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December 31, 2004

Are the figures of recorded crime any use?

Cultures and Crimes, Civitas's new book on crime and the police, will be published early next week. Cultures and Crimes looks at crime and policing within the context of the cultures of four societies, England, France, Germany and the United States.

I am one of the authors, and in the case of this volume I have the unusual advantage of being able to answer the principal criticism before it is made. It will be that "everybody knows", and everybody has known "for the past thirty or forty years", that the figures of police recorded crime are no good, and that nothing can be said about crime on the basis of them.

Well, if "everybody" means most sociologists and social policy academics hired since the end of the 1960s, and most prominent pressure groups whose wholly worthy business is to protect the interests and extend the rights of suspects, offenders and prisoners, then "everybody" does know that the crime figures are useless.

If these people are "everybody", then without doubt, everybody has repudiated the police figures of recorded crime for decades.

The great cry in the 1960s was against what was called the "cultural hegemony" of bourgeois values. The "bourgeois values" whose dominance was so deplorable included prudence, fortitude, temperance, thrift, fidelity, and duty, with a heavy emphasis on the myriad of values supporting life-long monogamy as both socially necessary and, on the average, individually beneficial. There were the specialised bourgeois values of the different professions: courage for the soldier, political impartiality for the government bureaucrat, scholarship for the academic.

From the 1960s, bourgeois values were attacked by the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie with might and main, often in the name of the superior values propagated by Trotsky, Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, or even Enver Hoxha. As one or other of these heroes failed or fell out of fashion, there was a drift into the impregnable solipsism and elitism of so-called "post-modernist" culture of anti-any-values nihilism.

Cultural dominance now lies almost entirely with those who when young had been scandalised that there was such a thing as dominance. You would not think it, witnessing their childish persistence in shocking and challenging people who supposedly hold values that have largely ceased to exist. Today it is only their own world-view that goes unchallenged.

They have replaced the bourgeois morality of self-restraint, in accordance with which they and their parents and grandparents had been raised, with their own post-bourgeois amorality of unregulated self-expression.

Part of this new hegemonic outlook is the faith--the unquestioned belief--that their own hegemony has not had the adverse effect of drastically increasing the crime rate. A corollary of that belief is a second unquestioned belief, that any statistics, reports and memories that showed such an increase--and all statistics and nearly all reports and memories did show an increase--must be false.

For forty years, therefore, the people who were eventually to take over the cultural dominance of this country have maintained with the passion of zealots that anyone alleging that crime was rising in England was a benighted reactionary in the throes of moral panic.

Characterisically for a faith, glaring logical contradictions are easily accommodated. In the field of policing and crime, the most glaring is the juxtaposition of the following two beliefs. One is the belief in the uselessness of all crime figures, and of most reports and memories of crime. The other is the belief that crime rates have not risen.

But if the statistics, reports and memories are useless how could anybody know whether crime had increased, decreased, or remained the same? They would be just as useless for their case that crime has not risen since 1955 as they would be for my case that crime has risen dramatically since 1955.

That many people for a long period have repetitively asserted that the crime figures are rubbish is not at all the same thing as showing that they are rubbish.

The statistics of police-recorded crime do present many difficulties and contain many defects. The basis of some statistics has changed in now unmeasurable ways over the years. All we know is that they have changed, and that a time series constructed from them would be of little value. Others have been changed explictly and clearly from one series of years to another, and the effects of the change can be easily calculated. A good example is criminal damage. Recently, changes in the definition of violence against the person as a recordable offence broke that historical series, but also in a measurable way.

I should be glad to be directed to any study that deals systematically and not tendentiously with what is wrong with statistics of specific crimes which disables the statistics of other and most police-recorded crimes from being of value for use for specific purposes. I am sure such a study or studies must exist. It's just that I haven't come across one yet.

The fact that year by year there is an unrecorded figure (in some cases a very large unrecorded figure) for a specific crime renders the recorded figure a useless measure of the total volume of that crime. But that does not mean that the statistics of the proportion of the total that are recorded is not a good measure of the trend in the crime over the years.

Whether and to what extent the ratio of the unrecorded figure to the recorded figure of any particular crime is stable from year to year, and whether and to what extent the recorded figure is therefore available as a measure of the trend, is an empirical question to be answered in each case.

The pattern of actual crime statistics makes the assumption highly implausible that the ratio normally varies widely and randomly from year to year. But it is on this assumption that the "moral panic" and "useless statistics" schools consciously or unconsciously depend.

Cultures and Crimes, recognising that the statistics of some crimes are problematical, simply by-passes most of the problems.

First, the crime statistics are never used (except, possibly, in inadvertance) as evidence of the total frequency of all crimes or of particular offences. They are used only as evidence of changes in frequency over time.

Secondly, the statistics used are mainly those of robbery. This is a category of crime the legal definition of which has changed very little over the years, and is very similar in the four countries studied. Public attitudes to robbery as a crime have not changed, unlike other crimes such as domestic violence. Police recording practices, which have changed from time to time, and recently greatly affected certain categories of offence, had hardly affected the recording of robberies.

Thirdly, the statistics are placed wherever possible side-by-side with contemporaneous reports of social conditions that throw light on whether or not observers accepted the figures as being a true reflection of crime rates.

In the next few days, therefore (if we are fortunate enough to attract comment in the national media) we can expect to hear the contentless objection that the crime figures used in the book, though an accurate account of what the statistics report, are useless because the statistics themselves are useless.

What we shall not hear is any analysis of what precisely renders them useless--what changes in definition or recording practice or public attitude, occurring when, render them useless, or for what stated purpose they are useless. We shall not, that is, have the benefit of very much scholarly criticism.

What we shall not be given are any facts that show that the smooth curves of growth have somehow been created out of random jumps each year in the case of each crime in the proportion of unrecorded to recorded cases.

Preeminently, we shall not be supplied with anything but the odd eccentric contemporaneous account (if we are supplied even with that) that is capable of contradicting the many contemporaneous accounts that are quoted in detail in Cultures and Crimes, and which show that the figures of reported crime are a broadly reliable representation of the changes that have actually taken place in this country since the statistics were first collected in 1857.

Posted by at 10:28 PM | Comments (3)

December 24, 2004

The Government's Fix and How to Fix it

Due to the recent enforced closure of the Merseyside-based firm that supplied the NHS with flu-vaccine and diamorphine, it is reported in today’s papers that the country’s hospitals face the prospect of running out of supplies of the painkiller in a mere matter of weeks.

This is no laughing matter, since diamorphine is used in the analgesic treatment of cancer patients and others with serious and terminal painful conditions.

The Department of Health seems not overly concerned. It is reported as having spoken of switching to the use of alternative painkillers like morphine.

Clearly, however, since diamorphine was its previous drug of choice, the prospect of its not being available for hospital use cannot but be very serious.

In not having anticipated this crisis and formulated contingency plans to deal with it, the government displays a staggering degree of complacency and incompetence -- unless its recent legalisation of living-wills is its contingency plan!

Since the government seems incapable of organising the medical equivalent of a seasonal celebration in a brewery, I would like to end the year on a note of seasonal good-will to it by making the following suggestion, while recognising the problem in question is no laughing matter but one of appalling suffering shortly to occur as a result of its incompetence.

‘Diamporhine’, as is well-known, is the medical name for heroin. Now, the newspapers are constantly telling us the streets of England’s cities and villages are awash with the substance, as they are with practically every other drug known to man or beast.

Until the government can find a more reputable alternative source of supply, why doesn’t it announce a moratorium for those who possess quantities intended for illegal sale and offer to buy up the entire stock at some agreed above street-level price?

That way, those in genuine need of the drug could gain it, and those who are not in genuine need could be spared being made to acquire such need of it.

Admittedly, this would be only a temporary fix. But, then, as every junkie will testify, that is all that those in quest of the drug are ever after.

Wishing you a happier 2005 than 2004, but doubting whether for all too many it will be!

Posted by David Conway at 10:21 AM | Comments (1)

December 23, 2004

When Sikhs Must Hide… Can this really be the Season to be Jolly?

Can this really be the season to be jolly, given with each passing day some new nail is driven into the coffin of England’s traditional liberties?

Today’s depressing news concerns Sikh playwright, Guperpreet Kaur Bhatti. Her dramatised depiction of rape and murder in a Sikh temple or Gurdawara so offended some of her co-religionists that their violent protests forced the Birmingham theatre in which her play had been showing to full houses to terminate its run early.

If the forced early closure of her play was not bad enough, today’s papers report its author as having been forced into hiding on the advice of the police after receiving death threats from those apparently still not yet mollified.

Leaders of the Birmingham Sikh community are quick to dissociate themselves from violent protest, yet still find the play and its staging objectionable.

‘In a Sikh temple sexual abuse does not take place. Kissing and dancing don’t take place, rape doesn’t take place, homosexual activity doesn’t take place, murders do not take place’, so the chairman of the Sikh Gudawaras in Birmingham is reported as saying.

His sentiments are echoed by those expessed by a former co-chairman who is reported as having said, ‘Of course I condemn violence wherever it occurs and we are a peaceful and law-abiding community. But you should also consider who is provoking this violence – who is creating this anger but the author herself…. If this was set in a church or a mosque or any other place of worship there would be the same strong feelings.’

We have yet to see British Muslims out on the streets protesting at the sentencing yesterday of a British imam convicted of raping a twelve year old girl in his Bristol mosque while supposedly receiving religious instruction from him. Perhaps, the example of the Birmingham Sikh protesters will now embolden some of them to stage protests against the verdict, denying any such things could possibly happen in their places of worship.

Alternatively, as seems more likely, if British Muslims relucantly are forced to concede they can, so too, perhaps, should all religious communities. In that case, dramatised depictions of such incidents in their places of worship should be tolerated by all.

But even if it were inconceivable any such form of depravity could possibly occur in a Sikh temple, can it honestly be suggested, as apparently have some Birmingham Sikh leaders, that the fictitious depiction of any such an incident in one of their temples will bring their community into such disrepute in the eyes of the public as to warrant forcing the closure of any play which does? Surely, if anything is likely to, it will only be resort to muscle by some of that community to force any such play off the stage.

What makes this sorry tale so depressing is what it presages for the future of liberty in this country. Once any group, be it a minority or majority, is given license to impose its will by force, it marks the beginning of the end of the rule of law and the commencement of intolerant mob rule.

By way of consolation, perhaps, it is worth remembering that attempts to use force to suppress novel ways of thinking have a habit in the long run of grossly back-firing. One has only to think of Socrates, not to mention that figure whose birth his numerous followers are celebrating at this time of year.

Therefore, to all those who are: Merry Xmas!

Posted by David Conway at 03:09 PM | Comments (3)

December 22, 2004

Police numbers for crime prevention

Mr Kaye has raised a key issue in pointing out that the number of crimes has increased out of all proportion to the increase in the number of police officers and the "police extended family".

In the early 1990s there were 128,000 police officers year by year in England and Wales. The numbers declined somewhat in 1994-95, and then dropped sharply from 1997 to 2000, to 124,000.

The police services had regained their 1997 numbers of police officers by 2002.

None of this of course, discouraged the media from supporting the Home Office's version of its successes. In December 2001, for example, the BBC headlined the exciting news that "UK police numbers leap".

Numbers have increased again since, to 138,000. This is a record high, and therefore, of course, an improvement to be warmly applauded by everyone whose interest is in the primacy of crime prevention, the great leading principle of policing in this country from the first days of the Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police to the 1960s.

When he was Home Secretary, Mr Blunkett constantly referred to the "record numbers" of police officers and to "falling crime".

But the proper context for assessement is the increase in police numbers since the 1960s as compared with the increase in crime numbers since the 1960s.

Crime surged upwards from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, and on the streets the surge continued until the beginning of this century. Police numbers grew very slowly.

That is the meaningful context for assessing "record police numbers" and "falling crime". In that context, the rise in police numbers is welcome but grossly insufficient for crime prevention, and the fall in crime numbers leaves crime levels far above those of even the high-crime decade of the 1980s.

On the streets, of course, where the police role is essential in crime prevention, the fall in robberies of personal property does not get us back even to the levels of 1997, the year in which Mr Straw became Home Secretary.

As Mr Kaye implies, it is as if at the battle of the Little Big Horn Custer had been joined by another hundred soldiers, and five hundred of the surrounding Sioux and Cheyenne had gone home. There is "a record number" in the Seventh Cavalry and "a fall in the enemies' numbers". That's all right then.

Posted by at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2004

Tough on marriage, tough on the causes of marriage--and crime goes through the roof

I have been asked to add a bit to my last posted article. In it I said that crime had been brought down in the 1990s by people's own precautions, instituted because they were very reasonably experiencing a growing fear of crime; but that crime on the streets, the control of which depended on the police, continued to grow for another ten years.

With the numbers of robberies doubling and redoubling, the country at last awoke from the stupor into which it had been lulled by our academic and media elites. For decades they had dismissed the rise of crime as what they loftily dismissed as "moral panic". It was a double-barrelled sneer. Being "moral", for them, was worse than being in a panic.

I've been asked specifically to give the facts about the Home Office under Mr Straw from 1997 to 2001, and under Mr Blunkett from 2001 to 2004. Robbery is a police-controlled crime, as distinct from crimes where the public can do something to protect itself without the police (locks, bolts, alarms, staying indoors).

Mr Straw and Mr Blunkett, as Home Secretaries, were in charge of the Metropolitan police, London's police.

In the year that Mr Straw took over the Home Office there were 27,386 robberies of personal and business property in London.
By 2000 there were 35,709 robberies of personal property in London.
In 2001, the year Mr Straw was promoted to the Foreign Office, there were 47,559 .

No the wonder that Mr Blunkett said that Mr Straw left the Home Office in a mess.

In the first eleven months of 2004, the year of Mr Blunkett's departure, with December's figure of about 2,500 still to be added in, there have been 33,673 personal-property robberies in London--with December included, not fewer than 36,000 for the full year.

Thus Mr Blunkett has not succeeded in getting the figures back even to the 35,709 personal-property robberies of 2000. Mr Blunkett was all the further, of course, from getting back to the figure with which Mr Straw began, the 27,000 of 1997, which included business robberies as well.

Robberies of personal property in London is a good figure to take. The Home Office is directly responsible for London's policing. There's been no significant change in how robbery is defined. The category of "robberies" has hardly been affected by changes in recording practices by the police. The British Crime Survey has too few cases of robbery for it to be of much use, so the Home Office uses the police figures. The figures are right up to date, so officials and ministers cannot claim that things have (unprovably) improved since the figures were collected.

For all these reasons, the usual slipping and sliding between one set of figures and another is not possible here.

On the assumption that the December 2004 figure will be very low at 2,500, robberies in London would have fallen from 48,000 in 2001 to 36,000 in 2004.

But as late as 1990 there weren't as many as 36,000 robberies in the whole of England and Wales!

Taking the generous and hopeful estimate I suggested above--that the figure for London for December 2004 might be only 2,500--as late as 1961 there weren't as many as 2,500 robberies a year in the whole of England and Wales.

In the year David Blunkett became Home Secretary, 2001, there were 5,900 robberies in Lambeth alone. The national figure for robberies did not exceed 5,900 until 1969.

It is scarcely an occasion for popular celebration when the figure for Lambeth alone in the first 11 months of this year is 2,419. For this is more than the national figure of robberies for the full twelve months of 1961, 2,349, just before the cultural revolution began to shower its blessings upon us.

No the wonder people "fear" that crime is growing. People would have had to be extremely stupid not to come to fear crime. The stupid thing is to say that the fear of crime is "as much the problem" as crime itself.

David Blunkett has officially written as Home Secretary on "the family". But for him, as his Home Office's paper in July 2004 on community and crime made explicit, "the family" has virtually nothing to do with marriage.

He has revealed by his own conduct, furthermore, that he has no conception at all that he has done anything wrong, or that anybody can still be so benighted as to think he could have done anything wrong, in having a baby by another man's wife.

As the father of her child he has a full claim, according to his moral code, to all the social rights of parenthood. He must have been as gratified as I was amazed that he had Fathers4Justice parading for him over the weekend. I had always thought that they supported the wronged husband, not the infatuated interloper who wrongs him.

The incidental disclosures emerging from the affair show that such attitudes, such conduct and such claims are now regarded as entirely normal in the political, administrative, media and celebrity circles within which David Blunkett has spent the last few years. He leaves the Government with his "integrity intact".

The Blunkett case has made plain what before could be only suspected, that there was no chance at all that any possible connection between the dismemberment of the family and the rise in crime would be contemplated by such people, much less that they should favour any marriage-friendly policies.

Much better to believe (or feign) that crime is at an historically low level. (Is it possible that self-deception in own's own interest can be so powerful as to make such a statement a genuine error, rather than just a barefaced lie?)

For if crime is at an historically low level, and is sinking even lower, then obviously the sexual and parenting culture of the ruling, commenting and entertaining classes--now imitated and embraced as their own by most sections of society--cannot be held responsible for the non-existent high crime rates. "The fish rots from the head"? Not here, it doesn't!

It's the lower classes that are to blame. Hand out the ASBOs! Finger printing all round! More surveillance cameras will do it!

In the meantime ... improve rewards for any arrangement except permanent marriage as the basis for procreating and rearing children. Impress upon children in the schools that (with one exception) any "partnership life-style" is just as good as any other.

Denounce (in words approved today by a Daily Telegraph staff writer) criticism of the extra-marital adventures of Mr Blunkett's married lover as "nasty, sub-Saudi-Arabian, stone-the-adulteress stuff". [Comment, Daily Telegraph, 21 December 2004.]

Did you see any "sub-Saudi-Arabian stone-the-adulteress" stuff? Neither did anybody else. It was, the Daily Telegraph blandly tells us, the "sub-text" of "some of the stuff being put about". All we enlightened life-style people have to do is to decipher the code of these nasty sub-Saudi-Arabian adulteress-stoners and expose their real message. All partner life-styles are equal, but some are more equal than others, and life-long monogamy is not among them them.

(Is it a racial slur and backward to say that something is abhorrent because it is Saudi-Arabian, but not a racial slur and progressive to say something is abhorrent because it is nasty and sub-Saudi-Arabian?)

The Blunkett affair shows that, however much they lack self-knowledge and however much they wallow in their own self-serving justifications, we now enjoy political and media elites that are wonderfully well adapted to carrying out these tasks with genuine if self-deluded enthusiasm.

And let's be grateful to Mr Blunkett. Without so much as a nod towards the strengthening of life-long monogamy, and indeed giving a considerable shove that weakens it, he has reduced the robbery rate of personal property in London, so that there were "only" 33,700 robberies of personal property from January to November this year, and crime is at an "historically low" level.

By the way, from 1897 until 1941, there were never more than 400 robberies a year of personal and business property combined in all the cities, towns and villages of England and Wales put together.

These are not my figures. They are the Home Office's.

Posted by at 07:06 AM | Comments (2)

December 20, 2004

Worse Than When They Started

Perhaps unwisely, David Blunkett , said that Jack Straw left the Home Office in a mess. The Government has placed great emphasis on its Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. According to the Treasury, they ‘have become increasingly outcome-focused’, and are now supported by ‘rigorous performance information’. (Spending Review 2004.)

However, in two cases, performance has got worse: fewer offenders are being brought to justice and the number of robberies has gone up.

The baseline for robbery is police-recorded offences in 1999-2000: 68,782 crimes in the ten street crime initiative areas. The target is a reduction in those areas of 14% to 59,153 crimes. The Autumn Performance Report for 2003 honestly reports that, in 2002-03 the police recorded 83,661 robberies in the ten areas, an increase of 22%.

The Home Office Departmental Report 2004 does not give the total number of robberies, merely saying there was a 17% reduction from 2001-02 to 2002-03 and that further ‘substantial reductions’ had been made in 2003-04. The Autumn Performance Report 2004, however, shows that there were 76,776 robberies, an increase of 12% and still 30% adrift of the target.

In addition, there is evidence of a displacement effect from the ten street crime areas. Robberies increased 12% in those areas, but rose 20% in the whole country (from 84,277 to 101,095). (Crime in England and Wales 2003/04, Table 2.04.)

Posted by David Green at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2004

Blunkett's Home Office and the Truth about Crime

Now that Mr Blunkett is no longer Home Secretary, can we expect some slight remission in the flow of nonsense on crime from the Home Office?

In the past few months the Home Office has taken to chanting the mantra that crime is at a historically low level. That's on the childhood principle, presumably, that if you say something three times it's true. The culture and technical constraints of radio and television make it virtually impossible to secure a public airing of the clear facts that contradict that ridiculous falsehood. They're "statistics" and they're "complicated". The matter is settled with the most aggressive sound-bite or by the authoratative plausibility of the official spokesperson.

Yet if we look no further than London--the Metropolitan Police Area, for which the Home Office is directly responsible--real history has a different tale to tell.

Let's not open ourselves to the accusation of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the Home Office by dwelling on the fact that in 1906 there were fewer than 20,000 crimes in London. But it was the Home Office that invoked "history", not me.

When Mr Blunkett was born in 1947 there were still only 127,000 crimes a year in London.
Even in 1960 there were only 188,000.
For 2004, without the December figure, the figure is 965,000.

And the crime figures are ... historically low?

With a repetititve absurdity that competes with that of "historically low" crime figures, the Home Office assures us also that crime in the capital is falling.

The Home Office's own published statistics show that:
in the year 2000 there were 1,007,000 crimes in London.
In 2001 there were 1,043,000.
In 2002 there were 1,082,000.
In 2003 there were 1,058,000.
And in 2004, even if the December figure is as low 75,000 (very unlikely), the figure will be 1,040,000.

So there has been an increase of 33,000 crimes since the year 2000. (Remember, there were fewer than 20,000 crimes in total in 1906!)

Crime "is falling" is a phrase that means there is a trend. As compared with last year there has been a tiny reduction on 1 million crimes of, at best, 18,000 crimes.

The London crime figures rose in both March and April 2004 as compared with March and April 2003.

The latest figure is for November 2004. In November the crime figure rose as compared with November 2003 from 86,900 to 88,400.

And crime ... is falling?

Everyone would like there to be a trend. But by no stretch of anybody's imagination outside of the Home Office under Mr Blunkett is it a trend yet.

The Home Office has been adept in recent years at producing alternative sets of figures, with the effect of muddying all public discussion.

In the case of the London crime numbers, there is no alternative set of figures. These are the figures they rely on, and can only be relying on, when they prate about "historically low" crime, and "crime falling", and when Home Office ministers (and even, incredibly, the occasional academic!) appear on television to say the same.

Perhaps the most distasteful bit of responsibility-shedding by the Home Office has been the line that the fear of crime is as much the problem as the fact of crime. It's the populist and hysterical tabloids, stupid. It's the nervous old biddies, stupid.

The fact is that the totally reasonable fear of crime has undoubtedly been one of the main factors in preventing the crime figures being even worse.

The enormous rise in burglaries has been restrained by people making their homes into fortresses. Old people are mugged less than young people because they do not venture out into public spaces at night. Cars have been rendered much more difficult to steal than they were ten years ago.

Where the reasonable fear of crime cannot be accompanied by practical measures to secure one's own safety, as in the above examples, and safety has depended on the policing policies of the Home Office, the results on the streets of London (with bolted and alarmed houses, now the results on the door-step; and with securely locked parked cars, now the results in hijacking) have been disastrous.

Some inroads have been belatedly made in the street robbery figures. But there were still 1,000 more street robberies in the first 11 months of 2004 than there had been in the first eleven months of 2000, up from 32,700 to 33,700.

And on the Home Office's beloved "crime is at a historially low" point, from 1893 to 1941 there were never more than 400 robberies in total in the whole of England and Wales, never mind a rise of 1,000 in five years in London alone.

Perhaps Mr Clarke will take the opportunity offered by Mr Blunkett's departure, therefore, to spend more time over known facts and useful remedies, and less time with Pollyanna propaganda and macho bluster.

Posted by at 02:39 PM | Comments (4)

December 17, 2004

The Third Reich and the Fourth ‘R’

No one could remotely accuse today’s secularists who make up the bulk of the metropolitan ‘liberal’ elite of Europe and the United States of sharing the same political agenda as Adolf Hitler.

However, they both share one common objective that should send chills down the spines of true lovers of liberty, given how easily this iberal elite seems able to accomplish it today, and, supposedly, in the name of liberal values and ideals.

That objective is the de-Christianisation of Europe and America, and ultimately the world.

Although Hitler was prepared temporarily to play along with the Christian Church while he felt it expedient to do so, in private he let it be known he was concerned above all to free Europe, and ultimately the world, from what he considered to be the emasculating incubus of Judaeo-Christian values, and in particular, the ideal of human equality and the ethics of compassion, into whose grip he considered Europe to have fallen.

Paradoxically, it is very same values and ideals in whose name today’s supposedly liberal elites are busy pursuing the very same objective as Hitler, albeit by very different means.

Today, supposedly out of concern not to offend or discriminate against any minorities, these ‘liberal’ secular elites call for, and succeed in accomplishing, the removal of all traces of Christianity from public schooling.

How precisely this objective is accomplished varies from country to country, but the general tendency is the same. Thus, for example, in Italy, one school in Como has reportedly replaced the word, ’Jesus’ by the word, ‘virtue’, in the carols its children will be singing this year; while a school in Treviso is reported to have replaced the Christmas Nativity play by ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Likewise, in America, school districts in New Jersey and Florida have reportedly banned Christmas carols.

Schools in Britain have supposedly been left to choose for themselves how and whether to celebrate Christmas. Increasingly, they are reported as having chosen to dispense with any reference to Christianity. As many as 25% of English and Welsh schools will not be holding carol services this year, and as many as 50% of these schools will be substituting secular seasonal celebrations instead.

All this is supposedly being done in the name of greater ‘inclusivity’, despite religious minorities in these countries being known to prefer that all take some religion seriously than none be encouraged to take any seriously.

Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, David Bell, gave public support to this trend in a speech in April of this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1944 Education Act in which religious education and worship were made mandatory.

In that speech, Mr Bell questioned whether ‘we [are] right to be requiring from our young people levels of observance that are not matched even by the Christian faithful.’ He went to enquire whether there is any ‘continuing symbolic value in a common celebration of this country’s [Christian] heritage, and continuing practical value for pupils’ education, in behaving as those of faith do by undertaking an act of worship even though some are of no faith.’

For an answer to his questions,. Mr Bell would do well to turn to T.S.Eliot’s account of the ‘Idea of a Christian Society’ given in three lectures delivered at Oxford in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of hostilities. There, he wrote in support of such a form of society as follows:

‘Unless we can find a pattern into which all problems of life can have their place, we are only likely to go on complicating chaos … As political philosophy derives its sanctions from ethics and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation which will not, to its destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality’.

Some might object to such a metaphysically loaded justification being given for religious education in general and a Christian one in particular. But the propriety of such a form of justification is precisely what is at issue. While the likes of Mr Bell might have little time for religion, as many as 70% of Britain’s population turn out to be willing to own up to belief in God and the vast majority of these consider themselves to be Christian.

In such circumstances, the British educational authorities, and other countries, like Italy and the USA, no less Christian in culture, abuse their authority when they deprive the children whose education they superintend from initiation into or opportunity to participate in the religious traditions of their parents’ and their country.

Whereas Jesus bid his follows to render unto Caesar that which was his, today’s elite wishes no one to render anything save to Caesar.

As Eliot said back in 1939, the country faces three choices: to continue to sink into apathetic secular decline; to transmute into some kind of totalitarian democracy; or, finally, to become a positive Christian society, by no means the same, as he was at pains to point out, as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians.

Currently, Her Majesty’s Opposition seems at a loss how to recapture the support and enthusiasm of the country, given how New Labour has stolen so many of its economic policies. Perhaps, the way to its recovery lies in its deciding to stand up for Britain’s predominantly Christian culture. God knows, someone needs to.

Season's Greeting!

Posted by David Conway at 04:56 PM | Comments (1)

December 16, 2004

Old Tony’s Almanac … How the PM Could Really Serve the Nation

‘I am sure WMD will be discovered.’

‘I am sure David Blunkett will be exonerated.’

If only the Prime Minister would reveal which crew he is sure will win the next Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race!

Posted by David Conway at 08:48 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2004

Family Law and Judges' Personal Opinions

No body of evidence in the social sciences points more plainly in one direction than that which deals with the welfare of children conceived, born and brought up by their own two biological parents within the institution of life-long monogamy, as compared with children brought up under other arrangements, or lack of them.

There are failures and successes in all situations that have to do with conception, procreation and child-rearing. The failures are far more frequently found outside marriage than within marriage.

The law of the land is one element in the complex of inculcated attitudes and of organisational support for the institutional family of birth and childrearing within formal marriage.

Other contributions to this site in the past few days have dealt with the conduct of the Home Secretary, and his beliefs about what the family in this country now is, and ought to be. They are crucial influences on what he will do to defend or dismantle the institutional family. In this area, his personal conduct is preeminently not his private affair.

But we have just been treated to a remarkable insight into the relationship between the personal and the public at the highest levels of the Family Division of the High Court. The President of the Family Division, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, gave an interview this evening in which she articulated the degree to which she supposes--and presumably acts on the supposition--that it is up to her to decide whether Parliament is being sluggish in making the necessary reforms in family life. When in her opinion and the opinion of her judical colleagues Parliament is being sluggish, she then claims, it is for the unelected judges to make the reforms in Parliament's stead. How little respect they will have for the even more backward public can only be guessed at.

The courts for at least the last twenty years have consituted very nearly an avant garde in putting the most facilitative complexion on all measures that have tended to weaken the institutional family. The personal lives and moral beliefs of such family judges, therefore, have a public relevance that those of judges who deemed their duty was to strictly follow the text of the law, or at most to fathom the intentions of Parliament, did not have.

In one passage, the President of the Family Division of the High Court speaks (perhaps inadvertantly) for the whole of the Judiciary.

Apart from what she says in this interview, I have no idea what Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss's personal beliefs and social experiences are or have been. But her manifesto tonight. claiming that (in addition to the Common Law) what she and her judicial colleagues say the law is, is the law, certainly thrusts her "private" life firmly into the public sphere. Her interviewer, Eddie Mair, leads her to disclose some of the personal details that become public matters where judges embrace judicial activism

The precise issue she is discussing is the Bill that was before the House of Commons today, the Mental Capacity Bill. But her claims in relation to this aspect of family law clearly cover all matters of family law.

On the Mental Capacity Bill, her comments are almost comically one-sided--her remark, for example, that the Bill is "the culmination of the work of many, many organisations, all wanting to help people at the end of their lives".

There have been, of course, "many, many organisations, all wanting to help people at the end of their lives" that have worked in opposition to the Bill.

I am also unfamiliar with the current discourse of academic and advanced jurisprudence. For all I know, Dame Elizabeth's views are the staple of contemporary articles in the learned law journals. But her attitudes were to me so fresh, coming from a senior judge, that at first I could not, as they say, believe my ears.

Having checked each section of the recording of the BBC "PM" interview several times, I am satisfied that what appears below is indeed what she was asked, and what her replies were.

Eddie Mair: I'm joined now by one of Britain's most senior judges, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the President of the High Court Family Division. What are your thoughts on the Mental Capacity Bill?

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: Well, I very much approve of it. It is the culmination of a great deal of hard work of many, many organisations, all wanting to help people at the end of their lives. I'm coming to be much older. I'm 71, and I'm also interested as an ordinary person in the opportunity that this should be made better.

In your view, is this a clarification of the law?

Yes, It is.

Do you think MPs should have been allowed a free vote, conscience vote?

I don't think that it's the business of a senior judge to comment on how Parliament should organise itself.

Ah, I wondered, too, then, what you think about the supremacy of Parliament in this issue. You'll have heard there that the Lord Chancellor has written to the Archbishop of Cardiff, offering concessions. MPs were kept in the dark. As a citizen, does that worry you?

Well, I think all organisations are entitled to comment; and the Catholic Church, through the Archbishop of Wales, has been expressing its views for a number of months about this Bill.

I am interested that you say that--that the political aspect of this is not a matter for you.
It's probably worth explaining to the people listening that this interview came about because a Press Officer at the Department of Constitutional Affairs called our programme to ask if we were doing this story tonight--and we said, yes, of course; and we asked if we could have a Government Minister. Now, we were told that there was nobody available, but that you would be.
Thinking of the separation of the Judiciary and the Executive, do you think that it is appropriate for the Government to offer a member of the Judiciary to push the Executive's case?

I don't believe that I'm pushing the Executive's case. I think it's entirely appropriate that the Head of the Family Division, the Divison of judges who try these cases particularly in relation to terminally ill people, whether they're children or adults, should be able to say that this is a Bill that we as a Judiciary support.

But for the Department for Constitutional Affairs to suggest you as a guest while MPs are debating--that's a different matter, isn't it?

Well, I don't think that's a matter of which I have any comment.

But you agreed to be interviewed under these circumstances.

I am perfectly happy to be--to agree to be interviewed in relation to my support for a Bill which recognises the existing Common Law situation, but is making a lot of very important elements of clarification. It will make life [sic] much easier for those, um, who are ill and those who looking after people who are ill.

But just ...

I very much commend the Bill.

But just finally on a point of fact. It was the Department of Constitutional Affairs that asked you if you would be interviewed?

Yes indeed. They did ask me. And I would have been happy to have been asked by the Press on this particular issue.

You said last month at the "Withholding Treatment" conference in London that the Parliamentary process was slow and often in the process of catching up. It's therefore become the role of the judges--you said--to develop the law and give a liberal interpretation of the statutes when circumstances demanded them.
Um--some people--with respect to older [?all the] judges--might think that, really, we should rely on Parliament for these things, no matter how slow and cumbersome the process might be.

Well, there are gaps. Something has to be done. And in this particular, er, situation there were serious gaps about how mentally incompetent patients could be looked after [sic]. And the House of Lords in a famous case [indistinct], and in the Tony Bland case, filled the gap that had not been filled by Parliament.

Um. Can I ask you finally--and you'd be perfectly entitled to tell me to mind my own business--a more personal question, and it's pertinent of course. Do you have--would you want--a living will?

Yes. I haven't made mine yet, but I have been thinking about it for quite a long time.

Thank you very much, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.

[Interview concluded 5.14 p.m., 14 December 2004.]

Posted by at 09:50 PM | Comments (1)

Practical policies and racist labelling

European legislation and judicial rulings that override English law increasingly disable policies that in their intention and application are designed only to address practical problems. If any present or proposed policy can be represented with any trace of plausibility by the now widely state-subsidised pressure groups of self-defined “races” or “ethnic communities” as one that implies that members of their “race” or “community” are disproportionately at fault, then the policy is denounced as “racist”.

In everyday discourse, anti-racist rhetoric increasingly stifles discussions of various possible policies by labelling as “racist” wide swathes of opinion that has to do with empirical matters of conduct or culture, and nothing to do with race.

Cases where advocacy of or opposition to a policy is racist are not, of course, the subject of this piece. The subject of this piece is those cases where no racism can be detected. For the anti-racist, the racism of such an opponent is then said to be “incipient”, “crypto-”, “unconscious”, “institutional”, or to be racism with some other label that equally requires no actual evidence to justify its use.

For example, racists oppose immigration. But is opposition to immigration necessarily racist? Some well-off people oppose immigration as a drain on their taxes by people who have not paid any. Some poorly-off people oppose it as drain on welfare resources their own families would otherwise themselves enjoy. Are such arguments just a cover for the real reason they oppose immigration, that they are racists?

The laws of the “settlement” and “removal” of individuals and families, which operated in England from 1662, show that opposition to immigration has been—and therefore today can be—completely divorced from either racial or ethnic considerations.

Up to quite recent times, the laws of settlement and removal controlled internal immigration from one parish into another in England. If a person became "a charge upon the parish", the parish authorities could deport that person and his or her family to the parish where they had “settlement”—roughly, to their home parish.

Until 1795 such a family from another parish could be deported if the parish authorities thought it might claim welfare benefits; after that, only if it did claim benefits.

A Royal Commission on the Poor Laws reported that in 1907 there were still 12,000 people a year affected by these internal migration laws. The Poor Law Act of 1930 had (much mitigated) clauses dealing with settlement and removal, and problems of settlement still arose during the Second World War.

The completely non-racist arguments of the Poor Relief Act of 1662, which remained the rationale of internal settlement and removal for nearly three hundred years in this country, was that there was a practical problem that had to be tackled by practical policy.

The English welfare laws, as they bore on the internal migration of individuals and their families, can be legitimately condemned on various grounds as having been to an extreme degree abhorrent. But it is completely impossible to find anything racist in them:

that whereas by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another, and therefore do endeavour to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock [note: of welfare provisions], the largest commons or wastes to build cottages, and the most woods for them to burn and destroy; and when they have consumed it, then to another parish, and at last become rogues and vagabonds, to the great discouragement of parishes to provide stock, where it is liable to be devoured by strangers;

be it therefore enacted … that it shall and may be lawful, upon complaint made by the … overseers of the poor of any parish to any justice of the peace … that any person or persons are likely to be chargeable to the parish … to remove and convey such a person or persons to such parish where he or they were last legally settled …

These comments have not been arguments for or against legal immigration, illegal immigration, economic migration or asylum. The sole issue they address is the anti-racist’s condemnation of any opposition to immigration, on any grounds, as overt or covert racism.

They are arguments about the entirely different domains of race on the one hand--genetics--and culture on the other--social beliefs and arrangements for attending to a society's business.

An element in anti-racist ideology is hostility to the teaching by the host country of its cultural history, that is to say, the account of the way it has handled, by its customs. laws, and inbuilt attitudes and beliefs, the problems that arise in the course of individual and national life.

National history, however, is not solely a celebration of racist chauvinism and an instrument of ethnic-minority humiliation. It is also a record that can be drawn on to show decisively that certain generalisations are palpably false, in this case, the standard generalisation of the anti-racist lobbies that whatever the opponents say or even believe, opposition to immigration always has racial or ethnic prejudices at its core.

Posted by at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2004

Blair and Blunkett

The Prime Minister continues to support the Home Secretary, on the basis that it is Mr Blunkett's private affair that he has been the lover in an adulterous relationship that (he claims) has resulted in children being conceived and born.

There are plenty of people who think that sex, procreation and child rearing should be treated in some sense as the private concerns of the consenting adults.

Some of these believe that "privacy" means privacy from State interference. They believe that the media and the opinion of neighbours and friends have a role in condemining, praising or condoning such conduct, but that the State has no business favouring any sexual or child-rearing arrangement over any other.

Others take a still stronger line. They believe that neither the State nor any non-State agency or person (Churches, neighbours, relatives, think-tanks) is entitled to have or express any view about the personal and social consequences of any consenting sexual behaviour between adults, either on empirical or moral grounds. It is not their business.

Mr Blair cannot believe any of those things.

Tony Blair is an adherent of the Church of England. He sometimes attends services of the Roman Catholic Church. According to the theology of both churches, life-long heterosexual monogamy is with one exception the set of arrangements ordained by God for dealing with the human problems of physical lust, loneliness and child neglect. The exception is life-long chastity--abstention from any physical expression of heterosexual or homosexual desire.

One might have expected the bishops to give the public the benefit of their knowledge and wisdom in this case. The Bishop of Rochester has done so. Has anyone else?

Mr Blair, however, can properly plead that it is for each religion to retain its adherents and to make converts. He can plead, that is, that it is not the business the State to justify policy on any religous grounds.

But that is vastly different from any "private" versus "public" argument.

Mr Blair calls himself from time to time an "ethical socialist". Ethical socialism is the term given to the powerful--the dominant-- tendency in the Labour Party up to, roughly, the death of R. H. Tawney in 1962. It was explictly the socialism of the respectable English working class of the last half of the nineteenth and the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. To the ethical socialists, the ideals and to a large extent the achievements of the respectable English working class family made it, they said, "the socialist commonwealth in action". Ethical socialism strongly supported the family of life-long monogamy, and believed that, in the interest of children, local communtities, and society as a whole, the State had a powerful and benign role to play in supporting it.

Mr Blunkett goes far beyond justifying that it is anyone's right to have a sterile sexual relationship with another man's wife, and of no public importance whatsoever. He is seeking to make it a general rule of society that where such a relationship results in the birth of a child, then the lover must be accorded by public law rights of control over the child, with the court-granted rights enforced by the public authorities, even where the wife, her husband and the lover's child remain together as a married family, and vehemently reject the lover's claim that he must take up his "responsibilities".

Mr Blair's government spends enormous amounts of public money on lone-parent and broken-family households: housing them, providing them with monetary benefits, caring for some of their children in local authority homes, and out of all proportion to their numbers coping with their children in the prisons. Nearly every department of government is implicated in a large way in coping with the consequences of sexual promiscuity, lone parenthood and step-parenthood outside of marriage. The impact of the Home Office in failing to support life-long monogamy and supporting its competitors is enormous.

Mr Blunkett has made it clear that his private conduct is in line with what he advocates as public policy.

But Mr Blair has not always endorsed Mr Blunkett's view that "the family" to be supported by the State is any household with children no matter what their parentage and no matter what the sexual orientation of the adults or the nature and permanence of their relationship may be.

Mr Blunkett can self-righteously repeat that there is no conflict between the public policies he advocates and the personal life he leads. That does not make his personal beliefs about sex and the upbringing of children his own private business. It brings his personal beliefs about sex and the upbringing of children all the more decisively into the public domain.

Mr Blair, from his background in Christian doctrine and socialist philosophy cannot justify his new stance, either empirically, politically or logically, that criticism of Mr Blunkett's conduct in the Quinn affair is an invasion of his privacy.

Is "moral illiteracy" too harsh a term, then, to describe Mr Blunkett's and now Mr Blair's hopeless efforts to silence public comment by appealing to the strong and meritorious injunction in English culture to "mind one's own business"? This is not only Mr Blunkett's business. It is everybody's business.

Posted by at 12:44 PM | Comments (1)

December 10, 2004

What the Butler Saw… and What Should Always Remain Private

In an interview contained in this week’s issue of the Spectator, former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, delivers a coruscating attack on the style of government of the present administration.

Of especial concern to Lord Butler has been the way Prime Minister Blair’s almost Presidential approach towards his job has steadily eroded the sovereignty of Parliament, and, in particular thereby, undermined the authority of the House of Commons.

In face of what Lord Butler has exposed as the present administration’s contempt for representative government, small wonder is it that many of today’s more serious national dailies make their top news story the government's decision to reject the advice of the Electoral Commission that it proceed no further with its plan to replace the secret ballot by postal voting.

The Electoral Commission has rejected postal ballots on the grounds that their trial introduction in some constituencies in recent local elections have shown them to be highly susceptible to vote-rigging, especially, through intimidation.

The government’s ostensible reason for replacing the ballot box by postal ballots has been its concerns about low voter turn out and belief that postal ballots would encourage more voter participation.

However, it is almost inconceivable that any government, and especially this one, would have sought to make the change unless it thought it stood to gain some electoral advantage from implementing it.

In any case, that the government seems bent on pressing on with introducing postal ballots, against the advice of the Electoral Commission, is further evidence of its contempt for representative government that is of such concern to Lord Butler.

No one anticipated more clearly the dangers of postal ballots or spoke out against them more eloquently than John Stuart Mill.

As we witness the present government about to strike yet a further nail into the coffin of parliamentary democracy, it is worth recalling Mill’s warning against using postal ballots in parliamentary or local elections delivered back in 1861. Mill wrote:

‘The proposal … of allowing the voting papers to be filled up at the voter’s residence, and sent by post, … I should regard as fatal. The act would be done in… the presence of all the pernicious influences. The briber might, in the shelter of privacy, behold with his own eyes his bargain fulfilled, and the intimidator could see the extorted obedience rendered irrevocably on the spot.’

Then, in a footnote, Mill took care of the present government’s concerns about the need to reverse current low voter turn-out. He writes:

’The expedient [of postal voting] has been recommended … on the score of … obtaining the votes of many electors who otherwise would not vote, and who are regarded by the advocates of the plan as a particularly desirable class of voters…. But when the matter in hand is the great business of national government, …[t]he voter who does not care enough about the election to go to the poll, is the very man who, if he can vote without the trouble, will give his vote to the first person who asks for it, or on the most trifling or frivolous inducement. A man who does not care whether he votes, is not likely to care much which way he votes; and he who is in that state of mind has no moral right to vote at all; since if he does, a vote which is not the expression of a conviction, counts for as much, and goes as far in determining the result, as one which represents the thoughts and purposes of a life.’

Thus, those members of the electorate who are genuinely apathetic should not be encouraged to vote, and those genuinely concerned to vote should be allowed to do so without fear of intimidation, which means in the privacy of the voting booth.

Perhaps, current voter apathy in Britain will start to be reversed when its laws cease to be imposed by diktat from Brussels as European Directives.

We can only hope and pray, therefore, that, when the British electorate is asked whether the government should sign up to the European Constitution, the referendum will be conducted by means of the ballot box and not through postal voting.

Posted by David Conway at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2004

When the Nanny State does Not Know Best

Abigail is mother of two year old, Adam, and also the best friend of her neighbour, Brenda, also the mother of a toddler, Boris.

Both mothers have temporarily suspended paid work to stay home to raise a family. Currently, neither receives any government financial help to do so.

Under government proposals announced today, both mothers will shortly become eligible for considerable tax breaks, should either decide to resume paid work and hire a qualified nanny to look after her child instead.

Fast-forward in time from today to six months after the scheme has been introduced.

During this period, each mother has taken it in turns to look after her friend’s child so as to enable her friend obtain the necessary qualifications to gain nanny status.

Let us visit their two homes. During the day, Abigail works in Brenda’s home looking after Boris, being paid to do so as a nanny out of the proceeds of the tax-break for which Brenda’s husband has become eligible by hiring her. Meanwhile, Brenda is at work in Abigail’s house, looking after Abigail’s son, Adam, being paid to do so from the proceeds of the tax-break Abigail’s household is claiming.

Both Abigail’s and Brenda’s families now enjoy greater disposable income than before the scheme was introduced. Yet each mother would prefer to look after her own child who, in turn, would prefer being cared for by mummy than nanny.

‘Wait a minute’, the two mothers simultaneously exclaim one day to each other when returning each other’s child whom they have spent the day looking after. ‘Why don’t we only pretend to look after each other’s child? That way our husbands could claim the tax-break, without either of us having to forfeit looking after our own child.’

The government, however,has anticipated this wheeze and created an Inspectorate to ensure the tax break only goes to families where parents do not look after their own children. The cost of the Inspectorate is paid for by a tax rise that has all but wiped out any financial benefit either family previously gained from claiming the tax break.

The result of the scheme has been to create a new tier of bureaucracy to ensure families gain no financial aid from the state unless children in them are separated from their parents during the day.

Coda: Abigail and Brenda finally decide it is not worth the emotional cost to look after each other’s child at the expense of being able to look after their own. So, they decide to revert to being full-time mothers again.

Yet, each family must now bear from its weekly wage its share of the cost of maintaining the Inspectorate. The final net result is that both families have less disposable income than before the scheme was introduced. Otherwise, all else is as before.

Today's papers report Children’s Minister, Margaret Hodge, as boasting: ‘Our strategy is putting children at the heart of the modern welfare state for the 21st century. The childcare approval scheme is an essential element of our offer to families.’

Many families might wish her offer had been one they could have refused. But, on this matter, as on so many others today, their wishes will be disregarded. For today's nanny state considers it knows better by far than ordinary folk do what is in their best interests.

Posted by David Conway at 10:53 AM | Comments (3)

December 08, 2004

Let's hear it for a good dose of imprisonment!

No one seems to have a good word to say for prison at the moment. The Prison Reform Trust has published a report today criticising the criminal justice system for sending so many parents to prison, which causes problems for their children. In her foreword to the report Cherie Blair says that ‘we should examine closely whether there is a better alternative, for the individuals concerned and their families, to imprisonment which too often worsens rather than tackles the problem’.

Of course, you would expect this sort of thing from the Prison Reform Trust, in the same way that you would always expect a barber to recommend a haircut. What is more surprising in that the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales will be publishing tomorrow a document on prison which is so larded with the language of the anti-prison intelligentsia (many of whom actually work in the criminal justice system) that I can’t help wondering if any of their lordships actually read the document, or if they just left it to their ever-growing bureaucracy to handle the matter on their behalf.

Here are some of the key phrases, which will be familiar to anyone who has the misfortune to have to read the sort of drivel that passes for criminological research in some fashionable quarters:

‘The new Sentencing Guidelines Council should be given the brief … of gearing the system so that fewer people are sent to prison. It might start by recommending that large numbers of very low risk offenders might be diverted from prosecution by conditional cautions, warnings and reprimands. It might consider how to reduce the needless use of custodial remand… Sentences should not automatically reflect … the gravity of an offence. Rather they should sometimes be a response to how probable it is that any punishment other than prison is likely to fail… Building more prisons is not the answer to overcrowding. We need to send fewer people to prison.’

This disedifying farrago of clerical clichés is rounded off with a most unusual threat:

‘Politicians, newspaper editors and TV drama executives who promulgate punitive views, in wilful disregard of the evidence, to gain political or commercial advantage – or who seek to reinforce prejudices rather than convey the overall truth – do a great disservice to the cause of justice. They should be held accountable for their actions.’

If only the bishops would use this uncompromising language in matters of faith and morals, on which they are competent to pronounce!

But what is this ‘disregard of evidence’ of which they speak? The evidence actually shows that prison is more effective at preventing re-offending than all of the alternative measures proposed. First of all, prisoners can’t commit more crimes while they are locked up, which is good news for the rest of us. Second, when they are released they are less likely to re-offend than those criminals who were given the softer options. However much money the government spends on these options, and however much our increasingly politicised civil servants spin the results, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal the fact that prison is very good value for money, in terms of protecting the law abiding citizens. Which, in case the bishops have forgotten, is the role of the criminal justice system.

The fact is, we live in one of the most crime-ridden countries in the developed world. Our prison population is far too low, in relation to the volume of crime. It is strikingly below the European average, and would need to increase by three of four times to bring us up to the level of other countries at similar levels of economic development. It is not the case that we are sending lots of low-level, petty criminals to prison for their first offence. To go to prison now, you have to have a list of offences as long as your arm, and to have run through the whole gamut of cautions, community sentences, tagging, fines, intensive surveillance etc etc. Do the bishops ever think, as they sit in their palaces, of the misery these hardened, repeat offenders inflict on their terrified local communities before the criminal justice system eventually, after criminal careers that may have lasted for years, sends them to prison for some very short sentence, only a fraction of which will be served?

Of course, it is regrettable that we should have to deprive large numbers of men and women of their liberty. It would be better if they hadn’t offended in the first place. It would be better if more people held the sort of moral convictions that prevent most of us from ever committing a crime, whether we think we would get caught or not. People need to be guided by an internal moral compass. The churches used to be good at helping with that; now they seem to regard it as too much hard work. Much easier just to attack the government, or ‘society’, or newspaper editors, or TV producers, for‘promulgating punitive views’. Hell and damnation should never, as the Catholic poet Alexander Pope said, be mentioned to ears polite.

Posted by at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2004

Understanding David Blunkett

Sociology until the nineteen sixties was greatly interested in "understanding" how people behaved socially. "Understanding", though he retained much of its ordinary meaning, was defined with painstaking exactness by Max Weber.

One of his basic ideas was the common-sense one, that people can't act on the basis of what all the facts of the situation are--they can't possibly know the truth of more than a tiny fraction of them--so they act on their beliefs about what the facts are (and can, of course, be quite mistaken).

The sociology established by Max Weber saw its business as examining the evidence about what people believed to be factually true. What do given people believe is factually true about human nature? Are human beings born good or bad? Does every human being on the planet come into the world as a blank sheet on which society can transcribe any personality and from which it can draw any ability it wants, or is every individual mainly programmed by his or her genetic makeup?

What do given people believe is factually true about how people interact with one another? Left to follow their own self-defined interest, will they, because that is the way things work, further the interests of other people, led "as if by an Invisible Hand"? Or, if people are left to follow their own self-interest, will it result, on the contrary, in the "war of every man against every man" with everybody's life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short"? On that view, rigorous laws, ruthlessly applied, are necessary to stop society's natural tendency to descend into civil war.

What do people think is true of the physical world? Was the earth and all its plants and animals created 6,600 years ago by God, and is what we see around us every day--"the signs of the times"--the clear factual indication that the Battle of Armageddon is imminent? Or is that all antiquated nonsense?

His second idea was an equally common sense one, that any two people can agree on what the facts are, but they can differ on what they should do about them. One person can think that the existence of a given (believed) "fact" requires him or her to behave in one way. The other person, believing in the same "fact" can think that it requires him or her to behave in quite a different way. They differ in their moral commitments.

Most people agree that the number of abortions is higher now than in the early 1960s. Some people think that abortions should be available under more restricted conditions than today, and that there should be fewer. Other people think that conditions should be relaxed--that their should be abortion on demand, and abortions should be allowed later into the pregnacy.

They agree, say, that there has been a given percentage increase in a specified period in the proportion of families without a father to bring up the child. They can share the belief that the facts show a given percentage increase in the number of crimes committed by young men. They share the belief that the facts show that there is a demonstrable connection between a child being brought up in specified type of lone-parent household (say, that of the never-married mother) and the likelihood of that child committing a crime.

But one set of people, believing all of that, can believe that the right thing to do in response is to do what can be done to strengthen life-long monogamous fidelity. Another set of people, believing the same thing about what the "facts" are, can think that the right thing to do is remove all trace of privilege from the relationship of life-long monogamous fidelity, nationalise child care, and make sexual partnerships a generalised free-for-all.

This kind of sociology, sometimes retaining its German label, verstehende Soziologie, to make sure that people are talking about Weber's precise concept, designed for sociology, helps to make sense of what otherwise seems the impenetrable puzzle of the David Blunkett affair. Unless one applies the techniques of verstehende Soziolgie, the most puzzling thing of all is Blunkett's obvious sincerity, his insouciance, in his statements that he has done nothing wrong.

On the BBC's 10 O'Clock News last night he was crystal clear. "I don't think anybody can say I have said one thing in public and done another in private."

Many people will be amazed at that claim, and think it cannot be true. The mistake such people make is that they think that there exists in fact an institution called "the family", that this institution of the family is defined by a sub-institution called "marriage", and that marriage is defined by a voluntary undertaking by the wife and husband to live a life of mutual sexual fidelity.

Many people are married in Christian churches in this country, and do so using the the form of words that it is a relationship "ordained by God". Whom God has put together must not be parted by any human being; and neither the husband nor the wife should commit adultery.

But even if we forget the Christian churches, at any civil ceremony the bride and the groom are told that "marriage according to law in this country is the union of one man and one woman entered into for life to the exclusion of all others", and it is on that basis that the state's authorisation rests.

So people who think that there is an institution of the family, and a sub-instituion of marriage, and further sub-institutions such as weddings, can feel that they are on pretty firm empirical ground, to such an extent that it will not occur to many of them that anybody can have a different belief about what the "facts" are.

But this idea, that there exists in this country a privileged cultural institution of life-long monogamy is hardly David Blunkett's idea of the family at all. In the policy paper he produced in July 2004 he mentions the family many times. But he is never talking about the institution of the family in the sense of the above paragraphs. Marriage is hardly mentioned. A family for Mr Blunkett, is any household with children. What the relationship of the adults is to one another, and what their biological relationship is to the children, makes no difference. If there are children and adults living together, that is a family.

Here, again, David Blunkett's genuine self-righteousness can, be, in the sociological meaning of the word, "understood". On the BBC's 10-O'Clock News he made what appears at first sight the incredible claim that in the Quinn affair he has acted--of all words--"responsibly". "Everything I stand for is about personal responsibility. It's about respect. It's about building a cohesive society where you take the consequences of your actions."

To someone who believes that the dismemberment of the family calls for a reinstatement of family values and structures, he would have acted responsibly by refraining from entering into a sexual relationship with another man's wife. A fortiori he would have behaved responsibly if he had refrained from having a child by her. Having fathered a child by another man's wife who returned to her husband, he would have behaved responsibly if he had recognised that it was not for him to disrupt the family any more, made a substantial financial settlement for the upkeep of the child and, to put is crudely, butted out.

But David Blunkett's conduct is "understood" once we see that he has no sense that "the family" is or ought to be a sphere of life-long sexual fidelity. He conceives of his "responsibility" beginning much farther down the line--at a point, it has to be said, quite arbitrarily chosen on his personal whim.

He is surrounded by colleagues and bureaucracts in the higher echelons of government and the media most of whom (not all) think the way that he does. Home Office action conspicuously excludes promoting marriage, as does so-called "family supporting" actions of other government departments. In July 2004 a campaign was launched by the Department of Constitutional Affairs to promote "living togther agreements". The director of the campaign went out of his way with his disclaimer, that "we are not encouraging people to get married". David Blunkett's version of the "facts" of what "the family" is, therefore, is infrequently challenged. Astonishingly, it is hardly ever challenged by senior figures in the Christian churches. When it is challenged, the challenges are dismissed as the benighted complaints of superannuated Puritan cranks.

He is therefore quite genuine, and quite clear in his own conscience, that he has not said one thing in public and done another thing in private. He has not said, at any rate in his recent public policy documents, that he is in favour of either religious or civil marriage in this country.

His view of the "facts" of the family, and his "response" to the facts, have led him into a very curious model of child-rearing. He is free to father a child by another man's wife, and he must show his "respect" and exercise his "responsibility", by proving his paternity and gaining the legal right, granted by the courts, and enforced by the state, of contact and control of the child's education, health and other matters.

What has been said about David Blunkett's lack of attention to the rights and expectations secured by matrimony has to be qualified in one respect. It appears that he has enough respect for marriage to desire to marry Mrs Quinn. Ordinary serial monogamy already throws up myriad problems for the partners, the children and the general public. Serial monogamy on Mr Blunkett's model, where power resides with the married woman's lover to intrude still futher into somebody else's family , multiplies them. Mr B has a child by Mr A's wife. Mr B then uses the courts to obtain "parental responsibility" for the child in Mr and Mrs A's family. The child remains with Mr A, and Mr B marries Mrs A. As Mrs B, she takes another adulterous lover, Mr C, and has a child by him. On Mr Blunkett's model, Mr C can now interfere in Mr B's family life, while Mr B is still interfering in Mr A's family life. Mrs B marries Mr C, and has a child in an adulterous affair with Mr D ...

What a marvellous future of "a cohesive society where you take the consequences of your actions" and what an achievement to crown the first 34 years that Mr Blunkett has spent, as he put it on the 10 O'clock News, "endeavouring to change the world for the better". And (God help us all!) "with the Prime Minister's support" he will carry on doing so.

Posted by at 08:25 PM | Comments (1)

Hands in the cookie jar

Not content merely to tell us what food to eat, how to raise our kids, how much to drink, why we cannot smoke, and why we should not worry about having our identity under control of the state, the Labour government is now rolling up its sleeves in an effort to grab all that money just lying around:

The government is set to raid £15 billion lying 'dormant' in Britain's bank accounts to raise enterprise and skills in some of Britain's hardest-pressed areas.

Assets are regarded as dormant when they are unclaimed in bank accounts unused for at least a year.

Using the billions of pounds languishing unclaimed in financial institutions is to be a key part of Labour's plans to transform run-down inner cities.

Naturally, the financial institutions being bullied into going along with this proposal aren’t happy, as this money is used to fluff up their profit figures. However, since the banks’ profits have been doing so well recently, they realise they won’t have much popular support. The Tories and Lib Dems all think this is a fabulous idea, and their only quibble is how the money should be spent.

It has been long well-documented that there really is no effective opposition in Britain anymore, and as long as this is the case Labour will be allowed to erode the simple foundations of a free liberal society, in this case the idea of private property. For while it is entirely possible that good things will be accomplished with this money, we should remember that unclaimed or not, that money is not the state’s. While the government seems intent on going after the truly unaccountable cash that has been sitting around for years, it could set a dangerous precedent about how we have to explain our financial situation to them in the future. ‘Why yes, Mr Brown, I realize my savings account has been quiet for a while, but I was—yes, yes, you’re right. It’s just I thought—well, sure, good point there, sir. Silly me. I would probably just spend that money on fatty foods or a meaningless bourgeoisie holiday abroad. Please, take it with my blessing as my contribution to the Greater Good.’ Perhaps if Gordon Brown and Labour hadn’t single-handedly decimated this nation’s pension funds, people wouldn’t feel the need to salt away a few bucks for a rainy day in the first place.

(Hat tip to Nanny Knows Best)

Posted by at 10:10 AM | Comments (1)

December 06, 2004

Personal family conduct and public family policy

'Creating stronger families' was an explicit objective of the Home Secretary's recent Five-Year Plan. 'Families' were allegedly placed 'at the heart' of his policy to combat crime. (Confident Communities, Cm 6287, July 2004.) In the document, however, the word 'family' appears only when it means any household arrangement whatsoever. 'A family', to the Home Secretary throughout Confident Communities, is a household composed of any single adult, or any 'partners' of any sexual orientation, in any relationship, together with children, whatever their parentage. In the whole of the document 'marriage' is mentioned once, and then in order to denigrate it. At the time, I was baffled that in formulating public policy a Home Secretary could dismantle and transform the concept of the married family in this way. I'm not baffled now.

Posted by at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)

Window on the BBC's World

I rarely listen to Radio 5, but I happened to turn it on just before midnight last Saturday (4 December) to see if I could catch the score for the Sunderland v West Ham game. The announcer was just letting people know what the next discussion would be. His exact words were: "Does anybody in this day and age actually think prostitution is wrong?" I can spot a joke as well as the next man, and he was not joking.

Only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that the question could be anything but "Does anybody in this day and age think that prostitution is right?" For of course wives and mothers thought it was wrong for their husbands and sons to go cottaging, kerb crawling or frequenting brothels. Fathers and mothers would have been horrified at the thought of their daughters or sons being prostitutes. In that recent innocent age, children would have hardly been able to grasp that their fathers might be using prostitutes or their mothers paying for the services of a gigolo.

So have we really sunk so low that the BBC is correct in its casual assumption that hardly anybody in this country today believes that prostitution is wrong? Has William Blake's prophecy come so close to fulfilment in 2004, "The harlot's cry from street to street/Shall be Old England's winding sheet"?

Or was it just that BBC moderators and commentators, circulating within their narrow media coteries, have come to believe in TV's own world of ridiculously unrealistic "realism", according to which England is populated almost exclusively by foul-mouthed and promiscuous male and female louts?

TV seems to have a mission to make bad behaviour seem not only normal, but morally neutral. Ordinary people end by feeling that all their equally decent friends, neighbours and relatives must be exceptional relics stranded in some time warp, and that they themselves must be social and psychological freaks.

The tragedy is, life imitates art. What begin as a fiction ends as fact, especially when there are vast funds from licence money, virtually a poll tax, to freely play with every year, and the medium is as powerful as modern television.

Posted by at 02:27 PM | Comments (3)

Blunkett and the Milkman Clause

The most important effect of the Blunkett affair could well be the hitherto most neglected, namely, the astonishing twist he has given to the old legal question, Who is a child's father?

From at least as far back as the twelfth century the legal rule has been that if a mother of the child is a married woman then, unless proven to the contrary, her husband is father of the child. ("Pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant.")

The main intention was, of course, to protect the institution of marriage from the destructive intrusion into the life of a family of the lover of an adulterous wife.

The subsidiary intention was to allow the husband if that was he wanted, to refuse to accept the life-time burden of bringing up another man's child. The husband's get-out of proving the child is not his is bluntly called in some American states "the milkman clause". The husband's only purpose in seeking proof that the child was not his own was, and could only be, his wish that the marriage be dissolved because of his wife's infidelity. In common law the rebuttal of the presumption of the husband's paternity required evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the husband was not the father. The Family Law Reform Act 1969 reduced the burden of proof to the balance of probabilities, and Lord Reid ruled in one case that even weak evidence must prevail--all obviously in the interest of the the husband who was otherwise being tricked into raising someone else's child. The idea that any of this was in the interests of the milkman, the wife's lover, probably never occurred to anyone for hundreds of years. Yet this is exactly the way in which Mr Blunkett is seeking to use this body of law. The very recent innovation of DNA testing for the first time removes all doubt about biological fatherhood.

For this fact to be used to enable the offending male to intrude permanently into the family life of a husband and his reconciled wife turns topsy-turvy the unambiguous intention of the law and public opinion of centuries, and if accepted would deal another grievous blow to the precious and battered institution of life-long monogamy. For the Home Secretary of all the people in the land to take the initiative in playing the litigious milkman is simply grotesque.

Posted by at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

David Blunkett and the Family

David Blunkett is daily exhibiting a startling obtuseness about a distinction that lies at the heart of government--that between the public and the private. It is this, more than anything else, that has exposed his incapacity as a senior politician at the heart of national affairs, whatever his past achievements or present merits. Religion and secular morality define and attempt to control all public affairs. Politics define that small area of public affairs that are appropriately controlled by the coercive powers of State. Day-to-day politics are mainly arguments about where the line should lie in the light of current circumstances and knowledge.

Forty years ago, circumstances and knowledge seemed to indicate that sex could safely be privatised. They could be removed from public censure and praise, and notably from the rewards and punishments administered by the government. The condom and the pill between them seemed to have separated sex from both procreation and disease.

The surge in lone-parent families, with the expense of housing and maintaining mothers and their children being thrown onto the State meant not a reduction, but a vast expansion, in the involvement of the public in what has been primarily a matter for the spouses. The most public of institutions, the prisons, have being filling with the casualties of families without fatherhood. The surge in sexually-transmitted diseases has also made its own enlarged claims on public intervention in the interests of the sufferers' health.

Instead of simple assumptions about paternity that minimised the need for the law to intervene, public disputes about the rights and duties of the all sorts of divorced fathers, cohabiting fathers and one-night-stand fathers have had to be dealt with by more and more lawyers in an ever-larger public court system.

But to these disputes Blunkett has added an almost entirely novel one: the right of an adulterous woman's lover who can prove paternity in the courts, to use the courts and the apparatus of the State to control from the outside the child's family the upbringing of the child he had no right by religion, custom or the promises made in a civil marriage, to bring into the world.

What makes the Blunkett case far more important and far more public than any previous sexual scandal involving senior public figures, who simply knew and eventually acknowledged that they had misbehaved, is that he is seeking to establish through the courts, as a principle of national life, that the lover of another man's wife, if he demands it, must be publicly granted and publicly guaranteed a permanent right to a place in that man's family. Blunkett is publicly proclaiming that it his wish to make this social monstrosity the public norm.

And on what basis does he pursue this course? On the basis that it is nobody's business but his own, and the public should do the decent thing to a wronged and misunderstood man, and respect his privacy.

Posted by at 12:45 PM | Comments (1)

December 03, 2004

Why Life in Brown’s Britain is Destined to Become Still Harder

Despite all the manifold problems of rising levels of violent crime to have beset Britain since 1997, life has not been too bad for the vast majority of its citizens. In many ways, the period of sustained growth and rising living standards most of them have enjoyed was the legacy of sound public finance that the Labour Government inherited from the previous administration, plus its inspired early decision to place monetary policy beyond the remit of the Treasury.

Moreover, despite having vastly increased public expenditure and taxes to pay for it, Chancellor Brown so far has been comparatively prudent, managing to observe his self-denying ordinance, which he terms his ‘Golden Rule’, not to increase public borrowing over the course of the economic cycle save for purposes of capital expenditure.

Yesterday, Chancellor Brown delivered his Pre-Budget Report which most political commentators interpret as being his attempt to set out his stall as future leader to fellow party members. In announcing in it what he did, Chancellor Brown seemed to throw all previous monetary and fiscal caution to the wind.

For it sets out a highly ambitious and costly programme of public spending for the next decade the feasibility of which without increased public borrowing or taxes seems predicated on wildly optimistic assumptions about future rates of economic growth and hence future tax yields and employment levels.

Even if, as seems unlikely, Chancellor Brown’s economic assumptions turn out not unduly optimistic, and he therefore manages to implement his programme without needing to increase tax- or interest-rates, his plans seem unlikely to improve the quality of life for the vast majority of British citizens. This is because their supreme concern seems to be to increase the numbers of those in paid work.

In itself, such an objective need not be a bad thing, save in the case of one category of potential employee whom Chancellor Brown seems above all intent on seeing go out to work. This is mothers of young children.

To this end, he has undertaken to finance from the public purse a massively expanded programme of publicly provided child-care facilities. These include nurseries and greatly extended opening hours of schools at which children can be deposited.

If current levels of public sector provision are anything to go by, the standard of child-care these facilities are likely to provide will not be sufficiently high to prevent what studies have shown to be their all-too-frequent profoundly damaging psychological effects on the children who attend them. These are increased levels of aggression and anti-social behaviour.

The country thus seems likely to have to endure in future even greater levels of criminality and unruliness among young people than it has of late, and still more disruptiveness in schools.

Chancellor Brown could have chosen another way to create the ‘family-friendly welfare state’ he proudly boasted he was creating. He could have introduced transferable tax allowances for married couples, and other forms of inducement, to enable and even encourage those of them who wanted to look after their young children at home themselves.

Too many vested interests among Labour Party supporters, and doubtless not a little feminist ideology, stood in the Chancellor's way. As a a result, we shall all be made to suffer. Pity.

Posted by David Conway at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2004

How Much Faith Should We Have in Faith Schools?

Today’s papers contain the results of tests in English and mathematics carried out last summer on 11 years olds in England's primary schools.

They establish beyond doubt that, on the whole, faith schools achieve much better results than so-called ‘community’ schools which have no denominational affiliation and at which religious education and collective acts of worship have all but disappeared in recent years, despite still being legally mandatory.

Whereas faith schools make up only a third of England's primary schools, they account for as much as two-thirds of those whose pupils achieved the maximum possible test scores. Moreover, faith schools accounted for almost half of the 200 primary schools at which greatest progress had been made by pupils in these subjects since they were tested in them at the start of their schooling there.

To what are due the superior results faith schools, on the whole, seem able to achieve?

Their supporters tend to attribute the superior performance of faith schools to the educationally beneficial effects of their having a religious ethos. Their opponents tend to attribute their better performance to faith schools tending to attract larger proportions of middle-class pupils than attend community schools.

The statistics now available would seem to permit sufficiently detailed comparison between faith and community schools to enable an informed decision to be made between these two rival hypotheses concerning what accounts for their differential performances.

Should, as seems not at all unlikely, attending a school with a religious ethos be found to have a positively beneficial educative effect on pupils, quite independently of their social class, this fact would seem to have important policy implications for the future direction primary schooling should take in this country.

Those eager to know the results of such a comparison are advised not to wait until the government or the educational establishment has carried it out. Neither seems at all likely to be keen to discover or reveal that the religiously anodyne, if not wholly secular, multi-cultural approach towards primary schooling currently favoured by the authorities is educationally regressive.

Posted by David Conway at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2004

The twilight world of tax-funded 'voluntary' action

Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of finance, once gathered together a group of merchants from Paris and asked what they would like the government to do for them. One of them replied: Laissez nous faire – leave us alone. This is the origin of the phrase laissez faire.

Charitable bodies would do well to remember the words of this wise merchant as politicians of all parties try to conscript their services. At a meeting held to celebrate the centenary of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel last night, Michael Howard outlined Tory plans for a voluntary sector in which charity schools and hospitals would be able to compete for government funding to offer more choice to parents and patients. Alan Milburn, on the same day, was predicting that the voluntary sector would one day play as large a role as the state and the private sector in providing public services. He wants to encourage local authorities, primary care trusts and other bodies to award long-term contracts to charities, backed by substantial funding.

Of course, this is not really a new idea. We are already there. Many so-called ‘charities’ are no more than vehicles for carrying out the government’s statutory responsibilities on the cheap. Take away the government funding and they cease to exist. This actually happened to an organisation which used to be in the office next to ours in Waterloo. Of course, anyone can do anything cheaper than the government, but since when has cheapness been the defining characteristic of voluntarism?

Voluntary action is an essential component of a free society. Charitable bodies are schools of citizenship. They benefit not only the recipients of the services, but the providers. They make us better people and better citizens, capable of acting responsibly and altruistically, meeting other people’s needs in a way that builds them up, rather than degrading them to welfare-dependent status, in the manner of state-run welfare programmes.

It is simply not possible for voluntary bodies to carry out this role when they are acting under directions from Whitehall. Instead of following their own vision, they have to help the government of the day to achieve its targets, with a view to getting them re-elected. They cease to be part of civil society, and inhabit a ghastly twilight world in which politics poisons everything.

It is said that when you dine with the devil you should take a long spoon. When it comes to negotiating contracts with Whitehall, voluntary bodies would be well advised not to go to the table at all.

Posted by at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)