Daily Mail, 28 July 2005

While Britain is divided over the most appropriate way to deal with the terrorist threat, the nation’s First Couple appear themselves to be on opposing sides of the argument.

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister voiced his frustration with the judiciary for using human rights law to prevent the deportation of terror suspects and sympathisers.

Yet at virtually the same moment, Mrs Blair was telling a conference of lawyers in Malaysia that human rights had to be preserved, and that the courts had to act as ‘guardians of the weakest, poorest and most marginalised members of society against the hurly-burly of majoritarian politics’.

Mr Blair specifically attacked the Law Lords’ ruling that the detention without trial of foreign terrorist suspects was unlawful. But Mrs Blair specifically praised this very judgment as an example of the way judges taught government and citizens about the ‘ethical responsibilities’ of democracy.

It is simply astounding, moreover, that she made such remarks in Malaysia — a country notorious for its human rights abuses including politically motivated prosecutions, torture and oppression of women under Sharia law.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister made light of the apparent marital disharmony. But the fact remains that at the very moment he was floating even tougher action to protect the nation, his wife was firing a warning shot across his bows not to curtail civil liberties.

If Mrs Blair had been a junior minister, she would have been carpeted for crass misjudgment and political treachery. As it is, she appears to be able to make regular such sorties into the political arena with impunity, despite never having been elected to office, and improperly exploit her privileged position as the Prime Minister’s wife.

Nor is this the first time she has provoked outrage by her attitude towards terrorism. Previously, she appeared to sympathise with suicide bombers when she said: ‘As long as young people feel they have no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress’.

Now, she has taken the side of the very judges whom her husband has rightly blamed for making this country a haven for terrorists. She warned of the risk to civil liberties by responding to terror in a way that undermined our ‘most deeply held values and convictions’ — by which she meant human rights law.

But our most deeply held value of all is the protection of human life — protection which the application of human rights law over the past few years has made infinitely more difficult.

Overriding this law would apparently ‘cheapen our right to call ourselves a civilised nation’, according to the ‘First Lady’. But a civilised nation does not abandon the defence of its citizens by losing control of its borders, refusing to deport those who come here to incite murder or even carry out terrorist acts, or granting the demands of religious extremists (for example, allowing a Muslim schoolgirl to wear traditional full-length religious dress).

Yet that is the parlous state to which our judges have reduced us by putting human rights law ahead of the protection of this country. The Law Lords’ ruling on detention without trial, for example, revealed our most senior judges striking a feverish pose over human rights and in the process taking leave of their senses.

They decided that since foreign terror suspects were being locked up without trial whereas home grown suspects were not, this constituted unlawful discrimination. But foreign nationals do not have the rights or responsibilities of British citizens, who in turn cannot be deported. So how could it be discrimination when like was not being compared with like?

This illogical reasoning was capped by some bizarre judicial outbursts. Thus Lord Hoffmann declared that Islamic terrorism was less of a threat than the laws passed to counter it. ‘The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these’ he said.

So much for the declared intention by religious fanatics to destroy our way of life by causing loss of life on an unprecedented scale. Nor was Lord Hoffmann the only Law Lord who seemed to possess an alarmingly fragile grip on reality. Lord Scott declared that detention of foreign terror suspects was ‘ the stuff of nightmares, associated with France before and during the revolution, with Soviet Russia in the Stalinist era, and now associated, as a result of section 23 of the 2001 Act, with the United Kingdom’.

But the terrorist suspects he compared to the victims of a totalitarian dictatorship were in fact all free to leave prison immediately, provided they could find a country to take them — as two of them had in fact done.

In any event, the only reason the government was forced to lock up such suspects at all was that the judges had previously prevented it from deporting anyone to countries which might ill-treat them, under yet another interpretation of human rights law. As a result, this country now finds to its horror that for years it has been allowing in people which any ‘civilised’ country would keep out at all costs as a mortal threat to the public.

Indeed, our senior judges seem to be hell-bent on using human rights law to undermine all attempts to uphold our security and way of life. Over the years, they have repeatedly undermined immigration policy, resulting in the shambles we have today. And they seem almost automatically to side with any challenge to security and order mounted by groups with a grievance or an anti-authority agenda.

Look, for example, at the Court of Appeal’s ruling that schoolgirl Shabina Begum should be allowed to wear a full length jilbab. This was despite the fact that her headmistress warned that this would leave other Muslim girls defenceless against targeting and intimidation by fundamentalists, and despite the fact that this girl was backed by just such an extremist group.

I’m afraid the truth is that the Prime Minister’s plea to the judges to behave more responsibly will cut little ice. His government is clamped in the vice-like grip of human rights lawyers. Indeed, in her role as Cherie Booth QC and one of the founders of the leading human rights barristers’ chambers Matrix, Mrs Blair is acting as a kind of shop steward of human rights lawyers, employing a unique and arguably improper influence over the Prime Minister to press their lucrative case.

And while Mr Blair’s complaints about the judges are entirely justified, the irony is that it is he who is to blame for this perversity. For it was Mr Blair who introduced the Human Rights Act, even though he was warned that this would shift too much power to the judiciary. The judges are out of control — but it was Mr Blair who slipped the leash.

According to Mrs Blair, governments must always act strictly in accordance with the law. Indeed they must. The problem is that her husband introduced a very bad law, which has helped make this country ungovernable.

At a time of such a grave threat to national security, we can no longer afford to allow the judges to compromise our security. Human rights law should be repealed, or at very least we must derogate from those parts of it that prevent us from safeguarding this country’s interests.

Mr Blair should translate his words into action — and tell his wife to put a sock in it.

But of course, that might risk a human rights action brought against him by Cherie Booth QC, defending her freedom of speech. This would doubtless be funded by Legal Aid and bring still more lucre to Matrix’s chambers.

Daily Mail, 25 July 2005

Now more than ever, it is absolutely imperative that we keep our nerve. A terrible mistake has been made. An innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, was killed by mistake last Friday when the Metropolitan Police wrongly assumed that he was a suicide bomber and shot him dead while he was cowering on the floor of a tube train.

It is crucial, however, that the correct conclusions are drawn from this appalling tragedy. The first and most important point is that the police response to the threat they believed was posed at Stockwell station was correct, and indeed was the only action they could responsibly have taken.

Those officers believed that he was a suicide bomber about to blow up a train. They were following rules laid down by the former Met Commissioner, Lord Stevens, under which they must shoot a suspected suicide bomber in the brain. This is because even if a suicide bomber is shot in the chest he could still detonate himself by a twitch of the finger.

In other words, the threat posed by a suspected suicide bomber -- even if he is down on the ground -- is quite unlike the threat posed by any other suspect, and the only way to protect the public is to kill him instantly.

But as we now know, the police were confronting someone who had nothing to do with terrorism. So how could such a dreadful mistake have been made?

The police were staking out the property where Mr de Menezes lived because the address was found in a bomber’s rucksack. But it would appear that the police no idea who was supposed to be living there. When Mr de Menezes emerged, information that a suspect had left a property linked to suicide bombers was passed on to another squad who gave chase.

In other words, gripped by the fear that this man was a ticking human bomb the police jumped to a false conclusion, with tragic consequences. The reason they did so was not because they reacted wrongly -- indeed, they behaved with great courage -- but because of an appalling lack of intelligence information.

This is surely the crucial point. Since the July 7 bombings, the police have conducted an awesome forensic exercise in piecing together information. But they appear to have been doing so in an intelligence vacuum.

Obviously, we have no way of knowing what the intelligence services do know. And we are told they have succeeded in thwarting a number of previous Islamic terror attacks against this country.

Nevertheless, the gaps in their knowledge that now stand revealed are shocking. They had some 250 individuals under constant surveillance -- but none of the eight London bombers had shown up on their radar, even though some of them had appeared on the fringes of previous investigations. So how many other terrorists are there about whom the intelligence services have either suspected or done nothing?

Take, for example, the remarkable photograph that surfaced in the press last week of the group of young Asian men on a white water rafting holiday in north Wales last June. The newspapers immediately spotted two of the July 7 bombers in that group -- and now the police have revealed that they are investigating the possibility that at least two of last Thursday’s bombers were on the same trip. Such collusion would constitute a major discovery.

But the disturbing fact is that security sources were aware months ago that al Qaeda terrorists had been on 'refresher' courses in Wales. In other words, it would seem that a group of suicide bombers had been conducting a group bonding and military planning session at an outdoors pursuits centre right under the noses of British intelligence, who at the time were unaccountably looking the other way.

Some security sources say in despair that there is still a lamentable dearth of informed analysis, and a state of denial of the nature and extent of the threat that persists at the highest level of the government’s terrorist advisers.

Incredibly, even after the July 7 bombings, the intelligence services reportedly failed to foresee a follow-on attack, and told ministers they had very little to go on. This would explain the reported remark made by one participant at the COBRA meeting after last week’s bombings that the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, had ‘little to offer’.

This is because ever since 9/11 this country has been gripped by a kind of sleepwalker’s trance. Security officials failed to take seriously enough the fact that extremist groups such as Hizb ut Tahrir or al Muhajiroun were recruiting young Muslims to the cause of terrorism, by using Islam to provide a sacred purpose to the call to arms over claims that Britain and the west were deliberately targeting Islam and murdering Muslims worldwide.

Above all, they failed to grasp how widely that hysteria had spread. A poll in the Daily Telegraph last weekend revealed that while the overwhelming majority of British Muslims abhorred terrorism, some six per cent supported it. Apply that percentage to Britain's Muslim population, and it makes no fewer than 100,000 individuals who might support terrorist acts.

The poll also found that more than half of Muslims believe that, while western society might not be perfect, they should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end. However, almost a third believed western society is decadent and immoral and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, but only by non-violent means.

These figures suggest that a worrying proportion of Muslims are effectively at war with their own country. This became obvious following the invasion of Afghanistan, when some imams preached in British mosques that this was akin to Hitler’s invasion of Europe and called Muslims to arms. Some young Muslim men accordingly went off to fight against the west in Afghanistan.

In just the same way, the war in Iraq is now being used as a recruiting sergeant for terrorism, just as were the war in Bosnia, Australia’s support for the liberation of East Timor and the existence of Israel.

In other words, anything that is seen as a challenge to the hegemony of Islam is used as a pretext to recruit terrorists to wage war against the west. And these grievances are carefully and shrewdly differentiated to sow maximum division and confusion among different target populations.

Even now, Britain has not emerged from its state of denial. Following the tragedy at Stockwell station, some are saying the police cannot be entrusted with extra powers, and are calling on the police to abandon what they emotively term a ‘shoot to kill’ policy; and from some Muslim leaders, there are thinly veiled threats that unless we leave Iraq there will be more terrorist attacks.

But the war being waged against civilisation is -- as the weekend’s slaughter in Sharm el Sheikh displayed all too brutally -- a global assault by fanatics in the name of Islam which will not be assuaged by appeasement over any one grievance.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was right to insist that the instruction to shoot dead suspected ticking human bombs would remain. And he was right to warn that such terrible mistakes might happen again.

But brutal realism must not stop there. It must also mean taking all necessary steps against all those who might harm us, including securing our borders, and it must mean radical improvements to intelligence. This country is facing an unprecedented type of war. We cannot fight it with our hands tied behind our backs.

Daily Mail, 22 July 2005

Shortly before yesterday's attacks, a poster campaign was launched to display London's spirit of defiance in the face of terrorism. In Churchillian tones, the poster declared that the city was 'united in the face of these attacks' and that Londoners 'will not let anyone divide them'.

The message was signed by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. Immediately after the bombings two weeks previously, he struck a similarly resolute note when he condemned the wanton loss of life and declared emotionally 'Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail'. And at the press conference after yesterday's bombings, he appeared shoulder to shoulder with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to praise the emergency services and call for information to bring the perpetrators to justice.

All very proper and commendably statesmanlike for London's Mayor at such a time. And he has drawn understandable praise for the way in which he has managed to articulate the spirit of the city under attack.

Yet two days ago, Mr Livingstone had made a series of remarks about the causes of this terrorism that were anything but statesmanlike. Indeed, they came close to justifying suicide bombings and even providing incitement to others to carry out further attacks.

Although he said repeatedly that he did not support suicide bombings anywhere and opposed killing and all violence, in the next breath he blamed Britain for having practised 'double standards' in its foreign policy which had helped drive young British Muslim men to murder their fellow citizens. In an extraordinary interview on BBC Radio Four's Today programme, he blamed '80 years of western intervention in predominantly Arab lands' and accused Britain of having betrayed the Arabs after World War 1 by denying them their freedom in order to obtain their oil.

By this bizarre interpretation of history, Mr Livingstone lined himself up alongside such enemies of this country as the radical sheikh Omar Bakri Mohamed and Anjem Choudary, leader of the extremist group al Muhajiroun, who had similarly blamed British foreign policy for the London attacks.

But much more incendiary was what he said about the Israel/Arab conflict in this interview and at a press conference the previous day. Rightly observing that this issue has inflamed many young Muslim men, he made a series of remarks which would have almost certainly inflamed that sense of grievance still further -- and also came close to justifying the terrorism that flows from it.

He accused Israel, for example, of having 'indiscriminately slaughtered men, women and children in the West Bank and Gaza for decades', and said that 'given that the Palestinians don't have jet fighters, they only have their bodies to use as weapons'.

Now, Israel has done many controversial things which may justifiably be criticised, and sometimes its troops undoubtedly behave badly. But it does not indiscriminately slaughter the innocent; on the contrary, it goes to great lengths to avoid doing so -- for example, by conducting dangerous house-to-house searches for terrorists from which it sustains a high rate of casualties, as opposed to routinely bombing from the air.

Above all, its military actions are only taken to defend itself against systematic attack. Yet Mr Livingstone remarkably portrayed suicide bombings as morally superior to Israel's attempt to prevent its citizens from being murdered.

Despite the Mayor's professed horror of terrorism, this effectively
justifies suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians against Israelis. He excoriates Britain for 'double standards' -- and yet, while weeping over the victims of the London bombings, implies that the Jews of Israel are fair game for slaughter.

Even more lethally, Mr Livingstone's distortions about the Middle East conflict will undoubtedly have reinforced the unfounded, yet murderous, feelings of grievance about Israel in the Muslim world.

He claimed on the Today programme, for example, that one reason why Palestinians became suicide bombers was that they did not have the vote. The implication was that Israel prevented them from having the vote and was therefore an apartheid state. But the Palestinians in the disputed territories don't have the vote in Israel because those territories are not part of Israel. And in any event, they do have a vote – which they used to elect their Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas.

Such false assertions can only further inflame the murderous rage which drives Muslim boys into the arms of the cynical terror-puppeteers who turn them into human bombs.

Nor was this all. For Mr Livingstone also claimed it was wrong to brand a British Muslim boy a 'terrorist' if he got involved in Palestinian violence against Israel, whereas 'if a young Jewish boy in this country goes and joins the Israeli army and ends up killing many Palestinians and comes back, that is wholly legitimate'.

These comments are simply utterly unacceptable. British Jews do not serve in the Israeli army; the only 'Jewish boys' who do so are Israelis. Mr Livingstone thus implies a wholly unwarranted double loyalty among British Jews, whose patriotism is unquestionable.

Furthermore, by making the inflammatory suggestion that these 'Jewish boys' may be mistreating Palestinians, the Mayor has made Jewish boys in Britain fair game for Muslims who will no doubt be further enraged by such incendiary falsehoods, and increased the risks to a Jewish community which is already suffering a record number of anti-Jewish attacks.

In the current situation, such remarks are deeply irresponsible. They are also wildly inappropriate. Mr Livingstone is not a foreign minister. He is the Mayor of London. In that capacity, he has notched up some considerable successes. His congestion charge has reduced London's traffic; his extra buses have proved extremely popular; and he has expressed a proper concern to reduce crime and disorder.

But one cannot profess a horror of terrorism and the mass murder of
innocents in London while justifying such outrages elsewhere. Opposition to terrorism must be indivisible. Yet Mr Livingstone has also used his position to welcome to London -- and even publicly embrace -- Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the prominent Muslim cleric who supports suicide bombings in Israel. And yet Mr Livingstone still defends him, on the grounds that the sheikh has condemned the bombings in London.

Such attitudes would be unacceptable for London's Mayor at any time. But with the city under attack from terrorism, such double standards are insupportable.

They also raise an urgent question for the Prime Minister. For Mr Livingstone is not some far-left maverick on the fringes of politics. He is the Labour Mayor of London -- brought back into Labour's fold by Tony Blair himself.

The Government is drafting new laws against incitement to terrorism and declaring the firmest of resolve against all who justify acts of terror. If the Prime Minister really means this, he should therefore ask whether Ken Livingstone can still be a member of the Labour Party.

Terrorism can only be defeated if the country displays an unambiguous
solidarity against all such deliberate slaughter of the innocents, wherever it takes place, and rejects the moral inversion expressed in the weasely justifications of the terrrorists' motives. The mayor has an urgent case to answer.

Daily Mail, 18 July 2005

At a time when the government is having to grapple with an unprecedented threat to the nation, it is also having to deal with a problem caused by troublesome flies on its own walls.

It has stepped in to prevent the publication of two books that have been written by former officials. The first by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Britain’s ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the Iraq war and then the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Iraq, has been blocked by Downing Street and the Foreign Office until certain passages are removed. The second, a daily diary kept by former spin doctor Lance Price about his years in Downing Street, has been banned outright for breaching civil service rules.

Such moves will inevitably be seen as an attempt to censor publication of material which might be gravely embarrassing to the government. Certainly, it is generally in the public interest to know what goes on in Whitehall. But there is an even greater public interest in government being able to function effectively and with integrity. These two books are part of a wider and dismaying trend that has all but wrecked that tradition.

It is one thing for politicians to write their memoirs, and to do so after a period of time has elapsed which gives them a modicum of historical perspective. But people like Sir Jeremy Greenstock and Lance Price are not politicians elected for the views they hold. They drew their salaries from the Civil Service payroll, and were supposed to be bound by an ethic of public service based on trust and discretion.

Yet as soon as they left office, that trust and discretion appear to have been scattered to the four winds. Indeed, scarcely was the ink dried on some of their farewell cards than they tried to rush into print, in a grubby attempt to make money out of betraying professional confidences.

There is surely all the difference in the world between an attempt to contribute to public knowledge and understanding and a self-serving, highly partisan exercise designed to portray the former official in a good light, exculpate himself from blame and settle scores or — perhaps most damaging of all — play a political game from which he was formerly barred by the constraints of being a neutral public servant. And to do so, furthermore, for money —whose amount increases in direct proportion to the sensitivity of the confidences that are betrayed.

Sir Jeremy’s book reportedly draws widely on private conversations with the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary and on the private deliberations of the UN Security Council. Such a wholesale breach of trust by someone in such a privileged position undermines the whole process of government, in which people only speak to each other frankly on the implicit understanding that such private conversations will not be divulged.

The book is reported to say that the decision to go to war in Iraq was ‘politically illegitimate’, that UN negotiations ‘never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration’ and that opportunities were dissipated in ‘poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution’.

If Sir Jeremy had made these opinions public while he was in office, this would have been considered a sacking offence over an outrageous departure into politics for a supposedly dispassionate public servant. So what is the difference now? Nothing — except that now he is free to make money from marketing his views.

He is far from alone. Indeed, there is a veritable stampede of former officials rushing into print. Public servants used to think that the suitable rewards for a lifetime devoted to public service were a comfortable, inflation-proofed pension and a knighthood or some other gong on the Honours List. No longer. Now they are desperate to milk their careers for cash and celebrity.

Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to the US and now chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, caused dismay and outrage among PCC members when it was revealed that he was to publish his memoirs in which he would claim, among other things, that Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, told him to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’.

Although Sir Christopher decided not to accept an expected six-figure sum for any serialisation of his book in the press, accepting that this would jeopardise his impartiality as the overseer of press self-regulation, concern remains about a possible conflict of interest. For if Mr Powell, or anyone else aggrieved by the book’s politically controversial views, wished to complain about the newspaper which carried any extracts, the person he would have to complain to would be Sir Christopher.

The public rely on the PCC to uphold standards in the media. But how can people have any faith in it if it is chaired by someone who has himself betrayed official confidences and his professional ethic of trust?

For obvious reasons, trust and discretion are a particular requirement of officials who have been involved in security work. Yet this was spectacularly breached by the former head of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, who published her memoirs. The very act of publication destroyed at a stroke the principle of absolute loyalty and discretion required for the operational effectiveness of the security service.

Now Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is writing his memoirs, which will apparently cover his dealings with the former Home Secretary David Blunkett.

Meanwhile in the wings lurks Alistair Campbell, who kept a diary of his seven years as Downing Street’s spin doctor which he now intends to publish for an undoubted fortune. Publication of these diaries would be the ultimate betrayal of the ethics of government service.

The Cabinet Secretary Sir Andrew Turnbull, told Mr Campbell’s former deputy, Lance Price, that the whole premise of his own diary was completely unacceptable. How much more completely unacceptable, therefore, would be publication of the diary of Mr Campbell, the man who was arguably privy to more information about the workings of the Blair government than anyone other than the Prime Minister himself?

For Mr Campbell turned the government into an instrument of manipulation and mendacity. And now the last act of this arch-spinner, who brought government to an unprecedented nadir of untrustworthiness, will be to spin his own seminal role in this lamentable story.

Indeed, since he was a journalist before being recruited into Downing Street, one might view his diary as evidence that, far from being motivated by the highest ideals of public service, he saw his entire period in the inner sanctums of government as the supreme marketing opportunity for the ultimate beneficiary of his black arts — himself.

But then, Mr Campbell’s memoirs, along with those penned by all the other flies who have crawled off the wall and into the embrace of all-too eager publishers, are a testament to the broader corruption of the civil service. New Labour destroyed Whitehall’s ethic of disinterested integrity. Now its former officials are selling their stories to the highest bidder, the government is well and truly hoist by its own polluted petard.

Daily Mail, 14 July 2005

Our worst fears have now been realised. Four young British Muslim men, born and raised in peaceful, tension-free suburban Leeds where they played cricket and helped disabled children, travelled to London a week ago today to turn themselves into human bombs in order to murder as many of their fellow citizens as possible.

No-one in the Muslim or wider community in Leeds apparently had the slightest suspicion that any of them would ever have done such a terrible thing. They appeared to be utterly normal, regular young men. Their fanaticism was utterly invisible.

A truly appalling vista has now opened up before us. For if these four were able to hide their religious extremism so completely, fooling everyone who came into contact with them, how many more such young men may be harbouring similar feelings in total secrecy and may commit further such atrocities against their fellow Britons?

This is not just the first instance of suicide bombings in Europe. It is virtually the only time suicide bombers have targeted their own fellow citizens. Even in Israel, where suicide bombings have become so frequent, there has only been one example of an Israeli Arab citizen turning into a human bomb to murder fellow Israelis. Yet we now have to face the fact that some of our own citizens harbour an overwhelming murderous rage against their own country that makes them want to destroy it.

This terrible development poses the most acute, difficult and urgent questions about how this can have happened. For the usual alibis for suicide bombings now stand exposed as bogus. These terrorists were not foreign imports from some far distant conflict. They had not been dispossessed of any land; they did not live in the squalour of refugee camps. They were not destitute or despairing.

These were suburban boys who had been educated at British schools and had degrees, jobs, comfortable families. Yet unlike other British boys, their hopes and aspirations did not centre around the lives they were to live. They aspired instead to die, to turn themselves into human bombs in order to commit murder on a grand scale.

Above all, this poses the most urgent questions about the Muslim community from which this monstrous act has sprung. It is absolutely essential that we all find the answer to such questions if we are to have any hope at all of preventing further such atrocities.

Yet since last Thursday’s outrage, this crucial debate has been thwarted by a culture of denial in which it has been all but impossible to discuss freely and properly the questions in everyone’s mind. Since the bombings, many of the leading voices of British society have given the impression that they are less concerned about the atrocity that claimed the lives of more than 52 innocent people than the need to protect the Muslim community from any backlash.

Obviously, it is important to prevent any retribution against ordinary Muslims, the vast majority of whom are utterly appalled at what has happened and who themselves live blameless, law-abiding lives. But what has happened has gone much further than that. The impression has been sedulously created that this act of Islamic terrorism by four Muslim boys from Leeds had nothing to do with nothing to do with the Muslim community or indeed Islam.

Thus Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick made the astounding comment that ‘Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together’. Thus the parish priest of the church near where the number 30 bus was blown up said in his sermon last Sunday: 'We must name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Muslims.’

As for the BBC, it has seemed determined to wrench the spotlight away from the role of Islam in these bombings and instead displayed an obsession with avoiding ‘Islamophobia’. Item after item on radio and television has dwelt upon the need to avoid blaming Muslims for what happened, rather than addressing the hard questions to the community that cry out to be asked.

In doing so, it has been taking its cue from the Muslim community itself which seems to be in the deepest denial. Yes, it has certainly condemned the atrocity in the strongest terms. But in the very next breath, its leaders have effectively washed their hands of it by repeating like a mantra that anyone claiming to be a Muslim who commits such an act is not a proper Muslim, because Islam is a religion of peace.

This is the line being taken, for example, by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. In an interview yesterday on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme, Zaher Birawi of the Leeds Grand Mosque said he agreed with this view — and then immediately started talking about Islamophobia.

On BBC TV’s Newsnight on Tuesday, Irshad Chaudhury, a leader of the Leeds Muslim community said the four bombers were ‘not Muslims at all’, that people had to be taught that Islam was a religion of peace and that the term ‘jihad’ had been coined by the media and was not even known in Islam. Yet jihad — or holy war — is a central tenet of Islamic theology and law.

Thus four Muslim boys who committed an act of terrorism as part of a religious war against all who challenge the supremacy of Islam are presented by the Muslim community in Britain as nothing to do with them — and indeed, not even Muslims at all, on the basis that since Islam is ‘a religion of peace’, anyone who commits murder in its name cannot be a Muslim.

This reasoning turns both logic and morality on their heads. It also masks some deeply alarming statistics. Far from being adherents of a ‘religion of peace’, huge numbers of Muslims world-wide support al Qaeda — 65 per cent in Pakistan, 45 per cent in Morocco. And in Britain, where the vast majority of Muslims are opposed to terrorism, according to an ICM poll carried out for the Guardian some 13 per cent of a Muslim community of 1.6 million support it.

These numbers are horrific. And yet in the debate which has been going on for the past week, Muslims have been presented not as the community which must take responsibility for this horror, but as its principal victims.

This moral inversion is the result of the cultural brainwashing that has been going on in Britain for years in the pursuit of the disastrous doctrine of multiculturalism. This has refused to teach Muslims — along with other minorities — the core of British culture and values. Instead, it has promoted a lethally divisive culture of separateness, in which minority cultures are held to be equal if not superior to the values and traditions of the indigenous majority.

Even worse, multiculturalism causes the moral paralysis of ‘victim culture’, whereby to say an ethnic minority is at fault is to invite immediate accusations of racism. When Lord Ouseley reported on the 1999 race riots in Bradford, he concluded that many local people did not dare challenge wrongdoing among young ethnic minority people because they feared being labelled 'racist'.

When Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, warned strongly against multiculturalism in the schools in the eighties, he was branded a racist and hounded from his job. Now those Yorkshire chickens have lethally come home to roost.

The moral bankruptcy of this victim culture is all around us. Thus the BBC instructed its journalists not to refer to the London bombings as ‘terrorism’ because this was a subjective value judgment. And yet it allowed John Simpson, its World Affairs editor, to call these terrorists ‘misguided criminals’ an astounding value judgment which diminished the nature of the atrocity.

The problem is that this inversion of morality can be lethal. Such is the ethos of political correctness in our public services that librarians who want to complain about the potential danger of young Muslims logging onto websites instructing them in making bombs or nerve gas are told to say nothing for fear of being accused of prejudice.

All this prevents us from acknowledging the principal reason why otherwise ordinary young men turn themselves into human bombs — religious fanaticism.

The British find this difficult to grasp because of its fundamental irrationality. Yet contrary to what we are being told, this terrorism is all about religion.

It derives from a cult of hatred and death within Islam — albeit one that moderate Muslims privately abhor — whose explicit aim is to destroy the power of the west and any expression of freedom by Muslims or others which prevents the imposition of the most repressive interpretation of Islam.

Whether this represents a hijacking of the religion is matter for theological dispute. But the fact is that it has not been challenged by any leading Islamic religious authority; indeed, they have endorsed it.

This hatred is further incited and inflamed by lies and distortions about the history and present actions of the west and above all about the Jews and about Israel — a world-view based on a wholesale denial and inversion of the truth which has poisoned the minds of millions.

Even moderate Muslims believe many if not most of these untruths, thus reinforcing the lethal grievance culture which is the sea in which terrorism swims.

Yet even to say such things is to risk accusations of ‘Islamophobia’. And now the government is bringing in a law against incitement to religious hatred, all in order to appease the Muslim community which seeks to outlaw altogether the drawing of any association between Islam and terror. Ironically, this law is definitely not designed to prevent extremist British imams — who, yes, are only a minority — from disseminating their bigoted hatred of the west.

This madness has simply got to stop. Our society has now been attacked in a way that means it will never be the same again, and may well be subjected to more such attacks. And yet the very irrationality and moral perversion that lie at the core of this onslaught are being used to prevent us from addressing it.

Such lethal equivocation cannot be allowed to continue. We have to tackle all the sources of this poison. London must no longer be Europe’s terror factory — the ‘Londonistan’ in which terrorists wanted in other countries are allowed to walk freely in our streets. Publications advocating violence should be banned. Charities funding terror should be proscribed and their assets seized.

Imams preaching violence should be prosecuted or removed from the country. Extremist Islamic websites should be shut down and those who log onto sites providing blueprints for bomb-making should be arrested. Extremist groups should be banned and their leaders locked up or deported. We should have special judge-only courts for cases where evidence is too sensitive to bring to a normal trial. The Human Rights Act which has made it all but impossible to protect this country should be repealed.

But above all, the responsible Muslim community and its leaders — who are the majority — must come out of denial and unequivocally condemn the extreme interpretation of Islam that is twisting the minds of the minority of zealots in its midst.

This war for civilisation won’t be won by practical action alone. What we are up against is a death cult which recruits its foot-soldiers through propaganda based on lies and distortions which inflame grievance into murderous rage. These lies emanating from extremists in the Muslim world have been further inflated by support from those in the wider community in Britain — mainly on the left — whose obsessive repetition of such falsehoods and disproportionate attention to the misdeeds of the west while ignoring Muslim atrocities have helped turn grievance into hysteria.

We have already paid a terrible price for multiculturalism and this cancer of moral inversion and irresponsibility. These are tough measures — but we must take them if our society is to be defended against this horror that threatens us all.

Daily Mail, 11 July 2005

Sixty years on, Britain has commemorated the end of World War Two and the sacrifices made to achieve victory over fascism. The ceremonials took place yesterday in the long shadow of last Thursday’s atrocities in London — the terrible manifestation of a very different kind of threat.

We now face an enemy which has no country, no uniform and no visible shape but is instead a loose and shifting affiliation of groups across the world, bound only by their unifying cause.

The problem is that, unlike sixty years ago, our leaders shy away from giving this menace its proper name. They call it ‘terrorism’. But in fact it is nothing less than a world war being waged in the name of religion — with terror its weapon of attack — whose aim is to emasculate the power and reach of western culture and replace it by the hegemony of Islam.

The foot-soldiers of this religious army have camouflaged themselves among the citizens of the world. The result in Britain, according to leaked government documents, is that up to an estimated 16,000 British Muslims are said to be sympathetic to terrorism and and, according to fomer Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens, up to 3000 British born or British based people have passed through al Qaeda training camps over the years.

Of course, the vast majority of Muslims are undoubtedly decent, law-abiding, peaceful citizens. But since only one bomber needs to get lucky in order to cause death and destruction, these statistics are clearly absolutely horrifying.

In the face of this threat, however, our Prime Minister is muddled. He said last weekend that the root causes of terrorism were the perversion of Islam and extremism, fanaticism and acute forms of poverty in one continent which could spread their poison throughout the world.

He was right about the extremism and fanaticism, but wrong about the rest. Poverty is not the issue. Many Islamic terrorists are wealthy; most poor peoples do not resort to terror. The root cause of this threat is a religion whose dominant traditions have, over the past twelve centuries, preached or practised at various times of intensity holy war against the infidel.

Most British Muslims are appalled by these attacks. Indeed, they themselves are at equal risk of becoming victims of such indiscriminate terror. And many of them clearly wish to reconcile the undoubtedly peaceful elements of their faith with the tenets of western society.

But at same time they and others — from the Prime Minister downwards — are in denial when they say that because Islam is a religion of peace, by implication those who commit such acts are not true Muslims. On the contrary, this war against the west is not only being fought in the name of Islam but its aims, if not all its tactics, have been condoned by countless Islamic states and religious authorities and supported by millions of Muslims across the world.

Our leaders are too frightened to say this for fear of upsetting the Muslim community. So on the basis of a deeply flawed analysis, the government has produced a hopelessly misguided strategy.

This is to give British Muslims widespread concessions in the hope that this will dampen down the rage of the most extreme. According to the Home Office Permanent Secretary Sir John Gieve, the roots of Muslim extremism in Britain lie in ‘discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion.’ The remedy, therefore, is to reduce discrimination and promote integration. Hence, for example, ministers’ support for the law against incitement to religious hatred, or the introduction of sharia-compliant mortgages and suggestions by the Inland Revenue that polygamy should be recognised for the purposes of inheritance tax.

But Muslim extremism is not caused by lack of integration; the lack of integration is caused by the fact that Muslims are being inflamed against the west by radical preachers. A small minority of young Muslims are vulnerable to this process because, adrift between the profoundly opposing cultures of Islam and the western free-for-all, they are easy prey for the ostensibly righteous and idealistic message that they must fight the decadence and corruption of the west.

Some people think that the war in Iraq, where al Qaeda has regrouped after it was smashed in Afghanistan, has greatly inflamed Islamic terrorism and resulted in its export to Britain.

The first and most obvious answer to this is that 9/11 preceded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; indeed, America had been attacked by al Qaeda for a decade even before the Twin Towers were hit.

Iraq is indeed central, but for a different reason. Al Qaeda desperately wants the coalition troops to withdraw from Iraq, where the stakes for terror across the Middle East are so enormous, and has decided that the best way to achieve this is to put pressure on the public. Hence the bombings of Madrid and now London, whose aim was to destroy the alliance with America.

Those arguing that the Iraq war has put the coalition countries in danger are therefore doing the bombers’ dirty propaganda work for them. The Spanish fell for it. But even though they withdrew their troops, this did not stop al Qaeda from subsequently trying twice more to bomb the Spanish people — thus proving that for al Qaeda, the Iraq war is merely a side issue.

This is demonstrated time and again by its terror attacks across the world from Indonesia to the Caucasus, including in countries which were opposed to the Iraq war — while in Britain, as in Germany and elsewhere, planned attacks were being tracked and foiled even before 9/11.

Nevertheless, despite this evidence of unprovoked attacks on country after country, radical imams teach that the very existence of western influence is an act of aggression. Any action against the west is therefore said to be a legitimate defence of religious principles — and so any actual defence by the west against Islamic terror is presented instead as a further act of war to be avenged.

This lethal double-think means that the defence against terror has indeed inadvertently acted as a recruiting sergeant for that terror. But this is the terrible dilemma that terrorism poses. If its victims try to defend themselves by taking action against the terrorists (and Saddam was a godfather of terror) this feeds their warped victimology and recruits more to their cause. But to take the path of least resistance instead of fighting back is to signal a defeatism which spurs the terrorists on to their perceived and inevitable victory.

In other words, the choice is this: we take actions which may increase the immediate problem or, in the long term, we suffer total defeat.

Given such a choice, the only morally viable position is to fight terror with all the means at our disposal. There is no doubt that chronic American mistakes in failing adequately to respond to the nature and scale of the battle in Iraq have exacerbated the problem of Muslims flocking to the cause.

But to say that the fight against religious fascism should not be fought because it turns those who are fighting it into a target is a bit like complaining that the only reason London endured the Blitz was because Britain had declared war on Germany.

Now as then, appeasing aggression means cultural suicide. We are in for the long haul -- but we must no longer flinch from the truth, and from the means we must use to defeat the horror that we all face.

Daily Mail, 8 July 2005

Yesterday’s sickening atrocities were shockingly all too predictable. The former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens warned long ago that they were ‘inevitable’. As time went on after 9/11 with no British attacks, police and security experts repeatedly warned that there was no room for complacency and that the only reason attacks had not occurred was because a number of attempts had been foiled.

And yet, despite all this the brutal truth is that in many respects this country has simply not taken the terrorist threat seriously enough. Flinching from the tough-minded measures that cried out to be taken, it failed to take action commensurate with the threat that faced us and which culminated in yesterday’s carnage. Indeed, considering how much was known and anticipated, our failure to act can only be considered the height of incompetence or recklessness, or both.

Clearly, we do not know whether the people who carried out these bomb attacks were foreign nationals or home grown terrorists. But in the light of the clear and present danger from terrorists slipping into this country from abroad, the government’s failure to secure our borders defies belief.

Because of the shambles of our immigration and asylum system and the chronic inability by successive governments to police it properly, the astonishing fact is that faced with an unprecedented threat to our security the government simply lost control of our borders. As a result, no-one could know who was coming in or going out. As the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, observed, this made the job of countering the terrorist threat infinitely more difficult. Indeed, one might go further and say it made it impossible.

People who were not supposed to be here because they were illegal immigrants posing as asylum seekers have simply been allowed to disappear into the country in their thousands. Clearly, the vast majority of such people pose no security threat; but it is equally obvious that it is not possible to make a country safe if its borders are so permeable and administrative chaos allows people simply to vanish below the official radar.

This has been allowed to occur because, at a time of unprecedented danger, this country’s ruling elite has self-indulgently postured on human rights and the ‘diversity’ agenda with reckless disregard of the paramount need to give priority to the need to defend and preserve public safety.

The courts have undermined all attempts to police our borders, making it impossible to deport illegal immigrants or lock up those who are considered to be too dangerous to be at large. Faced with this irresponsible judicial moral grandstanding, the government failed to repeal the Human Rights Act and thus remove the principal weapon being wielded by the judges to undermine public safety.

Instead, when the Law Lords produced their intellectually flawed ruling that it was unlawful to detain without trial foreign nationals suspected of terrorist involvement, the government promptly caved in to the 'human rights' industry and released them. Although it placed various restrictions on their movements, the fact remains that it released people who it had previously said posed such an unconscionable danger to this country that normal procedures had to be suspended to put them behind bars.

Instead of robust action to deal with people acknowledged to be a danger to the state, all the Home Secretary can come up with is the deeply flawed proposal for ID cards — which will not even apply to many people coming into this country.

This move will destroy ancient liberties while adding precious little of practical assistance to the fight against terrorism. All it will do is enable ministers to give the impression that it is doing something — while at the same time they do little to stop extremist Islamist ideologues from using what has come to be known as ‘Londonistan’ (because the capital has become a centre of Islamic extremism) to promulgate their inflammatory diatribes against the west and thus swell the ideological sea in which terrorism swims.

It was nauseating to witness the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, deliver his ringing condemnation of terrorism yesterday — the same Ken Livingstone who invited the terrorism supporter and Islamic extremist Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi to speak in the capital last summer and physically embraced him on the platform.

Even more alarmingly, the country’s principal police force involved in counter-terrorism is now under the control of an officer whose obsession with the ‘diversity’ agenda is thought to be undermining the fight against terror.

The oppressive side of this philosophy surfaced recently when Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was rebuked by an employment tribunal for ‘hanging his own officers out to dry’ to prove his anti-racist credentials. This was after his force was found to have racially discriminated against three white officers who were disciplined after alleged racist remarks at a training day, in which one of them had referred to Muslim headwear as ‘tea cosies’, mispronounced Shi'ites as ‘shitties’ and said he felt sorry for Muslims who fasted during Ramadan. Yet Sir Ian responded to this finding against himself of institutional bullying by declaring he was ‘unrepentant’, repeating that the remarks were ‘Islamophobic’ and declaring that the Met had to ‘embrace diversity’.

Yet following this institutional bullying over Islamophobia, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick yesterday made the astonishing comment: ‘As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together’. So what, then, does he think al Qaeda is?

While few would disagree that the Met has to be sensitive to the needs of ethnic minorities, Sir Ian’s obsession with attacking ‘Islamophobia’ is now raising serious concerns among certain police officers and security sources. It is getting in the way of the job the police are called upon to do. Officers who try to address the delicate issue of terrorism and its supporters within the Muslim community now find themselves in danger of being accused within their own force of Islamophobia.

The situation has become so grave that some members of the security services no longer trust the Met with sensitive counter-terrorist information. Law-abiding and patriotic Muslims – and the great majority are just that --who try to give the police vital information about extremists sometimes find to their dismay and disbelief that it is not acted upon. And throughout, there is a woeful dearth of Islamic experts and a disastrous paucity of insightful and informed analysis.

Also, Sir Ian seems remarkably preoccupied with promoting himself and was all over the broadcast media yesterday after the attacks. But earlier in the day, his timing was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. For at 7.20 am, he boasted on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme that the Met was seen as the ‘envy of the policing world in relation to counter-terrorism’.

Along with the other emergency services, the Met did a great job yesterday. But counter-terrorism is all about preventing such catastrophes from occurring in the first place. Compared to what the American Department of Homeland Security has done, for example, the pusillanimity of the British effort makes you weep.

America now has draconian border controls, including racial and religious profiling which enables officials to stop people if they correspond to certain suspect characteristics. More people have to have visas to enter the country, and every entrant is now routinely photographed and fingerprinted. And this most diverse and multicultural of nations has no qualms about going into mosques to interview and interrogate Muslims.

Britain, by contrast, has pussy-footed around. Terrified of being accused of Islamophobia and wrapping itself in the mantle of the diversity agenda, it has allowed the human rights culture and a lethal political correctness to frustrate elementary and common sense measures to protect the people of this country. It has been sleepwalking to disaster. Yesterday, it paid the ultimate and terrible price.

Daily Mail, 4 July 2005

While the Prime Minister parades his global social conscience at G8 this week, his government is up to its old cynical tricks.

After requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, it released more than 500 pages of previously blocked documents produced by the Strategy Unit under Lord Birt, the ‘blue-skies’ thinker who advises the Prime Minister.

It chose finally to release them last Friday evening, knowing full well that the weekend papers would be so preoccupied by Live 8 that they would pay little attention to much else.

The exercise was reminiscent of the notorious incident when the former adviser Jo Moore sent an email on 9/11 suggesting it was a good day to ‘bury bad news’.

The government wanted to bury Lord Birt’s advice because, despite the fact that chunks of these papers have still been withheld from public scrutiny, they present a devastating picture of government failure across the board.

After years of Labour government, they reveal, there is precious little to show for it. Vital areas such as health, education, transport, crime and drugs remain mired in failure.

One report, written in 2002, states that despite millions of pounds of extra spending poured into the health service, Britons are less healthy than in comparable countries and the NHS bears part of the blame. It is short of virtually everything. Compared to other countries, it has fewer hospital beds, fewer doctors and a far smaller base of advanced medical equipment.

This has resulted in far higher waiting lists and poorer results from medical treatment — so much so that, in a startling admission of failure, it recommends that more patients should be sent abroad for treatment where facilities are better.

Another paper on transport says that Britain’s road and rail network are the least developed of any major country through decades of below average investment, with the most congested roads in Europe and overcrowding on many of the expensive and unpunctual railways -- and with improvements in punctuality made in the mid-nineties now slipping away.

Perhaps the most startling revelations are in a report written in 2000 by Lord Birt himself about crime. In this, he states that an estimated 130 million crimes are committed in Britain each year — some thirteen times higher than the official figure of ten million, and with drug offences accounting for no fewer than half of them.

At a stroke, this shows not only that the government’s claim that crime is falling is palpably untrue, but that much of the problem is due to a combination of two things. First is the revolving door of the criminal justice system, with half of all crime committed by a hard core of 100,000 persistent offenders, of whom only 15,000 are locked up — leaving 85,000 free to commit more crime. And second is the catastrophic failure of drugs policy.

But the Strategy Unit’s drugs paper exposes some of the limitations of Lord Birt’s blue skies operation. While it provides a shocking snapshot of the current situation — showing, or example, that drug-motivated crime has been rising while other crime has remained stable or fallen — much of its analysis is remarkably superficial and even downright ignorant.

For this paper fails to grasp the significance of its own findings. It dwells almost entirely on heroin and crack cocaine as the drivers of social problems. Yet it also reveals that by far the highest number of drug addicts are cannabis users. More than one million are dependent on marijuana — quite apart from a further two million users — compared to 250,000 heroin addicts and 140,000 addicted to crack cocaine.

Moreover, it also reveals that cannabis has been causing 674 mental health admissions a year, almost five times the number caused by the class A drug crack cocaine. Yet these findings were available in 2003, seven months before the government downgraded cannabis from a class B to a class C drug on the grounds that it was relatively harmless.

The paper states correctly that even if more drug imports were intercepted, this would not solve the drugs problem. This has now been seized upon by drug legalisers, who claim that since the war on drugs has failed the argument for legalisation becomes overwhelming.

But the Strategy Unit does not grasp that the reason the war on drugs has failed is that drug use can never be curbed simply by attacking drug supply. The key policy must be targeting drug consumption through an utterly consistent set of signals aimed at reducing demand by prevention strategies such as robust drugs education, treatment and penalties for breaking the law.

The war on drugs has faltered because the government has failed to fight it, refusing to send out consistent signals that no drug use will be tolerated and backing away from tackling cannabis. This was paralleled by a catastrophic decision by crime and intelligence agencies to downgrade their drive against cannabis imports. This sent cannabis prices through the floor and created a glut on the streets — and so traffickers who had made their money from cannabis promptly switched to pushing cocaine and heroin instead.

These and many other complexities pass the Strategy Unit by completely. The paper on education, for example, records a dismal litany of failure, with a high number of poorly performing schools, disruptive behaviour and bullying on the increase, and vocational qualifications lagging behind our European competitors.

Yet at the same time it makes a ‘powerful endorsement of the current education strategy’, claiming general improvements based on exam passes, numbers in higher education and international surveys that do not compare like with like. It thus takes no account of what has become increasingly obvious, that rising numbers of qualifications have been achieved by progressively lowering standards and emptying education of any worthwhile content.

What all this adds up to is not merely a devastating indictment of the Labour government’s record. It also raises serious questions about the role of Lord Birt himself. Among the papers disclosed last weekend was a letter from the Prime Minister’s office which permitted the management consultancy McKinsey — which pays Lord Birt an estimated £100,000 per year — to carry on bidding for lucrative government contracts.

Meanwhile a senior McKinsey partner, David Bennett, has been appointed head of the Prime Minister’s policy unit while Professor Sir Michael Barber, head of Mr Blair’s Delivery Unit, will shortly be joining McKinsey as an adviser on its public sector work.

Such two-way traffic is wholly improper, creating as it does clear conflicts of interest. But one has to wonder why Mr Blair is so besotted with Lord Birt that he is prepared to sacrifice the integrity of government for the dubious perspective of his blue sky.

For Lord Birt displays the weaknesses of McKinsey’s brand of managerialism. It is a balance-sheet mentality which reveals a distinctly superficial grasp of quantifiable numbers, expressed through graphs, pie charts and flow diagrams, but with zero knowledge of what is actually taking place on the ground.

Who can be surprised, therefore, that the government seems so demoralised about its ‘project’ and yet cannot seem to get anything right, since the advice on which it is basing its policies is so poor. It tells it what is going wrong but crucially does not inform it with any degree of accuracy why — a hidden process on which last weekend’s disclosures lifted so disconcertingly but a corner of the veil.

Daily Mail, 1 July 2005

Freedom of information has been one of this government’s proudest policy platforms. The Lord Chancellor, the minister in charge of making information publicly accessible, has loudly trumpeted ‘a presumption of openness’ bringing ‘greater accountability’ and ‘a radical and lasting change in the relationship between citizen and government.'

Yet the habit of secrecy seems to die very hard. Only this week, the British Board of Film Classification refused to reveal the identities of its censors who have given the new Steven Spielberg blockbuster, War of the Worlds, a controversial 12A rating.

And nowhere is secrecy more entrenched, it seems, than in Lord Falconer’s very own bailiwick. This week, he declared that the new Judicial Appointments and Conduct Ombudsman would ensure ‘the transparency of the new framework for judicial appointments’.

Oh dear. For it instantly became clear that new Office of Judicial Complaints would keep secret the identities and misdemeanours of the judicial figures arraigned before it.

The judges’ disciplinary system is already highly secretive. Last year, it was revealed, about 250 allegations of misconduct by judges or tribunal members were investigated, of which 11 were referred for judicial investigation, plus about 40 investigations into allegations of misconduct by magistrates. Disciplinary action followed in 68 cases.

But what exactly happened to them — and who were they? At this point, Lord Falconer’s transparency suddenly turned distinctly opaque. No names, no pack drill became instead the order of the day.

This, said the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, was necessary because public confidence would be harmed if any judge who was named after being disciplined continued sitting in judgment.

This is precisely the kind of hidebound instinct to protect error or wrongdoing which the new climate of openness was supposed to consign to history. It reflects an instinct for self-preservation that acts as a conspiracy against the public and gives professionals a bad name.

For if a judge has done something that might undermine public confidence, then the public surely has every right to know — indeed, in the circumstances, a particular right to know — what that fault might be.

Lord Woolf views with horror the prospect that judges who have been named and shamed might not enjoy full public confidence. But why should a judge expect that confidence if he hasn’t earned it? Our system requires that justice is done in public. So why should the judges themselves be exempt from this principle?

The system requires the public to place its trust in the unquestionable ability of the judges and the Lord Chancellor to ensure that every judge is beyond reproach. But how can this inspire public confidence when Lord Falconer himself is hardly a shining light of transparency, having never been voted into office but shoe-horned into the House of Lords as First Friend of the Prime Minister — and now presiding over a culture of institutionalised judicial secrecy while proclaiming his commitment to openness at every turn?

The days of such blind faith in the establishment to police itself have long since gone. Indeed, no other profession keeps its disciplinary proceedings secret in this way. Doctors, teachers or police officers cannot take refuge behind such a shield of anonymity. Yet the damage to their authority from such proceedings is equally grave.

Lord Woolf says the judges are different. Why? This just sounds suspiciously like professional special pleading and a recipe for short-changing the public.

This is a judicial world, after all, in which a former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, had to be literally propped up by judges sitting alongside him on the bench because he was suffering from senile dementia – a fact not publicly acknowledged until after he died. More recently, Mr Justice Harman resigned only after the Court of Appeal found that he had lost documents and forgotten evidence in a case in which he had taken more than 20 months to deliver his judgment.

Transparency and accountability are indissolubly stitched together. Lack of transparency means that people cannot be held to account for their actions. But our culture of secrecy is so ingrained that people in official positions can still deploy the most sanctimonious excuses to avoid public scrutiny.

Take our film censors who play a huge role in shaping our cultural attitudes by grading films according to criteria of taste and decency. The 12A rating that the BBFC has given to War of the Worlds means young children can see it accompanied by an adult while 12 year-olds and above can view it on their own.

This is even though it contains ‘sustained menace, threat and moderate horror’, and experts have warned that its scenes of violence could make children aggressive or disturbed. Yet the BBFC refuses point blank to release the names of the examiners who decided to give it this rating — or indeed the identities of any of its 30 examiners who classify films. We are not even entitled to know whether they have children of their own.

It maintains they work on the principle of ‘collective responsibility’, that they have no obligation to account for themselves since they are not paid out of taxpayers’ money, and that they have to be protected from ‘outrageous stalking campaigns by the press’.

On the contrary — it is such secrecy that is outrageous. The BBFC censors play a key role as arbiters of what is acceptable in the cinema. The public are entitled to know, therefore, what prejudices and attitudes they bring to the exercise of this role.

In the past, our film censors have been drawn disproportionately from those who have ultra-liberal views and who, by their anything-goes approach, have coarsened and brutalised our cultural values. So why should these individuals not be held to account for the attitudes they bring to the job?

Why should they not be exposed to robust questioning and comment about the controversial decisions that they take which may have such damaging effects on children and on our society?

Isn’t their anonymity simply another example of the sadly all-too predictable instinct to avoid legitimate and necessary public scrutiny — the very virtue that was supposed to be fostered by Lord Falconer’s new culture of openness? And aren’t those who scuttle for cover in this way generally people who feel that they have something to hide?

True, the Freedom of Information Act has enabled thousands of pieces of otherwise hidden information to be made available. Nevertheless, most requests for data are still being thrown out. Only 44 per cent of all applications for information from Whitehall departments and other bodies are granted in full.

Almost 1,000 complaints concerning failure to disclose material are being investigated by the freedom of information watchdog. Yet Lord Falconer’s department has been unable to say how many such requests have been rejected. So much for the freedom of that particular piece of information.

Yet while we are being prevented from finding out what we should be entitled to know about public bodies, officialdom is finding out more and more about us. A huge amount of irrelevant information is to be stored on the proposed identity cards, intimate medical records are to be put onto an electronic government database, and there are now smart cards in every walk of life encrypting a huge range of sensitive personal data, raising the ever greater risks of centralised abuse of personal information.

Not so much a transparent society, therefore, as a surveillance society – where as our privacy goes to the wall, the prospect of holding properly to account those who control our public life still seems as far away as ever.

Jewish Chronicle, 1 July 2005

It’s the church’s AUT moment. The endorsement by the Anglican Consultative Council of divestment from companies supporting Israeli policies echoes the boycott debate among university lecturers and plunges Jewish-Christian relations into a crisis.

Although the ACC softened its final position by weaselly caveats designed to produce deniability, the fact remains that the Anglican communion has now lined up behind those who are waging war against the Jews.

The Anglican Peace and Justice Network report on which the decision was based is a farrago of inflammatory lies, libels and distortions. It presents the Arab perpetrators of mass murder as victims and their real victims in Israel as oppressors merely for trying to defend themselves. Despite disingenuous pieties about opposing terror against Israelis, the document demonises Israel and supports policies that would lead to its destruction.

It claims that Israel ‘systematically and deliberately oppressed and dehumanised the people of Palestine’ and deplores ‘the continuing policies of illegal home demolitions, detentions, checkpoints, identity card systems and the presence of the Israeli military that make any kind of normal life impossible.’ But the only reason normal life is impossible is that the Arabs in the territories are intent on ending as many Israeli lives as possible.

It writes the Jews out of the historic script by claiming that the Palestinians were removed from their ‘historic lands’. But Judea, Samaria and Galilee are the historic lands of the Jews, not the Arab colonisers who drove them out.

It claims there is ‘little will on behalf of the Israel government to recognise the rights of the Palestinians to a sovereign state to be created in the West Bank — which includes East Jerusalem — and Gaza.’ Yet Israel offered precisely such a state at Camp David and at Taba, and the only response was the terror war waged against its citizens.

The report’s visceral anti-Jewish prejudice is expressed most starkly when it compares the ‘concrete walls of Palestine’ with ‘the barbed-wire fence of the Buchenwald camp’. Thus to these Anglicans, the Jews have turned into Nazis — and all because they are trying to prevent themselves from being wiped out in another genocide.

The scale of this moral inversion and the singling out of the Jews for such racial libels amount to incitement to hatred against Israel and a deadly propaganda weapon aimed by Christians at the heart of the Jewish people.

This hatred is being fuelled by the viciously distorted accounts of Israel’s history and present circumstances which pour out of Christian aid agencies and church newspapers in an unstoppable torrent, and by the very close links between senior Anglicans and radical Christian Arab clerics.

The report praises, for example, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El-Assal and Canon Naim Ateek. Both these figures are key exponents of replacement theology, the doctrine that underpinned centuries of Christian anti-Jewish hatred by claiming that the Jews have forfeited all God’s promises to them because they denied the divinity of Christ. Bishop Riah, for example, has claimed of Palestinian Christians: ‘We are the true Israel… no-one can deny me the right to inherit the promises, and after all the promises were first given to Abraham and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew…He is the father of the faithful.’ While Ateek, who is lionised by Anglicans, uses the imagery of the deicide to vilify Israel as the crucifiers of the Palestinians who play the part of Christ.

The ACC’s decision puts an enormous question mark against the way Jews currently relate to the Christian world. At a stroke, it has exposed the irrelevance of inter-faith dialogue and particularly the effectiveness of the Council of Christians and Jews. That organisation eventually produced a lamentably feeble and evasive comment about the ACC drama, just as it has tried to dismiss previous concerns about the anti-Israel animus of the Anglican church — all because it is paralysed by fear of rocking the boat. Well, that boat has now well and truly sunk beneath the waves of prejudice.

The time has surely now come for a fresh approach. Many decent Christians are appalled by the ACC’s position. Jews must now make common cause with them to expose the lies and fight the divestment mania that is now erupting among Christian churches and NGOs across the world. Instead of self-indulgent inter-faith talking shops, Jews need to start building relationships with individual parishes, giving Christians at all levels of the church a crash course in the history and present realities of the Middle East, taking them to Israel and opening their eyes to the truth — and publicly denouncing the lies that are being told.

After the Shoah, the Catholic church addressed the part that its own anti-Jewish theology had played in that catastrophe and tried to make amends. The Anglican communion, by contrast, never faced up to it. Now it faces a moral abyss.