Daily Mail, May 28 2003.

With almost every day that passes, it seems, fresh evidence emerges of the near total failure of the government’s education policy.

The Education Secretary Charles Clarke has been struggling to contain a crisis over school funding. Now statistics from the Education Department reveal that truancy has rocketed upwards since Labour came to power. No fewer than 566,644 secondary school pupils truanted last year – up by more than 143,000 from six years ago. And in primary schools, 564,445 played truant, up by more than 22,000.

These horrifying numbers have occurred in spite of an array of costly schemes which were supposed to cut the truancy rate by one third, including cash bonuses for schools with improved attendance rates, swipe-card registration systems and more powers to punish parents.

Yet what incentive do children from the toughest inner city areas actually have to stay put in the classroom? An Ofsted report due to be published next week on Excellence in Cities, the government’s flagship policy for transforming inner city schools, has found it has produced little or no improvement in their often dire results.

According to a leak from this report, this programme has had virtually no effect on attainment. All it has managed instead is to make disadvantaged children ‘feel better about under-achieving at school’.

What a terrible commentary on our benighted education system, that it should not only continue to abandon our most vulnerable children to ignorance and educational failure -- but it should actually boast that it is making them feel good about it.

Is this what Labour meant when it sang ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ during its 1997 general election campaign? It sums up a whole political philosophy which effectively says: ‘never mind the disturbing reality, just measure the feel-good factor’.

But there are real victims here – children at the bottom of the social and educational heap, for whom school is their only hope of rising out of disadvantage, and whose life chances are being thrown away by politicians who cynically dress up failure as success.

Not only are their policies bombing, but we are having to pay through the nose for the privilege. The truancy initiatives have cost us so far no less than £650 million, while Excellence in Cities has clocked up a startling £800 million.

Yet schools are having to make teachers redundant and shut down classes because they don’t have enough money to pay their bills. It is hard to recall a government making such a breathtakingly incompetent hash of its education policy. It simply hasn’t got a clue.

This would all be bad enough if it was just any policy. But education, let us not forget, is supposed to be special. Right from the start, Tony Blair insisted that it was his ‘passion’, his ‘number one priority’. He gave a solemn undertaking that the catastrophic failures in education would be reversed and the potential of every child would be released and developed.

It was education that was going to solve social problems from welfare dependency to teenage pregnancy by opening the doors to individual achievement.

These promises have been utterly betrayed through a toxic cocktail of political naivety, arrogance and ideology. The root causes of educational failure have not been addressed, but made worse.

The reason for the appallingly low expectations in inner-city schools lies in the substitution of do-it-yourself learning for proper teaching, the replacement of knowledge by ‘skills’, and the ‘all must have prizes’ approach whose goal is to make it impossible for children to fail – making achievement worthless in the process.

The Education Department has either reinforced much of this inanity or carefully skirted round the problem. Its Excellence in Cities programme brought in thousands of ‘learning mentors’ to counsel pupils with emotional problems, provided extra teaching for the most gifted and talented, and set up learning support units for disruptive children.

The ‘gifted and talented’ scheme was taken over by white, middle-class girls. The learning support units produced neither learning nor support. As for the mentors, they improved behaviour but not achievement.

Some of these children undoubtedly have very serious psychological problems. But what such children need above all from their schools is not mentoring but to be taught properly.

Indeed, the failure in teaching is a key reason behind the appalling truancy rates. Many truants can’t read or write properly. For them, school is therefore a humiliating waste of time. When truants are taught to read and write, they very often stop truanting.

For all the government’s boasting about its great success with the literacy hour in primary schools, the fact is that standards of literacy in secondary schools are still – thanks to fundamental flaws in the literacy scheme and epidemic cheating in school tests -- shockingly bad. Yet instead of putting this right, the government has the gall to promote ‘emotional literacy’ instead, where children are encouraged to identify and express their emotions.

But perhaps the most significant factor behind the truancy rate is the government’s insistence that all children should be educated in the same school. This has meant that those who are disruptive or have serious emotional problems are being taught alongside everyone else – where their needs cannot be met.

Time was when such children would have been taught in specialist schools which can cater for them. These have largely disappeared because of the government’s obsessional delusion that educating children separately will damage their ‘self-esteem’.

The fact that this policy is shattering many children’s whole lives, setting them on a trajectory from school failure through truancy straight into crime and eventual imprisonment, appears to escape ministers altogether.

To be sure, truancy is fuelled by much broader social problems. In Liverpool’s Speke district yesterday, 24 parents were due to appear in court to be prosecuted for allowing their children to truant. Only 13 bothered to show up. The vast majority of these parents were lone mothers.

There is no doubt that the truancy problem is being exacerbated by the sheer inadequacy and irresponsibility of these children’s parents. The government is right to want them to be prosecuted. But it has also failed to tackle one of the principal drivers behind such parental inadequacy – the huge and ever-rising proportion of lone mothers. It refuses to promote marriage or to tell the truth about the way the collapse of family life fuels every single social problem, truancy included.

Instead, it promotes the myth that all families are equally good for bringing up children, and gives lone parents financial and other encouragement to continue this socially destructive lifestyle.

Truancy and educational failure are complex problems whose roots lie deep in our contemporary culture. They are being made far worse by a government that refuses to face up to reality, and instead is trying to reshape society – leaving in its wake the wreckage of many poor children’s lives.

Daily Mail, May 26 2003.

The baleful shadow cast by Islamic terrorism is lengthening over Britain. The police and intelligence services are hunting two men, a British Asian and a Muslim convert, who have been trained as human bombs by al Q’aeda.

A separate group of Jordanians and Palestinians, known as al Tauhid, is reported to be plotting in London and Luton to carry out terrorist attacks in Britain. This follows repeated intelligence warnings and explicit threats by al Q’aeda against the UK.

As a sign of growing official nervousness, concrete barriers have suddenly been thrown up in front of the Houses of Parliament, and other high profile sites are likely to be similarly protected.

In such deeply alarming circumstances, one might think that all public authorities would do everything within their power to choke off the wellsprings of terrorism. But alas, this is not so.

For our ineffable judiciary is busy signalling that Britain is the land where terrorists may go free.

The Court of Appeal last week quashed the convictions of nine Afghans who hijacked a plane from Kabul three years ago and held its passengers hostage for three days at Stansted airport.

The court has yet to publish its reasons. But it appears the crux of the matter was its opinion that the trial judge, Sir Edwin Jowitt, misdirected the jury on the law of duress.

This common law defence says, in essence, that the accused or his family would have faced death or serious harm if he didn’t commit the offence, and that no reasonable person could have acted otherwise in these circumstances.

Sir Edwin set out a list of commonsense tests for the jury to apply before this defence of duress could be accepted, including the requirement to prove there was an immediate threat to the hijackers’ lives. It was this hurdle that the appeal judges said was wrong.

This was a bad misjudgement on their part. It is not in doubt that the Taleban ran an appalling regime. But even if – as the hijackers claimed – the Taleban had intended to kill them, it does not follow that they hijacked the plane under any reasonable interpretation of duress.

After all, there had been no immediate threat. No-one had held a gun to their heads and forced them to seize the aircraft. On the contrary, it was they who held a gun to their hapless hostages’ heads.

To act under duress means you have no option. But to say there is no option other than to commit an act of terrorism and take blameless people hostage is a grotesque argument. One cannot justify the saving of one’s own life by threatening the lives of innocent people and using them for blackmail.

The appeal judges’ ruling, however, effectively accepts the claim by terrorists the world over that they are driven to do their terrible deeds because circumstances give them no option. The terrifying fact is that this utterly spurious argument has been accepted by many respectable people.

Indeed, despite being criticised by the appeal court, Sir Edwin Jowitt himself sold the pass when he said the original hijacking in Kabul was not in itself a criminal act because the hijackers had been fleeing a barbarous regime.

It was only later, he said, when they refused to allow any hostages off the plane when it refuelled at Moscow airport -- not to mention the prolonged stand-off at Stansted when they threatened to kill all the passengers – that they displayed a callous disregard for their captives and changed the nature of the exercise.

But hijacking, like other forms of terrorism, is never excusable at any time or in any circumstances. There can never be any justification for taking hostages and threatening to kill them – even in the cause of saving the hijackers’ lives.

Nor is this the first time the judges have got this so badly wrong. In 1996, the appeal court quashed the convictions of five out of six Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime, who had hijacked a Sudanese airbus en route from Khartoum to Jordan and diverted it to Stansted. Once again, the appeal judges argued the jury should have considered that the crime had been committed under duress.

By such rulings, the judges are acting as unwitting handmaidens to terror. Although the court obviously won’t have meant this to happen, its ruling sends an undeniable signal: anyone living under a tyrannical regime can hijack a plane and expect to be given a pat on the head and a meal-ticket to Britain.

After all, the Iraqi hijackers have remained in Britain as asylum seekers, and the Afghans are living on benefits and in rent-free housing – and may even be able to claim compensation for wrongful imprisonment.

People turn to terrorism for one overriding reason – their confidence that they will succeed, due to the queasy or craven nature of the authorities with whom they will be dealing.

The judges, reeling from the current wave of public criticism that they’ve gone soft, complain they are badly misunderstood. Well, this latest ruling can only reinforce the view that something has gone very badly wrong instead with their whole moral compass.

In fairness, they are by no means alone. Indeed, their thinking reflects a widespread and deep-seated moral inversion that has taken place within our culture. Ever since airplane hijackings started in the 1960s, the world has effectively been rewarding terrorism.

The only way to defeat it is to put it comprehensively beyond the pale. But instead, with every hijacking or other act of terror, the world has meekly released prisoners, suddenly discovered that the terrorists have a case, shaken their hands, and even invited them – as with the Middle East ‘road map’ -- to participate in negotiations on their demands.

This merely amounts instead to a road map to more murder, hijackings and bombings. For the message is that terrorism works. Useful idiots concede that it is justified if the grievance is bad enough. But it’s never justified. The end does not justify the means.

And it’s an easy step from there to inventing such grievances. After all, what possible despair, injustice or misery can a British Muslim -- the beneficiary of liberal democracy, human rights and material comforts – claim to justify the murder of his fellow citizens?

Our society simply doesn’t take terrorism seriously. Oh, it takes the threat of carnage seriously enough. But it makes excuses for terrorism that it does not make for anything else.

After all, it is no longer possible to use the defence of duress for murder. Yet it can be used for hijackings -- for which our judges think there can be justification.

A similarly sick inversion of values was on display last night when Channel Four TV screened the opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. This was a work of artistic sympathy for the Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985, murdered an elderly Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, in his wheelchair and threw him overboard.

It was a historically false, viciously distorted apology for terror.

Our society can no longer tell the moral difference between the terrorist and his victims. This way lies anarchy; and that’s where we are headed.

Daily Mail, May 21 2003.

To the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic – should now be added a fourth. Recanting.

The Education Secretary Charles Clarke enjoys a reputation as the thinking person’s Blairite. Unlike so many of his colleagues, he is not afraid to confront difficult problems and dilemmas head-on. He is also a political bruiser not averse to decapitating some of the sacred cows of the Labour left.

So it is particularly depressing to see him caving in to the teacher unions and education establishment so swiftly by effectively destroying the one means parents have to ensure their children are being taught to read and write.

Mr Clarke yesterday announced the downgrading of the primary school assessment tests (SATs), with more emphasis being placed instead on teachers’ own evaluation of their pupils’ progress. The government’s pledge to ensure by next year that 85 per cent of 11 year-olds achieve certain standards in English and maths has now mutated into a mere ‘aspiration’. In future, schools will set their own targets.

Mr Clarke painted this volte-face as some kind of victory for the voguish concept of decentralisation. What cynicism. He is simply abandoning the field of battle. This is actually a victory for the education establishment, which for the last decade has fought tooth and nail against the (admittedly flawed) attempt by two governments to reverse the catastrophic collapse of school standards.

For the purpose of the SATs was not to test the children but the teachers. The tests were introduced by the Tories because so many children were emerging from primary schools illiterate and innumerate through systematic failures in teaching.

With the abolition of the 11-plus exam, primary schools had no external benchmark by which they could be measured. Only by testing children’s achievement levels could the performance of their schools be evaluated.

Mr Clarke maintains he is not going back to the pre-SATs free-for-all where some children, as he says, were failed ‘abysmally, appallingly’ by the school system. But that is exactly what he is doing.

For since the SATs are supposed to evaluate the schools, allowing teachers to assess their pupils is tantamount to allowing them to assess themselves. It makes a complete mockery of these tests. It thus represents a craven capitulation to a professional cartel that will resist to the death any attempt to expose classroom incompetence to the light of day.

As part of its tactics, the education establishment made the most risible objections to the SATs. Teachers painted a picture of children virtually on the brink of nervous collapse at the terrible prospect of doing these exercises. Such claims have always been self-serving rubbish. In good schools, children aren’t even aware they are doing these tests.

They are no big deal because they are of no significance for a child’s own progress. They are only of significance for the school’s reputation. Any pressure on children has come from teachers passing on their nervousness about what the SATs might reveal about themselves. Such pressure is therefore itself a sign of poor teaching.

The other great myth is that the stupendous effort put into teaching for these tests, and the attention having to be paid to English, maths and science, drives out other subjects from the primary curriculum like music, art or sport. Oh, please. Good schools manage to include all these subjects -- and still score excellent marks in the SATs.

These fatuous complaints are merely a cover for the continuing resistance by too many schools to teaching the basics. Unfortunately, Mr Clarke has caved in to the very agenda which has taken an axe to education. The giveaway was his observation that there should be more room in primary schools for ‘creativity’.

But ‘creativity’ has long been the cover for incompetence, slop and ideology in the classroom. Virtually everything that’s gone wrong in our schools derives from the mantra that nothing should be done to stifle a child’s innate creativity.

It was in the name of ‘creativity’ that children were not taught spelling or grammar on the basis that rules stifled their imagination. It was in the name of ‘creativity’ that children were not taught the basics of maths on the assumption that it was better for them to discover mathematical principles for themselves.

It was in the name of ‘creativity’ that essays were replaced by fictional stories -- on the basis that imagination, rather than thinking, was the highest goal of education. And it was in the name of ‘creativity’ that some teachers refused to tell children that their work was wrong, for fear this stifled spontaneity and damaged their self-esteem.

The reasoning was always utterly spurious. Creativity cannot be taught. It can only be encouraged and released by giving children control over language or numbers, and by teaching them to think.

By shameful contrast, its hijacking by educational ideologues has disempowered and disabled countless numbers of children – particularly those from disadvantaged homes who depend utterly on school – who have simply been abandoned to flail around in miserable ignorance.

If we really are going back to the promotion of ‘creativity’ in primary schools, we will return to the dismal scenes of able children spending hours colouring in, copying out and being left to their own ‘creative’ devices for lesson after lesson.

Worship at the shrine of this failed and destructive doctrine remains the orthodoxy in the education world. It is entrenched in the Department for Education and Skills, the quangos and the university departments of education that make up this introverted professional elite.

The SATs were far from ideal. Widespread cheating made them all but useless as a general guide to progress. But the focus on results that they provoked concentrated minds and did begin to drag the primary schools out of the mire.

They were introduced by the last Tory government, along with the national curriculum and school inspections, because the Tories had at least correctly diagnosed the problem – which is more than can be said for their current education spokesman Damian Green.

He says he has nothing against teacher self-assessment and is all in favour of emphasising ‘creativity’ in the classroom -- thus demonstrating that the Tories have pulled off the remarkable feat of actually going backwards into a dark age of ideological idiocy.

Nevertheless, this centralised approach has failed because it has attacked the problem in the wrong way. If the poison still coursing through the educational bloodstream is to be purged, two things should happen.

The rot should be removed at source by shutting down teacher training colleges and university education departments, which produce all these useless and damaging theories.

And teachers should be made accountable to parents, by giving us financial leverage – through vouchers, for example – to move our children if the schools don’t measure up.

Giving schools the freedom to fail their pupils without making them accountable is not decentralisation. It is political illiteracy. Mr Clarke should go back to school.

Daily Mail, May 19 2003.

Cabinet ministers will no doubt be applying matchsticks to their eyelids today. Like a sadistic teacher, the Treasury set them weekend prep consisting of one and a half million words to read on the five tests for joining the euro.

They will have to prove they’ve done their homework when they are summoned one by one this week to give their opinion on the euro to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Government protests that not a cigarette paper divides Gordon Brown from Tony Blair on the issue. But the truth is that they are locked in a bitter struggle.

Mr Brown wants to rule out a referendum in this Parliament because, he says, the Treasury’s five tests haven’t been met. Mr Blair wants to keep the option alive. Every day sees one of them seeking to claw back the initiative from the other.

The Cabinet’s interviews will therefore resemble some nightmare university exam which pits undergraduates against two professors, one of whom has made his reputation saying boiled eggs should be cracked at the round end and the other that they should be cracked at the point.

Since most ministers are pro-euro, Mr Blair is deploying the Cabinet as a political cluster bomb – one programmed to hit Mr Brown with lethal bomblets and destroy his grip on the issue. But are ministers really going to tell the Chancellor to his face that his 2500 pages and 18 volumes are rubbish? What will they do if he blasts back that they themselves are economically illiterate?

Prudent colleagues might therefore seek instead to satisfy Mr Brown by saying the time is not yet right to join the euro, while placating Mr Blair by waffling about the need for a timetable for entry.

But if any of these ministers had an ounce of courage or independence of thought, here’s what they actually should be saying.

The five tests are a farce. Even if the Treasury had produced five million words, the sole test that matters would still remain the political one. The only question to be answered at this moment is whether the British people would vote ‘yes’ in a referendum. And the answer to that is a resounding ‘no’.

The reason is not – as europhiles constantly claim -- the influence of the euro-sceptic press. How can this possibly be the case, given the existence of eurofanatic newspapers -- and the fact that the BBC makes clear almost daily that anyone opposing euro-federalism is certifiable?

Europhiles cannot bring themselves to admit they have lost the argument simply because it doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. You have to be wearing blinkers and with your head stuck fast in the Brussels trough to miss the fact that that the eurozone is not a happy place to be and that the UK is doing much better outside it.

Unemployment in euroland is almost twice as high as in the UK. Growth is far slower. Drastic cuts have been made in its public services to conform to the single currency’s rigid rules.

Far from losing business, the UK has attracted more inward investment than Europe. Our hugely important financial services industry is thriving outside the euro, and would be imperilled if we went in. Contrary to europhile propaganda, most of our trade is done outside the eurozone.

In other words, the economic case for staying out is overwhelming. And Mr Blair’s position is absurd. An intellectual argument made after five years of Treasury study can’t reverse itself within a year or two. Indeed, by saying that it may do so, Mr Blair shoots to pieces his fundamental claim that this exercise can be trusted to assess for all time Britain’s interests in joining the euro.

In any event, the premise beneath the five tests is wrong in itself. For the question they are set to answer – whether the time is right to join -- misses the point by a mile.

For even if the time ever does seem right, what if economic circumstances change – as they invariably do – and we then don’t have the freedom to lower or raise our own interest rates or employ other economic or monetary policies in our own interests?

Germany is now in precisely this bind. It has very high unemployment but is unable to take the measures it needs because it has signed up to ‘one-size-fits-all’ economic and monetary union.

The Treasury’s tests are supposed to produce ‘clear and unambiguous’ proof that joining would be in our interests. But as the new governor of the Bank of England has observed, it would take centuries for such proof to be clear and unambiguous. So by their own lights, the tests can never be met.

Given all this, the real question is whether any responsible government could ever commit this country to joining the euro. The answer – as the Conservatives are now at last openly saying – is no. The proper response to the question ‘when will the time be right to join’ is ‘never’.

Neither Mr Blair nor Mr Brown can give this answer because they will not acknowledge that the issue is a political one. Mr Brown says repeatedly that it is only about Britain’s economic interests. But it is not. As the proposed constitution makes all too plain in a wider sphere, the fundamental point behind the euro is whether Britain wants to sacrifice its ability to govern itself.

In fact, Mr Blair’s passionate commitment to the euro is utterly political. He believes the UK can’t go it alone in a ‘globalised’ world. He is demonstrably wrong. He thinks staying outside the euro will lose us power and influence. But power derives from a country’s prosperity; and ours patently benefits from keeping the pound.

Mr Brown thinks that the economic arguments are overwhelmingly against joining the euro now, that there is no way a referendum can be won before the next election and that continued uncertainty will affect the markets and be bad for Britain. In all that, he is correct.

But he also says he supports joining the euro in principle. So the argument he is having with the Prime Minister is merely about tactics and timing. Mr Blair thinks he can persuade the British. Mr Brown thinks the intellectual case cannot be made. Mr Blair thinks he can walk on water. Mr Brown sees it as a swamp.

The issue is also inextricably entangled with the poisonous personal rivalry between the two men. Mr Brown wants control over the terms of entry into the euro, just as he exercises control over the domestic agenda. Mr Blair, however, correctly grasps that the Brown-controlled public services have gone badly off the rails.

His problem is that Mr Brown has always done the thinking for both of them, and that people know it. That’s why he is a potential weapon of mass destruction, and why Mr Blair’s Cabinet cluster bomb may not achieve victory. But if the Prime Minister and Chancellor remain locked in this deadly feud, they may take the government down with them.

Ministers don’t need to struggle through 1.5 million words. It can all be said in 1200 -- the number you just happen to have read.

Spectator, May 17 2003.

Colin Powell has said he can see signs of progress over the Middle East road map. Israel, he noted, had taken measures which ‘constitute the beginning of the road map process’.

Well that’s just terrific, Mr US Secretary of State, because we all know the big issue is that Israel has not accepted the road map, which all right-thinking people praise, and is therefore the main obstacle to peace.

So what were these Israeli measures? They released 180 Palestinian prisoners and opened up Gaza and the West Bank (closed to keep in mass murderers) as goodwill gestures. And what were the Palestinian goodwill gestures in return?

They killed an Israeli gardener in the West Bank, fired rockets from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot and sent a human bomb on his way into Israel from Nablus, with more to follow. Israel promptly sealed off Gaza again. But of course, Israel is being oppressive and inflammatory and needs to be pressured into line. Does not the BBC tell us this, repeatedly?

Certainly, Israel sometimes does things which are bad and it should be censured. But on the big picture, it is having to perform to a script penned by Kafka. It extends a tentative hand to people who persistently murder its citizens. As a result, still more Israelis get murdered. The international community fails to hold the Palestinian perpetrators to account and instead blames Israel for not accepting the road map.

Er… isn’t the road map’s very first requirement for the Palestinians to ‘immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence’? Didn’t Colin Powell acordingly tell the new Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen to dismantle the PA’s terrorist infrastructure?

And what was the ‘reformed’ Palestinian Authority’s response? Col Rahid Abu Shbak, head of the PA’s Preventive Security Service in Gaza, said he had no intention of disarming any Palestinian, who had the right to continue to try to end the occupation of the territories.

Hasn’t the basic premise behind the road map -- that Yasser Arafat had to be taken out of the equation altogether – also been destroyed by the fact that he is still very much in the equation, having just appointed some 58 of his henchmen to PA posts, thus making a mockery of Abu Mazen’s authority?

But of course, it’s the Israelis who are the barriers to peace by refusing to accept the road map.Well, give that cartographer his cards; we’ve travelled to this place many times. It’s a well known neighbourhood called Appeasement Avenue.

The road map will fail because it assumes the conflict is a territorial boundary dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. It is not. It is rather a continuation of the 55 year-old Arab war of extermination against Israel.

People in Britain -- including the road map’s principal backer, Tony Blair -- believe the root problem is the West Bank and Gaza. If only Israel would get out and let the Palestinians have their state, they think, the problem would be solved.

Get real. The Arabs were offered a state in part of Palestine in 1948. They could have had it between 1948 and 1967, when the territories so many wrongly imagine Israel stole from the Palestinians were in fact illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt. They could had it after the 1967 war, when Israel offered the territories back in exchange for peace. And they could have had it -- including half of Jerusalem -- when Israel offered it in 2000 at Tabah.

But they didn’t want a separate Palestinian state. They wanted the end of the Jewish one instead. That remains their agenda. The Palestinians regard the whole of Israel as occupied territory to be liberated. Their maps, their schoolbooks, their insignia from flags to lapel buttons, draw the whole of Israel as Palestine. They want the Jews out.

The giveaway is that even the ‘reformist’ Abu Mazen wants the ‘right of return’, so that all Arabs who claim to have originated in Palestine can go and live in Israel. He says he wants a Palestinian state – but he also wants the Palestinians to be given an absolute right to live in someone else’s country. So what’s the point of having their own?

Anyway, what does this‘right of return’ mean? No UN resolution has ever given the Arabs any such right. And who’s to return? Those whose families fled in 1948 form only a tiny fraction of the four million Arabs in the disputed territories. Many of these originated from other Arab countries altogether.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven out of Arab lands as a result of pogroms and persecution before and after Israel was created. They are not sitting in refugee camps as helpless, cruelly manipulated weapons of a propaganda war; they have long been settled in Israel and elsewhere. But does anyone say these victims of Arab persecution should have their homes back as a quid pro quo?

The Arab demand to resettle in Israel is patently a device to eradicate the Jewish state. Yet to Colin Powell, Israel’s insistence that this demand must be renounced before negotiations can start serves merely to ‘complicate the issue’.

Oh, so sorry to bring up the inconvenient little matter that the Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map. But, if we’re talking complications here, isn’t it a shade convoluted to expect Israel to discuss the contours of a Palestinian state with people who are talking instead about destroying the Jewish one?

After all, Abu Mazen’s much vaunted opposition to terror is purely tactical. His remarks indicate that he thinks murdering Jews is merely counter-productive and will set back realisation of the real ultimate goal – the resettlement of Israel as an Arab state.

In these circumstances, the road map actively undermines the war on terror. For by presuming a moral equivalence between annihilatory terrorism and the state that it targets, it puts pressure on Israel and thus encourages terrorists to persist with a tactic that produces such prodigious appeasement.

The west should end this charade. It is not enough to tell the Palestinians to rein in their mass murderers. If terror is to be defeated, the west has to show it will no longer be strung along and taken for a bunch of suckers.

Few in Britain now grasp the true Arab agenda towards Israel. General ignorance of Middle East history has allowed Palestinian propaganda to invert both past and present realities, resulting in the progressive delegitimisation of Israel.

The outcome is that Israeli conquest is seen as the problem, when in fact it is the Arabs’ pathological inability to tolerate the legitimate sovereignty of Jews in a small part of the land to which the Jewish people lays the more ancient claim. If the Arabs really were to accept Israel’s existence, then -- Sharon or no Sharon -- there could be a Palestinian state tomorrow.

Only when these truths start being told will peace be possible. The road map, by contrast, is merely yet another signal that terror pays.

Daily Mail, May 15 2003.

Boys, boys! The war of attrition between the Home Secretary and the judges has descended to hand-to-hand fighting. A retired judge, Sir Oliver Popplewell, yesterday launched a devastating broadside against David Blunkett for undermining judges’ independence, producing incompetent legislation and being a hypocritical ‘whiner’.

His attack reflects the judges’ fury at Mr Blunkett’s attempt to fetter their discretion in sentencing convicted murderers.

Infuriated by the Law Lords’ removal of his power to decide how long a murderer should spend behind bars, Mr Blunkett last week laid down stiff minimum sentences for murder to be passed by Parliament.

Now, enraged by Sir Oliver’s jibe at ‘populism’, Mr Blunkett has hit back with a diatribe about judges who don’t live in the real world – and he threw in an attack on the chairman of the Bar Council for good measure.

This unseemly spat is the latest bizarre fallout of the government’s failure to get on top of serious crime.

Ostensibly, this is a row about who should decide the appropriate penalty for murder. The Home Secretary says that ultimately it should be the people, embodied in himself as an elected member of the government. The judges say this replaces justice with a form of lynch-law.

But there is a deeper tension here, which neither the grandstanding of politicians nor the defensive tactics of the judges can resolve. For the fundamental problem is the way our culture looks the concept of punishment itself.

Most people think criminals get really punished only if they are sent to prison. And they believe punishment is essential. But across the spectrum of the criminal justice establishment, among probation officers, police, lawyers and the judiciary, the concept of punishment has become a virtual taboo.

It is regarded as primitive, atavistic, an uneducated desire for vengeance, a throw-back to an uncivilised age. People who want to see criminals locked up because they want them punished are viewed as rednecks to be contemptuously ignored.

But punishment is an intrinsic part of justice. Without it, wrongs cannot be righted. Justice requires retribution: that the criminal who has inflicted pain, suffering and loss should be made to experience something approaching an equivalent pain, suffering and loss.

Anyone who has observed the part played by retribution in children’s universal passion for fairness understands that this concept of justice is hard-wired into us. Anyone who has ever disciplined a child knows that the direct relation of punishment to an offence is essential in the formation of a self-disciplined, orderly adult.

So how can people whose lives are devoted to administering justice regard punishment as beyond the pale?

The answer is that our age is governed by utilitarian principles, which hold that things only have value if they actively produce demonstrable and quantifiable improvements. So prison is justified only if it reforms criminals or deters people from committing crime. (The fact that it protects the rest of society from criminals for the duration of their incarceration is perversely considered irrelevant, since prison achieves this by default).

All the emphasis instead is on treatment of offenders, in the belief that this is supposed to change people for the better. The fact that it doesn’t significantly prevent re-offending or act as a deterrent is brushed aside; anything is considered better than punishment for its own sake.

This is because, with all actions judged by their consequences, there is no recognition of absolute moral principles that are valuable in themselves. So the principle of just deserts – which most people accept as only fair – is regarded as a biblical anachronism.

Any infliction of suffering upon criminals is held to be barbaric. But painful factors such as public shaming or serious deprivation of normal experience are crucial aspects of punishment. That is why community sentences are seen by the public not as punishment but as a cop-out.

In recent years, the failure of the ‘treatment’ approach and the fury of the public have forced some probation officers and others in the justice system to start using the language of punishment. But on closer inspection, this usually turns out to be punishment-lite, free of social shame, hardship or even serious inconvenience.

Common assertions that undergoing counselling or being instructed in the need to take personal responsibility are equal or even harsher punishments than time spent behind bars, stretch confidence in such professionals to breaking point.

This profound recoil from punishment has never been publicly confronted. Yet it has become the orthodoxy in the upper reaches of the judiciary, and underpins the judges’ ambivalence about sending people to prison except for the most serious murders or rapes.

In particular, the remarks by the Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf about the disadvantages of imprisonment, the fact that many murderers can be freed within a few years and the perception that the rights of criminals seem to count for more than the rights of their victims, have understandably enraged many people.

So as Mr Blunkett rightly argues, the judges have stepped seriously out of line with public opinion, with a resulting dangerous loss of confidence in the justice system.

Nevertheless, the judges are right to insist on freedom of action. It is wrong for politicians to decide the penalty in individual cases; justice has to be dispassionate, and politicians owe their office to a public opinion which is sometimes dangerously inflamed or uninformed.

Justice requires judges to have discretion over sentencing. It would be oppressive to prevent them from taking into account, for example, the provocation provided by years of domestic violence, or a mercy killing, or the fact that the killer is a child.

So it was predictable that when the Home Office published details of Mr Blunkett’s proposal this week, it was revealed that the judges would be free to set a minimum jail term of any length in certain circumstances. They might even be able to pass sentences in accordance with rival guidelines published by Lord Woolf, which lay down dramatically shorter terms of imprisonment, provided they explain their decisions in open court.

This opens up the prospect of a more subtle and unpredictable situation than might have been assumed from the way Mr Blunkett laid down the law last week. For if the judges do deviate from his popular tariff, they will come under considerable public pressure in having to explain themselves.

The tension between the Home Secretary and the wigocracy therefore looks set to continue. Mr Blunkett is using the blunderbuss of the law to tackle a deep-seated cultural phenomenon. No wonder this is an endless battle. For victory requires a profound social change -- a renewed respect both for moral absolutes and for the deepest instincts of human nature.

Changing a culture is not something that can be achieved by a Home Secretary alone. It requires an extensive public debate that faces up to the ways in which our society is shooting itself in the foot.

Only if this comes about might the judges once again acknowledge the moral value of punishment, and the rupture with the public finally be mended.

Daily Mail, May 12 2003.

The government’s split over the euro has now burst into the open. The Scottish Secretary Helen Liddell – apparently with Tony Blair’s authority -- has attacked Gordon Brown’s still unpublished verdict that Britain is not ready to join the single currency.

The Prime Minister and the Chancellor are locked in mortal combat over this issue. Shadowy supporters of each camp continuously brief and counter-brief. Euro campaigners demand a road map to their promised land. Treasury officials shoot back in irritation. The issue threatens to paralyse the government.

All this induces a sense of unreality. For Mr Brown’s famous five tests have not been met. The euro referendum is dead. The row is merely over its potential resurrection this side of the general election.

But while fighting over this non-event, the government is about to agree to a document which will destroy British self-government altogether. The European constitution, to be formally unveiled next month by the former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, turns the euro into a sideshow.

Indeed, if we sign up to this constitution, then all the issues that now preoccupy us -- David Blunkett versus the judges, asylum, foundation hospitals, the public services – will become quite irrelevant. The constitution will reduce Cabinet ministers to Brussels flunkeys, and Parliament to the status of Westminster regional council.

For it is not merely that a few of its articles are unacceptable. It is fundamentally inimical to very concept of self-government. If Mr Blair signs up to it, our nation’s independence will be destroyed.

Yet there are no rows or splits over this. Indeed, it has barely been discussed. The British people are not even to be given the chance to express their opinion on the matter. For the government is presenting it as a mere tidying up exercise which ‘embeds and clarifies’ what already exists.

This is a whopper of quite staggering proportions. For this constitution effectively tears up all previous EU treaties – Rome, Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice – and brings a totally new body into being.

The EU will no longer be an association of sovereign states. Instead, it will become a completely new legal entity with overriding powers to tell member nations what to do.

Unlike the Maastricht treaty, whose far-reaching constitutional implications were easy to dismiss as wild conjecture, this document spells it out in terms that no-one can mistake. Britain will simply be finished as a self-governing country.

It embodies an incalculable expansion of EU power. It will enforce common policies on foreign affairs and defence, asylum and immigration. We will lose control over finance and economics (regardless of whether we keep the pound). We will lose our power to sign our own treaties.

It is doubtful we would even have been able to go to war against Iraq. What is a nation if it cannot independently decide to defend itself?

There will be binding laws on social policy, public health, transport, freedom, justice and security, consumer protection, environment, agriculture and fisheries. Oh, and energy. So we can wave goodbye to North Sea oil.

In these areas, we will be forbidden to have our own policy unless the EU hasn’t got one. In other areas, such as commercial policy or conservation of ‘marine biological resources’, we won’t be able to make our own policy even if the EU has none.

We will lose our freedom to make moral choices. We will be bound by the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, a means of enforcing politically correct doctrines and other values endorsed by the European nomenklatura .

The tradition of common law which underpins the English concept of liberty itself will not survive the imposition of common justice polices including minimum sentences, common rules for rights of defendants and victims, and the right of a European public prosecutor to prosecute in British courts.

Locking people up is such a terrible power that it is essential that it is backed up by accountability to the people. A justice system imposed by a foreign power is so oppressive, unjust and undemocratic as to be unconscionable.

But it’s okay, folks – we’ll still be allowed control over humanitarian aid and outer space. In the absence of a Secretary of State for the Universe, therefore, Clare Short could now become the most powerful minister – indeed, the only powerful minister – in the government.

This constitution is simply nothing less than a blueprint for tyranny. It would mean the end of our independence and the tearing up of 1,000 years of history. We went to war to prevent such a calamity from engulfing our country. What Hitler failed to do, Europe is now proposing to bring about by edict – this time with the connivance of the British government.

For in forbidding Britain and other member states from exercising the will of the people through their own governments, the proposed constitution will destroy democracy. Instead, foreign technocrats and bureaucrats – supported by politically driven judges -- are to exercise draconian control from above and suppress the expression of national will.

Horse-trading over the constitution’s details will come to a head at an inter-governmental conference, maybe as early as December. Labour’s Commons poodles won’t lift a finger to stop the destruction of their country; so unless the House of Lords fights this off, Parliament could vote both itself and UK independence into oblivion within two years.

Mr Blair will doubtless ramp up his battles over selected articles in the constitution, and then present any minor concessions as proof that all danger to Britain’s interests has been vanquished. But this would be utterly false. The constitution itself is Britain’s political death warrant, and any attempt to present it otherwise is but the latest lie told to the British people about European union.

From the start, it has been presented as an economic union when it has always been at heart a political enterprise, and all its decisions are political ones. Euro-fanatics have consistently dismissed as ‘scaremongering’ the claim that the aim is a federal super-state. Well, here it is in Article 1 of the draft constitution: ‘a union… within which the policies of the member states shall be co-ordinated and which shall administer certain common competences on a federal basis’.

And unlike countries with federal constitutions, this will have no legitimacy. For constitutions give expression to the will of a nation state. This one, however, is intended to create an artificial state without a nation.

If Mr Blair intends to go down this road, it would be intolerable not to put such an irrevocable constitutional revolution to a referendum. Since his government believes the people of Iraq should have a referendum on their new constitution, how can it deny the same to its own citizens?

But a referendum is merely a tactical defence against something that should never even be countenanced: a government proposing to annex its own country to an artificial entity created to control it.

Instead, Mr Blair should exercise the UK’s veto and thus put a stop to this whole dangerous travesty which – sooner or later – will create serious popular unrest and destroy those very European ideals in which the Prime Minister professes so ardently to believe.

Jewish Chronicle, May 9 2003.

The revelation that two British Muslim boys turned themselves into human bombs to murder Jews in Israel has been for many a savage shock.

It has hideously embarrassed the Muslim community. The vast majority of British Muslims abhor violence and are entirely peaceful citizens. They are understandably horrified by the association of their community with mass murder.

Nevertheless, there is a huge problem here, and it does no-one a service to sweep it under the carpet. This home-grown atrocity cannot be dismissed as an aberration. Dozens of young British Muslims volunteered to fight with the Taleban. One Muslim extremist has claimed there are 50 more British human bombs waiting for the signal to strike, either in Britain or Israel.

Similarly, Fuad Nahdi, the publisher of Q News -- a voice, to a significant extent, of Muslim youth -- has forecast a British intifada. ‘First Tel Aviv, then Manchester?’ as the Guardian helpfully suggested. This is apparently because we are not listening to Muslim ‘pain’.

And the cause of this pain is Israel. Here is the sickening root of the problem. For when it comes to Israel, many so-called moderate Muslims cease to be moderate at all. They simply abandon truth, logic and fairness; and the truly terrifying thing is that so many appear impervious to factual, objective, fair-minded argument.

No doubt Mr Nahdi would cast himself as a moderate. Yet he writes of Israel’s ‘decades of military rule on behalf of Jewish conquerors over resentful Christian and Muslim populations’, ‘colonial-style racism and apartheid-style zoning laws’ and ‘the conqueror’s control of the third holiest place in Islam’. No mention that Israel has been under violent siege for half a century from Arabs bent on eradicating it altogether.

If Muslims think this is the voice of moderation, no wonder Britain now has a major problem. And as Mr Nahdi further enlightens us, it is not just Abu Hamza or Omar Bakri Mohamed who are fomenting this kind of hysteria. Such ‘radicalisation’, he says, is taking place in mosques up and down the country.

Indeed; in the wake of the Tel Aviv bombing, several British Muslims qualified their shock with the justification that this was an inevitable quest for ‘justice’ over Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians.

And despite careful attempts to limit public utterances to the disputed territories, many simply don’t think the Jewish state should exist at all. The Muslim Council of Britain’s media officer, Inayat Bunglawala, admitted this in the JC’s own letters page a few weeks ago. Yet he is among the first to complain that even writing about Islamic terrorism is to tar the moderate majority unfairly with the extremist brush.

This ‘moderate’ majority delegitimises and demonises Israel through lies, distortions and group libels, while sanitising or excusing Arab terror.

Many Jews want to reach out to Muslims. They are like us in so many ways. We see in them our own grandparents and great-grandparents, facing dislocation and prejudice as recent immigrants. So – as Richard Stone wrote last week -- Jews should take part in forums to encourage mutual understanding and friendship between the two cultures.

Such initiatives are commendable for all participants. And of course, Jews should acknowledge Israel’s errors or misdeeds. But one has to ask how useful such forums are if they serve to deny Muslim antisemitism and refuse to challenge Muslim antipathy to Israel.

Worse still are those Jews who agree with such Muslims that Israel is a ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ state, and who -- instead of fighting such group libels -- grotesquely condemn those who draw attention to them as ‘Islamophobes’.

Those who either support or brush aside such distortions also connive at the inversion of truth and historical evidence at the core of this obsessional hatred and defamation of Israel. It is an inversion which leads directly to the recruitment of young British Muslims into the terrible death cult which has hijacked their religion, and actively undermines the attempt by courageous moderate Muslims to promote Islamic reform.

The British authorities should actively arrest, prosecute, imprison or deport all those who preach incitement or recruit for terror. It is astonishing that they do not. Their failure to do so, quite apart from putting everyone in danger, is also a betrayal of all those decent Muslims who are aghast at the corruption of their faith – and their children -- by these religious fascists.

But the poison will never be drawn unless and until both Muslims and the wider establishment and media start telling the truth about the history of Jews and Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine and about current realities; and until they abandon the moral relativism which has inverted terrorist and victim in the Middle East and airbrushed Jewish ‘pain’ -- and the responsibility for inflicting it -- out of the picture altogether.

Daily Mail, May 5 2003.

Great Labour uprising, part two. This week, we are promised a revolt in Labour’s ranks to rival the rebellion over the Iraq war.

The cause this time is foundation hospitals. Over the Iraq war, the Tories were the Prime Minister’s staunch supporters. If they were to vote against foundation hospitals on Wednesday alongside enough Labour rebels, the measure could indeed be lost.

Foundation hospitals might seem a strange cause on which to go to the political stake. It is somehow hard to imagine that, down in the Pig and Whistle, people are locked in furious debate about the merits of these arcane institutions.

Yet they have become the litmus test of Tony Blair’s radical credentials. To flunk this reform now, he has told the Cabinet, would be catastrophic.

These hospitals are supposed to be set free from Whitehall control and given to local communities to run instead. Labour’s rebels say this will produce a two-tier service, usher in privatisation and spell the end of the NHS.

The more Mr Blair emphasises the radicalism of the change, the more enraged his rebels become. Yet this is a fight of fantasy, a veritable hologram of a war to the death. For foundation hospitals aren’t radical at all, but a minor reform.

The Health Secretary Alan Milburn has declared that the NHS can no longer be run from Whitehall and must be decentralised. A thousand times amen to that. But foundation hospitals are not going to bring about this Milburnian nirvana.

As a result of Gordon Brown’s implacable opposition, they have been emasculated. Their financial reins will be loosed only a little, while their borrowing will be controlled by yet another government regulator.

They will have only limited room to vary pay rates, they will be told what services they must provide, they will be subjugated to the same performance targets as everyone else, they will be restricted in the number of private patients they treat and they won’t even be able to develop their own computer systems.

Apart from all that, they’ll be totally independent! Mr Blair claims that front-line health staff and local communities will be put in the driving seat. In your dreams, Prime Minister.

But the silly saps in Labour’s ranks have actually believed such hallucinatory rhetoric. They really do think foundation hospitals spell the end of the monolithic, Stalinist NHS with the government’s thumb on its windpipe.

And while the rest of us might give heartfelt thanks for such a deliverance, these MPs respond by mass breast-beating. For they worship this monolith. They offer up the bodies of poorly-treated patients on its shrine. Rather than ever desecrate it by freeing up the system, they prefer to perpetuate the universal misery of a service on its knees.

But since foundation hospitals would not up-end the system at all, why are these Labour rebels beside themselves? The answer is surely that what matters to them is form rather than substance. The illusion that the NHS delivers equality of care to all is a fiction in which they have invested their very political identity.

So they simply don’t want to know that it actually betrays vulnerable people about whom they supposedly care most: the elderly poor, the inarticulate, the powerless. What matters instead is the story it tells: that every hospital delivers an identical service to every patient. And so the very fact that foundation hospitals – whatever the reality may be – would tell a different story, in which hospitals would compete to raise standards for all, is anathema.

For Mr Blair, on the other hand, the proposal encapsulates the usual mix of political calculation and wishful thinking. The Prime Minister has always genuinely wanted to transform the public services for the better. But he remains frustrated and perplexed.

For despite what he took to be the recipe for sure-fire success – simply not being the Tories -- nothing at all has worked. Health, education, transport, social services – all remain trapped in a lethal spiral of rising public spending and worsening results. And the more Mr Blair has tried to control things – introducing delivery units, and units for monitoring delivery, and units for monitoring the monitors of delivery -- the worse everything seems to get.

So he realises decentralisation is the solution. But as with everything else, he will not bite the bullet. Because ultimately, along with the party he leads, he is not prepared to lose control over the fundamental project of reshaping society.

But he realises that the Tories may do precisely this. They are now talking the language of real decentralisation, of recreating civil society from the grass-roots up. They are talking about re-empowering patients and parents, doctors and teachers. They are talking the language of community.

This is potentially terrifying to the Prime Minister. For this is supposedly his own territory. He suspects it would be popular, and it would work. But because of Labour’s ideology, he can’t go there himself. If the Tories ever got their act together, put coherent and attractive flesh on these bones and got some fire in their belly, the Prime Minister would be in big trouble.

So Mr Blair is ramping up the rhetorical radicalism. By 2008, he says, every hospital in England and Wales will be able to apply for foundation status. And the more his own rebels scream in protest, the more he can cast himself as the heroic radical facing down his dinosaurs – evoking both the folk memory of Mrs Thatcher’s fight against the unions, and his own demolition of Clause Four.

But it is all a mirage. However many foundation hospitals there may be, they will not be freed from central control.

If the Tories have any courage and strategic intelligence left, they should capitalise on this evidence that Mr Blair is on the back foot. They should vote against foundation hospitals as a charade, and trump the Prime Minister by announcing the very decentralisation reform that he would have us believe he is pushing.

For Mr Blair and Mr Milburn have has now given the Tories a priceless rhetorical gift. They have said they want to end the NHS monolith, free up the hospitals and put professionals and the public in the driving seat instead.

Until now, the Tories have been paralysed by Labour’s jibe that any fundamental health care reform the Tories propose is a plot to dismantle the NHS. But since that is precisely what the government now says it [ital] is doing, this weapon has been largely drained of its poison. This is the opportunity for the Tories to bring forward a monolith-busting programme that lives up to its billing.

Mr Blair assumes that the Tory lion is not dead but merely sleeping. Many others think it has all but breathed its last under Iain Duncan Smith. If the Tory leader is to prove them wrong and capitalise on the weakness that the Prime Minister himself has so clearly signalled, it is imperative that he raises his game immediately.

Can he do so? The signs are not auspicious. But even the cowardly lion of Oz eventually found his roar.