Britannia Radio

05 November 2011 10:19 PM

We have failed to keep faith with the men who died for us

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Some actions ought to be unthinkable. Even the lowest, dimmest lout ought to know that you do not defile monuments to the dead. Till a few years ago, the worst crook in Britain would have stopped himself from ripping a bronze plaque off a war memorial.

Those who claim that this country is not falling to pieces need to explain why such crimes are now becoming common.

Something has disappeared from the hearts of the people who do this. They are different from any generation that lived before. Let me explain.

Long ago, a retired Serviceman said to me that the least anyone could do, when he saw a war memorial, was to pause and read some of the names on it. It was a tiny thing compared to what the dead had done, but it would in some way help to make their deaths worthwhile.

I have tried to follow this advice. I read the names, often seeing several members of one family listed on a small village cross and forcing myself to imagine what this must have meant.

But above all I recall that these were all the best of their generation at every level, of all classes and all political beliefs, hundreds of thousands of lost fathers who never had children, or never saw their young grow to adulthood, a great legion of lost craftsmen, lost scientists, lost engineers, lost inventors, lost teachers, lost poets, lost architects, lost statesmen, whose absence still haunts this country almost a century later.

I read the inscriptions, which now reach across to us from a time so different that it is astonishing to think that it is in fact so close. Some are reproachful or unsettling – the line ‘Live thou for England – these for England died’ goes straight to the heart of the matter.

The one that haunts me most of all is in Fleetwood in Lancashire, which states fiercely: ‘Principles do not apply themselves.’

Another writes of ‘those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom... let those that come after see to it that their names are not forgotten’.

Many are fine works of art – the mud-encrusted soldier reading a letter from home on Platform 1 at Paddington Station is one of the great sculptures of the 20th Century. They were almost all created and paid for by people who belonged to the older tradition of art and poetry, in my view far superior to the silly chaos of what followed.

And now they are being pillaged, demolished, smashed, stripped, overturned and desecrated by people who probably cannot even read what is written on them and would not care if they could.

If that is not a fit subject for a moral panic, I do not know what is. These metal thieves are no better than grave-robbers, and we have bred and raised them among us. These sombre and thoughtful shrines are not glorifications of war, but memorials to beloved people who went to their deaths in the belief that they were saving civilisation.

It seems that they failed.

Easy divorce equals lost children - it's a simple equation

When will they make the connection? More than 40 years of divorce on demand, and nobody can work out how to ensure that the child victims of marriage break-up stay in touch with their fathers or their grandparents.

Nor can they devise a workable or fair system for child support.

As for the laws on custody and property after divorce, it is amazing that any man has the courage to get married when he knows what might happen to him if things go wrong.

And of course there is the subsidy for fatherless families. You don’t have to take my word for the effects of this, by the way. Listen to Adele Adkins, the singer, who presumably knows a bit about her generation.

She recently recalled that ‘the ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’

Could this mass condemnation of so many children to broken homes and/or the absence of fathers have anything to do with this week’s Barnardo’s survey, showing that nearly half of us think the young are becoming feral? I think it could.

Clooney's right: Bullyboy 'fixers' are the real rulers

Why are political professionals so foul-mouthed? The real stars of George Clooney’s clever and enjoyable new film about politics, The Ides Of March, are the backroom fixers and spin doctors who turn rather average individuals into TV superstars and propel them into office.

And they swear all the time about everything. I am sure this is completely realistic, from what I have seen of their real-life equivalents here.

I think they do this to prove that they have power over their underlings and can humble them without risking retaliation. Using dirty language to someone who cannot answer back is a form of showing off.

Interestingly, they often swear at the politicians who are supposed to be their bosses. Because, of course, the smiley Blair or Cameron figures who are sold to the public are not really in charge. The backroom fixers, who create them and mould them, represent the real power, which in the U.S. and increasingly in Britain comes from big-money backers. As Bob Dylan sang long ago ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears’.

If we want to get control of our country back, we have to devise a way of liberating politics from such people. Nationalising the existing parties, by giving them taxpayers’ money, is definitely not the answer.

But doesn’t it say so much about the Labour and Tory parties, that if you held a flag day for either of them it would raise a few old Spanish coins and some buttons? They have to rely on big donors because they long ago deserted their roots. Why is it considered so eccentric to say it is time to get rid of them and start again?

Feeble Frank is going to pot

Parents and teachers who want to stop children taking illegal drugs get little help from the Government.

The feeble website ‘Talk to Frank’ (which we pay for through our taxes) more or less assumes that drug-taking is normal, with lots of matey, slang-infested chat.

A much better resource for parents and schools, ‘Drugs – it’s just not worth it’, is now available from www.cannabisskunksense. co.uk. I strongly recommend it.

Mr Belisha’s Beacons, and the Passing of the Zebra crossing

It seems that the old British Zebra crossing, feebly imitated in the USA with narrow-striped crosswalks, is to disappear almost everywhere. Instead we will have Pandas and Pelicans, as they are childishly called.

An increasingly immoral and lawless British people are ignoring Zebra crossings more and more. I know this very well from personal experience. It is deeply unwise to rely on drivers stopping even if you are already in the middle of the road. Last year in the middle of Manchester I was almost run over by a driver who simply did not have a clue that he was supposed to stop. There were two policemen guarding a party conference a few feet away, and I recruited them to explain to the driver that he should have stopped. In my view he should have spent the rest of the day, and possibly the night, in the cells, and had his car crushed into a cube, but the police are much too busy protecting the political elite to bother with minor things like homicidal carelessness on the road.

Most of my fellow cyclists, of course, have concluded that zebra crossings don’t apply to them at all, behaviour that sends me into red mist territory. Their lives all depend on other road-users abiding by the rules. Don’t they owe a similar duty to pedestrians, next down in the food chain?

The alternative is the misleadingly-named ‘pedestrian controlled’ crossing, where you press a button, and wait for as long as a minute for a traffic light to change to red. In many cases, it is possible to cross well before this long wait is over, so drivers are frustrated to come up to a red light which is serving no purpose. Also, because pedestrians tend to think that drivers are legally obliged to stop at these lights (which of course they are, but so what?) they don’t bother to give a wave of thanks and stalk across without so much as a nod. Both these features of modern life harden the hearts of drivers, who grow ever more impatient of stopping without being thanked, or stopping for no good reason.

I jeer at the name ‘pedestrian-controlled’ because in fact the old Zebra crossings are genuinely pedestrian-controlled. You have an absolute freedom to step out and expect traffic to stop for you. The new devices take that freedom away from you, and award it to a variable and unpredictable timing device which operates according to no known law. In my home town there are some crossings where the light invariably changes in ten seconds, others where it can take more than a minute, others where it can vary between 20 seconds and more than a minute, for no observable reason. One in particular seems to be programmed to wait until there is no traffic approaching from either direction (quite a while) before uselessly changing.

Also, they bleep to signal the (often very short) time in which the pedestrian has lawful priority. This must be infuriating for anyone who lives nearby.

When these crossings were introduced in 1934 by the then Transport Minister, the odd but interesting Leslie Hore-Belisha, they had only the flashing yellow beacons which came to bear his name, plus some chrome studs in the road. The Zebra stripes were introduced only in the 1950s. Other countries copied the idea , but with differing success. I remember being warned before a first visit to Paris in 1965 that in that city the Zebra-like crossings in that city were not to be taken seriously by anyone who wanted to live long.

The French simply did not have the same self-restraint which we then possessed (and have now lost) . In the USA, where walking is a sort of crime against the national religion (yes, the car), crosswalks are largely ignored. In fact, when I tried to slow down for them when I lived there, I was hooted contemptuously, and soon gave up, like everyone else. By contrast, the ‘Stop’ sign was universally observed, so proving that Americans do have the capacity for self-restraint, but only towards their equals, ie other drivers in large cars. Interestingly, the USA has the same view of pedestrians as continental countries, that they are a nuisance, and so it is an actual offence to cross the road against the lights, even if there’s nothing coming.

On a visit to Canada, I was ashamed and embarrassed when I drove as I would have done in the USA. For there, with the far more British style of manners and self-restraint, crosswalks are (or were) observed. Not realising this, I drove across one in front of some waiting pedestrians, and blushed deeply when I saw in my rear-view mirror the Canadian drivers courteously stopping as they might have done in Pitlochry or Ludlow. My only relief came from the fact that my rented car had New York plates, so everyone had probably assumed the worst anyway.

These details of life are fascinating insights into the real differences between us and others, and the real difference between the past and the present. I’m sorry that the Zebra crossing is dying, but I’m not surprised, given all the other things that are passing at the same time. In Soviet Moscow, there used to be dead pedestrians lying beside the roads, as often as not, sometimes attended by grimy ambulances. In Cairo and Teheran, you sometimes can’t cross the road at all, unless you can assemble a crowd to cross with you, or get a local friend to act as a human shield.

We are All Doomed

High up in the Chiltern Hills, looking south across the Thames Valley towards Windsor Castle is the small village of Penn. Readers of the novels of Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one, another one) will know it well from her enjoyable book ‘In a Summer Season’. Mrs Taylor was an atheist, but did occasionally visit its parish church, where she would have seen a rare survival, the remnants of a ‘Doom’, or painting of the Last Judgement. It was rediscovered during repair works in 1938 (bits of it were very nearly thrown away) . If you, too, visit this church, you will find that you have to switch on a special light to view it . The plaque by the switch says (or used to say, it is some time since I visited) ‘For Doom, Press Switch’, which is alarmingly ambiguous.

There are several other similar paintings though only a few of these survivors, like that in Penn, were done on wood. Most were painted directly on the church walls and so have more thoroughly vanished, though there’s a startling example in the parish church at South Leigh near Witney . Sometimes the same scenes are done on glass, as in the astonishing windows at Fairford.

These came to mind at the weekend , which I spent in the lovely English cathedral city of Lincoln. Perhaps because I have spent so much time abroad, I’m more and more convinced that T.S.Eliot was right when he said (in ‘Little Gidding’) that the end of all our exploring will to be arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. My own country, almost inexpressibly beautiful at this time of year, is illuminated for me by a hundred memories of elsewhere - Russia, in and around the sad but very moving city of Moscow, rural Maryland, the Valley of the Elbe, Brandenburg, the Alps, the intimate country of Burgundy near Beaune, the French and German Rhineland, the high country of Zululand, the Golan heights, Persia between Esfahan and Qom, the extraordinary landscape on the railway line between Rawalpindi and Lahore, Bryce Canyon in Utah, the bare, hard hills and the long climb on the railway from Kashgar to Urumchi, the lakes and mountains west of Peking, the hills above Mandalay or the impossibly clear air of the Falkland Islands.

For me, a couple of days in Lincoln is as rewarding and as much of an adventure, as a visit to Prague. In fact the two cities have something in common, narrow ancient streets climbing up a steep hill to a fortress and a cathedral. But while Prague has its miraculous concentration of baroque buildings, somehow spared from all the wild destruction of the 20th century, Lincoln has in its cathedral one of the greatest buildings on the planet.

I love the English cathedrals and have spent a rather large part of my spare time visiting all of them and then doing it again, and the only thing which worries me about this is that more of my countrymen do not copy me. There are, it is true, plenty of sights to see abroad, and I have tried to view as many of them as possible. But why do we ignore the astonishing treasures we have here? And why, I might add, do we so foolishly resent paying to see them? How else can they be preserved for the next generation?

Earthquakes and storms have destroyed much of what used to exist in Lincoln. Decay and sectarian fanatics have destroyed quite a lot more. Even so, the West Front of the cathedral remains one of the most arresting sights in this country. Floodlit at night or catching the evening sun, or sombre in the mist and drizzle, the immense and loving detail, combined with the vastness of the structure, are an example of what architecture can do when it really tries.

This really is frozen music, and I will leave it to each person who sees it to work out which passage of music it most thoroughly represents - something involving trumpets at one stage or another, almost certainly , but also deep and powerful drums as in Purcell’s ‘Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary’.

For a large part of the west front, now being rather wonderfully repaired, is a frieze of the Last Judgement, to which you may respond with nervous laughter or serious thought, depending on your disposition. The little depiction of Dives ignoring Lazarus, as the beggar has his sores licked by dogs, is among the earliest parts to be restored, and the sculptor has made a fine job of recreating the style of the long-dead master whose work appears so simple and natural but is of course nothing of the kind. It is easy to look at because it was so hard to carve.

What are we to make of these things? The same theme is often to be found among the greatest paintings in the greatest art galleries of the world. Do we treat it as a meaningless fairy tale? As a ghost story with no power to touch us ? Or as a real if allegorical warning that what we do here really does matter somewhere else? I prefer the last. The world will end for all of us, not on some hilltop, gathered into a throng by some mountebank preacher, but on the unknown day when we will all die. And then what? We have no idea.

But pass through the great doors of the Lincoln Minster and see what was done by people who believed that their lives were subject to judgement, as we do not, and wonder if it is quite so easy to dismiss them as ignorant, benighted semi-savages.

What remains of the glass of the two great circular windows at the crossing, the Dean’s Eye and the Bishop’s Eye, is art of the first class, executed with enormous technical skill. Look at the building itself, inside and out, on a scale, and possessing such grace that it puts to shame almost every British structure of the last century (I except the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, which is of course a noble effort to maintain this dying tradition). Look at the carving on the great stone choir screen, and see if you can find it in you to scorn the masons who created such lovingly detailed beauty with tools so simple that we would call them crude (if you have time, travel the modest distance to the nearby Southwell Minster and look at the carving there, for further proof that our dim, clumsy, ignorant forebears possessed skills and devotion that we largely lack).

If our vain and puffed up assessment of ourselves is true, and the past was such a dark age of ignorance and superstition, why did that age of superstition produce art and music so immeasurably better than our own?

I think we might do well to be rather more modest about our achievements. It is interesting that the modern Britain, of motorways and shopping malls and hypermarkets, largely ignores or sweeps round the old cathedral cities. In London, people walk past Westminster Abbey without glancing at it, unless they are tourists. The one fully modern city which contains one of these masterpieces is Peterborough, where the Cathedral sits in strange solitude in a city centre that has no organic connection with it at all.

Could it possibly be that the difference between the two worlds has something to do with the fact that our forebears felt there might be a higher judgement than the one of their fellow-creatures, so easily fooled by public relations and smiling exteriors? Maybe doom has something to be said for it.

Judas, the First Socialist, and other issues

I’ll get on to Judas Iscariot in a moment. I am asked how I define poverty. I would define physical poverty as severe want – not enough food to eat, no access to clean water, absence of proper shelter either from great heat or from cold, inadequate clothing, untreated sickness and no possibility of medical help, conditions so squalid that cleanliness is impossible, severe overcrowding. These are the features of poverty that I have seen in various forms on my many travels into remote parts of the world.

I had an interesting discussion about this on Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five Live programme a few weeks ago, and was encouraged by a contributor from Africa who agreed with me that poverty of this kind does not really exist in this country. But he added that hardship undoubtedly does exist. Of course much of that hardship stems from not having things that others do have, and from a feeling of injustice and rejection. But this is not poverty, which in my view is an absolute condition of severe material want, not a comparative condition of being worse off than your neighbour. I would add, as I often do, that I suspect that there may be something very close to absolute poverty among the lonely old people of this country, trying to make ends meet on no more than their pensions, regarding any further appeal to the welfare state as a shameful (and therefore unthinkable) form of charity which they are too proud to accept.

Many of these live very pinched and deprived lives, though even they are materially rich beside the rural dwellers of North Korea or millions of the less fortunate in Africa and parts of India. But the measure of poverty as an arbitrary proportion of average income is just a device by which socialists justify their unending raid on the possessions of the wealthy and productive, to finance the unproductive and penniless state in its vote-buying projects. Some of these projects may incidentally do good. But their aim is not to do good, but to make their authors feel good about themselves, while increasing their power. It also incidentally shrinks the power of the productive middle-class to be charitable in their own right, as they have handed over a large part of their charitable duty to the state.

That is why I am so fond of Christ’s rebuke to Judas, and the account as a whole. The passage is as follows: The Gospel according to John, 12th Chapter, beginning at verse iv; Mary (not Mary Magdalene, but Mary, sister of Lazarus), has just taken a pound – or 454 grams in the Rocky Horror Bible - of very costly Spikenard ointment and wiped Jesus’s feet with her hair, ‘and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment’. ‘Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray him : ‘Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?’ This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus :’Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always’.

As so often, there’s a lot packed into this, notably the realistic recognition that there will always be poor people in the world , and those who wish to help them will always have the opportunity to do so. But it is the biting observation that Judas, like so many since, is pretending a concern for the poor to cover up other, less noble motives, that really goes home with a satisfying thud. There is no new thing under the sun. I’m accused by some of saying that Christianity has no part to play in politics. I’ve no doubt, as it happens, that it does have a part. But that it is an individual part, in that the man or woman who embraces Christian principle may be involved in politics, in any party which is not actually wicked, and use his or her individual influence to good and Christian ends. But I do not think there is such a thing as a ‘Christian policy’ or a Christian party’, or that any grouping should arrogate Christianity to itself as its own possession. This is because Christianity is not about earthly power, but about love. And if you think about it, power is the opposite of love – and the less love there is, the more power you will generally find.

That’s enough religion for this posting (though I plan another contribution on a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral which may be of interest to the atheist fancy). On other comments, Mr McDonald (or ‘McDonald’ as he perhaps prefers to be addressed) is wrong in particular in saying that the MPs’ expenses story was offered first to our sister paper ‘The Daily Mail’ (it wasn’t, though I should point out here yet again that I do not write for the ‘Daily Mail’, but for the ‘Mail on Sunday’ , a separate paper with its own editor and staff) and wrong in general, that the anti-EU rebels were specially spendthrift on the expenses gravy train ( I believe one of them had the lowest claims of any MP, whereas Mr Cameron himself, as I so often point out, was among the highest claimers – quite legally –for his nice country house, despite being personally rich. There’s a book to be written on the selective nature of the coverage of MPs’ expenses, and the selective nature of the way in which some were chosen for the public pillory and others exempted). Many of the rebels are, I believe, newly elected since the rules were changed). So the comment is both incorrect and irrelevant.

If people come here to plug the BNP, they must learn that they will earn themselves my utter contempt. I had thought we had got rid of them, but perhaps now the BNP – which is now tiny and very short of money - has emerged from its latest furious inner faction fight, it now has time to start spreading slime again. This revolting grouplet has been thoroughly dealt with here, and the index is full of clear explanations as to why no civilised person should dirty himself by association with such a spectacularly disreputable organisation. Reminder: It was founded by a Judophobe Hitler-worshipper, so pitifully obsessed with Jews that he once launched an investigation into Nicholas Griffin’s ancestry because he thought his (Griffin’s) father had rather a large nose, and still peopled with Holocaust-deniers and similar. The BNP’s noisy flag-wagging patriotism is wholly opportunist. So is its, er, critique of Islam. Mr Griffin, it might be recalled, once travelled to Tripoli to seek aid from the late Colonel Gadaffi. Not long afterwards he was consorting with the Ku Klux Klan. Is there nobody Mr Griffin can’t bring himself to meet? There is nothing to hope for from this squalid and pathetic faction, whose existence does grave damage to every cause it claims to espouse.

As for UKIP, I only attack it when I am foolishly urged to support it. I have explained why( again see the index) and only those who want me to attack it should sing its praises here or pointlessly seek my endorsement of it, which is never going to come. I cannot think of a more certain way of ensuring that opposition to EU membership returned to the braying margins of political, life, for the rebel Tories to have anything to do with this hopeless Dad’s Army, a group of people so politically naïve that they thought they could make use of Robert Kilroy-Silk. He tied them up, hand and foot, with their own cravats. The Gang of Four came closer to succeeding than most people realise. Their failure was not predetermined, though Margaret Thatcher bears some responsibility for it, as I shall one day be free to reveal. Oh, and to Howard Medwell ‘Why *not* “Pestilent”?’ It’s a good 18th-century pejorative term, much in need of revival.

How these 80 patriots can save us from 57 soppy liberals

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

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.

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

I back the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, (pictured) against the pestilent rabble that has cluttered up the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral.

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?

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.

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.