Civitas Blog

As the BBC reported this week, Britain now has a citizenship test. If you want the passport you will have to pass the official national test, be accepted as speaking sufficient English and then attend a special public ceremony held by a local registrar. The 45-minute test – covering government, society and practical issues and costing £34 – came into force yesterday. People seeking to become British will take the test at one of 90 centres across the country, before taking part in a formal citizenship ceremony. The ‘Life in the UK’ test is the last of a series of changes to how people become British brought in by the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, now also the former Work and Pensions Secretary.

It is good to see that the government has decided to raise the bar slightly on immigrant naturalization by making some familiarity with Britain a prerequisite. But is it enough?

The Times reports today the launch of a new campaign designed to educate children about the dangers of gun crime. It has been launched amidst mounting police concern about the increasing numbers and ever earlier age of black children who have taken to carrying guns.

Speaking yesterday at the launch of the campaign, London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, used the occasion to condemn rap music stars for having glamorised violence and promoted the use of weapons. With these groups firmly in mind, he is reported to have said people in the public eye should consider what role models they set.

A few months ago (Guardian 4th August 2005), the Mayor publicly defended the Muslim cleric, Sheikh Qaradawi, being allowed into this country to address young British Muslims, despite the cleric having publicly supported suicide bombings of civilians in Israel, something which the Mayor also went on to condemn.

Describing the Sheikh as ‘one of the world's most eminent Muslim religious leaders’, the Mayor claimed denying the cleric entry would show disrespect to British Muslims who he claimed revered him and only serve to increase the number of alienated fanatics.

The Sheikh is a public figure and role model for his admirers. Why should his alleged high standing among them be thought to license his being able to glorify one form of morally unjustifiable violence, when the high standing of rap artists among young British blacks is claimed precisely why they should desist from glorifying another form of unjustified violence?

Won’t the disrespect shown by the Mayor to young British blacks in condemning their cultural heroes merely alienate them and thereby increase their numbers prepared to carry guns?

Although portrayed as the spontaneous outpourings of justifiably alienated Muslim youth, the current disturbances occurring nightly in France, but also lately in Denmark, are not isolated incidents. They form part of a wider clash between two ways of life. One is secular, liberal and tolerant. It is the western way, although it has not always been so. The other is closed, illiberal, and fundamentalist. It is the way Islam is currently practised in so many places today and is long overdue for the same kind of modernisation and liberalisation as Christianity started to undergo at the time of the Reformation.

At that time, Europe was riven by similar kinds of religious strife as we are seeing there today. Indeed, tomorrow marks nothing less than the 400th anniversary of what, arguably, Was London's first successfully foiled religiously motivated planned suicide-bombing.

There are striking parallels between, on the one hand, the current conflict in Europe between disaffected and radicalised young Muslims, typically of non-European extraction, and earlier conflicts there between its various different Christian denominations.

One might, therefore, have supposed that those called on today to deal with these problems would have been tempted to see how similar problems were successfully addressed in earlier times. But so close-minded is our present government towards anything and everything that happened before about 1960, that, despite the best endeavours of those within it, like Tony Blair and Charles Clarke, who at least take the Islamist threat seriously, they simply cannot see how so many of the current measures they are proposng to resolve the current problems simply play into the hands of those behind religiously-motivated disorder.

Two classic instances illustrate this folly. The first is the government’s appallingly short-sighted Religious Hatred Bill. The other its cooption of to all appearances extremely immoderate Muslims onto the very advisory bodies it has created for suggestions as to how it should deal with these problems.

As far as the bill is concerned, while called for by Muslims ostensibly so they may gain the same legal protection from hatred being stirred up against them as Sikhs and Jews currently enjoy under the Race Relations Act, in reality the bill seems unneeded to secure such protection, since they already enjoy it. Nor does concern to gain such protection seem the real reason they are calling for it which rather seems to be a desire to insulate any aspect of their religion from criticism.

However honourable might be the motives of Muslims calling for it, this truly is going to be the tragic effect of this bill when enacted. Its effect will be tragic because, like all other creeds, religious or secular, Islam stands in permanent need of being able to be openly criticised, even ridiculed, so that the respective and prospective adherents of its various forms be able to be liberated from any intellectual or moral errors to which their adherence might otherwise have led them. This is important, not just for those who may have become subject to these errors, but for others.

No one saw more clearly than Adam Smith how crucial for the stability and cohesion of any society was the need for its members to be able to criticise and even ridicule each others’ most dearly held beliefs, especially their religious ones. Writing in 1776 in his Wealth of Nations, Smith observed ...

Trying before buying is a concept alien to New Labour. Whilst this government’s been in power, initiative after initiative has been rolled out without so much as a pilot study.

‘[T]he obvious purpose of a 90-day detention law… [s]urely. was to put pressure on suspects and their associates to talk. The police would be able to pick up anyone they felt like and say: "Tell us all you know and we will let you go. Otherwise we'll hold you for three months and interrogate you all the time."

This observation is made in a letter to the editor that appears in today’s issue of the Daily Telegraph.

Given how weak were the ostensible reasons offered by the police as to why they needed power to detain suspects without trial for as many as 90 days, it seems the letter writer has hit on the real reason behind their request. Let us henceforth suppose it so.

The writer of the letter appears to think such powers excessive and unconscionable. He writes:

‘Maybe this would have helped them make some intelligence breakthroughs, maybe it would simply have generated false accusations against innocent people. Either way, it looked like a step toward Guantanamo-style torture.’

Behind all the hype and tripe served up by pundits and politicians in the last few days over this issue, it seems the real issue might be whether the current threat to national security from Islamist terror is so grave as to justify granting the authorities license to place such enormous harrowing psychological pressure on individuals in the hope thereby of extracting from them information that might enable them to prevent acts of terror.

All sides admitted there was no magic to the chosen figure of ninety days: but clearly the longer the period of detention the greater the pressure capable of being exerted.

Suppose that had the ninety day clause been passed yesterday, the extra pressure the extra sixty days would have allowed the police to exert might in the future make the critical difference in terms of their being able to extract from detainees vital information that enables them to prevent some future terror bombing that claims several hundred or thousand lives.

Would its being able to do be enough to justify this extra period of detention, even though some might be scarred for life by the experience of being detained under its terms, although entirely innocent and having been found in to possess no useful information at all?

How much suffering and psychological damage incurred by how many innocent detainees, if any, could be the morally justified price that needed to be paid to prevent the death of how many other innocent people?

These are agonising and unpleasant questions that present circumstances force us to face.

Some seem to feel the probability such an extension of police powers might be able to make a critical difference in terms of their ability to prevent terrorism is too low as to warrant being given them.

Frankly, if I knew for certain it would do so, I would have no compunction in wanting the police to be given them. But, of course, we don’t know it will do so, but we can be fairly certain that some innocent people will be made to go through hell if they are. So how are we to weigh up the balance of risks and potential benefits against each other.

Rather than all the waffle that was talked yesterday, should not such issues have been discussed by MPs yesterday?

After having seen Parliament emasculate the Anti-Terrorism Bill by reducing the maximum period terror suspects can be detained without trial from 90 to 28 days, its remaining provisions are now under assault from the Muslim groups created by the government after 7/7 to give advice on how it should go about improving relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Today’s Guardian reports these groups are claiming such provisions of the bill as that proscribing the glorification of terrorism will only serve still further to alienate young British Muslims, thereby increasing their likelihood of ending up recruited in the ranks of Al Qaeda's suicide-bombers.

They claim these clauses will antagonise these young Muslims if enacted because they will then no longer feel able to engage lawfully in what they consider to be perfectly legitimate support of ‘self-determination struggles around the world’. For example, these groups are reported to have claimed, “the extremely fine line” between empathising with the Palestinian cause and justifying the actions of suicide bombers could no longer be drawn with any legal certainty.

Similarly, they claim, any list compiled by the Home Office of extremist websites, bookshops and organisations judged of concern will be seen as ‘censorship of all those who might criticise British foreign policy or call for political unity among Muslims.’

Instead of anti-terror legislation, what should begin, the Muslim advisory groups claim, is a ‘dialogue’ between British Muslims and others.

There are several puzzling things about these expressed concerns and proposals.

First, the Muslim groups opposed to the anti-terror bill for the reasons rehearsed above also tend to favour a Religious Hatred Law proscribing incitement of hatred towards those of their faith. They are apparently unconcerned about the repeatedly expressed concerns critics of this bill have voiced that it is bound to inhibit legitimate of criticism of religions, Islamic or otherwise.

How can there be open dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims, something for which the Muslims advisory groups are calling, if non-Muslims are to be inhibited from openly voicing critical opinion about aspects of their reigion through fear of thereby exposing themselves to prosecution for incitement to religious hatred?

Muslim critics of the anti-terror bill must abandon either support for the Religious Hatred Bill or opposition to the proposed anti-glorification of terror clause of the Anti-Terrorism Bill. They cannot expect to be able to have it both ways.

Secondly, and far more importantly, ...

In spite of the ‘pivotal’ new era of autonomy for education practitioners, childminders and nursery school teachers are to now be included in OfSTED’s remit.
New legislation under the Childcare Bill will demand that all infant-care providers implement a new national curriculum. Consequently, 0-3 year olds across the country will soon be learning the same thing, the same way, most probably at the same hour. What is concerning about an infant curriculum however, extends much further than restricting creative freedom for toddlers.

In Shakespeare’s severely underrated tragedy, Timon of Athens, Timon is told: ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest,/ but the extremity of both ends’ – a key observation considering the eponymous protagonist’s grotty end. In times characterised by Huntingdon’s clash of civilisations, between the extremes of ‘West’ and ‘Islamism’, this warning about extremities is disturbingly pertinent. But there is another pair of extremities, too, within the ‘West’, which is a cause for concern, namely a clash between the liberal ideals of assimilation and the celebration of difference. In the national media during the last couple of weeks we have witnessed an even greater glut of material on the subject of race relations than normal. Largely, of course, this has been provoked by the crisis in France, a crisis that challenges the republican model of assimilation and demands a reconsideration of that particular notion of laissez faire race relations within an ethnically heterogeneous old world state. We can now see that while at one pole the multiculturalist model is deeply flawed, because it formalises separatism and introduces what Trevor Phillips has called ‘have a nice day racism’, at the other pole the French assimilationist model fails because it relies on an illusion.

Despite making light of it in a leader that parodies the diary he might currently be keeping in some remote cave dwelling in a far off land, the report in today’s Daily Telegraph that Verso Books has just brought out, in a specially commissioned new English translation, a collection of all statements made by Osama bin Laden between 1994 and 2004 is no laughing matter.

For the same week has also seen reports, not only that the Queen is now an Al Qaeda target, but that Islamic web-sites have recently been showing a video made by the British-born July suicide-bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan, shortly before he blew himself up along with fellow passengers on the London Underground, in which he calls on his fellow British Muslim brothers and sisters to join him in the jihad that the Saudi Sheikh declared on the West some years ago, whose text Verso Books has now so responsibly and obligingly brought to the nearest bookshop of every university campus in the country, where, doubtless, many an impressionable confused and alienated young man and woman will have ample opportunity to read it at leisure, doubtless impressed by the apparent veneer of legitimacy the new imprint has given his views.

The publishers are quick to claim that, in publishing them, they are not implying their agreement with them. Rather, they claim on their web-site that they have decided to published bin Laden's statements to ‘demythologise the terrorist network’.

‘The idea is to have an annotated, scholarly collection of bin Laden’s words. Until now, his words have only been available in poor translations or sound-bites’, so one of Verso’s editors is reported to have explained.

According to the report in the Telegraph , one of the things the book makes clear is that, among the terms of surrender on which the Sheikh is apparently insisting before being willing to call off his war against the West, is that it discontinues ‘alcohol and gambling’ as well as displaying adverts that contain photographs of women who, apparently, are also required to step down from all jobs in which they serve ‘passengers, visitors, and strangers’.

While being, therefore, most unlikely to attract to his cause any chavs or Essex boys and girls, the views of bin Laden contained in the book are unlikely to be nearly as off-puting to any disaffected young British Muslims who might stumble upon the book, many of whom seem especially vulnerable at the ,moment to being drawn into the more fundamentalist and intolerant versions of their faith such as that which are espoused in it.

In light of this undoubted fact, it was arguably the height of cynical irresponsibility on Verso’s part to decide to commission and publish the book.

The Government wants and will soon announce new ways to force low-income workers to save more for their retirement. It has already announced it intends to extend by 2 years until 67 the age before which the full state pension can be drawn.

Given the relative inelasticity in demand for alcohol, plus the demonstrable highly damaging effect on health of more than moderate levels of consumption, would not the best way to induce such saving be for the government to impose a steep increase on the duty on alcohol, ear-marking the revenue for pensions?

At a stroke, the government would achieve the increased ‘savings’, improve the heath of the nation, and, as an added bonus, reduce social disorder associated with binge-drinking and the costs of policing it.

The price of alcohol has fallen in real terms very severely over the last couple of decades, thereby stoking demand and its associated costs.

The alternative is to raise taxes or find some other way in which to force people to save more. In the end, whatever it decides will amount to the same thing, as they will have less disposable income and therefore have to reduce their consumption of non-necessities such as alcohol.

Of course, it would have been much better had the country never had to start from such a situation as it finds itself in, but that is besides the point. The country faces a real pension crisis and something has to give.

At least, on the suggestion mooted above, private sector workers, shortly to be made to slog on to age 67 before being able to draw their full state pension, will be able to take some comfort from the thought that their public sector counterparts, who remain able to retire on full occupational pension at 60, will no longer be able to down quite as many pints down the local as their private sector counterparts toil to pay for public sector pensioners.

Latest education reforms have once again raised the question of selection. However, the government, who remain adamant that changes in education policy in no way reinstate selection, are not the ones raising this issue. Despite New Labour’s egalitarian rhetoric, many feel that granting new autonomy to schools will lead to a steep rise in the unofficial selection already occurring today. The education minister, Ruth Kelly, and the Prime Minister, however, insist that schools’ new freedoms, including independence from LEAs, will not denote powers to select pupils.

Dr John Sentamu, the incoming Archbishop of York and second most senior churchman in the Anglican communion, has launched a swingeing attack on multiculturalism. According to yesterday's Times, he has argued that multiculturalism is a doctrine which allows minority cultures to express themselves but is hostile to the majority host culture. It is in this way, for example, that England has become ashamed of its Empire and of its Christian heritage, wrongly in his opinion. As Britain's first black archbishop his words have particular heft and, following as they do his involvement in the Macpherson Inquiry, which introduced the notion of institutional racism, they represent something of a Damascus moment. Like the leader writer in the Times, I wholeheartedly agree with, and am encouraged by, his perhaps controversial statements. Anyone out there disagree? How can you disagree?

British culture is undergoing quite a make-over at present in the interests of its becoming more friendly to British Muslims, or, at least, less liable to arouse their wrath.

Where will the process end? Should it even be beginning?

Today’s Times reports that the director of a just-ended London run of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great removed from his production a scene in which Tamburlaine burns the Koran for fear it might offend Muslims. Its inclusion, he is reported to have claimed, ‘would have been unnecessarily inflammatory’.

Across the page is a report that a Muslim insurance salesman from Bristol is suing his employer for racial and religious discrimination after it offered him and his fellow employees as a reward for their good performance bottles of wine. Because consumption of alcohol is forbidden in Islam, he accuses the employer of having subjected him to ‘exclusion’.

The insurance salesman is not the only British Muslim who complains of social exclusion because of his compatriots fondness for drink.

Monday’s Guardian carries a report of a meeting of young British Muslims the paper had organised in London the previous week to enable it to find out about their current thinking. Apart from holding Tony Blair largely responsible for the July suicide bombings, the most noteworthy finding of the paper was its discovery of how excluded the young British Muslims complained of feeling as a result of their compatriots fondness for a tipple.

‘Non-Muslim Britain hasn’t begun to grasp how big an obstacle alcohol is to Muslims’ participation…. Alcohol is probably now one of the most effective and unquestioned forms of exclusion practised in the UK, affecting every kind of social network.’ Such was the ‘new insight’ the paper claimed to have come away from the meeting having acquired.

Meanwhile on the other side of the globe, today’s Daily Telegraph reports Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, recently delivered a lecture at the Islamic University of Islamabad in which he came close to offering an apology on behalf of his coreligionists for the Crusades.

‘Most Christians would now say that the history of the crusades … w[as] a serious betrayal of many of the central beliefs of Christian faith’, he is quoted as saying

In view of the Archbishop’s statement, one wonders for how much longer the St George’s Cross will remain England’s national flag. According to a report by CNN last month, calls for its replacement by a more ‘inclusive’ symbol have already begun to be voiced. Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, is quoted as having claimed it was now time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is ‘not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with’.

The white flag might be thought a suitable replacement. But there is one minority that might have difficulty identifying with such a pacific symbol.

Mrs Henderson Presents, a new film about the famous Windmill Theatre in London’s Soho, opens in cinemas across the country tonight. Judi Dench plays Mrs Henderson, an eccentric and wealthy widow, who went into partnership with producer Vivian Van Damm to revive the ailing genre of music hall and variety, hard hit by the talkies. She took over the lease of a run-down cinema, converted it for stage performances, and attracted the punters by presenting nudes for the first time on the British stage.

Ever since 1737, the Lord Chamberlain’s office had exercised powers of stage censorship. Every theatrical performance had to be licensed, to ensure that standards of taste, decency and respect for the Christian religion were maintained. Oscar Wilde’s play Salome was banned in 1893 on the grounds that Biblical characters could not be represented on the stage. Topics such as homosexuality could not even be hinted at, and bad language was suppressed. Nudity was out of the question.

Laura Henderson and Vivian Van Damm got round the Lord Chamberlain’s office by arguing that galleries are full of statues of naked women, and that a stationary nude woman on the stage was no more erotic than that. Amazingly, this specious argument was accepted, and nude girls featured in the shows at the Windmill, which went under the generic title of Revudeville, from 1932 until its closure in 1963. The shows still had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, but so friendly were the officials that they would ring to say when the inspector was on his way over. On one occasion a nude sneezed, and on another a dancer knocked one of the girls off her podium. On both occasion there were stern letters from the Lord Chamberlain’s office, warning them that the girls must on no account move. As long as that rule was adhered to, the Lord Chamberlain was satisfied. During the war the Windmill was regarded as an important contribution to the war effort, keeping up the spirits of the troops home on leave. It was the only London theatre not to close during the Blitz, and its proud slogan ‘We Never Closed’ was easily transmuted into ‘We Never Clothed’.

The Child Support Agency (CSA) has become synonymous with failure. The agency has a case backlog of 350,000, they succeed in collecting even nominal money from only 70% of those owing maintenance, and the number of public complaints has risen by 30% in the last year to 63,678. Indeed, the CSA failed five of its seven performance targets.

The Turner Commission is out tomorrow, here are our proposals for pension reform.

• Raise the retirement age to 70 in steps of 6 months per year over 10 years.


• Require contributions sufficient to meet the state minimum but no more.


• Scrap all up-front tax reliefs, but make pension benefits tax free.

Click Here for the Full Report (PDF)

Some serious questions about rules of evidence, or the judgement of some judges who apply them, are raised by the acquittal at the Old Bailey yesterday of the brother and sister of one of the two British Muslim suicide bombers of a Tel Aviv bar Aviv on 29th April 2003.

Among the alleged offences of which the pair of siblings were found not guilty was their failing to inform the authorities of their brother’s intention to commit an act of terror, an offence under section 38 of the amended Terrorism Act of 2000.

The prosecution case rested, for the most part, on an exchange of emails between them and their brother that took place immediately before the suicide bombing in which he took part. These emails, so the prosecution alleged, showed the two defendants had prior knowledge of what he was about to do.

One, sent by the bomber to his brother a week before the bombing, warned: ‘Difficult times may lay ahead for you and the family in the next few weeks or months. Plan now and get rid of any material you may consider problematic. Please give a copy of the following message to my wife: “After reaching our destination Allah guided us to his friends who … said they needed our help very much.… Know that everything is just a test.… Look after [… their children] and bring them up well. We did not spend a long time together in this world but I hope through Allah’s mercy and your patience we can spend an eternity together”’.

Another, sent by the bomber's sister to him the following day by way of reply, went: ‘We are happy that you are focused. … We all have to be firm and focused with reality as time is slipping away. There is really no time to be weak and emotional…. When we see you again it will be like only half a day has passed. You have no time for emotions.’

The defence denied the emails showed the two defendants had prior knowledge of the imminent bombing in Israel, and the jury accepted there was reasonable doubt.

What is problematic about their acquittal is that the jury were obliged by the judge to come to a decision on the matter in ignorance of some further circumstantial evidence the prosecution had wished to submit but which the judge ruled inadmissible.

That evidence was the testimony of former pupils of two different Derbyshire primary schools at which the sister of the bomber briefly taught as a supply-teacher in the immediate aftermath of September 11th 2001.
Children at both schools, apparently, had independently reported the woman had voicedto them praise of the attack on the Trade Towers, and, more importantly in this context, had claimed, according to one of them aged 10 at the time, that she was ‘on bin Laden’s team’.

The judge ruled the childfren's testimony inadmissible on the grounds that they 'were unreliable witnesses whose statements could not be corroborated’.

What makes the judge's ruling problematic is two-fold. First, it seems there was corroboration of what the children said their teacher had told them in the form of a tacit admission by her made shortly afterwards. Apparently, soon after the children made their claims about what the teacher had said, she was brought before the educational employment agency which had placed her in their schools. According to it, she ‘accepted that the comments were inappropriate and undertook not to repeat them’.

If this is not corroboration by the defendant that she had made the statements the children claimed she had , what then is?

Second, the police apparently discovered in the home of this defendant literature of the now banned Al-Muhajiroun, a break-away splinter- group of Hizb ut-Tahir to which her fellow-accused is also reported to have belonged.

Whatever difference between them, both these groups are on record as supporting suicide bombings in Israel.

Al-Muhajiroun (AM) was set up by Omar Bakri Mohammed in 1996 . A report on this organisation was published in May 2003 written by Michael Whine, Communications Director of the Community Security Trust Division of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. A paragraph of this report runs:

‘From their head office in the Lee Valley Techno Park in north London, AM claim to provide physical support, including finance and recruitment to overseas Islamist groups, including Hamas, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Hizbollah…. and to encourage British volunteers to train and fight abroad’.

In the context of the trial, surely these facts about the ideological proclivities of the accused amount to further circumstantial corroboration of what the schoolchildren had claimed they had been told by one of them after September 11, and combined with what the teaching agency claimed should have rendered their testimony admissible.

Had the judge allowed the prosecution to make the children's testimony known to the jury, it is possible it may still have decided to acquit the two defendants.

Even if it had, that testimony plus the reported filiation of one and source of literature found at the home of the other make it impossible to believe the complete incredulity they expressed upon their acquittal at what their brother had done.

Said the bomber's sister of him, ‘I cannot believe he would have contemplated such a thing – that he could think of planting a bomb and killing innocent people. It is beyond me.’

Her brother added on their joint behalf: ‘’We want to make it clear we did not know what our brother was going to do. It shocked us as everyone else.’

Since their brother did no more than that which Al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir consider to be perfectly legitimate and commendable, I feel like saying: go tell it to the Marines!