This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column





The pound sterling would have fallen hard and fast if we had voted to stay in the EU. I am amazed it did not do so long before. More than three years ago, before the referendum was called, I advised you to keep an eye on the value of sterling as a true measure of our huge economic difficulties.

Since then they’ve grown worse – enormous state debts, enormous private debts, a disastrous balance of trade and a devastating current account deficit, which measures how much we owe abroad.

Add to that the £435billion of funny money pumped into the economy by the Bank of England since 2009 in so-called ‘quantitative easing’, the smooth modern way of printing cash which is backed by thin air.

If you do these things, the currency must shrink in value, as surely as water will wet you, and as surely as fire will burn.

And now it has. I suspect it will get quite a lot worse, and the day when the dollar is worth more than the pound is now in sight. But currency markets like to wait for their opportunity. My guess is that, on the eve of the referendum, quite a few currency dealers bet heavily on a victory for the Remain campaign (as others did) and bought sterling in the belief that it would rise on the news. But others, more cunning or better informed, wagered the other way.

The resulting turmoil of rapid selling set off the avalanche which followed.

If the vote had gone the other way, then roughly the same thing would have happened by now, perhaps on the announcement of bad economic figures (there are so many, if you’re paying attention).

Everyone who understands the issue knows this. So they should stop saying – and you should stop believing – that the fall of sterling is your fault for voting for national independence.

This decision will have its costs – nothing worth having comes free – but a weaker pound isn’t one of them.

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Thanks to a 1950s childhood I like my gravy thick, salty and dark brown, best mixed to a background of Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. So I’m sorry to see the decline of Bisto and Oxo sales, which fell in September supposedly because of hot weather. They’ll be blaming global warming next.

Of course, the real problem is that nuclear families eating meaty meals around tables, such as the one portrayed by Lynda Bellingham in the famous old Oxo commercials, are disappearing faster than hedgehogs. I doubt anything can save them.

But there’s something a bit wet and defeatist about the new Oxo TV advertisements, in which a horribly correct modern family (the man looks terrified) are shown cringing to some ghastly female bully brought home for a meal by their daughter. The creepy interloper shows her approval of her meatballs not by eating them but by taking a photograph of them.

Advertising is such a slave of trends. Someone called Helen Warren-Piper, a marketing director for Oxo’s parent company, has actually said: ‘Those advertising scripts where the mum is literally tied to an oven just don’t work any more. It’s clear advertisers need to think beyond mum and do a better job at representing the whole of the modern family or consumers will reject them.’

Ah, yes, you’ll remember those days when mothers were literally tied to the oven, then briefly released to gulp down some gravy before being chained to the kitchen sink. It happened to Lynda Bellingham all the time. No it didn’t. What is she talking about?

And yet this rubbish dominates the world of business and commerce, which now peddle ideas once found only in seething, enraged ultra-feminist magazines.

****

My favourite ghost stories, by the genius M. R. James, usually involve someone being a little too curious, and so releasing from its hole or tomb a nasty force he wishes he could put back but can’t.

Pornography is like this. In my wild 1960s days I thought it would be clever to read Last Exit To Brooklyn (which had just escaped prosecution) as a gesture of support for freedom of expression. It poisoned and polluted my imagination, irrevocably. To this day, I wish I hadn’t read it.

The best thing to do with pornography is to keep it out of reach by the forces of shame and law. The claim that legalising it would be a great liberation has turned out to be one of the greatest lies of our time. It has enslaved millions.

It is not a passive, dead thing that can be examined in a classroom. It reaches out and leaps into your mind. Jenni Murray could not be more wrong in saying that children should study it.

****

What a pity that Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a man of great historical knowledge, blessed with a sense of proportion, has become a Russophobic warmonger madly suggesting that we start a conflict with Moscow in Syria.

Mr Johnson knows perfectly well that fighting Islamist fanatics in densely populated cities is hard, especially when they hold the population hostage, as the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra is doing in east Aleppo now.

The West and its allies had similar difficulties last Christmas in Ramadi, where the RAF (among other forces) dropped bombs in and around that city to defeat ISIS. I suppose it’s possible that no civilians died, but I somehow doubt it.

The difference is that, unlike their close cousins in the Al Nusra front in Aleppo, the Islamic State fanatics in Ramadi don’t have access to a slick PR operation in the West, skilled at producing emotive, perfectly composed atrocity pictures of wounded children, and in manipulating Western news organisations who (for the most part) have no actual staff reporters or photographers on the scene.

So almost all the things you hear about east Aleppo are one-sided, carefully controlled propaganda, not news. One way of dealing with one-sided propaganda is to check it against the stuff put out by the other side.

In a rare moment of balance, the BBC recently transmitted this, from Fares al-Shehabi, who represents Aleppo in Syria’s ‘People’s Council’.

He said: ‘More than half of the city is occupied by Islamists, many of them foreigners…

‘Just go and check for yourself who is ruling eastern Aleppo, who is really issuing the laws there, it’s Islamic courts, it’s exactly like Kandahar and Kabul before the coalition intervened to get rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it’s exactly the same thing, they don’t have any democracy, they don’t have any civil rule, they only have people with long beards with fundamentalist ideology running the show, and a lot of foreigners.’

If this is even partly true, what on earth are we doing rushing to the aid of these hairy-faced fanatics and infiltrators? Or are we, as we did so regrettably in Libya, once again backing the worse against the bad?

I am happy to help Mr Johnson on this, and respectfully remind him that my team beat his when we clashed on University Challenge. He’s not the only know-all in London.

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