Britannia Radio

22 January 2011 9:15 PM

Staffed up like the Chinese army, the Sickness Maintenance Service

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We have forgotten what the NHS is for. Most of us, I suspect, are wearied by talk of more reforms. We suspect this will mean a lot of new signboards and more bureaucracy.

Various dogma-driven politicians have pushed the health service this way and that for half a century, and I do not think they have done much good.

We mix up sentiment with argument. Of course our hospitals contain plenty of hard-working and competent people. But they are not, mostly, doing their work for nothing.

While we should be glad that they help us when we are injured, ill or afraid, this is what we hire them to do. We don’t condemn the whole NHS because of one bungle (and there are plenty of those).

So we shouldn’t canonise it because of one good experience.

The worst thing is that it has become a cult. This is because it is the one lonely success that socialists can point to.

They have wrecked the state schools, made a colossal mess of housing, given us one of the worst transport systems in the Western world and corrupted a generation with welfare. But at least medical treatment is free to all at the point of use.

And so it is. And, having actually lived in the USA and experienced the alternative, I am glad of that. But I know from conversations with senior doctors that levels of surgical competence in our hospitals are falling fast, partly because of poorer training and partly because of the effects of EU limits on working time.

Most of us, if we are honest, also know that standards of nursing are far lower than

they used to be, because proper nursing relies on virtues of discipline, obedience and conscientiousness that have vir¬tually disappeared from our culture. The people who do the job think that its most necessary tasks are beneath them, a problem in almost every trade and profession these days.

Criticism of this kind never makes any impression. This is partly because of the sacred character of the NHS among the socialist-minded people who rule our culture. But it is also because of its true, unmentionable function in politics.

It exists first of all to employ people, and only after that to tend to the sick. That is why it is now the largest employer in the world after the Chinese army and Indian railways.

But it is not in fact a Health Service. It is a Sickness Maintenance Service. Despite all the billions spent and borrowed, we long ago stopped getting healthier.

Much of the original work of the Forties health service involved treating the victims of dangerous, dirty and unhealthy industries, or of slum conditions, which left men and women broken and sick by the time they were in their 60s.

Now, when those industries and such slums have vanished, we are all unhealthy for completely different reasons. We seek ill health in our daily lives, and duly achieve it.

My nearest hospital has to be reached by passing through two concentric rings. The first is that of the smokers, piously barred from the hospital grounds, who are working hard on becoming patients in the cancer and cardiology wards.

And then there are the acres of car park, filled with thousands of the machines which we use to avoid the exercise that would ward off so many of the ills we suffer.

A real health service would reduce the taxes of those who looked after themselves, rather than waiting for people to fall predictably sick and then cutting them up or cramming them with expensive pills. But even to discuss this is to be accused of sacrilege, so it’s probably not worth bothering.

It’s not a phobia, Baroness – just reasoned debate

Should Muslims adapt to Britain, or should Britain adapt to Muslims?

The answer is obvious to me, but David Cameron’s appointment of Sayeeda Warsi to several high positions suggests he wants Britain to drown its past in multiculturalism.

Baroness Warsi’s weird outburst about dinner parties and Islamophobia came only a few days after she made a great fool of herself by unjustly denouncing her own party’s ‘Right wing’ for not working hard enough in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. It will make it difficult for the Tory leader to sack her (could she have thought of this?) without himself being accused of ‘Islamophobia’ by gullible twits.

We’re all quite entitled to distinguish between extreme and moderate Muslims, and to object to Sharia law, to polygamy, to the third-rate legal position of women in Islam and the merciless treatment of those who convert out of the Muslim faith.

This isn’t a ‘phobia’ but a reasoned disagreement about what kind of country we wish to live in.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Baroness Warsi is an asset to people like me, who carry on getting up each morning largely because they hope the Tory Party will collapse in a politically correct heap, and don’t want to die before this happens.

The ‘soft’ drug myth laid bare

I long for the day when the selfish people who make light of the dangers of cannabis meet justice face to face. They desire that their own greasy pleasure should be licensed, not caring that its ready availability in every school is actively ruining young lives. They are happy to sacrifice other people for their own convenience, a shameful thing.

But I wish even more that some of them would read Patrick and Henry Cockburn’s account in today’s Mail on Sunday’s Section 2 of Henry’s own descent into distressing mental illness. Patrick is one of the finest writers of his generation, a quietly courageous reporter who ventures often into terrifying places and makes no fuss about it.

In honest prose, chilly and clear as spring water, he describes exactly what happens to a family when a clever, happy and engaging child has his reason overthrown. Henry himself bravely gives his own version of events.

I think there is little doubt that cannabis, its easy availability and its false image as a harmless and ‘soft’ substance, are to blame for what happened. It will probably make you cry when you read it. I rather hope it does.

But above all, I hope that it makes a complacent generation think again about this grave menace.

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The simple question the Chilcot Inquiry won’t ask Anthony Blair, but should:

‘Isn’t the truth that you were too scared of Washington’s wrath to pull out of the Iraq invasion, even though you knew it was illegal?’

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As I suspected they would, the Christian hotel owners, Peter and Hazelmary Bull, came off worse in their courtroom struggle against Politically Correct Britain.

The law believes such people have no right to follow their own morals, except in private. The law also now states that homosexual partnerships are equal to heterosexual marriage, which New Labour tried to pretend was not the case.

Perhaps most importantly, the homosexual couple had their action paid for by us. Britain’s embryonic Thought Police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, provided the money on your behalf and mine, whether we like it or not.

This is not the end of the revolution we are passing through. By the time it is finished, I will not be allowed to write or say this. Don’t believe me? Wait and see.

21 January 2011 12:11 PM

For the Avoidance of Doubt - a Wicked Lie Squashed Once Again

A Mr 'Iam' alleges: 'Alcohol cannot be controlled, according to Hitchens'.

This is demonstrably false. Indeed, it is a contemptible flat lie for which I can find no excuse. If I thought this pseudonymous person likely to return here, I would require a withdrawal and apology from him. But I expect he is a hit-and-run raider.

I believe alcohol can and should be controlled and have long argued for this to be so. I just don’t think that it would be practicable to make possession of alcohol a criminal offence. I do think that it would be practicable to make the possession of cannabis a criminal offence. I think he does too, which is why he fears what I say, hates me for saying it and tells lies about me.

The stringent controls I advocate (disorderly drunkenness a criminal offence, driving while drunk a criminal offence, the keeping of disorderly premises a criminal offence, alcohol licensed for public sale only during limited periods of the day and at a limited number of outlets, alcohol forbidden to minors etc) are aimed at those who use alcohol as all dope smokers use cannabis.

In the unlikely event that I and Mr ‘Iam’ ever shared the same bar, he would find that I, and many other people, do not drink to get drunk, or stupefied, or intoxicated. There is no other purpose in smoking or eating cannabis, apart from self-stupefaction.

Prejudice or Postjudice? Common Sense, Cannabis and Hypocrisy

'Ben Johnson' writes, quoting me 'Further, I would say that many if not most of these drug apologists are themselves users of alcohol and tobacco, probably excessive ones, and have no genuine disapproval of them'.

And comments 'Does anyone believe that the phrase 'probably excessive ones' is based on anything more substantial than simple prejudice against the wrong sort of person?'

No, It's based on postjudice and common sense. By definition, most dopesmokers are tobacco smokers, and I think it would be very rare to find a dopesmoker who didn’t also smoke tobacco. And by definition dopesmokers are people who seek self-stupefaction, so if they drink alcohol you might reasonably expect that they drink it with that purpose too.

I am called upon to campaign on tobacco and alcohol with equal vigour to that which I use when campaigning against cannabis, so as to prove that my purpose is genuine, and so that the dope lobby can listen to what I say. My purpose is genuine and disinterested, and I defy anyone to show otherwise, whereas they are in all cases self-seeking.

They never will listen to what I say, and seek to prevent others from doing so too. They hate anyone who opposes their greasy pleasure, and seek to harry me into silence with lies and hypocritical propaganda of this sort (much like the BNP, who have a similar loathing for me and have made similar attempts to overwhelm me with hostile comment) .

There is no logic in this argument - that I must campaign equally on all three for my campaign on one to be valid. Huge government-sponsored efforts are made to reduce tobacco smoking, efforts I support. Many forces are willing to campaign for restrictions on drinking, restrictions I support and have always supported. I am, on the other hand, almost alone in continuing to resist what I regard as the dangerous introduction of a third legal poison in our civilisation. And it is extremely urgent.

What cannot be escaped is that the alcohol and tobacco diversion is a cynical and unscrupulous piece of hypocrisy by people who would in fact be horrified and severely personally inconvenienced if anyone took them at their word.

I am accused of being rude to the dope lobby. They deserve much more severe vituperation than I have at my command. By comparison with the human evil which they promote, the abuse which I justly heap on them is mild. The irreversible and tragic damage they are condoning, to many young lives, is appalling. They are happy to let this continue for the sake of their own selfish enjoyment, a classic instance of moral evil. I repeat my hope that at some point they will eventually meet justice face to face.

19 January 2011 1:10 PM

A Reply to Cary, voting analysis, and that stupid 'New Party' for what I hope is the last time

'Cary' posts: 'I’m disappointed to have to disagree so strongly with his (PH's) analysis of the by election.’ I posted the result of the election under another article, but it needs to be re-stated (in brackets are the general election numbers, together with the change in number of votes between the two polls).

Labour - 14,718 (14,186; +532)

Liberal Democrat - 11,160 (14,083; -2,923)

Conservative - 4,481 (11,773; -7,292)

UKIP - 2,029 (1,720; +302)

BNP - 1,560 (2,546; -986)

'Cary' continues: 'There is no evidence that any Tories switched to the Lib Dems; if that were so, where did all the erstwhile Lib Dem voters go? Certainly not to Labour who seem to have attracted a relatively small number of previous Lib Dems supporters. The simplest explanation is that sizeable numbers of Lib Dem and Tory supporters at the general election (especially the latter) did not vote this time. And thus Labour increased their majority from c100 to c3,500.

‘The result is good news for Mr Hitchens and those of us who consider ourselves proper Conservatives: faced with the party they support covertly urging them to vote Lib Dem, most (ie over 50%) of Tory voters stayed at home, some continued to vote Tory and a small number probably switched to UKIP. Hardly any bought David Cameron’s attempt to nudge Conservatives in the direction of the Lib Dems.'

Evidence of actual switching is hard to come by in a secret ballot. However, please note that the figures which 'Cary' cites are on a substantially reduced poll, so the size of the Labour vote actually represents quite a sharp increase.

Total votes cast for the parties listed in the General Election were 44,308, compared with 33,948 in the by-election.

If Labour's vote had held steady as a proportion of the turnout, it would have been something like 11,000.

If the Lib Dems had held steady on the same formula, they would have got about 10,500. If the Tories had held steady on their share of the vote, they would have got about 5,500. If anything, the Tory vote might have been expected to be higher than that, since their voters have a greater propensity to turn out at all times.

So we have to explain an increase in the Labour vote of almost 4,000, despite a drop in the total number of voters of 10,000. Where did these votes come from? Some of them will have resulted from the anti-Brown bounce, as voters driven away by Gordon Brown returned. But what of the rest? Direct switches from Tory to Labour are rare at all times, and I doubt if these formed any serious part of the Labour gain. Much more likely is that some of this was caused by Liberal Democrat defections, positively and demonstratively to Labour rather than to abstention, on quite a large scale. This is a credible result, and one everybody had predicted, especially after the tuition-fee volte-face.

That's the easy part. If anyone has any reason to doubt it, please produce evidence and arguments. The next bit is the interesting one, and the one which was not expected or predicted (though the MoS poll before the vote did show a surprisingly high proportion of Tory supporters willing to vote LD) and the one which fascinates me. The above explanation requires a switch of a large number of votes from Liberal Democrat to Labour. That would have left the Liberal Democrats with as few as 6,500, or (if a lot of Labour defectors returned from the wilderness of abstention) as many as 8,500.

But they didn't get 6,500 or 8,500. They received a far more creditable 11,160, a vote so healthy that it left Nick Clegg pretty much in the clear.

And the Tories, who ought, according to proportion, to have received at least 5,500 and probably rather more because of their ageing vote's high differential turnout, came out with only 4,481.

At least 1,000 Tory voters, and probably rather more, can I think be assumed to have switched to the LDs on this basis. Meanwhile, I daren't even begin to speculate on the size of the UKIP vote, which remains largely irrelevant and would surely have been much larger if there were any substantial conservative-minded discontent with the Coalition among Tory voters.

Some who abstained at the general election (and may have been potential Tory voters) may also have been encouraged to support the Liberal Democrats by the nods and winks of David Cameron. But I can see no reason why this result is good news for me.

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I am asked: 'Do you see any significance in the news on Conservative Home that David Davis and Jack Straw are joining forces to oppose the motion to allow prisoners the right to vote? Could both represent the conservative elements within each of their own parties?'

I wish it were so, as I have long hoped for such an alliance. But I wouldn't have thought Jack Straw would be its standard-bearer.

I sometimes use phrases such as 'skoolz n' ospitals' to make the point that those who claim to be concerned for these things speak without thought, and are not in fact worried about health or education, but about the money spent on these objects and the jobs so created.

Once again (groan) I'm urged to start a new party. Once again I beg the person involved to think for five seconds, and see that a) in a two-party system you cannot found a new party until there is a vacancy. There isn't such a vacancy. I tried to create one, and failed utterly.

b) the British people vote tribally, not rationally (hence the problem above).

c) I don't have the billions of pounds necessary to establish such a party against the competition of the state-funded or millionaire-funded or trade union-funded existing parties, which have the allegiance of the political reporters, and which possess guaranteed access to broadcasting worth hundreds of millions of pounds, simply because they are established.

I do hope this is the last time I have to squash this silly, thought-free suggestion, whose only result would be to destroy the hopes of anyone who followed it. I urged those who took this view to take a real practical step towards political change by refusing to support the Tories at the last election. They ignored my plea on various, and varyingly stupid, boneheaded, unresponsive and dim-witted grounds. The Tory party, which ought to have collapsed, survived and mated with the Liberals. Consequently we have the Social Democrat David Cameron as our Social Democratic Prime Minister, probably for at least another nine years, by which time I shall quite possibly be dead, and Britain will almost certainly be so. Give me strength.

I have since then abandoned any serious hope of making any impression on parliamentary politics. I carry on trying because I am forbidden by my religious faith to despair, and I have to accept that I might be wrong. But I see no evidence that I am wrong, and plenty that I'm right.

By the way, to the person who breezily and superciliously mocks my suggestion that attitudes towards opposition leaders are formed by trends of opinion within small and organised media cliques, I recommend a reading of 'The Cameron Delusion', in which this process is described and explained in detail. He doesn't have a clue how this country works. That's why he is so dismissive.

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

January 19, 2011 in Cameron Delusion (see also Broken Compass) , Conservative Party (see also Useless Tories, Tories) , Labour Party , Liberal Democrats , New political party , UKIP | Permalink | Comments (30)

17 January 2011 3:51 PM

The index opens

We now have an index. It's incomplete, as I'm still working on the years 2008 and 2009. I hope to finish that soon. But large parts of the archive are already included, so I've decided to open it up anyway.

For obvious reasons, the number of subjects covered is limited, and the system won't support an index as detailed as a book would have. If you cannot find articles you're searching for (and which you know to exist and whose date you recall) then please let us know and we'll try to fill the gap as soon as possible.

I recommend a two-stage search - first look in the index under the general topic of interest - all postings involved are then displayed. Then I'd recommend continuing to search using keywords and Control 'F'. All helpful suggestions, where practicable, will be considered.k

Old and Sad. Can the Coalition survive? Should it?

I've received several snappish little lectures this week, mostly from the dope lobby whose members so tirelessly promote their freedom to fry their own brains at the expense of any other poor fools who believe its lying propaganda and start the slow journey to the locked ward.

Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, go the fried cerebral cortexes, unable to absorb or to respond to facts or logic - I imagine this is because they' re overcome with that most powerful foe of truth and reason - their own dogged self-interest. I can't conceive of any intelligent, disinterested person espousing this slippery, selfish and evil cause.

I've replied to their feeble case, and various other critics, in the thread itself.

But I'll spend a little longer on the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election. Why? Because the result is so shocking, and such a departure from normal behaviour, that I remain amazed that it has attracted so little careful attention.

The issue is not who won. That's unimportant in the scheme of things. It would have been important if Labour had lost, since the seat was naturally theirs, and such a defeat would have changed the position of Edward Miliband, a man who is now so crudely and constantly attacked by cartoonists, sketch-writers and the rest of the conformist army of conventional wisdom that it is quite shocking. Why did this never happen to A. Blair or D. Cameron when they were novice leaders of the Opposition? Who decides who gets this treatment? Do readers of this stuff not realise that anyone could be its object if the whim of the time were different?

The cartoons in one Tory-supporting newspaper are quite astonishing in their continuous, obsessive hostility to the Labour leader, forgivable if directed at a head of government but almost totalitarian when directed against the constitutional Leader of HM Opposition. I have barely met Mr Miliband, and have no reason to suppose I agree with anything he thinks, but this sort of treatment, especially from within the steamy, lowing safety of a herd, is despicable.

We were told, as if it mattered constitutionally when it didn't, that Gordon Brown was 'unelected'. Well, he was an elected MP, and we don't have directly-elected premiers in this country, so the jibe was untrue and constitutionally meaningless. What was true was that the Labour Party had not put him through a leadership election. So what? The Tories did the same favour to Michael Howard after the putsch against Iain Duncan Smith, and nobody ever complained, which emphasises that this was not a serious question. Nor did Anthony Blair ever face a serious challenge in the Labour leadership.

Edward Miliband, by contrast, has fought and won an election to become his party's leader. But, like Mr Brown, he is not approved by whatever media coven it is that decides who is and is not fit to be Prime Minister (the same coven once rejected William Hague, too, though now it slobbers sycophantically at his feet). So his election is not deemed to count. It was won, they say, thanks to the trade unions. Let us leave aside the interesting question of whether the trade unions should have any say in the choice of the leader of the Labour Party, founded to advance their interests. I still have news for those who claim to be outraged by this. Mr Blair, whom they loved so much, also won the Labour leadership thanks to the trade unions, whose leaders fixed it for him from the start. So that can't be it, can it? Anyway, what really won it for Edward Miliband was his frank willingness to say unequivocally that the Iraq war was wrong. Anyone who has the faintest understanding of the Labour Party grasps that whoever was prepared to do this would have been almost certain to win the leadership against whoever was not, all other things being equal.

But back to the Coalition. You can decide for yourself whether its guiding principle is 'The Noble Lie' or the old and cynical belief 'Never let a decent crisis go to waste'. It adds up to the same thing. The founding myth of this government is the triple idea that Labour left Britain in a terrible economic mess (true), that nobody knew how bad it was till the books were opened (piffle) and that George Osborne alone understands how to fix it (Olympic piffle).

I am often chided here for having no interest in economics, but I think I can state here that the scale of the British economic crisis hugely dwarfs any of the measures proposed to deal with it, much as a mountain range dwarfs a sandcastle. They are simply not in the same scale of magnitude, and are mainly designed to restore confidence in the bond markets, since confidence is all that stands between us and the death of money, with all the Babylonian and apocalyptic results that would have. Heaven forfend.

Further, as I have already stated, these measures actually end by increasing the level of public spending, and will leave us in five years much as we are now, a grossly bloated welfare state living off a largely unproductive economy which has developed several ingenious ways of hiding the huge structural unemployment which has resulted from years of severe decline.

But of course they provide the opportunity for the government to pursue a number of long-cherished targets (notably severe and permanent reductions in military spending so that the money can be transferred to 'skoolz 'n' ospitalz') which the establishment has long wanted but not so far been able to achieve. My own county council likewise has long had its eye on several rather nice public libraries (I have my ideas as to why) which it now proposes to close, more or less on the grounds that this is some sort of national emergency. Personally, I have little doubt that an audit of its spending could produce many other possible cuts which would be more desirable. But that is not the point. The crisis is an opportunity to do what they have always wanted, and they are jolly well going to seize their chance.

About 400 people turned up to a public meeting in my Oxford suburb last week to protest against one of these library closures. I haven't seen a public meeting of this size since the 1970s, and - judging by the contributions - it was remarkably all-encompassing in terms of age, politics, etc. So perhaps parts of this agenda will actually become so unpopular that coalition will lose its momentum and raison d'etre.

But I doubt it. Much more likely, the council will retreat where it encounters steel, and try something else instead. People who will rightly rally for a beloved library, a simple and in my view unimpeachable cause, will often be highly resistant to any general political implications of the planned closure. And in any case they have no leadership. There's no movement, let alone party, in this country consistently campaigning for rational, real, lasting cuts in public spending based on a major revision of social welfare policy, and there's not likely to be. The coalition is, however, pretending quite successfully to be such a thing - and to be an emergency, crisis government - and has as a result gained the support of a large chunk of the conservative middle classes.

That's why Tory voters did that astonishing thing in Oldham and Saddleworth last week, and voted in large numbers for a Liberal candidate. That's why, as long as they can be persuaded that this is a crisis government , they will continue to do so. And, having got into the habit - and having laid to one side the many conservative desires that I listed in this week's MoS column - they will continue to do so. I believe they will also cooperate with whatever Lib-Con pact, preferably informal, they are presented with at the 2015 general election. A formal deal might be a bit too much to take - yet. Hints and twitches of the eyebrows, and private advice, are better - as was shown in Oldham and Saddleworth, where nobody ever said openly 'Tories should vote Liberal', yet thousands did.

Taboos once broken soon vanish as if they had never existed. It is extraordinary how quickly people can abandon the habits and even opinions of a lifetime, if they are given a good pretext to do so. (The Global Warming panic is another successful way through which conservative-minded people are diddled into believing all kinds of rubbish because of the supposed existence of a crisis, and the alleged existence of a plan to deal with it.) So the supposed Tory right-wing revolt among discontented MPs has been squashed before it really got under way. Tory voters in the country don't want it and regard it as unpatriotic. And since this revolt offered no profound and principled challenge to Cameronism, it has no lasting force or shape, and will swell and shrink according to mood and circumstance. I believe it will in the end get nowhere, much like the fabled Labour left which was likewise rendered irrelevant by Blairism, which it never understood.

The strains in the Coalition will not come from the right, which is either fooled, squared or cowed. They will come from the Liberal Democrat left whose MPs and councillors face direct challenges from Labour. I suspect Mr Cameron, who has proved himself an astute strategist in his dubious cause, is aware of this risk, and that his plans for electoral reform (largely unexamined, though I intend to examine them soon) are meant to deal with this. Let us see. But the glimmer of hope which I optimistically espied a couple of weeks ago has been thoroughly doused by this by-election, yet more proof that optimism is invariably a mistake.

I still cannot see why more people are not dumbstruck by the willingness of Tory voters to vote tactically, en masse and without formal instructions to do so, for a Liberal candidate. It is quite momentous, and changes all calculations.