Britannia Radio

08 October 2011 11:18 PM

So, there is a Plan B after all: saving the reckless at the expense of the thrifty

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The gruesome carnival of the party conferences is now over, so I can stop taking my nausea-suppressing pills at last. Do you have any idea how fraudulent these things are? They are sealed off from the people by police guards and high fences.

The applause is phoney and stage- managed. Even the arguments are faked. The vast halls are half-empty, and reached through bazaars of lobbyists for various forms of greed and folly.

The speeches themselves are seldom written by the people who obediently deliver them. There is no real life. All three major parties are living corpses, kept walking by transfusions from the taxpayer, dodgy billionaires or trade-union funds.

Meanwhile, the media coverage has mostly degenerated into pathetic partisan bootlicking of the party in power, matched by equally pathetic partisan savaging of the one that is out of power.

No doubt, Edward Miliband made a pretty dreadful speech in Liverpool the week before last. But it was nothing like as bad as the hogwash that gushed and gurgled out of the Prime Minister’s smirking mouth on Wednesday. As an exhortation to slackers and grumblers in some public-school football

team, it would have been average. As a statement of policy and aims from the Prime Minister of a middling nuclear power, it was pitiful.

Nor did it see fit to mention that the very next day the Bank of England would embark on a desperate plan (for once the word ‘desperate’ is justified here) to deliberately provoke yet more inflation.

Let me remind you of what one of our greatest economists, Lord Keynes, once wrote about this awful thing: ‘Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency.

‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.’

This colossal, unfair stealth tax on the prudent, to pay for the folly of the imprudent, is what we are reduced to. This is, as it turns out, Plan B. We have driven the country and the people deep into debts that can never be paid. So we will shrink the debt by shrinking everyone’s money.

So much for the careful, the thrifty, the provident who foolishly thought the Tories were their friends.

Their savings, their pensions, their long years of caution and restraint all shrivel to a handful of change in a surprisingly short time.

This crisis wasn’t made yesterday, or even in the Blair-Brown years. It has been in the making for decades, as sup posedly Conservative politicians have refused to get the Welfare State under control, refused to release this country from the chains loaded on to it by the EU, and risked all on the bubble of the housing market.

Of these people it has been rightly said that: ‘They could not dig, they dared not rob, and so they lied to please the mob.’ I hope I live long enough to see it carved on their tombstones.

Thought Police are still feeling collars

Much more should have been made of the amazing treatment of the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, a thoughtful and distinguished man. Mr Tyrie made the bad mistake of believing that free speech still exists in his party, and criticised the leadership. He was then taken into custody by a pair of Downing Street thought police officers, and soon afterwards emerged with his mind completely changed. Humiliating pictures of this event then found their way to the newspapers. This is how Blairism operated – and still operates.

Knox deserved to go free – just like ‘Lockerbie Bomber’

As it happens, I don’t think the Italian state ever came close to proving beyond reasonable doubt that Amanda Knox was guilty of murder. So, in a general way, I am pleased that she has been freed.

But compare the frenzy of interest over this rather unimportant case with the strange silence over the equally dubious – but far more important – conviction of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber, the Libyan Abdelbaset Al Megrahi.

One of the key witnesses against him has since admitted to lying in court.

Another, described by a senior judge as ‘an apple short of a picnic’, shockingly received a $2 million (£1.28 million) reward after giving evidence that many experts regard as highly dubious.

I suspect Megrahi’s release had more to do with the fear of a final, successful appeal revealing inconvenient facts than it did with British oil interests. If the US had wanted to stop him being freed, they could have. After all, they made us surrender to the IRA.

** DOES Richard Dawkins exist? The noted foe of religion seems set to be absent (despite many requests that he take part) from a planned debate with William Lane Craig, a leading American Christian philosopher (a number of other anti-God blowhards have also declined to debate with Craig).

To tease Professor Dawkins out of his Oxford lair, organisers of Craig’s tour plan to put advertisements on the city’s buses next week proclaiming ‘There’s probably no Dawkins.’ In the age of BCE and CE, it’s nice to see the other side hitting back.

** IN the supposed ‘Catgate’ row between Theresa May and Kenneth Clarke, who won? I don’t know, but I know who lost. We lost. This country is still subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, and to the views of judges on how it is to be interpreted.

Plenty of people who should never have been here in the first place will continue to be allowed by the courts to stay, even if they behave very badly.

But a lot of voters have been given the entirely fake impression that Mrs May is going to do something significant about this. I very much doubt it. I advise you to check on progress a year from now.

** MEET the new young MPs of the Labour Party and the Tory Party and you would find it very hard to tell the difference between them, if they weren’t actually wearing badges.

They’re not very interested in politics, though they know what views to adopt to get them up the ladder of ambition most quickly. They certainly have far more in common with each other than they do with a normal British person of any class.

Searching for any differences between the Labour and Tory parties this autumn, I can come up with only one. I don’t think Labour would have dared to devastate our Armed Forces with the disastrous and irreparable cuts visited on them by Mr Cameron.

** IF I have to read another word of praise for the magazine Private Eye on its 50th anniversary, I think I shall feel ill. It was, long ago, part of the cultural revolution that turned Britain into what it now is. These days it is a smug and very profitable organ of the new establishment, made all the worse by a pretence that it is still brave and dangerous.

We Need to Talk About ‘Antidepressants’

If you don’t want the plot of this month’s most fashionable film release (the week after next, I think) spoiled, don’t read another word. If you’ve read the book, then please be indulgent to me, as I haven’t. Those who have read the book ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ are ahead of me here. Whatever this article will be, it cannot discuss how faithful the new film ( dominated by the stark features of Tilda Swinton) is to the book of the same name.

In fact I will be most grateful for the thoughts of those who know the book well, if they wish to tell me that the novel deals in a different way with the central subject I wish to address below.

For those who have neither read the book (by Lionel Shriver, the only female Lionel I’ve ever come across) nor seen the film, it is about the perpetrator of a High School massacre in a fictional American town.

The killer-to-be, the Kevin of the title, is followed through childhood and early adolescence, as he grows more and more sinister and unappealing. Then he kills a lot of people, and is locked up, leaving his mother living a besieged and burned-out life, wondering if it was all her fault. I’m a bit baffled by the way the parents of Kevin’s victims persecute her. Is there any evidence that people do this in real life? I should have thought a sort of shattered pity would be more likely than a relentless, vengeful hate.

Not since that brilliantly menacing film ‘The Omen’ have I seen any child portrayed with such malevolence as is the young Kevin. I do hope the child involved banks his cheque and stops acting now. Playing that role again will surely be bad for him.

Kevin is every mother’s nightmare. The book has been described as a long propaganda treatise against giving birth at all. The one genuinely funny scene in the film shows his sleep-starved mother, haggard and utterly exhausted by the baby Kevin’s incessant screaming, deliberately parking baby and pram next to a pneumatic drill at full volume, presumably so she can’t hear the screaming any more. Yet faintly, through the roar and rattle of the drill, Kevin’s lusty yells can still be heard. Nothing will stop him. Nothing short of nuclear war can drown him out.

Many parents who have experienced such things will see this as an exaggerated portrayal of the problems of babies who won’t sleep and like to scream. Others, whose babies slept sweetly, will not.

Later Kevin spitefully vandalises his mother’s beautifully-decorated study, and wages a long, revolting war over what may be delicately described as potty training.

He finally gives in on this matter, after his mother, moved to rage by his behaviour, lashes out and accidentally breaks Kevin’s arm, also scarring him.

This is a very odd moment. The hospital never suspects that the break is anything other than the accident Kevin convincingly tells them it was. He subsequently blackmails his mother at every turn by simply pointing to the scar. Yet the violence changes his behaviour. From then on, he goes to the lavatory in a normal way. This isn’t quite consistent, in my view. It may also be an unintentional argument for old-fashioned smacking, that unspeakable sin.

There are various other clashes, including a very nasty set of scenes involving his little sister (realising what was bound to happen next, I squeamishly left the cinema for five minutes during one of these. Those who remained told me that it wasn’t as bad as I had feared, but I’m still not sorry)

In the film, we see remarkably little of Kevin’s more general childhood. What is his school like? Is he disruptive there? Is he packed off to nursery at an early age? Is he sat in front of the TV all the time? Does he play computer games a lot? (he’s seen doing so once, with his half-witted father, who never seems to grasp how monstrous his son is). At one stage (and this will be important later) he’s shown willingly and indeed enthusiastically allowing himself to be read a rather archaic and wordy version of the Robin Hood story, behaviour that doesn’t fit at all with the rest of his character.

I ask these questions about his upbringing because – trespassing on an old controversy - the fictional Kevin strikes me as exactly the sort of child who would be ‘diagnosed’ with the fictional complaint ‘ADHD’ or even the five-star version ‘ODD’ and then dosed into compliance by American or British doctors with methylphenidate or dextroamphetamine, the powerful mind-altering drugs used on either side of the Atlantic to ‘treat’ this alleged condition , for whose existence there is no objective evidence (see index under ‘ADHD’) .

There’s no mention of any such ‘diagnosis’ in the film. And in the one scene that addresses the subject, it’s left unclear whether Kevin (who is 15 when he commits his crime) has been taking illegal drugs in his early teens. I’d guess from the scene that we are supposed to think that he has been, but the makers of the film don’t think it that important. I glanced at the book to see what it said about the subject and it appeared to suggest that Kevin’s parents had been pretty relaxed about illegal drugs themselves.

However, we are left in no doubt that Kevin has been taking SSRI ‘antidepressants’ - though we do not learn this (as I’ll explain) until he is in custody after his crime.

During a visiting-time conversation with his mother, she suggests, and isn’t contradicted by him, that he has made cynical use of this fact, in his trial, to plead diminished responsibility. We also learn that his mother regards this as a smokescreen for the boy’s wickedness.

He is said to have come up with the correlation between SSRI drugs and rampage killings, in conversations with his defence attorney, and to have had all the case histories at his fingertips. This suggests that this pre-cooked excuse might even have been part of his plan for the massacre. The whole implication of this is that it has nothing to do with his crime, which has its origins in his character – which has its origins, perhaps, in his parents or their way of life. It is not for a moment suggested that he might have been impelled from mere nastiness into mass homicide by taking mind-altering drugs. That, of all things, is more or less ruled out.

I’ve mentioned here before (see index) the extraordinary correlation between such killings and SSRI ‘antidepressants’. (Yes, I know correlation isn’t causation. That is precisely why I call repeatedly for a proper investigation into the apparent link). I’ve also mentioned the growing doubts (see index, under ‘antidepressants’) among doctors about the nature and real effect of these drugs, notably the powerful articles by Dr Marcia Angell, of the Harvard Medical School, recently published in the New York Review of Books.

It seems to be to be a great shame that this film lightly dismisses Kevin’s acknowledged use of SSRI drugs as no more than a cheap defence attorney’s get-out. Once again, is there any evidence that this has ever happened? There seems to me to be more evidence the other way. Whatever other feelings I may have about this sombre, gruelling but potent film, this seems to me to be its greatest fault.

Still Useless After All These Years – the Tory Party’s amazing survival

A reader scolded me last week for bothering with the party conferences. Why, I was asked, did I waste my time at these empty events with these empty people?

Well, I have an excuse. For me these occasions are a little like a period of truce, or one of those diplomatic quirks which allow one to venture for a few hours into hostile territory. Under a sort of Safe Conduct provided by my valued colleagues on our political staff , I can meet and assess politicians who would almost certainly never consent to speak to me if I approached them individually.

I will admit that these days I seldom enter the conference hall itself, and when I do I seldom linger for long. My memory still echoes with the raucous but genuine debates that used to rend the air of Brighton and Blackpool when the Labour Party was still a real party, rather than an election machine for metropolitan trendies.

Even Tory conferences had their moments. They were always so tightly controlled that we would joke that they were like the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ( later I was to attend this body, and it was rather more lively than any British party conference of today). I came years too late to witness the great thrashing administered by Tory stewards to the Empire Loyalists (described in my ‘Cameron Delusion’ ) who still believed publicly in policies quite recently supported (in private) by the then yet-living Winston Churchill. But you could often feel the tension between the assumptions of the urbane, socially liberal platform and the raw, lower-middle-class patriotism that came in waves from the floor, and which would be assuaged, year by year, by empty ‘law and order’ and ‘strong defence’ speeches from front benchers given the task of at least appearing to be conservative.

I myself once presented Kenneth Clarke with a Labour Party membership application form, in an unsuccessful publicity stunt after he had made one of his wilder pro-EU speeches.

Watching Mrs Thatcher coping with the disaster of the Cecil Parkinson scandal was quite instructive, in a Blackpool swept by enormous autumn rainstorms and overhung with black skies. Likewise the pitiful last days of Iain Duncan Smith, whose slow-motion assassination by his own party and the media was one of the most ruthless things I’ve ever seen. And then there was the tory conference where Ann Widdecombe tried to set out an effective anti-drugs policy, and was immediately torpedoed in the bars of Bournemouth by the drug confessions of her front-bench colleagues.

There was a period, from about 1980 till about 2005, when both major parties were undergoing revolutions, reveolutions in which their traditional supporters were told to get lost, and in which they were taken over by machine operators and political professionals, smooth, merciless and utterly uninterested in open debate.

Now that’s over, the ‘debates’ are as exciting as a convention of tractor salesmen in Omaha , Nebraska, and perhaps less so. Even the fringe meetings, once a chance for dissenting thought to express itself, are now patrolled by the whips, and other sneaks and talebearers, , intent on ensuring that nobody does anything out of turn.

It was at one such meeting, organised by the Bruges Group, in Manchester two years ago, that I warned a stony-faced audience of ‘right-wingers’ that David Cameron would betray them utterly, and that the Tory Party didn’t merit their support. Some of those there who gave me the cold shoulder that afternoon have since written to me, to say how right I was, and I’m grateful. But the delusion persists, that Mr Cameron has some sort of secret ‘right-wing’ agenda, which he is waiting to unleash if only Nick Clegg would let him, or if only he could get an outright majority.

There is no evidence whatsoever of this supposed plan, and plenty of evidence that Mr Cameron would have governed like this with a majority. But the utter feebleness of the Tory ‘right’, whom I have many times compared to those loyal black Labradors who totter trustingly into the master’s car, as they are taken to the vet to be put down, ensures that it isn’t tested.

Indeed when, as I have predicted, the coalition stages its split in 2014, there will be a series of empty gestures to the ‘right’, to reinforce this impression. A few appointments of ‘right-wing’ MPs to junior ministerial posts for the fag-end of the government; a few doomed pieces of ‘right-wing’ legislation, destined to fail noisily as the Liberal Democrats vote them down (they will also benefit from this panto, by appearing to regain their left-wing credentials). The ‘right’ will be taken in by them because they want to be. The alternative, a claws and teeth fight against the intolerant and spiteful liberal leadership of their party, doesn’t appeal. It’s not in their nature. Is the same true of Tory voters? I do hope not. The Tory Party, despite is recent acquisition of lots of unappealing millionaire supporters, is organisationally decrepit and close to extinction. It only needs a bad defeat to bring it all tumbling down. And then those who want a conservative, patriotic government will have to recognise, in many cases for the first time, that they are friendless at Westminster and must build a proper party to speak for them if they want to be heard .

A couple of other points:

1.I plan to write at some length about the forthcoming film ‘We Need to talk About Kevin’, quite soon. I’ve seen a preview.

2. And I should say to the person posting as ‘Vegetarian’ that free speech demands responsibility and respect for truth on the part of the speaker. It is not a licence to spread, er, mistaken information. This person posted ‘I don't think he [Jesus Christ] would have sat like Hitchens while a man was electrocuted, boasted in a book about how he "smelt the human flesh burning", and then gone back for more. ('He liked it so much he bought the company!').’

Well, I can’t argue with ‘Vegetarian’ about Christ’s attitude under such circumstances. We can only speculate. But as for the occasion to which I think he must be referring, this is presumably the execution in April 1995 of Nicholas Lee Ingram in a prison in Jackson, Georgia, for the particularly vicious and cruel murder of J.C. Sawyer, many years earlier. Ingram *did* boast, during the crime, that he liked to torture people, and was as good as his word. This didn’t stop various persons from campaigning for his reprieve, though they must have known he was guilty. There was eyewitness evidence against him from Mrs Mary Sawyer, who had feigned death after he shot her too. He had tied them both to the same tree. I am not sure how I can be said to have ‘boasted’ about this execution, though I have described it in print more than once, believing it to be part of my job as a reporter.

And so it is. Many US reporters regularly attend such events, and two of them were more than willing to pass the task to me when I asked them. As a British reporter working in the USA, I considered it my job to describe that country as it is, and to experience things that I could only experience there.

George Orwell also witnessed an execution, about which he wrote very memorably. So did Charles Dickens, and (I think) Emile Zola as well as Arnold Bennett, who graphically described a public guillotining in ‘The Old Wives’ Tale’. Many other reporters have done so. Perhaps it is all right to witness an execution if you disapprove, but not all right if you approve. I cannot say. The experience is chastening whatever you think, as I have written. I certainly dispute having written about how I ‘smelt the human flesh burning’. I in fact recorded that no such thing took place, having had it many times suggested to me that it did. My account of the event, I like to hope, conveys some of the solemn, fearful dreadfulness of the occasion, even in the absence of such horrors.

As for ‘going back for more’ I have not subsequently attended an execution and do not intend to do so again. I had, however, attended an execution by lethal injection, of Larry Anderson , in Huntsville Texas, about a year before the Ingram case. Anderson had abducted and murdered Zelda Webster, stabbing her 15 times before dumping her body by the roadside. He was arrested while still spattered with her blood, and still carrying the knife. He said he was bloodstained because he had been ‘skinning rabbits’ but eventually told police where Zelda Webster’s body could be found.

I have also described his execution. But I do not believe I have ‘boasted ‘ about it.

This is why I object to what I regard as the insinuation and inaccuracy of the post by ‘Vegetarian’. I’ve told him or her that he or she must either substantiate the assertion made ( I do not think it can be substantiated, but I must provide the opportunity). If not, he or she must withdraw and apologise unreservedly. ‘Vegetarian’ has replied with a rather petulant outburst (this is all on the ‘What Labour Won’t Do’ thread). Well, this is my standard response to allegations of this kind. If he or she neither substantiates nor withdraws and apologises unreservedly, then he or she will no longer be welcome here. I don’t believe this is an attack on freedom of speech. I think it is perfectly proper chairmanship.