Civitas Blog

‘What legitimacy is there in a Parliament which makes crucial decisions on immigration with just fifteen ethnic minority MPs when there should be more than sixty? How can a House of Commons expect its decisions on counter-terrorism to be taken seriously by Muslim communities when there are only four Muslim MPs in the House of Commons? ‘

Trevor Phillips posed these rhetorical questions in a much publicised speech he delivered at the week-end to mark the fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

The DfES ought to be proud: they’ve cracked the child psyche and come up with the best way to encourage good behaviour in formerly wayward and wild pupils, namely, for schools and teachers to offer ‘prizes’ and increase their use of ‘encouraging language and gestures’. This is some of the guidance offered by the Elton Report (something commissioned 18 years ago – which, incidentally, is a longer time than I’ve been alive!), that the government has just brought in.

The guidance also states that ‘a rewards/sanctions ratio of at least 5:1 is an indication of a school with an effective rewards and sanctions system’ - which makes me wonder exactly what constitutes an ‘effective system’ in today’s society. Though I’m all for teachers being encouraging and supportive, I’d like to point out that whilst we may be children, we’re not ‘dense’. It is painfully obvious when a teacher is being genuine in their praise and when false praise is used. Words may be cheap, but they are more ‘effective’ when used sparingly.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make EU members, especially if their former imperial links with third world countries have already resulted in their having previously undergone large-scale immigration from them.

Why that should be so has been very well explained by Carl Mortished in a ‘European Briefing’ article that appeared in Wednesday’s Times under the title ‘A black and white view of immigrants from Eastern Europe’.

Mortished points out that, because so many immigrants from the new accession East European member states are willing and now able to accept very low-paid jobs here, whatever feeble formal attempts might be made to prevent them, their coming here to work is likely to exacerbate the already very high unemployment rates among some of the country’s black and Asian and minorities, especially their young men.

Incensed no arrests followed a demonstration that took place last year in London against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, despite one demonstrator having worn a suicide-belt and others having displayed banners calling for the killing of those who insult their prophet, a 35 year old man from Aberporth draped over his garden-fence a sheet on which he had painted the words: ‘ Kill all Muslims who threaten us and our way of life. Enoch Powell was right’.

Fearful that reprisals might be taken in his in his locality, the man's neighbour reported him to the police who arrested him and brought him to trial this week on a charge of religiously aggravated disorderly conduct.

‘Young minds are free from prejudice and discrimination, so schools are in a unique position to prevent social division. Schools should cross ethnic and religious boundaries, and certainly not increase them, or exacerbate difficulties in sensitive areas.’

Thus argues Education Secretary Alan Johnson, reportedly, in favour of what is widely expected about to become a new government policy for new faith schools that they must set aside up to a quarter of their places for pupils not of that faith, if there is local demand by them for admission.

There are many suppressed premises in his argument .To appraise its soundness, we need first to identify them, and then consider the truth value of all the independent ones.

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’.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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’.

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:

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.’

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

As a rule, Afro-American rap artists are not a group noted for the profundity of their political insight. The wording used by one in an advertisement for an employee reveals him as something of an exception.

Today’s London Times reports Sean “P Diddy” Combs as having advertised for a new butler by declaring himself looking for a white man. ‘I am an equal opportunities employer’, he is reported as having claimed.

On one level, Mr Combs’ advertisement exhibits no more than the sort of anti-white animus all too frequently voiced in the lyrics of his musical fraternity. What Mr Combs appears to be indicating is that he would prefer being served by a white man than by a black man so that he would then be able to triumph over someone of the colour of those who for so long subordinated to themselves those of his own colour. Since to express any such preference openly would violate anti-discrimination employment law, Mr Combs seems to be wittily exploiting the language of affirmative action to get away with doing so. In this way, he seems also to be cocking a further snook at whitey through openly defying his laws. Not much in Mr Combs’ advertisement for a classical liberal to admire, you might think. And were that all there was to it you would be right.

Freedom of speech should mean one thing: freedom of speech. It should not mean, ‘Say what you like but please don’t be mean’, or ‘Yes, speak your mind but don’t say anything too unpopular.’ However, as we are told to continue red-flagging our language, freedom of speech increasingly becomes an unnecessarily murky terrain about what you can say and, more crucially, whose feelings you can hurt.

Ethnic minorities suffer from ‘passive apartheid’ in rural Britain, according to Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Speaking on the Today programme, he pointed out that in the South West region of England ethnic minorities were found in the ratio ‘one in 85’, whereas in the UK as a whole the ratio was ‘one in 11 or 12’. John Humphrys put it to him that immigrants go to the cities because that is where the jobs are. Phillips strongly denied this and claimed it was due to hostility.

But, the only proof of this hostility was that, when you go in a local village shop, the shopkeeper tends to be a bit suspicious. Humphrys pointed out that people were suspicious of him when he went back to Wales, the land of his birth. In other words, they were not hostile so much as wary of strangers. But that did not satisfy Phillips, who was intent on inventing racism where none exists.

His underlying assumption is that any disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities must be the result of discrimination (passive apartheid). But there are many reasons for disparities in racial representation that have nothing to do with discrimination. Some of some are described in Liberal Anti-Racism, published in Prospect Magazine.

The original reason for establishing the Commission for Racial Equality was to improve racial harmony. But, this most recent of the periodic outbursts from the CRE, will have the opposite effect. Perhaps the time has come to abolish it.

Tony Blair’s illness is a reminder that old-Labour collectivism could easy re-assert itself under a different leader. One of the dominant trends under Gordon Brown has been the increasing use of means-tested benefits. In 1951 only 3% of the population relied on the old national assistance and unemployment benefit. Today about 22% of households of working age receive half or more of their income from the state.

Gordon Brown’s contribution: Despite a huge fall in unemployment, there were 240,000 more people on benefits and welfare tax credits in 2003 (6,383,000) than in 1997 (6,143,000).

At my local pub, there is a sign at the bar explaining that staff will do everything in their power to accommodate people with disabilities. The landlord explained to me that it was an attempt to protect them if they get inspected and their toilet facilities are deemed inadequate.

‘Why not just put in new toilets?’ I asked.
‘Sure. Why don’t you give me the ten thousand or more pounds it will cost?’ he replied.

The reason this is an issue at my neighbourhood watering hole is that 1 October sees the Disability Discrimination Act come into effect. Applying to a wide range of businesses and services, the act states that reasonable efforts must be made to accommodate disabled patrons through ramp access, adequate toilets, and so on.

Most people’s first instinct would be to consider this a great step towards equality, or at the very least, a good intention. After all, it is hard to imagine that a bar, nightclub, restaurant, etc. could shun potential paying customers or worse, humiliate them by ignoring them or being openly hostile. Yet, many disabled people are pointing out that it happens—therefore, they reason, this law is necessary.

However, laws such as this are based more on statism than a sense of fair play. It gives the state the power to tell an owner of private property how he has to conduct his business. While I would enjoy seeing prejudiced business owners be made to suffer for their ignorance or laziness, I cannot condone the state using the law to give me that pleasure. If business owners want to alienate a potential client base, let them—and watch them lose business as competitors eagerly pounce on the opportunity to snag customers.

Activists ignore the risk of punishing, or even closing, businesses such as my local that would do everything in their power to be helpful but may not be able to meet the letter of the law’s new standard. How, exactly, is that emancipating anyone, let alone the disabled?