Daily Mail, 29 December 2005

When David Cameron was elected Conservative leader three weeks ago, he made clear that his top priority was to get the party to bump up its measly number of women MPs. The absence of female faces on the Tory benches was an acute embarrassment and glaringly out of kilter with modern Britain.

Thirty years after the arrival on the statute book of the Sex Discrimination Act, it seems therefore that the under-representation of women in public life is still an unresolved issue.

So how far has this Act improved things for women? Alternatively, how far has it created a climate of impossible expectations by which women themselves feel they have not been well served?

The Sex Discrimination Act was a pioneering measure which did not merely try to level the playing field for women. As the first anti-discrimination measure of all, it introduced the idea that was to revolutionise the whole of British social and political life — that the state had a duty to impose equality between groups.

It may now seem hard to remember, but thirty years ago the public sphere was dominated by men. Before 1975 there were few bank loans or mortgages for women without a male guarantor and no legal redress against sexual harassment.

There were 15.4 million men in work and only 9.5 million women. The expectation was that married women with children would stay at home, and the man would play the role of breadwinner.

Three decades on, there are still 15.4 million men in work, but the number of working women in work has risen to 13.2 million. Excluding the Scandinavian countries, Britain has the highest proportion of working women in Europe.

Attitudes to working mothers have been changed out of all recognition, and financial independence for women has transformed their relationships with men – not necessarily for the better, as those relationships have become more transient as a result.

Britain’s workplaces have become feminised. Equal Opportunity Commission court actions have extended employment protection rights to part-time workers, outlawed sexual harassment and improved legal protection for pregnant employees, while its campaigns have helped achieve better maternity rights and paid paternity leave.

Yet a recent survey a survey by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation found that three out of four companies would rather break the law than employ a pregnant woman or one of childbearing age. So how have we managed -- despite all these manifest improvements -- to end up almost where we started from in this crucial respect?

The first problem is that an Act designed to end unfairness towards one sex has institutionalised it towards the other. Determination to boost the number of women in the workplace has meant that too often women have gained jobs or promotion not on merit but simply because of their sex. Not only is this profoundly demeaning to women and against the very spirit of equality, but it also entails discriminating unfairly against men.

Ironically one of the government’s most strident feminists, the current Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, herself admitted breaking the Sex Discrimination Act when, as the former Trade Secretary, she overruled advisers and appointed a woman to an influential job on the South West Regional Development Agency over the head of a better-qualified male candidate.

Next, employing women has placed more and more burdens on employers. Ever-longer periods of leave have been followed by new sex discrimination regulations which require firms to ensure that the workplace is free of discrimination and harassment. But these terms have been defined so widely that they threaten to become deeply disruptive.

A change in working hours or location or a refusal to allow employees to work from home, for example, could mean that employers are hauled up for indirect discrimination. And a new definition of sexual harassment makes it an offence to create an ‘intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’ that violates a woman’s dignity, a provision that potentially opens the floodgates to vexatious claims.

But a deeper problem is the premise upon which the Act was based. This was a desire not so much to create fair treatment for women as to deny the very notion of differences between the sexes altogether.

It confused equality with what might more appropriately be called ‘identicality’. Equality is about fairness. It hold that people in the same situation should not be treated differently because of prejudice towards them on account of their gender, race, sexuality or disability.

But this has been interpreted instead to mean that everyone must have the same outcomes regardless of what may be radically different circumstances or behaviour. This is not only profoundly unfair but often very damaging.

Look at education. The evidence suggests that boys and girls learn in different ways. Boys get more satisfaction from competing with each other, while girls prefer to understand the work they are doing.

Nevertheless, education policy denies such differences in the cause of ‘equality’. For the past two decades, feminist teachers have tried to change a school system they held to be hostile to girls. The assumption was that since boys tended to opt for science, maths and technology and girls for languages, humanities and domestic science, this was evidence of discrimination against girls.

Like so much feminist thinking, this assumed patronisingly that girls were incapable of doing things differently because they wanted to. The result was active discrimination against boys.

The curriculum expanded into ‘soft’ subjects like general studies, sociology or drama; textbooks, topics and tests were rewritten to prioritise female references; and the emphasis on coursework benefited girls but not boys, who tend to prefer ‘sudden death’ exams.

Hardly surprisingly, the result has been a calamitous decline in boys’ performance, with the education world wailing in despair but quite unable to see that so much of the cause lies in its own ‘equality’ agenda.

In the workplace, the denial of sex differences has meant a refusal to acknowledge that women’s preferred way of working would cause chaos if it was imposed on the basis that there was no difference from the way that men worked. This has particularly affected the medical profession, where more than 60 per cent of new doctors are now women.

Since so many of them choose to work part-time, GPs’ surgeries are struggling to cope because there aren’t enough doctors to cover the patients’ lists. Higher up the professional scale, where relatively few women choose specialities such as cardiology or gastro-enterology which require them to work long hours, fewer and fewer doctors will be available to take on such posts at all. The country will therefore increasingly be forced to recruit doctors from abroad to make up the deficiency.

The cause of such chaos cannot be acknowledged, however, because of the assumption built into anti-discrimination law. This encourages women and other groups to think of themselves as victims of society, and so anything they cannot have is by definition evidence of discrimination.

It follows, therefore, that they cannot be held responsible for causing a problem to others since all the responsibility is loaded onto society to redress their disadvantage. This principle, which is applied to other ‘victim’ groups based on race, sexuality or disability, has produced an ugly climate based on grievances and demands dressed up as ‘rights’ which destroys the notion of personal responsibility.

Earlier this week, a former Church of Scotland minister won the right to claim compensation for sex discrimination for being, she says, forced out of her job after being accused of having an affair with a married church elder. She says a male minister who had an affair would not have been treated in the same way. Does such a claim really advance the sum of civilised behaviour?

The anti-discrimination culture has also encouraged the idea that women can have it all — work, children and equal pay. Although the pay gap between the sexes for full-time work has dropped by some 13 per cent over the lifetime of the Act, the fact that a 17 per cent gap still remains is causing concern. A government-appointed commission on women and work is expected to recommend ways to tackle this gap early in the new year.

But the idea that this is yet another example of the way women are oppressed by men at work is simply wrong. Once again, this presents women — falsely and insultingly — as helpless and passive victims of life.

For while no-one would argue that women in the same circumstances as men should be paid less or denied promotion opportunities, ‘identicality’ takes no account of what women actually want. And this is often very different from what men want.

In particular, women’s aspirations tend to change dramatically once they become mothers. Some want to continue working; many do not, at least while their children are small.

If they take years off work, it is inevitable that their chances of promotion are reduced. It would be unfair —or, in some jobs, even dangerous —if they were regarded as on the same level of achievement as men having been away for so long. That reduces their earning power.

That’s not unfair — it’s their choice to live their lives in a different way from men. What is unfair is to expect to get the same pay for doing so.

‘Identicality’ also ignores the fact that, when at work, women tend to behave differently from men. Women are less interested in getting to the top of the tree. They are often passed over for promotion at work because they are less willing to put in long hours.

The reason is that many women put home and family first. The Government is gripped by the delusion that it can change this so that men and women will share equally tasks at home and at work.

Well, some already do and maybe more will; but many more will not, and it is women as well as men who dislike that idea. The idea of a ‘glass ceiling’ preventing women from advancing is simply misguided, and the whole basis of the government’s ‘family friendly’ policies is therefore an illusion.

As researchers Anne Moir and David Jessel pointed out in their book Brainsex, notions of work, success and ambition simply mean different things to the different sexes.

So most women tend not to want positions of power and responsibility. They have other priorities in life. That’s why there are so few women in politics. Yes, there is undoubtedly some prejudice going on here as elsewhere; but in the main, women aren’t in the political front line because they don’t want to be.

That’s why attempts to boost artificially the number of women in Parliament are not only unfair to men but are doomed to failure. The current Cameron plan seems to be to ask local Tory associations to choose from an A-list of candidates of whom at least half will be women.

Whatever system is chosen, however, it will do women no favours at all because it will force into the system women chosen not on merit but purely because they make up the numbers. That’s why the ‘Blair babes’ bombed so badly, because shoe-horned women tend to be second-rate women. This in turn gives women a bad name and makes prejudice against them more rather than less likely.

Women themselves are indicating more and more that ‘having it all’ exerts too big a price. Juggling work and motherhood can leave women shredded with exhaustion.

Ministers have noticed. Now a rethink is going on in Government, not least because of the imminent arrival of the new Equality Commission which will subsume the individual sex, race and disability bodies.

Unfortunately, however, this is unlikely to herald a new realism. Instead, it will probably signal an even more determined effort at social engineering, to force attitudes and behaviour into a new universe of unisex, multicultural lifestyle choice where no-one is allowed to admit any differences in value.

Whether as a result we will all live happier lives in a fairer, more tolerant and civilised society is very much open to question.

Jewish Chronicle, 23 December 2005

When, back in the mists of time, I first started writing controversially about family breakdown (the world fell in on me because I thought children were best served by being brought up by their father and mother) there was one particular insult that was hurled my way which stood out from all the others.

‘You’re just an Old Testament fundamentalist’ my assailants hissed. Hmmn, I thought, no sooner do they disagree with me than they’re reaching into the box marked ‘creepy Jew’. I thought it was just a low blow by nasty people, and left it at that.

But now I think differently. It was not a random bit of bigotry at all. It was a highly specific bit of bigotry. For what I was defending was not just traditional family life but a code of behaviour which followed rules and precepts laid down in what has been called the Judeo-Christian heritage. And at the heart of that was the Mosaic code.

The onslaught on traditional family life, by those who promoted lifestyle choice and said that anyone who disapproved of serial promiscuity and children with no fathers was a fascist, was being mounted by people who wanted to overturn that heritage and replace it by secular ‘human rights’.

This doctrine said that everyone had an absolute right to personal autonomy — in other words, make up their own moral rules. This was supposed to usher in a new dawn of happiness and self-fulfilment. Human rights were the way to end all the horrible things in the world like prejudice and hatred. Freedom of choice was the holy of holies that would create the new Jerusalem.

Anything that prevented this freedom, like religion, was considered an affront to decency. Religion was oppressive because it put constraints on human appetites. And the people who first invented those constraints were the Jews.

The only problem with this analysis was that the Mosaic code is actually at the root of our human rights. That’s because it gave the world the concept of morality, the sense of obligation to others which is what makes a civilised society rather than a bunch of savages all trying to knock each others’ eyes out.

Real human rights derive from the belief that we are all made in the image of God. That’s what gives us our belief in human equality. Take away the Torah and equality — the dignity of every individual — goes out of the window.

This line of argument doesn’t go down with secularists at all well. We don’t need religion to tell us how to behave well, they cry. To listen to them, anyone would think that they spend their entire lives in a bubble completely insulated from the culture that makes all of us what we are. The fact is that secularists also derive their values from the surrounding society, and like or not (they do not) the principles that our society most values come in the main from Judaism and Christianity.

Nonsense, they riposte: our liberal values, human rights and so forth, derive from the Enlightenment which was a revolt against Christianity. Not so fast. Yes, it was a revolt against the abuse of clerical power which separated church from state, allowing the development of tolerance, privacy and all those good things. But the architects of liberalism also knew that freedom depended on laws and that it was Biblical morality that kept the whole show on the road.

What’s happened now is that it’s come off the road. The secular onslaught against religion replaced freedom by licence. The notion of individual equality before God, the core of personal liberty, was replaced by the identical value of groups.

Since all lifestyles were of equal value, moral judgments between different lifestyles became discrimination, and duty was replaced by entitlement.

So behaviour such as sexual promiscuity or the abandonment of children became regarded as normal. Anyone criticising it was a bigot because the overriding requirement was that no-one should feel badly about themselves. Alternative lifestyles thus became mainstream. The counter-culture became the norm.

But this created victims among the most vulnerable — particularly children — and produced misery and harm. Far from being progressive, human rights doctrine is actually deeply reactionary because it prevents what is absolutely central to progressive values: encouraging the good in people and discouraging the bad.

Religion gets a bad press, particularly at present. And without doubt it has been, and still is, responsible for terrible things in the world. But secular societies tend to be very nasty places and secularists are among the most intolerant and illiberal people I have ever met.

A society without religion is a society without a soul. This weekend, we celebrate the victory of religion over a tyranny that tried to deny it. Religion gave us human rights. Don’t let the tyranny of the ‘human rights’ movement destroy it.

Daily Mail, 20 December 2005

The Law Commission’s proposal to downgrade many killings to manslaughter would run contrary to centuries of understanding of the meaning of our most serious crime.

Murder is defined as an unlawful killing with ‘malice aforethought’, which in turn is defined as an intention either to kill or to commit grievous bodily harm.

If someone is attacked with enough violence to kill him, the fact that the attacker may not have intended his victim to die is considered irrelevant. If he intended to inflict upon his victim so much harm that he died, it is thought as bad as if he intended to kill him.

Now the Law Commission is recommending an end to this assumption, so that only cases where the assailant intends to kill his victim will be classified as murder.

At a stroke, this would remove a very large proportion of cases which are currently found to be murder. Crimes where a victim is kicked to death, for example, or is stabbed during a robbery would be downgraded to manslaughter.

This startling proposal would minimise the severity of crimes in which people are killed as a result of intentionally severe violence. This would seriously offend many people’s innate sense of right and wrong. It would undermine the very notion of criminal responsibility at the heart of justice and would have a disastrous knock-on effect on the rest of the criminal justice system.

The inspiration for the Law Commission’s proposal, however, appears not to be a problem with the definition of murder but with the sentence it commands. There is general agreement that the law in relation to murder is in a mess because of the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment which automatically follows any such conviction.

This blanket punishment does not permit sentencing to reflect the fact that murder covers different degrees of culpability. Most people would agree that a ‘mercy killing’ — someone who kills his sick wife because of her unbearable pain, for example — is not in the same moral universe as a murder committed during an armed robbery.

Yet both would receive the same sentence of life imprisonment. As a result, juries are reluctant to convict of murder someone charged with a mercy killing, which means they are either acquitted or convicted of manslaughter instead. Either outcome after a deliberate killing is clearly unsatisfactory.

This was what happened last week when Andrew Wragg walked free from court, having been cleared of murdering his terminally-ill son Jacob. Although he had smothered him with a pillow in a premeditated act, he was given a suspended sentence after the jury accepted his plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility rather than the prosecution’s charge of murder. The result left many feeling that justice for Jacob had not been done.

This muddle could be resolved by scrapping the mandatory life sentence and leaving it to the discretion of the judge to pass a sentence commensurate with the gravity of the murder that had been committed.

The government refuses to do this because it fears a savage backlash from the public, since the quid pro quo for abolishing the death penalty was the mandatory life sentence. So instead of scrapping the sentence, the Law Commission is proposing to scrap the meaning of murder itself.

This is hardly a sensible or just resolution to this problem. A premeditated act of violence that kills someone should always be considered the most serious crime that can be committed, whatever the extenuating circumstances that in all compassion should mitigate the sentence in certain cases.

What’s more, the government appears poised to deepen this moral confusion still further. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, has indicated not only that mercy killings might be downgraded from murder to manslaughter but that the defence of provocation might be extended to premeditated killings rather than being restricted to those carried out in the heat of the moment.

But someone who deliberately plans a killing is not lashing out under the kind of provocation that blots out the normal reasoning process. The suspicion is that Lord Falconer is taking advantage of the confusion over the law of murder to advance a quite different agenda —to load the dice in favour of women who premeditatedly kill their partners, on the specious grounds that such women can never be really guilty because it is men, who unlike women benefit from the defence of provocation, who are always at fault.

The way through all this is surely to scrap the mandatory life sentence. If it were ever to happen, it would have to be accompanied by a new quid pro quo. The truth is that much of the public backlash over sentencing is driven by the fact that only a proportion of the sentence that is passed is actually served. Judges should have discretion over sentences for murder; but whenever a life sentence is given, it should mean just that, life.

The integrity of the crime of murder should be upheld, with flexibility and compassion introduced into sentencing; and transparency is the key.

Daily Mail, 19 December 2005

As people rush around buying last minute Christmas presents and putting the finishing touches to the tree, some will be uneasy — as ever — that the sound of church bells is being drowned out by the din of ringing tills and that the essential Christian message of Christmas is being lost in the annual tidal wave of consumerism.

Others are going to great lengths to submerge the message of Christmas completely by removing it from municipal displays or school assemblies in favour of the meaningless multicultural monstrosity of ‘Winterval’. This is being done to spare the feelings of other faiths — who are merely baffled, since they expect Christmas to be celebrated in Britain and feel disappointed when it is not.

Still others fume that any mention of religion is an affront, and even mount a secular crusade against the film version of Narnia on the basis that CS Lewis’s children’s fantasy is a Christian allegory and so may poison children’s minds by getting them to believe in religion.

And religion, they say, is a source of bad things in the world such as irrationality, brainwashing, hatred, prejudice and violence.

It is true that religion has been a source of tyranny, war and terrorism. Religions carry within them the capacity for bad as well as good — and some have rather better records than others in suppressing the former and expanding the latter.

When any religion believes it is the only path to truth, it follows that it cannot live with other peoples’ truths and the results are often bloody. How to reconcile religious convictions with the need to tolerate other people’s beliefs is a dilemma with which religion has to struggle.

But it is short-sighted to think that a world without belief would be a world without such problems. Secularists think that only scientific reason opens the door to freedom, tolerance and a better world.

But this is an unbalanced view. Some of the most intolerant people around are secularists who want to suppress all religious utterances. Their belief in their own ‘truth’ is as dogmatic and illiberal as any religious inquisition.

Some of the worst tyrannies in history have been irreligious. Think China, the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. And intellectuals have been among their most prominent supporters, demonstrating that the more highly developed the power of reason becomes, the less this is a guarantee of human decency or even simple common sense.

One of the most striking features about the human race is the way the religious impulse endures in all societies. Secularists scorn it as a crutch — Marx sneered that it was the ‘opium of the masses’ — but that doesn’t explain why all peoples have a need to believe in something beyond themselves.

Religion lies at the heart of our society’s greatest achievements because it enables the human spirit to soar. Western civilisation was created by Christianity. It was this that gave us the greatest artistic achievements of that civilisation --Paradise Lost, the Sistine chapel, Chartres cathedral or the works of Bach, which have been delighting Radio 3 listeners anew as they are played in their entirety in the run-up to Christmas.

It is also this Judeo-Christian heritage that has given us the values we hold so dear — including the values that secularists prize, such as human rights and tolerance.

Religion gives us a code to live by which helps make us better people. Secularists claim they can do that without religion. But their values are inescapably shaped by the society in which they live, whose own principles ultimately derive from these religious precepts.

The value we in the west place on every individual and on the principle of equality is based on our foundation religious doctrine that we are all created equal in the image of God.

From that doctrine sprang not only the moral codes of obligation to each other without which society would not exist, but also the principle of individualism which lies at the heart of freedom.

This individualism was the motor behind the development of our liberal society, which separated religion and state and thus institutionalised the notion of separate public and private spheres which guaranteed our liberty within the law.

This in turn gave us our notion of human rights. The paradox therefore was that, while liberalism was a reaction against the excesses of clerical power, the principle of human rights at its heart could not have existed without that particular religious tradition.

At best, religion plays a vital role in tapping into the desire to make ourselves into better people. It is only religion that enables people to transform themselves for the better. That is because it offers the crucial elements of hope and structure, which provides both a blueprint and a support for what is often a very difficult and discouraging process.

That is why the great social reform movements of the 19th century arose from evangelical Christianity. The monumental campaign against slavery, which in turn gave rise to a host of other progressive movements such as women’s rights, temperance and prison reform, was instituted by Christian activists. It could only have been promoted by people whose religious faith gave rise to outrage at slavery’s wholesale denial of human dignity.

And that is why modern social programmes attempting to deal with problems such as drug abuse or criminality tend to achieve much better results if they have a religious framework.

Some of the most spectacular examples have occurred in America. The InnerChange programme in jails, for example, which immerses prisoner volunteers in an intensive Bible–based programme for 18 months prior to their release, has dramatically slashed recidivism rates. Secular critics throw up their hands in horror at such ‘brainwashing’ but the fact is that it seems to work.

Or take the Institute for Responsible Fatherhood and Family Revitalisation in Washington. Run by devout Christian Charles Ballard, it turns drug-fuelled violent gangsters into responsible fathers and law-abiding, employed citizens by getting them to rethink and re-invent their entire lives. It manages this because it uses faith not to preach but to offer the possibility of personal transformation.

In Britain, there are similar faith-based projects achieving similar results. A Derbyshire poultry farm, Highfields Happy Hens, has been turned into a Christian vocational training centre for young offenders and excluded pupils. It claims to produce one of the lowest re-offending rates of any young offenders’ programme in the county.

Yet the authorities are deeply hostile to any mention of faith. According to the Christian pressure group Faithworks, the local council and the Home Office want to replicate the Highfield Happy Hens model — but without the Christianity that defines it.

Countless other religious progammes up and down the country have run into similar resistance from authorities which want the excellent results but not the element of faith that is so vital in producing them.

Our society tends to run away from religion as a threat to personal freedom. But in worshipping instead at the shrine of consumerism, we have created a technocratic and managerial void at the heart of our civilisation which has left many bereft, bewildered and bruised.

The authentic religion of this country is probably one of the best person-rescue services there is. It should be properly celebrated. Happy Christmas.

Daily Mail, 12 December 2005

When the new Civil Partnership Act came into force last week, family values campaigner Lynette Burrows took part in a discussion on BBC Radio Five Live about its implications.

During the programme, Ms Burrows said she did not believe that homosexuals should be allowed to adopt. Placing boys with two homosexuals for adoption, she said, was as obvious a risk as placing a girl with two heterosexual men who offered themselves as parents.

To her astonishment, the following day she was contacted by the police who said a ‘homophobic incident’ had been reported against her. She had committed no crime but, said the police, it was policy to investigate homophobic, racist and domestic incidents because these were ‘priority crimes’. Such action was ‘all about reassuring the community’.

Far from being thus reassured, it is difficult adequately to express one’s shock and abhorrence — not at Ms Burrows, but at the actions and attitudes of the police. What kind of a society has this become where, if someone expresses an opinion which falls foul of the politically approved doctrines of the day, the police start feeling their collar?

Freedom of speech is supposed to be the bedrock value of a liberal society. It should only be constrained in extreme circumstances where a crime may be committed, such as incitement to violence or encouraging terrorism.

In the case of Ms Burrows, no crime had been committed. It was simply that her views fell foul of the doctrine that to criticise the behaviour of self-designated victim groups is to be pronounced guilty of prejudice.

But Ms Burrows’ views are shared by many people, maybe even the majority. While most are — thankfully — tolerant of gay people, they draw the line at gay adoption because they do not think it is in the best interests of children to be brought up by two partners of the same sex.

Ms Burrows, however, was raising the incendiary issue of the risk of paedophilia. She was careful to say that this was a risk among heterosexuals as well as among gay men.

But the issue of paedophilia is a troubling one in the context of gay adoption. The vast majority of homosexuals are not paedophiles, any more than are the vast majority of heterosexual men. But a small minority of both groups are.

Within those small numbers, however, academic studies show that paedophilia is proportionately more common among gay men. What’s more, a number of gay activists talk it up — redefining it en route as ‘inter-generational sex’ — arguing that it is acceptable and even central to male homosexual life.

Clearly, it is a factor to be considered when it comes to adoption. It is simply outrageous if such entirely legitimate and necessary discussion is now to be made impossible. But then, the gay rights agenda is all about projecting gay lifestyles as no different from those of heterosexuals, so that any difference in the way gay people are treated can be ascribed to discrimination.

Consequently, it is not enough for gay people not to be stigmatised on account of sexual preferences which deviate from the norm. Instead, the very idea of moral norms has to be destroyed, and anyone who tries to uphold them can be vilified as a bigot and intimidated into silence.

That has now happened. To disapprove of gay lifestyles is to invite certain ostracism as a ‘homophobe’. But if this isn’t bad enough, we now find that voicing such opinions has become — incredibly —a matter for the police, who are putting state power behind such intimidation.

Although no offence has been committed, the police now believe they should investigate the giving of offence. In any sane moral universe, a person making such a complaint would be accused of wasting police time. But now — and remember, this is in the absence of any crime—it seems the police response is to make a menacing approach to the person who has voiced that opinion, to warn them off from voicing it again.

How have we descended to this, that while crime and disorder rage unattended in our streets the police are making a priority of harassing people because of the lawful opinions they hold?

The reason is that the police are now in helpless thrall to the ‘victim culture’ agenda in which self-designated victim groups cannot ever be deemed to have done anything wrong, and so anyone who disapproves of them is by definition prejudiced.

This is nothing less than a tool for destroying the fundamental values of this society by replacing its moral norms with values which transgress those norms. This is being achieved by portraying transgressive behaviour as normal, and anyone who dares say that it is transgressive is therefore by definition a bigot.

Such bullying is bad enough in the informal sphere where reputations are made and lost. When the police get involved, however, it becomes something very much more sinister.

We have already seen worrying evidence of this in the case of the evangelical preacher, Harry Hammond. After he held up a poster calling for an end to homosexuality, lesbianism and immorality, a crowd threw water and soil over him. Even though he was attacked, it was he who was prosecuted and convicted of a public order offence on the grounds that his behaviour ‘went beyond legitimate protest’. Yet the only thing that seemed to be illegitimate was his opinion.

The term ‘police state’ is much abused. But when the police start intimidating people simply because their opinions don’t fit the prevailing orthodoxy, that begins to look uncomfortably like a drift towards just such a situation.

The police are supposed to be the thin blue line that protects our society. But when they enforce an agenda which directly undermines our basic values, they turn from society’s defenders into the agents of its nemesis.

The views expressed by Ms Burrows are commonplace among mainstream Christians and other faiths. We appear to have reached a situation where the expression of such mainstream religious views will now get the police breathing down one’s neck.

What is even more astounding is that attempts by the Government to criminalise utterances which ‘glorify terrorism’ — and thus threaten our security — are being shouted down on the grounds that free speech has to be protected.

But not, it seems, when it comes to Ms Burrows. Look, for example, at the craven reaction of the BBC to the aftermath of its interview. Was it outraged by the fact that one of its contributors had been thus intimidated? It was not. Instead, it described her views as ‘challenging and unpleasant’ and distanced itself from her as fast as it could.

Some of us would defend to the death the rights of gay people to live their lives free of oppression and harm. But some of us would also defend to the hilt the fundamental values of our society against those who wish to destroy them to further an agenda of licence, gross irresponsibility and nihilism.

Those values to be defended include the freedom to voice an opinion and the freedom to tell the truth. If the police are now to be employed in denying such freedoms, we have reached George Orwell’s nightmare of the boot stamping on the human face — and we can kiss goodbye to our liberal society.

Daily Mail, 9 December 2005

Britain’s burgeoning culture of yobbery, disorder and violent crime has left politicians wringing their hands in despair. Schools find that teaching is all but impossible given the level of disruption and violence, not just from pupils but from parents.

The jails are full to bursting. The persistent under-achievement of black boys in school continues to cause concern, as does their over-representation in prison. The government’s ‘respect’ agenda has spawned a myriad speeches, committees and even a respect ‘czar’, and yet makes no difference.

But there is one local initiative which appears to be making a difference to these problems. What’s more, it is based on simple, obvious principles. Yet so deeply do these rub against the grain of fashionable thinking that, rather than being widely imitated, the project is regarded in official circles with suspicion and even disdain.

But not by David Cameron, who on Wednesday chose to go there, on his first official visit as new Tory leader, to launch his Social Justice Policy Group.

In the east London district of Plaistow, in an anonymous-looking building at 4 pm on three afternoons a week or on a Saturday morning, you will be greeted by an unfamiliar sight — a group of small boys, all of them black, standing smartly to attention in rows while a stocky, pugnacious-looking black man barks questions, instructions and homilies at them from the front.

This is Ray Lewis and his Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy.

Lewis used to be the governor of a young offenders’ institution. Distressed beyond measure by the relentless procession of young black men drifting through his jail en route to a lifetime of crime, he finally had enough of presiding over this assembly-line of wasted potential. He decided to break the vicious cycle of black under-achievement and criminality.

Two years ago, following the example of a similar project in Louisiana, he started his charity-funded academy as a kind of supplementary school with knobs on for young black boys with promise who are in danger of falling into delinquency and prison.

He takes about 50 boys aged between 8 and 16 who are recommended by their teachers because, although intellectually bright, they are prime candidates for exclusion through their disruptive or violence. His team consists of ten tutors, three ‘leadership instructors’ who collect the boys from their schools, a cook and a full time counsellor.

I spoke to a group of eight to 12 year-olds at the academy. They were bright, keen, polite, articulate and neatly turned out. They all sat up straight and above all they were calm.

Yet not long ago they had been the bad boys of their schools. They fought, they bullied, they swore, they smashed up the schools and set fire to them, they barricaded teachers into the classrooms, they were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Yet in a short space of time they had been transformed from jail fodder into model pupils.

So how does Lewis pull off this feat of alchemy?

He fills in some of the terrible gaps in the boys’ lives at home and at school. First and most important is that he raises their expectations of what they might achieve. He doesn’t want to hear about them becoming DJs or premier league footballers; he expects them to go to university and into top professions.

Accordingly, they are taken on outings to big companies or institutions to which they might aspire — Tate and Lyle, the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, the House of Commons, Oxford University.

They are hand-picked for their intellectual promise, but most — raised by lone mothers —have never known an orderly life or self-discipline.

So along with maths and English, Lewis and his tutors teach the boys social skills — how to eat, how to speak when talking to people at a dinner, how to make a cup of tea, how to talk to women, tidiness, basic manners, health and hygiene.

The second crucial component is discipline. On the basis that they can only build self-control, self confidence and achievement if they respect adult authority, he makes them conform uncompromisingly to very strict rules.

Each session begins with a roll call where the boys stand in drill lines before marching off to classes. They are not allowed to slouch in their chairs, they are told where to put their hands and to make eye contact with the tutors.

When they walk they do so in a straight line with no deviations and no talking. If they say ‘yeah’ or ‘right’ they are corrected. ‘After a few months’, says Lewis, ‘all of them are expected to be able to speak to an adult with humility, honesty and courtesy. ‘

What Lewis is dealing with is not just the disintegration of family life but also the fallout from the catastrophic failure of the education system. The boys themselves speak scathingly of their schools where they describe a horrifying degree of sloppy practice, indifference and low expectations among their teachers.

‘At school they’ll give you 50% for work that you should only get 1% for’, said one boy. ‘ Here they are straight up and tell you if you have to do something again.’

‘At school the teacher puts work on the board but half the time he’s just reading a paper. When you ask for help he shouts at you,’ said another.

According to Lewis, many senior teachers have no idea of the progress, or lack of it, of individual pupils or if they are getting into trouble — until their behaviour gets so bad it can no longer be ignored.

‘At school, these kids are not corrected’ he said. ‘Some parents are told that their children are top of their class, but this may be a support class about which the parents have no idea. If the child has turned up on time, that’s considered good by his teachers. But that’s not even on the starting block for me.’

Unlike in these schools where teachers clearly expect bad behaviour and thus lose the battle before it even starts, at Eastside good behaviour is not even an issue. It is simply taken for granted. There are no excuses.

‘At school they are given a lot of chances,’ said Lewis. ‘If they do something wrong they might be barred from a school trip, say; but then they apologise and go back on the trip. And so they know they can get away with whatever they do. Here it’s not like that. If they don’t do what’s expected, they don’t go on the trip.’

According to Lewis, the fact that he and his staff are black is crucial. Tough demands and high expectations from strong black characters creates respect among black children.

What Lewis is effectively doing is giving these boys father figures to look up to, the only ones they may have ever known. ‘I treat all these boys as my sons’, he says, ‘and we believe that the constant practice of good habits makes such behaviour permanent.’

It’s not just the boys who are held uncompromisingly to account but their mothers too, who all pay a small fee. ‘Most of the time the parents are the problem’, said Lewis. ‘I tell them they have to be here on time, they have to turn up to meetings.

‘They don’t have order at home. They don’t eat together; nothing happens there that can be described as family life. So we work with the parent as much as with the child.

‘We have a family meeting once a month. We might gently point out various things to them, like they cannot be having sex with a guy in the bedroom with the child in the next room, or that that maybe a nine year old should not be going to bed at 10.30, or what are they seeing on their Play Stations.

‘We throw out six to eight boys per year and always because the mother has refused to get involved. I’m not a baby-sitting service.’

Some local schools even asked Ray to show them how he does it.

‘The first time we went to one school we showed the head how to take a class. We’re using a style that was used years ago. I said to the boys: ‘We’re learning today about how to be successful, now shut up, put your magazines away, my name is Ray Lewis and your mouth only opens if I say so’.

‘They very quickly learned by my manner that I was there to provide them with knowledge and not to be messed about. At the end of the lesson I said, if you don’t want me to come back I won’t because I’m not getting paid. To a boy they all said, come back.’

But far from emulating Lewis’s example, both local teachers and Newham council appear to recoil. They take one look at the roll-call and hiss ‘boot-camp.’

You can see why the council regards him as a threat to the status quo. He shows up its own chronic failure as an education authority and directly challenges every bien-pensant belief in the book. All the usual excuses are given very short shrift indeed.

‘I don’t believe in attention deficit disorder’, he declares. ‘If these boys can concentrate on their Play Stations they can listen to me for half an hour. Self-esteem? Our boys have got too much self-esteem. We need to take this out of them and then we build them up. We love them and we believe in them, which is why I won’t listen to this rubbish.’

What Lewis is doing is hardly rocket science. It’s just plain common sense, old-fashioned teaching and a robust attitude towards wrong-doing and personal responsibility. But it works.

To him, the shattered lives of black boys amounts to a state of emergency. The rest of us might wonder why public money is being spent on other institutions which, far from acknowledging what they must do to address it, continue to be its principal cause.

Daily Mail, 8 December 2005

The Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has caused general outrage by saying airily that hospitals should make patients wait up to two months longer for their operations in order to save money.

Asked if she approved of the decision by Staffordshire primary care trusts to impose a six-month wait for non-emergency surgery, she said it would make sense to delay such operations to help trusts reduce their debts.

This gave every NHS trust a green light to turn what is currently a maximum six-month waiting time into the minimum. Doctors are thus being put under pressure to go against their clinical judgment and deny patients the treatment they need when they need it, all because of gross government incompetence in running the health service.

The more patients that hospitals treat, the more heavily they get into debt. So rather than the health service fulfilling its purpose to treat sick patients, such patients are being used to treat the problems of the health service by being parked on the waiting lists.

Yesterday the NHS Chief Executive Sir Nigel Crisp echoed Ms Hewitt’s comments by admitting that patients might have to wait longer for treatment because a quarter of NHS hospitals and trusts are failing to control their finances. This is surely the economics of the madhouse.

Having treatment on the NHS has become a lottery. You can strike lucky and find speedy treatment, modern facilities and efficient and pleasant care. But far too often standards fall woefully short.

When I broke my wrist a few months ago, I needed an immediate operation to set the bones. If the operation wasn’t done within a couple of days, the bones would have set permanently in the wrong position. Although I was admitted straight away to an NHS teaching hospital, I was bumped off the operating list to make way for more urgent cases because, although there were surgeons ready and willing to set the wrist, not enough operating theatres were in use.

The following morning I was starved and gowned for surgery, and then bumped off the list again as the surgeons fumed. In desperation, I had to have the operation done privately to prevent my wrist from being permanently crippled.

While I was on the NHS ward – by chance I had been put into a side room — I was further discomfited by being woken in the middle of the night and told I would have to move immediately to make room for another patient. Upon further inquiry, it became clear that I would be moved onto a mixed-sex ward — of the kind that the government has said must be phased out. At that point my normal desire to be accommodating deserted me and I simply refused point blank to be moved.

Of course, the vast majority of front-line staff perform a heroic job in trying circumstances. But the impression was of a system that was hopelessly mismanaged, desperately paddling to keep its head above water but sinking with every day that passed.

The fact is that the government has simply lost control of the health service. Chaos appears to be widespread as the money runs out. Trusts in Surrey and Stoke-on-Trent have been postponing patient admissions for up to four months in order to move them into the next financial year, thus saving on this year’s budget.

Surgeons are being told to operate on fewer patients as there is no money to pay for them. Efficiency is penalised. One surgeon in Cornwall was incensed to be told that the problem was that he was working too fast.

Other trusts are saving money by removing patients from waiting lists through a variety of sleights of hand. Now the government crows that the waiting list has dropped to below 800,000 for the first time since the late 1980s. But at what cost to sick people?

Across the country, NHS trusts are in dire trouble. The service as a whole is forecasting a £650m deficit by the end of the financial year. Rescue squads are being formed from management consultancy firms to stop these trusts from going bust altogether.

Virtually every government reform designed to rescue the situation has made things worse. The respected King’s Fund has warned that, far from improving the service, the latest reform package is causing trusts to fail. And in the general panic the targets keep changing, thus adding to the chaos.

Until last May’s general election, NHS managers were under instructions to hit their targets for cutting waiting times at all costs. After the election, as the size of the deficit became clear, the message changed and Ms Hewitt told health managers that balancing the books was the ‘highest priority’.

A new system of payment by results, where hospitals get paid only for treatments they carry out, has been partially suspended or modified by three strategic health authorities because they say it threatens to push their already parlous financial situation into an outright crisis. And so on, and disastrously on.

The crux of the matter is that the NHS’s problem has been consistently misdiagnosed. Its main difficulty is always said to be lack of money. But the amounts being spent on it are simply astronomical. It is now costing us almost £75 billion, compared with a mere £42 billion in 2001.

This vast increase, however, has been poured into a black hole, swallowed up mainly by pay increases and other costs and with only a meagre proportion going into improvements that patients can see.

An analysis by the King’s Fund shows that only 2.4 per cent of this increase has gone into new beds and operations. Ten times as much has gone into funding alterations to NHS pensions.

The next largest share has gone on pay increases for doctors and nurses and on wages for extra staff. The GPs cost more than the government expected, because they achieved more bonus points for getting more patients to have more tests.

This was a classic example of the perverse consequences of NHS management. The Government gave doctors a financial incentive to do more good things for patients. They duly did more – so many more that they ended up costing the NHS too much. And that’s a general paradox – the more efficient the NHS is in treating more patients, the more this costs and so the faster it goes bust.

Lack of money for front-line services is not the cause of the health service’s difficulty, but the result. The cause of the difficulty lies in the fact that it is simply unmanageable. A top-down, centrally run health service is a dinosaur on a dog lead. The Government cannot fix this problem because the Government is the problem. The more it tries to solve it, the worse it gets.

The NHS is too big and monolithic for any government to manage. The reason it is so bureaucratic is because it has to respond to so much control from Whitehall. The reason it wastes so much money is because it has no incentive to be prudent because it has no competition. Attempts to inject competition within the service merely mean Peter constantly robs Paul and debts spiral ever upwards.

On the other hand, European health systems are not crippled by these perverse consequences. They work much better because they are based on social insurance, which combine competition with protection for the poor and raise standards for everyone.

The NHS is still our sacred cow. But until we acknowledge that the system itself needs absolutely fundamental reform, too many sick people will continue to be not the beneficiaries of our health service but its victims.

Daily Mail, 5 December 2005

When this government falls into a hole it knows exactly what to do. It digs even faster and deeper, burying more and more victims in the process.

All the evidence suggests that its sex education policy is a disaster. Britain has the highest rate of under-age teenage pregnancies in Europe. The proportion of 13- to 15-year-olds who are getting pregnant is rising. Sexually transmitted diseases among young people are going through the roof.

Even the apparent drop in under-18 pregnancy rates is no more than a statistical sleight of hand, since the number of 16 year-olds using the morning-after pill has doubled since it was made available over the counter in January 2001.

Faced with the egregious failure of the strategy, government advisers have now proposed a brilliant remedy. Apply it even more widely! Their solution is to make sex lessons compulsory for all children starting at the age of five, so that detailed knowledge about sex should become a routine part of their education.

No sooner will a child have found his or her coat-peg and be measuring up the competition for the climbing frame than some teacher will be rattling off where babies come from. So while many children are not taught to read properly at five — indeed, a disgraceful number can barely read and write when they leave primary school at the age of 11 — they will be given ‘more rounded’ lessons on sex and relationships. Is this not grotesquely inappropriate?

The assumption behind compulsory sex education is that not enough of such information is reaching children to promote responsible behaviour. On the contrary — children can hardly move for this stuff, and it is the message that it carries which is irresponsible.

During the past decade, school sex education programmes promoting a ‘safe sex’ message have hugely expanded. Government-funded services advise on how to have sex, where to get the morning-after pill and how to spot sexually transmitted diseases. Girls as young as 13 are even being offered sex advice by text message; they tap in questions on their mobile phones and receive answers from sexual health workers.

Yet all this has not brought down the rate of sexual activity; far from it. The more such value-free sex education and contraceptive advice is given to children, the more their sexual activity increases. And the earlier in their lives this encouragement is provided, the earlier their sexual activity takes place.

This is because adult values are being loaded onto children who are too emotionally immature to cope with them. Teaching children that premature sex is permitted, appropriate and fun encourages them to try it out. This is hardly rocket science.

To believe that teaching them to link sex to ‘relationships’ will make them behave responsibly is simply risible. A ‘relationship’ is a concept that is so slippery as to be meaningless. It belongs to the world of TV soaps, which is about the level of reality that defines so many teenage — and a dismaying number of adult — sexual encounters to which the notion of permanent commitment is entirely foreign.

The increase in sexual promiscuity among children and teenagers is not due to ignorance but to the deliberate destruction of the notion of respectability. Not only are official blind eyes turned to enforcing the legal age of consent, but sex education actually targets under-age children.

Moral guidance is nowhere. Instead, sex education seeks to ‘clarify’ the child’s own values. But children need clear boundaries of behaviour. Treating them as if they have adult values is to abandon and even abuse them.

According to these government advisers, sex education for five year-olds would be confined mainly to ‘relationships and friendships’. But who can trust even this anodyne formulation, given the wildly inappropriate sex ‘education’ materials used in some schools?

One such video shown to nine and ten year-olds enlightens them about different positions for heterosexual, bisexual, gay and lesbian sex. Other programmes require children to act out sexual behaviour. Such material looks like propaganda for sexual license; some is so exploitative it verges on the predatory. Is it surprising that more and more children are acting out sexual behaviour, a common response to sexual abuse?

The worst of it is that such materials are not shown to parents who, on the rare occasions when they do stumble across it, are invariably aghast and furious at this abuse of both their children and of their own role. But then, the state is increasingly undermining parents and usurping their responsibility to guide their own children in the most private and personal areas of life.

Schools dish out contraceptives and pregnancy tests to 11 year-olds, and provide abortion services to under-age children without telling their parents. When Susan Axon challenged this abortion practice in court, the Family Planning Association said in evidence that the idea that ‘parents know what is best’ for their children was out of date and the views of health professionals should take precedence.

According to the Government, parents increasingly cannot be trusted to impart to their children qualities such as self-worth, restraint, friendliness, empathy and resilience, so schools must now teach ‘emotional literacy’. Accordingly, 14 separate emotional areas are to be taught, under titles such as ‘getting on and falling out’, ‘relationships’ and ‘good to be me’.

This is nothing less than a state grab for control over the way children think about the world — a creeping nationalisation of childhood that is steadily destroying the independence of family life.

What’s more, guidance on behaviour cannot be taught. It is learned by example, by being brought up in a loving, stable environment where identity and moral values are forged. Children brought up by their two parents are far less likely to have sex under 16 than those who are not.

More and more families are becoming unstable and fragmented. Yet instead of shoring up the married family — the best antidote to irregular behaviour — the government is ruthlessly undermining it by promoting the idea that all lifestyles are equal.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority says primary schools need to cover a wider range of relationships than the traditional nuclear family, and must teach children that families include same-sex couples, single parents and children in local authority care.

Ministers have progressively loaded the dice against marriage, making it ever more meaningless. Now they are undermining it still further with gay civil union, which comes into force today.

Contrary to the claims being made for this measure, it is not about equal rights or greater self-discipline. It is part of a wider onslaught on the whole notion of moral norms by separating sex, marriage and procreation and destroying the unique place of marriage in our society as the institution that best safeguards the healthy regeneration of human identity.

Both adults and children are being funnelled instead towards a sexual free-for-all. This is surely why the government is so opposed to sexual abstinence education.

All the evidence is that abstinence works in preventing irregular sexual activity. But the government doesn’t want to prevent such activity. On the contrary, it wants to promote it in order to produce ‘equality’ between lifestyles — while tidying away any inconvenient consequences such as teenage pregnancy.

Sex education is therefore not a means of protecting this country’s fundamental values. It is a weapon in the war being waged against them.