Britannia Radio

17 December 2011 9:59 PM

Don't forget they cheered Chamberlain's 'victory' too

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Sometimes whole countries can get things utterly wrong. This is usually because they prefer soft dreams to the raw truth.

We all know now that Neville Chamberlain made a huge fool of himself when he came back from Munich in September 1938 claiming to have won 'peace for our time' and 'peace with honour', and waving a worthless piece of paper in which Hitler promised that Britain and Germany would never go to war again.

But look at the newspapers of the time and you will find almost all of them crammed with sickly praise for Mr Chamberlain. He was invited on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace by King George VI and was there cheered by a gigantic crowd, many of whom would die in the war that followed.

They should have booed him - not because of what he had done but because he was fool enough to think that Hitler could be trusted. They applauded him because they did not want to be bothered by the boring details of European politics, and preferred to think that he had in fact bought peace.

Something similar is happening to us. Many people who should know better are still cheering David Cameron for his supposed mighty veto in Brussels on December 9.

They are doing this because they passionately want it to be true. They want Mr Cameron to be a patriotic conservative. But he isn’t.

They want Britain to stand up to the EU. But it hasn’t.

Mr Cameron did not in fact use the British veto. There was no treaty to veto. France and Germany were quite happy to get what they wanted by other means - France positively wanted to do so, and Jean-David Levitte, a senior aide of President Sarkozy, has described Mr Cameron’s action as a 'blessing'.

They were happier still to let Mr Cameron take the blame on the Continent - and the credit among his gullible and simple-minded 'Eurosceptic' backbenchers, who really oughtn’t to be allowed out on their own if they are this easy to swindle.

Nor did Mr Cameron save the City of London.

The French, who have never forgiven us either for Trafalgar or for not surrendering in 1940, are still determined to destroy the City. And they can do so - as long as we are idiotic enough to stay in their power by belonging to the EU.

They can and will do this through 'Qualified Majority Voting', under which Britain does not have a veto. Wishful thinking on this scale may not lead to war, as it did in 1938. But it will not help us get out of the EU, or protect us from those who pretend to be our partners, but are in fact our rivals.

Stop cheering. Start booing.

So which country will we ruin next?

President Obama wisely didn’t claim 'Mission Accomplished' when he posed with troops to proclaim the ‘end’ of the invasion of Iraq. If only it were the end.

Once the U.S. troops go, Iraq will become a new battleground between Iran, already hugely powerful through Shia Islam, Turkey, which hates and fears the growth of an oil-rich Kurdish state, and Saudi Arabia, which hates and fears Iran.

Not only was this war fought on a false excuse. It was then justified by another false pretext. And now its outcome is a far graver risk of instability and war than existed before we started.

Now, which Middle Eastern country can we mess up next?

* * *

Far too seldom the enemies of Britain actually admit their real goals. The greatly overpraised Professor Richard Dawkins (pictured) has now blurted out in a Left-wing magazine that his aim is to 'destroy Christianity'.

Well, I knew that, and you probably knew that – but the anti-religious lobby have until now always pretended that they were just nice, tolerant people.

They’re not. They’re as intolerant as the Spanish Inquisition, but not yet ready to show it.

We need fathers - not social workers

If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. The British Government annually aids the creation of thousands of fatherless families, by the simple procedure of subsidising them with your money and mine.

That is why we have so many father-free homes. Married families with fathers are better, and we should stop being afraid to say so.

Rather than doomed projects to use the State to 'transform 120,000 households in the grip of drugs and crime', all we need to do is stop these subsidies, and the number of such households will instantly begin to diminish.

Setting up yet more social-worker agencies to poke their noses into people’s lives never works. Yet the Prime Minister plans to do this. It is as illogical and hopeless as trying to turn down the central heating by stuffing raspberry jelly into the controls, instead of simply altering the thermostat.

But the mad revolutionary dogma of political correctness falsely condemns the obvious solution as a ‘war on single mothers’. No, what is needed is a war on the people who want to keep those mothers single.

* * *

I do wish people would get more angry about the gap between the anti-crime rhetoric of politicians of all parties, and the truth.

Last week we learned that more than £1billion in fines will never be collected. And the unlovely Ryan Girdlestone (pictured) was let off without punishment after hurling a 40 lb paving slab at a 79-year-old pensioner.

He faked remorse in court, then laughed about it on his Facebook page.

These things follow dozens of ‘crackdowns’ and ‘tough’ speeches. These crackdowns and speeches are all lies. Yet you still vote for the people responsible. Why?

A sermon of empty words

Poor old Archbishop Rowan Williams doesn’t really matter much.

This is because he’s a rather dull mainstream leftist, who talks about politics when he ought to be urging our neo-pagan country to return to Christianity. At the moment we’re more interested in shoes and booze than we are in God.

Since all three major political parties are also controlled by dull, conformist leftists, the Archbishop (pictured) is superfluous when he enters the political arena. He is powerless in the material world. As we have seen in the past few months, he doesn’t even control his own cathedrals.

But when the Prime Minister talks about religion, it’s a different matter. Mr Cameron has the power to shift this country sharply towards Christianity.

All he needs to do is to dismantle the many anti-Christian laws which have attacked the faith over the past half-century – for example, instant divorce, mass giveaways of contraceptives to children, the teaching of promiscuity in schools, the licensing of greedy commerce on Sundays, plus of course the total abandonment of right and wrong by the justice system.

He won’t do any of those things. In fact, he’d sneer at anyone who sought to do so. So his creepy pose as a ‘committed Christian’ (committed to what?) on Friday is – like almost everything about this man – a brazen fraud on the public.

Of the two, I think I prefer the Archbishop, who promises nothing and delivers nothing, to a premier whose parcels, when we eagerly open them, are always empty. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

How odd it is to hear of your own brother’s death on an early morning radio bulletin. How odd it is for a private loss to be a public event. I wouldn’t normally dream of writing about such a thing here, and I doubt if many people would expect me to. It is made even odder by the fact that I am a minor celebrity myself. And that the , ah, complex relationship between me and my brother has been public property. I have this morning turned down three invitations to talk on the radio about my brother. I had a powerful feeling that it would be wrong to do so, not immediately explicable but strong enough to persuade me to say a polite ‘no thank you’. And I have spent most of the day so far responding, with regrettable brevity, to the many kind and thoughtful expressions of sympathy that I have received, some from complete strangers. Many more such messages are arriving as comments here. My thanks for all of them. They are much appreciated not only by me but by my brother’s family. Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable less, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldn’t be properly human.

So, odd as it would be if this were a wholly private matter, I think it would be strange if I did not post something here, partly to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy, and partly to provide my first raw attempt at a eulogy for my closest living relative, someone who in many ways I have known better – and certainly longer - than anyone else alive.

It is certainly raw. Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly. We both knew it was the last time we would see each other, though being Englishmen of a certain generation, neither of us would have dreamed of actually saying so. We parted on good terms, though our conversation had been (as had our e-mail correspondence for some months) cautious and confined to subjects that would not easily lead to conflict. In this I think we were a little like chess-players, working out many possible moves in advance, neither of us wanting any more quarrels of any kind.

At one stage – and I am so sad this never happened – he wrote to me saying he hoped for a ‘soft landing’( code, I think for abandoning any further attempts to combat his disease) and to go home to his beautiful apartment in Washington DC. There, he suggested, we could go through his bookshelves, as there were some books and other possessions he wanted me to have. I couldn’t have cared less about these things, but I had greatly hoped to have that conversation, which would have been a particularly good way of saying farewell. But alas, it never happened. He never went home and now never will. Never, there it is, that inflexible word that trails close behind that other non-negotiable syllable, death. Even so, we did what we could in Houston, as the doctors, the nurses, the cleaners, and who knows who else, bustled in and out. I forgot, till I left, that I was wearing a ludicrous surgical mask and gown, and surgical gloves ( I am still not sure whose benefit this was for, but it was obligatory) all the time I was sitting there, and – this is extraordinary – time seemed to me to pass incredibly swiftly in that room. I was shocked when the moment came to leave for the airport, that it had come so soon.

Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it.

I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others. I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been. A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge. I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could. I’d add here that he was for a while an enthusiastic rock climber, something I could never do, and something which people who have come to know him recently would not be likely to guess.

He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.

This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today . People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to. My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember.

We got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens. At such times one tends to remember childhood more clearly than at others, though I have always had a remarkably clear memory of much of mine. I am still baffled by how far we both came, in our different ways, from the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools, of battered and declining naval seaports, not specially cultured, not book-lined or literary or showy but plain, dutiful and unassuming. How unlikely it would have seemed in those irrecoverable suburban afternoons that we would take the courses we did take.

Two pieces of verse come to mind, one from Hilaire Belloc’s ’Dedicatory Ode’

‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, there’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends’

I have always found this passage unexpectedly moving because of something that lies beneath the words, good and largely true though they are. When I hear it, I see in my mind’s eye a narrow, half-lit entrance hall with a slowly-ticking clock in it, and a half-open door beyond which somebody is waiting for news of a child who long ago left home.

And T.S.Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (one of the Four Quartets)

‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time’

These words I love because I have found them to be increasingly and powerfully true. In my beginning, as Eliot wrote elsewhere in the Quartets, is my end. Alpha et Omega.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday – a long day’s journey into light

As it happens, this posting answers the jibe from ‘Tarquin’ that I attack anything David Cameron does, because it is David Cameron doing it. I completely agree with and endorse his response to the Saville report on the Londonderry massacre (otherwise known as ‘Bloody Sunday’). He was quite right to offer the apologies of the British government and to accept that those killed on that day in 1972 were innocent, and to do so in generous and candid terms.

But that is not my reason for posting on this subject. I am moved to do so by reading Douglas Murray’s excellent and moving book on ‘Bloody Sunday’, recently published by Biteback.

I had long argued that the British government should apologise for this action, from a Unionist perspective. In my view Londonderry is a British city, under the British Crown. If British soldiers had done anything similar in Portsmouth, Bradford , Stirling or Swansea, the government would have fallen the next day.

The same must surely be true in this case.

Yet the shootings of 30th January 1972 did not bring down the government of Edward Heath. On the contrary, a wall of dishonesty and obscurity was thrown up around the event, and it is without doubt true that the Provisional IRA was able to use it to establish itself as a major force. It was the worst British blunder in Ireland since the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising.

I am old enough to remember the occasion. And I took part in a protest demonstration in York the following day, one of the few such demonstrations I can now look back on and say ‘I was right to be there’ - though I am sorry to say that the march turned violent at one stage, something that did no good to the cause.

At that time (and Dominic Sandbrook gives an extraordinarily good summary of the beginning of the Ulster troubles in his recent book ‘White Heat’) everyone involved was making a very considerable mess of Northern Ireland. It’s also my belief that the IRA, and the wicked men who always wanted bloodshed, took advantage of the ‘Civil Rights’ movement in a deeply cynical way – a way that wasn’t understood by the old and often naïve country gentlemen who were in charge at Stormont, or by the bored and detached politicians in London who suddenly had the Irish Question dropped in their laps. The one good thing that came out of it was Direct Rule (I don’t think there should ever have been a Parliament at Stormont) which achieved an enormous amount of wise reform, and which was the fairest and most law-abiding form of government the province ever had.

But the marchers who set out on that clear sunny day in January 1972 were overwhelmingly peaceful, religious, kindly people who felt that they had been unfairly treated and wished to say so.

And Murray’s description of the deaths of some of them – Patrick Doherty and Barney McGuigan – will break your heart. It is with these appalling scenes that he rightly opens the book, underlining the fact that real men died, and shed real blood, and that is what it is really about.

And he follows, relentlessly but in a light, fluent and irresistible style which kept me reading late into the night, bringing the awful day back to life and then pursuing various fascinating aspects of the vast, almost endless Saville Inquiry, much of which he attended.

The report itself, thousands of pages, is unlikely to be read by most of us. That is why Murray’s book is so useful. I found myself repeatedly jolted by new knowledge (perhaps I should have known these things before, but I didn’t, and now I do, and that is Murray’s doing) . He delves into things which remain either buried in secrecy or lost forever, thanks to the failing memories of the eyewitnesses.

By being sympathetic to , or at least understanding of, most of the main characters, his accounts of their failings are all the more devastating. Some of the soldier witnesses come out of the affair quite shamefully badly, evasive, dishonest, even disgraceful.

I don’t feel that this is so of Colonel Derek Wilford, the officer who seems to have taken most of the blame and whose identity – unlike that of the shooters themselves – has always been known, remains a moral puzzle. I remember strongly sympathising with his cry of pain in a long-ago radio interview (it ran roughly ‘Why is it always Bloody Sunday? What about Bloody Tuesday, Bloody Wednesday, Bloody Thursday, Bloody every day of the week when the IRA murdered innocent people’). He has a point. The IRA was and is a horrible organisation, which gloried in grisly murder, often of unarmed people in front of their families. Those responsible are now free, and in some cases highly-regarded, comfortable public figures. There will be no judicial inquiry into their crimes. If there were, they might well be as evasive and unconvincing as the wretched soldiers who, in my view, lost control of themselves in an undisciplined outbreak.

And Colonel Wilford’s loyalty to his men – quite proper in an army officer – remains commendable in a way, though it is not clear that they have been as loyal to him in return. He is also one of the few – if not the only person – who seems to have suffered as a result of his part in the disaster. He is the official scapegoat, his career blighted ever afterwards.

Murray goes as far it is possible to go in the search for ‘Infliction’, the ultra-mysterious MI5 informant whose report, produced during the Inquiry, was so embarrassing to Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. Mr McGuinness’s tricky, crowd-pleasing performance at the tribunal is neatly and mercilessly described.

His account of the behaviour and evidence of Bernadette Devlin (I still think of her by that name. and remember clearly her brief and fiery transit through British politics), in which she seems at one moment to be horrified by what she has herself thought and said, is extraordinarily powerful and evocative.

And his summary of the surprisingly strong evidence that there were in fact armed IRA men in Londonderry that day, and that some of them did in fact open fire is pitched exactly right. No, this does not in any way excuse the killings of unarmed, innocent men. But it does puncture a very important part of IRA propaganda about the event, and makes the stupidity of the killings easier for us, who were not there, to understand, though not to forgive.

All that having been said (and I could say much more if I had time) the crowning moment of the book comes at the end, when Murray returns to the poor McGuigan family, deprived of husband and father by an unjust and unjustifiable bullet. Earlier, he has recounted how, through a regrettable accident, Barney McGuigan’s widow came to see the terrible mortuary pictures of her late husband’s unspeakable facial injuries, decades after his death, an awful public ordeal followed by a ‘terrible eruption of sobbing’ .

If this account of grief beyond any human being’s power to offer comfort doesn’t make you hate war, I don’t know what will.

But now read this : ‘Barney McGuigan’s son Charles, meanwhile, would have been better justified than most in deciding that he should avenge the army, the security forces, the government that stood behind them. But nor did he choose to do so in the years after his father’s death. To Lord Saville, he recounted how ‘at the time of my father’s death, my mother cleared a space in our kitchen and made me kneel under the Sacred Heart picture and swear to her that I would never do anything about my father’s death that would bring shame on the name of the family. Having lost her husband, I believe that my mother was determined that she would not lose any other member of her family as a result of what had happened.’ He finished by saying ‘I have honoured that promise to this day.’

Murray also records the statement of Leo Friel, who saw Barney McGuigan shot. Mr Friel said : ‘I had witnessed what one person could do to another when I saw Barney McGuigan and I knew I could never justify doing this to another human being. I saw reality that day.’

He added, very tellingly :’ (emphasis mine) ‘ If I had been a hundred yards up Rossville Street and had *not* seen Barney McGuigan shot, I would have joined the IRA’.

Murray comments : ‘…These people, and many others, realised that they had a choice. And, like many others who have no memorials and are rarely recognised, they made the most important decision of all. They decided that in response to murder, they did not have to become murderers themselves’.

Yes, Bloody Sunday was a recruiting sergeant for the IRA, as the old cliché goes. But those who answered that Sergeant’s call were volunteers, not conscripts, They had an alternative. We should not forget that, when we judge these events.

How to Think – a user’s guide to the reasoning mind – plus some reflections on Cannabis farmers

It is easy to see why Britain is stuck in the EU, against its own interests. The pitiful level of many of the responses to my last two postings shows that two groups of people simply refuse to think about the subject. The first group are the ones who have been brainwashed into thinking that ‘Europe’ is automatically good, and that any doubts about the EU are caused by nostalgia or stupidity.

They do not actually know or understand the case for the EU (which certainly exists) because they have never heard it made. But they have heard, from teachers , broadcasters etc., the jibes of ‘Little Englander’ and ‘Do you want to go back to the Groat, then?’ which the pro-EU lobby have encouraged. How the heart sinks, at the level of this sort of thing. Where does one begin? Aren’t people ashamed of engaging in a major national debate at this kindergarten level?

They have encouraged these childish jeers because they know that very few people would be attracted by their utopian vision of a continent in which all nation states have ceased to exist, and in which the destinies of the continent’s people are controlled from the centre by an unaccountable elite which thinks itself to be benevolent.

The second group are those who continue against all evidence to believe that the Conservative Party is in fact conservative. In many cases, they believe this out of habit, and increasingly out of a fear (which they seek to suppress) that it is not true. For if it is not true, they might have to think and act – and anything is preferable to that.

These are two typical barriers to thinking. One, a received opinion held out of laziness and fashion, not deeply rooted in knowledge or reason, which lashes out at dissent with crude mockery. The other, a tribal clinging to a forlorn hope, held in place by fear of discovering that the truth is much less comforting than the illusion.

In both cases, the mind shuts down when it gets anywhere near the truth. In both cases, it is noticeable that the person involved does not deploy facts or reason himself.

After all, what did I actually argue? Most importantly that David Cameron was garnering praise from people who ought to have seen through him. Why? Because he was not in fact doing anything particularly exceptional or dramatic, and he was certainly not defying the real power in the EU - namely the Franco-German axis. That axis is quite happy to proceed on a country-by-country basis rather than though the cumbersome treaty process. It is true that the actual Brussels apparatus, whose spokesman is Mr Barroso, would like a formal treaty as it would give that apparatus more power. But France and Germany are much more important. Further, he was not actually protecting the City of London, which remains at risk as long as we are subject to EU law, most of which is made by Qualified Majority Voting where we cannot deploy a veto. This is why it is so important for those interested to read the Booker-North book I recommended. It explains and describes how, over and over again, British prime ministers have been trapped and ambushed into such surrenders.

I thought it rather strengthened my case that I was able to quote John Lichfield, an unimpeachable Paris correspondent for a pro-EU newspaper, and John Rentoul, an enjoyably frank Blairite, in support of my case. Mr Lichfield didn’t write his account of the French attitude to please me. He just wrote it because it was true and he rightly regarded it as significant. Mr Rentoul greatly enjoys teasing the non-Blairite wing of the Labour Party, but he’s interested in recent history and he recognises that David Cameron is and always has been serious about his Blairism. Mr Rentoul (among other things the author of a biography of Mr Blair) should be able to tell.

I would add here, for those interested, that my argument also has interesting support from my own side. Some recent, relevant postings from EU expert and opponent Richard North(co-author of ‘The Great Deception’) can be found here

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/12/walter-mitty-territory.html

and here

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/12/huge-coup-de-theatre.html

and here

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/12/story-so-far.html

In response to this, do I get any kind of thoughtful response from my opponents and critics? Judge for yourself. From ‘Tarquin’ comes this gem ‘All I know is that whatever Cameron had done, it would've been wrong’. Does ‘Tarquin’ actually ‘know’ this in any way? Can he point to any evidence that I have a personal hostility to David Cameron which overrides reason? If not, then his contribution is no better than graffiti scribbled on a wall, intellectually vacuous and wholly unresponsive. It is unlikely that I will support any step taken by Mr Cameron, but that is because I disagree with his politics, for reasons I have set out (for instance) in several books. But it is not unimaginable that Mr Cameron will do or say something which I am prepared to endorse and, as I have said here before, I have no personal animus towards him, have enjoyed his company on the rare occasions when I have met him and do not doubt his intelligence.

The single most wretched contribution comes from a Roy Robinson, who sneers: ‘So the whole thing was a conspiracy between Cameron and Clegg ,I thought as much ! .I will have to go on to David Icke’s site to see how it is all linked in to the New World Global Order.’

Mr Robinson ( I assume this is his real name) might have been wiser to hide this tripe behind a pseudonym. He hasn’t read what I have written, and he does not respond to what I have written. I doubt very much if we will see him back here. But why can’t people recognise that this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed seriously?

The contribution from ‘Cary’ is a bit more intelligent, though he endorses Mr Robinson’s empty jibe, which doesn’t actually chime with the rest of his contribution. . ‘Cary’ says : ‘Much as it may pain Peter Hitchens to admit it, Cameron did something genuinely EU sceptic this week that has genuinely upset Clegg, Sarkozy and all the other EU fanatics. I doubt he did it because he is a committed EU sceptic himself; his motives were mostly about survival as Tory leader (he’s lost the support of a large part of party loyalists and MPs and there’s a bye-election coming up this week where, if things went badly, the Tories could finish behind UKIP and knives might start to be sharpened).’

Well, I am quite happy to accept that Mr Cameron may have done something ‘EU sceptic’ as I have repeatedly (including in my latest post) derided the word ‘Eurosceptic’ . I regard it as meaning, broadly ‘critical of the EU in opposition, subservient to it in government’. ‘Scepticism’ can also be displayed in government, provided it is meaningless. The EU has always been reasonably happy to allow British governments (see my thoughts on losers in negotiations above) to adopt Churchillian poses, while ceding great slabs of power and wealth to the EU. But how does ‘Cary’ justify his assertion that Mr Cameron has ‘genuinely upset’ M. Sarkozy or Mr Clegg. My whole point is that Mr Cameron’s supposed veto (actually he didn’t veto anything – there was nothing to veto) was pleasing to the French President. As for Mr Clegg, he is so outraged that he has ….stayed in the government, and took two full days to express any reservations about Mr Cameron’s actions.

‘Cary’ then contradicts himself, by pointing out correctly that Mr Cameron’s main motive was to protect his position as Tory leader (a point I made in my article) . If that is so, then how and in what sense is his action ‘genuine’? It’s simply tactical, and wholly cynical.

Then we have ‘William’, who says ‘Peter Hitchens has to take this position though really doesn't he, as do UKIP. Can't let their 'true anti-european' brand be upstaged eh? Rather amusing to see these folks break bread here with the guardianistas.’

What does this mean? I don’t ‘have’ to take any position. Many other EU-critical journalists have praised Mr Cameron for his actions, in my view mistakenly. I belong to no party, and have no line to toe. What’s more, I explain in detail how I came to reach my position. As for ‘Guardianistas’, an expression which I think long ago lost any freshness, as did ‘Call me Dave’, what has that to do with it? The reason I cite articles from ‘The Independent’ is to make it clear that my assessment of *events* is not distorted by dogma. Mr Lichfield understands French politics and knows what is important. Mr Rentoul understands the Blairite position and is well-informed on the Blairite attitude towards the EU.

‘William’ continues ‘Where this argument falls down is that Cameron will now be under pressure to offer a referendum, in the face of the EU acting against our interests, especially now the eurosceptics have tasted blood (even if it is, as you suggest, only in their imaginations).

Better hope that doesn't happen Mr Hitchens eh? May put you out of business.’

Well I hope I have made clear by now that I have no desire for a referendum. As long as there is no major party calling in a united fashion for our exit from the EU, a straight vote on EU membership would probably be won by those who wish us to remain subject to foreign rule. The pitiful lack of understanding of the subject displayed across the media and politics in the last week shows how easy it would be to bamboozle the population, and how poorly prepared the ‘Sceptics’ are for a real battle. In any case, no Parliament could or would be bound by such a referendum even if it did produce a vote to leave.

So no, it wouldn’t ‘put me out of business’ ( always assuming that if we did become an independent country again, there wouldn’t still be plenty of ‘business’ for me to engage in). It’s no use just having independence. You have to use it.

Andrew Williams wrote : ‘I wonder if the Veto may be more important than you suggest...in spite of Cameron's intentions. The back-bench rebellion has proven to be effective in influencing the PM (despite Tory and Blairite commentators deriding it as empty posturing). The reserved reception to Cameron in PMQ suggests EU rebels aren't swooning just yet.’

Well, first of all, what veto? There was no treaty to veto (just as - and I remember breaking the news of this to an astonished newsdesk at another newspaper - there was no IRA bomb in Gibraltar before the SAS shooting of the IRA trio there).

There was no treaty because such things take months to prepare.

The back-bench rebellion is ‘effective’ only in so far as it compels Cameron to do everything he can to avoid a course of action which will lead to a referendum. But that is all he did – avoid a referendum. He didn’t preserve Britain from an EU power-grab. That can and will still happen. Nor did he ‘repatriate’ powers from Brussels(this is a fantasy. No such thing is possible under EU law). Mr Cameron’s only action is a political one, to do with saving his ludicrous, unworkable party from a richly-deserved split and collapse. Why should anyone be grateful for that? It is precisely this artificial preservation, by increasingly desperate measures, of a dead party, that stands in the way of Britain’s long-needed departure from the EU. And there seesm to metohave been a great deal of fawning over Mr cameron by suppsoed 'sceptics' notably at the famous Chequers dinner on Friday night. I gather the whips called for a restrained response after Mr Cameron's statement on Monday, as by then the supposed wrath of the Liberal Democrats, which had finally awoken all those days later, had to be soothed.

I think the assertion by ‘Neil P’ that Britain would benefit from the collapse of the City of London is absurd. I doubt if Mr ‘P’ has much idea what would happen to him, and our national economy as a whole, if such a thing happened.

Germany’s superior schools, transport etc are indeed laudable, and I am a Germanophile who thinks we should emulate many of Germany’s domestic policies. But they are nothing to do with our national independence.

Once again, I am asked why it takes so long for comments to be posted. It is not because I need to ‘approve’ them. In most cases I don’t see them before they are published, though a few are referred to me. It is because this site is part of a major newspaper group which takes the laws of defamation seriously, and because there are a limited number of people available to check contributions before they are posted.

Mr ‘Dreyfus’ is perfectly correct in pointing out that Norway and Switzerland have handled their economies better than we have. Perhaps that is partly because we have been in the EU since 1972, and because our governments – rather than confronting this country’s need to modernise its economy and reform its education(for example) have hopes that in some magical way EU membership will save us. One very good reason for returning to independence is that we would have to rely on ourselves again, and could make our own plans and efforts to do so. While we have declined greatly, as who has said more than I, all is not yet lost. We still have a base from which we could recover. Not paying our vast contribution to the EU would help.

Various people have cast doubt on claims made by contributors that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, warned of war. Well, on 26th October in a speech to the Bundestag, she said as follows: “No one should think that a further half century of peace and prosperity is assured. If the euro fails, Europe will fail.”

A note on cannabis farming

When I heard that there had been a revolting massacre in the Belgian city of Liege, ending with the self-slaughter of the culprit, I immediately wondered what drugs the killer would turn out to have been taking. And lo, (though none of the BBC radio or TV reports that I have so far heard or seen have mentioned this, though of course they do stress his ownership of guns) , the killer –Nordine Amrani – had earlier been convicted of cannabis farming.

When he was arrested in 2008, police found he had grown 2,800 cannabis plants in a warehouse. While I doubt if he could have consumed all his products himself, it seems reasonable to assume that he sampled his own goods, probably quite extensively. All that we know of his last days is that he apparently thought he was being ‘picked on’ by the police. The idea that you are being picked on is, I am told, quite common among heavy users of cannabis. It is also demonstrable that various types of mental illness are associated with heavy cannabis use.

I gather that gun law in Belgium is quite strict, or has been since 2006. Amrani was prosecuted under it, though somehow he seems to have been allowed to keep or acquire a substantial arsenal (I am not sure if this illustrates the feebleness of the law itself in practice, or the usual near-total failure of gun laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, or both. Amrani had been in trouble with the police since his teens, and would probably have been banned from legal gun-ownership in most states in the USA, certainly since what is described as ‘a vice conviction’ in 2003).

But it seems to me that you don’t start shooting and throwing hand grenades (surely these are illegal anywhere?) around in the middle of a crowded Christmas market unless you are in some way mentally ill .

Mental illness among individuals is (or was until the recent prevalence of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs) remarkably rare.

I mention these connections because I live in hope that sooner or later someone in government may act on them, and launch the necessary research to see if there is a link. I know that the connection between cannabis and mental illness flies in the face of the vast and costly PR campaign that has been waged on behalf of this drug for the last half-century, claiming that it is ‘soft’ and harmless and herbal. But does a wise person then reject the possibility that the correlation might actually be causation?

December 14, 2011 Comments (79) Categories: Abuse of PH , Being right , Cameron Delusion (see also Broken Compass) , Cameron, David , Cannabis , Conservative Party (see also Useless Tories, Tories) , Drugs , European Union , Guns , Tories ,Useless Tories | Permalink