This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Many say how sorry they are that they refused to believe me when I told them this, over and over again, before the last Election. Well, as the Scottish pastor said to his wayward flock as they called up to him from the flames of Hell ‘We didn’t know!’, I reply smugly ‘You know now’. Why it took them all so long, I don’t know. Mr Slippery’s shamefaced U-turn on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty happened before the Election, for all to see. But people would keep telling me that he somehow ‘really means it’ about his (rather feeble) scheme to recognise marriage in the tax system and his claim that he would do something to curb the Human Rights industry. They seem to have thought that one day he would rip off his suit and reveal himself to be ‘SuperTory’. Well, as for marriage, he now claims to be much more concerned about helping a few hundred homosexuals get married than about helping millions of heterosexuals to stay married. This is, in fact, a wind-up. I shouldn’t think Mr Slippery cares even slightly about homosexuals, and I wonder what he used to say about them in private before he was beguiled by Samantha’s dolphin tattoo and her fake cockney accent, and learned how to be cool. But he knows that driving homosexual marriage through Parliament will enrage the suburban voters he despises. He longs to be assailed by them, because it will make him look good among the Guardian-reading metropolitans he wants to win over. As for ‘Human Rights’, do not believe the piffle about how the Liberal Democrats have somehow sabotaged Mr Slippery’s commission on this subject. Mr Slippery sabotaged it himself. He packed it from the start with people he could rely on to make sure that nothing changed. Alas for him, he got one appointment wrong, that of Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who had the integrity to resign when it was clear to him that he was taking part in a fake. In one of the biggest political developments of the year (largely ignored by most of the political media, who wait for Downing Street to tell them what to write) Dr Pinto-Duschinsky revealed that the commission had been fixed. Does anyone really believe the Prime Minister couldn’t have prevented this if he had wanted to? Well, anyone who believes that deserves what he is going to get. The rest of us don’t. I see that the lovely Anna Friel is to appear in a film about the Fifties, a favourite period for movie-makers. But what is it about? It is about a squalid pornographer, the late Paul Raymond. Why do our film producers steer away from big subjects and concentrate on this sort of marginal, low tripe? A genuine drama could be made (despite the BBC’s recent abject failure in The Hour) about the Suez crisis of 1956, if Fifties glamour is what they want. Darkness is falling on this country in more ways than one. As free speech and thought are squeezed by ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes, our power supplies are threatened by Green lunacy and by our subjugation to Brussels. An EU directive on ‘large combustion plants’ has set rigid time limits on the operation of coal-fired power stations. They are now running out of hours faster than anyone expected. The first to be halted for ever will be Kingsnorth in Kent, a perfectly viable plant that must now shut in March next year. Many more coal-burning stations will be closed by order of the EU by 2015. Several nuclear plants also need to close soon. Let’s hope that 2015 is very windy. If not, it could be the year we become the first cold country in the Third World. Mr Brand, co-culprit in the Sachsgate affair, was arguing (if that is the word for his technique) in favour of liberalising the laws on drugs. I suggested that people like him are selfish kids pursuing pleasure at the expense of others. I am afraid I teased him a bit (Why does he wear that hat? Why do people think he is funny?). He then gave an excellent imitation of a tree-climbing rodent cheated of its nuts, using a voice that sounded like a wonky hot-air hand-dryer in a public loo. The exchange can be found easily on YouTube. I think it gives a pretty good idea of the difference between the pro and anti-drug causes. If your Government sets out to restrict welfare payments to those who really need them, you do rather open yourself to scrutiny on your own claims. The Prime Minister plans to take Child Benefit away from higher-rate taxpayers on the grounds that they don’t need it. He has also cut housing benefit so that welfare recipients cannot live better than people who work for a living. Both these are reasonable steps. But in that case, what do we think of the fact that the Tory leader, who is by no means poor, claimed Disability Living Allowance? I know, I know. All of us must sympathise with the Premier over the tragedy which befell his son Ivan. And I, of course, do so. But should that sympathy get in the way of a reasonable examination of relevant personal behaviour by our head of Government? The fact that Our Leader claimed disability payments was revealed by him, in an answer to a Labour MP, Joan Ruddock, during Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons on Wednesday, March 7. I have sought further information from No 10 Downing Street and at the time of writing have had no response. But I should say that for a couple as rich as the Camerons undoubtedly are, the sums involved (probably no more than £150 a week) cannot have been vital. In any case, they do not compare to his enormous and still little-known claims for mortgage interest on his substantial country house near Witney. I have always wondered whether he really needed to borrow £350,000, or indeed needed a house at all in a constituency only 70 miles from Parliament. But I have absolutely no doubt that he did not, in any true sense of the word, need you and me to fork out roughly £1,700 a month in mortgage interest payments on that house, for eight long years. We might call this payment ‘Parliamentary Housing Benefit’. Worse than a duck house, any day, I’d say. Is there a pattern here? I personally think this keenness to apply for other people’s money, even when he has lots of his own, undermines claims about ‘all being in it together’. How rich is he really? We do not know. But I think he was rich enough to manage without filling in the claim forms. Well, not an evening, exactly, but a few joyous minutes, connected by some sort of electronic miracle of the kind that has become all too easy in the modern world. The occasion can be found in full at about 40 minutes into this YouTubelink I appear again at around one hour 48 minutes and also briefly at one hour and 54 minutes. And I’m not planning to rehearse arguments on drug legalisation which have been held many times here and can be found in detail in many indexed items, and the comment threads that follow them. The occasion was a very strange encounter, presented as a debate but in fact not really one, more a sort of combative colloquy, streamed live by Google and Intelligence Squared (who do organise successful debates in conventional style) from a large hole in the ground near King’s Cross Station in London, underneath the offices of the ‘The Guardian’. I have no idea how the actual audience came to be selected, though I am used to the fact that metropolitan opinion is generally identical with the received wisdom of the BBC and the left-wing media - I might add that many supposedly conservative newspapers have, during the long slow surrender to drugs of the past 40 years, swallowed the propaganda of the liberalisers. I am sure that there were far too many people taking part, and I suppose that quite a lot of the audience (especially the overwhelmingly pro-drug online audience, and why is that?) thought that I could usefully have been left out of the cast. Like Theodore Dalrymple, another sceptic about ‘addiction’, I was even inconvenient to my own side. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of psychobabble, and the strange ascendancy of the pseudo-scientific chimera known as ‘Neuropsychopharmacology’ many arguments which would once have been open are now more or less closed, and those who do not agree with the orthodoxy are pushed to the margins. That is what Tuesday evening’s event also demonstrated. My main contributions to the event were as follows. First I blamed drug-takers for their own actions, and also blamed them, and their hedonistic selfishness, for the disasters which have befallen the narco-states, disasters about which that very good man Ed Vulliamy is rightly incensed, though I don’t share his solutions. Second, I stated that drug-taking was itself morally wrong. This is absolutely true for the reasons that I stated, and for other reasons too , which I hadn’t time to set out but which are dealt with in my book ‘The War We Never Fought’ (manuscript now delivered to the publishers). These are perfectly arguable propositions and I think I made the case for them clearly and rationally. The response I received was not rational. It was a form of rage, mingled with incredulity. They thought everyone like me was dead already. How dare I still be alive? (For an unfettered expression of this hatred see many of the barely coherent comments on the YouTube original, seething with rage and loathing). The alleged comedian in the hat (he was wearing a hat indoors, and nobody else was, how was it abusive to mention his hat, obviously a consciously chosen personal trademark? Perhaps he didn’t like me calling him an ‘alleged’ comedian, but I have to say I have yet to see any proof of the contention that he is one) responded to my point about selfish rich kids with a tirade of personal abuse and the standard all-purpose false accusation of racial prejudice that is the universal sign of a person who has no good argument, and knows he has no good argument. As his voice rose to a whine similar to the sound of an ill-tuned hand-dryer, he railed at me for daring to work for a newspaper he didn’t agree with (and which caught him out in a piece of behaviour which doesn’t exactly redound to his credit). It is amusing to be accused of bigotry by someone who fulfils its characteristics himself. Mr Brand was one of three people that evening who chose to abuse me personally and crudely. Another was Julian Assange, a person I have never previously met and for whom I feel, in general terms, some sympathy. If he wants to call me lavatory-wall names, that’s his privilege. But once again he offered no serious counter to my point. And, like Mr Brand, he received the general support of the audience for behaving in this way. The third was the extraordinarily over-rated lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who – on every occasion when I have debated him – has shown himself to be rather poor at reasoned debate. This may be excusable, if tiresome, in an amateur, but in one of Her Majesty’s counsel, a trained lawyer and part-time judge, it is pretty dispiriting. There are some opponents with whom it is a pleasure and a challenge to argue. He is not one of them. I might also add that in the Green Room beforehand he had approached me (without encouragement) in an ostentatiously friendly fashion, to which (having encountered him before) I responded with cool civility. I might also add that I received an e-mail from one of the pro-liberalisation speakers saying how much he regretted the rudeness of his side towards me, for which I am grateful. The point is far greater than a simple matter of manners. The point is that this sort of treatment is the presage of suppression and censorship. Now they are merely shocked that I still dare to say these things, which they had hoped to make unsayable before now. The long collapse of the remaining conservative elements in the Tory party (now almost complete) means that the spectrum of permissible opinion, in public debate, is narrowing sharply, and I do not know how much longer I shall be allowed to express my opinions on major public platforms. The Brave New World grows closer, and the world a little darker, each day. Sometimes people loathe me so much (there’ll be another posting on this subject shortly) that they convince themselves that I have various bad personal characteristics. Some years ago, when I said I drank half a bottle of wine a day, I was assailed by drug lobbyists as if I had admitted to a Bacchanalian nightly debauch, and was a terrible hypocrite for doing this and being against illegal drugs. This nonsensical case emerges from time to time, advanced by people who seem to take it seriously. Worse, others then take it up and the intelligent contributors here (you know who you are) fail to note its absurdity. So I must oppose it, though I have other better things to do, or people will think it might be valid. Half a bottle a night has for some years been way beyond me. I’m even quite enjoying Lent, as it gives me a permanent reason to refuse any alcohol at all, and not specially looking forward to being able to resume my occasional small glass of wine or even more occasional pint of beer after Easter. None the less a couple of anonymous contributors claim that my raucous, alcoholic behaviour stands in the way of policies I desire. This is tripe. I explain why below, with more patience than I personally think the argument deserves. I am now told that, to be consistent, and apparently to set an example to a waiting nation, I must give up alcohol entirely. I respond to the comment on the ‘In Front of Your Nose’ topic by Mr 'Think', (a comment which contains many quotations from me) interleaving my responses in his contribution and marking them ** Mr 'Think' begins:' [I am] Not the original questioner but I can see the obvious answers: ((PH asked) ' How, precisely, do I 'help to fuel the demand for alcohol' among other people with my own drinking? What are the mechanisms of this 'help'?' Mr 'Think' replies: The same way that those who buy and consume other drugs help fuel that demand, an argument you've made several times before. **Not so, and in fact dead wrong in in several ways. I am not opposed in principle to alcohol prohibition, though I think it impracticable, for reasons many times stated here. If I turned out to be wrong, I would willingly obey a prohibition law. It is precisely because I am an untypical drinker that I doubt that such a thing could be implemented. I do however frequently call for the reinstatement of the 1915 alcohol licensing laws, the closest this country could (in my view) reasonably come to prohibition. This does not in any way conflict with my personal drinking habits. My argument is not that those who take drugs are making drug legalisation more likely, though I do believe their actions are immoral as mine would be immoral if I drank to get drunk or to dull my discontent with an unjust world. . My argument is that campaigners for drug liberalisation are almost invariably drug users, whose motives are self-serving, though they generally don't say so. It is their illegal act which impels them to join this cause, because they would rather it were legal. There is no parallel, for the legal consumer of alcohol, especially a consumer like me, who wants alcohol to be more restricted than it is. To the extent that I campaign on drink laws at all, it is to make them more restrictive. This wouldn't, as it happens, incommode me one bit. They disguise their individual self-interest as a supposedly noble, libertarian cause. I do the opposite. I am quite open about my alcohol use, as they are generally not open about their illegal drug use. And I campaign for restrictions on the sale of alcohol, and have said not above a hundred times that I would happily give up alcohol for good if I could be persuaded that by doing so I could diminish the scourge of drunkenness. Next, alcohol is already legal. Illegal drugs are, er, illegal. By consuming alcohol I don't deliberately defy an existing law, so I neither corrupt myself by deliberate lawlessness, nor do I corrupt others by a bad example of deliberate lawlessness. Users of illegal drugs do these things, to their own detriment and to the detriment of our society. (PH said)' If I entirely ceased to drink (a state I have very nearly reached, as it happens) , who would even know, let alone care, let alone be influenced by it?' Mr 'Think' replies: 'The shops, bars and restaurants that supply you' **I drink at most two or three glasses of wine a week, and perhaps a pint of beer three or four times a year. I doubt if any of these suppliers would even notice my absence, or my abstinence. Or care. Mr 'Think' Your friends and family. **In what way would it influence them if I reduced this minimal consumption to nothing? Explain. Mr Think ''Your readers.' **I must here ask if there is anyone reading this blog who will say honestly and with a straight face that, were I to declare that I will nevermore touch a drop of alcohol, their personal behaviour would alter in any way. If so, how, and can I have it signed on a piece of a paper, with full name and address? Honestly. (PH quoted again) 'Why is my failure to cease drinking 'one of the reasons why alcohol prohibition is impracticable'. Mr 'Think' :'You argue that alcohol should be outright banned, but cannot be because it is culturally ingrained.' ** This is a mixture of error and half-truth. I don't argue that 'alcohol should be outright banned'. I have no moral objection to the moderate consumption of alcohol. I argue that it should be more restricted. The fact that a drug which is already legal cannot easily be banned is part, but not all, of my argument. It also cannot be banned because, thanks to being culturally ingrained, it has been legal for centuries, and making things illegal that ahve been legal for centuries is notoriously difficult if not actually impossible, however Draconian the law .(see modern Iran) Mr 'Think' :'You are one of those who drinks it, who contributes to that culture.' **But as I keep saying, I have no principled opposition to alcohol prohibition. I simply believe it to be impracticable. I could live my life without alcohol, missing only the taste of a glass of good Burgundy with a cold steak and kidney pie or of a pint of good ale drunk after a 50-mile bike ride. My life would be slightly, but not vastly, different. Were there to be a serious campaign for prohibition, which there is not, I would not oppose it on principle. I don't think there will be such a campaign, but I have made this statement several times and would abide by it if there were. Were it to be enacted, I would abide by it. How is this in any way comparable to someone who a) defies the law to use a stupefying drug and b) campaigns selfishly to change the law to suit himself? Note also that the campaign to destroy the drug laws currently exists (as a campaign for alcohol prohibition curerently does not and has not for many years) and the drug decriminalisation campaign is close to irreversible success ( rather unlike the non-existent campaign for alcohol prohibition, which my minor drinking is supposed somehow to be influencing, though how one can influence the outcome of a non-existent campaign, I am not able to say). Mr 'Think' asserts :' You are part of the barrier to the total prohibition you'd apparently ideally like to see.' To which I retort that actually I wouldn't 'like to see 'total prohibition', however it may 'appear' to Mr 'Think' that I would. I am sorry for him if he sees apparitions of this kind. I wouldn't 'like to see' it because I believe it to be impracticable. And I would add that nobody else of any significance is campaigning for it either. So how can I be an obstacle to something that nobody (including me) is asking for? An obstacle, to be an obstacle, surely has to have something to obstruct. What is it obstructing? Who is calling for this? (PH quoted again);'Who, with any influence over laws and events, is even considering such a measure?' Mr 'Think' alleges ' You considered it, you considered it would be desirable, but you considered it would be impractical. Because of people like yourself, whose culture it is to buy and consume alcohol.'; **No, not because of people like me, for whom alcohol is a minor pleasure which we could easily abandon if we wanted to, but because of people quite unlike me for whom alcohol has become a central pleasure of their lives, which, like illegal drug-takers, they would never consider giving up for the greater good. And the fact that I have considered and rejected it means that I am no longer considering it. (PH quoted again) 'Even if they were, what difference would my actions make?' Mr 'Think' asserts :'You would stop funding drug suppliers.' ** This is an abuse of language. Like it or not, alcohol is legal in this country and those who sell it are not 'drug suppliers' in the sense intended here. They are undertaking a legitimate business. I am not 'funding' them. I am legally buying their legal product. More, if they relied on me to sustain them, they would long ago have gone out of business (as it happens, both my local wine merchants have shut down in the last two years, but I don't think it's my fault, I just think that good-quality wine is not the most popular form of alcohol in my particular suburb, and I wonder why that is, if my habits are so influential?) . Mr 'Think' asserts again ' You would be setting an example.' **And I repeat my point above, an example of what, to whom? He claims : ' You would be taking a step to change a culture you apparently disagree with, but join in with nonetheless.' **Wrong. I would be taking a step of no significance, in support of a cause I don't even endorse. Mr 'Think again:' You would stop appearing as a hypocrite.' Well, I can't stop *appearing* as a hypocrite to people who loathe me so much for opposing them that they are laboriously determined (see above) to believe that I am a hypocrite whatever I do or say. That is beyond my power to influence, as the *appearance* is in their minds, not in my actions, and is not susceptible to correction by facts or logic, as it is motivated by hostility. As i say, I hope he doesn't see too manyof these apparations. It's a bad sign. But, as I explain above, my actions do not in any way conflict with my opinions. so I am not (in this matter at least ) a hypocrite. I have two debates ( both on drugs) to attend in the next two days, one of them in Yorkshire, so must be brief. Sometimes I am baffled by the responses I get to particular articles. I am used to the way in which the anti-God fanatics and Olympic-standard bores try to find some way of restarting their interminable quibble on the thinnest excuse. And I am woefully aware of the bilious intolerance of the drug legalisation lobby, which mounts organised attacks on any tiny sign of resistance to its new orthodoxy. But do wake up. Sometimes in journalism it’s necessary to be a tiny bit oblique to get a message across. You might know something you can’t actually say out loud. There’s a very good example of this in Arthur Koestler’s ‘Scum of the Earth’, an absorbing account of his very narrow escape from the Nazis in 1940, where he spots a cunning Paris journalist evading the censorship and telling his more alert readers that the French Army has broken at Sedan, and the Germans are once more on their way to Paris. I made the Lord Dannatt affair the main item in my column partly because it is an interesting and illuminating story about modern Britain. I think it it is quite obvious to any thinking person why he withdrew from the campaign, even though I leave the explanation unsaid. But I also led with it because it is by far the most important. It has little or nothing to do with homosexuality or with my views on it, or anybody’s. It is I who said elsewhere that this subject is Stalingrad for moral conservatives, so I’d be obliged if other people, using this term, attributed it to me, rather than offering it to me as if it were a new-minted idea that hadn’t occurred to me. It is about the rapid narrowing of permissible public debate, since the three major parties united behind the policy of Equality and Diversity. In my ‘Abolition of Britain’ I quote the Sixties radical Richard Neville, editor of ‘OZ’ as saying ‘there is an inch of difference between the Conservative and Labour parties. But it is in that inch that we all live’. I doubt if Mr Neville foresaw that within 40 years that inch would have first been metricated into 2.5 centimetres, then narrowed to a millimetre and then, with the Howard-Cameron putsch in the Tory Party, close altogether. Nor would he have predicted that the resulting consensus would be a good deal closer to the view of ‘OZ’ in 1968 than to the views of , say, the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of that date. But so it is, and if we are alarmed by Vladimir Putin’s closure of debate, and by the way in which Russian political life is open only to a small circle who conform to the views of the Putinocracy, and we say we are, then why are we not rather alarmed at the same process, admittedly more smoothly conducted, here in our own country, where we live and where we supposedly have some influence over events?. By the way, on the drugs issue, there is no need to go to the index to work out what a proper enforcement policy would be like. If anyone is so obtuse as to pretend not to know, the answer has many times been set out here – the interdiction of demand as well as supply, with severe penalties, properly imposed and enforced by an active police force, for possession of illegal drugs, and for use of premises for the consumption of drugs. This was the position in this country before 1971, when use of illegal drugs was far lower than it is now. Is it possible these facts are connected? I only ask.k
Angry about gay marriage? Mr Slippery will be SO happy
Anna deserves some genuine Fifties glamour
Vanishing into the euro-gloom
It's not funny and it's not clever
Does the Prime Minister really need benefits?
On being Insulted by Experts (and non-experts), and my evening with Russell Brand
A Serious Answer to a Silly Argument
Sunday, 18 March 2012
Hardly a day passes without someone ringing me up or writing to me to say that they now realise that our Prime Minister, Mr Slippery, is a fraud.
Last week I had my first encounter with the alleged comedian Russell Brand.
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