Civitas Blog

The Tories are recalibrating their position on the political spectrum and some new ideas are starting to emerge, but they are still paralysed by the problems of the welfare state. There is an entrenched belief that Tories are selfish individualists who don’t care about the poor, which means they are not fully trusted to reform health, education and welfare and are accused of only wanting tax cuts so their rich friends can enjoy the high life. The mistake of the Tories has been to fight back by accepting that big spending on the welfare state is proof of their compassion and that by rejecting tax cuts they are demonstrating their concern for the poor. Indeed, in all parties debate about public sector reform still seems wedged halfway between the age of collectivism and a more consumer friendly future. The Conservatives urgently need to differentiate themselves from Labour’s failed strategy without making it easy to caricature their view as selfish.

Particularly pertinent in light of the new anti-ageism legislation was the TES’ front-page headline on Friday: ‘New staff teach best: research explodes accepted myth of experience as young teachers outperform their colleagues’
But behind the Institute of Education and Nottingham University’s findings lies a rather different story.

Last Thursday a signature ceremony was held to celebrate the European parliament’s purchase of its own buildings in Strasbourg. The cost of the buildings? Just 136 million euros, of which approximately £10 million will come from British taxpayers held in escrow for such a noble purpose. Worth celebrating? On the plus side I guess 136 million euros is not bad as the cost of parliaments go, given that the Scottish one, for example, cost along the lines of £431m. Heh, we could buy a few more! At least then we could have a proper ‘travelling circus’; I’m sure MEPs must get incredibly bored of visiting just two parliaments.

Boris Johnson, we are told by all of the media, is not a very popular man at the moment, on account of a virulent case of foot-in-mouth disease. All the same, one of his comments yesterday in Bournemouth actually made rather good sense. To the calls for localism he posited an important caveat. ‘I may be in trouble for saying this,’ he told his audience, but we must not avoid ‘the issue of people’s failure to feel British, especially large chunks of the Muslim population.’ He added: ‘Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system. Are we ready for complete autonomy if it means sharia law? I believe we should make people feel more British first, before encouraging more balkanisation and multiculturalism.’ Yes indeed.

Boris Johnson, we are reliably informed by our media, is not a very popular man at the moment, on account of a virulent case of foot-in-mouth disease. All the same, one of his comments yesterday in Bournemouth actually made rather good sense. To the calls for localism he posited an important caveat. ‘I may be in trouble for saying this,’ he told his audience, but we must not avoid ‘the issue of people’s failure to feel British, especially large chunks of the Muslim population.’ He added: ‘Supposing Tower Hamlets or parts of Bradford were to become governed by religious zealots believing in that system. Are we ready for complete autonomy if it means sharia law? I believe we should make people feel more British first, before encouraging more balkanisation and multiculturalism.’ Yes indeed.
Nick Seddon

In a landmark decision this week, the European Court of Justice has ruled employers may pay their more experienced staff more than less experienced ones from a belief that extra job experience increases productivity, without needing to justify that belief first.

The Court was called on to decide the matter after employers of a 44 year old female health and safety inspector from Manchester appealed to it against her successful challenge in an employment tribunal against their having paid her less than male colleagues on account of their greater years of service. She argued the practice to be discriminatory, since it was invariably women like her who took time off work to look after their children who fell behind male colleagues as a result.

Thank goodness for this sane ruling. In an age when lesbians and single women are equally as able as married women to have children, whether a woman has a child is entirely up to her. Men hardly come into the reckoning, save through the decision of a woman to involve a man in the upbringing of her child.

The British government is widely reported to be as yet undecided whether to allow Bulgarian and Romanian nationals the right to work in the UK upon their countries joining the EU next year. Regardless of whether it does, come the accession of their countries to the EU, Bulgarians and Romanians will as citizens of the EU be able to enter Britain freely.

In anticipation of that day, it was reported last month in the Daily Telegraph that Romanians and Bulgarians have been busy queuing up to obtain passports to enable them to leave as soon as it arrives.

The British government was profoundly embarrassed by its gross underestimate of the numbers of East Europeans whose countries acceded to the EU in May 2004 who migrated to Britain to obtain jobs. They predicted only 13,000 would come. To date, at least 345,000 have.

Could it be to spare itself similar embarrassment of discovering correspondingly large numbers of Bulgarians and Romanians show up in Britain come accession day, irrespective of whether they have been granted the right to work here, that, as was reported in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Britain is about to lift visa restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria in advance of their accession? The more allowed in prior to their accession the smaller will the head-line figure be of those arriving come that day.

The Future Foundation, a think tank amongst other things, brought out a report last week telling us that today’s parenting is - contrary to popular belief - better than ever. According to their report, The Changing Face of Parenting, recent concerns about dangerously pressurised childhoods seem to have been misguided. However, a closer examination of the findings suggests that perhaps they don’t present such a break with recent concerns about overly pressuirsed children.

Once again the talk of the moment in the EU is focused on enlargement. Romania and Bulgaria are now in, with the attendant issues that has generated; Croatia has challenged Barroso’s position that enlargement must halt until a resolution to the constitutional crisis had been found and now France is planning to pass a controversial law making denial of the alleged Armenian genocide a crime. Now there are many issues attendant with Turkish membership, just ask Nicholas Sarkozy who has said that Turkish membership “would be the end of Europe politically.” However there is a definite controversy over this latest French political manoeuvre. Even Olli Rehn, EU enlargement commissioner, has spoken out against it, saying

“The French law on the Armenian genocide is of course a matter for French lawmakers, but there is a lot at stake for the European Union as well, and the decision may have very serious consequences for EU-Turkey relations.”

It seems strange that Jack Straw should have said what he did when he did. Up until now, he has established a reputation for pandering to Islamists – during the cartoon fiasco he seemed more offended by the portrayal of Mohammed than the banners calling for ‘a real holocaust’ – and at all costs seeking to woo the Muslim vote. So why court controversy by expressing discomfort about the wearing of the veil?

Well, I never. What’s going on?-- to borrow the title of Marvin Gaye’s illustrious soul ballad.

You wait forever for a New Labour minister to say something moderately critical about the intransigence of some British Muslims, and then, blow me, in the space of a week no fewer than three of them show up doing so.

The first was Jack Straw who last week-end publicly expressed his preference for Muslim women in Britain not to wear the niqab, especially when visiting his parliamentary surgery. The niqab is that particular form of veil favoured by some Muslim women which conceals all but the eyes of its wearer. Straw said he preferred they didn’t because he claimed their doing so placed a barrier between them and whichever non-Muslims wth whom they happened to be having dealings at the time that prevented communication and so was not conducive to social harmony and cohesion.

The response of some British Muslims to Straw's remarks has been predictably negative: ‘The Muslim community feels angry and let down’ one Labour-party Muslim activist in Straw’s Blackburn constituency is reported to have said. ‘We want him to apologise and will keep on protesting until he does. I feel outraged and want him out of his job. The majority of Muslim women want him out’ another Muslim woman reportedly said at a protest held in Blackburn against Straw.

Judged by the tone of these comments you would have thought Straw had asked Muslim women to disrobe completely before entering his surgery.

For requesting to be transferred to another discussion group because unable to understand the Urdu being spoken in the one in which she had been placed, all its others members being Asian and, with one exception, unable to speak English, a fourteen year old pupil at a school in Worsely, Greater Manchester, was, according to a report in the Daily Mail, placed under arrest and held in a police cell for several hours, after being photographed and finger-printed by the police, who then released her without charge.

Given the incident took place during a GCSE science class, the only consolation to be gained from this sorry incident lies in the knowledge that the girl had not missed much by being unable to participate in the class discussion. The new syllabus for science introduced last month has been comprehensively rubbished by experts as lacking in substance.

Following on from the National Audit Office’s conclusions that 13 per cent of the population are being failed by poor schools and preceding a report from the Public Accounts Committee warning the government about the impact of poorly-performing schools, the front of Friday’s Times Education Supplement reported the headline ‘No need to read books: Pupils can now gain top-grade GCSEs simply on a diet of extracts’.

Following on from the National Audit Office’s conclusions that 13 per cent of the population are being failed by poor schools and preceding a report from the Public Accounts Committee warning the government about the impact of poorly-performing schools, the front of Friday’s Times Education Supplement reported the headline ‘No need to read books: Pupils can now gain top-grade GCSEs simply on a diet of extracts’.

An enlightening publication released today by the Centre for European Reform (CER) heavily criticises the EU’s flailing attempts through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) to advance democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. The ENP, through MEDA (for Mediterranean neighbours), offers greater integration into the EU’s single market and financial assistance in return for, amongst other things, political economic and legal reforms. Yet despite a budget of c.$1bn p.a. the report finds EU efforts to have been almost totally ineffective, and virtually silent on set-backs to the very things it is supposed to be offered in return for. There have been no EU communiqués on the slowing momentum of political reform in Jordan and Morocco, the EU only reluctantly offered fund to Lebanon after Syria left and the EU refuses to bat an eye-lid when moderate Islamist groups are cracked down upon.

There are two points to be made here. Firstly, the EU is distributing aid wrongly. Aid has been front-loaded and – much worse – in collusion with corrupt governments. The EU really should have learnt from fifty years of post-colonial aid that this strategy doesn’t work and will only serve to prop up the very undemocratic regimes it is attempting to reform. Aid should be offered to a State only in response to improvements and, where this isn’t forthcoming (and preferably anyway), to independent groups in civil society.

Secondly, if the EU really wants to make an impact it should deal in something the MEDA recipients really care about: trade and full access to the EU single market (a point touched upon, but probably not emphasised enough, by the CER paper). This is worth a whole lot more than one-off aid payments. Moreover, with access to a vast new market for its goods, enterprise should be encouraged, production diversified to more than just the State and with it increased demands for representation and reform. But this is the EU and free trade we are talking about, never mind.

Yesterday’s Telegraph carried a frank and unequivocal comment article by the Labour MP and sometime Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane. MacShane says that while Britain’s politicians have been sedated by the opium of multiculturalism and political correctness, radical Islam has been spreading in our midst. He is damning of a leftwing that has aligned itself with anti-Semitism in favour of Islamism, damning of the failure to prosecute or extradite known terrorists, and damning of both the Home Office’s and the Foreign Office’s censorship of the debate. In actual fact, MacShane has been speaking out intermittently on this matter for some time, but he has also been accused of saying different things to different people. It is notable, then, that his denunciation of government policy to date includes a swipe at Tariq Ramadan, the high priest of double-speak or taquiya, and that he has been willing to see it printed in the national press. As MacShane presents it, there can be no ambiguity: we have a choice between terrorism - and free, democratic societies maintained by the rule of law. He is all for the latter. Perhaps he has finally decided to nail his colours to the mast. Not just this, but now, what with the recent pronouncements of Ruth Kelly, Jack Straw and John Reed, there is a growing sense that the government has finally realised that if it has a problem then it has to confront this problem robustly. Hence, perhaps, the timing of Tony Blair’s pronouncement yesterday, that his government’s position on multiculturalism had changed, and that the priority is now integration. No doubt the usual suspects will howl with horror. We should be cautious in our optimism and manage our expectations. There is a long way to go yet. But, as a Telegraph leader says today, if this government is serious about reversing the separatist legacy of multiculti politics and challenging the lethal ideologies infiltrating the Muslim mainstream in Britain, then this new political posture can only be a good thing.
Nick Seddon

‘Young minds are free from prejudice and discrimination, so schools are in a unique position to prevent social division. Schools should cross ethnic and religious boundaries, and certainly not increase them, or exacerbate difficulties in sensitive areas.’

Thus argues Education Secretary Alan Johnson, reportedly, in favour of what is widely expected about to become a new government policy for new faith schools that they must set aside up to a quarter of their places for pupils not of that faith, if there is local demand by them for admission.

There are many suppressed premises in his argument .To appraise its soundness, we need first to identify them, and then consider the truth value of all the independent ones.

Incensed no arrests followed a demonstration that took place last year in London against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, despite one demonstrator having worn a suicide-belt and others having displayed banners calling for the killing of those who insult their prophet, a 35 year old man from Aberporth draped over his garden-fence a sheet on which he had painted the words: ‘ Kill all Muslims who threaten us and our way of life. Enoch Powell was right’.

Fearful that reprisals might be taken in his in his locality, the man's neighbour reported him to the police who arrested him and brought him to trial this week on a charge of religiously aggravated disorderly conduct.

Criticism about the education system has been coming in hard and fast for much of New Labour’s time in power – particularly as Blair’s term comes to an end. However, over the last few days the curriculum has received a critical double-whammy. On Friday, new research confirmed what has already been confirmed by a plethora of evidence: that the persistent overload of Whitehall initiatives is doing little to improve schools, when not actually doing harm. A report published by the Nuffield Foundation warned that ‘policy busyness’ has failed to impact on the entrenched weaknesses in the education system. A key criticism to come out of the study led by Oxford University’s Professor Richard Pring, is that rather than focusing on the causes of these weaknesses the government has focused on the symptoms. Moreover, the report goes on to say that: ‘…in responding to symptomatic problems, Government has attempted to implement a whole range of policies at a very fast pace.’
Today, the National Geographic published research showing that in a survey of 1,000 children one in five of British under-14 year-olds was unable to find the UK on a map of the world, and that one in 10 was unable to name any of the world’s continents. The general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union took a rather odd defence against this finding saying that there was a ‘constant desire’ for groups to produce statistics doing down the system and thereby teachers’ abilities. Yet it is extremely unlikely that the glossy coffee table would be taking such a political stance to be actively seeking evidence of poor teaching. What is more, the weakness the survey reveals reflects not teaching quality but the effect of an over-concentration on A roads and river-flow in Geography. The only injustice might be blaming New Labour on the poor geography curriculum. Country geography seems to have fallen by the wayside pre-1997.

Anastasia de Waal

The European Court of Auditors have, for the twelfth year running, refused to sign off EU accounts. The Court did, this time around, certify administration, development and some agricultural spending, but found errors elsewhere accounting for around two-thirds of the EU’s £70bn budget. Most significantly the Court found that the EU Commission still has inadequate mechanisms to ensure beneficiaries do not claim more than they have the right to claim. This of course lays the budget open to error, but also to fraud.

It is worth referring to the NAO’s report earlier this year on the EU’s accounts for 2004, which found evidence of fraud to the tone of £667m. This was a 12% increase on the previous year – despite the Commission’s insistence it was reforming its accounting procedures. One might therefore be sceptical of Siim Kallas’ counter-attack on the Court’s decision to refuse to sign off accounts this year. He claims the auditors are not playing fair, particularly given that three-quarters of the EU budget is spent by Member States, not the Commission, and ignore the fact that money mis-spent one year is often clawed back the next. For example, the Commission got back E2.17bn of mis-spent EU cash from Member States in 2005 and wrote off just E90bn. But while this clawing back may look good for the Commission, it comes directly from the domestic taxpayers pocket. Secondly where the Court has been most critical – in the 44% of agricultural spending not covered by IACS (Integrated Admin and Control System) and in structural measures (totalling about E56bn) – are precisely the areas the NAO reported as the most fraudulent.

The fact is EU accounts are so ridiculously complicated at least in part because the tide of regulation coming from the Commission is still unrelenting. For example, of the 22,000 pieces of legislation on the EU statute book, about 12,000 were introduced in the eight years between 1997-2005. It is unsurprising the EU is so vulnerable to fraud and dodgy accounting when beneficiaries have to wade through streams of complex rules and regulations to access the EU budget. Yet another reason why deregulation is so vital.

In his last budget, Gordon Brown pledged to increase public expenditure so as to bring funding per child in state schools into line with the average costs per child in the independent sector. This move would involve increasing annual state spending per child from £5,000 to £8,000. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to close this gap, the Exchequer would need to spend an extra £17 billion per annum.

According to a report in today’s Times, the Chancellor has just been taken to task for this pledge by the House of Commons Select Committee on Education. They have argued to carry it out would only anger tax-payers unless the extra spending could be shown to result in improved performance by state schools.

To date, there has been little precious sign of extra spending in this sector having done so. According to the same news report, during the last eight years in which New Labour has been in power, annual public expenditure on education has increased by over 50%, yet last year only just over a quarter of pupils from state schools managed to obtain good GCSE grades in English, mathematics, science and a language — a fall of 4 percentage points from 2002.

I wonder whether, if instead of increasing public spending on state schooling in the manner pledged, the government were to award to parents of pupils at them who obtained good GCSE grades in these subjects a sum of £2,000 for each year their child had attended one, there would not soon be a spectacular and demonstrable improvement in the attainment levels of state schools at far less cost to the taxpayer.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make EU members, especially if their former imperial links with third world countries have already resulted in their having previously undergone large-scale immigration from them.

Why that should be so has been very well explained by Carl Mortished in a ‘European Briefing’ article that appeared in Wednesday’s Times under the title ‘A black and white view of immigrants from Eastern Europe’.

Mortished points out that, because so many immigrants from the new accession East European member states are willing and now able to accept very low-paid jobs here, whatever feeble formal attempts might be made to prevent them, their coming here to work is likely to exacerbate the already very high unemployment rates among some of the country’s black and Asian and minorities, especially their young men.

Comparable to the Future Foundation’s report, ‘The Changing Face of Parenting’, which looked at parenting patterns, is a new American publication ‘Changing Rhythms of American Family Life’. The significant thing about the study (a collaborative work between the American Sociological Association and the Russell Sage Foundation reported in the New York Times) which explores how parents spend their time, is its scale and detail. Building on one of the three authors’ demographic research done for the Census Bureau, ‘time diaries’ were used to chart how families divided up their work, childcare and housework time. This involved interviews with thousands of households by professional interviewers who used a standard set of questions. As with the Future Foundation’s report, what made headlines with this study was the fact that despite an increasing number of working mothers and total working hours in families, the amount of time American parents are spending with their children has risen in the last 40 years.
But perhaps the two most interesting findings are to do with gender equity and the amount of time spent on housework. In relation to the former, the authors state that there is now ‘remarkable gender equity in total workloads’ between mothers and fathers. This claim is based on the fact that although women continue to do twice as much childcare and housework than men in two-parent families, in terms of total unpaid and paid workload, men and women both appear to do around 65 hours a week. Relating to the latter point of interest, time devoted to housework, the study also revealed a steep decline since the 1960s of time women spend on household chores. This finding applied particularly to married women. Furthermore, whilst married women’s housework time has nearly halved, married men’s has more than doubled.
Anastasia de Waal

Last Wednesday the European Parliament voted to extend the EU’s Youth in Action programme through 2007-13. This programme will eat up a budget of some €885 million, or €147.5m per year. It’s goal? “To encourage young people to work together to acquire new skills through non-formal education activities, for a common project, for the defence of cultures, for a future of prosperity, understanding and peace," according to Ján Figel, EU Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism. All sounds very complicated, and very nicey nicey.

But let’s consider two points for a minute. Even taken at face value, is €885 million worth of grandiose projects really the way to go about promoting what is essentially social cohesion and intercultural dialogue between young people? Almost certainly not; Civitas’ own research has shown time and time again that such initiatives are best run and coordinated at the local level, and certainly not by an organisation as bureaucratic and cumbersome as the EU.

Taking this aside though, is this ‘social cohesion’ really what ‘Youth in Action’ is all about? Again, almost certainly not. The Conservatives clearly don’t think so, having already dismissed the project as ‘propaganda’. In reality – as is alluded to several times in the Draft Report by German MEP Lissy Groner - the project exists, to a not insignificant extent, to foster the idea of belonging to the EU among young people.

A previous statement by the EU Commission on ‘Youth in Action’ states: “One of the main challenges facing the European Union remains how to bring the EU closer to its citizens and have them more involved in the development of Europe….the Commission believes it has a role to complementary role to play [through ‘Youth in Action’]”. For the EU itself, it has to be true that it needs to be closer to its citizens; it is an elite project. Nor should there be a strong objection to non-prejudicial dialogue and friendship between European nations and cultures. But this is not going to happen by the EU throwing money at projects such as this. I feel British, and even to some extent European, because I have an affinity to British and related culture and values, not because any government spends ridiculous sums of money trying to make me feel like I do.