‘No platforming is silly’: An interview with Peter Hitchens

The Tab sat down with controversial Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens to talk about, among other things, the European Union, freedom of speech, Boris Johnson, David Cameron and conservatism. I began by asking him about his current fight for the reputation of the late Bishop George Bell (an early critic of Nazism) in light of allegations revealed by the Church last year he had abused a young girl in the late 1940s and early 50s.      

Why have you become so interested in the case of Bishop George Bell and the allegation which has recently come to light that he molested a young girl while a priest?

Well it had been an interest of mine for some time. I had, in the course of reordering all my thoughts about the Second World War, become very conscious of George Bell’s almost unique role in both being a confirmed opponent of Hitler and the Nazis, more confirmed than most – an early observer of the danger, a friend of the German resistance – and also, what some people might see as a paradox, a very severe opponent of the area bombing of German cities by the Royal Air Force.

And so when the three major newspapers and the BBC all came out with stories saying he had been a child abuser, I was astonished, because this didn’t in any way fit with the picture of him which I had formed through all my reading and everything else.

I also felt journalistically that those newspapers had made a serious mistake. They had done a thing which you’re not supposed to do: they had confused an allegation with a conviction and I decided I was going to pursue it. That’s why I got involved in it.

What comments do you have on the way in which The Argus has handled this case?

Well, I don’t like the way they’ve handled it because I think they’ve been among the newspapers which has treated an allegation as a proven fact, which runs against the principle of English justice, which is that you presume [a person is] innocent until proven guilty. All we have is a solitary, ancient, uncorroborated allegation. It is an allegation, a serious allegation and it should be treated extremely seriously and the person who makes it should be treated with sympathy and the allegation should be thoroughly investigated. And I mean thoroughly investigated. But until it’s been proven then no one’s entitled to say this happened.

Do you feel like the presumption of innocence is being eroded in other areas?

Oh, enormously. It is, anyway, in cases where sexual abuses are alleged it goes out of the window almost immediately, the crime itself being so horrible that people are inclined to say “oh well it must be true” or, alternatively, to be afraid – in case they are accused of it themselves – of suggesting that the charge might not necessarily be true. The presumption of innocence is not something like freedom of speech that can be enforced by statute. It has to exist in the hearts of people.

On that note of freedom of speech, we’re at the University of Sussex; now a lot of journalists have been saying recently there’s been a real encroachment upon the right to freedom of speech in university campuses.

There is no “right” to freedom of speech; there is no right to anything, it’s a freedom and that’s the whole problem with it – it has to be maintained by constant vigilance and determination and if it isn’t then it will die.

What do you think of no-platforming?

Well, I mean, I think it’s silly. I used to do it when I was a Trotskyist student myself, it’s one of those things which I am most ashamed of having done. I think that it should be met more with mockery than anything else, because I think mockery is in some ways the most effective weapon against zealotry. Certainly my worst defeats when I was a Trotskyist at university were those when I got laughed off the stage.

There was news recently about the government spending £9 million on pro-EU leaflets to send to every household in the country. What do you think about that as someone who’s a Eurosceptic?

Well, it’s exactly what happened in 1975. So it’s what I predicted, it’s a rerun. I’m against this referendum. I’m playing no part in it directly. I’m not going to vote. I despise referenda; I think they are unconstitutional and unparliamentary and also, I think it’s a trap.

A trap in what way?

It’s a trap because if, as I suspect, it’s a vote to stay in it will then subsequently be said that they were given the chance to leave and they didn’t take it and the issue is closed and let’s get on now with making arrangements for how we stay in.

I’m very interested by the appearance in the leave camp of people such as Michael Howard and Alexander Johnson’s stage name, Boris, when in fact neither of them seems to me to be an enthusiast for departure. I would be unsurprised if there were a narrow vote to leave and they didn’t say, “We must use this as a leeway to negotiate another position”.

So you wouldn’t call yourself a fan of Boris Johnson then?

I like him; when he was editor of The Spectator he was very good to me, he was a pleasure to meet. I’m not by any means in his circle of friends – he’s a hard person to dislike. My difficulty with Johnson is he makes people think that he is something he is not.

And that is?

That he’s an old-fashioned, Churchillian, patriotic conservative. He’s a cosmopolitan and one thing he does have in common with Churchill is that he is a social liberal – most of the Churchill fan club don’t understand this; that Churchill was not really a particularly conservative person.

‘He makes people something he’s not’ – Hitchens on Boris Johnson

What are your reasons for leaving the EU then?

I wish to live again in an independent country. I miss it – I miss it like a long-lost friend, it’s almost a physical pain to me. It’s very hard to communicate this to people who’ve lived all their lives in a province and don’t know what it was like to live in an independent country. I’m not even sure it can be restored. To me, I would pay a price for it. People say, “well you might lose economically by leaving” – leave me to it. For me, I wouldn’t hesitate to do that because independence is so important.

A lot of students will have you down as someone who is an arch-conservative. Yet you hold some views which many students would find they have in common with you. You said in one article that you were a strong trade-unionist and were for renationalisation of the railways.

I am, I am. [I’m] a life member of the NUJ [National Union of Journalists].

So, on some economic issues you are in tandem with certain socialist affinities.

Well, I’m a conservative. I am an actual conservative, I am not a liberal. Margaret Thatcher was an economic liberal. She had socially conservative instincts, but not socially conservative policies. Most of the things she did in office were economically or socially liberal and yet somehow or other doing all these things got conservatives a bad name – terribly unfair.

So do you think Cameron and Osborne are descendants of Thatcher?

Well, I think they’re managerial. George Osborne, particularly, has no discernible politics at all. David Cameron has a sort of Home Counties, Daily Telegraph-reading Toryism. But there’s no substance or depth to it.

So you think that Cameron is, in essence, a Blairite?

Yes, well like Blair himself, we never understood what his governments were doing. Cameron doesn’t understand the path he is following, he doesn’t realise the course of the vehicle in which he is travelling was set by Euro-Communist intellectuals in the 1980s. But it was. I know this because I’m a former Marxist. It’s the old Maynard Keynes thing: find me a politician who says he has no political philosophy and I will find you a politician who is the slave of some defunct economist and doesn’t know it. Politicians are always doing things which thinkers have prescribed for them to do, but very seldom understand where the ideas have come from which they follow.