Daily Mail, 28 November 2005

Up to half a million people are expected to line the streets of Belfast this week as George Best is buried. The death of this country’s most turbulent sportsman has confirmed his status as an icon, joining the pantheon of other celebrities — think, for example, of Princess Diana or John Lennon — whose deaths cemented them as people who had touched some deep part of the national psyche.

In Best’s case it was his genius as a footballer — the greatest player, it is said, that this country has ever seen. In this era of the mediocre, the second-rate and the dispiritingly dull, such outstanding talent was truly something to celebrate. It wasn’t just Best’s almost supernatural skill and grace with the ball, but the nerve, imagination, strength and courage he displayed. These were indeed qualities of character worth admiring.

His death at the distressingly early age of 59 was therefore particularly poignant, as was the terrible wastage through illness of that once splendid physique.

But as his family sadly prepares to bury him, perhaps one might venture the thought that the way his death has been received has been just a shade off-colour.

This is not to gainsay the touching tributes that have been paid to his courage and stoicism as his body steadily packed up. No doubt his fortitude in these most trying of all circumstances was admirable. Moreover, when someone dies it is only natural to wish to present the good in him, while not seeking to suppress what may have been less desirable characteristics.

But in the case of George Best, his personal history has been heavily sanitised. Here was someone who had drunk himself to death after years of alcoholism. Given the second chance of a new liver — a precious gift which other desperately ill people in urgent need of a transplant sometimes never manage to obtain — he blew it by hitting the bottle once again.

According to one account, he even referred in a brutally cavalier way to the new liver that he was proceeding to abuse, saying that it had been donated ‘without strings’ attached to the behaviour of the recipient. This seemed to be a licence to resume the drinking habit he sometimes affected to find so amusing.

Such selfish and self-indulgent attitudes translated into dire behaviour. He was highly promiscuous, cheated on his wives and was prone to violence, including attacks on women.

As one friend put it, his life with his second wife Alex was marked by crazed alcohol binges, violence, lies, paranoia, sordid affairs, gambling, drunk-driving, arrest, tears, threats of suicide, death threats, and break-ups and reconciliations with both his wife and his mistresses.

Another friend described his appalling propensity to violence. He once hacked off his wife Alex’s hair and drew all over her body with a marker pen. He punched and kicked her after a row on her 25th birthday. He even admitted hitting her, saying he had to 'give her a smack to get her off me'. Alex, who was often unable to eat, lived in constant fear of him walking through the front door and causing more trouble.

Some national icon! Yet when he died, he was hailed as a hero and a ‘perfect’ human being. The BBC gave him the full treatment normally reserved for major public figures, with an extended item on the news in hushed and reverent tones. He was variously described as ‘a great person’. ‘one of the most charming fellows I ever met’ and a man of ‘enormous personality and charm’ without whom ‘the world will be a sadder place’.

Our society sometimes seems obsessed by the issue of domestic violence against women. Yet here was a woman-beater who was being hailed as a hero. When such activities were mentioned, the tone was indulgent and sorrowful, as if nothing could be allowed to tarnish the genius and the charm.

What’s more, his alcoholism was presented as some kind of visitation before which he was merely a helpless and passive victim. His doctor, Professor Roger Williams, refused to censure him but blamed the alcohol industry instead. ‘When he hadn't been drinking, he was a good person’ he said of Best. ‘It was just the booze that made everything go wrong for him.'

No doubt he was, and it did; but the remark implied that alcoholism had taken over Best’s life without his having done anything to bring this about. It’s a bit like blaming shoplifting or burglary on the fact that shops and private houses are full of tempting goods to steal.

Of course, alcoholism is an addiction which is very hard to break. And Professor Williams is surely right about the irresponsibility of the industry. But Best had freely chosen to go down this road in the first place.

People who are addicted to alcohol — or to drugs, for that matter — are not victims but abusers. And such abuse often attaches to the cult of celebrity, which bestows not just fame and riches but an egotistic callousness towards others.

As a footballing genius, Best was once a deservedly significant figure in British national life. But subsequently he became an icon for a different kind of Britain — the Britain that worships fame and riches so deeply that it is indifferent to the often sordid reality beneath the glitz.

This Britain often secretly admires or identifies with such hell-raising — and then wallows in lachrymose gloom at the toll it takes on the body, without making the necessary connection between the two.

This in turn feeds into a mawkish sense of victimhood, which reinforces an increasing tendency to wallow in self-pity while absolving oneself of all responsibility for personal misbehaviour.

Personal decency is now signified not by good deeds but by hearts worn on sleeves. So when an icon of this Britain dies, people tell themselves they are grieving. Hence the mountain of flowers, football shirts, toys and handwritten notes now piling up at the shrine of Old Trafford.

But this is ersatz grief. We may regret the passing of a great talent, but we cannot grieve for the individual because we never knew him.

True grief is confined to those who did know him and whose privacy should therefore be respected, as Best’s elderly father so fiercely demanded of the media scrum outside the hospital where his son had just passed away.

To suggest that the public feels the same emotion is not merely intrusive. It denigrates the proper grief felt by his family, who mourn the real son, husband or father whom they knew. It also undermines our understanding of what grief actually is. It destroys our ability to separate real emotion from false, makes the feeling of true emotion more unlikely and thus further coarsens and brutalises our culture.

We witnessed that phenomenon with the death of Princess Diana. Now we are seeing something similar with the death of George Best. Sentimentality rules. What other wife-beater, serial adulterer and violent lush would have flags flown at half-mast for him from official buildings?

Drink, parties, women, fast cars, talent, entertainment, wealth, fame — these are now the iconic values of our culture. The final score? Celebrity, one; responsibility, nil.

Daily Mail, 21 November 2005

Someone should put the Child Support Agency out of its misery, and quickly. It has been a calamity ever since it was brought into being by a Tory government twelve years ago.

It has failed to collect £1.7 billion in back maintenance. It has a backlog of 350,000 cases, and over the past four years has made no fewer than 35,000 compensation payments for poor service. Yesterday, it emerged that that the amount of money it has collected from absent parents has plummeted following the installation of a new £456 million computer system.

The never-ending shambles at the CSA is matched by the shambles of the government’s response. The Prime Minister implied last week that it was so badly flawed it might have to close altogether. Yet ministers at the Department of Work and Pensions insist that it will merely be reformed — again — next January.

This is surely to flog a ruinously expensive horse that is not only dead but should never have been born in the first place. For the CSA’s problems lie far deeper than the Agency’s structure or its payments formula or its wretched computer. The very premise on which it was founded is fundamentally flawed.

From the start, its aims were confused. Its main purpose was to cut public spending through reducing state support for lone mothers by loading such payments onto fathers instead. Ministers claimed that this would restore parental responsibility. But the one did not follow from the other.

The argument was that men were financially responsible for their children whether or not such fathers were part of the family household. This was surely a profound mistake. Men’s responsibility is to be committed parents who look after their children by actually living with them.

But the CSA formula reduced fathers to being merely walking wallets, and helped redefine the family unit as the autonomous mother and child alone, serviced through payments from a distance by absent men.

As a result, Tory expenditure-cutters lined up in an unholy alliance alongside the ultra-feminist left. The feminist case was that lone motherhood was a right, and that although men might be too awful to be husbands they nevertheless had an obligation to pay for the upkeep of their children.

The result was that the CSA helped fuel gross injustice, galloping irresponsibility and the accelerating breakdown of the family.

When their wives or partners walked out taking the children with them, men were not only faced with the destruction of their family but were also — intolerably — forced to pay for it, even if the mother had begun a new relationship which was bringing money into their children’s household.

Making a man pay for the upkeep of his children in such circumstances simply because he was the biological father was unfair and inconsistent. After all, he would not be expected to do so if his children were adopted or fostered, because bread-winning is part of the wider role of every-day fathering.

But men were deemed to be equally responsible for their children whether they had fathered them through a series of one-night stands, deserted their wives for another woman or had themselves been deserted. Far from restoring the concept of responsibility to family life, this emptied it of meaning.

It also ignored the fact that the catastrophic phenomenon of mass lone motherhood has been largely driven by women.

Of course, there are many cases where mothers have been deserted by faithless husbands, and where it is right to pursue fathers for maintenance just as one would force anyone who breaks a solemn agreement to meet his responsibilities. But in most cases, it is the woman who either breaks the marriage or is content to have a baby without the father being involved.

This is because, consciously or subconsciously, she makes a calculation that she can go it alone financially, either because the state will provide or because, even if she is currently working, she knows that the state is showering benefits on lone mothers with children, including — in theory — child support payments.

If an unmarried woman chooses to give up work when she has a baby, this is presented by feminists as an unarguable case for mandatory payments by the father. But why? There is already a perfectly good social arrangement to give mothers precisely such support. It is called marriage. The problem is that the woman may not want marriage to the man, but she does still want his money. What kind of equality is this?

The assumption is that unmarried mothers are helpless victims, either of men or of circumstances (or both). We are told that the teenage mothers of popular stereotype are too clueless to know how babies are made. (Presumably, then, their boyfriends are equally clueless — which is not only equally unlikely, but makes forcing them to pay for their ignorance positively unkind.)

In fact, most of these girls assume that having a baby is a passport to an independent life— an assumption underpinned by the expectation of an income supplied or enforced by the state.

In the past, the boys were made to marry them. Now, however, the girls say these lads are a waste of space and so they reject them — and they are supported in this by their own mothers, who may themselves never have been married, and by their wider community where committed fatherhood is virtually unknown.

In any event, most lone mothers are not feckless teenagers but mature women. Women and girls have thus either made a conscious choice to have a child without being married, or have knowingly taken the risk of getting pregnant, or once pregnant are content to go it alone.

They have therefore chosen to forego the child support system known as marriage. To expect still to enjoy the benefits of that support, having explicitly rejected the duties it entails, is irresponsible and makes a nonsense of marriage. Yet that is precisely the set of assumptions that the CSA promotes.

At the heart of this problem is that child support policy is explicitly not intended to repair the family. Politicians are terrified to go down this road, taking refuge instead in the apparent neutrality of financial support for children.

But it is not neutral at all. On the contrary, it is fuelling further family breakdown by failing to acknowledge that the principal motor behind this phenomenon is the behaviour of women. Yes, some men are grossly irresponsible and are either unfaithful, desert their wives or father many children by different women. But many men feel licensed to behave in such a manner because of those women who declare them redundant.

It is women above all who should be made to take responsibility for their behaviour. If they choose to tear up a marriage contract or to have children without committing themselves to the father, they should bear the financial burden. Instead of being propped up with benefits or money extorted from rejected men, they should be expected to support themselves through work.

This may sound harsh. But if women were forced to recalibrate where their interests lie once they become mothers, the steam would go out of the lone motherhood industry almost overnight.

Far more harsh, after all, is the plight of fatherless children. In treating women instead as victims, the government ignores the real casualties of the egregious failure of its family policy — the greatest of all of Tony Blair’s betrayals.

Jewish Chronicle, 18 November 2005

Britain’s state of denial continues to deepen. We saw it after 9/11, when people said America had brought the atrocity upon itself — mainly through its ‘uncritical’ support for Israel. Then after Britain’s own human bomb attacks last July, the media became gripped by fear not of Islamist terrorism but of Islamophobia, or fear of the fear of Islamist terrorism.

Now we are told that the riots in France by Muslim and Arab youths from the banlieues — the city suburbs — have nothing to do with Islam but are the result of poverty, unemployment, racism and discrimination. Those who say, au contraire, that Islam is at the core of the disorder are being vilified as far-right racists and crazed reactionary demagogues.

Such a view surely displays a pathological refusal to connect to reality, which is given a vicious edge by the crude attempt to shut down debate through smears and demonisation. Denying the Islamic element of these riots is to deny the obvious.

The vast majority of the rioters are Muslim. They have sent France up in flames to screams of ‘Allahu akhbar’, chatter about jihad, declarations that they intend to turn France into ‘Beirut’ and pledges of support for Osama bin Laden. There have even been calls for a ‘millet’ system, through which the Ottoman empire provided separate development for different cultures.

More pertinently still, the French government — which has no idea how to deal with this insurrection — has begged Muslim leaders to quell the disorder. It is the imams who have gone into these neighbourhoods and urged the rioting youths through megaphones to go home ‘in the name of Allah’. The Union of Islamic Organisations of France has issued a fatwa quoting the Koran as saying that ‘God abhors destruction and disorder and rejects those who inflict it’.

Since when were imams and fatwas deployed to deal with a situation which had nothing to do with Islam? Religion is being used to quell this uprising because religion is at its core. Those who disagree, because there appears to be no open incitement to jihad by Islamist radicals, or because the youths are mainly secular and are said merely to want jobs and respect, are wearing blinkers.

Certainly, unemployment and all the resentments that come from being herded into impoverished and separate enclaves are part of this story, as are the internal personal tensions caused by the conflict between Muslim and degraded secular values. But this situation has been exploited by radical Islamists, who moved into the ghettoes and provided its smouldering youth with a creed that is more sedition than religion — and which inflamed them against the society for which they already felt no attachment.

The result has been a steady drumbeat of clerical intimidation in these areas. Teachers are subjected to daily insults and racist remarks, with children and their parents threatening them if they do not teach Sharia law or the Koran in class. Muslim defendants refuse to be tried by Jewish judges, and some municipal swimming pools have different hours for women and men to accommodate the Muslim population. And so on.

The political writer Michel Gurfinkiel, Editor-in-Chief of Valeurs Actuelles and a member of the Political Commission of Crif, the Representative Council of French Jewish Organizations, told me that the banlieues had spawned alliances of Islamists and local criminal mafias to create no-go areas for the French state.

Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood — the Islamists who preach holy war — have adroitly positioned themselves as honest brokers between the rioters and the state. Having been radicalising the banlieues for years, they are now poised to consolidate their power and use it to wring further concessions from a French state that is on its knees before them.

Britain should be watching these events across the Channel with undiluted alarm. So why is there this blank refusal to acknowledge what is actually going on, pouring scorn instead on all the evidence mentioned above, even though it comes from those in France who are at the receiving end?

Part of the answer is that multiculturalism has gone very deep here. Its proponents believe that cultural majorities are illegitimate and all minorities oppressed, and that anyone who finds fault with a minority is therefore by definition racist or ‘phobic’.

But perhaps even more significant is an aspect of the sturdy British character. The British just don’t do ideology or abstract thinking. Rooted in the everyday, they only believe what they can see, and think that every problem has a rational cause and a rational solution.

The upside is that they scorn extremism. The downside is that they simply cannot get their heads around religious fanaticism. Presented with clear evidence of the effects of shrewdly targeted religious sedition, they are incredulous and latch on to poverty and unemployment instead.

They think the attempt to Islamicise France and Europe is too mad to be true. They’re right — it is mad. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Daily Mail, 18 November 2005

What kind of police service do we want? asked the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair at the beginning of his Dimbleby Lecture. By the time he sat down, however, we were none the wiser about what Sir Ian, Britain’s most senior policeman, himself thought was the answer to his question.

Indeed, the underlying message of his peculiarly self-serving address seemed to be: ‘Help, I haven’t got a clue what the police are supposed to be doing, and if anyone out there has got any bright ideas then for Pete’s sake will they please tell me!’

Instead, he treated us to wide variety of views about other things. His lecture seemed to be the thoughts of a putative politician, delivering observations about the state of society.

Such opinions were not necessarily wrong. But what was the point of voicing them, except to moan that society was now very complicated and that the pressures on the police were too difficult for them to cope with?

The reaction of many people might well be: ‘For Heaven’s sake, Commissioner, just dry up and get on with it! We expect bobbies on the beat, not such self-serving vacuities.’ For without wishing to be rude, that is surely what they were.

By bemoaning the absence of debate over the use of lethal force, he appeared to be excusing himself in advance of the inquiry into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station after police mistook him for a suicide bomber.

Even more startling was his unwitting display of personal vanity, when he said that he had been asked to deliver the lecture partly because the producer wanted to know 'why someone like you would want to be a police officer’ —an anecdote whose sole point seemed to be to suggest that Sir Ian was too intellectual to be in the police.

This totally undercut his previous complaint that middle-class people didn’t join the police because they snobbishly looked down on them. It appears to be Sir Ian (MA, Oxon) who is sensitive about the uniform he wears.

The irony is that one of the problems with the police is that — on the contrary — it is positively stuffed with graduates whose heads are filled with ideological abstractions but who lack the years of solid hands-on experience that are essential for policing.

Pressure to rise through the ranks too fast has produced senior officers without a clue and streets left unprotected because the key element of policing, officers who know their patch like the back of their hand, is absent.

The resulting incompetence has produced debacles such as the abortive or flawed investigations into the Stephen Lawrence or Damilola Taylor murders, or the Windsor Castle break-in.

Sir Ian says the public ‘don’t know who we are’. Too right — we might not see a police officer on the streets from one month to the next.

He laments the fact that no-one has ever thought about what the police are here to do. But this isn’t so. The purpose of policing — as Sir Ian himself said —is to prevent crime and maintain public tranquillity. The only reason this is not discussed was that it has remained a bedrock of our society and a source of general satisfaction and even pride.

There is no mystery about what people now want from the police. They want those same principles actually to be enforced — above all, for the police to prioritise the restoration of that public tranquillity which has so catastrophically collapsed.

True, a debate is necessary about whether we have adequate legal structures to deal with the terrorist threat. But why does Sir Ian seem to think this means the police will have to change their relationship with the public? What has terrorism got to do with the fact that simple yobbery rages unchecked on our poorest estates?

The basic principles of policing are not out of date. All that has changed is the failure of the police to deliver them.

The reasons for that lie in a deadly fusion of developments over the past thirty years or so. The first was the police corruption and miscarriage of justice cases in the seventies and eighties which knocked the stuffing out of the police and caused the political and legal establishment to tie them up in knots in a massive bureaucracy.

The second was the way the police succumbed to the business-school managerialism which swept government from the mid-1990s. This required the public services to be judged by the delivery of quantifiable results.

At a stroke the purpose of policing was disastrously redefined from preventing crime to catching criminals — that is, producing quantifiable results. Instead of stopping crime, the police were now merely reacting to it.

Worse still, this led to collusion with government. Under the cosh of government targets, the police had to show results. So they concentrated on offences such as speeding which would produce the maximum results for the minimum effort.

As a result, police officers became increasingly politicised. They became paralysed by fear of giving offence to minorities, and adopted New Labour shibboleths such as a preoccupation with hate crime, domestic violence against women or gay rights. Instead of standing up to successive governments and telling them to get their tanks off their lawn, senior officers meekly did their bidding and too often turned themselves into New Labour mouthpieces.

Sir Ian himself has previously shown himself to be distressingly eager to espouse policy initiatives which just happen to be on the New Labour agenda, even — most improperly — during the last general election campaign.

Now there are calls for police forces to be controlled by locally elected boards, to deliver them from the clutches of central government and force them instead to deliver policing which meets the concerns of local people.

The problem with this, however, is that local control is likely to morph into political control. The fact that it would be at local level would not prevent local vested interests from trying to tell the police what to do.

The crisis in policing will not be resolved by anyone telling the police what to do except the police themselves. New York’s legendary turnaround from disorder to tranquillity was not achieved principally by a visionary mayor. It was achieved principally by a visionary police commissioner, who was backed to the hilt by the mayor because he was an eminently competent, sensible and tough-minded police officer.

The police need to restore their professionalism and their faith in themselves. They need to get onto the streets and stay there. They need to know every single thing that moves on their patch. They need to focus on prevention and make a bonfire of government targets.

Of course this is not easy because, from the top, government is pulling them in different directions. The solution lies in effective leadership at the top of the police service which will reassert the basics of British policing, reimpose the rule of law on our streets and, wherever government impedes that process, face it down. The free and frank exchange of views Sir Ian needs to have is not with the public but with the Home Office.

What do the public want? asks Sir Ian. What they want is an end to such public handwringing and bobbies put back on the beat. A period of silence from this particular officer would now be welcome.

Daily Mail, 14 November 2005

The masters of spin appear to have been hoist by their own whirling petard. The memoirs of Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to the US and previously press secretary to the former Prime Minister John Major, have scandalised the political establishment.

In his book entitled ‘DC Confidential’, Sir Christopher has accused Tony Blair of fluffing the chance to influence the Bush administration by being starstruck by the glamour of Washington. He has dismissed several senior Cabinet ministers as ‘pygmies’. And he has furnished descriptions of briefing Mr Major in his bedroom and even in his bathroom at Number Ten as he performed his early morning ablutions.

Politicians and mandarins have queued up to denounce the book as a betrayal of confidences. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has condemned it as ‘completely unacceptable’. Two former Cabinet Secretaries have said it is a betrayal of trust. Lord Heseltine has called on Sir Christopher to step down from his post as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission.

For his part, Sir Christopher has hit back strongly, accusing ministers of double standards and pointing out that the government itself cleared his book for publication without requesting a single amendment.

The truth, in my view, is surely that Sir Christopher has behaved badly. Revealing the content of private conversations almost immediately upon leaving office is indeed a betrayal of trust and wholly unacceptable between any employee and employer, whether in or out of government.

But ministers can hardly complain when this book had been vetted by the Cabinet Office, which consulted the Foreign Office before clearing it for publication. So why have ministers now come down on Sir Christopher’s head like the proverbial ton of bricks?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the damage done by his book is not so much political as personal. He does not reveal any smoking guns about the Iraq war or anything else. Instead, he describes Mr Straw as ‘intimidated and tongue-tied’ by official circles in Washington, or John Prescott talking about ‘the Balklands’.

What has surely got under the thin ministerial skin is the cutting condescension of a superior Whitehall Pooh-Bah in belittling who belittles the undereducated political novices he had to serve whose trousers were too tight and who fell over their words.

It is hard to see what else they are complaining about. Breach of trust? Betrayal of Whitehall’s codes of behaviour? Of course — wholesale, appalling and improper. But what’s new? Isn’t there more than a whiff of hypocrisy about the Government’s attacks on him?

For Sir Christopher’s behaviour is an emblem of the collapse of integrity throughout Whitehall, brought about in large measure by the very ministers who are now singling him out for attack.

After all, he has hardly pioneered the indecent sprint from the corridors of power into the arms of the publishing trade. There has been an unending stream of ministers and former officials rushing into print as soon as they leave office, and yet with barely a head turned.

Clare Short, Robin Cook, Geoffrey Robinson and Mo Mowlam all published memoirs and diaries shortly after leaving office, while David Blunkett, John Prescott and Gordon Brown are understood to have co-operated with the production of biographies, with colleagues queuing up anonymously to dish the dirt on their political opponents.

Many of these accounts detailed exchanges with civil servants who were still in post. Not surprisingly, therefore, civil servants and other public officials have taken this as a green light to do exactly the same. So we’ve had the memoirs of Lance Price, a former Downing Street spin doctor; Derek Scott, the Prime Minister’s former economic adviser; Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner; and Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5. When a top official from the country’s secret service breaks cover like this — however anodyne her account — the world, as Sir Christopher has observed, has indeed radically changed.

And over all of these dangles the prospect of the biggest potential breach of confidence of them all, the memoirs of the Prime Minister’s former press secretary and eminence grise Alistair Campbell who, having personified the politicisation of the civil service and the destruction of government integrity, is now poised to breach wholesale the confidences he obtained from this position.

If he is allowed to publish his own memoirs, on what possible basis can ministers claim that Sir Christopher has broken the rules?

Even so, all these wrongs still do not make a right. Of course, once an official brings information into the public domain, the media have no option but to report it. But the essential discipline for a civil servant — much more than for an elected politician — is to remain silent.

It is not surprising that diplomats are reportedly horrified by Sir Christopher’s book. For in the absence of official discretion, the conduct of government becomes impossible. If ministers or officials fear that their words are being recorded in a diary for eventual publication, they will simply refuse to speak freely, and government will then become paralysed.

The whole point of the civil service is that, however politicians may behave, their officials are supposed to uphold the constant and unchanging integrity of the public realm by keeping their distance. If politicians tell whoppers, their civil servants hold their tongue. This is because — until now — they have understood that they serve a greater good which transcends individual politicians, and which is the orderly process of government.

What we now have instead is something approaching government anarchy. The dispassionate integrity of the British civil service has been systematically destroyed. It was Mrs Thatcher who first began to politicise Whitehall. This was vastly extended by the Blair government which, believing the civil service was an impediment to its will, has by-passed and undermined it at every turn.

A dispassionate civil service that was removed from the fray was one of the crowning constitutional glories of the Victorian era. But now, that crucial distance between politicians and Whitehall has vanished. Instead, this government has subverted the civil service by advisers and czars, all designed to circumvent or bully public officials who are viewed as an obstacle to New Labour’s will.

The former head of the civil service, Lord Butler, has said that senior civil servants should abide by a ‘self-denying ordinance’ not to reveal the confidences of their political masters. But it was Lord Butler who stood spinelessly by while the Blair government took an axe to the integrity of the government machine that Lord Butler was supposed to defend.

Mr Straw has accused Sir Christopher of undermining the key relationship between civil servants and ministers. But it is Mr Straw’s own government that has eviscerated that relationship, and thus caused public officials aghast at ‘sofa government’ and the culture of lies and spin and manifold incompetence to want to set the record straight in what they perceive is a public disclosure free-for-all.

The mystery, though, is why the Cabinet Office approved Sir Christopher’s book. The suspicion lingers that senior officials were not exactly unhappy to see the politicians they hold in such contempt brought low.

Whatever the explanation, this farcical situation cannot continue. Consistency and self-discipline have to be brought back to Whitehall, and official discretion re-imposed. But that in turn has to go hand in hand with a restoration of the dispassionate integrity of the civil service, without which government in Britain will continue to be the unprincipled shambles it has so distressingly become.

Daily Mail, 11 November 2005

Let's try a modest thought experiment. Let's imagine that Margaret Beckett and Patricia Hewitt are being interviewed on BBC2's Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman on what direction they would like the Labour government to take.

To help enlighten the nation, Paxman proceeds to ask both of them whether they wear thongs or big knickers, whether they drink skinny latte or cappucino with chocolate sprinkles and whether their taste in men runs to brooding hunks or pale young men with sensitive fingers.

Can anyone doubt what would ensue? There would be immediate uproar, in the studio and around the nation. Ms Beckett and Ms Hewitt would express outrage and incredulity at being asked such demeaning, intrusive and stupid questions. They would refuse to answer them on the grounds that Paxman was patronising and type-casting them as fluffy airheads, thus diminishing the important work they do in governing the country.

Paxman would never hear the end of it. He would be excoriated in the editorial columns of liberal newspapers as a male chauvinist dinosaur. MPs would ask questions in Parliament about institutional sexism in the BBC. The Director-General would be summoned by the governors for a dressing-down.

Yet now look at what happened on BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour this week when the two contenders for the Tory crown, David Cameron and David Davis, were interviewed by presenter Martha Kearney, who is also the political editor of Newsnight.

She asked them whether they wore briefs or boxer shorts, whether they drank lager or beer and whether they preferred blondes or brunettes. And on what was doubtless considered to be a higher cultural plane -- Ms Kearney is, after all, also the newly appointed presenter of Newsnight's arty Friday Review -- whether they preferred Jamie or Delia, Scissor Sisters or Coldplay and Strictly Come Dancing or the X-Factor.

Has the cause of female equality really come to this? Questions about underpants? All those pioneering feminists who, down the decades, had battled through ridicule, hostility, obstructionism and worse in order to establish the simple principle that women were not silly, empty-headed, trivia-obsessed decorative objects but were the intellectual equals of men and should accordingly be given equal status in the public sphere, must be turning in their graves.

For here was a woman who had reached the starry heights of political journalism asking two male politicians questions that suggested precisely such a preoccupation with silly, empty-headed trivia -- and which were, moreover, demeaning to the opposite sex in precisely the manner for which men who spoke in this way to women would quite rightly be pilloried.

Worse still was the reaction of women to this sorry encounter. David Davis's answer that he preferred blondes, followed by his joking aside - 'I shouldn't have said that. My wife is brunette' - was deemed to have turned off women voters. Acording to Pamela Parker, president of the Conservative Women's Association, it was in 'bad taste' and patronising to women.

Well yes it was, deplorably so. But surely the real problem lay in the question that he had been asked in the first place -- along with all those other vacuous inquiries -- for diminishing what should have been a political interview to the level of giggling girliness. Yet here was Mr Davis, as a result, being judged in all seriousness for his suitability to become the leader of the Conservative Party and potential Prime Minister of this country on the basis of his answers to a dubious question about his taste in women -- with the propriety of such a question having been asked apparently not even occurring to the women who were thus giving him the female-equality thumbs-down.

Is this not one rule for women and another rule for men? Is this really what feminist solidarity is all about? And -- above all -- is this the dismal level to which British politics has now descended?

But no-one seems to have objected. On the contrary, Ms Kearney has reportedly since been accosted by several male MPs volunteering to disclose to her the details of their own underwear drawer.

No less dismaying was the general approach displayed by both of these contenders. For presented with these preposterous questions, they meekly answered most of them. Mr Cameron managed to sidestep the 'blondes or brunettes' conundrum, but did disclose his taste in underwear. And both men informed a hushed and expectant world of their tastes in drinking, cooking and rock music.

So why didn't they do what women would have done in an equivalent situation and refuse to answer on the grounds that such an approach reduced politics to a level of inanity one does not expect from a serious broadcasting organisation? Wouldn't it have been refreshing -- and a blow for real female equality -- if they'd said that women were surely interested in serious issues and that such questioning was demeaning to the female sex?

The reason why they did not is almost certainly that they were terrified to do so -- because they were being interviewed by a woman in front of an audience of women. To accuse a woman of having a trivialising agenda might expose themselves to the charge of being prejudiced by trying to saddle a woman with the old stereotype of an absence of seriousness.

But there wasjust such an absence of seriousness. So these two men, who are trying to persuade the public of the fearlessnes and robustness of their judgment and other inspiring aspects of their character, could not say what needed to be said because they were paralysed by the women issue.

The irony, of course, is that this was not treating women equally at all, since they were responding to a woman interviewer quite differently to the way in which they would have responded to a man.

There were, it has to be said, other indications of a positively crass or antideluvian attitude to women. Mr Davis dug himself further into a hole when, challenged over having attired his female cheerleaders at the recent Tory Party conference in T-shirts bearing the legend 'It's DD for me', he dismissed the resulting adverse reaction as a 'sense of humour failure'. And even the 'new man' David Cameron turns out to be a member of White's, an exclusive gentlemen's club.

In the light of all this, their proposals to boost the number of
Conservative women MPs by an 'A-list' of parliamentary candidates with half of the places going to women (Cameron) or a separate women's manifesto (Davis) seemed to be merely dutiful nods in the direction of gender politics.

For all politicians, the women's vote is crucial -- and it is defined by different issues from those that preoccupy most men. David Cameron appears to have the edge over his rival in winning this vote because he appears to be a hands-on, caring, sharing kind of father. Macho man, for today's women, appears to be a big turn-off.

And yet the Woman's Hour episode demonstrated that both male politicians and their female inquistors still fall into the trap of double standards and muddled atitudes when women are the issue.

Clearly, the cause of real female equality still has some way to go.

Guardian, 8 November 2005

At the heart of the MMR vaccine controversy is an attempt to blind people with science. Proponents of the vaccine say science has proved it is safe and that those who deny this are scientifically illiterate.

This argument has been used to tell parents that the evidence of their own eyes is not true. While the vast majority of children have had no problem with the MMR vaccine, a small proportion of parents found that after vaccination their children developed bowel problems, an allergic reaction to various foods and a halt to their behavioural development which produced the symptoms of autism.

Their concerns were dismissed by the medical profession. One doctor who did take them seriously was a gastro-enterologist, Andrew Wakefield. In a Lancet paper he said the children were suffering from a new disease, autistic enterocolitis, and at a press conference suggested that to be safe children should have single jabs instead of the triple MMR.

Since then, the government has pointed to a succession of epidemiological studies which, it claims, prove that MMR is safe. A recent meta-study by the Cochrane Library was likewise reported to have said that fears about the vaccine were based on ‘unreliable evidence’.

But the study itself did not say this. On the contrary, it found that nine of the most prominent epidemiology studies that are employed to attack Wakefield’s research were unreliable. Since it did not look at Wakefield’s research, it did not address the questions raised over the vaccine in the first place. The report therefore could not bear the conclusion attributed to it that MMR was safe.

When I pointed this out in the Daily Mail last week, I was attacked in these pages by Dr Ben Goldacre who claimed that I did not understand how science worked. On the contrary, it is Goldacre who is ignoring the evidence, and his errors go to the essence of the MMR controversy.

Like the government, Goldacre believes clinical findings are trumped by epidemiology, which he says is ‘evidence based’ medicine. But the attempt to refute Wakefield by epidemiology is a category confusion. Epidemiology looks at patterns of disease in a population. It cannot prove or disprove cause and effect in individual patients.

A paper published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons says epidemiology ‘cannot establish a causal association unless other biological evidence backs it up’ and does not meet a scientific standard of proof since it is particularly prone to bias – the very criticism that the Cochrane report made of the epidemiological studies of MMR and autism.

Having accused me of misunderstanding ‘real’ science, Goldacre then claims that I have fallen for pseudo-science by believing evidence that has never been peer-reviewed. Bizarrely, he asserts that I have relied upon research that has only been published in the ‘in-house magazine of a right-wing US pressure group well known for polemics on homosexuality, abortion and vaccines’.

What on earth is he talking about? The devastating finding of measles virus in the cerebro-spinal fluid of some autistic children who had been vaccinated with MMR has been peer-reviewed in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

He claims that Wakefield’s term ‘autistic enterocolitis’ has appeared in no other studies that have endorsed it. But Wakefield’s core finding of a unique gut-brain disease has indeed been replicated in peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Paediatric Neurology, Neuropsychobiology, the Journal of Paediatrics, the Journal of Clinical Immunology and the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

So what is this sinister ‘right-wing’ organisation upon which I am supposed to have relied? Alas, Goldacre does not tell us. So let us guess. Might it be, perhaps, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons which published the evidence of measles virus in cerebro-spinal fluid? Or might it be the American Institute of Medicine, which said that any evidence that symptoms worsen after booster jabs (as has been claimed with MMR) was real evidence of a link between a vaccine and a disorder?

Goldacre’s case boils down to evasiveness, ignorance, misrepresentation and smear. Are these really the attributes of a scientific vocabulary? Is this really ‘evidence-based medicine’?

Of course it is important to vaccinate children against dangerous diseases. But if even a small subsection of children is badly affected — which is all that is being claimed over MMR —the balance of risk dramatically changes.

The government and the medical establishment deny the evidence of any such effect. They claim that science has shown there is no case to answer. But it depends on which type of science, and whether it is being used appropriately.

The fact is that scientists are making progress in deciphering the mysterious relationship between a new type of bowel disease and brain disorder that Wakefield first identified.

The connection between this and the MMR vaccine is far from proven. But legitimate scrutiny of the real questions that have been raised are being stifled by the government and a medical establishment which have behaved recklessly and spinelessly, and are now busy suppressing all attempts to hold this up to the light.

Daily Mail, 7 November 2005

Night after night, France has been under attack by its Arab Muslim minority with the French authorities having totally lost control of the streets.

What started as an ugly localised disturbance in Clichy-sous-Bois — a grotty Paris suburb — after two Muslim youths were accidentally electrocuted has spiralled into an unprecedented national crisis. Extreme violent disorder has spread to cities such as Toulouse, Lille, Nantes, the cathedral town of Evreux in Normandy and even to the centre of Paris.

Thousands of cars have been set on fire and hundreds of people arrested across France. The rioters have torched post offices and fire stations, schools and synagogues, buses and warehouses, fired upon police, and doused a handicapped woman with petrol and set her alight.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-minded Interior Minister, has been blamed for inflaming the situation by his uncompromising language. French policy in general has been blamed for herding poor Arabs into suburban ghettoes where they have been left to fester in high unemployment and poverty.

The disturbances are thus being portrayed as race riots caused by official discrimination and insensitivity. But this is a gross misreading of the situation. It is far more profound and intractable. What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state.

When the police tried to take back the streets, they were driven out with the demand that they leave what the protesters called the ‘occupied territories’. And far from the claim that the disturbances have been caused by French policy of segregating Muslims into ghettoes, this is a war being waged for separate development.

Some Muslims have even called for the introduction of the ancient Ottoman ‘millet’ system of autonomous development for different communities.

The director of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, has previously suggested that France should be regarded as a ‘house of covenant’, by which he appears to mean that France should enter into an agreement with its Muslims to grant them autonomy within the state.

His response to the current violence is not to take steps to bring his own community under control but to suggest instead that the French government shows ‘respect’ and sends ‘a message of peace’.

But M. Sarkozy and the police are determined to take back the streets. The Muslims are equally determined to keep territory they feel they have conquered from the French state with which they feel no identification.

This crisis, however, did not start with the electrocution tragedy in Clichy-sous-Bois. It has been going on for decades. The scale of it is astonishing. Nine thousand police cars have been torched or stoned since the beginning of this year. The problem has not been M. Sarkozy’s tough approach. On the contrary — until now this permanent grumbling insurrection has simply been ignored.

For more than twenty years France’s Muslim areas have been out of control. Indeed, they only turned into Muslim ghettoes in the first place because Muslim violence and harassment forced everyone else out. And they became no-go areas for the police, seen by the Muslims as occupation forces entering their territory.

In schools in such areas, teachers trying to teach French or European history have been threatened with their lives by both pupils and their parents. In some cases young French people have converted to Islam just to escape the harassment.

Blaming an official policy of segregation is wide of the mark. The fact is that French Muslims want to be segregated. The ghettoes are a way of ensuring a separate Islamic existence without having to assimilate into French society.

The fact is that whatever policies different European countries have pursued to deal with minorities, they have not cracked this problem. France has enforced a rigid policy of state secularism and assumed that all minorities would adopt French values simply by being French.

By contrast, the British and other Europeans have adopted multiculturalism, which means giving minorities equal status to the majority, and have bent over backwards to be accommodating to them and not give offence.

Yet while France was burning, there were riots over several days in Denmark over the publication of cartoons satirising the prophet Mohammed. In the super-tolerant Netherlands, the film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered exactly a year ago because he had made an ‘insulting’ film about Islam. The Dutch immigration minister has had to wear a bullet-proof vest after shots were fired into her office, and death threats have been made against other ministers who have spoken against Islamist violence.

In Britain, British Muslims turned themselves into human bombs last July to murder as many of their fellow citizens as they could. We are told this was because of the war in Iraq. But France was a principal opponent of that war, and yet it is now being torched from Normandy to the Mediterranean.

For every country, a different reason can be found to blame it for the attacks being mounted upon it. Yet the common factor is the hostility of Muslims to the countries in which they have settled.

Clearly, not all fall into this category. Thousands of British Muslims are highly integrated and live law-abiding and productive lives. But it is equally clear that across Europe, those moderates are either unable or unwilling to stop those who want to impose their values on the majority.

And European governments have played into their hands. As the writer Bat Ye’Or reveals in her book Eurabia, the European Union and the Arab League entered into a series of official agreements some thirty years ago guaranteeing that Muslim immigrants in Europe would not be compelled to adapt in any way ‘to the customs of the host countries.’

This is all bound up with the erosion of national identities across Europe. This has affected even France, once a ferocious proponent of French culture which was imposed through a centralised schools system, a strong police force and national military service.

But now the schools system and the police have been weakened and national service has gone. Banning the hijab (Islamic headscarf) in schools represented a flickering of the old national certainty as France sniffed the danger that had arisen in its midst. But it was too little, and maybe too late.

Even now Britain, France and the rest of Europe are still in varying stages of denial over Muslim unrest. Reluctant even to admit that religion is central to this phenomenon, they look instead for ways to blame themselves and use the insult of ‘Islamophobia’ to shut down debate.

The warning for us from the disturbing events in France could not be clearer. We must end the ruinous doctrine of multiculturalism and reassert British identity and British values — and insist that although Muslims are a valued minority, they must abide by majority rules.

But if France fails to hold the line, the fall-out will be incalculable for us and for all of Europe.