Civitas Blog

If further proof were ever needed of how much national wealth New Labour has squandered through its profligate public spending policies, one need look no further than to the business section of today’s Times.

It is there reported that council tax bills are due to rise next year by an extra 1.5% just to cover the ever-mounting bill for the pensions of the huge and seemingly ever-burgeoning ranks of the army of retired local authority workers so many of whom have been recruited during New Labour’s term of office.

If you ever wondered how and why taxes could have risen by so much as they have done during this time to so little apparent effect in terms of improved services, here lies the answer.

I recently attended a conference on Martin Luther in his hometown of Wittenberg.

To get there involved making a two-hour train journey from Berlin through the wastelands of former East Germany. For the most part, what I saw seems to have remained untouched for the last half-century or so, save to have acquired, yet with a quality of ferocious abandon that was as unsettling as it was unfamiliar, the all-too-familiar spray-paint graffiti that blights so much of our own urban landscape.

On arrival at Wittenberg, now valiantly trying to turn itself into a place of pilgrimage and an international tourist centre, yet in reality largely a ghost-town still, I was reliably informed that much of the population of former East Germany, though now amply provided by the state with welfare in comparison with how things were before 1989,remains deeply demoralised, with many of the young having gone west to seek their fortunes.

I have no doubt that this sorry condition in which East Germany languishes as a result of the long years of Soviet domination has been replicated elsewhere throughout the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Small wonder is it today, since the accession to the EU of so many of these countries whose populations have been debarred from taking jobs within the EU save for Britain and Ireland, there has been a massive influx to this country of young East Europeans eager to throw themselves into whatever work they can find.

And jobs they have found in plenty: jobs in the domestic and service sector as well as construction work and other areas of employment, in both the official and, doubtless, black economy.

One can only admire and wish these young workers well, although one fears for the lands they have left which have been deprived of their more enterprising young folk.

Is their steady immigration to Britain a good thing or a bad thing – not for them, which it clearly is, but for Britain?

Despite the Labour Government being pledged to retain the British opt-out from the European Working-Time Directive, negotiated by John Major in 1993 when the Directive was first issued and which since has been invoked by as many as a third of British employees, as of yesterday it has ceased to be up to Her Majesty's Government whether British employees can continue for much longer to be able to escape the Directive by invoking the opt-out.

This is thanks to a vote taken yesterday by the European Parliament for Britain to lose the opt-out.

In itself, the vote does not settle the matter. However, the matter must now be referred to the Council of Ministers to decide by qualified majority voting, thereby removing the decision from the hands of the British Government.

Among the MEP’s t have voted for an end to the opt-out were all Britain’s Labour MEP’s. Their leader in Europe, Gary Titley, is reported in today’s Times as explaining that they voted as they did to ‘bring work-life balance to families in the UK’.

It seems to have escaped the notice of Mr Titley and his comrades that the Directive must inexorably raise labour costs, and that, hence, the only work-life balance that an end to the opt-out is likely to bring to many British families is an end to work with consequently precious little life to speak.

Anyone with the recent misfortune of having had to take a journey by bus in any of our cities at the end of the school day, when their streets are filled with the teeming ranks of their all-too-frequently ill-mannered, foul-mouthed, and indecorous charges, will have had no need to brave a visit to the apparently still wilder reaches of our out-of-town shopping malls to know a deep-seated pathology currently afflicts all too many of our youngsters today.

Yesterday, having somewhat belatedly recalled his promise as Shadow Home Secretary to get tough in office on the causes of crime, Prime Minister Blair took a pot-shot at those whom he declared to be the true causes of the waywardness of so many of the country's children today -- their parents.

The Prime Minister singled parents out for special mention among the causes of the rowdiness and unruliness of children, by berating them for having failed to impose adequate discipline at home and to instil in them due respect for others.

Having so identified what he considered the principal cause of their unruly behaviour, Blair was quick to disclaim any power to improve it. ‘I cannot solve all these problems… I cannot … raise someone children’s for them.’

Well said, Mr Blair: you certainly can’t. Indeed, as I recall, you too seem to have experienced the same difficulty many parents have in raising their children to behave with proper decorum in the case of some of your own off-spring.

American sociologist Charles Murray wrote an article for The Sunday Times in 2004, soon to be published in book form by Civitas, in which he argued the case for retributive justice. The principle of retributive justice is that the criminal justice system should punish criminals for the harm they have inflicted on their victims, and that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. This is the primary aim of criminal justice. Not reforming criminals or even preventing further crimes by incarceration. Both of these things may happen, of course, and there is much to be said for them, but they are secondary aims. Murray also argues for reforms to the way in which trials are conducted. He believes that former charges and convictions should be made known to the jury if they are for similar offences. He also argues that the system needs to draw a firm distinction between those he calls Outlaws and Citizens. Habitual criminals (Outlaws) should not be treated as if they have the same rights as the law-abiding (Citizens). Citizens who are threatened by criminals should be able to retaliate in any way they deem necessary to defend themselves.

As is reported in today's Times, differences of attitude among French voters towards the EU Constitution continue to stem from concerns they share that their country not become any more like Britain.

Supporters of the Constitution there claim that, only by its adoption, can their country be spared that evil fate. Its opponents there maintain that only by the Constitution being rejected can their country escape this fate.

When the turn comes for British voters to voice their opinions on the issue, doubtless their attitudes will be similarly governed by concerns they share about the effects the Constitution is likely to have in terms of making Britain more similar to France.

Unlike in the case of the French, however, British voters will part company with one another not over whether they believe its adoption likley to have this effect. For that it would do is something on which they will all surely agree.

Where British voters will part company with each other is over how they feel towards the prospect of Britain becoming more like France.

In Britain, the Constitution will be supported by those who fervently want Britain to become more similar to France. Opposition to it will come from those who look on this prospect with unmitigated horror.

One can only hope that, when the time comes for British voters to voice their opinion on this matter, they will be found not just in matters calling for political judgement, but also in those that involve an element of taste, that they can be relied on to display better sense than the French.

After last week’s Cabinet meeting in which the Government finalised its legislative programme for the forthcoming Parliament, Prime Minister Blair made a widely-reported speech. In it, he declared that, among the objectives of his new term of office, paramount would be the introduction of new legislative measures designed to curb growing yobbishness and unruliness, particularly among the young.

Blair characterised this element of his programme as one designed to restore a culture of respect. Having been quick to admit that the objective was not one any government could be expected to achieve single-handedly, he called for a debate on how best others could join with government in helping to achieve it.

Judged by the column inches that have been devoted to this subject in the press since his speech, Blair’s call for such a debate can be judged a resounding success. This is more than is likely to be able to be said for the legislative measures announced in the Queen’s Speech to tackle the problem, according to much of this comment.

A growing consensus is emerging that Blair’s proposed measures to tackle unruliness will prove of little effect or even counter-productive. This is because, so claim his critics of which I am one, they do nothing to reverse the chief underlying cause of the unruliness. This has been the steady collapse of the two-parent family which best socialises children to enjoy the greatest chance of staying out of trouble.

There is another flaw in Blair’s remarks to which, so far as I am aware, commentators have yet to draw attention. If allowed to stand uncorrected, it threatens to vitiate whatever measures his government should take to curb unruliness informed by it.

It doesn’t take a paediatrician to tell us that what happens during early childhood probably has a significant impact on the rest of our lives. The Greeks used to say your future lies behind you. The Bible talks of the sins of the fathers. Then there’s that famous poem by Larkin. In whichever configuration, the basic point is that parents have a substantial influence over – and thus responsibility for – the future of their children. Not that we’re very fond of that notion in our society. What with an unprecedented rate of divorce, and a high number of women in the labour market, not to mention men, how are our children growing up? With state childcare and faceless nannies? As it stands, a good many seem to be wiling away the hours until mummy and daddy come home by eating crisps, watching television (nice educational shows, such as the Teletubbies or Powerpuff Girls) and playing cute computer games like Grand Theft Auto, Kill Zone, and Gruesome Blood and Guts II: The Revenge of the Revenge.

Who knows what this does to their psyche, but one thing’s for sure, it makes them fat. Blunt, perhaps, but not bigoted. ‘Shame!’ shouts the political correctness lobby. ‘How dare you blame the individual or even their parents? It’s the fault of a relentlessly fatist system.’ But the biology’s simple as can be: put calories in and take none out and the body will bloat. We live in the age of the cult of the specialist, where common sense is forever being contradicted by sophistry, so it’s especially gratifying when scientists confirm the bleeding obvious. Today, in research by the universities of Bristol and Glasgow we discover that when three-year old children (read: any young kids) watch lots of television they have a particularly high chance of having a high body mass index – i.e. of being obese. And there’s no genetic get out clause. Professor Tony Barnett, head of the University of Birmingham’s diabetes and obesity group said these findings were not unexpected: ‘The rise in obesity we have seen in recent years cannot be put down to genes.’ So it really is lifestyle? Well, of course it is.

I remember so clearly rugby training in school games lessons. It was invariably cold and wet, and the first slide in the mud was like diving into a cold pond, all breathless and invigorating. If you liked that kind of thing, then rugby was fun. There were, of course, those who hated it, because they were fat, or lazy, or because they thought, with good reason, that rugby was a barbarous sport. For the first term or so, everyone played together, and the athletic and strong soon showed themselves to be better than the rest of the group. Skills – I promise there are skills in rugby – developed rather more gradually, but even still there were those who learned from scratch quickly, those who got better over a longer period of time, and others who were just plain useless.

In order for the school to produce a sports team, it made sense to siphon people off at different standards, some immediately going into the top group, some into the B, C and D squads. The categories were flexible. As some proved better or worse than initial thought, they were moved around, but what the squad divisions fundamentally enabled was people of similar strengths and abilities to progress at the speed that suited them most. Those that were bad mucked around with their coaches and had a good deal of fun; those that were good were sculpted into an efficient working team and had a good deal of fun. Early in the second term, the first team played and won their first couple of matches.

During the next four years, players in the different groups shifted around and permutated. At the same time, those who showed no interest in rugby were welcome to find out what they might instead be good at, and they tried out football, basketball and hockey. It turned out that some of the most uncoordinated on the rugby pitch were brilliant footballers, and some of the most club-footed footballers excellent hockey players and so on. By streaming people, everyone was able to excel. The natural rugby players did well at that sport. Those who had been rubbish at rugby were not forced to play alongside those that were good, to be danced round, and trampled over and generally humiliated, but instead were able to show their abilities at other games.

It seems to me self-evident that with discretion the same principles apply to academic and intellectual pursuits. So it says something about the prevailing orthodoxy that scientific and sociological research papers are needed as evidence to prove what any intelligent person should be able to comprehend immediately. The evidence for the failure of comprehensive education and the success of selective education has been rehearsed here before, in findings by the London School of Economics, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Andrew – now Sir Andrew – Adonis, head of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Now David Jesson of York University has found that when bright pupils are put with twenty or more other bright pupils they do better than they would if they were with less able students. ‘Such clusters exist in the state system,’ says the leader in The Times, ‘in grammar schools and in the best comprehensives. They stimulate academic achievers and offer some defence against the corrosive peer pressure that leads some to mask their abilities for fear of teasing.’ Once again, the implications for comprehensive schools are not great; but the advantages of various forms of selection are so obvious that this is almost difficult to credit as news.

Prime Minister Tony Blair used a speech on May 12th to launch a campaign to restore to these benighted shores a culture of respect, especially among their wayward young.

Doubtless it was to boost the respect in which he is held by this group, that, during the general election campaign, the Prime Minister's wife boasted of her husband's prowess as a five-times-a-night man.

In that speech, Blair was quick to disclaim government able to solve the problem, shifting the onus back onto parents. ‘I cannot solve all these problems… I cannot ... raise someone else’s children for them’, he said.

Today it fell to Beverley Hughes, Minister for Children, to acknowledge the limits of the government's power to control the behaviour of young people and to berate their parents -- this time, for not doing enough to discourage them from emulating the nocturnal habits of her boss.

In an interview reported in the Guardian, given in response to concerns about Britain continuing to top the European league-table for teenage pregnancies, Ms Hughes claimed that parents, and not the state, have a decisive role to play in providing children with sex education. ‘We really need parents to now see themselves as making an absolutely unique and vital contribution to this issue… It is a contribution I don’t think anyone else can actually make', the Minister was quoted as having said.

The Guardian was quick to reassure any readers otherwise in danger of choking on their muesli at the thought the government might actually want parents to discourage their teen-age children from indulging in sex that this was not what it was calling for from them. 'Ministers stress that they will not… encourage parents to advocate abstinence',it reported.

So, parents must know their place in the government's sex education programme. They are to play a more active part in it, but only in the government-prescribed manner of teaching their children how to enjoy sex without pregnancy.

In calling for greater parental involvement in the sex education of their children, the government show little sign of wanting to rescind the 1985 land-mark ruling of the House of Lords that upheld the right of NHS doctors to dispense contraceptive and abortion advice and treatment to under-age girls without their needing first to obtain the consent of their parents or even inform them.

One wonders whether government will also want parents to tell their children of the results of medical research also reported in today’s papers that has found ‘women may suffer a permanent decline in sex drive after taking the contraceptive pill.’

In matters of sex education, it seems, the only educative role for parents it wants them to play is to teach their children to live now so as not to play later!

It was somewhat reassuring to read in today’s newspapers that, at an emergency meeting of the AUT held yesterday, the union of university teachers finally saw enough reason to call off its boycott of Israeli universities which had previously been voted for at its annual conference last month, after a debate held on a Friday afternoon immediately before the Jewish festival of Passover, thereby conveniently guaranteeing no observant Jewish memebrs of the AUT could attend.

Whatever reassurance yesterday's decision might provide concerning the moral sanity of Britain's academics must be tempered, for the moment at least, by the knowledge that, with no less a perfect sense of timing, last Saturday, of all the days of the week that could have been chosen to conduct their meeting, the London branch of NATFHE, Britain's other trade union of r academics, succeeded in placing on the agenda of its forthcoming annual conference this weekend an emergency motion that calls on its members to join the boycott.

One of Israel's universities that the AUT had sought to boycott was its oldest-- the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, opened by Lord Balfour in 1925.

With all the characteristic wisdom and understanding for which British academics are so renown, those who called for it to be boycott seemed wholly unaware of how, ever since that university first opened, its whole orientation and thrust has always borne the stamp of its first chancellor and subsequent president, the American reform rabbi Judah Leon Magnes. He was champion of an entirely non-political form of cultural Zionism that aim simply for a Jewish cultural renaissance in Palestine, not the creation of a Jewish state to which Magnes was always vehemently opposed, preferring instead a bi-national state.

The crass stupidity and ignorance of the British academics who called for the Hebrew University to be boycotted is revealed by what said about Magnes and the university of which he was chancellor in a book published in 2001 by Yoram Hazony, president of a Jerusalem-based Institute for Jewish Social Thought and Public Policy. Entitled The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, Hazony's book liekwise reveals the equal stupidity of the British academics in seeking to boycott any other Israeli university. For what it reveals is how deeply influenced by the Hebrew University have been the staff and policies of all other of Israel's universities.

There are few more depressing aspects of the celebrity culture that engulfs us than the grotesque habit which celebs have developed of clutching the suffering of the world to their bejewelled bosoms. If they are really interested in using their celebrity to further good causes, as Virginia McKenna has done for wildlife conservation, that is admirable, but all too often we feel that the poor and the downtrodden are just being used to boost careers which are in various stages of detumescence. When the cameras stop rolling, the smiles fade and the celebs go back to their air-conditioned limos, hoping to get out of the world’s hellholes as quickly as possible.

It was with a sinking heart, therefore, that I read of the plan to resurrect the Live Aid phenomenon twenty years on. This time it is to be called Live 8, as the inntention is to tie it in with the G8 summit in Edinburgh, and that most absurd of all campaigns, the hubristic Make Poverty History.