This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column



When I travel round this country, observing its many problems and troubles, I seldom meet anyone who says: ‘What we need here in Britain is more political correctness.’

Nor do I hear many people saying: ‘The trouble with Britain is that fashionable, liberal views do not get much of a hearing, or have much influence.

‘What this country needs is more foreign rule, more mass immigration, more failing comprehensive schools, more broken marriages, more crime and more drugs; not to mention less Christianity, lighter punishments for criminals and less freedom of speech.’

So a breakaway movement from two politically correct parties, made up of people whose love of political correctness is the thing that most unites them, offers me little hope.

What is this ‘centre’ they go on about? A fraud. A small group of people have defined their extremely weird and, in many cases, downright crazy ideas as ‘the centre’ to make them seem respectable.

The rabble of ageing cultural revolutionaries who have learned to conceal their 1960s desires without much altering them, uses this term so that it can call everyone else ‘extremists’ or ‘hardliners’.

To me, and I suspect many millions of others, a sensible political party would be (for example) in favour of nationalising the railways (which our rulers won’t do) and against nationalising childhood (which they have done).

Such a party would side with strong families, preferably with one parent at home, not least because it is the collapse of such families which has created an impossible strain on the social services, and led to a great deal of crime and other unhappiness.

Such a party would restore the preventive police foot patrols which did so much to maintain order. It would also be in favour of the well-managed council estates so foolishly broken up by Margaret Thatcher. It would do something about the scourge of drunkenness unleashed on this country in the 1980s, and go back to tight restrictions on the sale of alcohol. It would enforce our laws against marijuana, as Japan so successfully does and as we used to.

It would not just nationalise railways, but also many other industries which have, under privatisation, siphoned money into the pockets of businessmen that should have been used to maintain and modernise infrastructure – water is the obvious example.

But it would not do this for dogma, just where it made sense for the nation and the people. It would begin a national programme to build new grammar schools, academically selective state secondary schools open to all on the basis of ability rather than wealth.

I could go on. But you get the picture. There are dozens of such sensible, fair, wise policies, some of them once pursued by the vanished Labour Party of Clement Attlee and Hugh Gaitskell, some of them once upheld by the Tories, before they became Blairites.

Such ideas put the people of this country, rather than a vainglorious and self-satisfied elite, at the centre. But you will strive to find a handful of MPs in any party who are remotely interested in them.

That is why this is the wrong breakaway, from the wrong thing, at the wrong time.

One day, they'll decide YOU'RE not British

I was born a British subject, loyal to His Majesty King George VI, and never wanted to be a citizen anyway. I was forced to become a British citizen by political meddlers in 1971, as the first step to becoming another thing I never wanted to be, a citizen of the EU.

A subject is a free man who lives under the law but otherwise acts as he wishes. A citizen owes what freedoms he is allowed to the state, which decides how free he may be and requires duties from him. Sometimes I think despots only grant us citizenship because they enjoy taking it away so much. I associate the stripping of citizenship most of all with the Soviet tyranny. They used this method on one of the greatest men of our age, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in 1974.

So my gorge and hackles rose when the Home Secretary announced he was removing the citizenship of Shamima Begum. Ms Begum is a fool and worse than a fool. She has a big mouth out of which some very nasty sentiments come tumbling. She is open to criminal investigation if she returns here, and that would be perfectly proper.

But it is ridiculous to pretend that she was not born or raised here. And it is cheap, crowd-pleasing mob politics to leave her (and her newborn baby) trapped for ever in some Syrian camp.

I know some people, notably a British Muslim of my acquaintance, think she deserves what she has got. But they are forgetting a basic rule. What you allow to be done to others will eventually be done to you too.

If we allow politicians to strip Shamima Begum’s citizenship from her, they will get a taste for it. And so will our own, home-grown mob. And those who think they are leading mobs always end up discovering that they are, in fact, being chased by them. That never ends well.

Gifted Keeley’s wandered into a pile of piffle

The normally wonderful Keeley Hawes should be glad that she is so frumpily unrecognisable in Channel 4’s daft new series Traitors (right). Who’d want to be associated with this piffle, which suggests that the alert Americans saved Britain from the communist menace in the 1940s?

Washington was crammed with Kremlin agents and sympathisers at the time, most notably the high Treasury official Harry Dexter White, who spied for Stalin while doing Britain down in the great Bretton Woods economic summit.

Traitors makes great play of the fact that there was a statue of Lenin in London in 1945. So there was, but the Left-wing Finsbury Council was forced to remove it from public show in 1946 because it was incessantly vandalised and defaced – sometimes, but not always, by fascists. On one occasion it lost its nose and both ears.

And its former site, the now-vanished Holford Square, is presently occupied by a block called Bevin Court, named after one of Labour’s toughest anti-communists, Ernest Bevin.

Cannabis: One more lethal link

Lord Matthews, the judge presiding over the horrible trial of the killer of six-year-old Alesha MacPhail, says he has ‘no idea’ why the culprit, Aaron Campbell, 16, committed ‘some of the most wicked and evil crimes this court has ever heard of in decades of dealing with depravity’.

The little girl’s body was discovered with 117 injuries, so dreadful they even shocked an experienced pathologist.

Well, I have an idea. I did what I always do when I hear of violent crimes which are both brutal and inexplicable. As soon as I heard the appalling details of this case, which took place on the peaceful Isle of Bute, I searched for the word ‘cannabis’ in the trial records. And immediately, as usual, I found that the accused was known to be a regular user of this drug.

It really is time to blast aside the PR spin which claims that marijuana is a ‘soft’, safe drug or even an actual medicine. It is nothing of the kind. Users all too often become mentally ill. And they are all too often found – as in the Alesha MacPhail case – to be the perpetrators of terrible, violent crime.

At the very least, this link must be investigated. The campaign to legalise marijuana, under these circumstances, is quite extraordinarily irresponsible and stupid. These involved should have the decency to drop it, now.

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