Daily Mail, 27 February 2004

As a Jew, I left the screening of The Passion in a state of shock. In the course of two hours, the ancient calumny fuelling centuries of Jewish persecution is boosted by the turbocharge of Hollywood’s most sophisticated form of emotional manipulation.

After decades of decent Christian attempts to interpret the Gospels in a way that does not blame the Jewish people for the death of Jesus, this horrific film resurrects the core charge against the Jews of deicide.

It portrays the Jews as a bloodthirsty mob, led by cruel and malicious leaders, who repeatedly bay for Jesus to be crucified. It makes no acknowledgement of the fact that, writing decades after the death of Jesus and under the yoke of Roman tyranny, the Gospel writers would almost certainly have wanted to present the Jews in the worst possible light rather than the Romans who actually crucified Jesus along with many other Jews.

Instead, the film depicts the Romans sympathetically, presenting Pontius Pilate as a decent man facing a dilemma and the Romans in general as baffled and taken aback by the murderousness of the Jews. The fact that Jesus himself is depicted as a Jew is neither here nor there. The Jews are presented as so vicious they would even have one of their own tortured and crucified. This is a film which unequivocally and deliberately presents the Jews as guilty of the most horrific crime in human history, killing the son of God.

And to ram home his point, Gibson bludgeons his audience with the most sickening scenes of violence, torture and sadism, wrenching the final hours of Jesus’s life out of context and going far beyond what is actually in the Biblical account. It shows the Jews themselves beating Jesus; and if the Romans really had scourged Jesus to the horrific extent depicted in the film, it is hard to see how he would not have died of his injuries then and there, let alone been able to support the weight of the cross.

What effect will all this have on those who see this film? There may be Christians who emerge with their faith strengthened and who will welcome a production which performs such a rare function. Thoughtful Christians, however, may feel distinctly uncomfortable to be confronted so graphically with the charge of racial guilt laid against the Jews, which is at the core of the Gospel story but which the Church is now at pains to downplay.

Among others, images of the Jewish mob screaming for Jesus’s death will simply be an incitement to hatred. At a time when Jew-hatred has been revived and attacks on Jews are rising around the world, such a film could have an incendiary effect.

Whatever Mel Gibson’s intentions, this disgusting film leaves the Jewish people once again vilified, and the oldest hatred resuscitated.

Daily Mail, 23 February 2004

From the moment that surgeon Andrew Wakefield first published his explosive theory suggesting a link between autism, bowel disease and the measles, mumps and rubella triple jab, the government and the medical establishment have been determined to discredit him and thus destroy his research.

Over the weekend, it looked as if they had finally managed it. The Sunday Times suggested that Mr Wakefield’s original Lancet paper in 1998, which first indicated such links, was a scandalous manipulation of the evidence.

The report claimed Mr Wakefield had failed to tell the Lancet he had also received legal aid funds to carry out a separate study, as part of the legal case being brought by parents of autistic children against the MMR manufacturers. To make matters even worse, it alleged, some of the children in the Lancet paper were involved in the court case. The Lancet study was therefore fatally compromised, since the parents had stood to gain financially if Mr Wakefield’s researches had enabled them to claim compensation.

No sooner did the story appear than the Health Secretary Dr John Reid demanded an urgent inquiry. However, upon examination the picture significantly changes. The Sunday Times originally made a series of claims against Mr Wakefield, which were all actually rejected by the Lancet except for the conflict of interest. But when one looks at the facts, this too begins to look a bit different.

Mr Wakefield’s legal aid-funded study was commissioned by solicitor Richard Barr, who had been approached by parents of children sick with autism and bowel disease who wanted to take legal action against the manufacturers of MMR. Mr Barr wanted to know whether there was clinical evidence to support such a case. So he asked Mr Wakefield to look at possible links between measles virus and bowel disease.

The Sunday Times report claimed that four or five of the 12 children in the entirely separate Lancet study were part of this legal action. But their parents only decided to go to court after they had been accepted for treatment by Mr Wakefield’s team at London’s Royal Free hospital.

The implication that they were selected because they were litigants with a financial interest in the results of the clinical examination is grotesque. All twelve of them were referred through normal NHS processes, either from doctors’ recommendations or after desperate parents, having heard on the grapevine of Mr Wakefield’s unusual sympathy towards these problems, had contacted him of their own volition. It was only subsequently that a few of them became part of the legal case.

So the two Wakefield studies were entirely separate, with no cross over. True, the Lancet editor has said the second study should have been disclosed to avoid the ‘perception’ of a conflict of interest, and that had he known of its existence, he wouldn’t have published Mr Wakefield’s paper which was ‘fatally flawed’ as a result.

But surely Mr Wakefield is being accused of a conflict of interest which did not occur at the time, in order to create the false impression that he and his colleagues deliberately skewed their selection of children for investigation in the Lancet exercise to support a crack-brained theory. Surely, he is being damned by the misleading application of hindsight, which has seriously misrepresented what happened. In other words, this appears to be nothing other than a smear.

It is also a smear whose timing should raise a few eyebrows. For the Legal Services Commission has now cut off legal aid funding for the parents, which threatens to stop the case altogether. It just so happened that Mr Barr applied for judicial review of that decision a week ago, and judgment has been reserved. So this smear looks very like an attempt to influence the court and ensure the case dies.

And make no mistake, the stakes could not be higher. The drug companies, the government and the medical establishment have every reason to fear this case going ahead.

For although Mr Wakefield is the focus of the frenzy, many other pieces of evidence suggest that concern over the vaccine is by no means confined to one possibly obsessive doctor. Although the vast majority of children clearly have no adverse reaction whatever from the MMR jab, the number of families with a very different story to tell indicate that, for a small proportion of children, something worrying may be happening.

What is so striking is the sheer volume of parents, not just in Britain but in America and other countries, who tell the same story of children who were developing normally — often with videos to prove it — only to stop developing and start suffering bowel disease after the MMR jab.

Moreover, vaccine-strain measles virus has been found in the gut of some children with autism and bowel disease. Earlier this month Dr Jeff Bradstreet, a US autism researcher, presented evidence to the Institute of Medicine in Washington showing measles virus in the cerebral-spinal fluid of three children with autism and bowel disease.

This virus most definitely should not be there; and the question is how it got there in children who had been vaccinated against measles. None of this proves MMR causes either bowel disease or autism; but it certainly indicates a cause for concern.

The government insists, however, that research overwhelmingly shows the vaccine is safe. But this is not so. The research in question investigates patterns of disease based on medical records. But this is unlikely to get to the bottom of the issue, since countless parents have said doctors not only failed to diagnose autism or bowel disease in their children but dismissed out of hand the parents’ reports that the problems seemed to start with the triple jab.

In any event, these studies do not prove MMR is safe. They say there is no proof it is not safe, a very different matter. The official misrepresentation of these conclusions is one of the most worrying things about this controversy. This is particularly so since the government had introduced the first type of MMR vaccine in 1989 — which it had to withdraw three years later because it was shown to cause aseptic meningitis — even though it knew at the time that Canada had already withdrawn it because it was found to be unsafe.

And as for conflicts of interest, what about the many scientists on the government’s vaccine safety bodies who are funded by the pharmaceutical companies?

Certainly, it is extremely worrying if parents are refusing to vaccinate their children against measles, mumps and rubella, with the dangers they pose of serious illness or even death. But not only does the government refuse to allow the use of less worrying single jabs — it also refuses to do the one thing that could settle this matter one way or the other.

Instead of calling for an inquiry into Mr Wakefield and dismissing parents’ concerns with such contempt, it should commission an independent, clinical investigation of affected children. Only then will we be able to judge who in this wretched story is actually right, and only then will all children get the vaccinations they need.

Observer, 22 February 2004

Let us all agree on one thing at least. The more Jews warn that antisemitism has come roaring out of the closet, the more people don’t like the Jews. Which is a bit of a problem if you believe, as I do, that the oldest hatred has indeed alarmingly resurfaced but is hiding under the respectable skirts of hostility to Israel.

This week, the European Union finally admitted there was a problem with rising Jew-hatred. While there was no comparison with the Holocaust, said European Commission president Romano Prodi, some criticism of Israel was ‘inspired by what amounts to antisemitic sentiments and prejudice’. On Friday, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity, reported the second largest rise in 20 years in attacks on synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish people in Britain.

Yet there were immediate moans in the press about having to listen to ‘grossly exaggerated’ warnings about rising antisemitism. In an Economist debate at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts last week, those issuing such warnings were accused of being the ‘new McCarthyites’, waving the shroud of the Holocaust to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

So when a woman said to me one evening: ‘I hate the Jews’, I should have dismissed my shock as a ‘grossly exaggerated’ response. When I was listed in a newspaper article as one of the Jews exercising sinister control over public debate in Britain, I should have said I brought this on myself by writing anything at all.

When I heard claims by a radio reporter that the Jews might have ‘poisoned the water wells of Egypt’ in 1947, I should not have wondered why one of the stock libels of medieval Jew-hatred was being broadcast as if it were true, since my concern was obviously shroud-waving.

And when in the ICA debate the Tory MP Robert Jackson accused British Jews of dual loyalty and said their Britishness was conditional on their explicit repudiation of the policies of Ariel Sharon, it was obvious that the reason he was singling out the Jews as second-class citizens in this startling way was because they are McCarthyites.

Let’s all agree on something else. Some Jews grossly over-react to perceived antisemitic bias. Their campaign of insults is as bad as the kind of insults which wing their way with monotonous regularity to me.

Nevertheless, as Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks told the EU conference, an unholy alliance between the left, the far right and the Islamic street means millions are being told that alone among nations, Israel has no right to exist and that all the troubles of the world are the work of the Jews. So why do claims of rising antisemitism provoke such fury?

At the heart of this bitter disagreement is the conflation of the issue of Israel with the issue of Jew-hatred. The latter claim maddens people who feel they can’t criticise Israel without risking being accused of anti-Jewish prejudice. The two, they say, are not connected.

In theory, that’s true. In practice, however, one issue often morphs seamlessly into the other, both implicitly in the way Israel is described and explicitly in overt Jew-hatred.

Criticism of Israel is certainly legitimate, as it is of any other country. Like many Jews, I am myself critical of its policies. But a line has been crossed into something else — the demonisation and dehumanisation of Israel based on systematic lies, libels and distortions. As a result, a lot of decent people have been unwittingly caught up in a narrative of hatred.

The former Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans tried to show where that line should be drawn. It was not antisemitic, he said, to report Israeli ill-treatment of Palestinians or Sharon’s past, or to deplore the long occupation of the territories. It was antisemitic to present Israel as diabolical, to invent malignant outrages, to condemn actions by Israel while not condemning worse elsewhere, and to vilify Jews so as to incite violence.

In all four categories, that line has been crossed. Diabolical? Israel is routinely described falsely as an apartheid or, worse, a Nazi state. While its society is far from perfect, Arab Israelis not only have the vote but serve in the Knesset, supreme court and army. To label it ‘Nazi’ is to delegitimise it.

Malevolent outrages? Look at the so-called ‘massacre’ of Jenin, reported with such vituperation that it has become an accepted fact even though there was no massacre: 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 mostly armed Palestinians died in that incident. Yes, there are some appalling and inexcusable incidents in Israel. But that doesn’t explain why Israeli self-defence is systematically and falsely represented as malevolent aggression.

Double standards? British academics try to impose boycotts on Israeli universities. Yet they organised no boycotts against Kuwait, which expelled 350,000 Palestinians in 1991; or Jordan, which murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians; or Syria, which has occupied Lebanon. And increasingly, people are saying Israel should not exist at all, thus singling it out alone for destruction.

Inciting violence? People like the LibDem MP Jenny Tonge have come close to excusing the mass murder of Israelis in a manner they would never apply to the mass murder of any other peoples.

Coverage of Israel is obsessive and disproportionate, and marked by a tone of hysteria and malice which is not applied to any other conflict. And it cannot be divorced from the overt Jew-hatred that has now surfaced in Britain and Europe, particularly the give-away calumny of world Jewish power. The claim that the Jews are a covert conspiracy to dominate the world is one of the oldest tropes of classic Jew-hatred.

Astonishingly, claims made by the European left are not far removed. It repeats claims that the ‘powerful Jewish lobby’ is now running American foreign policy. When Labour MP Tam Dalyell observed that a ‘cabal’ of Jewish power was behind Tony Blair, he was thought a loveable eccentric. In the House of Lords, a meeting was told that the Jews control the British media. One peer told a Jewish colleague: ‘Well, we’ve finished off Saddam. Now your lot are next’.

The outcome is that an astonishing axis has developed between Islamic Jew-haters and the left, marching behind the same banners of ‘human rights’ on demonstrations in Europe producing chants of ‘Hamas Hamas all Jews to the gas’.

Why? The main reason is ignorance of both the Middle East’s history and its present. Next, the left’s hatred of Sharon is so great, along with its prejudice that America/the west is the oppressor and therefore the Islamic/third world the victim, that it is unable to see what is happening.

Then there’s the left’s deconstruction of the very concepts of objectivity and truth, so that it has become a conduit instead for propaganda and lies; and finally, its own history of Jew-hatred from Marx onwards. The final twist is that there are some Jews on the left who subscribe to all the above too.

Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu said people were scared to say the Jewish lobby in America was very powerful. So what? he asked. ‘The apartheid government was very powerful but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.’

So Jews not only have vast power, according to Tutu, but are on a par with the great tyrants of the last century. Yet it was Tutu who actually had the power to publish this calumny about the Jewish people, and thus incite yet more to hate them. But of course, any Jews who call this by its proper name are the new McCarthyites.

Daily Mail, 21 February 2004

Quite simply, immigration is the issue of our age. And the reason it’s becoming increasingly contentious is that it calls into question the very future and character of the nation that our children will inherit.

Not that this issue is confined to Britain. Only a few days ago, the traditionally liberal Dutch and Danes unveiled draconian measures in a bid to stem the unprecedented waves of immigration now threatening to destroy their national identities.

Yet in Britain, the corrosive idea which seethes beneath the whole immigration controversy is the belief in fashionable circles that such a national identity is somehow illegitimate and that to defend it is ‘xenophobic’.

In his Burnley speech this week, the Tory leader Michael Howard recognised the delicate relationship that has to be negotiated between immigrants and the host culture. ‘I do not see society as a collection of minorities’, he said, ‘ but rather as a wide spectrum of individuals, all with their own talents, all British’.

But our governing elites do present this country as a collection of minorities, a ‘multicultural society’ in which British characteristics are of no greater value or significance than those of any other culture. Accordingly, they think it doesn’t matter how many immigrants arrive – the more the merrier, in fact, since multiculturalism is so desirable — and that anyone who objects to this is a racist.

But their premise is wrong. Britain is not a multicultural society. A mere eight per cent of the population are from an ethnic minority, and even then a number of those are Christians. Nor is this a country of immigrants; until the 1950s, there was no large-scale immigration since the Norman invasion 1000 years ago. Britain is a country with a distinctive and ancient identity and culture founded upon a dominant religion, Christianity, to which most of its citizens still feel an attachment.

Immigrants need to become part of that culture and society. Mr Howard spoke of his own family’s immigrant experience. My own grandparents and great grandparents were also immigrants and refugees from eastern Europe.

They came to Britain early in the last century because they valued and admired this country’s characteristics —fair play, tolerance, emotional restraint. Without sacrificing their own culture, people like them signed up to British values by learning to love Shakespeare and Jane Austen, by studying the history of parliamentary democracy and the growth of British institutions, by being taught leadership, discipline and team-work on the playing fields of England.

The crucial point was that these things were actually taught. People like my family were imbued with British values because the British themselves were proud of their identity and believed in transmitting what it stood for to all citizens and their children.

But this is no longer true. These things are no longer taught. For decades now, our schools and universities have been doing their best instead to destroy national pride. The very idea that they should transmit a national identity is considered racist, imperialist and exclusionary.

Great works of English literature are downplayed in favour of books that are ‘relevant’ to a child’s own background. British political history is out, so children are given no sense of a chronological national story to make sense of the society they inhabit.

Partly, this derives from an excess of tact towards minorities and guilt over the British Empire — even though teaching Empire properly would include the story of the many immigrant groups that fought heroically for Britain. And partly, it’s a desire to create an entirely new kind of society by destroying the old one.

That means, among other things, repudiating the Christian basis of British culture. Thus, a report on teaching religion in schools from the Blairite Institute for Public Policy Research wants to teach a ‘diversity of identities’ to equip children for life in a ‘multicultural society’. Accordingly, it wants children to question the faith they get from their families and to ‘regard the moral teachings of religion with suspicion’. Under cover of promoting ‘diversity’, this is actually a menu for subversion, explicitly aiming to undermine the family and the moral and religious basis of the nation.

Similarly, Edinburgh university is to ban Christian prayers at graduation ceremonies to avoid offending other religions and atheists and to avoid legal action under race or religious discrimination laws. Thus a national culture is redefined as intrinsically racist or discriminatory,
Because it is embarrassed by its own culture, Britain refuses to defend it in the way the Dutch or the Danes have done with their culture. . The Dutch have decided to expel around 26,000 failed asylum-seekers. The Danes have banned imams who teach that women should not work, promote female genital mutilation or preach death to the Jews, on top of already tough restrictions on immigrants.
These countries have grasped that multiculturalism poses a threat to their culture and identity which they are not prepared to tolerate. The Dutch say that their 30-year experiment in multiculturalism has resulted in sink schools, violence, and ethnic ghettoes.

Of course, most immigrants are hard-working, honest and with many other admirable characteristics. The problem is that if their numbers are too large, or if they don’t want to integrate, the indigenous culture cannot absorb them.

For example, if there simply aren’t enough people who can identify with the country’s history, then it cannot be taught. And since a nation is rooted in history, its identity then unravels. It becomes no longer even a question of being ashamed of our country’s past. There is no longer any sense that there’s a ‘we’ to have a past at all.

According to the philosopher Roger Scruton, this places democracy itself in danger. In his new Civitas pamphlet ‘The Need for Nations’, he suggests that without national loyalty, there can be no common ground. Democracy works only if its members think of themselves as ‘we’. If there is only ‘them’, people no longer recognise the validity of laws that bind them and are no longer prepared to make sacrifices or die for a country inhabited by people they don’t know or trust. The result is that democracy withers, and social disintegration follows.

David Goodhart, editor of the liberal magazine Prospect, makes a similar point. We are linked, he says, by a set of common values and assumptions. But as Britain becomes more diverse, that common culture becomes eroded. And if we feel we no longer have anything in common with our fellow citizens, we will no longer be prepared to pay for common welfare provision.

For this thoughtful discussion of an important dilemma, Mr Goodhart has been attacked by no less a grandee than the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality Trevor Phillips, who accused him of racism and likened him to Enoch Powell and the BNP.

How on earth have we got to such a pass, where a patently decent person is smeared as a racist simply for wishing to preserve a national identity? Why is Britain so much less attached to its identity than the Dutch, the Danes or other Europeans like the French? And why has education unravelled the culture in Britain to an extent not seen elsewhere?

It is often said that colonial guilt is to blame; but this is surely only part of the story.

The main culprit is the radicalised, baby-boomer generation who, in the sixties and seventies, made no secret of their desire to infiltrate and destabilise western society. They had much less impact in Europe, where institutions remained robust enough to mount a solid defence. Schools still transmitted their values, the family held up and the churches were strong.

In Britain, however, these institutions simply collapsed. The welfare state, in promoting a culture of rights, had eroded responsibility and duty and encouraged instead a culture of self-centredness. This created fertile ground for the cult of personal choice promoted by sixties radicals.

In addition, the close ties with America of language and culture meant that Britain was particularly susceptible to radical American programmes of child-centred education, extreme feminism and minority ‘victim’ rights. State monopoly over our schools and universities meant there was no challenge to these ideas, which all aimed to uncouple citizens from the traditions and established values of the nation. And faced with this rout, the church merely wrung its hands and dutifully followed suit.

As a result, the three pillars of national identity —family, education and church — have all crumbled.

Britain may be in the vanguard of this process, but it is part of a global trend. For the immigration crisis is the most visible symptom of the fact that the free world is at a turning point. The old idea that people’s principal duties are towards family, neighbourhood and the nation is being challenged by a new vision in which people have an equal duty to the entire world.

In this new trans-national order, the powers of individual nations are being progressively transferred to institutions that cross national boundaries. The European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation increasingly impose laws and obligations on countries where they are not accountable to the people. Much of this energy is being provided by human rights activists promoting ‘international law’, which has no democratic legitimacy but is increasingly being used to bring democracies to heel. Bit by bit as the nation state is superseded, democracy is being chipped away.

It is no accident that this trans-nationalism has been expanding ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is nothing less than the post-communist means of destabilising western society. Since the wake-up call of 9/11, there has been a fight back against this trend by countries determined to defend the old nation state, such as the Dutch and the Danes. In the US, a battle is under way between rival supporters of trans-nationalism and democracy. In Britain, we haven’t even grasped there is a battle to be waged.

According to Roger Scruton, we are slipping towards trans-national government ‘in which national loyalty will be no more significant than support for a local football team’. The outcome, he says, will be despotism and anarchy.

We can see signs of it already. In 1996, Greenwich council produced a remarkable report in response to the murders of Stephen Lawrence and two other local black boys. One of the principal reasons for the murderous rage of white youths, it said, was that they had no national identity to be proud of and to give their lives meaning. White children, it said, ‘seem like cultural ghosts, haunting as mere absences the richly decorated corridors of multicultural society.’

National identity is not static. It is enriched by additions from immigrants over time. People may also have several identities, like Russian dolls stacked inside each other. But ultimately, they have to have common bonds; and these depend on a common culture, which requires controlled migration.

The nations of the west are currently defending their democratic way of life against the external threat of global terror. But they are also being weakened from within by an even greater threat — the prospect of social suicide.

Jewish Chronicle, 20 February 2004

David Goodhart, editor of the liberal magazine Prospect, has written a thoughtful article about national identity and the challenges it faces from mass immigration. He notes that although our society is essentially an association of strangers, we accept the choices it makes and the restrictions it imposes because we nevertheless share with each other a set of common values and assumptions.

This solidarity, however, is threatened if society becomes too diverse and if we therefore no longer recognise what we all have in common. A culture of solidarity is based on primary obligations to family, locality and nation. This is now opposed, however, by the internationalist view that we have equal obligations to everyone in the world, and which therefore holds that national identity and culture are exclusive and illegitimate.

Goodhart’s argument finds strong endorsement in Roger Scruton’s new Civitas pamphlet, ‘The Need for Nations’. Democracy, he observes, is only possible if society accepts the ‘we’ that derives from a shared culture. That ‘we’ is destroyed by multiculturalism, which explicitly denies the ties that bind us. It is also destroyed by international jurisdictions such as the EU or UN, which impose upon us laws which have no legitimacy because their legislators are not answerable to us. At the end of this process, as the philosopher Kant predicted, ultimately lie despotism and anarchy.

Such challenges to majority cultures and the concept of the nation state are among the most difficult, complex and urgent issues we face. Yet a pavlovian McCarthyism seeks to shut down such debate. Thus the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, has accused Goodhart of racism, and likened him to Enoch Powell and the British National Party.

Phillips falsely claims that because Goodhart says ‘national citizenship is inherently exclusionary’, he is also saying ‘no foreigners need apply’. But Goodhart is not saying that at all. On the contrary, he says specifically that just because we tend to prefer our own kind does not mean we are hostile or unsympathetic to other kinds.

In other words, saying mass immigration is unsustainable is not the same as being beastly to immigrants. Of course, immigrants have much to offer this country. And of course, we all have a duty to offer asylum to genuine refugees. But the crisis now facing the west is a historically unprecedented mass migration of peoples, a different scenario altogether.

For Jews, with our own history as immigrants and refugees still a recent and traumatic memory, this whole debate is deeply troubling. We instinctively recoil from pulling up the drawbridge behind us. But like other minorities, British Jews have multiple identities which are stacked inside each other like Russian dolls. What binds us to our non-Jewish fellow citizens is adherence to common laws and conventions based on a culture and institutions rooted in a particular history and traditions.

True, we can’t share in that history until several generations have passed. But that’s no reason to destroy it; and too many newcomers mean it gets more and more difficult to share a history or identity. Thus the national ‘we’ gets replaced by a disparate and fragmented ‘them’, all competing for power and control. A ‘multicultural society’ -- that contradiction in terms — dissolves shared values, and so is the enemy of tolerance and minority freedoms. To label this concern as ‘racist’ is as stupid as it is vicious.

The attack on majority culture also directly threatens Jewish national feeling and the existence of the Jewish national home. If majority culture is illegitimate, then clearly a Jewish state is illegitimate. Indeed, the belief that Jewish national identity is ‘racist’ helps fuel the visceral hatred of Israel. Not, of course, that the Palestinians or any other third world people seeking national self-expression are found guilty of the same ‘racism’. But then, the attack on nation and majority culture is targeted specifically at western nations and western culture.

Time and again, the enemies of western values use the same preposterous argument. They take a perfectly reasonable proposition and then falsely identify it with its own historical distortion, so that they damn the former along with the latter.

Thus, national identity is falsely identified as nationalism, so that any defence of national culture is denounced as xenophobia. Thus, defending majority culture is falsely identified as hatred of foreigners, so the desire to uphold cultural values is denounced as racism. As David Goodhart has now discovered, anyone who dares defend British national identity will immediately be smeared as a bigot by the witch-hunters of cultural deconstruction.

The outcome is that real racism and prejudice become trivialised and then altogether denied; true racists find ever more fertile territory; society’s bonds of mutual respect and solidarity weaken and eventually snap; and all the while, humbugs like Trevor Phillips wrap themselves in sanctimony while they progressively silence the anxious voices of warning.

Daily Mail, February 18 2004

After endless leaks, the interim Tomlinson plan to reform the shambles of the school examination system has finally been published. Having read it, one frankly doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Rarely has an official education report managed to parcel up so little that is sensible or relevant in so much convoluted, impenetrable prose.

The exercise was supposed to answer employers’ concerns that many school-leavers don’t possess even the basic skills of literacy and numeracy. It was supposed to resolve the paradox that, while pupils are buckling under the pressure of more and more exams, standards seem to be slipping. It was supposed to bring order to the chaos of exam grading, and end the universities’ predicament of having to choose the most able from thousands of candidates with the same perfect grades.

At least Mike Tomlinson, a former Chief Inspector of Schools, has got one thing right. He has said that even young people with GCSEs, A-levels or a university place may still be illiterate or innumerate, so much so that some universities are having to run remedial classes for students. This official acknowledgement of the surreal extent of Britain’s educational calamity punctures the insulting complacency of the schools minister David Miliband, who continues to claim that education standards are rising with all the fervour of a medieval monk insisting that the earth was flat.

But the Tomlinson report does not even begin to address the meltdown in education standards that has made public examinations more and more meaningless. Instead, it proposes to set up an eye-wateringly complicated system in which the purpose of obtaining a qualification would be merely to progress to another qualification, thus making them more meaningless than ever.

What these proposals amount to is not far short of the destruction of the very concept of examinations altogether.

Certainly, there are many things wrong with GCSEs and A-levels — not to mention AS levels, whose introduction was such a mistake. The main problem with these exams, however, is that their standards have been progressively lowered to enable more and more pupils to gain qualifications up to degree level, where standards are correspondingly being eroded too.

The correct response would have been to restore rigour to A-level and GCSE, as well as introduce high quality vocational training which remains scandalously neglected. As the independent school heads have said, what is needed is tougher marking and an end to coursework with its opportunities for plagiarism.

But instead, Tomlinson’s new four-tiered national diploma for all pupils aged 14-19 would sweep all these exams away completely, and replace them by a system of credits which is as opaque as it is lacking in rigour.

Indeed, it replaces the very idea of measuring achievement — the essence of an exam — by measuring a pupil’s progress instead. Thus, it suggests pupils might proceed from one level of the diploma to the next without even having to achieve a qualification at each level. All they would have to do is transfer their credits on a ‘flexible ladder of progression’.

Its biggest boast is to introduce ‘core skills’ of English, maths and IT to address employers’ complaints that new recruits are illiterate or innumerate. But here also there will be no actual test of attainment. Instead, the least able pupils will merely have to ‘progress to achievement towards at least level 2 in mathematical skills, communication and IT’.

Behind this tortured syntax, it seems that pupils will merely have to work towards attaining skills which will not even be the equivalent of GCSE maths or English but will be something called ‘functional’ maths and ‘communication’ —less than basic skills which, although pupils don’t even master these, will nevertheless enable them to claim ‘credits’ towards their diploma.

Even in the higher levels of the diploma, standards will be dramatically reduced by the inclusion of non-educational activities for assessment. Pupils will have to produce an ‘extended project’ or a ‘personal challenge’, which could include a video, a job, a part in the school play or going abseiling. Worthy as such activities may be, making them count towards examination success reduces the whole process to absurdity.

Indeed, the report takes an axe to the very concepts of testing and measuring educational achievement. It is preoccupied instead with being sensitive to the feelings of ‘learners’ and avoiding exposing them to anything too onerous, let alone the possibility of failure which appears to have been erased altogether.

In a typical piece of gobbledegook, it says the diploma ‘enriches the learner’s experience by using a variety of types of assessment’, and ‘avoids placing an undue burden on learners and teachers’. The truth all but hidden by such verbal obfuscation is that mixing credits across a bewildering variety of levels and topics, academic and vocational, will make it all but impossible to compare one pupil’s achievement with another. So much for the proposed seven-point grading system at 18 to assist university admissions tutors.

The fairness of exams will vanish, as teachers perform more assessments of their own pupils. And employers, already frustrated by the erosion of reliable exam results on which to judge a job applicant, will have to study the ‘transcript’ of a school-leaver’s whole academic performance — without which, the report candidly admits, the value of the diploma will be all but obscured. And yet the report has the gall to say the current system is ‘confusing and lacks transparency’!

These proposals will betray children from top to bottom of the achievement ladder. By giving the lowest form of diploma to the least able, the new system will brand them as failures while once again doing nothing to bring about desperately needed improvements to the quality of vocational training.

By allowing the most able to take A-level early or even start a degree while at school, it disastrously confuses education with qualification. Exams simply measure what pupils have learned. If they spend fewer years being educated to a given level, they will learn less and the value of the qualification goes down. If A-levels or degree courses are so easy that many pupils can take them at much younger ages, those standards must be too low.

The purpose of education should be ‘knowledge for its own sake’. From this report, it seems this has now been altered to ‘qualifications for their own sake’. But one of the causes of our education meltdown is ministers’ obsession with targets to ‘prove’ standards are rising. Hence the pressure for more university students, higher exam grades —and more and more meaningless qualifications.

In an interview, Mr Tomlinson said the problem lay not with pupils or teachers but with the current exam system. But this is like blaming the existence of law for the crime rate.

He is wrong. The problem lies within a poisoned educational bloodstream. It lies in the retreat from the transmission of knowledge; in the obsession with not hurting pupils’ feelings so no-one can be allowed to fail; in the transfer of authority from teacher to ‘learner’; and in the confusion of education with qualifications, of which this report is such a disappointing illustration.

Daily Mail, 16 February 2004

The Tories are about to magic a rabbit out of their hat. They are going to show us how they can promise simultaneously to shrink the size of the state while guaranteeing to increase public spending on hospitals and schools.

In a keynote speech today, the shadow Chancellor, Oliver Letwin, is expected to say the Tories will reduce the projected increase in public spending to less than the growth in the economy. At the same time, ‘very substantial’ promised increases in spending on hospitals and schools will be offset by savings in administrators and red tape.

Expect an immediate war of the calculators as the Tories and their detractors clash over whether Mr Letwin’s sums add up. Already, government sources have gleefully claimed this is all a muddle, and that the Tories’ proposed £30 billion savings will come from slashing public services —the lethal charge they have previously pinned on them to such effect.

If he is to win this war of words, Mr Letwin needs to be more specific. Making savings through cutting bureaucracy is a claim which politicians often make but which tends not to translate into action.And even if hospitals and schools are protected, what about all the unprotected services such as policing or transport or care homes?

Whether or not Mr Letwin’s calculations do make sense, the more fundamental question arises of whether the Tories’ broad strategy to reposition the party in the eyes of the public is right.

There is no doubt that Michael Howard is a political class act who has stopped the rot and turned the party back into a serious opposition with some intelligent initiatives.

He is right to try to learn from the mistakes of the past, not least in his desire to shake off his own previously off-putting image. Hence his speech last week emphasising his humble family origins, which served both to help humanise him and uphold the classic Tory ideal of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.

Some of the Tories’ policies are promising. Plans taking shape to deal with the financial crisis in the universities have the potential to give them much-needed financial independence while lancing the boil of top-up fees. And the proposals for patients’ and parents’ ‘passports’ to choose hospitals and schools are — if properly developed —an almost guaranteed vote-winner.

The Tories rightly have their tails up because Mr Howard’s leadership has completely changed the mood. For the first time in many years, they have a leader who is seen as a serious player and who has enabled them to regain their self-respect.

Nevertheless, despite this rise in morale their approach is far from confident. On the contrary, they have adopted a strategy that is overwhelmingly defensive, whose principal aim is to neutralise claims by the government that the Tories are cruel and heartless, out of touch with the times and intent on decimating the public services.

As a result, they are in danger of throwing away a golden opportunity to seize the political initiative. For whether or not Mr Letwin’s figures add up, he intends to pour huge amounts of public money into the black holes of health and education. Given the government’s own vast spending on these areas, the one proposition that has been tested to destruction is the claim that their problems are due to lack of money. Unprecedented spending by this government has merely led to unprecedented waste and —whatever the government’s misleading indicators may say — standards that have only modestly improved in the health service and actually slid further backwards in education.

Mr Letwin insists that he intends to reform the structures of education and health provision. But patient and parental choice will hardly achieve this, particularly since they will not expand provision sufficiently to make those choices meaningful.

The Tories are committing themselves to these spending levels not because they are good for health and education but in order to fend off the government’s attacks. But given the fact that a deeply disillusioned public is ripe for fresh thinking, surely the Tories should be changing the terms of the debate, away from the sterile tin-rattling over Exchequer or local authority-funded services to new ways of funding and delivering them altogether.

Their defensive strategy runs the risk of raising other awkward questions as fast as it tries to close off further areas of potential attack. There was a markedly pro-EU shift in Mr Howard’s tone last week, not to mention his decision to realign the British Tories with a strongly federalist grouping in the European Parliament. Yet at the same time, he pledged to fight further European integration and to seize back control of British fishing grounds from Brussels. So which way is Mr Howard really facing on Europe?

Then there was his decision to vote for the controversial gay partnerships bill. He may think this gesture towards changing mores is relatively painless because the measure is only of peripheral importance. But this is not so. In detaching the legal benefits of marriage from its duties and decoupling it from biological parenthood, this bill is in the very forefront of the assault being mounted on sexual norms and will act as a Trojan horse for further family breakdown.

The Tories understandably want to park out of harm’s way all these issues which put them so uncomfortably on the back foot. But in taking the path of least resistance like this, they are in danger of falling into the bigger trap of becoming Tony Blair wannabes. After all, why should people vote for a pale blue imitation of Labour policies when they can have the real thing —complete with an iconic Chancellor who, if he is not Prime Minister by the next election, many think will inherit the post soon afterwards?

The Tories also run the risk of being regarded as shifty as Mr Blair himself. Having been so critical of the government for pouring money into the black holes of health and education, they now look very odd in proposing to do the same — whatever Mr Letwin’s caveats. They could end up with the worst of all worlds —a crippling financial commitment and with the public distrusting them even more.

The Tories are anxious to shake off their image as the ‘nasty’ party. But trust is the key political issue today. What people respect is principle, however unpopular it may be; and the politician who has the character to be true to his principles in the teeth of opposition is the one who earns their trust.

The problem with the Tories’ ‘safety-first’ strategy is that instead of providing such visionary leadership, it is merely accommodating itself to an agenda laid out by the Prime Minister.

The wounds inflicted by Mr Blair upon the Conservative party have gone very deep indeed. No-one should underestimate the extreme difficulty Mr Howard faces in repositioning a party whose nerve and self-belief have been so profoundly shattered.

But to make the real leap, he has to grab the public’s attention; and that surely means not defensive politics but framing anew the terms of public debate.

Daily Mail, 11 February 2004

The poignant, handwritten diary entry in its childish, rounded letters says it all. ‘I had my termanation (sic). Then in brackets underneath: (killed my baby).’

Through these few words, one can only guess at the turmoil in the mind of this 15 year-old girl as she struggled to come to terms with what she had done. After noting the event in the impersonal jargon used by the professionals who handled her case, she revealed in childishly simple terms how it actually felt to her. Not a ‘termination’, but killing her baby.

Tragic as this was, the really appalling thing was her isolation from her parents. In need of adult guidance and support more than at any time in her life, she had been effectively abandoned to make this decision and cope with its aftermath on her own.

For the doctors who dealt with her had not told her parents on the grounds of ‘patient confidentiality’. The girl, who was frightened of what they might say, had said she didn’t want to tell her mother. So her GP, who took a mere 15 minutes to see her, simply referred her on to the hospital which carried out the abortion. The first her mother knew of what had happened was when she read the entry in her daughter’s diary.

What have we come to when a girl barely out of childhood can have an abortion, a procedure with huge physical, emotional and moral ramifications, without the advice and care of her parents because they have been deliberately kept in ignorance of what is happening?

Something has surely gone badly wrong not merely with medical ethics but with our society’s whole attitude to sexuality, childhood and parenthood.

On every count, this incident illustrates a widespread breakdown of responsibility, care and common-sense. The first thing it shows is how far we have allowed the now commonplace practice of abortion to degrade our own sensibilities. An abortion is traumatic for any woman, let alone a child.

It is an event of great significance and difficulty, requiring a troubling balance to be struck between the needs of the mother and respect for the early life she is carrying. When that mother is herself effectively a child, it takes on a further dimension altogether of complexity and even tragedy. At such a time, the mother herself needs to be properly mothered, with the love, guidance and wisdom that only her parents can provide.

But the doctors didn’t see this 15 year-old in that way at all. They saw her merely as a patient with the ‘right’ to confidentiality. By law, a girl under 16 can have an abortion without her parents’ consent if her GP thinks she is mature enough to make the decision herself. That means understanding the moral, social and emotional implications of what she is about to do.

But the teenager’s behaviour in this case illustrates what should be blindingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of compassion or common-sense, that such young girls are too immature to make such decisions. She now says that she wishes her mother had been told, and that if she had been she might have kept the baby.

Tellingly, although she had told the doctors not to tell her parents, she now says: ‘I thought they would have to tell my mum’. In other words, she had clearly been at least half-hoping that someone else would take the decision to tell her mother, because although she was frightened by how she might react, the youngster still needed her.

That’s because she was still a child. And despite what the law says, such an immature person faced with a traumatic decision like this often doesn’t know what she actually wants, and desperately needs loving and supportive advice to guide her through it.

Sure, confidentiality is important — but not if the patient is a child. In those circumstances, the ‘right to confidentiality’ is surely a doctors’ cop-out. It makes life so much easier, after all, if they don’t have to navigate the choppy waters of fraught family relationships. But such avoidance makes a mockery of the care they provide for very young patients.

Such a failure, however, goes far beyond inadequate medical ethics. The law governing such a professional response is based on the prevailing notion that children have ‘rights’ because they are quasi-adults, and therefore mature enough to make their own decisions.

This profoundly misguided view has given rise to the mantra of ‘informed choice’, which means that all the adult world needs to do about risky or life threatening lifestyles —alcohol, illegal drugs, under-age sex —is to lay out the relevant information and expect young teenagers to make ‘informed’ and responsible choices.

Not surprisingly, what actually happens is that young people eagerly embrace such destructive behaviour because they’ve been given the message they can do it ‘safely’. Thus the adult world gaily dishes out contraceptives so that schoolchildren can make the ‘mature’ and ‘informed’ decision to sleep around.

And behind this lies the notion that the only bad consequence is a live baby at the end of the process. The actual outcome is behaviour which causes considerable emotional harm, a plethora of sometimes permanently damaging sexually transmitted diseases -- and imnnumerable unwanted babies, both live and aborted.

The parents in this particular case are understandably incandescent and distraught. As the mother says, she was expected to be by her daughter’s side when she had her tonsils out. Yet when it came to an abortion, with its momentous physical and emotional consequences, she and the girl’s father were deliberately kept in the dark.

They would have supported their daughter if she had decided to have the baby. But instead, says her mother, she herself was made to feel ‘so useless’ as a parent. And indeed, one of the worst aspects of this whole business is the undermining of parental responsibility.

Although they remain legally responsible for their children’s welfare, parents are seeing their rights taken away and given to their children instead. This deliberately severs a child from her parents by telling her, in effect, that she is now grown-up enough to do without them.

Behind all this lies the belief that officialdom knows better than parents how to deal with their children. Instead of parents providing guidance and support, that role is to be performed instead by agents of the state.

In so doing, they replace parental values by their own belief system. That presents children as quasi-adults and sex as a recreational sport, which has nothing to do with marriage and whose promiscuous indulgence carries no consequences that we should worry about except unwanted or teenage pregnancy.

Our society seems to be progressively stripping out the human — ties of family and parents, trust and responsibility, authority and dependence — and replacing it by an impersonal bureaucracy that seeks to regulate, licence and ultimately control human relationships and what they produce.

Throughout history, the surest defence against state control of our personal lives has been the family unit. Slice by salami slice, this is being dismembered. But don’t worry — confidentiality is being maintained.

Daily Mail, February 9 2004

On and on it goes. Tony Blair’s difficulties over Iraq just won’t die down. Yesterday, the former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix claimed Britain and the US had ‘exaggerated the importance’ of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, while Robin Cook managed to attack both the Prime Minister and the intelligence services for being misleading.

By now, most people are glassy-eyed at all this claim and counter-claim about who said what to whom. Who but a few anoraks and obsessives is following all this in detail?

Nevertheless, great damage has been done to the Prime Minister. Half the country thinks he misled the public and should step down. Despite desperately trying to row back to domestic issues, HMS Blair is badly holed and listing, with the Tory leader, Michael Howard, snapping his jaws as he scents political blood in the water.

What is so striking is the extraordinarily poor fist the government is making of defending itself. The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, sounded particularly feeble on radio last week. Mr Blair makes statement after statement and yet the impression merely mounts of incompetence, amateurishness and disarray.

For many people, the reason is clear. They think the Prime Minister misled the country about the threat posed by Saddam and the urgency of dealing with him.

Personally, I do not share that opinion. I thought the war was justified, and I also believe that Mr Blair has told the truth throughout. I think that is borne out by looking carefully at what has actually been said —which has been misinterpreted by many observers, and in my view, badly misrepresented by the BBC — and by trying to apply to it some logic and common sense.

But opponents of the war keep moving the goalposts. Mr Cook’s latest claims — that the Prime Minister ignored the intelligence agencies’ words of caution and that these same agencies kept him in the dark — illustrate how even self-cancelling arguments are being used in the attempt to make the facts fit the preconceived conclusion that the war was wrong.

So why has Mr Blair been so hamstrung? The answer has far wider ramifications than Iraq, and the fact that most people have neither the time nor energy to read up the facts behind the headlines. The Prime Minister’s acute difficulty goes to the heart of his manner of government, and cruelly lays bare its most fundamental failing.

This is nothing less than an absence of leadership. Leadership means sticking to decisions because they are right, even if public opinion does not agree. But Mr Blair is desperate for people to approve of what he is doing. So he won’t do anything that might upset the public. That’s why, where problems are difficult and opinion is divided — health, education, family, drugs — he ducks the hard decisions and takes refuge instead in fudge.

Such insecurity means he has to get people to agree. His problem, however, was that the British public did not agree with the case for war against Iraq. Despite the impression which is now given, that case was not made on the basis of intelligence, let alone the wretched 45-minute claim. It was made — as the government repeatedly said — because Saddam was in breach of UN resolutions requiring him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programme.

But because the public disagreed, Mr Blair made a fatal error. He tried to persuade people by using intelligence assessments. But intelligence should never be used as part of political debate. Using it in this way endangers a process that above all else depends for its effectiveness on secrecy. It compromises its independence and reputation by bringing it dangerously close to political influence.

Above all, intelligence assessments require informed judgment. But the public cannot form such a judgment. We can glimpse only fragments of the covert picture; and since the world of intelligence is essentially one of duplicity, we have no way of knowing who or what to believe.

The outcome has been a lethal open season of claim and counter-claim, in which partial, out of context or otherwise misleadingly presented gobbets of intelligence have been laid before a bemused public which is in no position to judge them.

We elect a parliament and a government to make such judgments on our behalf. A Prime Minister displaying proper qualities of leadership would have said the buck stops with me and the intelligence stays secret. Instead, Mr Blair invited the public to second-guess his own judgment — which, aided by anti-war and anti-Blair activists and every self-styled intelligence ‘expert’ in the media, it has promptly and disastrously done.

This is hardly surprising, given the way Mr Blair’s government has squandered public trust in so many other areas. The underlying cause is that this is a government of tyros, with no hinterland of political maturity or experience which might have brought its various fantasies of power down to earth.

In the past, our disinterested civil service played that role and kept the show on the road. But with the unforgiveable connivance of the former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler — who now happens to be chairing the intelligence inquiry —the Prime Minister marginalised and politicised the civil service, and handed over the administration of government instead to immature, inexperienced or ideological political courtiers.

The result has been chaos in many areas of government. And the greater the chaos, the more it had to be concealed. That was why spin and its supreme practitioner Alistair Campbell were so vital. Eventually, this was rumbled and Mr Campbell had to go. But now he has gone, we can see from the ensuing disarray what happens when a master illusionist leaves the stage.

If the Iraq war hadn’t happened, this would merely provoke contempt and disdain. But for those of us who thought that war was a just and necessary strike in the defence of the civilised world against terror, what is happening now has taken on the dimensions of tragedy.

For on this occasion, it is my view that Blair has actually told the truth. He acted on what he was told when he first came to office: that Saddam was an unconscionable threat that had to be dealt with, and that the nexus between terrorism and WMD was the most deadly danger the whole world faced.

But he is not believed; and the reason lies ultimately in his own weakness, insecurity and poor judgment, and the flawed government he has formed in that image.

Mr Blair himself, though, whether he is brought down or struggles on, is not the main casualty here. The really lethal damage has been done to the alliance against terror and the ability of this country to defend itself. For if neither politicians nor secret intelligence are now to be believed, there will be no agreement to fight any future battles that still lie ahead.

This is, of course, what the appeaseniks have been working towards. It is also why Michael Howard’s political opportunism is so lamentably ill-judged. The terrorists of the Islamic jihad, whose contempt for western decadence lies at the core of their murderous project, must be laughing fit to bust.

Daily Mail, 7 February 2004

We journalists are a cynical lot. So the attempt by the disgraced former MP Jonathan Aitken to stand for Parliament once again in his old constituency of Thanet South provoked predictable belly-laughs and raised eyebrows among the press.

The Tory leader Michael Howard blocked his return, showing he has no intention of risking the Tory party’s fragile recovery from the toxic stain of sleaze of which Mr Aitken’s fall from grace became such a potent symbol. Now Mr Aitken has thrown in the towel and abandoned his attempt.

The former defence minister and Chief Secretary to the Treasury in John Major’s government served nine months in prison for perjury. Having previously resigned his ministerial post to fight charges of accepting Arab hospitality against all the rules, he then lied about having accepted it in a libel case he brought against the Guardian newspaper.

Since he had vowed to fight ‘journalistic lies’ with his ‘sword of truth’, his conviction turned him into an icon of political mendacity. Now, however, at the age of 61 and seven years after his offence was committed, he thought that society should accept he was a reformed character.

To prove it, he has become a devout professional Christian. Having spent two years studying theology following his release from jail, he served as director of four Christian charities and wrote a book, Psalms for People Under Pressure, in which he observed: ‘many people remain, throughout their lives, in a state of denial about their own sinfulness’.

Pull the other one, say the professional cynics, it’s got bells on. Christian penitence? Come off it. What a convenient conversion to piety. Once a con- man, always a con-man. And in any event, how could he have returned to the Commons and the public life he had so polluted?

That seems far too harsh. Just as everyone has capacity for good and evil, so everyone is capable in principle of redeeming themselves through remorse, contrition or a desire to make amends.

In political life, the outstanding example of redemption is John Profumo. Forty years ago, he resigned in disgrace after lying to Parliament over his affair with Christine Keeler. Ever since, he has devoted his life to good works in London’s East End.

Profumo redeemed himself through a life of service to others and patent humility. From this, we infer that he is truly sorry for the wrong he committed. As a result, he is now held in infinitely higher esteem than members of the Parliament from which he was exiled in such disgrace.

Compare and contrast such selfless behaviour with the antics of the aristocrat Lord Brocket, who was jailed for five years after his £4.5 million fraud over the faked theft of over-insured antique Ferraris. Lord Brocket’s demonstration of post-sentence humility and remorse has been to cavort about in the jungle on the demeaning and voyeuristic TV show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! where grappling with the combined perils of Jordan and assorted creepy-crawlies is likely to renew interest from publishers in his autobiography.

Or take Lord Archer, who was jailed for four years for perjury, two of which he served. Unlike Mr Aitken, Lord Archer was not a model prisoner — he cocked a snook at the system by attending a lunch party thrown by a political friend, for which breach of the rules he was moved to a more secure prison. Since his release he has kept a relatively low profile and raised money for good causes, but suspicions persist that he is merely preparing for yet another self-serving come-back. Last Christmas, he resumed his famous champagne and shepherd’s pie parties, and in the publicity flier for his London marathon entry he names four famous people who are backing him.

Cynicism over Mr Aitken’s motives has been fuelled by the very fact that he wants to return to public life. Mr Profumo, after all, turned his back on it for ever for a life of duty. Of course, the life of an MP involves duty and public service too —but it also brings with it power, influence and status. In other words, Mr Aitken’s application might have been a case of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Back In There!

The speed of his desire to return also provoked unease. Time is not only a great healer but a great redeemer. The more time that passes after a wrong has been done surely makes us more likely to give the miscreant the benefit of the doubt that he is genuinely sorry for what he once did and has tried to make amends.

This is why people in public life, who may be justly pilloried for behaviour in their private lives which calls their current judgment into question, should not be denounced for misdemeanours committed decades previously.

Mr Profumo proved by his long years of dedicated service that he had learned his lesson. Mr Aitken’s offence, by contrast, is still too fresh in the memory.

Nevertheless, what he says now does seem to reveal a true long night of the soul. In his book, he describes how after ‘defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and now jail’ he embarked on a spiritual journey to forge a ‘right relationship with God’ — the ‘amazing’ results of the ‘discipline of prayer’ to which he turned for comfort on his first night in prison.

What seems really peruasive, however, is the apparent honesty with which he faces up to his faults, not only insisting that he has no-one but himself to blame but avoiding any glib assertions that he has now learnt all the lessons that he needed to learn.

On the contrary, he displays a disarming willingness to face up to the most difficult questions. Thus he recognises a ‘real danger that he may simply have replaced political pride with spiritual pride’. He still admits to ‘all kinds of minor failures and dishonesties of character - and maybe some major ones’. And he says he would even apologise to the Guardian journalist he accused before his trial of ‘the cancer of bent and twisted journalism’.

The result of that was a warm leader in the Guardian yesterday hailing his ‘remorse, regret, contrition and repentance’. The paper that used Mr Aitken to pin the devastating label of sleaze on the last Tory administration was urging his return to the parliamentary fold. No wonder Mr Howard declined the proposal.

And maybe Mr Aitken’s conversion is indeed merely a ruse to replace sin by spin. After all, he is still neither saint nor ascetic; he honeymooned with his second wife in the Bahamas. And in addition to his own perjury, this is a man who had tried to get his own daughter to commit perjury by giving him a false alibi — an act he now says was his ‘most shameful mistake’.

But true conversions in prison do happen. Anyone who has seen the remarkable Innerchange programme in American jails, a tough-minded regime which turns hard-faced, irreligious criminals into law abiding, professing Christians, can testify to the yearning among the most unlikely people to change their lives for the better from within.

Moreover, the initiative to apply for his old seat was taken not by Mr Aitken but by the local party. Two hundred activists signed a petition asking Conservative Central Office to allow him to enter the selection process. They said they had faith in him not just because he had been a good MP but because they had forgiven him, since he had done his punishment and paid his debt to society.

Punishment is indeed an important element of redemption. Saying sorry isn’t enough. Retribution is vital to our innate sense of fairness. If an offender does not pay his dues, society cannot forgive him and welcome him back. This is why it sticks in the craw that Martin McGuinness and other former IRA members are now running Northern Ireland’s administration, or that Irish terrorists were let out of jail before serving their sentence.

There is similar unease over the proposal by the governor of Holloway prison that Maxine Carr should be released even earlier than the automatic half-sentence remission to which she is entitled.

Given that these early release rules apply to all prisoners, it would surely be invidious to treat her differently. After all, despite popular feeling she was convicted only of the relatively minor offence of perverting the course of justice after the Soham murders.

Nevertheless, giving any prisoner automatic early release simply because the jails are too full makes a mockery of justice and cuts short the process of redemption that one hopes accompanies a sentence that is commensurate with the crime.

Of course, punishment does not necessarily produce redemption. Some criminals never admit to their crimes, let alone repent of them. Redemption has to be earned, and the more serious the crime, the steeper the barrier to redemption. The late Lord Longford thought the Moors murderer Myra Hindley was truly penitent and so should have been released. Apart from scepticism that she was leading the good lord up the garden path, people could not accept this because they thought the dues she had to pay to society were just too heavy.

Sometimes, the most that can be hoped for is that an offender makes a start on that journey. But some crimes are so monstrous that redemption is difficult to countenance. It’s hard to imagine Hitler or Stalin, had they been jailed for crimes against humanity, feeling remorse for their appalling deeds.

Nevertheless, we all want to see evidence of human goodness because it tells us that we can all redeem ourselves if we do wrong. The prospect of redemption gives us hope for the human condition. But it has to be earned.

Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz to write some of the most inspirational books about hope in the face of unspeakable evil, said he would not forgive any of the perpetrators of the Holocaust unless they showed ‘with deeds, not words’ that they were aware of the crimes that had been committed. In that event, ‘an enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy’.

Mr Aitken has said that in his previous life, he would have been cynical about someone like himself. Despite Mr Howard’s ban, it is hard not to contrast Mr Aitken’s humility with the collection of chancers, liars, hypocrites and self-serving egotists already gracing the Parliamentary benches. If Mr Aitken had returned, maybe his remorse would have been catching.

Daily Mail, 2 February 2004

The BBC row rages on with increasing bitterness. Any idea that the Hutton report would draw a line under the Gilligan affair has proved wide of the mark. As the acting Director-General Mark Byford desperately tries to put the BBC’s shattered pieces back together again, statements by his ousted predecessor Greg Dyke and Andrew Gilligan have further inflamed the civil war being waged inside and outside the corporation.

Underwhelmed by Lord Hutton’s findings, the public says it still trusts the BBC more than it does the government. Shaken by this turn of events, ministers have sharply abandoned the strutting triumphalism of last week and are now pledging, hand on heart, their commitment to the BBC’s independence.

It is the BBC itself which has now placed that independence in jeopardy. By making such a cardinal error over the Gilligan broadcast and then grievously compounding it by failing properly to investigate the complaint, it gave unprecedented ammunition to its enemies.

As a result, those who want to see it privatised are greedily circling. Others want it brought under the control of Ofcom, which would subject it to politicised control and a remit which has no interest in acknowledging the BBC’s fundamental values but would sacrifice them instead on the altar of competition.

The BBC at present resembles a driver who has been in a catastrophic car smash caused by his reckless driving. Our response should be to restore it to health, posting guards against any gangsters who might try to finish it off as it lies on life-support in its hospital bed, but at same time taking steps to ensure that it doesn’t behave so destructively in future.

It deserves protection because its fundamental ethic is the jewel in the crown of British popular culture. The BBC was founded to stand above the fray of commercial pressure and embody instead unchanging values of truth, fairness and excellence. Its commitment to impartiality has given its journalism a kitemark of trust across the world. Because these are universal values, they have helped unite the nation. The BBC is loved because it is one of the few remaining institutions which make people feel part of a national story of which they can be proud.

This is a heroic tradition, to which both BBC executives and politicians pay routine lip-service. But in fact both of these warring sides have shown that even now they still don’t properly understand what these ideals entail, and instead have helped to betray them.

All governments attack the BBC. Under Mrs Thatcher and John Major, the Conservatives subjected it to pressure that was then thought unprecedented. Alastair Campbell merely brought his own particular brand of relentless bullying to the task.

What happened over the Gilligan story was a classic example of the boy who kept crying wolf. When the government finally did have a valid grievance, the BBC dismissed it as yet another ill-founded assault. If Mr Campbell had not devalued his own currency of complaint, the BBC might have paid more attention.

This kind of government pressure on the BBC is totally out of order. It is not the same as an individual making a complaint. Given the relationship with the government through the licence fee, it amounts to crude intimidation.

So the BBC is absolutely right to stand up for its independence. But because it has been embattled for so many years against such government pressure, it sees itself as a perennial victim, wrapped in a mantle of self-righteousness and incapable of error. It has forgotten it has other principles to uphold. It has forgotten its obligation to the truth.

This problem is infinitely more serious and more pervasive than the Gilligan affair. There is a rot running right through the corporation. And I say this as a passionate defender of public service broadcasting, and an occasional contributor to the BBC’s programmes.

Across a wide range of issues, its journalism has long departed from its founding ethic of impartiality and objectivity. With a few honourable exceptions, it views the world through a prism of left-wing thinking: against America, against the nation state and against western moral values.

This bias reveals itself on subjects as diverse as the war on terror, Europe, Israel, Ireland, the Conservative party, GM food, cannabis, big business, family values, feminism and religion. And one reason why Andrew Gilligan’s report never got the scrutiny it warranted was because it corresponded to the BBC’s own prejudiced view of the Iraq issue — which had got so bad during the war that the crew of the Ark Royal stopped watching the BBC in protest.

The combination of this steady drip-feed of bias with the public’s implicit trust in the BBC’s impartiality has left many people disastrously ill-informed on many issues —a failing which by definition they do not realise.

Certainly, the BBC broadcasts token voices of dissent. But the starting point is that these depart from an accepted norm. The bias infects everything from the choice of subject to the selection of interviewees and the implicit premise behind the questions asked.

Of course, it is vital that BBC interviewers should give no quarter; there must be no return to the supine approach of a long-departed deferential age. But all too often, such robust interviewing is directed only at one side of the argument, while the other is handled with kid gloves.

The BBC has a duty to occupy the dispassionate centre ground. The problem, however, is that it has shifted that centre ground sharply to the left. But because it thinks that still is the centre, it cannot grasp that its own ‘impartial’ standpoint is actually deeply partisan. This is a terrifyingly closed thought system which repels all objections.

Greg Dyke is being presented as a martyr to the BBC’s independence. But in implying that journalists might get away with false statements if they attribute them to somebody else, he has shown as poor a grasp of journalistic ethics as did the staff who protested at his departure.

Moreover, under his tenure the BBC further dumbed down as he ruthlessly played the ratings game. The haemorrhage of creative talent which resulted from the managerial stranglehold of his predecessor, Lord Birt, has not stopped. The result has been the sad decline of what was once the greatest generator of artistic creativity in the broadcast world.

The BBC needs to be saved from itself and restored to its founding ethos of public service. The solution is not to abandon the licence fee; commercial outfits such as Channel Four news can be even less objective.

Its deep-seated cultural bias can only be addressed by appointing a chairman and director-general who are committed to upholding disinterested standards of objectivity and excellence.

At the same time, the government has to restore the ‘hands-off’ principle to the BBC. Across the board, British institutions —the universities, the police, the health service — have been crippled by the double whammy of a loss of professionalism and government interference.

The BBC is a unique British institution which once served as a beacon to the nation. Lord Hutton’s watershed report is an opportunity, not to defend the indefensible but to restore it to its proper calling.

Sunday Telegraph, 1 February 2004

Hardly had Lord Hutton finished summarising his report than the goalposts were promptly moved. Among those who were apoplectic that he had exonerated the government and eviscerated the BBC, the cry arose that he hadn’t addressed the ‘wider’ issue. This was that the Iraq war was based on false intelligence that Saddam posed a threat from his weapons of mass destruction.

This myth has been reinforced by widespread media reports that Dr David Kay, who recently resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, has said no WMD actually existed in Iraq, thus proving that Saddam was no threat and we were led up the garden path to war.

If you look, however, at what Dr Kay actually said this week to the Senate Armed Services committee and in media interviews, a very different picture emerges. Certainly, he claimed there had been a major failure of intelligence which had misrepresented the situation. But he was specifically referring to large weapons stockpiles which he now thought weren’t there after all, and to Iraq’s large-scale weapons programme which he said had been wound down after 1991.

Intelligence agencies, he said, had failed to grasp that in the corruption and chaos of the Iraqi regime, Saddam himself was being told lies about his weapons programmes, whose large-scale production had stalled under the pressure of UN inspections. Such a serious intelligence failure is clearly a huge political embarrassment for both President Bush and Tony Blair, prompting the US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to acknowledge mistakes had been made and President Bush to say he wants to ‘know the facts’.

But Dr Kay was not saying Saddam was therefore no threat on the WMD front. On the contrary, not only did he say it was possible that smaller WMD stockpiles remained hidden in Iraq, but that ‘right up to the end’ the Iraqis were trying to produce the deadly poison ricin. ‘They were mostly researching better methods for weaponisation’, he said.

Not only that, Saddam had re-started a rudimentary nuclear programme. And he had also maintained an active ballistic missile programme that was receiving significant foreign assistance until the start of the war.

Such revelations corresponded with Dr Kay’s interim report last autumn, which detailed ‘dozens of WMD-related programme activities’ which had been successfully concealed from Dr Hans Blix’s UN inspectors. These included a clandestine network of laboratories containing equipment suitable for chemical and biological weapons research, and new research on the biological agents Brucella and Congo Crimean Haemorrhagic Fever. And a scientist who had hidden a phial of live botulinum in his house had identified ‘a large cache of agents that he was asked but refused to conceal’ and for which the ISG was now searching.

This all suggested, said Dr Kay, that after 1996 Saddam had focused on ‘smaller covert capabilities that could be activated quickly’ to produce biological weapons agents. And last week, he told this paper that he had discovered from interrogating Iraqi scientists that before the war Saddam had hidden WMD programme components in Syria.

So according to Dr Kay, Saddam had posed a very live threat indeed from WMD. Yet this evidence has been almost totally disregarded, as an almost unanimous chorus of journalists has asserted that Dr Kay said Iraq had no WMD.

His evidence has been brushed aside because of the assiduously promulgated myth that we only went to war because we were told Iraq had WMD that were ready to use.

But this is not so. We went to war because Saddam was grossly in breach of UN resolutions instructing him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programme. True, messrs Bush and Blair asserted he had WMD stockpiles which would be found. But this wasn’t the reason for war. Such claims were only made to bolster the case to a public that seemed incapable of grasping that the reason for war was not the presence of WMD but the absence of evidence that it had been removed.

Failure to make this case successfully led Bush and Blair to claim — according to Dr Kay, in good faith but on the basis of flawed intelligence — that since these stockpiles were unaccounted for they were probably still there. That claim has now spectacularly backfired, since the failure to discover any WMD has merely led people to conclude this proves the war was indeed ill-founded.

But this is not so. For the fact that Saddam was actively engaged in WMD programmes, large-scale or not, shows he was indeed in breach of the UN resolutions, and was indeed the threat he had been assumed to be from his record, temperament, regional ambitions and links to terrorism. How much ricin, after all, do you need to kill thousands of people? To listen to anti-war critics, it would seem that modest amounts of biological agent somehow don’t count as WMD, or a re-started nuclear programme is no threat because it is only rudimentary.

To Dr Kay, the war was absolutely necessary because Saddam had become ‘even more dangerous’ than had been realised, and ‘it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat.’

Yet virtually no-one has reported these remarks. Instead, Dr Kay is being quoted out of context to sustain the charge by the anti-war brigade of government duplicity.

They have implied he resigned because he realised no WMD ever existed. But actually, he threw down his bat and stormed off the pitch in fury at the Bush administration for failing to give the ISG the money it needed to search for WMD, and for its incompetence in not preventing crucial evidence being destroyed by Iraqi looters.

Those who know him well say he is so angry that he has been determined to embarrass the administration as much as possible. The result is that he has enabled the British media and anti-war politicians to take his finding that Saddam posed a different sort of threat even deadlier than had been thought, and turn it instead into the false claim that he said no threat had existed at all.

History is constantly being rewritten over Iraq by people who were against the war from the start and have presented every development in the most malevolent light to prove that Bush and Blair took us to war on a lie. Logic, rationality and judgment have been suspended; and David Kay’s testimony is but the latest casualty.