Civitas Blog

If you are interested in changes in English culture from, say 1956, when there were still quite large pockets of disquiet at the introduction of government-sponsored gambling in the form of Premium Bonds, and still for the Labour Party the redistribution of income by gambling was morally only marginally superior to its redistribution by theft, I hope you did not miss the gem on the BBC Today programme this morning.

One in six of us, it was reported, have adopted as our New Year Resolution ... "winning the Lottery".

While I was picking up the morning paper I mentioned this in the shop. "What clown came up with that figure?", a man growled. "It'll be more like nine out of ten."

Ron Bramwell speaks of his gut feeling as a police officer that crime surged after 1955 because there were more things to steal.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, England was still reaping the benefits of having a head start on all other countries in the industrial revolution, and there were many more things to steal at the end the century than there had been in the middle. Criminal Statistics 1908 summed up the period in these words:

"Crime has increased very little in the past half century, and taking into account the greater opportunities open nowadays to an indiviudal of criminal tendencies through the greater profusion of wealth and personal possessions ... it may reasonably be inferred that the members of the predatory classes are appreciably fewer than in 1857 in spite of the fact that in the interim the population has almost doubled."

The pervasive tone of the literature of Edwardian times is a settled confidence that England was indeed steadily becoming a still more crime-free and civilised society. What George Dangerfield called "The Strange Death of Liberal England" did not occur until later, when George V was on the throne.

On New Year's Eve I posted an essay in which I predicted what the academic reaction to Cultures and Crimes would be.

Right on cue, Professor Mike Hough, the Director of Criminal Policy Research at King's College, London, is quoted in the Observer this morning as saying that "This is nonsense. Academics mostly [sic]agree that crime in the UK rose in the early 1990s".

He only goes so far as to say that academics "mostly" agree that crime was rising in the early 1990s. As I say it was, he can only think that the book is nonsense on that point if he is not among the academics who are now willing to concede that crime was rising, even if only "in the early 1990s". He doesn't tell us.

The book makes clear that from the early 1990s that the criminological and social policy establishment tended to drop the rhetoric of "moral panic" and admit that crime was then rising.

It had dawned on them that the rise in crime could be blamed on the harm that Mrs Thatcher did to 1980s' Britain. But what Professor Hough elides is a core issue: the long period of denial that crime was rising rapidly before (and long before) the 1980s and 1990s.

Is the book nonsense when it says that crime did surge from 1955? Again, Professor Hough is silent.

Professor Hough says that crime peaked around 1995 and has been falling ever since. The book makes quite clear that general crime did fall from the mid-1990s. Professor Hough can't think that bit of the book is nonsense, either, then.

Crimes that were most capable of being controlled by the security measures of householders and manufacturers themselves did peak around 1995 and have been falling ever since. The book gives the statistics that confirm this.

But one of the main points of the book is that crimes the control of which depended largely upon the effectiveness of the police soared away, until the robbery figure of 121,000 in 2001/02 at long last acted as Britain's wake-up call. Professor Hough ignores this crucial fact. It is a fact that is at the very heart of the book's argument.

The spokesperson of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), following no doubt his or her careful study of the book, provides what I called in my essay "contentless" criticism in its purest form. The book, according to the spokesperson, uses conflicting evidence to draw simplistic conclusions. What conflicting evidence? What simplistic conclusions?

The Association of Chief Police Officers, the Observer blandly reports, has reacted "with fury". The Observer, usually alert to such things, makes no comment on the fact that "criticism" of this sort from the most senior police officers in the country is a little unsettling.

The book is "a criticism of the police" only in sense that it argues that the deterioration of the ratio of police officers to crimes, and the diminution of the rights protecting victims as compared with the rights protecting perpetrators, has made it sociologically impossible for the police to engage in effective crime prevention on the old Peelite model.

Police officers are bound to be stuck at their desks for long periods filling out forms, and talk about "beat policing" anything remotely as dense as it was up to the later 1960s, on present "record" police numbers (they are at a record) cannot be anything but moonshine.

As for the Home Office ... "The risk of being a victim is the lowest since records began." Well, who could have possibly worked that one out from the Home Office's figures?

The first reponse from the Home Office to Cultures and Crimes was that the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest since records began.

No! Records began in 1857.

If no notice had been taken of the book, that utterly reckless statement would have done the job nicely.

But notice is being taken of the book, and the Home Office has decided that it will have to be more circumspect. Its latest comments on the book are now the much safer, "Your chance of being a victim of crime is now at its lowest level since 1981".

I don't know if the population figures they use are those of 2001 and 1981 Censuses.

If the Home Office did their calculations on a more refined basis than that of the total population, then they can supply the correction, and show what difference it makes to the percentage (and more importantly, to the argument), directly onto this site.

On the basis of the Census population, the risk of being a victim of a BCS crime was almost precisely the same in 2003/04 as it was in 1981, 22.5 per cent--in fact the 2003/04 figure is fractionally lower than the figure for 1981.

Unfortunately for the Home Office spokespersons, the relevance of their comments in relation to Cultures and Crimes is almost zero. The book starts with the fact that crime in general has fallen from the enormously high levels of its 1995 peak--to the still enormously high levels of 1981 and today. From 1955 there had been a relentless rise in crime, so that by 1981 the first British Crime Survey estimated that there were 11 million crimes in the year. In 2003/04 the BCS estimate was that there were 11.7 million crimes in the year.

Crime fell from the mid-1990s in both the BCS and police-recorded statistics because householders and car manufacturers took more and more elaborate precautions to keep criminals at bay.

The subject of Cultures and Crimes is the category of crimes and disorder where the numbers went on rising until 2001/02: the offences the control of which was least within the power of people themselves, and where dependence on the police was greatest--on the streets.

Sorry! I thought that the Home Office had had the sense to realise that they'd been rumbled. But my wife's just come in with this morning's Daily Express. 'A Home Office spokeswoman said: "Latest figures show the the risk of being a victim is at its lowest level since records began."'

The BCS figures, by the way, do not attempt to touch some of the most rapid areas of crime growth.

In spite of the fact that the reduction in the age of both victims and perpetrators is a phenomenon of many years' standing, the BCS excludes all crimes committed against under-16s.

The BCS excludes all drug crimes.

But, hey! The crime figures look a lot better without them!

According to The Times, the Lake District national park authority is to scrap guided walks by volunteer rangers because too high a proportion of participants are white. Mick Casey, a media officer for the authority, said that ‘only 35,000’ per year took part: “The majority who do the walks are white, middle-class, middle-aged people,” he said. “The Government is encouraging national parks to appeal to young people, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.”

Can this really have been the intention of the Government? After all, if everything in which the majority of participants were white, middle-aged and middle-class were scrapped, what would be left? The tax burden is disproportionately met by white, middle-class and middle-aged people, but I doubt whether Gordon Brown wants to scrap income tax. And what if the national park authority had expressed the opposite preference? Too many of the people going on the guided walks are black, working class and old (or young); therefore the walks should be scrapped.

Discrimination is wrong when it involves prejudice. Landlords who put up signs saying ‘no blacks’ were prejudiced. That is, they failed to judge individuals on their own merits. But what’s the difference between a landlord refusing accommodation to people because they are black and a national park authority refusing to offer a service to people because they are white (not to mention middle-class and middle-aged)?

The under-representation of ethnic groups in a particular workplace or activity may be the result of prejudice. It might also be for any number of other reasons. (Perhaps members of ethnic minorities have got better things to do than go on guided walks.) The mere existence of disproportionate representation provides no proof of prejudice one way or the other. To believe otherwise is like arguing that; ‘Postboxes are red; therefore every red thing is a postbox.’

In an interview last night, the Prime Minister referred to a recently published book. He said that it ignored the national crime statistics that show an overall drop in crime. The only book about crime that was being extensively discussed in the national press and radio at the time was Civitas's, Cultures and Crimes: Policing in Four Nations.

I don't think that, just because I am a faithful member of the Labour party (and have been for far longer than him), Mr Blair will expect that he can misrepresent my purely factual research with impunity, and that I won't answer back.

Beyond statistical matters: though I have a deep sense of inferiority to the Prime Minister in every other respect, I don't feel I'm greatly inferior to him in my direct knowledge of what 'traditional Labour voters' have believed, have valued and what they now experience.

Far from ignoring it, I put the recent overall drop in crime at the heart of of my book.

The total number of crimes rose precipitously from 1955 to 1995. The steep rise was confirmed by the British Crime Survey figures from 1981 to 1995 (blowing the whole of the "moral panic" school out of the water).

From the mid-1990s strenuous efforts were made by ordinary householders and businesses to protect their property. People stayed away from black spots. Car manufacturers installed ingenious security devices. The overall number of crimes fell. That's an essential message of the book.

But where the reduction in the numbers depended upon effective policing, crimes continued to rocket. The national crime figures on robberies that go back beyond 1981 tell their own story.

1954 800
1964 3,000
1974 9,000
1984 24,000
1994 60,000
2003/04 101,000 (of which 91,000 were robberies of personal property, "street crime")

There were 121,000 robberies at the peak of 2001/02, and the number was down to 101,000 by 2003/04. I do not ignore that fact in the book. I highlight it.

Of course the Prime Minister is strictly right. The book does ignore falls in crime that have taken place--since the book was finished. But the implication of his remark is, that when still later figures are published, they will adversely affect the historical and cultural context of the book's findings.To be kind to him, that's not at all likely.

If the Prime Minister was referring to some other book, this posting does not apply.

The response of the public to the terrible tragedy in South East Asia has been almost as difficult to take in as the disaster itself. The stupendous generosity shown by people in this country, and in many other countries, shows that there is no shortage of compassion for the victims of one of the worst natural disasters anyone can remember.

However, some people in political circles are trying to turn this into something more than humanitarian aid. There have been calls for a programme of large-scale, long-lasting aid – i.e. transfers of capital from Western governments and Western-funded multi-national organisations to the governments of affected countries.

This is a very different thing, and could have serious negative consequences. Foreign aid, although well-intentioned, creates welfare dependency on an international scale. People become accustomed to thinking that they do not have to pull their own weight: someone else will always be there with a handout. The effects on the recipient nations are the same as those on long-term welfare support in our own country: industry and initiative are suppressed, sloth, self-pity and mendacity are encouraged.

Giving people money doesn’t make them rich. No rich country in the world today became rich because of free or subsidised transfers of capital from other countries. Wealth is the product of hard work, inspired by entrepreneurial vision. Getting a handout just puts off the day when you realise you have to roll your sleeves up and get down to it. There is a direct correlation between the amount of aid nations have received and their poverty and backwardness. Most foreign aid has gone to sub-Saharan Africa, and the results are there for all to see. Do we really wish to inflict this on the peoples of South East Asia, where a number of countries already have flourishing economies? Indeed, it is not unusual to hear people calling for trade barriers to protect our home-grown producers from the ‘unfair competition’ of Asian suppliers! The irony is that those calling for protectionist measures are often the same people who demand more foreign aid.

Gordon Brown and others have been speaking of a new Marshall Plan. This is misleading, since the Marshall Plan, which was a great success, had a clearly-defined and time-limited goal: to rebuild the devastated infrastructure of Europe after the Second World War. In fact, Europe got back to work so quickly that the Plan was curtailed earlier than had been estimated. It was never intended to be a permanent stream of funding, which is what the foreign aid lobbyists now demand.

Gordon Brown’s dream of managing the affairs of developing countries from the West, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, is not only completely politically unfeasible: it would actually leave the people of the ‘beneficiary’ countries worse off.

Did you know 2005 has been officially designated ‘Year of the Volunteer’?

Didn’t think so. But then you have probably been too busy working or playing to have had your attention drawn before now to this fact. Well, since you have found a spare moment to read this blog, let me tell you about it.

A post-graduate student of broadcast journalism has sent me this note. 'I wonder if you could let me know what your feelings are about the way in which reports such as yours are often used in the press to sensationalise.'

My reply to the student is as follows:

The first thing I have to say is that I do not wish to give you the impression that I've had much to do with the media. I haven't. Nearly all of them, nearly all the time, have failed to take a blind bit of notice of what I have written.

I am not complaining. My victim status as a Geordie (strictly a Mackem) of working-class origin and present affiliations is a weak one, and I can therefore only conclude that, when my work has been ignored, it has not been good enough to claim attention.

It has been said that the proposed religious hatred law is no more than a cynical attempt to buy hardline Muslim votes. In Muslim Weekly Government minister, Mike O'Brien, openly admits that the measure was put forward following lobbying by the Muslim Council of Britain. Mr O'Brien, MP, urges Muslims to vote labour and assures them that it's not the first time that the 'Labour Party has delivered for Muslims'.

The illiberal character of the proposed law and the threat to our heritage of freedom of speech have been ignored in the quest for votes. Melanie Phillips has warned of the dangers. Polly Toynbee is also worth reading on the subject.

There is an interesting debate about the Civitas book Cultures and Crimes: Policing in Four Nations at the Samizdata website.

Mr Ron Bramwell has asked me this question in connection with my article "The sensational and the trivialising press":

"What was driving the public housing planners of the 1960s? Was it money from builders, or voters?"

It is a long, long story.

Part of what drove the planners of that time was sincere do-goodism. They knew best. An old friend of mine wrote a book at the time about the Newcastle planners. The title of Jon Gower Davies's book exactly caught the point: The Evangelistic Bureaucrat. A German book was entitled The Drawing-Board Preachers. My books at that time were about the Sunderland planners.

The planners were not out on a limb. Most people of woolly good will lived outside the slum clearance areas. Among the leading lights of the New Left in London (many of them ex-public school boys), very rapidly joined by the middle-class Marxist and Trotskyist students of the new universities, there was the ridiculous idea that working class life in northern England in the 1960s was accurately described by Engels in his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844. (In the early 1890s Engels himself had said that those conditions no longer existed.) In those days, town planning used to head the list of worth-while professionals among students (there were beginning to be a lot of them in the 1960s), so the planners were bouyed up by that.

In People and Planning I go through the history of Sunderland's housing and neighbourhoods from the growth of the town as a great shipbuilding and coal-mining centre in the middle nineteenth century to the 1970s.

Until the 1960s people who desperately wanted to be rehoused were being cleared from their crowded, multi-family houses, with few amenities in squalid neighbourhoods. They couldn't get into council houses fast enough. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s families on the new estates would proudly display their new homes, modern schools and new other community buildings and shops to their admiring working-class relatives from the older parts of the town.

It was only in the 1960s that the planners began to bite into respectable working-class neighbourhoods--great communities--and use against people perfectly capable of looking after their own homes, and increasingly owner-occupiers of them, the compulsory purchase laws that had been intended for use against slum landlords.

The estates were further and further away from the big shops and leisure focuses of the town centre. Suddenly, prefabricated tower blocks made their appearance. The local authority allocated dwellings on the basis of "need". "We can't have her rattling about the place like a pea in a pod." People who had a couple of spare rooms where their grandchildren could come and stay found that they had no chance of spare space if their house was demolished.

Then "need" began to mean preference for unmarried girls who were pregnant or had a small child or children. Within three of four years the uncontrolled children were the bane of the housing estates. People who expected neighbours to respect one another's privacy and property moved out, or would not move in. A vicious circle was created. You stood a better chance of a council house if you didn't get married. (That's not a red-top myth. I looked at all this at the time, as a full-time researcher, in the housing offices of the old Sunderland Corporation.)

The inculcated idea that a man's duty primary adult role was to live under the same roof with the mother of his children, and provide by his own work for each child for at least the first sixteen years of its life, was increasingly redundant. Young men were free to drink and fornicate as they liked. It took many years before drugs and the crime that was needed to support drugs took a firm hold. Nobody in those days dreamed that it would spiral as deeply as it did. Perfectly sincere, gruff old Labour politicians, many of them the salt of the earth, were on automatic pilot that more and more council housing was a good thing, and that the very few "bits of lasses" who "got themselves into trouble" should be treated kindly. The very few.

Labour men and women active in an industrial provincial town like Sunderland, with hardly any contact with or sympathy for the advanced ideas of the emerging libertarian Left of the student movements, didn't think there could ever be more than very few. Their world was a world of the universality and permanence in civilised societies (yes, they were as yet untouched by shame about English social institutions) of what everybody knew was the best way to handle sex, companionship and mutual aid, and the upbringing of children: namely, conception within marriage and life-long monogamy.

Men worked hard and long in the forges, foundries, shipyards, glassworks, shipyards and the pit. Women worked hard and long with the children; they worked hard and long in their homes' tiny sculleries, and over the poss-tubs, mangles and coal-fired boilers in the little brick outhouses in their back yards. But there was not much trace of the idea that women had the worse half of the family's grinding existence, and that the institution of marriage had failed.

That they would be the instruments of the family's destruction rarely occurred to any of these old Labour councillors. The prediction would have horrified them.

But--and this is why you commented as you did, I suppose--the planners and councillors who pursued policies of slum-clearing and rehousing were backed up by the people who made money in all the private professions and businesses surrounding demolition and construction. The planners were backed up by the myriad traditional local government professionals whose jobs came to depend on the endless momentum of demolition and rehousing schemes: the quantity surveyors, the architects, the public health officials, the lawyers in the Town Clerk's department, and all their support staffs.

Eventually they were backed up by the extraordinary variety of new professionals and pseudo-professionals in national and local government, and the academics and pseudo-academics who taught them, who emerged to service the burgeoning failures of the new prize winning estates and Corbusieran "machines for living in".

Again, they were, by and large, decent ordinary people who'd done pretty well in the job market. Their intentions were, by and large, benign.

But the damage they were doing didn't affect them adversely, and they knew (at least intuitively) that if the damage stopped being inflicted they'd be on the dole. In their cocoon of self-righteousness and often their superciliousness, they were quite happy to continue "doing good".

In the late 1960s the planners and the public health people produced "scientific surveys" of the housing districts that showed that the houses were technically unfit for human habitation, and physically incapable of lasting another five or ten years.

The surveys were self-contradictory bodged-up balderdash. (You'll have to read People and Planning and Public Participation and Planners' Blight to see the evidence for that, and to see whether or not you agree that the evidence produced there justifies these harsh remarks.) But in the planners' and health officials' eyes it did not matter. They were in the right in their policies of clearing these slums. The system required them to justify their policy by facts. But what did a few facts about the attitudes and homes of working-class people here or there have to do with their grand designs? "Everybody knew" that slum-clearance was a good thing. That's what they'd been taught; that's what their colleagues took for granted; and that's what their advancement in their profession depended on.

There was plenty of petty corruption. Housing and planning councillors were often in the pockets of the better educated and better paid senior officials. But the corruption was, say, bottles of whisky at Christmas from contractors to officers, and drinks bought at conferences by the officers for the councillors, for which the sozzled councillors were sufficiently grateful. The officers weren't doing anything they didn't want them to do.

In the later 1960s the planners nationwide were backed to the hilt by a Newcastle politician, T. Dan Smith, a principled Trotskyist in his younger days. I have no doubt that he was sincere enough in thinking he was doing good. But he was so arrogant in his self-conception, that he was enlightened and right and ordinary people were backward and wrong, that to oil the wheels of progress he spread corruption far and wide through local government.

Wisely, he kept his home base in Newcastle relatively free from corruption.

Corruption was not more than a petty problem in Sunderland (as far as I know, but I've led a sheltered life, as I have admitted in other articles) under an incorruptible and highly competent politician who took over as Council leader in the later 1960s. Charles Slater.

In County Durham corruption in connection with town-planning projects was rife. It was originally exposed by Private Eye in an article entitled 'Handy Andy'.

Smith operated by appointing "consultants" to his various "public relations" firms. Depending on the size of the local authority and the influence of the councillor, he'd appoint him or her (nearly always him in those days) as a consultant at £500 or more, running into the thousands of pounds a year or as a single fee.

Smith was always in the clear. The Chairman of the Housing or Planning or Management Committee would do what Smith was paying him for. Legally he had to declare an interest as being on Smith's payroll. If the errant councillor was exposed, Smith could say, and did say, "How shocking that he did not declare his interest! I naturally assumed he would do so. His misconduct has nothing do with me".

When a prominent Labour leader of a London borough, influential throughout the whole of the south-east of the country, was prosecuted for taking a bribe in this form from Smith, he was found guilty. When Smith was prosecuted for bribing him at a subsequent trial (he managed to have them separated) he was found innocent of bribing him. That's how well it worked.

He was the darling of the Department of the Environment. He once stayed at a London hotel, waiting for the call he expected to receive from Harold Wilson to join his new Cabinet. This was at a time when rumours were swirling around him. But the rule of public life that had prevailed since the middle of the nineteenth century, that the nature of corruption meant that the appearance of impropriety was sufficient to disqualify a person from public office, was being replaced by the assumption that a public official was innocent until his was proven guilty. If anything marked the beginning of the degeneration of British culture, that did.

Practice did not, of course, always follow the rule. The Marconi affair, cash for peerages, police malpractice and other scandals occur as quickly to my mind as to the mind of any reader. But by the middle of the twentieth century, English politics, English public adminstration, and English public life generally were probably as clean as in any large society that has ever existed.

Anyone interested in this side of the matter can look at the Smith affair, and contrast it with the the Sidney Stanley affair, as dealt with in the report of the Lynskey Tribunal, and as dealt with by both Churchill and Attlee when the Lynskey Tribunal's report came before the House of Commons.

The whole thing blew up in everybody's face when a Pontefract architect called John Poulson went bankrupt. When his documents were subpoenaed, hundreds of notes on scrappy bits of paper were unearthed, implicating dozens of politicians, from Westminster to the obscurest pit village on the Durham coalfield. Poulson had kept them for quasi-blackmail purposes. If he went down, they'd all go down with him, so they'd better protect him.

For months, as the scandals unravelled, Smith was supported by important sections of the national broadsheet press. (Guess which.)

He was eventually jailed.

Ronan Point collapsed in east London. People hated the maisonnettes and blocks of flats. Whereas in the 1960s working-class communities had united in opposing the plans to demolish their houses, in the 1980s they were turning out to cheer the dynamiting of the flats into which they had been rehoused.

So it was all bad do's. But it wasn't driven by "builders and money". It was driven by good intentions.

The point is, that if the good intentions had meant that Smith lost money (he ended up on "Millionaires' Row" in Newcastle, and the Rolls Royce of this poor lad from Wallsend had one of the first customised plates--was it T Dan 1?); or had meant that the building industry fueled with enormous taxpayers subsidies lost money; or that local government officers were being sacked instead of hired as fast as the machinery of government could manage; or that university, polytechnic and training-college posts in social work were being curtailed instead of vastly expanded, then the effects of the good intentions would have been subjected to scrutiny by more than a handful of extremely unpopular academics (as one critic wrote) "from their fastnesses on the banks of the Wear". (Note from Jon Gower Davies: "Heh! What about the fastnesses on the banks of the Tyne? I was just as unpopular as you.")

Go to the top of the class the person who sees any resemblance between this phenomenon and the dismemberment of the institution of life-long monogamy. If divorce meant a halving of the houses being needed instead of a doubling of them when the former united household splits into two; and if only half the washing machines, TV sets, refrigerators, beds, resulted from families breaking up instead of doubling the number, do you think that the crime, the disorder, and the damage to children would have been accepted complacently as a case of "change but not deterioration" (the slogan of the 1990s)?

Big business didn't drive the cultural revolution. But the cultural revolution turned out to be very profitable for big business.

And as the breakdown of the family has been good for business, not to speak of armies of government and voluntary social workers of all varieties, then any adverse effects of the breakdown of the family have to be soft-pedalled.

It must be literally among the daftest things that have ever been said, that crime is lower today than it has been since records began. Yet that's what the Home Office officially said in dismissing Cultures and Crimes.

And the Guardian quoted an "expert" (somebody called Professor Mike Hough) who was "bemused" by the book, because "most academics" (still only most academics!) believe that crime rose "in the early 1990s" but that "crime had fallen since then".

The headline in the Guardian was, "Experts deride report on crime and moral decline". Experts? It need not be said that I'm no Einstein (the understatement of the year), but I was reminded of what Einstein said when he heard that Hitler had provided one hundred physicists (wow, that's a lot of experts, Einstein's in trouble now) who all agreed that Einstein was wrong. Einstein remarked, "If I were wrong, one of them would have been enough".

So I agree with the sense of Mr Bramwell's comment. But what interests lie behind any particular long-lasting folly of the intellectuals is sometimes quite a complicated matter, and what those interests are is a puzzle that has to be unravelled in each particular case.

Various Home Office spokesmen continue to deny recent changes in police practice have contributed in any way to a massive increase in violent crime recently witnessed in this country. They do so by citing a recent minor fall in the crime-rate as evidence violent crime has not risen, and hence as evidence the new methods are effective.

This reply overlooks two things.

Pensions are a real problem nowadays. The state pension is in trouble as a result of the falling birthrate coupled with increasing longevity, which means there are fewer and fewer young, working people to support more and more elderly people. PAYE pensions mean that anything you pay in now goes straight out to whoever is of pensionable age. When you retire, your pension will depend not on what you have paid in – which will be totally irrelevant – but on what the generation of workers at that time are paying in. ‘National Insurance’ is not based on any recognisable principles of insurance.

Occupational pensions are in trouble, as final-salary arrangements are becoming unsustainable, even in the public sector. The government has announced that, for 1.3 million workers in the NHS, pension age will rise from 60 to 65, and some workers will be offered average-salary pensions rather than final-salary.

Private pensions are in trouble, partly because of Gordon Brown’s raid on pension funds to pay for his own projects, which left them less robust than they would have been to withstand a falling investment market.

And as for saving if you are on a low income – forget it. The government’s pension credit makes it a complete waste of time and assets. You will be much better off if you just spend everything and then claim the Chancellor’s new benefit for the elderly, aimed specifically at those who have never given in to a thrifty instinct.

Which makes it all the more strange that the government launches today its child trust fund, which will open a savings account for every baby born, and put £250 into it, with a top-up at age seven. According to Stephen Timms, financial secretary to the treasury, the aim is to ‘boost the culture of saving… We want to make sure that every single young person has a worthwhile financial asset available to them at the age of 18’.

The only way in which these young people will have a ‘worthwhile financial asset’ at 18 will be if they get into the habit of saving themselves – but why would they do that, when all the signals sent out by the tax and benefits system encourage you to spend rather than save? If they leave the £250 gathering interest for 18 years, it will just about cover their eighteenth birthday celebrations, perhaps enabling them to take advantage of the government’s 24-hour drinking laws and big new casinos.

The Home Secretary has announced that the law governing the degree of force that householders can use to protect themselves against criminals will not be changed. Instead, the government will run a campaign to tell us what the appropriate response should be. At the same time, a private members bill introduced by Roger Gale MP to allow householders to use whatever degree of force they consider necessary against intruders has failed after being described by Home Office Minister, Fiona Mactaggart, as a recipe for a "spiral of violence and retaliation". The bill reflected the preferences of a poll of listeners to the Radio 4 Today programme.

Once again, an attempt to reform the criminal justice system in a way that reflects the concerns of ordinary citizens has been defeated by those who run the system, and who are convinced that they know what we need better than we do.

One of the reasons for the high level of dissatisfaction with the police and the courts is the feeling of absolute powerlessness that we have in this country. Nothing we think makes any difference, as the criminal justice system is above politics. This sounds good, in the sense that we have always prided ourselves on having a system that can’t be manipulated by party politicians to their own short-term advantage, but in reality it means that it is beyond the ability of voters – citizens – to influence it. In the USA people elect their district attorneys, some judges and, of course, their mayors, for whom the appointment of the police chief is one of the most important decisions they will make. If crime is felt to be out of control, a lot of people are in danger of losing their jobs. In Britain, the authorities can just tell us that the ‘fear of crime’ is the problem, and that crime is really falling. Nobody believes this, but so what?

The situation is made worse by the rock-solid consensus amongst the political parties that no radical reforms are needed. A new initiative here, a bit of extra funding there, is felt to be the answer. Whichever way you vote at the general election, it is unlikely that anything much is going to be done about crime, unless the political landscape suffers a seismic shift.

All too many university students today languish in a condition of moral turpitude, according to Professor Steven Schwartz in a report in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.

“Plagiarism, incivility, rudeness and reneging on legitimate debts – all these are depressingly common among university students”, he is reported as claiming.

“How can we begin to expect them to analyse ethical issues such as stem cell research, nanotechnology, euthanasia or gay marriage when we cannot get them to understand that they should be polite to others and that they should meet their obligations?” he is reported as having lamented.

To improve the moral tone of university life, Professor Schwartz bids university teaching staff to set a personal example. “We must meet our classes on time, return assignments promptly, and mark fairly” he proposes.

Professor Schwartz is well placed to comment on the moral calibre of today’s university students. As well as heading the Government’s working party on University Admissions, he is also Vice Chancellor of Brunel University

Prisons are overcrowded; so the Government has come up with a novel way to deal with the shortage of prison accommodation. According to a report in today's Times, judges are to be forbidden from imposing prison sentences unless they have first checked there is enough room to accommodate the convicted offender.

In yet another top-quality leading article in The Business Andrew Neil adds a note of realism to Gordon Brown’s crusade for poverty relief.

Peter Bauer, the great champion of poverty relief by means of free markets and free trade, once quipped that foreign aid was a system by which the poor people in rich countries subsidised the rich few in poor countries. To be sceptical about aid seems harsh to most people, but escaping from poverty does not depend on foreign aid – it is only possible where governments keep order, protect property and ensure that agreements are honoured, so that all are free to use their talents and energies as they believe best. The countries that remain poor today have governments that have not created these conditions.

Debate about the small proposed Tory tax cuts has focused on the risk that services will have to be cut. But that is not the real issue. Health and education are largely public sector monopolies. Both main parties say they are in favour of ‘choice’, which implies competition (normally seen as the opposite of monopoly), but neither has connected the ‘tax and spend’ debate with the ‘choice’ debate.

The Opposition ought to use tax reform to bring an end to public sector monopoly in health and education. Their voucher scheme for education is a small step in the right direction, but their plans for the NHS are feeble. Most people who go out to work are paying taxes that cover their share of the NHS. But we are forced to pay our share by handing over an unknown amount to the Treasury. Why not give all of us a tax rebate equal to let’s say 80% of the cost of the NHS on condition that we take out a health insurance policy of our choice? We would all continue to pay enough to cover the cost of ensuring access for rich and poor alike, but without being trapped in a monopoly system.

Tax cuts for their own sake don’t inspire anyone. But tax cuts as part of a strategy to restore personal responsibility, end public sector monopoly and create competition that would help to raise standards for all, are a worthy ideal. The Health Policy Consensus Group has proposed how it could be done.

The debate about what we now call faith schools is becoming muddled by the grouping together of schools which may be teaching insurrection and disobedience to the law with schools which teach adherence to a particular creed which may be contrary to mainstream, modern, secular thought.

David Bell’s speech, delivered to the Hansard Society on Monday, attracted headlines for claiming that the growing number of independent faith schools is threatening the cohesion of society. There are now over 300 fee-paying religious schools, including 50 Jewish schools, 100 Muslim schools and over 100 evangelical Christian schools. David Bell acknowledges that, in a free society, parents have the right to educate their children in their own beliefs, but that ‘faith should not be blind. I worry that many young people are being educated in faith-based schools with little appreciation of their wider responsibilities and obligations to British society.’

The proposed law against religious hatred is one of the main threats to freedom we face. It is likely to stir up intolerance and religious animosity. The best online briefing on the subject can be found at the Christian Institute website (PDF file).

The Government dropped an earlier proposal in 2001 but has deviously included a new measure in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill, now before Parliament. Further comment can be found at this page on our own website.

On 17th January, David Bell, Head of Ofsted, delivered a widely reported lecture to the Hansard Society on the subject of British citizenship and how best our schools should be deployed so as to turn out good citizens, especially now they are required to teach citizenship.

Mr Bell’s wide-ranging speech touched on a number of different aspects of this thorny subject.

Most media attention was directed to the concerns voiced by Mr Bell about the likely socially divisive consequences of the rapid growth of faith schools, especially Muslim ones, unless they ‘adapt their curriculum to ensure that it … helps [pupils] acquire an appreciation of and respect for other cultures in a way that promotes tolerance and harmony’.

Mr Bell’s concerns here have been greeted with great protestation by British Muslims. Dr Monhmaed Mukadam, chairman of the Association of Muslims Schools, has accused Mr Bell of Islamophobia by singling out only Muslim schools as potential seed-beds of sectarianism.

Whether, in having drawn special attention to the potential divisiveness of Muslim schools alone among faith schools, Mr Bell is guilty of having incited hatred of a religious group is an issue on which, perhaps, we can await instruction from the courts after the government’s bill making incitement to religious hatred a crime has completed its passage through parliament.

My bet is that no English court would ever so regard Mr Bell’s lecture, although it might well do so if exactly the same sentiments were put less guardedly or by some less reputable establishment figure, something which, in itself, should give any classical liberal who values equality before the law cause for concern.

However, there was something else said by Mr Bell in his lecture that to date has gone un-remarked on by the media that should be of far greater and more immediate cause for concern to classical liberals than anything he has said about the need for faith schools to adopt curricula that inculcate tolerance and respect for others.

Today’s Daily Telegraph carries an op-ed by Tom Utley on the government’s recent announcement that it proposes shortly to offer young native-born British citizens the opportunity to participate in a special ceremony to mark and celebrate their transition to full-blown citizenship when they come of age to vote at 18.

As can be inferred from the title he gives his piece, ‘Free-born Britons don’t need an oath to make them feel they belong', Mr Tom Utley sees little of positive value in the idea of such ceremonies for native-born citizens, and much to condemn it.

Michael Howard has sparked a calm and measured debate about immigration that is long overdue. For too long, false accusations of racism have intimidated many people into remaining silent. Of course, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the CRE, did his best to fan the flames in the Guardian, where he is quoted as saying: "It appears that Mr Howard has, against his own better instincts, and for purely political reasons, surrendered to the provisional wing of his party to base this campaign, not on measured and rational debate, but on the ill-informed propaganda of some of the more demented anti-immigration groups."

The Government opted not to play the race card. Hazel Blears, the Home Office minister, claimed that the opposition would be unable to afford a new system because of its planned £35bn spending cuts. "Everybody agrees with controlled migration," she said. "That requires investment in both effective border controls and immigration systems. Michael Howard's words and the Tories' spending plans are at odds."

Even if ‘everybody’ does agree that a change of policy is needed, there is still no consensus about some of the fundamental facts. For instance, what have been the economic consequences of immigration? One Home Office report estimated that in the fiscal year 1999/2000 Britain’s 5 million migrants paid in aggregate £2.5 billion more in taxes than they received in government expenditure. However, Professor Bob Rowthorn (among others) has challenged these estimates on the Civitas website. He shows how some unusual factors led the researchers to exaggerate the benefit by about £2.1 billion and how many costs were left out of their calculations.

A new Government study, the Crime and Justice Survey, has found that nearly a quarter (24%) of males aged 14-17 were serious or prolific offenders, committing crimes such as car theft, burglary and violent assaults at least six times (and usually far more) in the previous year.

The social-science evidence points strongly to the influence of parents as the chief underlying cause of juvenile crime. In England, 27 per cent of prison inmates had been in care and 47 per cent had run away from home as a child. But it's not just broken families. Criminal parents are much more likely to raise criminal offspring: a recent survey found that 43 per cent of prisoners had family members who had been convicted and 35 per cent had a family member who had been in jail. But family breakdown is important, especially when parents contradict each other - thereby providing no clear moral lead - or compete for affection by being lax with their children. Such conflict is more likely in disrupted families, when one parent is absent, or when a new partner or step-parent appears.

Over a quarter of children are now being raised by only one parent and just over 40% of children are now born outside marriage.

Most people don't commit crimes because they think it's wrong, and parents play the dominant role in providing their children with a conscience. Because parenting is a difficult task, if one parent must do the job of two it becomes more difficult still. Of course, a lone parent may be able to raise a child successfully if he or she is not naturally pre-disposed to crime, and the school and wider community are supportive. But, single parents have less chance of success, particularly when confronted by an inherently difficult child, and still more so when they live in a disorderly neighbourhood. In such localities, boys who lack the guidance of a law-abiding father often turn to other role models. Perhaps they will be keen on football and the local team manager will have a good influence on them, or maybe they will look up to the local car thief or drug dealer.

Oxford University has announced that it is to restrict the number of places available to British students by 1,600 in order to have more places to offer to overseas applicants. The reason is a very simple financial one: fees for British students are paid by the government, at such a low level that the University is left out of pocket, while overseas students can be charged realistic fees which actually make a profit for the university. The overseas students are effectively subsidising the British ones. As there are still large numbers of such students wanting to study at Oxford, it makes financial sense to alter the ratio of imported to home-grown undergraduates.

It would be nice to think that places at Oxford, or any other university, were awarded on grounds of academic merit alone. We like to think of universities as places of higher learning and repositories of the culture. Even people who don’t go there probably feel that their existence adds to the quality of life in the country.

Last December, the Law Lords ruled by eight to one that it is unlawful for the British authorities to detain indefinitely foreign terrorist suspects whom they are unable to deport to their countries of origin for fear they would then suffer ‘human rights’ violations.

That judgement may yet come back to haunt their Lordships should, as the Security Services warn, Westminster be a prime target for an Islamist dirty bomb. Alas, if it does, they will not be the only ones whose safety their judgment will have imperilled.

“We cannot be surprised that some within the next generation do not value our parliamentary democracy if they know nothing of the English Civil War, do not vote if they are not taught about the struggles to widen the franchise, and do not value any authority figures, if they are not told the inspiring tales of the national heroes of the past.”

So, Tim Collins, Shadow Home Secretary for Education, is reported as yesterday having declared at a conference of Catholic Head Teachers. He went on to make a new Tory pledge that, if elected, they will extend the compulsory study of history at school beyond the age of 14 when it can currently be dropped to 16.

The remedy Mr Collins prescribes for the malady he claims to detect in today’s young seems remarkably ill suited to cure it.

Some critics of the Government’s plan to put terrorist suspects under house arrest without trial have said it would be conceding the terrorists’ case. Presumably they mean that the terrorists are totalitarians who want to crush liberal democracy. To live under a dictator is to live at the mercy of arbitrary power and to live under the arbitrary power of Charles Clarke would be similar.

Some writers, such as Bentham, understood freedom as the absence of all restraints on the individual. However, the classical liberal view is that to be free is live under law. In other words, freedom is not the absence of restraint but knowing in advance when it can be used against you. The occasions when compulsion can be used must be pre-announced in the form of laws. We must all have the chance to participate in making and changing these laws, which restrain the authorities as well as the citizens. In this sense liberty and order are two sides of the same coin.

Of course, the quantity of law may become so great, and the intrusions so frequent, that the scope for individual initiative is tiny. In this sense we can speak of a trade-off between freedom and order, or in Acton’s terminology, the sphere of conscience and the sphere of authority.

Charles Clarke’s plan for house arrest is inconsistent with the idea of ‘liberty as order’, under which we know when force can be used against us. Instead of his scheme, he should go ahead with an earlier proposal to create a new offence of ‘acts preparatory to terrorism’ and list the types of action that may lead to a charge, so that evidence can be brought forward and contradicted.