Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
Back from Moscow on Sunday night, I thought it was time to deal with some of the points made on this weblog while I've been away. I'll take them more or less in order. "John Demetriou" responded to the post on 'The Lion has wings' (9th May, 1.03 am) . He readily assented to the undoubted fact that "the BBC doesn't like right-wing Tories". I should think so. But he didn't grasp the huge significance of this, and therefore didn't understand why it is so disturbing, and why so many even more disturbing things follow from it.
The BBC is supposedly bound by its Royal Charter to be politically impartial. The point of this rule was not to make the BBC the arbiter of what is thinkable, but to ensure that it didn't use its immense power to influence politics. Yet it does, and on the side of a 'centre-left' view of right and wrong that is deeply partial. The phrase 'right-wing Tories' is itself a giveaway - the words 'right-wing' are employed to mean 'unacceptable'. They have no absolute meaning apart from that, since a Tory who might have been considered acceptable by the BBC in the 1960s or the 1970s would be dismissed (for his social, moral and cultural views) as a sort of Nazi by the BBC of today.
For the BBC's 'progressivism' ( I'll return to the word 'progressive' later) is a ratchet, just like the Left's position in general. The official Tory opposition is allowed to exist provides it accepts, in general, the changes made by the Left, and proposes only minor modifications in office. In this way it can function as a safety valve, allowing breathing spaces when state control and taxation do not increase at the previous rate, for a few years. Then we return to the proper, BBC-approved style of government in which the march towards the 'progressive' utopia proceeds again. Note that in an article for the 'Independent', which he no doubt hopes his loyalists won't see, David Cameron last Friday declared that the Unconservative Party are now the 'true progressives' of British politics.
It is outrageous that an organisation kept in being by a poll tax, enforced with the threat of imprisonment, is allowed to enforce its political prejudice in this way. But Mr "Demetriou" passes by this huge feature of our political landscape as if it were unimportant, or as if he approved of it.
With even more than his usual bumptiousness, he asks :"Why do you think the reforms of the 60s happened? A lot of people voted for Harold Wilson...knowing full well what that implied politically. So either the lion's share of the electorate were brain washed, or, the zeitgeist and political momentum and will of the people was a bit more lefty than we know it now or knew it before hand."
This is not actually the case. You do not need to have been there ( I was, though only 12) to know this. You can read the documents, and (for instance) Dominic Sandbrook's excellent book on the era, 'White Heat' . Political insiders, who had read Crosland's 'Future of Socialism' and "Roy Jenkins's 'The Labour Case', published some years before, knew that electing a Labour government would mean a vast social and educational revolution. But the voters didn't. The revolution wasn't in the 1964 Labour manifesto - which, for instance, claimed that comprehensive education would mean 'grammar schools for all', a claim that its author must have known was a lie. The Plowden Report, basis for the general sabotage of state primary schools, wasn't even published till 1967.
Many voted Labour because of revulsion over the moral decay of the dying establishment, exposed in the Profumo affair. It is hard to think that voters disgusted by ministerial adultery would have actively voted for no-fault divorce, which they then got. Nor would they have voted for the abolition of hanging, if they had been told that this is what they would get. Personally I doubt if they would have voted for abortion on demand either, but they got that too.
Many just thought it was 'time for a change' and were impressed by Harold Wilson's air of scientific knowledge, competence and modernity. The willingness of people to be taken in, in this way is limitless. The great raft of cultural and moral change, as described in my 'Abolition of Britain' (which I am glad to say is shortly to be re-published in Britain) were not in the 1964 or 1966 manifestos. They were largely brought about by so-called 'Private members' Bills' in all cases covertly supported by the government whips, and with the collusion of large numbers of left-wing Tory MPs. The Labour Right (then still in existence) often voted against them. Brian Lapping's 'The Labour Government, 1964-1970', Penguin Special, 1970, shows in detail just how radical the Wilson government was. I really don't think anyone in the 1964 and 1966 elections ( in the second of which I went out canvassing for Labour) had a clue what they would get.
The concept of an 'Establishment' is by its nature hard to define or pin down. Even so, such a thing clearly exists and clearly affects life in this country, at least as much as economics and foreign policy do. I am not an academic researcher, but I am sure that, were anyone to research this, the penetration of key positions in education, law and justice, the civil service, the church and the media by the radical left could easily be traced and established. Anyone who deals with any of these spheres could not fail to have noticed it. Anyone who can remember the state of these bodies and institutions 40 years ago would realise that they had undergone a major change. Those of us who watched and listened to the BBC during the early 60s, the years of Hugh Carleton Greene, realised that a deep change was under way. The protests and warnings of Mary Whitehouse, largely borne out by what has happened since, were at the very least an indication that this was important.
Anyone who doubts the potent role of the media in deciding what is 'news' , and how much importance is given to a subject, needs only to look at the concentrated fury visited on Gordon Brown in the last few months ( by the very media who gave the politically identical Anthony Blair a free pass for almost ten years) to realise that . I noticed the other day that the establishment bellwether, 'the Guardian' had begun publishing cartoons of Gordon Brown as a decomposing corpse, just as it did with John Major. Mr Cameron is portrayed as a perky maggot. What Mr 'Demetriou' declines to think about is the curious reasoning that leads a left-wing establishment to turn on the leader of the principal party of the left, and to begin to puff the leader of the supposed principal party of the right.
If such critics would start to think, rather than pretending that nothing interesting was going on, they might not necessarily reach the same conclusions that I have reached. But it would be a good deal more interesting to read what they have to say than it is at the moment.
I think the difficulty with columnists is that both their keen supporters and their bitter enemies often see what they want to see in their columns, rather than what is actually there. That is because, as I have said before, most political opinions are tribal chants, or fashion choices, which their owner has not thought about for years (if at all) and doesn't much want to.
"Herbert Asquith" complains that I attack the concept of 'addiction' without medical qualifications. The whole point about 'addiction', Mr 'Asquith', is that it has no objective medical definition and is often attributed to people by 'experts' who also lack medical qualifications. As for the word 'moron', I don't believe it has been used in a technical, medical sense for many decades. I'm pretty unenthusiastic about psychiatry, much of which seems to me to be speculative pseudo-science gussied-up with Greek expressions, but the use of terms such as 'paranoia' is really just a dressed-up way of saying 'this man is mad and we don't need to listen to him'.
The trouble is that, in the old USSR, such diagnoses were used against dissenters from the regime's view, and they were confined to asylums and 'treated' with powerful drugs and violent restraints, and I see a strong parallel between that and the way in which conventional political correctness tries to classify its opponents as suffering from phobias and pathologies - so it doesn't need to reason with them. I feel particularly strongly about this because I once met Anatoly Koryagin, a Soviet psychiatrist who courageously protested against this misuse of his profession, and was himself classified as insane as a punishment for his temerity. By the time they had finished with him, his own wife couldn't recognise him. Fortunately , thanks to protests from his western colleagues, he was eventually released and restored to health.
"Paul T" justly reminds me that I said that if Boris Johnson won the London mayoralty I might need to reconsider my position on the inevitability of a Tory defeat. If this had been the only result of the May elections, I might have devoted more attention to it, and to the reasons why in the end I decided that my basic position remains sound, though I am certainly troubled by the ability of a determined media establishment to boost David Cameron - if only by creating a force-field of negative charisma round Gordon Brown
I was so appalled by the way in which my media colleagues misrepresented (or failed to examine) the English and Welsh local elections that I felt I needed to concentrate mainly on that. As I've already pointed out, not one of my critics on this subject has challenged my factual point, that 44% of 35% is not a basis for a general election landslide. I assume that is because they know I'm right. In which case, why does conventional wisdom continue to insist that the political climate has changed utterly? I'll be analysing some recent opinion polls in the near future, but brief glances at the data show there is a still an incredibly high level of abstention.
This wasn't quite the case in the London mayoral election. In fact, it's interesting that Ken Livingstone won in 2004 with far fewer votes than he lost with in 2008 ( if you add 1st and 2nd preferences together, he got 828,380 in 2004 and 1,028,996 in 2008). The fact that London was a higher poll results from several things:
The amazing amount of coverage devoted to a purely local election in national media, much of it with an axe to grind; the fact that London is actually now an EU province, the only equivalent in England of the EU provinces in Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland.; the fact that this province has an elected head of state, the only one that does in what is still officially a monarchy. I'd add the fact that Ken Livingstone is a brand on his own, who exists independently from the Labour Party, has little connection with Gordon Brown. There's also the very significant fact that many media figures on the left, notably Andrew Gilligan, Nick Cohen and Martin Bright, joined the anti-Livingstone campaign, knowing perfectly well that this would help Boris Johnson. Would they have done this if David Cameron hadn't liberalised the Tories? You must be joking. But I think a lot of left-liberal voters saw this as permission to defect from Ken, either to abstention, to Brian Paddick (the Liberal) or even to Boris Johnson.
Then there's the 'Have I got news for You' factor. I once appeared on this ghastly programme (yes, they were desperate, desperate to get somebody 'right wing' on it so as to try to look balanced). Even that one appearance (they cut out one of my two perfectly decent unscripted jokes) gave me a taste of what real TV celebrity might be like. I was more or less used to a small number of politically interested people recognising me from programmes such as 'Question Time'. But after being on 'Have I..." just once, I found the number of complete strangers who recognised me shot up, and went well beyond the borders of the politically interested. This was showbusiness. And Boris Johnson has been on it not just once, but (I think) dozens of times. He is, as I pointed out, a major brand in British public life, and his humour, likeability and self-depreciation are hugely attractive to people who do not share his politics, and who suspect (in my view rightly) that Boris Johnson's personality is more important than his politics, which are rather vague.
So I don't think I'm persuaded that a Johnson victory in London (itself a completely untypical part of the country) is proof that the Tories will or can win the next election. It would be a loss of nerve, given the real results in the local elections and given these specific factors, to abandon a long-held judgement (this *judgement* is entirely separate from my *opinion* , that the Unconservatives *shouldn't* win. That opinion won't change even if I'm the last person alive that holds it). But I will admit that I had underestimated the concerted will of the left-liberal media elite to get David Cameron into Downing Street, and also underestimated the ability of Gordon Brown to dig himself deeper into the deep mineshaft he is in.
People who worry about the 'feasibility ' of my scheme still don't get the point that there is no other course if you want a pro-British government. A Tory party recovery now would mean the end, for years and perhaps for good, of any hopes of a morally, socially, culturally or fiscally conservative government in this country, not least because of the death-blow it would deal to the remaining conservatives in the Unconservative Party. By the way 'David' , who claims that the election of David Cameron was fair, has missed the entire point of my post. David Cameron's election as Tory leader was the result of a cleverly-orchestrated media-stampede, based on one vapid speech. Without the intervention of the liberal media, Mr Cameron would probably not even have come third, and David Davis would almost certainly have won.
I do not advocate this course, of trying to undermine the Tory Party, because it is certain to succeed (nothing worth having is ever that easy). I do so because there is no other way of achieving what needs to be achieved. What almost makes me weep is the way that the very people who could bring this aim about constantly seek petty, silly excuses for voting for their bitterest and most determined enemy. What possible advantage do they see for themselves in a Cameron government committed to the EU, a huge welfare state, a social-work approach to crime, comprehensive state education, the continued undermining of marriage, and all the rest of the rubbish we have already?.
I am so grateful for those contributors who do grasp these points and take the argument seriously. I am also grateful for those who say that they like Mr Cameron because he is left-wing. But those who claim to be conservative, and argue for voting for Mr Cameron, just reduce me to bafflement.As for those who say ' let's not do anything new unless we're certain it will succeed, even though doing nothing is pretty terrible', do they apply this feeble view to everything else in life? I do hope not.
On the subject of cannabis(and I return to this again later), let me first of all quote from a letter published in Monday's 'Times':
"I support the Government’s intention to raise cannabis to category B. As a hospital manager for over ten years and operating under the Mental Health Act (1983), I see almost weekly people sectioned because of mental illness and who either need their section renewed or are appealing against detention. Rarely do I see a teenager or young man who has not taken or who is not taking cannabis. Those rare occasions where cannabis is not used the committee remark upon it. For those vulnerable youngsters the results are tragic. Bright futures are destroyed and the prospects for them are a life of using the mental health services during recurring episodes of their illness. Employment at best is poor or often non-existent.
I agree with the advisory council that a full educational programme showing the possible effects of smoking cannabis should be undertaken. In my opinion heroin addiction is preferable to cannabis in that heroin treatment can be successful, but once cannabis has triggered a mental illness there is no cure on offer.
The Rev Dr Anthony J. Carr "
I would add that if there is as yet not much research linking cannabis with mental illness, it is because that research has yet to be commissioned, and should be commissioned. People seem to think that research mysteriously happens independently of fashion and funding. But until recently, the powerful international PR campaign for cannabis has pushed its critics into a corner. If the research is done, I am confident it will dispel all doubts on the matter.
"Rob" , in my view feebly, tries to suggest that my campaign for legal controls on a dangerous poison are in some way similar to political correctness's campaigns to suppress beliefs it does not like. I would like to think that this was such obvious twaddle that it wouldn't be necessary to say so, but "Rob" is obviously rather proud of this formula. So I will say "This is obvious twaddle".
In another non-parallel, "Will" urges me to substitute obesity fro drugs in my argument about cannabis. Why should I? What are you talking about? Nobody ever lost his mind through getting too fat. And if you get fat, you can get thin again - whereas if you lose your mind to dope, you never get it back. Nor is food, or fatness, illegal, by international treaty or national statute.
Patrick Elliott says that in my item about the police shooting of Mark Saunders, I seem to be suggesting that they were reasonably defending themselves. Actually I'm more cautious than that. Mr Elliott has read into my words something I was careful not to say. Not having been there myself, I am reluctant to be too specific about whether I think the police acted justifiably on this occasion. It is perfectly clear that Mr Saunders was behaving in a dangerous and criminal fashion, but nobody who wasn't there can have much of an opinion on how else it might have been handled.
I say I " have little doubt that the police shooting of Mark Saunders in London will be found to have been lawful by an independent inquiry. " I then add:"People who start gun battles with the police in Chelsea are asking for quite a lot of trouble. ". These are, once again, statements of fact, not of opinion.
I am against the arming of the police. I feel a sort of rage whenever I see an armed policeman in this country, because I know that we once managed without them and can remember when as a people we were proud of it, and feel a keen, almost painful sense of loss. But I think an armed police force was the inevitable result of getting rid of hanging, as I have often said. The real threat of the rope kept British criminals unarmed. The main point of my article was that hanging would be more civilised. The other point was that, if the police are to be given latitude when they shoot people who are acting in a frightening manner, and they obviously have to be or their job is impossible, then the law-abiding public should be given the same .
What I didn't know when I wrote the item (because I was in Moscow) was that Mr Saunders had been taking anti-depressants. The number of shooting incidents in which these drugs are involved, in the USA, in Finland and now in Britain, is disturbing and needs to be examined urgently. Research, please. It is in many ways the most interesting thing about the event.
I hope this answers one of the queries of Mike Williamson. But Mr Williamson also says "In a recent blog you said the only people who supported a ban on guns were the criminals and I would also say that is true of a ban on drugs. I think Prohibition in the US was the major cause of organised crime and the corruption of the police and judiciary. Like it or not, cannabis is now so widely used that it just won't be possible to get rid of it."
This is another wholly useless parallel. Guns are a wholly different thing from drugs. There are many good uses for guns in good hands, mainly as deterrents of evil actions. There is no good use for a stupefying, brain-destroying narcotic like cannabis (despite the medical marijuana propaganda which was long ago admitted to be a red herring by Keith Stroup, one of the leading figures in the pro-dope campaign NORML. And even if you are gullible enough to believe in medical cannabis, I think you'll accept that no truly medicinal drug could possibly be taken without measured doses, and could certainly not be smoked or baked in a cake. There is in fact a legal form of THC, in the form of Nabilone, a nausea-suppressant legally available on hospital prescription in Britain. But it is not very widely used, and the pro-dope campaigners don't like it because you can't get high on it, and so pretend it doesn't exist) .
Prohibition ( here we go again, does nobody listen?) was an attempt to ban something already deep in the culture of most Americans. In fact it was seen by beer-drinking Italian-Americans, whiskey drinking Irish -Americans and beer-drinking German-Americans as an attempt by Puritan WASPS to attack their pleasures, and by implication to attack them. That's one of the reasons Franklin Roosevelt abolished it, though it did a surprising amount of good in some ways. I might add that it did not make illegal the possession of alcohol ( and it is the legal attitude to possession that this classification row affects), but only the manufacture, sale and transport of it. I am , as I repeatedly say, uninterested in the sale of drugs, and the supposedly evil dealers. I don't think there would be any dealers to speak of if people were afraid of being caught in possession.
Anyway, the number of regular dope-users ( they all seem to think that everybody is as stupid as they are, and so exaggerate their numbers and support) is way below the number of habitual alcohol users in pre-prohibition America. It's also way below the number of people who, in my childhood, thought it safe and right to drink and drive - and who were persuaded otherwise by a mixture of stern prosecution, repeatedly applied (everyone knew someone who'd been caught when this began) and unremitting propaganda.
Why be so defeatist? Of course, Mr Williamson is not one of these. But defeatists usually desire the defeat of the thing they say will be beaten, and say 'it won't work' because they don't want it to work. It's the same, I think, with getting people to get rid of the Unconservative Party. They moan and grizzle about how hard it is, because they don't really want it to happen.
Adrian Ford says the legal status of cannabis has little effect on its use. That's because the legal status on its own is not the determining factor. What matters is if the police arrest and charge, the authorities prosecute and the judges send to jail. Cannabis users stupidly criminalise themselves when they knowingly break the law and buy this muck. They shouldn't blame others for criminalising them. Nobody made them buy it. A caution for a first offence, and then six months breaking rocks in the Hebrides for a second offence, with a full year for a third, should do the trick. You have to mean it, though. I do.
In contrast to those who claim that my article supported the police action against Mark Saunders, Dave Philpot appears to accuse me of being too hard on the police. Make your minds up, do. Once again, proof that people see what they wish to see, and often don't actually read what is said. I'm still waiting for my pro-Tory critics to come back to me on the facts of the local elections.
Now to the subject of Israel, where people fly off their handles almost the moment they start arguing about it. David Corbett writes:
"Much of what is now the United States was purchased fairly and legally by Puritans, Quakers , Baptists, et . al. during the colonial period. Some Eastern tribes were ordered to cede lands to the whites or suffer extermination from the Iroquois ( Delawares for example). Later when the United States was a nation. The Indian nations were not citizens of the republic ( hostile aliens ) , and were often allied against it with charming European British,French, and Spanish interests. When the United States emerged victorious against these threats, the Europeans and Indians were forced to cede lands as reparations. C'est la guerre. I am not excusing land grabs or illegal treaties but not all of the U.S. was "stolen ", and certainly not by Americans."
Ummm. Where to start? Israelis would point out that much of their land was purchased legally. I won't go into the ins and outs of that, as it's not my position that Israel is blameless (as some posters seem to think, or rather, to want to believe so as to make it easier for them). Israel has often behaved very badly indeed, and the Deir Yassin massacre, mentioned by some contributors, is a specially serious example of that. I've always condemned such behaviour outright, along with the actions of the Stern Gang, and think it shame on Israel for commemorating some of these terrorists, and elevating others to high office in politics.
But my point is that Israel shouldn't be judged any more harshly (or any less harshly) for its faults than other countries, and that every major colonial nation has seized land from others and forced people into exile. I am unclear why it matters that the Indian nations weren't citizens of the American republic (were they offered the choice?). Nor do I see how being 'forced to cede land as reparations' is not another self-justifying way of saying "we took it". The Israeli argument would also be 'C'est la guerre'. Just admit it, that's all. I love the USA, but it's futile to pretend that it treated the Indians (or, if you prefer, Native Americans) fairly, or that it didn't seize huge parts of its most valuable territory from Mexico.
I do not want to get into the general argument about two states, Camp David, etc etc etc. We would never have an end to it. Both sides have long, detailed and excellent cases, which is why a firm and final compromise is the only end that would work, but there'll be no compromise until the Arab side stop believing that West will always give in under pressure. And that will only happen when Arab propaganda against Israel, especially in Europe, is countered, and gullible people, especially in Europe, stop believing that there's only one good side, and only one bad side.
My only point here, the only one I've time and space to argue to any effect, because it has natural justice on its side, is that Israel should be judged no less, and no more harshly than other nations. At present, it isn't . And those who judge it specially harshly need to ask themselves why they do this.
Ulrich Martin Renner says the Germans expelled from Poland and the Czech lands were 'actually expelled from Germany. No, Herr Renner, they were expelled from territories lost to Germany as a result of its defeat in an aggressive war it had itself started, under a government with much popular support. To pretend that these territories are still Germany is as futile and dangerous as is the Palestinian demand for a 'right of return'. Herr Renner is however quite right that this was brutal ethnic cleansing, in defiance of promises given at Potsdam that it would be conducted in a humane fashion.
AS I wrote in the Mail on Sunday on 5th October 2003 "We said in Article 12 of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement that those Germans displaced would be moved in 'an orderly and humane manner'.
In truth, we did little or nothing to keep our word. The expulsion was chaotic, bloody and cruel. Many died, including innocent children whom nobody can accuse of anything.
And the expellee organisations of today are not crypto-Nazi oafs trying to rewrite the past. When I asked Walter Stratmann, their spokesman, about the controversy, his replies were measured and thoughtful.
Stratmann, 55, rejected any attempt to make out that the expulsion was equal to the Holocaust. He said: 'The Holocaust belongs in a historical constellation on its own. It was without comparison. It is a different theme, one that stands alone. I don't think President Rau drew this comparison between the expelled and the Jews, and neither do we.' He rejected Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's view that the events were part of a German self-destruction, saying: 'What Fischer said is not true. The expellees had no control over their fate. They were civilians, children, women, not soldiers. They were [his emphasis] victims.' And he was quite clear that this was not about a return to the lost lands.
'There can be no return. This is not what this is about. It is about perhaps going back to visit, but we are about remembering. It has nothing to do with compensation, that is not what we seek.' He rejected the idea that the episode should now be forgotten, as it largely has been in Britain, saying: 'One must always remember the past. It is important for the future that such things must never happen again and that can only come through remembering. To forget is totally the wrong way.' One other surprising voice urged Britain to acknowledge that a wrong was done. Alan Posner is a senior editor and columnist for the influential daily Die Welt newspaper. Posner told me: 'It's disgraceful that Germany should not be allowed to have its own centre to commemorate the victims of that huge expulsion. It is a blot on Britain's escutcheon and on the memory of Winston Churchill that can never be erased.' Before you jump to conclusions, you should know that Herr Posner was born in Britain in 1949, son of a British mother and a German Jewish refugee from Hitler who served in the British Army in the Second World War. He is one of the few Germans who has an absolute right to speak in this way. And his plea for a mature attitude to modern Germany is hard to resist. "
It's a fascinating and disturbing episode of modern history that very few British people even know about. If they did, they might be less self-righteous about Israel.
"Grant" accuses me of hypocrisy, and alleges that I say "The Jews should be applauded for taking back lands from which they were exiled over two thousand years ago!". I say nothing of the kind. The whole regrettable business is the regrettable consequence of European Judophobia, and is the least worst solution to a shameful problem. What's more I often criticise Israel, as any thinking person must and as many Israelis do. I have particularly attacked the use of indiscriminate bombing and shelling that inevitably leads to the deaths of children. 'Grant' presumably hasn't noticed this because it doesn't suit his argument, whatever that may be.
He also says " It's odd that Peter, a committed Christian - or so he says - always ignores the fact that in 1948 20% of the Palestinians were Christian. These Christians have been treated just as badly as the Muslims, but their existence is a very inconvenient truth." Inconvenient to whom? It's my strong belief , and I dealt with it to some extent in a recent review of Matt Rees's excellent thriller 'The Bethlehem Murders' (buy it!) that Arab Christians have suffered greatly since the Palestinian Authority took over Christian areas such as Bethlehem. Rees's book has some pretty harrowing descriptions of how things are now. Christian Arabs did a lot better under Israeli rule than they do under PA rule (let alone under the rule of Hamas) . In fact the rise of militant Islam throughout the Middle East has caused a great exodus of Arab Christians from Arab countries.
Nick Seward also ignores my actual point and relies on the belief, unfounded, that defenders of Israel believe it to be a perfect or faultless state that does no wrong. On the contrary, I regard Ariel Sharon as a war criminal. But I still defend Israel's right to exist within secure borders, and to be treated no worse, and no better, than any other country. Argue the actual point. Or perhaps he can't?
"Millicent Bystander" (good name, is she also a member of the Millicent Tendency?) seems not to have grasped the essential distinctions between monogamous Anglican Christianity and polygamous Islam, in which women have half the legal standing of men. May I suggest, just for a start, a thoughtful reading of the marriage service in the 1662 Prayer Book (1928 in the USA), as a guide to the English Church's views of the proper relations between man and wife? And then a comparison with Koranic rules?
Poor old Sherlock Holmes is dragged into this. Conan Doyle made it absolutely clear that Watson fiercely disapproved of Holmes's Cocaine habit. And the reason why there were no laws on the subject at the time was that these drugs were barely used at all, and there was no need. One thing I can guarantee, however. Had Holmes smoked dope instead of shag, none of those mysteries, from the Hound of the Baskervilles to the Final Problem, would ever have been solved. The great detective, a giggling nobody in a squalid set of rooms in Baker Street, would have ended up staring into space in a lunatic asylum. And Professor Moriarty would no doubt have been a leading light in the campaign to legalise Cannabis, grateful for its role in saving him from justice.
I am appalled by the pitiful lengths some people will go to, to avoid this simple fact. Dope can and does destroy lives, and the fear of legal punishment is the best ally the friends and families of its potential victims have in protecting the young from the irreversible tragedy of brain damage. Damn all the selfish people who stand by and help these tragedies happen. I have nothing but contempt for their evasion, their lack of seriousness and their dishonesty.
What a nasty, sly programme the BBC made about Mary Whitehouse. Bafflingly, the drama, starring Julie Walters as the TV campaigner, was billed and previewed as being ‘fair’ to her.
