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. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down Those interested in the unending drug debate may wish to go here to watch a recent debate organised by the IEA, in which I clashed with Christopher Snowdon and other ‘libertarians’ about the drug laws. One major issue of contention was the incessant pretence by drug decriminalisers that the British 1971 Misuse of drugs Act bears any resemblance whatsoever to US alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.
Their dream is a 'British FBI' - the reality may be our own KGB
Fake tears for Syria
Days when we were happy and glorious
They Tuck you Up, Your Mum and Dad
30 May 2012 8:25 PM
Confronting the ‘Prohibition’ Myth
26 May 2012 9:19 PM
Why don't you want our children to have as good an education as you, Nick?
Sunday, 3 June 2012
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.
I am lucky enough to have got hold of a copy of the new Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, a majestic volume edited by Archie Burnett, and now published on both sides of the Atlantic (Faber and Faber in Britain , Farrar Strauss and Giroux in the USA). It’s a huge undertaking, a tombstone of a book (the right word, when thinking about the lugubrious Larkin, the poet of cemeteries, tombs and impending death. But we’ll come to that) .But it’s a real delight for those who want to know the history and backgrounds of the poems.
My guess is that Larkin will survive this age, and be remembered and read for a very long time to come.
I hope very much that his current fame gives way to a deeper understanding. Too many people have only heard of him because of the crude and (even to me ) excessively pessimistic opening line of ‘This Be The Verse’ – the Adrian Mitchell parody ‘They tuck you up, your Mum and Dad’ is very funny and in some ways rather better than the original, which is so relentlessly, hopelessly miserable that it richly deserves to be mocked. And then there’s the other one about sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley and the Beatles.
These are not his best work, or anything like it. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is more like it, evoking so many things at once - not least, for me the exact feeling of a long slow train journey on a sunny afternoon, in the days when Edwardian England was still just visible amidst the tacky modernity of Macmillan’s Britain, of proper compartments with sliding doors and sagging, dusty seats you could sink into, windows you could open, and pictures of obscure holiday resorts on the walls, As Larkin wrote ‘now and then a smell of grass displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth’ .
A few carriages down, they were no doubt serving brown Windsor soup in a somnolent dining car. I used to enjoy the toasted teacakes and jam in the old dining car, on the way down from York, as i dmired the many gargantuan power stations that stand about the line there. But, as usual, I digress.
And then there’s the evocation of the enormous, high wide skies of the flat lands from Hull down to Grantham on the old North-Eastern line , ‘the river’s level drifting breadth began, where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’ …’all afternoon, through the tall heat that slept for miles inland, a slow and stopping curve southwards we kept’. Who else would couple ‘tall’ and ‘heat’, and make it make sense? I see, as I read the phrase, the great clouds high above the black earth fields.
And then something important starts to happen. It happens all the more convincingly, all the more memorably, because you are alone in that musty old compartment , in the sealed world of the train as it trundles through the stifling day.
If you haven’t read it, find it, and read it like a story and I think you will find it hard ever to forget it again, or to resist the powerful pictures which it forms in the mind as you do so. I never come into London on the King’s Cross line without one line or other of it coming to life in my mind.
I have said elsewhere that I think Larkin is, without meaning to be, and indeed while meaning not to be, a great religious poet.
His grasp of the importance and power of death, and his willingness to think about death even as he recoils from it in loathing and horror, make him a thousand times more interesting and illuminating than his contemporaries. ’Ambulances’ is one of the most profound meditations on death amidst life that I have ever read, and recalls the shocking words in the Church of England burial service ‘In the midst of life we are in death’.
Death is largely unmentionable in our time, even by poets and often even in Church - where funerals are often spoiled by clergymen intoning that rubbish about how the deceased is ‘only in the next room’ . Pah. A funny sort of next room, with no way through to it from this one, just a slammed, silent door with no handle or lock.
How very much I prefer Larkin’s frank, rather panicky dismay, and the grisly but utterly honest view of our mediaeval forerunners. In the superb parish church at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, with its lovely courtyard of almshouses and its ancient school, still functioning as the village primary, is the grisly carving of Alice de la Pole, once Duchess of Suffolk. Beneath a grand effigy of her as she was in life, in a shadowy chamber at which the visitor must peer from a kneeling or squatting position to see the full effect, is a very different sculpture – the duchess as she will be some time after death, a rotting, skeletal cadaver. I visited this numinous, beautiful place again the other day to check my recollection, and because it is one of the most astonishing and (happily untouristed) sights of southern England.
There are several of these cadavers and other reminders of death in English churches, some more harrowing than others. There's an extraordinarily light-hearted one in Norwich cathedral, in which, beneath a rather cheery skeleton, the inscription reads, roughly :'As Ye Are now, so once was I. As I am now, so shall Ye be'.
The cadavers were done, usually, in the lifetimes of their subjects, who would have confronted (often very skilfully done) images of themselves as corpses, a strange experience.. I strongly suspect that Larkin must have come across them on more than one of his many church visiting expeditions.
He says at one point ( in ‘Aubade’ , another unforgettable reflection on death) that religion is ‘a vast moth-eaten musical brocade, created to pretend we never die’ .
I love the idea of a vast, moth-eaten musical brocade, all faded golds, reds and blues, frayed at the edges and thin enough to let bright sunlight pass through it. And I can easily picture just such a thing hung up in the side-aisle of a little-visited, second-rank cathedral or other great church somewhere in provincial England – perhaps Beverley Minster, close to Larkin’s unbeloved Hull. And it would be hard to come up with a more succinct description of the Church of England as it was before the modernisers got to work. Once again, like all really good poetry, it lodges and settles in the memory without the slightest difficulty.
But what if the brocade, rather than being a pretence and a curtain in front of emptiness, was telling the truth? What if the brocade was created to proclaim, rather than pretend, that we never die – and that we have come to prefer to believe that death is the end because we do not love the implications of the other idea?
What if the idea that what will survive of us is love, as Larkin suggests in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ is not an almost-instinct, almost true, but the exact truth? What if the trees are coming into leaf, not ‘like something almost being said’ but like something truly being said? Did Larkin ever wonder? I bet he did.
In a horrible, ignorant speech last week, the Deputy Prime Minister revealed himself as a limited, conformist slave to conventional wisdom. He is also a wretched, skulking hypocrite, as I shall explain later. He ought to know better.
Thinking people of Left and Right have at last begun to see that comprehensive state schools have failed the country, and, above all, have failed the children of the poor.
Even veteran radical commentators such as Nick Cohen and Mary Ann Sieghart see the sense in selection by ability.
But Mr Clegg is demanding that our great universities should be ruined by the same egalitarian dogma that has wrecked secondary schooling.
Put simply, he wants the best colleges to lower their entry requirements. This will, of course, increase the number of state school pupils who get in. And it will reduce the numbers from private schools.
It is easy to sympathise with this, if you forget that it will also mean that university standards will fall, irrecoverably. It should not be possible to buy privilege in education. It is obvious that ability and merit alone should be our guide.
But that is exactly where we were heading in this country until the Left-liberal levellers got to work. Mr Clegg thinks that ‘little has changed’ in the past 50 years. Oh yes it has. It has got much worse, thanks to people like him.
In 1965, just before most grammar schools and Scottish academies were abolished, 57 per cent of places at Oxford University were taken by pupils from state grammar schools or direct grant schools (independent schools that gave large numbers of free places on merit, a fine system done away with in 1975 in another wave of vindictive Leftist spite).
What is more important, the number of state school entrants was rising rapidly, and had done ever since 1945, when the grammar schools were opened to all who could qualify.
No special concessions were made in those days. The grammar school boys and girls were there by absolute right. These brilliant people still hold high positions in every profession and activity.
But after 1965, the flow dried up, and instead of having a proper, qualified elite, we had to make do with privileged ninnies such as Mr Clegg instead.
Either they had gone to hugely expensive private schools, as he did, or they arrived at the top via the rich, well-connected socialist’s route to privilege, a semi-secret network of excellent state schools, some religious, some with tiny catchment areas where most people cannot afford to live, some with other elaborate arrangements to keep out the masses.
These schools – the Roman Catholic London Oratory that atheist Mr Clegg has visited as a prospective parent is an example – are officially comprehensive. But, in fact, they are comprehensive in the same way that 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terrace house.
What does Mr Clegg plan to do for his children? Does he plan to toss them into a bog-standard comp, where they will have to struggle to learn from demoralised supply teachers amid the shouting, the mobile phone calls and the fights?
Will he then feel his parental duty has been done if, despite the fact that they know very little, they are given privileged access to Oxbridge, but are unable to benefit from its rigour? I doubt it.
He won’t talk about it. He thinks it’s none of our business. Well, he is wrong. He has made it our business by supporting and defending a system that slams the gates of good schools in the faces of all those who are not rich.
Don’t work, Dave, just rest and play
A word of praise for our Prime Minister. The fact that he likes to relax and to spend time with his wife and children is the best thing about him.
I would far rather have a Premier who enjoys his leisure than one who lives his life in meetings, growing pale and gaunt from never seeing the sun.
True, I am much too crusty to see any point in Fruit Ninja. Give me a decent book any day, or an old film.
But a man who lingers over an extra glass of wine with his Sunday lunch is far less dangerous than a glowering sobersides who ignores his children while he stares at spreadsheets.
And remember, like all politicians, he can only do damage while he is working.
Tories should be wary about making it easier to sack people. Since they don’t do the job they claim to do, and haven’t for years, voters might get it into their heads that it is time to sack the Tory Party and replace it with something better.
I can't really see why we fuss so much about convicted prisoners being given the vote. We already elect the sort of governments that burglars and muggers dream of.
Why would the inhabitants of Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways not vote for Kenneth Clarke, Secretary of State for Injustice?
He provides them with prisons full of legal and illegal drugs.
He gives them in-cell TV sets and snooker tables, multiple menus and relaxed regimes. The only thing they might object to is that he makes it so difficult for them to get in (15 offences necessary to qualify, in most cases) and insists on cutting all sentences by at least half.
I know who’ll get the convicts’ vote.
We are promised that five calls to the police about one problem will now guarantee that they take action. I don’t want to sound too demanding, but shouldn’t one call be enough?
During the Cold War, I did all I could to oppose those who wanted to get rid of our nuclear weapons. Only the USSR would have benefited. Now I’m baffled to find many old Left-wingers happy to spend billions on modernising the Trident system, which has no conceivable point now that the Soviet Union is dead and gone for ever.
The main threat to this country’s independence is the growing need to import energy. As Vladimir Putin has proved, natural gas is a weapon that can actually be used.
Windmills will not save us. Scrap Trident and spend the money on dozens of nuclear power stations. Soon.
Bicycling through an idyllic village in Cameron country on a perfect May day, I was musing on moving there when I saw coming towards me a gross figure in jeans, T-shirt and one of those stiff-brimmed baseball caps that invariably betoken outstanding stupidity and aggression.
A cigarette was screwed into the middle of his face. He was being towed along by a pair of slobbering weapon dogs, slightly better looking than he was. There is no escape from our nation’s moral and cultural decay. It is everywhere.
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