Daily Mail, 1 May 2006

The spectacular multiple pile-up that is the Labour government has left two ministers fighting for their political lives.

John Prescott’s future looks bleak. The tawdry claims by his former lover Tracey Temple were bad enough. But separate allegations by a former Labour party aide that he sexually harassed her over a two-year period are even more serious and – if true – mean he cannot possibly remain in office.

The position of Charles Clarke, frantically trying to locate more than 900 foreign prisoners who should have been considered for deportation, has become steadily worse as more details have seeped out. Now Tony Blair has pointedly refused to guarantee the Home Secretary’s job, saying that his survival depends on his success in sorting out the mess.

It is pretty objectionable that these ministers are still in post at all. But whether they stay or go is immaterial. What we are witnessing is not just two different ministers on the rack. It is nothing less than the disintegration of public administration in a democracy that has fundamentally lost its way.

Mr Clarke says the Home Office is seriously dysfunctional. Absolutely true, and this goes back to well before Labour came to power. These tendencies, however, have become infinitely worse since 1997, in large measure because of Labour’s highly ideological agenda promoting multiculturalism, mass immigration, human rights and hostility to the traditional family.

Along with the education department, the Home Office is at the cutting government edge of such social engineering because it is the ministry with the most coercive power which it has used, under this government, to reshape society.

One only has to think of its attempts to rig the criminal justice process to convict more men of rape, its distorted use of research on domestic violence to demonise men, or its tacit support for drug decriminalisation to realise quite how badly the Home Office is out of control.

It is more obsessed with promoting diversity and instructing staff to avoid politically incorrect attitudes than ensuring they are of the highest quality and properly trained in what the job requires.

Once upon a time, the senior civil service would have put an end to such rubbish. Now, our highly politicised mandarins are themselves part of the problem. The National Audit Office has discovered that the former Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Sir John Gieve, who presided over the foreign criminals debacle, was also responsible for such financial chaos – before departing to become deputy governor of the Bank of England – that £1 billion appears to have gone astray in the ministry’s accounts.

The incompetence and arrogance of the Home Office are beyond belief. Take its handbook, Life in the United Kingdom, which advises immigrants seeking UK citizenship on how to be British. This is riddled with egregious historical errors, getting important facts and dates wrong and misquoting Sir Winston Churchill.

But when the Historical Association submitted a seven-page list of these errors the Home Office simply ignored it, and only after two further letters eventually asked – too late – for help. Meanwhile the actual author of these mistakes, Professor Sir Bernard Crick, has high-handedly dismissed these complaints as ‘absolute quibbling’.

It is this kind of arrogance, on top of the incompetence, which is so deeply offensive. What many may find most shocking of all from Tracey Temple’s sordid saga is the account of apparently non-stop partying and drunkenness in the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. This displays an utter contempt, not just for the dignity of office but for the public and the ordinary lives they lead.

This whole mess has come about in large measure because this is a government of tyros and carpet-baggers. The New Labour project is composed of people who are politically, morally and philosophically rootless: amoral, post-modern, post-moral, post-political beings whose only purpose in life is power for its own sake, and who believe that such an end justifies the most cynical and ruthless of means.

This is why it is currently mired in the corruption scandal over cash for peerages. It is why revelations like the Prescott affair erupt, as people scent dissolution and accordingly the ties of loyalty and discretion start to snap.

But this has roots deeper still than the Blair government. It is painful to remember that heady day in 1997 when the Blair family posed on the steps of Downing Street, an emblem of a wholesome fresh start after the sleaze of the John Major years. Now Mr Blair himself is being compared to Sir John, rocked almost daily by fresh revelations of incompetence or scandal.

Although the Blairites have made things worse, the roots of the problem lie in far broader cultural decay. Look, for example, at the meltdown in education. Is it surprising that civil servants are so inadequate, when the brightest and best of our young people need to be offered remedial courses in the basics at university?

As a former politics professor Sir Bernard Crick, at least, should have known better. But is it so surprising that he displays such a contempt for history when, in defining citizenship for new immigrants, he repudiated this country’s traditions in favour of a multicultural, rights-based society in which people are advised how to get the most from the state?

All these destructive trends are rooted in disdain for this country’s identity, its laws and traditions. That is why European human rights law is so important to the New Labour project. But human rights law lies at the very heart of Charles Clarke’s woes.
Even when criminals are recommended for deportation, more often than not the courts thwart this on human rights grounds. Indeed, the Home Office reportedly told the immigration service not to push for deportations because it feared such offenders would promptly claim asylum, which it wanted to avoid at all costs because it was desperate to keep the asylum figures down.

Apart from this alleged scam, it is outrageous that convicted foreign criminals should be able to claim asylum at all after serving their sentence. The presumption should be that such individuals should be thrown out, on the basis that no country should be obliged to accept people who are undesirable.

One reason why immigration got out of control in the first place was that the courts routinely thwarted deportation on a variety of human rights grounds. The judges no longer seem to acknowledge the responsibilities of citizenship, and have interpreted human rights law to make a mockery of justice.

But it was the Blair government that gave the judges this power through the Human Rights Act – possibly the most effective legal weapon ever devised to turn a country’s values upside down and reduce attempts to protect its own interests to chaos.

Yes, the Home Office is dysfunctional. But it is merely doing the bidding of a serially dysfunctional government.

Public disillusionment with the whole political class has now reached dangerous proportions. At this week’s local government elections, the danger is that people will say ‘a plague on all your houses’ and stay away.

Such despair is lethal to democracy. The public safety valve is the power to throw the rascals out. This week’s local elections provide an opportunity for a powerful protest vote. What comes after New Labour is a problem for another day. First things first. This rot has got to stop.

Posted by melanie at May 1, 2006