Again and again, in articles and discussion programmes, I hear the phrase ‘democratically-elected’ used as if it is a synonym for ‘automatically good’. Thus, whatever one might say about the Queen, a President would be ‘democratically-elected’. And so he would in some way be more legitimate than any other head of state. Why do people believe this? What reason do they have to believe it? Has it proved to be reliable in human history? Contrary to the beliefs of most, neither of the two great free civilisations in the world have any principled attachment to being mass (let alone universal) suffrage democracies. The original U.S. Constitution says very little indeed about voting, which was left to the individual states. The founding fathers of the USA would have been appalled by the idea of it. That is one reason why they built their capital (whose long prospects and wide avenues were I think designed to make it easy to put down revolution with grapeshot) in the remote swamps on the Potomac to avoid the dangers (which they much feared ) of mob rule. In many parts of the early USA, the principle of ‘no representation without taxation” which is after all the corollary of “no taxation without representation”) meant only 70% of adult males qualified for the vote. This proportion grew during the mid-19th century , largely because political parties wanted to expand the market for their lies and promises. Secret ballots did not come to the USA till the late 19th century. As for the USA’s slave and freed slave population, largely black-skinned, we all know how recently they were allowed the vote in reality. The US Senate was specifically designed to be protected from ‘the fury of democracy’, hence the fact that Senators have much longer terms in office than members of the House of Representatives. Until the passage of the 17thAmendment in 1913, which faced strong and honourable opposition from several leading figures, U.S. Senators were not in any case elected by popular vote, but chosen by their state’s legislatures. The USA of course has a third (wholly unelected) chamber of government, the Supreme Court, which is in many ways more powerful than either the House, the Senate or the Presidency. Many of the most radical changes in American life, notably the legalising of abortion, have been brought about by this body. I suspect that left-wingers would be alarmed at any suggestion that it should be democratically elected. Britain’s reformers, likewise, were far from keen on the rule of the masses. Cromwell loathed (and executed ) the Levellers. The great factions of the 18thand early 19th centuries were not remotely democratic. The freedom and order of this country were largely the result of an adversarial parliament (in both Houses), Jury trial, the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta and the Habeas Corpus Act (see my ‘Abolition of Liberty’ for details of this, unless you feel unable to ready my books, in which case, take my word for it). Mass suffrage democracy, when it actually came about, was, to begin with anyway, an advantage for the Tory Party which – in the days before the dismantling of marriage – could rely on the women’s vote as being solidly socially conservative. This paradox has now come to an end, but it has always made me laugh. Have we benefited from mass suffrage? In one very important way, we have suffered terribly from it. In what must be one of his most prophetic statements, Winston Churchill warned the House of Commons on 13th May 1901 that ‘the wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings’ . His prediction was borne out with great speed. Surely any thoughtful person must be struck with a cold feeling round the heart when he reads Aldous Huxley’s 1947 preface to ‘Brave New World’ and comes across this passage: ‘But meanwhile we are in the first phase of what is perhaps the penultimate revolution. Its next phase may be atomic warfare, in which case we do not have to bother with prophecies about the future. But it is conceivable that we may have enough sense, if not to stop fighting altogether, at least to behave as rationally as did our eighteenth-century ancestors. The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually taught men a lesson, and for more than a hundred years the politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the temptation to use their military resources to the limits of destructiveness or (in the majority of conflicts) to go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors, of course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern. For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and when he wrote a letter to the Times, suggesting that the First World War should be concluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the eighteenth century had been, the editor of that once conservative journal refused to print it. The nationalistic radicals had their way, with the consequences that we all know --Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe and all but universal famine.’ The ‘nationalistic radicals’ were of course democrats, including Churchill himself. They had made a popular, democratic case for war to stimulate recruitment and to permit the high taxation and general ruin and regimentation which the war involved. But they could not in the end control the 'democratic' patriotic monster they had created, and dared not end the war, even once it was clear that it would be a disaster to continue it. Nuclear weapons, by promising a repeat of the 30 Years War with knobs on, restrained the warmongering populist tendency for a while. But when the Cold war ended they were quick to find new battlefields, as they strove to impose ‘democracy’ on the planet with fire and the sword. It is public opinion and 'democracy' which are being swayed, by 'democratic' TV reports into supporting the next war, an intervention in Syria. Huxley’s statement (in 1947) that ‘for the last 30 years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left’ is even more prophetic than Churchill’s. How else could Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan be regarded as conservatives? Theyb got away with it only because real conservatives had died out. Personally, as I examine the record of ‘democratically-elected’ rulers across the world, my Cromwellian head begins to be ruled by my Royalist heart, and I start to see the point of giving the headship of the state to the Lord’s Anointed, provided it can be combined with the rule of law, an adversarial parliament, the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, Jury Trial and Habeas Corpus (in short, the 1689 settlement rightly known as the Glorious Revolution). As for ‘democracy’, how is it morally reliable or creditable to grant the ultimate power to political parties? It is these that, in any democracy, actually control access to the legislature. They are controlled by the executive, bought by rich interests, impermeable to the public will. Don’t believe me? Try to become an MP and see what happens. Even primary elections, on the face of it a good idea, can now easily be purchased by millions (see the recent triumph of Mitt Romney, beloved by no-one but also outspent by nobody). The trite conclusion, now a cliche, is that democracy is the worst of all systems, except for the others. The implied suggestion is that we must have this disreputable fraud, or subject ourselves to Hitler, Mussolini, the Chinese Communist Party , Stalin or Ceausescu. But I don’t think that is really the choice at all. I tend to think that the systems of government of Britain and the USA, before universal suffrage, were far better at delivering ordered liberty , peace and prosperity (the ultimate aims of any government) than their modern successors. ***** Next, a word on why I always put ‘libertarian’ in inverted commas. Most thinking humans, in our post-Christian world , yearn for a universal touchstone of goodness which will somehow substitute for the Christian faith. For some it is the market, for some it is ‘liberty’, for others it is equality. It is easily demonstrable that the market sometimes, even often, lays waste valuable things, destroys customs and taboos, tosses aside human feelings. It is obvious to the slowest thinker that ( as Karl Marx pointed out) the freedom of all is impossible, as it will lead to conflicts between groups who wish to be free to do something which tramples on the freedom of another. ‘No man fights freedom’, wrote the sage of Trier, ’He fights at most the freedom of others’. Well, exactly. The trouble with these ideas is that they simply lack the universal power over all humanity of the Sermon on the Mount and the Commandments, and that they are based on a desire for power, rather than on Christianity’s preference for love, and its central suspicion of power and the mob, as so graphically set out in the story of the Passion. And sometimes I think a little light mockery is the best way to make people think. After all, one day they may realise that it is possible they are mistaken. **** And finally a few thoughts on why someone who chooses to call my books ‘drivel’ (yet now admits he hasn’t even read one of them, because he found it too hard) can reasonably be asked if he has any work of his own which we can see, to see if he is qualified to say so. I didn’t stop him saying so, or censor or disallow his post. I allow all kinds of people to post the most astonishing rubbish about me here. I just questioned his qualification. Actually, had he made a TV programme, exhibited a painting or produced a play, or done any creative thing involving the public giving of himself, he would be qualified to have a view. I tend to think, having written and presented four TV programmes and written five books (four published, one to come out in the autumn) that I have risked myself in the public square and can therefore pronounce on other people’s works. As it happens, I seldom write bad reviews of books (I make exceptions where their authors are self-serving political figures, who are not primarily authors). If I am sent a book which I think is really bad, I generally decline to write a review at all. My criticisms of films are essentially dissents from universal praise, and I believe that they are informed and thoughtful and that some readers have found them helpful. What is the purpose of criticisms of such things, by the way? It varies. In the case of Philip Pullman’s children’s books, I wished to warn parents that the stories are propaganda. In the case of the recent film ‘The King’s Speech’, I wished to ensure that the film’s severe deviation from historical truth was placed on record, because of a fear that it would (as historical fiction on film often does) become the accepted version of a historical incident. I thought the mangling of ‘Tinker Tailor’ in the Gary Oldman film (and the comparable mangling of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ in a recent TV version) illuminated our cultural decline and the working methods of the cultural revolution. I like to think that I can tell the truth in plain English, even where it will get me disliked. But I think I would hesitate to come to a writer’s weblog, cloddishly and blatantly misrepresent his views, and - when patiently invited to discover what those views actually are - to dismiss his books as ‘drivel’ to his face, not having made any serious effort to read or understand those books. If I have done anything comparable here, I regret it. But I don’t think I have. Back at my desk (I wasn’t that far away – funny that when I go on assignment readers always assume I’m on holiday, whereas when I go on holiday they assume I’m on assignment) I thought it was time for some conversation with readers. But before I forget, those who were interested in my reflections on Philip Larkin can find my review of the new Collected Poems in the American conservative magazine ‘National Review’here. I’d like to address some readers who told me that the early 1950s in Britain were not some sort of ‘Golden Age’. Well, let the record show that I have never said that they were. Not only that. I have repeatedly said that I have no such view. The past is in any case gone and irrecoverable. Even if we wished to return to it, we could not. We study it carefully, so as to understand our own times better, and also to avoid choosing – as our parents and grandparents did – the wrong future. We also have the tedious allegation that people have always complained that the past was better than the present. Well a) that is not what I am saying and b) I don’t believe this is true of all times and c) what if, on some occasions, they are right to mourn the loss of good things in the past? Does that mean that their complaints are invalidated because others have mistakenly done so at other times? This is not serious debate. And grown-up people should steer clear of it. So a belief in a ‘Golden Age’, and a desire to return to such an age, are not the argument. The argument is about whether we have lost anything valuable, and if so, whether we could then by thought and care have preserved it, and whether we might now or in the future, by thought and care, restore or recover it. And I would be pleased, if, *just for once*, one of these braying, repetitive and thoughtless critics actually responded rationally to the reply I shall now give. I was born in 1951 and so of course did not directly experience the Coronation. I was in my pram at the time. Careful readers will have noted that I was referring not to my own experience but to the film of the Coronation which has just been reissued as a DVD. Like so many such films (I believe there’s a positive treasury of evocative footage of the era on the British Council website) it shows glimpses of a Britain now as vanished as the lost city of Atlantis. These glimpses are brief (they weren’t the purpose of the film) but they are very evocative for me as, when I did grow conscious of my surroundings, the people, cityscape and countryside of my youth were rather similar. The sight of that Britain preserved on colour film awakes many memories. This particular Britain did not die in one night, but vanished slowly and in part. It survived in many ways until the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Traces of it could be found in a few remote corners much later than that. I tend to think its death was marked by a series of apparently unconnected events – Winston Churchill’s funeral, the final disappearance of steam railway locomotives, the abolition of the old coinage, the burning off of the old town gas in great braziers in the streets at around the same time, and the feeling of despond and darkness that came after the Yom Kippur War and Ted Heath’s Three Day Week. Not coincidentally, the country was taking the Brussels yoke at the same time, ceding its sovereignty to what would become the EU. What was different? Well, my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’ mentions many of these things, really a matter of the ways in which people thought and behaved, rather than measurable in material possessions and material living standards. Even a book wasn’t really long enough to explain all the things which had changed, nor the how, nor the why, though I do recommend it to anyone who is interested. It is not the book my enemies have claimed it to be. So my article, with only a little space, sought to summarise them thus : “In 1953, criminals were afraid of the police, school pupils were under the thumb of teachers, couples stayed married till they died, we made the most of the things we used, hardly anyone lived off the State, our Parliament and courts made and maintained our laws, poor people were thin rather than fat, and the strongest drug around was aspirin. What is more, we loved our country and respected its traditions, laws and institutions. Every educated person would have known the words that open the Coronation film, John of Gaunt’s dying speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II which ends ‘. . . this earth, this realm, this England’. “ I said nothing here about wife-beating, chilblains, smoking, homosexuality, hygiene, food quality or the death penalty – though most of these subjects are in fact tackled insome detail in ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I do wish my critics would actually read, rather than thinking that they have read it when they haven’t (I can always tell). Yet one contributor rages at me : ‘ The good old days? The police, teachers, parents, husbands, etc used to beat people up on a regular basis. Innocents hanged, I see there is still no mention of Sam Hallam. Sexual abuse in the home tolerated, "It's nothing to do with us!" Homosexuals imprisoned. Single parents, and their children, they had an older word for love child then, ostracised and made to feel ashamed. Backstreet abortions. People having to lie in court in order to get a divorce. Kids who failed the 11-plus condemned to be industry fodder.’ Let’s take this piece by piece. ‘The ‘good old days’ is his phrase, not mine. I never use it. Criminals now terrorise whole areas of our cities, unrestrained by any fear of the police. I am on record as saying that the police should be free to thump badly-behaved people within reasonable limits, because it would be simply silly to deny that this ever happened, or to deny that their authority rested to some extent on their freedom to do so. Anyone is welcome to argue about whether this is a good thing, but not by snorting away in a superior fashion about what a bad person I am for accepting this rather obvious truth. They should bear in mind that it is a choice. You can either have the police licensed to thump low-lifes, or you can have the low-lifes in charge. No utopia is available, in which the police are soppy and the bad people are well-behaved. Teachers have ceded control of classrooms to children who refuse to listen or maintain order. Those who wish to learn are abandoned. To some extent, this is the result of the abolition of teachers’ freedom to inflict corporal punishment. There are, of course, several other reasons, but these are also connected with or national moral decline. Once again there is a choice here. Which do you want? Disorder, or the cane? Violence and sexual abuse against children in the home, usually inflicted by step-parents is horribly common in the present day. The fate of children taken ‘into care’ is often appalling. I don’t know whether this abuse could be said to be ‘tolerated’ but it certainly happens under the modern dispensation. Whether it would be possible to quantify such abuse under the old regime and under the new, I do not know - but I am by no means sure that the ‘enlightened’ society of today would come out any better. The same is true of men beating women. Of course wife-beating was a problem in the past. But now that we have all but abolished marriage, is such violence at an end? I rather think not. On the contrary, as Anthony Daniels has argued, in a society where fidelity is far from being the norm, jealous men are much readier to use violence to enforce it than they used to be. Given that children are so much better off in stable marriages, and that the outcome for women in this case is not that different (and may well be better for married women than unmarried ones – I await reliable facts) there isn’t even much of a dilemma. I don’t know what the case of Sam Hallam has to do with this. There will never be a perfect world. Justice systems will always make mistakes. My own view is that they make more nowadays than they used to. The jury system has been unacceptably weakened, both by majority verdicts and by the abandoning of any qualification for jury service (this is explained at length in ‘The Abolition of Liberty’). It has also been weakened by fake conservative Home Secretaries such as Michael Howard, who abolished the right to silence, and by the post-Macpherson frenzy, when the double jeopardy rule was abandoned. The presumption of innocence, once quite strong in theory and practice, has now become a very weak force in practice. Opponents of the death penalty claim to be worried about the execution of inncoents. they aren't really. It is just a rhetorical point. Innocents die for all kinds of reasons (millions in abortions, to which the anti-execution lobby seem to have no ojection) Many innocents are murdered, far more than used to be in the days ogf the death penalty, sometimes by convicted murderers who have been released. Convicted killers go free after a few years in non-punitive prisons. Innocents are also shot by armed police. Homicide and homicidal violence (which would have resulted in hundreds of deaths a year if we still had the hospitals of 1964) have increased enormously, as has the carrying of lethal weapons by criminals. Meanwhile, in the brave new world preferred by my critics, people are arrested and fined for expressing unfashionable opinions about homosexuality, and often face harassment at work for expressing conservative or Christian opinions, events unthinkable in 1953. By the way, I obviously need to state here, yet again, that I fully support (and am countless times on record as supporting) the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which ensured that homosexual acts between consenting adults were no longer subject to criminal prosecution. I have to say this because my opponents either have not troubled to find out my views, or hope that others will not know my real position. My views on the revolution in the treatment of unmarried mothers are set out fully in ‘The Abolition of Britain’, along with an interesting history of how this change came about. I am happy to discuss this with anyone who is really interested, but the author of the above caricature of recent history may not be terribly interested in the facts. Children deprived of the opportunity of selection into high-quality free state education moulder, rot and despair in bog standard comprehensive schools far worse than any Secondary Modern. The best guarantee of racial harmony is a strong fellow-feeling brought about by full integration of migrants. While disgusting racialist signs in windows have disappeared we have instead whole cities in which large numbers of citizens have no converse with those of different ethnic origins, and often do not even speak the same language. Is this progress? Or the exchange of one evil for another? I don’t like either of them. I want tightly-controlled immigration, an end to multiculturalism and strong efforts to ensure true integration. That is one lesson we can certainly learn from the past 60 years. I also know that there was a serious increase in crime after (and as a result of) the huge social dislocation of the 1939-45 war. That was the reason for the making of the famous film ‘The Blue Lamp’ I know that there was delinquent behaviour before 1939. I don’t believe that the past was a paradise. Here’s what I do think. That there is no reason to assume that our material advances, which are undoubted, came at the necessary and unavoidable cost of a huge moral decay. I cannot see why we could not have come to eat better, to be better housed, to be better-travelled than we were in 1953. Just because the two things happened at the same time, does not mean that one was the cause of the other. But some of our current woes can certainly be traced to the dismantling of moral barriers, against selfishness and extravagance of all kinds. Our period of moral decline has also, as I tried to point out, been a period of economically moral decline, in which we have ceased to make what we use, and have become a debtor nation, unable to supply our own needs through our own work and skills, and living on morally dubious funny money. I think our moral, social and cultural decay has something to do with it. This interesting article by Larry Elliott in Monday’s ‘Guardian’ must be sobering for believers in ‘progress’. Read it here. In the same paper, the fascinating obituary of the brilliant aeronautical engineer, Sir James Hamilton, here contains the following passage, discomfiting to believers in educational ‘progress’: ‘In 1973 Hamilton [who had attended a Scottish Academy (Penicuik Academy, now vanished), the north-of-the-border equivalent of a grammar school] moved to the Cabinet Office as deputy secretary, serving under prime ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson. From 1976 to 1983 he headed the Department of Education and Science as permanent secretary. Both during this period and later in the Margaret Thatcher years, he became seriously concerned at what he termed "extremely mediocre" education standards in science and engineering at some universities and technical colleges.’ A couple of other points. The petulant ire of tobacco smokers against attempts to discourage their smelly and dangerous habit sometimes leads them into hysteria, and so into laughable category errors. Banning smoking from pubs really isn’t the equivalent of Stalin’s 1937 purge, or even remotely comparable with anything the KGB ever did. The freedom to damage your own health, and to bereave and profoundly distress your close family in a long-drawn-out and painful way, is also not comparable to the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly, which are precious national possessions. Another misunderstanding comes from someone who suspects that the centralised NCA may be re effective against cannabis than our decentralised police forces. It is not a lack of manpower or organisation that is behind the British state’s failure to interdict drug possession. It is a deliberate lack of will. There is absolutely no reason to suppose, in any case, that nationalised law enforcement would be any more efficient or effective than non-nationalised law-enforcement. I am wary of comparisons between this country and Asian countries which have ferocious laws against drug smuggling. I know little of these societies or their laws, suspect that drug abuse is widespread in them, and think the death penalty should be reserved for heinous murder and possibly treason, and then only in countries with the presumption of innocence, proper (unanimous verdict) jury trial and a free press. I am also very much against the detention of prisoners, whether convicted or unconvicted, in squalid, ill-supervised and overcrowded conditions. Maybe later in the week I might discuss the claims of ‘Republicanism’ versus ‘Monarchy’ , and of course of that strange form of delusion known as ‘democracy’, under which people repeatedly vote for their own cynical subjugation by organised gangs of habitual fraudsters, and pretend they can choose their government. This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column We are about to get a national police force under direct government control. They like to call it 'Britain’s FBI’. But Britain is not the USA and does not need an FBI. For the sort of crime that concerns most people is small and local – burglary, gangs of menacing youths in the street, shoplifting and vandalism. This does not need some posturing agency, just a few thousand plods on foot patrol with the freedom to use their own initiative. Anyway, aren’t the grandiose, puffed-up MI5, and the equally self-important anti-terror squad of the Metropolitan Police, quite enough to deal with the supposed terror menace? Neither of them saw the last major terrorist episode coming, nor were they any use after it happened, but who knows? Maybe they’ll do better next time. Even so, the Government is already hiring top management for a sinister and worrying body to be known as the National Crime Agency. This is unconstitutional, as Parliament has only just begun to debate it. Interestingly, the Bill to create the agency began life in the House of Lords, a favourite route for laws the Government wants to keep quiet about. The project is arrogant and anti-British. The NCA’s director-general will have the power to order Chief Constables about. He will answer directly to the Home Secretary. It is, in short, the very thing that, since the days of Sir Robert Peel, Parliament has striven to prevent – a national police force under the direct control of the government. In Peel’s time, MPs understood that such a force, if it fell into the wrong hands, would be a terrible engine of oppression. That is why police forces in this country have always been local (by the way, an equally worrying scheme to centralise all Scottish forces under the Justice Minister is well advanced). An earlier failed attempt to do the same thing, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), flopped because it lacked the crucial power over Chief Constables. SOCA will disappear into the NCA, along with some other shadowy bodies. The NCA’s own officers will be civil servants, subject to government orders – quite unlike police officers who take an oath to uphold the law and can refuse what they believe to be unlawful instructions. This is how Big Brother states are born. You are watching it happen. I hope the Speaker takes the Home Secretary to task for hiring NCA staff without parliamentary authority. And I hope that peers and MPs, as their forebears would have done, chuck out the whole slimy thing. It is not Britain’s FBI. It could be Britain’s KGB. Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria? Have we learned nothing from the failed hopes of Egypt and Libya? Don’t we realise that the ‘activists’ we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias? It is our diplomatic intervention, and that of the USA, that has unleashed sectarian civil war in this complex country. Those who want to stampede you into supporting British interference in Syria know that ‘weapons of mass destruction’ won’t work any more. So they seek to bamboozle you with fake humanitarian concern. Do not be fooled. What is there to celebrate? Get hold of the heartbreaking film of the 1953 Coronation, and try to imagine what the next one will look like. The ceremony itself is so Christian (and Protestant at that) and so British, that if it happened these days it would immediately be subject to 10,000 complaints to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. In 1953, criminals were afraid of the police, school pupils were under the thumb of teachers, couples stayed married till they died, we made the most of the things we used, hardly anyone lived off the State, our Parliament and courts made and maintained our laws, poor people were thin rather than fat, and the strongest drug around was aspirin. What is more, we loved our country and respected its traditions, laws and institutions. Every educated person would have known the words that open the Coronation film, John of Gaunt’s dying speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II which ends ‘. . . this earth, this realm, this England’. Of course it’s not the Queen’s fault that it has all gone wrong in her long reign, though I tend to think that she has been more multicultural and politically correct than she needed to. And there would have been something wonderful about her refusing (say) to give Royal assent to Britain’s membership of the Common Market, which effectively ended 1,000 years of history, and her own role. And listen carefully and you’ll notice that most of the current praise for the Monarchy is fake, and comes from people who hate it in their hearts but recognise that the time is not yet ripe for what they really want. They’ll always say that of course Her Majesty is brilliant but perhaps the question can be re-opened when she is gone. There’s a similar theme in the opinion polls, with much support for the stupid idea of ‘skipping a generation’ to Prince William. This is of course the view of the still seething millions of Diana fanatics, who brought the country close to mob rule when the Princess died. They are not monarchists, just celebrity worshippers. * * * War on Drugs latest: I saw this on Tuesday in a seafront park on the South Coast. A lavishly tattooed mother is supervising her brood in the sunshine. One of them, aged about 11, openly pulls from his pocket a neatly-rolled cannabis spliff, lights it with an experienced flourish, and begins to smoke it. * * * It is clear that the Leveson Inquiry has already made up its mind that Britain’s press needs to be bound and gagged by regulation. What an odd country in which a free press is considered a danger, and politicians are not.
Pop goes the Monarchy: The Queen listened to Paul McCartney - and I heard the end of the Royal Family
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Pop goes the Monarchy: The Queen listened to Paul McCartney - and I heard the end of the Royal Family
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06 June 2012 2:18 PM
What is so Good about Democracy? What’s wrong with ‘Libertarianism’? And who has the right to review what?
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04 June 2012 3:21 PM
Loss and Gain, Past and Present, and who talked of a Golden Age?
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02 June 2012 10:01 PM
Their dream is a 'British FBI' - the reality may be our own KGB
Fake tears for Syria
Days when we were happy and glorious
Sunday, 10 June 2012
Speaking as a convinced and unshakeable monarchist, I'm really glad the Jubilee is over. It was awful.
The worst moment of all was the Buckingham Palace concert, where the poor Queen pledged allegiance to the vile new culture of talentless celebrity. Any institution that has to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney to get down with the kids has plainly lost the will to live.
It is a measure of how bad things have got that Her Majesty has to pretend to like the cacophonous, semi-literate, musically trite rubbish that seems to have invaded almost every space in this country. I bet she loathes it, really.
The Queen had to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney as part of the Jubilee concert
The Queen had to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney as part of the Jubilee concert
Actually, though it is almost dangerous to say so, there are still quite a few people who actively dislike pop music, not just because of its ugly intrusiveness but also because of the sort of people who make it, and because of the message it ceaselessly spreads through millions of loudspeakers and millions of headphones clamped to millions of heads.
Its songs are the hymns and anthems of the modern religion of The Self. Self-pity. Self-indulgence. Drugs. Loveless sex. They are the exact opposite of the Queen's pledge, made on her 21st birthday in 1947, that 'My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service'.
I really do wonder how all the complacent commentators, who have praised the Monarch for trying to live up to this pledge, can square this with their equally gushing praise for the concert.
The Britain celebrated last week was one which laughs at ideas such as duty and service, and which has jeered at the Queen for most of her reign precisely because she stands for these things – which it regards as stuffy and outmoded.
Only by treating her as a harmless, meaningless old granny, to be simultaneously indulged and ignored, can the Beatles generation bring themselves to clap along to a funky electric version of God Save The Queen. It's them she needs to be saved from.
As for the strange sopping procession of boats down the Thames, I have yet to work out what it was supposed to mean. The first message of it, to me, was to remind me that the Useless Tories and New Labour's closet republicans had combined, in the usual mixture of spite on one side and feebleness on the other, to get rid of the Royal Yacht.
The second was that we no longer have a Navy, so a Fleet Review at Spithead would have been an embarrassing display of national decline.
Twenty-odd years hence, give or take a decade, when Buckingham Palace is a museum and the Windsors are pensioned exiles, some people will say: 'Who would have thought it, amid all that enthusiasm in 2012, that the British Monarchy had so little time left to run?'
Well, I would.
The truth seeps out of Syria
I have been contacted by a group of Western women who live in Syria and who believe that most of what the world is being told about that country is false.
As far as I can discover, they are not stooges of what they agree to be a rather nasty government in Damascus, but exactly what they say they are: normal human beings caught up in a political tornado. For obvious reasons, I have promised to protect their identities.
I urge you to read what follows, because it is important, because our emotional interventions in other countries never do any good, and because it is vital that people resist attempts to drag us into Syria, too, by feeding us one-sided atrocity propaganda.
This sort of propaganda has a price. I hope you have noticed the continuing tally of deaths of selfless British soldiers in Afghanistan, in a cause long ago abandoned.
And I hope you have also noticed that Libya, 'rescued' by us a few months ago, is now a failed state whose main international airport was recently taken over by gangsters, and where unjustly arrested prisoners are starved and tortured in secret dungeons.
One of my informants from Syria writes of the 'activists' we hear so much about: 'These protesters are not peaceful, flower-carrying people wanting freedom. No, they are weapon-toting killers who snipe, who ambush, who fire upon the army with the sole purpose of inciting riot and mayhem.'
She blames Salafis, ultra-puritan Muslims influenced by Saudi teachings, who loathe and threaten Syria's minorities of Alawites and Christians. She says many of the 'activists' are foreigners, a view shared by all my informants. Many of the 'activists' are armed.
Armed intervention is in fact well under way, uncondemned by the UN, which readily attacks the Syrian government for defending itself. Another writes: 'I have seen reports of opposition rallies which showed pictures of pro-government rallies, and reports purporting to be from the north Syrian countryside, where it has been an incredibly wet year, which appear to have been taken in some desert. The news being accepted as truth by BBC World News is so biased these days that I no longer believe what they say about anything any more, after more than 60 years of crediting them with the truth.'
She says she has spoken to a man who took part in a march at Hama last summer. He 'was worried for his safety, but was given a red rose to carry and assured the whole thing would be calm and orderly, and seeing many other men from the mosque joining in with their small sons, he agreed. They walked for a very few minutes, the unarmed police watching them from the wayside, then a man next to him pulled out a gun and shot the nearest policeman dead.'
A riot followed, reported by foreign TV stations as a police attack on peaceful marchers.
I expect to have more to say on this in weeks to come.
The Liberal Democrat Vince Cable is being called a 'traitor' to the Coalition because he has been having phone conversations with the Labour leader, Ed Miliband. Well, I'm not sure you can 'betray' a grubby, unprincipled, power-seeking pact such as the Coalition.
But if a Lib Dem talking to Labour is bad, how much worse is Mr Slippery's regular contact with Anthony Blair, including a visit to Chequers?
The truth is that all the parties are now really one anti-British politically correct monster, and the only thing that voters can influence (if that) is the arrangement of their faces in the group photographs.
I repeat my prediction here that the Coalition will break up next year, that Nicholas Clegg will go off to be a Euro-Commissioner, while Vince takes over the leadership of his party. The Tories will then run a minority government, pretending to be 'tough' but not getting any of their Bills through. Then, after the 2015 Election, Vince will go into Coalition with Ed.
Oh, and the EU referendum? If it happens, it will be rigged. If there's still a majority for leaving, it will be ignored.
Speaking as a convinced and unshakeable monarchist, I'm really glad the Jubilee is over. It was awful.
The worst moment of all was the Buckingham Palace concert, where the poor Queen pledged allegiance to the vile new culture of talentless celebrity. Any institution that has to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney to get down with the kids has plainly lost the will to live.
It is a measure of how bad things have got that Her Majesty has to pretend to like the cacophonous, semi-literate, musically trite rubbish that seems to have invaded almost every space in this country. I bet she loathes it, really.
The Queen had to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney as part of the Jubilee concert
The Queen had to suck up to Grace Jones and Paul McCartney as part of the Jubilee concert
Actually, though it is almost dangerous to say so, there are still quite a few people who actively dislike pop music, not just because of its ugly intrusiveness but also because of the sort of people who make it, and because of the message it ceaselessly spreads through millions of loudspeakers and millions of headphones clamped to millions of heads.
Its songs are the hymns and anthems of the modern religion of The Self. Self-pity. Self-indulgence. Drugs. Loveless sex. They are the exact opposite of the Queen's pledge, made on her 21st birthday in 1947, that 'My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service'.
I really do wonder how all the complacent commentators, who have praised the Monarch for trying to live up to this pledge, can square this with their equally gushing praise for the concert.
The Britain celebrated last week was one which laughs at ideas such as duty and service, and which has jeered at the Queen for most of her reign precisely because she stands for these things – which it regards as stuffy and outmoded.
Only by treating her as a harmless, meaningless old granny, to be simultaneously indulged and ignored, can the Beatles generation bring themselves to clap along to a funky electric version of God Save The Queen. It's them she needs to be saved from.
As for the strange sopping procession of boats down the Thames, I have yet to work out what it was supposed to mean. The first message of it, to me, was to remind me that the Useless Tories and New Labour's closet republicans had combined, in the usual mixture of spite on one side and feebleness on the other, to get rid of the Royal Yacht.
The second was that we no longer have a Navy, so a Fleet Review at Spithead would have been an embarrassing display of national decline.
Twenty-odd years hence, give or take a decade, when Buckingham Palace is a museum and the Windsors are pensioned exiles, some people will say: 'Who would have thought it, amid all that enthusiasm in 2012, that the British Monarchy had so little time left to run?'
Well, I would.
The truth seeps out of Syria
I have been contacted by a group of Western women who live in Syria and who believe that most of what the world is being told about that country is false.
As far as I can discover, they are not stooges of what they agree to be a rather nasty government in Damascus, but exactly what they say they are: normal human beings caught up in a political tornado. For obvious reasons, I have promised to protect their identities.
I urge you to read what follows, because it is important, because our emotional interventions in other countries never do any good, and because it is vital that people resist attempts to drag us into Syria, too, by feeding us one-sided atrocity propaganda.
This sort of propaganda has a price. I hope you have noticed the continuing tally of deaths of selfless British soldiers in Afghanistan, in a cause long ago abandoned.
And I hope you have also noticed that Libya, 'rescued' by us a few months ago, is now a failed state whose main international airport was recently taken over by gangsters, and where unjustly arrested prisoners are starved and tortured in secret dungeons.
One of my informants from Syria writes of the 'activists' we hear so much about: 'These protesters are not peaceful, flower-carrying people wanting freedom. No, they are weapon-toting killers who snipe, who ambush, who fire upon the army with the sole purpose of inciting riot and mayhem.'
She blames Salafis, ultra-puritan Muslims influenced by Saudi teachings, who loathe and threaten Syria's minorities of Alawites and Christians. She says many of the 'activists' are foreigners, a view shared by all my informants. Many of the 'activists' are armed.
Armed intervention is in fact well under way, uncondemned by the UN, which readily attacks the Syrian government for defending itself. Another writes: 'I have seen reports of opposition rallies which showed pictures of pro-government rallies, and reports purporting to be from the north Syrian countryside, where it has been an incredibly wet year, which appear to have been taken in some desert. The news being accepted as truth by BBC World News is so biased these days that I no longer believe what they say about anything any more, after more than 60 years of crediting them with the truth.'
She says she has spoken to a man who took part in a march at Hama last summer. He 'was worried for his safety, but was given a red rose to carry and assured the whole thing would be calm and orderly, and seeing many other men from the mosque joining in with their small sons, he agreed. They walked for a very few minutes, the unarmed police watching them from the wayside, then a man next to him pulled out a gun and shot the nearest policeman dead.'
A riot followed, reported by foreign TV stations as a police attack on peaceful marchers.
I expect to have more to say on this in weeks to come.
The Liberal Democrat Vince Cable is being called a 'traitor' to the Coalition because he has been having phone conversations with the Labour leader, Ed Miliband. Well, I'm not sure you can 'betray' a grubby, unprincipled, power-seeking pact such as the Coalition.
But if a Lib Dem talking to Labour is bad, how much worse is Mr Slippery's regular contact with Anthony Blair, including a visit to Chequers?
The truth is that all the parties are now really one anti-British politically correct monster, and the only thing that voters can influence (if that) is the arrangement of their faces in the group photographs.
I repeat my prediction here that the Coalition will break up next year, that Nicholas Clegg will go off to be a Euro-Commissioner, while Vince takes over the leadership of his party. The Tories will then run a minority government, pretending to be 'tough' but not getting any of their Bills through. Then, after the 2015 Election, Vince will go into Coalition with Ed.
Oh, and the EU referendum? If it happens, it will be rigged. If there's still a majority for leaving, it will be ignored.
From time to time the British media completely miss a story of huge significance. This is one of those times.
Sixty glorious years, my foot. I feel for the poor Queen, who deserves nothing so much as to put her feet up for a bit, having to go through all this performance.
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