Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer
It is certainly true that on the face of it he has much in common with some recent Islamic suicide bombers. He is disturbed by female emancipation, and thinks women would be better off in the home. He seems to be pretty down on homosexuality. Above all – and in this he strongly resembles an Islamist – he believes that his own religious leaders are deeply decadent and have deviated from orthodoxy. He is repelled, like so many Muslim terrorists, by anything that resembles the mingling of cultures.
People will say that we are looking at the mirror image, in fact, of an Islamic terrorist – a man driven by an identical but opposite ideological mania. There is certainly a symmetry here, and yet in both cases, Breivik and the Muslim bomber, I don’t think that ideology is really at the heart of the problem. Yesterday the television reporters found an acquaintance of his from Norway, a fellow called Ulav Andersson, who said that he had known Breivik pretty well. He was surprised by all the Knights of Templar stuff, because he had never really been religious, and he wasn’t aware that he had been interested in politics.
“He didn’t seem opinionated at all,” he said. He just became chippy and irritable, said Ulav Andersson, when some girl he had a crush on jilted him in favour of a man of Pakistani origin.
It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him, and his feeling of inadequacy in relation to the female sex. The same point can be made (and has been made) about so many of the young Muslim terrorists. The fundamental reasons for their callous behaviour lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill.
There is an important lesson, therefore, in the case of Anders Breivik. He killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males. Sometimes there come along pathetic young men who have a sense of powerlessness and rejection, and take a terrible revenge on the world. Sometimes there are people who feel so weak that they need to kill in order to feel strong. They don’t need an ideology to behave as they do.
Michael Ryan had no ideology in Hungerford; Thomas Hamilton had no ideology in Dunblane. To try to advance any other explanation for their actions – to try to advance complicated “social” factors, or to examine the impact of multiculturalism in Scandinavia – is simply to play their self-important game. Anders Breivik may have constructed a portentous 1,500 page manifesto, but like so many others of his type he was essentially a narcissist and egomaniac who could not cope with being snubbed. We should spend less time thinking about him, and much more on the victims and their families.
The Metropolitan Police has got too big for its boots
Gone are the days when the Metropolitan Police was led by men such as Sir Edward Bradford, whose qualifications were based on his service as a distinguished military officer – which included being half-eaten by a tiger while on colonial service in India.
Modern-day Met commissioners more often resemble politicians in uniform than military men with exotic scars. Much has also changed in the nature of crime and in Scotland Yard’s responsibilities. The Victorian force founded by Robert Peel in 1829 faced few of today’s challenges of serious crime and terrorism.
In 2011, the Met must not only police the capital, it must also shoulder responsibility for all counter-terrorist operations across the UK, as well as security for visiting VIPs, personnel for major state occasions and royal protection.
Unfortunately, Scotland Yard has found it increasingly difficult to meet these diverse demands – and the phone-hacking scandal has brought the organisation to a crisis point. In the Lords this week, Lord Blair, a former commissioner, asked if the resignation of two commissioners in three years meant that there was “something gravely wrong with the political oversight” of that body. It had not occurred to him that something might have been wrong with his own judgment and performance.
But the crisis in confidence goes beyond personalities, to fundamental issues of policy. Not only has its leadership been lacking, but the Met’s very constitution is in question. Like the Home Office in 2006, the case for reform is stronger than ever.
Boris Johnson avoids David Cameron resignation question
The Mayor of London called a press conference to talk about the resignation of John Yates, the Met Police Assistant Commissioner, when he was asked whether the Prime Minister should resign over his appointment of the former editor of the News of the World.
Johnson said: “I’m not here to discuss government appointments. Those questions you must address to government.
“I don’t think there’s a very clear read across [from Sir Paul Stephenson hiring Neil Wallis to Mr Cameron hiring Andy Coulson].
“This is a matter you must address to No 10 Downing Street.”
Boris Johnson defends not pursuing News of the World prosecution
The London Mayor also said he had no plans to call for the sacking of Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who yesterday expressed ”regrets” over failures during the Scotland Yard inquiry.
There was huge media interest in Mr Johnson’s private life amid claims in 2004 that the then editor of the Spectator had an affair with columnist Petronella Wyatt.
Speaking at his monthly grilling by the London Assembly, he detailed how he had discussed with police in 2006 that he may have been a victim.
He said he told detectives he would help as part of a prosecution ”if you need me” – but understood he would not be required.
Mr Johnson added: ”Quite frankly, why on earth should I go through some court case in which it would have inevitably involved going over all the pathetic so-called revelations that the News of the World had dug up… Why should I, when the police had made it clear to me when they had abundant evidence?”
Blappp! It hurts to say it, but we owe a great debt to paintballing
He didn’t even look old enough to pay the congestion charge. I have now retired to nurse my injuries in some Surrey gastropub, while the younger generation continue their happy mimesis of war.
As I wait for my lunch, I am thinking about the role of paintball in the UK economy, and the relative importance of services and manufacturing. Look at the dosh we are all pushing out this afternoon in this heaving Surrey gastropub: vast Sunday roasts washed down with knockout Chilean Cabernets. I swear: it is almost 3pm and some of them are still having their prosecco aperitifs. Where is it all coming from?
There in the car park are the sort of vehicles you would expect to see in this neck of the woods: big, burly 4x4s, their haunches and flanks gleaming in sinuous waves of metal. They come from Japan, they come from Germany, they come from France, they come from Korea. Just about the only place they don’t seem to come from is the UK.
If you were a pessimist, and you were worried about our manufacturing base, and the recent defeat of Bombardier at the hands of Siemens, you might be disposed to see a terrible lesson here: other countries have paintshops; we have paintball. Other countries still make things; we pay to run around in the woods. You might think that paintball was just another low-skills service-based industry that does nothing for this country’s competitiveness or exports. And you know what, I reckon you would be almost completely wrong.
Yes, of course we need to boost hi-tech manufacturing, which is one of the reasons I am pleased that all the new aircon tube trains will be made by Bombardier, and the new hop-on, hop-off bus for London will be made in Ballymena. But don’t sneer at paintball, because the difference between making a car and supplying a sylvan paint- based war game is not as big as you might think.
The paintball company I have just used is called Delta Force, and it not only employs 1,000 people already, with 24 sites across the UK. It is now expanding into New Zealand and Australia. It is one of the biggest paintball firms in Europe, and according to Alex and Russell, two paintball marshals, it has just had its best year ever in the UK market. The company is hiring staff in Crawley, Edinburgh, Broxbourne and Leicester. It is looking for a supervisor to run the camp in Auckland. And these are not mickey mouse jobs: they require leadership, charisma, and the ability to marshal 300 people and teach them the safe use of a CO2 gun.
Given the savage indiscipline I have just seen, I imagine that if you can run a paintball camp, you can run just about anything. The guns themselves are made in England by a firm based in Aldershot, so that every boost to paintballing has a knock-on benefit for old-fashioned manufacturing; and I can easily imagine that there will soon be paintball apps – enabling you to tell where your enemies are on your handheld – so that there is scope for a fusion between paintballing and the digital economy.
And if paintball is simply servicing a fantasy, then so are the great big shiny cars outside the gastropub. These butch 4x4s aren’t any more useful, really, than my clapped-out 16-year-old Toyota: they just allow their owners to have a certain conception of themselves, just as paintballing allows you to dream of being Rambo. The value is in the fantasy.
Paintballing, finally, is good for business. It builds esprit de corps. It helps you let off steam. It gives many thousands of young people the rush of adrenalin that is so often missing from their childhoods, and it teaches the rest of us a vital lesson: that there will come an evening or a morning or a noonday, when you least deserve or expect it, when someone will shoot you in the back.
