Yet it could have been so good, and I switched it on in the genuine hope that it would be. If you don’t like watching public humiliation or cooking, there is little enough to see on the TV. This is especially so since University Challenge turned into a scowling science lesson, and most news and documentary programmes are aimed at backward eight-year-olds with the attention span of a bedbug. Which is why The Hour could have been great. There was, from the mid-Fifties to the early Sixties, a mighty revolution in TV news and current affairs. The story of how it happened, combined with the events that it covered, Suez, Hungary, the end of the Empire in Africa, and later the Cultural Revolution, could be great drama. No such luck. TV producers seem to think that if they deploy enough cigarettes, bright-red lipstick and nail polish, not to mention a few dozen pairs of vintage spectacles, they have recreated the era of Anthony Eden. If they can hire a few old cars and clunky Bakelite telephones, they imagine they have attained utter perfection. What they don’t seem to understand is that the spirit of the age is what they need to capture, and that people in those times were quite unlike us. They really did speak in those strangled accents, and in complete sentences. That is because they thought differently, had grown up with different experiences from those we know. Everyone over 25 could remember the war. Men really were courteous to women, and women – including educated women – genuinely expected to get married and have children and saw nothing wrong in that. The men wore blue or grey suits (often shabby) and knotted their ties tightly. Most women – particularly in offices – were compelled to be fairly dowdy by the general shortage of money. Career advancement came very slowly, and so deference was common in offices. People knew if their colleagues were married. Oh, and stabbings in London were so rare that they merited a bit more than a paragraph in the paper. But The Hour revolves around two central characters who seem to have been transported direct from 2011 into 1956. The pair, played by Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai, stamped and flounced through the slow-moving scenes as if they were superior to the times they lived in, cross that everyone wasn’t Left-wing and politically correct like them, sure that they were about to inherit the Earth. Did the director have a bit of a problem with persuading them to get into character? While all the other actors had been subjected to more or less authentic 1956 makeovers, these two looked as if they’d just wandered in from the Groucho Club, or wherever 2011 groovers go. The BBC cannot recreate 1956 because it loves the present day too much, and is afraid to admit that anything about the past might have been better. It was drugs that put Charlie in jail I must disagree with my colleague Liz Jones about the 16-month prison term given to Charlie Gilmour, who swung on the Cenotaph. The sentence is, of course, nothing like as long as it looks. He will serve half of it at most. It was not passed to do Gilmour any good and I shouldn’t think it will. It was passed on behalf of the millions who thought his behaviour disgraceful and felt he should be punished. Our courts don’t do this often enough, which is why more and more people seek private revenge. By the way, if he hadn’t taken an illegal drug, the whole thing probably wouldn’t have happened. I say let’s have more custard pies in politics. What is wrong with all the people who have adopted gloomy long faces and intoned about the dignity of Parliament, breaches of security and so forth? And why do Westminster’s broadcasting rules prevent the cameras from showing such events (which is why you have seen only a back view of the Murdoch splat)? A pie in the face is a good test of a public figure, as is a bit of heckling. I suspect a few well-placed, well-timed pies might have halted the advance of Anthony Blair, who would have had to get Alastair Campbell to wipe them off and change his clothes for him. The real damage done to Rupert Murdoch was not the pie, but his magnificent wife’s embarrassingly maternal response, as if her little boy had been attacked in the playground and couldn’t look after himself. Mr Murdoch will never be a real tycoon again. Now that Rupert Murdoch has apologised for phone-hacking, isn’t it time that all the politicians, journalists, notables and ‘impartial’ broadcasters who backed the euro took out their own advertisement in the papers to apologise? They need to say sorry not just for being stupid, gullible and ill-informed, but for the derision and insults (‘Little Englander’, ‘Xenophobe’ etc) that they heaped on people such as me who rightly warned against it. His opinions were eventually judged so bizarre and embarrassing, even by a Labour government that winked at the covert decriminalisation of supposedly illegal drugs, that he was removed from that committee. This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Since we are to have a Judicial Inquiry into the wicked Press, shouldn’t we also have one into wicked politicians? Journalists can be nasty, and newspapers beastly, but their misdeeds are as nothing set beside those of governments. Governments also hack into phones, poke their noses into our personal affairs and misuse the information they obtain. Governments break up families in secret and hold increasing numbers of trials in secret, too. Governments sell information about us to outsiders. The state records our emails, spies on our rubbish bins and uses airport X-ray machines to peer sneakily at our naked bodies. It knows what we earn and where we live and monitors our medical records. It takes an increasingly creepy interest in what we think and say. No doubt politicians claim that these actions are justified. But who is to know, especially in a country with a weakened Press? However, these are minor crimes when set beside the other things governments do. Newspapers don’t bomb Belgrade or Baghdad or Tripoli, or invade Afghanistan and then forget why they did it. Newspapers don’t waterboard people, or bundle them off to clandestine prisons. Newspapers don’t release hundreds of convicted terrorists on to the streets nor thousands of convicted ordinary criminals either. Newspapers don’t open our frontiers to hundreds of thousands of unchecked migrants. But you may – rightly – say: What about the newspapers that have helped governments do some or all of these things? And here I will agree with you. The proper relationship between the Press and the government is the same as the one between a dog and a lamppost. Yet the Murdoch Press slobbered for years at the feet of the Blair government. They had a price. The Murdoch empire wanted Britain to go to war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The grotesque screeching of lies that stampeded us into these wars was a joint operation between News International and the dark heart of Alastair Campbell’s Downing Street. Then, when New Labour sagged, the same deal was on offer to anyone else cynical enough to accept it. I have never forgotten October 2, 2009, when David Cameron paid his first instalment to Rupert Murdoch, in return for his papers’ support in the coming Election. He promised a closer engagement in Afghanistan – ‘If I’m Prime Minister, Whitehall will go to war from minute one, hour one, day one that I walk through the door of Downing Street.’ He made other promises, driven by public opinion. But nobody, in September 2009, wanted us to get deeper into Afghanistan. Nobody, that is, except Mr Murdoch. In short, Mr Cameron was quite ready (as he has since proved) to send people to their deaths in Helmand and to allow many more to be maimed for life, to secure the support of The Sun during the Election campaign. This was one pledge he unequivocally kept. From that moment, I decided that Mr Cameron was personally disgusting as well as politically wretched. I think paying for office with the blood and limbs of other people is quite a lot worse than hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone, even if it isn’t illegal. And I’d like to hear Mr Cameron’s account – on oath – of the negotiations that led to this bargain. Just as I’d like to hear Anthony Blair’s account – on oath – of what he promised these people and what role they played in the carnage he unleashed in Iraq. Instead we get an investigation into the Press. Haven’t we got things a little out of proportion? A pathetically thin excuse I have now measured the road that Defence Minister Andrew Robathan says is ‘very narrow’, too narrow, apparently, for the hearses containing dead soldiers from Afghanistan. I went to Carterton, the small town on the doorstep of RAF Brize Norton where the honoured dead will arrive after September. And I measured the Burford Road, just outside the Church of St John the Evangelist, along which the cortege could pass on its way to Oxford, if the authorities had not chosen another route, which carefully avoids the only major High Street nearby. The road at this point is 22ft wide, which doesn’t strike me as specially narrow. Two-way traffic was getting through pretty briskly. What is more, Carterton, a strikingly modern town with exactly the same population as Wootton Bassett, has plenty of broad pavements on which people might – if they wished – assemble to pay their respects to those who did their duty to the utmost. Of course, the Prime Minister and his shadowy, rich backers (not all Murdoch employees) dwell just round the corner in the cosy hills above Witney and Chipping Norton. I do wonder what contacts they may have had with the Tory-controlled Oxfordshire County Council that has selected the route. The whole thing is increasingly suspicious. Boston and the silent explosion Say this to yourself slowly. A quarter of the population of Boston, Lincolnshire, are immigrants from Eastern Europe, Portugal and Asia. This amazing fact was well down the story about an explosion in an alleged moonshine factory. But it is in many ways far more explosive than the explosion. I first visited Boston 25 years ago when it was such a settled place that people from outside that part of Lincolnshire (me) were actually called ‘foreigners’ by the locals. The repeated warnings from Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch, that the country is being transformed by migrants, are plainly true. The only remaining question is whether it is a deliberate policy or mere incompetence. Being British has no future – for anyone I spent most of Sunday in the lovely Northern Irish city of Armagh, which on Tuesday was the scene of violent disturbances. I was not surprised to hear this. It was clear from the rival displays of flags of both Unionist and Nationalist communities – half-a-mile apart – that even this small country town remains profoundly divided, and the 1998 surrender to the IRA has not resolved the province’s problems at all. As I reported some weeks ago, several indicators suggest that the tensions are actually worse. I watched a modest Orange Parade, largely middle-aged and far from triumphalist. And I felt for those in the Province who simply wish to remain British and must now live under the rule of Martin McGuinness and his band of ruffians. Mind you, there’s not much future these days for anyone anywhere who wants to stay British. That’s not allowed.
23 July 2011 11:15 PM
The BBC can't recreate 1956 - because it loves our selfish, grasping present too much
‘I am a Scientist! You Will Obey!’ Professor Nutt speaks again
A Monumental Error, and Other Themes
Why does Rupert Want War?
Swinging on the Cenotaph
Sunday, 24 July 2011
Why does the BBC find it so hard to understand the past? Last week saw the launch of a new drama set in 1956, The Hour, attended with great trumpet blasts of publicity. It was, from top to bottom and from side to side, the most feeble, laughable tripe.
What a pity that the laws against that crime have been quietly abandoned, and that the rock music industry has done so much to pretend that illegal drugs are OK, or he and his family would have been saved from much woe.
+++ I AM almost unable to believe that the devastation of our Armed Forces is happening so fast, and with so little protest, under a nominally Conservative Prime Minister and Defence Secretary. The Royal Navy has virtually ceased to exist, and the Army is being forced to rely on part-timers for a significant part of its strength.
Usually this drawing of teeth and pulling of nails is what happens to conquered nations as they take a foreign yoke. Even Vichy France was allowed a bigger army than ours by Hitler. I think perhaps we are a conquered nation, but just not willing to admit it in public.
Real politics thrives on a diet of custard pies
Yes, I know I’m asking for a pie of my own by saying this. And I have a pretty good idea when and where I’m going to meet it. I’ll let you know how I get on.
+++ THE vast folly of the European single currency becomes more obvious with every day that passes. It may yet be the ruin of us all.
Many readers will recall my various clashes with Professor David Nutt, the noted Neuropsychopharmacologist and former Chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs.
I suspect they were worried that he was drawing attention to the establishment’s covert acceptance of drugs in our midst. I suspect that many more serious people on the drugs decriminalisation side view the Professor as an embarrassment. I wouldn’t blame them.
He has enjoyed the notoriety ever since, becoming a bit of a hero to many decriminalisers. I’ve attacked him for it. And now, in an article on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ site
he makes a direct attack on me. Actually, this isn’t the first time. Last December he gave an interview to The Guardian in which he assailed me for my alleged ’baseless alarmism’ about drugs.
Now I must do so again. It is important that Professor Nutt’s contributions to the drugs debate are judged on their merits, not protected from proper analysis by his scientist’s white coat.
Professor Nutt’s latest ‘Comment is Free’ article is as cavalier with facts as his claim on the radio that 160,000 people were subject to criminal sanctions for cannabis possession. The majority of them ( as I have shown) were not punished at all, merely given unrecorded warnings without legal force.
The problem with the Lancet report that began our quarrel is that it is a curious hybrid of natural science and social science, known as ‘Multicriteria Decision Analysis’ . Measurable chemical or physical factors such as ‘intrinsic lethality’, and physical damage, are assessed in the same document alongside such things as Family adversities, ‘Extent to which the use of a drug causes family adversities—eg, family breakdown, economic wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, future prospects of children, child neglect’.
Or 'International damage, Extent to which the use of a drug in the UK contributes to damage internationally—eg, deforestation, destabilisation of countries, international crime, new markets'; or 'Community - Extent to which the use of a drug creates decline in social cohesion and decline in the reputation of the community'; or 'Loss of relationships. Extent of loss of relationship with family and friends'. In effect, it claims to consider, in the same package and with the same objectivity, both stomach ulcers and deforestation, sociology and also psychology, chemistry and neurobiology. That is the point I strove to make. In the weighting of all these things against each other, some subjectivity must be involved. The claim that science has somehow established that one drug is more damagaing than any other is, to say the least, questionable *on scientific terms*.
I also pointed out that the report didn’t seem to take into account the difference made to alcohol’s impact by the fact that it is legally on sale, whereas most of the other drugs examined are at least technically illegal. Decca Aitkenhead (no political ally of mine) made the same point in her interview.
By omitting these facts Professor Nutt gives the impression that the clash was one between a cool, objective scientific mind and a raging tabloid hack. This is highly misleading.
Finally, but very significantly, Professor Nutt asserts ‘the BBC issued a statement saying that they would not use him [me] again.’
They issued no such statement. This is pure fiction. His account of my subsequent encounter with the ‘Feedback’ programme is also misleading in several significant ways. I didn’t protest about ‘censorship’. I complained about having been attacked at length on air on a supposedly impartial station, without being given any opportunity to defend myself. And I had to make very considerable efforts to secure the fair hearing that I eventually received.
I can only hope that Professor Nutt’s science is better than his journalism. But if he wishes to claim that his scientific standing gives him some special right to pronounce on this subject, it would seem to be incumbent on him to use the most basic scientific method in his own work – factual accuracy.
On and on it goes. Mr ‘Beaufrere’ claims to be ‘honestly’ unable to understand my position on alcohol. Well, I am ‘honestly’ unable to help him further. Can anyone else explain it to him? I doubt it. His problem is not with the explanation, but with his determination, derived from received wisdom and so not susceptible to examination, to believe that the existence of legal alcohol is an absolute obstacle to laws against cannabis. Against such an obstacle, the intelligence of Einstein, the forensic power of Sherlock Holmes and the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln cannot prevail. Let alone me.
It is perfectly simple and has been stated here more times than I care to recall. If there were any words of fewer than one syllable which I could use for the purpose, I would do so. Nor do I think that Mr Badger’s query, accompanied as it was by one of those ghastly Internet winks, was seriously meant.
I usually find that when people claim to be unable to understand something, they are in fact unwilling to do so.
Oh. And ‘commit’ is a reflexive verb here. I don’t know why its reflexivity has been abolished elsewhere, but on this weblog the only thing one commits, without a reflexive pronoun, is a crime, or a solecism or a faux pas. I commit myself to maintaining this proposition.
I suppose it happened about the same time that ‘The 1800s’ an expression referring to the years from 1800 to 1810, began to be used to refer to the entire 19th century (etc.). Was this introduced because it became too difficult to explain to uneducated children how the centuries had been numbered before?
Likewise I stand by my view that active campaigning to weaken the law against cannabis, for your own benefit, means that you are happy to see the human destruction that you know will result. The comparison he attempts to make (whereby I decline to support war on foreign countries because I don’t like their governments and am therefore said to be ‘happy’ about the regime of the Third Reich) doesn’t work. The element of active campaigning for the ease of one’s own pleasure, at the expense of others, is absent. So not a slur. A statement of fact. Cannabis legalisers are, axiomatically, selfish and wicked. I know some claim, incredibly, to support this campaign without any element of self-interest. If this is true( which, as I say, I very much doubt) then they are deluded and credulous. Take your choice.
Mr Slane asks how a Christian can be in favour of prisons. It’s not a matter of principle (though his alternative appears to be sale into slavery, which doesn’t strike me as specially Christian (***UNDERSTATEMENT WARNING***) ).
This is where we start from. Our system has arrived at prison as its principal weapon against wrongdoing (in fact prisons are a liberal idea, see my ‘Abolition of Liberty’). The Christian surely seeks to make that system conform as closely as possible to Christian principles.
An eater of vegetables says (first quoting me): ’ "It is simply false to pretend that the Second World War was fought out of idealism. This falsehood is spread by people who want to start wars for idealistic reasons now."- Peter Hitchens.
- That's a silly thing to say.’
That is the view of this person. But it isn’t necessarily true because he or she says it is. Can he or she tell us why he or she thinks it is silly? It seems perfectly sensible to me, and true, and I have explained why here in the past (see index). Briefly, is this person really unaware of the use of ‘appeasement’ and of Churchillian rhetoric, accompanied by the presence of a bust of Churchill on George W.Bush’s desk, the gift of our Washington Embassy, in fomenting the Iraq war?
I don’t think those who disapproved of Charlie Gilmour’s abuse of the Cenotaph, and subsequent behaviour, would have been satisfied by a fine, which he (or his parents) would have had no difficulty in paying.
Mr Platt cannot find anything in the index about fox hunting because I haven’t (n as far as I can remember) written anything about it since this blog started, and probably long before that. I seldom do. I care very little about it. My general view has always been that slaughterhouse cruelty is far worse, if you want a cause. Likewise the living conditions of many pigs and chickens. These things can be ameliorated by buying meat more carefully; and that the keepers of cats are responsible for far more hideous torture of small animals and birds than are foxhunters.
But as a suburban person I have no strong feelings about fox hunting, though I would welcome a method of stopping them relieving themselves in gardens and strewing mangled fast food cartons about the place. A hunt would probably be impracticable for this purpose.
Mr Platt goes on to ask ‘If the owner of a B&B turns away a homosexual couple on religious grounds does Mr. Hitchens consider the owner to be immoral, or is the imposition of such a law incompatible with a free society?’
I don’t see the comparison. Nobody suggested that the B&B owners refused unmarried guests (heterosexual or homosexual) to pursue pleasure. They did it because they believed it was their moral duty.
A number of readers chided me for what I said about the sentence given to Charlie Gilmour. I have responded privately to his father. But in general I stand by what I said. I don’t rejoice at the sentence (given my reservations about our prison system, it is hard for me to do this, ever), nor have I gloated over it. But I think those who say it was excessive are mistaken in many ways. The main point is that the general outrage against his actions had to be reflected by the justice system. All justice systems area form of street theatre, to discourage the bad and encourage the good. They pick on particular individuals to make examples of them. It is wise not to become one of those they pick on.
Several contributors have asked this week why support for the Afghan and Iraq wars was so important to the Murdoch organisation, and why it was such an important part of the deals made with Anthony Blair and David Cameron.
I think it is because Mr Murdoch genuinely believes in the aggressive neo-conservative globalist idea, which lies behind these wars.
He is a revolutionary radical ( I believe he had a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford), who has of course grown out of that sort of teenage left-wing view, but still seeks a home for his utopianism. He is also strongly prejudiced against the old-fashioned British establishment and the monarchy, the class system, closed borders and national sovereignty.
The 1981 film ‘Gallipoli’, starring, yes, Mel Gibson, which I think he backed, has been accused of perpetuating a number of anti-British myths about that campaign which are still widely believed in Australia, and was marketed – very annoyingly to me – as ‘from a place you never heard of, a story you’ll never forget’. In my generation, we’d certainly all heard of Gallipoli, and the implication that hadn’t was rather insulting.
I have always been much more baffled by his unyielding opposition to British membership of the Euro, a rare blast of support for national sovereignty against its foes.
I also suspect that Mr Murdoch’s commercial ends are – or certainly were - greatly aided by his strong support for a certain kind of rather basic American patriotism, which won him friends among the more simple-minded Washington politicians. But as it happens I suspect his feelings on this score are quite genuine. He is an anti-sovereignty, open borders interventionist neo-conservative, who has become a US citizen and, so far as I know, means it.
Several (mostly female) commentators have expressed doubts about the 16-month prison sentence imposed on Charlie Gilmour, a Cambridge history student who is notorious for swinging from one of the flags on the Cenotaph in Whitehall, later saying that he didn’t know what the Cenotaph was.
Oddly enough Gilmour wasn’t actually charged for this action, but was on trial for various other acts of stupidity and destruction at a student demonstration. Was the sentence too harsh?
Well, first of all, I would imagine that Gilmour will serve nothing like 16 months. The most he could possibly serve will be eight months, since almost all prison sentences are frauds on the public. They are in general automatically halved as soon as they are passed. And given the overcrowding of the prisons, I would expect him to be out and tagged in a surprisingly short time. Watch out for news of this.
In plain legal terms, I think the sentence may be too long – simply because the Cenotaph desecration wasn’t technically involved (though the maximum for his offence is five years) .
But did the court really ignore this incident? Could it? Many people were affronted and distressed by his behaviour, and thought it particularly inexcusable in a history undergraduate at one of the world’s greatest universities. They were (and I was) unimpressed by his claim that he didn’t know what the great and famous monument was. The trouble with this claim is that it might possibly be true, even for a Cambridge history undergraduate. The study of history nowadays is sketchy and often quite deliberately directed away from narrative forms or from any national preoccupation. Even so, it must have been fairly easy to guess that the structure was important and serious, and that swinging on the national flag in a public place might not be a good plan.
And (again also in my case) some observers weren’t terribly mollified by his admission that he had fried his brains with whisky, Valium and LSD, supposedly because he was upset about being snubbed by his natural father. I’m sorry for his trouble, and his natural father doesn’t sound very nice, but in the grown-up world, someone who takes mind-altering drugs is not less responsible for his bad actions under their influence, but more responsible. He decided to take them. He must have known they would unhinge him.
And there are in this world many people who have far greater griefs than this, who do not respond by swallowing rocket-fuel. As a plea in mitigation, it lacks power.
The judge may also have been influenced by Gilmour’s behaviour in court. According to one account in an unpopular newspaper, Gilmour giggled as film footage was shown of him prancing and squalling about the place like a cut-price Robespierre. I have only seen this in one place, but if it is true, then I would expect the judge to have been unimpressed by it.
The most telling argument against his treatment is that he is the victim of some sort of Toff Tariff, under which he is punished harder because he comes from a more comfortable background. I am not sure I am against this. I think that public figures can expect to be hit harder if they land in the dock, especially if they are the sort who influence others. So why not also fortunate and favoured people who reject the laws and customs which protect them and their way of life?
And there is the old rule that from those to whom much is given, much is required. Speaking as a former teenage troublemaker, I think I would have deserved a pretty hard time if I had been in court for something like that. I would probably have got it, too. Some older readers may remember the Garden House Riots in Cambridge, in 1970, when a protest against the Greek Colonels got out of hand. Some of those convicted on that occasion got 18 months, and probably served a good deal more of than Gilmour will serve.
One commentator compared Gilmour’s treatment to the suspended 15-week sentence given to the appalling Wendy Lewis, who relieved herself, while smoking, on Blackpool’s majestic and august war memorial (one of the finest structures in that place). Deputy District Judge (don’t you long for the days when we still had magistrates?) Roger Lowe told her that he had spared her custody to ‘allow her to get help for her drink and drug problems’.
Hmph. Her problems look pretty self-inflicted to me. What other factors might influence this difference? Blackpool’s memorial, important as it is, is not the National Cenotaph. . And the pictures of Lewis committing her desecration are not such as can be shown on TV or reproduced here or in the newspapers, so although her behaviour is in fact worse, we are not as shocked and angry about it as we would otherwise be. I am inclined to agree with Blackpool war veterans that she got off far too lightly, rather than that Gilmour was too heavily punished.
I would be much happier with Gilmour’s sentence if he was going to spend it in an austere, disciplined prison run by the authorities, rather than in a modern British jail which will be none of those things and where he may well find himself being persecuted by other inmates because he has been on TV and is posh.
But in an age where we have ceased to believe in punishment ,and pretend instead to believe in the will o’ the wisp of ‘rehabilitation’ ( and I would guess that the people complaining about Gilmour’s sentence think I am barbaric for believing in punitive prisons) , that option is not open. And can any serious judge really have such a person before him and not pass an exemplary sentence?
It’s all very sad. But I cannot join the chorus of protest.
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