Civitas Blog

This coming Sunday sees the start in the Cornish town of St Just of a two-day festival that takes place there each year to celebrate its fourteenth century church. As well as that church and an obligatory public house that stands next door to it, the town also boasts a small secondary school catering for several hundred local children who traditionally have been given the Monday off to join in the festivities.

When she joined it from London earlier this year, the school’s new head Jackie Steele decided that henceforth it would remain open on these Mondays. She reportedly took the decision without consulting the local vicar or the town council which pleased neither. Nor was her decision to the liking of the townsfolk whose complaints have led to Ms Steele relenting and sending parents a letter of apology in which she informed them that they could withdraw their children from school on that day.

At last week’s Tory party conference, shadow education secretary Michael Gove committed his party upon their return to power to restoring the teaching of narrative British history in schools. He reportedly said:

‘Instead of being taught about the Magna Carta the Glorious Revolution and the heroic role of the Royal navy in putting down slavery, our children are [now] either taught to put Britain in the dock or they remain in ignorance of our island story, That is morally wrong, culturally self-defeating – and we would put it right.’

Yesterday was the first day of the month in which children return to school after the summer holidays. (Cue for cheers or boos depending on age.)

Along with the start of the new school year, yesterday also saw the launch of a new anti-faith school initiative.

Named the Accord Coalition, what distinguishes this new organisation from all other lobby groups campaigning for the same end is that its membership includes several prominent religious figures and groups. It is not just the usual group of virulently anti-religious suspects such as Polly Toynbee, Phillip Pullman and A.C.Grayling, although all of these belong to it.

For those sufficiently fortunate never to have needed to know, WDWTWA stands for ‘Who Do We Think We Are Week?’ For those still none the wiser, according to the proud boast of the Department of Children Schools and Families, 'WDWTWA is a new, DCSF-funded education project, designed to engage primary and secondary school teachers in the exploration of identity, diversity and citizenship with their pupils.’

TWTWTW stands for ‘That Was the Week That Was’, a sixties satirical tv show that brought the likes of Bernard Levin and David Frost to fame. Since it supposedly took place last week, WDWTWA has now mercifully become TWTWTW. I say "mercifully" because of the awful twaddle it well and truly was.

The tragic discovery last week in her Handsworth home of the emaciated corpse of seven year old Khyra Ishaq raises several disturbing questions.

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Another May, another Mayor mercifully less prone than some to praising preachers of hate, and now, to add further icing to the cake of all who long for this country to return to the days when it was a tolerant, peaceful and civilised place in which to live, another moderate Muslim organisation to join the recently launched Quilliam Foundation in tackling the pockets of extremism and intolerance that remain among Britain’s Muslim community.

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Some claim faith schools are socially divisive. They want them replaced by mixed community schools where children of all different faiths will be schooled together. That way, so the argument goes, all will be forced to mix and thereby become friends. By so becoming, the theory continues, they will be freed from the prejudices and negative stereotypes about each other caused by their lack of familiarity.

Theory does not always work out in practice, as the mother of a fifteen year old pupil at a community school in Swindon tragically learned a year ago last January.

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Last week, in a carefully calculated act of political spite and jockeying for position in his party, Secretary of State for Schools Ed Balls took Jewish voluntary-aided schools to task for having wrongly included in their application forms the information that parents are expected to make voluntary contributions, assuming they have means, to the costs of religious instruction and external security. Apparently, it is OK for them to include the information in their advertising and brochures, but not in their applications forms. Search me why not.

Jewish schools certainly would seem in need of every penny parents of pupils can give them.

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More than enough, perhaps, has already been said about the speech given last week by the Minister for Culture Margaret Hodge in which she criticised the Proms and other unnamed iconic cultural events -- the Henley Regatta?, Glyndebourne? -- for not being sufficiently inclusive.

So well does the Culture Minister's speech epitomise a central flaw in so much current governmental thinking about community cohesion as to warrant a brief re-visitation.

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Forgive me for returning to the claim made last week by the Archbishop of Canterbury that it is now unavoidable in the interests of social cohesion that certain elements of sharia become recognised by or incorporated within British law.

Despite having been gone over so well by now, his remarks raise such an important issue concerning the future direction of this country that they are well worth revisiting. For, despite all the attention his remarks have received, there are certain dangers in what the Archbishop is calling for that have yet to be sufficiently spelled out.

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Today’s Times contains a report entitled ‘Universities join battle against terror as guidelines’. It tells of how Britain’s university chiefs have finally agreed ‘to inform the police of any extremist behaviour by students or visiting speakers that they suspect may lead to terrorism’.

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The truth shall set ye free, the good book says, a venerable adage that strangely seems to admit of exception in the case of straight-talking Anglican bishops.

This is especially true of those, like Bishop Nazir-Ali, with temerity enough to claim that Muslim no-go areas have lately grown up in Britain in consequence of large-scale immigration, combined with multiculturalism and the rise of Islamic extremism.

No sooner did his claim appear at the week-end in an article in the Sunday Telegraph than a stampede quickly broke out among politicians and pundits eager to be first into the tv studios to sound off about how lacking in all evidence was the bishop’s claim.

Yesterday at the Old Bailey, three young men, Sodrul Islam, Delwar Hussain and Mamoon Hussain, were convicted of the attempted murder of a thirty-one year old fourth man, John Payne. The attempted murder took place in April 2006 on the Clichy estate in Stepney in London’s Tower Hamlets.

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Slowly, slowly, I sense the beginnings of a great historic sea-change in public opinion at home and abroad concerning the wisdom of President Bush’s decision in 2003 to go to war in Iraq. Initially, his decision was greeted with very widespread condemnation both here and abroad, condemnation that grew louder as any suspected WMD failed to show up.

Recently, however, public outrage at that decision and at the US's continued military presence in Iraq has begun to subside. It has subsided with the growing calm in that country the Petraeus surge has brought, combined with increasing hostility among Iraqis and their increasing success in defeating foreign Al Qaeda fighters in their country. Slowly, former outrage at Bush’s decision to go to war is giving way to a silent reassessment of the action.

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In a follow-up piece in today’s Guardian Unlimited to his important debate on Islam last week with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ed Husain laments the woeful ignorance about that religion whch he claims is displayed by her and other ex-Muslims and non-Muslims who condemn it in toto on the strength of what he argues are only certain immoderate versions of it.

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Last Friday, the Charity Commission announced the creation of a new Faith and Social Cohesion Unit to lead its work with faith-based charities.

In the first instance, it announced, the new unit will focus on Muslim charities and communities. Directing its work will be a newly created Project Board the members of which, we were told, will include representatives from MINAB, the Mosques and Imams Advisory Board.

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In quest of Muslim votes, David Cameron has turned for policy advice to a group of Muslim party members known as the Conservative Muslim Forum (CMF).

Last week, that group gave David Cameron the benefit of its collective wisdom on what policies his party should adopt to make itself of greater appeal to Muslim voters.

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‘Blackburn, in common with many northern towns, is experiencing a huge upsurge in pimping, and it is an unpalatable truth … that many of the newest wave of pimps come from within the Asian community.’

So claimed a truly stomach-churning report in last week’s Sunday Times. The report exposed the large scale of organised sex trafficking of white under-age girls lured into prostitution and drug addiction in northern towns by unscrupulous gangs of men of largely Pakistani origin.

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Although we rightly worry about the potentially divisive effects of faith schools, on-campus extremism, and the hateful intolerance that some Muslims show former co-religionists who leave Islam, in actuality the battle for social cohesion will be lost or won not so much by what takes place in Britain than by what happens in the Middle East.

For it has been there where the Islamist virus currently plaguing the world was first spawned, and it has been this aggressive, intolerant and supremacist ideology that ultimately fuels all demands and forms of activity by Muslims that so currently imperil social cohesion at home.

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No society can flourish in the absence of its enjoying a considerable degree of cohesion among its members.

In determining how much cohesion a society enjoys, few factors play a more decisive role than do the policies it adopts towards two decisive matters. These are immigration and education.

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There is a bizarre story in today’s Times. Apparently, Education Secretary Ed Balls will announce today that all secondary schools must include compulsory lessons in ‘happiness, well-being and good manners’.

They are being introduced reportedly on the basis of the apparent improvement in behaviour and academic performance of primary pupils who had received such lessons as part of an extensive pilot programme named ‘Seal’ which stands for ‘Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning’.

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‘How would the Muslim community respond if ITV made a programme challenging Muhammad as the last prophet?’

So, according to a report in Saturday’s Guardian, does Anglican canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo protest against the decision by ITV to broadcast, on some as yet unnamed future Sunday, a one-hour documentary setting out the Muslim view of Jesus.

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Passing a lesser-known London park this morning, it was pleasing to see a neat phalanx of young men raising the Union Jack - writes Peter Smith. Rather than joining their peers for a ‘night on the tiles’ to mark the end of school, these young men – teenage boys, if you will – are members of the Scouting movement. At 8 am today, thousands of Scouts from across the world celebrated the one hundredth birthday of an organisation that has instilled civic virtues in tens of millions of young men.

One wonders what Robert Baden-Powell would make of the Scout Association today. Its beginnings were austere: a handful of boys taken on a week-long ‘experimental camp’ at Brownsea Island, Dorset, followed by the re-publication of field craft books originally written for soldiers in the Boer War. But Baden-Powell was (as marketing strategists say) ‘on to a good thing’ and the organisation stands as it does today, with 28 million members today.

What’s the secret to the Scout Movement’s success? Many famous leaders in politics, science, exploration and culture are proud to be still associated with one of their childhood pastimes. In a word, its values. Scouts are taught to become self-reliant, responsible, caring and committed members of society; in other words, they become adults. Baden-Powell mixed working class and public schooled children to promote integration and team work across social divides. The formation of young minds according to a common syllabus but with plenty of scope for individual challenge and creativity provides a keen template to educationalists, social commentators and politicians today. It remains a showcase for how entrepreneurial people can better the lives of many others without the interference of central government. Scouts everywhere, happy birthday, and here’s to another hundred years.

To mark next month’s sixtieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan, earlier this month the BBC Asian Network commissioned a poll of 500 young British citizens of south Asian extraction, aged between 16 and 34. A control group was also polled about the same matters made up of 235 young whites of comparable age currently residing in Britain. However, the results of the poll, whch were published yesterday, leave it unclear how many of these whites were British citizens as opposed to being immigrants from the EU.

The results of the poll make very interesting reading, but not for the reasons the BBC chose to highlight in its account of the poll issued on its website yesterday.

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Three closely connected unresolved issues hold the key to peace abroad today and with that a resolution of the tensions currently posing the gravest threat to social cohesion at home.

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Being desperate to stop the radicalisation of British-born Muslims, the government turned for expert advice on how best they may be taught about Islam so that they would learn that only moderate versions of their religion were, if not authentic, then at least palatable.

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Towards the end of last year, following separate exposes by John Ware and Martin Bright as to
just how immoderate in view and policy are the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, until then the government’s preferred interlocutor when dealing with the country’s two million Muslims, it looked as though the government was finally about to get serious in henceforth only dealing with and supporting genuinely moderate Muslim organisations and their leadership.

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A recent article in the International Herald Tribune provides its readers with some not entirely reassuring details about how young British Muslim students at their country's burgeoning madrassas are being taught citizenship in them.

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Today's newspapers contain two different horticultural stories each with a bearing on social cohesion.

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Dominating the sky-line of Regent's Park's Hanover Gate entrance is the now somewhat slightly tarnished golden dome of the Central London Mosque. Its leafy affluent environs are a far cry from the congested run-down streets of Whitechapel home to the East London Mosque which was the subject of last Tuesday’s posting.

Some of the messages being purveyed at the Regent’s Park mosque, however, are no less worryingly divisive than those being purveyed at its East End counterpart that formed the subject of Tuesday's posting.

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The letters ‘ELM-LMC’ stand for the East London Mosque- London Muslim Centre. Situated in Whitechapel Road, the Mosque was opened in 1941, with the London Muslim Centre being opened in June 2004.

The current chairman of the ELM-LMC is Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari, who also finds time to serve as Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain as well as on the Organising Commitee of London Olympics.

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