14 April 2012 10:14 PM
'Cushty, easily done!' A criminal's mocking words that sum up our injustice system
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
The pro-crime lobby who run our injustice system have two fixed beliefs.
One is that criminals are victims.
Their misdeeds are not their fault but the inevitable result of non-existent poverty.
They have no personal ability to overcome their backgrounds, and so it would be cruel to punish them.
The other is that prisons are a waste of money, an ‘expensive way of making bad people worse’ as the supposedly Right-wing Tory Home Secretary David Waddington said in 1990.
They would rather not have any prisons at all.
They keep the jails we have only because of tiresome public opinion, and because of newspapers like this one that hold fast to traditional ideas of right and wrong, justice and punishment.
That is why they deliberately run those prisons very badly – they are pointless, apologetic warehouses, largely under the control of the inmates and full of illegal drugs.
Almost nobody is sent to these places until he or she is already a habitual, confirmed criminal.
They are then almost always swiftly released, after learning for certain what they have long suspected, that they have nothing to fear from the police or the courts.
Then the pro-crime liberals write reports pointing out how awful the prisons are (while ignoring the fact that their own ideas have caused this) and urging that even fewer people are sent to them.
As a result, crime increases so much that – despite ultra-liberal guidelines on sentencing – the prisons still fill and overflow.
Last summer’s mass disorders (wrongly called riots) were a direct result of this moronic policy.
Last week we saw two court cases which showed exactly what is going on.
Both are dismal and dispiriting.
Our existing political class, their heads crammed with the mental cotton wool of Sixties Leftism, will learn nothing from them.
But will you learn the crucial lesson, that the Tory Party is just as soppy, just as liberal and just as much your enemy as Labour?
Case One concerns Caroline Pattinson (pictured above), an abuser of heroin, which is supposed to be illegal but isn’t in practice.
Pattinson, 34, has committed 207 crimes in 20 years.
These include 108 convictions for theft, many for cruel frauds on pensioners. But until last Tuesday she had never been sent to prison, except on remand.
Now that she has, she’s not worried. Why should she be?
On being sentenced to 30 months (of which she will serve at most 15 months), she mockingly called out: ‘Cushty! Easily done!’
Case Two concerns Gordon Thompson, also 34, another child of post-Sixties Britain.
Thompson collected an 11½-year sentence for burning down a large shop in Croydon during the mass disorder.
This sounds tough, but once again I doubt if Thompson has much to fear from a modern British prison. The nastier you are, the easier it is to do time in these places.
In any case, I’ll be amazed if he serves more than six years, if that, before they find an excuse to tag him and send him home.
The sentences passed on those involved in the summer outbreak of mass greed and destructiveness have been heavier than usual, but purely for public relations reasons.
Normal lawbreakers continue to get the standard soft treatment.
Thompson already had 20 convictions (fare-dodging, beating up his wife, cocaine possession, carrying knives), and had been so exceptionally callous to his neighbours that the courts did occasionally manage to imprison him, though, as usual, too late and too feebly to do any good.
No, prison doesn’t work – unless it’s an austere place of punishment. But it is absurd to claim that it makes criminals out of harmless innocents.
It is the Permissive Society and our lavish Welfare State which are an expensive way of making bad people worse.
Gove’s schools fail the crucial test
Every Easter sees the same sterile battle between the teachers’ unions, whose conferences give platforms to unrepresentative, strike-happy loudmouths, and the Education Secretary, currently Michael Gove.
Mr Gove (like his many forerunners) knows that being attacked by such people is good for his image.
But it is not good for the country.
The real issue is what it has been since 1965.
Are schools places for pupils to learn, under authority, the things they need to know to be good and useful men and women?
Or are they to be laboratories of social engineering, designed to force equality and Left-wing ideas on all those who can’t afford private fees?
Mr Gove, who is no fool and so has no excuses, knows this perfectly well.
But he will not take the one step that would put it right – the return of academic selection.
Instead, he is trying to nationalise all the State schools in England (this is what the academy programme actually means), a bureaucratic non-solution that will give terrifying centralised power to a future Labour Education Secretary.
How is this conservative?
You can’t fool me with that spoonful of sugar
I shall keep on saying this till everyone notices.
The ‘health-and-safety’ frenzy that has reduced us all to quivering cowards in the face of the slightest risk is nothing to do with human rights or even political correctness.
It is the direct fault of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Tory Governments, which introduced ambulance-chasing, no-win, no-fee lawyers into this country.
They did so with Section 58 of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, and the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations, passed as a Statutory Instrument in 1995. Repeal them.
Tory laws made us all cowards
I shall keep on saying this till everyone notices.
The ‘health-and-safety’ frenzy that has reduced us all to quivering cowards in the face of the slightest risk is nothing to do with human rights or even political correctness.
It is the direct fault of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Tory Governments, which introduced ambulance-chasing, no-win, no-fee lawyers into this country.
They did so with Section 58 of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, and the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations, passed as a Statutory Instrument in 1995. Repeal them.
The one thing I learned when I visited North Korea is that it is not a serious threat, except to itself. It is a pathetic remnant of the Cold War, frantically hoping that the rich West will save it from Chinese domination.
Drunkenness (on cheap rice wine) is rife, there’s almost no electricity or petrol, the underfed soldiers’ weapons are obsolete and decayed. No wonder the much-trumpeted rocket fell into the sea.
Pity for the North Korean people, not fear of their ridiculous leader, should be our main response.
An Argument for Punishment
Modern Britain doesn’t believe in punishment. It doesn’t believe in punishment (and this view is common even among supposed conservatives) because it doesn’t believe in personal responsibility. Otherwise intelligent people, for instance, accept concepts composed of baloney and bunkum, such as the almost universal belief in physical ‘addiction’ to various drugs and pleasures. Or they prose on about ‘rehabilitation’, a concept never defined and so impossible to disprove (but in fact non-existent). Then there are the widespread beliefs that people are fat, or have sexual or other tastes they can’t control, because of genetic determination.
As in so much of modern life, these absurdities flourish because of the almost total collapse of serious Christian belief and understanding, which has left a vast uncultivated wasteland in which all kinds of nonsense, from astrology to Trotskyism, flourish like mental bindweed.
But what, then, are we to do about the homicidal idiocy of texting, or telephoning, while driving? In my local weekly newspaper this morning I read yet another appalling account of a horrible road accident in which a young woman drove her car headlong into another coming in the opposite direction, so ending her life and leaving her young son alive in the back of the car. The poor child had to scramble free and stood helplessly on the roadside, telling passers-by that his mother was still trapped inside. Actually, she was probably already dead. Phone records show that the woman involved had been taking part in a text exchange at the time of the crash. I have very little doubt that this was so. The child is now bereft and will probably remember that terrible day, in one way or another, for all of his life. It is unbearably sad. Can we do nothing to prevent it happening again? Could we have done nothing to prevent it in the first place?
As I bicycle and walk, I constantly see people driving while holding mobile phones and either looking down frequently at them, or holding them to their ears with one hand. This is both illegal and stupid, and known to be. It is not just mildly risky , but appallingly dangerous to themselves and to others. Yet they do it anyway. This makes me so angry that , if they are stopped in traffic, I rap on their windows and tell them that this is illegal in the (invariably vain) hope that a police officer might be nearby. One such (a highly educated French professional in Chelsea) actually jeered at me ‘The police are never anywhere to be seen. Why should I care about this law?’ before driving off with a smile on his face. Most of them are momentarily embarrassed, but as soon as they realise that I’m not a police officer, they recover their poise. If there is time, they will often give me a free character analysis.
It is interesting that if you point out to people in modern Britain that they are breaking a law, they will usually ask if you are a policeman, as if they were serfs in a country where the law belonged to the state, and not to the people, and you needed a man in uniform to make you obey it, rather than your own conscience. (Don’t they realise how lucky they are to live in a country where the people make, observe and enforce their own laws? Obviously not). Or they begin a lengthy, if ill-informed, study of your personality and its failings. The fact that they are in the wrong is instantly forgotten. Indeed, it doesn’t count. Laws only matter if you’re caught by the cops.
So what are we to do, to avoid the sight of more weeping small boys on roadsides, crying for someone to wake up their mother, who is trapped in the car, which has crashed because she was on the phone, or texting?
Well, an advertising campaign on TV would be good. One of the Welsh police forces made a fiercely powerful short film in which a young woman’s texting while driving causes a mass pile-up. I wish everyone could see it. Having been in a serious road accident myself, I can say that it is the most accurate depiction of the awful speed with which everything happens, and the terrifying silence afterwards (accompanied by the realisation that severe damage has been done) that I have ever seen.
But that would be useless if it isn’t accompanied by *enforcement of the law*. No doubt, failing to enforce this law universally and consistently ‘frees up’ officers for more paperwork, for investigating journalists or pursuing allegations of homophobia. But is this the right approach? I think not.
I might add that I don’t think just stopping these people and talking to them would be enough. I should have thought that (like persons accused of breaking PC speech codes) they should be placed in police cells for several hours, be fingerprinted, photographed and swabbed for DNA. And that they should then swiftly be brought to court and imprisoned for a week, it being made very clear to them that a second offence will land them in prison for a year.
And do you know what? I think people would then stop texting and phoning while driving. If not, not. Any objections?
Quiz Show: ‘We thought we were going to get TV … but TV has got us instead’.
I have at last managed to see for the second time the astonishingly good film ‘Quiz Show’, made in 1994 about the true-life scandals affecting American TV quiz shows in the 1950s. I first watched it on a long-ago weekend in Philadelphia, during a brief break in my then pursuit of Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader who had been given a visa by Bill Clinton, to visit, propagandise and fund-raise in the USA. Somehow it fell to me, as Washington correspondent of another newspaper, to follow him around asking him unwelcome questions.
Mr Adams and I got on so well together that he once suggested in a Washington DC press conference that it was time I was ‘decommissioned’. I felt a glow of pride, and something else as well, not quite so pleasant, whatever was it…?
But I digress. As I watched ‘Quiz Show’, I thought it must surely become a much-talked about classic.
It is a rather beautiful film, including a bold attempt to recreate the optimistic America of the 1950s (so very different from the grey, scraped, tired Britain of the same era), when TV was still a novelty. People who go on (in my view rather inexplicably) about the dull, dull, dull TV series ‘Mad Men’, standby of every magazine and fashion page for months past, might take a look at ‘Quiz Show’ to see a rather more lively and realistic recreation of the fashions, attitudes and manners of that time.
There are several wonderful moments in which the corruption of the soul is shown in exactly the form it takes in real life – that is, blithely smiling, very hard to resist, and clothed in acceptable excuses. There is also, in the character of Charles van Doren, an illustration of the old truth that the corruption of the best is the worst of all.
The heart of the plot is a Congressional investigation into the rigging of big-prize TV quiz shows. The director, Robert Redford, concentrates on Van Doren because he is a genuinely knowledgeable, well-read, thoughtful man, the youngest in a family of revered intellects and writers. At one stage he is shown at a family gathering, crammed with great literary names. His father refers to James Thurber casually as a friend, as he was. The men trade Shakespeare quotations and historical references. They don’t own TVs or watch TV and they aren’t frightened by the rapid takeover of culture by television, despite T.S. Eliot’s warning some years before, in a famous letter to the London ‘Times’.
In one scene freighted with foreboding, the young Van Doren gives his father Mark (played by the wonderful Paul Scofield) a TV set for his birthday. You know that this means the old, intellectual life at his handsome Connecticut farm will come to an end, just as it will end throughout the modern world as the great conformist box steals the minds of millions, and atrophies their imaginations.
I won’t give too much away in case any of you decide to watch the film, which was as good as I remembered it being, if not better with the passage of 18 years (the even older film ‘Witness’, another film that ought to be a classic but somehow isn’t, likewise stands up to the years very well). But there are two prophetic scenes: one in which a cynical character says there is no real point in having difficult quiz shows which need clever people to appear on them – easy ones with simple answers will do just as well (as it has proved) - and another in which the Congressional investigator sighs, ‘We thought we were going to get TV … but TV has got us instead’.
And They’re Off...
I’m sure my Ironside ancestors, not given to gambling, wouldn’t approve, but Ladbrokes on Monday were offering 33 to 1 on my becoming an MP before or during the next general election. My own odds would be rather longer, but I suppose that it’s nice that they care.
Their press statement wasn’t entirely flattering : ‘Jessica Bridge of Ladbrokes said: "George Galloway has shown recently that anything can happen in politics. Hitchens shouldn't be ruled out as a serious contender.” ’
Anything can happen, eh? Well perhaps not. Anyway, grateful as I am for the encouragement I’ve received from many readers, I’ll now go into a bit more detail.
One, this is not an attempt to found a new party. As I have said a thousand times, real political parties arise when there is a vacancy for them. There is, just now, no such vacancy.
Anything founded when there is no vacancy bears the same relation to a real party as a Hornby trainset does to the old Great Western Railway. You may call it a party, and make appropriate noises as you play with it on the sitting-room floor. But it will not be a party.
What I would hope, at this stage, is that concerned individuals would begin to think about forming small exploratory committees in existing constituencies, under the ‘Justice and Liberty’ motto. They should aim to find out if there is support for a candidate broadly in favour of the simple principles I set out. They should then look for a suitable person, preferably genuinely local prepared to put himself or herself forward, with all the time and commitment that this involves, and prepared to serve in Parliament if actually elected.
The first aim of such committees must be to undermine the duopoly of the dead parties, and to send a repeated signal to Parliament and the media that voters in sizeable numbers are no longer prepared to vote or work for MPs who ignore their most basic concerns.
Only if such a party begins to score sizeable votes, and eventually wins seats, will the next stage begin – the stage in which the duopoly is genuinely challenged.
Several possibilities occur. Here’s an example: If such a committee manages to set itself up, it might then raise funds to organise an open primary election (those involved will need to become experts in electoral law quite quickly, as the duopoly will certainly try to use that law to obstruct them) which would be bound to attract a great deal of publicity and would, if well-organised, help to create a local presence for the candidate eventually chosen, and a legitimacy much greater than that held by the candidates of the duopoly.
I should have thought that anyone interested should aim for a long, slow take-off. The duopoly parties (and the Liberal Democrats as well) must be holed below the waterline before and during the next election (which will probably produce a Lib-Lab coalition, at this rate), so that they can be properly sunk in the next five years or so.
The main purpose in the early stages will be to attack them for their complacency and their rejection of common sense, as well as their obsession with elite preoccupations, and their scorn for the real difficulties of normal human beings. There will be time enough, once the duopoly have been badly damaged, to begin to formulate a detailed programme. For the moment, it will be simpler, and not dishonest, for a radical movement to define itself by what it is against.
Thanks to the ghastly Fixed-term Parliaments Act, there will be time to take advantage of the increasing problems of the Coalition (though it would be wise to be reasonably well-advanced by the time the Coalition stages its inevitable fake split, something it is likely to do around the end of next year).
As for me, personally, I shall not rush into the first by-election that comes up, but will consider carefully before putting myself forward. Genuinely local candidates with real connections and loyalties will often have a higher claim. I have no illusions about the limits of my appeal. But I think it possible that, despite that, there may now be enough voters who are detached from their old loyalties, and willing to listen to a thoughtful alternative.
I said I'd never stand as an MP... Well, I've changed my mind
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
If George Galloway can get elected, should I too stand for Parliament? I have resisted the idea for years. I once worked at Westminster and saw the powerlessness of the individual MP against the thuggish pressure of the party whips.
I know that almost all elections in this country are rigged to suit the big parties. I am saddened by the way so many good people honestly imagine that they pick their own MPs at General Elections.
In fact, by clinging to habitual party loyalties, they just confirm the choices already made for them in secret by the party machines.
These machines are ruthlessly centralised nowadays, so that any independent or honest person is sifted out of the selection process. A few get through by accident, but you will have noticed that the experiment with open primaries has not been repeated. We can’t have actual voters playing any real part in picking candidates for safe seats. That would mean revolution.
Then there is the problem of party loyalty itself. I am endlessly baffled by the way in which the patriotic, honest, law-abiding people of this country vote for Labour and Tory candidates who loathe Britain and refuse to stand up for nation, law, liberty or justice. Yet they do. The millions of patriots who voted Tory at the last Election committed an act of self-harming idiocy. To support Mr Cameron’s openly declared Left-liberal project was as unreasonable as punching yourself repeatedly in the face, or burgling your own house.
Yet suddenly, in the past few weeks, I think we can hear the sound of mental chains snapping. The ridiculous and squalid performance of the Government on so many different subjects has – perhaps briefly – woken large numbers of people from their dreamlike doze of dangerous complacency.
They may have vaguely known that government was for sale. But the sight and sound of the unlovely Peter Cruddas openly selling the Prime Minister of this country (and his wife) to anyone with the money to pay suddenly brought home the truth in a way that thousands of words could not have done.
Mr Slippery’s attempt to get himself out of this was even more obviously the act of a fraud who has been found out and knows it. Caught in the searchlight, we saw a naked Public Relations Man, whose first and last resort is trickery and slickness, because that is what he prefers.
First we had a fake panic over petrol, then a fake pretence at being a man of the people by claiming to have stuffed his face with a fictitious Cornish pasty from a shop that had long ceased to exist. What a surprise, then, to find him last week claiming unconvincingly to have a lively Christian faith, while his Home Secretary gets on with snubbing and sidelining genuine Christians in the accursed name of ‘equality and diversity’ – Mr Slippery’s real religion, as we surely must now realise.
Those of us who have known this for ages, who have studied Mr Slippery’s bottomless cynicism, grotesquely greedy expenses claims and instinctive Leftism on all major issues, have until now been stuck hopelessly at the edge of things, surrounded by deluded optimists who think that Mr Slippery is only held back by Nick Clegg, and is preparing to emerge as his true self at some vague point in the future, round about the same place as the one where parallel lines meet.
Surely this is now unsustainable. As for the other parties, they are the same. I think that is one of the reasons for George Galloway’s victory in Bradford West. The old loyalties are at last dying, the Coalition actually speaks for nobody, there is no proper opposition in Parliament and – instinctively, like a flower seeking light – the electorate is recognising that this has to be put right. Mr Galloway is not, of course, the solution. We must do better than that.
John Maynard Keynes once said: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind.’ And he asked those who criticised him: ‘What do you do, sir?’ Well, I too have changed my mind.
And I think several hundred other people should do the same. In each parliamentary seat, concerned and wise men and women should now turn their minds to finding a candidate who has independence of mind, who is neither bigoted nor politically correct, who loves this country and is proud of its independence and its ancient liberties, who hates crime and injustice, who supports the married family and the rule of law, who understands that education without authority is impossible.
Where by-elections arise, they should be ready to fight them, and when the next General Election comes they should be ready to fight that too, to bypass and overthrow the sordid, discredited tyranny of spivs, placemen and careerists that is now ruining what ought to be one of the greatest civilisations on Earth.
I urge them to do so, under the simple motto of Justice and Liberty, a name that nobody can copyright and a pledge that nobody can fake. And if they do, then I’ll seriously consider putting my name forward.
Palin: Ignorant but profoundly decent
There is an extraordinary new film about Sarah Palin, Game Change, in which that fine actress Julianne Moore – herself a PC Leftist – gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the luckless Vice-Presidential candidate, who was even more ignorant about politics than our own Anthony Blair.
Unintentionally, the makers of the film reveal that Mrs Palin, for all her failings, is in fact a profoundly good person.
The scenes of her meeting Down’s children on her campaign and treating them as they should be treated – as fully human, valuable people rather than as embarrassments who should have been aborted – are inexpressibly moving.
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This weekend thousands of returning British travellers will face appalling passport queues. When will people realise that this is because the EU bans us from having what every truly independent country has – special queues for our own subjects?
France can teach us nothing about 'human rights'
France can teach us nothing about 'human rights'
Beware of praising France’s fake-conservative President Sarkozy (never more fake, and never more conservative than during elections) for deporting Islamists in defiance of the Human Rights Charter.
France can do this because, for all its democratic trappings, it is utterly different from Britain. Like most of our continental neighbours, it has no real tradition of law being above power – the key to civilisation.
Britain by contrast, abides by the laws she makes and the treaties she signs, a principle going back to Magna Carta. That is why there is no compromise available.
If we are to regain our own laws and liberties, we must withdraw from the Human Rights Charter and leave the European Union too. Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are a far better guarantee.
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