Daily Mail, October 28 2002

A silent coup has taken place in drugs policy. The legalisers have captured the Home Office. The government has quietly downgraded its attempt to reduce the number of people taking illegal drugs.

This astonishing development became clear last Friday, when the Home Office minister Bob Ainsworth told a conference that the government was going to place ‘harm minimisation’ at the centre of its revised drugs strategy, to be unveiled in a few weeks’ time.

To the unwary, ‘harm reduction’ -- as ‘minimisation’ is more commonly known -- may sound a worthy enough aim. But it is actually a euphemism for throwing in the towel altogether against drug abuse.

For the advocates of ‘harm reduction’ say we should not try to reduce drug use through the law. Instead, we should accept it as a way of life and minimise the harm it causes. So they want to provide ‘injecting rooms’ -- where users inject illicit drugs under official supervision -- and promote treatment of addicts with substitute drugs such as methadone.

The aim should not be to get people off drugs, apparently, but to keep them on drugs indefinitely -- in a way that makes them (according to a conference speaker) ‘less vulnerable’. In other words, they say there’s a safe way to use drugs.

Yet there is surely no safe way to use drugs; that’s why they are illegal. Ainsworth told the conference that the government believes methadone treatment should be increased. But how can one justify keeping addicts permanently addicted?

What’s more, ‘harm reduction’ is actually a cover for the demand to legalise drugs altogether. This was clear from the agenda of last week’s conference in Ashford, Kent. For despite the fact that it was organised by a group including the Home Office and Conservative-controlled Kent county council, it was dominated by legalisers with startling track records.

The veteran Dutch drug legaliser Peter Cohen -- who told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in 1997: ‘I openly admit I use drugs’ -- said it was ‘criminal’ for the state to deprive drug users of their ‘consumer choice’ in shopping around for a better brand of cannabis or the very best quality ecstasy.

Freek Polak, a Dutch psychiatrist, who once said politicians would have to be ‘forced step by step’ to support drug legalisation, protested that requiring heroin addicts to be supervised by a doctor when the drug was prescribed to them in the Netherlands was ‘an enormous restriction on their social activities’.

And another speaker, the Rotterdam pastor Hans Visser, once ran an illegal heroin supply scheme.

This group was described to me by Hans Koopmans, of the De Hoop psychiatric hospital for drug users in Dordrecht in Holland, as ‘the nucleus of the legalisation movement in the Netherlands. They are a small minority, extremists as far as Dutch drug policy is concerned.’

At the conference, one preposterous claim followed another. Ira Glasser, the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union and another prominent legaliser, claimed that fatty foods were just as much of a killer as drugs such as crack cocaine or heroin.

The real purpose of making drugs illegal, he said, was to victimise black Americans. And since so many black people in Florida had been deprived of the vote because they had drug convictions, it even followed that keeping drugs illegal had led directly to George W Bush ‘fixing’ the American election.

The presentations were so wacky that if you closed your eyes you might think you had been transported back in time to the counter-culture of the 1960s.

But this wasn’t Haight-Ashbury, or even contemporary Amsterdam. This was Ashford, where some 200 council staff, drug action teams, police officers, magistrates, academics and civil servants spent two days being bombarded with arguments for liberalising or legalising drug use.

It is simply astounding that the Home Office and Kent County Council should lend their authority to such a group to spread their ideas in Britain. So how could this happen?

The answer is that most drug agencies now promote ‘harm reduction’. The Home Office listens to them. And some of the most prominent of these agencies --– Turning Point, Drugscope, and the International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA) – were involved alongside the Home Office in organising this conference.

Should the Home Secretary be unaware that ‘harm reduction’ is a Trojan horse for legalisation, he should investigate the IHRA’s website. For there he would find authors extolling the benefits of LSD, claiming that laws criminalising drug use ‘violate certain basic rights of the person’, and recommending that hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline should be licensed.

And he would also find the IHRA blurting out one truth at least -- that ‘meaningful harm reduction’ inevitably requires legalisation. Of course it does. For if one accepts the premise behind ‘harm reduction’ -- that everything should be done to make the drug user’s life more comfortable -- it follows that laws that make such drug use illegal prevent that from happening.

But of course, the law is designed not for the benefit of drug users but to protect society from them, and this radical ‘harm reduction’ approach is actually contrary to three UN drug conventions.

As Herbert Schaepe, secretary to the UN International Narcotics Control Board has written, these conventions require countries to significantly reduce both the supply and use of drugs. ‘Harm reduction’, he said, could not be allowed to thwart the wishes of the UN. So ‘injecting rooms’, for example, would not be permitted.

These three conventions are the biggest obstacle in the way of drug legalisation. So now the legalisers have set their sights on getting them abolished altogether.

At an undisclosed meeting in the European Parliament building in Brussels two weeks ago, a network of legalisers met to launch a campaign against the UN conventions. The Transnational Radical Party, also known as Parliamentarians for Anti-Prohibitionist Action, claims to have 52 European politician members, both MEPs and MPs, including the British Labour MP Paul Flynn.

At the Brussels meeting, it combined with the International Anti-Prohibitionist League headed by the notorious American legaliser Arnold Trebach, who declared ‘the beginning of a new bold international campaign’ to create ‘an international legal framework for the full legalisation of drugs’.

All they need to get repeal of the conventions onto the UN’s agenda is for one country to suggest this at the UN review conference on drug policies at Vienna next March. To bring this about, they will co-ordinate an international propaganda campaign targeting MPs, civil servants, experts and the public to create ‘a favourable political climate’. They have even helpfully produced a draft resolution promoting repeal.

They are targeting governments whose thinking has already been deeply corrupted. A series of meetings has been held by the health ministers of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and France to discuss harmonising policy along the lines of the Dutch approach which turns a blind eye to cannabis use.

And last March there was a private meeting at Wilton Park, in Sussex, organised with the drug agency Drugscope and the Foreign Office. Drugscope, which is hugely influential in the Home Office, wants to decriminalise cannabis at least, and has argued that countries can get round the UN conventions.

But at the meeting Martin Jelsma, a Dutch legaliser, went even further and said it was now urgent ‘to begin to question openly and seriously the straitjacket of the conventions’. Harm reduction, he said, had spread throughout Europe and was now ‘irreversible’. ‘The flood’, he declared, ‘is already on this side of the dyke’.

The flood waters certainly seem to have engulfed the Home Office. Ainsworth told the Ashford conference that the revised strategy would concentrate efforts against hard drugs, since cannabis was not as harmful. But this ignores the fact that study after study has shown the appalling effects of cannabis on the brain, the damage it does to cognition and memory and the way it can provoke schizophrenia.

The Home Office is simply ignoring the fact that adopting different approaches to ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs just doesn’t work. As Herbert Schaepe has written, the Netherlands and Switzerland, which both have a liberal approach, have not only failed to reduce demand for drugs but now have ‘significant drug abuse, illicit trafficking, manufacture and cultivation problems’ and have become suppliers of narcotics and psychotropic substances to the whole world.

The Ashford conference repeatedly hailed Dutch policy as a great success. In fact, it has been anything but. According to the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment, use of soft drugs among Dutch high school students increased by more than 30% over the past ten years.

‘Drug use has gone up, both cannabis and cocaine’, says Hans Koopmans in Dordrecht. ‘The main problem of liberalisation is that we can’t convince youngsters that drugs, particularly cannabis, are dangerous.

‘The idea that as criminalisation hasn’t worked we should legalise is really very naïve. You will just get many more people addicted. As for reducing drug crime, most addicts who commit crime were doing so before they started on drugs. The link between drugs and crime is not that simple.’

To be fair, when Kent’s ruling Conservatives realised -- too late --that their own council staff had helped draw up such an unbalanced list of speakers, they were aghast. After all, said council leader Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Kent was opposed to the Home Secretary’s proposal to reclassify cannabis, and would never support legalisation.

When I remarked upon the imbalance to the council’s conference organisers, they launched a panicky damage limitation exercise. Hastily, they rearranged their programme by asking an anti-legalisation campaigner, Malou Lindholm, a former Swedish Green MEP who happened to be in the audience. But she was only one against many.

The really dismaying thing is that with no organised body to counter the ‘harm reduction’ propaganda, many simply have no way of knowing that what they are being told is wrong.

Countries such as Britain have a drug problem not because drugs are illegal, but because young people have long been given conflicting and ambiguous signals. Every country which has liberalised its drug policy has an escalating problem. It is only those countries which enforce the law consistently that do not.

The ‘harm reduction’ legalisers have saturated Europe with stunning success. They have now captured the British government. We have already seen the disastrous results of the cannabis ‘experiment’ in Brixton. As a result of the government’s revised drugs strategy, it will now abandon countless more young people and society at large to ‘harm production’– drug dependency, physical damage and criminally wasted lives.

Daily Mail, October 21 2002

Listening to the Prime Minister on Northern Ireland is surely the nearest approximation to an out-of-body experience. On the podium is the Tony Blair who kow-tows to terrorists by granting them power while they point a gun at his head. But hovering directly above him is the Tony Blair who looks down upon himself and savages such a tactic as a farce that doesn’t work.

Mr Blair’s remarkable speech last week has been hailed as the moment of truth, the point at which the IRA was told unequivocally that the game was up. The IRA could no longer be half in, half out of the peace process, he said. It had to renounce violence altogether.

The Prime Minister was hardly short of provocation. The arrests of IRA men for helping Columbian terrorists and the break-in at Castlereagh police station were in turn all but eclipsed by the discovery of IRA espionage at Stormont, and the revelation that Mr Blair was known to the Provisionals as the ‘useful idiot’.

His new tough line also appeared to be shrewd politics. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, who are said to be intoxicated by the celebrity of power, will surely bust a gut to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly to life.

Moreover, since September 11 the world has changed. With the glacial chill that has descended in Washington, IRA violence is now said to be unthinkable. And if this is really so, then surely Sinn Fein will no longer be able to play its manipulative games.

Yet it might do precisely that – making some apparently spectacular offer over decommissioning which will not amount to anything other than to cause disarray amongst the Unionists, as before. And the fear is that the British government will keel over, as before; because despite Blair’s new-found bullishness, his words were ambiguous.

For he still does not acknowledge that the peace process was fatally, endemically flawed. He does not accept that the very outrages he identified – the paramilitary punishment beatings, gangsterism and drug dealing – are the direct result of bringing terrorists into government under the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

On the contrary, he insisted that the government ‘will simply not countenance any path’ other than implementing that agreement. This is because the very concept of the ‘peace process’ has a kind of mythical quality for him. So in similar vein, while he supports action against both Iraq and Al Q’aeda, he thinks it vital to resume the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East by reopening negotiations between Israel and Yasser Arafat.

But appeasement of terror does not bring peace. True, in northern Ireland it has brought a protracted lull in IRA bombings – but it has created a violent ‘mafia’ state. And in the Middle East, it was the Oslo peace process which actually armed the Palestinian Authority and resulted in terrorism of such unprecedented ferocity that it destroyed the Israeli government promoting that process and brought Ariel Sharon to power instead.

Mr Blair’s appeasement plays into the terrorists’ hands because he makes two fundamental errors. The first is his failure to acknowledge that terrorism is violence as theatre. Its aim is to attract attention, to have a propaganda effect by manipulating public opinion.

To do so, it is crucial for terrorists to be taken seriously on their own terms as political fighters. So the importance of being included as potential statesmen in a ‘peace process’ cannot be overestimated. And the more this happens, the more terrorism is encouraged.

The second error is to see the cause of terror as oppression, poverty or thwarted national aspirations. As the American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says in his book Why Terrorism Works, this search for terror’s ‘root causes’ smacks simply of after-the-fact justification .

Sure, Northern Ireland’s Catholics suffered discrimination and worse by Protestants. But terror continued to escalate despite decades of reform which progressively dealt with these injustices. Sure, Palestinians are entitled to their own state if they wish to live in peace with Israel. But just such a ‘two-state solution’ was offered in 1948 and rejected by the Arab states which tried instead to destroy Israel, an attempt which has continued unabated through war and terrorism (and despite another such offer in 2000) ever since.

The cause of terror is the fact that terrorists know that it works – first as a means of attracting attention, and then as a route to power. Terrorism gave Sinn Fein its place in the Assembly. Terrorism gave Arafat his place in the Oslo accords.

Yet the terrorism they sponsor still endures. This is not because of oppression – after all, many, many people are oppressed and do not resort to terror – but because of ethnic hatred and tribalism.

The Palestinians are indoctrinated with an incendiary hatred of Jews through a torrent of medieval antisemitism pouring out of the Arab world. The Catholics in Northern Ireland back Gerry Adams not despite but because of his past as the IRA’s head man, because in conflicts based on tribal hatred people tend to back leaders who are cast in a heroic mould.

As ever, Tony Blair is facing two ways at once. In his speech, he damned those who from the beginning had identified the fundamental flaw in the peace process. These people had apparently undermined all those working for peace through their ‘malignant whisperings’.

And yet in the same speech Blair conceded the truth of these ‘whisperings’. For he actually conceded that the violence had given the terrorists negotiating leverage over the political process. The threat of violence, he declared, ‘no longer pushes the British government forward’ – thus revealing that it had previously done so. What an admission!

He conceded the force of the ‘malignant whispering’ that while the Irish wouldn’t allow Sinn Fein to be in government until the IRA gave up their activities, the British had forced the Unionists to share power with them with no such insistence.

He conceded also that it was grotesque for republicans to become police officers while maintaining an active paramilitary organisation outside the law. This only needed to be stated, he declared, to be seen as an absurdity. But who was it other than Tony Blair who brought about this absurdity?

Now the IRA has reportedly rejected his ‘unrealistic’ demand to renounce violence, although the ‘Real IRA’ is said to be split. But why should the terrorists take any notice, when in the next breath Blair declared that the government would do its best to carry on implementing the agreement ‘in any event’?

In other words, the IRA might put its next shipment of arms on video and play it on a screen in Trafalgar Square, and the appeasement process would still sail on regardless.

As Alan Dershowitz says, the only way to deal with terrorists is to place them beyond the pale of negotiation. The message has to be unequivocal – that they have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Despite his gung-ho image, our Prime Minister has dismayingly managed to convey precisely the opposite, as he floats high above his body on windy currents of fantasy and delusion.

Daily Mail, October 17 2002

The other day, I fell into conversation with a Labour peer about the proposal to allow cohabiting couples to adopt, which was thrown out by the House of Lords last night.

He and his colleagues had been bombarded, said this peer, by preposterous claims from Christian groups that cohabitation was much more unstable than marriage. When I replied that this was indeed the case, he launched into an astonishing tirade.

People who cohabited, he spluttered, were far braver than people who were married. He himself had left his wife of more than twenty years, and it was the bravest thing he had ever done.

He didn’t know a single married person who wasn’t playing around (he used a far cruder term) outside marriage. Not only that: every couple without exception who stayed married for a long time was in fact deeply miserable.

His remarks may have been eye-popping – such generalisations are, after all, demonstrably absurd -- but his broad approach is not unusual among politicians and the metropolitan intelligentsia, who treat arguments for sexual fidelity and the need to champion marriage as signs of incipient insanity.

To justify their own louche lifestyles – and often to expunge some terrible hatred or resentment buried deep in their own childhoods -- they use every opportunity to attack and destroy the very idea that marriage may be preferable or superior in any way.

Indeed, the campaign to allow cohabiting couples to adopt has very little to do with the welfare of children. It is instead the latest stage in the remorseless drive to undermine marriage by people who are determined to promote alternative lifestyles instead.

Most of the sound and fury about the adoption amendment has been about its provision that gay couples should be able to adopt. Opponents have therefore been predictably attacked as ‘homophobic’, the smear now routinely used to shut down debate by terrorising anyone who dares suggest a problem with the gay rights agenda.

In fact, the number of gay adoptive parents would always be miniscule. The real sting in this proposal is the signal it would give that heterosexual cohabitation is of equal value to marriage when it comes to the raising of children.

But this is simply not true. The proposal would not only act against the interests of adopted children but also cause more children in general to suffer a fractured family life.

For the growing belief that cohabitation is just ‘marriage without the bit of paper’ is simply wrong. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that the rise and rise of cohabitation is now the major factor driving ever upwards our disastrous proportion of fatherless children.

Although some cohabitations do last for decades, the number of cohabiting couples who stay together for the duration of their children’s upbringing is actually very small.

As research this week has confirmed, cohabitations break up twice as frequently as marriages, and – most tellingly for the adoption debate – the arrival of a child tends to precipitate the break-up. Other studies have shown that while 8% of married couples break up within the first five years of their children’s lives, this figure shoots up among cohabiting couples to a massive 52% .

What’s more, marriages where the couple have previously cohabited tend to break down more frequently than where the couple have not lived together.

None of this should be very surprising. After all, people bring very different attitudes to cohabitation and marriage. In deciding to cohabit, they are making a very strong statement that they want the freedom that comes from a built-in opt-out.

It is said that if the adoption amendment went through, councils would require proof that cohabiting couples were stable and committed. But this is absurd. The proof of commitment is marriage.

If a couple are unable to commit themselves to each other for ever, why should we believe they will commit themselves to an adopted child for ever? How can they promise to safeguard that child’s welfare when they refuse to make the commitment to each other that is its best guarantee?

Children who need adoptive parents are intensely vulnerable. The very last thing they need is for their adoptive family to fragment.

Their abiding need above all else is for a mother and a father. Which is why gay adoption is not a good idea. This is not a matter of prejudice. After all, single gay (or straight) people can currently adopt, a provision designed to cover rare circumstances where this is in an individual child’s best interests; and no-one suggests these people make anything other than excellent adoptive parents in these cases.

But in general, gay adoption is not in children’s best interests. They are too vulnerable, and there are too many potential added disadvantages for them to cope with: not only the instability of the unions, but possible difficulties with social adjustment and gender identity.

Gay people deserve sympathy in their desperate longing for family life. Unlike heterosexuals, marriage for them is not an option. But adoption law must be for the benefit of children, not adults.

Of course, children are infinitely better off adopted than in care. But the real need is to end the prejudice and backsliding by council social workers against the thousands of married couples desperate to adopt but who are thwarted by bureaucratic inertia or ideology.

In other words, there is no need to look beyond married couples to end the scandal of children waiting fruitlessly for adoption. The real purpose of the cohabitation amendment is not to benefit children but to signal that alternative lifestyles are equivalent to marriage in moral status.

This idea is being pushed by an unholy coalition of interests. There are enormously powerful voices in legal, adoption and political circles arguing for gay rights. But this lobby knows its cause is unpopular. So it has joined forces with those heterosexuals who want to undermine marriage by spreading its benefits to alternative lifestyles.

Signals matter enormously in shaping attitudes and behaviour.

There is no doubt that this argument over what they should be has become a war-zone of intolerance. On one side, the Christian Institute’s suggestion that parents should carry ‘adoption cards’ declaring they don’t want their children adopted by gay people in the event of their deaths is unnecessarily offensive.

But for sheer venomous hatred and spite one has to go to the other side. The late Baroness Young was vilified for fighting the gay rights agenda in defence of the interests of children and marriage. When she died from cancer a few weeks ago, the gay publication The Pink Paper danced disgustingly on her grave, gloating that activists were ‘delighted’ by her death.

Now Baroness O’Cathain, the peer who has taken up Lady Young’s baton, is getting the same kind of treatment. As the government licks its wounds over its defeat, the chances of the interests of adopted children taking precedence over the self-centred vitriol of the victim culture seem, sadly, more remote than ever.

Daily Mail, October 14 2002

The Tory bloodletting continues. Attempts to end the furore over the reported proposal to expel Lord Tebbit from the party were dashed yesterday when Tim Yeo, shadow spokesman for trade and industry, disowned the peer and Michael Portillo poured scorn on the Tebbit camp’s ‘voices on the side’ (the words pot and kettle spring to mind).

The Tories are fighting like ferrets in a sack. Iain Duncan Smith is trying to bridge the gap between the warring factions of modernisers and traditionalists, otherwise known as ‘niceys’ versus the nasties.

But this battle is actually being fought on the wrong territory. For neither traditionalists nor modernisers have properly understood the opportunity offered them by the threat known as Blairism.

Indeed, most Tories don’t think Tony Blair is a threat at all. They think his greatest crime is political cross-dressing. They moan that he has made off with the conservative wardrobe, leaving them without any eye-catching clothes.

But Blairism is not a conservative creed. Beneath rhetoric cunningly aimed to placate middle Britain, it is nothing less than a revolutionary attack on freedom and parliamentary democracy, which seeks to remodel the family, the nation state and even human nature itself.

Yet most Tories do not appear to grasp this. Traditionalists tend to dismiss Tony Blair as a vapid and cynical spin-merchant, whose ideas need not be taken seriously. And as the former Tory adviser John O’Sullivan has correctly noted, the modernisers who surround Duncan Smith have actually swallowed wholesale the Blairite view of the world -- that Britain has become ‘Dianafied’.

They think that to win again they must follow suit. Hence their obsession with the party’s appearance, with being touchy-feely and ‘inclusive’; hence their promotion of minority politics, lifestyle equivalence and the victim culture.

The Tories think they lost the election because they weren’t Dianafied. But if anything shows they really are utterly out of touch, this is it. The reason they lost power was because they were so incompetent. The public understandably concluded that the Conservatives couldn’t run a whelk-stall – an impression merely compounded under William Hague.

The Tories have nevertheless correctly identified that Labour’s own incompetence now makes it vulnerable. Accordingly, they have come up with a potentially lethal line of attack over the government’s failure to deliver improved public services.

For it is not only failing here in competence, but in its core goal to help the poor. It is the poor who are most damaged by failures in schools and hospitals; it is the poor who are trapped by being unable to buy decent education or health care.

The public services will only deliver if they are decentralised. And that must mean giving leverage to parents and patients who must be able to escape failing provision. That is why the Tories’ proposal to give people money to buy the education of their choice is a really powerful idea.

It’s why giving all [ital] hospitals freedom from political control -- as opposed to the government’s limited scope for foundation hospitals -- is similarly right (although subsidising 60 per cent of private health care is not [ital]a good idea, since it leaves out those who cannot afford to pay the remaining 40 per cent).

Radical decentralisation turns on power being given to the people over their public services. That’s the lesson from the neighbourhood programmes in Easterhouse, Glasgow (which so impressed Duncan Smith) and all the other places where communities are being rebuilt by the grass-roots, in the teeth of endemic obstruction from Whitehall and town hall.

If the Tories can muster the courage to develop the principle of public service free from central control, they will have Labour on the run. For although the government is now talking the language of decentralisation, it will choke on its sun-dried tomatoes before giving parents or patients leverage over the system.

Even a properly developed public service agenda, though, would not be enough. Promising better delivery is essentially about process, not principle. To win hearts and minds, the Tories have to be angry. And they can only be angry if they grasp that Blairism is not a ‘nice’, cuddly, inclusive doctrine but a deadly threat.

The biggest threat it poses is to the nation and to democracy itself. For Labour deeply, viscerally believes in supra-national institutions and values. It thinks –fatuously – that ‘globalisation’ has made the nation state redundant. Hence its obsession with human rights law, the International Criminal Court and the European Union.

All these things are progressively draining power away from the British people and the parliamentary process. What greater cause can there be than to defend democracy against such a threat? Yet the Tories, paralysed by their divisions over Europe, are lamentably failing to articulate this most profound anxiety and

anger of the British people.

They have also become so obsessed with the need to offend no-one that they are in danger of losing the plot completely over Labour’s war against the traditional family. Of course it is right to emphasise that Tories are not in the business of attacking or demonising individuals.

But that should not mean effectively endorsing the doctrine that anything goes, the position towards which David Willetts dangerously strayed when he told the conference that the party would now support all types of family.

For if the party really is to support and encourage fatherless, fragmented or unstable households, it will merely condone and connive at yet more emotional harm to children, more violence between adults, more mental and physical ill health among women and men. How can this possibly be construed as helping the vulnerable?

Moreover, the Tory conference gave a platform to claims about the family which were misleading, manipulative or simply untrue – the hallmarks of victim culture politics. It heard from Willetts, for example, that many single mothers were abandoned. Well, some undoubtedly are; but most divorces are initiated by women who have not been abandoned.

Kate Green, director of the National Council for One Parent Families, told the conference that most lone mothers had never set out to bring up children on their own. But mothers who initiate divorce proceedings are doing precisely that. And single mothers by choice are the fastest growing group of lone parents.

Even worse was to come when the women’s aid activist Sandra Horley was given the platform to announce that 90% of domestic violence took place against women. Such a claim is simply astounding, when the research conclusively shows that women in such incidents initiate violence as much as men.

The Tories are making the terrible mistake of confusing care for the vulnerable with the culture of victimhood. In fact, victim culture actually harms the vulnerable by excusing, minimising or denying harmful behaviour.

Duncan Smith is right to draw a line under the Tories’ past association with selfish individualism and lack of responsibility. But his greatest asset is his integrity – and victim culture is based on lies.

The Tories need fire in their belly. They will only get it once they brush the stardust from their eyes and realise that the Dianafication of politics is not nice at all, but very nasty indeed.

Daily Mail, October 7 2002

Rigging the A-level grades – that still-developing scandal – was clearly not the half of it. It is now apparent that university entrance is also being rigged to swindle thousands of young people out of the places they deserve.

According to reports, the top universities are to cut by up to one third the number of places they are offering to pupils from independent schools in favour of those from state schools. Some universities, indeed, are admitting they will accept state school pupils with A-levels two or three grades below those obtained by independent school pupils.

This eye-popping initiative to punish merit and reward mediocrity is the universities’ supine response to the trumped-up ministerial charge that they are giving preferential treatment to ‘privileged’ pupils from elite schools.

Far from remedying an injustice, this reverse discrimination makes a mockery of any notion of equity or fairness, as well as destroying the very essence of education.

For it is not only grotesquely inequitable. It also shatters the fundamental principle that academic success is to be achieved through merit. We are now, it seems, to go backwards in time to a system in which achievement depends not on what you have done but on who you are and what your background is. The only difference is that whereas this once discriminated against the poor, now it is to penalise the better-off.

This travesty of progressive politics is as half-baked as it is unfair. Ministers claim they want to stop pupils from poor backgrounds losing out in the university race against pupils from wealthier ones. Well in that case, merely favouring state schools is plainly woefully inadequate.

Surely, they would also have to discriminate against successful [ital] state schools, since their pupils patently have the advantage of a more favourable education? Surely, they would have to discriminate against professional parents in state schools, since their children undoubtedly have the advantage of coming from book-lined homes?

And if we’re really talking unfair advantage here, then surely they would have to discriminate against all those middle-class parents -- including the Prime Minister himself and so many in his government -- who have their comprehensive-school educated children privately tutored on the side to make up for the dismal education from which their less privileged classmates are left to suffer?

But ministers can no more acknowledge the blatant hypocrisy and incoherence of their position any more than they appear able to grasp the terrible damage they are doing to education. Earlier this year, the Higher Education Minister Margaret Hodge brazenly declared that universities should lower their entry requirements for students from working class homes.

She appeared wholly oblivious to the patronising insult she had thus delivered to working-class pupils by implying that they could not be expected to achieve the same academic standards as the middle classes.

The Schools Minister David Miliband went even further. Top pupils at every school, he said, should get into university regardless of their A-level grades. This is taking levelling-down to staggering new depths.

But then, these ministers are ideological wreckers. Far from raising education standards, they are wilfully and systematically destroying them altogether in the cause of an unattainable and, indeed, quite mad goal of academic equality.

Ms Hodge claims that universities are discriminating against bright children from inner city schools. But there’s no evidence for that at all. She commits the cardinal error -- repeated over and over again by the zealots of the left -- that any difference must mean discrimination.

There are several reasons why so many inner-city state school pupils don’t go to university, none of them the universities’ fault. They may want a job instead. They may not want to incur student debt. Above all, they may not be able to achieve good enough grades in the core subjects the universities require.

This, indeed, is the real scandal that holds so many disadvantaged pupils back -- that standards in many state schools simply aren’t good enough. Instead of putting this right, the government is causing standards to slide even further. It then systematically lies to the public through rigging the results and shoe-horning more and more young people into Mickey Mouse courses, so that it can falsely claim standards are rising.

The truth is that ministers regard education standards as infinitely malleable in the wholly disreputable and discredited cause of social engineering.

This is not some Old Labour aberration in the government’s ranks. Until he became an MP at the last election, youthful Miliband ran the Prime Minister’s policy unit. He is not only a rising star. He is at the intellectual heart of the Blairite project.

We can now see that the abolition of Clause Four was no more than a propaganda stunt designed to mislead us into believing that New Labour had renounced ideology and entered the real world. Not so. Blairism has turned out to be an absolutely lethal combination of old style egalitarianism and post-modern vandalism of existing institutions and values.

Not surprisingly, its education policies have not brought about egalitarian heaven on earth. And as every policy fails in this crazy aim, the government introduces yet another to block the exit for all those desperately trying to escape the rising tide of destruction.

Thus, higher education was expanded; but it wasn’t enough to bump up working-class numbers. So universities were paid by results, with more and more students awarded both places and degrees regardless of standards; but it still wasn’t enough.

So a postcode premium was introduced under which universities lost money if they didn’t take students from poor areas; but it still wasn’t enough. So now ministers are taking an axe to university standards themselves. No doubt it is only a matter of time before they abolish exams altogether and award a degree-level certificate to everyone in the country.

And now to cap it all, parents who have fled in despair to the independent sector as the last redoubt of reliable educational standards (and who have paid twice for education through taxes and fees) find their children are to be punished for the crime of being well-educated.

Enabling bright children from poor backgrounds to rise through the agency of education was once the great liberal ideal of our political class. This meritocracy, which expressed itself through the grammar schools, enabled poor children of talent to rise out of disadvantage.

But now, with the very idea of meritocracy destroyed in the name of a spurious equality, working-class pupils have less [ital]opportunity than before.

The universities have spinelessly connived at this disaster. In private, vice-chancellors bemoan the collapse of standards. In public, they refuse to blow the whistle, choosing instead to further corrupt academic quality in order not to jeopardise government funding.

The only way out is for the universities – and, indeed, the entire education system – to be set free altogether from political control.

For it is truly astounding that this government has fooled so many for so long that raising education standards lies at the heart of its vision. Instead, it is taking an axe to excellence in the name of uniformity. Equal opportunity, RIP.