Civitas Blog

'I don’t wear the niqab to separate myself from society… It’s not about separation.'

So said the veil-wearing British-born Muslim woman who finally appeared on Channel Four’s Alternative Christmas Day Message to talk about the practice.

Apparently, Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri doesn’t agree. Last Sunday, an audio-recording was posted on websites used by Al-Qaeda in the past of someone who purported to be and sounded like Zawahri who called every Muslim women in the west who wore a veil ‘a soldier in the battle of Islam against Zionist-Crusader.’

New Year is a time for leaving the past behind, turning over a new leaf, making new beginnings and looking to the future. So too for the European Union, apparently.

Midnight on Sunday and the EU’s political elite were cheerfully (and grandly) “welcoming two new members into the family”, according to Jose Manuel Barroso, but behind the fireworks there is concern.

2007 promises, or rather threatens, a dramatic escalation in mutual hostilities between the two contending forces in the current war between western liberal democracy and Islamism whose effects are likely to be most fully felt in the main current theatre of hostilities -- the Middle East.

This is because, rather than heed the Iraq Study Group which proposed capitulation to the forces of jihad, President Bush seems about to make one final push to quell the insurgency in Iraq and quite possibly also to endeavour, through or in concert with Israel, to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability before it acquires or worse still exercise it.

While Anatole Kaletsky and Matthew Parris in the op-ed page of today’s Times pour scorn on Bush's likely new strategy to end the war against terror by confronting its sponsors, quite wrongly in my view, buried in the News in Brief columns elsewhere in today’s Times is another indication of the gathering storm that lies ahead of us this year and which promises or threatens to be felt much nearer to home.

A British Prime Minister once claimed: “We take the same view in the United States and Britain that our first duty to freedom is to defend our own, and our second duty is to try somehow to enlarge the frontiers of freedom so that other nations might have the right to choose it.” That Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher, referring to the importance of the transatlantic alliance.

After 11th September 2001, the United States and Britain found the opportunity to rebuild the strength of the Anglo-American alliance once again. Tony Blair has attempted to pursue that path, yet in favouring EU-policy on a number of occasions, it is clear that Washington now feels snubbed writes James McConalogue.

Today’s Times relays the contents of a speech, and accompanying paper, of economist David Blanchflower, the latest appointee to the Bank of England’s Monetary Committee, about the economic consequences of the recent large influx of workers to Britain from Eastern Europe.

I have been trying all morning to no good effect to make sense of what he is reported as having said on this subject and would greatly appreciate assistance from readers of the Civitas blog better versed in the arcane science of economics than I am.

This afternoon Ruth Kelly, the now communities and local government secretary and [ironically of course] former education secretary, will announce why it is that she decided to send a child of hers with learning difficulties to a private school. Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday broke the story that a Labour minister had decided to take their child out of the state school system. In a rather extraordinary and highly uncharacteristic display of discretion, the MoS did not publish the name of the minister in question ‘in order to protect their identity’. The reaction to the story has been interesting.

On Friday 5 January, a twenty-seven year old Muslim from Birmingham, Umran Javed, was found guilty of soliciting murder and stirring up racial hatred during the Danish cartoon protests in London. It is alleged that Javed led a 300-strong crowd of demonstrators in London, chanting such comments as “"Denmark, you will pay, with your blood, with your blood”, “Bomb, bomb Denmark".

”While this rare case appears to be justified – to a jury at the Old Bailey, – the policy of a modern government should maintain a view on the absolute liberty of opinion and public protest, since it is only in the rarest of cases –such as this - in which one has encroached upon the liberty of others –- should any intervention be sought by law or parliament, writes James McConalogue.

Next Monday evening at 8pm, Channel Four is scheduled to broadcast a Dispatches programme which promises to make compulsive viewing for all concerned with how little progress the British authorities have seemingly made since 7 July 2005 in curbing the propagation of Islamist extremism.

Entitled ‘Undercover Mosques’ and reportedly twelve months in the making, the programme is an expose, using secretly filmed footage, of several British mosques playing host to, as well as selling dvds of, radical imams disseminating hate-filled messages that no responsible government should allow to be purveyed.

One of the mosques accused of selling such inflammatory dvds is the Central London Mosque situated in Regent’s Park whose attached bookshop is accused of selling dvds of incendiary speeches by two radical preachers, Sheikh Feiz and Sheikh Khalid Yasin.

Some think that, within any liberal democracy, the state must be entirely secular and neutral as between different religions and none, as both France and the USA are. State schools, on this view, must be entirely secular in their teaching and ethos.

Others deny liberal democratic values to be incompatible either with religious establishment or with the state-funding of faith schools. To be compatible with liberal democratic values, all that is required of a state is that it extend tolerance to all tolerant religions, and impose no element of coercion in matters of worship, religious education, or religious conscience.

Montreal hosted the 1976 Olympics. It took its taxpayers thirty years to pay off the bill for hosting them according to former Montrealer, Mark Steyn, in a piece published in the Daily Telegraph in November 2005 in which he warned Londoners of what their city could expect by way of costs for staging them in 2012.

A year after Steyn's warning , Jack Lemley, the American engineer employed to head the construction programme for the London Olympics, resigned, complaning his warnings about their rapidly spiralling costs had repeatedly been ignored by government ministers.

Nicolas Sarkozy really needs to get a grip when it comes to the European Union. What an insightful and populist policy to come out with in launching his presidential campaign: ‘I want to say that Europe must give itself borders, that not all countries have a vocation to become members of Europe, beginning with Turkey which has no place inside the European Union’. Yet on Sarkozy's grounds neither has France.

At the end of 2004, the Law Lords ruled detention without trial of terror suspects unlawful where the nature or source of the evidence against them made their trials inexpedient, and, if foreign, where the risk their ‘human rights’ might be violated if returned home ruled out deportation.

The then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, responded to this ruling by introducing ‘control orders’ about whose likely efficacy I forecast in a blog about the matter I posted on the Civitas website at the time: ‘Control orders are unlikely to prove any more effective against genuine terrorists than ASBO’s have proved in restraining juvenile delinquents of which … in some areas of England every one is breached. ‘

Today’s Times leads with the story that ‘a British-born terror suspect was on the run last night after breaking his control order and evading police by taking shelter in a mosque.’ Apparently, the man absconded within four days of the order being placed on him earlier this month.

On the back of a DfES-commissioned study by PricewaterhouseCoopers [PwC], the government is predicted to respond to the current head teacher shortage by bringing in an additional management layer of non-teacher personnel. Bearing in mind the reason for the current recruitment crisis – a barrage of ever-changing and often contradictory directives – the government is responding in what has become trademark New Labour strategy: not addressing the issue but conjuring up an expensive sticking plaster. Unfortunately bolstered by the PwC report, the DfES’s attitude is not to trouble-shoot but rather to trouble entrench.

A Muslim employee working at the till of the Cambridge branch of W.H.Smith will not face dismissal, nor even, apparently, redeployment, despite her persistently refusing to sell packs of cigarettes to customers requesting them on the grounds that doing so would be contrary to her religion.

If a miracle is a breach of known laws of nature, and if the adage there can be no smoke without fire derives from our understanding of what some of these laws are, this Cambridgeshire Muslim has shown herself able to work miracles at will. For, by doing what she has without suffering dismissal, she has shown there can be no smoke without fire!

An article in the Financial Times last week reported the former commercial director of the Department of Health, Ken Anderson, saying EU law will soon force the NHS to open up many more of its services to bids from private sector companies. His argument is basically that that the government’s policy of slowly introducing more competition into healthcare is “increasing the likelihood that NHS services may be subject to EU single market and competition rules”. Probably true. In which case could the EU, finally, be doing the UK a favour?

If it is one thing that the Government is eager to keep in the latest fads and fashions, it is the criminal justice system. In fact, it seems like only yesterday that the last round of changes came in under the Police and Justice Act. You could be forgiven for that nagging feeling as it was only last week. The very morning after, the Serious Crime Bill was published as it went for an initial House of Lords reading. With another, so far unpublished, Criminal Justice Bill due in the spring, the government really is spoiling us. Confused? The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) certainly are as they are still talking about a ‘Serious and Organisated Crime Bill’ [sic] in their press release (via Samizdata), yet this went through Parliament in 2005!

A DfES report out today will recommend citizenship classes in schools place more focus on what it means to be British, rather than teach solely about such values as tolerance and justice.

According to a news item trailing today’s report in yesterday’s Times , schools will be recommended to do so because all their recent emphasis on minorities and diversity has left many white working-class children with ‘negative perceptions of their British identity’.

To illustrate this all too prevalent negative self-image, the Times cites one white teenage girl, whose case is featured in the report, who, after hearing in a lesson that others in her class originally came from the Congo, Portugal, Trinidad and Poland, remarked that she “came from nowhere”.

In honour of that poor successfully deracinated young girl, I offer the following lament (with apologies to the Beatles):

She’s a real nowhere Lass,
Living in a Multicultural Morass
Making all her nowhere plans
for nobody.

Doesn’t have a point of view,
Knows not where she’s going to,
Isn’t she a bit like you and me?
Nowhere Lass, please listen,
Citizenship lessons will supply what you’re missing,
They're designed to make you think the world’s at your command.

She’s as blind as she can be,
Just sees what’s shown on t.v.
Nowhere Lass, do you think that way you can be free at all?
Nowhere Lass, don’t worry,
You’ll never be made to read Charles Murray,
Leave it all till somebody else
Hands out your free bus pass.

Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where she’s going to.
Isn’t she a bit like you and me?

In terms of column inches, the announcement that British values will be taught in schools has been this week’s top education story – see David Conway’s blog, posted yesterday. But by no means is this topic now closed: the Daily Mail and the Times Education Supplement [TES] have both revisited the story with relish today. This time however, although the two papers take quite different attitudes to it, the focus is on the ‘diversity’ aspect of these forthcoming British values. The Mail ran the story under the headline ‘New curriculum will “make every lesson politically correct”’, stating that ‘children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science’. The TES’s reporting on the other hand, was considerably more cheerful, running the story under the headline ‘Tackle racism head-on.’

The findings of a Populus poll of just over a 1,000 British Muslims make for disturbing, if not entirely unexpected, reading. Commissioned for a report published by Policy Exchange today, entitled Living Apart Together, young British Muslims revealed themselves far more extreme in outlook than their parents’ generation. According to today’s Daily Telegraph, the poll found the following contrasts in the outlook of 16-24 year old and those aged over 55:

* 40% of 16-24 year olds would prefer to live under Sharia law as against 17% of over 55s.

* 12.5% of 16-24 year olds admire al Qa-aeda as against 3% of over 55s.

* 30% of 16-24 year olds favour the killing of apostates from Islam as against 19% of over 55s.

* 75% of 16-24 year olds prefer Muslim women to wear a veil as against 25% of over 55s.

* 40% of 16-24 year olds prefer Muslim schools for Muslim children as against 20% of over 55s.

These figures are truly disturbing, especially given 84% of the Muslims polled believed they had been treated fairly in Britain. They raise the question as to what exactly has brought about the radicalisation of young British Muslims.

This insightful comment was made by David Miliband MP in the Independent’s “You Ask The Questions” column yesterday:

Q. Please could we legislate that all items must have a "power off" switch? VANESSA OWEN, Orpington, Kent
ANS. The European Union is leading the way on this - one reason you cannot protect the environment if you are a Eurosceptic.

Ahem. Sorry, this is just a ridiculous jump in logic. In fact that’s being kind; there’s absolutely no logic in it at all.

I wasn’t immediately enamoured with the DfES’s new plan, based on an independent report by Sir Keith Ajegbo, to ensure every lesson on the national curriculum teaches the values of diversity, race relations and multiculturalism. There are the natural anxieties that the extra requirements would just get in the way of teaching core subjects properly and involve teachers having to push the latest government propaganda that wouldn’t make it past the class clown without being brutally mocked. However, my mind changed as soon as I heard that a similar, and already highly successful, scheme is already in full swing at the London School of Economics.