Civitas Blog

Anthony Browne argues in The Retreat of Reason that political correctness, which classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism and allows no dissent to be expressed, is poisoning the wells of debate in modern Britain. Click here to read the press release.

'Members of the public, academics, journalists and politicians are afraid of thinking certain thoughts'. Political correctness started in academia, but it now dominates schools, hospitals, local authorities, the civil service, the media, companies, the police and the army. Since 1997 Britain has been ruled by political correctness for the first time. 'The Labour government was the first UK government not to stand up to political correctness, but to try and enact its dictates when they are not too electorally unpopular or seriously mugged by reality, and even sometimes when they are'.

Anthony Browne describes political correctness as a 'heresy of liberalism' under which 'a reliance on reason has been replaced with a reliance on the emotional appeal of an argument'. Adopting certain positions makes the politically correct feel virtuous, even more so when they are preventing the expression of an opinion that conflicts with their own: 'political correctness is the dictatorship of virtue'.

Whether an argument is true or not is a secondary consideration to whether it fits with the PC view of the world:

'In the topsy-turvy politically correct world, truth comes in two forms: the politically correct, and the factually correct. The politically correct truth is publicly proclaimed correct by politicians, celebrities and the BBC even if it is wrong, while the factually correct truth is publicly condemned as wrong even when it is right. Factually correct truths suffer the disadvantage that they don't have to be shown to be wrong, merely stated that they are politically incorrect. To the politically correct, truth is no defence; to the politically incorrect, truth is the ultimate defence.'

The publication yesterday of Anthony Browne’s book The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of the public debate in Britain, has led to extraordinary scenes here in the office. Quite apart from the flurry of media attention, resulting in a stream of interviews with various national and regional television and radio stations, there were an almost unprecedented number of requests for the book – trumped only by another Civitas bestseller, Our Island Story – and a slew of emails pledging support and thanking him for his courage and acuity. It seems that the book has hit a nerve. People, weary of intolerant political correctness, of the hegemony of the liberal heresy that says no one that is protected as part of a victim group can be subjected to criticism, have had enough.

Until recently Mr Cameron had given the impression that he was going to take a long, careful look at policy issues and wait for commissions to report before making final decisions. In the last few days, however, he has shut down the health and education debates and pre-judged social security reform. In today's Daily Telegraph I have tried to explain why. Let me know if you think I'm wrong.

According to a report in today’s Times, almost twenty percent of women who gave birth to a child in Britain in 2004 were themselves born somewhere else than the UK.

Of the babies born in 2004 to such mothers, almost two thirds of their fathers had been born elsewhere than the UK.

On the same day as the media are full of stories about the sad predicament in which the current leader of the Lib Dems finds himself as a result of the power of demon-drink, the Times carries a report about the findings of a European-wide comparative study of the effects upon health of excessive consumption of alcohol.

The study was undertaken by Professor Robin Room, of Stockholm University’s Centre for Social Research on Drugs and Alcohol. Its findings were recently published in the Lancet and have been summarised in today's report about them in the Times.

In yesterday’s Sunday Times Bruce Anderson defends David Cameron’s tactic of declaring Tory support for public sector monopolies in health and education. Anderson thinks the Tories need to prove their compassion and so, even though education vouchers and social health insurance are good ideas, they must be ditched because they would be caricatured by Labour as ‘cuts’.

Above all, he argues that David Cameron’s strategy is ‘subtle’. David Cameron, we are told, felt he would have a honeymoon period of about three months from the press and believed that he needed to 'strike fast and hard' during this time. Anderson claims that ‘In order to reconcile the electorate to his party, [Cameron] has to persuade the voters that he believes in the National Health Service and state education.’

According to a study published by the National Audit Office today, a million children are being failed by schools eight years after Tony Blair hollered that famous line, education, education, education. Although just 577 schools are judged to be failing or have ‘serious weaknesses’ by Ofsted, the NAO report has found that the number of schools failing to provide a decent education is far higher. ‘We estimate that these 1,557 schools educate around 980,000 pupils, or 13 per cent of the school population,’ it says.

Ministers spent £840 million on improving struggling schools last year and £160 million on replacing failing comprehensives with city academies. There are many Labour backbenchers who see no pressing reason to tinker with the structure and organisation of schools: they would prefer that ministers preserve the status quo and allow the extra money to bring about any improvements it can. However, the NAO’s report could be employed by the PM and Ruth Kelly to help them drive through reforms outlined in the White Paper.

You have to hand it to Tony Blair. The American entertainer, Fifty Cent, has nothing on our Prime Minister as a performer.

On Tuesday of this week, Tone-da-Drone, as I now like mentally to refer to our consummate home-grown rap artist, unveiled a swathe of proposed initiatives designed to curb street-crime and disorderly families.

They join the already swollen collection of failed previous ones, like ASBO’s, designed to curb the same problems.

Bearing, surely not unintentionally, the curiously apt acronym of ‘RAP’, the Prime Minister chose Swindon as the unlikely venue for launching his much-vaunted ‘Respect Action Plan’.

Does his choice of these terms by means of which to characterise the domestic policy initiatives he wishes to make his swan song as PM, suggest the former rock-n-roll enthusiast has spent too much time listening to his children’s confiscated CD’s or watching MTV with them?

In any case, and much more importantly, just how respectful of Parliament was the PM’s choice of venue to unveil the plan?

Respec’ Tone once again, this time for the manifest contempt you have shown Parliament in choosing Swindon as the place at which to unleash upon the nation your latest RAP!

In his just published and much heralded Civitas pamphlet, The Retreat of Reason, author Anthony Browne argues that important truths have been withheld from the public, with adverse social consequences resulting from their suppression, because a powerful elite of self-styled ‘progressive' opinion-formers has judged their circulation to be prejudicial to the image and standing of certain groups whom that elite considers vulnerable and therefore to stand in need of such protection.

Unsurprisingly, Browne’s claims have not gone uncontested by this elite. None has proved more vehement in its denunication of them than has been the Independent newspaper and those who write for it.

On the day after the publication of Browne’s pamphlet (4 January), that newspaper ran a hostile news report about it, plus a still more hostile editorial which denied there was any truth at all in any of Browne’s claims.

Not content with its two earlier attempts to discredit Browne’s pamphlet, last Monday the newspaper returned to the fray. It took the form of an op-ed piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who the week before had, on the day of publication of the pamphlet, given vent to such fury with it on the BBC Today radio programme that its producer had had to pull the live item from the air half-way through the broadcast.

Indeed, so full of indignation did Ms Alibhai-Brown continue to remain a week later at what she considered to be the calumnies contained in Browne’s pamphlet that, in her op-ed piece in the Independent, she confided to having harboured a desire to inflict upon the offending pamphlet physical violence. Thus, she freely confessed that it had been ‘the only publication I have ever read that I wanted to slap several times’.

Fascinating as this glimpse into the inner phantasy-world of Ms Alibhai-Brown was, it did leave this reader wondering how sound Ms Alibhai-Brown's grasp of reality could be.

Was she unaware, I could not help but wonder, that the appropriate form of treatment for so offensive a piece of literature as she had clearly found Anthony Browne's pamphlet was to burn it not beat it?

Perhaps, it was because of the deeply politically incorrect historic associations of book-burning that only a phantasy of beating the hapless pages was able to pass through Ms Alibhai-Brown's censorious super-ego into her consciousness, for onward transmission via her keyboard into her reader's imagination.

However, Ms Alibhai-Browne was subject to no comparable inhibitions when it came to her explaining what it was in Browne’s publication that had provoked such ire in her. ‘The journalist Anthony Browne’ she wrote, ‘has written a hyperventilated attack on “political correctness” which he claims has silenced and corrupted public debate and killed people in Britain”. Ms Alibhai-Browne dismissed these claims as but ‘the fearful fantasies of an anti-PC chap gone quite mad’.

David Cameron is right to be opposing ID cards, as reported in the Daily Telegraph this morning. Everything Blair and co. do is designed to grow government at the expense of civil society and the individual. This is yet another example. And even more cogent arguments against ID cards can be made, not on the basis of civil liberties, but on the feasibility and cost of the scheme.

Are ID cards a proper response to the terrorist threat? Simply, no: they are the wrong answer to the problems of crime and security. They will offer the illusion of safety based on technology not intelligence. ID cards in Spain did not prevent the Madrid bombings, nor would they have done anything to stop 9/11. Richard Reed, like most terrorists, did not hide his identity, only his intention.

Are ID cards going to be effective in controlling immigration? There are already so many illegals in Britain – the government guesses there could be as many as 570,000 illegal immigrants (multiply that by three to get a more accurate estimate) – as to render the scheme almost pointless. The only way it would work would be if ID cards were mandatory for every British citizen, and the borders were far more effectively policed.

Are ID cards going to stop benefit fraud? Less than 2 per cent of benefit fraud is due to ID fraud; instead, benefit fraudsters tend to misrepresent their circumstances. The fact that there are 73 million live national insurance records, but only 46.5 million in the country entitled to a national insurance record hardly fosters confidence in the government's ability to run such a scheme.

Are ID cards going to stop ID fraud? Biometric testing can hardly be said to be failsafe. Even if with three biometric measures it could be said to be 99.9 per cent effective, there would still be a 1 in 48,000 failure rate, which means that someone would be able to access several different records using his own biometrics in order to create different identities (99.9 per cent is, by the way, beyond the realm of possibility).

Are ID cards going to stop crime? If they ever catch them, police rarely have trouble identifying suspects, only proving they're guilty. Cards won't deter criminals unless the government gives police stop and search powers and, again, for this to be effective the card would have to be mandatory. It’s difficult to see what difference ID cards would make, unless the criminal kindly leaves his propped up on the mantlepiece after stealing your DVD player.

Ruth Kelly faces her toughest battle yet as Education Secretary today, as she gives a make or break statement over the sex offender debacle. Adding to calls for her resignation over sex offender clearance comes the latest blow in the full publication of GCSE results (and the lost war on persisting truancy to boot). Although the BBC cheerfully announced that the jump in GCSE attainment was ‘even bigger than thought’, a closer look at 2005 performance is an expose of the serious cracks beleaguering New Labour’s education policy. Whilst the results may show a 0.6-point rise in achievement from the provisional data published in October, they also reveal that the government’s flagship city academies fall amongst the worst performing schools in the country, and that private schools continue to out-strip state sector attainment.

Last Saturday, Chancellor Gordon Brown gave a widely reported keynote speech at a Fabian Society conference on the Future of Britishness in which he was widely reported as having called for a new national public holiday to celebrate all that is good about Britain and Britishness.

That apparent call of Brown’s has sparked off some lively and often amusing letters in the broadsheets from those writing in to offer suggestions.

Many have rightly pointed out, Britain is less in need of any new ones, than appreciation of the value and meaning of existing ones like Guy Fawkes’ Night or the reigning sovereign’s official birthday.

The most amusing suggestion I have come across came in a letter in yesterday’s Times. N.L.Denton wrote to point out that, since the current government ‘has spent the past eight and a half years trying to eliminate any sense of Britishness or pride in Britain, [a]n appropriate day to celebrate the British way of life, culture and values would be the anniversary of the day when this government is voted out of office.’

Muslim cleric, Abu Hamza, is currently standing trial at the Old Bailey, charged with having incited racial hatred and with having solicited murder in statements that he is alleged to have made in sermons he delivered at the Finsbury Park mosque when an imam there.

Today’s Times reports that Mr Hamza’s counsel, Edward Fitzgerald QC, is running the defence that the statements made by his client in his sermons that have been construed as criminal in intent could not possibly have been so, since all Mr Hamza was doing was quoting from the Koran and other sacred Muslim texts.

‘It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran’, Mr Fitzgerald is reported to have explained on Mr Hamza’s behalf.

One such statement, whose purpose in Mr Hamza's having quoted which is at issue, comes from the Koran. It runs: ‘Fighting is ordained for you, though you dislike it. You may dislike something although it is good for you, or like something although it is bad for you: God knows and you do not.’ (Chapter 2, verse 216)

A second comes from the Hadith, the compendium of sayings attributed to Muhammed. It runs: ‘The trees will call out to the Muslims “There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”.’

In further exoneration of his client, Mr Fitzgerald is reported to have observed that all the great monotheistic religions have scriptures that contain “the language of blood and retribution”.

The trial continues.

Less shackled by the falsely-pc notion that the two-parent family is a thing of the past, too antiquated to be backed by contemporary policy, academics in the USA have contributed extensively to the contemporary body of research which evidences the benefits of the ‘traditional’ family. The latest contribution from across the Atlantic comes out of the economics departments at the University of California and the Claremont McKenna College.

What with the education White Paper threatening to sink the Blair regime and the ID cards being blocked again yesterday in the House of Lords, these are fun times in Westminster, and now we have the embattled PM offering yet another ‘radical reform’, this time of incapacity benefits (IB). IB is intended for people with a disability that prevents them from working, but the Government admits it is now enjoyed by about a million people who are perfectly capable of work. It is one of the deepest dependency traps. IB abuse is hardly a new problem: it has merely become more acute. There has been a significant growth in government spending on IB over the last 20 years. Currently, 2.7 million people of working age claim IB and, since 1997, the social security budget has risen from £130 billion to £160 billion in real terms. The government estimates that its new measures could save anything up to £7 billion a year.

The cup of human kindness is not always what it seems -- at least not in France.

According to a report posted yesterday on the website of BBC News, soup kitchens in that lately much benighted land have been forbidden by the authorities there from distributing free helpings of their traditional native cuisine to their poor and hungry compatriots, because the pork contained in such forms of cuisine has been judged to render its free distribution n public a form of discrimination against Jews and Muslims whose respective religion forbids them to eat such meat.

Known as ‘Identity Soup’, the French authorities ordered the meaty broth be removed from offer outside central railway stations because they judged it would be liable to result in public disorder.

Presumably, when such broth is offered in a French restaurant, its accompanying price tag prevents it from being discriminatory because it renders the soup equally unavailable to all without means to pay for it, regardless of their race, creed or colour.

On the other hand, surely in strict consistency, if the free distribution of such soup is deeemed inflammatory because not equally available to all regardless of their race, creed or colour, why should not its sale be judged equally as discriminatory and hence inflammatory?

More seriously: why on earth should not right-wing groups, if they wish, be at liberty to offer in public free food only acceptable to those whom these groups find acceptable?

If these groups are thereby making a political statement through that gesture less generous in spirit than we might like, so what? It is not as if they are saying by it: ‘Non-Jews and non-Muslims only’. It is the Jews and Muslims who freely choose to abstain from eating pork who are here choosing not to consume the broth on offer. They are not being forbidden from consuming the soup by the groups placing it on offer.

One wonders, though, whether the price of European countries trying not to allow any offence to be caused to any of their minorities might not one day end up being their imposing on all a prescribed uniform cultural identity from which all traces of historic individuality have been carefully removed by fiat in the supposed interests of ethnic and racial harmony, and, if so, whether the price of such artificially-induced harmony might not have been too high to be worth paying.

Jean Charles de Menezes was neither white nor British born. Yet, rightly there has been no shortage of media coverage of his cold-blooded summary execution by police last July in a London underground carriage.

His killing occurred the day after a ‘feigned’ multiple suicide bombing on the same transportation system that had been staged whilst the shockwaves of the real suicide bombings of the 7th were still at their height.

One reason for the vast media interest there has been in the police execution of this perfectly innocent man has been the profound, and still unanswered, questions it has raised about the propriety of police conduct and procedure, both before, at the time of, and subsequent to the killing, at every level of seniority of the police force.

These questions go right up to the very top of the tree on which Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair continues to remain perched. His grip there seems ever more precarious, especially since the long-awaited results of the IPCC enquiry into the shooting have now gone to the CPS for consideration whether criminal charges should be pressed against any of the police involved in the shooting. .

For Sir Ian to have accused the media of institutional racism as he did yesterday -- accusations he repeated today at the very same time as he apologised for what he now admits was insensitivity in having previously suggesed media coverage of the killings of school-girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had been unduly and disproportionately large on account of their skin colour -- is really a case of insult being added to injury.

Last week, news of Scotland’s unprecedented rise in lone parenthood – since 1997 the figure has risen from 140,000 to 174,000 - re-awoke issues around the relationship between policy and behaviour. Whilst Scotland’s record rise in single parents outstrips the UK’s by 7% (24% compared to 17%), Office for National Statistics figures show that under New Labour the number of lone parents in the UK has risen from 1.6 million to 1.88 million.