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August 30, 2005
Failing to achieve
Best ever A-level and GCSE results yet another year running. The Opposition points to grade devaluation, the Government to ever-brighter pupils and improved teaching. Meanwhile in schools, indignant heads assure us that pupils and teachers simply ‘worked really hard’. So what’s the real score?
Thinking back to the last preoccupation in education, classroom behaviour, its not then surprising when independent research tells us that standards haven’t in fact improved. Yet independent research also indicates that exam papers haven’t actually got much easier either. Strictly speaking therefore, something has improved: pupils are considerably better at exam performance, and their teachers better at exam preparation. It’s little wonder then that schools feel indignant - pupils and teachers have worked hard, doing exactly what the DfES told them to.
The trouble is, statistical progress of this sort doesn’t constitute educational progress. In a system where teaching and learning are driven by test outcomes, educational aims have become distorted. The rot first set in when so-called ‘norm’ referencing was replaced with ‘criterion’ referencing as GCSEs replaced O-levels. The new system meant that the top grade was no longer reserved for those pupils in the nation’s top percentile. In the criterion marking scheme, you now needed only to satisfy the set criteria. For a Government fixated on proving itself through the achievement of education targets, criterion testing can be heavily exploited. The Government sets the DfES test targets which are then passed onto schools to be artificially achieved through spoon-feeding. Teaching is now about advising pupils how to best navigate through exam papers in order to pick up maximum points. And with league tables the markers of success, everyone involved is motivated to play the game.
Thus all-importantly, the greater number of A-grades does not amount to the same as an exceptional generation of better scientists and mathematicians. Rather, higher results signify the sapping of pupil and teacher creativity, and most likely lower standards of education. The bottom line is that schools are failing pupils in order to make them achieve the necessary grades. Our children are losing out on real learning, and our teachers are becoming robotic. Now we know just how good both parties are at following instructions, let’s give them some that are educationally worthwhile.
Anastasia de Waal
Posted by Robert Whelan at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2005
Why it is in the Wrong Spirit that the Government is Encouraging the Nation to Drown Its Sorrows
Last month, according to a report in today’s Times, saw a massive increase in muggings on the streets of London and of such suburbs as have loaned it uniformed police officers to help patrol its public transport system in wake of the heightened security concerns triggered by the terror bombings at the start of that month there.
The threat of further terror strikes in the capital has not abated. Indeed, if anything it has intensified and shows no signs of going away for the foreseeable future.
It can then hardly be the right moment for the government to be embarking on a social experiment likely to stretch police resources still further away from what should be their normal task of protecting the law-abiding against criminal predators.
However, it is on such a foolhardy course that the present government seems intent by pressing on with its plan to relax current licensing laws to allow very much longer opening times for pubs and off-licenses.
It seems intent on continuing with this course, despite severe criticism by police and judges who have said that extending hours will merely add further alcoholic fuel to the already raging fires of drunken violence that nightly turn our city centres into no-go areas, save for all intent on taking part in what seems to have become the new national past-time for Britain’s young of binge drinking.
In a piece of insane reasoning worthy of a character from Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the government justifies its policy by claiming that, by keeping pubs open for longer, urgency will be removed from drinkers to get down a few before closing time. It claims the current fast-track to drunken disorderliness will make way for a gracious meandering lane to quiet inebriation apparently the fashion on the continent where extended open hours are said to encourage less frantic alcohol consumption.
It would be interesting to know upon exactly what evidence, if any, the government bases its surmise that, by extending British opening hours, it will reduce drunkenness.
The notion that it is likely to do any such thing seemingly flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary provided by the annual spectacle of young British holiday makers in Europe displaying their legendary propensity for getting drunk. They seem unmoved by Europe’s longer opening hours to moderate their native approach towards drinking which may best be described as drink-as-much-as-you-can-as-fast-as-you-can-and–then-knock-over-everything- in-sight-that-moves-until-you-pass-out-in-a-drunken-stupor.
The general short-sightedness and complete lack of intelligence displayed by the present government’s approach towards dealing with social problems, or at least those it considers such, of which its approach towards the problem of binge-drinking is but an instance, is never better illustrated than by the findings released this week by the Office of National Statistics on social inequality which reveal how little progress the government has made since 1997 in its multifarious efforts to close the gap between rich and poor. Despite all its initiatives and special measures since gaining office to reduce inequality, it turns out it has had next to no effect in achieving that goal.
The principal reason it has failed to do so is something on which it chooses not to dwell. Setting aside the special problem posed by endogenously generated radical Islamism among Britain’s disaffected young Muslims which has an entirely different and peculiar cause, what primarily lies behind practically all of Britain’s present current social problems, from binge-drinking, through anti-social behaviour to relative deprivation, is the collapse of the two parent family. For this collapse has left large numbers of young males, especially those from the lowest social classes where single parent families are most frequently found, inadequately socialised and unmoored by claims of familial responsibilities.
The government refuses to address this problem – or even to acknowledge that it really is one, let alone how much of a principal cause it is of all those that it does identify as such.
If we stand back and ask what must be done to put the genie of deracinated, demoralised, out of control drunken, violent and disorderly British young males back in the bottle of domestic responsibility, the search for an answer must surely take us back, beyond the 1960’s radical feminism that did so much to undermine the family and to inform present social policy of new-Labour, to a much deeper cause.
This cause of the nations's woes is the current virtual absence among all classes, but especially so among elites, of any believed purpose in life of the sort formerly provided by and through participation within some organised religion, principally here, Christianity.
A restoration of regular national church attendance and its associated way of life, of which belief in the sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage formed an integral part, would certainly do much to quell practically all of today’s acute social problems. This is so, especially if such a life-style were to be sincerely adopted by teachers and others who like teachers set an example and exert a profound moral influence upon young people.
But is such a sea change in British public and private life necessary to achieve this desired result? And, if it isn’t strictly necessary, is it preferable to any equally as effective secular alternative way to provide people, especially the young, with a personally and socially benign sense of purpose in life?
The present government is seemingly seeking to restore such purpose, especially among the young, by encouraging socially beneficial forms of voluntary activity. Whilst no doubt vastly preferable to anti-social behaviour, all such activity can in itself do for those who engage in it is occupy their time constructively. It would leave them bereft of any purpose were, admittedly per impossible, they successful in fixing all social problems. Fixing what is wrong in life can hardly be an adequate purpose for it!
In the absence of any promising secular alternative, short of once again being plunged into total war against a totalitarian enemy bent on the nation’s destruction, a prospect not to be ruled out at prensent but neither one devoutly to be wished for, it would seem organised religion holds the field alone as able to provide such a benign sense of purpose.
Despite whatever reservations anyone might rightly have about the left-leaning former prelate’s grasp of micro-economics, William Temple seemed to have been spot on when, in his Presidential Address to the York Diocesan Conference in June 1929, he remarked that ‘the need of the world now is not more liberty for the exercise of men’s various faculties, but some purpose in life which may give significance and harmony to the enjoyment of that liberty’.
He seems no less correct in having supposed, at least for those Englishmen and women not members of another faith that such a purpose could only be supplied by the Christian religion.
We tend today to think the current problems of crime, drunkenness and disorderliness among young people, that I have claimed indirectly but inextricably connected with the collapse of the two-parent family, are of only fairly recent provenance. But there is evidence that all of them began to appear simultaneously well before the 1960’s and then, as now, arose from people's lack of any benign sense of purpose in their lives, such as attachment to some genuine historic world-religion would have provided them.
Consider the results of a survey of the ethical views and leisure-habits of 1,000 randomly sampled York residents carried out by Seebom Rowntree towards the end of Labour’s first period of office, published in 1951 in a book entitled English Life and Leisure.
Rowntree’s findings were summarised by the American conservative writer, Russell Kirk, in an article he wrote at the time when he in England on a Guggenheim scholarship to study British society. Kirk summarises Rowntree’s 1951 findings so:
‘Physical poverty is virtually extinguished in York; but the moral condition of the new welfare-society that has replaced poverty is a dreadful thing… The conduct confessed and the convictions expressed … are … of a population among whom thirty per cent of the babies are conceived out of wedlock, of whom only ten per cent go to church, who spend twice as much on drink and tobacco as upon rents and property-taxes, whose acquisitive habits make it impractical to put towels in public lavatories, whose Sunday reading is the rape and seduction items in the News of the World… These case histories are the record of people cut off from tradition, social sympathy, and the hope of posterity, wretched social insects caught in the trap of self, men and women bored with pleasure, bored with people, bored with life, trying to forget through a few pints or a ticket in a football poll the drab futility of existence.’
Does that sound familiar?
Kirk rightly traces the descent of so many post-war residents of York into ennui, and beyond that into the false and short-lived comforts of the bottle, to the decline of religion in English national life, of which decline he claims the causes to be multifarious. One prime cause Kirk identifies is the deterioration in the calibre of those entering the church brought on by inadequate stipends caused by the cost of funding the levelling policies championed by the likes of Seebohm Rowntree and other supporters of the Atlee government.
Be that as it may, Kirk contrasted with the bored and anomic residents of post-war York the medieval craftsman and guildsmen who helped to construct and decorate York cathedral. His words have profound contemporary relevance in connection with what lies at the root of so many of the country’s current social problems. Kirk wrote:
‘The guildsmen were not bored, because they had hope and consolation bound up with their ordinary endeavours. But the modern workmen are bored, because their work itself, for the most part, is mere routine, and because that work is only part of the production-consumption equation…. Life with principle, work with purpose: political liberality is no substitute for these… [M]ere additional does of “social planning” …can[not] preserve or restore man’s higher nature….
‘We must … look beyond humanitarian sociology, if this society of ours is to endure: looking toward a mundane future nobler in aspiration, yes, but also towards the towers of York Minster.’
In our present pluralistic, largely secular society, it might seem beyond the remit of legitimate government concern for it to have any regard to consideration of what possible social benefit might accrue from a restoration in popularity of organised religion in English national life.
I, for one, do not see how that can possibly be so. Increasingly, it seems to me it is on matters to do with culture, not gross with national product or its equitable distribution, that the fate and future happiness of the nation turns. In connection with such matters, the potential role religion might be able to play in national renewal seems to me absolutely pivotal.
Spirit might well then be the answer to the country’s present ills, but not the sort the government currently seems hell-bent on forcing down the nation’s throat.
One feels like calling out to it: 'Time gentlemen, and ladies, please -- to come round to your collective senses and to reconsider what still further furies you are, albeit unintentionally, about to unleash upon the hapless and long-suffering British public! Time, ladies and gentleman, please!'
Posted by David Conway at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2005
They cost a lot, but are they working?
Lord Adonis' City Academies continue to cause controversy. The Telegraph is ambivalent on principle, since they are really a rightwing thing, but has repeatedly pointed out that for the amount of money being spent the returns are remarkably mixed. As the for the Guardian, since the idea of using the private sector to bolster the shortfalls in the public sector is automatically to be regarded as a bad one, the government's experiment is a betrayal as well as a failure. What with the widespread acceptance of the academic failure of comprehensives and the admission by the likes of Baronness Warnock that was inclusion was a mistake, the Labour project's day are numbered. The New Labour project is hardly faring better - patchy semi-selection in the form of specialist schools, catchment (i.e. income) selection in comprehensive schools and then of course these dubious academies. Type 'City Academy' into the search engines on any of the newspaper websites and you'll find a plethora of material, but here are two notable columns, one from the Telegraph, the other from the Guardian. It is patently clear that if Blair is to achieve his number one objective in office - and let's face it, it's looking a bit late now - he's going to need far better education, education, education.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 09:36 AM | Comments (1)
August 11, 2005
The Angelic Musings of Salman Rushdie
Having been subjected to a fatwah that called for his death for blaspheming against God and insulting the man Muslims consider His supreme prophet, few besides Salman Rushdie can be considered better qualified or to have more of a right to call on Muslims to modernise their outlook.
Such a call is precisely what Mr Rushdie makes in an article in today’s Times, entitled, ‘Muslims unite! A new Reformation will bring your faith into the modern era’.
Amidst all the various flim-flam this week about how the anger of young alienated British Muslims might be abated by re-branding them British Asians or Asian British, Mr Rushdie goes to the heart of the problem when he writes:
‘It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it….
‘However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence within Islam that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse all but impossible….
‘The traditionalists’ refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the 7th century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st.’
Amen, to that, brother!
Assuming what Mr Rushdie asserts here is spot on -- as I certainly do, it follows Mr Rushdie is no less right in drawing attention to how ineffective the government's present reliance on ‘traditional, but essentially orthodox, Muslims’ is likely to prove in helping to quell Islamist radicalism, unless they too publicly affirm the need for their religion to modernise itself in the way in which he calls for.
Earlier this year, doubtless through the offices of the Prime Minister, a knighthood was bestowed on Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, for his work in helping to promote good inter-faith relations in Britain.
In his article, Mr Rushdie reminds readers this is the man who, as recently as January of this year, denied Muslims could be terrorists, saying that he expected use of the expression ‘Islamic terrorist’ to become an offence after the proposed law proscribing incitement to religious hatred comes into effect.
Mr Rushdie further reminds readers this is also a man who, in 1989, said of him in relation to the fatwah just issued against him, ‘death is perhaps too easy’.
Iqbal Sacranie – whoops, sorry, Sir Iqbal - readers of the Times are elsewhere reminded in today's issue, is also someone who last year responded to concerns the paper had raised about what was being taught to prospective British imams at a training college in Wales, whose course was then validated by the University of Wales, by accusing the paper of engaging in a witch-hunt against what he described as being a ‘credible and established institution’.
The curriculum of the parent body of this training college, whose course the Times reprts today has had its validation withdrawn by the University of Wales, is one devised by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a great Muslim progressive according to the well-known authority on Islam, Ken Livingstone, whose teachings -- that is, al-Qaradawi’s, not Livingstone's -- include the legitimacy of wife-beating and the slaughter of homosexuals, apostates, and all Israelis.
Reliance by the government on ‘moderate’ Muslims of the likes of the head of the Muslim Council is unlikely to prove the way in which to curb Islamic fanaticism, given such ‘moderation’ as his.
Nor will simply requiring Imams wishing to preach at British mosques to speak in English be enough to stem the growing tide of alienation and hatred of Britain, and of much else too, to which young British Muslims are all too easily exposed today, not simply at their local mosques, but, often and far more commonly, through the inter-net or on videos – and all conveniently in the vernacular!
One thing is absolutely certain. Giving orthodox Muslims the power to prevent their religious texts being exposed to the kind of criticism for which Mr Rushdie is calling, through their being able to claim any such criticism an incitement to religious hatred, is the very reverse of what is needed.
What, then, is?
I am tempted to say that it should become mandatory for all British citizens, by the time they have completed their secondary education, to have been obliged to study and been examined in a course about religion in the modern world which would require them to become familiar with the very approach towards religious texts for which Mr Rushdie is calling in the case of Islam.
Control of marking of any such examinations would, of course, be in the hands of those qualified to teach and examine them -- an ideal way, we might think, in which to keep any idle theology and philosophy graduates fully occupied!
If it is protested that imposing any such requirement would be a gross intrusion into freedom of thought and expression, I would reply by citing in its support the words of that well-known apostle of liberty, John Stuart Mill, who, in his famous essay, ‘On Liberty’, proposed something not at all dissimilar, although, for purely pragmatic reasons that are no longer applicable reasons, he stopped short of calling for it to be made compulsory.
This is what Mill wrote on the subject:
‘The instrument for enforcing the law [requiring all children to receive an education] could be no other than public examinations, extending to all children, and beginning at an early age. An age might be fixed at which every child must be examined, to ascertain of he (or she) is able to read. If a child proves unable, the father [or, today, as likely, mother?!], unless [s]he has some sufficient ground of excuse, might be subjected to a moderate fine, … and the child to be put to school at his [or her] expense. Once in every year the examination should be renewed, so as to make the universal acquisition, and what is more, retention, of a certain minimum of general knowledge virtually compulsory.’
Although, Mill would have exempted such a course about religion as I am proposing from being compulsory, he would not have done so, I think, because he considered that it would be dealing with too contentious a subject. Rather, he exempted it from inclusion as part of the compulsory curriculum for more pragmatic reasons. For all that, in the passage quoted above, he stipulates as needing to be taught is what he considers it to be necessary for children to be taught in their compulsory elementary schooling.
Mill does go on to propose a system of voluntary examinations for higher or secondary schooling, which Mill would have allowed at the time to be voluntary, for passing which children would receive a certificate.
Now, in such secondary schooling, despite attendance being voluntary, Mill did seek to include precisely such a course as I am proposing. Mill wrote:
‘To prevent the State from exercising, through these arrangements, an improper influence over opinion, the knowledge required for passing an examination (beyond the merely instrumental parts of knowledge, such as languages and their use) should, even in the higher classes of examinations, be confined to facts and positive science exclusively. The examinations on religion, politics, or other disputed topics, should not turn on the truth or falsehood of opinions, but on the matter of fact that such and such an opinion is held, on such grounds, by such authors, or schools, or churches. Under this system, the rising generation would be brought up either churchmen or dissenters as they now are, the State merely talking that care that they should be instructed churchmen and instructed dissenters. There would be nothing to hinder them from being taught religion, if their parents chose, at the same schools, where they were taught these other things.’
Mill made these proposals in 1859, twenty years or so before education became compulsory in Britain, at a time when the country could not have afforded to prolong universal compulsory schooling beyond the elementary level. Given how much more affluent the country has since become, plus the fact that compulsory education has now been seen fit to be extended to sixteen, there is no reason why the kind of purely informative course about religion I am proposing, that would acquaint British Muslim schoolchildren with the approach towards their religious texts for which Mr Rushdie is calling, and to which Mill took no principled exception, should not now be deemed a necessary part of the general knowledge that every British citizen should be expected to have acquired before leaving.
If certain present faith schools should find themselves unequipped to provide such tuition from their existent staff, then it would and should be the responsibility of the State to make such trained staff available to them, and to make acceptance of such staff and such tuition in them a condition of their receiving license to operate.
This would surely be a promising way of beginning to address the problem to which Mr Rushdie draws attention in his article.
The State needs, for all our sakes, to begin to grasp this particular nettle, however, painful it might initially be for it to do so. The alternative is to allow the weed of religious hate, intolerance, and violence to grow here to unmanageable proportions.
Posted by David Conway at 11:53 AM | Comments (1)
August 10, 2005
24-Hour Party People
Frankly, I can’t wait for 24-hour drinking. It’s going to be hilarious. Quite apart from pubs packed to the rafters at three in the morning with insomniacs who’ve come down for a nightcap, and bedraggled nymphs who’ve tumbled out of clubs looking for a quick eighteen pints of lager before going to bed, we’re going to be treated to a round-the-clock version of those most contemporary of spectator sports – chav fighting and oik baiting. As the BBC reports today, the Council of Circuit Judges, responding to a Government consultation document, Drinking Responsibly, has warned that with the relaxed licensing laws that there will be ‘an inevitable explosion in alcohol-fuelled violence’. Certainly anyone who thinks that longer drinking hours in Britain will turn us into svelte continentals, eating bouillabaisse late into the evening with a glass of montepulciano had better think again. Or even better, think Faliraki.
In an appendix to the submission by the Council of Circuit Judges, one judge described how excessive drinking turned Brits into ‘savages, angry, blind and brutal’. Why are we like this? Well, for a start, we’ve never been any good with the grog – Chaucer and Hogarth testify to that – even if things have been getting markedly worse. And to be fair, there’s no point idealising the rest of Europe – the Italians have their own hooligan problem, and the Germans have never been too averse to a bout of fisticuffs after a drink or ten – but we remain the ultimate alcohol twits.
Booze is one of Britain’s great antisocial social problems. Perhaps it’s our weather (it seems there’s nothing like a bottle of whisky when you’re feeling dour and depressed), perhaps it’s our working patterns (nothing like a barrel of beer when you’re feeling overstressed), perhaps it’s our uptight manners (nothing like a few pints of personality if you want to be the coolest man in the bar), perhaps it’s our over-regulated, sanitised way of life (nothing like a night on the town to make you feel beyond the law), perhaps it’s our welfare state (nothing better for a cretinous thug to do than get sloshed and fight), but whatever it is, it has its roots deep in our culture.
It has to be a concern, then, that the government's response is to tweak the licensing laws. Particularly suspicious is the administration's habit of giving with one hand and taking away with the other, in this instance liberalising the drinking laws and introducing on the spot fines for those who drink too liberally. Either it's a stealth alcohol tax or an act of gross ineptitude. Surely the focus should be on attitudinal change - on education and propaganda campaigns. Of course, it’s possible that the government is taking the right course of action – the policy equivalent of steering into the skid when you loose control at the wheel. But the fact is that even if this is the right course of action, and in two generations we all end up more mature, we will, in the meantime, have to put up with fifty years of total mayhem. If the fabric of society becomes any more threadbare and unwoven than it already is, no future government will uphold the law changes.
So let me qualify my opening paragraph: it’ll be hilarious if, fleeing from militant Muslims, drunks and Hazel Blears, you find yourself in some remote corner of the planet with a satellite dish and a television. Sit back and enjoy the show.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:23 PM | Comments (10)
August 03, 2005
Don't mention the war
Having argued here before that we should shut up the radicals and repress their materials, I now have to admit that I’ve changed my mind. If we call ourselves a free and open society then we cannot react to the violence and the threat of more violence from Islamists by censoring the opinions of their coreligionists. To shut down Islamic bookshops selling literature that advocates extremism is inconsistent, unless it is proposed that anything with unpalatable views – think BNP pamphlets or Mein Kampf – is also banned. Added to which, as The Economist leader points out this week, such material would simply end up on the internet, making surveillance even harder, and it’s also worth remembering - think The Satanic Verses - that censorship is fastest way to create a bestseller.
It is, furthermore, hypocritical to oppose the Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill on the grounds of its limitation of freedom of speech without realising that such a law is tantamount to what we are asking be imposed on the Muslim community. We should repeal the blasphemy laws, block the religious hatred law, enforce current laws, such as the incitement to racial hatred (if the BNP could be indicted under this in 2001 for their abuse of Muslims, then Hitzb-ut-Tahrir could be tried under this now), admit intercept evidence in court, and bring in the law for acts preparatory to terrorism.
The danger is that we respond to attack by being reactionary. If we are, as we say of ourselves all the time, tolerant, stoical in the midst of a crisis, and so on, then we must show that we are now. At least in part, how we define the current crisis effects how we decide to confront it, and allowing debate, rather than stifling it, is the best hope we have of finding a way through in the long-term.
It is, firstly, inadequate to dismiss suicide bombers by pretending they can’t be dignified with being called anything other than psychopaths. Psychopaths don’t receive a heroes’ welcome, but thousands of people attended the funeral in of Shehzad Tanweer Pakistan, one of the ‘martyrs’ who blew themselves up on July 7.
Secondly, and connectedly, it’s dishonest to talk in terms of the incompatibility of Islam and violence (The Guardian line, for instance, of publicly endorsing the views of Hitzb-ut-Tahrir by employing one of their number as a commentator) since the defence of suicide bombing is widespread. The radicalisation of mainstream Islam, perhaps since the spread of Wahabism, and the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood, certainly since the Iranian Revolution, is more pervasive than people like to think. This was recently attested when Muslim Weekly, Britain’s biggest selling Muslim newspaper, published Abid Ullah Jan’s, ‘Islam, Faith and Power’ on July 8. The editors clearly knew his views would be well received – including his defence of warfare, jihad, for the expansion of an Islamic state across the world, subject to the kind of severe shari’a law enforced in Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Thirdly, however, on the contrary, it is wrong to treat this as a war. Or rather, it is possible to prevent this becoming a war. Much as evangelicals (the kind who read the metaphor of the armour of God at the end of Ephesians in literal terms) and neocons (Mark Steyn’s article in The Spectator this week concludes, ‘If it’s a war, you can win it. Anything less is unlikely to end in victory.’) are keen on their gung-ho adrenaline, it will only make things worse to react as if this is a war of simple opposites, a clash of civilisations. And this isn’t just because polarisation plays into the terrorists’ hands.
But if it looks like a war of sorts, why shouldn’t we define it as all out war and react accordingly? Quite apart from the fact that the Iraq war should remind us that effects (it obviously wasn’t the beginning of suicide bombing) can also become causes (it has been a recruiting sergeant), making worse what’s already bad, a war forces people who would otherwise intelligently mediate to take sides. After the furore in The Sun about Tariq Ramadan, the supposedly ‘extremist’ cleric, it now turns out that he's an important moderate. On the Today programme last week he categorically condemned all forms of suicide bombing anywhere in the world, including Palestine, which is further than the Muslim Council of Britain will go. On Sunday he rightly observed that targeting people like him would convince other moderates of the intolerance of the West. Similarly, we need to listen to the likes of Prince Hassan of Jordan (who says in The Spectator this week that ‘[w]e must acknowledge that the terrorists are products of Islamic history. Only by recognising this brutal fact will we realise that the fight against terrorism is also an internal Muslim struggle’). But if the battle lines get drawn, important debates will go by the wayside. Don’t be fooled: we are in this for the long haul. But it is a struggle, not a war.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:40 PM | Comments (1)