This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column This would have had nothing to do with bigotry, or racism or any of the other rude words flung at the British people by their ruling class of snooty elite liberals. It does not take much to see that mass immigration is a daft idea. The most basic argument for it – that it helps the economy – is false. And yet, here’s the mystery. Nobody wants it, and it is damaging – but it keeps on happening. Some people were stupid enough to think that this was just a Labour problem. They were not paying attention. The Tory Party has been keenly pro-immigration for decades. It made this view clear as long ago as 1958 when party stewards violently silenced anti-immigration protesters at a Blackpool rally addressed by Harold Macmillan. Many independent witnesses were shocked at the blood-spattered savagery of the beatings handed out to the hecklers. They should not have been. The more liberal the Tory Party gets, the more ruthless it has to be to its own natural supporters. As usual, the amazing thing is that so many of those supporters carry on voting for it. The elite wish to pretend that they sympathise with us about the problem. But secretly they want to change the country for ever, and see mass immigration as the best way of doing this. * * * Every crank, dingbat and fanatic in Southern England has found his or her way to the camp by the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Given time, every faddist in Europe will arrive. There are already plenty of North American accents. Whatever your cause, it has a pavilion here, especially if it is a lost cause. The poor Kurds are represented. There are lots of those infuriatingly smug, self-satisfied Guy Fawkes masks. Unimpressed: Our columnist Peter Hitchens visited the protest camp outside St Paul's and concluded it is a 'chaotic, self-righteous festival of drivel' There’s propaganda against the ‘persecution of sex workers’. The Socialist Workers Party, those latchers on to every passing procession, have a stall that looks a little too neat and tidy for the occasion. Bolshevik discipline doesn’t really mesh with the world of Twitter and dope. As George Orwell once said, such things attract the people he jeered at as ‘sandal-wearers’, ‘nudists’, ‘sex-maniacs’ and ‘vegetarians with wilting beards’ . . . the sort who are drawn to ‘progressive’ causes ‘like bluebottles to a dead cat’. There really are signs against ‘capitalism’, a word used only by people who still think you can change human nature, which you sort of can if you have concentration camps and an effective secret police. And there are other placards enquiring rather aggressively: ‘What would Jesus do?’ People who ask this question always assume that Jesus would agree with them. Well, I suppose it’s possible. But what would He agree with, exactly? Stand here long enough and you will be pinned to the wall, or to a pillar, by lots and lots of nice but rather silly people. There’s the man who thinks we invaded Iraq to punish it for not having a central bank. There’s the man who thinks the clue to the greed of the City somehow lies in the Channel Islands. And there are dozens of recently fledged experts on the wickedness of the City itself, though it is clear that this is a new concern for them. They are thrilled to have discovered that the City of London Corporation is so fantastically undemocratic. They had no idea that such wickedness still survived, and that they can be against it. There’s the slender public schoolboy with the looks of a tragic Thirties poet who, handed a megaphone, emits five minutes of the higher drivel about nothing in particular. ‘We are the people,’ he claims, adding: ‘We have forgotten what and who we are.’ He can speak for himself. I’m sure that if I had waited long enough, I would have been taken to one side by enthusiasts for flatulent diets, speakers of Esperanto, or persons who think that The Key To Everything is to be found in the measurements of the Great Pyramid. My nostalgic side hoped to run into advocates of opening Joanna Southcott’s box, which was supposed to be unsealed at a time of grave national crisis, in the presence of all the bishops (it was eventually found to contain an old lottery ticket and a horse pistol). Mess: The tents belonging to the anti-capitalist protesters with the glorious backdrop of St Paul's Cathedral But such enthusiasts are scarce nowadays. And in these less religious times, battiness takes new forms. A dreadlocked man in a Rastafarian hat and glowing red trousers rages about world citizenship to an audience of perhaps 12, including me. In the mighty porch of the cathedral, a group of furry people are listening to a man play the guitar. I am reminded of Tom Lehrer’s song: ‘We are the Folk Song Army. Every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice . . . unlike the rest of you squares.’ Later, as darkness and drizzle fall, and a general meeting of stupendous, award-winning tedium gets under way, I am reminded of that forgotten horror of the Sixties, the ‘teach-in’. The people’s representatives (if that is what they are, as they don’t represent me) take an unbelievable amount of time to approve a bland statement about Egypt. They are, it turns out, in favour of democracy and against repression. But this process has a new variant. The old show of hands has been replaced by a strange finger-wiggling gesture, like a guilty mother waving goodbye to her toddler at a day-care centre. People do this without seeming to be embarrassed, or giggling. It is a bit like a cult. They’re all terribly sweet. Most of them know that I am an evil Right-winger, or if they don’t know, someone else tells them. But they still cheerfully engage me in yet more long, earnest conversations from which it is hard to escape. When I ask one – who has lectured me lengthily about the wickedness of the banks – what his qualifications are in economics, he concedes with a self-mocking smile that he doesn’t have any. Where do they come from? It’s hard to tell, though a lot are obviously students with vague timetables. One says he works with autistic children, a rather noble calling. Wouldn’t he be doing more good if he went back to that? He doesn’t think so. To him, this is more important. Interesting talk: Peter Hitchens sat with former Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser, pictured, who was among the smokers outside St Paul's It’s impossible to dislike most of them, though I have to admit I carefully avoided the squad of four gaunt men with hollow heroin-abusers’ faces, dressed in war-surplus fatigues and kicking a football around. And I tried not to meet the stern gaze of the astonishing bearded preacher, who strides backwards and forwards across the cathedral steps, expounding his own version of the Gospels, for hours and hours and hours. If haranguing were an Olympic event, he could harangue for Britain. The only trouble is that – because he is always on the move – you would have to follow him backwards and forwards for several miles to follow his argument. As it is, you get a snatch of it and then it fades away, and then it starts again. The camp is scruffy, ugly and dispiriting. The last time I saw so many of these bubble tents was in Mogadishu in the middle of a horrible famine, when many of them contained dying babies. Now you can’t tell what or who is in them because they’re mostly zipped up tightly. Not having my own thermal-imaging device, I cannot be sure, but in several hours at the camp I saw little sign of life among the tents. There’s a lot of sensitivity over the heat-sensitive pictures which seemed to show that most of them were empty by night. ‘They falsified it,’ a determined young man tells me, in between thrusting pamphlets at me and giving me a forbidding reading list. But it is not actually squalid. There’s some sarcasm among the campers about claims that the place is awash with urine. Variety: Whatever your cause, it has a place at the protest outside St Paul's I can only say that it wasn’t when I was there, though nobody made any great efforts to deny that a lot of cannabis was being smoked. If there really was a war on drugs, I suspect the police could devastate the camp by simply enforcing the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971. But of course there is no such ‘war’, and the police aren’t interested. A neat line of portable lavatories is available from dusk onwards, and the campers are plainly trying to keep the area tidy. One, rather unskilfully, as if he has never seen a broom before, sweeps litter from the cathedral steps. There’s quite a lot of smoking of ordinary cigarettes going on, an interesting reflection on a generation that prides itself on not being fooled by corporate greed and consumerism. So why did they fall for that bit of it? Among the smokers is none other than former Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser, who appears at dusk unnoticed by the campers. As we sit companionably on the steps, he tells me that everyone has got the story wrong. He never told the police to let the campers stay. All he did was ask them (and the campers) to leave the cathedral steps on the morning of October 16, to clear the way for early-morning worshippers at a service he was about to take. Both police and campers politely did as he asked and Holy Communion went ahead as planned. That is it. He also reassures me, contrary to some accounts, that the cathedral is a kindly employer, and he and his young family are being allowed to stay in his rather nice house until after Christmas. It was time to go into St Paul’s itself. I had hoped for Evensong, the most beautiful and potent service of the Church of England. It would have done the campers good to listen to the haunting, 2,000-year-old words of the Magnificat: ‘He hath shewed strength with his arm. He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ Someone might then have explained to them that this was a promise of eternal justice, not a programme for government. Alas, it was some other modern service, its bare, plastic language weirdly out of tune with the clouds of medieval incense and the gorgeous feudal robes of the clergy. And the sermon, like so much of the Church of England, was infected with modern Leftwingery and talk about ‘equality’, which sounds nice in theory but always ends up very nasty in practice. From outside the giant doors, you could just hear the bearded preacher roaring distantly, like the sea. I sat by the great, dark tomb of the Duke of Wellington, wondering what that blunt and unaffected man would have made of the tented city, and concluding ‘not much’. I suspect he might have contrived a convenient burst water main on the site, to wash them away without fuss. I shall be travelling for most of this week and so will not be posting as frequently as I have in the past fortnight. I’d just like to muse a little about my appearance on BBC Question Time last week (I think it should still be available on the BBC i-player for a while), and on some reactions to it. On Saturday, under a heavy disguise, I at last penetrated the strange world that is ‘Twitter’, a place where Stephen Fry is accounted a genius and where I appear to be unpopular. I’ll say more about that in a moment. As it happens, it was not a specially controversial edition of the programme. And the London audience was a good deal less one-sided than the one I met in Norwich a few months ago. During the unbroadcast warm-up question (on the English diet versus the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ones) we all had a reasonable amount of fun with deep-fried Mars Bars. The only topic on which I was first up – and so obliged to answer the exact question, as asked – was about the St Paul’s encampment. But it was a legal query about whether new laws are needed to shift the tents. Plainly, they aren’t. If the Cathedral, or the City Corporation, wanted to use the law to move the campers, then they could do. But they don’t. So I had to use valuable time explaining this obvious fact, rather than giving my opinions on the camp. It was only when Benjamin Zephaniah started telling us what Jesus would have thought (how does he know?) that I had the chance to come back and give some opinions. As it happened, I’d spent much of Wednesday at St Paul’s (I hope my account of this will find its way here at some point) , and so I had some fairly definite views – namely that the camp is silly and self-righteous (though most of the campers are perfectly nice) and they should all go home. This doesn’t strike me as particularly controversial. I also mentioned the fact that Jesus Christ rather plainly and repeatedly made it clear that he was not interested in worldly power, a scriptural truth which led many ‘Twitter’ posters (see below) to chide me for not knowing my Bible. I should have thought ‘My Kingdom is not of this World’ and ‘Render unto Caesar…’, not to mention His conversation with Pilate, and His instruction to Peter to sheath his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane all make this perfectly plain. But perhaps there is a missing Fifth Gospel according to St Polly Toynbee, where things are otherwise. As for my views on public sector pensions, they are positively mainstream. How can the public sector expect other taxpayers, many of them with reduced pensions or no pensions at all, to pay to protect government employees from the problems that everyone in private industry has long been suffering? Likewise on the Euro crisis, I can with some justification point out that I was called rude names by ‘mainstream’ people for opposing the whole silly scheme at the start. But I cannot in all conscience claim that I have an easy solution to the present mess, and I feel very sorry for the ordinary Greeks who are being collectively punished for the failures and mistakes of their elite. When fathers’ access to their children after divorce came up, I thought the point was that there is too much divorce, and said it was only reasonable that divorce law should be reformed to distinguish between couples who have children, and couples who don’t. Once again, this seems to me to be so blazingly obvious that it isn’t in the least bit adventurous. Personally, I’m against divorce at all, but I recognise that this isn’t a position I can, or should, force on anyone else. I just hope that one day it becomes the general view again. The people who most need defending are the children, who I think are always the innocent victims of marriage break-up – and also of the general decline of stable two-parent families. All right, I own up to a piece of slight mischief when the obscure subject of Prince Charles’s legal rights as Duke of Cornwall came up. I feel an increasing need to be frank about my dislike for democracy, a thing far too many people confuse with liberty. At the moment, most people , brought up and brainwashed into believing that democracy has been fought for over the centuries, when in fact it was pretty willingly handed over by cynical politicians who saw its advantages to them. That is, they realised that it gave them the power to bribe people with their own money. The real foundations of our civilisation lie elsewhere – the Rule of Law, the 1689 Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act, and of course Jury Trial, the very core of Anglosphere liberty. Democracy is largely ignorant of these things and often hostile to them. It has certainly been used to undermine Jury Trial and the presumption of innocence, under the pretext of ‘crackdowns’ on crime or terror. Two simple points that people need to digest – Hitler’s National Socialists came to power through democracy and couldn’t have done so without it. And Hong Kong’s form of government, hardly democratic at all, is,even so, far preferable to that in the People’s Republic of China, possessing freedom of thought, speech and the press . Why? Liberty and the Rule of Law, inherited from Britain. These facts show that democracy is not invariably good in itself, nor is it essential to the existence of a civilised and free polity. In which case it is surely possible for civilised people to have doubts about it. Pure democracy would be mob rule, so I teasingly said that I was rather glad that we weren’t a democracy, but that democracy was restrained by law, tradition and constitutional monarchy. Well, and so I am, and I wish more people realised how lucky we were that our ‘democratic’ politicians, incompetent, inexperienced, power-mad, are restrained by such things. This led to an amusing clash with Ed Balls , during which I won applause for saying I thought I could have done a better job of governing the country than he had. Well, couldn’t I? And at the end we were asked what we thought were the things that led most surely to happiness. I should point out here that we were in Westminster Hall, equalled only by Hagia Sophia (The Church of the Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople (Istanbul if you insist) in its age, majesty and size, full of the past, never wholly light, never wholly warm, immensely disturbing to the modern mind. Outside the small lit area of the stage and the seats, in the chilly darkness, linger the imprints and echoes of almost a thousand years of English history. Could Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I, have tussled here over the nature of kingship, without leaving any trace behind in the wood and the stones? And what about all the thousands and thousands of others, not so well remembered? Perhaps that is why I instantly knew what I would have to answer to that question – faith in God. It was the answer all my forebears would have given, and understood. In fact, all those thousands of ghosts would have been baffled if nobody had mentioned the Almighty. I also knew that it would earn me some derision. And it was exactly because of that that I decided to say it anyway. Some of you will know what I mean. Others (for whom I feel a bit sorry) won’t. The following morning a colleague told me that I was ‘trending’, whatever that meant, on ‘Twitter’. Well, I had a pretty good idea what it would mean, as it happened. And when on Saturday I slipped through a side entrance into the world of Twitter, I found a long list of semi-literate comments expressing the desire to hit me or kick me, commenting on my lack of beauty, calling me unprintable names, telling me I was stupid. It was rather comforting, because the people involved were all so limited. I know you can’t say much in a Twitter posting. But these were hopelessly inarticulate people, who thought it enough to say that they loathed me, and never felt the need to say why. In all cases, the fact that I disagreed with them was enough, and – with a tiny number of exceptions – they could feel sure that their fellow Fry fans would say ‘amen’, or whatever Atheists say instead of ‘amen’, to that. By the way, I had heard that a certain BBC radio person had posted a number of uncomplimentary remarks about me on Twitter. But I have been unable to trace these. Is it possible they have been deleted? If so, did any contributors here notice or record them, or do they know how to recover deleted tweets? If so, I should be interested to go into the matter, fascinated as I am by BBC impartiality. Oh, and Nottingham. A few days ago I received an invitation to debate the death penalty at a student society in Nottingham( I shan’t at present name the society, or the person involved, as I suppose the whole thing may have been a prank). It was at very short notice and the writer was very pressing, saying that I was the ideal person etc, etc, so much so that I assumed the original speaker had pulled out at the last minute. Though I have a rather full diary at the moment, I reluctantly agreed. On the grounds that the case ought to be made properly if it was going to be made at all. But a few hours later the student society told me that they planned to ‘pair’ me with Nick Griffin, of the BNP, who would be speaking alongside me. I said that in that case I certainly wouldn’t be there. And I gave the student society a large piece of my mind. How could they have thought otherwise? Easy. To such people all ‘right-wing’ persons are equally evil, and I am indistinguishable from the BNP. Such people, like the ‘Twitter’ mob genuinely believe that I am some sort of National Socialist. Thus does the BNP help to poison all debate. How I wish it would shrivel away. This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Those who claim that this country is not falling to pieces need to explain why such crimes are now becoming common. Something has disappeared from the hearts of the people who do this. They are different from any generation that lived before. Let me explain. Long ago, a retired Serviceman said to me that the least anyone could do, when he saw a war memorial, was to pause and read some of the names on it. It was a tiny thing compared to what the dead had done, but it would in some way help to make their deaths worthwhile. I have tried to follow this advice. I read the names, often seeing several members of one family listed on a small village cross and forcing myself to imagine what this must have meant. But above all I recall that these were all the best of their generation at every level, of all classes and all political beliefs, hundreds of thousands of lost fathers who never had children, or never saw their young grow to adulthood, a great legion of lost craftsmen, lost scientists, lost engineers, lost inventors, lost teachers, lost poets, lost architects, lost statesmen, whose absence still haunts this country almost a century later. The one that haunts me most of all is in Fleetwood in Lancashire, which states fiercely: ‘Principles do not apply themselves.’ Another writes of ‘those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom... let those that come after see to it that their names are not forgotten’. Many are fine works of art – the mud-encrusted soldier reading a letter from home on Platform 1 at Paddington Station is one of the great sculptures of the 20th Century. They were almost all created and paid for by people who belonged to the older tradition of art and poetry, in my view far superior to the silly chaos of what followed. And now they are being pillaged, demolished, smashed, stripped, overturned and desecrated by people who probably cannot even read what is written on them and would not care if they could. If that is not a fit subject for a moral panic, I do not know what is. These metal thieves are no better than grave-robbers, and we have bred and raised them among us. These sombre and thoughtful shrines are not glorifications of war, but memorials to beloved people who went to their deaths in the belief that they were saving civilisation. It seems that they failed. When will they make the connection? More than 40 years of divorce on demand, and nobody can work out how to ensure that the child victims of marriage break-up stay in touch with their fathers or their grandparents. Nor can they devise a workable or fair system for child support. As for the laws on custody and property after divorce, it is amazing that any man has the courage to get married when he knows what might happen to him if things go wrong. And of course there is the subsidy for fatherless families. You don’t have to take my word for the effects of this, by the way. Listen to Adele Adkins, the singer, who presumably knows a bit about her generation. She recently recalled that ‘the ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’ Could this mass condemnation of so many children to broken homes and/or the absence of fathers have anything to do with this week’s Barnardo’s survey, showing that nearly half of us think the young are becoming feral? I think it could. And they swear all the time about everything. I am sure this is completely realistic, from what I have seen of their real-life equivalents here. I think they do this to prove that they have power over their underlings and can humble them without risking retaliation. Using dirty language to someone who cannot answer back is a form of showing off. Interestingly, they often swear at the politicians who are supposed to be their bosses. Because, of course, the smiley Blair or Cameron figures who are sold to the public are not really in charge. The backroom fixers, who create them and mould them, represent the real power, which in the U.S. and increasingly in Britain comes from big-money backers. As Bob Dylan sang long ago ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears’. If we want to get control of our country back, we have to devise a way of liberating politics from such people. Nationalising the existing parties, by giving them taxpayers’ money, is definitely not the answer. But doesn’t it say so much about the Labour and Tory parties, that if you held a flag day for either of them it would raise a few old Spanish coins and some buttons? They have to rely on big donors because they long ago deserted their roots. Why is it considered so eccentric to say it is time to get rid of them and start again? Parents and teachers who want to stop children taking illegal drugs get little help from the Government. The feeble website ‘Talk to Frank’ (which we pay for through our taxes) more or less assumes that drug-taking is normal, with lots of matey, slang-infested chat. A much better resource for parents and schools, ‘Drugs – it’s just not worth it’, is now available from www.cannabisskunksense. co.uk. I strongly recommend it.
This Government, like all before it, will only be happy when we have... The UK No Border Agency
07 November 2011 11:00 AM
Everyone's terribly sweet... but what a festival of drivel!
More...
God, Happiness and Twitter. And what nearly happened in Nottingham
05 November 2011 10:19 PM
We have failed to keep faith with the men who died for us
Easy divorce equals lost children - it's a simple equation
Clooney's right: Bullyboy 'fixers' are the real rulers
Feeble Frank is going to pot
Saturday, 12 November 2011
If anyone had ever asked us, we would have said that we did not want millions of people from Asia, the Balkans or the dead Soviet Empire migrating to this country.
We rightly complain that young people cannot get work. So why import foreigners to do that work, while paying our own children to take to crime and sit at home smoking dope?
It makes no sense at all, not least because the South East of England is now one of the most crowded places on Earth, and feels that way.
And so it goes on. I doubt if we shall ever know exactly who is to blame for the latest border fiasco. Theresa May, the liberal, PC Home Secretary, is protected by a mysterious media bodyguard of flatterers and defenders. But the reason for the mess remains the same as it has always been.
Those figures showing that most illegal migrants who arrive here are allowed to stay, or that foreign criminals are not deported, or that passport checks were skimped, are not evidence of government failure. Nothing much will be done about them.
They will be nearly as bad next year and the year after.
They are evidence that the real policy is and always has been to act against our wishes and interests. Everything else is a pretence.
The truth is the opposite of the public stance. It is typical that our major airports have all now got huge new signs proclaiming 'UK Border', just at the moment when that border has more or less ceased to exist.
One day, perhaps, those to blame for this disgrace will be punished. But I think it will by then be too late.
We are too trusting for our own good.
We ALL pay a terrible price for Britain's lethal motorways
If a train crash cost as many lives and hurt as many people as the M5 pile-up, the whole rail system would be paralysed by inquiries and speed restrictions.
In fact, our horribly dangerous roads still see thousands of needless deaths a year, but nobody does anything because all the misery comes in small packets, so that one or two homes mourn, and the rest of the nation carries on unaffected.
We do not see a pattern. The futile attempt to blame a firework display for the motorway horror is an example of this. The real problem is that such roads are unavoidably crammed with vehicles that are much too close together, travelling much too fast.
Just try driving on a British road at a reasonable speed, and at a sensible distance from the car in front. See how long it takes before some moron is nudging your back bumper and flashing his lights, or before another moron cuts into the space you have left.
As for fog, it is not exactly a surprise in November, is it? Yet since motorways were introduced here, people have driven too fast in such fog. It is amazing more people aren’t killed.
I’d plough up all the motorways in the country, and rebuild the rail network that Beeching trashed. Motorways are a horrible idea. They have ruined our countryside and our cities, and it’s no surprise to me that Adolf Hitler liked them so much.
But as long as we have them, the police should be made to patrol them properly, so that sane people have some protection against the thoughtless, homidical chancers who currently rule our roads.
Today, maths dunces like me don't stand a chance
I was never any good at maths. Only the dedicated patience of a great teacher helped me get the lowest possible grade at O-level.
These days I probably would not even know how bad I was at maths. There would be nobody around who could tell.
When Channel 4’s Dispatches programme tested 155 teachers in 18 schools, they found that most of them could not do simple calculations.
How could such people have helped me? You cannot teach maths if you are hopeless at it yourself.
And I suspect the same goes, in many cases, for reading, writing and spelling.
Our schools have now been so bad for so long that those in charge are themselves ignorant. Worse, they may be unaware of it, or scared to admit it.
Do they fail to correct spelling mistakes because they don’t know how to spell themselves?
Do they struggle to teach reading because they are barely literate? It is all too possible. And how can such people have the blazing enthusiasm for books, history or science that makes the young want to learn?
It is useless to blame these teachers. They, like their pupils, are the victims of a cruel, 50-year experiment on defenceless human beings.
That experiment, known as ‘progressive education’, has conclusively failed. There is no better evidence than the vast disaster of our state comprehensive system that discipline, rigour, authority, selection and tradition are vital in the schooling of the young.
But the mad experiment seems to have smashed common sense, knowledge and thought so completely that there is now nobody left in the education establishment who is able to stop it. And so it goes on and on and on, wrecking lives and hopes.
All this time, the rich and powerful are exempt from it, and don’t care.
What can I do about the fact that my new mobile phone has opinions and wants to impose them on me? It is a paid-up member of the Global Warming cult.
Instead of just telling me that it is fully charged, it sternly orders me to save energy by unplugging the charger from the wall. Well, as I don’t believe in man-made global warming and reckon the amount of power involved is tiny, I shall of course ignore it.
But how long before it starts reporting me to the authorities?
There’s a Buddhist shrine next to an arrow marking the direction of Mecca.
Che Guevara, that old mass murderer, has his image on display.
And I contrasted the great classical majesty of the cathedral, one of man’s most successful attempts to combine reason, science and hope, with the chaotic, self-righteous festival of drivel outside.
Yet there’s no doubt which of the two is closer to the mood of the modern world, more’s the pity.
Some actions ought to be unthinkable. Even the lowest, dimmest lout ought to know that you do not defile monuments to the dead. Till a few years ago, the worst crook in Britain would have stopped himself from ripping a bronze plaque off a war memorial.
I read the inscriptions, which now reach across to us from a time so different that it is astonishing to think that it is in fact so close. Some are reproachful or unsettling – the line ‘Live thou for England – these for England died’ goes straight to the heart of the matter.
Why are political professionals so foul-mouthed? The real stars of George Clooney’s clever and enjoyable new film about politics, The Ides Of March, are the backroom fixers and spin doctors who turn rather average individuals into TV superstars and propel them into office.
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