PETER HITCHENS: How long before common sense is actually illegal?
Common sense has now been defeated in this country. There is really nowhere to turn if you still believe in it.
For years, many have assumed that a reasonable, conservative, Christian view of life was still upheld in several important places. But they have been wrong.
The Long March of the Left through the institutions of Britain has included almost all such places. The buildings still stand, the lawns are still neatly mown, the windows sparkle and the people look the same.
But put them to the test and it is as if you have wandered on to the set of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Normal-seeming people mouth the mad slogans of the ultra-Left. And they are in charge.
Last Sunday, my colleague Ian Gallagher demonstrated this with his devastating report on the treatment of a school chaplain, Dr Bernard Randall, by an allegedly Christian independent school.
Dr Randall, a plainly reasonable, well-educated and tolerant person, did no more than deliver a sermon calling for more tolerance.
Dr Randall, a plainly reasonable, well-educated and tolerant person, did no more than deliver a sermon calling for more tolerance
The heart of it ran: 'Whichever side of this conflict of ideas you come down on, or even if you are unsure of some of it, the most important thing is to remember that loving your neighbour as yourself does not mean agreeing with everything he or she says; it means that when we have these discussions, there is no excuse for personal attacks or abusive language. We should all respect that people on each side of the debate have deep and strongly held convictions.'
Dr Randall says he was then reported to the counter-extremism body Prevent, and told that his future sermons would be censored in advance and monitored. He has since lost his position.
From time to time, I receive letters from parents of children in the state school sector, revealing just how relentlessly they are propagandised in favour of the modern Left-wing consensus.
Who is really surprised by that, or by the leaden dominance of such thought in our universities? The education industry was the first and easiest target of the cultural revolutionaries when they fanned out from the campuses in their thousands after 1968.
The same people are in the police, the legal profession, the HR departments of major employers, the NHS, and now the Armed Forces.
They took over the Labour Party years ago and are now busy doing the same thing to the Tories.
They are, of course, in the BBC and the publishing industry, and in the Church of England, whose current leader is caught up in a Maoist campaign to get rid of politically suspect monuments.
For the moment, you are reasonably safe from this if you keep quiet. But I am genuinely unsure how long that can last.
We are moving rapidly – as the past few months have shown – towards a society in which compliance with the official view is actually demanded.
I can only warn you, as I have done for years. But I don't suppose anyone will believe me, even when the evidence is so strong. It can't happen here, can it?
The BBC took a great book... and added lesbians, smoking and Nigel Farage!
I always got the impression that my mother had a pretty good time in the Women's Royal Naval Service – the Wrens – during the Second World War.
It was a great time for spirited and adventurous young women, and she was definitely one of those. And it was thanks to her that I read and loved Nancy Mitford's marvellous book The Pursuit Of Love, which I have reread many times in the past 50 years.
What a miserable job the BBC have just made out of dramatising it. As usual in re-creations of the past, several characters are ambassadors from 2021, sinless believers in equality and diversity, accompanied by modern music to let us know they are OK.
The rather complex eccentric Uncle Matthew is played by Dominic West as a crude Nigel Farage figure with a joke moustache the size of the Forth Railway Bridge
They tell us who and what we can approve of about the world of 80 years ago, and also make it clear who we should disapprove of – though the book has perfectly good heroes and villains of its own.
The rather complex eccentric Uncle Matthew is played by Dominic West as a crude Nigel Farage figure with a joke moustache the size of the Forth Railway Bridge. Do they really think that a man who hunts his own children with bloodhounds has no sense of humour?
There is a stupid feminist speech directed at the kindest single character in the book. There is a lot of camp cavorting, in which the rather plump Lord Merlin is portrayed as slender and desirable. There is the usual incessant smoking (I have checked the text and there is barely a mention of it). There is a repeated suggestion that the two main characters, Fanny and Linda, have lesbian yearnings for each other.
But above all it lacks the spirit of the book, the sheer toughness, independence and courage of that generation of women, which had absolutely nothing to do with 21st Century ideas of third-wave feminism, and was deeply entangled with patriotism. If such people existed before Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan came along to tell us what women should think, much of the myth of pre-1960s female enslavement comes apart.
In one very telling moment, clumsily bungled in the drama, Linda is appalled by her daughter Moira's desire to take refuge in America from the coming air raids. 'Children might or might not enjoy air raids actually in progress, but a child who was not thrilled by the idea of them was incomprehensible to her, and she could not have imagined having conceived such a being.'
Well, quite, I thought when I first read it half a century ago, and as I think now. Please read the book.
Seeking peace has caused so much misery
I've been glad over the past few years that antisemitism has become so unpopular.
Alas, there had already been many years of such antisemitism, especially in the BBC, whose crude and biased reporting continues to help millions misunderstand the situation in Israel. I'll make one point about this mess, confirmed by many visits.
If you really care about the conditions in which the Arabs of the region live, which you should, then the last thing you should support is any more conflict or any more attempts at a 'solution', which no Arab leader will ever actually agree to.
Fifty years of supposedly seeking a peace deal have made life for Arab men, women and children vastly worse.
As one Arab Israeli of my acquaintance likes to complain: 'Oh, for the good old days before we had peace.'
I have not voted for 30 years and now I am pretty certain I shall never do so again. The plan to demand 'proof of identity' at polling booths, put forward by a Prime Minister who once said he would rather eat an ID card than show it to an official, rules me out anyway. Actual polling fraud is concealed in the postal voting system. Why not fix that?
Well, I told you that the Blair creature was a menace, not the safe pseudo-Tory he claimed to be. I told you Theresa May was useless, and that Gordon Brown was a dogma-driven hardliner. And I also told you that David Cameron was slippery. Right every time. Now will you believe me about a few more things? It will save you a lot of trouble.
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