This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column Actually I didn’t much like the Fifties, which I remember as bleak and chilly and smelling of damp raincoats, stale tobacco, suet pudding and cabbage. Not to mention the chilblains. It is the fate of those who don’t much like the present to be told all the time that they are yearning for some bit of the past, when they’re not. Even so, as I try not to laugh too loud at the pretensions of the supposedly advanced modern world, I cannot help being fairly sure that the past 50 years or so have not been a matter of unmixed progress. I remember winters when the sea at the end of our road actually turned to ice, winters when the milk on the doorstep froze into a sort of dairy rocket, with the foil top perched on the solidified cream, winters when our garden was full of gigantic snowballs for weeks on end. And as far as I can recall, my father still went off to his work each day and so did everyone else. The trains and buses continued to run, the roads and pavements were swiftly cleared of ice and snow. In that Britain of town clerks, rural district councils, bus conductors with peaked caps station masters, the Gas Board, unreformed county boundaries, yards, feet, inches, pounds and ounces, we somehow managed to be far more efficient than we are in the days of chief executives, Metropolitan Authorities, Network Rail, centimetres and kilograms. And I think more and more that we have mistaken newness, modernity and packaging for reality. Yes, of course, the narrow, shabby restrained country of 50 years ago had its drawbacks. What is interesting is how many of them we have managed to retain in our frenzy of change – the deep and wasteful class divisions, the bad diet and general poor health, the neglect of the old, the grim cities – though now they are grim in a different, more modern way. Our supposed progress, by contrast, is often a shallow matter of possessions, plastic and paint, accompanied by a shocking level of incompetence and defeatism, which afflict us when we face any sort of challenge – from foot-and-mouth disease to a few inches of snow. At Christmas, in some strange but powerful way, the past lives in our minds as at no other time. Perhaps those of us who still remember it should recognise honestly during this moving and reflective season that in our haste for change and modernisation, we have lost at least as much as we have gained. The BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, deserves credit for being the first to begin to grasp the problem of the Corporation’s heavy cultural and moral bias to the Left. As well as admitting that such bias was rampant in the Eighties, he has now said several things that go to the root of the matter. Here are two of them: ‘Avoiding party political bias is a subset and only a subset of impartiality. It’s possible for all major parties to agree on a given subject and for there still to be a legitimate opposing view which should be heard and scrutinised’, and: ‘People sometimes confuse impartiality with centrism, ie a bias towards more “moderate” world-views as opposed to more “radical” ones.’ This is strong, thoughtful stuff, not that he will be glad that I think so. But then, I’m biased. As far as I can find out, there is absolutely no historical warrant for the idea that King George VI was urged to use the f-word by his speech therapist during his attempt to cure his stammer. So why did the makers of the film The King’s Speech feel the need to insert a scene in which this happens? Even if it did happen, there are other ways of letting us know that it did, apart from showing it. If the British Board of Film Classification had any courage or resolve, they would have stuck by their decision to give the film a ‘15’ rating and so sharply reduced its market, solely because of this passage. The producer, director and scriptwriters could not have been certain that the BBFC would cave in. They were prepared, therefore, to risk significant commercial damage for this cause. I know that, to get their laughs, many modern ‘comedians’ rely almost completely on the f-word’s fading power to shock. But I think there is more to it than that. In much of the entertainment industry there is a militant desire to destroy taboos and upset the gentle, for its own sake. Revolutionaries love to debauch and corrupt. How better to do this than to portray the trembling, retiring Bertie, who never wanted the throne and was happiest at home with his small family, spitting out dirty words? I’d say shame on them if I thought they understood words of more than four letters. Evidence piles up that Britain has secretly recognised a Palestinian State, to please the Arab world. Careful readers of the list of newly commissioned officers from Sandhurst will find among those who ‘passed with a view to being commissioned into the armed forces of their countries’ (the official wording) two cadets destined for the as yet non-existent army of an as yet non-existent ‘Palestine’. A few weeks ago, the Foreign Office told me that a Press notice from our Jerusalem consulate, describing William Hague’s ‘first visit’ to this ‘country’, was a mistake. They refused to say if anyone had been reprimanded for it. Our national duplicity in this part of the world knows no bounds, but if there is a War Against Terror, which side is the dodgy Ramallah regime on? A former KGB agent in London between 1977 and 1984, Yuri Kobaladze, writes in a Moscow newspaper: ‘Some of our best sources were British journalists . . . I had some real friends among those English reporters.’ I have long suspected something of the kind was going on and I think Mr Kobaladze would be doing us all a favour if he would kindly name some names. Not because Mr Cameron has to keep him there but because he wants to keep him there. A Minister who blabbed conservative thoughts would have been sacked in minutes. The Liberal Democrats are not the junior partners in the Coalition, but Mr Cameron’s indispensable allies against the Tory Party which still cannot understand how completely it has been kippered by liberals and social democrats. This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column Here’s an example. Our absurd obsession with terrorism is encouraged by long-faced ‘security experts’ and used to justify enormous state spending on surveillance and other creepy activities. Currently we are in a new frenzy of concern about suicide bombers. We examine the life of Taimour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly, who blew himself up in Stockholm, and wonder how we could have known that he would do this, and so have stopped him. We couldn’t have. His life did not follow any obvious pattern which would lead to this disgusting end. Compare this with the known fact that each year 100 entirely innocent people will be killed at random by mental patients released on to the streets by our indefensible ‘care in the community’ policy. Many of these killers give many clues to their likely future actions. Many will have had their brains scrambled in the first place by using the technically illegal drugs a feeble State has allowed to spread throughout society. The deaths they cause are often just as gruesome as those in terror attacks. The victims’ families are just as stricken. By a simple reform, the ending of ‘care in the community’ and the recreation of proper mental hospitals, we could avoid almost all these killings. By following the severe Swedish policy of penalising drug use, we could reduce the number of unhinged people in our population. But we do neither. Just as we refuse to take the basic steps which would enormously reduce crime and disorder, especially reintroducing the preventive police foot patrols which everyone wants, which are promised constantly, but which never happen. If there is a covenant between government and people, it is based on one thing: the ruler is given power in return for his ability and willingness to guard the population from evil and danger. Is something similar now happening among the nation’s militant homosexuals? I only ask because I really cannot see why a homosexual couple would have sought out Chymorvah, the seaside hotel currently being sued for its policy on allocating bedrooms. Has anyone asked this pair how often they stay in such establishments, or how they came to choose it? I haven’t seen the answer if so. But, alas, as he proved beyond doubt last week, he is an ill-informed, susceptible nitwit who has swallowed whole all the dishonest and mischievous propaganda of the ‘legalise drugs’ lobby. Lots of people who ought to know better fall for this stuff, when a tiny bit of research would show them it is folly. You can always spot them, when they talk about ‘Prohibition’, as if Eliot Ness of the Untouchables were stalking the land, smashing up drug dens with an axe, when in fact cannabis possession is effectively legal (most users get off with a meaningless warning, if the police bother them at all) and millions of pounds of your taxes are spent on dosing criminal heroin users with legal methadone, to keep them stupefied and happy. They also babble about a ‘war on drugs’. Well, if the lavishing of money and social workers on deliberate criminals, who are encouraged to continue in their criminal way, is a ‘war’ then the word doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. These thought-free burblings will earn Mr Ainsworth applause from supposedly intelligent media commentators such as Simon Jenkins, once editor of The Times, who really ought to know better. And of course they are given enormous prominence on the BBC, which I suspect is crammed with former and current drug abusers, just like David Cameron’s Tory high command. But they will earn him the curses of parents whose children’s lives have been – or are yet to be – ruined by drugs, and of a society which will find out too late what it is like to live in a state where pleasure and self-stupefaction have driven out self-discipline and the work ethic. What, you may wonder, leads a middle-aged white-collar trade unionist into the wacky world of drug legalisation? I have no idea. Was it something they discussed during those meetings of the International Marxist Group that Mr Ainsworth once attended? Or is the moustache a giveaway? Like so many of his age group, did Mr Ainsworth see the 1967 release of Sergeant Pepper – and the druggies’ anthem A Day In The Life – as a seminal moment in the cultural revolution? There, we were told, the evil Serbs were oppressing the saintly Kosovars. Our Armed Forces (having been forbidden to fight our actual enemies, the IRA) were ordered into action in support of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a sinister outfit of evil repute, as all serious observers knew at the time. Now, and not a moment too soon, the grisly truth about the KLA has begun to emerge, including credible stories of victims murdered, as they pleaded piteously for mercy, so that their corpses could be harvested for organs. I have no doubt that Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia committed many evil deeds. But I did not think then that they were the only people in the Balkans who were guilty. And the crude anti-Serb propaganda which was used to bamboozle the British people into supporting the bombing of Belgrade was a dry run for the worse manipulation which took us to Baghdad. Will we learn from this that it is unwise to go to war on the basis of emotive propaganda? I doubt it.
25 December 2010 10:16 PM
My father got to work even when the sea froze... then came 50 years of 'progress'
Finally, a glimmer of light at the biased BBC
Why put filth in the mouth of our King?
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18 December 2010 8:40 PM
Our gutless rulers get in a flap over one unhinged killer - but do nothing to stop 100 others
Sunday, 26 December 2010
What got Vince Cable into real trouble was his hostility to Rupert Murdoch, who has a mighty say in our Government thanks to a secret pact with David Cameron. But why is Mr Cable still in the Cabinet?
Modern Britain encapsulated: Sitting deep in conversation with each other in a suburban chain coffee bar, two PCSOs in uniform and presumably on duty, ingesting large hot drinks surmounted with volcanoes of whipped cream. In the lavatory, not 15ft away, in constant use by mothers and young children, a junkie’s used syringe rolling on the floor. Happy Christmas, anyway.
Our elite and our media are always worrying about the wrong things. We fret and legislate about matters we cannot alter, and we do nothing about things we can change.
Our current governing class lacks the courage, the decisiveness or the sense to do this. It prefers the noisy pretence to the dogged and unspectacular reality. That is why it is time it was replaced.
Militants looking for trouble
Irish Republicans used to travel many miles to attend, and be offended by, the Orange Parade at Drumcree in Northern Ireland. When they got there, they would stand about for hours, making sure they were thoroughly upset by the ghastly sight of red-faced, middle-aged men hobbling by in bowler hats.
It seems to me that the law on this subject is now being used as a sword for militants rather than as a shield for the wrongly persecuted. Who wants or needs this?
A dopey day in the life of ‘Bob the Beatle’
I rather like Bob Ainsworth, a relatively straightforward man among the menagerie of slimy, fanged creatures that populates Westminster.
Does he imagine himself sitting among the Fab Four, suspended above reality atop a sweet-smelling cloud? It would explain a lot.
Kosovo, a dry run for our great Iraq disaster
The seeds of the Iraq War were sown in Kosovo.
Now that their hero Julian Assange has a) fallen victim to the European Arrest Warrant and b) is the subject of anonymous accusations of sexual assault in which there can be no indisputable evidence, can we expect the same Left suddenly to discover that these things – over which they have long been complacent – are pernicious threats to liberty and justice?
If the Irish people wish to abolish their admirable laws protecting unborn children from murder, then that is up to them. But it is no business of bureaucrats in Strasbourg calling themselves a ‘Court of Human Rights’.
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