Civitas Blog

It’s been an ongoing saga for years, but finally the farce has come to an end. No, Harold Bishop hasn’t died, and it pains me to tell you that Barbi’s still alive too; but on the upside the Home Office’s Bill for the incitement to religious hatred was last night defeated in the Commons. As the BBC reports, the narrow defeat means that the Bill will become law with a series of amendments passed by the Lords designed to safeguard freedom of speech and meet the concerns of campaigners such as the comedian Rowan Atkinson. Our reasons for opposing the Bill are well documented elsewhere on the website, but the wider spectrum of resistance has also been revealing, with an unexpected alliance forged between the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association, the Christian Institute, the Evangelical Alliance, the Muslim Parliament and the Muslim Forum. This represents a triumph for the Voltairian principle of disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it.

‘Muslims up in arms over all over the world at irreverent Danish newspaper cartoons of Mohammed’, ‘Death threats received by Danish and Norwegian newspapers for publishing cartoons of the Prophet', ’ ‘Middle eastern Muslim countries boycott Danish goods’, ‘Armed Fatah militia surround EU offices in Gaza after EU defends Danish Prime Minister for refusing to condemn or prosecute editor of Danish newspaper’ etc, etc, scream newspaper headlines around the world.

These headlines, or words to their effect. report the latest twists and turns in the long-running and still on-going saga of the widespread outrage that has been provoked within the Muslim world by the publication of irreverent cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper last September and since in other European newspapers.

Time was when I would have been appalled by how out of all proportion to its ostensible cause was the scale of this latest outburst of Muslim outrage and indignation. But if there is such a thing as jihad-fatigue, I am beginning to suffer from it.

By this I do not mean to imply that the death threats and boycott threats should not be taken seriously by those at whom they have been directed, as well as by the authorities whose job it is to protect their recipients. I mean that it has become all to sickeningly clear that the numerous Muslims throughout the world who have responded so disproportionately to this latest perceived failure by non-Muslims to extend towards their religion the deference that they consider it due are no longer worthy of being taken seriously, intellectually or morally.

The disproportion of their sound and fury to what they claim has been its cause reveals that there is simply no other way in which to respond to them, save to say:

The rapidly escalating war of Mohammed’s turban may yet serve to establish the reverse of Karl Marx’s famous adage that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.

Despite the ferocity of the current posturing of outraged Muslims throughout the world over the continued unrepentance of a Danish newspaper for having last September published irreverent cartoons of Mohammed, the true significance of the current rumpus seems to have eluded the world’s media. This is that it presages a far worse coming conflagration.

At best, what it heralds is full-scale conventional war in the Middle East, with much spillover in Europe and America in terms of Islamist terror bombings there. At worst, we await a full-scale nuclear Armageddon.

Labour’s education rebels claim to want good schools for everyone. Why then are they so hostile to schools that are already good? Mr Blair is glad that some schools do a good job and wants to focus on raising standards in failing schools. Why would someone professing concern for equality be against his strategy?

Two distinct types are opposed to Blair’s reforms: those concerned about social solidarity and those who want social equalization. The equalizers are hostile both to good schools and committed parents - who are often denounced as ‘pushy parents’ when merely calling them middle class is not considered condemnation enough. What do pushy parents and successful schools have in common that might explain this animosity? Both bring about unequal outcomes in society and that is what Labour equalizers are against. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian recently described the attitude succinctly: “Secondary schools cannot compensate for the damage done in one of Europe's most unequal societies: by the age of five children's destinies are all but set by social class or parental ambition. Schools are only remedial. Real change will come only if society grows more equal in wealth, status, esteem and reward.”

Tomorrow is the first day of National Marriage Week. To many (those out of touch with both the stats and the young) Marriage Week might seem like a last ditch attempt to resurrect an antiquated institution. Yet marriage today is far more robust than is publicly acknowledged. 7 in 10 families are still headed by a married couple, and multiple attitude surveys show that young people are as keen as ever to tie the knot. This is not to deny, of course, that significantly more marriages end in divorce than half a decade ago. However, high divorce rates reflect a great deal more than attitudes to marriage, and the number of cohabiting relationships that dissolve is infinitely larger. As Harry Benson, one of the country’s chief champions of marriage is fond of saying, family breakdown in cohabiting relationships has become the new concern, displacing divorce.

The Prime Minster’s speech on the European Union at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, on 2 February was remarkable both for his willingness to recognise the need to radically alter the way we view the EU and his reluctance to acknowledge the best ways of reaching this goal. Mr Blair called for an ‘open Europe’ where ‘practical people’ would ‘work on… practical but radical steps’. The PM has come to the conclusion that the people of Europe have been turned off Europe by a political elite that spends too much time talking about the nature of EU political structures and too little time putting in place new policies to help them live their lives.

As outlined in Wil’s comments (in the previous blog) on the Prime Minister’s speech last week, Europe’s greatest need (sadly unrecognised by the British government) is greater democratic accountability within its structures and institutions. The people of Europe feel that the EU is beyond their control, a perspective supported in a Eurobarometer poll taken in July 2005 that showed that less than half of EU citizens were satisfied by the way democracy worked within the Union. This same poll, moving onto the issues of future EU enlargement, showed that over half of the EU citizens (52%) opposed Turkish accession. This in itself is a disturbing figure and one that doubtlessly would have increased – one would think – over the last week as Danish and Norwegian embassies are engulfed in flames, violent Islamic placards are paraded on Sloane Street and Catholic priests are shot dead in Ankara. The Union needs to listen to its citizens, but an argument can be made that those same citizens need to consider in more detail the question of Turkish accession to the European Union and the positive influence that it could bring not merely to Europe but also to the wider geopolitical stage.

So there we have it: the collision of the two great British characteristics of decency and freedom of speech. On the one hand there is politeness, the wish not to hurt anyone’s feelings or cause offence; on the other hand there is the inviolable right to say almost anything. Generally the two act as checks on each other, encouraging us not to be, on the one hand, wimps, while preventing us, on the other hand, from being thugs. While many felt that the decision of the British newspapers not to publish the Danish cartoons represented an abandonment of their responsibility to exercise free speech, a majority felt that printing them months after their first appearance would've been gratuitous. Offence is good - and it's good to be free to offend - if offence is necessary. The worry, if it's not, is that acts of provocation end up being used to provoke more provocation. Then we're back in the playground again.

Despite 9/11, Madrid and July 7, as well as myriad other instances, it seems that we have constantly to be reminded that there are rogue elements in western society that seek to destroy both the tolerance of others and the right to speak out. The pandemonium surrounding the Danish cartoons - the savage vandalism and killing around the globe and the incitements to it in our own country - are only the latest instance. The government and its police force to whom, under the terms of the Hobbesian contract, we look to protect our safety, are going to have to get a whole lot better at protecting legitimate free speech - few things make people want to be rude as much as being told they’re not allowed to be rude - and punishing those who refuse to live by the laws of the land.

‘There should always be charity and goodwill between different beliefs; toleration must be the norm, but even toleration has its limits. Locke would not have believed in insulting publications….’

Thus writes William Rees Mogg in an op-ed in last Monday’s Times entitled ‘Tolerating the Intolerable: Even Locke, our greatest prophet of liberty, would never have defended those offensive cartoons’.

In seeking to recruit the great British seventeenth century philosopher to the cause of those who, whether by government edict or self-censorship, would suppress publication of the cartoons, critical of Islam, that have lately become the epicentre of a firestorm of frenzied Muslim protest throughout the world, Rees-Mogg -- normally a voice of comparative sanity in an otherwise turbulent sea of media madness -- has erred very badly indeed.

Even if the world manages to avoid the very real risk of a nuclear Armageddon, triggered by Iran's acquisition of nuclear capability and then either it or Israel deciding to neutralise the threat that each perceives that the other one poses it, there is another no less serious danger that humanity faces emanating from the same quarter.

This is the risk of global mental sclerosis to which humanity would fast be in danger of succumbing were either the UN, or failing that then the EU, to accede to current Muslim demands for each to impose curbs on the freedom of individuals publicly to criticise or lampoon religions.

On the surface, such called-for curbs can appear fair and reasonable. Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists Sikhs and Muslims will all receive equal protection from their respective religious beliefs and practices, or lack of any, being criticised, satirised or insulted. In reality, such blanket protection is neither fair nor reasonable. For not all belief systems, and associated codes of practice, are equally as benign and hence worthy of respect and protection as each other.

Just as it would be ludicrous for the UN or EU to accede to any demand by neo-Nazis for their creed and its associated practices to be spared criticism, insult, or being lampooned, so there are versions of some world religions -- even, maybe, some world-religions simpliciter - that equally deserve not to be protected from severe criticism, insult and ridicule.

Should, in the supposed name of equal fairness to all different religions and faith groups, all religions become insulated by international or EU law from criticism or being lampooned, then humanity would suffer almost as profound an injury as that which it would sustain through suffering the calamity of nuclear holocaust.

For what is the special value of humanity, if it is not based on its being the one species with the capacity to think for itself and develop mentally?

What point does its survival have, if it should cease to be able to exercise that capacity and thereby develop and progress through thought and enquiry?

At least, the other animals do not pose the risk of which mankind has been recently accused -- of threatening to induce ecological catastrophe.

By their very nature, people’s religious beliefs, or the lack of them, touch matters of their deepest concern. Therefore, these beliefs of theirs are ones whose criticism, challenge, or being mocked are liable to evoke in those who harbour them the strongest emotions of hurt. But to deny people the right to criticise and challenge such beliefs, or the lack of any, on the part of others is to inflict on these latter a potentially far greater harm than any that they might suffer by having their religious beliefs or unbelief criticised, challenged, or lampooned.

‘Does marriage make people happy, or do happy people get married?’ is the title of a new paper from economists at the University of Zurich. Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey analysed the ‘causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being’ using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey. One of the most interesting findings from the data (which spans 17 years) was the alleged impact of different roles taken by each spouse within marriages. According to the author’s analysis, ‘potential, as well as actual, division of labo[u]r seems to contribute to spouses’ well-being’.

As EU finance ministers meet today in Brussels to discuss the economic agenda for 2006, a very old argument about the role of the EU has once again been rumbling through both the continent’s cobbled streets and through the shiny glass and steel corridors of its Parliament. Over the weekend protestors and trade unionists marched in Strasbourg and Berlin against what they see as a grave threat to the social market model which remains so totemic across much of continental Europe. The current threat comes in the form of the EU Services Directive, a piece of EU legislation which has been grinding through interminable redrafting for the past five years. Its original aim was to provide greater freedom to service providers to sell their services with the same freedom across the EU. According to last weekend’s protestors, this would lead to ‘social dumping’ as service jobs in western European member states were undermined by cheap competition from the dreaded East. Sadly, it looks likely that these arguments may have won the day, with the current EU President, Wolfgang Schussel, expressing sympathy with the social dumping argument.

One of the most persuasive arguments for taking up smoking again seems to me to be the news that it has now been banned across England. It’s a civil liberty thing – pubs should be allowed to choose. As for ID cards – civil liberties are relevant counterargument, but the imbecility of the measures owes more to the government’s inability to make such an ambitious scheme work, the exorbitant costs, and the imminent failure to achieve any of the stated objectives for national safety. Now, the anti-terror legislation being debated in the Commons tempts me to start attending libertarian rallies or hollering about the glories of Fascist freedom fighters and Marxist revolutions.

Let’s be clear that the terror bill has got nothing to do with being firm on terrorism. The offence of glorification owes more to Downing Street's obsession with being seen to do something than a wish to tackle terrorism in a meaningful way. The Conservative shadow attorney general Dominic Grieve has said his party will back the plans to ban indirect encouragement of terrorism, but has rightly accused the government of trying to manufacture a ‘dust up’ so that Mr Blair can claim other politicians aren’t protecting the public. ‘This is a bogus spat,’ he said this morning on the Today programme, ‘generated by No 10 Downing Street for the purpose of the prime minister looking tough.

There are, I think, two points which show that this is the case.

It’s cold and rainy, with today’s newspapers full of depressing headlines.

Do you need cheering up? If so, here's a story that might manage to raise a smile:

It’s Berlin 1936 and two Jews sit together on a park bench to read their daily newspapers. One pulls out a copy of a familiar Yiddish newspaper that offers up its latest daily bulletin of woes currently besetting their people.
Much to his amazement, his companion pulls out and proceeds to immerse himself in the pages of a copy of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.

The first Jew turns to the second in horror and asks what could possibly have possessed him to choose to read such a virulently anti-semitic newspaper. His companion patiently replies by explaining as follows:

‘Well’, he says ‘whenever I read a Yiddish newspaper, all I ever learn about are pogroms, more Arab riots in Palestine against Jewish settlers, the latest German laws dispossessing Jews and curbing their freedom. It’s all too depressing. If, however, I turn to Der Sturmer, what then do I read? That the Jews own all the banks; they control the media, dominate the arts. Frankly, that's far more uplifting.’

I was put in mind of this old story by two recent 'news' items currently doing the rounds of the Middle East media.

Caterpillar Inc is a US manufacturer of the bulldozers with which the Israeli authorities knock down houses and other buildings in the occupied territories that they judge need demolition in the interests of Israel's national security.

The Church of England has investments in Caterpillar Inc, and, of late, many Anglicans have expressed qualms that their church might be profiting from these, given what they consider to be the violations of their human rights suffered by those who lose their their homes as a result of the use to which the bulldozers are put by the Israelis that the corporation in which it invests manufactures.

Last Monday, the C of E’s governing body, the Synod, passed a resolution, with the personal support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, calling on its investment managers to disinvest from Caterpillar Inc..

Presumably, the Anglicans who so voted can all sleep easier in their beds safe in the knowledge that no part of their church’s income will shortly be likely to derive from so nefarious a source.

In fact, of course there is a large amount of disingenuousness on the part of those who voted for the Church of England to disinvest in Caterpillar. Their call for the church to disinvest in that company was born less out of concern that their church might otherwise profit from forms of activity of which they so strongly disapprove, than it was by a desire thereby to use the moral authority of their church to send out a signal that it abhors the Israeli government’s policy towards the Palestinians with whom it stands shoulder to shoulder in their struggle with this modern-day Goliath.

Assuming this to be the prime motive of all those Anglicans who, like Rowan Williams, voted in favour of their church disinvesting in Caterpillar Inc., what a glow of moral self-satisfaction there can be anticipated as forming on their faces when they read of the some of the most recent forms of Israeli governmental activity involving these bulldozers that their gesture of protest might be pressuring the Israeli government to cease to engage in.

According to a report coming from Jerusalem today, ‘Israeli Defence Force officials have been ordered to demolish …a small section … outside … a biblical city … in the West Bank … consisting of … several homes…. The IDF sources [said] they have been cleared to use “all necessary force” to remove [the] …residents.’

Incredibly, schools are to now be judged according to their different ethnic compositions. The government's education watchdog, Ofsted, has implemented a new grading system whereby schools are judged on a ‘contextual value-added’ (CVA) measure. CVA takes into account not just levels of improvement, but social background – including ethnicity.

Europe’s Commissioner for External Relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, made her first official visits to the South Caucusus states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan on Thursday and Friday of last week. On this trip she made the comment, “2006 should be the year that takes our partnership up a gear”. And well she might, for without anyone really noticing (let’s be honest – how many of us were aware of the ongoing ‘frozen conflict’ in Nagorno-Karabakh) the Black Sea region is rapidly growing in prominence on the political radars of European nations and of the EU.

The key to this rise in awareness is energy. The Ukraine-Russia energy dispute that severely hampered European gas supplies at the beginning of the year sharpened awareness of Europe’s dependence on Russia for our energy. 25.2% of our total gas supply comes via the Ukraine. After Russia turned off the taps during the pricing dispute in January, Hungary and Poland saw a 40% drop in supply as the Ukrainians began to siphon off gas pipelined to Europe. Less than a month later, in what must be seen as suspicious circumstances, a transit pipeline in Georgia exploded. Moscow blamed terrorists. Tbilisi blamed Moscow.

This is the ground over which, apparently, both New Labour and the Conservatives are fighting. Yesterday, David Miliband – dubbed ‘Brains’ by Alastair Campbell when he was Blair’s head of policy at Number 10, and allegedly a contender for the top spot himself – announced in a speech to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations that politicians had to confront the ‘sense of powerlessness’ in the electorate. The answer, according to Miliband, was ‘double devolution’: the handing of power not only to town halls, but also to individuals and community groups. This would bring about ‘a different form of accountability: direct to the citizen, rather than via the state’.

If any conjuncture of events could have been better tailored to give liberals of all shades cause to ponder exactly where the acceptable limits of freedom of expression should be set by law, few can be thought of being so well suited for the purpose than the rare and striking combination of events to which we have recently been witness.

They comprise the on-going world-wide wave of Muslim protests sparked by the publication by a Danish newspaper of cartoons of their prophet, Mohammed; the recently concluded separate and quite independent trials of Abu Hamzu and David Irving for each havinf expressws views which has resulted in their receiving substantial custodial sentences; and, finally, the still unresolved confrontation with the law of Nick Griffin and his fellow British National Party member for having publicly aired certain disparaging opinions about Islam.

What should a consistent liberal’s position be in relation to these several cases, all involving expression of opinion or publication of images? Should all be permitted by law? Should none be? Alternatively, if what is called for is a more nuanced approach, by reference to what principle or set of principles can and should liberals determine which forms of expression may and should be allowed by law within a country, and which should not?

The present government has great faith in faith schools, and amongst the other objectives of its current educational reforms is a desire to encourage still more of them. Subject to certain important caveats offered below, so it should.

This is so for several reasons. One is that faith schools have been proven to achieve, ceteris paribus, better exam results than community schools. Another is that, while some parents send their children to them only for the sake of the better exam results they are likely thereby to gain, many others, quite possibly the majority, do so because they subscribe to the faith with which the school in question is affiliated and want their children to attend it because they believe it will best inculcate and reflect their faith in its curriculum and ethos. Both these reasons are perfectly legitimate reasons why there should be faith schools.

However, many critics of faith schools oppose them on the grounds that, in a society as ethnically and religiously plural as ours, they impede integration and social cohesion and foster sectarianism.

Perhaps, it was because faith schools have started to believe this of themselves, or else have begun to fear that, unless they make more effort to demonstrate their non-sectarian credentials, those who do might eventually seek their closure or an end to state funding of them, that, as was reported in yesterday’s Times, they have decided to adopt the National Framework for Religious Education. This framework was originally devised for non-denominational community schools. What is distinctive about its approach ro religious education is that it requires children be taught about all the major religions practised in Britain today.

‘A jolly good job’ you might say, and possibly you will be right.

Today the Power Inquiry calls for constitutional reform. Some of its proposals, such as lowering the voting age to 16, are ill-considered, if they are genuinely intended to increase informed debate, but there are also proposals for direct democracy. Here is a discussion of the value of the referendum and citizen's initiative by Brian Beedham, a former Economist correspondent.

On February 13th, DP World, a ports operator owned by the government of Dubai, a small but economically ambitious member of the United Arab Emirates, paid $6.8 billion to acquire P&O, a British firm which runs a global network of maritime terminals. With P&O came six American ports – Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, New Jersey and New York.

A funny thing has been going on in a far flung corner of the European Union and we should be taking note. The islanders of a small archipelago in the Gulf of Bothnia, off the south-west coast of Finland, are angry and they might be about to rock the European Union’s boat. The chain is called Åland and for those of you not familiar with Finnish geography, this is what the Columbia Encyclopaedia has to say about it: