This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column But the Tory Party is just a rather slippery and dishonest organisation. There’s nothing immoral about pushing it gently but firmly through the dark door marked ‘Exit’. In fact I’d have fewer qualms about that than I would about putting down an elderly guinea pig. Any human being, by contrast, is immensely, uniquely valuable. We cannot kill our fellow creatures, except under very special circumstances of self-defence or deterrent justice. And yet we do. And we will do so even more quite soon. A society that baulks fussily at the death penalty for guilty murderers has become adept at excusing the convenient killing of innocents. Using the advanced techniques of a perverted science, we hunt down imperfect babies in the womb and kill them. Or we kill perfect babies because their birth might disrupt our comfy lives. And we tell ourselves that it is all right because our victims aren’t fully human, though in our hearts we know they are. When the law which permits this massacre was first proposed nearly 50 years ago, we were told that it would be for exceptional and very difficult cases only. I do not know if those who campaigned for the change really believed that – but their opponents warned that it would lead to abortion on demand. And that is what happened, because that is what suited the baby-boom generation to which I belong. Couldn’t you see the unspoken thought – that it might be more convenient for the old and ill to be hurried into the grave – lurking behind the black-clad figure of Sir Terence Pratchett as he presented his pro-death programme at the licence-payers’ expense last week? Sir Terence is no doubt innocent of such thoughts himself, and motivated entirely by understandable fears of his own Alzheimer’s. But there must be many homes in this country where men and women are secretly hoping that their parents will die in a reasonable, timely manner – and above all that they will not consume their inheritance with endless care-home fees before they go.
19 June 2011 12:48 AM
This man in black is leading us to a very dark place
The Deserving Poor, and being booed in Norwich
Sunday, 19 June 2011
There's only one suicide I would cheerfully assist. If the Tory Party wants to go to Zurich and end it all, I will accompany it, hold its hand, help it swallow a cocktail of poison, refuse its pleas for water at the last moment (for its own good, of course) and listen to its death gurgles. It would be a mercy.
Now that generation and its children (the ones who weren’t aborted) have a new fear and
a new desire. And the BBC – the voice of the boomers – has begun to express their secret concern, louder and louder. The old are a burden. They must die sooner, in the interests of the State, and of the middle-aged.
Unhappily, many of those parents may also be guiltily wondering if they should hang on to life when it means that the home they have bought over many years of careful saving may have to be sold to pay for their care, instead of being passed on to their offspring.
Meanwhile, the State is consumed with a similar fear, that the NHS may fall to pieces trying to cope with the coming wave of old people living on into their 90s and demanding ever more care, space and medicine. It is this fear that lies behind the current frenzied attempts at reform. Taxation simply will not pay for it.
I predict that if assisted suicide is made available here, it will gradually become commonplace, just as abortion did. And it will not necessarily stay voluntary. In the Netherlands, that supposed paradise of liberal thought, there are about 1,000 instances every year of a patient’s life being ended by a doctor, without an explicit request. As a brilliant analysis of the issue by Professor John Keown, of Georgetown University in Washington DC, states: ‘Dutch courts have held that just as the relief of suffering can justify the termination of patients who request euthanasia, it can equally justify
the termination of those who cannot.’
And once it is commonplace, as with abortion, those who oppose it will be a noisy but powerless minority, because so many of us will have become accomplices in kindly murder, that we will not dare to call it murder, and will get angry with those who do. But it will be murder all the same.
New signs, same lousy schools
Education Secretary Michael Gove has just declared that another batch of schools are to become ‘academies’. I’ve yet to see any proof that ‘academies’ are better than other schools, though they have nice new signboards. But at this rate, all the schools in the country will be ‘academies’ by the time Mr Gove has finished – and no doubt all the children will be above average, and all the exam results will be ‘As’ and ‘A-stars’.
And still nobody will know anything. The really sad thing about this is that Michael Gove is an intelligent man, who knows this is all rubbish and window-dressing. In fact, he is himself window-dressing for a government that couldn’t care less about the schooling of the poor.
Is it the State’s job to rob us on behalf of addicts?
Undeserving Poor Latest: Abusers of illegal drugs in this country receive something like £1.7 billion a year in benefits, from you and me. £730 million alone is squandered on giving methadone to people who have chosen to ruin their lives (and those of everyone who knows them) by taking illegal heroin.
The figures are revealed and explained by Kathy Gyngell today in a devastating pamphlet, Breaking The Habit. The logic behind this seems to be that if the State robs you on the drug-users’ behalf, they won’t need to burgle your house or mug you. Something wrong here?
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At last the monstrous myth of ‘ADHD’ and the unspeakable drugging of healthy children is being questioned. It’s a small start, but the Association of Educational Psychologists is calling for a review into the use of Ritalin on children, many as young as five. Not a moment too soon. There are now nearly 700,000 prescriptions being handed out each year. Which Minister will risk the wrath of the mighty and spiteful Ritalin lobby by launching such an inquiry?
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Idiots like Joanne Fraill shouldn’t be allowed to sit on juries. Yet she did, and contacted the defendant via Facebook, the Morons’ Directory. How couldn’t she have realised this was wrong? Isn’t it time we introduced a much higher minimum age and a serious education qualification for jurors, many of whom are not fit to go out on their own, let alone decide the fate of a fellow creature?
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Still they won’t admit the real reason for the abolition of weekly bin collections. So I’ll say it again. It’s the European Union Landfill Directive, stupid.
Is there any point in public debate, in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?
Sometimes I wonder.
I asked a simple question in my main column item – about why Christians, in their charitable work and in their engagement with wider politics, should make no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
I produced two unambiguous quotations from scripture which clearly permit, and indeed demand, such a distinction. It would be odd if they did not. The idea that someone could live comfortably at the expense of his fellow men , when he was able to work, would have been so unthinkable to any previous civilisation that it would have been regarded as absurd.
The real question is whether the modern creation of a large welfare-dependent class in our society is an improvement on the past, or a worsening if the human condition. I tend to think it is the latter, and to blame many of the faults of our cruel, coarse, disorderly society on the extension of welfare to people who do not really need it , and the reclassification of human weaknesses and failures as incurable ‘disabilities’ which must be indulged. In some ways worse, these failings (drug-taking, drunkenness etc) are equated with genuine disabilities which are not in any way the fault of the sufferer.
But my critics don’t take this up. Some go into diversions about the rich. Well, if the rich start claiming welfare payments, or evading the taxes they are legally obliged to pay, then I’ll start condemning them for it. But if not, they’re not part of the argument. The rich ( I know this annoys communist levellers, but it’s true) spend their own money. Welfare recipients spend other people’s money, taken from those other people by taxation under the threat of imprisonment.
Then I was accused of indulging in theology, by atheistical logic-choppers and show-offs who have swallowed R.Dawkins and A.C.Grayling, and long to lure me into some futile dispute on a subject which doesn’t interest me and in which I’m not versed – not because they actually wish to debate the subject, or would ever concede their position as a result of argument, but because they wish to show off. No dice, guys.
I think this is in any case mistaken. Theology is to do with the philosophical arguments for religion as such. I wasn’t making any. I never do. My only point is that we are free to choose whether to believe or not, as I have many times explained here. Quite a lot of my opponents actually seek to deny this choice by various means, which generally have little to do with facts or logic.
The most I could be accused of here is internal scriptural exegetics, aimed only at people who already accept the Christian faith, and at one who, in the Archbishop’s case, is its chief representative in this country. The quotations I produced from Holy Writ are wholly unambiguous and can only be interpreted in one way. They are also from the New Testament, uncomplicated by the supersession of many Old Testament laws by the new covenant.
None of the other hostile comments addressed this simple point – that there are different sorts of poor people, and it is reasonable for Christians to distinguish between them.
My own view is that those who needlessly throw themselves on the charity of others are active thieves from the poor (who are in the end the main source of both tax and charity) and frauds on goodness, who poison the wells of generosity and altruism, and their actions cry out for justice. This does not in any way affect my belief in charity as a duty.
Likewise, nothing I said from the Question Time platform in Norwich is specially controversial. Most serious persons agree that much foreign aid is wasted, misdirected and misappropriated. Some does positive harm. The late (Lord) Peter Bauer, who knew more about this than all of us put together, did say what I quoted him as saying. The proportion of our aid budget which is controlled by the EU is as I said ( I confirmed the figures with Mr Mitchell’s department that morning, and he told me he had personally signed off on the answer).
Yet I was treated as if I had said all aid should be stopped, which I didn’t say, and don’t believe.
Likewise it is true that our society was until the 1960s a sexually restrained and puritan one, and that it changed largely because an active and persuasive minority wanted it to change, though many others have since decided that they, too, approve. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest (my main point) that the sexualisation of children is a consequence of that . It is undeniable that sexually charged and explicit material pours out of the radio , the TV and the Internet.
As for sex education, much of it is aimed at overcoming the inhibitions of pupils about what many of them reasonably regard as private or embarrassing matters (the use of joke words for body parts in class, etc). It is perfectly reasonable to describe this as taking away the innocence of those exposed to it. As I have said before, if any adult apart from a teacher said these things and illustrated these acts in front of our children, mobs of News of the World readers would be breaking their windows and demanding they be sent to jail forever. As it is, they’re paid to do it by the taxpayer.
Sex education was originally devised by George Lukacs, as education commissar during the brief Hungarian Revolution, to debauch the minds of religiously-brought-up children. When it was first introduced in this country it was purely biological, and heavily circumscribed. It is only as the power of parents has declined, and that of social workers and teachers increased, that (under the excuse of combating disease and under-age pregnancy) it has been permitted to become so explicit and to be based on the assumption (itself both false and morally questionable)that the young will have sex outside marriage whatever anyone says or does.
As for my statement that the pretext for sex education is that it will prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies etc, this is demonstrably so – that is what its advocates say it is for. Equally true is my further statement that, the more sex education we have had, the more STIs and unwanted pregnancies we have had. In the absence of research into this correlation, we may only guess as to the cause of it, if any. But what is certainly true is that sex education is failing *on its own terms*.
Nothing I said was specially controversial. On Libya, many of my critics in the audience would have agreed with me if it hadn’t been me saying it. As it is they didn’t want their views expressed by such a wicked person (‘the Sunday Mail hack’).
The howling intolerance of a vocal section of the audience (and the licence given to members of that audience to barrack me and interrupt me) shows how any defiance of current orthodoxy is now greeted not with argument but with rage. It is probably a good thing that there was no question about man-made global warming, or who knows what might have happened?
All this has drawn attention away from other oddities about the programme. Why does the Coalition now qualify for two members of a five-person panel? Isn’t a newly-elected MP who hasn’t risen above the rank of Parliamentary Private Secretary a bit junior for such a task? And why was the Labour Party represented by a man who, while a heavyweight politician, is no longer even in Parliament? Wasn’t anyone in the Shadow Cabinet available or able?
I should not here how grateful I am for the kind letters and e-mails I have received from viewers who felt that I had been unfairly treated, or needlessly abused. I can’t really complain for myself – if I couldn’t take a joke, I shouldn’t have joined, and I’ve experienced far worse than that in TV studios and elsewhere. It is a reasonable price to be paid for getting on to the most powerful medium of modern times, which conservatives have to use if they can, whatever they may think of it. The real sufferers from the unfairness and the abuse are not me, but the BBC licence-payers who are entitled to more respect for their opinions.
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