Civitas Blog

‘For me, the vital issue facing … the nation is the loss of this country’s long tradition of Christian wisdom which brought to birth the English nation…. [T]he Church in England must once again be a beacon by which the people of England can orient themselves…. Having shed an empire and lost a missionary zeal, has this great nation, and mother of parliamentary democracy, also lost a noble vision for the future? We are getting richer and richer as a nation, but less and less happy. The Church in England must rediscover her self-confidence and self-esteem that united and energised the English people…. The Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History tells not only of how the English were converted, but how that corporate-discipleship, the Church, played a major socialising and civilising role by uniting the English and conferring nationhood on them…. Christians, our priority is amongst the 72% who in the last census said they were Christians. That’s where our task lies.’

This is an extract from yesterday’s inaugural sermon by the Most Rev Dr John Sentamu, the new Archbishop of York. It suggests his ministry might bring to the Anglican church a better understanding of its historic role and purpose than that which some other leading Anglicans have displayed of late.

Rather than forever seeking to concede ground to secularists and fundamentalist followers of faiths other than Christianity whose adherents would seek its replacement by theirs, the Church of England should reassert its historic function of being the most important civilising and acculturating force in the nation.

Secularists and fundamentalists of other creeds like to claim the empty pews in so many churches throughout the land today shows it has become a post-Christian nation. The self-identification of English in the census suggests otherwise.

One of the most distinctive features of this Anglican nation was its tolerance of those of other creeds and denominations, particularly, those seeking to immigrate to Britain to escape persecution or seek economic advancement, provided they were prepared to be loyal and law-abiding.

Dr Sentamu opened his sermon by alluding to the Judaic sources of Christianity before ending it with a prayer adapted, without acknowledgement, from the Jewish liturgy. That prayer, the most sacred in the Jewish liturgy, calls on Jews to acknowledge God as their one and only Lord, before exhorting them to love God with all their hearts, souls and might.

In his adaption of this prayer, Dr Sentamu extended its scope beyond Jews to the 71% of his compatriots still prepared to classify themselves as Christian. Clearly, its scope could also be extended to include British Muslims too who worship the same God as Jews and Christians.

Rather than excluding religion from the public square, or else going even further down the multicultural route that requires England’s Christian majority to relinquish ever-more of its Christian roots and heritage, perhaps the best way for the country to increase cohesion and become a more united as a nation than it has of late become would be, as Dr Sentamu suggests, for its Christian majority to regain touch with their historic faith and traditions from which so many of them have of late become estranged, often by a deliberate strategy on the part of those with an animus against it, be they humanists or zealots of some other faith.

Recognition by all those whose own creed does not preclude them from so doing of their shared belief in the same God might be a better way to foster social cohesion and unity in England than ever further multiculturally- motivated attrition of its Christian heritage and culture.

Those young British Muslims who in recent times have seemingly become ever more reluctant to integrate and correspondingly ever more drawn towards extremist forms of their creed might be less inclined towards self-segregation and less drawn asa result towards incendiary versions of their faith were England’s majority to become more appreciative and proud of its Christian heritage and character.

As the Civil Partnerships Act comes into force today, traditionalists may be up in arms and progressives rejoicing, but how will civil partnership actually affect their respective political agendas?

It's well worth reading Roger Scruton's interview on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Meaning of Conservatism. Part I is at the Right Reason blog site. Part II of the interview by Max Goss is here.

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss has had an extraordinary career, spanning thirty-five years as a judge in the family courts and rising to be the most senior female judge in the land, as President of the High Court Family Division in 1999. It has not been a career without controversies, and many of the cases over which she’s presided - including the Cleveland Inquiry, which many believe led to the Children Act 1989 - have been highly sensitive. She has often been accused of penalising fathers, but the lack of a consistent track record in judgements makes it difficult to conclude as to her personal opinions. Now, as the newspapers are reporting, she has come out in favour of the traditional family unit and criticised the government’s failure to support it in any way more substantial than rhetoric. ‘It is a sad fact’, she has said, ‘that a government which has published excellent proposals on helping parents and children after the breakdown of relationships has done nothing practical to support married couples.’ There is a good analysis of this in the Daily Telegraph by Jill Kirby, who chairs the Family Policy Group at the Centre for Policy Studies. The voices speaking out for the family are getting louder and more numerous. The time has come for policymakers to respond.

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder in New York by a deranged fan of the rock singer turned anti-War protestor, John Lennon.

‘All you need is Love’ and ‘Give peace a chance’ were the compositions with which, in his distinctively nasal Liverpudlian drawl, Lennon lamented America’s war effort in Vietnam and implored its forces to lay down their arms.

A quarter of a century on, another American war in another equally faraway theatre, this time undertaken with active British participation, evokes similar opposition from similarly well-heeled English literati, who, like Lennon, would have lasted no more than five minutes under the regimes against which the US was and is fighting.

Last night, from the clinic in which the ailing seventy-five year old playwright is undergoing treatment for widely suspected throat cancer, Harold Pinter delivered an excoriating attack upon American foreign policy since World War 2, especially its current military action in Iraq.

The attack formed the substance of his Nobel acceptance speech, ‘Art, truth, and politics’.

As a piece of theatre, Pinter’s televised delivery of his speech was truly electrifying. As an actor himself in his time, Pinter really knew how to deliver to maximum effect his scathing indictment of Bush and Blair. By the time he had finished, viewers of it could be forgiven for thinking there was little to choose morally speaking between Bush (or Blair for that matter) and bin Laden beyond the former's more frequent recourse to a barber.

‘The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading. as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.’

‘We have brought torture, cluster bombs, … innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.’

‘How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arranged before the International Criminal Court of Justice.’

‘At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began.’

Powerful stuff, undoubtedly. The question, however, is how much truth is there in the assertions of Pinter with which he indicted America?

Those with sufficiently intact and long memories will doubtless still be able to remember quite vividly how easy and enjoyable it was to learn to read in primary school. One aid in the process back in the 'fifties and 'sixties were series of very simple reading books that gradually became slightly but progressively more challenging and interesting.

One notable example of such were the Ladybird 'Peter and Jane' stories.

That approach got swept away in the wake of more progressive but less effective methods introduced into primary schools with disastrous effect in the seventies.

Well warranted concern by the present Labour government about high rates of illiteracy among schoolchildren and school-leavers led to its imposition of a 'literacy strategy' that required children by age seven to have been taught to read 158 specific prescribed words.

Today's Times reports some startling results of a £1million research study just completed by Warwick University's Institute of Education that call that strategy into question.

Among its findings were that: 'only 100 of the most common words were needed to tackle any book, including adult fiction and non-fiction'; that 'only 16 words accounted for a quarter of written English'; that, with mastery of those hundred 'high-frequency' words, children could understand nearly a half of all texts; and that the additional 58 words required under the literacy strategy added only between 2 and 4% to the understanding of children.

The implication of the research is that young children need not have been obliged to learned as many as over a third of the words the literary strategy requires them to by aged seven before being able to read for themselves. The time set aside in school to ensuring children have mastered the surplus third of prescribed words would have been better spent letting them read books that, like the Peter and Jane series, initially used only words from the most common 100 and then gradually expanded the children's reading vocabulary by introducing new words.

Those, like the present writer with both distant but pleasant memories of having learned to read with the old-style Ladybird books and more recent but distinctly less pleasant memories of seeing what purgatory their own children's primary schooling was made by the government's literacy strategy requiring them to master masses of lists of words at the expense of letting them read easy texts for themselves, will have a word of their own to describe that strategy that, despite being an easy word does figure among the government's list of prescribed words.

Can you guess, readers, what it is? Here is a clue: it has four letters, starts with 's,' and ends with 't'.

‘I pass protesters every day at Downing Street, and believe me, you name it, they protest against it. I may not like what they call me but I thank God they can. That's called freedom’

Not only does that statement, made by Tony Blair in 2002, sound intolerably smug, but it’s also become increasingly untrue...

France, Australia, Denmark, Sweden.…the number of western countries which have started to become plagued by violent clashes between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens is steadily growing.

Today, five months on from the July London undergound bombings, the Times reports police have still yet to identify all of the young British-born Muslims who attended the make-shift gymnasium housed in a mosque in Beeton where Mohammad Sidique Khan, the believed ring-leader of the London bombings, is thought to have recruited his accomplices in terror.

‘Youngsters who attended … Khan’s youth club remain hostile to police’, the Times reports in explanation of the lack of police intelligence.

The EU is an entity not noted for encouraging competition, especially in the public sector.

But a ruling delivered by the European Court of Justice yesterday promises to inject into our ailing NHS more patient choice and competition than all the government’s current initiatives to promote them put together.

According to a report in today’s Times, the court found a 74 year old woman from Bedford entitled to reimbursement from her local Primary Health Care Trust to the tune of £4000 she paid for a hip replacement in France after it told her she must wait 12 months for the procedure at home.

Her lawyers argued this amounted to ‘undue delay’ since both French and British consultants whom she saw informed her that her condition warranted more urgent treatment.

When her Primary Care Trust refused to authorise her treatment abroad, she went ahead with the surgery there anyway, and then sought reimbursement from it.

Despite the Court’s decision yesterday, the case is by no means finally resolved. The Department of Health remains unwilling to accept the ruling, reportedly arguing that ‘if all NHS patients were guaranteed reimbursement when they sought treatment abroad it could undermine the NHS system of waiting lists.’

The Advocate-General of the European Court who delivered yesterday’s ruling was not convinced by the government’s argument and is reported to have said:

‘The fact that the NHS is an entirely public body, funded by the State and providing health care free at the point of delivery, is irrelevant for determining whether the situation falls within the scope of the Treaty’, permitting freedom of movement within the EU by citizens of its countries for receipt of all services.’

An interesting judgement, and one certain to give NHS managers much food for thought, as they settle down to enjoy the festive season. Should it bring on ulcers in them, they can at least comfort themselves with the thought speedier treatment than at home might now be freely available abroad!

Last week the Office for National Statistics published figures on what it described as a ‘new social trend’. According to a report by Oxford statistician John Haskey, the number of ‘living apart together’ – LAT – couples, is now broadly in line with the number of cohabiting couples. Using the 2002-2003 General Household Survey, Haskey estimated that around 1 million couples can be classified as LATs – 3 in every 20 men and women between 16 and 59 who were neither married nor cohabiting at the time of the survey. The study showed LAT-ing to occur most frequently amongst the 30-34 year old cohort, with around 20% of these couples living in separate accommodation. To not exaggerate the phenomenon, Haskey sought to eliminate ‘casual’ daters from the figures, by excluding teenagers and students in the count.

Haskey offers numerous explanations for what The Times described as this ‘social revolution’, but he identifies the common theme as 'risk aversion'. This risk is described in the report as faced by divorcees with children, professionals with jobs in different cities, those caring for relatives and those striving to protect their children’s inheritance rights. Haskey is emphatic that the rise of LAT-ing signifies neither less commitment, nor greater individualisation. Rather, the increasing number of LATs is indicative of ‘caution…holding people back from situations they [see] as risky’.

It’s that time of year again – the sparkly trees are in people’s windows, stockings hanging, holly on the doors, mistletoe dangling like a potential rape charge above unsuspecting heads, the morass of heads bobbing through our shopping centres, tripping over their bags of shopping, shoving each other with their bags of shopping, telling each other to sod off with their bags of shopping. And then there’s television – all those vapid entertainments like Eastenders and Desperate Housewives – and cinema and pantomimes and turkeys and mince pies and mulled wine and beer and an armageddon of parties.

So far it’s just Winterval, as they called it, with characteristically obscene banality, in Birmingham, the pre-Christian and the post-Christian cocktail of traditions. Yet so much of what we enjoy at this time of year draws its force from this nation’s Christian heritage. I’m thinking about the Christ in Christmas: Christmas carols – when the idiotic PC lobby in the CofE isn’t de-gendering and de-poeticising them, as Magnus Linklater points out in The Times today – and all the stuff about Bethlehem (where Palestinians have just kicked out the Christians) and the manger and the adoration of the magi, & c.

Few choose to have a puritan Christmas, without presents, without a tree, because both from the Christian and the atheist perspectives there has been what Salman Rushdie calls the chutneyfication of cultures, a blending and mixing and enriching. So the idea that we should try to cut out, in some politically correct way, the Christian bits, apart from being nasty, is patently absurd. Yet there are those who, wrongly believing themselves to be representing the sensitivities of a minority in Britain that is alleged to be offended by the Christianity of our Christmas, want to do just that.

To lose, not only Christmas, but also the KJV, Prayer Book, Order of Service, which are essential to an understanding of our literature, art, music, philosophy and architecture, would leave us noticeably impoverished. The majority, such as those who are flocking to churches for their weddings, and those who love to visit our historic churches and ruins, and those who cram into churches at this time of year, clearly don’t want to see our Christian heritage erased. Even if they are themselves atheists.

Indeed, an understanding of this great world religion can, at a time when Britain as a nation is seeking a corporate and unifying identity, help us to work out what we can call ‘ours’. Shared identity is a combination of the old and the new: as ethnic groups become more and more established and influential, they already enrich and add to our nation’s narrative, and will continue to do so; but Christianity, too, is integral to the old as well as the new. This is not the place to examine all of the issues, but Simon Heffer considers a few more in today’s Daily Telegraph.

Shortly after the London underground suicide-bombings in July, the government undertook a consultation exercise, primarily with representatives of the British Muslim community, to ascertain what special additional measures needed to be taken to combat further acts of terror by disaffected Muslims living in the UK.

One being mooted by the government was its acquiring the power, as a last resort after self-regulation by the relevant local Muslim community had failed, to order the closure of mosques known to have encouraged terrorism or to have expressed support for proscribed organisations under the Terrorism Act.

Last week, the Home Office announced that, in face of much opposition to that measure from Muslim groups and others whom it had consulted, it had decided not to press forward with it.

Needless to say Muslims groups who, during the consultation exercise, had voiced their opposition to the proposed measure responded with jubiliation to the government's announcement, none more so than the Muslim Council of Britain.

On the day of the announcement, December 15, it issued a press release, welcoming the government’s climb-down over the measure, which stated:

‘In our formal submission to the Home Office consultation… we made it clear that the government’s original proposals had aroused a great deal of concern and even anxiety among many British Muslims. Mosques are and remain entirely peaceful centres of worship. … We believe that the police already have sufficient powers to deal with any potential problems so we are delighted that the government has today listened to these concerns and opened the way for mosques to be seen as partners against extremism and not as incubators of extremism.’

To demonstrate the government’s ability, without need of this further power, to deal with any potentially problematic mosques, the Muslim Council cited in its press release the temporary closure of the one in Finsbury Park, London, after it fallen under the control of the notoriously pro-terrorism cleric Abu Hamza, whilst control of it was being wrested from him.

In its original submission during the consultation exercise, the Muslim Council expressed full agreement with a claim that had been made by the Bishop of Southwark as part of his own submission. The claim was that ‘there seems to be only one case in the public domain, where any potential link between a place of worship and terrorist activity has been suggested’.

From the Bishop’s quoted claim, the Muslim Council drew the inference in its own submission that ‘mosques are being misidentified as incubators of violent extremism, while the social reality is that they serve as centres of moderation;… the notion of influential “back-door” mosques is a figment of the imagination’.

In its view, what had done more to radicalise young British Muslims than any form of indoctrination they might have received in any British mosques was the present government’s ‘foreign policy and the double standards … in its dealings in the Middle East in partnership with the government of the US.’

Of that view the Muslim Council went on to say in its submission: ‘This view has received support from the Task Groups convened by the Home Office. We urge you to accept this fact. We ask you to take urgent remedial action so that our citizens, here as well as in the rest of the world, do not become targets of… terrorists’

The somewhat oblique phraseology to which the Muslim Council resorted here suggests it believes Blair’s support for, and involvement in the current US led military action in Iraq -- and, perhaps beyond that, the more long-standing support of Britain for the State of Israel, has been fundamentally to blame for the mayhem visited on London commuters on July 7 and narrowly spared them again on the 21st of that same month.

It is clear the present government has not acceded, nor is likely to in the immediate future at least, to the Muslim Council’s plea that it radically alters its current foreign policy in the Middle East.

It is equally clear, however, the government has decided to accede to the plea of the Muslim Council and of others not to risk further alienating the Muslim community by assuming additional powers to close mosques found to have supported terrorism.

Clearly, the government accepted the assurance of the Muslim Council, and of other like-minded representative bodies whom it consulted, that, with the sole exception of the one in Finsbury Park, no other mosques here have been a source of the radicalisation of young British Muslims.

The Muslim Council's credibility on this matter, however, is surely thrown seriously into question by the following two facts:

It is reported in Wednesday’s Times that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to put into effect a ruling of his country’s Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, of which he happens also to be head, calling for the banning of all western music from that country’s state television and radio.

‘Blocking indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is required’ the Revolutionary Council is reported as having decreed.

While much western music is certainly indecent -- one has only to think of some of West Life’s more recent feeble efforts -- one has to wonder what could lie behind the ban.

A clue might be provided by the detail in the report that Iranian television often uses as background music for its programmes songs performed by Eric Clapton.

One of these, however, is a song that, one would have thought, should have given the Iranian president cause to promote its broadcasting. It is Clapton’s masterpiece ‘Layla’, composed after he had fallen hopelessly in love with Patti Boyd, the estranged wife of Clapton’s close friend and fellow legendary guitarist, George Harrison.

To express the depths of his frustrated forbidden love, Clapton drew on the classic Middle Eastern story, dating back to the Ummayad period, about a man driven to madness by his love for a young woman, named ‘Layla’, after her father forbade her to marry him. That story later passed into Persian literature after it was turned into an epic poem by the Persian poet, Nezami.

What better symbol could there be of Islam’s growing influence in the West, one might have supposed, than the frequent broadcasting in Iran of this Clapton song?

What, then, could possibly have led Iran’s President to ban Clapton’s music from his country’s air-waves?

Deep reflection on this vital issue of the hour has enabled me to come up with two possible solutions to this conundrum.

One possibility is that the presumably less than full mastery of the English language on the part of President Ahmadinejad caused him to mishear the lyrics of another well-known song that has been immortalised by Clapton’s version of it. This is his rendition of Bob Marley's reggae classic, ‘I shot the sheriff.’

Had President Ahmadinejad misheard as an ‘a’ the ‘e’ that occurs in the last word of the song’s title, which also forms the opening line of the song’s chorus, what he would have heard Clapton to be boasting of having done is to have ‘shot the Sharif’.

The broadcasting of such a claim could never be tolerated in a country that proudly boasts as its sole think- tank one named ‘Sharif’, and which, furthermore, according to its mission statement, aspires to be ‘the most pioneer[ing] national and world-class think-tank that plays an essential role in national development and human life improvement all around the world.’

Should, however, as I suspect, that not be the correct explanation for the ban, it could surely only have been imposed because, since, in that part of the world, the term ‘Layla’ has become synonymous with 'lunatic', President Ahmadinejad was concerned, not without some cause, Clapton's song of that name might well become, in time, forever associated with his -- not only in our country, but his!

As we here too at Civitas about to assume radio-silence for the duration of the festivities, may I on its behalf extend to all visitors to the Civitas blog a hearty Season’s Greetings and hope that 2006 will prove a more peaceful year than the tumultuous one to which we are shortly to bid farewell!