Some rapes ARE worse than others... there, I've said it
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?
16 May 2011 2:22 PM
How I can be so relaxed about Bin Laden's death? It's easy...
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and
14 May 2011 6:43 PM
Keep on kissing the Tory frog if you like - but he's never going to turn into a prince
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
First, I’ll deal with the massacre of Liberal Democrat councillors. There was some justice in this. We have a Liberal Government, and it was right that Liberals should be punished for its failings – the terrible schools where learning takes second place to social engineering, the mad foreign policy where we intervene cluelessly in other people’s countries while disbanding our armed forces, the pitiful justice system which refuses to protect the good from the bad, and instead makes excuses for the bad.
But alas, this was not what the voters meant to do. They believed the comical media fiction – the exact opposite of the truth – that this is a conservative Government being propped up by imprisoned liberals. And so they sacked a lot of Liberal councillors in revenge for this imagined crime.
I do wish these people could find me one scrap of evidence that this is in fact a ‘Right-wing’ Government. It would cheer me up. Please don’t tell me about the alleged ‘cuts’, which when finished will still leave us as one of the highest-taxed and most state-controlled, politically corrected countries on earth.
The people who should have been punished, who stand for election as Conservatives and then govern as Liberals, were let off.
I do not know if this can last. It is quite possible. I suppose that Tory voters may believe that if they carry on voting Tory, their party may one day turn into a proper conservative pro-British movement. This is a bit like going down to your nearest swamp, pond or bog and kissing all the frogs you can find in the belief that eventually one of them will turn into a prince.
It didn’t work the first time because it is never going to work. But hope seems to override sense in the polling booths when party loyalties are involved.
It is striking that if people forget party loyalties they actually start to think. Millions for once actually used their brains in a polling booth when asked to decide on the AV referendum.
The huge majority against AV was a flickering vision of what might happen if we had a party that wasn’t the Tories, and which stood for common-sense policies on crime, mass immigration, education, the family and national independence.
The sad part of this is that our clear dislike of constitutional reform will not actually make much difference. I suspect we will now get something much worse than AV as a consolation prize for the Liberals. This will be a ‘Senate’ to replace the House of Lords, elected by proportional representation. And there will be no referendum on that because we might reject it.
Then, as the Election approaches, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories will stage a noisy trial separation.
It will be much like the largely faked bickering of the past few weeks, only more so. And it will end with the Liberal Democrats pretending to walk out of the Coalition in a huff over some carefully chosen row.
And then David Cameron will be Prime Minister of a minority Government which is made up entirely of Tories, but which still follows the Liberal policies Mr Cameron likes. The excuse this time will be that it doesn’t have a majority.
He hopes that thanks to the revolutionary boundary changes due to come into force soon that he will then win the next Election outright. And then he will be able to govern as a Liberal because nobody in his feeble party will dare to challenge him. If that doesn’t work, he can always try another coalition.
More than eight years ago I wrote in this newspaper warning of the foolish sex quotas being imposed on Fire Brigades. I have nothing against any fit, strong women who want to work as firefighters. Good luck to them.
What I warned against was a lowering of standards to raise the quota of women in the fire service. Minimum height rules were abandoned, chest expansion and lung-capacity tests abolished. A test which involved carrying a 12-stone man 100 yards was scrapped.
I suspect that the main result of this will have been more small, unfit men in the Fire Service, which doesn’t strike me as a good thing. The numbers of women have remained obstinately low. But the equality zealots have not been put off. I have heard from a firefighter who (as they all do) begged me to keep her or his sex, name and location secret. He or she writes that the watered-down fitness standards of only six years ago have now been weakened further still. ‘They’ve reduced the standard to the point where, if you can walk, you can probably pass it. I know of a woman, weighing 26 stone, who smoked, drank and had done no physical exercise since she left school 16 years before, and she drove everywhere. She came down and took the “official national fire service fitness test” and passed. She only failed to get in because she was scared of heights.’
Could these reduced standards, combined with a reduction in training and a pursuit of ‘equality and diversity’, have anything to do with the alarming rise in deaths in the fire brigades, especially since 2003? Something is certainly wrong. The Fire Brigades Union and the Labour Research Department – both Left-wing bodies – say that more firefighters are dying on duty now than for 30 years.
Time for an inquiry, before it gets worse, and before the public are affected as well. Surely the saving of lives comes before equality and diversity? Or does it?
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