Daily Mail, 30 May 2005

Like the demise of Mark Twain, rumours of the death of the European Union have been greatly exaggerated.

The implications of yesterday’s French referendum on the EU constitution were amply summed up in advance by Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the current EU president, when he declared that if the French said ‘oui’ European integration would proceed, and if they said ‘non’ European integration would proceed.

That’s what the EU means by ‘consulting the people’. That’s why France’s President Chirac threatened that if the French voted no, they would be made to vote again until they said yes. No doubt such a fate will befall the Dutch if they vote ‘nee’ in their own referendum this Wednesday, unless they do so by an overwhelming majority.

In any event, this whole crisis has been more about political momentum rather than any possible real change in direction. For regardless of the constitution, the reality is that the countries of the EU are already the helpless captives of an all-encompassing, anti-democratic bureaucracy with a life of its own.

Much of the constitution was always going to be imposed upon us anyway through the seemingly endless wrinkles in existing EU treaties. Indeed, the creation of an EU diplomatic service and the harmonisation of criminal justice are already well under way.

In other words, nothing so trivial as the will of the people would ever be allowed to derail the EU project, which has come to define the world view for a whole class of politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers who have governed the nations of Europe for a generation.

Nevertheless, the French referendum campaign dramatically exposed the profound fault lines and contradictions in the whole EU project. The passions unleashed by the constitution relate not just to this treaty but, much more fundamentally, to the European dream itself.

Millions of European voters have grasped that that the EU project is a swindle. It was sold to them on the false prospectus that it would bring prosperity. Instead, they find their countries are crippled by economic sclerosis.

The problem, however, is that many do not understand why this has happened. Many French voters who voted ‘non’ did so for the wrong reasons. They believed that the constitution would foist upon them Anglo-Saxon market disciplines and expose them to the chill winds of competition from foreign companies and workers.

Ironically, this position is the diametric opposite of the British ‘no’ voters, who rightly fear that further integration with Europe would destroy our economic advantage and leave us similarly crippled.

What even the French ‘non’ voters don’t seem to grasp is that the whole EU edifice rests on a set of fantasy foundations. The first is the premise that the nation states of Europe have common interests.

In fact, they have rather more irreconcilable social, political and cultural differences — and their economic interests lie in being in competition with each other, the very thing the EU is in business to stifle.

The second great myth is that the EU can become a rival global power to the US: the social welfare state versus the unbridled free-market. Euro-fanatics are so wrapped up in this infantile hostility that they have failed to notice that the world has moved on.

India and China are fast becoming major competitors; the developing markets are in Asia and the far east; and newcomers to the EU from eastern Europe are American economic wannabes. The last thing they want to do is emulate stagnant, high-unemployment economies such as Germany, where voter revolt has caused beleaguered Prime Minister Gerhard Shroeder to advance the date of the general election.

The third fantasy is that the nation state is the cause of war and only the supra-national EU has kept the peace in Europe since World War 11.

This is the most dangerous rubbish of all. Peace in Europe was guaranteed by NATO and the Atlantic alliance. Indeed, it is when self-government is suppressed and national identity threatened that people turn violent.

In those circumstances, they would also be far less keen to fight against any enemy threatening their freedom —because they would no longer have any significant freedom to defend. As the MEP Daniel Hannan has argued, the main threat to freedom comes from supra-national tyrannies — communism, Nazism, Islamic totalitarianism —to which only the nation state can offer any proper defence.

Yet the EU is fundamentally hostile to the very idea of the nation state. Not only is it emasculating national powers but its erosion of national borders has encouraged the mass movement of peoples across the continent, the very thing fuelling the pan-European voter revolt.

The French are the driving force behind the European supra-national ideal. Yet when faced with the inevitable consequences — the arrival of millions of foreigners who threaten not only French jobs but French national identity — they don’t like it.

The wholly erroneous belief that the nation state is a recipe for war, and that instead a supra-national government should impose laws and values to which everyone signs up and which will spread harmony and goodwill in place of conflict, is precisely what is embodied in the EU constitution.

Its extension of EU powers would take away what remains of our ability to govern ourselves. It would deprive us of control over finance, foreign policy, defence, taxation, social security, criminal justice, immigration and a host of other policies. The wholesale transfer of power to a brand-new pseudo-state would reduce Parliament to the status of Westminster regional council. As such, it sounds a death knell for democracy.

This has never worried the French because the EU is quintessentially a French project. France has always been in the driving seat telling other states what to do and rigging the EU rules to suit itself. Other countries also do not share these concerns because they have a shaky historical attachment to democracy and liberty.

This is why the objections to the constitution by the British people are so very different and so very emphatic. Despite the lies that have been told about it being merely a ‘tidying-up exercise’ —a comic counterpoint to President Chirac’s hysterical claims that a ‘no’ vote would destroy the EU —the British understand that what is at stake is our unique culture of liberty, independence and democracy.

A great fissure in the world has opened up between those who believe in the nation state and those who believe it must be superseded by supra-national institutions, which do away with a nation’s identity expressed through its own laws and values.

The EU constitution represents a great leap forward in that rolling revolution. But whatever the final fate of that particular treaty, the fanatical and corrupt elite that drives the EU onwards will not give up. Through bullying, lies and intimidation they will continue to deprive us of our ancient liberties, slice by salami slice.

However the political aftermath of the French and Dutch votes plays out in the short term in Britain and in Europe, the fact remains that the UK now needs to have a full and frank debate about its place in a European Union that presents such a clear threat to our constitutional traditions and national identity.

The death of the EU might have been exaggerated — but the danger of the death of British democracy can hardly be overstated.

Daily Mail, 25 May 2005

Anyone who wants to understand the full implications of the culture of disrespect that so troubles our Prime Minister should study the story of the so-called ‘baby factory’ in Derby. For this case perfectly encapsulates the moral degradation that is bringing increasing sections of our society to its knees.

Twice-divorced Julie Atkins lives with her three daughters and three grandchildren. There is not one committed father for any of them. Two of the babies’ fathers are teenage boys, while the third is a 38 year-old man.

Two of Mrs Atkins’s daughters, 14 year-old Jemma and 15 year-old Jade — mothers of 15 month-old T-Jay and five month-old Lita respectively — are well below the age of sexual consent.

Her third daughter Natasha, mother of six month-old Amani at the grand old age of 18, has previously had two miscarriages and an abortion. The entire menage is supported by the British taxpayer to the tune of some £31,000 per year in benefits and allowances.

The most disturbing thing about this disastrous situation is that everyone blames everyone else and no-one takes any responsibility. One might expect Mrs Atkins to show some shame or contrition for what has happened. After all, she has signally failed to protect her daughters and allowed them to be sexually active — one of them, at least, before she even reached her teens — so that as a result two children have given birth to children, while the third daughter became pregnant no fewer than four times by the age of 16.

Such a mother is surely guilty of the most reckless neglect. Yet instead Mrs Atkins passed the buck first to her daughters’ school for inadequate sex education and then to the government.

Mrs Atkins clearly thinks that her family is someone else’s responsibility. She appears to have no concept of what the maternal role involves, no idea of duty towards her own children and no understanding whatsoever that the single most important reason for her daughters’ plight is the values they have imbibed from their own parents’ behaviour.

She is not alone in playing the blame-shifting game. The mother of David, who was 14 when he made Jemma pregnant at the age of 12, says she is ‘very annoyed and angry’ — but only that Jemma changed her phone number and stopped her son from seeing the baby, and that David and Jemma ‘were being allowed to sleep together’, a fact of which she says she had no idea until she was told Jemma was pregnant. Did it not occur to her that she should be angry and ashamed with herself for having so little control over or even knowledge of what her 14 year-old child was up to — which according to the locals was the talk of the neighbourhood?

And then there is Martin Dodd, father of two of the three teenage mums, who claims that he also had no idea any of his daughters had given birth until he read it in the papers. Unlike the mother of his daughters, he doesn’t blame the school or the government, but her. ‘I think they have only copied what they have seen at home’, he proclaimed. ‘They should have been set a better example. Having one pregnant daughter could be an accident but three seems irresponsible.’

Seems? There can be surely not a scintilla of doubt that the whole grisly situation is the very quintessence of irresponsibility. What does not seem to occur to Mr Dodd is that he is very much part of that irresponsibility himself.

When he claims his daughters only copied what they saw at home, he never spoke a truer word —but not in the way he seems to think. For what they saw at home was a father who wasn’t there. And what they also knew was that their mother had herself given birth to them all out of wedlock — Natasha by another father altogether — before entering into two marriages which both ended in divorce.

In other words, they have indeed only copied what they learned at home — that fathers are disposable, sexual partners serial and that someone else will pick up the tab. And the tragedy is that their babies will almost certainly follow the same dismal pattern of failed relationships, early pregnancy and an infinite range of other problems.

Let us be clear about why this case is such a disturbing emblem of our society. There are many households that do not fit this pattern, in which lone parents are struggling heroically to bring up their children. Their families may be broken through no fault of their own. They do the best for their children, bring them up carefully and responsibly and often produce model citizens.

But there is another type of family where all standards of restraint and civilised behaviour have broken down: a pattern of recklessness which is increasingly being repeated throughout Britain. Mrs Atkins and her ‘baby factory’ might be a particularly ripe example, but fatherless children are now being produced on an industrial scale, with generations of female-only households which think they can do without fathers — the single greatest cause of the ‘yob’ culture and the breakdown of civility and order.

How can this have happened to Britain, one of the most advanced societies in the world?

There was a time when standards of behaviour were upheld to which all would aspire and by which they would be judged. Sobriety, sexual restraint, hard work and abiding by the law were all held to be vital for civilising the masses. These virtues were policed by a combination of laws and informal sanctions such as shame or stigma.

But now all that has slipped away. Constraints on behaviour are construed as an assault on the sacred right to immediate gratification. Shame and stigma are considered far worse than any crime or anti-social action. Upholding notions of respectability is seen as elitist and oppressive so that even the law is routinely disregarded.

In a society that was truly concerned to prevent children from being sexually abused, under-age sex would lead either to prosecutions or to the children involved being taken into care. In practice, there are rarely prosecutions now unless an adult man is involved, in which case it mutates into paedophilia, the modern taboo. By contrast, teenage boys having sex with 11 year-olds is somehow just ‘kids doing what kids always do’.

For their own safety, children should be removed from parents who are a danger to their welfare. But given the lamentable state of our social services, this is a sick joke. The presumption is that children should never be removed from their parents unless they are about to be killed (and too often, not even then). The prevailing ethos holds that sexual promiscuity is not evidence of danger.

This is because even under-age sexual activity — unlike pregnancy or disease — is not seen as bad in itself. Sex has been redefined as a recreational sport, and lone-parent families are said to be no worse than any other for the raising of children.

As a result, no shame or stigma is attached to lone parenthood. The government has hugely exacerbated this by insisting that all types of family are equal but lone-parent families are more equal than others. So it has loaded the tax and benefits dice in favour of lone parents.

The result has been the rise and rise of cohabitation, serial parenting and the assumption that fathers are a disposable extra. As daughter Jade remarked about the three babies: ‘We don’t need their dads. We give them all the love and support they need’.

On the contrary — it is the state that provides the material support without which she and her sisters could not finance their dysfunctional lifestyles. And this touches on what is perhaps the single most powerful engine for this collapse of civilised values: the welfare state.

It is surely nothing short of fantastic that the taxpayer should be subsidising behaviour which is so much to the detriment not only of individuals but of the wider society. This has come about because of the understandable anxiety that the vulnerable must be helped.

The problem is that ‘help’ rapidly turns into incentives. Young girls think of the flat they are going to get and the benefits to live on and think these are their passport to an independent life. They are instead incentives to fecklessness.

The key problem with the welfare state is that it has detached rewards from behaviour. As a result, it has destroyed the concept of personal responsibility. People are encouraged to think instead in terms of rights and entitlements.

This has had a widespread corrosive effect on behaviour and produced the ‘something for nothing’ society. The more people look to the state to provide, the more the state takes control of everyday life; and the more control taken by the state, the more people become infantilised and responsibility is destroyed.

Mrs Atkins complains she needs a bigger house, and says she struggles to cope — on an income significantly higher than many hard-working families take home. The welfare state has detached her from any sense of responsibility for her own behaviour and her own family. Someone else looks after them. Everything — even her daughters’ sexual behaviour—is someone else’s fault.

This corrosion has affected all levels of society. The higher social classes also produce irresponsible adults and damaged children. But the harm done by this collapse of responsibility is most disastrous at the lower levels of society because there people have far less with which to cushion its uncivilising effects.

We now have two Britains. The key divide is no longer between north and south or between rich and poor. There are after all plenty of decent, respectable, hardworking poor people and plenty of dissolute rich.

The divide now is between those who live in a world of basic civilised codes which everyone acknowledges, and those who live in what has been unpleasantly termed an ‘underclass’ which is disconnected from mainstream life and its values.

These are the ‘feral’ children who cause so much crime and social mayhem, and whose violent, wild or otherwise dysfunctional behaviour presents such a problem in our schools.

The only way to deal with it is to provide children for whom all the codes of civilised life are absent with the security of absolutely rigid discipline and educational structure.

Unfortunately, education has gone the other way. Those schools which instil order and discipline in and out of lessons are rare success stories. They are swimming against a professional tide which has hollowed out education and replaced the necessary structures of learning by pap and propaganda.
For children from shattered backgrounds, this educational free-for-all provides the coup de grace.

If our culture of disrespect is to be tackled, these fundamental causes have to be addressed. Sad to say, there is precious little sign of it. The government can’t even decide which minister should handle it, let alone face up to the part it has itself played in loosening our social glue. And the Tories are silent, paralysed by the risible fear that they will be seen to be ‘nasty’ or out of touch.

But the enormous cost of our increasingly fractured and brutish society is unsustainable. It has to be tackled by restoring integrity to the family and education and fundamentally reforming the welfare state. The alternative is social suicide.

Daily Mail, 23 May 2005

Once, we all said ‘Yuk’. Now, it seems, we are saying ‘Who could possibly object?’ What was abhorrent and grotesque yesterday is fast becoming mandatory today.

A motor neurone disease victim, Bryan O’Regan, has volunteered some of his skin cells to make a cloned embryo in the hope that cells from such a clone can be used to develop a cure for MND after his death.

This follows the announcement last week by Korean scientists -- with whom Mr O’Regan’s doctors have teamed up -- that they have created more than 30 cloned human embryos and dismantled them to grow the world’s first embryonic human stem cells which were an identical match to those of patients with diabetes and spinal injuries. (Stem cells are the body's master cells which can develop into any tissue and, in theory, used toreplace diseased/damaged cells.)

Meanwhile, scientists at Newcastle university have created three human clones, the most advanced being a five-day old female embryo — the first cloned embryos to be created in Britain and, indeed, in the west.

These developments are being hailed as scientific breakthroughs which hold out the hope of cures for a range of dreadful diseases. And of course, it is entirely understandable that those who are suffering in this way will desperately cling to anything which offers hope. But far from enhancing our humanity, this scientific race threatens to destroy it altogether.

There is a strong sense of unreality about all this. Earlier this year, the United Nations voted in favour of banning all forms of human cloning because of the insuperable ethical problems that it poses.

The British government is simply ignoring this unhelpful ruling. For it has passed a law permitting what is euphemistically called ‘therapeutic’ cloning, which is said to be quite different from ‘reproductive’ cloning which it has banned.

This is because ‘therapeutic’ cloning involves using cells from a cloned embryo to grow tissue which can be implanted into a patient, rather than allowing the cloned embryo to develop into a baby.

This is a highly disingenuous and meaningless distinction, since ’therapeutic’ cloning still involves the creation of a human embryo which, if it were left alone — all other things being scientifically equal — would grow into a baby.

The cloners and their Whitehall patrons, however, claim that this isn’t reproductive cloning because the cloned embryo will be killed before it gets anywhere near becoming a baby. Look, they say, it will be no bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence: not an unborn baby, but a bundle of cells which can only be seen under a microscope.

In making such a claim, however, they give their essentially dehumanising game away. For they are redefining human reproduction as only a process which produces a breathing baby at the end of it.

On this reasoning, it follows that an unborn child is no longer part of the human reproductive process. That’s why they do not regard a five-day old embryo as a human life but merely a collection of cells to be pulled apart and then flushed away like a soapsud.

This displays a profound disrespect for early life, which is all the more dangerous because the cloners and their backers refuse to acknowledge that what they are creating is human life at all. That is because all they can see is the noble purpose for which they are creating it, to relieve the suffering of others.

But instrumentalising life in this way, bringing an individual into being solely to benefit other individuals, is utterly inimical to the deepest belief of our civilisation that every human life deserves equal dignity and respect.

Yes, we have greatly eroded that belief over the years, particularly by our promiscuous use of abortion. But ‘therapeutic’ cloning is worse than abortion, and even worse than the destruction of ‘spare’ embryos created through in-vitro fertilisation. For it means deliberately creating a life solely in order to destroy it.

In addition, who can doubt that ‘therapeutic’ cloning is a step on an already lethal slippery slope? How many times have we heard the government or the medical experimentation lobby swear with hands on their hearts that this or that ‘essential’ development — abortion, artificial insemination by donor, experimentation on embryos — is hemmed in by an iron legislative wall to prevent us from slithering into an ethical nightmare?

Yet every single such development has opened the door to increasingly indefensible practices that have degraded and coarsened our society. Once human embryos are created, the pressure to do more with them at later stages of gestation will inevitably increase, and eventually the pressure to allow some of them to develop into babies will become irresistible.

All, of course, from the highest of motives. We are told that human cloning is necessary to alleviate human suffering. Yet this is nothing less than emotional blackmail. First, it is far from clear whether cloning will actually cure any diseases. Formidable difficulties remain, not least in ensuring that the disease to be alleviated is screened out from the implanted cloned tissue.

Moreover, considerable success is already being achieved by using stem cells drawn from the bodies of children and adults. The race to clone embryos surely derives from a different agenda altogether — to put Britain in the forefront of scientific discovery. This serves the interests of scientists looking to win empires and Nobel prizes, and of a government keen to cash in on the resulting economic bonanza and Britain’s ‘standing’ in the world.

Britain might indeed achieve distinctive standing on this issue — but as a pariah. For the reason it has become a magnet for those wanting to do this work is because much of the world rightly regards it as unethical and dangerous.

It is no accident that the UK is in the forefront of the cloning race in the west. For this country has become a major exporter of consumer-driven self-centredness. It is the pioneer post-moral society, where religion has disintegrated faster than anywhere else on the planet.

The collapse of the religious sense of the sacred has reduced the definition of personhood to no more than a chemical soup of body parts, sensory activity and DNA.

British scientists therefore think the only legitimate objection to cloning is that it may be unsafe. Anyone who thinks in terms of right or wrong is regarded as a religious nutcase.

Thus science has junked ethics altogether, and any intrinsic respect for life has vanished. All that matters instead is the brutal utilitarian doctrine which is now our state religion: serving the happiness of the greatest number.

Cloning is but the latest stage of a softening-up process which has been going on for years. IVF, embryo experimentation and surrogacy have made us accept that sperm is to be banked and eggs to be harvested regardless of origin or destination.

The links between sex, procreation, and parenthood have progressively been snapped while we have stripped unborn life of meaning and respect. As the American bio-ethicist Leon Kass has written, the clone is the ideal emblem of this society — the ultimate single-parent child.

Just like previous developments, the arguments for cloning are couched in the most noble terms. So we will surely be led inexorably to clone live human babies, all to produce a more advanced world free from disease, infertility or unappealing characteristics.

It is a Faustian pact which shifts us straight from altruism to eugenics, bargaining away our humanity for the chimera of a world without pain. ‘Therapeutic’ cloning may look like progress, but it will only lead us from our disturbing post-moral present to an altogether more chilling post-human future.

Jewish Chronicle, 20 May 2005

Osama bin Laden’s nemesis is small and female, with spiky orange-tipped hair and an unshakeable Muslim faith which equips her to declare that the mullahs have no clothes.

Irshad Manji — her first name, appropriately enough, means ‘the divinely inspired moderate one’ — blew into London like a whirlwind last week on her revolutionary mission to provoke an Islamic reformation which would defeat the mullocracy, allow Islam to accommodate itself to the modern world and neutralise the forces of secularism.

Last year she published a book, The Trouble with Islam, a tour de force in which she argues that her religion has been hijacked by the forces of reactionary and murderous darkness. A whole tradition of critical thinking and religious debate — itjihad —was suppressed centuries back and replaced by a hidebound tribalism which destroyed independent thought and eventually mutated into the hideous sacrilege of the human bomb.

Her book is a feat not merely of astounding personal courage but also of intellectual confidence. Arriving in Canada at the age of four after her family fled Idi Amin’s Uganda, she was educated in mainstream schools but attended the madrassah at weekends. There she was taught two overwhelming doctrines — that women were inferior, and that the Jews were not to be trusted. When she asked for evidence of the supposed Jewish conspiracy against Islam, she was thrown out.

Unlike many who would have promptly repudiated their faith, she never lost it. Instead, she set out to educate herself in her religion away from the intellectual tyranny of the madrassahs. And what she discovered, she says, revealed that the imams were teaching lies about Islam in order to shut down free thought and exercise total control.

Manji’s book along with her defiance of Islamic sexual codes — she is a lesbian and prominent feminist campaigner in Canada — have marked her out for death threats by the bucketload. Undaunted, this Muslim refusenik has set out to gather support among Muslims across the world for a revival of itjihad and with it the best chance of an Islamic reformation.

Her articulacy is awesome, her scholarship formidable and her tenacity extraordinary. But is she right? Is Islam at root a religion that can accommodate pluralism, or has she exaggerated its capacity for adaptation?

She maintains that its lethal intolerance derives not from its religious tenets but from the characteristics of Arab tribalism which drove out the more open-minded traditions of the faith itself. This may well be so. After all, Judaism and Christianity can be interpreted in ways that either maximise or minimise their more disobliging bits. So doesn’t it follow that Islam, too, can be interpreted to separate mosque and government, the essential precondition for reconciling religion with individual liberty?

The crucial question, however, is surely where the core of a religion resides. Judaism has been able to accommodate itself to its host societies because its precepts do not require it to colonise other cultures. Christianity’s reformation managed —however bloodily — to separate church and state without unpicking the fabric of the faith itself. But since Islam holds as a fundamental tenet that all authority, both spiritual and temporal, comes from God, how can it ever separate religion from politics?

And even if Manji has got the theology right, what chance does she have of persuading anyone else?

She claims that her book is causing huge excitement among young Muslims living under tyrannies around the world and who are desperate to hear her arguments. Secret groups of Muslim dissidents are downloading the book’s Arabic translation that she has placed on the internet, and educating each other in the lost traditions of their faith.

This holds out the dizzying hope of emerging from the nightmare of religious fanaticism. Nevertheless, there is one issue on which even Manji’s eloquence cannot prevent the shutters from slamming down. That issue is Israel and the Jews.

One of the most remarkable passages in her book is her passionate defence of Israel and her attack on the lies told about it by the Arab world. But on this issue, even would-be reformist Muslims will not follow her. For Muslim hatred of Israel and prejudice against the Jews are fundamental, and fuel much of the Muslim paranoia and animosity against the west.

Whether or not Manji’s analysis is entirely realistic, her goal is heroic. But she is being undermined by the very western culture that has given her such personal freedom. As she says, it is remarkable that in this society, fanatical Muslims feel confident while Muslims committed to reform feel intimidated — and non-Muslims who speak against the fanatics are pilloried in turn as racists and Islamophobes.

But her cause is the key to the future, and all of us who love freedom should give Irshad Manji — and all the other courageous Muslim refuseniks struggling towards the light — unequivocal backing in this war for civilisation.

Daily Mail, 19 May 2005

With respect, the government does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting on top of the yob culture about which the Prime Minister professes to be so concerned.

The situation is dire. Vicious, even sadistic crime is commonplace. Disorder and threatening behaviour are a modern plague, and whole communities are under siege from crime and yobbery.

Abigail Witchalls remains paralysed having been savagely stabbed in the neck while pushing her 21-month old son in his buggy. Phil Carroll, a father of four, was left in a critical condition after being attacked by two hooded youths who were part of a rowdy gang causing trouble by his gate in Salford.

Chief Superintendent David Baines, who is investigating the attack on Mr Carroll, has painted a horrifying picture of feral children intimidating entire neighbourhoods, with minimal control over their behaviour and little parental authority over their lives.

Tony Blair says he wants to restore a culture of ‘respect’. Yet in the next breath he implies that respect has disappeared because of deep-seated cultural changes over which he has no control.

Not so fast, Prime Minister. Yes, our society has changed in many disturbing ways which have helped create this epidemic of lawlessness. But what governments say and do sends powerful signals which help shape a society’s behaviour. And far from taking the necessary steps to hold the line against social collapse, Mr Blair’s government has repeatedly weakened and undermined it.

Certainly, it has thrown up a plethora of initiatives in this week’s Queen’s Speech. But these amount to little more than vacuous gestures, tinkering at the edges or locking the stable door after the horse has been allowed — or even encouraged — to bolt.

Its proposed curbs on guns and knives will add little to existing police powers. Its proposals for compulsory drug testing or excluding drunks from city centres are frankly insulting given the damage caused by its own policies.

Its urban regeneration programmes have produced an explosion of pubs, it is further encouraging round-the-clock drinking and its downgrading of the dangers of cannabis has encouraged a rise in the use of a drug which is now frequently implicated in savage criminal attacks.

What makes this crisis positively surreal, however is that the single most important cause of feral children and the collapse of respect for authority is the single issue that no politician will talk about — the destruction of the family.

The biggest reason for the rise in crime is the relentless growth of a lethal sub-culture of fatherless children and disorderly homes. While many lone parents do a good job of bringing up their children, the fact remains that most delinquents have fractured family lives.

There are whole communities where committed fathers are unknown. As a result the process of socialising children has broken down, leading to children from emotionally chaotic backgrounds violently acting out their disturbance in school before being sucked into crime.

The truth is that the family is the crucible of social order. Break the family, and you break social order. How can children respect their parents when at the deepest level they believe that their parents have abandoned them? Such abandonment makes children feel they are worthless. If they don’t even respect themselves, how can they be expected to respect authority?

Mr Blair was absolutely right to say that the causes of crime are rooted in family and parenting, but he cannot just shrug off responsibility. For his government has consistently promoted the lethal fiction that all types of family are of equal value in bringing up children.

Tax and welfare policies have provided financial incentives for lone parenthood and penalised marriage. As a result, cohabitation has soared and getting on for half of all children are now born outside marriage.

The government refuses to shame or stigmatise people for bringing up children in fatherless households or with serial partners, the surest predictor of crime. Yet according to Home Office minister Hazel Blears, it is prepared to shame the unfortunate children they produce by making them wear distinctive uniforms when performing community service — itself the wholly inadequate response to the crimes they have committed and their need for the disciplines of punishment.

Beyond the family, too, authority has run up the white flag. Discipline in many schools has collapsed through the malign confluence of politics and culture. Children are out of control, their parents are often even more violent, teachers no longer have the training to cope and government makes the whole situation impossible by giving children rights which can be enforced through a whole bureaucracy of hearings and appeals.

As for the police, they have simply abandoned the streets to the gangs. The youths who attacked Mr Carroll were part of a threatening mob drinking alcohol from litre bottles and smoking cannabis. It is all very well for Mr Baines to highlight the daily intimidation that is going on in such areas, but why aren’t the police putting a stop to it?

Now the government intends to give local authorities more powers to deal with graffiti, fly-tipping, abandoned cars and other low-level nuisance. But why aren’t the police already preventing the routine spitting, swearing, urination, litter and menacing ‘hoodies’ which produce the climate of intimidation on our streets?

We surely don’t need more legislation. What we do need is for the police to implement the laws that already exist. We already have initiatives coming out of our ears: parenting orders, Sure Start projects, 4000Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, 66,000 fixed penalty fines, intensive supervision orders, Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, Youth Offending Teams. Yet the more initiatives that are produced, the worse it all seems to get. Just how long will it take for the penny to drop?

What matters above all is that a consistent signal is given that not just lawlessness but incivility and both formal and informal rule-breaking will not be tolerated. In the US, crime and disorder have been curbed by precisely this consistency from pro-marriage and abstinence policies to zero-tolerance of crime on the streets.

But in Britain we are going in the opposite direction. Faced with the progressive collapse of social order, politically correct Whitehall latches onto one alibi after another to avoid facing up to the need to restore individual duty and responsibility.

So we read that civil servants are flocking to read the latest fashionable tome, Respect in the Age of Inequality, by the sociologist Richard Sennett. But Professor Sennett is not proposing to restore respect for authority.

Instead, he is attacking disrespect for the poor, which he believes is expressed by the fact that some people succeed and others do not. The best route to respect, he says, lies in empowering people to discuss their own behaviour ‘so there is peer pressure to behave rather than imposition by authority’.

This ideological nonsense merely reinforces the infantilism which has so eroded personal responsibility, and is precisely the kind of gobbledegook that has helped get us into this mess in the first place.

Respect for authority has been eroded because it is no longer being earned. At every level authority has been in full retreat — from the family, the schools and the streets, aided and abetted by a government which has chosen to release the demons of individual ‘rights’ at all opportunities. Now we are all paying the price.

Daily Mail, 16 May 2005

Fairness, impartiality and objectivity are the essence of public service broadcast journalism. This understanding is enshrined in the BBC’s charter and provides a key justification for the licence fee.

Now, however, an explosive insider’s account threatens to blow this cosy assumption clean out of the water as a fraud upon the public. Robin Aitken, who spent his entire career as a BBC journalist, has written a book accusing the BBC of institutionalised leftism.

This is by no means the first time such an accusation has been levelled, but generally such critics have been dismissed as parti-pris. This is why Aitken’s book, ‘Taking Sides: Bias at the BBC’, is so significant.

For 25 years he chalked up solid experience across the board as a BBC reporter, covering some of the biggest stories of the day. In other words, he is BBC man through and through. So when someone like this lifts the lid on newsroom culture, it carries weight. And his message is that BBC journalism is as bent as a corkscrew.

In Aitken’s words, there is a centre-left consensus at the BBC that colours its entire output and undermines its impartiality. Dislike of US Republicans, he says, is close to being an article of faith. The flagship Today programme failed to present a balanced view of Iraq; it was hostile to the very notion of a war simply because it couldn’t bear the fact that President Bush was both a Republican and an evangelical Christian.

Its unshakeable belief in the moral authority of the UN means it will not entertain any scepticism about that corrupt organisation. And its prejudice against Ulster Protestants meant that when a former IRA terrorist who turned informer told Aitken that Pat Finucane, the Belfast solicitor murdered by loyalists, was a senior figure in the IRA, he could not persuade the BBC to run the story.

This picture of a corrupted BBC culture that is ideologically skewed towards the left is blindingly obvious to anyone who does not share those assumptions. It is a far deeper problem than the political partisanship recently let slip by Today presenter Jim Naughtie when he inadvertently referred to the Labour Party as ‘we’.

With a few honourable exceptions, the BBC views every issue through the prism of left-wing, secular, anti-western thinking. It is the Guardian of the air. It has a knee-jerk antipathy to America, the free market, big business, religion, British institutions, the Conservative party and Israel; it supports the human rights culture, the Palestinians, Irish republicanism, European integration, multiculturalism and a liberal attitude towards drugs and a host of social issues.

Every day, its relentless bias rolls across the airwaves to shape the assumptions of our society. Who can be surprised at Britain’s current anti-Americanism when the BBC starts from the premise that President Bush is a dangerous extremist?

Thus it describes Republicans opposed to his controversial UN nominee John Bolton as ‘moderate’. On News 24 the other night, after scenes of ecstatic Georgians praising President Bush for supporting their quest for freedom, the presenter declared that America was interested in Georgia only in order to grab its oil.

Who can be surprised at Britain’s visceral hatred of Israel when, having all but ignored such atrocities as the two decades of genocide in southern Sudan or the systematic Muslim persecution of Christians worldwide, the BBC obsessively transmits a twisted view of the Arab war against the Jewish state which presents genocidal Hamas terrorists as heroic freedom fighters and Israeli attempts at self-defence as unwarranted aggression?

On issue after issue, the BBC throws impartiality to the winds. When abortion recently resurfaced as a controversy, TV’s Newsnight featured a discussion between two pro-abortion campaigners — Sir David Steel, the architect of the current Abortion Act, and the feminist writer Suzie Orbach — with no-one to put an anti-abortion view.

On another occasion, when Prince Charles sounded off about an educational culture which encouraged everyone to think they could all achieve the dizzying heights of fame and fortune, Newsnight not only sneered at his own privileged background and education but also misrepresented what he had said to put him in the worst possible light. And so on, and endlessly on.

The terrifying thing is the BBC’s inability to acknowledge that there is a problem. Senior BBC executives appear anxious to produce impartial journalism. But presented with example after example of bias, they are baffled. They can’t see the prejudice — because they themselves share it.

Even more alarmingly, they think their position represents the centre ground. They therefore think that those who oppose it are extreme. So their idea of balance is utterly unbalanced, and they subscribe to a thought system that is closed.

That is why the BBC can produce such grotesque aberrations as the Today programme item last year about definitions of terrorism, which involved a discussion between Leila Khaled, the erstwhile Palestinian plane hijacker, and Danny Morrison, the erstwhile Northern Ireland Republican terror detainee.

I write this as someone who is often asked onto such programmes to provide ‘balance’. But with the exception of the Moral Maze on which I am a panellist, where a cross-section of opinion is essential to the format of the programme, such appearances amount to little more than tokenism.

It is quite common for BBC discussions to pitch two or three participants against one —or indeed, no-one at all — on the other side with the dissenter presented as an extremist.

On programmes like Radio Four’s Any Questions or TV’s Question Time, such a hapless participant may be up against not only an unbalanced panel and a hostile studio audience but the Dimbleby brothers each subtly conveying supercilious distaste.

The obvious remedy is to bring on presenters and journalists who do not share the closed thought system of the left. Flagship programmes like Start the Week or other current affairs programmes are rarely fronted by anyone outside this consensus.

The BBC regards its departing political editor, Andrew Marr, as a star although his apparent closeness to New Labour too often made him seem like a mouthpiece for Downing Street.

His departure is an opportunity to replace him by someone outside the left-wing tent. But the gossip is that the job may go to someone very much inside it, Newsnight’s Martha Kearney, because the governing imperative is apparently to ‘get a woman’.

The BBC chairman Michael Grade appears to be genuinely concerned about lapses in journalism standards. In a lecture last week, he passionately upheld the BBC’s ethic of impartiality.

To his credit, he set up a review of his journalists’ attitudes to the EU which found that they were unbalanced, and he is setting up a similar review dealing with the reporting of the Middle East. But he has an uphill battle to get his senior managers to put this right, because so few are themselves outside this all-embracing consensus.

BBC journalism is trusted around the world — which is why its bias is of such momentous importance and has such potentially devastating consequences. Mr Grade needs to insist on changing the faces the BBC presents to the world and thus levering open its closed thought system, if its tattered kitemark of impartiality has any chance of being restored.

Daily Mail, 12 May 2005

One of the key public concerns voiced in the general election campaign was Britain’s unacceptably high crime rate. Long-suffering communities believe that not only are they suffering from epidemic crime and disorder, but to add insult to injury criminals are not dealt with effectively even when they are caught.

Now, a senior police officer has lent his authority to the suspicion that the courts have simply lost the plot. Paul Kernaghan, chief constable of Hampshire, has made the remarkably outspoken charge that judges and magistrates appear to be more concerned with the needs of criminals than their victims, and in particular are simply refusing to lock up serial offenders.

As an example, he highlighted the case of one such criminal in his area who, despite having 120 previous convictions, was sentenced to merely 14 days in jail.

In an alarming number of cases, serious repeat offenders are not even sent to prison. In Winchester, a teenager who was caught trying to sell heroin and crack cocaine was given a two-year supervision order after Judge Andrew Barnett said he was ‘giving him a chance’.

In Manchester, Judge Stuart Fish told a pair of serial criminals with more than 100 convictions between them that he would not jail them because it would cost too much money and previous sentences had not stopped their crime spree. So for attacking a woman and stealing her benefits money, they walked away with rehabilitation orders and community punishments.

And in a particularly appalling case last month, a man was finally jailed in Leeds for murdering two sisters and an elderly couple — after having previously been given only a community sentence and probation for a vicious knife attack.

It seems scarcely credible that such criminals are being given such derisory sentences, which bear no relation to the gravity of these crimes and fail to lock up people who pose a danger to the public.

The judges protest that they are not soft sentencers at all, and point to the fact that Britain imprisons more people than any other European country.

This claim is disingenuous. True, we jail more people per head of population than in the rest of Europe. But that is simply because we suffer far more crime than those countries do. So it’s not surprising that more people in total are locked up.

The much more telling question, however, is whether we jail those who commit that crime as often as other countries jail their own criminals. And here the figures show that our rate of imprisonment per crime is well below the European average.

So faced with one of the highest crime rates in the industrialised world, our courts are sending people to prison less frequently. Might there not be, just possibly, a connection between the one trend and the other?

Moreover, criminals whose sentences have already been significantly reduced for bureaucratic reasons are having them cut again. New guidelines mean that the courts will cut 15 per cent off the jail sentences of criminals such as burglars, thieves or dangerous drivers who are thought to pose no risk of violence to the public.

But what about the risk of their committing another crime, a risk removed while they are in jail — one reason for sending them there in the first place? Such a total lack of transparency, with sentences that bear no relation to the penalty imposed, is simply inimical to the very concept of justice and brings the system into disrepute.

So what on earth is causing our judges and magistrates — supposedly pillars of a prudent establishment — to behave in such an irresponsible way?

As Mr Kernaghan suggested, one reason is their obsession with keeping prison numbers down because of the chronic overcrowding in our jails. No one disputes that this is indeed a serious problem. But the obvious solution is therefore to build more prisons.

Instead, the bureaucratic tail is wagging the criminal justice dog. As Mr Kernaghan said, if someone needs to be locked up it is absurd not to do so because no cell is available. Yet the justice system is indeed suspending punishment because there isn’t enough capacity.

However, that is not the only reason. For like so much of the criminal justice establishment, the judges are gripped by a visceral distaste for prison. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, has repeatedly advocated community sentences for non-violent offenders.

This is because of a profound belief that prisons are merely ‘universities of crime’ that make bad people worse and thus even more likely to commit offences. Community sentences are therefore considered to be more effective.

However, all the evidence contradicts this. The distressing fact is that neither prison nor community sentences have much success in preventing criminals from committing more crime. But at least while they are in prison, the community has some relief from their activities; and at least these offenders are being punished.

But then, to the bien-pensant criminal justice establishment, the notion of punishment itself is viewed with utter contempt as no more than a primitive lust for vengeance, and therefore deeply uncivilised.

Yet inflicting a measure of pain commensurate with the crime is an essential part of justice. No punishment, no justice. And as any parent knows, punishment for misdeeds is an essential part of the process by which a child learns the distinction between right and wrong and becomes a civilised human being. Hence, no punishment, no civil society.

At a deeper level still, much of the judiciary, like the Home Office and the probation service and even some of the police, either believes that nothing can be done to change people’s behaviour because criminals are formed by factors beyond their control, such as poverty or childhood abuse, or that only psychological treatment will work.

In fact, there’s no evidence that psychological treatment does work. What this post-moral elite refuses to accept is that crime results from a moral breakdown, and that it is only when prison is combined with attempts at moral improvement such as drug treatment or education — unfortunately too often absent —that the best chance occurs of turning that behaviour round.

Sentencing is not the only aspect of the criminal justice system which has lost its way. After all, very few crimes end up being prosecuted in court at all. That’s because at every stage the system fails — including the police, whose performance leaves much to be desired.

Mr Kernaghan wants league tables to measure the courts’ performance. But as our ailing education system shows, the blunt instrument of league tables does little to address the underlying reasons for the failure of our public services.

Our criminal justice system is currently mired in a combination of bureaucratic inertia, political pusillanimity and ideological perversity. Hapless citizens run the gauntlet of a crime wave dismissed as an exaggeration by a disdainful and out-of-touch establishment, which regards calls for imprisonment as further evidence of unsophistication.

Accordingly, it is delivering a sentencing policy which enables criminals to thumb their noses at the system, and is now increasingly making a mockery of justice itself.

Wall Street Journal Europe, 9 May 2005

It was a famous victory--and yet the victor is mortally enfeebled, and his shell-shocked troops have turned against him and demanded that he promptly fall on his sword.

While Britain once again has a Tony Blair government, the first time that Labour ever won a third consecutive term, its majority was slashed by 100 seats. The government was elected with the lowest share of the popular vote gained by any ruling party in the nation’s history.

The principal reason for this drop was the tide of irrational hysteria that has engulfed Mr Blair over Iraq. The Prime Minister was widely believed to have exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein and taken the country to war on a lie. He had already lost public trust through a combination of political scandals and unfulfilled policy promises. This was amplified by a poisonous media presentation of the war and its aftermath, in which distortions, omissions and irrational arguments became accepted as truth.

In this election, those who had opposed the war in Iraq through both virulent hostility to what they saw as American ‘unilateralism’ and a prejudiced and snobbish hatred of President George W Bush united with those who supported the war but believed that Mr Blair had lied in order to sell it to the country.

Iraq thus became the lightning rod for voters’ disillusionment, and Mr Blair, hitherto his party’s most potent electoral asset, a liability. Labour candidates were shocked by the abuse they received on doorsteps from voters who called Mr Blair a liar. The party was saved from a rout by the visible attachment to Mr Blair at every opportunity of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is popularly credited with running a successful economy.

Mr. Blair is back in 10 Downing Street but with less evident power and authority. Although on paper he still has a comfortable majority of 67, given the sizeable group of hard-left troublemakers on Labour’s backbenches he may now be their parliamentary prisoner, unable to push through proposals for anti-terror legislation or welfare reform. He will also be looking over his shoulder at the 62 Liberal Democrat MPs who are well to the left of Labour and whose opposition to the Iraq war helped them pick up nearly a quarter of the votes cast. Although the LibDems didn't make their hoped-for breakthrough. their 11 extra seats will help them join the Labour left in Parliament to make Mr Blair’s life difficult.

The Prime Minister's greatest attribute was his ability to neutralize the left. He was only able to do so because he was acknowledged to be an election winner. Now that act will be harder to pull off, all the more since Mr Blair already said that he'll step down before the next election. Even party loyalists are demanding that he go sooner rather than later to hand the Prime Ministership to the impatient Chancellor.

Along with the Prime Minister, Mr Brown was an architect of New Labour and is keenly aware of the need not to frighten the middle class. Nevertheless, his instincts are much more those of redistributive old Labour. One of Mr Blair’s difficulties has been that the Chancellor’s iron grip on the public services has progressively ruined them, while his expansion of dependency on state jobs and welfare has frustrated any radical welfare reform.

This government infighting should have provided ample opportunity for the Conservative opposition, which under Michael Howard’s leadership had been transformed from a party flat on its back into a disciplined force that added more than 30 seats and restored morale. But on the morning after the election, Mr Howard horrified his colleagues by announcing that he would resign as soon as a new structure was put in place for electing his successor.

This means Britain now has two lame-duck leaders, in charge of the government and opposition respectively. At a stroke, this took the heat off Mr Blair by plunging the Tories immediately into a feverish leadership election. The party now faces a period of fratricidal strife just at the time when it should be building on its new-found discipline to repair the gaping hole in its platform.

For despite the skilful professionalism of their campaign, the Tories did not increase their share of the popular vote from their previous dismal score of around 33%. Several of their new seats were only gained because disaffected Labour supporters voted LibDem and thus let the Tory candidate in by default.

The Tories’ main problem is that they no longer know what they stand for. They are split over Europe, between those who think the party is too right-wing and those who think it is not right-wing enough, between people who think the famous middle ground of politics means endorsing gay marriage and those who think it means deep tax cuts.

The result was this overwhelmingly negative campaign, providing no big picture of what kind of Britain they wanted. Worst of all, Mr. Howard tried to capitalize on the anger over Iraq even though he had supported the war. His repeated taunt that Mr Blair was a liar rebounded badly; British voters don’t like their politicians to trade insults, even if they agree with them. And it merely reminded them that they don’t trust any politician, including Mr Howard.

The Tory leader’s singular achievement was thus to be voted even less popular than a Prime Minister who has notched up the lowest public approval in electoral history. All this has led some to conclude that Britain now has a left-wing consensus. The truth is surely very different. Mainstream voters tend to have conservative impulses on many issues such as immigration, crime or European integration.

The problem for this conservative majority is that there is no party they wish to vote for. Although the Tories’ attack on immigration resonated widely, voters did not believe they would actually deliver on this or on anything else. This is because they view the Tories as flaky opportunists who don’t stand for anything except regaining power -- and that's because the Conservative party no longer seems to know what conservatism is for.

Because Mr Blair adroitly moved to embrace the market and squash the old Labour trade union left, the Tories concluded that he had parked his tanks squarely on their own lawn. They failed to understand that, although the left was defeated in its aim of workers’ revolution, its tactics merely switched to a culture war -- aided and abetted by Mr Blair’s unworldly belief in creating a kind of globalised utopia, which expressed itself in such things as the promotion of same-sex union.

Britain has thus sustained a relentless attack on the nation through multiculturalism, the destruction of the family and the surrender of self-government to Europe. It has produced a ruling class whose centre of political gravity has moved substantially to the left, producing a degraded education system, politically correct police officers and judges who think prison is a dirty word.

This cultural slide has produced a disturbing rise in irrationality, prejudice and extremism. There was a whiff of anti-Semitism in some Labour attacks on Mr Howard, while in east London Muslims voting en bloc returned the MP George Galloway, who had been thrown out of the Labour party for being the principal cheerleader for Saddam Hussein and who now represents a coalition of the anti-democratic far-left and militant Islamism.

The danger now is that, whoever leads it, the Labour government will preside over a further slide down this road while the Tories merely return to inspecting their own navel. As Britain ponders the ironic symmetry of a Prime Minister who is being entreated to depart and an opposition leader who is being entreated to remain, a resolution to its disturbing problems seems the last thing on anybody’s mind.

Daily Mail, 9 May 2002

General elections are supposed to be periods of catharsis. The nation decides, the great arguments stop and people then heave a huge sigh of relief and get back to their lives while the new government starts to put into practice all the exciting things it has promised to do.

No such luck this time. This election has now saddled Britain with two lame-duck leaders, in charge of both the government and the opposition respectively. With exquisite symmetry, one is being entreated by his party to depart forthwith, with much bad temper that he is still there at all, while the other is being entreated by his party to stay, with much bad temper that he intends to go.

The dismaying prospect therefore looms of political convulsions and party in-fighting, with paralysis in government matched by navel-gazing by the opposition and with the likelihood of any resolution of Britain’s problems obliterated by the smoke and fury arising from the collision of titanic egos on either side of the Commons chamber.

This is all the more extraordinary given the historic nature of Tony Blair’s achievement in being the first Labour leader to win a third consecutive election victory. Some victory — with MPs now calling on him to step down without delay.

To coin a famous phrase, Mr Blair may be back in government but he is no longer in power, which has drained away to Mr Brown. This was graphically demonstrated within hours of his victory when he signally failed to reshuffle his Cabinet in the way he wanted, with ministers stamping their feet and screaming ‘Shan’t!’ when he tried to move them or rearrange their portfolios. If the Prime Minister can’t even appoint the Cabinet that he wants, his position becomes absurd.

Nevertheless, he has said he is not going. And given this man’s tenacity and formidable political skills, he may well wait for events to move his way again. In particular, he will be watching the opinion polls in France creep back towards a yes vote in this month’s referendum on the EU constitution. If the French do vote yes, he may well believe — however unlikely this may seem to others — that this shows he too can turn the tide of British euroscepticism in our own referendum next year.

But his weakness remains. Despite the fact that on paper he has a comfortable majority of 67 MPs, his 50-plus hard-left backbench troublemakers mean that the erstwhile slayer of left-wing demons has now effectively become their parliamentary prisoner. It’s hard to see how he can now get his anti-terror laws through, while radical reform of the welfare state becomes a vanishing prospect.

This is of course a great opportunity for the Conservatives to exploit Labour’s disarray. But instead, Michael Howard’s announced departure presages a prolonged bout of vicious in-fighting on the Tory side.

As a result, the modest gains made by the Tory election campaign threaten to be wiped out in the all-too predictable clash of personalities. This is particularly unfortunate, since the campaign exposed the fundamental weakness of the Tories’ position which must be addressed if they are ever to regain power again.

Mr Howard’s achievement in that campaign should not be underestimated. He took a party that was flat on its back and in a short space of time turned it into a disciplined, united and professional fighting force.

But that considerable feat was not enough. Many Tory seats were only won because the slide in Labour’s vote to the LibDems let in Tory candidates by default. And despite the extra seats they gained, they still achieved no greater share of the vote than their dismal 33 per cent at the previous election.

Some suggest that this reveals a left-wing mindset among the majority of voters. But all the evidence suggests that the majority have conservative views over immigration, crime and Europe. That is why Mr Blair himself is in such difficulty over these very issues.

While voters like certain Tory measures, however, they do not like Tory men. They regard the Tories as untrustworthy and opportunist. And that’s because what these politicians say doesn’t add up to a coherent picture of the society they want to bring about. Their negative attacks on Labour irritate voters — even though they may agree with the substance — because they recognise that the Tories’ attacks on their opponents are no substitute for having a positive vision of their own.

As the party’s co-chairman Lord Saatchi wrote yesterday, presenting a shopping list of slogans is not enough. A party needs to show a clear sense of purpose which taps into voters’ idealism and gives them hope of a better society. Every successful leader has had such a vision. Clement Attlee said ‘We won the war, now let’s win the peace’; Mrs Thatcher said ‘Britain can be great again’; Tony Blair said he wanted Britain to have ‘social justice and economic competence’.

Lord Saatchi was right to say the Tories needed to have such a purpose. But what he did not say was what that purpose should be.

There is a danger that Mr Howard’s departure will merely trigger a re-run of the old, sterile argument in the party between the so-called ‘modernisers’ and the old guard; the advocates of tax cuts versus greater public spending; those who say we were too right-wing versus those who say we weren’t right-wing enough.

The issue is not how much government is wanted, but —as David Willetts began to suggest yesterday — what kind of government and what kind of society. The overriding issue is increasing social fragmentation and the slide in decency, honour and accountability at all levels. The purpose should surely be nothing less than to restore and rebuild the integrity of Britain.

Just about every one of today’s issues hangs on this simple concept. The Tories should discuss first and foremost how to restore the integrity of government, the primacy of Parliament and the independence of the civil service.

They need to discuss how to rebuild the integrity of the nation itself, restoring its sense of national identity by tackling the issues of immigration and multiculturalism and giving people back the ability to govern themselves by taking back powers from Europe.

They need to discuss how to take politicians out of the public services, restore the independence and integrity of professionals and make them accountable to patients, parents and communities.

Fairness needs to be restored to education by removing worthless courses, restoring honesty to examination grades and enabling people once again to achieve through merit.

Transparency needs to be restored to the criminal justice system and just deserts to welfare; and words such as decency, tolerance and compassion reclaimed from their abuse by the left and restored to their proper meaning.

The obvious message of this election was that people no longer wanted Mr Blair but thought the Tories would be worse. The deeper message was that, disillusioned by Mr Blair’s failure to deliver the vision of the better society that he promised, they desperately want someone else to offer it to them.

The Tories now have a chance to work it out — but only if they grasp that instead of feuding over who should lead their next attempt to gain power, they first have to tell us what they want that power for. The signs are not auspicious.

Daily Mail, 6 May 2005

One of the tests of decency for any society is the way in which it treats its old people. Communities with a social conscience revere their elders on account of the contribution they have made over so many years, and protect, look after and cherish them as a result.

On this basis, Britain doesn’t appear to be faring too well in the decency stakes. Far from being a specially protected member of society, being an old person is becoming an ever more hazardous experience.

Take the new guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). Its Citizens Council, made up of ordinary people who give NICE the benefit of their views, has proposed that certain treatments might be denied to patients on account of their age.

In cases in which age could ‘affect the benefits or risks of treatment’, it said, medical staff would be justified in discriminating against them -- guidance which NICE will now use in deciding what treatments to approve and for whom.

On the face of it, the wording of the guidance might seem unobjectionable. Obviously, there are cases where someone’s age makes a particular type of treatment too risky.

But this is a matter of clinical judgment by that individual’s doctor. That is a very different matter from a general pronouncement by a government quango that certain treatments should be withheld from people just because they are old.

The guidance is confused because it also says that ‘health should not be valued more highly in some age groups rather than others’, which appears to be a direct contradiction.

To clarify what was meant, a Nice spokesman said treatments might be withheld if there was a ‘justifiable clinical reason to not provide a treatment for certain age groups’.

But there can be no [ital ‘no’] clinical reason not to provide for an entire section of the population. On the contrary, such a blanket order means that there is no room at all for clinical judgment, which by its very nature can only be made patient by individual patient.

‘A justifiable clinical reason’ would therefore seem to be NICE-speak for something very much uglier -- discriminating against old people because, in a top-down health service where services have to be rationed, the elderly are considered to be disposable.

They are, after all, being singled out here. For the guidance lays down that there should be no such discrimination against any other group such as smokers, the obese, gays, trans-sexuals, or ethnic minorities.

Remarkably, the status of all these people does not turn them into an automatic ‘clinical’ risk for certain treatments as it will now do for the elderly. This surely gives the game away. What is being proposed is not a clinical judgment at all, but a callous official calculation about the relative desirability of the old.

This is merely the latest in a long line of deeply disturbing judgments made by NICE. Only recently, it issued a shocking ruling that drugs used to treat the horrifying symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease were not ‘cost effective’ and could no longer be prescribed.

This was despite the fact that, four years earlier, it had approved these very same drugs on the basis of solid evidence that they made all the difference to the lives of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Despite the fact that huge public outrage forced an embarrassed Government to tell NICE to back down, the ban on these drugs still shamefully stands.

These appalling decisions are being made because NICE is not actually about ‘clinical excellence’ at all. Despite Government denials, it is in the brutal business of rationing NHS treatments.

In its guidance documents, it candidly admits that its calculations are made on the basis of ‘value for money’. So it follows inescapably that it must decide that some lives are more valuable than others.

Once, treatment was carried out on the basis of individual doctors making decisions based on clinical need and ranking their patients in order according to that need. But now, NICE makes value judgments about the worth of a life based on the obscene concept of ‘Quality Adjusted Life Years’ ( QALYs), under which classes of people are given scores according to their ability to function.

The inevitable result is that the lives of those who are not able to function very well are considered less valuable than those who are. Not surprisingly, on this basis the life of an old person is worth less than that of someone who is younger.

The impenetrable jargon used by NICE about ‘calculating the incremental cost effectiveness ratio’ of treatments, along with its grotesque discussions about whether this should be ‘less than £20,000’ or ‘more than £30,000’ per QALY, reveals that clinical judgment has been replaced by accountancy, and medical ethics obliterated by the brutalising economics of the balance-sheet.

What in heaven’s name is [ital ‘is’] the cost-effectiveness of a human life? What price can be put on the wisdom and experience of an elderly person, or the love and respect that a family has for a grandparent, or the fact that dementia sufferers are able to dress themselves or recognise the face of their husband or wife?

Even to ask the question reveals its gross inappropriateness. These attributes are simply priceless. Yet in the pitilessly utilitarian world of NICE, human life itself now comes with a price tag attached.

This is inimical to the first principle of medicine to treat people according to their needs. It is simply intolerable that such judgments are being handed down from on high by a government body whose first requirement is to cut costs.

More generally, it also illustrates the dismaying trend to treat the elderly as second-class citizens -- and even, in certain circumstances, to dispose of them altogether.

According to Age Concern, the health service routinely discriminates against old people. Although the risk of getting breast cancer increases with age, women over 70 are denied automatic screening. Many mental health services are denied to the elderly; people who are being treated for depression, say, find that at 65 their doctor suddenly signs them off and they are shunted onto inadequate elder care instead.

Half of Britain’s GPs say they have concerns about the way the health service may deal with them as older people. No wonder, considering how the elderly are so often neglected on hospital wards, or risk being starved and dehydrated to death because a doctor has decided the quality of their life is inadequate. No wonder, considering the chronic shortage of staff to care for old people either in their own homes houses or in residential homes.

This is all happening because our society simply doesn’t care enough about its old people. A self-centred culture no longer wants the bother of looking after its aged.

The destruction of the family has snapped the bonds of care between the generations. A society obsessed by the cult of youth and physical perfection doesn’t want even to think about growing old. It prefers to dispose of the problem instead.

The NICE guidelines do not just expose the cold-blooded managerialism that has ripped the heart out of the health service. They also reveal a coarsening of our culture towards those who, despite deserving society’s very deepest protection and respect, are increasingly being ruthlessly abandoned.

Daily Mail, 2 May 2005

This is the crucial bit. It is only now that millions of people will be beginning to focus properly on the decision to be made in casting their vote on Thursday.

If the polls are to be believed, something mighty strange is about to happen on that day. The public believe in large numbers that Tony Blair is a liar, that the war in Iraq was a fraud, that immigration policy is an outrageous shambles, that violent crime is out of control and that health and education are in dire straits.

And yet the pollsters tell us that this same electorate is about to vote Labour back with a large majority, trouncing the Conservatives for an unprecedented third time in a row.

Such predictions surely need to be treated with some caution. There are so many variables in this election, all with unpredictable effects, that anything might happen.

More voters than ever before will only make up their minds at the last minute, having been round the electoral course many times only to reach no conclusion. If there were a box on the ballot paper marked ‘none of the above’, such a candidate would doubtless storm to victory.

This is the disaffection election. People vote when they are presented with a distinctive political vision which lets them hope for a better life for themselves and a more decent society. But this election has not been about hope. It’s been about defensiveness, damage limitation and knocking the other fellow.

This is the ultimate no-confidence election — illustrated almost comically by the two main parties vying with each other to play down their chances, both to get the vote out and to keep it firmly at home.

The Labour government has palpably lost confidence in the Blairite project itself. For all the dense verbiage in its ‘Little Red Book’ manifesto, the fact is that its vision of transforming society has gone belly-up and it doesn’t know why.

Education standards have disintegrated. Social mobility has gone into reverse with fewer disadvantaged children rising up the social ladder than before.

Billions have been poured into the NHS, only to be largely swallowed up in bureaucracy. Micro-management from Whitehall has transformed the aim of ensuring people don’t have to wait weeks for a GP’s appointment into the farcical situation — of which I have personal experience — where the only appointment people are told they can make is within the next 48 hours, but which they can’t make because they find all the phone lines are jammed at the time they are told to make the appointment.

For this no-confidence party, Tony Blair is the ultimate no-confidence leader. He is the leader who is not going to be leader, who will bow out at some unspecified time during the next Parliament.

Faced with this unnerved, incoherent and defensive government, the Conservative party has a vast open goal. But it too has played a largely defensive and negative game.

The key to the Blairite implosion is political control. It is only by removing politicians from the public services altogether that they will improve. Yet the Tories’ proposals on school discipline and clean hospitals merely tackle symptoms of the malaise, while their plans to increase taxes and spending guarantee that Whitehall’s grip on these services — whatever they say about ‘red tape ‘ — will remain.

And because they have presented no alternative overarching vision, everything they say — even on immigration, the one issue where their approach really is fundamental and distinctive — seems like opportunism.

The LibDems have made headway over Iraq. But their domestic policies don’t survive serious scrutiny, as the punitive nature of their local income tax plan embarrassingly revealed. As for the Tories’ attack on Blair as a liar, this merely reminds many voters that they think all politicians are liars. If people are presented with a set of self-cancelling negatives, why bother to vote?

Pressed on this yesterday, Mr Howard insisted that he was bringing hope. But specific policy proposals do not by themselves offer hope of a better society. That only comes from a vision that reflects a society’s deepest values.

The word that’s missing here is surely ‘aspiration’. People want to hear how they will be enabled to better themselves, how their children will be helped to rise out of disadvantage and that society will be run on the principles of fairness and just deserts. The great theme might well be ‘no-one left abandoned’.

Education is the crucial territory. The aim should be to end the scourge of rotten education that is holding children back, not only by freeing up the schools but by removing the political stranglehold of universities promoting lethal education theories. Why aren’t the Tories making more, much more, of the scandal of illiteracy and innumeracy in our schools?

‘No-one left abandoned’ would also mean new ways of organising the whole range of welfare services, so that patients or pensioners are no longer passive and helpless supplicants but people who, through social insurance systems, take responsibility and control over their own provision.

It would mean using tough love approaches to tackle moral disintegration by promoting family responsibility and a zero tolerance approach to drug taking, crime and disorder.

And it would also mean defending the nation’s ability to govern itself and to prevent it from abandoning its identity, which enables everyone to share in a national project of betterment rooted in ancient institutions and values.

This all forms the essence of progressive politics. Labour once stood for just this, when it believed in patriotism, meritocracy and the grammar schools. But it turned its back on progressive politics when it abandoned meritocracy for ‘levelling-down’, and when the left decided to attack democracy and the nation state in favour of supra-national institutions like the EU and ‘universal’ values like judge-made human rights.

In addition, because the welfare state created a culture of dependency and entitlement, a vicious cycle was created in which more the public demanded as their rights, the more politicians felt obliged to deliver — and the more they delivered, the more it went wrong and the more they tried to cover it up.

Labour pretends to be progressive, but in fact its agenda is one of social control, reducing the public to serfdom as more and more depend on the state for either work or welfare.

What’s needed is to take Neil Kinnock’s famous warning not to be old, poor or sick under the Tories and show that currently it is the old who are being abandoned by the inadequacies of state-run policing, the poor by state education and the sick by state health care.

But who will do so? Labour is the problem; the LibDems don’t understand what a problem is; and the Tories run away from the problem, because to tackle it means taking great political risks over such things as welfarism, Europe and the cult of public sentimentality.

The parties are thus reduced to platitudes because they will not articulate the passionate differences of opinion within our society about how it should be organised and where its place is in the wider world. With the exception of immigration, the impression is that they are dancing on the head of a pin while the great issues of our time remain unaddressed. There are three days left for the polticians to put this right.