Brilliant
Do you still need proof our rulers are lying to us? Just take a train
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Once you have resigned yourself to the fact that this is now a mad country with a mad Government, you can – as I do these days – enjoy the comedy.
You can also understand how it works. Last week, for instance, the railways were told that they had to survive on less money, and be more punctual.
Actually, the privatised railways are a huge scandal, under which taxpayers have for years lined the pockets of railway operators in return for a worse service that costs far more than the old British Rail.
But I’m not going to bother you with the woes of the sad minority who travel by train.
The point is quite different. The rail regulator’s decrees will be obeyed. The trains will get worse, and yet they will get more punctual.
How can this be? Well, just as one of this country’s main solid exports these days is containers full of rubbish, its most successful activity is the production of optimistic statistics. You’ll have noticed that things get worse. But at the same time the official figures get better.
And it was while travelling by train that I discovered the principle that governs this activity. I noticed that my train would tear through the countryside at great speed, and then stop, sometimes for ten minutes or more, at all the stations. When I looked at the departure indicators, I saw that this was not a delay caused by the theft of the signal cables or the failure of the engine. It was planned.
The train was sitting there because it was not yet timetabled to leave. The timetable had been padded. Such a long time was allowed for the train to get from station to station that it would almost never be late – at least as far as the statistics were concerned. In this way, the train companies do not have to pay compensation to passengers.
For example, 25 years ago, the fastest train on a route I know well took 45 minutes to complete its journey. Now, the same train does the same run in 60 minutes. So, by the standards of 1988, all the trains are late. But the official figures trumpet a steadily rising standard of punctuality. And they are true. But they are also a lie. It doesn’t take much of a mental jump to see how the same thing has been done with A-levels and GCSEs.
Crime, as I have discussed here, is manipulated by simply reclassifying wrongdoing so that millions of actions simply cease to be crimes, and are not pursued or recorded. Crime down. Misery up. Job done, as Mr Blair might have said. Unemployment falls because people are cleverly no longer listed as unemployed, even though they would like to work and haven’t got jobs.
The arithmetical magic by which the Government claims to be cutting public spending while increasing it, and cutting borrowing while borrowing more, doubtless has some similar fiddle behind it. But the really astonishing thing about this Wonderland of Blatant Lies is that so many people believe what they’re told.
My advice is to keep an eye on the value of the pound sterling abroad, and on the price of gold.
People elsewhere in the world are beginning to realise what sort of country this is, and some figures cannot be fiddled.
The Great War - our greatest mistake
The First World War was the most important event of modern history, rightly compared to the fall of the Roman Empire in its significance.
And this country’s entry into that war was the biggest mistake ever made by British politicians, which is saying something. Of course, all serious historians know that Germany started it, but the really puzzling question is, why did we join in?
It was absurd to think we could stop Germany dominating Europe. In an effort to obstruct the inevitable, we sent our best young men to die, squandered our wealth and foreign investments, and lost both our naval supremacy and our empire.
If Germany had won quickly in 1914, there would have been no Hitler, no Bolshevik Revolution, no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mussolini.
As it happens, the ‘September Programme’ for a united Europe, drawn up by Berlin when they thought they had won in autumn 1914, looks suspiciously like the modern European Union. Except that the September Programme did not envisage Britain as a subject province, whereas we are one now.
So, after two immense wars and incredible amounts of death and destruction, we are worse off than we would have been in September 1914, had we stayed out. No doubt we would have had to adapt to a German-dominated continent, but with our navy and empire intact, we would in my view have kept far more independence than we have now.
The only things that remain the same, after 100 years, are the pitiful calibre of our politicians and their crazed enthusiasm for foreign wars whose ends they cannot know, and do not seem to care about.
British power on the scrap heap
And so HMS Ark Royal ends her days in a Turkish scrapyard. The death of a great ship is always a sad thing, but this is also a national milestone. Power like this, once lost, is gone for good.
You can also understand how it works. Last week, for instance, the railways were told that they had to survive on less money, and be more punctual.
Actually, the privatised railways are a huge scandal, under which taxpayers have for years lined the pockets of railway operators in return for a worse service that costs far more than the old British Rail.
The point is quite different. The rail regulator’s decrees will be obeyed. The trains will get worse, and yet they will get more punctual.
How can this be? Well, just as one of this country’s main solid exports these days is containers full of rubbish, its most successful activity is the production of optimistic statistics. You’ll have noticed that things get worse. But at the same time the official figures get better.
And it was while travelling by train that I discovered the principle that governs this activity. I noticed that my train would tear through the countryside at great speed, and then stop, sometimes for ten minutes or more, at all the stations. When I looked at the departure indicators, I saw that this was not a delay caused by the theft of the signal cables or the failure of the engine. It was planned.
The train was sitting there because it was not yet timetabled to leave. The timetable had been padded. Such a long time was allowed for the train to get from station to station that it would almost never be late – at least as far as the statistics were concerned. In this way, the train companies do not have to pay compensation to passengers.
For example, 25 years ago, the fastest train on a route I know well took 45 minutes to complete its journey. Now, the same train does the same run in 60 minutes. So, by the standards of 1988, all the trains are late. But the official figures trumpet a steadily rising standard of punctuality. And they are true. But they are also a lie. It doesn’t take much of a mental jump to see how the same thing has been done with A-levels and GCSEs.
Crime, as I have discussed here, is manipulated by simply reclassifying wrongdoing so that millions of actions simply cease to be crimes, and are not pursued or recorded. Crime down. Misery up. Job done, as Mr Blair might have said. Unemployment falls because people are cleverly no longer listed as unemployed, even though they would like to work and haven’t got jobs.
The arithmetical magic by which the Government claims to be cutting public spending while increasing it, and cutting borrowing while borrowing more, doubtless has some similar fiddle behind it. But the really astonishing thing about this Wonderland of Blatant Lies is that so many people believe what they’re told.
My advice is to keep an eye on the value of the pound sterling abroad, and on the price of gold.
People elsewhere in the world are beginning to realise what sort of country this is, and some figures cannot be fiddled.
The Great War - our greatest mistake
The First World War was the most important event of modern history, rightly compared to the fall of the Roman Empire in its significance.
And this country’s entry into that war was the biggest mistake ever made by British politicians, which is saying something. Of course, all serious historians know that Germany started it, but the really puzzling question is, why did we join in?
It was absurd to think we could stop Germany dominating Europe. In an effort to obstruct the inevitable, we sent our best young men to die, squandered our wealth and foreign investments, and lost both our naval supremacy and our empire.
If Germany had won quickly in 1914, there would have been no Hitler, no Bolshevik Revolution, no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mussolini.
As it happens, the ‘September Programme’ for a united Europe, drawn up by Berlin when they thought they had won in autumn 1914, looks suspiciously like the modern European Union. Except that the September Programme did not envisage Britain as a subject province, whereas we are one now.
So, after two immense wars and incredible amounts of death and destruction, we are worse off than we would have been in September 1914, had we stayed out. No doubt we would have had to adapt to a German-dominated continent, but with our navy and empire intact, we would in my view have kept far more independence than we have now.
The only things that remain the same, after 100 years, are the pitiful calibre of our politicians and their crazed enthusiasm for foreign wars whose ends they cannot know, and do not seem to care about.
British power on the scrap heap
And so HMS Ark Royal ends her days in a Turkish scrapyard. The death of a great ship is always a sad thing, but this is also a national milestone. Power like this, once lost, is gone for good.
*****
I’m sure I should be worried about all this surveillance by the Americans and GCHQ, but I’m inured to it by my years as a correspondent in Moscow.
As I travelled to the Soviet capital by train, I was approached in the dining car by a mysterious and attractive older woman, who offered to work for me (years later she confessed to me she had at the time been the mistress of a KGB general). She quickly supplied me with a cleaner and driver, who had full access to my flat and knew where I was at all times.
When my brand new imported Volvo was laughably forced to undergo a safety inspection by the Soviet traffic police, it came back with the driving mirror loose, because they had put a microphone behind it but couldn’t work out how to screw the mirror back in.
Every few days, my phone would stop working, and I would have to go round to the exchange, where I would hammer on the door and shout up the number to laughing girls who leaned out of the window and told me it would be fixed by the time I got home. It was. We all knew why it had stopped.
I am far more worried by the power of the modern British state, not to watch me but to slowly reclassify what was once normal into thought-crime.
As I travelled to the Soviet capital by train, I was approached in the dining car by a mysterious and attractive older woman, who offered to work for me (years later she confessed to me she had at the time been the mistress of a KGB general). She quickly supplied me with a cleaner and driver, who had full access to my flat and knew where I was at all times.
When my brand new imported Volvo was laughably forced to undergo a safety inspection by the Soviet traffic police, it came back with the driving mirror loose, because they had put a microphone behind it but couldn’t work out how to screw the mirror back in.
Every few days, my phone would stop working, and I would have to go round to the exchange, where I would hammer on the door and shout up the number to laughing girls who leaned out of the window and told me it would be fixed by the time I got home. It was. We all knew why it had stopped.
I am far more worried by the power of the modern British state, not to watch me but to slowly reclassify what was once normal into thought-crime.
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