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July 27, 2005
What choice do we really have?
Ruth Kelly has admitted that Labour has failed to close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor. ‘We need to think about why children from more deprived backgrounds do not always have the opportunity to access the better schools, and what sensibly, we might be able to do about that,’ she said at the IPPR. The government has actually been aware of this for some time, at least since 1998 when Andrew Adonis – the same Andrew Adonis who wrote in Class Act that the comprehensive school system has replaced selection by ability with selection by income – entered the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, but it has for a long time denied it and now begun to frame the discussion in terms of the need for choice.
However, it is not clear how choice is possible in the current environment without reducing the regulatory burdens that make it so difficult for new start-up institutions to flourish, without therefore opening up the educational market to all and any providers, and without bringing in something approximating to vouchers for parents.
But this government doesn’t really believe in free choice. Otherwise, how could it be going ahead with the closure of the 70 or so remaining grammar schools in Northern Ireland (despite the region outperforming the rest of Britain in exams) despite the fact that two thirds of parents over there want to retain the system, as The Times reports today?
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, an executive member of the Governing Bodies Association, said: ‘The grammar school has been a wonderful escalator for children from backgrounds where in England they find it difficult to succeed. It’s not perfect but I can’t believe that by removing the most successful bit, that we are improving it.’
In Britain, those few grammars that remain after the educational equivalent of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1950’s, the BBC reported in 2003, are not just successful in terms of ‘raw’ results but also the best on the ‘value added’ scale. Last year’s the OECD’s PISA study of an enormous range of countries found that the gap between private and state education in Britain is greater than in any other country bar Paraguay and Bolivia. Grammar schools were once the bridge. In the past fifty years, Oxbridge entry from the state sector has gone down, from 60 per cent to 50 per cent.
Peter Morris, a teacher, said on this morning’s Today programme that he will be appealing to the Professional Association of Teachers at its annual conference in Buxton to vote to bring back ‘the most successful type of school that Britain has ever had’. There, to argue against him, Margaret Tulloch, secretary for Comprehensive Future, regurgitated the standard mantras.
Grammar schools don’t exist in Finland, she said, which is held up as the paradigm of comprehensive schooling. Yet the demographies, immigration patterns and educational traditions make it so different as to be inadmissible evidence. Grammar schools are hugely socially divisive, she said. Yet they are not as divisive as comprehensive schools. Grammar schools make those who don’t get in feel like failures, or ‘deferred successes’ in the newspeak. Yet the current policies of social inclusion, as Baroness Warnock recently admitted, have been a complete deferred success. Grammar schools are elitist, she said. And that really is the point. She's quite right they're elitist. For the very notion of excellence is redundant without a scale from worst to worse to bad, through good and better, to best.
Until the government is willing to provide parents with real options in the state and private sectors, which includes grammar schools, 'choice' will be nothing more than a myth.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:52 PM | Comments (1)
July 21, 2005
Beyond Our Ken: Why Some Victims of Suicide-Bombing are No Different from all Other Suicide-Bomb Victims
Two short weeks to the day 56 Londoners of all races, creeds and colours were indiscriminately killed by four home-grown Islamist suicide-bombers, London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, has gone on public record in support of the moral distinction, drawn by Muslim theologian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi whom the mayor has called ‘progressive’, between suicide-bombings carried out by frustrated Muslims in London, unconscionable and wrong, and those carried out by frustrated Muslims in Israel, permissible, if not heroic.
The basis for the distinction, apparently, is twofold. First, whereas ordinary Londoners are innocent, ordinary Israelis are not. Ordinary Israelis are fair game in a way ordinary Londoners are not because Israel has a militia army in which all adult Israeli citizens must serve. Second, whereas Muslims in this country with a grievance against their government’s foreign policy can register their dissent through the ballot box, Palestinians have no corresponding peaceful way to register their opposition to Israeli policy in relation to them.
Dear or dear! If the Mayor thinks these differences between Londoners and Israelis will provide sufficient moral protection for the former from those Muslims prepared to kill the latter, he is even more of a fool, and a dangerous one at that, than he is in describing the views of Dr al-Qaradawi as progressive.
Precisely because Israel’s is a militia army, there is no more reason to think that Israelis who do not refuse to do their militiary service support Israeli policy in relation to Palestinians than there is to think British citizens, who do not refuse to pay their taxes which go to pay for the British army, support British foreign policy in relation to Iraq.
What’s good for Israeli geese, from an Islamist point of view, therefore, can easily be judged by one of them no less good, from their point of view, for British gander.
As for disgruntled British Muslims having, but disgruntled Palestinians lacking, a vote, it may have escaped the Mayor’s notice that Palestinians are not Israeli citizens but have been under military occupation since the 1967 War, pending a Middle-East peace settlement. Iraqis, disgruntled with Britain’s occupation of their country, cannot register their opposition to it by voting in Britain, any mmiore than can Palestinans vote in Israeli elections. (Well, perhaps, that’s overstating things a bit, sadly, since the advent here of postal voting!) Does that entitle them to register their opposition to British foreign policy in their country by bombing Londoners?.
It is interesting to note, by the way, that the Stern Gang and Irgun restricted expression of their resistance to British rule in Palestine before 1948 by targeting British military and government installations: not by indiscriminate terror bombings. So there is precedent for non-enfranchised freedom fighters being able to be a little bit more discriminating than Palestinian suicide bombers have been.
As for the Mayor championing the views of Dr al-Qaradawi as progressive and moderate, while the Muslim teacher might, unlike some still Muslims less ‘moderate’ than he ,have condemned the London suicide-bombings, this having done so offers less than full assurance of the progressiveness and moderation of his views, given some of the other things Dr al-Qaradawi has gone on public record as having supported. These include:
· The killing of homosexuals to keep society pure;
· The killing of apostates who have rejected Islam
· Female circumcision carried out on girls
· Wife-beating
· The killing of all Israelis
Returning to the last of these practices of which the friend of the Mayor is in favour, given the current popularity in Britain today of the political opinions of rock musicians, perhaps, friends of Israel could hold a concert at Hyde Park at which Bob Dylan could be invited to come and sing his 1983 song, ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ which offers greater insight into the nature of the current Middle-East conflict than does our very own neighbourhood bully. Lest readers of Civitas’ website have never or not recently heard the song, here are their lyrics:
Well, the neighbourhood bully, he's just one man,
His enemies say he's on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one,
He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
The neighbourhood bully just lives to survive,
He's criticized and condemned for being alive.
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin,
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
The neighbourhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him.
He was supposed to feel bad.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him,
'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
He got no allies to really speak of.
What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love.
He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
Well, he's surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
Every empire that's enslaved him is gone,
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.
He's made a garden of paradise in the desert sand,
In bed with nobody, under no one's command.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
Now his holiest books have been trampled upon,
No contract he signed was worth what it was written on.
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth,
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
What's anybody indebted to him for?
Nothin', they say.
He just likes to cause war.
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed,
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed.
He's the neighbourhood bully.
What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers?
Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighbourhood bully, standing on the hill,
Running out the clock, time standing still,
Neighbourhood bully.
Posted by David Conway at 10:54 AM | Comments (1)
July 20, 2005
England's guilt: blame Richard the Lionheart
Do you know what happens when you bomb London? The British government apologises for any offence caused and offers your coreligionists a job. No seriously, bomb us, and we’ll apologise to you. Yesterday, the BBC reported that Margaret Hodge, the Employment Minister, believes that it is important to find ways of encouraging young Muslims to feel integrated into British society, in the light of the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July, and ensuring they get jobs when they leave university is her answer. Quite apart from the ethics of such preferential treatment, she’s clearly ignorant of the circumstances of the four men (and the seven suicide bombers we previously exported to countries like Palestine and Pakistan), because decent education, jobs, the appearances of contentment and decency, really were not the cause of their radicalism.
Of course, there’s been a lot of talk about tightening up the terrorism laws, extending the security services, and policing our borders, and I cautiously applaud these measures, but, as Bill Durodie wrote in Chatham House’s recent Security, Terrorism and the UK report, the ‘problem with these is that, in seeking to secure society from the outside, we fail simultaneously to engage society from the inside with a view to winning a debate as to what we actually stand for.’ It remains to be seen if we have the nerve for that. Not just in terms of frank debate, but also in terms of unequivocal clarity. Although Tony Blair said yesterday that those who advocate suicide bombing ‘whether it's in London, whether it's in Afghanistan or Iraq, or it's in Palestine or it's in Turkey or Kashmir, or anywhere … have got no place in our country’, it’s not clear whether the government will make good on this rhetoric.
Even after being subjected to the worst terrorist attack on British soil, you can still go and read for yourself incitements to jihad on the Leeds Grand Mosque website, for example. Not dissimilarly, members of the MCB on television and radio – and this includes Sir Icqbal Sacranie – fail to condemn unequivocally suicide bombing on the appallingly rickety grounds that it’s different in Palestine. Last night I was shocked to watch on BBC news as Anjem Choudary, a former leader of al-Muhajiroun, a group which applauded the 9/11 attacks, refused to condemn the London suicide bombers. And if Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is truly considered a moderate by the Islamic community, then I rest my case Your Honour on the case for how radicalised mainstream Islam has become.
But then the thing I’m missing, I suppose, is that it’s got nothing to do with Islam. The widespread use of the Qu’ran to justify violence is irrelevant, jihadists are a loony fringe, even if they are spreading all over the world, even if their influence on the airwaves and across the internet is alarming. We Brits, staggering under the twin assaults of external terrorism and internal guilt, remain kinder to extremists than any other European country. Take Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned across Europe but welcome in Britain. As Mark Steyn reports in the Daily Telegraph, the German Interior Minister says the group ‘supports violence as a way to realise political goals’, namely a worldwide caliphate, the BBC says it ‘urges Muslims to kill Jewish people’, and the Guardian has dubbed it ‘Britain’s most radical Islamic group’. Which is some cachet. How extreme is too extreme? The Guardian has just given one of them a job.
But it’s entirely our fault, remember? If it wasn’t for our foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan everything would be alright. Well hang on. It’s undeniable that Iraq and Afghanistan have contributed to the radicalisation of Muslims throughout the world, but the militancy already existed quite independently. Would it end if the UK and US withdrew from the Middle East? Would it heck. The idea that al-Qaeda was no threat until we created it does not stand the slightest scrutiny of events in the 1990s — from the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993, to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and, of course, the September 11 atrocity a year later. But of course, we probably created them with the formation of the Israeli state, or perhaps it was the Crusades… Any other bright ideas?
Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:10 PM | Comments (2)
July 18, 2005
The Latest Bulletin on the NHS Offers Few Surprises and Little Comfort
“Why in the 21st century are we still so poor at involving patients in their care?”. So asks Simon Williams, director of policy at the Patients Association, according to a news report by the BBC, in light of the disturbingly low level of NHS patient involvement in their own treatment that is announced by the Healthcare Commission in its annual report on the state of NHS published today.
Indicative of this low level of patient involvement are the following findings of the Healthcare Commission published in its report:
· A third of patients’ diagnostic tests are not explained to them in a way that is understandable to them.
· A fifth of patients left hospital confused as to what their drugs were for.
· Only 22% of coronary bypass surgery patents were told of alternative treatments.
· The UK ranked lowest for patient involvement in their primary care among five countries surveyed.
May I proffer the following answer to Mr Williams’ question?
Britain remains poor at involving patients in their own healthcare because, under the present system of socialised provision, patients lack any genuine consumer power that alone can be provided by their having a genuine choice between providers who are allowed to compete between themselves for custom.
In the absence of genuine patient choice, there will be no competition between providers, or hence any incentive on their part to inform and involve patients fully in their treatment, should it be more costly and inconvenient for them to do so, which undoubtedly it is in a great many cases.
Tentatively, the government is feeling its way to providing greater consumer choice but healthcare providers are likely to howl if the result have the intended effect of exposing defective forms of provision.
Posted by David Conway at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
University Challenge: Your Starter for Ten…
In the wake of last week's terror suicide bombings in London, the Government is considering introducing new legislation to strengthen the country’s defences against further acts of terror.
Among the new laws under active consideration is one that would permit, if not require, non-nationals to be denied entry into the country, if they have previously been denied entry by another country, with whom the UK has friendly relations, on grounds of being suspected of having links with terrorists or terror organisations.
Should the Government introduce such a law very rapidly, someone who could well be liable to be denied entry to Britain as a result is Professor Tariq Ramadan of Geneva, due to speak later this month at a conference in London specially arranged for Muslim youth.
The reason why Professor Ramadan might be denied entry to Britain, should such new legislation be introduced is that, last summer, he was denied entry to the USA where he was due to take up a university appointment in Islamic ethics, after the US State Department revoked his entry visa at the last minute.
A spokesperson for the US State Department subsequently explained to a Washington Post reporter that it had revoked Professor Ramdan's entry visa 'under a section of the US code that bars terrorists and their associates, as well as people who have incited others to violence’.
On today’s World at One news programme, Professor Ramadan was interviewed about the possibility he might be denied entry into Britain on such grounds.
In that interview, Professor Ramadan was adamant there was absolutely no reason why he should be denied entry. He insisted he had always expressed opposition to the use of suicide bombings and other forms of terror and just as strongly denied ever having had any links with Islamic terrorists. He said:
‘There is nothing in my record. There are as many links to terrorists in my life as there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There is nothing in my life connected to terrorists.’
In view of Professor Ramadan’s assertion, it is, perhaps, time the US and UK governments should consider resuming their search for WMD in Iraq. This is because, although it went unmentioned in the BBC radio interview with Professor Ramadan, last December it was reported by the Geneva newspaper, Le Temps, that his name had become linked with that of alleged Al Qaeda member, Djamel Beghal, currently under arrest and about to face trial with others for having attempted to blow up the US embassy in Paris in 2001.
According to the post on the weblog of Daniel Pipes for 14 December 2004, this newspaper article ‘describes Beghal as an active part of the international Islamist terror network, an itinerant preacher dedicated to living as the Prophet did and to acts of violence against infidels. The part [of the indictment] salient to Ramadan concerns Beghal's having become a practicing Muslim in 1994. … At that time, according to the indictment, "he [Beghhal] took charge of preparing the lectures of Tariq Ramadan."’.
Professor Ramadan apparently does not admit ever having met or even being able to recall Djamel Beghal, but unfortunately did not reply to messages left by Le Temps seeking an interview on the subject.
Countries have no legal or moral obligation to reveal to non-nationals to whom they deny entry what their reasons were for denying them entry, if these reasons pertained to grounds for suspecting they might have had links with terrorists or terror organisations.
Prima facie, it looks as if the USA, and, by extension, therefore, the UK too, does have reason to suspect that, at one time Professor Ramadan, may have had significant links with a member of Al Qaeda.
It is also worth adding that, according to the on-line encyclopedia, Wikpedia, this suspected Al Qaeda member with whom the there is some reason to think Professor Ramndan might at one time have had significant links ‘once lived in London and attended the Finsbury Park mosque along with Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, … and other Al Qaeda suspects’.
Whether the Government should introduce legislation that would enable it to deny Professor Ramadan entry into this country before he is due to speak to Muslim youths here is a question I shall leave to readers to comment on.
Posted by David Conway at 05:08 PM | Comments (1)
July 13, 2005
Get Away
So you’ve had enough of the smog, the pneumatic drills, the helicopters, the sirens, and you want to scurry away for a weekend in the countryside. You’ve never been there before, and you’ve no idea what it’s like, but you recently heard someone mention the Lake District. So you do what any moderately resourceful person would do: you have a quick look on the internet, you go into a library and ask an assistant what books are available, you look at a few maps and guides, and two weeks later you end up in Ambleside. A glorious amphitheatre of crags and mountains surrounds this Lakeland town, the buildings are quaint, and if you step out into the hills you’re sure to be impressed by the views. Although the chances are you’ll come back enchanted, exhilarated and revived, you may equally have slipped on a cowpat, fallen into a ravine and been drenched in a thunderstorm. It is, to be fair, not everyone’s idea of a holiday.
Yet while it remains your prerogative to not want to venture outside the suburbs of our cities, providers are being punished for choices made in the supply pool. Until residents of the countryside can do a better job of attracting target minorities from the cities – for members of victim groups to have to find out about the holiday destination themselves is, we’re told, almost proof of a kind of institutional discrimination – it will be assumed they are bigots. We were alerted to this earlier in the year when the Lake District National Park decided to scrap its voluntary rangers (their remit: to guide interested people around the Lakes) because the majority of visitors were middle-aged middle-class white people and they were failing to draw members of ethnic minority communities. Perhaps the fallacy is obvious: ethnic minorities might not be choosing to go and take up the voluntary service.
Now, however, the Countryside Agency, has found that ethnic minorities and disabled people and city dwellers do want to go to the countryside but can’t be sure if it is a ‘welcoming’ place. I’m sceptical of how desperate the respondents in the survey were to go to the countryside, but it’s nevertheless worth examining the assumptions involved in the notion of ‘welcoming’.
There is, undoubtedly, a long history of mutual suspicion between town and country, but whenever I’ve been into the Cotswolds or the Lakes or anywhere else, I’ve always thought the locals pleasant enough. There are those who love them, who idealise the cud chewing farmers and ruddy Constablesque haywains. In my experience, some say a jovial hello as you pass them on a footpath, some look suspiciously at you and grunt as you go into their shops, and others start firing at you as you cross their land; but personally I don’t see why it matters if they’re nice or not. Must you be ‘accepted’ or 'celebrated' by everyone everywhere you go?
What about ethnic diversity, though; surely it’s significant that the composition of the population in the countryside is overwhelmingly white? Well, quite apart from the fact that this misses the point (why should skin colour matter unless you’re willing to accept the obverse, that for a Welsh farmer travelling into London, Lewisham would be a pretty unattractive prospect?), the distribution of ethnic groups in Britain results from historical agglomerations. Pakistanis, Indians and Afro-Caribbeans have tended to settle in cities like London, Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle. This is not the fault of the rural (by no means dominantly middle-class) whites; it does, however, go some way towards exposing the pettiness of criticising countryside tourist brochures that don’t show a sufficient number of ethnically diverse people on the front cover. I mean, what are they supposed to do – sham it up by putting a Somali on a tractor in Devon just to make the point?
There is, however, a concession to be made. You do have to accept that the topography is fundamentally disablist (this useful term was recently coined by Demos to explain how everything in our society – and now we can add nature too – is set against disabled people). It doesn’t take long to come to this conclusion: there are no handrails in the Pennines, no brail signs on the Pembrokeshire coastal path, no wheelchair ramps on Ben Nevis, and bird song evidently discriminates against deaf people, which means that rambling and ornithology, to mention but two countryside pursuits, should be banned. And imagine being out on the moors as an obese one-legged ninety-five year-old single parent lesbian with chronic agoraphobia?
Excuse my sarcasm, but there is a dire need for some common sense thinking. What would diversity festivals in Snowdonia, gay pride marches through the East Anglian fells, single mothers’ day in the Cairngorms, or banners on the top of mountains saying Scafell welcomes paraplegics actually achieve? What would be the point? When you’re strolling through the Yorkshire Dales, what matters more, the beauty of the scene or a sign telling you you’re welcome? Sheep would probably crap it on anyway.
The Countryside Agency, a government quango, spent £360,000 on this report. Fortunately, both Labour and Conservative MP’s have objected to the waste of taxpayers’ money by a public body. But nothing will change until someone deletes it from the pantheon of rubbish bodies that exists in this country to come up with rubbish and pointless research.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 03:47 PM | Comments (2)
July 12, 2005
Normal Service has Been Resumed by the BBC asap -- and by the Met Even Sooner
I was clearly guilty of wishful thinking in the blog I wrote last Friday when I applauded the apparent decision by the BBC, in the wake of last Thursday’s London bombings, to cease referring to those who had carried them out, and perpetrators of other such atrocities, by euphemisms such as ‘militants’, as had become its practice, and instead to start calling these despicable vermin by their rightful name of terrorists!
Today’s Times carries a brief news report to the effect that the BBC has decided to refer to last Thursday’s bombers on its news website simply as ‘bombers’, and not ‘terrorists’.
In explanation of this terminological decision, a spokeswoman for the BBC is reported as having said: ‘The word “terrorist” is not banned by the BBC …. [but] we take care great of the language used.’
…. So, it’s back to normal service from the BBC, although their news bulletins have yet to fall into terminological line.
If last Thursday’s bombings in London temporarily brought some parts of the BBC to their collective senses, they showed no such signs of having been able to awake from their complacent stupor the upper echelons of London’s Metropolitan police.
Shortly before the bombings occurred, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, was interviewed on BBC radio’s ‘Today’ programme about security at the supposedly still forthcoming Olympic Games to be held in London in 2012. In the interview, Sir Ian boasted how British anti-terrorist procedures were the envy of the world.
Shortly after the bombings, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met, Brian Paddick, took to task a BBC interviewer who had spoken of ‘Islamic terrorists’ as their possible perpetrators. ‘As far as I am concerned’, Mr Paddick said, ‘Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’
Doubtless, it is because Mr Paddick’s panglossian views about Islam and terror are so widely shared by his senior colleagues that, according to a report in today’s Times, the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers have not seen fit in the light of last Thursday’s bombings to withdraw their financial support for bringing to London later this month the controversial Swiss-based Muslim academic, Tariq Ramadan, to address young British Muslims at a ‘Middle Path’ conference to be held at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park being organised by the Muslim charity, Da’qatul Islam.
For the benefit of those who might not before have come across the names of either the speaker whose visit to London the Met are helping to finance or that of the organisers of the conference at which he is due to speak, it might help to know the following.
Professor Ramadan is the maternal grand-son of Hassan-al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist organisation, created in Egypt in 1928 but banned there in 1954, which has consistently preached world-wide Jihad.
Professor Ramadan is also the brother of Hani, a fellow resident of Geneva to which their father fled in 1954 when the Brotherhood became banned in Egypt. According to Robert Spencer, author of the 2003 book, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, brother Hani was sacked from a teaching post he had held there for having defended in an interview he gave to Le Monde the stoning of adulterers.
In the foreword he wrote for a republished edition of a book written by his grandfather, Professor Ramadan described it as containing ‘the core of the spiritual education of the Muslim Brotherhood’ and his grandfather’s teachings as ‘simple and luminous’.
Among the teachings of Professor Ramadan’s grand-father, so Robert Spencer reports, are such simple and luminous doctrines as that, in Al-Banna’s own words, 'In [Muslim] tradition , there is a clear indication of the obligation to fight the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians], and of the fact that God doubles the reward of those who fight them. Jihad is not against polytheists alone, but against all who do not embrace Islam’.
It is unlikely that Da’watul Islam, the organisers of the forthcoming London conference which the Met are helping to pay for Professor Ramadan to attend so as to be able to addres, will regard his views and associates as departing too far from what they consider the non-extreme ‘Middle Path’ that they favour.
As Stephen Pollard reminded us in a Thunderer piece in yesterday’s Times, this charity saw fit to invite to speak at its Middle Way conference last year, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and someone who, in a sermon delivered in March 2003, is alleged to have called on his followers to ‘destroy the Zionist, the American, and the British aggressors’.
Reassuringly, Mr Pollard informs us, the Sheikh does not consider someone who blows himself up whilst engaged in jihad to have committed suicide and hence as not having contravened the express Muslim prohibition against suicide. In an interview given last year, according to Mr Pollard, the Sheikh claimed that ‘Islam justifies suicide bombings in Iraq against the US military and in Israel against women and children’.
So, to sum up: according to the BBC, those who carried out last week’s London atrocities are bombers, not terrorists; and, according to the Met, Muslims cannot be terrorists or capable of carrying out acts of terror in the name of their religion.
When will we be told by these same authorities, as Winston Smith was finally instructed to believe at the end of George Orwell’s novel 1984, that 2+ 2=5?
Posted by David Conway at 01:06 PM | Comments (1)
July 08, 2005
St George’s Cross for England — and Rightly So
Today, flags are to be flown half-mast in mourning for victims of yesterday’s atrocities in London.
If nothing else good comes of what happened, let us hope it will finally lead the BBC, and other media who have so lamely followed it in recent times, to consign once and for all to the dust-bin of history the term ‘militant’ as a euphemism with which to refer to perpetrators of such dastardly deeds.
There is little comfort to be gained from today’s papers. But alongside the eyewitness accounts of startled commuters and the photographs of the carnage, there is one story to lift the spirits, not without relevance to what happened yesterday.
According to a report in today’s Times, archaeologists have just unearthed in the Syrian city of Palmyra an apparently phenomenally well-preserved third century mosaic depicting St George slaughtering the dragon. Some archaeologists are reported to believe the mosaic may well be the source of the St George legend.
So closely associated today is England’s patron saint with this legend that we forget he once had an identity altogether apart from and prior to it and that it only became tacked onto the story of his life to commemorate some genuine heroic act of his which the story was intended to symbolise.
It is deeply politically unfashionable and incorrect these days to venerate the name of this saint whose status as the patron saint of England is often ridiculed today in view of his not being a native-born Englishman.
But there are many important quintessential elements of British national culture which have a foreign origin. For example, our national flag in which St George's red cross figures as the symbol of England, is known as the ‘Union Jack’ from the practice of King James 1, in whose reign England became united with Scotland and Ireland, of referring to himself by the French equivalent of his name – Jacques!
The non-English origin of the patron saint of England is one of them.
Who was St George? When and why did he become patron saint of England? How and why did the legend of the slaying of the dragon come to be attached to the story of his life? And what possible grain of comfort can be thought capable of being drawn from knowledge of any of these things, given yesterday’s atrocities?
The man who is England’s patron saint was reputedly a real Roman soldier born in Cappadocia, eastern Turkey, in the third century to converts to Christianity before their faith had become the official religion of the Roman Empire and whilst adherents of it were still being persecuted by the pagan Romans.
One Roman emperor still making life tough for the coreligionists of his parents was Diocletian in whose army George reputedly served. It was supposedly whilst on a mission to England that George discovered the suffering being inflicted on Christians by Romans, upon which discovery George supposedly returned to Rome to plead with the emperor on their behalf -- in vain, as it turned out. George was beheaded for his efforts on the orders of Dicoletian, supposedly in of all places Lydda, now in present-day Israel. He thereby underwent the martyrdom for which he was subsequently canonised.
It was not until a thousand years later that St George became official patron saint of England. This was well after, but because of, the symbolism associated with the legend of his slaying of the dragon, a legend that had become added to his name centuries before. Indeed, the legend was no more of English provenance than was the saint himself, but also like him of middle-eastern origin.
According to this legend, it was whilst journeying through Libya, then under the rule of Egyptian kings, that George heard about a dragon that, like the minotaur, feasted on a daily diet of young maidens whose supply had all but been exhausted, save for the daughter of the king of Egypt who had promised her hand to whoever would slay the dragon, an act of gallantry that George obligingly performed.
This legend had become attached to George’s name because, from early Christian times, dragons were used as symbols of the devil, unmitigated evil. The legend represents the triumph of good over evil that had been enacted by his stalwart defence of Christianity against persecution, and, at a more general level, the triumph of the Christian spirit over the forces of darkness.
It was doubtless because of the resonance of this legend about St George that caused Richard 1 to make St George's red cross, something that had come to symbolise George's own martyrdom, the emblem to be worn on their chests by all fellow crusaders who, at the end of the twelfth century, won back Jerusalem from the Saracen invaders of Palestine, albeit only temporarily.
It was another brave Englishman, or, rather, Englishwoman -- Florence Nightingale -- who also resorted to use of the same symbol as the emblem to be worn by all her fellow army nurses in the Crimean War, a war, incidentally and significantly, Britain waged in defence of Muslim Turks against Russian aggression.
Reference to the nursing of casualties of aggression leads me to the present-day relevance of St George in the light of yesterday’s horrific events in London.
St George became patron saint of England for the same reason as the legend of his slaying a dragon became attached to his name. His martydom, as does the legend, symbolises the triumph of Christian faith, hope and charity in the face of evil. A better and more fitting symbol for this country today can hardly be imagined!
It is a symbol for this country whose calls for jettisoning all British patriots should ardently resist, as they should all who currently seek to harm its inhabitants and their free, generous, tolerant, kindly way of life.
Posted by David Conway at 11:08 AM | Comments (2)
July 06, 2005
G8 and Aid to Africa
George Galloway is right to attack the government for using African aid as a diversionary tactic, redirecting attention away from Afghanistan and Iraq and compensating for the public’s bad faith. But, as the BBC reports, he has been accused of self-righteous sloganeering, and his grasp of the issues is lamentably simplistic. For an altogether more sophisticated and informed analysis of what aid can and cannot achieve, the best place to look this week is The Economist. See both the leader and the special report: 'The difficulty of helping Africa'.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 11:11 AM | Comments (2)
July 01, 2005
Identity Cards
It's difficult not to feel uneasy about the number of new powers that have been granted to the government. Again and again, liberties which we once held dear and which previous generations fought to safeguard are derided and dismissed: Blair and Co. have removed habeas corpus, put house arrest on the statute book, banned protesting within a kilometre of parliament, and put forward proposals for the satellite tracking of cars for road use charging - and now ID cards are on the way. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been held up by MP's in the House of Commons on a number of occasions recently. Poor Orwell: he intended his dystopia to be cautionary, not a textbook for the Cabinet.
In response to worries about holding personal information on ID cards, the government smugly replies that it can already access whatever it wants - from our tax details, to that bout of tonsillitis ten years ago, to the points on our driving licence, and the dating line we called last week. But this is not the same as having all the data on a single central database - especially since cards could someday be demanded by police on the streets or required for the use of basic public services. So with the opposition saying that ID cards are a threat to civil liberties, and the government promising that ID cards will protect our civil liberties, who is right? Are the sacrifices required by such a measure worth making?
The principle purpose of the cards given by the government changes constantly, as each reason is presented and rebuffed, so it pays to look at some of them in turn.
Are ID cards a proper response to the terrorist threat? Simply, no: they are the wrong answer to the problems of crime and security. They will offer the illusion of safety based on technology not intelligence. ID cards in Spain did not prevent the Madrid bombings, nor would they have done anything to stop 9/11. Richard Reed, like most terrorists, did not hide his identity, only his intention.
Are ID cards going to be effective in controlling immigration? As we have just heard, the government guesses there could be as many as 570,000 illegal immigrants (multiply that by three to get a more accurate estimate), so there are already so many illegals in Britain as to render the scheme almost pointless. The only way it would work would be if ID cards were mandatory for every British citizen, and the borders were far more stringently manned - or just manned.
Are ID cards going to stop benefit fraud? Less than 2 per cent of benefit fraud is due to ID fraud; instead, benefit fraudsters tend to misrepresent their circumstances. The fact that there are 73 million live national insurance records, but only 46.5 million in the country entitled to a national insurance record hardly fosters confidence in the government's ability to run such a scheme.
Are ID cards going to stop ID fraud? Biometric testing can hardly be said to be failsafe. Even if with three biometric measures it could be said to be 99.9 per cent effective, there would still be a 1 in 48,000 failure rate, which means that someone would be able to access several different records using his own biometrics in order to create different identities (99.9 per cent is, by the way, beyond the realm of possibility).
Are ID cards going to stop crime? If they ever catch them, police rarely have trouble identifying suspects, only proving they're guilty. Cards won't deter criminals unless the government gives police stop and search powers and, again, for this to be effective the card would have to be mandatory. And even still, the police already have the power to stop and question someone if they have reasonable suspicion they're about to commit a crime. So it is difficult to see what difference ID cards would make, unless the criminal kindly leaves his propped up on the mantlepiece after stealing your DVD player.
Then of course there is the question of viability. Can we really trust the government to deliver such a high-risk centralised database? The ID system would require data to be permanently accessible from a wide range of public and private locations, which would mean building one of the most complex computer systems on the planet. The government's own Information Commissioner says it is 'unecessary', and the UK Computer Research Committee has expressed 'deep scepticism about the Home Office's ability to specify, procure and implement a national software intensive system on the scale that would be necessary'. Let's not forget the Home Office's record on IT is hardly perfect - recent failures include the tax credits benefits system - and it is a fact universally acknowledged that hackers can access pretty much anything they want to these days. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the European Commission has expressed doubts about the storage of such secure information on a central database due to the 'risk of data misuse', which is why Germany is sensibly introducing a passport with facial biometrics and fingerprints - but not on a central database.
What about the costs? Who is going to fund libraries, banks and hospital emergency services for the card reading machines to be installed? Quite apart from the expense of each individual card, that money will obviously have to come from the taxpayer. No one can say how much the cards will cost, and the government dismisses the LSE's calculation of anything up to £15 billion for the whole system, but then the government never is too reliable about the costs of such projects. It said that the criminal court computer system would cost £150 million, but that ended up costing £400 million, and it said that moving GCHQ's computers to another building would cost £20 million, and that ended up being closer to £450 million. The cost of the scheme will be phenomenal, and what's spent on ID cards cannot be spent on anything else. Money would be better used to provide thousands of extra police officers and invest in courts, prisons and rehabilitation centres that would provide genuine security for the citizens of this country.
This risks becoming the lastest security failure, a multi-billion pound blunder, and what will we get out of it? Check your Orwell.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 01:21 AM | Comments (5)