08 September 2012 10:03 PM
Have a nice cup of tea, Mr Burglar and please don't say I hurt you
This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column
Get used to it. You are not safe in your own home. Just because only one judge has been silly enough to admit that he thinks burglars are brave, don’t think there aren’t hundreds more just the same.
They simply don’t have the courage to admit it. Some older judges, true, may still secretly disapprove of thieves. But they lack the principle to resign from a job where their main task is to keep criminals out of prison.
It’s the same with the police. I used to jeer that if the whole lot of them were abducted by aliens, nobody would notice. They’d vanished from our ken already.
But now they are completely in the grip of Equality and Diversity. They long for the chance to arrest someone for having the wrong thoughts about sex or religion, or for acting as if right and wrong still existed in this country.
One well-publicised couple, Tracey and Andrew Ferrie, have been released without charge after daring to defend their home against a violent and evil invasion.
But I beg you not to try it yourselves. Note that the Ferries spent three days in custody first, not far short of the real average prison sentence for a convicted criminal.
The police, the CPS and the courts still hate anyone who acts as if criminals are wrongdoers and as if they have an absolute right to their own property or peace.
Note that Daniel Mansell (now awaiting sentence after pleading guilty to raiding the Ferries’s isolated home) was ‘jailed’ for six years in February 2009. If such sentences had any relation to the truth he would not be at large. But all British prison sentences are whopping lies.
And if our prisons still punished instead of being lawless, drug-infested warehouses, Mansell would long ago have been taught the hard way that crime does not pay. As it is, he has a long career behind him of thieving and witness intimidation, and I would expect there’s a long career ahead of him too. How he must laugh at us.
And why not? I too laugh at our wobbling, jellified, whimpering apology for a criminal justice system. I hope I never need it, for I know it won’t help me or do justice to those who have wronged me.
But I fear that it will one day find a way of locking me up for expressing incorrect ideas. Partly for that reason I wouldn’t dream of lifting a finger to resist a burglar. I’d just give him a cup of tea and ask him to sign a declaration that I hadn’t hurt him. Otherwise it would be me in Belmarsh, and my burglar on the loose.
My favourite episode of British law and order dates from 1999 when some poor woman in rural Somerset had her car vandalised and went to the police. They wrote to her to say that the people who had damaged her car were victims too.
The epistle explained that the culprits were probably heroin ‘addicts’ living in bad housing who had come from broken homes. It urged her to give a thought to those less fortunate than herself.
She said: ‘That’s just not what you expect from the police.’ Well, it’s what I expect from them, and so should you if you have any sense.
Sometimes I wish they would just get on and proclaim the People’s Republic of Britain, strip away the sentimental decorations and the lingering reminders of the lost past, and do their worst.
Maybe then there would be a revolt against the self- righteous, smug elite who have turned us into a Land Fit For Burglars.
MPs shouldn't give medals - that's why we have a Monarch
It was thoughtless and wrong of the Paralympics organisers to invite politicians to hand out medals.
MPs shouldn't give medals - that's why we have a Monarch
It was thoughtless and wrong of the Paralympics organisers to invite politicians to hand out medals.
Half the point of having a Monarchy is that we don’t have to admire or revere Ministers or MPs, mostly jumped-up careerists and backstairs-crawlers.
I wouldn’t myself want to receive a raffle prize from a politician, let alone a well-earned award for excellence and hard work. What if the award-winner doesn’t share the politics of the Minister involved?
I’m all in favour of booing politicians. These days they don’t get heckled or booed nearly enough, which is why they get so above themselves.
One of the greatest moments of modern times was the Blair Creature’s rough handling by the Women’s Institute.
And I don’t see why a really distinguished and admirable person such as Ellie Simmonds, whom we can all happily cheer, should be expected to act as a human shield for any Prime Minister.
Some religions are more equal...
Some religions are more equal...
What Christians in Britain have to understand is that this is not a Christian country any more. It’s no good going to the Court of Human Rights.
Harriet Harman’s Equalities Act 2010 (backed, as I ceaselessly remind you, by the Useless Tories and particularly by Mrs Theresa May) made all religions equal.
That means Christianity in this country has no greater legal status than Mormonism, Buddhism, Jainism or Scientology – and rather lower status than Islam, because our Government and Establishment are scared stiff of Islam.
Precisely because Christianity used to be dominant, that means that the authorities will seize every chance they can to take it down a peg or two.
This process is only just beginning. You’ll be amazed by how much more there is yet to come, in schools, laws, broadcasting, policing and – I hesitate to mention it, but it will come – the Coronation of our next Monarch.
Well, that’s the end of the great Cameroon experiment, then. The Tory Party is as deceased as it always was. By moving the coffins around in the crypt, the Prime Minister has not made his Cabinet any less dead.
They never had any purpose but getting office. Having got office, they can only snivel into their handkerchiefs when they lose it.
Meanwhile, the next – Lib-Lab – coalition is already starting to form. There’ll be more snivelling then.
Yet again newspapers refer to a lawless murder as an ‘execution’. Please stop doing this. An execution is a just punishment for a heinous crime, and if we still had them, we’d have fewer murders and less violence in general.
There's an old saying in Whitehall: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ This means that bad times are always a good excuse to do something unpopular and bad that a well-funded lobby has wanted for ages.
Hence the third runway, and the dismantling of suburban planning laws. You can’t do anything about it, except loathe and despise those responsible. It’s all part of national decline.
Peter Hitchens will be at the Henley Literary Festival at 4.30pm on Sunday September 30 to talk about his new book, The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender To Drugs. For tickets go to henleyliterary festival.co.uk or call 01189 724700.
Well, that’s the end of the great Cameroon experiment, then. The Tory Party is as deceased as it always was. By moving the coffins around in the crypt, the Prime Minister has not made his Cabinet any less dead.
They never had any purpose but getting office. Having got office, they can only snivel into their handkerchiefs when they lose it.
Meanwhile, the next – Lib-Lab – coalition is already starting to form. There’ll be more snivelling then.
Yet again newspapers refer to a lawless murder as an ‘execution’. Please stop doing this. An execution is a just punishment for a heinous crime, and if we still had them, we’d have fewer murders and less violence in general.
There's an old saying in Whitehall: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ This means that bad times are always a good excuse to do something unpopular and bad that a well-funded lobby has wanted for ages.
Hence the third runway, and the dismantling of suburban planning laws. You can’t do anything about it, except loathe and despise those responsible. It’s all part of national decline.
Peter Hitchens will be at the Henley Literary Festival at 4.30pm on Sunday September 30 to talk about his new book, The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender To Drugs. For tickets go to henleyliterary festival.co.uk or call 01189 724700.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
Share this article:
01 September 2012 11:14 PM
We'll go down as the nation that smoked itself stupid
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Cannabis makes you stupid. I know this already, from the feeble arguments and moronic insults that I get from the dope lobby when I argue for harsher, more effective laws against this dangerous, unpredictable poison.
But now you and your children don’t need to take my word for it. Science has at last caught up with the blazingly obvious. Smoking cannabis in your teens permanently reduces your IQ – official.
A highly reputable study traced a sample of more than 1,000 people from birth for 38 years. They controlled for all the other variables. Marijuana was the consistent factor in the lives of those whose IQ shrank and stayed shrunk for ever. The more they smoked, the worse it was.
People who smoked the drug in their teens were still held back by the time they reached the age of 38. Even these people’s friends confirmed that their memories and their attention spans had declined.
Imagine if some electronic device or prescription medicine were found to have this effect. Human habits would change overnight. The company responsible would probably go out of business, after being forced to pay out billions in compensation.
The newspapers and the airwaves would rock and shudder with the row. ‘BAN THIS DRUG THAT WRECKS MINDS!’ they would shout, ‘BAN IT NOW!’ And Parliament would act.
But no. The story flickered briefly through the newspapers – page 7, page 4, page 2, page 12 in the shameful case of one supposed quality daily, and page 27 in The Sun, where the news might have done most good. Only the Left-wing Guardian, to its lasting credit, put it on the front page where it belonged.
Many of those who most needed to know the risks they run will never have heard of this survey at all.
I cannot fathom this double standard. Think of our regular panics – mad cow disease, salmonella in eggs, swine flu, brain tumours from mobile phones, the wild fear of exposure to sunshine. Most of these, if not all of them, are trivial or mistaken.
But when a reputable, thorough and respected scientific survey shows a measurable danger to the brain from a drug that is widely used by the elite classes and their children, nothing happens.
Worse, our society continues to weaken the already feeble laws against it, with police officers instructed to issue meaningless ‘cannabis warnings’ to those caught with it.
The 40-year publicity campaign for dope, provided gratis by dozens of rock stars (who can flourish however stupid they are), has been so effective that 13-year-olds who smoke it do not even think it is a drug.
And untold numbers of criminal parasites make a tidy living by running chains of hydroponic cannabis farms in the attics of suburban houses. In fact, it is one of Britain’s few agricultural success stories of modern times.
When future Chinese historians ponder our national collapse, laughing softly as they do so, I think they may well note that this was the society that banned T-bone steaks while it decriminalised cannabis, and that it was the country that smoked itself stupid.
They will conclude that we deserved the irreversible national decline that followed. And they will be right.
Exterminate the 'Dalek checkouts'
I beg you to join my boycott of automated tills in supermarkets and other shops. If you don’t, human staff will vanish from these places and go into the dole queue instead.
Why should we help these big greedy businesses to make our lives more miserable, and to make more people unemployed? We were fooled by the banks in the same way, and realised too late that we would never again be able to discuss our accounts with anyone with a pulse and a brain. Surely once is enough.
And yet, day by day, I see my fellow shoppers marching to their own doom by submitting to the robot revolution.
A survey of 4,000 shoppers in The Grocer magazine claims that we actually want more of these things. Allegedly ‘the customer experience is improving’. I suspect that the truth is that the onslaught of the machines has been so rapid that few people have thought very hard about where it will lead.
Interestingly, in the USA, public resistance has been much stronger and the use of these supermarket Daleks has actually declined.
Perhaps that is because so many Americans are armed, and the supermarkets are afraid they will put a bullet through the next machine that sneers ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ as they struggle to scan their potatoes.
Another dose of costume claptrap
How does the BBC choose its classic serials? Does a committee convene and say ‘Gosh, this book will allow us to rent lots of old cars, spend a fortune on clothes and hire some ravishing young actresses with generous mouths? Oh, and we can have some smoking so everyone knows it’s in the past’?
I think so. And afterwards, some poor sap has to turn the wretched thing into a drama – as with Parade’s End.
How can the nation not laugh as Benedict Cumberbatch, in heavy-duty tweeds from head to toe, fornicates furiously with a complete stranger in a railway carriage, soon after intoning that he is a stern Tory who believes in monogamy and chastity?
*************************************************************
Alas for poor old Sir Rhodes Boyson, a man too principled for politics, disdained and patronised by the Tory smoothies who made him an MP and a Minister, but didn’t listen to him.
Sir Rhodes, who has died at the age of 87, was a great teacher and a superb headmaster, angry and sad at the wrecking of the grammar schools because it destroyed the hopes of bright poor children (such as he had been).
It’s interesting to note that many of the things this good, generous man believed to be right and necessary are now actually illegal, including the cane and the creation of new grammar schools.
Compare and contrast with the Transport Secretary, Ms Justine Greening, who became and remained an MP largely because she stuck carefully to local issues, such as aircraft noise, which are really the job of councillors, and mentioned conservatism as little as possible.
And now that she finds herself in a government that wants to blast her London constituency with extra aircraft noise, what can she do, and what is the point of her?
**************************************************************
If the Houses of Parliament have to close down for repairs, will we at last notice that our current rulers are pygmies, scurrying about in the ruins of a lost civilisation?
I hope so. The gorgeous grandeur of the buildings makes these dreary people look more significant.
If they had to hold their debates in an exhibition centre in Milton Keynes, we’d see them for what they really are.
**************************************************************
Posts
