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PETER HITCHENS: Fight for freedom? 'Duvet Dave' would rather be in bed

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Responsible: David Cameron set up the Leveson Inquiry

So who really won the Cold War? In the past week this great and famous home of liberty has set off down the road to a state-controlled press. And in supposedly free Europe, the authorities (the same ones who endlessly seek more power over us) have sought to steal money from supposedly free citizens.

We all know the old saying that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. The world in which we live may call itself free, but if unfettered speech and thought are endangered, and private property is not safe, then our liberty is a lie.

It is quite funny to listen to British politicians and pundits sneering (as they do) about arrangements in modern Russia. They should attend to our own troubles before lecturing Vladimir Putin on his.

We have gone so far down this dismal slope that I have more or less given up hope that anyone will do anything about it. All that is left for me to do is to point out what is going on.

It is all yet more proof of the fact that you can never trust politicians. Left to themselves, they choke freedom as bindweed chokes a garden.

But I think the chief shame has to lie with Mr Slippery, our Prime Minister, living up to the name which I long ago bestowed upon him.

Mr Slippery set up the original Leveson Inquiry in a short-sighted attempt to look good. By the time he realised he had created a great clanking, devouring monster, it was too late to stop.

So he pretended that he would prevent the Leveson report from turning into state regulation of the press. Then he realised that he couldn’t, so he disguised his defeat as a decisive act of strength. That was when he abruptly halted the talks in which he was being wrestled to the ground by the press-hating lobby of spiteful, short-sighted leftists and vengeful celebrities.

Finally, he was responsible for what will come to be seen as one of the stupidest and most shameful moments in British political history.

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With freedom of the press – and in the end the freedom of the country – at stake, neither Mr Cameron nor his meaningless cypher of a ‘Culture’ Secretary, Maria Miller, could be bothered to attend the decisive meeting. That meeting was held on enemy territory, the Labour leader’s office. It was attended by the anti-freedom campaign ‘Hacked Off’. Yet it was closed to any spokesman for the free press.

The only representative of the ‘Conservative’ Party was the giggling Leftist intellectual Oliver Letwin, famously so  gullible that he once let a  burglar into his house in the middle of the night. As Mr Letwin doesn’t much care for press freedom, and was armed only with some warm pizza, he was of little use.

 If we still had history books, this incident ought to go down alongside King Alfred burning the cakes and King John losing the Crown Jewels in The Wash. We could call it ‘The Ministers who went to bed rather than fight for freedom’.

Even now, in a corner of every newspaper office in the country, a faint shadow is growing and gathering. In time, it will thicken, darken and resolve itself into the chilly, relentless figure of the censor. And David Cameron, who has achieved nothing else of note in his life, will be remembered mainly as the man who brought censorship back to Britain.

Oh brother, what an odd way to show you support the Church

I have always loathed the compulsory mateyness of Red Nose Day. Charity should be done in secret, not used to polish the images of showbiz figures and the grotesquely ill-managed BBC.

It also suffers from the default Leftism of modern ‘comedy’.

The quickest way to a laugh is to use the  F-word, and many alleged jokes trade on the fact that some people still hate swearing, love their country and – horrors – believe in God. Insult them, and the mob will cackle.

Weak stuff: Rowan Atkinson's sketch for Comic Relief did not impress Peter Hitchens

No need to make an effort or be truly witty. At any time of day, a real funny man would have refused to perform the embarrassingly bad lines, full of coarseness and crudity, mouthed by Rowan Atkinson on ‘Comic Relief’, which might as well be renamed ‘Vomit Release’ if this is the best it can do.

He would have done so not on the grounds of decency, but because he was ashamed to be associated with such poor, weak stuff. Whose idea was it to mock Christianity? Mr Atkinson’s brother Rodney has revealed that the alleged comedian has supported the church in private life. So why attack it in front of a crowd?

Even ten years ago, these events would have caused an enormous row, not the mild media tremor they actually brought about. We have been shocked so much that we are numb. What worries me is this: if this could happen in 2013, what will be considered normal in 2023?

The distinctive smell of lunacy

Since the police have taken the law into their own hands and decriminalised cannabis possession, why do they bother handing out laughable ‘scratch and sniff’ cards so that people can nose out cannabis farms in the house next door?

Cannabis farming is one of our few successful growth industries, flourishing without any EU subsidies. Since everyone (except me) thinks it’s perfectly all right to smoke it, even though it can make you go permanently mad, and since its principal ingredient is now available through the NHS, what is the logic in stamping it out?

One thing or the other.

But not both.

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Next Sunday, the 31st, we once again go through the pointless ritual of shoving all our clocks and electronic devices forward an hour. Millions of people, compelled to get up 60 minutes earlier, will be forced to suffer jet-lag without even going anywhere. I’ve never seen a decent reason for this performance, which doesn’t increase the amount of daylight by one second.

For Christians, next Sunday is Easter, the most important church service of the year, and it’s a real nuisance to be robbed of an hour that morning. Until 1997, the law recognised this, and the clocks never went forward on Easter Day. Since then, the Godless European Union has compelled us to move our clocks about when Brussels says, Easter or no. Just another little sign of our loss of independence.

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This week, as it was revealed that our gas supplies are only a few days from exhaustion, we started shutting down several perfectly good coal-fired power stations (Didcot ‘A’ near Oxford was among the first to go).

This unhinged decision is a self-inflicted wound, imposed on us by our futile pursuit of a ‘low-carbon’ economy. By the time we’ve crippled our electricity generation, and are suffering power cuts, China will no doubt have built another 20 coal-fired stations. Who benefits from this dogma-driven behaviour?


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