23 October 2010 11:20 PM
A chainsaw massacre... where the cost cutters end up spending £92bn MORE
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
What cuts? My favourite two facts about British public spending are these. Housing benefit, probably the single most fraud ulent and wasteful state handout ever invented, costs more each year than the Army and the Royal Navy combined.
And while Labour spent £600 billion (roughly £10,000 for every human being in this country) in their last year in office, the supposedly vicious cutter George Osborne plans to spend £692.7 billion (£11,500 per head) in 2014-15, after his alleged chainsaw massacre. Britain remains bankrupt in most important ways.
We spend more than we earn. We pay huge numbers of people to do silly jobs, or to do nothing at all while pretending to be ill. Our public services, about which we are all supposed to be so sentimental, are often dreadful. And where this is so, it is usually not because of a shortage of money.
A good, well trained and dedicated doctor cannot be bought with cash, any more than a conscientious nurse or a clean hospital ward can be obtained by spending more. A smart new hospital building can be hosting MRSA within months of opening. Its nurses – now armed with costly and useless so-called degrees, but often lacking the dutiful discipline of their forebears – can still leave the old to die of dehydration or to fester in their own filth.
Comprehensive education is designed to be inferior to selective schooling, but is supposed to make us more equal, the fundamental purpose of our more- or-less communist state machine. Which is why politicians impose it on other people and use every wile and trick to avoid it for their own children.
Local government is an out-of-control disgrace, employing thousands of people on salaries they could never command in the real world, doing (or not doing) things that nobody wants, but shrieking predict ably that the ‘cuts’ will force them to shut libraries and leave parks neglec ted while the condom outreach workers multiply, the twinning trips continue and swollen ‘Chief Executives’ pay themselves the sort of salaries most of us cannot even dream of. But above all, like drug dealers ensuring a continuous clientele, we get people used to the idea that the State will provide – starting with the much-abused Educational Maintenance Allowance.
Given that our frightful state schools cannot train most of their pupils in the basic skills of work, this creates a huge pool of people who are permanently unemployed and unemployable – quite needlessly. For there is work – as the hard-working migrants from Eastern Europe who do so much of it daily prove. It is just not paid at the fantasy wages we seem to think we are entitled to. This cannot continue for ever. My own guess is that it will be swept away some time soon by a wave of terrible inflation, which will destroy the provident and the prudent as well as the parasites, and which finally will reduce this country to the Third World status it seems so anxious to attain.
The idea that the present Government is somehow facing the truth and acting boldly is ridiculous flattery, and we should stop encouraging it.
Sneering lout who did even more damage than Blair
The memoirs of Keith Richards are as self-serving as those of Anthony Blair. And in the end, it may well be Mr Richards who is more important. Mr Blair, like so many people of my generation, really wanted to be Mick Jagger and probably saw being Prime Minister as a poor second best – at least until he found out how rich modern politics can make a man.
And when the history of our times comes to be written by cold, dispassionate minds, they may well recognise that the utter destruction of a way of life by the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll cult was far more significant than anything Mr Blair did.
After all, he was only the junior partner in his biggest single deed, the half-witted war on Iraq with its seas of blood, its mountains of skulls and its irreparable damage to the power and influence of the West. But the Rolling Stones, or some of them anyway, were the spearhead of a colossal global cultural revolution, the results of which continue to echo down the years.
I have long believed that one of the most important moments in our history was the exoneration of Mr Richards from drugs charges in 1967. It may not have killed as many people as the Iraq War. But it helped to ruin many lives, and still does so. And Mr Richards was vaguely aware of it.
He told the judge in the case, David Block: ‘We are not old men. We are not concerned with petty morals.’ What did the judge make of this? Old he might have been, but he was not petty and he knew more about morals than Mr Richards ever will. He had survived the sinking by the Japanese of the aircraft carrier Hermes in the Indian Ocean in 1942 and (like my father) was present at the Battle of North Cape in 1943, perhaps the last great fleet action of the Royal Navy. But in the contest between the two worlds represented by the sneering lout in the dock and the distinguished man on the bench, the entire British establishment has long taken the side of the lout.
Mr Richards’s drug conviction, like that of ‘Sir Michael’ Jagger, was overturned on appeal by the Lord Chief Justice in person. My liberal conservative colleague, Lord Rees-Mogg – then editor of The Times – rallied to the defence of Mr Jagger, allegedly a ‘butterfly’ broken on the wheel. Some butterfly. Some wheel.
Mr Richards is an old man now, a debauched, capering streak of living gristle who ought to be exhibited as a warning to the young of what drugs can do to you even if you’re lucky enough not to choke on your own vomit.
Yet, far from being embarrassed, he goes on about it as if it was all a good thing. If he can even remember 1967, does he ever, in the long dark nights, wonder if he chose the right life or did any damage? I do hope so.
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A word of praise for Lady Hale, whom I had not until now seen as a friend of marriage. Alone in the Supreme Court, she opposed the nasty un-English idea of pre-nuptial agreements, which insert built-in failure into every marriage, the way manufacturers put built-in obsolescence into cars. This change will make things worse.
‘It is wrong,’ she also correctly stated, ‘to equate married with unmarried parenthood.’
Together with Harold Wilson’s poorly designed divorce reforms of 1969, judicial scorn for the idea of lifelong marriage has transformed our society for the worse – causing great misery to millions of abandoned and heartbroken, wounded children.
It is good that somebody is at last criticising this. It would be better if a major political party recognised that a grave mistake was made in 1969, and began to put it right.
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Yet more reason for a full, deep inquiry into so-called ‘anti-depressants’. How many suicides have been prescribed these ill-researched and unpredictable pills, also possibly linked with rampage killings?
Both Yvonne Brown and her son Ben, who threw themselves to dreadful deaths from the Humber Bridge within weeks of each other, had been prescribed with ‘anti-depressants’.
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