Britannia Radio

A Parting Shot

I have carefully studied Mr Everett's attempt to respond to this post, and I am afraid he seems to have missed the point so completely that I wonder if he has joined our old friend Tim Lemon, viewing the world through a dented telescope from one of the Moons of Jupiter. In fact, I find his stance so frustrating that I will rescind my promise not to post anything else for a fortnight, just to say the following.

One or two points. He says: ‘I’ve yet to see Peter Hitchens ever, ever accept someone else has an alternative valid point to his own (even when it’s factually true, such as the time I informed him of Paul ‘Bono’ Hewson’s devout Christianity, which he wasn’t aware of, but then continued to churlishly doubt).’

I don't recall doubting the Great and Sainted Dog Biscuit's adherence to a church. Nor do I. I believe he is a member of the Church of Ireland. No more do I doubt Anthony Blair's membership of the RC church. But I shouldn't be at all surprised if, in both cases, those involved didn't turn out to espouse the sort of modern welfare Christianity, which mainly worships state intervention and foreign aid, and is a bit woolly about some of the sterner doctrines of the faith.

And my whole life (see my books 'The Broken Compass' - or its revised paperback edition 'The Cameron Delusion' and 'The Rage Against God') has been a process - which I have described in unusual detail - of accepting that others have valid points of view, and changing my mind as a result. I would say (though I am, of course biased here) that this whole blog is constant evidence of my willingness to engage, with facts and logic, with any serious and civilised opponent who is ready to argue with me. The fact that I usually come off better in such engagements may stem from the fact that I have been through most of these positions myself, and so know their flaws better than those who now hold them. Who knows?

Mr Everett - who wishes to apply my strictures against the political journalists' clique to myself - seems not to see the importance of the difference between openly expressed commitment to a cause or belief (on which I have spent so much time above) and covert propagation of an unstated but urgent agenda. In fact it's this simple point to which he seems wholly closed. Once again, if only he'd read 'The Cameron Delusion', he'd save me a great deal of effort. And I'm tempted to tell him not to return to this argument until he has done so. However, I fear he won't read it and that, even if he does, he will (see below) emerge with his view unaltered.

Nor does he seem able to tell the difference between one person (operating openly with a declared aim) and a group of people, operating under a false flag of impartiality, whose aim is undeclared.

Nor does he grasp my essential point about the weird unanimity of a supposedly competitive and diverse group of media.

I certainly hope that what I say has some influence. And I would love to believe that my words may have helped deprive the Tories of a majority. But he doesn't listen much, does he? Half my case, for several years before the poll, was that the Tories would not and could not get such a majority at the 2010 general election (nor will they get one in future, unless and until they change the constituency boundaries, and even then it will be tough). This was not an opinion, or something I was urging, but a fact, available to any unbiased and informed reader of opinion polls (see my long ago posting 'How to Read an Opinion Poll' among others). One of the main activities of the media clique was to deny this fact, by wilfully misunderstanding polls which all pointed in the same direction. Wilful misunderstanding (again see below) is generally the result of a fixed opinion, not of deliberate dishonesty.

What I was arguing was this: that the large number of people who planned to vote Tory to 'get Labour out', despite their general disappointment with that party, were in fact misguided. They could not do this. The Tories could not win. In which case they had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by abstaining in large numbers, or at least voting for non-Tory candidates, and so sending the Tory Party to such a defeat that it would collapse and make it possible for real conservatives to seek to replace it with something better.

Thus, I can say with absolute conviction that a) my assessment was right and b) my advice was ignored. What I said *would* happen, happened. What I urged people to do, they did not do.

I was at fault in not thinking more seriously about the possibility of a Lib-Con pact, which I thought was excluded by the militantly anti-Liberal rhetoric of the Tory leadership - all the more militant because the differences between the two parties were so small.

It is my suspicion that Mr Cameron and his close advisers realised long before the election both that they could not win it alone and that such a pact might be possible, and I will not be surprised if, in memoirs yet to be written, we find that there were contacts between the two party leaderships well before the election.

But Mr Everett's claim that I somehow cost the Tories the election is, alas for me, not borne out by any facts.

I still cannot understand how a principled person can offer an alternative opinion to his own stated one, arrived and stated consistently over years. Either I have an opinion, or I don't. If I do, I can't simultaneously have another one. It's kind of him to concede that I don't *have to* offer two contradictory opinions on one page under my name. But he seems quite unable to see how ludicrous such an act would have been. Again, this hilarious inability to descry the blazingly obvious stems from the problem I shall deal with at the end.

Mr Everett more reasonably says that the Mail on Sunday should have offered an alternative opinion to mine. And so it did, both in its main opinion column, which urged a Conservative vote, and in many columns by Lord Rees-Mogg, who was repeatedly supportive of Mr Cameron and his project, and continues to be.

Conveniently for Mr Everett, he ignores my mention of the MoS opinion column. He does so, once more, because to acknowledge it would be to admit that his argument is bunkum. But he cannot do that (see the end).

Fairness does not consist of one person speaking opposite ideas simultaneously out of either side of his mouth. It consists of giving competing points of view proper space in which to be heard - something the MoS always does, notably by having a columnist of the Right, and a columnist of the Left, occupying prominent positions in the paper.

As to his scheme, he says: ‘He cannot say that he did not think of this, as I requested it in the week before on this blog, as I suspected what he was about to do. (Not that “my” requests/opinion counts for anything, I just think that would have been fairer if they’d done it..)’

Nor do I say that I did not think of it. I just say that it would have been silly, and the problem was more than adequately dealt with by the opinion column and by Lord Rees-Mogg.

Continuing not to pay attention, Mr Everett says: ’On to another point - Peter Hitchens says that this (sheep-like) tiny clique “…are all agreed that the key qualification for being in office is that you must agree with them”. Not at all like Mr Hitchens then, hey?’

Well no, actually, not at all. I am open in my partiality. They are not. I am alone. They are many. They have guaranteed access to the airwaves without being required to declare any partiality. I have episodic, occasional, brief access to the airways - in which I am always clearly identified as having a stated position.

Mr Everett: ’However, Mr Hitchens does not tell us who these “tiny clique” are – other than they are “political writers and broadcasters”.’

I assume that, having been alerted, people can watch out for this sort of thing themselves. It is very easy to see.

Mr Everett: ’Presumably some of these people in this “tiny clique” are openly biased columnists such as himself – in which case they’re the same as him.’

No, actually, by definition they cannot be. Open declarations of bias by, say, BBC correspondents and presenters, or by lobby journalists on national newspapers, would make this behaviour impossible (except in the bizarre cases of some openly biased columnists who then become 'impartial' presenters of BBC programmes, their former views apparently forgotten, discussed in my book. This is a process not available to me, as I know in detail, having responded to a BBC executive's public urgings to conservative journalists to apply for a presenter's slot, and got precisely nowhere). Again, this is blazingly obvious from all I say. If Mr Everett spent the time he uses up on these repetitive and unresponsive complaints, reading my book on the subject, he would by now understand the point which most readers of this site long ago grasped.

No, I am not going to respond to his urgings to start naming the people involved. As I say, readers, viewers and listeners, once alerted, can easily spot it for themselves. Mr Everett could do, if he so chose. I am confident they will observe the truth of what I say, which is evident to me, morning, noon and night. But I do not have the research and record-keeping facilities, or the time, to bandy names about. Any individual I accused of this would perforce have to deny it, and then I would have to spend most of my life watching many years of old videotapes and combing through recordings and cuttings substantiating my case. I've no doubt I could do so, if I devoted my whole waking life to it, and if I were granted the facilities. But I prefer to live as a human being, columnist, blogger, author, cyclist, reader of books etc, who occasionally eats, sleeps and even wanders round a cathedral. And, contrary to the beliefs of many, I don't have some vast 'staff' working for me. There are some things I am willing to do for Everett. This posting is one of them. But there are others I'm not.

Oh, and what's the explanation? The one that always applies in cases where people don't get it, even when it's in plain view. There is none so blind as he that *will* not see. The real question is why Mr Everett is so determined to cling to a political party whose leadership loathes and despises him, has always betrayed him and always will. I'd understand it better if Mr Everett were a keen supporter of the EU taking over Britain, of bad schools, lax law-enforcement, uncontrolled mass immigration and systematic undermining of the married family. But I don't think he is these things. The Tory Party, on the other hand, is.k

Travel Notes

I plan to be travelling for much of the next two weeks. I do not expect to post (apart from my column from the Mail on Sunday) during that time.

Perhaps Mr Mulholland would like to make his usual assumption and make his usual comment on how I seem to have an awful lot of holiday, and how disgraceful it is. Then I could point out to him, as usual, that 'travelling' does not necessarily mean I am on holiday. Which gives me the chance to say that original comments are always more welcome than weary repetitions of dead discussions.

How to be biased

I have been thinking about Mr Everett's strange and baffling suggestion that I should have included in my pre-election column an item urging people to vote Tory, for the sake of fairness. I have been trying to think of the appropriate wording.

How about this: ‘For the sake of balance, the author also urges those who disagree with everything he says, and who prefer not to believe the long catalogue of attested and provable facts that he lists in aid of his argument, to vote Tory.’

Or: ‘Despite the facts and logic which clearly lead to the opposite conclusion, the author recognises that some of his readers will still wish to vote Tory, even though there is no possible sense in them doing so.’

I mean to say, what is this rubbish?

What does Mr Everett think columnists do? They set out their opinions, openly, under their own names. They assemble, sometimes disclose and give prominence to facts or stories which support their opinions. They do not write stories on the news pages of the paper - though in my case I used to be a reporter, and I do write foreign dispatches which are, like my columns, clearly identifiable as opinionated. They contain adjectives of approval and disapproval. They contain statements of opinion on major issues touched on by the article.

So for instance, readers of my report from Iran would quickly be able to see that I do not support an attack on Iran by the 'West'. Readers of my report from Turkey will quickly see that I oppose Turkish membership of the EU, and reject the common belief that the Erdogan government is harmless and friendly towards the 'West'. Readers of my writings from Ukraine will see that I do not support the 'Orange Revolution' or the concept of the 'New Cold War'. Readers of my account of South Africa will see that I am not sympathetic to the ANC. Readers of my accounts of China will know that I regard that country as a police state, and that I disapprove (amongst other things) of its one-child policy. And so on.

Those who disagree with me on these points may still read what I write, but will be a) alerted to my partiality and b) entitled to ask if a writer with different opinions might have painted a different picture, and to compare the differing versions available, and then to wonder which would have been more truthful. Thus do we grope towards the truth, our goal.

They can see these things because I state them clearly in the article, using the methods above. In many cases, they will know from my past statements elsewhere (in my column, on broadcasting stations) where I stand on these issues. Those who agree or disagree with me will be aware that they are doing so, and will never be in any doubt that the facts selected, and even the illustrations used, will have been influenced by my clearly-stated partiality.

Above all they will know that there is something with which to agree, or disagree, something to accept, or something to reject.

I do not know of any more honest way to seek to persuade people of a contentious point of view.

But watch a TV news bulletin, or read a news story in many newspapers or magazines, and things may not be so clear. The writer will not helpfully include statements of open bias in his story. He will not use adjectives to show his approval or disapproval. But he might even so be biased, and seeking to persuade the reader of his opinion. And if so he will be far better-placed than I am to do so. For people are much more easily persuaded (as advertisers know) if they do not realise that they are being persuaded.

For instance he might present a controversy in a number of interesting ways.

He might open the story with the allegation made by the body, or country, or party of which he approves, which he and his editor have agreed to place prominently in the newspaper or the TV bulletin. In which case he might say that this body or country 'said' or 'announced' whatever it did. And then he might add that the body or country of which he disapproves 'denied' the report. Immediately, the denier is at a disadvantage, precisely because he is the denier. The presumption of guilt is universal in the media. The decision to run the allegation, and give it prominence, is itself motivated by bias. Israel suffers particularly from this form of reporting. But allegations of wrongdoing against the Palestinian Authority, or Hamas (or indeed any Arab government) are rarely reported. Thus the context in which Israel's undoubted wrong doing takes place is seldom stated.

Or he might use such words as 'claimed' to describe the statements made by one side, while using the word 'said' for the other side. Or a person may be said to have 'insisted' such and such, the unstated implication being that this insistence is an irritating refusal to accept the blazing truth.

But above all, unseen bias is achieved by selection of material, selection of pictures, choice of which story to run and which to dump or put on an obscure page. Now if, in an article attacking Mrs Theresa May I use a picture making her look silly, it will be clear what I am up to. But if a newspaper repeatedly uses in its news columns a picture of a politician grimacing, or with his head in his hands, or his hand over his mouth, or next to a sign marked 'exit' (and it is impossible, in public life, to avoid having your picture taken next to such a sign so such a picture will exist), the purpose is not stated or seen, and the cumulative effect of ridicule and contempt on minds which do not even realise they are being exposed to propaganda is not actually felt by its victim, the innocent reader.

Broadcasters, as I have often said, have an extra battery of techniques, from tone of voice, to camera angle, to lighting, to who gets the last word, to the way in which questions are formulated. In none of these does the viewer or listener see the unstated bias, unless his ear is tuned to listen or watch for it. And each act of bias is so small and subtle that, taken by itself, it seems entirely harmless and cannot be used to formulate an official complaint. But believe me, it goes on.

Oh, and how about this story? When I worked for another newspaper, in the early years of the Blair government, I continued to write a strongly anti-Blair column - despite the fact that the newspaper's editorial line was strongly pro-Blair. No difficulties arose. I was the paper's recognised and tolerated dissenter. Openly biased comment is actually not that sensitive. But on one occasion (as sometimes happens to columnists) I was sent a startling story by a reader. The story was that Cherie Blair had been hosting a trip on the Royal Train for the wives of foreign leaders.

The story checked out as true, and I wrote it. And there was a kind of collective panic among the paper's editorial executives - because they knew (as I did) that the headline 'Cherie takes over the Royal Train', or whatever it might have been, would be more damaging to the Blairs, among our largely monarchist readership, than any number of columns written by me. In the former days when my newspaper had been anti-Labour, I reckon the story would have led the front page, and been picked up by all the other papers and quite possibly the BBC.

But on this occasion they ran it, after much tooth-sucking, on such an obscure page that hardly anyone noticed it, and a rival paper ran it as a (much-followed) 'exclusive' on its front page several months later, in the sincere belief that the story was new, while I ground my teeth. There's another part of this story that I will not set out here because I cannot prove it, but hope one day to do when a certain spin-doctor's full diaries are published.

News, you see, is much more politically sensitive than comment.

But to grasp this, you have to understand that the two are different things, and I suspect the root of Mr Everett's difficulty is that he won't see this.

By the way, Mr Everett, in a laborious effort to avoid my counter-arguments, tries to make out that there is an inconsistency in my pointing out that the group of influential political journalists is tiny, while also describing them as a 'phalanx'. Not so. They are indeed tiny in number in comparison with (say) the members of the Tory or Labour Parties, voting in leadership elections. But they are a pretty formi

Piffle Made in Dagenham

Oh dear, what a bad film 'Made in Dagenham' is. Like, 'Brassed Off' and too many other modern British films, it relies far too heavily on the f-word for laughs. And it projects onto the past the attitudes of the present, giving people views and characters they couldn't have had. For those who haven't read the reviews or seen it, this is a fictionalised dramatisation of the Dagenham women workers' strike for equal pay in 1968.

Now, I may be completely wrong about this, but I worked on farms and in a brewery in the late 1960s, in which there was quite a lot of bad language and a modicum of violence too, and I just do not think that women, even in a workplace, would have used this word as readily then as they are shown to do in this film. It still had an immense power to shock.

There is also one scene, in which Sally Hawkins, playing strike leader Rita O'Grady, uses this word after barging (through her own fault) into Rosamund Pike, playing the boss's wife Lisa, in a school corridor. Ms Hawkins, the overwhelming star of this film, is very well cast. She has the perfect face for the role, and a slight hint of Rita Tushingham in her features, which awakens memories of many social realist films of the time in the memories of people such as me.

I cannot begin to say how unlikely this scene is, from start to finish (the likelihood of two such women sending their sons to the same school, even in the lost era of grammar schools, is close to zero), but I am just sure that a woman of the type Ms Hawkins is playing would not have used language of that sort in these circumstances. There are many other unlikely agitprop moments, not least a ludicrous moment in which one of the strikers is suborned by the offer of a modelling career, and by the crude caricatures of at least three marriages. Plus a Ford executive in Detroit, portrayed as raging against a selection of revolutionary political groups most of which did not yet exist (at least under those names) in 1968, and which certainly had no role in Dagenham industrial disputes.

And that is just one of the ways in which the makers of this film show that they really don't understand the past. Clips of the real Dagenham women strikers, shown as the final credits roll, emphasise that these were doughty, greying ladies (a word they use of themselves) who had come up through the tough world and close society of London's East End, and who were interested (as English people used to be) in simple fairness and justice, not in starting a social revolution. There are also many expressions which seemed to me to be to be far more American than the speech of the time. And of course the nervous, self-conscious smoking which is now the film-maker's universal way of saying 'This is the past'. The thing about smoking in those days is that it was so normal and universal that people were barely aware they were doing it, any more than they were aware they were breathing or walking. Modern actors just can't simulate this.

I might add that in all my years as a Labour correspondent, I never heard trade union officials address each other as 'comrade', even the ones who were open Communists (most of those I knew would have laughed out loud if anyone had called them this). Then there's the weird laudatory portrayal of Barbara Castle, emphasised by the ludicrous attempted comical duo who are supposed to be her senior civil servants. They seem to have come out of some super-dire Norman Wisdom comedy of the 1950s).

And it's my understanding that Harold Wilson smoked cigars in private. The pipe was for TV.

But perhaps above all there's this question, in which the film doesn't touch. The Ford Dagenham plant, in the 1960s, employed about 25,000 workers, almost all of them men, sustaining them in a way of life immensely more modest than ours, but also less indebted, better-educated, more peaceful, better policed and more sober (again, the female drunkenness portrayed in the film seems out of place to me. Such things were severely frowned on). It was a society founded on real work making real exportable products, in which men fulfilled the role of breadwinner and were for the most part responsible husbands and fathers.

Now that entire factory is gone, as are almost all the other places that provided work for men. There are plenty of jobs for women (who are universally supposed to be better off as a result, though their children might argue) and fewer and fewer for men, especially working class men whose lives often drain away into unemployment and crime.

We make little that is tangible, and export less. Heaven knows how we shall continue to afford the standard of living we think is our right -a standard more appropriate to a major exporting country with a powerful economy.

Dagenham is the site of a wind farm.

I think it is legitimate to ask if this is actually an improvement. The entire film is based on the belief that it is unquestionably so.

Notes and Queries

A few responses to comments. On arming the police, the main point is that the death penalty (at least until the 1957 Homicide Act) protected the police, and all of us, from armed crime, by effectively deterring criminals from carrying firearms and knives. I think this effect is unquestionable, and my arguments for making the connection are to be found in full in the relevant chapters of my book 'A Brief History of Crime'. I simply haven't the space to set them out here, but would urge readers hostile to this conclusion not to dismiss it until they have read this material. I would personally prefer to be against the death penalty. I endorse it because facts and logic so insistently support its return.

Abolishing the death penalty led to an increase in armed crime and the stealthy arming of the police, transforming their relationship with the public. The numbers of shootings by the police, which I think will rise, are not themselves the issue. It is the fact that they take place at all, and that the officers responsible are almost invariably granted anonymity and exonerated, which is the point. I expect the numbers to rise, in any case. We never had very many executions either, at any time in the 20th century, but that didn't alter the principled objections of campaigners who felt the death penalty was wrong. Nor should it have done. Principles are principles, even if they are misguided.

On the distinction between my solitary call for people to withdraw votes from the Tory party (which I really wish had been as effective as one correspondent alleges), and the near-unanimous propaganda of the political media, which has in turn been used to destroy Margaret Thatcher, to install Anthony Blair, to destroy Iain Duncan Smith, to destroy Gordon Brown and to elevate David Cameron.

One, my column is an open expression of my personal opinion. It does not operate by nuance and selection of facts, by tone of voice, by ensuring that my side gets the last word in discussions whose direction is partially chaired by supposedly impartial presenter, nor by systematically choosing unflattering pictures of those I wish to undermine, while using flattering pictures of those I wish to build up. It makes no pretence at impartiality. And it is solitary. Nor by presenting subjective judgements of speeches as facts.

My complaint against the press and TV pack (I agree that the press alone could not achieve this, but the same structures apply to the BBC and some independent broadcasters) is that they are unanimous, and collective. And that their bias is not openly declared, but concealed, made highly effective through the subtle methods I outline above.

A note to Mr 'Un'. I apologise for speculating on his sex, but not for anything else I said (not that it matters much, since nobody knows who he is anyway). I have been the target of some spiteful personal attacks, in which the person involved sought to wound me by references very similar to the ones made by Mr 'Un'. I thought this person might have been trading under a false flag. Plainly I was wrong, but if I were Mr 'Un', I would not take it as a compliment that I had this suspicion. Attacking me in this way seems to me to be low in general, since the attacker knows I am debarred from any robust defence of myself that might not also involve in an unwanted quarrel with my brother. It is even lower when the attacker knows that my brother is very ill, as Mr 'Un' obviously does. Shame on him, and on others who use this grubby method to avoid proper argument.

Why should these bleating sheep decide who runs the Labour Party?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Who should pick the leaders of our political parties? Those parties, or a bunch of journalists? The answer seems simple to me. I don’t like the Labour Party, but it represents an important strand in British opinion. If its members choose Edward Miliband to lead them, according to their own rules, then that is their affair.

The same goes for the Tory Party. In the days when Conservative leaders were still picked by the party rather than by the media, Iain Duncan Smith was fairly elected.

The media later played a major part in the campaign to destroy and overthrow Mr Duncan Smith in a democracy-free putsch. Michael Howard, and later David Cameron, were anointed by jour nalists and chosen by them.

In fact it was the absurd and well-organised adulation of Mr Cameron by the tiny clique of political writers and broadcasters that thrust this obscure Young Liberal into Downing Street.

Now the same clique are enraged by the refusal of the Labour Party to do what they told it to, and had in many cases wrongly predicted that it would do. Most of last week’s coverage of the Labour conference was an extended scream, from the jour nalists’ playpen, of ‘Waaaah! We wanted David and you picked Ed! How dare you! We’ll get you for this!’ And they will, you just wait and see.

A dull, flaccid speech by David Miliband was lauded as if it were some mighty oration by David Lloyd George or Abraham Lincoln. A dull, flaccid speech by Edward Miliband was sneered at as if he were barely coherent. This was much like the treatment, some years back, of David Cameron and David Davis by the same people. Everyone said the same thing.All opinions, in our supposedly varied and competitive Press, were the same. Ever wonder how this happens?

And so it will continue. David Miliband’s petulant walkout from politics is treated as a heroic Shakespearean tragedy. Everything Edward Miliband does from now on will be a blunder or a gaffe.

Every tiny quarrel will be magnified into a split the size of the Grand Canyon. Unflattering photographs of him (not difficult to find) will be chosen in preference to kinder ones.

It’s a scandal. And this is only half of it. The other half is that this media clique, most of whose members make the average sheep look like a forceful individualist, are all agreed that the key qualification for being in office is that you must agree with them, Sixties liberals almost to a woman.

Yet they are utterly unaccountable. Parliament is transparent and the Labour Party electoral college a model of democracy by comparison.

It is time somebody told these people that they have too much power and not enough responsibility.

New Labour is dead? Oh, ha ha. New Labour is alive and living in No 10 Downing Street, and all the happier because so many Tory dupes haven’t noticed that Blairism continues, pink in tooth and claw, to ravage what’s left of this country.

Emma is right... verbal bindweed’s throttling English

Emma Thompson is right to worry about the verbal bindweed that is choking the English language. The power of speech is the main thing which distinguishes us from the animals – a point brilliantly made by C.  S. Lewis in his Narnia books.

It is closely linked to the power of thought – the thing which actually makes us people instead of highly sophisticated robots. If you cannot speak clearly and with expression, then your thoughts will also be muddy and half-formed. And if you allow fashion to dictate the way you talk, taking your style from the TV and the internet, you surrender your mind to conformism.

Hardly anyone actually reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, though lots of people think they have.

If they did, they would find that at the core of the Big Brother society is Newspeak, a language designed to make most things unsayable, and so unthinkable. Who would have thought our society would have volunteered to vandalise one of the most expressive and beautiful languages that ever existed?

Stopping at the Hilton, en route to a police state

How does a free country become a police state? With your help. I arrived in Manchester last Sunday and checked into the Hilton. There, having given my credit-card details, I was asked for ‘photo-ID’.

I visit lots of dictatorships, where I expect this sort of thing and put up with it because it’s their country. But here at home I enjoy the absence of such snooping. So I politely but firmly declined. ‘But it’s our company policy,’ intoned the check-in person, as if this trumped thought or reason.

Actually it isn’t Hilton company policy. I’d faced no such demand from their Liverpool hotel the week before, or at the many American Hiltons I’ve stayed in. But in any case I replied: ‘Well, it’s my policy that I don’t accede to such requests.’ I pointed out that they had no lawful right to do this. And after a minute or two a deputy manager was produced who said I could check in anyway.

Great. But I know several other people meekly submitted to this police-state demand. Which is why, five years from now, we’ll all be doing it everywhere and another bit of liberty will have gone for good, because it was too much trouble to save it.

So this is Liberal Britain: execution by masked gunmen

The masked avengers of the Metropolitan Police’s firearms squads scare the pants off me. It’s not just the street-fighting gear they sport, clothes designed to give the wearer a feeling of irresponsibility. It’s not just the IRA-style facewear.

It’s not just the huge numbers of them – enough to invade Sierra Leone once the Army’s been disbanded by George Osborne. It’s not even the anonymity most of them are granted, like something out of the Middle Ages.

It’s the fact that nobody notices. Liberal fanatics abolished hanging in this country nearly 50 years ago. Yet when we had the gallows, our police were unarmed. And if the state wanted to kill someone, it could only do so after a jury trial, an appeal and the chance of clemency. This was called ‘obscene’ and ‘barbaric’.

Now we have a heavily-armed police force whose members, masked like Henry VIII’s headsmen, deal out death as helicopters thunder overhead – no jury, no judge, no appeal. And those who said capital punishment was wicked refuse to see the connection. Oh, and please note the crazed, shotgun-wielding barrister Mark Saunders was taking ‘anti-depressants’ – another connection everyone refuses to see.


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The latest propaganda for the non-existent complaint ‘ADHD’ was torn to shreds on Radio 4’s Today programme by Oliver James, despite highly unhelpful interruptions by the presenter Justin Webb, who gave the pro-ADHD spokeswoman a free run. ‘Evidence’ of a genetic link is nothing of the sort.

Even if it were, the fanatics who want to drug normal children and excuse our society’s selfish, horrible treatment of them, have to solve this problem. How can you have a ‘genetic link’ to a complaint for which there is no objective diagnosis? What is it linked to?