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.

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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.