This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

In the midst of the most fraudulent General Election I have ever experienced, a clear and honest voice speaks, and is drowned by a tornado of lies.



After 40 years in the trade of journalism, I think I know what news is. And when Norman Tebbit, the fiercest and roughest anti-socialist street-fighter of the Thatcher years, suggests that Tories in Scotland vote Labour, that is news.



This is what he said: ‘From the Tories’ point of view we are not going to come home with a vast number of seats from Scotland. We know that. So the choice is, would we rather have a Scot Nat or Labour? I think, on balance, probably a Labour MP would be a more reasonable thing to have.’



Asked if he was advising Tory supporters to vote Labour where it is contesting seats with the SNP, he said: ‘I hesitate to say that. But it is logical from where I stand.’

Of course it is. Anyone who seriously wants to keep Scotland in the UK must seek to stop the rise of the SNP, not to fuel and encourage it.

Lord Tebbit is not the only Tory who has been appalled by the deliberate boosting of the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon by such figures as Chief Whip Michael Gove and Chancellor George Osborne.



Both these men have acted like student politicians, helping one enemy to do down another. This may work in the tail-coated silly-clever struggles of the Oxford Union. But it is quite wrong when a real country is at stake.



Lord Tebbit’s outburst was astonishing from a man who would have been a Tory Prime Minister, had an IRA death squad not confined his wife to a wheelchair and injured him far more badly than he has ever revealed.



So why haven’t we heard more about it? And why hasn’t the Tory Party expelled, or at least suspended him for this blatant defiance of his leader?



I mainly blame the squeaking multitudes of political journalists who, in my view, have settled on a line about what this Election is about and are reading from a script given to them by the Government spin doctors on whom they depend so much.



And Lord Tebbit’s amazing intervention doesn’t fit the script. In fact, it utterly destroys the official version, that this is a contest between a fiscally responsible, unionist Tory Party and a mad Trotskyist Labour Party in hock to the SNP and some trade union maniacs.



In fact, it’s the most amazing development in politics since another former Tory giant, Enoch Powell, urged his supporters to vote Labour in February 1974 and snarled ‘Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!’, in response to cries of ‘Judas!’



Yet it’s barely been mentioned, because it’s easier for commentators to ignore it than to explain it, and admit that their whole version of events is wrong. But it is.

Yes, Cameron IS to blame for this disaster

It was amusing to watch David Cameron’s aides get all hoity-toity when Ed Miliband suggested the Premier might bear some blame for the squadrons of coffin ships now wallowing in the Mediterranean, full of desperate migrants.



Of course Mr Cameron is to blame. He knew nothing of Libya or its importance when he sought to be the shining hero of a brief and glorious war against Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.

The trouble is that Red Ed supported our intervention in Libya too, so can only rather lamely criticise the poor follow-through afterwards.



There’s nothing ‘disgraceful’ about doing this. The disgrace lay in Mr Cameron’s own vainglorious and ignorant intervention, on the phoney pretext of preventing an imaginary massacre. If this hadn’t happened, the Med would not now be full of foundering boats and floating corpses.

All that is left to do for my friend Jason Rezaian is to ask for your prayers for him. Jason is a kind, gentle and rather bumbling person, with a Persian father and an American mother, and he loves his father’s country.



It became his mission to explain Iran and its people to a puzzled and often hostile West. He changed my life and my mind by conducting me round that beautiful and astonishing country, introducing me to his large and friendly family there.

He insisted that – though I was prostrated by some sort of food poisoning – I went with him to Isfahan, the absolute pinnacle of Iranian culture, art and beauty, because he was so proud of it. He was right. It is astonishing.



Now, monstrously, the Iranian authorities are accusing this benevolent and patriotic man of espionage against the country he so obviously loves. They have held him in prison since July. It is all very cruel and wrong and will one day be shown to have been a terrible injustice.



His captors say that they follow a faith of compassion and mercy. I think they need to be reminded of this. Whatever strange purpose lies behind this wicked treatment, it cannot justify it.

The self-righteous supporters of mass immigration think the rest of us are stupid and evil. All over the country there are moronic yellow posters shouting ‘I am an immigrant’ which assume that you and I dislike immigrants personally.



They also make the lame point that immigrants do valuable or useful jobs. There’s a fireman, a postman, a bus driver, a nurse, a teacher and a chef (I’m not so sure about the human rights barrister or the comedian). Of course they do, but, like most people in work, they do their jobs because they are paid to, not because they have come across the oceans solely to be nice to us.



What doesn’t seem to have occurred to the designers of this rather insulting and patronising propaganda is this: we could have trained people who are already here to do these jobs. As we have about a million young people not in employment, education or training, this is a real issue.



What many of us object to is the politicians who, for whatever reason, forget that societies cannot easily absorb huge numbers of new citizens. I resent the suggestion that this perfectly reasonable view is motivated by racial hatred or personal spite.

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How we love to reintroduce species to places from which they were once drive. I've long been suspicious of this, especially the bringing of red kites back to the Chiltern Hills. Officially, these huge birds are harmless to other living creatures, though other birds often seem rare where the kites are common.

Well, on Tuesday, I watched one with what looked like a live bird in its claws, fighting off an aerial attack by a frantic crow. Have we made a mistake? Will we ever recognise it?

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