This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column His mysterious visit, to the country in Europe where he is most likely to be insulted, is the target of every liberal elitist in Britain. A whole assembly of crackpot sexual revolutionaries and wild ultra-Leftists will be ranged against him. Such people normally do not have much popular support. Against the previous Pope, their campaign would have been insignificant squeaking, barely heard above the applause. But thanks to the abuse of children by some priests, and the Roman Church’s feeble efforts to punish them, all that has changed. It is now respectable again to be anti-Catholic. Well, that’s reasonable. Paedophilia is disgusting, and particularly so among men supposedly dedicated to goodness. But the Vatican doesn’t actually tell its priests to abuse children. The vast majority of them do not so do. And it has tried to stamp out the problem and to offer genuine apologies to the victims. I (as a non-Roman Catholic) have examined some of the main charges levelled against Benedict XVI by his attackers, and found that several of them are simply untrue, whereas others have been crudely distorted. I have also examined the record of one of the main critics of the Papal visit. This is Peter Tatchell, prominent in the ‘Protest the Pope’ campaign. I admire Mr Tatchell’s physical and moral courage, notably when he was badly beaten by Robert Mugabe’s bodyguards for attempting a citizen’s arrest of that monster. The effects of that beating still trouble him. But this does not cancel out what I believe is the hypocrisy of his attempt - and that of the Left in general - to wage war on the Pope by employing the charge of condoning or failing to act against paedophilia (it is No 5 in the charge-sheet set out by ‘Protest the Pope’). For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a start ling letter to the Guardian newspaper. In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored. When I contacted him on Friday, he emphasised that he is ‘against sex between adults and children’ and that his main purpose in writing the letter had been to defend free speech. He told me: ‘I was opposing calls for censorship generated by this book. I was not in any way condoning paedophilia.’ Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’. He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’. He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’. And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. 'Several of my friends - gay and straight, male and female - had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. 'None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. ‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’ Well, it’s a free country. And I’m rather grateful that Mr Tatchell, unlike most of his allies, is honest enough to discuss openly where the sexual revolution may really be headed. What he said in 1997 remains deeply shocking to almost all of us. But shock fades into numb acceptance, as it has over and over again. Much of what is normal now would have been deeply shocking to British people 50 years ago. We got used to it. How will we know where to stop? Or will we just carry on for ever? As the condom-wavers and value-free sex-educators advance into our primary schools, and the pornography seeps like slurry from millions of teenage bedroom computers, it seems clear to me that shock, by itself, is no defence against this endless, sordid dismantling of moral barriers till there is nothing left at all. Can we be straight about the Blitz, now that it is 70 years since it began? Most of us have two absolutely clear reactions to it. The first is that dropping bombs on women and children in their homes is a wicked form of warfare. The second is that - despite all the horrors of being bombed - the British people were not demoralised or blasted into defeatism, but worked all the harder for victory because it was the only way to get back at the enemy who dropped death on them from the sky. Yet as soon as anyone suggests that we were wrong to bomb German women and children in their homes - as I firmly believe we were - they are shouted down by cries of ‘They asked for it!’. Actually, they didn’t ask for it at all. The children, as always, had no say in the matter. And the people who bravely voted against Hitler to the last lived in the poor urban areas which we deliberately bombed. And when anyone argues - as I do - that the bombing of German civilians was also an ineffective way of fighting the war, doing surprisingly little damage to the Nazi war effort, they are shouted down by apologists who seem to think that Germans responded to bombing differently from British people. It’s not true, and those who have studied the facts agree. Yet I am absolutely in favour of a memorial, large and majestic, in a place where as many people as possible will see it, to the young men who nightly climbed into their bombers and flew over Germany. They believed they were helping to destroy a great tyranny. They trusted their leaders. That is why they set off, hearts in mouths, in the full knowledge that they probably wouldn’t come back, and that they were likely to die in a specially horrible fashion. Not since the Somme in 1916 had so much steadfast valour and youth been squandered by old men who ought to have known better. On the Bomber Command war memorial, alongside the shattering number of names and the chokingly sad ages at which they died, should be the words ‘Lions, led by Donkeys’. I have paid thousands of pounds and dollars in tax to British and American taxmen - both in supposedly free countries - over the past 30-odd years. And they have never once said ‘Thank You’. This is because they think, deep down, that they have an absolute right to all our money, and we should be grateful that they let us keep any of it. If this isn’t true, then why are they so rude to us when we give them so much money? Can you think of anyone else who does this? This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column And I have been met with unending scornful denial. This vital truth, that the most important cultural and media organisation in Britain, which shapes the views of millions on every subject, is tilted against the conservative cause in every field of human endeavour, has been for years the most obvious fact in the country – but also the one most utterly denied. Well, now we have double-proof that the BBC is biased and knows it is. And also of how that bias has helped to shape British politics. First, from the Director-General himself, Mark Thompson, above, we have the admission that, when he joined the Corporation 30 years ago, there was a ‘massive bias to the Left’. I love that ‘was’, as if all those Eighties Leftists have stopped being what they were, and stopped hiring people like themselves. Also there’s the absurd claim that the Corporation now has ‘an honourable tradition’ of journalists of the Right working for it. Really? Perhaps they are strong among the makers of children’s programmes in Gaelic. The BBC remains reliably pro-EU, pro-PC, anti-Israel, in favour of the sexual revolution, soft on drugs, fanatical about man-made climate change. It has partly cured itself of its crude anti-Americanism, and Mr Thompson’s confession is plainly a sign of a wider recognition that things have not been right, in both senses of the word. Two of its own prominent journalists, Jonathan Charles (on the EU) and Roger Harrabin (on global warming), last week broadcast extraordinary programmes on Radio 4. In one, Mr Charles actually said of the launch of the euro in 1999: ‘Even now I can remember the great air of excitement. It did seem like the start of a new era ... for a few brief days I suppose I and everyone else suspended their scepticism and all got caught up in that euphoria.’ I suppose he did. And Mr Harrabin mused, faintly hilariously: ‘I’ve never considered myself a climate-change sceptic.’ No, nor has anyone else. But he conceded: ‘I’ve always had questions that weren’t fully settled, particularly about our ability to model future climate given our poor knowledge of some elements of the current climate system.’ But now we have the latest evidence, from Mr Thompson’s briefing notes, that the BBC has for a long time been co-operating closely with David Cameron, who disembowelled the Tory Party to make it acceptable to the BBC’s militant cultural revolutionaries. I first pointed this out long before the Election, when the BBC refused to disclose details of a meeting Mr Thompson had then with Mr Cameron. Around the same time, BBC coverage of the Tories switched from an unending stream of high-pressure slime to cautious approval, gradually warming into endorsement. The key to this is which of the two was and is the senior partner at these meetings. You will get a better picture of modern Britain if you grasp that it is the BBC which, as the medieval Church once did, gives or withholds its blessing to the leaders it approves of. Lean to the Left, or face frozen disapproval, consistently unfair coverage, misrepresentation and actual exclusion from the national debate. This is a real, dangerous scandal threatening our future. Yet it merits less space in the media than a fuss about cricket. Maybe Mr Brown is weird. But isn’t Mr Blair just as peculiar? Just, for a start, look at the way he sat during the alleged ‘interview’ with Andrew Marr last week,right. ‘Audience’ would be a more accurate term. I have noticed he often does this, legs wide apart, with his tie draped over his, er, trousers. Strange, or what? Then there’s the passage in which he claims to have had a premonition that he would become leader of the Labour Party. ‘Premonition’? Ha ha. I long for the day when someone explains just how this no-account barrister rose to high office. (Here I repeat my appeal for anyone who was ever represented by him in court to get in touch.) How did he become MP for a safe northern Labour seat, and then leader of a major political party? All the books so far written fail to explain this miraculous series of events. Maybe it really was the finger of destiny, as Mr Blair seems to imagine. Carole Caplin might know. Or maybe (my preferred explanation) it was really a good old Labour Party machine fix, which began with a search for someone malleable who was the absolute opposite of Michael Foot (no walking stick, no donkey jacket, no ideas, no books, no thick glasses, looks good on TV) and ended with an unhinged war on Iraq. Note, as Mr Blair admits, that being Prime Minister was the first and only job in government he ever had. There’s a fascinating story to be told one day of how this grave national mistake came to be made, but this isn’t it. Meanwhile, these memoirs – written in a consistently jokey style – are much more like those of an actor than those of any politician I’ve ever come across. He looks back on the great stage of history, across which he was ushered, inwardly baffled, by skilled directors and producers, much as some old ham might look back on his days in Hollywood. Iraq... do we really want to do it again? And still I meet people who claim that the Iraq War was in some way a success. As the USA formally ends its combat role, the country is lawless, riven by sectarian hate. Despite its supposed ‘democracy’, its politicians cannot form a government. Iran, supposedly our enemy, dominates Iraqi politics. Christians have fled persecution in their tens of thousands. Many Iraqis live abroad, too scared to return home for one good reason or another. Women, far from being ‘liberated’, are now forced to wear black shrouds. There is terror in the streets. Power and water have never been properly restored. The men America paid to fight for it are now deserting back to the insurgency. The pro-British middle class, destroyed by sanctions, has never recovered. And a new war is in the making over Kurdish control of the northern oilfields. And then there are the dead and maimed. Until those responsible in high places have admitted this was a dreadful error, we face the risk that they may try again, perhaps in Iran. They must be made to apologise before any such stupidity takes place. ********************************************* The official persecution of Blackpool teacher David Roy, driven from his job for standing up to revolting indiscipline in his classroom, is yet more evidence that the State and the law in this country instinctively side with the wrong people. The lies of troublemaking children were readily believed. Only Mr Roy’s determination led to his vindication. Many others, sensing the mood, have surrendered to chaos, and who can blame them? But reports blaming this change on Labour policies are misleading. Successive Tory governments have left most state education in the hands of the Left. And they continue to do so.
11 September 2010 10:38 PM
Question - who said 'not all sex involving children is unwanted and abusive'. Answer - The Pope's biggest British critic
04 September 2010 6:56 PM
It must be true. The BBC's own boss says it's biased
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Here comes the Pope, though he would have much more fun if he stayed in Rome for root canal dentistry.
Yet when one of the few men on the planet who argues, with force, consistency and reason, for an absolute standard of goodness comes to this country, he is reviled by fashionable opinion.
Bombing cities is just wrong – even when the planes are ours
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For about 20 years, I and a few others have been pointing out that the BBC is biased to the Left, morally, culturally and politically. I have made this case patiently, with evidence, not crudely.
Blair, a baffled old ham striking a very peculiar pose ...
What a very odd creature is Anthony Blair. I feel I can justly point this out because Mr Blair has devoted so very much of his gruesomely interesting book to making nasty comments about the weirdness of Gordon Brown.
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