Jewish Chronicle, 26 December 2003

I read David Aaronovitch’s JC column last week with more than usual interest. His gist was that right-wing Jews were a kind of ethnic aberration, and that it was more natural and comfortable for Jews to be on the left than on the right.

Nowadays, I’m always being called not just ‘right-wing’ but ‘extreme right’ or even ‘ultra-right’. Certainly, this makes me feel uncomfortable. In fact, it makes me chew the carpet.

Like David, I too came from a background where Conservatives were regarded as the class enemy. Like him, I think Jews should identify with the poor and oppressed. And concern for people at the bottom of the heap is still what drives me.

But unlike him, some years ago I started to change my view about the left, who confusingly often call themselves liberals. I began to realise they were not liberal at all, but profoundly illiberal. And I began to grasp that far from acting -- as they trumpeted at every opportunity -- in the interests of the poor and oppressed, just about everything they did trapped them in that condition.

On every issue where there were true victims – education failure, family breakdown, drug abuse -- they denied the truth and substituted instead lies, ideology and propaganda. They were against western culture, external moral rules and self-discipline. They were for nihilism, the worship of the self and gross personal irresponsibility.

And any deviation from this they labelled ‘right-wing’. Emptied of meaning, this has become a catch-all smear – code for ‘cruel and heartless’, deployed to intimidate and to shut down any challenge to the left. So saying that family disintegration is generally a disaster for children is ‘right-wing’. Saying that children are betrayed by schools that fail to teach them to read is ‘right-wing’. Saying it was right to go to war in Iraq (as David himself has discovered) is ‘right-wing’. And saying that Israel is more sinned against than sinning is so ‘right-wing’ it’s off the graph.

But if anyone is being ‘cruel and heartless’ on these issues, it is the left. And wreathed in sanctimony, they ostracise and punish anyone with an opposing view who they present as swivel-eyed lunatics. BBC producers regularly tell me I am referred to within that most objective of corporations as ‘mad’. Jews on the left are just as bad. One Jewish publisher reacted to a book proposal from me by declaring, ‘I’d rather take ricin than publish her’.

The left are simply obsessed by ‘the right’. Their position is often conceived principally in opposition to it. Proclaiming that they alone are moral – because they are not ‘cruel and heartless’ – they thus demonise and dehumanise the opposing point of view, to which their minds are terrifyingly closed. It is a pathology which has got far worse since the collapse of communism. These are ideologues without an ideology; and old habits die hard.

In truth, these labels are now meaningless. The Tories are as likely to espouse lower-class populism as represent the men in fur-collared coats. Labour has embraced the market. The economic argument which defined my parents’ and grandparents’ view of politics is dead. Instead, today’s political battles are cultural, and the divisions are even more bitter and profound.

So what am I? Well, I resist labels. But if I’m pushed into a corner, I suppose I think of myself as a liberal moralist. People use the term liberal wrongly, which accounts for much confusion. It is used to describe approval for personal autonomy, which has been taken to mean rejection of all codes of behaviour which might constrain freedom of action. In my book, that’s not liberal at all but libertinism, and a formula for radical self-centredness and a lengthening trail of victims.

Real liberalism, by contrast, relied on external rules to guarantee personal liberty. It was always a moral project which believed in making judgments between right and wrong behaviour. But if there’s a cardinal value of today’s left, it is non-judgmentalism. As a result, they have embraced lies, wrongdoing and injustice. They have made morality into a dirty word.

This should be fought tooth and nail, and it is surely the duty of Jews to fight it. This is not ‘right-wing’. It is instead a defence of civilised values; it is a defence, above all, of Jewish values.

I believe Jews should always be on the side of truth, justice and real (rather than sentimental) compassion. I think there is no nobler cause than tikkun olam, or repair of the world. The left are taking an axe to that world. Those Jews who cling to history to justify their attachment to this creed are wrapping themselves in a mantle of self-delusion and intellectual muddle.

This is not right-wing. It is simply right.

Daily Mail, 22 December 2003

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon on Christmas Day reportedly will attack the detention without trial of Muslim terrorist suspects in Britain and in Guantanamo Bay. Dr Rowan Williams says this sends a bad signal to Muslims that their faith is being targeted, and hinders their own development of ‘toleration and pluralism’.

Eyebrows may well be raised at the use of Christmas Day, whose primary message is surely for Christians, to discuss another faith. Moreover, the Archbishop’s specific comments give rise to considerable unease.

For he implies that ’religious toleration’ means tolerating terrorism. To say that detaining terrorist suspects ‘targets’ Muslims is also an insult to those moderate Muslims who are thus implicitly tarred with the same brush. Even worse, it ignores all those British Muslims who, having urged our government to do far more to exclude the extremists corrupting their religion, cannot understand why it has left so many still at large.

True, Guantanamo Bay is a cause for concern since prisoners there are detained without any judicial oversight. But as the Home Secretary said yesterday on BBC Radio Four’s The World this Weekend, our own anti-terror law is entirely different from the situation in Guantanamo Bay. It was passed by Parliament, and people detained under it – not because they are Muslims, he said, but because they ‘pose a major threat’ – have their cases reviewed by the courts.

Certainly, its provision for detention without trial is far from ideal. But these are desperate measures for desperate times. We face an unprecedented threat of mass murder on an unprecedented scale by people behaving in unprecedented ways.

This threat is greater than conventional terrorism, but doesn’t fit into existing legal definitions of war. Yet just as in a conventional war, evidence against some people cannot be brought to court because to do so would compromise the gathering of highly sensitive intelligence.

Our criminal law rests on the premise that it is better that several guilty people should go free rather than one innocent person go to prison. But with this kind of terrorist threat we simply can’t take that risk, since the consequences of just one guilty terrorist going free could be cataclysmic.

These terrorist suspects, who are not British, are being detained because the government thinks they are dangerous but refuses to deport them. No country in the world is expected to take in people it considers to be enemies of the state. Other countries simply throw them out.

But in Britain, judicial and ministerial impotence over deporting undesirable aliens means that to protect the public there is no alternative to locking them up. Moreover, they are actually free to go – if they either choose to return to the country from whence they came, or can find a third country to take them.

What is so extraordinary is that the Archbishop has chosen to raise this of all issues as his main concern at Christmas. Yet he appears to be ignoring the systematic worldwide Islamist persecution of Christians.

In country after country, radical Islamists are murdering Christians and attacking their churches. In Indonesia, a recent spate of attacks on Christian villages and individual Christians follows dozens of similar attacks in recent years. Three years ago, bombs exploded at 11 churches there on Christmas Eve, and this year the country is on terror alert against al Qa’eda once again.

Christians in Somalia have suffered wave after wave of Islamist attacks, including the recent murder of an elderly Italian nun who ran hospitals, orphanages and schools, and a British couple working for a children’s charity. Last February, a radical Islamist group said all Somali Christians should be treated as apostates from Islam and should be killed.

In Pakistan last month, a 15 year-old Christian boy was kidnapped and taken to an Islamic religious school where he was beaten and forced to become a Muslim. In Egypt, Islamists went on an anti-Christian rampage, burning and looting homes near Cairo. Similar atrocities occurred in Nigeria, where thirteen churches were torched along with 40 businesses and many Christian homes. In the Philippines, Christians are being repeatedly singled out and killed. And so on and appallingly on.

In the face of such global terror against its own flock, the Church remains quite astoundingly mute. Through such craven silence, it unforgiveably betrays its own followers. But it also effectively abandons others – including moderate Muslims, Jews, Hindus and secularists -- who are similarly the explicit targets of this Islamist fascism.

Reformist Muslims literally take their lives in their hands to speak out against the tyranny that has engulfed their religion. Nevertheless, some immensely brave souls are doing just this.

Dr Muhammed Talal al Rashid, for example, wrote an article in the Saudi Gazette in response to the murder of a Saudi Prince by radical Islamists in Algeria in which he said: 'We have bred monsters. We alone are responsible for it…We are the problem and not America or the penguins of the North Pole or those who live in caves in Afghanistan. We are it, and those who cannot see this are the ones to blame’.

Or take Irshad Manji, a Canadian broadcaster and an observant Muslim, who has asked why so many Muslims have ‘chosen hate’. She advocates an Islamic reformation and has said that this ‘may very well begin in the West, where we enjoy the precious freedoms to think, challenge and be challenged without fear of state reprisals’.

If the Archbishop really wants to reach out to moderate Muslims, he should surely be highlighting and supporting such courageous people. Or does he think they too, perhaps, are ‘targeting’ Muslims for criticism?

But Dr Williams’s sermon is not the first indication of something profoundly disturbing in his thinking. In ‘Writing in the Dust’, the pamphlet he published after 9/11, he wrote about people in the west, saying: ‘…we have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving them no other option’.

So according to this, people in the third world are somehow forced to participate in terrorism. But no-one is forced into terrorism. It is a choice all people can refuse to make.

Dr Williams’s remark comes close to justifying terror, as well as dismissing the third world as moral savages. It is an astounding thing for anyone to say, let alone the Archbishop of Canterbury. It embodies a truly deadly moral confusion.

Reaching out to other religions is a noble instinct. But not if it means ignoring attacks on your own flock or upon others. Not if it means extending the hand of friendship to those whose own hands are bloody. Not if it means abandoning those brave Muslims who need all our support if they are to rescue their religion from the evil that has befallen it.

Our western values are indeed precious and have to be fought for. But that fight will be undermined and may eventually be lost if the leaders of our culture no longer even understand them.

It can and will be won if people from all religions and none, who remain faithful to the principles of truth, justice and real compassion, unite to reassert our common humanity and help each other to remain true to these core beliefs. Happy Christmas.

Daily Mail, 19 December 2003

There is one overwhelming fact that cries out for attention from the shocking revelations that have emerged after the conclusion of the Soham case.

It is that the history of both Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr was dominated by irregular sexual activity including obsessional and violent sexual behaviour, serial relationships and under-age sex that was at best dealt with ineffectually and at worst either ignored or condoned.

Holly and Jessica were merely innocent victims who, as Jessica’s father has said, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when the time-bomb that was Huntley’s lethally twisted personality happened to go off.

And nothing should detract from Huntley’s culpability for the terrible murders he committed. Nothing should excuse the lies told by Carr in her attempt to protect him. Whatever their backgrounds, people – unless they are mentally ill -- know the difference between right and wrong and are able to choose the path they take.

But the trail that led to these terrible events consisted of a pattern of sexual behaviour that goes far beyond one man’s history of sexual violence. It throws into alarming relief a culture – or at least, a sub-culture -- in which norms of sexual restraint, self-respect and parental and community responsibility have catastrophically broken down.

For it is not merely that Huntley was previously investigated in connection with no fewer than eight sex offences. It is that many of these incidents – along with yet others that have now come to light – were mired in ambiguity or indifference arising from a spreading acceptance that a sexual free-for-all is now the norm for everyone, including children under the age of consent.

This phenomenon of under-age sexuality was clearly extensive enough to warrant concern at Soham Village College, where a previous caretaker had been dismissed over allegations of a sexual relationship with a pupil. And indeed Huntley, who had been asked in his job interview what he would do if a pupil developed a crush on him, reported precisely such an incident.

The under-age episodes in his own history are in themselves profoundly troubling. Police believe he had at least 30 sexual partners, many under the age of consent. But if it’s bad enough that such a man should be at large, what’s surely even more alarming is the collusion by children, parents, police and social workers with criminal under-age sexual activity.

Huntley first came to official attention when the parents of a 15 year-old girl told police and social services he was having sex with her. The matter was dropped after the girl refused to make a formal complaint. But Huntley had allegedly committed the crime of unlawful sex. He should have been charged – which would at least have put his name on the police national computer.

Janine Oliver was 14 when she too started having sex with him. But according to Janine, when her mother eventually contacted social services after the schoolgirl had moved in with him they decided – incredibly – that ‘I was old enough to make my own decisions’ and that her family were providing ‘support and protection’. Such is officialdom’s craven response to criminal sexual activity and the duty to protect the young.

Even more disturbing is the attitude of some of these parents. Teachers called in police and social services when 15-year-old Emma Fish started an affair with Huntley. But not only would the girl not co-operate with them – neither would her parents.

In the wake of the Soham murders, some of these parents are now belatedly protesting – but nevertheless blaming everyone but themselves for what happened to their own children. 15 year-old Katie Webber moved in with Huntley who abused and intimidated her. Her mother now says: ‘He ruined Katie’s life’ and ‘she never sat her exams because of him’.

But what was this mother doing when her daughter started having under-age sex? Why do some parents refuse to co-operate with the police over such activity? Whatever happened to parental responsibility?

The answer surely lies in our climate of radical self-centredness, in which sex has become the defining activity in a culture ruthlessly fixated on pleasure and instant gratification. Sexual restraints have been knocked away. Sex has become the nation’s premier recreational sport. Moral disapproval is ‘authoritarian’.

Parents who want to junk tiresome responsibility so they can behave with the freedom of children are happy to regard their children as mini-adults who cannot be disciplined and who make their own decisions. Children learn the rules of behaviour from their parents’ serial sexual shenanigans. Schools dish out the condoms, GPs hand over the morning-after pill. Teen magazines advise on sex acts for tots. The age of consent is regarded as a joke.

And paedophiles like Huntley therefore see no bar to going down the age range in sexual conquests from 15 to 12, or younger.

This free-for-all also complicates allegations of rape. One of the four girls who claims Huntley raped her turned out to have lied that she hadn’t known her attacker, when CCTV footage from a Grimsby nightclub showed her dancing with Huntley and kissing him. Separate rape claims were made after he shared a taxi to another girl’s house, and after three months had elapsed following yet another meeting at a nightclub. Maybe these rape claims were true; but such ambiguous signals given by the breakdown of the old rules of sexual restraint make such claims far more difficult to prove, and as a result place women in greater danger.

The collapse of sexual order does not merely provide the swamp in which people like Huntley swim. It helps create them in the first place. Huntley’s philanderer father left his mother, who promptly took a lesbian lover. Not surprisingly, Huntley developed a deep confusion over his own sexuality which undoubtedly fuelled his murderous violence.

Carr also had a troubled background, growing up without a father after her mother left her husband when Carr was a toddler. Again not surprisingly, her resulting fragile sense of self led to both anorexia and degraded sexual exhibitionism, not to mention her attachment to Huntley despite the ill-treatment to which he subjected her.

What all this adds up to is that part of our society has degenerated into a fetid stew of anarchic sexual activity, leading to a terrifying loss of human empathy and even predatory violence. Individuals whose sense of self has been pathologically damaged by the dismemberment of their own families prey upon others, including children who have themselves become detached from established codes of behaviour, law and self-restraint through a similar collapse of family structure. These codes are in turn no longer policed by either parents or a governing class who have simply turned their backs on moral responsibility and on enforcing the fundamentals of a civilised society.

The murder of children remains, thankfully, very rare. Nevertheless, lives lived on the margins which give rise to these terrible events will surely grow in number as more and more children emerge from the emotional chaos of fragmented backgrounds with shattered sexual and personal identities.

The murder of Holly and Jessica has illuminated a sickness, not just in two individuals, but in our wider society.

Daily Mail, 15 December 2003

The capture of Saddam Hussein is absolutely tremendous news, a great day for the people of Iraq and for everybody who believes in life and freedom and the need to fight to preserve them.

A mass murderer, responsible for a regime of hideous and barbaric cruelty, is now to be brought to justice, tried and sentenced -- as he must be -- by the people he enslaved. And a significant player in world terrorism who menaced the security of the west has at last been removed from that terrifying picture.

The discovery of the former dictator in his underground hole is of enormous military and political significance. At a stroke, the dynamic within Iraq has been transformed. For despite the ostensible military victory in the spring, the war did not end there. For the second time, the US-led coalition had merely scotched the snake, not killed it.

It let Saddam get away in 1991 after the liberation of Kuwait, allowing him to run rings round the world over his weapons of mass destruction programme. When it finally went to war again last spring, it toppled his regime but found he once again slipped through its fingers.

The result was that the Iraqis simply didn’t believe he had gone forever. When people have been subjected to a tyranny as all-embracing as Saddam’s regime, the terror does not begin to disappear unless the tyrant is captured and visibly removed from the stage.

And indeed, he had not gone, since attacks by Saddam loyalists continued. Just a few hours before news of his capture, a car bomb killed 17 people at a police station near Baghdad. Such a terrorist insurgency was precisely what Saddam himself had threatened: that if he lost the conventional war, he would go underground and fight a war of attrition.

Whether he was actually still directing murder operations against the coalition forces, or whether Saddamite terrorists were merely drawing inspiration from the fact that he was still at liberty, the former dictator continued to cast a poisonous shadow over Iraq.

Many Iraqis therefore remained far too terrified to bring the coalition useful information, and even some captured Iraqi officials undoubtedly remained silent in either hope or fear that Saddam might eventually emerge victorious once again.

Now that shadow has finally been lifted, and the joy of the Iraqis is plain for all to see. Only now can they properly emerge from the nightmare through which they have lived. The psychological importance of this event cannot be overestimated. The Saddamite insurgents are now truly leaderless. Maybe they will now lay down their arms; and maybe those who have important information will at last come forward.

And of course, there are hopes that Saddam will himself finally answer the great questions arising from his record: in particular, the true state of his WMD programme, and what he did with the WMD material for which he refused to account to the UN. According to security sources, the whole lot could be stored within an area no bigger than an American two-car garage, so it could easily have been hidden in Iraq or in a neighbouring Arab state.

But there is no guarantee that Saddam will spill the beans on any of this. Why should he, since the absence of such evidence has done so much to weaken the coalition through internal dissent? And hugely significant though his capture undoubtedly is, this is by no means the end of the war in Iraq, let alone the wider war against terror.

For Saddam’s loyalists are not the only people wreaking havoc within Iraq. Iran and Syria are also major players in the terrorism that continues there. Saddam’s arrest, and the resulting increased likelihood that Iraq will now move towards peace and prosperity, might even provoke them to step up a terrorist campaign whose purpose is to frustrate precisely that objective for fear it destabilise their own tyrannical regimes.

If Iraq is to be stabilised, much depends on how this new situation is handled. It offers the coalition the chance of regaining an initiative that has been greatly endangered by the serious blunders made in post-war Iraq by the US administration, paralysed as it has been by internal fighting between the State Department and the Pentagon, with President George W Bush playing shuttlecock in the middle.

In particular, it should now put the squeeze on both Iran and Syria, both of whose regimes – along with other Arab leaders – will have been severely shaken by the capture of Saddam whose ability to call the shots (both literally and figuratively) against the west gave him near-mythic status. The US has already imposed sanctions on Syria in order to pressurise it to end its sponsorship of terrorism -- which is doubtless why Syria is now calling for a ‘clear, constructive and reasonable dialogue’ with America.

As for Iran, seen by many as the very pivot of the terror infrastructure, America should not only stand fast against its development of the nuclear bomb; it should also actively assist the majority of its people who wish to be freed from the tyrannical regime imposed by their rulers, but who need practical support and encouragement if they are to bring about its fall.

Beyond all this, however, al Q’aeda still remains to be dealt with. There is increasing evidence that Saddam – whose involvement in Arab terrorism over the years has never been in doubt -- was involved with al Q’aeda as well. Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph reported a top-secret memo published by Iraq’s coalition government which linked Saddam’s regime to Mohammed Atta, the al Q’aeda mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal.

This follows the leak of a memorandum by the American defence department to the Senate intelligence committee which detailed astonishingly intricate links between Saddam and al Qaeda going back to 1990. It said they had a relationship that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps, Iraqi financial support and safe haven in Iraq.

But al Q’aeda is a complex global network of terror, and if Saddam was involved he was merely one of its players. His removal only points up the failure to catch Osama bin Laden, and the still baleful threat of further atrocities by his outfit.

Saddam was not merely a bad man to his people but also – whether or not he was involved with al Q’aeda -- a significant weaver of the intricate web of the terrorism that threatens all of us.

Now finally he has been stopped. That’s a cause for rejoicing, and a potential tipping point. But no-one should be under any illusions that terrorism in Iraq, let alone the rest of the world, will now cease. Instead, Saddam’s arrest offers America its biggest – but possibly, its last – chance to get the peace in Iraq back on track and worldwide terror ultimately defeated.

Daily Mail, 11 December 2003

Next to kissing babies on the stump, announcing a raft of measures targeted at improving the lot of children is the stock-in-trade of politicians with an eye to populist appeal.

It also wrong-foots the opposition. For who but the heartless, it might be thought, could possibly object to funnelling public money into child welfare, especially at Christmas-time?

Doubtless, this kind of calculation was not a million miles from the Chancellor’s mind when Santa Gordon pulled out of his pre-Budget sack a list of apparent goodies for children: a doubling of childcare places and the creation of 1000 new children’s centres; an increase in child tax credits; tax breaks for employees whose employers contribute to childcare; and help with child care costs in parents’ own homes.

This programme, however, is not about the interests of children at all. It is rather a radical agenda to reshape the family, to make parents increasingly dependent upon the state, and to undermine them by giving the government more and more control over the care of children.

The whole thrust is to increase ‘childcare’. By this, the government does not mean care by parents -- the one thing that’s really important and yet is not provided for. Instead, it’s all about getting mothers out to work and paying other people to care for their children. As the director of the Daycare Trust said yesterday, Gordon Brown is the ‘childcare champion’.

He meant it as compliment. But ‘childcare champion’ is not the same as ‘children’s champion’. For many years now, the most extravagant claims have been made that it is actually better for children to be looked after in day nurseries or by childminders than by their own mothers at home. But in fact, daycare does not have overall a clean bill of health.

True, some children from multiply deprived homes do benefit from extremely well resourced daycare. But research also indicates that children who spend long periods in daycare from an early age are more likely to have behavioural problems than infants cared for by their mothers. Young children benefit from an intensive relationship with a single constant carer. But in many daycare centres there is an alarming lack of personal contact between staff and children.

With no consensus on whether daycare is good for children or not, it is essential that a level playing field should give parents the choice of whether to work or not.

But the reason daycare is being pushed so hard is nothing to do with the needs of children, but an ideological obsession with getting all women out to work. So there is no choice. Instead, the whole system of benefits and incentives – including child tax credits – is loaded against mothers staying at home.

Widespread protests by women at such an oppressive policy led the Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to deliver an apparent recantation, saying ministers had been wrong to give the impression that stay-at-home mothers were worthless and that all women should get jobs.

Yet at the first opportunity to correct this mistake, Gordon Brown has merely delivered more of the same. Not only does it discriminate against women’s desire to do the best for their children, but under the camouflage of ‘help for children’ it actively undermines their parents.

It is simply staggering that Sure Start, the programme which will deliver the new children’s centres, is almost entirely devoted to replacing parental independence by state-approved child care. The children’s centres will provide not only daycare but ‘parental outreach’, family support, a base for childminders, and a ‘service hub’ for parents and providers of childcare.

The message this gives is that the care of children is a collective activity to be supervised and run by the state, which knows how to bring up children better than their own mothers who should be sent out to work instead.

In Delivering for Children and Families, a report published by the government a year ago, such intended state interference in family life was made crystal clear when it announced: ‘The government is developing an overarching strategy for all children and young people from conception to age 19’.

How have we got into a situation where the government is now boasting of such wholesale intrusion into personal freedom and independence? The answer lies in an unholy alliance between a number of separate agendas.

First and most important is the feminist agenda to reshape family life to give women independence from men by making them all self-supporting, thus undermining the idea of ‘pooled’ resources which is the economic basis of marriage.

The government was aware, however, that family disintegration was an immense and growing problem. Prevented by the feminists from supporting marriage, it had to be seen to do something else to give the impression it was supporting family life.

This is where the Chancellor’s own preoccupations entered the equation. Gordon Brown has an unshakeable belief that paid work is the panacea for all ills. He also wants to redistribute money from the better off to the poor. But redistribution sounds too Old Labour. Far cleverer and safer to talk instead about ‘ending child poverty’. The outcome was that the issue of family life was redefined as the issue of children. This had the advantage of appealing to everyone.

So the solution to poverty and family breakdown –uniting the feminists and the Treasury -- was to get lone mothers out to work and provide mass child care. But by targeting lone parents for such help, and removing financial support for married couples, the government has provided a financial incentive for lone parenthood, making child poverty and disadvantage all the more likely.

For even with these huge subsidies, lone parents will still be poor and children will still be hugely disadvantaged from not being brought up by both parents. The real solution to poverty and the emotional disadvantage of children is for mothers to marry men who are paid a family wage. Instead, the government has created a single-parent family wage. The result is that in the lower reaches of the income scale, the family has been redefined as a mother and children, with a man as an optional extra who is actually discouraged from being a responsible father.

The grotesque apotheosis of this approach is the proposal to give teenage single mothers £5,000 of free nursery care to encourage them to go back to school and ‘get better jobs’. It is, in fact, a £5,000 incentive to teenage motherhood – resulting, no doubt, in such girls being sucked into the Sure Start childcare and parenting ‘support’ system.

The childcare strategy is not some benign aberration. It is a throwback to the Marxist idea that social life should not be rooted in the family – the bulwark of independence from the tyranny of the state – but in the state itself.

Taken with other initiatives such as parenting orders or the National Family and Parenting Institute, it represents a vast intrusion by the state into private lives, while at the same time destroying the only family structure in which the state has any legitimate interest.

It is, in short, nothing less than the progressive nationalisation of childhood and of family life itself.

Daily Mail, 8 December 2003

The Health Secretary, Dr John Reid, has announced that ‘bug-buster’ officials are to be appointed in every English hospital to combat the alarming rate of infections caused by poor standards of hygiene. And what is the most crucial purpose of this urgent, £12 million ‘call to arms’? Why, the need to ensure that hospital staff actually wash their hands!

The sheer, jaw-dropping incongruity and inappropriateness of the government’s response to the incredible filthiness of our hospitals is enough to make one weep. The Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has published a plan, entitled ‘Winning Ways’, to reduce hospital infections.

Just look for a start at the list of people at whom this plan is targeted:

‘PCT CEs, NHS Trusts CEs, SHA CEs, DsHSC, Medical Directors, Directors
of PH, Directors of Nursing, PCT PEC Chairs, Special HA CEs, CCDCs,
CMOs, Royal Colleges’.

This blizzard of initials and titles represents senior NHS managers and other medical bigwigs. In other words, this is bureaucrats talking to bureaucrats. But the only people who actually matter are those who run -- or should be running – the actual cleaning of wards, operating theatres and rest of the hospital buildings.

Sir Liam then solemnly proceeds to list all the initiatives the government has already tried to reduce hospital infections. There was a report and guidance in 1998; then a circular in 1999; then a control assurance standard on infection control in 1999; then an infection control circular in 2000; then a decontamination control circular in 2000; then further detailed guidelines on the prevention and control of infection; then a mandatory surveillance scheme for serious (bloodstream) infections; and then more guidelines produced this year by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.

This is bureaucracy gone stark, staring bonkers. All these initiatives -- and yet 300,000 patients per year still suffer hospital-based infections which cost the NHS £1 billion a year, prompting the Health Secretary to set up yet more initiatives costing more millions, which boil down to how to tell staff to wash their hands.

Failure to meet this elementary standard of hygiene, says Sir Liam, is believed to be down to laziness or carelessness. So does he say staff should be told to behave more responsibly and should be disciplined if they do not? Good gracious, no.

The real reasons they don’t wash their hands, apparently, are inadequate facilities, lack of time and a ‘paucity of hand hygiene agents’. Dear oh dear; is Sir Liam seriously suggesting that thirty years ago when the wards were spotless there was any less of a ‘paucity of hand hygiene agents’ (such as soap and water)?

This prize piece of gobbledegook obscures the real source of the problem – the breakdown of anything remotely resembling effective hospital management. Sir Liam says ward staff now control their own ‘environment’ budgets. Big deal, since these staff have no say in awarding or ending cleaning contracts, and cannot discipline or fire cleaners who don’t do the job properly. Instead, these ‘budget-controllers’ spend their time pushing paper around.

The result is that no-one is properly held to account. No-one tells the cleaners not to use dirty water to wash the floors; the contract is with the cleaning company, and so the hospital staff disclaim responsibility. No-one can tell the nurses what to do. If anyone is bawled out, the chances are they’ll sue for harassment.

In a blistering, utterly shocking and true report on the NHS for the Centre for Policy Studies entitled ‘Managing not to Manage’, Harriet Sergeant provides chapter and verse on the NHS calamity.

A consultant anaesthetist wrote last year (in this newspaper) how, when she became a hospital patient herself, she found in the toilets a pile of faecally-soiled paper underwear, a blood-stained theatre gown, a filthy toilet bowl and pubic hair in the shower. In three weeks, she never saw a cleaner bring a mop into the bathroom. She caught the superbug MRSA.

A retired GP, visiting his wife in hospital, was shocked to find sweet-papers, old bits of Elastoplast and the tops of disposable syringes behind the bed. His wife died from blood poisoning after contracting MRSA. In another hospital, an anaesthetist related how no-one cleaned the blood-splashed operating theatre between operations, and infection rates were accordingly high.

Dr Reid has attacked Ms Sergeant’s report as ‘brutally tendentious’. It is not. Shamefully, it is all too true. And much of the reason is rooted in a deep-seated problem with modern nursing.

Of course, nurses are under enormous pressure with rising demand and too few staff. And of course, there are many examples of first-class hospital care. But there are also many, many instances of really shocking neglect. This is particularly true if you are old or inarticulate, leading to a breakdown in the most basic level of care, as anyone who has witnessed the sometimes heartbreaking way in which the elderly are treated in NHS hospitals can testify.

The rot goes back to the 1980s when nursing became ‘professionalised’. Care, kindness and common sense went out of the window. They were displaced by the doctrine that nurses should have parity with doctors and should not be asked to do anything that might demean their status as women – such as ensuring the wards were clean. Instead of being taught how to feed, toilet and dress patients to make them comfortable and preserve their dignity, in came politically correct concerns with poverty, ethnicity, class and gender. And out went concepts of hierarchy and discipline as affronts to the autonomy of the nurse.

‘Modern matrons’ are supposed to be responsible for ensuring high standards of infection control and cleanliness. But ‘modern matrons’ do not have the power of old-style matrons, because the continuing rejection of authority figures in nursing means no-one is able to tell anyone else to do anything.

For decades, our hospitals had remarkably low infection rates, despite their systematic underfunding and primitive facilities, because iron control was maintained over hygiene. Unlike the ‘modern matron’, her old-style predecessor exercised control over every nurse, cleaner and porter and she knew every patient under her care – because she understood that it was her care they were under and for which she was accountable.

She ran her hospital like a military exercise. Today, that is impossible because nurses find that approach anachronistic and unacceptable. The result is sloppiness, a culture of excuses and gross dereliction of managerial duty, and patient infection.

What is needed is a return of the old-style matron, ward sisters with clout and a hierarchy of management where the people in charge actually connect to the front-line.

Instead, Dr Reid’s lamentable ‘call to arms’ is to be answered by the new Directors of Infection Prevention and Control and the new Inspector of Microbiology – not to mention the National Patient Safety Agency, the Commission for Health Care and Inspection, the Health Protection Agency, the Clinical Governance Support Team, the Modernisation Agency and the chief executives who run the hospitals.

None of this scandalously bloated bureaucrats’ bonanza, of course, will tackle the crisis in professionalism on the front line, the only thing that will actually make any difference.

Daily Mail, December 3 2003

The government claims that the Domestic Violence Bill which was published yesterday will put the ‘needs of victims’ at the heart of the criminal justice system. In fact, it does something very different. Incredibly, it takes an axe to the very notion of justice itself.

For the bill proposes something at which one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. It will give the courts the power to impose a ‘restraining order’ to protect an alleged domestic violence victim from a defendant, even after he has been acquitted in court.

So even if a man – and it is almost always a man who finds himself in the dock – has been found not guilty of assaulting his wife or partner, he may still be treated as if he is guilty and prevented from going anywhere near her. He will leave the court without a stain on his character, only to be treated as if he were a criminal. This measure will destroy the very concept of innocence itself.

Appalling as this is, however, it is merely one strand in a far broader and sinister pattern emerging from current government measures, which – under the guise of protecting a range of politically correct ‘victims’ -- amount to a wholesale onslaught against justice, freedom, truth and objectivity.

The assumption lying behind the invidious Domestic Violence Bill proposal is that if a woman makes an allegation of abuse against a man, it must be true – even if a court has found no substance to the charge. It thereby enacts the ultra-feminist belief that all men are guilty. Far from giving victims, as ministers claim, ‘the support they need to convict the guilty’, it will create an entirely new type of victim – men who are innocent, but are treated as if they are not.

The driving force behind it is not a concern for victims at all. It is a rabid anti-man agenda (evident also in separate moves to rig rape trials against men) which presents men as invariable abusers and women as invariably abused. This was made clear by the Solicitor-General Harriet Harman who said this was ‘a tough new law which will protect women and offer violent men a choice – stop the violence or you will face prison’.

In fact, all reputable research overwhelmingly indicates that women are just as likely to be as violent towards their partners as men – and even land the first blow more frequently than men. Yes, more women than men are actually killed by their partners; but that is due more to the fact that men tend to be stronger rather than any innate abusiveness, which is shared equally between the sexes.

These facts, however, are drowned out by the fact that ultra-feminism has claimed a general victim status for women. This is part of the ‘victim culture’, in which any group whose situation is in some way disadvantageous claims this is due, not to chance or individual incompetence or misdeeds, but to external ‘oppression’. This status then entitles it to demand preferential treatment, including the presumption that anything its members may do is legitimate and anything its ‘oppressors’ may do is not.

As a result, victim culture produces a complete reversal of responsibility, in which innocent people are deemed guilty of discriminatory or prejudiced acts towards members of the self-designated ‘victim’ group which by definition is always innocent. Far from protecting real victims, therefore, victim culture reverses the roles of victim and victimiser and produces real injustice.

It also destroys notions of truth and objectivity. For the essence of victim culture is that these ‘victims’ define themselves as such. Despite the fact that this is wholly subjective and therefore eminently challengeable, this self-definition nevertheless trumps any objective reality. So the woman who claims she is the victim of domestic violence trumps the man who is aquitted of the offence.

The same pernicious fallacy underpins the new employment equality regulations that came into force this week. These regulations outlaw discrimination, victimisation or harassment on grounds of sexual orientation or religious belief. Clearly, real prejudice or discrimination is wrong. But these regulations – imposed upon Britain by the EU -- usher in a truly Kafkaesque nightmare for employers, who now face being accused of victimising or harassing employees on the grounds of sexual or religious orientation of which these employers may be completely unaware.

Far from correcting injustice, these regulations pave the way for infinite injustice – not least because the grounds for complaint are once again based on the alleged victim’s subjective perception rather than an objective test. So someone can say he thought that his employer believed he was gay and that was why he didn’t win promotion – and win a case for harassment.

Or employees can sue for ‘violation of their dignity’ on account of sexual orientation or religious belief. With the threat of being hauled off to a tribunal on the basis that someone -- of whose sexuality or religious beliefs a colleague was blissfully unaware -- took grievous offence at his playground humour, people are going to be too terrified to open their mouths.

If a Muslim employee, let’s say, expresses a mild opinion that women should stay at home rather than go out to work, this will now constitute harassment if his female colleagues decide this remark was an offensive attack upon them. And their employer also faces potential legal action unless he disciplines this Muslim employee. What on earth is all this going to do for communal relations?

Similarly, if an employer restricts staff breaks, he might be sued for discrimination by, say, a Muslim who needs to pray at regular intervals. So the hapless employer will have to allow such breaks unless he can prove it would seriously damage his work. The contortions required by all this descend into politically correct farce when the regulations solemnly intone: ‘…it could be justified to refuse permission to a firefighter to take a prayer break at any time when she is responding to an emergency’. Just how many female Muslim firefighters can there be in Britain?

This is all sheer madness. The potential for abuse is endless. It opens up the prospect of legal action on the basis of any perceived slight. It will tie businesses up in knots. It will increase ill feeling towards women and minorities. And it will force intrusion into private lives, which will be turned into a public battleground.

Moreover, such potential abuses will be enforced by their own commissariat, the proposed new Commission for Equality and Human Rights. According to ministers, this body – which will replace the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission -- will provide more ‘joined-up’ support for a crackdown on discrimination and the promotion of ‘equality and diversity’. It will also for the first time promote and police human rights law.

Far from expanding equality and diversity, however, this new super-quango is likely to worsen the Orwellian nightmare of victim culture. It will be a vast bureaucracy enforcing a hugely expanded, oppressive agenda of political correctness that will set citizen against citizen and conduct a witch-hunt against any attitudes of which it disapproves.

At the root of the injustice of victim culture is the substitution of objective tests and rules by subjective experience. This replaces a system of law based on generally accepted beliefs by a free-for-all in which self-designated victim groups write the laws to suit themselves.

This lies behind the proposed Civil Partnerships Bill, which gives most of the legal privileges of marriage to cohabiting homosexual couples on the grounds that the fact they don’t have such privileges is proof that society is discriminating against them. In fact, it is doing nothing of the sort, because marriage is a unique institution in which society has a particular stake.

This obvious truth, however, is now brushed aside on the grounds that anyone who doesn’t have something that someone else has got is by definition a victim of prejudice. So marriage is to be further attacked and weakened, because the subjective definition of a self-designated victim group now trumps all our existing laws, customs and understandings.

Even more dramatically, the proposed law reform for transsexuals will enable another ‘victim’ group to trump our very understanding of what it means to be a human being. The Gender Recognition Bill, announced the day after the Queen’s Speech, will allow transsexuals to register for a new birth certificate in their adopted sex, and to marry in that sex.

Now of course, people who feel the need to take the drastic step of changing their sex deserve every sympathy and consideration. But apart from the fact that surgery is not always a solution to their problems, the proposal would establish personal identity on the basis of a lie.

For their new birth certificate would say falsely that they were born into the sex which they now profess. But this would not be true. And if they marry, there are grounds for saying that they would be marrying someone of their same ‘real’ sex. For despite their ‘gender reassignment’, it does not follow that just because they feel themselves to be, and desperately want to be considered as, a member of their chosen sex, that they are indeed so.

After all, the bill also expressly states that they will retain their rights and obligations under their old gender, such as being a mother or father. So we may have the grotesque situation, for example, where a transsexual may be pursued for child support as a father, even though as a woman he has married another man.

How can our society have got into such a terrifying, nihilistic mess? At root is our profound loss of values and the emergence instead of two destructive doctrines. The first is ‘identicality’, the belief that if anyone doesn’t have what other people have got, they must be the victims of prejudice. The second is gross personal irresponsibility, and the corresponding tendency to blame others for any personal misfortune.

This has given rise to the compensation culture of human rights – the defining religion of the EU -- which has encouraged group after group to define itself as victims, and use the ever-expanding army of grasping and ideological human rights lawyers to make money out of exercising the desire to control the lives and thoughts of their fellow citizens.

The foundation stone of English liberty is the principle that everything is permitted unless it is expressly forbidden. We shall soon reach the point where everything will be forbidden unless it is expressly permitted. Discrimination and prejudice are wrong. But the victim culture is scything through the foundations of truth, liberty and justice, and establishing in their place a truly victimising tyranny of the self.

Daily Mail, 1 December 2003

The government is in a blind panic. Desperate to stave off defeat over its flagship proposal to introduce university ‘top-up’ fees, it is throwing a couple of bones to its rebels. It says it will raise the financial threshold at which graduates will pay back these fees, and it will give more teeth to the university access regulator, whose job is to get more disadvantaged pupils into university.

Initial reaction shows such appeasement may have little effect. At least 130 Labour MPs are in open revolt, because the proposal challenges Labour’s core belief in what it calls ‘equality’ but what others might more accurately term its fanatical zeal for forcing everyone into the same mould.

There is no question that the universities are in a parlous position. But the government’s proposal is no solution. It’s not merely that even the full top-up fee of £3000 is nowhere near enough to keep the universities’ heads above water. Far more disturbingly, the whole approach presents a huge threat to the concept of a university itself, to freedom of intellectual inquiry, and to advancement by merit – the only principle fair to all.

In particular, beefing up the sinister access regulator should be seen as a threat of the kind that should have no place at all in a free country. It is not just that – as the Education Department’s very own red tape watchdog has warned – the proposed system would be a bureaucratic nightmare. The very basis for such a regulator is pernicious.

The government has no business regulating access at all. The universities should be open to everyone who has the ability to go there. Instead, the government is rigging the system to give preferential access to pupils with the right social cachet, and discriminating against those who don’t have it, even though their prowess may be greater.

The fact that the social cachet in question means coming from the wrong side of the tracks or from failing schools makes it no less obnoxious to discriminate against merit in this way. It is social engineering, and appallingly unjust. But then, education policy in general -- including the expansion of the universities to take half of all school-leavers – is based on precisely this ideology.

The universities are up the financial creek because of the huge expansion of places with no money to fund them. But this expansion has resulted in a catastrophic lowering of standards, because many students who have been encouraged to go to university do not have the ability to cope.

The government subscribes to the Lewis Carroll fantasy that everyone should be seen to achieve equally, for fear that different levels of attainment might hurt people’s feelings and ‘self-esteem’. This delusion dumbed down the GCSE, which in turn forced A-level standards to slide; and as a result of that, so too did standards at university.

At same time, the government used financial blackmail to force the universities to take not only more students but more from poor educational backgrounds. So standards slipped to ensure that more and more students who weren’t up to it got degrees -- including rigging entry requirements to favour students with poor A-level grades.

The outcome is that many degree courses now have to include much remedial work which should have been done at school. This has been devastatingly confirmed by the former Chief Inspector of Schools Mike Tomlinson, who said recently that many students could no longer sustain an argument, because multiple choice questions at GCSE had led them badly by the hand. In other words, our university students – the cream of our education system – have not even been taught how to think.

The government is gerrymandering university entrance to conceal the fact that the reason fewer bright, disadvantaged children are getting into good universities lies in its own disastrous failure to address low standards in the schools. A study by the National Audit Office has shown that even when lower previous ability or disadvantaged backgrounds are taken into account, children achieve far more if they go to grammar schools than comprehensives.

But instead of addressing the comprehensive disaster, the government continues instead to hollow out education itself. As a result of its decision to make modern languages optional at age 14, 60 per cent of comprehensive schools have dropped compulsory foreign language teaching. And the main casualties are the poor, as it has been dropped in more than twice as many schools with disadvantaged intakes.

Ministers claim that this will help avoid turning poor children off school. But this is tantamount to saying poor children are too stupid to learn foreign languages. What an insulting betrayal of the very children the government is so hypocritically forcing the universities to shoe-horn into their courses.

It gets worse. The school exam regulator is backing the idea of combining history and geography in one course to make these subjects ‘more popular’ and provide a ‘broader outlook’. But this would mean many pupils would learn half as much history and geography as before. Once again, A-level would have to drop its standards to accommodate such gaps in knowledge.

And now the government is to destroy the very essence of a university altogether. Institutions that don’t do research will be able to qualify as ‘universities’ merely because they teach. But universities are principally research institutions. They are not high schools for the over-18s.

The teaching they do depends on their embodying a bedrock of original academic inquiry that constantly pushes forward the frontiers of our understanding and knowledge. Without their research base, they cease to be universities. Any ‘degrees’ they may offer would be worthless – and would demean all degrees.

The government is obsessed with widening university access because it thinks economic success is related to the proportion of the population who have degrees. But this is not so. Look at Switzerland, for example – stunningly prosperous, but with half the number going to university as in Britain. The Swiss priority – quite rightly – is with high quality vocational training for the vast majority.

Universities are not about training in economically useful skills. They are about the education of the human mind. They are about truth, knowledge for its own sake, and excellence. They are not suitable, appropriate or desirable for everyone. This not elitism. It is demonstrable realism.

The attack on the universities has surely reached the point of no return. Ministers haven’t got a clue what universities or education are actually for. This is a government of philistine vandals and ideological wreckers. Education has become a devastated landscape of mediocrity and mendacity.

The universities must now break free from state control. They should become independent institutions able to set their own fees. Students should be given public money in vouchers to spend on the university of their choice, and the inevitable top-ups should be offset by bursaries and scholarships for the poor.

Having instead to pay through the nose through top-up fees for the collapse of education standards and the destruction of the very idea of a university, while the guardians of our intellectual freedom are bullied into social engineering, is surely the final intolerable insult.