Free TV

Dear Stan,

I have recently seen reports that most of the major US newspapers are in terminal crisis or near-terminal crisis. The "Rocky Mountain News" in Denver is closing, the venerable (1865) "San Francisco Chronicle" is slashing jobs in what looks like its death spasms, the "New York Times" is losing tens of millions a year, the corporation which runs the "LA Times" and the "Chicago Tribune" has filed for bankruptcy....and can these titles survive much longer in their own right?

Part of the problem has been falling circulation caused by, er, giving the stuff away for free on their Web sites. Why should anyone in their home cities pay for these papers when anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can read them for nothing?

Is the BBC committing similar slow motion suicide? Apart from enraging people like me, who ought to be its core supporters, with garbage programs, abortion propaganda and eyewatering salaries for people of questionable ability, it has been giving its material away for months on the iplayer service - check it out on www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. You can watch very recent BBC programs shortly after they are broadcast live to UK audiences, plus truckloads of other material such as David Attenborough's natural history documentaries.

I noted in earlier blogs that the BBC extorts $200 from every TV-watching household in the country, regardless of whether they watch BBC or not. I say "extort" because there is a consensus across all the political parties that the BBC licence fee should remain untouched, so there is no constitutional way of resisting it. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and politicians aren't going to offend a major media player.

But you need a TV licence only for "live broadcast" material. As the iplayer content is not transmitted in "real time", you don't need a TV licence to view it. Well, seeing that everyone on the planet with a broadband connection can view it for free anyway, it would be doubly iniquitous to force a fee on British iplayer viewers.

So far the only way you could avoid the TV licence was by being over 75 or by living on those dodgy housing estates in Northern Ireland where the local Catholic or Protestant ganglords would break the legs of any TV licence enforcer. The obvious downside was that they would also break your legs if you offended them. Now that you can use iplayer to watch BBC for nothing, how much longer can it survive?

Reading Catholic Segmentation

Dear Stan,

Many thanks for the blog update! Yes, the photo shows the sanctuary of St William of York - amazing. The composition does not extend to floor level, so you can't see the temporary wooden platform erected over the main sanctuary floor.

HERE'S A LINK to our two churches on which you'll find the latest bulletin with Mass schedules.

You will see that St William has a 3:00pm Hungarian Mass, on top of the 900am English, 1100am Latin and 600pm University. St James is hosting the Ukrainian Mass. For many years St James also hosted the regular Polish Masses, until 1981 when the Poles acquired their own church, few hundred yards to the south.

This "new" Sacred Heart was the former Anglican church of St John. It is a fine Victorian structure, sited in what is now designated as a historical conservation area. But the Anglican authorities were determined to demolish it and sell the site for development. The Poles and the Reading Victorian Society joined forces to fight this act of vandalism. The Anglican authorities actually obtained legal permission to demolish St John....until some wily legal eagle pointed out that they had only obtained permission to demolish the church, not the surrounding wall. And, until the wall was demolished, they could hardly get the heavy equipment in to demolish the church. At which point, rather than go through more legal exercises, the authorities surrendered and sold St John to the Poles at a very low price.

With the mass invasion of Poles in the last 5 years, Sacred Heart is packed to the doors for 4 Masses every weekend. But,even though it lies well within St James' parish boundary, it might hardly exist as far as the "English" parish is concerned. You can see that it is not mentioned on the website or newsletter. And, despite the usual bureaucratic obsession with Mass attendance statistics, which you can see in the Blackfen parish articles you sent me, the very healthy Mass attendance at Sacred Heart does not appear in the Portsmouth diocesan statistics.

Despite the never ending propaganda about Christian Unity we have had for the last 45 years, these examples from churches within a two mile radius of Reading town centre give you a taste of the practical fragmentation of Catholics into multiple sub-congregations divided by language and liturgical preference. As I said in an earlier post, the logical end result would be the Protestant situation of every person being his/her own Pope and congregation.

St. William of York Latin Mass

I sent Bill links to posts about the Latin Rite controversy at Our Lady of the Rosary in Blackfen, England, asking if he knew about it. The links were rebuttals by two priests, Fr. Tim at Blackfen... HERE... and Fr. Z in the US... HERE.

Below is Bill's response, and a picture of the first Latin Mass at his Church St. William of York. (The web's amazing that these pictures exist.)



Dear Stan,

Many thanks for the link to this story. I am not familiar with Blackfen being as it is on the far side of London. But Fr Tim is locally famous in England. The Latin Mass is exactly what we have at St William of York every Sunday.
The St William Sunday timetable goes:

900am Start of English Missa Normativa.
1000am: Mass finishes, coffee starts in annex.
1015am: We, the choir, finally get started on rehearsal for next week
1030am: Choir practice finishes as the Tridentine Rite congregation start to arrive, a wooden platform is laid over the Vatican 2 -style sanctuary and the huge folding partition to the right of the altar is rolled out to seal off the annex area, which is normally an extension of the main nave. Perhaps they feel that the annex area with its serving hatch from the kitchen is too secular....
1100am: Latin Mass starts.

Between the 900am English Mass with organ hymns, the 1100am Latin rite and the 600pm University Chaplaincy Mass with guitar/keyboard/etc, it is like 3 churches in one building; a new metaphor for the Holy Trinity?? And of course we have the occasional Hungarian and Sri Lankan Masses at St William for those minorities.

So far the Latin Mass Society have not caused any noticeable acrimony in our parish, because they are so largely separate from the most of the St William parishioners, though a few St William parishioners do go to the Latin Mass. The Latin Mass parishioners converge from miles around; as far as I know, it is the only regular Latin Mass venue between west London and Oxford, which is quite a gap. The Latin Mass priests are entirely separate from Fr Dominic, who serves St William and also St James in the town centre; this is obviously not the case at Fr Tim's parish. (St James parishioners have even less reason to notice the Latin Mass presence in the little church up in the University area). And the Latin Mass people do help considerably e.g. by taking turns to clean the church. But I can see the potential for friction elsewhere, especially among those people who will sing the praises of every kind of diversity - except that which they don't like.

Money To Burn

There is one part of the economy guaranteed bombproof against any financial catastrophe or recession. It is of course the public sector. We had yet another demonstration of this in Reading on 17th February.

More (Video) Here

Last May I described how St Mary's Butts in the town centre was closed by the police while they searched this historic thoroughfare for evidence after the murder of a 17 year old youth. Most people would accept the necessity for such measures, despite the chaos and inconvenience it caused. For one thing nearly all the bus routes in town go through the Butts at one point in their journey, so bus services were heavily disrupted.

But now on 17th February we had a repeat performance. The Butts was sealed off by the police. It was not just the traditional strips of blue and white tape; substantial wooden barriers appeared at both ends. Last May there were hardly any police vehicles present - just the forensic team in their white cover-all suits. Now there were police vehicles galore with blue lights flashing, even when parked. Apparently the jury in the murder trial were enjoying a field trip to familiarise themselves with the crime scene.

Er....couldn't they just walk to the scene with a couple of guides and inspect it while the rest of us went about our lawful business? It is barely ten minutes walk from the Crown Court where the trial is in progress. Welll, no. The problem is that the defendants are allegedly entitled to see what the jury sees, so they enjoyed a field trip to the Butts in their prison van. Hence the police presence suitable for a Presidential visit. And of course the TV crews and other media trooped along in force, so the event appeared on the evening BBC local news.

As one wag put it years ago, such exercises are all tied up with the Liberty of the Subject. While the police are occupied with such futile tasks the Subjects elsewhere can take Liberties. I can't imagine how much it cost, but I suspect the police will not be highlighting the bill in the PR puffs they issue to show how effective they are. The business of taking juries along to crime scenes is a recent innovation; the idea that you have to take the defendants as well can only be another monstrous imposition by the tribe of Human Rights lawyers. All people who are doing mighty well at the expense of the rest of us.

Death in Care

I visit an elderly parishioner who lives in a care home on the Oxford Road, three miles west of Reading town centre. Tony used to be a vicar at St Giles, about half a mile south of the town centre. St Giles is famous locally for its ultra-High Anglican style of worship. Arguably Holy Trinity on Oxford Road, Brian Brindley's old parish, was even higher in its heyday in the 1980s. Brian staged liturgies fit for a Papal coronation, with enough bells, smells and lavish vestments to give any Evangelical instant heart failure. But St Giles comes a very honourable second, with faithful celebrations of any number of Saints' feastdays.

After his retirement, Tony lost no time in converting to Rome. But in his bedroom there are still mementos of his Anglican glory days, notably a framed photograph of him with the Archbishop of Canterbury, circa 1962 I guess. Archbishop Michael Ramsey was world-famous as "leader" of the world-wide Anglican community of the time and there is Tony, prominent among his clerical entourage. It is a poignant reminder of the time when, as another convert ex-Anglican clergyman said to me, he had an "absolutely brilliant mind", before a series of large and small strokes and advanced age reduced him to a stage of child-like helplessness.

He was briefly in a much less attractive care home on the Bath Road before his move to Riverview. It is thus named because, when the trees have shed their leaves, you can just about see the River Thames on the far side of the Oxford Road and the London-South Wales main railway line. In some ways this is a plus point for a care home. Those residents with some remaining mental faculties have visual stimulation from the incessant traffic and the frequent trains linking London to Cornwall, South Wales and Birmingham. The interior is well furnished and maintained - not that you would expect anything less, with fees up to 800 pounds ($1,200) per week......

The staff are like the United Nations, with white Britons being a tiny minority - i.e. one care assistant and one receptionist, from my numerous visits to date. Not that it diminishes the care in most ways. The residents look clean and relatively well groomed and dressed and there is none of the pervasive urine odour that you find in other care homes. This is no small matter, given their extreme helplessness and considerable mental confusion. It is an inevitably depressing sight in the dayroom, with formerly active citizens sitting in an apathetic circle of silence or intermittent verbal outbursts.

The staff are always welcoming, with Krys, one of the numerous East Europeans, knowing how to serve my tea just as I like it (milk, no sugar). But you can't help suspecting the chance of communication problems, between the constant changes of 24 hour care staff on shifts and the numbers whose first language is not English.

I was thus greatly surprised to see reports in our local papers about the death of a 97 year old resident at Riverview. She had reportedly died from hypothermia after admission to the Royal Berkshire Hospital. I always found the home well heated - too much so on some days, when I felt compelled to open Tony's window for a breath of fresh air. But frail elderly people need that extra warmth. So how did this very vulnerable lady get hypothermia? We await the formal inquest and coroner's report. But the PR bullshitters, as ever, were very much on the ball. A few days after the news of her death broke, I visited Tony and the receptionist handed me a circular letter in an envelope as I signed in at her desk. It reassured visitors about the misleading media reports - though it did not say how or why they were misleading - explained that the home was working with Reading Social Services to bring the matter "to a close".


Ho hum....call me a rancid old cynic, but I shall be scrutinising media reports and any coroner's verdict very closely for the next few months........

Benefit of the Doubt

Having recently seen and appreciated "Doubt", I could not help reflecting on how suspect much of the pedophile witch hunt in Britain has proved. Years ago an old joke ran: "In England you are innocent until proven guilty. In France you are guilty until proven innocent. In America you are innocent until the papers come out the next morning. In Russia you are guilty until proven guilty and then you are guilty all over again."

Some recent British cases combine these American and Soviet styles of jurisprudence. The most monstrous single case concerned two children's nurses in Newcastle, in the far north-east of England, who had their lives utterly ruined by baseless accusations of child abuse. They were forced to flee their homes, because any suspected pedophile can expect a lynch mob on his/her doorstep. And "suspected" means "proven beyond all possible doubt" as far as our moronic mobs are concerned. A resulting expensive enquiry, manned by "experts" in social work and childcare, was commissioned by Newcastle City Council. It demonstrated conclusively that the spirit of Lewis Carroll is alive and well in the land.

Among numerous bizarre matters, it considered an accusation that one of the nurses had been taking pornographic pictures of the little children in her care and selling them on the pedophile websites which abound on the internet. Why on earth would a reputable nurse be tempted into such iniquity? The chairman of the enquiry ( a professor of social work at one of our joke universities) surmised that she was short of money. "But a police investigation found no evidence that she was short of money." Well, explained the chairman, that's because she was selling child pornography......Lady, face it, you're definitely in a lose-lose-lose situation here.

It was not just the unfortunate nurses who were losers. When the court case which demonstrated their innocence finally came to an end, there were legal and other bills of 8 million pounds ($12 million) to be picked up by the luckless local taxpayers of Newcastle. But of course some people will never be convinced of their innocence and the smell will follow them around forever.

Once our indescribably evil tabloids get on the case, any hope of mercy or balanced judgment flies out the window. In 2000, the worst of them "The News of the World" (better known as the "News of the Screws") ran a witch hunt against pedophiles in the wake of the murder of 7 year old Sarah Payne. "Name and Shame" was the title of their campaign to name every convicted pedophile in Britain. The whole insane business was abandoned after a couple of weeks when it was obvious that it was causing serious public disorder in the underclass areas, most notoriously on the Paulsgrove estate on the north side of Portsmouth, our major naval base city. The local mob terrorized twenty suspected pedophiles out of their homes and it was near-miraculous that no one was killed. Even worse, we have had a never-ending campaign, headed by the Screws, since then to introduce "Sarah's Law", a British version of Megan's Law. The fact that Sarah's bereaved mother has been the public face of the campaign makes it no less deluded and dangerous.

The ever excellent Theodore Dalrymple suggested forcefully that much of the anti-pedophile rage in such underclass areas could be convincingly explained by guilty consciences. The appalling neglect of children on such estates provides wonderful opportunities for sexual predators - especially among women who invite a paramour into a home with young children.

A recent case in Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands off the west coast of Normandy, was equally baseless. For months newspapers ran sensational stories about fragments of bones being discovered in an abandoned children's home on the island. The smell of implicit pedophilia was guaranteed to attract every journalist in a 500 mile radius. But sadly it turned out to be another case of a wonderful story killed by ugly facts. The evidence had as much substance as the ghosts in the Nicole Kidman film "The Others", also set in Jersey. When it turned out that the bone fragments were either hundreds of years old or, er, bits of wood, an awful lot of senior policemen and journalists found themselves with egg on their faces. See the excellent www.richardwebster.net site for an enthralling set of documents on this and numerous other witch hunts in Britain and other countries.

With this level of intelligence displayed by the great and the good, perhaps we should not blame the cretinous tabloid-reading mob too much. "Doubt" displayed such a contrasting intelligence and ambiguity in its approach. I think that Father Flynn was plainly guilty, but that is based partly based on the past 40 years of 20/20 hindsight and accumulated evidence as to the ways in which corrupt and depraved priests have behaved around children. For example, dosing the victims with alcohol and/or drugs is one well-practised technique of the predator. The fact that Father Flynn was such a good and popular communicator with the parish children immediately raised suspicions in my mind. In so many cases, after the police and media have descended on a parish, the stunned parishioners have protested "Father Smith was such a great priest, so good with the children....". Having a genuine wholesome interest in children's welfare and a more sinister intent may well overlap in complex ways and in far more cases than we like to admit.

From the perspective of 1964, where "Doubt" is set, the issues would have been far more confused than they seem to a 2009 audience. The film is one of the extreme rarities in mainstream cinema which is willing to entertain uncertainty from beginning to end and make everyone's motives mixed and suspect. How much easier it would be if the dodgy priests all looked like extra-Satanic versions of Jack Nicholson and the accusing nuns looked like Doris Day...........

No Special Relationship - US & UK

Dear Stan,

A fascinating piece on US-UK relations by Peter Hitchens. He knows his history - including the bits of history that politicians prefer to forget when they are inconvenient.

I was glad to see him supporting my blog piece about "punching above your weight" when he again describes the blindingly obvious - how the Irish influence outweighed the British in Northern Ireland matters. Part of the "Good Friday" so-called "peace settlement" (heavily sponsored by uber-liar Bill Clinton of course) in effect abandoned central British control over parts of the province to the various para-military thugs and drug dealers.

To take one telling example, on the housing estates controlled by the IRA, no one pays the BBC TV licence which everyone else under 75 in Britain is forced to pay. The license enforcers know they will be dealt with if they dare to enforce the law in these areas. I think it is outrageous that we are forced to pay $200 per year for the sort of garbage the BBC churns out. But it is hardly a fair exchange - free TV in return for having your life ruled by gangsters and drug dealers.

William Murphy, 18 Kingsway, Caversham Park Village, Reading, RG4 6RA, United Kingdom. Tel: 011 - 44 - 118 - 9543087 Mobile: 07899017301

10 February 2009 10:19 AM
Down with the Special Relationship
Peter Hitchens

When I lived in Washington DC I tried for many months to find the famous 'Special Relationship' which I had heard so much about back home. It was not there. I could find nobody, including our then Ambassador, who admitted its existence.

What was more, I noticed that my country was pretty unloved in the American capital, despite the increasingly shabby and embarrassing Winston Churchill and/or Margaret Thatcher cults common among a certain type of American.
In fact I was later able to witness, at very close quarters, the complete diplomatic defeat of Britain in Washington by the tiny Irish Embassy. Bear in mind here that the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue is a relic of Imperial grandeur, both magnificent and huge. The Ambassador's residence, a fine piece of Lutyens in a sort of semi-country-house style, is a rather melancholy reminder that we were once great. The nearby Embassy buildings, though architecturally frightful, are large and suggest (correctly) that Britain maintains a very large staff here, much of it devoted to military and intelligence cooperation, or attempts at cooperation.

Yet, during 1994 and 1995, this whole apparatus knew less about the White House and its intentions than the Irish, and was quite unable to win a diplomatic battle over what amounted to American recognition of the Provisional IRA as a negotiating partner.

I was once phoned up by a White House official who had become aware that I was writing uncomplimentary articles about this. She wanted to brief me into softening my views. But she wrecked the whole thing by comparing Bill Clinton's intervention on the side of Gerry Adams with his involvement in Yugoslavia.

'So', I said to her 'You regard Britain, your wartime ally, a sovereign democracy with a thousand years of history, the origin of your own constitution, as the equivalent of Serbia?' She went very quiet. Because in fact that is exactly how the White House then regarded Britain, and I should think is pretty much as the White House regards us now.

This was nothing new. There's a very good scene in Ian Curteis's excellent Falklands Play (still yet to be broadcast on BBC1 or BBC2) , during which Margaret Thatcher goes intercontinental when Al Haig suggests that the US ought to be even-handed between Britain and Argentina.
And it's been clear for ages that, in its desire to have a 'single phone number' when dealing with what some Americans refer to as 'Yerp', the US State Department has been anxious to cram Britain into a European Superstate. In fact it's often been suggested that the CIA has been involved in various backstairs pro-EU campaigns in the past. I've never been quite sure how the various neo-conservative admirers of the USA, Eurosceptics to a man, cope with Washington's strong pro-Brussels policies. I expect they just ignore them.

Now, I love the USA as much as many and more than most. I'm glad it's there. If we can't be top nation any more (and we can't), I'm glad it's the USA that has taken over the position. But I won't get sentimental about it. They don't. The American national anthem is an anti-British song about the Royal Navy's bombardment of Baltimore, in which the presence of British soldiers on American soil is referred to as 'their foul footsteps' pollution'. At the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia (to whose foyer I was once admitted) stands a statue of Nathan Hale, America's first spy, hanged by...us, the British. American schoolbook history is full of dubious stuff about British oppression of the Colonists, and many Americans believe the sort of tripe encapsulated in Mel Gibson's appalling film 'The Patriot", in which British officers are portrayed as being more or less like the Nazis. Meanwhile the cruel and intolerant treatment of the very large numbers of pro-British loyalists left in the USA after the revolutionary war is forgotten. Canada, where they mostly fled, is their memorial.

More recently, it was our ally the USA which ended British naval supremacy (and in effect put a stop to our Asian Empire) with the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. This was in truth the moment at which the British Empire was finished, though we had to go through several defeats before we believed it. And of course there was the desperate indebtedness of Britain to the USA after the Second World War, which enabled Washington to demand the dismantling of the Empire in return for aid.

Not to mention Suez, where the US Sixth Fleet actively harassed British warships on their way to Egypt, and President Eisenhower threatened us with bankruptcy if we didn't withdraw.
Well, that's all right. Why should it be otherwise? America's accession to the topmost rank could only have come at our expense. America's interests are different from ours. Nations don't have eternal friendships, as Palmerston long ago pointed out.

But in that case isn't it time we stopped the pretence, which survives only in London, that we are somehow specially close to the Americans? Mightn't we actually get more out of them, and have a more healthy relationship, if we rather more frequently told them we were not doing as they wished?
France, through stroppiness and refusal to cooperate with the USA, has probably received just as much military help and support from Washington as we have, if not more, and its nuclear forces are more independent than ours.

Now here's an opportunity to declare independence, as we might put it. The miserable behaviour of the British government, in ordering the suppression of a British court judgement on the allegations that Binyam Mohamed, is deeply embarrassing to anyone who believes either in truth or in national sovereignty. Our judges cannot say what they wish, apparently, because of a fear that we will then be denied US intelligence cooperation.
Then let it be so. I am sure that no American judge would be silenced by British government threats of this kind, even if they had any substance to them. The case of Mr Mohamed isn't even the point. The point is, do we run our affairs or not? And if the answer is that we cannot run them without annoying the Americans, then let us annoy the Americans. What good has our slavish following of US policy in Iraq or Afghanistan actually done us, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan? I am told that relations between the two militaries are now poorer than they were before, which isn't much of an achievement. If this is what being special involves, I would rather not be special any more.

Road Into Eden, Cornwall, & Lands End

Eden is one of those powerfully evocative words which people love to use in the most bizarre contexts. The professional atheist Richard Dawkins uses it in a book title - "River out of Eden". Now I have been through the Eden Project in Cornwall, 280 miles south-west of London. Go a bit further and you reach Land's End - the last bit of the British mainland.

The Eden Project is the biggest tourist attraction in the South-West of England. Basically, it is an enormous botanical showcase, centred on two vast hothouses. The larger of the two, the Tropical zone, is the largest hothouse in the world. I much preferred the environment in the smaller Mediterranean zone, far less hot and humid. Both are wonders of architecture and engineering. In the Tropical zone, a waterfall cascades over 100 feet vertically through the various levels of lush vegetation. Along with smaller buildings they are sited in a disused china clay pit, an abandoned relic of Cornwall's industrial past.

It is not just the thousands of plants in this artificial environment. You know you have arrived in Cornwall when you see palm trees fluttering in the brisk Atlantic winds. Actually palm trees can be found on the west coast of Scotland, hundreds of miles north, thanks to the Gulf Stream. But it is still a lovely reminder of the contrasts to be found in such a small island. On the north coast of Scotland you have a bleak treeless landscape populated with sub-artic flora. Here you can imagine yourself in the Mediterranean.

I was dimly aware that Truro had a cathedral. I was completely unprepared for its size and beauty. Like the cathedral in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, it is way out of proportion to its surrounding town. It is a reminder of the time when Cornwall was very rich as a result of the tin mining industry.

A truly bizarre relic of the Cornish past is the occasional use of the Cornish language on official signs. This is even more pointless than the bilingual signs in Wales and Ireland, where at least a small percentage of the population still speak their Celtic tongue. The last person to have Cornish as his language of choice died in 1770. It "survives", if you can call it survival, just as an academic revival by a handful of enthusiasts.

Land's End itself is a disappointment as much as its Scottish equivalent, John O'Groats, on the very north-east tip of the British mainland. John O'Groats had little more than a souvenir shop and a cafe, but at least the cafe was open when I visited last June. At Land's End there is a larger cluster of buildings that you might call a theme park, if you were feeling generous. But nearly everything was shut in January, apart from a souvenir shop. As I bought my postcards, the shop assistant regretfully told me that there was nothing open even for a cup of coffee.

But the Lizard Point made up for it all. The weather in January on the most southerly tip of mainland Britain was better than that in June on Dunmore Head, the most northerly part of the mainland. In January the Lizard was bathed in sunshine, the sea was blue and it was a fantastic day to be alive in such wonderful scenery, with subtropical plants tossing in the wind.

Don't Mention Abortion! - Revolutionary Road

Having just seen the widely praised "Revolutionary Road", I am still trying to work out all the reasons why I detest it so much. Some of them are the same reasons why I hated "American Beauty", by the same director, so much.

Does no fashionable Hollywood director or writer have a kind word to say about traditional marriage? But on top of this there is a deafening silence on the part of the critics. Only one reviewer, on the US Catholic Bishop's website, mentions the abortion which kills Kate Winslett's character. This is like writing a history of WW2 without mentioning Herr Hitler.

I am not sure if the film condones her choice - much of the script displays a preposterously trivial and adolescent attitude to serious moral questions, with the tiresome characters' yearnings for some undefined meaningful life being the most important factor in human existence. You might say that the young mother's demise is an implicit plea for safe abortion on demand, rather than a bodged Do-It-Yourself procedure at home. But I doubt that the author is even that consistent and serious.

On a more trivial note, it is plain that the producers were oblivious to the impact on audiences anywhere outside North America. The young couple's lovely house would be beyond the dreams of any young couple on Europe today - never mind in the 1950s. Was it really possible for a young single-wage family to live in such style in the New York commuter area in 1955? The house used in the film is like those on the upmarket Caversham Heights area of Reading - and in upmarket areas around other British and European towns and cities. The difference is that the British and mainland European houses would have less land than the "Revolutionary Road" home and could be afforded only by middle-aged professionals. I suspect that most audiences elsewhere on the planet will laugh at the attempt to evoke sympathy for two dumb Yanks who don't know how lucky they are......and evidently know even less about the cost of living in Paris.

Abortion Propaganda

How to get free propaganda for your cause? Get the ear of someone at the BBC. It has long been notorious that you can get a 30-minute free prime time commercial for your luxury holidays or expensive consumer toys by getting the BBC to produce a suitable programme. One of the few justifications for the iniquitous 139.50 TV license fee was the claim that we have no paid commercials on BBC - unlike those horrible American channels. As the old quip goes:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! The British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do unbribed
There is no reason to.

Now we have primetime abortion propaganda, as Peter Hitchens so well describes in this column on 25th Jan 2009.

========

This Isn’t the Truth, it’s Lying BBC Slurry

The BBC’s bias in favour of wild radical causes is not just to be found in its news and current affairs output. A number of people rang me to urge me to watch an astonishing programme on BBC1 last Monday.

This was a police thriller called Hunter, staring Hugh Bonneville and Janet McTeer. A lot of money had clearly been spent on sets, costumes, cars and actors. Almost everyone in it was young and attractive. It tore along at a compelling pace and was on at prime time.
And what was the plot? A group of abortion opponents had kidnapped two young boys, and were threatening to murder them unless BBC news showed a film of an abortion. The kidnappers were outwardly respectable people – a doctor, a nurse and a charity worker with an MBE. During the police hunt for the culprits, a righteous (and alluring) young woman detective aggressively interrogated an (entirely innocent) medic.

‘So,’ she hissed, ‘you’re an anti-abortionist?,’ using the words much as she might have said: ‘So, you’re a Nazi war criminal.’

Since the anti-abortion movement in this country is composed of kindly, non-violent people who seek to stop the slaughter of unborn babies, it is hard to see how they could resort to the murder of young children in pursuit of their cause.

Why is this lying slurry chosen for screening on our main channel? Well, perhaps it’s summed up in the line given to Janet McTeer at the end of the programme.

‘Thank God for abortion,’ she says.

Which I reckon is the BBC’s official view.

Behold the Loaf!

Dear Stan,

While listening to "Something Understood" on the BBC's Godslot on Radio 4 on 25th January, I heard this wickedly funny little rhyme. It is obviously not a recent composition, but still comes up smelling fresh as dawn in the face of all the various "scientific" maniacs claiming to have brilliant insights into the meaning of life.

Miniature, by Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)

The grey beards wag, the bald heads nod
And gather thick as bees,
To talk electrons, gases, God,
Old nebulae, new fleas.
Each specialist, each dry-as-dust
And professorial oaf,
Holds up his little crumb of crust
and cries, 'Behold, the loaf!'

British Education - Better Results PLEASE!

Our local superstar Kate Winslett has just scored a double whammy at the 2009 Golden Globes. Way to go, Kate... I hope this inspires our local council to come up with a better tribute than the "Winslett Place" they named in her honour a few years ago. This is a dreary development of apartments on the Oxford Road, two miles west of the town centre. I loved a recent interview which probably won't win her many local fans. She mentioned that she has no trace of a Reading accent, despite being born and brought up in the town. She attributed that to coming from a theatrical family, who tended to speak better.....ouch!

I recently saw her in one of the award-winning roles, "The Reader". So strange to see a superb, largely German, cast all speaking English. So rare to see a film with illiteracy as an important theme. That point seems to have been buried in most comments on the movie, who concentrate on 1) she plays a former concentration camp guard and 2) she takes her kit off (yet again) for some highly suspect sex scenes with an underage boy.

The Nazis have moved into the dustbin of history, but illiteracy lingers on, despite the truckloads of money poured into public education. It is a plague afflicting many people's lives, even if it doesn't push them into confessing to war crimes, as Kate's character does in one of the most baffling scenes in cinema history. The effect on most people is a life of blighted opportunity, restricted careers and, in a surprising number of cases, a descent into crime. It is so taken for granted by the prison authorities in Britain that one of the first things a prisoner undergoes on entering prison is a basic literacy test.

It is not just basic literacy where the British education system continues to fall down, although that is obviously the key to just about everything else in education. A 2008 story in our local "Evening Post" described how 10 and 11 year old pupils at a highly regarded primary (elementary) school had passed the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examination intended for 16 year old pupils throughout the country. No great surprise there. The sample questions printed were plainly of a mathematics standard which I was taught at 9 or 10 or even earlier. E.g. "Write the number two thousand and seven". Excuse me....after 11 years of compulsory education, this is the level expected at age 16???

To compound the confusion, this was the GCSE paper at "Foundation" level. There are three levels offered - Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced. On checking the specimen papers, it was obvious that "Advanced" is a completely different examination with questions more appropriate to a 16 year old. But "Foundation" sounds more credible than "Childish" or "Joke". But the grades offered for these wholly different examinations overlap. The highest you can get at "Foundation" is a Grade C (allegedly by answering 67% of the joke questions correctly), where the "Advanced" paper allows you to achieve up to A* level. The fact that there has to be an A* grade higher than the traditional A speaks volumes about grade dilution.

Friends who are involved in local education as voluntary school governors explained this joke examination away as the consequence of the schools' anxiety to keep pupils "engaged" with mathematics for as long as possible. They need to give even less able or motivated pupils something to aim for. This smells of utter desperation on the part of the teaching profession. The compulsory school leaving age goes up to 18 by the year 2016 - i.e. pupils starting high school in September 2009 will have to serve a seven year sentence, without hope of remission. So how are the luckless teachers going to keep the unmotivated motivated until 18?

Part of the problem is that teachers, pupils, parents, politicians, educational bureaucrats, the huge educational ancillary industry (such as textbook publishers and examination boards) and much of the commentariat have a strong interest in pretending that such worthless qualifications mean something. £75 billion pounds ($140 billion US dollars) is spent on public education in Britain each year. If money talks, £75 billion pounds gives an overpowering scream, drowning out most of the alternative voices. But they're not fooling anyone else, least of all the universities and employers who accept the products of 13 years of state education.

The "Evening Post" story had a wickedly funny twist. The local councilor who highlighted this educational fiasco was quoted as saying (in more than one place) that he did not think these 10 and 11 year old pupils were "proteges". I assume that he meant "prodigies", but no one noticed the obvious mistake - certainly not the journalist or editor who are supposed to be professional users of the English language. If the adults are semi-literate, what hope is there for the children? (Remember "Billy Bathgate", where Dustin Hoffman's dimwitted gangster made exactly the same mistake? But he was supposed to be an exemplar of pig ignorance.)

And we are talking about competence in English and Mathematics, the only subjects of practical relevance for the majority of the population. Only a small minority will find a practical application for their years of studying science and languages, much less history or geography. And even this more academic minority will be utterly dependent on the accurate use of English and Maths.

Some of the consequences can be seen at University level, with universities forced to provide remedial classes for new students to teach them what they should have learnt years earlier. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read the flyer for mathematics workshops at Reading University. It was displayed on a large notice board and invited students who were having problems with statistics, calculus, percentages and basic arithmetic. Admittedly Reading is not the top university in the land. But it is a serious institute of higher education and research. How on earth do you bluff your way in here if you can't do basic arithmetic or percentages?

Statistics might be a different matter. I can imagine someone applying for a Psychology degree course on the grounds that it looked like a soft option and then finding to his horror that it involved some statistical analysis. (Sociology was an even more mercilessly derided subject. In the bathrooms at the University, a graffito above the toilet roll holder explained: "Pull here for Sociology degree".)

In fact the situation is even more dire than the above "Evening Post" example might suggest. Only 58% of the high school population achieve a "C" pass in both GCSE English and Mathematics. And the "C" grade is probably of a standard which would constitute a bad failure in any other high school examination system in the world. So 42% of pupils cannot even achieve a bad failure in a joke examination in the two most basic subjects, including the only language they have ever spoken - or ever will speak.

One high school in Bristol found that 40% of its 13 and 14 year old pupils were functionally illiterate and drew the blindingly obvious conclusion: it was pointless teaching these pupils French or biology or any other highly desirable subjects. What limited resources the school had needed to be focused on getting the students fit to survive in the most menial work situations.

The failure of education is not just a disaster for the world of commerce and industry. Some years ago the driving test was changed so that it involved a substantial theory component tested by a simple written exam. This was plainly a catastrophe for the subliterate and illiterate. The driving test used to involve only enough literacy to read a number plate (as a crude eyesight test, not a literacy test) and answer a few questions about road signs. Now even a simple written test became a Mount Everest of impossibility for a substantial minority. The theory test can be taken in numerous languages, but there is no "illiterate" version. Not surprisingly, the number of people taking the driving test plummeted from 750,000 a year to 600,000 - a decline suspiciously close to the rate of illiteracy (20%). Are there fewer drivers on our roads than in 1998? The roads are more congested than ever and the number of cars continues to increase. Plainly more and more people are driving without licenses and getting away with it.

Yet the number of road deaths is at an all time low, which suggests that the "tougher" driving test with its written exam was just another bureaucratic waste of time and money. Basic human instincts such as self-preservation are probably a better safeguard of public safety. Also, the police are forced to admit that, with 20 million vehicles on the road and an overstretched police force, the chances of anyone being caught driving without a license are very small. The only way such miscreants are likely to be caught is if they are pulled over for speeding or are involved in an accident. So, perversely, having no license is arguably an extra incentive to drive safely and avoid drawing unwelcome attention to yourself.

The police were forced into this admission of impotence when a young man drove his decrepit car into a lake about 50 miles north of London. Three little children, all under 5, in the back seat drowned. But the driver and his girlfriend (the children's mother, who had produced the children with the help of two other guys) both survived. To a rancid old cynic like me, this looked like a very convenient way to get rid of three inconvenient children and I am sure that the same unworthy thought occurred to the police. But they couldn't pin anything worse than "causing death by dangerous driving" on him. Of course, he had no driving license, any more than than he had a marriage license. Similarly he had no insurance, no roadworthiness certificate for the car (bought cheaply as an insurance write-off after an accident) and no road tax certificate for the car. In response to the media hubbub over the fact that this driver had been on the public roads undetected for years, the police could only state truthfully that they had very little chance of catching such unlicensed drivers.

But illiteracy imposes yet another handicap on the poorly educated. Driving a van or a taxi was one way of earning a living if you had no educational qualifications. Nowadays, if your employer insists on seeing a valid license before he lets you drive one of his vehicles, you are immediately denied the job.

A dedicated teacher explained part of the problem: If children have a chaotic and unhappy home life, they will never learn anything at school, no matter how well the lessons are prepared and how enthusiastic and competent the teachers might be. As ever, there are some teachers who should plainly not be working in the profession and blight the learning of hundreds of pupils. But parents are the first educators of their children, as Catholic educators have always emphasized. This is not just a matter of dogma; it is plainest common sense. The fact that 40% of the pupils at that Bristol high school were illiterate comes uncomfortably close to the figure for marital breakdown and the number of children living in one-parent homes. Bristol has some of the best schools in the country and some of the most desirable living areas on the planet. But, as a port city, it also has its share of grim inner city neighbourhoods with high rates of family breakdown.

Obviously there is huge variation within such "average" figures. Some schools in Reading, as I pointed out in an earlier post, achieve a Stalinist 95 to 100% of passes at GCSE level. But then schools such as the Abbey School and St Joseph's Convent are fee paying. If you are a child of divorced parents, your mother and father have been financially badly damaged already and all the less likely to afford the fees. Also both these schools are religious foundations which at least pay lip service to the ideals of Christian marriage. If you are paying $21,000+ per year to educate your child, you are seriously motivated about education (or at least certification) and will take a serious interest in his/her progress. It is a case of multiple good influences all blowing the same way, unlike the underclass where all the multiple bad influences blow the same way.

I could not help feel both elated and depressed in 1996 when I saw my Canadian friend Helen reading a simple story book with her two year old daughter. The little girl was being raised in Athens, so she was going to be naturally bilingual in English and Greek, and her mother and grandmother were working to make her trilingual in English, French and Greek. Obviously any child of the English underclass (such as the drowned trio above) was already at a hopeless disadvantage compared to Helen's daughter. And that is long before they even started school. What hope have you when your parents have no interest in education and you have no stable family support, with your mother bedding a string of transient boyfriends (who might also take the opportunity to bed you)?

From time to time you find an asinine article in one publication or another arguing for the abolition of private schools in the UK, always in the interests of "equality" and "fairness". Apart from the fact that such a ban would be in direct contradiction to European human rights legislation, the articulate middle classes would always find one way or another around it, not least by redoubling their efforts at informal education.

The most powerful education is of course personal example. Some years ago a local Indian woman became Local Hero for the day when she fought off a robber at her convenience store, despite being five feet nothing tall. She was not going to work 16 hours a day to have her money taken by some moronic thug. In passing, the article mentioned her four children. One was going to be a lawyer, another an accountant, another a doctor..... You can hardly accuse the British of discrimination in favour of the Indian minority. Their very visible success, like that of Jewish and Chinese minorities in Britain and elsewhere, is down to familial attitudes to education and hard work. Years ago I spoke to a teacher who described a Chinese immigrant visiting the school to check on his child's progress. In his halting English, he asked anxiously about his child's behaviour and his respect for his teachers. The teachers were astonished at this line of questioning, as the lad's behaviour and politeness were always impeccable. When reassured on these points, the father said: "That is good. Now we will talk about his work...."

In comparison, there is no place in the future for a substantial part of the British population. The only place for the English underclass in the legal European economy of 2030 would be washing Helen's daughter's Mercedes (no sane person would let them service its brakes or engine) or hoovering her apartment. But the Albanian underclass in Greece would be doing those jobs anyway. And that is assuming that a more motivated class of menial workers had not invaded Europe from Asia or Africa. No wonder so many will be forced into drug dealing, prostitution, pornography, burglary or any other illegal way of survival.

Part of the solution is already blindingly obvious. So much money is poured into public education that it would make more sense to give every child a voucher, redeemable at any school of the parent's choice. One educational writer claimed that educational expenditure per child is already over £9,000 ($16,000) a year, EXCLUDING the monstrous bureaucratic overheads of local educational authorities and the Department of Education. Paradoxically, at such levels of public expenditure there is no longer any justification for public schools. Every school should be private, cutting multiple knots simultaneously. Parents would be free to apply to any school they deemed suitable for their child: large or small, single sex or coed, religious or non-religious, with particular emphasis on maths, sports, music, languages, etc ( I wonder how many would opt for an explicitly atheist school???). No need to go cap in hand to a local education authority and fill out an impertinent application form, hoping that your child does not get forced into one of the substandard schools.

Plainly, as I noted in an earlier post, most of the vested interests above would oppose such a reform. But experience elsewhere, in Sweden, Holland and parts of the US, show its practical superiority in terms of parental commitment and academic achievement.

Yet this could only be a first step in achieving "better results", the tiresome obsession of much of the British middle class and media professionals. What are "better results" worth if it is just a higher percentage of pupils achieving higher scores in exams of doubtful credibility? The only worthwhile results are the eternal ones.

Far more important than the obvious academic deficit in the British underclass is the moral difference of wholesome example in family living and moral development. Helen's children would be raised in a stable loving home with two parents plus a network of grandparents, uncles, aunts and family friends who were not into drug dealing or other criminality. Most importantly of all, they would be raised in the knowledge of God, go to a private Catholic school in Athens and be surrounded by an overwhelmingly Christian culture.

A voucher chance of a proliferation of Christian schools, including innovative and imaginative styles of teaching free from central restraint, might be one huge step in recreating a civilised culture in Britain. It would certainly not be a sufficient step by itself. The cultural influences outside school walls are just too powerful at present. But it would be a significant ray of hope for many children whose present chance of a good career in any field is as remote as their chance of winning two Golden Globes....

Punching Above Your Weight

Who influences whom? How big does a minority be to have a public voice? Plainly some groups acquire visibility and power out of all proportion to their numbers. Obvious examples include the Irish and Jewish communities. Who gives a fig about the huge German slice of the USA population - never mind the Serbs, Armenians, etc? Even the gruesome collection of Irish gangsters and terrorists who seem to have no problems accessing the White House for photocalls with the President have only a tiny organisation behind them - albeit they are backed by plenty of money derived from drug dealing and other racketeering.

I was fascinated to see the figures quoted for the main British atheist organisations - the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the National Secular Society have a few thousand members each out of a population of 60 million plus. Even the poor old Church of England, in its present diminished and fragmented state, boasts anywhere from 900,000 to 1,700,000 "regular" worshipers - depending on which figure you believe and how you define "regular". Catholic and Muslim communities similarly outnumber the atheists. Even the smaller Baptist, Methodist, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist communities dwarf the card-carrying atheists. Yet, the militant atheists are granted regular access to Parliamentary committees formulating public policy and future legislation.

From one viewpoint it is bizarre that such atheist organisations even exist. If you are a tennis player or a stamp collecting enthusiast you may join a club of like minded people. If you have no interest in such pursuits, you don't join a society of non-tennis players or one devoted to denouncing the evils of stamp collecting. As organisations inspired mainly by opposition to something else, atheist groups inevitably have problems attracting people for positive reasons.

Purely rationalist ethical and philosophical theories about how to lead a Good Life are utterly abstract and bloodless constructions with zero popular appeal. There is no such thing as a "non-practising" atheist. Admittedly in the late 19th century there were "Ethical Societies" which held quasi-religious meetings in London for non-believers in an age of widespread church attendance. These were forerunners of the present-day atheist movements. But most run of the mill modern British atheists seem content to wander through life in a state of non-belief without seeking formal attachment to any atheist club.

It is hardly surprising that the professional atheists end up adopting some ludicrous positions in opposition to Christian organisations, even those with the most marginal Christian influence. My favorite recent example was the campaign about the Scouts' oath mentioning God. The ever wickedly funny Bryan Appleyard (I recommend his demolition job on Princess Diana) had huge fun putting the boot in. See Oh Grow Up!

After all, if the atheists want a world wide atheist youth movement, there's nothing to stop them putting their money where their mouth is and doing just that, rather than bullying an organisation which had Christian foundations. Admittedly the history of non-Christian youth groups is not encouraging: the Hitler Youth, the Communist Pioneers, the Red Guards...all crumbled to dust like a vampire at dawn.

Politically Incorrect - Cuba Solidarity and Gay Liberation

2009 is a year of multiple anniversaries - 70th anniversary of the start of WW2, 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall....oh, and the 50th anniversary of Castro's seizing power in Cuba. One of the many enjoyable and heartwarming sights recently has been numerous writers pouring excrement over the great man and all his works - notably Theodore Dalrymple at his best:

Cuba a Cemetery of Hopes

It is a measure of how far French political writers have come since the enchanted summer of '68; who could have imagined that "Le Monde" would one day be so critical of left wing Paradises?

It also reminded me of one of the most hilarious events in my life - better than any movie or stage comedian I have paid to see. It was the 1993 conference of my union in Bournemouth, on the South Coast. A motion was proposed that our union affiliate to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. Normally, with all the gruesome old Stalinists on the Executive Committee, such a motion would have been instantly passed nem con (without dissent). Unfortunately, a Gay Liberation speaker jumped up to protest at Castro's treatment of his brethren in Havana. For a few terrible minutes two forms of Political Correctness faced a head-on crash. You could feel the Castro supporters tying themselves in knots trying not to offend the gays while upholding Fidel and all his marvelous works. Finally, the Cuba motion was passed, but it was a close-run thing......

Stranger Than Satire - Porn and Crucifixes

It's getting harder and harder distinguishing between spoof news reports and so-called "real life". I was browsing the ever-funny "Daily Mash" website and then switched over to the allegedly serious "Daily Telegraph" for the "real news". What do I see? An item explaining that US porn barons are applying to Congress for a $5 billion bailout for the adult entertainment industry. Seems reasonable - the porn merchants probably have more satisfied customers than the Big Three of Detroit who are getting so much taxpayers' money.

But in the "Holy Smoke" blog on the "Telegraph" website its Religious Affairs correspondent Damian Thompson describes an even more surreal story from the little town of Horsham in the beautiful county of Sussex, south of London. The vicar at the Church of England parish has taken down the crucifix outside the church as it is a too-graphic depiction of pain and suffering. As Damian explains patiently, the Crucifixion involved nailing a man to a piece of wood......


Crucifix depicts pain and suffering, says vicar. So he takes it down.

The vicar of St John's Church, Horsham, has taken down a crucifix from the front of his church because its depiction of pain and suffering was too vivid. The Rev Ewen Souter was worried that the sculpture (which had been on the building for 45 years) might detract from the parish's "welcoming"...

Click on link for blog post. Image on this blog is NOT the crucifix at St. John's.