Daily Mail, 27 June 2005

Throughout the great controversy over asylum-seekers, it has always been an article of faith that genuine refugees should be admitted to this country. The Huguenots, the Jews, the Ugandan Asians – Britain has often sheltered those who genuinely fear persecution. Yet Labour — of all governments — is now shamefully slamming the door on them.

The deportation of one such asylum-seeker, Crispen Kulingi, was stopped at the weekend at least temporarily after outraged protests from Labour MP Kate Hoey and others. For this man is the organising secretary and election co-ordinator for the Movement for Democratic Change opposition movement in Zimbabwe, and his proposed forced removal to neighbouring Malawi would almost certainly result in his being delivered into the tyrannical hands of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

Although the removal of Mr Kulingi has been halted, the government has refused to reverse its policy of deporting Zimbabweans to whom Britain has refused asylum, which has triggered hunger strikes by dozens of such asylum-seekers who are being held in detention.

This is a truly extraordinary situation. Britain appears either unable or unwilling to deport thousands of failed asylum-seekers who arrive here each year and simply vanish into Britain, many of them patent economic migrants from eastern Europe or elsewhere. And yet the very same immigration system appears to find no difficulty in rounding up Zimbabweans and forcibly removing them to a country that has descended into one of the most terrifying and brutal tyrannies on the planet.

This is sometimes being done with indecent trickery and haste. A number of Zimbabwean couples who were told that they had to retake their marriage vows in a British register office to prove that they were indeed married were promptly arrested at the ceremony along with their guests and sent back to Harare within hours.

Yet Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe is committing horrifying and systematic atrocities, with deliberate killings, physical assaults and the torture of political opponents. He has razed to rubble tens of thousands of homes and businesses in poor communities that provided the base for the political opposition to his regime — an operation which claimed the lives of two toddlers bulldozed along with these miserable shacks. These forced removals of people are being likened to the murderous clearances in Cambodia under Pol Pot.

At a meeting of G8 ministers on Thursday, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw expressed ‘profound concern’ about Zimbabwe and urged African leaders not to turn a blind eye to the actions of President Mugabe. Yet at the very same time that the Foreign Secretary is hectoring other countries for ignoring Mugabe’s tyrannical behaviour, the Home Secretary is sending political opponents of his regime back to face his fury.

Ministers claim that Zimbabweans will not be returned if the government believes their lives are at risk. The Immigration Minister Tony McNulty insisted that the government had received ‘no substantiated reports of abuse of any person returned to the country’.

But these are weasel words, since campaigners say that dozens of people who have been returned have simply disappeared — which means that by definition there cannot be any ‘substantiated reports of abuse’.

A number of Zimbabweans whom Britain has forcibly removed have been sent to Malawi — for reasons which are unclear, unless it is to pretend that they are not being sent back to Zimbabwe itself. But since Malawi has links with the Mugabe regime, several of these deportees have ended up in the hands of Mugabe's thugs anyway. Simon Phiri, an asylum seeker who was deported from Britain earlier this year, was picked up by the Zimbabwean authorities when his plane touched down in Malawi. His whereabouts now are unknown. No doubt Mr McNulty would regard his fate, too, as evidence of ‘no substantiated reports of abuse’.

The government doggedly maintains that these are not genuine refugees — by which it presumably means they do not conform to the criteria laid down by the Refugee Convention that they have a ‘well founded fear of persecution’.

It is pointed out that each of these asylum-seekers has been judged by an appeals tribunal not to be a genuine refugee. Of course, not everyone claiming to be a Zimbabwean refugee is what he or she purports to be.

But in the case of Mr Kulingi, it is hard to see how an immigration appeals tribunal could have come to this conclusion. He says he was tortured and left for dead before being transferred from hospital to a safe house, from where he fled Zimbabwe for the UK in 2003.

This account appears to have been corroborated from two sources. The Home Office was sent a letter from the MDC confirming Mr Kulingi's role in opposing Mugabe; Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, had even taken the unprecedented step of asking the British government not to send Mr Kulingi back. The Home Office was also aware that the US State Department had produced a report detailing what had happened to his family.

Days before the British government ordered his removal, bulldozers had razed his hometown district of Mabvuku, a hotbed of opposition to the Mugabe regime. Several of Mr Kulingi’s family lost their homes in the assault.

So how can the immigration tribunals be getting this so wrong? According to Kate Hoey, the system is so chaotic that decisions in general often appear to be arbitrary. People who are transparently not genuine refugees are being allowed in or disappear into the country, while others who have a well-founded claim are treated as bogus and detained.

Removals to Zimbabwe were stopped for a time because of the descent into tyranny; but last November the government resumed deportations after a two-year ban — presumably using the fiction that democracy was returning with last spring’s election, in order cynically to bump up its removal figures to quell the asylum controversy.

Now the government is frightened that ending forced removals will trigger another flood of asylum claims from Zimbabwe. But this is wholly unacceptable. It mean sending people back indiscriminately into Mugabe’s terror, regardless of whether or not they are genuine refugees, merely to stop more coming.

There is, however, a real dilemma here. Under the Refugee Convention, only those who are individually singled out for persecution are considered to be genuine refugees. But such is the random, even unhinged nature of the terror being unleashed upon Zimbabwe, the country is clearly unsafe for many more souls that would be covered by the terms of the Convention.

Moreover, given the paranoia of the regime it is likely that anyone returned from Britain will be regarded as a political opponent. In these circumstances, returning anyone is to turn a blind eye to terror.

The root of the problem, however, is that nothing is being done to address these crimes against humanity. We have a particular responsibility to Zimbabwe. Maybe for that reason we appear reluctant to face up to what has happened there.

Africa is now the focus of Tony Blair’s idealism. But the government sees it as the victim of white western colonialism, rather than facing the unpalatable truth of the horrors being wreaked by the end of colonialism in Zimbabwe— more than 20,000 people now burnt or bulldozed out of their homes, mass starvation and unspeakable terror.

The government was quick enough to intervene to end tyranny in Bosnia. What about making Zimbabwe’s tyranny history? What’s holding it back?

Daily Mail, 22 June 2005

Britain is sitting on an infertility time-bomb. A leading fertility expert, Professor Bill Ledger, has warned that within the next ten years the number of couples experiencing problems conceiving children is expected to double.

By 2015, he says, one in three couples may need fertility treatment. Low success rates from IVF mean soaring numbers will be left childless, with extra thousands going through this draining treatment at huge cost to the health service.

He blames this looming crisis on modern lifestyle factors such as delays in starting a family, obesity, falling sperm counts and rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases.

His warning compounds a deep and increasing anxiety about low fertility rates not just in Britain but across the whole of Europe and beyond. For many years, Britain and other European countries have experienced fertility rates at below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, the point at which a country’s population replaces itself over time.

This raises the spectre not just of an imbalance between the generations, with too few younger people to care for the rising numbers of the elderly. More urgently, it suggests a kind of cultural death wish, in which our society’s fundamental instinct to reproduce itself may be disappearing.

Certainly, Professor Ledger’s warning suggests a high rate of self-destructive behaviour which is undermining our ability to reproduce. Our hedonistic culture appears to have lost any sense of its collective and long-term interests. Instead, young women and men live in this affluent consumer society as if there is no tomorrow — and by doing so are helping ensure that is precisely what is increasingly coming to pass.

Sexual promiscuity, for example, has produced spiralling rates of chlamydia which have doubled over the past decade. Since the infertility it can cause is undetectable, it is only when women who have been infected by it decide to have children that they will find they are unable to do so.

Hardly surprisingly, abusing our bodies can play havoc with our reproductive systems as well as with the rest of our health. Smoking increases infertility in both men and women, and obesity can mean women have trouble ovulating or conceiving naturally.

As for declining sperm rates, no-one seems very sure about the extent or the reasons for this. There may be a variety of factors. But since cannabis is known to decrease sperm production, it does not take a genius to work out that our current cannabis free-for-all is likely to be making its own dismal contribution to this growing problem.

But the most significant factor appears to be the change in the behaviour of young women who are putting off motherhood until they are in their thirties or even forties. This is because their aspirations and the way they think about children have fundamentally changed.

In previous eras, as is still the case in less developed societies today, children were seen as a vital necessity — to earn income for the family or look after their parents. But in our industrialised, highly individualistic welfare states, children have turned from a necessity into an obstacle to adult self-realisation. And the people for whom they are principally seen as an obstacle are their potential mothers.

As a result, women no longer think their interests revolve around children. They might like to have one or two but only as an adjunct to lives that are much more interesting and fulfilling centred around work, playing the sexual field and generally having a good time.

So children are pushed to the back of the queue. At same time, playing the sexual field has destroyed the old bargain by which a man committed himself to be a father in exchange for a sexual relationship with a faithful woman. So when women finally start looking for men to play their part of that bargain, they find to their immense astonishment and dismay that they are thin on the ground.

All this means motherhood is being delayed with the gloomy consequences spelled out by Professor Ledger. He has suggested that if Britain made it easier for women to take time off work to have children, they would not put off motherhood for so long. In France, he says, the number of women seeking fertility treatment declined after the government started offering tax breaks to younger women who took time off work to have children.

That may be so. But the difficulty of combining work and family is not the full explanation for declining fertility rates.

According to UN figures, every European country — including France — has fertility levels which, although they fluctuate, are below the 2.1 replacement rate.

The even lower rates in Italy and Spain have led some to conclude that the problem lies in traditional societies where men are still the breadwinners and there is minimal help for working mothers. Faced with the choice between having children and staying at home or going to work and not having children, Italian and Spanish women are doing without the children. To reverse the decline, it is argued, countries need to pour in the kind of help for working mothers seen in countries like France, Sweden or Iceland.

In fact, these countries generously help all families, not just working mothers —unlike Britain, where middle income, married couples with the mother staying at home are fiscally penalised.

But state family support cannot be the whole explanation because in the US, the fertility level is 2.08, significantly higher than even the most fertile Europeans. Yet the US does not even provide full medical cover let alone the same kind of generous maternity leave and wide social safety net that most of Europe enjoys.

So there must be another reason for the higher US birth rate. The most likely explanation surely indicates in turn why Europe’s fertility rates are failing. America is an optimistic society that believes in itself and thinks it has a future. It is also a religious society, which despite its conspicuous economic consumption still adheres in large measure to a sense of a shared community of moral, spiritual and patriotic precepts.

As a result, America loves its children and invests in them — not through state largesse, but in the far more important sense that it wants to hand down its values to subsequent generations.

Much of Europe, by contrast, is now a troubled continent with a galloping identity crisis caused by mass immigration and a desire to obliterate its bedrock values. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Britain, a ruthlessly self-centred, irreligious society devoted to the cult of instant gratification. Who can be surprised, therefore, that it is now so hostile to children?

Moreover, the fact that Britain’s fertility rate is not as low as others masks the fact that fewer babies are being born to married couples and more and more into households with no committed father — and communities of broken families are broken communities.

In the short term, because of the overall number of young people, Britain’s population is not forecast to fall. But if these fertility trends continue, this society will eventually die out.

To keep going, it will have to replace its babies by mass immigration from countries where fertility remains untouched by the ravages of modernity. In short, our infertility rate is a warning that unless we start investing in families we are on a course of cultural self-destruction.

Talk to Patrons' Club, Witney Conservative Association, 16 June 2005

I’d like to share with you my thoughts about the current political situation arising from the general election, the referendums in France and the Netherlands, and the Tory leadership contest. And I’d like to start with that relaxed, calm, laid-back and focused conversation that the Conservatives are presently conducting with themselves.

They are asking each other why they lost the election and how best to reposition the party. Many say that radical change is necessary. But what kind of change? No-one seems to know.

Rival versions are being offered of what the electorate was actually saying. The party was too nasty; the party was not nasty enough. It should have talked even more about immigration; it should have talked much more about schools and hospitals. It should have clearly stated it would cut taxes; it should have done much more to reassure people that it could be trusted not to destroy the public services. Above all, it still doesn’t reflect the way society has changed — the party is not black enough, not gay enough, not serially-partnered enough.

To me, this is a bit like trying to devise the perfect menu without first working out whether it’s for a barbecue, brunch or formal banquet.

In other words, the Tories don’t know what they are for. They appear to be suffering from a profound identity crisis — one that is based on their inability or refusal to understand what is happening to our society. Without properly understanding what is going on around them, they cannot hope to correctly decide how to react to it, let alone sell it to the public.

They have to go back to first principles and decide what conservatism actually is. Now, there are many interpretations of conservatism, but it seems that a conventional understanding is that it stands for a small state, the defence of liberty and low taxation. But I think this misses a very important factor. To me, conservatism is not so much a discrete ideology or philosophy as a state of mind.

Edmund Burke is said to be the founding father of conservatism. Actually, he was not a conservative as such. He was in fact a liberal. He was only called a conservative because he saw need to defend — to ‘conserve’ — the values and traditions of liberty from the totalitarian impulses of the French Revolution which threatened to destroy the foundations of this liberal society.

Since then, much of the raison d’ètre of conservatism has been the defence of what is valued in our society against attack. For much of the 20th century, this comprised a defence against communism, or socialism. This defence was a constant understanding, although it certainly waxed and waned as the encroachments of socialism became so widely accepted that even the Tories no longer perceived them as a threat. The Butskellite Tories, for example, went along with the encroachments of the welfare state, a tradition sharply broken by Mrs Thatcher who freed the country from the power of the trade unions and started to privatise the public services.

The problem was that even under Mrs Thatcher the Tories viewed everything through an almost exclusively economic prism. They were very slow to acknowledge the erosion of the very fabric of society that was inexorably taking place through the ideologies that consumed education and kicked away the props from beneath the traditional family. They were therefore totally unprepared to grasp what still needed to be done once their economic platform stopped being a distinctive Tory cause.

Mrs Thatcher demonstrably galvanised the party and gave it a sense of purpose by having a very clear vision of what she was against and what she was for. She was the slayer of the dragon of state control of the economy. And crucially, she offered voters hope — hope of restoring Britain to greatness, hope of a better future for individuals and their families; and she spelled out the way in which she was going to deliver on that promise of hope. For without hope, why should people support a politician? Why should they vote for a party unless they believe that it offers hope of mending what needs to be broken and changing things for the better?

The problem was that once that particular dragon was slain, the Tories no longer knew what they were for. Communism went down the tubes, and with the final vanquishing of this great historic enemy the Tories’ raison d’ètre seemed to vanish. Tony Blair abolished Clause Four and embraced the market; and the great cry went up from the Tories that ‘he’s parked his tanks on our lawn’. And they’ve remained paralysed by that perception ever since. Blair’s stolen all our best tunes, they wail. He talks like a Tory. He looks like a Tory. And so their only room for manoeuvre has been to claim — with justification — that he’s a bogus Tory: he puts taxes up by stealth, he’s all talk and no delivery, he’s a liar, and so forth. Much of this may be true; but such a position means the Tories remain fixated by Blair and allow him to set the agenda which they can only lamely follow. They allow themselves to be defined by what he is doing rather than setting out their own vision. They don’t have a vision to set out any more because they think he’s stolen it.

This is the great error that the Tories are making. They have failed to grasp that the battleground has changed. The great divisions of our time are no longer economic. Everyone now buys the market. The economic battle has been won. But there is another, even more lethal war being fought below the Tories’ radar. This is what has been called the culture war, an all-out assault which has been going on for at least half a century upon the norms and traditions of western society and the very concept of the nation state.

On the great battleground issues of family, education and social order, the networks of formal and informal legal and social sanctions that restrain behaviour in the interests of others have been progressively dismantled. They have been supplanted by a culture of ‘rights’, in which groups designating themselves as marginalised or oppressed by the majority demand equal status and the end of moral ‘judgmentalism’. The family has been attacked by the doctrine that alternative lifestyles are of equal value to heterosexual marriage. Anti-social, harmful or illegal behaviour such as drug-taking or under-age sex is either tolerated or even promoted. The education system has been emptied of knowledge, with an explicit animosity towards teaching British political history and transmitting the values of the nation. The very idea of a majoritarian culture, intrinsic to the identity of the nation, is now deemed to be racist. The only legitimate society is considered to be multicultural. And political correctness means that this repudiation of majority values cannot be questioned.

It is no accident that this culture war, which has been under way for several decades, accelerated as communism started to enter its death throes. The political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was an icon of the sixties generation that now controls our establishment and defines our culture, wrote that the workers would never rise up and overthrow western capitalism. Economics would never be the weapon that would destroy the west. Instead, he proposed a steady infiltration and takeover of all the institutions of society — the universities, media, schools, civil service, legal profession — so that the values of that society could be replaced by the transgressive values of those who lived on its margins. So it has proved. Gramsci’s blueprint has been followed to the letter.

At the root of this cultural onslaught is the desire to control people by knocking away the props that make people free. The family is one of the principal props, and the nation state itself is another. Both of these are linked: the particular form of the western family, the monogamous married couple, is the bedrock of the democratic nation state. One of the deepest divisions now in our world is between the defenders of the nation — the idea that a people is entitled to express shared cultural, religious and legal traditions based on a nation’s history — and those who think by contrast that the nation state is the principal cause of war and prejudice in the world and so should be replaced by supra-national institutions such as the EU, UN, international law or human rights doctrine enforced by supra-national courts, all of which embody values which represent a universally applicable concept of the good and therefore can never be challenged by opposing national values.

Which brings me back to Tony Blair. For the doctrines that I’ve just been talking about are all espoused by Mr Blair. He believes passionately in universal values imposed by supra-national institutions. He believes in the corrupted idea of tolerance under which ‘judgmentalism’ is a form of prejudice. He believes in a global utopia where the mere application of reason (embodied by himself) eradicates all prejudice and ends all human conflict— and which brooks no opposition. For how can there be any opposition to moral perfection? That’s why, as he has often said, his aim is not just to defeat the Conservative party but to destroy conservatism for all time. In other words, Mr Blair is not a conservative at all. He is the modern equivalent of the French revolutionary Jacobins. His tanks are not parked on the Tory lawn. On the contrary, his guns are pointing straight at the Tories and all other dissidents. And yet the Tories are forever trying to clamber up alongside Mr Blair on his own gun-turrets and start firing in the same direction themselves.

Meanwhile, others can see at least part of this picture very clearly. While the Tories pussyfoot about on Europe, too terrified to speak up in case the Today programme is nasty to them or their own superannuated big Eurobeasts start growling, the peoples of Europe have left them behind. The revolt against the EU constitution is of the greatest significance, particularly in the Netherlands where people have realised that their way of life is under attack from the opening up of borders and the denial of national destiny.

This is a tremendous opportunity for the Tories to come out of the EU closet and say very clearly that the EU should now become no more than an economic association of independent trading nations — or else Britain should come out of the EU altogether. Because this is not just a fight against Chirac, Shroeder and Juncker, not just an argument about feather-bedded French farmers, but a struggle to defend democracy against an oppressive, anti-democratic bureaucracy that was created specifically in order to destroy the power of the nation state.

Moreover, the Tories should say, this should not be seen in isolation. The democratic nation state is under attack from both without and within. That means standing four-square with the US in the great fight to save the free world from the jihad declared against it (the party’s wholly opportunistic squirming over Iraq was not only disreputable but revealed the palpable vacuum in its thinking). It means taking back power for democracy from the EU and from unaccountable human rights lawyers; it means opposing multiculturalism, the proper context for ending Labour’s undeclared policy of mass immigration; and it means taking emergency remedial action to shore up the family, principally by ending incentives to cohabitation.

This last suggestion tends to be resisted by most of the current Tory leadership, on the basis that it is either too divisive or that what the party needs to do before it can gain power is to make itself appear ‘reasonable’ rather than extremist. To which I would make two points. First, unless the Tories say what they think is right, because they think it is right, they will get nowhere. Voters can sniff out politicians who are not being true to their own principles from a long way off. And that matters. People will only support politicians they trust, and politicians who stick by a set of consistent principles, if necessary against the scorn and insults of salon society, win plaudits even from those who disagree. The secret of George W Bush’s success, after all, is that voters know exactly where he is coming from because everything he says hangs together.

The second point is that the Tories need to reclaim the language of morality from the left which has hijacked it and corrupted it beyond recognition. The Tories have allowed the left to redefine the intolerable as tolerance, to destroy authority by confusing it with authoritarianism and to redefine compassion according to the inverted and amoral logic of victim culture which has destroyed the concepts of duty and responsibility by excusing damaging behaviour on the grounds that all lifestyles are morally equal. Such nihilism is the polar opposite of the reasonable status to which it is ascribed by the left. It is not reasonable for children to be abandoned to the emotional chaos of serial parenting. It is not reasonable to connive at the unlawful sexual abuse and exploitation of children by providing contraception or abortions to children below the age of consent. It is not reasonable to promote brain damage and addiction among young people by reclassifying cannabis as a less dangerous drug. It is not reasonable, in short, for a political party to promote or condone lifestyles which damage the vulnerable and leave a trail of personal damage and social chaos. It is the very opposite of the progressive instinct to build a better society — without which ‘modernisation’ becomes something out of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

In conclusion, we know that people are dangerously disaffected by all politics. They believe that it is irrelevant to their lives, that politicians don’t speak their language and that in any event they are powerless to make any difference. They are right. Politicians are powerless because so much power has drained away from Parliament – to the EU, to human rights lawyers, to supra-national institutions. And all parties now say very similar things, all chasing the same agendas thrown up by the focus groups — made up of the very people who disdain such opportunistic pandering to popular demand.

People want to be given hope of a change to a better world for themselves and their families. Unless politicians offer a genuine sense of purpose they will get nowhere. But it is not enough to agree on the need for such a sense of purpose. Tony Blair, after all, has a sense of purpose, but it is one which is transforming Britain in ways which do not support human flourishing. Yet through the force of inertia, the public will not vote for another party unless it offers a real alternative.

That alternative is obvious — a defence of the nation and its values against all the forces that threaten their demise. That is the agenda now for progressive politics in Britain.

Daily Mail, 20 June 2005

Not since the Greek god Zeus turned himself into a swan in order to seduce the unsuspecting Leda has there been such an astounding makeover.

This week, the Prime Minister will appeal to European opinion over the heads of ‘Old Europe’ to support his plan to use Britain’s six-month presidency of the EU, which begins next week, to reform its sclerotic institutions. This follows last week’s astonishing scenes where the row with France’s President Chirac over his attempt to bounce Britain into scrapping its rebate produced what has been described as the worst crisis in the EU’s history.

Backed by the Netherlands, Sweden and other small nations, the Prime Minister refused to make concessions on the rebate unless this was linked to reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Now, in a petulant display of bullying, France is threatening to sabotage both Britain’s EU presidency and its hosting of next month’s G8 summit. So it’s war.

You have to pinch yourself to realise that this crisis has been precipitated by Tony Blair who, with pennants streaming, has ridden out at the head of this epic battle against Old Europe. This is the Tony Blair who, as the true European believer, was an evangelist for the euro, ditched dozens of British vetoes in the treaties of Amsterdam and Nice and only a few short weeks ago was proclaiming the merits of the very EU constitution the demise of which he is now busy exploiting.

Overnight, it seems, the greatest political cross-dresser of all time has once again stolen his opponents’ clothes and reinvented himself. Gone is the lame duck Prime Minister stumbling from one debacle to another. Suddenly he has turned into Mrs Thatcher, Henry V and the Duke of Wellington rolled into one, to fight to the death the ancient enemy of France and pose as leader of a dynamic New Europe to spread the faith of the free market and rescue the people from an oppressive and antedeluvian bureaucracy.

Now this fervent pro-European has got Eurosceptics purring in approval. Whatever one thinks about Mr Blair’s principles, even his most implacable enemies would surely have to agree that he is a politician of rare genius as well as of uncommon luck.

It was luck that delivered him the ‘no’ votes by France and the Netherlands, thus removing the danger of a British referendum delivering an even louder ‘no’. It was a stroke of genius, however, instantly to recognise the opportunity this gave him to reinvent himself as the slayer of the lumbering EU dragon.

So what are we to make of this dramatic change of direction? It is hardly the first time, after all, that Mr Blair has performed a European volte face. When he first became an MP in the 1980s he was anti-Europe — as were the majority in the Labour party.

It was only later on, when Labour sought to shed its extremist image and looked around for a new set of radical clothes — which were tailor-made for it by Jacques Delors, who cast the EU as the defender of social justice against the ostensible ravages of Thatcherism — that Mr Blair and his party became as stridently in favour of the EU as they had once been against.

So might Mr Blair once again be changing his views to suit changing political circumstances?

It would be a very great mistake to imagine that Mr Blair has suddenly turned into a Eurosceptic. He remains as fervent a believer in the European project as he ever was. But one has to understand what that project means to him, and why the opportunity that has now presented itself to him is so important.

He has always believed that Britain should be at the very heart of Europe so that it might lead it and shape it in its own image and interests. The fact that such a proposed coup against the Franco-German axis that has always run Europe betrayed extraordinary hubris and self-delusion never deterred him.

That is why, despite being regularly outmanoeuvred by France in negotiation after negotiation, he kept coming back like a punch-drunk boxer for yet more punishment.

Now, however, the French and Dutch referendums have presented him with a golden opportunity for a palace revolution, to assemble a rival power base to knock France and Germany off their European perch — and replace the sclerotic EU economy with a British-style market model, on the basis that by their ‘no’ votes the peoples of Europe have sent a clear message that the old order has to change.

But like so much about Mr Blair, this thinking betrays a fundamental muddle and distortion. There were many different reasons for the ‘no’ votes, but two of the most powerful run directly opposite to what Mr Blair believes. French voters did not vote against sclerotic EU economics. On the contrary, inefficient French farmers love the subsidy provided by the CAP. What they objected to was the very market economics which they associate with Britain, which they falsely blame for their own economic woes.

What these voters also objected to, particularly in the Netherlands, was the political aspect of the EU which is destroying national identity and self-government by its multicultural, homogenising, one-size-fits-all approach. In other words, they were asserting the right of a nation state to govern itself in accordance with the views of its own people— the process known as democracy.

But now look at what Mr Blair is proposing in his palace revolution. He wants to replace the CAP by the market —but doesn’t utter a word about taking back power over our own laws. Instead, he has talked about ’getting round’ the no votes against the constitution, from which one might infer he will use the EU presidency to work out ways to impose many of its provisions by stealth — no doubt with the assistance of the black arts deployed by EU commissioner Peter Mandelson.

On Thursday, he will reportedly reassert his European credentials by emphasising that he believes in a strong ‘social model’ for Europe, which is why he signed Britain up to the social chapter of the Maastricht treaty and introduced the national minimum wage.

In other words, far from the Eurosceptic position that the EU should simply become a trading alliance of self-governing European states and junk the political union at the core of the project, Mr Blair remains a true believer in creating a pan-European government that tells member states what to do. He simply wants to control it so that he tells them what to do.

In the fight to defend democracy from supra-national institutions that undermine national parliaments, Mr Blair is still firmly on the wrong side. He talks about reconnecting with the public who, he says, want to modernise the EU. But the institution whose raison d’etre is to obliterate the democratic expression of the different peoples of Europe cannot reconnect with them. It can only alienate them.

Mr Blair is a man of many missions. His new mission, it seems, is to save Europe from itself. Now he faces a torrid six months fighting with the implacably hostile France and Germany — but on a battleground that is built on quicksand.

Daily Mail, 13 June 2005

Here we go again. It’s the hunting ban in a new guise -- but this time those being relentlessly targeted are not toffs in red coats but people who express prohibited ideas.

For the third time, the government aims to pass a law against incitement to religious hatred. This oppressive measure was previously blocked by objections from a cross-section of horrified parliamentarians, who rightly saw it as an assault on a fundamental democratic tradition.

Peers condemned it as ‘an attack on free speech’, ‘sweepingly broad’ and a ‘straightjacket on the freedom of expression’. Yet despite its double rejection, the government is now threatening to use the Parliament Act to ram it through.

The lethal absurdity of this bill was underlined by the recent case in which a child was systematically attacked by members of an African Christian sect who thought she was a witch. Yet because the religious hatred bill fails to define religion or religious belief, it would give protection to extremist cults and sects — including those which believe in beating children to drive out demons — and anyone who attacked such a cult might be jailed for up to seven years.

The ostensible purpose of this bill is to give religions the same protection afforded to Jews and Sikhs, who are defined as racial groups and so are covered by the law against incitement to racial hatred.

In fact, this offence is rarely used because its curb on free speech is considered to be so draconian. But in any event, the comparison is a false one. Attacking people on account of their race is to attack what they are. Attacking people on account of their religion is to attack what they think. The former is an uncivilised attack on our common humanity. The latter is an integral part of debate in a liberal democracy.

Religions are ideas which routinely arouse hatred by followers of one faith against another — and sometimes against their own co-religionists —or between atheists and believers. If the hatred aroused by religion is criminalised, religious debate will be suppressed.

Home Office minister Paul Goggins has claimed the bill will not stop people poking fun at religion or causing offence. But it criminalises threats, abuse and insult where these may stir up religious hatred — and insulting religion merges seamlessly into causing people to hate that religion. The bill therefore will indeed turn the giving of offence into an offence.

In Australia, a similar law has resulted in the conviction of two Christian pastors, one of whom had previously been forced to flee death threats in Pakistan after he refused to convert to Islam. Their offence was to conduct a seminar in which they quoted critically but correctly from the Koran.

Our government claims that its own bill sets a higher bar than the Australian law for any conviction. But the Australian example could well happen here, since the definition of when insult turns into hatred is wholly subjective and at the whim of whoever is interpreting the law.

Trying to prevent religious hatred from being expressed would effectively criminalise much of literature, including the New Testament and the Koran. The blasphemy law, which protects only Christianity and has largely fallen into disuse, should be repealed, not effectively extended in this back-door way.

The Government claims that the bill is necessary to close a legal loophole exploited by neo-Nazi groups which get away with targeting Muslims because the law does not cover religious groups.

Of course Muslims and others should be protected against violence and intimidation. But there are already laws to deal with incitement to violence. Moreover, the courts interpret the term racial hatred broadly enough to include attacks couched in the name of religion where this is being used to target individuals for attack.

Next, ministers say the bill will only protect believers against attack, not insulate beliefs themselves against criticism. But the government itself muddles the two. Home Office guidance to the bill’s previous version said a prosecution might be triggered, for example, 'in response to an extreme racist organisation widely distributing material setting out a range of insulting and highly inflammatory reasons for hating Islam'.

In any event, we already have laws to protect religion. When a BNP organiser put up a poster with a picture of the Twin Towers in flames and the legend ‘Islam out of Britain— protect the British people’, he was convicted and fined for a threatening, abusive or insulting action motivated by hatred of a racial or religious group.

So why is the government going to these extraordinary lengths? The answer is that it is trying to appease the Muslim community which has been pressing for such a law for years. Ministers are desperate to win back votes by Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims which were lost over the Iraq war, and also because they think that if they give the most extremist Muslims whatever they want this will quell Islamist rage against Britain and the west.

That is why, in a grovelling article in Muslim News before the last election, the then energy minister Mike O’Brien boasted of all the measures the government had introduced at Muslim request, including the religious hatred law. That is why, in a pre-election letter to all mosques Home Secretary Charles Clarke apologised for the failure to get this law through Parliament and blamed it on the opposition parties.

If it is now passed, it will shut down legitmate and vital debate about Islam. Months ago I asked the newly knighted Sir Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, whether he thought that any public statements about Islamic terrorism, or any speculation about the number of Muslims in Britain who might support Islamic terrorism, would constitute incitement to religious hatred. He replied: 'There is no such thing as an Islamic terrorist. This is deeply offensive. Saying Muslims are terrorists would be covered by this provision'.

Ministers have brushed aside this threat to suppress any criticism of Islamist terrorism, saying that since the Attorney-General’s consent is required for any such prosecution such a threat is empty. But who can have any confidence that the government would stand firm? Indeed, look at who is now the Attorney’s deputy, the Solicitor-General — none other than the same Mike O’Brien who wrote the Muslim News article, and who has now compromised the political independence of the law officers by openly expressing his support for the religious hatred bill at a conference last week.

The disturbing fact is that, had this law been on the statute book when Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, he might well have been prosecuted for incitement to religious hatred rather than being protected by the British police against the fatwa to murder him.

Even without any prosecutions, writers and performers will simply censor themselves through fear — as ministers have admitted is their aim. This law will generate rather then suppress religious hatred and will set group against group in a decibel auction of denunciation. It will, in short, usher in the British Inquisition, and threaten that hard-won freedom for which so many Britons have died.

Spectator, 10 June 2005

Since the intensification of the Palestinian jihad five years ago, Britain and Europe have been convulsed by an eruption of virulent anti-Jewish hatred based on systematic lies, libels and demonisation directed at Israel by the media and intelligentsia.

Still reading? Well done. Others will no doubt already have thrown this article across the room in disgust. For conventional wisdom has it that there has been no upsurge of anti-Jewish hatred, only legitimate attacks on Israel which are being labelled anti-Jewish prejudice by those who are either suffering from advanced paranoia or are Zionist zealots attempting to sanitise the crimes of Ariel Sharon.

Now, however, agreement that hatred of Jews is indeed umbilically linked to the current attack upon Israel has emerged from a most unlikely quarter. In France, everyday violence and intimidation has left French Jews in a state of siege.

Yet two weeks ago, the French appeal court in Versailles ruled that in a comment piece published by Le Monde in 2002 entitled ‘Israel-Palestine: The Cancer,’ the paper was guilty of ‘racial defamation ‘against the Jewish people. In other words, under cover of an attack upon Israel in language which is replicated every week in Britain and Europe, the most prestigious newspaper in France had been whipping up hatred of the Jews.

The appeal court ruled that the article, written by a well-known sociologist, a university lecturer and a member of the European Parliament, contained comments that ‘targeted a whole nation, or a religious group in its quasi-globality’.

The article was the usual farrago of untruths, libels and distortions about Israel. It described it as ‘oppressing and asphyxiating the Palestinian population’, repeated the lie about the massacre of Jenin that never was, and claimed that Israel was imposing apartheid beneath the shroud of the Holocaust.

In particular, the court singled out two paragraphs which explicitly defamed the Jewish people as a whole:

‘It is hard to imagine that a nation of fugitives born of a people who have been subjected to the longest persecution in the history of humanity…should be capable, in the space of two generations, of transforming themselves into a people sure of themselves and dominating (of others) and, with the exception of an admirable minority, a scornful people that takes satisfaction in humiliating others…’

‘The Jews of Israel, descended of an apartheid [sic] named the ghetto, are ghettoizing the Palestinians. The Jews, who were the victims of a pitiless order are imposing their pitiless order on the Palestinians. The Jewish victims of inhumanity are displaying a terrible inhumanity. The Jews, scapegoats for every evil, are "scapegoating" Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, made responsible for attacks that they prevent them from preventing.’

Le Monde, which is now appealing to the highest court in France, merely sniffs in lofty disdain. The ruling took these remarks out of context, said one of the paper’s lawyers; of course these authors were not anti-Jewish. Some of their meilleurs amis, no doubt, are Jews.

In fact, these two paragraphs provided the rhetorical climax to the article’s group libel against Israel and thus explicitly associated what it so delightfully called ‘the chosen people’ with ‘plunder, gratuitous destruction, homicides, executions’.

One might have expected such a momentous ruling pronouncing Le Monde guilty of racial prejudice against the Jews to have made waves. Not a bit of it. The French have ignored it. The case was only brought to light by the Middle East commentator Tom Gross in the Wall Street Journal Europe, who asked why nothing had been written about it anywhere a week after the ruling. Following his article, the Guardian belatedly ran a story.

The media has been silent because the same kind of calumnies are routinely published and broadcast in Britain and throughout Europe: obsessively disproportionate and libellous coverage which equates Israel with the Nazis, misrepresents its defence against terror as brutal aggression, and singles out the Jewish people in their ancient and restored nation state as uniquely unworthy of self-determination.

So should those who are deeply concerned by the rise in prejudice and violence towards Jews provoked by this perversity be able to take similar action? In Britain, only individuals, not peoples or nations, can seek the civil redress provided by the libel laws. So should we too have a crime of racial defamation?

Well, no. For heartening as it is to see a public body at last calling this prejudice by its proper name, the case against Le Monde also provokes unease. Racial prejudice is hateful and should be exposed as such. But this should be done at the bar of public opinion, not in a court of law.

It was only through a procedural quirk of this particular case that Le Monde was required merely to pay notional damages; since racial defamation is a crime, its editor and writers could have gone to prison. It is surely oppressive to jail anyone for their opinion.

The courts are a blunt instrument, and using them to suppress free speech is deeply troubling. Our draconian libel laws already stifle much necessary expression, and anti-discrimination laws are in danger of demonising half the population for being either racists or every kind of phobe.

Incitement to violence is a crime that should be prosecuted. But hatred and prejudice are subjective concepts and so can easily be used to suppress legitimate expression.

We already have a law against incitement to racial hatred, and the government proposes to introduce a new crime of incitement to religious hatred. The latter will criminalise legitimate and necessary criticism of religion, while the former is so problematic that it is scarcely used.

If political views that promote anti-Jewish or other racist hatred were banned, so too must all literary anti-Jewish and racist stereotypes be banned, which would mean censoring much of English literature, not to mention the New Testament and the Koran.

What is hateful and prejudiced to one person may be legitimate comment to another. The way to deal with prejudice is surely through the public pillory, naming and shaming and countering it with the truth. In other words, far from suppressing expression the remedy is to open up debate.

The problem, though, is that the media refuses to do this over Israel because the prejudice is omnipresent. This is why ‘blogs’ — website comment spots — are becoming increasingly important to bust the monopoly of the mainstream media and subject its bias and prejudice on any subject to systematic exposure, deconstruction and opprobrium.

Racist expression poses an acute dilemma for a liberal society. Its effects are noxious; its antidotes may be muted. But suppressing it just drives it underground. If hearts and minds are to be won, prejudice has to be fought in the open on the battlefield of ideas.

Daily Mail, 9 June 2005

Now she tells us!

Our most eminent and influential public policy thinker, Baroness Warnock, is about to publish a report which calls for a fundamental re-thinking of the policy of inclusion, under which children with physical or emotional difficulties are taught in mainstream schools alongside everyone else. She describes the implementation of this policy and the consequent removal of such pupils from special schools as a ‘disastrous legacy’.

So it is. The problem, however, is that it is her own disastrous legacy. For it was Mary Warnock who, in the early 1980s, laid down the principle that all children, however disabled or emotionally damaged they might be, should be taught in mainstream schools.

It was a policy which created a classroom revolution — one which has caused chaos and misery for countless thousands of children and their teachers and made many schools all but ungovernable. Children with special problems require specialised teaching and attention. Yet the specialist help they once received has been all but destroyed, leaving these most vulnerable children all but abandoned and schools in general unable to cope.

So what does the architect of this catastrophe now have to say? ‘Governments must come to recognise that, even if inclusion is an ideal for society in general, it may not always be an ideal for school’, she says. But it was Lady Warnock herself who told governments that inclusion was the ideal for schools.

She now condemns the system of statementing disadvantaged pupils, which led to vast numbers of children being inappropriately classified as ‘special needs’. This bureaucratic racket saw schools all too eager to ‘statement’ children because every special needs child brought in extra cash. Now Lady Warnock tells us that this ‘turned out to be not a very bright idea’.

How many of Lady Warnock’s many other contributions to our national life might she now similarly decide to inform us have turned out to be ‘not very bright ideas’?

For this is by no means the first time this immensely influential individual has changed her formidably brilliant mind about matters of fundamental importance to us all. In 1994, she was on the House of Lords committee which unanimously opposed legalising euthanasia. Yet in recent years she says she has changed her mind, and not only supports making euthanasia legal but was fully aware that her incurably ill husband, Geoffrey, accepted the help of a family doctor to take lethal doses of morphine in order to end his life.

In 1984, as the author of the Warnock Report which shaped Britain's fertility laws, she supported a total ban on human cloning. Three years ago, however, she suddenly announced that she favoured human cloning in certain circumstances, such as male infertility.

So on what other issues might she now change her mind? Is it not deeply alarming that a person who has played such a seminal role in literally changing the culture of this country should turn out to be such a flake?

She has been at the heart of the most controversial and momentous changes to our medical values. Whenever the government had a controversial medical ethical dilemma it sent for Mary Warnock. On embryo research, she was the biddable philosopher who could be relied upon to subordinate everything, including respect for human life itself, to the wishes of self-centred individuals and governments keen to use medical experimentation to boost the gross national product.

For it was Lady Warnock who actually triggered embryo research, after the committee which she headed on fertility treatment shifted the definition of an embryo in order to allow it to be experimented upon for up to 14 days after conception. Might she now change her mind over this, perhaps, and agree with the vast majority of individuals on this planet that an embryo is created not at her completely arbitrary point but at conception?

But then on issue after issue, Lady Warnock has made a devastating contribution towards unravelling our society’s essential humanity and has helped destroy any intrinsic respect for human life.

For her, the end has always justified the means. Accordingly, she views early human life as eminently disposable and even sees nothing wrong in harvesting eggs from dead foetuses. Moral scruple is dismissed as the ravings of religious freaks. All that matters is that someone else might benefit.

Over the years, she has effectively set herself up as the country’s national arbiter of which kind of human beings should be allowed to live and which must be sentenced to die – ranging from handicapped babies to patients who are in a persistent vegetative state.

In an unabashed echo of eugenic thinking, she has declared that some lives are more worth living than others — and of course it follows that she knows which ones fall into which category. Only last week she called for rules which would ensure that the majority of the most premature babies do not survive.

On pitiless planet Warnock, human beings are no longer thought to have any value as soon as they become unhealthy and dependent — a universe in which only the whole and healthy seem to qualify as human beings worthy of respect.

Accordingly, her support for euthanasia has gone far beyond endorsing people’s ‘right’ to expect doctors to end their lives. It was instead, she said, the duty of people to kill themselves — not only if they were terminally ill, but merely frail — in order not to be a burden to others.

It is a world view, moreover, which is blind to its own hubris. There is tremendous danger, Lady Warnock once mused – in a rare moment of self-knowledge - in thinking there are moral experts who know what is right. Yet she has spent her entire career telling the rest of us what is right – including when she decides that she is wrong.

Her thinking is not merely removed from the experience and values of mainstream people whose behaviour is anchored in the moral codes of our culture. Lady Warnock actually holds such people in contempt. Thus she sneered at Mrs Thatcher's ‘odious suburban gentility’, for it is the suburban middle classes (the epitome of moral and social order) who are looked down upon with unbridled snobbery and contempt.

But what Lady Warnock has always seemed most passionately to despise is religion, the bedrock of the values she has done so much to undermine. Since she is clearly much given to recantation, may we now urge her to finish the job and declare that she now believes in God?

Lady Warnock is a preposterous figure who in the pages of a Dickens or Swift would have been immortalised as one of the comic monsters of our literary heritage. As it is, she has played a monstrous part in helping destroy our moral and social heritage. She is surely one of the most titanic and dangerous egos of our troubled age.

So humility is not a word in her lexicon. Having changed her mind on school inclusion, she has not learned the obvious lesson that getting it so wrong might just have destroyed her credibility. Instead, she now presumes to tell us with the same absolute certainty to do precisely the opposite.

A period of silence from this particular quarter is now surely in order.