This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column Human rights are a threat to free speech. This has never been clearer, since the breathtaking attempt by the judges to gag the reporting of Parliament. What sort of mind comes up with this tyrannical idea, and sees it as an acceptable price to pay for covering up the misdeeds of nauseatingly rich celebrities? It is suddenly, terrifyingly plain that the Human Rights judges instinctively loathe proper British liberty. The new dogma of Human Rights gives them a mighty weapon against it, which they now feel strong enough to use. It has always been hard to fight against Human Rights because the phrase sounds so nice. Who could oppose such a wonderful thing? But now we know why we should oppose it in one important detail. If the alleged ‘right’ to privacy is so powerful that it trumps the freedom to report parliamentary proceedings, then we are better off without such a right. Every single one of these rights can be interpreted in some similar twisted way. And for too long we have failed to notice the nasty revolutionary origins and the nasty purpose of this noble-sounding idea. Human Rights, closely related to the ideas behind the bloodthirsty, ruthless revolutions in France and Russia, are now being used to give our own Left-wing elite the power to override a thousand years of tradition, national independence and freedom, in the name of something that sounds noble but is in fact sordid and ugly. In the past 30 years I can think of only one instance – a group of railwaymen who refused to be forced into a union closed shop – where Human Rights have been used in the interests of real freedom. In many other cases, the Human Rights Act has been deployed to reduce the freedoms of the hard-working, the tax-paying and the law-abiding. The rights asserted have been those of lawbreakers trying to avoid justice, illegal immigrants trying to avoid deportation for criminal acts, prisoners trying to win votes and similar unpopular and unwanted changes for the worse in our way of life. If Christianity is being sidelined, marriage reduced to the level of any other sexual relationship, Britain being pressed to adapt to immigrants rather than the other way round, extreme feminism imposed on workplaces, schools compelled to re-admit trouble-making pupils, Human Rights will be involved. Real rights and freedoms are not like this. Our British Great Charters, Claims and Bills of Rights do one simple thing – tell the Government what it cannot do. These are in truth the only rights worth having. But it has become deeply unfashionable to say so. In fact, the elite has become so committed to this unpleasant dogma that opposition to it is viewed as wicked. People like me – though still allowed to speak – are allowed on to mainstream national broadcasting only under strict conditions: that we are ‘balanced’ by at least three other people who disagree with us so that our views, actually held by millions, are made to look like an eccentric minority opinion. In some cases, newspapers, once open to our views, are pressured into silencing our voices. Our books, if we can get them published, are not reviewed. The major political parties won’t select us as candidates. And so on. No, of course, it is not as bad as being arrested and locked up – though in modern Britain it is increasingly possible to have your collar felt for expressing an unfashionable opinion. But it is without doubt an attack on our freedom of speech – which is of little value if millions never hear what we say – while our opponents are not restricted in the same way. It is bad enough that David Cameron has caught the Blair disease, and thinks the Armed Forces are his rather than the Queen’s. But what really dismays me is that both these men have been responsible for prolonging the purposeless war in Afghanistan, in which many British and American soldiers have died – or have been too terribly injured ever to attend a barbecue again. In both countries this is because these leaders didn’t have the courage to admit the war is pointless, and end it. Feeding soldiers burgers doesn’t make up for sending them off to be killed or maimed without good reason. I still do. It is now plain that I was right to suspect that he is seriously mentally ill. We still need to know why. I would like to see some research done on this. The cannabis lobby (what’s in it for them, by the way?) were furious with me for even suggesting such a thing. In Britain and America there are countless parents of teenagers who have good reason to suspect that this supposedly harmless, allegedly soft drug did dreadful damage to their sons and daughters. More and more research suggests a link between cannabis and mental illness. I believe that within ten or 20 years, that link will be as clearly established as that between cigarettes and lung cancer. And that those who now noisily insist that this drug is harmless will be as discredited and disdained as the Big Tobacco lobbyists who pretended for so long that there was nothing to worry about. Anybody who really cared about the suffering people of the region would stick to helping everyone get richer and live better, a process quietly under way already. This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column The extension of rape, to cover any situation where a woman says she has been raped, is a huge difficulty for a fair legal system that relies on actual evidence before deciding guilt. As he quickly found out, it is not. I am sorry that he was in the end forced to grovel. But this is a Liberal, PC government, and I am not surprised. Revolutionary feminism, which regards all men as predators and sees the married family as a sordid prison, has scared most politicians, most judges, most journalists, most civil servants – and most people – into accepting its nasty dogmas. Oddly enough, Mr Clarke would normally be an ally of this cause. But ultra-feminist zealotry is bitterly intolerant of any disagreement, however gentle or thoughtful. Nothing short of total submission will do. The problem is Mr Clarke’s unceasing search for ways of stopping our prisons from bursting. The answer is quite simple – the reintroduction of serious punitive prison regimes, plus putting the police back on preventive foot patrol. But that would never do in the liberal world of David Cameron. So instead sentences – even for rape – must get shorter and shorter until they almostentirely disappear. It won’t work. Whatever this lot does, I promise you, the prisons will be crammed, with their revolving doors whizzing round fast enough to generate electricity. Modern liberals make a few exceptions to their view that lawbreakers need to be let out of jail quickly. One is over child-molesting, which has become the one form of sexual behaviour of which we can all still disapprove. One is when people ‘take the law into their own hands’, by defending themselves, their families or their property. The courts and the police view this as competition, and fear it. So it is crushed with heavy sentences. Another is offences against political correctness. And another is rape. But in this case rape does not usually mean what most people think it means – the forcible abduction and violation of a woman by a stranger. It means a dispute about consent, often between people who are already in a sexual relationship. It means one person’s word against another’s, in highly unequal circumstances, with the accuser granted anonymity and the accused under the glare of publicity. Ms Guerin, who during her stint in Israel often seemed more like a prosecutor than a reporter, has adopted the full hijab or headscarf, completely covering her hair, plus a very, very long dress. Is she trying too hard here? And if so, why? The BBC said it was a ‘conservative area’ but couldn’t provide any details of how it measured this. It also said other female reporters had done the same thing, but couldn’t, despite repeated requests, substantiate this. I’m all in favour of showing respect to the culture where you are. But in this clip, Ms Guerin is speaking to camera and standing in front of a van, not conversing with some mullah stuck in the 14th Century. If he will wear a Union Jack tie, then I don’t see why an Army band can’t play Kevin Barry or some other rebel ditty while he lays his tributes. As far as I am concerned the Irish people, almost all of them, are our friends, brothers and sisters, bound to us by many common causes, greatly enriching the culture and history of our two islands. If I could undo the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders, I would. The obvious liking shown on both sides during the Queen’s visit is far more representative than the violent, undying hate of Sinn Fein. The pro-drug lobby – much like Big Tobacco when the link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made – is hostile to any facts that contradict its claims. I fear Sir Ian’s allegiance to this cause has affected him in this way. During a London debate on the subject last week, my ally Dr Hans-Christian Raabe tried to hand Sir Ian an article from the New England Journal Of Medicine that supported a point he had just made – that deaths due to legal prescription drugs (eg methadone) far exceed deaths due to illegal drugs (eg heroin) in the USA. Sir Ian flung it to the floor. Is this what we should expect from a former president of the Royal College of Physicians?
28 May 2011 10:22 PM
Wherever there’s trouble, you’ll find Human Rights
22 May 2011 2:04 AM
Some rapes ARE worse than others... there, I've said it
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Now that we see Human Rights openly employed in a direct attempt to gag MPs and reporters, perhaps others will begin to wonder if the great liberal revolution is as good and kind as it claims to be.
Flipping burgers doesn’t make up for moronic wars
I thought it quite gruesome to see David Cameron and Barack Obama dispensing grilled meats to service personnel – some of them wounded in war – in the Downing Street garden.
If Mr Cameron and Mr Obama really cared about them, they’d put away the barbecue, and bring them home – and also halt the increasingly moronic intervention in Libya before it gets any worse.
Cannabis: the dreadful truth
When a giggling Jared Loughner was first charged with the horrible mass shooting in Phoenix, Arizona, I suggested that he was insane and wondered if he had been unhinged by his acknowledged past heavy use of cannabis.
In the meantime, wouldn’t it be wiser not to take the risk, and for the law against this drug to be strengthened rather than weakened?
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We now have proof that computer games stop children reading, withering their imaginations and filling their minds with grubby rubbish. Parents have a right and a duty to protect their young from this sort of thing. You wouldn’t give your children neat gin. Why leave them alone at the screen?
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It's time for another round of grandiose Middle East ‘peace’ efforts. The one thing that can be guaranteed about these is that they will lead to more war and more death.
There are already shopping malls in Gaza (yes, really, I’ve been there), Hebron and Ramallah. Israelis and Arabs cheerfully share the same cut-price supermarkets on the road south of Jerusalem. Prosperity and normality, not endless wrangling over land, is the road to peace.
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The more sex education we have, the more abortions we have. So can we try having less sex education for a few years and see what happens?
I am sick of the censorship that surrounds the issue
of rape. So I shall defy it. Of course all rapes are bad. But some rapes are worse than others.
Even for saying this, I know quite well that I will get raging, lying abuse. This is what
happened to Kenneth Clarke, right, when he went on the radio and tried to speak his mind as if
this were a free country.
Those who don’t think there’s anything wrong with this definition are quite entitled to their opinion. But they’re not entitled to shout down those who disagree with them. Even so, I bet they try to.
In full hijab, is Orla trying a bit too hard?
Here's the BBC’s very severe reporter Orla Guerin broadcasting from Pakistan after an atrocity.
Even the late Benazir Bhutto, who was Premier of Pakistan and needed to keep the imams happy, usually wore her headgear further back than this.
Now Gerry Adams can lay a wreath in Guildford
Following the Queen’s successful visit to the Irish Republic, I look forward to the day when President-of-all-Ireland Gerry Adams makes a state visit to London and lays wreaths at Harrods, in Hyde Park, outside the Old Bailey, in Bishopsgate and at Canary Wharf, and then heads out of town to do the same in Brighton, Deal, Warrington, Manchester, Guildford and Birmingham – and on the graves of Ross McWhirter and Ian Gow.
Yet, behind all the smiles and generosity, Sinn Fein has been the ultimate winner in this conflict.
Lawrence retrial is a bad day for liberty
I am sorry but I cannot rejoice at the planned retrial of a suspect in the Stephen Lawrence murder case.
The rule against being tried twice for the same offence is a keystone of freedom. And to work, it has to be a rule, even when it breaks our hearts to obey it. For if it is not absolute, then one day a bad government will use this as a precedent to pursue and crush opponents. Why do we care so little about these great treasures of liberty? Perhaps we no longer deserve to have them.
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The head of the Armed Forces, General Sir David Richards, has been making political speeches, calling for more indiscriminate bombing of Libya.
This is not his job. He is also plumb wrong. We should abandon this daft ill-considered war before we get in any deeper.
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It always gravely saddens me to see Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a distinguished doctor who has dedicated his life and mind to the cure of disease and the easing of pain, supporting the dangerous campaign to soften our drug laws. If successful, this will lead to greatly increased pain, misery and disease.
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