Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog

Time 2020-11-12 19:03:50

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Speaking at a splendid Buckingham Palace dinner, the President of the United States told the assembled great and good: ‘You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language… no, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and interests.’Good advice, in my experience. But he might as well have saved his breath. For the President was not (as it might easily have been) Donald Trump, who traces his ancestry back to the Trumps of Kallstadt in the Rhineland and so is one of 44 million German-Americans who are neither cousins nor Anglo-Saxons). It was the lofty academic Thomas Woodrow Wilson, and the words were spoken on 27th December 1918, when you might have thought the two great English-speaking powers were suffused with a joint glow of warmth at their recent victory over the Germans.Not a bit of it. And remember that at this stage Britain had yet to default on its giant war debt to the USA, worth about £225 Billion by today’s values. We stopped repaying or paying interest on that debt in 1934, and contrary to popular belief it remains unpaid to this day (our Second World War Debts to the USA were recently paid off, which is why people wrongly assume that the 1914-18 loan has been settled as well. It hasn’t been, and it probably never will be, but it is impolite to raise the matter, which is why I do so).In fact, US-British rivalry had been quietly growing for decades, and it had come to a head in the years just before the Great War when the USA began seriously to expand its Navy. It is amazing how much public fuss we made about Germany’s famous attempt to match our fleet, outspent by us and abandoned by the Kaiser in 1912, and how little attention we pay to the real, lasting challenge from the country which would eventually supplant us.In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt had despatched his ‘Great White Fleet’ of battleships around the world to show that the USA was now a major naval power – a direct challenge to Britain which, then in alliance with Japan, challenged the USA for naval dominance in the Pacific. In the end, Britain would reluctantly break the Japanese alliance in 1923 under US pressure. In hindsight, that was probably the moment at which the British Empire’s fate was settled for good. In 1916 Woodrow Wilson had backed the so-called ‘Big Navy’ act, of which he said ‘Let us build a Navy bigger than hers [Britain’s] and do what we please.’ Wilson resolved to build ‘incomparably, the greatest Navy in the world’ aiming to make the US Navy equal to any two others in the world. This of course is now a fact. The USSR tried and failed to challenge it. Now China, with more deliberation and care, and with far better equipment than the Soviets managed to create, is seeking at least to challenge it in its own region.I am indebted to Adam Tooze’s marvellous, original history of the true significance of World War One ‘The Deluge’, for much of what I say here. It does not mess around ridiculously trying to show that Germany didn’t start the war, when it obviously did. It doesn’t get bogged down in the British obsession with Flanders. It grasps that the centre of the war was the Eastern Front, and that its wider effects were principally felt in the East of Europe and Russia, and in the power struggle between Britain and the USA, which the USA was bound to win. He also understands the huge cost of it, and what this meant to the relative standings of Britain and the USA.Tooze records that, during his sea voyage to London in December 1918, Wilson had made it plain that he would no longer accept Britain’s total dominance at sea. He told aides that if Britain did not come to terms over this, America would ‘build the biggest Navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it…and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map’.Tooze also records that the growing naval confrontation between these two supposed shoulder-to-shoulder eternal friends were so bitter that ‘ by the end of March 1919 relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other’.In the end, the confrontation would be indefinitely postponed by the Washington Naval Treaty, in which Britain agreed to severe limits on strength, and the USA likewise agreed limits on building. But the Anglo-Japanese alliance was broken, and when the next world crisis came, it was partly the result of that breach.Of course Britain fought a bitter naval war between 1939 and 1945. But the big set-piece confrontations between capital ships, such as the sinking of the Bismarck and (to a lesser extent) the sinking of the Scharnhorst, were exceptional. The main naval war was fought with destroyers (which at Narvik smashed the German destroyer fleet and so made a German invasion of Britain almost impossible), which did the real work at Dunkirk and which, supported by cheap and ill-armed corvettes, won the Battle of the Atlantic. Yes, I know that some battleships and many cruisers also did valuable convoy work, and were crucial in the D-Day bombardment. But it was a destroyer war, in which we never had enough destroyers. The really big ships were almost liabilities, since their loss, as in the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, was so devastating and demoralising that it is tempting to wonder if it might have been better never to have had them at all.Poor HMS Prince of Wales was also the scene of the Placentia Bay meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt. I am more and more convinced that the late Herman Wouk’s description of this encounter in his book ‘The Winds of War’ gets closer to the substance than most British official history, which drones on about an ‘Atlantic Charter’ (which doesn’t exist, though a nameless document very damaging to Britain does) and Churchill’s first meeting with Roosevelt.Wouk records it as ‘The Changing of the Guard’, the moment at which world power actually passed from Britain to the USA, and significantly this took place aboard British and US warships anchored close to each other, very near to territory (at Argentia in Newfoundland) recently ceded to the USA by Britain in return for desperately-needed destroyers. I use the word ‘desperately’ as it is rarely used, in its full strength. Our need was huge. The Royal Navy had started the war with 176 destroyers. After Narvik and Dunkirk, only 68 of these were still fit for service in home waters. It was because of this crisis that Churchill was prepared to cede sovereign territory to Roosevelt, something he would never otherwise have contemplated.Much of this, the true relationship between the two countries, is dealt with in my widely-ignored and sometimes-slandered recent book ‘The Phoney Victory’ Also useful for a cooler, less sentimental perspective on the relations between the two countries in 1939-41, is Lynne Olson’s superb book ‘Those Angry Days’. Ms Olson is a fine popular historian, and most of her books are readily available here, including the recent and excellent ‘Last Hope Island’ and her new book ‘Madame Fourcade’s Secret War’. But I am shocked and irritated that no publisher has seen fit to bring out ‘Those Angry Days’ in this country. I had to buy it in Moscow, Idaho. It would open many eyes here, and make relations between Britain and the USA better for being more honest and knowledgeable. Less slop and slush might mean a deeper, more genuine friendship based upon recognition that we are two different countries with differing interests. This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday columnNormally I would go this morning to a small village war memorial and stand in the cold November air while we prayed a little, sang O God, Our Help In Ages Past, and observed the usual silence between bugle calls.But a few weeks ago, I was told this was impossible. Apparently we would all be too close together, or something. So the event was to be switched to a nearby cemetery, where we could all stand a long way from each other.‘There will be white crosses painted on the grass to indicate where people should stand to ensure social distancing… Masks are not compulsory in this scenario, but their use would be appreciated,’ said the parish circular.And, of course, we were supposed to leave our names and addresses in case, in the wind and the cold, as we avoided each other, we somehow contracted or passed on Covid.How, I wondered, would those we were commemorating have viewed these pathetic precautions and the spirit of subservience to the State (constantly advised by Church leaders) which they express?I was getting ready to endure this parody, wondering if it would make me laugh out loud or lose my temper, or both.But then Johnson and Hancock, our prison governor and chief warder, once again made normal life illegal. The feeble pseudo-ceremony was cancelled, as are all other religious services.Quite a few people in the churches and in politics are beginning, too late, to seethe about this repression of an important part of national life. Any actual war veteran, should he take part in a Remembrance Service inside, could be fined on the spot by an official.But the more we obey Hancock and his dubiously lawful decrees, the more he thinks he can boss us about. It is because the churches took the knee to him in March that he now feels he can kick them in the face. So it is good to mark that last week we began once again to have an opposition in this country. More public voices are being raised against this unjustified folly, out of all proportion to the hugely exaggerated risk. Back in March, as I know very well, anyone who spoke up against this was treated more or less as an outcast apostle of evil, callous and selfish, not to be listened to.Now, a significant number of MPs are ready to vote against it. More and more of the media are examining it as severely as they should have done from the start, though the BBC remains mostly a shameful propaganda organ of Downing Street. I think we have reached the end of the beginning.And one day we may yet liberate ourselves from these sinister clowns. When we do, there will be much to forgive.But I am not sure I will ever be able to forgive the people who made it a crime to sing O God, Our Help In Ages Past at an English village war memorial. Turning your children into Stasi spies The invention of ‘hate crime’ has turned this into a society where the police patrol our minds and opinions. When exactly did we start to slither down such a steep and frightening slope? Whose fault is it? It will end with something very like the East German Stasi, who were nothing like as nice as their portrayal in the film The Lives Of Others.Now, tucked away on page 481 of a 544-page ‘consultation document’ from the highly influential Law Commission, is a suggestion that what we say in our own homes should in future be prosecuted. It is many years since our homes have been our castles, but this is a totalitarian idea, especially now that almost anything can be recorded.You might think that you never say anything at home that could get you into trouble. But the rapidly tightening speech codes of our society grow narrower every day.Nobody speaks as freely now as they did 20 years ago. Are you sure that your opinions, once normal, will not one day become a crime? I expect that expressing doubts about the CO2 explanation of global warming will become a criminal offence in my lifetime, and if you doubt it, look around you.The other really nasty thing about this (apart from the opportunities for blackmail) is that your children could end up accidentally denouncing you, by a chance remark at school picked up by a zealot teacher and reported to the authorities. I would once have urged you to campaign against this. But with the sort of Government we now have, I say, prepare for it to happen.Strangelove was mad – but this is far worseOne of the funniest moments in all the history of cinema is the point in Dr Strangelove, pictured left, where a scuffle breaks out in a Pentagon bunker between the Russian ambassador and an American general.The President of the United States (sane and compos mentis by modern standards) scolds them both, snapping: ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!’But for black humour I think it is beaten by Hancock’s announcement last Thursday that ‘travelling abroad for the purpose of assisted dying is a reasonable excuse and so anyone doing so would not be breaking the law’.The Government has practically reorganised itself into an anti-death league. Rather than have anyone die of Covid, however old and ill they are, it is prepared to destroy the entire economy. But if you actually want to do away with yourself, it will smile on your otherwise forbidden journey. You are excused from the laws which would normally force you to stay at home for your own alleged good – so that you can die.By contrast I, aged 69, am prevented by law from taking the very minor risks with my life or yours, which would result from going to the pub, entering a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods or getting the Prime Minister’s face tattooed on my backside (something I am increasingly tempted to do).*****Back in 2003 too many in the media fell for dodgy dossiers. We were supposedly 45 minutes from an attack by Saddam Hussein, who had secret arsenals of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now we have a new dodgy dossier, a dud before it was leaked to the BBC, wrongly predicting 1,500 deaths a day from Covid. And we fall for this stuff. Doesn’t the old saying go: ‘Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me’?*******At a railway station near me there is a poster threatening fines of £6,400 for not wearing a face nappy. How many muggings would you have to commit to be fined that much? *******Delusions make you see things, and in Vienna they made almost everyone see double on Monday, when a madman was on the loose, killing people. First reports insisted that there was more than one gunman. They often do. It also happened in the mosque shootings in New Zealand in 2019. This is because police and media have it fixed in their heads that such attacks must be organised and political. Some are, but most are not. I will be lied about and accused of excusing Islamist terror when I say it, as I so often am. But most of these attacks are by crazed individuals sent insane by marijuana, a terrible drug with great PR. We’d know if we looked. But we want to think they are something else.If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down Some honourably abstained, but are not listed. The SNP did not vote. Those who voted in favour of making their fellow-citizens bankrupt and jobless should not be forgotten. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-11-04/division/AACC940F-185C-4EC7-A751-C1D2638CF974/PublicHealth?outputType=Names I apologise for the shaky picture here. A last-minute computer freeze meant I had to use facetime at short notice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTpJmT1KQrc feature=youtu.be This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday columnThere was once a famous Chinese executioner so skilful with his razor-edged sword that crowds would pay to watch him behead criminals. One day he came to a small provincial town where the authorities had given him a large fee to do away with a notorious killer.He entered the arena and made several elegant and delicate passes with his weapon. The condemned man sat gloomily before him, looking unimpressed with all this fuss. ‘Just get on with it!’ he growled.The executioner bowed politely, smiled and said softly: ‘Kindly nod, please.’ The murderer did so and his head, already parted from his body by a stroke of incredible swiftness, tumbled from his shoulders.I think we in this country are like that condemned man. A terrible thing has been done to us but we have not yet realised it.It may even be that the British Revolution, a horror that this country has repeatedly escaped by good sense and natural conservatism, has actually taken place.In a lecture of astonishing power and force last week,https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/10/lord-sumptions-devastating-lecture-on-the-governments-rule-by-decree-and-grasp-for-despotic-power-.htmlthe former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, revealed in sad detail what has happened to our country in the name of Covid. I have placed a copy of it and a recording on the Peter Hitchens blog and I strongly advise you to read and watch it.It says that Parliament has been elbowed aside by Ministers who rule by decree.Now, Jonathan Sumption is not just a brilliant lawyer. He is also a distinguished historian. Last year he gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures, and they were the best for many years. If he has any politics I have no idea what they are, but he uses language with immense care.If he says this ‘has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one’, then you may be sure that this is so.When he says ‘Ministers are accountable to no one, except once in five years at General Elections’, you may be sure that this is true. This a complete breach with centuries of law and tradition, and who can say where it might end?When he points out that laws, backed by tyrannical, ruinous fines, are now made at televised press conferences and enforced by bluff by police forces operating far beyond their authority, then it is happening. He accuses the Government of showing ‘a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers’. This, he says, is how freedom dies.And behind it lies an astonishing, previously unnoticed seizure of economic power, which has made the entire Covid panic possible.By long tradition, Parliament has had ultimate control over the Government’s purse strings. It must permit major spending specifically. Without this power it is just a mascot or a toy.That power has been abolished. Back in March, unnoticed by almost everyone, Parliament vastly increased the Government’s freedom to spend what it liked. The old limit, for emergency spending, was increased from a mere £11billion to almost £270billion a year.I cannot say where or how this will end. It is my own growing belief that Johnson and Hancock do not understand what they are doing.Their decision to strangle our struggling economy once again in an alarmist shutdown is one of panic piled on panic and is visibly destroying the NHS they claim to be saving, as well as laying waste to those jobs and businesses they have not yet ruined or obliterated.I see them as two schoolboys on the footplate of an old-fashioned steam locomotive, clattering into deepening twilight, too scared to call for help, too vain to admit their error. They started it moving by accident, foolishly pulling and pushing at levers whose functions they did not know. Now they cannot find the brakes. The safety valves are blocked. The whistle screams, the pace gathers.Alas, the rest of us are trapped in the lurching, bucketing train behind them, unable to reach or influence them, let alone stop them.A needless stampede towards the abyssThe oddest thing about the Panicdemic is that nobody would know it existed if the Government and its mouthpiece the BBC did not constantly seek to terrify us into a state of servile fear.It does not help that they all presume the truth of the unproven belief that shutdowns control the disease.In many years, comparable numbers of people die from respiratory ailments. Quite normally, 1,600 people die every day for all kinds of reasons, though it has become almost sacrilegious to say so. Most of them do not die from Covid.Many die from other diseases whose treatment has been halted or reduced by the Panicdemic. All such deaths are rightly mourned by the bereaved. Except that, thanks to the Panicdemic, they cannot hold proper funerals.How long will it be before the realisation sinks in that we have been stampeded, quite needlessly, into poverty and darkness?If only they would ban Halloween...Given all the dozens of good things that have been banned in the name of fighting Covid-19, how on earth is it that the miserable imported festival of Halloween was allowed to go ahead in most places? I had hoped that we might be spared this event, which in some places is little better than door-to-door intimidation and in others leads to near-fatal consumption of sugar by the young. The daily spectacle of millions walking about in muzzles is quite scary enough. The ultimate lockdown lunacyAny government truly concerned about public health would encourage the growth and spread of gyms, which probably do more than any drug to save us from avoidable disease.Fit men and women are far more likely than the unfit to fight off and survive diseases such as Covid. Yet gyms are often the victims of shutdown fanatics.I have had a heartfelt message from gym owners in Wales, determined not to be closed by their irrational, flailing politicians. Lawrence Gainey, of the Welsh Gym Owner Collective, says: ‘We strongly believe gyms are an essential service.‘It’s a scientific fact that active participation in exercise actually relieves the strain on the precious NHS through the promotion of physical and mental wellbeing. In forcing the closure of gyms, the Welsh Government is performing an incredible act of self-harm to a large proportion of its population and we cannot stand by and allow that to happen.’I have to say that nothing would induce me to enter a gym anywhere. I’ll stick to my pushbike.But Mr Gainey is absolutely right and I hope he succeeds.If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday columnThe story is told (it may even be true) of the old woman who lived alone with her cat in a small wooden shack on the border between Russia and Belarus. One day, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union made these two places into separate countries, an official banged on her door.‘Sorry to bother you,’ said the bureaucrat, ‘but we need to fix the frontier properly now. At the moment, it runs right through your kitchen. We can’t have that. So you can decide where it goes. We really don’t mind which but would you rather be in Belarus, or in Russia?’She thought for a moment and said: ‘Belarus, definitely.’The inspector noted this down, but could not help asking: ‘Purely as a matter of interest, why is that?’And the old lady replied: ‘I just can’t stand those long Russian winters.’She was no more deluded than we are, as we madly twist our clocks forwards and backwards, supposedly in pursuit of more daylight. Just as the freezing blizzards blow equally in Belarus and Russia, the amount of daylight remains unchanged whatever your clock says.This morning Britain returned to its natural time zone, after seven long months when every clock in the country had lied. I, for one, greeted this with joy.Anybody who goes to work, whose children go to school, who relies in any way on timetables or broadcasting schedules, has been compelled since March 29 to do everything an hour earlier than they needed to. I rise quite early enough as it is without being hauled even earlier from my bed by this stupid edict.I can find no hard evidence that it does or ever did the slightest good. Each year it certainly causes several avoidable heart attacks among time-lagged people in the weeks immediately afterwards. It makes it harder to get children up in the morning and harder to get them to go to bed in the middle of summer. It has forced long-distance commuters (such as me) to rise in the dark for the past few weeks.Imagine what would have happened if it had been done more honestly. Imagine if your children’s school had written to you in March to say that you must get them to school an hour earlier. Imagine if your employer had emailed you to say that for the next seven months you would have to turn up at work an hour earlier. I think a lot of people would have said ‘Why?’ and quite possibly: ‘No.’But the annual clock change has become a habit and so nobody really thinks about it. And everybody does what they are told.A lot of people are so baffled that they are never sure whether the clocks should go forwards or backwards. But they do it anyway.I only understand it because I once flew backwards across the International Date Line, from Siberia to Alaska, from Monday morning to the previous Sunday afternoon, living the same day twice. It was then that I grasped the difference between official time and real time.There is an unalterable natural time, which remains the same however we mess around with it. Noon, sunrise and sunset are actual events, to do with the relation of the Sun to the exact part of our planet on which you stand. And governments who fiddle with the clocks, so that they lie grossly about this, are often trying to manipulate their people.Our frenzy for clock-changing resulted from a national panic during the First World War. Parliament had, for many years, resisted faddist campaigns to introduce so-called daylight saving (a fraudulent expression).But when Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered every clock in the German empire to be jammed forward, supposedly to strengthen the war effort, in April 1916, British MPs panicked. Within a month they had done the same. We have suffered it more or less ever since.And because politicians and media types tend to be the sort of people who get up late and go to bed late and never normally see the dawn, it has always been popular with them. Almost every year about this time (but never in March) they begin a campaign to ‘just leave the clocks where they are’, in the justified hope that most people won’t realise what this means until it is too late. Some of them even seek to put us permanently on the same time as Berlin, which would mean the sun would not rise much before 9am in London in December and would not set till 10.20pm in June.They call their campaign ‘lighter later’ but it would be just as true to call it ‘darker later’.The point about this strange performance is that nobody can really justify it with hard facts. Yet we have continued to do it for more than a century. Does this remind you of anything? It certainly reminds me of something.Unreason and habit are powerful forces, far more powerful these days than reason and common sense. Panic hardens into habit.I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 2120, your great-great-grandchildren are still being compelled to wear face coverings, tracked and traced wherever they go and kept 7ft apart at all times, all over the world.A golden cast in a drama as dull as leadThe BBC’s terrible, shameless bias is actually stronger and more effective in dramas than it is in news and current affairs. A Leftist storyline in Call The Midwife will influence many more people than a boring Leftist documentary.And that is why it still transmits the embarrassingly bad works of Leftist idols such as smutty Alan Bennett and snotty Sir David Hare, who have been indulged for so long that they no longer need to make any effort to be good.Now Sir David’s four-part political drama Roadkill has been given everything the BBC can give it – fine and famous actors, including Hugh Laurie, obviously expensive production and big promotion. Yet the result is a great wobbling mass of tin, lead and cardboard. You have to laugh, especially at the serious bits.Sir David seems not to have noticed anything since the 1980s. He no longer knows how politicians dress, speak and act. He has even less idea of what newspapers are like (which is perhaps why he has yet to answer an awkward question I put to him more than two years ago. Still waiting, Sir David).Only anger will end this miseryJohnson, the man who ruined Britain, continues to stamp across the landscape like a mad giant, squashing small businesses, obliterating jobs and then flinging funny money at the victims as if that could bring back what they have lost for ever.By doing so he achieves nothing. The crisis which he claims to be dealing with exists only in twisted statistics and shameless propaganda. No suspicion that he might be mistaken appears to have crossed his mind. Those of us who have tried using facts and reason to change his mind are more or less in despair. The funny money is visibly running out.Increasingly, I fear that anger is the only force that will bring this misery to an end. I hope not, for that will bring new miseries. Can nobody reach him, while there is still time?If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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