WHERE AM I ?

I nicked this piece from Peter Hitchens,

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

It is still just possible to imagine that this is a normal country, if you don't pay too much attention.

But the story of the couple who were spied on in case they were cheating to get their child into a popular school shows just how strange and alien Britain has become.

Usually when I say I feel I am living in a foreign land, my enemies accuse me of making some veiled remark about immigration. But that's not what I mean at all.

Immigration is a problem, sure enough, but if I want to talk about it, I'll make it clear that's what I'm doing. I'm not ashamed of being against mass immigration on its current absurd scale.

I feel no need to disguise my views.

What bothers me just as much is the sense of being transported, when I wasn't looking, into a very bad dream from which there is no waking up.

When exactly did it happen? When did my town hall change from being a friendly, efficient place into a headquarters of fussy political correctness where I feel like an unwanted interloper?

When did the BBC news become a shameless propaganda show, instead of a discreet one?

When did my GP surgery start asking me for my ethnic origin? Worse, when did they start treating parents as guilty suspects if they bring a child into hospital after a fall?

When did it become impossible ever to speak to anyone who will take responsibility for anything?

When did I start getting the feeling, as one of these episodes begins, that there is absolutely no point in complaining or resisting, because if I don't accept this, sooner or later, 'security' is going to be called and I will be worse off than I was before.

It was not always like this. I know it wasn't. I can remember when it wasn't. What I cannot remember is, at any stage, asking for the changes that have happened, or being asked if I wanted them.

They just happened, and now they're here.

And, while there will be some outrage in the newspapers about the spying episode – since newspapers are one of the last places where common sense survives – nothing will change.

Other couples will be spied on in the same way, under the same law, which will not be changed.

So let us look at this case and see why it happened. First of all, the spying. Authority is immensely powerful in this country now.

It has hidden itself in a tangle of quangos and interlocking authorities, effectively nationalised and often Europeanised, too, run by people whose names we can never find out.

There's no scrutiny. The main political parties are dead things, job creation schemes for people who couldn't make it anywhere else, where independence is punished.

The law is beyond the reach of most of us, unless we want to use ambulance-chasing lawyers to make grotesque claims for damages.

Then there's the question of the school. Everyone knows that the official propaganda about education is a lie. We do not have a comprehensive school system, as we pretend, but a viciously unequal selective system which fails hundreds of thousands of children from the beginning.

Selection is done by money and influence. And people try to cheat, by singing hymns and saying prayers they don't believe, by renting flats in catchment areas or lying about their circumstances.

Replacing this with a just system based on merit is ruled to be 'politically impossible' and 'cruel' – so the unfairness has to be maintained, and policed by snooping.
This has happened for years. I know of head teachers who have done it personally.

If only they'd realised that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act allowed them to use taxpayers' money to stake out people's homes and follow them about.

So there it is. Lies, unaccountable authority and the seeds of a secret police force – checking today on school catchment areas, and tomorrow on what? One thing's for sure. You'll find out too late.

Charlton knew it: The bad guys will always have guns

Charlton Heston was a good and decent man, as well as a fine actor and a brave one, who did his own stunts.

Some people can't work out how the same person courageously went on civil rights demonstrations long before it was fashionable, and equally courageously opposed the authoritarian, futile silliness of 'gun control' when that cause wasn't fashionable either.

The two things are completely linked. Both are causes of liberty and justice, and both got him into trouble with received opinion.

Gun control, much imposed by dictatorships, restricts gun ownership to the State, to criminals and (in this country) certain officially approved terrorists.

It bans law-abiding people from defending themselves, even where the State is not doing its job.

As Mafia turncoat Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano once said: "Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters.

"I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun.'

Boys in blue, but not ours

Funny, in a way, to see China taking over from the USA as the world's most-protested-against country.

Peking will be a lot less relaxed than Washington about having its flag burned all over the place, but it is a sign of being a real superpower.

So expect more men in blue tracksuits who, by the way, were not the first example of an aggressive approach to protecting China's fragile image abroad.

In 1999, British police took placards from demonstrators during a State visit by Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

They later admitted they were wrong, to avoid court action. That's why they couldn't use quite such heavy-handed tactics to protect the Olympic flame, and presumably that was why the Chinese supplied the mysterious tracksuited men.

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Amazingly fast, the world we knew is slipping away from us. Britain's seat on the UN Security Council – and so its veto – is now under direct threat.

I wonder how long it will be before serious moves are made to indict Anthony Blair for war crimes – it is only leaders of weak nations who need to face this sort of thing.

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TV executives tell me that no mainstream channel can now show old episodes of The Sweeney because they are considered too violent. Interesting how tastes change.

Last week the BBC's supposedly gentle, quirky comedy Love Soup showed a suicide in which a woman's body thudded into the pavement and oozed blood and, shortly afterwards, a scene in which a dog has sex with a woman.

When did the taboos against such things dissolve, exactly?

How come this seriously strange programme has one of the most enviable slots on licence-funded terrestrial TV?

Still, at least we know that the central character, played by Tamsin Greig, is an OK person because she is shown reading The Guardian on her day off from her job as boss of a cosmetics counter.

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A jury of adults, after listening to great mounds of evidence that Princess Diana died in a car accident, concludes that it was 'unlawful killing'.

With this level of stupidity stalking the country, how much longer can democracy survive?