"Once again the Useless Tories are thinking of bringing Ken Clarke back to their front bench, so as to look as if they have some, er, bottom.
"Mr Clarke is without doubt an asset, a quick-witted and human politician who has a life outside Westminster (his love of jazz is genuine, not a pose). He also has plenty of bottom." Peter Hitchens "Will Israel never learn? Each bomb is a gift to its enemies: Devaluing the £ in our pockets", Mail on Sunday, 3 January 2009
"So much for the Tories, then. Surely, this must be the end. Finding that nobody takes seriously their ‘Shadow Cabinet’ of unknowns and teenagers, and unknown teenagers, they have delved into the cupboard of the yesterdays.
"In there they have found Ken Clarke, an unreliable medium-range missile, decommissioned many years back because of its habit of landing on its own troops. Next it’ll be John Major, Lord Heseltine and Michael Howard. That should cure us all of nostalgia. ... No government containing Mr Clarke could offer anything better than a repeat of the Major years." Peter Hitchens "What use is Ken against Mandy? They agree on everything", Mail on Sunday, 24 January 2009
"But Mr Clarke doggedly keeps on in active politics, a rare grown-up in a government of inexperienced and callow young men. I actually rather like Mr Clarke, as do many people. (He is funny and convivial, his enthusiasm for jazz is genuine, and his knowledge of it real, and he tends to tell the truth in preference to spin. He took it in good part when I once tried to present him with a Labour Party membership card)." Peter Hitchens "What will real Conservatives do about this Torberal Government?" Mail Online weblog, 12 May 2010
"I agree completely with that awful old wet liberal Ken Clarke. Talking about politicians and crime, he says ‘the failure of the past has been to use tough rhetoric and to avoid taking tough decisions that might prove unpopular’.
"Quite. I would much rather have an honest, straightforward mugger-hugger like Ken in charge, weeping and snuffling about rehabilitation and similar rubbish, than a false friend of the people like that phoney hard man and closet liberal Michael Howard, all mouth and no truncheon.
"That way, we all know from the start that we can expect no help from the State against the misery of modern Britain... What unites Michael Howard and Ken Clarke (and the Labour Party, and the Liberals) is that they wilfully don’t have a clue about crime or disorder. They wilfully know nothing about policing. They wilfully don’t understand what happens in prisons. They know that the truth is very Right-wing indeed, so they hide from it." Peter Hitchens "This mugger-hugger knows the truth, just like the ‘all mouth and no truncheon’ phoney", Mail on Sunday, 4 July 2010
Showing posts with label Peter Hitchens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Hitchens. Show all posts
Sunday, 4 July 2010
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Peter Hitchens on the Tories
Peter Hitchens has been opining about Her Majesty's Official Opposition again:
Gove delivered a speech last Tuesday, the text is reproduced on the Conservative's website and Hitchen's quote was in response to a journalist's question. Gove commended New Labour for not being Old Labour, identifying the later in the main with fringe figures like Arthur Scargill, and positively viewing NLs acceptance of the Thatcher changes. Gove claims Labour is returning, under Gordon Brown, to the 1970s. His speech as a whole was pretty much a standard Conservative response to their opponents. Perhaps Hitchens was present when Gove delivered his speech, or perhaps not, or has read the cited text, or perhaps not.
I am always telling you that the Cameron Tories are Blairism reborn, but you don’t have to take my word for it.We know Hitchens claims the return of grammar schools would be socially just, but does he mean to suggest a government should pursue unfairness?
Take the words of Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove, spoken a few days ago:
‘At its best, New Labour was a recognition that the values of enterprise and aspiration could be fused with a commitment to social justice and fairness. And the party that best exemplifies that view now is David Cameron’s Conservative Party.’ He said it.
Gove delivered a speech last Tuesday, the text is reproduced on the Conservative's website and Hitchen's quote was in response to a journalist's question. Gove commended New Labour for not being Old Labour, identifying the later in the main with fringe figures like Arthur Scargill, and positively viewing NLs acceptance of the Thatcher changes. Gove claims Labour is returning, under Gordon Brown, to the 1970s. His speech as a whole was pretty much a standard Conservative response to their opponents. Perhaps Hitchens was present when Gove delivered his speech, or perhaps not, or has read the cited text, or perhaps not.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Peter Hitchens on World War II
This Daily Mail article has to be read to be believed. The counterfactual form takes a ridiculous turn; nowhere does Hitchens' accept that the Third Reich had to be destroyed. And he follows an argument Diana and Oswald Mosley made that leaving Hitler with a free hand in continental Europe would have saved the British Empire. As if it was worth saving.
Incredible.
Incredible.
Monday, 31 August 2009
Does the BBC have a liberal bias?
About time someone took apart the BBC has a 'liberal bias' argument, which Mehdi Hasan does in this week's New Statesman. Responding to a piece on Peter Hitchens' blog, Hasan issued a challenge to him, Hasan has now deconstructed Hitchens' posting.
By the way, Hitchens original article in the Statesman is here.
By the way, Hitchens original article in the Statesman is here.
Thursday, 27 August 2009
Just fancy that!
Peter Hitchens, referring to people who have used his unpleasant nickname, gave this response in a 2005 Guardian interview:
On Monday, Hitchens headed an entry on his blog: "The growing need for medical tests to determine which side politicians are on." Having spent years trying to label New Labour figures as marxist, it is not surprising he fails to recognise Michael Gove's reasons for admiring Tony Blair as consistent with a Conservative viewpoint, and to see it as being a disorder. Blair once had to deny being a neo-conservative himself, a label Gove happily accepts.
So what kind of regime would be likely to meet Peter Hitchens' "need?"
I don't like being called 'bonkers' and I think to some extent it demeans people who use phrases like that. But I take comfort from the fact that most totalitarian regimes tend to classify their opponents as mentally disordered.And lock them up too, but Hitchens, in at least the form he was quoted, failed to make the distinction.
On Monday, Hitchens headed an entry on his blog: "The growing need for medical tests to determine which side politicians are on." Having spent years trying to label New Labour figures as marxist, it is not surprising he fails to recognise Michael Gove's reasons for admiring Tony Blair as consistent with a Conservative viewpoint, and to see it as being a disorder. Blair once had to deny being a neo-conservative himself, a label Gove happily accepts.
So what kind of regime would be likely to meet Peter Hitchens' "need?"
Sunday, 16 August 2009
Peter Hitchens and death
Peter Hitchens, in his Mail on Sunday column, contrasts David Cameron's put downs of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan and MP Alan Duncan. In defending Hannan over Duncan, "a keen supporter of the sexual and cultural revolution" (he is in a civil partnership), Hitchens makes the following point:
I happen to think that we make too much of a fetish about health care, here and in America, because we’re all anxious to keep death at a distance and pretend it doesn’t exist.Well, we would! Understandably, most people want to live for as long as possible, and usually feel for those who do not enjoy a healthy life. I think Hitchens wants to leave it all to god.
The truth is that doctors can patch us up if we injure ourselves, cure a rather limited number of diseases with pills or surgery, and comfort us if we feel rotten – but most of our ills are caused by the way we live, and many are the inevitable results of age.Really? Medical science is fixed forever, and the allocation of resources across the country and throughout the population is not an issue? A fortnight ago, Hitchens objected to the Asquith government being "pioneers of the welfare state". So in fact politics has a solution Hitchens' dislikes, but he is trying to avoid admitting he thinks in this way. In fact, some of the Asquith government's policies on welfare were motivated by the shocking physical health of recruits during the Boer war, rather than from basic human decency or 'left-wing' politics.
Politics has no answer to this.
Monday, 20 July 2009
Peter Hitchens and Bob Ainsworth's Trotskyist past
Peter Hitchens was attacking the new Secretary of State for Defence in yesterday's Mail on Sunday for being a 'candidate member' (provisional so to speak) of the International Marxist Group in the early 1980s. Particularly making my Wikipedia acquaintance spit with fury was the IMG's support for the IRA. The IMG was a wholly legal organisation, even if the IRA was not, like the International Socialists (now SWP) of which Hitchens was a member between 1969 and 1975. But what I find in an official 1975 history of the group by Ian Birchall, under the heading "1969-1970: Towards a Workers’ Party", is the following: "IS’s position was always one of unconditional support for the IRA in the struggle against imperialism".
Oh dear!
Oh dear!
Monday, 22 June 2009
Cultural internationalism and the dilemmas of liberalism
I wonder if Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday considers it a liberal plot that the Polish film Katyn (2007) has not yet received the level of attention gained by Ashes and Diamonds (1958)? Hitchens tends to elide the whole liberal to left spectrum, the earlier film was made under Communism, so it is not complete facetiousness to put across this suggestion.
The two war films share a director in Andrzej Wajda, but the perpetrators and victims of military action are reversed. Katyn details the massacre of 22,000 Poles by Soviet troops in 1940, while Ashes and Diamonds concerns the assassination of a Communist in 1945. Hitchens came close to suggesting something sinister in the delayed UK release of Katyn when he first mentioned it last January, though Wajda’s eminence would make its eventual distribution in the UK very likely, and the general release of foreign language films often takes time. Anything to fill space in suggesting something dubious perhaps or maybe Hitchens was pulling a conscious fast one. Alas, a tabloid journalist like Hitchens can safely assume his readers will be unfamiliar with the name of Andrzej Wajda.
Hitchens two references to Katyn have been in passing, but it is remarkable the film is referred to at all in the Mail on Sunday; it is unlikely to appeal to “middle England.” When there is a need to maximise newspaper circulation or the number of viewers in order to maintain profits, the newspaper industry is in decline and satellite stations are ever increasing in number, pluralism in content is likely to be an exception, difference cannot be communicated or known about.
A comparison of the delay between the domestic premiere and its release outside Poland of Katyn with Ashes and Diamonds though, does not suggest the validity of a putative Hitchens’ conspiracy theory. More seriously, the attack by Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the two Mail titles, on the "metropolitan" values of the London media in his Cudlipp lecture in January 2007 was also an attack on the more internationalist culture Londoners enjoy, and Katyn is likely to be seen by a higher proportion of Londoners, still depressingly small, than the population of any other part of the UK. As Hitchens attacks any audio-visual technology later than the film projector, one wonders if he has realised the audience ("the liberal elite") who will see Katyn in his preferred context are the people he most detests?
For those unable to see Katyn in a cinema, the DVD player will be an enabler, but Hitchens has no time for information technology, except when he can promote his appearances on YouTube. As subtitled films, and he refers to them from time to time, are now virtually extinct on terrestrial television channels and scarce on satellite, as television has become a wasteland, the DVD is the main way for many to view something they hope will be of value to them. Years ago, foreign language films were not infrequently screened on BBC2 and Channel 4, and because those channels are "free at the point of use", Katyn would have received a much larger audience than it will today. Yet Hitchens regrets the introduction of television, and evidently thinks it should have been stopped (The Abolition of Britain, 2000 ed., p135-36). In fairness it is the habit of watching television which he finds objectionable, and the habit may legitimize programming of questionable value, but Hitchens sees the quality of programming as no defence. He wrote of Katyn on June 21,2009: “if it is showing near you, I recommend you make the effort to see it”, but Hitchens can suggest no solution if it is not.
Hitchens, the devout anglican, shares the prejudices of his other ultimate boss, and the references to 'Cultural Marxism' in Dacre’s Cudlipp lecture might seem familiar enough to Hitchens’ critical readers to ponder whether he had a hand in it. The provincial populism associated with such Conservative ‘anti-elitists‘ as Dacre and Hitchens does not exactly encourage cultural internationalism, modern “little Englanders” can scarcely be expected to consider it desirable, but the anglocentrism of the liberal Mark Lawson at The Guardian is no better.
The rise of Hollywood relative to the cinema of the rest of the world is much commented upon, and the economic liberalism which has allowed it to do so is in conflict with other liberal values. If 'liberal' can be defined as the limitation of restraint, economic liberalism can become positively illiberal because it restricts people’s openness to new experiences. Of cause, the inverse can also be true: following the liberation of France in 1944, the adolescents who later became the nouvelle vague film makers were inspired by the American movies they had been denied.
Blaming ‘the system’, or less crudely the ‘mainstream media’ for the lack of pluralism, a practice of the editors of the medialens website in their coverage of contemporary events, risks defending or advocating something much worse; they use the Manufacturing Consent model associated with Noam Chomsky which is notably singular, and medialens recent piece criticising the British media’s coverage of North Korea demonstrates its capacity for the perverse.
The objective observer might well conclude that what one defends might bear a remarkable similarity to the policies one would follow given the opportunity. For this reason, it is unsurprising the ‘socialism in one country’ form of economic autarky (leave the EU, antipathy to immigration) still advocated by Bob Crow of the RMT union, which turns into a particularly repugnant form of nationalism on the blog of Neil Clark, received such a derisive level of support in the European Parliamentary elections on June 4.
The two war films share a director in Andrzej Wajda, but the perpetrators and victims of military action are reversed. Katyn details the massacre of 22,000 Poles by Soviet troops in 1940, while Ashes and Diamonds concerns the assassination of a Communist in 1945. Hitchens came close to suggesting something sinister in the delayed UK release of Katyn when he first mentioned it last January, though Wajda’s eminence would make its eventual distribution in the UK very likely, and the general release of foreign language films often takes time. Anything to fill space in suggesting something dubious perhaps or maybe Hitchens was pulling a conscious fast one. Alas, a tabloid journalist like Hitchens can safely assume his readers will be unfamiliar with the name of Andrzej Wajda.
Hitchens two references to Katyn have been in passing, but it is remarkable the film is referred to at all in the Mail on Sunday; it is unlikely to appeal to “middle England.” When there is a need to maximise newspaper circulation or the number of viewers in order to maintain profits, the newspaper industry is in decline and satellite stations are ever increasing in number, pluralism in content is likely to be an exception, difference cannot be communicated or known about.
A comparison of the delay between the domestic premiere and its release outside Poland of Katyn with Ashes and Diamonds though, does not suggest the validity of a putative Hitchens’ conspiracy theory. More seriously, the attack by Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the two Mail titles, on the "metropolitan" values of the London media in his Cudlipp lecture in January 2007 was also an attack on the more internationalist culture Londoners enjoy, and Katyn is likely to be seen by a higher proportion of Londoners, still depressingly small, than the population of any other part of the UK. As Hitchens attacks any audio-visual technology later than the film projector, one wonders if he has realised the audience ("the liberal elite") who will see Katyn in his preferred context are the people he most detests?
For those unable to see Katyn in a cinema, the DVD player will be an enabler, but Hitchens has no time for information technology, except when he can promote his appearances on YouTube. As subtitled films, and he refers to them from time to time, are now virtually extinct on terrestrial television channels and scarce on satellite, as television has become a wasteland, the DVD is the main way for many to view something they hope will be of value to them. Years ago, foreign language films were not infrequently screened on BBC2 and Channel 4, and because those channels are "free at the point of use", Katyn would have received a much larger audience than it will today. Yet Hitchens regrets the introduction of television, and evidently thinks it should have been stopped (The Abolition of Britain, 2000 ed., p135-36). In fairness it is the habit of watching television which he finds objectionable, and the habit may legitimize programming of questionable value, but Hitchens sees the quality of programming as no defence. He wrote of Katyn on June 21,2009: “if it is showing near you, I recommend you make the effort to see it”, but Hitchens can suggest no solution if it is not.
Hitchens, the devout anglican, shares the prejudices of his other ultimate boss, and the references to 'Cultural Marxism' in Dacre’s Cudlipp lecture might seem familiar enough to Hitchens’ critical readers to ponder whether he had a hand in it. The provincial populism associated with such Conservative ‘anti-elitists‘ as Dacre and Hitchens does not exactly encourage cultural internationalism, modern “little Englanders” can scarcely be expected to consider it desirable, but the anglocentrism of the liberal Mark Lawson at The Guardian is no better.
The rise of Hollywood relative to the cinema of the rest of the world is much commented upon, and the economic liberalism which has allowed it to do so is in conflict with other liberal values. If 'liberal' can be defined as the limitation of restraint, economic liberalism can become positively illiberal because it restricts people’s openness to new experiences. Of cause, the inverse can also be true: following the liberation of France in 1944, the adolescents who later became the nouvelle vague film makers were inspired by the American movies they had been denied.
Blaming ‘the system’, or less crudely the ‘mainstream media’ for the lack of pluralism, a practice of the editors of the medialens website in their coverage of contemporary events, risks defending or advocating something much worse; they use the Manufacturing Consent model associated with Noam Chomsky which is notably singular, and medialens recent piece criticising the British media’s coverage of North Korea demonstrates its capacity for the perverse.
The objective observer might well conclude that what one defends might bear a remarkable similarity to the policies one would follow given the opportunity. For this reason, it is unsurprising the ‘socialism in one country’ form of economic autarky (leave the EU, antipathy to immigration) still advocated by Bob Crow of the RMT union, which turns into a particularly repugnant form of nationalism on the blog of Neil Clark, received such a derisive level of support in the European Parliamentary elections on June 4.
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