30 June 2018 9:46 AM
Do we owe our freedom and happiness to democracy, or does our civilisation have another foundation?
Some readers may be interested in this article for 'New English Review', on our curious delusions about democracy.
https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=189328&sec_id=189328
June 30, 2018 Comments (37) Categories: 'Democracy' | Permalink
29 June 2018 2:26 PM
Another Reason Not to Like Thatcherism.
For some time I have been mocking the teenage scribblers of the ill-named Adam Smith Institute (would the author of 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' really have liked them?) for their support for marijuana legalisation and commercialisation.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/adam-smith-joins-the-drugs-lobby-or-who-should-be-embarrassed.html
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/08/my-retort-to-the-adam-spliff-institutes-latest-effusion-of-drivel.html
in which I renamed them the Adam Spliff Institute.
Should I now call the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) the Institute of Narcotic Affairs?
For, presumably emboldened by William Hague's emotional, thought-free spasm about cannabis legalisation, here comes the grander and supposedly more grown-up Institute for Economic Affairs, once a flagship of Thatcherite free-market thought.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/29/legalise-cannabis-in-uk-institute-for-economic-affairs
The document involved is here:
https://iea.org.uk/publications/joint-venture/
It talks grandiosely of 'prohibition' but admits (on p.31) 'teenagers already find it very easy to buy cannabis in many parts of the country and prosecutions for possession are so rare that it is doubtful whether the law is an effective deterrent. If this is so, how can there be 'prohibition'? Much of the rest of it is of course about money.
It also makes the legalisers' usual Pollyanna-style claims that legalisation means the drug will be safer (in just the same way cigarettes are so much safer because they are legal, I imagine).
It claims 'Legalising cannabis could alleviate the mental health issues associated with cannabis in two ways. First, by generating tax revenue that could be spent on mental health services. Second, by allowing safer, regulated cannabis to displace the more dangerous strains that have taken over the market.'
Note the frequent use of that useful word 'could'. Grasping that 'could' does not mean 'will' or 'is', is crucial to the understanding of media and official documents.
Now, the IEA has long been surrounded by suggestions that it may take money from Big Tobacco. It does not tend to confirm this, but here's an example of the allegations made against it and the Adam Spliff Institute:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jun/01/thinktanks-big-tobacco-funds-smoking
Also this:
http://www.tobaccotactics.org/index.php?title=IEA:_History_of_Close_Ties_with_the_Tobacco_Industry
People who think of these bodies as conservative in any meaningful way really do need to reconsider. They supported Thatcherism, but for the same reasons which make me increasingly hostile to Thatcherism, the dominance of money above all, and the absurd idea that freedom without strong morals can lead anywhere but chaos.
They may still occasionally voice conservative sentiments. But in general they are in tune with the funky post-Christian Brave New World in which policy-making, money-making and media are now linked in London and other big Western capitals.
This event,
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/high-time-to-legalise-cannabis-tickets-46409301470
… currently advertised on the IEA website, is also interesting. It mentions the influential organisation Volteface,
http://volteface.me/about/
this group is backed, I think, by an internet millionaire, and (I believe) was involved with one of the 'medical cannabis' cases which came to prominence earlier this month.
The June 30th event is also sponsored by something called 'Cannaglobal', about which I can find nothing and know nothing.
Just as I was thinking about the IEA's tobacco links, I learned that Imperial Brands, formerly Imperial Tobacco, has just begun to invest in 'medical cannabis', see here
http://www.imperialbrandsplc.com/Media2/Key-announcements/key-announcements/imperial-brands-ventures-ltd-announces-investment-in-oxford-cann.html
This reflects recent investments by American beer and tobacco companies which have begun to take an interest in legal cannabis businesses.
This morning I asked the IEA about its finances. I received the following opaque reply, strangely at odds with its bracing endorsement of a free market in pretty much everything. Not information it seems:
'We respect the privacy of our donors and don't place a list of them in the public domain. It is a matter for individual donors whether they wish their donation to be public or private – we leave that entirely to their discretion.
We don't accept any earmarked money for commissioned research work from any company.
We accept donations from individuals, foundations and companies both domestic and foreign in order to pursue our charitable objectives. We do not accept funding from the UK (or any other) government.
Ideas and policies produced by the Institute are freely available from our website for any individual or organisation to adopt, but we do not "sell" policy. The Institute is entirely independent of any political party or group, and is entirely funded by voluntary donations from individuals, companies and foundations who want to support its work, plus income from book sales and conferences.'
So that's all right, then.
June 29, 2018 Comments (33) Categories: Cannabis , Drugs , Liberty , Thatcher, Margaret | Permalink
Some Interesting Developments in Syria, and in the Investigation of Alleged Poison Gas Attacks
Once again the USA has publicly distanced itself from Syrian jihadi rebels against the Assad state:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-assad-regime-us-support-syria-rebels-israel-golan-heights-a8417716.html
This sounds familiar. On 30 March 2017, the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Hayley, formally and openly abandoned Washington's former aim of overthrowing Assad
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/us-assad-syria-ambassador-un-nikki-haley-a7659266.html
Very soon after this change, on 4th April 2017, Syrian rebels said that a chemical weapons attack by Syrian air force jets had taken place in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, a claim reported as fact by large numbers of Western news organisations, though as far as I know, no Western staff reporters visited the site. This is not surprising, as it was in an area controlled by Islamist jihadis, and most accounts of the alleged atrocity were written far away from the scene, apparently based upon information from sources who might reasonably be assumed to be partisan.
I think it would be fair to say that, despite these disadavantages, most western governments, politicians, commentators, and the great majority of readers of and viewers of, and listeners to western media believe that the Assad state was guilty of this alleged atrocity. I have been among a small minority pointing out that we lack definitive proof, and that there are powerful reasons to argue that the Syrian state had no interest in doing any such thing, rather the reverse. See this examination by me of the British Foreign Office position:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/05/my-questions-to-the-foreign-office-about-syria-and-chemical-weapons.html
Subsequently, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) generally regarded as a reliable and impartial investigative body, reported on the event. It admitted that its investigation had not met its own publicly-declared standards. Please see here https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-chemical-weapons/evidence-of-syria-chemical-weapons-use-not-up-to-u-n-standard-idUSBRE93P0UG20130426
And also see below, in the extensive set of links to my previous articless on the OPCW and JIM investigations in Khan Skeikhoun). The OPCW's own staff were unable to reach the site. And there was no reliable custody chain for samples which eventually arrived in neighbouring Turkey.
Later, a further report was produced by the United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism, (JIM). This report had the same flaws from which the OPCW report suffered, being largely based upon OPCW material. But even so, it attributed blame to the Syrian government.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/26/syria-gas-attack-bashar-al-assad-un-tillerson
Largely because of this, Russia henceforth regarded the JIM as biased, and so vetoed the renewal of the JIM when it came up for discussion at the UN Security Council. The usual rule in such matters is to work out what you would think if the polarities were reversed, the JIM had blamed the Syrian rebels, despite having not visited the site or having a reliable custody chain, and the USA, France and Britain had as a result decided to veto the renewal of the JIM's existence. You might well think that the USA, France and Britain were reasonable in taking such an action.
Past articles:
The OPCW did not go to Khan Sheikhoun, and so could not have conducted an investigation according to its own stated standards:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/07/who-gassed-whom-in-syria-we-dont-know-please-dont-be-rushed-into-war.html
The OPCW report on Khan Sheikhoun:
https://www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/Fact_Finding_Mission/s-1510-2017_e_.pdf
The JIM report on Khan Sheikhoun:
https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7b65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7d/s_2017_904.pdf
And here's why (in the OPCW's own words) these reports do not actually come up to the standards publicly set by the OPCW for itself;
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-chemical-weapons/evidence-of-syria-chemical-weapons-use-not-up-to-u-n-standard-idUSBRE93P0UG20130426
The significance of this is explained here in my article on how to read OPCW reports:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/04/waiting-for-the-opcw-how-to-read-the-next-report-on-alleged-chemical-weapons-atrocities.html
Here also is my article 'Rushing to Judgement', my analysis of what we actually know, as opposed to what we think we know.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/04/rushing-to-judgement-over-syria-some-previous-experiences.html
Here is an earlier article on the alleged gas attack at Ghouta in August 2013, written when I first began to wonder whether what I was reading and being told was as clear as it was being made to appear.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/04/what-happened-at-ghouta-do-we-know-.html
Since then we also have the alleged atrocity at Douma, which led to this conversation between me and Andrew Neil on the BBC :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqKGFrQ20l4
And we have had the Salisbury episode, perhaps murkier than all the others, on which I have never had enough information to do more than speculate that some part of the Russian state was probably responsible, though on the grounds that they did have an interest in doing so, and that nobody else did, rather than on actual forensic evidence available to me. In my view the episode has no real bearing on the Syrian cases.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/03/peter-hitchens-were-goading-russia-into-a-dirty-war-we-cannot-win.html
Now, more or less at the same time as the USA has left the Syrian rebels to their own fate, a meeting in the Hague has completely changed the OPCW's terms of reference. Previously it was not expected to attribute blame in the cases it investigated (perhaps, hence, the creation of the JIM?)
But yesterday, this all changed. http://www.therepublic.com/2018/06/27/eu-netherlands-chemical-weapons-2/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/27/opcw-granted-powers-to-identify-source-of-chemical-attacks-in-syria
I do wonder what the consequences of these two pieces of news – the USA's abandonment of its former allies, and the new rules for the OPCW - will be. I expect we shall find out soon.
NB. I append the link below in case anyone is silly enough to accuse me of being an apologist for the Syrian state. This is demonstrably not the case. I take only one side in this matter. the side of the truth:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/08/my-response-to-allegations-that-i-am-an-apologist-for-syria.html
June 28, 2018 Comments (12) Categories: Intervention, Liberal | Permalink
Some Thoughts Occasioned by a recent visit to Saffron Walden
While writing my soon-to-be-published book about the cult of war 'The Phoney Victory' I spent some time wondering about Richard Austen 'Rab' Butler, in 1939-40 a junior minister at the Foreign Office, with a reputation for high intelligence and for supporting strongly the policy of appeasement with which the British government rather briefly dallied in 1938 and early 1939.
A vague, faint but persistent cloud has always hung around his name, because it is suggested by some that he may have favoured a negotiated peace with Germany in 1940. Some discussions which he held with a Swedish Trade envoy, Bjorn Prytz, in St James's Park on a summer day in June 1940 were telegraphed back to Sweden by Prytz. The conversations seem to have continued as the two men walked into the Foreign office building, and the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax appears to have been involved. Butler was reported by Prytz (a fluent English speaker) to have argued for 'common sense rather than bravado'. When Churchill learned of it he assumed, reasonably, that the Swedish diplomatic service would have passed it on to Berlin. He was understandably furious, and Butler went through a humiliating procedure during which he abased himself and absolutely insisted that he had not been engaging in any moves designed to lead to a negotiated peace with Germany, and nor, of course had Lord Halifax.
Well, who knows what all this meant? Halifax himself had bungled Britain into war and defeat by aggressively pursuing the March 1939 guarantee to Poland, a diplomatic device more or less designed to commit Britain to war with Germany. It had no other purpose, since we did not in fact help Poland materially at all. I suspect Halifax envisaged a re-run of 1914, with the Maginot Line: a static war in which France's huge armies and air force stood between Britain and the wrath of the Germans, while the Royal Navy slowly blockaded Hitler into submission.
He could not really have envisaged anything else. Britain's' very expensive rearmament campaign which had begun in 1934 had by 1939 greatly strengthened the RAF and the Navy, for defence of the Empire and the home islands, but had done very little to strengthen the Army, which was still small and poorly-equipped and could not really make any difference to any continental combat. Until Britain collapsed into the arms of the USA, liquidated her life savings and abandoned the last traces of fiscal responsibility(as it would do in 1940-41) , it simply could not afford to do any more.
But Halifax's scheme was blown to pieces when, in late August 1939, Hitler made his pact with Stalin, and so ensured both that Hitler could concentrate his forces in the West, and that that any blockade would be ineffective, as Stalin could and would supply him by land with food, oil and war materials.
It is perfectly conceivable that, facing the total ruin of his scheme, Halifax, a born negotiator but not a natural fighter, might have considered a peace with Hitler, if he could get reasonable terms. After all, at this stage, Nazi Germany was just a fairly unpleasant dictatorship. The full horror of the industrialised mass murder of Europe's Jews had not really begun, and it was just about possible for an English gentleman to consider making a deal with it. It was, in my view, Churchill's great genius that he understood that no such bargain was possible. Smaller men could not see this, which is why, whatever else we may think of Churchill, we have to be glad he was there at the time. However sad our decline since then it is nothing like as great as it would have been had we made peace with Germany. Halifax simply did not know what he was up against, either when he actively pursued war after March 1939, or in the crucial few days of 1940 when the War Cabinet pondered what to do.
It is, I think, conceivable that Halifax might have used his clever, pro-appeasement junior to put out some deniable feelers on that score. Some think he did. Some think he didn't, and that Butler acted on his own, a remarkably bold action for a young junior minister. Your guess is as good as mine, perhaps better. In any case, Butler was reduced to menial tasks for much of the rest of the war and was not even allowed to enlist when he applied to do so.
And then he was shuffled to one side, in a typically Tory manoeuvre, to work on post-war education. Being a clever chap, you see, he could be entrusted with a subject which the Tory party had never much cared about. And he it was who devised the tripartite plan in the 1944 Education Act that came to bear his name.
This brought more than a thousand grammar schools within the reach of all who could qualify for them, and – alongside them – opened about 150 of the best private day-schools in the country to pupils from state primary schools. It was the biggest democratisation of education in history.
At the same time it experimented, for the first time in national history, with providing state secondary schools for all – until it went up to 15 in 1947, the school-leaving age in this country was 14, and those who did not get scholarships to grammar schools (or whose parents could not afford to take them up) got no more than an elementary education, a few years tagged on after their 11th birthdays, in what were basically extended primary schools. Most people don't realise that the much-reviled Secondary Moderns were a noble experiment, trying to do something that had never been achieved before, and a considerable advance on the nothingness which had preceded them.
Perhaps they might have been better (many were in small, old and decrepit buildings) if we had truly been the victorious country we imagined ourselves to be, But post-war Britain was broke, and the vast expenditure on new comprehensives made possible by the greater prosperity of the late 1960s wasn't available for them. Nor were the oceans of funny money which nowadays flow rather mysteriously into 'academies'. So the Secondary Moderns were short of cash, the technical schools called for in the Butler Act were seldom even built, and the number of grammar schools did not grow to cope with the 'bulge' in childbirth (this is what it was called in my childhood, nowadays everyone uses the American term 'baby boom').
This was why, form about 1956 onwards (when the bulge created very heavy demand for school places of all kinds, and new housing too), grammar schools simply could not offer enough places to those qualified to get into them. My guess is that we needed to build about another 500 more, on top of 1,300 inherited from before. The Tory governments of the era were not interested in doing anything about this, and began by allowing Secondary Moderns to expand their intake an (on occasion) open sixth forms and pursue 'A' levels. Much of the alleged antipathy to grammars resulted from this cheapskate era. In fact, it was annoyance at qualified children not being able to get into them, hence Labour's shockingly dishonest and wriggly 1959 manifesto pledge: 'One of the greatest barriers to equality of opportunity in our schools is the segregation of our children into grammar and other types of school at the age of 11. This is why we shall get rid of the 11-plus examination. The Tories say this means abolishing the grammar schools. On the contrary, it means that grammar-school education will be open to all who can benefit by it.
Later some Tories, notably the dripping wet Sir Edward Boyle, joined in the anti-grammar movement. The rest didn't care much. Their children were not affected.
All these thoughts crowded into my mind last week as I answered an invitation from the Richard Austen Butler debating society https://rabdebating.wordpress.com/ to argue about Russia and our defence policy with a former soldier, Rupert Wieloch, in a pleasant bookshop in Saffron Walden.
Saffron Walden came to prosperity by growing Saffron (a special sort of crocus is necessary). It was (like much of the east of England) for the Parliament in the Civil War, and at one point was the headquarters of the new Model Army and of Oliver Cromwell himself, Lieutenant General of Horse and leader of the Ironsides who would one day make the name of England feared all across Europe.
If you found such a beautiful place in France, you would say how beautiful France was. But because it is England, we do not notice it enough.
It has, alas, no railway station so I walked, by choice, the three miles from Audley End station, deliberately going the long way past the Jacobean glories of Audley End house itself, another piece of evidence that the English past simply could not have been the ignorant, dismal and benighted era we are always being told it was.
Saffron Walden is one of those many dozens of small, unregarded English towns (Winslow is another) which reminds you that English independence and personal prosperity date back many centuries, that in our sea-shielded islands we attained a very special level of civilisation. Its church, a glorious piece of entirely English gothic, unthinkable in any other country, and containing that strange English mixture of grandeur and austerity, lifts the heart, the mind and the eye. And it contains Rab Butler's Garter banner, a delightful mediaeval knightly thing, such as you might have seen flying from a tent at Agincourt, still surviving, just, into the present day. Those of you who have read Conan Doyle's great historical romances, 'The White Company' and 'Sir Nigel', now not merely unfashionable but passing into the stage where they will soon be incomprehensible, may know the sort of feeling the Garter banner stirred in me. I hope it is still there 200 years hence, so decayed that you can almost see through it, like those ancient battle flags you still find laid up in the shabbier cathedrals.
For Rab Butler, eventually a Knight of the Garter even though he was never premier, was the Member of Parliament here during all those long years when he came so close to being Prime Minister, but was blocked at the last, probably because old men had not forgotten 1940. Seeing his banner there (his personal gift to the church) made me think better of him, as an Englishman, than I had before. I rather imagine he had a strong sense of the history from which he came, and probably more in common with a Victorian MP, or even with the fierce parliamentarians of Cromwell's age, than with the bland persons who sit at Westminster now.
The evening was pleasant – good solid argument, conducted in a civilised but uncompromising fashion, as the light faded and thickened in the old English town outside. As we all spilled out into the dark street at the end, and went off to a very unspoiled pub to carry on the discussion, I felt I was part of something very old and very valuable, and hoped against hope that it would survive.
June 27, 2018 Comments (52) Categories: Culture , Grammar Schools , History , Hitler , Secondary Moderns | Permalink
From Turkey comes absolute proof that democracy and liberty are not the same thing
The most spectacular example of democracy destroying liberty has always been a bit too powerful to be any use. The Third Reich is such an explosion of evil into the civilised world that many people see it as a sort of mystical, exceptional occasion, with no lessons for today.
There's also the Godwin's Law aspect of using this episode to settle any quarrel. The first person to introduce Hitler or the Nazis into any argument is automatically the loser of that argument, usually because it is disproportionate or silly as in 'Hitler was against smoking, therefore people who oppose smoking are like Hitler'.
So, although National Socialist Germany came about through universal suffrage democracy (as moderated by the proportional representation which liberals are still very keen on) and was created entirely according to the most liberal constitution of its time ( a constitution never replaced during the 12 years of Hitlerite rule) nobody has ever publicly drawn any lessons from these facts.
Like much of the evidence against universal suffrage democracy – the elections without real choice, the supremacy of big money in campaigns, the frequent superiority of unelected chambers over elected ones, in terms of quality and independence, the nasty role of the whips in Parliament, the tendency of universal suffrage democracies to commit economic suicide rather than adopt sensible economic policies, it is something we prefer not to think about.
So I am not expecting much thinking to take place about the very frightening triumph, in elections at the weekend, of Turkey's new Islamist despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Some doubt has been cast on the legitimacy of these polls. Personally I think that doubt may be justified. But Mr Erdogan's power over his country's media and courts is such that I very much doubt whether these questions will ever be properly investigated. The deed is done. He now combines the posts of head of government and head of state. And I do not think he will relax his furious process of gathering all power to himself.
Regular and longstanding readers here will know that I have been concerned about Mr Erdogan's Turkey for some time. I made two visits there, trying and not altogether succeeding in understanding the direction in which Mr Erdogan was going (I was and remain puzzled by his foreign policy objectives, which may not actually have any real consistency. I was, I think, right that he was a menace to freedom, and that his ultimate objective is an Islamised country.
You may study these past articles here:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/04/my-warnings-on-turkey-1-from-14th-august-last-year-mr-erdogan-changes-trams-.html
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/04/my-warnings-on-turkey-2-from-2010-a-harsh-east-wind-blows-out-of-ankara-and-istanbul-.html
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/04/my-warnings-on-turkey-3-from-2005-early-warning-about-erdogan.html
I do not think I shall return to Turkey, as I would not be sure that I would be safe there. Mr Erdogan has, in the past few years, almost entirely crushed opposition to him, mostly on the pretext of a failed putsch against him, an event about which I would like to know a good deal more.
Since then his already oppressive state has wiped out most of the remaining free media, and obtained the adoption, now complete, of a new constitution which makes Mr Erdogan terrifyingly powerful. Foreign journalists are by no means immune from his intolerance. I do not think he much likes criticism. So I fear I shall never again be able to visit the lovely and majestic Hagia Sophia, once the Church of the Holy Wisdom, now a museum , probably destined to be (as it was under the Ottomans) a mosque. Nor shall I be able to cross the Bosphorus, one of the most enjoyable ferry journeys in the world from Europe to Asia. I am glad that I managed to do while I had the chance.
With so many of his opponents ( a large number of them journalists) in prison, often after travesties of trials, and with civil society more or less crushed, he is in my view rather more unassailably powerful than Vladimir Putin is in Russia.
Interestingly Mr Erdogan said yesterday (during the suspect vote which made him the unchallenged supreme leader of the country) a 'democratic revolution', explaining 'With the presidential system, Turkey is seriously raising the bar, rising above the level of contemporary civilisations'.
The 'presidential system' means that Mr Erdogan now rules from his large new palace unencumbered by a prime Minister, and that Turkey's Parliament is a cypher.
So there it is, liberty and the rule of law, which never existed in post-Soviet Russia, Wiped out in Turkey, by universal suffrage democracy. Bizarrely and paradoxically, the only influences which could have stopped Erdogan becoming an Islamist superboss were the Armed Forces, whose power he finally broke after the failed putsch (which, as far as I can see, no significant general or admiral supported).
For many years western liberals praised Erdogan – the 'Economist;' magazine being especially keen to describe him as 'moderately Islamist' long after it was obvious that (to use his own metaphor) he had ridden the tram of democracy as far as it would take him, and had now abandoned it, climbing into the tank of autocracy in which he is finishing his journey.
And his NATO membership keeps them, to this day, from treating him with the special hostility they reserve for Vladimir Putin. How funny that Putin and Erdogan get on rather well, and that Erdogan's worrying victory was swiftly welcomed by the unlovely Hungarian leader Viktor Orban (some western conservatives foolishly admire Mr Orban. They will come to wish they hadn't, I suspect). https://thehungaryjournal.com/2018/06/25/orban-first-eu-leader-to-congratulate-erdogan/
But all these are details. The real thing is this: Democracy has, in this case, directly destroyed liberty, as I suspect it will increasingly do in this era of failed liberalism, not to mention the growth of Chinese power and the existence of an economically successful despotic world power. How can people continue to think and speak and act as if democracy and freedom are the same thing?
And if they are not how, if at all, ae we supposed to defend freedom and the rule of law form people such as Mr Erdogan?
June 25, 2018 Comments (99) Categories: 'Democracy' , Being right , Islam , Liberty , Turkey | Permalink
Billy's plight is awful – but don't be duped into legalising dope
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Picture this. Ten years hence, at the urging of Tory politicians, bishops, churchgoing pseudo-conservative columnists, and various other dupes and suckers, Britain has legalised marijuana.
It is on sale in the high street. It can be bought in one click on the internet, and at superstores, shopping malls and farmers' markets.
Children smoke it in the street, or eat cannabis sweets.
Politicians have quickly moved to tax it, so filling a large part of the hole in the national finances. But this has had two unintended results.
Everyone in the top level of politics is now irrevocably part of the cannabis lobby, because they dare not lose the revenue which now pays for the NHS. And large numbers of violent and ruthless gangsters are making a good living out of selling illegal dope, at prices far lower than the taxed version.
The police, never that interested, have great difficulty in working out what is legal and what is not, and look the other way as cannabis farms spread into the nicer suburbs.
We know this will happen, in some detail, because of what has already taken place in American states, such as Colorado, which have made the same decision. But there will be more, which is only obvious if you make certain connections which I have been trying to get people to make for some years.
There will be small tragedies, affecting only a child and his parents – a bright teenager whose grades suddenly slide and fail, and who sinks into a life of muttering red-eyed persecution mania, his hopes gone and his life ruined.
There will be more crime, much of it idiotic and ultra-violent, such as the death of Sheffield church organist Alan Greaves, beaten to death on his way home for no reason, some of it categorised as 'terrorism' so that its strong links with marijuana are not noticed.
But most people in authority, as they do now, will refuse to concede that there is any link. In fact, this refusal will be worse than now, as all the media figures and politicians and police chiefs who argued for legalisation will be most reluctant to admit they made a mistake.
So, though millions will know it was a grave error, it will never be put right. And the country will descend into the Third World, its government and politics together corrupted by a drug that doesn't just stupefy its users, but also automatically halves the intelligence of its advocates.
But there will be one other interesting development. Once legalisation is achieved, you will hear much, much less about the alleged medical uses of cannabis. These were only ever advanced as propaganda for the drug.
I have never denied that cannabis may have some medical uses. But the truth is that many years of research have yet to come up with much in the way of conclusive evidence for it. And the very few licensed drugs based on cannabis have not been particularly successful or widely used since they were licensed some time ago.
Like everyone else, I sympathise greatly with Charlotte Caldwell, who has struggled since her son Billy's birth to help him overcome the terrible effects of his epilepsy, a mysterious and deeply distressing thing. I admire her tiger-like, dedicated nurture of her boy and her endless quest for anything that will comfort and succour him.
If I thought that cannabis, in any form, was a proven help to them, then I would say 'look the other way while she uses it, since Billy's plight is so bad, and his life so much in peril anyway that practically anything is worth trying to help him. And work day and night to get the drug past the medical regulatory authorities, provided it passes the tests a modern country requires. Then make sure it is widely available to all who suffer in this way'.
With that in mind, I spent a lot of time last week trying to discover the facts of the Caldwell case. My sympathy for Charlotte and Billy remains undimmed.
But I can tell you that I quickly found that this mother and child are surrounded by a high wall of spokesmen, professional PR men, sympathisers and advisers, including one very rich man who has engaged in public campaigns to legalise marijuana for general use. Friendly at first, these sympathisers quickly identified that I was not an ally in their cause, which in my view goes way beyond the plight of Charlotte and Billy Caldwell. One simply refused to answer factual questions. One mysteriously stopped taking my phone calls at all. Another brushed me off with a snotty email. Others just fell silent.
But I kept going. I wanted to know what exactly it was that Billy was taking – for there are two quite distinct types of 'cannabis oil'. One (based on the ingredient CBD) is largely legal. The other (based on the ingredient THC) is not.
I wanted to know who had supplied and prescribed it, and when. This was so I could look up the exact legal position, and the research, if any, into the effectiveness of the precise oils involved.
I also wanted to know about other successful treatments Billy had earlier in his life, when he was largely free of fits for some time. When I submitted my list of questions to one of these spokesmen, he entirely accepted that they were legitimate and reasonable. And so they were.
But the next day I received a gruff and suspicious dismissal from a source I had never even contacted in the first place, claiming Ms Caldwell was 'very upset by this line of questioning'. So I left it at that. I have no wish to upset her.
But here is what I concluded. This episode has been much more about snake oil than cannabis oil. Charlotte Caldwell is wholly innocent in the matter, but in my view she is being used by others.
They hope that, by associating marijuana with medicine, they can soften its image and soften you up to accept the legalisation they long for. What better evidence for this could there be than William Hague's sudden decision to support cannabis legalisation? There is absolutely no logical connection between Charlotte Caldwell's plight and this highly dangerous policy.
The only link is a carefully fanned emotional spasm, in which sympathy for a sick child is skilfully manipulated by PR men into polishing the image of a very dangerous and nasty drug which, if it is legalised, will make this country a far, far worse place to live in.
Another 'expert' on the wrong lines
How I laughed to see the suggestion from the Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, that badly behaved children should once again be made to write lines at school.
Oddly enough, I was at a school that still imposed this punishment, which I thought even at that time was something from the lost Edwardian age of Billy Bunter and Mr Quelch. Offenders had to write, 20 times before breakfast, the words: 'Few things are more distressing to a well-regulated mind than to see a boy, who ought to know better, disporting himself at improper moments.'
Can anyone imagine how any modern child could possibly be made to do any such thing, by any modern school?
Macron absolutely right to give youth a row
France's President Macron was absolutely right to tell a disrespectful youth not to call him 'Manu', as if he were his mate, in some playground.
The head of state of any country must be respected.
But he should not have had to do it. Poor France has never really recovered from guillotining its king, and veers all the time between semi-dictatorship and semi-chaos.
How lucky we were to be able to restore our lost monarchy in 1660. But will we have the sense to keep it?
June 24, 2018 Comments (87) Categories: Cannabis , Drugs , Education , France , Monarchy | Permalink
20 June 2018 12:12 PM
'Medical Marijuana' and the wider campaign for full legalisation
Some readers may like to listen to this interview I gave to TalkRADIO, about 'medical marijuana' and its connection to the wider campaign to legalise this drug.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LwM1Ii2zkM&feature=youtu.be
June 20, 2018 Comments (57) Categories: Cannabis , Drugs , Propaganda , War on Drugs(alleged) | Permalink
Forget 'evil' dealers. It's time to target the REAL drug villains...
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
The real drivers of drug crime in this country are the smug and self-satisfied people who buy and use illegal drugs. Yet, somehow, they are the ones who get away with it, even though their actions are severe crimes – in theory.
This has long been my view, but I was moved and pleased to hear Baroness Newlove, cruelly robbed of her brave husband by the violent crime from which nobody is now safe, making this point in the House of Lords.
Alas, her powerful words received little attention. Could this be because parts of our media are corrupted by widespread drug abuse? I could not possibly say.
She condemned 'the middle-class drug users who are funding this wave of violence. City workers who drink their Fairtrade coffee out of a reusable cup during the week think nothing of the supply chain of the stuff they snort up their noses at the weekend. In my view, they are as guilty as the moped riders'.
It is that point about the Fairtrade coffee that seems to me to be so important. People consider themselves to be right-on about climate change and third world poverty and recycle religiously, because they think these things are ethical and good.
Likewise they noisily despise the big greed lobbies which push tobacco, dubious pills, greasy fast food and sugar-laden drinks.
Yet I suspect that, to a man and a woman, they are all in favour of the fashionable campaign to 'decriminalise' or 'regulate' illegal drugs, especially the ones they like to take. Do they not know that a billionaire lobby (I call it Big Dope) stands behind the campaign to legalise marijuana?
Do they not know that this campaign is terrified of the growing mountains of research which link this supposedly soft drug with permanent mental illness?
And what do they think will be next, once the Big Dope lobby has succeeded, and cannabis is in high street shops, advertised everywhere, and freely available on the internet?
They will say: 'But wouldn't you rather these things were sold legally than in the hands of gangsters?' No, I wouldn't. Gangsters are foul and dangerous, but they don't have one 50th of the power, wealth or ability which cynical businessmen have to sell and spread their nasty products. Like tobacco, cannabis and cocaine can never be safe. Let us not make the mistake of making them legal, too. Would cigarettes kill more or fewer people if tobacco were illegal, had never been advertised, could not be sold in shops and was only sold by gangsters? Plainly, they would kill many fewer people. Does 'regulating' them now, as the legalisers urge we should do with drugs, make cigarettes less deadly? No, it does not. They kill just the same. We go on all the time about cartels and evil dealers and how they should be stamped out. But they never are.
This is because we forget the fact that the source of all this crime is in our midst.
It is the thousands of selfish people, with more money than sense, who buy illegal drugs and sustain the whole great stinking heap of wickedness which they bring into being.
They should be made to be ashamed of themselves, and to fear the law, made for the benefit of all, which they callously break.
Who can fail to be moved by parents who believe that cannabis oil will help their stricken children? And who cannot be sympathetic to sufferers from MS and similar afflictions who believe that the drug in some form is good for them?
But compassion should not close our minds to fact and logic. You should know some important things. Cannabis has risks, which may well outweigh any good it does. The British Government has no hardline dogmatic objection to testing the medical properties of cannabis. It has licensed at least two drugs made from the cannabis plant, and there is a special legal cannabis farm at a secret location in Kent, to supply the makers of one of them.
But perhaps, above all, note that the American Keith Stroup, a veteran campaigner for legal marijuana for recreational purposes, gave the game away long ago. In a February 6, 1979 interview with the American university newspaper The Emory Wheel, he said he and his comrades planned to use medical marijuana as a red herring to get pot a good name. It may have been the biggest red herring ever.
In my lifetime I have seen London's skyline, once dominated by the brooding glory of St Paul's Cathedral, ruined by alien towers which would be fine in Chicago, but are quite wrong here.
Now I must warn of a new threat to the glorious stone crown of Oxford, an assembly of ancient towers, domes and spires which in some lights looks like John Bunyan's Celestial City, and is one of the great treasures of the world, not just of England. Various vain fools are threatening to start infesting this unique cityscape with new, tall towers, dreary and unlovely.
Unless they are stopped, Oxford could be gone in a generation, swallowed up by stupidity.
Don't be duped by this 'rescue mission'
The great Chinese sage Confucius correctly said that we would never get anything right until we learned to call things by their proper names.
The blizzard of lies which surrounds the subject of mass immigration is one of the main reasons why we cannot deal with this crisis. Take, for instance, the incessant claims in all media that European ships are 'rescuing' the migrants who set sail night and day from Libya in leaky, unseaworthy little boats.
No, that is not what they are doing. They are assisting greedy people-smugglers, who deliberately expose migrants to danger because they know they will then be picked up and taken to Italy, or wherever it is.
I suppose it is just possible that the migrants themselves, mostly fit young men from sub-Saharan Africa, don't know that this is the plan, in which case you have to wonder why they pay large sums of money to be allowed to get into vessels which are obviously dangerous and will plainly never get them across the Mediterranean.
But the smugglers know it and so, I suspect, do quite a lot of the supposedly saintly charitable organisations which arrange for them to take the next stage in their journey. Again you have to ask yourself what precisely these people hope to achieve. This extraordinary process, never previously known in the history of civilised nations, is doing terrible damage to Europe.
Every major country which has experienced this sudden arrival of lawless queue-jumpers has been convulsed with discontent and anger – for it is always the poor and weak who live with the direct consequences of open borders.
It will not stop, or even slow down, if we continue to mislead ourselves. If we were really 'rescuing' these migrants, then what would stop us taking them back to the beaches they came from, which we never do?
The Israeli thriller series 'Fauda' (Chaos, pictured) is perhaps the most astonishing, thought-provoking TV I have ever seen about the Middle East conflict. The drama, available on Netflix, is about a special Israeli anti-terror squad and their Hamas opponents, but it goes quite deep into their private lives and treats both sides as equally human – and often equally cruel. In one episode an Israeli tough girl convincingly turns herself into a hijab-wearing Arab woman, while a devout Islamic widow is transformed, for a suicide mission, into a skimpily dressed Israeli nightclub customer. But they are not at all the same underneath. I'm a keen defender of Israel, but so far the Arabs, with their genuine religious devotion and strong family loyalties, have the edge over the rackety, secular Israelis.
June 17, 2018 Comments (195) Categories: Architecture , Cannabis , Culture , Drugs , Immigration , Language , Mass Immigration , War on Drugs(alleged) | Permalink
What happened to Marxism? My explanation in the Spectator of how 1960s revolution took over the world
If you think Communism's dead, you may be as deluded as John le Carre's mole-infested Circus was in 'Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. Why things are not what they seem.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/marxism-didnt-die-its-alive-and-well-and-living-among-us/
June 14, 2018 Comments (45) Categories: Abolition of Britain , Blair, Anthony , Communist Party , Culture , Gramsci, Antonio , Political Correctness , Trotskyism | Permalink
A Podcast on Communism's revival as a great pink blancmange of political correctness and sexual revolution
Some readers may like to listen to this Spectator Podcast in which (the segment starts at 12 minutes, 55 seconds) I discuss, with the left-wing journalist Paul Mason, the turn of the political left away from mechanical old-fashioned state-control Marxism towards a pervasive pursuit of social and cultural revolution.
https://audioboom.com/posts/6895506-next-up-nato-is-trump-turning-on-europe
June 14, 2018 Comments (30) Categories: Culture , Gramsci, Antonio , Marriage | Permalink