25 September 2010 8:57 PM
One enlightened policeman isn’t going to scare the bad people
Things will not get better. Just because Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constab ulary has suddenly realised that police officers should once again walk the beat, do not expect that anyone will pay any attention.
Maybe you’ll see a token patrol of two tiny, rotund PCSOs, chatting to each other as they tactfully ignore the anti-social behaviour raging all round them.
The yelling louts and the problem families will still rule the streets. The police will still regard you as a nuisance if you call them – assuming you can get through. And if they do respond to your call, they will shake their heads sadly and say there’s nothing they can do. Here, have a tissue, a crime number and some counselling.
In the unlikely event that anyone is ever arrested and charged for a crime, and then actually convicted and imprisoned, they will still be rapidly released after a few months mixing with their mates and taking drugs in warehouse jails.
What has already happened to burglary – now regarded by authority as a trivial and uncontrollable offence – is happening quietly to murder. The plans to introduce a charge of ‘second-degree murder’ will in the end enable many killers to get away with short sentences, and eventually (you read this here first) with fines and ‘community service’.
The result, as with burglary, is that it will become com monplace, like so many other crimes that are now dealt with (or rather, not dealt with) by fatuous cautions and unpaid on-the-spot penalties where the culprit isn’t even required to go to court.
Look at the two burglars, pictured happily awaiting arrest as they sat trapped on the roof of a home they had violated. Did they look like men afraid of the law, or dreading their punishment? Of course they didn’t. Bad people in our society are not afraid. This is why we must all be afraid instead.
Listen carefully to those in authority when they promise to put things right. They do not really mean it, because they continue to believe in the ‘progressive’ ideas of the Sixties. They don’t believe in punishment. They don’t believe in deterrence. They believe that police constables should be treated as suspect and untrustworthy, while criminals should be treated as unhappy victims of their backgrounds.
They believe in ‘Human Rights’, which are invariably the rights of the wicked and the selfish.
It is true – I have been saying it for many years – that our cities could be altered overnight if they were once again guarded by proper constables, armed with nothing more than a truncheon and the force of per sonality. But this cannot be, because our governing elite actually hates this idea.
The Home Secretary, Theresa May, burbles about reducing police paperwork, as every Home Secretary I can remember has done. But she will not repeal the Police And Criminal Evidence Act 1984, that piece of Tory legislation whose codes of practice are the origin of most of that paperwork. Nor will she repeal the Human Rights Act, which polluted our legal system with ultra-Leftist drivel.
They were there to attend a memorial service for Alexander McQueen, the fashion designer who, most regrettably, took his own life in February, aged 40.
I must admit to being slightly surprised that this great national, religious building – the scene of the funerals of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Winston Churchill – should be used for such a gathering.
The cathedral says that Mr McQueen was a notable figure (which is undeniable) and a Londoner, which is also the case. I do not know if Mr McQueen had any religious affiliation, or what it was if so. Nor does St Paul’s.
I am assured the service itself was decorous, though I would question the inclusion of Gloomy Sunday, a song sympathising with suicide, in a Christian ceremony.
As it happens, I think such sad souls should be treated gently by the church, without too many questions.
It is not the first time. Silly Labour Leftists and Tory golf-club twits, in a similar bout of delusion, jointly fooled themselves that Anthony Blair was some sort of conservative. While they did so, Mr Blair mounted a virulent attack on marriage and Christianity, destroyed rigorous education, encouraged mass immigration, raised taxes to unprecedented levels and vastly expanded the public sector, while handing over our powers and freedoms to foreigners.
Now the same people weirdly imagine that David Cameron is some sort of conservative. In the golf clubs they bray that he is using the Liberal Democrats. In Left-wing covens they complain that the Liberal Democrats have been swallowed by the Tories.
This is drivel. The blazing truth is that Mr Cameron is the smiling, willing prisoner of the Sixties Leftists who run the Liberal Democrats, and with whom he agrees about almost everything from cannabis to wind farms. His coalition with them enables him to trample on the remaining proper conservatives in his party, in the name of necessity. But actually he much prefers it to the majority Tory government he couldn’t achieve.
‘Our Liberal-Conservative Gov ernment will take Britain in a historic new direction, a direc tion of hope and unity, conviction and common purpose,’ he announced at the very start. It was ‘a historic and seismic shift in our political landscape. It can demonstrate in government a new progressive partnership’.
He meant it. And so a new party is taking shape among us, which, for the sake of its own survival, must pretend in public that it is two parties for a little while longer.
Did you know that Vincent Cable sent his supposedly radical Liverpool speech to the Tories to be vetted in advance? He did, and it was approved.
The same went for Nick Clegg, who amazingly cannot tell legal tax avoidance from criminal tax evasion. And when, next month, the Tories gather in Birm ingham, all their speeches will likewise have been vetted by the Lib Dem machine. This is just a glimpse of the cosiness with which the Cameroon liberals have hugged their supposed political foes.
There is no way out for the actual Liberals, even if they wanted it, for their MPs can only hope to survive the next Election thanks to a pact (probably unstated) with the Tories.
But there is no way out for the Tories either, for they have decided they want office at all costs, and the price they have paid is that their voters and activists must ever here after work their guts out to keep a Left-wing government in power.
And if they fail and Labour wins (which it well might), they still get a Left-wing government. Cunning, eh?
Will all we have turn to dust and ashes, just like my Soviet roubles?
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Britain cannot go on as it is. Either our dominant elite will recognise that their ideas are wrong, and must be changed. Or a series of avalanches will sweep away our comfortable lives.
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.
We had our first warning in the failure of the banks. What will follow, if we pay no attention, will I think be worse.
This pitiable husk is the evidence of our non-war on drugs
The sly, dishonest propagandists who claim that the ‘War on Drugs’ has failed really do need to explain what war this is, exactly, and when it was ever fought. Look at the pathetic case of George Michael, who – drugged out of his mind with supposedly harmless, supposedly soft cannabis – drove his powerful spoilt brat’s car into a shop.
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.
Let us please have a real war on drugs, especially on the brain-wrecking poison cannabis, the dangers of which have been concealed by decades of falsehood. There will of course be casualties. But, as the wretched George Michael has shown, there are plenty of casualties now, when no war is taking place.
Christians cannot be right about anything these days. If Stephen Fry had remarked that returning to Britain via Heathrow was like arriving in the Third World – which it so often is – then his worshippers and sycophants would have said what a clever and original thought it was.
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.
How to be Bourgeois, and other matters
I am pleased to see the enthusiasts for Stephen Fry attempting to hit back here on his behalf. I have long enjoyed the wonderful description of Mr Fry given by the Dictionary of National Celebrity ‘a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like’, not least because it helps to explain much of the enthusiasm among received-opinion leftists for this person's rather unprofound and trite opinions.
Radical opinion has now become so dull and free of thought or knowledge that Mr Fry actually appears to quite a lot of people as a latter-day Oscar Wilde. Say what you wish about Wilde, and personally I think him greatly over-rated for political and cultural reasons, but there is no doubt that he had a genuinely outstanding talent and an original wit. So did his near-contemporary H. H. Munro (Saki), who I think to be the more interesting of the two.
More baffling is the admiration for Mr Fry's supposed comic skills. For anyone who actually appreciates P. G. Wodehouse, Mr Fry's version of Jeeves and Wooster was so creakily wooden and blatant as to be almost physically painful. It is not impossible to portray this pair on TV - as I have pointed out before, Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael did so brilliantly, with much subtlety, in the early 1960s, and were actually lauded by Wodehouse himself - who must be the ultimate judge.
But it is difficult, and it requires the actors involved to realise that Wodehouse's genius lies in his descriptions. You can't actually put lines such as 'Ice began to form on the butler's upper slopes' into dialogue. But you can, having read it, know immediately and exactly what it means, and if you have the sympathy and the talent, you can presumably convey it on screen.
Mr Fry is praised here for describing my newspaper's stablemate, the Daily Mail, as a 'shrieky weaselly little bourgeois tabloid'. Like some contributors here I am interested by the use of the word 'bourgeois' here. This expression (as George Orwell long ago pointed out) is completely unknown in normal spoken English, except as the name of a typeface, and I would expect the compositors who used it would have pronounced it 'borjoyce', just as Churchill would refer to the Nazis as 'Narzees', and the Gestapo as the 'Jesterpo' - not because he couldn't do foreign if he wanted to, but because the deliberate mispronunciation of foreign words is a very old expression of Englishness.
The origin of the use of the word 'bourgeois' as a boo-word is quite clear and unmistakable. It comes directly from the propaganda of the Communist movement. (I remember a debate in the International Socialists, in which writers for the 'Socialist Worker' were solemnly instructed to cease to use the word 'bourgeois' and write 'big business' instead. The move, intended to make our propaganda more accessible to shop stewards in car factories, was not much of a success.)
In short, the use of the word in this way identifies the user as in the tradition of the classical left - the left which apologised for, or concealed from itself, the totalitarian results of its thinking. I wonder what Mr Fry thinks about Cuba, by the way? Does anyone know? I am sure the word 'bourgeois' is still used in English-language propaganda beamed from Havana. Many fashionable leftists continue to defend this awful prison island, where non-violent political dissenters have their testicles pierced as torture, and whose leaders only recently apologised for the virulent persecution they heaped on homosexuals for many years, virtually uncriticised by their fellow-travellers and apologists in the West.
And that's all it does. As an insult, it is pretty feeble, as is its little brother 'petty-bourgeois', often coupled with 'Fascist' or (in the case of the more cautious and better-educated) 'Poujadist'.
Shrieky?
I am not quite sure what this is intended to suggest. If it is over-excitement, didn't Mr Fry himself get a little over-excited about the visit here of the Bishop of Rome? One wonders what a newspaper edited by him would look like.
It seems to me that many of the front pages of the 'Independent' these days might qualify at least for the description 'shrill', (and that newspaper is probably technically more 'bourgeois' by some way than is the Daily Mail).
Tabloid?
Now that every daily paper except the Telegraph, the FT and the Guardian is tabloid in shape, this word likewise lacks any particular power.
So I am unchastened by this condemnation, and fail to see what is brilliant or even notable about it.
I am still hoping that we may be able to create an index for this blog, which would make it so much easier to deal with contributors who (plainly primed by some central propaganda source, probably our schools) try to muddy the waters on cannabis by saying ‘Wot about alcohol, then?' as if this were a clinching argument.
These people have plainly never thought about this at all. They also come late to the argument.
I have repeatedly said here that the existence of one legal poison in our society, with all its disastrous consequences, cannot possibly be a logical or moral justification for the introduction of another.
I have also repeatedly said that I favour strong legal restrictions (and moral ones) on the sale and consumption of alcohol, and that I support measures (backed by law) to discourage tobacco smoking. So the attempt to claim that I am inconsistent also falls.
Why can't these people just say what they really mean, which is ‘How dare you interfere with my selfish pleasure? Who cares if other people worse off than I, are harmed by the laxity of the cannabis laws?’ Then we would know what they actually are, and how much attention to pay them.
They couldn't really care less about alcohol (which many cannabis users drink at the same time as they smoke dope) or tobacco (which they mix with their chosen muck), and only raise this issue to obscure the truth. But there are enough fools in this world who are taken in by this stuff to make it worthwhile for them to put it forward yet again. One or two will always fall for it. Here it will always be met with scorn and derision.
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