Daily Mail, December 22 2002

What God needs for Christmas is a spin-doctor.

Religion has got a terrible public image. Of all the great faiths, Christianity takes this most to heart. Constantly red-faced with embarrassment at itself, it backs away from one encounter after another, mumbling apologies.

Even at Christmas, it is being air-brushed out of the celebrations. You have to search to find Christmas cards with nativity scenes. The Christmas story is held to be irrelevant, risible or offensive.

Indeed, so great was the fear of giving offence to Moslems in particular that the Red Cross banned Christmas altogether from its 430 fund-raising shops, with staff ordered to take down any religious decorations. This, in fact, only caused astonishment and scorn among Moslems, whose teachings say they should respect other faiths.

Christianity has hardly been helping itself. The Catholic church in particular has dug itself into a terrible hole over covering up for its paedophile priests. And now we learn that a Catholic priest took part in the IRA bombing of the Northern Ireland village of Claudy in 1972.

As one of the mothers bereaved in that carnage observed, it seems perverse beyond belief for a man of religion to be involved in mass murder.

The same can be said of Islam. So great was the atrocity carried out in its name on September 11, and so grave the continuing threat, that since then all [ital] religion has been demonised as a source of terror, violence and oppression.

This is a wildly unbalanced view, which says more about the prejudices of those secular folk who have seized upon September 11 to mount their own jihad [ital] against any and every faith. It is undeniable that, throughout history, dreadful things have been done in the name of religion when it has tried to force people to adhere to its version of truth, or been used as a marching song for territorial conquest.

But it is also true that the great tyrants of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, perpetrated atheistic creeds which led to genocide, mass murder and oppression.

And religion has also been a powerful force for good. It has given us civilisation, by teaching us to regulate our behaviour through codes of morality. And the values cherished by secular folk themselves – such as individual liberty and equality -- derive from the Judeo-Christian belief that mankind was created in the image of God.

Religious instinct is hard-wired into the human psyche. It is as futile – and as intolerant – to try to eradicate it as it would be to try to stamp out our love of music, for example, or our creativity.

Certainly, the two great proselytising religions, Christianity and Islam, pose specific dangers of oppressing non-believers. But they also do much good. It cannot be stated too strongly that the West’s necessary defence against terror perpetrated in the name of Islam is not [ital] a declaration of war upon the religion.

Moderate Moslems should be helped to resist the violence that has hi-jacked their faith, and given every assistance to replicate the separation between church and state that enabled Christianity to shake off its own violent legacy.

Moreover, the Moslems’ critique of the West has much truth in it. As they say, the West has indeed torn up its moral maps, substituted the worship of materialism for religion, and lost its way in family breakdown, prostitution, drug abuse and crime.

In short, they are right to argue that there is a God-shaped hole in western secularised society. The very same argument was mounted by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in his Dimbleby Lecture last week.

One can disagree with Dr Williams over much of his analysis of social trends – that the nation state is being wiped out by globalisation, for example – but still agree with the key spiritual point he was making.

As he said, our consumerist approach to politics has turned any policy restricting lifestyle choice into electoral suicide. Yet this individual free-for-all has not created the good society. For without any deeper connections to anything beyond ourselves, politics becomes a meaningless game of shifting advantage.

Merely encouraging respect and tolerance is not enough, he said, if the ultimate goal has become releasing our own potential, shrouded in vague and sentimental platitudes towards others.

The abandonment of public religion and morality undermines politics, law and citizenship. What is missing is any sense of the intrinsic value of things, of what gives life its meaning.

People want to find such a prop. The problem, though, is that many no longer believe the supernatural story that accompanies it. Indeed, a survey at the weekend suggested that one quarter of Anglican clergymen themselves no longer believe in the Virgin Birth. So how can religion reconnect to the people?

The answer is to bring it out of the pulpit and into everyday life. There is no doubt that religion reaches the parts other social reformers cannot reach. Its successes can be seen most spectacularly in the United States, where results achieved by religious groups working with drug addiction, family breakdown or crime beat secular projects hollow.

That’s because religion provides individuals with structure, support networks and -- most crucial of all -- hope. Dr Williams was arguing similarly that the Anglican Church should play a much expanded role in areas such as education and the regeneration of desolated communities.

Liberal secularists who regard him as their ally should look again at what he is saying. For they hate religion and want to banish it altogether from the public sphere. He, by contrast, wants to bring it back to replace what he calls the ‘market state’ which has failed.

But if it is to do that, he will surely have to confront the Church’s own retreat from moral authority, which has caused it so often to become indistinguishable from the most morally indifferent social worker.

What happened, for example, in Birmingham’s Balsall Heath was particularly instructive. For years, the Moslem community there led a daily picket against the street prostitutes, pimps and kerb-crawlers who were degrading the neighbourhood. The pickets succeeded not merely in removing this nuisance from their area, but also in substantially reducing crime as a result.

Yet the local churches were hostile and even preached against this exemplary civic activism as a ‘campaign against working women’.

What a turnaround from the 19th century, when evangelical Christians were the driving force behind the great reform movements such as the abolition of slavery and child prostitution, and the promotion of temperance and sexual continence. It was these Christians who re-moralised Britain.

Deficiencies in both the state and the free market demand new ways of thinking about our social problems. Without any doubt, the way forward is through giving a greater role to voluntary organisations and religious bodies.

This week will amount to what is for many only an annual exposure to the Christian ritual. Others will seek to avoid it altogether. But religion – given inspired and statesmanlike leadership – might yet ride to the rescue of a beleaguered society. Happy Christmas.

Daily Mail, December 16 2002

When President George W Bush declared his ‘war on terror’, he effectively announced that the practice of cosying up to state sponsors of terrorism was now at an end.

Tony Blair is supposed to be America’s ally in this struggle. Yet today, he is rolling out the red carpet for a man who sits at the very epicentre of terror, the Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Terror is absolutely central to Syria’s policy. It sponsors Hezbollah in Lebanon, which not only carries out terror attacks against Israel but before September 11 had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group.

At a rally in Lebanon last month, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called on Palestinians to ‘take suicide bombings worldwide’. Yet the man being feted in London this week has forged a far closer relationship with Hezbollah even than his father, the late President Hafiz al-Assad.

Syria also hosts the headquarters of Islamic Jihad and numerous other terrorist organisations. As Damascus radio said earlier this year, ‘Syria has turned its land into a training camp, a safe haven and an arms depot for the Palestinian revolutionaries’.

Last week in an interview with the Times, President Assad declared that he actually supported Palestinian ‘suicide’ bombers. Yet this is the man who will dine with the Prime Minister in Downing Street today, meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace tomorrow and attend the Lord Mayor’s dinner.

As a Jew who believes that Israel is a principal victim of the terror sponsored by Syria and others, I am appalled by this honouring of a man with so much blood on his hands. But many others must also be wondering just what is going on.

The answer is that President Assad is New Labour’s kind of guy. He and his wife have great PR because hey, they don’t even look or sound like Arabs. The President is an ophthalmologist who studied medicine in England, no less. Mrs Assad is actually an Englishwoman who started life as plain Emma from west London.

The Times reported that he didn’t look like a ruthless dictator – no doubt because he didn’t sport military fatigues, or goose-step across the room.

But of course, far from being a New Labour dream the Assads are the first family of a backward country with extensive poverty, absence of human rights and second-class status for women.

Yet this charmer with the bedside manner has apparently beguiled the Prime Minister into believing that here is a man who is going to lead Syria out of the dark ages and with whom Britain can therefore do business. Just how gullible can you get?

This state visit is presumably intended as a reward for President Assad’s support for the UN resolution on Iraq. But this was clearly a tactical manoeuvre. In November, Syria’s Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shar revealed that it had voted for the resolution to divide President Bush’s administration and prevent war against Iraq.

In other words, this was a spoiling exercise. And indeed, in last week’s interview President Assad warned that the campaign to topple Saddam would have ‘catastrophic consequences’ for the region.

Now, intelligence sources are claiming that Syria is actually surreptitiously arming Iraq. It is reported that more than 52 crates containing new air-defence systems and spare parts have been smuggled from Syria into Iraq since last December, enabling the Iraqis to upgrade their air defence capabilities. And Syria is also said to have allowed Saddam to open an oil smuggling route through the port of Latakia.

Well, what a surprise. But do many in Britain actually care? For a disturbing number of people still can’t see the point of taking military action against Saddam Hussein. They think there is no link between the Iraqi dictator and al Q’aeda, and so he poses no terror threat to the west.

I happen to believe such a link does exist. But even if it did not, the threat from Saddam is still plain. He repeatedly declares his intention to become leader of the Arab world. Weapons of mass destruction would help him achieve this ambition.

This would mean that despite his secularism he would become leader of the Islamic jihad. The people who brought us September 11 would then be equipped with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Mr Blair has grasped that we cannot sit by and wait for this to happen. Hence his support for President Bush. But this obscures significant differences between the two. For Mr Blair appears to believe that Islamic fascism is susceptible to reason, and in particular to the force of his own personality.

This hubris has already led him into humiliation. Last year, shortly after the murder of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze’evi by the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Mr Blair went to Syria to tell President Assad to renounce violence. He got his reply at a press conference when he was forced to listen to the Syrian leader defend Palestinian terror attacks on Israel.

So why on earth is he honouring this man in this way? The main reason is that he is desperate to demonstrate that Britain has no quarrel with Islam or the Arab world as such. But this spectacularly misses the point. The west has indeed no quarrel with Islam, one of the world’s great religions and civilisations.

It is rather that certain Islamist groups and their state backers have declared war in the name of Islam against the west in general and the Jews in particular -- and not just those in Israel.

President Assad himself makes no distinction between hatred of Israel and hatred of the Jews. In a disgusting remark when he visited the Pope last year, he said: ‘The Israelis are trying to kill all monotheistic religious principles on the basis of the same mentality that led to the betrayal and torture of Jesus, and the same mentality through which they tried to kill the Prophet Mohammad’.

His defence minister Mustafa Tlass is the author of ‘The Matzah of Zion’, a grotesque anti-semitic libel which claims that the Jews drink the blood of children. This obscene publication, now in its eighth reprint, is doing a roaring trade in the Arab world. Earlier this year, President Assad extended Mr Tlass’s term for another two years in appreciation of his services.

Mr Blair’s refusal to acknowledge all this in public is more than shameful. It serves to perpetuate terrorism. His failure to take a principled, public stand against the sponsors of terror and the anti-semitism that fuels it is taken as a sign of weakness, to be exploited by terrorism’s many godfathers.

Such grovelling appeasement also perpetuates ignorance and confusion among the British people, with the resulting lack of support for action against a terror network whose nature and reach are simply not understood. It has led too many to believe that Israel is the cause of world terror, rather than recognise that Israel is the principal target of a genocidal onslaught against the Jews and a wider war against the west.

Realpolitik is the art of the possible. Naivety and hubris merely make leaders look ridiculous or compromised – and leave their countries dangerously exposed.

Daily Mail, December 14 2002

Something is clearly seriously amiss in our society’s whole approach to the status and significance of children. This week, two sets of figures were published which should cause us to stop dead in our tracks.

The first was revealed at a sexual health conference hosted by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Its honorary secretary, Professor Allan Templeton, revealed that a horrifying 13.8 per cent of girls aged under 16 were infected with the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia, which can cause pelvic inflammation and infertility.

In Professor Templeton’s words, this is a ‘staggering’ infection rate for girls who are under the age of consent. And this is quite apart from the unacceptably high 10 per cent infection rate among older teenagers and women under 25.

Even worse, among the girls he has treated no fewer than 28 per cent become re-infected within six months, and 20 per cent within a year.

In other words, there is an epidemic of promiscuity among young girls, including children for whom sexual intercourse is against the law – and whose reckless behaviour appears to be impervious even to the warning signals of serious disease.

At same time, the Office of National Statistics revealed that birth rates in Britain have now dropped to a historic low, with women having an average of 1.6 children. This is below the birth rate of 2.1 children which is required to keep population numbers stable.

So it appears that sex is no longer being used by our society to reproduce itself through having children. Instead, it is producing promiscuous children who are contracting sexually transmitted diseases (not to mention our appalling teenage pregnancy rate).

How can we have got ourselves into such a disturbing situation, which poses such grave dangers for the well-being and even the survival of our society?

The answer lies in the revolution that has occurred in the way we look at birth, marriage, family life and the relations between men and women. Sex has become detached from reproduction. Instead, it has been turned into a recreational sport denuded of any moral or social constraints.

These are symptoms of a society which now worships at the shrine of personal fulfilment and instant gratification, producing a profound change in sexual behaviour. If these trends remain unchecked, the eventual outcome must inevitably be the erosion of the bonds of duty between the generations and a country left with no stake in its own future.

At this point, a statistical health warning is needed. Demographic projections are almost invariably wrong. Unforeseen events occur causing people’s behaviour to change, throwing all forecasts into confusion.

Nevertheless, one cannot ignore current trends. And if a birth rate of only 1.6 continued, Britain as we know it would eventually go out of business. While the birth rate is falling, people are living much longer. So unless more babies were born, within a few decades Britain would become top heavy, with too few young people to support the huge numbers of the elderly.

There wouldn’t be enough working-age tax payers to fund the public services and meet the medical and pension costs of the older generation. And eventually the overall population would decline in numbers, too.

It is not just Britain which faces this difficulty. Most of the developed world is suffering from a birth rate below the replacement level. According to the European union’s statistical office Eurostat, last year there were more deaths than births in 43 per cent of the EU’s 211 regions.

But in some European countries – the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Sweden, for example – the birth rate has now turned upwards again.

Why is all this happening? The first thing to say is that this is by no means a new phenomenon. The British birth rate started to decline in the 1880s with the development of contraception. The ‘baby boom’ after the Second World War was an aberration. Now we are not only back with decline, but it is becoming more pronounced.

Demographers and other experts are scratching their heads over a trend that is common to countries with wildly different cultures and attitudes.

The rise of the consumer society is an obvious culprit, with materialism squeezing out the sacrifices of child-rearing. Women are charged with preferring to go out to work rather than devote their lives to child-production. The status of children themselves has changed, too. In less developed societies – as in Britain, generations ago -- children are viewed as a source of income for the family. In modern Britain, having children has turned from an investment to an expense.

In addition, families have lost many of their functions as a result of the welfare state. Once, they played a principal role in educating children, caring for their elderly, or looking after relatives. Now, the state provides education, health care, old people’s homes and unemployment support. Since the state has nationalised the family in this way, incentives to have children have declined.

But this cannot be the whole explanation. In countries like Italy, Spain and Greece, where the family is still venerated and where a lower proportion of women work than in Britain, the birth rate is even lower at 1.2 and 1.3 children per woman.

According to the Oxford demographer Professor David Coleman, women in southern Europe are now simply refusing to shoulder the enormous burdens imposed by this veneration of the family, which leaves women having to do everything for husbands, children and elders simultaneously -- and increasingly, cope with a paid job too.

This is clearly not the situation in Britain, where women do not generally juggle such extensive family duties. The common factor, however, is surely a revolt by women throughout the developed world against a domestic role they believe fetters their personal freedom.

In Britain, where the integrity of marriage and the influence of the church have all but imploded, such self-interest has gone far further. Fewer calculate their interests down through the generations. The here and now is all-important. So without that need to invest in the future, the dependency of the young – or the old -- becomes an intolerable bore.

The change in women’s attitudes is indeed pivotal – but not perhaps because so many women have jobs. After all, in countries like Sweden or Denmark where just as many women work, birth rates are now rising.

It is surely much more to do with our extreme, ‘unisex’ feminism which has relentlessly inculcated the view that marriage is slavery and must be avoided at all costs if women are not to lose their identities.

To free themselves from men, says unisex feminism, women have to become like men (or their caricature) – unconstrained, predatory, seeking instant gratification and then moving on. Thousands of women, believing this propaganda, now behave accordingly.

As they get older, however, and their biological clock ticks ever more loudly, they get a terrible shock. Wanting at last to have a child by a man who will fulfil his role as its father, they cannot find a suitable chap to oblige.

This is surely the difference from other countries where the birth rate is now rising. There, women in their thirties are finally having children. Here they are not – and the reason is surely not hard to spot.

British men have been demonised as rapists, child molesters and wife-beaters, or caricatured as feeble-minded wimps. They are told their role as breadwinner is defunct -- unless they are actually separated from the mothers of their children, at which point they will be hounded for child support.

At the lower end of the income scale, their full-time jobs are being replaced by part -time jobs colonised by women. Marginalised by work, home, the divorce courts and the welfare system, not surprisingly they no longer view a broody, unattached but multiply-partnered woman as an unmitigated joy.

In the meantime, women wonder why they can’t find a decent man with whom to have a child.

The freedom women now enjoy to have sex without the risk of reproduction, with the corresponding collapse of any stigma or moral constraint, has turned sex into the defining commodity of our consumer culture.

The flip side of such adult irresponsibility is that children are treated as mini-adults. Not only parents but the state now refuses to treat children as the immature individuals they are, requiring the effort of protection and guidance.

Instead, through sex-education in schools it equips them for the sexual marketplace – and congratulates itself for its ‘responsibility’ as it dishes out condoms to under-age youngsters. The result is that sex has become a recreational sport for children just as it is for adults, with shocking and shameful results.

When individuals become concerned only with their own selfish needs and desires, society starts to break down. The traditional family was the principal mechanism by which our society ensured that its members had a commitment to looking after each other and thus guaranteed its survival. Safeguarding the welfare of children was critical to that understanding.

But now, children have ceased to be our investment in the future. Of course, there are thankfully still many families where children are infinitely precious. But the bleak statistics of dismembered family life cannot be gainsaid.

Children have become commodities, to be fitted into lifestyle choices just like other consumer goods – desirable, certainly, as adult ‘rights’, and alas all too dispensable when they get in the way of adult desires. A society which abandons its children has stopped caring about its own future.

This is not irrevocable. As I have said, there are countries – Denmark, Sweden, the United States – which have looked over the edge and decided to pull back. But it all depends whether people feel an investment in their society, or whether they are rootless individuals only interested in themselves. A country has to have enough pride and belief in itself to want to continue.

A society that no longer wishes to survive but is prepared to replace itself by something entirely different is truly decadent. It is engaged in nothing less than social suicide.

Saving ourselves from this fate means restoring the pact between the generations. This mean investing heavily in committed parenting, with financial incentives to have children and to shore up and strengthen marriage.

Admittedly, this would not solve the dilemma of women torn between their desire for freedom and the pull of motherhood – a dilemma that individual women alone have to resolve for themselves.

And women are the crux of all this. It is women who are the civilising force in both family and society. This was the critical insight by the feminist pioneers of the 19th century, who opened up the public sphere for women so that the whole of society might be improved by their influence.

But unisex feminism has betrayed that legacy and left women confused and abandoned. It is possible that women will come to rethink where their own interests really lie. If that were to happen, our children might be rescued from the sexual free-for-all, and the gloomy demographers might be proved wrong yet again.

Daily Mail, December 9 2002

Whatever else it may turn out to be, this is emphatically not a private affair. What started out as a question mark over Cherie Blair’s choice of friends, and then became a rather bigger question over her property dealings, has now become a tide of sleaze lapping at the steps of one department of state after another.

Following last week’s belated admission by Mrs Blair that she had indeed used the con-man and convicted fraudster Peter Foster to buy two properties in Bristol, friends sprang to her defence by insisting that these were merely the personal affairs of a private individual.

Mrs Blair herself seemed to believe that how she chose to invest her money was no business of anyone else. The uproar was simply evidence of a political vendetta being mounted against her.

Well, there can’t be many private dealings in which so many government departments are involved. According to lawyers for Mr Foster, who was already facing deportation home to Australia, the Home Office suddenly tried to bundle him out of the country by the end of last week to curb the mounting embarrassment he was causing.

The Department of Trade and Industry is apparently investigating an allegation that Mr Foster has breached a ban on holding company directorships.

The Lord Chancellor’s Department, which appoints the judiciary, now has to grapple with the apparent naivety and poor judgement of Ms Recorder Booth -- not to mention continuing questions about whether she has yet told the whole truth – when considering her supposed ambition to become a High Court judge.

And what kind of private individual deals with public questions about her affairs by using the Prime Minister’s press office? Public and private cannot be separated so easily when your husband just happens to be the Prime Minister.

One of the most astonishing aspects of this whole affair is the way Tony Blair has been presented as hermetically sealed from his wife’s activities. The impression has been created that she alone decided to buy the two Bristol flats, and that she alone stood to benefit. But that is not true.

Mr Blair stands to gain from these investment properties as much as his wife. The £69,000 discount Mr Foster negotiated on the deal – whether or not this was because he brandished the Blair name – benefits them both. So even though the Prime Minister may have left all the negotiations to his other half, he is an equal beneficiary of the deal -- and is therefore tarnished by the way it was done.

For we now learn that it was conducted through a ‘blind’ trust established by the Blairs. Under the terms of this trust -- set up with the proceeds of the sale of their Islington house when they moved to Number 10 – the couple were supposed to have no knowledge of where their money was invested. Yet while the flats may indeed have been purchased in the name of the trust, Mrs Blair was clearly directing the sale, as last week’s emails show.

Downing Street claims that trust rules apply only to stocks and shares and not to property. But the ministerial code of conduct makes no such distinction between investments. In his forward to this code, Mr Blair says the rules should be applied both in the spirit and the letter. Mrs Blair seem to have broken their spirit, at the very least. And unless she kept secret from her husband the fact that they were spending half a million on investment property, he would have broken it as well.

It is an irony that this ‘blind’ trust, which was created to keep the Prime Minister at a proper distance from financial transactions in his name, has now drawn him straight into the affair. For the fact that the trust bought the properties means that the trail of awkward questions from the deal leads straight to him, too.

A fraudster and con-man does nothing out of generosity of spirit. What did Mr Foster want in return for his wheeler-dealing on the Bristol property market? He says he refused to charge Mrs Blair the £4000 fee of the accountant he used during the deal, paying it out of his own pocket. Why? What did he expect to receive in return for this largesse?

Even more startling, the accountant in question, Andrew Axelson, is himself awaiting trial on money-laundering charges. And why was an accountant needed at all for a straightforward property deal?

Mr Foster’s connection to the Blairs arose through his girlfriend, Carole Caplin, Mrs Blair’s guru on fashion and dubious therapies and former trainer for a mind-bending cult condemned in Parliament as ‘profoundly wrong’. Ms Caplin is said to be a regular guest at Chequers. For the Prime Minister to consort with such a person calls his own judgment into question. And if he didn’t know about her shady boyfriend, he should have done.

Mr Foster has boasted that he would recruit Mrs Blair to endorse his plan to supply dubious slimming pills to British schools. No doubt he has grossly inflated his claims of access and influence. But the Prime Minister should never allow himself to be put into a position where such people can make capital out of his proximity.

Our predominant victim culture encourages people to blame others for their own errors or misfortunes. Mrs Blair’s resentment at the fierce questioning she has provoked is a typical example. As the wife of the Prime Minister, she is not a private individual. She wields substantial influence over him, maybe more than anyone else. If her judgment is deeply suspect, it rebounds on him and has an impact on the country.

If Caesar’s wife needed to be above suspicion, why should that not be equally true for the wife of Tony Blair?

Public and private cannot be separated here. So it was perplexing, to say the least, to hear the Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin stubbornly insist last week that the Tories would have nothing to say on the Bristol affair because it was a private matter.

Now, very late in the day, Iain Duncan Smith has finally raised ‘legitimate and genuine concerns’ – but only about the press operation, not the dubious aspects of the deal itself. Whatever the government’s latest outrage – its nihilistic sponsorship of the drug culture, its latest lethal attack on marriage, its loss of control of the country’s borders, and now unsavoury relationships in Downing Street – the Opposition simply pulls the covers over its head.

And because the Tories are so cravenly transfixed by Mr Blair, they allow him mysteriously to float high above all the chaos and venality that characterise his administration. No sleaze sticks to him. He is Downing Street’s very own out-of-body experience. And now he is even attempting to float above his wife.

But if the Tories aren’t prepared to be outraged, the public certainly are. Here is a wealthy Prime Minister and his high-earning wife, with a cool half million to invest on the property market for luxury accommodation for their student offspring, courtesy of con-men and charlatans in their social circle -- while the government prepares to fleece the middle classes through top-up fees.

A private matter? On the contrary. It goes to the heart of our diminished political process and the continuing corrosion of our public life.

Daily Mail, December 4 2002

The shadow of Joseph McCarthy now stalks the Palace of Westminster. The late, unlamented American senator lent his name to the infamous anti-communist witch-hunt, in which many innocent individuals had their reputations viciously smeared and lives wrecked as a result.

But now we are seeing disturbing signs of a McCarthyism of the left. Under the protection of parliamentary privilege, the Home Secretary made an astonishing accusation against the Times journalist Anthony Browne. In Monday’s debate over his proposal to accept 1200 asylum seekers from Sangatte, David Blunkett claimed that Mr Browne’s articles were ‘bordering on fascism’.

Anyone unfamiliar with Mr Browne’s work, which has been carried in the Mail, would surely conclude from this that he should be treated as a pariah. After all, isn’t fascism one of the most odious of all doctrines, a violent repudiation of democracy associated with oppression, persecution and genocide?

But nothing he has written could remotely be considered akin to such a repugnant creed. All he has done is to present -- in a series of articles and a book for the think-tank Civitas -- facts and figures about immigration which reveal the frightening impact of current immigration policy, and expose the unmitigated hypocrisy of those who argue in its favour.

Using official statistics and logical analysis, he blows an enormous hole in virtually every argument used to support mass immigration. As he has asked, why should a densely crowded island, with four million people who want to work but who are not working, need a rate of immigration that will quadruple population growth, cripple already desperately overstretched public services and create parallel societies?

He has also written that most of the alarming increase in HIV has been caused not by gay people but by immigrants from Africa – a fact which he says has been stifled by political cowardice.

One does not have to agree with every aspect of his analysis to realise that he has helped provoke a debate that has been all but stifled by the fear of precisely the kind of accusation that has now been made against him. To say he borders on fascism is a quite astonishing and disgraceful smear, and a gross abuse of Parliament.

But smears don’t stop at Anthony Browne. In the same debate, Mr Blunkett abused the Tories as a ‘rabble’ who would back the far-right to scare people into believing that ‘managed migration’ was the same as ‘clandestine asylum seeking’.

Under the jargon, this was as misleading as it was offensive. The 1200 from Sangatte aren’t ‘managed’ migrants. They’re being allowed in only because Mr Blunkett has failed to ‘manage’ his negotiations with the French, and is using work permits cynically to conceal the fact that not one of these migrants is entitled to come here.

To accuse the Tories of backing the ‘far right’ was to top this ignominy with a collective slander, provoking Michael Howard -- who represents Folkestone, which has borne the brunt of the Sangatte debacle, and who is himself a Jew -- to understandable rage.

Nor do the smears stop there. Sir Andrew Green, founder of the think-tank Migrationwatch which has made a significant impact in a very short space of time, is also getting the treatment.

Sir Andrew, a former distinguished ambassador, founded Migrationwatch because he was horrified that a policy of mass immigration had effectively been introduced with no public debate whatsoever – indeed, the public was unaware it was happening. Through diligent use of official statistics, which showed that at current rates Britain was allowing in the equivalent of a city the size of Cambridge every five years, Sir Andrew alerted people to facts which had been suppressed.

For that, he and Migrationwatch have inevitably been labelled ‘right-wing’. The Observer, which tried very hard last weekend to smear him, was so short of ammunition that it resorted to damning him by association as a ‘close friend of disgraced former minister Jonathan Aitken’.

It also tried to damage his collaborator, the distinguished demographer Professor David Coleman, whom it labelled ‘right-wing’ because he had previously advised Tory ministers. But Professor Coleman happens to be the most eminent demographer in the country precisely because of his work’s dispassionate rigour and freedom from political bias.

Notably, the facts and figures produced by Migrationwatch or Anthony Browne are not contested. Their opponents resort instead to the tactics of smear, innuendo and vilification – the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt.

The reason the left cannot deal with immigration honestly and effectively is rooted in a profound shift in its ideology. With the collapse of communism, the left’s whole focus changed. It could no longer be economics, since capitalism had so comprehensively routed its enemies.

So the attack on western society moved instead into issues of personal identity, ethnicity, race and nation. The very idea of defending a culture and traditions that go back centuries became damned as imperialist and illegitimate. The only permitted model for society was multiculturalism. So anyone arguing against the transformation of our culture through mass immigration had to be racist.

And because the left claims the moral high ground, anyone else must be -- by definition – both right-wing and evil. So ‘right wing’ has become the label to hang round the necks of anyone who dares disagree.

It has become code for ‘no decent people should have anything to do with this’. It is a smear. It is the McCarthyism of our political élites.

As a tactic designed to shut down public debate, it has had a good deal of success. For we have reached a situation where ordinary, decent people have become not only too frightened to say what they think, but even to think it for fear of believing themselves to be racist.

Certainly, there are people who hold prejudiced, unpleasant and dangerous views about immigrants and other minorities. But there are also thousands of liberal, tolerant people who have found that their legitimate concern that their culture cannot survive the unrestricted migration of the poor of the world is branded uncivilised.

These illiberal – even totalitarian – instincts of the left aim to stop the truth being told. The truth is that the government has lost control of our borders. The truth is that migrants are targeting Britain because this is the one country in the world which will lose them. The truth is that asylum is being abused.

Immigration has done this country a great deal of good. But Britain is not a country of immigrants. It has had a settled culture for a thousand years, and until recently the number of immigrants was minute. Immigration only works to a society’s benefit if it is managed at a rate which allows the indigenous culture to assimilate the newcomers.

It is truly disgusting to smear those who voice such concerns as ‘anti-immigrant’. There are plenty of black, Asian and other minority Britons who are appalled by the immigration shambles, both because they value what is being lost and because they fear the inevitable backlash.

The British National Party is making alarming progress. That’s the real fascism, Mr Blunkett – and it is your policy, not the work of assiduous journalists, which is now raising that horrific spectre once again.

Daily Mail, December 2 2002

The government is in a frightful panic over the fact that, like an alchemist having a bad hair day, the public services are crumbling into dust in its hands. The more spells it conjures up to put them right, the worse they all get.

The most spectacular and fundamental failure of all is the attempt to teach every child to read, write and be numerate.

According to the schools inspectors Ofsted, a quarter of all 11 year-olds are still failing to reach the required standard of reading and writing. Their reading standards have in fact fallen by three percentage points over the past two years.

Our numeracy record offers further cause for despair. A report by Unicef says that almost half of all British teenagers are unable to do basic subtraction, putting the UK behind countries such as Hungary or Korea. Ofsted says numeracy is slowly improving, but there are still weaknesses in maths teaching.

Yet we’ve had three to four years of high profile strategies which the government developed in order to improve literacy and numeracy. How can the world’s fourth largest economy still be so startlingly backward in the very basics?

Ofsted blames the literacy failure on weak leadership and poor management by head teachers, who fail to ensure their staff get to grips with traditional teaching methods. But this is only partly true.

The real problem lies in the literacy strategy itself. In fairness, it has brought about some improvement by putting teaching back at centre stage and giving primary teachers a welcome shot in the arm.

But it is still fundamentally flawed. That is because Tony Blair has never understood that the very bloodstream of education has been poisoned by a pernicious ideology. As a result, even the people he entrusted to get literacy right hijacked the policy to perpetuate the very thinking it was set up to counter.

Anyone who was taught to read by what’s called ‘synthetic phonics’ -- sounding out letters and then blending those sounds together -- will no doubt find it hard to believe that this tried and tested method fell from favour in the teaching profession.

Instead, teachers expected children to learn to read by a kind of osmosis. Rather than systematically decoding print through phonics, teachers used a mixture of methods, including guesswork and memorising whole words and phrases. The result was that many children became disastrously confused and demoralised.

True, the literacy strategy put phonics back on the agenda. But the then Education Secretary David Blunkett flinched from taking on the education establishment. He merely threw in a bit of phonics along with those other methods that had done so much damage.

So the literacy strategy is still failing to teach children to blend letter sounds together. Instead, it gets them to memorise words or guess them from the context, the initial letter or the pictures on the page.

The result of this mess is that, despite literacy hours involving vast amounts of teaching materials, videos, one-to-one help, special teacher training, input from educational psychologists and an avalanche of bureaucratic directives, many children are still unable to decode the simplest of words.

Yet there is no reason why virtually every child can’t be taught fast to read and write. In the current newsletter of the Reading Reform Foundation – which has ceaselessly and fruitlessly pointed out to the government the flaws in its strategy -- teacher Fiona Nevola relates how she has used synthetic phonics to teach many children to read after they were written off by their schools.

One boy of seven was classified dyslexic, and spent his time with his learning support assistant making Plasticine dinosaurs. But after 12 lessons over 5 months, Ms Nevola transformed his reading age from 5.5 to 9.2.

Another boy, William aged 9, who had been withdrawn from mainstream school to a dyslexic unit where he made no progress, moved from a reading age of 7.8 to 9.2 in eight weeks. ‘Why haven’t I been taught like that before?’ he asked angrily.

Why indeed? We should all [ital] be incandescent. Thousands of children are being written off – leading to truancy, emotional problems and crime -- when the problem is not they who are unteachable but their teachers who have failed to teach them to read.

The reason lies in continued resistance by leaders of their profession. Ofsted reports that Cambridge’s prestigious teacher training college, for example, makes hardly any reference to phonics on its course for primary school teachers. So these new teachers know all about the National Literacy Strategy, but next to nothing about teaching children to read. It makes you want to weep.

The reason goes to the very heart of what has gone wrong with education in general. The animosity against phonics derives from ‘child-centred’ education, which regards pupils as the equals of their teachers. The result is that children are expected to run before they can walk.

So in maths, they may grapple with ‘set theory’ without ever being taught how to subtract. In history, they may be analysing historical sources without ever being taught what actually happened in the past.

And in the literacy hour, Ofsted tells us, teachers are particularly successful at ‘introducing children to a range of genres’, and in discussing antonyms and word roots. But what on earth is the point of children being knowledgeable about literary genres or linguistic structure when they can’t even read or write?

This madness is all rooted in a political ideology which viewed child-centred education as nothing less than a programme to undermine western society. Since mass literacy had not brought about the workers’ revolution, it had to be destroyed. The ‘new literacy’, as it was called, would apparently free the masses by replacing reading skills with ‘spontaneity’ and redefining educational failure as success.

Most teachers wouldn’t even know about this preposterous ideology, let alone subscribe to it. But incredible as it may seem, it lies at the root of the ideas with which they have been trained, and which have sent them so grievously ill-equipped into the classroom.

Mr Blair thinks he can reform education from Whitehall. This is a terrible mistake. It does not acknowledge the universal scale and gravity of our educational implosion.

Literacy and numeracy standards are not some discrete, localised problem that can be solved by artificially redirecting lesson structure.

Instead of imposing a literacy strategy created by an education establishment that has become irredeemably corrupted, Mr Blair should be should be going to the heart of the problem by shutting down the teacher training colleges that are doing all the damage.

Education decline is a deformation at the very heart of our culture. As such, it is very hard to address. But it is vital to understand that it is being driven by élites at the top. The only way to tackle it is therefore to deprive them of power.

That means wresting control from teacher training colleges, Education Department officials and the Downing Street policy unit, and instead giving responsibility to head teachers and leverage to parents. If Mr Blair wants to be remembered for education reform, he must understand that he simply has to let go.