Britannia Radio

08 January 2011 8:53 PM

So who's in charge tonight at the Prison With No Warders?

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Who thought of having open prisons in the first place, and why did nobody laugh? The whole idea is blatantly silly, like ‘Dry Water’ or ‘Hot Ice Cream’.

But it is nothing like as foolish as having a Prison With No Warders.

Two staff were in charge of almost 500 convicted criminals, and not just ordinary criminals, but the sort of lawbreakers that even Kenneth Clarke and his liberal Injustice Ministry are willing to lock up.

As we found when they set the place on fire rather than be breathalysed, these are not nice people. Do you really think Ford is the only British jail where illegal drink and drugs are regularly being consumed against all regulations?

I wonder what the staffing levels were at all this country’s other prisons on New Year’s Eve. I wonder what they are tonight.

It would be funny if it did not matter. But it does matter. And the truly shocking thing about the Ford events is that they have led to no national scandal. A prison has been set on fire (and we shall have to pay for the repairs).

It has been revealed to be, to all intents and purposes, unstaffed. The local population were entirely exposed to what anyone in this anarchic encampment of criminals chose to do.

Nobody has resigned. The story has faded from newspapers and broadcast bulletins. The ‘Opposition’ has not taken it up with any vigour. And yet we, the people, have been treated with complete sneering contempt.

Our political elite do not believe in punishment or justice. Sniggering behind their hands, they put on a sort of cardboard street theatre to fool us: police who never patrol; courts that hardly ever send anyone to prison; sentences that are never served; prisons with no guards.

You would have thought, when this was exposed in flames for the fraud it is, someone would have been embarrassed, and someone in mainstream politics would have been angry on behalf of the undefended population of these islands.

No such luck. Meanwhile, the wicked will have observed and remembered. And they will feel still more free to do exactly what they want to do.

Pitiful Prescott, a picture of vulgarity

How sad to see the pitiful figure of John Prescott reduced to advertising cheap car insurance. Does he really need the money? What for? I had thought more highly of him.

Just before I heard this sordid news, I had listened to a 1959 recording of Labour’s titanic Nye Bevan, who in the Forties and Fifties must have been young John Prescott’s hero.

Bevan was filled with prophetic scorn for the nasty new Britain he saw growing up under Harold Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ society.

He spoke of the ‘delusion of television’, and the way in which debt was taking hold so that ‘the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land’, warning of ‘a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud’.

Well isn’t Mr Prescott’s miserable commercial a sign of just such a society?

The tired Tories, like an old labrador on its last legs

For a moment, the Parliamentary Tory Party has woken from its long, complacent doze. It is like an incontinent, smelly old labrador slumbering by the fireside, which has begun to notice that its owner isn’t quite as affectionate as he used to be.

The chocolate treats have stopped. There’s a snappish, exasperated tone in His Master’s Voice, and that new poodle puppy is getting all the attention.

Could it be that, before all that long, there’ll be a melancholy trip to the vet from which there will be no return?

Well, of course it could. Young Master Cameron is not a sentimental man, and he’s had all the use he ever hoped to get out of the Tory Party.

One of his faults (in his own terms, not mine) is that he’s just not very good at hiding such feelings.

And so Mark Pritchard and the other Tory MPs have begun to mutter, loyally of course, about what looks startlingly like an unstated pact between the ex-Tory Party and the ex-Liberal Party.

They have immediately been reassured. Oh no, nothing like that is planned. The very idea. They can all go off back to sleep in front of the fire.

And so it will go on until the day when the car turns into the vet’s gateway, and through their rheumy old eyes they will at last see and understand the fate that’s long been planned for them.

I’m sorry to say this, but they deserve it – as do all those who trade principle for office.

****************************

Silence, or silly stuff about women wanting rich husbands, has greeted a devastating pamphlet from Dr Catherine Hakim, which tears to pieces the false propaganda of the ultra-feminists who want to force us all to be equal when we’re not all the same.

Feminist Myths And Magic Medicine can be read online. It shows that boot-faced, state-sponsored campaigns for equality do not work, and that the lowest pay gap between men and women in the world is not in Scandinavia but Swaziland.

The truth about the Left-wing paradise, Sweden, is so startling that it alone makes reading the booklet worthwhile.

My favourite fact is that the pay gap for men and women was higher in ferociously feminist East Germany than in the West. Read it. Harriet Harman never will. Theresa May ought to.

****************************

I am setting this down because I have never seen it in a British newspaper (maybe I was living abroad when it was published) and it is important.

The Communist Party of Great Britain was directly subsidised by the Kremlin, whose diplomats secretly handed over large leather bags full of banknotes to a CPGB functionary.

This continued from 1956 (as a reward for the party’s support of the invasion of Hungary) until 1979 and at times was as much as £100,000 a year – more like a million in today’s money.

What does Comrade Dr Baron John Reid, a party member during the years of subsidy, think about this? Or Comrade Peter Mandelson, a keen member of the Young Communist League in the early Seventies?

****************************

I cannot for the life of me see why we should be worried that a British chemist has

sold the State of Arizona the chemicals it needed to execute a murderer, Jeffrey Landrigan. Landrigan gruesomely murdered Chester Dyer while already on the run from a 40-year sentence for murdering his supposed best friend, Greg Brown. While in prison he had nearly murdered another inmate, stabbing him 14 times. What sort of person gets into a state of outrage over the lawful execution of such a man in a free country? Outside the BBC, most people think that Arizona has a more sensible justice system than we do.

January 8, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Share this article:

• Digg it
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Nowpublic
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Fark

06 January 2011 12:05 PM

The King James Bible versus the Sid James Bible

On this, the Feast of the Epiphany, a word or two on the Authorised Version of the Bible, known to Americans(and increasingly known here) as the 'King James' version, which has been the subject of some discussion, oddly enough, on the Open Prison thread.

'Private Eye' this week has a rather good jeer at the Church of England's supposed reverence for a book it never uses, and also (I think this is their coinage) uses the expression: 'The Sid James Version' to describe the many horrible modern translations of the Bible which are used instead.

Meanwhile the Queen (though weirdly interrupting her message to babble about sport) and the Archbishop of Canterbury, have recently spoken in praise of the 1611 Bible, and BBC Radio 4 has been running a series, hosted by James Naughtie, on the history of the Authorised Version.

But what I have yet to hear (outside 'Private Eye') is any reference to the fact that this is all lip-service. Anglicans will know that the Authorised Version is very rarely used in services, and has disappeared from the lecterns and the pews of almost all Anglican churches. Instead, you will get one of the many Sid James versions.

Some of these can at least claim to be scholarly new translations, though into an English as flat as Kansas and as dreary as the plains of Karaganda. Others are mere paraphrases of the 1611 translation. In almost all cases the tough, obscure passages in the Authorised Version (especially when St Paul really gets going) are just as tough and obscure in modern versions.

What's more, the Authorised Version tends, in fact, to use good hard, earthy English words: 'And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!' doesn't seem to me to be in any way hard for a 21st century person to understand. Indeed, you can hear and feel the woe and regret in it across the centuries, an old man weeping and alone. Whereas take a few modern versions: 'The king was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. And thus he said as he walked, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” ’ (New American Standard) or 'The king was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: "O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you--O Absalom, my son, my son!” ’ (New International Version)

Or, where the Authorised Version has: ‘And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land,’ this in the New International Reader's Version becomes: 'A king will come who will do what is right. His officials will govern fairly.

‘Each man will be like a place to get out of the wind. He will be like a place to hide from storms. He'll be like streams of water flowing in the desert. He'll be like the shadow of a huge rock in a dry and thirsty land.’

No contest, really, is there? The new versions tend only to be tolerable at all when they stick closely to the Authorised Version's poetic text.

As for 'thee' and 'thou' and 'ye', these remind the reader or listener that they are in a poetic and eternal context, not reading Harry Potter or listening to the radio news. And, as it happens, almost every other major language has retained these important distinctions. And isn't 'Would God I had died for thee' immediately more poignant than 'Would God I had died for you'? 'Thee' (as any Yorkshireman knows) can refer only to one person. 'You' can refer to a whole roomful.

Every major religion uses special language for worship, to separate the temporal from the eternal. Where this has been abandoned (as among Roman Catholics after the near-abolition of the Latin Mass, and the extermination of the Prayer Book by world-wide Anglicanism) this has often led to a severe fall in congregations and been accompanied by a decline in influence. So why do they do it?

Now, if modernisers went through the National Gallery removing everything old, everything morally worrying or hard for the uneducated to understand, or if Shakespeare were put into modern idiom by the Royal Shakespeare Company, or the works of Milton were rewritten to suit the 21st century, there would be powerful and effective protest. That's why these things don't happen. (More ordinary museums are, by contrast, subject to constant politically correct revision to keep them in line with egalitarian dogma.)

But the effective extirpation of this mighty cultural treasure, in the course of 50 years, has proceeded almost uninterrupted. And I doubt very much if the celebrations of its 400th anniversary will halt or reverse this process.

As to why, I think the answer can be found in the extraordinarily fierce and bilious anti-religious vituperation which from time to time appears on this site, and is common elsewhere, and is also at work inside the churches, where many senior figures wish to dump what they regard as the baggage of a penitential and gloomy past.

We have now had two generations brought up to believe that nobody and nothing has the right to tell them what to do, or to restrict or restrain themselves - especially in what they regard as their private life.

And they can tell within minutes of encountering the Authorised Version of the Bible, that it is their enemy's weapon. This is because it is not simply a translation, but a poetic translation, written to be read out loud to country people in large buildings without loudspeakers, to be remembered, to lodge in the mind and to disturb the temporal with the haunting sound of the eternal. In this it is very effective, as can be shown easily by listing (as a recent book 'Begat' does, the enormous number of Biblical phrases which have entered the language).

I suppose we increasingly call it the King James Version here now because it is in truth no longer Authorised.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.

January 6, 2011 in Religion | Permalink | Comments (51)

Share this article:

• Digg it
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Nowpublic
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Fark

03 January 2011 2:10 PM

Can a Prison be a Prison and still be Open?

I think a lot of points are being missed about the fires and disorder at Ford Open Prison over the 'New Year' holiday. First, there's an attempt to put all the blame on the shoulders of the already doomed minister Crispin Blunt. What does it matter that Mr Blunt was at a champagne party when the trouble started? If he had lingered there once he had been told, that would obviously count against him. But I have seen no report that he did so.

I have no brief for Mr Blunt, who seems to me (despite an honourable past in the Army) to have swallowed whole the left-wing ideology of the modern age. But I sense that he's being leaked against so as to isolate the government as a whole from direct blame for this ridiculous event, and to end controversy and recrimination with his eventual sacking. He's already a dead man on leave, having damaged himself by taking a public position on prison regimes which embarrassed David Cameron.

This wasn't because Mr Cameron privately disagreed with Mr Blunt on the issue (which I think was about prisoners being able to hold parties inside). It was because Mr Blunt expressed his real views in public and stuck to them - something Mr Cameron is unlikely to do if it looks as if it will hurt him in the polls.

I am sure Mr Cameron, Harold Macmillan reincarnated, only soppier, is privately quite happy for our prisons to have very soft regimes. Like most elite liberals, he probably feels guilty about incarcerating anybody at all. His moral system doesn't provide him with a justification for punishment. His comfortable life has never acquainted him with the awful plight of the honest, decent poor, left undefended against predatory and dishonest neighbours by the policies of rich, aloof wet leftists like himself.

He sees a prison and thinks 'there but for fortune go you or I' - when in fact (though fortune can certainly play a minor part on some occasions) most prisoners in free countries have gone to jail through their own deliberate and conscious choice to break - not once but many times - the known laws of their society.

This is about the fundamental political philosophy which directs our country, Fabian Social Democracy allied with a post-Christian general compassion which does not discriminate between deliberate wrongdoers and others, since it has no real belief in absolute right or wrong (see elsewhere), and attributes human failings entirely to social conditions, and mainly to material social conditions at that - being unable (for instance) to distinguish between moral and material poverty.

Ford (which, in a melancholy touch occupies the site of a former Royal Naval Air Service station) only exists because of the adoption of Social Democratic penal policies by our major parties over the past half-century.

It is completely based upon the idea of 'rehabilitation', a concept for whose existence in practice there is no objective proof whatsoever. In fact, it has generally been used until recently to house prisoners convicted for non-violent offences and white-collar crime, who can be expected to see the sense of behaving well in return for relaxed conditions and lots of days out, interspersed with monthly five-day passes and ending in full-time employment outside the prison. If you select candidates for these privileges carefully enough, it might even look like that elusive thing, evidence for rehabilitation.

Plainly Ford is ill-adapted for the more usual type of prisoner, ill-educated failures accustomed to violence and unused to long-term calculations about the future or even the present, and of course for the myriad drug abusers who now (for reasons which baffle the druggie lobby, but which don't baffle me) have such a high representation in the prison system. They can pretty much be relied upon to be irrational in any matter beyond their immediate desires and needs. But thanks to the failure of our penal policy to contain crime, and despite almost superhuman efforts to let as many people out of prison (or let them off prison altogether) as possible, Ford is now said by the Prison Officers' Association to be housing many inmates who really aren't suited to its regime.

That's why I'm also unmoved by suggestions that it was foolish of the tiny number of officers present at Ford on the night of the disaster to have attempted to breathalyse the prisoners they thought had been drinking. I wasn't there. I don't know, but I suspect that they can have had no idea (thanks to long experience of handling prisoners who wanted a soft life) what was about to happen. It is hindsight to say otherwise.

What is not hindsight is for me to say that the real problems of the British prison system - that the jails are largely under the control of the inmates and that they are full of drugs (and other contraband) which the authorities do little to control, have many times been stated by me. And that these events show this to be true. And it is this feebleness, combined with many other weaknesses in our criminal justice system, which encourages those who might otherwise turn away from crime to commit it. And that it is this that leads to the steady increase in crime, despite statistical attempts to conceal this, and the resulting inability of our prisons and our courts to cope. A proper penal system is about crime prevention. That must be based upon several things- first of all we need to ensure that children are properly brought up under the authority of parents, teachers and other significant adults. The reconstruction of the married family and the reordering of our schools can achieve this.

Then there must be genuine fear, for those who knowingly breach the established rules of society, that the consequences for them will be unpleasant. That means all prisons must be grim - not because they are run by inmates imposing their own twisted code, but because they are run by authorities who believe in right and wrong, and are morally ready to punish wickedness with austerity, discomfort, a measure of humiliation and a lot of hard work.

And this fear must be reinforced by the visible presence of a preventive police force, not paid to chase after crime once it has happened, but paid to prevent it before it happens, by walking the streets on foot.

It's simple. It would work, and it won't be tried until we replace the existing political parties.

The tiny staffing levels, especially at night, the attempts to avoid disorder by providing plentiful facilities for relaxation and distraction - from TV sets and pool tables to semi-licit drugs and legal methadone - the social worker approach in which officers of the Crown are compelled to show 'respect' to convicted criminals, the utter abandonment of concepts of punishment and discipline, the underlying assumption that crime is a disease of capitalist society rather than the product of fearless human evil, all led directly to this.

It is not much use now to get into a state about the prevalence of drugs and drink, the easy conditions, the women being smuggled in. These things are well-known to the authorities (and to me, because I have been paying attention) and have been for years. Nobody in the Prison Service will be even slightly surprised by what has happened at Ford. These conditions will not, for the most part, be altered by this event (though there will be some minor and short-lived cosmetic changes after the inevitable inquiry). They are the consequence of the most settled and most unalterable beliefs of the people who have been misgoverning this country for half a century.

Nothing short of profound political change at the very top will set these things right.

That is why the Tory Party must split and collapse, and be replaced by a genuinely conservative formation. And this is an outcome which I now think is becoming a possibility again, as the Parliamentary Conservative Party experiences in detail what it is like to live under the leadership of the ruthless liberal despotism of the Cameroon machine. They certainly believe in punishment and discipline when anyone thwarts their will, as dissenting MPs are finding. The complaints from Mark Pritchard at the weekend come from a very deep place in the Tory Party, and they are not to be dismissed.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.

January 3, 2011 in Crime , Prisons , Tories , Useless Tories | Permalink | Comments (88)

Share this article:

• Digg it
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Nowpublic
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Fark

Not Shaken to the Core. Giant Damp Squid invades Ambridge

I was wrong about The Archers - but I have an excuse. I was theorising on the basis of misleading data, which came from a source which might have been assumed to be reliable. What started all the speculation was the phrase used by the series editor, Vanessa Whitburn, in an interview with the ‘Guardian', in which she predicted that Sunday night's episode would 'Shake [the fictional village of] Ambridge to the core'.

Personally, I don't think an emergency (but successful) Caesarean section and a man falling off a roof, the actual events in this episode, even remotely measure up to this billing.

Indeed my Archers consultant informs me that major personality transplants (a common device on Ms Whitburn's watch) were needed to sustain the storylines surrounding even these two unshaking non-core events.

But it was fun while it lasted

However, the mean and spiteful posters here, who come only to sneer, could not of course see it as such. 'Alan' (funny that we can't know the full name of this courageous critic. Still, doubtless the thought police watch even comments on soap operas and his employers are sensitive on the subject of Nigel Pargetter): 'Your Archers prediction was not only woefully wide of the mark it was also terribly revealing. Why do we turn to you for analysis Peter when the views you see life through distort it so ?’ (At least, that's what I think he meant. I have corrected several typing errors.)

And James Stenson joins him, saying: 'Peter Hitchens has moved into predictions? What fun. This may be the first time I've seen him attempt anything falsifiable, even if it is about the Archers.

‘Unsurprisingly it proves (a) predicated on the assumption that “politically correct propaganda” pervades and (b) utterly wrong. Nigel fell off a roof and not a single wheelchair-bound lesbian Chinese dwarf came to his rescue.

‘More of the same, please, Peter - continue to put your interpretation of the world to the test.'

Revealing of what? And I should have thought that my prediction that the Tories wouldn't win the election was falsifiable, though as it turned out it wasn't falsified at all. They didn't win. Likewise my prediction that the Iraq war would turn out to be a grave mistake, my warning that New Labour were not what they appeared, but a radical danger to the country, my warning that David Cameron would drag the Tories so far to the left as to be indistinguishable from Labour, my warning that exam devaluation was taking place despite the denials of the authorities, and was cementing lower education standards, my warning that Barack Obama was in fact a normal human being and a rather undistinguished Chicago machine politician, and would not save the world as imagined (all of these derided at the time) etc etc. Still, it's possible that someone who is deeply interested in The Archers might not have noticed these predictions, or even have been aware of them.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.

January 3, 2011 in BBC bias , Political Correctness | Permalink | Comments (26)

Share this article:

• Digg it
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Nowpublic
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Fark

01 January 2011 6:49 PM

Didn’t you read the small print? Now it’s Dave’s turn to rub our noses in diversity

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Another year begins with another Big Lie exposed. I wonder how many voters foolishly supported David Cameron’s Unconservative Party last May because of his loud claims that he would do something about immigration.

Yet a report from a Left-wing think tank, the IPPR, shows that Mr Cameron must have known perfectly well that his pledge could not be kept. Immigration will not fall this year and may even rise. EU citizens can come and go as they please. Lithuanians and Latvians, and many of our Irish neighbours, will arrive in thousands in search of work, keeping wages low.

We will continue to host hundreds of thousands of overseas students and large numbers of alleged refugees. ‘Family reunions’ will allow many others through supposedly closed doors, from all the parts of the world which have already supplied so many of our new citizens.

Mr Cameron’s vaunted cap on economic migrants from outside the EU will indeed begin to operate, but this will affect no more than two or three per cent of the immigration total.

So why this gap between claim and reality? First, Mr Cameron could be fairly sure that most voters wouldn’t notice the small print in his pledges. Secondly, we are not considered grown-up enough to discuss the greatest political issue of our time – the steady takeover of our once-independent country by the EU and the colossal implications of this. And no major political party will offer us an exit.

But third, the modernised Tory Party, just like its New Labour twin, actively favours large-scale migration. Rich young careerists in pleasant parts of London – who form the core of all our establishment parties – couldn’t function without the cheap servants and cheap restaurants that immigration brings.

Not for them the other side of immigration – the transformation of familiar neighbourhoods into foreign territory. Not for them the schools where many pupils cannot speak English, and the overloaded public ser¬vices. Not for them the mosque and the madrassa where the church and the pub used to be. Not that they mind that so much. These people have no special loyalty to this country, nor much love for it. They are not significantly different from the Blairite apparatchik Andrew Neather, who last year unwisely said openly what such people have long thought privately.

Let me remind you that he spoke of ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. And that he recalled coming away from high-level discussions ‘with a clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main -purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Well, doesn’t Mr Cameron also like to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date? I think he does. And of course anyone who complained could be (and always will be) smeared as a ‘bigot’. In fact, the issue long ago ceased having anything to do with skin colour. We have many black and brown Britons who have, over time, become as British as I am – though alas this is less and less the case because the curse of multiculturalism has prevented proper integration, as has the huge size of the recent influx.

And we have many people here with pale northern skins who do not speak our language or share our culture.

Our wealthy urban elite are actively pleased by these changes because they did not like Britain as it was, conservative, Christian, restrained and self-disciplined. They like it as it is, and as it will become. But what about the rest of us?

Who made our proud monarch spout such tripe?

Has Her Majesty been abducted? I am still puzzling over her weird Christmas broadcast, which began and ended with just praise for the matchless Authorised, or King James, Version of the Bible, which celebrates its 400th birthday this year. It was clear that she both knew about the subject and had genuine feeling for it. But in the middle of this, she suddenly began babbling about sport, as if someone like Alastair Campbell had taken over the Royal brain.

Finally, after a silent but obviously considerable internal struggle, she fought her way back to her own chosen subject with the strangest link I’ve ever seen. It went like this: ‘King James may not have anticipated quite how important sport and games were to become in promoting harmony and common interests. But from the scriptures in the Bible which bears his name, we know that nothing is more satisfying than the feeling of belonging to a group who are dedicated to helping each other.’

Surely, nobody, not even Anthony Blair, could have pronounced this tripe in a public place without in some way being forced to do so.

We know that the Queen’s speech at the Opening of Parliament is written by the Government. But I had always thought that the Christmas broadcast was more personal. Obviously it is not. I think we should be told who is responsible for this grave humiliation of our head of state.

A telling blow in the bogus ‘war on drugs’

While it is good news that there is a knighthood for Robin Murray, the psychiatrist who has done so much to warn against the mental health dangers of supposedly harmless cannabis, our efforts to combat the drug menace are in deep trouble.

An excellent book by Glasgow University Professor Neil McKeganey, Controversies In Drugs, shines a harsh light on the fashionable ‘harm reduction’ policy that has done so much damage. Huge amounts of money, about £900 million a year, are being spent on supposed ‘treatment’ of drug abusers that often involves maintaining them in their sad and dangerous habits at our expense. Efforts to get them off their drugs have been badly neglected.

As for the alleged ‘war against drugs’ or ‘prohibition’ of which we hear so much, Professor McKeganey can find little trace of it. Nobody should engage in this debate until they have read this telling book.

I can hear gunfire echoing around Ambridge

I’m going to risk a prediction here about tonight’s 60th anniversary special edition of the BBC radio drama The Archers. The programme’s editor, Vanessa Whitburn, has promised an event that will shake the fictional village of Ambridge to the core.

Most soaps have become vehicles for politically correct propaganda, and Ms Whitburn has been commendably candid about this. She once said: ‘To be PC is really to be moral. It is having a correct moral stance. PC is, in fact, my moral plank. I don’t think that wishy-washy liberal ideology works any more.’ On another occasion she proclaimed: ‘Drama always has to move you to make you think, and distress you for a purpose.’

She recently rejected criticisms that an episode involving a raid on the village shop was unrealistic, saying: ‘I had newspaper cuttings about raids on village shops, and how awful they were. If one did big stories all the time, it would start to lose its reality, but when we do one of them the repercussions of it reverberate for a long time.’

Well, most PC enthusiasts disapprove of rural firearms and want tighter controls. Ambridge is so real to listeners that a gun rampage in its lanes would have a powerful effect. And 2010 saw two such rural gun rampages, so the cuttings justify such a thing.

Don’t be surprised if this non-existent village echoes to the sound of gunfire tonight, distressing you for a purpose, and reverberating for a long time. And don’t expect the arguments for the free man’s liberty to own a firearm to get much of a hearing afterwards.

January 1, 2011 in BBC bias , Cameron, David , Conservative Party (see also Useless Tories, Tories) , Drugs , Immigration , Mass Immigration , Monarchy , Political Correctness , Useless Tories | Permalink | Comments (73)

Share this article:

• Digg it
• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Nowpublic
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Fark

Still Not Getting It

I have now begun to enjoy the predictable inability of the atheists to grasp the following simple proposition: Absolute ideas of good and bad, wrong and right, cannot exist without a religious belief. Unless they are attributed to a power beyond human control, then such ideas have no sure foundation.

They can appear to exist, but they will swiftly become conditional as people alter them to suit their circumstances. Any honest human adult with any self-knowledge at all knows that he or she can and will talk himself or herself into believing that a desired or convenient act is in fact justifiable. The more powerful that human being is, the wider the range of actions to which this applies. An illustration in miniature of this is the transformation of human behaviour which often results from placing a person behind the wheel of a motor car. The power conferred will often turn apparently mild, patient, considerate and gentle persons into snarling, selfish monsters. Imagine, in that case, the transformation possible if someone is put in charge of a state machine. Power, as Lord Acton did say *tends* to corrupt. What does it corrupt? Moral goodness.

I might add to this that atheists generally cannot distinguish between 'Golden Rule' common decency - a self-interested practice of public goodness in the hope of securing a return from one's fellow creatures, with the belief that one must love God above all things, and love one's neighbour as oneself, a wholly different and much tougher proposition.

The two examples of moral sophistry I always come up with here are:

Number one - (for liberal leftists) abortion, which secular sophists quickly conclude is not the meaningful killing of an innocent person but the justified removal of a 'foetus' or 'blob of jelly' which is not properly human and whose removal therefore involves no moral breach.

Number two - (for patriotic conservatives) the bombing and burning to death of women and children in their homes, provided the regime of the country involved is sufficiently wicked on the Hitler-Stalin scale. These hideous killings (of unquestionably sentient but wholly innocent beings) are justified and excused by the higher purpose of saving the country from a dreadful enemy. Anyone who raises doubts about this is drowned out by false accusations that such protestors are equating the bombing of Dresden with the Holocaust. Personally I regard the Holocaust as a distinct and unique crime, considerably more wicked than the bombing of Dresden. But this does not in any way overcome the problem that the bombing of Dresden was morally wrong too.

Paradoxically, many of the liberal defenders of abortion will condemn the bombing of Dresden, but quite large numbers of them could be found to defend the more recent bombing of Belgrade (which the British left were in general happy with), and a significant number of secular leftists also defend the bombing of Baghdad and the bombardment of Fallujah.

So when 'Tony' asks petulantly: ‘Are you seriously suggesting that people who have no active belief in a higher Deity are somehow inherently lacking a sense of moral code? That unbelievers are somehow lacking in compassion for others?’...my answer is 'No'. That's not what I said, and 'Tony' has absolutely no basis, save his own rush to judgement, for concluding that this is what I said.

Nor is it what I think. Unbelievers are quite capable of having and following a moral code. Who could doubt it? I never have. But they will be borrowing that moral code from religion, and would have no basis for distinguishing between right and wrong if religion didn't provide it for them.

But it's what I knew 'Tony', and everyone like him, would immediately convince himself I had said. They almost all, almost always, do it.

Here's what I did say: 'All the categories of good and evil employed by the Godless are in fact religious categories. They cannot acknowledge this, for two reasons.

‘One, because it would make them look silly to admit it, and expose one of the large holes in atheist certainty which are at least as embarrassing to the Godless as the more arcane claims of Christianity are to the believer.

‘The other is that the accusation of free riding gives them private cause for alarm, alarm they cannot admit to without disclosing their true reasons for their own faith in a Godless, purposeless universe. After all, if they were to concede that they wish to be free from those rules, then in all honesty they would have to argue that others should be free from them too.'

As I said. they cannot acknowledge it. So they feign rage at a suggestion I haven't actually made, while steering smartly round the much more important suggestion which I have made. Note the large concession I made in my original article, of doubt and weakness in my own position, which they didn't seize on because to do so would be to acknowledge that both sides - including them - have problems. The atheist is consumed with such a burning certainty that he is sure that only the believer has problems of doubt.

Most believers, by contrast, are filled with doubt. And I've said before that both Christians and atheists fear there is a God. But Christians also hope there is one.

The connection between Christianity and liberty is likewise straightforward. It stresses the self-government of each human, based upon his willing acceptance of the known desires of God. This creates a society in which individual conscience, self-discipline and self-restraint are so nearly universal that there is no need for a strong state to enforce rules of goodness.

Thanks to Christ's clear statement of the distinction between earthly and celestial power ('My Kingdom is not of this world' and 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's), Christianity does not seek or endorse (as for instance Sharia does) a theocratic state. Though it does urge Christian love upon rulers, it rejects Utopian movements. (Christ rebuffs Judas's socialist plan - to sell the costly ointment which the weeping woman is wasting on Christ's feet and give the money to the poor - by remarking that the poor will always be with us. One gospel also hints that Judas, like so many utopian socialist states, is actually a thief who intends to steal the money he pretends to want to distribute to the needy.)

The rule of law (wholly absent in so many parts of the world, and not even understood in many more) is perhaps the most important contribution of Christianity to liberty. Because it asserts the existence of a celestial law higher than human law, and of rules so important that even the powerful may not break them with impunity, it creates the concept of an invisible but supreme authority higher than that of princes. This lies behind the development of most truly free societies. Without this concept, Magna Carta, and all that flowed from it (and Magna Carta is the ancestor of the American and English Bills of Rights) would not exist.

We might also consider that the division between Church and State is the origin of political pluralism, and some theorists have likewise attributed this idea, and the development of the separation of powers, to the existence in the Christian mind of the concept of the Trinity.

Once again, if people would read my books, they would find much of this explained. They're readily available, in bookshops and libraries, for anyone really interested.

I've also stated, more times than I care to remember, here and elsewhere, that in my view belief is a choice. We are all free to believe that there is a God, or to believe that there is no God. In either case it's a matter of faith. Childish abuse about 'flying spaghetti monsters' and 'fairytales' misses the point that the putative existence of God would explain a number of things which otherwise remain unexplained. (Not least 'Why is there something, rather than nothing?') Many people who jeer in this fashion are startlingly ignorant of the limitations of scientific knowledge or indeed of the existence of many distinguished scientists who are also religious believers. Science cannot answer the question 'Does God exist?' for us. We must choose for ourselves.

What's important is the making of the choice, and what fascinates me is the reason behind the choice. I believe most atheists are less than candid about why they so very anxiously want there not to be a God. They could so easily conclude that the question couldn't be decided, and leave it at that. But they absolutely must go further, and are then stuck in self-condemnatory traps about faith, such as my brother's two-edged assertion that 'what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof'. Well, so it can, and that goes for atheism as well as for belief.

And thus it leaves both sides where they were before, with nothing but faith. Well, that suits me fine. I choose to have faith in God. This seems to me to be quite easily explicable. It is easy to see why the human heart yearns for a just and purposeful universe in which the least of us matters, and each action has significance. But why would an intelligent person yearn with such furious passion for a pointless chaos?

I think the only way for this argument to advance is to concentrate upon that issue, since faith and belief are consequences of the individual's desire. What do atheists want, and why?

Works every time.