At the beginning of Arthur Koestler’s extraordinary book ‘The Scum of the Earth’ he ponders on what was - in 1939 - the great unsolved problem of Europe. How could France, a country of bread and wine, co-exist next door to Germany, a nation of blood and iron? Germany must surely dominate, thanks to its greater population and its industrial and economic might. The war of 1871, and French defeat by Prussia, had shown how powerful Germany was. The costly victory of 1918 had shown just how much blood France would have to shed to stay out of Germany’s shadow. Yet France was still, in 1939, not willing to accept German domination of Europe. Koestler, a Communist ex-spy and journalist, a Hungarian national and general troublemaker, was rounded up by the French Republic on the outbreak of war and put into a grim prison camp for subversive aliens, at Le Vernet in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Somehow, he got out again, just in time to be caught in Paris as the Germans arrived, and to be rounded up again. The story of his escape, quite possibly mendacious, is at the heart of this neglected book, and is a great evocation of the absurdities, terrors, miseries and hilarities of a great nation collapsing. I have never been one of the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ mockers of France. France is a martial nation and its people know how to fight, as I should have thought Verdun proved beyond any doubt (that’s if you had forgotten Austerlitz, Marengo, Jena and a dozen other Napoleonic triumphs, and the awkward fact that England lost the Hundred Years War – plus the even more annoying fact, for those who jeer about there being no French military victories, that the decisive American triumph over Britain at Yorktown was really the work of the French Admiral de Grasse, and of French army officers such as Lafayette. French soldiers fought on long after British troops had left via Dunkirk, and the garrison of one part of the Maginot Line refused to surrender to the Germans until personally ordered to do so by the Minister of Defence). The story of the final days of an independent France, the last meeting of a Free National Assembly, the last editions of free newspapers, is a bitterly sad one, and I see no reason to believe things would have been much different if the Germans had been able to get their army on to our Island. So then we come to Vichy, that very curious episode, disowned by modern France but organically connected to it. Vichy was an anomaly, and like all anomalies it is very instructive. We’ve almost all seen the film ‘Casablanca’ and its ambiguous villain-cum-hero Captain Renault is by far the most interesting person in it (By the way, as far as I can discover, ‘the ‘Marseillaise’ remained the French national anthem under Vichy, which makes a bit of a nonsense of the ‘duel of the anthems’ scene in which singing it is shown as an act of rebellion). Reflecting that ambiguity, the USA and Canada both had diplomatic relations with the officially neutral Petain regime until well into the war (The US Ambassador, Admiral Leahy, was recalled in the summer of 1942). The USSR recognised Petain until June 1941, when Vichy supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. By contrast, British troops and airmen, especially in the Middle east, were several times in direct and often rather bitter combat with Vichy military units. The British attack on the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940 had provided the foundation for a lasting enmity. A recent interesting book (‘England’s last war Against France’ by Colin Smith describes this rather sad conflict). Just as the French resistance has been magnified in later years, the extent of French acceptance of the German New Order has been minimised. After Charles de Gaulle, who by sheer force of personality revived France as a major country and maintained its independence of action within the European Union (as it then was not), the most important French politician of recent times was Francois Mitterrand, the last Socialist president of that country. There is still what is called ‘controversy’ about exactly what Francois Mitterrand was doing in the Vichy era. His modern supporters make out that, even if he appeared to be working for the Vichy regime (as he did appear to be) he was in reality toiling under cover for the Resistance. He is even supposed to have accepted a medal from the Petain state, the Francisque, because he had been ordered to accept it for the purposes of maintaining his Resistance cover. Well, maybe. When the award of the Francisque to Mitterrrand was originally revealed in post-war France, he denied having received it at all. Why do that if he had accepted it as cover for some noble act of courage in the resistance? Then there was the odd story of his arranging to have a wreath laid annually on the grave of Marshal Petain (the Vichy head of state). My guess is that , like many intelligent Frenchmen of the time, he was facing both ways, waiting to see who won. Maybe he continued to face both ways, just a little, and perhaps to feel that he had good excuses for doing so. We have to remember that until the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942, most people on the European continent were resigned to living under Berlin domination for the foreseeable future. Typical of these was the interesting (and ultimately repellent and disgraceful) Pierre Laval, an originally socialist politician of some significance and intelligence, who concluded in 1940 that the future was German and acted accordingly, so ending his days in front of a firing squad after a pretty wretched parody of a trial. I wonder who his British equivalent would have been, had the situation arisen? But to return to Mitterrand, he was President of France when German diplomatic power once again became irresistibly dominant on the European landmass, after reunification of Germany in 1989. And it was under his Presidency that France participated in the accelerated integration of Europe pushed through by another French socialist, Jacques Delors, and the European Community became the embryo state now known as the European Union. It is my theory that this EU, though not as some say a ‘Fourth Reich’ does attempt to deal with Koestler’s conundrum – how can France, proud, patriotic, independent-minded, co-exist with Germany without losing her dignity? The French, confronted with the horrible choice between the two ‘V’s, Verdun or Vichy, can hardly be blamed if instead they choose Brussels. Nor can the Low Countries and Denmark, who have well understood since 1940 that their sovereignty is conditional upon German goodwill (by the way, the model occupation of Denmark by Germany is a historical episode which has had far too little attention. Denmark had a Social Democratic government and a functioning Parliament until the end of 1941, though it was under Berlin control at the time). As for Italy, well, that’s still more complicated. This isn’t the occasion for a re-examination of the Hoare-Laval Pact, but I wonder what would have happened if it had gone ahead. Yes, it was the same Pierre Laval. For France (whose dreams of independent power perished, as did ours, at Suez in 1956), the EU has been a clever arrangement to provide grandeur and soothe feelings in a time of decline. I have discussed elsewhere the Elysee Treaty of 1963, under which France long ago agreed to share domination of Europe with Germany. The bargain has been very fruitful for France because of the Common Agricultural Policy, because of France’s unchallenged seat on the United Nations Security Council, because of France’s continued maintenance of a nuclear strike force and of some of the most significant conventional armed forces in the world, not to mention maintaining its equivalent of the British Commonwealth, the ‘Francophonie’. Germany, meanwhile, has been able to get on quietly with becoming the industrial and economic superpower of Europe, the chief power in the European Central Bank, using the Euro as a means to devalue the Deutschemark and so aid its exports to non-EU countries. It has also been able to resume, peacefully, the diplomatic directions which it has been seeking since 1871 – domination of the Balkans and the Baltic states, also of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Carpathia and the Western Ukraine (look at the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for a map of pre-Hitler German aims in the east, plainly stated, and see how many of them have now been achieved under the banner of the EU). I do not think a new president in France will really be able to challenge this arrangement, or much want to, whatever the election rhetoric may have been. The whole EU seems to me to be an admission that it simply is not worth anyone trying to question German pre-eminence any more. That is what pro-EU apologists mean when they say that the EU has ‘prevented war in Europe since 1945’. It has prevented it by bringing about longstanding German foreign policy aims, by consent and peacefully, and without the national humiliation and bankruptcy attendant on war and subjugation. By the way, these German aims pre-existed Hitler and were held to by democratic and respectable German statesmen, including some of the July plotters who sought to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi state. They should not be confused with the National Socialist polices of extermination and racial murder with which they became entangled after 1933. This seldom mentioned but often remembered period of modern European history, the period of unquestioned German dominance between Dunkirk and Stalingrad, is one of the many reasons why Britain, which was not militarily defeated or occupied, and did not suffer a tyranny of its own making before 1945, simply is not suited to EU membership. I mention it because of claims that Francois Hollande will challenge Angela Merkel over aspects of EU rule. I honestly doubt it. That conflict is over. The wider question, of whether the poorer, smaller countries at the fringes of Europe are prepared to stay inside the Eurozone to suit German aims, is a different one. Unlike the central part of the European project, which is ugly but conforms to the facts of life and power, the relationship between the northern and southern European countries looks to me to be unsustainable. Spain, Greece and Portugal badly need to devalue, which means leaving the Eurozone. I am not sure how this can be avoided for much longer, though the current awful situation has endured long after many believed it would collapse. I have been asked for more details of my long-ago, solitary appearance on ‘Have I got News for You?’. To this day, I cannot give a full account of what happened, except to say that the show is pre-recorded, that great swaths of recorded material are not broadcast, and that on this occasion a particular allegation was made against a major public figure, and that the discussion of this took up a lot of time and energy; and that I, being familiar with the laws of defamation, took no part in it at all, which perhaps didn’t help my cause. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down I write this in ignorance of the result of the London mayoral election – votes are still being cast as I type. Were I asked to guess the result, and it would be dull not to try, I would say it was quite possible that Ken Livingstone will win, floated to victory on a general Labour surge, and further aided by a general Tory sag. But this is not in truth a Labour versus Tory election. London is increasingly a Presidential republic, a province of the EU in its own right, separate in almost all ways from the rest of the barely-United Kingdom. Ken Livingstone does not really speak for Labour, but for a wholly new, multicultural, globalist rainbow coalition which he himself prophetically invented 30 years ago. Livingstone, whom I have known slightly for many years (and for whom I once very reluctantly campaigned, when he stood as Labour candidate for Hampstead in 1979) is a very clever, cunning and far-sighted man. I campaigned for him, despite having voted against his selection as candidate at the Hampstead General Management Committee. This was in the days when Hampstead Labour Party used to hold its meetings in the beautiful headquarters of the train-drivers’ union ASLEF, in Arkwright Road NW3, a short walk from Frognal, where Hugh Gaitskell had once lived. It had been the house of the great conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who was always said to have inherited a fortune from his family, who had made it through selling Beecham’s pills – hence the large marble ‘pill’ which decorated the bannisters of the house. But I digress. I had some idea, carried over from my days of Trotskyist ‘Democratic Centralism’, when majority votes were binding on all, that party loyalty obliged me to support him even if I didn’t agree with him. Anyway, he hadn’t a hope of winning in the Hampstead of those days, so it made no practical difference, and I used to enjoy knocking on doors and handing out leaflets high on the airy hill of Hampstead in the fine spring weather. I suspect it is exactly because of his powerful individual force that, when he did make into the House of Commons, for another seat, he was a failure. He also suffered by being ahead of his time. In those days, the mainstream of the media, and of conventional wisdom, laughed at his politically correct attitudes, his support for British surrender in Northern Ireland and his keen appetite for the sexual and cultural revolution. They also underestimated his personal appeal, and his organising skills. And they foolishly scorned his undogmatic understanding that a lot of people don’t, can’t or won’t drive cars, and want good, cheap, well-co-ordinated public transport, and will vote for it if offered the chance. But London, where multiculturalism and the sexual revolution were so much more successful than in the rest of the country, was a different matter. And the London mayoralty, a republican presidential-style post which actually demands a show-off individualist rather than a clubbable parliamentary collective-responsibility type, might have been designed for him. I have been amused, over the past few years, by the way in which the ‘respectable’ left have turned on Ken Livingstone, their most successful and coherent figure. I suspect that this is because, like Caliban looking in the glass, they don’t much like seeing themselves so clearly and uncompromisingly depicted. They particularly dislike his appeal (much like George Galloway’s) to the Muslim vote. Well, too bad. If you are a multiculturalist who believes in open borders, as the ‘respectable’ neo-con-influenced left do, then you are, sooner or later, going to have to make an accommodation with the Muslim vote. Ken Livingstone, just as he did with his other clever, ahead-of-their-time positions, has seen this and has no problem with it. Why should he? He is a serious Leftist. Those on the left who do have a problem with it have a simple solution. They should abandon the Left. That is what the Left is like. That is why I abandoned it – not least because I understood long ago that Ken Livingstone wasn’t a joke figure, but a prophet of what the Left would become. So, can Londoners (and I haven’t been one of those for more than a quarter of a century) counteract this by voting for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson? Would a defeat for Mr Johnson be a blow for the forces of righteousness? Or should we just rejoice at any failure by the Supposedly Conservative and Allegedly Unionist Party? Well, Mr Johnson is, like Mr Livingstone, an enjoyable figure. I barely know him. I’ve not spent much time with him. My world, in general, is not his. I don’t think he’s as funny as some people think he is, and can get irritated listening to besotted Tory audiences guffawing helplessly at Mr Johnson’s rather over-stretched sub-Wodehousian I Say Old Bean How Spiffing performances. And I am, I must admit, deeply, deeply jealous of the huge booster rocket given to his career by his multiple appearances on ‘Have I Got News for You’. (Yes, I was on it once, and there’s a long story, if you like, for a cold, wet winter evening, long after most of those involved are dead). Still, I can see why, in the mental desert of their party, Tories reach out to anyone who can make a speech at all, let alone one with jokes in it. I once debated on the same side as him at the Oxford Union, though can’t remember for the life of me what the topic was. He arrived late for the pre-debate dinner, and spent most of the remaining time before the debate scribbling notes in a state of what looked to me like some anxiety. I think, like many first-rate performers, he is extremely, needlessly nervous before he takes the stage (Harold Macmillan, one of the smoothest performers Westminster has ever seen, is said always to have been violently sick before Prime Minister’s Questions). And I was once on the opposing team in the first-ever University Challenge non-student contest -‘Broadsheets’ versus ‘Tabloids’, in which the despised ‘Tabloids’ won, mainly thanks to a storming performance from Tony Parsons, whose reaction speed made the average panther look lethargic. Mr Johnson was also friendly and helpful to me while he was editor of the ‘Spectator’, for which I shall always be grateful, and it was with his very strong encouragement that I launched my mischievous, foredoomed bid for the Tory nomination in Kensington and Chelsea, to annoy and discomfit Michael Portillo, and to publicise my then newly-released book ‘the Abolition of Britain’. We had an amusing chat during the last elections, when I explained to him that I hoped he’d lose because I hoped the Tories would collapse, a point of view he found quite understandable, and absorbed equably, though his Australian spin-doctor Lynton Crosby, without whom Boris would not have won in my view, wasn’t as taken with it. For years I thought of Mr Johnson (his family call him ‘Al’, not ‘Boris’, in case you didn’t know) as more or less an ally in the major causes of our time. But I have, bit by bit, come to suspect that this is probably a misapprehension. He’s amusing, well-read and clever, characteristics that are good in themselves. But he’s not particularly conservative. Sonia Purnell’s interesting biography suggests strongly that his apparent doubts about the EU are nothing like as strong as they appear. I don’t think Mr Johnson has any very strong political convictions, and I think his time as London’s Mayor has tended to emphasise this. The Mayor doesn’t have very much actual power, being , as I say, a sort of mini-President with a pulpit from which to speak and have influence. But he has also been influenced by the post, which corrals in one voting district the biggest concentration of moral and cultural radicalism in the country, and hasn’t had a small-c conservative majority for decades. If he loses the election, he is more or less bound to re-enter national politics, a development which would not make David Cameron happy. So that might be a reason for proper conservatives to hope for his defeat, as would be any setback, external or internal, for the Useless Tories. But I wonder if, like Ken Livingstone, Bois Johnson is not too big and too original a character, and too much of an individual, to succeed in the Commons. Then again, he might make a very enjoyable and effective Leader of the Opposition, the post that the next Tory leader will have to occupy for some years after 2015, if things carry on as they are doing ( and a post that David Cameron will not fancy one bit).07 May 2012 4:16 PM
Blood and Iron versus Bread and Wine, the Sad Fate of France in a German Europe
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Did I Have News for You?
I gathered from the programme makers that I had been invited on because they were, at that time, having great difficulty getting right-wing politicians to take part. This didn’t bother them as such, but they were worried about the impartiality rules which govern British broadcasting, and under which they might have got into trouble. I think their later decision to make Boris Johnson a sort of semi-permanent star got them out of this difficulty. He was officially a Tory, after all.
So I was asked on as a sort of Quota Reactionary. The pay was good – a thousand pounds for an evening. I already knew, from Boris Johnson’s original expose in the Daily Telegraph, that the programme’s apparent spontaneity was not entirely genuine. It is, or was, pre-recorded. Large parts of it were plainly rehearsed.
I made two reasonable spontaneous, unscripted, unrehearsed jokes, one about Apache helicopters, supposedly being used to stop ethnic cleansing, being named after a people who had been ethnically cleansed by the US Cavalry (Tony Benn later used the same joke, though whether he thought of it himself or copied it from me I cannot say), and another about Anthony Blair’s inability to find time for soundbites, while the hand of history was on his shoulder. Both got reasonable audience laughs, but the second one was edited out of the final cut while by contrast a silly episode where I was confronted with a plate of melons in a vaguely lubricious context was left in at length (the idea had obviously been to embarrass me).
My fellow-guest, Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of the ‘fat ladies’ who in those days had a TV cookery programme, was perhaps more anxious than I was to push herself forward on every occasion, which may have rather cramped my style.
But my real problem was that I am so out of sympathy with the programme’s heart and soul. This is the ‘Private Eye’ view of the world, in which satire is basically left-liberal, aimed at ‘stuffiness’ and ‘pomposity’ and the ‘establishment’ and Jeffrey Archer, whereas mine is much more along the lines of the late Peter Simple, aimed at the twittering pretentiousness of the new elite, atheist bishops, vainglorious, pious rock stars, left-wing Tories and Polly Toynbee.
What they revere, I mock. What they mock, I often revere. It could never have worked. But the celebrity effect of even one appearance was astonishing. I already experienced a small amount of street recognition. After being on HIGNFY, it was immensely greater. Had I been on several times, I would have passed a sort of sound barrier into full-scale fame, politically useful if personally costly.Share this article:
05 May 2012 6:32 PM
All the pillars of the Cameron delusion have now collapsed
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday columnThat's settled, then. We shall have an openly declared Labour government again by 2015, instead of a Labour government in all but name, as we have now. The Tories cannot possibly win the next Election, just as they never had a hope of winning the last one.
But in 2015 it will be even worse for them. In 2010 they fanned a wild, unhinged hatred of Gordon Brown to get their failing vote out, despite having no policies to offer.
Their attempts to engineer a similar scorn for Edward Miliband have failed. Voters are now so weary of the Coalition that they don’t really care if the Opposition is led by a goofy Marxoid teenager.
You won’t notice much difference when Labour take over, except that no Labour government would have dared to smash up our Armed Forces as Mr Cameron has done. They would have been too scared of being accused of national treachery.
Political correctness will rule over all, as it does now. Crime and disorder will flourish, as they do now. Mass immigration will carry on, as it does now. The EU will continue to steal our independence, as it does now. The married family will continue to be besieged and undermined by laws and the active promotion of fatherless homes, as is the case now.
The welfare state will continue to swell far beyond our ability to pay for it, and children will carry on emerging from 11 years of alleged education barely able to read and count. New grammar schools will be illegal, as they are now.
The one good thing is that the Cameron delusion ought now to reach an end. But will it? Or will Britain’s conservativeminded people carry on voting stupidly and pointlessly for the Tory Party, which hates and despises them and everything they care for? All the pillars of the Cameron delusion have now collapsed. The Tory Party cannot win a majority by any method. Nobody trusts it, and it stands for nothing except getting posh boys into office.
Mr Cameron is not a secret patriot waiting for the chance to rip off his expensive tailoring and reveal his inner Thatcher. He is exactly what he looks like, an unprincipled chancer with limited skills in public relations. He likes being in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats because he agrees with them.
George Osborne is not an iron Chancellor with a severe plan to save the economy. His cuts don’t exist; he’s as wedded to the big-spending welfare state as Ed Balls or Gordon Brown are. On top of that, he’s not very good at his job.
Because so many people foolishly trusted Mr Cameron in 2010, we have wasted several precious years. But we can bring about the collapse of the useless Tories in 2015 by refusing to vote for them any more.
If you must vote at the next Election (I shan’t), vote for the absurd Dad’s Army of UKIP if you want to. At least it does no harm. But the real business of constructing a new pro-British party to speak for all the abandoned, honest, patriotic, gentle people of this Disunited Kingdom can begin only when we have chucked the Tories into a suitably stout wheelie bin and slammed the lid down on top of them.Was Sylvia a victim of these 'suicide pills'?
If you won’t take it from me, will you take it from Ted Hughes? I get into great trouble for warning that ‘antidepressant’ pills may actually make people worse. Well, the renowned Poet Laureate believed that it was an ‘antidepressant’ that led to the otherwise inexplicable suicide of his beautiful, talented wife Sylvia Plath. This sort of thing is still going on. Time for an inquiry, I think.
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You might have got the impression from some reports that Speaker John Bercow is a wicked baddie, and Mr Slippery, our leader, a gentleman of the old school. Normally, I’d let this go, but this week it’s the opposite of the truth. Mr Bercow is doing what a Speaker ought to do, and making sure that Ministers in trouble come to Parliament and face hard questioning. Whatever his politics or his past, or the foolishnesses of his wife, Mr Bercow is upholding our constitution and liberties, and good for him.
Mr Cameron, meanwhile, has taken to delivering cowardly and disrespectful verbal rabbit-punches to older MPs who dare to tease him. When Dennis Skinner, 80 but still very sharp, made a perfectly justifiable comment, Mr Slippery hit back crudely: ‘He has the right to take his pension and I advise him to do so.’ And when David Winnick teased him lightly, Mr Slippery snapped: ‘I think Russell Brand got it just about right yesterday.’
Brand, the odious alleged comedian, had sneered about Mr Winnick’s age, at a committee hearing on drugs. Interesting that Mr Slippery identifies with this very nasty, coarse person. I think it tells us a lot about him.
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The more ferocious border controls are, the more futile they tend to be. I have held a US visa for years, and obtaining the last one involved hours of form-filling, acres of personal information, a criminal record check and an interview. They know more about me than I can currently remember.
Yet I must still queue for ages at US immigration, and be photographed and fingerprinted, before I can get in. Well, it’s their country, and they can do what they like, but for the past 20 years or so millions of Central Americans have got into the US, founded families and settled into jobs there, by sprinting from Tijuana into San Diego, or wading the Rio Grande. It’s the same with us. For years and years, our border officials feebly admitted thousands of people with tenuous claims to be refugees, and failed even to record the names of those caught being smuggled into the country in lorries. And then they let the EU force us to admit uncounted legions of migrants from Eastern Europe, including former Soviet republics, who now – absurdly – have the same legal right to be here as you or I.
And then they have the nerve to claim that they are making us wait hours to get back into our own country for our own good.
Plucked from the ranks of our ineffectual, excuse-making chief constables, Border Force chief Brian Moore quickly showed us what he was made of. He droned, in the zombie tones of modern inflexible bureaucracy, that if there were four-hour passport queues during the Olympics ‘then so be it. We will not compromise on safety’.
Oh, it’s for our safety, is it? No, it’s not. If we were serious about that we wouldn’t have staged the stupid Olympics in the first place. It’s because, if we behaved like an independent country and opened up passport lines marked ‘British subjects only’, the EU would fine us for breaking European law. And we’d pathetically pay the fine.Share this article:
03 May 2012 5:09 PM
What should proper conservatives make of Boris Johnson?
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
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