PETER HITCHENS: How the Left censored the blindingly obvious truth about rape

A State agency has been forced to reverse a decision to cut compensation to rape victims who were drunk

Women who get drunk are more likely to be raped than women who do not get drunk.

No, this does not excuse rape. Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been.

But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy.

Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.

Yet a wave of hysterical ultra-feminist propaganda has this week forced a State agency to reverse a perfectly sensible decision to cut compensation to rape victims who were drunk.

Personally, I’m not sure where all this ‘compensation’ came from. It used to be grudgingly paid out. Now it flows in tens of millions (£200million last year) from the taxpayers’ pockets into the hands of the wronged.

I suspect it is the result of the almost total failure of the criminal justice system to prevent crime, catch culprits or punish them when caught. Instead of offering justice, the state provides a cheque.

So I suppose we must resign ourselves to the fact that a growing slice of our taxes will be handed over to victims of unsolved rapes, while rape itself increases – the inevitable result of the collapse of sexual morality.

But I cannot see why women who ignore the wisdom of the ages, and make themselves more likely to be victims by drinking too much, should get the same size cheque as women who are raped despite acting responsibly.

Someone called Bridget Prentice, a one-time teacher who now has the banana republic title of Justice Minister, actually said last week that ‘a victim of rape is not in any way culpable due to alcohol consumption’.

This is flatly untrue and she must know it is. Of course she is culpable, just as she would be culpable if she crashed a car and injured someone while drunk, or stepped out into the traffic while drunk and was run over.

Getting drunk is not something that happens to you. It is something you do.

Nor is being drunk – which makes you miss danger signals, make bad judgments, lose consciousness in unsafe places and then lose your memory, too – comparable with ‘dressing provocatively’ as the feminist thought police would like to pretend.

If women want to dress provocatively, then they should be free to do so, and I say thanks a lot to those who do.

Our society is based on self-restraint. We can be provoked and still behave ourselves. We do not need to compel women to dress like bats, as many Muslim countries do, so as to curb the unchained passions of hot-blooded menfolk.

All the above is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet, in the main forums of public opinion, such views are becoming harder and harder to express because of the unreasoning storm of fury that will follow.

The collapse of the Tory party into the arms of Leftism has made this much worse, particularly on the BBC, which no longer feels any duty to give airtime to social and moral conservatives.





Devastation: Thousands of Georgians have paid a terrible price for their president's wilful, unhinged actions

Will someone send this sabre-rattling twit a history book

I like Georgia. I like Georgians and their superb hospitality. I have several times travelled to that beautiful country. But I wouldn’t lift a finger to save it from the Russians.

What cause would we be serving? Democracy? Ha ha.

This Olympically corrupt statelet is not a law-governed democracy. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s nauseatingly named Rose Revolution was a putsch achieved by an orchestrated mob, followed by an election so shamelessly one-sided that our supposed hero got 96 per cent of the vote.

The only excuse for this was that previous elections had been rigged, too, which of course they had.

American-trained he may be, but his opponents and critics fall victim to blatantly Soviet-style methods of intimidation. He is also adept at bombastic propaganda.

Do we really want young men from the Midlands of England and the Lowlands of Scotland fighting and dying for years to come to save this dubious creature from his own unhinged, wilful conflict with the Kremlin?

You might think not, but David Cameron is all for it. In an amazing demonstration of unfitness for office, the Tory leader last week wrote one of the daftest articles I have ever seen.

He wants Georgia to be allowed into Nato, so committing this country to come to Georgia’s defence if it is attacked. He wants to do the same for Ukraine.

Will someone send this man an atlas and a history book? When will our political class stop trying to grow hairs on their teenage chests by starting wars and deploying forces we no longer have?

Why should we get entangled in this? What business is it of ours if Russia wants friends and allies on its borders, rather than a weird Nato alliance, kept on life-support long after it triumphantly achieved its purpose. What is Nato for now? Does anybody know? If they know, will they say?

No doubt some half-educated twerp will now accuse me of appeasement. There is certainly plentiful appeasement going on now – of the Provisional IRA and of the European Union.

But Britain has no interests in following American adventures in the Caucasus, let alone taking sides over the dangerous future of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is not Hitler – or Stalin. As for Neville Chamberlain, the stupidest thing he ever did was to promise to defend Poland, when he knew we couldn’t and wouldn’t do so. When our bluff was called we were dragged by an unstable, rackety ally into a war we weren’t ready for and very nearly lost.

Who plays that part today?





Welcome to Nowhereville, West Midlands

Officials in Birmingham are in trouble for printing a picture of the wrong Birmingham (the one in Alabama) on a recycling leaflet.

I can’t see it’s such a big mistake. Both city skylines are almost identical masses of cuboid blocks, and I have often wondered if Birmingham’s city fathers were determined to turn the place into a copy of a North American burg, hideous freeways and all.

All too many British cities are going the same way, characterless nowherevilles, their old distinctive domes and spires overpowered by graceless geometric lumps.



• With A-level pass rates now resembling the results of a North Korean referendum, do I really still need to point out that these exams have been devalued? I sense the professional liars who claimed for years that all was well have now given up. About time. But who will repair the damage they did?



• BBC reporter Colin Blane was describing, with some awe, the release of Sea Eagles into the wild somewhere in Scotland. He began by saying the eagles were 15 yards away, then suddenly revised this to 15 metres. Why? The BBC deny the existence of any instructions to its staff to go metric. But faced with a Freedom of Information Act request for details, they claim the Act doesn’t apply to such things.