Civitas Blog

Yesterday’s Times contains a half-page op-ed article by Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In it, he explains why the electorate should vote for his party at forthcoming election rather than for the Tories -- whoops, sorry, I mean for the Conservatives!

Basically, Mr Blair’s case boils down to two assertions he makes about New Labour’s track record over the past eight years.

Andrew Neil has an excellent discussion in The Business of the Government’s misguided approach to poverty and equality. The Government is not waging a war against poverty, as it claims. It is attempting to equalise people because its prime concern is not the interests of the poor as such, but the size of the gap between the better off and the less well off.

Now that the election date has been announced, we will be publishing some guides to the main public policy issues: initially crime, the NHS, education and welfare. The briefings will be fully referenced so that everyone can check the facts for themselves. The first one is here.

Yesterday the Home Affairs Select Committee announced that relations between British Muslims and the wider community have ‘deteriorated’ since the September 11th, 2001 terror atrocities in the US and the resultant war on terrorism. MPs found many of Britain's 1.8 million Muslims felt persecuted under controversial anti-terrorism laws and expressed fears over the perceived rise in institutionalised Islamophobia evidenced in the increase in the number of police security checks.

The report read: ‘Muslims in Britain are more likely than other groups to feel they are suffering as a result of the response to international terrorism. We do not believe the Asian community is being unreasonably targeted by stops and searches but accept that Muslims perceive they are being stigmatised by the legislation’. Labour MP and committee chairman John Denham called on the government to sustain better community cohesion to ensure the Muslim community was fully involved in developing ‘the next steps in tackling terrorism’.

In an article in Muslim Weekly last year, senior Labour energy minister Mike O'Brien accepted that many British Muslims were ‘understandably ... very angry about the war’. But, as if in exchange, he listed reasons why a Labour government and Blair had been good for Muslims, including its drive ‘to toughen the laws on incitement to religious hatred.’ And there’s the rub. The cynical approach of this government could hardly be more clearly evidenced than by forcing the prevention of terrorism law through parliament and then trying to mollify (read: get votes from) those targeted with a different law. The incitement to religious hatred bill is a sop with wide-ranging implications for freedom of speech.

So it was bad news for the government and good news for the rest of society that among a number of other high profile pre-election casualties, the bill has been dropped. The dangers and deficiencies of the bill have already been rehearsed elsewhere on this site – see the Civitas Blogs and the Background Briefing – but the fundamental point is that it was badly drafted and a bad idea. Its loose wording risked jeopardizing free speech, and as Ken MacDonald, Director of Public Prosecutions said, criminalizing a state of mind; there was no definition of the key terms, such as ‘insult’ and ‘hatred’; and there was no defence of truthfulness.

The law would have fomented suspicion, hostility and resentment rather than promoted tolerance. It would have provided maximum protection for the most litigious people in society and encouraged religious extremism by shielding religious leaders from legitimate criticism. Icqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain made clear that it would have illegalised criticism of the Prophet Muhammad and that offenders would have been prosecuted. Since the Christian blasphemy law is nominal and ineffective, there is no protection currently offered to religious groups in Britain that is not also available to Muslims by being covered under existing criminal and racial laws.

The fact is that punitive laws are not the way to deal with poor cohesion in society or to foster better community relations. For now the government’s strategy of giving with one hand and taking away with another has been stymied. But if Labour comes back after the election, so will the bill.

A staggering one in five 11 year-olds cannot read properly. This is the alarming finding announced yesterday by the Education and Skills Select Committee. The Committee's criticisms of primary literacy teaching arrive amidst a series of attacks on the Government’s National Literacy Strategy. The Committee declared the current reading record ‘unacceptable’, demanding an ‘immediate review’ on the way that our children are taught to read.

In what is claimed to be a landmark judgement in terms of the legal treatment of same-sex couples, today’s Times reports that contact rights in respect of two young sisters, aged 6 and 3, have just been awarded by an appeal court judge to the former female partner of the children's lesbian mother who split up with her former partner two years ago after she conceived the children by means of AID whilst still in relationship with her.

In explaining his reasons for the decision, Lord Justice Thorpe, Deputy Head of the Family Division of the High Court, said he had made it so that the former lover of the mother of the girls could continue to play ‘a significant role’ in their lives.

In arriving at his decision, the judge appears to have been swayed by the 'expert' testimony given by a court welfare officer who claimed that ‘excluding the former lover would not help the children understand the history of their earlier lives.’

The same officer is further reported as having claimed their continued contact with the former lovewr of their mother “would help the girls to have clear picture of where they fit in when they grow older.”

Lord Justice Thorpe indicated the general ‘principles’ that had helped him to make up his mind on the issue when he added that:

“What has been said about the importance of fathers is of equal application in same-sex parents…. I am in no doubt at all that the children require firm measures to safeguard them from diminution or loss of a vital side of family life.”

Had this story appeared last Friday on 1st April and not today, I would have thought it a joke, and one in poor taste at that.

Here is the second voter briefing, covering education standards. We have also added links to some government websites.

Here is the third voter briefing: on crime.

Yet again the Tories have been caught with their pants down in the playground and the Labour goody-goodies have rushed in to fuss and giggle, twiddling their pigtails and sneering delightedly.

This time Ed Matts, the Conservative candidate in the marginal seat of Dorset South who unwisely doctored a photograph of himself and Ann Widdecombe, is the naughty schoolboy. It wouldn’t be the first time a politician had compromised his views for an official party policy, but the decision to alter his campaign stance to hide the fact that he had opposed the deportation of a Malawian asylum-seeker has provided the Government with a perfect excuse for some pre-election sanctimony and scorn. Within moments of hearing about the scandal, John Reid hotfooted it down to the constituency to wring his hands and march around in feigned incredulity.

The important point is that both parties have conducted the debate about immigration more on the basis of opprobrium than principle. Which is why Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, pointed out that ‘people are having debates about perfectly legitimate subjects but maybe they’re doing it in ways which create tensions’: ‘Everybody is entitled to talk about immigration or gypsy camps and no subject should be off limits,’ he affirmed. ‘It is a question of how they go about it. We want grown-up leadership.’ Even accounting for the fact that fear of being labelled racist by the CRE has stifled intellectual debate, he is absolutely right.

Imagine a mainstream newspaper printing an op-ed article by a former master of an Oxbridge College aseerting all women to be hysterical men-hating leeches with whom men would be better off having nothing to do.

Although few in their right minds would take such an article seriously, you can imagine it would not go un-remarked on by the sorority running the Equal Opportunities Commission. ‘Male prejudice’, ‘disgraceful insult to women’, ‘rampant misogyny’, we can imagine them complaining in letters of protest to editors and on ‘Women’s Hour’.

Time was, however,-- and not too long ago at that, when it was practically de rigueur among ‘progressive’ newspapers to carry some article written by a women levelling an equivalent accusation against men.

In the late ’sixties and ’seventies, such misanthropic feminists were given full license by academia and the media to preach their man-hating message throughout society.

It is difficult to know exactly what overall social effect their anti-male ranting had. It can hardly be doubted, however, that it contributed in no small measure to the general discrediting of the institution of marriage that happened at that time, as well as the concomitant discrediting of the related system of complementary gender roles which led to young children being nurtured primarily by their mothers while their fathers laboured to support them both during the early years of their children’s dependency.

Among the two most vociferous champions of feminist misanthropy were Germaine Greer and her American counterpart, the lately deceased Andrea Dworkin, the obituary for whom appeared in yesterday's Times.

In today’s Times, there appears in the form of an op-ed article by Ms Greer an encomium to her former sister-in-literary arms and dungarees. In it, Ms Greer continues to spew forth the same man-hating message she and Ms Dworkin did so much to propagate in former years.

Politicians and pundits here have currently worked themselves up into a lather about voter-apathy in the forthcoming general election and are seeking to work us all up into the same condition of concern about it as themselves.

Personally, I can barely stifle a yawn, or, rather, suppress a cheer, about the apparent lack of enthusiasm on the part of so many of the current British electorate to visit their local polling booth come election day to put a cross on their ballot slip, or else, and ever more likely these days, to have handed over their blank voting paper before then to whichever local Mafiosi is rigging the ballot in their constituency. (Apologies to any Italian readers for the apparent slur on their community. However, I use the term in question generically. You all surely are thinking of exactly of whom I am also thinking!)

The fourth voter briefing, covering the Government's welfare and work policies, is now available.

Overall welfare dependency has increased since 1997, despite a large fall in unemployment.

According to a report from the Picker Institute, an international think tank that has surveyed nearly a million NHS patients since 1998, the NHS has improved when subjected to government targets, but not otherwise. In some cases the service has become worse. Quoted in The Times, Angela Coulter, chief executive of the charity, said: “The most disappointing thing is that all the rhetoric about creating patient-centred care hasn’t led to improvements across the board. Only where specific targets have been set — in waiting times and in cancer and heart disease — are we seeing big improvements. Where there are no targets, in areas such as cleanliness and access to a GP, the service has not improved and in some cases has got worse. Many aspects of patients’ experience still need urgent attention.”

Scottish experience has been similar. The Scottish Assembly has not targeted waiting lists, but focused more on public health issues. In Scotland waiting lists are going up, suggesting that hospital managers respond to direct pressure by focusing effort on target compliance at the expense of services or activities not visible to the target setters.

What is missing is a constant, unrelenting pressure to provide the best service for customers. Public sector monopoly with targets is an improvement on public sector monopoly with no such targets, but a system based on competition would be better still. The imperfections of the human condition mean that without pressure to perform, the producers are likely to settle for a quiet life. More important still, by allowing scope for invention and experimentation, a competitive system allows standards to improve through a process of mutual emulation.

In January 2001, the EU decided to award 1.7 million Euros to Birzeit University. Situated in Nablus on the West Bank, the web-site of the University boasts it is the ‘first Arab university to be established in Palestine’.

The EU gave Birzeit University the money to ‘promote respect for human rights and the rule of law in Palestine and to reinforce Palestinian civil society institutions’.

Among the development objectives of the various University institutes and centres involved in the project, one, it states, is to ‘develop pluralistic ideals, democratic values and team sprit’.

A few years since the EU awarded the money to the university, the fruits of its investment are beginning to become visible.

One delectable piece of such EU-subsidised fruit that has been carefully cultivated at the West Bank university is a motion to be debated by the AUT at its annual three-day conference this year beginning today calling on members to boycott three Israeli universities.

On March 17th, I wrote a blog relating the unsettling experiences my wife (and, to a much lesser extent, I too) had had at the A & E department of our local NHS hospital after an ambulance brought her there (with me in attendance) in the middle of the night following a bad fall she had suffered after fainting.

After waiting almost four hours before being seen by a doctor, my wife was told she would have to be moved to what the nurse who told her this conceded to be an inappropriate ward, prior to undergoing further necessary tests.

Upon pressing to know why since A& E was practically empty at the time, I was informed this was not because A & E needed her bed but to meet a government target that all patients admitted to A&E be either admitted to a ward or discharged within four hours.

It was, therefore, with a sigh of recognition but little pleasure that I read in today’s Daily Telegraph that a study conducted by researchers at Sheffield University of more than 400,000 patients who had similarly been admitted to A & E departments found that as many as ‘one in eight patients is moved out of emergency departments in the 20 minutes before the four-hour deadline expires.’

The crime figures released yesterday can be put in context by referring to the Civitas Crime Briefing.

Trust has figured prominently in the election campaign. Here is a Civitas Online Publication (PDF file) by Peter Briffa that explains why trust in politicians has diminished.

Given that it’s rather difficult to discover reliable facts about what millionaires do with their cash, the sociologist William Rubinstein carried out a study on dead ones in 1984 and 1985. He found, among other things, that those whose fathers were wealthy businessmen or landowners still made up 42 per cent of the ranks of millionaires, from which it could reasonably be concluded that in Britain the surest way to get rich was to be born rich. Notwithstanding the rosy promise of John Major to build a classless society by 2000, and the earnest New Labour Manifesto pledges to continue ‘breaking down the barriers that stop people fulfilling their talent’, it appears that those from less privileged backgrounds are now even more likely to continue facing disadvantage into adulthood, while the wealthy continue to benefit disproportionately.

One finding emerges fairly clearly from the literature on the subject: levels of mobility are low compared to ideals of equality of opportunity. It does not follow that those at the top are to blame. A recent study conducted by the LSE, Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America, has compared the life chances of British children with those in the US, Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. It examined the extent to which a person’s childhood circumstances influenced their later economic success as adults. The four Scandinavian countries performed best, with social mobility being greatest in Norway. Canada was also found to be a highly mobile society. Germany was placed close to the middle while Britain and America trailed well behind. The gap in opportunities between the rich and poor in the US is at least static. In Britain it is getting wider: intergenerational mobility fell markedly in Britain, with less recorded for a cohort born in 1970 than for a cohort born in 1958.

Mr Blair says he wants to move away from talking about trust in him to focus on education. Yet the Government’s claims about educational attainment since 1997 also throw doubt on his honesty

Labour’s education manifesto contains a headline comparison between 1997 and 2005. In 1997 this country was 42nd in the ‘world education league’ and in 2005 we were third best in the world for literacy at age ten. The only international comparison of literacy at age ten is the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) whose last results were for 2001, not 2005. England did indeed come third (Scotland was 14th, but no doubt has a different manifesto).

Now here comes the geek bit. The response rate to the survey was only 57% of the original sample. Only two other countries out of 35 fell below 60% (and they also came high up the table). Most others had response rates over 80% (Germany 98% and France 93%). Moreover, pupils in England were in their 5th year of schooling, whereas in most other countries they were in year 4 (only two other countries tested in year 5).

Why is the sample response rate more than just the preoccupation of maths anoraks who should get out more? The main fault of our education system is that it fails the least able pupils in each age group. Our best schools are probably as good as the best anywhere in the world, but our worst schools are well below par, as official figures testify. In 2003/04 only 53% of 16 year-olds achieved five or more GCSE passes at grades A* to C and 4% failed to pass anything. At age 11 only 74% achieved the required standard in maths, well below the Government’s own target of 85%.

A recent OfSTED report found that 44% of boys aged 11 and 29% of girls were leaving primary school unable to write properly. It attributed the failure to poor teaching and declared that one in three lessons in English and maths were unsatisfactory.

Here is a question for Mr Blair. How many of the schools considered by OfSTED to be providing unsatisfactory lessons respond to international surveys? We might conjecture that the 57% response rate was because badly performing schools did not want to make their failure obvious to the outside world. If the schools that responded tended to be the good ones, it would make the overall results look much better than they really were. Some supporting evidence comes from 14th-ranked Scotland, where the initial response rate was 76%.

The Labour manifesto does not only pretend that the reading figures are for 2005 when they are for 2001, it also implies that the country has improved from 42nd in the ‘world education league’ to third. But what it calls the ‘world education league’ is a comparison of the impact of the education system on the economic competitiveness of countries. Comparing this wider measure with the PIRLS reading study is a bit like claiming that the England cricket team has improved since 1997, as shown by the tremendous success of the rugby team in winning the world cup.

In any event, the most recent comparison of international achievement, called the ‘world education league’ by the press, was the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which gives figures for 41 countries in 2000 and 2003. Between those years, the UK dropped from fourth in science to 11th, from seventh in reading to 11th and from eighth in maths to 18th. Perhaps Mr Blair is right. The debate should move on to education.