anticant's arena

Hail - and Farewell

2009-12-15T17:23:00.005Z

‘Tis the time for seasonal festive greetings to cheer the bleak midwinter. Warmest wishes to all regular and occasional visitors and posters for a Merry Christmas and a healthy, prosperous and – dare we say it? – more peaceful New Year.

Anticant won’t be blogging so much, if at all, in 2010. The Arena and the Burrow have had their little day, and when the salt loses its savour enough is enough. I’ve run out of steam. My thanks to all who have helped to make these sites fun, lively, and for the most part good humoured. That’s quite an achievement in these fratchy times.

And so to bed…….

The world we live in

2009-11-20T11:12:00.011Z

A few of today's headlines:

Worried pimp 'called off rabbi's drug-fuelled orgy'

Court hears rabbi so exhausted after days of cocaine-fuelled partying that pimp grew worried and cancelled supply of girls

Gang 'killed victims for their fat'

Four people arrested in Peru for murdering up to 60 people to sell their fat to cosmetic clinics in Europe, police claim

MPs' standards chief quits over expenses disclosures

David Curry claimed almost £30,000 for a second home that his wife banned him from staying in following an affair

Government deficit now increasing at £3bn a week

Twitter urges Murdoch to be open

Bears queue to use indoor toilets

You couldn't make it up. (Except the last one, which I did.)

Down to earth idealist

2009-11-17T18:37:00.010Z

I recently mentioned that for a while in 1950-51 I lodged in the same Hampstead house with Rowland Kenney, without realising that he came from my grandmother's native Saddleworth, or that he had led a distinguished and varied career including intensive involvement in the early Socialist movement and, during and after the First World War, as a British diplomat.

A leading trade unionist (John Hodge, who was Minister of Labour during the 1914-18 war) grandly entitled his autobiography Workman's Cottage to Windsor Castle. Rowland Kenney might well have called his Underground Navvy to High-Flying Diplomat - instead, he called it Westering (1939). Kenney, who was born in 1882, was one of a large family of mill workers in a small Pennine village on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire. In those days, poor children were sent to school when they were three, before being put to work part-time in the cotton mills aged ten or eleven. Any other path was unusual, and most of the Kenney children went "through 't mill". Rowland loathed the harsh working conditions and insanitary atmosphere, and determined to escape into the fresh air at the earliest opportunity.

Always a sensitive, introspective and thoughtful boy, he was physically tough as well – given his vivid descriptions of continual beatings by teachers and fights with other boys at school, he had to be. So when he was 15 he seized the opportunity of a job as a chain-horse lad in the London and North-Western Railway's Lees station, near Oldham, and during his eighteen months there he says his life broadened out in many ways. By now he was steeped in the idealistic socialist writings of Robert Blatchford's Clarion ; intellectually agnostic, he warmed to the aesthetic beauty of the King James Bible and, though an unbeliever, attended church services so as to enjoy the stately language and the music. At the same time, he yearned for the open road: the first part of his memoir is aptly titled "Vagabondage".

So, chucking up his steady job, he did casual work of many kinds – including a brief spell underground as a tunnelling navvy, the most arduous occupation of all his many temporary adventures. Farming in Lincolnshire and work as a carter was followed by 18 months in Mumps goods yard, Oldham – then a most dangerous place which would make the hair of today's effete 'elf 'n safety' obsessed generation stand on end. Rowland's job was as a capstanman – working with boy assistants ("nippers") to slew round the turntables transferring fully loaded wagons from one set of railway lines to another. A false move or miscalculation of a fraction of a second's timing could result in severe injury or even death for the operatives. But for that very reason – the skill involved, and the exhilarating sense of power which resulted - he delighted in the task.

All this time he was reading and reflecting, becoming more aware of his intellectual aspirations and his emotional needs. His experience of heavy labouring had not coarsened him, but made him more intense. He was seized of an overwhelming desire for knowledge – a need to know. He went to spiritualist meetings, where he was told by a young medium that he would always be possessed by the urge to keep moving on – as his future life proved. He found the burgeoning urges of sex a puzzle – the Lancashire folk of the late nineteenth century, he says, had a stark horror of expressing emotions of any kind, and to speak of love would embarrass both speaker and hearer alike. It was taken for granted but not mentioned. It was not until he was living a bohemian life in London that Kenney met and later married a Norwegian girl.

The hazardous perils of Mumps were followed by a spell as a casual builder and then – thanks to one of his older brothers – more regular employment, first as that doyen of working-class respectability a commercial traveller, and later as manager of a Manchester booksellers' and stationers' branch shop in Preston. But despite having achieved a modicum of security, Rowland Kenney was still restless and absorbed in his idealistic socialist politics. The second part of his memoir is called "Crusade". He attended many meetings in Manchester, and got to know the leading members of the infant Independent Labour Party. Soon he was offered a job managing the publications section of the Party's National Administrative Council, and in 1910 he began a new life in London on the modest salary of £3 a week. It was less secure than his previous employment, but he never hesitated.

This new work brought Kenney into close contact with the founders and leading members of the ILP and – as always happens when one encounters one's idols at close quarters - he soon became somewhat disillusioned and sharply critical of them all. Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden all possessed a copious dose of vanity, he says, and the first two disliked and distrusted each other to a degree which sometimes made their working together extremely difficult. The puritanical Snowden, though he could be bitingly sarcastic, was the one who Kenney admired most for his uncompromising socialism – although he ended up in the House of Lords after a lifetime of calling for its abolition!

Before and during the 1914-18 war, when he was first editor of the Daily Herald and then involved in other journalism, Rowland Kenney was at the centre of London left-wing bohemian life, and tells many interesting stories of the people he knew in those days – not least the egregious Frank Harris. Another once hugely influential, though now largely forgotten, socialist writer was A.R. Orage, editor of the New Age. It was through him that Rowland Kenney later became deeply involved in the esoteric philosophical movement centred around G. I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. And Kenney was also friendly with the gentle anarchist, Prince Kropotkin.

Partly because his wife was Norwegian, and he had spent some time in that country, Kenney was asked by the Foreign Office to undertake a wartime mission to help familiarise the Norwegians with the Allied case and to counter German influence in Scandinavia. Subsequently he was sent to Poland to gather information on political and social conditions there for the British delegates at the Paris Peace Conference. He got to know the Polish leaders, Pilsudski, Paderewski and Dmowski, and was horrified by the extent and intensity of Polish anti-semitism. He reported to the British delegation in Paris, but did not stay for the signing of the Versailles Treaty and was seriously injured in a plane crash while returning to England. This badly affected the rest of his life, but nonetheless between the wars he pursued a successful career as a Foreign Office diplomat.

A strange turn of events for a one-time underground navvy and goods yard worker! It's a shame that Rowland Kenney and his fascinating life story are now largely forgotten. He was that rare being, a hard-headed idealist. But then, Pennine grit will out.

Note to posters

2009-11-15T08:24:00.003Z

Recently, some anonymous spammers have been adding off-topic comments, commercial advertisements, etc., to old posts in the Arena and the Burrow. These will be immediately deleted, so please don't bother.

Adrift on a sea of claptrap

2009-11-12T13:43:00.003Z

In a pungent article in today's Independent, Adrian Hamilton lambasts the empty rhetoric spouted by Western leaders at the recent Berlin Wall (demolition) celebrations. Sarkozy, Clinton, and –needless to say – Gordon Brown uttered meaningless platitudes about 'freedom' and the West's role in promoting it. Brown's "you know that while force has temporary power to dominate, it can never ultimately decide" takes the biscuit for sheer nonsense – the hastiest glance at history tells us it simply isn't true.

Our purblind Prime Minister loftily proclaimed that "an Africa in poverty, Darfur in agony, Zimbabwe in tears, Burma in chains, individuals, even when in pain, need not suffer for ever without hope". As Hamilton points out, all this Pollyanna-ish flim-flam churned out by his Whitehall speech writers flies in the face of reality. It wilfully denies the inescapable fact that, far from exerting themselves effectively to right these undoubted wrongs, Western leaders are tumbling over backwards not to rock the boats of petty tyrants, dictators and mini-Hitlers all over the world instead of putting pressure on them to reform.

Unfortunately, little of all this is the result of conscious hypocrisy or of deliberate lying. The reality is even worse – that our leaders sincerely believe most of the hifalutin nonsense they spout about 'democracy' and 'freedom', whilst blithely ignoring the damage they are doing to these concepts both at home and abroad. For most of the past decade – ever since the '9/11' Twin Towers atrocity – they, and much of their electorates and the media, have lived in a paranoid state of false consciousness, misconstruing much of the actual state of world affairs and chasing will-o'-the-wisps such as a shadowy 'Al Qaeda' alleged to have the power as well as the will to launch murderous terrorist attacks on the American and European civilian populations. So, ostensibly to prevent this, the West has launched murderous attacks upon the civilian populations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rationale of which are now being increasingly questioned. Whether it is already too late to retrieve a firmer contact with reality and tackle the outstanding issues which are making the world such a dangerous place remains to be seen. But judging from the flowery phrases uttered at the Brandenburg Gate, the chances are not very bright.

In these uneasy days, I am increasingly drawn back to Matthew Arnold's superb poem Dover Beach (1867), in which he laments the ebbing Sea of Faith, hearing "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/retreating, to the breath/of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/and naked shingles of the world/….And we are here as on a darkling plain/swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/where ignorant armies clash by night."

The dwindling faith of which Arnold wrote was religious faith. Now, it is our previously taken for granted faith in democratic values, principles, and practices which is visibly shrivelling when confronted with our leaders' self-deluded posturings and verbal acrobatics which defy a very different truth.

Time to stop digging

2009-11-07T09:26:00.004Z

It used to be the received wisdom that when you find yourself in a hole, the sensible thing to do is to stop digging. Nowadays, however, the new orthodoxy is that when in a hole, you should dig ever more frantically until – with luck – you re-emerge at the Antipodes.

With scarcely a break in the serried ranks of government and opposition until the other day, when Kim Howells took upon himself the honourable role of the little boy who pointed out that the emperor was naked, the lunatic policy pursued by the denizens of Westminster Walter Mitty Land with regard to Afghanistan has been to redouble our futile efforts to bring Western-style 'democracy' to a country whose proud people have never bowed their necks to a foreign invader, or to foreign notions, in a thousand years. Afghanistan has always been a thorn in the flesh of its neighbours, including the erstwhile British Raj and the Russian Empire. As the gateway to India, it was the focal point of the 19^th century 'Great Game' between the two great powers. Successive British and Russian attempts to invade and subdue the warlike and lawless Afghan tribes in their mountain fastnesses have always ended in disaster for the invaders.

The history of all this is an open book to any who cares to read. So why should we imagine that the present Western incursion into Afghanistan will end any differently? Listening to idiotic politicians and well-meaning servicemen prattling on about how we are performing an essential service to the Afghan people by bringing our alien and unwanted notions of freedom and justice to them, and so it is obligatory upon us to remain for as long as it takes to achieve our purpose, would be comical if it were not so tragically sickening.

As the procession of coffins returning through Wootton Bassett gets longer, grieving wives and mums mumble through their televised tears that their brave boys were heroes – but isn't it time now to bring the other lads home, because we don't really know what they are there for? The mood of the country is turning increasingly negative, with a tinge of defeatism creeping in. So the Prime Minister yet again defiantly dons his fake Churchillian mantle and sombrely tells us that the 'mission' remains essential for our home security. His repeated assertion that British troops fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan make terror incidents at home less likely is absolute tosh – the reverse of the truth, in fact – and the crass politician or civil servant who first dreamed up this glib mantra deserves to be hung, drawn and quartered. For the plain fact is that young Muslims born and growing up in Britain are being antagonised, and radicalised, by the spectacle of British troops fighting their co-religionists in faraway places.

If we don't succeed in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown insists, fundamentalist Islamists and that shadowy entity, Al Qaeda (whose existence – like that of God - is always assumed, but never demonstrated, by Western leaders) will take over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons – and then the real balloon may well go up. So the Afghan 'mission' must not fail. And it is for the benefit of the Afghan people – we are their liberators, not their invaders. Strange, then, that the Taleban, who were almost wiped out by the first onset of American and British troops, are now steadily increasing their hold over more and more territory.

Brown, however, has neither sent adequate reinforcements nor equipped the unfortunate soldiers already there with the weapons and armoury they need to do their assigned job successfully. And now, while still insisting that we must remain in Afghanistan and triumph there, he has started to hedge his bets by making the sending of more troops conditional on the Karzai government in Kabul rooting out corruption. This is asking the leopard to change its spots with a vengeance. What we would term 'corruption' is not an Afghan aberration, nor, in their eyes, a malpractice – it is endemic in the way of life of those regions, where business is customarily accompanied with 'sweeteners' – backhanders – which are regarded as a normal part of any deal by all the parties involved. To expect a government, or a people, to abandon its customary cultural practices in the name of bringing them 'democracy' which most of them do not want is as purblind as the flatteries of King Canute's courtiers. And for Gordon Brown of all people to make such a demand is consummate hypocrisy from someone whose own government, and that of his predecessor, has been riddled with corruption and venal behaviour on the part of politicians – the classic case being the abandonment, on Tony Blair's personal instruction, of the BAE Systems fraud investigation over Saudi contracts. Sauce for the gander?

It could well be that the Brown 'condition' is a cunning pretext for an early withdrawal on the ground that the Afghan government is not fit for purpose, and that therefore our 'mission' cannot succeed. If so, it would be the first glimmer of sanity in an otherwise manic policy – and also, of course, gives the lie to his incompatible argument that our remaining there is essential for Britain's own security.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a shameful and troubling episode in our national history. Launched on false or at least flimsy pretexts at the behest of a frightened and bullying power-drunk ally, they have been little short of disastrous in performance and even more so in diminishing Britain's world reputation. And they – Afghanistan in particular – are far more dangerous than most people, including those involved in running them, seem to realise. There are no wars without consequences. It is not simply a matter of either 'winning' or else calling it quits, bringing the boys back home, and resuming normal everyday life as if the whole thing had never happened, or was just a friendly football match. The material carnage and the stench of death left behind will be as nothing compared with the legacy of lasting bitterness against the West, and Britain in particular, which this latest post-imperial adventure will leave in the hearts and minds of Iraqis, Afghans, and their fellow Muslims around the world – not least here at home. We have stirred up a hornets' nest. How these negative emotions will work out in the future remains to be seen. But the outlook is far from rosy.

Anticant remembers…..

2009-11-05T17:50:00.005Z

The Battle of Hampstead

It is sixty years since Anticant came to London as a young man to start an interesting job and become a part-time Bar student. After some months lodging in stuffy South Kensington, he decided to move up to the fresher air of hilly Hampstead, which reminded him of his north country Pennine home.

He found a vacancy in a small, solid, square detached house near Belsize Park. Across the front of the first floor, four large arched windows let copious sunshine into what had originally been the best bedroom, and which now became Anticant's spacious bed-sitting room.

The owner of the house was a rather grand lady, Mrs Constance M. (Anticant thought of her as "Connie", but would never have to presumed to address her as such.) Her husband, a local solicitor, had died untimely, leaving Connie a widow in her late forties. She took in three gentleman-lodgers to make ends meet, looking after them efficiently and sometimes a trifle brusquely – she almost certainly considered being a 'landlady' beneath her. She regarded herself as part of the Hampstead cognoscenti, and gravely informed Anticant that nobody who was anybody lived "on the wrong side of the Finchley Road". (In later years, Anticant did so for several decades.) Despite long sessions of sunbathing in her pretty back garden, Connie always seemed tense and hyperactive. Possibly she was sexually frustrated, but Anticant did not choose to explore that avenue.

The other lodgers were all interesting in different ways. There was a jolly young Dutch naval officer, attached to the embassy, courtesy of which he supplied Anticant with bottles of cheap rum. There was a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman of distinctly bohemian cast, who wore a flowing cloak and a low-crowned wide-brimmed hat of the type favoured by artists in the 1890s. His name was Rowland Kenney, and he was indeed far more distinguished than Anticant realised until much later. Mr Kenney was a major figure in early 20^th century socialist politics, and had been the first editor of the Daily Herald. He had served as a British diplomat in Scandinavia and Poland, and had written books about all this, including an autobiography, Westering. Even more interestingly, he was a brother of Annie Kenney, the Saddleworth-born mill girl who was one of the earliest associates of Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters in their epic fight for womens' suffrage, and who, with Christabel Pankhurst, had caused a national sensation by serving a short prison sentence in 1905 after refusing to pay a small fine for making a disturbance at a meeting addressed by Liberal cabinet ministers Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey at Manchester's Free Trade Hall. Sadly, Anticant had no idea of Mr Kenney's past, or of his connection with Saddleworth, while they both lived in Connie's house, and it was with much regret that he later realised what a unique opportunity he had missed for some fascinating conversations and mutual family reminiscences with the old gentleman.

After Mr Kenney left – or before he arrived; it doesn't really matter – there was a retired colonial civil servant of immense dignity with whom Anticant sometimes went for Sunday morning walks across Hampstead Heath while Connie was preparing lunch, for which we were under strict instructions to be back by 1 'clock PROMPT. This gentleman affected a monocle, and spoke in an accent so refined that he would have pronounced it "refained". Our failure to return punctually after an especially sunny stroll to the Spaniards Inn and back led to a memorable scene which threatened to erupt into a veritable Waterloo. We did, in fact, overstep the mark badly, only getting back to Connie's forty minutes after we were due. She was absolutely furious; the excellent lunch over which she had spent immense trouble while we were gadding about was (in her eyes) ruined, and she told us off in no uncertain terms.

Anticant bowed meekly before the storm, but the stately ex-governor (or whatever he was) did not. He rose from the table, drew himself up, fixed his monocle firmly into his eye, and declared: "I" – he pronounced it "Ay" – "have never been spoken to like this before, and Ay have no intention of putting up with it at may tayme of life!" Whereupon he stalked out and betook himself to the nearest pub for a beer and sandwich, leaving Connie gasping like a fish and Anticant giggling up his sleeve. Unsurprisingly, the pompous gent. moved to other lodgings shortly after this epic brouhaha.

All this happened more than half a lifetime ago. But it stays vividly in Anticant's memory, not least because he passes by that house quite frequently on his journeys to and from the Hampstead hospice where he is now a day patient. Driving past, he looks up at the four arched windows and reflects on all that has transpired since his year's tenancy of that charming room. Connie is long dead, and probably nobody except Anticant even remembers her in that road where she once reigned supreme in her hospitable house and sunny garden.

You couldn’t make it up…..

2009-11-04T19:58:00.003Z

72,234 people signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to resign immediately. Here is his response:

"The Prime Minister is completely focussed on restoring the economy, getting people back to work and improving standards in public services. As the Prime Minister has consistently said, he is determined to build a stronger, fairer, better Britain for all."

HA! HA!! HA!!!

Political fatheads

2009-11-04T03:58:00.004Z

Three items of recent news typify the inane incoherence of current political thinking (or what passes for it).

First, elections: Having squandered much treasure and many young lives on fruitlessly endeavouring to ensure that the Afghan people were given the chance to vote “honestly”, the Americans and British are now wringing their hands about “corruption” and a “failed state”. They are fine ones to talk! If they looked nearer home, they would find both in their own back yard. Does anyone honestly think that George W. Bush, with his hanging chads, the stopped Florida recount, and the wafer-thin award by the Supreme Court, was really the legitimately elected president of the USA in 2000? And can a British government with an overall majority based upon just over 35 per cent. of the votes cast at the 2005 election (on a 60 per cent. total poll) credibly lecture Afghans or anybody else about the virtues of democracy? Phooey!

Next, politicians versus experts: While it was quite funny to see the normally laid-back Alan Johnson going ballistic because one of his scientific advisers had had the temerity to question the logic of his refusal to accept advice to downgrade the classification of cannabis – presumably because that wouldn’t have gone down well with Sun and Daily Mail journalists (some of whom, it’s a pretty safe bet, are personally familiar with more arcane illegal substances), the logic of his “scientists are all very well, but ultimately these are political decisions” stance rang pretty thin. The usual clap-trap was then pumped out about ‘having scientists on tap but not on top’. He was promptly backed up by the Prime Minister, whose message amounted to “our minds are made up – don’t confuse us with the facts”. Obviously, Postman Pat has no intention of going down into history as Postman Pot.

Finally: David Cameron’s abject wriggle out of his ‘cast-iron’ promise that the Tories would hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. There’s no point, he says, because it’s too late now. And – needless to say – it’s all the government’s fault. The way in which all the mainstream parties duck and weave to ignore the obvious desire of the British people to have a direct say about our continuing membership of the European Union is contemptible. Even more contemptible is their failure to initiate, less alone to sustain, an informed debate about the pros and cons for the UK of belonging or not belonging to the EU. Such a debate is long overdue.

Fit for purpose?

2009-11-02T11:56:00.004Z

The question is being widely asked: ‘Is Tony Blair fit to be President of Europe?’ An even more pertinent question is, was Tony Blair fit to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

Judging from revelations by his old chum and former mentor “Derry” Irvine - head of the barristers’ chambers of which both Tony Blair and his wife Cherie Booth were members and first met each other, and once known as ‘Tony’s chief crony’ - the answer is an unequivocal “No”.

Lord Irvine of Lairg was the last holder of the historic office of Lord Chancellor until its abolition in 2003, and his recently released paper to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution’s Cabinet Office Inquiry reveals that he was unceremoniously bundled out of office without any prior consultation concerning this major constitutional change even though it affected him personally.

When Bonnie Prince Charlie landed at Moidart to ignite the ‘Forty-Five’ and summoned his loyal clan chiefs to join him, one of the foremost, Cameron of Lochiel, endeavoured to dissuade him, being convinced that the expedition was sheer folly, whereupon the Prince won him over by saying that he was determined to proceed, and that “Lochiel, whom my father esteemed the best friend of our family, may remain at home, and learn his Prince’s fate from the newspapers”. Poor Lord Irvine fared even worse: he learnt his own fate from the newspapers.

Having maintained a dignified silence for six years, Lord Irvine has now broken cover because of evidence given to the Select Committee by Lord Turnbull, who was Cabinet Secretary at the time. Lord Turnbull, when asked whether the incumbent Lord Chancellor was consulted about the government’s decision to abolish his office, replied: “The Lord Chancellor was consulted. The trouble was that he disagreed with it”. The conventional route of consultation could not be followed because Lord Irvine was unwilling to act as the advocate of change and was not prepared to lead the consultation, Lord Turnbull alleged. “On the day it was a complete mess up.”

Not so, Lord Irvine now declares. It was HE who was not consulted. “In early June 2003 there were press rumours that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished. I had no intimation of this, but when the TIMES and the TELEGRAPH carried the rumour I determined to see the Prime Minister.” He did so on 5^th June. “I asked him directly if there was any truth in the press rumour that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished and transferred to a new Secretary of State in the Commons. He hesitated and then said it was being considered, but nothing had as yet been decided. I asked him how a decision of this magnitude could be made without prior consultation with me…within government, with the judiciary, with the authorities of the House of Lords which would lose its Speaker and with the Palace. The Prime Minister APPEARED MYSTIFIED [Anticant’s emphasis] and said that these machinery of government changes always had to be carried into effect in a way that precluded much discussion because of the risk of leaks.”

Lord Irvine left the meeting “surprised (a) that the Prime Minister thought the abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor was of the same order as any [other] machinery of government changes…and (b) that the Prime Minister had no appreciation that the abolition of this Office of State, with a critical role in our unwritten constitution affecting a House of Parliament, the judiciary, of which the Lord Chancellor was by statute Head and by constitutional convention guarantor of its independence, required extensive consultation, most careful preparation and primary legislation.”

Lord Irvine saw Blair again on 9^th June, when the Prime Minister lamely said that it had been impossible to discuss the proposals with the Lord Chancellor in advance – even though they concerned the abolition of his own office! – because such discussions “would leak all over the press”. Lord Irvine comments: “It then strongly bore in on me that the Prime Minister had not received any or any proper advice and was completely unaware that complex primary legislation was required.”

Further discussion convinced Lord Irvine that the whole project was botched, and missed an opportunity to make properly considered constitutional and administrative changes. “We left off on the basis, as the Prime Minister was always wont to say, that that no final decision had been taken, but I felt that in reality the die was cast…”

Next day Lord Irvine handed the Prime Minister a note pointing out that there were about 5,000 statutory references to the Lord Chancellor in primary and secondary legislation, and without a proper amending Statute redefining his existing functions administrative chaos would be unavoidable. Constitutionally, the Lord Chancellor was regarded as the guarantor of judicial independence. To proceed without any consultation with the judiciary, or with the House of Lords authorities about the Chancellor’s role as Speaker, would be high-handed and insensitive. “Since the political decision is to close down a great Office of State with broad constitutional implications, then it should be done in a seemly, measured and balanced way instead of the incoherent, unworked up and piecemeal approach currently likely to be adopted.” He followed this up with a more formal memorandum outlining the steps he thought should be followed. But the next day – June 12^th – this was rejected by the Cabinet, and “that afternoon I returned the Great Seal to Her Majesty and ceased to be a member of the government.”

Lord Irvine has obviously written and published his paper under the stress of considerable indignation. Leaving his personal feelings aside, what does it tell us about Blair’s prime ministerial performance? Coming hot on the heels of his ‘sofa government’ approach to the Iraq war via sexed up dodgy dossiers and broken promises about a second UN resolution, the Irvine episode may seem something of a storm in a teacup. But it isn’t – it vividly confirms and illustrates – as many New Labour ministerial memoirs still to come seem likely to do – the insouciant, at times almost wacky, atmosphere at No. 10 during the reign of King Tony.

Tony in Never-Never Land? Or, maybe, Turnbull in a China Shop? Either way, is this weird and intellectually frivolous man really European Presidential material? I don’t think so. The only deep thing about him is his incorrigible shallowness.

If I ruled the world.....

2009-10-26T17:38:00.005Z

In a comment on my previous post Irony rules, OK? concerning Saudi Arabian ‘justice’ I said:

The West's insatiable need (or greed) for oil motivates it to prop up and subsidise these corrupt and barbaric regimes, and thereby to connive at our own destruction. Much of the billions of 'petrodollars' they take from us return into Europe and USA as funding for Saudi-promoted Wahabbi'ist mosques and 'faith schools' which preach and teach disdainful abhorrence of the local culture and open democratic society.

If there ever was a Trojan Horse...

Phil then posted the following:

The alternatives:
We stop buying oil from them.
We invade them and change their regime.
We fund internal revolution.
We buy their oil but limit all other interaction.

I only think the first and last are worth discussing. If the UK stopped buying their oil others would continue and the UK would continue to receive the same petrodollar investment into religious incitement to insurrection. However, the UK wouldn’t need to support the government and could cease to being hypocritical.

We could buy their oil without supporting them in other ways and we could do more to stop religious incitement of hate.

These are obviously very difficult political and ethical issues. What clearly we in the west should not do is what we are doing – openly supporting dictatorial and theocratic governments who suppress their own people and directly or indirectly invest in insurrectionist activity within our countries.

What are your suggestions?

My response:

Cripes – as Mayor BoJo would say – you are turning Anticant’s Arena into an Instant Oracle for solving the world’s problems…..

Well, here goes:

The ethical issues aren’t difficult at all. First and foremost we need to recalibrate our national moral compass, which has gone sadly wonky in recent years because of all the claptrap and bullshit which passes for public debate. Free speech must be restored to its time-honoured place in our affairs: that includes the freedom to offend, and the abolition of ‘hate speech’ crimes designed to stifle the expression of honest differences.

The political issues are more complex, but for a start:

1. Renounce humbugging diplomatic utterances such as the Queen’s having twaddle about “shared values” put into her mouth even on vapidly formal occasions such as State banquets. It is perfectly possible to be polite to visiting foreign guests without being hypocritical.

2. Admit that TES (aka Lawrence of Arabia) was a bit of a charlatan, and that his rosy visions of the House of Saud as lithe young warrior-chieftains roaming the desert in flowing robes on pedigree white stallions is not entirely borne out by the current effete crop of Saudi princes.

3. Limit, as you suggest, our relations with Saudi Arabia to strictly commercial transactions which do NOT include the sale of arms to them, or the corruption and bribery which goes along with that.

4. Persuade the US (a) to abandon the fatuous policy of ‘liberal interventionism’, because we cannot foist our Western version of democracy upon people who don’t want it, any more than we can allow them to subvert it in our own countries; and (b) to withdraw the automatic ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card which is currently in the pocket of the Israelis, as a prelude to working seriously to achieve an even-handed Middle Eastern settlement of the Palestinian problem and wider issues, including Iran.

5. Make it crystal-clear to the Saudis, and to Muslims living in Britain, that anti-Western propaganda, whether on religious grounds or not, and the financing of terrorist operations through bogus charities, will result in long prison terms for those found guilty, followed by deportation even if they are accredited diplomats.

6. Stop pandering to social and quasi-legal practices such as ‘Sharia law’ within our borders which run counter to our domestic traditions and values, and ensure that there is only one law – UK law - for everyone residing in or visiting these shores.

The Oracle has rather run out of steam, but perhaps that’s enough for the time being.

Racial pride is fine. Racial hatred is wicked

2009-10-26T08:57:00.003Z

Of all the manifold stupidities of current political debate, the mantra that ‘racism’ is a mortal sin of which any respectable person should be thoroughly ashamed is probably the most absurd.

Every human being belongs to one or more races. There is no such thing as a ‘raceless’ person. There is no such thing as a hundred per cent. racially pure person, whatever the ignorant claims of racial supremacists. We are all, to a greater or lesser degree, mongrels – many of us, including myself, proudly so. And we are all – or should be – proud of the races to which we belong and with which we identify. Sometimes this can be a mistaken pride, because every race has an associated cultural tradition which is far from perfect, and blots on its historical record of which it should not be proud. But the natural instinct of every human being and group is to stick up for its own, right or wrong.

There need be nothing bad about this. Where it becomes socially toxic is when people use race as a weapon against others. This is woefully common, and occurs not only as direct aggression but as manipulative social engineering. If the recent assertion by a former speechwriter for Tony Blair and other Labour ministers is true, the huge increases in the numbers of migrants coming into the United Kingdom over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and to "rub the Right's nose in diversity" – a euphemism for irrevocably changing the country’s population mix in ways which were bound to cause friction between the existing inhabitants and newcomers from different backgrounds, cultures and religions.

For such a drastic step to be taken by a government not only without previous public debate, but whilst deliberately avoiding one, is cynically arrogant in the extreme and, in the eyes of many, a piece of treachery unparalleled in our history. This alone, unless disproved, shows Labour to be unfit as a governing party.

The attempt to avoid serious debate of this issue, and to damp it down as much as possible, has been an ongoing ploy of the ‘Politically Correct’ multiculti brigade throughout the past decade. This has not been a one-party issue; all of the mainstream parties have been anxious not to listen to the concerns of those who dislike the speed and scale of immigration – or, if they have grudgingly listened, have smugly asserted that the critics are quite wrong and that immigration is wholly beneficial, so if you don’t like it you must lump it. And then they are stupid enough to be at first dismissive, then growingly surprised, and now alarmed, at the rise in support for the British National Party.

Whatever else one may think of the BNP – and I for one don’t think much of it – forcing this concern into the open is at least one service – possibly the only one – it has performed for our politics. Now it is up to the mainstream parties to get off their backsides and ensure that the BNP does not garner the fruits of the disgruntlement their own culpable neglect has spawned.

If they are to do this, there will be have to be a much tougher, more principled and realistic, approach to legitimate concerns felt by those whose historic home towns have been in some cases unrecognisably transformed during the past few years. There must be a firmer stance against those who, having been welcomed into our country, express open hatred of our traditions of free speech, fair play, tolerance of different lifestyles, and pluralistic social mix. There can be no room for British ghettoes, self-imposed or otherwise.

It is not wrong to require adherence to basic British values from all British citizens, including newly arrived and first-generation ones. People who choose to live here have to recognise that there are civilised standards they must adhere to. Religious and cultural diversity are to be welcomed; imported religious exclusiveness and cultural apartheid are not. No-one should be expected to abandon their own beliefs or cultural ways as long as these do not conflict with fairness, justice, and the rights of the individual which have been struggled for and painfully achieved here down the centuries.

But evil customs such as ‘honour killings’, female genital mutilation, and the social subordination of women must be tackled head on in Churchillian “up with this we will not put” mode and ruthlessly stamped out, whether they are adhered to as cultural or religious or both. People who believe they have a mandate from their god or their tribal customs to beat their wives and murder their daughters irrespective of the law of the land are not wanted here – let them go and do these vile things somewhere else. No British government, of whatever political complexion, is fit for purpose which fails to make this crystal clear not only by words but also through decisive action.

Those who preach that all traditions and cultures are equal but different and should he patronisingly tolerated in our midst, even though in some respects primitive by our standards, are wrong and deluded. They seek to atone for the alleged sins of past white colonialism by turning a blind eye to things which no decent modern society should tolerate. This is pseudo-liberalism gone mad and colonialism standing on its head. Some traditions do enshrine values which are superior to others; and where these values conflict there can be no compromise. To think otherwise is to collude with primitive bigotry and cruelty, sometimes amounting to barbarism, by speciously painting culprits as victims. Those who do so resemble W.S. Gilbert’s “idiot who, in enthusiastic tone, praises every century but this and every country but his own”. These featherbrained folk have ruled the roost (fast, thanks to them, becoming a dungheap) for too long. Surely it cannot be much longer before their time is up and their shallow ideas are thoroughly discredited and rejected by the electorate.

Irony rules, OK?

2009-10-25T10:09:00.003Z

One of the most egregiously silly posters on the Guardian’s comically named and rigorously censored 'Comment is Free' site solemnly informs us that Islam is an “overwhelmingly peaceful and gentle religion whose people have been abused by the West for hundreds of years”.

Here is the latest peaceful and gentle story from that land of milk and honey and haven of sweetness and light, Saudi Arabia, with whom, our revered Queen assured us not so long ago, we have "shared values".

As Private Eye would say, “Shome mishtake, shurely?”

The powerlessness of prayer

2009-10-23T20:43:00.001Z

A correspondent in a letter to the National Secular Society’s Newsline relates the following:

In a small Texas town, Mt. Vernon, Drummond’s Bar began construction on a new building to increase their business. The local Baptist church started a campaign of petitions and prayers to block the bar from opening.

Work progressed right up till the week before opening, when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground. The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that - until the bar owner sued the church on the grounds that the church was ultimately responsible for the demise of his building, either through direct or indirect actions or means. The church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection to the building's demise in its reply to the court.

As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork. At the hearing he commented, “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this, as it appears from the paperwork that we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not!”

Prostitution IS a moral issue

2009-10-22T19:32:00.005Z

The hoo-ha generated by Nick Davies’ Guardian article exposing the dodgy statistics deployed by the anti-prostitution feminists and their allies in the government which seems to have resulted in a huge waste of public money and police time spent scouring the country for ‘trafficked’ women, as detailed in my previous post, has at long last sparked off an overdue debate about the credibility of the government’s latest attempt to criminalise the clients of prostitutes who use the services of such women, even unknowingly.

Davies has another, even more powerful, Guardian piece demonstrating beyond a shadow of doubt that even if the government ministers, the Home Office, and the agencies involved touted these inflated figures around in good faith, they were irresponsible and reckless in the extreme in doing so. If, as seems increasingly likely, there has been a gross misuse of public funds prompted by a wild goose chase stoked up with phoney statistics plucked out of the air to fit an ideological agenda, it is a scandal which calls for an official enquiry and, if found proved, requires some resignations including ministerial ones.

Of course, where trafficking is concerned it is quite true that even one genuine case of a woman being forced into prostitution against her will is one case too many; and that the law and the police should do everything in their power to stamp out such abuse. But to use unsubstantiated allegations that there are many thousands of women working as ‘sex slaves’ in Britain as an excuse to toughen the laws against all prostitutes and their clients is an entirely different matter.

I appreciate the moral objections held by many people – not all of them religious – against prostitution, and also the sincere conviction of feminists that prostitution degrades women in a way which should not be permitted, even if the women themselves freely choose to be prostitutes. But I do not accept that in a democratic society anyone should be ‘forced to be free’ by doing something, or abstaining from doing something, which does not involve unwilling third parties.

That, to my mind, is the central moral issue over prostitution. It is about liberty; it is about choice; it is – however perverse this may seem to some – about human dignity.

To treat others with whose moral choices and personal behaviour you disagree as delinquents, unwilling clients, ‘victims’ requiring to be ‘rescued’, robs them of their dignity and is arrogantly presumptuous. In recent years there has been all too much of this condescending meddling in other peoples’ privacy, especially in matters of sexual behaviour. For a too short period in the 1960s and ‘70s it seemed as if over-rigid moralistic attitudes towards all sexual activity outside marriage, whether consenting or not, as sinful, disreputable, and sometimes illegal were becoming outmoded and that a new ethic of more tolerant understanding towards mutually desired relationships whether heterosexual or homosexual was evolving. Consenting sex, whether accompanied by love or not, was more frankly accepted as a fact of life. The author of the best-selling Joy of Sex, the respected biologist Dr Alex Comfort, viewed sex as one of the healthiest human sports, to be practised enthusiastically with a gourmet’s discrimination. The Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, Dr John Robinson, declared that the proper function of the law in society was not to prohibit but to protect, not to enforce morals but to safeguard persons, their privacies and freedoms.

While the aim of safeguarding the persons of prostitutes, and especially those who are unwillingly involved in the sex industry, is laudable, it should not be at the expense of their privacy and freedom. By all means let us put the maximum effort into tracing and rescuing women – and men – who have been compelled into sexual slavery; but it is not right to penalise those who have chosen to earn part or all of their living by providing sexual services, or those who avail themselves of those services on a mutually consenting basis.

Prostitution, like any other walk of life, covers a multitude of circumstances and personalities. The assumption that all prostitutes are sad, miserable, usually drug-ridden creatures is demonstrably false. Some are, no doubt. But there are also plenty of women – and men – who have freely chosen this life, and often not solely for its financial benefits. Some of them (horror of horrors!) actually enjoy sex, and are genuinely friendly with their clients. Not all prostitution even involves sexual activity: much of it is about alleviating loneliness. I have been told of one client who used to seek out the company of a sympathetic sex worker simply for an hour’s companionable chat and a cup of tea; no sex occurred, but when the client departed he left a £50 note on the mantelpiece and felt that he had received value for money. Admittedly this may not be typical or even frequent, but it does illustrate that the contention that all sex workers are being cruelly and cynically exploited doesn’t hold water. I agree with the Victorian bisexual literary critic John Addington Symonds who once wrote: “Good Lord! In what different orbits human souls can move. They talk of sex out of legal codes and blue books. I talk of it from human documents, myself, the people I have known, the adulterers and prostitutes of both sexes I have dealt with over bottles of wine and confidences.”

My approach to these issues is from the standpoint of humanity – of free choice, consent, privacy, and non-interference in personal lives by bossy social engineers. I suppose my philosophy would nowadays be labelled ‘Libertarian’, but that is a label which irks me because it marginalises what rightly used to be the mainstream attitude of a more tolerant, civilised society than today’s and relegates it to a fringe eccentricity. If that really is the 21^st century British ethos, so much the worse for our society and our country.

I do not know what Harriet Harman, Fiona McTaggart, Julie Bindel or Denis MacShane do in their boudoirs or other places of assignation, who they do it with, or how they do it. So long as it is mutually consenting, it is none of my business: they can do it solitarily, in duos, in threesomes or in larger groups, in the bath, or hanging from the ceiling by their toes for all I care - it is a private matter. And personal privacy is the chief casualty in this incessant prurient snooping into other peoples’ consenting sex lives. Pierre Trudeau, sometime prime minister of Canada, once said that the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. I agree with him. Mutually consenting sexual activity – whether for love or for payment, for both or for neither - is the individual citizen’s personal choice and private affair, and a basic human right.

A load of Poppy cock

2009-10-20T08:15:00.005Z

According to today’s Guardian, “the UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.”

This outcome, the paper unsurprisingly suggests, indicates that “the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media….Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.”

This huge and costly operation – known as ‘Pentameter Two – was hailed by former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as “a great success”, and its head claimed that 528 arrests had been made. But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found, despite six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking".

Although police described the operation as "the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved", the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged. Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter.

The head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Grahame Maxwell, who is chief constable of North Yorkshire, acknowledged the importance of the figures: "The facts speak for themselves. I'm not trying to argue with them in any shape or form," he said. He is commissioning fresh research to try to get a clearer picture of the scale of sex trafficking. "What we're trying to do is to get it gently back to some reality here," he said.

But a po-faced person from the Poppy Project – a Home Office funded agency set up in 2003 to combat the trafficking and abuse of women - sniffed defensively that “it is incredibly difficult to establish prevalence because of the undercover and potentially criminal nature of trafficking and also, we feel, because of the fear that many women have in coming forward."

‘Incredible’ is certainly the right word for the Home Office’s research estimate that there are 80,000 working prostitutes in the UK, and for Pentameter Two’s original claims that there are between 6,000 and 18,000 ‘sex slaves’ working in the UK – although their operation only led to 167 such persons being identified.

As a result of all the hullabaloo based upon these dodgy figures, Parliament is now in the final stages of passing the Policing and Crime Bill which contains a proposal penalise any man who has sex with a woman who is "controlled for gain", even if the man is genuinely ignorant of the control. Although the definition of "controlled" has been tightened, sex workers' groups complain that the clause will encourage women to prove that they are not being controlled by working alone on the streets or in a flat without a maid, thus making them more vulnerable to attack.

We have, of course, been here before. The Great Paedophile Panic originally stirred up by some hysterical paediatricians and a burgeoning ‘child protection industry’ which led to scandals such as the miscarriages of justice involved in some prosecutions of alleged offences – some dating back many years - at childrens’ homes, and the witch-hunts over what proved to be purely fantastic stories of ‘Satanic Child Abuse’, some of them resulting in years of agony and separation for blameless families, are still fresh in the memory.

One would think that the government would have learned some due caution from all of this, but there are evidently powerful elements who are still driven by a puritanical hatred of all sexual activity which doesn’t conform with their narrow notions of propriety, even if it is between consenting adults.

Of course no-one condones the sexual exploitation of unwilling women – or men, for that matter – by third parties for profit. But that is an entirely different matter from the persecution of prostitution willingly engaged in on a mutually consenting basis

Half a century ago, the Wolfenden Committee in its famous report on homosexual offences and prostitution declared that

Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.

Amen to that. It’s high time that a civilised society – if we still are one - adhered to that common sense principle.

"Curiouser and curiouser", said Alice.....

2009-10-17T20:47:00.003Z

A vintage week in Looking-Glass World:

* Trafigura solemnly assures us that their abortive super-injunction against the 'Guardian' newspaper "was never intended to gag parliament or attack free speech";

* The head of MI5 declares that "the Security Service does not torture people, nor do we collude in torture or solicit others to torture people on our behalf”;

* Foreign Secretary David Miliband earnestly intones that if the details of what was actually done to Binyan Mohamed are revealed, the United States will cease to share intelligence with us "as surely as night follows day";

* 'Daily Mail' "star" columnist Jan Moir whines (through a non-apology issued by the paper's PR agency) that "I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my [disgustingly vicious] article [about Boyzone singer Stephen Gately's death] has homophobic and bigoted undertones."

Back to reality next week? Some hopes!

The torture debate: don't ask, don't tell

2009-10-16T19:02:00.002Z

The Director General of the Security Service, Jonathan Evans, has jumped with both feet into the increasingly heated debate about British use of intelligence obtained through torture. In a centenary speech at Bristol University yesterday (15 October), he made a valiant effort at having it both ways.

“I can say quite clearly that the Security Service does not torture people, nor do we collude in torture or solicit others to torture people on our behalf”, Mr Evans said. BUT (there is always a but)…..

We live in a nasty world, and it is an unfortunate fact that other countries’ intelligence services – including America’s, Mr Evans tut-tuttingly admits - do use torture to extract information about terrorist threats. We share intelligence with those countries. If we did not, we might suffer atrocities on our streets which could otherwise have been prevented. Indeed, according to Mr Evans, “many attacks have been stopped as a result of effective international intelligence co-operation since 9/11” (presumably including intelligence obtained through torture). How many attacks, and how seriously threatening, Mr Evans does not say: we have to take his word for it.

After 9/11 the UK and other Western countries were faced with the “fact” (Mr Evans’ word) that the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaida was “indiscriminate, global and massive”. Again, he does not provide any evidence for this flesh-creeping assertion, and admits that “now, 8 years on, we have a better understanding of the nature and scope of Al Qaida’s capabilities but we did not have that understanding in the period immediately after 9/11”. Why not, if our intelligence services are so competent and on the ball as they like to claim? And Mr Evans gives no indication of what our current “better understanding” is; presumably the bin Laden bugaboo has shrunk to a punier size, but we are still not told how serious the threat from Al Qaeda is today, or even what that shadowy non-organisation amounts to.

What Mr Evans does tell us is that “we” (that is, the security services) were aware that 9/11 was not the summit of Al Qaeda’s ambitions. But what those ambitions were he doesn’t reveal. What he does reveal – and should be ashamed to have to do so – is that “our intelligence resources were not adequate to the situation we faced and the root of the terrorist problem was in parts of the world where the standards and practices of the local security apparatus were very far removed from our own” – a euphemism for “they torture people as matter of course”.

Nevertheless, “we would have been derelict in our duty” (says Mr Evans) “if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this county from attack”- ‘circumspectly’ presumably being another weasel-worded euphemism for “turning a blind eye to their barbarous methods”. The justification is that “Al Qaeda had indeed made plans for further attacks after 9/11” – when, where, on what scale? Again, Mr Evans doesn’t tell us.

Mr Evans assures us that “I do not defend the abuses that have recently come to light within the US system since 9/11”. Nor would he dispute the judgement of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee that MI5, among others, “was slow to detect the emerging pattern of US practice”. In other words, his office was asleep at the wheel. When the emerging pattern of US policy was tardily detected, Mr Evans assures us, “necessary improvements were made”. Again, no indication of what these were.

Pleading his agency’s tradition from its earliest days of “a culture of pragmatic decency that served it well in changing times”, Mr Evans concludes with the ringing pledge that “we have to work hard to ensure that we do not collude in torture or mistreatment”. “Enormous effort”, he says, goes into assessing the risks in each case but it is not possible to eradicate all risk. But the reality is that “we do not solicit or collude in torture. We do not practice torture.” So that’s alright, then: it’s all the fault of those degenerate Yanks (who will no doubt be highly gratified to hear it) and their Asian satellites. We’re in the clear.

This egregious performance reminds me of Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’ who regales his sadistic sovereign’s ear with graphic descriptions of torture and execution and then, when it transpires that the hapless alleged victim was the Mikado’s son, pleads that he in fact wasn’t there, and had merely sought to add “a touch of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” . It’s all ‘look, no hands’, and – in true American army fashion – ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.

And, quite incidentally, Evans’ lame apologia blows sky high the reiterated Jack Straw defence of plausible deniability that, when Foreign Secretary, like the three wise monkeys rolled into one he hadn’t the slightest inkling that we might be using intelligence obtained through torture, because nobody had told him.

It used to be said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. But as we no longer have any virtue to profess in our public life, why bother being hypocritical any more? If torture is OK, let’s say so forthrightly and use it ourselves unblushingly. If it’s not, let’s do everything we can to stop it, whoever is doing it. What we shouldn’t be doing is to make humbugging prevarications along the lines of “We only practice the highest standards of food hygiene, but if some of our foreign suppliers send us tainted meat we have no option but to feed it to our customers”.

Is believing in nonsense harmless?

2009-10-11T16:45:00.004Z

There is a cant phrase which is often tossed around in the increasingly heated debates between religious believers of various stripes and between believers and non-believers. It is that “everyone should be free to believe what they wish, providing they are not harming others”.

At first glance, this appears to be an admirable sentiment. But on closer scrutiny it doesn’t hold water for the simple reason that nonsensical beliefs are not harmless, and do not deserve respect.

While everyone should indeed be free to believe whatever they want in an open, tolerant society – and how can one stop them? – we should recognise that unreasonable beliefs which are groundless and positively false when they fly in the face of the evidence are indeed socially harmful.

If you think for a moment, you will see that they are bound to be. If more and more individuals and groups believe in things which are in fact not so, and which often conflict with each other, the more fractured and at odds society will become.

If someone sincerely believes that they are Napoleon, or a poached egg, should we respect their belief simply because it is sincere though mistaken, or should we place them under some sort of constraint if they proceed to behave as Napoleon did (attempting to make themselves dictatorial emperor) or as a poached egg does (sitting passively on a piece of buttered toast waiting for someone to eat them)? Should we respect the sincere belief of a mother who refuses life-saving medicine for her dying child because she puts her faith in prayer?

If someone sincerely believes that God, or Allah, or Jehovah, is telling them to reorder the world in his image, and that they are justified in using all necessary means, including force, to do so, are they harmless? Was Hitler harmless when he believed – or affected to believe – that he had a sacred mission to cleanse first Europe and then the world of Jews?

The answer to that last one may be obvious; but the important question is, where do you draw the line? Are Creationism or Intelligent Design merely harmless alternative theories to evolution, or would their wider adoption as orthodoxy by a majority of society lead to crippling and ultimately disastrous curbs on freedom of experimental thought and scientific progress?

Are the quaint dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church – many of which would have been summarily dismissed as superstitions in an earlier, less mealy-mouthed, age - harmless? When you glance at history and consider the many thousands, if not millions, who have been murdered for believing or not believing in the highly fanciful doctrine of transubstantiation, it is scarcely possible to think so.

On Stephen Law’s philosophy blog there is currently a lively discussion about a Catholic church in Oxford which is inviting its congregation to obtain Plenary Indulgences by venerating the relics of St Thérèse on display in the church. In order to do so you must
“1. Make a good sacramental Confession
2. Receive Holy Communion (within a few days)
3. Pray for the Holy Father's Intentions
4. Take part in a service or devotion in honour of St Thérèse, or spend some time in prayer, concluding with the Our Father, Creed and invocations to Our Lady and St Thérèse."

Is this all good harmless fun, or a pernicious type of brainwashing which, far from benefiting those who participate, will render them more credulous and obedient to “the Holy Father’s intentions” – which many non-Catholics consider to be in some respects (such as the Church’s prohibition of the use of condoms) extremely socially harmful?

Stephen Law comments: “It appears that, by following the above 4-part instruction, Heaven-bound Catholics can go directly to Heaven without having to spend any intervening time in Purgatory during which their sins would be fully cleansed prior to their encountering God. Almost every Heaven-bound soul ends up being punished - and purged of sin - in Purgatory for a period; how long depends on how big a sinner you were [See here and scroll down to Purgatory for more info].

The offer, if you like, is a get-out-of-Purgatory card. That partly explains the length of the queue outside the church, I suppose.”

Predictably, most of those posting additional comments regard the whole idea as ludicrous. But one poster, who is a member of a Catholic male confraternity called the Little Oratory, was highly indignant:

“I think this post, the content and the tone of it, is appalling. It is intolerant, rude and offensive. If you consider yourself "intelligent", why do you think this kind of writing does can do any good? Suffice to say that some people believe in God, in heaven, and in building a better world before they get there: if you don't believe in these things just get on and enjoy life while you can and leave others alone.”

But should we leave people who believe this sort of thing alone? Indeed, CAN we? Why should they be immune from logical criticism?

The historian A.L Rowse once wrote: “Those who will believe nonsense must expect awkward consequences.” What he didn’t point out is that the awkward consequences all too often spill over onto others who don’t believe the nonsense.

What it was like....

2009-10-10T12:38:00.003Z

In a comment on my previous post, Zhisou refers to the “astonishing illiberal attitudes” towards homosexuals in the pre-reform era.

To savour the full flavour of the 1950s and ‘60s atmosphere we battled against for homosexual law reform, you have to leaf through the parliamentary debates. Here are a few nuggets:

There is no more baneful or contagious an influence in the world than that which emanates from homosexual practice. It makes a life of leprosy….there are such things as sodomy clubs [which] are plague-spots wherever they exist. They draw in those who would otherwise be immune and turn them themselves into corrupters of their fellows…sucked in and held on to, as it were, by an octopus of corruption.

- Bishop of Rochester, 4 December 1957

Their actions are viewed with repugnance, amounting to condemnation, by their fellow-citizens, who wish them to strive their utmost against all that separates them from normal companionship and sympathy.

- Lord Mathers, 4 December 1957

I can well understand the pleas of those who say that those who practice this cult in private are inoffensive citizens. Perhaps they are, if it is meant that they do not break windows or behave riotously. Nevertheless, they are, in my opinion, a malignant canker in the community and if this were allowed to grow, it would eventually kill off what is known as normal life…I believe that humanity would eventually revert to an animal existence if this cult were so allowed to spread that, as in ancient Greece, it overwhelmed the community at large.

- F. J. Bellenger MP, 26 November 1958

These homosexual practices are not a potential danger but are a present danger to the youth of our country…There can be no question that this practice is a social evil and that it undermines the morals of the country.

- James Dance MP, 26 November 1958

Whether or not one calls it an unnatural act, most MPs and most members of the public abhor the practice [of homosexuality] in any shape or form whatsoever.

- Norman Cole MP, 26 November 1958

In my opinion, all right-thinking people would at best – and I put it at best – think of these homosexuals as people with warped minds who have little self-control….in the general run the homosexual is a dirty-minded danger to the virile manhood of this country.

- Godfrey Lagden MP, 29 June 1960

[I had the dubious privilege of appearing – in shadow, back to camera – with this gentleman on one of the earliest television programmes on the subject. At first he glared at me as if I was some dangerous wild animal. After the broadcast he became quite amicable, and during the return journey to London asked me in a genuinely puzzled way “is it really true that these homosexuals find the idea of going to bed with a woman distasteful?”]

To condone unnatural offences in male persons over 21, or, indeed, in male persons of any age seems to me utterly wrong. One may just as well condone the Devil and all his works….I have heard some say that such practices are allowed in France and in other NATO countries. We are not French, and we are not other nationals. We are British, thank God!

- Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, 24 May 1965

I am convinced that public opinion is completely against this proposal and that the vast majority of our people consider, rightly or wrongly, that sodomy is wrong, unnatural, degrading and disgusting; and I agree with them….this horrible revolting practice is a great security risk.

- Sir Cyril Osborne MP, 26 May 1965

On one thing I think that we can all agree. It is that these people are a great people for proselytising. Their passions seem to be much stronger than those of normal people, and they cast their net very wide for their satisfaction.

- Lord Saltoun, 16 July 1965

I cannot stand homosexuals. They are the most disgusting people in the world, and they are, unfortunately, on the increase. I loathe them. Prison is much too good a place for them; in fact, that is a place where many of them like to go – for obvious reasons.

- The Earl of Dudley, 16 June 1966

Progress - of sorts

2009-10-07T14:08:00.003Z

The current row at the Tory Party conference, where various gay worthies have been protesting about the Party's association in the European Parliament with homophobic East European politicians, prompts the reflection that we have indeed moved on somewhat since 1946, when Lord Denning in an appeal court judgement pronounced that homosexuality was "an abomination", and cited approvingly the words of another judge, Lord Sumner, who had declared in 1918 that "Persons who commit the offences now under consideration, seek the habitual gratification of a particular perverted lust, which not only takes them out of the class of ordinary men gone wrong but stamps them with the hallmark of a special and extraordinary class, as much as if they carried on their bodies some physical peculiarity."

This was the dire atmosphere in which young gay men such as myself grew up in pre-Wolfenden days.