This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column I used to fall for the old arguments about smoking and freedom – that people were entitled to do this stupid thing if they wanted to. I may even have used the expression ‘nanny state’, though I try very hard to avoid it now. Sometimes even grown-ups need a bit of nannying. I even campaigned, in an office I worked in, against a planned smoking ban, though I have never smoked myself. I was quite wrong. It is perfectly sensible and justifiable to use the law to try to stop people from harming themselves, unless there are very good reasons for the risk. Because when you harm yourself, you harm plenty of other people too. No, I never believed the stories about second-hand smoke, and still don’t. Cigarettes stink and spoil the atmosphere, and anyone who smokes them near others who are eating is inconsiderate and rude. But I think the evidence that they give cancer to anyone apart from the people actually smoking them is very thin indeed. The real harm to others is quite different. If you fall seriously ill, you are not the only one who suffers. Everyone close to you suffers too, often more than you do. And after your (often unpleasantly lingering) death from lung cancer, it is the others who are left to grieve and cope without the help, company and income of the carefree smoker who said it was a risk worth taking and discovered too late that it wasn’t. And I have no doubt at all that the bans on smoking, in trains, cinemas, buses, pubs, restaurants and hotels are helping many people give up a habit that is actually much harder to quit than heroin. And one measure of the rightness of these bans is how quickly it has begun to seem strange that smoking was ever allowed in these places. Did we really watch films through columns of bluish effluent? Were trains on the London Underground stained a noxious yellow, full of stale fug and strewn with butts? Was the back end of every aeroplane a sordid zone of wheezing and spluttering? Yes, it was so, though I really can’t work out why we put up with it for so long. Something so self-evidently ugly and dirty obviously wasn’t good for us. I realised that I couldn’t really believe – as I do – that the law can be used to discourage cannabis, or drunkenness, or drunk driving, if I continued to support the futile, fatal freedoms of smokers. We know that homosexuals trump Christians. We know (at least I think we do) that animal rights campaigners, pagans and believers in man-made global warming are the equals of Christians. Thanks to the case of Emdadur Choudhury, whose Islamist grouplet deliberately set out to enrage any patriotic British person by burning replica poppies and chanting ‘British soldiers burn in Hell’ during a two-minute silence, we know something else: the judiciary and the police are scared out of their socks by Islam. Even under the USA’s very open free speech laws, this nasty piece of publicity-seeking bad manners would have been classified as ‘fighting words’ and denied protection. Yet here the consequence was a £50 fine, so small as to be barely worth the bother of collecting it from a culprit who is in any case living off the state he claims to despise. What I am waiting for is a test case in which (and how I long for this) two elderly Muslims, running a B & B, are sued by a funky homosexual couple for refusing to accommodate them. Both parties would have their costs paid by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. But others can influence it with great speed and power. Take the case of the Johns, the Derby couple who refused to say what they didn’t believe, and so were forbidden by judges to foster any more children, ever. Swiftly, the supposed Right-winger Iain Duncan Smith was on TV saying the court was correct. Had IDS simply misunderstood? No, soon afterwards David Cameron was seizing the opportunity to say he too was against freedom of conscience and in favour of iron political correctness imposed by the State. Only because of a Freedom of Information request do we know that teenage criminals, supposedly being ‘monitored’ by the authorities, were charged with more than 100 serious offences last year, including rape and murder. All those charged had already been convicted at least once, and been released under so-called supervision. This is clear evidence that Kenneth Clarke’s feeble policies, which make much less use of prison, are actively dangerous. 'Even within a revived British monoculture, Christianity would as moribund as it is now. What is there left of Christianity in public life which is enough to warrant making Christianity the state religion? If so, how was it arrived at? When was it discussed, or announced? How could a Conservative who disagreed achieve a change in this policy, as I am always being told I should go back into the Tory Party to do? Mr Smith is widely believed to be 'right wing'. I wonder in what way this is now true. 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.’12 March 2011 8:35 PM
I was wrong on cigarettes but believe me, I’m right on cannabis
Share this article:
10 March 2011 10:38 AM
Teaching Christianity as Truth
Share this article:
09 March 2011 1:32 PM
Have the Left Won?
Share this article:
Gravity and Outrage
Share this article:
07 March 2011 9:09 AM
Britain not Christian any more - Official
Share this article:
05 March 2011 7:16 PM
No-fly zones? Oh, grow up Mr Cameron
Share this article:
04 March 2011 1:12 PM
Like, Hello? Why no mention of the Tory humiliation at Barnsley?
Share this article:
03 March 2011 9:58 AM
Foul-Mouthed Kings, and do we know how they spoke in the Past?
Share this article:
Sunday, 13 March 2011
So I changed my opinion. The ban on displaying cigarettes in shops will cause fewer people to smoke, as all the other measures have since the first health warning appeared on the first packet. And in time this strange, self-destructive habit, which is actually very new and only really invaded the civilised world during two disastrous wars, will be banished to the
margins of life.
Then we will have proof prohibition does sometimes work, if it is intelligently and persistently imposed. And the stupid, fashionable claim that there is no point in applying the laws against that sinister poison, cannabis, will be shown up for what it is – selfish, dangerous tripe. Where we can save people from destroying themselves, we must do so.
So, what if the poppy burner insulted a gay?
It is time we were told the rules of the new game called ‘Equality and Diversity’, under which some thought crimes are treated more harshly than others.
Then at last we shall find out whether the law of England thinks Islam or the Sexual Revolution should dominate our future. We can have one or the other (and we will). But not both.
Genuine Tories will never make a dent on Dave
Some of you urge me to rejoin the Tory Party and work from within to change it. Can anyone tell me how this could be done? I have studied the Tory constitution and can find no way in which its dwindling membership can influence policy at all.
A decision had obviously been taken by Tory High Command to follow a specified line on this notable case. Whose decision, and in whose interests? And is anyone accountable for it?
The real cost of feeble Clarke
We are not being told the truth about crime.
The truth about this situation is being suppressed because nothing will be done about it, and we will suffer.
****************
An interesting slip-up by the Prime Minister, as usual more or less missed by those who report on Parliament. During Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Mr Cameron was asked if he would support a referendum on British membership of the EU. He replied that he wouldn’t, because we were ‘better off in’. This deliberate snub to the anti-EU pressure group ‘Better Off Out’ explodes once and for all the stories spread by Mr Cameron’s many media toadies that he is hostile to the EU. But even more strikingly, Mr Cameron’s answer showed – unintentionally –that he thinks that in such a referendum we would vote to leave. Is he right? He’s not going to give us the chance to find out.
Rudyard Kipling wrote in 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings': 'As the dog returns to his vomit and the sow returns to her mire, the fool's burned, bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire.'
Why does this line return to me when I contemplate Mr Embery's contribution 'I must say I did enjoy the irony of Peter Hitchens asserting "If you wish to state something to be a truth, you must at least attempt to prove it to those to whom it is not evident," within a piece that conveys his bitterness at how his own unproven supernatural belief system is no longer properly recognised by the state and (as argued in previous pieces) is also no longer taught as "truth" to the nation's young.'
Mr Embery seems to me to be a master at misunderstanding the arguments of others to suit himself. He pestered me for months because I had correctly cited Richard Dawkins's ferocious opposition to the religious instruction of children. He correctly pointed out (though in my view it makes no difference to the substance of my case that Professor Dawkins, pictured, is hostile to the religious upbringing of children, an undoubted fact) that Professor Dawkins was not against children being taught *about* religion, as a sort of eccentric and backward manifestation of humanity's childhood. He was against them being taught it as a religion they might be expected to follow.
To placate Mr Embery, and leave no possible room for doubt, not that I thought there really was any doubt, I took to using the shorthand 'teaching religion as truth' to distinguish it from the Dawkinsite approach, of teaching it as if it were a dead thing.
Anybody who reads this weblog, and anyone who has read my book 'The Rage Against God' will know that my oft-stated position is that there is no proof available of the truth or untruth of religion. Therefore it should be clear , and I now make it doubly so to avoid any further misunderstanding (deliberate or otherwise) that I think the following.
The Christian religion should be taught in the state schools of this country as the religion on which our civilisation is based, which we all ought to follow. Those who teach it should make it clear that they believe it to be true, explaining why this is, and what the reasons are for holding this belief. Parents who do not wish their children to be taught in this fashion should be entirely free to opt out of such instruction at any time.So should teachers who do not believe this to be the case.
I'd just like to draw attention to (and perhaps give new life to) a discussion between me and Mr Grant Price on the 'Foul-Mouthed Kings' thread. I agree with Vladimir Smith that this has been most interesting. I still stick to my view that the Left's victory on all fronts, cultural moral and material, is objectively measurable and can be stated as a fact.
Yet I still meet people who think that New Labour was 'right-wing', or that trade union power and industrial nationalisation are key divisive issues, on the basis of which we can decide where someone stands in relation to Left and Right.
This misconception does of course serve the interests of the Left, which draws much of its moral strength from its belief that it is still a crusade against a wicked reactionary establishment, every member of which, and every institutional trace of which has long ago died and been buried two metres (I use the foreign occupation measurement rather than the British customary one deliberately) underground.
I would also say that I have, on this thread, dealt completely with the claim from Mr Charles that I was stating a general principle when I criticised the inaccuracies and inventions of 'The King's Speech'. I wasn't. The criticism was specific. I also wasn't making a general point of principle when I criticised the clunking, misleading adaptation of 'South Riding' which recently hobbled to its conclusion on the BBC. Of course such adaptations need not be tied to every word of the book involved. But they must stick to the spirit of the work, or they are not adaptations, but wholly new works.
As I clearly said, I will not engage in any further discussion about the issue of homosexuality and Christian sexual morality. I think it is a dead end, and an exhausted topic. I have explained why, and those who wish to explore this will find acres of debate in the index.
So let's take another theme from our conversation. Here is a post from a person with an incomplete name (and in my experience such people feel free to drop out of the discussion, rather frustratingly, when it suits them, as they aren't really responsible for their arguments, or for defending them):
'This does remove some of the official link between Christianity and the state, but really, your post has no gravity. In whose eyes, other than yours, is the de-religionization of the state self-evidently outrageous?
'Christianity is just not the religion of the nation anymore. Why should it be the religion of the state?'
I think this contribution (which continues by stating correctly that the Christian faith is dying or already dead in much of the rising generation) does at least address partly the point at issue. I don't know quite how one measures the 'gravity' of a newspaper column article. Why do so many people imagine that, because they think something, it is automatically the true measure of everyone else's opinion? Your opinion is an opinion. It is not a fact, or the truth. If you wish to state something to be a truth, you must at least attempt to prove it to those to whom it is not evident.
Nor do I at any stage say the change is 'outrageous'. I point out that it has happened, and that it is significant. I don't, as it happens, think it is 'outrageous'. I don't think many things are. Since I understood what was happening to this society, and set that understanding out in 'The Abolition of Britain', I have been more or less unshockable, and seldom capable of outrage, though I do feel quite a lot of contempt for allegedly conservative politicians who refuse to recognise the state of things, or to do anything about it. And not a day goes by when I do not wonder if I have left it too late to emigrate.
Our contributor asks :'Christianity is just not the religion of the nation anymore. Why should it be the religion of the state?'. Let me put this question another way. 'If Christianity ceases to be the religion of the state, might we not regret that we ceased to be a Christian country? Or 'Why should people expect the state to behave in a Christian fashion if they themselves don't believe in Christianity?' You see, posed in this way, there is a suggestion that the absence of Christianity might be a disadvantage. This is at least worth considering, alongside the questioner's evident belief that we have nothing to lose by this change.
The change is interesting because, as I state, the laws of this country are based upon Christianity, and were shaped and ordered by it. In my view, the very existence of the concept of law is in deep trouble without a belief in God and a divine order. Why should the powerful obey laws at all if they have no belief in a tribunal higher than themselves? But if the powerful do not obey laws, then we have anarchy, as is evident in the majority of countries where this is exactly what happens, as a matter of course.
One problem with this discussion is that so many people have no experience of lawless countries. They think that the demi-paradise in which we live, based on Protestant Christianity, is normal, that incorruptible officials and limited government are usual, like our temperate climate.
They also think that a general assumption of moral rules based on Christian precepts ( even if those who apply them do not think themselves to be Christians) is normal, as if it came with air and the water and the grass and the earth.
In fact these things are rare and unnatural. Please see my book 'The Rage Against God' for my reasoning on this, and accounts of my experiences in the Soviet Union and in Mogadishu, which led me to this conclusion. I have since travelled much more widely, in Africa, China, India, Burma, North Korea, Iran and several other Middle Eastern countries, as well as in the Anglosphere and some of the more left-wing parts of Latin America, and my conclusions have been strengthened rather than shaken.
My guess is that lot of people think they will be pleased when Christianity dies. Or they are simply indifferent to its death, thinking it a hangover from a childish past that can easily be dispensed with.
But they don't yet realise just how much of our civilisation depends on it. When they do find out, they will regret having cast it aside so willingly, and recognise the thing I am pointing out - that a legal system based on Christianity will crumble without Christianity, and that what replaces it may be quite alarming. Not least, it will tend towards the sort of totalitarian thinking expressed in the judgement on the Johns case. 'Say this, even if you don't believe it, or suffer'. If only God is good, then human beings are limited in their behaviour.. Once human beings begin to think that they are good, there is nothing they won't do to those who disagree with their own self-assessment. Wait and see.
Ideas do actually matter. The ideas expressed in this judgment have huge implications which may not be 'outrageous' but are certainly grave, whether you approve of the judgement or not.
I just thought I should expand on the amazing developments in the courts in the last year, culminating in the recent case of Mr and Mrs Johns (pictured below), the foster parents banned from fostering because they were not prepared actively to endorse the sexual revolution.
The effect of this case (and once again I'm uninterested in discussing the issue of homosexuality which has been the pretext for this development, and will not respond to posts on that subject, which I regard as exhausted and diversionary) is revolutionary in two ways. First, the Law of England is no longer based upon Christianity but upon the new secular dogma of 'Equality and Diversity', whose origins lie in the thinking of the 1960s revolutionary left.
That is to say the national dogma is suspicious of national sovereignty and the things which accompany it - patriotism, immigration control, national loyalty, national institutions. It actively defines many of these ideas as 'racist' , that is a sort of thought-crime ( a defamatory smear made much easier by those, some of whom post here, who think that a man's ethnic origin, rather than his culture, defines him).
The same dogma is militantly in favour of sexual liberation - the liberation of adults from the marriage bond, the consequent liberation of children from parental authority - which is more or less unlawful anyway.
Once again those who oppose this development are not reasoned with, but defined as thought-criminals and classified as suffering from various isms and phobias which rule them out of mainstream discourse.
And of course the Christian religion itself is allowed to continue to exist as an eccentric choice, but has no special claim on the law and must compete for status and attention against any other belief, including the fantasy of man-made global warming.
This latter is a work in progress, which is why one of the law's most important activities is to ram home the message to individual Christians that they have lost the status they formerly held (much as its prosecutions of people such as Tony Martin ram home the message that the law no longer takes the view of crime that it used to hold, and is much more concerned with asserting its monopoly of force than with apprehending, let alone punishing, wrongdoers) . A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has experienced bluntness verging on rudeness when he has protested against the new judicial attitude.
All revolutions do this. One of their most important features is the public personal degradation of figures formerly held in high regard. It lets people know that things really have changed (Charles I knew he was doomed when his military guards started blowing tobacco smoke in his face). The ejection of the Bishops from the House of Lords, which will take place within ten years by my guess, will be accompanied by great deal of cruel jeering and bad manners, you see if it isn't.
The second crucial feature of this is that it involves a totalitarian imposition. The Derby case arose not because of anything the couple had said, but because they would not promise, in a hypothetical conversation with a child, to endorse, positively, a certain type of behaviour.
Now, I'm told ( I would be glad of any more details) than in a 1985 case, a sports team successfully challenged a local authority which tried to compel it to make a denunciation of the apartheid system before it would be allowed to use facilities. What you think of apartheid has nothing to do with this. The principle is 'can you be compelled to hold a view by a government body? ' A judge said that telling people what to say was pretty much a Nazi attitude,and foreign to the laws of England. This no longer seems to be the case.
The couple said that their Christian beliefs caused them to hold a different view. The Judges, if I have correctly understood their ruling, said the couple's views did not necessarily flow from their Christianity, and thus didn't qualify for the protection granted to 'minorities' by Equality Law. One wonders what the position would have been had they been a Muslim couple, but this has yet to arise.
But this is a technicality alongside the heart of their judgement, which ran thus. First, they said that it was not yet “well understood” that British society was largely secular and that the law has no place for Christianity.
“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,” they said.
It was a “paradox” that society has become simultaneously both increasingly secular and increasingly diverse in religious affiliation, they said.
'We sit as secular judges serving a multicultural community of many faiths.
We are sworn (we quote the judicial oath) to 'do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will’.”
Actually, it ought to be well-understood, following the striking and rather militant judgement by Lord Justice Laws last year in the case of the 'relationship counsellor' Gary McFarlane. He said legal protection for views held on religious grounds was 'deeply unprincipled'.
'This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective,' he said.
'Law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.'
Plainly, the message has not wholly sunk in. Interestingly, in his summing up before sentencing last November at the end of the trial of a Muslim fanatic who stabbed the Labour MP Stephen Timms, Mr Justice Cooke said of Mr Timms 'I understand that he brings to bear his own faith, which upholds very different values to those which appear to have driven this defendant.
Those values are those upon which the common law of this country was founded and include respect and love for one’s neighbour, for the foreigner in the land, and for those who consider themselves enemies, all as part of one’s love of God. These values were the basis of our system of law and justice and I trust that they will remain so as well as motivating those, like Mr Timms, who hold public office.'
I fear his trust is misplaced. It is true that the English legal tradition was until recently consciously and specifically Christian. Here's a description of the building of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand ( whose architect, G.E.Street, was also the designer of several fine churches) 'Over the highest point of the upper arch is a figure of Jesus; to the left and right at a lower level are figures of Solomon and Alfred the Great; that of Moses is at the northern front of the building.'
The Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, has above its main portal the words "Defend the Children of the poor, and punish the wrong-doer'. This is a quotation from the 72nd Psalm (Verse 4, Miles Coverdale version). Its Great Hall is adorned with the words 'Moses gave unto the people the laws of God'.
Likewise, the Houses of Parliament (where Laws are made) are founded upon the original St Stephen's Chapel. They contain a consecrated and functioning chapel to this day. The Central Lobby is decorated with murals depicting the four Christian patron saints of the nations of the United Kingdom, George, Andrew, Patrick and David. The quarter chimes of Big Ben are based upon Handel's aria (from the Book of Job) 'I know that My Redeemer Liveth' . And the Monarchy itself is legally based upon a wholly Christian Coronation service St Edward's Crown itself is surmounted with a Christian cross and the anointed and crowned monarch is presented with a copy of the Bible.
There's an amusing side issue here, as - as my friend Christopher Booker recently pointed out - : 'Mr Justice Burton ruled recently that Climate Change evangelist Tim Nicholson's "philosophical belief" in man-made global warming was on a par with religious belief and must therefore be given legal protection under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, issued under the 1972 European Communities Act to implement EC directive 2000/78.'
And I thought I might share with you the Human Rights Commission's statement about their lawyers' use of the word 'infected' to describe the possible impact of the couple's views on a child in their care.
They said :' Earlier this week the case of Johns v Derby City Council, in which the Commission had intervened, attracted some attention.
Unfortunately a mistake within our legal submission led to an inference that we did not intend and which was misconstrued as suggesting that the Commission equates Christian moral views with an infection. This oversight was caused by a drafting error in our submissions to the court. This should have been picked up in our internal clearance process for the legal documentation and does not represent the position of the Commission in any way.'
As I have said, the couple's lawyers objected to the use of the word 'infected' in court at the time. But they received no response. That was in November. Why, months later, have they suddenly discovered that this use of language was an oversight and written to the Johns to apologise? I wonder.
In the meantime, it seems to me clear that, whatever you may think of these developments, they are quite revolutionary, and probably considerably more significant, in their long-lasting effects , than the last General Election.
If our laws,. having been founded for centuries on Christianity, are now founded on something else, there is no corner of our constitution that remains unaffected.
How long before the murals of the Saints in the Westminster Central Lobby are obscured by modern non-representational portraits of Equality, Diversity, Progress and Harmony? And before Christ and Moses are quietly removed from the Law Courts? As for the next Coronation Service, I increasingly dread it. It will be used to teach us how low we have sunk since 1953.
I might add for the benefit of various pestilential posters that the laws applied in this case originated in a series of Equal Treatment Directives imposed on this country by the European Commission, and enacted under duress (and without choice)by our non-independent Parliament. Doctor Sean Thomas will no doubt point out that they could have been enacted on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday, and in a different typeface, also on more expensive paper, and accompanied by a bunch of flowers and a bottle of Chardonnay, if we had liked. Maybe so. Who cares? He seems to think this matters. It does not seem to me to be of any importance at all, and is the kind of thing you need an academic lawyer to point out (with all that implies).
It appeared to me, by the way, that Ian Duncan Smith, appearing on BBC Question Time last Thursday, took the side of the Council rather than that of the Johns. Is that now Conservative Policy?
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.
Posts
