Daily Mail, January 13 2003

The fact that a terrorist suspect armed with the deadly poison ricin has escaped a police dragnet and is still on the loose is obviously deeply alarming. Concern turns to incredulity, however, when we learn that British citizens have been placed in such danger because the government failed to act upon informed advice.

Sixteen days after the September 11 attacks on America, senior civil servants issued the Home Office with a stark warning that the only way to stop terrorists arriving in Britain was to lock up asylum seekers until their identities had been checked.

The government refused to do so, no doubt because this was precisely what Ann Widdecombe, then shadow Home Secretary, had recommended before the 2001 election – for which she was damned as ‘racist’.

Now we see the terrifying lunacy of such branding. For at least two of the ricin suspects were indeed ‘asylum seekers’, living on benefits in an Islington council flat.

Of course, most asylum-seekers are not terrorists. Yet given the active threat to Britain from Al Q’aeda, it is equally obvious that it is imperative to check the bona fides of absolutely everyone who is allowed into this country.

But on the contrary, the government hasn’t got the faintest clue whom it has let in, having allowed thousands of asylum seekers simply to disappear into city life.

Of all the tasks of government, the most fundamental is the requirement to keep its citizens safe from dangers posed both from within and from without. Yet this government has foundered on both counts. For in addition to its indolence over potential terrorists, it is conspicuously failing to protect its citizens against home-grown crime.

Street offences are on the increase, gun crime is at record levels and burglary is once again on the rise. A YouGov opinion poll last week revealed devastating evidence for Tony Bair that public confidence in the government’s ability to get crime under control has simply collapsed.

The extent of Prime Ministerial panic over this was revealed by an anonymous ‘senior government source’ briefing at the weekend against both the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor for saying that first and second-time burglars should not necessarily go to jail.

A government is clearly in trouble when it feels the need to dump buckets of ordure onto not just a top judge – whose error was to do what the government itself said it wanted – but also on its own Lord Chancellor.

This is hardly surprising. For the promise to make people feel safe lies at the very core of the compact Tony Blair personally made with the British people. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ was the slogan which brought him to power.

That was because people understood he was promising two things which they thought were crucial. The first was that the culture of excuses and incompetence would be ended, and that criminals would be punished and stopped. The second was that he would restore security and order to a society that felt insecure and disordered, by healing the social divisions that were causing children to run amok.

The crucial undertaking was to transform education for the better. Yet this brave boast, too, has now blown up in his face. The much-vaunted literacy and numeracy strategies are failing so badly that they are now to be merged – a rescue attempt of truly desperate incoherence. After more than seven years in which education was the top political priority, teachers in the world’s fourth largest economy still aren’t able to teach primary schoolchildren to be literate and numerate.

Now the government is effectively going to destroy science education in schools, with the basics of physics, chemistry and biology to be replaced by uneducated discussions of scientific current affairs. The sheer, philistine stupidity and destructiveness of this take the breath away.

The government has simply lost the plot on education, as it has on virtually every single thing it touches. Prisons, the health service, transport – all the public services are in a state of deepening chaos. This is a government that is in power but not in control.

The irony is that this administration of control-freaks meddles where it should keep out – pulling the strings of doctors, teachers or police officers ever more tightly, thus crippling their professionalism – while managing to lose control of what it has an overwhelming duty to protect, the country’s security and internal order. And the more power it accrues to itself, the less it is able to deliver its promises.

Mr Blair’s apparently down-beat present mood doubtless reflects a genuine bewilderment. How can it be, he must be asking himself, that absolutely nothing is working? How can this possibly have happened, since the only thing the country needed to solve all its problems, after all, was to have a government that was Not-Tory?

For Blairites really do believe that all bad things are Tory and that New Labour has an absolute monopoly of virtue, and that as long as the Tories are kept out of office the public services will automatically recover and beaming NHS patients will leap onto punctual trains and teenage tearaways will start helping old ladies across the road.

Being Not-Tory is vital to New Labour’s definition of itself because once it junked Clause Four socialism and embraced the free market, there was every danger that it would become indistinguishable from the Conservative party. So it fell silent on economics and erected instead universal human rights and non-discrimination between lifestyles as its immutable principles, and targeted racism, offensiveness and ‘xenophobia’ for eradication altogether from the human psyche.

What mattered most was being thought to be nice people and not hurting anyone’s feelings. That meant appeasing the moral and emotional blackmail of those self-defined victim groups who defame any who dare frustrate their agenda. The result has been the paralysis over immigration and asylum.

Failure to improve the public services in itself might be enough to seal a government’s death warrant. Losing control over the country’s internal and external security would normally be terminal.

But these are not normal times. For the Conservatives, who should be poised to take advantage of this wholesale loss of government control, are paralysed because -- astonishingly – they too are obsessed with becoming the Not-Tory party.

So we now have the extraordinary spectacle of an embattled and demoralised Prime Minister whose party is riven by factions and plots and schemes to hasten his departure, facing an embattled and demoralised Leader of the Opposition whose party is riven by factions and plots and schemes to hasten his departure.

The danger to Britain from governmental incompetence and appeasement is acute. This is now a country adrift. It is crying out for leadership. Does anyone have the courage to deliver?

Posted by admin at January 13, 2003