This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column The governing elite have decided to respond by pretending to be fierce for a few weeks. But they will do nothing to change the policies that brought us to this state. Those policies will continue, and so will the consequences. The Prime Minister, who has a great talent for faking anger and concern over things he couldn’t care less about, gave a speech on Monday that could have been delivered by his idol Anthony Blair. It even contained several of Mr Blair’s favourite verbless sentences. We had the usual lies, told now for more than 30 years by politicians of all parties, about scrapping police paperwork, putting constables back on the beat, replacing rights with responsibilities, and distinguishing right from wrong again. Nothing will happen. We had the curious confession that ‘you can’t say that marriage and commitment are good things – for fear of alienating single mothers’. And, lo, the word ‘marriage’ was not mentioned again in the entire oration. Why not? Because of that very fear. We will continue to subsidise the fatherless families that create the conditions for gangs and feral youth. There was praise for the few exceptional state schools that work. But there was no commitment to build the new grammar schools that would spread such standards to the whole country. Why not? New grammar schools are currently illegal – yes, illegal – under an Act of Parliament. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, made a commitment to stick with the tried, tested and utterly failed egalitarian stupidity of comprehensive schooling more clearly still. He delivered his thought-free post-disorder speech at a comprehensive school which was presumably opened up specially for him. Mr Cameron’s choice of location was also significant. By that I don’t mean it was near the expensive house in the country which he could have afforded himself but which we taxpayers kindly helped him to buy with the (now discontinued) special housing benefit for MPs – though it was. I mean that the place was picked to send a careful message to the liberal elite that he remains one of theirs, and that they can ignore his claptrap about the ‘broken society’. He chose to deliver his words at Base 33, a ‘youth centre’ in Witney, a solid symbol of the failed policy of appeasement towards vandalism and feral behaviour. Behind him, plainly deliberately selected for the purpose, was a wall vividly covered in graffiti – that ugly, hateful and aggressive blight that law-abiding people rightly see as a sign of menace and a warning that the neighbourhood is troubled. It is loutishness rendered in spray-paint. Mr Cameron also declared that ‘government cannot legislate to change behaviour’. This is both defeatist and untrue. The whole Fabian socialist project, which revolutionised our nation throughout the 20th Century and which eventually took over the Tory Party itself, was intended to change behaviour, and did so. So is the new programme which has replaced it, the politically correct drive for ‘equality and diversity’. The 1969 Divorce Reform Act completely changed the nature and standing of marriage. The Children Act of 1989 sharply reduced adult authority. The consequences of the Human Rights Act are limitless. The Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971 decriminalised cannabis, with huge results for behaviour. So did the abolition of the old alcohol licensing laws. Numberless Criminal Justice Acts have robbed the courts of power. What does he mean, ‘government cannot legislate to change behaviour’? It can, and it does – but always in the wrong direction. It is 20 years since I woke up to find tanks trundling down my Moscow street, gun barrels aslant in the early morning sun. It was, in a way, what I had been waiting for and expecting during my entire time as a correspondent in what was then the capital of the Evil Empire. I had hurried back from the Black Sea coast the day before because of rumours that something of the kind was about to happen. Yet the actual sight of naked force near my home was still a fearful shock, and I have never claimed to have understood fully the world-changing events that followed. But we now have a clear and exciting account of these momentous times, written by my old friend Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, one of the great reporters of our age. It also explores and illuminates the bristling personal rivalry and loathing that crackled between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. It is a marvellous read and would make an unmissable TV docu-drama. It is called Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day Of The Soviet Union. Please read it. Those who seek to blame or indeed punish parents for the misdeeds of their children should heed the painful cry of one such parent this week, a respected TV cameraman. ‘I am heartbroken and totally ashamed,’ he said of his daughter’s criminal actions. ‘This is the end product of a society that tells you that you can’t discipline your children.’ Those who do, he said, risked being reported to police or social services. He concluded: ‘Children now have the power over their parents, not the other way round.’ I think it’s worse than that. You can, of course, argue that it’s the slumping in the armchair and the grazing on junk food that actually kill people. But what if TV, by switching off our imaginations, weakens important parts of the brain? Could it be the explanation for all this dementia and Alzheimer’s which are afflicting the first generation to be exposed to lifelong TV-watching? Suspects who would normally be given bail are being held in custody. Magistrates, who normally send two per cent of convicted criminals to prison, are now sending 70 per cent there. Sentences are up to 40 per cent longer than average. Within weeks, things will have settled back to where they were before, not least because the jails will be bursting. The absence from public view of the Injustice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has been one of the most interesting features of the past week. He is biding his time.
28 August 2011 9:07 AM
We're cheering on a football crowd with AK-47s, who could be worse than Gaddafi
20 August 2011 9:33 PM
The picture that tells you everything you need to know about the Great Faker
Sunday 28 August 2011
The moment has come to admit that I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it.
It looks to me pretty much like a football crowd armed with AK-47s and bazookas, with the added ingredient of Islamic militancy. Why am I expected to like it?
For we are all supposed to approve of it. Every media outlet, every politician, every church pulpit, treats it as an unmixed Good Thing.
Not me. I look at these wild characters in baseball caps and tracksuit bottoms blasting ammunition into the sky (often killing or injuring innocents far away, but they don’t care) and I am mainly thankful that they are a long way off.
I suppose it is possible that this lot will miraculously create a law-governed democracy with freedom of speech and conscience. But I somehow shan’t be surprised if they don’t.
Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better. The world has known this since the French Revolution of 1789, when bliss and joy turned to mass murder and dictatorship in a matter of months.
The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like. Power can be given (not often) or taken, and shared out in different ways. But it never ceases to exist.
Egypt’s upheaval has already begun to go bad. Libya’s has been plastered with danger signs from the start. The anti-Gaddafi rebels are an incompetent and fractious mess. They have already murdered one of their own leaders.
And – I think it very wrong that this aspect is played down so much – their victory would never have happened without Nato providing them with an air force, as it did for the equally suspect Kosovo Liberation Army in the early days of Blair.
We have given them the military gifts of cool self-discipline, long training and competence which we ought to reserve for ourselves and for protecting our own freedom and independence. If they don’t possess them, I don’t think they deserve to rule a country.
The official pretext, that we are ‘intervening to protect civilians’, is lying hogwash and should be laughed at every time it is used. In the past few days – according to reliable reports – Libya’s rebels have been guilty of indiscriminate shooting into civilian areas and the brutal and arbitrary arrests of suspected opponents.
It is false to claim, as some instantly will, that by saying this I am defending Colonel Gaddafi. I am not. He is indefensible.
The questions are these: Will what follows be better? Will the burned, bandaged bodies, the crammed morgues and the hospital wards full of stench, screams and groans have been worthwhile? Were we right to take sides?
Here are some problems for the cheerleaders of this event, most of them modern Left- liberals. The savage regimes that are now falling are the direct result of the destruction of the empires of Europe. America, which encouraged this, quietly hung on to its own large land empire. So did the USSR.
These campaigners for ‘colonial freedom’ argued – I recall them doing it – that it didn’t matter what sort of regimes arose when independence came. What mattered was that they would be free from us. That ‘freedom’ led directly to Colonel Gaddafi.
True, Europe’s empires were often violent and cruel, though ours was generally better than the others. And they were frequently corrupt, though again ours was cleaner than the ¬others. But their misdeeds were petty set beside those of most of the newly ‘free’ countries of Africa and the Middle East.
Now it is the very same Left-liberals who are most set on using bombs and sanctions to overthrow the states they were so keen on. How strange that, more than half a century after the Suez bungle finished us as a Mediterranean power, British military force is now in action again in North Africa, bolstering a farcical yet sinister army in pick-up trucks whose aims we don’t even know.
Violence and bad language – is that really the best we can offer children of 12?
I was beguiled into seeing the new film Super 8 by enthusiastic reviews. It was suggested that it was the new ‘ET’, a rite- of-passage drama about an unhappy boy discovering important truths through contact with an alien.
I really should have known better. I should also have known that a ‘12A’ rating doesn’t mean what someone of my generation might think it means.
Super 8 seemed to me to be needlessly violent, frightening and noisy, with many moments at which a 12-year-old might want to hide behind the seat or look away.
Even the train crash was overdone, while being less impressive than the better and more believable one in The Fugitive. There’s also a scene that makes a joke out of the brain-wrecking, indeed life-wrecking drug cannabis, probably more dangerous to teenagers than to any other part of the population.
Its rating only emphasises the complete uselessness of our film classification system, which seems to think that really rather young children should be able to see ‘moderate violence’, ‘occasional’ gore, ‘brief indications’ of sexual violence and ‘disturbing sequences’ and hear the f-word spoken, provided these things are not frequent or sustained.
The s-word, used like punctuation in Super 8, is apparently unrestricted now. ‘Infrequent use of very mild bad language’, as they call it, is now permitted even by the rare ‘U’ classification. I know the s-word also appears in ET, and I think it shouldn’t. Plenty of children are still brought up not to use it.
And ‘realism’ – usually advanced as the case for this sort of thing – isn’t an argument in a film in which an alien comes to stay in a suburban house.
Like, hello? If we can be unrealistic about a telepathic extraterrestrial in the wardrobe, and airborne pushbikes, then we can be unrealistic about the s-word, too, can’t we?
But even with this fault, ET is a far gentler and more appealing film – and a far better one – than Super 8. And it is sad that in the 20-odd years between them, our idea of what it is suitable for children to see and hear has changed so much.
The education con is collapsing at last
Britain's disastrous education establishment are at last being found out. They said history was being properly taught, but the truth is now revealed – fewer than 30 per cent of comprehensive pupils in England and Wales study it at all.
They say the GCSE is a good exam. But now a distinguished private school head has confessed (after years of pretending otherwise) that it is ‘the worst exam of its kind in the world’.
Next, Labour admits that abolishing the 11-plus was a stupid mistake? Alas, not any time soon.
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
It is now clear that we have learned nothing from seeing our cities in flames and our streets ruled by violent thieves.
Gripping day that changed the world
There’s still a tremendous unsolved mystery in the supposed suicides of several
people at the heart of the failed communist putsch – especially those of Nikolai Kruchina
and Georgi Pavlov, the chief treasurers of the fabulously wealthy Soviet Communist Party, who both ‘jumped’ from high windows in the days after the coup.
Crammed with fascinating and telling detail, it describes Mikhail Gorbachev’s final evening as President of the USSR, with a series of flashbacks to the events that led
to the hauling down of the Red Flag from the Kremlin.
Pull the plug on Child Power
I think all modern parents will recognise the truth in this. Except for David Cameron and Ed Miliband.
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News that watching too much TV can shorten your life comes as no surprise. It certainly makes us more easily fooled and more conformist, and is the only explanation for the electoral success of the Blair creature – surely a form of mass mental illness.
If so, then expect these scourges to strike at younger and younger victims in decades to come.
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If the courts always behaved as they are doing now, we wouldn’t have many of the problems we have. But the current frenzy of ‘toughness’ is a public-relations gesture and will not last.
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