Jewish Chronicle, February 28 2003

Many in the Jewish community are aghast at what they believe to be an upsurge in anti-Jewish feeling in Britain. Media coverage of Israel appears to be driven by obsessive spite and malice, representing self-defence as aggression and perpetrating distortions, double standards and lies. They feel the only explanation must be antisemitism, a view reinforced by regular articles in mainstream publications about the malign influence of the Jewish lobby.

But there are others in the community who don’t see it that way at all. These people, who are mainly on the political left, think the claim of antisemitism is a device to mask the crimes of Ariel Sharon. They believe Israel is guilty of appalling acts against the Palestinians, and that Sharon is a thug who stands in the way of a peace settlement. Those who level the charge of antisemitism are denounced as hysterical, paranoid and – worst offence of all – right-wing.

A conference in Jerusalem last week on antisemitism and the media provided chilling and authoritative evidence that the Jewish left has donned blinkers, ear mufflers and a thick bag over its head which it has then buried up to its shoulders in the sand. The conference, organised by the Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Antisemitism, was by no means a rally of Sharon supporters. The renowned Holocaust expert Professor Yehuda Bauer said: ‘There’s no doubt that Israel is committing human rights violations on the West Bank’, and Jews had a duty to criticise Israel’s misdeeds. Yet he was also in no doubt that the Jews are facing a new kind of virulent antisemitism: a genocidal threat to the Jewish people from fanatical Islamist totalitarianism, camouflaged by the lies and distortions about Israel in the western media.

The recurring conference theme was a nexus of anti-Jewish hatred between fanatical Islamists on the one hand and the British and European media on the other. The connection revolved around the Nazification, dehumanisation and delegitimisation of Israel, with both Islamists and western media using anti-Zionism as a cloak for prejudices rooted in both medieval Christian and Nazi demonology.

The volume and nature of Arab and Muslim propaganda about the Jews exposes as simply asinine the claim that the Middle East conflict is about the West Bank or Israel’s behaviour. In newspapers, TV programmes and mosques throughout the Arab world, Jews in general are dehumanised and demonised, a prelude to their destruction. They are represented as apes and pigs engaged in a conspiracy against the world, with claims that 9/11 and even the Columbia space shuttle disaster were Jewish plots. There is repeated use of the blood libel, and a 41-part series on Egyptian TV promoting as authentic the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some Arab intellectuals have spoken out against such fabrications, but these are a minority.

The Islamists’ repeated equation between Zionism and Nazism has now constructed a strategic alliance with Europe. This species of Holocaust denial absolves Europe of guilt towards the Jews, and replaces it by European guilt towards Arabs said to be displaced as a result of the Holocaust. Europe has waited for 50 years for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of addressing genocidal Muslim antisemitism, the Europeans have seized upon a narrative which paints the Jews as Nazis and the Palestinians as the new Jews.

Accordingly, the conference heard about German claims that Israel was using Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of repeated charges in Sweden that the media was controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel. It heard that the reconstruction of French identity around large-scale Muslim immigration is being done at the expense of Jews, who are being excluded from public debate if they challenge the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) -- now playing to packed houses in Paris -- about the malevolence towards Israel shown by the French media. And it was told about the way the British media describes Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’ while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’.

What was notable was that journalists and academics from the Israeli left waved all this aside. It was unimportant, even on occasion a joke. What really mattered was Israel’s bad behaviour. One finds the same attitude on the Jewish left in Britain. A left-wing Polish journalist, Konstanty Gebert, explained this phenomenon. The left was unable to accept the overwhelming evidence of the new antisemitism, because to do so would not only mean accepting it had grossly misconstrued the Middle East crisis but that its whole world view was wrong. This is the belief that reason can reconcile all differences; and so all that’s needed in Israel is an enlightened government, and reason will prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason destroys that world view. It also might (horrors!) give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the left as a protective against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

The result is an Orwellian mutation of the oldest hatred: a global, lethal anti-Jewishness which is marching in Britain and Europe under the banner of anti-racism and human rights. As Yehuda Bauer remarked, although there are important differences between now and the 1930s, the refusal of the Jews to grasp the threat they now face is tragically all too familiar.

Daily Mail, February 26 2003

Ruthlessly, inexorably, unforgivably, our universities are being turned into instruments of the most blatant ideological discrimination and manipulation.

Yet another outstanding candidate has been turned down by Bristol university. Mark Smith achieved nine A* grades at GCSE and four As at AS level, and is predicted straight As in the three A-levels he is taking this summer. But Bristol turned him down, it seems, because he was a pupil at the independent Bedford school.

This follows Bristol’s rejection of another Bedford pupil with 10A* GCSEs; and also of Anirudh Singh from King Edward’s school in Birmingham to whom, despite his five As at A-level – and an eventual place at Cambridge – the university did not even grant the courtesy of an interview.

These are but the latest in a string of such rejections by Bristol and other leading universities, which has led independent school heads to suspect a systematic policy of discrimination against their pupils.

This is nothing other than the most egregiously unjust social engineering, by which the universities are doing the government’s bidding to force up the proportion of students from comprehensive schools and poor backgrounds through rigging the system against the middle classes.

Remember: this is the government which came to power on the promise to raise education standards. What a sick joke. This policy is inimical to the ideals and even the very purpose of education itself.

For educational institutions must never discriminate on non-educational grounds. Everyone has the right to realise their potential. That means everyone must be treated equally if they pass the same test of merit. But now, merit and aspiration are being penalised out of ideological spite.

It gets worse. Some universities are even planning to compel candidates to declare their parents’ earnings and educational qualifications before offering them places skewed towards the poor.

This really is intolerable. Just imagine the outcry if universities were giving priority to the offspring of the rich. And this from a government that has made anti-discrimination the bedrock of its belief system. Discrimination, it now appears, is fine – even mandatory -- when it is against those of whom ministers disapprove. Just as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, some animals in this government’s yard are clearly more equal than others.

It is even more unjust than that. For the policy penalises young people for the financial success, prudence or foresight (for heaven’s sake) of their parents. What kind of educational philosophy is this, that looks at students not as individuals with an equal right to be taught but instead as people branded with a mark of Cain, on account of their birth or family backgrounds over which they have no control?

The outcome is staggeringly unfair. Edinburgh university recently joined some Oxbridge colleges and other universities such as Bristol (again) and Nottingham in cutting the entrance requirements for state school applicants, while others have raised them for those from independent schools. This has meant that some independent school candidates are being turned down on the basis that they are either too good, or that the goalposts have been moved – against them alone.

Now the ratchet of discrimination is to be turned yet again. It is not enough that for some years, a postcode premium has operated which has forced the universities to perpetrate such injustices. This is because they get extra money if they discriminate in favour of students living in poor districts or who are at comprehensive schools.

But now, the very blunt instrument of this postcode premium is to be refined. The government intends to calibrate even more precisely the kind of people who are to be favoured. So the universities will henceforth be bribed to discriminate in favour not only of the poor but those with no family members who have been to university and those who attend poorly performing schools. This will mean that it will no longer be enough to attend a comprehensive. It has to be a bad one.

In addition, the sinister ‘access regulator’ will deny a university the right to charge higher tuition fees if it is thought to be doing too little to attract candidates from poor backgrounds.

All this makes a mockery of the very idea of qualifications. These are to be replaced by subjective judgments about non-educational factors. In truth, it is only objective tests embodied in universally applicable qualifications that are fair to everyone. To destroy this objectivity makes the system both unjust and meaningless.

Indeed, Schools Minister (and Oxford graduate) David Miliband has now pushed this principle to the point of absurdity by arguing that the top pupils at every school should get into university, regardless of their A-level grades.

This is the deconstruction not just of education but of the very notion of achievement. Just imagine if this approach were applied to, say, footballers, who could qualify for the Premier League regardless of their performances but on the basis that no members of their families had ever played the game.

This is the very antithesis of meritocracy. Instead of elevating personal achievement, it will depress it. To get priority for a university place, pupils will now need to attend a sink school – at which, by definition, they will have learned little. The only way they will be then able to survive the course is if it dumbs down.

The result is that one reason why more poor children don’t go to university – that the schools are not good enough – will not be addressed. Instead, university standards will drop to accommodate bad schools.

Such a policy does no favour to disadvantaged pupils, to whom it is immensely patronising and insulting. Ministers assume that the reason such students don’t go to university is discrimination. It doesn’t occur to these insulated snobs that many young people may prefer to get a job instead. But of course, these ministers know better than such individuals what they should do with their lives – because they are poor.

The case is now unanswerable for universities to break free of government control before higher education is destroyed altogether. Nevertheless, they must take a considerable share of the blame for the situation in which they now find themselves.

When school standards started to slide, university vice-chancellors said nothing. When their own courses were forced to dumb down, they said nothing. When the government started to manipulate their funding for social engineering purposes, they said nothing.

The universities should be custodians of objectivity, knowledge and intellectual potential. Instead, they have become the shoddy accomplices to cultural nihilism and institutional vandalism.

From the very top of the university sector, the state is forcing the whole of the education system into homogenised mediocrity, with public examinations becoming ever dumber to allow more pupils to get higher passes, and now university admissions being rigged to produce more graduates with ever more meaningless and degraded degrees.

Ministers are resorting to a shameless class war to conceal the bankruptcy of their education policy, while university dons cringe before the funeral pyre of the ideals they have so cravenly betrayed.

Daily Mail, February 24 2003

Many parents will have been astounded to read that a government-funded sex education programme is training teachers to tell 15 year-old schoolchildren about anal and oral sex.

Doncaster teacher Lynda Brine, who was trained for the course, says she was amazed to be told to deal with questions about what semen tastes like or whether women have anal intercourse.

The programme, entitled ‘A Pause’, was devised by researchers at Exeter university and trains teachers to respond to pupils’ questions about all kinds of sexual experience. The belief that children are already sexually active and that ignorance is to be avoided at all costs means that all their questions are treated as equally valid.

But this is a premise which potentially turns sex education into semi-pornographic encounters in which children receive the implicit message that sexual taboos are worthless.

People might imagine that such a grossly inappropriate approach has been devised by someone who subscribes to a permissive belief in a sexual free-for-all. The irony, however, is that the very opposite is the case.

The man behind the course, paediatrician Dr John Tripp, is deeply concerned not just about sexual activity among children but also about the damaging effects of family breakdown. Indeed, for years he fought a heroic battle against a concerted attempt by the social science establishment to first censor and then belittle research he published in 1994 showing the damage parental separation did to children.

The driving aim of ‘A Pause’ is to delay sexual intercourse among schoolchildren by making it easier for them to resist pressure from their friends and the media. Much of this programme is uncontroversial and has gained widespread respect.

The difficulty has arisen over its contention that to avoid sexual intercourse, pupils should be advised that there are other ways of achieving sexual intimacy, ranging from hand-holding and kissing to oral sex.

Dr Tripp insists that he is not encouraging them to pursue these activities, merely advising that they are less dangerous than sexual intercourse which he hopes they will help avoid. And anyway, he says, his course advises pupils how to resist pressure to indulge in the whole range of sexual behaviour.

His anxiety to avoid sexual intercourse among children is entirely honourable. But the distinction he draws between sexual intercourse and what he calls ‘outercourse’ is, in practice, spurious.

He claims his approach has reduced the number of pupils having sexual intercourse by between 13 and 15 per cent. One might think that providing children with a menu of sexual experiences to sample would make full sex rather more likely. But even if Dr Tripp’s claim is true, the aim of responsible sex education should surely not be so limited.

Teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are not the only reasons why sexual activity among schoolchildren is deeply undesirable. The main reason is that,

in the absence of both emotional maturity and spiritual meaning, such inappropriate behaviour harms children’s development.

Holding hands or kissing are simply in a different league from intimate genital activity. That is because this involves areas of our body that we guard as our most private and protected. Revealing them is therefore a very special act.

Doing so too casually strips that act of its significance and can harm our own sense of ourselves. If the idea that sex should be reserved for a special relationship becomes meaningless, it becomes much more difficult to sustain a permanent committed sexual union.

It is not puritanical to say this. It is rather to recognise that spiritual and emotional meaning distinguishes human sexual activity from animal behaviour. Genital gratification separated from a permanent loving commitment is a form of degradation. When emotionally immature children behave in this way, it becomes akin to abuse.

The Exeter programme has produced something which appears to contradict its own founding beliefs because it has fallen into a common trap. It assumes that because many young people are sexually active, any sex education programme has to limit itself to minimising the damage.

The government and virtually the entire health and sex education establishment think that it is simply ridiculous to imagine that young people can be persuaded away from sexual activity. Of course, the young have always experimented with sex. But what we are facing now is something quite different – the normalisation of sex as a recreational sport, the fracturing of self-restraint and commitment, and the smashing of every sexual and moral taboo.

This sexual anarchy can be halted, if only there is the will to do so. Successful American schemes show it is possible to challenge all premature sexual activity through programmes aimed at sexual abstinence -- a word which in Britain causes apoplexy among policy makers.

They caricature the abstinence approach as an authoritarian, self-defeating ‘just say no’ exercise. But this is not so. The most high-profile of these American projects, the Washington-based Best Friends programme, is a brilliant, shrewdly targeted club that girls love to join.

Crucially, it recognises the nexus between adolescent sex, drinking, drug taking and academic performance. Starting when the girls are nine and going through to high school graduation, it builds up their self-respect and gives them the self-confidence to deal with the pressures on them to drink, take drugs and have sex, which they are taught to view as a potential threat to themselves.

It provides weekly fitness sessions where the girls discuss diet and nutrition, takes them out on trips and matches each girl with a mentor teacher whom they meet once a week to talk about anything. Crucially, it builds a corps d’esprit [ital] which provides peer and adult support to say no sex till after they have left school, no alcohol until the legal age of 21 and no drugs ever.

And it works. Compared with national figures, only a tiny number of Best Friends girls have had sex or become pregnant by the time they leave school, and very few take drugs. Moreover, among these mainly highly disadvantaged pupils – who would normally be expected to drop out of education – the majority on the programme stay at school until they are 18 and many go on to college.

Of course, the cultural pressures on our children to indulge in harmful adult behaviour are immense. The driver behind their premature sexual activity is the sexualisation of the culture and the breakdown of the traditional family. But the belief that all we can do is go with the flow is a self-fulfilling counsel of despair.

What’s needed instead is an explicit challenge to this cultural slide, tailored to young people’s sense of their own self-interest. The current prevailing brutalisation of sexuality and relationships is not in anyone’s interest.

Young people need to be taught about love and self-restraint, trust and commitment, acts and consequences, and the human dignity embodied in the link between sex and marriage.

Can anyone see this government funding such a programme? Not a chance. It would rather teach the young about oral and anal sex – and then shed crocodile tears over our lost and abandoned children.

Daily Mail, February 21 2003

The asylum judgment by Mr Justice Collins threatens to turn the simmering feud between the government and the judiciary into all-out war.

The Prime Minister has ordered new legislation to stop the courts thwarting the will of Parliament in bringing the asylum crisis under control.

His fury is entirely understandable. Time and again, the courts have twisted asylum policy out of recognition. Mr Justice Collins is a serial offender, having overturned the almost identical attempt in 1996 by the then Tory government to stop benefit payments to asylum seekers who did not automatically identify themselves as such when arriving in this country.

That policy caused asylum applications to drop to 30,000 per year. But after the judge's ruling they rose disastrously to more than 70,000. Now the same judge has repeated the ruling that created the problem the government is trying to address.

By carrying on like this, the courts have set themselves against the overwhelming wishes of the public. No fewer than 80% of people – including many minorities -- want the government to take tough action to curb the abuse of asylum.

The crisis is acute. No-one wishes to refuse entry to genuine refugees. But of the 100,000 claiming asylum each year, 60,000 are judged not to be genuine; and yet of these, only 12,000 are removed. The rest simply vanish into the country leaving the government without the faintest idea who is still here and who has departed – and all this with Britain facing the gravest possible threat of terrorism.

It is not surprising that Home Secretary David Blunkett, struggling with the government's most serious domestic political problem, has blown a fuse. Our current asylum shambles is to a considerable extent the result of decades of judicial interference with immigration and asylum policy.

In 1989, Strasbourg judges extended the scope of the article in the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting torture or degrading treatment in a ruling that made it impossible for us to deport illegal immigrants -- including terrorists -- to anywhere the judges thought such abuses might be practised. So we now have the ludicrous situation where we cannot deport a terrorist to America because it has the death penalty.

Meanwhile, English judges began to interpret the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees much more broadly than other countries, so that our definition of a refugee was expanded from its original meaning of someone persecuted by the state to anyone facing the threat of attack by violent groups. So now we have the extraordinary situation where we grant asylum to former fighters with the Taleban, against whose tyranny we went to war.

These two rulings, which have turned our asylum law into farce, took place against the background of a rising tide of judicial activism in Britain. A mere twenty five years ago, the judiciary jealously guarded its independence from politics. But then two things happened to change the way the judges saw themselves.

The first was the increasing ambit of European human rights law, with the Strasbourg judges progressively increasing their scope as part of the growing ideological belief in universal legal principles that trumped the law of individual countries. Although the Strasbourg court is nothing to do with the European Union, this ideology fitted the accelerating movement towards political union in Europe and the idea of a supranational political entity.

This encouraged English judges to flex their muscles in new directions. During much of the Thatcher years, the Labour party appeared near to its demise and provided little effective opposition; this encouraged the judges to take upon themselves an opposition role. They began to challenge government policy more and more through the increasing use of judicial review – especially over asylum , which offered most opportunities for this new and exciting role.

The result was that they came to think of themselves in a much more political way. When the Labour government came to power, it made a bad mistake. Instead of putting the judges firmly back in their box, it entrenched their new role by incorporating the Human Rights Convention into English law.

It thus made a rod for its own back. All Mr Justice Collins was doing, after all, was taking advantage of the very role in bringing the government to heel that Mr Blair had so eagerly given him.

Now, like King Lear making empty threats to his all-powerful daughters, the government is said to be planning to limit the role of the judges in interpreting international human rights obligations.

If so, it will fail once again. It will not deal with this dual crisis over asylum and judicial activism unless it tackles both problems at source.

The fundamental problem over welfare benefits for asylum seekers lies not in the court ruling but in the policy itself. Welfare benefits are part of the compact between a state and its citizens. By making them available to some asylum seekers but not to others, the government makes it inevitable that, in the interests of justice, claimants have to be able to prove whether they are entitled to them.

The point the government has failed to grasp is that the premise itself is wrong. Asylum seekers are not yet citizens. And we know that the vast majority are not entitled to be considered as such. At the same time, we want to be generous to true refugees, and we wish no-one in our country to be destitute.

The essence of the problem is that we treat asylum-seekers prematurely as citizens, free to seek illegal work or claim benefits. The solution, in the interests of justice, compassion and order, is to recognise that this is wrong and unjustifiable.

Instead, we should send back those who clearly should not be here before they enter (indeed, anyone entering from safe France is by definition not a refugee) and securely detain the rest while their claims are processed. This would mean no destitution and no uncontrollable flood; instead a humane, fair and orderly approach.

But to do this, Mr Blair has to rewrite both asylum and human rights policy in a tough, uncompromising and focused way. First, Parliament should pass its own asylum law, defining exactly what we mean by the term refugee. This would reclaim asylum policy from the clutches of the judges who have wrenched it into such disrepute.

Second, we should withdraw from the human rights convention. At the very least, we should not re-enter until we have secured the kind of reservations entered by other countries to ensure that we are no longer forced to act against our own interests.

Ideally, we should stay out of the ECHR and tear up our Human Rights Act altogether. For this culture of rights has not expanded freedom. Instead, it has given power to unelected judges to make questionable decisions on issues which properly belong to Parliament. The only things that have expanded exponentially are judicial hubris and the parasitical industry of human rights lawyers.

The judges are wrongly playing politics. But the real fault lies with the government, which will not face up to the dramatic reversals of policy that are needed if this twin crisis is to be solved.

Daily Mail, February 17 2003

The show of ministerial solidarity with the Prime Minister in the wake of Saturday’s astonishing mass Iraq protest underlines the parlous position in which Tony Blair now finds himself.

For this was no ordinary demo comprising the usual crew of rent-a-mob agitators. Sure, they were organising the show; but behind their banners marched middle Britain – hundreds of thousands of ordinary, decent, middle-of-the road people who took to the streets in an unprecedented show of popular feeling.

The Prime Minister thus finds himself directly at odds with the mainstream British public, the very people whose approval he so assiduously courts at every other juncture.

This extraordinary squaring-up is not just a devastating blow to Mr Blair. It is also a warning shot for a democracy in trouble.

The vast rally was said to be a show of people power and a reassertion of democracy. But such claims should alarm any proper democrat. For democracy is not rule by street protest. Democracy involves voting in leaders who are expected to take decisions that the rest of us cannot second-guess.

Such a compact between leaders and led is built on consent and trust. But the problem now – and it is a huge one – is that this compact has been shot to pieces by the systematic erosion of that trust.

People no longer believe anything politicians tell them. We have reached a truly alarming state of affairs when last week’s airport security alert provoked widespread cynicism that the reports of intelligence ‘chatter’, the obvious acute police alarm and the deployment of so many troops were merely an attempt to trick people into supporting the Prime Minister.

Mr Blair is now reaping the whirlwind of the distrust he himself has sown. Parliament is the crucible of national consensus. It is through Parliament that political leaders have to win the backing of the nation’s representatives, and never more so than in committing the country to war.

This the Prime Minister has signally failed to do. At the weekend, he made a fine and courageous speech to the Labour Party’s spring conference. But he should have made it to Parliament in a debate where his case could be tested.

His failure to do so has now backfired disastrously. For if he can’t trust himself to win his argument in Parliament, why should the public believe it – especially if he chooses to make it through plagiarised academic essays lifted off the internet?

Throughout his period in office, Mr Blair has ridden roughshod over democracy. Again and again, he has failed to consult with Parliament. He has tried to expunge all means of opposition, buying up public institutions through the gross extension of patronage.

Open debate has been replaced by spin, lies and dissembling. And he has failed to tackle the issues people desperately want addressed from the foundering public services to the illegal immigration crisis, while indulging illiberal and irrelevant crusades against fox-hunting, hereditary peers and middle-class university applicants.

The result of such contempt for the people is that they have taken to the streets. The issue of war was partly a catalyst for all the pent-up frustration and fury over the slide towards a one-party state and the absence of any effective opposition.

In my opinion, this is both tragic and dangerous. For frustrated middle Britain was marching shoulder to shoulder with people who deeply, sincerely and in my view utterly misguidedly are viscerally opposed variously to America, President Bush, Israel, capitalism and war itself.

I passionately believe they are terribly wrong, and their opposition is unintentionally strengthening the hand of a tyrant who threatens the peace and security of the world.

But people don’t believe the case has been made to prove this. And indeed, whenever the Prime Minister has tried to make it, he has undermined it by appearing to shift his ground.

He is now arguing that Saddam is a tyrant to his own people. But everyone knows this. They also know there are many tyrants in the world and we don’t go to war against them.

The case for war has to be made from the point of view of Britain’s own interests. I believe there is an overwhelming case here. But because Mr Blair has not made it properly, people believe we are being dragged into battle on the coat-tails of President Bush, exposing us to dangers we would not otherwise face.

The protesters think they are pulling the world back from the brink of war. But war was declared twelve years ago. It was Saddam who struck first in 1991, and the condition for suspending hostilities against him was that he totally disarm because, even in defeat, he still posed a threat to us. His persistent refusal to do so means we have a legal right and a moral duty to resume those hostilities, in order to disarm him and remove that threat.

But Mr Blair has not made clear the nature of the danger we face. He has never made the case that America has grasped, about the axis of pan-Arab and Islamic terror, and megalomaniac Saddam’s place within it. He has not spelled out Saddam’s sponsorship of mass murder by Palestinian terrorists in Israel, and his links with other terrorist groups.

The reason is that he is afraid of offending both Britain’s Arab interests abroad and Labour MPs’ Moslem constituents at home. Instead, he has tried to hide behind the coat-tails of the UN, a stratagem that has now blown up in his face.

For the emphasis on weapons inspection caused people to believe that the case for war depended on finding these weapons. But on the contrary – like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark in the night -- it is the absence [ital] of such discoveries that is actually the smoking gun.

As the UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix himself has said, Saddam has refused to show that he has destroyed what we know from previous inspections that he has amassed – including 6,500 chemical bombs, stocks of anthrax and nerve agent and 3,000 tonnes of precursor chemicals. So he’s still got it all. And we know from his history that he will not hesitate to arm terrorist groups with these terrible weapons if he thinks he can get away with it. So the threat he poses to us has vastly increased since 1991.

Yet the dismaying fact is that thousands of sane, sensible, responsible British people now subscribe to the extreme left position that America, not Saddam, is the major threat to the world. Demonstrably absurd views which were once confined to a few radicals have now become the norm. The centre of the country’s moral and intellectual gravity has shifted.

The result is the military equivalent of the national spasm of self-delusion that followed the death of the Princess of Wales. The British bulldog has been Dianafied – with the result that it is now supporting Saddam in power, betraying the terrorised Iraqi people and imperilling the defence of the west.

Saddam is doubtless laughing fit to bust; and Mr Blair has been transformed from an evangelist for a new global order to a hollow-eyed martyr, hoist by his own petard.

Daily Mail, February 13 2003

The BBC is about to send its very own Valentine to the nation’s men.

Tomorrow, it unveils a ten-day season of programming devoted to the subject of domestic violence. There are to be special programmes, topical films, and relevant story-lines in the soaps, all on the same theme.

Of course, all violence in the home is a cause for concern. But alas, I fear, this is not to be a dispassionate presentation. On the contrary, this electronic abuse-fest has all the hallmarks of a propaganda onslaught, representing domestic violence as a one-way street in which men are the abusers and women are always the innocent victims.

Yet there is overwhelming evidence that this stereotype simply isn’t true. Women in the home are just as violent as men -- and more so when it comes to violence against children.

Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC – which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries -- has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy ‘research’.

Dismayingly, this warped view has now become the official received wisdom, with the whole panoply of law, political activity, voluntary action and public money being used to promote the fiction that men are programmed to be violent towards women and children while women are blameless.

The overwhelming message of the BBC’s ‘Hitting Home’ season is that men are the pariah sex. Violence by women barely gets a look in. The season’s website thoughtfully lists the warning signs of impending violence – but only by men. It provides helpful tips for changing abusive behaviour – but only by men.

Its schedules are similarly programmed. Behind Closed Doors features a neighbour suspected of abusing his girlfriend and her son. Kilroy will spotlight men who are violent towards their partners. Jeremy Vine will interview the well-known daughter of a violent father. The related film is entitled ‘Skin of Man, Heart of Beast’. You get the idea.

The website justifies this remarkable approach by claiming that domestic violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men upon women. And it trots out the hoary old statistic that one in four women suffers domestic violence.

But the claim is simply false; and the one in four statistic, like so much of the research that backs up these claims, is not worth the paper it is written on.

For all such assertions have been made by feminists who simply wrench the facts to fit a venomous prejudice against men. Some of these studies are outrageously skewed, based on samples of utterly atypical women in battered women’s hostels. The rest just don’t meet the most basic standards of rigorous research.

By contrast, the many authoritative studies that have been done paint a very different picture. The fact is that much -- if not most -- domestic violence is reciprocal. There’s usually a fight, in which both partners are violent. Dozens and dozens of studies have now shown that women at home are as violent as men, if not more so.

Nor is it true that most violent women act only in self-defence. Some do; but women strike the first blow in about half of all disputes. Studies have shown that some wives assault their husbands when there is no impending danger of an attack upon themselves, or where husbands have never shown violence towards them.

The doyens of this research, the highly respected American social scientists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, have reported that in about half the cases they studied both partners were violent, while in the third quarter only the husbands and in the fourth quarter only the wives were violent.

Other studies have found women up to six times more likely than men to use severe violence. Even the Home Office put a toe into these most agitated waters when it reported that equal numbers of men and women said they had been assaulted by a current or former partner.

All this evidence, however, has been furiously denounced by feminists on the grounds that more women are more seriously injured than men in domestic violence incidents. That is true; and more women are killed by men than vice versa. But that is largely because men are stronger than women. It does not mean that men are aggressive and women are not.

On the contrary, as the psychologist Dr John Archer has noted, many men actually hold back when they are when attacked by women. Some 29 per cent of women college students admitted initiating an assault on a male partner. O those women, half said they had no fear of retaliation. So in fact, far from fearing men’s aggression, women take their restraint for granted.

None of this, of course, finds its way into establishment thinking about domestic violence. The ‘Hitting Home’ website goes so far as to acknowledge that men can be victims -- but then promptly rubbishes such claims.

It says, for example, that many male perpetrators of violence falsely claim that they have been victims, in order to exonerate themselves from blame and avoid police action. Yet this is extremely unlikely, since men are known to be excessively reluctant to identify themselves as victims of domestic violence for fear of ridicule.

Moreover, the website does not level the same charge against women of making unfounded claims of domestic violence. Yet there is plenty of evidence that they do; sociologist Dr Sotirios Sarantakos, for example, has said that the credibility of women’s accounts of violence is highly questionable.

Even more astonishingly, the website claims that men are rarely denied their parental rights by the courts. This assertion is simply ludicrous. The courts perpetrate gross injustices against men, who are frequently denied the right to live with or even have contact with their children on the basis of unproven and often spurious claims of abuse.

Divorce lawyers say many women simply make up such allegations because they know the courts are predisposed to believe them. One such barrister says that in his experience, more than half the wives in divorce cases invent charges of violence ranging from being pushed during an argument to child abuse. Such claims are generally believed because of the inbuilt assumption that men are intrinsically violent, and women intrinsically good.

The result is that many fathers are unjustly deprived of contact with their children. Even worse, the frequent breaches by mothers of court contact orders are justified by feminists in the higher judiciary on the grounds that the children in such cases might be harmed by abusive fathers. In other words, regardless of the lack of proof – or even evidence -- all men are guilty.

This thinking is now entrenched in official circles. The ‘Hitting Home’ season’s steering group included several government officials. The extreme feminist agenda of vilifying men through character assassination, distortion and lies has now got the full force of the political machine behind it.

The result this weekend is the kind of concerted propaganda exercise one might expect to see in time of war, with men targeted for attack here by what might be described as gender fascism.

Daily Mail, February 10 2003

The debacle of the government’s Iraq ‘intelligence’ dossier is, even by the standards of Blairite amateurishness and opportunism, an absolute jaw-dropper.

The stakes were obviously high. Aware of the mountain to climb in the battle for public opinion, the government presented a 19-page document as the latest intelligence summary.

This promptly blew up in its face like a dud Scud missile. For it was revealed that much of it had been cobbled together from a twelve year-old analysis by a Californian post-graduate student and from published material in Jane’s Intelligence Review. Whole chunks of these texts had simply been lifted wholesale, complete with typographical errors.

In other words, the case for risking world war three was being made by sloppy plagiarism of the kind which would have swiftly consigned a reporter on the Penge Gazette to unlimited keyboard-cleaning duty.

For this was nothing other than lazy journalism. It was not an intelligence document at all – indeed, MI6 hadn’t even seen it -- but a production by four junior officials in Alastair Campbell’s propaganda unit (international division).

No matter that the facts in the document may have been rock-solid. The deception involved in this spin-job provided the anti-war lobby with a stunning coup. It enabled them to claim that the whole case for war was equally built on sand.

This was of a different order of magnitude from other government embarrassments. Tony Blair is about to commit British troops to war, resulting in loss of life. This is the most serious decision any government has to take.

In a democracy, it is imperative that it enjoys the support of the nation. When the government tells us the case for war, we have to be able to believe it. This is why the deception played on an already disbelieving public has been so disastrous.

This impact is even more agonising if one believes – as I do – that the case for war is overwhelming, based on the lethal combination of Saddam Hussein’s megalomaniac ambitions, his sponsorship of terrorism and his build-up of weapons of mass destruction.

Last week, the American Secretary of State Colin Powell produced powerful evidence to back up the case for war. Yet alas, he too was sucked into Alastair Campbell’s black hole when he praised the ‘exquisite detail’ of the now discredited British document, which he described as a ‘fine paper’.

As the US administration’s leading dove, Mr Powell is the one person who can convince a sceptical world. Mr Campbell has now achieved the truly brilliant feat of making Mr Powell look stupid, and handing the anti-war lobby a weapon against the impressive case he presented.

Not surprisingly, public support for war is not rising but falling. According to a YouGov poll at the weekend, only one in three voters supports Mr Blair, while two out of five believe Mr Powell distorted his own evidence.

This phenomenon goes far beyond the public’s reaction to the crisis over Iraq. For there has been a wholesale breakdown of trust in the entire political class.

As last weekend’s Michael Cockerell documentary on BBC2 revealed, many politicians blame the media for this situation. But if the media seem aggressive or cynical, it is because politicians have become masters of evasion and manipulation.

From imbroglios stretching from Formula One to Stephen Byers, from foot and mouth to the A-level scandal, the first instinct of the Blair administration seems to be to lie, dissemble and evade. It has become a by-word for deviousness and an absence of candour, and has made manipulation of the public into a growth industry.

But people are not stupid. New Labour’s cult of spin-doctoring, soundbites and pager instructions may have transformed MPs into zombies, but it has also – catastrophically -- turned the voters into cynics about the political process.

Even more damaging is the widespread contempt in which Mr Blair personally is now held. People have learned to take whatever he says with a huge pinch of salt. They watch him make policy on TV one day (as with the asylum crisis last week) only to see his ministers slide away from it the next. All his promises have been broken. ‘Everything can only get better’ has mutated into ‘nothing works’.

The performance targets amount to lie after lie. The implicit pledge to the middle classes lies in ruins beneath the rubble of pensions, tuition fees and national insurance rises.

This is all particularly lethal because Mr Blair personified a compact between himself and the people over the heads of his ministers and his party. ‘Trust me’, he said. ‘I am different’. And people did; so the disillusionment now is bitter, and trust in whatever he says is smashed to bits.

It is, of course, hugely ironic that the politician whose every move has been governed by focus groups and opinion polls is now so at odds with the people.

But this loss of trust predates Tony Blair. The Tories destroyed their own credibility in government when they evaded answering every difficult question, politicised the civil service and turned the government information service into a propaganda machine.

All politicians are now struggling with a democratic deficit, caused by the widespread public view that none of them is prepared or able to address the issues that matter to the people.

At an even deeper level still, there has been a collapse of trust in authority. With mass communications making society much more transparent, the revealed incompetence of so many public bodies has made people wary of believing anyone in authority at all.

In the context of war, this is disastrous. In the past, people understood that intelligence couldn’t be disclosed because of the risk of blowing the cover of informants. They accepted that the government was restricted in what it could say, to prevent the enemy from knowing what the government knew about him.

It is clear that throughout this Iraq crisis, both the British and US intelligence services have prevented politicians from disclosing all they know, for precisely these reasons. But now they are not believed. Instead, people take this absence of intelligence as proof that that there is no evidence for war.

Part of the problem is that the British don’t see the overall picture. Unlike the US, Mr Blair has chosen not to make the case for an ‘axis of evil’, the many-headed hydra of pan-Arab Islamic fascism. He is now paying a heavy political price for failing to educate the electorate which, as a result, cannot understand why Saddam has to be stopped.

But even if he did make that case, he would still have a problem convincing the public because people simply wouldn’t believe him.

This is immensely dangerous. Armies in democracies cannot fight without the consent of the people. But given Britain’s absence of trust in its leaders (and its corresponding new penchant to swallow West-hating lies), the question is whether this country would ever have the will to fight in its own defence unless a missile were found trained on London – by which time it would be far too late.

Daily Mail, February 3 2003

The British establishment continues remorselessly to saw away at the branch on which it is sitting.

Sir Bernard Crick, eminent politics don, former university tutor to the Home Secretary and chairman of David Blunkett’s advisory committee on citizenship, has revealed his group’s proposals to beef up requirements for immigrants.

Mr Blunkett is concerned that too many new citizens are not assimilating into British society, with relatively large numbers unable even to speak English. So now, applicants for British citizenship must be tested to show they have ‘sufficient understanding’ of both the English language (or Welsh or Gaelic in Wales and Scotland) and of British society and civic structures.

Anyone who fondly imagines that new immigrants will now have to reach a required standard of English should think again. If they can demonstrate that they have moved from knowing not one word of English to a few phrases sufficient to enable them to hold down an unskilled job, they pass the test of citizenship.

So we will still have hospital porters or cleaners who can barely string a sentence together. What kind of meaningless test is this? How can someone who can only manage a few phrases of broken English possibly ‘participate’ or ‘engage’ in British society, the government’s defining characteristics of citizenship?

The clue lies in a giveaway phrase in the committee’s report. The language test, it blithely asserts, is not intended to fail anyone (perish the thought). It merely aims to increase the immigrant’s own skills. So whatever Mr Blunkett may have intended, Professor Crick is clear that his proposals are not for the benefit of the country at all, but for the immigrant.

This reflects the tone of his whole report and reveals the twisted nature of its thinking. For it subverts the very concept of citizenship, which it thinks principally concerns the rights of the individual. Its main thrust is how to help new arrivals grab everything society has to offer – schools, medical treatment, the minimum wage, advice on human or welfare rights. The duties of a citizen are included as a perfunctory afterthought to these ‘rights’.

But citizenship is not about what the country owes to an individual, but what an individual owes to the country. So it isn’t about rights at all. It is principally about obligations -- to fellow citizens, to the law and to the nation. Any benefits should derive from first meeting those obligations.

And that won’t happen unless people understand the country’s history, which explains what those duties mean. As the economist Professor Robert Rowthorn observed recently in a lecture about the dangers of unlimited mass migration: ‘ A nation is a community of mutual obligation that is based on a shared history’. Without such a grasp of the country’s past, there can be no ties of attachment in which civic obligations are rooted, and no meaningful sense of nationhood.

Yet the Crick committee explicitly rules out the teaching of history as a condition of citizenship. It claims that learning about history requires a sense of obligation, which can only arise after the immigrant has been equipped with practical help and knowledge. But this is downright perverse. People don’t develop a sense of civic obligation from being told how to draw benefits or sue for sexual discrimination – quite the reverse.

Tellingly, the committee actually sneers at a ‘memorised history curriculum ‘ which it claims provides ‘little understanding of the real traditions and nature of a country.’ But without knowledge of history, no understanding is possible.

Instead, the committee would substitute political propaganda. In teaching immigrants to respect the law, for example, it says it would highlight human rights and anti-discrimination legislation. But these measures actually run counter to the English common law which is the very basis of English liberty. Far from inducting immigrants into the country’s values, such teaching would tear up British history and replace it by New Labour’s year-zero political programme of group rights and victim culture.

Just as far-reaching, the committee would teach immigrants that ‘for a long time the UK has been a multicultural country’. But this is totally untrue. Until very recently indeed, Britain was a remarkably homogeneous country with a settled culture, very few immigrants and a history that could be shared by the vast majority.

And it is still not a multicultural country. How can it be, with only some eight per cent from ethnic minorities? Of course, as the report says, we all need to treat each other with ‘respect, understanding and tolerance’. But that must include understanding and respecting the culture of the indigenous majority.

For example, the committee says immigrants should be taught about the role of the monarch. But you can be quite sure it does not envisage telling them that she is the Defender of the Faith, and that this is a Christian country. For the unspoken agenda here is to remake British identity altogether.

There is a belief that instead of being hung up on a historic past we should become like America, a society of immigrants where people are united merely by loyalty to the flag and the constitution. But this is to misunderstand America. The US actually drums its iconic history into all its citizens, whose allegiance is shaped not by multiculturalism but by widely shared Christian values.

In Britain, by contrast, the establishment is hell-bent on destroying Britishness and replacing it by multiculturalism. Professor Crick maintains disingenuously that his report merely suggests language classes with some practical content, and has ‘nothing to do with Britishness’. But since he is supposed to be mapping out a test for citizenship, it would appear that to Professor Crick being a British citizen has nothing to do with British identity.

This should come as no surprise. Citizenship is a process which requires a society to transmit the knowledge and understanding of its past.

But Britain no longer teaches its own identity even to its indigenous people. British schoolchildren can now leave school with virtually no knowledge or understanding of British political history, which for years has been considered by the teaching profession to be ‘imperialist’ and ‘xenophobic’.

The un-teaching of British history is part of a wider agenda to remake the country, from a place bound by a shared identity and its resulting obligations to one where individuals owe their principal allegiance to themselves. Indeed, Professor Crick is also the inspiration behind the new citizenship education in schools, which similarly preaches an activist rights culture.

The 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke said that a society is a compact between the living, the dead and the not-yet born. Without an awareness of history, that compact and the very idea of a society become meaningless.

Rather than safeguarding citizenship, the Crick committee is promoting instead the balkanisation of Britain.