Daily Mail, June 30 2003.

Today, the government is producing a consultation paper on same-sex unions. It will propose that many of the benefits of marriage, such as pension and property rights and the abolition of inheritance tax, should be conferred on homosexuals if they register their partnership.

The details may change, but the basic plan is already a done deal. Anyone who protests will be defamed as a homophobe.

The proposals are being presented as rights for homosexuals. But these are not anyone’s ‘rights’. The benefits of marriage are the quid pro quo for a network of obligations enforced upon individuals by the state -- not in their interests, but in its own.

This interest is to promote and support a unique institution that is the bedrock of social stability through the safeguards it provides for the upbringing of children.

But children are increasingly being regarded as commodities, illustrated by the repellent story of the lesbian couple who are expecting a baby conceived using sperm bought from an internet site, and who are interviewed in this paper today. Elsewhere, a surrogate mother is planning her ninth pregnancy to provide an infertile couple with a child.

And now marriage benefits are now to be disbursed as a kind of sexual jackpot, to be won by a minority interest group taking ruthless advantage of the breakdown in sexual norms it has done so much to bring about.

Marriage is a legal commitment to a permanent and faithful sexual union. But what will be the responsibilities of a registered gay partnership? Since any residency qualification will either be minimal or non-existent, couples will be able to register transient or unfaithful relationships and still collect the jackpot. And any form of ‘divorce’ is unlikely to include a penalty if one partner walks out upon or cheats the other.

In other words, this is a ruse to enable gay couples to have rights without responsibilities.

Activists have sedulously promoted the impression that gay couples are just like heterosexuals in wanting to settle down in monogamous unions and knit bedsocks by a cosy fireside. And some gay couples do indeed live together faithfully for years, and deserve respect.

But according to gay researchers themselves, this is not generally the case. One American study of 156 gay couples, for example, revealed that only seven had maintained sexual fidelity; another found that 43% of gays had had sex with 500 or more different partners, and 28% with one thousand or more.

Even the influential gay marriage proponent Andrew Sullivan acknowledged in his book Virtually Normal: ‘There is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman’.

This is because (although Mr Sullivan would doubtless disagree) what has kept the majority of married couples faithful is the pivotal role of women, whose traditional requirements curb male promiscuity. (This is now coming under strain as more women become promiscuous, but that’s another story).

Civil unions for gays are therefore a farce which will undermine marriage still further. For if gay couples get the benefits of marriage without its constraints, why should heterosexuals respect the institution? So marriage will give way even more to cohabitation, and pressure from heterosexual cohabitants to have the same ‘rights’ as gay couples will become unstoppable, however loudly the government now protests it won’t extend them.

Most reasonable interests of gay couples who live together can be safeguarded by private legal agreements, just as with friends or relatives who live together for years. But the gay rights agenda is not concerned with individual justice. It aim is rather to publicly affirm homosexual equality in order to destroy the idea that marriage is the norm.

Marriage places a public constraint on sexual impulses for the good of others and the wider society. Without such a chain on the appetite, society becomes an amoral jungle of competing selfish interests trampling each other down.

Yet that’s precisely what is happening across the whole spectrum of sexual relationships and family life. More and more people see marriage not as a sacred means of creating kinship, but merely as a love affair with a handy set of rights attached.

When it comes to children, in particular, people are behaving with reckless and selfish abandon. Children are increasingly being used solely to satisfy adult desires.

Thus, the pregnant lesbian conceived through sperm bought from an internet website called Man Not Included. Given the devastating effect of fatherlessness upon children, such behaviour is reprehensible (no less among heterosexual women who also use this service). But a website set up to produce fatherless children for commercial profit is utterly appalling.

Then there’s the mother of four healthy boys who has undergone fertility treatment abroad to select the sex of her unborn twins and ensure the birth of daughters. Such sex selection is outlawed in Britain; but given the galloping commodification of children, how long can it be before the taboo on designer babies is broken, like all the others?

Of course, once people once looked to the church for guidance through such a maze. But now the church itself is spinning without a moral compass. The appointment of the gay canon Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading matters, not because of his personal life – which he has promised will be chaste – but because of his support for the gathering campaign to bless same-sex unions.

This is a challenge to church authority over a fundamental issue – its prohibition against any sex outside marriage. This rule is crucial, because marriage is only upheld by taboos on sexuality outside its confines. The progressive removal of all those taboos is what has brought marriage to its current enfeebled state.

The agendas to dismantle sexual norms, undermine marriage and marginalise men within the family are all linked. Heterosexual anti-family activists and the gay rights lobby have for years used each other to rewrite marriage and relationships to a radically self-centred script.

Now Angela Mason, the former director of the gay rights lobby group Stonewall, is head of the government’s Women and Equality Unit, which has drawn up the same-sex union proposals. Its other recent triumph was to declare that it was wrong for mothers of children under two to stay at home and look after them, rather than going out to work.

So according to this government, natural behaviour is to be condemned, discouraged or maybe even penalised in what can only be described as a pathological inversion of values.

And who appointed Ms Mason to her influential post? None other than the Trade and Industry Secretary and veteran feminist Patricia Hewitt, who – despite being married herself – said a year before Labour's 1997 victory that marriage 'doesn't fit any longer, particularly not in Britain'.

Accordingly, our society now endorses marriage-lite, anyhow sex and a biological bazaar. The creator of Man Not Included has said: ‘Is there a standard family any more? I don’t believe so’.

Well actually, millions of people do [ital] still believe that the family means parents and their children. But they are being forced to watch in mute incomprehension and inchoate rage as it is wilfully and progressively destroyed, with consequences as terrifying as they are unprecedented.

Daily Mail, June 23 2003.

To raise or to lower taxes is the most politically sensitive question in domestic politics. It is also, however, the question that misses the point by a mile, and the one that illustrates better than anything else just why politics has become so dislocated from everyday reality.

There is no doubting its explosive nature. Hence the apoplectic response by the Prime Minister to Peter Hain’s suggestion that the highest earners should be taxed at punitive rates. Tony Blair promptly slapped Mr Hain down in the most brutal and unequivocal manner possible.

The fact is, however, that while Mr Blair may have buried the idea of soaking the rich along with Clause Four, it’s the middle classes whom he has been soaking by stealth – a far more effective way of raising large amounts of money.

But of course, it has to be done covertly. The excitable chatter in Labour circles a year or so ago, when activists declared that the public had learned to love tax rises in order to pay for better public services, was always palpably absurd. For the one suggestion that makes the public spring in table-thumping fury from their habitual apolitical torpor is the idea that they may have to pay more in tax.

The Tories know this with every fibre of what remains of their political being. Their instinct is therefore to offer tax cuts as the surest and most cynical route back to power. But they also know that people are furious about the manifest decline in quality of the public services, which they want to see improved. So if the Tories propose tax cuts, Labour will accuse them of abandoning the poor to die in the street, or making thousands of teachers and nurses redundant. Hence the current paralysis inside the Tory high command over tax.

But the Tories are asking themselves the wrong question. The issue is no longer whether taxes should be raised or lowered, or whose pips need to be squeaked. The whole basis on which public services are paid for through taxation and delivered by Treasury-controlled public expenditure needs to be fundamentally reformed instead.

Paying taxes to the Exchequer to be spent upon health, education, transport and so on has failed to meet people’s needs. This is because the public services -- which need to be accountable to the public -- are accountable instead to the government that forcibly takes money from the public to pay for them.

The result is that people see their taxes disappearing into a variety of financial black holes created by government incompetence or ideology, or the sheer inability of Whitehall to grasp what is needed on the ground. The more money raised in taxes merely results in yet more of it being sucked into the void. And the more the government tries to recalibrate its controls to improve matters, the worse the situation gets.

This is what makes taxpayers so incandescent. It is not that they don’t want to pay for high quality services. After all, increasing numbers of people – many on relatively modest incomes – are prepared to pay for private health or education, because they know that they will get high standards and that they can go elsewhere if they don’t think they are good enough. What they resent – and will be increasingly unwilling to do – is having to pay through the nose for inconvenience, untreated illness and educational collapse, which they can do nothing to influence.

And these failures are now on a scale that makes a mockery of the idea of the welfare state. As Alan Milburn said before he resigned as Health Secretary, there are now even more inequalities in health care than before the NHS was set up. And as the Audit Commission said recently, health service targets were being manipulated or not met at all, the NHS was probably unable to deliver value for money and there was a real risk that billions of pounds would simply be wasted.

Education is deteriorating dramatically from top to bottom. Reading levels have failed to improve, A-level standards are declining, university dons are having to dumb down their courses to cope, and now the Education Department is once again lowering the standard of school tests to produce the illusion of meeting its wholly dishonest ‘improvement’ targets.

Everywhere one looks, the public sector is creating perverse incentives, protecting incompetent staff, and paralysing competent professionals by so much red tape that talent is haemorrhaging away. And yet we are expected to pay ever more for this shambles.

The Prime Minister has grasped the problem. In his remarkable speech on the public services last week, Mr Blair acknowledged that money was not enough to reform the public services, that the status quo was one of ‘entrenched inequality’, and that power should be put into the hands of patients or parents.

But although Mr Blair’s diagnosis is correct, he appears wholly unable to administer the necessary treatment. For he is not prepared to abandon central control. As the public service think-tank Reform has observed, his continuing belief that government must set standards – not to mention Gordon Brown’s control freakery – totally negates his professed desire to give control to local people. And transferring power to local authorities – as David Blunkett was suggesting for the police – is no solution, since it merely replaces central control by localised political obstruction.

Instead, the public services should observe a set of clear principles. First, they must be freed from political control, so that responsibility returns to front-line professionals. Second, the public must be able to choose services wherever possible, thus forcing accountability and higher standards from those professionals. Third, there should be collective provision where appropriate through social insurance, so that the community takes responsibility for those who are genuinely poor while the vast majority pay what services actually cost. And fourth, there should be transparency and a direct connection between the payment and the service.

That would mean, for example, social insurance for health and long term care; vouchers –maybe with private top-ups -- for schools and universities; and road pricing to replace indiscriminate transport taxation by the principle of payment for road use.

The Tories have taken some cautious steps in this direction, through their ‘patients’ passports’ and ‘school scholarships’ which would enable patients to choose hospitals and parents to set up new schools.

But they have also displayed continuing confusion. Announcing an end to tuition fees, for example, was an opportunist political stunt which would do nothing to solve the universities’ funding crisis or the current preponderance of Mickey Mouse courses.

And the fact that they are still arguing over tax reductions shows they remain in the same old trap of thinking of themselves as the party that sets people free from the state.

Instead, the goal for any party that wants to reconnect political life to everyday public needs should be different. It is to replace taxation and centralised delivery by locally accountable funding that sets public service free from the control that is killing it off – and with it, the public’s belief in the political process itself.

Daily Mail, June 19 2003.

The government’s war against men is now plumbing ever more astonishing depths. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, the Home Secretary David Blunkett could scarcely wait to boast of new proposals to deal with domestic violence.

Such crimes are indeed a serious matter. But the Home Office not only continues to distort them as overwhelmingly caused by male aggression against innocent women and children, against all the evidence that this is not the case. It is now taking a giant step towards fundamental injustice.

Anyone truly concerned with civil liberties could not fail to have been appalled by Mr Blunkett’s comments. The problem was, he enthusiastically explained, that at present ‘you have to get someone through court’ before a domestic violence suspect can be restrained.

So his solution is to restrain them before they even get to court. In other words, he wants action taken against a man on the basis of an unproven allegation by a woman– made under the protection of anonymity, to boot. So much for this Home Secretary’s understanding of the presumption of innocence, the meaning of justice and the necessity for a trial of the facts.

Even worse, despite the fact that he has just given the women’s refuge movement extra millions in public funds, he thinks women should not have to move out when they claim they are being attacked. The men they are accusing should move out instead, pronto. So men will now be evicted from their homes simply on the basis of an accusation.

The way will thus be clear for a woman who has tired of her man to get the police to evict him, without the tedious irrelevance of having to ‘get someone through a court’.

These are proposals which are simply inimical to the rule of law. They also spectacularly miss the point.

True, some 150 people – the majority of whom are women -- are killed at home every year. But if we want to stop the appalling toll of domestic violence, we have to address the unstable relationships which are fuelling the phenomenon.

For unmarried partners present vastly more risks of physical abuse to both adults and children at home than do married couples. Transient relationships lead to more jealousy, insecurity and, in extreme cases, violence. Furthermore, unmarried individuals are far more likely to abuse a child in their care with whom they have no biological connection.

The Home Office itself has previously acknowledged that the dislocation arising from marital breakdown is a ‘key risk factor’ in domestic violence. Yet the government has encouraged the false belief that all relationships are equal in value.

While thus giving its blessing to domestic arrangements which give rise to violence between intimates, the government is choosing to pile the blame on men. For although it claims in passing that one in six men suffers from domestic violence, it says women are mainly their victims.

This is a wicked distortion of the facts. There is overwhelming evidence from dozens of international studies that women are as violent towards men as men are towards women. Women are indeed more likely to initiate violence. Even the Home Office – which persistently ignores this research -- reported some years back that equal numbers of men and women were initiating violence towards each other.

True, women get hurt more badly in such fights because men tend to be stronger. That is presumably why more women than men are killed in these disputes. But there is also much anecdotal evidence that many men are too ashamed to report their injuries.

The Home Office report reheats yet again a number of misleading old chestnuts. It says, for example, that one in four women suffers domestic violence. This is rot. It is a figure extrapolated from studies that don’t stand up to serious scrutiny – illustrating the dismal standards which characterise virtually all domestic violence research in this country, but which the Home Office not only slavishly relies upon but also funds.

Not only does the government distort the facts about violence between adults, but it ignores the role played by women in violence towards children. For all the evidence suggests that while men commit most child sexual abuse, women subject children to more neglect, physical injury and even murder.

An NSPCC study a few years ago revealed that mothers were the most frequent perpetrators of children’s physical injury, emotional abuse and neglect. This is hardly surprising since mothers generally have more contact with their children than anyone else.

In America, where trends are likely to be similar to Britain, the Department of Justice said that in 1999, three out of five maltreated children had been abused by their mothers. And in 2001, the US Department of Health and Human Services reported that 32.4% of child fatalities were committed by mothers, compared to 14.2% committed by fathers, 14% by non-parents and 25.1% by mothers and fathers acting together.

So the idea that men are responsible for the vast majority of domestic violence is simply untrue. Yet Mr Blunkett is urging women to make more such claims -- on the basis of which men are to be deprived of their homes, their children and their reputations.

These preposterous proposals are based on the extreme feminist belief -- which has captured the Home Office -- that all men are guilty. That’s why rape trials are now to be rigged, too, by weighting the burden of proof against the defendant. Many men are already victims of this egregious prejudice in the divorce courts, where unproven allegations against them are automatically believed and used to deprive them of contact with their children.

Clearly, some men are indeed guilty of violence against the women they live with or their children. But some men are guilty of other crimes, too. Yet this has not caused the government to tear up the elementary rules of justice in those cases. So why is domestic violence so different?

The answer is that men are being demonised as intrinsic rapists, wife beaters and child abusers as part of a broader agenda. It is nothing less than an aim to destroy the married family, cripple ‘male power’ by emasculating men’s role and undermine masculinity itself.

So men are given the impression they can no longer be breadwinners (unless they are separated from their children’s mother, in which case they will be pursued for money the length and breadth of the land).

Meanwhile, women are lured back into the workplace by a government fanatical in its feminist agenda. Only recently there was a report from the Women and Equality Unit which implied that it was wrong for women to stay at home with their children when they could be economically active.

At the same time, men are patronised as emotionally illiterate, and regarded as no more than walking wallets, sperm donors and mothers’ au pairs.

In fact, the biggest protection against domestic violence is marriage, the very institution the government is busy destroying. Domestic violence is far rarer within the stable and loving context that marriage affords than among cohabiting couples who are more prone to insecurity and jealousy.

Since the government’s approach is exposing hundreds of thousands of children to hugely increased risks of violence and abuse, Mr Blunkett’s pious assertion that he was ‘putting children first’ was enough to make one choke on the cornflakes.

By encouraging mass fatherlessness, this government is putting children last. These domestic violence proposals go even further: removing men not just from family life but from the protection of the law itself.

They are being turned into un-persons, excluded from the ambit of human rights (so much for the wretched Human Rights Act). And once again it is a male politician, in the emasculated Home Office, which is putting the boot into men.

Daily Mail, June 16 2003.

What does a frustrated radical do when all his ideas for transforming present-day society go pear-shaped? Why, he reaches for an ancient tradition and abolishes that instead.

The centrepiece of Tony Blair’s farcical reshuffle was his decision to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor. The fact that this post is 1400 years old would have cut no ice at all. Indeed, it would merely have made the case for getting rid of it 1400 times stronger.

Anyone who defends the Lord Chancellor’s post against abolition is to be dismissed as one of the ‘forces of conservatism’ standing in the way of progress and modernity.

In fact, the proposal reveals once again this government’s lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance. People might think the Lord Chancellor is pretty irrelevant: a bloke in fancy dress who doesn’t seem to do much except walk backwards in front of the Queen and get into trouble buying expensive wallpaper.

The previous incumbent, Lord Irvine, was undoubtedly a hopeless minister. But the removal of not just the man but his office is another matter altogether. The problem is that the role straddles government, judiciary and legislature which should be kept separate. But removing this anomaly is far from straightforward.

We are being told the changes are intended to strengthen the independence of the judiciary. But when politicians cross their hearts and swear repeatedly that this is their purpose – as Lord Falconer did yesterday-- it’s time to start counting the spoons.

This most centralising of governments has never bestowed independence upon anyone. And since the Home Secretary is locked in mortal combat with the judges over sentencing powers, the idea that the judges are to get more autonomy is simply incredible.

Instead, it is far more likely that the proposed judicial appointments commission, which will appoint the judges, will become an instrument of political control over their selection. If commission members are appointed by the government, it will be packed with tame placemen, in the same way that this Prime Minister has abused his powers of patronage to bring other institutions to heel.

And anyway, there has never been so much as a whisper of political cronyism in the Lord Chancellor’s appointments. We actually have the most independent and least politically corrupt judiciary in the world, in sharp contrast to countries where legal and political powers are formally separated.

For our odd and messy unwritten constitution, which rests so much on everyone accepting certain conventions and backing away from conflicts of interest, actually works.

Unfortunately, Lord Irvine was far too cavalier with these conventions. He sat as a judge, for example, on cases in which the government arguably had an interest. He also abused his office by soliciting party donations from barristers whose promotions he held in his hand.

There is doubtless a need to reform the Lord Chancellor’s role to stop this kind of abuse from happening. And there is also a good case for taking the Law Lords out of Parliament altogether and establishing them as a separate supreme court.

But wholesale abolition of the Lord Chancellor starts to unravel our whole constitutional tapestry. For this ancient office —more senior in the pecking order even than the Prime Minister – occupies a central position in the design.

The Queen is reported to be furious that she was not consulted about the move. It is hardly surprising that she should be so concerned about its implications for the monarchy itself. For the Lord Chancellor is the representative of the Queen in Parliament.

As the Keeper of the Great Seal of England, he is the custodian of the symbol of the monarch’s authority as a constitutional sovereign. With the abolition of the Lord Chancellor, who will henceforth be the trusted steward of the Great Seal? Or will Mr Blair consign that to the dustbin of history as well? And can the monarchy then be far behind?

This kind of concern is anathema to New Labour, for whom symbolic traditions have at best merely decorative appeal, and for whom the only constitutional validity derives from elections. But the importance of the Lord Chancellor’s role lies in its acknowledgement that the public interest resides beyond party politics – the very thing that Mr Blair, who thinks he is the public interest, wants to stamp out.

The judges and Lord Irvine are themselves in part to blame for this axing of yet another of our constitutional checks and balances. The judges have undermined their own claim to independence by becoming steadily more politicised. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, has previously strayed into politics with his strictures against imprisonment.

Today, he is due to speak in the House of Lords on the Criminal Justice Bill, on which he is expected to be critical. He is able to speak in Parliament by virtue of his role as one of the most senior members of the judiciary. If judges use this platform to make political speeches, they can’t expect politicians to take them seriously when the judges insist on maintaining their independence from politics.

The main reason for the judges’ increased politicisation, however, has been the Human Rights Act, which has allowed them steadily to undermine government policies. The Act has also provided impetus for the abolition of the Lord Chancellor, since its guarantee of hearings by an ‘independent and impartial tribunal’ sounded the death knell for a Cabinet minister who was also head of the judiciary.

This is, of course, especially ironic since the person who brought in the Human Rights Act was none other than Lord Irvine, who has now bitten the dust in a vain attempt to protect the independence of the judiciary he headed.

Like the proposed commission to appoint the judges, the Human Rights Act was also an illustration of New Labour’s belief that conventions should be swept aside and replaced by formal codification.

The unwritten British constitution produced concepts of liberty and the rule of law far superior to countries with codified constitutions. But the radicalism of New Labour depends on a ‘modernising’ agenda which means tearing up these traditions.

Not only is this dangerously wrong, but it is hasn’t even been thought through. Just as with the abolition of the House of Lords, the government has swung the demolition ball of prejudice at the Lord Chancellor – and then realised it hasn’t got the faintest idea how to replace him for the better.

Doing so without consulting either the Queen or Parliament reveals the dangerous extent to which Mr Blair now perceives himself to be the country’s supreme leader. He can ride roughshod over our constitution without any discussion. But as with the House of Lords, it is only when the detail is examined that the intellectual and political bankruptcy of the plan itself becomes all too apparent.

Lord Falconer is now a part-time, unpaid Lord Chancellor. Instead of abolishing himself, he should tell his good friend Mr Blair to stop mucking about with the constitution and start repairing the incompetent shambles that now afflicts virtually the whole of public life – and of which this reshuffle was but the latest extraordinary example.

Jewish Chronicle, June 13 2003.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Jews look after their own. For the government, this is a cause of unbridled admiration. Ministers such as Gordon Brown extol the way the Jewish community funds an infrastructure of care homes and other social services.

And indeed, it should be viewed with great pride. Many generous figures dig deep into their pockets to provide high standards of care for those who require it. As a result, the community tends to imagine that its aged, chronically sick or handicapped and other needy folk are well provided for and there’s no need to worry.

But there is. For Jewish care homes are in desperate straits. They are simply running out of money. Some may go to the wall, causing untold distress to frail residents. Others face an invidious choice between reducing their standards and closing down.

From the beginning of this year Jewish Care, which is now running a deficit of more than £3 million, has been charging new residents in its homes – those whose income is so low their places are funded by their local authority -- £45 per week, and has asked relatives of existing council-funded residents to fork out the same amount as a voluntary donation.

The reason is a national care homes crisis caused by a serious shortfall between the homes’ rising costs and the funds local authorities are choosing to pass onto them from an already inadequate government allocation.

Last year, this local authority swindle got so serious the government stepped in and councils released more money to the homes. This year, the government is disinclined to wade in again. So the councils are up to their old tricks once again in failing to pass on enough money to cover the homes’ costs.

The result is that organisations like Jewish Care will have to retrench and start reducing their services. As someone with a relative who has benefited from the high standards of Jewish Care, and with other relatives being looked after in other homes, I find this prospect particularly appalling.

There is distress all over the country. Many small homes have shut down, causing immense upset and often premature death to elderly residents who find themselves suddenly shunted out of the only home they know.

Underfunding also means a poor standard of care. As people live to ever greater ages and the level of frailty rises, there is an increasing need for well trained staff. Yet homes depend on carers who are often inadequately trained, and used simply because they are cheap.

Many nurses and carers are brilliant. They don’t just perform essential tasks for their helpless charges with skill and efficiency; they also treat them as human beings, with sensitivity, compassion and even love. But with so many poorly trained carers being used, there are too many who have little understanding of the way physical, mental and emotional needs all form a nexus of frailty. The result is that some of our most needy people may get care that is rushed, perfunctory or even unkind.

But better training would cost more money; and care homes haven’t got enough even to keep standards as they are.

This crisis has far deeper roots than government parsimony or council legerdemain. In the long run, it can only be solved through some kind of new insurance-based system of care funding. But for the present, unless more money is urgently provided, the consequences will be dire.

The Jewish community needs to do two things. First, it must dig even deeper into those capacious pockets. It is coasting along on complacency, assuming that its duty is done through successful appeals for spanking new buildings. But the real costs are incurred by the staff inside those buildings; and at present, there simply isn’t the money for enough carers, let alone well trained ones.

Equally important, the community has got to start exercising some political muscle. Not a squeak has been heard from it over the care homes crisis, no doubt in line with the characteristic posture of British Jews in keeping heads below parapets in all circumstances. Well, it’s time to stick them over the top.

Let us hope that Lord Levy, president of Jewish Care, is bending the ear of his good friend the Prime Minister about this urgent problem. Other well-connected community notables should similarly be raising it at every opportunity. And is it too much to expect the Board of Deputies to raise its voice above an inaudible murmur?

The care world is fragmented, and therein lies its powerlessness. The Jewish community could take a lead in welding together an alliance of care organisations to bring to public attention what is happening and shame both government and councils into solving this crisis.

But first, the Jewish community has got to wake up.

Daily Mail, June 9 2003.

Like some mythological femme fatale, the government is going to tell the British people today that ‘no’ really means ‘yes’. The Chancellor will tell the Commons that his famous five economic tests for joining the euro have not been passed. But he will do so, it seems, as the lead part in a spectacle of euro-fervour that would make a Billy Graham convention seem half-hearted.

Gordon Brown said yesterday that he and Tony Blair would both now be putting the pro-European case and sweeping aside ‘anti-European prejudice’. A supporting chorus of ministerial noddies will no doubt be telling us how great the euro is and how committed they all are in principle to joining it.

It’s so great, indeed, that we are not going to sign up to it. But the fact that an exhaustive Treasury exercise has concluded it is not in this country’s economic interests to join is merely, it seems, an irritating procedural detail to be overcome in short order.

The one thing that is not in our economic interests is for such uncertainty to be prolonged. Yet that is precisely what will now happen. For Mr Blair is desperate to keep the prospect of joining the euro alive.

Hence his protracted row with Mr Brown over allowing a further window of opportunity. We may know today whether we will definitely/probably/possibly have yet another Treasury assessment/referendum paving bill/other declaration of euro-intent, before the next election/next year/in the next five minutes.

This is because Mr Blair believes he can persuade the public to love the euro. For the real test that hasn’t been passed, of course, is the political one. A weekend poll showed 61 per cent of people opposed to joining, with a mere 29 per cent in favour.

This is hardly surprising, since one would have to have the acumen of a snail in hibernation not to realise that Britain is doing just great outside the euro, thank you, and that this country needs to be locked into a rigid, sclerotic economic and monetary system likes it needs a hole in the head.

No matter. Mr Blair believes that this only goes to show the British people have been brainwashed into Thinking Wrong Thoughts by the tabloid press. All it needs is for him to start making what he calls the ‘patriotic case for Europe’, and the British will wake from their deep sleep of unreason with cries of joy as they realise that they really do love losing their power of economic self-government after all.

So today marks the start of the great softening-up process, to make the public believe there’s no point fighting the euro because it’s inescapable. Having lost the argument, Mr Blair intends to have his way by creating the illusion of inevitability through strumming a background riff of enthusiastic euro-preparation.

The reason for his obsession is that European union lies at the very core of Mr Blair’s political vision. Fantastic as it may seem to lesser mortals, he genuinely believes that he can transform the EU from the corrupt, despotic project that it actually is into an open, democratic, market-oriented body of nation states – led triumphantly into these sunlit uplands by Britain.

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, people who have read the actual words of the treaties, listened to what the Eurocrats are saying and understand the power politics of Europe have concluded that this vision is pure, undiluted surrealism. And this resistance has been made far stronger by a number of factors Mr Blair didn’t bargain for.

The first is the massive eruption of fury over the proposed EU constitution. People have understood this means the end of the United Kingdom’s power of self government and the effective demise of the nation. In the grip of his obsession, Mr Blair cannot spot the absurdity of trying to dismiss the constitution as a ‘tidying-up exercise’ while simultaneously boasting that the government is heroically beating off the threats it poses to this country’s interests.

He has also been hoist by his own petard. Frantically pushing for a referendum on the euro, he is on the weakest possible ground in refusing a referendum on the even more far-reaching EU constitution.

The second factor which has wrong-footed him is the Iraq war. For the controversy over Saddam’s invisible weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has destroyed his credibility. The claim that he lied to the country has stuck, and will do further damage to his case for the euro.

This is a striking irony for those eurosceptics who believe the case for war was sound, and that the current furore is evidence of a collective lobotomy.

The reason for the government’s debacle over WMD is that it was guilty of a spin too far. Its second ‘intelligence’ dossier on Iraq was a sloppy document which included information that was plagiarised or downloaded from the internet.

Now Alastair Campbell has acknowledged to the head of MI6 that this included material which had ‘not met the required standards of accuracy’.

Unlike the government’s first dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, however, this had not been approved by the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was instead a rogue piece of political spin, cobbled together by a special unit set up by Mr Campbell.

Nevertheless, both the dossier and Mr Campbell’s acknowledgement apology are now being used to make the false and demonstrably ridiculous claim that the government’s whole case for war was based on lies.

The reason the government hyped up the argument in this way was because it had a big problem. The public simply wouldn’t accept that the legal case for war was the absence of evidence that Saddam had abandoned his WMD programme.

The British also didn’t see Iraq in the same way as did the US after 9/11. The Americans realised then that unless the west urgently de-fanged the Arab and Islamist nexus of terror – in which Saddam was a key and cunning player – it would be a sitting duck for more such outrages.

No doubt concerned by Arab and Muslim reaction to such an argument, Mr Blair never made this case to the British people. As a result, the public remained unconvinced of the justification for war.

This vacuum, plus the self-evident hype and spin, created widespread mistrust -- fertile ground for the incendiary charge that Mr Blair sent soldiers to war on the basis of a systematic deceit. Thus the Prime Minister fatally undermined a case that was perfectly sound.

The result of that – along with the lies spun about the EU constitution and a host of other matters -- is that people won’t believe him over the euro. Nor should they. For to say the euro is not a constitutional issue and that opposition to it is based on xenophobic prejudice is indeed a lie.

The irony is that by falsely accusing Mr Blair of waging war on the basis of a massive deception, the pro-EU, anti-war lobby has made it much more likely that the public will conclude he is lying to them over the euro, to which they will remain staunchly opposed.

Daily Mail, June 4 2003.

Once again, the House of Lords has ridden to the rescue of elementary justice, fairness and commonsense. Once again, the government has announced that it is determined to prevent their Lordships from carrying out this service to the nation.

Earlier this week, peers voted in an amendment to the Sexual Offences Bill that the names of defendants in rape cases should be kept secret. The government promptly announced it would overturn this decision when the bill returned to the Commons.

The Home Office minister Lord Falconer told the Lords the criminal justice system had to remain open and transparent.

But women who bring rape charges against men are granted anonymity. So why does Lord Falconer believe the criminal justice system can justifiably suspend its important transparency for women accusers but not for the men they accuse?

The reasons given for this discrimination are utterly preposterous. The radical barrister Baroness Kennedy said anonymity for women was essential because otherwise they would not bring their accusations forward on account of the ‘stigma’ attached to making such claims.

Now, no-one should minimise the ordeal for a woman in not only having to face her attacker in court and having to give evidence of a highly distasteful kind, but in facing cross-examination which inevitably calls into question her own character and morals.

But what about the stigma that attaches to men who are unjustly charged? For the concern that women won’t bring charges if they are identified totally ignores the fact that a steady stream of men who are thus accused are subsequently shown to be innocent. Yet their reputations and careers have nevertheless been ruined.

Last year, for example, the Australian snooker player Quinten Hann was cleared

of raping a student. He said he felt that he was the victim after a nine-month investigation and six-day trial in which he consistently claimed that his accuser had been a willing partner.

The rugby player Hywel Jenkins was cleared of rape in just five minutes after the Crown Prosecution Service said there was not enough evidence to put him on trial. Afterwards, he said that he had endured 'seven weeks of hell' after being accused by a 28-year-old woman of raping her during a party.

Giving women the protection of anonymity means it is more likely that women will make such false accusations. But then, the monstrous presumption beneath this bill is that all women are truthful and all men who are accused of rape are guilty.

The reason for the bill is that the government believes there are not enough convictions for rape. It thinks too many men are getting acquitted of rape who are actually guilty.

It is simply astonishing that people who purport to understand the rule of law and care about the presumption of innocence can say that not enough people are being convicted. On whose say-so? By what criteria?

Do they have any reason for thinking that any of these acquitted men is guilty of rape? Of course not. How can they possibly do so? It is merely their prejudice – a pathological belief in male sexual guilt.

It is not even the case that rape convictions are particularly low. Convictions for murder, for example, are running at 40 per cent while convictions for rape at 41 per cent. But no-one suggests that ‘not enough’ people are being convicted for murder.

There may be a variety of reasons for the low number of rape convictions, just as there are for other crimes. The incompetence of the Crown Prosecution Service is undoubtedly a factor in not properly assessing the evidence in cases that fail to convince the jury.

But one of the most likely reasons why convictions have fallen is that rape claims have become highly ambiguous through the dramatic changes in sexual mores. While the number of rapes by complete strangers has gone down, the frequency of casual sexual encounters has caused a steep rise in claims of ‘date rape’.

This is clearly far less straightforward than a case where a woman claims she has been pounced upon in a dark alley. A sexual encounter freely entered into but where at some point the woman may have changed her mind, or where one or both partners were drunk, poses very tricky problems of judgment for juries.

So not surprisingly, they are reluctant to convict – especially for a crime which can result in life imprisonment.

But such an obvious explanation is dismissed out of hand because it assumes that women may not always be victims – indeed, that they may even be partly responsible for what has happened to them but are not prepared to take any responsibility for it.

And this contravenes the cardinal tenet of extreme feminism – the assumption that men are intrinsically rapists, wife-beaters, child abusers and generally violent individuals, that women are their prey and that society additionally loads the dice against the female sex.

Lady Kennedy actually said in the Lords: ‘To treat as equal those who are unequal creates further injustice’. So women are to be given a protection denied to men, despite the proven injustice of innocent men having their reputations ruined by women - because women are supposed to be the victims of society!

To paraphrase George Orwell, all animals have equal rights -- but women have more equal rights than others.

No-one should be surprised that the government, unabashed by the eloquent arguments mounted in the Lords against this proposed injustice, is refusing to admit that it was wrong. For it has been captured by an ultra-feminist agenda promoted by pressure groups which have put down deep roots within government – in the Home Office in particular.

So determined are ministers to pursue this anti-man vendetta that the Sexual Offences Bill loads the court dice drastically against male defendants.

Until now, a man accused of rape could use the defence that he honestly believed the woman had given her consent. The bill not only removes that defence, but reverses the burden of proof. Now, the man will have to prove that no reasonable person could have doubted that the woman gave her consent to sex.

The inclusion of that objective ‘reasonable’ test, the Lords heard, means that even if the defendant honestly believes the woman had consented, he might still be convicted. In other words, the test he will have to meet to be acquitted is now being set impossibly high.

Civil libertarians like Lady Kennedy, who would die in the last ditch to defend the presumption of innocence, normally pronounce that ten guilty people should go free rather than one innocent person be convicted. They ruthlessly use the Human Rights Act to pursue such principles through the courts. Yet they suddenly put all that into screaming reverse when it comes to fighting the sex war.

Rigging the justice system in this way is based on sheer malicious, vicious prejudice against men – mostly driven through, ironically, by male politicians, in thrall to a feminist agenda they are too wimpish to confront.

Daily Mail, June 2 2003.

The pack is in full cry. Tony Blair has lied to the country! Excitement can barely be contained. Allegations have reached fever pitch that the government hyped up intelligence reports to make the threat from Saddam Hussein seem worse then it was to justify going to war against Iraq.

The German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, no less, has advised Mr Blair to admit that he misused such intelligence and misled world opinion. And of course Clare Short and Robin Cook are busy stoking the flames, claiming that the Prime Minister deceived the British public while committing a monumental blunder. At the same time, similar claims are surfacing in the US that the Bush administration distorted CIA reports to make a false case for war.

Did Mr Blair mislead this country? It is certainly possible that he deliberately over-egged the pudding in his attempt to persuade a highly sceptical public of the need for military action. The central charge is that he included in the government’s war dossier a claim that the intelligence service thought was far too flaky to be used -- that some of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) could be made ready for use within 45 minutes of an order to deploy them.

We know enough about the way Alastair Campbell operates to find charges like this all too credible. After all, the previous revelation that the government passed off information from a PhD thesis as fresh intelligence material about Iraq hardly inspires confidence in the government’s judgment.

If it turns out that it did indeed mislead us over the war, this would cause trust in government -- already at an exceedingly low ebb – to collapse quite disastrously.

It would also give an enormous fillip to those who were always against the war and are still straining to discredit it. For any proof of official exaggeration would cast doubt on what remains an overwhelmingly strong argument: that Iraq was indeed producing weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam was a danger that could no longer be tolerated, and that the war was perfectly legitimate.

But it is hard to see from the evidence so far that Mr Blair did mislead the country. What is perfectly clear instead is the extent of the deeply dishonest campaign to discredit both the Prime Minister and the war by people who were deeply opposed to military action in the first place.

The argument now raging is being fuelled by the intelligence services of both the UK and the US, who are furiously (and anonymously) briefing against their respective governments by planting stories that their information was misused.

It is quite astonishing to find the kind of people who would normally treat such government spies as a conspiracy against democracy suddenly hanging on their every word, simply because they are providing ammunition against the war. But anything the spooks say always has to be treated with scepticism, because they tell lies for a living.

They also have an agenda of their own. Both countries’ intelligence services are at odds with their respective governments over attempts to change the way their information is used. And both have serious egg on their faces through their inability to predict 9/11, their slowness to grasp the full nature of the threat from the Islamic jihad, and their consequent failure to have enough sources in Iraq and in other hot spots of the Arab and Islamic world.

The result is a row created by black propaganda emanating from shadowy figures, making it hard to tell what is or is not true.

But simple common-sense lends weight to the government’s case. An anonymous intelligence source told the BBC that the 45-minute claim was unreliable, but was included on the insistence of Downing Street. But there is no evidence that this claim – merely one sentence in a large dossier -- wasn’t true. All we know is that MI6 agents thought the claim wasn’t fireproof and so didn’t want it publicised.

For all we know, it was true but Saddam simply chose not to use such weapons. After all, he would have been stupid to have used any of them, thus handing the propaganda victory to his enemies. Similarly, he would have been extremely stupid to have left any of his WMD to be found by the allied troops. And Saddam, who had outwitted the west for so long, was certainly not stupid.

To say that because no WMD have been found means they didn’t exist is simply ridiculous. The first set of weapons inspectors said thousands of litres of botulism and anthrax were unaccounted for. Last February Hans Blix, the head of the second UN inspection team, said Iraq had failed to account for 6,500 chemical bombs, provided no evidence that it had destroyed 8,500 litres of anthrax -- and there were indications that its supplies of nerve agent had not only not been destroyed but had even been weaponised.

The anti-war lobby claims that the war can only be justified if WMD are found. But this is factually wrong. The burden was always on Saddam to comply with the UN’s binding instruction to demonstrate that he had destroyed them. He refused to do so. The war was a legitimate enforcement of the will of the UN.

After all, who told the Commons in 1998: ‘There is no room for doubt over the scale of Saddam’s chemical or biological capacity, nor over his repeated attempts to conceal it’? And also: ‘We will use force to make sure that Security Council resolutions are implemented’? Why, none other than the person who is now claiming the whole thing was an illegal put up job -- Robin Cook.

To believe that Mr Blair lied, one would have to think Saddam perversely concealed the fact that he had indeed complied with the UN and instead deliberately invited the destruction of his regime. One would have to believe in a vast conspiracy of lies comprising two governments, two sets of weapons inspectors, several European countries and the UN Security Council. And one would have to believe that the two mobile biological laboratories found in Iraq were actually – what shall we say?– travelling cinemas, perhaps, or circus trailers.

To listen to the BBC’s disgracefully partisan presenters, you’d think the whole case for war rested on what the intelligence services told the UK and US governments. But it did not. It rested on Saddam’s non-compliance with UN resolutions. The spies’ contribution was merely additional.

Mr Blair’s problem of credibility over Iraq is in part of his own making. His government has form in the honesty department as long as Pinocchio’s nose. It has constantly misled us over the public services, tried to cover up ministerial and party peccadilloes, and is now busy telling whoppers once again about Europe.

Mr Blair says he will release yet more intelligence about Iraq’s WMD. But will anyone trust this either?

The tragedy is that no-one believes him when he now speaks the truth in saying that the threat from Saddam was all too real.