This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Almost everything about the day was false, and wherever it touched reality it was worrying rather than reassuring. The Royal cars trailed to Westminster Abbey between motorcycle outriders with flashing blue lights and Range Rovers crammed with bodyguards. On the way back, the Life Guards (trained killers to a man) for some reason had to be escorted down the road by mounted police. Even Majesty must now be governed and pestered by the twin menaces of ‘security’ and ‘health and safety’. The police, for once looking like servants of the people in their tunics and helmets, only reminded us how many of them there are and how rarely we see them, and also that on all other days of the year they slouch about in flat caps and stab vests. The Edwardian braid and sashes worn by Princes and Dukes emphasised that our Armed Forces are shrunken remnants – lots of big hats, not many planes, ships or soldiers. Never have they looked so laughably Ruritanian. Inside the Abbey, it was obvious that most of those present, though they are our educated elite, feel awkward in church and do not know the words of what were once familiar hymns. And even on the 400th anniversary of the majestic, poetic and powerful King James Bible, we had to endure a lesson (sorry, a reading) from some flabby modern version. The marriage service was, as it almost always is, tamed to remove the really dangerous, subversive bits. What? A wife obey her husband? He’ll be calling her ‘dear’ next. But then again, this husband didn’t promise to endow his wife with all his worldly goods, only to share them, nor to worship her with his body. The blunt statement that the first purpose of marriage is the procreation of children was censored, too. The fierce condemnation of men who behave towards women ‘like brute beasts that have no understanding’ was also left out. I should have thought it was needed now more than ever, given the way so many much-admired celebrities regularly act. If you go back to the present Queen’s Coronation service in 1953, you will find it was a profoundly British occasion – a -celebration, reaching back far into the past, of our long and happy sovereignty over ourselves. It was also a straightforwardly Protestant Christian ceremony, based on ideas of self-discipline and self-restraint that we have entirely abandoned in the years since. The two things are completely bound together. You cannot remain free unless you can govern yourself. When the day comes for our next Monarch to be crowned, we will no doubt put on an excellent show for the tourists. But political correctness, equality, diversity and the overwhelming fear of giving offence – and the fact that these days we prefer to do what we like rather than what we know to be good – will ensure that it will lack the heart and meaning it had in 1953. And my guess is that it will be the last time we try. Jack Straw, a former Home Secretary, has cunningly sniped at Kenneth Clarke’s plans to reduce the use of prison, producing these interesting figures: ‘The number of offenders given short sentences does not reflect a failure of the prison system, but the failure of those same offenders to respond to non-custodial sentences by going straight: 96 per cent of short-term prisoners have at least one previous conviction; three-quarters have seven or more, typically for multiple offences each time.’ Having dumped the Blairites by rejecting David Miliband, Labour is now free to get tough on crime and mass immigration. If it does so, then I think it can pretty much guarantee to win the next Election against the current lot, on any system of voting. When the Tories abandon their own supporters as thoroughly as they are now doing, all kinds of things become possible. Labour might even rediscover its old loathing for the European Union, another issue on which Mr Cameron has failed to live up to his own words. Logically, Labour ought also to be in favour of restoring grammar schools, since they help the poor. I'm still waiting for any proof that the volcanic ash cloud, which paralysed Europe a year ago, actually existed outside computer projections. I have looked at AV carefully and can’t get excited about it, for itself. But I urge you to vote ‘No’ because the whole thing is designed to destabilise our existing system. Once you have got rid of what people were used to, and was always there, you can do what you like. There’s a long-term plan to make us as much as possible like a continental country, with politicians you can’t sack, endless coalitions, and politics entirely beyond the reach of the people. **************************** The terrible death of 15-year-old Isobel Reilly, apparently from an overdose of ‘Ecstasy’, reminds us how dangerous drugs can be – though the risk to mental health from supposedly ‘soft’ cannabis is the gravest threat to the young. But I was struck by the response of one London commentator, Katie Law. She said in the London Evening Standard: ‘I never cease to be amazed at how many middle- class parents I know regularly snort drugs, smoke weed, pop pills and drink excessively, while at the same time lecturing their children on the dangers of substance abuse . . . One father jokingly told me this weekend he was sure his son wouldn’t dream of touching his weed, while at a dinner a couple of years ago, the man on my right rolled a joint while the one on my left began cutting lines of coke. There were three children asleep upstairs.’ This isn’t my world. I fled the capital many years ago. But it is the world in which many politicians, lawyers, media figures, actors and academics live and move. It is these corrupted, selfish people, for whom drugs are normal, who stand in the way of responsible laws to control them. This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column Colin Atkinson would have been fired if it hadn’t been for the might of this newspaper – and the dogged courage of a union official, Terry Cunliffe. Many unions are keen on ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes, and wouldn’t have taken the case. And as it’s Easter, I’d like to focus on the fact that the manager involved, Denis Doody, had a picture (perhaps I should say ‘icon’) of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara on his office wall. Interesting. Why? Well, what we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death. The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day. The resurrection, which some of us still celebrate today, symbolises the ultimate defeat of cruel and cynical human power by a far greater force. Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged. Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will. The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical. What about the cult of Comrade Guevara, embraced by Mr Doody? It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of ‘equality’ as a bludgeon to flatten opposition. Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him. He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution. One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: ‘I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.’ Later, when the rock-star rebel ‘Che’ was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials. Guevara’s view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. ‘Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.’ There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people’s blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others. Care to choose? His words, spoken in Bedford, were: ‘I think we know in 1997 the country needed change.’ Do we know that? Did it ‘need’ the ‘change’ it got – 13 years of political correctness, stupid wars, tax and spending? I hardly think so. Generally, the Prime Minister pretends at voting time that he didn’t like the Blair-Brown junta. But if it turned out that he’d voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Mr Cameron, in full election mode, is now banging on (as he would call it if anyone else did it) about drunkards and illegal drug abusers claiming benefits for being drunk and drugged. He doesn’t mean it. He regards types like me, who think that you can stop drinking too much if you want to, and that people take heroin because they like it, as horrible reactionary brutes. But unless you accept that people are fully responsible for their own actions – and modish liberals like Mr Cameron spend half their lives denying this – then the logic leads - inexorably to paying them ‘incapacity benefit’. Likewise his opportunist moaning about judges making privacy law. They do this because Parliament (under his beloved Blair) gave them the power to do it. He knows perfectly well that this is the case. How can I begin to tell you how much this man and his party do not deserve your support? And how much they laugh at you when you give it to them? If you think that people are unhappy because bad things have happened to them, and that giving them mood-altering pills is wrong, you find yourself viewed as a heartless monster. In last week’s episode of the occasionally enjoyable TV police series Lewis, the detective, played as an increasingly ill-tempered and crusty figure by Kevin Whately, started out being hostile to a tricky pill-dispensing doctor. So did his funky underling, James Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox. But the real message was different. Their boss told the younger man: ‘You’re supposed to be bringing Lewis out of the Stone Age, not joining him there.’ And lo, by the end, the seemingly nasty psychiatrist was revealed to be a saintly and honest character. I find these days that even asking questions about the huge prescription of antidepressants in modern Britain gets me into trouble. Actually, that’s why I keep doing it. The twitchiness of the pill-popping faction suggests they are hiding their own grave doubts. What got my goat was the description of Mr Parris as ‘civilised’, after he had gravely misrepresented my views on a public platform and refused to make amends for this cheap behaviour. As civilised as a rattlesnake, I’d say. Parliament has not been recalled – did you know that only the Government can do this? The main effect of our intervention has been to prolong a civil war, and the futile carnage in Misrata is largely our fault. Having intervened supposedly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, we may be causing one in Misrata. The only truly humanitarian course now available is to provide an evacuation fleet to get non-combatants out of that city as soon as possible.
30 April 2011 10:20 PM
They wouldn't have thought much of this wedding back in 1953
Jesus vs Che Guevara: A man who laid down his life for us ... or a murderous ‘rock-star’ rebel? We know which the Wakefield Cross persecutors will worship this Easter
We now have to be pleased that a man has not been sacked from his job for putting a small cross on the dashboard of his company van. Please forgive me if my joy is muted this Eastertide. The real meaning of the Wakefield Palm Cross Affair is not specially happy.
Did Cameron vote for Labour in 1997?
David Cameron said on Friday that it was a good thing Labour won the 1997 General Election, something that a remotely awake media would have blazoned across the sky in vast headlines, but which they buried instead.
Lewis and a drugs cover-up
The issue of psychobabble versus common sense – linked to the dangers of antidepressant drugs – is increasingly important.
Mr Parris civilised? I’ve got news for you
Some of you may have enjoyed my cameo appearance on Have I Got News For You, in which I was filmed sneering lengthily at the presentation of an award to the slippery ex-MP Matthew Parris.
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As the Libya policy goes wrong, the nation’s brakes have failed. Where is the high-level criticism? Where the questioning? The Prime Minister was interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and even managed to give some (duff) racing tips but, incredibly, was not asked about Libya.
Sunday 1 May 2011
Friday's Royal parade was a dying gasp for the Monarchy, not a new beginning. This isn’t wishful thinking. I want the Crown to survive. But I do not think it can do so in a modern Britain that has turned its back on the ideas and habits that make a Monarchy possible.
Will Ed steal the Right vote?
This Liberal Conservative Government is so Left-wing that even Labour is now attacking it from a conservative point of view.
But do they have the courage and honesty to admit that most of their policies for the past 50 years have been wrong?
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I wish I thought that Anthony Blair had been deliberately left off the Royal Wedding invitation list. It would show that the Palace still had some fighting spirit in it somewhere, if they had set out to snub this annoying, destructive, oily person. But alas, I suspect it was just a blunder by a flunkey.
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