Churchill After 50 Years, by David Lindsay

It is 50 years this month since the death of Sir Winston Churchill. Do not be a nodding dog.

In the 1930s, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability.

One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds.

So did the other one. Far more than background united Churchill and Mosley, the originator in English of the currently modish concept of a Union of the Mediterranean.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that:

“Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.”

That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”.

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs.

The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, which as much as anything else has been an inspiration to the vociferous anti-monarchist minority in Australia ever since: “Why should we bother with them after that?” The Lancastria. The men left behind in France.

Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died.

And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. In reality, the Soviet Union that had been broken by the War had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, still less to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

But the electorate was under no illusions while he was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels.

He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two of them – the first, I say again, while the War was still going on – and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote.

In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It went on to win comfortably the subsequent General Election, just as it was to do in 1992 after it had removed Thatcher.

And we have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought, making it a failure in its own terms.

We condemn genocidal terrorism against Slavs and Balts no less than genocidal terrorism against Arabs, or the blowing up of British Jews going about their business as civil servants, or the photographed hanging of teenage British conscripts with barbed wire.

Churchill’s Zionism was precisely that of the BNP, seeing the Jews as not really British, and therefore wishing to transport them to Palestine. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues in the Conservative Party of the 1950s.

On this, if on nothing else, Nick Griffin was right: if Churchill had been alive today, then he would have been in the BNP. It would have been welcome to him.

Trident: The Plates Are Shifting, by David Lindsay

The colossal, especially Labour, abstention rate in today’s Commons vote on Trident indicates that the plates are shifting. The Labour Whips told people to stay away. Why ever would they have done that?

Far from representing national pride or independence, our nuclear weapons programme has only ever represented the wholesale subjugation of Britain’s defence capability to a foreign power. That power maintains no less friendly relations with numerous other countries, almost none of which have nuclear weapons.

Like radiological, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons are morally repugnant simply in themselves.

They offer not the slightest defence against a range of loosely knit, if at all connected, terrorist organisations pursuing a range of loosely knit, if at all connected, aims in relation to a range of countries. Where would any other such organisation keep nuclear weapons in the first place?

Furthermore, the possession of nuclear weapons serves to convey to terrorists and their supporters that Britain wishes to “play with the big boys”, thereby contributing to making Britain a target for the terrorist activity against which such weapons are defensively useless.

It is high time for Britain to grow up. Britain’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council could not be taken away without British consent, and so does not depend in any way on her possession of nuclear weapons; on the contrary, the world needs and deserves a non-nuclear permanent member of that Council.

Most European countries do not have nuclear weapons, and nor does Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Are those therefore in greater danger? On the contrary, the London bombings of 7^th July 2005 were attacks on a country with nuclear weapons, while the attacks of 11^th September 2001 were against the country with by far the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

The only nuclear power in the Middle East is Israel. Is Israel the most secure state in the Middle East?

It is mind-boggling to hear people go on about Iran, whose President is in any case many years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and in any case only wants one (if he does) to use against the only Middle Eastern country that already has them. What does any of this have to do with us?

Numerous Tories with relevant experience – Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones – were sceptical about, or downright hostile towards, British nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. In March 1964, while First Lord of the Admiralty and thus responsible for Polaris, George Jellicoe suggested that Britain might pool her nuclear deterrent with the rest of NATO.

Enoch Powell denounced the whole thing as not just anything but independent in practice, but also immoral in principle.

Gaitskell’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour Conference, stated: “Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources.”

Although the SDP was in many ways a betrayal of this heritage, it is nevertheless the case that nuclear weapons were not mentioned in its founding Limehouse Declaration, and that David Owen did have to act at least once in order to prevent a unilateralist from being selected as a parliamentary candidate.

In an echo of Head, Thorneycroft, Birch, Jones, Jellicoe and Powell, even that strongly monetarist SDP MP and future Conservative Minister, John Horam, was sceptical about the deployment of American cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe.

Shirley Williams has long been doing sterling work in the field of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament; it is inconceivable that she, or indeed Bill Rodgers, Gaitskell’s right-hand man in the CDS, really wishes to “renew” Trident. It is even difficult to believe that of Owen these days.

There could not be bigger and more unwise spending, or a more ineffective example of the “Big State”, than nuclear weapons in general and Trident in particular.

Diverting enormous sums of money towards the civil nuclear power that is the real nuclear deterrent, towards public services, towards the relief of poverty at home and abroad, and towards paying off our national debt, precisely by reasserting control over our own defence capability, would represent a most significant step towards One Nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. It is what Disraeli would have done.

Ed Miliband, over to you.

What A Far Less Hysterical Time The Cold War Was, by David Lindsay

In view of today’s Commons debate on Trident, what a far less hysterical time the Cold War was.

Everyone with any sense knew that it was all lies. People who could not see that, including those who imagined that a threat of domestic revolution existed, were a joke even at the time. But we shall come back to them.

The Soviet Union had neither the will nor the means to invade Western Europe, never mind the United States. It had no desire whatever for alternative centres of Communist power. It would in any case collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, exactly as and when it did.

Consider quite what Britain was like in those decades without the world’s coming to an end, or the United Kingdom’s constitutional order collapsing, or either party of government’s adopting Marxism-Leninism, or anything like that.

The intelligence services were so riddled with Soviet agents from top to bottom that it was a standing joke even among the general public. Such penetration extended even to the Royal Households. As the exposure of two dead Ministers as Czechoslovak agents has demonstrated, it also extended to the very right-wing elements both of the Labour Party (John Stonehouse) and of the Conservative Party (Ray Mawby).

Professing oneself a Communist was always perfectly respectable at the very highest levels of British society, where it was treated as just another aristocratic eccentricity. Wogan Phillips, second Baron Milford, sat as a Communist in the House of Lords for 31 years until his death in 1993: throughout most of the 1960s, and throughout all of the 1970s and the 1980s. He still called himself a Communist even after the party had dissolved itself in 1991.

Eric Hobsbawm ended up as a Companion of Honour, unlike either Tony Benn or even Michael Foot, despite the fact that that would have been the obvious gong for both of them. It is notable that, unlike the second Viscount Stansgate, the second Baron Milford never disclaimed his peerage. In point of fact, the latter’s party was a moderating force, especially over and against sections of the Labour Left, which contained people whose views, Trotskyist and otherwise, were far more extreme.

Throughout its history, the Communist Party of Great Britain was avowedly and actively opposed to a violent revolution in this country, holding, as Lenin had done, that its objectives could and should be attained wholly within and through the British constitutional and parliamentary process.

By the 1970s, especially, by no means everyone on the Labour Left took that view. Most still did. But by no means all. And Labour had had a problem with Trotskyist infiltration for as long as there had been Trotskyists at all.

The CPGB was full of intelligence agents, but the intelligence agencies were full of Eastern Bloc agents, and so on, and on, and on, and on, and on. We shall never know the extent to which the turning of those wheels within wheels prevented or resolved industrial disputes, precluded those disputes’ escalation, and so on.

Certainly, the CPGB was capable of highly fruitful co-operation with the trade union and Labour Right, much of which was very Right indeed and had all the British and American connections to match. Compare and contrast the successful partnership between Mick McGahey and Joe Gormley in 1972 and 1974 (against a Conservative Prime Minister loathed by the overlapping worlds of MI5, MI6 and his party’s own right wing) with the failure of McGahey and Arthur Scargill in 1984 and 1985.

The Communist had wanted to hold a national ballot, and had always remained open to compromise. He had wanted to reintegrate the UDM without rancour once, as he correctly predicted, its patrons had discarded it. He always called Scargill “that young man”, and he declined ever to write his memoirs or to authorise a biography, since “differences must remain within the family,” which said it all.

McGahey used to appear on things like Any Questions. He was as respectable as that. His union, with the closest ties of any to his party at home, and with an unmatched internationalist tradition stretching deep into the Soviet Bloc, effectively controlled around 85 per cent of the nation’s energy supply for many decades. It did not strike at all between 1926 and 1972, or between 1974 and 1984, an extremely unusual approach during those periods even for trade unionists with vastly less, quite literal, power.

The NUM was also a huge voting bloc at Labour Party Conferences, joined by the numerous Constituency Labour Parties that it effectively controlled. It sponsored enough MPs to make a significant difference, considering the normal size of Labour Governments’ majorities, if any, historically. For almost the whole of that period, only MPs had a vote in Leadership Elections. Look at the Leaders elected.

Like those on the mainstream Labour Left Tribune, certain staffers on the Morning Star were and are members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and Lobby, as their Daily Worker predecessors also were.

Such membership required and requires full security clearance to go about the Palace of Westminster, and Lobby membership gives access to twice-daily briefings by the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman. The Daily Worker and then the Morning Star participated in all of that throughout the Cold War, as did Tribune. Did the Realm fall? Well, there you are, then.

Joan Maynard managed to sit not only as a Labour MP but as a member of that party’s National Executive Committee while also, with several other MPs, on the Editorial Advisory Panel of Straight Left, a newspaper and a faction that had been set up because of the feeling that the Communist Party was going soft. In 1979.

She served with distinction on the Agriculture Select Committee. Her Straight Left colleague James Lamond was on nothing less than the Public Accounts Committee. For many years, all of them under a Conservative Government and most of them under Margaret Thatcher, he was on the Speaker’s Panel, chairing Standing Committees of the House. Parliament survived.

Pat Wall sat as an MP while probably the single most important Trotskyist thinker in the world at the time. His fellow-Militant Dave Nellist won Spectator Backbencher of the Year. Mildred Gordon was an MP while the widow of a leading American Trotskyist and the wife of Trotsky’s bodyguard, who as her husband presumably held a House of Commons pass.

None of this is to condone any of those positions or factions. For example, the Communist Party could be violently anti-Catholic in the Scottish coalfields. There was also more than a touch of that, motivated in no small part by the Catholic backgrounds of many of the participants, to the activities of the Militant Tendency on Merseyside, and perhaps also in certain parts of London in those days.

But all of it does provide some context.

Not least, it provides some context to the most uncritically spook-dependent British Government of all time, which came to power in 1997. That Government was both laden with, and surrounded by, veterans of extreme left-wing organisations. Of course those veterans did whatever the intelligence services told them. They were the intelligence services.

The Marxism Today for which Tony Blair wrote is long gone. He was the only politician at the founding meeting of Demos. But Demos is now chaired by David Goodhart, a stalwart attendee and speaker at Blue Labour events.

Formally, the Communist Party became the proto-Blairite Democratic Left, which became the ultra-Blairite New Politics Network, which became Unlock Democracy, which is still there, in a building bought thanks to the largesse of Lenin. Still there, but directed by a Liberal Democrat.

Unfortunately, however, the spirit of Jimmy Anderson and Major Harry Truscott remains very much a feature of the present age. There is a party for which hardly anyone else still votes, and which is led by the Prime Minister. There is another party, now complete with a member of a House of Commons, with absolutely no one else in it, or even so much as voting for it.

Some of them believe that both the Sino-Soviet Split and the fall of the Soviet Union were faked. Many of them believe that the KGB murdered Hugh Gaitskell in order to install Harold Wilson. All of them believe that Wilson was a Soviet agent. They really, truly, honestly believe these things.

They are convinced that Scargill was trying to stage a Red Revolution on the 1917 model, and that Gormley had more or less done so in 1974. It never occurs to them that the Heath Government, which in any case they profess to despise, was “toppled” by nothing other than the votes of the electorate, four years after that same process had installed that Government.

The theory of the Great Red Peril, including The Enemy Within, continues to be propounded, but tellingly by people who for the most part are not employed by academic institutions. The same was true of that theory at the time. As it also was, and very largely still is, of the economic theories to which Thatcher, who was as illiterate economically as she was historically and geopolitically, was so attached.

Across the full range of her agenda, the intellectual guiding lights hated the Conservative Party, not least when they were nominally members of it. They had no roots in it; nor had she. Not uncommonly, they had Marxist roots instead.

The Conservative Party hated them back, which led it to hate her, until eventually it became the only organisation ever to succeed in getting rid of her. She then spent 15 years a joke figure, and just under another decade as one of those extremely old people who are only waiting for the end.

But even during her Premiership, it was not as if there were no ties to the Soviet Bloc. Very soon after Polish miners had been gunned down, the Thatcher Government was importing coal from Poland to order to assist in breaking the Strike.

On the other side of the Sino-Soviet Split, Thatcher fully deserved her designation by Red Star as “The Peking Plotter”. She never saw a Maoist whom she did not like. She installed Mugabe, having refused any other settlement, and she even arranged a knighthood for him. Then there was Ceaușescu. Then there was Pol Pot. When Nelson Mandela died, her flame-keepers could be heard criticising him and his for their criticism, in turn, of Steve Biko.

We ought to be governed by people who understand all of this. But we are not.

Sex Wars, Class Wars and Age Wars, by David Lindsay

The criminal justice system itself seems to have very little confidence in Ched Evans’s conviction, which it clearly regards as a noisy embarrassment that it wishes would go away. Look at the evidence.

Evans was released on license after having served half his time. That was despite the fact that his supporters maintained a website that did not merely protest his innocence, but offered a £10,000 reward for evidence against his accuser. Immediately upon his release, not only did the Criminal Cases Review Commission fast-track his case, but it publicly announced that it had done so.

Of the fully 10 people who have ever been prosecuted for naming the victim, nine were not even fined, but were merely ordered to pay £624 plus costs, while the tenth’s combination of that, a nominal fine, and a victim surcharge of a whopping £15, came to a grand total of not much more than £1600.

At the time of writing, the action against the website for contempt of court has been due “within weeks” in the way that Iran has been “two years away from a nuclear bomb” for well over 10 times that long.

That football clubs have considered signing Evans can only mean that the Probation Service regards him as posing as near as it is permitted to say to no risk whatever. The powers that be pay more attention than that to some people who have been acquitted, or never charged, or never arrested.

Or are we seriously expected to believe that a Probation Officer might ever have been deputed to follow Evans and his teammates around the country as a kind of valet, a footballers’ footman, not so much Falstaff’s page as Prince Hal’s, undoubtedly fetching the drinks, quite conceivably cleaning the boots, and not unimaginably arranging the “birds”? There you are, then.

Evans maintains his innocence and is appealing, as is anyone’s right. Whichever way that goes, his case will almost certainly place others like it, with no forensic evidence but with non-consent presupposed under Harman’s Law, in a category similar to that of foxhunting: rarely brought before the courts, even then mostly privately by a charity that happened to be as rich as Croesus (although what would fulfil the role of the RSPCA here?), hardly ever resulting in a conviction, and subject to sentences all the way down to absolute discharge.

The Parole Board, the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Probation Service manifestly want that to happen. As is the view of the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service where hunting is concerned, they have better things to do than chase after people who, leaving aside whether or not their actions were unpleasant or just plain weird, had the misfortune to be criminalised as politically distasteful by the weirdo Blair Government that feels far longer ago than it was.

Nevertheless, Evans is a convicted man, and he is free only on license. He has not completed his sentence. Therefore, it might have been better if he had not found work until after that completion. That, however, is a call for him to be dependent on State benefits.

The acts that he does not dispute are morally reprehensible enough, and the attitude of his girlfriend’s father is a most discombobulating insight into an entirely different world. But of course footballers are not role models. Who, exactly, models his off-pitch behaviour on them?

When the younger male fans of Oldham Athletic had followed those of Sheffield United in not committing anything remotely resembling either the disputed or the undisputed acts of their supposed idol, then football itself would have had to have confronted the fact that its practitioners simply were not national figures, or moral bastions, or “cultural icons”, or even persons of the slightest especial importance.

Feminists used to challenge the cultural priority of football. That priority arose entirely out of the process in the 1990s whereby the game was changed from a working-class pursuit into one in which chavs performed like monkeys for posh boys. But now, it is scarcely, if at all, an exaggeration to say that British feminism could not survive the upholding of Evans’s appeal.

Tens of thousands of people have been enticed into the utterly undemanding act of signing online petitions. Petitioning is in itself an integral part of the democratic process, rather than any sort of “mob rule”. But these petitions have presupposed the earth-shattering importance of this person and of his doings. Imagine if that amount of energy had been diverted into something that really mattered. As, not very long ago, feminists would once have said.

Everything about Ched Evans is repulsive. As for his fiancée’s father, Karl Massey, he is the kind of patriarch that gives patriarchy a bad name, almost making Margaret Thatcher look good for having dismantled its economic basis except in the very richest sections of society.

If all fathers of daughters were like Massey, then the human race would become extinct. He is far too concerned with being his future son-in-law’s best mate, a position already filled by the delightful Clayton McDonald, Evans’s acquitted co-defendant.

Natasha Massey is her own woman, young, attractive, from a monied background, and doubtless well-schooled at her father’s expense. It is hardly as if she could do no better than a man who, by his own admission, booked hotel rooms in which to have sex with strangers. But if even her dad is not going to tell her that, then what hope is there?

Yet it is not as if Evans’s detractors are any more sympathetic than his defenders. At best, they are possessed of a breathtaking sense of their own entitlement. At worst, they have been issuing their own threats of rape and other violence.

There is an obvious campaign to say the word “paedophile” as often as possible in relation to this case of sex between a 19-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man. That 19-year-old woman is always called “a young girl”. Ordinarily, feminist opinion would rightly be outraged at the description of an adult woman as a “girl”.

All in all, Evans is being turned into a most unworthy Dreyfus. But who or what are the Dreyfusards, and who or what are the anti-Dreyfusards? This mere footballer, and this fundamentally bad man, is being held up as the hero of a resurgent, especially male, working class.

Yet if all the anti-Dreyfusards really were to be cast out of public discourse at some point in the next year or two, then would their places be taken by the working-class men who are so strikingly underrepresented in the media and among those politicians whose existence the media acknowledge? Of course not.

Working-class women are even more underrepresented in the media, and are very underrepresented indeed in politics, rather than merely being found among those 19 out of 20 MPs whose existence the commentators choose to ignore. There are still quite a lot of working-class men among those 19.

Whereas there are now barely any working-class women in Parliament, or anywhere else in politics. Grandes dames of what was once Fleet Street, what do you have to say about that? Or about the distinct paucity of working-class women among your own colleagues?

Rather than News in Briefs, might The Sun consider running an opinion column by a working-class woman? For that matter, how about an opinion column by a working-class woman in any of the newspapers, or on any of the websites, that campaigned against Page 3? And will those women commentators who are defending Page 3 be adorning their future copy with topless photographs of themselves?

It is the class thing that is striking when one compares the calls for Evans to be denied at least prominent or well-remunerated (indeed, I am the first to say, obscenely overpaid) employment over something that had nothing to with football, with the warm welcome back that is simultaneously being extended by journalism itself to the privately schooled plagiarist and fabricator, Johann Hari.

City types whose incompetence or outright criminality has brought ruin to vast numbers of people, while sending the bill to each and every one of us, are rarely dismissed in the first place, and see their incomes continue to rise exponentially. David Laws is back attending Cabinet.

Does anyone seriously doubt that there is or has been an element of sexual violence to the Bullingdon Club? And not of the kind that the victim does not remember. At the very least, that Club exists to commit criminal damage and assault. What if a group of young men on a council estate, the same age as Oxford undergraduates, organised themselves into such a club, complete with a uniform? What say the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Mayor of London?

Tony Blair continues to make what he and his sycophants clearly assume will be received as significant political interventions. It bears its frequent repetition that Blair is, of all things, a Middle East Peace Envoy. None of the writers and broadcasters who cheered on the Iraq War, all of them safely upper-middle-class or above, has ever suffered the slightest adverse effect of that catastrophic misjudgement. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Until his retirement, Judge John MacMillan, who had used the n-word in order to brand black people lazy in the course of his work as an Employment Tribunal judge, and who had been found to be biased against plaintiffs, was permitted to continue to sit without even having to notify the sides in cases subsequent to his double disgrace.

Plummy commentators airily suggest that Evans become a bricklayer, or a painter and decorator, as if lower moral standards were only to be expected in such walks of life, and as if it were possible to walk straight into those trades, which in reality take years to learn.

Some lightning rod for all of these and similar concerns has been necessary throughout the present century. But even if his appeal is upheld, the pity, the tragedy, the shame will be that that will have to had to have been the disgusting Ched Evans. One and all, J’accuse.

Sticking to the undisputed facts, Evans had sex while being watched by his brother. His brother! Vile. Just vile. Yet this case, that of a 16-year-old whom a woman judge accused of “grooming” her 44-year-old teacher, and the coming into effect of the new law in Northern Ireland criminalising the purchase of sex, provide an opportunity to tidy up the shambolic law on sexual offences.

First, the age of consent should effectively be raised to 18, by making it a criminal offence for anyone to commit any sexual act with or upon any person under that age who was more than two years younger than herself, or to incite any such person to commit any such act with or upon her or any third party anywhere in the world. The maximum sentence would be twice the difference in age, to the month where that was less than three years, or a life sentence where that difference was at least five years.

Either the age of consent is 16, or it is not. If it is, then teacher-pupil activity above that age is the height of unprofessionalism, but it is not properly a matter for the criminal law. That is one of the many very good reasons why the age of consent ought, with the caveats set out here, to be raised to 18, even granted that many of us were born in September, and indeed that very many people indeed were born such that their legal majority will be attained in the first term of what will soon be the compulsory Upper Sixth.

No different rules for “positions of trust”, which are being used against male, but not female, 18-year-olds looking after female, but not male, Sixth Formers visiting universities. And no provision, as at present, for boys to be prosecuted at any age, even if they are younger than the girls involved, whereas girls have to be 16.

At least unless they decided as adults to seek to make contact with their children, the sometimes enforced financial liability of male victims for pregnancies resulting from their sexual abuse ought also to be ruled out. How’s that for victim-blaming?

Secondly, it ought to be made a criminal offence for anyone aged 18 or over, or possibly only anyone aged 21 or over, to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. No persecution of girls whose lives have already been so bad that they have become prostitutes. No witch-hunting of boys desperate to lose their virginities. But the treatment of women and men as moral, intellectual and legal equals.

Thirdly, the replacement of the offences of rape, serious sexual assault, and sexual assault, with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, enabling the sentences to be doubled. The sex of either party would be immaterial. There must be no anonymity either for adult accusers or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. There must be no suggestion, in this or in any other area, of any reversal of the burden of proof.

And fourthly, the definition of obscenity as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal, or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts. Sentencing would be the same as for the illegal act in question in each case.

Far from American-style legislation requiring universities to apply internally administered “balance of probabilities” or “preponderance of evidence” tests to sexual assault allegations, such policies must be banned by Statute. It is incompatible with the Rule of Law to punish someone for a criminal offence of which he has not been convicted.

As for demands for various things to be taught in schools, how is that curriculum time currently being filled? Apply the Eton Test. Would this be taught in a school that assumed its pupils to be future Prime Ministers or Nobel Laureates? If not, then instead fill the hours with something that is. Teach Latin. For, be in no doubt, someone else will. And the people who did one will be able to distinguish themselves from the people who did the other.

Evans’s leading antagonist, Jean Hatchet (pseudonymity is a grand old literary tradition), professes to be astonished at the existence of a subculture in which the behaviour that Evans admits is routine. In that case, she ought not to be commenting on such matters in the United Kingdom of the present age, since she knows absolutely nothing about them. I do not like that behaviour, either. But it is not news to me.

On her blog, in response to provocation, Hatchet gives vent to her hatred of those who are, “often acne-ridden, but scrubbed, hair product well-applied, cheesy grin liberally spread, arms around identikit mates. In football kits or the default polo shirt. Well-pressed by their mum no doubt.”

Those are the main victims both of violent crime, and of low-level harassment such as being arbitrarily stopped by the Police or not allowed into places. They are objects of constant media ridicule; realistic depiction of their lives, or even the playing of them by actors their own age, does not exist. They are universally assumed to have little intellectual and no emotional life. They are not even allowed to join their fleeing mothers in such women’s refuges as have survived this wretched Government, with no one caring if they then have to go back to violent homes or sleep on the streets.

Ask those acne-ridden, cheesy-grinning identikits how “privileged” they feel. But rather less can be done about the Hatchet attitude to them, which when expressed institutionally can lead to their deaths, than can be done about the foregoing. And sadly, rather less can also be done about people who have sex while being watched by their siblings. Vile. Just vile.

Not that most young males “in football kits or the default polo shirt” have sex filmed by their brothers. They admire, and they seek to emulate, Ched Evans as a footballer. They do not model their sexual conduct on his. Give them some credit. Or else admit that you agree with everything that Hatchet embodies when she describes them as “identikit”. No identity, just identikit. No individuality. No personality. No humanity.

Fit to be blown to pieces for absolutely nothing in whatever comes after the faux-feminist (and, in those terms, utterly unsuccessful) war in Afghanistan, and after the actively anti-feminist war in Iraq, which replaced a regime that had won United Nations awards for girls’ education with a regime that was and is most unlikely ever to do so.

Their acne, their grinning faces and their over-styled hair look a lot worse when their bodies, which feminists presume to define and control, are beaten up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no one cares. Or are blown to smithereens on a battlefield, for no good reason whatever.

Or freeze on the streets, because they are not permitted to join their mothers in the few women’s refuges that this wicked Government has left open. Or are therefore beaten or killed by the violent men whom those mothers were fleeing. Or are driven to suicide by the discriminatory enforcement of the age of consent laws.

Across the board, the owners, the only owners, of those bodies are far more likely than their sisters to be arrested for, charged with, prosecuted for or convicted of the same offences, and to receive vastly more severe sentences upon conviction.

If a boy, even if he were well under 16, engaged in anything approaching the behaviour for which a 16-year-old girl has despicably been accused of “grooming” her teacher, then he would get himself at least a Police caution for stalking, and he would thus find it difficult to secure employment for the rest of his life.

None of this is about how well these boys are doing at school, or about how much money their families have. Those are immensely important issues. But they are not these issues. These problems apply across the board. Nor is there any suggestion that any of this negates or belittles feminist grievances. Do, for example, racial injustices negate or belittle those against women?

Football, for which I have no love (unlike Hatchet), but the young male support for which now transcends all class distinctions, so that one wonders what a lot of posh fathers and grandfathers must think; video games, which I have honestly never understood; and Internet pornography, and the drink-fuelled sexual culture exemplified by Ched Evans, both of which I profoundly despise: these are rapidly becoming the only places where young males run at least relatively little risk of being arrested or assaulted for existing at all, if they are so much as let in.

Yet how pro-male is Internet pornography? I admit that my knowledge of it derives from its feminist and Christian critics, although I make no apology for that. I am 37, so I am of the generation that doubtless dodged a bullet in being slightly too old for it to have been our introduction to the female form.

But at least according to those critics, this material often does not depict the faces of the male participants, who, moreover, are paid less than the female ones. They are just penises, in the way that they are just trigger fingers, just cannon fodder, just “acne-ridden cheesy grins”, just “identikit”.

Likewise, a lot of video games seem to revolve around killing as many other “identikit” men as possible. Strippers and prostitutes, too. But mostly other men.

The most vicious misogyny is often produced by, and very successfully marketed to, women. Even allowing for the importance of recognising that the viewers are perfectly capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality, something similar seems to apply to these two popular cultural phenomena of our age.

By coming after the “drunken sex at weekends” culture while also appearing to come after football, the Evans case has actually or apparently come after fully half of the things from which perhaps the male half of an entire generation still experiences any kind of welcome. Some repetition is in order, the better to reinforce this point.

They are beaten up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no one cares. They are blown to smithereens on battlefields, for no good reason whatever. They freeze on the streets, because they are not permitted to join their mothers in the few remaining women’s refuges. Or they are therefore beaten or killed at home.

They are driven to suicide by the discriminatory enforcement of the age of consent laws. They are far more likely than their sisters to be arrested for, charged with, prosecuted for or convicted of the same offences, and to receive vastly more severe sentences upon conviction.

They need only have a row with a girlfriend, or follow a girl home, or ask a girl out, in order to be given at least a Police caution for stalking, and thus find it difficult to secure employment for the rest of their lives.

Their genitals have been mutilated in infancy on an industrial scale, often at public expense, which is to say, as an act of the State; the BBC Three programme Free Speech recently refused to permit any discussion of this subject when its youthful audience voted heavily for such on the website provided.

They hear, and they join in, the global outcry when Boko Haram kidnaps girls who could be their sisters or their classmates. But they also hear the deafening silence when Boko Haram simply takes machetes to those girls’ brothers and male classmates, or the gales of derision on Twitter whenever anyone does report that fact.

They saw the recent viral video of little boys who agreed to kiss and caress a slightly older girl, although it must be said that none of them bothered to ask her first, but who then refused to hit her. Girls instructed to kiss and caress a boy would probably refuse, which would be up to them. But instructed to hit him, they would go right ahead, and they would be cheered from one end of the Internet to the other. Boys know that.

From a very early age, they are harangued about how their bodies are supposed to work by people who do not have male bodies and who have often had barely any contact with male bodies, although undeniably having had extremely negative experiences of such contact when it has occurred. They are financially liable for pregnancies that result when they have been sexually abused.

It is widely assumed that they cannot be sexually assaulted by women or girls. Well, a decade or so ago, when I was on supply in far from the worst school to which I was ever posted, I directly witnessed a group of girls aged about 13 or 14 sexually assaulting a male classmate with whose girlfriend they had had an altercation. Their punishment of her was to do that to him.

He was extremely distressed, although there is very little that a supply can do, even if, on reflection, I ought to have called the Police and let the heavens fall. No one in authority cared, and the Head of Year did not even recognise the boy’s name. There seemed to be no suggestion that this event was particularly noteworthy. But, if anything, I suspect that it would be more common now than it was then.

Set in this context, the campaign against Ched Evans has been the last straw. In view of Oldham Athletic’s previous contract with Lee Hughes, he is now demonstrably less employable than a convicted killer. How did that happen?

Evans was charged on the basis of what we should all identify as entrapment techniques if they were to be employed in many another country. He was convicted on no evidence except that his accuser could not remember anything, including the sex that she only knew that she had had because Evans and McDonald had said so.

He was thus convicted against the only other testimony, that of a co-defendant who was acquitted and who remembered everything; we now have Sharia Law in reverse, with the testimony of one (drunken) woman overriding that of two (relatively sober) men. He was refused leave to appeal.

He was convicted of a singularly stigmatised offence with which only a male can be charged, and the law of which was drastically altered in the High Harman Era significantly to the detriment of the presumption of innocence, with further changes now proposed so that those alleging rape will be placed at a very considerable advantage in the cross-examination process.

Although the ever-compliant Parliament of Blair’s pomp must bear a great deal of responsibility for characteristically waiving this through, locking up half the young male population would not bother those who were behind it. Especially if it were the half from such places as Sheffield, Oldham and Rhyl, that was what they wanted. That is still what they want.

This clash has been coming for years. Now, it is here.

Deliberately Misleading, Or Just Technically Incompetent?, by Mark Chapman

Without any sense of irony, David Cameron came back from a march in Paris which was ostensibly about claiming freedom and made a speech saying that he wanted to remove everyone’s online freedom. 

Specifically he announced that he wanted to ‘remove the safe spaces online which terrorists currently use’, and that there should be ‘no form of communication which we [the Government/Police] cannot read’.

Let us leave to one side for a moment the fact that France has an even greater level of state surveillance than the UK currently has, and that the ‘failure’ (if any) of security services in not stopping the Charlie Hebdo murders was one in not following up or continuing on already known leads.

Let us instead just think for a moment about what it would mean for there to be ‘no form of communication which we cannot read’.

That is that any message from one person to another, in any form, must be able to be recorded, stored, and read by someone working for the Government.

That in itself is a very disturbing concept for anyone with a concern for civil liberties and the awareness of Government to overreach once it has such all-encompassing powers.

However, it is perhaps the more technical aspect that is more telling.

Taking the (reasonable, but unsaid) assumption that we are talking about online and digitally, there are fundamentally two ways for this to happen.

Either all communication is unencrypted, in which case it is effectively public, for anyone who intercepts it can read it.

Or the Government is able to read encrypted messages, which means the Government having the ability to either break codes, or access ‘back-door vulnerabilities’.

In asking for this ability, what David Cameron appears to have totally missed is both the critical importance that encryption plays in our lives today, as well as the ubiquitous nature of it.

The ability to send secure (i.e. encrypted) communications online is the bedrock of so much that we do online.

When ordering goods and paying for them online, we use encryption to ensure that our credit card details are only given to the vendor, and not anyone who is able to intercept that message.

Similarly, when banking online and sending our account details and payment instructions, encryption is critical to the security of those communications.

Is the Government really saying that they want the ability to intercept all our online shopping details?

he ability to encrypt, and correspondingly decrypt, messages and communications easily has been one of the major drivers behind the digital revolution over the last 15 years.

Does the Government really want us to go back to a pre-internet world?

Even more ridiculously, does Cameron suddenly expect international companies which provide global messaging services (be that Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, or just humble old email) suddenly to acquiesce to UK Government regulation to remove encryption?

Companies such as this would just refuse to provide services to the UK and continue in the rest of the world. That highlights the pointlessness of any legislation.

Just because something is illegal, doesn’t stop it from being possible.

Secure, encrypted email takes less than 10 minutes to setup on a mobile phone. It is here to stay, however much the Government might not like it.

Given the utter futility and pointlessness of any legislation, Cameron must know the pointlessness of what he is suggesting.

But he is using the situation to make an election pitch for authoritarian votes at the upcoming election.

In this case, he is deliberately misleading people as to what is or is not possible, and doing so purely for perceived electoral gain. 

Alternatively, he genuinely believes that what he is suggesting is feasible and that it would have no consequences.

That is even scarier as it shows a total lack of understanding of even the most basic of digital services and highlights the catastrophic consequences of legislating from a position of such ignorance.

In conclusion, this highlights the desperate need for us to have politicians of principle who are digitally aware and technically savvy.

Either way, David Cameron has just ruled himself out.

Mark Chapman is the Pirate Party’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Vauxhall.

A Most Unworthy Dreyfus, by David Lindsay

Of the Iran-Iraq War, Henry Kissinger probably never did say that it was a pity that only one of them could lose. But someone first used that line about something. I salute whoever that was. I find the saying to be of at least weekly utility.

Everything about Ched Evans is repulsive. As for Karl Massey, he is the kind of patriarch that gives patriarchy a bad name, almost making Margaret Thatcher look good for having dismantled its economic basis except in the very richest sections of society.

Natasha Massey is her own woman, young, attractive, from a monied background, and doubtless well-schooled at her father's expense. It is hardly as if she could do no better than a man who, by his own admission, booked hotel rooms in which to have sex with strangers. But if even her dad is not going to tell her that, then what hope is there?

That Evans's case is before the Criminal Cases Review Commission can only be because of the emergence of what his legal team submits is new evidence. It cannot be based purely on the evidence heard at his original trial, because that is not how the Criminal Cases Review Commission works. In view of that ongoing process, comments on this article will be closed.

Yet it is not as if Evans's detractors are any more sympathetic than his defenders. At best, they are possessed on an astonishing sense of their own entitlement. At worst, they have been issuing their own threats of rape and other violence against the relatives of those who might happen to get in their way.

Exemplified by The Guardian's Hadley Freeman on Woman's Hour earlier this week, there is an obvious campaign to say the word "paedophile" as often as possible in relation to this case of sex between a 19-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man.

Even by the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine in discussion with Freeman, that 19-year-old woman is always called "a young girl" of whom, even by his own account, that 22-year-old man "took advantage". Ordinarily, feminist opinion would rightly be outraged at the description of an adult woman as a "girl".

All in all, Evans is being turned into a most unworthy Dreyfus. Should his appeal be upheld, then it seems quite possible that British feminist academia and journalism might never recover, so much has been invested in vilifying him quite beyond his undeniably just desserts.

But who or what are the Dreyfusards, and who or what are the anti-Dreyfusards?

It is impossible to believe today's Guardian's implication that the only people in Oldham who could be found to defend the hiring of Evans were men who were willing to be named, while the only people who could be found to oppose it were women who were not willing to be named. That was not what Twitter looked like. That was not what Question Time, both the panel and the audience, looked like.

Rather, this mere footballer, and this fundamentally bad man, is being held up as the hero of a resurgent, especially male, working class.

But if all the anti-Dreyfusards really were to be cast out of public discourse at some point in the next year or two, then would their places in it be taken by the working-class men who are so strikingly underrepresented in the media and among those politicians whose existence the media acknowledge? Of course not.

It must be added that working-class women are even more underrepresented in the media, and are very underrepresented indeed in politics, rather than merely being found among those 19 out of 20 MPs whose existence the commentators choose to ignore.

There are still quite a lot of working-class men among those 19. There are now barely any working-class women in Parliament, or anywhere else in politics.

Grandes dames of what was once Fleet Street, what do you have to say about that? Or about the distinct paucity of working-class women among your own colleagues, something about which you could do a very great deal more, if you had a mind to?

It is the class thing that is striking when one compares the calls for Evans to be denied at least prominent or well-remunerated (indeed, I am the first to say, obscenely overpaid) employment over something that had nothing to with football, with the warm welcome back that is simultaneously being extended by journalism itself to the privately schooled plagiarist and fabricator, Johann Hari.

City types whose incompetence or outright criminality has brought ruin to vast numbers of people, while sending the bill to each and every one of us, are rarely dismissed in the first place, and see their incomes continue to rise exponentially.

Tony Blair continues to make what he and his sycophants clearly assume will be received, and will be entitled to be received, as significant political interventions. It bears its frequent repetition that Blair is, of all things, a Middle East Peace Envoy.

None of the writers and broadcasters who cheered on the Iraq War, all of them safely upper-middle-class or above, has ever suffered the slightest adverse effect of that catastrophic misjudgement. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Until his retirement, Judge John MacMillan, who had used the n-word in order to brand black people lazy in the course of his work as an Employment Tribunal judge, and who had been found to be biased against plaintiffs, was permitted to continue to sit without even having to notify the sides in cases subsequent to his double disgrace.

And so it goes on.

Some lightning rod for all of these and similar concerns has been necessary throughout the present century. But even if his appeal is upheld, the pity, the tragedy, the shame will be that that will have to had to have been the disgusting Ched Evans.

One and all, J'accuse.

The NHS Will Now Have To Pick Up The Pieces, by Louise Irvine

The withdrawal of Circle just 3 years into its controversial 10-year contract to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital is exactly what we warned and predicted would happen and illustrates the folly of private sector involvement in our NHS.

When the going gets tough, the private sector gets going – dumping patients and leaving the NHS to foot the bill and clear up the mess. 

Not only was Circle making a financial mess of running Hinchingbrooke but it was putting patients, including children at risk.

The Care Quality Commission has released an explosive report revealing the hospital is unsafe, uncaring and poorly-led.

It’s no coincidence that privately-run Hinchingbrooke is the first ever hospital to be rated inadequate for caring and placed in special measures.

These damning CQC findings about Hinchingbrooke should sound the death-knell for creeping NHS privatisation.

It’s also revealing to look at the language used by Circle in its earlier announcement about withdrawing from its contract, saying the franchise is “unsustainable”.

This perfectly illustrates the difference between the private sector, which seeks profits, and public NHS trusts which prioritise patient care and don’t walk away from patients when they realise they can’t make money from them.

This shows exactly why the market has no place in healthcare. The privatisation experiment has lamentably failed.

The NHS will now have to pick up the pieces. This contract should not go back out to tender, but should go straight back to the NHS.

Circle says “the playing field has changed”. It’s interesting and somewhat ironic that the reasons cited by Circle are increased pressure on A&E, insufficient funding and lack of beds for patients waiting to be discharged.

Welcome to the world of all NHS hospitals, struggling with these very problems created by the policies of this government.

The successful PR campaign claiming to have “transformed” the hospital masked a continuous failure to meet financial targets — and as a result meant not a penny of profit to Circle.

But Circle can just walk away from this mess as a get-out clause is triggered once it has put in £5 million of its own money, although it still has to pay another £2m to exit the contract.

And behind the PR statements about Hinchingbrooke being a shining example of excellent patient care, the reality is very different.

A recent letter from the CQC following a preliminary inspection listed a whole catalogue of failings, from emotionally abusive patient care to poor medical practice. It also highlighted a blame culture making it hard for staff to raise concerns.

The company refused to meet staff unions, and has been found it hard to recruit or retain sufficient staff — pushing up spending on agency staff.

Circle’s management of ​Hinchingbrooke had been feted by government and media as a shin​ing example of ​how the private sector could improve on the NHS.

But now, it has been shown to be shiny on the outside, yet hollow on the inside.

Dr Louise Irvine is standing for the National Health Action Party against Jeremy Hunt in the general election in South West Surrey​.​