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Antony Flew, whose clear writings in the philosophy of religion I have learned a lot from, died last week. There is a sympathetic but accurate obituary in The Guardian of "the Humean philosopher and atheist who ultimately came to believe in intelligent design".
Obviously the position that Flew eventually adopted was nonsense. I don't doubt his sincerity, but it has to be said that Flew's mental acuity had greatly declined by the end of his life. I wrote a post about him on my previous blog in 2007. With the prerogative of the idle blogger, I'm simply going to reproduce it. Flew had a great intellect and influence, and I mark his passing with respect. The post, which I called "The exploitation of Antony Flew", follows.
The New York Times Magazine carries a long and saddening article, entitled "The Turning of An Atheist", about the English philosopher Antony Flew. It's a fascinating read and I encourage you to stick with it. (I was sent the article by an old friend, Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Werner was a Jewish Berliner in the 1930s, and is an indefatigable analyst and opponent of political extremism; he has lately started an interesting blog on that subject.)
Flew, now well into his 80s, was in the last century one of the leading academic proponents of atheism. The author of the NYT profile, Mark Oppenheimer, writes:
[Flew's] greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse thousand words, Flew argues that “God” is too vague a concept to be meaningful. For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved. Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — there was Antony Flew.
I recall seeing one of those BBC television interviews in the 1970s. Flew was arguing against the notion of God as Designer. He gave the example of the liver fluke, and asked rhetorically whether the theist regarded the parasite as an instance of divine handiwork. I recall this partly because I was and remain flummoxed by the question, and also because I've never come across anyone else refer to a liver fluke in public debate. (I much later read Flew's book on Darwinian Evolution, which makes the same point.)
But the NYT profile continues:
Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese. “There Is a God” is an intellectual’s bildungsroman written in simple language for a mass audience. It’s the first-person account of a preacher’s son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford, spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his old age, embracing the truth of a higher power. The book offers elegant, user-friendly descriptions of the arguments that persuaded Flew, arguments familiar to anyone who has heard evangelical Christians’ “scientific proof” of God. From the “fine tuning” argument that the laws of nature are too perfect to have been accidents to the “intelligent design” argument that human biology cannot be explained by evolution to various computations meant to show that probability favors a divine creator, “There Is a God” is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.
I had previously read of Flew's apparent acceptance, not of formal religion, but of the notion that the Universe evinces an intelligence. He is a deist rather than a theist. Oppenheimer's account gives a background to that intellectual shift that I had not known. Flew is clearly of declining mental powers. Interviewed by Oppenheimer, he is unable to give an account of the book that names him as co-author. Oppenheimer writes a slightly feeble concluding paragraph, but the rest of the article is a model of journalistic inquiry. I would add three points.
Oppenheimer reveals that Flew - on his own admission - didn't write the book. Oppenheimer allows nonetheless that "the section on Flew’s childhood could hardly have been written without his cooperation". Well, it could have been. I haven't read this latest book attributed to Flew as co-author, and perhaps it does indeed contain previously unpublished recollections; but Flew has before now written an elegant autobiographical account of his intellectual development. It's called "A Philosopher's Apology"; it was written in 1996 and it forms an afterword (pp. 183-208) to Flew's Philosophical Essays, 1998. In it, Flew writes at length of his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, his schooldays, and his teenage thoughts that first led him to atheist and "mortalist" conclusions.
Secondly, the article refers briefly to Flew's right-wing politics. I have never held any brief for these, but I'm particularly sorry to read that Flew has now embraced the xenophobia of the UK Independence Party. In the 1996 essay that I've referred to, he comments that he joined the Conservative Party after Mrs Thatcher became leader (i.e. sometime in the mid-1970s) but "shall certainly not continue a member unless the leadership takes an uncompromising stand against the project of making the UK one of the future United States of Europe". So it has clearly proved. As a political activist, Flew was always liable to overstate even when he had a point. (In the same essay, for example, he describes the historian E.P. Thompson - with whom he'd been at school - as "labour[ing] for the pro-Soviet 'peace' movement". Thompson was wrong on the issue of nuclear disarmament, and the neutralist course he urged was certainly in the strategic interests of the Soviet Union, but it's unfair and inaccurate to say he worked for the pro-Soviet wing of the peace movement.) But as a political philosopher, Flew had important things to say. (See, for example, a short essay on "Communism: The Philosophical Foundations", in his 1993 book Atheistic Humanism.) There is pathos in the spectacle of a noted scholar whose mental gifts are now severely impaired and who spends his declining years railing against immigration and Europe.
Thirdly, there is a dispiriting parallel with an earlier and very great thinker, whom Flew has written much about. In his last decade, Bertrand Russell devoted himself to the anti-war and anti-nuclear cause, with disastrous effects on the quality of his prose. As A.C. Grayling put it in a critical review of the second volume of Ray Monk's biography of Russell a few years ago:
To readers who remember Russell's last years it will come as no surprise to have it confirmed that his apparent nonagenarian metamorphosis into a revolutionary follower of Che Guevera was the result of his name being misused by his egregious "secretary" Ralph Schoenman, an intemperate supporter of fiery causes. Russell was bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war, but the crude propaganda about it that Schoenman had him sign was certainly not his.
I corresponded with Ray Monk at some length while he was writing this book - I couldn't and don't claim any expertise about Russell, but I gave some political background to the issues of international relations of that time - and was privy to one or two of the remarkable discoveries he made about this aspect of Russell's life as a public intellectual. I think the book is outstanding, and confirms what had long been believed about the Russell-Schoenman relationship. In his memoirs (Out of Step, 1987, p. 380), the late pragmatist philosopher and socialist Sidney Hook, a friend of both Flew and Russell, quotes a revealing story as recounted by the writer Ronald Clark:
Russell intervened in the Cuban crisis [of 1962] which threatened to bring America and Russia to the brink of nuclear war. As an American blockade of the island appeared imminent a statement was issued to the press from [Russell's home] Plas Penrhyn. As typed it began, "Mankind is faced tonight with a grave crisis." This was altered in Schoenman's hand to: "It seems likely that within a week you will all be dead to please American madmen." On Russell's suggestion, "a week" was altered to "a week or two", but otherwise the statement was issued as Schoenman had altered it.
At least one could say that Russell's intentions, if not his words and thoughts, were vaguely discernible in all this. The parallel is that Antony Flew's name appears to have been appropriated for the intellectually crude sentiments of others - but in his case, in the service of views that make a mockery of his life as a thinker and public intellectual. It's a crying shame.
I've been reading the Tory manifesto. The tone has shifted a lot since the 2005 election, and in ways that are more liberal. There's a conspicuous and welcome lack of the same stress on immigration. And the disgraceful and false remark - which might have come from the Respect manifesto for the 2005 election but was in fact in the Tory one - that "Mr Blair misrepresented intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq" appears to have been an idiosyncrasy of Michael Howard's leadership.
And then you come up against this (page 103):
"We will promote our national interest with an active foreign policy. We will work constructively with the EU, but we will not hand over any more areas of power and we will never join the Euro."
This passage is contradictory and a party that consistently pursued liberalism in foreign policy (and the manifesto does claim to espouse a "liberal Conservative foreign policy") would not make it. The word "never" is the hardest line that the Tories have ever taken on this issue. Even the 2005 manifesto said merely that a Tory Government would not join, rather than it would never join. And as a policy it makes no sense.
A currency union is not a matter of principle: it's a way of realising microeconomic benefits implicit in the liberalising scheme that is the Single Market. The sensible question is whether the costs in giving up an independent monetary policy outweigh the benefits of exchange-rate stability. The answer will not be the same for all countries at all times. To say that it would never be right for the UK to join the euro is not merely dogmatism: it's extremism.
I thought I'd heard every evasion and excuse, but the Holy See's second-highest prelate after the Pope has just surprised me:
"Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, said that the child rape scandal that is threatening the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide is linked to homosexuality and not celibacy among priests."
Here is what appears to be his explanation in full:
"Cardinal Bertone said: 'Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and paedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and paedophilia. That is true. That is the problem.' Cardinal Bertone also said that the church had never impeded investigations of paedophilia by priests."
Bear in mind the remarks of that hapless half-wit when you consider the judgement of the BBC's Religious Affairs editor on the campaign of protest against the Pope's visit to the UK in September:
"The BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott said the anti-Pope campaign could be seen as a mischievous attempt to create an 'air of criminality' around the Pope.
"'The controversy over alleged Papal involvement in the cover-up of child sex abuse is providing atheists with a stick with which to beat religion,' he said."
Now, I've never been one to complain of BBC bias, largely because I don't think it exists. But Pigott's statement is extraordinary. The Pope stands accused of sins of omission that would never have occurred to you or me if we'd been in a similar position. If we knew that people under our charge and using the cover of their profession had raped and tortured children, you and I would report them directly and urgently to the police. The Catholic hierarchy in several countries has demonstrably not done that.
I do, as it happens, find it impossible to consider these appalling crimes as somehow distinct from the institution within which they've been committed. But to describe atheists' concern with the scandal as "a stick with which to beat religion" is in my opinion contemptible. I consider that human welfare would be advanced by a decline in the authority of organised religion - in its liberal as well as its more overtly authoritarian forms. And it is right as well as inevitable that the authority of the Catholic Church will have been severely damaged by this scandal. How could it not be? John Henry Newman declared in his Parochial Sermons:
"Christ shines through the sacraments, as through transparent bodies, without impediment. He is the Light and the Life of the Church, acting through it, dispensing of His fulness, knitting and compacting together every part of it...."
Catholics affirm that the Church is the Body of Christ, and not in a merely metaphorical sense. The Church's reach into the lives of the faithful first ensures that the victims of clerical rape have no escape from it, and secondly has allowed these crimes to be covered up for decades. (For harrowing examples, see a fine documentary called Deliver Us From Evil, made a couple of years ago by Amy Berg, about the Church's intentional indifference towards the crimes of Father Oliver O'Grady, a child molester given a 14-year gaol sentence in California.)
And yet those of us who call the Church to account for its conduct are supposedly the mischievous ones.
We report today the departure of Gita Sahgal from Amnesty International. I have an accompanying commentary on the affair:
"The issue between Amnesty International and Gita Sahgal is not a personnel dispute. It is about the type of organisation that Amnesty has become. Its critics charge that it has diluted its defence of universal human rights by allying with a group that rejects that principle. By its treatment of Ms Sahgal, and its grudging and euphemistic explanation for its behaviour, Amnesty has confirmed that the critics are right."
I'm slightly late on this, but I recommend a sane and balanced comment for The Guardian by Gavin Phillipson, a legal academic at Durham University, on the reform of libel law. There's a lot wrong with libel law in England and Wales. In particular, the law hasn't caught up with the digital age: the multiple publication rule is iniquitous. The advent of conditional fee arrangements makes it cheaper for newspapers to settle even if they're confident of their case. And the costs for a defendant can be prohibitive. Phillipson argues that you can deal with the problems by reform of costs and procedures, but that the legal right to defence of reputation is important. He says:
"Robust comment and opinion is already protected. A few days ago in the Guardian a comedian who hosted the campaigning gig with the catchy slogan, 'English libel law is a dangerous joke', said: it's not just scientists facing the threat of legal action, it's investigative journalists, political bloggers, pretty much anyone who publishes their opinion, whether it's backed up by empirical evidence or not.
"This is so categorically wrong, it's a joke – and a dangerous one, in spreading rampant misinformation. Under the defence of fair comment, anyone can publish an opinion, however exaggerated, unfair or prejudiced, provided that it is honestly held and is based on true facts. Libel law only captures false statements of fact."
This is right and important. The case I've used periodically in arguing for the value of libel law is the famous one of LM magazine, which was sued by ITN for defamation. LM had libelled journalists covering the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia in 1992. ITN was awarded £375,000 in damages and LM was forced to close. The trial took place ten years ago, as Mick Hume, LM's editor at the time, recalled in article last month for Spiked magazine.
I don't intend to go yet again into the claims that Hume makes about the judgement, which are pitiful and bleating. (They should be compared with a definitive treatment of the trial by David Campbell in a two-part article for the Journal of Human Rights in 2002.) My point is rather Hume's preposterous, fatuous, self-regarding boast that LM was defending the principle of free speech. I'm a near-absolutist on free speech. I strongly defended, for example, the liberty of David Irving when he was gaoled in Austria. I condemn laws to criminalise Holocaust denial not only in the UK but also in Germany, a country whose postwar political culture I greatly admire. And I don't confuse libertarian campaigns for freedom of expression with a whine on the part of those who are caught out when they can't defend their claims on matters of fact.
If you can defend your statements on matters of fact, then (and I speak from pleasing experience on this) under English law you are invulnerable to a writ for libel, because you have the complete defence of justification. That's as it should be. The case for libel reform is strong enough as it is without exaggerating the restraints on the communications media.
One more distinctive item from Anne McElvoy's profile of Steve Hilton, the Tory strategist:
'On foreign policy, where he has least influence, his conviction is that Britain is better out of military entanglements in the wider world. He’d be quite happy to live in a peaceful “little Sweden”, but acknowledges that an appetite for being involved in world affairs is in the national DNA.'
If Hilton seriously believes that being involved in international affairs is an idiosyncrasy, then he might consider the recent history of peaceful Sweden. Here, for instance, is Johan Eriksson, a Swedish political scientist, writing in Foreign Policy in 2003 about the persistent Soviet submarine incursions into Swedish waters in the 1980s:
'The most spectacular of these incidents was the "Whiskey on the rocks" episode, in which a Soviet Whiskey class submarine strongly suspected of carrying nuclear weapons was grounded deep in the Swedish southeast archipelago in October 1981. This incident brought Sweden to the brink of armed conflict with the Soviet Union and also became a highly controversial domestic issue, in effect breaking up the traditional parliamentary consensus on security policy.'
It's an illusion of isolationists on both wings of politics to believe that if you opt out of the quarrels of larger powers then you'll be left alone. And even if you are left alone, that's only because those other larger powers - and specifically the United States - are protecting you.
In a long Sunday Times profile of Steve Hilton, the Tories' political strategist, Anne McElvoy comments:
'He is a fierce meritocrat, though one who now lives largely among the well-connected and privately educated. The idea that social do-gooding can be combined with wealth creation appeals to him. One colleague jokes: “It’s the Notting Hill view of charity.” His aim is to reinvent Burke’s conservatism of the “little platoons” for a new era. “Social action is at the heart of what we do,” he tells doubting colleagues.'
Any Conservative readers who share Hilton's wish to reinvent Burke's conservatism for a new era won't thank me for saying this. But take a close look at what Burke said of those "little platoons". If Hilton is a fierce meritocrat, then he hasn't understood the concept at all. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke writes:
'Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arragonce, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition, is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.'
You need the context of the first two sentences I've quoted. Burke is complaining that men of good breeding are behaving in an undignified way by allying with their social inferiors. In Burke's scheme, the Christian commonwealth is given by God, and each man has his rank within it. That's what he means by "little platoon": it has nothing to do with, and no relevance to, the modern Conservative Party's programme. This has not been realised either by the party itself (see page 5 of its new "Big Society" document) or by David Cameron's conservative critics.
Burke is an extraordinary figure to be citing at all in modern political debate. His philosophy was reactionary even for its time. Believing that hierarchy was divinely sanctioned, he opposed all efforts in the 1770s and 1780s to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, which barred anyone from public office who was not an Anglican. Meanwhile Thomas Jefferson was drafting the single most important document of the Enlightenment, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786, which insisted that there be no religious test for public office (my emphasis):
"That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."
That's more like it.
In his preface to a 1952 edition of Homage to Catalonia, Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, noted: "Sometimes in his quarrel with the intelligentsia Orwell seems to sound like a leader-writer for The Times in a routine wartime attack on the highbrows." Trilling meant this ruefully, but his purpose was to defend Orwell against so unseemly a characterisation. Orwell, after all, was not a leader writer for The Times: he was a man of action and a radical.
I think of this dismissive line when criticising Amnesty International, because the organisation has a noble history of action as well as sentiment, and it's recently been fiercely criticised in a Times leader. But we were right. In February, we noted the case of Gita Sahgal, an Amnesty employee. We said of Amnesty and its reputation for the disinterested defence of human rights:
"That reputation is irreplaceable. Yet through inexplicable insouciance, Amnesty is squandering it. It has collaborated with a group called Cageprisoners, which was established by Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim who is a former inmate at Guantánamo. Cageprisoners is not a defender of political liberty and the welfare of prisoners. It is a defender of radical Islam.
"Gita Sahgal, the head of the gender unit of Amnesty’s international secretariat, has drawn attention to the cynicism of this association. Amnesty stands for a disinterested defence of human rights. Islamism is an ideology of theocratic and sexual repression. Having stated her concerns to Amnesty, Ms Sahgal went public with them this week. Within hours, she found herself suspended from her post. In an extraordinary inversion of its traditional role, Amnesty has stifled its own still small voice of conscience."
On Friday 9 April, Gita Sahgal left Amnesty International. She has issued a statement, which I'm publishing in full. It's a powerful indictment of a terrible and foolish wrong turning taken by an organisation that has done a lot of good in nearly half a century. Ms Sahgal has paid a price for her commitment to secularism and women's rights. She has my admiration and strong support.
STATEMENT BY GITA SAHGAL ON LEAVING AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
On Friday 9th April, 2010 Amnesty International announced my departure from the organization. The agreed statement said, ‘due to irreconcilable differences of view over policy between Gita Sahgal and Amnesty International regarding Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, it has been agreed that Gita will leave Amnesty International'.
I was hired as the Head of the Gender Unit as the organization began to develop its Stop Violence Against Women campaign. I leave with great sadness as the campaign is closed. Thousands of activists of Amnesty International enthusiastically joined the campaign. Many hoped that it would induce respect for women’s human rights in every aspect of the work. Today, there is little ground for optimism.
The senior leadership of Amnesty International chose to answer the questions I posed about Amnesty International’s relationship with Moazzam Begg by affirming their links with him. Now they have also confirmed that the views of Begg, his associates and his organisation Cageprisoners, do not trouble them. They have stated that the idea of jihad in self defence is not antithetical to human rights; and have explained that they meant only the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim.
I thank the senior leadership for these admissions and for their further clarification that concerns around the legitimization of Begg were of very long standing and that there was strong opposition from Head of the Asia programme to a partnership with him. When disagreements are profound, it is best that disputes over matters of fact, are reduced.
Unfortunately, their stance has laid waste every achievement on women’s equality and made a mockery of the universality of rights. In fact, the leadership has effectively rejected a belief in universality as an essential basis for partnership.
I extend my sympathies to all who have fought long and hard within Amnesty International to match the movement’s principles with its actions. I know many of you have been bewildered by this dispute and others deeply shamed by what is being done in your name. You may have been told that that debate is not possible in the middle of a crisis. I agree that there is indeed a crisis and that the hardest questions are being posed by Amnesty International’s close human rights allies, particularly in areas where jihad supported by Begg’s associates, is being waged.
I am now free to offer my help as an external expert with an intimate knowledge of Amnesty International’s processes and policies. I can explain in public debates, both with the leadership and inside the Sections, that adherence to violent jihad even if it indeed rejects the killing of some civilians, is an integral part of a political philosophy that promotes the destruction of human rights generally and contravenes Amnesty International’s specific policies relating to systematic violence and discrimination, particularly against women and minorities.
During these last two months, human rights gains have been made to defend the torture standard and to shame governments who have been complicit in torture through their ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policies. But the spectre that arises through the continued promotion of Moazzam Begg as the perfect victim, is that Amnesty International is operating its own policies of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’
So I invite you to join me as I continue to campaign for public accountability at this moment, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others?
Gita Sahgal
Former Interim Head of the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Unit, Amnesty International
Denis MacShane writes poignantly for The Guardian:
"It is not just President Lech Kaczynski, but among the dead are Poland's finest military commanders, who had restored Poland's reputation as a great soldiering nation. There were also the governor of the central bank and other senior ministers. There was Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the presidential candidate for the social democratic SLD party; Andrezj Kremer, the rising young foreign minister, seen as a future EU foreign policy star; the delightful Jolanta Szymanek-Deresz, whom I knew as a fellow-member of the praesidium of the party of European Socialists, and who came to the Labour party conference last year. Leading Poles based in London, like the former president of the exiled Polish government in London, Dr Ryszard Kaczorowski, also died.
"Never before in modern or even recent European history has a national leadership been so abruptly removed."
My only observation is that this country has a particular link with Poland, which has survived totalitarianisms of different stripes. The rights of smaller nations were one of the more admirable causes of Victorian Liberalism, and Viscount Palmerston supported the Polish rebels who fought for independence from Russian domination in the 1860s. In a dispiriting augury of more recent politics, it was Germany, under Bismarck, that extended support to Russia.
London was the home of the Polish government-in-exile during WW2, from which patriots demanded the Soviet Union account for the massacre at Katyn. And you did not have to be either a Catholic or a supporter of Mrs Thatcher to find very moving the way that she and Lech Walesa were mobbed by the congregation of the Church of St Brygida when she visited Warsaw in1988. Over the decades since WW2, Poles have settled in this country and enriched it - around 30,000 live in my home town of Leicester. When Poland acceded to the EU - an institution that has done immense good in dissipating conflicts in Europe - Tony Blair aptly described that country as an old friend in a new Europe. I'm terribly sorry for Poles and for what has happened this weekend.
Paul Waugh of The Standard has an excellent political blog, in which he has uncovered in gruesome detail what he calls "the first Twitter suicide of the election campaign". But I noted another post on his blog in which he recounts the retirement of the Tory MP Sir Nicholas Winterton:
'Sir Nicholas Winterton was witnessed, coming out of the chamber behind the Speaker's chair. He was "crying his eyes out", I'm told. A fellow Tory MP tried his best to console him.
'The uncharitable will no doubt be cynical about this. And I can already imagine the jibes about him simply being upset at losing his first class rail travel. Or the loss of his amazing second home expenses arrangements.
'Yet I suspect many Tories will be moved at the sight of an old man who's simply sad to leave his workplace after nearly 40 years' continuous service.'
Maybe they will be moved. But I'm not. I don't allow foul people respite when they die, and I'm especially not going to do it when they merely retire. I don't necessarily associate Winterton with his fellow MP and bonehead wife with the predilection for racist jokes, but I still count him a disgrace to public life.
Winterton was a strong supporter of corporal punishment (i.e. beating children) in schools when it was still legal. After the House of Lords proposed abolition of this disgusting practice in 1985, Winterton urged the then Education Secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, to legislate to allow it to continue. In the same year, when the governing body of the Stoke Mandeville paraplegic games declined to allow a team from apartheid South Africa to take part, Winterton condemned the decision as "absolutely despicable". In 1987 he urged that all Aids victims be completely cut off from the rest of society. When the House of Commons voted for a common age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, Winterton intervened in the debate with this wisdom: "Am I not correct in saying that a homosexual act is unnatural and that if the Lord Almighty had meant men to commit sodomy with other men their bodies would have been built differently?" This was consistent with his views in 1981, when the Criminal Law Revision Committee had feebly proposed not an equal age of consent but a reduction in the age of consent for homosexuals from 21 to 18. Winterton declared: "It's appalling that such a proposal is even being considered. I will not tolerate recommendations that encourage youngsters to indulge in unnatural relationships."
In short, the passion of Winterton's deeply held political beliefs is inversely related to their intelligence. By accident I attended the count for Winterton's Macclesfield seat in the 1997 election, as I'd assisted with the independent candidature of Martin Bell in the neighbouring seat of Tatton. I thought, as Winterton gave his acceptance speech, that here was an ancien regime that was very ancien indeed. One of my vanishingly small number of political achievements is to have read in draft Martin's political memoir An Accidental MP and to have dissented from some kind words he'd written about Winterton, his fellow Cheshire MP, which didn't make it to the published version. Whatever Winterton's attainments as a constituency representative were dwarfed by the position he took on South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
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