Civitas Blog

… you still have plenty to fear, especially if your name is a popular one in Britain. The state has rewarded one Amanda Hodgson’s willingness to volunteer to help at a local school by branding her an alcoholic thug and heroin addict. Rather than receiving an apology for the obvious errors, she has been told to supply even more information, including her fingerprints, in order to prove she is innocent of the crimes that her name and date of birth have convicted her. If she doesn’t, Lancashire Education Authority will revoke her license to hug.

Related today: Esther Rantzen acknowledges some of the more pernicious aspects of the new culture of child (over)protection.

Newly published guidance for play leaders and nursery teachers instructs them to be on the look-out for and to reprimand racist attitudes evinced by toddlers.

“No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action”, they are reportedly instructed.

Among potentially racist behaviour of toddlers for which nursery teachers are instructed to be on guard and ready to take them to task is their saying “yuk” when presented with unfamiliar foreign food. The guidance warns: ‘Children [might] react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying “yuk”.’

The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study released today by Civitas.

In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children need to have contact with a range of adult members of the community for their education and socialisation, but 'this form of collaboration, which has traditionally underpinned intergenerational relationships, is now threatened by a regime that insists that adult/child encounters must be mediated through a security check' (p.xii).

Once upon a time in a not so far-off kingdom, still somewhat anachronistically known as a united one, there lived two lads named Ed, although neither had been given that name at birth.

Continued on the Centre for SocialCohesion blog.

‘Mothers who have children aged under 11 face greater discrimination in the job market than any other group…’

So today's Times reports the newly appointed equalities supremo, Trevor Phillips, discovered after completing a review of income inequality on behalf of Tony Blair.

Mr Phillips’ reaction to this discovery is reported to have been one of astonishment, thereby revealing himself simultaneously completely lacking in even an elementary grasp of economics and as such supremely well qualified for his new role as Chairman of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights.

Today’s Spectator contains an article by John Gray, criticising, as doomed to failure or, even worse, as being liable to be counter-productive, the government’s recently announced strategy against the growth of domestic Islamic extremism by encouraging local initiatives to foster closer integration of Britain’s Muslims and encourage the moderates to stand up to and speak up against the extremists.

Globalisation, Gray argues, has caused Britain to become so culturally diverse that it is folly to think we could or should seek any value consensus beyond the need for mutual tolerance in a social arrangement he calls 'modus vivendi'. To demand any more of Britain's Muslims, he argues, is to ‘single them out for deviating from a national consensus that is now largely mythical’ and positively fosters their radicalisation.

I wasn’t immediately enamoured with the DfES’s new plan, based on an independent report by Sir Keith Ajegbo, to ensure every lesson on the national curriculum teaches the values of diversity, race relations and multiculturalism. There are the natural anxieties that the extra requirements would just get in the way of teaching core subjects properly and involve teachers having to push the latest government propaganda that wouldn’t make it past the class clown without being brutally mocked. However, my mind changed as soon as I heard that a similar, and already highly successful, scheme is already in full swing at the London School of Economics.

For requesting to be transferred to another discussion group because unable to understand the Urdu being spoken in the one in which she had been placed, all its others members being Asian and, with one exception, unable to speak English, a fourteen year old pupil at a school in Worsely, Greater Manchester, was, according to a report in the Daily Mail, placed under arrest and held in a police cell for several hours, after being photographed and finger-printed by the police, who then released her without charge.

Given the incident took place during a GCSE science class, the only consolation to be gained from this sorry incident lies in the knowledge that the girl had not missed much by being unable to participate in the class discussion. The new syllabus for science introduced last month has been comprehensively rubbished by experts as lacking in substance.

This really is the height of tokenistic irresponsibility: councillors in Liverpool are agitating for the name of one of the world's most famous streets - Penny Lane - to be changed because it may have been named after a slave-trader. As one of the people interviewed in the Daily Mail's report points out, this attempt to erase social memory, to revise history, is more than stupid. It is also dangerous.

It has been widely reported in the media this week that an Anglican vicar is in the process of garnering enough support from his fellow clergymen and women to be able to table at the General Synod of the Church of England a private member’s motion calling for St George to be replaced by St Alban as patron saint of England.

His ostensible reason for seeking the change is his claim that, of the two purported Christian martyrs to receive canonisation, it is the fourth century British-born Alban who is far more likely to have actually existed and lived in England than George, supposedly a third century Christian Roman soldier born in Cappadocia, now in Turkey, and who, according to legend, was beheaded in Lydda, Palestine, on orders of the Christian-persecuting Emperor Diocletian, after refusing to renounce his faith.

I cannot for the life of me see what entitles the Revd to his apparent confidence that St Alban more probably existed than did George. Granted as pure legend the latter’s victorious tussle with a dragon, that no more shows George never to have existed than does Jesus not accompanying Joseph of Arithemea to England show Jesus never existed.

Given the Reverend’s purported grounds for wishing to retire George as England’s patron saint, are we to assume that, should he have his way, we would next read about him calling for the removal from his church’s hymnal and its wider place in English national life of William Blake’s wonderfully evocative and inspirational poem ‘Jerusalem’?

Today’s Times carries a report about Abdul Rahman, the 41 year-old Afghani facing trial in his home country for what still remains there the capital offence of having converted from Islam to Christianity, something he did some fourteen years ago whilst residing in Pakistan. Apparently, it is reported, he might be able to avoid the death penalty by pleading being unfit to stand trial by virtue of insanity.

One need not be a follower of the libertarian anti-psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, who rejected the very notion of mental illness, to be disinclined to pin one's hopes for this poor man’s future on faith in any such a sanity clause.

The reason the man should not be having to face trial or the death penalty for having done what he is alleged to is not that he is unfit to plead by virtue of insanity. It is, rather, that he has no case to answer, having done nothing for which he deserves to stand trial or be punished in having left his previous faith for another.

In his just published and much heralded Civitas pamphlet, The Retreat of Reason, author Anthony Browne argues that important truths have been withheld from the public, with adverse social consequences resulting from their suppression, because a powerful elite of self-styled ‘progressive' opinion-formers has judged their circulation to be prejudicial to the image and standing of certain groups whom that elite considers vulnerable and therefore to stand in need of such protection.

Unsurprisingly, Browne’s claims have not gone uncontested by this elite. None has proved more vehement in its denunication of them than has been the Independent newspaper and those who write for it.

On the day after the publication of Browne’s pamphlet (4 January), that newspaper ran a hostile news report about it, plus a still more hostile editorial which denied there was any truth at all in any of Browne’s claims.

Not content with its two earlier attempts to discredit Browne’s pamphlet, last Monday the newspaper returned to the fray. It took the form of an op-ed piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who the week before had, on the day of publication of the pamphlet, given vent to such fury with it on the BBC Today radio programme that its producer had had to pull the live item from the air half-way through the broadcast.

Indeed, so full of indignation did Ms Alibhai-Brown continue to remain a week later at what she considered to be the calumnies contained in Browne’s pamphlet that, in her op-ed piece in the Independent, she confided to having harboured a desire to inflict upon the offending pamphlet physical violence. Thus, she freely confessed that it had been ‘the only publication I have ever read that I wanted to slap several times’.

Fascinating as this glimpse into the inner phantasy-world of Ms Alibhai-Brown was, it did leave this reader wondering how sound Ms Alibhai-Brown's grasp of reality could be.

Was she unaware, I could not help but wonder, that the appropriate form of treatment for so offensive a piece of literature as she had clearly found Anthony Browne's pamphlet was to burn it not beat it?

Perhaps, it was because of the deeply politically incorrect historic associations of book-burning that only a phantasy of beating the hapless pages was able to pass through Ms Alibhai-Brown's censorious super-ego into her consciousness, for onward transmission via her keyboard into her reader's imagination.

However, Ms Alibhai-Browne was subject to no comparable inhibitions when it came to her explaining what it was in Browne’s publication that had provoked such ire in her. ‘The journalist Anthony Browne’ she wrote, ‘has written a hyperventilated attack on “political correctness” which he claims has silenced and corrupted public debate and killed people in Britain”. Ms Alibhai-Browne dismissed these claims as but ‘the fearful fantasies of an anti-PC chap gone quite mad’.

The publication yesterday of Anthony Browne’s book The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of the public debate in Britain, has led to extraordinary scenes here in the office. Quite apart from the flurry of media attention, resulting in a stream of interviews with various national and regional television and radio stations, there were an almost unprecedented number of requests for the book – trumped only by another Civitas bestseller, Our Island Story – and a slew of emails pledging support and thanking him for his courage and acuity. It seems that the book has hit a nerve. People, weary of intolerant political correctness, of the hegemony of the liberal heresy that says no one that is protected as part of a victim group can be subjected to criticism, have had enough.

Anthony Browne argues in The Retreat of Reason that political correctness, which classifies certain groups of people as victims in need of protection from criticism and allows no dissent to be expressed, is poisoning the wells of debate in modern Britain. Click here to read the press release.

'Members of the public, academics, journalists and politicians are afraid of thinking certain thoughts'. Political correctness started in academia, but it now dominates schools, hospitals, local authorities, the civil service, the media, companies, the police and the army. Since 1997 Britain has been ruled by political correctness for the first time. 'The Labour government was the first UK government not to stand up to political correctness, but to try and enact its dictates when they are not too electorally unpopular or seriously mugged by reality, and even sometimes when they are'.

Anthony Browne describes political correctness as a 'heresy of liberalism' under which 'a reliance on reason has been replaced with a reliance on the emotional appeal of an argument'. Adopting certain positions makes the politically correct feel virtuous, even more so when they are preventing the expression of an opinion that conflicts with their own: 'political correctness is the dictatorship of virtue'.

Whether an argument is true or not is a secondary consideration to whether it fits with the PC view of the world:

'In the topsy-turvy politically correct world, truth comes in two forms: the politically correct, and the factually correct. The politically correct truth is publicly proclaimed correct by politicians, celebrities and the BBC even if it is wrong, while the factually correct truth is publicly condemned as wrong even when it is right. Factually correct truths suffer the disadvantage that they don't have to be shown to be wrong, merely stated that they are politically incorrect. To the politically correct, truth is no defence; to the politically incorrect, truth is the ultimate defence.'

CLICK HERE for further details of Our Island Story

The Daily Mail and Daily Express today follow the lead of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph by devoting a full page each to reporting and commenting on the decision by Civitas to republish the out-of-print classic children’s history of Britain, Our Island Story, by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall.

Civitas decided to republish the book so as to make it available to every primary school in the country from concern that today’s schoolchildren receive a raw deal from their study of history through being deprived of acquaintance with the grand narrative sweep of their country’s history that Mrs Marshall so ably supplied.

So enthused was the Telegraph by Civitas’ decision to republish the work that it decided to broaden the appeal Civitas had made to friends for donations towards the costs by inviting its readers to join in making contributions. This they have done enthusiastically and in most splendid fashion, many recalling in the process how inspired they became with history by first reading Marshall’s book.

Indeed, today’s Daily Telegraph contains as equally an enthusiastic paean to the book by Lady Antonia Fraser.

As might be expected, the coverage given by the Mail and Express to the prospect of the republication of ‘Our Island Story’ has been no less positive than that of the Telegraph, although neither saw fit to follow the Telegraph’s example by calling on their readers to contribute financially. Perhaps, they sensed, rightly or wrongly time only will tell, that the target will be reached without need of their doing so.

We should not expect their enthusiasm for the project to carry over to papers like the Guardian and to their readership. Already, misgivings have started to be voiced by those who have expressed concern that, in her book, Mrs Marshall chose to refer to the Maoris whom the British first encountered in New Zealand as ‘savage cannibals’.

Even were Mrs Marshall’s book to have contained no such infelicitous forms of expression, and, arguably, for the period it contains very few indeed and all are easily excisable or amendable so as to bring her book into line with current political sensibilities, Civitas’ decision to make her book more widely known to today’s schoolchildren would still face massive opposition from the same quarter.

For the source of their concern with a book such as hers is altogether different and goes much deeper. Rightly its opponents sense that what the book gives and would give young readers who fall victim to its charms, or victim to any other that purvey a similarly Whig interpretation of our island’s story, is a sense of national identity that these opponents of the book wish bitterly to resist schoolchildren today being given the opportunity to acquire.

Back at the very start of the millennium, well before Civitas’ decision to reprint Mrs. Marshall’s book was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye there, the redoubtable Polly Toynbee had given voice to precisely those sentiments that truly underlie the recently voiced opposition to the idea of republishing and disseminating Marshall’s book.

Posted by David Conway on June 23, 2005 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)