This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column The main threat to this country’s liberty, independence and prosperity comes from the European Union. Almost every week, some pitiful ‘Minister’ confesses that he is powerless against a decree from this grey, bland Empire across the Sea. The latest is the one which says we must now pay full welfare benefits to 100,000 European migrants, who we must also allow to live and work here, because we no longer control our own borders. So it is pathetic and contemptible for our collaborationist national leaders to pretend to be patriots by ordering planes, tanks and ships – and men – into foreign parts. Haven’t they sentenced enough soldiers to death already in the futile adventure of Afghanistan? They are posing as brave when their decisions force others to be brave, and in many cases be dead or severely maimed for life. They are posing as virtuous when they are merely trying to cover up for their weakness and failure in other matters. I have little time for Mr David Cameron. I told you all, correctly, that he was a Left-wing liberal who would let you down. If you aren’t yet sorry you voted for his useless party, you soon will be. But I had thought that he was at least grown-up, unlike the absurd, Olympically ignorant Blair creature, who got a thrill from invading countries he couldn’t find on a map. I was wrong. Mr Cameron’s Oxford degree and Etonian polish actually clothe a small boy in shorts who wants to play with jet fighters and seeks diplomatic advice from . . . Mr Blair. One of the greatest if grimmest pleasures of my week was to hear the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, dismiss Mr Cameron’s fantasies about a no-fly-zone over Libya as ‘loose talk’. What is all this morality in foreign policy? We sucked up to Colonel Gaddafi because our oil industry needs to be in Libya. If Mr Cameron so loathes tyrants who slaughter their own people, then what was he doing in Peking, simpering at the Chinese leadership a few yards from the scene of one of the greatest massacres of modern times? The current fashionable rage against Colonel Gaddafi is barmy and self-defeating and we will have to say sorry for it if he holds on to power. Our logic seems to be that we will take a high moral tone towards any leader who fails to terrorise his people into submission, but remain silent about those who are ruthless enough to stay in the saddle. Meanwhile, we do nothing about the great national issue of our time, the EU’s slow-motion strangling of a thousand years of independent British history. Since I can’t get anyone in politics to follow my advice, I get my main pleasure from gloating at the stupid mess they get into by ignoring me. If you want a law enforcing sexual equality, then I hope you get it. Hot and strong, inflexible, absolute and quite mad. So farewell Sheilas’ Wheels, and farewell to lots of men’s pension money too. He is good at this kind of sleight of hand. In fact he knows perfectly well that Britain’s iron-bound ‘Equality and Diversity’ laws force us all to be multicultural. The High Court has just made this very clear by trampling on the free speech and thought of a baffled and kindly Derby couple, Owen and Eunice Johns. The judges pronounced that it was not yet ‘well understood’ that British society was largely secular and that the law has no place for Christianity. Well, it is clearly understood now, by anyone paying attention. They declared: ‘Although historically this country is part of the Christian West, and although it has an established church which is Christian, there have been enormous changes in the social and religious life of our country over the last century. We sit as secular judges serving a multicultural community of many faiths.’ What this meant, in this case, was that Mr and Mrs Johns are forbidden to foster any more children because they are not prepared to mouth the slogans of political correctness. Note well, it is not even because of what they have said or might say – which would be quite bad enough. It is because of what they decline to say, because they do not believe it. They believe instead in the Christian faith which made this country what it used to be. And the courts of England, turned upside down by the commissars of egalitarianism, now enforce this totalitarian concept. You might like to know that you paid double for this repulsive and shameful case to be brought. Not merely was it pursued by Derby City Council. (Bill £14,000). They were joined (with a separate legal team costing you another £14,000) by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. This is the body which said in court that the moral views of the couple might ‘infect’ a child – a statement they have apologised for, nearly six months later, after it got into the papers. They claim it was a mistake. I think the only mistake was to let us know – too early – what sort of monster we are dealing with. The EHRC, backed by the courts, is an actual Thought Police Force and Inquisition combined. It should be disbanded before it gets any more powerful. But the Muscular Liberal A lot of people didn’t want it to be true, so it was ignored until millions had gone needlessly to early graves. Now the evidence that cannabis is a danger to mental health grows clearer each week – the British Medical Journal has just published a powerful paper linking cannabis with psychosis. Yet in the media and in the Government, the falsehood that this is a ‘soft’ and harmless drug continues. Next step: the transfer of Ulster to Dublin rule and a grinning Gerry Adams in government in Dublin. From the moment I tuned into the Radio 4 Today programme till now (as BBC News 24 blares in the background) I have heard it repeated over and over again that the Barnsley Central by-election is desperately bad news for the Liberal Democrats. No doubt this is true, to the extent that by-election results in Labour safe seats have any importance at all at the moment. It is equally bad news for the Tories, beaten by the Dad’s Army of UKIP, whose cravat-wearing, golf-playing heartland is hardly close at hand up there in the West Riding. Yet this is simply not being said. In fact, on the radio this morning I had to wait for about half an hour to hear it so much as mentioned that it had happened at all. There is a significant Tory defection to the right here, a thing the BBC greatly dislikes and fears. And it is trying to minimise it in case it spreads. Bias in operation. See my book, ‘The Cameron Delusion’ to find an explanation for this seemingly unlikely alliance. I’ll try to pick up as many of the threads of discussion as I can. I have been a little distracted by the need to climb Mount Everett once again (see separate posting) and other obligations. Theodore Harvey asks: ’I do find it a little odd that Mr Hitchens and his brother Christopher have been united in their attacks on “The King’s Speech” despite their diametrically opposed views on the Monarchy. Is it not positive in an age of rampant republicanism for a popular movie to portray George VI and the institution he served in a favourable (for all Logue’s irreverence) light? Does not the movie movingly and accurately depict the heroism of succeeding in a role one did not choose in a way that could only exist in a hereditary monarchy? Surely “The King’s Speech” deserves some solidarity from monarchists; there must be good reasons why republicans hate it.’ Not quite so serious, because it merely invents a thing that never took place, is the gathering of the crowds outside Buckingham Palace as the Anti-Fascist People’s Monarch makes his rallying speech in September 1939. Once again, this is a nonsense, confected to overcome the difficulties anti-monarchists suffer over having a King at all. If this King could be shown to have readied and steadied the people for the war against right-wingness which then loomed, then he must be all right, and the aforementioned classless, irreverent jackaroo can be excused for wasting his valuable time on a reactionary, repressed hereditary figurehead and feudal throwback. The fact that there was such a crowd -gathering about a year before, when Bertie invited Neville Chamberlain onto the Buckingham palace balcony to thank him for Munich, just underlines the distance this film has travelled from the truth. I might add, just for fun, that many of the British Left in September 1939 (some of them prominent actors) did not actually support the War Against Fascism, because Stalin (at that point Hitler’s valued ally) told them not to. They didn’t get round to being pro-war until, when was it ? Oh yes, June 1941. But that really would short-circuit the brains of those, in the studio and in the cinema queue, who think truth doesn’t matter. The reason why my brother and I, for our separate and opposing reasons, both criticise this film is that we both happen to think that the truth matters. I thank Mr Robinson for his information about previous dramatisations of ‘South Riding’. I’m struck by the way in which the makers of the BBC series seem unaware that the book was prominent and well-known before they found out about it. This also gives me the opportunity to point out something about Andrew Davies and his grasp of the book. After confessing that he had never previously heard of ‘South Riding, saying ‘The title sounded a bit Northern, rural and worthy for my taste - and what or where was South Riding anyway? In Yorkshire, I supposed, but which bit?’, Mr Davies wrote in the MoS: ’I also had fun building up one of my favourite characters from the book, Alderman Snaith’s cat. Snaith, the nearest thing to a villain in the story (played by Peter Firth) lives alone with his pampered puss. They are both very fastidious, and spend a lot of time preening themselves. Winifred didn’t give the cat a name, so I decided to call him Edgar and make him Snaith’s co-conspirator.’ Leave aside how irritating it is of him to refer to the author as ‘Winifred’, when he cannot possibly have known her. This reminds me of those insensitive workers in old people’s homes who insist on using the first names of the inmates What else is wrong with this passage? You wish to know? Turn, then, to page 138 of ‘South Riding’, BBC Books edition 2011, with an introduction by none other than Andrew Davies - and what do we find? ‘Snaith was permitting Sir John Simon - the tom on the hearthrug - to curl a luxurious tongue round his fingers, removing the last flavour of buttery anchovy paste ...’. Now, ‘Sir John Simon’ sounds a lot like a name to me. And ‘tom’ sounds quite like a cat. Thus ‘Winifred’ does seem to have given the cat a name. But of course the name’s a humorous reference to an interesting Liberal politician (famously aloof and reserved) of the time (Foreign Secretary when the book was written). I can see why he might have feared the reference would be lost on modern viewers. But ‘didn’t give the cat a name’? Harrumph. More than one contributor notes the ludicrous caricature of Councillor Huggins, the ‘Christian’ character in the programme, held up for scorn and ridicule. One minute he is preaching, or rather raging like a poor impersonation of Hitler on a bad night at the Kroll opera. The next he is fornicating on screen with a crudely-painted, simpering floozy, a moment I think we could all have been spared. Such liaisons don’t take place in public. So why are we shown them? Couldn’t it be alluded to indirectly? He is of course fat, ugly and bald (though in the book he has a beard). As it happens, almost all the major characters, in the book, have at least some allegiance to what was once our national religion. This can easily be divined by the simple expedient of reading it. Sarah Burton, raised an Anglican but now full of doubt, is still much moved to thought by Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and also by the Jubilee service (unimaginable now in its display of national unity) which ends the book. Robert Carne attends Evensong weekly in the parish church, untroubled by the Magnificat’s less-than-friendly attitude towards the proud ( to be scattered in the imagination of their hearts), the mighty (to be put down from their seat) and the rich (to be sent empty away). Alderman Snaith is a sophisticated and well-read nonconformist of a type then common. As for poor Huggins (page 50) ‘Huggins knew a thing or two about the Kingsport slums. He had been born in one. He was on the Public Heath Committee of the South Riding County Council. He was a compassionate man. He really hated misery. Had he created the world not a woman should ever be overburdened, not a child forlorn, not a man discouraged...the dissimilarity of East Kingsport from Heaven was a cause of real distress to him, and he cursed the proud and cruel men who made money by grinding the faces of the poor and by driving girls into vice and men into drunken squalor’. Note the broad generosity of this portrayal, so much more interesting than the less-than-one-dimensional hypocrite of the Davies version, with all the subtlety of a villain in the ‘Beano’ . Huggins falls in spite of trying to be good, as real people do. I am asked by ‘Curtis’: What makes Peter Hitchens think that people in the nineteenth century spoke more slowly and more distinctly than people do now? He was not around then to remember.’ No, I wasn’t but I was, as a small child, able to meet and talk to many people who had lived in that century, including my own grandfather. They were still quite common, then, as were those brought up before the Second World War. And I recall that they spoke with far more precision(especially if they had been well-educated) than people do today. Actually all you need to do is read the dialogue in (say) Dickens, and you will see a wholly different register. Mr F: ’Secondly, I work intermittently for the BBC. I am less “of the BBC” than you are given the frequency of your appearances.’ **Even here Mr Finn continues to miss the point. Actually I am seldom on the BBC. Would he care to hazard a guess as to how many times I was on it in the past year. including the two(!) occasions when I appeared solely to rebut wholly unfair personal attacks made on me in my absence on major programmes? I agree my appearances are memorable, because they rather stand out from the consensual blandness all around. But I only ever appear at someone else’s behest and under someone else’s control, to discuss subjects of their choice at times of their choice. The other crucial difference is that , despite being occasionally allowed on, I am not thereby convinced that BBC’s attitude towards me is fair, or recruited into the trilling, happy choir of ‘impartialitee’. Mr Finn again :’Given that there may be an ulterior motive for hard questions being asked of left-wing people such as Crow and Galloway, namely that they damage the centre left/right cause, you ignore the much more plausible reason for the question being asked; that the interviewer is playing devil’s advocate for the right generally.’ No, I don’t ‘ignore ‘ it.I examine it and find it implausible. He adds: I suspect that viewers of a right wing persuasion were much more inclined to support the thrust of that questioning than your average Labour supporter regardless of what dubious benefit may be gleaned by the Labour leadership from castigating them (I am thinking of Ken Livingstone’s expulsion).**I wouldn’t know. I am not talking about what ill-informed viewers may have *thought*. I am talking about what took place, and why what might seem paradoxical is not in fact paradoxical at all. . And why what appears to him (not a conservative) and the BBC establishment (almost bereft of conservatives) to be ‘right-wing’ does not appear so to me ( an actual conservative). Mr Finn again:’ This is the problem with what you are saying; if Paxman is hard on the left then he is in thrall of the centre left Labour leadership yet when he attacks the Labour leadership he is doing it from the far left.’**No, I do not say this or think it. This is absurdly wrong. This misunderstanding shows that he is simply not listening to what I am saying. I say that it is perfectly possible for a BBC person, himself of the cultural and moral left, to give a genuinely hostile interrogation to a figure from the ‘hard left’, because the ‘hard left’ threatens and damages the electoral prospects of the political movement which best embodies the desires of said social and cultural left (ie New Labour). The same BBC person can be critical of Labour not from the ‘far left’ but from a competence and delivery standpoint (‘Has Labour done competently what it said it would?’ or from a disappointment standpoint (‘ I never expected a Labour government to go to war in Iraq’). From this position he can mount moderately critical interviews of left-wing political figures, which are yet not from a conservative standpoint - that is ‘Are these policies right at all?’ He’ll never get this until ( as he plainly hasn’t) he reads my books. ‘The Abolition of Britain’ and ‘The Cameron Delusion’, in which the absurd media misunderstandings of what is ‘left’ and what is ‘right’ are demolished and carted away to landfill sites. Mr Finn again: ’The other inconsistency with your argument is that on the one hand you say, quite rightly, that it is impossible to have a completely impartial news service but then you pick a handful of instances of apparent bias one way as if that is proof of a systemic bias throughout the organisation. Others on this forum would do well to take note of this. Just because you detail your favourite bit of BBC “bias” doesn’t prove any argument about systemic BBC bias.’ Mr Everett says he is distressed by my suggestion that he appears to hold certain positions, based upon contributions he made here largely in the form of questions. These were the words which provoked him: ’But what else could he (Mr Everett ) do but miss [my point about multiculturalism, race and culture], if he wants to maintain what appears to be his belief in racial determinism? Others, interested in the matter and having open minds, are urged to read Thomas Sowell’s book ‘Race and Culture’. Mr Everett may continue to hope for salvation from the BNP if he likes.’ My answer to that is to quote what he said (27th February, 4.50 pm, ‘Tinfoil Hats’ thread), which in tone and content ( full of sarcasm, implied accusations of intellectual snobbery and of strongly deployed inverted commas to underline his scepticism of my use of certain words) and seems clearly to bear this interpretation on a subsequent reading. (I’ve inserted some asterisked notes to explain what I mean ‘Peter Hitchens thinks “all cultures are different (hence my complementary opposition to both racial discrimination, which is irrational , stupid and unjust, and to multiculturalism, which prevents cultural assimilation into the national monoculture and promotes hostility between cultures, often along coincidentally ethnic boundaries, so increasing the danger of racialism).” Mr Everett: 'Fair enough.' (** Mr Everett here repeatedly advances the word ‘race’ as an alternative, if not ‘synonym, for ‘culture. Why is he doing this if he does not disagree with my view that the problem is cultural? ) Mr Everett: ‘They saw at first hand the hostile clash of cultures that occurred when different ‘peoples’ / ‘cultures’ / ‘races’ mixed and they often did not like what they saw or experienced. Their foresight and then experience told them they were not going to like what was going to occur as the new immigrants arrived, and so they objected to it. Unfortunately they may have possibly failed to be sufficiently clear about the intellectual distinction between ‘cultures’ and ‘races’ - (**This appears to me to be sarcastic, and sarcastic in a way that suggests strongly that Mr Everett regards my distinction between race and culture as valueless and mistaken. In which case what explanation does he have for the differences which undoubtedly exist between host community and new arrivals? He doesn’t , note well, actually challenge my belief with facts and logic, only with dark hints that I secretly share his views, yet fear to express them, and am insulated from the truth by ‘caution’ and my personal distance from the habitations of the poor. ) Mr Everett again: ‘They just “called a spade a spade” (**Can Mr Everett conceivably be unaware of the double meaning in this? Does he not know of the (derogatory) use of the word ‘spade’ by racially prejudiced persons in the 1950s and 1960s? Who knows? But I am entitled to wonder what he seeks to communicate here, and by this particular choice of words in this context). Next he asks me to justify my suggestion that ‘2. that I (Mr Everett) continue to hope for salvation from the BNP’ That is easy. I can see no other interpretation of the following passage from the same posting :’”When they looked for a political voice for their entirely reasonable objections to this new mixing of uncomplimentary ‘cultures’ - they found only the BNP. But when they joined or sympathised with the BNP they were denounced as ‘nasty’ ‘beyond the pale’ ‘knuckle scraping scum’ for their troubles. Some lost their jobs and some were convicted as criminals for voicing their objections. So – a ‘catch 22’ ‘no-win’ situation for those who found themselves in this situation - and who had been cut adrift by their own country’s unaffected ‘elite’.” I’ll address his other questions once he’s extracted himself from the above, if he can. I have finally found time to see the Coen brothers' remake of 'True Grit', a film almost limitlessly superior to the monstrously overhyped, historically absurd, factually misleading 'The King's Speech'. I'll come on to that in a moment. But first some contributors here think I will feel in some way mortified by the awards heaped on 'The King's Speech'. Why should I? We all know how Hollywood rewards the meretricious and the obvious, and why should it surprise us when it happens again? I must pay tribute to whoever was behind the publicity for this film ('The King's Speech'), which has actually managed to recruit normal human beings to spring to its defence when I ( and incidentally my left-wing brother Christopher) have pointed out its glaring and undoubted inaccuracies and other faults. Why do they do this? The thing about 'True Grit', apart from the fact that it is enjoyably funny, exciting, absorbing and very good-looking, is that it has taken so much trouble to imagine the past. Now, the BBC have spent a fortune in 'South Riding' on steam engines, tailoring, vintage vehicles and such stuff (though in fact they could never persuade most of the extras to subject themselves to the actual hairstyles of the time, particularly the way the men looked). And of course they have a lot of smoking, the TV producer's unfailing signal to the audience that we are now in the past. But what they don't seem to grasp is that the whole effort is ruined by their failure to pay any attention to the way people talked in the past. One actor in 'South Riding' is shown in a trailer (I've yet to spot this in an actual broadcast) saying 'I can't believe I'm hearing this' as if he were a character in EastEnders. This is only the most glaring of the various anachronisms I have spotted. I'm also slightly puzzled that the Squire, Robert Carne of Maythorpe, who attended St Peter's School in York and was a cavalry officer in the First World War, is depicted as speaking in a broad all-purpose Northernshire accent which I doubt he'd have possessed. I'm not sure. Maybe an expert on Northern Posh can set me right about that. But in 'True Grit', the characters all speak as I think people did in the 19th century. That is, more slowly, with the words emerging individually instead of in a slurred stream (yes, I know Jeff Bridges sometimes breaks this rule, but there are reasons for this) , with less abbreviation and a more correct grammar. Their phrasing is also influenced by the Bible with which they were all closely familiar. This really does give the watcher the impression that he is in a different, harder time, when cold was colder, tastes and smells stronger and language more potent. It is also a joy to the ear, delivering its dry humour with a slow precision, like an old clock. No doubt the rescue of several British subjects from Libya involved courage, organisation and competence, of the kind our armed services can still provide. They are among the few British organisations which still insist on high levels of training, which punish failure and reward success. They have been able to ward off - so far - much of the deadening egalitarianism which has destroyed professionalism and even basic competence in so many other areas of service and endeavour. I do not know how long this can last as the armed forces are stripped of men, experience and equipment by a supposedly 'Conservative-led' government to pay for the NHS, windmills, comprehensive schools and foreign aid. It cannot be pointed out often enough that HMS Cumberland, crucial to these operations, is on her way to the breaker's yard. Oh, and a note to broadcast journalists. The phrase 'The HMS Cumberland' is an illiterate solecism. Think about it. 'The Her Majesty's Ship'. Not good, eh? Mind you, as we cease to be a maritime power many people probably don't know what 'HMS' stands for. I long ago gave up explaining that warships didn't have crews, but 'ship's companies', and that those who served in them were 'in', not 'on' their ships. I think even the Navy has given up on this one, which used to be the distinguishing mark, linguistically, between those who knew the Navy and those who didn't. And regular readers here will have noticed my teeth grinding at the use of the word 'Battleship' (the specific name of a huge, heavily-armoured and mightily-gunned type of mobile fortress) to describe some trifling tin frigate only just too big for a boating lake. But I digress. So why the fuss? I think my colleague James Forsyth, who compared the government's initial Libya performance to the behaviour of a budget airline, was closer to the mark. The Hercules flights, and the voyages of the doomed HMS Cumberland have been overblown. I suspect the government is encouraging this view, as it adopts a raucous and rumbling tone in its dealings with Libya to try and make us forget its failure to do its most basic duty last week, that is the protection of its own people. But how ridiculous it all is. Supposedly we are now terribly moral about the wicked Libyan regime, denying diplomatic immunity to its leaders, freezing its assets, refusing to print its banknotes. Tough, eh? This Libyan wickedness does not seem to have troubled the existing British government (or its predecessor) at all until about two weeks ago, or why was a British firm printing those banknotes and why were there so many British personnel in Libya in the first place? By the way, please don't go on at me about the supposed 'Lockerbie Bomber'. There is absolutely no evidence that the Libyan Abdel Baset al-Megrahi had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing, almost certainly carried out by terrorists under Syrian control, at the behest of Iran. The truth is that Colonel Gadaffi's government is being punished not because it is wicked (so is Syria's, for instance, as I keep needing to mention) but because it is weak and tottering. How embarrassing all this will be if the Gadaffi family manage somehow to regain control of the country. Terribly sorry, your colonelship, sir. Hope you understand we were only going through the motions? Can we have our printing contract back? No hard feelings, eh? Which brings us to a fascinating but inescapable irony, or is it a paradox? . The more ferocious and ruthless an Arab government is, the more effective it is at grinding rebellion into the pavement at the earliest possible moment, the more likely it is to retain the favour of Her Majesty's Government and its allegedly ethical foreign policy. The message is 'if you can hang on to power, we'll stick by you. But lose it , and we'll denounce you till our throats are sore.' Surely some mistake? Some people (I had a letter from one this morning) still believe that governments have humanitarian impulses, and go to war to do good. The great myth that we intervened in Yugoslavia to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing still persists, even though the Iraq war - launched on a similarly false idealistic prospectus - is now almost universally discredited. Many people still harbour the fantasy that World War Two was fought to rescue the Jews from Hitler. No such luck, as the millions of dead Jews from Frankfurt to Minsk could attest, if they were alive to do so. By the time the Foreign Office could bring itself to believe the terrible reports reaching it from Auschwitz, at awful cost to those who smuggled them out, it was pretty late anyway. But even then they didn't do anything. Nations follow their own interests. Some governments are better at it than others. This particular government, judging by the last few weeks, isn't very good. Elaine (I have removed her inverted commas as requested) is cross because I said: 'She is cross that I don't share her wide-eyed, naive admiration of these ambiguous and unfinished events.' She retorts: 'I have never suggested anything of the sort.' Oh, I don't know. Why else would anyone get so worked up that I had suggested the possibility that outsiders might have influenced the great Arab Revolt (which is all I did, as she seems now to accept, having written repeatedly as if I had stated it as a fact). Who would get so defensive, if he or she didn't have some idealist picture of the revolt? Ever since the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, which so far as I know was a genuine popular street revolt, it has been plain that in the TV age this is quite a good way of destabilising a government. Those whose job it is to destabilise other people's governments cannot have failed to observe this . The wave of 'colour revolutions' in former Soviet countries have always seemed to me to be open to question, as they so very much suited the foreign policy of various Western countries - and the governments which resulted from them have seldom if ever lived up to the ideals expressed. States which wish to survive this sort of thing have also been thinking about it. Vladimir Putin , in his customary ruthless, clever and competent fashion, has created the sinister state-sponsored youth movement 'Nashi' to deter any attempts at such a 'colour revolution' in Moscow. In Iran, the pro-regime Basiji and the Revolutionary Guard developed particularly brutal and effective methods (charging into the crowds on motorcycles) to intimidate and scatter the Tehran crowds after they rigged the Presidential elections. It's also clear that repressive states, whose authority rests on the control of the streets, falter at any stage, then they are lost. 'Harrison' asserts :'It seems to me that Mister Hitchens's main strategy, whenever he wants to rebuke someone who is critical of Israel, is to criticize the actions of another government.' He or she entirely misses the point. The poor thing has to, for to do otherwise would be to examine his or her true motives in a way that might be disturbing. That point is that Israel does many bad and reprehensible things, for which I often criticise it, just as I might (and do) write critically of any country I visit, or whose government does things of which I generally disapprove. But the 'anti-Zionists' criticise Israel alone and exclusively. They are apparently unaware of or unconcerned by the equally wicked actions of others often including their own home countries. This is particularly notable when they complain about Israeli mistreatment of Arabs, which undoubtedly takes place. But they say nothing about Arab mistreatment of Arabs, which also takes place. This indicates that their concern is not over what is done, but about who does it. I have never had a satisfactory reply to this from the 'anti-Zionists' . This is because it is in fact unanswerable. It is claimed that Israel is a special friend of the USA. So is Saudi Arabia. But the anti-Zionists are silent about its abuses. It is claimed that Israel receives vast military subsidies from the USA. So does Egypt. But the anti-Zionists are silent about its abuses. And so on. Arab Sunni Muslims mistreat Arab Shia Muslims. Arab Muslims persecute Arab Christians. Arab regimes murder and uproot their own populations. Nobody complains. Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank after conquering it in 1948. Nobody complained. It just goes on forever. Where propaganda reigns, the truth is, as usual, elsewhere. But some of us know what is going on, and will keep saying so. I just love the way Mr Everett misses the equally important (and related) point about race and culture. If we didn't have multiculturalism, then the problems he described wouldn't exist. But what else could he do but miss it, if he wants to maintain what appears to be his belief in racial determinism? Others, interested in the matter and having open minds, are urged to read Thomas Sowell's book 'Race and Culture'. Mr Everett may continue to hope for salvation from the BNP if he likes, but heaven help us if he is right. Recent research seems to show that the British people long for a conservative formation which doesn't have the BNP's national socialist taints,. the BNP, like the Tory Party, is an obstacle, not a way out of our difficulties.I have explained why. The index may prove useful here. Have I missed something, or has Mr Finn of the BBC given up his attempts to claim that the BBC is impartial? I'll take this as an admission of defeat, I think. I can't easily expand the index, as I have stated. When I have time (which I don't now) I may be able to remove some categories, which I need to do to allow me to create any more. When I first began building the index, Ididn't know there was a limit on the number of subjects. Thoughtful person can imagine the problems this caused, when I belatedly found out. 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. 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 particular demand to change this. In my early years in the newspaper 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 disorder 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.’ 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. 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.
05 March 2011 7:16 PM
No-fly zones? Oh, grow up Mr Cameron
Like, Hello? Why no mention of the Tory humiliation at Barnsley?
Foul-Mouthed Kings, and do we know how they spoke in the Past?
Race versus Culture - and can we deduce an opinion from a question?
True Grit meets South Riding
Not exactly Entebbe, is it?
A few quick general comments
Stupefied in the gutters of the new Gin Lane, we’re just where our leaders want us
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Any genuine patriot in politics would devote his every effort to extracting us from the EU. Joining it was the gravest mistake made by any British Government in at least four centuries. Leaving it should be the heart of our foreign policy.
That would be a real, difficult challenge of diplomacy, which would require actual courage and determination from politicians, and couldn’t be sub-contracted to the real men in the Army, the Navy and the RAF.
Sheilas pay the price of lunacy
So much then for Sheilas’ Wheels and all those other perfectly sensible insurance companies which made good money by exploiting the unquestionable truth that women are safer drivers than men. Good.
Women are different from men. A law that pretends otherwise is unhinged. That is the law we have. What are you going to do about it?
Who’ll defeat our Thought Police?
You may have thought that the Prime Minister was attacking multiculturalism when he made his militant-seeming speech in Munich a few weeks ago.
The British State now has the legal power to punish us if we do not say
what it wants us to. Once this idea is abroad, nobody is safe.
Mr Cameron won’t do that. Who will?
********************
The link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made by scientists in 1929.
Why? As with cigarettes, because people don’t want to admit the truth.
*******************
More fall-out from our shameful surrender to the IRA. Bloodstained Sinn Fein grows stronger daily.
If we must have interpretation on the BBC (and in so many cases it is an excuse for camouflaged bias that I think we would be better off without it) then surely it needs to be better than this? Why isn’t it? Because the BBC has made a treaty with the Tories, in return for their willingness to adopt the BBC’s ideology.
To which I answer ‘Do republicans hate it? I’d have thought many of those involved in making it were republicans, myself. I can’t speak for my brother, except to say that he, like me, thinks that historical inaccuracy is important - and that there is no justification for the inaccuracies in this film. I suppose the plot would be difficult if the job weren’t hereditary, though I suppose you could have someone trying to recover his voice after some disease or accident had robbed him of it (and his chosen profession) . But the fundamental message - entirely unjustified by the known facts of the story, which is far from lost in the mists of time - is (I sum up loosely) ‘cheeky, hard-up, informal and classless Aussie jackaroo saves stuck-up repressed royal snob from stammer probably caused by snobbish repression, largely by making him swear and by mocking the grandeur of his position’. It has everything for the modern leftist, not least some pretty severe mockery of the Church and of such flummeries as solemn oaths.
Onto this piffle, to salve the consciences of all the anti-monarchists involved, is tacked a severely mangled version of history (once again no great scholarship or research is needed to know this, only an intelligent knowledge of the recent past) which makes out that the British monarchy was some sort of anti-fascist weapon, which needed to be saved so it could be mobilised against Hitler . I think this is because most people in the Movie Business couldn’t begin to grasp any other justification for having a monarchy, or indeed any other justification for having a war at all, apart from that it was a fight against what they would undoubtedly call ‘fascism’. That is why the most crucial untruth - the actual positive falsehood that Churchill was pro-George VI and anti-Edward VIII - is necessary to the plot, along with various other consequent misrepresentations of Baldwin and Chamberlain. This is particularly bad because it is the precise opposite of the truth.
Or read the reports in newspapers of the time, in which words are deployed very differently from now. I think Gore Vidal gets it quite well in his superb historical novel ‘Lincoln’.
Yes, I do think the word ‘doomed’ entirely alters the relationship between the definite article and the phrase ‘HMS Cumberland’. This is quite easily illustrated by saying it out loud.
Mr Finn returns. I reproduce much of what he says below, with my responses marked with asterisks thus **
He asserts: ”The point you made about criticisms of Bob Crow and Galloway is disingenuous. There was of course frustration amongst the right of the Labour party with left-wingers such as these but are you really concluding that there was no ideological criticism of these characters from further to the right, which Paxman in his role as interrogator was voicing?”
**Yes, that is more or less exactly what I am concluding. Except that the rage against them didn’t come from the Labour ‘right’, a political force which ceased to exist about 25 years ago when the SDP defected and mandatory reselection was introduced. (There is now one actual ‘right-wing’ Labour MP, John Spellar, who ought by rights to be in a museum). It came from the practical power-seeking Labour left establishment which seized control of the party after the defeat of the Trotskyists and Bennites by the Eurocommunist left (ludicrously characterised by Fleet Street as ‘the right’) in the early 1980s. As a conservative, I have little passion to spare on Mr Galloway or Mr Crow, whom I know to be politically negligible forces. The Labour elite fear and loathe them because they might remind poorly-informed people of what sort of movement Labour actually is, in ways they can easily understand. Most conservatives rather like Tony Benn. Most Labour establishment figures despise him with a furious resentful passion, blaming him for extending their years out of office. So not disingenuous at all, just based on a clearer and better informed understanding of politics and the Labour Party than Mr Finn (or I suspect many BBC persons) possesses.
Mr Finn says: ’This position is the mark of someone who is really only interested in moving the political agenda to an ever-rightward direction.’
**Well, I am obviously hoping to move politics in a conservative direction. But all I want the BBC to do in this scheme of things is stop putting its thumb on the left-hand scale, while pretending to be scrupulously impartial.
**I never said it did. Proof of the kind he speaks of would involve the deployment of staff and money I don’t possess, though there have been ( as I mentioned earlier in this argument) surveys, notably on the EU issue, which have clearly demonstrated bias. Though I have myself many instances of the operation of BBC bias, and personal knowledge of the left-wing politics of some of its staff who pose as impartial, I have relied rather more on the clear admissions of partiality made by the BBC’s own director general, Mark Thompson, and one of its senior presenters, Andrew Marr, as well as on insider’s books by Robin Aitken and Peter Sissons. Quite why anyone bothers to pretend otherwise in the presence of such a cloud of witnesses, I don’t know (or rather I do, but it just makes me so sad to realise) .
And now at last here it comes. I’ve been waiting for it, indeed, I couldn’t go to bed until it limped home. The good old tail-end charlie of this argument, two engines dead, shuddering and spluttering towards a bumpy landing with smoke streaming from its tail, the oldest and most useless cliche of the lot. Here it goes :’Well, we’re attacked by the left and the right at once, so surely we must be doing something right.”
Here at last it is in the form employed by Mr Finn, coming in low over the rooftops. I do hope it lands safely this time:’These instances remind me of the situation thirty years ago when you had Norman Tebbit complaining about BBC bias to the left and Tony Benn berating the BBC for its bias to the right. Just because you may have one or two pet instances of bias one way or the other it should be obvious that that doesn’t prove anything wider than those particular instances.’
**If you are attacked simultaneously by Norman Tebbit and Tony Benn, and for the same thing, I’m not actually sure that it’s a sign you’re right. Could it in fact be that the BBC does have a powerful bias in favour of whatever it believes is the current consensus, a bias which is hostile to any non-consensual view? And that everyone outside that consensus, regardless of politics, can see that? Whereas the BBC, like the goldfish I mentioned earlier, genuinely believes it has no opinions. Cue dialogue of the deaf, on one side, anyway. Think on, as Squire Carne probably wouldn’t have said, except when portrayed by the BBC.
He asks: ’1. ‘Can Hitchens please point to which part of my Tinfoil hats post says:
1. that I believe in ‘racial determinism’ (and maybe he can define that)’
So the differences between cultures lie ‘often along coincidentally ethnic boundaries’.
An important ‘coincidence’ some might think.(**My comment, why is it important? What is the implicit suggestion of this comment?)
So, more educated (and cautious) (**What does ‘cautious’ mean here? What am I being ‘cautious’ about? The implication is that I am afraid of something, and so not stating my true views, or what Mr Everett regards as what ought to be my true views, or isn’t it?).
Mr Everett :’ people can differentiate their views on immigration etc between ‘cultures’ and ‘races’. Intellectually this is important to them and confers respectability to their position. (**What is meant here by ‘respectability? Surely the only ‘respectable’ position is one based on truth and logic, and honestly held? Once again there’s a clear implication that my opinions are guided, and perhaps altered by a ‘cautious’ desire to seem ‘respectable’ to an unnamed audience. I have been exposed to these accusations, often from BNP supporters, or racial determinists of other kinds, in the past. (I can recognise them when I see them again. Does Mr Everett really not know what he is doing with these tried if rather unsubtle linguistic devices?)
But what of the average person - or perhaps the people on lower income bands - who do not appreciate, or feel the need to take part in, these intellectual niceties? (**No ‘nicety’ is involved. Either the determining factor is unalterable racial difference, or alterable cultural difference. The distinction is crucial, not least in deciding what policy to adopt towards it).
They see their neighbourhoods transformed within 2 or 3 generations from a place where they felt comfortable, and where everyone more or less ‘played by the same rules’ - into one in which their old ‘culture’ (and coincidentally race) was gradually (or rapidly) replaced by new ones, as people from different ‘cultures’ (or ‘races’) arrived, with the blessing of their country’s ruling ‘elite’ (who mostly did not experience the same transformations themselves).
Back to the great rescue. I am puzzled that it is being represented by so much of the media as if it were some kind of ultra-macho operation. The Entebbe hostage rescue by the Israeli Sayeret Matkal, or the Iranian embassy siege rescue by our own SAS, are the standards by which such things must be judged. And this was not such an operation, or anything remotely like it.
The interesting paradoxical consequence of this, from an idealist Western point of view, is that the rulers who are readiest to open fire on crowds at an early stage are those most likely to survive, and therefore are immune to the alleged human rights concerns of, say, William Hague. Mr Hague rages against Colonel Gadaffi on the assumption that the Colonel is finished. He keeps his lip buttoned about the Peking tyranny, because they mowed down their own people in Tiananmen Square, the Syrian tyranny because (on the assumption that Iran is not involved) everyone remembers the Hama massacre. I do wonder what might happen if Gadaffi manages in the end to hang on. It will all be very embarrassing.
If I wanted to destabilise one of these countries, I would (amongst other things) suborn the middle ranks of the security police, so that they failed to act effectively in the first crucial hours of street protest. President Mubarak was almost certainly finished once his police lost control of Tahrir Square and the streets around it. He would have had to be far more ruthless to regain it once he had last it.
I don't believe pre-1914 Portsmouth was exceptional in its levels of drunkenness. Any seaport city has such problems, and Britain had plenty of those (almost all its major urban areas, in fact, except Birmingham) . Lloyd George's licensing laws (which I have always believed were his pay-off to the temperance interests which had supported the Liberals, the munitions factories being merely the pretext) transformed working class life for the better.
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.
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.
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