Civitas Blog

A foreign terror suspect held without trial or charge since December 2001 has been freed from Woodhill Prison. He is an Egyptian known as ‘C’. According to the Home Secretary, there was not enough evidence to maintain his ‘certification’ as a terrorist suspect. His case was due to be reviewed at a Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) hearing later this week.

At a previous appeal hearing, Home Office lawyers had argued that C was a leading member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, now allied with Al Qaeda. He was said to have been in contact with prominent extremists in the UK and had assisted in fraudulent fundraising. He was wanted in Egypt where he had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for terrorist offences.

Instead of releasing him, he should have been deported to Egypt. The counter argument is that he might be tortured or executed, but other countries, such as Sweden, have successfully agreed to extradite terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Jordan by making an agreement that prisoner will not be executed. France regularly sends terrorists back to Algeria. It is further argued that such agreements are only ‘a piece of paper’ but all these countries are friendly nations, with whom we have diplomatic relations, and often very close ties, going back many years. They have strong reasons not to break their word.

Moreover, they deserve our full co-operation in the struggle against terrorism. Looked at from the vantage point of countries such as Egypt or Jordan, it must seem as if we are giving safe haven to terrorists who threaten them. If the Human Rights Act gets in the way, then it’s yet another reason to abolish it.

When Tony Blair famously stated his priorities as ‘education, education, education’, no one could have foreseen the extent to which this subject would come to dominate the news, on an almost daily basis. Pronouncements from the Secretary of State, speeches by the Inspector of Schools, reports by OfSTED, seem to pour forth in an unending stream, outlining failures and promising success.

The frankness with which which those charged with running the state education system describe the problems which beset it is something new. The old idea of all pulling together and not rocking the boat seems to have been abandoned. This is a good thing, because it helps if the public discourse bears some relation to reality, and the reality is that for many children in Britain today, the education they receive is simply appalling.

We have just come across a website by a police officer (writing under a pseudonym) that offers dry, and often amusing, commentary on the leadership decisions of today's generation of sociology-trained chief constables. Well worth a regular look.

Despite its promise to make ‘education, education, education’ its top priority, schooling under the present government has shown few real signs of improvement. A major problem with it that, if anything, has steadily worsened under the present administration has been pupil disruptiveness.

Today’s papers carry reports that David Bell, Chief Inspector of Schools in England and Wales, has just declared that ‘classroom discipline is worse now than at any point since Labour took office eight years ago. The proportion of secondary schools with good pupil behaviour has fallen from three quarters to two thirds, while 9 per cent have serious discipline problems, compared with 6% in 1997’.

With the imminent prospect of a general election, it seems the government has finally decided to do something about the problem. Reversing its former policy of actively discouraging schools from excluding their disruptive children, Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly, announced last Tuesday schools are now to be allowed and encouraged to adopt a policy of zero tolerance towards them. Schools are to be allowed to expel and refuse to readmit them until judged ready.

The Secretary of State pulled few punches, ’Every teacher knows what [it] is like and every teacher hates it: incessant chattering: calling out in class and answering back; inattention; lateness; leaving the premises without permission; flouting uniform or dress codes; and causing a nuisance to their children in class. ’ If this is what being a member of Opus Dei does to an education minister, all I can say is 'Hallelujah'.

‘Labour wants to destroy Mr Howard as a political leader by using his Jewishness against him. They know to a hair’s breadth what they are doing. Of course, any anti-Semitism has been denied; the purpose of the operation is to raise the controversy and then withdraw…. [V]oters who do not like Jews will have been reminded of their prejudice, by modern advertising techniques… It is a dirty, dirty, dirty business and it disgraces both the Labour Party and the Prime Minister …[for]this is his campaign’

Although Labour Party spokesmen vehemently deny any anti-Semitic intent behind them, Labour has now removed the advertisements displaying Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin as flying pigs and Howard in similar guise to Fagin from its official web-site and will not use them in its forthcoming election campaign.

However, the words quoted above from Lord Ress Mogg's characteristically astute and trenchant article in last Monday’s Times continue to have cause to resonate. For they have a profound bearing on an important political issue currently facing this country that has by no means been resolved.

I am in the United States, and I have heard only indirectly about the recent edition of BBC Newsnight that dealt with crime and policing in London. I understand that, just as, according to the press, Civitas's Cultures and Crimes aroused the 'fury' of the Association of Chief Police Officers (a little intimidating to people of nervous temperament, that, I should think), so the Newsnight item that used Cultures and Crimes has provoked Mr Livingstone into going or threatening to go to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission about the staff who reported and produced it.

Labour's White Paper A Mayor and Assembly for London proposed in 1998 that oversight for the Metropolitan Police should be transferred from the Home Secretary and Parliament to a Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA). In July 2000 the MPA came into existence, replacing the arrangement that that had lasted for the previous 170 years.

Of the 23 members of the MPA, 12 are appointed by Mayor Livingstone, and Mayor Livingstone sets the police budget, which then goes to the London Assembly. There are seven 'independent' members of the MPA, one of whom is appointed directly by the Home Secretary. In 1999 the Greater London Act made the Metropolitan Police Area the same as the area of Mayor Livingstone's jurisdiction, i.e. the area covered by the 32 London boroughs.

‘The most seriously ill NHS patients should be allowed to die so that the money can be better used elsewhere, the Health Department is expected to tell the Court of Appeal. John Reid, the Health Secretary, is expected to refer to the cost of keeping coma patients alive with food and water.’

So ran the opening sentences in a report in yesterday’s Times.

Anyone intrigued to know how NHS resources might be better deployed than on keeping sick people alive need only wait to today’s Sunday Times for an answer. Here a damming front-page report on current (lack of) cancer care in the NHS opens by informing readers that: ‘The government’s £2 billion scheme to revolutionise the treatment of British cancer sufferers has failed, with much of the money wasted on creating 400 bureaucrats.’

It is reassuring to see that, in a world in which so much else is changing so fast, New Labour remains wedded to Labour's public-sector traditions -- unless you happen to be seriously ill or not rich enough to be able to pay twice for health insurance.

According to the British Crime Survey, overall crime is falling and, according to police records, it is probably stable after allowing for changes in the method of recording. In any event, since the mid-1990s, under both the BCS and police records, crime has fallen. This still leaves us with the fourth highest crime rate among the other 39 European countries covered by the Council of Europe’s, European Sourcebook of Crime, and it only means that crime is ten times what it was in the 1950s instead of eleven or twelve times.

Why has it come down? And can the police claim credit? There are two main reasons.

First, some high-volume crimes have fallen because private householders have spent a lot of their own money defending themselves. The 17-country International Crime Victims Survey found in 2000 that a higher proportion of people in England and Wales had burglar alarms than any other country in the survey: 34% compared with an average of 15%. We had also spent more on special door locks. Some 69% had such locks, second only to the Netherlands where the figure was 70%. The 17-country average was only 44%. The Home Office estimated in 2000 that, for every stolen car, £370 had been spent on security and another £320 on insurance, a total of £690. For every domestic burglary about £330 had been spent on defensive devices and another £100 on insurance, £430 in total. In England and Wales in 2000 about £4.9 billion was spent on security, or about £200 per year for every household. (The Economic and Social Costs of Crime, Home Office Research Study 217, 2000.)

Second, detection rates have been falling but imprisonment rates and sentence length have been rising. In 1951, 47% of indictable offences were detected by the police. By 1991 the rate had fallen to 29% and the latest figure is 23% in 2003. (Criminal Statistics 2003, Table 1.1) In 1992 crown courts sentenced 47% of those convicted of indictable offences to immediate custody. In 2002 they sentenced 66% to immediate custody. Over the same period, average sentence length increased from 21.1 months to 27.8 months. (Criminal Statistics 2002, Table 4.16.) Partly as a result of these changes in sentencing , the prison population has risen since 1993, from about 46,000 to around 74,000 today. The incapacitation effect of locking up repeat offenders goes a long way towards explaining the fall in crime since the mid-1990s. Criminals can’t break into your house while they are behind bars.

Since police detection rates have fallen over the period from 1991 to 2003, it is not easy to attribute the fall in crime to police success. On the contrary, if the police had played their part more effectively we might have got crime down even more – perhaps to the extent that we no longer had the fourth highest crime rate in Europe.

In The Times last Saturday Anthony Browne describes the risks many Muslims face when they convert to Christianity. One courageous individual told The Times that:

‘He and his family have been regularly jostled, abused, attacked, shouted at to move out of the area, and given death threats in the street. His wife has been held hostage inside their home for two hours by a mob. His car, walls and windows have been daubed in graffiti: “Christian bastard”.’

Mr Blair’s Government is falling over itself to pass a law against the encouragement of religious hatred at the request of the Muslim Council of Britain in the hope of winning Muslim votes. Ostensibly the measure will protect Muslims from Islamophobia, but the most serious problem we face is not the victimisation of Muslims by non-Muslims, rather it is the intimidation of former Muslims by those who have retained their faith. Few freedoms are more important than the ability to join or leave voluntary associations of all types, including religious faiths, without fear. Instead of inventing a thought crime, the Government should enforce the law against violence as it stands.

The old saying that history is just one damn thing after another is no longer true, according to Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Last week the QCA published a report confirming what many teachers, university lecturers and parents have been complaining about for years: history is now taught in such a fragmented way that children have no chance to develop a chronological sense of the order in which important events happened. Survey after survey has told us that a majority of people questioned thought that Oliver Cromwell fought in the Battle of Britain, and other such absurdities: now we are getting it from an important government agency charged with monitoring what is actually going on in schools.

The list of failings is startling. Not enough time is allocated, to start with. Only 4% of curriculum time is allocated to history in Key Stages 1 and 2. To make it worse, certain periods are covered two or three times, while other periods are completely ignored. The phrase which was taken from the QCA report by the newspapers – the Hitlerisation of history – describes the way in which twentieth century history, especially the Second World War, is covered in depth, with no reference to earlier centuries. It is as if the twentieth century just sprang out of nowhere. The British Empire is conspicuous by its absence.

Among the very first acts carried out by Sir Ian Blair in his new job as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was to change their logo. At the cost of several thousand pounds drawn from his budget, the word 'together' was added making the logo now read, 'Working Together for a Safer London’.

Londoners, I am sure, will now all be able to sleep more soundly in their beds together, safe in the knowledge of Sir Ian's bold initiative.

At the time he announced it, Sir Ian remarked “The word you’ll hear a lot from me is ‘together’”.

The Commissioner has certainly lived up to his promise. In an open letter sent to all Londoners at the start of his appointment, Sir Ian remarked, after declaring one of his central aims to be ‘to build stronger links with Londoners’, ‘If we are to be successful, we must work together with you.’

Few at the time could have appreciated just how much a man of his word Sir Ian would turn out to be, or how literal-minded.

According to reports in yesterday's papers, the Sheffield branch of the Samaritans is facing threat of closure. It is doing so because the Big Lottery Fund recently rejected an application from it for a £300,000 grant with which to refurbish new premises it recently acquired because of the imminent expiry of its current lease.

The Sheffield Samaritans claim it was told by the Big Lottery Fund that the reason it rejected their application was that it judged they had not been doing enough to target minorities such as asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, the young, and the elderly.

The Big Lottery Fund deny this was their reason for rejecting the Samaritan's application. They claim they rejected the application simply because of the sheer competition from other worthy causes.

Clearly, if the Samaritans’ version is accepted of why their application was rejected, the group to whom the Big Lottery Fund has just awarded £360,000 to help prostitutes in their work was judged by it to be doing enough to target these minorities.

Even if the Lottery Fund’s own version of why it turned down the Samaritans' application is accepted, it still seems odd they should have judged that helping prostitutes in their work is worthier than helping those in a state of desperation and often on the brink of suicide.

The EU accounts for 49% of UK exports, which amounts to 19% of GDP, a declining share. Britain also invests twice as much in America as it does in Germany, France, and Italy combined.

For an update on the declining importance of EU trade to our economy check out this New Frontiers Foundation report.

Are education standards going up or down? Here is our survey of the evidence (PDF).

According to the NHS Board Room Pay Report 2005, the pay of NHS chief executives rose 70 per cent in ten years, while nurses’ pay only went up by 50 per cent. The NHS accounts in the year to March 2004 show that the average salaries of chief executives in England was £107,500, with the fattest cat of them all being the chief executive of Hammersmith Hospitals who takes home a tidy £212,500 each year. Meanwhile, many nurses are struggling to make £18,000. Union leaders are not the only ones who should be concerned.

Not entirely surprisingly, there’s strong evidence to suggest that increased spending on medical resources has a beneficial impact on medical outputs. In particular, researchers at the OECD have repeatedly demonstrated that higher doctor numbers are significantly associated with lower mortality, and in its 2003 report International Health Comparisons, the NAO declared that the number of doctors per 1,000 of population is the second most important measure after occupation in terms of explaining variations in premature mortality.

“They don’t know it, but we’re bringing them the plague”, reputedly quipped Sigmund Freud to the two fellow psycho-analysts who accompanied him on his first trip to the USA as their boat approached New York harbour in August 1909.

They had gone there after the head of a Massachusetts university had invited Freud to lecture on his revolutionary new form of psychotherapy about whose supposedly miraculous efficacy rumours had started to circulate in the US.

Ignorance of their own very much other than metaphoric highly contagious disease is not an excuse that can be pleaded by the many TB carriers from overseas who have seemingly been entering Britain of late to gain the benefits of free NHS treatment for their condition. Their numbers would undoubtedly have helped to make Britain the world’s capital for health tourism and significantly have contributed to the startling rise of reported cases there of this disease in recent times.

Nor can ignorance be the plea of either the Government or Opposition of the risks to which they seem willing to continue to expose the country by failing to advocate that all would-be entrants to it from countries in which TB is prevalent be made to undergo prior screening and found clear of the disease before being allowed to enter.

Advocates of church disestablishment rarely miss an opportunity to argue for their favoured cause. Many of them believe they have been provided with a glorious one by the recent announcement of the forthcoming civil marriage of Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles in a ceremony that will immediately be followed by prayers and a dedication conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

One such opponent of church establishment quick to seize this opportunity was self-styled Anglican atheist, Theo Hobson. (You go figure!)

In an article of his in last Tuesday’s Times (Feb. 15 2005), entitled, ‘Get Off Your Knees, Dr Williams’, Mr Hobson claimed that, by having publicly expressed its approval of the marriage, despite being unable on doctrinal grounds to conduct the ceremony since the couple are divorcees, the Church of England ‘has opted to become part of the heritage industry ... [and] no longer a convincing or compelling form of Christianity.’

It remains a complete mystery why anyone should suppose, as clearly Mr Hobson does, that the Church of England would become any more convincing or compelling a form of Christianity were it to sever its special connection with the monarchy.

Rod Liddle has a thoughtful piece in the Sunday Times about the inconsistencies of groups insisting they are victims of oppression.

You can say that black and Asian women make up 8% of the general population and 29% of the female prison population, so long as you think it is proof of discrimination. But you can't say that a higher proportion of black and Asian women commit crimes compared with their white counterparts.

Why? Because political correctness demands that blacks and Asians are victims of an oppressor group. Any unfavourable outcome must therefore be due to discrimination, even if it's not. Mere facts must not be allowed to get in the way of solidarity with victims.

But hold on, perhaps they were 'fitted up' by the white police. Then why did 79% of people who appeared before magistrates in 2003, and 63% of those who appeared before Crown Courts, plead guilty ?

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, continues to be in trouble for pointing out that there are only a few outstanding female scientists because scientific ability is not evenly distributed between males and females. Sarah Baxter provides an update in the Sunday Times.

Why do some people find the mere statement of this fact so upsetting? It seems to be because they have confused moral equality with equal outcomes. The origins of moral equality lie in our Christian heritage. As earlier liberals would have said, we are all equally children of God and, since all will be judged by their maker, all must be seen as equally capable of choosing right from wrong. But career success and failure have nothing to do with moral equality in this sense.

Closely allied with the idea of moral equality is the view that a person’s life chances should not be determined by his or her ascribed status (such as male or female; black or white). All should be able to advance according to their individual merits.

Some people now interpret this ideal to mean that any real and existing differences associated with an ascribed status cannot be acknowledged. This view implies a further assumption, namely that particular abilities are equally distributed between groups defined by their ascribed status. Consequently, it is inferred that, if success or failure in a particular career are not equally distributed between the groups, then it must be because of discrimination. Yet the liberal ideal has always been to allow individual talent an outlet, with the inevitable result that some will be more successful than others because talent is not equally distributed between groups.

Concern with the proportionate distribution of favourable outcomes between groups defined by their ascribed status is a return to a pre-liberal view of the human condition, in which the main category of analysis is the group (the tribe, the clan, the aristocratic family) rather than the individual. So long as any woman is free to become a scientist and to pit her abilities against anyone else, no liberal should be surprised to find disparate outcomes and there should be no liberal objection to the mere declaration that differences in outcome between men and women have been discovered. Let’s hope that Larry Summers will not be deterred from speaking without fear or favour.

Why John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, wasn’t lynched for having the audacity to make suggestions about the differences between the sexes is mystifying, given the intolerant fury that has been directed at Lawrence Summers recently. No one seems to mind when counsellors confirm certain stereotypes, such as that men are more competitive than women, more physically aggressive and have better spatial reasoning, or that women are more concerned about relationships, more adept at understanding body language and better with words. Yet what Summers, president of Harvard and former secretary to the US Treasury, said to a conference of economists last month has now been so mangled that one could be forgiven for thinking that he announced men were good at science while women were not because they were thick.

According to the transcript of his lecture, he compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming. All of which are statistical certainties, irrespective of why. After declaring that racial and sex discrimination needed to be ‘absolutely, vigorously’ combated, and conjecturing that bias might not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences, he posited a set of possible reasons. Firstly, he said, women need to take career breaks to have children; secondly, women are ‘innately’ less scientifically minded; thirdly, and consequently, the pool of women to recruit into top-level scientific posts is smaller.

No prizes for guessing which one of those caused the kafuffle, but there’s something wrong when it’s a heresy even to suggest that biological differences might be worth considering. What’s curious is not that a politicising press should fan the flames of controversy, but that the halls of academia – putative heartland of intellectual advancement and dispassionate debate – should field reactions like that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins who, upon hearing Summers’ words, told reporters that her ‘heart was pounding’, her ‘breath was shallow’ and she was going to be sick. Evidently, she hardly demonstrated her rationalism by spitting her dummy like that, but there is a bigger problem. The great illiberal trick is to discredit contrary opinions by declaring that their arguments are unfounded, whether or not they can actually be verified, and drown all salient opposition in torrents of indignation.

An evangelical group, Christian Voice, is reported in today's Times as having successfully managed to ‘persuade’ a cancer charity, Maggie’s Centres, to decline the donation of £3000 offered by the cast and company of the West End musical, Jerry Springer-the Opera, raised by a special charity performance of it last Friday.

Christian Voice considers the musical blasphemous in the manner of its portrayal of Jesus and hence that all proceeds stemming from any performance of it unworthy of being accepted by a charity that Christians either work at, attend or support through donations.

Christian Voice conducted its campaign by employing a number of different strategies. It spoke to the charity of the offence it would cause its Christian clients and employees were it to accept the gift. Additionally, it claimed that, were it to do so, the charity would lose even more money than it would gain because otherwise would-be Christian donors would withhold their donations to it. Christian Voice also threatened to picket the premises of the charity were the gift accepted.

No right-minded person can possibly take exception to members of Christian Voice exercising their right to protest peacefully and lawfully against a musical they consider blasphemous. More questionable is their method of conducting their campaign against the musical by extending it to a charity offered a gift out of proceeds from its performance.

Ruth Kelly’s attempt to address what she terms the ‘intellectual snobbery’ surrounding vocational education is in fact, exacerbating it. What is proving to be an inherent educational snobbery in the DfES towards non-academic skills will undeniably, have the effect of further segregating pupils into two channels of high and low achievement.

Having dismissed Tomlinson’s overly optimistic recommendations to implement a unified diploma designed to create ‘parity in esteem,’ the Education Secretary claims to be pursuing an alternative route to re-balancing the status gulf between academic and vocational subjects. Kelly’s plans for 14-19 education allegedly seek to put an end to the second rate reputation of the vocational subjects through a form of re-branding which will revamp their image and quantifiable educational value.

According to David Cracknell in the Sunday Times, the Government is about to publish a bill that will make it illegal for the providers of any goods or services - such as hotels, shops, pubs or restaurants - to refuse service to someone because of their religion. It had been expected that discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation would also be included, but the report says that Downing Street fears that Muslims might feel offended if they were ‘lumped together’ with homosexuals in the same bill.

This is not the first time that one of the official victim groups in society has squabbled with the Government over the planned Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). Until now there have been three protected groups: women, ethnic minorities and disabled people. Three new categories are to be added: sexual orientation, religion or belief, and age. A few months ago I attended a meeting in the House of Commons where enthusiasts for gender equality objected to being ‘lumped in’ with old people, who they felt were not as deserving of victim status as women, and when the Government issued a consultation document on the CEHR, the Commission for Racial Equality was opposed to the initial plan because it lost some of its privileges. Above all, it did not want to lose coercive powers to punish employers for disobedience.

Once the protected status of all six victim groups is legally in force, there won’t be very many people left who can’t fit into one or more of the categories, leaving white males as the undisputed oppressors of all the others.