Daily Mail, 29 September 2003

Tony Blair has come out fighting. Even before many delegates to the Labour party conference had unpacked their suitcases in Bournemouth yesterday, the Prime Minister declared there would be no turning back on top-up fees or foundation hospitals, no surrender to the left and no reason to think that the war on Iraq was anything other than entirely justified.

Such defiance is a carefully calculated tactic. His position, at the start of what is predicted to be the most bitter and bloody party conference since Labour came to power, is parlous. This week will show us just what the man is made of; as he put it himself in an interview at the weekend, it will be ‘a test of my mettle and character’. He will need both in spades.

He has lost the trust of both his party and the country. Opinion polls show that more than 40 per cent of party members want him to stand down as leader before the next election. The public have concluded he is irredeemably mendacious and out of touch.

Voters have resolutely refused to believe that Iraq posed a sufficient threat to the west to justify going to war. As a result, that issue (on which I believe the Prime Minister was right, and will be vindicated by history) has driven a poisonous wedge between him and his party.

The controversy over Iraq, however, has merely brought to the boil the simmering discontent over the state of the public services. The widespread belief that Mr Blair misled the country over weapons of mass destruction has reinforced popular fury that he has persistently misled the country over his promise to improve health, education and transport.

With the LibDems winning Brent East on an ultra-left agenda, Labour’s left-wingers have a new spring in their step, arguing that the country requires a sharp shift in their direction.

Mr Blair disagrees. He knows better than anyone that his electoral success was made possible only by his appeal to the aspirations of conservative Middle Britain.

Like the Light Brigade in its famous charge, Mr Blair has decided that with cannon on every side he has no option but to ride straight into the valley of death. Comparisons are being made with Mrs Thatcher’s difficulties over the Westland helicopter affair, when she turned political peril into a barnstorming conference speech and went on to win the next election.

Mr Blair needs to pull an identical trick with his big speech tomorrow. But his difficulties are far deeper than those faced by Mrs Thatcher. Westland was a ‘chattering class’ issue, of only marginal interest to the public. Her government remained solidly rooted in a coherent ideology – one that continually forced Labour to tag along in its shadow.

Mr Blair, by contrast, suffers from profound incoherence over domestic policies. He thinks the issue on which he is taking his iron-jawed stand is simple. His opponents are centralist dinosaurs who want the state to run everything. He, by contrast, represents radical decentralisation and the market. But this division is not so clear.

The problem lies in the hollow core of New Labour itself. To produce its ‘Third Way’, it stitched Thatcherite market economics onto Labour’s egalitarianism. As long as Mr Blair was an electoral winner, his party swallowed its distaste for his ‘right-wing’ views. Now, though, it scents blood.

The Prime Minister is surrounding himself by a praetorian guard of market-oriented advisers and ministers. But they cannot escape the fundamental contradiction that makes a mockery of his decentralisation agenda.

Certainly, he is happy for the state to stop running public services and to contract them out instead to the market. But private hospitals doing operations or companies delivering education contracts are still doing so only under state control.

Indeed, the more diverse this market provision, the more destructive control the Government is forced to exercise through ever more instructions and regulations.

Why do the Blairites want this control? In order to impose an egalitarian agenda. So despite relinquishing responsibility for the running of public services, they now regulate professionals to within an inch of their lives and even tell parents the state knows best how to bring up their children.

The Labour party wants to believe it is on an idealistic crusade and that the government shares its vision. But its ideal of egalitarianism is not compatible with either fairness or liberty.

The most startling example is the gerrymandering of the universities. Through the Orwellian ‘access regulator’, they will be forced to discriminate against pupils from good schools, hitting parents who’ve done their best for their children and junking merit for social engineering.

Education, of course, was the gold-plated pledge that proved Mr Blair was in tune with aspirant Britain. Now it may turn into his nemesis by penalising those very people who are ambitious for their children. Old Labour stood for penal taxation; New Labour stands for penal education.

The Blairites know their project has gone pear-shaped. They dimly grasp that their control freakery is part of the problem, but they can’t face up to the deeper explanation. To do that would mean jettisoning baggage that would make the abolition of Clause Four look like a sideshow.

For the real choice Mr Blair has to make is not between state control and the market. It is between egalitarianism and liberty. The creed that would deliver both public services that work and a fair society is equality of opportunity, not the current attempt to impose uniformity with which it has become so confused.

Real equality of opportunity means encouraging aspirations and rewarding merit. Of course, this means that not everyone will achieve the same. That is what the Labour party finds an anathema. Uniformity, though, is not only impossible to achieve, but the attempt to impose it is inevitably deeply unjust.

And it is also alien to the deepest traditions of the British Labour movement. In the first half of the 20th century, this was animated by the belief that rewards for merit and effort formed the rungs of the ladder of opportunity, and that public services were not monolithic.

It was only with the 1945 Attlee government that Labour tore up these traditions and imposed instead state control of public services, on the basis that only the state knew the way to the new egalitarian Jerusalem and would force everyone to go there.

Mr Blair should return to the principles that animated the Labour movement when it owed rather more to Methodism than to Marx. Instead of scorning vouchers or insurance as Tory abominations, he should claim them as his own territory – following the example, indeed, of Scandinavia or Holland, where a wide choice of provision fits perfectly well into societies that the left itself hails as progressive and enlightened.

Trust comes from telling the truth. Mr Blair’s difficulty stems not just from spin. The very foundation of New Labour is a fraud on the public, because it pretends that egalitarianism and freedom of choice are compatible. They are not.

Unless the Prime Minister chooses between these contradictory ideals, his government will not succeed and regaining the public’s trust will be forever an unattainable goal.

First published in the Spectator, September 27 2003.


Tony Blair told us the truth. There, said it. Shocking, isn’t it? Something you would never dream of reading in a family publication. Especially the Spectator, the paper which supports Andrew Gilligan.

Everyone knows, after all, that Mr Blair is a liar. We wouldn’t believe him, would we, if he told us the time. Everyone knows he made up the threat from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction because none has been found, and if something isn’t found then it proves that it never existed. Everyone knows that this is, well, just obvious.

And apparently, everyone knows that the evidence to the Hutton inquiry has proved Mr Blair misled the country over the case for war against Iraq. A bit of a consensus has developed that Andrew Gilligan’s infamous story was ‘basically’ correct. Despite the fact that he and the BBC grovelled to the inquiry over numerous, ahem, errors in his incendiary accusation, we are told that London taxi drivers and restaurateurs are bestowing upon him laps of honour and free banquets, weeping in gratitude at the service he has performed for the nation in exposing the Prime Minister for the liar we all know he is.

Before we disembowel Mr Blair and stick his head on a pole on Tower Bridge, maybe a small pause might be in order to consider the actual evidence submitted to Hutton. Leave to one side the way Dr Kelly was treated by both the Government and the BBC, each of whom tried to use him as a weapon against the other. Leave aside also Alastair Campbell’s frantic obsession with punching the BBC to the ground. The Hutton evidence shows quite clearly that the central BBC charge, that the Government gave the country a false prospectus for war by exaggerating the threat from Saddam against the opposition of the intelligence service, has been blown out of the water. Yet somehow, the opposite impression has been received. Somehow, much of the evidence has been downplayed, omitted or perversely interpreted to a degree that suggests a mass abdication from reason, logic and objectivity.

Readers who think this analysis is itself off the wall might disobligingly claim that it is influenced by this author’s own views about the Iraq war (I supported it). To which I would simply say: read the actual evidence.

Take Dr Jones and Mr A, the senior Defence Intelligence Staff analysts whose evidence that their doubts about the September dossier were brushed aside has been represented as holing the government below the waterline. But what was barely reported was that they never saw all the intelligence on which that dossier was based. Indeed, they said in terms that they had to express these reservations precisely because they had been left in the dark. Yet Mr Gilligan’s camp claims this shows he was ‘basically’ correct to say that intelligence officers’ concerns were ignored. It would be more ‘basically’ correct to say instead: ‘Two analysts who had never seen the relevant intelligence were furious that their uninformed remarks were brushed aside by those who had seen it’. But maybe that might not have had quite the same impact on the Today programme.

Take the evidence of Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, about the line in the dossier that Iraq could deploy WMD within 45 minutes. His agreement that this was given ‘undue prominence’ was seized upon as a heavy blow to the Government. But look at what the man actually said. The 45-minutes intelligence had concerned Iraq’s battlefield weapons, but this gloss had not been included. With hindsight, he conceded, given the way the assertion was misinterpreted by newspapers wrongly assuming it referred to Iraqi strategic missiles endangering British forces in Cyprus, he had to agree that it had been given undue prominence.

So the ‘heavy blow’ turns out to be that whereas the Government was originally blamed for including the 45 minutes line because it was too flaky, it is now to be blamed for not having realised that the media would misinterpret it or hype it up. Some blow! And is anyone really suggesting that it wouldn’t have mattered that the ‘Brits 45 mins from doom’, as one paper put it, would only be situated on the battlefields of Iraq rather than in airbases in Cyprus?

In any event, the idea that the 45 minutes claim played a key role in the case for war is completely untrue. It was but one sentence in the September dossier’s main text, repeated twice within its internal summaries and once more in the foreword by the Prime Minister, who mentioned it in passing on one further occasion. That was it. The hundreds of thousands of words used by the Government to make its case about the threat from Iraq were overwhelmingly concerned with the deadly combination of Saddam’s WMD capacity and his intention, which the Government said he might well one day carry out, to use it against our interests.

Next, ‘everyone knows’ that the inquiry has proved that Mr Campbell ‘sexed up’ the September dossier. Certainly, he proposed changes to the text. But the Hutton evidence reveals that his role was merely to make presentational suggestions, which John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the dossier’s final author, could accept or reject. And he did reject many, while accepting others -- which were all concerned with producing as many hard facts as possible and making the text clear and consistent. Given that the dossier was the Government’s own case to Parliament, why is this considered a hanging offence?

Contrary to widespread assumptions, the inquiry heard that Mr Campbell did not ask for specific changes to the 45 minutes line. He merely pointed out inconsistencies in the language. It was Mr Scarlett who decided on the final language used in this line, having gone back to consult the original intelligence to deal with the inconsistencies – which, he said this week, was done before Mr Campbell even mentioned them.

The pack scented blood again over Tuesday’s disclosure that a sentence was removed after Mr Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, suggested it should be redrafted because it might have given the misleading impression – as indeed was given in some of Wednesday’s papers, which misreported this evidence -- that Saddam would only use WMD in self-defence. Mr Powell intervened because he remembered seeing intelligence that Saddam planned to use chemical or biological weapons aggressively, a fact that had been left out of the dossier. When Mr Scarlett looked again at the intelligence, he found even stronger recent reports of Saddam’s intentions to use such weapons in this way, and accordingly removed the inadequate sentence. So what? This was a truer intelligence summary.

Indeed, not one single fact has emerged at this inquiry to indicate that the Government did anything other than slavishly follow what the intelligence service was telling it. An intelligence document disclosed on the very first morning said: ‘Iraq’s military planning specifically envisages the use of WMD; Iraq has chemical and biological weapons and is able to make more; Iraq continues to work on developing nuclear weapons’.

When Mr Blair said he decided to go to war because of the intelligence flowing across his desk, he was telling the truth.

So why are we not reading this in the headlines of even the most pro-war papers? Probably because the Hutton evidence is being filtered through various prisms. Many journalists were anti-war, even on papers whose editorial line was not, and were certainly anti-Campbell. Perhaps more significant, the media tend to have a collective view of a story; and this story is Blair’s Integrity Meltdown, and maybe even the beginning of the end for the Prime Minister. And finally, some journalists say they feel sympathy for Andrew Gilligan, on the basis that their own stories couldn’t bear similar scrutiny – hardly the most reassuring advertisement for the British media.

The public view this through their own prisms, such as their now visceral distrust of Mr Blair. Like the boy who cried wolf, he now finds that as a result of the persistent mendacity of his administration, when he does tell the truth he is not believed.

The public also persistently refuse to believe that Saddam posed any threat to the West. Dr Kelly himself, it seems, did not agree. According to the Hutton evidence, he thought there had been no alternative to war to stop Saddam who, he believed, had hidden his weapons of mass destruction which Dr Kelly thought he might be able to find.

What an irony, that the fate of the man who might have helped prove the Prime Minister’s integrity has been turned instead into a weapon for its destruction.

First published in the Daily Mail, September 22 2003.


Surely, in the immortal words of John McEnroe, they cannot be serious? Alas, the latest pronouncement from those in charge of our exam system is truly beyond satire.

Their new idea for boosting examination success is to abolish the very idea of failure, along with the difference between the right and the wrong answer to a question.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has told those marking the school curriculum tests that ‘F’ for ‘Fail’ is to be replaced by ‘N’ for ‘Nearly’, and that maths questions are to be marked ‘creditworthy’ or ‘not creditworthy’ instead of correct or incorrect. A QCA spokesman said – apparently with a straight face -- that if pupils don’t pass these tests it doesn’t mean they have failed, because they will have ‘nearly reached the target’.

This may seem ridiculous beyond parody (will the Conservatives now claim they ‘nearly’ won the Brent East by-election?). Tragically, however, it is merely the logical outcome of an education system which is steadily destroying the concept of achievement itself.

A-level standards have now become so degraded, with universities unable to distinguish between pupils obtaining vast numbers of top grades, that the Government has floated the preposterous suggestion of admission by lottery. Tomorrow Professor Steven Schwartz, the Government’s adviser on university admissions, is expected to propose that the universities lower the A-level grades required of children from sink schools.

This grossly unjust proposal reflects the neanderthal view that real intellectual achievement is a conspiracy against the working class. The Government has dismally failed to correct the appalling standards which act as the real bar to university for able pupils from many schools in poor areas. It also refuses to accept that many pupils at such schools understandably believe that a university degree is of less use than proper training for a skilled job.

Actual facts like these, however, can’t be expected to block the path of an ideological fixation. Professor Schwartz wants to set up a two-tier admissions procedure to shoe-horn into university the pupils that both he and the Government unfairly assume are discriminated against – a travesty that will destroy the worth of such qualifications altogether.

Labour’s obsession with identical educational achievement is strongly echoed by the entrenched belief in the education world that sheep must never be sorted from goats. Getting the correct answer or passing an exam is not as important as preventing pupils from having their feelings hurt.

Such political and education ideologues believe that the education system has failed if it fails anyone. That’s why the government wants half the population to have a university degree.

Schools Minister, David Miliband, condemns as elitist those who argue that only relatively few can benefit from a university education. Expect to hear a lot more of such ministerial class-war sneering as the university top-up fees argument rages. Yet top-up fees have only become necessary because successive governments have hugely expanded university numbers.

This expansion has itself reduced achievement and caused rampant exam grade inflation, as standards are lowered to funnel more students into higher education. Those who have blown the whistle on this corruption are either denounced or ignored. Only recently David Kent, a senior maths examiner, revealed how he was forced to lower the GCSE pass mark to avoid failing too many students because their performance was so poor.

The progressive loss of any reliable, objective measure of achievement, along with a widening choice of soft subjects, means that ever more students are apparently qualified for university but with ever less knowledge. The result is not just an explosion of absurd degree courses, but the standard of proper subjects is also being forced downwards.

Universities are now heavily into remedial work for the many students who haven’t learnt enough to keep up. But since these institutions receive funds in proportion to the numbers getting good degrees, the standard of those qualifications is going down.

These students can’t do the work because theA-level has been dumbed down. That’s because the GCSE, the exam ‘no-one could fail’, has in turn been of such a low standard; and the reason for that was to give the majority of 16 year-olds a qualification.

The futility of that particular aim was shown up by last week’s OECD figures which revealed Britain’s dismal international education performance at 16, despite many more students going to university.

Against the background of our ruined A-levels, Professor Schwartz is expected to propose US-style intelligence tests as a university entrance requirement. But crucially, such tests do not require evidence of an appropriate level of knowledge.

This is a proposal that has nothing to do with concern over education standards, and everything to do with forcing up the proportion of working-class students. Indeed, the universities will only be able to charge top-up fees if they prove they are taking more children from poor schools.

In this way, ministers will effectively put a gun to the universities’ heads to reduce standards, in order to promote the government’s programme of crude social engineering at the expense of academic rigour. And to cap this destruction of the education system, students will be forced to pay for the privilege.

The mess in which the government is in over top-up fees is deepening into wild incoherence. Thus the Education Secretary Charles Clarke lets it be known that he will exempt the poorest students -- while the Prime Minister confides that he is most worried about resistance from the middle classes.

Such political pain is particularly pointless, since top-up fees will solve nothing. They will need to be set far higher if the universities are to stave off bankruptcy. They will tighten still further the government’s grip on the universities’ windpipes. And they will be subsidising useless degree courses and declining educational achievement.

The collapse in education and the corruption of the universities can only be halted if these institutions are set free from government control. That would mean they would have to charge fees. Fair access could be ensured by channelling higher education funds into weighted vouchers which could then be topped up, supplemented by scholarships and bursaries. Putting power into the hands of education consumers would spell an end to meaningless degree courses and create more pressure for high quality vocational training.

Those who say this is elitist are themselves responsible for making qualifications at every stage increasingly worthless. In fact, they are the real elitists, since their charge that it is wrong to deprive people of a university education reveals that they think any other qualification is demeaning and without merit.

The Prime Minister insists he will not be deflected over top-up fees. He thinks he is being radical by introducing the market into higher education. He does not realise that his whole education is policy utterly wrong and misguided, hijacked by the very ideology of levelling down that he appears to imagine he is opposing.

Tony Blair made education reform the litmus test of his government’s success. With his policy descending into farce, he will doubtless continue to delude himself that he is ‘nearly’ becoming ‘creditworthy’. The rest of us may conclude instead that he has simply failed.

First published in the Daily Mail, September 15 2003.

Rational common-sense has held the line against raw emotion. Sweden has now emphatically voted against joining the euro.

This is a particularly heartening and significant result. For despite previous polling evidence indicating a substantial majority against the euro, the shocking murder of the popular Swedish foreign minister and Euro campaigner Anna Lindh threatened to upset the apple-cart in a national spasm of horror and sympathy.

In the end, the Swedes’ opposition was simply too strong and too deep. They understood that the euro was a threat to their power to determine their own financial and economic affairs, and in particular to their beloved welfare state.

The steadiness of this understanding was all the more remarkable considering not only the emotion following Mrs Lindh’s murder but also the huge discrepancy between the massive government-backed ‘yes’ campaign and the relatively small and modestly funded ‘no’ group.

That fact alone must make grim news for Tony Blair, whose own intention to bamboozle us into signing up to the euro will now be significantly set back as a result of the reassurance provided by a country confident that it will be better-off outside it. After all, it will be somewhat difficult for Mr Blair to paint the Swedes as swivel-eyed, conservative, Europe-hating lunatics.

And the Prime Minister also knows that British resistance to the euro has been deepened by the collapse of public trust in his government, exacerbated by the current furore over Iraq.

Nevertheless, he continues to argue that only by becoming a full-hearted member of the euro-club can Britain successfully fight for its own interests within Europe. This is demonstrably not the case, illustrated by Gordon Brown’s victory last week over the issue of VAT on children’s clothes despite the fact that we are outside the single currency.

Such a victory, however, is simply dwarfed – as, indeed, is the euro itself -- by the proposed EU constitution which, it seems, is to be nodded through the House of Commons. If we sign up to this new treaty – for that is in effect what it is -- Mr Brown will no longer have any power to stop developments like VAT on children’s clothes. Indeed, the government won’t have much power to do anything at all, since Britain will have ceased in any meaningful sense to be an independent country.

For the EU constitution would bring into being a unique mega-state which would deprive us of control over finance (what price our euro-referendum then?) as well as foreign policy, defence, taxation, social security, criminal justice, immigration and asylum. In areas such as transport, communications, energy, public health or commercial policy, we would be forbidden to make our own agreements with other countries.

We would lose most of our veto safeguards. On foreign and security policy, we would be required to ensure that our national policies conformed with the EU’s position, whatever it was. We would no longer be able to defend ourselves.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said last week that the constitution ‘significantly strengthened the power of national parliaments’. Is he on the same planet? The constitution would reduce Parliament to the status of Westminister regional council.

Mr Blair says it is not fundamental and so doesn’t require a referendum. Yet the Leader of the Commons, Peter Hain, let slip that in private, Mr Blair had said the outcome of the constitutional convention thrashing out the constitution was ‘absolutely fundamental… more important than Iraq ‘ and that its impact ‘will last for generations’.

Taxed with this contradiction, the Prime Minister claimed that while the outcome of the negotiations would be fundamental, the actual changes the constitution would bring in were not.

One can only gasp at such shameless linguistic legerdemain. It also makes no sense, because while denying that the constitution represents a fundamental change, the government is simultaneously boasting about the heroic stand it will make at next month’s inter-governmental conference in fighting off the threat it poses to Britain’s powers over tax, social security, defence, ‘key’ aspects of criminal law and treaty changes.

Its purported defence of these ‘red lines’ which will not be crossed deserves a loud raspberry for two reasons. First, it shows the government is not prepared to defend Britain’s power to control anything else. So it will be curtains for our freedom to decide issues such as immigration, public health, transport, the rest of justice and security, consumer protection, environment, agriculture and energy.

Second, it is highly unlikely that the government will succeed even in defending its ‘red lines’. So far, it has won agreement on a mere 11 out of 200 proposed amendments to the constitution. And on the big issues, it will continue to duck and weave and knock down straw men to disguise its all-too likely defeat.

Take, for example, the constitution’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, which would impose a wide range of politically correct doctrines including the ‘right’ to strike. The government poured ridicule on anyone who pointed out that this would be legally binding. Ministers said that if this were to be the case, they would oppose it.

It turns out that the Charter is indeed legally binding. Lo and behold, the government’s line has shifted. Mr Blair now declares he will instead prevent the Charter from ‘extending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice’. What on earth does that mean? That court has remorselessly extended its own jurisdiction for years, with the UK powerless to do anything about it.

The government’s new position is that it won’t oppose the Charter unless it bestows new powers upon the EU. But the objection to the Charter is that it greatly extends the EU’s existing powers to enforce laws on member states. In other words, on the Charter – hitherto a ‘red line’ issue – the Government is sounding a wholesale retreat.

The most telling giveaway, however, occurred in Parliament last week, when the Prime Minister made it clear that vetoing the whole constitution was not an option he would use. But if he fails to persuade other countries on his ‘red line’ issues, the only way he can defend them is by using the veto which would indeed stall the constitution altogether. So not only has he now given away his bargaining position – he has exposed his ‘defence’ of Britain’s self-government as a charade.

The proposed constitution effectively tears up all previous EU treaties and establishes instead a brand-new legal entity. If Parliament approves this measure, a referendum is obviously essential since the issue simply could not be more fundamental.

But we shouldn’t have to get to that point. It is almost beyond belief that Parliament could endorse this latest and most monstrous EU lunge for power. What is the point of electing MPs at all if they are going to vote to abolish British self-government?

Euro-fanaticism lies at the very heart of Blairism. If the Prime Minister did veto the EU constitution, he would become a national hero overnight and his political troubles would be ended. But his personal project would implode. So he continues to sell us his dodgy euro-prospectus, a shameless con-trick which the inspiring Swedish referendum result will do little, alas, to discourage.

First published in the Daily Mail, September 10 2003.


The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has wobbled police helmets by appointing an American police chief to knock our British coppers into shape. True to form, officers have reacted in their usual open-minded, enlightened and unassuming fashion by whingeing that an American has nothing to teach the British police, who are perfect in every way.

What kind of fools’ paradise do they live in? Several US cities have been stunningly successful in cracking the crime problem, in ways that leave our police looking like Inspector Clouseau having a bad hair day. Mr Blunkett’s new recruit, Paul Evans, is head of the Boston police force which has spectacularly reduced the city’s crime rate.

He managed it because of a sea-change in attitudes which affected not just the Boston police but other agencies like the probation service and, perhaps most crucial of all, the local community.

In the early 1990s, Boston’s gangland murder rate got so bad that the black community – whose young men were both doing the killing and getting slaughtered - decided to start helping the police instead of regarding them as the enemy. Equally significantly, the probation service abandoned its desks and started going out on patrol with the police to pick up miscreants and even lock them up – patrols vigorously joined by the black clergy.

At the same time, Mr Evans embarked upon a neighbourhood policing strategy which ensured that officers remained in the same neighbourhoods to build up local relationships and find out what was going on. The result was a 30 per cent drop in crime, with an almost 70 per cent drop in murders.

The real question is not whether we should be trying to import crucial elements of Mr Evans’s experience -- of course we should -- but whether he has any chance of repeating his success in this country.

There is no doubt that drastic action is needed to tackle the deep malaise in our police service. Mr Blunkett told chief constables yesterday they were out of touch with the public; his despair over the performance of many of them is entirely understandable.

The police have simply lost the plot. With some honourable exceptions, they are no longer in control of the streets. Instead, they have become crippled by political correctness, a cynical culture of promotion and an overwhelming impulse to watch their backs.

Despairing officers say privately that everyone is looking for quick promotion, achieved by floating ever more bizarre initiatives that catch the eye of superiors who may have university degrees but little street experience. The outcome is that officers don’t stay in their posts long enough to build up local contacts or basic expertise – resulting in fiascos such as the abortive prosecution over the killing of Damilola Taylor, or the intrusion at Windsor Castle.

Indeed, it is hard to credit that some chief constables are in post at all.

Some of them display opportunistic or ideological views, believing that crime is all the fault of society; or that the police are the worst offenders of all against civilised values; or that the real problem is not crime at all but fear of crime. And others appear to prefer to concentrate on speeding motorists, rather than focusing on burglary, muggings or other crimes that so alarm the public.

Mr Evans is likely to provide a refreshing antidote to such profound professional demoralisation. But the big question is whether he will have much effect.

After all, he won’t be running a police force -- which might have been the best way to show up the rest -- but will head instead the Home Office Police Standards Unit. As such, the danger is that he will become part of the problem rather than the solution.

For although Mr Blunkett told the chief constables that reform should not be imposed by Whitehall, he is the most centralising Home Secretary in history. His Home Office has imposed layers of bureaucracy which have paralysed the police, preventing flexible responses to local problems, and distorting priorities by encouraging forces to deliver spurious improvements which look good on paper -- like speeding fines.

It is also hard to see how Mr Evans can replicate the factors that made the ‘Boston miracle’, as locals call it. For his neighbourhood policing was made possible by close co-operation with other agencies who were all singing from the same hymn sheet.

But who can envisage our own, offender-loving probation service thinking of itself as a law-enforcement agency? Or our hidebound and jealously territorial Lord Chancellor’s Department agreeing to fast-track the most violent and dangerous offenders, as they did in Boston? Or our rigidly non-judgmental social workers setting up a fatherhood programme, as is done in Boston to promote parental responsibility and tackle the shattered family lives that are the root cause of so much crime?

In addition, Mr Evans will be contending with some distinctly mixed messages coming out of the Home Office itself. David Blunkett is certainly exercised by popular fury about crime levels.

However, he has also given a signal that soft drugs aren’t very serious. This runs totally counter to the ‘broken windows’ principle of American neighbourhood policing: that even minor nuisances like begging, vandalism or abandoned cars have to be tackled if there is to be any success in tackling major crime.

Drug offences, therefore, are stamped on hard under this philosophy. Yet in Britain, Mr Evans will find that policing runs not on ‘broken windows’ but on a blind eye.

Then there are the mixed messages on imprisonment. In America, prison is regarded as essential in reducing crime. If there are too many criminals, they build more prisons. Mr Evans may be bemused to discover that, while the Home Secretary excoriates the judges for not passing stiff enough sentences, he is busy letting prisoners out ever earlier because concern over prison overcrowding drives all before it.

Mr Evans will also discover the unchallenged primacy here of the human rights culture which ties the police up in knots. In part, this was a response to the police corruption cases and miscarriages of justice two decades ago. Instead of finding ways to put the police in order, governments fettered them by procedures, regulations and laws. The whole experience knocked the stuffing out of the police and severed their bond with the public, from which many ills have followed.

Reforming the British police is very tricky. Forces can’t be made directly accountable to the public without compromising their all-important independence. Police reform in America was driven most effectively by powerful mayors. But unlike the US, we do not have politically controlled police; nor should we.

So how are they to be made to reform themselves? Mr Evans may say some very pertinent and useful things. But what if the police choose not to listen? After all, becoming truly accountable would uncomfortably root out all kinds of cosy cartels, unacceptable practices and worse, all of which are now being swept under the carpet.

The American cop is going to have his work cut out.

First published in the Daily Mail, September 8 2003.


Most governments develop mid-term blues, but Tony Blair’s now appear to be painted deepest indigo. Shaken by the collapse of trust in his government, he has rearranged his bunker, declared the death of spin and the resurrection of dispassionate civil service control, and said he will imminently relaunch his project with fresh and radical ideas.

But as Parliament reassembles today after this most extraordinary summer, it is hard to see how he will do it. He has been seriously damaged by the general impression that he behaved badly towards the weapons expert Dr David Kelly, and misled the country over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

A weekend opinion poll revealed that a majority believed Mr Blair should resign as result of the Kelly affair, with more than three quarters of respondents agreeing that he had acted wrongly in the period up to the scientist’s death.

Such premature conclusions are more a consequence of weeks of media hype than cool logic. While Dr Kelly appears to have been hung out to dry by both the government and the BBC, there is still much about his behaviour that remains mysterious and inconsistent. And the inquiry has so far produced no evidence that stands up to scrutiny to support the impression that the country was misled over the case for war.

But with so many accusations being made, with so much confusing and contradictory evidence and with so many slippery and self-serving performances by ministerial and civil service witnesses, the inquiry has created a general belief that the government has been playing fast and loose with the truth over the war.

And the reason this impression has sunk in like a permanent stain is that the public was already deeply cynical and disillusioned about the government’s integrity and general competence. If Mr Blair had been making a reasonable fist of government and was respected as the ‘pretty straight kind of guy’ he likes to think he is, then Iraq – even with its current difficulties – would not have offered such a potent opportunity to damage him, and the Kelly affair would probably never have happened in the first place.

The reality, however, is that the Prime Minister long ago lost the confidence and trust of the public. Wearied and alarmed by failing public services whose administration has gone from bad to disastrous, people have been forced to endure the added insult of systematic lies and distortion as ministers have claimed that everything is getting better.

Such public disillusionment made Mr Blair vulnerable to his Labour enemies. The uproar over university top-up fees and foundation hospitals is set to resume with the new political season. Now, a further Cabinet split is reported over compulsory identity cards, and the general pace of ‘reform’. And at the TUC this week, the brothers are threatening to turn up the heat on the government over public service reform, and are beating the tribal tom-toms once more for industrial unrest.

Such Old Labour malcontents have seized upon the Iraq and Kelly crises as their weapons for Tony’s destruction. At the weekend, Clare Short attacked Mr Blair for abuse of power, flouting proper procedures and misleading the public. And Michael Meacher – in a jaw-dropping caricature of the most extreme ultra-left paranoid fantasy -- claimed the US had deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place to provide a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq to secure oil for America.

Meanwhile, Mr Blair is more isolated than ever before. With Alastair Campbell’s departure, he has lost his closest political intimates. There are now renewed reports that the twice-disgraced Peter Mandelson is being recalled to fill the vacuum, which if true hardly creates confidence that Mr Blair has now consigned government spin to history.

How, indeed, could he do so? The overriding objective of Blairism is to be in power; so propaganda remains essential. Alastair Campbell’s crime was not to have been a propagandist but to have been -- ultimately -- a failed propagandist.

Anyway, the problem Mr Blair faces lies far deeper than a revulsion against spin. The government has lost its way, everyone knows it and it knows everyone knows it. The Blairite project has imploded.

Propaganda is based on lies. The government’s lies arise from the need to suppress the fact that it is incompetent, and from its refusal to acknowledge that the cause lies in its own political and intellectual incoherence.

The whole Blairite project amounts to a spatchcocking of Thatcherite market forces with the Old Labour shibboleth of equality, held together by the assumption that it must control everything from the centre to create the new Jerusalem.

The result is chaos on every front and the worst of all possible worlds for Mr Blair – deep, destabilising splits in Cabinet over half-baked policies whose radicalism is anyway severely compromised, making them hardly justify such risks of political immolation.

Foundation hospitals, for example, have been emasculated. The NHS will still be controlled from the centre, even though there are signs of retreat over some specific targets.

Identity cards won’t solve crime, welfare fraud, terrorism or illegal immigration because these problems are being exacerbated by the government’s own mixed messages on crime and punishment, the dramatic increase it has created in welfare dependency, and its lack of political will in expelling undesirables.

As for university top-up fees, these will not solve the universities’ problems. The money won’t be enough, the universities will still be paralysed under the cosh of political control and interference, and the mass expansion of university education that is making degrees ever more worthless – while bankrupting the sector -- is going to accelerate.

Weekend remarks by the Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt, that those who oppose government plans to send half of all eighteen year-olds to university want to keep the working classes trapped as plumbers, reveals that ripe combination – so typical of the Labour party elite -- of cynical, grandstanding class war and deep disdain for anyone with a manual trade.

The fact is that under this government there is now less likelihood that clever students from poor backgrounds will get to university. And everyone is being sold short by the wholesale destruction of education standards, which have now become so meaningless that the government is contemplating allocating university places not by merit but by lottery.

If Mr Blair sorts out the domestic agenda, then short of a killer judgment by Lord Hutton he can probably rise above the Iraq fallout. But he will not get a grip on the public services unless the government abandons its impulses to control and reshape people’s lives, to remove all inequalities and to destroy the country’s institutions and the very idea of a self-governing nation in pursuit of a utopia of universal values.

But can anyone see this government relinquishing control? And if it did abandon its ideological goals, what would be left to distinguish it from the Conservatives? Yet if it doesn’t, it may allow the Tories – despite their lamentably weak profile -- to propose precisely such credible and attractive public service reforms instead. And there lies Mr Blair’s dilemma.

First published in the Jewish Chronicle, September 5 2003.


The Hutton inquiry into the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly has apparently become the most popular of all political websites. Well, you might scoff, that’s about as surprising as discovering that the kiddush is more popular than the Shabbat sermon.

But the Hutton website is particularly remarkable because of the way it is subverting the media. If you read every day’s full postings, and then read – and listen to – the media coverage of that evidence, it’s like stepping in front of a distorting mirror.

For this inquiry into the apparently deadly effects of spin is itself being spun daily by the media. They cherry-pick the proceedings to further their own agenda, whether this is to attack the government or the BBC. Accordingly they downplay, omit or even misrepresent the evidence which doesn’t fit their particular cause.

But the huge amount of actual evidence is painting a far more complex, subtle and yet ultimately still baffling picture. The BBC preferred to pose as heroic defenders of a political Alamo than fulfil its prime duty to tell the truth. The government was in its turn obsessive, manipulative, slippery and ruthless. Dr Kelly was used first by the BBC as a weapon against the government and then by the government as a weapon against the BBC. And yet a mystery remains. Despite the undoubted pressure from being hung out to dry by all and sundry, is this really enough to make a man kill himself?

These complexities, however, are as nothing to those who are determined to use the fate of Dr Kelly as a stick to beat up those who supported the war against Saddam. The continuing attacks in Iraq and the non-discovery of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) provide fertile ground for a big lie. This is that we went to war because the government exaggerated the threat from Iraq as immediate, telling us falsely that Iraq could deploy WMD within 45 minutes.

Leave aside the fact that intelligence officials are emphatic that they believed this 45 minute claim to be true. The idea that we went to war to avert an immediate threat is a rewriting of history. The government scarcely mentioned the 45 minute claim. The burden of its case was that the combination of Saddam’s ongoing WMD programme, his association with terrorism and flouting of binding UN resolutions amounted to a threat that had to be removed.

The problem was that the public didn’t agree. Hence the government’s dubious pressure on the intelligence service for stronger material.

But what is clear from the Hutton website is that the case for war was justified. An intelligence document last September stated that Saddam ‘had chemical and biological weapons’ and was ‘able to make more’, that he was continuing to ‘work on developing nuclear weapons’, and possessed ‘ballistic missiles able to reach Israel and the Gulf states’.

And Dr Kelly himself was a fervent supporter of the war. His sister told the inquiry that he had persuaded sceptical members of his family that there was no alternative to military action to disarm Iraq. And subsequently he was certain that the missing WMD had been hidden.

There was no option but to have disarmed Saddam by force. Now there is no option but to see the thing through. The US has failed to understand that the war in Iraq has not ended. The surrounding Arab and Muslim tyrannies have every interest in preventing a democratic and peaceful Iraq, as they have in preventing a resolution of the Palestinian impasse. If the US is to win in a place it rightly perceived to be pivotal, it has to produce far more money, more troops and a far tougher attitude towards the terror puppeteers in Iran and Syria pulling the strings simultaneously from Iraq to Gaza.

If the US fails to raise its game, the war on terror is lost. But there are many in Britain who earnestly want it to lose, because they believe the real problem lies elsewhere.

I recently had an encounter with a distinguished and influential military expert who sought to persuade me of the error of my ways in supporting the war against Saddam. After a few skirmishes, he said we were skating round the real issue. Oh yes, I said, and what was that? The real cause of terror, he said, was Israel’s refusal to allow the Palestinians to have their state.

I gently tried to remind him of a few salient historical facts about the Middle East conflict. Don’t tell me this nonsense, he said with Olympian disdain; I was there, serving in the Palestine police in 1947 and I saw it all first hand. The fact is that the creation of Israel was a terrible mistake.

Ah yes, the real issue indeed; the issue at the very core of this whole rotten appeasement culture, of which the Kelly affair is such a potent and tragic emblem.

First published in the Hadassah magazine, August/September 2003.


These are not good times to be British and an Israel sympathiser.

I first realised that public opinion had turned nasty in December 2001, when I appeared on a flagship BBC TV current affairs show. An Israeli in the audience asked why Israel was being condemned for taking similar action against terrorists to the moves America was making in its own war against terror.

My fellow panellists, including a Labour and a Conservative MP, deplored Israel’s brutality and the ‘terrorism on both sides’. The audience was even more hostile. When it was my turn, I said there definitely was a double standard; I wondered why people were sympathetic when Israelis died, but not sympathetic when they tried to prevent themselves from dying; and said that the Palestinian Authority was a sponsor of terror and incited violence daily against Israelis and Jews across the world.

The audience responded by hissing me. Even worse, when I said that Israel was a democracy, they laughed derisively. A fellow panellist then accused me of having ‘double loyalties’ because I was a Jew.

For me, this was a defining moment. I realised that this was not a rogue event but reflected a substantial swathe – maybe the majority – of British public opinion. Since then, my suspicions have been more than confirmed. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in Britain at present, it is open season on both Israel and the Jews.

Prior to this, I had felt quite comfortable as a British Jew. Although I was sympathetic to Israel as the Jewish homeland, I had not paid it any particular interest. Indeed, I had never visited the country until a month before the current intifada started. But everything has changed. I have now visited Israel on a number of occasions and, despite the obvious dangers, have actually felt more comfortable there than I now do in Britain. This is a terrible shock. I no longer feel comfortable in my own country because of the poison that has welled up toward Israel and the Jews.

In Britain, media coverage of the Middle East is systematically twisted to paint Israel in the worst possible light. There is an eagerness to believe that all Israel’s actions are malign, even where the facts clearly refute such assumptions.

The BBC is a particularly egregious offender. It usually treats Palestinians to soft and respectful interviewing, while Israelis are treated roughly and constantly interrupted. Its questioning reflects a general assumption that Israel is the cause of the Middle East tragedy and it is Israel, not the Arabs, upon whom pressure has to be applied. Some of its current affairs shows, moreover, are breathtakingly malign. The BBC recently aired a documentary which recycled unsubstantiated claims that Israel had used nerve gas on the Palestinians. Worse still, in a radio discussion that served as a trail for her TV show, the reporter repeated Arab claims that in 1947 the Jews had poisoned the water in Egypt’s wells’. She was clearly unaware that she was further recycling one of the most grotesque of the medieval libels against the Jews.

The BBC merely reflects a commonplace view amongst the British intelligentsia. Israel’s attempts to defend itself are routinely represented as a desire for conquest, vengeance or punishment. Its behaviour is constantly subjected to double standards. And increasingly, people are saying that it should not have been created at all.

Nor does this stop at the demonisation of Israel. It morphs into open antisemitism, in ways which would have been simply unthinkable even a few years ago. Even in the most respectable media outlets, the language being used constantly elides Israel and the Jews and -- consciously or unconsciously -- draws on ancient antisemitic tropes to do so.

The New Statesman printed an ‘investigation’ into the power of the ‘Zionist’ lobby in Britain, which it dubbed the ‘kosher conspiracy’ and illustrated by a cover depicting the Star of David piercing the union flag. The Independent, a national newspaper, illustrated an article on the Israel lobby in Washington with a picture of an American flag on which the stars were replaced by gold Stars of David. Prospect magazine published a cover article asking whether the Israel lobby in America was distorting American interests -- and concluding that it was.

Even Parliament now plays host to such attitudes. Tam Dalyell, a Labour MP, claimed that both Tony Blair and George Bush were influenced by a ‘cabal’ of powerful Jews – and he even included on his list people who were not Jews at all, but merely had some Jewish ancestry. His remarks were brushed aside indulgently as an embarrassing outburst by a venerable eccentric. The following day, a BBC TV current affairs show devoted a substantial item to asking whether Mr Dalyell’s claims were true – an item which left the impression that there was indeed a group of tightly knit Jews in America who wielded far too much power. And in the House of Lords, one peer told a Jewish colleague: ‘Well, we’ve finished off Saddam. Now your lot are next’.

Shortly before the war on Iraq I took part in another BBC programme, this time on radio, which was broadcast in front of an audience in Wokingham, Berkshire, the very heartland of Conservative Britain. One of my fellow panellists this time was the veteran revolutionary socialist Tariq Ali. He delivered the speech he has made for years – that America was the fount of all evil, that President Bush was more of a threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein, and that if there was a rogue state equipped with nuclear weapons which should be dealt with, it was Israel. To my astonishment, the audience cheered and clapped – particularly when he made the crack about Israel. When it was my turn to speak, I said the opposite; for which I was, once again, hissed.

Something very strange indeed has happened when middle-aged and elderly Conservative Britain now applauds the anti-American, anti-Israel sentiments of someone who a few years ago they would have thought was a dangerous revolutionary. So why does Middle Britain now think Israel and America, rather than al Q’aeda, Saddam Hussein and the ‘axis of evil’, are the root cause of world terror?

The answer is complex, but no less terrifying. The first factor is the influence of the political left which has simply captured the establishment: media, politics, civil service, legal profession, the churches. As a result, its world-view has increasingly become the received wisdom of the general public. And it is the political left which now openly promulgates the opinions that Israel should not exist, that it is a Nazi state and that the Jews control America.

Why does the left take this position? The most obvious explanation is that it demonises America and western capitalism, and lionises the third world and all liberation movements. At a deeper level, its embrace of victim-culture means that it now confuses truth with lies. People are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behaviour. So there is a tendency to equate and then invert the role of the perpetrators of violence and that of their victims, so that self-defence is misrepresented as aggression while the original violence is viewed sympathetically as understandable and even justified. The human bomb is therefore a hero, while his victim had it coming.

The left has identified itself with the cause of the Palestinians as the latest oppressed victims of the west. But one outcome is that it has thereby embraced the Arab propaganda of hatred, directed not merely at Israel but at the Jews. Uncritical acceptance of the former has legitimised the latter.

This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the banner of anti-racism and human rights; and in which, moreover, a strategic nexus has been forged between Europe and the Arabs. Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, the Europeans have eagerly embraced a narrative that depicts the Jews as Nazis.

The result is that antisemitism, underground since the Holocaust, has now re-emerged under the guise of anti-Israelism. The old antisemitism wanted to destroy the Jews; the new antisemitism wants to destroy the Jewish state. So Israel is demonised and delegitimised. Many in Britain now believe that Israel is as illegitimate as was apartheid South Africa, with which they draw a direct comparison.

The astounding ignorance among ordinary Britons of the history of the Middle East has created an open goal for Arab and leftist propaganda. And despite Prime Minister Tony Blair’s image as a supporter of Israel, he has made this worse. Not only has he failed to draw attention to and condemn the Islamist libels against Israel and the Jews, but he has endorsed the pernicious doctrine of moral equivalence through his promotion of the ‘road map’.

The British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed after the Iraq war that there was a need to ‘even up’ Israel and Iraq, implying an equivalence between a country that is terrorised and a regime that was a sponsor of terror.

A culture that no longer believes in objective truths but thinks everything is a matter of opinion has become gullible and credulous towards lies and propaganda, which it is unable to distinguish from facts and logic. The result is the re-emergence in Britain of the oldest hatred, and a refusal to grasp the true nature of the peril facing the west.