21 April 2012 9:21 PM
Bungling bearded windbags on to jets won't solve anything
What do we know about Right and Wrong (and other subjects)? And some more lessons in how to argue
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Theresa May, one of nature’s soppy liberals, is struggling to seem decisive over the deportation of the Bethlehem-born windbag Abu Qatada. The trouble is, Mrs May isn’t even any good at pretending to be tough.
Labour and Tory politicians love this sort of charade. It makes them look as if they are guarding the nation against the Islamist threat. Like so much of what they do, it is a noisy, empty fraud on the public.
They exaggerate hugely. Like several other furry-faced old blowhards, Qatada is said to have been Osama Bin Laden’s closest henchman. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he wasn’t. He isn’t now.
He cannot really be much use as a Terrorist Godfather now that he has been on TV, and MI5 and the police watch his every movement. Well, can he? Think about it.
It has all gone wrong for Mrs May because she and her department are not very good at what they do. But really the British people ought to have seen through this fake controversy by now.
The real Islamist threat to Britain and the rest of Europe comes from uncontrolled mass migration from Muslim countries. Combined with our national refusal to defend our British, Christian culture, this is rapidly creating a powerful and influential Muslim vote which will increasingly change our country.
Given a few more decades, it will have profoundly altered this country. I have long suspected that this island will be more or less Muslim within a century, and it will be the fault of this generation. It would be perfectly legitimate for a respectable, law-abiding and civilised political party to act now to prevent this.
But instead they leave the subject to steroid-swallowing nutcases like Anders Breivik, or creepy opportunists like the BNP.
Millions reasonably worry about this. But they are dismissed as extremists by a liberal establishment which views robust defence of Britain’s culture as bigotry.
In Labour’s case this comes from a genuine loathing of Britain as it was. For the Tories, as in so many other matters, it is cowardice, combined with total lack of principle.
They recoil like salted snails from the simple idea that immigrants should be expected to accept the customs, morals, language and traditions of their host country. They cannot explain why this idea is wrong, because it is not wrong.
The migrants have come here voluntarily. While they are welcome to follow their faith and maintain their culture, by seeking and continuing to live here, they and their descendants have accepted that our culture should remain dominant, our religion remain established and our language and laws remain supreme.
It is the opposite of ‘intolerant’ for any British person to say that he does not want to see Sharia law or polygamy in operation here. Nor should we be embarrassed to condemn forced marriages or the horribly misnamed murders known as ‘honour killings’.
As for ‘racism’, the statements of some Muslim leaders about Jews are among the nastiest examples of prejudice in the modern world. It is interesting, in a bitter way, to see how reluctant the politically correct Left are to attack this, or even admit the problem exists.
As a Christian who is grieved by many features of modern Britain I often find myself allied with British Muslims. I have yet to meet a Muslim I don’t like.
But that doesn’t stop me saying that I do not want this to be a Muslim society, which is the likely long-term result of the liberal elite’s twin policies – of open borders and multiculturalism.
Bundling bearded mullahs on to aeroplanes doesn’t actually make any difference to this. It is a crude attempt to seem tough while actually being weak.
Anyway, Mrs May cannot even bundle mullahs efficiently – because she and her Government insist on revering and obeying the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg.
This court would have no actual power, if our ruling class had not willingly given it that power. If Britain withdrew from the entire Council of Europe tonight, nobody could or would do anything about it.
But we don’t withdraw, because our governing class long ago discovered that, in the name of ‘Human Rights’, it could override our old laws without any need for a vote or a debate.
Our allegiance to the court exists only because of a well-intentioned blunder by our grandfathers. When they adopted the European Human Rights Convention more than 60 years ago, they never thought it would apply to us.
In those days we were rightly confident that our liberties were guaranteed by safeguards forged over seven centuries, from Magna Carta of 1215 to the Bill of Rights of 1689.
On the far side of the Channel things were profoundly different. Despotism, fanaticism, organised hatred and aggression were never far away.
Take Strasbourg itself, where the Human Rights Court sits. In 1950, that lovely, haunted place had only recently got rid of its own Gestapo office, complete with torture chambers. National Socialist pseudo-scientists at the perverted Reich university there had been working on setting up a mad, grotesque museum of Jewish skeletons.
These medieval horrors were taking place in a modern city as late as 1944. Had events turned out slightly differently, they would still be going on now.
No wonder it seemed a good idea to set up some sort of mechanism to stand in the way of such things.
But we never needed it on our side of the Channel, and we do not need it here now. We only continue to obey it because our establishment finds it useful in its unrelenting campaign to stamp out common sense, and abolish Britain as we have known it.
Wives deserve more than 'equality', Nick
Nick Clegg's smooth and smiley public-school exterior conceals a bitter and intolerant commissar. The Deputy Premier says he wants men and women to be regarded on ‘exactly the same basis’. How odd, when women can have babies, and men cannot. Treating different people as if they are the same is unfair.
And he thinks it ‘really weird’ that other people ‘find it odd that women want to be both mothers and have a career’. Those who have doubts about this have ‘got to get with it’ and are living in a ‘sepia-tinted yesteryear’.
The fact that something is happening now, and didn’t happen in the past, doesn’t magically make it right.
Mr Clegg, whose wife earns a giant salary as a lawyer, has an interest in this subject. I expect that, like most elite couples, they can afford the very best in nannies.
But most women work because they damned well have to, thanks to years of campaigning by people like Mr Clegg. Many hate handing their children over to paid strangers. What’s more, it’s obvious the absence of mothers from children’s lives is one of the reasons for so many of our social and educational problems.
Raising your own children is an honourable and important task, not to be scorned. In my view it’s rather more valuable than advising mining companies in Morocco. What luck not to be a Liberal Democrat.
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After the 1976 drought, there was much talk of a national water grid. I wonder if this would have been built by now if the water industry had not been privatised? Increasingly, I cannot understand why Tories think privatisation is automatically good. It isn’t.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
The Breivik case, and some comments here, caused me to search out this report I wrote for the Mail on Sunday of 22nd April 2001. It concerns the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the mass murderer of Oklahoma City. I realised that it had not been posted on the Internet at the time and, though it is quite old, it addresses some of the subjects under discussion, such as the moral effects of different methods of execution. It is also relevant because McVeigh, like Breivik, was inaccurately connected with political conservatism by liberal left propagandists. In fact, both men’s homicidal fanaticism is utterly unconservative by definition. Mass murder as a political act is the tool of utopian radicals, for reasons often discussed here. I wonder now if McVeigh might not, like Breivik, have been taking powerful drugs with the capacity to twist the mind.
Here is what I wrote, from Terre Haute, Indiana:
‘How refreshing to be in a country where they put terrorists to death, rather than negotiate with them. The execution of the mass murderer, child-killer and bomber Timothy McVeigh will take place soon after dawn on Wednesday, May 16, here in the middle of America's rich green heartland, almost within sight of the world he has lost: the world of open highways, shopping malls, all you can eat and boundless liberty. But he will die in a stark brick blockhouse behind the razor wire and watchtowers of one of the USA's bleakest penitentiaries.
Watching outside on the bare sweep of government-owned grass which lies between Indiana State Highway 63, Justice Road and the prison itself, will be two groups of demonstrators, one applauding McVeigh's end, the other protesting that he should be left alive.
The rival gatherings will be kept apart and searched before being allowed on to the site.
The authorities do not want a repeat of the scenes outside the 1989 execution of the serial killer Ted Bundy, when tasteless folk waved miniature electric chairs and frying pans in the air, while vindictively chanting: 'Fry, Bundy, fry.' So no cooking utensils are permitted.
Officials have even made a list of exactly what will be allowed in the roped-off area outside the prison: a candle screened against the wind, a phone, a Bible and - every hypochondriac American's right - a few bottles of pills. Next to the demonstrators will be a giant encampment of satellite dishes, spreading into the front gardens of several local people who have rather sensibly rented the space out to the mighty networks.
The event will overwhelm the small city. It has never exactly been a big tourist destination and many of the regiments of reporters and TV staff will have to stay in college halls of residence because there are not enough hotel rooms. Prison staff are worried that traffic congestion before the event will hinder or prevent their daily deliveries of pizza. A more serious fear - that another unhinged crazy man may try to avenge McVeigh by bombing the town - has persuaded the authorities to close vulnerable buildings, especially courts and schools, for the day.
The name of this place - Terre Haute - means 'High Ground'. The joke goes that, since the surroundings are entirely flat, it must be the moral high ground. And why not?
Is there anyone who really, passionately, deeply thinks that it will be wrong to let 33-year-old McVeigh ride the fatal needle of lethal injection, take his dose of deadly chemicals and leave the world several decades ahead of schedule? It is as if Thomas Hamilton, the Dunblane child killer, had not done away with himself and Britain had still had the death penalty at the time. The liberals would have been pretty quiet, as they are here.
For this week was the sixth anniversary of the day McVeigh set off the Oklahoma City bomb, six years in which he has not once expressed remorse, in which he has referred to the dead children among his 168 victims as 'collateral damage', and in which he has yet to understand, even slightly, what it is that he has done. Perhaps, in the final hours when they take away his 24-hour cable TV and cut off his daily phone calls, when they offer him his last meal - anything he likes provided it costs less than $20, contains no alcohol and can be obtained locally - he may begin to get the point. Though perhaps not. During his trial, as the lists of the dead were read out and the awful injuries he caused detailed, he often ended the day by sending out to a restaurant for a 'Cowboy Steak' done medium rare, or a double bacon cheeseburger.
Maybe even then it won't sink in. He may still have the nerve to recite his planned last words, verses by the English poet W. E. Henley, about how he is the 'captain of his soul' and 'the master of his fate'. But when the moment comes for the walk to the death house, when they find a place to insert the needle and hook him up to the tubes through which extinction will come, quietly but certainly, perhaps then he will wish he hadn't said: 'Death and loss are an integral part of life everywhere. We have to accept it and move on. To these people in Oklahoma who lost a loved one, I'm sorry, but it happens every day. You're not the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or granddaughter. It happens every day, somewhere in the world.' Thanks a lot for that, McVeigh. But what if you made it happen? The thoughts of Sonja Lane, whose husband Donald was murdered by McVeigh, are worth recording here, for those inclined to forget what death actually means. Asked about the effect of her violent loss, she said simply: 'There is nothing in my life that is the same.' These matters are worth mentioning since so many people these days look at executions from the point of view of the murderer. They say how hard a life he had, how he never had a chance, how we are just doing to him what he did to others. Or they say that we may have executed the wrong man. They say that even when - as in the case of James Hanratty - we have obviously executed the right one.
When, some six years ago, I witnessed the execution of the British-born killer Nicholas Lee Ingram in the state of Georgia, there was also little doubt that they had the right man, though fashionable opinion in Britain thought he should be spared.
I didn't think so. Just before I was escorted into the prison at Jackson, and by pure chance, I was shown photographs of his victim, J. C. Sawyer, after Ingram had finished with him. They were nothing spectacular, just a middle-aged guy with a bloody hole in his head, but they brought Ingram's revolting crime to life. Ingram had stormed into these harmless people's remote house, crazed with booze and drugs, marched Mr Sawyer and his wife Mary deep into the woods at gunpoint, lashed them to a tree and then tortured and taunted them before shooting Mr Sawyer in the head. He meant to kill Mrs Sawyer too but bungled it, leaving behind the witness who would eventually put him on Death Row.
I am very glad I saw those pictures.
I found it easier to bear what followed, a process which was and is meant to be horrible, and which left me feeling several years older, though it lasted only a few minutes.
Georgia still uses the electric chair, because its people and government believe that executions should have dramatic moral force. The witness room next to the Jackson death chamber, with its hard wooden seats like church pews, is clearly designed to underline this point. To enter it, you must pass the big green diesel generator which supplies the voltage for the fatal charge - so absolving the local power company of any part in the process.
Through a window which stretches the width of the room - about 18ft - you first see the chair itself, a crude mockery of a throne in heavy, thick, polished wood, hung with straps for arms, wrists, waist, chest, thighs and ankles, and a headrest which has nothing to do with comfort.
Once the prison warden had intoned the words: 'We will proceed with the court-ordered execution', a ghastly melodrama unfolded. Ingram, his scalp shaved white but his moustache still intact, was brought in by six large guards but climbed unaided and unresisting into the chair. The warders bent over him and with practised, fussy movements bound him tightly to it.
Asked if he had anything to say, Ingram - unrepentant and bitter - simply spat a great ball of saliva at the warden. He was too furious to be frightened. If he had been afraid, his mouth would have been utterly dry, as any coward can tell you.
Now the real deathwatch began. The guards produced one more strap, a chinpiece which clamped Ingram's jaws shut. He could not have spoken or spat if he had wanted to. Trussed and muzzled, immobile and silenced, he looked, for the first time, pitiful and helpless rather than cocky and angry.
Then he was prepared for the current.
They put a headpiece on him, a little like an old-fashioned rugby scrumcap, containing a soaking sponge to aid the flow of power. Water dribbled down his face and they wiped it off with a towel. They brought up a cable from behind and attached it to the cap, carefully tightening the wing nuts.
Another cable was clipped to his leg.
Then they fitted a brown leather cowl to the cap, covering his face so we could no longer see his angry, bitter scowl. His knuckles were white with tension.
Everyone left the room. On the other side of the partition, Ingram was alone in the electric chair.
Suddenly, as 2,000 volts went through him, Ingram slammed back into the chair so hard that the tremendous thwack of the impact went through the room like a shock-wave. His knuckles were almost blue. It was very violent, but also very controlled. He did not catch fire. He did not writhe. There was no smoke nor any sizzling sound.
After a while, the officials returned, a doctor listened to his silent heart through a stethoscope, the warden pronounced that all had been done in accordance with law, and the curtains were drawn. As we left, we saw a hearse arriving to collect the remains, a hearse presumably ordered while Ingram was still alive.
If anyone ever manages to get permission to show such an event on TV, I would advise you strongly not to watch it. I have done it for you. I think its moral effect in general is good, but I think it may harm those who see it at first hand. Soon after my own experience, a friend told me that her father had once witnessed a hanging in some official capacity, and that the memory had returned repeatedly to haunt him in the last weeks before his own death. I am not at all surprised.
Nor, if some fool manages to broadcast it on the Internet, should you watch the execution of McVeigh by lethal injection. This is not just because McVeigh himself would like you to, though the fact that he would dearly love to star in the drama of his own execution is a very good reason not to let this happen. It will also be bad for you. Like the Oklahoma victims' relatives, who will watch it on a special TV link on May 16, you will feel stained and disgusted by the experience, but also baffled that an event of such great moment should be so uninteresting. I have seen this too, in Huntsville, Texas. A man called Larry Anderson was dying for the abduction and stabbing of Zelda Curtis, whom he dumped in a ditch after he had finished with her.
All that happened was that he lay on a thing that looked like a hospital trolley, with a tube in his arm that looked like a drip. He stared menacingly through the glass at the witnesses, refused to make any final statement and then more or less fell asleep. From my notes at the time (I cannot remember it as clearly as the Ingram affair) I see that he gave three snorting, puffing breaths, like a drunken man snoring. I thought he looked greyer and shrunken but it may have been my imagination. No shadow of death passed across his face. By comparison with Zelda Curtis, he had a very easy time indeed.
I still think Anderson was better dead, and there is now some evidence that Texas's hard policy has begun to slow the rise in the murder rate in the Houston area, where most killings in the state take place. Violent, immoral criminals have begun to make the rational calculation that it may not be worthwhile to kill potential witnesses, which until recently has been a pretty safe oneway bet. But I thought at the time, and I think now, that lethal injection looks far too much like a medical procedure, the putting down of an inconvenient citizen, and far too little like the punishment it is meant to be.
McVeigh describes it as 'state-assisted suicide' and he has a point.
But this is where our own squeamishness has got us. McVeigh's execution is the first by the federal US government, as opposed to individual states, since 1963. Then, a kidnapper and murderer called Victor Feguer was hanged at Fort Madison, Iowa.
His last words were: 'I sure hope I'm the last one to go.' And at the time, many people in America and Britain probably shared his hope. The world seemed to be becoming a more peaceful place.
Murder rates in the US dropped steadily from 1935 to 1960, while in Britain they were tiny and static, as were crimes of violence or armed crime. In both countries, execution was abolished in the mid-Sixties.
Was it a coincidence that it was exactly then that the American murder and violent crime rates began their ballistic upward climb? Was it a coincidence that British murder rates began to rise then too, as did armed crime? Murders in England and Wales stood at 55 in 1964. Nowadays it is often four times as great or more, and this only tells half the story. The Home Office pathologist Professor Bernard Knight said recently that the British homicide rate was artificially low. Advances in medical treatment, he explained, now save hundreds of people who would have died from their wounds 40 years ago. The actual amount of lethal violence has risen to heights our fathers would have thought impossible.
America, being a proper democracy, responded to this explosion of arrogant, selfish brutality by building more prisons and by allowing any state which wanted to bring back the death penalty to do so. The federal government eventually restored it too, which is why the builders have been busy here in Terre Haute constructing the brand-new federal death row. But the liberal reformers - who helped boost the crime wave with their false optimism back in the Sixties - have not given up.
It is because of them that the death penalty in most American states is rare, and subject to long delay, and that the semi-medical lethal injection procedure is the one used in almost all of them. It is because of them that a return of the death penalty in Britain is still unthinkable, not only for people like Thomas Hamilton and the IRA, but for anyone who chooses to kill. The price of a life in Britain has not been so low for centuries.
And yet many in Europe like to look down on America for keeping capital punishment on its books.
European Union officials have recently taken to lecturing the Americans on this as if they were somehow more civilised, though continental Europe's 20th Century record for state-sponsored murder and violence, with its victims numbered in millions, makes the United States look like Toytown.
As the execution of Timothy McVeigh draws nearer, some in Britain will seek to mock or to undermine its purpose, to suggest that it is excessive, barbaric, brutal and needless. They will sneer at the circus which surrounds it and suggest that we handle these things better on our side of the Atlantic.
Before you accept this, it is worth wondering which is actually more barbaric - the lawful execution of a proven murderer after a fair trial before an independent jury, observed by a free Press, or the feeble surrender of authority in the face of violence and dishonesty. I think I know where the moral high ground is to be found.'
Once again we discover that what we are talking about is a profound moral division, rather than rival sets of research. That’s not to say that facts and research are unimportant, but one has to remember for what purpose it has been done, and by whom it has been commissioned, and if it gives a whole or partial version of the truth. I’ll come back to that, but may I first of all plead, yet again, with contributors here to reply to what has been said, rather than to a caricature of what has been said, or to things which have simply not been said at all.
I take as my example the words of Mr ‘Steve B’, who wrote:
‘As a child of the "Permissive Society and our lavish Welfare State" I can't quite reconcile this view of me with my father, a child of the halcyon 30s and 40s, who hit another teenager over the head with a hammer once he realised the foot stuck in a rabbit hole wasn't going to get free anytime soon. I'm a peace-loving guy, Peter, but my dad was a thug.’
This passage raises a number of questions about hammers, their availability, and about whose foot was stuck in a rabbit hole and why, and how Mr ‘B’ knows anything about this incident, and what happened afterwards. But that’s not my point.
Mr ‘B’ is asked to produce any quotation which justifies his use of the phrase ‘the halcyon 30s and 40s’. Where have I said this? Where have I ever suggested that the past was ‘halcyon’? Where have I ever said that the 1950s, or any other period, were a ‘golden age’? Never. Yet it is almost guaranteed that anyone who doesn’t like my views will, within seconds of addressing my arguments, claim that I have.
Why is this? Where do they get it from? What makes them think it will in any way advance their arguments, to invent for me a belief and an opinion which I do not share? Are instruction manuals on how to counter my arguments handed out by Liberal Central? Given the wearisome, yawn-inducing sameness of so much of this stuff, I do sometimes wonder. I have put in FoI requests to the British Boring Board of Control, and to Liberal Central.
Once again, I do not believe there was ever a golden age, or a halcyon period. I am not a Utopian. I don’t believe in earthly paradises, in the past or the future. No human era is perfect, or remotely resembles perfection. The past is irrecoverable even it was in some respects better. I am concerned with the present, and with our determination repeatedly to choose the wrong future. I freely acknowledge that our current age is materially more comfortable than any in history (though I don’t think this is necessarily an unmixed blessing).
Mr ‘B’ then continues: ‘I'm also having trouble with the idea that a man who lives in America can believe their harsh attitudes to prison and the ultimate penalty are actually having a limiting effect on their excessive murder rates. Over 10,000 killed every year by handguns in the US. That's more than three 9/11s every year, yet no War on Handguns as there is on terror. Perhaps if they'd taken all those people and shot them live on breakfast TV in downtown New York...perhaps not. Being soft on prisoners may not work but the opposite would appear to be equally obvious right on Mr. Hitchens' doorstep.’
Who is this ‘man who lives in America’? Not me, anyway. As it happens, I did live in the USA some years ago (and in the USSR and the Russian Republic before that) but for most of my life I have lived in Britain, and do so now. But wherever I am I pay attention to the facts. I am not particularly keen on American penal policy. I have many times pointed out that the two countries are utterly different and can learn little from each other. But the idea that the USA is tremendously tough on crime is not supported by facts. Its ludicrous acceptance of the red herring ‘medical marijuana’ in many states is a case in point. About a quarter of convicted criminals in the USA are in prison. The rest are on parole or probation.
On the matter of guns, I must tediously point out that to say someone was ‘killed by a handgun’ is almost entirely useless in judging the nature of the death. Who used the gun? For what purpose? Under what circumstances? Guns (not always handguns, hence the difference in figures) are used annually in about 20,000 suicides in the USA, whose explanation must be complex, and in about 18,000 homicides. This latter figure is no great surprise in a historically violent country with no effective death penalty (yes, you read that right, very few murderers in the USA are ever executed, and then only after waiting so long that they have forgotten what they did. Most states which ‘have’ the death penalty rarely if ever impose it, those that do impose it usually take around 15 years to do in a minority of murders) and which leaves many violent convicted criminals at large. Many more criminals are killed by armed policemen (usually at least 300 a year) than are executed. But Amnesty International is not very interested in that. Climate appears to be more influential over crime and homicide than gun ownership (with gun homicide rates similar in most of the northern states of the USA to those in neighbouring Canadian provinces, despite sharp differences in gun laws). By the way, more than 40,000 die each year in car accidents in the USA, so perhaps a ‘war on cars’ would be more urgent.
On the question of prison privatisation, I am against it. The punishment of wrongdoing is a moral matter, which should be reserved to the state, which exists for moral purposes, not a commercial contract. In any case, I am a conservative, not a liberal. I am not an enthusiast for privatisation, and in many cases actively oppose it. It has badly damaged Britain’s railways, and has devastated our capacity to generate electricity. It has also damaged our water industry. I suspect that a non-privatised water industry would long ago have developed a national water grid which would now be able to overcome the current drought in the South of England.
On the issue of free will, I suppose we now have in progress the biggest experiment on that subject ever embarked upon in human history. This country’s criminal and penal policies were, until perhaps 50 years ago, based on the idea that wrongdoing should be punished. I explore in my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’ (a modified version is available in paperback as ‘The Abolition of Liberty’) the long and gradual process by which this was abandoned.
But roughly from the end of the Victorian age until the Second World War, we based our policing and justice and prisons on the belief that people should be and were free in almost all aspects of life, but if they broke known laws they would be treated with some harshness, and deliberately punished, through loss of liberty and honour, compulsory hard work, separation from the world outside, deprivation of pleasures, austere living conditions etc.
During that period, crime and disorder were very much less common, by any conceivable measure, than they are now. I put this mildly. I draw the attention of readers to the quotation from the Oxford historian Jose Harris (‘Private Lives, Public Spirit, Britain 1870-1914) which I reproduce in the book ‘… a very high proportion of Edwardian convicts were in prison for offences that would have been much more lightly treated or wholly disregarded by law enforcers in the late twentieth century. In 1912-13, for example, one quarter of males aged 16 to 21 who were imprisoned in the metropolitan area of London were serving seven-day sentences for offences which included drunkenness, 'playing games in the street; riding a bicycle without lights, gaming, obscene language, and sleeping rough. If late twentieth century standards of policing and sentencing had been applied in Edwardian Britain, then prisons would have been virtually empty; conversely, if Edwardian standards were applied in the 1990s then most of the youth of Britain would be in gaol.’
This is explored in some detail in my book, and those who are genuinely interested are urged to read it. But I personally find it very hard to believe that the two facts are unconnected. Even I might suggest, wicked people who might otherwise have thought it justifiable to hit someone else with a hammer might have been restrained by the fear of punishment.
Such a society did not seek to interfere in the minds of men and women, to tell them what they could or could not believe or say. It was almost completely uninterested in such things. It was interested in actions. It is my belief that such a society is much better and much more free than one that tries to make windows into men’s souls, through social background reports and largely empty talk of ‘rehabilitation’, whatever that is.
In fact, the more free we have been to act badly, the less free we have been to think and speak freely. I think the two are connected. A society which does not believe in free will does not believe in a free mind, either. I would be interested to explore this connection.
Of course, no true free will is possible unless we live in an ordered universe with discoverable laws and rules, both physical and moral. If the universe is a random, accidental chaos, how and why should there be rules, how can we assume that they exist, and how can we measure the validity and effects of our actions? In which case, how can our actions be free, if we do not know what their effect is? In which case, how can our will be free?
Oh, and before anyone writes in about grammar schools to go on about the stigma of failure etc, will they please read the index, the index, the index, the index? Try the entry on ‘grammar schools’ which (I know this is confusing and obtuse) refers you to lots of postings and debates here in the past about … grammar schools). They may find that what they wrongly regard as a fresh argument has been dealt with, shredded into rags and patches, and chucked into the dustbin of history some time ago.
Those who are genuinely interested, rather than willing victims of propaganda who come here to regurgitate standard anti-grammar arguments they have got from Liberal Central are urged to read the relevant chapter in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’. All my books can be obtained through public libraries, for no more than a modest reservation fee. I do not recommend them to make money, but to spread my ideas.
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