Daily Mail, September 29 2005

The targeting of children’s nurseries for attack by violent opponents of animal experiments signals a horrifying escalation in animal ‘rights’ terrorism. Gloating over the apparent impunity with which they are operating, the terrorists have boasted that they are ‘free to attack at will, whenever and wherever’.

Dismayingly, such a claim seems to possess more than a grain of truth. Despite new laws against animal terrorism and the ever tougher rhetoric about new powers to tackle terrorism following the July bombings in London, violent extremists are successfully terrorising an ever widening range of people who may only have marginal connections with medical research that uses animals.

Through an unremitting barrage of hate mail, harassment, assaults, arson attacks, hoax bombs, death threats and smear campaigns, a tiny group of terrorists has managed to bring universities and major pharmaceutical companies almost to their knees. Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) has borne the brunt. But now targets include not merely its employees but staff and shareholders working for any institution associated with it.

A family in Newchurch, Staffordshire, stopped breeding guinea pigs for medical research after six years of a hate campaign against them, which culminated in the desecration of the grave of the farmer's 82-year-old mother-in-law whose remains were dug up and removed. Innocent people are now in fear for their lives - simply because a small group of people have run rings for years around police and politicians who have seemed either paralysed by or indifferent to this utterly appalling state of affairs.

The problem is not the absence of laws but the lack will to implement them. Yes, of course terrorism is difficult to tackle. But if the authorities were really determined to stop it, they could. Instead, the response at all levels of our society has been inconsistent and spineless.

The police have been spectacularly ineffectual. A tiny group of fanatics forms the hard core prepared to carry out acts of terror. A wider circle of some 200 individuals carry out acts of intimidation. Many of these extremists, if not all, must be known to the police.

Yet they refuse to act even when they are handed clear evidence. For example, an activist equipped with a long-lens camera was caught near the Staffordshire farm gathering information about movements on the property, apparently to pass on to those planning terrorist actions. Yet the police said there was no evidence that he had done anything wrong.

Of course, there is a concern to allow free speech to those legitimately protesting against animal experiments. But it is simply beyond belief that the police cannot mount the infiltration and surveillance necessary to detect those who turn to violence and to bring them to justice.

But then, who can have much faith that justice will hold the line against terror when - although some judges have granted exclusion zones around other targets - a few months ago a judge refused an application for an exclusion zone around Newchurch to protect its inhabitants from this terrorism. His refusal was based on the need to allow legitimate protest -- but such protests surely stop being legitimate when the views they express provide the justification for terror.

Those who should know better have shown a distressing tendency to run for cover in the face of threats from the violent tendency. Earlier this month, the New York Stock Exchange postponed a planned listing of the parent company of HLS, minutes before the stock was due to start trading, after Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) listed contact details of Stock Exchange employees from board members to directors, economists and account managers.

Rather than postponing the listing, the Americans should have prosecuted SHAC for intimidation. But there is nothing like a threat to profits to cause companies and governments to cave in to terror.

Such short-term expediency, however, is storing up a long-term economic disaster. For pharmaceutical research, which is worth billions to the UK economy, will simply relocate to countries with fewer scruples about the human rights of protesters - and with far lower ethical standards about the welfare of research animals.

There is surely an even deeper reason for the absence of political will to defeat animal terrorism. This is the strong streak of sentimentality that sets the inviolability of animals higher than the relief of human suffering -- even though most people now say they support the humane use of animals in medical research.

This is surely why the police are so poorly resourced and why the Government so disgracefully removed Professor Colin Blakemore from the New Year’s Honours List, simply because he has fought a lonely and brave campaign against this terrorism and defended the humane use of animals in order to find treatments for disease.

Unless a society transmits the firmest and most consistent message possible that it is united in its absolute determination to defeat such tactics, the terrorists will have the upper hand. Alas, we have given the opposite impression - and the threat to the lives of infants and their carers, along with countless other innocents, is now the grotesque result.

Dail Mail, 24 September 2005

The party conference season, which opened this week with the Liberal Democrats’ conference, traditionally signals a quickening of the political pulse.

In these few wind-blown weeks by the seaside in Blackpool, Bournemouth or Brighton, as the Labour and Tory conferences follow the LibDems, political life wakes up again after the summer holidays. This is because the conferences are supposed to be a showcase for the great clashing principles and philosophies that fuel the parties’ programmes. This is where we learn what makes our politicians tick.

So there is usually an air of expectancy and even excitement among political observers that the curtain is about to go up once again on the great drama of politics.

But not this year. Far from a quickening of its pulse, political life appears to be rapidly passing into a coma. Rather than a great clash of principles, it has degenerated into an unprincipled, unfocused and incoherent rearrangement of the stage scenery by politicians who appear to have not the slightest clue what script they are supposed to be articulating.

Take the Liberal Democrat jamboree which has just finished in Blackpool. One might have thought this would have been the LibDems’ moment. Conservative chairman Francis Maude floated the idea that the Tories might enter an alliance with them. Labour is nervously warning its members not to become mesmerised by the electoral threat they pose.

But can anyone really take the LibDems seriously after the antics of the past week? On three key policies, the leadership was defeated. The party doesn’t know whether to be carnivores or herbivores, split down the middle between tough ‘Orange Book’ free-marketeers and those who think the public sector should be declared a protected species.

In his final speech, Charles Kennedy declared he intended to be Prime Minister and rounded on those who claimed to have better ideas than he did. Yet only two days earlier he had admitted he was not a proper leader.

Given that they are patently a shambles led by a donkey, by any normal criteria the LibDems might be thought to be on their last legs. Yet so great is the malaise in our political life that they are talked about in all seriousness as a more potent challenge to the government than the Tories, the party which is still performing its long-running impersonation of a slow train crash.

The Tories’ own conference in a week’s time is likely to be something from which all sensitive types should avert their gaze. Instead of presenting a coherent alternative to the Government, it threatens to be no more than an unseemly platform for introverted navel-gazing and backstabbing around contenders to head a party that seems to have made changing the leader a substitute for thinking.

The problem is that the Tories simply do not know any longer what they stand for. The main consideration in their leadership election is not whether the candidates stand for the right things but whether they can win a general election.

Thus we have the comic spectacle of Ken Clarke, a fanatical pro-European, apparently being supported by Tories in the country who are viscerally anti-European simply because they think he can win. And why do they think this? Because he has charisma -- which translates into a beer belly and a forthright manner. But even given the lamentable conformity of most politicians, ‘blokeishness’ is hardly a political vision.

Other candidates are scarcely any more inspiring. None of them would set the world alight because none of them seems to be motivated by anything deeper than the desire to gain power for its own sake.

So while they are busy making speeches tacking to right or left as appropriate -- or both simultaneously -- or calculating on the back of an envelope whether David or Ken will scoop up David’s or Liam’s or Malcolm’s votes when they drop out, they are letting the Government get away with one policy disaster after another with at best only a pallid protest.

Indeed, they have been almost completely silent over the parlous state of the economy -- so much so that the LibDems’ carnivores, who have been landing some powerful blows on the Treasury, now appear to be articulating the conservative position more effectively than the Tories.

As for Labour, although it remains the only show in town because of the weakness of the Opposition, it is itself still riven by the poisonous feud between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor and the tension between New and Old Labour. Tony Blair remains an utterly devalued Prime Minister, isolated within his own party and unable to get his way however many czars and advisers and delivery units he establishes.

All Labour’s ambitious social reforms have foundered. Truancy has got worse despite the millions spent on trying to reduce it. Teenage pregnancy has actually increased in areas where the government’s teenage pregnancy initiative has operated. The Sure Start child care project has made no difference to children’s well-being. The crises in law and order, health care or education remain unresolved. The government can’t even get it together to carry out the necessary housing revaluation.

So what is the reason for this strange death of political Britain? How have we managed to arrive at a situation where an entire political class has nothing coherent, distinctive, useful or inspiring to say?

One important reason is that all three parties are stuck in the politics of the past while the world has utterly changed around them. They have all lost their identities in a universe where old certainties have been torn up and divisions that once defined the political landscape no longer exist.

Instead of parties opposing each other, they are now deeply divided within themselves. Over taxes or public spending, whether the public services should be run by the state or the market, or moral issues such as family life, gay rights or drug legalisation, it is hard to say what any of these parties believes because they are so divided. Indeed, if you shut your eyes you cannot tell a Tory social liberal or Europhile from a Blairite believer or a LibDem.

This is because three parties are still structurally organised around issues that are no longer the ones that divide people -- while the issues that do divide people very profoundly cross all party lines.

Parties once organised around issues of class and money have lost their defining fiefdoms. The Tories once represented the boss class, landowners and big money; Labour was the party of the workers and the trade unions while the Liberals were the party of free trade and progressive ideas.

Throughout the last century these great fiefdoms of distinctive vested interests dwindled. The relentless rise of state power after World War I finished off the Liberals and replaced them by Labour. In turn, Labour saw its working-class base shrink, and the Tories correspondingly lost their boss-class base, as the rise and rise of the middle class flattened these old antagonisms and created a constituency that all politicians equally had to win over.

This middle class was created and nurtured by the welfare state. But this came to trap all politicians in a culture of undeliverable expectations. Having led the public to believe they were entitled to demand unlimited benefits from the state, politicians of al parties found that they couldn’t ever satisfy this open-ended demand.

In addition, the more services they tried to deliver the more of a hash they made of it because central control doesn’t work. But having created this culture of entitlement and expectation, no politicians were brave enough to admit that the structure was flawed for fear of the backlash and lost votes.

So they have all ended up merely making managerial changes -- trust hospitals and city academies -- which merely echo each other in failing to address the core of the problem.

But while they were all dancing on the heads of these various pins, a host of really divisive issues emerged which the three parties had no interest in addressing because they did not reflect the vested interests around which these parties had been formed. Worse still, they deeply divided the population. So for politicians looking for votes, these were issues which spelt political disaster and were therefore best avoided altogether.

But they happened to be the most important issues of all because they were deeply connected with enormous changes in British society which would change it beyond all recognition. These were not to do with economics or class. They were cultural and moral issues -- family breakdown, drug abuse, social disorder, the erosion of discipline and punishment, immigration, multiculturalism.

These issues were rooted in a profound set of challenges to the foundations of moral and social order, which arose from the development of a culture of extreme individualism which saw all constraints on behaviour as an attack on the sacred right of self-expression.

This was coupled with an excessive guilt complex arising from the retreat from empire, resulting in a pathological loathing of the nation, its traditions and its values and a corresponding obsession with privileging minorities over the majority population and culture.

The result was a systematic attack upon the country’s bedrock values. But despite the seminal importance of what was happening, politicians shied away from it -- partly because of the confusion that resulted from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

This led some to claim ‘the end of history’ -- or in plainer language, the victory of capitalism and democracy over totalitarianism. This was an error since, although the collapse of the Soviet Union undoubtedly ended the argument over economics in favour of the free market, the battleground then shifted to the cultural and moral agenda as a means of destabilising the western world.

In Britain, however, this great shift was not properly understood. In particular, the Conservative party made a disastrous mistake. Because Tony Blair junked Clause Four and embraced the market, the Tories concluded that he had parked his tanks on their lawn. The worst they could throw at him was that he was only pretending to be conservative.

What they missed entirely was that, unlike most politicians, Mr Blair had understood the great shift that had occurred and was in the forefront of the new politics. He thus presided over a cultural revolution -- tearing up the British constitution; progressively undermining and then nationalising the family; reversing a century’s efforts against vice by liberalising drug law, drinking and gambling; changing the whole identity of the country through a covert policy of mass immigration and ruthlessly promoting multiculturalism; and weakening the nation and its founding values even more fundamentally by ceding more and more power to supra-national power-brokers such as the EU or human rights lawyers.

One would have thought that such a revolutionary programme which has left millions of British citizens aghast would provide a golden opportunity for an opposition party to draw up the clearest possible battle-lines and provide voters with a very clear choice between fundamentally conflicting political principles.

But because the Tories failed to grasp what had happened, and wallowed instead in the outrage of being deprived of their supposedly natural role as the party of government, and because these issues do bitterly divide the population, they became unsayable.

The issues that mattered most were therefore the ones about which no-one spoke. There was silence or only muted protest because they were considered too difficult or too risky, or because opposition politicians were competing to be Blair wannabes.

So there has been silence over the drift towards disaster of the economy; silence over the massive pensions scandal; silence over Europe; silence over immigration; silence over the disintegrating family. Instead we are subjected to a series of stage-managed seaside farces which will tell us little except who is up and who is down.

Is it surprising therefore that voters are so deeply disillusioned with politics and have turned off in droves?

What we are suffering from is a dearth of political leadership. There is no-one with a deeply held vision and the charisma to put it across that can galvanise the country. That is because the best and brightest no longer go into politics; and that is because this is no longer where the power is. Influence now lies elsewhere -- because politicians have made the big issues off limits and because power has drained away to bodies such as the EU.

Both the assault on the country’s values and the consequent decline in political leadership are rooted in a profound loss of confidence in Britain as a nation. Only if politicians have the courage and vision to acknowledge this collapse and vigorously address it will political leadership return and politics will become interesting once again -- and there will be at least a chance of halting our lethal democratic malaise.

Daily Mail, 22 September 2005

Britain’s universities were once the envy of the world. The quality of the education received at university level was considered to be outstanding.

The efficiency of an A-level system which accurately selected those who were equipped for the rigours of a university education was widely admired, and a university degree was a kitemark of academic quality and a passport to demanding employment.

Now all this lies in ruins. The value of higher education is quite simply being systematically destroyed by a philosophy straight out of Lewis Carroll’s most surrealist flights of imagination.

Today’s graduates find that a degree is quite likely to be merely a passport to the dole queue, or to a job as a traffic warden, porter or shop assistant. According to official figures, as many as three quarters of graduates are unemployed or languishing in stop-gap jobs that do not need a degree.

And meanwhile in the least academic universities, no fewer than one third of students are dropping out of their courses, at a cost to the taxpayer of at least £450 million a year in tuition fees and subsidised loans.

This lamentable state of affairs is the direct outcome of the government’s determination to funnel half of all school leavers into university, a policy as educationally suicidal as it is obtuse. It springs from the obsessive — and inversely snobbish — Labour belief that anyone who does not go to university is a victim of ‘discrimination’.

But the fact is that only a very small proportion of the population is suited to the abstract disciplines of a university degree. So it is obvious that if very large numbers are propelled into university, education standards must be lowered to accommodate all those who can’t cut the intellectual mustard.

The higher education system has accordingly comprehensively dumbed down. Valuable vocational courses have vanished along with the further education colleges that once delivered them. Now all such colleges are universities, every other tutor is a professor and all get degrees which are supposed to be of equal value.

But of course this is nonsense on stilts. A degree in golf-course management does not have the same value as a degree in physics. A host of similar absurdly inflated courses have replaced useful practical training by useless abstractions, merely to create the illusion of academic prowess.

Worse still, since university finances are pegged to results the numbers getting firsts or upper seconds soar ever more dizzyingly upwards while the value of all these grades plunges ever more dizzyingly downwards.

The outcome is record numbers emerging with worthless degrees into a marketplace which is now saturated with people with meaningless letters after their names. Having a degree is fast degenerating into what A levels, or even O-levels, once represented — the minimum requirement for a white collar job.

But employers turn up their noses because they know these degrees aren’t worth the paper they are written on.

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that so many students are now dropping out. Either they can’t keep up because they are so badly qualified, or they realise that their degree courses are nonsensical and they have been sold a pup.

For ministers, however, all this is irrelevant. This whole policy is propelled not by a concern to improve education but by the dictates of class war. The universities have been turned into the tools of social engineering, placed under a financial cosh to discriminate against well-qualified students just because they come from fee-paying schools. Merit and aspiration are being penalised out of pure ideological spite.

This is the education of the madhouse. And it has come about because instead of promoting equality of opportunity — the essence of a fair society – the government is determined to impose equality of outcomes.

This ‘all must have prizes’ mentality is why the government believes that half the population should have a degree. Anyone who points out the obvious, that this is progressively destroying the value of all degrees, is immediately denounced as an ‘elitist’ who wants to deny the disadvantaged the opportunity to better themselves.

But it is the government which has so grotesquely betrayed the poor. For the bitter irony is that fewer pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are now going to good universities. A report for the National Foundation for Educational Research has found that a multi-million pound government programme to encourage the poorest teenagers to go to university has failed to make any significant impact.

Yet the more devastating the evidence of the effects of their policy, the more measures ministers devise to force yet more unsuitable students into degree courses — with a gun to the universities’ heads.

If a private individual displayed such a catastrophic disconnection from reality he would have long ago been put in a straitjacket and incarcerated for the good of society. As it is, higher education is being systematically eviscerated in pursuit of the quite mad goal of academic equality — and the country’s future well-being and prosperity are being fatally undermined.

Daily Mail, 14 September 2005

One of the most prized of all the jewels in the Blairite crown is the government’s £3 billion Sure Start programme which furnishes child-care, parenting classes, health advice and a range of other provision for parents and children under five in deprived areas.

For a government vulnerable to the charge that it long ago abandoned any radical credentials, Sure Start has come to possess an almost mystical significance as an emblem of Labour politicians’ power to transform the lives of the poor.

Ministers refer to Sure Start at every opportunity in reverential tones, promoting it as the panacea for a range of social ills including inadequate parenting, educational under-achievement, mental illness among both parents and children, anti-social behaviour and welfare dependency. This truly miraculous programme, we have been repeatedly assured, will transform the lives of the poorest and with them improve the well-being of the whole of society.

This is also a government, however, which acknowledges the value of nothing unless it produces tangible improvements which can be measured. So to justify their planned extension of Sure Start by 2010 from the current total of 524 local programmes to 3,500 children's centres -- one in every neighbourhood in England -- ministers need to provide proof that it is achieving results. This is what they call ‘evidence based policy-making’.

As a result, it appears, they have put the team of academics from Birkbeck college, London which is evaluating the scheme under intense pressure to produce this evidence immediately – even though it will take much longer for the effects of these schemes to be rigorously assessed. Rigour, however, gets short shrift from Blairites in a hurry to spin their own good news.

Alas for these ministers — their unshakeable belief in their own propaganda has now spectacularly blown up in their faces.

For according to Birkbeck’s preliminary snapshot survey, far from transforming the lives of the poor Sure Start appears overall to have made no difference at all. Although some individual schemes have been successful, in general it has failed to boost children’s development, language or behaviour in the areas where it is operating. Indeed, the children of teenage mothers actually did worse [ital ‘worse’] in Sure Start areas than elsewhere.

Exactly how do these findings square with claims made by the Education Department that its Sure Start policy has been governed by ‘timely information which informs the programme’s continuing implementation’?

The response to this exquisitely timely but most unwelcome information has been truly comical. ‘Evidence-based policy making’, it now turns out, means a policy of denying inconvenient evidence. Ministers themselves were clearly so embarrassed that they sent back the report for the Birkbeck team to include more detail on Sure Start projects that had actually worked.

There is no doubt that there is a huge and growing problem of poorly parented children. But this is overwhelmingly the result of the breakdown of the family, which in some parts of the country has produced whole communities of fatherless children and with mothers mired in a vicious circle of inadequacy, isolation and poverty.

The responsible approach would be to try to stop this disintegration of family life. But the government has refused to do so, promoting instead further family breakdown through talking up the ‘diversity’ of family structures and loading the financial dice in favour of unmarried parents.

Having thus added fuel to the fire of family collapse, it has then stepped in to ‘rescue’ the situation on the grounds that salaried professionals know better than inadequate parents how to bring up their children and that state-financed child-care and nursery provision turn problem infants into model citizens.

In fact, the available research does not support this claim. The much quoted Head Start programmes in America, for example, which provided early years education and health and social services for parents and children, produced some short term improvements in behaviour and achievement but these effects wore off as the children passed through school. And in Britain there is no evidence that pre-school nurseries compensate for the manifold cumulative disadvantages of increasing family disintegration and the impact of mass fatherlessness.

Moreover, Sure Start not only undermines parents by telling them in effect that professionals know best but subjects them and their children to an insidious form of state thought control, effectively reprogramming the mainly poor families in its sights to have the correct attitudes to everything from nutrition and smoking to relationships with their partners and bringing up their children.

For example, government guidance to ‘early years’ officers on the Sure Start scheme says they must ‘offset the process whereby children may learn to be racially prejudiced at an early age’ by making sure children ‘unlearn any negative attitudes and behaviour they have already learnt’.

It would be astonishing if Sure Start’s £3 billion did not produce some good results. But in general, it is yet another example of the Blairite approach to social problems which refuses to tackle their root causes and indeed continues to exacerbate them while making a song and dance instead about their symptoms — thus compounding the original problem many times over by additional layers of intrusive and coercive state control of people’s lives.

The most devastating effects of this approach are being felt in education and family life, where the state has become an agent of the very damage it is ostensibly trying to correct. It is, of course, a classic revolutionary tactic to cripple a society’s independent institutions and then seize control under the pretext of having to repair the damage. For ‘family-friendly’ policies, read nationalisation of the family —and Sure Start is an important weapon in this armoury.

Now, though, it stands exposed as a total waste of money. Not only is the government fiddling while the family burns — but the poor old British taxpayer is being taken for yet another ruinously expensive ride while it does so.

Daily Mail, 12 September5 2005

As we can hardly avoid knowing, education is supposed to be Tony Blair’s absolutely top priority. Yet Britain’s education system is quite simply sliding inexorably down the drain.

Nearly one-third of 14-year-olds are still not reading at the expected level for their age-group, and only half of all 16-year-olds get acceptable grades at GCSE. Business leaders observe that even those who do get reasonable GCSE grades have not mastered the basics of English and maths. In the schools themselves high levels of truancy and disorder have barely been dented, while low-level disruption in class has become an accepted way of school life.

The response by Education Secretary Ruth Kelly has been as feeble as it is confused. She insists that education standards are rising, while at the same time producing one panicky, gimmicky and inadequate initiative after another to stop the rot.

Her diagnosis of the problem appears to be simply that some schools are not up to scratch. So she has now given poorly-performing schools a year to improve or face closure. But shunting pupils from failing schools into successful ones will merely threaten to overwhelm them and undermine their own standards.

Yesterday, she came up with another wheeze, this time to identify under-performing teachers by measuring the achievements of individual classes. But this threatens to submerge schools still further in crippling bureaucracy to service the dangerously blunt instrument of central government targets — and do the job that any competent head teacher should be doing.

All these initiatives merely serve to rearrange the deckchairs as the Titanic goes down. Failing schools are not the source of the problem but its outcome. Education standards have collapsed across the board — so much so that even well-regarded schools are producing pupils who, despite record exam successes, often cannot cope in higher education or the world of work.

That’s because the driving obsession that everyone must achieve equally means that standards are being lowered from top to bottom of the system in order to shoehorn record numbers into higher education and thus support the entirely bogus claim that education standards are rising.

As a result, some GCSE and A-level grades have become little more than a joke. Pupils were able to gain good GCSE passes this year with scores as low as 45 per cent in more than a hundred examination papers.

Pupils scoring as low as 16 per cent could be awarded C grades in one Edexcel maths GCSE paper, and an A* grade with only 47 per cent in an AQA business studies paper. They could also achieve a C grade with 20 per cent in AQA GCSE maths, 25 per cent in classical Greek or 28 per cent in physics. At Edexcel C grades at GCSE were awarded for 32 per cent in a French paper, 36 per cent in German and 39 per cent in religious studies.

Despite this patently farcical situation, the Government insists that the rising number of high grades is proof of higher standards. But given the fact that the number of A-grades at A level has increased almost threefold in just over 20 years, this is simply incredible.

The A-level pass rate rose this year to almost 97 per cent; yet more than half of employers think university graduates are only ‘average’ to ‘poor’ in numeracy and literacy. Who can be surprised when, according to examiners' reports, three quarters of the brightest maths students were unable to convert a fraction to a decimal in one of this year's GCSE questions?

Indeed, remedial courses are now common at universities struggling to accommodate students whose knowledge appears to diminish as their grades dizzyingly soar ever higher. York university has scrapped a maths test for new undergraduates because, as the number with top A-level grades rose, scores fell so low that the test became meaningless.

The reason is that the content of education has been hollowed out. Studies have shown that when primary school children are taught to read by long-abandoned traditional methods they learn to read up to five times faster than through the government’s literacy hour.

Since the government lifted the requirement for pupils to study a foreign language to GCSE, the numbers studying such languages has slumped. The number of pupils choosing to study other hard subjects which are essential to this country’s success, such as such as physics, chemistry, biology or maths, has catastrophically declined while the number choosing frivolous subjects like ‘media studies’ has exploded.

Hard subjects themselves, meanwhile, are being dumbed down. The basics of biology, chemistry and physics are to make way at GCSE for ‘relevant’ topics such as recycling, organic farming and the uses of cannabis.

A review led by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the body that decides what is studied in schools, has proposed to ‘modernise’ the teaching of English literature by effectively abolishing literacy. Films would be afforded the same status as books, while basic skills such as grammar, spelling and reading may be ‘re-evaluated’. But without these skills, people can neither write nor think.

At the same time, vocational exams often teach nothing to fit pupils for the world of work. Questions on one Leisure and Tourism GCSE paper, for example, asked candidates to describe ‘what customers need to do to receive a delivery service from an Indian take-away restaurant’, ‘your own Saturday leisure activities and the time you spend on them’ and ‘what is meant by a short-break holiday’.

Such wholesale destruction of fundamental education precepts — and by a government which proclaims education as a fetish at every juncture — seems scarcely credible. Its roots lie in the government’s mania for ‘equality’, which it interprets as the need for everyone to possess a qualification of identical value.

This doctrine has been ruthlessly promulgated — under the guise of ‘anti-elitism’ — by ideologues in the education world who have increasingly replaced knowledge by nothing less than propaganda and indoctrination. Teachers who are appalled by this process report a staff-room orthodoxy in subjects such as English, History, Geography, Religious Education and General Studies which imposes a consistent anti-American slant and a constant diet of ultra-feminist views — and which ostracises those who don’t conform.

The government cannot rescue this dire situation for the very good reason that it is itself the problem. It is government control which has destroyed an education system which was once the envy of the world.

First, it destroyed excellence through the imposition of the comprehensive school; next, it destroyed knowledge through the imposition of ideological fads. And it achieved this devastating coup — which has simply changed the intellectual and moral landscape of Britain — by denying parents any means of escape to send their children to schools that would teach them properly.

Now Ms Kelly mouths the rhetoric of parental choice. Yet people trying to set up their own schools face immense bureaucratic obstruction, while more than one million pounds of public money has been spent in the past two years on campaigns to abolish the remaining grammar schools.

If the government were serious about education reform, it would open up schooling to the market and equip parents with vouchers to buy the education of their choice. Unfortunately, the only choice it is prepared to give parents is the choice of which it itself approves. The outcome is the ruin of British education, and the slow but systematic undermining of our country’s future.

Jewish Chronicle, 9 September 2005

For many of a secular bent, espousing religious belief is tantamount to evidence of fascism or insanity or both. Israelis in particular often display such an attitude. I often find that when secular Israelis discover that I keep kosher and even attend synagogue they regard me with a new wariness.

This happened only the other day, when at a conference dinner in Berlin the Israeli sitting next to me, who was tucking into his lobster and veal, looked askance at the plate of mushrooms that I had been served (sometimes the alternative catering proves a little erratic) and said ‘Vegetarian? Kosher??’ and then said defensively: ‘I keep kosher at home’; and then, alarmed lest I might think he was actually religious, added hastily: ‘but only so that anyone can eat in my house’.

Two weeks ago, the renowned Israeli novelist Amos Oz wrote an article in the Times excoriating Israel’s settlers. Stanmore’s rabbi Jeffrey Cohen took an exceedingly dim view of this on the grounds that Oz was a ‘Jew-hating Jew’ who had used an international platform to revile his own people. So did I, and wrote accordingly in my website diary.

This produced the novel experience of finding both myself and Rabbi Cohen denounced in last week’s JC leader column for our ‘unrestrained and unwise’ vilification of Oz which showed a ‘total lack of understanding’ of the context in which he was writing.

This context seemed to be that no-one in Israel would turn a hair at what Oz had to say, which was merely to want a secular democratic state within the 1967 borders and accordingly to oppose the religious motivation behind the settler movement. Oh, and if we had read Oz’s autobiography A Tale of Love and Darkness — ‘preferably in its original, beautiful Hebrew’ — we might see the error of our benighted ways.

Some JC readers might well share the leader-writer’s outrage at what I wrote on my website. But since I have thus been denounced without readers being told what I actually wrote, it might be considered an advantage for them to know what they are to be outraged about.

Rabbi Cohen, of course, can speak for himself. But for me, the distressing aspect of Oz’s article was not that he wanted Israel to be a secular state. It was his out-and-out attack on religious Judaism, his implication that this was necessarily extremist and nationalist, that it had created the monstrous injustice of the settlements, that the settlements were the sole obstacle to peace with the Arabs and that Israel should therefore be stripped altogether of any religious identity.

Now I have consistently opposed the settlements and supported the disengagement. But Oz’s tirade seemed to me to be deeply unpleasant, distorted and unfair. Yes, some settlers have undoubtedly been motivated by religious fanaticism and – as I wrote on my website -- the behaviour of some of these during the disengagement was despicable.

But many, particularly in Gaza, were neither religious nor extreme but merely poor people lured to Gaza by the prospect of cheap housing. Next, Oz equated religious Judaism with nationalist fanaticism. Yes, most nationalist extremists are religious. But by no means all religious Jews are ultra-nationalists.

Oz’s obsessive hatred of religious Judaism – which encompasses an enormous spectrum of attitudes -- suggests that it is he, the militant secularist, who is the fanatic. His desire to strip Israel of its religious Jewish identity seemed to me to be tantamount to stripping the soul from a human being.

I was very struck by the analysis of his anti-religious animus delivered by Kenneth Levin in his book ‘The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege’ (Smith and Kraus) which I wrote about here last month. Levin writes of Oz that, as a result of the Arab siege of Israel which has systematically prevented him from living a normal life, he is possessed by rage towards Jewish history, Jewish culture and Jewish ties to the land.

In this he resembles those 19th century Jewish intellectuals in Europe ‘who railed against the curse of the Jewish, of Jewish history and Jewish identity (often doing so – as Oz does – while professing individualism or universalism as more noble and high-minded than any narrow ethnic or religious or national identity) but whose indictments of all things Jewish were a response to Europe’s besiegement of the Jews and their own eagerness to escape the siege’.

His desire accordingly to strip Israel of its religious identity seems to me to be profoundly anti-Jewish. As it happens, I have read and admired A Tale of Love and Darkness. But it is perfectly clear -- even to one such as myself who did not read it in the ‘original, beautiful Hebrew’ -- that it describes Oz’s deep attachment to Israel. What it does not describe is his attachment to Judaism which, from his comments in the Times, must be open to question.

Sanssouci Colloquium, Potsdam, 2 September 2005

Response to keynote address by EU Vice-President Günter Verheugen

I agree with one thing that Herr Verheugen said, and one thing only — that the EU is in a state of crisis. He appears, however, to be baffled by what this crisis is about. It seems clear to me that it is a crisis of democratic legitimacy, which will not be resolved by Herr Verheugen’s managerial remedies.

The EU constitution that has now been so spectacularly rejected was supposed to cement European integration, to take the EU onto a new plane altogether, to create a wholly new political entity. It turned out to be a step too far. It imploded, and thus exposed the fundamental flaws in the entire EU project.

Herr Verheugen brushes aside the very idea of a European superstate as an ‘impossibility’, and he implies that it always was so. But the EU constitution was creating an entity with its own flag, its own anthem, its own currency, its own laws, its own foreign policy, its own defence policy, its own economic policy, its own social policy. Member states would have been left with little more power than a heritage theme-park. In my view, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is idle to pretend that it is not a duck.

Moreover, this was to be a virtual reality state, a free-floating entity with no political, legal or cultural anchorage and created instead entirely by bureaucratic legerdemain. In Britain there was once a much loved magician called Tommy Cooper, who would pull rabbits out of his hat. He had a catch-phrase: ‘Just like that’. Well, the constitution was going to magic up a state which defied all known political laws — just like that.

But the peoples of Europe, who know a duck when they see one, rose up and said no to this project. What the EU seeks to deny — the particular and local attachments that constitute a nation — turned out to be mighty important to the citizens of these countries. The only people who were surprised by this were the European élites.

Herr Verheugen is surprised that people are so alarmed by demographic change and mass migration. The only people who are surprised are those who think that national identity and identification with the values of a nation are somehow illegitimate — one of the founding dogmas of the EU supra-national project. But amazing as it may seem to these élites, people actually want to govern themselves in their own nations in accordance with their national traditions, cultures and laws.

This is all, of course, music to the ears of eurosceptics like me for whom the scuppering of the constitution appears to have brought us in from the cold. Hitherto, we have been scorned as isolationists and protectionists. Herr Verheugen talks of reforming the EU by making it embrace competition. It’s a bit rich to hear this at precisely the time that the EU has provoked a crisis by preventing the import of clothing from China — demonstrating that it is the EU, rather than its critics, that is protectionist and anti-competition.

The great mistake the EU makes is to confuse attachments to nation with isolationism. The desire for self-government is not isolationist. It is simply the precondition for democracy. Herr Verheugen tells us that the nation state is not big enough to cope with the problems of the modern age. On the contrary — it is only a properly functioning nation state that will enable us to cope with these problems.

The EU is a profoundly anti-democratic project. Its concept of democracy amounts to the will of the collective trampling down individual national interests — a collective without even a language in common.

Herr Verheugen tells us that the EU is now engaged in a period of reflection. He tells us there is to be a new model for integration reflecting diversity. But on this very day we read that Commissioner Frattini wants us all to swear an oath of allegiance to the EU, to its laws and to its Charter of Fundamental Rights. This is monumentally arrogant. People owe their allegiance to their own country, because they are part of a community of people shaped by common laws, history, customs, religion, culture. Because of this attachment, people will die for their country. No-one would ever die for the EU.

But then, who can be surprised at such arrogance when it was Herr Verheugen who presented a copy of the EU constitution to an Italian astronaut to take to the International Space Station — presumably to demonstrate that its cosmic appeal should also colonise outer space. No doubt this is the significance of the stars on the EU flag.

The fundamental myth at the heart of the EU is that it embodies one common culture. Obviously, member states have a number of interests or characteristics in common. But there is no one European identity. Instead the EU represents an attempt to manufacture an entirely artificial one. But this one-size-fits-all approach is wrong, and will not work.

Nations have a duty first and foremost to look after their own citizens. That’s why the attempt to foist upon us, for example, a common immigration policy is anti-democratic and ruinous, particularly for Britain which has borne the brunt of mass illegal immigration. This is largely through Britain’s own incompetence. But that is for the British government to sort out and to be held to account by the British people. It is not for the EU to dictate its immigration policy. If Britain wants to deport foreign extremists, this is a matter for the British Parliament and the British people to decide. The attempt by the EU to frustrate this democratic compact is intolerable, and one of countless incursions into democratic sovereignty.

The EU is now divided into Old Europe, which still wants to supersede national self-government, and New Europe, which does not. New Europe wants a trading alliance of sovereign nation states. New Europe hasn’t just emerged from the long nightmare of Soviet totalitarianism only to be sucked into a European totalitarianism.

But there is another division in Europe, between the people and the elites. The people want to govern themselves. But the élites remain wedded to the doctrine of which the EU is a principal exemplar — the doctrine of transnational progressivism. This holds that the nation state is responsible for all bad things in the world, like war or prejudice, which derive from local and particular attachments rooted in backward-looking and reactionary ideologies like religion or national stories which merely set people against each other. Utopia, by contrast, will be delivered by transnational institutions — such as the EU, European Court of Human Rights, UN, International Criminal Court — which by denying all the constraints of the past and particularly those rooted in religion or local traditions will impose values which are universal and therefore brook no opposition. This transnationalism of which the EU is such a pillar is therefore nothing less than an out and out assault on democracy, freedom and the attachments that make us into functioning communities founded on a shared sense of identity and interests.

Herr Verheugen referred to the fact that the EU was born in the aftermath of World War Two. The EU was founded on the premise that the greatest threat to civilisation arose from war between nations. But that is no longer the case. The greatest threat to us today is coming from a war that recognises no national boundaries, a global war of religion being waged through the asymmetric and transnational warfare of terror. And the only way to defend ourselves against this new threat is for nations to have a strong sense of and belief in themselves, a commitment to defend their democracies and if necessary to die for them. Yet it is that sense of national identification that the EU has been busily destroying, thus dangerously weakening the ability of European nations to fight in their own defence.

That’s why this period of reflection should be used to radically rethink not just the structures but the whole philosophy of the EU. Herr Verheugen’s prescriptions merely amount to more effective ways to present the same old democracy-denying, nation-superseding programme in a more palatable form. Well, it won’t wash. We’re not going to have the wool pulled over our eyes again. The times are far too dangerous.

Daily Mail, 5 September 2005

Hurricane Katrina has done more than reshape the geographical landscape of the southern states of America. It has also landed a pulverising blow on its political landscape, from which it may be even harder to recover.

As relief finally arrived for the stricken survivors of the catastrophe, a political salvage operation was also getting under way to counter the savage condemnation raining down on President Bush from all sides. But the repercussions go far wider and deeper than the political reputation of one man.

America has undergone two seismic shocks in the past four years. First was 9/11 which destroyed its hitherto intact sense of invulnerability. Traumatic as that was, however, it reinforced its belief in its own heroic image and transformed American policy accordingly, with enormous consequences for the rest of the world.

By contrast, Katrina’s impact is lethal. For this disaster has struck hard at America’s sense of it own omnipotence. Its unrivalled sense of itself as the best and most powerful country on the planet which can do literally anything that it wants now lies at the bottom of the sea of sewage and decomposing bodies that has obliterated one of America’s great cities and turned an area larger than the size of Great Britain into a disaster zone.

Disbelieving Americans have had to face the fact that for day after agonising day the world’s greatest superpower was unable to provide food, water and medical supplies to the thousands stranded by the flood, unable to scramble buses or planes to evacuate them, unable to do anything while an unknown number of victims died not from the impact of nature’s savagery but from astounding American incompetence.

Of course no-one should be blamed for a natural calamity of enormous ferocity. But human agency — or more to the point, the lack of it — was the cause of an untold loss of human life.

True, the disaster has handed the many enemies of America and President Bush a golden opportunity to exploit it for political ends. With undisguised gloating, they have claimed that the hurricane was caused by global warming, or that the looting and anarchy took place because part of the National Guard was tied up in Iraq —and that both are the President’s fault.

Both claims, however, are demonstrably absurd. Hurricanes are no stronger or more frequent now than they ever were. As for the National Guard, they were there all the time; 7000 additional troops have now turned up and started restoring order. They hadn’t been sent previously simply because no-one with the faintest idea was in charge and the management of the relief operation was a complete shambles at every level.

In New Orleans and Louisiana, attempts to rebuild the flood defences were mired in bureaucracy as fragmented as it was corrupt — even though everyone knew what was coming. Several years ago, emergency planners predicted that the destruction of New Orleans by a hurricane was the third most likely disaster to hit the US behind a terrorist attack on New York and an earthquake in California.

But they did nothing because they complacently assumed the defences would hold. And so when disaster struck there was no rescue plan that could cope — just endless buck-passing and obstructive rivalries.

Nevertheless, President Bush’s own absence of leadership has also been lamentable. He failed to visit the stricken area until way too late; he consistently claimed things were under control even while the TV screens were showing people starving to death. At a time of unprecedented catastrophe for the nation, its leader appeared to be wholly divorced from reality and at the mercy of events.

But there are deeper failures still. Anti-war critics claim that the flood levees were not rebuilt because the money had been diverted to Iraq and homeland security. Quite apart from the fatuous implication that America should never spend money prosecuting any foreign wars or safeguarding its citizens from terrorist attack, it is a distortion.

Louisiana’s flood defences were underfunded both at state and at federal level throughout the 1990s under successive presidents. Moreover, the problem was not that the defences hadn’t been upgraded. Indeed, the levee near Lake Pontchartrain that gave way and inundated much of the city had been completed and was in good condition. Instead, New Orleans drowned as a result of a fundamental strategic error — that the levees were only built to withstand a force three hurricane, a decision made decades ago based on a cost-benefit analysis, and Katrina was force four.

This disaster has exposed the dark underbelly of the American dream. The hurricane has stripped bare the ugly reality of America’s racial and social polarisation, just as it peeled away the thin veneer of civilisation itself.

The shocking orgy of looting and rape that followed the flood has to be set in the context of a largely poor, black city where the murder rate was already ten times the national average because the local forces of law and order had long ago given up.

America’s downside is the terrible poverty of the southern black underclass — the people who were the principal victims of this disaster because they did not have the means of their white neighbours to flee the city at speed. This undeniable truth has led in turn to the suspicion that the relief effort was so slow because the lives of poor black people were considered of less value, a radioactive charge which is already being exploited by the black demagogues Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

But given the staggering incompetence of the American system from top to bottom, one has to wonder whether, if an American city had to be evacuated following a terrorist attack, similar mayhem would not ensue regardless of the colour of its inhabitants.

Whether we like it or not — and many do not — the free world relies on America for its security. And this is why hurricane Katrina is potentially toxic for the rest of us.

President Bush is already weakened by the ongoing struggle in Iraq. If the view settles that he fouled up over New Orleans he will be politically crippled, his authority will evaporate and the defence of the west will be left leaderless. Which is why political predators and western fifth columnists such as George Galloway and ‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda are now busily assembling to redouble their attack.

The dismaying fact is, however, that America has handed them their weapons. Those of us who remain convinced it was right to remove Saddam Hussein and that the west faces an unparalleled threat from global terror are aghast beyond words at the staggering incompetence of the leader of our defence, first in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad and now in New Orleans.

The danger is that this double whammy might now reshape America’s political landscape once again — but this time by undermining that belief in itself which gives it the will to fight for freedom and democracy. For that to be avoided it must now acknowledge its failings and restore belief in both its political class and in itself.

American cities have been rebuilt before from the ashes of hurricanes, fires and other disasters. This time, however, America has looked into the toxic floodwaters and seen an ugly and horrifying reflection. Everything now depends on how well it clears up this mess, both in the southern states and in the political sphere. The stakes are enormous, for all of us.