Civitas Blog

Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of finance, once gathered together a group of merchants from Paris and asked what they would like the government to do for them. One of them replied: Laissez nous faire – leave us alone. This is the origin of the phrase laissez faire.

Charitable bodies would do well to remember the words of this wise merchant as politicians of all parties try to conscript their services. At a meeting held to celebrate the centenary of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel last night, Michael Howard outlined Tory plans for a voluntary sector in which charity schools and hospitals would be able to compete for government funding to offer more choice to parents and patients. Alan Milburn, on the same day, was predicting that the voluntary sector would one day play as large a role as the state and the private sector in providing public services. He wants to encourage local authorities, primary care trusts and other bodies to award long-term contracts to charities, backed by substantial funding.

Of course, this is not really a new idea. We are already there. Many so-called ‘charities’ are no more than vehicles for carrying out the government’s statutory responsibilities on the cheap. Take away the government funding and they cease to exist. This actually happened to an organisation which used to be in the office next to ours in Waterloo. Of course, anyone can do anything cheaper than the government, but since when has cheapness been the defining characteristic of voluntarism?

Voluntary action is an essential component of a free society. Charitable bodies are schools of citizenship. They benefit not only the recipients of the services, but the providers. They make us better people and better citizens, capable of acting responsibly and altruistically, meeting other people’s needs in a way that builds them up, rather than degrading them to welfare-dependent status, in the manner of state-run welfare programmes.

It is simply not possible for voluntary bodies to carry out this role when they are acting under directions from Whitehall. Instead of following their own vision, they have to help the government of the day to achieve its targets, with a view to getting them re-elected. They cease to be part of civil society, and inhabit a ghastly twilight world in which politics poisons everything.

It is said that when you dine with the devil you should take a long spoon. When it comes to negotiating contracts with Whitehall, voluntary bodies would be well advised not to go to the table at all.

Today’s papers contain the results of tests in English and mathematics carried out last summer on 11 years olds in England's primary schools.

They establish beyond doubt that, on the whole, faith schools achieve much better results than so-called ‘community’ schools which have no denominational affiliation and at which religious education and collective acts of worship have all but disappeared in recent years, despite still being legally mandatory.

Whereas faith schools make up only a third of England's primary schools, they account for as much as two-thirds of those whose pupils achieved the maximum possible test scores. Moreover, faith schools accounted for almost half of the 200 primary schools at which greatest progress had been made by pupils in these subjects since they were tested in them at the start of their schooling there.

To what are due the superior results faith schools, on the whole, seem able to achieve?

Despite all the manifold problems of rising levels of violent crime to have beset Britain since 1997, life has not been too bad for the vast majority of its citizens. In many ways, the period of sustained growth and rising living standards most of them have enjoyed was the legacy of sound public finance that the Labour Government inherited from the previous administration, plus its inspired early decision to place monetary policy beyond the remit of the Treasury.

Moreover, despite having vastly increased public expenditure and taxes to pay for it, Chancellor Brown so far has been comparatively prudent, managing to observe his self-denying ordinance, which he terms his ‘Golden Rule’, not to increase public borrowing over the course of the economic cycle save for purposes of capital expenditure.

Yesterday, Chancellor Brown delivered his Pre-Budget Report which most political commentators interpret as being his attempt to set out his stall as future leader to fellow party members. In announcing in it what he did, Chancellor Brown seemed to throw all previous monetary and fiscal caution to the wind.

David Blunkett is daily exhibiting a startling obtuseness about a distinction that lies at the heart of government--that between the public and the private. It is this, more than anything else, that has exposed his incapacity as a senior politician at the heart of national affairs, whatever his past achievements or present merits. Religion and secular morality define and attempt to control all public affairs. Politics define that small area of public affairs that are appropriately controlled by the coercive powers of State. Day-to-day politics are mainly arguments about where the line should lie in the light of current circumstances and knowledge.

Forty years ago, circumstances and knowledge seemed to indicate that sex could safely be privatised. They could be removed from public censure and praise, and notably from the rewards and punishments administered by the government. The condom and the pill between them seemed to have separated sex from both procreation and disease.

The surge in lone-parent families, with the expense of housing and maintaining mothers and their children being thrown onto the State meant not a reduction, but a vast expansion, in the involvement of the public in what has been primarily a matter for the spouses. The most public of institutions, the prisons, have being filling with the casualties of families without fatherhood. The surge in sexually-transmitted diseases has also made its own enlarged claims on public intervention in the interests of the sufferers' health.

Instead of simple assumptions about paternity that minimised the need for the law to intervene, public disputes about the rights and duties of the all sorts of divorced fathers, cohabiting fathers and one-night-stand fathers have had to be dealt with by more and more lawyers in an ever-larger public court system.

But to these disputes Blunkett has added an almost entirely novel one: the right of an adulterous woman's lover who can prove paternity in the courts, to use the courts and the apparatus of the State to control from the outside the child's family the upbringing of the child he had no right by religion, custom or the promises made in a civil marriage, to bring into the world.

What makes the Blunkett case far more important and far more public than any previous sexual scandal involving senior public figures, who simply knew and eventually acknowledged that they had misbehaved, is that he is seeking to establish through the courts, as a principle of national life, that the lover of another man's wife, if he demands it, must be publicly granted and publicly guaranteed a permanent right to a place in that man's family. Blunkett is publicly proclaiming that it his wish to make this social monstrosity the public norm.

And on what basis does he pursue this course? On the basis that it is nobody's business but his own, and the public should do the decent thing to a wronged and misunderstood man, and respect his privacy.

The most important effect of the Blunkett affair could well be the hitherto most neglected, namely, the astonishing twist he has given to the old legal question, Who is a child's father?

From at least as far back as the twelfth century the legal rule has been that if a mother of the child is a married woman then, unless proven to the contrary, her husband is father of the child. ("Pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.")

The main intention was, of course, to protect the institution of marriage from the destructive intrusion into the life of a family of the lover of an adulterous wife.

The subsidiary intention was to allow the husband if that was he wanted, to refuse to accept the life-time burden of bringing up another man's child. The husband's get-out of proving the child is not his is bluntly called in some American states "the milkman clause". The husband's only purpose in seeking proof that the child was not his own was, and could only be, his wish that the marriage be dissolved because of his wife's infidelity. In common law the rebuttal of the presumption of the husband's paternity required evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the husband was not the father. The Family Law Reform Act 1969 reduced the burden of proof to the balance of probabilities, and Lord Reid ruled in one case that even weak evidence must prevail--all obviously in the interest of the the husband who was otherwise being tricked into raising someone else's child. The idea that any of this was in the interests of the milkman, the wife's lover, probably never occurred to anyone for hundreds of years. Yet this is exactly the way in which Mr Blunkett is seeking to use this body of law. The very recent innovation of DNA testing for the first time removes all doubt about biological fatherhood.

For this fact to be used to enable the offending male to intrude permanently into the family life of a husband and his reconciled wife turns topsy-turvy the unambiguous intention of the law and public opinion of centuries, and if accepted would deal another grievous blow to the precious and battered institution of life-long monogamy. For the Home Secretary of all the people in the land to take the initiative in playing the litigious milkman is simply grotesque.

I rarely listen to Radio 5, but I happened to turn it on just before midnight last Saturday (4 December) to see if I could catch the score for the Sunderland v West Ham game. The announcer was just letting people know what the next discussion would be. His exact words were: "Does anybody in this day and age actually think prostitution is wrong?" I can spot a joke as well as the next man, and he was not joking.

Only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that the question could be anything but "Does anybody in this day and age think that prostitution is right?" For of course wives and mothers thought it was wrong for their husbands and sons to go cottaging, kerb crawling or frequenting brothels. Fathers and mothers would have been horrified at the thought of their daughters or sons being prostitutes. In that recent innocent age, children would have hardly been able to grasp that their fathers might be using prostitutes or their mothers paying for the services of a gigolo.

So have we really sunk so low that the BBC is correct in its casual assumption that hardly anybody in this country today believes that prostitution is wrong? Has William Blake's prophecy come so close to fulfilment in 2004, "The harlot's cry from street to street/Shall be Old England's winding sheet"?

Or was it just that BBC moderators and commentators, circulating within their narrow media coteries, have come to believe in TV's own world of ridiculously unrealistic "realism", according to which England is populated almost exclusively by foul-mouthed and promiscuous male and female louts?

TV seems to have a mission to make bad behaviour seem not only normal, but morally neutral. Ordinary people end by feeling that all their equally decent friends, neighbours and relatives must be exceptional relics stranded in some time warp, and that they themselves must be social and psychological freaks.

The tragedy is, life imitates art. What begin as a fiction ends as fact, especially when there are vast funds from licence money, virtually a poll tax, to freely play with every year, and the medium is as powerful as modern television.

'Creating stronger families' was an explicit objective of the Home Secretary's recent Five-Year Plan. 'Families' were allegedly placed 'at the heart' of his policy to combat crime. (Confident Communities, Cm 6287, July 2004.) In the document, however, the word 'family' appears only when it means any household arrangement whatsoever. 'A family', to the Home Secretary throughout Confident Communities, is a household composed of any single adult, or any 'partners' of any sexual orientation, in any relationship, together with children, whatever their parentage. In the whole of the document 'marriage' is mentioned once, and then in order to denigrate it. At the time, I was baffled that in formulating public policy a Home Secretary could dismantle and transform the concept of the married family in this way. I'm not baffled now.

Not content merely to tell us what food to eat, how to raise our kids, how much to drink, why we cannot smoke, and why we should not worry about having our identity under control of the state, the Labour government is now rolling up its sleeves in an effort to grab all that money just lying around:

The government is set to raid £15 billion lying 'dormant' in Britain's bank accounts to raise enterprise and skills in some of Britain's hardest-pressed areas.

Using the billions of pounds languishing unclaimed in financial institutions is to be a key part of Labour's plans to transform run-down inner cities.

Naturally, the financial institutions being bullied into going along with this proposal aren’t happy, as this money is used to fluff up their profit figures. However, since the banks’ profits have been doing so well recently, they realise they won’t have much popular support. The Tories and Lib Dems all think this is a fabulous idea, and their only quibble is how the money should be spent.

It has been long well-documented that there really is no effective opposition in Britain anymore, and as long as this is the case Labour will be allowed to erode the simple foundations of a free liberal society, in this case the idea of private property. For while it is entirely possible that good things will be accomplished with this money, we should remember that unclaimed or not, that money is not the state’s. While the government seems intent on going after the truly unaccountable cash that has been sitting around for years, it could set a dangerous precedent about how we have to explain our financial situation to them in the future. ‘Why yes, Mr Brown, I realize my savings account has been quiet for a while, but I was—yes, yes, you’re right. It’s just I thought—well, sure, good point there, sir. Silly me. I would probably just spend that money on fatty foods or a meaningless bourgeoisie holiday abroad. Please, take it with my blessing as my contribution to the Greater Good.’ Perhaps if Gordon Brown and Labour hadn’t single-handedly decimated this nation’s pension funds, people wouldn’t feel the need to salt away a few bucks for a rainy day in the first place.

(Hat tip to Nanny Knows Best)

Sociology until the nineteen sixties was greatly interested in "understanding" how people behaved socially. "Understanding", though he retained much of its ordinary meaning, was defined with painstaking exactness by Max Weber.

One of his basic ideas was the common-sense one, that people can't act on the basis of what all the facts of the situation are--they can't possibly know the truth of more than a tiny fraction of them--so they act on their beliefs about what the facts are (and can, of course, be quite mistaken).

The sociology established by Max Weber saw its business as examining the evidence about what people believed to be factually true. What do given people believe is factually true about human nature? Are human beings born good or bad? Does every human being on the planet come into the world as a blank sheet on which society can transcribe any personality and from which it can draw any ability it wants, or is every individual mainly programmed by his or her genetic makeup?

No one seems to have a good word to say for prison at the moment. The Prison Reform Trust has published a report today criticising the criminal justice system for sending so many parents to prison, which causes problems for their children. In her foreword to the report Cherie Blair says that ‘we should examine closely whether there is a better alternative, for the individuals concerned and their families, to imprisonment which too often worsens rather than tackles the problem’.

Of course, you would expect this sort of thing from the Prison Reform Trust, in the same way that you would always expect a barber to recommend a haircut. What is more surprising in that the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales will be publishing tomorrow a document on prison which is so larded with the language of the anti-prison intelligentsia (many of whom actually work in the criminal justice system) that I can’t help wondering if any of their lordships actually read the document, or if they just left it to their ever-growing bureaucracy to handle the matter on their behalf.

Abigail is mother of two year old, Adam, and also the best friend of her neighbour, Brenda, also the mother of a toddler, Boris.

Both mothers have temporarily suspended paid work to stay home to raise a family. Currently, neither receives any government financial help to do so.

Under government proposals announced today, both mothers will shortly become eligible for considerable tax breaks, should either decide to resume paid work and hire a qualified nanny to look after her child instead.

Fast-forward in time from today to six months after the scheme has been introduced.

In an interview contained in this week’s issue of the Spectator, former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, delivers a coruscating attack on the style of government of the present administration.

Of especial concern to Lord Butler has been the way Prime Minister Blair’s almost Presidential approach towards his job has steadily eroded the sovereignty of Parliament, and, in particular thereby, undermined the authority of the House of Commons.

In face of what Lord Butler has exposed as the present administration’s contempt for representative government, small wonder is it that many of today’s more serious national dailies make their top news story the government's decision to reject the advice of the Electoral Commission that it proceed no further with its plan to replace the secret ballot by postal voting.

The Prime Minister continues to support the Home Secretary, on the basis that it is Mr Blunkett's private affair that he has been the lover in an adulterous relationship that (he claims) has resulted in children being conceived and born.

There are plenty of people who think that sex, procreation and child rearing should be treated in some sense as the private concerns of the consenting adults.

Some of these believe that "privacy" means privacy from State interference. They believe that the media and the opinion of neighbours and friends have a role in condemining, praising or condoning such conduct, but that the State has no business favouring any sexual or child-rearing arrangement over any other.

European legislation and judicial rulings that override English law increasingly disable policies that in their intention and application are designed only to address practical problems. If any present or proposed policy can be represented with any trace of plausibility by the now widely state-subsidised pressure groups of self-defined “races” or “ethnic communities” as one that implies that members of their “race” or “community” are disproportionately at fault, then the policy is denounced as “racist”.

In everyday discourse, anti-racist rhetoric increasingly stifles discussions of various possible policies by labelling as “racist” wide swathes of opinion that has to do with empirical matters of conduct or culture, and nothing to do with race.

No body of evidence in the social sciences points more plainly in one direction than that which deals with the welfare of children conceived, born and brought up by their own two biological parents within the institution of life-long monogamy, as compared with children brought up under other arrangements, or lack of them.

There are failures and successes in all situations that have to do with conception, procreation and child-rearing. The failures are far more frequently found outside marriage than within marriage.

The law of the land is one element in the complex of inculcated attitudes and of organisational support for the institutional family of birth and childrearing within formal marriage.

‘I am sure WMD will be discovered.’

‘I am sure David Blunkett will be exonerated.’

If only the Prime Minister would reveal which crew he is sure will win the next Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race!

No one could remotely accuse today’s secularists who make up the bulk of the metropolitan ‘liberal’ elite of Europe and the United States of sharing the same political agenda as Adolf Hitler.

However, they both share one common objective that should send chills down the spines of true lovers of liberty, given how easily this iberal elite seems able to accomplish it today, and, supposedly, in the name of liberal values and ideals.

That objective is the de-Christianisation of Europe and America, and ultimately the world.

Now that Mr Blunkett is no longer Home Secretary, can we expect some slight remission in the flow of nonsense on crime from the Home Office?

In the past few months the Home Office has taken to chanting the mantra that crime is at a historically low level. That's on the childhood principle, presumably, that if you say something three times it's true. The culture and technical constraints of radio and television make it virtually impossible to secure a public airing of the clear facts that contradict that ridiculous falsehood. They're "statistics" and they're "complicated". The matter is settled with the most aggressive sound-bite or by the authoratative plausibility of the official spokesperson.

Yet if we look no further than London--the Metropolitan Police Area, for which the Home Office is directly responsible--real history has a different tale to tell.

Perhaps unwisely, David Blunkett , said that Jack Straw left the Home Office in a mess. The Government has placed great emphasis on its Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. According to the Treasury, they ‘have become increasingly outcome-focused’, and are now supported by ‘rigorous performance information’. (Spending Review 2004.)

However, in two cases, performance has got worse: fewer offenders are being brought to justice and the number of robberies has gone up.

The baseline for robbery is police-recorded offences in 1999-2000: 68,782 crimes in the ten street crime initiative areas. The target is a reduction in those areas of 14% to 59,153 crimes. The Autumn Performance Report for 2003 honestly reports that, in 2002-03 the police recorded 83,661 robberies in the ten areas, an increase of 22%.

The Home Office Departmental Report 2004 does not give the total number of robberies, merely saying there was a 17% reduction from 2001-02 to 2002-03 and that further ‘substantial reductions’ had been made in 2003-04. The Autumn Performance Report 2004, however, shows that there were 76,776 robberies, an increase of 12% and still 30% adrift of the target.

In addition, there is evidence of a displacement effect from the ten street crime areas. Robberies increased 12% in those areas, but rose 20% in the whole country (from 84,277 to 101,095). (Crime in England and Wales 2003/04, Table 2.04.)

I have been asked to add a bit to my last posted article. In it I said that crime had been brought down in the 1990s by people's own precautions, instituted because they were very reasonably experiencing a growing fear of crime; but that crime on the streets, the control of which depended on the police, continued to grow for another ten years.

With the numbers of robberies doubling and redoubling, the country at last awoke from the stupor into which it had been lulled by our academic and media elites. For decades they had dismissed the rise of crime as what they loftily dismissed as "moral panic". It was a double-barrelled sneer. Being "moral", for them, was worse than being in a panic.

I've been asked specifically to give the facts about the Home Office under Mr Straw from 1997 to 2001, and under Mr Blunkett from 2001 to 2004. Robbery is a police-controlled crime, as distinct from crimes where the public can do something to protect itself without the police (locks, bolts, alarms, staying indoors).

Mr Straw and Mr Blunkett, as Home Secretaries, were in charge of the Metropolitan police, London's police.

In the year that Mr Straw took over the Home Office there were 27,386 robberies of personal and business property in London.
By 2000 there were 35,709 robberies of personal property in London.
In 2001, the year Mr Straw was promoted to the Foreign Office, there were 47,559 .

No the wonder that Mr Blunkett said that Mr Straw left the Home Office in a mess.

In the first eleven months of 2004, the year of Mr Blunkett's departure, with December's figure of about 2,500 still to be added in, there have been 33,673 personal-property robberies in London--with December included, not fewer than 36,000 for the full year.

Thus Mr Blunkett has not succeeded in getting the figures back even to the 35,709 personal-property robberies of 2000. Mr Blunkett was all the further, of course, from getting back to the figure with which Mr Straw began, the 27,000 of 1997, which included business robberies as well.

Mr Kaye has raised a key issue in pointing out that the number of crimes has increased out of all proportion to the increase in the number of police officers and the "police extended family".

In the early 1990s there were 128,000 police officers year by year in England and Wales. The numbers declined somewhat in 1994-95, and then dropped sharply from 1997 to 2000, to 124,000.

The police services had regained their 1997 numbers of police officers by 2002.

None of this of course, discouraged the media from supporting the Home Office's version of its successes. In December 2001, for example, the BBC headlined the exciting news that "UK police numbers leap".

Numbers have increased again since, to 138,000. This is a record high, and therefore, of course, an improvement to be warmly applauded by everyone whose interest is in the primacy of crime prevention, the great leading principle of policing in this country from the first days of the Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police to the 1960s.

When he was Home Secretary, Mr Blunkett constantly referred to the "record numbers" of police officers and to "falling crime".

But the proper context for assessement is the increase in police numbers since the 1960s as compared with the increase in crime numbers since the 1960s.

Crime surged upwards from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, and on the streets the surge continued until the beginning of this century. Police numbers grew very slowly.

That is the meaningful context for assessing "record police numbers" and "falling crime". In that context, the rise in police numbers is welcome but grossly insufficient for crime prevention, and the fall in crime numbers leaves crime levels far above those of even the high-crime decade of the 1980s.

On the streets, of course, where the police role is essential in crime prevention, the fall in robberies of personal property does not get us back even to the levels of 1997, the year in which Mr Straw became Home Secretary.

As Mr Kaye implies, it is as if at the battle of the Little Big Horn Custer had been joined by another hundred soldiers, and five hundred of the surrounding Sioux and Cheyenne had gone home. There is "a record number" in the Seventh Cavalry and "a fall in the enemies' numbers". That's all right then.

Can this really be the season to be jolly, given with each passing day some new nail is driven into the coffin of England’s traditional liberties?

Today’s depressing news concerns Sikh playwright, Guperpreet Kaur Bhatti. Her dramatised depiction of rape and murder in a Sikh temple or Gurdawara so offended some of her co-religionists that their violent protests forced the Birmingham theatre in which her play had been showing to full houses to terminate its run early.

If the forced early closure of her play was not bad enough, today’s papers report its author as having been forced into hiding on the advice of the police after receiving death threats from those apparently still not yet mollified.

Due to the recent enforced closure of the Merseyside-based firm that supplied the NHS with flu-vaccine and diamorphine, it is reported in today’s papers that the country’s hospitals face the prospect of running out of supplies of the painkiller in a mere matter of weeks.

This is no laughing matter, since diamorphine is used in the analgesic treatment of cancer patients and others with serious and terminal painful conditions.

Cultures and Crimes, Civitas's new book on crime and the police, will be published early next week. Cultures and Crimes looks at crime and policing within the context of the cultures of four societies, England, France, Germany and the United States.

I am one of the authors, and in the case of this volume I have the unusual advantage of being able to answer the principal criticism before it is made. It will be that "everybody knows", and everybody has known "for the past thirty or forty years", that the figures of police recorded crime are no good, and that nothing can be said about crime on the basis of them.