Jewish Chronicle, 31 October 2003

A few months ago, I wrote in this space about the lamentable failure by Israel to get its case across. Last week, in Israel at the invitation of its government to talk to officials about public opinion in Britain, I obtained an insight into the full extent of its inability to win hearts and minds.

A few examples illustrate the difficulty. Many foreign journalists arriving in Israel to cover a story check into the American Colony hotel in the eastern part of Jerusalem. This hotel is beautiful, luxurious and fashionable -- with public areas full of fashionable journalists interviewing fashionable Palestinians over exquisitely prepared meals served in exquisite surroundings.

When journalists first check in, their arrival is clearly, if discreetly, noted. Within a few hours, the phone will ring in their room and a helpful Palestinian voice will offer them assistance with travel into the territories, with interpretation, with arranging interviews. Such offers are important because it is difficult to work in the territories without such assistance. It is not difficult to work within Israel, so journalists do not need equivalent help. They depend on helpful Palestinians. They do not depend on Israelis.

Israeli officials grind their teeth over the American Colony, but appear powerless to do anything about it. And the administration as a whole seems incapable of acknowledging that the same techniques spread far beyond that hotel. Despite the fact that the government press office and other ministry spokesmen deluge journalists with information and offers of help, they are still outclassed in the day by day propaganda war. In the bitterly contested incidents where Israel’s international reputation is shredded, Palestinian sources are quick with their own accounts. The Israelis, by contrast, appear not to grasp the pressures on foreign journalists – even on occasion releasing information in Hebrew, which hardly any of them understand.

Statements frequently arrive after journalists’ deadlines have passed. Last week, after an Israeli rocket attack on a car in Gaza, claims were made that the Israelis had deliberately fired on a group of civilian bystanders and killed several. It took a full day after the attack before the Israelis released a film taken by an unmanned drone, which appeared to show there had been no civilians anywhere near the car. The delay was reportedly caused by a row within the IDF over whether or not to release this film. By the time it was released, the Israelis had lost the initiative.

If an incident happens during the evening, journalists will quickly find on their laptops emails from a variety of helpful Palestinian outlets providing an account of what has happened, a selection of quotes for use, an offer of interviews with relevant people and a list of contact numbers which can be phoned all night for further assistance. From the Israelis, there is often silence.

Newspapers, broadcasters and news agencies depend on Palestinian stringers
and cameramen to provide words and pictures. These are often distorted, but the foreign media use them because they have no alternative. When such distortions are circulated by the news agencies, they appear in dozens of newspaper accounts throughout the world. And if foreign journalists happen to see things which the Palestinians don’t want them to report, they are threatened.

The Israelis could help counter this manipulation by setting up their own news outlets and circulating truthful information and assistance to journalists -- in English, and in time. But they don’t, because the administration neither knows nor seems to care that it has so incompetently left the field wide open to propaganda and lies. The shambles of its public presentation simply defies belief. There is no central control, no coherent approach. Spokesmen who pop up on TV or radio are selected – or self-selected – not on the basis of any ability to communicate (often absent) but through political patronage and the power of individual egos, all competing against each other.

I asked Natan Sharansky, minister for the diaspora, why the Israelis were so indifferent to the task of public persuasion. His answer was shocking. The government’s view, he said bleakly, was that throughout their history the Jews had been forced to justify their existence; they were no longer prepared to do so. I heard something similar from many others, who added that attempts to persuade people were all hopeless, especially in Britain and Europe.

This lethal combination of arrogance and despair, the belief that righteousness makes its own case unaided and that the world will never listen, has meant that Israel has simply vacated the most important battleground of all. Sharansky – who is visiting Britain this weekend – knows how catastrophic this is. In a recent article, he wrote of how Israel had abandoned Jewish students on American campuses who were left unaided to run the gauntlet of lies and vilification. He raised the possibility that, with the field thus vacated, even American public opinion could turn against Israel. His is a powerful voice – but will any of his colleagues now listen?

Daily Mail, 27 October 2003

While all eyes have been fixed upon the skies by Concorde’s last flight and upon the psychiatric ward by the nervous breakdown engulfing both the Conservative party and the Royal Family, the issue that people care about far more – the government’s failure to control illegal immigration – continues to stagger from crass ineptitude to empty threats and abject surrender.

This week, the Home Secretary David Blunkett will unveil an Asylum Bill which, we are told, will be a package of tough measures to curb the abuse of asylum. Mr Blunkett understands all too well that the public is enraged beyond measure by the asylum scam.

The Home Office is therefore telling us at every opportunity that it is going to be draconian towards asylum-seekers. So under the new bill, those who fail to provide written proof of their identities will be thrown into jail.

Last week, the Government told us it was ‘clearing the decks’ for further harsh new measures. It was ending welfare support for all families denied asylum but who refused to accept the government offer of a paid return home, and it might also make any benefits conditional on complying with the removal process.

In fact, these stern-sounding proposals were merely the bitter coating on a sugary pill. Far from revealing a ferocious new resolve, this was a display of supine capitulation.

The decks are to be cleared through an amnesty to 15,000 families – an estimated 50,000 souls in all – who applied for asylum before October 2000 but were turned down. Despite the fact that they are therefore illegal immigrants, they are to be given indefinite leave to remain and within five years will be eligible for British citizenship.

The government says this will save money by removing these families from the asylum appeals process, and enabling them to move off benefits and into work ‘to fully contribute to society’.

Such arguments are breathtakingly disingenuous. These particular asylum-seekers could in fact have worked, since their cases predated the restrictions on working that were subsequently introduced.

As for saving the cost of appeals, most of these families have already exhausted the appeals process and still had their claims rejected. The only thing that has not been done is to enforce the outcome of that official process by deporting them. This sends the clearest possible signal of weakness and a further invitation to buck the system.

In any event, the reason the appeals system is manipulated so destructively is because of the ammunition provided by the Human Rights Act. That same act is likely to be further pressed into use against the new proposals to place restrictions on benefits, or to jail asylum-seekers, or remove their children into care.

And since many more asylum-seekers have arrived since October 2000, it can’t be long before human rights lawyers are bringing yet further time-wasting claims that it is discriminatory not to give them an amnesty, too.

Above all, the amnesty sends the indefensible message that if people actually get here, then even if their cases are rejected the Government will allow them to stay. No greater incentive could there be for illegal immigrants to try their luck.

Now to make matters even worse, immigration officials say it will take them six months to work out who these 15,000 families are. By the time they have cranked out their letters, the rest of the asylum-seekers will have melted away into the landscape.

Far from being a claimed one-off, we have been taken down this road before. An amnesty granted by Jack Straw affected 21,500 people between 1998 and 1999, and one by the Tories affected 32,300 people between 1991 and 1994. Amnesties are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Government states it has halved asylum claims this year. But the truth is that it hasn’t got a clue how many people are coming or going. And the ease with which incomers can simply disappear is the single greatest incentive behind the flow.

Look what happened last summer after 63 Chinese citizens were found to be working illegally in East Anglia. Four were rejected asylum-seekers, 16 were asylum applicants, 10 had committed other immigration offences -- and no fewer than 33 were simply working here illegally and anonymously. When they were arrested, however, they promptly claimed asylum, triggering years of delay. Meanwhile, the employer using this illegal labour was not even prosecuted.

The Home Office says the new measures restricting benefits will send ‘a clear signal’ that people refused asylum from now on must leave the UK. This is like saying the law against burglary is a clear signal that no-one should rob anyone. But it’s useless if everyone knows that it’s never enforced.

For the problem is that, despite a claimed increase in removals, the Government deports very few illegal immigrants; nor will it lock people up so they cannot just vanish into the ether. Of the 63 arrested in East Anglia, only one was actually deported.

In particular – and this is surely the real reason for the amnesty – the government shies away from deporting families because of the ensuing negative and highly emotional publicity.

Other countries –the Netherlands, France, Denmark – detain and deport illegal immigrants. The only reason our government does not do likewise is a failure of will.

It refuses to face up to the fact that an effective asylum policy is impossible unless it tears up its own Human Rights Act, renegotiates exemptions to the European Convention on Human Rights, and passes its own law defining a refugee.

One wonders, however, what its real motives actually are. In a remarkable but little-noticed line in his amnesty anouncement, Mr Blunkett quoted an observation by the Chief Inspector of Schools that children from asylum-seeking families were ‘especially motivated and doing well in schools’, and that MPs from all sides appealed every week for such families to be allowed to stay.

What’s Mr Blunkett getting at – that illegal immigrants should stay because their children may bost the Government’s education targets? Maybe they are well motivated; but does that mean the UK should take all the millions who want to come here, and about whom the same thing might be said?

His remark not only ignores the enormous pressure on public services from large numbers of extra people descending in rapid and unmanageable succession onto the system. It also comes close to saying that the needs of the indigenous population must take second place to those who have no right to be here at all. It says lawfulness no longer matters.

The message is: arrive with children in tow, and the government will not have the stomach to throw you out. Use children to break the law, and Britain will reward you with the prize of its citizenship.

Once, it was understood that the primary obligation of a citizen was to uphold the law. Now, citizenship is being redefined as a reward for illegality and moral blackmail.

This is not merely guaranteed to increase the flow of illegal immigration. It bespeaks a moral bankruptcy and denial of the civic order at the very heart of government.

Daily Mail, 20 October 2003

The simmering tension between America and what it contemptuously calls 'old Europe' is today expected to boil over once again. At an extraordinary meeting called at NATO's Brussels headquarters, the US ambassador and his French counterpart are heading for a slanging match over the proposed European defence force.

The Americans are alarmed that proposals in the EU constitution to establish such a force would undermine NATO by setting up separate -- and therefore rival -- EU military planning headquarters. In addition, by proposing that EU members would pledge to defend each other if attacked, the EU would duplicate NATO's own mutual defence guarantee.

The Prime Minister has tried to paper over the chasm by blandly stating that he would do nothing to undermine NATO, that he is America's best friend and that he would only support the EU defence force if it were complementary to NATO's capability. Well, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, he would say that, wouldn't he?

Once again, Tony Blair is trying to be all things to all people by occupying some notional centre ground. Once again, he is posing as the bridge between the US and Europe. But bridges get walked over.

The defence proposals and the constitution of which they are part represent a momentous and indeed calamitous development for our country. They are the final stage of the EU's transformation from a trading block into a superstate, aimed at rivalling the US itself. By signing up to the constitution, Britain will destroy the fundamentals of a nation state, surrendering -- amongst other things -- the power to enter into its own treaty alliances.

Mr Blair says he will defend the 'red line' issues of tax, foreign policy and defence. Since he has retreated on the vast majority of his previous red lines, this just isn't believable. And his protestations over the EU defence force similarly lack all credibility -- not least because, until recently, the government maintained there wasn't going to be a European army at all.

Now the US has realised Mr Blair has been playing them for suckers. Meanwhile, the French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin -- using, of all things, the Dimbleby lecture -- last night deepened Mr Blair's difficulties from the other side, saying there could be no European defence force without Britain.

You bet: without the British forces which are uniquely well-trained, experienced and willing to inflict and take casualties, the European defence capability from which all these qualities are conspicuously absent would be a joke. But the British would end up being trapped within a chocolate army.

The crunch has arrived. There can be no more fudging. We are faced with a clear choice between two rival power blocks, and two rival views of the world.

Ever since 9/11, Britain and Europe have been swept by a rampant anti-Americanism. Indeed, President Bush's itinerary on his imminent state visit to Britain is being truncated because of the likelihood of huge protests. Despite this popular animosity, however, it is clear that when the chips are down British interests lie not with Europe but with the world's one remaining superpower, America.

It is NATO that guarantees our security, as Mr Blair is all too aware. But a European standing army would obviously damage it. As the former British ambassador to NATO Sir John Weston has observed, there cannot be two separate multinational organisations with similar membership presiding over the same European military manpower, assets and budgets and each claiming the same responsibility for Europe's defence and security.

The push for a defence force arises from the delusion that Europe has one common identity and one common interest. But this is plainly not the case. Just look at Iraq. The French, up their necks in commercial contracts with Saddam's regime, secretly colluded with him to undermine the West. The Germans, burdened as ever by their history, adopted their customary ostrich position when it came to military action. The idea that British defence interests would be served in any way by being shackled to this lot is simply idiotic. The difference in priorities would merely result in deadlock and paralysis.

Nor is it the case that being part of the EU defence force would be the same as being part of NATO. There is all the difference in the world between being a member of a treaty alliance as a sovereign power, and being part of a structure that takes away our power to sign our own treaties and conduct our own self-defence.

This is precisely what the EU constitution would do to us. But Mr Blair cannot admit it, because while his head may belong with America, his soul belongs with Europe.

His overriding desire to be at its heart is blinding him to reality. He has ruled out a referendum on the constitution on the grounds that it would not alter Britain's relationship with the EU. This is mighty disingenuous: the constitution will alter the whole basis of the EU, by effectively tearing up all existing treaties and creating a wholly new legal entity.

This Frankenstein state will remove our powers of self-government. It explicitly makes this country's laws subject to European law, takes control over our defence and foreign policy, finance and economics, justice, health, energy and asylum policy, and will turn Parliament into Westminster regional council, with the Queen as no more than a theme-park figurehead.

As this paper said last week, the threat to our constitutional monarchy -- about which the Queen has signalled her alarm -- raises urgent questions about what the Queen can and should do to fulfil her role as the ultimate guardian of the nation.

The Prime Minister was reportedly warned by Sir Stephen Wall, his most senior adviser on Europe, that refusing to hold a referendum on the constitution would be 'untenable'. After a day of wobbling on the issue, he nevertheless finally ruled it out.

The reason is obvious. To accede to a referendum would be effectively to admit the case against the constitution. With the euro, by constructing the fiction that the issue was only about economics, he ensured that the argument was -- improperly -- restricted to the narrow economic issue on which there is clearly a legitimate debate to be had. But having claimed that a referendum on the EU constitution is inappropriate because it does not entail the dismantling of the nation, if he then agreed to hold such a referendum how could he possibly argue the case for the abolition of Britain?

The question this country now has to answer is this: which side are we on? Are we on the side of America, which for all its faults remains our best guarantee of liberty, security and the defence of the West? Or basket-case Europe, that crucible of seething hatreds and resentments, papered over by a self-serving oligarchy of unelected bureaucrats, lawyers and bankers who would subject us to sclerotic, undemocratic and corrupt control?

The answer is obvious -- except, it appears, to the Prime Minister.

Spectator, 18 October 2003

Tony is fighting Gordon while fending off Robin and Clare and trying to shaft Geoff while Jack beats him up about David. Iain is being knifed by Michael and Vanessa, egged on by MPs furious he hasn’t laid a glove on Tony and has made them vulnerable to Charlie, so that instead of Iain they would rather have Michael or Oliver or David or Tim or possibly the Central Office doorman, any of whom would achieve the instant rapport with the British voters that Iain so painfully lacks.

They all might as well not bother. The British voter couldn’t give a monkey’s. It’s obvious who’s going to win the next general election. The victor will almost certainly be the Abstention Party. As things stand, people are going to not vote in droves.

The public is profoundly, dangerously turned off from politics. They think all politicians are serial liars. They think all politicians are incompetent. They think the gladiatorial combat in Parliament is monumentally irrelevant because it takes place between factions of lying incompetents. So much is a given. And as far as it goes, much of this perception is true.

But it doesn’t go very far. Why do politicians lie? Why are they so disconnected from what ordinary people want from them? The reasons surely go much deeper. The explanation the public give for their intention not to vote is ‘They’re all the same’. They repeat this dirge like a cracked record because it is true. Politicians from opposing parties are far closer to each other than they would care to admit.

This convergence became significant after the collapse of socialist ideology. Tony Blair promptly ‘triangulated’ by welding Thatcherite economics onto Labour egalitarianism. The Tories cried foul and wrung their hands. Then they cried fraud. Now they just cry.

Both sides pretend there is a chasm between them. Labour say the Tories will privatise everything in sight and restrict choice to the rich while abandoning the poor to rubbish services. The problem is that this is what Labour is doing. The Tories say they will decentralise everything in sight, put central government in a box and hand power over public services to the people. The trouble is that Labour is talking the same language.

Whether or not it will put it into practice is irrelevant. To the public, these are devils dancing on the head of a pin. As a result, the more ferocious the parliamentary combat, the more ridiculous it seems and the more irritated and disconnected the public gets.

All parties offer impossible goals. Both Labour and the Tories promise lower taxes and higher public spending, while the Liberal Democrats promise heaven on earth – no tuition fees and well-funded universities. None tells the public that hard choices must be made. None dares admit that the EU is increasingly turning them all into political eunuchs.

Instead, having promised what they can’t possibly deliver, they find in office they have to conceal the fraud. That’s why they lie, through the whole farrago of spin, evasion and manipulated statistics. So the public turn their backs in disgust – and are promptly said to be ‘no longer interested in politics’. Not true. Politics is no longer interested in them.

People will only vote if they think it will make a difference. Politicians, however, hate difference because they think it loses them votes. They assume they have to treat the public as identikit consumers.

So they pander to rampant materialism and individualism. You want to have a baby as a 55 year-old single woman? No problem, we’ll give you IVF with no questions asked. You want the shops open whenever you feel like spending money? No problem, we’ll abolish the sabbath and give you Sunday opening. You want to get rid of Grandma because you find her mental and physical frailty distressing? No problem, we’ll give you the means to have her killed by starvation and dehydration through the Mental Incapacity Bill.

Politicians assume that people only want bread and circuses, or money and freedom. But their deepest concerns are over the quality of their lives.

The paradox is that the public are most passionate over those issues which most deeply divide us – moral, social and cultural – and from which politicians run a mile. People care deeply about threats to the well-being of their children, about their own ever more fragile emotional security, about the increasing difficulty of feeling they belong anywhere, about the calamitous drop in public civility, about the debasing images that confront them from every TV channel and advertising hoarding.

But all these issues and more are considered forbidden territory for politicians. For the umpteenth time, the Home Secretary made the right growling noises this week about anti-social behaviour. But the government refuses to tackle the issues behind it: the family breakdown, the drug culture, the truancy. Instead, its appeasement of the forces promoting such aberrations – its tacit encouragement of fractured family life, its ambiguous signals on ‘soft’ drugs, its dumbing-down of education into meaninglessness and vacuity -- merely fuels the antisocial fires.

Not that the Tories have been any better. True, Iain Duncan Smith deserves credit for speeches in which he has outlined an approach that explicitly challenges rampant individualism and tries to reassert the communal values that sustain a healthy society. But both he and the tiny band of believers promoting such ideas are widely scorned by the party’s morally challenged snobs for an agenda held to reflect narrow, under-educated minds out of touch with a changing society. If IDS is destroyed, this fledgling -- and still far too timid – ‘common good’ agenda will die with him.

If so, far from connecting with a changing society the party will become even more irrelevant to the concerns of those who might ever bother to vote. These people are very angry – that the fabric of their orderly world is being ripped apart, and that no politician has the bottle even to acknowledge it, let alone do anything about it.

So what would engage them? Well, how about their local environment, for a start – a challenge to the supermarkets which run small shops out of business and tear the heart out of communities. And if we’re talking planning, what about an attack on the municipal big-wigs who market their towns on the back of all-night clubs that act as drug factories for the local youth?

What about championing the rights of parents against the concerted attempt to subvert their children’s morality under the guise of sex education? Or promising to put duty and adult responsibility back at the heart of society by repealing the Human Rights Act and the Children Act? Or linking welfare to behaviour? Or reintroducing fault into divorce? Or putting a brake on genetic manipulation?

Yes, such proposals would create massive rows. Yes, they would be divisive. But they would also create passionate constituencies and a point to voting. By playing to the lowest common denominator of a consumer society, politicians have turned increasing numbers off voting altogether. Only by showing conspicuous courage in daring to be different can politicians break this cynical and despairing mould.

Daily Mail, 16 October 2003

Excuse me, there must be some mistake – I can’t have heard the name correctly.

Patricia Hewitt, the Trade and Industry Secretary, has said the government has undervalued women who stay at home to bring up their children instead of going out to work. Labour ministers had given the impression, she said, that stay-at-home mothers were worthless and that all women should get jobs. This had been a mistake.

Come again? This is Patricia Hewitt talking, the most ferociously feminist member of a government which, since its inception, has discriminated against mothers at home and spent billions in bribes to get them all out to work.

It must surely count as the most spectacular recantation since Archbishop Cranmer denied his belief in Protestantism.

This is the government, after all, whose Gender and Equality Unit said only four months ago that even mothers of young children should go out to work. They should take paid jobs, it declared, to help the economy and pay back the cost of their education. And it claimed there were 'real problems' over women who stayed at home to bring up their children.

Who is the minister responsible for this unit? Why, none other than Ms Hewitt. In her own foreword to this Orwellian diktat, she said women needed to increase their ‘economic participation’ in society. Now she would have us believe she regrets such sentiments.

What hooey. Ms Hewitt has form in this matter as long as your arm. In 1990, she was one of the authors – along with the Solicitor General Harriet Harman and the former Women’s Unit official Anna Coote – of a pamphlet entitled The Family Way.

This mounted a concerted attack on the stay-at-home mother and the breadwinner father, an arrangement it dismissed with contempt as entirely outdated. Women, it ordained, must not be economically dependent upon men since that meant men had power over them at home, were more likely to be violent and would stop women from leaving them.

It said mothers wanted and needed both to work and to care for their children. Fathers should accordingly do half the housework and should not contribute more than half the family’s income. What was essential to bring about this happy state of affairs was a huge progamme of state-sponsored child-care.

The Family Way was not only a manifesto for the destruction of the traditional family. It was also a blueprint for Labour government policy, which has followed its prescriptions almost to the letter.

Just as it suggested, the government has introduced a huge programme of child-care support. In addition to massive subsidies for child-care provision, the new tax credits give thousands of pounds to working mothers to spend on child care.

In addition, single-earner families are discriminated against by the tax system which, because partners are treated independently with each entitled to a tax allowance, leaves dual-earner families significantly better off.

Ms Hewitt claimed that the tax credit system had been changed to give more money to stay-at-home mothers. But this is highly disingenuous. Yes, such mothers get a few hundred pounds, but this pales into insignificance beside the thousands of pounds available for working mothers to spend on child- care. The signals could not be clearer.

It was not her job, said the Trade Secretary, to preach. But this is nothing less than an agenda to redefine motherhood and fatherhood, financially penalising traditional women of whom the government disapproves and rewarding instead mothers who have paid jobs.

Hatred of traditional family life dripped from every page of The Family Way. Now Ms Hewitt- who herself is twice-married – has said that ‘what makes people happiest is a good marriage, a good family life’. Yet in 1996, she informed us that marriage ‘no longer fitted’ in Britain.

Economic pressure was therefore employed to eliminate what Ms Hewitt saw as an outdated way of life that made women financially dependent on men. This tied in with Gordon Brown’s belief that the only route to salvation was through paid work. The Treasury thus became the instrument of ultra-feminist ideology.

The government has repeatedly claimed that all mothers want to work. But this is very far from the truth. A survey this week showed that only one per cent of mothers would choose to work full-time after having children, and only one third would be happy to work part-time. Most said that being away from their children so much in their early years would make them so anxious and guilty they would rather be a full-time mother.

This is hardly a new finding. Survey after survey has shown that the majority of working mothers take jobs not from choice but out of financial necessity. Even ministers discovered this in a consultation exercise in 1999, when women told them in no uncertain terms that the government did not value stay-at-home mothers. Yet it has resolutely overriden what women actually want, intent instead on forcing a shift in work patterns and the shape of family life.

Ms Hewitt’s decision to don her hair-shirt and ritually abase the government’s record is hardly a genuine conversion. It is much more likely to be part of the Prime Minister’s attempt to repair the damage done to his government’s image among dangerously disillusioned voters.

Tony Blair knows he was brought to power by the decent, responsible, orderly classes, who believed he had given them a commitment to protect their security, well-being and way of life. It is these people whose trust and patience he has squandered, and whose anger he must assuage.

Hence this week’s loudly-trumpeted initiative on anti-social behaviour; and hence, undoubtedly, the ever-pliant Ms Hewitt’s nostra culpa.

But this is just yet more spin. These words are not matched by equivalent deeds. There are no new policies, nor any change in policy.

Indeed, the announcement on anti-social behaviour was mainly notable for the complaint by both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary that all their myriad policies to tackle this scourge were being ignored. There was no recognition that without a much more radical approach – getting rid of the Human Rights Act and the Children Act, for example, or tackling family disintegration – their impact on anti-social behaviour would remain minimal.

As for mothers and work, nothing is changing. The incentives to work and the disincentives to staying at home remain in place. If Ms Hewitt’s remarks were sincere, they would usher in a policy to give women real choice about working. That would mean a tax and benefits system that created a level playing field between women who stayed at home and those in paid jobs.

The fact is that her emollient words were an object lesson in cynicism -- in character with someone who has ruthlessly re-invented herself from being Neil Kinnock’s loyal aide to becoming the impeccably Blairite Cabinet minister.

Ms Hewitt says she wishes now she had spent more time with her children when they were small. She thus poses as on the same side as stay-at-home mothers. It is about as believable as Lucrezia Borgia expressing regret for the people she had poisoned, and announcing she wished she’d taken up knitting instead.

Daily Mail, 16 October 2003

A hundred years ago, one of the most extraordinary and controversial women ever to have emerged in British public life launched a violent crusade to transform the sexual and political landscape.

Egged on by her daughter Christabel, on October 10 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst summoned a group of women to her house in Manchester to form the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant wing of the female suffrage movement.

With her motto ‘Deeds, not words’, Mrs Pankhurst decided that the way to jolt into life the near-moribund campaign to obtain the parliamentary vote for women was to stage militant spectaculars—such as harrassing politicians and causing a public nuisance -- to seize popular attention.

It was Christabel, however, who pushed this approach further. Edwardian England was a society where women were regarded as delicate and protected creatures. Realising the enormous propaganda value from images of respectable women becoming victims of male brutality, Christabel masterminded a strategy of violent illegality whose aim was to get women sent to jail and thus turn them into martyrs.

Public emotion was manipulated still further when the jailed suffragettes went on hunger strike, thus trapping the government into ordering them to be forcibly fed – a procedure so brutal and disturbing, and requiring such heroism from the jailed women, that popular feeling was inflamed and women flocked in droves to the suffrage cause.

In the decade after the WSPU was founded, the suffragettes dreamed up countless violent and exhibitionist stunts. Burning rags were stuffed into letterboxes, chairs flung into the Serpentine, and envelopes containing red pepper and snuff sent to every Cabinet minister.

The Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was an implacable foe. As the government repeatedly stalled all attempts to push female suffrage through Parliament, the violence intensified. Windows and street lamps were smashed, golf greens burned with acid, and bombs were placed near the Bank of England.

A package containing sulphuric acid was sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and burst into flames when opened. An axe was thrown at the Prime Minister; he was attacked in his car by a suffragette with a dog whip; other militants tried to tear off his clothes on a golf links in Scotland, but were beaten off by his daughter.

Although they were careful to avoid actually killing anyone, Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel were in effect sexual terrorists, using violence to browbeat the government, provoke a disproportionate reaction and thus manipulate public feeling into support for their cause.

Part of their devastating effect was that they were ultra-feminine, fashionable, society women. Mrs Pankhurst used her beauty, charm and graciousness to move audiences with her eloquence; Christabel was a dazzling pin-up and devastating platform speaker.

The whole Pankhurst family was embroiled in the battle for votes for women. Emmeline’s husband, Dr Richard Pankhurst, had drafted the very first women’s suffrage bill in 1870. Their children’s interests took second place to the cause. Indeed, the emotional abandonment and jealousies of the siblings, vying desperately for their mother’s attention, was to play itself out in vicious family splits over the suffrage.

Christabel was always Emmeline’s favourite. The second daughter Sylvia, intensely jealous, formed a rival socialist suffrage organisation in London’s East End and fought bitterly with her mother and sister over their ‘elitist’ approach. The youngest daughter, Adela, was packed off to Australia by her mother to prevent her from joining forces with Sylvia.

Among the wider suffragette family, however, Mrs Pankhurst was worshipped as superhuman and flawless. But she and Christabel were also deeply divisive. They ran the WSPU as autocrats; indeed, Mrs Pankhurst viewed it as her private army and assumed this entitled her to act like a despot.

The result was that in 1907 the WSPU split, as even militant women became sickened by the Pankhursts’ extreme authoritarianism and emotional exploitation. As the dissidents’ leader Teresa Billington-Greig observed: ‘If we are fighting against the subjection of woman to man, we cannot honestly submit to the subjection of woman to woman’.

When it bcame clear that their extreme militancy was actually losing them public support, Christabel used one final throw of her manipulative dice. Playing on widespread alarm about ‘white slavery’ -- the abuse of young girls as prostitutes -- she wrote a series of articles about ‘the great scourge’ of venereal disease, which she claimed had infected most of the male population.

Men were thus presented as a source of sexual poison. Extreme militancy, claimed Mrs Pankhurst, was justified as a ‘surgical operation’ to cleanse society of this menace.

Controversy has always raged over whether the militant suffragettes actually helped or hindered the cause. In fact, there’s probably some truth in both views.

There is no doubt that before Mrs Pankhurst came on the scene, the issue of votes for women had hit the political buffers. Although Millicent Fawcett, leader of the constitutional campaign which had steadily changed public opinion, distanced herself from the WSPU’s violence, she nevertheless acknowledged that militancy was a powerful recruiting sergeant for the cause.

On the other hand, the violence repelled many who had previously been sympathetic. In the event, what broke the deadlock and gave women the vote was the First World War, during which time women impressed everyone -- including the government -- when they performed for the war effort numerous jobs which previously had been the preserve of men.

But what would Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel have made of women today? Doubtless they would be delighted that women now take for granted equality in politics, education, work and every avenue of life. In Mrs Thatcher, they would probably have recognised a soul sister – although both Pankhursts would undoubtedly have been convinced that Christabel should have been the first British woman Prime Minister.

But there is surely also much that would dismay them. For central to their cause was their perception that women’s behaviour was morally superior to men’s. Indeed, the whole point of getting the vote was to enable women to use this superiority to curb male sexual excess, civilise public life and elevate the whole of the human race onto a higher sphere of existence.

They would surely be aghast to discover, therefore, that female equality is now interpreted as ‘identicality’, with women believing it is their right to be as sexually promiscuous, hard-drinking and foul-mouthed as men.

Christabel, in particular, would have taken an exceedingly dim view. For after the war, she became a fundamentalist Christian and campaigner against modern degeneracy and indecent literature.

She would therefore have found herself in the opposite camp to modern ultra-feminists -- with one exception. For along with their pursuit of ‘identicality’ is the simultaneous assumption that women are superior to men, characterised by the ultras as incorrigible wife beaters, child abusers and rapists. With these prejudices, Christabel would have felt entirely at home.

Mrs Pankhurst, meanwhile, died -- it is said -- after the shock of learning that Sylvia had become an unmarried mother. Today, she may merely have shrugged. Whether that also shows the upward progress of women is quite another matter.

Daily Mail, 13 October 2003

The most astonishing thing about the revelation of our sordid and debauched football culture is that anyone is astonished.

Worshippers of the football cult are apparently shocked by the degradation of their so-called ‘beautiful game’. The nation is shocked by the stories of casual group sex between players and young female fans, who volunteer for ‘roasting’ – the euphemism for the charming boast of ‘stuffing a girl like a chicken’.

The girls themselves are shocked to discover that, after they have swanned around half-naked, flashed their underwear and behaved in other sexually provocative ways, the men to whom they have sent these signals of eager availability proceed to take them literally.

But how can anyone be remotely surprised by any of this? Such behaviour and attitudes are on display every day of the week – evidence of a society which worships celebrity and money, no longer understands that actions have consequences, and has turned self-restraint into an abuse of human rights.

Football – far from being beautiful – has become a symbol of our corrupted, debased and unruly ‘me’ society. Over the years, players have indulged in appalling behaviour both on and off the pitch – ill-discipline (like the half-time fracas in Saturday’s match with Turkey), drunkenness, violence, drug abuse, anti-social behaviour in the street. Their fans have behaved accordingly – violent, racist, yobbish.

The healthy response would have been to shun such players and marginalise the game as an embarrassing disgrace. But instead the players were lionised, their fame, wealth and public adulation grew and grew, and the game itself talked up as a national obsession.

Tomorrow, the Prime Minister is expected to announce a new push against antisocial behaviour to curb drunkenness, intimidation and rowdiness. Such behaviour has developed into a plague because it has been treated with indifference, and will only be curbed by tough responses.

In similar vein, football clubs should ban their rowdy, drunken, violent players. Yet they receive only light penalties for misbehaviour -- because the money they generate is the only thing that matters to club owners. More cynically still, bad behaviour makes players even more famous and so more valuable.

So the money cascades in and the players’ celebrity status grows to fever pitch. Their lives are minutely dissected, their vast mansions are drooled over, their every banal utterance is breathlessly transcribed and they become global icons, bigger even than movie stars.

Their heads are further turned by the girls queuing up to go to bed with them. No-one can say what happened at the London hotel where a teenager claims she was raped and serially assaulted by Premiership players, or in the separate case involving claims of assault involving two Leeds players and a 20 year-old girl.

Nevertheless, the behaviour of the girls who now swarm around footballers is not only appalling but sends out the most dangerous set of signals possible.

With their micro skirts, flaunted underwear and skimpy tops leaving little to the imagination, they dress like hookers in order effectively to prostitute themselves. They offer themselves for casual sex with men whom they meet solely for that purpose, because a one-night stand with a celebrity footballer is something to brag about.

Even worse, a one-night stand with a whole team of them is an even greater conquest. So girls are apparently queuing up to be shared around between football stars.

Of course, the behaviour of the players themselves in going along with this is utterly sordid and repugnant. Of course, it is possible that things can get out of hand, leading to an actual assault. But such sexually aggressive behaviour by girls sends out -- at the very least -- a set of ambiguous and confusing signals.

If they offer themselves for casual or even group sex, they can hardly be surprised when men treat them like sluts. This does not excuse sexual violence. But it’s a bit like a woman being mugged if she has left her handbag wide open and her purse and mobile phone on clear display. This doesn’t mitigate the seriousness of the crime -- but the victim must bear some responsibility for recklessly inviting it.

These girls’ behaviour is even more reckless because their sexual availability sends such a devastating message. This is that they don’t regard sex as having any more significance than a pleasurable sport, and have no regard for their own bodies which they are happy to make available to a complete stranger for his pleasure. Since girls thus patently regard themselves as no more than a piece of meat, it is hardly surprising that men contemptuously treat them as a ‘stuffed chicken’.

But why is anyone surprised by such a debasement of human dignity? One only has to look at the tawdry scenes in Ayia Napa, or in our town centres on a Saturday night. In our sick society, sex sells everything, including – disgustingly -- thongs for small children.

Our culture has lost all sense of modesty, shame or personal respect. It has become instead vicious and voyeuristic. Pornography, violence, cruelty and humiliation are now mass prime-time entertainment. Bad behaviour is routinely celebrated on TV, and is a passport to fame and money.

Sex is held to have no deeper value than as a means of instant gratification. Continence is so last century; group sex parties and partner-swapping are now relationship chic. Privacy is out; sex is now public entertainment. Hence the rescheduling to a prime-time TV slot this week of Teen Big Brother, a so-called ‘educational’ programme which just happens to feature an actual sex act – another historic achievement for humanity by Channel Four.

Much of this sexual promiscuity is being driven by family disintegration, which for girls creates in particular feelings of sexual worthlessness and disrespect for the body.

It is the combination of such tragic personal frailties with the feminist doctrine that equality requires female sexual aggressiveness that has completely destroyed accepted codes of behaviour between men and women. For women have always controlled sexual relations. When they withheld sexual favours, they tamed and civilised male sexuality.

But now girls are sexually available, they have effectively given boys a licence to be irresponsible and even loutish. Boys who happily use them for sex say – like their football heroes -- that they regard them nevertheless as slags.

With women having torn up their sexual and moral rule book, men have done exactly the same. Far from liberating women, the sexual free-for-all has inflicted upon them humiliation, self-abasement and contempt.

To those who promoted the sexual revolution, however, casual sex is a badge of freedom. They depict anyone who dares suggest that this should be discouraged and sexual restraint promoted instead as some kind of fascist.

Having preached that women must behave as badly as men, however, they must take some blame for the catastrophic collapse of respect for women by men. Football, as a game for barbarians, is merely the technicolour version.

By reacting in such horror to the football scandals, our society is behaving like Shakespeare’s Caliban, the deformed monster who, when he finally looked in a mirror, could not bear the sight of his own reflection.

Daily Mail, 6 October 2003

The Tories have started their party conference in the manner of actors striking a set of stirring poses while behind the scenes the props are disintegrating, the script is being constantly rewritten and the whole company is trying to throw the director out of the stage door.

The persistent failure by Iain Duncan Smith to lay a glove on the government, even when its own reputation has nose-dived, has promoted a climate of seething mutiny.

While the party in the country is quietly getting on with the business of making itself more relevant – as with the selection of a black candidate in hitherto exclusive Windsor -- Tory backbenchers are falling over themselves to be disloyal to the leader who has promoted just such a shift.

Now, his enemies have tried smear tactics to engineer a palace coup. An unscreened BBC TV item has reportedly made claims of impropriety about Mr Duncan Smith’s employment of his wife as his secretary. No evidence has emerged that this was in any way irregular. Indeed, many politicians of all parties do exactly the same. The significance of the charge lies rather in the fact that there are people in the party prepared to use such a smear to lever their leader out.

The party’s problem, however, is far more severe than impatience over its leader’s failure to go for the jugular. It has been laid bare by the split over tax. Mr Duncan Smith says the Tories will cut taxes. But his Treasury spokesman, Michael Howard, is reportedly furious since he says this can only be an aspiration, no doubt aware of the damage if the Tories are thought to be preparing to take an axe to the public services.

If the Tories can’t even agree on whether they are a tax-cutting party or not, how can they expect to be taken seriously? Their programme simply isn’t coherent.

This week, they promise to unveil a series of specific policy proposals. Some have huge potential merit and popular appeal, such as the expected announcement of a move towards a voucher system for schools, or the increase in state pensions by restoring the earnings link.

Such policies could be vote-winners – if they were presented with conviction and consistency. Mr Duncan Smith is pilloried for his deficiencies in this department. But the Tories are very mistaken if they think that his departure would solve their problems. For a start, who would replace him? Every alternative candidate would divide the party.

And the party’s plight goes far deeper than personalities. The Tories are suffering from two basic problems: their intellectual incoherence, and the fact that voters think they are out of touch.

People are simply bewildered by what the party is saying, because it no longer know what it stands for. This problem developed after the Soviet Union imploded, since the fight against socialism had given the Tories purpose for almost a century and masked the party’s permanent internal divisions.

Tony Blair responded to the collapse of socialism by inventing New Labour. This paralysed the Tories from the start, since they mistook Mr Blair’s conservative rhetoric for the real thing and concluded they had been left without a cause.

Still mesmerised by the Prime Minister, they were further traumatised last week when he saw off the threat from Gordon Brown by adopting Mrs Thatcher’s ‘not for turning’ tactic. As a result, the poor boobies think he really is Mrs Thatcher. No wonder they’re in such a state.

Attacking him as a liar rebounds badly, since it merely reminds people that they think all politicians are liars. In desperation, the Tories are now falling back on tax cuts. But this will also rebound, since it reinforces the impression that the Tories are the party of the better-off – deepening the widespread perception that they are out of touch with ordinary concerns.

Yes, of course people need to be freed from increasing state control. But independent-minded Britain also has a deep belief that we all have some responsibility for each other – a sense of the common good.

So rather than individual freedom, the message should surely be social solidarity – the need for the nation to pull together and look after the interests of all its citizens.

That would mean attacking Labour for ruining social cohesion by promoting family breakdown (yes, the Tories have got to tackle this head on), giving disastrous signals to young people on drugs, and destroying education standards.

It means standing up for nation and culture, through a principled critique of illegal immigration on behalf of Britons of all colours and creeds, along with an onslaught against the government’s supine surrender over the EU constitution.

It means promoting a welfare society instead of a welfare state, with the encouragement of mutual assistance in health and social services. It means explaining the significance of vouchers as a means of using taxpayers’ money to empower the poor and disenfranchised by giving them control over the way it is spent.

Only by emphasising such collective elements in their proposals will the Tories begin to break down the view that they are disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people.

But even that is not enough. The other reason they are seen as out of touch is not -- as the party’s libertines absurdly suggest -- because their front bench isn’t heaving with cohabiting, cocaine-snorting, gay feminist transsexuals.

It is rather because they are seen as representing upper-class professionals or well-off business people – the employer class --whereas most of the population are employees, and increasingly public sector workers to boot.

Tony Blair – the public school and Oxford-educated barrister – had exactly the same problem. People may squirm at his patronising glottal stops. But by carefully allowing himself to be seen in the uniform of the ordinary person (jeans, open necked shirt), carrying the defining symbol of the ordinary person (mug of tea), and talking about the things that matter most to the ordinary person (his children) he managed to persuade people that he was an ordinary person.

Now the ex-army officer running the Tories has to do the same. He has to get personal. He has to stop being a stuffed suit on a podium and connect, visibly and tangibly, to ordinary concerns. He has to talk sympathetically about people’s worries and aspirations, showing from his experience how he personally shares them. And he has to present his policies in terms of real people – not just the poor, but crucially the middle classes whose votes he has actually lost -- and the impact these policies will have on their lives.

The Tories are the party that has always defined itself by defending the country against a threat. They’ve seen off their opponents on economics. But the big threat now is from social, moral and cultural breakdown, promoted so assiduously by New Labour.

If Mr Duncan Smith transforms his approach so that he articulates this with passion and conviction, and in a personal and accessible way, he will inject coherence for the first time into his party’s policies and provide the ammunition for the powerful challenge to the government which our democracy so badly needs.

Simple, really.

Jewish Chronicle, 3 October 2003

One of the most widespread and disturbing assumptions of our age is that if people suffer from any disadvantage, privation or adversity, they must by definition be victims of someone else. Well, sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren’t. Bad experiences happen to people for many reasons, not least that they may have brought such hardships upon themselves.

One of the most widespread and disturbing assumptions of our age is that if people suffer from any disadvantage, privation or adversity, they must by definition be victims of someone else. Well, sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren’t. Bad experiences happen to people for many reasons, not least that they may have brought such hardships upon themselves.

The assumption of victimhood effectively denies personal responsibility for one’s actions. The result is an ugly, dishonest and manipulative victim culture, in which any group that feels aggrieved can pose as victims, while real victims -- sometimes their own -- either go ignored or find themselves accused of being victimisers, in a pernicious moral inversion.

Just such a victim culture appears to be under creation in Germany. Its president, Johannes Rau, has not only accused Britain and the Allies of forcing the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945, when former German territories were handed to neighbours in the post-war reconstruction of Europe but has also likened the plight of those Germans -- the Vertriebenen -- to the suffering of the Jews, and said their experiences were part of a ‘historic constellation’ that included the Holocaust.

President Rau’s outburst follows controversy over a German proposal to build a memorial to the Vertriebenen in Berlin right next to the Holocaust memorial now under construction. This has provoked protests by Poles and Czechs, who, mindful of the suffering of their populations under Nazi rule, say this risks casting the executioner in the role of victim.

Of course, it is a truism that wars create casualties am-ong civilian populations. Of course, there is often rough justice in the aftermath of war. And, of course, on an individual level, not all Germans were guilty of wrongdoing. But they did elect a government that attempted genocide and world domination, and which did invade Poland and Czechoslovakia. True, Britain’s policy of appeasement under Neville Chamberlain was shameful. But to suggest, as did President Rau, this means Britain should share responsibility for Nazi atrocities, is preposterous. And to equate the plight of displaced Germans with the suffering of Jews murdered by their regime is grotesque.

This is, of course, but the latest example of German historical revisionism, a process in which certain historians have systematically tried to present the German people as victims of the Nazis, no less than the people they persecuted. This attempt to impose moral equivalence is to deny the significance of the Holocaust and gradually erase German responsibility.

This despicable process is obviously rooted in a particular historical experience. Victim culture, however, is a more pervasive Western phenomenon. This is largely be-cause of the West’s worship of the individual, which has bestowed upon people’s subjective views the power to trump every other consideration. As a result, self-definition has become an incontestable right. So groups defining themselves as victims, however specious the claim, are able to exert moral blackmail upon everyone else in order to insist that their ‘rights’ must take precedence.

Onto this cult of subjectivity the ideological left has spatchcocked its own belief that the capitalist West is always the oppressor, and the developing world always its victim. As a result, the West can never be a victim, while the Third World can do no wrong, even if it engages in acts of terror against the West.

This lethal combination has resulted in two consequences of huge significance for Jews. The first is that Jews can never be afforded the status of victims, since as all leftists know, they invented Western capitalism and are therefore by definition the oppressor class. So any attempt at self-defence by Jews is re-classified automatically as aggression. Hence the vilification of Israel.

The second is that the story the Palestinians have told -- that they are the victims of Jewish oppression (and indeed, that the Jews have become the Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews), so that Arab terror is simply legitimate self-defence -- has been unquestioningly swallowed in Britain and Europe. Of course, not all Palestinians support terror. And of course they are indeed victims, not of the Jews but of the Arab despotisms which refused them a state of their own and then kept them in squalor as pawns in the attempt to destroy Israel.

This, though, is not acknowledged by Britain and Europe. As a result, the calumny that there is a global Jewish conspiracy against the Arab and Muslim world -- in the face of which terrorism is justified, or understandable -- has effectively been endorsed by Britain and Europe.

This is why the Palestinian cause has become radical chic, the acme of victim culture, not only provoking widespread support in Britain but now, in addition, finding a disturbing echo in Germany's own attempt to deny responsibility for its past.

Daily Mail, 2 October 2003

An eminent Danish psychologist has provoked a furore by saying poor women should be paid to stop having children, in order to increase the proportion of intelligent people in the population.

Professor Helmuth Nyborg, dean of the Psychology Institute at Aarhus university, says he is worried that highly educated women are choosing to delay having children while less educated women are having many more.

Since he believes that intelligence is hereditary, he thinks women at the bottom of society should be actively dissuaded from reproducing, while the workload of intelligent women should be reduced to encourage them to have bigger families.

Professor Nyborg has raised the spectre of eugenics, the doctrine which advocates selective breeding so that undesirable hereditary characteristics are eventually eradicated from the population.

This repugnant doctrine, which tears up the belief that every human being has intrinsic worth, was discredited after Hitler’s agenda of racial ‘purification’ led to the Holocaust. Indeed, the notion that biology determined people’s personalities came to be regarded with intense suspicion for the same reason.

So the assumption that intelligence was hereditary, which had been around since early in the 20th century, became widely frowned upon. However, it erupted once more into the forefront of debate in 1994 with the publication of The Bell Curve, a book by the American researchers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. This caused uproar by arguing that intelligent people generally behaved well while unintelligent people behaved badly, and that some ethnic groups were less intelligent than others.

The Bell Curve’s statistics were widely condemned as deeply flawed. Now, however, Professor Nyborg has taken its core argument a stage further. But as other Danish experts have pointed out, his fundamental assumption is false.

Yes, there is a genetic component to intelligence -- but it is only one component. The idea that intelligence is fixed, and so impervious to any outside influence, is wrong. It can be enhanced or diminished by a host of factors, such as adequate nutrition, education, or family circumstances.

In other words, while an element of intelligence is passed on biologically from parents to children, other elements are not. So if surrounding circumstances are favourable, the children of poor parents – who themselves may or may not be intelligent -- can become highly educated.

Indeed, there are many, many examples of bright people who come from the lowest social classes (not to mention stupid people from the upper classes). That’s why the low expectations of so many schools in poor areas are such a scandal, precisely because good schooling can make all the difference in raising children out of the disadvantage of their backgrounds.

So it follows, therefore, that even if unintelligent women were to stop having children, this would not reduce the proportion of unintelligent people in the population; on the contrary, it might prevent as many potentially intelligent children from being born.

Some might find it strange that such a distasteful suggestion, with its historical connection to Hitler’s extermination policies, should have surfaced in Denmark, one of the most progressive societies in the world. In fact, the left-wing Scandinavian countries were enthusiasts for eugenics well into the last century, because the doctrine was associated principally with the progressive intelligentsia who believed in the perfectability of mankind.

Invented in Britain in the late 19th century, it was a dominant creed among ‘enlightened’ Victorians who assumed that social improvement depended upon breeding out undesirable racial or social characteristics so that only the fittest should survive.

Transported to the U.S., these eugenic doctrines were widely promoted by the American elite, so that by the Twenties thousands of people regarded as having low intelligence were being forcibly sterilised and many more institutionalised or denied the right to marry. It was the American eugenists who invented the notion of the superiority of the Nordic ‘Aryan’ race, and it was their ideas which Hitler eagerly absorbed and transformed into his extermination programmes.

Professor Nyborg claims that ‘Hitler didn’t believe in eugenics’, wanting instead to exterminate individual groups. But this is simply untrue. Heavily influenced by the American eugenists, Hitler started sterilising people with congenital illness in 1934 and then murdered tens of thousands of mentally and physically handicapped people -- quite apart from his extermination programmes against the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others he deemed unworthy of existence.

Professor Nyborg may well recoil from such an association, but his remarks are nevertheless in line with that whole way of thinking which so catastrophically disfigured the last century, and in which so many ‘enlightened’ people were implicated.

Indeed they still are, since the ’planned parenthood’ movements -- whose UN sponsored third world birth control programmes and promotion of women’s contraceptive and abortion ‘rights’ in the west are a touchstone for modern progressives -- sprang from precisely the same eugenist thinkers in Britain and America.

It is, however, these women’s rights which actually lie at the heart of Professor Nyborg’s concerns. As he says, educated women are having fewer children. That surely is the real problem, because it is causing countries across the developed world to experience a drop in the birthrate of advantaged babies.

The real crisis facing western countries, however, is not a deficit in the national stock of intelligence. It is a widespread breakdown in norms of behaviour. Professor Nyborg talks about mothers at the bottom of the social heap who ‘are not able to manage even the simplest tasks’. This is indeed one of our gravest problems.

The solution, though, is not to stop the poor having children but to alter patterns of behaviour – patterns which have been so disastrously promoted by those very educated people whom Professor Nyborg extols.

For it is the intelligentsia which has promoted the idea that all types of family are as good as each other, that no stigma should be attached to unwed parenthood or that cohabitation is as good for children as marriage. The result is family disintegration which hurts everyone, but does the most catastrophic harm to those lowest social classes where the consequent emotional havoc produces the breakdown in behaviour that Professor Nyborg identifies.

Indeed, it is family disintegration which fuels the educational under-achievement or outright failure which leaves so many children from the lowest social classes unable to develop their intelligence.

At the same time, there is something particularly offensive about Professor Nyborg’s equation of intelligence with moral worth. One does not have to be intelligent to be an upstanding human being. There are plenty of people who are not particularly bright but who are a lot more decent, and make a far better fist of bringing up their children, than others who have a lot of brain power but are somewhat deficient in the personal responsibility department.

The educated classes make a fetish of intelligence. This leads some of them to advocate a draconian approach towards those they think don’t possess it. The result is that they single out the poor for punishment while neatly avoiding facing up to the need to tackle irresponsible behaviour, including their own.

It’s not intelligence that matters. It’s behaviour, stupid!

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