He boasted that he was a mass murderer and he can hardly have been shocked that the USA hunted him down and killed him. But in the end the operation looks tawdry and futile. The Americans admitted as much when they lied that he had defended himself when he hadn’t. I’m sure they wish he had, in fact, put up a fight. For reasons it’s hard to explain, but which most decent people instinctively know, killing an unarmed man in his bedroom just doesn’t look good, however wicked he is. For once, Archbishop Rowan Williams has a point. For the next 20 years, people will be arguing about whether Bin Laden could have been captured and tried. But the real problem with the whole business is that it doesn’t really resolve anything. Only the dimmest mind can imagine that it does. Bin Laden obligingly dressed like a villain in a melodrama, and obligingly claimed to be behind the September 2001 massacres in New York and Washington. I’m not sure he was. The attack was really dreamed up in the Middle East. It was in Gaza and East Jerusalem – not Kabul or Kandahar – that the streets exploded in joy when the news of these disgusting murders first broke. The attack on the Twin Towers wasn’t made because Bin Laden ‘hated our way of life’. It was aimed at driving U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia, and compelling Washington to support a Palestinian state. How do we know this? First, because one of the culprits said so. Abdulaziz al-Omari, almost certainly the man who flew the American Airlines plane into the North Tower, made a pre-suicide video, which was briefly shown on Al Jazeera TV in September 2002. This homicidal fanatic had dressed carefully for his last message. He was shown wearing a chequered ‘keffiyeh’ headscarf, of the type associated with the Palestinian cause. What was his aim? In his own words, his planned murders were to be ‘a message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine’. And amid all the frenzy about Bin Laden, and the attack on Afghanistan, he got his way. For all its bluster about a ‘war on terror’, the US quietly bowed to this outrage, much as it had forced us to bow to the IRA in Northern Ireland. U.S. troops were withdrawn from Saudi Arabia in 2003. As for ceasing to support the ‘cowardly Jews’, Washington dispatched three separate missions to see Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (two led by General Anthony Zinni, one by Secretary of State Colin Powell himself). The U.S. also made its peace with the bitterly anti-Israel United Nations. It paid off millions of dollars in subscriptions which it had until then rightly held back in protest against that organisation’s corruption and general wickedness. This is significant because on September 3, 2001, just eight days before the attacks on America, the US delegation had stalked out of a UN conference on ‘racism’ because of the torrent of hateful language being aimed at Israel. Most importantly of all, President George W. Bush declared, almost exactly a month after the Twin Towers fell, that the US now supported a Palestinian State. This was a violent, astonishing reversal, especially by a supposedly ‘Right-wing’ Republican President. When, in May 1998, the then First Lady Hillary Clinton had urged such a policy, she was instantly disowned by her own Left-wing husband. Afghanistan, ‘Al Qaeda’ and the fact that ‘they hate our way of life’ (so do I) were all diversions from the real issue. This is whether the ‘West’ is ready to defend Israel’s right to exist, or if it will continue its long and failed policy of appeasing Middle East terror with weak concessions, bags of money and slices of Israeli territory. That issue has not gone away. The death of Bin Laden turned our eyes away from a new treaty between the unbending Islamists of Hamas and the more slippery Islamists of Fatah. Less than four years ago, Hamas militants were throwing screaming Fatah members off high buildings in Gaza, so this is the cosiest reconciliation since the Stalin-Hitler pact. So great is the crisis that the EU’s treasured Schengen Agreement – the abolition of borders from Calais to Warsaw – has been torn up. This is no bad thing in itself, but the fact it has happened shows the EU governments have been taken completely by surprise. But our political leaders are clueless children in foreign affairs, just as they are in domestic ones. Their wild enthusiasm for all these mysterious revolutions is pure self-indulgence. They have forgotten our national interests, and have decided instead to follow the policies that make them feel good about themselves. Michael's latest response to Peter: I still do not understand the point Peter is making regarding German temporal dictatorship. These were different places, a different time, in the era before widespread electric lighting, when living and working patterns were entirely different to what we see in Britain today. A century ago, maybe two million people laboured on the land in the UK; now the figure is a few tens or hundreds of thousands at most. We get up later, work possibly longer hours (though for fewer days)), mostly indoors and have altered all sorts of things about our society from when schools and factories open to railway timetables to take account of these shifts. Peter says: “So, a shift of the clock by one or two hours is likely to shift the days of millions of people, willy nilly.” In fact, there would be one LESS time switch for people to get their heads around. A switch to CET would merely involve the cancellation of the GMT switch the following October and from then on the clocks would change back and forth as they do now. Peter says: “Children wouldn't get 'longer' to play outside. They could just do so at different times of day. The evenings wouldn't be 'longer' - they'd just happen at different times of day. And how on earth they'd be 'lighter', I have no idea. Do they have a big lamp?” Wrong! Of course the amount of daylight is the same regardless of what timezone you choose, but there is a BIG DIFFERENCE between daylight at the start of the day and daylight at the end of the afternoon - at least in winter (none of my arguments really apply in summer, when there is more than enough daylight to go round however we organise our clocks). Go to the park first thing in the morning in January and it will probably be too cold and miserable to play. Children will not have had their breakfast; they will be getting ready for school. But at 4pm school is over, it will be a few degrees warmer and play outside is a realistic proposition. Skewing the clocks to favour daylight in the early winter morning robs us of USEFUL daylight. Light winter mornings are simply not as useful as light winter afternoons. Peter advocates sunset while we are still at work. My evenings would be ‘lighter’ simply because the ‘evening’ defined as the time between the end of the working day and bed, would coincide better with the time when the Sun is still above the horizon. No big lamp needed. I agree with Peter that timezones can be political, although it is interesting that the earliest campaigners for Daylight Saving came not from the wishy-washy Left but included people like King Edward VII and Winston Churchill (yes yes, I know, Jeffrey Archer is a clock-changer … you can't always choose your allies) Peking time in western China is an abomination. Kaliningrad is an oddity and of course imperial powers will seek to impose centralist diktats on their dominions. But that is not an argument for saying we should not consider change, if we decide it is in our best interests to do so. Peter says: “Can Michael find a significant free sovereign territory whose clocks are permanently fixed to a natural meridian two hours different from its own?” Yes, Iceland. Peter’s strongest point is his suggestion that as I am basing my arguments mostly on benefits that would accrue in winter, I may wish to leave our current summer time alone, and simply be on GMT+1 all year round. He is right; I think this is an ideal solution and he is also right in saying that it would not be allowed under EU law. This is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. I am a democrat and it is up to us to decide under which timezone we choose to live. If a majority of people favour the status quo so be it. No arrangement will suit everyone; the trick is to find one which suits most people most of the time, if one can be found. My argument is that a shift to CET (and yes, avoiding CET+1 if possible) would benefit the majority of people in the UK, who live predominantly in the south east and who work indoors. The strongest advocates for the status quo come from the far north of Scotland, the building industry and from the farmers. Some would suffer from a timezone switch, but more (I believe) would benefit. Mine is a purely utilitarian argument, not political, nor motivated by Euro-leanings of any kind (although a utilitarian case can be made that by aligning our clocks with those on most of the Continent trade and so on would be easier). Peter, your call. Probably a final word on the Royal Wedding. Those of us who feel we are in exile in our own country have plenty of difficulties in explaining this, not least because most people naturally prefer to be content with their place in the world. Why make yourself miserable when you don't need to? The sun is shining, all's well with the world, etc. First, it's a mistake to confuse contentment with happiness, an elusive experience best summed up by the old but true saying 'we were happy and we didn't know it'. I believe it's perfectly possible to be both discontented and happy, and cannot myself imagine being wholly content. Like the supposed joys of retirement, as seen from the office or workbench, I suspect utter contentment would lose its charms as soon as one arrived there. The human heart's not made to be content, as St Augustine pointed out. But I could be a great deal more content than I am, and I think my concerns about our society are major, not trivial. I genuinely fear the future in which the young will have to live, and think that many of the bad things that threaten them are curable. But only discontent, now. And an occasion such as a Royal Wedding, when so much attention is focused on one event, is a good opportunity to alert people ( who may previously have felt that all was well) to the fact that all is not well. Others will be annoyed. There's no way round this. It's how controversy works. It occurred to me, to explain how all this appears to me, to quote from a greatly underrated novel by Kingsley Amis called 'Russian Hide and Seek', published more than 30 years ago. It is not his best (that, I think, must be the savage 'Girl, 20') but it is good and still well worth reading. The book is, on the face of it, about a Britain many years after a Soviet invasion and occupation, after which the national culture has been more or less completely wiped out, right down to the mass felling of almost all mature trees. My own view (and this was the first novel I ever had the good fortune to read in proof before the reviewers - who raved over the same author's dreadful book 'Jake's Thing' - had given the official, damning verdict on it) is that it is a satire on the self-imposed cultural revolution which had by 1980 achieved much of what an invasion might achieve. The scenes involving an attempt to stage a performance of Romeo and Juliet as part of an official Moscow-sponsored English cultural revival are bitterly funny, and seem to me to jeer accurately at many modern 'interpretations' of Shakespeare, not to mention the bad verse speaking of many actors. The scene in which an Anglican church service is held, in front of and including a wholly baffled 'congregation' of post-invasion British people, is bitter and poignant, but not funny. I referred to it in my 1999 book 'The Abolition of Britain'. But the part of the book which sprang to mind during our latest discussion is this. (It's on p.103 of my Penguin edition, near the beginning of Chapter Nine). A garden party is in progress: 'Everything, from a sufficient distance, looked as if it had been done in style, looked right; to everyone there everything was right. No one thought, no one saw that the clothes the guests wore were badly cut from poor materials, badly made-up, ill-fitting, unbecoming, that the women's coiffures were messy and the men's fingernails dirty, that the surfaces of the [tennis] courts were uneven and inadequately raked, that the servants' white coats were not very white, that the glasses and plates they carried had not been properly washed, or that the pavement where the couples danced needed sweeping. No one thought, no one perceived with other senses that the wine was thin, the soft drinks full of preservative and the cakes stodgy, or that the orchestra's playing was ragged and lifeless. No one thought any of that because no one had ever known any different.' Yes, yes I know. It wasn't *that* bad. Not this time. And my point is much more about the *spirit* of the wedding than about the physical conduct of it. But the point, that 'No one thought any of that because no one had ever known any different' is the devastating bit. If you don't know, you won't care. If you do, you'll care like anything and others will look blankly at you and possibly get annoyed with you for pointing it out( as at the person who insists on making a fuss over a bad meal at an expensive restaurant, frequently 'spoiling the evening' for the others, which is why people so often unprotestingly eat costly muck at such places without a syllable of protest). Of course, the real reason for a lot of the criticisms of what I said was this - that so many people prefer our post-Christian society because they think it suits them. Well, I know that. I understand that not everyone shares my view, or how would we be where we are now? But they may not prefer it when it has gone a little further down the road which it will inevitably travel. I'm just pointing out that we have taken what I believe to be a wrong turning, while it's still relatively easy to turn back. Not only was my comment on the Royal Wedding much attacked here, but it was also assaulted by the ineffable Libby Purves in The Times. Her sarcastic summary of my article is crammed with adverbs such as 'crossly' and 'furiously'. I wouldn't have said I was particularly cross myself. It was written more in regret than in anger. I was simply stating a fact - not one I rejoice in, but one I accept as the case. I wasn't much concerned with making an immediate point that everyone would love and agree with, but one that I think will still look valid years after the gush of Friday has evaporated. President Obama says 'Justice has been done' on Osama bin Laden, and I'm inclined to agree with him. While I'm still unsure that bin Laden played as large a part in 11th September 2001 as he boasted, he did boast, and was without doubt in general responsible for many cruel murders. Obviously I should prefer him to have been tried properly, but capturing him alive would have been hugely difficult and dangerous, if not actually impossible, and his own many public admissions, nay gloating avowals, of guilt make a trial superfluous.
07 May 2011
Bin Laden’s death changes nothing: the 9/11 killers got EXACTLY what they wanted
04 May 2011 5:14 PM
Shedding more light on the timezone question
There is nothing wrong with the term ‘daylight saving’. It does not imply that daylight is being created out of thin air, merely that we are trying to maximise the correlation between the times people are awake, up and about, and when the Sun is above the horizon. That’s it, nothing sinister at all. On Not Knowing the Difference
That is, can the Crown actually survive through two more Coronations? I think the next Coronation will be a major strain on the national belief in monarchy, because of the clash between what it stands for and the way in which it will have to be conducted. The one after that may never happen at all - and that, after all, is the one that most closely concerns the young couple married last Friday.
The concepts that sustain it are already almost impossible to explain to anyone under 50. Christianity itself is a mystery to most British people (hence my point about the mumbled hymns). Even I felt quite uncomfortable actually using the word 'Protestant' in a British national newspaper. For most readers this expression nowadays conjures up the figure of the Reverend Iain Paisley, or some bowler-hatted march in Drumcree. The idea that it might be our own tradition is baffling to them.
And the reader who pointed out that I'm more of a Roundhead than a Cavalier is pretty close to the mark. My version of monarchism is a 1688, Glorious Revolution, Bill of Rights version, not a Laudian Stuart one (though I've a lot of time for the first Elizabeth).
Few grasped my point, which is this: If you want a functioning monarchy, you have to have a serious, responsible and religiously committed people, who revere tradition and honour the past. That's simply not what we are. WE ceased to be during the Diana frenzy, the ghost of which haunted the whole event last week. And you cannot really like the events of last Friday if you value the hard, sometimes cold, sometimes gloomy things that lie beneath the ceremony and the pageant. Monarchy can't be fashionable, can't be modern, can't be populist - at least not for long.
If you marry the spirit of the age, you will pretty soon be bereaved or divorced. For that spirit doesn't wait around in the same place for long.
My guess is that the two central figures in the event went through it largely for their parents and for the institution, which was of course nice of them, but didn't actually involve a deep personal commitment. They may well have found large chunks of it incomprehensible, if not eye-wateringly tedious, and perhaps both.
There's a very funny pastiche of the wedding, produced by a mobile-phone company and on YouTube, in which the nuptials are rather funkier than the ones which actually took place, but which I expect was much closer to what they and their contemporaries would have wanted if they had been allowed. A lot of trouble has been taken to get convincing lookalikes. Some people suspect (I'm sure unfairly) that Archbishop Rowan Williams is actually playing himself in the joke version).
The big event for the friends of bride and bridegroom was not the Abbey service, but the party afterwards, which the older Royals sensibly bowed out of. . It was also the big event for much of the media and especially the gossip writers
And there really is a strong dissonance between the one and the other. Do I really need to go into detail?
My points about the marriage service will have meant nothing to those to whom they meant nothing, and lots to those who cared.
This is the point I constantly come up against. That all these arguments, over drugs, marriage, crime, schooling, foreign affairs etc are down to which sort of country you prefer, and what price you are prepared to pay for what you prefer. As I have begun to write my next book, on the non-existent 'War on Drugs', it has become clear to me that the issue, from right back into the late 1960s, has been ' are we to be a self-controlled, restrained people who accept this as the price for the ordered, peaceful, stratified, and insular civilisation we desire, deferring immediate gratification for long-term security and solid prosperity? Or are we to be a relaxed, pleasure-seeking and unrestrained people who accept that the price of that may be more disorder, less efficiency, more chaos, a steady decline in our real wealth - and less political freedom?
I know my opponents would put it differently, but I'll leave them to do that. My guess is that many of them actually quite like the benefits of the 'repressed' society I favour - the assurance that our frontiers will be defended, that there will be a competent doctor in the hospital when they need him, that there's somebody out there when things get difficult. But they're not really prepared to pay the price for it.
I did actually prefer London when its great buildings were still black with soot. It had the look of a serious capital which, in my view, it has now lost. It looks to me like a filmset or a Disney pastiche. Nobody could defend smog, and I won't, but the buildings stayed black for many years after the smog was cleared, in the days when the buses and the tubes worked, and were cheap and safe. I suspect the huge increase in traffic means the air is just as dirty now, but doesn't appear to be. A lot of people who remember post-war but pre-modern London praise its cheapness, its friendliness, its efficiency and the way in which people without much money were able to live and work in its centre. That is no longer really possible.
I also noticed that nobody much took me up on the fact that the grand service uniforms looked rather overdone given the pitiful state of the services themselves.
On the question of the wife's promise to obey, it forms part of a very tough contract indeed, and is not in my view either submissive or intended to be. The husband's promises are just as onerous.
Elsewhere in the 1662 service are to be found, for instance, these words :So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself; for no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth it and cherisheth it...let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself".
The Biblical passage chosen for the wedding (as well as being from The Duff Bible) was not specially traditional for this occasion.
What was omitted (and is in my view far better and far more lovely) is Miles Coverdale's translation of the 128th Psalm, one of the most beautiful marriage blessings ever written, including the words: 'Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house; thy children like the olive branches round about thy table. The Lord from out of Sion shall so bless thee that thou shalt see Jerusalem in prosperity all thy life long. Yea, that thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace upon Israel.'
Perhaps it's the references to Jerusalem and Israel that the modern pro-Palestinian clergy don't like (certainly several references to the Jewish patriarchs, and specifically to Isaac and Rebecca) have been cut out of the original prayers. I thought that was quite interesting, myself. Thomas Cranmer thought they belonged there, and so they were for about 400 years without a break. Then some bureaucrat thought they didn't. Which of them was more likely to have been right?The execution of Osama bin Laden: A few thoughts
But the many more-or-less liberal politicians and commentators who now exult at this death have a problem that I don't have. I believe in the death penalty, as deterrent and retribution. They don't. Had he fallen into the hands of some EU tribunal, bin Laden would have faced life imprisonment in some Dutch celebrity jail, doing his basket-making alongside various Serbs, and a few Croats for good measure, while the kitchens toiled to provide him with halal meals. This refusal to execute murderers is supposed to be a principle, so wouldn't be affected by the huge numbers of murders involved in this case. Shouldn't they then be condemning this execution too? On what morality or legality is it based, if we do not accept the death penalty?
And if they are not condemning it, why not?
I can cope with soppy liberals. I can cope with macho boasters. I know where I stand with either. But soppy liberal macho boasters are too much for me. If the death penalty is wrong, it's wrong, and they should say so. This mission could have had no other end.
Something similar is going on in the apparent attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi, which the Libyans say has led to the deaths of his youngest son and three grandchildren. Official sources deny that this is the purpose of missiles repeatedly aimed at compounds in which Gadaffi may live. In that case, what are they doing? And what moral basis do they have for their outrage against the Libyan regime, with which they had excellent and productive relations six months ago?
There are other questions about this bin Laden business. You may believe in 'al Qaeda' if you wish. I have yet to see any evidence that there is such an organisation, or if the phrase has anything other than a vaguely general application to a vast variety of Islamic armed militants loosely if at all connected to each other. I think this novelistic bogey is an invention of journalists and spooks (and politicians) all of whom have reasons to promote its importance.
If this organisation has now been decapitated, can we now declare the 'war on terror' over? I doubt it. Airports are going to be even more oppressive for quite a while. Our soldiers remain in Afghanistan. And so on.
Was there ever really such a war? Or was something else going on, during which the 'West' actually appeased the very terrorists against whom it was raging? I set out in my book 'The Broken Compass' (reissued in paperback as 'The Cameron Delusion') an alternative explanation for the events of 2001. I pointed out the following facts:
People sometimes wonder about the timing of the outrages. Here's a possible explanation. The terrorist assaults on the USA were immediately preceded by the UN conference on 'anti-racism' in Durban, during which the verbal attacks made upon Israel and the United States by Arab and Islamic delegates were so virulent that the delegations from the USA and Israel walked out (on 3rd September).
The murders in Manhattan and Washington DC were met with a wave of joy across the Middle East, from Beirut to Gaza. This wave only diminished (and even then, not totally, especially in Gaza) when local Arab leaders realised that the vengeful fury of the USA would be terrible if their rejoicing became widely known among Americans. On 16th September 2001 the Washington Post (and several other major US newspapers) reported that the Palestinian Authority had been trying to suppress film taken of Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrating the outrage. 'Palestinian officials have told local representatives of foreign news agencies and television stations on several occasions that their employees' safety could be jeopardized if videotapes showing Palestinians celebrating tha attacks were aired. Broadcast news organisations operating in the Palestinian-ruled portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have complied'.
In other words, stop showing this in the West, or your people won't be safe in areas under our control. Censorship? I should say so. If you remember seeing any of this stuff (and I do, particularly of smiling women distributing sweet pastries) this explains why it has since completely dropped out of the archive narrative.
On 17th September 2001 several provincial big city US newspapers (including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) carried a story presumably from wire services or syndicated from other newspapers with foreign bureaux, which described how the Palestinian Authority had confiscated and then censored an Associated Press videotape showing marchers in Gaza carrying a portrait of bin Laden. My book speculates on why this story did not appear in more major US papers.
Next, I would draw to your attention the pre-suicide video of one of the actual 11th September hijackers, shown on Al Jazeera in September 2002 (and very briefly on some Western stations) a year after the event. Abdul-Aziz al-Omari (believed by the FBI to have been responsible for the hijacking of the American Airines plane that was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center) was shown wearing a chequered 'keffiyeh' headscarf, of the type associated with the Palestinian cause.
What was his aim? In his own words, his planned murders were to be 'a message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine'.
There is much more about this in the chapter entitled 'A Comfortable Hotel on the Road to Damascus', in my book.
But here's the really important bit. While the 'West' was bombarding sand and rocks in Afghanistan, largely irrelevant to the issue, the USA was behaving very differently in the Middle East. In a series of urgent and hastily-arranged missions, it sent first General Anthony Zinni (December 2001 and March 2002), then Colin Powell himself (April 2002), to meet the Palestinian chieftain Yasser Arafat. US troops were withdrawn from the Arabian peninsula in 2003, as it happens an action demanded by the mass-murdering terrorist al-Omari. Most striking of all, on 10th October 2001, was George W. Bush's declaration of his personal and Presidential support for a Palestinian State. For the USA as a country, and for a supposedly conservative Republican President, this was an enormous change of view. In May 1998 Hillary Clinton had made a similar statement - and it had been swiftly disavowed by her (Left-wing Democrat) husband and by the entire administration.
What, if not the attack of 11th September 2001, brought about these momentous changes in US foreign policy? Have we all been looking in the wrong direction?
I'd add a couple of other thoughts. I was amused by Mr Obama's use of the phrase 'Deep in Pakistan' to describe Abbottabad (named after a British army officer, by the way and still somehow retaining that name nearly 70 years after the Empire ended). It's amusing that Pakistan is the sort of country into which one can go 'deeply'. Would one say 'Deep in France' or Deep in England'?. And if one did, would one use the phrase to describe a substantial town a couple of hours' drive from the capital?
I must admit I had always thought that bin Laden was in Quetta, a rather remoter (or deeper) spot. I treasured President Hamid Karzai's wry remark some years ago that Bin laden was 'either in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and he definitely isn't in Afghanistan'.
But this discovery does raise the question 'What didn't they know about bin Laden's hiding place, and when didn't they know it?
Sunday, 8 May 2011
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
What a lot of rubbish we have been told about Osama Bin Laden. I’m not sorry he’s dead.
In fact, those demonstrations of ghoulish delight got so out of hand that the Palestinian authorities quickly got them taken off the world’s TV screens by making dark threats to
Western news organisations. That’s why so many people still don’t know about them.
Like that, this is also full of menace for the world. Bin Laden, on the other hand, is – and always was – a sideshow.
Where will Britain’s next Henry come from?
Henry Cooper was a natural aristocrat, chivalrous, kind, unbigoted, modest, a devoted and faithful husband – in so many ways superior to the people who actually form our national elite.
Sir Henry was also quite typically British, at least as that word was understood until very recently. But given what we have done to the country, where are the future Henry Coopers going to come from?
The real cost of the Arab Spring
It grows clearer by the day that the main result of the Arab Spring for us in Europe is a surge of illegal migration across the Mediterranean.
This is thanks to wilful blindness. The problem was easily foreseen, and I did warn
of it in the days when everyone (except me) was oohing and aahing about the supposed birth of democracy in the Arab world.
Is there any chance that Parliament will wake up to this fact any time soon, or that
the Opposition will start doing the opposing that it is paid to do?
***************
Once again, after the wretched, drug-induced death of Isobel Jones-Reilly, and the miserable attempted suicide of Brian Dodgeon, in whose house she met her end, we hear the use of the stupid phrase about the young ‘experimenting with drugs’.
Look, the experiments have been done. That’s why they are illegal. All these substances can lead to misery, madness, crime and death. Those who treat the matter lightly should work in the mental hospitals where the young victims of the drug cult end up.
****************
There are many lessons to be learned from last week’s elections and vote on AV. I plan to write about them next week.
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