Charles Moore

In all the arguments surging about Fidel Castro, I have noticed the lack of simple, even tourist-level observation, of what his country has been like in recent years. This can tell you more than disquisitions on land reform or geopolitics. A friend who went there this year reports that the level of goods available to citizens is even more limited than he remembers from visiting communist Romania in the 1970s. He entered one local-currency government food shop in Havana. Three staff sat at the counter, but there was literally no food to buy. There was a Havana-wide shortage of eggs at the time, and when a box of eggs appeared at one end of the town, mobile phones brought crowds rushing with the news.

‘Independent’ is becoming an excuse-word in government. The inquiry into historical child abuse is called the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). This lets the government wash its hands of it. Although Theresa May set it up, with its hopeless remit, she keeps it at a distance now. So does her Home Office successor, Amber Rudd. In the Commons debate on the IICSA’s latest travails this week, the government fielded only a very junior minister, Sarah Newton. She, too, hid behind the point that the inquiry is independent. Of course the government should not be running it. But if no chairman — the fourth one is now being undermined — and no senior lawyers can stay the course, don’t its inventors have to try something else?

In Northern Ireland recently, I sought out the Mass times of the local Church of the Immaculate Conception. Its website duly listed them, but I was surprised to find roughly half its web-page filled with a picture of a young woman’s all-but-naked torso and the invitation to click for more ‘Diva pics and videos’. I couldn’t tell whether this was a viral invasion or an Irish parish’s highly unimmaculate conception of how to make extra money for its good causes. When I met the priest, I was about to ask him, but he looked so young. I remembered that this is still the Year of Mercy, and stayed silent.

It is a great relief that there will be no inquiry into the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in 1984. The weirdness is that Mrs May’s people ever entertained the thought in the first place. The push for an inquiry is a classic example of the attempt by the aggrieved, usually on the left, to turn history into a trial. If we were to inquire into the miners’ strike, more than 30 years on, it would be far more pertinent — though still a very bad, divisive idea — to establish the full facts about how Arthur Scargill got money from Gaddafi’s Libya and was promised it by the Soviet Union. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is current proof of how retributive urges make a just process impossible.

It is a great relief that there will be no inquiry into the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in 1984. The weirdness is that Mrs May’s people ever entertained the thought in the first place. The push for an inquiry is a classic example of the attempt by the aggrieved, usually on the left, to turn history into a trial. If we were to inquire into the miners’ strike, more than 30 years on, it would be far more pertinent — though still a very bad, divisive idea — to establish the full facts about how Arthur Scargill got money from Gaddafi’s Libya and was promised it by the Soviet Union. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is current proof of how retributive urges make a just process impossible.