesley Crosland' of old. The other evidence, namely a complete leftward change of mind, is less persuasive since people do this sort of thing and more people ought to change their minds than do. Even so, it is unusual.
But to use strange idioms? It reminds me of the moment in the film 'Went the Day Well?' where the utterly convincing (but fake) British Tommies are discovered using continental sevens, which in those days would have been like the BBC using kilometres and metres - obviously, incontrovertibly not genuinely British.
As for the other things he's said, surely this is prejudice, equally unworthy of the former 'Wesley'. Such things don't seem to me to result from either thought or real experience. The middle classes contain all kinds of people, some of them no doubt pretentious and tedious, some of them not. Always, Mr 'Crosland'? Always? A powerful word, that. And anyway, which class does Mr Crosland think he belongs to, and why? And which class do his friends, neighbours, work colleagues and acquaintances think he belongs to?
Then there's Mr Mulholland, who wonders : ‘Perhaps I should adopt more appropriate mannerisms in order to be more acceptable to Mr Hitchens and such.’
What possible grounds have I given for such a silly remark, in an article which plainly mocks the old prejudices - dating from Nancy Mitford's little joke about 'U' and 'non-U', and John Betjeman's equally mischievous 'Phone for the fish knives, Norman'?
I am asked elsewhere to explain my opposition to liberal intervention in foreign countries. I am happy to set this out briefly, and answer any questions it may raise. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the grisly 30 Years War in 1648, was a great step forward in human wisdom. The parties accepted that dislike for another nation's regime was not sufficient reason for making war on it. They recognised that, in the absence of such a principle, horrors would follow (as they had for the previous three frightful decades).
Look in the background of many Brueghel and Bosch paintings and you will see, in the hellish miseries depicted, drawn-from-the-life accounts of what this war was like. Like all idealist enterprises, it was crueller than crime, because the perpetrators were convinced they were doing good, and so entitled to do anything in the cause.
Of course, as in the case of all good laws, there are attractive arguments against the Westphalia view, that national sovereignty should remain inviolate. The same can be said of the law against being tried twice for the same offence, casually cast aside in England some years ago, and now threatened in Scotland. That law, a crucial defence of liberty, can sometimes lead to dreadful injustices. But once it is dismantled in a temporary storm of outrage, then it is gone for good. And we are all then vulnerable to a state which can pursue us with repeated prosecutions until it crushes us.
But that brings us to the wonderful exchange in Robert Bolt's 'A Man for All Seasons' in which Sir Thomas More argues with his cousin, Roper, against such zealotry.
Roper: ‘So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law?’
More: ‘Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?’
Roper: ‘Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that.’
More: ‘Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
‘This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
‘Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.’
This argument, made by the wise since the days of Socrates, is always under attack from people who think (like Thomas Paine) that they are somehow special, a qualitative advance over their forebears. Thus, they, 'historic' or 'enlightened', can 'begin the world over again'.
And I will no doubt be told how callous I am to say (as I must) that interventions in such affairs as Rwanda and Sierra Leone are better not made, if that means that one day China, or the EU, or the USA can intervene here on some 'humanitarian' pretext to steal our independent right to order our own affairs. Say we one day got a government that wanted to restore national independence, to leave the EU, to halt mass immigration, to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights? The leader of such a government might quickly be portrayed on global TV stations as some sort of Milosevic figure. It wouldn't matter that this was untrue. He would be subjected to the equivalent of Dayton and/or Rambouillet, and replaced by Paddy Ashdown and an EU army, before we knew where we were.
The principle also operates the other way, a fact that pro-war persons such as Nick Cohen seek to obscure by claims that anti-war demonstrators, marching against the attack on Saddam Hussein ‘opposed the overthrow of a fascist regime’.
By the vacuous use of the word 'fascist' in this and other cases, the conventionally left-wing person attempts to make his individual choice of bad regime scientific and general. But in fact he does the opposite. The word in this instance means nothing. There is virtually no specific parallel between Benito Mussolini's Italian dictatorship and the regime of Saddam Hussein, either in its method of coming to power, its behaviour in power or its general political view. The word only makes sense if it is taken to mean 'bad, and currently disliked by the author'.
I might add that the habitual use of 'fascist' to describe nationalist, and sometimes racially murderous regimes is itself an oddity. Why not 'Nazi' or 'National Socialist', since the most prominent and destructive such regime was the German NSDAP? I will tell you. The term, as a general description of Axis regimes, was popularised by Soviet propaganda between 1941 and 1945. They could not use 'Nazi' because the Nazi-Soviet pact (1939-41) was still fresh in the memories of millions, and because 'Nazi' is (not coincidentally) short for 'National Socialist'.
The long-lasting influence of Soviet thought and terminology on the supposedly democratic Western Left (which in theory rejects any sympathy with the USSR) is an interesting subject, and one day I'll deal with it. But to return to Mr Cohen.
As I say in the relevant chapter of 'The Cameron Delusion', the marchers were not (as Mr Cohen claimed) 'opposing the overthrow of a fascist regime’. Indeed, they were not opposing the overthrow of any regime. They were opposing their own government's intention of attacking another country. Many of them (I wasn't taking part, owing to my principled disagreements with many of the marchers' other views) were fairly unsophisticated pacifists who would have opposed a genuinely just war. Many were more sophisticated. Some will have understood that governments often offer pretexts for wars that are not in fact the true reasons.
But if the marchers *had* been doing as Mr Cohen claimed, and it was and is the duty of this country to take military action against foreign regimes because it views them as wicked, then surely there are many other regimes against which we should now be fighting wars to the death. China, a vast police state with extensive slave labour camps, comes to mind. So does Zimbabwe. Any reader of the reports of Amnesty or Human Rights Watch could doubtless come up with several others. Indeed, if the wickedness of a government is a cause for war, then we really ought to reconquer most of Africa.
But of course this is not the true reason for our intervention, any more than the Western powers destroyed Serbia and extirpated what remained of Federal Yugoslavia, to save the poor Bosnians or the poor Kosovars from the wicked Serbs. These episodes, like that in Iraq, were preliminary assaults on national sovereignty, a concept rapidly vanishing under the threat of liberal intervention and under the increasing power of world courts of one kind and another. The revolutionary left have always loathed nations, rightly viewing them as conservative in nature. And this zest for invasions is the new foreign policy of those who grew up protesting against the Vietnam War. Just as the sexual, moral and cultural revolution is the new domestic policy of people who once supported state ownership and rallied for the striking miners.
Their aim was to alter the rules of great power conduct (see Mr Blair's famous 1999 Chicago speech. I wonder who wrote it?). And of course the easiest way to do this was by stirring the humanitarian instincts of the Western peoples by showing them horrors on TV, and saying these horrors could be ended by intervention. This worked with Sierra Leone and in Kosovo (though I remain proud that I opposed this intervention at the time, a stance which accustomed me to severe unpopularity among many of my own readers). But it ran into big trouble in Iraq, and is now, after many years of ignorant complacency, encountering difficulties in Afghanistan too.
Holmes and the vanishing genius
The final chapter in Tony’s silly story?
Here’s an idea for Anthony Blair, whose vanity-packed memoirs will begin to fall like lumps of lead from the presses all too soon. Don’t bother having any signing sessions, not least because the country can’t afford the police presence. Just sit in a warehouse on some industrial estate and sign almost all the books. Then charge extra for the rare unsigned copies. People will give a lot more for an object they can be sure that you haven’t actually touched. They could even be offered as prizes.
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In the week that several British bodies were penalised by the EU for failing to display its nasty blue and yellow symbol, the EU appointed its first ambassador to the USA – who announced that he would henceforth be speaking on behalf of Britain and all other EU countries. How long before our majestic Washington embassy, which already flies the EU flag, is downgraded into a consulate? How long before our politicians, especially the useless ‘Eurosceptics’, admit that Brussels has succeeded where Philip of Spain, Bonaparte, the Kaiser and Hitler failed, and we are now a subject province of a continental empire?
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British ‘statesmen’ who imagine that their fearsome condemnations of Iran, or clarion calls for Turkish EU membership, resound in the chancelleries of the world, and are spoken of with awe in the cafes and teahouses of great cities, might like to know that while travelling recently in a European country, I was unable to change Sterling into local money. ‘Sorry. It’s an exotic currency,’ said the bank brusquely, as if I’d offered them a bundle of North Korean Won.
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Here they come again, the weird obsessives who want the clocks to be wrong all the year round. Look, if you want the children to come to school an hour earlier, just open the school an hour earlier and end classes an hour earlier. Then change back in the spring. You don’t need to make everyone else follow suit. Moving the clocks doesn’t alter the amount of daylight available.
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