text:
Let's see if Al Johnson can get out of this one. The Tories have said many times that they will put a stop to the pursuit of long-retired British soldiers through the courts, for crimes allegedly committed during the Northern Irish Troubles.
But they have also just agreed to do exactly the opposite. A key part of the resurrection of 'power-sharing' in Northern Ireland is a pledge to revive a rather nasty deal called the Stormont House Agreement, swallowed by the Cameron government just before Christmas 2014.
This pretty much makes sure there will be more of these politically motivated cases.
It is the latest stage in the appeasement of the Provisional IRA and of the other Ulster terror groups, which began in 1998 with the lawless mass release of scores of grisly terrorists, 'loyalist' as well as Republican.
This surrender to criminal violence, the most shameful and abject in modern British history, is generally ignored or forgotten on the mainland.
Its dire effects are mostly felt in Northern Ireland itself. But there is one part of it which reaches across the Irish Sea, and that is the unceasing attempt to pursue these cold cases.
Every time it happens, the Tories say they will stop it. And then it happens again. This is because it is what the IRA (and its front organisation Sinn Fein) want. And what they want happens. Guess why.
Maybe some of these cases are just. I cannot tell. It is not the point. Justice has never been the point of the 1998 agreement.
This not only led to the rapid freedom of many serious murderers, it also effectively prevented the prosecution or punishment of alleged terrorist criminals who were not tried before the deal was reached.
You may remember the case of John Downey, the alleged culprit of the bloody 1982 Hyde Park bombing.
He was one of nearly 200 people who had been given written official promises that they would not be prosecuted.
And, as the judge said, even if he had been convicted he would have served no more than two years – for a crime of astonishing savagery.
So that is the deal for the terrorist side, who are supposed to have been defeated in 1998.
But the Stormont House Agreement, which Mr Johnson has just agreed to put into effect, promises: 'Legislation will establish a new independent body to take forward investigations into outstanding Troubles-related deaths; the Historical Investigations Unit (HIU).'
It adds: 'In respect of its criminal investigations, the HIU will have full policing powers.'
The observant Sarah Jones, Labour MP for Croydon Central, quizzed the Prime Minister about this on Wednesday.
She asked: 'The press were briefed last year that the Prime Minister was going to bring an end to all ongoing investigations from the conflict, and he said on Monday that he would not support vexatious claims when there was no new evidence.
However, the Stormont agreement includes the HIU, and the point of all the ongoing investigations is that the original evidence has never been properly investigated, so will the Prime Minister tell us today, yes or no, whether he now supports the investigation of every single outstanding claim?'
Mr Johnson's answer was pure waffle, full of holes: 'Nothing in the agreement will stop us going ahead with legislation to ensure that no one who has served in our armed forces suffers vexatious or unfair prosecution for cases that happened many years ago when no new evidence has been provided. We will legislate to ensure that cannot happen.'
Who decides what is vexatious or unfair? What if the HIU insists that the evidence is new and the Belfast prosecution service agrees?
Heaven help poor British soldiers if this is all the protection they have. The shadow of the gunman still lies across this land.
War twisted into a stupid fairytale
What is the point of the much-praised film 1917, an absurd fairy tale with almost no connection to reality?
Two Great War soldiers are sent on foot across no-man's-land on a 'desperate mission' to prevent a massacre.
Leaving aside the obvious point that futile massacres were pretty much a regular occurrence throughout the First World War, and there's no sign that the high command cared all that much, why go on foot?
As the two heroes stumble from hazard to hazard in what my colleague Matthew Bond has rightly noted is quite like a video game, they watch British planes flying overhead. Couldn't these planes have taken the message?
Having wriggled and struggled sweatily through a deadly maze to get into no-man's-land, the pair are then overtaken by a convoy of British lorries, which appears to have got there by taking the first right turn off the Ypres by-pass.
If the roads are open for trucks, why not send the message by motorbike? And here's another question.
When was the last time a film started collecting awards before it had even been shown in cinemas?
Keep out of my opinions, Mr Plod
The Guardian newspaper, voice of the Establishment, has been squawking like an indignant parakeet about counter-terrorism police listing Extinction Rebellion as an extremist organisation.
XR turned out to be on a list of 'extremist ideologies', which was to be reported to the Prevent programme.
In a way, I agree with The Guardian's outrage. The police have no business probing people's opinions. There should be no such lists.
The word 'extremism' has no objective meaning and it could one day be applied to me or you, if things carry on as they are.
Policing in this country is already far too political and, to put it politely, police officers really aren't very good at understanding such things.
We have a very expensive Security Service, MI5, which –thank heaven – has no powers of arrest or prosecution, to keep an eye on those who might move from angry speechmaking into acts of violence.
When I was a Trotskyist in the 1960s and 1970s, MI5 did a pretty good job of watching us without interfering in our freedom of speech and thought.
Alas, all their files on us were destroyed soon after New Labour came to power, as the Blair government was crammed with ex-Trots (including the Blair creature himself), who may not have been all that ex.
And when extremists become the government, who dares call them extremists? But XR can hardly blame the authorities for being interested in them.
The think-tank Policy Exchange made a fascinating study of their nature and origins.
Many who have gone on their protests might be surprised to learn just how radical and fanatical they are.
Remember how they seriously discussed disrupting Heathrow. And how, about the same time, they tweeted (last April 1) that 'this movement is the best chance of bringing down capitalism'.
But they deleted the tweet after nine minutes, presumably when they realised they had given away too much.
Worth watching? Yes, but not by Mr Plod.
Talking of Mr Plod, I'm pleased to see that new research by Cambridge University has confirmed what all good coppers know and what I've been saying for decades.
A visible police presence on foot reduces crime. Just four 15-minute patrols a day on some of the capital's most crime-ridden Underground platforms reduced reported crime by 28 per cent in patrolled locations, while it rose by 16 per cent on platforms without patrols. Will anything happen? I doubt it.
Meanwhile, a major newspaper has just published on its front page, as hot, big news, the fact that police have given up pursuing the serious crime of marijuana possession.
While rejoicing over the sheep that was lost, etc, I have to say that any reader of this column could have told them that years ago.
January 19, 2020 Comments (69) Categories: Abolition of Liberty (see also Brief History of Crime) , Brief History of Crime (see also Abolition of Liberty) , Cinema , First World War , Free Speech , Freedom of Speech , Global Warming , IRA (Irish Republican Army) , Ireland , Northern Ireland (see Ulster) , Useless Tories | Permalink
24 March 2019 12:18 AM
PETER HITCHENS: 'I fear a British Trump who'll crush our civilisation'
I fear a British Donald Trump. I fear such a person will steal the slogans of the Right and the merciless, dishonest propaganda methods of the Left – as the US President has done. I fear that the rise of such a figure is the likely outcome of the catastrophe caused by David Cameron's folly in calling a referendum, and everyone else's folly – of walking into such an obvious trap. It barely matters now how the whole thing ends. The sense of disappointment and betrayal now abroad is here to stay. A lot of people are not going to be forgiven for their part in the EU referendum fiasco.
Can anyone really have thought that this great greasy, congealed granny knot, tied and retied and tightened for nearly 50 ye
ars, could be undone by a single clean stroke? Did they think it could be undone without any effort on their part to change the British political, legal, cultural and media elites which had for 40 years supported our membership of the EU? They might as well have expected all the nation's rivers to reverse their courses, or stood around waiting for figs to grow on thorns.
Can they really have thought, in a controversy so profound and passionate, that a vote of 51.89 per cent to 48.11 per cent was a shining, decisive mandate in which the winner could hope to take all and the loser should be left to grind his teeth in perpetuity?
Well, if they did, it was a bad mistake, and the resulting divided country – in which one half will barely speak to the other, or acknowledge membership of the same nation – is the last and most bitter fruit of half a century of self-delusion, from which we have all now been roughly roused by real life.
Of course, the sensible response to that awakening would be to take a long, hard, cool, reasonable look at our country and work out what might be a wise and affordable compromise, and where we went wrong.
But I fear we will not do that. I fear we will have one last fantasy instead, a Great Leader cheered by adoring loyal crowds as he promises to punish other people on their behalf.
AND worst of all, I fear that such a person, and his supporters, will bring our long age of free civilisation to an end. Since 1945, democracy has been about voters trying to improve their own lives by choosing the parties which seem to promise them most. That is gone. We will soon look back on it with nostalgia.
From now on, democracy will be about a sullen, cheated, resentful majority wishing to make sure that everyone else now suffers as much as it has been suffering. We are moving from the politics of self-improvement to the politics of vengeance and spite, conspiracy theories, scapegoats and calls for the jailing and humiliation of the defeated.
Armoured by resentment and a desire to pay back years of humiliation, such a leader – who like Trump will come from the world of TV or from nowhere, which is roughly the same thing – will have far more power than any US leader. The President's freedom of action is greatly limited by the US Constitution's separation of powers and by the Supreme Court. We have nothing of the kind.
This will be the price we pay for the complete failure of our parliamentary system to reflect the fears and wishes of the British people over the past few years, culminating in the tragi-comedy of Theresa May's premiership.
For the absurd Westminster manoeuvres of the past few weeks, and of the weeks to come, are not an isolated event. They are the end of a far longer process of decline and decay.
I do not think Parliament as it now is, or our political system, will survive for very long after this. We are no longer adult or wise enough to cope with either, or to use them properly.
Each one of the repeated failures of democracy comes at a high cost. But the accumulated bill is now so great that it cannot be paid except in anger and disillusion.
Since the 1960s, when advertising men moved into politics, and our national leaders were sold to us like foreign holidays, we have been repeatedly let down and disappointed. And there has been no redress.
Harold Wilson's technological shiny New Britain, promised in 1964, never materialised. Instead, we had devaluation, strikes and the catastrophic destruction of one of the best state education systems in the world.
Ted Heath's supposed gritty realism, promised in 1970, ended in the Common Market, plus wild inflation and the three-day week.
Margaret Thatcher's vaunted revolution, promised in 1979, with its flashy wrappings and bold slogans at home and abroad, devastated our manufacturing industry and did nothing to halt or slow the great Left-wing moral and cultural revolution which now has us in its grip.
As for the Blair-Brown-Cameron era, which began in 1997 and still drags on, people are only just beginning to realise the scale of its foolishness and its crazy revolutionary radicalism.
For most people the thing is just too big to understand. In a few short years, Britain became somewhere else. Criminal justice collapsed. The police became paramilitary social workers uninterested in the problems of the public and obsessed with sex and the internet.
Schools failed to teach the most basic knowledge yet preached the gospel of Stonewall. The word 'husband' disappeared from government documents, Christianity was officially dethroned as the national religion, the beliefs of a small coven of Marxist revolutionaries became the official family policy of a great and ancient state, terrorism was bounteously rewarded with amnesties, territorial surrender and power, and its gory dead-eyed practitioners invited to white-tie dinners at Windsor Castle.
But a nation that gave up defending itself against its real enemies in Belfast suddenly became furiously keen on overthrowing selected tyrants in the Middle East, squandering lives and money on adventures that had no conceivable benefit for us, and which would in the end bring great woes to our doorstep.
Absurdly posing as the foe of terror, even as it gave power and concessions to the terrorist godfather Martin McGuinness, it smashed up the ancient liberties of its own constitution, and engaged in disgraceful state-sponsored kidnaps overseas, which are only just coming to light.
And, rather than opposing all these dreadful ideas at home and abroad, the Conservative Party enthusiastically adopted and copied them, until it was impossible to tell it apart from the Blairites. The price of these adventures is still being reckoned.
But the most evident of them was the great spasm of mass migration from the devastated Middle East and across the Mediterranean, both direct and traceable results of our interventions in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The current insoluble migration crisis of Europe, convulsing almost every continental country, was also the great unmentioned reason for much of the rage against the EU in 2016.
Immigration inevitably affects the poorer parts of the country, and it was Britain's gloomier, more depressed areas which had already had their noses well and truly 'rubbed in diversity' (as New Labour's insiders smugly described it), by the largest episode of immigration since the Norman Conquest.
The idea that the great columns of migrants advancing across the continent from Greece, or from Libya, might now end up in Boston or Birmingham or Slough was too much for Labour voters to bear.
Labour voters? Yes. It is the most astonishing fact of our past few decades that traditional Labour voters (such as Gillian Duffy, dismissed as a 'bigoted woman' by Gordon Brown) secured the majority for Leave.
Released for the first time from tribal allegiance, they took revenge on a party which had taken them for granted all through its long march of liberal intellectual policies.
They had put up with the withdrawal of police from the streets, with the treatment of criminals as sick people to be pitied rather than bad people in need of punishment. They had endured the closing of the gates of good schools to all but the rich, and the state's weird obsession with sexual revolution. They had seen manufacturing industry, steelworks, coal mines, shipyards, car factories and council housing disappear.
Now, just for once, they could roll those resentments up into one missile, and hurl it back at the heads of the London pseudo-intellectuals who had taken over their party.
What a pity it had never happened before. But the sad truth is that both the big parties long ago turned their backs on their supporters.
At election times, they were advised by PR men to make vague promises: 'More bobbies on the beat', 'Education, education, education', 'We will rescue the NHS', or 'The NHS is safe in our hands'. But these were either things they had no intention of doing, or they were things they could not afford.
And so we came to the end. We had a Tory Party that openly despised its supporters as fruitcakes, and a Labour Party that openly despised its supporters as bigots.
We had a series of governments that could not afford to pay for their promises and so had borrowed dangerously. It could never be enough, so nothing worked properly. We had a population which could not get used to the fact that it now took two wages to pay for the family life that had once needed only a single income. And even then, although there was officially no inflation, everything seemed to get more costly every week. So they borrowed too.
And then the effects of 50 years of bad schools began to work right through into the whole of society, with a million young people more or less unemployable, their jobs done by Poles and Romanians and Bulgarians.
I can just remember another country, a place of austere self-control, of unwrecked countryside and sober cities, serious schools, heavy coins, visible, authoritative policemen, flourishing industry. You could not take any long journey without seeing the forges and furnaces and shipyards which made almost everything we used.
If I'd known how soon it would vanish I would have treasured it more. Instead, I can do no more than try to find out why and how we threw it all away.
March 24, 2019 Comments (345) Categories: Abolition of Britain , Abolition of Liberty (see also Brief History of Crime) , Brief History of Crime (see also Abolition of Liberty) , Ireland , Liberty | Permalink
Peter Hitchens: The trial of 'Soldier F' is the final proof that the IRA won
The decision to prosecute one of the Bloody Sunday soldiers is straightforward victor's justice. And if you still haven't grasped who won in the war between Britain and the Provisional IRA, perhaps the truth will now at last sink in. All war is crime. But only the losers ever face trial for it.
Whether 'Soldier F' is guilty or not is a matter for the courts, and should stay that way. I have nothing to say about it. But the long, dragging process which has led to his being charged is political, far more a matter of power than of justice.
It is because we were the vanquished and the Provisional IRA, backed with all the might of the USA, were the winners in 1998 that this is happening at all.
If we had won, scores of IRA and 'loyalist' murderers (freed as a sop to the Protestant killer gangs) would still be doing time. And our police and courts would still be hunting down the culprits of hundreds of terrorist crimes which will now never be punished. And there would not be the slightest chance that a long-retired ex-paratrooper would be preparing for his trial, for actions allegedly taken while under Army discipline.
IF you are sharp-eyed, you will have noticed that the body which announced the prosecution is called the Public Prosecution Service, not the Crown Prosecution Service. That should be a helpful hint. Britain's continued rule in Northern Ireland is provisional, in more senses than one.
So the Crown, the symbol of British authority which adorns every courthouse and prison (and every embassy abroad), and is to be found on the cap-badge of every police officer and all service personnel, has already been abolished in Northern Ireland.
In the same way, our flag has been hauled more than halfway there. In Northern Ireland now, the Union Jack can only be flown on public buildings in limited circumstances.
Everybody there knows that one day soon, the referendum promised in the 1998 surrender to the IRA will be held, and the whole thing will be handed over to Dublin rule. For the first time since 1945, a Western European country will surrender territory to its neighbour as a reward for successful armed aggression backed by the USA, a fact so shocking that many still cannot comprehend it.
This handover is guaranteed by solemn treaty, by the way. There'll be no dithering, no negotiation, no second thoughts. The projected Irish referendum is not 'advisory'. It will be final if it decides in favour of a united Ireland (though it can be held again, every seven years, if it produces the 'wrong' result, until it comes up with the right one).
Yet millions, especially the Blair creature who signed the instrument of surrender, are still keen to pretend that we won this nasty little war, when we lost it, as Soldier F now knows very well.
It is all part of the deep, deep sleep of Britain, from which we shall only be awakened by shock and awe, as we finally realise that we have spent what we earned, and wantonly wrecked what we inherited from our wiser forebears.
I'm a veteran of political demonstrations going back to the 1960s, though I have given it up in recent years.
One sad thing has always been constant at these events – the almost total absence of glamorous young women, especially when it is raining.
They're just not all that keen on such things, usually preferring expensive restaurants to street protest. I can't think why.
But in recent months I keep seeing pictures – such as this one taken yesterday (see today's MoS) – of unusually attractive female enthusiasts demonstrating in favour of leaving the EU, whichseem to contradict this ancient law of nature. They even turn out in pouring rain. Does anyone know who they are?
If human nature has changed,we need to do the research into how this extraordinary thing happened.
Are Daleks aiming at No 10?
The most sinister building in London has, for many decades, been the Admiralty Citadel, a windowless concrete bunker overlooking Horseguards Parade. Attempts to make it seem less menacing, by growing Virginia creeper on it, have not succeeded. I've never been able to find out what goes on inside it. As I passed it the other day, I noticed it has sprouted Dalek-like protuberances, above,(see today's MoS) pointing in the general direction of Downing Street. The Ministry of Defence says they are 'communications equipment'. If they say so, it must be true.
I hate to say it, but we missed our chance to dump the Tories
The current EU mess really was not that hard to foresee. As I wrote in a blog posting on February 4, 2016: 'I myself am baffled as to how a referendum could decide the issue, when huge majorities in both Houses of Parliament, plus the great bulk of the media, plus businessmen (traditionally utterly ignorant about politics) plus the civil service, the education sector, and the judiciary, are committed to our continuing membership. If we voted to leave, who would implement the decision?'
On February 28, 2016, I wrote here: 'You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.' Something I now hear repeated almost every day by somebody or other.
Likewise, when I realised nearly two weeks before the vote that there would be a 'Leave' majority, I predicted: 'We are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.
'If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?'
My argument, for years before then, was as it is now – the main obstacle to any serious change for the better in this country is the existence of a party which calls itself 'Conservative' but is nothing of the kind.
Alas, I fear it is now too late to get rid of it. Everyone is too bitter to think.
If the Tories collapsed, some horrible Trump-like body, with its knuckles brushing the ground, would barge into the empty space.
March 17, 2019 Comments (151) Categories: Ireland , Northern Ireland (see Ulster) , Terrorism , Tories , Useless Tories | Permalink
Is it Reasonable to Insist that Northern Ireland be Treated Exactly like the Rest of the UK?
I noted quite early on in our current crisis that the Irish border could be a problem. As it happens, I now think that the Irish side have made a bit too much of this. The 1998 Belfast Agreement did not have anything direct to say about the Irish border (I'll come to the indirect implications in a moment).
What's more, a British crash exit from the EU (now unlikely anyway) would not require the UK to put up border controls on roads and railways to the Republic. It would require Dublin to put up such barriers, as the UK would have become a Third Country under EU rules, and so could not lawfully be treated any differently from any other country outside the EU, without running foul of the World Trade Organisation. That would mean that great masses of EU bureaucracy, especially the non-tariff barriers of the Single Market, great wodges of regulation, would have to be imposed on traffic leaving Northern Ireland and trying to enter the Republic, or originating from Britain and heading for Irish ports or airports.
The root of this is Ireland's quite legitimate desire to be separate from the UK, not any wish in the UK for a breach with Ireland.
It obviously makes sense to try to overcome this in a friendly and civilised fashion. But what really puzzles me is the affronted poses of so many Tories, and come to that Democratic Unionists, who say that it is quite impossible for Northern Ireland to be treated in any way differently from the rest of the UK.
This is a very thin argument. The British government made Northern Ireland a semi-detached part of the country form the start, by giving it the Stormont Parliament in 1921. I believe some sensible Unionists spotted this baited hook at the time, and did not want Stormont. They rightly wanted full permanent union with the rest of Britain (a policy I wish we had followed) , rather than an obviously temporary toy Parliament, whose very existence suggested that Northern Ireland was destined, in the long run, to be unified with the Dublin-ruled state to the South But others, seeing the chance of jobs and titles, accepted it.
But from the start, Northern Ireland was treated separately and differently from the rest of the UK. It is the only constituent part of the UK to be named separately on the Passport. Until the Blair era, for more than 70 years, no other part of the UK had its own assembly. Arrangements in Northern Ireland for education, health and welfare and railways (NI's trains are still nationalised, and jolly good they are too, where they exist) are separate from those in the rest of the country.
Both in the days of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the days of its very different successor, the NI Police Service, the province has had a unified police force rather than the system of local city and county forces which still exists (though horribly diluted by Roy Jenkins in 1967) in England and Wales, and existed until very recently in Scotland.
Now it is more different still. Uniquely among UK police forces, the PSNI does not have a proper Royal Crown on its badges or coat of arms. On the mainland, such badges must bear the Crown of St Edward or the Crown of Scotland (symbols of royal authority deriving from the Coronation Oath and central to their lawful exercise of power and its nature). On the PSNI badge, there is a little cartoon crown, like a Monopoly token, along with various other squiggles (a cartoon harp, emphatically not the one used as a state symbol in the South, a torch, an olive branch, the scales of justice, a boot, an iron, no, I made the last two up). Nor is the cartoon crown on the top of the badge.
Northern Irish Driving Licences do not display the Union Flag, unlike those issued in the rest of the UK, though they do display the EU flag. Presumably this is because of a fear that Nationalist drivers would reject such licences. One has to wonder what happens to this arrangement when we leave the EU.
In NI, the flying of the Union Jack itself (no pedantic comments on how it is the Union Flag, please, the names are interchangeable) is far more restricted than in mainland Britain. There was a terrible row in Belfast when the City Council voted to restrict the flying of it to 18 designated days. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20651163
But NI is the only part of the UK where the flying of the national flag is regulated by law on government buildings, and restricted by that law to 18 days a year. The law 'The Flags Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2000', lists these days, and some other permissible occasions, and then adds : ' Except as provided by these Regulations, no flag shall be flown at any government building at any time.'
Let us leave aside the freedom of NI political parties to raise funds abroad, and various other peculiarities. Let ius rejoice at the freedom of those born in NI to obtain Irish Passports, once very popular among British journalist working in the Soviet bloc, because of the ease with which their neutral documents allowed them to obtain entry visas, which might take weeks if they used UK passports.
The most enormous difference between NI and the rest of the country is that NI's membership of the UK is now, er, provisional, and has been since the Belfast Instrument of Surrender to the IRA, (known blasphemously to the soppy and naïve as 'The Good Friday Agreement') 1998. A single referendum can shift it to Dublin sovereignty.
I am repeatedly told this is impossibly distant and unlikely. But in last Saturday's FT, fast supplanting the Guardian as the main newspaper of the British Left, the Irish economist David McWilliams produced some extraordinary facts and figures suggesting that NI cannot long sustain itself as it is.
https://www.ft.com/content/7d5244a0-f22d-11e8-ae55-df4bf40f9d0d
Unionists are now in a minority among young people in NI (though Protestants are still hugely in the majority among the old). The Catholic population could be a majority by 2030. As I often point out, many middle-class Protestants are using their good grammar school education to take their pick of mainland Universities – and not coming back afterwards. The mood is also shifting in the Republic, despite conventional wisdom that the South does not want unity
McWilliams says politicians in the Republic are 'talking about unity in a way I have not heard before'. He says it is 'still remote but not improbably so'.
He is also very good on the cultural and economic reasons why unification may begin to appeal very strongly not all that far off in the future.
Personally, I think he is over-cautious. I think the events of the last three years have greatly accelerated the process which will leave to the transfer of Northern Ireland to the Republic, which – when it happens – will be the first transfer of territory in Western Europe since 1945, which will have been made as a result of, and under pressure of, violence and the threat of further violence.
Mr McWilliams is so young and modern an Irishman that he doesn't seem to know that the words 'Fear God. Honour the King. Love the Brotherhood' are what used to be a fairly widely-known passage from the Bible (The First Epistle of Peter, 2:17) and describes them as a sectarian slogan, because he sees them on a banner in an emphatically Unionist village. Well, maybe that is their intention, I'm not qualified to know the minds of those who displayed them (they're often found in war memorial chapels in England). But the forgetting of the Bible is a perplexing and worrying thing. When all this is gone, what will come after? With what will our minds be furnished, to give shape and dignity to our thoughts?
But in general, Mr McWilliams is an acute and reasonably open-minded observer of events in the North, from the Southern point of view, , and tend to think his judgement is not far off the truth. In which case, it seems to me to be rather silly to make a huge great big deal about giving Northern Ireland different treatment from the rest of the UK, should that come about. We have done that for years, because we are weaker than we pretend to be.
December 7, 2018 Comments (45) Categories: European Union , IRA (Irish Republican Army) , Ireland , Northern Ireland (see Ulster) | Permalink
The burglars are at your door. And the police? Hiding in their office: How the balance of fear is shifting in Britain as criminals are no loner afraid of the law
Britain today is like a ship, long ago holed deep beneath the waterline, which now begins to list alarmingly, as the sea starts to slop on to the deck.
In many parts of this country, the balance of fear is shifting. Criminals are not afraid of the police and the courts. Normal people are afraid of wrongdoers.
How long before this happens where you live?
And then, what use will your easily broken windows and easily kicked-in front door be, or your burglar alarms to which nobody will respond?
In London, where the horror of knife crime is now plainly out of control, police are failing hopelessly in their efforts to catch and prosecute the culprits, even where there are living witnesses who could identify the men who tried to kill them. But they dare not do so.
As Sarah Jones, a Labour MP who heads Parliament's all-party group on knife crime, says: 'What's particularly shocking is the growing number of offences where the police identified a suspect but they weren't prosecuted because the victim did not support further action. This suggests a serious problem with victims feeling too afraid or mistrustful to testify.'
I would guess that this goes a lot further.
Many of us who have had dealings of one kind or another with the modern police suspect that, if we go to them, they will probably manage to mess up the case, ably assisted by the CPS, while also giving our full personal details to the suspect.
Even if they get it right, the criminal will be 'spared jail' by a feeble judge. Simpler to let it go.
And so the figures of recorded crime have a very distant relationship to actual crime. If there's no insurance to be claimed, why bother?
Most of us reluctantly recognise that things which were once restrained by the law – general low-level nastiness, vandalism, public drunkenness, illegal drugs – have now been decriminalised by stealth.
The problem is that almost nobody in politics, or the media, or the police, is remotely interested in why this has happened or how to put it right.
The police themselves are like BT, or one of the other monster monopolies, which view the public as a nuisance.
The Police Federation is just another public service union, whose solution to everything is more taxpayers' cash. But a lingering sentimentality stops us seeing this.
We used to like and respect the police, and we wish we still did, so we are more easily fooled by them than by any other lobby.
Take the current moaning about how their almost complete failure to enforce the laws against burglary, drunk driving, and drug possession is caused by a shortage of officers.
Police strengths are down a bit from their 2009 peak (was that an especially crime-free year?) but are significantly higher than they were in the days when all forces managed to patrol the streets.
The problem is that the police are doing the wrong thing.
Think about it. Please. What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he or she can do first aid?
The officer cannot unburgle or unmug or unstab you. He cannot unsmash your windows.
If your life has been ruined by a drunken driver, or a motorist texting while driving, he cannot unruin that life. He cannot restore the irrevocably lost mental health of the teen who has smoked marijuana.
The best he can do is, with a lot of luck, arrange for the criminals involved to do a bit of community service, or be sentenced to a fine they won't actually pay.
His job was to prevent these things from happening, by being a visible, patrolling presence in every town and village.
But he has stopped doing this.
The beats he used to walk long ago vanished. The police stations, hundreds of them, were sold off. So were the police houses. The police road patrols became a rarity.
The modern police deride these simple, effective methods. They claim they cannot halt cybercrime or terrorism or domestic abuse.
Well, this would be a good argument if the modern police methods of hiding in remote office blocks or driving about chatting to each other, worked any better.
But they do not.
I am astonished that the debate on this subject continues at this ignorant, partisan level.
It is as if the captain and his first lieutenant were arguing, on the bridge, about the menu for dinner, while the ship went down by the bows.
Corbynites may love the new film Peterloo, about the indefensible massacre, in 1819, of unarmed Englishmen and women by drunken, stupid soldiers under the command of dolts.
If Left-wing speeches are your thing, there is no shortage of them in this drama, which seemed to me to last slightly longer than the Hundred Years War.
The final scenes of slaughter are, by contrast, powerfully moving.
But the whole point of Peterloo is that it was the middle classes who publicised it, using that great invention, the newspaper, and denounced it, and sought the reforms which ensured that the voice of the people would be heard and heeded in the land, without bloodshed.
I feel great sympathy for the old soldiers now being dragged from their retirement by officious detectives to face investigations about long ago events in Northern Ireland.
Soldiers are owed the total loyalty of the Crown, which sent them into danger and demanded their disciplined obedience.
But I feel no sympathy with most of the soppy politicians now raising their cases and bleating about how unfair it all is.
For these politicians continue to pretend that our abject crawling to IRA gangsters (and 'Loyalist' gangsters, too) in Belfast in 1998 was a benevolent, happy peace deal.
It was not. It was a capitulation.
Which is why it is we who withdrew our forces, and we who hauled down our flags and ceded our territory (it will pass to Dublin's control quite soon).
Our lawless enemies kept their guns and bombs, rose to power, and dined at Windsor Castle.
And it is our soldiers who face police inquiries, while hundreds of grisly terrorists were released from well-earned prison sentences, and hundreds more promised that their bloody crimes are forgotten.
How strange it is that a country which admires Churchill's defiance of a wicked and mighty enemy applauds our surrender to a small, criminal gang.
We have sold out to the Saudis
Unlike those who rushed to conclusions about alleged gas attacks in Syria, without bothering with evidence, I have waited till it is beyond reasonable doubt that the Saudi regime murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, on their own premises, using their own state- paid hoodlums.
And now I can say this to our Government, and to the warlike media voices and MPs of all parties who have postured over the undoubted wickedness of Russia and Syria: You are hypocrites. Your moralising is all phoney.
Because, as we will see in the years to come, the many barbarities of the Saudi regime will not lead to sanctions, or bombing raids or missiles or mass expulsions of diplomats.
Nor will the increasingly obvious aggression and despotism of our other great friends, the Chinese.
These killers and tyrants will still be welcome at Buckingham Palace. And this does not really bother you.
So it is obvious that we, as a country, can be bought, and actually have no morals.
And so either your outrage against Syria and Russia is a pose to make you look better than you are; or you do not know what you are talking about; or you have other, less creditable reasons for seeking conflict with these countries.
That is now established.
'Short Breaks in Mordor' A collection of my reports from places you need to know about but probably don't want to visit - E.g. Pyongyang, Baghdad, Minsk, Teheran, Cairo, Katanga, Mandalay, Deoband, Peshawar, Baku and Tashkent - is now available as a paperback here
https://amzn.to/2R2LaYn
October 28, 2018 Comments (108) Categories: China , Cinema , Crime , Culture , History , Intervention, Liberal , Ireland , Moral Preaching , Police , Political Correctness , Russia | Permalink
More taxes, Archbishop? Ask your right-on pals to pay first
I pray every day for Archbishop Justin Welby, though with no very great hope of success. Christians are supposed to pray for their enemies, and he seems to be one of those.
I will never forget the panic-stricken look on his face when I said a friendly hello to him at a Lambeth Palace reception, to which I had obviously been invited by mistake. I suspect – judging by his open dismay – that he would have preferred to have had Satan at his party. I left very soon afterwards.
And later I came to have a really low opinion of his abilities, and of his interest in justice, as I and others battled to get such justice for the truly great Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who died 60 years ago.
Under Archbishop Welby's leadership, Bishop Bell was publicly denounced by his own Church as a paedophile after a miserable secret kangaroo court. The evidence against him was ancient, thin and uncorroborated, and no defence had even been heard. Yet, now that this process has been exposed as the unfair botch it was, the Archbishop still won't accept he made a mistake.
And his endorsement of last week's wild Blairite demand for more taxes and a severe assault on our freedom to pass on our hard-earned life savings to our children, did nothing to improve my opinion.
Christians can be socialists or conservatives, or liberals in politics. Or they can be none of these things. It is their personal actions, not their views, that matter. It is absolutely not the task of the religious leader of England to take sides on political and economic quarrels of which he plainly knows little and understands less.
But does he understand the Gospels any better? In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ at no point says 'Blessed are the Tax Collectors'. When he tells us to help the hungry, the sick and the homeless, he does not tell us to hand on the job to the State. He tells us to do it ourselves, not through the cold, impersonal agencies of PAYE and the Universal Credit system.
Governments are often very bad at spending money. I pay quite a bit of tax, and wouldn't mind at all if it went (for example) on an NHS that was well-run, schools that I thought were good, or on a criminal justice system that I thought was effective. But I get none of these things.
And it's not because the State has too little money that this rich country now has so many food banks.
It is because the state is so incompetent at helping those in real trouble. Charities, sustained by private donations and private hard work, often do the job much better.
Higher tax will not mean people give more to charity. It will mean they give less. Worse, if you threaten the freedom to inherit, you threaten private property itself. And if you threaten that, you threaten the whole basis of freedom. Without private property we all become slaves of the secular, anti-Christian state. How can that be a Christian desire?
Nobody is against tax as such. Most of us are in favour of other people paying more tax. But almost nobody is in favour of paying more himself, in practice.
Look into many tax avoidance schemes and you will generally find plenty of right-on leftist comedians and media figures, taking full advantage. And, though HM Revenue & Customs is always happy to accept voluntary extra contributions, for some reason these are rare.
THE Archbishop, amusingly, issued his fatwa against inherited wealth and in favour of tax through the Institute for Public Policy Research. This leftist coven was set up to provide a fancy figleaf for New Labour's wild debauch of spending and borrowing, which destroyed many pension funds and plunged the nation deep in debt.
But, oh, look, the IPPR, so keen on taxing others, has somehow qualified to be a registered charity. This status normally means not having to pay income or corporation tax, capital gains tax, or stamp duty. Gifts to registered charities are also usually free of the inheritance tax that Archbishop Welby wants to be so strictly applied to the rest of us. They are often spared all or most business rates on their premises, and can get special VAT treatment.
Quite why such outfits as the IPPR should escape the punitive taxes which are now putting so many small firms and shops out of business, I have no idea. Couldn't the money be better spent on the poor? Perhaps the Archbishop could do something about it?
BBC's squalid excuses for child killers
The over-praised BBC drama Mother's Day seemed to me to have forgotten who actually murdered Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry in Warrington in 1993.
Well, I certainly remember: the IRA, whose apologists and supporters are now invited to the White House and Windsor Castle, planted high explosives in cast-iron litter bins in the heart of an English town where – as it happened – many Irish people lived. These cruel monsters made sure those fleeing the first bomb would run straight into the blast of the second.
The culprits have never been caught, and if they were, they would be almost immediately released under the nauseating terms of our surrender to the IRA. The drama, in my view, made far too much of stupid excuses issued by Republicans for this crime. It gave valuable airtime to fictional mouthpieces and excuse-makers for the IRA cause. It also greatly exaggerated a minor fire at the Irish club in Warrington to suggest it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.
No doubt Tim and Johnathan were not the first or only children to die in the Troubles. No doubt Loyalist bombs were just as savage. No doubt the British Army and the police were not without faults. But so what? The IRA men who coldly planted bombs outside a town centre branch of McDonald's, set to go off at lunchtime on a Saturday, deliberately set out to kill and maim innocent people including children and did so, horribly. Nobody made them do it. There was no excuse for this. There never will be.
Nobody, least of all the BBC, should try to make one.
A moving message from the Cold War
If ever you are tempted to forget how lucky we are to live on our safe island, see the brilliant new Polish film Cold War, in which Joanna Kulig plays one of a pair of lovers whose lives – which in a free country would have been happy and contented – are utterly ruined by the Iron Curtain. There are no car chases, and there is mercifully little sex. But there is a lot of thought.
When I lived in crime-ridden Moscow, I had a solid steel front door. Such things were and are common there. After the recent incident in Bexley in South-East London, when a family out for a meal watched in amazement on a mobile phone (linked to their doorbell) as armed robbers kicked their front door off its hinges at 9pm, I wonder if the time has come to follow Moscow rules here. British houses are not made to withstand such attacks. We assume the law keeps us safe. But bad people are not afraid of the law now.
I am increasingly frightened by electric bicycles, actually rather fast, near-silent heavy motorbikes which are unregistered but can kill or maim. Are these ever-more-common things adequately regulated or controlled?
September 9, 2018 Comments (70) Categories: BBC , BBC bias , Cinema , Cold War , Crime , Human Wrongs , IRA (Irish Republican Army) , Ireland , Tax , Terrorism | Permalink
05 August 2018 1:54 AM
Gangsters go free but soldiers face trial: proof the IRA won
Why do you think police are now investigating the long-ago acts of British soldiers in Northern Ireland, while Patrick Magee (pictured), the multiple murderer who tried to do away with the British Cabinet in Brighton (killing five innocent persons and injuring another 31) is a free man? And why do you think our Government cannot stop this? I will tell you. It is because we surrendered to the IRA in 1998. The defeated must do as they are told.
If, like me, you opposed this at the time, you are entitled to complain. If you were gulled by talk of 'peace', when you must have known a price would be paid, then you cannot. You shrugged and let it go. And there's more to come.
Quite soon now, a large chunk of our national territory will pass under the rule of a foreign power, as a result of a violent attack on this country.
This sort of thing is not actually supposed to happen nowadays in civilised Western Europe, but we get round it by pretending it is not happening.
You may have guessed that the place involved is Northern Ireland. Thanks to the Instrument of Surrender signed by the Blair Government in 1998 at Belfast, a referendum is all it will take to place this area under the control of the Irish Republic. A recent survey by Lucid Talk for the BBC showed 45 per cent would vote to stay British, and 42.1 per cent would vote to leave the UK. In my view, it is a matter of time before there is a majority to leave.
You may say that the transfer will therefore be democratic. But no such vote would ever have been considered if Britain had not given in to the IRA in 1998.
Look at what happened in this supposed festival of peace and love. Hundreds of IRA prisoners were freed. So were scores of equally disgusting gangsters from the 'Loyalist' side, so as to look even-handed. An amnesty, in all but name, was given to any who had yet to be caught and convicted.
The only people who didn't benefit from this were those who prefer peaceful, lawful methods.
Thousands of British troops withdrew. Hugely expensive surveillance equipment in sensitive areas was dismantled and taken away for ever. The police Special Branch, a formidable weapon against the terrorists, was disbanded. IRA mouthpieces were allowed into mainstream politics on fat tax-funded salaries, and invited to Royal banquets. Sinn Fein, the IRA megaphone, was even allowed to raise funds abroad – so far more than £10 million from US businessmen and Hollywood poseurs. The Crown of St Edward, symbol of authority in our Kingdom, was stripped from police badges, while flying of the Union Flag was severely limited by law.
Meanwhile, it was pretended that the IRA had disarmed, but no visible, checkable proof of this was ever produced.
IRA bombings, including the worst single massacre of the whole Troubles, at Omagh, continued. These extended to the English mainland – including one in Ealing and another outside the then BBC TV Centre in 2001. But these were all conveniently accepted as being the work of so-called 'dissidents'.
And here is a puzzle. Irish Republicanism is notorious for the viciousness of its internal conflicts. In the past its factions have gone to war with each other, or hanged each other, because they disagreed over the 1921 peace treaty with Britain.
But I can find no trace of any attempt by the Provisional IRA to destroy the alleged 'Real IRA' (they must know who they are), which suggests to me that it is simply a cover used for deniable operations, when the British Government is being slow to make concessions.
And that might give you a clue as to why a 76-year-old former paratrooper is under police investigation for crimes allegedly committed in Londonderry in 1972, while all manner of IRA and UVF killers from the same era haven't a care in the world, and probably live off money you pay in tax.
Scorned... by the Westminster Soviets
The Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi, who killed 22 people at a concert in May 2017, had been rescued from Libya in 2014 by the Royal Navy. Why?
Libya was in chaos because David Cameron had helped an Islamist rebellion there, one of the stupidest actions of any modern British politician.
So with that in mind, shouldn't the Government be a bit more careful about helping Islamist rebels in general, and about who else it welcomes into our borders? Apparently not. Last week I noted plans to bring into this country members of the so-called White Helmets, a controversial, supposedly humanitarian organisation that has operated for years in areas of Syria controlled by militant Islamist jihadis.
Bizarrely, even after the Libyan disaster, Britain has been helping these jihadis too.
I still have no idea why these White Helmets need to come to Britain. Like you, I do not really know who they are. On Monday I asked the Home Office how and where they will be vetted, where they will live, and who will support them. They replied three days later with meaningless flannel, about an eighth of an inch short of an actual insult.
When I chided the press officer involved, saying that the British Government really owed some respect to the concerns of British citizens about this sort of thing, and was behaving like a Soviet ministry in the 1980s, he laughed.
I would name him, because I think this behaviour demonstrates the astonishing arrogance of modern government, which long ago ceased to understand who pays its wages.
But I have been begged not to do so as it would be 'unfair'. I don't, as it happens, agree. But remember that laughter the next time you hear a Minister going on about how vigilant we are.
Are we really so much wiser than Dennis's dad?
Oh, for the lost world of the Beano, 80 years old this week, and come to that, the Dandy, the Beezer and the rest of them. How I used to look forward to their arrival at the newsagent's each Saturday. How my parents disapproved of them, and urged me to read the worthy, educational Eagle instead.
It's partly a yearning for a whole range of lost things, from Corona soft drinks to Palm Toffee and Fry's Five Boys chocolate, and also that now-vanished Saturday evening feeling, best in crisp autumn air, of release and freedom (a lot to do with the fact that so many people still worked on Saturday morning).
But I'm still unable to persuade myself that the days when angry fathers pursued their errant children with slippers (or were supposed to do – mine never raised a hand to me despite multiple provocations) were so terribly wicked.
Nowadays Dennis the Menace would be drugged with Ritalin, a stone overweight from sugary drinks and welded to some sort of screen. Dad's slipper and teacher's cane may have been bad, but are we really sure that our descendants will look on us as good parents?
I will mention here, once again, the virtues of the Norway Option as a clean, easy route out of the EU. We don't need France's permission to take it. We can just decide to follow it, take it down off the shelf, and plug it in. As the deadline approaches, I suspect many more people may notice this. Do not be dismayed. Norway (I've been to look) is definitely outside the EU and does very well.
August 5, 2018 Comments (117) Categories: Cameron, David , European Union , History , Human Wrongs , Intervention, Liberal , IRA (Irish Republican Army) , Ireland , Libya , Norway , Smacking | Permalink
PETER HITCHENS on why Britain should declare independence from BOTH Europe and the States
The time has come for Britain to declare independence from the USA. If our two countries do, in fact, have a 'special relationship', it is now an especially bad one.
Our internal affairs are none of Washington's business. Many people rightly denounced Barack Obama's crude attempt to influence the EU referendum by saying we would be at 'the back of the queue' for an American trade deal if we voted to leave.
The same people must logically also denounce Donald Trump's gross and ill-mannered intervention in our private affairs on Friday, which he then pretended, totally unconvincingly, not to have meant.
Both Presidents may well have been speaking something like the truth, though in fact trade and investment between us and the USA are pretty healthy in any case, mainly thanks to our similar laws and languages.
But it is our affair, not theirs. The two Presidents should have known better, and so should whoever in Britain advised them to poke their noses into our affairs.
The Obama interference backfired so badly that it probably swung the vote to Leave. Mr Trump's meddling, especially his mischievous endorsement of 'Boris' Johnson (his real name is Al), may possibly help save Mrs May from her own Tory Party.
What do I think about it all? As one of the most longstanding campaigners for a British departure from the EU, I am in near-despair at the way an honest, patriotic cause has been hijacked by frantic free-traders, mini-Trumps who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and have no real interest in this country at all.
I want to preserve our liberties, unique laws and form of government, our Christian culture, our beautiful, flexible language, our unrivalled landscape, the irreplaceable gifts of a thousand years free from invasion.
I want my maps measured in yards and miles and my groceries in pounds and ounces; and I hope in the end to be laid in 6ft of English earth, not two blasted metres. But I couldn't care less about our supposed freedom to import GM foods and chlorine-washed chicken from the USA.
In fact, I strongly suspect that people who think this is the most important issue are as much of a threat to my kind of Britain as the EU is. What's more, I cannot see that creepy obeisance to the USA is any better than crawling to Brussels. It does not matter what kind of President the USA has.
Franklin Roosevelt stripped us of wealth and empire. Truman broke promises to share nuclear technology with us. Eisenhower humiliated us at Suez. LBJ loathed us for refusing to join his mad adventure in Vietnam. Reagan wanted us to sell out the Falklands to Argentina. Clinton actually made us sell out to the IRA. George W. Bush made us his lapdog. Obama was pretty openly our enemy.
In most cases, they were not personally hostile to Britain. Some of them actually quite liked us. But in US politics, if you can offer the President's party neither votes nor money, you don't count.
Trump cares little about this country. His arrogant rudeness towards us suits some domestic game he is playing, for he is the most brilliant politician since Princess Diana – not especially intelligent or knowledgeable, but cunning beyond belief. He knew what he was doing when he said what he said, and you may be sure it was for his benefit, not ours.
Why DID we fall for the Drab Four?
I can still remember the evening in 1968 when I tried, and failed, to get into a packed showing of The Beatles' cartoon Yellow Submarine, then a sort of cult. I never did manage to see it at the time.
So I was filled with curiosity when it was revived last week after 50 years. It was terrible.
This wasn't just because it was full of the idea that the bought pleasures of noise (and perhaps, just possibly, drugs) were the only real happiness, and that other approaches to life were grey and miserable.
It was because the whole thing was so crude. There was no proper plot, and the jokes were dreadful.
Long before 1968, Disney's brilliant animators had created works of art with cartoons. But this was lame and slow, and made surprisingly little use of music.
The cartoon Fab Four were also shown in their embarrassing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi phase, all droopy moustaches and candy colours.
How could it have been a success? Yet again, the only conclusion you could draw was that they had put something in the water round about 1967, and everyone between the ages of 15 and 30 had taken leave of their senses.
'They always say 'Nothing can derail the Peace Process'. Why can't it?
When I point out that Britain surrendered to IRA and 'loyalist' terror in 1998, which is exactly what we did, I am shushed and asked angrily whether I am against peace. But 20 years after that capitulation, there is no real peace. True, much of the low-level intimidation and sectarian crime which continues does not get reported here. But the past few nasty days in Londonderry have reminded the complacent of what is actually happening. Don't you think the IRA could stop this if it wanted to? The question is, why doesn't it want to? We took a short cut, buying fake peace by appeasing killers. As always in such bargains, we got neither peace nor honour. I am still predicting the sight of Irish troops firing plastic bullets on the Protestant Shankill Road, perhaps within 20 years.
The Truth is lost in the propaganda war over Syria
Back in April I was treated with something very like contempt because I refused to be rushed into supporting a Western attack on Syria.
This illegal assault was supposedly justified because of alleged gas attacks by the Syrian government in Douma.
As I said at the time, there was no independent evidence that this had actually happened, and also no good reason to rush into action.
The area affected had at that time been under the control of a savage Islamist militia, and so Western journalists and diplomats could not safely go there.
But lurid and distressing reports on the supposed atrocity were prepared by media organisations hundreds or thousands of miles away on the basis of material provided by propaganda sources. They were given great prominence.
Now, almost unreported, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has produced its first report on Douma. The OPCW is not perfect, and has sometimes got carried away, but on this occasion it has been properly cautious.
In April, a major and rather self-important Left-wing national newspaper wrote that unidentified doctors 'said the symptoms had been consistent with exposure to an organophosphorus substance'.
Now the OPCW says: 'No organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties.'
Lots of other things remain unresolved. The whole report, and a discussion of it, can be found elsewhere on my blog and here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/07/initial-thoughts-on-the-opcw-interim-investigation-into-the-alleged-gas-attack-in-douma-syria.html
But those who scorned me when I urged caution owe me an apology, I think.
July 15, 2018 Comments (105) Categories: Cinema , Culture , Intervention, Liberal , IRA (Irish Republican Army) , Ireland , Special Relationship , USA , warfare | Permalink
Its Hour Come Round At Last? Reflections on the Abortion Referendum in Ireland
It was not my business to discuss Ireland's Abortion Referendum while it was going on. Ireland is a sovereign country especially (and reasonably) sensitive to attempts by British people to push it around or to influence events there. Not that I personally believe I could have had any such influence, just that I might have been accused of trying to exert it. I am surprised there was so little fuss about the British student bodies who helped Irish students in Britain to travel home to vote. This looked to me like blatant interference in somebody else's internal business.
Now, I'm not going to enter into the actual abortion law argument as such, here. Personally I regard abortion as absolutely wrong and hope that I could stand up for this position under all circumstances. But I understand and sympathise with those who believe there are exceptions, and I think the law of our country should allow for them.
My thoughts on it are fully-expressed in this long-ago posting, recently republished here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/05/safe-legal-and-very-common-the-abortion-epidemic-originally-published-in-2007.html
I'd also like to link to this Wikipedia entry
on the death of Savita Halappanavar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar
which I think can reasonably be said to show that the role of Ireland's existing abortion laws in this case is contentious, and that a change in that law, following the case, was possible despite the existence of the Constitutional Clause overthrown by the recent referendum.
I'd also make two points about Ireland's referendum that seem to me to be important, and to show (I'll return to this later) a profound shift in the understanding of morality in Western Europe in the past 60 years.
First, in 1966 Britain it was perfectly possible to believe sincerely that the David Steel Abortion Bill, which was passed the next year, would ease conditions for a few desperate women, forced into unwanted pregnancy and faced with real threats to their health if it went ahead.
But the operation of that law, and the hecatombs of unborn babies destroyed since (many of them by women who have had at least one - and sometimes several - previous abortions) made it impossible for any Irish voter to believe that last week. They *knew* they were voting for abortion on demand, at a rate of many thousands a year.
Likewise, in the mid-1960s there were no ultrasound scans (sonograms), and knowledge of the development of the unborn was much more limited. The Irish electorate voted for abortion knowing things about unborn babies, their appearance, development and activities in the womb, very early in life, which the British MPs of 1966-7 did not know. Similarly, the treatment of severely premature babies was far less advanced in 1966-7 than it is now. Babies which would have been regarded as wholly unviable then, have since survived and grown to live full lives as adult humans. I might say that attitudes towards Down's children have changed for the better, partly thank to the moving advocacy of Dominic Lawson and his wife Rosa Monckton, and to the late Princess Diana, who stood Godmother for the couple's Down's daughter Domenica. But I am not, alas, sure that they have changed enough.
Now, to that referendum. First, once again, it's the Irish people's business what they do with their laws. But it's very noticeable that the event has reverberated well outside the Republic's borders.
There are calls, many of them from so-called 'Conservatives' in British politics, for the restrictions on abortion still in place in Northern Ireland to be removed as a result of a vote in a separate jurisdiction. I can see no logical case for this. The whole point of Northern Ireland is that it is separate from the Republic of Ireland, a separation in fact reinforced and strengthened by the terms of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 ( for as long as Northern Ireland *does* remain separate). Dublin's former claims on the territory of Northern Ireland have been formally rescinded.
The BBC and several liberal newspapers are covering this development with great enthusiasm, blowing hard on the sparks in the hope, as I assume, of creating a real momentum for such a change. I saw a BBC 'reporter' describing Northern Ireland as 'out of step' on the main TV bulletin on Sunday night. Is this impartiality at work? To be out of step is surely to be in the wrong. That is what the metaphor means, as it refers to a soldier on parade who is not keeping step with his unit, who are following the instructions they have been given.
Northern Ireland, for sure, is different from much of the rest of Europe on this question. But it is and must remain a matter of opinion whether it is right or wrong to be so. The phrase 'out of step' suggests a partiality in favour of looser abortion laws. (The same bulletin, by the way, allowed another 'reporter' repeatedly to describe two parties in Italy as 'populists', a pejorative description. Why could he not have used their actual names, The Five Star Movement and The League? ).
Why are they so worried about the abortion law in a place they will probably never visit, let alone inhabit?
This leads me to the heart of this question. Like marijuana, abortion is part of the creed and life of the supporters of the cultural revolution.
It is one of those identifiers and creators of solidarity and fellow-feeling, much like Jewish dietary laws or the fasts of Christianity and Islam. The passing round of the shared joint is a sort of Holy Communion of the modern bourgeois bohemian (or was, until the collective snorting of Cocaine at dinner parties began to supplant it).
Support for abortion (like its almost invariable corollary, horror at the death penalty) is more like a sort of masonic handshake, a test. Those who don't pass it are obviously not to be trusted or welcomed or liked.
Well, in my homicidal Bolshevik days I was of course a keen supporter of abortion. No coy nonsense for me about being 'pro-choice'. I wasn't pro-choice. It was abortion I favoured, and its opponents could take a running jump. I openly hated the bourgeois family and the marriage-bond that held it together. I believed it quite justifiable to kill in a good cause.
Children, as far as I was concerned, could just as well be raised in state nurseries. In any case, we were busy doing important things. How dare they force us to breed - or to give up sex, if we didn't want to breed? The very idea.
I remember being rather disturbed by the sad and lonely little knots of abortion opponents we sometimes encountered at demonstrations – often hollow-faced men with severe hair and very tightly-tied ties, standing in the rain next to some glum nuns. They perfectly encapsulated what we were fleeing from, the ordered, hierarchical, self-disciplined life of the suburbs, lawn-mowing, shoe-polishing, respectable, possibly even (gasp, shudder) church-going. What if we were all to be dragged back into that world, compelled by a bawling baby to take out a mortgage, live in the provinces, become a commuter, sing hymns and acquire a garden gate?
No, we were destined to live in the capital, child-free, lawn-free, hymn-free, unencumbered, without obligations to our parents, and the past, or to children, and the future.
And it was both very tempting and very enjoyable, in a shallow, empty sort of way. I came to dislike it, but then again I came to dislike a lot of things I had once favoured.
But others still seek it. I think it is a feeling of relief that they have escaped the rural, small-town or suburban life of Ireland that lay behind the rather strange rejoicings in Dublin at the weekend. These are metropolitan bohemians who want adolescence to go on forever, or at least into the foreseeable future. To me their jubilations were a festival of death, but I do understand that they don't see it that way. Which is why they have to dispute (in fact, in the proper sense of the word, deny) the humanity of the aborted child. If there was no life then how could its removal be a death?
Oddly enough, I noticed this feeling slightly diminishing in the Blair era, after mass immigration had got under way and a great wave of cheap, affordable servants became available to the professional middle classes of London. Now, they could have children and continue with their exciting metropolitan double-income lives without having to pay too much to get someone to take care of the babies and the children. Raising children, previously a rather unfashionable activity mainly left to the poor, became modish. Children's clothes, and all the equipment associated with child-rearing, previously mostly hideous, gradually began to become tasteful and much more expensive. The bohemian middle classes, in a desultory sort of way, even began to realise just how dreadful most state secondary schools in London were.
But despite all this, abortion remain a masonic test of whether you were properly right on. I think this very, very deep and goes back to the Helvetius problem, the replacement of religious faith, as the mark of virtue, by earthly utopianism. Utopianism requires a reform of man himself. He must become something else, and so be limitlessly changeable and reformable. This is toughest for those who have no wish to be changed.
This conflicts utterly with the Christian belief that we are all unalterably made in the image of God are and are uniquely valued by God, named and known by him from the beginning of the universe. The deliberate killing of any innocent person is therefore morally impossible, and even guilty persons can only be killed according to variations of the Just War theory which greatly limits the taking of life.
And that is why earthly utopians logically cannot accept arguments based on the inviolability of innocent life.
Similarly, the idea of lifelong marriage, which may well not suit one party, or even both parties to such a marriage, is only really justifiable if you accept the idea of a divine lawmaker who stands above and beyond utilitarianism.
Modern liberal utopianism *by its nature* excludes such a God from the universe - though it can just about tolerate a tamed, minimised, Nice God who doesn't really care about all that stuff and certainly doesn't require obedience to absolute laws.
So it is rare for left-wing people to be against abortion . My late brother was one of those rare left-wing opponents of abortion: He explained '[an] unborn child seems to me to be a real concept. It's not a growth or an appendix'. This short film is the clearest expression of his view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apt4iR6axnY
If you can't for any reason watch it, here's a transcript. In a debate, he had condemned religions that praised infanticide, which prompted one of the moderators to ask him if he was involved in the pro-life movement.
He replied:
"I believe the concept of 'unborn child' is a real concept, yes, and I've had a lot of quarrels with some of my fellow materialists and secularists on this point.
"If the concept 'child' means anything, the concept 'unborn child' can be said to mean something. And all the discoveries of embryology, which have been very considerable in the last generation or so, and of viability, appear to confirm that opinion, which I think should be innate of everyone. It's innate in the Hippocratic Oath. It's instinct in anyone who's ever watched a sonogram, and so forth.
"So 'yes' is my answer." (to the question of whether he was on the 'pro-life' side )
Another left-wing person who stood out against pro-abortion conformism was the American Nat Hentoff, now alas gone from us, whose syndicated column 'Sweet Land of Liberty' stood up against all kinds of giants and fashions. He was, as all principled writers should be, inconvenient to everybody at some point. Here's an example of his anti-abortion writing http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/i ndivisible.html
But you'll note how rare they are, and how both of these men were, all their lives, at an awkward angle to their own milieu, never quite orthodox even in unorthodoxy. You might even say (though this is not axiomatically a criticism) that they were inconsistent. I just think it's a pity, but not a surprise, there are not more of them.
But there aren't, which is perhaps why (please correct me, anyone , if I am wrong) the media commentary in Ireland over the abortion referendum was overwhelmingly in favour of the change. And not just in expression of opinion but in the assumption of virtue.
Well, I'm interested in what kind of ideal society requires the easy disposal of unborn babies,regards making that action easier as a subject for public rejoicing, and loves it so much that it seeks to spread the idea to its neighbours.
It makes me think of William Butler Yeats's 'Second Coming', no not that bit, this bit:
'A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'
Which gives me a sensation not wholly different from the one I get at the end of that astonishing book 'Rosemary's Baby'(which was, as you will recall, a child of 1967) .
May 28, 2018 Comments (146) Categories: Abortion , Christopher Hitchens , Ireland | Permalink
14 April 2018 4:56 PM
An Appearance on 'Any Questions' plus some Saturday Afternoon Arithmetic
Some readers may like to know that I was on the panel for BBC Radio 4's 'Any Questions' on Friday night. You may listen to it here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09yh6n7
The programme was broadcast from Oxford Town Hall, a building I've written about here in the past, and where I more usually go to sing Christmas Carols (though I have more than once been in a protesting mob outside as well). It was a very large audience, and what you might expect for Oxford, leftist in an old-fashioned Guardianish way, but not in a modern Guardianish way – that is, unenthusiastic about war, filled with fury at the result of the EU referendum.
The programme opens with an exchange about what we then didn't know for certain would be the missile strikes on Syria later that night. I have to say that I also feared they would be much larger than they turned out to be, and have a slight suspicion that the Pentagon had toned things down. Its boss, General James 'Mad Dog' Mattis, was cooler about the alleged atrocities than most in the US government, and continued to treat the allegations as allegations, something hardly any senior person in British politics seems able to do.
Be that as it may, I had a couple of clashes, one with the ultra-liberal Tory, Lord (Chris) Patten, and the other with the Labour MP and former Blairite minister Caroline Flint.
This blog's great friend, Ky, has done her usual magic and analyzed the timings of the opening debate. I've deployed my decrepit arithmetical skills here (I'm open to correction, Ky is not to blame) to see if I did in fact hog the debate, as I was being accused of doing. NB Ky has now done a full analysis, which I reproduce at the bottom of this article.
There's a reason for this, as listeners will find.
She found that Chris Patten, who was given first shot and spoke for 57 seconds, was then asked to continue by Jonathan Dimbleby, so spoke by invitation for another 12 seconds. He seemed to stop but then resumed for another 24 seconds. Ky says that amounts to a total of 90 seconds.
I then spoke for 94 seconds without pause.
Jonathan Dimbleby then asked me a question, which took me 12 more seconds to answer.
Lord Patten was then invited by Jonathan Dimbleby to respond. Which he did for ten seconds.
I intervened (Lord Patten having sworn on air and, as it seemed to me, attempted to assert personal moral superiority over me). This lasted for 23 seconds.
By this stage, Lord Patten has had 100 seconds, and I've had 129.
Caroline Lucas then gets 29 seconds
Lord Patten, in a response to my calling him a Jingo, quite rightly gets another 17 seconds to respond.
Running score: Hitchens 129, Patten 117.
Caroline Lucas gets another 37 seconds
Caroline Flint speaks for 122 seconds, in two sections between which Jonathan Dimbleby asks her to elaborate on aher position.
Running score: Hitchens 129, Flint 122, Patten 117, Lucas 66
Jonathan Dimbleby then invited Lord Patten to rejoin the discussion, which he does for 55 seconds.
Running score, Hitchens 129, Flint 122, Patten 172, Lucas 66
Caroline Flint is then invited in again by Jonathan Dimbleby and speaks for 36 seconds.
Running score Hitchens 129, Flint 158, Patten 172, Lucas 66
I then intervene uninvited for 58 seconds until Jonathan Dimbleby tries to interrupt and Caroline Flint repeatedly interrupts, attacking me for supposedly speaking for too long.
Running score Hitchens 187, Flint 158 (168 if you award her 10 seconds for interrupting me again and again, as I think you should), Patten 172, Lucas 66
I then manage to get another heavily uninterrupted segment, bringing my total (with interruptions) to 235.
Caroline Lucas was then allowed to speak for 105 seconds, and Chris Patten once again invited to make a contribution, which he did for 78 seconds.
Running score: Hitchens 235, Flint 168, Patten 250, Lucas 171.
I think this shows that Lord Patten and I, sometimes in direct clash, grabbed more of the discussion than was our fair share, but also that Lord Patten was offered more opportunities to speak, whereas I seized quite a few. I'd add that perhaps He and I were more engaged in that subject than the other panellists. Caroline Flint didn't interrupt Lord Patten for going on too long. In my case, I'd say that I urgently need to say some things that nobody else would articulate. While Caroline Lucas is healthily sceptical of warmongering, she did not seem to me to especially well-briefed on the facts and diplomatic background of the matter. As I've noted before, I believe that I tend to have to fight a little harder to get in and stay in than other contributors do. Perhaps later we'll get a full score for the whole programme, but when we do I think we will find that Ms Flint, especially, got great quantities of uninterrupted time. Almost at the end of the programme, Ms Flint spoke for about 3 minutes at a go (there was an interruption of perhaps 20 seconds from Jonathan Dimbleby explaining that Any Questions audiences are not vetted for 'balance' ).
Ky's full analysis :LP = Lord Patten, PH=Peter Hitchens, CL=Caroline Lucas and CFG = Caroline Flint.
JD= Jonathan Dimbleby.
First comes a full analysis of each segment. Then at the bottom an analysis of each contributor's timings in each segment. The final total shows that Lord Patten at more than ten minutes, had a much larger share of the programme than the other three, Caroline Flint came second, I came third - and Caroline Lucas was only slightly behind me. Yet I would say I was the one most interrupted by the chair, and by other panellists. Ky (to whom I am most grateful for what seems to me to be a fascinating exercise in facts versus perception) modestly says that she cannot be totally sure her timings are right. If anyone wishes to correct any of her figures, please do so.
LP 1.29-2.23, 2.36-.48, 51-3.15...90'
PH 3.17-4.51 ...94'
LP 5.58-6.18 ...10'
PH 6.25-6.48 …23' Interrupted by JD while making a point 'Before you act you have to know'
CL 6.56-8.25...89'
LP 8.33-8.50...17'
CL8.50-9.27...37'
CF9.39-10.39, 10.59-11.59...122'
LP12.30-13.25...55'
CF13.27-14.03...36'
PH 'May I correct…?'
PH 14.08-14.34 <—Intr. 15.02 <—Intr. by CF, 15.06 PH' I didn't interrupt you' -
15.26 <— JD 'OK, Peter..!' - 15.36-.41 <—CF 'you are not the only voice…' JD 'excuse me!' -.15.54…106' with interruptions by CF, JD
CL16.26-18.11...105'
LP18.35-19.53…78'
Q Israel
PH 23.55-24.55, 25.07-25.14 …67'
LP25.24-27.34...130'
JD27.43-28.03...20'
CL28.43-29.16 appl-30.27…104'
PH 32.05-08…3'
Q Ireland
CL 32:39-33.09 appl-34.16…97' with interruption
PH 34.17-36.14 …117'
LP 36.29-37.03…34'
PH 37.11-15…4' 'freedom of speech…'
LP 37:18-58…40'
JD37.59-38.11
LP38.11-39.41…90'
LP40.17-35…18'
PH 40.49-41.21<- inter.- 32<- inter .40.41 …52'
CF42.06-43.23…77'
CF 43.49-45.31…102'
CL 45.35-46.20…45' CL vs CF
PH 46.42-49...7'
Syria:
PH 94' + 12' +23' + 106 (with much interruption ca. 10' by CH & JD) = 235'
CF 122' +36=158' without interruption
CL 89'+ 37'+105' = 231'
LP 90'+10'+17'+55'+78'=250'
PH 67'+3=70'
CF 75'+ 77'+28'=180'
CL 104'
LP 130'+34+32=196'
PH 117'+4'+52' (with interr)+7= 180'
CF 77+102'=179'
CL 97+45=142'
LP 34'+40'+90'+18'=182'
PH 485'
CF 517'
LP 628'
April 14, 2018 Comments (14) Categories: BBC , European Union , Intervention, Liberal , Ireland | Permalink


With the eventual breakdown of 'unpopular' alliance of BJP-PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, the 'forward' ripples in political spectrum were felt not only in the state but also in New Delhi. The efforts made in New Delhi to install People's Conference Chairman, Sajad Gani Lone, as Chief Minister with the support of BJP and rebel MLAs from PDP, Congress and NC were finally aborted by 'grand alliance' sting and as such could not culminate the BJP's political agenda in the fragile state into 'political gainer' for the 2019 general elections. They remained mere ripples; though the undercurrents were felt by regional political majors and forced them to transcend their ideological and political rivalries and stinged a grand alliance to keep BJP-PC combine at bay which prompted the Governor to dissolve the assembly citing 'strange' and 'unconstitutional' reasons. BJP and Sajad Lone led-PC were busy in attracting the MLAs to their kitty both by fair and foul means. Imran Ansari, MLA Pattan and former cabinet minister was the first to question Mehbooba Mufti's leadership and openly questioned the internal democracy in the party, dynastic politics and nepotism under Miss Mufti's leadership. Yasir Reshi, PDP-MLC, also voiced his dissent against Mehbooba-led government and joined the rebel group orchestrated by Ansari. Speculations were rife that about 19 MLAs from Congress, NC and PDP joined the rebel group and mellowed somewhat to extend support to Sajad-led BJP-PC combine to form a new puppet government in the state. Cracking the whip on dissenters who had publicly criticised Miss Mufti to avoid factioning, PDP removed legislator, Yasir Reshi as the party's district president for Bandipora hurriedly without constituting any internal committee to look into the matter. The climax of the political melodrama staged in the state was robbed-off by the senior PDP-leader and MP, Muzaffar Hussain Beigh by expressing his dissatisfaction with the party's functioning and implicitly brimmed signs of consonance to the BJP-PC combine script and described his joining in PC as ghar wapsi (home-coming) if PDP is not willing to correct its behaviour. Our Senior Correspondent, Hamid Rather and Kashmir Magazine editor-in-chief, Mohammad Aslam, spoke to rebel PDP-MLC Yasir Reshi over his dissent, expulsion and the efforts to instigate a political tsunami in the party and state. Here are the excerpts from the interview.
Q: What were the reasons behind your rebellion against PDP, the party that made you a leader and MLC?
A: I joined Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after listening to late Mufti Muhammad Syed's vision and mission for the state of Jammu and Kashmir. His leadership and political ideology have left an indelible influence on me. I buckled my baggage, prepared my body and mind and tied-up the shoe-laces and rallied behind late Mufti Sahab to be a part of the peace and 'Healing Touch' efforts in the fragile state. The party started its functioning with its core agenda of working towards an abolition of dynastic politics that National Conference cradled in the state, fight against the corruption and work towards the political solution of the Kashmir conflict sprawling since decades. After Syed's death, his daughter, Mehbooba Mufti was sworn as the CM of the state after a brief political lull and uncertainty. Very soon afterwards, the party's core agenda and founding principles began to tremble and PDP is reeling under identity crisis. During Miss Mufti's regime, there was rampant corruption; a new phase of dynastic politics (Uncle-nephew) emerged and the claim to form government with the support of NC and congress was the last nail to the coffin of PDP ideology. The mistreatment to the separatists by the Mufti-led government was against the vision that late Mufti Syed held. He always held that separatists have a political ideology different from ours and we need to fight it ideologically and not through brute force. NIA raids on separatists were freely allowed by Miss Mufti as she was holding the Home department portfolio too besides Chief Ministership. Under such erosion, I felt suffocated within the party and expressed the dissent.
Q: Have you expressed your dissent with PDP high command before going public?
A: Yes. I have raised these issues in all party forums, meetings, and chambers and even sent a communiqué to party president Mehbooba Ji. Let me give you an example of mama-bateja rule (dynastic rule) under Mehbooba Ji. Tasaduq Mufti, son of late Mufti Sahab was made MLC and then a cabinet minister in a hush-hush manner. What qualification he possessed that warranted his wild card entry into cabinet and at the same time not giving any portfolio to the two or three time MLAs having eligible qualifications, experience and people's mandate is questionable. Was not it the emergence of the dynastic politics in PDP too? How was then PDP different from NC dynastic politics against which we started as an 'emancipator' force? I felt my complaints and views were not given due weightage. I felt alienated within the party I gave my years of life to grow and develop at the local and state level. I increased the PDP vote bank in Sonawari, Bandipora from mere 2200 to 32000.
Q: Apprehensions were that you were preparing to leave PDP because of NIA raids and joined with Sajad Lone led group to get protection?
A: This is wrong. There was neither any raid nor was I summoned by NIA regarding my property possession or security matters. I belong to mainstream politics and will remain in the same till death. I have nothing to do with separatists. But, here too I have disagreements and dissatisfaction with the role played by Miss Mufti in giving protection to the citizens of the state whether he is a separatist or a mainstream politician. Here too PDP has shown divergence from late Mufti Sahab's vision. He always held that separatist have a political ideology different from ours and we need to fight it ideologically and not through brute force. NIA raids on separatists were freely allowed by Miss Mufti as she was holding the Home department portfolio too.
Q: Do you want to say that there is complete roll back of the 'vision' regarding Jammu and Kashmir that Late Mufti Sahab held?
A. Yes. I could not differentiate PDP from NC today. I conceive NC still better as whatever they say they say it openly and PDP has become a treachery and double-faced storehouse of lies. PDP dumped its much hyped 'Self-Rule' policy, gave clemency to corruption instead of preventing it and put a full stop towards the efforts for resolving K-issue. So PDP is preparing towards its own death.
Q: Why were you silent during the formation of PDP-BJP alliance as these two parties have complete anti-agendas or political ideologies regarding the state?
A: The alliance was the result of the fractured mandate given by people in different regions of the state. In Kashmir, PDP was the largest majority party with 28 MLAs and BJP emerged as the major force with 25 MLAs. So for the smooth and harmonious development of the state, Late Mufti Sahab kept aside his political ideology and forged an alliance. It was going well during his tenure. Mufti Sahab was a forceful leader and he kept his views before PM, Modi when he visited the state and other forums too. He was well aware of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) and has taken steps to accommodate the party's promises to the people. But all went wrong after the incumbency of Mehbooba Ji and party's agenda as well as the promises made to the people belied the hopes and aspirations of the party members, workers and people.
Q: If Mehbooba Ji diluted his party's agenda and resonated with the BJP's views, then, what was the reason BJP called back the support to Mehbooba-led PDP in the government formation?
A: Corruption has touched high levels during Mehbooba Ji's regime. Rampant corruption is the primary reason BJP called back its support to her government. Moreover, the security of the state was going worse day by day. Local militancy spiked and civilian causalities increased during her tenure as CM. All this prompted BJP to break its alliance with PDP.
Q: Apprehensions were rife in the political circles that you were the main force in lobbying the MLAs behind Sajad Lone to form the new government with BJP's support? This is also evident from your close association with Lone sahib. What are your views?
A: I have huge respect for dynamic leaders irrespective of the party they work for. Abdul Gani Lone, the founder of People's Conference was a veteran leader. After reading "Achievable Nationhood" I felt that late Lone Sahab was a contemporary ahead of his times. He was a father figure for me. He taught me politics and in fact nurtured me. His son, Sajad Gani Lone, is my brother. I have good relations with my brother and I will continue these relationships. But the allegation that I was working for creating factions in parties and lobbing MLAs for Sajad Sahab is untrue. I am an MLC. I have no role in government formation. I am not very significant leader that political giants in the state politics will pay attention to me.
Q. Imran Ansari and you were having acrimonious relation. How all of a sudden you became friends in the Sajad-led group that was being created for government formation?
A: I agree Imran Sahab and me were having differences over a range of issues. It was on behest of Mehbooba Ji that we sought out our differences and became good friends.
Q: So this similarity in thoughts has given you strength to express your dissent against the PDP later. Do you agree?
A: Breaks into laughter. The party high command was diluting its core agenda. We both being conscious citizens and responsible leaders listened to our inner voice and the promises made to people kept reverberating in our minds forced us to express our dissent. In a democracy, there is always scope for dissent and we did nothing wrong in doing that.
Q: After cracking whip on you by removing from PDP District Presidentship, you have reverence for PC and cordial relationship with Imran Ansari, how are you seeing your future? Is there any plan of following Imran Ansari who recently joined PC?
A: I am in PDP. I have not left the party yet. I have seen leadership skills in Sajad Lone in these three years as a minister and I have immense praise and respect for him. He has a clear and transparent vision regarding the state of Jammu and Kashmir. He is not having double standards like NC and PDP. He is a straight forward person with huge pain to do something for its own people. If there is any leader in the state in whom I am seeing the capability to remove the unemployment and poverty, it is only Sajad Sahab.
Q: So when are you formally joining PC?
A: It is not important to join a party to praise its leader. I am in PDP right now.
Q. Senior PDP leader and MP, Muzaffar Hussain Beigh in a press conference also acknowledged the malfunctions in the party and Mehbooba-led coalition government and expressed his intentions of joining the PC as 'Ghar-wapsi' for him? Has this strengthened the dissent wave against PDP? What are your views?
A: Muzaffar Sahab is leader par excellence. Even Sajad Sahab has acknowledged his political stature and welcomed his statement. I am seeing Muzaffar sahab as a world-class leader and I am ready to rally behind him.
Q. Muzaffar Sahab was against the PDP's decision of boycotting ULB elections. What are your views regarding this? Do you agree with the party's decision?
A: It was a wrong decision. It alienated PDP members and workers at grass root level. Urban Local Bodies (ULB) elections are meant for local governance where development related issues are tackled. What PDP achieved from boycotting from municipal elections? Nothing! In fact PDP installed proxy candidates and some won fortunately. Boycott call shows that PDP is not in favour of the development activities at grass root level in the state.
Q. 'Grand Alliance' of PDP, NC and Congress was stinged to keep Sajad Lone at bay, Governor, Satyapal Malik, dissolved the assembly citing 'strange' and 'unconstitutional' reasons. Do you agree that dissolution of assemble was constitutional?
A: It was an unconstitutional decision taken by Governor Sahab. The grand alliance if formed and claimed to have the support of the required majority to form the government should challenge the decision in the court. Moreover, Governor Sahab should have given them the opportunity to prove majority at the floor of the house. This is how the constitutional scheme should look like. At the same time, forging an alliance with the NC and congress who are responsible for all the constitutional erosions in the state and against whom the PDP was formed seems to me more 'unholy' than PDP-BJP alliance.


text:
Featured News Latest News News Ole Miss Sports Trending News
Matt Corral goes down, Ole Miss loses 21-7 in Sugar Bowl
by J.T. Mitchell January 2, 2022
Photo courtesy of the Allstate Sugar Bowl/Twitter
On Saturday night, the No. 8 Ole Miss Rebels fell to the No. 6 Baylor Bears by a score of 21-7 in the 2022 Allstate Sugar Bowl.
The game's first drive resulted in an interception from Matt Corral, mirroring when Chad Kelly opened the 2016 Sugar Bowl with an interception. However, the rest of the game did not mirror 2016's outcome.
Four drives later, Matt Corral went down with a lower-body injury and would not return (Good news is that all x-rays came back negative, according to head coach Lane Kiffin after the game).
Things didn't start great for quarterback-in-relief Luke Altmyer when the former four-star threw an interception on his first drive. The interception was returned by Al Walcott for a 96-yard touchdown, giving Baylor a 7-0 lead that the Bears would take into halftime.
Altmyer gave Rebel fans hope in the third quarter when he connected with Braylon Sanders for a 37-yard touchdown, tying the game up.
Baylor prevailed, scoring two fourth-quarter touchdowns to seal the game.
Leading the offensive stat sheet for the Rebels was Dontario Drummond with nine catches for 104 yards. Jerrion Ealy had 65 yards on 12 carries, and Altmyer finished 15 of 19 for 174 yards, one touchdown, and two interceptions. On the defensive side of the ball, Chance Campbell had 10 tackles while Miles Battle had the only turnover for Ole Miss with a second-half interception.
Ole Miss concludes Kiffin's second season with 10 wins and three losses. With the win, Baylor notched their first 12-win season in program history.
Remembering when Betty White started off the 'Hotty Toddy' chant
It's official: Buc-ee's closes land deal in Mississippi
J.T. Mitchell
Ole Miss' bubble burst with 75-70 loss to Vanderbilt
Steven Gagliano February 27, 2021
MSU's Grant Library to be discussed in Jackson
Brittany Land July 10, 2018
'News To-Go' for Monday 1/16
kim January 16, 2017 January 17, 2017

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl