This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

This was the week we kow-towed to China, bowing low to the new masters of the world. The poor Queen was compelled to receive Peking’s Premier, Li Keqiang, below, who was not on a state visit and was not entitled to such a meeting.

This miserable moment had to happen, as we are more or less bankrupt and we have to take money and investment from anyone who will give it to us, at any price.





I have visited China many times. It is an exciting and energetic place. But it is also an unpleasant, corrupt, cruel police state, in which people fear to speak their minds and opponents of the regime disappear. All media are harshly censored and punished when they rebel.

The Communist Party, responsible for countless murders and one of the worst man-made famines in human history, still dominates the government, and its officials deal brutally with those who stand in their way.

I know personally of one woman whose house was demolished around her because she defied the one-child policy. Others have been forced to have abortions.

China ruthlessly colonises its neighbours. Most people know about Tibet – and I wonder how long it will be before the exiled Dalai Lama is welcomed at a high level in London again. Something tells me it will be the far side of never. Money talks.

But fewer are aware of events in Sinkiang. There, China is busily overwhelming the Turkic, Muslim people who have lived there for thousands of years, by organised and state-sponsored mass immigration.

Well, bankrupts can’t be choosers. But the Cabinet that smarmily welcomed Comrade Li Keqiang is the same one that is always hot to intervene against tyranny and misgovernment in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and which haughtily condemns Russia for annexing Crimea.

Let’s not have any more of this. It’s obvious that we don’t really care about human rights or aggression. We just like to think we do. Principle is principle, and if you won’t stand up to the big bullies, then you shouldn’t try to cover up your poverty and cowardice by hounding the small ones.

Tom may learn, but Cameron never will

The new film Edge Of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, both above in a scene from the movie, allows the main character to live the same events over and over again until he gets them right.

But would this work on politicians? They never seem to learn anything from their own experience, or from history. Take our Prime Minister and his nutty, pointless battle to block the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as Supreme Smoothie of the EU. I carry no torch for Mr Juncker, but why bother?

The European Union has cupboards and attics crammed with grey, discreet men and women who would readily step in if Mr Juncker were rejected. Within a week, you couldn’t tell the difference.

To object to him because he is a ‘federalist’ is like objecting to a bicycle because it has wheels. Of course he is a ‘federalist’. The entire EU is federalist. That is what it is for. Come to that, Mr Cameron – who supports the EU – is a federalist, and the whole Tory Party is federalist.

This has been obvious to anyone at all observant for years and years, as has the fact that the EU, like a monster in a swamp, cannot be defeated by anyone in that swamp. The moment you think you have outwitted the monster, as poor Mrs Thatcher did, it will rise from the slime behind you and gobble you up.

The EU is, as I keep pointing out, the continuation of Germany by other means – though, unlike in 1914 and 1939, this time it is Germany with full American backing.

Why don’t our conventional politicians learn from years of repeated experience on these lines? Because they don’t want to.

Far too little fuss has been made this week about the brilliant and perceptive remarks of Dominic Cummings, a former government apparatchik now on the loose. If he’d been Ed Miliband’s ex-aide, the row would still be going on.

As well as pointing out that politicians are in fact as dim as you think they are, and there is no secret room containing smart people who actually know what they are doing, he said this of the Tory Party and its attitude towards the EU.

It is ‘whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow’.

A bit mild for me, but unusually close to the truth for a political operator.

Bennett rewrites history for the boys

The BBC favourite Alan Bennett, right, has grown soft with too much flattery. He is even praised for making a paedophile teacher the hero of The History Boys, a bad, crude, ignorant play and a worse film.

Now he has delivered a silly class-war sermon attacking private schools. Doesn’t he realise that many snob-free homes make huge sacrifices to buy their children out of the comprehensive school disaster?

Probably not. He appears to know nothing of Britain since about 1964, which is probably the last time anyone dared criticise him. He said in his sermon that he had once expected grammar schools to ‘gradually overtake’ public schools in getting their pupils into Oxford and Cambridge. Then he vaguely mused that it ‘didn’t happen’.

He is utterly, spectacularly, hog-whimperingly opposite-of-the truth wrong about this. It did happen. By 1965, grammar and direct grant schools got 57 per cent of Oxford places, and public schools 41 per cent. The state school share was rising every year.

But then Mr Bennett’s Left-wing friends smashed up the grammar schools, and abolished the direct grants, and it all went backwards, as it has ever since. It is them he should be attacking, not independent schools, which often strain themselves to offer free places to poor children, but cannot replace the grammars that Mr Bennett’s comrades smilingly, hatefully destroyed.

►► I actually shook with rage listening to Richard Hawkes of Scope on Radio 4 last Tuesday, blandly defending his charity’s plan to shut down its larger old-fashioned homes where some people have lived happily for 30 years or more.

He had just listened to a recording of several such residents, saying quite clearly that they were happy as they were and did not want to move. But he then declared that ‘disabled people’ were ‘telling us’ that they did not want to live in such places.

I am used to big organisations claiming to know what I want better than I do. ‘There’s no call for it,’ they say, as they stop providing something I like, from thick-cut marmalade to quiet carriages.

But that’s just stupid. Turning these people out of their happy home is cruel as well as stupid. If you give to Scope, tell them to drop this unkind policy.