PETER HITCHENS: Militants who turned out town halls in concrete corridors of mediocrity
I expect dozens of councils will soon go bankrupt like Birmingham. Councils in general spend so much on propaganda, pensions, redundancy payments to people they then rehire, rainbow flags and on pursuing an agenda of cultural, moral and social revolution that it is amazing any of them are still solvent.
In their concrete corridors of mediocrity, thousands of fanatics and zealots turned out by our alleged universities thrive and rule.
Apart from state schools, there is probably no more dense concentration of all the daft ideas that have taken over our country in the last half-century. Though the organisation formerly known as ‘The Police’ must come a close third.
How did it all happen? Well, partly it was the smashing of the state grammar schools (and their Scottish equivalents) in the 1960s, and the end of proper education. Very soon afterwards, a growing number of people literally did not know what seven fives were, or where Africa was, or anything else much.
But it was also thanks to a revolution in local government which few now remember. It wasn’t just that, in an act of revolutionary spite, all the familiar old counties were messed around with and moved about. I recall, almost 50 years ago, on my first local newspaper, watching the old borough council wound up and replaced by some new body with an invented name.
I know some of them do their best, but these days hardly anyone knows who local councillors are, and that is why MPs are now besieged with the small-scale nagging drainpipe and neighbour problems, writes PETER HITCHENS
Robbed of any real democratic link with the people, walled-in by growing bureaucracy, increasingly reliant on central Government handouts, town and county halls became a playground for militants, show-offs, ambitious baby politicians and spendthrifts
Instead of a frowning and hard-to-please town clerk in a spartan Edwardian office with brown lino on the floor, it had a smiling ‘chief executive’ with efficient, glinting spectacles and a flashy modern desk in a carpeted suite.
Nobody knew any more who was responsible for what. If you asked the District Council to fix a pothole or exterminate some rats, they referred you to the County Council, and vice versa. Local councillors and aldermen, once long-serving if pompous persons well-known in their neighbourhoods, faded away. They were replaced by the usual party placemen and placewomen.
I know some of them do their best, but these days hardly anyone knows who local councillors are, and that is why MPs are now besieged with the small-scale nagging drainpipe and neighbour problems which councillors used to deal with, and which really aren’t Parliament’s job. How can councils be accountable if voters don’t know who they are and what they do?
Robbed of any real democratic link with the people, walled-in by growing bureaucracy, increasingly reliant on central Government handouts, town and county halls became a playground for militants, show-offs, ambitious baby politicians and spendthrifts.
So here we are. I am sure a lot of people knew it was foolish when we messed it up, just as many knew it was stupid to rip up the railways, destroy the grammar schools, take the police off the streets, make it easier to divorce than to get out of a car lease, legalise pornography, build almost everything with concrete, join the Common Market and put the BBC in the hands of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, a sort of Chairman Mao of the airwaves. But it seemed unstoppable at the time, as if someone had put something in the water. Why are bad ideas so successful? Why is it so hard, if not actually impossible, to undo them?
Bond’s no Dalai Lama…he can’t be reincarnated for the Sir Keir age
By my calculations, James Bond, the fabled 007, is now at least 102 years old. Ian Fleming never actually revealed his date of birth, but when Charlie Higson wrote a series of books about Bond the Etonian teenager, he settled on 1920.
So his continued existence as a granite-fisted superfit agent of MI6 (in books if not in the movies, where he is apparently dead) is obviously a testimony to a diet of caviar, vodka and cigarettes. If only we had known.
I wouldn’t laugh, as I am well into extra time myself and have not treated my body as a temple, but Mr Higson has recently published a new adult Bond book, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, in which Bond is very much fixed in the present day – the story revolves around a threat to the Coronation of Charles III.
Alerted by alarms on the internet, I read this work with a jaundiced eye. The centenarian Bond now eats yogurt – yes, yogurt – for breakfast and drinks mineral water from bottles (he rips off the cap in a manly way, but surely bottled water is a sissy substance if ever there was one). He wears a seat-belt when he drives.
The villains in Charlie Higson’s new Bond book are all persons from what The Guardian and the BBC would call ‘the Far Right’, a largely imaginary gallery of caricatures, violent and anti-democratic.
But there is more. The villains in this book are all persons from what The Guardian and the BBC would call ‘the Far Right’, a largely imaginary gallery of caricatures, violent and anti-democratic.
This is a typical Leftist slander festival. Bond’s enemies (and those of MI6) are people who want to limit immigration (horror!); are suspicious of zealotry about global warming (shock!); are grotesque parodies of all of us who don’t like the EU (dismay!); or are the sort who prefer English customary measurements to the metric system (guilty, your honour).
Actually, our two secret services are now so PC that this is not far from the truth. People like me are now their targets.
Bond, despite having been educated at Eton in the 1930s, is scornful of all such positions. His enemies, based in a castle in Hungary, are either swivel-headed joke reactionaries, total cynics, football thugs or dupes.
King Charles, meanwhile, stands for the BBC virtues (which is why his Ukippy foes want to get rid of him). Bond’s transformation from crusty clubland gambler and boozer into Blairite yogurt-eater is not explained, any more than his miraculous ability to perform prodigies of vigour in combat or in the bedroom while aged 102. But I think it should be.
These figures of fiction are not like Doctor Who. They cannot be endlessly reinvented, rejuvenated, given sex-changes or character transplants.
I would much, much rather accept Hollywood’s view that Bond is dead than see him absurdly reincarnated, like the Dalai Lama, for the age of Sir Keir Starmer and Extinction Rebellion.
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