Civitas Blog

‘Every one who receives the protection of society owes ... for the benefit ... a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists ... in not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights...
[S]ociety is justified in enforcing [this conduct of] ... those who endeavour to withhold fulfilment.’

So John Stuart Mill wrote in his ‘Essay on Liberty’ which, to this day, remains the best point of departure for classical liberal reflection about which forms of conduct and voluntary association should be permitted by law and which proscribed.

I was put in mind of Mill’s Essay by a brief news story in today’s Times. It concerned objections against the Sexual Orientation Regulations, recently introduced into Northern Ireland and shortly to be extended to mainland Britain, raised by the proprietor of a Bournemouth hotel that caters exclusively for homosexual and bi-sexual men.

These Regulations have been much in the news of late because of their likely impact on those Catholic adoption agencies that, because of the religiously informed moral abhorrence towards homosexual acts many Catholics share, will not place children with gay couples, being unable in good conscience to be complicit in causing them to be brought up in households where such acts are openly engaged in. The effect of the Regulations will be to force such agencies to cease discriminating against homosexuals in this fashion or else shut down.

The Bournemouth hotelier was opposed to the Regulations because they will also make it unlawful for hotels like his to discriminate against heterosexuals in the way they currently do. They too will be forced to close unless they cease catering only for homosexuals which is their whole point. Because they will have this effect, he considers the Regulations to discriminate against homsosexuals!

News-wise the education scene has been comparatively calm this week. That is to say, no senior DfES official has resigned, no national attainment results have been published and there hasn’t been a curriculum overhaul [that’s scheduled for next week]. Announcements and judgements have nevertheless been made and it appears that no news [relatively speaking] doesn’t mean good news…

Today’s Times contains a Thunderer column by a Mr Murad Ahmed entitled ‘I’m Angry with extremist nutcases’.

Written in light of last week's arrest of nine young British Muslims suspected of being involved in a plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier for having fought in Iraq, and then film his execution for use in a propaganda snuff-movie, the piece is ostensibly designed to draw attention to how unrepresentative such extremists are of British Muslims.

In reality, however, Mr Ahmed's true target is the British media which he criticises for focussing exclusively on the would-be perpetrators of such acts of terror and their supporters, at the expense of denying any voice to their moderate Muslim critics such as he.

Whilst also criticising his fellow moderate Muslims for not doing enough to make vocal their dissociation from their extremist co-religionists, Mr Ahmed offers such a huge amount in extenuation of the latter as almost amounts to an apologia for their terror antics.

The riposte of many of those who support the EU ideal to opinion polls which tell us, for example, that only 33% of UK citizens think the EU is ‘a good thing’ (Eurobarometer, May 06) is often to say something like, “well, they are just opinion polls”. They represent opinions, often based on tabloid Euro-scepticism, which tends to focus on the perverse effects of certain ridiculous regulations the EU produces; such as what constitutes a banana or requiring all produce be weighed in metric. Yet if people could perceive the constant undercurrent of positive impact the EU has, which is not widely reported, opinion polls would paint a very different picture. This runs with Blondel et al.’s argument that ‘more knowledge [of the EU] leads to more support’ (1998: 102). But does it?

John Reid, in honour of little known and even lesser practiced ‘Safer Internet Day’, has launched another barrage of verbal torpedoes over the issue of sex offenders using the Internet. The plan is to force released sex offenders to register their online identities (email addresses and usernames) with the government so that their communications with others including children can be tracked and dangerous behaviour ‘flagged’ before anything in the real world takes place. Unfortunately, both the strategy and implementation of this place seems to be based on little more than one or two ‘Paedofinder General’ sketches from the television series Monkey Dust.

Today’s Times reports that Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly announced yesterday that, as part of a wider government strategy to combat Muslim extremism, it has just created a new central government fund of £5 million with which to make grants to local councils for specific projects aimed at this objective.

According to the report, the kinds of project for which local authorities will receive money include those designed to work with young Muslims excluded from schools and mosques to prevent their becoming ‘groomed’ by extremists; assertiveness training for imams and Muslim women so they can ‘face down’ extremists [good luck on that one!]; new local forums for moderation with strong local leaders and role models; inter-faith school twinning programmes; and extra-training and information for local institutions such as mosques on how to spot and prevent extremist activity.

As potentially worthwhile as all such kind of local initiative might be, on the very same page as this news story is a second news report that suggests none of these initiatives is likely to have much effect in combating Islamic extremism until all government bodies, central and local, are willing to act on the powers that are already at their disposal to combat all forms of Islamic activity that promote hostility among Muslims towards non-Muslims which serves as the general seed-bed within which Islamist extremism flourishes.

This week marks ten years of National Marriage Week. And ten years of marriage-less Government policy.

Marriage has been kept off the Left’s agenda in order to give people greater choice. Yet for all its democratic ambitions, the Left’s stance on marriage is jeopardising its very own principles.

Last Saturday’s Times reported that a Cambridge under-graduate has gone into hiding in a safe-house after receiving threats for having recently reproduced in a weekly satirical college flysheet one of the notorious Danish cartoons of Muhammad, along with a highly deprecatory remark about him, albeit one that some serious thinkers consider warranted, however misguidedly.

It also reported that, as well as dissociating itself from, and condemning, republication of the cartoon and publication of the comment, the student’s college is also beginning an investigation and disciplinary measures to determine whether he should be sent down for what he has done.

One can understand the college’s desire to avoid violent protests against the student as well as itself, sad though it be for the country to have found itself in a situation where, for something seemingly so comparatively trivial, such grave consequences have been thought liable to follow.

Should the college have announced it is considering whether to send the student down only as a way of taking the immediate heat out of the situation and until tempers cool, then its decision would be understandable. However, if it is seriously considering sending the student down, even if should he have been in breach of any student code of conduct it might have, its decision would represent a most serious and ill-advised restriction on freedom of thought and expression in one of the country’s oldest seats of learning.

With half of the Europe project team conducting research on the continent, this week's Tuesday blog entry will look sadly neglected. In the meantime, we can take a quick look to the US where a school choice revolution might be finally beginning in earnest after a few faltering starts. The sign of any real choices in education for parents seems as far off as ever in the UK. A recent report that I have compiled of the overseas evidence in support of parents having a free choice of schools to send their children and the British government's inability to include this in their reforms has been uploaded here.

by Pete Quentin

There has recently been a lot of (increasingly) confident talk amongst those who propose further integration of European defence. Javier Solana has been boasting of the EU’s military “successes” in Congo and Lebanon last year and talking up the “full operational capacity” of its new battle groups. Meanwhile the German presidency is expected to see further EU-led management of the international deployment in Lebanon and proposals for policing support of NATO in Afghanistan.

In fact the French General who commanded those troops in Congo is so pleased with the progress he has declared that “we finally have the beginnings of a European army”. Or do we?

Today’s Spectator contains an article by John Gray, criticising, as doomed to failure or, even worse, as being liable to be counter-productive, the government’s recently announced strategy against the growth of domestic Islamic extremism by encouraging local initiatives to foster closer integration of Britain’s Muslims and encourage the moderates to stand up to and speak up against the extremists.

Globalisation, Gray argues, has caused Britain to become so culturally diverse that it is folly to think we could or should seek any value consensus beyond the need for mutual tolerance in a social arrangement he calls 'modus vivendi'. To demand any more of Britain's Muslims, he argues, is to ‘single them out for deviating from a national consensus that is now largely mythical’ and positively fosters their radicalisation.

‘Class war over classics’ is the Times Education Supplement’s front-page headline. Following the Government’s list of books in their Key Stage 3 reforms, the TES reports that staff are planning to simply disregard the diktat: ‘They said it was misjudged, politically motivated and “will not be taught”’. Whilst education secretary Alan Johnson describes the texts in question [for example, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice] as “untouchables”, critics such as the English Association secondary committee’s is quoted as saying: “I would be stunned if any of these writers are taught.” Although anti-elitism has been referred to in the argument for dropping texts like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, the main objection to keeping these texts on the syllabus is that they are too difficult – rather than too irrelevant - for Year 7 and 8 pupils. The TES quotes one teacher as saying: “ Is whoever chose these writers prepared to come and teach them to my bottom set Year 7s?”

But are the educational community underestimating pupils, and perhaps thinking about the test levels they must get their pupils to reach? The ‘classics clash’ coincides with new research from London University’s Institute of Education, which throws into question both teachers’ expectations and the ability sets pupils are put into. The research, which shows that ‘many secondary school pupils in England find their school work too easy and want harder lessons,’ found that between 18% and 25% of 13 and 14 year-old pupils want to be in a higher ability set in order to do harder work. According to Professor Susan Hallam who led the research: “It seems highly likely that what is happening is that teachers’ expectations are not sufficiently high for quite a lot of students.”
Does this mean then, that the Government’s push for more challenging classic texts will benefit pupils? Probably not. The trouble is, that with the pressures put upon teachers to achieve targets in the Key Stage 3 assessments, harder texts won’t equate with more of a challenge for pupils. As Dr Bethan Marshall from King’s College London predicts, “teachers will pick a few short stories or excerpts to get around it.” One clear lesson from the debate, an increasingly old lesson, is that all these central diktats – on what’s taught and what’s tested - are doing little for learning. Were schools allowed to respond a little more to their pupils, rather than just Whitehall, the curriculum might become more ‘fit for purpose’ [that is, learning - though it’s easy to forget].

The NHS has always been Labour’s favourite child, representing its now faded and tattered dream of fully socialised public services. Grown old and decrepit, for some years now it has been reliant on ever more potent injections of government cash to keep it in proximate working order, a course of treatment now shortly about to end as basically the medicine has run out.

The treatment has not worked. The patient continues steadily to decline and the hour is surely approaching when the hard decision will have to be made to take it off life-support and replace it with a new system more reliant on patient choice and consumer sovereignty, albeit one that preserves protection for all against medical catastrophe regardless of means.

How sick the patient is indicated by the results of on-line poll of over 3,000 doctors currently working for the NHS conducted by the Times and published in today’s issue. A majority denied any improvement in the NHS had occurred since 2002, denied the increased funding on the NHS had been well-spent, and denied that their own specific area of medicine had benefited in any way.

That almost double the number of the doctors polled thought the NHS would fare better under David Cameron than Gordon Brown suggests a truly profound level of doctor disillusion with New Labour’s approach to health care.

In the run up to the next election, the Conservatives have a window of opportunity to develop a policy on health care that would put in place the ground-work for an appropriate system for the 21 century. Let us hope they do not squander it.

One can easily agree with the premise of Timothy Garton Ash’s search for ‘the story Europe wants to tell’; namely that ‘Europe has lost the plot’. In an essay recently published in Prospect magazine Garton Ash states that ‘as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome…most Europeans have little idea where we’re coming from; far less do we share a vision of where we want to go’. Very true. And the vision he offers of focusing on shared goals – freedom, peace, law, prosperity, diversity and solidarity – is not necessarily a bad one; it’s just that he somehow assumes the current structure of the EU is the best way to go about achieving them.

One of the biggest controversies surrounding immigration is that no one knows exactly how many immigrants from the enlarged EU enter the UK; let alone how many currently reside and how many are working.

A simple method of inquiry, that the government should have implemented years ago, is one universally familiar to club bouncers: counting people in and out at the doors. A system to count legal migrants as they enter via tunnel, sea or air would have required just a little extra work at passport checks and keeping track of passengers as they exited the country. Since there re no limits on entry or staying in the country, there would have been little incentive for immigrants from the Accession 8 countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) to enter the country illegally and hence a relatively good indicator of the numbers currently resident in the UK could be created. This, for one reason or another, has never been implemented.

As well as being Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC, John Esposito is also founding director of that University’s Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

On the strength of these credentials, one might be tempted to suppose not only that Professor Esposito is an expert in Islam but also concerned to foster better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Perhaps, because these credentials of his project such an ostensibly benign and informed image of him that Gallup Organisation chose to appoint Professor Esposito to interpret for it the data it has gathered from a world-wode survey of predominantly Muslim countries as part of its World Poll.

This latter poll is an opinion survey which the Gallup web-site modestly describes as an ‘historical undertaking …to audit the well-being of the globe for the next hundred years’.

No less modest is Gallup's revelation on the same web-site that, as starting point for its World Poll, it has chosen to conduct ‘a study representing the hopes, dreams and fears of a billion Muslims’.

This survey of Muslim opinion world-wide is under the direction of Gallup’s Muslim Studies director, a Ms Dalia Mogahed. One of her key areas of interest, according to the Gallup web-site, is ‘the depth of misunderstanding regarding religion and government between the Western and Islamic cultures’. Clearly, Ms Mogahed must be another person concerned to promote better understanding and relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, one might also be tempted to suppose.

Professor Esposito and Ms Mogahed were both quoted at some length in yesterday’s Times in a news report by its religion correspondent, Ruth Gledhill, about the interim results of that Gallup survey of Muslim opinion world-wide.

What a travesty of good reporting that account turned out to be.

School ‘improvement’ strategies which alienate teachers and thereby set schools back, have become a recurring theme under the New Labour government.

In the last ten years, the number of Muslims inside British prisons has doubled. They now number more than 7,000 and account for some ten per cent of the total prison population.

The growth in their number has led to a corresponding increase in the number of imams serving in them as chaplains or seeking to do so.

Concern about how potentially fertile a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda prison can be has led to the increased vetting of prospective prison imams, as well as increased scrutiny of literature they might seek to bring in with them.

According to a report in today’s Times, in addition to routine counter-terrorism checks by the Prison Services and a further check by the Criminal Records Bureau, all prospective imams in the prison chaplaincy service must undergo vetting by the security services, as well as be conversant with English.

In addition, it was reported, all Arabic literature, including the Koran, will have to be translated into English before being allowed into prisons to ensure no hidden messages for prisoners are contained in it.

One hopes that it will not only be imams and Arabic literature that will be carefully scrutinised before being allowed inside. In recent years, prison has proved a particularly fertile recruiting-ground for Islamist terrorists who became converts to Islam while inside. Any literature they would have read that assisted in their passage to Islamism was certainly written in English, not Arabic.

By Pete Quentin

At the heart of the EU debate (as with almost everything else in politics) is the question of identity. Which groups, or communities do individuals believe themselves to be members of? What is it that allies them to these groups and separates them from others? A major factor in determining the answer to these questions is historical experience, whether it be personal, communal or in this case national.

Regardless of where you are and whom you ask, if you quiz someone on their identity, they will NOT describe themselves as European – not even beyond the continent and certainly not in Brussels! They may be Portugese, Scottish, or even Cornish but they will not be European. Here lies the fundamental problem with the EU project - it requires the sacrifice of, above all else, national sovereignty. People make sacrifices and bear burdens for those things they identify with and they do not identify with the EU.

The Telegraph reports today that over 200,000 pupils in the UK will miss out on their first choice of secondary school this year. Going by last year’s figures, the problem is concentrated particularly in inner-city areas. In 2006, 33% of Birmingham students failed to get their first choice place. In London, Wandsworth, Brent and Westminster faced similar figures of 36%, 28% and 32% respectively.

Meanwhile in Brighton, the Labour run local authority has made the arguably laudable attempt to clamp down on selection via house price by introducing a lottery for oversubscribed school places. The aim is to prevent further economic and social segregation that the limited number of places in good schools has managed to entrench up until now.