18 September 2010 7:03 PM
Will all we have turn to dust and ashes, just like my Soviet roubles?
I think I know which is more likely. Catastrophes do happen, and people survive them after a fashion, though their lives are never really the same afterwards.
The post-1968 ruling class are so convinced of their own rightness that I can no longer believe that anything will persuade them they might be even a little bit wrong.
And once again I am reminded of the complacent fools’ paradise that was the Soviet Union in its last years. Somewhere I still have the bank book I acquired in communist Moscow, after a lengthy interro gation about my class background.
In it are recorded the few hundred roubles I deposited there and will never see again. But Russians often had many thousands stored away.
All of it was dust and ashes when reality finally burst through the broken Iron Curtain.
Great mountain ranges of savings were abolished in an evening, as the currency was ‘revalued’ out of existence. Supposedly generous health schemes collapsed – though in truth they had long been short of drugs, especially painkillers and antibiotics, and the filthiness of the hospitals had been a grave danger to recovery. Jobs that had been meant to last for life were abolished, and the places where those jobs were done vanished. Pensions went unpaid or became valueless.
The money, the jobs, the Welfare State were all based on an illusion. When the illusion became unsustainable, they crumbled.
Well, how can we afford to carry 1.5 million people who have never worked? How can we afford to house jobless migrant families in Notting Hill grandeur? How can we sustain the enormous NHS which we gorged with cash in good times, while quietly loading it with enormous long-term debts to finance a building splurge?
None of this is real. Our economy continues to function out of habit and faith rather than because we are paying our way in the world.
Our state education system is a gigantic international joke, so bad that the remaining employers here would mostly much rather hire Poles with hardly a word of English than the products of our anarchic classrooms, where multitudes have ‘special needs’ and failure is the only thing that is rewarded.
The people who said that manufacturing doesn’t matter now admit they were wrong, but that does not bring back the lost factories. The North Sea money that carried us over much of the worst is nearly all spent.We have acquired a Government whose main reason for existence is to protect the status quo, which hates to think and which loves to pose – but to which there is no sensible opposition. Only a contrite confession of failure, combined with a readiness to reconsider every policy from welfare to crime to schools to immi gration, could possibly avert the great smash which seems increasingly likely to me.
It occurs to me that he could just as easily have hurled his machine at a family with young children, or have caused a gory pile-up on a motorway. Those unmoved by this possibility might look at the man himself, a pitiable husk whose long-term admirers must be increasingly embarrassed by him.
And is it not reasonable to suggest that much of this folly, crime and degradation results from his repeated use of drugs which are supposedly illegal? Yet what has happened to Mr Michael when he has been caught breaking that law, as he has been over and over again?
Meaningless ‘cautions’, that is what – though his case has not been so spectacular as that of the ‘singer’ Pete Doherty, who has been in court for drugs offences so many times that the Criminal Records computer overheats when his name is fed into it.
If these famous people were properly punished, and if the police did not constantly seek excuses to fail to do their jobs, then we might actually have that war.
And we would have much less drug use.
Laws that are enforced are effective. Look how quickly the market traders of Britain surrendered to kilograms after the prosecution of Steve Thoburn. When did you last see anyone smoking on an aeroplane, where such an act can have you led off the flight in handcuffs?
Meanwhile, those which are not enforced are worthless – like the non-existent ban on using a hand-held mobile phone while driving, which the police cannot be bothered to put into effect.
And BBC Radio 4, or Radio Fry as it should be renamed as he is on it so much, would have hired him to make a series of programmes about the awfulness of airports, to be delivered in that insufferable, giggly golden syrup voice of his.
But when a Cardinal says the same thing, he is denounced by all Left-thinking people for racism, even though there is not the slightest evidence that any such thought had crossed his mind.
It is the slovenly shabbiness, and the general feeling of arriving somewhere worse than the place that you have come from, which is the problem with Heathrow and many other places in this country too.
* Once the police forces of this country could have relied on fierce public support against cuts in their funds and manpower. Now I think they will get very little. For years I have said they should sell the helicopters and fast cars and get back on foot.
I said they should reopen police stations and man them. I said they should remember that the middle classes are their friends. And almost all I heard in return was moaning that I was anti-police and unfair to a fine body of men. Piffle.
The police forces of this country have broken their covenant with law-abiding people and now they lack friends when they need them most. If they had listened to me instead of being so sensitive, this would not have happened. Flattery is not the same as friendship, and criticism is not necessarily hostile.
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
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?
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