Daily Mail, 28 February 2005

Half a century ago, in the wake of the great struggles against fascism and communism, the view took hold that the application of law would settle all the world’s problems and conflicts. Codifying principles to which all civilised people could sign up would, it was thought, eradicate hatred, impose global order and remove any occasion for war.

This has now developed into an industry which threatens to usurp the democratic process itself. For instead of being governed by the rule of law, we increasingly have rule by lawyers.

This helps explain why the Government’s senior legal figures currently find themselves in the eye of so many simultaneous storms. They are performing a role for which they are not equipped but which has given rise to wholly unrealistic expectations.

Instead of conveying a nation’s values, law has increasingly become a moral end in itself. Take, for example, the culture of human rights which gives precedence over national laws to a set of values decided by lawyers; or the development of supra-national legal institutions such as the UN’s International Court of Justice.

Or look at the way our own common law is being steadily eroded by the encroachment of European law, on the basis that these distinctions no longer matter because we are all now bound by universal legal principles which brook no opposition.

All these developments are based on the elevation of law to a doctrine of legal infallibility. The law itself has become a kind of secular religion, with lawyers the new priesthood. As a result, governments and other public authorities now look to lawyers to bestow or withhold their blessing.

But rule by lawyers is based on assumptions as flawed as they are dangerous. International law, for example, is of dubious authority since it is not rooted in any democratic jurisdiction. It is merely an expression of prevalent ideological views which are subject to disagreement.

Laws passed by national parliaments also depend on interpretation by the courts. In other words, far from providing certainty, law is a battleground of deeply contestable viewpoints where victory depends on highly subjective judgments. And yet people expect lawyers to make black and white divisions between right and wrong.

The two controversies currently engulfing the government’s legal figures offer a perfect illustration of this dangerous misunderstanding. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer is being blamed for getting the law wrong in saying that it allows the Prince of Wales to have a civil marriage.

This has revolved around an arcane argument over whether the stipulation in the 1836 Marriage Act, that members of the Royal Family could not have a civil marriage, also applied to the 1949 Marriage Act, which didn’t mention it. There are persuasive opinions on both sides — so much so that, frankly, one might as well toss a coin to arrive at an answer. The point is that it would take a court to decide — and any court would be likely to rule in favour of the wedding in Windsor Guildhall, because judges are predisposed to make the law work for everyone.

Furthermore, the advice by Lord Falconer contains what is for the courts the clincher of the Human Rights Act, which entitles everyone to the right to marry. How very convenient, one might think, to have a law which defuses such a constitutionally explosive situation and give Prince Charles what he wants. But that’s because supremely malleable human rights doctrine has been afforded this deeply suspect role of an overriding moral and legal authority.

The second great controversy is over the opinion about the legality of the Iraq war delivered to the Prime Minister by the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith. It was damagingly claimed that his advice was actually written for him by two Prime Ministerial cronies, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan; and that whereas the Attorney had originally told Mr Blair he feared the war would be illegal, he was pressured to change his mind and to say that a second UN resolution would not be necessary after all.

These claims have arisen from a book by Professor Philippe Sands, a barrister in the human rights set Matrix Chambers. But they are based on two fundamental errors. Professor Sands was using a transcript of Lord Goldsmith’s evidence to the Butler inquiry, in which he was reported as saying that ‘they’ — referring to Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan — had set out his view in a Parliamentary answer.

But after the inquiry secretary checked the audio evidence, it was discovered that Lord Goldsmith had actually said ‘I set out my view’, a fact confirmed by Lord Butler who has now corrected the record. So the lethal claim that Lord Goldsmith had not written his own advice — and implicitly, that he lied when he denied this last week — was simply untrue.

The second error was the interpretation of Lord Goldsmith’s earlier and unpublished advice to Mr Blair. It was claimed that he expressed doubts in this about the legality of the war — doubts which disappeared from his Parliamentary answer two weeks later. But this is surely to misread the evidence.

For in Professor Sands’s account of that earlier opinion, he reports Lord Goldsmith telling Mr Blair that no further UN resolution was needed for the war to be lawful, and that it was sufficient for the Prime Minister — not the Security Council — to decide whether Saddam was in breach of the UN resolutions.

However, the Attorney went on, since a court of law might not agree with this view it would be safer to have a second resolution. In other words, Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair that in his opinion the war was legal; but since other lawyers disagreed, there might be a successful legal challenge.

That is a completely different matter from claiming that Lord Goldsmith said he thought the war might be illegal. He did not. He said merely that others thought so. This was undoubtedly true. There was, and remains, huge controversy among lawyers over the legality of the war.

In such a climate, the International Court of Justice might indeed have ruled it illegal. But who would place any faith in the moral authority of such a politicised court — except those lawyers for whom international law has the sanctity of an unchallengeable faith?

The argument that the war was legal — which rests on the interconnection of three sets of UN resolutions — is a cogent one. To me, Professor Sands’s attempt to refute it is weak and unpersuasive. And that is surely because what seems to drive him is the view that any action which does not enjoy the support of the international community is illegitimate. But the idea that no Prime Minister can take action he considers necessary to defend his country unless international lawyers give him permission is preposterous.

Such legal supremacism is profoundly anti-democratic and is one of the curses of our age. The great irony, however, is that it is government lawyers such as Lords Falconer and Goldsmith who are among the most enthusiastic proponents of that very legal supremacism, on whose indefensible expectations they have now been so uncomfortably and unfairly skewered.

Daily Mail, 21 February 2005

The full extent of the disaster caused by the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy is only now becoming apparent. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that more than 1000 girls aged 14 had abortions last year.

In addition, 148 abortions were performed on girls aged between 11 and 13. About 3,500 girls aged under 16 have pregnancies terminated every year. And among the youngest age group, the number of abortions jumped last year by nine per cent.

Small wonder that until a week ago the Government was refusing to disclose these statistics on the spurious grounds that they were so small that disclosure risked identifying individual cases. Now we can see the real reason — that these horrifying figures expose the utter bankruptcy of government policy.

Not only did Britain’s abortion rate reach a record level in 2003, but the highest increase occurred among teenagers, the most vulnerable of all. The toll of damaged lives and compromised emotional and physical health among young people is hard to over-estimate.

Yet those who are responsible still don’t get it. The chief executive of the Pregnancy Advisory Service, Ann Furedi, has said that ‘pregnant teenage girls face a real problem and abortion can be the solution’.

But abortion is not a ‘solution’ for teenage pregnancy. It is an admission of failure. For a child to conceive and bear a child is a tragedy. For a child to conceive and then have her child destroyed is no less of a tragedy.

The essence of the problem is not girls being trapped in early motherhood, grave though that it is. It is that teenage girls — including a shocking number under the age of legal consent -- are becoming pregnant in the first place.

What this reveals once again is the utter failure of the government’s strategy which aimed to halve pregnancies among 15-17 year olds in England by 2010. Right from the start, it was clear that this policy was fundamentally flawed.

Behaviour is influenced above all by the signals and incentives that society provides. The most powerful signal is the law, which through the age of consent was designed to protect under-age girls. Yet instead of enforcing this law, the government chose to send a different message — that there was nothing wrong with under-age or teenage sex as long as suitable precautions were taken.

Sex education thus became a synonym for sex promotion. Children were given advice more appropriate for sexually promiscuous adults. Worst of all, parental responsibility was undermined by children being offered abortions without their parents even knowing, let alone giving their consent.

The result has been as appalling as it has been inevitable: an inexorable rise not just in the rate of teenage pregnancy but also abortions and sexually transmitted diseases among the very young.

This has been nothing less than a complete abdication of responsibility by the adult world, which has taken the view that children and teenagers are quasi-adults able to make responsible choices about behaviour. All they need, according to this thinking, is information to enable them to select from a menu of lifestyle choices.

But children and teenagers are not adults. They are immature, and the choices they make can therefore be catastrophic. What they actually need is firm boundaries that tell them that certain behaviour is wrong and that it inevitably carries unpleasant consequences for them. But instead, when it comes to alcohol, drugs and sex, the adult world has ripped up those boundaries and effectively told children to go ahead and indulge provided they are careful — and then expresses mortification when they are not.

Some influential people actively want to promote a breakdown in conventional norms of behaviour. Many others in official circles believe — wrongly — that government is helpless to resist the great cultural movement towards a behavioural free-for-all.

Until very recently Conservative politicians — many of whom certainly share this latter view — were additionally paralysed by terror of any repetition of the ‘back to basics’ fiasco under John Major’s government, in which an expressed determination to halt the social damage being done by the rise of fatherless families imploded in ridicule over the irregular private lives of Tory ministers.

The trauma inflicted upon the party was so great, and its resulting resolve to avoid the charge of hypocrisy so absolute, that until last week Tory politicians have refused to dip so much as a toe into the moral agenda. In addition, a number of Tory MPs believe that the only way back to power lies in going along with changing social mores on drugs and sexual behaviour.

As a result, the Conservative Party simply abandoned the moral battlefield. In doing so, it effectively disenfranchised millions of decent people who are aghast at the increasingly self-destructive behaviour among the young and its promotion by government agencies. Embattled parents in particular, who watch in horror as their authority is undermined leaving them powerless to insulate their children against the lure of alcohol, drugs and premature sexual activity, are desperate for someone to speak up for them.

The infuriating thing is that if political leadership adopts a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to social disorder, it can stop this kind of cultural slide. Experience in America has shown that shrewdly presented messages promoting sexual abstinence have helped defy cultural gravity and brought down the rate of teenage pregnancy.

Now, at long last, Michael Howard appears to have realised this. Last week, the Conservatives added a moral dimension to their health strategy by declaring that ‘responsible behaviour’ was the cornerstone of good health, and pledged to help young people avoid the pitfalls of permissiveness.

Their sexual health strategy, they said, would target young people with a clear message of the risks of early or unprotected sex, and would help them resist peer pressure to engage in irresponsible sex, drug abuse or binge drinking.

Of course, much depends on what this would mean in practice. And there’s still a long way to go before the Tories fully re-engage with the moral crisis that lies beneath so many of our social ills. Nevertheless, it is a courageous stab at the received unwisdom of non-judgmentalism, which has such a stranglehold over intellectual and political life and has sacrificed so many thousands of young casualties to binge-drinking, drug-taking and sexual promiscuity.

And politically, it is a shrewd way back into this crucial but treacherous territory. For however irregular the behaviour of adults may be, the one thing that unites them is concern for their children’s welfare. The growing disorder and distress among children touches a powerful general nerve. Indeed, Tony Blair’s own rise to power was fuelled in no small measure by his adroit manipulation of this most neuralgic issue.

But as binge-drinking rises, drug abuse soars and under-age abortions hit record levels, Mr Blair’s most cherished ambition to transform society for the better lies in ruins. This is an area where he is intensely vulnerable. If Mr Howard holds his nerve and makes more of this moral collapse under this most moralising of politicians, he could find that the territory shunned by the Tories as a minefield is actually paved with gold.

Daily Mail, 19 February 2005

This week, Strasbourg judges bestowed upon us long-suffering Britons yet another human right — the right to be rude and inaccurate about someone at public expense. In declaring that Helen Steel and David Morris, the so-called ‘McLibel Two’, should have been publicly funded in the successful libel case brought against them by McDonald’s, the European Court of Human Rights effectively said that taxpayers should foot the bill for individuals to malign corporations and other individuals.

Almost every day, it seems, the human rights industry throws up fresh absurdities as it trains its legal guns on what it deems to be unfair or prejudiced. Take the Samaritans. Of all of the many groups who do essential work with the needy, it is hard to think of a body that commands more unequivocal respect.

There is probably no organisation that is by definition less prejudiced against any individual. Yet astonishingly, the quango that distributes National Lottery money to good causes has turned the Samaritans down for a much needed £300,000 grant on the grounds that it has failed to do enough to meet the needs of ‘target groups’ — asylum-seekers, ethnic minorities and the disadvantaged. Instead, this quango has handed £360,000 to a group that campaigns to legalise prostitution and brothels.

You have to pinch yourself. By what warped reasoning can prostitution possibly be more of a good cause than saving people from taking their own lives? And exactly why, to these ethically lobotomised quangocrats, are the lives of some types of people apparently of more value than the lives of others?

This kind of perversity has now degenerated even further from rank injustice into the undermining of social order. Police officers around the country say they are being forced to spend valuable man-hours and resources in protecting drug traffickers, robbers and gunmen from other drug traffickers, robbers and gunmen. Time they could be spending protecting the lives and property of the innocent victims of crime is having to be spent on protecting people who should by rights be arrested and locked up instead.

This crazy state of affairs has come about, according to the police themselves, because human rights legislation has imposed upon them a clear ‘duty of care’ to protect not only the law-abiding but anyone suspected of being ‘at risk’. So we now have the farcical situation where gangsters dial 999 to report that one of their members has been abducted, and expect the police to come to the rescue.

More and more, this country appears to be run by a nightmarishly irrational and malevolent bureaucracy straight out of the imagination of Lewis Carroll or Franz Kafka. Never has a society paid more attention to human rights, the promotion of tolerance and the curbing of prejudice. So how on earth have we managed to put decency and common-sense into such sharp reverse?

The villain of the piece is that very same human rights culture which, far from expanding human freedom as it purports to do, has become instead our society’s most powerful means of suppressing it. This is because it has put legal muscle and the threat of financial or other penalties behind the ruthless enforcement of anti-discrimination law.

Yet this law is actually nothing of the kind, since it promotes the most active and reprehensible discrimination against a wide variety of blameless individuals.

That’s because the term ’discrimination’ has been hijacked by the pernicious ideology of ‘victim culture’, which attaches it to any apparent disadvantage suffered by any groups which regard themselves as powerless — principally ethnic or sexual minorities, disabled people or women.

Since they define themselves as victims of the powerful, it follows that any disadvantages in their lives can never happen by chance or because of some inherent problem in themselves. Indeed, even if they behave badly, ‘victim culture’ absolves them of any responsibility on the grounds that they are ‘oppressed’ and thus immune from blame.

The only people who can ever be guilty are those deemed to be in power — men, the middle classes, white people, the physically able. In other words, mainstream society — whose principal crime is that it is mainstream, and is therefore by definition exclusivist, elitist, racist, sexist and innately beastly to any group that considers itself to be handicapped by anything.

The principal engine for this victim culture is human rights legislation, which therefore constitutes a fundamental attack on mainstream values. This is why it actually victimises the Samaritans and the true victims of crime.

But this human rights culture is attacking not only blameless groups of people but also the bedrock values of our society. This is because its anti-discrimination provisions rest on the premise that no moral judgments can be made to draw distinctions between people.

Anti-discrimination law holds that, in the interests of equality, everyone must be treated in exactly the same way and be entitled to exactly the same outcomes in their lives, regardless of their circumstances or behaviour.

This, however, is not equality so much as ‘identicality’, in which the effects of difference are simply denied altogether. It means that whatever people do, or whatever differences there are between them, they are all entitled to claim exactly the same outcomes as their ‘rights’.

This doctrine of identicality has had a baleful effect. For a start, it has made the governance of Britain increasingly impossible — paralysing immigration and asylum policy, for example — and even exposing us to danger. Take the key judgment by the Law Lords which said foreign terrorist suspects could not be locked up without trial, the ruling which plunged the government’s anti-terror policy into crisis.

The judges compared foreign and British nationals, and decided that as the former were not being treated in the same way as the latter, this constituted unlawful discrimination. But this was not to compare like with like. Foreign nationals do not have the rights or responsibilities of British citizens.

What’s more, British nationals cannot be deported, nor once arrested are they free to move to another country, as are the foreign terror suspects who can leave at any time if another country will take them. So to say that it is discrimination to treat foreign suspects differently from Britons is grotesque — an absurd logic which was driven to its inevitable conclusion when the Home Secretary duly declared he would lock up British suspects without trial as well.

But identicality is doing yet deeper damage. For its bar against judgmentalism makes it an enemy of morality itself, which by definition discriminates between right and wrong, truth and lies. So human rights law simply tears up our moral rules, including the concept of truth itself. That is why it has allowed trans-sexuals to destroy the birth certificate which reveals the sex into which they were born, and present instead a new birth certificate solemnly declaring the lie that they were born in the opposite sex.

Since discrimination between right and wrong lies at the very core of our Judeo-Christian moral codes, identicality is the principal engine for the destruction of fundamental western values. The very factors that make these distinctive, the moral rules deriving from Biblical authority, have to be struck down instead by the secular faith of human rights.

That is why those who most lose out under anti-discrimination law tend to be Christians or other defenders of traditional beliefs. So a black church was hounded for employing a black Christian technician on the grounds that this discriminated against Asians. A Christian mother and toddler group was told by its local council to paint the boys’ and girls’ lavatories the same colour, put away its Bibles and celebrate non-Christian festivals.

Harry Hammond, an evangelical preacher, was convicted of a public order offence for displaying an ‘insulting’ sign condemning homosexuality and immorality — even though he himself had soil thrown at him and water poured over his head.

And anti-discrimination legislation has even undermined the rule of law itself, when the Court of Appeal ruled that gypsies should be allowed to breach the planning laws since they were entitled to the right to family life’ like anyone else — regardless of the fact that they were acting unlawfully in pursuing it.

The terrifying thing is that our entire intellectual and ruling class appears to have succumbed to this madness. Thus Sir Ian Blair, the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was not only reported as saying that the police were still institutionally racist because all the country’s institutions were racist, but also has ordered that the force's motto be changed, at a cost of many thousands of pounds, in part because the old one featured joined-up writing that ‘discriminated against short-sighted people’.

Job applicants throughout the public sector are required to demonstrate the purity of their commitment to anti-discrimination. Once, the British civil service was a model of competence and dispassionate professionalism. But now, it masks its dreary mediocrity and sloppiness by presenting every policy through the pious prism of ‘targets’ for its ruthless onslaught against mainstream culture. Whitehall has turned into a secularists’ Salem.

The root cause of this travesty is that our intellectual class now fanatically subscribes to a grand ideological project: the creation of a utopia where everyone will be treated identically, and all distinctions based on disapproving judgments will be stamped out — except, of course, the judgment that such judgmentalism is wrong. But in doing so, it is stamping out the individuality that makes us human.

The truth is that the human rights culture is not about rights at all, but about power — the power to shape society in the image of which its framers happen to approve. It is nothing less than a revolutionary project to dissolve the bonds of national values and replace them by a universal, secular creed enforced by judges and quangocrats.

Despite the fact that it is based on a post-war convention designed to prevent any repetition of the horrors of fascism in Europe, anti-discrimination law has turned into a weapon of oppressive social control. Because it claims to embody universal values, it brooks no opposition. But it is not universal at all, since human rights law requires judges to arbitrate between competing values.

It is rather the principal weapon of a particular ideology which seeks to ride roughshod over values rooted in the culture, laws and traditions of individual nations, and in so doing trample common-sense, decency and democracy itself underfoot in a world turned upside down.

FrontPageMagazine.com, 18 February 2005

Suddenly, all the talk in Britain is of antisemitism. For the past few years, despite the firestorm of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice which has been raging, any protests have been slapped down as paranoia. Yet in the last few days, a lot of people have been discovering the phenomenon.

The cause is Labour’s supremely politically-correct Mayor of London, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone.

At a publicly-funded party he threw to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Labour MP Chris Smith coming out as gay, Livingstone was door-stepped by a reporter for the London Evening Standard, Oliver Finegold. The Mayor responded by asking whether he had previously been a German war criminal. When Finegold protested that he was Jewish, Livingstone observed: ‘Arrr, right, well you might be Jewish but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?’

The train of thinking behind this remarkable outburst was that the Standard, which Livingstone hates because it opposes his policies, is owned by Associated Newspapers which also owns the Daily Mail (for which I happen to write). In the 1930s, the Mail supported Oswald Mosley’s fascists.

Livingstone’s seamless connection between that episode 70 years ago and a Jewish reporter from the Standard asking him a question about a gay party in 2005 struck people as both beyond comprehension and deeply objectionable.

It is bad enough to call anyone a German war criminal. Likening Finegold to a concentration camp guard when Livingstone knew he was a Jew was unforgiveable. Not only was it deeply offensive, but in calling a Jew a Nazi it trivialised the Holocaust and denied the history of Jewish suffering. And this from a Mayor whose professed ‘anti-racism’ defines his politics.

It has all been made even worse by Livingstone’s refusal to apologise. The Greater London Assembly, the Mayor’s ‘parliament’, is appalled. The promoters of London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics, which was being assessed by the International Olympic Committee this very week, are aghast. The Mayor’s own advisers have told him to apologise. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has told him to say he is sorry. The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Commission for Racial Equality have reported him to the Standards Board for England, which could ban him from office for five years.

Yet Livingstone has not merely refused to apologise but brazenly justified his attack on Finegold. Spraying ever more extravagant insults, he also rambled on about his opposition to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Many have been left wondering whether he has lost the plot altogether.

So why has the normally politically adroit Livingstone, who reinvented himself from being the leader of the ‘loony left’ in the 1980s to become the cheeky chappie who was elected Mayor of London on a wave of popular affection in 2000, not only fallen into a hole but kept digging? The immediate explanation surely lies in the Qaradawi affair and the Mayor’s embrace of Islamist extremism.

Last summer, Livingstone hosted in London Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Islamic jurist who has supported human bomb terrorism by the Palestinians and expressed poisonous and even murderous prejudice against Jews, gays and women (a set of attitudes of rather more urgent concern than views expressed in the 1930s).

Qaradawi was in London to preside over the annual meeting of the European Council for Fatwa and Research and a conference on the hijab, both at Livingstone’s invitation.

Livingstone’s warm public endorsement of Qaradawi managed to unite against himself an extraordinary coalition of protest by those who felt directly threatened by the Islamist’s views. This coalition remarkably included Jews, gays, Hindus, bi-and trans-sexuals, Sikhs, women’s rights organisations, progressively-minded Muslims and students, and produced a thick dossier charting Qaradawi’s terrifying attitudes.

Livingstone hit the roof at this, and no wonder. For among those now ranged against him -- and accusing him, no less, of condoning the most violent and virulent prejudice, the crime of crimes -- were the very constituencies of the victim-culture on which he had constructed his entire political platform. The rainbow coalition of minorities had now turned against their erstwhile patron.

Without these minorities, Livingstone has no power base. That is surely why he threw the otherwise baffling extravaganza for Chris Smith, to mend his fences with the all-important gay rights lobby.

But the Qaradawi affair had thrown up another very disturbing feature. For Livingstone produced his own utterly bizarre counter-dossier defending his right to host Qaradawi, whom he described admiringly as ‘one of the most authoritative Muslim scholars in the world.’

In this, he carefully distanced himself from Qaradawi’s views -- while managing, offensively, to equate them with those held by Catholics and Jews — while claiming that Qaradawi was neither a supporter of terrorism nor a social reactionary, but instead ‘one of the Muslim scholars who has done most to combat socially regressive interpretations of Islam on issues like women’s rights and relations with other religions.’

Let us briefly remind ourselves of some of the highlights of the ‘progressive’ Qaradawi’s oeuvre. He has said that Europe will be conquered for Islam by preaching and ideology. He supports democracy, provided it is driven by the laws of Sharia.

He approves of female circumcision. He supports the ‘light’ beating of wives by their husbands. He has lent his name to discussions about the most appropriate method for executing homosexuals. He sits on the Sharia Board of al-Taqwa Bank which waslabelled a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and its assets frozen, by the U.S. government.

He is rabidly Judeophobic. His sermons regularly call for Jews to be killed, along with ‘crusaders’ and ‘infidels’. He has spread the lie that the Torah permits Jews to spill the blood of others and to seize their land. He has insisted that all Jews are responsible for Israel’s actions, and on Al Jazeera’s website stated: ‘There is no dialogue between us except by the sword and the rifle’. Although he disapproves of al Qaeda terrorism, he supports human bomb terrorism against Israel. He said: ‘The Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation’.

Horrifying stuff. But according to Livingstone, it isn’t true. The allegations against Qaradawi, he claims, amount to nothing more than a conspiracy theory. And here his document veers into the utterly irrational. For because some of Qaradawi’s utterances have been translated by the MEMRI translation service, whose founder was once an Israeli intelligence officer, Livingstone claims that the attack on Qaradawi is a Mossad plot. So in other words, the evidence about Qaradawi is a conspiracy by Jews to produce a false conspiracy theory about Muslims. The Mayor’s document states:

‘It may seem difficult to take such material seriously, but in some respects the approach of MEMRI, echoed in the dossier, is reminiscent of the various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories – this can be seen very easily if one simply substitutes the words "Jewish" and "Judaism" for "Muslim" and "Islam" throughout the dossier’.

This is, of course, preposterous. There has never been a shred of doubt that MEMRI’s translations are accurate. And having claimed that these truthful renditions of Qaradawi's hair-raising utterances are merely evidence of a Mossad plot, to equate this with actual, classic anti-Jewish false conspiracy theories is simply mad.

More than that, in this demented attempt to equate Israelis with antisemites, or accuse all his opponents of being Mossad agents or their dupes, Livingstone’s wording has more than an echo of the paranoia pouring out of the Arab world itself.

This is surely no accident. The Mayor is said to be very close to precisely such Islamists. In particular, his court includes several cadres of a tiny, hard-left sect called Socialist Action which is thought to have links with British groups which follow the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood.

Certainly, the Mayor is being strongly supported in his current travails by Islamist extremists. The Muslim Brotherhood-influenced Muslim Association of Britain, which has links to Hamas and says Qaradawi is a moderate, strongly supports Livingstone in that controversy.

As for the furore over Oliver Finegold, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee website says Livingstone must be supported against ‘this vicious attack by our Zionist enemies… Ken Livingstone is a faithful and tireless friend of Muslims. And now the Zionists are closing in for the kill – what will Muslims do?’

This website also says that ‘Jewish Zionists’ abuse their power to influence foreign policy against Muslims, and that those Muslims who attended the Holocaust Day ceremony were ‘Uncle Toms’; and in a feature on the men around Tony Blair, it singled out only prominent Jews in public life or people with connections with Jews. Livingstone has said he is ‘virulently’ hostile to antisemitism. With supporters like MPAC and the MAB, what on earth would he look like if he admitted being hostile to Jews?

But then, Livingstone already has form in this department, with a long history of accusing Jews in both Israelis of being Nazis or British Jews of being ‘neo-fascists’ if they support Israel.

And this illustrates the far wider issue -- that the left, of which Livingstone is such a shining ornament, has got into bed with radical Islamism. Subscribing to its twisted narrative of 'oppression', the British left routinely libels the Jews of Israel as 'the new Nazis', has breathed life into Muslim Jew-hatred (which itself borrows deeply from Nazi propaganda), and prompted a terrifying increase in anti-Jewish feeling ranging from muttered social prejudice, through public accusations of the 'global Jewish conspiracy', all the way to record levels of physical attacks on Jews, synagogues and cemeteries.

Tony Blair has been embarrassed by London’s Mayor. But this is a chicken that has simply come home to roost. Livingstone was formerly kicked out of the Labour party on account of his extremism. But when it became clear that he was going to win the London Mayoral race as an independent candidate and humiliate Labour, Blair readmitted him to the party to ensure that Labour won that election.

Now Livingstone has re-emerged in his true colours. But so too has the rest of the Labour movement, with posters and articles disgracefully using anti-Jewish stereotypes in order to appease Muslim sentiment through peddling anti-Jewish prejudice.

For Blair’s government, Britain’s 280,000 Jews are now utterly disposable, to be traduced and abused to buy 1.8 million Muslim votes. That is the real embarrassment of the Livingstone affair — to have hung out the dirty washing of the left, which grovels before prejudice and terror to stay in power.

Daily Mail, February 14 2005

When at the age of 14 Luke Mitchell murdered his girlfriend Jodi Jones, he tied her up, slit her throat and then mutilated her body. After Mitchell, now 16, was convicted at Edinburgh High Court last week the judge, Lord Nimmo Smith, said it was one of the worst cases of murder he had seen for years, and he gave him the longest sentence ever passed on a youth in Scotland.

This horrific crime makes you wonder how any human being could do something so inhuman. The answer is not hard to find.

The court heard that Mitchell was influenced by satanism, the ‘shock rocker’ Marilyn Manson and by a deficiency of emotion. But the final trigger for this act of savagery was something else again. It was Mitchell’s consumption of cannabis.

As the judge said, cannabis can seriously damage the mental processes of those who habitually take it. And he made a key point when he told Mitchell that cannabis ‘may well have contributed to your being unable to make the distinction between fantasy and reality, which is essential for normal moral judgments’.

In other words, his cannabis habit meant that when he killed Jodi Jones, Mitchell was simply unable to recognise that what he was doing was truly wicked.

This devastating fact about this so-called ‘soft’ drug has been systematically concealed from the public, with increasingly disastrous consequences. Cannabis is popularly thought to be relatively harmless. In fact — quite apart from the fact that it often leads onto other drug use — it is one of the most toxic and dangerous narcotics around.

It has profound and long-lasting effects on the brain, it can cause people to become psychotic, and in certain circumstances it can promote violence and even murder.

Most crucially, it destroys the ability to make moral judgments. That is why the claim that legalising cannabis would put a stop to the crime with which it is associated is so terribly ignorant and stupid. On the contrary, more cannabis means that even more crime is likely.

Yet instead of targeting cannabis as a prime source of dangerous mental illness, social breakdown and crime the government has tacitly encouraged its use by downgrading it to the same category as steroids and anti-depressants, on the grounds that the police have better things to do than pursue a relatively harmless recreational drug.

The result of this appalling policy is that more young people are using cannabis, causing more addiction and mental illness and undoubtedly fuelling more crime and disorder.

But the case of Luke Mitchell has another highly disturbing feature. Astonishingly, he has achieved cult status among young women. Female fans have been bombarding him in his youth jail with sexually explicit letters. On the steps of the High Court, four giggling girls held up a homemade banner with his photograph and the message: ‘This boy here is a sexy boy!’

How can we have descended to the horrifying state of affairs where a clearly psychotic killer, who sadistically butchered a teenage girl, has become an icon for young women who display the most callous indifference to the slaughter of one of their own – and are even turned on by her murderer?

Much of Mitchell’s fan-mail comes from admirers of his hero Marilyn Manson, the self-proclaimed ‘antichrist superstar’ who topped the charts on a platform of sex, drugs and satanism. Manson, who has acknowledged heavy drug use, depression and self-mutilation, rubs broken glass onto his chest during concerts, spits on the audience and simulates sex acts.

In their letters to Mitchell, some of the schoolgirls refer to the violent lyrics in Manson’s work including his obsession with the slaughter in 1947 of the Hollywood actress Elizabeth Short, known as the ‘Black Dahlia’ murder.

With websites now dedicated to Mitchell, too, there are fears that a disturbed young person might try yet another copy-cat murder. Such fears are hardly groundless. In 1999, the killings in America at Columbine High School in Denver were committed by two young Manson fans.

What we are facing now among a section of our young people is a terrifying breakdown of the bonds not just of socialisation but of civilisation itself. This is the result of a number of ruinous changes in our society -- in which the growing acceptability of drugs is a significant part.

For these young people, the moral obligation to accept the difference between right and wrong has disintegrated. From all sides, they are bombarded by the message that the only thing that matters is their own pleasure and gratification.

Duty, responsibility, shame and stigma have all but evaporated. Difficulty, pain or failure are viewed as assaults on their right to be happy. What trumps everything else is the need to protect their feelings.

Instead of providing boundaries to give young people the security that is vital for emotional health, the adult world has simply abandoned them.

Family disintegration shatters their sense of themselves, schools leave them floundering in their own ignorance and immaturity, and the commercial world exploits and encourages their premature sexualisation.

It is among these rising numbers of confused, unhappy or disturbed children that the ‘Goth rock’ cult of satanism, self-harm and nihilism principally has its lethal appeal. And drugs are absolutely central, with their fatal promise of pleasure and escape which so cruelly and cynically preys on those whose lives are most emptied of meaning and purpose.

In a society where morality has become a dirty word because of the chains it places on the human appetite, the appeal of cannabis and other drugs is precisely what makes them so deadly – that they destroy through chemical action those pathways in the brain that give us our moral sense in the first place.

In short, they effectively lobotomise human conscience. So it is no accident that there is such a determined attempt to pretend that cannabis has no serious ill-effects. For its acceptability is part of the assault under way on our moral codes and the substitution of an ‘anything goes’ attitude.

This drug liberalisation lobby has got government ministers – along with some senior police officers, no less -- firmly in its clutches, propelling them down the deeply dishonest ‘harm reduction’ road.

Many of these campaigners are themselves drug users -- or the parents of drug users -- and are therefore either unwilling or simply incapable of acknowledging the acute dangers of moral collapse.

The attempt to internationalise this slide is intense and insidious. Across Europe, campaigners are steadily pushing to change the UN’s drug policy from combating drug use to permitting it under the guise of ‘harm reduction’.

Next month, for example, yet another high profile and subtly orchestrated drugs policy conference will take place at Wilton Park, an agency of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

For the third year running, this conference will feature, alongside undoubtedly worthy speakers, some of the highest profile campaigners for the legalisation of drugs in the world.

So greatly has public opinion been softened up and confused by talk of ‘harm reduction’ and the official distortion of the truth about cannabis that some participants undoubtedly haven’t a clue about the real agenda for legalisation that drives the conference organisers.

How many more Luke Mitchells will it take before our society wakes up from its lethal, drug-stupefied trance?

Daily Mail, 11 February 2005

Anyone tempted to write off Tony Blair as a lame duck politician should think again. The announcement that the Prince of Wales is finally to marry Camilla Parker Bowles has the canny fingerprints of the Prime Minister — that consummate political operator — all over it.

Consider first of all the timing. The wedding is to be held on April 8. The general election is expected to be called for May 5. Mr Blair has reportedly decided to fire the election gun in the week of the wedding and dissolve Parliament the day before, thus milking it to his advantage.

But an event of this significance would have been planned for some time, and the Prime Minister was certainly aware of it.

The timing of this marriage, so close to the election, is highly suspicious because it is so much in Mr Blair’s interests. It means that for him, much of the heat will be off because a firecracker — a major event of extraordinary constitutional significance and controversy — is being tossed (notwithstanding the leak) slap bang into the middle of the campaign.

The feebleness of his policies, along with any risk that the Tories might steal a march on him, will be overshadowed by the all-consuming interest in the forthcoming nuptials.

Just when the country’s attention should be focused upon the democratic choice before it, public debate will be dominated instead by the controversies arising from this unprecedented union, not to mention the human fascination and the passions it is likely to unleash.

In short, the country’s attention will be all but completely diverted away from the democratic process.

It means that the Prime Minister will either benefit from any ‘feel-good factor’ from the joyous event or, if the public are hostile to the match, from Prince Charles becoming a lightning rod for the country’s discontents. Instead of trying to counter the voters’ monumental disengagement from the political process, it means that Tony Blair will turn the popular desire to think about anything other than politics to his advantage.

And this is by no means the least of it. For although legions of royal advisers have been cudgelling their brains for years over how to resolve the constitutional conundrum posed by the desire of Prince Charles to marry Mrs Parker Bowles, the actual resolution of this most delicate of problems is pure, undiluted Blairism. For it is neither fish nor fowl.

Every child in the world knows that a King is married to a Queen, a Prince to a Princess. But no longer, it seems, in Blair’s Britain. The wife of the Prince of Wales is not to be the Princess of Wales, but the Duchess of Cornwall. But because she will be married to His Royal Highness, she will be Her Royal Highness — even though, as a mere duchess, she is not the same kind of Highness as he is.

When Prince Charles becomes King, his wife will not become Queen but a totally new invention, the Princess Consort. In short, Mrs Parker Bowles appears fated to go down in history as the first ever Royal Euphemism.

This is because of fears that the public won’t wear it if the woman who was famously — according to Princess Diana — the third person ‘in this marriage’ is seen to supplant her. It is also because of strong feelings within the Royal Family and in some church circles that the King, as supreme head of the Church of England, should not have as his Queen a woman he could not marry in church because she was involved in the break-up of his first marriage.

But like the whole Blairite box of tricks, the formula is an illusion. Just imagine the coronation of King Charles. Are we really to believe that the woman seated on the throne alongside him will not be his Queen? As they emerge from Westminster Abbey, will his loyal subjects really be cheering His Majesty the King and Her Royal Highness Not-the-Queen?

The sense that this is a royal con-trick is pure New Labour. Just as Blairism means never having to choose between two conflicting choices, so Prince Charles is thus able to have it all — the crown and Camilla. Thus the constitution is distorted into farce to enable the government to make it up as it goes along.

From ‘the third person in the marriage’, one might say, to the monarchy of the third way.

This is likely to have a number of baleful consequences. It will seriously weaken both the monarchy and the Church of England. Not only is Prince Charles tarnished, but the Queen herself also loses moral authority for having sanctioned this, with the public left feeling that a grubby episode has been grubbily resolved.

Instead of embodying an ideal of the nation to which all can aspire, the monarchy will finally become a lustreless reflection of a deeply flawed society in which the widespread failure of people to take responsibility for their actions, in particular when it comes to the betrayal of spouses, remains nevertheless a significant source of shame and concern.

And instead of holding the line, the Church of England has been complicit in this whole seedy saga, with the Archbishop of Canterbury giving his literal blessing to a union which is not a marriage in the eyes of the church, and which turns a blind eye to the fact that it legitimises an adulterous liaison that was part of the break-up of a marriage.

This second marriage makes it much more likely that when he becomes King, Prince Charles will no longer be the Defender of the Christian Faith and that the disestablishment of the Church will finally become a reality.

In short, it marks a seminal moment for the monarchy, the Church of England and the constitution. And in the monarchy’s weakness, the Prime Minister can now seize his moment.

The decision about this marriage had to be taken by the Queen. She would act only upon the advice given by her Prime Minister. Tony Blair has thus managed to resolve the royal dilemma, and both the Queen and Prince Charles are now in his debt.

As a result, Mr Blair effectively has them in his pocket. With the Prince of Wales so reduced in moral stature, and the role of his wife-to-be downgraded into absurdity, the way may be set not only for a drastically slimmed-down Royal firm but for the silencing of any potential Royal dissent over future Labour policies. Of these, the most crucial is Mr Blair’s overriding goal to sign Britain up to the EU constitution — and thus destroy this nation’s independence, of which the monarchy is symbol and protector.

When Princess Diana died, Tony Blair brilliantly hi-jacked the event and turned personal tragedy into political gold. He both manipulated the public mood as the grieving champion of ‘the people’s princess’, and rescued the panic-stricken Royal family from the fury of the public.

Now, it seems, he has managed to hijack the monarchy itself —leaving this ever-more diminished historical relic playing second fiddle to ‘President’ Blair. Far from the Prime Minister being finished, the monarchy of the third way could be Tony Blair’s crowning achievement.

Daily Mail, 7 February 2005

Boys, boys! The election hasn’t even been called and already things have got completely out of hand. There are more dirty tricks flying about than in a witch-doctors’ trade fair.

Smears are spinning wildly in every direction. Labour sympathisers are being urged to use the new Freedom of Information Act to dredge up ancient information to discredit Michael Howard relating to family matters, claims of political impropriety which he has denied, and his opposition to the promotion of homosexuality in schools.

And all this follows hard on the party’s hasty withdrawal of posters featuring Mr Howard and the shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin, which were widely condemned for playing on anti-Jewish stereotypes.

Nor is this all. A story planted last week claimed that John Major and Norman Lamont were trying to block the disclosure of sensitive Treasury papers about the Black Wednesday debacle, even though they had vehemently denied such an intervention saying they had merely asked to see these papers to consider their reply.

Nasty, nasty stuff, all of it. These wretched tactics are being blamed on the high priest of the dark arts himself, Alastair Campbell, who is said to have been put back on Labour’s payroll to help orchestrate its election campaign.

The Tories have every right to be outraged. And yet, in the very next breath, their joint chairman Dr Liam Fox mounted an assault on the Prime Minister’s wife for using the Blair name ‘wherever there’s cash to be made’. The Tories would doubtless defend this by saying it is true. But personalised attacks of this nature are still the politics of the street brawl. Descending into the gutter with one’s degraded opponents is hardly the approach of statesmen.

Nor is this personality grudge-fest confined to the battle between political parties. Astonishingly, a fight to the death is taking place inside the Labour government itself. The epic feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over the Chancellor’s thwarted Prime Ministerial ambition has been paralysing the government.

Now, Labour’s election strategist Alan Milburn has even attacked the new Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, for not playing to the gallery over killing burglars and has said his appointment was a mistake. Yet both Messrs Milburn and Clarke are supposed to be true Blairite believers. The words ‘ferrets’ and ‘sack’ spring irresistibly to mind.

What makes this behaviour all the more startling is that it merely reinforces the public’s dangerous disaffection with the whole political process. Voters watch in contempt as politicians outdo each other in distasteful and unseemly irrelevance, while what really matters to people — the way the country is actually being governed — careers out of control.

Look at immigration, where the government has lost control of our borders. The Tories came up with a package which actually addressed the root causes of the crisis for the first time. The government poured scorn on their proposals, but today is to propose a pale imitation as it attempts to claw back rhetorical ground while still refusing to face up to the core problem.

Or look at what is happening in the flagship areas of education and the health service. A report by Ofsted last week painted a dire picture of an education system grossly failing a very large number of pupils. Some 40 per cent of secondary school children, it said, were being denied a decent education.

As for truancy, despite the fact that the Government had spent more than £800 million on improving school attendance, the proportion of school days lost to unauthorised absences remained untouched at around 0.7 per cent.

Wherever one looks, vast amounts of our money are being thrown down the drain on services that are failing to improve. Despite the unprecedented investment in the health service, it still appears to be heading steadily towards the knacker’s yard.

Cancer specialists say a £2 billion scheme to revolutionise cancer treatment has failed, with many patients waiting even longer for treatment and much of the money wasted on bureaucracy. Psychiatrists say mental health services, apart from for the most acute emergencies, have all but collapsed.

According to James Johnson, chairman of the British Medical Association, all three key elements of the Government’s NHS reforms are in deep trouble. The scheme to give patients a choice of hospitals for non-urgent treatment is in chaos; increased use of private providers is threatening to destabilise entire hospitals; and a new system of finance in which hospitals get paid by results is badly foundering.

These core services of education and health have become, quite simply, a national scandal. Yet instead of addressing these signal failures, politicians are descending to personalised smears and abuse.

The outcome is that the public are more likely to turn off altogether and refuse to vote at all. Politicians know this perfectly well. Yet they can’t stop themselves — and this is surely because, at root, they have nothing to say.

The underlying problem giving rise to this systemic failure in the public services could not be more fundamental. It is a breakdown in the accountability of government to the governed, coupled with a simultaneous erosion of personal responsibility among the public.

Labour has no answer to this because it is a key part of the problem. Tony Blair has lost control of his party because his project has run out of steam.

Even the ‘reformist’ Blairites will not face the fact that the NHS model is broken beyond repair. Trying to reform it is like trying to reform the Red Army — which it resembles in size and ethos — without accepting that Communism was the problem. As for education, the Prime Minister seems unable to face the fact that the core Labour doctrine of egalitarianism remains, as ever, at the very root of its disastrous decline.

For their part the Tories, too, don’t know what to say. Their latest volte-face on ID cards illustrates the problem. The fact that they can switch like this from support to opposition only underlines the fact that they are not animated by a consistent set of core beliefs which ensures that everything they think hangs together and tells the same basic story.

There is such a story, if only they could see it. It is the need to defend the core values of the nation which are under attack on all fronts. In the NHS, the values under siege are fairness and duty to the vulnerable; in education, it is the concept of truth itself; in the justice system, freedom from fear and insecurity; in immigration, the preservation of national identity; in Europe, the existence of democracy and the nation state.

All these things are being sold short as the governance of the country careers into ever-increasing chaos. But the Tories’ inability to agree on what conservatism actually signifies today means that even though they are coming up with many sensible proposals, their apparent opportunism means that no-one is listening.

The almost inevitable outcome of such a flight from political courage on all sides is a dirty election — and the growing feeling that politics itself is now in some kind of self-destructive end game.

Jewish Chronicle, 4 February 2005

Last week I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate on Zionism. This was a more than usually disturbing experience. It wasn’t just that the motion, ‘Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews’, blamed Jewish self-determination for the current threat to Jewish existence. It was that this profoundly anti-Jewish motion was proposed by three Jews — and (unsuccessfully) opposed by three Jews.

Thus we had the spectacle of Jews being forced to defend themselves against other Jews arguing that anti-Jewish hatred was the Jews’ own fault —the classic argument used by those who have hated Jews down the ages.

Of course, the motion’s proposers — Professor Avi Shlaim, a ‘revisionist’ Israeli historian, Jacqueline Rose, a professor of English literature and Amira Hass, a Ha’aretz journalist based in the disputed territories —didn’t see it that way. Shlaim insisted he was not an anti-Zionist or hostile to the state of Israel, but simply opposed the ‘occupation’ and the policies of Ariel Sharon. His side thus effectively defined ‘Zionism today’ as the ‘occupation’ and Sharonism.

This was patently absurd, not least because it begged the question of what to call the many Israeli political parties viscerally opposed to Sharon, and the many Israeli patriots opposed to the ‘occupation’. Are they not Zionists, too? Zionism today is what it has always been, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and as always it takes many different forms.

Whatever the disavowals of Shlaim and his team, through their distorted, factually wrong and grossly unfair analysis they powerfully contributed to the vicious delegitimisation of Israel that is now under way, and beyond that the attempt to undermine the Jews’ moral role in history.

Jews like these are now doing real damage to the Jewish people. They don’t just provide ammunition for its enemies, but make them fireproof against charges of anti-Jewish prejudice. That’s why the media have now discovered the delightful sport of Jew-baiting — using Jews to denounce Israel and then setting them against other Jews, to watch them try to destroy each other.

Most of these Jewish tormentors are on the left, and see the world through a distorting prism that depicts all actions by the capitalist west, including self-defence, as colonialist aggression and all actions by the third world, including terrorist mass murder, as the behaviour of defenceless victims.

This warps the perspective even of those who have a firm attachment to their Jewish background. But many others in this camp have only the most superficial connection with Judaism. They tend to be highly secularised, or wholly assimilated; people with a profound ignorance of Judaism, who have rejected many if not most of its precepts and who are ashamed or embarrassed to be associated with it.

They are therefore all too prone to assimilate the prejudices of the surrounding society. Showing indifference or contempt for their people’s culture and traditions, the only time they wrap themselves in their Jewish identity is when they trash it in public.

In Israel, one can see this pathology at work on a larger scale. Israelis who obsessively distort or exaggerate Israel’s misdeeds and dismiss the existential threats that it faces seem to have internalised the truly murderous hatred that surrounds them.

There’s nothing new in this. Throughout history, some Jews have taken on the mantle of their persecutors. The originator of the blood libel in the Middle Ages, after all, was reportedly a Jewish convert. And Marx and Freud — the inspiration for many of today’s Jewish Israel-haters — turned anti-Jewish prejudice into political and psychological doctrine.

But it would be unwise to dismiss this as the pathology of a few on the fringes. For what they are saying strikes a more widespread chord. This is because they purport to speak the language of Jewish ethics, which they define around the role of the Jew as perpetual victim. Hence their eagerness to identify themselves with the suffering of the Shoah.

But what they define as unethical is the Jew as a fighter — the killer of terrorists, the destroyer of Palestinian houses and the occupier of land. The argument that such actions are taken of necessity to protect Israelis from being murdered has no resonance whatever — because the very image of the Jew who causes hardship and suffering even in self-defence is intrinsically unacceptable. And this strikes a chord because Jewish non-violence is indeed so deeply rooted in Jewish moral identity.

The implications of this are profound. Was Israel not founded, after all, on the belief that never again would Jews go passively to the slaughter but would fight to defend themselves? But if Jews believe that militarism is unethical, then defending Israel’s right to defend itself may cause a loss of Jewish self-belief and a further spur to assimilation. It is this looming Jewish identity crisis that made last week’s debate not merely a cause of revulsion but the symbol of a potentially lethal malaise.