This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Most opinion polls need to be viewed with a lot of suspicion, and read very carefully. It was because I took this view that I was the only commentator in the country who correctly predicted that David Cameron’s Liberal Tories would not win May’s General Election. So please believe me when I point out that such polls do not just happen. Someone decides to commission them, for a reason. This costs a lot of money. And the questions that are asked can themselves be used to create opinions where none existed. They are a device to manipulate public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Just asking people this question is a form of propaganda. The whole point of the monarchy is that it is not a popularity contest. That is how it stays above politics, which increasingly resembles Strictly Come Dancing, since all the parties agree and we can only judge them on their leaders’ staring eyes, bald patches, fluent German, nice clothes, children, wives, unwives etc. We all know that today’s public darling is tomorrow’s burned-out case. The fact that a fickle public, asked a question in an internet survey, prefers the youth of William to the quizzical permanent middle age of Charles tells us nothing of value. William will age as well. If he became King because he was young and good-looking, he could presumably be removed the moment he began to get lined and bald. How silly. In an era when our politics is full of callow young men with no real experience of life or the world, Prince Charles is a reassuringly wise figure, whose thoughts on many things are a good deal less weird than the Prime Minister’s hurriedly invented bilge about Big Societies and Gross National Hap piness. Someone has obviously told Mr Cameron that he needs a philos ophy to be respectable. So he has got Mr Steve Hilton to levitate for a bit and come up with one. No wonder Charles talks to members of the vegetable kingdom. It must be far more rewarding to chat to the average parsnip than to listen to the careerist PR men, California gurus, retread Marxists, Europhiles and backstairs-crawlers who now infest the upper reaches of the British political class. What strikes me about the breezy ‘Darker Later’ campaign – whose supporters probably never see the sunrise except on the way home from all-night parties – is its arrogance in Scots who must be plunged into winter blackness, Orthodox Jews whose prayers must be disrupted, people who get up early every day and don’t want to do it in the dark for long extra months, people who don’t want to be kept awake till nearly midnight on summer evenings, all must bow before this campaign’s questionable claims of benefits, based on guesswork, dubious statistics and little else. Our current arrangements are a compromise, which may not suit everyone, but at least takes into account the needs and fears of people without a big lobby to back them. For a real illustration of its arrogant, London-based attitude here’s the alleged comedian David Mitchell, writing in support of ‘Darker Later’ in the Left-wing ‘Observer’ last April: ‘As an added bonus, it’s likely to upset Scottish people and farmers.’ Ho ho. It can’t be done without the return of grammar schools, the reintroduction of corporal punishment, the lowering of the school-leaving age and a mass cull of the education establishment, dedicated as they are to spreading ignorance in the pursuit Watching Mr Gove promising to fix the schools without these things is like watching a carpenter trying to make a decent table without a saw, a chisel or a plane. In the end, he’ll be reduced to shouting, plus stunts and gimmicks like, er, getting soldiers to do the teaching. Seeing it done was another. The absence of a proper patriotic opposition has never been more painfully obvious, as the Ark Royal is condemned to the breakers, and the Harriers that flew from her are prepared for sale abroad. On Wednesday we saw decades of experience, skill, courage and tradition dissolved in a few tear-stained minutes on the decree of politicians who clearly have not the slightest feeling for the history of their own country, and who are using the debt crisis as the universal pretext to make cuts that would normally be politically impossible. In this The scrapping of Ark Royal is plain stupid. But we owe a debt to the Irish people who, despite the dogmas of their leaders, have so often come to our aid in their thousands in time of war, despite many reasons why they might feel bitter towards us. I hope one day all the peoples of these islands can again live together in a properly united Kingdom. For all our quarrels, we have more in common with each other than with anyone on the Continent. Far from gloating over Dublin’s long-delayed recognition that EU membership means being a vassal of Germany, we should realise that we are in a similar fix, and it has done neither of us any good. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down. Here he goes: ‘How on earth is anyone meant to enter into a rational argument about Samantha Cameron's hat?’ If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down. I am grateful for the many messages of encouragement following my posting last week, in which I expressed my frustration at the pitifully low level of some of the comments posted here.
27 November 2010 8:50 PM
He may chat to parsnips, but Charles MUST be King
Prince Charles must succeed his mother when that sad moment comes. Opinion polls suggesting that we pass the throne to Prince William over his father’s head are both constitutionally stupid and slightly sinister.
Last chance to halt Berlin Bulldozer
Please use the next few days to contact your MP and let him or her know that you do not wish to be subjected to Berlin Time. The key vote is this Friday, a day when many MPs don’t bother to turn up in the Commons unless they know you care.
the face of objections from minorities.
The Berlin Bulldozer doesn’t care.
Poor Gove, reduced to gimmicks already
How sad, but how inevitable, to see my old friend Michael Gove reduced to the usual airy, grandiose boasts of Education Secretaries of both parties for the past 40-odd years – that bad teachers are to be sacked, spelling is to be taught, discipline restored, etc. None of this will happen.
of equality.
A nation’s pride sent for scrap
Knowing that we were going to scrap our last serious chunk of sea power was one thing.
case, the cut ought to have been impossible.
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The Left-wing former Tory MP, now journalist and BBC favourite, Matthew Parris is mainly famous for his shampoo-free locks. Perhaps he has failed to apologise for misrepresenting me, despite being so often asked to do so, because he is too busy not washing his hair.
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Well, so much for the Government’s promise to put a serious limit on immigration. Not only are they quite unable to control arrivals from the EU. They have left so many loopholes in the rules for non-EU migrants that our wholly unacceptable levels of immigration will
continue as before. Why, when we have so many graduates and so many jobless people, do we need to import any workers at all?
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Of course we should help Ireland in its time of need. I care little for the Irish government, which has all the charisma of an ashtray and has for years been in the pocket of the EU.Share this article:
24 November 2010 4:26 PM
Political Party Admits it Was Wrong. Nobody Notices
During the frenzy of unreason which followed the July 7th bombing in London and the various thwarted and theoretical bombs involving liquids, underpants and shoes (none of which has ever actually gone off in non-laboratory conditions), the government decided it needed the power to lock terrorist suspects up for 42, and then for 90 days without charge or trial.
Many of us objected to this on the grounds that it breached a principle of the law, which forbids imprisonment without trial. And, that principle once having been breached, who knows where it might end?
Now Edward Balls, once a prominent member of that government, accepts that this was unnecessary. He thinks we could settle on 14 or 28 days of arbitrary imprisonment.
Well, it's an improvement, and a welcome admission of a mistake, for which Mr Balls should get some credit. I doubt, though, if anyone would be admitting it was a mistake if wiser people had not campaigned so fiercely against these deeply unpleasant and unjustified measures.
I'd just about be ready to allow 48 hours at an outside stretch, though I think it far wiser to stick to 24. If the police really can't think of a holding charge by then, or come up with a good reason to deny bail, then the magistrates should automatically order the release of the arrested person.
As for the supposed 'terror' danger, isn't it axiomatic that a person known to the authorities is more or less useless to any serious terrorist plot, which relies totally on surprise to achieve its aims? Once a person has been so much as interrogated, his name will always attract attention on any passenger manifest, his movements will always be subject to a certain amount of surveillance, and only a complete incompetent would use such a person in any terror enterprise.
The reasons advanced for the reintroduction of arbitrary detention for the first time in 300 years (outside wartime) were not only feeble. They were deadly dangerous to the real liberties we enjoy (instead of the fanciful ones, like the alleged ability to choose our rulers, actually non-existent).
Why? Because arbitrary detention, as the wise authors of England's (and the USA's) Constitutions knew, means that the state has arbitrary power to ruin the individual's life. Such power will always tend to grow up anyway, and only constant vigilance will keep it at a manageable level. An increasing amount of British law effectively abolishes the presumption of innocence (particularly in some cases involving children), and badly needs to be reformed.
Anyone who has committed a real objective crime, for which evidence can be produced, will not in any important way be protected by these ancient safeguards. If there is convincing evidence against him, he can be found guilty and punished all the more severely because of the strong likelihood that he is actually guilty. What makes these safeguards so worthwhile at any cost (and I note some judge complaining about the cost of Jury trial as if a price could be set on liberty) is that they make it very difficult for those in power to use the courts to persecute their critics and opponents.
This is the reason for the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, for the existence of Jury Trial, and the presumption of innocence which is meaningless without it, the Petition of Right in 1628, the Bill of Rights of 1689 which reasserted its principles. And that in turn gave rise to the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, whose authors consciously traced their roots to England's Great Charter and the long battle between Parliament and the House of Stuart. I have mentioned here before that, during the making of a programme on the growing threat to liberty, I was allowed to hold in my hands the actual vellum original of the Bill of Rights, and found myself trembling as I did so.
Yet these tremendous documents are now largely forgotten or unknown by supposedly educated people, and their hard, old lessons ignored in the modern passion for 'Human Rights', which sounds as if it is the same but is in fact a wholly different thing.
Wise and learned men, whom we look down on as ignorant country squires but whose minds were in many ways richer and more informed than ours will ever be, knew one big thing - that power would be abused if it were not restrained. They knew it because they had seen it at first hand. They protected us against the thing they feared by hard, unrelenting laws which said that the state could not do certain things.
The language of their documents is not usually flowery and rhetorical, like the various Declarations of Rights of Man which have so often been a prelude to dreadful assaults on men. The one exception to this is the American Declaration of Independence, which is rather lovely, but which had to be ballasted and contained soon afterwards with the workmanlike carpentry of the Constitution and the emergency repairs to that Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.
In the grumpy tradition of Coke, Selden and the other authors of the Petition of Right, the British and American Bills of Rights are bald, cold, hard limits on power.
'Congress Shall make no law …’ they say.
As in: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’
Or, in the English original of a century before: ‘That the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal;
‘That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal;
‘That the commission for erecting the late Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious;
‘That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal;
‘That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;
‘That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;
‘That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;
‘That election of members of Parliament ought to be free;
‘That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;
‘That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;
‘That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders;
‘That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;
‘And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.’
Or, from the Petition of Right: ‘No freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.’
And: ‘no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act of Parliament; and that none be called to make answer, or take such oath, or to give attendance, or be confined, or otherwise molested or disquieted concerning the same or for refusal thereof; and that no freeman, in any such manner as is before mentioned, be imprisoned or detained; and that Your Majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers and mariners, and that your people may not be so burdened in time to come; and that the aforesaid commissions, for proceeding by martial law, may be revoked and annulled; and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may issue forth to any person or persons whatsoever to be executed as aforesaid, lest by colour of them any of your Majesty's subjects be destroyed or put to death contrary to the laws and franchise of the land.’
All of this led to the USA's even harder, clearer and more codifed defences of free debate, protection against arbitrary arrest and the punitive billeting of troops, not to mention the right to bear arms which, technically, all British subjects still possess (though see my 'Brief History of Crime' for a discussion of how this important liberty has been bureaucratically revoked by stealth). And that is why, despite a startling Germanic culture of bureaucracy and over-willing acceptance of authority, English liberty has survived as well as it has (though now much under threat) in the USA. It has also survived (in different conditions and with different) in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The simple point is that humans can only be free where the state is restrained. 'Human Rights' being an attempt to codify a secular morality on the basis of competing group rights, actually strengthens the state by making the courts the umpires in this competition. It also gives the courts the power to legislate, because its showy vagueness allows them to 'interpret' various phrases to their own satisfaction.
Now, it is true that the US Supreme Court has managed to do this with bits of the Bill of Rights, notably the phrase 'cruel and unusual' (itself taken from the 1689 English Bill). But this is obviously intellectually shabby, as no serious person could imagine that the men who drafted this thought that the death penalty was cruel or unusual, or intended that meaning to be conveyed. But it is so much easier to do with the various universal declarations, European Conventions, Canadian Charters and now the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.
This last is full of horrible weasel phrases whose effect is often quite different in practice from its apparent meaning. Nobody may be deprived of his possessions ‘except in the public interest’ (Article 17) which is as tough as wet tissue-paper. The rights of freedom of expression and to privacy ('private life') inevitably conflict. The right to marry and found a family conflict with non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, which alter the meaning and status of the word 'marry'. The promises of religious 'diversity' make all faiths equal, thus diminishing the role of the one faith which has actually defined Europe and shaped its distinctive civilisation- Christianity.
The rights of children are in effect the rights of states and their agencies to intervene in supposedly free families.
Articles 47 and 48 on 'Justice' are airy, open to subjective interpretation (and without any means of enforcement). What is a 'reasonable' time? Who judges the impartiality of a tribunal?
We should be prouder of, and better-informed about, the keystones of the astonishing and unusual liberty which we enjoy in these islands and which also exists in the rest of the Anglosphere (though nowhere else). Many other countries may appear on the surface to be as free and open as we are. Switzerland alone has a comparably powerful (yet utterly different) set of mechanisms for keeping the state at bay.
Examined closely, most of the world's post-1945 democracies aren't that free. And we are becoming more like them. If Mr Balls, and others, are prepared to reconsider their rather ruthless view of these matters (and of such monstrosities as identity cards) then it is a good thing for all of us. It is beginning to dawn on lots of people that the terror bogey is an excuse for governments to take powers, rather than a real issue seriously addressed by relevant measures.
But if we are to continue to educate Mr Balls and his colleagues on such basic matters, we must know our own history better. It would help if Oxford graduates had heard of the Bill of Rights.Share this article:
22 November 2010 3:55 PM
How to Miss the Point....and How to be 'Skewered' by Matthew Parris
I had planned to spend much of today at an interesting London debate, but - having read the responses to my weekend posting (which is also my MoS column) - I really couldn't resist the chance to deal with a number of remarkably silly and obtuse contributions, of the kind I wish to discourage.
Here goes. Someone calling himself 'Dennis' informs me: ‘Most people have realised that it is the drug dealers themselves who lobby the government to keep cannabis illegal because it keeps their prices high. Nice of you to act as their spokesman.’
Now, were I to use a formula as sloppy as this 'most people have realised' that (say) cannabis is linked with mental health problems, I would be besieged by pro-druggies attacking me for generalising without evidence - even though the work of Robin Murray, often cited here, demonstrates that there appears to be a link. None of the pro-druggie enthusiasts for 'science' or evidence' ever seems capable of dealing with the Murray work, understandably preferring to ignore it.
But I'll be amazed if any of these 'science' and 'evidence' enthusiasts appear here to criticise the bravely anonymous 'Dennis' for his evidence-free claim, combined with smear.
This is not argument. It is heckling.
Next we have 'Tony', again so bold that he dare not let us know his surname. He opines: ‘Twice now the whole idea of linking “Berlin Time” to a nasty Euro conspiracy has been roundly kicked on the Mail website as little other than a fantasy that cynically attempts to exploit any lingering WWII sentiment, or even resentment toward a long dead and irrelevant Kaiser. When that failed, he calls “foul,” arguing that the voice of the people has been strangled by an obscure single interest group. More likely, Mail readers simply agree with the idea of more daylight toward the end of the working day. After all, at this time of year we're all going to work in the dark or near dark. Setting the clocks forward another hour makes no difference to that, does it? I couldn't care less if the sun was due south at 12 noon or 1pm, quite frankly. No one is going to be able to tell the difference. Perhaps Mr Hitchens would care to engage the debate on more adult terms instead.’
Well, on the contrary, my original article traced the invention of Central European Time to its historical source, namely Wilhelmine Germany. It pointed out that the same empire had imposed CET on conquered territories in the 1914 war. And that its direct descendant, the Third Reich, had done the same in the 1945 war. And that when those countries were briefly released from German pressure, they reverted to a time-zone closer to their own meridian.
'Tony' presumably knows little of the process by which the European Union has sought to integrate the economies and transport systems of its members, nor has he noticed that this integration has all been one way - that is to suit the interests of Germany, the country whose enormous power the EU was designed to contain and channel into peaceful rather than warlike forms of dominance.Nor did I call 'foul'. I truthfully pointed out (reproducing on this site the actual posting) that 'Lighter Later' has urged its supporters to post on the site. I discovered this by a simple process of deduction. Large numbers of postings had appeared (much greater than the normal level of comments on such articles) using such politically correct terms as 'xenophobic', not much favoured by readers of these newspapers. They also seemed to have been written by people who had not read the article. So I looked at the 'Lighter Later' website to see if such a call had been made there. And it had. The following day a similar message was posted about a poll on the website. Some people may think this is legitimate. I just believe that, when it happens, it ought to be recorded that it has happened.
If anyone still resents the Kaiser, I don't know who he is. Even my grandfather, who lost most of his friends in the 1914 war, and only survived himself because he had the luck to be posted to India, had softened on the subject by the time he died many years ago. But a lot of people, in my view rightly, see that (as Otto von Bismarck once said) many of Germany's interests are advanced 'in Europe's name'. If different countries co-ordinate their time, there is a simple 'who whom?' question. Who is conceding to whom? Since time is not abstract, but based upon the rotation of the earth, the country which gives up its own meridian, and switches to that of another, is objectively and demonstrably the 'whom' - the weaker, servile part of the relationship.
As I pointed out yesterday, no free and independent country in the world, outside the influence of German economic and diplomatic pressure, has adopted a time zone 15 degrees of longitude away from its own meridian. No more have they abolished their own borders (another amazing achievement of German diplomacy, absurdly unsung). And attempts to shift time so far from nature in this way in Britain, the USA and Portugal, have been rejected in the past precisely because they were so unpopular with normal human beings.
I have also referred to known evidence of covert propaganda by the EU and its supporters in this country, particularly the Connaught Breakfasts, details of which were revealed in the BBC programme 'A letter to The Times', broadcast on Radio 4 on the 3rd February 2000 and jaw-droppingly revelatory. There is no doubt at all that this has taken place in the past. Why should it not still be going on?
If, as 'Tony' claims, this matter is so unimportant, and makes so little difference, why have so many attempts (seven since 1994) been made in the British parliament to switch us to CET?
This is an entirely adult discussion, and I suspect 'Tony' is sulky because it is not going his way.
Still Missing The Point about That Hat
Now let us turn to 'John Wright', whose style seems faintly reminiscent of someone else, but I can't quite recall who.Quite easily, actually. See below. But the point I made was that, had Cherie Blair worn such a hat on such an occasion, she would have been criticised for it. Whereas Mrs Cameron wasn't. The hat was a Fedora, and it was jaunty, as male apparel sported by attractive women so often is. Most of us know the basics of the language of clothes, that one does not turn up to a black tie dinner in jeans and t-shirt, or to Glastonbury in a suit. There are some subtleties in between and most of us have made mistakes (there's an amusing and illuminating angle on this in Sebastian Faulks's novel' Engleby', in which the central character's complete inability to wear the right clothes for the right occasion alerts the reader to a far, far deeper problem).
The Labour leader Michael Foot was torn to pieces (metaphorically) some years ago for turning up at the Cenotaph in a coat (now on display in a museum in Manchester) which Fleet Street described as a Donkey Jacket. It wasn't a Donkey Jacket, but Michael Foot was at that stage officially bad, so that it was what it was called. The rest of the language of clothes, though arguable, remains pretty easy to read. I asked a number of people with varying opinions what they thought of the hat. Most felt it was wrong for the occasion, and I tend to agree with them. Mrs Cameron, as it happens, got away with it entirely.
Still Missing the Point about the Professor
Mr Wright continues: ‘Professor Nutt seems to have produced an interesting paper on the effects of drugs - both legal and illegal - within our society. I feel that his conclusions are valid and should be more widely debated.’
Well, if Mr Wright paid any attention here, he would have seen them debated at length on previous postings here, and they had a substantial and sympathetic airing throughout the liberal media on 1st November.
But as it happened, this odd and dubious report was not under discussion on this occasion. It wasn't even mentioned. What was plainly under discussion was whether Professor Nutt's professorial title qualified him to pronounce with authority on matters not connected to his discipline. Two such pronouncements were quotes, both linked by a theme, the first that 160,000 people had suffered 'criminal sanctions' for possessing cannabis, and the second that 'criminalising' such people was more dangerous to them than cannabis itself.
Not merely was the Professor far from his zone of expertise here. His statements seem to me to be thoroughly misleading, and propagandistic. Not only does he seem unwilling to acknowledge Robin Murray's work (and Professor Murray has drawn it to his attention). He suggests that the criminal law is far more punitive towards cannabis than in fact it is. And he suggests that a person who deliberately breaches the criminal law is in some way a victim of a process called 'criminalisation'. Which is logically absurd.
That is what I believe 'stinks' - as any competent reader of English can clearly see, if his mind isn't clouded by prejudice. Now, if anyone wishes to set up as a propagandist for drug law reform, that's fine by me. But he should be introduced as such when he's doing this, not by an academic title which has no bearing on the issue (and whose implied rigorous standards he is not applying in his research into the facts). The public and the media shouldn't imagine that his scientific qualifications, unless directly involved in what he says, automatically entitle his statements to respect. Mr 'Wright' misses this whole point because it does not suit him to engage with it. Were he to do so, he would have to concede that my use of the scientific method - careful research, demonstrable facts etc - was in this case superior to the Professor's.
Plus the Simply Untrue
And now we have Mr Jim Whitehead, who contributes: ‘Peter Hitchens: your blog posts are becoming increasingly ill-argued. You have admitted elsewhere that you do not understand the peer-review process, the foundation of modern scientific research.’
No, Mr Whitehead, I have never 'admitted ' (or indeed said) anything of the kind. I asked, on the 'Today' programme, rhetorically ‘What does Peer Review mean?’ I didn't ask this because I do not know what it technically is, but because I doubt very much that it provides the seal of scientific approval which it is often claimed for it.
Mr Whitehead continues: ‘Here you deign to suggest that Professor Nutt - by providing figures you reluctantly admit to be correct - is somehow abusing his position as a professor. He is not. His assertions, wherever I have seen them, have been supported by factual references to reputable studies.’
I do not think Mr Whitehead knows what 'deign' means, though it is always a pleasure to use it. I do not 'reluctantly admit' (that little word again) or even say that Professor Nutt's figures were correct. Nor was there any reluctance involved in making this the lead item of my column.
The number of impositions of criminal sanctions is a clean different thing from the number of recorded offences for which such sanctions might be applied in law. In fact it is in the gap between the two that the entire argument lies. And if Mr Whitehead, who has the brass neck to attack me for my allegedly 'ill-argued' posts had read the item with any care, he would see that it is an exploration of the chasm between the number of recorded offences and the number of sanctions imposed. It is also an exploration of those 'sanctions', which in many cases are not 'sanctions' at all in any serious meaning of the word.
I might add that more than 22,000 recorded cannabis offences do not seem to have attracted any penalty of any kind at all. If they did, they are not recorded. Thus on basic arithmetic, even if one accepted that a 'Cannabis Warning' or a Caution or a PND was a 'criminal sanction', Professor Nutt is out by 22,000. He has made a basic category error, confusing the recording of an offence with its outcome in the criminal justice system.
I do not think this distinction involves any great precision of language. But even if it did, a Professor of anything should surely be expected to be fastidious about precision.
My figures and my descriptions of 'Cannabis Warnings', 'PND's and 'cautions', come from the relevant government departments (Justice and Home) and from the Association of Chief Police Officers. I am sure anyone else could replicate them if they chose to do so.
Whose posts are 'ill-argued' now, Mr Whitehead?
A Funny Sort of Skewer
And now back to Mr 'Wright' again. He says: ‘I also note that you are particularly prolific in dishing out insults to anyone from Stephen Fry to Tony Blair via mostly everyone to the left of you (which, apart from the resident droolers on this blog, is, well, everyone).’Well, I'm happy to own to having referred to Mr Blair as 'Princess Tony', a just punishment for his use of the phrase crafted for him 'The People's Princess', and his general takeover of the Diana mourning moment. But I felt, and feel, that he was big enough to look after himself. And the name seemed frivolous after he became instead a bloodstained warlord and a national disgrace.
I'm also proud to have spread to a wider audience the wonderful description of Mr Fry in the 'Dictionary of National Celebrity as 'A stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like'. And to point out how immensely puffed up he is. But again, Mr Fry is quite capable of fighting his own corner, as he showed in a recent debate on the Roman Catholic Church where, as I understand it, he took no prisoners.
Mr Wright continues: ‘You are rather over-sensitive though when it comes to criticism of your good self, a major character flaw.’
Well, I have several times explained that my complaint is not over being called names, an experience I have been undergoing since I entered my first school playground more years ago than I can remember and which, though I don't enjoy, I reckon as being a reasonable occupational hazard.
It is over the obdurate unresponsiveness, and unwillingness to argue properly, which is typified in these posts.
What do I mean by unresponsiveness? Well, the opposite of what I have demonstrated above. In this posting, I have taken the meat of the charges against me, and rebutted it in detail. I haven't ignored what's said or pretended it hasn't been. Nor have I misrepresented my opponent's case. Indeed, any visitor here knows that a lot of time and trouble is devoted to providing accurate quotation on which to base arguments.
Mr Andrew Bishop asks: ‘Do I get the impression that you want comments, only if they express views similar to yourself?’ To which I can only reply that if he has that impression, he hasn't got it from me. I strive to keep this site open to all opinions. I ask only that they stick to facts and logic, and that they respond to the arguments of those they disagree with. I could easily ban all attacks on me if I wanted to. But I don't. No serious person studying this blog could claim that criticism of me or my arguments is stifled.
This is a Skewer? Get me Rene Magritte. Fast
But it is misrepresentation, and the obtuse misunderstanding engendered by a dogmatically clouded mind, that I most object to (though I have to say banal statements without any argumentative force such as 'The times are changing' (why not 'Where have all the Flowers Gone?' or 'The Answer is Blowing in the Wind'? Times that can change in one way can change in another. The statement has no value of any kind) or 'what you want will never return' (why not? How do they know?) or 'get with the project' (why should I? I don't like the project and can explain why) do make my heart sink, mainly for the wretched, dank state of mind which they reveal.
And my heart also sank when the former Tory MP Matthew Parris misrepresented what I had said in a radio debate with him. Because the thing I object to most of all in an opponent is misrepresentation. It poisons the wells of debate. So I scolded him sharply at the time and afterwards, and then contacted him to let him know that I planned (as I had told him I would) to post my words and his account of them on this blog, here, where all could see the huge difference between the two. And I intend - because I believe it to be morally imperative - to pursue this to the point of resolution.
So here comes Mr Wright again, saying: ‘Mr Parris skewered you rather neatly in your recent spat and I cannot for the life of me see what he has to apologise for.’
Well, that's such an interesting point of view that I for one yearn to know how on earth Mr 'Wright' arrived at it, as I don't feel at all skewered, much more angered by a respected public figure's casual attitude to accuracy, particularly disturbing in a journalist. What precisely were the words of Mr Parris which 'skewered' me? In what way did they do so? But I bet he cannot do so and, if he is who I think he is, he won't respond anyway, to this or anything else. In the meantime I wish I could commission my favourite surrealist painter, the late Rene Magritte, to paint a blank canvas entitled 'This is a Skewer'. This could represent the non-existent skewer with which Mr Parris didn't actually kebab me. It could hang alongside his (Magritte's, not Matthew Parris's) famous picture of a pipe, entitled 'This is not a Pipe'.
That'll have to do for now. When we have this problem sorted out, and the site back on an even keel, I can get on with discussing the amazing Labour withdrawal from the policy of 42-day and 90-day detention.Share this article:
An Appeal from the Chair
I note that many of these supportive messages came from people who do not necessarily agree with my positions. This is most important to me. I greatly value the contributions here of people who are willing to enter into serious arguments, based upon facts and reason. And inevitably many of these will be from readers who do not share my opinions.
I am distressed only by those who write here to abuse me, or to make unresponsive comments which do not actually engage with what I have said (or which lazily repeat arguments many times exploded here). The task of compiling an index, which would help deal with the second problem, is one I have neglected because I have recently been travelling a great deal, and preparing for several debates and speeches. The need to document and transcribe my recent adventures on Radio 4 also took up a great deal of time. But I hope to use the next few months to set up a good working index which will allow anyone to look up what has been said here over the past few years, on most major subjects.
But this does not solve the abuse problem. I'm told to screen comments. I am against this, as a net which would catch the sort of people I have in mind might well also catch others who did not deserve to be caught. Also, I don't object to being abused myself, and pride myself on allowing the maximum possible freedom of speech. What I object to is that I alone have to shoulder the task of dealing with it.
And this is my point.
Think of this site as a public debate, in which I am both chairman and principal speaker. If hecklers or organised interrupters try to disrupt such a debate, or if certain persons make persistent nuisances of themselves, the mood of such a meeting will generally be hostile to them. The audience has come for serious debate, not for foolishness of this sort. And the chairman can rely on that mood to support his efforts to control them.
So to those who kindly urged me to continue, I have a very serious request. Do not ignore postings which you think break the rules of serious debate. Show that the mood of the site is against this sort of thing. Do not wait for me to seek to rally support against them. I should only need to intervene on such things very rarely. Many of them are quite possibly hoping to get my attention by being unpleasant. If you will condemn them, I won't need to. So they will fail in their objective, and perhaps be chastened as well.
Comment unfavourably upon them, as soon as you see them - not necessarily by disagreeing with their sentiments, and certainly not by being rude in return, but by pointing out that they have descended into abuse, or that they ignore the argument clearly made and the facts clearly stated (these are the main faults of such postings). Let them know that this sort of thing is not acceptable here. A one line comment, as long as it names the contributor involved, is quite enough - if sufficient people do it. It takes a moment. I beg you to do this from now on. Otherwise, all those messages of encouragement aren't really worth very much in practice.
Sunday, 28 November 2010
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