This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

The BBC plans to ‘question the very concept of civilisation’ in a new and lavish TV series. Well, at least they’re being open about it this time. The promise is made by one-time Blairite commissar James Purnell, now a senior BBC mandarin. The most interesting thing about Mr Purnell is that he once managed to appear in a photograph of an event at which he had not been present.

Some other MPs, who were there, said they had left a space for him to be slotted in later, though he said he had no idea this was the plan. Believe what you like. This is at least better than the old Stalinist practice of obliterating people from pictures in which they originally featured, but it is all too typical of the modern elite’s sketchy relationship with ideas of absolute truth or absolute good.

Alas, he is now all-too-present at the BBC. Mr Purnell, whose former total political partiality is of course no sort of problem in the supposedly politically neutral Corporation, promises viewers: ‘We’ll turn to civilisation. Well, Civilisations – inspired by Kenneth Clark’s seminal documentary series, but in many ways the opposite of the original. Rather than a single view of civilisation, we will have three presenters.

‘Rather than looking at Western civilisation, we will look at many, and question the very concept of civilisation.’

That’s interesting. Does he think there would even be a BBC unless there had been an agreed concept of civilisation in the now-forgotten, abolished Britain which first created it?

Let him wander, some spring morning, out of the dreary new plastic palace (already showing its age) that the Corporation has built for itself in the centre of London, and examine its handsome original headquarters next door. There he will find an inscription in Latin, intended to be the first thing seen by everyone entering the building.

I will translate the important parts of it: ‘This temple of the arts and muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931… And they pray that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest, and that all things foul or hostile to peace may be banished thence, and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are lovely and honest, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.’

It leaves no doubt that the stated purpose of the building and the organisation were explicitly Christian. Much of it is actually taken from the Bible. And it pretty fiercely warns that those things which are ‘foul’ or ‘hostile to peace’ are to be banished. But anyone who has many dealings with the BBC, and I have had lots, will know that its idea of what is virtuous, and its idea of what is foul (which sometimes includes me personally), have changed beyond recognition since that inscription was carved 86 years ago.

That is why it now rejects the original idea of civilisation, fundamentally European and eventually Christian, which it still just about tolerated in the 1960s when Kenneth Clark’s famous series on the subject was made.

But what does it favour instead? By offering us three differing ideas, and inviting us to choose which we prefer, it is not, in my view, being open-minded.

It is saying above all that it no longer endorses Lord Clark’s idea, or its own founding charter. Oddly enough, back in the 1960s, its then Director General, Hugh Carleton-Greene, was the blazing unconcealed spirit of the British cultural revolution. Like others in that era, he went too far, too fast, was too obvious, and so was reined in. His successors, ever since, have been more cautious and more cunning. It looks as if they have done their job so well that they feel safe to come out into the open again. But what will they do with the old inscription, now that it is actually a lie?

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Anti-terror cops or the new kit for teachers in our schools?

There are many falsehoods in modern Britain. One is the alleged ‘fall’ in crime figures, this week yet again exposed as a deliberate fiddle. Another is the claimed ‘improvement’ in state comprehensive schools, where in truth classroom behaviour is often appalling and learning almost impossible as a result.

When this open secret was revealed a few years ago by undercover TV cameras, the authorities responded by disciplining the brave teacher who had helped expose it.

Of course they did. What else would you expect? But now the growing chaos has led to calls for teachers to be equipped with body-cameras. Why stop there? Why not kit them out in the face-masks, goggles, helmets, bother boots, combat gear and heavy artillery sported last week by ‘police’ officers in Downing Street during a visit by the Israeli premier.

If teachers dressed like this, and could also get away with shooting or electrocuting the occasional pupil (as the police get away with shooting and Tasering the odd innocent person), exam results and general performance would soar.

I suspect there’d also be many fewer false accusations of sexual harassment, and a sharp drop in bullying.

Am I joking? I’m not really sure. The authorities will do almost anything to protect themselves, which is why the police guarding politicians dress up like Judge Dredd and drape themselves with weapons.

But any normal person seeking to live an orderly, honest life – a private citizen besieged by louts in her home, a teacher struggling to control a feral classroom, a shopkeeper plagued by incessant theft – faces arrest and punishment if he or she snaps and lashes out.

Surely it is only despotisms where the police protect the powerful, and turn a cold and brutal shoulder to the people?

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Once again an incident first reported as terrorism turns out to be the random act of a mentally ill person. In this case it was Zakaria Bulhan, who killed retired teacher Darlene Horton, in Russell Square, London, last August. The same thing happened when the equally insane Muhaydin Mire stabbed a random victim at Leytonstone Underground station in December 2015.

As it happens, many other violent acts officially designated as ‘terrorist’ have been conducted by people who were plainly mentally unhinged. And we have also seen several crimes chillingly similar to terror acts – including beheadings – but where there was no conceivable political motive.

Thanks to near-total lack of interest from the police, Government and media, we seldom find out if these people have been taking drugs. Sometimes we do. Mire undoubtedly had been.

But why won’t we look into this rather obvious connection? This sort of violence is new. So is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, both legal and illegal.

The same goes for the disturbing number of young people suffering from mental illness in general.

It would hardly be a surprise if those who took such drugs became mentally ill. Is it the power of the very wealthy pro-drugs lobbies, on the verge of winning their campaign for legalisation, that keeps us from examining this urgent question? I suspect so.

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I’ve worked out why the modern Left hate Donald Trump so much, and why anti-Trump parades have become the biggest boost to the Rentacrowd protest industry since the Vietnam War, opposed by millions who didn’t know what it was about or where Vietnam was.

It’s because the President subconsciously reminds them of themselves. Unlike most ‘Right-wing’ figures, he adopts the habits and practices of the shouty Left. He’s shamelessly bigoted, and regards his bigotry as a virtue. He’s ignorant, materialistic, unread, foul-mouthed, sexually liberated, sees opponents as enemies to be crushed rather than as fellow citizens to be persuaded or at least respected, and he despises the rule of law.

People hate in others what they dislike in themselves. I’ve seldom seen a better example of this maxim in action.

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