29 September 2012 8:53 PM
Plebs? No, but I wish they'd remember we are their bosses
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column
So why is it that the people in charge of these systems act as if they were prison warders processing us for a ten- year sentence?
I have no love for Andrew Mitchell. I know from personal experience that he swears too much. But after a week in which the National Union of Jobsworths has sought to smear and destroy him, I have decided to take Mr Mitchell’s side.
Why? Partly because I have had enough of officious people in uniform, whose wages I pay but who – at best – regard me as a nuisance.
They have no need to be like this. The British Army (one of the last institutions in the country that is any good) won golden opinions for the way its soldiers handled Olympic security with charm and competence.
Mr Mitchell simply wanted to ride his bicycle – democratic, clean, quiet, and a form of transport I think all politicians should be compelled to use – through a gate. He’d done it before.
Had he been sprawled arrogantly on the back seat of a big fat Government car, flanked by smarmy bureaucrats, he’d have been waved through. But no, PC Jobsworth ruled, probably from behind his machine gun, that it was ‘policy’ to make Mr Mitchell go through the side gate. Ah ‘policy’, the obstructive jack-in-office’s excuse for refusing to be helpful, in our supposed free- market economy.
Your favourite marmalade has disappeared from the shelves? It’s ‘company policy’. You have to endure two minutes of pointless, deafening, half-witted announcements every time your train approaches or leaves a station? It’s ‘company policy’.
This is just another way of saying that you count for nothing, and your complaint will be tossed straight into the bin.
And then there’s the bit about how Mr Mitchell ‘said’ he was the Chief Whip. Said? How could this officer not have known? When I worked at the House of Commons, in another age, the wise, calm, helpful constables who staffed the place made it their business to know by sight the name of every single MP, 630 or more, within a week of a General Election.
If I were in charge of the police guarding Downing Street, I would get rid of any constable working there who could not identify by sight and without hesitation every member of the Cabinet.
This episode will, I hope, rebound hard on those who seem to me to have abused their positions to make trouble for a Minister. They should remember who employs them, and who pays their wages.
They are not paid to leak such matters to the papers. This is lawless personal spite, not law enforcement.
If they really thought the law had been broken, then they should have arrested Mr Mitchell.
Our police force has gone badly wrong and it’s time it laid down its guns, sold its helicopters, removed its baseball caps and stompy boots, and went back to patrolling the streets on foot – and on bikes.
Our police force has gone badly wrong and it’s time it laid down its guns, sold its helicopters, removed its baseball caps and stompy boots, and went back to patrolling the streets on foot – and on bikes.
That’s my ‘policy’.
Only fools swallow Nutt's gibberish
The much-touted Channel 4 programme on ecstasy turned out to be rather pathetic. Professor David Nutt, the noted propagandist for weaker drug laws, oozed so much self-regard that the studio audience almost drowned in it.
Only fools swallow Nutt's gibberish
The much-touted Channel 4 programme on ecstasy turned out to be rather pathetic. Professor David Nutt, the noted propagandist for weaker drug laws, oozed so much self-regard that the studio audience almost drowned in it.
Poor Jon Snow, looking about 90 and trying with all his might to get down with the kids, greeted Old Nutt’s pseudo-scientific gibberish with gullible cries of wonder, a sad comedown for this normally skilled and probing inquisitor.
In the middle of it all, a vast plastic brain, looking like a discarded prop from a Seventies episode of Doctor Who, flashed and flickered to illustrate Old Nutt’s vague but ambitious speculations about the workings of this mysterious, little-understood organ.
Then there was Dr Evan Harris, who ‘bravely’ volunteered to take part in the trial. Did he take ecstasy? Nobody’s sure. Dr Harris’s pupils are always so dilated anyway, due to his wonder at his own cleverness, that nobody – including him – could be sure if he had been given real MDMA or a dummy pill.
What was this all about? I reckon there is, or soon will be, very big money behind the exploitation of mood-altering drugs (look at the vast commercial success of fishy, risky ‘antidepressants’).
The only obstacles are those pesky people, like the courageous Professor Andy Parrott, who warn that the risks of drugs such as ecstasy hugely outweigh their joys. Professor Parrott, though not on the platform and often interrupted, was the true star of the programme.
A life of genius and real drama
Sometimes the death of an actor gives me a special pang – especially when it’s one whose face I have known since childhood. I was always fascinated by the mysterious, faintly scornful foreign features of Herbert Lom, whose performance in the original and unequalled version of The Ladykillers was a work of genius.
A life of genius and real drama
Sometimes the death of an actor gives me a special pang – especially when it’s one whose face I have known since childhood. I was always fascinated by the mysterious, faintly scornful foreign features of Herbert Lom, whose performance in the original and unequalled version of The Ladykillers was a work of genius.
Now he has died, aged 95, I find that he really was mysterious, and haunted by an intolerable regret, more dramatic than any drama. First, he was a Bohemian aristocrat whose real name was Herbert Karel Angelo Kuchacevic ze Schluderpacheru. You can see why he stuck to Lom.
Second, he arrived in England as a refugee in 1939 with his Jewish girlfriend. He was allowed in by the Dover Customs officers. She was sent back to Prague and, in due course, was murdered in a German concentration camp. You could make a film of that, but alas, Herbert Lom is no longer available to star in it.
Why does this country still maintain a vast, expensive apparatus for wiping Moscow off the map? Trident is as obsolete as the Maginot Line, built for a danger that is over and will not arise again.
Why does this country still maintain a vast, expensive apparatus for wiping Moscow off the map? Trident is as obsolete as the Maginot Line, built for a danger that is over and will not arise again.
Meanwhile, our conventional Armed Forces, our real protection against unpredictable risks, are being made redundant and sold for scrap. Sir Nick Harvey is quite right to open a debate on the severe shrinking of our oversized bomb.
Can we really believe that Mr Slippery, Etonian and holder of an Oxford first-class degree, doesn’t know what Magna Carta means? If he doesn’t know, then things are even worse than I thought (and that means very bad indeed). If he does, what was he playing at?
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TV for Gnats..or 'The Resurrection Men dig up Karl Marx'
I’ve always liked the expression ‘Resurrection Man’, used in late 18th-century England to describe the unscrupulous gents who dug up freshly-buried corpses for surgeons in need of subjects for dissection. It has a lovely English robustness and grim humour to it. Does anyone else view the world in quite the same way? And Jerry Cruncher, the bank messenger who supplements his income with a bit of resurrection work (in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’), is one of my favourite minor Dickens characters, another being the redoubtable Miss Pross, so wonderfully unlike her French opposite number, Madame Defarge.
But there’s really not much excuse for trying to dig up old Karl Marx, who was been weighed down with an enormous and hideous monument to himself in Highgate Cemetery, for 60-odd years (before then, the old man’s grave was much less prominently marked). He was an accomplished journalist and an energetic and interesting thinker, but he was profoundly wrong about economics, and his ideas, alas, became the gospel of a very ugly and gangsterish political movement, which blasted the lives and fortunes of millions of people for 70 miserable years, and whose ugly relics and vast graveyards still litter the planet. So why on earth will the BBC give an hour to his memory on BBC-2 on Monday 1st October? I am interested in this project because I am very slightly involved in it. I was contacted several months ago and asked if I would be interviewed about Marx, as an ex-Trotskyist. Given that the BBC is crawling with left-wingers of various sorts, I assumed this was because they felt the need to have a hostile voice. They did, but the trouble was that there isn’t all that much to say.
Marx’s fundamental error was to assume that there was such a thing as ‘capitalism’, that is to say that normal economic relations were a specific state of being, out of which humanity could escape by adopting a rather vague alternative known as ‘socialism’. I always object, these days, to the very idea of ‘capitalism’. It treats remorseless reality as a dogmatic choice. You might as well call weather ‘ rainism and sunism’, as if we had some way of creating and dwelling in an alternative atmosphere which dispensed with the earth’s climate as it is, and instead provided perpetual delight, warmth, fertility, plenty and joy (details unspecified, to be supplied after you’ve handed over state power to me). But not so the BBC. They chose to rank Old Karl alongside Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, as a towering economist of our age. He is to be number three in a series of three ‘masters of Money’ on BBC2 at 9.00 on Monday evening. I’m not myself sure that Hayek ranks with Keynes in influence or importance, though he is certainly interesting and original. I tend to think that he (like Keynes, only more so ) has been done in by his disciples, who have made more out of his ideas than Hayek would ever have wished to do.
The same thing happened to Keynesianism under, for example, Macmillan, who went far beyond what the great man himself would have sanctioned. Even the most rigorous economic conservatives have to concede that Keynes engaged practically in the real world, and was often right in his actions because his understanding was so great. But he never pretended, as the Marxists do, to a total understanding of reality. Nor, I think, did Hayek. The trouble with economies is that they are wherever they are when you need to fix them, and are seldom if ever easy to subject to formulae or idealistic solutions. Take our own, just now. A conservative person can do little, because the British economy is so dependent on welfare payments and high taxation that a sudden withdrawal of these things would probably kill it, just as a starving man can be killed by being given what would normally be a healthy square meal. A moral and cultural revolution must precede an economic one. Economics, as Keynes and Hayek( and Marx) knew well is subject to politics, morality, human desire and self-discipline (or the lack of it) habit and tradition. Not to mention the existence or non-existence of the rule of law, the thing which I tend to feel is vital to any truly successful state, and which is itself founded on Christian principles.
But anyway, I found myself sitting on an old chair in a bizarre, almost derelict house in West London which had recently been used as the set for ‘the King’s Speech’, being interviewed on film (though not by Miss Flanders, whose involvement I knew nothing of) about Karl Marx. The result can be seen on Monday evening, two very brief cameo appearances, in which I laugh at the idea of an ‘alternative’ to ‘capitalism’, and in which I quote from my book , ‘The Rage Against God’ that ‘Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and you never get there’. Well, better than nothing, but what I had hoped to get across was that intelligent modern revolutionaries see that Marx was in fact a prophet of globalism and of the cultural and moral destruction which is engendered by the race for wealth. That’s why they backed the invasion of Iraq and the new multiculti, liberal interventionist, Hillary Clintonised USA. And it’s why conservatives like me dig in our heels about closing borders and defending national sovereignty and monoculture. In the words of the old bearded one : ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. ‘The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.’
And then again :’ The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.
'It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’
Spooky, eh, when you think that it was published in 1848? Marx turns out not to have been the prophet of Lenin and Stalin, who hated God, wanted absolute power and needed a pretext for seizing it, but to have been the prophet of the Canton sweatshop, the computer age and the sweeping away of national borders. That is a really interesting subject, and so is the Gramscian cultural and moral revolution which has helped to make it possible, and which has accompanied it. Alas, Miss Flanders’s programme (which is crammed with silly parables and games to explain matters to simple minds, and rapid editing, to help any gnats who may be watching cope with their short attention spans. TV for gnats is increasingly common, I find) is much more about whether Marx has anything to say about the current banking crisis. In my view, the answer to that is a resounding ‘Nope’. There’s also a silly failed joke about how a ‘Marxist Broadcasting Corporation’ would have reported the events of the last few years, which looks to me remarkably like what the BBC has actually been doing. See for yourselves on Monday evening.
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28 September 2012 2:46 PM
You Never Know.... Oh, yes, you do
The worst possible argument for keeping Trident is the most common one. It can be summed up as ‘You Never Know…’
We all know people who live their lives on this principle. Their houses are jammed with clutter, their attics and garages and garden shed bulge with books, manuals for obsolete devices, old mowers, sheaves of gas bills and bank statements, unwearable items of clothing. None of this stuff will ever be looked at or used again. One day, the Salvation Army, or some house clearance service, will cart it all away (mostly to the dump, though some will end up in charity shops where it should have been all along) after the owners are dead.
I find this quite forgiveable, even charming, though I would have an almost permanent skip outside my house, so that I could throw large things away more easily, if I could. I think it’s Davies, in ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ who takes an unreasoning, fierce joy in hurling large, unwanted objects overboard from the yacht ‘Dulcibella’ , particularly stoves. It occurs to me that I can’t remember Davies ever having a Christian name in that marvellous book, much as I didn’t have a Christian name during my prep-school years.
But while it’s charming in an individual, and understandable, it’s stupid for a government to cling to things for which there is no rational case.
Britain built its first nuclear bomb (and it was a big struggle) largely because the 1945-51 Labour government realised that in those days it was essential to maintain any sort of standing with the USA. Ernest Bevin, who I suspect of having been a great man, is supposed to have resolved to go ahead with the project after being treated like an office boy by Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, a not-very-well-informed Southerner. He is supposed to have said : ‘I do not want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, as I was. We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’
A similar sentiment was later voiced by Bevin’s near-namesake and left-wing rival, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, who said he did not want a future Foreign Secretary to go ‘naked into the conference chamber’, as he rejected his old left-wing friends’ calls for unilateral British nuclear disarmament in 1957, during the first early flourishing of anti-bomb sentiment in Britain.
There’s a very interesting story attached to this. Labour’s conference (then a real, living body which took actual votes on policy) voted to ban the bomb in 1960, and Hugh Gaitskell made one of his two most powerful speeches (the other being when he had correctly warned that British entry into European union would be ‘the end of a thousand years of history’) . On this occasion he said that there were ‘some of us, Mr Chairman, who will fight, and fight, and fight again to save the party we love’.
There was then a powerfully-organised campaign, throughout the Labour Party( then still an organisation with a large and active membership) run by a body called the Campaign for Democratic Socialism. This worked through Labour ward meetings to reverse the Ban the Bomb policy.
By this time Britain had the Bomb, though it was a close-run thing. One of the main reasons’ for Bevin’s annoyance with Byrnes had been the ingratitude of the USA for Britain’s original work on developing the Atomic Bomb, and the shut-down of US co-operation.
C.P. Snow, ( regular readers here will know of my soft spot for thus much-abused author) , wrote two novels on this topic. The first ‘The New Men’ concerns the struggle to develop the bomb, in many cases by men of the Left, scientists of the pre-1939 sort who were often utopians, in a place which closely resembles the Harwell laboratory . The second ‘Corridors of Power’, deals with a Tory Defence minister who tries (with much help from the civil servants and some discreet American backing) to abandon the British bomb on pragmatic grounds. This turned out to be politically impossible at that stage, as it would have been. There was still a good rational argument (in my view unanswerable) that Soviet domination of Western Europe was ultimately only prevented by MAD, and that a British and a French nuclear force made MAD that much more assured, because the Soviets could never be sure, that, even if the USA held back, their cities were safe from nuclear destruction. Both books are still well worth reading now, as historical documents and stories.
One of Snow’s attractions to me was his willingness to deal with large issues of this kind, intelligently and with great background knowledge. Snow had been in the centre of civil service decision-making since the beginning of the 1939-45 war, and knew what he was writing about. He was very good at describing intrigue (‘The Masters’) trials and scandals(‘The Sleep of Reason’ and ‘The Affair’), fascinated by science and scientists, and frank about his own left-wing passions. I’ve never seen quite why D.H.Lawrence and Henry James (who, as H.G.Wells once sniped, ‘chewed more than he bit off’) are supposed to be such Olympian geniuses by comparison.
Like another dedicated left-winger, Claud Cockburn, he seems to have had a respect for the type of conservative who is so secure in his position and beliefs that he doesn’t give a damn about offending his own side when necessary. But I digress.
The problem here is that at some point the argument about the Bomb got mixed up with the pro-Soviet Left’s desire to break up NATO and make the USSR the principal military, diplomatic and economic power in Europe. Part of this resulted from the left’s revulsion (in my view justified) against Harry Truman’s use of the bomb in Hiroshima, and even more so by the second bomb on Nagasaki. A sort of case can perhaps be made for Hiroshima, though many historians, with access to the full documents of the time, now dispute the idea that Hiroshima forced Japan to surrender (she was about to do so anyway). But none can be made for Nagasaki.
By the way, the point about the bombs in ’The War Game’ being Soviet ones is this. Much of the CND case, and indeed the strongest part of it, was about the immorality and wickedness of even maintaining such cruel weapons, let alone using them. But CND campaigned only against British bombs, not least because anyone who campaigned against the Soviet bomb would have been locked up if they had done so on the territory of the USSR. This fact rather made the point, to most supporters of the Bomb, of what the argument was all about. But it didn’t seem to have occurred to most CND supporters, especially in the ‘Ban Cruise’ era, where much of the anti-cruise propaganda seemed to suggest that cruise missiles wouldn’t just be based here, but used to attack Britain.
The argument that the West’s nuclear weapons were specifically meant *not* to be used, and that if they ever were used they would have failed in their purpose, didn’t always get across.
The argument that the West’s nuclear weapons were specifically meant *not* to be used, and that if they ever were used they would have failed in their purpose, didn’t always get across.
Having dwelt in that era, and under that supposed threat, I must confess to having been entirely free of fears about dying in a nuclear holocaust, as Mutual Assured Destruction made perfect sense to me, not least because the Cuba crisis had shown that it worked.
I was much more worried that Europe would disarm and become Sovietised, or even that a Soviet invasion might succeed. People should remember that the USSR was constantly trying to detach West Germany from NATO with plans for nuclear-free zones and so forth.
The Kremlin had crushed opposition by force or secret police terror in East Germany(19530 Poland (1956) , Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), and it had compelled Poland’s government to crush Solidarity after 1980 as well, meantime invading Afghanistan. The installation of the Pioneer (SS20) missiles was aimed ( as the novelist James Buchan puts it in his interesting book ‘A Heart’s Journey in Winter’) directly at the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Left-wing Germans might have disavowed Marxism. But they had no special love for the USA, and were still sentimentally attached to socialist internationalism. Their former leader, Willi Brandt, had been much closer to the Soviets than he had ever let on, and not just because of the East German agent at his elbow, Gunther Guillaume. And all Germans dreaded having another war on German soil.
The Kremlin had crushed opposition by force or secret police terror in East Germany(19530 Poland (1956) , Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), and it had compelled Poland’s government to crush Solidarity after 1980 as well, meantime invading Afghanistan. The installation of the Pioneer (SS20) missiles was aimed ( as the novelist James Buchan puts it in his interesting book ‘A Heart’s Journey in Winter’) directly at the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Left-wing Germans might have disavowed Marxism. But they had no special love for the USA, and were still sentimentally attached to socialist internationalism. Their former leader, Willi Brandt, had been much closer to the Soviets than he had ever let on, and not just because of the East German agent at his elbow, Gunther Guillaume. And all Germans dreaded having another war on German soil.
There were millions of Germans held hostage in East Germany. Meanwhile, the then-perpetual German Foreign Secretary Hans-Dieter Genscher, worked hard to smooth relations both with East Berlin and Moscow. It could have happened. German neutrality wasn’t impossible. And then, so much for NATO.
And after that, what? . Well, people said Finland, a Western country forced into neutrality by Soviet Power, wasn’t so bad. In fact, the Kremlin had a right to veto appointments to the Finnish government, but general Western prosperity, and the very existence of NATO, kept Finland freer than it would otherwise have been. Imagine, instead, a Europe in which all the countries were ‘Finlandised’ and there was no NATO counterbalance. There were powerful Communist Parties in Italy and France, and a big fellow-travelling movement in Britain, concentrated in the trade unions.
Here , readers will also see that the Warsaw Pact planned carefully for what they hoped would be the future.
But all this is one with Nineveh and Tyre. The Soviet Communist party will never come back. Russia, as a European rather than as a global power is no threat to Britain, and is in my view a potential ally if we ever escape from the EU. The principal threat to British independence and liberty is from that EU. A nuclear weapon (despite one strange comment here) will certainly not help us shake free of that. Switzerland, which has no bomb, has managed to put up a better fight against Brussels and Berlin than we have. Likewise Norway.
I cannot see any reason why any nuclear-armed power in the Middle East or further east should be interested in destroying London . But if such a threat developed, there are much lower-tech ways of delivering nuclear weapons than the wildly elaborate Trident, or its even more wildly elaborate (and costly) planned successor. What this country needs is a navy sufficient to protect its shores and to project power in regions where we have influence, or where we need to protect our citizens from piracy.
Our air force needs to be able to defend our skies, and our army to be available to defend our shores and to be sent, rapidly and effectively, to protect our people and interests abroad. To achieve this, we need to work constantly to maintain a skilled core of professionals, and to update our equipment to the latest standards.
I might add that the main threat to our strategic independence currently comes from the approaching energy crisis, when the forced shutdown of old nuclear and coal-fired power stations will make us wholly dependent on foreign gas and electricity (and unreliable wind). A huge, French-style programme of building nuclear power stations is the only serious answer to this, and would be a much better way of spending the money than on the Thunderbirds fantasy, Trident, a weapon bigger than the country which owns it, designed to attack an enemy who ceased to exist 20 years ago and who will never return.
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27 September 2012 1:44 PM
Bin the Bomb
Long ago, before I grew up, I was a great enthusiast for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I had lots of badges. I was once in trouble for trying to get into a secret government nuclear fallout shelter (Regional Seat of Government) in Cambridge. I went on CND marches – I remember in particular one in Easter 1966, one of the last of the old Aldermaston marches, though by then they started in the Berkshire village where our deterrent is made, and finished in Trafalgar Square, rather than the original plan when they did it the other way round. I think there was a big puppet show, featuring figures drawn by Gerald Scarfe, and shouted, inaudible speeches in the March wind and we all sang a song, to the tune of ‘Jerusalem’ , the only line of which I recall is ‘…. And that the bland shall lead the bland’.
It was all a bit like a church outing, including sleeping on the floors of church halls, proclaiming our faith and a sharing a feeling of uplift. I think it was later the same year that I went on a much smaller march to the Polaris warhead factory in Burghfield, near Reading. I have never got so wet in my life, but we glowed with righteousness as we trailed past the fenced-off hummocks, amid the piney heathland, where the engines of mass death were made. Soon after that came Vietnam which took our minds off the Bomb, and then the thrills of Bolshevism in the International Socialists
I can’t recall exactly when I realised that it was all drivel. Some time in my post-university years, I think when, beneath the leaden skies of chilly Swindon, I confronted reality for the first time in many years. It came to me that deterrence actually worked, was working, protected me personally and that I really ought to support it.
I suspect my Bolshevik training helped me along. There were many disputes among the comrades about the Soviet bomb, with the orthodox Communists torn on the issue, as they had tagged along with CND in the hope of picking up members (and because British nuclear disarmament suited Soviet foreign policy). But it was of course ludicrous, as the Soviet fatherland had its own engines of mass death, pointed at us, and – as I would personally discover years later in the secret H-Bomb town of Kurchatovsk –did a handy line in pro-Bomb propaganda for home consumption.
For us Trotskyists, who evaded any kind of of Soviet loyalty it was easier ( well, mostly, there was a deep difficulty about this for some of us, who insisted that the Soviet state, though corrupt, was a ‘degenerated’ or ‘deformed’ worker’s state, and so ultimately to be defended against capitalism). I remember a mocking chant, to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’ which ran ( I think) ‘The Workers’ Bomb is deepest green, it’s not as black as it might seem, degenerated though it be, it’s still the People’s Property, so raise the Workers’ Bomb on high, beneath its shade we’ll live and die, and though our comrades all shout ‘b***s’ , we’ll stand beneath it when it falls’.
As indeed we would have done. It all faded away until, back in the early 1980s, the cruise and Pershing Missile controversy erupted. It was important. The USSR had begun to position ‘Pioneer’ or (as we called them) SS-20 medium rage nuclear missiles in European Russia, capable of reaching Western European targets. So what?
Well, so quite a lot. NATO, in those days a real alliance designed to deter a Soviet advance into Western Europe, was conventionally feeble. Its troops were poorly co-ordinated (the only standard equipment across all armies was the official NATO sickbag) , hugely outnumbered by the mighty GSFG ( the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, so vast that East Germany all but sank under their weight. You could hardly move in the GDR without meeting them).
Our forces were also in the wrong places, for insoluble political reasons. US troops, for instance, the biggest and best-equipped, were in the US zone of West Germany. But the main Soviet thrust, had it come, would have gone across the North German plain where the smaller, less powerful British and German armies were mainly to be found.
In any case. We relied on the following calculation. If the GSFG ever did advance, we would eb bound to counter with tactical nuclear weapons. The USSR would then either have to give up, or respond by going Ballistic, and launching a strategic attack against the USA, so inviting Mutual Assured Destruction (the famous, and misnamed MAD, which stopped even the silliest of politicians from contemplating war in those days, because it would obviously be insane to start a war. Look at them now. They can’t stop starting wars).
Well, if Chicago were incinerated, the USA would be bound to retaliate, and the theory worked. But what if the Soviet response to battlefield nukes was instead to fry Frankfurt, Munich, Lyon and Manchester, using the SS-20s? Would the USA risk Chicago, or Kansas City, for Europe then? Doubtful.
The SS-20s broke the chain of MAD. Destruction wasn’t mutually-assured any more. In which case it wasn’t as mad to start a war in Europe as it had been. And who was going to do that? Well, guess.
A Soviet conventional advance across Europe had become thinkable for the first time in decades. In that case, the countries of Western Europe, fearing this possibility and (having no realistic defence against it which didn’t involve a European nuclear war) would be under pressure to accommodate themselves to the Soviet will in a way that had been unknown since the founding of NATO.
Hence the decision to deploy American-controlled, but European-based weapons which could retaliate against Soviet cities if Western European cities were attacked by SS-20s.
This, by the way, was the context for the now-famous argument I had with my brother in 1984 or thereabouts, during which he said that he didn’t care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon. It was, in my view, the defeat of the SS-20 ploy that led to the end of the USSR.
At that time, I had a pro-NATO sticker on my car , mainly to annoy my Oxford neighbours, who all had CND stickers on theirs, opposing what they called ‘cruise’. This was the time of Greenham Common and the Greenham Common Women, and also for a revival of CND, which had almost vanished in the 1970s. This time it even had membership cards, which it never had the first time round.
There were special showings of Peter Watkins’s gritty propaganda film ‘The War Game’, stupidly refused a showing by the BBC when it was first made in the 1960s. This shows, in the style of a documentary , the effects of a nuclear attack on parts of Southern England. And the panic infecting the country in the days before. It’s rather a charming period-piece now, with its pre-metric measurements, helmeted bobbies, phone boxes, vicars and BBC accents.
But like all such films (think also of the slicker American film ‘The Day After’ ) its scenario for the outbreak of war is unbelievably feeble and incredible. The truth was that, after the Cuba standoff had ended in compromise, it was hard to see what could actually bring about a superpower nuclear exchange. ‘Dr Strangelove’, with its (credible but false) suggestion that most of those involved were unhinged, probably persuaded more people.
All I needed to do, when ‘The War Game’ was shown near me, was to get up during the post-film discussion and point out the obvious but neglected fact that the nuclear explosions we had all just watched were the explosions of *Soviet* weapons, aimed at us. From then on, the CNDers didn’t really recover. I recall (after one such showing in Hampstead), infuriating my defeated opponents by cheerily helping them stack the chairs after the confused audience had gone.
Well, all that’s over now. The GSFG, the Soviet Army, the Warsaw Pact armies, are just so much scrap and reminiscence. The USSR is gone, the last SS-20 is in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, Greenham Common has gone back to the land, and Russia has about as much interest in invading Western Europe as I have in developing an enthusiasm for Glam Rock.
So why do we continue to main this vast apparatus for destroying Moscow, called Trident? I have no idea. The ideologies, the rivalries, the ideas that caused it to be built are now so much yellowing paper in an archive. The conflict it was designed to prevent never took place and never will. Our significance in the world has shrunk in spite of our missiles . Ernest Bevin wanted a British bomb so that the USA wouldn’t order us about. Perhaps he was right in those days, but it seems to me that we would be better able to resist American pressure if we’d spent the money on building an economy instead.
So why not get rid of it? Because Labour is still afraid that if it bans the bomb, people will realise just how radical it is. And because the Tories have long relied on a noisy fake patriotism to cover up the fact that they have sold the country to the European Union, the greatest British diplomatic defeat of modern times. Did Trident preserve us from that? Will it help us get out? Will it keep us warm when we can’t afford the imported gas any more?
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26 September 2012 2:56 PM
In the Heat of the Night, and... A Threat to Kick me
A moment for some general conversation. First, on the advantages and disadvantages of bicycling. Take yesterday. I had various business to do in and around my home town. No bus route exists that could have taken me directly on any of the journeys I made. Had I used a car, apart from sustaining our corrupt relationship with the world’s most unpleasant regimes, apart from having pumped a good deal of filth into the air and inflicted unpleasant noise on a lot of people, I would have had to have left my vehicle occupying valuable urban space, and contributed to the general tinny, garish ugliness of the modern British street-scene.
If you doubt the last point, take a photograph of any picturesque or handsome streetscape in this country. You’ll barely be conscious of it as you click the shutter, but when you examine the picture later you will see how the human proportions are disrupted, and the subtle colours of local stone or aged brick driven into the background, by the irritating presence of so many ugly steel boxes, whose height and general shape conflicts with buildings and street furniture designed for humans.
Later, my chores and errands done, I was able to escape the 21st century by pedalling vigorously for about half an hour, to a point where I finally escaped bypass roads and ribbon development, and dropped off the edge of the modern world into a landscape which (if you ignore the barbed wire) could have been painted by Constable. During the next hour or so of fast riding, I passed a handsome country house, a fine old 17th-century bridge, a beautiful old mill and two unspoiled villages containing 700-year-old houses still in continuous occupation. I stopped to admire a very beautiful herd of pedigree cattle, and to observe two rainbows. I wasn’t making any noise, so I could (once I was out of range of the endless whoosh of the Motorway) able to hear the wind in the trees, one of the loveliest and most thought-inducing sounds known to man. I did all this without in any way disrupting, damaging, polluting or disturbing the peaceable landscape which I crossed.
Most of the roads I used were almost empty of cars (Though where they weren’t empty, the stink and noise was especially unpleasant because it broke into the peace and purity). No Wahhabi oil regime needed to fuel this journey. It could be done on sausages, toasted teacakes, fried eggs or any other easily available fuel. The wear and tear I inflicted on the roads ( a big problem these days, when repairs are less and less frequent) was minimal. I didn’t run over a single squirrel, hedgehog, fox or badger, or slay any birds.
The first disadvantage is the failure of imagination on the part of some rural drivers, who think they can go past you at 50 miles an hour at nine or ten inches distance, without inconveniencing you. Not all drivers are like this. Another disadvantage was one I didn’t notice at the time. I had, apparently, been in danger when , at around 10.00 am, I rode my machine across Magdalen Bridge in Oxford.
This is one of the loveliest stretches of road in the world (and would be lovelier without any cars), as it provides the first, slowly opening prospect of Oxford’s curved High Street, celebrated in verse (‘The streamlike windings of that glorious street’, W. Wordsworth) and in a fine painting by J.M.W.Turner. But, as I now know, it is fraught with unseen perils. A person whose name I shall not reproduce here went on to Twitter yesterday morning, to boast: ‘Just resisted the urge to kick Peter Hitchens off his bicycle on Magdalen Bridge’ .
Did he mean it? It is rather worrying if so. As restraint weakens in our society, how long before such threats become actions? Would the police be interested ? (of course not, they’re much too busy refusing to open the gate). He seemed to be boasting of his own self-restraint. Had I been in a big fat car, of course, it would not have crossed his mind to rush in the road and kick my vehicle. Is this why unpopular politicians resort to cars, rather than take the Andrew Mitchell option, and sensibly pedal through the congested streets of London?
But really, here, I have set out the simple arguments why, back in 1978 or thereabouts, I began cycling to work in London. There were no bicycle lanes, no helmets, and most of my colleagues thought it was a sort of madness to do so. At best, it was regarded as eccentric. I thought then, as I think now, that cars make the world uglier and make us dependent on oil in a way we really could do without. I also happen to think that, after cigarettes, cars are the principal cause of ill-health, whether it be back problems, heart disease or any of the other many problems caused by lack of exercise, in our country. And that is not to mention the thousands of needless deaths and injuries which are caused by motor vehicles, few of them reported because they happen one by one, but each a vast tragedy in the lives of those involved.
In those days I counted myself an environmentalist. I joined Friends of the Earth, because I reckoned I was a friend of the Earth. I thought I should simply make my personal contribution to reducing this – and I was astonished, over time, by the benefits. I still recall, the first time I rode up Primrose Hill on the way home, the terrifying dizziness I felt as my heart, for the first time in years, started doing its job again, dislodging globs of fat and gunk from my artery walls. I knew for certain that, even if bicycling wasn’t doing me any good, not bicycling had been doing me harm. I’m amused to this day when left-wing persons are surprised that I ride a bicycle. It doesn’t compute, for them. Nor does my support for railway nationalisation. But that is because they simply don’t understand what conservatives are, or what they think.
I also noticed on Twitter than a source which looked very much like a manufacturer of cycle helmets was having a go at me for saying (on the Jeremy Vine show at about 12.30 pm on Tuesday)that I wasn’t convinced of the arguments for such helmets. Don’t they have an interest? Could their view be influenced by it?
By the way, can anyone explain to me an oddity of modern traffic lights? Being a law-abiding person, I stop at red lights. This morning I did so at a junction, and waited, and waited, and waited for the light to change. It didn’t, and for far longer than usual. There was no other traffic, in any direction, as it was quite early. Then, when a car came up behind me, it instantly switched to green. Do these things now have sensors, which respond to cars, but not to bicycles? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
I’ve also noticed that on streets in London where there is a succession of lights, they seem to be phased in such a way that only an Olympic cyclist could possibly pass through more than one without having to stop. Whereas cars , with their greater acceleration, can keep up continuous motion, cyclists, who have to make a personal physical effort to accelerate away from a standing position, are repeatedly halted. Does anyone know how this is arranged and calculated?
Now, back to hanging for a moment. Yes, I was teasing when I pointed out the correlation (not causation, remember everyone) between climate and murder in the USA. Though I do think that in this case the real link has more to do with the former existence of slavery, a catastrophic curse on America as a civilisation, there is more to it than that. I am quite certain that the calculating crook, of the type one would hope to deter by having an effective death penalty, is not significantly deterred by the feeble street theatre of ‘execution’ in any US state. It’s only designed to fool people, and of course (like all such things, including the New Labour project’s supposed right-wingness) it manages to fool a fair number of unthinking people at both ends of the political spectrum
As I so often say, the delay is so great, the likelihood of being executed so small, that these executions ( alas) serve much more to keep certain politicians and parties in office than they do to restrain murder. This is most notable in those states where the death penalty officially exists, but where it is never carried out.
Calculating criminals, whose lives are at stake, pay more attention to the facts, and less to propaganda.
Calculating criminals, whose lives are at stake, pay more attention to the facts, and less to propaganda.
A person calling himself Martin Narey, also on Twitter, attacked me for what I’d said, saying that the State of Louisiana had(I think ) 150 times as much gun crime as Britain, despite having a death penalty. Is this the same Martin Narey who used to be a prominent bureaucrat in Britain’s pointless warehousing organisation, known as the prison system?
I don’t know, but in any case, I was referring to knife *and* gun crime, and I think knife crime is currently very serious in this country (gun crime will come, be sure of it) . More important, Louisiana, ‘has’ the death penalty in much the same way that Hampshire ‘has’ hurricanes.
As far as I can gather, Louisiana has executed 28 murderers in the last 36 years. But it has something in the region of 500 murders a year, around twice the murder rate in New York . On 10th January 2010, the major local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, reported that ‘State’s death penalty becoming a rarity ; Bordelon execution was first since 2002’
‘Thursday's execution of Gerald Bordelon, happened only because the convicted killer waived his appeals, hastening his death by many years. His was the first execution since 2002, when Leslie Dale Martin was executed for the rape and murder of a Lake Charles woman in 1981.
'The dramatic decline in Louisiana executions since 1987, when the state briefly led the nation in that statistic, comes at a time when, nationally, both executions and the imposition of new death sentences have waned significantly.’
The report said that Texas ‘still executes convicts at a steady clip’. I’ll come to that in a moment.
Bordelon, by the way, had strangled his 12-year-old stepdaughter, after kidnapping her at knifepoint and forcing her to, well, I won’t go on, it’s too distressing, look it up if you must. There was no doubt of his guilt. He showed police where he’d put her poor defiled body. But the crime was committed in 2002, and he was convicted in 2006. And he waived his right to appeal. And in the period during which his was the sole execution, approximately 5,000 murders were committed in that state. Call that a death penalty? Call it a deterrent? Oh, do come on, Mr Narey.
So what about Texas? Since 1976, Texas has executed 480 people (an average of about 13 a year) . But Texas has a population of nearly 26 million, more than five times that of Louisiana. Its annual homicide rate is now around 1,250. So, that’s roughly one execution for every 100 homicides. And are they speedy? I would say not. Among the most recent to be executed is Marvin Lee Wilson, put to death in August this year, who committed his murder in 1992.
I’d be interested in any sources for more detailed statistics on this, such as numbers off death sentences passed, compared with numbers of executions, average times spent on death row before execution, numbers of condemned murderers dying of old age on death row etc. But as far as I can see the death penalty in the USA is a great big red herring, whose purpose is political and not aimed at imposing justice.
Oh, by the way, yes, 'A Warning to the Curious' was a reference to the wonderful M.R. James ghost story of that name. Do not, I advise you, 'experiment' with things you do not fully understand. The results may be permanent, and unexpected.
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24 September 2012 4:21 PM
Street of Shame
Swearing at the Police is wrong, and foolish too.
I have to say that even in my Trotskyist marching days I didn’t swear at the police. It would have struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a bad idea for all manner of reasons. Though it wasn’t because I, then or ever, thought that police officers were tender plants who would wilt at the sound of expletives. It was just that if they didn’t like it, they were rather better-placed than most people to make trouble for me.
But that’s a particular point. Though I don’t always succeed, I try very hard to keep from swearing at anybody, especially anybody who can’t hit back. I have a feeling – which I’ve explained here before – that swearing is a display of power, a way of letting someone know that he can’t hit back. I did also once, as an experiment, try swearing back at one of those louts who tells you to **** off when you ask him to pick up the litter he has just dropped. It was curiously unsatisfying. Perhaps my plummy voice isn’t menacing enough, but I ended up just feeling a bit soiled, worried about becoming what I had beheld. So these days I tend to riposte cheerily with ‘How unimprovably witty and trenchant!’, which at least has the virtue of baffling them.
There are many other arguments against the level of bad language in modern Britain, and I still stand by my view that our culture is much too relaxed about four-letter words. They’re there for moments of grave stress and danger, and also as a warning that the next step will be violence. Make them too common, and, like any other currency, they’ll lose their value and their power, and we’ll also lose an important safety zone between civility and blows.
We’ve all heard the story about the soldier who (as soldiers do) used the f-word and the c-word as others would use punctuation . When one day he dropped a General Purpose Machine Gun on his foot (this hurts) he stood mouthing silently for about a minute, unable to think of anything suitable to say. He hadn’t any words in his vocabulary to cope with the occasion.
So I’m not very sympathetic to Andrew Mitchell who, as far as I know, swears rather too much. Nor am I a friend of his. Nor do I support his party, nor seek to defend the government he helps to sustain. Nor do I care at all whether he stays in his government job or quits. I’d go further. I’d say that if he quits, the incident will have provided a useful safety valve for our unresponsive, arrogant elite, who can pretend, with such sackings that ordinary people ( or ‘plebs’?) have some say in the government of the country. They don’t, of course. Personally, I’d rather be called a ‘pleb’, and have some influence over events, than be smarmed by politicians and have my views utterly ignored. I’m quite proud of having my traceable origins in the Portsmouth slums and, further back, in the Wiltshire and Cornish countryside.
I didn’t write anything about Mr Mitchell’s Downing Street confrontation last week because the capital punishment issue took up so much time and space, and also because I had a nagging voice in my mind saying ‘Yes, it’s wrong to swear at the police. But isn’t it also wrong for the police to be as officious as they often are these days, and have we heard the whole story?’
Plus, as a cyclist, I’ve noticed a petty but annoying development recently, by which bicycles are banned and blocked from places where cars are allowed. How can this be right? A letter in this morning’s ‘Guardian’ summed up my feeling by correctly pointing out that if Mr Mitchell had been sprawled, emperor-like, in the back of a big fat armour-plated ministerial car, he would have been waved through by the very same officers who ordered him to get off his machine and walk through a side gate.
So why was he held up when he was riding a bike, a more democratic and far cheaper form of transport, leaving aside any contentious green and environmental considerations? Could it be because the police, like too many of us, see the car as badge of status, and the bicycle as a sign they are dealing with a weaker, less important person, what you might call a ‘pleb’?
I might add that Mr Mitchell was on his way *out* of Downing Street, so there was no doubt he had already established that he had permission to be there. There was no great need to check his credentials to let him out.
According to the original story, he was told ‘ security rules mean they open the main gate as little as possible’.
Is that so? So do they keep two or three ministerial or ambassadorial cars waiting in convoys, inside and outside , until there are enough of them to justify opening it? And do they tell their impatient passengers that if they wish to leave sooner they must get out of their cars and walk through the pedestrian gate? Do you know, I rather doubt it.
If anyone watched the gate all day, I think they’d find it was opening and shutting the whole time, and opening it for Mr Mitchell (or anyone else) on his bike really didn’t make much difference to the daily tally. Short of shutting it the whole time, and building a tunnel for the occupants, it’s going to have to be opened quite a lot. So why not for a cyclist? I wonder how many cyclists pass through each day, and how many cars and vans? After all, here’s a conundrum. It’s illegal to ride a bike on the pavement, but legal to ride it on the road, because it’s a vehicle. So why must it stop being a vehicle when it comes to opening a gate designed for vehicles? Again, it seems to come back to the second-class status of bikes and their riders.
So Mr Mitchell, despite his unpleasant foul-mouthed outburst, might have a sort of case.
Then other doubts come trickling in. How did this story reach the ‘Sun’ newspaper, exactly? Who told the ‘Sun’, and on what terms? We’re told that tourists and members of the public were said to have been ‘visibly shocked’. Have any come forward to say so? Did these outraged individuals tell the ‘Sun’ about the incident? Or did someone else? If so, who?
Were the outraged members of the public interviewed as potential witnesses by the outraged police officers? There are enough of them (police officers I mean, not outraged ones necessarily) around there, on both sides of the gate, to do this if necessary. I’m faintly concerned about this because the tourists who hang around Downing Street are mostly from abroad and wouldn’t have known who Mr Mitchell was (most British people wouldn’t have done, then, either) . They might not even have known he was swearing, foreign swearing being a completely different thing from ours. And it’s a noisy location. The last time I bicycled past it, which may have been last Wednesday, as it happened, there was a very noisy demonstration on the other side of Whitehall, which seemed to be something to do with legal protection for prostitutes, or ‘sex workers’ as they are now termed. The word ‘SLUT!’ was being used quite vigorously, if I remember rightly, cutting through the mighty roar of London’s traffic. Though not ‘Pleb!’ or ‘****!’.
Since then we seem to have learned a bit about the police officers involved. One was a woman. A connection, which seems to me to be pretty tenuous, was made with the murder of two policewomen in Manchester. This is a horrible event, but it doesn’t actually have much to do with this much less important moment in our national life. They considered arresting him under the Public Order Act, or so we are told. Well, why didn’t they if they were so appalled? Chief Whips are not above the law.
The evidence against him could then have been tested, first by the CPS and then on oath in a court of law. This, increasingly, seems to me to be the most satisfactory ending. It’s been suggested that if Mr Mitchell disputes what has been said, he should either sue the officers or quit, but I think a criminal court would be a better place.
There’s also a sad thing to add, about how police officers in general (some nobly resist, and I know it) have been transformed from a fairly genial bunch of public servants, generally ready to do a bit of give-and-take with anybody, into grim-jawed and humourless robocops, festooned with machine-pistols, tasers, handcuffs and big clubs, and got up like soldiers in some future fantasy of hunger and chaos.
When, long ago, I worked at the House of Commons, the coppers who guarded the building were of the genial type, big, often bearded, wise, infinitely experienced, discreet and humorous, and boy, did they work at knowing who all the MPs were. The moment the election results were in, they got hold of the leaflets and made picture directories. Within a week or two of the new Parliament assembling they could greet every member by name. Significantly, they still wore the old uniform of tunic and helmet, and I am quite sure this made them behave more like sworn citizens in the office of constable, and less like cops (the unlovely word the ‘Sun’ likes to use to describe British policemen and policewomen these days).
This was fantastic security, of course, better than any computer, because they also knew instantly if they saw people in parts of the building who shouldn’t have been there.
In those days, there were just a few crowd barriers at the entrance to Downing Street. And the coppers on duty were the old sort. The ludicrous, hideous Ceausescu-style gates that are now there had not yet been built, and ‘security’ wasn’t the ultimate, unanswerable excuse for shutting off politicians from the public that it has since become, though by then we had had nearly 20 years of the IRA blowing up London, a much greater material threat than the nebulous ‘Al Qaeda’ menace.
I am old enough to remember when we ‘plebs’ could walk along Downing Street just like any other street – I recall taking part in a demonstration *in the street itself* as Ted Heath was trying to form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe in February 1974. You could have ridden your bicycle in and out, Chief Whip or not, and nobody would have cared. You could probably have left it leaning against the wall, honestly. The deeply sad thing is that this recollection should now seem so strange and hard to believe. Yet it was so.
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Death and the Maiden
By ‘Maiden’ in this case, I mean the virgin commenters who come here and lecture me, without taking the trouble to check the index or read my books. I don’t mind diffident comments from people who haven’t done these things. I can’t expect everyone to do their homework. But I do mind assertive, lofty ones, and sniffy ones. If you want to be assertive, lofty or sniffy, please *check what I have written and said first*. Mr Stephenson, for instance, tells me a lot about the past operation of the Death Penalty in Britain, as if I didn’t know. Good for him, but he could have got much of this information out of the chapter on this subject (‘Cruel and Unusual’) in my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’. I think I have often recommended this chapter to those interested in my detailed position. The book can be obtained through any decent library. I am asked how I can support the ‘non-arming of the police, yet the the arming of the citizenry? ‘Surely’, the wonderfully named Mr Holmes, writes,’ it should be the other way round. Why does it make sense to give criminals guns, but not the cops?’. Well, I never said we should *give* guns to criminals. And in fact I support the lawful freedom of the law-abiding population to possess firearms, though it’s not a freedom I would want to exercise myself, or would urge anyone else to exercise, so it’s going a bit further to say I urge ‘the arming of the populace’. But here’s the point. Where gun ownership is illegal, criminals will be the only people who own them. Why? Because, they don’t mind about breaking the law, and because no society can be so sealed that guns do not circulate in it. I believe it is true that no gun crime has ever been committed by a first offender.
**NB (these words added at 2.5 pm on Monday 24th September) It has been correctly pointed out to me by a kindreader that the above statement 'no gun crime has ever been committed by a first offender' is wrong. Thomas Hamilton, the Dunblane killer, had no previous convictions (though the Cullen report shows that he was a highly suspicious character who had many times attracted the attention of the police and in my view he should have been denied a firearms licence long before he committed his horrible crime). I should have phrased the above more carefully. I mean that crimes such as armed robbery are never committed (as far as I know) by first offenders.
As for the police, unless they are severely restrained, they will develop into an engine of oppression (the reason why Parliament repeatedly rejected suggestions of a British police force, until Peel developed his brilliant scheme of unarmed constables without special legal powers.(See also ‘A Brief History of Crime’ , a book anyone interested could read with profit) . A death penalty, which can be used against police killers and murderers in general, is actually essential for such a system of ordered liberty to operate Our liberties have diminished ever since hanging, and the principle of punishment in general, were abolished. The two are directly connected. ‘Oliver’ says that hanging will make criminals shoot all the witnesses. What is his evidence for this assertion? It certainly did not happen here when we had the penalty, whereas it did during the Wormwood Scrubs police murder (post abolition) discussed in my original article. On the contrary, the absence of a death penalty so that the sentence for armed robbery is not profoundly different from the sentence for murder *does* mean that it is a reasonable gamble for the robber to kill the witnesses. There is some suggestion that this is what has happened in the USA since the effective abolition of the penalty there ( see below) ‘Stranger murder’, that is, the murder of someone by a person wholly unknown to him, is the category that has increased. I don’t know what Mr Rawlings is trying to say, but he seems unfamiliar with my views on the bombing of Dresden ‘Rex’ says that ‘killings by (so called legally held) shotguns are becoming a regular occurrence now’ Are they? Where are the figures on this. I was under the impression that legally-held weapons are hardly ever used in the commission of crimes in Britain. This was certainly the case the last time I researched the issue, though this was some years ago. Alan Wylie wins this week’s award for most outstanding failure to check the index. He says (oh, joy) : ‘If capital punishment is a deterrent to criminals carrying guns, how come in the US the states that have capital punishment also have the highest rates of police being shot while on duty i.e. Texas, Florida, North Carolina, while the states that do not have capital punishment have lower rates of police murders, even though they are often the most populous states. Really Hitchens, you must instil some research and rigour into your right wing rantings.’ Really, Mr Wylie should instil some research into his standard-issue fashionable opinions. As I have explained many times here, the death penalty does not exist as a realistic prospect in the USA, and has not since the 1960s. The minority of murderers who are executed, even in death penalty states, die about ten years after their crimes. Most murderers will die of old age waiting for the exhaustion of an appeal process which has been used by liberal campaigners to obstruct the penalty. Many states which officially maintain the death penalty never in fact impose it at all. Therefore the statistic ‘the states that have capital punishment also have the highest rates of police being shot while on duty’ is of no use unless the user then analyses the frequency of the application of the penalty, relative to the number of murders committed. As I have said before, a much better correlation is that between climate and crime. The hotter the state, the more the crime. But if any state *really* reintroduced the death penalty, you might see a signgificant difference.
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