Civitas Blog

Yesterday, John Prescott announced he has decided to give up use of the grace-and- favour country house of Dorneywood traditionally reserved for deputy PMs. He was doing so, he claimed, because the kerfuffle surrounding his continued use of it, after having been stripped of his former responsibilities in that office in last month’s cabinet reshuffle, was preventing him fulfilling his remaining ones in that office -- whatever they are!

The immediate occasion of his decision was the publication in the press last week of photographs of him and his colleagues hard at work there during a supposed away day last Thursday ... playing croquet.

Would that he and his colleagues had always been equally as diligent during their years in office.

Then the country might not be in the very serious mess in which it appears they have deposited it as a result of their misgovernance of it.

About the only decent thing the present government has done during its time in office in my opinion -- and I am aware this view is by no means widely shared by all its supporters, let alone its critics -- is to have joined the US in regime change in Iraq. Everything else to which they have turned their over-zealous hands has turned to ashes.

This in The Times today:

‘THE days of vast lecture halls filled with bored, hungover students falling asleep may be over. In what is being likened to the printing revolution of the 16th century, podcasts may soon replace lectures. Forcing undergraduates out of bed to visit campuses is not the best way to teach, researchers have found. Academics are investigating how they might use digital technology and MP3 players to help students. Lecturers are already using podcasts to supplement lectures. Harold Fricker, a lecturer at Coventry, says: “There is a shift equivalent to the Gutenberg presses of the 1500s.” A trial podcast mixing rap and information will be discussed today.’

Three objections…

It has recently been announced that Sir Iqbal Sacranie is to step down as head of the Muslim Council of Britain in favour of his deputy, Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari.

A BBC news profile of Dr Bari informs us that he is chairman of the East London Mosque, as well as a specialist teacher in London’s Tower Hamlet for something the web-site terms ‘behaviour support’ and for which, it further reports, Dr Bari received an MBE in 2003.

According to this profile of him, at last year’s general election, Dr Bari, in his capacity as chairman of the London Mosque, helped to secure a healthy turnout of the Muslim vote in London’s East End by informing its attendees they had a duty to vote.

It would be tempting, although doubtless mistaken, to think that part of Dr Bair’s remit as a teacher of ‘behaviour support’ involved this call to active citizenship.

To think this of what falls under Dr Bari’s remit as a teacher of ‘behaviour support’, would doubtless be mistaken, however tempting, since it was precisely the large Muslim turnout his intervention is reported to have helped secure that was responsible for the return to parliament of George Galloway and his notorious ‘Respect’ party, hardly a good day for parliamentary democracy.

Energy continues to dominate the EU agenda and EUObserver has informed us that Javier Solana and the European Commission have recently drafted a strategy paper called “An external energy policy to serve Europe’s energy interests” which will be used as a discussion point for the European Council summit on 15-16 June. In light of the indecisive results of the EU-Russia summit in Sochi last month, which saw Russia still refusing to ratify the Energy Charter Treaty, it is no surprise that Russia appears (the text has not been released) to dominate the agenda. With this in mind it seems pertinent to take a quick look over two recent reported developments on the periphery of this tug-of-war and that should get a mention in Brussels next week: the EU special representative for the Caucasus intimating that the EU may get involved in future peacekeeping in Nagorno-Karabakh, on the Armeni-Azeri border, and the increasing closeness of Russo-Algerian relations that have led to media concerns of a possible OPEC-equivalent cartel forming to dominate trade in natural gas.

Three excellent articles have recently appeared on the internet about the problems Europe is facing as a result of disastrous policies that various European governments have adopted, including the ever-growing supra-national one in Brussels, in response to the huge influx of Muslim immigrants to this region in recent years.

The first is by Flemming Rose entitled ‘Europe’s Politics of Victimology’ . In it, the culture editor of Jyllands Posten explains the motivation of his paper in publishing last September the notorious set of cartoons of the prophet Muhammed that were eventually to unleash such a storm of Muslim protest at them around the world.

‘By treating a Muslim figure the same way I would a Christian or Jewish icon’, explains Rose, he was -- rather than intending to insult Danish Muslims or the founder of their religion -- ‘sending an important message: You are not strangers, you are here to stay, and we accept you as an integrated part of our life. And we will satirize you too. It was an act of inclusion, not exclusion; an act of respect and recognition.’

By declining the invitation, the outraged Danish imams who stirred up Muslim protests at the cartoons were declining inclusion – other than on their own terms which were to make non-Muslims mountains come to Muhammed.

It’s not really what we want to encourage, the stigma that disabled people are potential lawsuits, but with the rising litigiousness of the disability lobby in this country that is where things are going.

Last year the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) announced that it was suing Debenhams for the failure of one of its stores to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for people in wheelchairs. This week the BBC reported that the Arcadia group, one of the UK's largest clothing retailers, is facing legal action over the inaccessibility of one of its stores, a branch of Burton in Stafford. The DRC says it has evidence that 40% of the group's shops – which include Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins, Wallis, Burton and Evans – have barriers that make it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to shop there.

The argument, which depends on rather inflated figures about the number of disabled people in Britain, is that with disabled people’s spending power set at £80 billion, all retailers should improve access to their stores in order to take the profits. If this truly were the case, though, surely savvy retailers would capitalise on the supposedly untapped market. By using the disabled spending argument, the DRC’s reasonableness is confounded by its own self-generated paradox: if you do not make money out of disabled people, disabled people will make money out of you.

The requirement of ‘reasonable adjustments’ – providers of goods, services and facilities have legal responsibilities not to discriminate against disabled people – is enshrined in the Disability Discrimination Act. What this means is that companies, public sector and social care agencies have legal duties to meet the additional needs of people with disabilities. In due course this will extend to a legal requirement of inclusive design of products, services and environments. Yet making such a process compulsory forces designers, manufacturers and service providers to make unreasonable adjustments. The lower the chance of using a benefit, the weaker is the case for having it: scarcity is a consideration as well as dignity.

A legal framework for cohabiting couples would not simply be superfluous it would be a potential infringement of their rights.

The cohabitation debate continues, although this time under a different guise. Somewhat ironically, whilst advocates of rights for cohabiting couples argued two weeks ago that they were being penalised by not being entitled to the rights of same-sex couples in civil partnerships, Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger, a lesbian couple married under Canadian law, have described civil partnership as ‘discriminatory’.

The Council of the European Union (Council of Ministers) has long been a whipping boy for those angry at the lack of transparency in the EU. In 2002, the House of Commons European Scrutiny Select Committee famously compared it to the closed Parliament of North Korea. Critics have rightly made a stink about the fact that while the EU’s twenty-five member states take a rather preachy attitude towards encouraging democracy in other parts of the world, they take most significant legislative decisions behind closed doors. Last year, the Council bowed to pressure to allow the beginning and end of some meetings to be filmed by news crews. Now, there are moved to allow cameras in for the full length of meetings discussing the single market, the environment and transport. A revolution it ain’t. But British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has cried foul: she is worried that allowing in cameras will encourage participants to play-up to national audiences, thus crippling decision-making.

I can see where Mrs Beckett is coming from. This is a tricky circle to square: transparency is a laudable goal, but it will only work if we trust our fellow member states. If we can’t trust them, then perhaps it is better to avoid a diplomatic brouhaha by keeping decision-making behind closed doors. Yet, I can’t help but think that there is a greater imperative here: ensuring that decision-makers are accountable and are seen to be accountable. It is this that makes Mrs Beckett’s back-pedalling misguided.

Cast your mind back to February. We weren’t allowed to see the cartoons, but the reactions to them were everywhere. On our screens, in our newspapers, we were treated to the spectacle of Muslim extremists holding up banners praising the ‘magnificent’ attacks of 9/11 and calling for ‘a real holocaust’. There was even a cute little two-year-old girl wearing an ‘I love Al-Qaida’ cap, and that comedian who decided to don a suicide belt for a joke. After 9/11, 7/7, and various other Islamist atrocities, we could be forgiven for feeling that these weren’t just empty gestures. And then of course there were the riots all around the globe, the bizarre sight of Danish flags being torched, and the sacking of Danish embassies, a violation of diplomatic immunity that for some incomprehensible reason went unpunished.

In Britain, the apologies we heard from the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, the former Met chief, Lord Stevens, and others, indicated they were more upset about the depiction of the Prophet than about the fact that there are people in this country who are hell bent on slaughtering the rest of us. As I predicted here at the time, while people have been arrested for protesting outside the Cenotaph, not to mention clobbered by the police for opposing the fox-hunting ban, the public’s call for the cartoon protesters to be punished was quietly brushed under the plush carpets of Whitehall and Scotland Yard. Freedom of speech was most evidently lost in identity politics: incitement to murder, which has been on our statute books for a long time, was carefully glossed over. It’s called cowardice, folks, and it’s not something the Brits have been very well known for in the past. What’s happened to us?

As some pointed out at the time, and have continued to do so, this pusillanimity can be emblematic as one of the critical failures of multiculturalism. A politically enshrined doctrine that prioritises difference over unity can only fatally weaken the society in which it is enforced. Rather than seek common ground – or, since history has given us a very great deal of that, rather than assert common ground – we have allowed the glue of our common values to be loosened by the glue of minority cultures and religions. Thus could Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, ban the flying of the English national flag in our prisons on the grounds that it showed the cross of St George, which was used by the Crusaders and is thus offensive to Muslims. Society, in this environment, becomes friable, liable to crumble when a rigid wedge, such as that of radical Islam, is driven in.

At last the People couldn’t bear it any longer, so they said to the Barons (who were now Noble English Gentlemen): “We really can’t stand this misery any more. Won’t you do something?”

These are just a few of the things the Barons put in their List. But you can see what a bad King John was when they had to put in things like that. There were lots more things in the List, so they called it the Great Writing, or Magna Carta.”

So wrote Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall about what happened in England on 15 June 1215 some 791 years ago. She did so in her 1937 re-working of Our Island Story written for still younger children and published under the playful title of Kings and Things.

Tomorrow is the official 80th birthday of the Queen. Yesterday, to mark the occasion a special morning service was held at St Paul’s, followed by a slap-up lunch at Manson House. There over three hundred guests, ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to Margaret Thatcher, turned up to pay homage to the remarkable lady who has done more than anyone else during this last turbulent half-century to hold the nation together.

Remarkably, this occasion served to evoke some rare words of sense from both the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Two American researchers form the Universities of Florida International and Miami, Finley and Schwartz, have ‘redone’ Parsons and Bales’ famous 1950s study on fatherhood fifty years on (Volume 7, No.1, 42-55 of Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 2006). The outcome of the revisit is surprising – in that it is surprisingly similar to the outcome fifty years ago. Looking at the ‘characterisation of the fathering role,’ Parsons and Bales’ found that fathering centred on so-called instrumental functions. That is, fathering was more about providing income, protection and discipline, than it was about ‘expressive’ functions – the more emotional aspects of care giving, which were found to be largely mothering functions. The original study covered an ethnically diverse sample of American students from both divorced and in tact families. The aim was to gauge the role that the respondents’ fathers had played in their upbringing. In reproducing the study, Finley and Schwartz have gathered a similar respondent pool. What Finley and Schwartz’s research shows is that 50 years later, despite huge societal change, little has altered in the nature of fathering.

Two weeks ago my blog ‘Energising the Debate’ mentioned a memorandum of cooperation that had been created between Gazprom and Algerian state gas monopoly Sonatrach. This had coincided (by sheer happenstance, surely!) with Russia writing off $4.74bn of Algerian debt and Algeria inking an arms deal worth $7.5bn with Russian state arms exporter Rosoboronexport. The response of several industry insiders and press outlets, including the Times, was that these developments presaged the beginning of an OPEC-esque cartel of natural gas producing countries. This month, Hadi Hallouche of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies has released a report tackling this issue of a future gas cartel and focusing on the potential of the already-existing Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) to develop along those lines. Its conclusion was that whilst it was not impossible, it was currently not likely to occur because of several factors: Instabilities within the priorities of its members, the fact that gas operates in a sellers market at present, the fact that GECFs structure is not designed to operate as a cartel, and the lack of a coherent global gas market of the nature of the oil market. However, in terms of the European market, the evidence could in fact be taken to suggest a compelling case for a cooperative cartel, not built out of the existing GECF structure, but around the locomotive forces of Russo-Algerian cooperation.

In drawing attention to Samaira Nazir, a twenty-five-year-old graduate who was brutally stabbed to death for wanting to marry a lower caste Afghan man rather than a suitor in Pakistan, Allison Pearson uses her Daily Mail column this week to make a robust case for outlawing forced marriages in Britain. It’s curious that the argument even needs to be advanced, that there could possibly not be a consensus, but as Pearson points out, our government is scared.

‘To find the real reason for this shameful abandonment of vulnerable young people, we need only look at the government consultation paper. It suggested a criminal offence of forced marriage “would disproportionately impact on black and ethnic communities and might be misinterpreted as an attack on those communities.” Misinterpreted? I don’t think so. You would be absolutely right if you saw a law against forced marriage as an attack on practices among certain groups which the majority culture finds cruel, offensive and plain wrong.’

‘Slavery? Under-age sex? We can live with that, just as long as we don’t offend fanatical Muslims and potentially trigger another wave of attacks. Yet it is precisely because authorities have allowed communities, living according to their own laws and speaking their own languages, to get away without integrating into mainstream society that we found ourselves in this mess in the first place. It’s a bitter irony, but in the quest for tolerance our country has found itself in the bizarre position of being able to value every point of view except our own.’

Well said. It’s as good a reason for picking up a copy of the Daily Mail as you’re ever likely to get: a defence of liberty and tolerance, a defence of the individual against cruelty, a defence against the exploitation of women, a defence of our values. If we cannot distinguish between right and wrong, if we say that all cultures are of an equivalent value, if we cannot make ethical judgements because of the dictatorship of relativism, then how can we provide a safe haven for the oppressed? Why would people be beating on our doors if they didn’t think they could receive asylum here?

Next year marks the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. In many ways, this anniversary would form a fitting occasion for a national day of celebration, a rallying point to foster social cohesion as well appreciation of this country’s glorious role in the past as a harbinger of liberty around the globe.

In our present-day victim culture, however it would seems, no one in this country shall be allowed to take any vicarious enjoyment or pride in this world-historic achievement of their country, without first having been made to eat a hefty slice of humble-pie for its past complicity in the practice.

A foretaste of the guilt-fest currently being planned for the country's inhabitants next year in connection with its past involvement in the African slave trade can be savoured from a report in today’s Times entitled, ‘Slaver’s descendant begs forgiveness’.

Through its system of select committees, the House of Commons is currently undertaking a review of citizenship education in schools. This element of the national curriculum aims to turn out pupils who are civil, politically literate, and active in public affairs.

Given newspaper accounts of daily proceedings in the Commons, there is some reason to doubt how well suited some of its present occupants might be to deliberating how schools should set about seeking to attain these educational objectives.

Consider the following exchange there reported in yesterday’s Times:

“Shut your bloody gob!” shouted Dennis Skinner at Andrew Robathan on the Tory front bench. Mr Robathan, who had just told Mr Skinner that it was time for him to get his pension, smirked back.

“Tell him to shut his bloody mouth!” cried Mr Skinner at the Speaker who admonished him to calm down. “He started it!” cried Mr Skinner.

The Speaker chided him: “You are getting very childish.”

Mind you, learning about such goings on there might be the best way to persuade schoolchildren how undemanding it is to be an active citizen. It is nothing more than mere child's play even at the highest national level-- or should I say especially there?

David Rennie’s blog last Friday on the Telegraph website neatly encapsulates the tortuous dynamics of the current debate over reform of wine subsidies. Although French resistance to reform of the EU’s support to wine makers obviously reflects a wider economic problem of unwillingness to accept competition and open markets, it is clear that at root, the problem is a cultural one. Many in France (including the political elite) view themselves as a nation of producers – horny-handed sons of the soil, duly proud of their country’s long agricultural heritage – rather than as a nation of consumers, seeking out the greatest satisfaction in return for their Euros.

In reality, consumer life in France is much more similar to that in say the UK than this crude dichotomy suggests. Yet even amongst consumers, the desire to maintain a connection with the terroir is much stronger than for Britons. While the French happily chow down on ‘ le MacDo’ like the rest of us, a psychological imperative remains for life to be contained within the hexagon of their country. Hence the resistance to reforms that propose changing established French practices such as wine production.

In many ways this is an admirable wish, yet as Mr Rennie suggests, it is incompatible with life in the single market. What he doesn’t suggest, but maybe could, is that this divide might one day lead to a reassessment of the way that France relates to the rest of Europe, if the French people decide they would rather retain their idiosyncratic way of life than risk the cruel realities of globalisation.

I would be interested to hear readers' comments about the following two articles in the Guardian today. The first is a report about the government's initiatives for working in collaboration with the private and 'voluntary' sectors. That the word 'collaboration' might actually conceal an unequal power relationship is implied by Campbell Robb, head of policy at the National Council for Volunteer Organisations. As he points out, the 'government has a mixed record of actually delivering what it promises' in its relations with the voluntary and charitable sector. The second is a comment article by Simon Jenkins predicting the demise of public confidence in the state and the rise of philanthropy. 'The movement from voluntary to compulsory welfare began with a shift in moral imagination. I see no reason why that shift should not be reversed.' Is there a tension between the message of the first article and the sentiment of the second?

‘I hope we will honour the victims [of the London terror bombings last July], and look frankly at what can be done at the European level to give more coherence to the fight against terrorism and organised crime.’

So Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, is reported to have said according to a report in today’s Times.

Few will surely want to disagree with the sentiment expressed in the first half of his assertion.

Many, however, will want to question the suggestion contained in the second half of his assertion about how the memory of the victims of last year's London tube bombings may best be honoured.

For a change, some good news courtesy of a report in today’s Times:

By last night tendering their resignations from the Dutch coalition government, three ministers belonging to the tiny coalition partner in it, the strangely named D-66 party, have brought it down. Their resignations forced the Dutch prime minister to tender his resignation, thereby most likely precipitating early elections.

The three ministers resigned out of their wholly justified opposition to the continued presence within the government of its immigration minister Rita Verdonk who had quite understandably incurred their wrath last month, along with that of many others, by having summarily stripped the Dutch MP and fellow Liberal party-member Ayaan Hirsi Ali of her citizenship for having lied when applying for asylum from Somalia many years earlier to escape a forced marriage.