This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column This was the Government’s surrender to lawlessness and disorder, bumptiously trumpeted by Kenneth Clarke last week. The Prime Minister was very worried about this announcement, which was delayed several times because of his fretting. He was not concerned because he disagreed with it, for he is wholly in tune with Mr Clarke. He was nervous in case Tory voters finally grasped what sort of Government this is. But the poor dears sleep on, still fooled. Luckily for Mr Cameron and for Mr Clarke, sympathetic media and a series of other events swiftly buried Mr Clarke’s Green Paper. When its effects are felt over the coming years, few will realise that their intolerable, besieged, vandalised lives, their smashed front doors and violated homes, their drug-ruined children, their distraught and bloodied family members weeping powerlessly for justice and not getting it, are the direct consequences of Mr Cameron and his deliberate decision to stop even trying to protect the public. Past governments have tried to cope with this in many ways. Recently they have sought to pretend it isn’t happening by fiddling the figures. But this cannot conceal the fact that the prisons are getting fuller and fuller of bad people, even in spite of letting as many of them out as quickly as possible. Mr Clarke’s solution is to stop sending large numbers of bad people to prison at all, and to use so-called community punishments instead, even though their feeble uselessness is proven by a recent report from Policy Exchange. Currently such punishments often go uncompleted, and frequently involve such stern retribution as working in charity shops. The reoffending rate is appalling. A Liberal answer: Because we are too tough. True answer: Because we have far more crimes per head than our neighbours. Q Why can’t we simply build more prisons? A Liberal answer: Because prisons are horrid, crime is caused not by human wickedness but by deprivation, and we don’t like being responsible for such a harsh system. True answer: We have built more prisons. But we don’t use them properly (see below) and the criminally-inclined are not frightened of them. So the criminally-inclined become actual criminals. And we cannot build them fast enough to house the growing criminal underclass our policies have created. Q Many claim that ‘prison works’. Does it? A Liberal answer number one: Yes, but only by keeping criminals off the streets till they offend again, which isn’t much use. Liberal answer number two: No, huge numbers of prisoners reoffend after serving time. So prison makes them worse. True answer: Prisons are purposeless warehouses, where criminals are corralled for a short while with other people like them. The nastier they are, the more they are left alone by increasingly powerless staff. They are given taxpayer-funded drugs, or a blind eye is turned to illegal drug-taking. They are seldom made to work and – as we saw with the case of the gangster Colin Gunn, who has forced officers to call him ‘Mister’ – they are treated with absurd generosity. With the exception of those who commit a few specially heinous crimes, most criminals do not get sent to prison until they are already habitual law-breakers, with a long line of cautions, unpaid fines and suspended sentences behind them. Then when they arrive in prison they are given drugs, TVs and pool tables. No wonder they reoffend. Q Why have we failed to reduce the drug-taking which leads to so much crime? A Liberal answer: We have not tried hard enough to treat this sickness, and must devote more resources to reducing the harm of drugs and to providing treatment for these poor unfortunates. True answer: If the possession of illegal drugs is not treated as a crime, it will increase. After the Wootton Report of 1969, we began to give up punishing -possession of the most serious and common illegal drug, the slickly marketed mental poison cannabis. Its use has increased incessantly since 1973, when the Tory Government gave in to the wealthy, powerful cannabis lobby, largely funded by rock stars. Penalties were sharply reduced and Lord Hailsham told magistrates to stop imprisoning people for possessing it. The lie, that it is a ‘soft’ and harmless drug, is still widely accepted in the establishment. Last year, most people caught in possession of this substance were let off with a meaningless warning, despite its recent ¬restoration to Class ‘B’. In a disgraceful act of concealment – which amounts in my view to dishonesty – Mr Clarke’s Green Paper hides the fact that cannabis is the criminal’s drug of choice. In paragraph 18, it says: ‘A significant proportion of crime is committed by offenders who have multiple problems. Evidence tells us that: 64 per cent of newly sentenced prisoners report using a drug during the four-week period before custody (30 per cent heroin, 28 per cent crack cocaine).’ I went to the source of these figures. It states that 46 per cent of these newly sentenced prisoners, far more than had used heroin or crack, had used cannabis. When I asked the Ministry of Injustice to explain why they had left this out of the list, they pathetically claimed there was no room for the information. We get a lot of talk from politicians about how they are against ‘appeasement’. They were against the ‘appeasement’ of Saddam Hussein, and look where that got us. They are against the ‘appeasement’ of the Afghan Taliban, and the coffins keep on coming home to prove how tough they are, and Headley Court is always busy. Lots of them say they are against the ‘appeasement’ of Iran and North Korea, and I tremble to think where this fake toughness will get us. But in the real confrontation on our own streets, where the slouching, blank-eyed, grinning enemy lurks and giggles, his mind scorched by drugs and his moral sense shrivelled to the size of a lentil by our sad and violent culture and our useless schools, appeasement is the path our leaders have chosen – appeasement of drugs, appeasement of the crime they cause, appeasement of criminals themselves. We all know that eventually the appeaser is destroyed by the very menace he seeks to buy off, but many others have to be ruined first. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down. This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column The monstrous birth of a new Liberal Conser¬vative Party is now certain. One of its midwives is Sir John Major of Maastricht and Black Friday. A few weeks ago I drew attention to the amazing remarks of Francis Maude, a close ally of David Cameron, who said he would prefer a coalition to a Tory majority after the next Election. I am sure Mr Cameron agrees with this. Now, Sir John – another close Cameron ally – has called for a permanent alliance of two of our three parties against the people of Britain. Not that he put it quite like that. In a little-noticed but important speech in Cambridge, he said that he liked the Coalition and hoped some way could be found ‘to prolong co-operation beyond this Parliament’. This, he said, could lead to a realignment of British politics. He recalled that the Tories had an informal pact with the Liberals in 1951, which probably saved that party from oblivion. He didn’t say – but most Liberals know – that they will need something similar to save them from massacre at the next Election. This is revolutionary stuff. And I am grateful to Mr Major, whose strange, mealy, roundabout way of speaking often reveals more than he means it to. Because he also explained the attraction of coalitions – to politicians: ‘Two parties are more likely to enjoy a tolerant electorate for policies that are painful.’ Or, in other words, that a coalition can ram through unpopular policies (Mr Major is an expert on those) more easily than one-party governments. This is, of course, even more the case when the third party actually agrees with the Coalition about almost everything, and is still trying to work out how to pretend to be the Opposition, when it doesn’t really want to oppose. What a perfect outcome for the political class – two liberal parties in permanent power, pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, anti-marriage, warmist. And an Opposition that doesn’t oppose. A pity about the rest of us. This is propaganda garbage, just like the piffle talked about another famous picture of polar bears perched on a melting ice floe. That was taken in August, when ice in Alaska always melts. Land was close by. Polar bears can swim for hundreds of miles if they want to. The piggyback picture is just as misleading. It isn’t remotely new. I have established that it was taken by the charming Mrs Angela Plumb on a holiday in Spitsbergen more than four years ago, on July 21, 2006. It then formed the basis of a scientific paper written by the equally charming Jon Aars, a Norwegian polar bear expert. I have read this paper. It speculates that the cubs may ride on their mothers’ backs to avoid the cold water, as they don’t have the thick layer of blubber that allows adult bears to swim in icy temperatures for hours. It was unintentionally revealing. Our Left-wing Establishment believes crime is a sickness to be treated, rather than a deliberate act that needs to be punished. Prisoners are even given heroin substitutes at our expense, because of the myth – swallowed by the Injustice Secretary, Ken Clarke – that immediate withdrawal from heroin is dangerous. It is generally just unpleasant – and so it ought to be. Nobody needs to poke this filth into his body. In a kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome, prison governors and Ministers begin to identify with their captives. They entirely forget that those captives are in prison because they have done serious damage to innocent people. Listen to this astonishing statement from the governor of High Down Prison, Peter Dawson: ‘The thing I want to say first about sending someone to prison is that it always does harm to the person in prison. My job is to mitigate the harm done to the person who is sent to prison and those that care for them on the outside.’ Broadcasters and newspapers have virtually abolished the yard (still lawfully used on thousands of road signs) and the foot. But their most determined campaign is against the inch. Why do the weather people insist on telling us that 10cm of snow have fallen? Partly, they do it because they are fanatics. Partly because it sounds much worse than 4in. A country halted by 4in of snow sounds – and is – rather pathetic. While reading John Major’s Cambridge oration, I discovered an amazing fact about him. He writes poems, which he promises eventually to give to the Churchill College archive which houses the rest of his papers. I can’t wait. If only we had known this when he was in Downing Street. Still, he’s lucky. Quite a lot of things rhyme with ‘Edwina’ and with ‘Currie’, and also with ‘Redwood’ – though ‘Bastards’, ‘Portillo’ and ‘Maastricht’ are tougher. One was the way in which this plan’s advocates present guesswork as fact – and ignore actual fact. And the other is the way they largely get away with it, as few non-Scottish MPs bothered to do any serious research into the matter. The scheme is a potential disaster. Let us hope it is now quietly strangled.
11 December 2010 9:59 PM
Never mind rioting yobs. The real enemy will soon be roaming your street, giggling and blank-eyed ...set free by this bumptious idiot of a Tory
06 December 2010 2:52 PM
The Kalashnikov Paradox
A High Standard of Debate?
04 December 2010 11:11 PM
The eternal Coalition: Perfect for politicians, lousy for the rest of us
Sunday, 12 December 2010
The parasites and bawling wreckers who invaded London on Thursday did David Cameron a favour. They helped to draw our eyes and minds away from a much more frightening event.
This year this country reached a moment of decision. It has been coming for some years. The amount of crime and disorder, caused mainly by the deliberate destruction of the married family and the abolition of fatherhood, is now enormous. Up
till now, it has mainly affected the poor, though I am not sure this will continue to be the case.
Here I’ll try to set out what is really going on, and what it means. I’ve given two answers to each question – the liberal elite view, and the truth.
Q Why do we imprison more people per head than any other Western European country?
The sight of a steam train storming through the snow in Yorkshire's North Riding didn't just fill me with a warm glow of memory. It evoked a thought (below) and a particular recollection, of something I am fairly sure that I saw aged four, namely the last run of the old Princetown railway, on a wintry March Saturday in 1956.
Can the engine have been blue as it went sadly through the hamlet of Dousland where we then lived, on its last journey? I don't think so, in fact all experience suggests a sooty black was more likely - but memory, that lying jade, insists it was blue. The line (much of my childhood seems to have been spent near or riding on now-defunct railway lines) ran up from Yelverton to the top of Dartmoor and was the only link between Dartmoor Prison and the outside world if the snow came down hard and the roads became impassable - though in one really bad blizzard it had once been closed. My father pointed out, as we watched the final train chuff by, that one day they'd wish they'd kept it open. Though of course helicopters can always make the journey in an emergency, so perhaps they haven't. I don't suppose my father, born before 1914, had completely adapted to the idea of helicopters by 1956.
I now learn that heavy old filthy old steam locomotives can easily conquer snowy conditions, whereas modern electric and diesel engines, being too light and too dependent on sensitive computers which don't like the cold, will shut down.
This comes as no surprise. Steam will work when almost everything else doesn't. When I lived in Moscow, I visited a vast park full of enormous black steam engines, each with a red star painted on its smokebox, waiting to be recalled to service when the great day came. The park's existence had until recently been a secret. The thinking behind this was fascinating. All motorised transport, and even aircraft, would be knocked out by the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) from nuclear weapons. The only machines which would continue to function were steam engines and bicycles. So the Soviet Army had maintained a reserve of steam engines, ready to roll westwards in case there was no other way of invading Germany. This would have run into trouble in Poland, the only non-Russian country which in those days had lines built to the wider Russian gauge. But I suppose the construction battalions could have done a high-speed widening job on Western tracks if necessary.
But maybe they just kept them anyway, in case of something turning up. Most people know the old joke about the US space programme spending millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that would write in orbit, in weightless conditions - whereas the Soviet solution was to give their cosmonauts pencils. I don't know if it's true, but it expresses a truth.
Most Soviet equipment was extremely crude. But it was also easy to mass produce, wasn't made to tiny tolerances, didn't depend on high levels of maintenance, or on temperate and dry conditions. That's why, if a conventional Third World War had ever been held, the USSR would probably have won. NATO planes would have been grounded by drizzle. Soviet MiGs would have flown in all weathers in huge numbers. NATO tanks, with their superb fire control, would have suffered ceaseless computer glitches. Soviet tanks, crude and simple, would have lumbered on regardless and kept shooting. Etc etc.
And of course the Kalashnikov AK-47 weapon would have carried on firing when everything else had jammed. The AK-47 is the absolute proof of the contention that simple, crude, reliable devices are often more use than over-engineered, needlessly complex ones. American soldiers have been known to throw their own M16 weapons away and to swap them for Kalashnikovs, and it is easy to see why. Does this have any implications for the way in which we design and build such things as railways, now?
A very brief reflection here on a couple of contributions to Friday's House of Commons debate on Berlin Time, the official record of which can be viewed on the Parliament website.
As I said in my MoS column, the arguments in favour of this pernicious Bill depend very heavily on assuming the truth of various projections about (for example) tourism which are wholly speculative, and on a bizarre and mistaken belief that road deaths fell during the last period of 'Darker Later' tyranny when in fact they rose. Note here the limits of my argument: I don't know why deaths rose, or if they would have risen more or less under different circumstances, or even fallen - though several major changes in road conditions and traffic laws were beginning to be felt around this time. What I do know is that they did in fact rise, and that therefore, whatever the reason for this rise, it is impossible to claim that they fell, or to speculate on why they fell.
The Minister, Ed Davey, made in many ways the best speech of the debate, which acknowledged many of the facts and arguments deployed against the Bill by the Mail on Sunday. I am still unclear if the government will now quietly adopt a version of the idea, which I am absolutely sure has not gone away. I shall be looking into this.
But I would like to record two (Tory) contributions. One is from a Mr Ben Gummer, whom I think I once met while speaking to an undergraduate society in Cambridge (he made a strongly pro-EU point in response to what I said, in summarising my book 'The Abolition of Britain') but have not since encountered. I gather he attained a very good degree and has written a book on the Black Death, so he is obviously not a fool. He is the son of the notable Tory Europhile and social liberal John Gummer, a very clever politician (with an equally clever brother in the shape of Lord Chadlington) let down in this febrile, lookist age by his overgrown schoolboy appearance and by his perfectly reasonable decision to let his daughter eat an unpalatable but risk-free hamburger in front of photographers, in a justified attempt to stem the ludicrous BSE panic.
The other is from Mr Tobias Ellwood, someone for whom I would normally have some time, given his upbringing abroad and his army service - both likely to broaden the mind and strengthen the character - and his personal courage recently demonstrated when he confronted a group of louts in the street (and was quite severely beaten for his pains).
Note that, despite what I am about to reproduce, I have taken the trouble to find out a little about these people, and to stress their abilities and achievements.
Contrast that with what follows, two abstracts from Hansard, the official record of the debate:
Ben Gummer: ‘May I put to him an argument that has not been put so far? The unofficial opposition to the Bill appears to have been mobilised by Mr Peter Hitchens. Is that not the clincher in favour of a successful passage for the Bill, or does the Hon. Gentleman wish to find himself in alliance with Mr Hitchens?’
And a little later.
Tobias Ellwood: ‘But let us get back to Peter Hitchens. [Laughter.] He is one of the few voices that are against the daylight saving, but I believe that he now acts as a drag anchor against that great British newspaper the Sunday Mail- [Interruption.]-I am sorry; The Mail on Sunday. He is anti-change; he is anti-technology, so the idea of moving the clocks abhors him. That is slightly odd. Because he does not like inventions and technology, one would have thought that using the light bulb less might appeal to him, but he does not put that argument forward. He would rather put forward a wartime rhetoric with references to Berlin time to foster prejudice against the Bill.
‘ “Why Berlin time?” it has been asked. "Why not Gibraltar time, Madrid time, Paris time or Rome time?" Clearly, those descriptions would not conjure up the same worrying image as the UK crumbling to the mighty powers of Berlin after the sacrifices that we made in two world wars. I say to him, "Peter, you are potty. Clearly, you are a very, very angry man and stuck in the past. You are a cross between Alf Garnett and Victor Meldrew but without the jokes." He is a restless regressive: the King Canute of politics, fighting the tide of change. He will never lose sight of the past because he has chosen to walk backwards into the future. This is nothing to do with Berlin or wartime images.’
I can't say this with certainty of Mr Gummer, since he makes no reference to me other than to jeer. But I am quite sure that Mr Ellwood has not read what I have written about this, or that if he has he has not understood it. If his research on me and my opinions is an indication of the level of his research on the issue of changing the clocks, I think we can safely discount what he says. Meanwhile I challenge him (and Mr Gummer) to a public debate, preferably in front of his Constituency Association, on this subject.
By the way, this morning's 'Guardian' also contains another instance of the automatic assumption in the establishment that 'Right Wing' commentators are axiomatically stupid, wrong and ill-informed. Ms Decca Aitkenhead has interviewed Professor David Nutt. She was not that impressed with him or his case, and some of the druggie posters here will not like what she said about his much-touted report. She wrote: ‘Last month Nutt's new foundation published its first major report in the Lancet, which ranked 20 different drugs according to 16 different harms they do, both to users and to wider society. Alcohol came top, higher than heroin, crack and crystal meth, while ecstasy and LSD were ranked among the least damaging. It was, undeniably, the most comprehensive study of their respective risks ever conducted – and as someone who has enjoyed certain recreational drugs far more than I've ever liked alcohol, it would suit me very well to welcome its findings. But its shortcomings seemed pretty glaringly obvious, even to someone as unscientifically minded as me.
‘The rankings did not allow for the drugs' current legal status – and therefore availability – and so as Nutt himself has acknowledged: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used." But by that token, I suggest, one could say that drinking tea is more dangerous than climbing Mount Everest. Just because lots of people have been scalded by a popular drink, this tells us little about the risks of a minority sport such as mountaineering. If we're trying to establish the objective danger of a specific substance, in order to formulate policy, surely we can only calculate its harm in the context of its prevalence?’
But at least she tried to ascertain what the Professor thought and what he knew. Not in my case. No need. I am dismissed thus: 'He [Professor Nutt] is also very good at exposing the confusion of much political thinking on drugs, as well as the baseless alarmism of media commentators like "Peter Hitchens, who don't want facts to get in the way of prejudice".’
So that's all right then. All that work I did on the facts of criminal sanctions for cannabis possession, not to mention all Robin Murray's work on cannabis and mental health - on which I base my justified alarm - doesn't exist. Half the problem conservatives have is simply getting anyone to pay attention to what they actually say. And when those who refuse to pay attention include Tory MPs, I think it safe to say that my contention that the Tory Party is part of the liberal establishment is pretty much proven. Though of course 'HM', that steadfast and unshakeable believer in BBC neutrality (even when the organisation's own senior figures own up to it), will presumably continue to insist that I am imagining this treatment, and 'Bert' will presumably argue that none of it has any significance to anyone but me, and that I am merely 'thin-skinned', and unable to cope with personal slights. Good Lord, if that were so, I should have gone home in tears long ago.
As it happens, I rather enjoyed being personally attacked in the Commons, which I fear is as close as I shall ever get to taking part in a debate there - something I once longed to be entitled to do. But I didn't let my pleasure cloud my concern about the argument.
Taken for another ride by the warmists
Aaaaah! Look at this lovely picture of a polar bear cub riding on its mother’s back. It appeared in a number of papers this week with stories – inspired by the lobbying group WWF – suggesting that this was a new development, caused by global warming.
But there’s no proof of this, as polar bears can’t speak English or Norwegian so cannot tell us why they do what they do. The paper accepts that bear cubs may always have done this.
Jon Aars himself said to me that polar bear cubs have ridden on their mothers’ backs for ages. ‘What we do not know is whether or not it is happening more frequently than it used to,’ he says.
So we don’t know. Once again the almost invariable rule applies. If any picture is produced to support the warmist panic, it will turn out to be suspect. Oh, and by the way, how much use have all those stupid windmills been during the cold snap?
Jail – there to help the poor old crooks
I went to prison again on Monday, for a debate sponsored by BBC2’s Newsnight about crime and punishment.
And this is where your taxes are going. It is sometimes hard to decide who commits the greater crime – the thief and the lout, or the politicians and civil servants who fail to punish and deter them.
Metric snow, and its pathetic result
The intensifying campaign to force the foreign, unwieldy metric system on the British people continues apace.
Time myths tick on
Watching the Commons debate on the Berlin Time Bill – in which my name was frequently taken in vain – I was struck by two things.
A message to Matthew Parris, the Left-wing Cameron supporter and anti-Christian who recently spread a gravely inaccurate version of what I had said in a radio debate: I’ll stop telling the truth about him if he apologises for misrepresenting me. And I recommend he pauses for thought on this matter.
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