Incised Deeply

If the Mail on Sunday were not part of the all-media operation to bounce us into a Starmer Government, then it would have 10 pages on The Labour Files, including a thundering editorial. Still, Peter Hitchens writes:

Sometimes light shines into a tiny corner of the world and you see something which wholly upsets the conventional view of things. I was approached by a Jeremy Corbyn supporter, Jenny Manson.

Jenny, a Jew, is a retired tax inspector in her 70s who lives in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Her mother narrowly escaped an antisemitic massacre in what is now Ukraine in 1917. I disagree with her about almost everything. For some years she has been facing accusations of antisemitism because of her defence of Mr Corbyn. She is slight, humorous, quiet and friendly.

In a new and extraordinary TV documentary on Al Jazeera (which has its own interest in the subject of Israel), she plays a telephone message left for her, as a result of political attacks on her. Part of it runs ‘You ****ing Nazi bitch, you should burn in the gas oven, you stinking Nazi swine’. The culprit has since apologised and accepted a police caution. But is this what politics has come to? 

He also writes:

How could I know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline between Russia and Germany? I wasn’t there. But the belief of many media that it must have been Russia seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. They could turn it on and off before it was blown up. Now they can’t. The USA, by contrast, hated the pipeline because it was a Russian foreign policy weapon, linking Germany more closely to Moscow. 

And the noisy but candid (and very anti-Russian) Polish politician Radek Sikorski may have given the game away. First, he tweeted ‘Thank you, USA’ with a picture of the gas bubbling up into the Baltic. Then, when lots of people noticed, he deleted it. That made me think he was on to something.

And:

The most moving thing I read last week was Cosmo Landesman’s terrible account of the death of his son Jack, a victim of cultural and moral revolution. This passage should be incised deeply on huge stone slabs in the centre of every city:

‘Before Jack’s death, I’d never questioned my liberal belief that recreational drugs were a valid and safe form of pleasure. People like me, who as teenagers grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, saw drug usage as a harmless rite of passage. Back then, any talk of the damage that drugs could do was dismissed by us as “tabloid hysteria”.

‘So when it was the turn of our children to experience drugs, there was no need to worry. They’d be fine. We thought we were so smart and cool about drugs, but we were just naive, arrogant and ignorant.’

And he calls on the Government to:

Renationalise the railways, the water and energy industries, and embark on a major infrastructure programme in which British contractors are favoured.