Daily Mail, July 29 2002

The lazy haze of summer may finally have descended, but in the distance the drumbeat of war grows ever more insistent.

According to weekend reports, Tony Blair has told President George Bush that Britain will support a war against Iraq, while British military planners are preparing for hostilities that might start sooner than has been thought.

Such action might split not just the Labour party but Britain itself down the middle. For a rampant and ugly anti-Americanism is being allowed to make the British political weather.

This prejudice can only be countered if Blair does what he has so far been reluctant to do and properly makes the case for war to Parliament. For it is Parliament where the national consensus is forged.

Real concerns are being expressed about action against Iraq, which the Prime Minister must lay to rest. For these claims are all eminently implausible, wrong and defeatable.

Take the argument mounted by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that war against Iraq is morally permissible only if backed by the UN. At best, this assertion is dangerously naïve; at worst, morally blind.

On December 3 1982, a UN resolution which was opposed by the US and the UK but supported by a number of European countries proclaimed the legitimacy of resistance against foreign occupations ‘by all available means including armed struggle’ – a euphemism for terrorism.

The UN’s human rights commission consists of some of the most flagrant abusers of human rights in the world: Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria. Syria, indeed, is now a member of the UN security council, an incredible development considering that Syria is a principal state sponsor of terrorism.

The UN has deplored the fact that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights abuses and terrorism. It has not deplored the worldwide assaults on synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and Jewish individuals overwhelmingly promulgated by Muslims.

It has not deplored the torrent of anti-Jewish hatred and medieval blood libels pouring out of Muslim countries, and their incitement to mass murder against Israelis and Jews. Instead, it has repeatedly castigated Israel for seeking to defend itself against terror, and sponsored, moreover, the obscene ‘anti-racist’ Durban conference which turned into a disgusting carnival of anti-Jewish vilification.

It is truly staggering that anyone should seriously suggest that this most corrupt institution should be regarded as the moral arbiter of a nation’s actions.

The second argument is that war would be illegal under international law. Not so. A nation is legally entitled to make a pre-emptive strike in self defence against an imminent threat.

What’s more, since Saddam is in breach of the undertakings he gave which suspended hostilities in the Gulf War – to destroy his weapons of mass destruction and allow this to be verified by the UN – lawyers argue that war now would merely amount to a resumption of those hostilities.

The third argument is that Saddam does not pose an imminent threat to the west. Admittedly, the evidence is circumstantial; but it is still pretty persuasive. We know he has chemical and biological weapons, which he has used against his own people.

We know from defectors that he still has a clandestine programme to enrich natural uranium to weapons-grade material. We know that thousands of tonnes of chemical and biological agents in Iraq are unaccounted for; that is why the UN inspectors need to go in, and why Saddam’s refusal to allow them to do so is so alarming. We know he trains and collaborates with terrorists. We know he rewards the families of ‘suicide’ mass murderers.

It is argued that he would not use weapons of mass destruction because he knows the US would retaliate. But what’s to stop him providing others with chemical or biological agents for such weapons, so that the credulous would say -- precisely as they do now -- that there was no evidence to link Saddam with any atrocities?

In the light of all this, to wait for such a man to strike on the basis that we don’t have concrete evidence of an immediate threat seems not so much a moral position as simply mad.

But the appeasement factions claim the real reason for war is nothing to do with the above. Instead of President Bush’s ‘axis of evil‘ comprising those states that sponsor terror, they believe in an axis of evil comprising the US, Israel, Tony Blair and the intelligence agencies of the west.

So they would have us believe that the US would wildly expose its armed forces to the risk of heavy casualties; that it would wildly risk Iraq either re-occupying Kuwait or lobbing a chemical weapon at Israel; and that Bush would wildly risk the political obliteration that would result from failure.

All of this is deemed to follow not from any assessment of a clear and present danger but from some cynical, malevolent conception of self-interest. This certainty about such near-suicidal recklessness can surely only be explained by a truly pathological anti-Americanism.

The Americans believe unseating Saddam would deliver to other terror states the message: ‘You’re next,’ which would persuade them to abandon their terrorist ways. Maybe; maybe not. The consequences may be far messier.

But the bottom line is surely that we cannot sit and wait for the next atrocity. The war on terror cannot be won unless the world shows that it will no longer continue to support, condone or appease terrorism as it has done, the single most important reason why terror has taken such a hold.

People think terror won’t be stopped until the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians is solved. In fact, the reverse is true. Terror in Israel will stop only when its godfathers in the Arab world are tackled. Only then will the Palestinians have a realistic prospect of a state that lives in peace alongside Israel.

But in Britain, the belief has taken hold that the cause of terror is Israel, backed by America. This venomous circle is closed by the claim that America is controlled by the Jews, that ancient anti-Jewish libel now being endlessly recycled in the periodicals of the intellectual left.

The current anti-Americanism and its intimate bedfellow, anti-Jewish hatred, illustrate a decadent, self-hating culture which surfaced after September 11 when many people thought America deserved what had happened to it. Subsequently, many Britons and even more Europeans have come to sympathise with the terrorists who strike at the west.

This is surely the real reason that Tony Blair is so reluctant to make his argument in Parliament. He may have grasped that Saddam Hussein has to be stopped, but there is little sign he has understood that terror throughout the middle east is caused not by dispossession but by unquenchable hatred and despotic power.

For Blair to make the case for war properly would expose the pernicious British and European appeasement of Islamic fascism, and raise questions about the motivation of those who invert morality and truth in denying the wellspring of Arab terror.

Constitutionally, he may not need Parliament’s mandate for war but politically it is imperative that he makes this case, and well; or he could find that war against Iraq becomes his nemesis.

Daily Mail, July 24 2002

Mark Twain once observed that there were three kinds of untruth: lies, damned lies and statistics. Now we should add a fourth category of whopper: the Home Office research study.

According to one such specimen published this week, no fewer than one in every 20 women aged between 16 and 59 in England and Wales has been raped, and one in ten has experienced some form of ‘sexual victimisation’. Most of these assaults, said the study, had been committed not by strangers but by intimates – partners, former partners and acquaintances.

If true, this would indeed be an appalling state of affairs. Such huge numbers suffering serious sexual assault would mean that women were living in the shadow of an intolerable level of violence by men. After all, rape is one of the most serious crimes on the statute book because of the damage it does to a woman, both physical and psychological.

If the researchers were correct, one would therefore expect to hear an enormous amount of female distress and rage being expressed against these male ‘intimates’. We would all of us know women friends or relatives who had been raped or sexually assaulted.

But we are not hearing this. We are instead shocked and amazed by these figures. The reason for our incomprehension is simple. What the researchers are telling us is not true. Indeed, this study is a load of manipulative, malevolent rubbish which must call the credibility of the Home Office research department seriously into question.

The devil here is in the definition. To most people, rape means sexual penetration against the victim’s consent, which implies of necessity an act of violence or the threat of violence.

The Home Office researchers have muddied this concept. Instead of the legal definition of rape as ‘penile penetration’, the study defines it merely as ‘forced to have sexual intercourse against your will’.

But the definition of ‘forced against your will’ is highly subjective. It can so easily translate into ‘if you didn’t want to’, which can become meaningless. Although the study claims the word ‘forced’ implies an assault, it does nothing of the kind.

A woman might feel forced to have sex against her will, for example, if her lover tells her that otherwise he will leave here for another woman. Or she might be an unwilling participant because he is drunk, or hasn’t had a bath for a week, or she doesn’t love him.

The crucial point is that in such circumstances she is participating in sex even though she could choose not to do so. She is therefore not the victim of violence. By any fair-minded or common-sense definition, this is not rape. Yet the Home Office researchers appear to have included this kind of experience in their definition.

This already highly questionable exercise then becomes positively surreal. For believe it or not, the ‘raped’ women in the survey themselves don’t think what has happened to them is rape. The study actually admits that, of the women who the researchers said had been raped, fewer than two thirds themselves described what had happened to them as rape. And fewer than three quarters of those who the researchers said had experienced sexual victimisation thought of this as a crime.

The reason for the discrepancy is perfectly obvious to anyone who is not busy playing sexual politics. These events were simply not rapes or sexual assaults, and the women concerned knew this perfectly well. That is because most of these incidents happened within sexual relationships with intimates, and the women involved appeared to accept what most people would think, that the issue of consent between lovers can be highly ambiguous.

Yet what these women themselves made of their experiences seems to be of no consequence to these Whitehall researchers, who of course know better than the victims what has happened to them. (So much for Home Office rhetoric about putting the victim first). They therefore drum up one self-serving reason after another to explain why sexual experiences which the women didn’t think were rape were indeed rape.

Thus, they suggest that the women might not want to admit they have been raped because this is degrading and stigmatising; or they may not want to acknowledge that someone they like or love is a rapist. The idea that they knew perfectly well that the person they liked or loved was not a rapist does not occur to these researchers. The women are simply wrong.

This astonishing display of contempt arises because nothing as inconvenient as a few facts can get in the way of the assumption behind this study: that women are being raped, and men are getting away with it.

The ideological bias that is clearly driving this research is underlined by a crucial omission. The study says that most sexual violence is committed by partners. But – highly significantly – it omits to make a distinction between partners and spouses. It therefore does not tell us whether women suffer as much sexual assault from husbands as from boyfriends or cohabitants.

Yet all the available research suggests that the risk of sexual violence is negligible within marriage, and is hugely increased among cohabitants or more casual sexual partners. Marriage is actually the best physical protection against sexual violence.

But this study states instead that home life not safe. Here we get to the nasty core of this whole misleading exercise. For the underlying purpose is to demonise men and write them out of the domestic script altogether.

It is this agenda of marriage-busting, man-hating feminism which has now got the Home Office well and truly in its clutches. Ever since New Labour came to power, it has been spouting a torrent of distorted information about domestic violence.

It has been exaggerating its incidence, omitting a vast amount of international evidence that women are equally aggressive as men and –- again – refusing to acknowledge the key fact that most domestic violence takes place between cohabiting and other unmarried couples.

The fact is that sexual mores have dramatically changed. Women now initiate casual sex; they carry condoms in their bags and drink, smoke, swear and often parody the worst caricature of macho culture.

As a result, the rules of the mating game have totally altered. The room for ambiguous signals has hugely expanded. That’s why the courts are reluctant to convict men accused of rape.

But Whitehall’s feminists cannot allow a little thing like injustice to interrupt their agenda. So the government is now hell bent on rigging the justice system itself to get men convicted of rape, by hook or by crook. To justify this, men have to be shown as perpetrating an intolerable level of violence upon women.

The result of this lie is not only to commit a calumny upon the male sex. It will also trivialise real rape when it occurs, make it harder to convict the guilty and betray the true needs of women to be protected against violence.

Daily Mail, July 22 2002

On the surface, little has changed. Visiting America as I have just done still knocks you for six with the sheer, exuberant differences between the US and Britain. For starters, there's the American eagerness to serve, the smiling and prompt helpfulness, so astonishing to Brits accustomed to battling the surliness of the average waitress or car park attendant.

Then there's the disconcerting feeling that you have turned into Gulliver in Brobdingnag. For everything in America seems larger than life, from the multi-lane highways to the soaring skylines; from the gargantuan food portions to the gargantuan citizens whose girth sometimes appears to defy the laws of human mechanics.

And there's that life-enhancing sense of boundless energy, the belief that problems are there to be solved, the total absence of Britain's corrosive cynicism and defeatism: the can-do society, so very different from our own deadly culture of decline.

But scratch a little deeper and you find that America is suddenly being gripped by a most uncharacteristic sense of uncertainty and a questioning of its very belief in itself. The country suffered a terrible blow on September 11 when, for the first time, its sense of physical inviolability was punctured. People asked themselves: how could this happen to us?

Now it has taken another knock which is possibly even more profound. Last Friday, yet another torrid week for the stock market culminated in shares crashing through the floor, wiping out – according to one of the excitable commentators wheeled out on TV – the equivalent of the combined economies of Denmark and Greece and producing the worst financial results for more than 30 years. Now ordinary Americans are saying, how could we be screwing up in this way?

What's driving the US stock market into meltdown is the backwash of the Enron, WorldCom and other corporate scandals which have caused a collapse of public trust in companies to tell the truth about their performance and profits.

It's a classic bubble that has popped. Nothing new there, you might think. But it has prompted a general outbreak of insecurity and introspection. And if consumers stop spending through a collapse of confidence, the economy really will be in trouble.

In downtown Indianapolis where I have been attending a conference, the atmosphere is febrile and jittery. People are saying they are really worried about their savings and pensions. They are nervous that their jobs will disappear along with public services on which they rely.

There is a sense of bewilderment that the natural order of things has somehow been stood on its head. For until recently, Americans took their astonishing prosperity for granted as their birthright. Wealth creation was what they did, and the good times, both financial and political, all flowed from that. Now they not only fear that these benefits are being taken away from them. They cannot understand how this could have happened.

The panic has developed because the market seems implacably set on a downwards path. A people that believes it can fix just about anything is looking on aghast as the plunging Dow Jones index tears that certainty to shreds.

Political and corporate America is frantically trying to put Humpty together again. President Bush has produced a tough-sounding reform package. He has laid down the law to business that it has to discover ethics and banish fraud and theft from its dealings.

Yet given his own background in oil, this has produced a horse-laugh from various quarters.

Meanwhile, Vice-President Dick Cheney has also been tarnished by official findings of dodgy accounting practices at the Halliburton oil services company where he was chief executive.

Beneath this predictable political sniping at big-business Republicans, the financial crisis has prompted a deeper and searching debate. In Britain, the turbulence on the money markets is as yet an ominous cloud on the horizon, with rising house prices enabling a sense of complacency to mask longer-term concerns.

But in the US, wealth creation itself, the very article of American faith, is now in the frame. Innocence has been lost. Americans once believed corporate executives to be truthful, and that the stock market was the path to prosperity. Now, a debate is now raging over the values of the business world; and on everyone's lips is the hitherto unmentionable g-word itself – greed.

Thus Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress that the crisis arose because 'an infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community'. Since the avenues to express that greed had grown so enormously, he said, he had changed his views and now believed the government should more closely regulate the financial world.

This has prompted outrage from libertarian conservatives who believe greed is good because it is the engine of wealth creation. This has provoked in turn corresponding outrage among those who say that this is effectively to endorse dishonesty and theft.

But if the true faith is faltering, its high priest has also tumbled from his pedestal. For Greenspan, who for years has been credited with near-mythical powers to keep America Inc. solvent, is now seen not to be delivering.

This shattering of public trust and confidence has further punctured America's sense of its own invincibility. What was hit from without by September 11 is now being hit from within. America 's influence rests on its financial credibility. Now the question is being asked: will corporate abuses erode a key element of national power?

Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr, who coined the term 'soft power' to describe America's non-military influence, told the New York Times that the answer was definitely yes. For if it has lost the moral high ground, then the US can no longer tell the rest of the world how to behave.

The consequences could be incalculable. At present, there is overwhelming public endorsement for President Bush's war on terror. His draconian security proposals and the expected war against Iraq have widespread domestic support.

But if the crisis of financial confidence continues, might not the haemorrhage of credibility erode popular backing for a war against Iraq? For such an initiative fundamentally depends on trust in the President to be telling the truth about the clear and present danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

In cynical Britain, by contrast, Tony Blair does not enjoy that trust. So when the Prime Minister says that intelligence reports have convinced him that Saddam poses such a threat that he must be stopped, he finds himself vilified as President Bush's poodle.

But the President's room for manoeuvre depends ultimately on America's belief in itself. It is because the US thinks that it is morally superior to decadent, defeatist, appeasement-minded Europe that it is opposing it on a whole variety of issues, including the possible war against Iraq.

So unless it solves its financial crisis and restores the trust and confidence of the nation, there is now a distinct danger that it will not only imperil the prosperity of the western world but also fatally undermine the war against terror on which its freedom depends.

Daily Mail, July 15 2002

Once upon a time, Chancellors of the Exchequer were merely keepers of the public purse. So far as the spending ministries were concerned, the role of the Treasury was to dole out taxpayers’ booty for departments of state to spend as they saw fit.

No longer. Gordon Brown has ripped up that script and written himself a new one.

As Chancellor, he bestrides the political stage like a colossus. His record as steward of the nation’s finances is largely unchallenged. He arouses widespread admiration for his intellect and the integrity of his beliefs.

Today, he is expected to dish out untold largesse to rapturous spending ministers, particularly the Education Secretary Estelle Morris. Labour backbenchers are sighing with relief. Now at last, they think, the Chancellor is riding to the rescue of the beleaguered public services with his pockets stuffed with money.

In fact, the more cash Brown hands out, the more muscle he puts behind his own agenda to change the face of British society. For crucially, he is controlling how the money is spent to an unprecedented degree.

Brown knows better than most that money doesn’t produce reform. In education, for example, spending has risen threefold in real terms over the past 40 years. Yet skills in reading among one in five adults and in numeracy among nearly half of all adults are still below the standard expected of 11 year-olds.

The Chancellor is rightly concerned lest all the extra money disappears into a series of black holes with no discernible improvements. So the government is unleashing a battery of ‘reforms’ to which funds will be tied through ever more numerous targets and performance indicators.

This whole approach, however, is doomed to fail because the ideological aim of the strategy itself is fundamentally flawed.

That aim is no less than the old Labour dream of redistributing wealth and achievement between rich and poor. In a private speech two months ago, Brown delivered a tirade against elitism, private education and the privilege of birth: the rhetoric, in short, of class war that Tony Blair has tried so hard to excise from his party.

It is perfectly true that poorer people are now much less able to get to university, and less likely to escape backgrounds of deprivation. That should indeed worry all of us who have the interests of the whole of society at heart and feel an obligation to the most vulnerable.

But what the government refuses to face is that its own strategy of egalitarian social engineering is a major factor behind the stagnation of the poor. Nowhere is this more starkly demonstrated than in education policy.

In a meritocracy, where ability is rewarded, education is the route out of disadvantage. But since this also creates losers, egalitarians are hostile to meritocracy and want instead to impose equality of outcomes.

This means that – however they may rant against privilege -- they are actually against rewarding ability. Instead, they squash poor, able people into universal mediocrity in which they are trapped (while themselves taking care to live in areas with good schools, or paying for private tuition on the side).

Labour’s deepest core belief is in equality of outcomes. So it is incorrigibly wedded to that engine of egalitarian social engineering, the comprehensive school.

This has in fact been a disaster for the poor. Some 25 per cent of comprehensives get worse results than secondary moderns in our remaining selective areas. In Northern Ireland’s selective system – now threatened by Sinn Fein’s policy of revolutionary nihilism -- more poor children get five good GCSEs and go to university than in mainland Britain.

The government has now acknowledged that the comprehensive school has failed. Yet it will not replace it. Instead, it will introduce inequalities within the comprehensive system through increasing ‘specialist’ schools.

These do better than ‘bog-standard’ comprehensives, not least because they probably attract children from higher-motivated families. But what happens if a child is not interested in art or music or technology? How many develop such an aptitude at age 11 anyway? This is a means of further restricting choice for children who need, above all, a school that is excellent all round.

The damage done by egalitarianism has also all but destroyed what children are being taught, with the government eroding knowledge still further and replacing it with ‘skills’.

At 14-plus, the curriculum is now poised to abandon compulsory modern languages and geography for lessons in tourism, manufacturing and leisure. The government is undermining teaching itself through its batty desire for children to ‘take ownership of their learning’, part of the rubric of the ‘child-centred’ education orthodoxy which has abandoned generations of children to drown in their own ignorance.

Similarly, the Department for Anti-Education has proposed that ‘thinking skills’ be taught independently of subjects, even though pupils only learn to think by engaging with knowledge. This, we are told, will help pupils ‘form rich images of problem situations in multiple modalities’—the kind of gobbledegook we can expect to be the norm once the government has destroyed altogether people’s ability to think.

The result of all this educational vandalism is to kick away the ladder of opportunity for the poor. To conceal this wickedness, the government is rigging all the benchmarks to give the illusion of progress.

The literacy strategy is deeply flawed, with teachers delivering a catastrophic confusion of methods to teach reading. The strategy’s ‘success’ is bogus; there is widespread cheating in the SATS, so it is hardly surprising that achievement among new secondary school pupils appears to take a dive.

At GCSE and A-level there is rampant grade inflation. Who can doubt the growing worthlessness of exams when, despite the fact that 45 per cent achieve grade C maths at GCSE, a study of 400 trainee teachers showed that 42 per cent of them could not multiply eight minutes 25 seconds by eight?

There are now more A-level passes in business, communication or media studies than physics or history. Now children are to be bribed to stay on at school after 16. What is the point if they are merely going to do media studies? And what is to stop them just taking the money and running?

A really radical strategy to raise education standards would look very different. It would free schools from destructive local authority control and allow them to be genuinely diverse; abolish teacher training institutions that do untold ideological damage; withdraw political control from the exam system, so that teachers with a love of their subject can once again set syllabuses that educate and inspire; and introduce vouchers so that poor people can make the same choices for their children’s education as the rich.

Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown well understand that their project is worthless if education founders. But they have yet to grasp that their noble ideal of making education a lifeline for the poor is being destroyed, not by class war but by doctrines rampant in the education world and which lie at the heart of Labour ideology.

Daily Mail, July 12 2002

Much of the drugs debate in Britain is driven by despair that virtually nothing can be done to stem the rising tide of abuse. Yet the experience of Sweden, to which virtually no attention has been paid, dramatically shows how it is possible to get on top of the drugs menace by adopting a far more tough-minded approach than anything seen here.

Compared with Britain, their drug problem is miniscule. Around 11 per cent, of schoolchildren there have tried drugs, compared to around 45 per cent in Britain.

But the rate is rising in Sweden just like everywhere else; a decade ago, it was nearer to three per cent. The Swedes are very troubled by this increase, which they think is partly due to the great tide of youth drug culture and associated libertine values washing through Europe.

Nevertheless, Sweden’s rates of drug use are still far lower than other countries. And both the Swedish government and public are overwhelmingly committed to continuing their tough drugs policy, whose aim is nothing less than achieving a drug-free society.

Central to this policy is the understanding that if a society is to control drugs, their use must be viewed as utterly beyond the pale. Once you realise how Sweden translates that view into practice, you begin to understand why the essence of the British problem is that drugs here are not actually viewed as unacceptable, and that such ambivalence makes effective control all but impossible.

The Swedes deliver an utterly unambiguous message: all drugs do harm that society will not tolerate. Unlike Britain, they don’t talk about drug ‘abuse’ as if this is different from use. To the Swedes, all drug use is abuse.

From this, certain things follow. First, law enforcement does not differentiate between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs. That doesn’t mean saying all drugs have the same effect; clearly they do not. It means instead accepting they are all illegal because they all result in harm to individuals and society that is totally unacceptable.

Cannabis, for example, is seen as a menace in itself, with the Swedish health ministry emphasising the risks it poses of mental illness and social withdrawal.

Second, they do not make the distinction made in Britain between users and dealers. Concentrating effort on drug dealers – as we do – is fruitless. The supply of drugs is not only unlimited, but is driven by demand. So while the dealers should not be ignored, an effective drugs policy has to concentrate on damping down demand.

That depends on delivering a consistent message that drug use simply will not be tolerated. It is illogical and counter-productive, say the Swedes, to throw the book at drug dealers while regarding users as victims. It is vital instead to see drug users as people who are breaking the law and violating moral and social norms. So in Sweden, not just possession but drug use itself is a criminal offence.

This does not mean everyone smoking a joint gets thrown into jail. Criminal sanctions are mainly used against the dealers. What it does mean is that law enforcement, treatment and education all sing from the same hymn sheet and make the drug user the focus of firm attention.

Because drug use is illegal, the police can request blood or urine samples to test for drugs where they suspect they are being used. According to Ralf Löfstedt, the deputy director of Sweden’s Health and Social Affairs ministry who gave evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, drug users are identified at an early stage and are prosecuted but not jailed.

Information about them is then passed onto welfare agencies, who deal with the users’ needs through appropriate treatment. A lot of money is spent on detoxification and treatment programmes; drug withdrawal treatment in prison is compulsory; and prisoners can spent part of their sentences in treatment programmes out of jail.

Very heavy emphasis is put on prevention. Accordingly, there are specific police initiatives directed at street dealing, raves and other youth activities. Even more important, social workers, teachers, youth workers and police deliver an uncompromising message to young people: drugs are not to be used.

Britain’s approach, by contrast, is ‘harm reduction’, which roughly translates into the message: ‘Do it safely’. The Swedes rightly think this is disastrous. Their message is: ‘Don’t do it’, and they provide not only education on those lines but strategies to help children resist peer pressure.

They also regularly hold huge drugs conferences addressed by government ministers, which promulgate the same unambiguous message.These help maintain the national consensus that drug use is intolerable and can be beaten.

Of course, Swedish culture is very different from ours. But what Sweden understands, and what we have forgotten, is the universal fact that law enforcement and public policy are crucial in shaping public attitudes.

Rather than plunge its drugs policy into chaos, the government would have done better to have paid Mr LØfstedt rather more attention.

Daily Mail, July 11 2002

With the stubbornness of a mule with its head stuck in a bucket, David Blunkett has simply dismissed the mounting chorus of dismay and announced yesterday the downgrading of cannabis possession to a broadly non-arrestable offence.

Reclassifying cannabis from a class B to a class C drug is a deadly mistake. It is hard to over-estimate the magnitude of this error, the lethal threat it poses to children, and the depth of ignorance and sheer wilful irresponsibility that it represents on the part of the government.

The gravity of this development was illustrated by the resignation in protest of Keith Hellawell, the government’s drugs adviser.

He joins a list of other high-profile critics of the government’s ‘softly softly’ approach to cannabis. Lord Warner, the chairman of the Youth Justice Board, this week criticised ministers for failing to explain the long-term health danger posed by the drug.

He highlighted research showing that more than half of young offenders aged between 11 and 16 smoke cannabis, and that having access to drugs was one of the major factors that turn children into criminals.

Many police officers in all ranks are also bitterly hostile. They have repeatedly expressed grave concern about the effects of the cannabis ‘experiment’ in Lambeth, south London, where in a precursor of Blunkett’s reclassification policy the police no longer arrest cannabis users but are instead supposed to give a warning and confiscate the drug.

According to the people of Lambeth themselves, the policy has been an unmitigated disaster. It has led to an explosion of open drug-dealing of all kinds to children, with the police mainly looking in the opposite direction. Even worse, some of these children (who are as young as ten)are moving into selling hard drugs because the money is greater.

The most damaging effect is the signal it gives children. How can adults tell them cannabis can blight their lives if the police are effectively signalling that it’s too trivial for them to bother about?

The policy has made drugs acceptable for children, for whom they are fast becoming a way of life. Can there be a bigger social disaster in the making? Can there be a greater indictment of police and government policy than this betrayal of the young to drugs?

Yet astonishingly, Home Office ministers say this experiment is such a success they will extend it. This obscene ‘success’ will put a drug dealer on every street corner in Britain, and wreck the lives of thousands more children.

Trying to placate his critics, Mr Blunkett has made certain ‘concessions’. He is raising the maximum sentence for cannabis dealing to 14 years in prison.

But making fierce gestures towards dealers while tolerating cannabis use is totally illogical. Users and dealers are often one and the same person. The message is fatally mixed. If using cannabis is not worth bothering about, why should its suppliers be targeted for public obloquy?

And despite making possession a non-arrestable offence, Blunkett is to give the police powers of arrest when there are aggravating factors, such as a danger to public order or if someone is caught carrying the drug near a school.

So let’s get this straight. Cannabis possession is to remain illegal; but no action will be taken against someone who possesses it; but action will be taken when it is being possessed in certain designated ways (but not in others).

Not surprisingly, the police are now in a state of absolute chaos over what they can or cannot do. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

This shambles of a policy makes no sense at any level. How can cannabis possibly be considered in the same category as other class C drugs such as slimming pills, tranquillisers and anabolic steroids when it is vastly more dangerous and damaging?

Mr Blunkett told the Commons that ‘cannabis is dangerous, but not widely dangerous to one’s future and mortality’. Where has the Home Secretary been living? His ignorance is astounding.

Scientific experts list a vast array of effects which show that, far from being relatively harmless, cannabis is one of the most toxic drugs around.

It can cause psychosis, fragmented thought processes, depersonalisation and an inability to sustain concentration and attention. It can decrease learning ability and permanently harm short-term memory. It is addictive, with many uses needing it just to get out of bed in the morning.

At high levels it causes confusion, anxiety, delusions, disorientation, panic attacks, hallucinations and paranoia. A 1998 report found 50-60 per cent of cannabis users had experienced an anxiety attack.

Several studies have found it can cause impulsively violent behaviour, and is associated with violent death. One study found a far higher mortality rate among cannabis users with a very high proportion of violent deaths. Out of 268 New Yorkers sent to prison in 1984 for murder, 73 were under the influence of cannabis at the time of their crime.

In another study in New Zealand of 1000 young men aged 21, 34 per cent who were cannabis users had convictions for violence or had reported violent behaviour in the previous year – five times higher the rate of violence in the general population.

In short, its effects pose innumerable dangers not just for users but for others. And it is a gateway for other drugs, too.

So how on earth can the government be proposing to liberalise use of this most dangerous drug? The answer is that a concerted campaign to legalise all drugs through the Trojan horse of cannabis liberalisation has now reached saturation level amongst policy-makers and the great and the good. It is now very difficult to find official drug information that that is not subtle legalisation propaganda.

A whole series of official committees packed with the gullible, the covert legalisers and, most powerful of all, parents who don’t want their own drug-taking children to get criminal records, have been parroting the same decriminalisation message for months.

This has produced an appalling level of ignorance and credulity that reaches all the way up to the Home Office.

The result is a drugs policy that has now descended into farcical chaos, denounced by the government’s own adviser, and which is about to deliver a death blow both to the government’s alleged fight against crime, its responsibility to children and what remains of its tattered claims to competence, conscience and basic common sense.

Daily Mail, July 8 2002

You can almost see the shoulders shrugging in Britain. The Drumcree parade in Portadown, Northern Ireland provoked rioting yesterday, following an increase in sectarian violence which has been erupting recently on the streets of the province.

Political tensions have been rising, with Unionists threatening to walk out of the Northern Ireland Assembly unless the violence is brought under control. On the mainland, there’s an almost palpable air of exasperation and indifference. We’ve all been here before.

But in Belfast from where I have just returned, there is despair. Both Catholics and Protestants are aghast at what has happened: the descent of their society into institutionalised mayhem, and the effective connivance of a government hiding behind the fiction of the peace process.

Mrs Bridie McCloskey claims her son Joseph has been forced into permanent exile in England because of death threats from the IRA. ‘People are getting killed on both sides, but Tony Blair doesn’t want to hear this’, she says. ‘The people are expendable. All that matters is the peace process at any price’.

The situation in Northern Ireland is vastly worse than mainland Britain has grasped. A province which is still the moral and constitutional responsibility of the United Kingdom has become a gangster state.

The peace process has not brought peace. Instead, paramilitary power is being consolidated over both Catholics and Protestants through endemic organised crime: smuggling, drug dealing, extortion and protection rackets. More deadly still, the Assembly has been compromised by some members’ paramilitary links. And worst of all, the peace process has effectively paralysed the forces of law and order.

Last week, after a year-long special inquiry, the Commons Northern Ireland Select Committee painted an astonishing picture of institutionalised, systematic violence and intimidation in which terrorism and organised crime are now inextricably linked. Far from the terrorist godfathers laying down their arms, they have now turned instead to racketeering.

The MPs found that smuggling of fuel, cigarettes and alcohol along with counterfeiting, drug dealing, extortion and protection rackets are now netting for the paramilitaries some £18 million per year. These terrorists are tightening their grip over their cowed communities through regular murder, physical violence, forced exile and the flaunting of illegally obtained wealth.

Armed robberies in 2001 increased by no less than 264 per cent from the previous year, and hijackings by 100 per cent. Smuggled cigarettes have swamped the market. Some 120 petrol stations have been forced to close because of the prevalence of illicit fuel, and nearly two thirds of the remaining petrol stations are partially involved in the illegal trade.

Such corruption is now almost endemic within the fabric of Northern Ireland, with legitimate business ‘interwoven in partnerships with criminal organisations’.

The racketeering is on such a scale that it is now spreading fast into mainland Britain, too.

What’s more, it is feeding and facilitating terrorism. There is significant evidence, said the MPs, that the paramilitaries are improving their capability to mount further terrorist campaigns, with their vast illegal incomes financing both propaganda and weapons.

So what is the government’s response to this terrifying situation? On the day the report was published, the Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid took tea with the loyalist thugs who loomed so menacingly from its pages. It is the equivalent of the Italian government inviting the Mafia in to iron out a few problems over a chummy bowl of pasta.

Not that anyone else seemed any more exercised. The select committee report was barely covered in the British press, where the peace process has largely anaesthetised thought.

Yet because of the gangster culture, both communities are now awash with arms. ‘Decommissioning’ in such circumstances is a sick joke. ‘The place is a tinder-box waiting to go up’, said one despairing resident.

There is a mad sense of unreality about all this. Things are plainly happening and yet they are blandly denied.

Mrs McCloskey, for example, says the IRA forced her 31 year-old son Joseph into exile in England after he helped bouncers at a bar break up a fight in which IRA men were involved, following which an attempt was made on his life.

Sinn Fein deny he has been exiled and say there is no evidence of paramilitary involvement. But Mrs McCloskey says she has been told by IRA men, amongst them members of the Assembly, that if her son returns he is a dead man.

The terrorists may no longer be shooting the security services, but they have instead taken over law and order. The police are demoralised and emasculated. Some 2000 officers have been paid off from a force of 8000, part of a restructuring ostensibly designed to win the trust of Catholics.

In fact, this has simply wrecked the CID. In addition, the training of new recruits has turned into a disaster. Anti-terrorist training has been stopped on the grounds that peace has now broken out, and practical aspects of policing are being ignored in favour of grovelling guidance on ‘community relations’.

Both republican and loyalist paramilitaries are fomenting trouble in order to turn their communities against the police, so that the men of violence can control them instead.

And they are succeeding. Wherever paramilitaries hold sway, whether Catholic or Protestant, the police have retreated. The result, as paramilitary punishment expert Professor Liam Kennedy has documented, is the most sickening violence by terrorists against their own communities.

Since the Good Friday agreement, shootings and beatings of young people under the age of 19 have increased spectacularly, with republicans particularly involved in the huge rise in such violence against Catholic children aged 13 to 17.

As Kennedy so devastatingly remarks, these beatings and shootings are a means to exercise paramilitary power ‘even at the cost of the torture and mutilation of young Catholics’, which are no longer seen as beyond the pale of civilised behaviour.

What’s more, when the police do arrest someone he is often released. One republican terrorist, who was let out of jail as part of the peace process, was subsequently arrested for attempted murder but released on bail by a judge, arrested again for rioting and released again after the police told the court he was a ‘valuable asset’ in keeping the lid on his part of Belfast. Now this man has been employed as a community development worker, with a salary paid by the taxpayer.

In short, while the infrastructure of terror has been left intact, the effect of such appeasement is to destroy the infrastructure of law and order instead.

The danger now is that intense Protestant disillusionment will translate into a rout of David Trimble’s moderate Ulster Unionists by Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. If that happens, said one observer, the moderate Catholic SDLP will similarly wither away. It will then be the DUP versus Sinn Fein, and a threatened slide into civil war.

Has Tony Blair got the honesty and the courage to face up to this situation -- or is he simply going to turn his back on the Mafia state he has helped create?

Daily Mail, July 3 2002

The desperate and horrible fate which 108-year-old Alice Knight inflicted upon herself is enough to make one weep bitter tears of compassionate but impotent rage.

Mrs Knight, one of Britain’s oldest women, starved herself to death in protest at the closure of her nursing home in Norwich, where she had lived for six years. When she was subsequently moved to another home, she refused food and medical care for a month as she simply lost all will to live.

Until the move she had been happy and active, washing and dressing herself and putting on her jewellery every day. But for the last month of her life, her stricken family could only watch helplessly as she grew progressively thinner and weaker, saying that she no longer wanted to remain in this world.

Such terminal despair and misery in one so old and vulnerable, who is overwhelmingly owed a duty of care and respect, is a frightful indictment of a society. Yet this dreadful story is but the tip of the iceberg.

In the past five years, so many care homes have closed that some 50,000 places have been lost, or one eighth of the total. Like Mrs Knight, many other residents have paid the terrible price of such closures with their own lives. One resident in four dies within a month of being moved. An estimated 12,000 elderly care home residents have died as a direct result of home closures over the past five years.

The reasons are not hard to see. These residents have often lost almost everything already. They have lost their spouse, their own beloved home and most of their possessions; they have lost their independence and often their health.

With their horizons so poignantly shrunk, they cling with added desperation to familiar surroundings, the last reassurance and security left to them. Having become entirely dependent on things staying as they are, they simply cannot bear the trauma of losing their home. Yet increasing numbers are nevertheless being prised from their refuge and deposited in strange new surroundings.

How could such a widespread and appalling state of affairs have come about? The brutal answer is simply that this is a society that does not care for or value its elderly, an attitude that extends all the way up to the government.

Other cultures look upon us with astonishment. Families from Asia or other European countries such as Italy, where family life still means something very important, venerate their elders and assume it is their duty to look after them when they can no longer look after themselves.

By contrast, in individualised, self-centered Britain people are far less prepared to assume such responsibility, a reluctance becoming increasingly pronounced as family breakdown makes ever more tenuous the vital bonds of attachment between the generations.

A government that wanted to encourage family responsibility would provide financial incentives to help people shoulder this burden through tax relief or other monetary assistance for the care of elders. Yet this is a government which does not seem to understand what family life actually means, ignoring the time bomb that it is helping to build by encouraging instead individual ‘rights’ and fractured relationships.

Nor, however, can it slough off its own responsibility onto some mythical utopia of ‘community care’. For with more and more people living to very great ages, with a rising degree of extreme frailty and dependency, more families are simply unable to give their elders the care they need at home. So inevitably, pressure on institutional care will continue to rise.

Yet at time when demand has never been greater, care homes are closing in great numbers. Blame for this must be laid squarely at the government’s door. For instead of displaying an ounce of compassion for the plight of vulnerable residents forced out when homes close, the government is actually causing these tragedies to happen as a direct result of its meanness and its obsession with red tape.

First, it doesn’t give the local authorities enough money to pass onto the homes. Second, of the money it does provide, local authorities are not stopped from taking a substantial top-slice to spend on other things. For years, councils have been paying homes a rate per resident that has risen more slowly than the rate of inflation, causing a shortfall now estimated at some £80 per resident per week.

Big charities, with chains of homes, can subsidise the shortfall from their reserves. But smaller homes with no such funds to fall back on simply cannot afford to sustain such heavy losses.

One might think that the government would display some compassion towards frail, old people who cannot cope when their last refuge is taken away from them. One might think it would realise that such meanness towards care homes is a false economy because of the knock-on effect on the health service, where beds are increasingly being blocked by elderly people who have nowhere else to go because of the shortfall in care home places.

But no. The government has displayed neither an ounce of compassion nor an iota of common sense. Has it ring-fenced the care homes’ money so that local councils cannot stick their fingers in the till? It has not.

Instead, it has inflicted upon the already suffering homes the knock-out blow of a bewildering battery of ‘improvements’ which they must provide. These are nit-picking regulations which involve meeting such requirements as the precise width of doors, the temperature at which water comes out of the taps or the designated content of home brochures.

The very last thing these regulations improve, of course, is the actual care of residents. They merely correspond instead to the impenetrable workings of the bureaucratic mind and the mania for central control. The cost of such folly, moreover, is prohibitive.

In short, the government has imposed ridiculous and costly new requirements, but refused to provide the funds to carry them out. So homes are closing. Can anything be more heartless and more incompetent?

Even in homes which still struggle on, standards are often low. There aren’t enough staff, and those who are employed include often ill-equipped carers, used solely because they are cheap labour.

This dire situation in England and Wales has now been made more acute by the anomaly in Scotland, where care in such homes is being provided free. For how long are the English going to put up with subsidising superior care in Scotland, while their own is causing such misery?

Ultimately, meeting the huge cost of long-term care must surely be part of a totally fresh way of financing health and residential services. One based on a system of insurance and an encouragement of families to look after the old through tax breaks.

In the short term, the government has a moral duty to ensure that those who paid tax and national insurance all their lives are no longer swindled and abandoned but are looked after properly. That means withdrawing these ludicrous regulations, providing homes with adequate and ring-fenced money and displaying towards the elderly the compassion and respect they deserve.

Daily Mail, July 1 2002

At first blush, it seems such a good and even obvious idea. Identity cards would surely be the answer to unlawful fiddles of all kinds. What could be simpler to control criminals, benefit cheats or illegal immigrants than a ‘smart card’ that separates out those who are entitled to the rewards of lawful citizenship from those who are not? Why should the law-abiding have any problem with that?

This week, the Home Secretary David Blunkett will issue a consultation paper on the government’s proposal to introduce ‘entitlement’ cards – identity cards in all but name—for the entire population, to regulate individuals’ access to a range of public services. It would apparently be compulsory to possess such a card but not to carry it at all times, although failure to produce it when required would be punishable by fines or imprisonment.

The proposal is likely to ignite furious protest from a wide range of MPs, pressure groups and other individuals anxious about its implications for civil liberty. The government disingenuously pretends merely to be opening a ‘national debate’. What this means is that it knows it may have to beat a hasty retreat if the reaction is overwhelmingly hostile.

The arguments in favour appear seductive. Most of us regularly have to fish in our wallets or purses for more and more little bits of plastic which we are required to produce in our everyday lives. Why, then, should we object to having to fish out another?

After all, identity cards are commonplace in Europe where everyone accepts they have to produce them on demand. The French government tells us repeatedly that the reason why Britain is disproportionately targeted by migrants is because the absence of identity cards means asylum-seekers can easily disappear without trace into the system.

It is certainly true that we are facing unprecedented pressures, and not just from the unresolved problem of mass migration. Since September 11, it has been clear that Britain faces a potential threat from terrorism which requires a far more hard-nosed approach to the balance between liberty and security than it has so far acknowledged.

But hold it right there. Britain is not the same as Europe. We have a very different approach to liberty. Here, everything is permitted unless it is forbidden. People can go about their business without being expected to give an account of themselves.

By contrast, in Europe freedom is something that has to be codified and granted from above. So Europeans have always been used to producing ‘papers’ to prove themselves, a practice that we have always found unacceptable.

The case now for identity cards would have to be overwhelming for us to go down this route. But when the proposal is looked at carefully, it doesn’t stand up.

For starters, is it to be compulsory to carry these cards or not? According to some leaks, asylum-seekers would have to carry them at all times while the rest of us would not. This opens up a dismaying vista of confusion and potential harassment. For how are the police to know whether someone who looks foreign is an asylum-seeker, and therefore required to carry this entitlement card, or a British citizen who is entitled to keep it at home?

Even if Blunkett is proposing that no-one would have to carry it at all times, thousands of law-abiding folk would still be turned into criminals if they failed to produce it when required. Indeed, the distinction between a voluntary and coercive scheme is illusory, since we would undoubtedly find that if we did not keep the card in our pockets we would be subject to massive inconvenience.

All this goes absolutely against the British grain. There is all the difference in the world between freely choosing an entitlement card, and being compelled under threat of punishment by the state to produce one.

Moreover, this would be a ‘smart card’ containing an array of personal information. Making such details available to any official agency would mean kissing goodbye to individual privacy and inviting further state control over our lives.

In any event, this is a bewhiskered old wheeze that has done the rounds of Whitehall before. Peter Lilley, who rejected identity cards when he was a Tory minister, has shown that the case simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

For example, the police point out that identification of criminals isn’t the problem – it’s rather catching and convicting them. Similarly, identifying illegal immigrants wouldn’t answer the rather more pressing question of what is then to be done with them.

The problems of dealing with crime, terrorism, illegal immigration or benefit fraud are rooted not in a shortfall in state information but in rotten policies and a general failure of official will.

Asylum-seekers are already given an identity document without which they cannot legally obtain benefits or jobs. The problem lies not in identifying such people but in the fact that they are not detained, that those who shouldn’t be here are not sent back and that they are presumed to have an automatic entitlement to welfare.

Benefit fraud is rarely due to false identity. It is escalating instead because of Gordon Brown’s obsession with extending means-testing and the dependency culture, which are positive incitements to cheat.

It is also doubtful that identity cards would help combat terrorism. Extremists linked to Al Q’aeda or other supporters of middle eastern terror openly recruit to their murderous cause or distribute leaflets inciting people to violence. Yet they are hardly ever prosecuted as a result of the excessive timidity of the law officers and a government policy of appeasement.

Crime reduction is being paralysed by a criminal justice system wildly signalling that authority is in full retreat. The proposed entitlement card would cost an estimated £1 billion. Wouldn’t it be better to spend such a sum on more police officers on the streets?

Identity cards just don’t fit our culture. They were introduced here briefly during the war, but were abandoned in 1952. In conditions of peace, they caused such public resentment that they positively hindered the work of the police. For again unlike other countries, the British police are not a coercive state force but are dependent on the consent and co-operation of the community.

Unfortunately, the government seems to care little for Britain’s distinctive culture. Is it not, after all, sacrificing the common law to the Napoleonic system through its codification of human rights and the spreading imposition of European Union edicts?

Now, thrashing around in panic to show that it is getting on top of our social problems, it is not coming up with policies that actually work but is proposing instead to nail down still further the coffin of British liberty.