Civitas Blog

‘Mothers who have children aged under 11 face greater discrimination in the job market than any other group…’

So today's Times reports the newly appointed equalities supremo, Trevor Phillips, discovered after completing a review of income inequality on behalf of Tony Blair.

Mr Phillips’ reaction to this discovery is reported to have been one of astonishment, thereby revealing himself simultaneously completely lacking in even an elementary grasp of economics and as such supremely well qualified for his new role as Chairman of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights.

Who is going to win this lottery? It looks as though the answer might be the private sector – and not social integration.

Just over two years ago when head of Ofsted, David Bell delivered a widely reported lecture on citizenship to the Hansard Society in which he warned about the potential threat to social cohesion posed by independent faith schools that failed to prepare their pupils for life in the pluralistic democracy that Britain is today.

For issuing this warning, as well as for urging the government to monitor their growth to ensure pupils at them learned ‘the wider tenets of British society’, Mr Bell received a drubbing from several Muslim community leaders.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, then Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, accused Mr Bell of gross irresponsibility for having suggested they posed any threat to “our coherence as a nation”. Dr Mohammad Mukadam, chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools, accused Mr Bell of ‘Islamophobia’, challenging him ‘to come up with evidence that Muslim schools are not preparing young people for life in British society’.

Since then Mr Bell has moved from Ofsted, and Sir Iqbal Sacranie has also steped down from being MCB Secretary General to make way for Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, chairman of the East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre. It must, therefore, always remain conjectural whether, had he remained at Ofsted, Mr Bell would have taken up Dr Mukadam’s challenge by citing those Muslim schools that have since then been disclosed to be not adequately preparing their pupils for life in British society.

By Will Thavenot

David Cameron is set to make a speech today outlining his vision for Europe, calling for Europe to focus on the ‘three-g’s’ – globalisation, global warming, and global poverty. He has also published a joint letter with the Czech Prime Minister, Mirek Topolanek, saying that Europe should be underpinned on three basic principles: commitment to open markets, commitment to a Europe of strong nation states, and a strong Trans-Atlantic alliance.

Everything in these statements is about looking outward, with Europe as a representative body, in a wider global community. This is all well and good. Europe is undoubtedly stuck in a rut, from which it is finding it hard to extricate itself. The same problems just will not go away, such as member states unable to reach a consensus on the constitution, the issue of Turkey and enlargement, energy and the environment – to name but a few. Something needs to happen, one way or another, or the European Union is in danger of gradually grinding to a halt.

But is David Cameron’s vision the way forward? Is it even a feasible proposal, or is it just pie-in-the-sky rhetoric from someone who has proved himself to be masterful in manipulating his audience, but has yet to cut the mustard and back up his wonderful and ambitious dreams with hard hitting realistic action?

The NHS remains in crisis. More catastrophes barely make an impression on the British public. They no longer seem to make a difference: the NHS limps on with the efforts of the doctors and nurses that still treat medicine as a vocation. Some targets are hit, others are missed, and amid the crushing burden of admin and the monthly crop of scandals, hospitals and surgeries force through some limited health provision.

Last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph reported that a group of Oxford University students had started to campaign for the dismissal of one of its dons for being associated with Migration Watch UK and for having publicly voiced the scepticism he shares with it about the alleged economic benefits of the recent large scale of net immigration Britain has experienced.

The campaigning students belong to the Oxford branch of Star, Student Action for Refugees, a group lobbying on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers. Their quarry is no less than their University’s Professor of Demography, David Coleman.

Today’s issue of the Daily Telegraph contains a characteristically robust, good- humoured and flawlessly argued defence by Professor Coleman of the concerns he shares with Migration Watch about the recent scale of immigration, as well as of his association with it and another organisation to which the students have also taken exception.

Among their several complaints against Professor Coleman is that he has used his status as a university professor to legitimise the views and reports produced by Migration Watch UK.

In the apparent absence of any reasons or arguments adduced by the students against these views and reports, one feels like retorting it is they who are using their status as Oxford university students to de-legitimise free debate about an important public issue and to stifle academic freedom.

Given Oxford is notoriously the home of lost causes, the only consolation that may be taken from this sorry episode is that it augurs well for those, like Professor Coleman and Migration Watch, who have long sought to challenge the left-liberal consensus on this issue.

‘Every school in England should set up a council so pupils can have a voice in the appointment of teachers and running the school, a Commons committee says,’ reports the BBC News website today under the headline ‘School councils a must, say MPs.’ Based on research done by London University’s Institute of Education [where, notably, most government-used policy evidence seems to come from] the Education and Skills Select Committee are advising that the government should make school councils compulsory.

Professor Anthony Glees is Director of the Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies at Brunel University. After the July bombings of 2005 but in that same year, the Social Affairs Unit published a report jointly authored by Professor Glees and a former student of his entitled ‘When Students turn to Terror’. It documented the security risk British universities pose through providing environments conducive to infiltration by Islamist extremists seeking to acquire useful skills for their deadly trade and on the look-out for potential jihadi recruits.

In a survey conducted last Thursday (8th March) at the annual Civitas Sixth Form Conference on the European Union, 68% of 16-18 year olds revealed that they would vote against ‘a Constitutional treaty that gives the EU legal personality’ (i.e. the power to make international agreements by itself, or on behalf of member states).

Significantly, 54% of students also responded that ‘the UK should stay in the EU, but push for a looser relationship, based on free trade and intergovernmental cooperation’, when asked which of the following statements came closest to their own view:

a. The UK should support further EU integration, giving more power to EU institutions. (19%)

b. The UK should stay in the EU and push for a looser relationship, based on free trade and intergovernmental cooperation. (54%)

c. The UK should support maintaining the status quo in the EU. (8%)

d. The UK should withdraw from the EU. (13%)

e. Don’t know. (6%)

Before long, many of us will be sitting on Adam Smith. The Bank of England has just launched a new £20 note bearing an image of the Scottish philosopher and inventor of economics, writes Dr Peter Heslam.

It isn’'t clear whether the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, had anything to do with the decision. – He is a Smith enthusiast who is proud to share his birthplace of Kirkcaldy. In any event, it is a remarkable choice, given the way Smith’'s ideas are often associated with precisely what is wrong with the global economy today: its relentless, unethical pursuit of the free market, to the detriment of humanity.

Perhaps if the truth were known we wouldn’'t be so surprised. After all, Smith argued that the economy could function in the interests of all only if it was held in check, both by the state and by morality. In fact, he insisted that it could not thrive apart from a culture steeped in virtue.

He was also the first serious thinker to suggest that there was a solution to global poverty. It was not charity, philanthropy, state power or any other top-down or paternalist strategy; it was the freedom of the individual to pursue their own economic self-interest. Only this –directed as it was by the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence –had the capacity to unleash the human creativity necessary for economic prosperity.

Smith went further. The very aim of human society, he said, should be ‘universal affluence’ through the creation of wealth. This would put the economy at the service of human beings, rather than vice versa, liberating people from the prison of poverty and scarcity that was the inevitable consequence of the subsistence model that had dominated human history.

It was not the Make Poverty History campaign of 2005, therefore, that first inspired the public to think that something could be done about global poverty. It was Smith'’s book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 – a time when, even in the West, most people were poor.

Smith'’s own hand in economic affairs may now be invisible, but if we are to address contemporary global poverty, the ideas he articulated are worth revisiting. The new £20 in our pockets will be a reminder to do so. In this way, it may exert a greater influence for the good of humankind than through its purchasing power alone.

Dr Peter Heslam is director of Transforming Business at Cambridge University (www.transformingbusiness.net)

Today’s Times reports the last-minute cancellation, for what were reported to have been ‘bureaucratic’ reasons, of a three-day programme of lectures and seminars due to have begun at the University of Leeds yesterday, organised by its German department.

The speaker was to have been a visiting German academic, and his subject how the Nazis deliberately stirred up anti-Semitism in the Middle East, a region that had previously been comparatively free of this pathology but where it is now rife in its most virulent form.

As mentioned, the University denies having cancelled any lecture for fear it might offend Muslim students of whom several had reportedly complained to it about them.

Puzzled as to what possible ‘bureaucratic issues’ could have required cancellation of a lecture, given the programme had reportedly been publicised three weeks ago, your intrepid reporter made enquiries of the University's Press Office and was given the following explanation that he was told he could attribute to the University Secretary:

'The decision to cancel a public lecture by Dr Kuentzel has nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of speech, anti-semitism or Islamophobia, and those claiming that is the case are making mischief. Nor is the University bowing to protests or threats from interest groups or individuals.

'The lecture has been cancelled on safety grounds alone and because - contrary to our rules and protocols - no assessment of risk to people or property was carried out, no stewarding arrangements were in place and the University was not given sufficient notice to ensure safety and public order (the lecture came to our attention less than 36 hours before it was due to take place).

'We value academic freedom and remain committed to promoting and positively encouraging free debate, enquiry and, indeed, protest. We tolerate a wide range of views, political as well as academic, even when they are unpopular, controversial or provocative.

'Where meetings are potentially controversial, we have a duty to protect the safety of participants in the event, and other people within the vicinity, and to ensure that public order is maintained. The University cannot allow an event to take place without the necessary arrangements in place.'

In view of this explanation, we can look forward to the lecture being rescheduled to some future occasion which will allow the University time to make adequate stewarding arrangements for them.

In the meantime, those wishing to learn more of what the German academic would have said had he been able to give his talk can click onto the following link to a highly informative article of his on this very important subject.

I should also point out that, in a separate communication from the University, I have been asked to state that, contrary to what was reported in the Times, the lecture-seminar programme has not been called off, only the public lecture that was part of it. Two seminars on the subject that are reserved for its students alone are going ahead.

By the way, as I recall, the Nazis perfected the technique of using violence and its threat to suppress speakers whose views or race they did not like. Could this technique have been something they also passed onto the Middle East along with their anti-Semitism?

According to The Times interpretation, splashed across their front page today, ‘middle-class pupils face losing out on university places if their parents have degrees and professional jobs,’ after the University and College Admissions Service [UCAS] announced land-mark changes to the university admissions system. Prospective students will now be asked to declare both whether their parents went to university and what type of job they are in. The Times’ assertion that this move could potentially lead to middle-class pupils being discriminated against is tied to UCAS’ confirmation that the underlying motive is to ‘support the continuing efforts of universities and colleges to widen participation.’

As was commented on here last week, Leeds University recently cancelled at the last minute an advertised public lecture organised by its German department on how the Nazis fostered anti-Semitism in the Middle East.

The University claimed the lecture was cancelled because its German department had not gone through the mandatory procedures for such events that would have involved a risk-assessment exercise that would have enabled it to provide adequate stewarding arrangements. Because it hadn’t, so the University claimed, the lecture had to be cancelled on safety grounds.

The University vehemently denied cancelling the lecture in response to complaints from its Muslim students.

Below is the text of an email to the University’s Vice-Chancellor sent in advance of the cancellation of the lecture by an engineering student there who, apart from his name, signed himself former head of its ‘Palestinian Solidarity Group’.

Today – in fact at this very moment – the EU-ACP (African-Caribbean-Pacific) Joint Parliamentary Assembly convenes in Brussels for their biannual plenary meeting. Talking shop or not, the Assembly has acquired an increasingly prominent role, particularly given the tensions surrounding the EU’s intention to end its preferential trade arrangements with ACP countries in favour of bilateral Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The blurb on its website states: ‘A substantial part of the work of the Joint Parliamentary Assembly is directed towards promoting human rights and democracy and the common values of humanity….in order to guarantee the right of each people to choose its own development objectives and how to attain them.’ If so, then now, given the situation in Zimbabwe, is the time to prove it.

Few uncomatosed citizens of this country are going to make it through to the end of the coming weekend without being made aware that this Sunday marks the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. On 25 March 1807, royal assent was given to a parliamentary bill prohibiting transportation of slaves from Africa to the British West Indies.

Nor should anyone of good will and liberal sentiment want to let the anniversary go unmarked and uncelebrated. Nor, therefore, would or should they want to take umbrage if those with the power to engineer such things use the occasion to encourage British citizens to dwell on its significance. For, rightly understood, what the occasion commemorates has the potential to promote, among the diverse citizens of this deeply fractured and divided society that Britain has now become, is a true sense of community and of their common humanity, and pride in their British citizenship.

Sadly, however, and perhaps all too predictably, in our politically correct climate, a true opportunity to promote social cohesion has been missed by the government. Indeed, more than that, it has chosen to mark the occasion in a woefully tendentious way that distorts the event and its significance, and makes of the occasion something divisive, indeed, positively racist.

Education secretary Alan Johnson’s announcement that school dropouts will be criminalized has met a mixed response. ‘Attendance orders’ will be slapped down on teenagers detailing a course that they should attend; teens who breach the order face a £50 fixed penalty or prosecution. As Alex Frean points out in The Times, criminalizing school non-attendance is not in itself a new concept in our education system. What’s new is that the move criminalizes pupil rather than parent, and of course that the offence applies to over 16-year-olds.

With great fanfare the BBC has launched a prime time documentary called The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom. It is the usual bravely radical, groundbreaking BBC stuff of course. In other words it is full of soft left clichés recycled from the heyday of collectivism, writes Graham Cunningham.

I was reminded of that 1960’s folk music ditty Little Boxes, popularised by Pete Seeger. Older readers may remember it. Here are a few snatches from memory:

And the people on the box
All went to the university,
Where they ticked all the trendy boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's teachers and film directors,
And tv executives,
And they're all full of radical-chic tacky
And they all think just the same.

OK I confess. I might have changed the words a bit!

The year is 1780. A sailing ship is ploughing through heavy seas across the Atlantic, loaded almost to the gunwales with a cargo of human beings. They are chained together on narrow shelves, soaked in sweat, blood, vomit and excrement.

In a smart London club, an elegant young graduate fresh from Cambridge is seated at the gambling table, delighting his friends with his wit and charm. From a business family and already an MP, he has a fortune behind him and a promising career ahead.

Who would imagine that these two worlds could have anything in common? Yet that young man was to become the principal instrument in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the bicentenary of which we celebrate this week, writes Dr Peter Heslam.

Dr Crippen delivers a steady drip feed of episodes that demonstrate quite how ridiculous and dangerous hospital bureaucracy has become. This diary entry from yesterday was exemplary.

Tuesday 27th March

Ah!

What delicious --yet, ultimately, deeply painful -- unintended irony is conveyed by the image that graces the NHS web-page containing details of its publications for health care workers and patients about its much vaunted electronic database of patient records.

This irony is especially piquant in light of a report in today’s Times about the concerns Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has publicly expressed that potentially compromising information about Muslim women given by them in confidence to their GPs might be, or has been, leaked to those in their own communities who would make violent reprisals against them, upon learning of what they had disclosed. The kind of information at issue is that that which concerns ‘domestic violence or sexual health problems of these women.’

The Times Education Supplement’s [TES] front page headline, ‘One in four parents who home-educate children provides little or no teaching’ ties neatly in with the alarming news that our already very high secondary school truancy rate ‘is at least 18% higher than thought’ [BBC News]. The connection between home schooling and truancy lies in the revelation that ‘some schools are encouraging parents of persistent truants to register as home educators to get their attendance up’. The other connector is bullying: 1 in 3 pupils truant because they are being bullied – and it is thought that a significant number of children are removed from school and educated at home in order to evade bullying. But the ultimate connection is, as stated by the TES headline: that some home schooling might boil down to truancy.