Britannia Radio

02 April 2011 11:55 PM

We can protect a mob in Benghazi, so why not a little girl in Stockwell?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why does the British Government care more about protecting civilians in Libya than it does about protecting them in Britain?

In this week alone a tiny little girl and an innocent shopkeeper have been shot and badly wounded in the London suburb of Stockwell, within sight of the Palace of Westminster.

They were caught in the crossfire of a gang war.

About 50 criminal gangs are said to be active in this area, and many of them are armed with guns, which our vaunted strict firearms laws have somehow failed to keep out of their hands.

And no help comes. The police sit on their fat backsides waiting for bad things to happen and then rush round too late. The courts strain to avoid sending wrongdoers to prison.

The prisons are run by the criminals, who get angry when warders try to deny them drugs and alcohol.

Ultra-violence and homicide are now so common that its perpetrators are often free after a few short years detained with a pool-table and lots of free methadone at the taxpayer’s expense.

The idea of protecting us – the civilians of Britain – with a proper patrolling police force, severe justice and the effective deterrent of the death penalty is rejected with shuddering horror by the comically misnamed Conservative Party that dominates the Government.

And such suggestions are regarded as positively wicked by the Liberal Democrats who sustain the Coalition.

Even those of them who pretend to believe in the death penalty will say: ‘But what if
an innocent person got killed by mistake?’

Yet when it comes to Libya the same people suddenly lose all their doubts.

They’ll protect Libyan civilians by dropping tons of high explosive on anyone who attacks them. If innocent people are killed by mistake, and they have been and will be, that is ‘collateral damage’, sad but acceptable.

They have obviously discussed killing Colonel Gaddafi because of his undoubted crimes against humanity. But they won’t hang a British murderer for his crimes against us.

Why do this miserable bunch of vain poseurs have to go to North Africa to do justice?

Why are they more interested in helping an Islamic mob in Benghazi than in protecting the British people who pay their huge wages? Why can’t justice begin at home?


A snarling menace, let off the leash by liberal ‘justice’

The liberal elite like to think that they have made Britain more civilised by being kinder to bad people. They think that the days of ugly mobs baying round the Tyburn gallows are over for good.

Let them examine the scenes in Swindon last week, as a man accused of a rather nasty murder, but not convicted of it, was brought to court. I lived and worked for some years in Swindon and still sometimes visit it. It is not specially worse than anywhere else in the New Britain, reasonably prosperous and certainly far more so than when I first knew it nearly 40 years ago.

But the inflamed crowd, with its tattooed faces and furious rage, was as close to a lynch mob as anything we have yet seen in the 21st Century. As I believe in justice rather than vengeance, in the presumption of innocence and the rule of law, I thought the crowd was frightening. I do not think it will be that long before such a mob gets hold of its victim and horrible things follow. I hope not. I will do what I can to prevent it. But I will not be surprised.

This scene would have been unthinkable in the early Seventies Swindon I knew. At that time, Britain had only recently begun on Roy Jenkins’s great liberal experiment – divorce on demand, subsidised one-parent families, covert legalisation of drugs, vast ill-disciplined comprehensive schools, abolition of beat policing, abolition of the death penalty, relaxed prison regime, easy bail and the rest.

The trouble with this experiment is that the consequences are horrible, but only for the people who live in Swindon and not – yet – for those who still think it was all a jolly good idea. By the time the tattooed mobs are raging in their nice villages and comfy suburbs, it will be too late to put it right.

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According to the Sentencing Guidelines Council, you can now be found with a bag of dope big enough to pull your arm out of its socket and not be considered a serious criminal. Cue outrage.

But not from me. I do not understand why we treat drug-dealers as wicked, vicious criminals, while treating moronic, self-destructive drug-users as victims. It is users who bring misery to their families by wrecking their mental health. It is users who commit crime to pay for their pleasure. It is users who become a danger to their fellow creatures. If there were no users, there would be no dealers. Yet their numbers grow because possession of cannabis, cocaine and heroin is now effectively legal.

This is a limitlessly stupid and irresponsible policy, and the cause of endless misery and crime. The sooner we realise the extent of the Government’s surrender to drugs, the sooner we may come to our senses and reverse it. But will we?

The senior levels of politics are full of people who have taken drugs, or have friends who take drugs. What would happen if a mid-level Minister were revealed as a recent user of cocaine, or a Cabinet Minister found to have attended a recent party where cocaine was openly snorted?

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Let us hope and pray that some good comes from the unbearable death of
ten-year-old Harry Hucknall, found hanged at his Cumbria home last September. Somebody had ‘diagnosed’ this little boy with clinical depression and ‘ADHD’ and had prescribed an anti-depressant and Ritalin. The poor child had been horribly bullied at school.

His parents were separated. He had moved home 14 times. It is hardly surprising that he was unhappy. Why on earth would anyone think that drugs were the answer?
West Cumbria Coroner Ian Smith said that Harry had been given ‘two powerful, mind-altering drugs’. He urged doctors to be ‘extremely careful in prescribing such medication’. I congratulate him on his understatement.

Harry’s case became known because his cousin is a rock star. How many other tragedies like this are going unreported? We are long overdue for a proper inquiry into the prescribing of such drugs, especially to children. Let it come soon, please.

What is a 'Front Line' police officer?

Here we go again. I have just watched a BBC report on the alleged threat to 'Front Line' police officers. We were shown a policewoman driving a car and speaking urgently into her radio, perhaps about to race at speed to an incident the police had failed to prevent, and could do little about when they got there. And we were told some stuff about 'Bobbies on the Beat'.

Look, for the nine millionth time, there are no 'Bobbies' and there is no 'Beat'. The 'Beat' was abolished by the Home Office in 1966. Despite immense increases in their numbers (only on show at demonstrations or football matches) the police have never been so absent from our midst.

The police officers we have today are not 'Bobbies' but sedentary bureaucrats who react to crime and disorder after it has happened. The occasional concessionary foot patrol (almost invariably in pairs, chatting to each other and oblivious to what is going on ten feet away) is exactly that, a temporary concession to public demand, viewed by Chief Constables as a diversion away from the real work of political correctness and managing crime . The use of the words 'Front Line' is pretentious and grandiose.

And wasn't the performance of the police during last Saturday's TUC demonstration rather feeble, given their macho self-description as a 'Front Line' and their dismissal of the rest of us as 'Civilians'?

Some 'Front Line'.

They certainly appeared to be backing away from demonstrators outside the Ritz Hotel. Several other rather obvious (and in some cases predicted) targets for exhibitionist vandals and show-offs (sorry, 'anti-capitalist protestors') seem to have been poorly and unintelligently defended.

And how did the plinth of the Achilles statue, in Hyde Park, where the peaceful demonstrators were congregated, come to be daubed with moronic spray-paint scribblings (which I saw being washed off on my way to an appointment in London on Monday morning)? Could neither the march stewards, nor the police, have prevented this expensive, moronic dirtying of one of the pleasanter parts of the capital? Judging by how much of it there was, it must have taken a long time to accomplish the damage. And it is a monument to the Duke Of Wellington's military victories, nothing whatever to do with the subject of the march. Not that these people will ever have heard of the Duke of Wellington. They just recognised it as a traditional work of art, and so instinctively identified it as a thing to be damaged and diminished.

PS, One or two contributors asked how I ever came to be a Trotskyist. My political history, such as it is, is described in some detail in 'The Cameron Delusion' and also in 'The Rage Against God'. The latter is very soon to be available in paperback, by the way.

Fair Game, or not so fair?

Not all the critics liked the new film Fair Game starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. My Daily Mail colleague Christopher Tookey gave it a severe pasting, saying :'It received rave reviews from critics in the U.S., who claimed it to be not only a triumphant mixture of the Bourne films and All The President's Men, but also a key political document. It promptly bombed at the box office.

'The people were right. This is a turgid thriller, indifferently directed by Doug Liman and sanctimoniously written by British brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. Not even a heartfelt central performance by Naomi Watts can hide its lack of action and suspense.

It is also, despite its title, unfair. The less you know about the facts behind it, the more likely you are to swallow its wildly dishonest message. This hectoring film purports to tell the "true" story of how, in 2003, the name of CIA analyst Valerie Plame Wilson was leaked by George W. Bush's White House team.

The chief villains are Bush adviser Karl Rove (Adam leFevre) and Lewis 'Scooter' Libby (David Andrews), Vice-President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, who — according to the film — colluded to discredit her noble husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, played by Sean Penn.

There are so many distortions within the movie, but space does not allow me to recount them here. Suffice to say, whenever the Hollywood Left tries to sell you a conspiracy theory, it is a good idea to check the facts out yourself.'

But the Mail on Sunday's Matthew Bond took a strikingly different view : 'Fair Game is an impressive dramatisation of a true story. Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame, the CIA spy whose diplomat husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), was dispatched to Niger in 2002 to find out if the poverty-stricken African country had sold so-called uranium "yellowcake", a vital precursor to a nuclear bomb, to Saddam Hussein's Baghdad regime. Wilson, a former ambassador to Niger, definitively concluded it had not.

'This unwelcome finding goes down badly with White House hawks desperate to justify the looming invasion of Iraq and so, when Wilson further angers them by going public with his claims, they 'accidentally' blow his wife's cover.

Suddenly, every would-be terrorist and misguided American patriot knows exactly where at least one CIA spy lives.

It's a complicated tale, the content and characters of which won't be particularly familiar to British audiences.

But with Watts on convincing form and with Bourne Identity director Doug Liman driving things along, Fair Game is worth catching, despite its passing resemblance to Paul Greengrass's Green Zone and the rather tiresome over-indulging of Penn and his radical politics in the closing third.'

Jenny McCartney, in the Sunday Telegraph, gave it an interesting review and four stars. Philip French in 'The Observer' said it was 'a riveting conspiracy thriller in the class of All the President's Men, which in many ways it resembles.' He concluded: 'Although the outline of this story is well known, Fair Game gives it dramatic shape and teases out the moral problems raised. We are drawn into considering urgent questions that involve our society, the world in which we live, and the conduct of those still active on the political scene and benefiting from their murky association with events that have caused so much chaos and so many deaths.'

When such distinguished critics disagree, I tend to think the thing to do is to go and see for myself.

But I cannot. (Not in the way that Mr 'Bunker' 'cannot' believe in God, by which he means he has decided not to, but because it is physically extremely difficult for me to do so).

Fair Game was shown briefly in a late-night slot at my local multiplex, but never at a time when we could get a baby-sitter. If it was on anywhere else nearby, I've missed it, though lots of other unwatchable, patronising tosh was available. I like thrillers set in Washington DC because I once lived there, and it's my kind of thing. I'm also (like many others) quite interested in the story of a female spy apparently exposed by the powerful as revenge for her husband's whistleblowing.

Many of you will have seen the arresting Vanity Fair picture of Valerie Plame and her husband sitting in an open car, looking mysterious. Friends of mine in DC thought that Plame had been very badly treated. I agree with Christopher Tookey that it's always wise to check the facts (how couldn't I?) but in any case I'd like to form my own opinion as to whether the film is honest.

And the fact that a film bombs at the box office doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. We're not all teens on dates (I'm told that cinemas in the U.S. make more money from their vast buckets of popcorn and vats of fizzy drinks than they do out of the ticket price, and this could explain the aiming of films at the teen market and the increasing trend for tickets to be sold at the popcorn stand).

I would have liked to see this film on a proper screen in a proper cinema. Now I'll have to wait for the DVD and watch it as it was never meant to be seen, on a TV screen.

Blue Labour

I thought this phrase referred to David Cameron's eviscerated Tory Party. But I learned last night on BBC Radio 4 that it is also applies now to a group of Labour Party thinkers who want their movement to stop ignoring the British working class on such subjects as mass immigration and sexual politics - concentrating instead on the conditions of the working poor.

This was discussed at length by David Goodhart on the Analysis programme, which I think is available on iPlayer (as is my appearance last Friday with David Aaronovitch on the TV programme The Daily Politics, which some of you may enjoy).

If such a tendency took off, it could revolutionise the political battle in this country, putting Labour on the side of social conservatism and leaving all the green and pink stuff to the Tories.

Set it alongside an interesting article by Martin Ivens in yesterday's Sunday Times, in which Mr Ivens argues that in many ways the Coalition is now to the left of Labour. (He mentions taxation, inflation, forced egalitarianism in the universities, law and order and foreign aid).

Commenting on the moment when Nicholas Clegg admitted he had no disagreements with Mr Cameron any more, Mr Ivens says :'It actually implies that the Prime Minister has so diluted core Conservatve beliefs that he is acceptable to the Lib Dem leader'.

And he says (correctly) that 'Fleet Street's hounds are led off the scent by the privileged background of the government's leaders.'

I wonder if the things I explained in my book 'The Cameron Delusion' last year are at last beginning to penetrate the world of conventional commentary. I do hope so.

Bunker mentality

I'd like if possible to move the discussion which began on 'A Hunk of Read Meat' to this new thread. 'Red Meat' is now so far down the archive that it takes quite a while to reach it, and there are at the last count 303 comments upon it, many of them a dialogue between me and Mr 'Bunker', if dialogue it can be called.

Of course, this may attract no interest. The titanic struggle between me and Mr 'Bunker' (now also involving the Norse Thunder God, Thor) may appear to some readers as being as thrilling as the death grapple between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty on the lip of the Reichenbach Falls. Others may see it as more like two people dressed as the Michelin Man biffing each other with foam-rubber cudgels at the end of a seaside pier. Now that Thor is involved, can we soon look forward to appearances by Baal , Ashtaroth and Moloch? Perhaps we just need some new (human) participants.Digg it

A demonstration of powerlessness

In my Trotskyist days, I recall, one of our smarter senior comrades once sneered at elaborate plans we were all making for some demonstration. I think it was the TUC's enormous march against Ted Heath's industrial relations laws in (was it?) 1971, around the time the currency went decimal. We were all excitedly booking coaches, making placards, dreaming up slogans and generally getting ourselves into a state of heightened revolutionary fervour.

'Demonstrations are demonstrations of impotence', he intoned. 'If you need to show your support by shambling through central London for hours in the cold, then you plainly don't have any real power. You never see demonstrations by the British Road Federation (in those days the major lobby for motorway building) , do you? And when I do see such a demonstration, then I'll look out for a major expansion of the railways'.

His words spoiled the occasion for me, because they were so obviously true. But in those days I liked demonstrations for their own sake. They appeal to the boy scout in all of us, in the same way that muddy pop festivals do today. Togetherness, shared discomfort, a feeling of being a part of something bigger than yourself, are all rather enjoyable. Not to mention the self-righteous feeling of parading your certainties.

I'd been on lots - a rather small CND Easter march against the Bomb in 1966, a pale shadow of the original Aldermaston marches of the early sixties, an even smaller procession through drenching, freezing rain (I've never been so wet before or since) to the Polaris warhead factory at Burghfield outside Reading, several Vietnam War demonstrations, including the astonishingly violent and bitter one outside the American Embassy in March 1968, and the celebrity replay (do I recall Vanessa Redgrave in a headband, or is it my imagination?) in October of the same year. Then there was the protest against Enoch Powell in Oxford, where I led a charge against the Oxford constabulary outside the Town Hall, and was appalled and flummoxed when their line broke and the way into the hall was open. I didn't know what to do next - another telling realisation that helped me, ever so slowly, to think my way out of leftist politics. But that was also before I badly injured myself in a motorbike accident, an event that robbed me of much of the physical bravado I'd had before, and also began a long, long process of thought that eventually helped me grow up.

Then there was the protest against the Bloody Sunday massacre in York in 1972 - one of the few that I don't really regret. Our behaviour was a bit over the top, and I don't defend that, but the shooting of several fellow-subjects of the Queen by our own armed forces was a grave event( and a major political error , too). If we hadn't protested, we'd have been neglecting our civic duty. Not that it did any good.

Talk about governments killing their own people.

But I think the last I attended was a counter-march directed against the National Front in Leicester. They were trying to stir up trouble over the admission of Asian refugees, fleeing from racial bigotry in East Africa. We were trying to make left-wing capital out of that. It was thanks to that particular march that I found out what the words 'laughed off the stage' actually mean (just as,. years later,, I would understand the expression 'I wished the ground would swallow me up', but that's another story).

I made a speech at the York Students' Union in which I tried to link the Leicester affair with a dock strike we were then busily supporting ( If you held a strike of any kind in those days, you had to fight off eager Trotskyists coming to help you) .

There was no link at all (except our Bolshevik opportunism) and I stumbled. Someone called out accurately from the back of the room 'There are no docks in Leicester!', and I was , yes, laughed off the stage. Ouch. I can't recall going on any marches after that, but I think I've done my share.

Two things come to mind. One that in those days the media were pretty much universally hostile or indifferent. The crustier and more port-inflamed pundits of the Daily Telegraph would come out on to the balcony of their Fleet Street building to jeer as we went by, and we would merrily jeer back at them. Only the Communist 'Morning Star' (which nobody read and which we derisively referred to as 'the Daily Employee' because of its cowardly decision to stop calling itself 'The Daily Worker') would mention most of these things at all. TV might show a few seconds.

The sort of friendly, prominent and sympathetic coverage given to the TUC march by the BBC on Saturday would have been unthinkable.

Two, that most of the causes we marched for triumphed in the end, but not because we marched on the streets. They triumphed because the university generation of 1967-73 went on to work in the media, teaching, the law, the police, the church and the civil service, and marched instead through the institutions. And in many ways the less noise they had made in the raucous days of Grosvenor Square and Ho! Ho! Ho chi Minh!, the more effect they eventually had. I was amused to discover, a couple of years ago, that among my fellow-marchers on March 17 1968, protesting against America's conservative war in Vietnam, was one John Scarlett, who would become the head of MI6 and be central to Britain's liberal war on Iraq. I find this a very telling fact.