This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Some will be threatened. Some will find their seats have vanished thanks to Mr Cameron’s creepy reform plan. As long as they submit to him, they have no future. They will achieve nothing worth having for themselves, or for those who voted for them. The things they believe in will still be scorned by the cold, ruthless liberal clique that runs the Tory Party. Britain will stay trapped in the burning building that is the European Union, gaining nothing and losing independence, liberty and prosperity. But look at what happens to the mere 57 Liberal Democrat MPs who voted for the EU on Monday. They are much loved by Mr Cameron and his circle. They need only to whisper a desire and it is granted – the latest being the ghastly plan to make us all live on Berlin Time. Unlike the principled Tory rebels, these Liberal Democrat MPs stand for very little. They are mostly in Parliament because of what they are not, and what they don’t think or don’t say, rather than because of who they are or what they believe in. If 57 soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentities can push David Cameron around with the constant unspoken threat of walking out of the Coalition, think what 80 pro-British, anti-crime, anti-immigration, pro-education MPs could do to him by actually walking out of it. He would then have to face a proper opposition – after all, David Davis disagrees with Mr Cameron much more than Ed Miliband does, and about far more subjects. But to have any impact, the 80 must quit the Tory Party, which last week finally and irrevocably turned its back on its voters. As long as they stay inside it they are powerless serfs. Worse, they are a human shield protecting Mr Cameron from the emergence of a proper patriotic movement. Following the example of the ‘Gang of Four’, who nearly 30 years ago came within an inch of destroying and replacing the Labour Party, they should declare independence. From then on, if Mr Cameron wants their support, he will have to ask for it nicely, rather than by threatening, insulting and bullying them. And such a grouping would at last provide a real alternative to the three near-identical BBC-approved parties that nowadays compete for our votes. My guess is that such a breakaway would do well at any by-election in an existing Tory seat, and by 2015 would be at least halfway to replacing the sordid and treacherous official Unconservative Party. Then we might have something to hope for. What is there to lose? Its potential leaders know who they are, and how to act. Now is the time to do so. You wouldn't find Jesus in a St Paul's tent St Paul’s may be a bit commercial, but I don’t see how else it can pay for the upkeep of one of the ten greatest buildings in Europe, recently superbly restored. The Church of England gets no tax money. And the Cathedral’s continued existence amid the soaring towers of mammon is an important reminder of the faith and beliefs that actually sustain our wealth and freedom. As for the protesters, why are we all supposed to be so nice to them? They seem to think that by brainlessly saying they are against ‘capitalism’, they automatically become good. ‘What would Jesus do?’ they ask, with a whining implication that He would be one of them. Tripe. He despised politics, and rebuked Judas Iscariot (the first socialist) for going on and on about the poor to make himself look good. As you’ll recall, he wasn’t as good as he looked. Christianity is not about having the right opinions and telling everyone. It is about who you really are, and what you really do, in secret, when nobody is looking. Is smashing gravestones funny, Fiona? Newsreader Fiona Bruce (pictured) was the focus of the viewers’ discontent. They felt she had been far too light-hearted in her presentation of a rather dark item, in which a callous moron was shown driving a stolen JCB digger through a cemetery, smashing and scattering gravestones. Some may be unmoved by this, or even think it amusing. But there is a large class of people who, for one reason or another, find the desecration of graves obscenely shocking and grim. I am one of them. But at the end of the item, Ms Bruce spoke only to the London trendies, and forgot about everyone else. She exclaimed ‘Unbelievable!’ – as if it was all a bit of fun – while lifting her hands in the air and grinning with apparent amusement. Then, half-laughing, she handed over to the weatherman. The BBC knew the matter was sensitive because of the complaints they had received. Yet a spokesman – while flatly refusing to allow me to see the BBC’s own recording of the programme – had the nerve to insist Ms Bruce’s response was ‘of pure astonishment at the extraordinary scenes that had resulted from the driver’s trail of destruction’. Ms Bruce herself, in my view rather more wisely, declined to comment at all. For I have now seen a recording of the programme, despite the BBC’s efforts to keep it from me, and after watching it several times I think the complainers are right, and the BBC version is severely misleading. This shows yet again that BBC people move in a world quite unlike the one where most people dwell. And that the Corporation, paid for by a tax levied under the threat of fines and prison, still arrogantly refuses to accept that it owes its paymasters any courtesy, or is obliged to be open when it has blundered. The REAL tragedy behind the summer 'riots' Much fuss last week when the Ministry of Injustice released figures about the backgrounds of those arrested after the mass thieving and destruction (the so-called riots) of last summer. The liberal Left, which fools itself that crime is caused by non-existent ‘poverty’, seized on suggestions that many of the alleged offenders came from ‘deprived’ backgrounds (which in Left-speak appears to means ‘unable to afford the latest widescreen TV’). Well, they can believe that if they want to. But I am sure that if anyone had checked, it would have turned out that more than 90 per cent of these people came from homes where there was no father reliably present. (NB: it’s the absence of the father I am emphasising, not the presence of a single mother.) This is the single biggest predictor of bad outcomes in any child’s life, but it is also one our welfare system vigorously encourages. I expect that is why the Government didn’t try to find out the facts. Sometimes one sees the vast gulf of understanding which lies between oneself and other people brought up in an entirely different world. My reply: So far, so good. I said that. He continues 'The first policy that you support is capital punishment. You acknowledge that the death of innocents would be an unintended consequence of this policy - as you still support the policy you must therefore accept the death of innocents as an unintended consequence.’ My reply, so far, so good, though I would say it *might* be an unintended consequence of a death penalty, not that it would be, as it happens. I also said (and will repeat later) that all conceivable steps should be taken to avoid such innocent deaths. Recognising their inevitability is not the same as being indifferent to them. It is certainly not an argument for not taking steps that could prevent innocent deaths. The steps that I advocate (to ensure that innocents are not executed) are comparable in aim and effect to the enforcement of the drug laws that I advocate. There is a multiple misrepresentation of my *purpose* in advancing this argument. I am not saying that we shouldn’t care about innocent deaths, and only a person consumed with furious hostility towards me could imagine that was what I was saying. I am saying that those who advance the danger of innocent deaths as a sole argument against capital punishment (and there are many Tory and other politicians who do so, while claiming to accept arguments about deterrence) are not restrained from other policies by similar or greater dangers of innocent deaths. Therefore this cannot be their real objection. Either they have another objection, which they conceal because they are ashamed of it or know it to be feeble. Or they have not thought about it. Or they are avoiding the responsibility which falls on any government, to protect the people from harm. He continues:’The other policy that you support is keeping illegal drugs illegal, or in other words, not introducing a third poison when we already have two. You advance the "innocents might die" argument as a case for this policy.' Do I? Where did I advance that argument, precisely? One small part of my argument (in this instance, though I have been conducting it here and elsewhere for many years on many differnet fronts ) is, I rather thought , that people who took such drugs in the belief that they are ‘soft’ or ‘safe’ might well fall victim to irreversible mental illness, thus ruining their own lives and the lives of those who loved them and/or depended upon them in any way. There are, on occasion, deaths from drug abuse, but these -though avoidable and tragic - are exceptional and not in themselves the burden of my case. Nor, as it happens, is the question of mental illness. This is just the part of my case which my pro-drug opponents cannot deny or avoid. They are entirely relaxed about this country’s adoption of a third-world pleasure-based morality – of which legalised drugs are a major feature - which will destroy its culture, its society, its freedom and its economy if unchecked. They either think this is a good thing, don’t believe it is a problem or don’t care. I am not concealing this argument. I make it all the time to anyone who will listen. I’m just not wasting it this week on morally corrupt cultural revolutionaries (and self-interested drug lobbyists) whose reaction will be ‘So what? I want to join the Third World, provided I can stay rich and comfortable’. For them, I point out that their selfish pleasure is bought at a high price –the risk to the sanity and happiness of others. I hope that by doing so I will at least make them ashamed of their greedy, self- centred contempt for their fellow humans. Whereas if there were properly enforced laws against possession, these people, and many others besides, would in many cases not be so stupid as to ingest a drug which is in truth hugely and unpredictably dangerous. This is a simple policy matter - where a policy reduces damage to innocents. It is not in any way a policy which accepts an increase in innocent deaths as the price of its success, as it happens. Cannabis rarely if ever kills those who use it. A law properly punishing possession of cananbis does not risk innocentt deaths. Worrying about mental harm experienced by guilty deliberate criminals - for cannabis users are by definition criminals under law – is rather different from worrying about deaths among the innocent. It is also not my sole argument He adds:’ In the case of cannabis specifically, whilst innocents would not die, they might suffer from serious mental illness, which is a consequence that you have previously stated to be just as serious. You accept that innocents might die in policy 1, which you support. You then use the "innocents might die (or come to serious harm)" argument to support policy 2. That is, as you say in your own words above, inconsistent.’ No it isn’t. I am sorry, this silly-clever stuff is too ingenious for its own good, because it is founded on mischief rather than serious reason, and so misses the fundamental point of what I am saying. That is why I could not when it was first presented, and cannot now, see how anyone could honestly believe it to be a serious point. I am only dealing with it here because the drug lobbyists are apparently so desperate that they have, pathetically, persuaded themselves that it is a serious point. To say that the ‘innocents might die’ argument is generally inconsistent, and therefore useless *as a sole argument against capital punishment* and as a sole argument *advanced by people who accept innocent deaths as the price of other policies they desire*, is *not* to say that it is never justifiable to advance the reduction of pain and death as a justification for any policy. Nor is it to say that the law should be indifferent to the deaths of innocents. Obviously diligent steps should be taken to ensure that innocent persons are not executed, as I have said time without number. Would it then be ‘inconsistent’ for me to say that diligent steps should be taken to stop people going mad from smoking cannabis. ? To say that the argument ‘innocents might die’ does not work as a sole argument against the death penalty is *not* to say that we should not be concerned over reducing the deaths of innocents – indeed, the death penalty itself, in my view, reduces the deaths of innocents, and that is one of its many purposes. Finally, my argument concerns the faults in objections to the adoption of a law which might have the consequence of innocents dying. It does not concern objections to the non-enforcement of a law, whose non-enforcement undoubtedly leads to harm to innocents, if not deaths. So tell me again, where my alleged 'inconsistency' is. I note that this absurd diversion has taken the pressure off the drug-legalisers, who until it was introduced were struggling to explain why the existence of two legal poisons could justify the legalisation of a third. I suspect that is the point of it. They are beaten yet again, so rather than admit it, they have changed the subject. One said that wanting to leave the EU was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. The other attacked Mr Cameron’s broken pledge for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Both knew that the Tory whips would destroy them if their names became known. So their words were spoken by actors, as if they were dissidents in some foreign dictatorship. This extraordinary behaviour, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ultra-respectable Analysis programme, tells you all you need to know about the Conservative Party’s real position on Brussels, and plenty of other things. For of course, this isn’t just about boring old Brussels. The EU is symbolic of all the other great issues that divide Mr Cameron from Tory voters – mass immigration, crime, disorder, education, marriage and morals. I have known since I first spotted him trying to weaken the anti-drug laws that Mr Cameron was not a conservative. I have spoken to former colleagues who have concluded that he believes in nothing at all, but I think it is much worse than that. I think he is an active, militant elite liberal, who despises our country and its people, just as much as any Islington Marxist does. What I could never understand was how so many men and women with the usual complement of eyes, ears and brains (and nostrils) managed to fool themselves so completely about him. How many times did I read weighty commentators (weighty because of the huge number of lunches they had eaten with their political insider chums) proclaiming that Mr Cameron was a ‘sound Eurosceptic’? Or that he had ‘deep conservative instincts’? I seem to remember one such even praising his cricket. I still remember the look of rabbit-like fear on his smooth face on the day he broke his pledge of a Lisbon referendum. He was too cowardly to take a question from me, while that pathetic burst balloon, William Hague, sat silent in the front row of the press conference, endorsing his chief’s poltroonery. But still the Tory loyalists wouldn’t see it, fooling themselves with a babyish dream that Mr Cameron had a secret plan, that once in office he would tear off his outer garments and reveal himself as SuperCam, a real patriot and conservative. Well, now he has torn off his outer garments, ordered his cringing followers to vote against an EU referendum and revealed that he is in fact the reincarnation of Ted Heath, the man who betrayed Britain to Brussels and got his way by bullying and shameless dishonesty. Nobody is making him do this. It is his own true self speaking. I told you so. I was right. And I am now enjoying myself telling you again. But when will you do anything about it? Nearly as bad, most of our media reported the barbaric spectacle in gleeful tones. God preserve them from ever being at the mercy of a lynch mob themselves is all I can say. Shame, also, on those who referred to this squalid crime as an ‘execution’. Why is this word these days applied to its opposite? An execution follows lawful due process. It is not another word for a gang slaying or a lynching, such as happened to Muammar Gaddafi. Any new state that begins with such an event will be poisoned and polluted by it ever afterwards, just as the communist world was blighted by the Bolshevik massacre of the Russian imperial family in 1918. The nebulous new Libyan regime is already torturing its prisoners, who in many cases have been seized without formal legal procedure. From now on, all those who supported this ill-advised intervention will share responsibility for every lynching, whipping, unjust detention and miserable dungeon in the New Libya they helped to make. Doesn’t anyone know any history? The day that Colonel Gaddafi overthrew King Idris in 1969, Tripoli was full of rejoicing crowds, no doubt similar to those who celebrate today. I am pleased to say that a planned march against immigration in Boston, Lincolnshire, has been called off. The organisers rightly feared that it would be taken over by sinister and creepy factions. It occurs to me - though of course it isn’t true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the ‘British Patriotic Party’, and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers. And then these people could latch on to every decent protest and wreck it. By contrast, look at what is happening in Switzerland. There, a mainstream political party isn’t ashamed to oppose mass immigration on perfectly civilised and reasonable grounds. The Swiss are on course for a referendum that will almost certainly vote to close their borders after a failed experiment with leaving them wide open.
29 October 2011 10:04 PM
How these 80 patriots can save us from 57 soppy liberals
For the Avoidance of Doubt – I do not work for MI5
An Evening without Richard Dawkins
The Barmy Logic of the Drug Legalisers
Black Labradors Bite Master Shock
This is no SuperCam - just Ted Heath Mk 2 (... complete with his own Thought Police)
New Libya, same bloody way of doing business
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Why are the 80 Euro-rebels still in the Useless Tory Party? They know that they were right, and David Cameron (pictured) was wrong. They also know that if they stay under his command he will carry on treating them like insects.
I back the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, (pictured) against the pestilent rabble that has cluttered up the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The BBC forget far too often that they are paid for by you and me. That is why I was so angry last week when they refused to show me a recording of a recent TV news bulletin which had attracted many complaints.
I am publishing this as a free-standing post because I feel it must be resolved properly, and want to be certain that the person involved is aware of the risks he runs.
Some days ago, in a response to my column of last Sunday (‘This is no SuperCam’), a Mr ‘Harold Stone’ posted a comment. I should say here that some of his comment was edited for legal reasons but - according to the rules which operate here - his direct personal criticisms of me were not edited. All may say what you like about me, provided it is true, or just hostile and abusive. Untruths, however, are not acceptable. The editing process also led to a delay in his words being published. But they were published. This is what he said:
He first quoted what I had said :‘It occurs to me - though of course it isn’t true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the ‘British Patriotic Party’, and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers.’
He then wrote: ‘And it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys about the effectiveness of the party system, or oppose repatriation on “moral grounds” because the other deception they peddle, about the irrelevance of racial differences, allows them to insist that an Englishman can come from Tunbridge or Timbuktu. You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services (think Ian Fleming and a score of others less well-known). Speaking as a racialist myself, that is to say one genuinely led by the facts, by observation, by reason and the lessons of history rather than pretending to be, I’d say it’s how all security services operate to discredit truth-tellers. Trotsky ordered the cadres to ignore rational argument and to make truth-telling distasteful to people. Equalitarian dogma (disguised as Christianity?) could thereby pass itself off as ‘authentic’ conservatism which, because of its ideologically driven repudiation of biology, would fail to conserve a damned thing. Again I must ask if you know what a nation actually is Mr Hitchens, you who boast about your grasp of history, and wonder what on earth gives you the right to sneer at Cameron when you display not a shred of integrity yourself on this subject, since it’s plain you know the truth deep down?’
Mr Stone is welcome to his opinions, much as I dislike them. But he appears to suggest that I am an employee or servant of the Security Service, engaging in systematic dishonesty on their behalf. He uses these pretty direct words: ‘You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services’ and ‘it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys’.
I must ask him either to substantiate this allegation with facts, or to withdraw it and offer an unreserved apology. If he does neither then, under the usual rules, he will no longer be welcome here. I think a week should be enough. In case he has not so far seen this warning (first posted yesterday on the relevant thread) I will date that week from the publication of this posting. I will listen to any reasonable request for more time but given his confident tone, I imagine he has the evidence at his fingertips and should rapidly be able to back up his claims. Or perhaps not.
This is a light-hearted diversion for the God-hating adherents to this site (to whom I occasionally fling hunks of bleeding flesh, so that I can watch them come flapping from afar to feast on it).
Maybe it will also be a rest from the tedium of responding (yet again) to the various lame and exploded ‘arguments’ of the drug lobby, for making their selfish habit even more legal than it already is. If just one of them ever paid any attention, or engaged seriously, it would make it seem worthwhile. But they never do. It’s all mechanical, destructive rhetoric they’ve got off the telly, or learned in PSHE classes.
Now, serious engagement was exactly what we got in the uplifting surroundings of Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (named after Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, since you ask, and one of the great buildings of Europe, superb inside and outside but perhaps most astonishing of all up in the mighty roof-beams that make it possible) in Oxford on Tuesday night. The Sheldonian is one of a group of buildings which in largely embody English history, as well as expressing the Royal grandeur of the restored Stuarts. They look pretty startling now, but set amid the small and muddy town that was Oxford at the end of the 17th century, they must have seemed almost impossibly majestic.
Next to it is Bodley’s Great Library, and beyond that Radcliffe Square dominated by The College of All Souls, a monument to the dead of the Hundred Years’ War, and the soaring church of St Mary the Virgin, scene of Thomas Cranmer’s great trial and renunciation of the Pope. Next to the Sheldonian is the Clarendon Building, once the headquarters of the University Press, and built thanks to the profits of the ‘History of the Great Rebellion’, the first great account of the English Civil War, written by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sheldon, a courageous Anglican who had to be ejected bodily from All Souls, by the Cromwellians, was a close ally of Clarendon, so it is fitting that buildings named after both of them stand next to each other. Three hundred yards away is the spot where Cranmer, (and before him Latimer and Ridley) were burned to death for their Protestant beliefs.
But I digress.
The American philosopher William Lane Craig had offered to debate Richard Dawkins’s book ‘The God Delusion’ with its author, in his home town (and mine) . Dawkins is around, because he has his own event in another Oxford location on Friday. But despite being in the midst of promoting a new book, Dawkins refused to come. He came up with a series of silly excuses, none of which holds water. And an empty chair was provided for him at the Sheldonian on Tuesday evening, in case he changed his mind and – yes – to mock him for his absence. Details of this controversy are all over the web, and I was impressed by the behaviour of another Oxford atheist, Daniel Came, who said Dawkins should have turned up, and had the guts to be there himself . I might say that I thought his contribution was serious, thoughtful and properly modest about the limits of what we can know. The bumptiousness and raillery of Dawkins and some other anti-God preachers was entirely absent from his discourse, and it was all the better for it.
I have to confess here that I don’t find Craig’s debating style or manner very attractive. It is too smooth and American for me – and his best moment (again, for me) came when he dropped his salesman’s manner and said, in effect, that he was sorry if he seemed too certain, and that his fundamental claims were modest ones – that the Theist position was scientifically tenable.
The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won’t try to summarise it because I’m sure I’d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.
Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain’s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.
The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins’s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn’t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.
For what Craig achieves is this. He simply retakes an important piece of ground that Christianity lost through laziness and cowardice, rather than because it lacked the weapons to defend it.
He doesn’t (in my view) achieve total victory over the unbelievers. He simply says : ‘In this logic, which you cannot deny, and in this science, which you cannot deny either, it is clear that there is plenty of room for the possibility that God exists and made the universe’. No scientifically literate person, who is informed and can argue logically, can in truth say that he is wrong.
The trouble is that so many ‘official’ Christians have more or less conceded this ground, not being very firm believers themselves, and lacking Craig’s training in logic and science.
He is the antidote to the lazy belief that in some way ‘science’ is incompatible with ‘religion’, and to the idea that all believers are unlettered morons who think the earth is 5,000 years old and that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.
This is, I’m afraid, all too often the tone of the anti-God people who come here to post. It’s settled, you’re stupid, why not give up?
It’s not settled. We’re not stupid. We won’t give up.
(NB: A note to Mr ‘Crosland’. I won’t respond to any queries he posts here - and I have a small bet with myself as to what form they will take this time - until he replies to my ‘childishly simple’ private letter to him, which he has had since August).
‘Andrew’ writes (on an earlier thread) first quoting me:
‘"Anyone who accepts the death of innocents as a possible if unintended consequence of any policy which he supports - any policy - cannot logically advance the 'innocents might die ' argument as a case against any other policy. It is inconsistent." -Peter Hitchens 4 October 2011 ‘
Regular readers here will know that I often scornfully refer to Tory MPs as ‘Black Labradors’, those hopelessly loyal dogs who endure all things from their masters and then, tails thumping and eyes shining with love and joy, are crammed into the station wagon for their final journey to the vet.
Well, I suppose you could say that on Tuesday night we saw the revolt of the Black Labradors.
But it was all the wrong way round. There they were, nearly 80 Tory MPs, all representing the views of their constituents as they are supposed to do, and they let themselves be defined as ‘rebels’.
It was they who were threatened with punishment and the ruin of their careers (should MPs have ‘careers’? I do not think so. The whole idea is all wrong ) .
The man doing the threatening was an individual elected to the leadership of his party on false pretences, on subtly spread untruths about his true feelings which enabled so many Tories, members, MPs and voters, to harbour ludicrous delusions about his true beliefs.
And he had then become Prime Minister thanks to a similar subtle hint, never made explicit, but spread through the media by willing toadies, that he was ‘sound’ on the issues that really concern conservative British people.
By contrast, the 79 ‘rebels’ were merely doing what they had said they would do and what they were elected to do, and, in a way, what they are paid to do.
It is Mr Cameron whose ‘career’ should be threatened. It is Mr Cameron who should be facing ‘discipline’ for behaviour which, even according to his loose Public School code, is fundamentally shameful – namely pledging to be one sort of Prime Minister to gain office, and then being another sort when he got there.
Now, I’m not very sympathetic to those who were fooled by this. It was plain to me that Mr Cameron was always what he now is, and I used a lot of effort, patience and time in explaining this to wilfully deaf Tories before 2010.
(By the way, I much enjoyed myself on Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Bruges Group in London, where I was able to say repeatedly that I had told them so, in October 2009, and they had then welcomed me with a response so chilly it made me believe in man-made global cooling. Last night was different. My calls for the death of the Tory Party were met with warm applause. Meanwhile, the rather absurd David Campbell-Bannerman, who has incomprehensibly returned to the Tories from UKIP, while still claiming to be pro-independence, at the precise moment when the Tory Party has rededicated itself at the altar of Brussels, must have found the whole occasion a sore trial. Too bad.)
And now I say to these ‘rebels’, that their ‘revolt’ on Tuesday night will be worthless if they do not now move rapidly towards leaving the party which dares to punish them for following their principles and representing those who sent them to Westminster. If this breach is not the occasion for such a split, then they are indeed Black Labradors. A brief spell of whimpering, even an uncharacteristic nip at their master’s silk-socked ankles, does not fundamentally alter a relationship in which the good are servile, and the bad are triumphant.
Mourning in Mexico
Mr Scott, who still hasn’t remotely answered my question about how the existence of two legal poisons, both disastrous, justifies the introduction of a third, tries to change the subject by going on about Mexico.
Mexico, like all other countries where the growing of illegal drugs has become a lucrative industry, is the innocent victim of the immorality of pleasure-seeking Westerners. It is their willingness to pay high prices for their brain-frying substances that has given the drug-gangs the power they possess.
The root of the evil, lies in the decadence of these rich and selfish criminals. To bring it to an end, therefore, we must discourage drug-taking by punishing it.
Oh, and the constant raising of the Portuguese ‘experiment’ is of little use here. Many of the claims made are at least disputed, and the word ‘treatment’ is a flat falsehood. To call it a euphemism is too polite.
It is nothing of the kind, as drug-taking is not an illness but a wilful crime, and ‘treatment’ does not stop drug use, but instead subsidises and encourages the habit. It is merely a polite way of saying that the state takes over the role of drug-dealer and thief, robbing the taxpayer to provide free pleasure to parasites, who for the most part make themselves incapable of productive work through their voluntary, pleasure-seeking habit. I wonder how long Portugal will be able to afford such a crazy response.
That way lies the end of civilisation. No proper country can afford to behave in such a way for long, as it will destroy its economy and poison its moral system. Nor is it moral to levy tax for such a destructive purpose. That road leads to an impoverished and exploited Chinese-dominated (and probably Chinese-ruled) Europe. Or perhaps to an Islamic Europe, as the Chinese may not much want to take responsibility for the mess we are making.
Just a second, but I have to point out that the current ‘revolt’ by Tory ‘Eurosceptics’ has no hope of achieving anything. Well, it has achieved one thing, to remind those who had forgotten, and tell those too dim to have realised it so far, that David Cameron is in fact a keen supporter of the EU project.
I do try to restrain my use of sarcastic inverted commas, deploying them mainly for such things as knighthoods granted to rock stars. People like me, brought up on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sir Nigel’ and ‘The White Company’, think chivalry is not attained by making lots of money from cheap music. So we find most modern knighthoods ridiculous. I’ve never really understood why people who despise tradition and the older virtues would want such archaic handles to their names.
But this ‘revolt’ is no such thing. It will not shake the power elite of the Conservative Party, a near-mediaeval group of courtiers beyond the reach of any sort of accountability. As for the word ‘Eurosceptic’, it is largely meaningless, as well as being ugly and clumsy. The two things are connected. For it is a word that seeks to hide the truth, rather than state the truth.
The ‘Sceptics’ may offer many doubts and criticisms of the European Union. But they continue to belong to a party which has the EU in its DNA. And they must by now realise that nothing they do will change that party. Yet they remain inside it, making the occasional gesture of exasperation or defiance, as they are doing tonight.
Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it – near impossible without at least one major party calling for a vote to withdraw - it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a general election to be won by a party committed to secession. And with the Tory party in the way, bed-blocking the position that ought to be occupied by such a party, that will never happen.
And here is why – the miserable fiasco of the Suez expedition, an explosion, 50 years too late, of British resentment towards the American takeover of our position as top nation.
After Suez had failed, largely but not wholly because the USA had wrecked it (it was a stupid plan anyway), the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told Guy Mollet, Prime Minister of France, ‘France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States and the Soviet Union. Nor Germany, either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world, that is to unite to make Europe. England is not ripe for it but the affair of Suez will help to prepare her spirits for it. We have no time to waste. *Europe will be your revenge*.’
This is recorded in the memoirs of the then French Foreign Minister, Christian Pineau.
Adenauer and Mollet were meeting in Paris that day (Tuesday, 6th November 1956) to finalise the founding arrangements of the Common Market, which as we see here is, was and always will be an anti-American project, though the US State Department and the CIA have never, it seems, been able to work this out.
As for Britain not being ripe, I should hope we would never be ripe for such a thing. I doubt very much whether Konrad Adenauer had much understanding of Britain – few continental politicians do, Charles de Gaulle being a rare exception. The two men, for instance jointly attended Mass in Rheims Cathedral, their continental Roman Catholicism binding them together just as it excluded the Protestant British islanders from their world.
There were at that stage many British patriots so outraged by America’s behaviour that they too felt the need for revenge. And they began to the Common Market as the vehicle for this, perhaps not caring about the price and being themselves too disillusioned with their own country’s traditions to care much about preserving them.
It still amazes me how much reasonably well-informed people care about empty - and indeed often dangerously misleading - trinkets such as universal suffrage, and so little about jewels of great price such as Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, jury trial and the English Bill of Rights.
Ted Heath, perhaps the least pro-American British prime minister of modern times, was also the most pro-EU. And it also seems to me that he was the one least moved by the grandeur of our separateness, the unique liberties secured thanks to our Island position and all that followed from it.
It is absurd to imagine that any of these people, or indeed anyone deeply involved in the British politics of the late fifties and early sixties, did not know what the Common Market really was. In fact it has always seemed to me to be the worst argument against this project, to say that we were told it was a free trade agreement and it turned out to be a plan to absorb us into a superstate, and we never knew.
Those who didn’t know, chose not to know. Although Ted Heath and the pro-Brussels faction did not wish it to be discussed, the opponents of the plan noisily proclaimed that it was what it was.
They were ‘maverick and marginal’ because we – people and politicians and media figures alike – proclaimed that they were marginal and stopped our ears to the blatant truth. Among those who did so until very late was Margaret thatcher herself who – never let this be forgotten- campaigned for a ‘yes’ vote in 1975 in a sweater patterned with the flags of the Common Market nations.
Opposing Maastricht, or the Single Market, or the Social Chapter, or every other accretion of Brussels power up to and including the Euro and the Lisbon Treaty, is just so much shouting in the street if it is not allied to a recognition that each of these things is in fact a necessary and logical part of the European project. And also let us strip ourselves of the illusion that the EU could, had we joined it earlier been designed to suit us better. Its needs and aims conflict with ours because it is continental, and we are not. That is why we have ever been able to form any lasting alliance against the Franco-German heart of the project, with any other member of it.
You can’t oppose them without opposing the project as a whole. You can’t do that from within a party which is completely wedded to that project, and which contains no mechanism through which you can influence its policy.
The logic of this seems to me to be quite clear, and quite inevitable.
Now, I am sorry that we ceded our global supremacy to the USA. How could any child of a naval officer, born and brought up in a succession of naval harbours, as they emptied of warships and sank into decrepitude or became museums, not feel that way? But I do not see why Britain, or England if it comes to it, has to choose between being a superpower or a province. Nor do I see why we must choose between the USA and the EU.
It seems to me that there is a large space between the two conditions, and between those two powers, in which a powerful, wealthy, mature and civilised nation might sit quite happily, if it wished to do so.
Though I can truly say I voted ‘No’ in 1975, I must admit I did so because, as a junior reporter on the Swindon Evening Advertiser, I uncovered a nasty piece of dishonesty by the pro-Market campaign, and had my story suppressed on polling day by a pro-Market executive -. I took my revenge by going out and voting ‘No’, though I had until then fallen for the very seductive idealism promoted by the pro-EU campaigners, and been unimpressed by the cut-rate Churchillian rhetoric of (for example) Peter Shore.
I don’t suppose I thought about it again for nearly 30 years, being diverted by what seemed to me to be the more urgent matter of the Cold War. But in recent years, especially since the end of that Cold War, it has forced itself on my attention, and I have moved from indifference to concern to alarm to a certainty that, if we wish to survive as an independent state, we must secede.
Any fool can be ‘sceptical’ about an institution or a policy. He can be sceptical about it while in fact supporting it in practice. He may do this either because he doesn’t really care, but has been put on the spot by constituents, or because he cares a bit, but not enough to risk his political career.
These are both perfectly reasonable human positions with which we can all sympathise, but they are not politics.
If we are not prepared to fight this properly, and to wreck the Tory Party to save the country – plainly more essential than ever – then we might as well go home, and accept that our country will henceforth be ruled from abroad. Which is it to be?
This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column
Two Tory MPs are so scared of David Cameron’s pro-EU thought police that they have hidden their identities when giving radio interviews on the subject.
Well, it was bunkum and balderdash, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t know about his cricketing skills, but his performance on the EU issue has been dishonest and treacherous from the start.
Colonel Gaddafi was cruelly murdered by a mob. This disgusting episode, which no decent person can approve of, is typical of the sordid revolution which our Government has decided to endorse and aid.
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