19 May 2012 11:08 PM
Why defeat an evil empire – and then embrace a stupid one?
The Man Who Wants to Gag me (but says he doesn’t) – and Other Topics
I shall be away from my desk for the next fortnight. That's two weeks, for US readers, or 1.4 decades (decimal ten-day weeks) for any Jacobin readers, and for that neatness enthusiast, Lord Howe of Aberavon, who must presumably be rather taken with ten-day weeks and ten-month years. So, after this contribution, I shall be posting only my Mail on Sunday column until Monday 5th June which I believe is Sextidi, 16ieme Prairial, the Day of the Carnation, in the year 220. Why didn’t this wheeze catch on the way litres and metres and kilograms did? I would myself have enjoyed the annual Feast of Opinion, which happens about a week before Michaelmas, during the Labour Party conference.
Please note the continuing tone of exasperated ‘why can’t you conform, you stick-in-the-mud old fool!’ tone of those who refuse to understand the desire of many people to retain customary measurements in daily life. My side has never sought to suppress or discourage the use of metric measures where people wish to use them, nor to stop them being taught in schools. Whereas the Metric fanatics seek actively to suppress knowledge and use of the customary system, knowing that without such totalitarian force they will never get people to prefer metric measures in daily life.
And in fact the British Weights and Measures association, which I have long supported, helped campaign for a bar selling German beer to be allowed to do so in litre and half-litre glasses, because that is what its customers preferred. This illustrates very well the difference between the two systems, and the difference between their supporters.
Before I go, I wish to publish (it is below) for a wider readership a long reply I gave to ‘Mev’ on an earlier thread (he is of course at liberty to reply at length if he wishes). I’ve revised it slightly since then.
I’d also like to mention to Mr Stephenson that the answers to his clever-silly questions about crime and prison, if he is really interested , which I doubt, are to be found in my book ‘A brief History of Crime’, though the argument is summarised here there are also some more recent figures on prison which I cited in a Mail on Sunday article on 5th June 2011 ‘: '96,710 criminals sentenced last year for more serious "indictable" offences had 15 or more previous crimes against their name. They included violent muggers, burglars and drug dealers. Of those, only 36 per cent - around 34,600 offenders - were given immediate custody.' So even after 15 or more previous offences, they won't put most of them away.’
By the way, why do I doubt a genuine curiosity? Because he quotes the statistic, invariably adduced without thought or curiosity by penal liberals, that Britain ‘imprisons more people than any other European country’. First of all, this comparison is not done as a percentage of the population, but on a per-thousand basis, and the difference is not very big. Secondly, it ignores the rather obvious fact that levels of crime and disorder are much higher here than in most of our European neighbours , thanks in my view largely to the state encouragement of fatherless families, the state sabotage of disciplined schooling, the disbanding of the old preventive police force, the deliberate enfeebling of the courts and prisons, and the 40-year endless failed experiment in drug decriminalisation which we are undergoing. Anyone who can quote this statistic as if it were a powerful argument has very probably chosen his side already.
One problem with crime statistics these days is that the old classic series have most been discontinued, that the old Home Office has been divided into two separate departments, and that what figures there are, are not compiled in such a way that information useful to conservatives is easily obtainable. The compilation and arrangement of statistics is as political as their publication, its timing and emphasis.
It often takes weeks to get quite simple information, and an MP known to me has run up against a blank wall in an attempt to discover the fates of persons arrested and convicted for Class ‘A’ drug offences.
Now to ‘Mev’, the would-be censor who claims he isn’t one. (By the way, another contributor makes the excellent point that if ‘Mev’ is capable of resisting what he regards as my wicked and false siren song, and boy, does he resist it, why does he presume that others don’t have the same mental equipment? Does he think my readers are too thick to be able to make up their own minds, or so thick that they will immediately be seduced by my dangerous arguments?)
‘Mev’ seems to want to persist in his battle, so here goes. He asked for it : I’ve interleaved my responses in his message, marking them **. 'Mev': Oh I'm 'absurd' am I, for asking perfectly reasonable and straightforward questions, which you then fail to answer, because you can't. **I am not sure what questions I have failed to answer. Perhaps he could set them out.
'Mev' : Charming. I do not wish to 'censor' anyone, thank you - please stop stating that falsehood - I believe in free speech. Is that plain enough for you?
**No, it isn’t. My experience of would-be censors is that they always declare that they favour free speech, before demanding measures to restrict it. A mere declaration in favour of free speech doesn’t, in my experience, mean anything unless it’s backed up by a willingness to see opinions the person dislikes, published unhampered in prominent places. The whole force of the argument from ‘Mev’ is that a major Tory-supporting newspaper is doing wrong by publishing my attacks on the Tory Party, unhampered and prominently. His requirement for some sort of ‘balance’ or other disclaimer would of course, if implemented, hamper my freedom of speech. It would also tend to make it less likely that I would be published at all. Any editor constrained by such conditions would eventually become reluctant to publish the material that required them to be met. If ‘Mev’ cannot see this, then he really needs to think a bit more. If he can, then he must see that what he desires is a form of censorship.
It’s also quite amusing that I am the only journalist in the country to whom he appears to want to apply his bizarre formula for ‘balance’. And gosh, I happen to be the only journalist in the country, with a major platform, who is prepared to urge conservative people to desert the Conservative Party.
Censorship does not always take the form of a government official with a blue pencil, striking out words he does not like. Censors and suppressors very rarely recognise themselves for what they are.
'Mev':Play the ball I'm playing, not the one you wish I'd play. I don't like your Don't Vote Tory campaign because it's built on completely ridiculous logic (now proven)
**I don’t think anything is ‘proven’, except that I was absolutely right to predict that the Tories couldn’t win the 2010 election.
‘Mev ‘ … that a new 'real' (your definition) conservative movement is ready to spring into formation if the present Conservative Party fails to achieve majority governments
**I have never said anything remotely so specific. I have said that the split and collapse of the Tory party, which I believe would have followed what I sought and argued for – the humiliation of the Tories at the polls in 2010 - was the *necessary* condition for such a thing to happen, not a *sufficient* condition, and I have said this time out of mind, on innumerable occasions. No regular reader here has any excuse for being in any doubt of that. The fact that ‘Mev’ misrepresents my position so completely must be due to a wilful failure of understanding in him. He doesn’t see what I say, because he doesn’t want to. He’s not listening, because he is too angry to do so. This is the very problem this posting addresses.
'Mev':. I object to this campaign because - quite plainly: 1. the Conservative Party would not simply disappear following a defeat (even several) - it would sit there taking 20-30 percent of the vote even if your Hitchens Party did suddenly materialize. Those members, councillors and MPS who’ve put in years of effort are not going to shut up shop just to please you. Nor would its voters all just switch to you. AND 2. - even if your new movement did get off the ground (it won’t) it would simply split the anti-socialist vote even further - leading to never ending Labour Governments.
**The first part of this is speculative. Once political parties cease to be able to deliver office at a national level, they shrivel away very quickly as the essential camp-followers, gong-hunters and placemen peel away in search of something else. So would the liberals and the social democrats who make up a large part of Parliamentary and local government Toryism. It is impossible for anyone to say with certainty how the Tories would in fact have responded to a Labour victory or a Lib-Lab coalition in 2010. I think there would have been a complete collapse in finance and organisation, followed by at least one split in the Parliamentary Conservative Party. But it didn’t happen, and there won’t be a similar opportunity ( arising as it would have to do from a fourth successive general election defeat) in my lifetime, so who can say?
**As for the second claim - ‘even if your(my) new movement did get off the ground…’ is again wilful misunderstanding. I have often pointed out that the collapse of the Tories , by my theory, could – if they were replaced by a genuinely patriotic, socially conservative, anti-crime, anti-mass immigration party - have been rapidly followed by the splitting and collapse of Labour. Labour (see the Regional Government referendum in the North East in 2004, thrown into the sea in a strong Labour area, by a vote of 696,519 to 197,310 ) is deeply vulnerable to a socially conservative challenge from anyone who is not the Tory Party.
**‘Mev’ likewise completely fails to grasp my basic point that the Tory party is now so hated that it is unsaveable by anyone or anything, and will never again hold a majority in a United Kingdom Parliament, regardless of what anyone, says or does. One of the main effects of the Tory survival in 2010 was to save the Labour Party, as a socially revolutionary, anti-British, pro-immigration, pro-crime formation. I hope ‘Mev’ is pleased to have achieved this awful thing.
'Mev' again :However – even before we ever get that far (and we never will) - it's quite apparent following your bold "you go first and I'll consider joining later" Call to Arms, last month, that this movement does not and will not ever exist
**Well, on that, I can’t necessarily disagree with him, though his description of my suggestion is false. The portents are gloomy, as none knows better than I. But one has to try to do something to keep hope alive. Given his confidence that I have failed and will fail, why does he seem so anxious to have me escorted everywhere I go by special minders saying 'He's wrong! He's wrong!'
Mev :Not one person has posted on your weblog that they have taken the first steps to set up the kind of committee that your proposed - and it would take an awful lot of committee members (and time and money) for it to even get one foot off the ground. Your idea is simply dead in the water, for all to see. PROVEN. FACT. There is no new movement ready to form.
**No, that’s not a ‘proven fact’. EVEN IN CAPITALS. It may yet take place. The next general election is surprisingly distant ( three years away), though many people are so weary of the current government they think it’s been in office for far longer. The Tory Party is already in grave difficulties, This government is in difficulties, the economy is in difficulties. How can he be so sure? He mustn’t mistake his own analysis of the possibilities for a proven fact. I don’t. That must be apparent now, even to you, even with your hands over your eyes and your fingers in your ears.
‘Mev’ : I DO object
**He may object away. IN BLOCK CAPITALS, IF HE LIKES. It’s a free country (though it won't be if he succeeds in censoring me as he wishes). But he shouldn’t imagine that, because he doesn’t like my opinions, he in some mysterious way acquires a moral right to legislate or demand special restrictions on the expression of my opinion.
'Mev': to you using your unique cuckoo like position at the heart of the middle class Sunday paper - to sway 'conservatives' away from their natural party – **Why am I a ‘cuckoo’? Why is it their ‘natural party’. What is the basis of this assertion? These people don't belong to the Tory Party, and the Tory Party doesn't own them or their votes. The Tory Party hates, despises and incessantly betrays the middle class readers of the Mail on Sunday, as I point out in detail, week by week by week. Even if it were their ‘natural party’ and many have deserted it, why should it continue to be? Whose interests does that serve? Not that of my readers.
'Mev': because 1. no pro-Conservative opponent is given the space (following page? or even sharing your pre-election page? Why not simply accept that challenge?)
**First of all, I am not the editor, and do not take such decisions. Secondly, if I were asked my opinion, I should say that the British media are a whole, of which my newspaper is a significant but by no means dominant part, and that the spread of the British media, including the overwhelmingly influential pro-Cameron BBC, includes legions of commentators who write what ‘Mev’ wants to read, and overwhelmingly counterbalance any effect I might have had. That’s why the Tories have survived for as long as they have, while trashing the hopes and desires of their ‘natural’ supporters.
** Secondly, for goodness’s sake, read the paper. It’s full of pro-Tory news stories and commentary .On election day, a full-page leading article, further forward in the paper, urged a Tory vote. I strongly suspect that ‘Mev’ doesn’t actually read the Mail on Sunday.
‘Mev’: to argue against your proposal / position and 2. because no leftwinger of equal 'standing' is doing the same as you’re doing to Labour voters in a leftwing paper – so that is an ‘unfair’ situation, in my opinion.
**That’s his opinion. Others have other opinions. Why should I be influenced by his opinion, based as it is on a wilful misreading of my position and a great deal of evident partisan, personal hostility?
'Mev': However, I have never called for you to be banned or 'silenced' though – so please stop falsely claiming that – just to distract people, and offer your sycophantic supporters ‘something’ to work with.
**No, because he doesn’t dare come out into the open with such a call. But see above.
‘Mev’ The only person ‘silencing’ you on the question of ‘how are the committees going?’ is YOU – because you have simply refused to answer or acknowledge the question – and that is the only ‘absurd’ thing here.
**He knows perfectly well what the answer is. Nothing has yet happened. I never imagined that there would be some kind of immediate surge. I was explaining how, when the opportunity arises, it could best be done. Does he think the crisis of the Tory Party is over? He is in for some surprises, if so.
17 May 2012 11:53 AM
Not Listening – the Left’s Favourite Tactic in Argument
Last night (Wednesday 16th February) I took part in a debate about drugs at the Institute of Economic affairs (IEA) in London. My opponent was a Mr Christopher Snowdon. I made arguments familiar to readers here, mainly the recitation of unquestionable facts and examples, about the deliberate decision of the British governing class to cease to enforce the laws against possession of (technically) illegal drugs, above all the laws against cannabis.
As usual, I might as well not have bothered. Much of the audience, Thatcherite liberals and ‘libertarians’ who have swallowed Friedrich Hayek, followed him up with a heavy helping of J.S.Mill and for some reason think they are conservatives, and my opponent, whose contribution deeply disappointed me, sat there while I said these things ( I was going to say ‘listened’, but I think that may be a severe and misleading exaggeration) and then they continued to advance their standard argument, that this country is subject to a wicked and severe ‘prohibition’ of drugs, which causes grave harm and must therefore be ended. And then there were the usual patsies of the ‘Medical Marijuana’ fancy, long ago revealed by its inventor as a propagandist red herring.
They insistently use the word ‘prohibition’, to assert a wholly false parallel between the American ban on the sale and manufacture of previously legal, mass-produced and mass-consumed alcohol, with Britain’s wholly different drug laws. When the falsity (on every level) of the parallel is pointed out to them, they do not in any way engage, or enter into a proper discussion of the differences. They just do it again.
I might as well have sent a cardboard cut-out of myself, for all the impact my assembled facts had on my opponent or much of the audience (judging, as one must, by their own spoken contributions). I live in hope that one or two people there might have gained something. But most (much like my absurd critic ‘Mev’, who wants to censor me for daring to criticise the Tory Party effectively, but daren’t quite say so, and so dresses his ignoble desire up as a call for ‘fairness’) they had armoured their minds against uncomfortable fact. They were impregnable.
Something similar is evident in the often silly comments on my post about Lord Howe’s demand for enforced, total metrication. My critics write as if I am proposing a similarly total ban on metric measurements. Far from it. I am perfectly happy for those who wish to use the metric system to be able to continue to do so. I am perfectly happy to accept that some trades and professions find it more convenient. My problem with it is that it is not suited to daily life or to the small commerce of individuals, and that I object to being bullied into adopting it. I also have a deeper objection, that it is ugly and soulless, and its loss in our daily life would be another barrier between us and our history and culture.
It is also suggested that I am in some way unable to cope with it. On the contrary. I went to proper schools where we were taught both systems, and conversion factors between them. I have lived in a country, the USSR, where its use was supposedly universal (actually, in private markets, it was, as it always is, adapted for human use). I have also live in a country, the USA, where its use is still marginal. The question of the Mars orbiter has nothing to do with either the metric or customary systems, but with the incompetence of individuals who failed to establish which system they were dealing with. Incompetence, as I have pointed out, can also have appalling effects in a universal metric system, as in the problem of severe overdoses which I am told is increasingly common in the NHS. I am against incompetence. But the point about metric measurements, in which it is quite easy to make a major error on an order of magnitude (whereas customary measures, with their different units for different levels of measurement tend to avoid this) is that it makes incompetence harder to avoid and detect within a universally-used system.
Some bore says there are no exact facts in the article about how popular or unpopular the metric system is. Well, I would love to be able to launch surveys of opinion on this matter. But I don’t have the resources to do so. I do recall a supermarket official recently noting that customers at his chain’s petrol pumps had been reducing their purchases from £20 to £10 at a time. I do believe this is the way most people buy petrol, and I think that is significant. What’s interesting is that, as is usually the case, discussions of this subject produce a large and often passionate response. Those in favour of preserving the customary system in daily life are usually eloquent and thoughtful. Those in favour of wiping it out by law are usually jeering, dismissive and unresponsive to the case of their opponents. I just wish the defenders of the metric system would make a bit more of an effort to see the point of view of those who wish to preserve customary measures in daily use. But their system is fundamentally totalitarian in origin and purpose, so perhaps that is why they tend that way as well.
My favourite contribution comes from Ronnie James. What did I say to justify this bizarre explosion? I have no desire to compel him to be stuck in a darkened hole with breathing apparatus on, worrying about how much air he’s got in his tank. I should have thought he’d have decided on how to measure that before he got into the hole.
As for doing a day’s physical work, what exactly does that have to do with it? In my long ago days of shovelling pig-muck and barley , I can’t recall the form of measurement mattering very much, nor even when I was slinging crates and rolling barrels at a (sadly now-defunct) brewery, though there were 56-pound bags of something or other that had to be hefted, and they stick in the mind. All that mattered was that you carried on until the muck or the barley was all shovelled, the barrels all rolled, the crates all slung, the sacks all hefted. At the end of eight hours of that, I could watch any rubbish on the TV without complaint, and even enjoy reading, or rather gaping at ‘Tit Bits’ and ‘Reveille’ before falling into a dreamless sleep. Takes you back, eh? It’ll be gas lamps, ten bob notes, bus conductors and town gas, next.
I have since then treasured Ronald Reagan’s remark (explaining his choice of the acting profession) that he had always been told that hard work never killed anyone, but he wasn’t anxious to find out if this claim was true.
Unlike him, I know several shops and market stalls which, frightened by the Metric Martyrs case, now refuse to sell goods to me in pounds ( and interestingly their supposedly metric scales are not finely enough calibrated to sell me, say, 454 grams of coffee, my revenge on them for this cowardice, so it has to be 450 or 455). He attributes to me arguments I have not made and goals I do not have. Then he attacks me for these arguments and goals. I hope he enjoyed it. But it would have been better if he had actually dealt with what I said.
Ah well, that was the point I was making at the beginning.
By the way, Parliament never decided to impose the metric system on this country. There is no authority in English or Scottish law for any such programme.
16 May 2012 2:57 PM
Under Threat Again - the Last Traces of a Free Country
I feel increasingly hemmed in by the determination of so much of the broadcast and print media to use exclusively metric measurements, often to the point of absurdity . Some reports even gave the height and weight of Gareth Williams, the GCHQ employee found dead in a locked bag, in exclusively metric measurements, which must have been quite meaningless for millions of people. Presumably this is because our Europeanised courts system now uses nothing but foreign measurements, just to demonstrate that it can. Still, it all helps me keep my mental arithmetic supple, as does the daily effort to work out how much rain has fallen in inches rather than millimetres or centimetres (chosen at random by the Met Office as their metric measures) , or what the temperature will be in Fahrenheit. I cannot visualise them any other way, because I am English and was brought up in England, rather than in the sort of Airstrip One where we now dwell as strangers and sojourners, our roots torn up, our landmarks removed, our future a grey blur.
Even supposedly conservative outlets quite often do this. Several have taken to putting the metric version first, and then putting the customary one in brackets. You know that in a few months, the bracketed version will begin to disappear, and it will be metric only before too long. I regard this as bullying, an improper use of power to tell people how to talk and think, and to make them less British (the main purpose of it). The BBC is positively aggressive. I have tried to establish that this is a set policy, which I don’t doubt that it is, but the BBC is protected against Freedom of Information inquiries and so I have not been able to pursue the matter beyond the bland denials I have received.
I reckoned something must be going on when characters in the radio soap opera ‘The Archers’, supposedly of my generation, began referring some years ago to the heights of fences, hedges and gates in metres. In those days such people never really did this. Now, I rather think they do, after years of such badgering. Of course, the BBC has itself illustrated the difficulty of a system nobody can really think in. I often refer to a moment in (I think) ‘the Living World’ on BBC Radio 4, when Lionel Kelleway, distinguished presenter of natural history programmes, announced that some cliffs (actually 600 feet high) were 2,000 metres high (6,560 feet). They would be a sight to see.
That is just silly. But I do wonder whether what I am told is the growing number of wrong prescriptions and doses in the NHS has something to do with metrication. Mix up a milligram and microgram, or simply add or subtract and extra zero, and you’re in deep trouble.
As for shopping, remove landmarks, such as the one pound jar of marmalade, and before you know where you are 454 grams (one pound) has quietly become 415, or 400, or maybe 300 – but the price is the same. It’s easy to see where that leads. We used to buy loose sweets by the quarter (four ounces) as children. Now they are sold in 100 gram bags, whereas a quarter is nearer 114 grams. How long before 100 grams becomes 80?
That’s leaving aside the sheer unpoetic ugliness of metric measures, their imposed, top-down, bossy character, their spiky, made-up polysyllabic names and their sheer inconvenience. A litre is too much to drink, but too little fuel to get you home. As far as I know, most people have never adapted to the litre of petrol, and buy it instead by the pound sterling, in the shape of ten pounds’ worth. Kilograms have the same difficulty. They’re too big, too hard to visualise. Lots of people now buy their fruit and vegetables in markets in ‘bowls’, judging quantity by sight rather than weight.
I’ve mentioned before how the ‘livre’ (pound) still survives in rural France, two centuries after it was abolished, and how no wine worth drinking is ever sold in litre bottles.
The human mind rejects these measurements, and, left to their own devices, human beings won’t use them. Canada, supposedly metric for years by force of law, still in reality retains most customary measures (in French as well as English) because of next-door America, where legal enforcement of metric measures would I think be constitutionally impossible. Poor old backward America’s continuing use of these supposedly obsolete measures, and its failure to suffer economically, scientifically or educationally as a result, always warms my heart whenever I go there.
We are not so fortunate. Here comes that old nuisance Geoffrey Howe (Lord Howe of Aberavon) one of the geniuses who got us into the Exchange Rate Mechanism which nearly ruined the country, to declare in the House of Peers:
‘British weights and measures are in a mess. We have litres for petrol and fizzy drinks but pints for beer and milk. We have metres and kilometres for athletics and the Ordnance Survey but miles per gallon for cars. We have the metric system for school but still have pounds and ounces in the market. Certainly, this muddle matters. It increases costs, confuses shoppers, leads to serious misunderstandings, causes accidents, confuses our children's education and, quite bluntly, puts us all to shame…
‘… every civilised society has recognised the need for one set-and only one set-of standard measures. By contrast, we have managed to come near to recreating Disraeli's two nations-divided between, on the one hand, a metrically literate elite and, on the other, a rudderless and bewildered majority.’
Now that *is* interesting. How, when and by whom was this decision ‘finally taken’ in 1965? Lord Howe speaks as if Parliament, which in 1965 still governed this country, took a decision, and passed a Bill. Did it? When? What was the Bill called? When did it pass? When was it debated? In whose election manifesto did it feature? Was it really unconnected with our attempts to join the then Common Market, which had been begun in the early 1960s by Harold Macmillan?
Lord Howe drove his message home, with heavy thuds of his verbal mallet ‘How did we manage to end up in this very British mess? It is because successive British Governments have lacked consistency, candour and courage in implementing and presenting a policy which was, at the outset, rightly supported by a broad majority of all those who had given the topic serious consideration. It was the first Wilson Government who launched the process in 1965, and the Heath, Wilson and Callaghan Governments who carried it on. The whole operation was handled, without significant controversy, by a broadly representative commission: the Metrication Board, which, in its final report in 1979, was able to suggest that the change was by then almost complete. In the Heath Government I had been, as Britain's first Minister for Consumer Affairs, responsible for the metrication programme. By 1979, however, I had myself become a penny-saving Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as such I readily accepted the decision to abolish the Metrication Board, which claimed to have completed the process.’
Note that he says there was ‘no *significant* controversy’ . Who defines ‘significant’? What does he want before he accepts that this is not popular? A Peasants’ Revolt? Rick-burning in the shires? A million-man march? A lot of people never liked this, didn’t want it and would reverse it if they could. They were just never asked. And, with so many other small but significant changes of this kind, they didn’t feel it was enough of an issue to rise up in revolt. The Metrication Board never represented me. I do think it’s quite funny that dear old Sir Geoffrey wound up the Board because he thought its job was done. Just goes to show how little contact he had, by then, with real life in this country.
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