Peter Hitchens interview: Free speech is vital, release the republicans and replace the police

but it's extraordinary how often what what happens to me when I say something is not that someone says I disagree with you but they say you shouldn't have been allowed to say that even if the person who dissents from what you think is wrong you will be able to strengthen your own arguments by by confronting his and that if he is right then Society badly needs to hear from it there is never any good reason for suppressing yourself it's always advantageous Peter hedgens first of all your thoughts on this Moment In Time the passing of Queen Elizabeth II well it will be very interesting to see how much of a gap there is between what lab 4 this event and what comes afterwards I mean I very much feel like I was actually in France when it happened I left London on Monday last week and came back on Saturday to a different country and it's not yet excuse me just how much the difference is going to be and how deep it's going to be but plainly we've been living in a sort of state of suspension preserved from a lot of historical influences by the very long life of the lake queen and I think that departure is going to cause a very large number of changes that we haven't even began to see the beginning of in terms of the Constitution the British constitution what dangers do you foresee the accession of Charles posing well I think apart from anything else the queen was so personally popular that her her position wasn't much questioned in the later parts of her Reign though if you think back you'll find that there were moments in the earlier parts for Raymond she she wasn't anything like so popular and there was a lot more questioning I think that the principle dangers to the to the Constitutional settlement probably come from the Commonwealth particularly Australia where there is a very strong Republican movement which may not immediately obviously it would be an unfitting and extremely rude to start doing anything about it now but in perhaps within four or five years may make a serious attempt to introduce the Republic there and that will have an effect here a lot of English people see Australia as a kind of Sunny version of our own country and if they see a more or less British Republic coming into being then the effect of that will be considerable here the prime minister of course Australia Nevada Republican as well yes but also with the the good sense of the man is not to raise the issue now in your view then anticipating perhaps those arguments to come what's the strongest case for the constitutional monarchy that we have here in Britain well the strongest case of it for it has has been in in my lifetime that the Monarch is like the King on the chessboard he or she has no particular power I mean a clever chess players could use a king to some extent to to radiate a small amount of power from his position but his main function is to keep other people from occupying the position he has what worries me about politics is that there's more and more pseudoglamor attached to politics and politicians the two worst instances of this and I've been non-political here because it's true in recent years have been Mario Thatcher and Ashley Blair both of whom it seems to me have become semi-monarchical in in their periods of government they became personally the head of government and Were Somehow almost made them like heads of state and dining Street itself has increasingly become a government Department a department of the Prime Minister uh more and more similar to a British White House than he ought to be in our Constitution and there's this now this this idea which is growing very strong that the Prime Minister has to have a direct mandate that is to say the Prime Minister has to win a general election before he or she is truly in office and I think that Mr truss is going to face quite a lot of Demands that she she goes to the country quite soon for that reason is constitutional rubbish the Prime Minister derives his or her power from from being able to to command the majority of the house of cards but it's widely believed and there are all kinds of other things going on at the edge of our constitution the the revolution in Scotland Wales and the surrender to basically to terrorism in Northern Ireland and to Republican movement there weakened the country of the edges and made it less unified also we've created interestingly another Province United Kingdom in London which now has actually a republican Constitution it has directly elected head of state as the mayor which is if you look at English local government before that year nothing of the kind ever ever existed and there are all kinds of Republican things just stating you know it's just a waiting perhaps to come to birth in the years to come now I don't like that I don't think politicians should have the the ceremonial power or the command of loyalty which the King has it's a very important detail of life for instance that police councils in this country swear an oath of loyalty to the to the Monarch and also to uphold the law they're not civil servants and they shouldn't be the whole idea of the police is they uphold the law and the the whole if you look carefully at the coronation service which is well worth doing because it's the wording of it is fascinating a lot of it is simply about the idea that the law is above all and of course that is a fundamentally religious idea because the whole concept of the idea of a law being above men of power has to rely on the uh on on a belief in a king of kings or an almighty God and it's a very religious ceremony as well those things are much weaker in this country than they used to be and when the the late Queen actually exceeded to the throne both the Christian religion and belief in the root of law I think we're much stronger Among Us than they are now and it's for a constitution like ours to work people need to believe in it and do they do they understand I constantly find myself arguing people who say they're Republicans who think that the Monarch has power that's the most amazing thing they actually think that we have some kind of autocratic Louis XIV style Sun King monarchy they don't have any idea what happened in 1688 or how important it was on this point then about police officers in that oath to the Monarch because as Charles's accession is taking place we've seen these pockets of Republican protests breaking out and in turn those protests being met with really quad Draconian policing particularly in Scotland where two individuals now have been charged with a criminal offense I hadn't seen that but I'm I'm distressed to hear it yes there's the the young man the young man who shouted at prince Andrew and the woman who held the sort of well it said abolish the monarchy and it also said uh I won't use the language here but F imperialism as well yes they've both been charged I don't like these things but I think that they should be expressible and they certainly aren't crimes I mean it's it's in Putin's Moscow that people are arrested holding on placards not here and the the to me policing in this country is always supposed to be quite different for policing anywhere else the police officer was supposed by Good Humor intact to obtain his obtain his wishes by by persuasion uh not by the the arresting and handcuffing of people and it's it's just wrong that has crept into our system along with the decline in the belief of the rule of law a huge decline in the presumption of innocence in the behavior of the authorities and indeed the behavior of everybody else and people are constantly being assumed to be guilty of crimes they're only accused of and the population or assumed to be guilty I mean look at this uh if I go down as I hope still to do to to to to to to file past uh Her Majesty's coffin in Westminster Hall I have to go through something called airport style security I am presumed by the state uh to be potentially guilty of some hideous offense now I think I'm prepared to bet you quite a lot so money in that Airport's style Security will not uncover a single thing but Millions well tens hundreds of thousands of people have to pass through it because over and over again the authorities assume act as if we're guilty they tried a few years ago to issue us with identity cards which have no other purpose than to reverse the the relationship between the individual and the state and they came very close to doing so they've now found what are effectively covered ways of doing so your passport is in effect and your driving license is in effect a functioning identity card now if you don't have either of those documents you can be in quite big difficulties increasingly you mentioned uh Putin's Russia and the placards I'm reminded of the scenes in February as Russian citizens protested the illegal invasion of Ukraine and it reached the point where they actually started holding blank pieces exactly but they've still got arrested absolutely and in Westminster a couple of days ago a gentleman was accosted by a police officer for holding I know a black piece of paper in case he might offend someone with what he wrote on the piece of paper I mean it's extraordinary well it's and and wrong do you have thoughts on it further than that or simply well what can one say I I just it it it just isn't the function of the police force in this country to patrol people's minds we can debate the taste of the ACT of protesting at the funeral procession of the Monarch you know I'm talking about the individual who shouted at prince Andrew but at a funeral there is a different thing going on I if someone turned up at the funeral of a beloved relative of yours and started shouting uh and continue to do it then I think that would be an offense against the piece but these are these these things have not taken place with funerals they've taken place at approximations of the accession uh or just processions and I don't think that's the same you're at that proclamation of the accession in Oxford one such protest happened could you tell us about what I couldn't really see I mean because the the jobsworth mentality had meant that you couldn't actually get very close to this bunch of old geezers who were making approximation uh they put fences across the road and so I was standing unable to see anything but but listening to last because then somebody shouted something I couldn't hear that and then somebody else shouted back oh shut up you Burke and I thought husbandedly British and they later turned out that the the protester who I think had said who elected him uh had been arrested and handcuffed I I just find this completely objectionable and indefensible it's a public humiliation well did you handcuffing somebody yes and also it's it it should only be done when required when the person is offering violence and can't otherwise be restrained or as some kind of Escape risk it just seems to me to be a completely excessive use of authority and and a failure to understand how Authority is exercised in a free country which is very much by consent and I said by uh by concern I mean it's much more effective isn't it if you have a police officer who with a with a joke and a smile can obtain agreement which seems to me it's been perfectly possible under those circumstances it wasn't a violent or high tension or drunken occasion it was just a group of people on a Sunday lunchtime standing in the center of an ancient Town listening to a ceremony I think you've mentioned before talking about free speech and offense you've referred to the dictatorship of rage and that people May respond not actually to the substance of what's said but what they believe has been well there's a lot of that about as well there's a lot of failure to understand I mean our education system has completely failed to educate people in an awful lot of important aspects of what a civilized society can be and should be like and people also don't seem to have absorbed what I thought was a was a fairly basic lesson of living in a free society which is the need to listen to your opponents and be prepared to tolerate people saying things you don't like what do you think that speaks to about our modern society then right so that I I just I'm about to publish a book about the the deliberate destruction of our education system in the 1960s I think it shows that when you destroy your education system you have an uneducated people and not just uneducated in mathematics spelling and foreign languages but uneducated in the the basic understanding of of constitutional law which makes someone a good citizen so what are they teaching people in those schools then I don't know uh it's quite difficult to get into most schools most of the time I and if if you do go of course it's like it's like visiting prisons uh you you can't just turn up and say a wormwood scrubs and say I'm a journalist I'd like to see what's going on uh the the mystery of Justice chooses which prison you go to and it's the same with the schools they decide whether or when you go and when you go they're ready for you so how do you know what's going on one thing I will say uh is that they appear to be quite disorderly because there was an undercover filming of some of some schools a few years ago uh by some teachers who agreed to smuggle cameras into a particular School you probably remember this case and the teachers involved were censured the the country didn't turn around and say this is shocking our schools are disorderly and and full of ignorance they said these teachers have done this Dreadful thing they should be disciplined and that but it was just an illustration of of how little we know about what goes on but I I strongly said uh from from from the way people talk and and the the sort of responses you get on social media for saying certain things which would once have been perfectly acceptable that a lot of conformism is taught uh that a egalitarian Dogma is is widely taught and and the tolerance is not taught I was about to say I think there's actually a Common Thread between this discussion about grammar schools and this discussion about Republican projects and it's an intolerance of dissent yes but you you have to be you have you have to explain to you uh the the the the tolerance is important and once once the idea is taken root I think it flourishes in most minds but it's now been explained to you we know how to do it when it confronts you with you but it's extraordinary how often what what happens to me when I say something is not that someone says I disagree with you but they say you shouldn't have been allowed to say that as a product man of uh modern British schooling would you make the case to me for descent and tolerance well it's an old JS Mill case isn't it the if you even if the person who's who descends from what you think is wrong uh you will be able to strengthen your own arguments by uh by by confronting his and that if he is right then Society badly needs to hear from him there is never any good reason for suppressing yourself it's it's always advantageous if if you're right then then by by combating it in civil and an equal accelerant discussion uh then you will be able to show that you're right to his satisfaction and yours and make your own arguments better if he's right then he will have learned something vital further to our earlier conversation about free speech do you think there are limits to free speech and if so well everybody knows it's a free speech because the the country in in the world which has made the greatest effort to make speech free by law the United States with the the First Amendment of the Constitution which we can't have because we could never have anything in our constitution saying Parliament shall make no law it's simply impossible for our parliamentary Constitution to allow that so we can't have a First Amendment but they have it and there's a huge amount of case law on the limits of it but basically they are that you can't use your freedom of speech to incite uh violence and obviously the old the the old cliche about you can't shout fire in a crowded theater either but basically otherwise you have to put up with it a final word on uh policing in Britain the protester in Scotland who was shouting at prince Andrew I thought threw into sharp relief how heavily he was policed versus perhaps the level of investigation that Andrew was faced uh in this country what role do you see in modern Britain for for the police force because it does seem they're more interested in sort of handcuffing protesters and dealing with the minor crimes well as far as I'm concerned the we need as rapidly as possible to recruit and train a a new set of police forces and I say a set of police forces because I believe profoundly that the police should be local much more local than they are now probably about as local as they are in the USA with every reasonably sized Town having its own police force responsive to its own people as it ought to be and when we've trained those new police forces this function will be the original appeal function of of preventive foot patrol above all things and the prevention of crime above all things being their purpose then I think we should close down the existing ones which seem to me to be one of the biggest failures uh in our country and they just have failed they did the the figures of their their total failure to follow up or do anything about large amounts of crime and the fact that so much crime has now been effectively in decrimed as they call it so it is no longer even treated as crime starting most obviously with shoplifting but now coming up to burglary and and lots of other offenses particularly so-called antisocial Behavior the only thing to do uh it seems to me to be pleasant out but first of all you also have to build something else before they are closed down and that's what I would do uh following the original appeal principles which were abided by in this country by the police until the middle 1960s uh and but as as they stand the police forces we we have which which reacts with increasing actual lack of effect to crimes which they've waited to happen uh is simply no good and they are plainly unteachable you criticize them when they when they just say we have we can't do it because we haven't got the resources it's a complete untruth uh the the police in this country before the middle 1960s had far fewer offices than they have now and they successfully police this country on a much lower budgets nothing to do with resources it's all to do with the way in which they run interesting your phrase their D crimes jogged my memory about uh this other peculiar sort of uh word that I've noticed in the last week in relation to the protester in Oxford Simon Hill who was de-arrested and I'd encourage viewers to watch our interview with Simon we spoke to him earlier this week but I mean I've never seen the word dearest well it's funny what is an arrest anyway it's it's often when someone is arrested it's often used as a basis in which to presume their guilt I remember when I was trying to campaign for the uh for the uh to to preserve and protect and recover the reputation George Bell who was accused of of horrible pedophile crimes a few years ago one of the things which my opponents kept saying to me well the police the Sussex police say that if they had been informed of these things in 1952 or whenever it was they were supposed to have happened they would have arrested him this had two things wrong with it one it wasn't true and and the other is that there's huge numbers of educated middle class people assumed that effectively met his guilt it doesn't uh an arrest doesn't have any any status in in the establishment of Guild but on the other hand uh once you've been arrested especially in a public place you stay arrested that will always have happened if the police later on say we've dearested him they haven't actually achieved that they've done that person with substantial amount of public damage and saying that he's now being dearested doesn't undo it in my view Peter thank you very much for taking the time I really appreciate it pleasure yeah see

Channel: PoliticsJOE

Views: 140,130

Keywords: Politics, UK politics, British politics, Parliament, Government, Westminster, peter hitchens, peter hitchens interview, peter hitchens best bits, peter hitchens question time, peter hitchens brother, peter hitchens debate, christopher hitchens, political interview, free speech, cancel culture, abolish the police, politics news, breaking news, political news

Id: 4hRzVL3IoI8

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2022