Why We Need To Go Back

Peter Hitchens writes:

Five people have been prosecuted for supplying drugs to Hollywood actor Matthew Perry. One of them, Jasveen Sangha, has just been locked up for 15 years. I begin to wish I had been tougher on the late Mr Perry the only time we met, in a debate on drugs in a BBC studio in 2013.

What if I had got through to him and he had broken away from all the flatterers and dealers who crowd around the rich and famous? He might be alive, and the futile, vengeful frenzy of the state against his suppliers might never have happened.

Is there anything more pointless than our obsession with ‘evil dealers’ – when those dealers would have no customers if we hadn’t given up prosecuting drug possession? Who finances the vast global drug disaster? Dealers?

No, their customers do it.

Mr Perry, who died of a drug overdose aged 54 in October 2023, was much loved by millions. They greatly enjoyed his portrayal of the character Chandler Bing in the TV series Friends.

I wasn’t one of them, when we met. I had not watched an episode of Friends in my life and I had never heard of him. I was astonished to find he had a presidential-size entourage so big it took up an entire green room at BBC HQ. I was much more worried about my other opponent, the formidable drug liberalisation campaigner Molly Meacher, who looks like a harmless nice old lady doing her knitting but who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

But here was this Chandler Perry, or Perry Bing, or whoever he was, and he wanted a fight. That suited me. I rather liked him and much regret his passing. He was obviously an intelligent, charming man. My genuine sympathies go to his family.

I’d often hoped someone might arrange a return match. But it never happened, and if it had, the great majority of any audience, in the studio or at home, would have backed him against me.

For there are multitudes who live their lives on the same basis, that they can’t stop themselves hurting themselves because they enjoy the things that hurt them.

And the reason a lot of people supported him is this: people really don’t want to be told that they have free will. Where they do bad things, or things they are a bit ashamed of, it is reassuring to believe that they have some sort of disease and can’t control their desires.

Someone had persuaded Mr Perry this was so and he believed it. In fact, he believed that it was medically and scientifically proven – which I don’t think it is.

Since our clash, which was a bit sarcastic but by no means savage, I have become even more of a hate figure than I was already. Large numbers take Matthew Perry’s view that they are forced by addictions into harming themselves. They are furious with me for telling them they are mistaken.

Many, many personal tragedies have already resulted from this view. It has dominated the drug policies of the Western nations since the 1960s, changing medical and legal attitudes to drug abuse.

So many more tragedies are yet to come. We will not prevent them by locking up the dealers who take advantage of them. There will always be other dealers, taking bigger risks and charging higher prices.

But we might avoid some of them by ceasing to accept the excuse that ‘I can’t stop myself’. Yes, they can.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools. He also writes:

Back in May 1991, I watched the then Soviet Union shoot Britain’s Helen Sharman into space from its remarkably crude and simple launchpad in Kazakhstan. The real name of this mysterious place was Leninsk, not Baikonur, a town many miles away.

It was surrounded by a 10ft-wall and had a pleasant park, complete with Ferris wheel, next to the Syr Daria river.

This was risky, devil-may-care Soviet technology and the small number of spectators were allowed far closer to the launchpad than we would have been in the US. Given that 120 people had been burned to death there in a missile accident in 1960, this wasn’t reassuring. I won’t forget it quickly. The growling thunder and the shaking of the earth as the ancient, crude, triple rocket lifted off was like the end of the world.

I recall thinking that the giant effort needed to lift the tiny capsule into orbit showed how extraordinarily tough the earth’s atmosphere is, and suggested that perhaps we were not really meant to try to break through it.

Not long before, I had been to the museum in northern Moscow where they still keep the charred, scarred, sphere in which Yuri Gagarin came safely back to our planet after his 1961 single orbit.

I gulped, never having grasped until then just what a primitive and perilous thing it was to plunge back through this amazingly thin but terrifyingly tough defensive barrier.

The distances are startlingly short. The beginning of outer space is the Karman Line, about 62 miles up. Meteorites frizzle and evaporate on their way in, just below that level. So would returning spacecraft, if they did not have superb heat shields. Gagarin flew only 200 miles above the earth, but if anything had gone wrong it might as well have been a million miles.

Is all this risk worth it? The first landing on the Moon was thrilling and haunts me still, but why do we need to go back?

Well, it beats going to war. Ours is an improbably dominant species. Far from having been seen off by something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction. Space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way.

That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

Due Process

The Assisted Suicide Bill lost, the Chagos Surrender Bill abandoned, the proscription of Palestine Action ruled unlawful, the Epstein Class defeated in an actual war by Iran, and now Anna Mikhailova writes:

Dozens of Labour MPs are preparing to “kill off” the government’s controversial cut to jury trials when parliament returns next week.

The MPs have tabled an amendment to the Courts and Tribunals Bill that they are prepared to push to a vote if the government refuses to accept it. It is expected to be published on Friday and MPs will be canvassed for support on Monday.

The rebel amendment, which has been drafted by Labour MPs and senior lawyers, puts forward plans to introduce specialist rape courts, which would have both a jury and a specialist judge. It explicitly removes government clauses that would “restrict jury trials”.

The rebels believe that as many as 90 Labour MPs could back the amendment if it comes to a vote.

The bill would create judge-only trials for about half of those heard by juries at present in an attempt to cut the backlog in the crown courts, which stands at a record 80,000-plus cases. The judge-only trials would be for a range of offences that attract prison sentences of up to three years.

The amendment has been put forward for consideration by a committee of MPs, but supporters have made clear that they will force a vote in the Commons if the government does not back down. It is seen as the main route to “kill off” and defeat the controversial jury trials reforms, a separate source told The Times.

It is in the name of Charlotte Nichols, the MP who has accused the government of “weaponising” rape victims to justify the changes. Charlotte Nichols MP.

Last month she waived her right to anonymity to reveal that she had been raped and criticised Lammy for using crime victims as a “cudgel” to push through his reforms.

She said: “My amendment seeks to get the government to make good on the promise in our manifesto of specialist rape courts. We know that it’s that which will help ensure timely justice and that complainants and witnesses have the support to give their best evidence — reducing victim attrition in the process and retraumatisation as far as possible.”

Stella Creasy, another Labour MP who has campaigned on the issue, said: “It’s a false choice between supporting victims and supporting due process — there is a way forward to ensure both can be done as we seek to tackle the backlog in the courts, and amendments like this show that we are serious about doing so. I hope the government listens and recognises this is a constructive way forward.”

Kirsty Brimelow KC, the chair of the Bar Council, which represents barristers, said: “The government should do what it pledged in its 2024 manifesto and prioritise those cases of vulnerable people through a specialist court that would retain a jury and focus on sexual offences and domestic abuse cases.

“We all want to see an end to delays for victims, complainants and defendants so we should focus on what we know will work rather than hacking away at a constitutional cornerstone which reflects community participation in justice.”

While Peter Walker writes:

Labour MPs are hoping to hijack plans to cut back on jury trials in England and Wales by proposing specialist courts for sexual offences with fixed dates for trial.

Those behind the amendment want to block the wider plan to stop thousands of cases being potentially eligible for jury trials – a measure ministers say is needed to cut court backlogs – and they say the specialist courts alone could still solve much of the problem.

The government is braced for possible rebellions when the courts and tribunals bill returns to the Commons after Easter for its committee and report stages, when amendments are considered and, in some cases, voted on.

Backers of the new amendments said they believed 90 or more Labour MPs could either vote against the government or abstain if their demands were not met.

In a campaign coordinated between different factions of backbenchers, the first amendment would strike down the bill’s central aim: to remove the right of defendants in “either way” cases, where they can opt for a magistrate or jury trial, to pick the latter.

Even though judges can impose heavier sentences than magistrates, ministers say more people are opting for jury trials in the hope that the prolonged wait for the case to be heard could lead to the charges being dropped as victims and witnesses give up.

The second amendment, tabled by Charlotte Nichols and Stella Creasy, would create specialist courts for cases involving sexual offending or domestic abuse, which would have time limits for cases to be prepared and a fixed trial date.

While sexual offences such as rape will still be tried by juries even if the bill is passed, ministers have consistently argued that one of the main reasons for the proposed changes is to speed up the progress of sexual cases through crown courts.

However, Nichols has argued that sexual offences are being “weaponised” by the government to force through the bill. Last month, the Warrington North MP told the Commons how she opposed the bill despite waiting more than 1,000 days for a trial in which the man accused of raping her was acquitted.

Nichols argues that given Labour promised in its manifesto to “fast-track rape cases” with specialist courts at every crown court in England and Wales, the amendment in her name would be the correct way to deal with the backlog.

“For me, the specialist rape courts would get rid of the need for the changes to jury trials,” Nichols said. “But it would be a significant enough win for victims that if the wider bill did still pass, we would have done enough that I could sleep at night.”

Some rebels behind the amendments have held talks with David Lammy, the justice secretary, and Sarah Sackman, the courts minister, who are understood to have not entirely ruled out some movement from the government.

Nichols said that if there was no movement, she and a large number of Labour MPs could defeat the government, given there were 10 Labour votes against and 90 abstentions at the second reading of the bill in March. “If ministers show no willingness to address people’s concerns, then you could end up with a lot of people who abstained at second reading as a show of good faith, now voting it down, and some who voted in favour deciding to abstain. The ball is very much in the government’s court now.”

A government official said ministers would continue to stay in touch with MPs, but added: “It remains the case that we need to make these necessary changes to jury trial thresholds so as to bring down the backlog of cases.”

So they have changed the reason again. Having been a matter of principle, it is now back to the backlog.

The Prayer Vigil For Peace

In union with the Holy Father today, at 6pm in Rome, so at 5pm here.

Do Not Be Distracted

They had always wanted to do it, but the Epstein Class launched the Iran War to distract from the Epstein Files, and then, via the sacred medium of Melania Trump, they tried to use Jeffrey Epstein to distract from their loss of the Iran War in which Britain was a full participant. America gets Melania, but we get Yvette Cooper. In these dying moments of Lear Starmer, Cooper is positioning herself as the fiftysomething, middle-class woman who must be "the adult in the room". 10 years ago, Theresa May did the same. How did that turn out?

Cooper versus Kemi Badenoch? Can you imagine? Badenoch is trying to take the credit for the abandonment of the Chagos Surrender Bill. Until January, Donald Trump was a supporter of that sellout, which had been negotiated by James Cleverly and which would have gone ahead if the Conservatives had won the last General Election, when Labour would have voted against it. At Third Reading in the House of Lords, the Conservatives failed to table the fatal amendment that would have succeeded in killing off this Bill that had not been in the Labour manifesto, and which indeed directly broke a commitment that was. The responsible Shadow Minister was Andrew Rosindell.

Ah, yes, Reform UK. No one relocates from Hong Kong to London just to donate to a political party. Already pardoned by Trump for violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, Ben Delo is now up against the Chinese approach to such matters, and that does not end in 30 months' probation. Its cryptocurrency links make Reform rich beyond the wildest dreams of any other party, with that income exceedingly difficult to trace. It is therefore in a position to, for example, simply pay a year's energy bills on behalf of two of Nigel Farage's long-serving activists, Ray and June Dibble of Wigan, who have local elections next month, but whose position within the party may or may not protect it from what would otherwise be an open-and-shut case of treating.

That's showbusiness. Time was when this sort of "surprise" doorstep presentation would have been made by Cilla Black or by a member of Coronation Street royalty. Like everything else to do with Reform, the whole event was gloriously in the tradition of Old ITV and of its roots in things like variety, musical hall, and holidays camps. Camp is the word, all right: the razzmatazz, the end-of-the-pier blazers, the celebrity guest appearances, it is no wonder that the Boomers love it. And the money men behind the scenes of all of that were always better left there.

The same was true of football. Does Rupert Lowe even cheer for England? His target electorate could not possibly do so anymore. Restore Britain cannot find any council candidates outside the Great Yarmouth that Lowe was turning into the Brighton of the Indisputably Far Right, but its YouGov debut at four per cent makes it a serious threat to Reform, which holds seats by tiny minorities while being handfuls of votes away from capturing hundreds more.

Still, Restore has a clear brand identity. The Greens, on the other hand, are now trying to position themselves as, of all things, the party of housebuilding. I was very glad that they opposed the two-child benefit cap, but I could not see how that opposition was compatible with anything else for which they had ever stood. And now, this. Although someone might consider telling their existing councillors. And just as Peter Thiel could vote for Reform or Restore, so Noam Chomsky could vote Green, or for Your Party as envisaged by Zarah Sultana, whom Parliament lists as its only MP. Every party in the present House of Commons is an Epstein Class party. Do not be distracted from that.

Not On This Rock

As the Church of the Holy Sepulchre reopens in time for Orthodox Easter, humiliating the Epstein Class that had already lost the Iran War, those of you who have been in touch with suggestions for Donald Trump's Antipope are all very naughty, and one of the three most popular names, remarkably two of them English, is in any case perfectly sound on Iran. Is he still some sort of Old Catholic? Claiming to be the Latin Church as She existed until 1870 is a long way from the Free Church of England or the Reformed Episcopal Church. The fashionable talk of an age-old Special Relationship between Anglicans and Rome is like the 250-year-old Special Relationship between Britain and the United States. 250 years since what, exactly? But Calvin Robinson is sound on Iran. Alas, then, he can never be Antipope.

Not so the other Englishman on the terna. As we approach the centenary of the birth of the late Queen Elizabeth II, complete with an exhibition of her clothes for those with more class than Margaret Thatcher's knicker-sniffers at last year's Conservative Party Conference, at least some of Gavin Ashenden's gigs must be paid, so there is something almost fraudulent about his trading on his former status as an Honorary Chaplain to the monarch. There are always dozens of those. He may have met the Queen, as a lot of people did, and he may even have preached in her presence. But he no more ministered to her personally than your local Monsignor, who is probably a Chaplain of His Holiness extra urbem, hears the Pope's Confession.

Surreptitiously for the last four of his nine years as an Honorary Chaplain to the Queen and as a paid and housed incumbent in the Church of England, and then openly for a further two years thereafter, Ashenden was also the Bishop of Nowhere, or at least of the Bishop of No One, since he was the Christian Episcopal Church's Missionary Bishop in the United Kingdom and Europe, where it had no congregations when he was appointed and where it still had none when he resigned. Produce anyone whom he ever confirmed or ordained. It is possible that even Ceirion Dewar exercises more ἐπισκοπή than that.

But the smart money is of course on Bishop Robert Barron. Between him, the Society of Saint Pius X, and the German Synodal Way, the three great threats to the unity of the Catholic Church cover the full range of Epstein Class opinion and taste. With Douglas Wilson, Brooks Potteiger, Paula White, Franklin Graham and so forth, Bishop Barron is one of the Mad Mullahs who already have nuclear weapons, but who do not have doctorates on Kant, preferring a Board of Peace with the man who elbowed aside Gordon Brown before routing William Hague and Michael Howard. To Stalin's intentionally rhetorical "How many divisions has the Pope?", Christopher Hitchens is said to have replied, "More than you think." But how many nukes will the Antipope have?

In Absentia?

As Peter Mandelson is fined for having urinated outside George Osborne’s house, Mandelson’s handpicked MP for Hartlepool, one Jonathan Brash, is to host on Monday the Awami League of the overthrown Bangladeshi dictator Sheikh Hasina, who was in November sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity. The following month saw the conviction in absentia for corruption, with a sentence of two years’ imprisonment and a fine, of Sheikh’s niece, Tulip Siddiq, who is the Labour Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Kilburn, and who is thus a constituency neighbour of Keir Starmer, under whom she previously served as Anti-Corruption Minister.

As yet another of their councillors and parliamentary staffers, Conor McGrath of Stevenage, is convicted of child sex offences, Labour right-wingers are normally very sniffy about the Labour Left’s ties to what were not officially “sister parties”, nominally Socialist parties from the same mould as they were. Plus the American Democrats, who would not thank anyone for calling them that, but who are in fact the mould.

Yet the Awami League does not even pretend to be anything like that. If Campaign Group MPs were wrong to host, say, Yanis Varoufakis, because he was not a member of PASOK (who is anymore?), then what does that make Brash? Or Siddiq, in addition to her being the only British MP subject to an Interpol Red Notice? She rejects her conviction because it was delivered by a judge without a jury. Think on.

We See You

The Epstein Class lost the Iran War, so here comes Russia again. How stupid do they think we are? There is in any case no grounds for sanctioning Russia for having pressed (not very successfully) its claim to Ukraine east of the Dnieper, although there are people at or near the very top in Russia who openly want all of it, but not for sanctioning Israel for pressing its claim to Lebanon south of the Litani, although there are people at or near the very top in Israel who openly want all of it. There are at least some people in Eastern Ukraine who would want it to be in Russia, but Israel could annex Southern Lebanon only by expelling or exterminating its inhabitants. That is what it is doing.

Yvette Cooper is "deeply troubled", though not so deeply troubled as to stop arming Israel, or to stop the nightly reconnaissance missions from RAF Akrotiri for which we did not even charge the Israelis. She stands so little chance of holding her own seat that it will be next month or never for her to become Prime Minister. In power or out of it, the North East remains a major centre of the right-wing machine within the Labour Party, so Cooper kept me in prison twice as long as I should have been. I cannot imagine that that made me anything special. That is just what she is. Be afraid. Be very, very, very afraid.