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.