Daily Mail, January 27 2003

This is a critical week for the future of Iraq and the alliance between Britain and America. Today, the UN’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix reports to the Security Council on his progress. Tomorrow, President George W Bush makes his seminal State of the Union address, and on Friday Tony Blair is to meet him at Camp David for a council of war.

It is also a fateful week for the Prime Minister. For he now realises that he has still failed to persuade the British public of the case for war. According to a YouGov poll at the weekend, just over a quarter of respondents said they were convinced that Saddam Hussein was sufficiently dangerous to justify military action. And only one in five would support war without UN backing.

Meanwhile, Mr Blair’s self-appointed role as the bridge between the US and Europe has been holed below the waterline by the declared hostility to war of France and Germany.

President Bush, aware that opposition is also growing amongst the American public, is saying the inspectors should be given more time. But the world has already waited 11 years for proof that Saddam has destroyed his capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Blair says that in the absence of a second UN resolution, war would be justified if the inspectors said Iraq had obstructed them. But Mr Blix says his report will be ‘a mixed bag’ – in other words, it will provide ammunition for both liberators and appeasers.

In this tumult, the Prime Minister has been criticised for not making the case for war effectively enough. In fact, the case has been made, but the public will not accept it. Instead, myths have achieved the status of killer arguments.

Myth number one is that no ‘smoking gun’ has been found. But the west doesn’t have to produce a smoking gun. It is Saddam who is required to produce the evidence that he has complied with the terms of the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire.

This made it a condition that Saddam destroy his weapons of mass destruction and prove that he had done so, because he was rightly considered a huge menace to the world.

Repeatedly declaring his intention to become the leader of the Arabs, he had already invaded and attacked a number of countries, posing a direct threat to western interests. If he became armed with weapons of mass destruction, this threat would then paralyse the west.

That danger has never gone away. Much US and British intelligence obviously cannot be revealed, as it would compromise vital sources. But the burden of proof lies not with the west but with Saddam to prove he has got rid of the weapons we know he had.

Yet he has failed to produce a single document on the fate of his known stockpile of deadly VX nerve gas, or the anthrax or botulinum he had amassed. He has failed to explain his known attempt to procure enriched uranium from abroad, or his manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles that he claims not to possess.

In recent weeks, the inspectors have discovered chemical warheads – showing Saddam lied when he said he had no weapons of mass destruction – along with 3,000 documents revealing his continuing efforts to build nuclear weapons.

We know he has issued his troops with chemical protection suits – against the effects of the weapons he says he hasn’t got. Similarly, we know from US intelligence that last autumn he ordered more than 1.2 million doses of the standard antidote for soldiers likely to be exposed to poison gas, and 25 metric tons of powder which makes chemical dust weapons.

We know he has threatened his scientists with death if they talk, and that he has hidden weapons in friendly countries such as Syria. Yet all this evidence is simply dismissed by the British public.

The second myth is that he doesn’t have the missiles to threaten us. But missiles are not necessary. As we have seen from the ricin plot, terrorists can easily be supplied with chemical or biological agents, and Saddam is a godfather of terrorism.

The third myth is that President Bush’s real agenda is to seize the Iraqi oilfields. In view of the known threat posed by Saddam, this theory is truly bizarre. Yes, oil is vital for the west; hence the Gulf War when Saddam invaded Kuwait. It is Saddam who wages wars for oil.

In America, by contrast, the oil interest has meant until now that America turned a blind eye to tyranny as long as the oil kept flowing. Indeed, the oil interest still paralyses any action against Saudi Arabia, a fount of world terror.

These myths are simply irrational. The key fact remains that Saddam has refused to prove he is no longer a menace to our lives and our interests. So why do three quarters of us no longer believe this threat?

There are several explanations. The first is the passage of time since the Gulf War, creating the belief that only a fresh invasion (or the discovery of a nuclear missile with ‘London’ stencilled on its side) can justify action.

The second is the widespread distrust of politicians as unprincipled opportunists. But if that judgment is true here, why should President Bush be risking his political future like this? Why should Mr Blair be setting himself so dangerously against his party, his country and his important friends in Europe?

The third is the failure to understand the reality of Islamist fascism. Many believe this is merely America’s war, and Britain is needlessly getting involved. But look at what is now being unearthed by police in Italy and Spain -- terrorist cells targeting cities all over appeasement-minded Europe.

For the Islamist tiger – being ridden by secular Saddam for all he is worth – is roaring its death threats to ‘Crusaders and Zionists’, or Christians and Jews; in other words, to western civilisation in general.

This is constantly illustrated by the repeated Islamist attacks on Christian communities around the world. Yet few in Britain are aware of this persecution because it is ignored, not only by the media but – astonishingly – by the churches.

Instead, British clerics parrot the fashionable anti-Americanism which invariably blames the west for the misdeeds of the third world, which it casts as the helpless victims of western imperialism.

At a deeper level still, there is now a vast difference between American and European attitudes. The US believes in itself strongly as a nation, is deeply religious and is prepared to fight to defend its values. Europe, by contrast, is post-nationalist, post-Christian (including many bishops) and pacifist.

But in a battle between Islamists who are prepared to kill and to die for their beliefs, and European liberals who have come to believe that all war is bad and must be replaced by supra-national talking-shops and peace at any price, there is no contest.

When a civilisation no longer has the stomach to fight for its existence, and views its own self-defence as unwarranted aggression, it has signed its own death-warrant.

Daily Mail, January 23 2003

The revolution is now within sight of its goal. Our education system is finally being destroyed.

The ideological vandalism that has crippled the teaching profession and which Tony Blair once promised to eradicate is now rampaging out of control in his education department.

This week, we learned that GCSEs are to be transformed and A-levels swept away by new exams which will make it easier for everyone to say they have the same qualification. This is the logical outcome of a situation in which exams have been dumbed down to meaninglessness.

As the A-level re-grading scandal last summer showed, it is politically very tricky when the drop in standards becomes too dramatic to explain away. So – hey presto -- the government will abolish the exam altogether and replace it by ‘A-level lite’, under a fancy European name.

At age 16, there is to be similar sleight of hand.The GCSE replaced the previous system of O levels and CSEs because of sensitivities about a two-tier qualification. So the GCSE was the exam no-one would fail. But since this was a lie built upon an impossibility, everyone quickly worked out that only the top grades were really passes, while the bottom grades were really fails.

The old CSE was introduced in the first place because of the snobbishness of the governing class, who felt there was something shameful about leaving school with no ‘academic’ qualification and having a mere trade or skilled craft.

So now the government has come up with the brilliant wheeze of abolishing these differences altogether by a ‘hybrid’ GCSE which merges the academic and the vocational, and will thus persuade people that bricklaying and physics are of equal status. And it will be easier to pass. Bingo!

Yesterday, the Education Secretary Charles Clarke unveiled his controversial proposals to almost triple university tuition fees and burden new graduates with some £21,000 of debt. The political difficulties of such an imposition are formidable and will doubtless deepen.

But this risky policy is the outcome of the very same pressure behind the progressive collapse of standards in our schools. This is the ‘all must have prizes’ thinking which says that everybody must achieve equally, that no-one must fail and now that 50 per cent of the population must have a university degree.

This has meant that in the past twenty years, the number of university students has doubled while funding has halved. But these huge numbers should not be going to university. Since many have no aptitude for a degree course, the result has been the devaluation of standards and the proliferation of absurd degrees like golf course studies.

So graduates will be burdened with £21,000 debts– and many able candidates put off from applying to university – to subsidise Mickey Mouse degrees.

The government is now collapsing standards from top to bottom of the education system like a pyramid of cards. Merging academic and vocational studies at GCSE will mean lower standards in both.

Foreign languages will no longer be compulsory after age 14. Science remains -- but how valuable is this when biology, chemistry and physics are to be scrapped in favour of fuzzy discussions about cloning, genetically modified food and diet?

And A-level – once the ‘gold standard’, to be defended to the death – is to be tossed away in favour of a French-style Baccalaureate, which offers a broader range of subjects. Mr Clarke says A-levels are too ‘narrow and exclusive’.

This is code for saying they are difficult (heaven forbid), and that too many doctors, say, have never read Jane Austen. But why is breadth better than depth? Is it really progress to have a literary surgeon who was never taught the basics of science?

And huge numbers of French students fail their first year university exams. The ‘depth’ of A-level always produced, by contrast, a minimal university drop-out rate in Britain. Moreover, to get into a top university in France – which ironically has the kind of elitist system to which Mr Clarke would take an axe -- students have to take a further exam.

The government is right to stress the need for high quality vocational education. But it will not provide it, because proper vocational education involves different, specialist education for children with different aptitudes. European vocational education is excellent precisely because it is taught and examined separately from academic schooling.

Yet our government is determined to stamp out all such differentiation. The result will be the further devaluation of school exams at 16 and 18 -- with the likely outcome that independent schools will devise their own exam system.

That will doubtless make them into further targets for government spite. Significantly, Mr Clarke is now making menacing noises once again towards the grammar schools. Of course. Anything that embodies high educational standards must be removed, because its crime is to highlight the abject failure of the rest of the system.

It is here that the government’s cynicism and malice are now most apparent. Through its ‘access regulator’, universities are to be forced to take children from poor backgrounds. So as children learn less and less, the universities are to be forced to take students who haven’t made the grade, and destroy their own standards in the process.

This appalling abuse of the universities spells the demise of education itself. It penalises merit and betrays aspiration. It also reveals a deep contempt for the very people whose interests the government wears on its sleeve. For it doesn’t seem to occur to these ministers that the main reason many working-class children don’t apply to university is that they don’t want to. They’d rather have a skilled job.

If anyone has ruined the life chances of poor children who would benefit from university, it is this government by failing to raise education standards (it can’t even get children to read and write adequately, for goodness sake), persisting with comprehensives which lowered university uptake from the lowest social classes, and now by putting them off completely through fear of crippling debts.

But these ministers are not driven by a passion to raise standards. On the contrary, they want to lower standards because their most visceral belief is egalitarianism. A process that started with child centred education in primary schools and then produced the comprehensives is now reaching its logical apogee with an education minister, David Miliband, who actually sneers at proponents of academic rigour as ‘elitists ‘.

An education system reflects the vigour and the values of a society. The reason the Baccalaureate or vocational education work well in Europe is because those countries have a very strong sense of what they stand for and where their interests lie.

Our permanent educational revolution, by contrast, reveals a country that is rudderless and adrift, without any clear sense of what education is for; and which is now at the mercy of the third-rate shallowness, authoritarian control-freakery and old-fashioned Marxist class malice of New Labour.

Eat your heart out, Matthew Arnold. The ideal of a liberal education is in its death throes, with the government’s hands round its windpipe.

Daily Mail, January 20 2003

A Taliban soldier who fought the British and Americans in Afghanistan has been granted asylum here because he says he fears persecution from the new western- backed government in Kabul.

Excuse me? Let’s just get our heads round this one. Britain helped get rid of a despotic, terrorist Afghan regime that persecuted its people and deprived them of their human rights. Yet we are now granting asylum to one of that regime’s soldiers who fled when we helped liberate the country.

Whatever next? Asylum for Osama bin Laden? This is surely more like lunatic asylum. Any claim to coherent principle has imploded into the surrealistic chaos of a system out of control.

Now, in a move as shifty as it is futile, the Home Secretary David Blunkett has commissioned 20 property firms to buy up country mansions and former hotels to house asylum-seekers. Not only is this a dodge to get round the planning laws, but since these hostels won’t even be secure it is not going to prevent the majority of asylum-seekers simply melting away into the population.

And it won’t stop them from overloading our buckling public services. In Staffordshire, a GP has now been forced to expel more than 30 patients from his list -- including an 88 year-old woman -- because of intolerable pressure from asylum seekers.

This crisis has arisen because Britain seems to have lost the ability to think straight – with the result that its citizens have now been put in danger. All the terrorist suspects in the fatal stabbing of DC Stephen Oake – and no fewer than 10 out of 14 Algerians detained as terrorist suspects in the last month – are asylum-seekers. The British seem to be no longer capable of grasping the difference between those who merit and those who abuse asylum.

Indeed, the very idea that such distinctions should be drawn brings on a fit of the vapours and the claim that asylum-seekers are being ‘demonised’. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said he is ‘extremely concerned’ about the links being made between terrorists and asylum-seekers. And Mr Blunkett has fended off calls for more effective action by saying he is not prepared to denounce all asylum-seekers and immigrants.

But the fact remains that the government has lost control of its borders. As the Home Office itself has said, Britain has mislaid hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.

The vast majority of asylum-seekers are not genuine refugees; and of the 100,000 who arrive every year, no fewer than 60,000 are here illegally. Yet only about 12,000 are sent home, and the reminder abscond.

Of course, most asylum seekers are not terrorists. But the asylum shambles is the sea in which terror most easily swims. With the threat of terrorism so acute, it is obviously imperative to know the bone fides and whereabouts of everyone coming into the country. But for years, the government hasn’t had a clue.

The chairman of the Algerian Refugee Council has said hundreds of Algerian terrorists have been let in. Is he too a ‘demoniser’? Intelligence sources say that the worst difficulty they face is that the asylum system has turned into mass immigration without control or proper information.

And the problem is not just confined to terrorism. We know the influx has also imported drugs, firearms and child prostitution. To refuse to act effectively on the grounds that this ‘demonises’ all immigrants is an attitude of such terminal immaturity that any politicians who espouse it deserve to be deprived of office for that alone.

Mr Blunkett says radical measures would cost too much. What kind of a response is that if we are truly in what was described by the Prime Minister as a ‘uniquely difficult and dangerous’ year of ‘big challenges requiring big decisions’?

Radical measures are now urgently needed. The root of the crisis is the way in which European and British judges have effectively extended both the European Convention on Human Rights and the 1951 UN refugee convention.

In a pamphlet published by the think-tank Politeia, Martin Howe QC has argued that a key judgment by the European Court of Human Rights in 1989 extended the Convention’s prohibition of torture or degrading treatment to preventing removals to any country where ill-treatment might be practised. This made it impossible to deport terrorists, since they could always argue they would face ill-treatment if they are returned.

The second problem is that English courts have interpreted the UN refugee convention far more broadly than other countries. France and Germany, for example, say genuine refugees can only be persecuted by the state, whereas English judges say attack by terrorists or rebel groups also constitutes persecution.

As one Law Lord remarked, this grossly distorted British asylum policy. The result was that Britain became a magnet for asylum seekers.

But if the problem was largely created by English and European judges, the fault must lie with the politicians who have allowed this to happen.

So what should be done? The first priority must be to deter asylum-abusers from coming here. Most asylum-seekers arrive with no identity documents, and many deliberately destroy them. As the think-tank Migrationwatch has argued, those who arrive without proper papers should be locked up. This would send a powerful corrective signal to those who currently identify Britain as an easy target.

Next, Britain should withdraw from the UN refugee convention. This does not mean shutting our doors to genuine refugees. It means that rather than being trapped by an outdated convention that has been hijacked by the judiciary, Parliament should instead write its own asylum law, restricting refugee status to circumstances which most people would accept were a legitimate definition of persecution.

Finally, as Martin Howe suggests, Britain should remove from its human rights legislation all those measures which are preventing it from safeguarding its citizens. This would mean first withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights; then passing a law to allow us to exclude terrorists and other undesirables – in accordance with the actual words of the UN refugee convention; and then re-joining the ECHR, entering a reservation in accordance with this new domestic law.

It is not only possible for a country to join the ECHR on its own terms; it has been done. Other countries such as France entered a number of reservations when they joined it, because of their keen understanding of the need to protect their own interests. Britain by contrast --whether through naivety or arrogance -- entered not one such reservation when it joined. Isn’t it high time to start protecting our own interests, just as other countries do?

The government has a moral duty to genuine refugees. But its primary duty is to keep its citizens safe. If it fails to do so, the real danger to refugees and other immigrants will be from an enraged public that feels unsafe and turns on them in fear, fury and frustration.

Yesterday, Mr Blunkett said testily he was willing to consider any practical suggestions for resolving the asylum problem. Well, here they are. How about it, Home Secretary?

Daily Mail, January 14 2003

The sensational disclosure that the former deputy drug czar Mike Trace has assembled a secret network to pressurise governments into legalising drugs lifts a veil on an operation as sinister as it is extensive.

The implications are simply astounding. Despite his official role in combating drugs in Britain, Europe and the United Nations, Mr Trace is revealed to be the driving force behind a co-ordinated international effort to disband the world’s anti-drug laws by stealth.

As a result of the relentless bombardment of legalising propaganda disguised as ‘harm reduction’, the public in Britain and Europe have become increasingly receptive to the idea that the real problem is not the drugs themselves but the law that makes them illegal.

With the public thus softened up, the legalisers’ main obstacle now is the UN conventions on drugs, passed in 1961, 1971 and 1988. These require countries to prevent possession, use, production and distribution of illegal narcotics.

In 1998, the UN embarked on an ambitious ten-year programme to move towards a ‘drug-free world’, committing itself to reducing demand and preventing illicit drugs from becoming a way of life – the very situation that ‘harm reduction’ policies institutionalise.

This April, countries are to review progress at a UN drugs meeting in Vienna. Drug legalisers are now co-ordinating all their efforts to getting repeal of these three UN conventions onto the agenda at that crucial Vienna meeting. They are doing so by gaining a critical mass of influence over all the principal participants in that debate.

Their campaign is like a vast iceberg. A small part recently became visible in the European Parliament, when no fewer than 108 MEPS signed a petition to abandon the conventions and legalise drugs.

Below the surface, campaigners are agitating covertly to manipulate public opinion and government ministers through propaganda and pressure. And at the centre of this, pulling the strings of an operation linking Europe and the US, sits Mr Trace.

His positions give him unrivalled influence. Since 1997 he has been at the heart of the British establishment, first as deputy drug czar and then as Director of Performance at the Government’s National Treatment Agency. He is at the heart of Europe as chairman of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the body which effectively draws up EU drug policy. And now he is at the heart of the UN as its head of demand reduction.

In all these posts, he is supposed to be upholding laws to reduce drug use. Now he is revealed -- in his own words -- as a fifth columnist, an underground agitator working covertly to undermine these very laws and being secretly paid to do so by notorious international legalisers.

What stands revealed is not merely deep duplicity and a cynical abuse of trust. The scale of the network he is co-ordinating is astonishing. The British headquarters of his operation – created from the shell of the ailing drug charity Release – is being financed in part by the Open Society Institute, funded by the billionaire financier George Soros.

Like other Soros-funded outfits, the OSI openly campaigns for ‘harm reduction’ and legalisation on the grounds that the war on drugs causes more harm than drugs themselves.

Mr Soros, whose billions have funded much of the legalising propaganda that has been bamboozling Britain and Europe for years, wrote in his autobiography that his remedy for drug abuse would be to establish a ‘strictly controlled distribution network’ through which he would make most drugs legally available.

Meanwhile, the makeover of Release is being overseen by a telling group of influential worthies -- including a former Home Office civil servant who was involved in drugs policy. Just what have we come to when such pillars of Britain’s establishment are conniving at a clandestine attempt to undermine UN efforts against drug use?

But that’s not all. For Mr Trace’s attempts to obtain additional funds from European sources disclose a vast and intricate web of non-governmental organisations, all beavering away at drug legalisation.

In particular, Mr Trace sought funding from the Brussels-based Network of European Foundations for Innovative Cooperation (NEF). This innocuous-sounding grant-giving body has actually spawned a proliferation of drug legalisation efforts through its offshoot ENCOD, the European NGO Council on Drugs and Development.

ENCOD says that ‘drug use as such does not represent the huge threat for society as it is supposed to do’. The real threat, it says, is posed by the war on drugs to the ‘millions of peasants in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia’ -- the people cultivating the drug crops! So it wants a legal framework to bring about the industrialisation of drug production, no less. And to achieve this, it proposes that public opinion should be softened up by ‘harm reduction’ policies which will pave the way to eventual legalisation.

The appalling thing is that this crazy, nihilistic agenda is now being accepted into mainstream thinking. Is the British government aware, for example, that its favourite drug charity DrugScope, which furnishes so much ‘objective’ information and advice on which the Home Office bases its drugs policy, belongs to ENCOD and therefore presumably subscribes to this shocking doctrine?

ENCOD, moreover, has close links to the Transnational Radical Party, the drug legalisation outfit which has a toehold in the European Parliament and which has been the driving force behind the MEPs’ legalisation petition.

If these MEPs can persuade the EU to adopt their position, the legalisers’ hand at the Vienna meeting will be immeasurably strengthened. Meanwhile, Mr Trace is boasting that through his influence over both the UN official responsible for drugs policy and the Greek foreign minister -- the key EU functionary, since Greece currently holds the presidency -- he will influence the Vienna meeting from the inside towards legalisation.

These disclosures pose some urgent questions. How much influence did Mr Trace exercise over the British government’s reclassification of cannabis and other lurches in drugs policy? Is the Home Office aware of the web of deceit and manipulation which it has been helping to fund?

Are the organisations Mr Trace works for aware of his covert activities? How far has he influenced the vital European Monitoring Centre and compromised its statistics? Are European governments aware how they are being manipulated?

And will the world now finally wake up to the fifth column in its ranks that is well on the way to making widespread and growing drug addiction a permanent reality?

Daily Mail, January 13 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Mail, January 8 2003

Whichever political genius let Lord Irvine out of the attic where he had been safely stowed out of sight must surely be feeling his own collar this morning.

The Lord Chancellor, who earned national derision over his taste for wallpapering his official residence at £300 of taxpayers’ money per roll, was subsequently bundled away and not allowed to frighten the voters again.

Until now. In an interview with the Today radio programme this week, Lord Irvine managed to undo all the careful work of his handlers. On the subject of burglary, and then on reform of the House of Lords, he revealed himself (and by extension, the government) to be monumentally out of touch, patronising and arrogant.

First, he made the astonishing claim that most people were happy to see burglars kept out of jail -- even if it was their second offence – provided there were no ‘aggravating elements’.

Just what planet is the Lord Chancellor living on? Burglary is its own aggravating element. It is felt by its victims as an assault on their privacy, a violation of the sanctuary of home so great that some victims cannot bear to carry on living there. It causes particular distress to old people, some of whom even die from the shock of it.

None of this seems to occur to Lord Irvine who – when he is not residing at his protected nine-room official apartment – lives in a heavily guarded Scottish mansion.

What on earth was he talking about when he claimed that most people had no faith in prison as a remedy for crime? Does he really think, therefore, that most people would prefer to see murderers, rapists or drug-dealers escape a jail sentence?

Most ordinary people just want action to be taken to prevent themselves from being burgled. Lord Irvine is simply wrong to say that community sentences work better than a jail term. The reconviction rate after a community sentence has been passed is virtually the same as after a prison sentence. The difference is that while the burglar is locked up, he is not able to burgle.

The Lord Chancellor was springing to the defence of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, who said in a judgment that burglars who would previously have got 18 months in jail should now get a community sentence.

But Lord Irvine’s real gaffe is to have underlined even more starkly that the judges are merely doing the government’s bidding. In a confusing statement yesterday in which it appeared to be hedging its bets, Downing Street tried to distance itself from both Lord Irvine and Lord Woolf. Yet the fact is that the Government is also desperate to get prison numbers down.

For although more people need to go to prison because more serious crimes are being committed, the Treasury is simply refusing to fund more prison places. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is said to believe that since jail sentences don’t deter crime, there is no point in providing any more prisons. One might as well say the same about community sentences – or, for that matter, the law itself.

Beneath this refusal lies a deep contempt for the opinions of ordinary people. The bien-pensant view is that anyone who wants criminals to be jailed is an atavistic red-neck bent on vengeance. But this utterly ignores the fundamental role that punishment plays in the whole concept of justice. And it also ignores the function that prison -- properly conceived -- can play in rehabilitation.

Yes, prison currently fails. But that is because the government treats it merely as human warehousing. Used properly, it could teach inmates to read and write or learn a useful trade; it could impart the means to self-control, and crucially -- with proper follow-up on release -- support them in living law-abiding lives.

None of this is done because the government is not prepared to pay for it.

Not content with this, the Lord Chancellor then treated us to his views on House of Lords reform. One might think that here he would have shown just a touch of humility, since he is after all the minister personally responsible for this debacle. But no, not a bit of it.

The policy is stuck at stage one because Labour MPs have rejected the government’s proposal for 20 per cent of peers to be elected. They think this isn’t enough. Brushing this aside, Lord Irvine mysteriously divined that people had turned against ‘hybridity’, and wanted either all peers to be elected or all to be appointed. Yet the government, he said, didn’t support this brutal choice. So what did it support? Well, it was going to be left to an official committee to make sense of it all.

In other words, Lord Irvine hasn’t got a clue what to do about Lords reform. The government is stuck up the proverbial creek with no paddle in sight. Advance to an all- elected chamber would cause Parliamentary paralysis; retreat to an all-appointed chamber would be such an extension of executive power that even this government couldn’t get away with it.

So we are likely to be stuck with stage one of Lords reform for ever and a day – and with the unacceptable extension of cronyism that this has brought about. Having embarked on this reform out of spite for hereditary toffs (yet can any belted earl come anywhere near Lord Irvine of Lairg for grandeur?) the government is paralysed.

And there are so many more urgent things to tackle – such as our transport chaos. Yet here too, Lord Irvine could only scoff and sneer. Why, he snorted, to judge from the media you’d think the government was responsible for the bad weather or the terrible traffic.

Well, hello, Lord Chancellor – the terrible traffic is very much the government’s responsibility, because of the truly terrible absence of a proper transport policy. But then why should Lord Irvine or any other minister even know what this really means when they are transported everywhere in chauffeured official cars?

Not a shred of regret or concern did he deign to utter about any of the government’s comprehensive failures to govern this country adequately. Just look at the looming distress from the crisis in the pension industry, to which government policies– in particular Gordon Brown’s raids on pension dividends and the penalties he has imposed upon savings – have made such a significant contribution.

Yet with his own guaranteed pension of a £180,000 lump sum and £90,000 per year, Lord Irvine declared that the next election would show how this government ‘will be loved’.

Lord Irvine may be considered to be a one-man own goal – but in displaying such a deep disconnection from ordinary people’s lives, he sadly typifies the administration of which he is such a magnificent ornament.

Daily Mail, January 6 2003

Placid Britain has been mugged with a sub-machine gun while dozing in front of the TV. Over and over again, we have told ourselves smugly that we are not like America. We don’t have its its violence, its crazy gun culture and its astronomical murder rate.

Now, though, we are realising that our tranquil self-image has been stolen from under our noses.

The terrible killing of two teenage girls and the wounding of two others in Birmingham has shocked us into acknowledging that our cities increasingly resemble the shoot-out at the OK corral. Firearms offences have doubled since Labour took office, up by 20 per cent in the last year alone.

Two men were shot dead last week in Sheffield and Liverpool. A gunman has been firing at police from a siege in Hackney, a London borough where drive-by shootings and other gun crime have become almost routine.

Now the Home Secretary is frantically semaphoring that he is the toughest dude on the street. So he’s bringing in a five-year minimum sentence for possessing an illegal firearm, and he may ban replica guns which can be converted to working weapons.

That loud crack you’ve just heard was not another gunshot; it was the sound of the stable door being bolted after smacking the horses on the rump and watching them disappear over the horizon.

We now have gun law in Britain because our politicians, police and judges have given up on the actual law. The police long ago retreated from the streets, abandoning communities not just to crime but to intimidation so grave that people are too terrified to give evidence in court against the killers.

The government has given up trying to reduce drug taking, the fuel on which the gun culture runs. Instead, its disastrous ‘harm reduction’ drugs policy has resulted in burgeoning drug use and the crack cocaine epidemic engulfing the slums.

The judges, meanwhile, have given up enforcing justice. Instead, they are enforcing their belief that prison doesn’t work and the jails should be less overcrowded. The lamentable guideline judgment from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, which laid down that burglars who would have got up to 18 months in jail should now be given community sentences instead, has already produced preposterous results.

A drug addict who burgled seven homes was released with a community drug treatment order by a judge who said he would have gone to prison had it not been for Lord Woolf’s guidelines. In similar vein, a judge thoughtfully gave a community sentence to a machete-wielding burglar with 51 previous convictions to enable him to realise his ‘undoubted talent for writing poetry’.

David Blunkett is said to be spitting tacks. But hang on: in November, he joined forces with the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General to call for greater use of community penalties as an alternative to custody, to reduce prison overcrowding.

Now that Lord Woolf has done precisely as he was asked, though, Mr Blunkett appears intent on using him as the fall guy while posturing as the voice of public outrage.

Well, it just won’t wash. The gun culture has arisen through a comprehensive failure of nerve by an entire governing class, which has become more concerned about being thought to be nice people than doing what is necessary and right.

Criminal gangs from eastern Europe and Jamaica have been allowed into the country because of the failure of will to tackle asylum abuse. Now the Home Office is talking about curbing this traffic. How? It has lost control of the country’s borders because it is not prepared to enforce a tough-minded policy.

And the shameful endorsement by both government and the police top brass of the Macpherson ‘institutional racism’ smear has grossly handicapped the police in dealing with the growth of the gun culture in black communities – with the result that black victims have been abandoned.

But gun crime is the result of a far wider and deeper sickness. For this is a society which has come to distrust or even reject the function of law, social sanctions or stigma in restraining anti-social behaviour.

This is powerfully illustrated by the way in which, for the intelligentsia, illegal drugs are not the problem so much as the law which prohibits them. (Just wait, post-Birmingham, for some dumb trendie to say the way to end drug-related gun crime is to make all drugs legal). Every single person who has promoted drug liberalisation and said the law on drugs is an ass bears some responsibility for the gun law now engulfing our streets.

For it’s not merely idiotic to imagine that -- short of all drugs being given away free – the gangs would ever just pack up their squillion pound businesses and go away. Drugs themselves help create that ‘ice in the heart’ that causes people to kill each other. People are pulling guns not just to protect their criminal turf, but against minor slights -- a parking ticket, or someone treading on their foot or laughing at their haircut.

The rise of gang culture follows directly from other developments willed by our intelligentsia, such as the collapse of family and committed fatherhood. Lacking self-esteem because of their shattered emotional backgrounds, young men turn to the gangs to provide it.

Increasingly unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, they are all too vulnerable to the popular culture of violence and sadism – murderous computer games, or ‘gangsta rap’ with its glamourising of guns, violence and hatred.

But appalling as all this is, it need not be hopeless. We should look to America where, despite its appalling gun culture, several cities have managed to bring down crime.

They’ve done this by giving the utterly consistent signal that no law-breaking and disorder will be tolerated. That certainly means more police on the streets. It also means understanding that -- for crime victims -- prison works. But it also means – crucially -- communities taking responsibility for their own young.

A few years ago, the US city of Boston suffered epidemic gun crime, cocaine turf wars and staggering murder rates. Now its streets are relatively safe. It turned the situation round only when the black community – which disproportionately furnished both criminals and victims -- recognised the desperate need of their fatherless young men for father substitutes and of their whole community for spiritual leadership.

So its preachers came out of the pulpit and onto the streets. They worked closely with the police, going out on patrol together. And former gangsters who had themselves been reformed devoted themselves to teaching the new generations how to read and write, and other employment and social skills.

The crucial ingredient which is missing in Britain is optimism. Americans believe they can improve the human condition. But in Britain, our governing class is sunk in deep pessimism. It believes it can’t beat social problems but can only institutionalise them, whether it’s family breakdown, drug taking, or educational failure.

The gun culture can only be defeated if this country shakes off this decadent defeatism and rediscovers the fighting spirit required to solve our social problems.