Civitas

June 22, 2006

How To Avoid A Bad Guilt-Trip: Just Say ‘Know’

Next year marks the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. In many ways, this anniversary would form a fitting occasion for a national day of celebration, a rallying point to foster social cohesion as well appreciation of this country’s glorious role in the past as a harbinger of liberty around the globe.

In our present-day victim culture, however it would seems, no one in this country shall be allowed to take any vicarious enjoyment or pride in this world-historic achievement of their country, without first having been made to eat a hefty slice of humble-pie for its past complicity in the practice.

A foretaste of the guilt-fest currently being planned for the country's inhabitants next year in connection with its past involvement in the African slave trade can be savoured from a report in today’s Times entitled, ‘Slaver’s descendant begs forgiveness’.

Here, it is reported that earlier this month a 37 year old youth worker from Cornwall named Andrew Hawkins, who claims direct descent from the Elizabethan slave trader with whom he shares the same surname, begged forgiveness of the Vice-President of Gambia before a crowd of 25,000 Africans assembled there for the sins that his ancestor committed in relation to that practice. The latter-day Hawkins did so, apparently, along with a score of colleagues of his from a UK Christian charity named ‘Lifeline’ which had organised the trip.

To accentuate their contrition, so it is reported, Mr Hawkins and his colleagues had before the ceremony shackled themselves in chains similar to those used by European slave traders to bind African slaves in transporting them across the Atlantic.

Apparently, the Gambian Vice-President found it in her to forgive the assembled penitents in a magnanimous gesture that Mr Hawkins found most moving. Of his forgiver, Mr Hawkins remarked, she ‘accepted the apologies very graciously. She offered her forgiveness and then came forward and took the chains off. That was entirely impromptu and very moving.’

Concerning the value of his trip more generally, Mr Hawkins was no less impressed, being reported to have said:

‘It was one of the most memorable things I have ever done. You see just how deep are the wounds left by the slave trade really are. As someone with family links to the slave traders it was a very difficult thing to see the consequences of their actions.’

The report adds ominously that Mr Hawkins believes not enough is taught in Britain about its complicity in the slave trade and about the effect its complicity in that trade has had on Africa. So, next year, it is reported, he and his colleagues plan to walk from London to all the major slaving ports in the country.

What the Times report about next year's planned walk omits to mention is that Mr Hawkins and his fellow guilt-ridden colleagues from Lifeline plan to make it in chains. As the charity’s website explains about next year's planned walk:

‘A dramatic feature of the walk will be the slave coffle itself... [that is] walking as a group in yokes and chains. This symbolic action has been taking place under the name of the Lifeline Expedition in recent years. The expedition is a series of reconciliation journeys, which constitute a response to the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade… A frequent reaction of Africans of the Diaspora was "At last! Now we feel that white people are taking our story seriously. Thank-you - but so much more needs to be done."

'White people walking in an attitude of humility in the slave coffle … would surely be more appropriate than any sort of triumphalist commemoration [of the abolition of the slave trade]. It would certainly be in keeping with the attitude of William Wilberforce who once said: "I mean to take the shame upon myself, in common indeed with the whole Parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried under their authority. We are all guilty - we ought all to plead guilty."’

So, now we in Britain know that we are not to be allowed to take any pride in our country’s lead in abolisheing this dastardly trade without first having been required to feel guilty for its earlier complicity in it.

But who the hell shouldn’t be required to feel guilt by that token? And what right have present-day Africans to forgive present-day Europeans for the complicity of their ancestors in this trade, when their own ancestors in Africa had been no less complicit in the practice? More to the point, what right have present-day Africans to demand more contrition from the British for past complicity of their ancestors in this trade, when so many parts of Africa remain riddled with the trade today?

Surely, rather than seeking to make whitey contrite for their forefathers’ role in the slave trade, present day Africans of the Diaspora should be more concerned about seeing the slave trade stamped out in the many parts of the African sub-continent in which it apparently still flourishes?

Tucked way on page 2 of today’s Times is a brief news report to the effect that a national police drive against human trafficking has discovered ‘a dozen girls, aged from 12 to 17 and mainly from countries such as Sierra Leonne and Ghana ..… [who have] been brought to Britain as sex slaves and …found on the streets discarded because they were pregnant.’ The report goes on to claim that as many as 8,000 such girls are working in brothels in Britain against their will.

A news report posted on the BBC News website in 2001 entitled ‘Africa’s trade in children’ gives some indication of the scale of the present-day slave trade in African children. It suggests that, whether they be British descendants of John Hawkins or present-day Diasporan Africans, all who profess any concern about this abominable practice have much better objects of their attention than the British public in general. The report states:

‘When war disrupts rural economies, children are forced onto the streets; In Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where 10-year olds are sexually exploited at military bases.

‘In Luanda, ‘catorzinhas’ – 14-year-olds – are now fashionable playthings.

‘Even in peaceful regions, children are shipped t work as prostitutes n cities such as Douala, Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Libreville, and Abidjan.

‘Young Zairois are sold across the River Congo.

‘ The trade is growing in Cape town and Durban, and there are now thought to be more than 70,000 child prostitutes in Zambia.

‘ In Sierra Leone, child trafficking is largely in the hands of the Lebanese.

‘ The traffic is now growing from Africa to Europe and is treated almost like any other business transaction.’

Lest it be replied that the present-day complicity in slavery in many parts of parts of Africa is the legacy of past European involvement there in that trade, it is worth noting that, by the time the first European voyages to that continent took place, slavery and trading in slaves was already rife throughout Africa, as it was in many other parts of the world with the notable exception of England.

Indeed, according to the entry on the African slave trade in the web-based encyclopedia Wikpedia, it was slave traders in Africa who first introduced to the initial voyagers there from Europe the idea of using African slaves in European colonies in the Americas. As the Wikpedia entry puts it:

‘The idea of using black people from sub-Saharan Africa as slaves initially came from the existing Arabian and Persian slave trade along East Africa which Portugese sailors came into contact with in the fifteenth century. The Europeans had also noted the West African practice of enslaving prisoners of war.’

Moreover, so the article point out, Africans were not always the losers in this trade. It speaks of ‘the massive wealth black Africans were making from selling their own enslaved people to … Europeans.’

So who, then, owes an apology to whom as regards the slave trade?

Does Andrew Hawkins owe the Vice President of Gambia an apology for what his ancestor did to hers?

Or does she owe Mr Hawkins one for what one of her ancestors may have done to entice one of Mr Hawkins' ancestors into participating in this appalling practice?

Or, as I prefer to see the matter, does neither owe either any form of apology?

And, irrespective of who it might be who deserves to apologise to whom for the sins of slavery in the past, wouldn’t the time of everyone who is in any way concerned about African slavery be spent far better in considering how best that continent may be rid of this vile, but still very much alive, barbaric practice, rather than in laying bad -- because undeserved -- guilt-trips on innocent third parties who have much better cause to celebrate the part that their country took in helping to stamp out this practice than they have to feel bad that, like practically every other, their country once took part in it?

Posted by David Conway at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2006

Messing around with childplay

The former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Lord Herman Ouseley, and Jane Lane, a nursery education expert, are recommending that nursery teachers ‘help children unlearn racist attitudes’. In an article appearing in the journal Race Equality Teaching, Ouseley and Herman argue that nursery staff should look out for child play where there are signs of racial or cultural prejudice.

The proposals have met a frosty reception from educators and commentators alike. A spokeswoman from the National Confederation of Parent Teachers Association argued that children of this age do not note differences in skin colour, whilst early years carers are arguing that it is already common practice for nurseries to promote integration.

Making an issue out of race at an age as early as three years old is at best going to be futile in combating racism in our society and at worst generate problems where they don’t exist. Young children are naturally curious and so probably do, at least in passing, notice difference; but when they do it is something which is interesting, not something which is an issue. Moreover whilst children may not be astute to prejudice at three, they are astute to coercion. Having their playmates carefully picked thus not only risks displacing innocence with labels, it risks making what could be natural integration a chore. We need to teach children to be open-minded, Ouseley and Lane are telling us. This is exactly what children are and imposing the narrow-mindedness of adults on them would be highly misguided.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 06:37 PM | Comments (3)

January 05, 2006

Where Will a Woman’s Place Be Two Centuries From Now?

According to a report in today’s Times, almost twenty percent of women who gave birth to a child in Britain in 2004 were themselves born somewhere else than the UK.

Of the babies born in 2004 to such mothers, almost two thirds of their fathers had been born elsewhere than the UK.

In the case of some British cities, the number of births that occurred in them in 2004 to mothers not themselves born in Britain almost exceeds births in them that year to mothers who had been.

The percentage of births in British cities in 2004 to mothers who had not themselves been born in Britain is as follows: London – 49%; Slough – 48%, Luton – 44%, Leicester – 38%, Cambridge - 36%, Birmingham – 34%.

Of the women not born in Britain who in 2004 bore a child in Britain, 27 % came from the Indian sub-continent and 13% from Africa, parts of the world not noted for being in the vanguard of sexual equality, especially in occupations to which the attach the greatest prestige, income and political power. The traditional societies in these regions tend to be distinctly patriarchal in character.

These facts suggest that, quite apart from any other reasons, the suggestion made by the Equal Opportunities Commission in its just-released annual sex and power survey that it might take as many as 200 years before women enjoy as much power as men do in Britain could well be overly optimistic. Indeed, given cultural inertia, and the changing demography of Britain, the balance of power between the two sexes could well in future start to tilt further in the opposite direction with more and more patriarchy.

It looks as if the sorority who run the Equal Opportunities Commission have a lot of consciousness-raising to do before their ‘sisters’ will want to take up the reserved quota of positions in boardroom and parliament for their gender that the Commission wants guaranteed them in the name of equity.

But what makes whoever works in the Equal Opportunities Commission so sure that women whose families have come in recent times from countries with such very different forms of life to Britain’s will either want, or benefit from coming to want and then being granted opportunity, to participate at the top as the Commission wants them to have?

Granted many or even most of them will have come here because they believe their opportunities and prospects here are better than in their countries of origin. However, they will as a rule, surely, have calculated those prospects and opportunities in terms of their conception of their traditional roles, as wives, mothers, and home-makers, not as company directors and cabinet ministers.

I can only think that what drives the Equal Opportunities Commission to call for equal representation of women in all top positions is aspirations of their own to occupy such positions themselves, and a belief they will be unable to succeed other than by persuading men they should be granted them on grounds of gender-equity rather than on the basis of any other consideration.

Yet, since women with similar aspirations to theirs are liable to constitute a steadily diminishing proportion of the overall number of British women in future, assuming current demographic trends continue, so will the demand and need for thier gender having such large representation in top positions also correspondingly diminish.

Indeed, one can imagine the day when British women might come to look on such aspirations for members of their gender as those currently harboured for them by the Equal Opportunities Commission as positively oppressive to members of their gender.

Much needs radical re-thinking in light of Britain’s changed demography, not least the future place and role of women in this country.

Posted by David Conway at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2005

Multiculti sense

Dr John Sentamu, the incoming Archbishop of York and second most senior churchman in the Anglican communion, has launched a swingeing attack on multiculturalism. According to yesterday's Times, he has argued that multiculturalism is a doctrine which allows minority cultures to express themselves but is hostile to the majority host culture. It is in this way, for example, that England has become ashamed of its Empire and of its Christian heritage, wrongly in his opinion. As Britain's first black archbishop his words have particular heft and, following as they do his involvement in the Macpherson Inquiry, which introduced the notion of institutional racism, they represent something of a Damascus moment. Like the leader writer in the Times, I wholeheartedly agree with, and am encouraged by, his perhaps controversial statements. Anyone out there disagree? How can you disagree?

Posted by Nick Seddon at 09:16 AM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2005

The middle ground

In Shakespeare’s severely underrated tragedy, Timon of Athens, Timon is told: ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest,/ but the extremity of both ends’ – a key observation considering the eponymous protagonist’s grotty end. In times characterised by Huntingdon’s clash of civilisations, between the extremes of ‘West’ and ‘Islamism’, this warning about extremities is disturbingly pertinent. But there is another pair of extremities, too, within the ‘West’, which is a cause for concern, namely a clash between the liberal ideals of assimilation and the celebration of difference. In the national media during the last couple of weeks we have witnessed an even greater glut of material on the subject of race relations than normal. Largely, of course, this has been provoked by the crisis in France, a crisis that challenges the republican model of assimilation and demands a reconsideration of that particular notion of laissez faire race relations within an ethnically heterogeneous old world state. We can now see that while at one pole the multiculturalist model is deeply flawed, because it formalises separatism and introduces what Trevor Phillips has called ‘have a nice day racism’, at the other pole the French assimilationist model fails because it relies on an illusion.

In yesterday’s Guardian, Vikram Dodd reported that Britain is more racially integrated than ever before, using academic research that is undermined by actual ethnic agglomerations. Isolated concentrations of ethnic groups in different cities and constituencies are not only evidenced by Census statistics, but also signalled by tensions such as those in the north of England in 2001 and, recently, in Birmingham (have these been forgotten with a promptness that could not be improved upon because they didn’t fit the white-man-as-oppressor picture?). Dodd quotes Dr Ludi Simpson, author of the research, as saying that ‘segregation does not cause social exclusion’. The overwhelming mass of evidence, from the Jim Crow laws in the US, to the findings of the government commissioned Cantle report into the 2001 troubles, to everything that has been happening on the streets of France (and you needn’t take my word for it – almost every interview with a rioter evinces some kind of complaint about being segregated) indicates that this is patently nonsense. Ghettoes promote suspicion and ignorance of other groups – and tension.

Regarding events in France, we should be careful to avoid indulging in smugness. Can anything be learned, though, from what has happened across the Channel? In yesterday’s Times David Aaronovirtch, who has often in the past been outspoken against militant wahabi-jihadi-salafi Islamism, and attacked for being so, takes issue with articles by Rod Liddle and Patrick Sookhdeo in this week’s Spectator. He makes the tiresomely obvious point that it is wrong to assume that all Muslims can be categorised as zealots, a point undermined by being exaggerated. He also observes that intelligent people are failing to use their discernment because their alarm has risen to such a state that they will blame Islam for the French riots. Well, the evidence strongly suggests that Islamists have fomented the riots, which is not, however, to claim that they are the sole cause of them. Of course much of the rioting has arisen out of resentment at poverty and exclusion among many groups. It has partly also arisen out of segregation.

Crucially, Aaronovich fails to recognise the truth in what the Spectator articles perhaps overstate. If Liddle and Sookhdeo are mildly alarmist, they are nevertheless right that separatism has been caused at least as much by immigrants of, say, the Maghreb, as by the host nation. The Muslim community in France, as in Britain, as in Holland, seeks to stay together, forming itself into Islamic enclaves – a statement that it no less true in general because there are obvious exceptions. Thus it is that in Birmingham, as in Oldham, as in Paris, as in Amsterdam, Islam has given many of the rioters a unified identity. We do not need to exaggerate the extent to which it is true to accept that we have in the last thirty years or so, and longer if you trace the genealogy of extremism to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, witnessed the radicalisation of mainstream Islam on a global scale. If we are to have any chance of avoiding doing a France, we have to prevent people doing an Oldham or a Bradford or a Birmingham again. This implies that we must recognise the danger posed by balkanised Islamic communities. We must seek, not multiculti separatism, nor conformist assimilation, but a robust acceptance of difference while demanding common ground and integration. We must seek the middle ground.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:24 PM | Comments (1)

October 26, 2005

In a twist

I love it when this government gets its knickers in a twist. Goodness knows it’s got itself tangled up in so many problems it deserves to be tripping over. The attempt to legislate virtually every aspect of public and private life is proving complicated for the classroom swat Ruth Kelly, the priggish Patricia Hewitt and the haughty Baroness Scotland. They’re not alone, but they’ll do for today. You see, Kelly’s trying to keep bossy Blair happy by doing exactly what he tells her, Hewitt’s having her pigtails tugged by that naughty Johnny Reid, and as for Baroness Scotland, she’s been pushed around in the playground of the Lords.

Kelly’s problem is that doing what Tony tells her is not popular with the rest of the class, for the bullies on the backbenches have been heckling her and saying all sorts of horrid things. I’ve complained a lot about the government’s education policy, but it’s going in vaguely the right direction by seeking to remove power from teaching unions and LEAs by creating more independent state schools (bizarrely what the Conservatives called grant maintained schools until they were abolished by New Labour, but still) and bringing private sector providers into the education market. All of which is hated by Old Labour stalwarts. And the problem is there are still too many regulations that hamper start-up schools, well, starting, despite the white paper’s talk of getting rid of red tape; catchment areas remain; and selection is still taboo. At the moment ‘independent’ is little more than rhetoric – Kelly will be crying her eyes out soon enough. I don’t usually think much of what she writes, but there was a good piece by Alice Thompson in The Times yesterday about how grammars were the best engines of social mobility. Raising people from poverty and exclusion will need something similar.

As for Hewitt, watching her troubles is nearly as satisfying as seeing the class geek get caught for smoking behind the bike sheds – only this one hates smokers. Which is why she and Johnny Reid have had such a falling out. Okay, so the health lobby have won the argument about smoking, that it’s bad for you, like drinking too much, eating too much, or extreme sports. (Incidentally, for those who go on about costs, twelve million people smoke in the UK at an estimated cost to the NHS of 1.7 billion a year; but the Treasury receives around £8 billion in tax from tobacco sales.) Many continue to smoke because it’s fun, so Reid, the Scottish bruiser, promised in the election manifesto to ban smoking in pubs that serve food but allow it elsewhere. Hewitt wants an outright ban on smoking in all public places and members clubs, which is pretty draconian. So the same government that talks about choice in education wants to deny it in public life by micromanaging behaviour. Anyway, so bad has been the tiff in the Cabinet that the Bill looks set to be shelved. Wouldn’t it be easier to control if there was, as The Times suggests, a licensing system that permits some pubs, with or without food, to be smoking establishments, meaning that customers would know in advance what kind of air they’ll be breathing?

And then there’s old Baroness Scotland and the incitement to religious hatred bill. She’s tried, oh she’s tried, and so have all her cronies in government, but this is a glorious debacle of New Labour’s own making. A backhand promise to the Muslim kids annoyed about Iraq – as if they were the only ones – has turned into a mess. Well, The Times reports today that the Lords have scuppered the bill’s chances of going through in its present ramshackle form. Baroness Scotland has promised to go away and do her homework properly this time. This government has seemed impervious to criticism about the importance of the freedom to criticise, but at last the message seems to be getting through. You promote tolerance through freedom of expression. You outlaw sticks and stones, but not words. Now it looks like the Religious Hatred Bill might not end up being an extension of the 1986 Public Order Act, but a new schedule requiring that the prosecution prove that the defendant acted with criminal intent, and adding in a provision that allows for the right to ridicule, insult or abuse religions or their adherents, and to allow proselytising. This is a good thing.

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

October 20, 2005

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

Today’s Times reports that a former communist mayor of a Sicilian town has just entered a convent of a closed order of nuns that has required her to take a vow of silence so that she may spend her remaining days in contemplation and prayer.

Only slightly less bizarre is another report in today’s Times that Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, has denied an accusation that has just been levelled against him by the Commission for Judicial Appointments, the independent watch-dog charged with scrutinising judicial appointments to ensure their fairness, that he has appointed to the bench a disproportionately large number of Oxbridge educated barristers who gained firsts.

What is so bizarre about the story is less that the Commission should consider a candidate’s class of honours and the university which awared them not a relevant consideration to any decision as to their likely suitability for some post that requres intelligence and sound judgement. It is rather the vehemence with which the Lord Chancellor apparently has denied the suggestion he was affected by such considerations in his deliberations as to whom to appoint.

The Lord Chancellor, who is reported to have read law at Cambridge, is quoted as having responded to the accusation by saying: ‘The plain implication [of it] is that I was influenced by details of which Oxbridge college they attended, and whether they obtained first class degrees. This is wrong. The candidates’ educational background played no part in the process.’

I am deeply puzzled by m’learned friend’s response and would truly welcome enlightenment from readers as to why a candidate’s degree class and from which university it was gained should be considered irrelevant in deciding their suitability for a position.

Having gained a first from Oxbridge is surely not like having been brought up in Chichester or even having been to Eton.

Surely, the Lord Chancellor should have come clean and admit he had taken into account the considerations of which he has been accused of having taken into account. Clearly, they were, at most, only one of several others of which many must surely have carried far greater weight. But, at the margin, where most appointment deciisons to highly competitive positions are made, such minor considerations can and should have their place.

Or do we now live in a world where educational qualifications are mere ‘background’ and all that matters is how badly under-represented and disadvantaged some minority group is to which a candidate belongs?

Posted by David Conway at 07:54 PM | Comments (3)

October 13, 2005

In defence of free speech

What is multiculturalism? I only ask because yesterday in the Guardian the mayor of London’s director of policing and equalities, Lee Jasper, launched into a tirade against Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, that was characteristic only for its anger and ignorance. Entitled ‘Trevor Phillips is in danger of giving succour to racists’, his ‘argument’ begins by attacking Phillips, and those like him, who have the audacity to suggest that multiculturalism intensifies segregation. Relying on a fairly faulty syllogism, he claims that all who are opposed to multiculturalism want total assimilation and are, by implication, ‘white supremacist’. To address this slur, we need to remedy an underlying deficiency in Jasper’s article, which is that he attempts no definition of multiculturalism. Since most people understand it merely as being part of a multi-ethnic society this matters greatly.

A more extensive discussion can be found in Civitas’ recent publication, by Patrick West, The Poverty of Multiculturalism, but it is a form of cultural relativism which states that all cultures are equal, while at the same time saying that British traditions and ways of life should give way to those of ethnic minorities. As Kenan Malik has pointed out, there is a difference between multiculturalism as a lived experience and multiculturalism as an enforced ideology. There is a difference between living alongside people who have different customs and outlooks, and the state forcing us all to retain these differences, using its muscle to do so – through financial aid to ethnic minorities, prioritising foreign festivals and language teaching in state schools, and so on. What in its inception was a tolerant ideal to encourage mutual understanding ends up emphasising difference and acting as an agent of separatism.

The fact that Trevor Phillips is willing to provoke a debate at a time when leftwing pieties and rightwing prejudices need to be examined and tested is to his credit, and to accuse him of giving succour to racists is risible. Yet Jasper says that Phillips’ pronouncements on the subject are ‘counterproductive and generate many of the most unapologetic headlines in the rightwing press’ – presumably he considers his own headline unsensational and conducive to rational thought. Free speech, it seems, is something the multiculturalists will only allow for themselves. No one, other than proper racists, wants homogeneity within the population. No one wants everyone to look and behave identically. Diversity is good, cultural exchange is good. But a society in which people do not share values and language is unstable. As the likes of David Goodhart have stated on a number of occasions, too much diversity jeopardises trust.

Jasper’s next bit of spite is directed at Trevor Phillips for observing that differences between Muslims and other groups in British society have more to do with culture than race. Jasper makes the illogical quantum leap: ‘the truth is that vile anti-Muslim prejudice, using the religion of a community to attempt to sideline and blame it for many of society's ills, is the cutting edge of racism in British society.’ It appears that ‘racist’ is a word you can use to attack people whose views you disagree with – rendering the term almost meaningless in its misprision. Jaspers is also appalled that Trevor Phillips could have stated at the Tory party conference that the British Empire had some upside because, he states, ‘in reality the empire was a system of subjugating hundreds of millions of black and Asian people, justified by a white supremacist ideology.’ This is staggering – and sad. Ignorance often assumes its own certainty, asserts its ‘reality’ as if there were nothing beyond it, and in the process reveals itself to be little more than a prejudice. For all the wrongs of the Empire, it spread democratic process, encouraged international trade and industry, established infrastructures still in place today, etc, etc.

Trevor Phillips deserves respect for saying that we need a robust debate and for being willing to get it going. It is just a pity that the likes of Lee Jasper would rather impose a bourgeois dictatorship of illiberal liberalism. And we’ve not even started on the reasons why multiculturalism is failing millions of ethnic minority British nationals…

Posted by Nick Seddon at 02:35 PM | Comments (3)

October 07, 2005

On the Unwisdom of Expecting More Movement from National Mountains than is Purely Natural

In recent times, and especially since the July tube bombings, many have begun openly to question the wisdom of the received policy of multiculturalism which recent critics have begun to claim does not do enough to integrate minorities, especially British Muslims.

Not so, argues Bristol University’s Professor Tariq Modood, in a recent article posted on Open Democracy in which he defends the beleaguered policy. Instead, so Professor Modood contends, the source of ‘the lack of a sense of belonging to Britain able to withstand the ideological call of jihad against fellow Britons… can be found in arguments on both the right and left [of the majority society]’.

In Professor Modood’s reckoning, therefore, the four British-born Muslims who blew up their fellow passengers had been unable to acquire a British identity as a result of right-wing ‘notions of Britishness that hold non-white people are not really British and that Muslims are an alien wedge’ and left-wing notions that hold there is ‘something deeply wrong about rallying round the idea of Britain, … and that the goal of seeking to be British … is silly and dangerous, and indeed demeaning to the newly settled groups among the population’.

To counter what he considers these causes of British Muslim alienation, Professor Modood argues that ‘what is urgently needed is not a panicky retreat from multiculturalism, but … to recognis[e] Muslims as a legitimate social partner and include them in the institutional compromises … that characterise the evolving, moderate secularism of mainstream western Europe’ .

‘Moreover’, Professor Modood concludes by observing, ‘ this is not just a matter of state action, for the burden of multicultural representation has to be borne by the multitudinous institutions of civil society that constitute our public space, our public interactions, and our plural, public identities.’

About this analysis of the causes of Muslims alienation, several doubts may be raised.

Jews were able successfully to integrate within British society, as Professor Modood himself acknowledges in the article, at a time when racially exclusivist notions of Britishness were far more prevalent than they are now.

Moreover, Jews integrated without need of either state or civil society having to change much to enable them to do so. Indeed, early on in the history of their re-settlement in Britain after their centuries-long explusion from it in medieval times, the Anglo-Jewish community went out of its way to expedite its integration. It set up and financed schools for its chiildren, not to impede their assimilation as do those who call for separate faith schools today, but to facilitate it by making Englishmen and Englishwomen of British-born Jewish children.

Moreover, the Anglo-Jewish community went out of its way to avoid becoming in any way a burden on the public purse by developing an elaborate and entirely self-financed set of welfare services for its members.

Why, on earth, should church and state in Britain, let alone civil society, be expected to make any further institutional compromises, beyond those already long since made well before the post-war wave of largely Asian Muslim immigration, so as to offer to minorities ‘a plural, changing inclusive British identity which can be as emotionally and politically meaningful to British Muslims as the appeal of jihadi sentiments’?

Early on in his article, Professor Modood observes that American Jews, often cited as a paradigm of a successfully assimilated minority, ‘have also changed the American society and culture they have become part of’.

Too true, but this was because their fellow Americans came to adopt Jewish idioms, humour, and culinary tastes voluntarily, not to prevent American Jews becoming alienated and turning to terrorism..

Just like the popularity in the USA of bagels and Bilko, the current popularity in Britain of the Notting Hill Carnival and of chicken tikka marsala bears ample testimony to the capacity of its predominantrly liberal Anglo-Protestant culture to absorb spontaenously such elements of minority cultures as its populace find to their liking. Minorities who, better to facilitate their own accommodation, expect more modification of mainstream cultures than their bearers are spontaneously willing to make, risk demanding more movement from national mountains than is compatible with their stability and hence with the well-being of those who dwell upon their slopes.

Instead of always asking of the mainstream culture and society ever more in the way of change to prevent the alienation of their young, how about minorities who have chosen to settle here teaching their children the value of gratitude to their hosts and of their need to make appropriate adjustments, rather than forever calling upon their host communities to change more swiftly and radically than they would be happy to do of their own accord?

Posted by David Conway at 12:31 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)

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 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)

April 14, 2005

Ms Anthropy Rages On … Fortunately Fewer and Fewer Women Listen Any More

Imagine a mainstream newspaper printing an op-ed article by a former master of an Oxbridge College aseerting all women to be hysterical men-hating leeches with whom men would be better off having nothing to do.

Although few in their right minds would take such an article seriously, you can imagine it would not go un-remarked on by the sorority running the Equal Opportunities Commission. ‘Male prejudice’, ‘disgraceful insult to women’, ‘rampant misogyny’, we can imagine them complaining in letters of protest to editors and on ‘Women’s Hour’.

Time was, however,-- and not too long ago at that, when it was practically de rigueur among ‘progressive’ newspapers to carry some article written by a women levelling an equivalent accusation against men.

In the late ’sixties and ’seventies, such misanthropic feminists were given full license by academia and the media to preach their man-hating message throughout society.

It is difficult to know exactly what overall social effect their anti-male ranting had. It can hardly be doubted, however, that it contributed in no small measure to the general discrediting of the institution of marriage that happened at that time, as well as the concomitant discrediting of the related system of complementary gender roles which led to young children being nurtured primarily by their mothers while their fathers laboured to support them both during the early years of their children’s dependency.

Among the two most vociferous champions of feminist misanthropy were Germaine Greer and her American counterpart, the lately deceased Andrea Dworkin, the obituary for whom appeared in yesterday's Times.

In today’s Times, there appears in the form of an op-ed article by Ms Greer an encomium to her former sister-in-literary arms and dungarees. In it, Ms Greer continues to spew forth the same man-hating message she and Ms Dworkin did so much to propagate in former years.

A few sample sentences from Ms Greer’s piece will give both its gist and tone:

‘Woman-hating is alive and thriving; even in mild-mannered Britain in 2005 two women every week will meet their deaths at the hands of their male partners. Dworkin’s object was always to … bear witness against the oppression of women. What she said was often shocking; the shock of the true….

‘What she … point[ed] to was the fact that throughout the mammalian world penetration is synonymous with domination; the penetrated individual, whether male or female must lose status. To be feminised is to be degraded, no matter what the context….

‘Dworkin wanted women .. to become enraged and dangerous because men, unless they were unmanned by mortal fear, would continue to abuse and degrade women in fantasy and in reality. At the hour of her Dworkin’s death, prostitution was the fastest growing industry across the globe, with pornography, its promotion material, even faster growing.’

Now one might have thought that the best antidotes against both prostitution and pornography would be for women to seek the sanctuary from them both provided by marriage. But our two sisters will have none of it:

‘Women have no way of realising themselves because the very concept of women has been invented, described and prescribed by men…. In Dworkin’s herstorical analysis, marriage, which she characterised as “living legal and social death”, was historically founded in rape.’

Greer ends her piece by endorsing a claim made by Dworkin in 1986 that, despite all that had been accomplished on behalf of women’s liberation in recent decades, women were still losing the battle of the sexes. Greer writes:

‘In the intervening years no alternative system of sexual relationship has been invented; rather women have struggled to conform more exactly to the dehumanising fantasy, carving themselves into the shape of the sexist stereotype, enduring ever more ingenious forms of penetration of mind and body.’

Reading Greer today is like stepping into a literary Tardis to be carried back to the late sixties or early seventies. Mercifully, fewer and fewer younger women buy into this anti-male invective these days.

However, the legacy of the likes of Greer and Dworkin is all about us, even to the point that, in its web-site, the Equal Opportunity Commission cites the statistic about lethal male domestic violence as evidence that women are not equally as safe as men.

It is worth, therefore, citing a few facts as a reality check against the wild posturing of Ms Greer and her dwindling band of remaining followers.

First, despite more female partners being killed by their male partners than conversely, it cannot be inferred either that men hate women or that women are less safe than men.

Men are more violent than women period, but their victims are as likely, if not far more likely to be other men than women. If there are more domestic murders than other forms of murder, this is not because women are especially victimised by men, but because men are more likely to be living with women than with other men, and, being more violent than women, are, therefore, more likely to kill female domestic partners than male ones.

Second, despite rape being an appalling act of violence of which women are more likely to be victims than men and men are overwhelmingly more likely to be perpetrators than women, it does not follow either that there is anything inherently oppressive to women in consensual heterosexual intercourse, or that men are more implicated in or culpable for prostitution and pornography, or that there is anything oppressive to women about marriage.

Greer’s claim that women’s becoming wives, and, therefore, most probably mothers in the usual way, prevents them from realising their natures could only have been made by someone whose appreciation of gender was so distorted as to have led to her once describing herself with pride as a female eunuch.

In the course of her piece, Greer observes: ‘No one would dare show representations of a racial or religious minority being systematically humiliated and abused for fear of reprisals from activist females.’

Clearly, male oppression cannot be quite so all-pervading and severe as Greer claims it, or else, by the same token, she should have been inhibited from writing such an anti-male diatribe as she has done by fear of male reprisals.

It would go too far to suggest that, in writing as she did, she was asking for it.

Rather, far better is it to say, as an epitaph on Ms Greer's article, that her very act of having written it for publication is the best living proof there is of the falsity of what is asserted in it, as well as of the ultimate insincerity of its attention-seeking author.

Posted by David Conway at 12:02 PM | Comments (2)

April 06, 2005

A Sword of Damocles Hanging Over Free Speech

Yesterday the Home Affairs Select Committee announced that relations between British Muslims and the wider community have ‘deteriorated’ since the September 11th, 2001 terror atrocities in the US and the resultant war on terrorism. MPs found many of Britain's 1.8 million Muslims felt persecuted under controversial anti-terrorism laws and expressed fears over the perceived rise in institutionalised Islamophobia evidenced in the increase in the number of police security checks.

The report read: ‘Muslims in Britain are more likely than other groups to feel they are suffering as a result of the response to international terrorism. We do not believe the Asian community is being unreasonably targeted by stops and searches but accept that Muslims perceive they are being stigmatised by the legislation’. Labour MP and committee chairman John Denham called on the government to sustain better community cohesion to ensure the Muslim community was fully involved in developing ‘the next steps in tackling terrorism’.

In an article in Muslim Weekly last year, senior Labour energy minister Mike O'Brien accepted that many British Muslims were ‘understandably ... very angry about the war’. But, as if in exchange, he listed reasons why a Labour government and Blair had been good for Muslims, including its drive ‘to toughen the laws on incitement to religious hatred.’ And there’s the rub. The cynical approach of this government could hardly be more clearly evidenced than by forcing the prevention of terrorism law through parliament and then trying to mollify (read: get votes from) those targeted with a different law. The incitement to religious hatred bill is a sop with wide-ranging implications for freedom of speech.

So it was bad news for the government and good news for the rest of society that among a number of other high profile pre-election casualties, the bill has been dropped. The dangers and deficiencies of the bill have already been rehearsed elsewhere on this site – see the Civitas Blogs and the Background Briefing – but the fundamental point is that it was badly drafted and a bad idea. Its loose wording risked jeopardizing free speech, and as Ken MacDonald, Director of Public Prosecutions said, criminalizing a state of mind; there was no definition of the key terms, such as ‘insult’ and ‘hatred’; and there was no defence of truthfulness.

The law would have fomented suspicion, hostility and resentment rather than promoted tolerance. It would have provided maximum protection for the most litigious people in society and encouraged religious extremism by shielding religious leaders from legitimate criticism. Icqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain made clear that it would have illegalised criticism of the Prophet Muhammad and that offenders would have been prosecuted. Since the Christian blasphemy law is nominal and ineffective, there is no protection currently offered to religious groups in Britain that is not also available to Muslims by being covered under existing criminal and racial laws.

The fact is that punitive laws are not the way to deal with poor cohesion in society or to foster better community relations. For now the government’s strategy of giving with one hand and taking away with another has been stymied. But if Labour comes back after the election, so will the bill.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2005

Nothing is... but thinking makes it so

The gap between perception and reality makes for a hoary old debate but for a long time English law has been fairly clear on the distinction.

These days, however, largely as a result of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the ensuing Macpherson Inquiry, the boundary has become rather confused. The Macpherson report stated that a ‘racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’, and as Robert Skidelsky writes in the Civitas booklet Institutional Racism and the Police, the ‘notion that the perception of a fact makes it a fact’ is a ‘legal and philosophical monstrosity’. As Michael Ignatieff comments in the same publication: ‘What is most dismaying… is that it [the Macpherson Inquiry] became a story about just one thing – race. But the central issue was not race, it was justice.’

Race has become such a sensitive issue that anything can be converted into a racial crisis or crime by anyone that chooses to manipulate the evidence, and anyone who opposes such a manoeuvre can expect to be accused of being racist.

Last Sunday in The Observer, Jay Rayner outlined ‘a long and desperate list of hate’ [sic.] in a catalogue of race crimes. It is a particularly disturbing article, arguing that the problem is far worse than generally suspected, but a quick glance at the Home Office statistics reveals that, while the risk of being victim of a racially motivated incident is supposedly higher for members of minority ethnic groups than for white people, the estimated number of racially motivated incidents has been declining. What’s obvious, moreover, is that figures for any crime defined by perception are likely to be radically divergent depending on… well, yes, perception. And the criteria for judging perception are, to say the least, mutable.

This is not for an instant to deny that racist crime exists, nor that it is a profoundly disturbing social ill which we should attempt to cure. But we must avoid the assumption that everything bad that happens to a non-white person does so as a consequence of racism. Most of the crimes that Jay Rayner is talking about are not clearly defined as racially motivated.

It is not good enough for any crime against a person of ethnic minority origin to be labelled racist. Someone who murders an Asian woman does not necessarily do so because she is an Asian woman. If all crimes against racial groups including whites are dubbed race crimes then the word ‘race’ becomes otiose and we may as well simply talk about crimes. If people have committed a crime they should be punished according to the nature of the offence, irrespective of whether the victim or the criminal is of one race or another. The blood runs red whatever the skin colour, religion or country of origin. And it goes without saying, of course, that greater discernment would make it easier to identify genuine instances of race crime and address causes more effectively.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 06:24 PM | Comments (1)

March 22, 2005

Gypsies and a ‘whiff of the gas chamber’

Yesterday the standard of political debate reached a new low when Labour MP, Kevin McNamara, said that the Tory plans to apply housing and planning laws equally to gypsies had "the whiff of the gas chamber about them". Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, did not go quite so far, but remarked that Mr Howard combined "opportunism and nastiness in equal measure". Unusually, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, did not exploit the issue to exaggerate racism as he has so often done. Instead, he commented in the Guardian: "This will only be a race issue if people want to make it one ... it really should be about space and housing, not ethnicity." Full credit to Mr Phillips.

On one level this is a simple question about equality before the law. The law applies equally to all or it does not. As Locke taught, the law should be the same for the favourite at court or the countryman at plough. But this is not an isolated case. Increasingly claiming ‘victim status’ has become a useful political ploy for gaining preferential treatment at the expense of other people. Politically designated victim status can provide opportunities for circumventing laws that apply to everyone else and for making private gains at the expense of other people. Victim status has become the equivalent of the ‘favourite at court’ in the seventeenth century.

Posted by David Green at 10:19 AM | Comments (3)

March 21, 2005

Gypsies and Legal Equality

The dispute over gypsies and their ‘human right’ to be exempt from planning laws is just the latest episode calling into question one of the fundamental precepts of English liberty. We used to take it for granted that everyone was equal under the law. Not so. Since the Human Rights Act, if you can hire a clever lawyer and find an activist judge, you may be above the law.

The Human Rights Act of 1998, which came into effect in 2000, has turned out to have a very wide reach. A web site which monitors the Act lists over 700 cases so far. Since the Human Rights Act became law there has been a tendency for more and more people dissatisfied about something or other to seek a legal opinion on whether the Act can be moulded to their purpose, encouraging by lawyers who see the Act as an opportunity for money making. Potential or actual cases include the BBC licence fee, the housing conditions of Lithuanian asylum seekers, a violent child who objected to being taught in a separate class, murderers who want access to hard-core porn in prison, opponents of the MMR vaccine, the police strike ban, the London congestion charge, pension rates for British citizens living overseas and the closure of care homes.

But are we any better protected? Few think so and awareness of the disadvantages is growing. First, it undermines individual freedom. Second, it has contributed to 'rights inflation', and undermined support for the fundamental moral precepts on which the original concept of a 'human right' was based. Third, it has encouraged people to emphasise their group identity within the nation, rather than their common status as citizens of a free and open society. Fourth, it is tending to have a corrupting effect on the legal profession and has led to the politicisation of the judiciary.

Our tradition of freedom rests on the belief that everyone should have a chance to make the most of their life and that, to do so, each of us needs to know what the law prohibits. By defining when compulsion will be used, we are left free to use our talents to discover better ways of meeting human needs and of living together in harmony. This freedom must be enjoyed by everyone, because we never know in advance who may make lasting contributions to improving the human condition. But, on fundamental matters like press freedom and safety from terrorism, the Human Rights Act can mean one thing today and the exact opposite a few months later.

Take the recent case of foreign terrorist suspects detained under emergency powers. In July 2002 it was held that the imprisonment was unlawful because it applied only to foreign nationals. Then, in October 2002, the Court of Appeal, decided that the detention was consistent with the Human Rights Act. Finally, in 2004 the House of Lords ruled against the Government. In March 2002 it was decided that the Mirror should not have published details of Naomi Campbell's drug treatment. Then, in October, the Court of Appeal decided that the publication of articles about the claimant's treatment for drug addiction did not breach her right to confidentiality and that the press should be given reasonable latitude under Article 10 to publish information in the public interest. Now that decision has been reversed. The Campbell ruling means that newspaper editors can't be sure whether they will be hailed as heroes for keeping the public informed, or denounced as law breakers.

The British have always been keen on their rights, but until recently a right meant an entitlement to be protected against the abuse of power by the government or powerful private organisations or individuals. Today a 'right' is less an entitlement to protection against the abuse of power (a protection we can all share with each other); rather it has become a claim against other people, an opportunity to gain financially or to secure preferential treatment at the expense of others. Rights as 'opportunities for private gain' instead of 'protections for all', has encouraged a 'compensation culture' based on the exaggeration of grievances.

It has also distorted the law-making process into a scramble for preferential treatment for groups who are sufficiently well organised to secure political designation of their victim status. There are already six official categories for preferential treatment (gender, race, disability, religion, age and sexual preference) under the Governments proposed Commission for Equality and Human Rights.

One outcome has been 'category creep': once it becomes an advantage to be in a group more people try to get in. For example, 'disability', formerly confined to people who were deaf, blind or wheelchair bound, has been redefined so widely that Government newspaper advertisements this week are declaring that there are 10 million disabled people. Gypsies did not used to be classified as a race, but once it became advantageous, they pressed for inclusion. Romany gypsies were recognised in 1988 and Irish travellers in 2000.
The legal profession has become less a vocation guided by a code of ethics and more a business which looks upon particular statutes as opportunities for financial gain. Lawyers have traditionally had an obligation to the court as well as to their client. They are not supposed to be the mere hired guns of one side in a dispute, prepared to pull every stroke in the book to win. They have a duty to seek the truth, which they should put above the narrow interests of their clients or their own interests in making money. The opportunities offered by the Human Rights Act have proved too much for some.

Human rights should be narrowly defined, to exclude only those things that should never be done. The Human Rights Act is so vague that it has opened up opportunities for every kind of malcontent or chancer who thinks there might be money or other advantage to be gained from legal confrontation.

If we want to preserve our heritage of equality before the law and the moral equality of every citizen implied by it, we should abolish the Human Rights Act.

Posted by David Green at 08:06 PM | Comments (8)

March 18, 2005

Political correction: poisoning the Ivy League

The tragedy in The Human Stain, Philip Roth’s great chronicle of America during the Clinton impeachment, is detonated by an innocuous question: ‘Do they exist or are they spooks?’ Coleman Silk, an eminent professor at New England's small Athena College, asks it about two absent students. The students turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Silk is disgraced. His life begins to unravel. Like all good novels it frictionlessly combines fiction and reality to make important points about the state we’re in.

Roth’s narrative blasts at full throttle through the idiocies and injustices of political correctness, and this is particularly relevant given that in the unmargined world a different faction of the political correctness lobby is hounding another dean out of office. In January, Harvard’s president Larry Summers suggested there might be biological reasons which contribute to the low proportion of female professors in the sciences. Mr Summers, a brilliant economist, had previously been criticised for his managerial style and now the schadenfreude of his enemies has become unmistakable. The debate has been rehearsed here before but it has now reached a new level, as Camilla Cavendish observes in her trenchant column in yesterday’s Times.

Summers’ position has now been rendered all but untenable by a no confidence vote of 218-185 by members of the faculty of arts and science. Although Harvard Students for Larry rejected the vote, saying that this ‘demonstrates a complete rejection of the major tenets of academic freedom’, their anger about such censorship is unlikely likely to sway the myopic academics. It is incredible that he might lose his job for saying what he did. Then again, as Roth said of the difficulty facing novelists in the modern age, reality is constantly outstripping even our wildest imaginations.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 09:14 AM | Comments (3)

March 11, 2005

Separate but equal?

Since it’s not what’s said, but who says it that counts, certain people get away with statements that others would be censured for making in even the most tentative terms. On Monday, Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), spoke out about schooling black boys separately. Through the prism of the media, the story took on a spectrum of colours and shades, and the CRE immediately started to complain that he had been misreported. What he said was not that black boys should be schooled separately but that, following the success of a pilot project in the States, we should consider schooling them separately.

It seems ironic that the CRE, an organisation that has deformed the debate about racial and cultural differences, should be so sensitive about being misrepresented, especially given that as media mangling goes this was mild. Imagine, on the contrary, what would have happened if a white politician, Michael Howard, say, drawing on the same evidence, had made those comments. He would have been dubbed a white supremacist. There would have been calls for his resignation. When David Bell, chief inspector for schools, recently said that the growth of Islamic faith schools poses a potential threat to the ‘coherence’ of British society, Muslim groups reacted with outrage. Are members of religious, racial and ethnic groups the only ones permitted to discuss them?

On the face of it, so long as we discount the historical context, Trevor Phillips’s suggestion is persuasive. The fact is that of every sector of the population, black boys are doing worst, and, so the syllogism goes, they therefore need special help. The statistics, assuming they’re correct, say that just 43.3 per cent of black African pupils achieve five good GCSE passes, nine per cent fewer than white children, and only 35.7 per cent of black Caribbean pupils get their five A-Cs. Black boys are twice as likely as their white peers to be expelled. By A-level the gap yawns even wider. All boys do badly – 43.8 per cent – but black boys do worst with 27.3 per cent.

Given such overwhelming evidence of failure, any solution is worth considering. But problems instantly present themselves. How are we to define such a diverse racial group? Why should black boys – as a statistic doing worst, but hardly alone in doing badly – receive special treatment? Indians and Chinese are outperforming white children, but no one would consider putting the worst performing whites in separate schools. Bangladeshi children are performing abysmally, yet they are not mentioned. It’s interesting, too, that the whole idea of streamlining, of separating people according to educational performance, should be so easy to smuggle in under the guise of race. Of course, selection makes some sense. But people who’ve advocated it in the past have been attacked because of the way such policies might intensify feelings of rejection in the least successful.

And then there's history. The bottom line is that against the backdrop of the civil rights movement such policies are unthinkable. Commenting on ethnic separatism in America, the black Harvard professor Orland Patterson has talked of the ‘lamentable betrayal and abandonment of the once cherished goal of integration.’ ‘The thought that repeatedly haunts me,’ he says, ‘is that the South did finally win the moral battle over integration, for no group of people now seems more committed to segregation than Afro-American students and professionals.’ Quite apart from the fact that it would fall foul of racial equality laws, what would a two-tier system do for mutual respect? Trevor Phillips himself said two years ago that BNP voting is at its most extensive where people don’t mix: ‘the pattern of BNP voting is never in areas where black, white and Asian people live together, know each other and understand each other’.

What’s more, the racialisation of education risks missing the point. Issues of bad schooling, deprived backgrounds and inadequate socialisation are transformed into debates solely about skin colour. As Baroness Rosalind Howells, the black Labour peer, said, dismissing Mr Phillips’s suggestion: ‘I would never support segregation of any sort. It is the education system that is failing not only black pupils but also white working-class pupils from council estates.’

Trevor Phillips is absolutely right that we should have a debate about this. I just hope we're all allowed to take part.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 01:05 PM | Comments (11)

March 08, 2005

Multiculturalism and the Jilbab Ruling

Rod Liddle has yet another brilliant piece in the Sunday Times, on this occasion dealing with the Court of Appeal decision that Denbigh High School was at fault in not permitting a young Muslim girl to wear the jilbab.

It's another example of how the Human Rights Act now means that no one can be sure what the law requires of us. We have travelled a long way from John Locke's 'a standing rule to live by'.

Posted by David Green at 05:30 PM | Comments (1)

February 28, 2005

Victims and their oppressors

According to David Cracknell in the Sunday Times, the Government is about to publish a bill that will make it illegal for the providers of any goods or services - such as hotels, shops, pubs or restaurants - to refuse service to someone because of their religion. It had been expected that discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation would also be included, but the report says that Downing Street fears that Muslims might feel offended if they were ‘lumped together’ with homosexuals in the same bill.

This is not the first time that one of the official victim groups in society has squabbled with the Government over the planned Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). Until now there have been three protected groups: women, ethnic minorities and disabled people. Three new categories are to be added: sexual orientation, religion or belief, and age. A few months ago I attended a meeting in the House of Commons where enthusiasts for gender equality objected to being ‘lumped in’ with old people, who they felt were not as deserving of victim status as women, and when the Government issued a consultation document on the CEHR, the Commission for Racial Equality was opposed to the initial plan because it lost some of its privileges. Above all, it did not want to lose coercive powers to punish employers for disobedience.

Once the protected status of all six victim groups is legally in force, there won’t be very many people left who can’t fit into one or more of the categories, leaving white males as the undisputed oppressors of all the others.

Posted by David Green at 05:28 PM | Comments (2)

February 23, 2005

It's good to talk

Why John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, wasn’t lynched for having the audacity to make suggestions about the differences between the sexes is mystifying, given the intolerant fury that has been directed at Lawrence Summers recently. No one seems to mind when counsellors confirm certain stereotypes, such as that men are more competitive than women, more physically aggressive and have better spatial reasoning, or that women are more concerned about relationships, more adept at understanding body language and better with words. Yet what Summers, president of Harvard and former secretary to the US Treasury, said to a conference of economists last month has now been so mangled that one could be forgiven for thinking that he announced men were good at science while women were not because they were thick.

According to the transcript of his lecture, he compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming. All of which are statistical certainties, irrespective of why. After declaring that racial and sex discrimination needed to be ‘absolutely, vigorously’ combated, and conjecturing that bias might not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences, he posited a set of possible reasons. Firstly, he said, women need to take career breaks to have children; secondly, women are ‘innately’ less scientifically minded; thirdly, and consequently, the pool of women to recruit into top-level scientific posts is smaller.

No prizes for guessing which one of those caused the kafuffle, but there’s something wrong when it’s a heresy even to suggest that biological differences might be worth considering. What’s curious is not that a politicising press should fan the flames of controversy, but that the halls of academia – putative heartland of intellectual advancement and dispassionate debate – should field reactions like that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins who, upon hearing Summers’ words, told reporters that her ‘heart was pounding’, her ‘breath was shallow’ and she was going to be sick. Evidently, she hardly demonstrated her rationalism by spitting her dummy like that, but there is a bigger problem. The great illiberal trick is to discredit contrary opinions by declaring that their arguments are unfounded, whether or not they can actually be verified, and drown all salient opposition in torrents of indignation.

At one level, the debate has been encouragingly open, to the extent that dialogue has opened up even within single publications. Nevertheless, it’s fairly typical to see someone like Natasha Walter, for example, writing a sneering article about ‘sexual mumbo jumbo’ in The Guardian, and dismissing all countervailing cognitive research, even though Brenda Maddox had already provided counterevidence in the same paper, and Simon Baron Cohen¸ a Cambridge psychologist also writing for the same paper, had broadly concurred with the Harvard leader. Cohen is at pains to state that ‘you cannot tell what kind of brain a person has from that person’s sex’ but, he adds, ‘Summers may be right that biological factors are producing sex differences in the mind, which are further acted upon by the social environment.’

The suitability of women’s brains for scientific research is not in question, nor is the fact that the barriers against women in academic science have been incredibly high until very recently, nor that there have been numerous important female scientists and will undoubtedly be far many more. My point is not that Summers was right. It’s just that it can’t possibly be a bad thing to highlight existing inequalities in the sex ratio in science, and to encourage debate. What matters, for anyone who chooses to engage, is to accept that both sides can marshal evidence, and that it is on evidence, rather than opinion, that the battle should be waged. The evidence may show us that there are cognitive, genetic, environmental, or no differences between the sexes, but we have to be able to consider it without recourse to moral and political shibboleths. Whether or not men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or both are from Earth, equality of opportunity should be the objective: an open and honest discussion is integral to that process.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 02:06 PM | Comments (2)

February 22, 2005

Gender discrimination and Harvard University

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, continues to be in trouble for pointing out that there are only a few outstanding female scientists because scientific ability is not evenly distributed between males and females. Sarah Baxter provides an update in the Sunday Times.

Why do some people find the mere statement of this fact so upsetting? It seems to be because they have confused moral equality with equal outcomes. The origins of moral equality lie in our Christian heritage. As earlier liberals would have said, we are all equally children of God and, since all will be judged by their maker, all must be seen as equally capable of choosing right from wrong. But career success and failure have nothing to do with moral equality in this sense.

Closely allied with the idea of moral equality is the view that a person’s life chances should not be determined by his or her ascribed status (such as male or female; black or white). All should be able to advance according to their individual merits.

Some people now interpret this ideal to mean that any real and existing differences associated with an ascribed status cannot be acknowledged. This view implies a further assumption, namely that particular abilities are equally distributed between groups defined by their ascribed status. Consequently, it is inferred that, if success or failure in a particular career are not equally distributed between the groups, then it must be because of discrimination. Yet the liberal ideal has always been to allow individual talent an outlet, with the inevitable result that some will be more successful than others because talent is not equally distributed between groups.

Concern with the proportionate distribution of favourable outcomes between groups defined by their ascribed status is a return to a pre-liberal view of the human condition, in which the main category of analysis is the group (the tribe, the clan, the aristocratic family) rather than the individual. So long as any woman is free to become a scientist and to pit her abilities against anyone else, no liberal should be surprised to find disparate outcomes and there should be no liberal objection to the mere declaration that differences in outcome between men and women have been discovered. Let’s hope that Larry Summers will not be deterred from speaking without fear or favour.

Posted by David Green at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)

February 21, 2005

Things You Can't Say

Rod Liddle has a thoughtful piece in the Sunday Times about the inconsistencies of groups insisting they are victims of oppression.

You can say that black and Asian women make up 8% of the general population and 29% of the female prison population, so long as you think it is proof of discrimination. But you can't say that a higher proportion of black and Asian women commit crimes compared with their white counterparts.

Why? Because political correctness demands that blacks and Asians are victims of an oppressor group. Any unfavourable outcome must therefore be due to discrimination, even if it's not. Mere facts must not be allowed to get in the way of solidarity with victims.

But hold on, perhaps they were 'fitted up' by the white police. Then why did 79% of people who appeared before magistrates in 2003, and 63% of those who appeared before Crown Courts, plead guilty ?

Posted by David Green at 08:00 AM | Comments (6)

January 07, 2005

The proposed religious hatred law

It has been said that the proposed religious hatred law is no more than a cynical attempt to buy hardline Muslim votes. In Muslim Weekly Government minister, Mike O'Brien, openly admits that the measure was put forward following lobbying by the Muslim Council of Britain. Mr O'Brien, MP, urges Muslims to vote labour and assures them that it's not the first time that the 'Labour Party has delivered for Muslims'.

The illiberal character of the proposed law and the threat to our heritage of freedom of speech have been ignored in the quest for votes. Melanie Phillips has warned of the dangers. Polly Toynbee is also worth reading on the subject.

Posted by David Green at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2005

Discrimination Against Whites

According to The Times, the Lake District national park authority is to scrap guided walks by volunteer rangers because too high a proportion of participants are white. Mick Casey, a media officer for the authority, said that ‘only 35,000’ per year took part: “The majority who do the walks are white, middle-class, middle-aged people,” he said. “The Government is encouraging national parks to appeal to young people, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.”

Can this really have been the intention of the Government? After all, if everything in which the majority of participants were white, middle-aged and middle-class were scrapped, what would be left? The tax burden is disproportionately met by white, middle-class and middle-aged people, but I doubt whether Gordon Brown wants to scrap income tax. And what if the national park authority had expressed the opposite preference? Too many of the people going on the guided walks are black, working class and old (or young); therefore the walks should be scrapped.

Discrimination is wrong when it involves prejudice. Landlords who put up signs saying ‘no blacks’ were prejudiced. That is, they failed to judge individuals on their own merits. But what’s the difference between a landlord refusing accommodation to people because they are black and a national park authority refusing to offer a service to people because they are white (not to mention middle-class and middle-aged)?

The under-representation of ethnic groups in a particular workplace or activity may be the result of prejudice. It might also be for any number of other reasons. (Perhaps members of ethnic minorities have got better things to do than go on guided walks.) The mere existence of disproportionate representation provides no proof of prejudice one way or the other. To believe otherwise is like arguing that; ‘Postboxes are red; therefore every red thing is a postbox.’

Posted by David Green at 08:51 PM | Comments (13)

December 23, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore, to all those who are: Merry Xmas!

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

November 25, 2004

Lammy’s Lament -- a Case of Misplaced Dissatisfaction

According to reports in yesterday’s newspapers, David Lammy is not a happy bunny. In that respect, he is probably no different from the vast majority of his compatriots who daily make their way wearily to and from work, doubtless concerned about where to find the readies this year to cover the costs of celebrating Christmas.

Why should Mr Lammy’s unhappiness be deemed more worthy an item of news than theirs?

Mr Lammy differs from the vast majority of his compatriots in at least two respects that make his unhappiness more newsworthy, at least in the eyes of newspaper editors.

First, as well as being a Labour MP for the London constituency of Tottenham, Mr Lammy is currently junior minister at the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Moreover, Mr Lammy is not just any old MP or even junior minister. At 32 years of age, Mr Lammy remains one of the youngest MPs, not to mention Government ministers. Moreover, when elected in 2000 at the age of 28, he was the youngest person to be elected to Westminster for decades, if not centuries.

It is, however, not just his relative youth in relation to the level of seniority of the position he holds in public life that makes the state of Mr Lammy’s mental well-being such a matter of public interest.

Mr Lammy stands out from the vast majority of his fellow ministers and MPs, not to mention the vast majority of his compatriots, by virtue of being black. Moreover, he achieved his prominence in public life against all the seeming odds, for he achieved his swift advancement from the most seemingly unpromising of circumstances. Born and raised in Tottenham to a black single mother as one of five children, Mr Lammy managed to escape his relatively disadvantaged background through educational scholarships that led him to gain law degrees from London and Harvard and thereby pursue a successful career at the bar before taking up his present career in politics.

With all this going for him, one wonders what Mr Lammy could possibly find wrong with the world to make him unhappy. Precisely what has turns out to be a second way in which his unhappiness differs from that of his everyday un-newsworthy compatriots.

Most normal everyday unhappiness springs from people considering themselves to have not enough money or from being jilted. Mr Lammy’s state of unhappiness springs from less mundane concerns than these. It springs from what he considers is the insufficient diversity within the legal profession through whose ranks he has made such swift and notable progress.

Mr Lammy made known his dissatisfaction with the lack of diversity in the legal profession in a speech he delivered in London on Tuesday of this week to a meeting of the Standing Conference on Legal Education. There he drew attention to the need for greater diversity in the legal profession by making the following remark: ‘Whilst the values of diversity are widely accepted – in reality, diversity is permeating the dense structures of our legal profession only very slowly. We need to speed up the process’.

Although, in is speech, Mr Lammy recognised and welcomed the fact that ‘there are more black or minority ethnic solicitors than ever’, it would seem there are still not enough of them to satisfy him. He complained that, in 2003, only just under 8% of solicitors with practising certificates came from an ethnic minority background, as did only 10% of self-employed barristers, and 14 % of employed barristers.

Mr Lammy reveals how much ethnic minority participation in the legal profession would be needed to satisfy him when he described as good news that over 25% of current law students are black or from an ethnic minority.

What saddens Mr Lammy most is not so much the sheer lack of ethnic minority lawyers. It is their lack of relative progress and success within their profession. ‘We should not be content with black and ethnic minority lawyers finding only that they are doing asylum and immigration work’, he states.

Who or what, in Mr Lammy’s view, is to blame for their relative lack of achievement and success? In his eyes, the fault lies with the top legal firms and chambers who, in his view, are not doing enough to sponsor and recruit law students who attend new universities in comparison with those they sponsor and recruit who study at Oxbridge. What these firms must do, according to Mr Lammy, to remedy their fault is engage in more aggressive outreach and affirmative action so they recruit more ethnic minority lawyers and to positions in which they will eventually enjoy the greatest income and prestige within their profession.

How deserving of sympathy is Mr Lammy for what ails him? Not a lot, it must be said.

First of all, according to the Office for National Statistics, ethnic minorities currently make up only 7.9% of the overall population. This is exactly the same proportion as that in which they are currently present in the legal profession. Why should diversity require they be represented in greater numbers?

Second, were ethnic minorities to be represented in the legal profession in the greater numbers for which Mr Lammy calls, this could only have come about were they selected on grounds other than merit or ability, unless they were demonstrably more able or more ambitious than their white counterparts. Mr Lammy produces no evidence they are. Since, without evidence of their being so, it would come dangerously close to chauvinism or worse for him to claim they were, it can only be inferred that Mr Lammy is requesting law firms to recruit and sponsor law students on grounds other than merit. This need not necessarily be in their best interest, as a recent study has shown.

A recently published study of the effects of affirmative action on behalf of black law students, conducted by Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, found that, on the whole, they were harmed not helped by it. Professor Sander wrote that most of the black law students whom affirmative action had helped gain places at top law schools “end up at schools where they will struggle academically and fail at higher rates than they would in the absence of preferences.” Professor Sander concludes, “A strong case can be made that in the legal education system as a whole, racial preferences end up producing fewer black lawyers each year than would be produced by a race-blind system.’

As for Mr Lammy’s concern that the top and most lucrative law firms are not doing enough to sponsor and recruit ethnic minority law students, Mr Lammy has produced zero evidence the firms in question do not recruit and sponsor solely on grounds of ability not colour, as his own remarkable progress within the legal profession testifies.

It is hardly surprising top law firms recruit students from Oxbridge, and, we might add, from Harvard, given this is where they have sponsored them to study. Nor is it surprising that it is these universities the top firms sponsor students to attend. It may not have escaped Mr Lammy’s attention that Oxbridge and Ivy League Universities are almost universally thought to offer the best higher education which is precisely why his Government is at such pains to increase the rate of minority participation at them.

In conclusion, it would seem there are better things for Mr Lammy to worry about appertaining to the law and diversity than his concerns about what turn out to be a wholly illusory lack of diversity in his former profession. One such is the over-representation of ethnic minorities among victims of mugging and violent crime. Another is the apparent over-representation of some ethnic minorities among the perpetrators of them. Happy Xmas, Mr Lammy!

Posted by David Conway at 05:07 PM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2004

Religious Discrimination

There has been recent press speculation that the Government intends to introduce a law against religious hatred, possibly under the guise of setting up a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights. If it does, it will encourage religious extremism by shielding religious leaders from legitimate criticism. It will reverse the triumph of liberalism and free enquiry over entrenched authority and permit religious dogma to go unchallenged. And it will encourage religious fanatics to 'play the religion card'.

Trevor Philips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, recently found himself under attack for Islamophobia because he had the temerity to appeal to Muslim leaders to reiterate their opposition to terrorism. And for her audacity in criticising the inferior status of women under Islam, Guardian columnist, Polly Toynbee, has been declared the ‘Most Islamophobic media personality’ by the Islamic Human Rights Commission. It led, she says, to a bombardment of emails ‘each one more luridly threatening than the last’. Read on.

Posted by David Green at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2004

Mr Trevor Phillips Puts His Foot In It …

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) was set up by the Race Relations Act to foster racial equality by rooting out racial discrimination and racial hatred.

In recent years, the CRE has become one of the most vociferous advocates of a change in the law so that the current prohibition of incitement of hatred towards racial groups becomes extended so as to cover religious groups too.

The chief intended beneficiary of the extension are British Muslims. Not coinciding with any single racial group, they currently remain unprotected in law from hatred being incited against them on account of their religion.

This extension of the law is in the pipe-line and destined to reach the statute book within the lifetime of the present parliament.

Its critics claim the extension of the law is bound to curb free-speech and legitimate criticism of religions. They argue adherents of any religion subjected to criticism will be able to suppress it by claiming it will incite hatred of them.

Advocates of the extension respond by denying legitimate criticism will be curtailed by the change in law. One to have so argued is Trevor Phillips, current Chair of the CRE.

In a conference in July of this year organised by the IPPR, Mr Phillips welcomed this extension of the law, denying it ‘would lead to people not being able to criticise other religions; these changes would protect the believer, not the belief’.

On Tuesday of this week, Mr Phillips delivered at Oxford's Centre for Islamic Studies a public lecture entitled, ‘Why Muslims will make Britain a better place’. The lecture was largely given over to an elaboration of the multifarious ways in which the speaker saw a Muslim presence in Britain as enhancing the life of that country.

Given its title and contents, plus Mr Phillips' other credentials as a champion of this country’s minorities, it might hardly have been expected his lecture would have given British Muslim leaders any cause for complaint.

Yet, yesterday’s newspapers carry reports that some of them at least are up-in-arms with Mr Phillips, metaphorically speaking of course, for his having supposedly upbraided them in his lecture for not doing enough to exhibit public condemnation of acts of terror carried out in the name of their religion by the likes of Al Qaeda.

Their complaint is that, since they have repeatedly given public expression to their abhorrence of Islamist terrorism, what Mr Phillips said went beyond legitimate comment and amounts to ‘Islamophobia’, something the public expression of which Mr Phillips has called for to be banned.

At first glance, or even after closer scrutiny, the published text of Mr Phillips’ lecture fails to disclose anything in it that can remotely be construed as Islamophobic. All Mr Phillips said in it about the need for Muslim leaders to display public opposition to Islamist acts of terror was this: ‘Though I know it is irritating to many of you, and feels unjust that you have to do this time and again, it remains important for mainstream Muslim leaders to point out that British Muslims have no time for terrorism, and call on anyone who practises it in the name of Islam to cease.’

Given the manner in which, since the Macpherson report, racist acts have become officially construed as being any that a racial minority finds such, it would seem the mere fact some Muslim leaders consider Mr Phillips’ remarks to be an expression of Islamophobia will, in time, suffice to render them such in the eyes of the law after it becomes changed in the manner for which, among others, Mr Phillips has called.

If the Chair of the CRE cannot be trusted to know where the line is over which no one should be allowed to tread in publicly speaking about different religious groups, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Either Mr Phillips must be considered unworthy of his job on account of his harbouring unconscious Islamophobia, or else the extension of the law for which he has called must be considered unworkable and hence undesirable -- in which case his suitability for the job he holds becomes equally suspect through having called for it.

Alternatively, the appropriate lesson to be drawn from the furore occasioned by Mr Phillips’ lecture is that the entire enterprise of seeking to achieve racial and religious harmony by legal diktat as to what may or may not be said about any religious or racial group is a legal quagmire into which it would have been better for this country never to have allowed anyone to step, including the Chair of the CRE.

Posted by David Conway at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2004

Trevor Phillips Exaggerating Racism Yet Again

In The Times today Trevor Phillips contends that ethnic groups still suffer from racial discrimination and that we need ‘more vigorous enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws’. The evidence he gives is selective and takes the form of examples of disproportionate representation of ethnic groups in various walks of life: 22% of white British children live with one parent compared with 55% of African-Caribbean children; or ethnic minorities are eight times less likely to ‘visit the countryside’.

If there is a single belief underlying a free society it is the moral quality of all individuals. The founders of liberty drew their inspiration from our Christian heritage. All were equal in the sight of God and, if all were to come face to face with their maker at the end of their lives, they must be allowed to take personal responsibility for choosing truth from error and right from wrong. The underlying idea is that we should judge people according to the things they can do something about. We can’t help where we are born, or whether we are black or white, male or female. But we can control what kind of people we become. Consequently, all the great defenders of liberty believed that we should all be equal before the law. Yet, what we now have is laws under which some people are more equal than others. A crime with a racial motive is now more serious than one without, and the force of law will be used against employers who fail to meet racial quotas (woops, forgot to call them ‘targets’) which can only be met by giving additional weight to race at the expense of personal qualities or fitness for the job. In a world dictated by Trevor Phillips, an employer who treated candidates as moral equals and ignored ascribed characteristics like race, would be at fault.

Recent guidelines from the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), chaired by Trevor Phillips, reveal the dangers. The guidelines require employers to discriminate in favour of non-whites, so that their workforce reflects the ethnic make-up of the wider society. If ethnic minorities make up 8% of the population, then every workplace must be 8% non-white.

The CRE defends the new guidelines by insisting that racism still exists and claims that the under-representation of non-whites in particular workplaces proves its point. But the underlying assumption that the disproportionate representation of ethnic groups in an occupation must be the result of discrimination is profoundly misguided. Discrimination is a possible cause, but there are many other more likely explanations. Among the most obvious is that people in ethnic groups might prefer other jobs. People of Indian origin,