Civitas

Here is what Ms Toynbee wrote back in January 2000 in a piece in the Guardian:

‘Everyone delves into the past for convenient emblems that suit their political predilections. National identity is constructed from a confection of selective memories according to political taste…. But does a modern pluralist society need to turn somersaults in an attempt to devise a common national identity at all? …

‘The left is not generally at ease with nationalism. The idea of Englishness makes the good [latter-day welfare-state, not classical-- DC] liberal’s flesh creep…. National pride is unsavoury stuff.

‘[W]e do not want or need definition. All attempts at national definition are bogus, sentimental, ahistorical, dangerously exclusive of some parts of the population, narrowly self-limiting, arrogant, and potentially aggressive.

‘We should stay sceptical about the romance of nationality…. “Our island story” all depends on who the confused “our” is. …To what extent can we be more proud of Shakespeare than a German might be?

‘People everywhere love their own country, just as they love family, home, garden or local landscape… But these strong natural sentiments turn into absurd and potentially dangerous nationalism when elevated into a general theory of the superiority of your own kind, your own people, your own language simply because it is yours.

‘[W]e should … quietly demonstrate an English disdain for nationalism as a meaningful creed. As for our own self-image, the less national navel-gazing the better. Wave no flags, make no claims, try to do the right thing more often than we have in the past.’

Here we have in a nutshell the self-deprecating and relativistic anti-national cosmopolitanism that lies behind present opposition to the republication of Ms Marshall's book and that can no more free itself from the need to draw on a narrative -- in this case a hopelessly bogus one -- to ground its self-hatred and hatred of country that Ms Toynbee wants British schoolchildren not to be inoculated against by being taught the kind of history Henrietta Marshall’s book provides. More than anything, Ms Toynbee dislikes the idea of giving young readers cause for being proud of who they were in being British.

Of the two rival accounts of this country’s history, I prefer Mrs Marshall’s version of events to Ms Toynbee’s any day and rejoice at the prospect that soon every British schoolchild may once again be able to learn of them by reading her book. For what they will come away with having done so is, as Ms Marshall puts it towards the very end of her book, the idea that:

‘From the very beginning of our story you have seen how Britons have fought for freedom, and how step by step they have won it, until at last Britons live under just laws and have themselves the power to make these laws.’ (p.510)

As for Ms. Toynbee’s version of British history, while not wanting to deprive schoolchildren from knowing that it and others exist, when there is fair fight between them all in the arena of ideas, rather than, as at present, the suppression of Mrs Marshall’s version, I have every confidence that they will respond to learning of Ms Toynbee’s version by singing the chorus to a well-known traditional English nursery rhyme that makes allusion to a well-known traditional English afternoon ritual -- provided, that is, they have not also been deprived of opportunity to learn these songs, as well as participate in the ritual of afternoon tea!

Posted by David Conway at 12:47 PM | Comments (10)

June 22, 2005

In defence of history: the Our Island Story appeal

Good news about Civitas’ project to republish H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story. The Daily Telegraph’s fabulous campaign has been overwhelmingly successful. Within a week, as John Clare points out in today’s ‘Any questions?’, £13,345 has been raised, and the money keeps coming in. One of the lovely things about this article is the sheer enthusiasm of the readers and donors, and the newspaper’s leader, ‘Our story is worth telling’, adds further welcome endorsement.

What the Telegraph appeal shows (as did George Courtauld’s unexpected bestseller, the Pocket Book of Patriotism) is the simple fact that there are many people with a passion for a more unified civic identity in Britain and a desire to place history at the centre of that drive. Numerous research documents have recently recognised the value of history for citizenship, but few are clear about how to deliver the most important (albeit unfashionable) elements in teaching history – the chronology, which makes it intelligible, and the stories, which make it memorable.

Our Island Story is the best example we have been able to find, and that is why we are putting into the arena. It might be old, arid academics might think it is out of date, but they are the ones who are out of date, for children love it, and many parents cherish the excuse to read it to their children, as the Daily Telegraph’s readers’ comments make clear. This is not about hegemony - we are not suggesting it becomes the only resource, we merely wish to offer it as an alternative to the materials currently in schools.

In addition to the Daily Telegraph coverage, Civitas’ Our Island Story appeal was featured on this morning’s Today programme. Among other things there was a revealing report which provided the juxtaposition between a handful of Bangladeshi children who were expressing their profound interest in H.E. Marshall’s story of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, and, staggeringly, their headmistress, not having read it, saying, irrelevantly, that she could not possibly endorse a book that ‘detracted from their self-esteem.’ What?!

In interview, Civitas’ Deputy Director Robert Whelan fielded the questions with his usual panache, and managed to draw from Sean Lang of the Historical Association the concession that it is a ‘very important book’. Mr Lang’s opposition to the book was that ‘it’s of its time, but its time is not now’, which led to him agreeing on the need for a return to narrative history but not wanting to commit to anything other than the need for children to grapple with a plurality of narratives and construct their own narratives – undisputable for older children, but precisely what confuses children of seven or eight years old.

In other fields people are realising that unstructured child-centred learning is failing, but in the subject of history, too many young children still suffer at the hands of people who cling to the mantras of relevance and no-such-thing-as-one-truth. As Robert said this morning, we need to bring back into primary school classrooms a sense of events following other events, and of characters and stories, because ‘you simply cannot understand your country and its institutions if you just do a series of modules about women in ancient Egypt or the condition of the medieval serf.’

Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:29 PM | Comments (3)

June 21, 2005

When is free trade not free?

Christian Aid has been trying to add to our sense of guilt over the problems of Africa by publishing a report claiming that imposing free trade on African countries has cost them almost £150 billion over the last 20 years.

This sounds dreadful, as if we are deliberately trying to make a bad situation worse for some ideological objective – pure economics. But what Christian Aid turns out to mean by free trade is the dumping on African countries of EU food surpluses, which can be bought for less than African farmers can produce their crops, so the local economy is undermined.

No one would dispute that this is a foolish and pernicious process, but what does it have to do with free trade? The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, which is responsible for these gross surpluses, is about as far from the principles of free trade as anything could be. Billions of pounds are spent paying inefficient European farmers (especially the French ones) to produce expensive crops that nobody wants. To avoid actually having to destroy this food, it is given, or ‘sold’, to Africa. Without the CAP, which consumes 40% of the entire EU budget, there would be less undermining of African farmers.

Another, quite legitimate, complaint that Christian Aid and other organisations make is that Western countries erect trade barriers against developing countries to protect their own domestic industries. This is particularly true of textiles. If there is one thing that brings together the free-market economists and the fairtrade/ make poverty history lobby, it is this grossly unjust practice. On the one hand we are writing off their loans and handing them foreign aid, and on the other we are refusing to let them sell their goods and services into our markets, which would enable them to support themselves with dignity. There is no moral justification for such a policy.

But Christian Aid can’t leave it there. They don’t want free trade, but fair trade. They want African countries to be able to erect trade barriers against our imports to protect their own industries, whilst having free access to Western markets. Did I miss something, or is there an inconsistency here? You can’t have it both ways. If there is one thing the history of tariffs tells us, it is that as soon as one country erects them, everyone else follows suit. That is why the work of the World Trade Organisation in trying to dismantle them through the GATT negotiations is so important.

This is one of those areas where there really are no heroes and villains. Western countries are just as bad as African countries when it comes to demanding access for their own goods in other people’s markets, whilst denying reciprocal favours to others. The only logical answer, which also makes sound economic sense, is to have a genuine free for all. And may the best producers win.

Posted by Robert Whelan at 06:01 PM | Comments (8)

June 17, 2005

This PC Malarkey is Increasingly Proving to be No Joke

According to a report in today’s Daily Mail, Newcastle City Council is considering requiring comedians who wish to perform at its town hall to sign a pledge they will not make any jokes about homosexuals, lesbians or ethnic minorities.

Councillors who are calling for the requirement claim it necessary to ensure comedians performing on their turf do not violate the council’s ‘social inclusion policy’.

In elaborating on their reasons for calling for this requirement, the deputy leader of Newcastle's ruling Lib Dems is reported to have said:

‘This is not about free speech. It is about whether the council should hire out its premises to those who are deliberately offensive to minorities.’

In a form of circumlocution for having come up with, doubtless, our Deputy Prime Minister would have been willing to give up one of his two jags, this same council leader is reported to have added:

‘The equality board is recommending to the executive that anyone who wishes to hire the City Hall should sign as part of their contract confirmation that the proposed use would not be offensive and break our social inclusion policy. If people do not wish to sign they could use other premises.’

If this is not a sign that, when the forthcoming bill is passed make incitement to religious hatred an offence, one can be sure to see a massive curtailment in the freedom of comedians to make jokes about religions, contrary to what government ministers have claimed, then nothing is.

More importantly, however, what the councillor has said betrays something far more sinister than simply a po-faced humourlessness for which leftist politicos are rightly noted.

What right have local councillors to consider the municipal premises over which they exercise control their own private property?

Surely, they administer these premises on behalf of the communities they represent. If these premises are open to hire by the public and someone wishes to hire them for a lawful purpose for which the premises are not inherently unsuited, by what right can a council withhold their hire on the grounds it does not approve of the purpose for which they wanted for hire?

Who is not being inclusive: comedians who refuse to sign the pledge because they want to be able to make jokes about gays or whatever, or these councillors?

May a conservative-minded local authority likewise withhold the hire of its town hall from comedians who refuse to sign a pledge that they will refrain from making jokes about vicarage tea parties or Women’s Institute flower-arrangement classes?

Surely, it is significant that, by far, the most successful tv comedy show in years, ‘Little Britain’, is a show that consistently sends up just about everyone in society - above all, perhaps, gays, which at least one of its two main stars openly admits to being in real life.

By the councillor's reasoning, the BBC would have to take ‘Little Britain’ off the air, not to mention the endlessly repeated episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil Fawlty dares to mention the war!

For those who have read this far, but seek something a trifle more edifying than this rant, I close with a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a work that gives such eloquent and prescient warning of the dangers of the cultural tyranny liable to attend the kind of democratic despotism Britain has increasingly become of late:

‘I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed in the world….

‘The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and all alike incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

‘Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

‘Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed them to endure and often to look on then as benefits.’

Have a nice day -- if you still can!

Posted by David Conway at 10:25 AM | Comments (10)

June 16, 2005

The Rotten State We’re In

Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph devoted its lead front page story, plus its main editorial, to the subject of the National Lottery Bill. When enacted, the Government will have a much bigger say in determining how money raised from the Lottery will be allocated.

When first created in 1992, the primary purpose of the Lottery was to raise monies for worthy causes not otherwise funded by state revenues, such as sport, heritage, and the arts.

Upon being elected in 1997, New Labour changed the remit of where Lottery funds could go so as to include health, education, and the environment, into which areas they have increasingly since flowed.

As was predicted at the time, the effect of New Labour’s decision has been a substantial reduction in Lottery money going into the areas it was created to help. As the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday:

‘In 1996-97, … the lottery gave £291 million to good causes. Last year it was down to £216 million. The amount spent on health, education and the environment has grown from £231 million in its first year, to a peak of £433 million last year. Since 1997, £360 million of lottery money has been spent on heart disease, cancer and stroke care, while £300 million has gone on “healthy living centres”’

Both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, which today runs a two-page feature on New Labour’s plans for the Lottery Fund, are both highly critical of New Labour for diverting it from the areas the Lottery was created to help into plugging gaps in public services supposedly financed by taxes and national insurance.

But should the state have ever got involved at all in charitable funding in the first place?

As is well-known, the prime Lottery punters are the lower social classes, not noted for their patronage of the arts and national heritage, or even sports.

As the Mail notes in its report, ‘since the Lottery started, the percentage of Britons taking part in sport has not increased at all.’

Instead, it seems Britons prefer to remain inveterate couch potatoes, topping the European league table for nightly hours spent glued to the box and devoting precious few to reading.

As ever, the prime beneficiaries of state largesse would appear to be the middle classes. For example, £78 million of Lottery money went towards the costs of rebuilding and refurbishing the Royal Opera House, a venue not exactly noted for drawing to it to the social classes who patronise the Lottery.

Far more disturbing than reports of the National Lottery failure to fulfil its original purpose has been the apparent manifest failure of income tax to fulfil the purpose for which it was introduced.

This, as all good students of English history know, i.e. anyone born before c. 1960, was to finance the military.

William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax early on in the nineteenth century, as a purely temporary expediency to help fund the British war effort against Napoleon, and spare the lower orders a disproportionate share of the costs as had formerly fallen upon them when revenues for this purpose had come primarily from indirect taxation.

Evidence of the failure of income tax to fulfil this vital function comes in the form of an announcement by the National Audit Office, that was also reported in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, that there are now ‘serious shortcomings’ in the readiness of our forces for operations.

Since coming to power, New Labour has deployed the armed forces in several substantial engagements, while simultaneously cutting military budgets.

Should not those who wish to gamble be left to take part in On-line poker, leaving those who like a night at the opera to pay their own way, without subsidy from benighted working-class gamblers?

This way the state could be left free to concentrate on its core business of defending the realm and preserving internal order.

As for the zealots in New Labour, always eager to get their hands on the public’s money so as to expend it ways they think they know best how to, they would do well to recall the words of warning delivered by their patron-saint, Lord Beveridge in 1948:

‘The making of a good society depends not on the State but on the citizens, acting individually or in the free association with one another, acting on motives of various kinds, some selfish others unselfish, some narrow and material others inspired by love of man or love of God. The happiness or unhappiness of the society in which we live depend upon ourselves as citizens, not in the instrument of political power which we call the State.’
[Lord Beveridge, Voluntary Action (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948), p.320.]

Posted by David Conway at 12:46 PM | Comments (4)

June 15, 2005

Our Island Story

CLICK HERE for further details of Our Island Story

In the Guardian on Saturday, Tristram Hunt decided to take up arms against Tim Collins, the obsolete shadow education secretary, by criticising the Conservative history education policy. Now Hunt is an excellent historian, and one with whom we at Civitas have had contact in the past, but the nature of his response to the Conservatives’ desire to combat the ‘yawning gaps’ in the curriculum by emphasising chronology and narrative is curious. For he launches into a rant about the defects of Whig history and cautions against – nay, pours opprobrium on Collins for allegedly advocating – the kind of error perpetrated by the Japanese ministry of education’s omission of Japanese wartime atrocities from its textbooks. But hold your horses sunshine. What makes you assume that any response to higgledy-piggledy and culturally relativistic teaching must necessarily be fascist thought control and the translation of history, the most complex of humanities, into a ‘simple-minded morality play’?

Let’s take stock of the contemporary situation. For a start, the government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has expressed its concerns about the current system’s inadequacies. In its most recent report, it bewails the ‘fragmentation of the learning experience’ – what David Starkey has dubbed the ‘mosaic’ approach – for its failure to inculcate in pupils a basic chronological framework. Not long after the QCA’s report was published, the Historical Association, having been commissioned by the government to audit the way the subject is taught, agreed that the subject is in a profoundly parlous state. Supplementing popular concerns of teachers, parents and academics, the QCA and the Historical Association both referred to the ‘widespread disquiet over what is seen as the gradual narrowing and “Hitlerization” of post-14 history.’ Even despite this, the number of school leavers able to say what Auschwitz was, or even provide precise dates for World War II is alarmingly low. What’s more, in a 2001 survey of 200 pupils, 30 per cent of 11- to 18-year olds thought that Oliver Cromwell fought at the Battle of Hastings; and, three years later, a poll of 1,300 pupils aged 10 to 14 found more than a quarter unable to say which war D-Day was associated with. I’d laugh if I didn’t want to cry.

Hunt’s right that it’s a mistake to ‘stop teaching history at too young an age (14 rather than 16)’ but he then goes on to mention that ‘the 1980’s trend for multiculturalism downplayed many elements of British history that are only now being reversed.’ That multiculturalism downplays Britishness under aegis of the dictatorship of diversity is beyond doubt, and that it turns the study of the past into an identity politics contest is similarly certain, but why does he seek to mitigate the damage that has been done by those policies? One need not be a nationalist to understand that a shared sense of identity in a state is crucial for civic cohesion and stability. Even the most cursory of searches on the home office website immediately reveals extensive work on civil society and ways to bolster it, and the ippr has also done a good deal of work on this, recognising that there is in our society a very low level of identification with our formal institutions and operations of government, and that this is reflected in our voting patterns.

It would be absurd to argue that history teaching is the only contributing factor, but cultural lingua francas, irrespective of celebrated differences, can help to forge loose but nevertheless discernible bonds. Multiculturalism, as Trevor Phillips has admitted, has eroded cohesion and as David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect, has observed, undermined the ‘glue of values.’ It is still very much a live force, and by treating it as a mere passing fad of the 1980’s, Hunt shows that he is out of touch.

A word about relevance, since this is often an argument used for politically correct histories, along the lines that history must be contiguous with my life for me to want to study it. I see no reason why as a seven-year-old kid a bunch of sex crazed Scandinavians with horns on their heads were any more relevant to me than to a seven year old Aborigine, and the same applies for the ancient Egyptians, the Han Dynasty, or even plump old Queen Victoria. But that misses the point, for history becomes relevant as we learn about it and interiorise its various vicarious experiences. I came to find longitudinal themes like the fight for freedom (from the Peasant’s Revolt, through Cavaliers and Roundheads, to the Glorious Revolution, the American War of Independence, political reform and the Suffragettes) interesting and engaging, and to see that by the accidents of my birth what had happened remains relevant to the land in which I was born and grew up. Good narrative history excites us and enlarges our perception.

Like Hunt, I don’t want us to ‘lose sight of the virtues of our critical, pluralist approach’, which he says is admired throughout Europe. Nor need he worry about narrative history with a sense of chronology being uncritical. The study of empire does not have to be unthinkingly patriotic – of course it can take in the Mau Mau and the Chinese Opium Wars, as well as the Indian Civil Service – but at least let’s teach it! What must be remembered, as we debate such issues, is that we’re talking about teaching a range of ages, and that younger children need different treatment to older students. When you’re young, what matters most is passionate, energised history. This needn’t be skewed or fantastical, but the truth is that children respond well to stories, to narratives that bring people and events alive in their imaginations. Even Marxist historians recognise that narrative history is the most effective foundation for communicating a particular configuration of the past at a later stage, since knowledge precedes understanding, as facts do argument. When children are older, what’s been learned can be modified, contended and even refuted.

This, finally, is partly why we’re so interested in Our Island Story by Henrietta Marshall, a history of Britain to which Antonia Fraser and the Guardian’s David McKee have both expressed their ‘lifelong gratitude’. In today’s Daily Telegraph, John Clare plugs our campaign to raise money so that we can do a reprint of this children’s classic. We are grateful to him for this, because we believe that one useful way to combat the lamentable situation is to publish high quality teaching materials and circulate them. When they're older, people will naturally turn to questions of propriety and historiography that Hunt and so many other professional historians engage in, but we've got to get them interested and informed in the first place...

Posted by Nick Seddon at 04:41 PM | Comments (3)

June 10, 2005

Why the Government Seems Hell-Bent on Driving Us All Stir Crazy

It’s back, and that’s official!

Yesterday, the Government announced it intends to keep an electoral pledge it made to introduce a law during the lifetime of the present Parliament making it an offence to say or publish anything liable to incite religious hatred.

Paul Goggins, the Home Office Minister, who made this announcement yesterday, is reported as having said by way of reassuring those who worry such a bill might curb legitimate debate and criticism:

‘It does not stop people poking fun or causing offence. It is about stopping people from inciting hatred. It is about protecting the believer, not the belief.’

One sort of senses what distinction the Minister is seeking to draw. However, one does one wonder, in the light of it, why the Government has not become concerned to proscribe incitement to all forms of hatred of persons by anyone on whatever grounds.

Upon what grounds -- that don’t also apply with equal force to incitement to religious hatred -- is the Government not seeking to make it an offence for anyone to incite hatred of theatre-goers who don’t switch off their mobile ‘phones before performances start, or those who place garden-gnomes on their front-lawns?

Why should the Government confine the legal protection it wants extended from racial groups only to religious groups?

Why don’t we all need to be protected by the law from having hatred incited against us, regardless of our race, creed colour, sex, age, or whatever?

Surely, in confining the legal protection it seeks to extend from racial groups only to religious ones, must not the Government somewhere be in violation of one of its pieces of equality legislation ?

Doesn't anyone else in society suffer from the hatred of others from incitement to which the government should surely also be seeking to protect them by banning it?

I don’t know about you, but I find casuistic in the extreme the Government’s distinction between the religious believer, who must receive protection, and their religious belief, which need not.

If some individual or group persists in a hateful form of belief or action, and if it should be legitimate and lawful to point out the hatefulness of this form of belief or action to others, why shouldn't it also be perfectly legitimate and lawful to be able, not just to hate whoever should persist in such hateful forms of belief and action, but also to point out to others not only the hatefulness of them but the equal hatefulness of whoever persists in them?

And what can pointing out to someone the hatefulness of another be but inciting them to join one in hating that hateful other person?

I just don’t get, therefore, what the Government wants us to think it is up to in introducing this proposed piece of legislation.

Like many others, however, I strongly suspect that ...

... what the Government in fact is up to, and knows itself to be, is re-paying an electoral debt it incurred to a religious group whose support it courted by promising to enact the bill and who want it enacted so as to gain thereby for its religious beliefs and practises immunity from public criticism.

As such, the Government is being disingenuous in purporting to say that only religious believers will be protected, not their beliefs.

Warrant for the suspicion is provided by the clarification of the Government’s legislative intention in introducing the bill that is to be found on the Home Office’s official website.

In a section there entitled, ‘Incitement to Religious Hatred Frequently Asked Questions’, the Home Office explains that, among the forms of expression that the proposed bill will not make a legal offence, is the ‘publishing or reading from religious texts such as the Bible or the Qur’an’. It then immediately goes on:

‘Of themselves these activities do not meet the criteria of the offences. However, if a person were to use threatening, abusive or insulting words/actions with the intent or likely effect that hatred would be stirred up whilst undertaking the actions listed above, then by definition, they could rightly fall into the scope of the offence.’

What the Home Office appears to be saying here is that, while quoting from the Bible or Qur’an may never legitimately be construed as an incitement to religious hatred, once the proposed bill is enacted neither work may lawfully be quoted from should such quotation be combined with any further utterance intended or likely to stir up hatred of the group which regards the quoted text as sacred.

If that is not designed to protect these books from criticism, what is?

Of the two texts in question, and I shall refrain from specifying which, one contains the following statements about adherents of another religion which I shall again refrain from specifying further, beyond saying many live in this country:

‘And thou wilt find them the greediest of mankind…Evil is that for which they sell their souls… Because of the[ir] wrongdoings … and of their taking usury… and of their devouring people’s wealth by false pretences, we have prepared for …them … a painful doom…. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. The hatred is clear from what they say, but more violent is the hatred which their breasts conceal…. In truth, th[ey] are an open enemy to you. … Fight against such of those … until they pay for the tribute readily, being brought low… Many are the[ir religious leaders] ..who defraud men of their possessions. . They spread evil in the land.’

According to the Government’s own clarification of its proposed bill, it is to be lawful for a religious leader of the group who regards as sacred the text from which these quoted words come to quote them before an assembly of co-religionists.

It could, however, be an offence for anyone else to quote these words with a view to suggesting that their being quoted by such a religious leader before a group of co-religionists would be likely to stir up in them a hatred of the religious group about whom the quoted words speak.

This is because this suggestion seems not at all unlikely to stir up hatred of the religious group who accept the quoted words as holy writ in all to whom it made who either belong to the religious group about whom the quoted words speak or who have a hatred of religious hatred.

That is why I say that, in announcing its intention to press on with this particular piece of legislative folly, the Government seems hell-bent on driving us all stir crazy!

Posted by David Conway at 03:06 PM | Comments (5)

June 09, 2005

Council Crematoria Have Now Become the Last Place to Get Cross as Well as be Seen Dead In

Previously incorrigibly naughty six-year old Joshua Cohen was permanently cured of his bad behaviour by being briefly placed by his desperate parents in a local Catholic school. When they asked him what the nuns had done there to effect his miraculous reform, Joshua replied, ‘ Didn’t you see what pictures were on their walls?’

I was put in mind of this rather feeble Jewish joke by a report in today’s newspapers that a 5-foot gilt and wooden crucifix that for the last half century has adorned the wall of a Torquay council crematorium has become the latest casualty in a concerted campaign to rid the nation’s public places of all Christian symbols and artefacts.

Last week it was the turn of bed-side bibles in NHS hospitals in Leicester. This week it is the turn of crucifixes in council crematoria.

The feeble joke was brought to mind upon reading about the crucifix by the thought that it can now surely only be a matter of time before some bright spark calls for all representations of the Passion to be removed from churches on the grounds the sight of them might frighten children or encourage them to emulate its example on some poor child.

We seem to have entered into a new Puritanical age, only this time inspired by secular multicultural zeal rather than religious enthusiasm.

Prominent Catholic MP, Ann Widdecombe is reported as having remarked of the removal of the crucifix, ‘This is yet another cretinous and pointless surrender of our heritage.’

Ms Widdecombe is not the only one lately and rightly to have become concerned about the threat to Britain’s cultural heritage posed by so-called ‘progressive’ forces.

Yesterday's papers carried reports of a speech made the previous day by the Prince of Wales to a group of teachers in which he voiced concern about how Britain’s cultural heritage is in danger of failing to be transmitted to schoolchildren in the name of the need for contemporary relevance.

According to a report in yesterday’s Times, what prompted the Prince’s remarks was the recent decision of the examinations board, Edexcel, to replace a requirement for students preparing for examination in English literature to study ‘classic texts by authors such as Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare in favour of focussing on slang, the language of digital communication and reality television shows’.

Edexcel is reported as having been motivated to make its decision by concern ‘to make English more accessible to students, particularly in cities’.

The mind boggles: one would have thought the decision bound to have exactly the opposite effect!!!

One of the few remaining whole texts that children studying English are required by the National Curriculum to study is George Orwell’s fabulous 1984 which becomes daily ever more prescient.

Let us hope children will not be distracted by their English home-work assignments to watch ‘Celebrity Love Island’ or web-footage of ‘Phone Chicken’ to prevent them reading Orwell’s novel through to the very end. There they will find an Appendix which outlines the history and principles of ‘Newspeak’ in words that ring all too chillingly true today:

‘Newspeak was the official language … devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.

'The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

‘When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored… In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable….Take, for example, the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….

‘It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original…. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

‘A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, would be destroyed.’

Present-day Ingsoc Party members have found a short-cut solution to the problem posed by these potentially embarrassing politically incorrect elitist works. Destroy any vestiges of national pride on grounds of its being offensive to minorities, and thereby remove any vestigial traces of prestige that these canonical works of English literature might once have enjoyed. Thus, they can cheerfully be consigned to the incinerator along with yesterday’s embarrassing newspapers cuttings.

How double-plus un-good [= Newspeak for 'well-wicked'] a solution is that?

Posted by David Conway at 10:42 AM | Comments (2)

June 08, 2005

Take and take?

The government has developed something of a knack for giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Not content with the ban on fox hunting, a backhander to backbenchers disenchanted by its courting of those nasty middle classes, nor with the notion of liberalising the drinking laws but imposing spot fines on those who drink too liberally, it is seeking, as tensions have escalated with Muslims over Iraq and the war on terrorism, to administer relief in the form of proposals for the prevention of religious hatred. Using laws to strike bargains is a risky strategy, and Civitas has voiced its opposition to this bill before ; it was dropped in the run up to the general election, but as the BBC reports, it’s back.

Although the anti-terrorism legislation ended up being little more than a rickety compromise, the fact is that Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims feel got at, and slips, such as Hazel Blears’ delightful admission that the ‘reality’ was that ‘our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community’, have hardly helped matters. New Labour has for some time been seeking ways to deal with the problem. In an article last year in Muslim Weekly, senior energy minister Mike O'Brien conceded that many Muslims were ‘understandably... very angry’. In exchange, he listed reasons why the Blair administration had been good for Muslims. These included plans ‘to toughen the laws on incitement to religious hatred’.

In Australia, where a similar law was passed in 2001, two pastors from the not very incendiary Catch the Fire Ministries have successfully been prosecuted for raising human rights concerns about Islam. Notwithstanding the judge’s acceptance that theirs was a fair representation of the teachings of the Qur’an and the Shari’a, it was deemed that truthfulness was no defence if the context could be construed as offensive. There was public outrage. As Amir Butler, executive director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, has said: ‘a few nasty words about Muslims, spoken to a small gathering by a small group, transformed an unknown organisation into martyrs with an international platform.’

Over here, the Home Office denies that the laws would cover beliefs as well as believers, but some people clearly perceive them as a way to put a stop to anything they find distasteful being said about their faith. According to Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, ‘defamation in the character of the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH)’, would be ‘a direct insult and abuse on the Muslim community’, and illegal. Likewise, Catholics unhappy with the tradition in Lewes of burning an effigy of the Pope on bonfire night would be able to take their gripes to court. Scientologists, Satanists and Moonies could all jump on the bandwagon.

Unlike skin colour, belief is a choice and should be open to debate. Journalists of the George Orwell mould, who go by the dictum that ‘if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’, are not exactly overjoyed at the prospect. Nor are satirists. What, it is reasonable to ask, would courts make of the Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch in which Muslim worshippers were shown in a Mosque bowing to the ground with the voiceover: ‘And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contact lens’? A rap on the knuckles for being rude is one thing; seven years in jail quite another.

The real problem is that, like the terrorism law – like so many of the laws that have been rushed through by this government – this is badly drafted legislation. There does not seem to be any precise definition of what might constitute ‘hatred’ or ‘insulting’ behaviour, for instance, nor any obligation for the plaintiff to prove that a statement actually is capable of incitement. Its premises are also sketchy, a fact which Anglican groups, in particular, have highlighted. Since the blasphemy law is nominal and ineffective, they say, what need is there for extra protection for Muslims who are already, as are Jews and Sikhs, covered by race laws (which were sufficient for dealing with members of the BNP who targeted Muslims in 2004).

If the Australian case is anything to go by, the government’s attempt to win over support would not unambiguously favour Muslims. Down under, Christians have been found sitting in Mosques with their notebooks out, and other religious communities have also started monitoring each other in order to bring cases. It has been observed that a law designed to promote tolerance in fact rewards the least tolerant (those most anxious to take offence). Amir Butler is just one of many public figures who initially hoped the law would protect Muslims from victimization but who have since come out strongly against it.

So what Ken MacDonald, Director of Public Prosecutions, has described as the ‘expectation gap’ could leave British Muslims feeling cheated. Along with the supposedly punitive terrorism laws, they might come to the conclusion that the state is taking away with both hands.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 10:43 AM | Comments (4)

June 07, 2005

Keeping a sense of proportion

The way in which Michael Jackson’s trial has been dominating the world’s news for what seems like forever is a sign of the unhealthy obsession that we have developed with paedophilia. In an age of moral relativism, it seems to be the only thing left we can all wholeheartedly agree upon. Many people take an extremely relaxed view of lifestyle events like divorce and abortion which used to occasion shock. But sex involving younger children is – quite rightly – considered to be beyond the pale, and we want to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent it.

Unfortunately, the scale of the response has now overtaken the real risk. Measures have been put in place that seem to be based on the assumption that there are paedophiles lurking everywhere, and that anyone who wants to get close to children must be a pervert. This is a terrible insult and injustice to the majority of people working with children who would never dream of harming them.

As everyone knows, all teachers have to have their private lives turned upside down to get ‘advanced clearance’, but so do the dinner ladies and classroom assistants. Also, anyone who works with children in any voluntary capacity is treated as a potential abuser, as if no one would give their time freely just to help young people. The Boy Scouts have been reporting for years that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get Scout Leaders in some parts of the country, and this could be partly because men who come forward are exposed to the most unpleasant suspicions. The Children’s Country Holiday Fund is a splendid charity, set up by Canon Barnett at the end of the nineteenth century, which has helped hundreds of thousands of children to experience holidays in the fresh air, but a few years ago it had to suspend operations because of the number of allegations which were being made by children, almost all of which were malicious, but which have to be treated as genuine while the claim is investigated. This puts the unfortunate and innocent adult through months of suspicion.

Now Roy Case, chair of the English Golf Union, is warning that their programme for seeking out and training promising young boys is under threat, as the men running it feel they are all being treated as potential child abusers. Volunteers have been told that they must not offer unaccompanied children a lift home after training, that under-11s must be supervised by two adults of the same sex in the changing rooms, and that adults must never visit locker-room lavatories while children are in them. ‘Volunteers who feel that they are under suspicion are not going to hang around’, he says.

What is the point of all this? Do we really need to impugn the motives of all those good people who are willing to give up their time to work with promising or deprived young people, just to flush out the handful of real perverts? Surely there must be a more sensible approach. And it does seem ironic that this mass hysteria about child abuse is taking place at the same time as the police have adopted an extremely relaxed attitude towards enforcing the age of consent. Cases of sexual activity involving girls of 14 and 15 are very rarely even investigated now, and the terrible case of the family of three girls who became pregnant at 12, 14 and 16, reported in media two weeks ago, has not resulted in any prosecution of their boyfriends – one of whom was a man in his thirties.

Don’t girls need to be protected as well as boys? And, before we start insulting innocent volunteers, wouldn’t it be a good idea to pursue those who are definitely breaking the law? There is much to be said for consistency.

Posted by Robert Whelan at 05:21 PM | Comments (4)

June 03, 2005

The Bugs that You’re Liable to Catch from the Bible…

Today’s newspapers report NHS executives responsible for hospitals in Leicester are due to meet today to decide whether to order the removal from patients’ lockers of copies of the Gideon bible that have long routinely been placed there, as they have been in bedside tables of hotel-rooms and prisons throughout the world.

They are reportedly entertaining imposing the ban on two grounds. First, they fear the presence of the bedside bibles might violate equality and diversity codes or else offend non-Christian patients obliged by their presence to come into contact with them. Second, they are concerned the bibles might harbour the MRSA bug and so increase the risk of patients contracting the disease though handling them.

Mm!

In response to the first concern, Gideons International, who distribute the bibles, have offered to place notices in ward lockers advising patients how to obtain any preferred alternative sacred texts. In addition, representatives of all other major faith groups represented among Leicester’s large minority population have indicated entire satisfaction with the presence of the bibles and have expressed sadness at the prospect of their compulsory removal.

As to the second alleged ground for banning the bedside bibles, apparently the hospital authorities are not also contemplating banning from wards either newspapers or any of the numerous NHS notices routinely placed in patient lockers. Doubtless, MRSA bugs are all new-age pagans who believe only in homeopathy.

The fact is we have here another example of the same crazy political correctness as lately has caused Birmingham Council to replace Christmas by ‘Wintermas’, some schools to scrap nativity plays, and some shops and businesses to stop displaying Christmas trees, putting up decorations, or allowing staff to hold office parties at Christmas for fear of offending non-Christians. One may even include the craven message broadcast by the Queen last Christmas in which she seemed almost apologetic for celebrating the festival and anxious to include as many non-Christians in the celebrations as possible.

I have no immediate answer how to stop the madness and would welcome suggestions from readers.

However, please send suggestions by email. I have decided no longer to open ordinary post, for fear of what bugs envelopes might harbour, or to answer the telephone, lest I may offend any of the acoustically challenged.

Posted by David Conway at 10:17 AM | Comments (5)

June 02, 2005

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find Out What It Means to the C.E.... of the National Youth Agency

In seeking to revive a culture of respect, Tony Blair has got it all wrong by thinking it can be restored by him and his like constantly banging on about how ill-behaved young people are today.

So said yesterday Tom Wylie, Chief Executive of the government-funded National Youth Agency, in a speech reported in today's Times.

Instead, Mr Wylie is reported as having said, the way in which young people should be taught to respect others is for their elders to show them greater respect than they are shown by Mr Blair and other government ministers who constantly berate them for being yobs.

Mr Wylie proposes the best way elders can show the young the respect which he claims their due is by the Government throwing more of the hard-earned money it has taken from them in taxes in the direction of the young.

This act of homage to the nation's youth, doubtless, is to take place under the close supervision of the agency over which Mr Wylie presides whose role is described in its web-site to be that of 'influencing and shaping youth policy and improving youth services'.

Mr Wylie is reported as having said, ‘Young people don’t learn respect through osmosis. They need good youth work, managed by respectful adults, who can tell them, ‘That’s not how to speak to your mates, that’s not how to lose a game or treat a girl in a club’.

Apparently, Mr Wylie believes only government can and should be trusted to supply youth with the ‘clubs, sports facilities, theatre groups, music workshops, computing classes and other group activities’ in which they are to receive the lessons in how to behave Mr Wylie wishes to see delivered in them.

The Times reports Mr Wylie as having indicated he considers it 'absurd that the Government was prepared to spend £50,000 a year for every young person kept in a young offenders institution but only £71 a year on activities that might prevent them from being sent there in the first place’.

Eh? Shouldn’t the cost of providing youth with schools, universities, parks, playing fields, and national museums and art galleries, be factored into the equation -- not to mention the cost of policing the streets and maintaining the entire social infrastructure and fabric of civil society?

In any case, why should Mr Kylie presume it necessary for government to tax the public for there to be available for the young the specifically youth-dedicated institutions he has in mind for their socilisation to be carried out in?

Why can’t it be left to the voluntary efforts and donations of parents, local communities, charities and churches to create, fund, and run them?

And wouldn’t their provision through agencies formed, financed, and run by voluntary initiative in civil society be likely to be more effective in socialising the young than when they are provided and financed by the state, when what is more likely to motivate those who staff them be concern with the size of their public sector pay-packets rather than the more admirable altruistic motives that tend to lie behind genuine voluntary endeavour?

Finally, how can the chief executive of the national agency responsible for youth policy be supposed to be taken seriously whose idea of how to instil respect in the young is to suggest that adolescent boys on a night out, who, say, might have called for their ‘bitches to be smacked up!’, should be politely informed by some club official, ‘That’s not how to treat a girl in a club’?

Posted by David Conway at 11:25 AM | Comments (3)

June 01, 2005

Anythingarian

In the first dialogue of Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation, Lord M. asks what about the religion of another character, and Lord Sp. replies that he’s an ‘anythingarian’. The coinage is more resonant now than ever before. If postmodernism is a uselessly incoherent philosophy, since it knows only what it is not, not what it is, it has nevertheless become a handy sociological description. For throughout Britain (and the West generally), we have for some time been witnessing a crisis of legitimation. Everything is contested. Nothing, as the paradoxical truth statement goes, is true. There is only, as Nietzsche declares, a perspective seeing, a perspective knowing. What postmodernism supremely represents, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, is an incredulity towards all metanarratives. No totalising theories prevail. In this world, there is only multiplicity and fragmentation. As the margins of society seek recognition from the centre and the centre becomes more obsessed with the romance of the margins, there is a simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal movement. All cultures are pronounced equal. Nothing in this kaleidescopic collage stays still, nothing can be established, nothing agreed.

History curricula have suffered awfully on account of this, since the mosaic approach to teaching adopted by cultural relativists has resulted in unprecedented numbers of school leavers having an inadequate knowledge or understanding of events, people, or the institutions that have evolved over the course of many centuries and have come to express and develop the thought of our society. Thanks to an overemphasis of the assumption that history is always history for someone, the legacy of the hard left is historical amnesia, dislocation and temporal parochialism. These problems translate across disciplines. In their 1998 book Class Act, Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, in the process of thrashing comprehensive schools, adduce the Institute of Education’s assertion that schools are guilty of too often ‘legitimising one popular view of mathematics’ and so devaluing ‘the students’ informal mathematical experience and skills… which are equally, if not more, valuable to the individual.’ Maths is oppressive; it should be replaced by ‘ethnomathematics’. As the headmaster in Lambeth who appointed an expert in Nigerian cooking, with no experience of maths, to teach maths in his school put it: ‘It is real life maths with Ibo cookery – transferable maths.’

A historian without a sense of chronology? A mathematician without an understanding of trigonometry? It’s all hilariously miserable. But surely a common language is one thing all accept as valid? Well, for making the rather innocuous and sensible point that English should be taught as a first language in schools, and that promoting Asian languages would lead to the relegation of English and the ghettoising of communities, the headteacher of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Ray Honeyford, was, in 1985, vilified by left-liberal commentators and local politicians, condemned as a racist and suspended. The celebration of ethnic particularism is becoming more and more risible. Last year, Bill Crosby was forced to point out that West Indian children should not be taught slang in London classrooms since it would do them a disservice. The same applies to mathematics: the numbers will not change; there’ll just be more people who cannot add them up. Lazy, unrigorous thinking has sold short a generation of pupils who desperately needed education as an engine of social mobility. After such a catalogue, is it any surprise that according to Sunday’s news the government is hoping to recruit religious education teachers with no necessary knowledge of any religions?

Religious education is compulsory in schools, but it is not a national curriculum subject. In the Sixties and Seventies, the pressure from secularism, humanism, and the evident presence of multi-religious classes in many schools gradually led to an educational consensus that religious induction was to be outlawed. In time, ‘indoctrination’ became the favourite taboo word of educationalists. This, in a pluralist society, is reasonable. But now religious education has been hijacked by the multiculturalists. Despite all the QCA's talk of provoking ‘challenging questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, beliefs about God, the self and the nature of reality, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human’, the fact that the Teacher Training Agency has written to humanities graduates to reassure them that teaching RE is no longer about learning the Bible merely serves to emphasise the extent to which religious education has become more about promoting diversity and an antiracist environment than about religion. How, if teachers are ignorant about the Bible, is religious education going to fulfil the QCA’s ambition to develop ‘pupils’ knowledge and understanding of Christianity, other principal religions, other religious traditions and other worldviews’?

It seems to me there are two points to consider. The first concerns the composition of our population. The second concerns culture and acculturation. Firstly, then, is the fact that 70 per cent of white British people (40 million) described themselves Christian in the 2001 Census. This is not even a race thing, given the high proportion of ethnic minorities who subscribe to the Christian faith: majorities of Black people and those from Mixed ethnic backgrounds were identified as Christian (71 and 52 per cent respectively). It would be fair to say that these people are being shortchanged by not being taught about the culture to which they adhere. Secondly, Britain has a strong history and tradition of Christianity. It really is bizarre to think that students should be encouraged to know more about Muslim or Sikh festivals than Pentecost or Christmas. Added to which, the Bible is the single most influential book in the entire canon of western literature, and readers with no knowledge of it will be severely disadvantaged. Likewise, philosophy students would have difficulty reading anything post-classical without at least a passing familiarity with scriptures, and Nietzsche, for instance, the great iconoclast, riddled his books with biblical references. An atheist needs to know what he or she is revolting against. Without that, there is no revolt, only that which Nietzsche so despised, the herd mentality.

Yet it is the herd that is running amock, a herd of anythingarians. And this, in Joseph Ratzinger's phrase, is the ‘dictatorship of relativism’.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 06:29 PM | Comments (1)