Daily Mail, 30 March 2005

The protracted death of the American brain damage victim Terri Schiavo is a deeply horrifying and disturbing spectacle. Twelve days ago Mrs Schiavo, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for the past 15 years, had the tubes delivering food and water to her withdrawn. Her death is now imminent.

Let us not mince words about what we are witnessing here. Quite apart from the unedifying saga of the struggle between her parents and husband over whether she should live or die, or the drama over President Bush’s intervention to force the courts to reconsider her case, the stark truth is that Mrs Schiavo is being slowly starved and dehydrated to death.

It has been said that she is being ‘allowed to die’. This is nothing less than a mutilation of the language in the service of a lie. Mrs Schiavo is not being ‘allowed to die’, for the simple reason that before the feeding tubes were removed she was not dying. True, she was in a persistent vegetative state; but however appalling her situation was, she was nevertheless living and not dying. It was only when food and water were withdrawn that, like anyone else upon whom this might be inflicted, she started to die.

In other words, this is nothing less than a state-sponsored killing. Not only that, its form is barbaric. Would the state ever be allowed to starve a healthy person to death? Of course not. The very suggestion is abhorrent. Yet it has been sanctioned for someone who is desperately sick.

We are told that PVS sufferers feel nothing. But how does anyone know? No-one can possibly tell what they feel. In any event, food and water are the most fundamental needs of life itself. Withdrawing them is to remove the most elementary duty of care to a desperately vulnerable individual — with the express intention of killing her.

We in Britain, however, cannot look upon Mrs Schiavo’s enforced death as an aberration peculiar to America. On the contrary, the same thing has been happening here on a regular basis ever since Tony Bland, the Hillsborough PVS victim, had his feeding and hydration tubes removed after a seminal ruling by the Law Lords in 1993.

The judges believed this was in Mr Bland’s best interests. But it can never be in someone’s best interests to kill them. And here we come to the source of the moral confusion that has gripped Britain and now America.

For what the Law Lords never accepted was the crucial difference between, on the one hand, allowing a dying person to die without pointless medical intervention, and on the other taking action with the express purpose of ending the life of someone who is not dying.

In the Bland case, the judges crossed a moral Rubicon. Since then, other PVS victims have had their feeding tubes removed. They too have therefore been killed with the express permission of the courts.

As a result of a compromise hammered out between Government and objectors, the Mental Capacity Bill —going through its final stages in the Commons next week — appears to introduce a degree of uncertainty into the legality of this procedure by prohibiting any action ‘motivated by the desire to bring about someone’s death’. But this wording is ambiguous enough to allow our morally muddled judges to continue to uphold killing as a legitimate medical procedure — and even more horrifyingly, to extend it to people suffering from dementia, or strokes.

What’s more, because starving someone to death causes such revulsion, people inevitably will begin to say it would be more humane to give them a lethal injection instead. But then, we appear to be sliding down the wider medical ethical slopes with terrifying speed.

Just look at the comments this week by Professor Bob Edwards, who with Patrick Steptoe pioneered in-vitro fertilisation with the birth of the very first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978. Professor Edwards said he saw nothing wrong in human cloning. He was not even just talking about ‘therapeutic’ cloning, whose purpose is merely to grow cells to cure disease. He was actually supporting the idea of cloning a human baby. Once this procedure was shown to be safe, he said, there would be no significant ethical barrier.

This was an astonishing position for a responsible scientist to take. For reproductive cloning should strike us all as profoundly dehumanising, denying the uniqueness and individuality of every human being and opening up the terrifying prospect of the manipulation of human identity.

Professor Edwards’s comments surely revealed the arrogant moral blindness of a scientist who has lost touch with the essence of what makes us human — our moral sense, which derives from respect for human life. As a result, he jeered at the revulsion against cloning a baby as ‘misguided and extreme’.

Thus morality is turned completely on its head, and human existence is reduced to a bundle of cells under a microscope, to be grown, manipulated or destroyed with no more concern than grafting a species of tomato onto a vine.

This process of dehumanisation was set in train when Steptoe and Edwards first opened Pandora’s box of IVF tricks. Those who warned at the time that this would inevitably lead us into an ethical wasteland were dismissed as doom-laden Cassandras with over-fertile imaginations.

But just look at what has happened since. IVF doctors are creating babies for families without fathers. Women old enough to be grandmothers are now giving birth. With the biological link between conception and birth broken, surrogate motherhood has become a cottage industry.

‘Spare’ embryos are routinely created and destroyed as part of the IVF process. And now the Commons Science and Technology Committee — in a report which five of its ten members refused to back — has said parents can choose the sex of their IVF embryos and destroy those of the ‘wrong’ sex; and furthermore, that the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos should be allowed for medical research, as long as they are destroyed after 14 days, and the ban on reproductive cloning should be reconsidered.

As the frontiers of medical science get pushed ever forwards, our society’s attitudes seem to become more and more callous. Any residual moral squeamishness is fast disappearing. Morality has been transformed into a code for medical science to give everyone what they want — with specious reasoning to disguise gross selfishness and irresponsibility as the alleviation of suffering.

In Britain, it seems, nothing is to be allowed to stop this march of scientific brutalisation. Last month, the United Nations called for a complete ban on all forms of cloning. But Britain has said it will defy this ruling by continuing to allow ‘therapeutic’ cloning — a spurious distinction, since even this involves the creation of a very early embryo.

The first injunction of medicine’s ethical codes is ‘do no harm’. By any normal standards, taking someone’s life is to do them terminal harm.

Killing can never be a therapeutic procedure. The fact that it is now considered to be so shows how badly our society has become degraded, sliding down the slippery slope from the alleviation of suffering all the way to the destruction of respect for human life itself.

Daily Mail, 21 March 2005

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Is the unimaginable about to happen and the Conservative Party to snatch triumph from near-extinction by winning the general election?

Even to ask the question is to acknowledge the seemingly overwhelming odds against such a suggestion. For the Tories to achieve the electoral swing needed to overturn Labour’s massive majority would entail, in the eyes of many, the biggest comeback since Lazarus.

But we live in disoriented and volatile times. Polls fluctuate; and the Tories have recently been dissolving Labour’s lead like a blow-torch on an ice sculpture.

Beyond the polls, there is now a distinct feeling that something intangible has shifted in the political ether. It is not just the palpable panic in the Government’s ranks over the inadequacy of Alan Milburn’s tactics as Labour’s election mastermind, or the desperately forced shows of unity between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to conceal the profound fissure at the very heart of government.

More than that, there seems to have been a subtle but perceptible shift in the national mood. Even last week’s pork-barrel Budget left people looking askance. For they have begun to hear once again a sound that had almost disappeared from the national memory. It is the sound of the Conservatives’ voice.

For the past few weeks, the Tory leader Michael Howard has been setting the political agenda. In the past, I have not been one of Mr Howard’s biggest fans. There was too much about him that seemed nakedly opportunist. And there are still huge holes in the Tories’ thinking. On the NHS, for example, they remain too timid about restructuring a system that is fundamentally bust. And their continued refusal to address the scourge of family breakdown, the single most important cause of so many social ills, remains a serious flaw.

Nevertheless, on important issue after issue Mr Howard has recently been scoring direct hits upon the government, forcing it painfully onto the back foot. In short, at this eleventh hour he has turned the Tories back into a real opposition.

It started with asylum and immigration, when Mr Howard went for the jugular by daring to confront the fact that the root causes of this crisis lay in international treaties. By boldly proposing to tear up or alter Britain’s membership of these treaties, Mr Howard provided at last a clear alternative that left the Government badly winded.

Next, he has made highly effective use of the experiences of individuals, such as Margaret Dixon’s repeatedly cancelled shoulder operation or Maria Hutchings’s autistic child, to dramatise the conspicuous failure in the public services.

But maybe his most important development has been to start saying the unsayable. On issue after issue — bringing down the time limit for abortion, amending or abolishing human rights law, or now further attacking the way this has permitted travellers to drive a caravan and horses through the planning laws — he is at last giving voice to the silent majority who feel utterly disenfranchised by a political and legal class that seems to have taken leave of its senses.

Believing that they themselves are decent, tolerant, law-abiding people, this beleaguered majority feels that the middle ground they inhabit has been hijacked and — worse — that no-one sticks up for common-sense or justice, because to do so is to invite ridicule or vilification. It is hard to over-estimate public fury at this systematic upending of the notion of right and wrong, and the corresponding relief that a politician has summoned the courage to break the taboo against challenging it.

The key to Mr Howard’s new approach is surely his Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, the architect of Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s electoral victory. As an outsider, Mr Crosby is obviously uncorrupted by the single most crippling factor that has brought the Tories to their knees — their belief in Tony Blair’s own mythology.

Their view that Mr Blair was riding high on social and cultural change pushed them into becoming Blairite wannabes. But the lesson of the last few weeks is that when Mr Blair’s balloon is popped, he disintegrates. This was spectacularly proved after the Budget, when the Prime Minister was publicly humiliated by media attacks exposing the whopper he was telling about the Tories’ intention to ‘cut’ £35 billion from public spending when in fact they plan to increase it.

Because Mr Blair is so widely distrusted, he has become his party’s liability. By contrast, Gordon Brown is widely respected for his stewardship of the economy. And conventional wisdom holds that while people feel prosperous, they won’t unseat the government.

But much of the reason for this prosperity is that the Chancellor diminished his potential to wreck the economy when he gave independence to the Bank of England. Since the Tories will not reverse this, economics has been largely removed from party political considerations.

As a result, people now take prosperity for granted. What concerns them much more is the black hole into which billions of public money are being poured, along with their sense that the country’s values are being destroyed by a sneering, out of touch, metropolitan elite.

In other words, social and cultural matters are uppermost in people’s minds. That’s why issues such as abortion, immigration or the wrongs done by human rights law are striking such a chord. It’s why the government is suddenly running scared over cannabis reclassification.

Some Labour politicians, such as the party’s strategic thinker Douglas Alexander, have realised that values are the key. But those on his list merely display the party’s bankruptcy of vision. He cites international development, family values and the NHS. But the NHS is bust; this government has dismembered the family and ritually sacrificed its entrails; and as for international development, when the Prime Minister starts boasting about saving Africa it’s time to send in the removal men.

How all this will actually stack up at the election, though, is anyone’s guess. The electorate’s disillusionment with all politicians runs very deep indeed. And the whiff of Tory opportunism is far from having been dispelled.

But the Tories are now being listened to because they have stumbled across a truth they previously failed to grasp. Far from being a conservative, Tony Blair stands for the counter-culture. Until very recently, the Tories allowed that to go by default. Now, by smashing taboos and confronting issues such as travellers' illegal camps, immigration, abortion and human rights they are issuing at last a challenge to this Government’s rotten culture of sentimentalised amorality and the undermining of our national culture and institutions and the rule of law itself.

People have long been disillusioned with the Blair government but felt no alternative was on offer. Elections, after all, are about choice. If no choice is available, people will not vote. But if they feel the Tories are presenting a credible alternative, a tipping point might well be reached when the whole electoral centre of gravity suddenly shifts and overnight those poll findings can be turned on their head.

Anything can happen in these most confused and uncertain of times. But if Mr Howard’s highly effective smash-and-grab raids develop into a sustained and coherent vision which chimes with the beleaguered majority, the unthinkable might just happen.

Daily Mail, 14 March 2005

After last week’s epic stand-off over the government’s anti-terrorist control orders, the people of Britain are entitled to feel more than a little bemused. The battle was fought to a Parliamentary standstill, with both sides claiming a tactical victory. But the monumental issues at stake remain perplexingly unresolved.

At the core of the whole controversy lies the toxic question of trust. The Government says the new powers are needed to counter terror because the previous ones were inadequate, and many potential terrorists are at large who pose an unprecedented threat of violence.

Critics respond that they don’t believe the threat is serious enough to justify the attack on our ancient liberties. Yet the security service is now reportedly recommending anti-terrorist measures at certain polling stations during the general election. In all this murk, it’s the devil’s own job to work out where the truth actually resides.

Take the foreign terror suspects who were jailed in Belmarsh because, we were originally told, they presented a threat so serious they had to be locked up without trial. After the Law Lords ruled that their detention was unlawful, however, we were suddenly told that these detainees could safely be dealt with outside jail, under control orders of varying severity.

The Home Secretary wasn’t even proposing to activate the house arrest provision without a further resolution by Parliament. So how could it be that people who posed an unprecedented threat before the Law Lords’ ruling could now be safely contained in the community?

More baffling still, before the control orders became law some prisoners were released under bail conditions which were thought to be not dissimilar. So if it was possible safely to release them under such conditions all along, why had they been locked up in the first place?

The response that they were never dangerous at all is absurd, since the Special Immigration Appeals Commission had confirmed they were indeed dangerous, and that the terrorism they allegedly represented constituted a ‘public emergency threatening the life of the nation’.

What is much more likely is that, after the Law Lords’ ruling, the Government simply panicked over what to do. As a result, its measure was wholly inadequate to protect public safety — even before it was put through the Parliamentary wringer.

After all, does anyone really believe that tagging, along with a raft of dubiously enforceable restrictions on communications, is the proper way to deal with such reportedly lethal individuals? Even the draconian house arrest provision requires a level of police and security manpower which is almost certainly not available. And who can have faith in basic levels of official competence? Despite being on the cards for so long, the actual release of the Belmarsh detainees last week descended into chaotic farce.

How on earth can such provisions be remotely appropriate to deal with someone like Abu Qatada, for example, said to be linked to the alleged mastermind of last year’s Madrid train station bombings and described by a British judge as a ‘truly dangerous individual’? It is nothing less than astonishing that such a person is no longer locked up.

In truth, the lamentable fact is that we seem to have ended up with the worst of all worlds — the destruction of our ancient liberties and procedures wholly inadequate to deal with the threat that we face.

The origins of this problem lie in the fact that, over the years, the judiciary has systematically destroyed the government’s ability to control this country’s borders and either prevent undesirables from coming in to the country or throw them out.

Ministers had panicked because they refused to face up to the real cause of the crisis — the Human Rights Act. It was the judges’ interpretation of this Act which forbade the Government from deporting these foreign terror suspects, thus forcing it to lock them up instead. It was the judges who then used this Act to declare it unlawful to lock them up. And undoubtedly, these same judges will shortly be asked to rule under the same Act that the new control order restrictions are yet another breach of human rights.

The root of the problem is human rights law and the arrogant and out-of-touch judges who interpret it. If these suspects are as dangerous as SIAC says, it is utterly ludicrous that we can’t deport them. No country has ever been expected to admit people who pose a threat to the life of the nation. Yet this Government refuses to admit the disaster of its own cherished human rights law and the urgent need to rethink the assumptions beneath it.

But that is only half of this tangled story. For the question remains whether there is a serious threat from home-grown terror suspects to justify control orders against British subjects. Mr Blair says there are several hundred trained al Qaeda operatives in Britain. The former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens says there are up to 200.

The Law Lords had been told that upwards of a thousand Britons had attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Shadowy security sources reportedly claim a smaller number of people — ranging from a dozen to forty —are actually human ‘ticking bombs’.

But for Heaven’s sake — even if there are ‘only’ between 12 and 40 such ticking bombs at large, why on earth aren’t they already locked up?

The answer is that in certain cases, evidence couldn’t be produced in court without compromising intelligence sources. Very well: the government has now taken powers to restrict such people without trial. Arrests of a number of British suspects can surely be expected imminently.

If no such arrests occur, it is unlikely that this is because no domestic threat exists — given the string of so far unreportable terrorist cases involving British suspects going through the courts right now, along with the conviction two weeks ago of a second British shoe-bomber.

A more likely explanation would be the fear of provoking the Muslim community. Indeed, some object to control orders on the grounds that existing legal powers are adequate but have not been used because the police have been ordered to employ a softly-softly approach towards Muslim terror suspects.

But it is possible that even though such back-pedalling may have occurred, fresh powers were nevertheless still needed to circumvent the risk in some cases of compromised intelligence.

The problem, though, remains that Government claims about the terrorism threat are simply not believed. This is the corrosive effect of the widespread belief that Mr Blair lied about the threat from Saddam Hussein, and therefore would not be trusted even if he said that today was Monday.

Mr Blair has only himself to blame for this. In example after example, he has been more than economical with the truth. During last week’s uproar, he hardly helped himself when he claimed that the security service had said the ‘sunset clause’ would be dangerous, only for that to be immediately repudiated.

But as a result, when he has told the truth he is not believed either. Evidence published in Britain and America — although inadequately reported — clearly shows that up to the start of the war, mostly unchallenged intelligence warnings consistently warned year after year that Saddam never stopped trying to build weapons of mass destruction, along with forging links with al Qaeda.

The tragedy of our times is that, at a time of national danger, we are governed by politicians so patently inadequate they are neither trusted nor believed — and the only victors are the terrorists, watching and plotting as Britain tears itself apart.

Jewish Chronicle, 11 March 2005

Diminutive in stature though he is, Natan Sharansky, Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and the diaspora, is surely one of the moral giants of our age. His new book ‘The Case for Democracy’ is a clarion call to the west to rouse itself from its moral torpor and realise that the only way to peace and security lies through the transformation of tyrannies into democracies, or from ‘fear societies’ into free societies.

Only then will they stop terrorising the rest of the world, because where governments are accountable to the people, their aggression is curbed. In addition, free societies have no need to demonise a spurious external threat — such as America or Israel — to divert the anger of enslaved populations away from the tyrants who oppress them.

The aim of transforming rogue states into democracies is, of course, the doctrine promulgated so controversially by President Bush. It is therefore not surprising that Sharansky has been feted by the White House and his thinking applauded in Presidential speeches.

The irony is that this is probably a rather warmer reception that he will have received from his own country. For what the book starkly lays out is that the self-delusion and lack of moral clarity in confronting tyranny that has led the west so disastrously astray applies in spades to the Israelis.

Despite — or perhaps because of — being in the front line of attack by several rogue states simultaneously, Israelis of all parties appear constitutionally incapable of grasping what the proper response to tyranny should be.

Instead of encouraging Palestinian democracy, which would harness the desire of ordinary Palestinians to live peaceful and prosperous lives, Israel has launched one disastrous attempt at appeasement after another. This has merely helped confirm the Palestinians’ enslavement to tyranny, which ensures that terror continues.

Sharansky’s galvanising insight is that all peoples want to live in free societies rather than fear societies. But this was waved away by Israel’s governing elites, which told him in effect that moshiach (the Messiah) would arrive sooner than democracy for the Arabs.

So instead of telling the Palestinians there would be no deals unless they reformed themselves into a society governed by the rule of law and free institutions, the Israelis cultivated one Palestinian strongman after another, convincing themselves each time that swords were turning into ploughshares before their very eyes.

This was the delusion that lay behind the debacle of Oslo. The way Israel was taken for a ride during that process, with the ensuing terrible loss of life that it brought about, makes you weep – because the reason for that delusion was Israel’s desperate psychological need, after half a century of bloody siege, to kid itself into believing that a bloody tyrant was miraculously turning into a man of peace.

As a result, all the evidence of the Israelis’ own eyes was simply ignored. The escalating terrorism merely provoked Israel into more and more concessions. The money and power given to Yassir Arafat was clearly not benefiting the Palestinians but consolidating his own tyranny. Yet strengthening Arafat became a primary goal of the peace process on the grounds that only he could confront the ‘enemies of peace’.

Sharansky is surely right to bemoan the divisions between right and left as meaningless. What matters is the division between right and wrong responses to tyranny. Where I personally part company with him, however, is over his opposition to the Gaza disengagement on the grounds that without extracting the quid pro quo of democratisation this looks like weakness. My own view is that Israel cannot escape soon enough from its self-imposed trap of ruling another people.

But Sharansky is also right is to say that when divisions within a free society are allowed to eclipse the division between free and ‘fear’ societies, moral confusion ensues. And he provides a graphic example from his personal experience.

When he arrived in Israel from the gulag, he put on a kippah (skullcap). A prominent Israeli journalist promptly sneered that Sharansky had merely exchanged one struggle for freedom for another.

As Sharansky writes, while in prison he thought one wore a kippah whenever one felt close to God. Since he had no kippah to commemorate many such moments in jail, his non-Jewish Ukrainian cellmate used the fabric that protected his feet from frostbite to sew one for him.

To this day, he writes, he wears this same kippah at the Passover Seder when he commemorates the journey of his people from slavery to freedom. And yet in the country of his own freedom, an Israeli religion-hater could not see the difference between this symbol of the unquenchable freedom and goodness of the human spirit and the oppression perpetrated by the KGB.

If Israelis are so morally blind that they cannot perceive when others gain their freedom, how can they ever fight for it for themselves?

Daily Mail, 7 March 2005

This is a month of sobering anniversaries. Later this week the Spanish commemorate their ‘3/11’, the horrific Madrid train bombings that took place a year ago on March 11. And two weeks’ time sees the second anniversary of the start of war in Iraq.

The recent carnage in Iraq and Israel provides sickening evidence that these battles still rage on. And as last week’s conviction of a second British shoe-bomber reminds us, along with the controversy over the government’s proposed control orders, Islamist terrorism menaces this country too.

Yet at the same time, something very different and quite remarkable is stirring in the Arab world. Quite suddenly, a small wind of freedom is beginning to blow in countries which we have been told are impervious to the very idea.

In Egypt, President Mubarak has announced there is to be a contested presidential election for the first time. Saudi Arabia has said that women are to get the vote. And among ordinary Palestinians, anger at the recent Tel Aviv bombing for setting back the chance of peace provided a dramatic contrast to their normal jubilation at the deaths of Israelis.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, the pro-Syrian regime in Lebanon was forced to resign after huge popular demonstrations against the Syrian occupation, and Syrian President Assad is now making (so far unconvincing) noises about withdrawing his forces.

So why is all this happening? In a word: Iraq. Despite the persistent violence and the many grievous errors made by the coalition, the fact that Iraqis actually voted in a contested election has galvanised the Arab world.

The spectacle of previously implacable ethnic or religious enemies actually having to haggle and compromise to form a government has electrified Arabs for whom rule by a tyrannical strongman is the norm.

The whole point is that this need not be so. And the visible demonstration of this fact in Iraq has altered the geo-political landscape. As Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon’s veteran Druze opposition leader — and an opponent of the war— has remarked, the Iraq election was ‘the start of a new Arab world. The Berlin Wall has fallen.’

Of course, this does not mean that swords will be turned into ploughshares overnight. Tragically, further carnage is all but inevitable. But Arab tyrants are nevertheless feeling the hot breath of freedom on their necks.

What this tells us is that within the Islamic world, the vast majority of people want to live in freedom just like the rest of us. The war being waged by the west must not be principally a war of bombs and bullets, although sadly these have their place.

It must be instead principally a war of ideas: of democracy against tyranny, of freedom against slavery, and of the rule of law against corruption, torture and murder. The belief that there is something about Arabs or Muslims that makes them impervious to such virtues is simply wrong.

These insights form the central argument of an inspirational new book, ‘The Case for Democracy’, by the former Soviet political prisoner and now Israeli minister, Natan Sharansky.

Sharansky was one of a group of prominent dissidents whose campaign for human rights helped weaken the Soviet Union. His experiences as a prisoner of the KGB for nine years before being freed in 1986 to emigrate to Israel have given him unique insights into the nature of tyranny and how to respond to it.

In particular, he has realised that all tyrannies — whether Soviet, Arab or Islamist — may appear strong but in fact are endemically weak. Even as they were jailed, he and other dissidents understood what at that time few in the west had grasped — that Soviet Communism itself was about to collapse like a pack of cards.

Tyrannies are weak because they are hated by the populations they terrorise. If their people rise against them, they are finished. To keep them pliable, they invent bogus enemies such as America, Israel and the west, whom they demonise by lies and libels.

The threat to the west is therefore directly related to the repression within the societies that spawn it. So the only way to destroy this threat is to help turn these tyrannies into free societies — which virtually never wage aggressive wars, because the electorates to which their governments are answerable invariably want to get on with peaceful lives.

This is, of course, the doctrine espoused by President Bush which is much mocked for its apparent utopianism. But as Sharansky says, exactly the same was said of the Soviet Union — that its people were incapable of freedom.

Some societies will indeed never be democracies as we understand the term. But for Sharansky, the key issue is the freedom to express one’s views without being taken away by the secret police and locked up, tortured or killed. This is the difference between a free society and a ‘fear society’. And no-one, he says, including Arabs or Muslims, wants to live in a fear society.

It was the west’s high-volume support that gave Sharansky and his fellow dissidents the strength to carry on with their heroic fight. As he says, we should surely be similarly treating as dissidents those brave Arabs and Muslims resisting their own tyrannical regimes.

As with the Soviet Union, we should complain every time one of them is arrested or murdered. We should publish lists of Arab and Muslim heroes, organise petitions, vigils and demonstrations, broadcast radio messages and write books and articles in support.

Regimes crumble quickly if they are opposed. But instead, a lack of moral clarity within the west has inflated its own misdeeds to the same level as the oppression within fear societies, and equated terrorism and its response as a ‘cycle of violence’.

In addition, the west continues to support or appease dictators because it has never understood that peace and security depend not on the stability of tyranny but on societies that are free.

As a result, fear societies continue because the free world merely transfers its support from one strongman to another in a relay race of repression. Khruschev, Brezhnev, Saddam Hussein, Arafat, Assad — there is an endless list of tyrants who the free world thought it could manipulate but by whom it who ended up being manipulated.

It is not enough for such rulers to promise to eradicate terror groups or hand over some token terrorists for trial. Not is it enough merely to hold elections. Free societies depend on institutions that respect human rights such as independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, free opposition parties.

Only then do they become accountable societies in which the impulse for aggression dies. And so in its own interests, the free world must hold these rulers’ feet to the fire until they deliver such reforms.

To be sure, this is a long, dangerous and difficult road. But the yearning for freedom by the human spirit is universal and as old as humanity itself. A spark has ignited in the Arab and Muslim world. Will the west now nurture it — or snuff it out?

The war against terror is not a clash of civilisations. It is a defence of civilisation against barbarism, in which the west should stand shoulder to shoulder with Arab and Muslim dissidents against those who enslave them, and in this way defend the peace and security of the world.

Daily Mail, 3 March 2005

One of Tony Blair’s proudest boasts is that his government’s educational reforms have improved Britain’s shamefully low rates of children’s literacy. Yet a report published yesterday by the Centre for Policy Studies claims that the National Literacy Strategy has been a failure, with almost 1.2 million children having failed to achieve expected levels of literacy since its launch in 1998. So who is telling the truth?

The answer is that although there has been an improvement in literacy rates, it is very small— and even that is contested. Wholly unacceptable numbers of children are still unable to read and write adequately.

Last year, only 56 per cent of 11 year-old boys and 71 per cent of girls in England reached the standard expected for their age in writing, while only 46 per cent of girls and 33 per cent of boys reached the highest standard of reading.

The fact is that the false assumptions embedded in our country’s decades-long national reading disaster are still firmly entrenched — and the government remains as stubbornly resistant as ever to acknowledging this debacle.

When the scheme was launched, the then Education Secretary David Blunkett famously promised to resign unless 80 per cent of 11 year-olds met expected literacy standards. They didn’t. The rate went up from 65 per cent to around 75 per cent, where it has remained stuck — with persistent claims of both cheating in school tests and lowering of standards casting doubt even on that level of progress.

The reasons for this were crystal clear from the start. Britain’s modern literacy problem arose because – extraordinary as this may sound —the teaching establishment stopped training teachers in the tried and tested methods of teaching children to read.

For various reasons — one of which was excessive concern for the feelings of children who didn’t learn to read as fast as others — teachers junked the structured system of phonics, the matching of letters to sounds, which is crucial in teaching children to read.

They used instead a variety of other methods, such as memorising or guessing at words. But all this produced was children who gave a convincing impression of being able to read but, when faced with unfamiliar words, could not do so.

Crucially, they had not been taught to decode the language, the skill which only a phonics-based approach provides. Yet they were falsely said to be reading, a cruel deception which left millions floundering.

Despite the catastrophic results of this approach, however, virtually the entire education establishment defended it with near-religious fanaticism. Professors of education queued up to claim that what was most important was that children understood the meaning of what they were reading.

But this was clearly to put the cart before the horse. Understanding the meaning of words which have been merely memorised or guessed at does not mean a child can read. Yet to these education ideologues, it was more important for a child to be able to say what was in a book than actually to be able to read it.

They also claimed that it was important to use a variety of methods in teaching children to read. But this was in itself disastrous, because when children are taught many approaches they merely become confused and the value of phonics is lost.

The way the education establishment closed ranks on this issue, and the depths of its ideological zealotry, cannot be over-estimated. As a result, the government’s attempts to combat its harmful effects were doomed to failure.

A bitter and protracted battle ensued over the content of the National Literacy Strategy. The outcome was a fudge, in which while it paid lip-service to phonics it included other methods like word-recognition — the very approach that had caused so much damage in the past.

The result was that although a little progress was made at the start, it soon stalled. Yet the tragedy is that this is so unnecessary. For every single child in the country who does not suffer from some innate handicap can be taught to read by what is now called ‘synthetic phonics’.

This involves blending letters and sounds and then steadily building up mastery of two-letter combinations, irregular words, prefixes and suffixes. It teaches children steadily and systematically to decode the language. And wherever it is used, it produces results.

A seven-year study of schools in Clackmannanshire has shown that pupils taught this way instead of by the official method were on average no less than three and a half years ahead for their age in reading and one year and eight months ahead in spelling by the age of 11.

What’s more, boys outscored girls; and pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds did almost as well as those from more favoured homes.

We didn’t need the Scottish survey to tell us this. The author of one of the synthetic phonics schemes, Ruth Miskin, was previously head of a primary school in east London where she used this approach. Virtually every pupil was from a Bangladeshi background and most did not speak English as their first language. But by age the age of six, every one of them was reading fluently.

In truth, synthetic phonics is hardly rocket science. It is, in fact, the way most of us were once taught to read.

Yet the establishment still bandies about the term ‘phonics’ to camouflage the abject and persistent failure in the classroom. On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, Professor Henrietta Dombey of Brighton university — a veteran defender of discredited education strategies — insisted that phonics had to be taught ‘in the context of focusing on meaning, and this is not what’s happening in Clackmannanshire’. Thus an approach more than three times as successful as the government’s own scheme was airily dismissed.

In response, Schools Minister Stephen Twigg was wet beyond belief.
Boasting once again of the success of the literacy strategy, he commended both Professor Dombey and Ruth Miskin — before uttering the giveaway phrase that synthetic phonics had to be combined with other strategies such as ‘word recognition’. Yet this is the very same ‘variety of approaches’ policy which has so singularly failed.

The reason the literacy strategy went wrong from the start was that ministers chose to listen to the very people responsible for the disaster in the first place — the preposterous academics who had taught generations of teachers to teach un-reading in our primary schools.

The outcome remains nothing less than a national scandal. Because of the grip still maintained by this pernicious ideology upon our teacher training institutions, British children are less literate than many in the third world, let alone our major economic competitors.

Their resulting failure to cope at school is undoubtedly a major cause of the dismaying levels of ill-discipline and truancy at school, not to mention crime and other anti -social behaviour. At a deeper level still, if children are not able to read they are not able to think.

Behind the figure of more than a million illiterate children lies an untold story of human misery and criminally wasted potential. The government has been told on innumerable occasions of both the problem and the solution. How many more children will need to be sacrificed before it finally wakes up?