Jewish Chronicle, 28 November 2003

Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has compared Tony Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Hitler, he said, also claimed to be protecting the rights of an indigenous population.

By this remarkable comparison Cook demonstrates that he apparently cannot tell the difference between an act of self-defence (whether one thought the invasion of Iraq well-advised or not) and an act of wanton expansionist aggression. Once again, we see the extraordinary moral confusion now prevalent in this country, so evident in the representation of Israel’s attempts to defend itself as aggression.

Yes, Czechoslovakia should now be on our minds, but surely we should draw a very different conclusion. The British belief that if Hitler grabbed Czechoslovakia he would not have turned upon Britain typified the appeasement culture of the 1930s. The parallel with today is indeed striking. For Britain and Europe are currently gripped by a very similar mood of appeasement.

If only Israel would allow a Palestinian state to be established, goes the thinking, the Islamist jihad would just go away. The slightest criticism of the Muslim community provokes outrage – as the Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane found when he commented, in the wake of the discovery of a Sheffield boy who had turned himself into a human bomb in Iraq, that British Muslims had to show more clearly that they upheld democracy against terrorism. And the EU has suppressed a report on antisemitism because it found that many such incidents were carried out by Muslim or pro-Palestinian groups, and so there were fears the report might increase hostility towards Muslims. This is appeasement gone barking mad.

In Islam, the servility that flows from appeasement is a well-established weapon in the cause of jihad. The Bali bomber Amroz shouted at his trial: ‘Jews, remember Khaibar. The army of Mohamed is coming back to defeat you’. The Arabian desert oasis of Khaibar was where, in 628, the Arabs who conquered the Jews made it a condition of their surrender that they could return to farm their lands as tenants if they ceded half their harvest, before they were ethnically cleansed from the region -- along with the Christians -- in 640. Khaibar became the milestone in the creation of the Islamic status of ‘dhimmi’, the condition of subjugation and humiliation in which Muslim conquerors permit certain ‘infidel’ enemies to live.

This condition of ‘dhimmitude’ produces a cast of mind in which the desire to appease a tyranny rather than fight it is uppermost. And despite the war on terror, we can see ‘dhimmitude’ in the extraordinary refusal to acknowledge the real nature and scale of the Islamic jihad.

People are almost entirely ignorant, for example, of the worldwide Muslim persecution of Christians that is taking place. In country after country, Christians are being harassed, attacked and killed. In the last week, Muslims burned down 13 churches in Nigeria, killed four Christians in Indonesia and set fire to and looted Christian homes in Egypt.

Why do people not know about all this? Certainly, the media barely report it. But more important still, there is also a stunning silence from Tony Blair, President Bush and the Church itself.

Since 9/11, the line from Blair and Bush is that Islam is not the problem: merely a lunatic fringe is responsible for global terror. It is certainly true that the jihad does not represent Muslims generally. Indeed, thousands of Muslims themselves face harassment, intimidation and death at the hands of the jihadists, who have reformist Muslims in their murderous sights along with Christians, Jews, Hindus and secularists. But equally, the jihad cannot be merely a fringe movement when the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed received a standing ovation and no dissent from more than 50 Islamic states for his disgusting remarks alleging a Jewish world domination by proxy.

Yet the truly global aspirations of the jihad and its systematic persecution of Christians, Hindus and reformist Muslims are never mentioned by Blair and Bush. Nor do they ever mention the torrent of demented Jew-hatred pouring out of the Arab world which provides limitless incitement for terror. Doubtless, their silence is caused by fear – fear of the reaction by the domestic Muslim population, fear of jeopardising commercial interests in the Arab world, and fear of provoking further anti-western animosity.

Their silence is echoed even more astonishingly by the church itself. On the worldwide persecution of its flock, it is mute. It believes it can stave off even worse through ‘reconciliation’. But by its truly shameful failure to speak out and fight back, the church is abandoning and betraying its own people.

And the result of this ‘dhimmitude’ is that the population in general remains ignorant of what we are all up against – a war declared upon the civilised world, which has yet to wake up to its own predicament.

Daily Mail, 26 November 2003

Today’s Queen’s Speech is expected to include a proposal to give gay partners the same ‘rights’ as married people. The argument is based on equality. Since gay people are just as capable as heterosexuals of forming permanent, loving relationships, it is said to be discriminatory and even cruel to deny them the same benefits as those enjoyed by married couples, such as inheritance tax exemptions or pension rights.

But this is not actually about discrimination at all. It is not about equal rights. Its effects will not stop at gay people. It is rather the latest lethal offensive in the campaign to destroy the whole concept of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour bound by a set of recognised rules and thus undermine marriage, the fundamental bulwark of our society.

Indeed, we can already see clear evidence of this in the government’s intention, on implementing this new law, to remove marriage from all official forms. At a stroke, marriage will quite simply be obliterated from official life. From being a privileged institution on account of its fundamental role in creating social stability, marriage will now pass into a kind of bureaucratic purgatory, deliberately marginalised as a private arrangement of no great consequence. This is little short of a declaration of war on the institution that remains of the greatest significance to the vast majority of people in this country.

The ostensible reason is to prevent discrimination on grounds of sexuality. But this whole premise is fundamentally wrong. There is no discrimination, because married couples don’t have ‘rights’. The state rather gives them privileges in recognition of the specialness of marriage. Indeed, this is the only sexual relationship in which the state properly has any interest at all.

This is because marriage is not a love affair. It is an institution which hedges a sexual union between a man and a woman with a dense network of law, custom, privileges, pressures, tradition and ritual, because that union is the crucible of human identity which needs special protection.

That identity is created solely by the union of man and woman; only that union creates the blood relationship; marriage solemnises and sanctifies that union for that reason; and the state has an interest in giving marriage special privileges because if personal identity becomes damaged (as it so often does in fragmented or dismembered families) the social consequences can be appalling.

To give such benefits to non-married people is to hollow out marriage. It takes privileges that flow from the most solemn promise that can be made and distributes them regardless of the absence of any promise at all.

It is, indeed, no more than a rip-off charter. It would not only allow promiscuous gays to take advantage of the benefits while remaining in legal partnerships; by not even requiring a gay relationship to be consummated in order to qualify, it opens the way for friends to declare themselves in civil partnerships in order to grab the benefits on offer.

In other words, it will usher in a free-for-all that makes a mockery of law, morality and basic social values. How can any responsible government even contemplate such a nihilistic piece of social vandalism?

Some might say that since only a few people are involved, surely it is only compassionate to recognise that they crave the same things in life – loving companionship, stability and security – as heterosexuals. Indeed, there are certainly grounds for compassion (although many of these needs can already be met through private legal arrangements).

But if society is damaged, this argument becomes no more than sloppy sentimentality. Marriage, which provides the glue that holds society together, has long been under assault from our culture of hedonistic individualism. It is most threatened by irregular heterosexual behaviour, notably the rise of cohabitation which, through its inherent instability, is now the main driver behind the inexorable and terrifying increase in unstable families and fatherless children.

Despite being ostensibly reserved for gays, civil partnership rights will create an unstoppable momentum for extending them to heterosexual cohabiting partners. In addition, is it not equally unfair that two devoted sisters, for example, who may have lived with each other for decades, should be excluded from this ‘rights’ free-for-all? Or polygamous people? Or members of communes? And once heterosexual partners are given these privileges, marriage – already consigned to official limbo – will become even more stripped of meaning.

Gay partnerships, in short, are a means of destroying monogamous heterosexual marriage as our prime social and legal institution. That is, indeed, what the more honest advocates of gay rights acknowledge, in order to remove – they think – the stigma accompanying sexual behaviour that is not considered the norm. Since homosexuality is not the norm, it follows that the heterosexual norm has to be destroyed. The whole gay rights agenda is therefore a direct, outright attack on heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

But if that goes down the pan, then eventually so too will personal autonomy, which is the product of monogamous marriage and the bedrock of our freedoms (such as the freedom of minorities, including gays). This distinguishes us from societies where family structure takes very different forms and where personal freedom is compromised or non-existent, and minorities (especially gays) suffer as a result.

To many people, it is simply astounding that so much of our political life is now taken up with the gay rights issue. Tony Blair came to power on a commitment to shoring up marriage. Instead, from the start his administration has appeared to be obsessed with gay rights. Virtually the entire shopping list of the gay rights lobby group Stonewall, which seemed so outlandish when it first appeared, has now been delivered by this government.

Indeed, it is no surprise that the guidance on obliterating marriage was drawn up by the Women and Equality Unit headed by Angela Mason, Stonewall’s former chief executive, and answerable to Patricia Hewitt, the ultra-feminist Cabinet minister who once said that marriage no longer fitted in modern Britain.

People might still wonder, however, why an agenda espoused by such a tiny minority – and one that is distinctly totalitarian in its attempts to intimidate its opponents into silence by smearing them as prejudiced – has gained such purchase inside the Blair government.

To answer this, one has to see the gay rights movement for what it really is: a highly organised, pan-western movement which uses victim culture to advance its interests, with the result that personal liberty and independence of thought and action are undermined by the triumph of the most powerful interest groups over the weak.

History is studded with tyrannical regimes which tried to undermine marriage precisely because it is the principal line of defence for individuals against state power. If one thinks of the extent to which this government wants to control the way people think and act to ensure compliance with ‘acceptable’ behaviour, it immediately becomes clear why the gay rights issue lies at the very heart of the life-and-death struggle known as the culture wars -- and why that struggle itself is the most crucial and defining political battleground bar none in our self-centred, unthinking and lemming-like society.

Daily Mail, 24 November 2003

Following last week’s terrible carnage in Turkey, there are still grave doubts over whether this country has even now woken from its apparent trance to grasp the full nature of the threat we all face, and what needs to be done to counter it.

After the bombing of the British consulate, al Q’aeda threatened it would now target the UK itself along with Australia, Italy and Japan. In an under-reported paragraph, it also singled out for specific attack Jews around the world.

Faced with the criticism that the government is not doing enough to protect the country, the Home Secretary David Blunkett says that what’s needed is good intelligence rather than massive concrete blocks round every building.

This is true as far as it goes. And the police and intelligence agencies seem to have got their act together since 9/11 caught them so badly on the hop. But Mr Blunkett’s remarks will still strike many as hopelessly complacent. For in a number of areas, the government still seems – bafflingly – to be sitting on its hands.

How, for example, can it have ‘good intelligence’ while it has lost control of our borders so that it hasn’t got a clue who is entering or leaving the country? In one chilling estimate, police sources say there could be scores of individuals in Britain prepared to turn themselves into human bombs. But when illegal immigrants are simply disappearing into society by the thousand, how can they be detected?

Worse still, some of these potential terrorists are thought to be British Muslims. Clearly, this is a terrible thing for the law-abiding majority in that community. The only way to crack this appalling problem is for Muslims themselves to help the authorities to identify the extremists in their midst.

But many say that even when they do just that, the authorities still do nothing. No action is taken, for example, against the clerics who have hijacked mosques up and down the country to incite young Muslims to hate the west and even recruit them to terrorism.

Groups such as Hizb ut Tahrir or al Muhajiroun, which support suicide bombings and call for the Jews to be killed, are still allowed to whip up hatred and violence against the west on the streets of Britain – even though other countries have declared them illegal organisations.

No action is taken against Arab publications on open sale which promulgate antisemitism and incitement against America or Israel. The government’s inability to grasp the crucial part played by the hysterical incitement of irrational hatred means it also refuses to shut down organisations like Filastin al Muslema, a principal source of funds for Hamas based in London. It says there is no proof the money is used to fund acts of terror --but at the very least, it funds terror’s recruitment.

Even where the government does take action, as in the attempt to strip the radical preacher Abu Hamza of British citizenship and deport him, it is mired in legal delay. So even last weekend, Hamza was still free to whip up his followers by predicting imminent terror attacks in Britain. Italy, by contrast, recently managed to throw a similarly compromised imam out of the country more or less overnight. Not for nothing is our capital now referred to as ‘Londonistan’, the west’s prime exporter of terror.

In addition, there is still no general grasp of the real nature of the threat. Like many others, Clare Short has blamed the Istanbul bombing on Tony Blair’s decision to attack Iraq. This is demonstrably absurd. Al Q’aeda was attacking western interests for a decade before 9/11, let alone the Iraq war.

Ms Short’s argument echoes the Islamists’ claim that their violence is merely a response to western aggression. But this is a reversal of the truth. For it is they who have declared war upon the west. And they have done so not because of Iraq, or Israel, but to destroy western democracy, capitalism and modernity, whose very existence is held to be an assault upon Islam.

Al Q’aeda’s on-line magazine recently made clear yet again that the aim is to islamicise all western countries: ‘Therefore, the crime of the tyrants in infidel countries, who do not rule according to Allah's law, is an enormous sin… and we are obliged to fight them and initiate until they convert to Islam, or until Muslims rule the country’.

The crime is considered even worse, it says, for those who rule ‘Muslim’ countries not in accordance with Islam – which includes not only Israel but reformist or anti-terrorist Muslim regimes, which must all therefore be obliterated.

Hence the attacks by the global jihad –of which al Q’aeda is part – upon Indonesia, Morocco, Nigeria, Kashmir and Saudi Arabia; hence the murderous attacks on Christians around the world, along with Jews, secularists, Hindus and reformist Muslims. It is, as Jack Straw has said, a war being waged against the civilised world.

But when Islamists blow up westerners, these terrorists say they are only acting in self-defence because the west’s modernising influence is itself an act of violence. So any attempt by the civilised world to defend itself against real acts of terror is represented by Islamists as aggression. And in doing so, they do indeed incite other Muslims to rise up against this alleged attack upon Islam.

The mad logic of this way of thinking is that the west must never defend itself against terror because to do so may provoke more Islamists to sign up to mass murder. So because of their demented way of looking at the world, we shouldn't fight back at all. This is tantamount to a call to surrender, not just to fascism but to a kind of insanity.

Dismayingly, though, such a reversal of victim and victimiser strikes a chord in Britain. The Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane provoked fury when he courageously observed that British Muslims had to make much clearer a choice between terrorism and non-violence. In view of the extremists in their midst, this was surely a reasonable enough comment.

But Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, astonishingly said that Mr MacShane’s remark could ‘drive Muslims into the arms of extremists’. In other words, any criticism of Muslims is no longer to be allowed, and terrorism is to be blamed on those who warn against it.

In a similar display of spinelessness, the European Union's racism watchdog has suppressed a report on antisemitism because it concluded that Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups were behind many of the incidents it examined.

If people accept the twisted reasoning of the proponents of terror, it will win. And if a country flinches from the action that needs to be taken against terror, it will win.

Later this week, the Queen’s Speech is expected to include sweeping new emergency laws to counter terror. But unless we take the action that is necessary against those who intend to destroy our democracy, freedom and way of life, passing yet more laws will not prevent us from being –as Abu Hamza has taunted us – ‘sitting ducks’ waiting for attack.

Wall Street Journal Europe, 20 November 2003

The fall of Conrad Black is being received in Britain with almost as much glee as the defeat of his hero Napoleon at Waterloo. Acres of newspaper columns have been devoted not only to a detailed analysis of the imbroglio at his company Hollinger regarding non-compete payments that were not disclosed to Hollinger’s board, but also a gloating rehearsal of his personal history, character, sayings and lifestyle.

Of course, it is natural that a story about possible substantial corporate error or (for those who want to believe the worst) corruption should be a big news event. And there are other obvious reasons why the British media has got over-excited about this one. The possible sale of the Conservative-supporting Daily and Sunday Telegraph (not to mention the Spectator magazine) has serious implications for the balance of political support across the media spectrum. Papers in rival newspaper empires – some of whose proprietors are licking their lips over the prospect of the Hollinger-owned Telegraph group falling into their laps – have an obvious vested interest in such a story.

Nevertheless, there is more than a whiff of something else steaming pungently from this welter of coverage. For it goes beyond appropriate disapproval of corporate wrong-doing (if, indeed, that is what has taken place). Much of it has a hand-rubbing tone, as if to express deep satisfaction that Lord Black has got his come-uppance at last. This finds clearest expression not just in the repeated references to his allegedly overbearing character – he was described in the Guardian as ‘bullying, bombastic, verbose and vain’ – but to his Canadian origins and his controversial elevation to the House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.

What all this reflects is a combination of prejudices: old-fashioned British snobbery, resentment at a perceived ‘foreign’ carpet-bagger, and the perception that Lord Black used his newspapers to push political views which were themselves viewed as ‘foreign’ or in other ways suspect by a media dominated by what Donald Rumsfeld might call ‘old Europe’ attitudes.

Snobbery and suspicion of ‘foreigners’ are intimately linked in a country where the notion of Britishness is still bound up with breeding. It has surfaced in headlines such as ‘Newspaper mogul who loved the life of a lord’ in the Times, over a picture of Lord Black and his wife, the journalist Barbara Amiel, arriving at a fancy-dress party attired as Cardinal Richelieu and Marie-Antoinette. That, along with the gleeful descriptions of his many mansions, his executive jets and his fleet of limousines, just about says it all.

For Lord Black is seen as the foreign parvenu, the jumped-up vulgarian whose elevation to the peerage was the storming of the innermost citadel of the British establishment, the House of Lords, or an alien invader who had ideas far above his station. His way of life, globe-hopping between his various residences in different continents, made him easy to portray as someone with no investment in or commitment to Britain.

The fact that he was already a British citizen cut no ice with those for whom his very desire to be accepted into the establishment served as proof of his unfitness to be a member. Not only did he control an important slice of British culture; he committed the far greater sin of presuming to become a player in the political scene, using his newspaper ownership to gain access to politicians, intellectuals and others of influence in order to give wide currency to his opinions.

The forcefulness of his views, moreover, fuelled the further charge that he tells his editors what line to take. Of course, none of us can know what actually takes place in the private conversations between a proprietor and his editors. Much of this charge, however, is clearly fuelled by a visceral hostility towards the actual position the Telegraph papers have taken – strongly pro-America, supportive of the war on terror and of regime change in Iraq, pro-Israel and against the European Union.

Both Charles Moore – until very recently the Daily Telegraph editor – and Dominic Lawson, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, share these views. There would have been no need for Lord Black to have imposed this agenda upon them. True, Sir Max Hastings, a former Daily Telegraph editor, did not endorse this vision and has recorded an uncomfortable, adversarial relationship with a proprietor who was often on his back. But the fact remains that Sir Max edited the Telegraph for no fewer than ten years before he voluntarily stepped down.

Since then, Lord Black has continued to disagree from time to time with what his publications have printed. But his style is to bring the argument out into the open by – somewhat comically – firing off letters to his own papers to take issue with what they have said. In doing so, he actually tries to observe some kind of proprietorial distance – for which he has received no credit. On the other hand, after one such letter savaging the BBC following the affair of the dead weapons scientist David Kelly, the Telegraph editorial line – which previously had been much harder on the government than on the BBC – changed perceptibly.

For journalists, however, the only proper proprietorial behaviour is never to express a view on any political matter at all, since any such utterance constitutes a degree of pressure. To that extent, Lord Black – with his pugnacious approach – is certainly far from ideal. Nevertheless, the claim that he somehow forced the Telegraph titles to embrace a set of wildly extreme positions mainly reflects the now widespread and immensely troubling perception within Britain that a robust defence of western values is somehow ‘extreme’.

This view was summed up by the former Sunday Telegraph editor Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who wrote that the Telegraph has become an ‘American-propaganda and Israel-propaganda sheet’, reflecting a ‘neo-conservative, right-wing philosophy which is very much an American phenomenon’.

Indeed, it is his papers’ staunch defence of Israel which has perhaps given the hostility to Lord Black its most distasteful edge – not least through the frequent attacks upon Barbara Amiel for writing in the Telegraph about Israel’s predicament, which is considered intolerable not just because she is the proprietor’s wife but, far worse, because she is a Jew.

That kind of snobbish, disdainful, anti-American, anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish philosophy lying behind the general triumphalism over the humbling of Lord Black is -- distressingly -- very much a British phenomenon.

Daily Mail, 17 November 2003

Probably the last thing anyone would have predicted in Michael Howard’s new Tory dawn was the re-emergence of the death penalty as an issue. Certainly Mr Howard himself, who is personally against capital punishment, cannot have been expecting it.

One can only imagine his reaction, therefore, when he read yesterday that his shiny-new home affairs spokesman David Davis had supported the death penalty for certain types of murder -- prompting the immediate cry that the party had lurched terrifyingly to the right, and sharp condemnation from a brace of Tory notables.

Since Mr Howard has been straining every sinew to convince us that he intends to lead the Conservatives from the centre, and since the party has been slapping itself on the back over its new-found unity, Mr Davis’s remarks are likely to have been about as welcome in the leader’s office as a kissogram from Jeffrey Archer.

But any talk about a lurch to the right or a Tory rift is over-excited nonsense. Mr Davis’s remarks represent nothing of the kind.

He was asked for his views on capital punishment in the course of an interview with the Sunday Telegraph. Since he supports it, he had very little option but to say so. But as he immediately went on to emphasise -- and repeated on the radio yesterday -- this was solely his personal view.

It was unlikely, he said, that capital punishment would ever return in his political lifetime; he acknowledged that most of his colleagues disagreed with him; and anyway, his views could not become party policy, since the death penalty was always decided on a free vote as a matter of conscience for individual MPs.

Indeed, for that reason he could not be said to be speaking against the shadow Cabinet line and provoking a rift, since there can be no party policy on an issue of personal conscience. It’s as if a front-bencher had said, in response to a question about his personal views, that he was against abortion – interesting, but irrelevant. Capital punishment is, to coin a phrase, a dead issue.

What Mr Davis has done, however, is to revive for a fleeting moment the hoary old debate over the death penalty. For the majority of the general public, his remarks will have struck a deep chord. There is undoubtedly a widespread belief not only that the death penalty should never have been abolished and should be brought back, but that the failure to do so is undemocratic because it flies in the face of majority opinion.

The arguments used by Mr Davis, however, are as wrong today as they always were. If capital punishment had not been ended in 1965, several people wrongly convicted of murder since then would have been executed.

To counter this point, Mr Davis says the death penalty should be restricted to serial killings, because with DNA sampling these multiple murders leave no room for error. But this is not the case. There is always room for error. The DNA technique itself may be foolproof, but the capacity for mistakes to occur lies with the individuals who employ it.

There have been cases, for example, where -- through incompetence or worse -- apparently eminent forensic scientists have given evidence in court that has been shown subsequently to be false, sometimes after the person who was wrongly convicted has spent many years in prison. If the death penalty had still existed, the victims of such gross miscarriages of justice might now be dead.

In any event, the idea that the Yorkshire Ripper should be executed but not the perpetrators of terrorist atrocities would strike many as completely unacceptable. Mr Davis says serial killers show pre-meditated and cold-blooded intention. So, too, do terrorists and other murderers, whom he would apparently exclude.

Moreover, reintroducing the death penalty is likely to produce fewer convictions, as juries might well be unwilling to reach a verdict that is likely to lead to an execution. The public may cry vengeance from afar; but once in the jury-room, it’s often another story.

And it’s not even as if there’s any evidence that it is the deterrent Mr Davis thinks it is. The US, for example, is an exceptionally violent society, far more so than ours, despite the fact that many states have not merely the death penalty but the fearsome and barbaric electric chair.

Personally, I believe it is wrong for the state to kill anyone unless it is defending itself against a threat to life and liberty, as in time of war or in self-defence against terrorism. As for the argument that it is undemocratic to ignore the wishes of the majority, this grossly misunderstands the nature of a parliamentary democracy.

Our MPs are not delegates but representatives. That means we elect them to take decisions on the basis of what they think is right, not what the public tell them to do. That is because they are in a position that is not available to the public, to receive representations and information from all sides on an issue and debate it exhaustively.

The crucial point is that they always have to account for those decisions to the public, who can throw their MPs out if they disapprove of the line they take. The public, by contrast, do not have to account for their opinions to anyone. That is why holding MPs to those opinions would be a recipe for oppressive power without responsibility.

The fuss over Mr Davis’s remarks about the death penalty has overshadowed a rather more significant – and very welcome – shift he has signalled in the party’s attitude to cannabis. Not only has he said robustly that the mistaken decision to downgrade it sends out the wrong message, but he wants the police to arrest the drug’s users as well as dealers.

This is not another ‘lurch to the right’, that meaningless phrase used to damn any policy which dares contradict the prevailing libertine consensus. It is instead essential to protect vulnerable children, to reassert communal responsibility, and to prevent the law from descending into farce.

If Mr Davis really does go into battle over cannabis, he can badly wrong-foot the Home Secretary. Parents who are desperate when they watch their children’s school performance or mental health take a disastrous dive through cannabis use will be relieved beyond measure that at last a politician is prepared to tackle this scourge.

The crimes and disorder which so worry the public are rising because there aren’t enough police on the streets; because of the failure to enforce a ‘zero tolerance’ approach; because of the demoralisation of the police into serial incompetence and political correctness.

They are rising because of the uselessness of the Crown Prosecution Service; because of the impact of the Human Rights Act and Children Act; because of ‘inclusive’ education policies leading to truancy or school chaos; and above all, because of family disintegration.

These causes have nothing whatever to do with capital punishment, the spat over which will almost certainly prove to be a twenty-four hour wonder while serious crime and disorder continue their inexorable climb.

Daily Mail, 13 November 2003

The first female member of the Law Lords, Dame Brenda Hale, held a press conference last week. There, she gave vent to a variety of fashionable but deeply controversial opinions.

She was in favour, she said, of gay adoption, legally recognised gay partnerships and improved legal rights for heterosexual cohabitants, and wanted to see the concept of fault removed from divorce law.

These issues, which are among the most divisive in our society, are all political topics. They are the subject of heated debate in Parliament and among the general public. What, pray, was one of our most senior judges therefore doing in making known her own opinions on these matters?

For judges are not supposed to enter the political fray. We should not know what their views are. If they do nail their colours to any particular mast, they will not be viewed as properly impartial when cases touching upon such issues come to court.

What, indeed, was Dame Brenda doing having a press conference at all? She is a judge, not a politician. The explanation given was that many journalists wanted to interview her as the first woman Law Lord. All the more reason, then, to be especially mindful of her delicate position, and of the need to uphold the distinction between policy-making and law-enforcement upon which our system has traditionally depended.

Dame Brenda, however, appears to regard her new position as a political platform. But then, this is hardly surprising. For despite the fact that she denied she was a hard-line feminist – ‘a soft-line feminist’ is the most she would admit to – the fact is that she is the most ideological, politically correct judge ever to have been appointed to the highest court in the jurisdiction.

As such, she will be bringing this destructive perspective to bear upon binding legal decisions over some of the most difficult and contentious issues around. But for the past two decades – first as a legal academic, then as a law commissioner and a judge in the Court of Appeal -- she has already been one of the most powerful backroom influences over the development of family law. The disturbing truth is that she has taken it consistently in an anti-family and anti-man direction.

Dame Brenda was the principal architect, for example, of the Children Act, which by giving children ‘rights’ has helped destroy the authority of adults and made it impossible for teachers, social workers or even parents physically to restrain children from mischief without the child reporting them to the police.

Dame Brenda was behind a bill in the nineties --which was eventually withdrawn – which would have given live-in girlfriends who had left the mutual home the right to win a court order to move back, or even have their boyfriends evicted from their own property.

And Dame Brenda was behind the ultimately doomed attempt to remove the concept of fault from the divorce law, which would have given the marriage contract less significance than buying a second-hand car. As she announced this week, she still wants to see no-fault divorce introduced. But what is really worrying is that as a judge, Dame Brenda is advocating a change in the law. This is quite wrong. If judges want to take sides, they should remove their wigs and stand for election to Parliament.

But then, Dame Brenda is used to influencing the development of policy. For nearly a decade, in the eighties and early nineties, she was the driving force behind the Law Commission, the law reform body which takes a consistently radical line and whose proposals frequently turn into legislation. This body has been consistently hostile to marriage over the years, pushing for easier divorce and for cohabitation rights.

As a result of its pressure, in 1987 the status of illegitimacy was abolished and the green light thus given to unmarried parenthood. In 1988, the commission said there was no more need to support marriage than ‘any other living arrangement’, and dismissed the high rate of divorce as no great cause for concern.

Despite the fact that Dame Brenda wants to give legal rights to cohabitants and gay partnerships, she has denied being hostile to marriage. She did not think, she said, that marriage served no useful purpose (indeed, how could she since she has married twice?). Nor did she want to equate the ‘special nature’ of marriage with cohabitation.

But this kind of intellectual salami-slicing is precisely how marriage is being destroyed. Marriage is unique because it alone creates kinship – not through a ‘partnership’, but through a physical union that is the basis of our human identity. In recognition of this, it affords certain benefits revolving around a solemn promise of lifetime fidelity. If those benefits are sprayed around a host of relationships that don’t meet all these criteria, marriage becomes meaningless.

Nevertheless, family lawyers have been busily undermining marriage for decades. Against the express wishes of Parliament, the courts unilaterally removed the issue of behaviour from divorce by refusing to apportion blame between spouses; they introduced ‘quickie’ divorces; they loaded the court process against fathers; and they began to give property rights to unmarried women living with men.

All of this progressively weakened marriage by making it more and more meaningless in law. To cap it all, the lawyers pulled a disingenuous trick. At every stage in this sorry process, they said the law needed to modernise to keep pace with these changes – ignoring the fact that it was they themselves who had precipitated such changes in the first place.

This is exactly what Dame Brenda was doing when in 1980 she made her now infamous remark about marriage. ‘Family law’, she wrote, ‘ no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage…Logically, we have already reached a point at which…we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purpose.’

Far from merely regularising the new social landscape, she and other legal radicals were actively reshaping it around an anti-family agenda.

At the same time, the rise in judicial activism was propelling the judiciary into dangerous political waters. During the long years of Conservative government, the judges decided that they were the only real opposition and started to challenge ministerial decisions.

This judicial activism was given an enormous boost by Labour’s Human Rights Act, whose contradictory provisions force the judges into making political or ideological judgments. As a result, the once clear line between law-makers and law-enforcers has become dismayingly muddied.

Judges should not be trying to make the political weather, but deciding cases by interpreting laws passed by Parliament. But they are straying more and more into the political arena. They have allowed themselves to become compromised. And the most openly politicised of these judges is the feminist Lady Justice Hale.

As a result, we can all now guess which way her judgments are going to go. We know the ideological prism through which she views the world. Her arrival at the pinnacle of our judicial system illustrates how the amoral onslaught being waged against authority, social norms and personal responsibility has now penetrated even the establishment’s deepest and most conservative sanctum, the Law Lords.

Daily Mail, 12 November 2003

When Margaret Hodge was made Minister for Children in June, a lot of people could scarcely believe what was happening.

For it was Mrs Hodge who, as leader of Islington council from 1982 to 1992, spectacularly failed to deal with a paedophile ring abusing children in her council’s care. Heavily criticised for presiding over lethal chaos and a climate of intimidation in the town hall , she later tried to pass the buck onto her officials, claiming to have known nothing about the abuse at the time – a version of events her former staff have vehemently contested.

With such a grossly inadequate record in local government, anyone with a smidgin of shame would have quietly bowed out of public life altogether. Making a person with such a history Minister for Children instead was therefore a bit like having the late Robert Maxwell made Governor of the Bank of England.

Aware of the furore over this appointment, Tony Blair was forced to keep his new Minister for Children well away from the launch of his policy designed to protect children from debacles such as the killing of Victoria Climbié. Yet despite having to go to such embarrassing lengths, he made feeble excuses on her behalf and kept her in office. Now, however, she has been caught out in a flagrant abuse of her position.

Demetrious Panton, who was abused by a paedophile in charge of an Islington children’s home, tried during the 1980s to alert Islington social services to what was happening but was given the brush off.

Alerted to his story, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme tried to discover whether Mrs Hodge had been made personally aware of the case. When she learned of the BBC’s inquiries, however, she wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC’s chairman Gavyn Davies, copying the letter to the Director-General Greg Dyke, the director of news Richard Sambrook, Today editor Kevin Marsh, and a legal firm. In that letter, she also claimed that Mr Panton was ‘an extremely disturbed person’.

By such a response to Mr Panton’s revelation of abuse, Mrs Hodge was thus herself guilty of gross abuse of her position as a minister.

For faced with a perfectly legitimate inquiry, given the deplorable history of what happened in Islington under her leadership, she tried to use her personal influence to browbeat the BBC into not running the story.

Even worse, she resorted to smearing a victim of abuse whose only crime lay in having tried to alert her administration to what was going on. Far from being extremely disturbed, Mr Panton not only has a degree in philosophy and is studying for an MBA, but he is actually an adviser to the government on the New Deal for Communities, with John Prescott as one of his clients. As the police officer who dealt with his case remarked, Mr Panton is not the slightest bit disturbed. He merely wanted the paedophile who had abused him and countless other children locked up.

Mrs Hodge says she didn’t know of Mr Panton’s case until after she had left the council. Maybe so, since her administration was mired in chaos; if she didn’t know about it, she should have done. To add insult to injury, when he finally wrote her a six-page letter in 1996, she sent back a dismissive four-line reply referring him to Islington council. This from the Minister for Children, who says piously that since 1992 she has been ‘listening’ to children who were abused.

Faced now with Mr Panton’s bitter reproach, the least she could have done was apologise. Yet not only did she express no apology for failing to know something she jolly well ought to have known. Not only did she evince no concern whatsoever for his welfare. Instead -- unbelievably –she resorted to smearing him, thus adding character assassination to the abuse he had suffered, and attempting to bully the BBC into keeping it all quiet.

But then, she has form in behaving in such a way. In 1992, the London Evening Standard first revealed the paedophile scandal of Islington’s children’s homes. Mrs Hodge dismissed this as politically motivated 'gutter journalism'. Her instinctive reaction was not to find out whether the story was true, but to ridicule, deny and intimidate – the very techniques used against Mr Panton and the BBC.

Eventually, these reports were proved correct when an official inquiry concluded that the town hall had been 'paralysed by equal opportunity and race issues', which had prevented any proper investigation of complaints. That climate of fear was the direct responsibility of Mrs Hodge. Yet she has never acknowledged her part in creating that particular lamentable state of affairs.

Moreover, after her appointment as Minister for Children two horrified Islington social workers claimed that she had been told children were being sexually abused in the council’s homes two years before the Evening Standard’s disclosures. According to one of these workers, he had been so concerned that he had circulated a warning about paedophile abuse in council care. But Mrs Hodge, he said, had ‘screamed and shouted’ at him and refused to discuss it.

Mrs Hodge has never taken responsibility for what happened in Islington. The most she has done is to express ‘regret’ for the abused children, and to claim she has learned the lessons of such an experience.

But the main lesson is that someone who presided over such a disaster should not hold office. Yet outrageously she has said instead: ‘I think that equips me better than most, having been through that experience, in thinking about how we now create a safe environment for those children at risk’.

One might well ask how such a person can possibly have been appointed to any ministerial office, let alone to being in charge of child welfare.

The answer is bound to lie in that lethal mix of the personal and the ideological which so characterises this government. For Mrs Hodge is not only an old chum of the Blairs -- she is a key figure in the ministerial sisterhood, that group of long-standing feminist friends who have managed to network their way into the very heart of government.

They appear to exercise a considerable hold over the Prime Minister – no doubt because no-one else in his inner circle is prepared to criticise them for fear of falling victim themselves to New Labour’s deadly charge of ‘sexism’. Like several of her feminist colleagues, Mrs Hodge has successfully transformed herself from someone who flew the Red Flag over Islington town hall -- and epitomised the Labour party that Blair pledged himself to destroy -- to appearing the very model of moderation.

Until now, she has got away with it. But now, through her own behaviour, she has made her ministerial position completely untenable.

It is an insult to the children who were abused in her care. It is an insult to the staff of Islington council, whom she has wronged. And it is an insult to the electorate.

The Prime Minister’s indulgence of his old friend has been a serious error of judgement. He must now sack Margaret Hodge without further ado, before outrage and disgust at her turns into contempt for his weakness in the face of a grotesque abuse of power.

Daily Mail, November 10 2003

The Prince of Wales has flown back from his tour of India and Oman into the very eye of the storm. The claim made by his former servant George Smith about the Prince’s private life is now circulating on the internet, in the Scottish, Irish and Italian press and around the world.

The Prince himself is said to be relaxed, on the basis that the allegation is a lie and that he has nothing to hide or fear. The problem is that he has not told us what the allegation actually is.

Last week, his senior aide Sir Michael Peat made a complete ass of himself when he announced that whatever the Prince was said to have done with a member of his staff, he didn’t do it.

In saying this, Sir Michael thus poured a tanker of fuel onto the very flames he was trying to put out. For everyone was left wondering what on earth this alleged incident actually was.

Now it is only a matter of time before the substance of Mr Smith’s allegation seeps into the mainstream media across Britain.The only people who seem not to have grasped this are the royal household. Their handling of this whole imbroglio has been lamentable from the start.

They should have realised that openness was the best policy. Whatever uproar this would have provoked in the short term, they would have been in control of events. As it is, they have been wrongfooted at every stage, locking themselves into the grotesque cycle of manipulation and prurient speculation.

The impact of the allegations lies principally in their capacity to blackmail the Prince of Wales. This was obvious from the start, when Princess Diana visited Mr Smith and recorded him making his two explosive charges: that he had been raped by a royal servant, and that Prince Charles had been involved in an incident with a royal servant.

The Princess made the tape, it is said, as ‘insurance’ against any moves by Buckingham Palace to take her sons away from her. In other words, had such a move materialised she would have threatened to destroy her ex-husband’s reputation.

In the face of this sordid piece of manipulation, the Royals panicked. It was their desperation to find this tape, which had gone missing from the late Princess’s possessions, that was the real reason for the cack-handed prosecution of the former butler Paul Burrell.

Rather than launching such an obviously flaky court case, the Royals should have openly faced down the blackmail. Prince Charles should have said what these allegations were, that they were the product of a troubled mind, and that they were untrue. There would have been a brief furore, and then it would have been over.

Instead, the royal household ignored the rumours that were steadily gaining currency. Then – disastrously – when the former royal servant Michael Fawcett obtained an injunction against the press, the Prince’s solicitors backed this up with a letter demanding that Mr Smith’s claims should not be published.

More than anything, this gave the impression that there was something to hide, and provoked the ensuing feeding frenzy.

For sure, none of us can know whether or not these claims are true. But it is hard to envisage a more unreliable witness than Mr Smith. Not only has he suffered from mental illness and alcoholism – appallingly, Princess Diana reportedly plied him with drink before he made his claims to her -- but he has admitted to making two quite separate false claims of rape.

He lied about these, he said, because he had been drinking heavily and wanted to be admitted to hospital. He also made several claims that he had been threatened and attacked by a hooded gunman, but the police found no evidence at all to back this up.

Of course, people suffering from mental illness can nevertheless be telling the truth, just as people who are paid by the press to go public with their claims do not necessarily embroider events. Nevertheless, people might reasonably conclude that such outlandish claims, made by someone with this highly dubious history, are inherently suspect.

The strenuous attempts to suppress them was a principal reason why they gained such traction. But that wasn’t all. The apparently endless flow of disloyal backstairs claims about the Wales’s private lives -- not to mention the eye-opening revelation of the regular sale of gifts received by the Prince -- has helped create the sour impression that any claims about his household are believable.

In addition, his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles continues to offend, reviving popular disapproval that he cheated on his wife and reinforcing the willingness to believe any rumours about such an openly irregular private life.

Royal advisers do very well out of working for Prince Charles, which looks very good on their CVs. He is surely entitled to expect a rather better standard of service from them.

For despite all this agony, they are still getting it wrong. To cope with the current crisis, the Prince’s friends are now being wheeled into public to make the case that he is a national treasure.

I have not been approached by anyone from any side in this affair. Nevertheless, I do admire the work the Prince does. He is a tireless promoter of charities and other good causes; he has pioneered imaginative schemes for disadvantaged inner-city youth, who adore him; he has forced insular business people to connect with those on the wrong side of the tracks; he has given voice to the voiceless in promoting issues of general concern, such as education standards. He is the embodiment of public service.

But I also believe that --like the Princess Royal – he should allow these good deeds to speak for themselves. For one of the things that has so poisoned the atmosphere is that he has played the same game as Princess Diana’s rival armed camp, allowing his supporters to brief both openly and anonymously about his virtues, and to put the boot into the other side.

The Prince of Wales doesn’t run for office. The current mess does not imperil the monarchy; nor does it argue for the inheritance to go straight to Prince William. But mud sticks; and the enormous service Prince Charles performs for his country is in danger of being permanently tarnished.

What he should do now is tell people what the allegation about him is, and say convincingly that it is untrue. He should do this on television. Those who say he should remain aloof from the fray miss -- as ever – the point. Just as the Queen averted an incipient revolt after the death of Diana by addressing the nation, so it is only Prince Charles himself who can now lance this particular boil.

Having been thus open with the British people, he should then put his house in order. In particular, his courtiers and friends should no longer be authorised to talk about him. He should disband his armed faction, and trust the public to judge him instead on his public service. He needs to find --and hold -- his nerve. Only then will he rescue his good name, and restore some much needed discretion and dignity to the royal firm.

Ha'aretz, 7 November 2003

The British Conservative party has elected Michael Howard as its first Jewish leader – and potential Prime Minister – since Benjamin Disraeli led the Tories in the 19th century.

This has occurred when much of the Jewish community in Britain feels besieged by an upsurge of anti-Jewish hatred. So how can a country whose deep vein of prejudice is once again open and flowing be sanguine about the possibility of a Jewish Prime Minister?

Some Jews see no problem in Britain – quite the reverse. Howard’s rise demonstrates, they purr, that Britain has changed, that it has developed a new maturity, that British Jews have finally become truly accepted. From which Panglossian optimism, one can only marvel at the infinite human capacity for self-delusion.

For Britain is where the veteran Labour MP Tam Dalyell claimed a ‘cabal’ of Jews was controlling Tony Blair and George Bush – and was then promptly excused as a lovable eccentric. Where the following day, the BBC TV current affairs show Newsnight concluded that Dalyell had a case, and a ‘tightly-knit’ group of Jews really did control US foreign policy.

Where Israel is repeatedly dehumanised and delegitimised as an apartheid or Nazi state. Where almost two thirds of the public believe it is the biggest threat to world peace. Where attacks on Jews have increased. And where friendships between Jews and non-Jews founder over claims by the latter that the Jews are all-powerful, and that the establishment of Israel was a terrible mistake.

In this hostile climate, however, Michael Howard has climbed to the top of the greasy Tory pole after the sacking of the previous party leader, Iain Duncan Smith. So how does one explain the apparent contradiction?

The situation of diaspora Jews has always been characterised by many such ambiguities and nuances, by a profound ambivalence in the general population and a precarious balancing act over Anglo-Jewish identity.

Howard’s triumph is an astonishing turnaround. As Home Secretary in the last Conservative government in the 1990s, he became the most unpopular politician in Britain, as much because of his personality as his tough policies. He was widely viewed as sinister and menacing, leading his colleague Ann Widdecombe to make her infamous claim that he had ‘something of the night’ about him.

So what was she getting at? Howard provoked a notable repugnance not associated with other, even harder men of the right. This was clearly because he was viewed as an unctuous, oily, slippery, devious, too-clever-by-half lawyer – all epithets associated in the public mind with Jews.

True, under Margaret Thatcher’s earlier regime there were no fewer than five Jews in the Cabinet. But this was an aberration, caused by Mrs Thatcher’s personal admiration for the Jews which was not shared by her colleagues, who objected that there were ‘more Estonians than Etonians’ in the government.

Now, though, Howard is being hailed as the saviour of his party which is falling over itself to describe him as charming, decent, honourable, upright, fair, fastidious and virtuous.

So have the Tories suddenly learned to love the Jews? Not quite.

The Conservatives are in the grip of a protracted nervous breakdown, because they’ve been out of power for six years and the country regards them as a hopeless joke. So lacking are they in talent, and so bad is their disarray, they would have elected a Martian if they thought he might win the general election.

Howard is by far the most successful politician they’ve got. He has authority and experience, and through his forensic approach does serious damage to the Labour government in House of Commons debates. He is therefore the Conservatives’ only reliable weapon. And the Tories will do anything to win power.

Crucially, moreover, Howard’s Jewish profile has always been low. True, in his leadership bid he drew attention to the fact that he was the child of immigrants. True, he says Jewish values are still ‘an important guide and influence on my life’, and he attends a (Liberal) synagogue on the high holydays. But he has never made much of his Jewishness. His wife, the former model Sandra Paul, is a member of the Church of England; and his son Nick not only became a Christian, but provoked controversy as a student when he started trying to convert Jews to Christianity as well.

Despite the gushing compliments about Howard in the media in the past week, there have still been uncomfortable reminders of the prejudice lurking below the surface. With the press going overboard to describe how his father fled the Nazis in Transylvania, there was also a reference to Howard posing as a ‘proper English gentleman ‘who stood for ‘those very Anglo-Saxon virtues of fair play and decency’ – whereas according to his enemies, he was a ‘chilly, calculating, heartless, ruthless, ambitious, calculating political machine, bent on passing himself off as something he wasn’t’. In other words, not an English gentleman at all.

On Newsnight (again), the renowned anchor Jeremy Paxman asked another Tory MP: ‘What makes you think the country is ready for a man of Transylvanian origins?’ And in an apparently subliminal link, he followed this by saying Howard might as well have ‘something of the night’ emblazoned on his forehead.

When Howard was asked by a newspaper what he had felt about this extraordinary line of questioning, he displayed a rare unease and muttered something about Paxman’s reputation for disobliging remarks. His reticence tells you everything you need to know about Britain’s supposed ‘maturity’ towards Jews.

For Howard surely knew that for a Jew to complain about anti-Jewish prejudice in Britain is to provoke that very thing. That is the true measure of Anglo-Jewish status: you are accepted as long as you never come into conflict with the values of the surrounding community. Whatever they hit you with, you are supposed to take it in silence – the defining characteristic of the diaspora Jew.

And this surely lies at the very heart of the terrible bitterness over British attitudes towards both Israel and the Jews. For the British think there’s nothing wrong with the Jews as long as they agree with the generally accepted view that Israel is the cause of world terror because it is an apartheid or even a Nazi state.

Those Jews who agree with this analysis, and also agree that claims of resurgent British antisemitism are a figleaf to conceal the crimes of Ariel Sharon, are the Good Jews. They are welcomed at the most fashionable dinner tables; they are lionised in the universities, publishing or the media.

Those Jews who say Israel is defending itself against an attempt to destroy it, that its dehumanisation by the media breaks the bounds of legitimate criticism, and that Jew-hatred of a kind that was assumed to have vanished forever is now horrifyingly respectable, are the Bad Jews. They are not merely socially and professionally ostracised. They are regarded as not really British at all.

Antisemitism is now the prejudice that dare not speak its name. Everyone knows that ‘real’ antisemitism was what caused Howard’s father to flee Transylvania for Britain. Everyone also ‘knows’ that the victims of the Nazis have now turned into Nazis, that antisemitism is history, and that it exists today only as a shroud waved by whingeing Jews.

In other words, the newly ‘mature’ British like Jews as long as they dump upon Israel, and deny the now rampant public prejudice against them. The British like Jews as long as they turn the other cheek when people commit mass murder against them. They are the good Jews: the Jews who die, just like Michael Howard’s picturesque relatives. The bad Jews are the Jews who fight back.

The British believe they are not anti-Jew but anti-Israel. (So do many British Jews on the left, who encourage them). But they are not merely against the government of Israel. The agenda now is that the creation of the Jewish state itself was the big mistake that has led to world terror, and that the very idea of a Jewish state is racist. People now say this to me all the time.

So what would happen if Howard were to speak up loudly and firmly in support of Israel’s measures for self-defence, and against the new antisemitism? He would be taking a big risk of being fingered for double loyalty. For what troubles the British even more than the individual Jew is the collective Jew. Jews who publicly identify with each other are considered suspect. The British public will overlook a politician’s Jewish heritage as long as it’s kept to the level of something consenting adults do in private, and as long he doesn’t identify with Jewish peoplehood.

The idea that British Jews are not really ‘one of us’ is deeply rooted in British society. Even though prejudice based on Jewish identity went underground after the Holocaust, the successful dehumanisation of Israel by the media has legitimised the revival of the ancient canard of world Jewish power and other familiar tropes of Jew-hatred. British Jews, who have always trodden an existential tightrope, nevertheless believed until very recently that they were as British as anyone else. Now, they find themselves in the hideous position of being forced to denounce their own or bite their tongues as the price of social acceptance.

Michael Howard has said: ‘Being Jewish is no bar to playing a very important part in public life in this country’. True, but at a price. A Jewish politician who is determined to become Prime Minister would be brave indeed if he put his head above this particular parapet. Whether such a situation constitutes a ‘new maturity’ to be celebrated about Britain is quite another matter.

Daily Mail, 5 November 2003

One man dressed in a Spiderman outfit has single-handedly been bringing chaos to central London. Since last Friday, David Chick has been perched on top of a 150 ft crane in order to publicise his protest about the way the courts treat separated fathers.

Police have erected roadblocks around the crane to prevent Mr Chick from falling onto passers-by. The result is miles of tailbacks and misery for thousands of commuters trapped helplessly in the gridlock.

Mr Chick is merely the latest estranged father to stage a public protest. Militancy amongst fathers’ groups is increasing. They have picketed judges’ houses, forced the temporary closure of one court, placed hoax bombs in others and intimidated mothers arriving for hearings.

This kind of irresponsibility, harassment and threatening behaviour is totally unacceptable, and should be punished. Nevertheless, the desperation driving these men to such acts is real.

The flashpoint behind Mr Chick’s protest is how judges handle the difficult issue of contact with children after divorce. When the courts award care of the children to the mother, they usually make an order that she should allow the children to have contact with their father.

But when the father tries to make such contact, he often finds the mother bars his way. She fobs off the court with a series of flaky excuses. Worse still, she may make spurious allegations of abuse.

Even if the facts behind such claims are actually examined, the proceedings are weighted towards the mother. And many blameless fathers end up losing contact with their children.

The courts don’t want to jail the mothers because their children live with them. On this basis, no mother should ever be sent to prison for any crime. And anyway, why do they all have to be jailed? Many children could be sent to live with their fathers instead.

The courts think a child should be with its mother. But a mother who spitefully denies her child access to its father shows she is not fit to be in charge of that child.

The judges want to avoid enraging the mother still further, which they think would be bad for the child. But being deprived of its father is bad for the child. With the courts paralysed by their belief that mothers have to be handled with kid gloves, women have been able to string them along and get away with actions wholly against their children’s interests.

The singer Bob Geldof has drawn attention to this injustice. Drawing on his own custody battle with his late ex-wife Paula Yates, he has rightly observed that family law is creating 'vast wells of misery, massive discontent, an unstable society of feral children and feckless adolescents who have no understanding of authority, no knowledge of a man's love and how different but equal it is to a woman's.'

No doubt such outbursts are why some senior judges recently acknowledged that with so many contact orders being flouted by mothers, the law is being brought into disrepute. As a result, in a recent case where a mother refused contact, judges did for once transfer care of the child to the father.

But this problem is far broader and deeper than flouted contact orders. The whole justice system is institutionally biased against men and marriage. It is driven by an extreme feminist agenda, which stretches from the humblest family lawyer through the politically correct Law Commission to reach all the way up to government and the senior reaches of the judiciary.

How else can one explain the extraordinary proposal by the Law Commission -- which is expected to be backed by the government -- that women who commit premeditated murder of their menfolk may be charged merely with manslaughter if they have been abused?

At present, manslaughter only applies if the killing occurs in the heat of the moment. But the new argument is that if there was a history of abuse, such provocation excuses the deed even if it was carefully planned.

This is rigging the law to allow women literally to get away with murder. (The same provision would apply to abused men; but since such men are seldom believed, and most men who kill do so in the heat of the moment, it is mainly women to whom this would apply).

Of course, abused women need protection. But premeditation means women have a choice not to kill. The proposal gives the signal that premeditated killing in a domestic setting is justifiable. It effectively says that the crime is the fault not of the killer but of her victim. By removing personal responsibility for murder, it represents a wholesale attack against the fundamental principle of law itself.

But then, through a combination of moral cowardice and extreme feminism, family lawyers have been writing personal responsibility out of the script for decades. First, they removed the idea that behaviour mattered, so that eventually divorce law became so meaningless that fault was removed from it altogether.

And now, they actually reward bad behaviour. Despite the fact that women have been becoming increasingly unfaithful and predatory, they are now mainly awarded the lion’s share of divorce settlements.

Underlying it all is the judges’ assumption that women are generally more sinned against than sinning and that marriage is out of date -- a fact they have done their best to bring about. The leading exponent of that view – and the most influential voice in family law over at least the past two decades -- is Lady Justice Hale, a hard-line feminist, an opponent of marriage (despite being twice married herself) and a champion of easier divorce and equal rights for cohabitants.

Now she is to become the first female member of the Law Lords. She is without doubt exceedingly able. But her elevation epitomises the moral vacuum within our judiciary and wider establishment, which instead of holding the line for justice and social order are in thrall to the politics of the self, which makes victims of the vulnerable and leaves a trail of social and emotional devastation in its wake.

So men increasingly find they lose their homes and their children, even if their behaviour has been blameless. Their reckless public protests are inexcusable. But so, too, are the manifold injustices which are increasingly driving them over the edge.

Daily Mail, 3 November 2003

According to the government, cannabis is no more dangerous than slimming pills or tranquillisers. Last week, under cover of half-term and the sacking of the Tory leader, the government finally carried out its threat to downgrade cannabis from a class B to a class C ‘non-arrestable’ drug.

Tellingly, the Home Secretary David Blunkett was absent from a debate which – despite MPs’ protests -- lasted a mere 90 minutes. The government’s coyness stems from worries about public hostility to the clear signal it is giving young people that cannabis isn’t very dangerous. Just a few days later, fresh evidence has emerged to show just what a criminally reckless policy this is.

The Government says cannabis doesn’t kill. Now, Britain’s most senior coroner has blown that argument out of the water. Hamish Turner, president of the Coroners’ Society, has said cannabis is increasingly the factor behind deaths recorded as accidents or suicides. He estimates that in the past year, cannabis was a significant contributory factor in about 10 out of 100 deaths with which he dealt.

Other coroners agree, adding that cannabis is increasingly being found in the bodies of traffic accident victims, and warning that deaths will spiral if the drug is decriminalised. Cannabis, says Mr Turner unequivocally, is as dangerous as any other drug. It causes depression, paranoia and other mental health problems. And it kills.

All this will doubtless come as a bit of a shock to anyone who has fallen for the disingenuous statements on cannabis churned out by the government, not to mention the propaganda emanating from the pro-legalisation drug quangos and charities egging it on. It is no surprise, however, to anyone who has actually read the literature.

One Swedish study, for example, showed that cannabis had contributed to many homicides and other violent deaths, including motor accidents and suicides. These researchers concluded that ‘impulsive, intentional violent deaths seem to be characteristic for the cannabis user’ – patterns of behaviour and injuries which set cannabis apart from alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine or heroin.

In the US, another study of 268 murderers showed that almost a quarter of them had been under the influence of cannabis when they had committed their crimes. Some of those interviewed said of the drug ‘it made me aggressive, violent’, ‘it lowered my inhibitions’ and ‘I don’t think I had done anything if I hadn’t been under the influence’.

The stereotype of people just ‘chilling out’ on cannabis only applies to some people. By contrast, it can make others with different characters violent or lethal. So from society’s point of view, cannabis is just as dangerous as ‘hard’ drugs, and maybe even more so.

Much of the debate about cannabis rests on the mistaken impression that users don’t harm anyone else. This is simply not true, because apart from its links to aggression and paranoia, the damage it causes to the brain can also create devastating personality changes.

Habitual users often become passive, inflexible and rigid in their thinking; since they never question their actions, they are incapable of change. They can’t take criticism and instead feel misunderstood. So talking sense to them becomes a futile endeavour. This is surely why so much of the drugs debate feels to those opposed to legalisation like a dialogue with the insane – because indeed, they are talking to people some of whose brains can no longer deal with facts, deduction or logic.

There is now significant evidence showing the damage inflicted by cannabis upon people’s minds. Only recently, an expert at the Dutch Trimbos addiction institute reported that cannabis doubles the risk of schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions. As Hamish Turner so rightly observed: ‘Cannabis is a mind altering drug which has ravaging effects on the brain’.

Has anyone shown Mr Blunkett this research? Indeed, has he been shown any of the mountainous evidence about the terrible harm cannabis does to individuals and society? If he has, how can he possibly have downgraded it to the equivalent of a slimming pill?

But the suspicion is that he has not seen it. The suspicion is that he listens instead to advisers who are pushing for drug legalisation –such as DrugScope, an organisation which receives millions in grants from the Home Office, despite having links with the network of European activists mounting a co-ordinated campaign to soften up the public for drug legalisation and undermine the UN’s prohibition of drug use.

In the Commons debate on re-classification, the government’s case was a shambles. Caroline Flint, the hapless junior minister playing the role of Mr Blunkett’s human shield, was constantly on the back foot as angry MPs shredded her arguments.

She tried to justify reclassifying cannabis on the grounds that treating all drugs as equally harmful and dangerous lacked credibility. But all drugs have never been treated as identical. On the contrary, as she herself had observed a few minutes previously, they are divided into three classifications. So her justification made no sense at all.

When an MP told her that 14 year-olds taking cannabis were 60 per cent more likely to damage their brains, Ms Flint simply ignored his point. As Hamish Turner has correctly observed, some popular varieties of cannabis are up to ten times stronger than when it was used in the 1960s. But when the same point was made in the Commons, Ms Flint simply denied it.

The minister tried to hide behind the ‘experts’ on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. But as the Labour MP Kate Hoey pointed out, this committee has hardly any scientists on it; almost half its members are committed to liberalising drug use, and it contains no-one from any organisations who oppose this policy.

Ms Hoey has good reason to be angry. Her constituents were the guinea-pigs for the Lambeth ‘experiment’, the policing ‘blind eye’ to cannabis use which was a dry run for re-classification and which led to an explosion of all drug use in the borough.

Now, the rest of the country’s young people are to be exposed to the same disastrous muddle. They will think – mistakenly but understandably -- that taking cannabis is legal, since the police broadly cannot arrest them. More of them will therefore take a drug that damages their brains.

And there will be more contact with pushers dealing in hard drugs alongside cannabis, thus increasing all drug use – even though penalties for these dealers have actually been increased, as a nonsensical fig-leaf to conceal Mr Blunkett’s irresponsible capitulation.

The government’s soggy policy, and the signals it has been sending out that our drug law is an ass, has already had disastrous consequences. British deaths from ecstasy, cocaine and amphetamines have rocketed by 47 per cent in the past year. And in dozens of these fatal cases, the victims also smoked cannabis.

Coroners have explicitly warned ministers against the tolerance they are showing to cannabis. Other experts in pharmacology or toxicology say the same thing. They are all being ignored. The drug culture is now a recreational way of life for our young people, and the government has shamefully helped make it so.

Daily Mail, 1 November 2003

What on earth is the anxious parent to make of all this? Dr Simon Murch, one of the team from London’s Royal Free Hospital which first revealed parental concerns about a possible link between the MMR vaccine, bowel disease and autism in children, now says the vaccine is perfectly safe.

Since that original paper was published in 1998, its leading author Dr Andrew Wakefield has been on a personal crusade to persuade health officials and the public that there is increasing evidence to back up his fears of a link in a minority of children who receive the vaccine.

Now Dr Murch says the evidence for the overall safety of the vaccine is ‘comprehensive’ and that there is now ‘unequivocal evidence that MMR is not a risk factor for autism’. Yet Dr Wakefield insisted yesterday that there was ‘compelling evidence’ that MMR did play a part in causing bowel disease and autism in some children.

His side says it has also obtained potentially devastating evidence of measles virus in the brains of three autistic children. Further tests on one of them have apparently revealed that this virus is consistent with the MMR vaccine.

Dr Murch, however, maintains that all the epidemiological studies – which look for patterns of disease in the population – indicate no causal link between MMR and autism. However, these studies are either flawed or inadequate to the task of proving absolutely the vaccine’s safety.

True, they all say there is no evidence of any link. But that is quite different from concluding that no link exists. Yet the government and medical experts backing MMR persistently claim they have proved it is safe. What these studies actually suggest is that the jury is still out.

Dr Murch is alarmed that so many parents have refused to immunise their children with MMR that a major outbreak of measles is now on the cards -- along with a return of rubella -- resulting in serious illness, handicap or death. This is indeed a grave cause for concern.

But wouldn’t this be averted if the government gave parents the choice of single vaccines? Dr Murch claims that parents wouldn’t return after the measles jab for rubella or follow-up vaccinations. But surely it would be better than the current situation, where so many parents simply won’t take the risk of MMR at all?

Dr Murch says the risk of damage from measles or rubella is far greater than the minimal risk associated with MMR. Of course, all medical procedures involve weighing one risk against another. But how can we really trust the government’s assurances on this when it dismisses to many pieces of this baffling jigsaw?

The truth behind all this controversy can only be settled by clinical evidence. Yet a court case in which a group of parents of autistic children are suing the vaccine’s manufacturers and would, therefore, air all the available evidence, is now in doubt. Legal aid was suddenly withdrawn from the parents’ side on the grounds that they have produced no conclusive evidence of a link.

Smelling a rat, the parents are now trying to overturn that decision. Meanwhile, Dr Wakefield’s ‘compelling’ evidence remains secret, and parents are left in the dark.

Yet some of the experts who have seen it are the government’s own vaccination advisers. Even if it is not conclusive, the public interest surely demands that it should be placed in the public domain without delay. Only then can public alarm be allayed one way or the other, and children receive the vaccine protection they so clearly need.