Here we go, back down Gin Lane.William Hogarth’s depiction of a country drowning in drunkenness (pictured below) used to feature in the history books of my childhood as a quaint reminder of a debauched past. Mr Bumstead says he doesn't know what he needs to apologise for. How about the following words of his, which appear to imply that it is even possible that I would accept money from a tainted source? "If somebody had said: 'If some future BNP member list reveals that Peter Hitchens was financed by the BNP to further their agenda (as is quite possible), will we all have to change our views about how wonderful he was?' That would be a slur as it would raise the possibility (as you concede), without evidence, that Peter Hitchens (good) was manipulated by the BNP (bad) in order to discredit him." For me to be 'financed' by the BNP, it would be necessary for me to know at least that I was the recipient of money from somewhere. I might seek not to know what the ultimate source was, or I might actually know. But either way I would be severely culpable, either for knowingly accepting tainted support or for failing to make proper checks on the source of that support. I submit that a crowd of people in a large square are not remotely in the same position. If a regime has used the techniques used (for instance) by Britain and the USA in 'Operation Ajax' in Iran in 1953, I might well be a westernised Egyptian/Tunisian/Bahraini/Libyan with dreams of democracy, inspired by what appeared to be a spontaneous movement, and genuinely idealistic. I would not know that the events in which I was taking part had been orchestrated or paid for by agents of a foreign power - for both the paymasters and the recipients would have an interest in keeping this fact secret from me. Knowing what I know of Arab countries, I think the idea that they can be transformed into Anglosphere or even European Continental style law-governed democracies is absurd, and that those who think this possible are impractical idealists who are bound, sooner or later, to be used by less idealistic, less scrupulous forces (as has in effect happened in Egypt, now ruled by the Army). And by the way, do we know for certain that the Army will now continue indefinitely with the foreign policy of the Mubarak regime? I should say it was unclear. It is not a slur to raise the possibility that the crowds may have been unconsciously manipulated, nor is it a slur to speculate on one possible source of that manipulation. These things happen. Given the hugely different nature of the regimes targeted by sudden coincidental outbreaks of 'people power' and the curious fact that equally corrupt, equally tyrannical Syria has been immune from it (as has the Hamas tyranny in Gaza), one does have to wonder. Britain and the USA certainly used to do such things. Iran intervenes constantly on the affairs of other countries, especially post-Saddam Iraq and Syria. Syria intervenes in Lebanon, acting largely as Iran's proxy. These are known facts. I resent being accused of a 'slur' for speculating reasonably on the basis of them. I also dislike the suggestion that I could conceivably be the recipient of money from a tainted source. If realistic thinking aloud, combined with a rational rejection of naive and superficial optimism, is to be characterised as a bad action (and surely the word 'slur' has this effect) then reasoned discussion is impossible. It's good old emotional censorship again, by which I am said to have 'insulted' various people by doubting (say) the existence of 'ADHD' or of 'dyslexia', or casting doubt on the value of modern examinations, etc etc. Mr Denton asks: 'Isn't it very hypocritical how you, on the one hand, disapprove of politically correct terms like 'homophobia' and then, on the other, freely use the term 'Judophobia' whenever the Israel or Jewish subject pops up?' By contrast, we have as evidence of an irrational fear and dislike of Jews in the Arab and Muslim world the speeches of President Ahmadinejad casting doubt on the Holocaust, the description of Jews in Arab propaganda and the speeeches of popular preachers as being 'descended from pigs and monkeys' (the website MEMRI can and does provide reliable translations of this sort of stuff), foul 'Der Stuermer'-type depictions of hook-nosed, child-killing Jews such as the wall-painting in Gaza witnessed and described here by me, the continued propagation of discredited tripe such as 'the Protocols of the Elders of Zion' in the Arab media, the repetition in mainstream publications even of the mediaeval Blood Libel (the alleged use of Christian children's blood in the making of Passover pastries), the passages in the Hadith about the stones and the trees denouncing Jews at the last day, the close ties between many past Arab leaders and German National Socialism (most notably Haj Amin al Husseini, who fled to Berlin during the Third Reich and helped raise a Muslim division of the SS, he was the personal hero of Yasser Arafat), the sheltering of Nazi war criminals by Arab regimes - Alois Brunner, a notorious National Socialist child murderer was for many years given asylum in Damascus, where he may possibly still be living. I have myself listened to perfectly agreeable, well-educated, sane and intelligent Arabs spouting the most embarrassing rubbish about Jews as normal conversation in their living rooms. I might add that my attempts a couple of years ago to hold conversations just outside my office with British 'anti-Zionist' protestors against the Israeli attack on Gaza (an attack I myself denounced as a cruel folly), in which I attempted to suggest that Arabs were sometimes mistreated by each other, were met with such unreasoning fury that I had to flee for my own physical safety when it became clear to them that I sympathised with the Jewish state. And in general when I ask critics of Israel to explain why they single that country out for criticism, in a world full of comparable or worse wickedness, they tend to become either silent or enraged. What they never do is explain their selective rage. To do so would be to admit that there might be an unreasoning core to it. The whole phenomenon of Judophobia is a very strange one, not as far as I can see susceptible to reason. I've tried many times to hold reasoned, fact-based correspondences with persons who have this difficulty. It is quite futile. Some people just have this trouble, and there we are. One would feel sorry for them if it were not that from time to time their trouble leads to murder and other cruelty. My own solution is to try to persuade them that it is a problem, and one they should make an effort to control. But the temptation to indulge it, under the flag of anti-Zionism, is too strong for many sufferers. I use the term 'Judophobia' for two reasons: First because I know that it will get past their outer mental defences against unwelcome thoughts. When they hear something described as a 'phobia', they initially assume that it must be one of those things that they ought to be against. This is the way they proceed. The jolt they receive when they realise that their views could be described in this fashion is potentially educative, and certainly satisfying. Second, I do it because the phrase 'anti-Semitism' has lost its power. People either assume that they are themselves too nice to be such a thing, or assume that they are being called Nazis, when they know they aren't Nazis, so it bounces off. I don't in the least think that 'Holocaust denial' is a loaded term. There is no doubt that the German National Socialist government engaged in the systematic, deliberate, industrial mass-murder of Jews, including women and tiny children. Those who seek to deny or minimise this are to be despised, as are all apologists for, and coverers up of crimes. Mr Bumstead asks of the ECHR: 'There is another point though. The ECHR in our legal system is a superior court of appeal to which British cases can be referred. If it has ruled that prisoners have the right to vote and a British litigant pursues his case there then the ECHR will rule in his favour and damages and legal costs will have to be borne by the government. This function of the ECHR was meant to be abolished by the 1998 HRA which was meant to implement human rights law within the domestic legal system but if we stop doing this (i.e. start ignorning judgements from the ECHR) then we simply open ourselves up to indirect payments at a later date. Therefore the only way to avoid inevitable payments to prisoners would be to leave the jurisdiction of the ECHR - leading to the same result (by a circuitous route) as direct fines would have.' I'm not sure I understand this point. This particular case was initiated, so far as I know, before the ECHR was incorporated into British law, which is why it wasn't ruled on by a British court. The Strasbourg court is not a 'superior court in the British system' but a separate body with no legal power to impose its judgements here. It has no power to force the British government to do anything. If this country denounced the whole Convention, as in my view it should, then our courts would no longer be able to use the Convention as a basis for decisions, and they could get back to their proper job of interpreting law rather than masking government policy on the hoof by extravagant 'interpretation'. Mr Finn writes: 'You will find his less than cordial encounters with Barbara Roche, George Galloway, Yvette Cooper, Alistair Darling among others pre and post Blair. Do you really think that Gordon Brown (who I am sure you regard as hopelessly left wing) would have relished the opportunity of going up against Jeremy Paxman? ' This laboriously misses the point, which I clearly made from the start. Yes, Mr Paxman had clashes with such people, but *not from a conservative position*. Do I regard Mr Brown as 'hopelessly left wing'? I am not sure, Certainly he is an unreconstructed egalitarian (hence the ghastly Laura Spence episode). But his association with Blairite economic policies, and with the Iraq war, would have made him unpalatable to most leftists at the BBC. Mr Finn again, writes of the 'many caveats you have had to add to your main assertion, including the one saying that the BBC decided, with Paxman in tow, to turn on the Brown government the moment they realised that Cameron was 'one of theirs' ' I have not 'added these caveats'. These are points made many times here before (do please use the index) and elaborated in the book 'The Cameron Delusion' . Then Mr Finn continues down his slope of utter (but deeply self-serving) misunderstanding of the point at issue: 'Let's run with this preposterous notion for a moment. Another search on Youtube reveals Tony Blair, long before, being grilled quite convincingly by Jeremy Paxman along with others from the Blair government. ' Then we get cheap abuse (this is the ultimate weapon of the BBC person challenged in this fashion - quite a senior BBC figure called me a 'liar' without foundation on a public platform only last week, and I had to make him apologise for it). Mr Finn writes :'I was merely reacting to those tin-foil hat-wearers who frequent this forum and claim that the BBC is of the left.' How unimprovably witty and trenchant. Well, while wearing my tinfoil hat this morning I distinctly heard the Today programme presenter Evan Davis (approx 7.35 am) refer to the think tank 'Politeia' as 'right-leaning' or 'right-wing' (the sausages were sizzling so I am not absolutely sure which - but I am sure it was one of them). Now I would be most surprised if Mr Davis or any other Today presenter would ever refer to a left-wing think tank as such. The word 'respected' tends to be used for those. And they don't even know they're doing it, just as Mr Finn doesn't (and cannot) actually understand the argument into which he has so self-righteously and superciliously ventured. It really is very easy to work out why. BBC persons are similar. From their Oxbridge Junior Common Rooms to the sad day when their friends gather to say farewell at the crematorium, they never meet anyone who disagrees with them, except for contemptible outsiders who they can safely dismiss as unimportant or stupid or 'fascist'. Just as the poor bewildered fish doesn't know he is wet, they just cannot understand that they are biased. And the revelation of the truth can only come at some cost - fear of the dry, waterless, bowl-free world beyond, in which survival might be in doubt. My brother Christopher has been in touch on the subject of central heating and civilisation, prompted by our debate here on what ‘The Abolition of Britain’ is actually about. He is sure that I must have got the idea that central heating weakened family ties from an essay by George Orwell. (I am not so sure, suspecting that I found it first in Richard Hoggart’s ‘Uses of Literacy’ or Young and Wilmot’s ‘Family and Kinship in East London’. This particular Orwell essay is not in my much-scribbled-in, worn-to-a-ravelling four volume Penguin Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism’ from the late 1960s). Pointing out (with accuracy) that one of his family duties in our childhood was ‘minding the fire’, so he knows what he is talking about here, he writes: ‘ The relevant essay is called “The Case for the Open Fire”, and was published in the Evening Standard on 8 December 1945. It’s a defence of coal-burning hearths as against gas or electric ones rather than central heating, but it says inter alia that “the survival of the family as an institution may be more dependent on it than we realise”. He goes on to say that “it has an aesthetic appeal which is particularly important to young children.” He continues: ’The reason why I think you will scour Hoggart and Young in vain is that they didn’t have Orwell’s intuition. There were certain things - weights and measures is another good example - where he went straight to the point and didn’t consider things like research. But perhaps someone else - Alan Sillitoe for example, or even Raymond Williams - did manage the same observation.’ Well, there you are. If I can’t kill off the idea that I’m against central heating, I can at least claim to have the great George Orwell at my side in this hopeless but noble struggle. One of the glories of working for a newspaper is that I could within minutes slip downstairs and call up the actual article (the ‘Evening Standard’ files are held by Associated Newspapers, which bought the title in the 1980s). And so here I have it before me, published just as news of the Bretton Woods agreement hit the front page, a Saturday evening essay to decorate a thin, rationed, crammed newspaper. Gosh, it reminds me that London evening papers used to come out on Saturdays, which they long ago ceased to do. And here is the core of it. Orwell is discussing how the new homes, to be built in the post-war era, will be heated. “A small but noisy minority will want to do away with the old-fashioned coal fire”, he predicts. “These people - they are also the people who admire gaspipe chairs and glass-topped tables - will argue that the coal fire is wasteful, dirty and inefficient. They will urge that dragging buckets of coal upstairs is a nuisance and that raking out the cinders in the morning is a grisly job, and they will add that the fogs of our cities are made thicker by the smoking of thousands of chimneys. “All of which is perfectly true, and yet comparatively unimportant if one thinks in terms of *living* and not merely of saving trouble. “I am not arguing that coal fires should be the sole form of heating, merely that every house or flat should have at least one open fire round which the family can sit. In our climate, anything that keeps you warm is to be welcomed and under ideal conditions every form of heating apparatus wouldbe installed in every house. “For any kind of workroom central heating is the best arrangement. It needs no attention, and since it warms all parts of the room evenly, one can group the furniture according to the needs of work. “For bedrooms, gas or electric fires are best. Even the humble oilstove throws out a lot of heat, and has the virtue of being portable. It is a great comfort to carry an oilstove with you into the bathroom on a winter morning. But for a room that is to be lived in, only a coal fire will do. “The first great virtue of a coal fire is that, just because it only warms one end of the room, it forces people to group themselves in a sociable way.This evening, while I write, the same pattern is being reproduced in hundreds of thousands of British homes. “To one side of the fireplace sits Dad, reading the evening paper. To the other side sits Mum, doing her knitting. On the hearthrug sit the children, playing snakes and ladders. Up against the fender, roasting himself, lies the dog. It is a comely pattern, a good background to one’s memories, and the survival of the family as an institution may be more dependent on it than we realise.” And so it continues, with occasional swipes at cold, quick efficiency and memories (shared by me) of heating the poker red-hot, seeing salamanders in the depths of the blaze and throwing salt on the flames to turn them green (there is a snarl at fake-coal electric fires - ‘the most dismal objects of all’) and even a swipe at ‘clammy’ hot water bottles as inferior to the old warming pans. There is also this wholly inimitable and beyond-parody Orwellian segment, in which the leftist struggles rather comically with the traditionalist: ‘ Many a devout Communist has been forced against all his principles to take in a capitalist paper merely because the Daily Worker is not large enough to light the fire with.' Please note that’s ‘ a conservative’, not a ‘Conservative’. As I so often have to insist during these discussions about the mighty appointed BBC Presenterocracy, it’s not *Party* affiliations I’m interested in, but which side of the great moral, cultural and social divide the person is on. Mr Paxman is on record as saying that he has voted for ‘all the major parties. “More than the main three, oh certainly.” This was in an interview with Decca Aitkenhead of ‘the Guardian’. As readers here will know, I don’t regard the Conservative Party as being particularly conservative, so that doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the subject in question. All right, you say, so people change their minds. As indeed they do, and should. But (in answering the question I pose above) I can offer two significant pieces of information. So far as I can discover, Mr Paxman is not married to the mother of his children, despite the relationship being apparently long and happy. In my generation, such a situation generally means that those involved (one thinks also of Alastair Campbell and his unwife, Fiona Millar) do not approve of marriage. This position is neither particularly uncommon nor controversial among the metropolitan Guardian-reading left. But it is not a conservative view. Second, let us return to the ‘Guardian’ interview with Ms Aitkenhead for a moment (this was published on 9th February 2009). She asked him if his children were educated privately. Here’s what happened: ‘When I ask if he educates his children privately, he gets very defensive. “I’m very ready to be hung for anything that I do, but I think their lives are their own.” But they don’t decide where they go to school. “Yes, but it is they who go to school.” I’m not asking you to name their school, I say, I’m just asking if you educate your children privately. “Mind your own business.” ‘ Now, I have educated my children privately since the moment I could afford to do so. I’d rather not (I’d have much more disposable income if I didn’t). But I regard it as a defensible, wise choice. I’d rather the state schools were capable of doing what private schools do, and that they didn’t do some of the things that private schools tend not to do - that is, undermining the messages children get at home, with multi-culti, anti-Christian, PC propaganda. I don’t think the generality of private schools are by any means immune from many of the weaknesses of modern education, but they are not as bad as the generality of state schools. I know there are some exceptional state schools, but - despite being rather well paid - I can’t afford to live in their catchment areas, which, thanks to the requirement for large sums of capital, is (oh, what a lovely paradox) often far more expensive than paying fees for a few years. I think there are strong, powerful reasons for my doing this. On the other hand, Leftists (see the chapter on ‘Class War’ in my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’) see something morally questionable in using private schools, and when they do it, often do it reluctantly. Among affluent metropolitan leftist types, it’s a constant source of anxiety (see the long and fascinating quotation from Nick Cohen about this in my ‘Cameron Delusion’) . It cannot always be solved by such dodges as getting your children into Roman Catholic schools that are in all important respects grammar schools. Or by moving to the hugely expensive and tiny catchment areas of Camden Girls or William Ellis, among the few excellent private secondary schools in London. Sometimes, and this really hurts, the whole chequebook has to come out or the children get hurt. For these people, private education is morally troubling. That’s why David Cameron, who wants to appeal to precisely this class of person in the media, has wangled his child into a simply lovely C of E primary rather than pay the fees he could easily afford (though things will get much more difficult once secondary schools are involved). That’s why Ms Aitken, who is a very sharp interviewer, asked the question. She knew it was profoundly revelatory. And that is why Mr Paxman, an equally sharp interviewer, didn’t answer it. In general, I’d also ask my ‘Paxman is a conservative’ theorists to see if they can answer this question. Mr Paxman never had any trouble before 1997 interviewing Tory ministers from an oppositional (and therefore leftist) point of view. His job, you might say. He has to play Devil’s advocate, etc. But can anyone remember him interviewing a Blair-era Labour minister in a similarly hostile fashion, from the position of a *conservative* Devil’s advocate? Not as a disappointed leftist Devil’s advocate, please note (the standard anti-Blair critical position of the post-1968 media classes). But from a socially, morally, culturally ( and constitutionally) conservative point of view? Relevantly, I can recall during my long-ago stint as an (openly partial) presenter on the then ‘Talk Radio’, interviewing William Hague, and wishing afterwards that I had been able to find it in myself to be harder on him. But the muscle and force just hadn’t been there. I know of no evidence that Iran is behind any of these episodes. And I think we must allow that, thanks to TV and the Internet, some of them may simply be copycat actions by populations seeing an opportunity. But what put the idea in my mind were two facts which emerged in the past few days. But Bahrain, though tiny, is also enormously significant in the Great Game of power and oil, because it is the indispensable base for the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet ( and was until 1971 a Royal Navy base, when we still had them in that part of the world). It also struck me that the regimes which had already fallen, those of Tunisia and Egypt, were broadly sympathetic to the USA, as is Jordan, which has some current difficulties with crowds. And even Libya, since the Clinton-Blair rapprochement, has been more or less in the pro-American camp , despite Colonel Gadaffi's noisy rhetoric. What's more, sooner or later the question is going to arise - if all these tyrannies fall - of whether Saudi Arabia's widely-unloved monarchy can survive. Iran would certainly rejoice to see an anti-American government arise there. Whereas I have yet to see any serious sign of revolt in Syria, an undoubted despotism, but one which just happens to be a close ally of Iran. I remember, in my small, discreet hotel in Tehran a few years ago, being alarmed to find as my fellow guests several senior Syrian Army officers, impressively uniformed, obviously on some co-operation mission. I thought my accidental presence might get me suspected of spying, but fortunately this didn't happen. As to why Iran might think on these lines, I suspect the Iranian leaders might find it rather amusing, even just, to drive Western influence out of the Middle East through such methods. After all, Iran's own rather popular government, that of Mohammed Mossadeq , was disgracefully overthrown in 1953 by a joint CIA and MI6 plot, involving paid mobs, suborned newspaper editors and the rest ( you can read the CIA account of it on the web). My former MP, C.M. 'Monty' Woodhouse (MP for Oxford in the early 1960s and again from 1970-74) , was one of the organisers, as was the amazing Kermit 'Kim' Roosevelt (Grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt). These things do happen. And we are not always told about them at the time. On the other hand, it could all be a complete coincidence. Oddly enough, or perhaps not that oddly, most people are not made to think when they encounter facts. They ignore the ones they dislike, and welcome the ones they like. So I am more than a little wearied by the contributor who presents me with the latest piece of research which appears (we’ll come to that) to fit his pro-drug agenda, and appends the words ‘Makes You Think, Doesn’t It’ in a finger-wagging, brow-furrowing, darkly significant, pub wiseacre sort of way. All I know is that I have never managed to make this particular character think by producing information which contradicts or undermines his view. So the answer to his question is ‘Probably not in your case’. Unscrupulous propaganda and crude arguments are far better for persuading audiences in public debates than careful, thoughtful argument - and fair-minded concessions to an opponent are almost invariably treated as a sign of weakness. It’s all very sad. I once won an argument and a vote in a long-ago Labour Party meeting - the only time I ever did in that forum - through an act of conscious and crude manipulation. I decided, just to see what would happen, and for purposes of revenge, to use my opponents’ methods against them and see if it worked. My left-wing foe (I’ve completely forgotten the topic under discussion, though I can remember her chubby, self-satisfied face) gave me what I needed. She said that her plans would need to be introduced through ‘enabling legislation’. All I needed to do (it really was this simple) was to say, repeatedly that Adolf Hitler had employed ‘enabling legislation’ to bring in his regime ( ‘Hitler, yes, Hitler! comrades, did this very thing’) to gather enough deluded votes to beat her. I had no need to discuss the actual proposal at all. The crude, illogical, irrelevant smear was quite enough, just as such smears were always enough to defeat my proposals. I still recall the mixture of triumph and slight shame I felt. All I needed to do was to descend to their level, and I too could begin to win votes. I had already used good old Trotskyist entryist methods (I’ll tell you which ones another time) to get a seat on the party General Management Committee - how horrified they all were when I turned up with valid credentials. But in the end I tired of it. Nothing worth having could have been won by such means, and the pleasure of seeing the other lot beaten would soon have cloyed. As for the Labour Party, who could possibly have foreseen that it would manage to portray a takeover by the moral, cultural and sexual left as a return to ‘moderation’, and win the 1997 election on the strength of it? Not I, for one, though in those days I had only just become a political reporter, and did not yet know how ignorant that part of my trade is about politics. It was carried out by a team led by Professor John Halpern of Harvard Medical School, and published in the journal ‘Addiction’ last week. I am not sure how available it is, having been otherwise engaged on the Samantha Fraser affair (see previous posting) and lacking time to search. Nor have I checked the nature of the US National institute on Drug Abuse , which granted more than a million pounds for the research. The study is mainly directed against previous research which has suggested that use of MDMA can lead to brain damage. I have to say that ‘brain damage’ ( an effect hard to define and hard to detect) is not the effect I would necessarily associate with this drug, suspecting it rather more of leading to genuine (that is to say physiologically caused) clinical depression and other emotional deficiencies in later life. Now, the Observer story notes this, saying: ‘... the taking of ecstasy has also been linked to damage to the central nervous system and research in recent years has suggested that long-term changes to emotional states and behaviour have been triggered by consumption of the drug’. It goes on ( and please, please read the whole thing. I am not in any way trying to filter it): 'Halpern was sharply critical of the quality of the research that had linked ecstasy to brain damage. "Too many studies have been carried out on small populations, while overarching conclusions have been drawn from them," he said.’ Now, those who have read the whole report may correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to narrow the matter down only to the ‘brain damage’ part of the problem. No surprise there. I am really not sure how one could measure objectively the sorts of effects which I suspect this drug ( along with some others) of having. As Allan Bloom put it so powerfully in his general attack on drugs and rock music in ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ : ‘In my experience, students who have had a serious fling with drugs - and gotten over it - find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations. ‘It is as though the colour has been drained out of their lives and they see everything in black and white. The pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end or as the end. They may function perfectly well, but dryly, routinely. Their energy has been sapped, and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living, whereas liberal education is supposed to encourage the belief that the good life is the pleasant life and that the best life is the most pleasant life... He then makes a metaphorical connection between the drugs and the music that goes with them , saying ‘as long as they have the Walkman (we would now say MP3 player) on they cannot hear what the Great Tradition has to say. After its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find that they are deaf’. I think there are also some interesting reflections on drug use and later depression in Tim Lott’s interesting book ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’. I myself have a suspicion that drugs, by artificially stimulating pleasure-producing nervous reactions designed for rare moments of real triumph, joy and ecstasy (the real one), deplete the body’s reserves of joy and delight and leave them empty in later life when they may be badly needed. But again, how would one measure this objectively? But to return to the Observer report: ‘The resulting experiment whittled down 1,500 potential participants to 52 selected users, whose cognitive abilities matched those of a group of 59 non-users. (My note: I think this is a very small sample for much of a conclusion, but I am open to correction here) “We even took hair samples of participants to test whether they were telling the truth about their drug and alcohol habits,” said Halpern. “Essentially we compared one group of people who danced and raved and took ecstasy with a similar group of individuals who danced and raved but who did not take ecstasy. When we did that, we found that there was no difference in their cognitive abilities.” In other words, previous studies highlighted problems triggered by other factors, such as use of other drugs or drink, or sleep deprivation.’ My main response is that this study sought to narrow what was being examined to a very specific part of the possible effects of MDMA, one which may not even be its most fundamental risk to users.. I’d be interested to know more about its genesis. What it found is undoubtedly interesting, but I do not think it is the clean bill of health that a casual reader might imagine it to be. On some other matters of general conversation, nothing that I have read about the EDL makes me warm to it or see it as a solution to our problems, though it has better PR and more tactical nous than the moribund and increasingly factional BNP. I think some of those involved with it have unlovely pasts. James Hedges is right in his response to Tom Bumstead. The story about the ECHR’s lack of actual powers was carried in ‘the Times’ but picked up by many other media outlets. It seemed to me that Mr Paxman’s thoughts on the Iraq matter were only interesting because they appeared under his name, and that they were couched in the form and shape used by the Left. I am grateful for the figures on support for the war, which are indeed interesting. I also opposed the Kosovo war, an enterprise in which I found myself very lonely indeed - but it was good practice for the early stages of the Iraq affair, when non-Leftist opponents of the invasion were rare indeed, and when the BBC more or less stopped asking me on the airwaves because it couldn’t cope with the dissonance between the fact that I was an official bad person, and the other fact that I held officially laudable views. Bad person holds good view. This does not compute. While it is true that some non-Leftists opposed the Iraq war ( I was one of them) they did so in different ways and in different places from the left who did so. And for different reasons. I once declined an invitation to speak at a ‘Stop the War’ rally because I thought and think that the slogan ‘Free Palestine’, which was part of the package, was absurd, and unconnected with the issue. Whatever the region would be if the Arab Muslim cause triumphed, it wouldn’t be free. The Palestinian Authority had attracted several severe criticisms from Amnesty International even before it became an official government, and had pioneered new methods of TV censorship, never previously tried. Imagine what it would be like if it attained sovereignty. I can’t here go into the many reasons why law-governed, constitutional government is rare to non-existent in Arab Muslim countries. Here are a few : the power of clans, which makes political parties hard to form; the Shia-Sunni division, the absence of a pluralist tradition, the non-existence of the concept of separation between church (or mosque) and state, the absence of any kind of adversarial tradition or genuinely free press.One could go on and on. How do I know that the men who assailed Lara Logan weren’t Mubarak supporters? I don’t, but it strikes me that, had they been , the world’s press would have been very keen to say so, since that would have fitted the narrative they had decided to follow. I think the story was a) delayed and b) shorn of one its most significant facts (‘Jew! Jew! Jew!’) precisely because this upset the preconceptions ( and increasingly the desires) of the news organisations covering the matter. Had the attackers been Mubarak thugs, wouldn’t someone have said so by now? But they haven’t, so far as I know. I’m amazed at the apparent enthusiasm for AV among contributors here. The FPTP system, which I much prefer, produces strong governments which can be turned out in a night if they prove unsatisfactory, and compels parties to make coalitions before the vote, rather than afterwards. The reason it currently works so badly is not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with it, but because it is dominated by dead political parties, kept alive by state subsidy, guaranteed BBC access and dodgy billionaires. AV will do nothing to fix any of this. Our constitution was fine before Labour started mucking it up in 1997, and it is being changed to suit the governors, not the governed. No system is perfect. But the perversion of Parliament mentioned (the abolition of the death penalty, for instance) were achieved by bypassing elections. the Jenkins-Heath alliance, as discussed in my ‘Abolition of Britain’, was able to get majorities for the permissive society, and for EU membership, by creating a cross-party radical alliance between Labour and Tory ‘progressives’ - an alliance which was never tested at the polls. The system was about to deal with this, via the collapse of the Tory Party under IDS, when the establishment stepped in placed the Tories in receivership so saving them from the fate they deserved (see my ‘Cameron Delusion’) . Oh, if only someone would write a bitter song about the miserable justice system of our country, where a slouching youth can smash the face of a beautiful girl with a brick and walk from court with nothing more than a £200 fine and a year to pay it. He won’t even have a criminal record and I am not allowed to tell you his name. His case was heard in a special 'youth court' where his victim was not present and where everyone behaved with great consideration in case he was upset. When Clare Fraser told me what had happened to her lovely daughter Samantha, and what had not happened to the boy who attacked her, I actually cried. Not just because of the horrible injury to a good and admirable person; not just because of the eloquent fury of Clare's letter to me; not because of the squalor and mean-mindedness of the lout who, in a second of casual cruelty, smashed a hole in another person’s life as well as in her face. But because I had to admit to her that there was probably nothing to be done about it. My Left-wing generation all know a savage Bob Dylan song about the unpunished murder of a black waitress by a wealthy American tobacco farmer, The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll. As he told the story, Dylan repeatedly snarled: 'Ah, but you who philosophise disgrace, and criticise all fears, take the rag away from your face, for now ain’t the time for your tears.' Only after the judge has 'handed out strongly for penalty and repentance' by awarding the casual killer a six-month sentence does Dylan sarcastically conclude: 'Bury the rag deep in your face, for now’s the time for your tears.' I should say that song helped – and rightly – to ensure that this sort of injustice pretty much came to an end in the U.S. The injustice of our age is of a different kind. But it is no less smug and no less in need of being made to feel so ashamed of itself that it reforms its behaviour deeply and permanently. Something similar needs to be said here to those who for decades have withdrawn the police from the streets, neutered the courts, and coddled the lout in the hope that he will be nice back. The people (of all political parties) who have fiddled the crime figures down, the people who have automatically halved every prison sentence, the people who even now are saying that it will be perfectly all right if fewer wrongdoers are sent to prison, the sort who say that critics such as me are indulging in exaggeration and 'moral panic'. Not to mention the dried-up dead-hearted prosecutors, with calculators instead of consciences, who think their purpose is economy rather than justice. The scene is Widnes in the modern North of England, a district of neat, modest houses and sweeping new road systems, more Morrisons and Lidl than Waitrose, but bright and reasonably prosperous, not some lunar dead zone of boarded-up windows, dead fridges and old mattresses. Samantha Fraser, a superb young athlete, Christianly brought up in a kind home by good parents, suffered as follows. A youth, having nothing better to do one evening, hurled a brick at the car in which she was sitting. He just happened to be feeling that way, without warning. It could have been any car. It could have been your car, or mine. The brick came straight through the window at an impact speed of about 30mph, bringing a shower of glass fragments with it. It smashed Samantha’s nose into a thousand pieces. It made an actual hole in her forehead. She, having no idea what had taken place, numb with fright, unable to see and pouring blood, screamed repeatedly: ‘What’s happened?!’ ‘What’s happened?!’ Her friends in the car tried to tell her everything was all right, but as she says: 'I didn’t believe them. 'I couldn’t see. I was thinking that I would now be blind, that I would never be able to do athletics again.' When her elder brother saw the wreckage of her face, he urged his mother, Clare, not to come to the hospital because the sight would distress her too much. Samantha herself wasn’t allowed near a mirror for months after the attack last June. Later, when she saw pictures of herself soon after the attack, she did not believe it was actually her. 'It didn’t look anything like me. It looked like something out of a violent film.' Surgeons had to cut up through the roof of her mouth and slice the skin of her scalp from ear to ear to pull her poor face back into shape. She has metal plates in her cheeks and nose. I have to say they have done a marvellous job of rebuilding, and that Samantha herself is still a very good-looking young woman (though her mother talks wistfully of how irrecoverably perfect her nose used to be) and astonishingly free from bitterness. I only once caught a hint of sorrow, when she explained flatly that her senses of taste and smell have been destroyed forever. 'Eating food now is just like eating ... nothing,' she says, with a quiet understatement that actually conveys rather powerfully what a loss this is. 'Sometimes we wish she would moan a bit,' says Clare, a funny, thoughtful fierce person who understandably thinks her daughter has a lot to complain about. Rather than moan, this remarkable 17-year-old has thought very carefully about what the event means, and how she should respond. As her vision slowly returns to normal, she is once again training as an athlete. She is not so sure about the (entirely justified) hopes she had once of a modelling career. Disgustingly, her attacker – who was for a while at the same school as her – was able to intimidate her while he awaited trial, making foul gestures at her through classroom windows and once mocking her by miming the throwing of a brick. As long as she lives in the family home, she knows he is not far away. She won’t go near the stretch of road where the attack happened. She doesn’t like it. Suddenly, in the only sign of real distress she gives in a long conversation, she blurts out: 'I don’t like it anywhere in this country! 'It’s horrible. Do I want to move away from here? Yes, I want to move to America.' In Texas or California, she believes, she can live her life free of such people. Samantha’s parents were not told that they had 28 days to lodge an appeal against the trivial sentence imposed on the youth responsible, so they have no formal route to justice. All they can do is protest. The insulting compensation payments arrive, in little dribbles, and perhaps they may obtain more such compensation, but it does not actually compensate. What they hunger and thirst for is justice. For a while they actually hoped to get it. They unreservedly praise the police for trying to catch the culprit and succeeding. But Clare was quickly suspicious of the Crown Prosecution Service, which seemed mainly anxious to avoid expense and trouble, and so reduced the charge from one attracting a heavy sentence to one involving a far lighter one. They also abandoned the very serious charge of witness intimidation, watering that down to the charge normally used when someone swears at a police officer. When Clare challenged them, she says, they patronised her. Then there is the sheaf of letters from the CPS 'Witness Care Officer', one Linda Mullarkey. These letters, prompted by years of complaints that victims and witnesses were treated like dirt by the courts, seek to give the impression that the authorities really, really care. Alas, one of Ms Mullarkey’s missives shows the concern is just cut and pasted out of a book. 'On behalf of the prosecution team,' she says, 'I would like to thank you for your assistance in this case. 'Samantha’s evidence was crucial in bringing it to justice and his contribution is greatly appreciated.' We all make mistakes, but male Samanthas are rare in this country, if not entirely unknown, and anyone who had the slightest true concern about this particular crime would not have allowed such an error to remain in a finished letter. In this piece of sloppiness we see the gap between what we are told and what actually happens. If all the recent politicians’ speeches about 'crackdowns', 'bobbies on the beat', 'tough sentences' and the rest were played end to end, they would last about a year. But in this wholly clear-cut case of wicked, inexcusable and life-changing violence on an ordinary suburban street, we see them for what they are. A slimy mass of conscious falsehood, accompanied by the patronising and insulting dismissal of real fear and pain by people who themselves live in comfortable safety. I wish I could think of a way to make them cry. The CPS Prosecutor Defending her conduct in the case against Ms Fraser’s attacker, a CPS spokeswoman said: 'The defendant was charged with causing grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The defence offered a plea to GBH without the intent element. After reviewing the evidence, the prosecutor decided the plea was acceptable.' The CPS Regional Chief His CPS biography says he has been 'at the forefront of innovation in the service'. It adds: 'Merseyside was the first CPS area to develop the Early Guilty Plea scheme, which ... reduces expense to the public purse whilst also achieving swift justice.' The Youth Court Magistrate Vivienne Higgins, magistrate at Runcorn Youth Court, lives with her property developer husband in Widnes. She declined to comment, but in court she said she decided not to give a custodial sentence because the assailant was not a persistent offender, adding it was important to note he was 14 at the time of the crime. She said: 'We have considered the principle of the Youth Justice System and lack of previous offences. We therefore are sentencing him to the recommended Referral Order for [12 months]. Compensation £200.' The Order is a contract 'to repair harm caused by the offence and address the causes of offending behaviour'. The Defence Solicitor Mr Ferris, who has been a solicitor for 16 years and works in Widnes, has admitted he tries 'not to think about' whether his client is guilty. He recently defended a heroin dealer saying his client needed to 'deal' to pay off a drugs debt. He was unavailable for comment.27 February 2011 1:28 AM
Stupefied in the gutters of the new Gin Lane, we’re just where our leaders want us
We didn’t know how lucky we were. Now it does not seem so distant. In how many homes is drink now a reason for embarrassment, fear, disease, loss and other perils? How many children are growing up with a drunken parent? In how many hospitals is drink the principal cause of injuries on two or three nights of the week?
In how many towns and cities do we see men and women hope¬lessly inebriated, sprawled, spewing, incontinent, enraged, violent or dangerous to themselves and others?
Hogarth would not be surprised to see it. My grandfather, raised in the rougher parts of Portsmouth, remembered it very well from the years before the First World War. But in my parents’ time, and in the first part of my life, it was not like that. Pubs were closed for much of the day, and for longer on Sundays. Most shops did not sell alcohol at all. By comparison with now, drink was very expensive – especially spirits.
I don’t remember any partic¬ular demand to change this. In my early years in the news¬paper trade, where a certain thirstiness has always been common, I learned that if anyone really wanted to get a drink at any time of day, he could do so with a bit of ingenuity or forethought. There
were discreet ‘clubs’, often enjoy ably raffish and sordid. There were pubs that let you in after hours. There were special licences for market traders and – all else failing – there were the buffet cars of railway trains.
But I also saw a valued and talented colleague carried out of the newsroom by four strong men, weeping, struggling, shouting and very visibly wetting his trousers. I saw others destroyed in various ways – their mem¬ories shattered, ordered by doctors to stop drinking or die. One – a man always on the edge of severe violence – did die,
so lonely and unmissed that his decomposing body was found in his bleak, empty home some weeks after he had departed this life.
Around this time I noticed that the (Tory) Government seemed to have decided that the drink laws needed relaxing. Why? Various blatantly bogus ‘experiments’ were carried out in Scotland, based on the fatuous idea that the licensing laws actually caused drunkenness. We were told that these trials had ‘shown’ that weaker laws led to less violence and dis¬order on the streets.
Next it was the turn of the rest of the country. Laws that had worked well for 70 years were rapidly repealed. Labour Ministers began to talk rubbish about introducing a continental ‘cafe culture’ under which we would be supposedly treated as grown-ups. But we are not continentals, and it was not grown-ups who would be the main victims of this change. During the 2001 Election campaign, Labour – to its eternal shame
– texted young voters with the message: ‘Don’t give a XXXX for last orders? Vote Labour
on Thursday.’
So in the space of about ten years, a subtle and elaborate system for keeping us out of Gin Lane was dismantled. But why? The group of distinguished doctors who urged higher prices for alcohol last week suggested that politicians were too close
to the drinks industry.
This is no doubt true. The Tory Party was always the party of booze. The Prime Minister
was for a while on the board
of a company that aggressively sought 3am licences for its chain of funky bars.
But what about Labour, the party of Methodism and Temperance and the Band of Hope? Well, that was the bit of Labour they got rid of. Lobbyists from the drink industry were at one stage accused of writing New Labour’s licensing legislation themselves. And if they didn’t, they might as well have done.
I don’t think that money alone explains this.
The people who run this ¬country seem to have a growing desire to see as many of
us as possible stupefied, either with alcohol or with cannabis
or with trash TV. Perhaps they reckon it is the only way we can be persuaded to put up with the mess they have made.
It’s certainly working. If the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had flooded their streets with strong lager and alcopops, instead of relying on thugs and tear gas, they’d probably all still be safe in power.
The sex-fuelled BBC bulldozer has demolished South Riding
Don’t waste time watching the BBC’s ghastly, sexed-up version of South Riding on Sundays. Buy the book and read it instead.
That tiresome nuisance, Andrew Davies, has completely missed the point of this glorious, generous novel, so good and beloved that it has never been out of print since it was published more than 70 years ago. But he and the BBC have only just heard of it.
Mr Davies says: ‘I often find myself writing scenes that the original author forgot to write.’ What he means is that he rides his big red sex-fuelled bulldozer through the works of better writers, shoving aside their subtleties and putting in grunts and clinches – and cliches – instead. He would find a way to put explicit sex and crude Left-wing politics into Treasure Island if anyone let him.
Actually there is sex and there are Left-wing politics in South Riding. There are also other kinds of love and disappointment, cruel death, feminism, pacifism, and a fiery, angry desire to bring education to the poor. But they are not the sort of sex or politics the BBC likes.
For they are coupled with a deep and open-minded understanding of the older, conservative England that the old Left sought to change, with a strong if reluctant sympathy for the Christian religion, and a liking for the English people as they are, rather than as busybodies might want them to be.
The book is a long love letter to the East Riding, to Yorkshire and to England. And its thoughtful heroine would never – as Anna Maxwell Martin does on TV – make a trite pacifist speech at a job interview, or turn up for such an occasion in a short-sleeved scarlet suit.
‘Nothing could have been more sober and businesslike than her dark brown clothes,’ says the book about this very scene.
Mr Davies and the BBC think they know better. But they don’t.
*********************
I am grateful to all those who got in touch about my account last week of the attack on Samantha Fraser, whose lovely face was smashed by a brick hurled at her by a lout. You are right to be concerned. But the real point remains. The failure of the justice system to punish the culprit was not an anomaly or a mistake. Everyone was doing his or her job as the Government wanted them to. There is no reason to believe this will change.Share this article:
25 February 2011 1:17 PM
It's all here: Tinfoil hats and respected think tanks, plus Judophobia, and do crowds know when they're being manipulated?
No. It isn't. The word 'homophobia' is used (for instance) by my enemies to describe and so defame me. I have no 'irrational fear' or 'irrational dislike' (choose your preferred translation), or any other sort of fear or dislike of homosexuals, as individuals or as a group. The use of the expression is designed to portray a reasoned position as a pathology and to damage me personally.
Yes, Mr Finn, but *not from a conservative position* - rather from the position of a discontented leftist. Such criticism of New Labour was always permitted in the BBC, because their only dissatisfaction with the Blair government was that a) it was economically Thatcherite/liberal and b) it went to war in Iraq.Share this article:
24 February 2011 4:21 PM
The goldfish syndrome
Do goldfish know that they are wet, or even that they are in water, or (when they are in one) in a bowl? I doubt it. I imagine that they never consider these things. They just think that what is, is - and that it ought to be so, and always will be so. They only ever meet other goldfish who have the same view. They have powerful mental defences against considering any alternative.
I constantly encounter this difficulty. My recent dispute with the 'Feedback' programme (see the index under BBC' and 'BBC Bias') was an instance of it. They didn't have any idea that their treatment of me had been, itself, biased - until I told them so and rather vigorously petitioned them for justice.
The latest instance is in a contribution from a Mr Stephen Finn (on the 'Why Jeremy Paxman Might Not Be a conservative' thread), who says he has worked for the BBC. It is in many ways so perfect an example of the type that I am tempted to have it stuffed and put in a glass case. This posting is an extension of my reply to Mr Finn.
Mr Finn says he can answer my question: "Can anyone remember him [Jeremy Paxman] interviewing a Blair-era Labour minister in a similarly hostile fashion, from the position of a *conservative* Devil’s advocate?"
Mr Finn says :"Yes, many times. I'm sure we all can. "
Well, I thought here we were going to be referred to at least some of these 'many times' and told when they were, and involving whom, perhaps with some indicative quotations. But they don't seem to be there - which doesn't greatly surprise me.
Because, you see, I'm not sure we 'all can' remember anything of the kind ever taking place. I for one cannot recall a single instance of this. I can, by contrast, clearly recall Mr Paxman treating William Hague (as Leader of the Opposition, mind you) with weary disdain when Mr Hague had been stabbed in the back by Lord Cranborne over House of Lords reform and was trying to defend his position. Mr Paxman actually offered to hand over the questioning to a Labour minister, also present in the studio (who wisely declined the offer).
I thought then, and think still, that this action was one of the most significant moments in modern British broadcasting. In the years after May 1997 the BBC, which had been furiously adversarial towards the Thatcher and Major governments (notably concentrating on Tory splits over the EU during the election campaign, while making no balancing effort to examine faultlines within New Labour) were simply unable to adopt a similar stance towards the Blair government. They could and did attack it from the Left (on civil liberty, economic policy etc) but they lacked the intellectual artillery or ammunition or personnel to attack it from a conservative position.
This was partly for the reasons given by Mark Thompson, who has conceded the existence of a left-wing bias 'in the 1980s' which has somehow disappeared in the years since, or by Andrew Marr, who memorably said that the BBC is "a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people, compared with the population at large". All this, he said, "creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC".
When Andrew Marr says 'liberal' he doesn't mean 'partisan Labour' - he means culturally, morally, socially liberal, the opposite of me.
The problem arose only partly because of this difficulty. The liberal bias also has a huge effect on recruitment, training and promotion. Thus by 1997, the BBC had almost no major figures in the Presenterocracy (or anywhere else much) who weren't instinctively radical. The BBC's treatment of distinguished journalists who weren't in the club, such as Jeff Randall and Andrew Neil, is very interesting. Mr Randall has described the baffled hostility he encountered. Mr Neil, it seems to me, is forever limited to late-night or daytime programmes. He is by all measures a superb broadcaster, quite qualified to present 'Newsnight' or any of the major flagship radio programmes. But somehow this doesn't happen. I might add that neither Mr Randall nor Mr Neil strike me as being particularly socially conservative, tending more towards the economically liberal view of domestic policy.
The BBC only became adversarial towards Labour, in the form of the doomed Brown government, after the Tories (first neutralised by Michael Howard, then actually subject to a sort of political gender reassignment under David Cameron) had adopted the radical programme of Blairism (as discussed in my book 'The Cameron Delusion'). They could then be safely supported, as the Blairite heritage of political correctness and radical constitutional change, not to mention the holy NHS and the comprehensive school system, were safe in their hands.
Mr Finn continues: "Speaking as someone who has worked in a BBC newsroom I can only say that in my experience the BBC are fanatical about balance in news broadcasting. That view may be unpopular here but it happens to be true. "
Mr Finn suffers from the standard BBC mental blockage on this subject. He mistakes formal balance between political parties (which is sort of achievable) for real impartiality between two points of view ( which, because it requires a thinking, informed person to be a neutered nullity, is beyond the wit of man and unbearable for any red-blooded human).
And because his world would fall down around him if he ventured outside this tiny, safe and irrelevant magic circle, he misses the whole point of what I am saying.
I recall with joy a conversation with the late BBC veteran Vincent Hanna, a fine journalist and undoubted left-winger, who used to take a savage delight in pursuing any BBC person who ever showed any signs of *party* affiliation. I asked him if he had never himself had any political affiliation in this country. No, he said, he'd once been a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, but that didn't count. I pointed out to him that this assertion was itself doubly contentious, and said something quite important about his views on several subjects. He wasn't all that amused.
The BBC is indeed scrupulous to the point of physical pain in ensuring that fair amounts of time are given to the major parties, according to agonisingly detailed formulae. This is mathematically possible, though difficult, and I am sure they feel very virtuous about it.
However, it is wholly ineffectual even in this narrow field because it does not deal with the following:
*How much space to give to lesser parties which did not earn any coverage through their votes at the last election, but which may now have a considerable potential vote which may be affected by the tone and quantity of coverage given to them.
*The advantage which can be given to the government (but isn't always) through use of the 'sandwich' - in which the reporter outlines the controversy between the parties with reasonable fairness, but then adds that 'government sources' or some other anonymous thing, take a particular view or expect a certain outcome or adopt a certain interpretation of the facts. These unnamed sources or 'experts' are a device by which the government (if it is in favour) or the opposition (if it is in favour) may be given the best of the argument without anyone needing to step off the plinth marked 'impartial reporting'. Once you are aware of this method, you'll see it all the time. But most people aren't, so they are manipulated by it - and editors at the BBC are often very lax in controlling it.
*The use of loaded verbs such as 'claims' instead of 'said' (this happens all the time, and was applied on a BBC news report on Thursday night to a statement made by the Prime Minister). No BBC reporter, committed by Charter to impartiality, is entitled to cast doubt on the veracity of any statement made by any legitimate politician in good faith in this way. Yet they do it all the time.
*The use of tone or expression of voice, the giving of the last word, the angling of questions, the control (or lack of it) of facial expression (I remember the ecstatic grin on the face of one BBC journalist, now a prominent newsreader, on election night in May 1997 as the news of Labour's victory became clear).
Once we move from direct politics into the hundreds of other areas of contention, from immigration and the EU to man-made global warming, the sexual revolution, exam inflation, Israel versus the Arabs, Northern Ireland, religion versus secularism, capital punishment, gun control, the nature of American society, and so forth, the formula simply cannot apply as the parties often aren't divided on these matters. But the population, which pays the licence fee, is divided. And it is in these matters that the BBC endlessly demonstrates its bias by selection of presenter, choice of angle, time given to particular subjects and not given to others (to be sure, Roman Catholic priestly sexual abuse is important, and there's some interest in homosexual priests and bishops, but BBC religious affairs programmes concentrate on these subjects to the exclusion of, or minimisation of many equally interesting and important religious topics).
Nor is this problem confined to news and current affairs programmes. Woman's Hour, the Archers, the News Quiz, Have I Got News For You, all contain many instances of partiality in non-partisan but important and contentious matters.
The origin of the current discussion on this is the reprimanding of Mr Paxman for an article in the Guardian. The reprimand was futile and ineffectual - Mr Paxman's article can have surprised nobody. Why should we pretend that we didn't know this was what he thought? The whole presumption on which the incident was based was the absurd one which Mr Finn defends - that policing explicit political bias is any answer to charges of deep cultural, moral and social implicit bias. It isn't. Can we return to that?Share this article:
23 February 2011 3:35 PM
Central Heating: George Orwell Speaks
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Why Jeremy Paxman Might Not Be a conservative
Then there’s the past. Mr Paxman says he was a communist at school, and famously described himself as a socialist when he applied, in his twenties, for the editorship of the Left-wing ‘New Statesman’ magazine.Share this article:
Could Iran be Involved?
Several readers ask about my throwaway line, speculating that people might view the great Arab wave of uprisings differently, if it turned out to have been orchestrated from Iran, as is quite possible. Some seem to have taken my speculation as an assertion. Not a bit of it. That something is 'possible' does not mean that I know it has happened, or that I am saying that it has happened.
One was the surge of protest in Bahrain (now for the moment eclipsed by events in Libya). The other was the passage through the Suez Canal on their way to Syria of two Iranian warships (not 'battleships' as some people insist on calling them; a 'battleship' is a specific class of heavily armoured and heavily-gunned vessel, now more or less obsolete, and certainly not possessed by Iran. A 'warship' covers all types of ships adapted or built for warlike purposes, from a minesweeper to an aircraft carrier).
Well now, Bahrain has previously been the target of Iranian attempts to destabilise its government and take it over, back in 1981. Teheran is specially interested in this tiny kingdom because of the majority Shia Muslim population there, and because of one other thing, which I shall mention. Iran's position as guardian and friend of Shia Muslims has already hugely increased its influence in Iraq, and also in Lebanon. Teheran in general has a policy of trying to overcome its isolation in the Muslim world by becoming more powerful and by riding the wave of Judophobia and anti-Israel sentiment on the Arab street. President Ahmadinejad's shameful (and here I do mean the word as a direct criticism) Holocaust-denying railings against Israel have made him the taxi drivers' favourite in every Arab city, a status unheard of for a Shia Persian .Share this article:
21 February 2011 5:23 PM
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
But let us return to our ‘Makes You Think' friend, and his (or rather the) research on MDMA ( ‘Ecstasy’) as published in the Observer. As it happens, I seldom write about MDMA here, being much more concerned about Cannabis. So I don’t make any special claims to know much about it. The story itself is one of those that retreats a bit as you approach it, like a bank of fog.
I think Mr Wessex has told us rather more about himself than he has about the Middle East. Oh dear.
But I would ask readers to recognise that an absence of enthusiasm for the overthrow of Arab despots isn’t in any way an enthusiasm for those despots. It is based mainly on an unwillingness to believe that these events will lead to anything much better, and an irritation at the over-optimistic and shamelessly supportive coverage which supposedly impartial organisations have shown. The night Mubarak didn’t resign, the BBC nearly had a brain haemorrhage, so furious was it over thee Egyptian President’s failure to do as it had predicted he would. So far it has produced two naked military regimes where there had previously been a top-dressing of constitutional government. Worth it?Share this article:
A brick in the face of a beautiful girl - and the system that allows a slouching youth to walk free
Somehow the story needs to reverberate for years to come in the minds of the fat-bottomed, complacent persons who are responsible for this, and who will do nothing about it, ever, in case somebody at the BBC calls them 'fascists'.
So far have we come that these events can happen in our country.
She still hopes to study to become a nurse, as she always planned.Professionals behind the travesty
Clare Sedgmond was previously a solicitor at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Last year she prosecuted a man who had threatened his ex-wife and her family in abusive calls and texts. He received only a 12-month community order after Ms Sedgmond told a magistrate: 'We hope to come to some amicable agreement.'
Paul Whittaker, Chief Crown Prosecutor for CPS Merseyside, has a CBE for his work to reform the justice service – but he appears to have largely made his name by cutting costs.
Liam Ferris persuaded the CPS they would be unable to prove his client guilty of GBH with intent, and successfully challenged attempts to have the case heard at Crown Court instead of Youth Court.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
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