Archive for December, 2004
What the Butler Saw… and What Should Always Remain Private
Posted by David Conway in Civil Liberty on 10/12/2004
In an interview contained in this week’s issue of the Spectator, former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, delivers a coruscating attack on the style of government of the present administration.
Of especial concern to Lord Butler has been the way Prime Minister Blair’s almost Presidential approach towards his job has steadily eroded the sovereignty of Parliament, and, in particular thereby, undermined the authority of the House of Commons.
In face of what Lord Butler has exposed as the present administration’s contempt for representative government, small wonder is it that many of today’s more serious national dailies make their top news story the government’s decision to reject the advice of the Electoral Commission that it proceed no further with its plan to replace the secret ballot by postal voting.
When the Nanny State does Not Know Best
Posted by David Conway in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 09/12/2004
Abigail is mother of two year old, Adam, and also the best friend of her neighbour, Brenda, also the mother of a toddler, Boris.
Both mothers have temporarily suspended paid work to stay home to raise a family. Currently, neither receives any government financial help to do so.
Under government proposals announced today, both mothers will shortly become eligible for considerable tax breaks, should either decide to resume paid work and hire a qualified nanny to look after her child instead.
Fast-forward in time from today to six months after the scheme has been introduced.
Let’s hear it for a good dose of imprisonment!
Posted by Norman Dennis in Crime on 08/12/2004
No one seems to have a good word to say for prison at the moment. The Prison Reform Trust has published a report today criticising the criminal justice system for sending so many parents to prison, which causes problems for their children. In her foreword to the report Cherie Blair says that ‘we should examine closely whether there is a better alternative, for the individuals concerned and their families, to imprisonment which too often worsens rather than tackles the problem’.
Of course, you would expect this sort of thing from the Prison Reform Trust, in the same way that you would always expect a barber to recommend a haircut. What is more surprising in that the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales will be publishing tomorrow a document on prison which is so larded with the language of the anti-prison intelligentsia (many of whom actually work in the criminal justice system) that I can’t help wondering if any of their lordships actually read the document, or if they just left it to their ever-growing bureaucracy to handle the matter on their behalf.
Understanding David Blunkett
Posted by Norman Dennis in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 07/12/2004
Sociology until the nineteen sixties was greatly interested in “understanding” how people behaved socially. “Understanding”, though he retained much of its ordinary meaning, was defined with painstaking exactness by Max Weber.
One of his basic ideas was the common-sense one, that people can’t act on the basis of what all the facts of the situation are–they can’t possibly know the truth of more than a tiny fraction of them–so they act on their beliefs about what the facts are (and can, of course, be quite mistaken).
The sociology established by Max Weber saw its business as examining the evidence about what people believed to be factually true. What do given people believe is factually true about human nature? Are human beings born good or bad? Does every human being on the planet come into the world as a blank sheet on which society can transcribe any personality and from which it can draw any ability it wants, or is every individual mainly programmed by his or her genetic makeup?
Personal family conduct and public family policy
Posted by Norman Dennis in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 06/12/2004
‘Creating stronger families’ was an explicit objective of the Home Secretary’s recent Five-Year Plan. ‘Families’ were allegedly placed ‘at the heart’ of his policy to combat crime. (Confident Communities, Cm 6287, July 2004.) In the document, however, the word ‘family’ appears only when it means any household arrangement whatsoever. ‘A family’, to the Home Secretary throughout Confident Communities, is a household composed of any single adult, or any ‘partners’ of any sexual orientation, in any relationship, together with children, whatever their parentage. In the whole of the document ‘marriage’ is mentioned once, and then in order to denigrate it. At the time, I was baffled that in formulating public policy a Home Secretary could dismantle and transform the concept of the married family in this way. I’m not baffled now.
Window on the BBC’s World
Posted by Norman Dennis in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 06/12/2004
I rarely listen to Radio 5, but I happened to turn it on just before midnight last Saturday (4 December) to see if I could catch the score for the Sunderland v West Ham game. The announcer was just letting people know what the next discussion would be. His exact words were: “Does anybody in this day and age actually think prostitution is wrong?” I can spot a joke as well as the next man, and he was not joking.
Only a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that the question could be anything but “Does anybody in this day and age think that prostitution is right?” For of course wives and mothers thought it was wrong for their husbands and sons to go cottaging, kerb crawling or frequenting brothels. Fathers and mothers would have been horrified at the thought of their daughters or sons being prostitutes. In that recent innocent age, children would have hardly been able to grasp that their fathers might be using prostitutes or their mothers paying for the services of a gigolo.
So have we really sunk so low that the BBC is correct in its casual assumption that hardly anybody in this country today believes that prostitution is wrong? Has William Blake’s prophecy come so close to fulfilment in 2004, “The harlot’s cry from street to street/Shall be Old England’s winding sheet”?
Or was it just that BBC moderators and commentators, circulating within their narrow media coteries, have come to believe in TV’s own world of ridiculously unrealistic “realism”, according to which England is populated almost exclusively by foul-mouthed and promiscuous male and female louts?
TV seems to have a mission to make bad behaviour seem not only normal, but morally neutral. Ordinary people end by feeling that all their equally decent friends, neighbours and relatives must be exceptional relics stranded in some time warp, and that they themselves must be social and psychological freaks.
The tragedy is, life imitates art. What begin as a fiction ends as fact, especially when there are vast funds from licence money, virtually a poll tax, to freely play with every year, and the medium is as powerful as modern television.