Daily Mail, 27 January 2004

He is hardly known for his liberalising zeal -- indeed, many of his critics would claim that he is the most authoritarian Home Secretary for years in his attempts to prove he is tough on crime.

Yet now, by deciding to downgrade the law on cannabis, David Blunkett has scored a truly spectacular own goal. He has managed to unite a vast army of opponents -- doctors, police, teachers and parents -- in a ferocious backlash that is threatening his political credibility.

So why on earth did he do it? Why has he reversed the tough approach to drugs of his predecessor, Jack Straw, and blundered into a crisis of his own making?

And have no doubt that this is a crisis. By reclassifying cannabis from a class B to a class C drug, Mr Blunkett has thrown the law into abject confusion.

Many now wrongly think cannabis is legal or safe. The police say they don't know what they are supposed to do with cannabis users.

The UN’s International Narcotics Control Board has warned of ‘worldwide repercussions’ from the British initiative, which other countries fear will undermine their own anti-drug campaigns and encourage cannabis cultivation.

Mr Blunkett remains defiant and insists that the change simply allows the police to concentrate on tackling Class A drugs such as heroin or cocaine.

But this is completely disingenuous. Concentrating on heroin and cocaine is already police policy. Cannabis has been off the radar for years -- as the chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Andy Hayman, readily admits.

‘Seizures of cannabis have been decreasing and the number of cannabis users being brought before the courts has been reduced,’ he says. ‘Cannabis is not really a police priority.’

Nor is it a priority for customs. In 2000, a Cabinet committee secretly decided that customs officers would completely stop targeting cannabis smuggling -- again, on the grounds that heroin and cocaine mattered more.

According to former customs assistant chief investigation officer David Raynes, all specific investigations of major cannabis traffickers were stopped, along with any operations to disrupt the trade. The only cannabis seizures made were ones discovered in the course of other investigations.

So why does the government claim downgrading is needed to stop the police wasting time on cannabis? They have ALREADY stopped bothering with it. Indeed, reclassification is a consequence of the battle being given up.

According to Mr Raynes, the decision to halt customs swoops produced a flood of cannabis onto British streets, causing the price to drop and providing a major boost to the overall drug culture. This then helped fuel a fashionable belief that cannabis was now so mainstream that it was wrong to penalise its users.

In 2000, a report by the Police Foundation claimed that cannabis was less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, said the law was making things worse by jailing people for possessing it, and recommended that the drug should be downgraded.

The committee chairman, Dame Ruth Runciman, says: ‘I’m not in any way a legaliser. What I’m interested in is increasing the credibility of the law. I’m against criminalising tens of thousands of young people where we can avoid it.’

Central to the Runciman approach was a belief that the liberalisation of cannabis in the Netherlands had been a runaway success, an impression assiduously peddled by Dutch authorities.

The truth is that use of cannabis has more than doubled among Dutch schoolchildren since the soft policy began. Dutch young people have also become Europe’s biggest users of cocaine and ecstasy, and there has been an explosion of drug-related crime.

Yet opinion within the British government has steadily moved the Dutch way. After leaving her position as Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam was put in charge of drug policy before the 2001 election even though she was in favour of cannabis legalisation.

Perhaps the most baleful and far-reaching influence, which was not revealed until last year, was the presence of Mike Trace, deputy to the then drugs czar, Keith Hellawell.

To the astonishment and horror of international drug-enforcement agencies, Mr Trace was unmasked by the Daily Mail as the driving force behind a co-ordinated international effort to disband the world’s anti-drug laws by stealth.

From British headquarters partly financed by the Open Society Institute, which is funded by the billionaire and drug legalisation campaigner George Soros, Mr Trace was pulling the strings of a huge operation in which international activists were agitating covertly to manipulate governments and public opinion.

Their aim was simple: to subvert the UN laws which make cannabis and other drugs illegal.

Mr Trace was in a position of unrivalled influence at the very heart of the British, European and UN drug establishments. Yet in his own words, he was a ‘fifth columnist’, working covertly to undermine drug laws he was supposed to uphold and being secretly paid to do so by notorious international legalisers.

As Britain’s deputy drug czar, he was close to Mo Mowlam and had considerable access to ministers. The question must arise to what extent he shifted government thinking towards the legalisation agenda promoted by his international paymasters.

But others were pushing the Government in this direction too -- in particular the drug charity Drugscope, whose former director Roger Howard was a key influence within the Home Office.

Drugscope is a fervent proponent of ‘harm reduction’, an approach which holds that instead of trying to prevent people from using drugs at all, we should accept them as a way of life and minimise the harm they cause through education and treatment.

Harm reduction has become the orthodoxy among drug charities, largely because of the dominance of pro-legalisation organisations massively funded by George Soros which promote this view. In their more candid moments, legalisers admit that ‘harm reduction’ is a cover for drug legalisation.

Drugscope denies that it is promoting a covert legalisation agenda, but its arguments fall only a small step short of that goal.

Moreover, it has links to the very network of international legalisers that Mr Trace attempted to co-ordinate. It belongs to the European NGO Council on Drug Policy (ENCOD), an organisation of voluntary drug bodies which
believes: ‘Drug use as such does not represent the huge threat for society it is supposed to do.’

ENCOD wants a legal framework to bring about the industrialisation of drug production. To achieve this, it proposes that public opinion should be softened up by ‘harm reduction’ policies which will pave the way to eventual legalisation.

Whatever direct role these forces may have played in the development of the government’s thinking, the fact is that it has dramatically adopted their agenda.

When he announced the downgrading of cannabis to the Commons in July 2002, Mr Blunkett promised that ‘harm minimisation will be given greater priority’.

Last March, there was a private meeting on drug policy at Wilton Park in Sussex, organised by Drugscope and the Foreign Office. Participants from Third World countries who were anxious to learn how to combat drug use were astonished to find the agenda dominated by notorious drug legalisers discussing how to overturn the UN drug conventions.

One of them boasted that harm reduction had spread throughout Europe and was now ‘irreversible’. ‘The flood’, he declared, ‘is already on this side of the dyke.’

Mr Blunkett is adamant that the Government will not legalise cannabis or any other drug. He insists that he is acting on the advice of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which recommended reclassification of cannabis in March 2002.

But the Advisory Council has itself been accused of having a drug liberalisation agenda. The Lambeth MP Kate Hoey has claimed that at least 13 of its 32 members -- who include Drugscope’s ex-head Roger Howard -- are committed to liberalising drug policy.

The council’s chairman, Sir Michael Rawlins, brushes the charge aside, but the fact remains that the council has been trying to get cannabis reclassified for 20 years. And now the insidious ‘harm reduction’ gospel seems certain to make the effects of that policy all the more damaging.

Panicked by the backlash that downgrading has produced, the Home Office has spent £1 million on an advertising campaign which it says will tell young people that cannabis is dangerous and still illegal.

But since most drug educators adopt the defeatist ‘harm reduction’ approach, that message will be subverted at every turn.

Their view is that because most children take drugs anyway, education materials should not try to prevent them from doing so but should ‘minimise harm’ by providing them with ‘informed choices’.

Mary Brett, head of biology at Dr Challoner’s grammar school in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, says this approach is dangerous and wrong.

‘By no means do all kids use drugs’, she said. ‘Maybe 30 to 40 per cent try them, but most give up after a puff or two. It's simply wrong to think drug use is inevitable.

‘As for safety, there is no guaranteed safe way to take any drug. There should be no choice for children -- we should tell them drugs are illegal. Do we let them “choose” to break the law by speeding or petty pilfering?’

Yet drug education guidelines provided by the Government's curriculum authority use the phrase ‘informed choices’ over and over again; even at age 11, children are encouraged to make ‘informed choices’.

Drugscope, says Mrs Brett, constantly states in its information materials that cannabis is not physically addictive, which is untrue. Its website contains very few facts about the harm the drug can do.

‘One of the booklets about cannabis, distributed by Drugscope, shows a picture of two young chaps in a field of cannabis plants. One of them is wearing a cap with the logo, “Have fun, take care”. What sort of message does that send?’

Whatever Mr Blunkett thinks he is doing by downgrading cannabis, there is no doubt that a sea-change has taken place in government which has swung behind the ‘harm reduction’ agenda promoted by drug legalisers.

This agenda has found a receptive audience because many think the law against cannabis has failed. What they miss is that enforcement of this law collapsed years ago -- as the result of deliberate government decisions.

It is not the law that has failed, but the willingness of this society to provide a clear message that cannabis use is illegal, dangerous and wrong.

Now Mr Blunkett’s downgrading appears to have produced the worst of all possible worlds -- chaos, confusion and a dangerous signal to young people that smoking cannabis is harmless fun.

His officials say he wanted to make his name with his drugs policy. This cannot be quite what he had in mind.

Jewish Chronicle, 23 January 2004

In keeping with its legendary reputation for winning international hearts and minds, Israel’s government has developed a revolutionary model of diplomacy. It will dispense with speech altogether and start ripping plugs from the wall instead.

This exciting advance in Israel’s grasp of realpolitik was on display during the past week, when its new ambassador to London was confirmed as a Russian with a command of English which (he told the civil service vetting panel) leaves something to be desired; while in Stockholm its ambassador to Sweden dismantled the spotlights on an art exhibit and deposited one into the middle of the installation.

Thus was born something we might call performance diplomacy — or how Israel decided to solve its communication problem by turning aggression into an art form.

Of course the ambassador, Zvi Mazel, was grossly provoked. Entitled ‘Snow White and the Madness of Truth’, the exhibit consisted of a small ship bearing a picture of the Maxim café human bomb Hanadi Jaradat, who murdered 22 people in Haifa last autumn, sailing ‘with the smile of an angel’ in a pool filled with red water.

This glorification of genocidal mass murder was -- grotesquely -- part of a three-day conference hosted by the Swedish government on ‘preventing genocide’. As Mr Mazel said: ‘It is not a piece of work; it is a political call to kill Jewish people.’ The fact that the artist happens to be a deracinated Israeli merely underscores the pathological self-hatred of the Israeli far left which stokes the fires of European prejudice.

Now the embassy’s Swedish landlord has even told the Israelis to relocate on the grounds that they ‘pose a threat to other residents’. Mr Mazel was correct to link the exhibit to Sweden’s near-daily incidents of Judeophobia.

But however strong the provocation, an ambassador should not descend to acts of vandalism. His role is to represent his country. And what such a reaction tells us is that Israel has no self-control: that it no longer has the words to make its case, but lashes out with its fists instead.

Israel disagrees. Back home, the ambassador has become an overnight hero. With this one gesture, he is seen to have avenged the daily torrent of lies, blood libels and malevolent dehumanisation that now characterise European attitudes to Israel. Ariel Sharon thanked him for ‘standing up to antisemitism’. Other ministers said it was ‘an outcry from all of us’ and that he should be given an award.

The feeling is that Israel now has no choice but to act in this way. But Israel has chosen not to act in any other way. It has all but turned its back on the hate-fest in Europe. As its diaspora minister Natan Sharansky admitted, it has actually vacated the battlefield of European antisemitism and effectively abandoned British and European Jews to fight this poison virtually unaided.

Time after time, diaspora Jews have pleaded with Israel’s government to bring some professionalism to the statement of its case -- only to be slapped down by expressions of mulish indifference or active resentment, on the grounds that Britain and Europe are lost causes and that diaspora Jews should either make aliyah* or shut up.

The result has been a shambolic and incoherent presentation of its case; a complete absence of any publicly sustained forensic attack on the prejudice surging throughout Europe and the Islamic world; and continuing incompetence in the appointment of its ambassador to London.

This ambassador needs to possess three outstanding qualities: a faultless command of standard English, high-level diplomatic skills, and the ability to see deep inside the British heart and grasp the lethal question –‘Why should a Jewish state exist at all?’ -- that lurks behind every question Israel is asked.

Israel knows this. It has been told this many times. It has listened to countless pleas to get its diplomatic act together, the latest of which was offered by a recent Board of Deputies delegation. It gave its answer this week by confirming London’s new ambassador, Zvi Hefetz – a Russian-born lawyer with no diplomatic experience and self-acknowledged limitations in English, the latest beneficiary of the usual political patronage which has thrust so many unsuitable Israeli spokesmen into the world spotlight. It is an expression of the deepest contempt for British Jews, and total indifference to the unequal struggle going on here against anti-Jewish prejudice.

Mr Hefetz may of course turn out to be an outstanding diplomat with an extraordinary insight into British society and an undetected fluency in English to rival that of the late Isaiah Berlin. But the signs are not auspicious. It seems instead that the people of the book have abandoned the word altogether for the deed. Why bother about a minor detail like how the guy talks, when his beginner’s guide to diplomacy presumably now contains instructions on tripping a fuse whenever he blows one himself?

*Emigration to Israel

Prospect, February 2004

In the new order of war, the kind that is now raging in Israel, there are many different front lines. There are the heavily-guarded El Al airline check-in desks at airports around the world. There are the Israeli cafés and buses targeted by human bombs. And at the crossing point from Israel into Gaza there is the Erez military camp, under constant attack from mortars or sniper fire.

Gaza is the bunker of the middle east. Large quantities of arms are smuggled through the town of Rafah, which straddles the border with Egypt, along a warren of tunnels. The tunnels are well developed, some equipped with electricity. Mortars, guns and explosives regularly come through; the Israelis say it is a matter of time before bigger armaments follow.

The Israeli army is desperate to locate and destroy these tunnels. But most of them remain invisible. And because they are dug beneath Arab houses, the Israelis sometimes destroy these houses. They insist they only do so if suspected terrorists are based there. They also claim this is legal under the Geneva Convention, which says that a private house used for terrorism is no longer immune from attack. But some Arabs, as the Israelis admit, have been intimidated into allowing tunnels to be dug beneath their homes.

‘In the past,’ said an Israeli military strategist, ‘we fought in open spaces between military forces. In the new type of war, we have to fight in densely populated urban areas against an enemy that’s invisible, that wears civilian clothes and builds its explosives laboratories inside people’s houses.’

This poses an obvious dilemma. How can one fight such an enemy, which uses civilians as cover, without hitting those civilians? ‘Our rules of engagement are not to hit innocent civilians,’ said the strategist. ‘Throughout our operations we take the utmost precautions to make sure we don’t hit them. If we know we will hit them, we don’t do it. Hamas knows this and takes advantage of it. For them, the main target is civilians. They put their arms warehouses in the middle of densely populated towns.’

One of the peculiar features about Israel — one I noticed again and again — is that even in the eye of the hurricane, everyone seems to fasten desperately onto some apparent evidence of peace and reconciliation. Yossi, commander of the Erez camp, pointed to the industry park adjoining the camp where Israelis and Arabs from Gaza work side by side. ‘Whatever happens,’ he said, ‘even when we close off access from Gaza, this industrial park stays open; we never stop these Palestinians from coming here to work.’

This is how it could be, he was saying, co-operation between Jews and Arabs—a dream that must be kept alive, no matter what. But I kept thinking about those tunnels. After all, the arms are being smuggled from Egypt, which despite being one of the only two Arab countries which has made peace with Israel still pumps out hatred of the Jews. The wells of hatred within Gaza appear inexhaustible. And far from being an ‘occupied territory,’ it is demonstrably not occupied in any practical sense. The Israelis merely defend their border and the few Jewish settlements within Gaza (whose existence many Israelis themselves find insupportable), and undertake sporadic raids. But in Gaza itself, Hamas rules because no one else—not Israel, not the Palestinian Authority (PA), not Egypt, which ran Gaza until 1967—wants to confront it.

A few hours after I left Erez, three soldiers guarding the Jewish settlement of Netzarim inside Gaza were killed by Arabs who got into the base. Earlier that afternoon, an elderly Arab spotted moving towards the settlement of Elei Sinai, near Erez, was shot dead by the Israelis. The soldiers later acknowledged he was known to them as a harmless character. Another dreadful mistake. It will have chipped yet another bit off Israel’s fracturing belief in itself, surely the single most lethal chink in its armour. And of course it will have increased still further the misery and bitterness among the Palestinians.

The Israelis say they are aware that their actions may be recruiting yet more young Palestinians into terrorism. But the political and military top brass continue to believe that these actions will nevertheless force the Palestinians to bring terror to an end.

‘Of course we are concerned about the effects of our strategy,’ said the military analyst. ‘It’s a complex game, with no free lunches. We have to weigh the benefits against the damage done. This will take a long time. We have to change their philosophy.’

I was in Israel at the invitation of its government to talk about attitudes in Britain to the middle east crisis. This gave me the chance to talk to a number of ministers and officials in the Likud-led coalition.

I was there at an extraordinary turning point. Soon after I left, Ariel Sharon said that if in a few months’ time the Palestinians still hadn’t disarmed their terror infrastructure, Israel would take unilateral steps to disengage from the disputed territories. The Palestinians would be given the land, or some of it, but without a formal agreement on a state. Some settlements would be removed; other land would be consolidated into Israel.

It is not yet clear exactly what is proposed, but the idea of disengagement has already caused uproar in Sharon’s party. He appears to be saying that, for the time being, most of the unilateral action he proposes would take the form of moving Israel’s ostensible border further into Palestinian areas. If so, this amounts to little more than a new twist in the strategy that I heard repeatedly from officials: of battening down the hatches until the Palestinians halt terrorism. Indeed, I was struck by the almost complacent optimism among the officials, arising from what is surely a profound confusion of force with strength.

‘All that has to happen,’ said a senior Likud official, ‘is for Israel to show it is stronger and that terror will never win. The old view was that the Palestinians would continue terrorism until they were politically satisfied. But Oslo and Camp David were political efforts, and they failed. Now we and the US have reversed this view. When the Palestinians create a political entity that is not contaminated with terrorism, Israel can negotiate a solution. First, the Palestinians have to build a civic society. The way to achieve this is to explain to them that as long as they don’t build this, nothing will happen. Yasser Arafat is the symbol of the opposite approach.’

Such Likudniks seem to believe that there are Palestinians who, if only Arafat were to disappear from the scene, would be willing to make peace. ‘We are not confident that the people after Arafat will be different,’ said the official. ‘But we’ve had hundreds of hours of conversation with many Palestinians… There is a clear understanding that a society that uses terrorism will lose.’

Or as the military analyst put it: ‘They don’t think the Jewish state has a right to exist, but many think it is here to stay.’ This view appeared to line up the hard-line Likudniks alongside Israel’s peacenik left in a kind of mirror act. The peaceniks believe there are Palestinians prepared to make peace with Israel if only Israel would negotiate with them. The Likudniks believe there are Palestinians prepared to make peace with Israel if only the Palestinians stopped the terror. But since the Likud won’t negotiate unless the terror stops, what is its strategy?

‘The endgame,’ said the official, ‘is to create two independent states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side.’ But what would this Palestinian state look like? Would Likud, with its ideological commitment to ‘greater’ Israel, ever give away Judea and Samaria, commonly known as the West Bank? The official spread his hands dismissively. ‘Likud, Labour, all these political labels are now completely irrelevant,’ he said. ‘If peace was really on offer, mainstream Israeli opinion would force any government to make very serious concessions.’

The suggestion that the Likud is really committed to a two-state solution, however, makes Israeli leftists choke. For its only strategy — at least, prior to Sharon’s new unilateralism — has been holding the line, and teaching the Palestinians that terror doesn’t pay. Everything it does is based on this profound conviction that to show any bending in the face of terror only invites more terror. Was that not the lesson of the withdrawal from Lebanon in 1985?

It is that iron conviction which lies behind the controversial decision to route the separation fence over the Green Line and inside the West Bank. This has led critics to claim that the Israelis are using the fence to grab more Palestinian land. The Israelis reply that the fence marks no permanent boundary. They also say that the main reason why they have sited it over the Green Line is to teach the Palestinians a lesson—that the fence, which has been made necessary by Palestinian terror, is not going to mark out the 1967 boundaries. Instead they are going to have to negotiate the borders of their state, and thus understand that terror does not pay.

But there is no sign that this lesson is being understood at all. On the contrary, even Israel’s friends are exasperated by the apparently needless provocation of the fence’s route. Once again, the Israelis have taken a legitimate defensive position and turned it into a diplomatic defeat.

Yet one cabinet minister told me the fence would solve the problem of terrorism—just like that. But wouldn’t it turn the West Bank into a seething mass of hatred similar to Gaza? ‘So what?’ he said. ‘No suicide bombers have come out of Gaza because it’s already got a fence around it.’ But the West Bank is more porous than Gaza, with more opportunities to break through such a barrier. There are also many more Jewish settlements in the West Bank, with opportunities for terrorists to get through the fence around them, provoking more running battles, more deaths on both sides and more terrible, soul-destroying mistakes by the Israelis.

‘The Jews are an eternal people,’ said the military analyst. “In 20 years, or whatever it takes, Arafat will have gone. Waiting 20 years is no great time in our history. We are strong enough to go through this.’

This is a stalemate, not a strategy; a display of Israeli force which is wholly defensive and reactive. It is not stopping the attacks. More poignantly, for the Jews—for whom Israel is supposed to be the repudiation of the ghetto—to resort to fencing others in is a symbol not of victory but of despair and exhaustion.

The great question, to which no one can give an answer, is whether the majority of Palestinians really do want a two-state solution, or whether they still want to destroy the Jewish state and claim all of it for their own. Opinion pollsters often report they want two states. Other polls, though, report majority views in favour of continuing the violence even if the Israelis withdrew from the West Bank and Gaza, and strong support for the right of all Palestinians to settle in Israel, which would destroy the Jewish state.

So who are the pragmatic Palestinians with whom Likudniks could negotiate if only Arafat were gone? One such, they think, is Mohammed Dahlan, former head of security under Mahmoud Abbas, the prime minister who resigned after losing power to Arafat.

I spoke to Dahlan’s former aide, Elias Zanieri. He told me: ‘There’s been a tremendous change in the Arab and Palestinian world, which is ready to recognise Israel as a Jewish state within the 1967 borders.’ Did he mean the Palestinians would recognise a specifically Jewish state? He slid away from a direct answer. ‘What kind of Israel is for the Israelis to decide,’ he said. ‘No one is talking about removing Israel from the map.’ But it isn’t even on the map in Palestinian schoolbooks, I said; your children are taught that it doesn’t exist. That, he said, is because the conflict is not yet over.

Most Palestinians, said Zanieri, are not interested in dialogue because of the way the Israelis humiliate them and cause them great hardship at the checkpoints. But the only reason the checkpoints are there at all, I said, is because of Palestinian terrorism which the PA has done nothing to stop.

That, he said, is partly because as long as there is no political settlement on the horizon, the PA fears the bulk of the population would side with the extremists and there would be a Palestinian civil war. If a political settlement were visible, it would be easier for the PA to crack down.

But, I said, Camp David was a political settlement that was not just on the horizon but actually on offer—and yet that led directly to the current Palestinian terror campaign. Not so, he said ; the violence has taken place because the Palestinians never got what they were promised: for example, the release of their relatives from prison.

But why should they be released, I said, when they are terrorist murderers? After all, it’s the Palestinian terror which produces the Israeli response. If the terror were to stop, does anyone doubt that Israel would bring all its military activity to a halt and that Israeli public opinion would demand the Palestinians be allowed to have their state?

And now we got down to the heart of Zanieri’s argument. For to him—and, he said, this certainly goes for the Palestinian street too—Israel is the aggressor because it exists.

‘Israel was the aggressor because Israel was formed in 1948,’ he said. ‘The Palestinians think that the start of the Zionist aggression was the start of Jewish immigration in the 19th century. Israel started the war in 1967. That occupation is the source of the violence. What is violence? Two warring sides have their own terminology. For so many Palestinians, terror is occupation itself.’

If a moderate is someone who believes that a political settlement agreed by the world is akin to physical violence and who thinks that Jewish immigration into a land inhabited by Jews continuously since Biblical times was an act of aggression—and that this legitimises terrorism—what hope is there?

Yet the Israeli left—despite the collapse of the Camp David proposals—persists in believing that a negotiated compromise is there for the taking. Accordingly, a group of Israeli and Palestinian politicians recently unveiled the ‘Geneva accords’ which, they claim, outline an agreed two-state solution.

These proposals created fury on both Israeli and Palestinian sides. They have also provoked as much anger from former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who negotiated the Camp David accord, as from the Likudniks who regard the initiative as treasonable. One prominent peacenik said the Israelis behind these proposals have been guilty of culpable naivety which has imperilled the state.

‘They were not aware of the risk they took in indenturing future negotiations,’ he said. ‘This was not just a private initiative in the eyes of the Arabs. It’s thought as good as the Clinton proposals. And if the international community endorses it and establishes it as a point of reference, it will be very hard to arrive at any other position. But on each of the core issues, the Geneva proposals have lost us ground.’

And despite claims to the contrary, he said that the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees has not been waived. On the contrary, he said, that although Israel would control the flow of refugees the accord is based on UN resolution 194, which speaks about repatriating all ‘refugees'.

Israel appears to be caught in a deadly trap. It tried negotiations; these led to violence. It tried armed self-defence; this has not stopped the violence. It has retreated from Palestinian cities; this has increased the violence. Some Likudniks don’t accept they are trapped. The line, at least until Sharon’s recent talk of disengagement, is that they are on course for victory. ‘We are winning, because the Palestinians are a bunch of losers,’ said an official.

This was not only unpleasant, but surely wrong. The prime goal of terrorism is to demoralise its victims, while provoking such an overreaction from them that the terrorist becomes seen as the victim and wider opinion is recruited to the cause. This is exactly what has happened in Israel. Opinion in Britain and Europe is now firmly behind the Palestinians. The Israelis are regarded as racist oppressors. It is only a matter of time before this characterisation finds wide purchase in America, too, beyond the university campuses where it is already making steady inroads.

And despite such vilification, Israel will not use its strength to crush the war being waged against it. Instead, Israel picks its way from house to house to kill or arrest terrorists while trying to avoid innocent civilians, despite thereby incurring far greater casualties. It is thus fighting with one hand tied behind its back. This, surely, is the real and terrible import of ‘asymmetric warfare,’ the new order of war. For in a contest between people for whom life means everything and people for whom life means nothing, there is no contest. The death-cult has the whip-hand.

Yet Israel’s trap is even more hideous than this. For at the same time, there is no doubt that it has been brutalised by the experience of occupation. There are too many stories of trigger-happy soldiers, or of the humiliations and suffering caused to Palestinians corralled behind fences or at checkpoints. Yes, of course it is only to be expected that if soldiers have good cause to fear that even the most innocent-looking civilians might turn out to be human bombs, they may behave in a rough or even brutal manner.

But whatever the justification or excuse, causing suffering to others has a powerfully corrosive effect on Jewish self-belief. So blowing up Palestinian houses, or preventing sick Arabs from passing through the roadblocks because of a security alert—these things act as an acid eating away at Israeli self-respect. A state of permanent war, in other words, can eventually do what centuries of persecution have failed to do—destroy the Jewish soul.

There are those in Israel who see the trap the country is in. Last October, the Israel Defence Forces, Chief of Staff, Moshe Ya’alon, said the roadblocks were increasing support for Hamas. In November, four former heads of the Shin Bet security service warned Israel was facing a catastrophe if a peace deal wasn’t reached. ‘If nothing happens and we go on living by the sword, we will destroy ourselves,’ said ex-security head Ya’akov Perry.

The government reacted with fury to these high-ranking critics and accused them of naivety. But it seems that these strictures, along with the despised Geneva initiative, have nevertheless helped to jolt Sharon and his senior advisers into realising that stasis is not a strategy and that they have to be seen to be taking the initiative, however cloudy this may be.

Even prior to the most recent about face on disengagement, some of the government’s actions have betrayed a deep confusion. Last November, it ratified a prisoner exchange’—420 prisoners to be handed over to Hezbollah in exchange for the bodies of three dead soldiers and one live civilian. How could a government which makes such a fetish of never treating with terror agree to such a deal? The fact is, though, that since 1994 Israel has released thousands of prisoners in exchange for a handful of Israelis. The reason is the profound Israeli commitment to never abandoning its own. But it has thus almost certainly connived at the killing of more of its people by the men it released. Even worse, it has signalled its own weakness, thus encouraging the Arab strategy of using terror to win concessions. In other words, the Likud government has been like a punch-drunk boxer, stumbling blindly round the ring.

Has Sharon now realised that waiting indefinitely for an Arab miracle is destroying Israeli morale? The ambiguity of his remarks about unilateral disengagement has thrown the debate into confusion. From Sharon’s own Likudniks, there have been howls of anger that dismantling settlements would be a sign of weakness—the cardinal sin. From some on the left, there has been cynicism that this is merely a ploy that will amount to nothing. From the Palestinians, there have been simultaneous claims that this is a plot to steal yet more of their land and that Israel is losing its nerve.

Yet others, on Israel’s left and right, argue that this is not just a new twist in the ‘battening down the hatches’ strategy. They say that for Sharon to talk about dismantling any settlements and about disengaging from any part of the disputed territories represents a big shift. If indeed he has shifted, one reason is undoubtedly the demographic fact that has become central to public debate in the past few months: if Israel continues to hold the territories, within a few years there will be more Arabs than Jews between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. No matter that most of those Palestinians will be outside Israel’s borders; if Israel continues to rule Arabs who outnumber Jews, the momentum for one person, one vote will become unstoppable. If Israel granted it, it would be the end of the Jewish state. If it did not, it would not only become a true pariah in the world but would cause a devastating implosion within the collective Jewish conscience.

Gilead Sher was a senior member of Barak’s negotiating team at Camp David. It is this looming demographic nightmare, along with the moral crisis caused by the occupation, which makes him argue that Israel should now unilaterally withdraw. And he revealed that in June 2000, when Barak began to anticipate that Arafat would walk away from any deal, the Israeli government set up 14 secret committees to work on the complex business of withdrawal from everything but three blocks of settlements.

‘Governing another people is bad for us in every way,’ said Sher. ‘The question is, can we heal ourselves in a way that will preserve the Jewish nation for years to come? If we just withdrew, we would then be a country seeking to protect itself with the vast support of the international community.

‘You have to ask, what are the alternatives? To stay in the territories for ever? The Palestinians want this as it will mean a demographic wipe-out of the Jews. Making a negotiated peace? But a reliable partner for peace is still entirely theoretical.’

In the eyes of many in Britain and Europe, Israel’s attachment to the territories is ideological. But there is a more potent reason than ideology for its reluctance to withdraw. It is fear. It believes that to withdraw would leave it strategically exposed (particularly at Israel’s original nine-mile wide waist), and would announce Israel’s weakness in the face of terror. to the current terrorist war.

Sher’s reply to this is that withdrawal should be accompanied by a commitment from the Americans to take responsibility for guaranteeing security in the territories. Would this not be a reasonable price for the Americans to pay to guarantee the peace?

Much of Sher’s argument has been adopted by a most unlikely bedfellow. Ehud Olmert, deputy prime minister and erstwhile super-hawk, has also got the demographic point. He has gone further than Sharon in saying that Israel should now withdraw from most of the territories and all but a few settlement blocs to protect the democratic, Jewish nature of Israel. This has caused consternation in the Israeli right.

The other element in this shifting equation is the widespread belief in Israel that 'pax Americana' will solve the middle east impasse. To the military analyst, Iraq is the key. ‘A Palestinian state won’t stop the jihad,’ he said. “But if Iraq becomes a democracy, Syria will come under similar pressure. This is about self-determination for the middle east.’

Israel is trapped between the most treacherous of rocks and the hardest of hard places. But Sher and Olmert are surely right. Given that every strategy has a lethal downside, the question is: what is the worst thing Israel has to fear. Is it war? It has fought and won wars. Is it terror? It is suffering terror now, and for the forseeable future. What is surely worst of all is to lose its belief in itself and destroy its soul.

It is not that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are illegal. Under international law, land seized as a consequence of self-defence in war is legitimately held while the enemy refuses to make peace. But legality is not the point. The bottom line is existential vulnerability. If Israel hangs onto the territories, the Jews will be outnumbered. It cannot and should not rule another people. It cannot wait for 20 years for negotiations to begin. It should unilaterally give up the territories.

The fear that giving them up would hand a victory to terror is a very real one. But it is possible to turn this argument on its head. For withdrawal effectively forces a state on the Palestinians. It therefore does not give terrorists any victory if their goal is not a Palestinian state at all but the destruction of Israel. It is rather to frustrate their goals, call their bluff and thus defeat them. Victory for terror can therefore only be imposed by people who believe the destruction of Israel to be the real agenda of the Palestinians. Those who believe their goal really is a two-state solution would be giving in to terror if they brought it about at bomb-point. Ironically, therefore, it is only the Likud that can unilaterally withdraw without paying this moral price. Are they capable of realising it?

Daily Mail, January 19 2004

What price freedom of speech now?

The BBC has forced Robert Kilroy-Silk to resign as presenter of his TV show after describing Arabs in his newspaper column as ‘suicide bombers, limb amputators and women repressors’.

Harry Hammond, an elderly evangelical Christian, was convicted in 2002 of a public order offence after he held up a poster calling for an end to homosexuality, lesbianism and immorality. Last week, Mr Hammond had his conviction upheld after senior judges said his behaviour ‘went beyond legitimate protest’.

And now, the Sun’s jocular columnist Richard Littlejohn has been reported to the police for jesting that ‘cottaging’ (or trawling for homosexual liaisons) was a ‘career move’ for gay police officers and making other disparaging references to gay behaviour.

All these developments are an attempt to stamp out prejudice. Prejudice is indeed a disfigurement in our society and can lead to violence, such as assaults by neo-Nazis against Muslims and other Asians, or the 1999 nail-bombing of a pub frequented by gay people in London’s Soho.

Acts like these and incitement to commit them are rightly outlawed. But prejudice, however abhorrent, is not in itself a crime. If hatred of Jews were regarded as criminal, for example, we would have to outlaw the New Testament and the Koran, along with half the canon of English literature including works by Shakespeare, Dickens and TS Eliot.

A liberal society has to strike a balance between defending free speech and protecting vulnerable minorities. This is a high-wire act. But such is the current hysteria about prejudice and discrimination that this delicate balance has been upset.

The hallmark of a liberal society is the toleration of offensive views. As Voltaire said: ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. Not any more, it seems. Offensiveness is being criminalised.

Some gay people may have found Mr Hammond’s placard offensive. But he was himself attacked when a group threw soil and water over him. It was surely an Orwellian twist that the victim of a breach of public order was himself convicted of it while no action was taken against his attackers.

If it is illegal to say that homosexuality is wrong, this would appear to criminalise half the Christian church. Mr Hammond, who died soon after his original conviction, was not protesting against homosexuals but their lifestyles. His placard displayed no more prejudice towards gay people than its call to ‘end immorality’ showed animosity towards holiday revellers in Faliraki.

The problem is, however, that gay activists claim that disapproval of gay lifestyles amounts to disapproval of them as people. But there are genuine grounds for controversy over such lifestyles, not least over their implications for public health.

Homosexuality was legalised in 1967 on the basis that behaviour of which people disapproved should be tolerated. Now, such disapproval itself has become an offence. Anyone who questions gay lifestyles is targeted for vilification and intimidation.

Victim culture means that self-designated ‘victims’ of society cannot ever do wrong, and so anyone who accuses them of such is guilty of prejudice. After being cleared of criminal charges of minor dishonesty, Superintendent Ali Dizaei was reinstated by Scotland Yard last October and paid £80,000 compensation following a campaign by the Black Police Association which accused the Metropolitan Police of racism.

After Mr Dizaei dropped his claim for racial discrimination against the Met, disciplinary proceedings against him were halted – despite his having threatened his former mistress, and having told a lie to support his claim of racially motivated damage to his car.

This supine surrender to intimidation has provoked a protest from the chairman of the Police Complaints Authority, Sir Alistair Graham, who said Mr Dizaei should not have had special treatment just because he was black and because of concerns about race in the police service.

Making different rules for minorities is not about fighting prejudice. We are witnessing threats and moral blackmail used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It turns minorities from being genuine victims into abusers of power.

To add to this sinister atmosphere, Mr Littlejohn has been reported to the police ‘hate crimes’ unit by the police, in the form of the Gay Police Association. But why should there be gay or black police associations? The police should be scrupulously impartial. Victim culture replaces individual responsibility by group ‘rights’. For the police to be balkanised into such groups is to distort policing itself.

The crux of the current confusion is the meaning of the word ‘prejudice’. Criticisms based on facts or evidence are not prejudice. Real prejudice is dislike of people based on beliefs that are irrational or untrue.

Mr Kilroy-Silk’s remarks wrongly generalised about all Arabs and betrayed ignorance of Arab culture. But at their core was a series of truths about the murderous and repressive trends in many Arab states.

Indeed Ibrahim Nawar, the head of Arab Media Watch, said he agreed with much of what Mr Kilroy-Silk had said, that he was right about the oppressive policies in the Arab world, and that his treatment was very worrying because it meant censorship was taking place in the liberal west. What an irony, that it took an Arab to defend western tolerance while the BBC was taking an axe to it.

Alarmingly, any criticism of Islamist violence is likewise smeared as ‘Islamophobia’ — including concern over the attacks on Jews by Muslims, incited by Islamic propaganda which is recycling ancient anti-Jewish libels. But these attacks are the real phobia, because they are irrational and untruthful.

That is why the difference between the BBC’s treatment of Mr Kilroy-Silk and the poet Tom Paulin is so telling. Mr Paulin called for Israeli settlers to be shot and, in a poem referring to the ‘Zionist SS’, compared Israel to the Nazis. While criticism of the settlers would have been perfectly justified, this was simply incitement to murder and blatant, Holocaust-denying prejudice.

The underlying thrust of victim culture is to undermine the west and destroy its moral norms. So the west can only be victimisers, while the third world —along with lifestyle groups that transgress western moral norms —can only be victims.

There are some small signs that sanity is fighting back. An employment tribunal has shredded the decision by the prison service to sack a prison officer for making rude remarks about Osama bin Laden. The tribunal protested he had been sacked for ‘thought crime’ and questioned whether the prison governor lived in the real world. But far from expressing contrition, the prison service dismissed the findings on the grounds that it was determined to ‘eradicate racism’ in prison.

Vulnerable minorities such as homosexuals, Muslims, and Jews must be protected from real prejudice. Violence and incitement should be prosecuted. But by stripping minorities of moral responsibility, politically-correct victim culture actually dehumanises them, as well as exposing them to more violence by enraging the public.

Victim culture does not serve the interests of minorities. It serves instead the interests of self-appointed spokesmen with a very different agenda — the abuse of power.

Daily Mail, 16 January 2004

At long last, America is now grasping the nettle. In a bold move, President George Bush is launching a $1.5 billion programme to promote marriage and help couples stay together.

In doing so, he is consciously facing down one of modern society’s great taboos. Just like in Britain, there are many in the US who think that it is wrong to advocate marriage, on the grounds that this amounts to preaching or being ‘judgmental’ against unmarried lifestyles.

The Bush proposals shrewdly skirt round these pitfalls by avoiding any hint of moralising. Instead, they will offer practical help with relationship skills to keep marriages ‘healthy’, on the grounds that if people are informed about the many reasons why marriage is good for them and their children they will welcome guidance to keep their marriages on an even keel.

The President has understood something that the British government refuses to grasp — that attempts to tackle a range of social ills stand little chance of success unless the erosion of marriage is stopped in its tracks.

Now, new American research has provided yet more evidence — that marriage is the best preventive measure against crime.

A 70 -year study of 500 juvenile offenders born in the Twenties — the longest-running crime study in the world — has found that those who married were far more likely to go straight later in life than those who remained single.

According to the American criminologist Professor John Laub, who presented these findings to a meeting in London this week, the difference arose because marriage had changed these men’s whole way of life. Their wives actively prevented them from getting involved again in crime, and marriage often meant the men moved home and left their old criminal haunts. It also introduced them to new routines and to extended families that provided them with networks of support and even with jobs.

Marriage, in short, is a crucial factor in getting wild young men to settle down. It provides an antidote to the defeatist view that nothing can be done except pick up the pieces once a crime has been committed.

It used to be accepted that young boys would grow out of crime. What’s alarming today is that more and more are not growing out of it but growing into even worse trouble. The main reason for this is that whereas they would once have got married, now they do not. For more and more young men, marriage has simply gone out of fashion.

Professor Laub’s research is by no means the first evidence that marriage provides a powerful influence on men for the better. In 1998, another study showed that the behaviour of married men was quite different from that of single ones. Married men were more likely have a full-time job — itself a discouragement to crime. They were less like to use drugs or abuse alcohol, and less likely either to commit crime or become its victims.

A sensible government would realise that unless it shored up marriage it stood little chance of tackling social problems. Yet the British government not only ignores the evidence showing the critical importance of marriage. It not only refuses to boost it in any way. Instead, it consistently undermines it.

Another study published this week by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reveals the startling extent to which the government is actually subsidising family breakdown. Since the Seventies, state benefits for children have more than doubled — and the lion’s share has gone to lone parents, who have received more child support than couples almost every year.

In the same period, the proportion of lone parents has more than tripled to top one quarter of all families with children. The reasons lie in the huge cultural changes that have occurred during that time with the erosion of any stigma surrounding unmarried motherhood, easier divorce and the rise of cohabitation.

Nevertheless, the assumptions behind welfare policy also play a significant part in creating such trends. The tipping of the balance away from financial support for married couples to support for lone parents has been a powerful economic encouragement for lone parenthood, as well as reinforcing the belief that there is nothing wrong in having children outside marriage.

This disastrous process has been pushed by Conservative as well as Labour administrations. But under this government, the policy has accelerated. Claiming concern to promote the interests of children rather than family structure, Gordon Brown has poured record sums into child support in ways that discriminate against married couples.

But as the Rowntree researchers say, there is no guarantee that increased spending on children will improve their lives later on. Such improvements depend more on ‘parental characteristics’.

Indeed, the main parental characteristic that will improve children’s lives is actually being part of the family for the duration of their upbringing. Research overwhelmingly shows that in every single walk of life — physical health, mental stability, education, relationships, the propensity to drug abuse or other crime — children from fractured family backgrounds do worse than children whose parents have stayed together.

And despite the fashion for cohabitation, the best predictor that parents will stay together is still marriage. It is fashionable to claim cohabitation is just as good. But it is not. It breaks up more frequently than marriage and is a major factor behind the relentless rise of fatherless children.

What’s more, research also shows that cohabitation actually increases the risk that men will turn to crime. Unlike married men, who have a very great deal to lose if their marriages fail, cohabitation requires no commitment and therefore far less investment in the family unit.

Unlike the Americans, this government regards marriage as the taboo word. Its professed neutrality conceals the fact that this is the most anti-marriage government on record. Under the banner of child-centred concern it has brought about a feminisation of poverty, as welfare at the lower end of the social scale has effectively reconstructed the family unit as mother and child alone, with the father an optional extra to be pursued from a distance for child support.

Its terror of ‘moralising’ has led it effectively to condone sexual promiscuity. But now, as a result of the disastrous rise in sexually transmitted diseases among the young, the Health Development Agency has been forced to put the long-standing policy of ‘safe sex’ education into reverse and is recommending instead including abstinence messages in sex education lessons.

Sexual disorderliness and family breakdown impose unsustainable costs upon a society. They mean more educational failure, rising crime, more ill health, less productive work and more lonely and needy people.

The Americans have pioneered abstinence education with considerable success. In Britain, it seems, we are being forced belatedly to recognise the wisdom of that approach. Eventually, we will almost certainly have to follow their lead on marriage promotion too. Unfortunately, however, government obduracy means we are in for many more years of rising lone parenthood, fatherless children and an increasing toll of crime and social breakdown before that particular penny is finally allowed to drop.

Daily Mail, January 12 2004

Daffodils are on sale in some of our shops unseasonably early. Such evidence that spring seems to be arriving before winter has departed, along with excessively hot summer temperatures, has convinced many that global warming is well under way.

Unease that something funny is happening to the weather is reinforced by constant reports claiming imminent environmental doom, such as the article in Nature magazine last week claiming global warming will cause more than one million species to die out over the next fifty years.

In another article in the journal Science the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, claims global warming is an even more serious threat to the world than terrorism. He maintains that the ten hottest years on record started in 1991, that global warming is causing the ice caps to melt and the seas to rise, and that mankind’s activities in producing carbon dioxide have been proved to be the cause.

With all due respect to Sir David’s eminence, every one of these claims is utter garbage. What science actually tells us is that we just don’t know whether global warming is happening and, if it is, why. Much of the research behind this theory is specious, anti-historical and scientifically illiterate. If the world’s climate is indeed warming up beyond normal patterns, this could be due to natural reasons rather than the actions of mankind.

It is not true that the seas are generally rising. Some are; some aren’t. The claim is based on the atypical North Atlantic, ignoring the seas around Australia where levels have remained pretty static. Indeed, around parts of New Zealand and elsewhere they are falling.

What’s more, there’s no correlation between rises in climate temperature and sea levels. During the ‘Little Ice Age’ in the Middle Ages, sea levels rose; and between 1900 and 1940, when temperatures rose, sea levels actually dropped.

The ice-caps tell a similar story. Some are melting; some are not. The Larsen ice shelf in the Antarctic is breaking up, but most of the Antarctic ice is increasing.

Then there’s the claim that the climate is now the hottest on record. But this statistical record only goes back a few centuries, if that. Yet there’s plenty of other evidence that the climate in Europe was warmer than now by at least 2 degrees in 1100, when vines grew in Northumberland and farmers settled in Greenland. Since this was followed by the Little Ice Age which lasted until about 1880, it’s hardly surprising — and surely a cause for rejoicing — that since then the climate has warmed up by about 0.6 degrees, well within normal patterns.

As for the presumed villain of the piece carbon dioxide, this makes up such a tiny fraction of the atmosphere that even if it doubled it would make little difference to the climate. And like sea levels, it doesn’t correlate with climate change. Historically, it has increased hundreds of years after the climate has warmed up. Between 1940 and 1975, when industrial activity — which produces carbon dioxide —rose rapidly, the climate actually cooled.

Far from being proved, the claim of man-made global warming is a global fraud. Instead of being drawn from observable facts, it is based on computer modelling which churns out wholly artificial — and eminently manipulable — visions of the world.

Computers can only process the information fed into them. This is an inadequate procedure, not least because climate change is affected by billions of variables which are beyond any computer programme. The sea level ‘rise’, for instance, omits the full influence of certain crucial natural meteorological changes. And if the disaster scenarios of global warming are fed into the computer as a premise, it is hardly surprising that it will then ‘predict’ the disappearance of species as a consequence.

In other words, if you feed rubbish into a computer, you get rubbish out.

The claim that there’s a scientific consensus behind global warming is also utterly bogus. In 1992, more than 40 atmospheric scientists said the theory was highly uncertain and warned against using theoretical climate models which they said were not supported by existing records.

In 1997, dozens of meteorologists, geologists, atmospheric scientists and other experts said global warming was based solely on unproven scientific theories and imperfect computer models.

In 1998, 18,000 scientists signed the Oregon petition which again criticised this ‘flawed’ research, said historic evidence showed that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide was environmentally helpful, and predicted that the 1997 Kyoto agreement to reduce industrial emissions would keep the developing world trapped in poverty.

One of the world’s most eminent meteorologists, Professor Richard Lindzen, has also protested that while the science behind the Kyoto protocol was suitably equivocal about global warming, the document’s highly politicised summary — the part actually being used to force reduced industrial activity onto the western world — was written instead by government representatives, who had conjured up ‘scary scenarios for which there is no evidence’.

Indeed, global warming has little to do with science and everything to do with politics. Those scientists who endorse the theory command the lion’s share of government-funded research grants. Since the global warming prediction emerged in the late 1980s, climate science funding has gone through the roof.

Scientists know, however, that they won’t get funded unless their research confirms global warming. Too many enormous reputations would go down the plug otherwise; too many political agendas depend on the theory. So global warming has become big business.

This is ironic. For it is yet another variation of left-wing, anti-American, anti-west ideology which goes hand in hand with anti-globalisation and the belief that everything done by the industrialised world is wicked. The agenda to cripple this world is revealed by highly questionable assumptions made by climate modellers about likely developments in economics, technology or population movements, which affect emissions and consequent temperature predictions.

As the Economist recently pointed out, they assume growth rates that are beyond any historical experience, resulting in predictions of a bizarre economic future in which the United States stops growing and developing nations overtake the industrialised world. But that reversal of fortune is, of course, precisely the objective.

And if anyone objects, they are demonised. As Professor Lindzen has protested, science is now being used ‘as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens’.

Dr Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician who became famous for his book ‘The Sceptical Environmentalist’, paid a heavy price for pointing out that richer countries were cleaner countries, and observing that the costs of implementing the Kyoto protocol for less than one year would provide clean water for every human being on Earth.

For his demolition of the environmental scam, he was vilified across the globe and accused by a Danish scientific committee of ‘dishonesty’ — a disgraceful verdict that has now been demolished by a superior committee that tore into Dr Lomborg’s inquisitors for intellectual inadequacy.

The claim of man-made global warming represents the descent of science from the pursuit of truth into politicised propaganda. The fact that it is endorsed by the top scientist in the British government shows how deep this rot has gone.

Daily Mail, 10 January 2004

Until four days ago, conspiracy theories that Princess Diana was murdered were thought to be restricted to Mohammed Fayed, green-ink letter writers and those sad internet freaks who have nothing better to do but recycle the latest fantasies posted into the ether by any old crackpot or mischief-maker.

Last Tuesday, the royal coroner Michael Burgess changed all that. Opening the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, he acknowledged the theories that they were not caused by a ‘sad but relatively straightforward’ car crash and called in the Metropolitan Police to make inquiries.

By taking these theories seriously enough to have inquiries made, he raised the possibility that there might be some truth in them. Even if the police dismiss them, many people will believe more unshakeably than ever that this is an establishment fix and that the princess was murdered by MI6 acting on the direct instructions of Prince Charles, President Bush, the Pope and the World Association of Landmine Manufacturers.

Of course, a coroner is bound to consider all the evidence. But if people make totally off-the-wall allegations such as … well, that the heir to the throne wanted to murder his ex-wife, for example, one would no more expect the coroner to ask the police to investigate than to consult the works of Nostradamus, who some believe predicted the death of Diana along with 9/11, the assassination of President Kennedy and the rise of Hitler.

As a person in authority, a coroner surely has a duty to rule out preposterous or irrational theories, however widely they may be believed. Instead, Mr Burgess has set the police on a lengthy process in which they may have to interview the Prince of Wales about the apparent claim by the mentally fragile Princess Diana that he was trying to have her killed.

In a rational world, one would no more seriously entertain this possibility than speculate that the missing Beagle space probe had been kidnapped by Martians.

Yet it is clear that significant numbers of people — including perfectly sane, sober, intelligent folk — do believe she may have been murdered. They ignore the many changes in itinerary that night by Dodi Fayed that make such a plot wildly improbable. They brush aside the more plausible explanation that a car driven at 100 mph by a drunken driver may crash, and that someone who has chosen not to wear her seat belt may die. Indeed, despite the lengthy investigation by the French authorities, they believe that the French were also somehow in on the plot to cover up what happened.

But then, this is by no means the only conspiracy theory in which substantial numbers people appear to believe. Indeed, despite the fact that we imagine we are living in the most enlightened and rational society in the most enlightened and rational age known to mankind, a startling proportion of us appear to have taken leave of our senses.

Certainly, real conspiracies do take place from time to time. In 63 BC, a discontented noble called Lucius Sergius Cataline fomented a revolt against the Roman republic which was foiled by Cicero. In the Cato Street conspiracy of 1820, a Jacobin plot was discovered to assassinate the entire British Cabinet. And in our own time, there was the Cambridge spy ring and the Watergate cover-up.

But historical conspiracies are rare. The vast majority of apparently inexplicable events turn out to be caused by chance, accident or individual error or culpability.

Nevertheless, many of us veer from one loopy conspiracy theory to another. Thus, crop circles are the work of aliens trying to communicate with us; the moon landings were faked; the AIDS virus was spread deliberately to kill off black and gay people. And whole industries have sprung up around the theory that Elvis is still alive, or that the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover contains a hidden message that Paul McCartney is dead.

We have been deluged by theories that President Kennedy, his brother Robert and Marilyn Monroe all died at the hands of the mafia or the CIA or foreign interests — or even each other. Yet no such evidence has ever stood up to serious scrutiny. The murder of the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh last year was blamed by some on the Bilderberg group, a forum for European and American leaders represented by conspiracy theorists as a sinister power élite controlling the world. In fact, the lone man who confessed to the murder this week had been suffering from mental illness.

There is a popular reluctance to believe that people who are larger than life or have some kind of iconic status are actually just like the rest of us, with flawed and messy lives, and that their ends may be just as banal. People refuse to accept that their deaths may be due to accident, incompetence or a random lunatic because this would puncture the inflated and unrealistic view they had of them while they were alive.

The saturation of our society by the media, which unscrupulously mixes fact with fiction and prefers sensational conspiracy theories over less entertaining sober reality, is responsible for a lot of this damage. Oliver Stone’s misleading film JFK, for example, has convinced many beyond a shadow of doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald did not alone shoot President Kennedy.

Such views play on the widespread belief — which has taken hold since Vietnam and Watergate — that the ruling class represents a malign conspiracy against the public. Indeed, much of the appeal of Princess Diana was that she embodied a revolt against those rulers. So from this viewpoint, it follows that they must have caused her death.

But belief in conspiracies goes wider and deeper still. Theories for which there is no scientific proof, such as man-made global warming, are peddled as demonstrable fact; the anti-globalisation movement demonises an allegedly malevolent conspiracy of big business; the belief in sinister links between the military-industrial complex and the intelligence services underpins anti-Americanism and opposition to the war in Iraq.

All these prejudices belong to the ideology of the left, which is constructed on a gigantic conspiracy theory which blames capitalism for all the ills of mankind. Since the left now occupies the commanding heights of our culture, these assumptions are now commonplace. And since such determinism effectively removes individual responsibility for what happens, it is a creed tailor-made for a society devoted to the ruthless pursuit of self-interest, which has rejected mainstream religion and its moral codes.

Yet having dispensed with religion, people still have a desperate need to make order out of chaos. They are doing so not merely through conspiracy theories but by embracing many other areas of the irrational like the occult, paganism or the paranormal. Our super-scientific age has seen a popular flight from science to New Age therapies such as faith-healing, energy-giving crystals or feng shui — beliefs associated with no less a personage than the Prime Minister’s wife.

Obsessions with charlatans and quacks reflect widespread insecurity by people who, adrift without the consolations of religion, feel helpless and at the mercy of events. The more threatening the world becomes, the more they turn to the irrational. It all goes to prove GK Chesterton’s famous remark that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.

But religion is not necessarily a bar to the irrational. One of the most far-fetched conspiracy theories around is the widespread Muslim belief that Israel is somehow behind every outrage in the world, including 9/11. It is the same theory which holds that Princess Diana was murdered because she was carrying Dodi’s baby, who would have been a Muslim.

Such delusions are rooted in the pathological need by some Muslims to prove they are being systematically victimised by the west. This finds common cause with the left, which is also motivated — for rather different reasons — by hatred of the west. The result is an extraordinary axis that has emerged between the conspiracy theories of the left, radical Islamists and the far right.

Classic antisemitic libels that the Jews are plotting to take over the world, which were once the province of the far right, are now doing the rounds in the Muslim world. Yet the left, for whom this myth fits its own desire to demonise America, now also holds frequent discussions about the extent to which the Jews control US foreign policy.

At the heart of this descent into irrationality is a denial, not just of truths but of the very idea of truth. Post-modernism holds that there is no such thing as objective truth, merely individual opinions. This has destroyed the understanding that opinion is arrived at only after consideration of factual evidence and logical reasoning. Instead, evidence is increasingly viewed through a prism of prior opinion. The result is a collapse of reason and rationality in favour of prejudice and emotion.

We can see this at work over attitudes towards both Iraq and the Hutton inquiry, which go beyond legitimate differences of opinion into the wrenching of every development to support a prior prejudice, and a rush to judgment before the facts are even established.

Part of the problem is an official lack of candour and the fact that, too often, our political leaders do tell us lies. Part of the responsibility also lies with the media which amplifies such public distrust.

But the loss of trust in authority goes far deeper. There is now a belief that authority itself is some kind of conspiracy against the individual. So people leap to the worst possible conclusions. Thus, the worst is repeatedly assumed of Prince Charles, all because the country took the side of Princess Diana — precisely because she embodied emotion over reason.

As a result, an infectious hysteria has characterised British public debate since the death of Diana. The country now appears to believe that loopy conspiracy theories are true, that patently flawed news reports must be correct if they accord with people's prejudices, and that the free world is run by a bunch of shysters who would even go to war on a set of self-serving lies, despite the patent risk to their own political survival.

We are living through a flight from reason itself, a kind of collective paranoia. Unchecked, this can lead to dictatorship or totalitarianism as people no longer have the wherewithal to defend themselves against the lies that bring dictatorships to power. Far from a harmless curiosity, our emergence as a conspiracy culture should set an alarm bell ringing.

Daily Mail, 8 January 2004

Three weeks from now, the government’s reclassification of cannabis from a class B to a class C drug comes into effect. At that point, it will be officially considered no more dangerous than painkillers, steroids or tranquillisers.

Indeed, simply as a result of announcing this change — which also means the police will no longer arrest people for possessing small quantities of marijuana —many young people now believe cannabis really isn’t very dangerous at all.

Yet now comes the starkest warning yet that it is so dangerous it is causing unprecedented numbers of people to go mad. Professor Robin Murray, one of this country’s foremost experts on psychosis, has told The Times that cannabis is now the ‘number one problem’ reducing mental health services in the inner cities to crisis point. Up to 80 per cent of all new patients suffering from psychosis are reporting a history of cannabis use which, the professor says, has brought on their illness.

Four recent studies show that cannabis use — particularly by young people — can increase the likelihood of psychosis by up to 700 per cent. Furthermore, the drug drastically reduces the chances of recovery, since when patients leave hospital they return to their old haunts, resume taking cannabis and relapse.

Maybe in an attempt to be diplomatic, Professor Murray declines to criticise the fact that no psychosis experts were members of either the Home Affairs Select Committee or the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, both of which played a crucial role in advising the government on re-classifying cannabis. This is because at the time, he says, no-one thought any such experts were needed.

The professor is being far too kind. The omission of such expertise was a disgrace. There has been a welter of evidence, some of it going back more than two decades, suggesting alarming links between cannabis and mental illness. While this did not conclusively prove cannabis was the cause, it certainly indicated strongly that this was so.

In particular, a study of Swedish army conscripts in 1987 reported that those who had used cannabis on more than 50 occasions were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia than those who hadn’t used the drug at all. Another Dutch study of heavy cannabis users revealed a sevenfold likelihood of psychotic symptoms within three years.

In 1998, the National Institute of Public Health in Sweden warned that cannabis was one of the most toxic of all narcotics. ‘Compared with heroin abuse’, it said, ‘cannabis smoking — in addition to the strong grip with which dependence develops — is associated with far more serious risks regarding the development of mental disorders of various kinds.’ It listed these as ‘delirium, cannabis psychosis, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depersonalisation syndrome, depression and suicide tendency, antimotivational behaviour and impulsive violence’.

In other words, there was enough evidence even then to ring the loudest of alarm bells over cannabis and mental health. But the government simply ignored it.

Since then, further studies to which Professor Murray referred have reinforced this research and produced yet further alarming evidence of the link with mental illness. In New Zealand, young people who had used cannabis three times or more at age 15 or 18 were more likely to exhibit schizophrenic symptoms by age 26. Still other studies in America and Australia show cannabis users have a fourfold risk of depression.

In November 2002, these new studies were revealed in the British Medical Journal. The government ignored these, too.

Instead, it ploughed on with its reclassification in the apparent belief not only that cannabis doesn’t do much harm to users, but that it doesn’t harm other people. But this is not true either. The changes it causes in the brain can have profound effects on others, ranging from relationship difficulties to violence.

Jamie Lee Osbourne, jailed for life last month for murdering a stranger at random, changed under the influence of cannabis from a church-going teenager to a savage killer. His barrister told the court that cannabis had diminished his inhibitions and given him ‘delusional fantasies’.

Anne-Marie Pyle bludgeoned her father to death before setting fire to his house, after cannabis gave her psychotic delusions. Phillip Caswell, who strangled his sleeping girlfriend and then stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife, blamed the attack on his prolonged cannabis use. And so on, and appallingly on.

The Government has ignored all this, too. Instead, it has issued dangerously mixed messages about cannabis which can only encourage its use. On ‘Frank’, the Home Office drug information website, it has actually downplayed its dangers. ‘Cannabis psychosis’, it says, ‘is rare but happens when someone’s smoked themselves into oblivion. It can continue for some time but is treatable… Once stoned, users can find hidden depths in daytime television/ the most unlikely song lyrics’.

Despite his own evidence, Professor Murray refuses to condemn the government for downgrading cannabis from class B to class C because it does not cause psychosis in most people who use it. This is surely extraordinarily naïve. This reclassification sends out a totally misleading signal that cannabis is not dangerous. As a result, more young people are going to use it. As a result of that, the toll of mental illness he so chillingly describes is going to get worse.

And while most users may not go mad, its effects are not confined to psychosis but also include dependency, demotivation and loss of memory and the ability to think, not to mention physical effects such as an increased cancer risk or infertility.

Given all this, there is surely a case for reclassifying cannabis upwards to a class A drug. The dangers it poses to both individuals and to society are insupportable. To put it on the same level as painkillers is quite grotesque.

The Government’s reckless drug policy has already caused enormous damage, and this is set to accelerate. Ministers have simply shut their ears to those experts who have tried to warn them about the true dangers of cannabis. Instead, it has listened only to two kinds of people.

The first is the great and the good who wish to ensure they or their children will not end up with criminal records for taking drugs. The second is the legalisation lobby which has taken over the American, British and European drug information industry to such a degree that ministers cannot grasp the extent to which its distorted propaganda has successfully bamboozled the police, MPs, the civil service and much of the rest of the establishment.

The result is a criminal and public health menace which is now spiralling out of control, pulling the government behind it.

Daily Mail, 4 January 2004

This week, the Prime Minister comes back to political earth with a bump as he finally publishes his plans for university top-up fees and assesses whether his desperate damage limitation exercise against the threatened huge Labour rebellion has worked.

Various carrots are being dangled to buy off the rebels, including doubling the maintenance grant for poor students and writing off fee debts after 25 years. Some heavy stick is also being applied, in the form of the Home Secretary warning MPs against ‘grandstanding’ in pursuit of their own agendas. Some will be pacified; some will continue to object to the principle of variable fees; still others will refuse to pass up a golden opportunity to do significant political damage to their class enemy, Tony Blair.

Meanwhile the Tories, who have been lining up alongside the Labour rebels to defeat the government, are now beginning to have second thoughts. They have finally woken up to the fact that merely opposing top-up fees would leave the universities in precisely the parlous financial position which has led to the policy in the first place.

Before they jumped onto this particular bandwagon, the Tories should have produced their own proposals to reform university financing. This is a highly complex matter; but even so, there are two crucial arguments against top-up fees.

The first is that this crisis is the result of the huge and unfinanced expansion of university places, resulting in ever increasing numbers of unsuitable people being admitted to university. The outcome is a relentless deterioration in standards. To have to pay for the increasing meaninglessness of degrees is to add insult to injury.

The second major argument is the price the government will exact from the universities for this additional income. Top-up fees will provide ministers wedded to social engineering with yet more leverage to force good universities to discriminate against able students simply because they live on the right side of the tracks.

The universities themselves should be rising up in protest at this sinister agenda. Instead, they support top-up fees because they think of nothing other than their own survival. Of course, no organisation can survive if its income doesn’t match its expenditure. They are also right to point out that many of the arguments against top-up fees are confused and illogical.

For example, since up-front tuition fees will be abolished, one source of pressure on poor students will actually be removed, with repayment deferred until they earn a reasonable wage. Moreover, what really puts off poor students is their living costs; which is why, if the government is indeed proposing to double the maintenance grant, this would be a very significant pacifier.

But the universities may find that any such financial sweeteners are taken out of their top-up fee income, thus plunging them back into the financial mire. And here is the rub against the whole policy: the government is pulling all the strings.

Already, the ‘postcode premium’ means the universities lose funding if they don’t take enough students from government-approved (ie, poor) backgrounds. And with the new, Orwellian ‘access regulator’, such pressure is likely to intensify.

As a result of such mounting oppressiveness, some vice-chancellors have been flirting with the idea of independence from government altogether. But although some could become self-financing as far as teaching is concerned, they could not hope to match the funds the state provides for research.

Some are pinning their hopes on the House of Lords to draw any sting of greater government control from the top-up fees package. But this is surely a pretty fragile basis on which to rest any prospect of rescuing the universities from their plight.

If all fails and the bill threatens to emasculate the universities’ independence, some of them — notably the Russell group of top institutions that includes Oxbridge, the London School of Economics and Bristol university— may well feel no alternative but to declare independence from the government on student fees altogether. Such a desperate move would entail serious risks. It would mean taking more postgraduates and foreign students — who pay more —thus reducing places for British undergraduates. And it would also risk retaliation from the government, which might threaten to concentrate research funds on those universities who toed the line.

The universities are thus between a rock and a hard place. This dismaying situation is the result of a wider breakdown in the assumption of public interest on which our society once was based. Ministers have jettisoned this understanding by destroying the ‘hands-off’ principle of government, with baleful effects throughout public life: the civil service, the NHS, the BBC, where centralised political control has now replaced dispassionate and objective independence.

For years, the universities have endured this and said nothing. For years, they watched the destruction of education standards and said nothing. They too have lost that overriding sense of public service which once animated their forbears. Now, they look only to their own self-interest.

If only they would act together rather than alone, they would pack a punch ministers could not ignore. They need to go public on what has been happening — the government control that penalises merit, the attack on intellectual freedom, the implosion of education standards.

As for the Tories, they are saying broadly the right thing but for the wrong reason. Their sums currently don’t add up because they merely oppose further university expansion. They should propose shrinking the sector, the only way to stop both the financial meltdown and the downward spiral of degree courses.

They should face down the inevitable shrieks of ‘elitism’ by pointing out that what matters is not the rate of university admissions but the proportion of students who make it to graduation. In the past, Britain led the world in the proportion of successful graduates precisely because of the excellent match between students’ ability and the courses that accepted them.

Now, the drop-out rate is increasing alarmingly. Undaunted, ‘anti-elitist’ Labour MPs are even suggesting that universities should take applicants with no A-levels at all. What contempt this displays towards non-academic or poorly-schooled young people, whose interests are certainly not served by dropping out of university or being awarded poor quality degrees.

Instead, the Tories should flesh out in detail a policy of high quality vocational training. They should also commit themselves to restoring the hands-off principle of government.

The universities think top-up fees will give them greater freedom from government. But if ministers aren’t committed to giving them that freedom, they will find ways of using top-up fees to tighten the screw. After all, students pay up-front tuition fees now — and yet this hasn’t saved the universities from unprecedented government pressure.

The Tories should offer guarantees of university independence — maybe by setting up a body independent of government and answerable instead to Parliament to administer university funding.

The drama over top-up fees reflects a far deeper malaise. It is nothing less than a collapse of trust in government to spend taxpayers’ money honourably or wisely, and an erosion of the assumption of public duty which once animated university teachers and other professionals. However the university funding crisis is finessed, unless these crucial social ethics are restored we will continue to slide even further into self-centred mediocrity and invidious government control.