Daily Mail, 29 August 2005

For a brief moment yesterday, a wild hope arose that a Government minister was unprecedentedly owning up to a disastrous policy mistake.

Headlines announced that the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell was admitting ‘we got it wrong on 24-hour drinking’. Alas, by the very next sentence all hope of a revolutionary outbreak of ministerial candour had been extinguished.

For it became clear that, faced with mounting evidence of the disastrous consequences of the government’s policy on drinking, all Ms Jowell thinks the Government got wrong was the spin and all she concedes is that the policy will be ‘kept under review’.

The election campaign slogan: ‘Don’t give a XXXX for last orders? Vote Labour’ was stupid, she said, because it appeared to be an advert for hedonism — whereas the new law would ‘improve quality of life and curb crime’.

On the contrary — the slogan was stupid because the policy is stupid. Unbridled hedonism is precisely what it is about to unleash, with all the ghastly consequences that will follow.

The situation is already dire. Alcohol-related deaths, along with drunken and abusive behaviour on the railways and Tube, have risen by as much as 50 per cent in some parts of the country. In greater London violent crime, much of which is alcohol-related, has risen by six per cent over the past year.

More shocking still, younger and younger children are becoming more and more inebriated, with one in four 11 to 15-year-olds drinking alcohol every week — with the astounding claim that a quarter of them imbibe the equivalent of at least seven pints of lager or 14 measures of spirits.

Yet far from attempting to curb such behaviour, the government is relaxing the licensing law so that from November people can drink round the clock. Nine out of ten pubs are seeking later opening hours and supermarkets plan to sell cheap booze late into the night.

This policy is patently reckless. More drinking means more crime and disorder. Police officers and judges have expressed horror, warning that it will trigger a huge rise in crimes such as rape, grievous bodily harm and worse.

Crown Court judge Charles Harris says drinking by violent criminals is already taking place on a scale which is ‘simply beyond belief’. ‘The situation is already grave, if not grotesque, and to facilitate this by making drinking facilities more widely available is close to lunacy,’ he said.

The experience of other countries which liberalised their drinking laws proves the point. In Iceland, Ireland and Australia where pub closing times were extended, violence and disorder have grown.

It is astonishing — and tragic — that a Labour party whose roots lie in the Methodism that helped to curb British alcohol abuse in the 19th century should be promoting such ruinous excess. The problem has developed through a combination of government naivety and unbridled commercial greed.

Ministers were naïve because they thought the way to curb disorder at pub and club chucking-out time was to allow such places to continue to serve drinks. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that this would simply shunt the rowdiness of chucking-out time into the middle of the night, thus making the problem even worse.

They were also naïve in believing that they could turn Britain into a continental café society. They observed that although European cafes serve drink until very late their customers don’t get drunk, and in their extreme ignorance concluded that the one results in the other.

They thus failed to grasp that Britain has a very different culture from Europe. On the continent, people drink alcohol as part of a meal. In Britain, they drink beer and spirits in order to get legless.

If regulations are relaxed, more Britons will merely get very drunk. That explains the disgusting epidemics of debauchery, violence and vomit when young British holidaymakers descend on Faliraki, Ibiza or the Costa del Sol.

Ms Jowell, however, denies that the British have different drinking habits. Such dismissal of demonstrable social reality is all of a piece with New Labour’s governing myth that a nation’s historical culture is irrelevant, that national characteristics don’t exist and that all peoples are the same as each other.

The Culture Secretary says the new law gives greater powers to the police to curb alcohol-related disorder. But this law will create more disorder and crime to be policed.

Moreover, the police say their new powers are circumscribed. And they are already facing problems with councils for whom the lure of money-spinning pubs and clubs is stifling any sense of social responsibility.

These councils have themselves fuelled the binge-drinking culture by allowing clubs and pubs to open indiscriminately on the basis that a booming night life is the way to regenerate their areas. The result is that drunken revellers stagger from one establishment to another, and so local prosperity is paid for by rising mayhem.

Now some of these councils are at odds with the police over the proposed alcohol disorder zones, within which pubs and clubs linked to late-night disorder would meet the costs of extra policing and cleaning-up, on the spurious grounds that such zones could be unfair to law-abiding businesses.

Ms Jowell has caused amazement by insisting that the public can easily resist late-night licences by lodging objections with the councils that will grant them. This really takes the biscuit. For thousands of local people who might well wish to protest have effectively been silenced by those councils.

Residents have only a short time left to object to the bulk of applications for new licensing hours. But many have no idea that their local pubs or clubs have applied for such extensions, not least because they have been away on holiday, and a number of last-minute applications for licence extensions were submitted just before the August 6 deadline.

Moreover, many who have registered a protest have been turned down — on grounds including the claim that they live too far away, even where their homes are within 100 yards of noisy venues. Even councillors have been prevented from lodging objections on their constituents’ behalf.

The system has effectively been rigged to favour an alcohol industry whose irresponsibility this government has systematically indulged. One of the main factors behind the escalation of juvenile drinking is the sale of alcopops, sweetened alcohol drinks deliberately aimed at children and which have made alcohol as regular a part of their intake as Coke or Sprite. And now there is even a suggestion that the law might be exploited to allow children to be served alcohol legally in pubs.

It is scarcely credible that our government should have allowed such a cynical targeting of children, hooking so many of them into a ruinous drinking habit. At every stage, it seems, elementary social responsibility has been junked for the unfettered pursuit of commercial greed.

But then who can be surprised by any of this, when we learn that certain key academics who advised ministers over their plans to extend pub opening hours have received tens of thousands of pounds from more than 20 separate drinks and pub groups?

Ms Jowell’s obdurate, arrogant and insulting defence of this policy is the response of a government drunk on its own power — and as incapable of using it responsibly as the children who have downed the pints of lager and bottles of alcopops which it has so recklessly poured their way.

Jewish Chronicle, 5 August 2005

One of the most distressing features of the current hostility towards Israel is the part being played by Jews themselves, both in Britain and in Israel.

Many struggle to explain why they choose to disseminate lies and libels about Israel, thus lining themselves up squarely alongside those who hate the Jewish people. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of certain Israeli academics in this process of demonisation and delegitimisation.

For their value to those who wish Israel ill is that, however extreme or mendacious their claims about Israel might be, they cannot be accused of prejudice against the Jews because they are Jews themselves. Thus they provide a crucial alibi for those who wish harm against Israel and the Jews, and have led many others who are simply ignorant horribly astray.

Now, however, an impressive new book torpedoes the myth that Jews cannot be Jew-haters. In ‘The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege’ (Smith and Kraus), American psychiatrist Kenneth Levin demonstrates that the phenomenon of Jews who side with the oppressors of their own people has very deep roots indeed.

The 12th century Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela wrote of the Jews of Constantinople that much of the enmity they attracted was the fault of the Jewish tanners who made leather and polluted their streets with filthy water. The psychological terror caused by persistent enmity and persecution caused Jews over the centuries to convert, to force others to convert and to oppose such marks of identification as Jewish schooling.

Over and over again in 19th and 20th century Europe, emancipated Jews looked down in contempt upon Jews from the east who inconveniently drew attention to their origins through their appearance and behaviour. In order to protect themselves, the enlightened Jews — the maskilim —absorbed the anti-Jewish feeling that surrounded them and re-directed it at the religiously observant.

The founding father of the Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, denounced Yiddish as ‘a language of stammerers, corrupt and deformed’. Karl Marx, whose father converted from Judaism to Christianity in order to blend into society, agreed with the Jew-baiters of the time that the Jews were immutably materialistic and degenerate and that it was this that drove them to be corrupted by trade.

In order to gain acceptance from the surrounding society, the maskilim jettisoned not just the religion but the goal of the return to Zion. Instead, they embraced universalism and assimilation, declaring that the Jews should become citizens of the world’s nations and promoting Enlightenment principles of individual worth, reason and liberty.

Between the wars, widespread anti-Jewish prejudice in the United States similarly resulted in a flight of the intellectual classes from Jewish identity through conversion, changes of name and — perhaps most tellingly from the point of view of today’s difficulties — a tendency to blame fellow Jews for the hatred directed at them.

The real sting of Levin’s book, however, is to relate this ancient historical pathology among a beleaguered and traumatised people to the attitude of today’s Jews towards the plight of Israel, and in particular the flight from reality, logic and common sense displayed during the years of the Oslo ‘peace process’.

Controversially, he roots this in the revulsion felt by the Labour left at the election in 1977 of Menachem Begin — not so much because of his expansionist policies but on account of his support from the religious, the Sephardim and the petit bourgeoisie (horrors!), the victory of which disdained constituencies the left regarded as a great national catastrophe.

Refusing to sympathise with the discrimination suffered by the Sephardim, they directed their egalitarian fervour instead at the Arabs. The Likud government became the ‘other’, and thus the way was paved for the great moral inversion by the Israeli left in which Israel — the victims of the Arabs — were blamed for instead for oppressing them.

What followed was Peace Now, the systematic demonisation of Israel by a significant slice of the Israeli intelligentsia and the terrible delusion that peace with the Arabs was round the corner if only Israel made enough concessions. Levin sets this in the important context of the ‘New Historians’ — the Israeli anti-Zionists and post-Zionists who rewrote and falsified Israel’s history and thus handed the enemies of the Jews the intellectual weapons with which they are currently pursuing the destruction of Jewish nationhood.

What is fascinating and sobering about Levin’s account is the common threads linking the Jew-hating Jews of antiquity with those of today: the intellectual snobbery, the sucking up to powerful patrons, the internalisation of the surrounding hatred, the belief that they could become invisible as Jews, and the blaming of fellow-Jews for their own persecution.

Those who are not thus broken by this psychological siege of the Jews, concludes Levin, have to become not just resisters but educators. ‘The alternative, however disguised in claims of higher principle, is an ignoble capitulation to murderous bigotry’— and Israel’s annihilation.

Daily Mail, 1 August 2005

An Irish mother of six children who until recently was working in a chemist’s shop has just scooped Europe’s biggest lottery win of £77 million.

Dolores McNamara won the jackpot in the Euromillions draw. Her win means that at a stroke she has leapfrogged the Beckhams, who are worth a measly £65 million, to rank a mere £3 million behind rock star Rod Stewart on the list of Britain and Ireland’s richest people.

While no-one would begrudge Mrs McNamara her astonishing good fortune, such astronomical winnings should surely provoke a few qualms.

People gamble on the lottery every week because they are tempted by the possibility that they, too, might become as rich as Croesus through a random configuration of numbers.

I have to say I have never succumbed to this temptation. Indeed, I have never bought a lottery ticket and never will. That is because, from the very introduction of the National Lottery in Britain, I thought that this was a development that would rip off the poor, encourage a ruinous national gambling habit and coarsen and corrupt British national life.

Despite occasional controversies over some of the causes that are in receipt of lottery money, the National Lottery has become accepted as part of British life. But this doesn’t alter the fact that, despite the huge sums it raises for a wide variety of projects, it has not been good for society.

It is not just that some of those who have won stratospheric sums have either been dubious characters who plainly do not deserve to have so much wealth or are people from modest backgrounds who simply cannot cope with the dramatic changes it makes to their lifestyle. Indeed, Mrs McNamara — said to be a ‘lovely person’ — is reported to be ‘devastated’ at her win and to have gone into hiding.

The deeper problem is that it both epitomises and encourages the notion that people can get something for nothing — or, be more accurate, scoop up untold riches for the minimal outlay of a lottery ticket.

Thanks to the corrosive impact of half a century of the welfare state, we already had a something for nothing culture. This has progressively and ruinously eroded personal responsibility and made people feel entitled to expect or even demand benefits or advantages to drop into their laps.

The lottery is not only a supreme example of this kind of attitude but has made it even worse. While there is nothing wrong with wealth if it is honestly earned, playing the lottery is an attempt to get a lot of money without having to earn it. This is because it is simply a form of gambling.

Of course, many people gamble. But that does not mean it should be encouraged. A prudent society knows that it is a vice that at best should be only tolerated because of the difficulties of outlawing it.

Yet the advent of the National Lottery has encouraged gambling because it has made it respectable and even ordinary. After all, with lottery tickets on sale in supermarkets gambling has now become as mundane as buying the weekly shopping, with which it is so closely associated.

But gambling is not mundane. On the contrary, it can be ruinous because its addictive quality means that people can lose everything, including their jobs, houses and families, if their habit gets out of control.

By drawing so many more into such behaviour the lottery has helped increase gambling addiction, especially among the young who are most vulnerable to its cynical hype.

Research has shown that lottery scratchcards, in particular, are hooking the young in large numbers. Yet according to one management consulting group, scratchcards are the second biggest-selling brand in the UK market, ahead even of Coca Cola — and only behind Camelot’s Lotto game in first place.

Camelot has been at pains to donate to gambling addiction charities, and to devote much energy to attempting to minimise the damaging effects of the lottery upon society. Commendable as these efforts may be, they merely underscore the fact that the lottery is a business which is set up on the understanding that its core activity is socially undesirable.

The people who are most vulnerable to all this are the poor. True, everyone buys a lottery ticket of their own free will. But those at the bottom of the heap tend to have a deeply-rooted belief in their own powerlessness and are therefore much more receptive to the idea that fate controls their destiny. So they are more inclined to believe that the fate that made them poor may suddenly make them rich.

As a result, the poor spend a disproportionate amount of their income on lottery tickets. The desperation and gullibility of our most vulnerable citizens is thus exploited to fund the pleasures of the better-off.

Nevertheless, the lottery is given moral legitimacy by the fact that it funnels billions of pounds to good causes. But this justification is also deeply flawed.

First, some of this money has been spent on causes which range from the dubious to the downright absurd. This, £630 million went to the Millennium Dome, about which the less said the better; £340,000 to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, a body that helped extremists and was described by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett as 'colluding with terrorism'; and £420,000 to the Cusichaca Trust to help fund its bid to breed giant edible guinea pigs in Peru.

Second, the original promise that lottery money would be spent on good causes such as the arts, charities, heritage, sport and the millennium but not on core services which were the government’s responsibility has been broken. A sixth fund was added covering health, education and environment, and the government has tried to muscle in on how this money is spent.

As a result, the amount being spent on good causes has dropped while the amount being raked off to shore up the government’s shortcomings in health, education and the environment has gone up.

The lottery is therefore being used as a kind of stealth tax. And since those who are less well-off are more likely to spend more of their money on lottery tickets, the principle that the better-off should shoulder a greater burden than the poor in contributing to the common good is being stood on its head, making our society less fair as a result.

Protests have been muted partly because the lottery does fund some charitable causes. But this too is a distinctly mixed blessing, because people are now less willing to dig into their pockets to give to charity as they think this is what they are doing when they buy a lottery ticket. Yet that ticket may well be funding dubious causes or activities for the better-off, like seats at the opera.

Moreover, giving to charity is important not just for that organisation but also for the wider society. This is because it consists of altruistic acts of personal sacrifice. Yet people don’t buy lottery tickets as a selfless act of philanthropy but to win the jackpot. So the lottery actually is inimical to public altruism. Instead, it’s all about ‘what’s in it for me’.

The principal reason why the lottery does not provoke protest, however, is that it is overwhelmingly popular. People will look at Mrs McNamara’s staggering win and make for the lottery ticket queue with even greater alacrity. Whether this is also gambling with our country’s values is another question.