This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down The Slime Factories were working overtime last week, as I once again dared to voice a dissenting opinion on the issue of marriage and parenthood. We have now reached a point where it is almost impossible to pronounce or write conservative opinions about this subject without being personally abused, misrepresented and intimidated. There is a reason for this, which I shall come to in time. The chief dispenser of slime (though an army of righteous Twitterers stood, or rather yelled and squawked, behind her) was Emily Thornberry MP, member for Islington South and Finsbury, and the Shadow Attorney General. I will also say a little about her in a moment, but first a few general remarks. Some contributors urge me to try to soften my position on fatherless families by hedging it around with tributes to the wondrous virtues of single mothers. This misses the point. It may well be that all single mothers in general are full of all the human virtues. I do not deny it. But even so they all face a problem. They must raise their children without a father to help them, which, however saintly, diligent and devoted they are, weighs them down with a disadvantage. The standard formula of ‘most/many single mothers do a great job’ always seems to me to be irrelevant to this question, and sounds apologetic over a position which needs no apology. I am simply not, as is always alleged against me, criticising the mothers themselves, as I repeatedly make perfectly, unequivocally clear in unambiguous language. I am criticising the politicians who encourage fatherless families, because the outcomes for the children of such families are in general worse than for those of stable married households (see below). This discussion also raises the question of different types of ‘single mother’, a misleading category if ever there was one. There are the voluntary single mothers, the ones who have been recruited by the policies of successive governments for more than 40 years, who have become mothers without ever intending or seeking to marry the father of the child. There are those who have initiated divorces (to be distinguished from those whose husbands have initiated them), who could also be said to have volunteered for the status of single parent, though some of them will plead urgent necessity, and none of us will be able to dispute their case, or want to. In the wilderness created by the Permissive Society, there are many miseries which aren’t really our fault, even though we take the decisions. Then, quite distinct in my view, there are the wholly involuntary single mothers, deprived of husband and father by desertion or bereavement. And there are distinctions among these, between those who were married in the first place, and those who chose to embark on parenthood without the formal public declaration of permanence which is marriage. As I discussed in my 1999 book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, a potent and successful campaign was fought in the 1960s to erase all these distinctions and treat all women bringing up children in the absence of a father as if they were the same. I believe the purpose of that campaign was to remove the social and moral barrier (known to its culturally revolutionary critics as ‘stigma’) against those adults who chose (or were encouraged by the state) to raise children outside marriage. One long-term consequence of it (a fact which amazes many people) is that our welfare system no longer contains a specific widow’s pension. The state of widowhood is not, in itself, recognised as one in need of aid from the state. This change, which took place under Anthony Blair, is a break with almost all concepts of charity dating back thousands of years, under which widows and orphans were the first concern of any community. Interesting, eh? The next question is ‘does it matter’? I would say that it does. One of the best summaries of the problem is to be found in a paper published by the think tank Civitas in September 2002, entitled ‘Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family’, by Rebecca O’Neill. It can be consulted here. This paper was written to discuss the possible effects of the steep rise in births outside marriage, which began about ten years after the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, and after the welfare reforms of the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan governments. I will list some of the characteristics it identifies. Lone mothers are twice as likely to live beneath the official poverty line as are two-parent families. Lone parents have twice as much risk of experiencing persistent low income as couples with children. They are twice as likely to have no savings, eight times as likely to live in a workless household and 12 times as likely to be receiving income support (as it then was). I am not arguing here about whether these (or other) conditions are the simple direct *result* of being a single parent, a more complex question for another time. I am just stating them as facts. Other selected facts: single mothers have poorer physical and mental health. Young people in lone-parent families were 30% more likely than those in two-parent families to report that their parents rarely or never knew where they were. Lone parents were significantly more likely than couples to have strained relations with their children. Between 20 and 30% of absent fathers have not seen their children in the last year. Between 20% and 40% see their children less than once a week. Children in lone-parent families are nearly three times as likely to describe themselves as unhappy as children raised by couples, have more trouble in school, worse physical health, and are at greater risk of all kinds of abuse. Put simply, their lives in general are worse, and will be worse. A wise government would seek to discourage this form of household, for the good of the country as a whole – not by punishment or cruelty but at the very least by *ceasing to encourage it*. My favoured tools for achieving this are the end of subsidies for *future* single parent households (existing ones have been made a promise which must be kept until their children are grown), with a reasonable period of notice that this change is to take place, plus severe reforms of the divorce laws, making divorce considerably more difficult for couples with children than it is for those without them. I also seek moral and cultural changes, which would make parenthood outside wedlock less likely, and make marriage more difficult to begin, as well as harder to end. By the way, as this touches on moral territory, I should mention that I am chided elsewhere for saying that my pleasures are private, when I have views on the pleasures of others. But my private pleasures are legal, and do not in any way influence me towards campaigning for changes in the law which would make illegal pleasures more common. And, as I have many times stated, I do not attack private individuals for their private moral decisions, though I might defend myself against their immoral actions. This is not because I don’t think people do many wrong things, or because I don’t disapprove of those wrong actions. I do. But above all I must disapprove of my own wrong actions. Morals are a matter for the individual, and God. On the other hand, I attack politicians and their media and academic allies for pursuing polices designed (or predictably bound) to distort human behaviour in immoral (and therefore in my view unhappy or dangerous) directions. I do not in any way blame the women who have chosen to raise children on their own, because they are subsidised by the welfare state to do so. Their decision is entirely rational (and morally far preferable to the abortion of the child, a choice which is, alas, open to all). It is also easy to see why young women, with a strong and good natural desire to become mothers of babies (a wonderful thing in itself, and easy to understand) wish to avoid entanglements with the often feckless and irresponsible young men created by our fractured families, our wrecked schools, our culture of drivel and our morally bankrupt society and state. Likewise, in a state where marriage is more easily ended than a car leasing agreement (and is very often so ended) it is hard to condemn those who entered into such a lax agreement, later deciding to end it. How can any reasonable person, likewise, hold a woman responsible for having been deserted or – even more absurd - bereaved? I certainly don’t. The amazing thing is that I am accused of this by people who appear to be in possession of all their faculties. Why do they do this? They do it because the nationalisation of childhood, and the marginalisation of strong independent families in which private life and free thought flourish, is one of the main projects of the modern radical state, just as it was one of the central policies of the Communist state in the USSR. Weak families are a necessary consequence of the strong parental state, and its desired aim. Many of these statist radicals are extremely hypocritical, themselves maintaining traditional two-parent households while pursuing policies which tend to eradicate such households among the poor and weak. This, along with the hypocrisy of imposing egalitarian schools on others, while avoiding it for your own young, seems to me to be the crowning hypocrisy of leftism. Which brings me to Emily Thornberry, with whom I clashed on BBC Question Time last Thursday, 14th June 2012. At the time of writing, this programme is still available on BBC i-player. But I have in any case transcribed the central exchange, which now follows: The actual question was: ‘Do you agree with Community Secretary Eric Pickles that problem families have had it easy for too long?’ My answer was : ’I don’t think we’re entitled to sit here, any of us, and start saying anybody is having it easy in the poorer parts of our country. That’s not the point. The point is whether they are being given the sort of help they really need. ‘I don’t think that compassion should necessarily be expressed by throwing money at these people. I think that Eric Pickles probably feels the same way. But because this government is in effect a fraud which makes conservative statements and does no conservative things, nothing will come of this. But I think his general idea that what we need to do is to look at the reasons why we have so many problem families - which are fundamentally the destruction of the married family by the deliberate subsidising of fatherless families and an enormous welfare dependent class - then we might be able to do some good. But it doesn’t do any good being rude to people, except to politicians, who deserve it. ‘It doesn’t do any good being rude to people who are at the bottom end of society. Many of them are acting perfectly rationally. If you create an enormous welfare state, people will obviously go and collect the welfare which is offered to them and they will behave in the way which the welfare state persuades them to do. That is why we are in such a mess. And until we get serious welfare reform aimed at bringing back the solid family life which people used to enjoy in this country and which used to be particularly good for the upbringing of children, then these problems will persist, I just think Eric Pickles is showing off and pretending to be a conservative without actually being one, and offending people without doing any good.’ Emily Thornberry: ‘Before I came along today I was advised to do yoga deep breathing and to make sure that I didn’t get wound up by Peter Hitchens, but I just have already and we’re only on the second question. I suppose that given that my family that I was brought up was fatherless, and I suppose the fact that my mother was on benefits and that we lived in a council estate means that we were one of the problem families that you talk about, Peter. But actually, do you know what, we had a solid family life and we did well and me and my brothers did well and my mum struggled, and how dare you say that women, that single parents that live on council estates are therefore by definition problem families? How dare you?’ Thunderous applause. Stormy applause. PH: ’Had I said any such thing your phoney outrage would be justified. But as I didn’t, it isn’t. And you really do need to do a bit better than that.’ ET : ‘I made a note. (PH ‘Yes...’). ET ‘You talked about problem families being fatherless and you talked about them being on benefits and that describes the family life, that describes me as a child – and we were not a problem family.’ PH: ‘It’s the subject under discussion. I didn’t say anything about your family or anything of the kind. You are just engaging in phoney outrage for political propaganda purposes, which is what your Party always does... Pathetic rubbish.’ (I should note here that Grant Shapps MP, the ‘Conservative’ Party’s representative on the panel ‘absolutely agreed’ with Emily Thornberry that ‘this is nothing to do with people who have one or two parents, who are rich or poor or anything else’.) Greg Dyke, my old university acquaintance and former Director General of the BBC, asked what could be done about it ‘without having this sort of banter.’ PH: ’If you try and suggest what you should do about it, you get buckets of slime chucked over you by Labour politicians, and there’s an end to it. There is a simple problem, almost all serious work on the problems of problem families, a phrase not introduced into this discussion by me, in any major country, any major advanced country, will tell you that these problems are concentrated where there are no fathers, and if you won’t do anything about that, then indeed, if you continue to pursue policies which create more and more fatherless families, you will get more of it. I’ll carry on saying it however many times people chuck buckets of slime over me for saying it, because it is important and needs to be addressed.’ I wonder if any of my critics (preferably the intelligent and coherent ones) can identify anything in my spoken, broadcast words above that justified Ms Thornberry’s outburst. If so, can they please say what it is? I telephoned Miss Thornberry over the weekend and asked her if she would, telling her that I planned to blog about this, and giving her my e-mail and telephone details so that she could respond to this specific question. She has not yet done so. I attempted to discover if Ms Thornberry (she is, by the way, married to a distinguished barrister, now a judge, and lives in an attractive part of the fashionable London quarter, Islington) had any coherent critique of what I had said, or indeed understood my general point. I found fairly quickly that we spoke a different moral and political language. But, while I was aware of the existence of her view and language, she was more or less unaware of mine. We were, as the old joke goes, arguing from different premises. In fact, Emily Thornberry’s personal story is a good deal more interesting than her outburst would suggest. She did indeed grow up in a council house, in the absence of her father. But if anyone thought she was just an ordinary working-class girl made good, they were mistaken. Her mother Sallie, alas no longer with us, was a most courageous and distinguished person, and also much-loved by political allies and opponents alike. She was a teacher by profession, and an active and popular Labour councillor who became, despite the privations and difficulties of her life, Mayor of Guildford in Surrey, by no means a Labour town. But the family was not fatherless in the sense that it had never had a father. Nor was Sallie Thornberry unmarried. On the contrary, she was married to a distinguished and talented academic lawyer, Cedric Thornberry, who lectured at the London School of Economics, and rose to become Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations. He is still active in the international human rights industry. I do not know or seek to know exactly how he came to leave the family home, though he did so when his daughter was seven and his sons even younger. It is perhaps significant that Emily Thornberry omits all reference to him from her entry in ‘Who’s Who’ (those in Who’s Who’ write their own entries), though she does mention her mother. Whatever happened, Emily Thornberry has unpleasant, rather shocking Dickensian memories of bailiffs, and of going off to live in a council house in pretty sharply reduced circumstances. To give you some idea of our differing responses to this episode, she believes it is an argument for better state childcare to allow women such as her mother to go out to work. I believe it is an argument for strengthening marriage, and placing a higher value upon fidelity and constancy, and upon promises. She also, I believe, failed her eleven-plus, went to a secondary modern, and later to a comprehensive before studying law at the University of Kent and becoming a successful barrister. This casts an interesting light on her decision to send one of her children to a partially selective state school (a very rare category), a dozen miles from her home. I asked her how she explained the divergence between her personal educational policy, in favour of selection, and of her party’s educational policy, implacably opposed to selection. And I’m afraid she went quiet, and then attempted to make it an issue of her children’s privacy. I have not named and will not name the child or the school. It is about her, a public figure who has sought and obtained public office and seeks to take part in the government of the country, as an acknowledged member of a political party which has endorsed her, and whose endorsement she has sought and accepted. That political party is opposed to academic selection in state schools. It’s my belief that Emily Thornberry is a decent person (anyone with a mother like that has to be) but that she still has much to learn about principles and about civilised debate. Mr Cameron’s already reaching for the favourite tools of New Labour – surveillance and increased police powers over all of us, while horrible criminals roam the streets wearing pointless tags. And I am increasingly convinced that the Leveson Inquiry into the press, which he launched, will come down in favour of regulation which will menace press freedom. That freedom is one of the few protections we have against our incompetent, spendthrift and oppressive State. Let’s begin with the revelation that Mr Cameron drove away from a pub without realising that he had left his daughter behind. I’m not sure this is all that common, actually. I suspect it is easier to do if you are one of those problem families burdened with two cars, a grace-and-favour country house, a live-in nanny and a personal protection officer. It’s interesting that he got into more trouble for this than he did for leaving his integrity behind, when he broke his cast-iron pledge of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. I don't know which pub he left his integrity in. Perhaps the landlord still has it and could give me a call, though as it wasn’t very big in the first place it was probably swept up and thrown away with the crisp packets. But that’s the modern media for you, largely governed by people who have the political understanding of a marmoset – and yes, I am thinking particularly about Mrs Rebekah Brooks who, in her years of authority at The Sun, managed to be a cheerleader for Anthony Blair, Gordon Brown and Mr Slippery, without missing a breath. What was the price for this? I’m not sure. But the Tory leader’s first article for The Sun – after its miraculous change of mind – contained a strange pledge to fight the war in Afghanistan more vigorously. So each time I watch military coffins come back from that futile war, the horrible thought crosses my mind that those soldiers would not have died if it hadn’t been for Mr Slippery’s desire for office at all costs. Disgust is not a strong enough word, really. The truth obviously doesn’t matter much once war becomes fashionable. Hillary Clinton, the American Secretary of State, has been caught out using her respected office to make alarmist claims that Russia is supplying Syria with new helicopter gunships. She gets away with it because it is modish to believe in interfering in Syria. It’s so modish that the feared Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, has spotted the trend. Now that Syria is officially the world’s worst tyranny, she has swung the world of hemlines, heels and lip gloss behind the cause of war. Ms Wintour has icily disowned an embarrassing pro-Syrian article that her magazine ran last year, in which the attractive Asma Assad, wife of the Syrian president, pictured right, was billed as a ‘rose in the desert’ and described as ‘the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies’.23 June 2012 6:03 PM
There's nothing moral about tax - so feel free to avoid it
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21 June 2012 12:30 PM
Oh, it’s O-levels now, is it? Is Michael Gove as Rigorous as He Says He is? Or are we all dreaming (including Mr Gove?)
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20 June 2012 12:45 PM
On Being Nice, and on how Gordon Brown Saved the Pound
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18 June 2012 3:14 PM
The Phoney Outrage of Emily Thornberry – Slime Factories on Overtime
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17 June 2012 12:06 AM
So which pub did Dave leave his integrity in?
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16 June 2012 11:52 PM
War... it's this year's must-have accessory
Sunday, 24 June 2012
What on earth is moral about paying tax? A greedy, slovenly state forces you to hand over roughly half your money every year, by threatening to send you to prison if you don’t.
Then it shovels that money carelessly down a huge hole. The Government is bad at almost everything it does. If you sent it out to buy you a loaf of bread, it would come back a week later with stale cake, and pretend it had lost the change.
People who can afford to do so avoid the wretched ‘services’ the state arranges in return for this legalised theft. What are these? Schools that teach sexual licence but not times tables or proper reading; police who are never there when you want them; hospitals plagued with inexcusable dirt and neglect; a welfare system that punishes thrift and encourages sloth.
Meanwhile, the real essentials – the absolute vital duties of any government – are neglected or destroyed. Our borders are abandoned, our roads potholed, our Navy sunk, our Army soon to be small enough to fit into Wembley Stadium. As for criminal justice, where do I begin?
As it happens, I think I pay my taxes as fully as possible. Unlike several Left-wing commentators and broadcasters of my acquaintance, I don’t qualify for, and so don’t use, the obvious get-outs. But am I guilty if I take out an ISA (a form of tax avoidance) or set a charitable donation against tax? Certainly not. And if I were offered the chance to pay much less tax, simply and legally, I would take it.
The point was beautifully stated long ago by an American judge with the wonderful name of Learned Hand, who ruled: ‘Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the Treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes . . . nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.’
But it is not the same for the alleged comedian Jimmy Carr, a man whose jokes have been described by his own father as ‘cruel’, ‘dirty’ and ‘unkind’.
Mr Carr has become famous and rich because of his modish Leftism. He’s for the things I’m against. He used to be noisily against tax-avoidance, and I suspect he still would be if he hadn’t been found out doing it. For him, and people like him, there is an obligation to pay lots of tax, because they worship the modern liberal welfare state.
I recommend a minimum tax rate of 80 per cent for Leftist comedians, getting higher as they get more Left-wing.
Squalid fashion for a bankrupt nation
I’ve always thought ‘You’ll look funny when you’re 50’ was the best advice you could offer to would-be tattoo fashion victims, though, of course, many of them can’t believe they ever will be 50.
What will Joanna Southgate feel about her tattoos when she reaches that milestone? And why is it that so many young Britons are eagerly adopting styles – shaved heads for men, tattoos for men and women – once mainly associated with prison, squalor, depravity or even slavery?
There’s something slightly frightening about it, as if in some instinctive way they are preparing themselves for the future that lies just around the next corner for our bankrupt country.
Ed is only sorry immigrants lost him votes
I don’t need Edward Miliband to tell me that I’m not a bigot. I knew already.
But for daring – over many years – to oppose mass immigration into this country, I and many others were smeared in this way by Labour sympathisers.
If Mr Miliband now admits that was wrong, what is he going to do about it? Will he and his comrades, deep down, now recognise that we were right? If there are now too many foreign migrants in this country, which is the clear implication of his speech, there isn’t actually anything he can do about it.
The transformation of this country was deliberately sought by New Labour, as we know from the blurted revelations of former party speechwriter Andrew Neather. It’s happened. But Mr Miliband’s private polls tell him the policy is unpopular.
So he makes a speech claiming to have changed his mind.Has he really? I don’t think so. New Labour’s upper crust is made up of rich, snobbish London bohemians, who love the way that mass immigration has provided them with cheap servants and cheap restaurants.
They also despise the older Britain that the rest of us rather liked living in, and want to erase all trace of it.
Now they want to have it both ways – to keep the votes of the maltreated masses, while secretly despising their opinions. The Useless Tories, I might add, are exactly the same. Expect no good news from them.
A test that's sure to fail
Sorry about this, but the return of O-levels is as likely as the return of the sabre-toothed tiger. And Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, must know that.
The old GCEs were designed for a selective system, where the academically bright went to grammar schools. The equality fanatics who control the Tory Party (and the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats, and the civil servants in the Education Ministry, and the teachers’ unions) will not allow that.
Mr Gove is taking part in a hilarious new national game called ‘distancing ourselves from the Coalition’. As the next Election gets closer, Tories and Lib Dems will both be sucking up to their core votes, trying to get them to forget that the closeness and love of 2010 ever happened. This will mean a lot of posturing, but not much real action.
And Mr Gove and Vince Cable will both be working hard to become the leaders of their parties. They all fooled you in 2010. Do please try not to be fooled again in 2015.
Proof of the Good Friday surrender
Sinn FEIN’S Martin McGuinness is to meet Her Majesty the Queen. Well, who’s doing who a favour, exactly?
I know the Queen has to meet all sorts in her job, but this dead-eyed fanatic must be among the least agreeable companions you could find in a long day’s journey.
If anyone doubted that the Good Friday Agreement was a humiliating surrender by a once-great country to a criminal gang, they can’t doubt it now.
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All the cheerleaders of the Arab Spring need to be asked how they feel about it now, and if by any chance they wish they had been less keen to endorse it. But, even as it falls to bits, they still support it.
Is the new Tory minority government, noisily conservative and totally powerless, beginning to form before our eyes?
Close readers of this site will know that I have long predicted the break-up of the Coalition , probably next year. The pretext for this, I am more and more convinced, will be the plan for House of Lords Reform, over which there can be no concord between the Tory party and the Liberal Democrats. The timing is set by several things .
One, it is generally accepted by experts in manipulation that voters have a political memory about 18 months long, and can seldom remember much further back than that (try it on yourself). The Liberal Democrats need to re-establish themselves as a separate, oppositional, raucously left-wing party untainted by association with Mr Slippery.
The Tories need to re-establish their image as a conservative party, rather than as the aggressively PC, pro-EU, soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend, welfarist egalitarian outfit they really are.
So, if the next election is to be in May 2015 (and the Fixed Term Parliaments Act mandates that it shall be, unless something really odd happens) , the two need to have split by somewhere round about Guy Fawkes 2013.
This is also round about the time that the next European Commission is appointed. Baroness Ashton, currently Britain’s EU Commissioner, was put in her job by Labour (and is a Labour supporter) so is most unlikely to be reappointed. I think it very likely that Nicholas Clegg will be given the job. This will solve several problems for him. He cannot hope to hold his Sheffield seat at the next election. He faces a politically awkward choice, in autumn 2013, over where he should send his eldest child to school (he is said to have visited the Oratory, the controversial London Roman Catholic secondary where Anthony Blair sent his sons, which is a superb school but would cause some difficulties for an atheist egalitarian politician). And his party wants a different leader to take it into the 2015 election, as it is bound to suffer badly at the polls and his presence will make that damage worse.
My strong suspicion is that Vince Cable will be chosen as the party’s new leader , defeating Simon Hughes (if he chooses to try again) and Tim Farron, and that he will then lead his MPs out of the Coalition, agreeing to the arrangement called ‘confidence and supply’ which many Liberal Democrats and Tories wanted in 2010, but didn’t get because of the unexpected love affair between the Orange Book (free market libertarian) Liberal Democrats and the Cameroons, who found they had so much in common they couldn’t bear to be apart.
That’s worn off now, not because they don’t still agree on almost everything, but because of the weird pressures of the two-party system and universal suffrage, both of which elevate stupidity and ignorance to a great height. That is, the Liberal Democrats, who have actually got into office for the first time in decades, and have obtained a government of the radical left, are far more unpopular with their (stupid) voters and supporters than are the Tories, who abandoned the last remaining filmy scraps of conservatism concealing their horrid nakedness, to join a left-wing PC government, and so actually *did* betray their voters( at least, the ones daft enough to believe that the Tory Party is conservative, a regrettably large body of people).
The first formal step towards the new arrangement came last week, when the Liberal Democrat MPs were formally whipped to abstain in the vote on Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary.
This was the model for what was to come. The Liberal Democrats will do nothing to bring down the Tories, or to form a new informal coalition with Labour. They don’t want to trigger an election. They need mass amnesia to kick in first.
But they will be much more separate, and they will also, I believe, sacrifice their ministerial posts in the government, and the special advisor jobs given to their ambitious young apparatchiks. This will be hard to let go of, but a reasonable price to pay for regaining quite a few lost votes in marginal seats.
They will also get back, I think, the so-called ‘Short Money’, a very valuable and much-missed subsidy from the taxpayer, given to Opposition parties in Parliament, but not to government parties.
Meanwhile the Tories will be liberated in equally useful ways. Mr Slippery will be able to silence many of his critics by appointing them to ministerial posts made vacant by departing Liberal Democrats. He will also be able to find nice jobs as Special Advisers for several young thrusters whom he seeks to advance in years to come.
And he can let Michael Gove, and others, dream up (and go public with) all kinds of plans which will soothe dim loyalists into thinking that this is, after all a conservative government – sure in the knowledge that there is no parliamentary majority for them, and they will never happen.
It may even work, though I suspect the next election will throw up a Lib-Lab coalition in which Mr Cable , Mr Hughes and Mr Farron will be much happier than they are. As for the Tories, Mr Cameron can’t say this openly, but their day will come again once Scotland has quit the union (and if they can persuade the North of England, and Wales, to declare independence as well, then their chances of a majority will be even greater).
Yet again I am told to honey my words (this time on the subject of fatherless families) with sentiments which I regard as futile or worse. If I prefaced every statement I made about this subject with ‘of course most single mothers do a great job…’ , do readers seriously think that I would be any less hated, by those who hate me (and they do) for my moral and religious opinions?
As I’ve explained in my previous posting, whether single mothers do a great job or not is beside the point. The absence of the father from the home makes it likelier that the child (especially a boy) will do worse in life, however good the job that is done. Everyone would be better off if the children were brought up in stable, lifelong marriages. I refuse to apologise for, or qualify this factual statement with concessionary flannel. To do so would suggest that I was afraid of my critics, and that I conceded that they had moral right on their side.
On the contrary, to do so would be to give credence to the smear, that those who favour stable marriage are in fact persecutors of single mothers. This smear has been immensely effective in shutting down this debate, It won’t work for me. It’s not just that I’m not ‘sorry’ to have ‘upset’ the Emily Thornberry tendency, who think that phoney outrage is a substitute for facts and logic.
It’s also that I am proud that I still stand up for the married family, and am not ashamed to do so. So no more of this stuff about being ‘emollient’. Why should I seek to please or appease people who hate everything I stand for, and cannot distinguish between loathing my ideas and loathing me? Do my correspondents truly think that, if I make these concessions, Ms Thornberry and her Twitter friends will soften towards me? I can tell them it is not so.
Lenin, as so often, had it right…though you often have to read him backwards, as if you were using an instruction manual in what not to do, if you want to defeat revolutionaries.
‘Probe with a bayonet’, said that horrible man ‘If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, shove harder ’.
Revolutionaries respect only those who fight them as hard as they fight themselves. They scorn compromise and offer no mercy to those who give in to them.
Hard principle needs to be stated without compromise. If you are afraid of a crowd, whether physical or electronic, you will never be able to lead , and you are not worthy of any responsibility. If you are ashamed or nervous of your own opinion, then people will wonder if you truly hold it.
As for Gordon Brown, the absurd distorted hate figure which the Useless Tories used with such effect to drum up their dying vote in 2010, it is most interesting to read Alastair Campbell’s latest diaries.
Mr Campbell is at last becoming interesting, as he has no need to keep secrets any more. And one of two really interesting things in his serialised memoirs (in the Guardian) is the detail of the real row between Anthony Blair and Gordon Brown.
This was always portrayed as a sort of soap opera personal rivalry, between sunny, charming Anthony and grim, dour, unhinged Gordon. But in fact there was an issue - and it was British membership of the Euro. Brown, well-advised by the (almost equally mocked and misrepresented) Ed Balls, successfully resisted great pressure from Blair and most of his ‘modernising’ Cabinet colleagues (themselves backed by those keen Tory allies of David Cameron, especially Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke) to abolish the Pound Sterling.
In short, Gordon Brown saved the Pound.
However bad our economic circumstances are now, imagine how much worse they would be if Blair, Heseltine and Clarke had got their way. And wonder how things would have been if John Major, or David Cameron, had been in office at the time, with no Balls or Brown to stand in their way.
Yet Tory voters were persuaded to hate and loathe Brown, while they were urged to vote for and admire David Cameron, a man who had by then reneged on his promise of a vote on the Lisbon Treaty( and yes, he had, and I was there when he announced it and tried to wriggle out of his commitment, and he knew what he had done, and he looked thoroughly ashamed of himself and fearful he would be found out) on his promise of a vote on the Lisbon.
It is an interesting example of people being persuaded, by propaganda, to do wholly irrational things. And it bolsters my view that, until modern neuropsychpharmacology was invented (plus steroids), and until there was widespread use of cannabis, individual madness was far less common in our world than the madness of crowds.
This has been Mr Slippery’s worst week yet, and I think we should all be very pleased about that, as it weakens his hold. His whole period in office has been a dangerous fraud, and is now becoming a grave threat to British liberty.
I am still getting messages from ordinary people inside Syria, appalled at the inaccurate picture of events there being peddled by Western media. But the heedless rush to war continues.
She isn’t a magnetic rose any more. She is the wife of a brutal dictator. How fickle fashion is.
This sort of drivel almost makes me yearn for the good old days when all we got were hysterical lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
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