Peter Hitchens on the UKIP

Tories, UKIP, and other debating matters

Let me deal first of all with UKIP, and what looks remarkably like an organised campaign of postings. I am not hostile to UKIP. I just decline to endorse it. And that's not out of fear - I continue to attack the Tory Party for its uselessness and hopelessness, and confidently expect that, not long hence, most other columnists will be doing the same thing. I've become used to being a few years ahead of them.

First of all, UKIP is, like all small parties, prey to faction fights and backstabbing. People who are interested in power, but have none, tend to take it out on each other because the stakes are so small. I wonder if all my pro-UKIP correspondents realised that their party was about to run into the problems it hit at the weekend, with complaints of money going missing.

Well, I was not surprised. This sort of thing happens to such groups and the question must arise "Who told the papers?"

I also wasn't surprised by the silly, doomed flirtation with Kilroy, or by the twerp who went on about women (even 34-year-olds, I suspect) cleaning behind the fridge.

The whole outfit is not just amateur, and on shallow foundations. It has a blazer-and-cravat feel to it which limits its appeal to the same sort of areas where the Tory Party still stumbles about in its prolonged death throes, the Southern English middle classes. But the movement I hope for, which with luck will chuck New Labour into the sea, will have a far wider appeal than that. If it doesn't, it won't be able to do the job.

So, while I rejoice at every Tory vote and pound that defects to UKIP, because my objective is the downfall of the Tories, I don't feel either the need or the desire to praise UKIP itself. And the more I get pestered and badgered to do so, by people who seem to have decided not to understand my position, the more critical and dismissive of UKIP I shall be.

More on prisons:

Another fairly long sentence

On prison sentences, I am not trying to write an entire penal code. I want a sensible parliament of decent people to do that. Once we have re-established the death penalty for heinous and grievous murder, we can argue about what other offences might be punished by death. Because of the amazing ability of modern medicine to bring badly-injured people back from the brink of the grave, I am inclined to believe that some attempted murders (where the injuries were clearly aimed at causing death and capable of doing so) should be punishable by hanging, in a way that they used not to be.

But I am against mandatory death sentences. In practice, under the old English law, all death sentences could be commuted -by reprieve - and many were. This, it is argued, places a big burden on the Home Secretary, who would deal with reprieves. Well, too bad. If you don't want the responsibility, don't seek it. One way or another, your decisions will lead to the deaths of innocent people. The question is, which ones, how many and how? Current Home Secretaries cause the deaths of many, many innocents by their deliberate feebleness and resulting incompetence in defending the weak and good against the strong and wicked. In general a stern penal system, which does what it threatens, and is supported by an active preventive police force, pretty rapidly leads to a sharp decrease in criminal activity, as the Victorians and Edwardians found. Short, penal prison sentences, early in a criminal's dishonest or violent career, accompanied by the execution of notorious and callous killers, would alter the atmosphere of the country and promote the idea that we are responsible for our own actions, the idea on which civil peace is based.

I would reckon that if we did this decisively, we could be closing down redundant prisons within 25 years, and holding as few as a dozen executions a year, while the homicide rate dropped back to its low pre-1957 level. But nobody will try, because it's 'uncivilised' to do so.

He also argues for the distinction between alcohol and illegal drugs.

I hope this provides a partial answer to those who claim they cannot understand how I can be against identity cards and in favour of punishing possession of cannabis. Drug abuse destroys clear understanding, reasoned debate, self-discipline, responsibility and therefore morality. Where morality is weak, the state must be strong, intrusive and oppressive to keep order.

See also his "Gun Law and Common Sense"

Actually, I object strongly to the expression 'taking the law into your own hands'. The law is ours and we made it for ourselves, to protect us and govern us, as a free people. Our freedom to defend ourselves against criminal violence is part of our general freedom to live our lives lawfully. We hire the police to help us enforce the law, not to tell us that we cannot do so. Sadly, the modern British law is not our law, but an elite law, based on ideas which most of us do not share. And the modern police are the elite's police, not ours, which is one of the reasons why they have vanished from the streets, where we want them to be. The disarming of the people, and the cancellation of all their rights to defend themselves, are bad signs.