Civitas Blog

Patriotic history harmful to pupils; St George’s Day celebrations cancelled over spurious health and safety concerns; postal voting fraud on epidemic scale; Britain being carved up by Brussels into a set of regions of which the parts of some lie across the Channel.… With each day comes news of some fresh assault on the body-politic of this once great country.

What is the cause of this spiral of self-destruction into which Britain seems lately to have chosen to descend? How could such a once justly proud nation so speedily have reduced itself to a herd of bewildered sheep being tamely led by a pack of Scottish sheep-dogs acting upon the silent whistles of some far-off European shepherd?

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

Daniel Hannan takes on the issue of the so-called 'obesity epidemic' while John Tierney predicts more spurious climate change alarm in 2008.

As the new year emerges and the Government tries to shake off the failures of the last few months like a bad hangover, we must remember: when politicians trumpet new problems which only they can solve, the problems probably aren't as big as they are claiming. But if they are that big, they won't be the ones to solve them. So don't let them scare us this year. Our lives, as always, are in our own hands.

Today’s Times contains a Thunderer column by a Mr Murad Ahmed entitled ‘I’m Angry with extremist nutcases’.

Written in light of last week's arrest of nine young British Muslims suspected of being involved in a plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier for having fought in Iraq, and then film his execution for use in a propaganda snuff-movie, the piece is ostensibly designed to draw attention to how unrepresentative such extremists are of British Muslims.

In reality, however, Mr Ahmed's true target is the British media which he criticises for focussing exclusively on the would-be perpetrators of such acts of terror and their supporters, at the expense of denying any voice to their moderate Muslim critics such as he.

Whilst also criticising his fellow moderate Muslims for not doing enough to make vocal their dissociation from their extremist co-religionists, Mr Ahmed offers such a huge amount in extenuation of the latter as almost amounts to an apologia for their terror antics.

Being devout Christians of a traditional outlook regarding questions about sexual morality, an elderly couple from Wyre, Lancashire, were appalled last year upon discovering that their local council had decided to display in its offices literature that promoted a homosexual lifestyle. When they phoned the council to ask if they might display alongside the offending literature countervailing material that reflected their own outlook on the subject, they were informed that they couldn’t because it might give offence to homosexuals. They replied that they found the literature being displayed by the council offensive whereupon a complaint against them was lodged with the local police who subjected them to extensive interrogation to establish whether they had committed any criminal offence in having expressed their disapproval of homosexuality.

Although eventually no charges were proffered, the couple decided to take legal action against the council and constabulary for infringing their freedom of expression, an action that was due to be heard in the High Court next month.

On Christmas Eve, it was reported that the couple has agreed to drop their action after receiving an apology from the local constabulary and council and an offer to pay their legal costs plus £10,000 to a charity of their choice.

Homosexuals clearly deserve protection from violence and abuse, but not immunity from all criticism from those who consider their lifestyle to be a sin or otherwise immoral.

Last week there was a good article in The Times by Camilla Cavendish. Writing on the subject of charities lobbying and campaigning, she said that the Red Cross – and with it the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – has always been able to maintain its effectiveness on the ground, in the direct provision of services and aid, because it has always been politically neutral. She says:

‘By refusing to take sides in conflicts, it has always stood for the victims. This has historically given it access to places that other organisations cannot penetrate… We are a sentimentalist society. We are supposed to get angry to show we care. The world now is full of advocates, and that is a good thing. But sometimes, the best way to speak for those with no voice is to keep silent.’

There's a good piece by Daniel Finkelstein in The Times today, which casts doubt on the notions of e-Democracy as a legitimate way forward in this country. He argues that it could all too easily be manipulated by the government - which is running an experiment on the 10 Downing Street website - as a way to justify policies on the basis of spurious public backing. We are all asked to go to the Downing Street website and vote for Ringo Starr to be knighted as a way to test the system. A more comprehensive plan for change - in the form of direct democracy - was laid out in the June edition of the Civitas Review.

I am struck by two adjacent news-in-brief reports in today’s Times. One is entitled ‘Islamophobic bullying fears’ and reports a rise in anecdotal evidence of bullying of Muslim schoolchildren in British schools. The other which is immediately below is entitled ‘Terrorism books’. It reports that a 22-year old woman from Southall named Samina Malik has just been charged with hoarding terrorist handbooks on her computer.

However unjustified the bullying of Muslim schoolchildren undoubtedly is, its reported increase can surely not be unconnected with the reported rise in passive and active support among British Muslims for terrorism which forms the lead-story in today’s Times.

The Tories are recalibrating their position on the political spectrum and some new ideas are starting to emerge, but they are still paralysed by the problems of the welfare state. There is an entrenched belief that Tories are selfish individualists who don’t care about the poor, which means they are not fully trusted to reform health, education and welfare and are accused of only wanting tax cuts so their rich friends can enjoy the high life. The mistake of the Tories has been to fight back by accepting that big spending on the welfare state is proof of their compassion and that by rejecting tax cuts they are demonstrating their concern for the poor. Indeed, in all parties debate about public sector reform still seems wedged halfway between the age of collectivism and a more consumer friendly future. The Conservatives urgently need to differentiate themselves from Labour’s failed strategy without making it easy to caricature their view as selfish.

Some deep-seated problems, including high crime, falling education standards, unsustainable immigration, the low quality of the NHS, and rising welfare dependency are not being properly confronted by our political leaders. In particular, political discussion of public services like health and education still seems wedged halfway between the age of collectivism and a more consumer-friendly alternative.

Discussions are taking place across the political spectrum about the next steps and Recalibrating the Right is our contribution. It argues that we need to re-think the guiding principles of a free society, the obligations we owe each other and the traditional values we should uphold in order to discover the beliefs we should embrace in the immediate future. What's good about our country - and there's plenty to admire - and what's gone wrong? How can we come together to fix the problems that our political leaders are afraid to confront? What should be the relationship between a people and its government?

The first chapter sets out the guiding principles for reform and we are publishing it online to give our supporters a chance to contribute to our emerging work. We invite anyone who is interested to contribute their thoughts before the draft is finalised and published as a book. There are two ways to contribute: you can email us at this address or you can comment via this blog.

David Cameron made a speech yesterday in which he unveiled the main new policies that he intends to implement if his party wins the next election.

He will, he said, provide voters with more leisure rather than tax cuts, as well as opportunity to use that increased leisure in ways he claimed are more life-enhancing and fulilling than those leisure opportunities they currently enjoy.

Through its system of select committees, the House of Commons is currently undertaking a review of citizenship education in schools. This element of the national curriculum aims to turn out pupils who are civil, politically literate, and active in public affairs.

Given newspaper accounts of daily proceedings in the Commons, there is some reason to doubt how well suited some of its present occupants might be to deliberating how schools should set about seeking to attain these educational objectives.

Consider the following exchange there reported in yesterday’s Times:

“Shut your bloody gob!” shouted Dennis Skinner at Andrew Robathan on the Tory front bench. Mr Robathan, who had just told Mr Skinner that it was time for him to get his pension, smirked back.

“Tell him to shut his bloody mouth!” cried Mr Skinner at the Speaker who admonished him to calm down. “He started it!” cried Mr Skinner.

The Speaker chided him: “You are getting very childish.”

Mind you, learning about such goings on there might be the best way to persuade schoolchildren how undemanding it is to be an active citizen. It is nothing more than mere child's play even at the highest national level-- or should I say especially there?

Yesterday, John Prescott announced he has decided to give up use of the grace-and- favour country house of Dorneywood traditionally reserved for deputy PMs. He was doing so, he claimed, because the kerfuffle surrounding his continued use of it, after having been stripped of his former responsibilities in that office in last month’s cabinet reshuffle, was preventing him fulfilling his remaining ones in that office -- whatever they are!

The immediate occasion of his decision was the publication in the press last week of photographs of him and his colleagues hard at work there during a supposed away day last Thursday ... playing croquet.

Would that he and his colleagues had always been equally as diligent during their years in office.

Then the country might not be in the very serious mess in which it appears they have deposited it as a result of their misgovernance of it.

About the only decent thing the present government has done during its time in office in my opinion -- and I am aware this view is by no means widely shared by all its supporters, let alone its critics -- is to have joined the US in regime change in Iraq. Everything else to which they have turned their over-zealous hands has turned to ashes.

Housing has once more become a major political issue, repoliticised in areas where the supply is limited and the allocation methods are leaving an increasing number of people feeling disenfranchised and angry – areas like Barking and Dagenham, where the BNP picked up 11 seats in last week’s local elections, and Birkenhead, Frank Field’s constituency. A Labour MP of the traditional sort, Field wrote an excellent article in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Why Labour is losing the working class’, which went some way to identifying the key causes of resentment. Of support for the BNP, he said:

“It represents a clash between people's sense of fairness, grounded in a collective social ethic, and what they see as the foreign idea of individualised rights. Housing remains a flash point. The working-class sense of fairness is mocked by allocation policies that put at the top of the list groups who, in the local community's eye, have less claim than other groups. A policy of housing the homeless is noble. It is the way it is carried out which is so objectionable.

I have never heard a constituent - even one who has waited in the housing queue for decades - argue against a policy that looks after the homeless. What so many of my constituents object to, as I do, is the way the homeless jump to the top of the queue and are able to choose the best homes. This policy strikes at the very sense of fairness that working people hold. Fairness demands that those who have striven longest should rise to the top of the queue and take the best housing. The accommodation they vacate should then be offered to the homeless.”

His conclusion is along the lines of old working class values: those who have contributed to the community should be rewarded. That would indeed be a fairer allocation policy.

This came up in two discussions on the Today programme yesterday. They can both be listened to on the Today website, at 07.35 and 08.10. In the first, there was a quotation from a Barking & Dagenham voter who, expressing the frustrating of the poor working class in Britain, said that “the professional people are always putting us down, calling us racist and that, but, well, you know, we can’t afford to escape like them…” In the second, in direct contrast, Ruth Kelly, egregiously ignoring the wisdom of her fellow Labour MP, exhibited herself unable or unwilling truly to address this problem. Until she does so, Labour’s share of the vote will only continue slipping.

The BBC has handily sifted through the news about the day that is now being dubbed 'black Wednesday' on account of three nightmares in government: the revelation that Prescott had an affair with his secretary; the heckling of Patricia Hewitt by a conference of nurses; and the exposure of government negligence at the highest level concerning foreign criminals. There are good pieces by Philip Johnston and Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, as well as a good leader in the same paper. There is, too, a good piece in The Times by Anatole Kaletsky, as well as a good leader. The only thing I would add to the points made in these articles, and others besides, is that while Blair is deeply responsible for the mess, I hope the public doesn't react to his departure, when it comes, as if it is some kind of panacea. The whole government is a shambles, and the three figures in the heat right now should all be packing their bags too. What's more, we must hope that the British electorate makes its discontent known in next week's local elections.

Today the Power Inquiry calls for constitutional reform. Some of its proposals, such as lowering the voting age to 16, are ill-considered, if they are genuinely intended to increase informed debate, but there are also proposals for direct democracy. Here is a discussion of the value of the referendum and citizen's initiative by Brian Beedham, a former Economist correspondent.

This is the ground over which, apparently, both New Labour and the Conservatives are fighting. Yesterday, David Miliband – dubbed ‘Brains’ by Alastair Campbell when he was Blair’s head of policy at Number 10, and allegedly a contender for the top spot himself – announced in a speech to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations that politicians had to confront the ‘sense of powerlessness’ in the electorate. The answer, according to Miliband, was ‘double devolution’: the handing of power not only to town halls, but also to individuals and community groups. This would bring about ‘a different form of accountability: direct to the citizen, rather than via the state’.

In yesterday’s Sunday Times Bruce Anderson defends David Cameron’s tactic of declaring Tory support for public sector monopolies in health and education. Anderson thinks the Tories need to prove their compassion and so, even though education vouchers and social health insurance are good ideas, they must be ditched because they would be caricatured by Labour as ‘cuts’.

Above all, he argues that David Cameron’s strategy is ‘subtle’. David Cameron, we are told, felt he would have a honeymoon period of about three months from the press and believed that he needed to 'strike fast and hard' during this time. Anderson claims that ‘In order to reconcile the electorate to his party, [Cameron] has to persuade the voters that he believes in the National Health Service and state education.’

Until recently Mr Cameron had given the impression that he was going to take a long, careful look at policy issues and wait for commissions to report before making final decisions. In the last few days, however, he has shut down the health and education debates and pre-judged social security reform. In today's Daily Telegraph I have tried to explain why. Let me know if you think I'm wrong.