Daily Mail, 31 October 2005

Since Dr Andrew Wakefield first triggered the furore over a possible link between autism, bowel disease and the measles, mumps and rubella triple jab in 1998, the controversy has never died away. Now a study by the respected Cochrane Library has said, on the basis of 31 pieces of research into the possible side effects of MMR, that it found no association between MMR and autism.

Cue a frenzy of gloating by Wakefield’s enemies, ripe denunciations of those like this newspaper who took his concerns seriously and demands that we apologise for creating a scare that left children unvaccinated and at risk of measles, mumps and rubella. The Cochrane Library study, they shrieked, had found MMR to be ‘safe’, given it the ‘all clear’ and declared all such fears to be ‘unfounded’.

This is a load of old baloney. These people should start by reading the actual study rather than lazily recycling the press release. For the study didn’t say anything like this at all.

Certainly the lead Cochrane reviewer Vittorio Demicheli said in that press release: ‘We conclude that all the major unintended events, such as triggering Crohn’s disease or autism, were suspected on the basis of unreliable evidence.’

But Wakefield never suggested a link between MMR and Crohn’s disease, a disorder of the bowel. Wakefield reported instead the discovery of an entirely new syndrome, autistic enterocolitis, which produced distressing bowel symptoms along with a number of developmental problems resembling autism — but which the Cochrane report did not even mention.

Moreover, it did not conclude that Wakefield’s evidence was unreliable. On the contrary, it said that no fewer than nine of the most celebrated studies that have been used against him were unreliable in the way they were constructed. As a result, it said, their conclusions that MMR was ‘safe’ or ‘well-tolerated’ need to be ‘interpreted with caution’.

Next, the press release said: ‘There was no credible evidence behind claims of harm from the MMR vaccination.’ But the study did not say that. It did not even examine those claims of harm, which arose not from the epidemiological studies of patterns of disease which Cochrane investigated, but from clinical investigations of actual children.

What the report did say but was not mentioned in that extremely odd press notice was this: ‘The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre-and post-marketing, are largely inadequate’. And just as significant, this: ‘We found only limited evidence of the safety of MMR compared to its single component vaccines…’

In other words, far from saying MMR was safe the study said explicitly that the evidence for its safety was not good enough. Yes, it also said the evidence it looked at did not support any association between MMR and autism. But that does not mean it said the vaccine was safe. It was rather that it didn’t find anything to suggest that it was not.

And that was because the epidemiological studies that it examined are intrinsically unlikely to reveal the truth about the effects of MMR. For a start, they rely on medical records. But the parents complained that their children’s doctors dismissed all their concerns about autistic symptoms or bowel disease. So they never entered anything out of the ordinary on their medical records.

Furthermore, for the vast majority of children, the vaccine poses no problem at all. Only a very small proportion are said to have been badly affected, possibly through a combination of environmental or genetic factors. But population-wide studies are considered too large and insensitive to pick up small numbers like this.

It is the evidence that Cochrane did not examine that is the only material worth studying. This is the clinical evidence obtained not just by Wakefield and his associates but by others, which has posed alarming questions that have never been answered.

Wakefield’s discovery of autistic enterocolitis as a completely new syndrome has now been replicated in studies around the world as a new and so far unexplained disease in patients with autism.

It has also been discovered that autistic symptoms have got far worse in a number of children after they received booster jabs — and such booster jab evidence has been accepted by the American Institute of Medicine, at least, as an indication of cause and effect.

Most explosively of all, vaccine-strain measles virus has been found in the cerebro-spinal fluid of some autistic children — which suggests that in those cases the vaccine may have had a catastrophic effect on the brain.

None of this proves that MMR has caused autism in some children. But it does raise questions which need to be resolved as a matter of urgency. The only way to do so is to conduct large-scale clinical trials, which the government has consistently refused to do.

Hopes of examining the existing clinical evidence were pinned on the legal case being brought by parents claiming compensation on behalf of children said to have been damaged by the vaccine. But this case foundered when the parents’ legal aid was abruptly withdrawn.

Now Wakefield himself is being arraigned before the General Medical Council on eleven counts of serious professional misconduct, including an alleged conflict of interest over receiving funding from the parents’ lawyers, which he has strenuously denied.

Compare this with the Cochrane paper, where under the rubric ‘potential conflict of interest’ Dr Tom Jefferson, who is listed as the study’s second author, acknowledges that in 1999 he acted as a consultant for a legal team advising the MMR vaccine manufacturers.

Another researcher who helped with the Cochrane paper was one of the authors of a prominent study which rubbished Wakefield’s research -- a study which the Cochrane report itself then investigated.

And a number of epidemiological studies which the government has used to state that MMR is safe have been written by researchers with links to drug companies or to governmental bodies with an interest in disproving Wakefield’s concerns.

Are these not real conflicts of interest which should be investigated, rather than hounding the doctor whose discoveries have raised concerns over public health which have never been addressed?

One of Cochrane’s findings should give even those jeering from the sidelines pause. This was that the ‘Urabe’ strain of the mumps component of the triple vaccine causes aseptic meningitis.

Although the current vaccine does not contain this Urabe strain, the first batch of MMR vaccine introduced in 1989 did — even though the Health Department knew at the time that Canada had already withdrawn it because it was unsafe.

The British vaccine was only replaced years later, after researchers discovered to their horror an association with aseptic meningitis in Britain. So the idea that MMR was always safe is demonstrable nonsense.

The MMR scandal is getting worse. Urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered. The doctor who raised those questions is being subjected to what appears to be a witch-hunt. The parents’ recourse through the courts has been blocked. Now they have to put up with being told yet again that the evidence of their own eyes is fraudulent.

Every responsible person wants to see children vaccinated against dangerous diseases. But public anxiety could have been allayed overnight had the government permitted single vaccine jabs. Instead, we have clouds of obfuscation, an ignorant cacophony of catcalls – and an unresolved public health problem.

Daily Mail, October 24 2005

The education White Paper, which is being published tomorrow, has clearly been the subject of a titanic battle within the Government.

Over the weekend, we learned that the Prime Minister’s wish to give independence to state schools by enabling them to opt out of local authority control had been the target of a Cabinet revolt led by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.

This followed earlier reports that the proposal was being resisted by the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly herself, with yet further elements being opposed by the Treasury and Education Department officials.

After eight years in government, Mr Blair is still struggling to produce the education policy he wants. This is because, despite the claim that New Labour decisively broke with its class-war past, education is Labour’s real Clause Four. Thus Mr Blair’s dinosaur deputy is still spitting primeval resentment against the middle classes, elitism and the public school ethos.

One-size-fits-all schooling remains totemic for the Labour Party in the cause of equality of outcomes — and to hell with the fact that this has wrecked the education of millions of pupils and the life chances of the most disadvantaged, who depend utterly upon school and who have been systematically abandoned to mediocrity and worse.

If the leaks are true, the White Paper should be applauded for taking on the implacable alliance of educationists, MPs, lobbyists and civil servants responsible for this betrayal.

For example, it appears that it will repudiate mixed-ability teaching — the doctrine that took an axe to both achievement and order in the classroom by preventing teachers from tailoring lessons to the needs of their pupils — and will demand that schools restore the grouping of pupils by ability.

But as ever with this Government, the reality is likely to be less than the spin. The warring factions may be going to the barricades over a proposal which owes more to symbolism than substance. The independence being offered to state schools may be merely illusory.

There is no doubting Mr Blair’s long-standing — and long-thwarted — desire to remove from schools the dead hand of local government. But he intends to retain, and even extend, central government control by telling them what to do.

Look at the proposal to introduce ability tests at age 11 so that comprehensive schools recruit a proper cross-section of ability and don’t end up either as the preserve of better-off families or the very poor.

The Government says it wants to end the current dodge of school selection by house price. And yes, it is invidious that the better off have been able to play the system by moving into the catchment area of good schools, while paying lip-service to the comprehensive ideal.

But the problems of schooling are not simply caused by this imbalance in the intake of comprehensive schools. They have been caused by the comprehensive school itself which intrinsically collapses achievement into mediocrity in the cause of producing equality of outcomes, penalising merit on the basis that the most important thing is not to hurt anyone’s feelings if they don’t succeed.

It is this which, more than anything else, has driven our education system off the rails. Yet the Government still remains wedded to this ideology.

Thus it still refuses to give schools the independence to become academically selective. All they will be able to do is to improve upon the sole type of school permitted by the Government.

Parents’ choice of school will still be tightly controlled by Whitehall. Indeed, the Government is said to be proposing that pupils should be bussed out of their neighbourhood to ensure that schools obtain a better academic and social mix — although Ruth Kelly insisted yesterday that no one would be forced to go to schools they didn’t want to attend.

It is hard to square this pious assertion with her reported intention to ensure that every school takes pupils from the full range of ability. This must surely mean that some children will indeed be forced to travel farther afield to find a school with spare places in the appropriate ability band.

Far from extending choice, this will mean that while some children are bussed to better schools, others will be forced to travel miles away to inferior ones. This would be grossly unfair to individual pupils, and would represent an oppressive use of state power.

It is also particularly obnoxious given that so many Labour ministers, including Mr Blair himself, have played the system for years by transporting their own offspring across London to avoid sending them to the local sink school — even though, according to what they are now saying, it is only by forcing middle-class children into such sink schools that they will improve.

As a further egregious example of such double standards, the London Oratory, the Catholic comprehensive to which the Prime Minister sent his two sons despite its location on the other side of London, has been given special dispensation to flout the Government’s own rules and continue using selection interviews.

These are ostensibly to assess applicants’ commitment to Roman Catholicism but are suspected of being used to favour promising candidates. While there is nothing wrong with the Oratory being able to select whomever it likes, it is surely invidious to allow this one school to do so while preventing others from doing the same.

There is more than a whiff in all this of the old Soviet nomenklatura, who provided themselves with a luxury lifestyle while inflicting an equality of misery on the unfortunate proletariat in whose name the revolution had taken place.

If Ms Kelly really wanted to give the poor the same power as the better-off, she would introduce a voucher system to enable all parents to buy education in the school of their choice — both in the state and the private sector — as happens in several European countries where it has created true variety in school provision.

Instead of expanding choice in this way, she is proposing to move pupils around within the limited alternatives that exist at present. The Government is thus merely rearranging the pieces of the jigsaw to produce a pattern that it prefers. But it is its use of education in this way as a form of social engineering that lies at the core of our education meltdown.

The fact is that school independence and parental choice will always be fought tooth and nail by this alliance of educationists and political ideologues.

This is because such developments would not only remove their power to re-shape society, but more pertinently still would threaten their livelihoods as parents voted with their feet against the manifold incompetence of failing schools.

But it is only if parents are given this supremely mind-focusing power to hold educational feet to the fire that there is any prospect of challenging the destructive and idiotic educational fads that have hollowed out British education and left so many children stranded.

Ultimately, this is a failure of prime ministerial will properly to confront the lethal ideology that passes for radicalism on the Left.

Whatever proposals finally make it, therefore, into tomorrow’s White Paper, our education system is likely to continue to crumble — and with it the future health and prosperity of this country.

Daily Mail, October 17 2005

According to opponents of the government’s Terrorism Bill, it would plunge us into the horrors of ‘internment’, a ‘police state’ and even — in the words of one elderly former law lord — parallels with Nazi Germany.

Despite the fact that such reactions betray more than a touch of hysteria and irrationality, they reflect a widely shared opposition to the bill. In particular, the judges are squaring up for an epic battle of wills with the government, presenting themselves as the guardians of essential freedoms against ministers who are threatening to destroy them through such proposals as detaining terror suspects for up to 90 days’ questioning.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, has insisted that the judges will not change their approach to terrorism cases and warned the government not to ‘browbeat’ them. The law lord Lord Steyn said that the proposed anti-terrorism powers could violate the Human Rights Act. The Attorney-General — on the rack as ever — has wrung his hands and said he is not yet persuaded that 90 days’ detention is necessary.

The argument is that fundamental liberties are being sacrificed here for no good reason. Disturbingly, this suggests that — even after the July London bombings — influential people still don’t seem to grasp just what we are up against.

Quite simply, the threat posed by Islamist terrorism is so completely different from previous terrorist threats that it requires new attitudes and new procedures to defend ourselves against it. The rules of the game, as the Prime Minister said, have to change.

Earlier this month, a paper published by the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch spelled this out very clearly. In the past, the police waited before making arrests until at or near the point of a terrorist attack, so that they could assemble enough evidence to make the case stand up in court.

But unlike previous terrorists, those threatening us today give no warnings and seek to inflict as many casualties as possible.

So the police can no longer afford to take the risk of waiting. To protect the public, they are therefore forced to arrest suspects well before they have finished their investigations. Given the global nature of the terrorist networks, those investigations can involve inquiries on several continents, involving hundreds of computers and with many different languages to be translated.

In such circumstances, the two-week limit for questioning is clearly absurd. Indeed, it has already posed insuperable difficulties in adequately preparing terrorist cases for trial.

To describe the proposed extension as ‘internment’ or a ‘police state’ is grotesque. Internment is the random and indefinite incarceration of a group of people. What is being proposed, by contrast, is a limited period of detention targeted at individuals in a specific situation.

Despite reports to the contrary the independent terrorism law watchdog, Lord Carlile QC, has supported the case for a 90-day limit. Indeed he underlined how current procedures have left us unprotected when he wrote:

'I am satisfied beyond doubt that there have been situations in which significant conspiracies to commit terrorist acts have gone unprosecuted as a result of the time limitations placed on the control authorities following arrest. This is not in the public interest.'

What he criticises as inadequate is the proposed oversight of such detention by weekly visits to a district judge. Instead, he recommends adopting proposals suggested by the Newton committee in 2003 for a continental-style ‘examining judge’ to supervise the whole investigation, hear submissions from a security-cleared lawyer representing the detained person and with a right of appeal.

Although such a system is foreign to our own legal traditions, it might well provide an acceptable compromise between security and liberty to deal with a phenomenon that lies somewhere in between criminality and war and which therefore requires new structures to deal with it.

Other countries have a less squeamish approach to detaining suspects. The Foreign Office document that tried to make this point backfired when critics pointed out that other countries detain suspects who have not been charged for less time than we do.

But the key point is that after they have been charged they are often detained for far longer while police investigations proceed: in France for up to four years, in Greece for 18 months and in Norway indefinitely with court approval.

The unpalatable fact is that this country has left itself wide open to terrorism. The judges pose as our society’s bulwark against tyranny. But frankly, they are the very last people upon whom we can rely.

For with their obsession with ‘human rights’, it is the judges who have imperilled our safety by turning Britain into a magnet for terrorists and subversives. Through their interpretation of human rights law they have destroyed our border controls so that extremists could pour into the country knowing they would never be pursued.

The judges frustrated all attempts to deal with illegal immigration, thwarted other countries’ desperate attempts to get Britain to extradite terrorist suspects, produced the lunatic situation where people who are a danger to this country cannot be deported in case they may be ill-treated, and when the government tried to lock them up instead to safeguard the public ruled that this too was contrary to human rights law.

‘The real threat to the nation,’ intoned the law lord Lord Hoffmann, ‘comes not from terrorism, but from such laws as these.’ How can such people be entrusted to safeguard our security?

The distressing fact is that, faced with an unprecedented threat from terrorism, it is hard to see just who we can rely on.

The police hardly inspire confidence after pumping bullets into the head of an innocent Brazilian electrician whom they mistook for a suicide bomber.

As for the Government, it does seek a worrying degree of control over people’s lives while failing to get to grips with the country’s problems. To entrust our civil liberties to such incompetent control-freaks is indeed an alarming prospect.

But the judges, who are in the last resort our traditional defenders of freedom, have themselves squandered public trust because of their increasingly perverse and ideological rulings under human rights law which have undermined many of our most fundamental values such as family life, citizenship, equality under the law and even truth itself.

Regardless of this loss of trust in our society’s key institutions, however, we must coolly and clinically assess what we must do to defend ourselves more effectively.

Other countries are far more robust. France has recently thrown out a number of Islamist extremists without demur. Even ultra-liberal Holland is planning to ban the burka in public places — following the example of several towns in Belgium and Italy — because a garment which conceals everything except the eyes obviously makes identification impossible and is therefore an unacceptable security risk.

Yes, liberal values are the bedrock of our society. But equally, a liberal society has to protect itself from being destroyed by the exploitation and abuse of those values.

Of course security has to be balanced against liberty. And the law must be rigorously scrutinised to ensure that it is workable. But with circumstances so changed, the status quo is not an option. Those with their heads stuck in the sand threaten the safety of us all.

Jewish Chronicle, 14 October 2005

We were in Israel listening to an address by an Israeli Arab, a man who happens to run a project promoting reconciliation between Arabs and Jews. We were therefore expecting to hear about the dilemmas on both sides, certainly, but expressed with the objectivity and generosity that are surely necessary to any true reconciliation in such incendiary territory.

Such naivety was rapidly exposed. What we got instead was a 20-minute rant fuelled by grievance and resentment, a one-sided and distorted presentation of the Israeli past and present which wholly omitted any reference to the Arab wars of extermination against Israel or the systematic murder of Israeli civilians, and instead presented the Jews as motivated by an otherwise incomprehensible animosity and prejudice against the Arabs and a desire to do them down.

The real trouble was that among the audience were some Brits who were all too ready to believe such a portrait. The Israelis present waved away such concerns. The British participants, they insisted, were — with the exception of one or two who could hardly become any more hostile — all very sympathetic, open-minded, lovely people.

On our way out I was intercepted by one of these very sympathetic, open-minded, lovely Brits, a senior cleric in the Church of England. He had noticed my pain, he said, during the presentation and wanted to understand it. Oh dear. Such incomprehension did not exactly augur an imminent meeting of minds.

So I said my ‘pain’ was simply caused by the fact that we had heard a series of distortions and lies that would deepen misunderstanding and foment yet more hatred of Israel and the Jews, particularly among those whose ignorance of the truth made them fertile ground for such propaganda.

The cleric assumed an expression appropriate for dealing with a moral imbecile. ‘There is no one truth’, he intoned. ‘We all have to respect each other’s truths’. And the Arab we had just listened to was, in his view, a ‘hero’.

So to this Christian cleric there was no such thing as a lie? And if the ‘truth’ we were respecting was actually a lie, wouldn’t this ultimately lead to siding with terrorists rather than their victims, whose self-defence would thus be condemned — exactly as the Church of England now condemns Israel?

Well, he said, it was absolutely wrong for the Israelis to kill Hamas leaders as they were once again doing. (Naturally, he did not even mention the thirty-plus rockets that Hamas had just fired at the Israeli town of Sderot which had provoked this reaction). Instead, the Israelis should be talking to them.

Uh-huh. And what, pray, would they talk about given that Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map? Would he perhaps have advocated talking to the Nazis, in, say, 1936?

Interesting you should raise that, he said; I’ve been wondering the same thing recently. But look, he went on, this business of self-defence is overdone. Look at our government’s claim to have invaded Iraq in self-defence, which has now been proved to be a lie.

Oh? A lie, eh? Leaving aside little details like proof and historical evidence here, weren’t we supposed to ‘respect’ the government’s truth? Or are the only truths that the church ‘respects’ the ones that confirm its own prejudices?

I was thinking about this episode when I read the Chief Rabbi’s warning of a new kind of anti-Jewish feeling that has erupted in Britain — new because it now focuses on the Jews not as a race but as a nation, and through the demonisation of Israel is promoting fresh versions of the oldest hatred from the blood libel to the world Jewish conspiracy.

The point about this firestorm of anti-Jewish prejudice is that it is based on a big lie, a misrepresentation of past and present that turns Jewish victimhood into oppression and Arab aggression into victimhood.

At the heart of the new antisemitism is a wholesale denial of the truth about the Middle East tragedy. This in turn is part of a denial of the very concept of truth itself, a philosophical travesty that is more generally wrecking moral and social order in Britain.

The fact that Sir Jonathan Sacks has now — and not before time, some would say — publicly stated that Israel has become a global scapegoat is an important development because the British establishment now stands challenged at last by one of its own that it has a case to answer.

Similarly, the recent formation of the website ‘Anglicans for Israel’ is also significant — not just because it shows there are decent Anglicans who do understand the difference between truth and lies, but that there is now a public challenge to the church’s moral decay from its own flock.

It is only if people publicly uphold the truth like this that there is any chance of reversing our current death-dealing culture of prejudice and lies.

Daily Mail, 10 October 2005

The disclosure that the government is apparently drawing up sweeping powers to deal with antisocial behaviour is likely to provoke relief, belly-laughs and outright hostility in equal measure.

According to weekend press reports, Whitehall’s ‘respect’ unit is preparing a set of radical proposals which will target ‘nightmare neighbour’ households, parents of out-of-control children and binge-drinkers.

Feckless parents would face community penalties, and those in council houses would lose their homes if they failed to control their children’s yobbish behaviour. The worst families would be moved to secure gated areas guarded by wardens and CCTV cameras where they would be confined under curfew.

And there was also a suggestion that children under ten -- the age of criminal responsibility — might be subject to anti-social behaviour orders for the first time.

No sooner had these reports surfaced than the government distanced itself from them, with Downing Street claiming that it ‘did not recognise’ such proposals.

This has all the hallmarks of the classic government tactic of floating measures which are likely to be deeply contentious — not least within government, where there are reportedly tensions between the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister’s ‘respect czar’ Louise Casey — in order to gauge public reaction while denying that the plan has any substance.

The fact is that measures like these would be greeted with overwhelming relief by thousands of people whose lives are being wrecked on a daily basis by anti-social behaviour.

People are being terrorised not just by yobbish children and teenagers but by their disorderly parents. Those who have done no wrong are running a gauntlet of vandalism, litter and noise and forced to become prisoners inside their own homes for fear of the violence or obscenities that threaten them if they step outside.

Moreover, all the cards are stacked against them by a state which seems to privilege those who do wrong, rewarding miscreants with houses and benefits while being unable or unwilling to protect their victims through the criminal justice system.

The sheer scale of this breakdown in order indicates why these new proposals deserve a measure of scepticism. Whole swathes of the country have simply descended into anarchy, with feral children who have been abandoned to fatherlessness and parents whose response to any remonstration is to turn violent themselves.

Our once-civilised country has been turned into this social battleground because of a collapse of the disciplines that once governed people’s behaviour. But this is a collapse which the government itself has wilfully accelerated.

The single most important reason for this widespread disorder is the disintegration of the family. Yet the government has sedulously promoted the society-busting myth that ‘all lifestyles are equal’. It has actually encouraged lone parenthood by weighting welfare benefits towards unmarried parents — a critical incentive for those at the bottom of the financial scale.

It has made the chronic problem of teenage pregnancy even worse through sex education which projects sexual relations among the young as normal and effectively condones illegal sexual activity among under-age children.

Its professed aim to curb binge-drinking is absurd given the way it has presided over an explosion of drinking which it is now further exacerbating through allowing alcohol to be sold all night.

And its reclassification of cannabis as a less dangerous drug has fuelled a rise in drug-taking of all kinds, resulting in a corresponding eruption of criminal behaviour among users for whom these drugs destroy moral inhibitions against wrong-doing.

What we are experiencing in parts of our country is nothing less than social and moral meltdown. These proposed measures, however tough they may sound, merely amount to an incoherent attempt to deal with the symptoms by a government which is itself a serial offender.

One also has to be sceptical about whether any of this will actually see the light of day. Last year the Labour MP Frank Field introduced a bill to strip antisocial households of welfare benefits. But his bill was scuppered by John Prescott while Mr Blair stood mutely by.

The new package would require massive resources to fund all the resettlement and the policing involved. Who can be confident that these would be forthcoming? Isn’t this just what we have heard so many times before — rhetorical fire-breathing by the Prime Minister while nothing actually gets done?

And if these measures were to be enacted, they would provide no more than a sticking plaster approach unless the government abandoned its nihilistic approach to family life, drinking and drug-taking.

That said, we are where we are. Even if there were the political will to address the root causes of this disaster, that would take time. For thousands of law-abiding people, there is a social emergency that simply has to be dealt with right now.

As a matter of urgency, we have to end the situation where decent people are being held hostage by hooligans who are indulged by the state. We have to put power back into the hands of the law-abiding.

That means — as these proposals suggest — ending the lunatic practice of rewarding antisocial families. It does mean punishing parents who fail to control their children. It does mean taking away their houses, and it should mean taking away their welfare benefits.

This might seem unfeeling. But how much more unfeeling is it to allow decent people to live in daily terror and misery? Is it not better to withdraw the means by which people are able inflict that terror and misery and to teach them instead how to lead responsible lives?

In ultra-liberal Holland, after all, disruptive families are uprooted from their estates and rehoused in vandal-proof steel containers. Houses and benefits are the privileges of citizenship — and citizenship requires a duty to behave in ways that do not make other people’s lives intolerable.

Communities should be given back their power. They should be able to go to the police and get a delinquent removed instantly, not after months of judicial procedure. The onus should be on the miscreant to argue why this should not happen, not on his victims to argue that it is necessary. After all, summary justice is meted out for parking offences; aren’t public safety and the relief from intimidation more important?

Of course this will be ferociously opposed by human rights lawyers and other comfortable folk in our governing class. But they don’t have to live in these blighted communities. They merely create them.

After eight years in government, Mr Blair has precious little to show for his ambitious plans to heal the divisions in society. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ was the inspired slogan that first brought him to power.

This latest package is his last desperate attempt to avoid the looming judgment of history that his legacy was instead to create large areas of Britain where the life of the law-abiding had turned into the seventh circle of hell.

Yes, tough measures like these are probably now necessary. But they will have little impact unless Mr Blair reverses the whole direction of his government, which has ruthlessly encouraged disorderly lifestyles on the grotesque grounds of ‘anti-discrimination’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘social inclusion’ and all the rest of the politically correct group-think of metropolitan trendydom.

As ever, the Prime Minister wills the socially desirable ends — but refuses to acknowledge the difficult means by which he must achieve them.

Daily Mail, 7 October 2005

Not for the first time, human rights judges have lost the plot. The ruling yesterday by the European Court of Human Rights that a blanket ban on convicted prisoners having the vote is illegal is both ludicrous and offensive.

Anyone who is removed from society because of the seriousness of the crime they have committed automatically forfeits the rights of that society, including the right to a say in how it is governed. They have put themselves outside the law and its privileges. This is a principle which goes back many hundreds of years.

If prisoners are given a say in society's laws while themselves being literally outlawed, it makes a mockery of the whole nature of punishment and undermines respect for both the rule of law and the concept of citizenship.

Voting is not a basic element of human dignity as the ruling suggested. Indeed, the universal franchise is a relatively recent development. The vote is granted to individuals as a symbol of citizenship. In turn, citizenship requires obligations by citizens - the first and foremost of which is the duty to obey the law. But now, instead of an individual’s primary obligation to the state, human rights law turns this upside down by imposing a duty on the state to give people their rights.

So human rights law has decreed that prisoners have rights to TV, porn magazines, correspondence or to get married. Since the Convention says the essential aim of prison is ‘reformation and social rehabilitation’, it surely cannot be long before the court rules that punishment itself is illegal!

It is no surprise that yesterday's ruling undermines the essence of citizenship. For the judges - some from countries which boast a less than glorious history of human rights or democracy - arrogate to themselves the right to tell our Parliament what to do.

As the five dissenting judges pointed out, the court went far beyond interpreting the Convention. By extending its scope and meaning, it assumed the role of legislator and interfered in the business of national parliaments.

Not merely has the court attacked democracy, but its thinking is also flawed. Contrary to its claim that the British parliament had not properly thought through such a ban, the issue has, in fact, been considered many times in Westminster.

Now the Government is trying to minimise the effect of the ruling by saying that it might only be prisoners who have been convicted of less serious offences who will be allowed the vote. This might mean that convicted burglars could vote – while murderers, armed robbers or rapists could not. But this would diminish the sense of disapproval that society signals when a burglar is jailed.

Mindful of this problem, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, has suggested that it might still possible to comply with the court's judgment but also continue to deprive all prisoners of the vote. But this appears to be a bit of typical ministerial legerdemain.

Lord Falconer is wriggling like an eel because - as so often - the Government will not face the fact that the cause of this mess is the Convention on Human Rights itself.

It rides roughshod over national parliaments, courts, traditions and values. It busts open the compact between the citizen and the nation because it operates on the premise that a nation’s own values and institutions are less legitimate than trans-national values and supra-national institutions.

But the truth is that human rights law is not universal. It simply depends on the judges’ interpretation of its many conflicting principles. In fact, the case was already rejected by British judges who, despite applying the principles of the Human Rights Act, considered it to be absurd.

The culture of indiscriminate entitlement, promoted by the doctrine of human rights, has progressively wrecked this country’s fundamental values and traditions. It has also encouraged people to make demands based merely on being members of an interest group which did not have the same ‘rights’ as others. The result has been that the values of the majority in society have had to give way - on the basis that these small interest groups' self-designated ‘victim’ status trumps everything else.

For example, another Strasbourg ruling forced a change in English law to enable a transsexual to have a new birth certificate which says that their sex at birth was whatever he or she deems it to be. In other words, the certificate - the most basic guarantee that we are who we say we are - will be a lie. In this and countless other ways, the very basics of our society’s values - family life, truth, law, social order, and now in yesteday's judgment punishment and citizenship - have been relentlessly undermined or overturned.

Those values are deeply rooted in the religion, traditions and history of this nation. But they are being steadily replaced by values with no cultural roots and no legitimacy. Human rights doctrine has become a principal weapon against our society, with the judges the standard-bearers in this culture war.

Daily Mail, 3 October 2005

Another week, another party conference. Today, the Tories get under way. The watching public may well sigh and switch channels. Isn’t this just going to be a beauty contest for the leadership of a party that’s going nowhere? Isn’t Labour still the only political show in town?

By the end of the week, this verdict may have been justified. But what happens in Blackpool over the next few days should not be dismissed as insignificant.

Usually, platform speeches are bland and stage-managed while the real arguments take place on the fringe. Not this time. These platform speeches can make or break any of the five candidates.

In the country, the Conservative electorate will be listening carefully to every word. By the end of the week, we might be looking at the Tories in a different way.

So far, the signs are not terribly encouraging that we will hear much that is original or distinctive. The air is already thicker with the sound of trimming than a hedgerow in spring. Traditionalists and modernisers are converging in a stampede of platitudes and slogans to declare as one that the party must change.

This begs the question — change to what? The answer, not just from the modernising David Cameron but also the traditionalist David Davies, seems to be to become more like Tony Blair; while Kenneth Clarke appears merely to think he is a more competent kind of Blairite — indeed, he boasts that he gave New Labour its ideas — who can actually make government work.

But given how unpopular Blairism is in the country, a moment’s thought suggests this is all very perverse. Indeed, since at the last election more people in England voted for the Conservatives than Labour, whose overall share of the popular vote was almost as dire as that gained by the Tories, one can see that the very last thing that millions of Britons want is Blairism mark two.

Although the arithmetic of parliamentary seats may be a daunting challenge, it would not take much for the country to flip over and give the Tories victory once again. Labour’s own conference revealed a party and a government that have lost their way. For the Tory candidate who gets this right, the prize is within his grasp.

The cause of the Tories’ woe is not that they are insufficiently Blairite. It is that they are useless at opposing Blairism. What does have to change is their analysis of what has happened to politics in this country. For it is the fundamental flaw in this analysis that has surely paralysed them. And this is all about the famous centre ground of British politics.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a political party will only gain power if it occupies the centre ground. This, however, begs the crucial question of just what the centre ground actually is.

The Blairites boast that they dominate the centre ground, an analysis endorsed by the Tories who groan that as a result they have no room to manoeuvre.

But Mr Blair does not occupy the centre ground. It is rather that, by the language he uses, he has brilliantly redefined what it is and — in the absence of any opposition — unilaterally shifted the centre of political gravity sharply to the left.

Thus he uses the language of ‘social inclusion’; his child care policies are ‘family-friendly’; multiculturalism is presented as ‘tolerance’, education as ‘aspiration’, criminal justice as ‘victim-centred’ and economic policy as ‘prudence’. This allows him to define his opponents as extremists.

But it is Blairism that is extreme. It is New Labour that has dismembered family life, undermined British national identity, destroyed social mobility and the education of the most disadvantaged and wrecked social order through the encouragement of drinking, drug-taking and gambling. As for prudence — tell that to the millions whose pensions have gone up the spout.

Before they can claim the centre ground, the Tories need to reclaim the language. They have to point out that terms such as tolerance, fairness, aspiration or social justice have been twisted into their very opposite, and that the people the government claims to champion — the most vulnerable — have been left abandoned as a result.

The Tories don’t need to find new territory. Mr Blair is wide open to attack on his own turf. The Tories could so easily reveal the New Labour project for what it really is — an all out assault on the identity and integrity of this nation, its values and its democracy. But instead, they shy away.

Take human rights law. The Tories put only the most tentative toe in this water because they fear that if they say they will repeal this law they will be accused of trampling down human rights. But that’s because they have allowed the government to hijack the language.

Far from expanding our liberties, human rights law has turned the country upside down, made law and order virtually impossible and, by helping create our asylum and immigration shambles, undermined the security of the country at a time of terrorist threat.

As a result of public outrage, Mr Blair is now talking about repealing part of his own Human Rights Act. Once again, the Tories have been wrong-footed by the fear of being seen as extreme — while absurdly, Mr Blair himself has now set off towards the very stance that the Tories should have made a major feature of their opposition.

In fact, in almost every policy area the Tories are paralysed by the fear of being painted as nasty. But this has happened not because of the issues they raise but the way in which they raise them. What they fail to do is present them in an uplifting, optimistic or generous-minded light.

Take tax and public services. The candidates are still either saying taxes should be cut or that the public services should be safeguarded — or both simultaneously. This allows them to be painted as either still only out for the rich, or trying to pretend they have turned into supporters of state-run public services when everyone knows they are not (except for Ken Clarke).

But instead they should be speaking the language of solidarity and social justice. They should be saying that the only way to ‘one nation’ is not through state control, which abandons the poor and penalises middle-class aspiration, but through a new way of organising public services through decentralised and insurance-based schemes which restore professional independence, trust and altruism.

Blairism is essentially a trick — a brilliant trick, in that the language it uses creates the impression of unifying the country when in fact it is being progressively fragmented.

The Tories have failed to oppose this adequately because they too have been taken in by the language and thus cannot see that Blairism is not centre- ground and not conservative. It is rather a radical programme to subsume this nation into a trans-national utopia governed by ‘universal’ values under tight state control, and thus represents a direct assault upon our democracy, social cohesion and national identity.

Until and unless the Conservative party grasps this, it will never mount an effective opposition and will therefore not be taken seriously as a prospective government.

Charismatic political leadership arises from passion grounded in principle, coherent analysis and a clear vision of what power is for. This week will show us whether any of the candidates in the Tory beauty contest can at last rise to the challenge.