Civitas Blog

Tony Blair’s illness is a reminder that old-Labour collectivism could easy re-assert itself under a different leader. One of the dominant trends under Gordon Brown has been the increasing use of means-tested benefits. In 1951 only 3% of the population relied on the old national assistance and unemployment benefit. Today about 22% of households of working age receive half or more of their income from the state.

Gordon Brown’s contribution: Despite a huge fall in unemployment, there were 240,000 more people on benefits and welfare tax credits in 2003 (6,383,000) than in 1997 (6,143,000).

This week the Higher Education Funding Council ‘named and shamed’ 17 universities for not meeting their quota of pupils from state schools. Threatened with the prospect of losing state funding if they do not discriminate against children from private schools, some universities have publicised their strategy for meeting their quota. Exeter University, for example, asks for only one A and two B’s for pupils from state schools, when it would require 3 A’s from a private school student.

The Government’s policy is a strategy of hard-line egalitarian social engineering, concealed behind a smokescreen of ostensible concern for less fortunate pupils. It is an advantage to have committed and supportive parents, but the present government sees this advantage as unfair.

According to the Sunday Times, the police are shortly going to be encouraged to give offenders who steal goods up to £200 a fixed-penalty notice, similar to a parking ticket. It means that shoplifters and other thieves will be able to ply their trade without getting a criminal record.

Past experience of downgrading punishments should serve as a warning. The Criminal Justice Act of 1988 downgraded unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle to a non-indictable offence, encouraging courts to use non-custodial sentences. The result was that 30% more people had their cars stolen. In 1987 there were 20 thefts per 1,000 population. By 1990 there were 20% more and by 1993, over 30% more (26.2 per 1,000). The number of thefts only started to fall when the Government increased the use of imprisonment from 1993 onwards.

Today’s Times carries a report that a private health insurance company, PruHealth, intends to charge a lower premium to customers who maintain a healthy life-style by not smoking, regularly visiting the gym, etc.

Surely, the Treasury could and ought to consider offering comparable kinds of rebate in connection with NHS charges? At present the Government seeks to encourage healthier life-styles but without offering the taxpayer any real inducements to do so beyond making smokers and drinkers pay extra taxes for indulging their taste for tobacco and alcohol.

A new poll carried out by ICM for the New Frontiers Foundation finds strong support for the idea of taking back power over trade, employment, and civil rights, and for creation of a new global trade and defence alliance. The full findings and an analysis are available at this link. It's well worth a look.

In a speech made yesterday to a secondary school in County Durham, Mr David Bell, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools for England and Wales, laid out his vision of what purposes our schools should serve in today’s ever more globalised world. According to Mr Bell, they should seek to accomplish two main purposes.

The first is to teach the 3 R’s. This assertion of Mr Bell may come as a pleasant surprise to all traditionally minded individuals more used, in recent times, to hearing pronouncements by educationists on the purposes of schools that seem to view their prime function more as adjuncts of the social services than as educational establishments.

Something has gone badly wrong with the Home Office statistical service. Not all that long ago you could place reasonable reliance on official statistics. Today a mixture of bungling and deceit seem to be the rule.

I recently sent an email to the Home Office about the prison statistics asking them to clarify a figure on page 173 (Table 9.10) of Prison Statistics 2002. One row refers to 'Males aged under 17' and the next row to 'Males aged 18-20'. If interpreted literally,this means that the figures for males aged 17 are not included.

I asked the Home Office if the phrase 'Males aged under 17' should be 'Males aged 17 and under'?

They replied a few weeks later by saying that 'under 17' means under 17.999 recurring. Here is the exact quotation:

“In response to your recent enquiry regarding the above, the 'aged under 17' refers to those aged 17 or under in whole years (so up to 17.999..... years).”

Unless I am sadly mistaken, it would surely be much clearer to say ‘under 18’.

This was probably an example of bungling, but the Home Office is also not above statistical manipulation that can not be put down to error. Take a look at this short report on the Government’s policy targets.

In an interview with Le Metro today French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin says, “for the first time, Europe has a shared Constitution. This pact is the point of no return. Europe is becoming an irreversible project, irrevocable after the ratification of this treaty”.

For some other revealing insights into the real motives of some of the European elite take a look at the Vote No campaign website.

Ethnic minorities suffer from ‘passive apartheid’ in rural Britain, according to Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Speaking on the Today programme, he pointed out that in the South West region of England ethnic minorities were found in the ratio ‘one in 85’, whereas in the UK as a whole the ratio was ‘one in 11 or 12’. John Humphrys put it to him that immigrants go to the cities because that is where the jobs are. Phillips strongly denied this and claimed it was due to hostility.

But, the only proof of this hostility was that, when you go in a local village shop, the shopkeeper tends to be a bit suspicious. Humphrys pointed out that people were suspicious of him when he went back to Wales, the land of his birth. In other words, they were not hostile so much as wary of strangers. But that did not satisfy Phillips, who was intent on inventing racism where none exists.

His underlying assumption is that any disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities must be the result of discrimination (passive apartheid). But there are many reasons for disparities in racial representation that have nothing to do with discrimination. Some of some are described in Liberal Anti-Racism, published in Prospect Magazine.

The original reason for establishing the Commission for Racial Equality was to improve racial harmony. But, this most recent of the periodic outbursts from the CRE, will have the opposite effect. Perhaps the time has come to abolish it.

According to a report on the Today programme and a report in the Observer on 3 October, the Government is wrong to attach so much weight to the British Crime Survey (BCS), which substantially under-estimates crime. The report is by a new think tank, the Crime and Society Foundation, established by Kings College London. It confirms the case that we at Civitas have argued for the last three years, namely that the BCS probably only measures about half of actual crime and possibly much less.

Among the crimes excluded are murder, drug offences, fraud and all crimes against commercial premises and against under 16s. In 2003-04 the BCS reported 11.7 million crimes, but our estimates (based on a method accepted by the Home Office) show that there were at least an additional 10.9 million. You can check out the Civitas estimates at this link.

The independent commission, chaired by Adair Turner, has warned of the need for pension reform. Some groups are demanding an increase in the basic pension at the taxpayer’s expense, others an end to means testing, and a few are calling for raising the pension age.

A basic safety net is a necessity, but if we want to remain a free people and to enjoy independence in old age, the best safeguard is to rely on self-help: save as much as you can during your working life and ‘work until you drop’. Further discussion.

There has been a lot of attention this week to the report of the Iraqi Survey Group, which confirmed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. However, the far more important revelation is that United Nations sanctions were being circumvented and that voting in the Security Council by France, Russia and China was distorted by secret payments made by Saddam Hussein. Andrew Neil relates the facts in this week’s The Business.

Freedom of speech should mean one thing: freedom of speech. It should not mean, ‘Say what you like but please don’t be mean’, or ‘Yes, speak your mind but don’t say anything too unpopular.’ However, as we are told to continue red-flagging our language, freedom of speech increasingly becomes an unnecessarily murky terrain about what you can say and, more crucially, whose feelings you can hurt.

Members of the European Parliament want to prevent Mr Rocco Buttiglione from becoming the EU Commissioner for Justice because he has said that homosexuality is a sin. As a Catholic he does think it is wrong, but he has confirmed that he has no intention of using his public office to criminalise homosexual conduct.

The mainstream liberal principle has been that the realm of law enforcement should be kept small in order to enlarge the realm of conscience. Christians, including Catholics, have long accepted that the law should not be used to enforce every moral precept they uphold. In matters such as sexual preference it is accepted that we should not resort to law, but rely instead on individual decisions made in the light of public discussion and the call of conscience. But for there to be a moral sphere we have to allow freedom of speech, so that we can all learn from one another through public debate.

The new brand of puritanism represented by the MEPs is profoundly illiberal. They are not defending free speech, but the suppression of it by demanding that people who disagree with their preferred opinions should be driven from public office. If they win, we will have come rather a long way from a ‘live and let live’ society. Moreover, does anyone imagine that if Mr Buttiglione were a Muslim, whose faith also regards homosexuality as sinful, the same demands to ban him from office would be made?

‘I rejoice every time I hear of another American soldier dying! You people all deserve to die in another 9/11. You are destroying the world.’

You might expect to hear these sentiments on Al-jazeera, but certainly not from an English woman attacking a tourist on a bus. But it happened.

From my own experience, I'm often asked what part of the United States I'm from. When I reply, 'Oh, I'm Canadian,' many people quickly apologize for offending me or insulting me. I've found this puzzling--but I've also noticed when I first moved here, people warmed to me much quicker when my national identity was clearly established.

Therefore, we ask our American and British readers to please comment on this entry and share their experiences about US bashing here and abroad. As the linked article suggests, it’s well on its way to becoming more than merely fashionable.

As a rule, Afro-American rap artists are not a group noted for the profundity of their political insight. The wording used by one in an advertisement for an employee reveals him as something of an exception.

Today’s London Times reports Sean “P Diddy” Combs as having advertised for a new butler by declaring himself looking for a white man. ‘I am an equal opportunities employer’, he is reported as having claimed.

On one level, Mr Combs’ advertisement exhibits no more than the sort of anti-white animus all too frequently voiced in the lyrics of his musical fraternity. What Mr Combs appears to be indicating is that he would prefer being served by a white man than by a black man so that he would then be able to triumph over someone of the colour of those who for so long subordinated to themselves those of his own colour. Since to express any such preference openly would violate anti-discrimination employment law, Mr Combs seems to be wittily exploiting the language of affirmative action to get away with doing so. In this way, he seems also to be cocking a further snook at whitey through openly defying his laws. Not much in Mr Combs’ advertisement for a classical liberal to admire, you might think. And were that all there was to it you would be right.

Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten has criticised the Home Office for advertising for a marketing manager for ID cards before the legislation to introduce them has even been presented to parliament. Even worse, the advertisement on the Home Office website makes it clear that the successful candidate ‘will take responsibility for all aspects of positioning and promoting ID cards and ID card services to its customers and stakeholders. During the passage of the Bill, this will include communications with ministers, MPs and others.’

The editor of the Spectator, Boris Johnson, should not have apologised for the leading article in last week’s issue. Instead, he should have offered someone from Liverpool equal space to reply.

The Spectator leader drew attention to legitimate concerns. It may be that, in the light of criticism, the writer would want to amend or tone down some of what was said, but the main concern was valid: that the one-minute silence at the England/Wales football match and the two-minute silence in Liverpool were not justified.

But isn’t it a good thing if people come together in periodic acts of solidarity? Yes it is and, perhaps, we don’t do it often enough. But when a decision is made to display our unity we should be careful about the message that we are sending. The focus of the criticism in the Spectator was on the motivation of Liverpudlians for taking part. They stand accused of wallowing in victim status. In reality, I suspect that many were drawn in, as they were into the public displays of grief after the death of Princess Diana, for far worthier reasons. Above all, they felt a wish to belong, to be part of something bigger than themselves. But such a longing can be made to serve noble or ignoble, wise or unwise, purposes and it is reasonable for us all to ask ourselves what exactly we are giving our loyalty to when we take part in public displays.

The Tomlinson report into the education of 14-19 year-olds is a missed opportunity. By common consent our system, supposedly designed to ensure that rich and poor alike receive a good education, fails many of our children.

About 5% reach the end of compulsory schooling with no formal qualifications. Only 42% of 16 year-olds achieve a grade C or higher in both English and Maths GCSE. Many employers find young recruits lacking in basic skills. And worse still, even among those taking A-levels, a significant number of universities find that they have to provide catch-up courses for first-year students.

We should be having an entirely different debate. The introduction of a diploma with entry, foundation, intermediate and advanced stages will, of itself, be irrelevant. Reducing the number of external examinations, as the report proposes, will lower standards. Teacher assessment is notoriously unreliable because it expects each teacher to be a judge in his or her own cause. If a large number of their pupils do badly, perhaps it is because of bad teaching, a conclusion no teacher is likely to encourage. And the attempt to equalise status – parity of esteem – is a naïve absurdity. The status of occupations cannot be dictated by law or determined by a government policy. Such attempts are simply futile.

Instead of restructuring the qualifications framework, we should be focusing on the underlying causes of education failure. Above all, it is because the public sector is a monopoly. The small private sector allows an escape for some, but the real challenge is to create opportunities for the vast majority of the population by allowing new schools committed to high standards in learning to be established. Monopoly tends to diminish the discovery of better ways of meeting human needs and competition increases the chances that better solutions will be found.

From Guardian Unlimited (some colourful language ahead):

‘Last week G2 launched Operation Clark County to help readers have a say in the American election by writing to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio. In the first three days, more than 11,000 people requested addresses.’

Following this is a collection of responses from Americans who had heard of the Guardian’s distress over the state of their democracy. These ranged from the intriguing, to the bewildering, to the out-and-out hilarious (‘Mind your own business. We don't need weenie-spined Limeys meddling in our presidential election. If it wasn't for America, you'd all be speaking German. And if America would have had a president, then, of the likes of Kerry, you'd all be goose-stepping around Buckingham Palace’).

Has the Guardian completely lost the plot in its attempt to demonstrate such Grave Concern over the election? Someone there must have realized that such a plan would likely spark anger amongst Clark County voters; Americans would surely resent being told what to do by anyone, let alone a newspaper whose leftist slant makes the New York Times look like the Daily Mail. (Advocacy journalism such as this does not usually exist in mainstream North American media.) Imagine that you are Joe Undecided in Ohio and you get a letter from your typical Guardian reader imploring you to vote for Kerry: ‘Thank goodness this not-at-all patronising British person knows more than I do about my own nation’s affairs. Heaven knows what took me so long to make up my mind. Why, Britain must be some kind of political Utopia if all they have time to worry about is my vote… and, of course, fox hunting!’

Despite the paper’s unwillingness to admit this may have been a mistake, even the Kerry campaign has expressed its dismay at the stunt. Ohio is a key state and one Bush barely won four years ago and one Kerry’s supporters are desperate for now. Unless something big breaks in the news in the next few days, this election is going to be quite close. In an irony almost too mind-boggling to enjoy, is it possible that the Guardian just helped George Bush get re-elected?

An unusual coalition against reform of the gambling law has emerged. The Daily Mail is running a campaign but will not have expected support from Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian. The main thrust of her argument was that deregulation will increase addiction. She also reminds her readers of the experience of Atlantic City in the USA. It was hoped that the introduction of gambling would bring about economic regeneration, a hope that the British Government shares. But, if you drive to the gambling district of Atlantic City, you drive through the same slums that were there before the casinos opened. Moreover, there is even evidence that the casinos have driven out local leisure-related businesses. The free drinks that are liberally dispensed to encourage gamblers to go further, the free or cut-price food, and free shows make it impossible for rivals to survive for miles around.

Ofsted is a governmental body set up by the 1992 Education Act whose full name is the ‘Office for Standards in Education’. Its original remit was to inspect and report on the quality of all state schools. If, based on an inspection, Ofsted judged the quality of educational provision of a school to be unsatisfactory, then, unless the school addresses and rectifies those aspect of provision the report deems unsatisfactory, the school inspected stands in danger of being compulsorily shut down.

Since its creation, the remit of Ofsted has grown steadily, with more and more different kinds of educational establishment being brought under its inspectorial wing. In 2002, Ofsted acquired power of inspection over the country’s private schools. Its powers were extended to them on the alleged grounds that such powers over private schools as the state had under the 1944 Education Act were insufficient to compel those offering inadequate provision to improve the quality of their provision on pain of closure otherwise. Meanwhile, competition between such schools was deemed unable to exert market pressure for improvement, allegedly on the grounds that parents could acquire insufficient information about what went on in private schools to enable them to make informed decisions about which to send their children to.

Crime and anti-social behaviour are amongst the most serious problems we face. Quite apart from the financial costs of vandalism and rowydism, the inability of the forces of law and order to guarantee to law-abiding citizens the right to go about their business without let or hindrance is blighting thousands of lives. If people are too afraid to go out of their houses, or to visit public places like shops or parks, they are suffering a real diminution of their quality of life.

The government’s response to this has been the creation of the ASBO – the anti-social behaviour order. So confident are they of its effectiveness that much has recently been made of a programme to increase the number of ASBOs issued. However, there is little reason for this confidence.

Charlie Brooker writes a regular TV column for the Guardian. In the conclusion to his Saturday piece, Mr. Brooker went on bit of a… well, a tangent, to say the least:

‘On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?’

The article apparently is no longer on the Guardian’s website, and they have apologized by ‘associating’ itself with Brooker’s claim that it was all just a joke:

‘The final sentence of a column in The Guide on Saturday caused offence to some readers. The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer. "Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action - an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind."’

The Guardian claims that Brooker’s views do not represent those of the paper, and that’s fair enough. However, that the paper could run something that not only speaks to an astounding arrogance (is the whole civilised world really rooting for Kerry, or merely the social circles of self-important critics?) but also makes crass use of murderers for a cheap laugh begs the question: Exactly who is editing this stuff? The Guardian should enjoy the right to publish materials they may not agree with, but its readers should demand they hold themselves to at least a modicum of good taste and good sense. In an election year that has been especially polarized and out-and-out nasty, running pieces that long for a return of presidential assassins further cheapens the idea that elections can actually be about the civilised exchange of ideas. Whatever your politics, you deserve better from your daily.

(Thanks to A Small Victory for this.)

David Blunkett has admitted that he intends to give up Britain’s ability to veto EU policies on immigration and asylum. He claims that we will not have to accept any policies we do not like, but the EU has never operated that way. The European Court of Justice will impose policies agreed by a majority vote against the Britain’s will. Moreover, once power has been surrendered it has been the custom for it never to be given back.

Mr Blunkett has claimed that abandoning our veto will allow us to force other countries to follow policies we prefer. Mrs Thatcher made the same mistake over the Single European Act in 1986. She acknowledges in her book, Statecraft, that she thought Britain would be able to force other countries to de-regulate trade and commerce. Instead, Britain was coerced. Immigration and asylum will be no exception.

A country that cannot control who lives in its territory has lost the capacity for self-government. Our system of liberty demands much of ordinary citizens. It is only feasible where there is a common language and shared beliefs about fundamentals and it takes time for newcomers not used to the ways of a free people to settle in. Yet in 2002 the net number of foreign immigrants to the UK was nearly 250,000, double the rate before 1997. For accurate information about immigration check the MigrationWatchUK website. For further discussion of immigration take a look at Anthony Browne’s Do We Need Mass Immigration? (PDF).

‘Accurate, impartial and independent journalism is the principal way we support informed citizenship. Our journalism and editorial values are the cornerstone of the BBC’s remit and constitute a core rationale for public funding.’

So runs a statement on the opening page of the introduction to a submission by the BBC on behalf of the renewal of its Charter entitled,the BBC's Contribution to Informed Citizenship .

The statement carries a clear corollary the corporation seems willing to accept. This is that the BBC would not merit public funding were its news and current affairs coverage substantially inaccurate, partial, or unduly influenced by outside pressure or interference.

So long as news agencies remain staffed by mere mortals, all news and current affairs coverage will, on occasion, be less than fully accurate. In the present context, therefore, all the BBC’s claim to accuracy in its news coverage can amount to is that, at best, it never knowingly misinforms the public by broadcasting falsehood or withholds what it knows to be true and germane to any issue. At a minimum, this would require it to seek to verify its sources before broadcasting any contentious or controversial claim, as well as broadcast all information in its possession relevant to any issue.

John Locke, the great defender of the English Revolution of 1688, died 300 years ago today. Click here for an explanation of his contribution by Professor David Conway.

In The Times today Trevor Phillips contends that ethnic groups still suffer from racial discrimination and that we need ‘more vigorous enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws’. The evidence he gives is selective and takes the form of examples of disproportionate representation of ethnic groups in various walks of life: 22% of white British children live with one parent compared with 55% of African-Caribbean children; or ethnic minorities are eight times less likely to ‘visit the countryside’.

If there is a single belief underlying a free society it is the moral quality of all individuals. The founders of liberty drew their inspiration from our Christian heritage. All were equal in the sight of God and, if all were to come face to face with their maker at the end of their lives, they must be allowed to take personal responsibility for choosing truth from error and right from wrong. The underlying idea is that we should judge people according to the things they can do something about. We can’t help where we are born, or whether we are black or white, male or female. But we can control what kind of people we become. Consequently, all the great defenders of liberty believed that we should all be equal before the law. Yet, what we now have is laws under which some people are more equal than others. A crime with a racial motive is now more serious than one without, and the force of law will be used against employers who fail to meet racial quotas (woops, forgot to call them ‘targets’) which can only be met by giving additional weight to race at the expense of personal qualities or fitness for the job. In a world dictated by Trevor Phillips, an employer who treated candidates as moral equals and ignored ascribed characteristics like race, would be at fault.