One said that wanting to leave the EU was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. The other attacked Mr Cameron’s broken pledge for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Both knew that the Tory whips would destroy them if their names became known. So their words were spoken by actors, as if they were dissidents in some foreign dictatorship. This extraordinary behaviour, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ultra-respectable Analysis programme, tells you all you need to know about the Conservative Party’s real position on Brussels, and plenty of other things. For of course, this isn’t just about boring old Brussels. The EU is symbolic of all the other great issues that divide Mr Cameron from Tory voters – mass immigration, crime, disorder, education, marriage and morals. I have known since I first spotted him trying to weaken the anti-drug laws that Mr Cameron was not a conservative. I have spoken to former colleagues who have concluded that he believes in nothing at all, but I think it is much worse than that. I think he is an active, militant elite liberal, who despises our country and its people, just as much as any Islington Marxist does. What I could never understand was how so many men and women with the usual complement of eyes, ears and brains (and nostrils) managed to fool themselves so completely about him. How many times did I read weighty commentators (weighty because of the huge number of lunches they had eaten with their political insider chums) proclaiming that Mr Cameron was a ‘sound Eurosceptic’? Or that he had ‘deep conservative instincts’? I seem to remember one such even praising his cricket. I still remember the look of rabbit-like fear on his smooth face on the day he broke his pledge of a Lisbon referendum. He was too cowardly to take a question from me, while that pathetic burst balloon, William Hague, sat silent in the front row of the press conference, endorsing his chief’s poltroonery. But still the Tory loyalists wouldn’t see it, fooling themselves with a babyish dream that Mr Cameron had a secret plan, that once in office he would tear off his outer garments and reveal himself as SuperCam, a real patriot and conservative. Well, now he has torn off his outer garments, ordered his cringing followers to vote against an EU referendum and revealed that he is in fact the reincarnation of Ted Heath, the man who betrayed Britain to Brussels and got his way by bullying and shameless dishonesty. Nobody is making him do this. It is his own true self speaking. I told you so. I was right. And I am now enjoying myself telling you again. But when will you do anything about it? Nearly as bad, most of our media reported the barbaric spectacle in gleeful tones. God preserve them from ever being at the mercy of a lynch mob themselves is all I can say. Shame, also, on those who referred to this squalid crime as an ‘execution’. Why is this word these days applied to its opposite? An execution follows lawful due process. It is not another word for a gang slaying or a lynching, such as happened to Muammar Gaddafi. Any new state that begins with such an event will be poisoned and polluted by it ever afterwards, just as the communist world was blighted by the Bolshevik massacre of the Russian imperial family in 1917. The nebulous new Libyan regime is already torturing its prisoners, who in many cases have been seized without formal legal procedure. From now on, all those who supported this ill-advised intervention will share responsibility for every lynching, whipping, unjust detention and miserable dungeon in the New Libya they helped to make. Doesn’t anyone know any history? The day that Colonel Gaddafi overthrew King Idris in 1969, Tripoli was full of rejoicing crowds, no doubt similar to those who celebrate today. I am pleased to say that a planned march against immigration in Boston, Lincolnshire, has been called off. The organisers rightly feared that it would be taken over by sinister and creepy factions. It occurs to me - though of course it isn’t true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the ‘British Patriotic Party’, and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers. And then these people could latch on to every decent protest and wreck it. By contrast, look at what is happening in Switzerland. There, a mainstream political party isn’t ashamed to oppose mass immigration on perfectly civilised and reasonable grounds. The Swiss are on course for a referendum that will almost certainly vote to close their borders after a failed experiment with leaving them wide open. Mr Dodgeon, pictured right, calls himself ‘an old hippie’. He is an academic and former social worker. He is all too typical of the demoralised English middle class, a type of liberal bigot common in the media and among teachers and social workers. In their tens of thousands, they fried their brains with dope in the Sixties and Seventies, so becoming even more stupid than they already were. Now they form a noisy, powerful lobby against proper enforcement of the drug law today, lying that there is a ‘war on drugs’. Ha ha. If only there were such a war, a schoolgirl might not have died after taking drugs Mr Dodgeon had left in his house during a teenage party. And he himself might not have been badly injured later while trying to end his life by jumping from a flyover. Thanks to his selfishness and stupidity (the man is 61 years old), all these things happened. No doubt the drugs lobby will try to put the blame elsewhere. They will be wrong to do so. As it happens, I am rather sorry for Mr Dodgeon, whose pitiable attempt at suicide shows that he has suffered true remorse. But I am not sorry for the rest of his generation of idiots, who by their own bad example and irresponsibility - and by their unceasing calls for weaker drug laws - are endangering the health and even the lives of today’s young. * * * I don't normally think of Dame Joan Bakewell as an ally in my campaign to re-moralise Britain. I tend to feel she did her bit to de-moralise it in the Sixties. But I think she should be praised for pointing out what is missing in our country. She said: ‘Religious commitment to charity and kindness has declined. Nobody learns that. They don’t learn it in their homes, they don’t learn it in their school, it’s seen as soft. It’s not what you’re about. 'You’re meant to stand up for your own individual personality, make your way in the world and good luck to you. Kindness, empathy, generosity are all in short supply and people used to learn it from the churches – I learnt it at Sunday school. Where do you learn it now? I don’t know.’ Nor do I. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down 20 October 2011 5:25 PM 'Elaine' continues : 'But if this deduction is based on the fact that some Muslim terrorists have slit the throats of other humans to terrorize other people, then I would hope you would not be so prejudicial.' Elaine is extending what I said further than I said it, and then criticising me for what she thinks I might mean. I said what I said. No more, no less. It was based on direct experience and on observation. Whatever it may or may not be, it cannot be called prejudicial. For me, the 15th October is always a date to be remembered. Not to be recalled with any special pleasure, rather the opposite. But definitely one to be marked. The more I examine the recent history of our country, the more the 15th October 1964 seems to me to be a dividing line between one sort of Britain and another. For it was on that day that Labour won the 1964 election by an eighth of an inch, and so we entered the age of Harold Wilson, the most underestimated Prime Minister of modern times. By underestimated I don’t mean that people are wrong, if they recall him at all, to think of him as a rather shallow chancer without many redeeming qualities. By the standards of his time he was a pretty unscrupulous creature, especially when set against his rival, Alec Douglas-Home, a gentleman if ever there was one. I once served under a political editor of the Daily Express, in the days when it still sold two million copies a day and had some standing, who was a man of great experience and wisdom and on first-name terms with most of the leading politicians of the day. ‘All Prime Ministers go mad’, he would say. ‘It would be kinder to take them out and shoot them when they retire, like injured horses’. He had two exceptions to this rule. One was Alec Douglas-Home, who remained level-headed and sane till the day he died; and the other was James Callaghan, a premier for whom I find I have more and more time the more I know about him. Maybe if Callaghan, rather than Roy Jenkins, had been Home Secretary in the middle years of the Wilson Government, the great permissive society revolution of 1964-70 would not have happened, or would have been far more restrained. He only took over this post after the early reforming frenzy was over. He certainly is the only major Labour politician to have spoken explicitly against the permissive society, while resisting (alas unsuccessfully) the Wootton Report on Cannabis in January 1969. He was also genuinely concerned about the decay of state education, being permanently embittered by his own failure to get to university, entirely because his family were too poor. For it was Jenkins, in alliance with a crew of socially and culturally liberal Tories, who revolutionised the country. Incidentally, it was that same cross-party alliance –which has now taken over all three parties – that ditched the laws against pornography and got us into what was then the Common Market. Roy Jenkins is the father not only of the SDP, and of New Labour, but also of the ‘modernised’ Tory Party which now sits so happily in coalition with Jenkins’s own party. The thing was that the Jenkins revolution happened just as the fabric of the country was changing too. Tower blocks and motorways were being built. Ocean liners were being scrapped. Jet planes were beginning to be common. Steam engines and railway branch lines were disappearing. Bus-conductors were being abolished. Public phone boxes were being modernised and direct dialling introduced; primary schools were chucking out their stern old rows of desks; people were starting to buy imported cars in large numbers; colour TV began. As I look back now on my own childhood, 1964 offers a clear dividing line between one sort of country – in which I had been brought up much as a child might have been brought up in the 1930s , and the utterly transformed place in which I would experience adolescence. It smelt, felt and looked quite different. And, as I often say, it is my great good fortune to have seen personally the world that existed before, so that nobody can lie to me about it – and also so that I know what was wrong with it, and don’t idealise it. I did actually see small boys, the same age as me, diving for big old copper pennies in the mud of Portsmouth Harbour near the Gosport Ferry. And I mean diving, they went head first into the slime and came up coated in it. What is most striking about this memory is that they looked perfectly happy in their disgusting occupation, and that passers-by, as they chucked their pennies into the mud, thought it all perfectly normal. Like the whiff of coal-smoke, or the occasional sight of a mainline express steam excursion, or the glowing window of a proper old-fashioned toyshop on a late winter’s afternoon, walking up the ramp of the old Gosport Ferry ( as I did quite recently) and hearing the whoop of its hooter can trigger that extraordinary mixture of memories, including the disgusting food we used to eat (or in my case not eat), the unsatisfactory washing arrangements, the brutal dentistry and the perpetual stink of tobacco, or the gusts perfumed with stale beer that came out of the dark and faintly sinister pubs around Portsmouth Hard ( whatever happened to Brickwood’s Brilliant Ales?). And oddly enough I can remember the dark early morning of 16th October 1964, in a chilly prep-school dormitory on the edge of Dartmoor, when the result of the Wilson election still wasn’t clear, and hearing the burble of the radio from one of the masters’ rooms, and knowing that something momentous was going on, and being excited by it. I was right to be excited. But I might also have been a bit more worried than I was. Would it all have happened anyway? Would the Tories, had they won, have wrecked the grammar schools and launched the permissive society? Quite possibly. But then again, quite possibly not, or not as quickly. But the railways would have been ripped up, and the concrete blocks built (that had already begun), and I expect someone would have banned the Portsmouth Mudlarks too. But my life, and a lot of other lives, might have been very different. Labour governments in this country generally *make* radical changes. Tory governments *accept* those changes, but only rarely do they embark on destructive urges of their own. If we had had a Japanese-style permanent rule by one dominant party, we might be a bit better off. Not much, but a bit. I’m sticking with Amnesty for a while longer, because it still fulfils an important purpose – the Libya report being an example of that – which nobody else can or will do. Of course I recognise its severe imperfections and actual wrong doing, by my own standard. But I haven’t time to mount an internal political challenge to these policies, and I’m not sure that if I did have the time I’d much care to use it that way. The good that they do outweighs the harm. I am free to criticise them while being a member. It is all part of the age-old problem of how one can engage with the world. Either you are too pure to act at all; or you are so involved in the wickedness world that you become part of it. Somewhere between these two poles lies the narrow pathway we ought to tread. I feel for Mr Doyle in his argument with Mr ‘Bunker’. I will refrain from taking sides in their dispute (Mr Doyle does seem to me to be more scientifically informed than most contributors here, but maybe that is because he has not met his match on the evolutionist side. I’m not qualified to say. And, by the way, I’m still waiting for the reply from Mr ‘Crosland’ to my childlike questions on the subject, submitted to him in August). But Mr ‘Bunker’ has an absolutely infuriating style of debate, made all the worse by the self-congratulatory tone of it (and the self-congratulatory character of his pseudonym, fortunately undermined by the demonstrable fact that if anyone debunks him he doesn’t notice it has happened). He simply will not stick to defined terms, and at the slightest whiff of any attempt to pin him down, he will squirt ink into the water like a nervous octopus. I would say to Mr ‘Bunker’ that his contributions would be a lot more interesting to other readers, and a lot more educational for him, if he would try to correct these faults. I personally would rather eat a plate of congealed tapioca than engage with him again. Mr Cunningham asks ‘Cannot Peter Hitchens understand the consequences of turning a blind eye to politicians who behave inappropriately in either private life or public life (and the two are always linked in some way). No matter how ’trivial’ Mr Hitchens may think Liam Fox’s transgressions are, to ignore them, or worse, to actively discourage the press from investigating them, would embolden (some of) our politicians to engage in corruption far worse than anything hinted at in the Dr Fox case.’ Well, yes, Peter Hitchens can, I can’t see where I’ve said I’m against the press in general pursuing these things. I’m just expressing a personal regret that I was diverted by such stuff in the Clinton years. Morality, as I say sometimes, is for me. My only wider moral purpose is to help create the conditions in which other people can make the right moral choices, or at least aren’t pressured to take the wrong ones. I’m talking about what I think I shouldn’t have done, not what other people should or shouldn’t do. In fact I can make an argument (and have done) for such exposures. And I am sure there will be people who are happy to pursue them. Newspaper offices contain many different kinds of people. On the Clinton matter, people who ought to have been pursuing more serious matters got obsessed with Mr Clinton’s trousers. One result of this was that they thought they could destroy a bad liberal Presidency through scandal. And, when they failed, they had prepared no other weapons. They should have been developing a proper conservative alternative, not hoping for a mixture of reheated Reaganism and patriotic waffle to do the trick. Similar, but not identical criticisms should be levelled at the conservative media in Britain during the Blair period, constantly chasing after individual scandal, never grasping what New Labour was really about, and shrivelling in the end into a pathetic and hysterical personal attack on Gordon Brown, who for all this thousand faults, was the man who saved the Pound Sterling, along with the equally maligned Ed Balls. Mr Cunningham also says on the Fox matter : ‘I wonder if Mr Hitchens’ lack of interest in exposing the transgressions of Liam Fox has something to do with the fact he (Dr Fox) is on the Right of the Conservative Party and is also strongly sympathetic to the Zionist cause.’ No it doesn’t. I don’t care who’s in the cabinet of a government I despise. And I long for the collapse of the Conservative Party. I suspect Mr Cunningham is new here. Dr Fox’s idea of ‘right wing’ and mine are quite different. I am not, as Dr Fox is, a Thatcherite economic liberal. Indeed, I’m not a Thatcherite at all and have no plans to invite her to my birthday party (this is a joke, by the way. She wouldn’t come if I did. Apart from anything else, she knows I once had a beard, and gave me a steely disapproving look when I tried to escape from one of her interminable harangues on board her personal plane back in the 1980s. I thought she’d finished. She had in fact just paused for breath. I half-rose from my cramped seat, bottom in the air as I got ready to be the first out. She glared at me so ferociously I thought my trousers would catch fire, and so I meekly sat down again and endured another half hour). I hadn’t even realised Mr Fox had Zionist sympathies until the recent revelations. And it doesn’t make any difference now I do know. The British government definitely doesn’t have any such sympathies, whatever any individual minister may think, and it won’t unless and until Israel discovers a lot, and I mean a lot, of oil. Mind you, the recent gas discoveries off Haifa may test that proposition, eventually. I wish to record my gratitude to Mr Stephenson for doing the spadework and responding devastatingly to silly allegations made against Sir Winston Churchill. I am myself critical of Churchill, as I think anyone has to be in hindsight, but the idea that his mind, tongue and pen were for sale is absurd. A small piece of good news: Those of you who like to do your own research may be pleased to know that if you put the words ‘Millbank Systems’ into any good search engine, you will arrive at a wonderful new online version of Hansard, which puts many decades of important debates at your fingertips. 16 October 2011 8:58 AM ********************************************************************
22 October 2011 10:01 PM
This is no SuperCam - just Ted Heath Mk 2 (... complete with his own Thought Police)
New Libya, same bloody way of doing business
Drugs wreck lives: A lesson Mr Dodgeon's finally learned
A little glimpse of the Liberal Elite, and some general remarks
Saint Joan? Plus, my jolly evening with Mr Cannabis
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17 October 2011 10:39 AM
Harold Wilson Day passes unnoticed again
Some Conversation
A nudge and a wink... what the Left are really saying about Liam Fox
Sunday, 23 October 2011
This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column
Two Tory MPs are so scared of David Cameron’s pro-EU thought police that they have hidden their identities when giving radio interviews on the subject.
Well, it was bunkum and balderdash, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t know about his cricketing skills, but his performance on the EU issue has been dishonest and treacherous from the start.
Colonel Gaddafi was cruelly murdered by a mob. This disgusting episode, which no decent person can approve of, is typical of the sordid revolution which our Government has decided to endorse and aid.
* * *
If you doubt the terrible dangers of illegal drugs, look at the miserable fate of Brian Dodgeon.
Once upon a time I really, really wanted to work for the Financial Times. I thought (as a left-wing Labour supporter, as I then was) that to work on the FT’s renowned Labour Staff would be the best possible opportunity to help the socialist cause. And I came quite close to getting aboard – I remember to this day my interview with the then editor, ‘Fredy’ Fisher (That’s not one of my typing errors. He spelt his Christian name like that, though his actual name was Max, and he had done an amazing thing , a Berlin-born, grammar-school educated German rising to edit a major British newspaper) , in his marvellous office in the handsome old FT headquarters, looking out on to a floodlit St Paul’s Cathedral. I thought I’d acquitted myself reasonably well but I didn’t, in the end, get the job.
Who knows what might have happened if I had? It’s often said that newspapers work on people just as much as people work on newspapers. On the FT I would have been surrounded by left-wing graduates like me. I certainly wouldn’t have had the extraordinary remedial education in reality I received at the hands of the old Daily Express, which, when I finally made it to Fleet Street to join it in January 1977, was a broadsheet with a daily sale of more than two million, run almost entirely by non-graduates, Fleet Street hard men (many of them Scottish) who had done their time in the provinces and often done gruelling stints in Manchester or Glasgow. Higher up the scale were real veterans of the many small wars of the end of Empire, from Suez to the Congo, men who had been reporters in the days when stories had to be sent by cable.
Why this digression? Well, this morning I went to an awards ceremony. The only real benefit of this was that , as it took place at breakfast time in London, I had to leave my provincial home before dawn and bicycle to the railway station by starlight, and was able to see the silhouette of Windsor Castle outlined against a blazing red sunrise from my Paddington-bound train. If they introduce Berlin Time, I suppose I’ll be able to do that almost every day in Winter, and it may grow stale. But once in a while is quite a treat.
I had been shortlisted, as I sometimes am, for an award I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get. But oddly enough, as the ceremony ground on, my hopes rose. Almost every single award went to someone from….the Financial Times (one of these was given by mistake, and had to be re-awarded to its real recipient) . Then a few went to an old left-wing trooper from the New Statesman, and to a selection of Cameroon (or even more leftist than that) figures from ‘The Times’, a paper which no longer has a single proper conservative writer, as far as I can recall. The organisers of the breakfast had been so keen that I should come that I began to wonder if in fact I was going to be the figleaf for the occasion, the one ‘right-wing’ recipient to prove that the whole business wasn’t just the Liberal Elite patting itself on the back.
But no. This rather silly hope was dashed. When the shortlist was read out, the compere made various weak jokes about how ‘right-wing’ I am (though he had the grace to mention one or two other things about me) and there were the usual patronising titters. The award went to some teenage Cameroon who went on and on about Gordon Brown’s trousers..
I might as well have stayed in bed, not least because I loathe such events at the best of times, being slightly more misanthropic than Mr Badger in ‘The Wind in the Willows’ , and shrivel with foreboding at the mention of the word ‘networking’.
One thing struck me about the occasion, apart from the complete failure to avoid bias, or the appearance of it. One was the relaxed and unembarrassed use, from the platform in front of a mixed audience, men and women, all ages, of four-letter words. Some of these were uttered by a prominent BBC reporter, himself a former Financial Times staffer. I am more and more convinced that the public use of such words (when not being used to get cheap and easy shock laughs, by ‘comedians’ and other public performers who can’t think of proper jokes) is a demonstration of power. Those who have to listen to them are being told they haven’t the power to object, those who are the direct objects of them are being personally humiliated.
Reflecting on yesterday’s posting, there’s something very pagan about this development. I did wonder, amid the rather splendid surroundings, what these people would have thought if the people who actually made the occasion work had followed their example. What if the pretty girls serving their breakfast had responded to a request for more coffee with “**** off and get it yourself, you ****”, or the cloakroom assistants had refused to find their coats afterwards, saying “why the **** do you think I should remember where your ****ing coat is, you ****”.
I’ll tell you how they would have reacted. They would have been righteously furious at being spoken to in that fashion. And it might have gone further than that.
And here’s what I would have said if I’d won the award for which I was shortlisted (the number of awards to FT staff had become a bit of a running gag by then)
‘You may not believe this, but I too once almost worked for the FT. Perhaps if I had I too would have learned to use four letter words in public and be wrong about almost every major issue in our recent history . But luckily for me I found my way to the less-respectable end of Fleet Street.’
Cannabis etcetera
A few quick responses to contributors.
‘Lenny’ comments: ‘I'm not sure what 'many silly members of the British liberal establishment' have to do with it, take a look at many discussions on cannabis in your 'Right Minds' section and I'll think you'll find an overwhelming majority are in favour of legalisation, left, right, liberal.’
Well, when major ‘conservative’ unpopular newspapers, influential among politicians, academics, lawyers, doctors, teachers, police chiefs etc., back cannabis decriminalisation (and I am thinking here very much of Sir Simon Jenkins , formerly editor of The Times, and of Frances Cairncross, formerly of the Economist, and the former Cabinet Ministers Peter Lilley and Robert Ainsworth, plus a very silly senior doctor whose name escapes me but who above all ought to know better) it is not surprising if general opinion shifts a bit. That is what silly members of the British liberal establishment have to do with it. And I think ‘silly’ is really rather mild. And I call them silly because they’re old enough to know better ; old enough to know that the ‘harm principle’ as set out by John Stuart Mill is not in fact a very good argument ; old enough to know that all crime is, in effect, caused by law – but that is not an argument for getting rid of law; and old enough to know that there is no ‘war on drugs’ in this country, as they absurdly continue to claim.
Mr Wooderson (does he actually come here to read, or only to write?) maintains a fiction: ‘since the Home Offices of successive governments have refused to even consider it.[by which I think he means legalisation of cannabis] They just continue spouting the same old circular justifications for the 'war on drugs'. Well, that’s for the gullible, Mr Wooderson, as I have so often said here, and I only wish he’d pay attention.
People and governments should be judged by their actions, not by their rhetoric. And this government and its predecessors have steadily reduced the penalties for drug possession to such a point that back in February 1994, John O’Connor, a former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad declared that cannabis had been decriminalised ‘for some time now’. Mr Wooderson will also have seen (but perhaps not observed) my many postings here about the ‘cannabis warning’ (the non-penalty which is the usual police response to this ex-crime) and my recent figures on the real state of the law for users of so-called ‘hard drugs’. The British government cannot actually legalise cannabis possession, because of its binding treaty commitments to have laws against it. It is however free to enforce those laws so feebly that they are (as they are) a dead letter.
Given the immense damage that their efforts have already done. You’ll have to search quite hard, these days, for any medium prepared to host- let alone make – the case against legalisation. That’s not because it doesn’t exist, just because , as in so many other areas, liberals and leftists have seized the commanding heights of media and culture, and are using their power to exclude contrary views. A majority is not an argument doesn’t decide a moral question, or even a practical question. There are plenty of examples in 20th and 21st century history of wicked people and bad ideas achieving majorities.
I’d stick to my view on this if I were the last man alive who held my opinion, because I believe my view to be morally and practically right.
Grant Higgins (who so far as I can tell wasn’t present in Salford on Tuesday) writes : ‘Hitchens lost the debate HAHAHAHAHA well done Peter Reynolds. I would wish you luck in the next debate Mr Hitchens but, let’s face it, cannabis should be legal.’
I’d only point out that to lose a vote (by six) isn’t necessarily to lose a debate. As I may have pointed out, the great majority of the audience declared themselves as users of cannabis at the beginning of the debate. I do remember some drug legalisers jeering on this site when this debate was first mentioned (and that was long, long ago, to those who complain that I didn’t advertise it) that Mr Reynolds would ‘slaughter’ me and that I would be foolish to engage with him, etc., etc. Well, I respect Mr Reynolds as a debater, but I don’t think it can be said that this took place.
Those who doubt me may turn to the generous and thoughtful comment from Sanj Chowdhary, who doesn’t agree with me, but has the grace and sense to disagree in a civilised fashion.
I’d repeat here the point I made to him during our pleasant and affable conversation, that I would be much more interested in the case for medical cannabis, if its advocates didn’t lend their support to campaigns to decriminalise cannabis as a recreational drug. As long as they do that, they are my opponents. The two issues are separate. If cannabis does have any medical applications they are quite unconnected to its use for self-intoxication. And there remains the unpredictable risk of irreversible mental illness, surely a worrying side-effect for any drug, however good its other results may be.
The tiresome ‘Haldane’ resurfaces, with another of his thought-free, unresponsive ‘makes you fink, dunnit’ postings. Just as Mr ‘Bunker’ never notices when he is himself debunked, Mr ‘Haldane’ repeatedly proclaims the virtues of thinking while not troubling to do so himself. It obviously doesn’t make *him* think, as in all his many contributions here, he has never shown any sign at all of noting or responding to anything I have said. Here he is: ‘A few days ago the government's advisers on drugs recommended that heroin use be decriminalised. This is the reconfigured committee that eighteen months ago saw seven of its members resign in protest at the sacking of Prof. David Nutt, who led his committee in recommending the declassification of cannabis. So we now have a new group of advisers recommending further relaxation of criminal penalties. To be consistent, I presume, Mr. Hitchens, that you would want all these experts dismissed - and so on - until we have a body made up of right minded people such as your good self and the former communist postman.’
Mr ‘Haldane’ and Mr Wooderson should obviously get in touch with each other. Here’s poor Mr Wooderson, convinced that the establishment is dead set against decriminalising drugs. And here’s Mr ‘Haldane’, triumphantly pointing out that the establishment has been completely suckered by the legalisation argument (more silly establishment liberals, whose qualifications in their scientific fields do not seem to have armoured them against groupthink conformism, false logic and irresponsibility). If Mr ‘Haldane’ is right( and he is), Mr Wooderson can’t be.
But, as I say, the fact that they all agree doesn’t make them right. I don’t know who this ex-communist postman is, to whom Mr ‘Haldane’ refers. But were I Home Secretary, I wouldn’t merely sack the lot of them. I’d repeal the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act which set them up, and reinstate the 1965 Dangerous Drugs Act, which a) didn’t give cannabis a special ‘soft’ status, b) punished possession as severely as trafficking and c) punished those who allowed their premises to be used for consumption of illegal drugs. . Whatever they’re expert in , it plainly isn’t the urgent task of preserving our civilisation.
Roy Robinson a) mistakes the Christian church *as an organisation* for the Christian ethic among ordinary people. All human organisations (as Christianity states) are controlled by fallen, sinful human beings; and b) he neglects to mention that the churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, were severely persecuted by the German Nazis and the Soviet Communist states, can show many examples of courageous resistance to them, warned against their dangers ( see the encyclical ‘’Mit Brennende Sorge’ – can any other body in Germany show any more courageous and well-organised attempt to attack the Hitler regime once it was in power? , or indeed match the incredible courage of Cardinal Archbishop von Galen of Muenster in standing up to extermination policies and to the Gestapo? Many Christians also took appallingrisks across occupied Europe, by sheltering Jews from murder and persecution. The murder and the persecution were, by contrast, the settled and deliberate policies of a secular and anti-Christian government. The courage of that government’s opponents may often have failed, but I do wonder how Mr Robinson might have responded to the first whispered threat from the Gestapo, had he been in their power. The amazing thing is that anyone resisted at all. Among those who did, Christians are to be found in great numbers.
As for the Christian brothers etc., no doubt they are rightly open to much criticism, now I think accepted by their successors, and I do not defend or excuse them – but does Mr Robinson know or care about what happened in the orphanages of Soviet Russia, vigorously defended as a new civilisation by people such as him at the time? Or about the child-snatching policies of the East German state, likewise defended by anti-Christian bien-pensants until its fall. ? One need only look at the sycophantic rubbish still written about Castro’s Cuba by the modern western secular left to see that they are prepared to actively *defend* hell on earth while it is taking place, and to learn nothing from it. Nobody can say that the Christian churches have not learned from their mistakes.
Hitler loved his dogs. I can well believe it. But Hitler didn’t *personally* kill his victims. He found others to do that. I wonder if they were kind to animals?
Did I eat any of the Eid meat in Kashgar? No, I ate nothing more than an omelette and some toast all the time I was there, plus one very non-Islamic Chinese meal involving beef and noodles. Not sure why this matters.
‘Elaine’ inquires(first quoting me) : ‘ “In Chinese Turkestan but still (just) inhabited by Turkic Muslim Uighurs, it crossed my mind that a man who had slit a sheep’s throat would be bound to find it easier to do the same to a human, if it came to it). “
‘If this deduction is based on the chosen method of animal slaughter then I wonder if the same deduction would be made of a Jew slaughtering a sheep following the kosher rules, since the two methods are almost identical.’
My answer to this is as follows. Perhaps it could. But here are a couple of points. There is, so far as I know, no modern Jewish equivalent of Eid, though the original Passover must have something like it, and Kosher slaughter is carried out by a minority of professional slaughtermen. I would however point out that in Kashgar at Eid (known locally as Korban) the slaughter of sheep is not done by professional slaughtermen, but in each home by the male members of the family (all of whom are taught how to do it).
She continues ‘If the deduction is based on the assumption that this method is particularly cruel, then I suggest more investigation be done because you would learn that studies actually indicate that this method actually causes less suffering to the animal. In fact that is the whole point.’
No, that is not my argument. I am dealing with the effect on the person, not the effect on the animal (though I am not wholly convinced by the claim that this form of slaughter is less distressing to the sheep. You’d have to ask some sheep). I’m no fan of modern slaughterhouses, but in Kashgar tethered sheep awaiting slaughter could clearly see, hear and smell the fate of their fellows before being killed, and some, especially the big rams purchased by the richer families, put up a fierce fight before dying.
I must admit to having been a bit rude, from time to time about Dame Joan Bakewell, the former Thinking Man’s Crumpet and more recently the official Voice of Older people. Dame Joan has now stood down from this official post (the Voice, I mean, not the Crumpet, which I think she was happy to relinquish many years before). It was her chirpy reminiscences of the relaxed days of the 1960s BBC, when the studios smelt of weed, that particularly annoyed me.
But today I must praise her. In far-too-little-noticed interview, after the most recent scandal over neglect of the old in hospitals, Dame Joan said the following very interesting thing: ‘I think….religious commitment to charity and kindness has declined. Nobody learns that. They don’t learn it in their homes, they don’t learn it in their school, it’s seen as soft. It’s not what you’re about. You’re meant to stand up for your own individual personality, make your way in the world and good luck to you.
‘Kindness, empathy, generosity, are all in short supply and people used to learn it from the churches, I learnt it at Sunday school. Where do you learn it now? I don’t know.’
No, nor do I. Interestingly enough, the great social commentator Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose work on Victorian virtues (The Demoralisation of Society) is so valuable, also credited Sunday Schools for much of the advance in civilisation which took place in our country during the 19th century.
This is of course slightly slipping round the real issue which is why there were Sunday schools, and what it was they taught. I look forward to a snappy intervention from Mr Embery here, but of course the thing they taught was Christianity. This was not Christianity as an anthropological curiosity, a series of curious rituals practised by our ancestors who had not been enlightened by Darwin, Huxley etc. It was Christianity as truth, a living religion, hot to the touch, capable of inspiring the good and scaring the bad.
Well, I may be mistaken here, but I haven’t seen anywhere that Dame Joan has embraced the faith. Please correct me if I am wrong here. But if she hasn’t, she (and Mr Embery and others) are left with the problem of what, if anything, can replace it if we wish to encourage kindness in a society increasingly devoted to self-worship and self-satisfaction.
Together with this, I’d like to mention the horrible story from China of the little girl. Yue Yue, run over twice in a hit-and-run accident in Foshan in southern Canton, and of the extreme reluctance of anyone present to do anything about it.
China, I very much fear, is the model for our own future. Its achievement of prosperity without liberty is grim news for those of us who hoped that prosperity would always be the reward for liberty, so encouraging people in the ways of freedom – which is ultimately based on self-restraint, itself founded on conscience, itself founded on faith.
I would add that what I have seen of the new Chinese prosperity has a horrible empty feel to it, all glitter and no heart, the promise of the advertising man which is always unfulfilled by reality. It is also deeply insecure, and set amid an unsettling vastness and anonymity. And it will be at a far lower level, in many ways, than the sort of prosperity achieved in this country and the USA in the second half of the 20th century.
My own recent experience suggests that in Britain such an incident would bring people running. But for how much longer will that be true, as the older Christianised generation fades away and the new feral go-getters become more common?
What was unimaginable twenty years ago is commonplace now, in so many ways. Why should this not also be true in the chillier, more competitive world which we are entering, via this economic crisis?
A small memory of China sticks in my mind, one which made me realise just how far I was from home one autumn Saturday afternoon in the rather lovely tree-shaded French Concession in Shanghai (it’s neither French nor a concession, but in the great thundering monster-city of Shanghai it is a refreshing refuge from the vertical modernity and endless rush. The picturesque, pleasing, intimate street was lined with market stalls. As I rambled among them, I saw a mouse. It wasn’t one of those worrying filthy, bedraggled mice you see scuttling among the rails in London Underground stations late at night. It was a clean, healthy-looking little rodent with large pink ears, doing nothing in particular. An English child reared on Beatrix Potter would have thought it sweet. One of the stallholders saw it as soon as I did. It was nowhere near his goods, whatever they were, and doing him no harm. Yet he ran urgently towards it and angrily stamped it to death, not stopping until well after he must have been sure it was.
I thought, and still think, that this small incident did have something to tell me about China as a whole. Unkindness to animals often prefigures unkindness to humans ( I confess that when I witnessed the mass slaughter of sheep for Eid in Kashgar, In Chinese Turkestan but still (just) inhabited by Turkic Muslim Uighurs, it crossed my mind that a man who had slit a sheep’s throat would be bound to find it easier to do the same to a human, if it came to it).
No, I’m not saying that all Chinese people are unkind and ruthless. That would be absurd and in any case I know it to be untrue from personal experience. And it’s easier to be kind and generous when you are yourself ( as many of us are) more comfortable and prosperous than most Chinese people have ever been, or ever will be. But I am saying that a society almost completely bereft of any force which argues for selflessness and kindness will be crueller in general than one which has such a force. And not just crueller. It will be indifferent, when it ought to care, as I think is exemplified in the hospitals where the old are neglected.
The Dope Debate
Regular readers here will be familiar with Mr Peter Reynolds, leader of the Cannabis Law Reform Society, who has tried to take me to the Press Complaints Commission for being rude about Marijuana, and has from time to time turned up at public meetings to heckle me.
Some months ago he challenged me to a debate on cannabis legalisation, and when I accepted, the excellent Salford University Debating Society swiftly stepped in to offer a venue for our titanic battle.
This took place on Tuesday evening, and – though I’ll leave it to those who were there (apparently a televised version will find its way on to the web) to give their own impressions, I would say in general that it was fair, courteous, thoughtful and educational for all involved, and that the audience was intelligently receptive to the arguments of both sides.
I lost the vote (as I usually do, though I did once win the vote on the same broad subject after a tremendously high-octane clash with Howard Marks, of which I fear there is no recording ) but rather more narrowly (the margin was six votes) than anyone had expected. All of which , I think, goes to show that the case for legalisation is not as clear cut as many silly members of the British liberal establishment think it is.
Hypocrisy isn’t what it used to be. Once, Christian preachers would thunder about the virtues of marriage and then be discovered canoodling with women who weren’t their wives. Everyone would laugh.
Now, pious politically correct persons seek, by innuendo and hint, nudge and wink, to damage a Cabinet Minister by suggesting that he is a secret homosexual. And nobody laughs at the slimy dishonesty of it all.
Everyone pretends to be very concerned about the ‘Ministerial Code’, and about various boring meetings in hotels which may or may not have been attended by some youth.
They even discover, with feigned horror, that the Ministry of Defence is sometimes approached by people who want to make money by selling weapons. Gosh.
But none of this serious, detailed stuff is the real point of what’s really being said. Everyone knows it. Nobody admits it.
Here’s what is really happening. The modish Left know deep down that the public don’t agree with them about homosexuality. In private, they themselves may not even believe the noble public statements they so often make.
And so, without ever openly admitting what they are up to, they destroyed a Minister they disliked for allegedly doing something they officially approve of.
I am no friend of Liam Fox. I know nothing about his private life and care less. But I think it is a very dirty business that Left-wing newspapers, which claim to believe that homosexuality is no different from heterosexuality, behave in this way.
It’s particularly striking that this came almost immediately after the Prime Minister deliberately teased what is left of the Tory Party by saying he favoured homosexual marriage.
I suspect that Mr Cameron was trying to goad the enfeebled Right wing of his party. If they had reacted, he would have crushed them to show who’s boss.
The Left – and Mr Cameron is of the Left – have done this for many years. Moral conservatives have foolishly lumbered into the trap by objecting. And so they have allowed themselves to be smeared as the cruel persecutors of a gentle minority.
But the events of the past week show clearly that the Left, for all their noisy sanctity on the subject, are far from free of prejudice against homosexuals, and quite ready to use such bigotry when it suits them to do so.
Protecting the wrong flock
How typical of the furry Archbishop of Canterbury that he can stand up against the persecution of Christianity in Africa, but isn’t aware of it here.
We shall see in time if he did any good by sharing tea and scones with the sinister Robert Mugabe.I doubt it.
But his behaviour is typical of a church which has been so obsessed with the Third World for so long that it has forgotten the country of its birth, where legions of bureaucrats – often aided by soppy vicars – are quietly strangling the Christian faith.
My guess is that there will be a thriving Anglican church in Africa several centuries after Canterbury Cathedral has been converted into a mosque, and St Paul’s into a museum.
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A worrying film of a worrying book, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is about to open in this country.
It concerns the culprit of a school massacre, and – though the fictional killer is on SSRI ‘antidepressant’ medication, as almost all such killers are – neither book nor film grasps the significance of this. They minimise it. What a pity.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the alleged culprit of the latest rampage killing, Scott Dekraai of Seal Beach, California, is said to have been suffering from ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, which in the USA is often ‘treated’ with SSRI pills. He is also said by his ex-wife to be ‘a diagnosed bipolar individual who has problems with his own medication and his reaction to same’.
Eight more people are dead, quite possibly at the hands of someone who had been taking ‘antidepressants’. Isn’t it time the authorities looked into this connection?
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Rock superstars such as ‘Sir’ Paul McCartney are the new aristocracy.
Normal human beings bow and simper in their presence, their path is cleared through life, and their dull, unoriginal thoughts are treated with respect.
They also exude a tremendous smugness, these vegetarian, animal-loving, charity-supporting types who cram their unfortunate children into state schools to prove that a billion pounds hasn’t turned them into conservatives.
But when it comes to basic neighbourly behaviour, they are as yobbish as the over-rated music that made them rich and famous. Council officials had to be called to the McCartney wedding party in London in the small hours of last Monday to get him to turn down the racket.
If he’s so nice, why didn’t it cross his mind that others have jobs to go to and might need to sleep?
In a prison in ‘liberated’ Libya, Amnesty International inspectors report having seen instruments of torture and having heard ‘whipping and screams’ from a cell.
There is also clear evidence of racial bigotry in the savage treatment of non-Arab Africans. So, if we intervened there to ‘protect civilians’, why aren’t we intervening now?
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Street demonstrations are usually a waste of time at best. But they can also be dangerous or harmful. And I must appeal to any readers I have in Boston in Lincolnshire to stay away from a march against immigration planned to take place there next month. I also appeal to the organisers of the march to call it off. And I’m hoping for sleet, and a strong east wind off the Wash, on that day. Let me explain.
Some weeks ago I described the damage that stupid Government policies have done to Boston, which now has a huge migrant population mainly from Eastern Europe.
I did not blame the migrants, whose enterprise I admire, or those who employed them. I hoped to illustrate the wrongness of our open borders, and of the EU membership that forces us to keep them open. I also wanted to assail the terrible schools, the dim welfare policies and the family breakdown that have left so many British-born young people unemployable.
Some concrete-headed councillor in Boston chose to attack what I had written, and cast doubt on its truth, reasonably angering many Bostonians who knew that what I had said was correct.
But a demonstration in such a place can do no good, and may well cause tension and bring undesirable political chancers to the town. Already, an outfit called ‘Unite Against Fascism’ (what ‘fascism’, by the way?) is planning a counter- demonstration on the same day. Just imagine the stupidities that could lead to.
If there is trouble, it will only damage the cause of those who want common sense to prevail in this country again. Call it off.
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