Civitas Blog

That antiquated institution marriage seems to be making a comeback. What’s more we’re hearing about it in the most unlikely places. Last week The New Statesman told us that marriage wasn’t in fact ‘withering’ as they’d suspected we’d suspected, but that it was ‘cautiously putting out green sprouts’. Then this week The Economist tells us that marriage is recovering and explains ‘why marriages are lasting longer’. For the marriages advocates amongst us this all looks very promising: not only is it no longer antediluvian to want to marry, marriages are getting more robust. But whilst all this is good news in principle, a generation of stable, gender-equal partnerships is not actually just around the corner. Nor, therefore is the end of high family breakdown. As The Economist points out the greater longevity of marriage in recent years is a lot to do with parallel increases in cohabitation. Because cohabitation has become so normalised the people who marry today are ‘a more select group’. Consequently whilst divorce rates have remained relatively stable over the last 20 years, cohabitation rates have risen enormously – as has family breakdown. Ideology has changed, but practice is being a little slower.

Maybe I have a rather outdated image of what a nun gets up to, but I have to confess to being amazed as I watched Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ last night, to see Sister Barbara Raferty of Scoil Chriost Ri in Portloise, County Carlow, overseeing a budding arms brokerage business managed by her sixth form girls. Needless to say the good sister was not pursuing a lucrative way of repairing the Church roof, but was leading an exercise to demonstrate the continued loopholes in EU control of the arms trade. The message of the programme was that three years after the EU leaders reached a common position on arms brokering, it is still shockingly easy to trade lethal weapons and instruments of torture from within the European Union. For those who are sceptical of the worth of the Union, this programme provided pause for thought.

We received this as an email yesterday. What follows is a detailed and clear explanation of the (sinister) implications of ID card / National Identity Register database legislation. The email finished with the words: “If you did not know the full scope of the proposed ID Card Scheme before and you are as unsettled as I am at what it really means to you, to this country and its way of life, I urge you to email or photocopy this and give it to your friends and colleagues and everyone else you think should know and who cares.”

Since it introduced them in 1998, the present Government has come to place ever increased reliance on Asbo’s in its unrelenting but still very much un-won war on crime and its causes.

How efficacious Asbo’s have been in this regard remains very much a matter of controversy, as does the government’s continued faith in them as a judicial instrument.

Even though it might not be showing any signs of having lost its ardour for them, the judiciary certainly is beginning to do so going by a decision in the court of appeal made on Tuesday of this week, reported in today’s Times.

Two high court judges rejected an appeal by the CPS against the dismissal last year by a District Judge of a charge against a boy then aged 15 that he had breached one of the terms of an Asbo he was under that, ironically, had originally been issued against him by that very same District Judge.

The paragraph in the boy’s Asbo of which the CPS claimed the boy to be in breach was one ordering him to refrain from acting ‘in an anti-social manner’.

In what must surely go down as one of the most bizarre and astonishingly inept decisions by any appeal court in the land (since the last one!), today’s Times reports that an appeal court yesterday awarded primary care for two sisters, aged 7 and 4, to the former lesbian partner of the girls’ 32 year old (biological) mother, who had originally conceived the girls by AID when living with her former partner, now aged 47, but with whom the mother broke up some five year ago.

We have passed this way before.

Yesterday’s appeal court ruling is but the latest episode in a long-running saga of contention between the two former lesbian lovers over the two girls about which I had occasion first to write almost a year ago to the day.

Neither Britain nor the US have suffered any significant Islamist terror strikes on their own soil for some time.

Has the threat of such attacks now permanently gone away?

If it hasn't, are not the US and UK governments courting such attacks by prolonging the presence of their troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention one of them vaguely threatening to use of force against Iran to frustrate its nuclear ambitions?

Would the USA and the UK today not be safer if Bush and Blair had never invaded Iraq three years ago, or if Bush Snr had not decided earlier to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which caused US troops to be stationed on Saudi Arabian soil, thereby incurring the wrath of Osama bin Laden and other likeminded Muslims?

Many pundits here and in the US have offered affirmative answers to all these questions.

Yet there are counter-balancing considerations which should be considered before Britain and the US revise their foreign policies.

It’s become a rather amusing cliché that France would always prefer revolution to reform but once again this seems to have been the case. Despite M. de Villepin’s courageous attempt to stand firm in the face of student riots, strikes and street violence across his nation, M. Chirac yesterday led the climb-down of his government over the contested CPE, or youth first employment contract.

Let’s be clear about what the CPE proposed to do. France has enormous employment problems. It suffered a burden of 9.6% national unemployment in 2005 as opposed to Britain’s just over 4%. Added to that is the problem of 42% long term unemployment where unemployed workers could not find a new job within 12 months – again double the percentage of the UK. These statistics become even more acute amongst youth workers. In September 2004, 21.7% of 15-24 year olds were unemployed, a figure which rises to an astonishing 40% in some regions and which is largely blamed for the riots at the end of last year. The CPE attempted to combat these figures and their crippling social effect by adding flexibility to France’s ‘one-job’ oriented labour laws and allowing employers to terminate the contract of 18-25 year olds without warning within the first two years of their employment. Although there are obvious dangers to the legislation, when you consider that a quarter of dismissals in France are contested in work tribunals lasting an average of 30 months, you can see the reasoning behind it as an incentive to encourage employers to hire youth workers.

Ken Livingston is behaving very strangely at the moment and his behaviour invites speculation, but more than anything else one is left wondering if he’s a sandwich short of a picnic. His choreographed insult against intelligence – that the Tiannamen Square massacre was an event comparable to London’s poll tax riots – is merely the latest is a string of public relations bungles that had up to this point focussed on Jews. It is difficult to see what he’s trying to achieve. Has he been seduced by the glamorous dream of the Orient? Is he making the general inference that dictatorial communism in China, with its thousands of political assassinations, concentration camps, not to mention its extreme censorship of the press, is no worse than was Thatcherism in Britain? Is he reaffirming his leftist sympathies so as to endear the Chinese to his particular brand of relativism - or perhaps to sure up his uneasy alliance of Muslim and socialist supporters in this country by defining himself against conservatism and anything Judeo-Christian or otherwise western? Is he just trying to get himself ejected from the Mayoral seat in London? There was a sharp, sarcastic comment piece in The Times earlier in the week, and a good leader in the Daily Telegraph.

While Ken does everything he can to discredit Britain, it is worth remembering that today marks the 400th anniversary of the formation of one of the world’s oldest national flags, the Union Jack, which was introduced by James I/VI when he became King of England and Wales as well as of Scotland. It has become one of the best recognised and most highly respected brands in the world – not to mention a fashion item (perhaps the most famous instance was Geri Halliwell in a skimpy Union Jack dress in 1997). Apologetic multiculturalists and others generally embarrassed to be British tend to shy away from symbols of corporate national identity. But we should be proud of our nation and proud of our history. The Department for Culture Media & Sport has a list of 16 days when the flag should be flown on government buildings – that could do with being extended to 365.

Schools are to become less, not more independent from local authority control, we hear in Ruth Kelly’s latest announcement.

The new proposals which are unveiled today at the National Association of Schoolmasters and Women Teachers conference in Birmingham today set out a new system whereby even schools which are successful in terms of academic achievement will be subject to an ‘enforcement notice’. LEAs are to gain powers to issue warning notices and send ‘hit squads’ into schools deemed to be under performing in terms of progress. This is a response to OfSTED’s findings that one in four schools are ‘coasting’, providing an education that, in the words of former HMCI David Bell, is “nothing more than…mediocre.”

If I were to suggest at the next Civitas Christmas Party that we all play a round of the ingenious parlour game ‘Name Your Favourite EU Commissioner’, then my greatest difficulty would be in fielding the volley of bread rolls that would undoubtedly fly my way! There is not a lot about most of the current EU Commission to inspire admiration. Take the British Commissioner Peter Mandelson, example par excellence, who has refused to bang heads together in an attempt to reach a conclusion of the Doha round of WTO talks. Yet there is one figure amongst the current bunch who stands out as an example of how EU Commissioners should behave: the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

There are two good pieces in the Daily Telegraph this morning, one an editorial, the other a comment.

Both conclude that without radical restructuring of the healthcare service in this country we are going to be in trouble. This is exactly what Civitas has been saying for some time. You can read our reports in the health reform section of this website.

According to a disturbing report in today’s Times, British Muslims currently studying to become imams at a Muslim college in London have voiced disquiet- understandably anonymously -- about the disparaging way in which some of their set texts describe non-Muslims. They study them on their eight-year programme of study the last three of which are spent in the Iranian city of Qom, described by the report as ‘the power base of Iran’s religious leaders’.

Study of the text in question forms part of their introductory course on Islamic jurisprudence, and, apparently, it likens non-Muslims to filth, as well as offering a literalist interpretation of jihad.

The seminary in question, Hawza Ilmiyya, shares its premises and staff with a second Muslim institute, the ‘Islamic College for Advanced Studies’, that offers a BA in Islamic Studies validated by a British university. That BA forms the first three years of their eight year programme of studies.

From the report in the Times, it is unclear whether the course-unit which includes study of the text students on it commendably find offensive forms part of the BA or their later studies. By describing the course-unit in question as an introduction to Islamic law, the report suggests students are made to study this text as part of their BA programme.

The Times quotes a representative of the course who teaches at both institutions as denying the text is taught as true doctrine. ‘We just read the text and translate for them… The idea is that they would be able to read classical texts and that is all.’

However, if the text in question forms part of the BA programme, one wonders how any British University could have validated that degree without requiring that text be subjected in class to critical exegesis that calls into question the legitimacy of any literal reading of it. After all, the British state funds that validating body and, to put it mildly, there is a legitimate public interest that all home-grown imams be strictly moderate ones.

While Sienna Miller's acting admittedly is never going to win her any awards, she certainly seems to deserve one simply for acting in the latest film that she is in process of making in New York, given a report about it posted yesterday on World Net Daily (hat-tip, as ever: Little Green Footballs).

The film is a re-make of one originally made in 2003 by Theo Van Gogh, who was brutally stabbed to death in Amsterdam a year later by an Islamist angered with the Dutch film-maker for having made a film for tv that was highly critical of Islam’s treatment of women.

Although the current film has nothing to do with Islam, because it is being made in tribute to the murdered director, Ms Miller has, along with her co-star, received threats warning she will be sorry unless she pulls out of the film.

Since these warning letters clearly have in mind something other than the disappointing reviews the film is likely to receive, one can only take off one’s hat to Ms Miller and her co-star for their determination to press on regardless of them.

Mind you, some starlets will do practically anything to keep themselves in the limelight.

Still, putting your life on the line to do a film surely goes well beyond the call of beauty, or at least of that particular one. Certainly, given what befell Theo van Gogh, the threats Ms Miller and her co-star have received cannot be taken lightly.

Three cheers then for Sienna!

We can only hope and pray that the only corpsing to which Ms Miller and co-star may fall victim on set is that from which a rapid recovery is possible upon a subsequent take.

I commute daily to work in the centre of London by tube, as I did on July 7th last year.

Since that eventful day, I have to confess hardly a day has gone by when I have set out on that journey without wondering whether it would prove to be my last.

Am I just being paranoid?

Well, to adapt what was said of Harold Wilson after he persisted in claiming, when Prime Minister, that he was under surveillance by British intelligence: I may be paranoid, but it doesn’t prove that Islamist fanatics are not out to get me and all my non-Muslim compatriots who are as unwilling as I am to convert to Islam or accept dhimmitude.

It appears that Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, has created a delightful (if concerning) example of political irony, the consequences of which could have been stolen from the script of the forthcoming movie version of "Dallas".

Three weeks ago the European Commission launched a swathe of legal proceedings aimed at loosening the sclerotic nature of the European internal energy market. Mr Johnson saw this as an opportunity to note Britain’s “sanguine” attitude towards foreign mergers and takeovers and warn of the risks that Europe would be left behind by globalisation if they did not mimic our position. Two weeks passed and Mr. Johnson was proven right. The threat that protectionism poses has been made explicit. On April 19th Alexei Miller, CEO of Russian energy monopoly Gazprom, emerged from a meeting with EU ambassadors and stated that: “Attempts to limit Gazprom’s activities in the European market and politicise questions of gas supply, which in fact are of an entirely economic nature, will not lead to good results.” The thinly veiled threat continued: “It should not be forgotten we are actively seeking new markets such as North America and China.”

As if this bald threat to Europe’s gas supply was not enough, yesterday, Semyon Vainshtok, President of Transneft, which is to oil pipelines what Gazprom is to natural gas, followed up with a proclamation that Russia should also cut oil supplies to an ‘overfed’ Europe. “We have overfed Europe with crude. And every single economic manual says that excessive supplies depress prices…as soon as we divert to China, South Korea, Australia and Japan it will immediately take away crude from our European colleagues.” The irony is that what provoked this belligerence from the Russians was, unfortunately, a Financial Times revelation that Alan Johnson and other ministers were briefed in February about the legality of blocking a rumoured takeover by Gazprom of Centrica, parent company of British Gas. Ah. So much for sanguine, however full marks for sense.

Reading today’s newspapers about the worringly large number of foreign criminals who have been wrongly released into the community, rather than repatriated upon completion of their terms in prison as the judges who had sent them there had often recommended, put me in mind of that wonderful segment in Walt Disney’s film Fantasia known as ‘the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’.

The BBC has handily sifted through the news about the day that is now being dubbed 'black Wednesday' on account of three nightmares in government: the revelation that Prescott had an affair with his secretary; the heckling of Patricia Hewitt by a conference of nurses; and the exposure of government negligence at the highest level concerning foreign criminals. There are good pieces by Philip Johnston and Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, as well as a good leader in the same paper. There is, too, a good piece in The Times by Anatole Kaletsky, as well as a good leader. The only thing I would add to the points made in these articles, and others besides, is that while Blair is deeply responsible for the mess, I hope the public doesn't react to his departure, when it comes, as if it is some kind of panacea. The whole government is a shambles, and the three figures in the heat right now should all be packing their bags too. What's more, we must hope that the British electorate makes its discontent known in next week's local elections.

Today the TES reports on two teachers who found ‘pupils’ unruly behaviour and the demands of the National Curriculum too stressful’ and consequently have left the teaching profession for… the cleaning profession. In spite of - or because of – a combined 13 years in teaching, sisters Kirsty and Fiona Innes have given up school life to set up Aardvark Cleaning.