Peter Hitchens plays Heathcliffe. These new-fangled Victorian values are the thin end of the wedge. In my day we used to thrash our lads with the horse whip, the cat o' nine tails and any other farmyard animal we could lay our hands on. In time the practice declined, and so did the empire.
Peter Hitchens is upset by the decline of civilization. From his Daily Mail pulpit this Sunday he reminds us that not only are we failing to defend ourselves against the barbarians at the gate, but we are now producing plenty of our own little savages home-grown. But at least Peter understands that if they are monstrous, they were made monstrous, and not by some capricious deity nor some mystical shit innate within them, but by they way they were dragged up.
On the way, he manages to blame liberal policies, easy divorce and single mums. That last group have apparently been on the rampage ever since we did away with the stocks, the poor law and the treadmill.
Here's his latest column:
The point they miss is that the [Edlington Boys] in this case are almost certainly not freaks. I do not think they were born without consciences.
I think they have had their consciences shrivelled by the lives they have led. Though they are monsters, they are monsters we have helped to make.
Imagine if the same two boys had been brought up in a stable family, untouched by the drug culture, their minds unpolluted by televised slurry.
Imagine how it would have been if adults always felt able to discipline wayward children in the street, if local policemen had existed at all and felt free to wallop miscreants. Imagine if the place was full of experienced mothers, whose main task was to raise children, and hard-working fathers with real jobs.
They have done - and continue to do - tremendous, deep damage to our souls and bodies, and if there was ever a time to have a good, full-scale howling moral panic, this is that time. Yet if anyone proposes real radical measures to put these things right - the end of subsidies for fatherless homes, the reintroduction of hard discipline in schools, measures to make divorce difficult again, the freeing of the police from liberal codes of practice, ... - then they are called ‘extremists’, and the David Camerons of this world tell us that we ‘cannot go back to the old days'."
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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