Civitas Blog

In the first dialogue of Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation, Lord M. asks what about the religion of another character, and Lord Sp. replies that he’s an ‘anythingarian’. The coinage is more resonant now than ever before. If postmodernism is a uselessly incoherent philosophy, since it knows only what it is not, not what it is, it has nevertheless become a handy sociological description. For throughout Britain (and the West generally), we have for some time been witnessing a crisis of legitimation. Everything is contested. Nothing, as the paradoxical truth statement goes, is true. There is only, as Nietzsche declares, a perspective seeing, a perspective knowing. What postmodernism supremely represents, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, is an incredulity towards all metanarratives. No totalising theories prevail. In this world, there is only multiplicity and fragmentation. As the margins of society seek recognition from the centre and the centre becomes more obsessed with the romance of the margins, there is a simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal movement. All cultures are pronounced equal. Nothing in this kaleidescopic collage stays still, nothing can be established, nothing agreed.

History curricula have suffered awfully on account of this, since the mosaic approach to teaching adopted by cultural relativists has resulted in unprecedented numbers of school leavers having an inadequate knowledge or understanding of events, people, or the institutions that have evolved over the course of many centuries and have come to express and develop the thought of our society. Thanks to an overemphasis of the assumption that history is always history for someone, the legacy of the hard left is historical amnesia, dislocation and temporal parochialism. These problems translate across disciplines. In their 1998 book Class Act, Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, in the process of thrashing comprehensive schools, adduce the Institute of Education’s assertion that schools are guilty of too often ‘legitimising one popular view of mathematics’ and so devaluing ‘the students’ informal mathematical experience and skills… which are equally, if not more, valuable to the individual.’ Maths is oppressive; it should be replaced by ‘ethnomathematics’. As the headmaster in Lambeth who appointed an expert in Nigerian cooking, with no experience of maths, to teach maths in his school put it: ‘It is real life maths with Ibo cookery – transferable maths.’

In seeking to revive a culture of respect, Tony Blair has got it all wrong by thinking it can be restored by him and his like constantly banging on about how ill-behaved young people are today.

So said yesterday Tom Wylie, Chief Executive of the government-funded National Youth Agency, in a speech reported in today's Times.

Instead, Mr Wylie is reported as having said, the way in which young people should be taught to respect others is for their elders to show them greater respect than they are shown by Mr Blair and other government ministers who constantly berate them for being yobs.

Today’s newspapers report NHS executives responsible for hospitals in Leicester are due to meet today to decide whether to order the removal from patients’ lockers of copies of the Gideon bible that have long routinely been placed there, as they have been in bedside tables of hotel-rooms and prisons throughout the world.

They are reportedly entertaining imposing the ban on two grounds. First, they fear the presence of the bedside bibles might violate equality and diversity codes or else offend non-Christian patients obliged by their presence to come into contact with them. Second, they are concerned the bibles might harbour the MRSA bug and so increase the risk of patients contracting the disease though handling them.

Mm!

In response to the first concern, Gideons International, who distribute the bibles, have offered to place notices in ward lockers advising patients how to obtain any preferred alternative sacred texts. In addition, representatives of all other major faith groups represented among Leicester’s large minority population have indicated entire satisfaction with the presence of the bibles and have expressed sadness at the prospect of their compulsory removal.

As to the second alleged ground for banning the bedside bibles, apparently the hospital authorities are not also contemplating banning from wards either newspapers or any of the numerous NHS notices routinely placed in patient lockers. Doubtless, MRSA bugs are all new-age pagans who believe only in homeopathy.

The fact is we have here another example of the same crazy political correctness as lately has caused Birmingham Council to replace Christmas by ‘Wintermas’, some schools to scrap nativity plays, and some shops and businesses to stop displaying Christmas trees, putting up decorations, or allowing staff to hold office parties at Christmas for fear of offending non-Christians. One may even include the craven message broadcast by the Queen last Christmas in which she seemed almost apologetic for celebrating the festival and anxious to include as many non-Christians in the celebrations as possible.

I have no immediate answer how to stop the madness and would welcome suggestions from readers.

However, please send suggestions by email. I have decided no longer to open ordinary post, for fear of what bugs envelopes might harbour, or to answer the telephone, lest I may offend any of the acoustically challenged.

The way in which Michael Jackson’s trial has been dominating the world’s news for what seems like forever is a sign of the unhealthy obsession that we have developed with paedophilia. In an age of moral relativism, it seems to be the only thing left we can all wholeheartedly agree upon. Many people take an extremely relaxed view of lifestyle events like divorce and abortion which used to occasion shock. But sex involving younger children is – quite rightly – considered to be beyond the pale, and we want to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent it.

Unfortunately, the scale of the response has now overtaken the real risk. Measures have been put in place that seem to be based on the assumption that there are paedophiles lurking everywhere, and that anyone who wants to get close to children must be a pervert. This is a terrible insult and injustice to the majority of people working with children who would never dream of harming them.

The government has developed something of a knack for giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Not content with the ban on fox hunting, a backhander to backbenchers disenchanted by its courting of those nasty middle classes, nor with the notion of liberalising the drinking laws but imposing spot fines on those who drink too liberally, it is seeking, as tensions have escalated with Muslims over Iraq and the war on terrorism, to administer relief in the form of proposals for the prevention of religious hatred. Using laws to strike bargains is a risky strategy, and Civitas has voiced its opposition to this bill before ; it was dropped in the run up to the general election, but as the BBC reports, it’s back.

Although the anti-terrorism legislation ended up being little more than a rickety compromise, the fact is that Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims feel got at, and slips, such as Hazel Blears’ delightful admission that the ‘reality’ was that ‘our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community’, have hardly helped matters. New Labour has for some time been seeking ways to deal with the problem. In an article last year in Muslim Weekly, senior energy minister Mike O'Brien conceded that many Muslims were ‘understandably... very angry’. In exchange, he listed reasons why the Blair administration had been good for Muslims. These included plans ‘to toughen the laws on incitement to religious hatred’.

In Australia, where a similar law was passed in 2001, two pastors from the not very incendiary Catch the Fire Ministries have successfully been prosecuted for raising human rights concerns about Islam. Notwithstanding the judge’s acceptance that theirs was a fair representation of the teachings of the Qur’an and the Shari’a, it was deemed that truthfulness was no defence if the context could be construed as offensive. There was public outrage. As Amir Butler, executive director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, has said: ‘a few nasty words about Muslims, spoken to a small gathering by a small group, transformed an unknown organisation into martyrs with an international platform.’

Previously incorrigibly naughty six-year old Joshua Cohen was permanently cured of his bad behaviour by being briefly placed by his desperate parents in a local Catholic school. When they asked him what the nuns had done there to effect his miraculous reform, Joshua replied, ‘ Didn’t you see what pictures were on their walls?’

I was put in mind of this rather feeble Jewish joke by a report in today’s newspapers that a 5-foot gilt and wooden crucifix that for the last half century has adorned the wall of a Torquay council crematorium has become the latest casualty in a concerted campaign to rid the nation’s public places of all Christian symbols and artefacts.

Last week it was the turn of bed-side bibles in NHS hospitals in Leicester. This week it is the turn of crucifixes in council crematoria.

The feeble joke was brought to mind upon reading about the crucifix by the thought that it can now surely only be a matter of time before some bright spark calls for all representations of the Passion to be removed from churches on the grounds the sight of them might frighten children or encourage them to emulate its example on some poor child.

We seem to have entered into a new Puritanical age, only this time inspired by secular multicultural zeal rather than religious enthusiasm.

Prominent Catholic MP, Ann Widdecombe is reported as having remarked of the removal of the crucifix, ‘This is yet another cretinous and pointless surrender of our heritage.’

Ms Widdecombe is not the only one lately and rightly to have become concerned about the threat to Britain’s cultural heritage posed by so-called ‘progressive’ forces.

Yesterday's papers carried reports of a speech made the previous day by the Prince of Wales to a group of teachers in which he voiced concern about how Britain’s cultural heritage is in danger of failing to be transmitted to schoolchildren in the name of the need for contemporary relevance.

According to a report in yesterday’s Times, what prompted the Prince’s remarks was the recent decision of the examinations board, Edexcel, to replace a requirement for students preparing for examination in English literature to study ‘classic texts by authors such as Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare in favour of focussing on slang, the language of digital communication and reality television shows’.

Edexcel is reported as having been motivated to make its decision by concern ‘to make English more accessible to students, particularly in cities’.

The mind boggles: one would have thought the decision bound to have exactly the opposite effect!!!

One of the few remaining whole texts that children studying English are required by the National Curriculum to study is George Orwell’s fabulous 1984 which becomes daily ever more prescient.

Let us hope children will not be distracted by their English home-work assignments to watch ‘Celebrity Love Island’ or web-footage of ‘Phone Chicken’ to prevent them reading Orwell’s novel through to the very end. There they will find an Appendix which outlines the history and principles of ‘Newspeak’ in words that ring all too chillingly true today:

It’s back, and that’s official!

Yesterday, the Government announced it intends to keep an electoral pledge it made to introduce a law during the lifetime of the present Parliament making it an offence to say or publish anything liable to incite religious hatred.

Paul Goggins, the Home Office Minister, who made this announcement yesterday, is reported as having said by way of reassuring those who worry such a bill might curb legitimate debate and criticism:

‘It does not stop people poking fun or causing offence. It is about stopping people from inciting hatred. It is about protecting the believer, not the belief.’

One sort of senses what distinction the Minister is seeking to draw. However, one does one wonder, in the light of it, why the Government has not become concerned to proscribe incitement to all forms of hatred of persons by anyone on whatever grounds.

Upon what grounds -- that don’t also apply with equal force to incitement to religious hatred -- is the Government not seeking to make it an offence for anyone to incite hatred of theatre-goers who don’t switch off their mobile ‘phones before performances start, or those who place garden-gnomes on their front-lawns?

Why should the Government confine the legal protection it wants extended from racial groups only to religious groups?

Why don’t we all need to be protected by the law from having hatred incited against us, regardless of our race, creed colour, sex, age, or whatever?

Surely, in confining the legal protection it seeks to extend from racial groups only to religious ones, must not the Government somewhere be in violation of one of its pieces of equality legislation ?

Doesn't anyone else in society suffer from the hatred of others from incitement to which the government should surely also be seeking to protect them by banning it?

I don’t know about you, but I find casuistic in the extreme the Government’s distinction between the religious believer, who must receive protection, and their religious belief, which need not.

If some individual or group persists in a hateful form of belief or action, and if it should be legitimate and lawful to point out the hatefulness of this form of belief or action to others, why shouldn't it also be perfectly legitimate and lawful to be able, not just to hate whoever should persist in such hateful forms of belief and action, but also to point out to others not only the hatefulness of them but the equal hatefulness of whoever persists in them?

And what can pointing out to someone the hatefulness of another be but inciting them to join one in hating that hateful other person?

I just don’t get, therefore, what the Government wants us to think it is up to in introducing this proposed piece of legislation.

Like many others, however, I strongly suspect that ...

CLICK HERE for further details of Our Island Story

In the Guardian on Saturday, Tristram Hunt decided to take up arms against Tim Collins, the obsolete shadow education secretary, by criticising the Conservative history education policy. Now Hunt is an excellent historian, and one with whom we at Civitas have had contact in the past, but the nature of his response to the Conservatives’ desire to combat the ‘yawning gaps’ in the curriculum by emphasising chronology and narrative is curious. For he launches into a rant about the defects of Whig history and cautions against – nay, pours opprobrium on Collins for allegedly advocating – the kind of error perpetrated by the Japanese ministry of education’s omission of Japanese wartime atrocities from its textbooks. But hold your horses sunshine. What makes you assume that any response to higgledy-piggledy and culturally relativistic teaching must necessarily be fascist thought control and the translation of history, the most complex of humanities, into a ‘simple-minded morality play’?

Let’s take stock of the contemporary situation. For a start, the government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has expressed its concerns about the current system’s inadequacies. In its most recent report, it bewails the ‘fragmentation of the learning experience’ – what David Starkey has dubbed the ‘mosaic’ approach – for its failure to inculcate in pupils a basic chronological framework. Not long after the QCA’s report was published, the Historical Association, having been commissioned by the government to audit the way the subject is taught, agreed that the subject is in a profoundly parlous state. Supplementing popular concerns of teachers, parents and academics, the QCA and the Historical Association both referred to the ‘widespread disquiet over what is seen as the gradual narrowing and “Hitlerization” of post-14 history.’ Even despite this, the number of school leavers able to say what Auschwitz was, or even provide precise dates for World War II is alarmingly low. What’s more, in a 2001 survey of 200 pupils, 30 per cent of 11- to 18-year olds thought that Oliver Cromwell fought at the Battle of Hastings; and, three years later, a poll of 1,300 pupils aged 10 to 14 found more than a quarter unable to say which war D-Day was associated with. I’d laugh if I didn’t want to cry.

Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph devoted its lead front page story, plus its main editorial, to the subject of the National Lottery Bill. When enacted, the Government will have a much bigger say in determining how money raised from the Lottery will be allocated.

When first created in 1992, the primary purpose of the Lottery was to raise monies for worthy causes not otherwise funded by state revenues, such as sport, heritage, and the arts.

Upon being elected in 1997, New Labour changed the remit of where Lottery funds could go so as to include health, education, and the environment, into which areas they have increasingly since flowed.

As was predicted at the time, the effect of New Labour’s decision has been a substantial reduction in Lottery money going into the areas it was created to help. As the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday:

‘In 1996-97, … the lottery gave £291 million to good causes. Last year it was down to £216 million. The amount spent on health, education and the environment has grown from £231 million in its first year, to a peak of £433 million last year. Since 1997, £360 million of lottery money has been spent on heart disease, cancer and stroke care, while £300 million has gone on “healthy living centres”’

Both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, which today runs a two-page feature on New Labour’s plans for the Lottery Fund, are both highly critical of New Labour for diverting it from the areas the Lottery was created to help into plugging gaps in public services supposedly financed by taxes and national insurance.

But should the state have ever got involved at all in charitable funding in the first place?

As is well-known, the prime Lottery punters are the lower social classes, not noted for their patronage of the arts and national heritage, or even sports.

As the Mail notes in its report, ‘since the Lottery started, the percentage of Britons taking part in sport has not increased at all.’

Instead, it seems Britons prefer to remain inveterate couch potatoes, topping the European league table for nightly hours spent glued to the box and devoting precious few to reading.

As ever, the prime beneficiaries of state largesse would appear to be the middle classes. For example, £78 million of Lottery money went towards the costs of rebuilding and refurbishing the Royal Opera House, a venue not exactly noted for drawing to it to the social classes who patronise the Lottery.

Far more disturbing than reports of the National Lottery failure to fulfil its original purpose has been the apparent manifest failure of income tax to fulfil the purpose for which it was introduced.

This, as all good students of English history know, i.e. anyone born before c. 1960, was to finance the military.

According to a report in today’s Daily Mail, Newcastle City Council is considering requiring comedians who wish to perform at its town hall to sign a pledge they will not make any jokes about homosexuals, lesbians or ethnic minorities.

Councillors who are calling for the requirement claim it necessary to ensure comedians performing on their turf do not violate the council’s ‘social inclusion policy’.

In elaborating on their reasons for calling for this requirement, the deputy leader of Newcastle's ruling Lib Dems is reported to have said:

‘This is not about free speech. It is about whether the council should hire out its premises to those who are deliberately offensive to minorities.’

In a form of circumlocution for having come up with, doubtless, our Deputy Prime Minister would have been willing to give up one of his two jags, this same council leader is reported to have added:

‘The equality board is recommending to the executive that anyone who wishes to hire the City Hall should sign as part of their contract confirmation that the proposed use would not be offensive and break our social inclusion policy. If people do not wish to sign they could use other premises.’

If this is not a sign that, when the forthcoming bill is passed make incitement to religious hatred an offence, one can be sure to see a massive curtailment in the freedom of comedians to make jokes about religions, contrary to what government ministers have claimed, then nothing is.

More importantly, however, what the councillor has said betrays something far more sinister than simply a po-faced humourlessness for which leftist politicos are rightly noted.

What right have local councillors to consider the municipal premises over which they exercise control their own private property?

Surely, they administer these premises on behalf of the communities they represent. If these premises are open to hire by the public and someone wishes to hire them for a lawful purpose for which the premises are not inherently unsuited, by what right can a council withhold their hire on the grounds it does not approve of the purpose for which they wanted for hire?

Who is not being inclusive: comedians who refuse to sign the pledge because they want to be able to make jokes about gays or whatever, or these councillors?

May a conservative-minded local authority likewise withhold the hire of its town hall from comedians who refuse to sign a pledge that they will refrain from making jokes about vicarage tea parties or Women’s Institute flower-arrangement classes?

Surely, it is significant that, by far, the most successful tv comedy show in years, ‘Little Britain’, is a show that consistently sends up just about everyone in society - above all, perhaps, gays, which at least one of its two main stars openly admits to being in real life.

By the councillor's reasoning, the BBC would have to take ‘Little Britain’ off the air, not to mention the endlessly repeated episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil Fawlty dares to mention the war!

For those who have read this far, but seek something a trifle more edifying than this rant, I close with a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a work that gives such eloquent and prescient warning of the dangers of the cultural tyranny liable to attend the kind of democratic despotism Britain has increasingly become of late:

Christian Aid has been trying to add to our sense of guilt over the problems of Africa by publishing a report claiming that imposing free trade on African countries has cost them almost £150 billion over the last 20 years.

This sounds dreadful, as if we are deliberately trying to make a bad situation worse for some ideological objective – pure economics. But what Christian Aid turns out to mean by free trade is the dumping on African countries of EU food surpluses, which can be bought for less than African farmers can produce their crops, so the local economy is undermined.

No one would dispute that this is a foolish and pernicious process, but what does it have to do with free trade? The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, which is responsible for these gross surpluses, is about as far from the principles of free trade as anything could be. Billions of pounds are spent paying inefficient European farmers (especially the French ones) to produce expensive crops that nobody wants. To avoid actually having to destroy this food, it is given, or ‘sold’, to Africa. Without the CAP, which consumes 40% of the entire EU budget, there would be less undermining of African farmers.

Good news about Civitas’ project to republish H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story. The Daily Telegraph’s fabulous campaign has been overwhelmingly successful. Within a week, as John Clare points out in today’s ‘Any questions?’, £13,345 has been raised, and the money keeps coming in. One of the lovely things about this article is the sheer enthusiasm of the readers and donors, and the newspaper’s leader, ‘Our story is worth telling’, adds further welcome endorsement.

What the Telegraph appeal shows (as did George Courtauld’s unexpected bestseller, the Pocket Book of Patriotism) is the simple fact that there are many people with a passion for a more unified civic identity in Britain and a desire to place history at the centre of that drive. Numerous research documents have recently recognised the value of history for citizenship, but few are clear about how to deliver the most important (albeit unfashionable) elements in teaching history – the chronology, which makes it intelligible, and the stories, which make it memorable.

Our Island Story is the best example we have been able to find, and that is why we are putting into the arena. It might be old, arid academics might think it is out of date, but they are the ones who are out of date, for children love it, and many parents cherish the excuse to read it to their children, as the Daily Telegraph’s readers’ comments make clear. This is not about hegemony - we are not suggesting it becomes the only resource, we merely wish to offer it as an alternative to the materials currently in schools.

In addition to the Daily Telegraph coverage, Civitas’ Our Island Story appeal was featured on this morning’s Today programme. Among other things there was a revealing report which provided the juxtaposition between a handful of Bangladeshi children who were expressing their profound interest in H.E. Marshall’s story of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, and, staggeringly, their headmistress, not having read it, saying, irrelevantly, that she could not possibly endorse a book that ‘detracted from their self-esteem.’ What?!

In interview, Civitas’ Deputy Director Robert Whelan fielded the questions with his usual panache, and managed to draw from Sean Lang of the Historical Association the concession that it is a ‘very important book’. Mr Lang’s opposition to the book was that ‘it’s of its time, but its time is not now’, which led to him agreeing on the need for a return to narrative history but not wanting to commit to anything other than the need for children to grapple with a plurality of narratives and construct their own narratives – undisputable for older children, but precisely what confuses children of seven or eight years old.

In other fields people are realising that unstructured child-centred learning is failing, but in the subject of history, too many young children still suffer at the hands of people who cling to the mantras of relevance and no-such-thing-as-one-truth. As Robert said this morning, we need to bring back into primary school classrooms a sense of events following other events, and of characters and stories, because ‘you simply cannot understand your country and its institutions if you just do a series of modules about women in ancient Egypt or the condition of the medieval serf.’

CLICK HERE for further details of Our Island Story

The Daily Mail and Daily Express today follow the lead of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph by devoting a full page each to reporting and commenting on the decision by Civitas to republish the out-of-print classic children’s history of Britain, Our Island Story, by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall.

Civitas decided to republish the book so as to make it available to every primary school in the country from concern that today’s schoolchildren receive a raw deal from their study of history through being deprived of acquaintance with the grand narrative sweep of their country’s history that Mrs Marshall so ably supplied.

So enthused was the Telegraph by Civitas’ decision to republish the work that it decided to broaden the appeal Civitas had made to friends for donations towards the costs by inviting its readers to join in making contributions. This they have done enthusiastically and in most splendid fashion, many recalling in the process how inspired they became with history by first reading Marshall’s book.

Indeed, today’s Daily Telegraph contains as equally an enthusiastic paean to the book by Lady Antonia Fraser.

As might be expected, the coverage given by the Mail and Express to the prospect of the republication of ‘Our Island Story’ has been no less positive than that of the Telegraph, although neither saw fit to follow the Telegraph’s example by calling on their readers to contribute financially. Perhaps, they sensed, rightly or wrongly time only will tell, that the target will be reached without need of their doing so.

We should not expect their enthusiasm for the project to carry over to papers like the Guardian and to their readership. Already, misgivings have started to be voiced by those who have expressed concern that, in her book, Mrs Marshall chose to refer to the Maoris whom the British first encountered in New Zealand as ‘savage cannibals’.

Even were Mrs Marshall’s book to have contained no such infelicitous forms of expression, and, arguably, for the period it contains very few indeed and all are easily excisable or amendable so as to bring her book into line with current political sensibilities, Civitas’ decision to make her book more widely known to today’s schoolchildren would still face massive opposition from the same quarter.

For the source of their concern with a book such as hers is altogether different and goes much deeper. Rightly its opponents sense that what the book gives and would give young readers who fall victim to its charms, or victim to any other that purvey a similarly Whig interpretation of our island’s story, is a sense of national identity that these opponents of the book wish bitterly to resist schoolchildren today being given the opportunity to acquire.

Back at the very start of the millennium, well before Civitas’ decision to reprint Mrs. Marshall’s book was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye there, the redoubtable Polly Toynbee had given voice to precisely those sentiments that truly underlie the recently voiced opposition to the idea of republishing and disseminating Marshall’s book.

Posted by David Conway on June 23, 2005 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)