Civitas Blog

It's difficult not to feel uneasy about the number of new powers that have been granted to the government. Again and again, liberties which we once held dear and which previous generations fought to safeguard are derided and dismissed: Blair and Co. have removed habeas corpus, put house arrest on the statute book, banned protesting within a kilometre of parliament, and put forward proposals for the satellite tracking of cars for road use charging - and now ID cards are on the way. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been held up by MP's in the House of Commons on a number of occasions recently. Poor Orwell: he intended his dystopia to be cautionary, not a textbook for the Cabinet.

In response to worries about holding personal information on ID cards, the government smugly replies that it can already access whatever it wants - from our tax details, to that bout of tonsillitis ten years ago, to the points on our driving licence, and the dating line we called last week. But this is not the same as having all the data on a single central database - especially since cards could someday be demanded by police on the streets or required for the use of basic public services. So with the opposition saying that ID cards are a threat to civil liberties, and the government promising that ID cards will protect our civil liberties, who is right? Are the sacrifices required by such a measure worth making?

George Galloway is right to attack the government for using African aid as a diversionary tactic, redirecting attention away from Afghanistan and Iraq and compensating for the public’s bad faith. But, as the BBC reports, he has been accused of self-righteous sloganeering, and his grasp of the issues is lamentably simplistic. For an altogether more sophisticated and informed analysis of what aid can and cannot achieve, the best place to look this week is The Economist. See both the leader and the special report: 'The difficulty of helping Africa'.

Today, flags are to be flown half-mast in mourning for victims of yesterday’s atrocities in London.

If nothing else good comes of what happened, let us hope it will finally lead the BBC, and other media who have so lamely followed it in recent times, to consign once and for all to the dust-bin of history the term ‘militant’ as a euphemism with which to refer to perpetrators of such dastardly deeds.

There is little comfort to be gained from today’s papers. But alongside the eyewitness accounts of startled commuters and the photographs of the carnage, there is one story to lift the spirits, not without relevance to what happened yesterday.

According to a report in today’s Times, archaeologists have just unearthed in the Syrian city of Palmyra an apparently phenomenally well-preserved third century mosaic depicting St George slaughtering the dragon. Some archaeologists are reported to believe the mosaic may well be the source of the St George legend.

So closely associated today is England’s patron saint with this legend that we forget he once had an identity altogether apart from and prior to it and that it only became tacked onto the story of his life to commemorate some genuine heroic act of his which the story was intended to symbolise.

It is deeply politically unfashionable and incorrect these days to venerate the name of this saint whose status as the patron saint of England is often ridiculed today in view of his not being a native-born Englishman.

But there are many important quintessential elements of British national culture which have a foreign origin. For example, our national flag in which St George's red cross figures as the symbol of England, is known as the ‘Union Jack’ from the practice of King James 1, in whose reign England became united with Scotland and Ireland, of referring to himself by the French equivalent of his name – Jacques!

The non-English origin of the patron saint of England is one of them.

Who was St George? When and why did he become patron saint of England? How and why did the legend of the slaying of the dragon come to be attached to the story of his life? And what possible grain of comfort can be thought capable of being drawn from knowledge of any of these things, given yesterday’s atrocities?

I was clearly guilty of wishful thinking in the blog I wrote last Friday when I applauded the apparent decision by the BBC, in the wake of last Thursday’s London bombings, to cease referring to those who had carried them out, and perpetrators of other such atrocities, by euphemisms such as ‘militants’, as had become its practice, and instead to start calling these despicable vermin by their rightful name of terrorists!

Today’s Times carries a brief news report to the effect that the BBC has decided to refer to last Thursday’s bombers on its news website simply as ‘bombers’, and not ‘terrorists’.

In explanation of this terminological decision, a spokeswoman for the BBC is reported as having said: ‘The word “terrorist” is not banned by the BBC …. [but] we take care great of the language used.’

…. So, it’s back to normal service from the BBC, although their news bulletins have yet to fall into terminological line.

If last Thursday’s bombings in London temporarily brought some parts of the BBC to their collective senses, they showed no such signs of having been able to awake from their complacent stupor the upper echelons of London’s Metropolitan police.

Shortly before the bombings occurred, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, was interviewed on BBC radio’s ‘Today’ programme about security at the supposedly still forthcoming Olympic Games to be held in London in 2012. In the interview, Sir Ian boasted how British anti-terrorist procedures were the envy of the world.

Shortly after the bombings, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met, Brian Paddick, took to task a BBC interviewer who had spoken of ‘Islamic terrorists’ as their possible perpetrators. ‘As far as I am concerned’, Mr Paddick said, ‘Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’

Doubtless, it is because Mr Paddick’s panglossian views about Islam and terror are so widely shared by his senior colleagues that, according to a report in today’s Times, the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers have not seen fit in the light of last Thursday’s bombings to withdraw their financial support for bringing to London later this month the controversial Swiss-based Muslim academic, Tariq Ramadan, to address young British Muslims at a ‘Middle Path’ conference to be held at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park being organised by the Muslim charity, Da’qatul Islam.

For the benefit of those who might not before have come across the names of either the speaker whose visit to London the Met are helping to finance or that of the organisers of the conference at which he is due to speak, it might help to know the following.

So you’ve had enough of the smog, the pneumatic drills, the helicopters, the sirens, and you want to scurry away for a weekend in the countryside. You’ve never been there before, and you’ve no idea what it’s like, but you recently heard someone mention the Lake District. So you do what any moderately resourceful person would do: you have a quick look on the internet, you go into a library and ask an assistant what books are available, you look at a few maps and guides, and two weeks later you end up in Ambleside. A glorious amphitheatre of crags and mountains surrounds this Lakeland town, the buildings are quaint, and if you step out into the hills you’re sure to be impressed by the views. Although the chances are you’ll come back enchanted, exhilarated and revived, you may equally have slipped on a cowpat, fallen into a ravine and been drenched in a thunderstorm. It is, to be fair, not everyone’s idea of a holiday.

Yet while it remains your prerogative to not want to venture outside the suburbs of our cities, providers are being punished for choices made in the supply pool. Until residents of the countryside can do a better job of attracting target minorities from the cities – for members of victim groups to have to find out about the holiday destination themselves is, we’re told, almost proof of a kind of institutional discrimination – it will be assumed they are bigots. We were alerted to this earlier in the year when the Lake District National Park decided to scrap its voluntary rangers (their remit: to guide interested people around the Lakes) because the majority of visitors were middle-aged middle-class white people and they were failing to draw members of ethnic minority communities. Perhaps the fallacy is obvious: ethnic minorities might not be choosing to go and take up the voluntary service.

Now, however, the Countryside Agency, has found that ethnic minorities and disabled people and city dwellers do want to go to the countryside but can’t be sure if it is a ‘welcoming’ place. I’m sceptical of how desperate the respondents in the survey were to go to the countryside, but it’s nevertheless worth examining the assumptions involved in the notion of ‘welcoming’.

In the wake of last week's terror suicide bombings in London, the Government is considering introducing new legislation to strengthen the country’s defences against further acts of terror.

Among the new laws under active consideration is one that would permit, if not require, non-nationals to be denied entry into the country, if they have previously been denied entry by another country, with whom the UK has friendly relations, on grounds of being suspected of having links with terrorists or terror organisations.

Should the Government introduce such a law very rapidly, someone who could well be liable to be denied entry to Britain as a result is Professor Tariq Ramadan of Geneva, due to speak later this month at a conference in London specially arranged for Muslim youth.

The reason why Professor Ramadan might be denied entry to Britain, should such new legislation be introduced is that, last summer, he was denied entry to the USA where he was due to take up a university appointment in Islamic ethics, after the US State Department revoked his entry visa at the last minute.

A spokesperson for the US State Department subsequently explained to a Washington Post reporter that it had revoked Professor Ramdan's entry visa 'under a section of the US code that bars terrorists and their associates, as well as people who have incited others to violence’.

On today’s World at One news programme, Professor Ramadan was interviewed about the possibility he might be denied entry into Britain on such grounds.

In that interview, Professor Ramadan was adamant there was absolutely no reason why he should be denied entry. He insisted he had always expressed opposition to the use of suicide bombings and other forms of terror and just as strongly denied ever having had any links with Islamic terrorists. He said:

‘There is nothing in my record. There are as many links to terrorists in my life as there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There is nothing in my life connected to terrorists.’

In view of Professor Ramadan’s assertion, it is, perhaps, time the US and UK governments should consider resuming their search for WMD in Iraq. This is because, although it went unmentioned in the BBC radio interview with Professor Ramadan, last December it was reported by the Geneva newspaper, Le Temps, that his name had become linked with that of alleged Al Qaeda member, Djamel Beghal, currently under arrest and about to face trial with others for having attempted to blow up the US embassy in Paris in 2001.

According to the post on the weblog of Daniel Pipes for 14 December 2004, this newspaper article ‘describes Beghal as an active part of the international Islamist terror network, an itinerant preacher dedicated to living as the Prophet did and to acts of violence against infidels. The part [of the indictment] salient to Ramadan concerns Beghal's having become a practicing Muslim in 1994. … At that time, according to the indictment, "he [Beghhal] took charge of preparing the lectures of Tariq Ramadan."’.

Professor Ramadan apparently does not admit ever having met or even being able to recall Djamel Beghal, but unfortunately did not reply to messages left by Le Temps seeking an interview on the subject.

Countries have no legal or moral obligation to reveal to non-nationals to whom they deny entry what their reasons were for denying them entry, if these reasons pertained to grounds for suspecting they might have had links with terrorists or terror organisations.

Prima facie, it looks as if the USA, and, by extension, therefore, the UK too, does have reason to suspect that, at one time Professor Ramadan, may have had significant links with a member of Al Qaeda.

It is also worth adding that, according to the on-line encyclopedia, Wikpedia, this suspected Al Qaeda member with whom the there is some reason to think Professor Ramndan might at one time have had significant links ‘once lived in London and attended the Finsbury Park mosque along with Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, … and other Al Qaeda suspects’.

Whether the Government should introduce legislation that would enable it to deny Professor Ramadan entry into this country before he is due to speak to Muslim youths here is a question I shall leave to readers to comment on.

“Why in the 21st century are we still so poor at involving patients in their care?”. So asks Simon Williams, director of policy at the Patients Association, according to a news report by the BBC, in light of the disturbingly low level of NHS patient involvement in their own treatment that is announced by the Healthcare Commission in its annual report on the state of NHS published today.

Indicative of this low level of patient involvement are the following findings of the Healthcare Commission published in its report:

· A third of patients’ diagnostic tests are not explained to them in a way that is understandable to them.

· A fifth of patients left hospital confused as to what their drugs were for.

· Only 22% of coronary bypass surgery patents were told of alternative treatments.

· The UK ranked lowest for patient involvement in their primary care among five countries surveyed.

May I proffer the following answer to Mr Williams’ question?

Britain remains poor at involving patients in their own healthcare because, under the present system of socialised provision, patients lack any genuine consumer power that alone can be provided by their having a genuine choice between providers who are allowed to compete between themselves for custom.

In the absence of genuine patient choice, there will be no competition between providers, or hence any incentive on their part to inform and involve patients fully in their treatment, should it be more costly and inconvenient for them to do so, which undoubtedly it is in a great many cases.

Tentatively, the government is feeling its way to providing greater consumer choice but healthcare providers are likely to howl if the result have the intended effect of exposing defective forms of provision.

Do you know what happens when you bomb London? The British government apologises for any offence caused and offers your coreligionists a job. No seriously, bomb us, and we’ll apologise to you. Yesterday, the BBC reported that Margaret Hodge, the Employment Minister, believes that it is important to find ways of encouraging young Muslims to feel integrated into British society, in the light of the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July, and ensuring they get jobs when they leave university is her answer. Quite apart from the ethics of such preferential treatment, she’s clearly ignorant of the circumstances of the four men (and the seven suicide bombers we previously exported to countries like Palestine and Pakistan), because decent education, jobs, the appearances of contentment and decency, really were not the cause of their radicalism.

Of course, there’s been a lot of talk about tightening up the terrorism laws, extending the security services, and policing our borders, and I cautiously applaud these measures, but, as Bill Durodie wrote in Chatham House’s recent Security, Terrorism and the UK report, the ‘problem with these is that, in seeking to secure society from the outside, we fail simultaneously to engage society from the inside with a view to winning a debate as to what we actually stand for.’ It remains to be seen if we have the nerve for that. Not just in terms of frank debate, but also in terms of unequivocal clarity. Although Tony Blair said yesterday that those who advocate suicide bombing ‘whether it's in London, whether it's in Afghanistan or Iraq, or it's in Palestine or it's in Turkey or Kashmir, or anywhere … have got no place in our country’, it’s not clear whether the government will make good on this rhetoric.

Two short weeks to the day 56 Londoners of all races, creeds and colours were indiscriminately killed by four home-grown Islamist suicide-bombers, London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, has gone on public record in support of the moral distinction, drawn by Muslim theologian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi whom the mayor has called ‘progressive’, between suicide-bombings carried out by frustrated Muslims in London, unconscionable and wrong, and those carried out by frustrated Muslims in Israel, permissible, if not heroic.

The basis for the distinction, apparently, is twofold. First, whereas ordinary Londoners are innocent, ordinary Israelis are not. Ordinary Israelis are fair game in a way ordinary Londoners are not because Israel has a militia army in which all adult Israeli citizens must serve. Second, whereas Muslims in this country with a grievance against their government’s foreign policy can register their dissent through the ballot box, Palestinians have no corresponding peaceful way to register their opposition to Israeli policy in relation to them.

Dear or dear! If the Mayor thinks these differences between Londoners and Israelis will provide sufficient moral protection for the former from those Muslims prepared to kill the latter, he is even more of a fool, and a dangerous one at that, than he is in describing the views of Dr al-Qaradawi as progressive.

Precisely because Israel’s is a militia army, there is no more reason to think that Israelis who do not refuse to do their militiary service support Israeli policy in relation to Palestinians than there is to think British citizens, who do not refuse to pay their taxes which go to pay for the British army, support British foreign policy in relation to Iraq.

What’s good for Israeli geese, from an Islamist point of view, therefore, can easily be judged by one of them no less good, from their point of view, for British gander.

As for disgruntled British Muslims having, but disgruntled Palestinians lacking, a vote, it may have escaped the Mayor’s notice that Palestinians are not Israeli citizens but have been under military occupation since the 1967 War, pending a Middle-East peace settlement. Iraqis, disgruntled with Britain’s occupation of their country, cannot register their opposition to it by voting in Britain, any mmiore than can Palestinans vote in Israeli elections. (Well, perhaps, that’s overstating things a bit, sadly, since the advent here of postal voting!) Does that entitle them to register their opposition to British foreign policy in their country by bombing Londoners?.

It is interesting to note, by the way, that the Stern Gang and Irgun restricted expression of their resistance to British rule in Palestine before 1948 by targeting British military and government installations: not by indiscriminate terror bombings. So there is precedent for non-enfranchised freedom fighters being able to be a little bit more discriminating than Palestinian suicide bombers have been.

As for the Mayor championing the views of Dr al-Qaradawi as progressive and moderate, while the Muslim teacher might, unlike some still Muslims less ‘moderate’ than he ,have condemned the London suicide-bombings, this having done so offers less than full assurance of the progressiveness and moderation of his views, given some of the other things Dr al-Qaradawi has gone on public record as having supported. These include:

· The killing of homosexuals to keep society pure;
· The killing of apostates who have rejected Islam
· Female circumcision carried out on girls
· Wife-beating
· The killing of all Israelis

Returning to the last of these practices of which the friend of the Mayor is in favour, given the current popularity in Britain today of the political opinions of rock musicians, perhaps, friends of Israel could hold a concert at Hyde Park at which Bob Dylan could be invited to come and sing his 1983 song, ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ which offers greater insight into the nature of the current Middle-East conflict than does our very own neighbourhood bully. Lest readers of Civitas’ website have never or not recently heard the song, here are their lyrics:

Ruth Kelly has admitted that Labour has failed to close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor. ‘We need to think about why children from more deprived backgrounds do not always have the opportunity to access the better schools, and what sensibly, we might be able to do about that,’ she said at the IPPR. The government has actually been aware of this for some time, at least since 1998 when Andrew Adonis – the same Andrew Adonis who wrote in Class Act that the comprehensive school system has replaced selection by ability with selection by income – entered the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, but it has for a long time denied it and now begun to frame the discussion in terms of the need for choice.

However, it is not clear how choice is possible in the current environment without reducing the regulatory burdens that make it so difficult for new start-up institutions to flourish, without therefore opening up the educational market to all and any providers, and without bringing in something approximating to vouchers for parents.

But this government doesn’t really believe in free choice. Otherwise, how could it be going ahead with the closure of the 70 or so remaining grammar schools in Northern Ireland (despite the region outperforming the rest of Britain in exams) despite the fact that two thirds of parents over there want to retain the system, as The Times reports today?