Civitas Blog

Yesterday the Guardian published news of a study by London University’s UCL and Kings which shows that it is social background which determines pupils’ progress. The still unpublished report is based on national test attainment scores for nearly one million children, and shows that a child’s postcode acts as the best predictor of its success in school.

Upon first learning that a UAE-owned company was intent on purchasing practically every port in America, one might initially be forgiven for supposing that at least one Arab country had begun to show promising signs of detaching itself from strict complaince with a religious code of morality and law that is seemingly less than fully compatible with basic human rights.

Sadly, closer inspection reveals the kind of port on which the company was eager to lay its hands is of the nautical, rather than alcoholic, variety. Hence, whether it should be allowed to has to fallen to the US government to decide, rather than to edicts of the prophet Mohammed.

In February 1945, as the last War was ending, that most acute observer and critic of English manners and mores, George Orwell, wrote a paper, published in April of that same year, on the subject of ‘Antisemitism in Britain’.

I took down from my bookshelf earlier this week the volume containing Orwell's essay in light of what the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said in response to Monday's decision that he be suspended from office for four weeks after a complaint against him was upheld that had been lodged by the British Board of Deputies of Jews.

Last Friday the government education watchdog, Ofsted, published a report entitled ‘Parent’s satisfaction with schools’. The report is compiled using data collected from nearly 7,000 inspections carried out between September 2003 and July 2005. The report shows Ofsted ‘found that inspectors judged parental satisfaction to be excellent, very good or good in 88% of primary schools, 77% of secondary schools and 92% of special schools’. (Are we to conclude, incidentally, that 12% of primary, 23% of secondary and 8% of special school parents will be shortly setting up Trust schools?)

If proof were needed that, on occasion at least, the pen can be a match for the sword, it has been more than amply provided by the recent spectacle of widespread disturbances within the Muslim world over the publication by a small Danish newspaper of cartoons of the prophet, Mohammed.

Ostensibly, what has affronted the protestors has been the cartoons violating an injunction of their religion forbidding pictorial representations of him. Since drawings of Mohammed have long existed in both the Muslim world as well in the West without occasioning comparable protests, their true cause must lie elsewhere.

The time has come to strip the BBC of its status as a public service broadcaster. A programme broadcast on 5 October 2005 called 'Little Kinsey' manifested such a distortion of its source material that we can no longer depend upon the integrity of the BBC's factual programmes.

The full press release is here.

The report by Norman Dennis is here. (PDF - large file)

Listening to Margaret Hodge spouting sanctimonious cant about child poverty and how much New Labour has done to alleviate it is surely enough to make any sane person crazed.

One of the things we all know, don’t we?, is that George Bush and Tony Blair duped their respective parliaments and electorates into waging war to remove Saddam Hussein from power on the false pretext he possessed, or was just about to, weapons of mass destruction and thereby posed a substantial and imminent threat to the security of the West and its strategic allies.

Now, both of their countries seem immured in a seemingly un-winnable war in a country these two leaders had hoped to liberate from tyranny that is fast descending into the far worse state of anarchy in an incipient civil war between various contending factions and ethnicities.

Meanwhile, the US and UK invasion of Iraq has antagonised Muslim opinion around the world, radicalising their domestic disaffected Muslim youth, as well as emboldening and enabling Iraq’s neighbour and long-standing rival, Iran, to make a power-play in the region by becoming the first Muslim country there to acquire nuclear weapons and with them to become a regional superpower in the Middle East with potentially highly detrimental consequences.

All in all, then, the war against Iraq has been a total and unnecessary unmitigated disaster.

Or has it?

On Wednesday the fate of the surprisingly controversial Education and Inspections Bill will be determined. To secure a Second Reading, Blair and Kelly will have to succeed in pushing the reforms through Parliament. Which, despite the concessions made to the Bill in response to the concerns of Labour backbenchers, may prove problematic. A new BBC survey suggests that the proposed reforms will still probably only get through with the support of Opposition votes. What Parliament is unanimous on however, is the fact that the Bill is unsatisfactory. Rebel Labour MPs see the Bill as potentially fostering inequality, the Conservatives see it as overly ‘timid’ and the Liberal democrats see it as ‘a missed opportunity’.

A. An EU Battlegroup

Okay so as a joke it’s not going to have your friends doubled up in the aisles, but it does have a certain ‘it’s funny because it’s true’ quality. Because that is the sum total of solid troop commitment that has emerged from the vaunted European Security and Defence Policy in response to the UN’s request for peacekeeping troops to support their operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the elections in June. Thirty Belgians and ten Austrians. And it’s worth mentioning that the Belgians can only act in a logistical capacity because of a clause in their constitution that prevents them carrying out combat operations in former colonies. So our ten valiant John Rambo-esque Austrians shall ensure that Democracy is secure in Western Africa, ably supported by three times their number in Flemish cooks and quartermasters. Let the continent breathe freely once more – the Europeans have arrived…

We have had to wait an – as David Davis called it – ‘unconscionably’ long time for the police to get round to it, but they have finally arrested some of the incediary Islamists who were protesting so outrageously against the cartoons last month, as the BBC reports today.

It is, sadly, unlikely that the offending extremists – guilty of incitement to violence and murder – will be prosecuted. The police force’s evasive procrastination is typical of their approach towards Muslim extremists: the strategy is one of deferral until the issue is forgotten.

You won’t hear this often, but I recommend having another look at an article by Christopher Hitchens, written at the time. His point is that freedom of speech is paramount – that it is Denmark we should be protecting, not the enraged Islamic umma.

‘Some comfort/pleasure from Barney the dinosaur/Teddy and his awareness of his family are all that MB has. But… these assets are precious and real.’

So said Mr Justice Holman in the High Court yesterday in explanation of his decision to withhold legal permission from doctors who had sought it to withdraw life-support from an eighteenth-month boy in their care, identified in the case only as ‘MB’, suffering from acute muscular atrophy and with a life expectancy of only a year.

Had Mr Justice Holman been less able than his quoted remark reveals him to have been to put himself imaginatively into the acutely painful shoes in which the baby boy currently languishes in a hospital somewhere in the north of England, then doubtless today the boy would no longer be on a respirator there but in its morgue.

Three years on almost to the day since the invasion of Iraq by the US and UK, and amidst daily reports of continuing insurgency and turmoil there, plus increasing belligerence on the part of Iraq’s noisy next door neighbour Iran, it is a timely moment to reflect on the merits of the invasion, and, more generally, of President Bush's recent reaffirmation of his doctrine of pre-emption that lay behind it.

There was much initial support in the US and UK for the invasion of Iraq because of the general acceptance in these two countries of their respective government's claims that Saddam posed a severe and real threat to their national security by possessing WMD and having links with Al Qaeda.

When, after the invasion, no such weapons or any hard evidence of such links were discovered among the debris, support for the invasion rapidly fell away in the US and UK and has continued to fall there, as the number of returning body-bags and of Iraqi civilian fatalities continues to mount, and as stories in the western media continue to circulate as to what a legacy of chaos the invasion of Iraq has left in its wake since Saddam’s removal.

Meanwhile, the increased power that regime change in Iraq has given Shiites in that part of the world seems to have emboldened Iran to step up its nuclear programme in what looks like a clear bid on its part to become a regional super-power in the Middle East.

So, has all the blood-shed and other costs of war been worth it, or should the West have taken Saddam at his word that he had long since disposed of any stocks of WMD he had ever accumulated and that he had never forged any links with Osama bin Laden?

And even if Saddam had accumulated such weapons or had those links with Al Qaeda, has his forcible removal from power truly made the world any safer for democracy, to coin a phrase, given how unstable and perilous the situation has become in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular since the invasion?

Education Secretary Ruth Kelly has announced that the back-to-basics method of teaching reading known as ‘synthetic phonics’ is to become a legal requirement ‘embedded in the National curriculum’. This decision follows the conclusions of Jim Rose, a former Deputy Chief Inspector at Ofsted, that phonics work is ‘essential’ to teaching reading.

For all the talk about the collapse of the EU Constitution (and in some quarters of its stealthy implementation) it is easy to forget that the work of the European Union is still going on in many areas. One of the potentially most fruitful and positive of these is the Lisbon strategy, that was launched with much fanfare in 2000 and later re-branded after it became apparent that the lofty but rather vague goals set down in the original document were not being implemented. We have now had five full years of the Lisbon strategy, a landmark that is being marked in various corners with a slew of analyses of exactly how well the project has done so far. While I would not put myself at the front of any (metaphorical) choir to sing the praises of the Lisbon strategy to date, some new research does shed light on why the way in which the programme now operates could provide a model for EU operation in general.

The debate about how best to improve schools has been hijacked by egalitarians who are obsessed with selection. Would admission by lottery be a solution? Here are a few words from The Times arguing in favour. Does it concede too much to the egalitarians?

After all the whining about the House of Lords, how it’s unfair and unelected, and a club for atrophying gerontiacs, it’s great to see the House reaffirming its importance as a legislative check in British politics. Throughout the current PM’s regime the House of Lords has attempted to be a check and balance against the more authoritarian and autarkic impulses of New Labour. Now it has struck a blow against the PM’s wife, the lawyer for Shabina Begum. You’ll remember that last year a court ruled that teenager Shabina Begum's human rights were violated when she was banned from wearing full Islamic dress at school. Now that ruling has been overturned. As the Guardian reports, Lord Bingham said the school was fully justified in acting as it did:

Today’s Times carries a report about Abdul Rahman, the 41 year-old Afghani facing trial in his home country for what still remains there the capital offence of having converted from Islam to Christianity, something he did some fourteen years ago whilst residing in Pakistan. Apparently, it is reported, he might be able to avoid the death penalty by pleading being unfit to stand trial by virtue of insanity.

One need not be a follower of the libertarian anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, who rejected the very notion of mental illness, to be disinclined to pin one's hopes for this poor man’s future on faith in any such a sanity clause.

The reason the man should not be having to face trial or the death penalty for having done what he is alleged to is not that he is unfit to plead by virtue of insanity. It is, rather, that he has no case to answer, having done nothing for which he deserves to stand trial or be punished in having left his previous faith for another.

There is a superb comment piece by Jamie Whyte in yesterday’s Times which draws attention to a problem with the entire philosophy underlying Gordon Brown’s approach towards the role of the state in the provision of services.

‘Suppose Gordon Brown were to make a legal reality out of the rights he proclaims at Labour Party conferences. Suppose he guaranteed everyone “the highest standard of free healthcare”, “the best start in life” and all the rest…', Whyte invites us to imagine before remarking: 'This may sound like Utopia [but] ‘in fact it would be serfdom.’

The government’s paternity leave proposals, currently being prepared for the forthcoming Work and Families Bill, have come under attack from those who will be carrying the cost: employers. The government’s plan is to give fathers a standard three months of statutory paid leave and a further three months unpaid. Additionally, new policy will enable mothers to transfer some of their entitlement to the father of their baby. The problem with all this is that employers are worried that the arrangements will be open to abuse. According to Meg Munn, Minister for Women: “Businesses are concerned that while women claiming maternity leave are obviously pregnant, they can’t tell with fathers. Fathers may or may not be married and may or may not be living with them.” And as the Sunday Times pointed out, with the number of births outside marriage now as high as 42%, determining fatherhood is a much harder task. And of course the other issue, also pointed out in the Sunday Times, is that even when a man is genuinely the biological father, how can we be sure that he will use his paternity leave to be paternal?

With those inspirational words, Goran Persson, the Prime Minister of Sweden, summed up the release of the new Energy Policy for Europe (EPE) that emerged from the Spring economic summit in Brussels last week. It’s appearance won’t come as a surprise to anyone – Energy has ruthlessly hijacked the EU agenda since the Ukrainian gas crisis in early January and the release of the Commission Green Paper at the beginning of the month signalled that a Common Energy Policy was on the immediate horizon.

So what does it mean? Well Prime Minister Persson’s summary seems to encapsulate the complexity of the energy issue and also hint towards the dangers inherent in the European response. The Green Paper was an ambitious document and recommended three EU objectives in the field of energy strategy: Sustainability, Competitiveness and Security of Supply. It covered environmental issues, the importance of a new energy mix and the questions of sovereignty that this created, the need to complete the internal gas and electricity markets, issues of solidarity in times of energy crisis, the relationship between energy policy and the Lisbon agenda and external relations in terms of energy supply.

Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow'd my better part of man!
And be these juggling fiends no more believ'd,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope!

Funnily enough, I don’t like liars. I know all about Shakespeare’s equivocators – Macbeth’s witches, Iago, Richard III, etc. – how much damage they can do when they tell us what we want to hear, not what is true. And I’m suspicious of moral relativists. I suspect them either of knavish duplicity or wilful stupidity. You know, I just don’t think that if a Catholic priest is convicted for paedophilia Cabinet ministers would be calling meetings to tell the Catholic Church that it hasn’t happened - or that Henry VIII was in fact to blame. It just wouldn’t strictly be true.

I’m not a great fan of criminals either. I take one of those terribly outmoded approaches towards personal responsibility, that if you’re caught doing something illegal, not only you should be punished, but you should also be denounced. It sends out the wrong messages if you’re not. If everyone knows you're guilty, but don't punish you or denounce what you've done we’ll feel that things are unfair, and the British care dearly about fairness. Don’t we?

You’d have thought so. Except that the ongoing fiasco about the cartoons challenges such an assumption. The protesters against the cartoons in London – the ones calling for murder, decapitation, and similar charitable acts – were guilty of incitement to violence and incitement to murder. Added to which, those who burned down Danish embassies around the world broke the international law of diplomatic immunity. We should be in no doubt. What they did they did in the name of Islam and what they did was wrong. Most people are now agreed about that, even if it did take a lot of people a long time to discover their spines. Yet this is what Jack Straw said last night:

‘A large number of Muslims in this country were – understandably – upset by those cartoons being reprinted across Europe and at their deeply held beliefs being insulted. They expressed their hurt and outrage but did so in a way which epitomised the learned, peaceful religion of Islam. In doing so they were not being “unreasonable” or “un-European”. They were not threatening anyone’s values...’

Melanie Phillips is typically trenchant about the matter in her blog today. When you become indebted to bad guys at best you end up compromised, cowering and cowtowing; at worst you end up giving them everything they want. Islam might mean submission, but the extremists want Britain and the rest of the West to surrender.

When the social order is threatened we need a robust debate, not crapulous whining and pietistic cant. The newspapers broke no laws. It was the Muslim extremists who broke laws. Until we can be clear about this, we cannot begin to discuss how we orchestrate or promote greater racial and religious harmony. And we should be clear – those of us who believe in freedom of speech and the rule of law – how the social contract works. If you subscribe, you’re welcome; if you don't, you’re not. End of discussion. And we should stop feeling guilty about it.

Addendum: last week I posted the latest episode in the life and times of Ken Livingstone. Kindly enough, he has supplied us with another, affectionately calling the US ambassador to London a 'chiselling little crook'. The leader in the Daily Telegraph says what needs to be said. Has Red Ken become Mad Ken? When's this farce going to end?

It is reported in today’s Times that, in the north Indian state of Haryana, a doctor has just received a two-year jail sentence for having arranged a number of abortions on female foetuses carried out because of the gender they were.

Apparently, in that part of the world, a girl is somewhat of a liability to her parents. For, upon her marriage, they must stump up a hefty dowry to give to their future son-in-law and then stand by as their daughter is absorbed into the bosom of her new family-by-marriage, along with whatever earnings and other human capital she might bring with her.

Small wonder is it, then, that, with the advent twenty years ago of ultra-sound scans which can detect the sex of a foetus when only 12 weeks old, it has been estimated that something like ten million abortions have been carried out on female foetuses in India, bringing down its ratio of females to males from near par in 1910 to its present level of 927 males for every 1,000 males.

According to the report, the richer the area of India, the greater is the liability that the parents of a girl consider her to be. For example, according to the latest census figures for the Punjab, one of India’s most affluent states, the present ratio of girls to boys is as low as 793 to 1,000.

Precisely because of fear that prospective parents will engage in this same practice here, the NHS forbids them being told the sex of their potential future child when a pregnant woman undergoes her routine scan at 12 weeks of her pregnancy.

Actually, here in Britain, it would be far more likely that, were such a form of sex selection practised at all, it would be male rather than female foetuses who would be liable to culled on account of their sex.

According to a letter in today’s Times, among whose signatories figures that of a former chief inspector of prisons, current over-crowding in prisons is so acute as to deny prisoners opportunity for any form of education while there, save of the most basic kind to which priority, apparently, is currently being given.

Some might be tempted to retort by saying: ‘Tough, prison should no more be a university than it should be a vacation resort’. While true enough, such a response might dispose too quickly of the issue raised by the letter.