04 June 2011 8:26 PM
You want louts like this punished? You must be a ‘nasty extremist’ like me
That is because you agree with me that Wayne Bishop, whose triumphantly smirking, selfish face looks out at us from amid his terrifying brood of children, ought to be breaking rocks on Dartmoor instead, and to hell with his ‘right’ to a family life.
Bishop is a burglar. He is also a menacing lout who badly needs to learn some lessons in manners, but never will. We’ve all seen faces like that and learned to cross the street, or shift down the bus, to avoid them when we see them coming. Some people, and God help them, cannot avoid them because they live next to them.
Here are the figures, which should be tattooed on the foreheads of every member of the Cabinet so we are constantly reminded of how useless they all are: ‘96,710 criminals sentenced last year for more serious “indictable” offences had 15 or more previous crimes against their name. They included violent muggers, burglars and drug dealers.
‘Of those, only 36 per cent –around 34,600 offenders – were given immediate custody.’ So even after 15 or more previous offences, they won’t put most of them away.
So it’s almost an irrelevance that Bishop has been let out of prison in the name of his Human Wrongs. It is amazing that he was inside in the first place.
You are (for the moment) allowed to laugh at this, or to complain about it. But if, like me, you actually want to do anything about it, then you become an extremist, bonkers, spittle-flecked, lunatic etc.
Because against you, you will find all three major parties, most especially the treacherous, slippery and dishonest Tories, the BBC, the legal profession, the police and the Church of England.
They believe the system that allows Wayne Bishop and his many friends to smirk at you while they live off you is a good system. They think you are cruel, crude, outrageous and uncivilised to want a justice system that punishes bad people swiftly in ways they won’t forget.
Well, Wayne Bishop is the result of all their compassion and kindness and, as I grow older and nastier, I can’t help wishing that the people who created him could be forced to go and live next door to him for the rest of their natural lives.
A pop star so pretentious he seems to think he is a nettle, or perhaps a wasp.
Dame Judi Dench, an actress who believes mistakenly that because she spends her life uttering other people’s grand sentiments on stage, she is clever.
Tom Lloyd, a disgraced ex-copper who, as they say politely, ‘resigned amid claims’ that he got drunk and sexually harassed a woman at a police conference.
And that was after going on holiday during the biggest and most serious murder case his force ever investigated.
Then there’s that vague, bearded businessman Sir Richard Branson, who once told us to join the euro (what a mind!) and whose irritatingly bad trains proved he wasn’t as brilliant as he was cracked up to be.
I’ve explained the real situation, face to face, to a couple of these people. I told them, with facts and figures, how the ‘war on drugs’ that they rail against was called off in 1972.
But Colin Harrow’s story was exceptional. Colin likes the BBC, and sees the point of it.
Like millions, he feels betrayed by the way in which the Corporation has become an active and highly committed campaigner for a social, sexual and cultural revolution that they don’t support.
It is as if a valued old friend had suddenly taken up snorting cocaine in late middle age.
But Colin really didn’t see why The News Quiz, which goes out on Radio 4 at a time when children might easily be listening, should get away with transmitting Sandi Toksvig’s crude joke, which coyly smuggled the c-word on to the air while casually insulting an entire political party (one that I don’t support), and, crucially, had been pre-approved by a senior executive.
The BBC has played a big part in normalising the f-word and so making our society a lot coarser than it was.
It is plainly itching to do the same with the c-word, as its smug, unhelpful responses to Colin Harrow show.
The details of this event – and of Mr Harrow’s patient efforts to do something about it – are in today’s Mail on Sunday, and I urge you to read them for an insight into the proud, sealed minds of those who are in control of public broadcasting in this country.
The News Quiz itself has for years been a great red boil on the BBC’s bland face, utterly biased in favour of the Left in all matters, and neither ashamed nor restrained.
No executive ever does anything about this constant, repeated breach of the Corporation’s own charter.
This is simply untrue, as it obviously wasn’t within the audience expectations of Mr Harrow and, it is reasonable to assume, not within the expectations of quite a lot of other reasonable Radio 4 listeners. But he’s only a powerless licence-payer.
Once we dumped lifelong marriage, and decided that sex was just a game played for fun, like tennis, we licensed every form of sexual activity that didn’t happen to disgust us at the time.
The problem with disgust is that there’s no absolute standard for it. What people thought was disgusting 30 years ago is normal now, and what we think is disgusting now may easily be normal 30 years hence.
Our society has worked hard to destroy innocence, with explicit sex education, the abolition of taboos and the marketing of adult clothes and cosmetics to little girls.
Modesty is derided as repression. When I attacked a range of sexually knowing dolls for little girls, Slutz, I think they were called, I received angry letters from mothers saying there was nothing wrong with them. God help us. Nobody else will.
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.
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.
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