18 August 2012 11:05 PM
Even Stalin didn’t dare kill off Sundays – but the Tories will
Those who thought Margaret Thatcher was a conservative should have realised she wasn’t when she wrecked the British Sunday.
Is there anyone who really needs supermarkets and other big stores to be open on Sunday? I don’t remember starving back in the old days when such shops were closed.
As for it being vital to our economy, Germany – whose economy is vastly healthier than ours – has the strictest Sunday closing laws in the world.
Doesn’t every home need a still, untroubled day of rest, when everyone can relax at the same time?
Even Joseph Stalin, at the height of his Marxist rage against private life, failed to abolish the Sabbath. It took Britain’s Tories to succeed where he failed.
And now, after an ‘experiment’ in longer Sunday hours during the Olympics (and what have the Olympics to do with Sunday shopping in the first place?), Downing Street is talking about extending it.
This will mean more pressure on shop workers to work on Sunday, and more small shops put out of business by the incessant greed and ruthlessness of the supermarkets.
The Tory Party rightly points out that Labour is in the pocket of the unions. But both major parties are the puppets of the hypermarket giants.
And here I must put in a good word for Vince Cable, who is (as so often) being smeared and blackguarded by the whispers of Westminster’s professional backstairs-crawlers and their media receptacles.
Mr Cable is standing out against making longer opening hours permanent.
In doing so, he is quite properly being consistent with what he said to Parliament on April 30: ‘There is the suspicion, which we have already had aired, that the Bill is a Trojan horse preparing the way for a permanent relaxation of the rules. It is not.’
But what about his Tory colleague Mark Prisk, who told the Commons with equal clarity: ‘We have no intention of making the measure permanent’?
There’s a lot of tripe talked about how ripping up the rules that make life bearable in this country – from Sunday trading to the green belt – will save our failing economy.
It won’t. It will just turn a once pleasant landscape into a hooting, yelling version of Istanbul, a paradise for greed, and nothing to see for miles and miles but traffic jams, concrete and plastic.
Happiness is The Dandy and Fry's chocolate
The world would be poorer without comic strips. I learned to read with an ancient Tiger Tim annual, found in an attic.
I hungered each week for the Beano and the Dandy and can remember Desperate Dan when he was in black and white – though my favourite strip, for some reason, was one called Jonah, about a sailor whose ships invariably sank with a loud ‘Bloop!’
One of my chief pleasures is re-reading volumes of Calvin And Hobbes, the funniest and cleverest strip cartoon ever drawn.
So to hear that Desperate Dan is doomed is to be tormented with the half-remembered tastes, smells and sounds of the day before yesterday, like George Orwell’s lyrical description of Edwardian boyhood in Coming Up For Air.
I am once again digging (unsuccessfully) for gold on Dartmoor, eating Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, waving at steam trains, or riding my bike helmetless down car-free country roads.
If it were now, I’d be hunched in front of a screen slurping at a bucket of sugared water. I’m often falsely accused of nostalgia, but this time I plead guilty.
Team GB just reveals how far we've declined
Puzzled by hearing about ‘Team GB’ during the Olympics, I sought to find out exactly why the entire United Kingdom wasn’t represented at the Games.
It turns out to be a very complex subject. ‘Team GB’ as a name dates back to 1999, though the problem is much older.
The International Olympic Committee, that politically correct body, doesn’t seem to recognise the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Could that be why the Olympic Torch veered down to Dublin at one point? I’m not sure.
It’s quite well-known that athletes from Northern Ireland can compete in the Irish or British teams, as they wish. The rule was made in 1952 after two Northern-born swimmers were barred from the Irish team in 1948 amid some bitterness.
The gradual departure of Northern Irish athletes from the British team is a sensitive measure of Britain’s diminishing power. The process is not over.
I wonder how long it will be before Belfast athletes get into trouble for joining Team GB?
Why did the BBC choose Russell Brand, the alleged comedian (and tormentor of Andrew Sachs), to make a documentary about drugs?
Apparently, admitting to having used a lot of illegal drugs makes you an expert.
When I challenged Mr Brand’s qualifications on live TV, he screeched at me a bit, then offered to kiss me. I declined.
A viewer complained about the way I was treated on this programme, and was told ‘… as impartiality is the cornerstone of our entire programme-making process there is certainly no bias against Peter Hitchens’.
I am going to have this sentence stuffed and mounted, so I can keep it in a glass case.
Bring back BR, not Worst Late Western
I never thought I would feel sorry for Richard Branson. But it is obviously wrong and stupid to deprive him of the West Coast rail franchise, and give it to Worst Late Western.
Mr Branson may be pretty awful, but I wouldn’t let Worst Late Western operate a supermarket trolley.
They are experts in greedy fare increases and padded timetables that allow them to run trains slower than they were 20 years ago, yet claim to be punctual. They inflict endless futile announcements on passengers who want peace, but resort to total silence when their elderly trains are mysteriously becalmed in the dark.
But that’s railway privatisation for you, which vies with Gordon Brown’s sale of our gold reserves as the stupidest government policy of modern times.
Some people claim British Rail was worse. But BR didn’t have anything like the money that was given to the private train operators (who siphoned it all out into their own pockets) and also to Failcrack, the people who shamefully neglected what had until then been some of the best maintained lines in the world.
Now the subsidies are being squeezed, and so it is the passengers who suffer.
The Transport Department hates railways and loves roads and airlines, which is why roads are still nationalised (who did you think owned them?), and air travel is still hugely subsidised, thanks to the exemption of aviation fuel from duty and VAT.
I love trains and think they are a great British invention and vital to civilisation. But even if you don’t agree with me, you’d miss them if they weren’t there because of all the goods and cars that would end up on the roads instead.
Any party that promises to bring back BR will get my vote.
17 August 2012 10:46 AM
A Quick Thought on Self-Defence, and one or two other matters
Mr Bob Aldridge writes to ask: ’If self defence is the sole justification for war, does that mean that both Britain and the USA should have stayed out of the First and Second World Wars? Should the USA not have helped Britain over the Falklands? Where does self defence begin?'
As I think I have said before, I remain quite baffled by Britain’s 1914 declaration of war on Germany, based on a very generous interpretation of our treaty obligations to Belgium, and not in our national interests. It had been clear since 1870 that Germany was now the dominant power in central Europe, for solid reasons of population, economic strength, military skill and general inventiveness and energy. British foreign policy, based upon maintaining our global position as a trading empire and naval superpower, should have been aimed at taking advantage of this inevitable development, not trying to frustrate it.
And, as I have also said many times, our decision to declare war in 1939, for a cause we didn’t care about, for a goal we could not actually attain and had no intention of gaining, on the basis of a promise we had made when we had no intention of keeping it and no forces with which to keep it, with an army we didn’t have, at a time which didn’t suit us and which we allowed to be chosen by others, must rank as one of the most stupid diplomatic decisions ever taken by a major nation.
Both wars left us socially, morally and economically devastated, and neither achieved their objective. The myth created to justify the 1914 war retrospectively - the ‘War to end War’ - has long been exploded, not least by the rather blatant fact that it was no such thing. The myth to justify the 1939 war - that it was a war of principle fought for freedom and to save the Jews from Nazi murder - remains as yet unexploded, though the mere facts that its main European effect to was hugely to expand the murderous tyranny of the USSR, and that it didn’t directly save, or even try to save, a single Jew from Nazi murder, directly contradict these claims. Jews were of course saved by the eventual collapse and defeat of the Hitler state. But the Allies discounted courageously gathered reports of what was going on in the death camps, and declined to bomb the railways leading to them.
The entry of the United States into the 1914 war seems to have been manipulated by propaganda suggesting a German threat to the USA, providing at least a pretext of self-defence, and there was also the complex issue of German submarine warfare and its effect on American citizens and shipping. Personally I think Britain would have been far better off if we’d listened to Lord Lansdowne and signed a compromise peace, thus avoiding the Bolshevik revolution, the great German inflation, the Washington Naval Treaty and many other reverses and disasters. In 1941, Germany declared war on the USA, which had sensibly waited before entering the European war.
I shall be accused of all kinds of horrors for saying this. My motivation is, however, quite simple and unadorned – the interests of my own country and its people.
Mr Henry Noel asks, similarly ‘I hope that by "self defence" one does not mean waiting for the aggressor's knife to be in one's gut before responding.'
Well, my policy remains the sensible one of maintaining strong and effective armed forces, on the assumption that you never know from which direction danger may come. As Switzerland has shown more than once, this is quite effective.
I am not quite sure what the Falklands are doing in this question. Didn't Argentina invade the islands? And sending material help to an ally who's been attacked seems to me to be covered by 'self-defence'.
A reader who complained to the BBC about the handling of my ‘debate’ with Russell Brand has received a reply which contains the following immortal words ‘As impartiality is the cornerstone of our entire programme making process there is certainly no bias against Peter Hitchens’
I am having this sentence stuffed and mounted in a glass case.
Sailing The Cruel Sea Again, in a Left-Wing Way
A few months ago I caught the beginning of a BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of ‘the Cruel Sea’, Nicholas Monsarrat’s masterpiece about the battle of the Atlantic. It had a strange agitprop tone to it that I didn’t quite like. Having seen the excellent film version, starring Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden, more times than I care to remember, and having read the book twice, I searched my shelves for my dog-eared copy, but failed to find it. Last week, searching for something else entirely, I tracked it down.
By that time, alas, the BBC had removed the recording of the serialisation from their website, so I can’t transcribe the oddly leftist voiceover introduction which I recall from March. But I can provide you with this quotation from the Radio 4 website
‘But this isn't just a war story. In a surprisingly subtle way, The Cruel Sea also chronicles the often abrasive process by which classes, previously unknown to each other, were thrown together onboard ship and had to learn to rub along - and how the earned respect, in the long term, led to the future Welfare State and the social equity and cooperation of the 50's and 60's.’
To which I can only reply ‘Oh, yeah?’ And ‘so subtle that it isn’t there’. This is the second beloved book to which something of the sort has been done – a recent TV adaptation of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ turned the rock-ribbed conservative Chips into a sort of Guardian reader before his time. I have one piece of advice to the culprits of such adaptations. Find your own books. Leave ours alone. But of course the Cultural Revolution was bound to start changing the past once it had won.
Monsarrat’s book, at least the first three-quarters of it up to the sinking of HMS Compass Rose, the third major character in the story, is not as described by the BBC. The last quarter isn’t, either, being a rather messy series of half-developed plotlines including an ambiguous interlude in the USA and a love affair which I have often thought the publishers urged Monsarrat to insert, and which in the end he ruthlessly kills off, and I mean kills off. The only real love in the book is the entirely non-sexual comradeship between Ericson, the Captain, and Lockhart, his First Lieutenant, forged in combat and peril.
Monsarrat was a very clever man, but I don’t think he cared much about politics at that stage in his life. Later on, he seemed pretty conservative to me. I doubt if his two novels about Africa could even be published now (I read them, in slightly foxed ancient hardbacks, found in a back bedroom of a rented house in Deep France many years ago. I’d never seen them in an English bookshop , library or bookshelf, and I haven’t seen them since, either. Put it like this. They are not keen endorsements of post-colonial African rule).
The only overt politics I could ever find in ‘the Cruel Sea’ were a few vague unformed thoughts about how Britain’s politicians hadn’t prepared for a war that was obviously coming; the contrast between the underpaid sailors, fighting at all hours against submarines and filthy weather, and the dockyard workers on much higher wages, stopping work the moment the whistle blew and playing cards when they should have been working; and some sour reflections on American culture, America’s attitude to the war and America’s capacity to take over as the world’s leading power (mingled with some very friendly thoughts on the generosity of individual Americans) .
The core of the book is simply an unsparing account of war in a disciplined service, and its effects on men. It concentrates on the officers, because Monsarrat was an officer. But it does not by any means ignore the Navy’s equivalent of NCOs (Petty Officers) or other ranks (Able Seamen). There is plenty about Chief Engine Room Artificer Watts, and petty Tallow, not to mention (see below) poor Able Seaman Gregg. We had in our house, during my childhood, a ‘Cadet Edition’ of the book (my brother always used to remark meaningfully that he had never heard of any other book that had a ‘cadet edition’, and I think he was right, though it seems quite reasonable to me to have done this, as long as the original stayed on sale), fit for perusal by schoolboys in the late fifties and early sixties. It wasn’t that different from the film. But my, it is different from the full version.
Several scenes weren’t fit for ‘cadets’. Here are some : the full, squalid extent of the betrayal of Sub-Lieutenant Morell by his ruthless actress wife (who turns out to be more or less a prostitute, but only with the officer class, as revealed in a shocking scene when Ericson visits her to console her on her husband’s death in action); the horrible adultery (portrayed here perhaps more savagely and graphically than I have ever seen, and quite lacking in the standard novelist’s sympathy for the poor trapped woman yearning to breathe free) which causes Able Seaman Gregg to go absent without leave. The scene in which he finds his wife in the midst of her betrayal, in which no details are omitted, and the later moments when he tries to win her back, are almost too painful and disgusting to read. The description of the desolation caused by the German bombing of Liverpool is realistically bleak. The panic fear and shame of the young officer who develops gonorrhoea is drawn from the life.
But the most harrowing is the torpedoing of HMS Compass Rose, the howling desperation of the men trapped in the fo’c’sle, who know they will die and can do nothing about it, yet must also wait for death to come in a particularly horrible shape, the ghastly detail of what happens to men who slide down the barnacled side of a foundering ship (their genitals are torn) , and the detailed accounts of several deaths, in at least one case involving a man who has always been good and kind dying in a shameful and terrible fashion, and in another involving a feral selfishness which fails to achieve its aim, seem to me to have been written from true personal accounts. The experience sends the already terrified Sub-Lieutenant Ferraby mad, and, weeks later, reduces even the hardened Lockhart to streams of tears as he attends a Myra Hess concert in the National Gallery.
I expect and hope I shall read it several more times before I die. It conjures into life the world my own father inhabited, which he never wanted to describe to me; and it opens a clear window into a Britain now gone, but which occupied the same streets, fields and skies as the one we now inhabit. And it illustrates with sour clarity that war is unspeakable, and never to be sought or willingly begun. Self-defence remains the only possible justification. But it is not about the Welfare State.
After the Twitter Storm, and Mr Rifkind’s Grand Remonstrance
This is the first chance I’ve had to make some general conversation after the various controversies and insult storms that have kept me busy over the past two weeks, which I had originally meant to be fallow. Two of my controversies have now become formal procedures, and I will let you know when I get the verdicts on them.
But a few more continue. I’ve been tickled by the hatchet-faced attempts by various contributors to defend the police in the ‘arrested for not smiling’ incident. I thought it telling that the story was carried by the two most partisan (and most opposite) daily newspapers in the country. That’s why I linked to both of them, to stop both the ‘typical Daily Mail’ and ‘typical Guardian’ dismissals which I would otherwise have got.
Nobody is actually saying that the victim of this piece of heavy-handed policing was officially charged with ‘not smiling’. ‘Facecrime’ is yet to become part of English law (though ‘Thoughtcrime’ has made it on to the Statute Book with surprising ease, and very little protest).
The phrase ‘arrested for not smiling’ was used by the person involved. Once this has attracted your attention, you can see (if you are in the least dispassionate) that the increased officiousness of the police, excused in all things by the terror bogey (Slow, mechanical voice intones ‘If we can prevent just *one* terrorist incident, then it must surely be worthwhile to tattoo a bar code on the forehead of every British subject, and subject anyone on the street to search and arrest at all times, etc, etc’) , plus the conformist frenzy of the Olympics, combined to produce an inexcusable absurdity. The same sort of people who resorted to utterly desperate and baseless predictions of a boy cyclist’s likely course and speed, to excuse the Haverhill incident, turned out again to excuse the manhandling of an entirely innocent man. What was wrong (in either case) with having a quiet, polite word, on the basis that the police are the servants of the people, not their grim-jawed masters? Well, the police long ago forgot that they were civilians, and started calling us that. They serve the state, not us.
To make a change from the usual online free psychoanalysis, someone (doubtless reaching deep into his own experience of live broadcasting on the BBC) has offered me a few helpful tips on broadcasting and humour. He has even pointed out that I speak more slowly when I am presenting programmes that I make and write myself, than when I am being interviewed on someone else’s programme. (For this change of pace, I supposedly have a director to thank, as I would never have thought of it myself). Well, as they say duh! How many times do I have to point out that it is the post of presenter (granted to me a few times by Channel Four, but not by the BBC) that is crucial in broadcasting.
The presenter chooses, subject, angle of approach, interviewee, timings, last word, you name it. The interviewee doesn’t choose the subject, never knows when he will be interrupted, faded down or cut off, and can only get the last word by luck or (sometimes, and I’m not saying how) subterfuge. The same is true of the member of a panel on such programmes as ‘Question Time’, or ‘Newsnight’.
I might add that I actually don’ t particularly want to be loved by complete strangers. If my fate is to be loathed by people who think that Russell Brand is an expert on drugs because he’s taken lots of them, it is a fate I can endure. And as for the jokes, if you are officially funny, you could read out the KFC price list and the audience would roll about clutching its sides (this already happens to Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson. ‘Boris’ ,not the name his own family use, is really the name of a national comic character). If, however, you are a pompous reactionary bleep with No Sense of Humour, you can tell all the jokes you like, and even sometimes surprise your enemies into laughter, but afterwards you will still have No Sense of Humour.
Then there is the free psychoanalysis. I can get this any day by pointing out to cyclists on footpaths in Kensington Gardens that they have ridden straight over ten inch high lettering which says ‘NO CYCLING’ (in actual capitals). Are they perhaps visually impaired? Can I help them in some way? I always try politeness first, but it is usually a matter of seconds before I am on a metaphorical psychiatric couch, with my motives, previous life and general character being subjected to a searching and uninhibited examination. And all free. On one particularly delicious occasion, my analyst attempted a new type of shock therapy, which involved aiming his fist at me while still riding (don’t try this at home). Not realising that the approaching blow in the face was meant for my own good, I uncooperatively stepped backwards, causing my analyst to crash to the ground amid a satisfying crunch and tinkle of broken bike accessories. When I asked him if he was all right, and if I might help him in any way, he could only emit an odd, snarling noise, and had apparently been robbed of the power of speech. Well, you know what they say about heaping coals of fire.
Something similar has been going on on Twitter, which I enter from time to time by a secret back door, so that I can observe what’s being said about me. Dear me, it is mostly so banal. But I missed this amusing and almost flattering contribution from a lady who (if I have the right person) is Scotland’s answer (if it needs one) to Louise Bagshawe, the chick-lit author and occasional MP . She is called Jenny Colgan. Her website proclaims ‘Life is Sweet with Jenny Colgan’. Not always, it seems. She was due to be on the Radio 2 ‘Jeremy Vine Programme’ on Monday, where we were about to discuss the wild Olympophilia that has the country in its grip. As she prepared for this ordeal, she wrote (if it was indeed her)
‘@Jenny Colgan @jennycolgan
Oh GOD I am on Radio 2 debating the #limpicks at 1.30 with PETER HITCHENS #WAYoutofmydepth #whimperingwithfear #ohgod’
She underestimated herself. In fact the presenter of the programme, Vanessa Feltz, left us both free to make our individual cases with little interruption, and we didn’t really clash much.
What was really odd was that Ms Colgan received the following reply:
‘Simon Mayo @simonmayo
@jennycolgan don't worry Jenny. You give him enough rope and he does your job for you.’
If this is the Simon Mayo who is a BBC radio presenter, should he be taking sides on issues of public controversy, as he appears to be doing here? Of course, if it isn’t that Simon Mayo, it doesn’t matter. But if it is, perhaps it does
Next, to Mr Hugo Rifkind.
Now, Mr Rifkind works for the Times, so I can’t direct you to the article in which he had a go at me on Tuesday. It is behind a pay wall. But I’ll try to give a fair account of it.
Mr Rifkind is one of the young metropolitan smoothies, Cameroon social and economic liberals with a vague allegiance to the Modernised Tories, who have appeared all over the formerly conservative unpopular papers in the past few years, adorning columns of one kind or another. He is also to be heard quite a bit on BBC Radio 4. If I’ve ever met him, I wasn’t aware of it. I believe he is related to the former Conservative cabinet minister of the same surname. In former times, columns in newspapers tended to come either to people who were distinguished in other walks of life, or to journalists who had long careers behind them, were quite gnarled and had knocked about a bit . Now they seem to be more readily available.
Anyway, he told me off for saying (on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today' programme on Tuesday morning) that the opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics were victory parades to mark the triumph of the cultural revolution. Or, as I put it on air :’telling people who were not part of the cultural revolution that they had lost’.
In a future post I’ll analyse his arguments in more detail, such as they are. (Nick Griffin features, of course, as he must in all smears of cultural conservatives). But he said I was ‘precisely wrong’, and then told me that the Boyle event was a ‘reconciliation’ of two sorts of Britishness . Well, my kind wasn’t represented and I’m not reconciled. And the fact that Mr Rifkind is telling me that I am, or ought to be, makes my point rather well.
Smile, can’t you? Or else.
A footnote on the Blair creature. I gave my contribution to the ‘Today’ programme from a remote studio in Oxford, so I didn’t meet the creature when we were both on the same segment on Monday. I would just remind readers that, however relaxed and amused he pretended to be about what I had said on Monday, his minders used to make elaborate efforts to keep me from asking him questions in public .
These included trying to exclude me from the Labour manifesto launch in 1997 (two press officers attempted to close the door in my face, bleating ‘it’s full’ , when it obviously wasn’t. I pushed past them, laughing, in my aggressive, humourless way).
Then he and his minders refused to take questions from me however long I held my hand up. The correspondents from the Azerbaijan Courier and the Limpopo Herald benefited greatly from this. Towards the end of each press conference, anybody, but anybody who had his or her hand up would be called in preference to me. When he was eventually embarrassed into taking a question (about the contrast between his education policy and his choice of school for his eldest son) he refused to take a follow-up question about his first unsatisfactory answer, and ordered me to ’sit down and stop being bad.' (Mr Slippery, taking his role as heir to Blair very seriously, followed a very similar procedure 13 years later).
A few days later, I waited outside a building in Birmingham in which Mr Blair had given a speech, in the hope of questioning him again on his way to his car. A TV crew was nearby, so any encounter would have been recorded. After a long interval of immobility, Anji Hunter was sent outside to promise me an interview with the Labour leader, immediately, if I would come inside. Like a fool, I trusted this promise and went in, and as I sat down, Mr Blair and his mental valet, Alastair Campbell, jeered at me, got up and left. There is a photograph of this moment which hangs in my house, to remind me not to be tricked like that again.
Actually, I doubt very much whether Mr Blair ever understood the project for which he was the figurehead. He has never been very bright or well-informed, but was a pleasant, falsely reasssuring front for a very determined and successful effort to change Britain forever. This is why I never feel quite comfortable when I hear him described as a ‘war criminal’. The charge makes him sound more important than he was.
What’s interesting, however, is that the Twitter mob, even so, prefer Mr Blair ( who ordered the invasion of Iraq they claim to hate) to me (who opposed the Iraq war they claim to hate). Similarly, many of them rave about how my very existence profanes the memory of my late brother (who vigorously and unapologetically supported the Iraq war they claim to hate). I reckon this is because the only things the modern left really care about are sex, drugs and rock and roll, and of course God (‘He doesn’t exist, and I hate him’ being their motto). The anti-war stuff is just a self-indulgent, shallow pose.
13 August 2012 4:45 PM
Arrested for Not Smiling? You must be joking
When I referred in my column to the danger of being arrested for not smiling, I fear many readers thought this was a joke, even though I famously have no sense of humour. In fact it’s a reference to an actual event, first reported in the magazine ‘Private Eye’, and later repeated in two very different national newspapers, here and here.
My own view is that, had the Olympic frenzy not swept through the brains of British journalism like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this amazing tale would be far more widely known. The fact that it isn’t tells us quite a lot about the Olympic frenzy.
All kinds of thoughts cross my mind. But on this occasion, I’ll leave the thinking to my readers.
George Bernard Shaw said rightly that no Englishman could open his mouth without making another Englishman hate him. As an Irishman, he could see from outside that the curious code of accents, mingled with class and education, as well as with region, was a potent form of wicked magic.
The British military and naval classes, into which I was born, were less sensitive about it than most because they lived their lives in strictly ordered hierarchies where there wasn’t much resentment. I think this was because of the shared danger and adversity, in which everyone had seen everyone else, scared, dirty and swearing, with the wraps off - and because so many people actually avoid responsibility. Who’d want to be an officer, the first to be blamed? It was cosier further down the list. This is a more common feeling than most people want to admit.
But by the late 1950s, even naval officers were beginning to disguise their cut-glass accents. They were all too redolent of a pre-1939 age which obviously wasn’t coming back, of ‘young masters’ and ‘my man’. It accelerated after that, thanks to TV, which gave other accents airtime and dethroned the old ones. In a way, I’m rather sorry about the accents, though not about the old class distinction – I share Nevil Shute’s loathing for the silly waste and snobbery it caused (very well described in a neat novel about the early years of World War Two, called ‘Landfall’, which I greatly recommend. Shute’s dislike of snobbery was one of the reasons he went off to live in Australia).
I get a thrill of recognition whenever I hear Celia Johnson, as the Captain’s wife in ‘In Which We Serve’. It’s almost as good a gateway into the imagination of the past as the sight and sound of a working express steam engine (not that I’d compare Miss Johnson to a locomotive).
But I digress. I never really understood how much my accent annoyed another people until I was in my late twenties, living and working for the first time in London, and heard my voice being mimicked, in an exaggerated lahdidah, as I went into a cinema in Swiss Cottage. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was just the first time I had noticed it. I’d already unconsciously toned down my prep-school voice. But from that day on I toned it down still more. I noticed, a few years ago, that my brother, finding English public-school accents went down very well in the colonies, had actually become grander-sounding during his years in Washington, and though he would pronounce such words as ‘dynasty’ in the American manner (‘die-nesty’), he made no other concessions.
But in any case, there’s really no hope for me in the world of Estuary English and fake American. My voice (and my failure to disguise it further) immediately identifies me as privately educated. That is in itself a sin to many people. My use of formal grammar identifies me –accurately - as a believer in order, precedence and probably some sort of hierarchy. I think that’s what people mean when they describe me as ‘pompous’ a word they often can’t even spell. I think it’s what the crude caricature of me on ‘What the papers say’ was intended to suggest, plus a bit extra. These things are important. Czech exiles, returning from Britain after to the war to the new Communist Prague, were shocked to find that their precise grammar-school Czech was now considered too middle class, and that officials and political leaders were all speaking the Bohemian equivalent of Estuary, no doubt for fear they would sound ‘pompous’.
And I suspect it’s the near-instinctive recognition of an enemy, not by any means inaccurate, which gets the Twitter Mob going. Good heavens, they’re cross today, because I was on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme for a few minutes, talking about the Olympic Closing Ceremony. The item can be found here (introduced with a certain amount of anticipatory horror by Jim Naughtie).
The Twitter Mob, who always accuse me of never laughing or smiling, can’t actually have been listening because I open the item with a confession of having laughed quite a lot at the Ceremony (or Cacophony), as I did. It was, unintentionally, quite funny. But they know from my voice that I have no sense of humour, so, for instance, they expended a lot of energy trying to analyse my remark that ‘Even if I’d been interested, I’d have been bored’ and my confession that ‘I gave up listening to pop music in 1970, and saw no reason to regret that’. These, while statements of fact, are also, er, jokes. I called it even more of a Moronic Inferno than the opening ceremony, and sought to point out that the closing ceremony was explicitly anti-religious. It gave a central place to the anti-religious song ‘Imagine’, getting children to sing it (doesn’t that rather fly in the face of the Dawkinsite rage against children being brought up *with* religious belief? Wouldn’t the same difficulty apply to bringing them up with an active unbelief?).
And it gave an even more central place to the singing of ‘Always look on the Bright Side of life’, which was an important part of the puerile anti-Christian film ‘Life of Brian’. (Even more childishly, some people continue to deny that it was anti-Christian. Don’t bother.).
In case anyone didn’t get the message, this was accompanied by a chorus of Roman Soldiers (fresh from Golgotha?) and by a squadron of women dressed as nuns, speeding about the stage on roller blades. Well, I never, what a wheeze (I don’t think, actually, that many orders of nuns in this once-Protestant country were to be found wearing the elaborate winged coifs sported by these fake sisters, but what the heck, making a joke out of nuns has always been a key part of anti-religious agitprop, from the French Revolution onwards).
And so I shall continue to be pompous. It is my tragedy. By the way, although I don’t like the old Beatles numbers that were played at the closing ceremony (though I do quite like ‘Waterloo Sunset’, alas sung without much strength to it), the old songs have a certain power to them, and a memorability. It does seem to me that pop music since the 1960s has become utterly uninteresting by comparison. I think it’s because it’s now conventional, and has no power to shock, and also because it has already said all that it could possibly say. Listening to George Michael (which I’d never knowingly done before) was a form of torture. How can anyone enjoy this? It also seemed to me as I watched it that the closing ceremony failed on its own terms. I thought the praise for it this morning was a bit faint.
But the Olympic frenzy still has a little life left in it. Most of the media have lost all detachment, and are still reporting it as if it were a sacred ceremony rather than an event.And also see the separate item on the man who was arrested for not smiling.
Take this closing sentence from a BBC news report, on the Today programme: ‘The warm memories the games have a while yet to glow’. This sort of thing was rightly mocked, 30 years or so ago, in sycophantic reports of royal visits. But, as always, the revolutionaries themselves are just as bad as those they’ve overthrown, once they’re firmly in power. The slobbering over Mr Blair’s ‘great’ conference speeches by supposedly independent journalists was worse than any Royal toadying. And so is this.
12 August 2012 7:02 PM
No Kiss Took Place
Some of you have already seen the televised part of an encounter between me and the alleged comedian Russell Brand on Friday night. We were both taking part in a discussion on the BBC2 programme Newsnight, which can, for the moment, be watched here.
There was some speculation later in the programme as to whether Mr Brand did in fact kiss me off air. I can now state that he did not (see below).
As well as me and Mr Brand, the discussion featured a Tory MP called David Burrowes, and his friend Chip Somers, who you can look up. The presenter was Stephanie Flanders, who generally appears as one of the BBC’s senior economics commentators. Much of the discussion is perfectly clear on the film. But there are two points at which it becomes a bit of a bout between me and Mr Brand. I am not sure, in any case, how long it will be available on the BBC i-player.
I provide the following transcript (which, if not perfect, is as close as I can get to accuracy) to make it easier for others to make a dispassionate assessment. I feel the need to do this partly because of the response on Twitter on Friday night. I have already described this strange means of communication as an ‘electronic left-wing mob’, which it is. On this occasion it was also an electronic lavatory wall, on which contributors almost universally (I think it was universally, but I must allow for the chance that I missed something) agreed that Mr Brand has ‘wiped the floor’ with me or ‘run rings round me’. I honestly couldn’t see how this could be said. As an argument, it left a lot to be desired, but Mr Brand certainly hadn’t won it with any key fact or argument. Mr Brand is a major celebrity with all the adulation and sycophancy which that state encourages. He was appearing alongside an ally (Mr Somers) and a Tory MP who was a good deal more sympathetic to Mr Brand than he was to my position (this is no surprise to me, but I suspect most Twitter activists are politically rather limited and think that the Tory Party is diabolically right wing).
I had hoped not to meet Mr Brand in the green room beforehand, as I was sure that he would be ingratiating, and the green room (a cramped waiting room close to the studio, free of glamour) is pretty small at the best of times. That evening it was already occupied by two Olympic Gold Medal winners. They were being very generous with their medals, letting other guests handle them, and modestly accepting congratulations. Mr Brand, who at this stage appeared shirtless, so that we could see his tattoos and a large plaster on his torso, quickly charmed them into letting him wear their medals. He was also ingratiating, making various protestations of friendliness to me, which I politely but firmly rebuffed because I didn’t think they were genuine, and because I saw no reason to pretend friendliness towards him when I dislike everything he does.
My main reason for agreeing to appear was the opportunity it gave me to criticise the fact that the BBC was giving its facilities to such a person to make a documentary on drugs, and to argue against a) the strange belief that people who take illegal drugs have no control over themselves and deserve sympathy and b) the comical fiction that this country maintains a regime of penal prohibition against drugs. Later on it emerged that there would also be a chance to point out that the Tory Party is useless. It seemed worth giving up an evening for.
Here is a transcript of the two verbal brawls I had with Mr Brand:
The first took place roughly seven minutes into the programme: (SF is Stephanie Flanders, PH is me, RB is Mr Brand)
SF: (addressing PH) Russell Brand says this is a disorder, we should treat drug addiction like a disease, Do you agree?
PH: No, It’s a crime, it involves the possession of a Class ‘A’ drug which is a criminal offence, which people do voluntarily and they do it for pleasure. And if we continue to treat it as a disease, which (they) should be sympathised with, there will be more and more of it as there has been over the past many years. We do not any more enforce our own laws on this subject. The very word ‘addiction’ assumes that the person involved has no free will.
SF: You have no sympathy at all with the people who get trapped on drugs for years on end?
PH: I have sympathy with anybody who gets themselves into trouble. But sympathy isn’t the point. What I don’t have is any sympathy with somebody who deliberately breaks a known law. They are criminals. They should be punished. And honestly if they were punished for this they would by and large not get into the trouble they get into and there would be many, many fewer of them. But we don’t do that. Look at the figures for arrests of people even for possession of Class A drugs which we supposedly view most seriously. Of the ones who are convicted, fewer than one in ten are actually sentenced to imprisonment. This is a Class ‘A’ drug, the most serious.
SF: Russell Brand, they are criminals, What’s wrong with what he’s saying?
RB: I understand what Peter is saying. And I understand his frustration. As a person that has to deal with drug addicts in my life they are a frustrating type of person to deal with, But I think Peter that if you can find in yourself to look at human beings with compassion and love rather than with aggression, you will find there is more of an opportunity for progress. I know it’s annoying, but..
PH: I don’t wish to be lectured on aggression by you. You’ve been extremely aggressive to me in the past when we have met…
RB: That was because of the bigotry, Peter. I don’t mean it. I’m only having a bit of fun because of the Daily Mail stuff and that.
PH: When you actually learn to use reason you can accuse people of bigotry. Until then I should keep very quiet about it. Learn to use some reason in this matter.
SF: We’re very reasoned on Newsnight
PH: Why is a comedian being given a programme on the BBC to push a policy about drugs?
SF: Because he has first-hand experience
PH: Why is our debate on drugs so debased that this is the kind of the thing we are reduced to?
RB: Peter, why are you so angry?
PH: I am angry because many, many young people in this country are being betrayed…
RB: What do you think we should do?
PH…by a feeble government and a feeble est[ablishment]…
RB: What do you think we should do, Peter ?
PH: I think we should enforce our law against illegal drugs…
RB: You want people in prison?
PH: I don’t want people in prison, no, I want people deterred from taking drugs…
RB: How?
PH …taking drugs which will ruin their lives, by punishment
RB: But how, I want that…(interrupts, unclear)I don’t want people to take drugs, Peter
PH: … by punishment, by effective…
PH: You asked a question, you had better listen to the answer. I want them deterred
RB …(unclear interruption, talking over PH) not just banal, prescriptive bigotry…
PH : Listen to what I’m saying, you’ll learn something
RB: I’ve heard it before Peter
PH: Well you plainly weren’t listening that time either…
RB: Rambling…
PH: I want them deterred by effective policing…
RB: I don’t think you’re ignorant. I just think you’re innocent. You’re like a peculiar child.
PH: You see, ad hominem, ad hominem and interruption, absolutely nothing remotely resembling reason, thought or fact and yet you are making a programme on drugs for the BBC and I am not. And that is exactly what is wrong.
SF: (intervenes)
My summary of this exchange. Mr Brand seeks to patronize me, calling me ‘frustrated’, and later asking why I am ‘angry’. There is no doubt that he (having had the opening few minutes of Newsnight devoted to a film about his BBC3 programme (uninterrupted by me or anyone) and then a solo interview with Ms Flanders (also uninterrupted by me or anyone) is repeatedly interrupting me without the presenter making any effort to restrain him. His interruptions are destructive, in that he never waits for an answer to any of his questions but talks over the response, often with another question. And they are of course personally abusive (again unrestrained by the presenter). It becomes necessary for me to point this out, so reducing the time available to make my case. The other undercurrent is that one can only be kind and compassionate if one accepts the view of drugtaker as victim. The possibility that the other view, of allowing the person to have responsibility for his own actions and encouraging him to take responsibility, might be, in effect more compassionate, and derives from a desire to help one’[s fellow man just as much if not more, is excluded.
Roughly 15 minutes into the programme, there is a second, briefer passage:
RB: I understand your frustration, mate (addressed to me), but I really think that the techniques and methods that you’re talking about are antiquated and belong in another era. That kind of foghorn madness from bygone times is not going to help anybody.
PH: There you go again. No reason. Just abuse. I love to see the embrace between you and the Conservative Party. The more of it the better, the more people will realize how useless the Conservative Party is to people in this country who care about these things.
Here Mr Brand’s argument, apart from yet more personal abuse, is that my position is ‘antiquated’. He genuinely believes a) that this is an argument and b) that it is unanswerable. People with conservative opinions are often dealt with in this way. ‘Don’t you realise this is the 21st century?’ we are asked scornfully, as if the truth altered with the flip of the calendar. Actually the argument is totalitarian. They don’t really think that the passage of time has abolished truth or logic. They are saying (and this is the purpose of all such propaganda) ‘We have won and there is nothing you can do about it’.
Well, maybe they have won. I cannot see the future, but this sort of triumphalism always makes me wish that children were still taught Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, the cleverest and most devastating warning against those who think their power will last forever. The mocking double meaning of the words ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ is a lifelong gift to all who read these lines. I have in my life seen mighty tyrannies fall, sometimes close at hand, and it is startling to see how pathetic and lonely they appear once the end is near.
I have also learned to look at overweening spokesmen for triumphant majority views with a sceptical eye. Maybe they won’t always be winning. But what if they are? Like Whittaker Chambers in another controversy, I suspect much of the time that I have picked the losing side. But that does not daunt me. Losing sides often end up winning in the end, and even if they don’t, I would rather serve the truth, and be beaten, than serve a lie, and win. Isn’t this the normal view of any self-respecting human person?
Oh, and Mr Brand made no attempt to kiss me, though he did stand too close to me and make yet more unconvincing protestations of friendliness, in a TV Centre corridor, after the programme. In the end, after I had had to back away from him, he said (rather more honestly) words to the effect that I was part of a dying breed and he wouldn’t be sorry when we were all gone, and I responded that at least that was his honest opinion.
I suspect that such a kiss, without my consent, would have been sexual harassment, and that would surely never do. Nor, I have to say, would a reluctance to be kissed by Mr Brand be conclusive evidence, in itself, of the ‘homophobia’ he alleged against me. I, indeed anyone, might just not want to be kissed by Russell Brand. A male person would not even have to be exclusively heterosexual, or ‘heteronormative’ let alone ‘homophobic’ to prefer to avoid such an experience. I can’t of course speak for women, some of who seem to be rather taken by Mr Brand. As I am heterosexual and heteronormative, I have extra reasons for wanting to avoid his embrace. But ‘homophobia’ isn’t one of them.
For a rather different BBC moment, a five-minute interview of me by Matthew Stadlen, you may go here. Or you will be able to when the link is fixed, which will I hope be soon. In the meantime, just put the words 'BBC' and 'Five minutes with Peter Hitchens' into any search engine, and you will find it.
I’m not sure whether to be pleased or otherwise that this is classed by the Corporation as ‘entertainment’.
If you believe that Olympic glory makes a nation great, just remember the USSR
This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column
It seems that you can now be arrested for not smiling when an Olympic event is taking place. So I had better watch out in case I am wrestled to the ground and carted off by some Compulsory Happiness snatch squad.
For I have not been smiling nearly enough. I have watched two or three races on the TV.
There is still something thrilling in a raw contest among men and women stretched to the uttermost, in which there can be only one winner.
It is refreshingly unlike modern Britain, where the very idea that there must be losers for there to be winners is banned from most schools, and denied by our political leaders.
But I can summon up little interest in all the other alleged sports, dancing animals, underwater basketball, bikini display or whatever they are. As a lifelong cyclist, I find myself startlingly unmoved by Olympic cycling.
It is too technological, too dependent on machines and airlocks.
The riders look like aliens in their special outfits.
But good luck to you if you have enjoyed it. I am happy for you, provided I’m allowed to differ from you. The trouble is, I’m not sure I am.
From the moment these Olympics started, there’s been a strong smell of New Labour totalitarianism.
Those who have dared to say they didn’t like the Opening Ceremony have been lectured and made to feel isolated.
The BBC even transmitted an astonishing personal attack on me in which I was misrepresented (they have since apologised, an event as rare as a Lottery win, but alas the apology is nothing like good enough).
Now someone called Armando Iannucci, who is famous for something, has called me a ‘scribbling cynic’ and proclaimed that I and those like me ‘took a hell of a beating’.
I think this is because the British team has won a lot of medals, and the Opening Ceremony has been much praised.
I can’t see why an Olympic opening ceremony should have any politics in it at all. But remember how deeply the Blairite Cosa Nostra was involved in securing the Olympics for London at all costs, and how their heirs, the Cameron Tories, have taken up the baton.
Why? I think the pitiful failure of the Millennium Dome rankled badly with the Blairites. They were and are revolutionaries. They had long hoped to use the new century to proclaim Year One of their nasty, tatty, multicultural, anti-Christian New Britain.
Put simply, I think they wanted to undo the magic of the 1953 Coronation Ceremony, with modernist incantations and a censored, reordered version of our national history.
The Olympics were a second chance, in which a normal love of sport could be converted into an anti-conservative wave of feeling.
And behold, they have done it. I don’t begrudge the winners their joy, or the spectators their delight.
But do Olympic medals make a nation great? Was the USSR a great nation because it won lots of them? Is Jamaica a stable and happy society because Usain Bolt is a great athlete?
Would you rather have Australia’s thriving economy, or Britain’s medal tally? And by the way, have Prince William and his wife forgotten that they are future monarchs of Australia?
In a free country, there is no obvious connection between sporting achievement and national standing. The truth is that we have used scarce money to hire coaches, buy equipment and subsidise athletes in sports where competition is weak.
When all this is over, we will still be broke, disorderly, badly educated and gravely troubled by the greatest wave of mass immigration in our history. I cannot see why I should smile about that.
Ludicrous Louise is onle the first to wander off
When Louise Bagshawe changed her name to Mensch, it was a great loss to comedy.
This wonderful, ludicrous woman seems to have stepped out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel, one of those terrifying, strapping girls who thinks the stars are God’s daisy-chain.
And ‘Bagshawe’ was perfect for the part, in a way that the rather Manhattan moniker ‘Mensch’ isn’t.
Louise, who once got very cross with me when I said she had the political grasp of a Teletubby, symbolises the whole Cameron project. She wandered into and out of New Labour, as one might amble into and out of a bar or a shop.
As she explained: ‘My mother crystallised the issue by deciding to run as a Conservative in the county council elections and drafting me in to help. I said, originally, “I can’t, I’m in the Labour Party.” She said, “Don’t be so stupid.” ’
Quite. And now she has wandered out of Parliament, leaving the poor people of her Northamptonshire seat wondering why this exotic creature was foisted on them in the first place.
A lot of the modern Tory Party is just as vague in principle or purpose. Their only aim in 2010 was to get into office, which is why they could happily make a deal with Liberal Democrats, who were – officially – their sworn enemies.
Now it is clear that the whole empty project has run out of fuel. Louise is just the first of them to be wafted elsewhere on the winds of fashion and expediency.
The Government has no purpose except to stay in office. It will do so by splitting with the Lib Dems and forming a powerless minority administration.
In 2015, the Lib Dems under Vince Cable will form a coalition with Labour, and in return they will get the elected senate and rigged parliamentary elections they want.
There’s no escape. There might have been if only you lot had listened to me, and not voted Tory in 2010.
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I have never got on with Jon Snow, the Left-wing presenter of Channel 4 News. He once called me a Hitlerite in Reykjavik (it’s a long story).
But I gather (not from him) that he has been working very hard indeed researching the rules and jargon of all the Paralympic sports as he prepares to commentate on them so that he can get it right. I salute him for it.
Unlike the dubious Olympics, the Paralympics are pure virtue: no cheating, no drugs, just people who despise self-pity, rising above pain and adversity and showing us all what it can mean to be human, if you try.
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Who does William Hague speak for when he pledges this country’s support for the Syrian rebels?
My correspondents in Syria loathe these Islamist gangsters and are enraged by the Western media’s uncritical endorsement of them – the oxygen that keeps them going.
The most striking story of the week from Syria was the riveting account by British photographer John Cantlie of how he was kidnapped and nearly murdered in Syria by Islamist fanatics.
The worst and most murderous were British subjects from South London.
But because this account does not fit the ludicrous conventional wisdom that the Syrian rebels are heroes, it has not been followed up.
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