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Labour is right: let the homosexuals in
London is a uniquely pleasant haven for people with Aids
Only the most bigoted of liberals would deny that this country is extremely overpopulated. We do not need large numbers of immigrants and we particularly do not need all the illegal immigrants who somehow are allowed to stay here. We cannot possibly take in all the genuine asylum seekers, let alone the thousands of bogus ones.
So it came as a shock to learn last week that the Government is planning to honour one of its more alarming election pledges and to let in the homosexual lovers of British nationals. It is also considering letting in heterosexuals who are in common-law relationships with British subjects. (Such people were allowed to apply for residence until 1996, when the Conservatives withdrew the concession after claims that gay couples should have the same right.)
This development must be a cause of enormous public concern and of tremendous harrumphings across the shires. What clearer invitation to abuse could there possibly be?
It is only too easy to imagine the coils in which officials will find themselves entangled; the present method of inquiry into the authenticity of arranged marriages will be as nothing to this. "What is your partner's grandmother's maiden name, sir? And why does his family say they've never heard of you? Oh, I see, you haven't felt able to `come out' to the family - fair enough." And so on. "I put it to you, Ms Jones, that Ms Herzigova is not your long-term, live-in lesbian lover, but your resident au pair, whose work permit has run out. Can you explain why both of you have boyfriends? Ah, you are bisexual and don't believe in patriarchal bourgeois monogamy. Fair enough."
The temptation to cheat one's way into this country must be overpowering, not least for homosexuals. One does not have to be a gay-basher to point out that the United Kingdom, and especially London, is an almost uniquely pleasant haven for people with Aids. An employee of London Lighthouse, an organisation for those with Aids , told me not long ago, with innocent pride, how wonderful it is that London has become the Aids centre of Europe, leading the field in sympathetic attitudes, superb free medical care, generous welfare payments and emergency housing, and attracting Aids sufferers from all over the rest of Europe. There is little comparable care available on the Continent.
Yet for all the obvious temptations to abuse, it does seem to me right to allow husbands and wives, or their close equivalents, to be together. This is not a liberal, or trendy, approach. Whatever we may feel, we matrimonialists must concede that there is no longer in practice any real difference between one couple trying to build a future together, and another. As Lawrence Stone's famous history of marriage, sex and the family demonstrates, this view is much older and much more persistent than our relatively short-lived ideal of the lawfully married bourgeois couple.
Traditionally we have thought it wrong to allow immigration laws to divide a married couple; in recent years we have accepted that it is still wrong, even when the married couple do not conform to our ideas of what marriage should be - that is why we have accepted arranged marriages from the Indian sub-continent, repellent and cynical though the idea of such marriages may seem to many indigenous Britons, and wide open though it has been to abuse. Why should we be less tolerant to other forms of marriage?
There will have to be some very radical change, though, to confront the problems of numbers and abuse. For a start, the general immigration list could be completely closed, in view of the new pressure from couples. And to prevent people from coming for cynical reasons, the right of entry for partners would not include any right to British nationality, or the right of entry to any siblings, parents or other kin. Nor would it confer an automatic right to British welfare benefits - though obviously partners would have in justice to pay very much less tax, if they were not eligible for all state benefits.
This would deter all but the most committed couples from applying for residence; all they would be getting would be the right to live and work together: it should end with the relationship. However, what will actually happen will be a ludicrous and horribly expensive muddle. This is partly John Major's fault for refusing to allow immigration to be an issue in the general election. These things were never publicly discussed, and probably never will be.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 31, 1997 | Comments (0)
There are many people we should exclude
I was excluded from all sports teams. As far as the games staff were concerned, I was a non-person, distinguished only by my high weekly mark in deportment, which didn't count.
It is very wearisome to come back from the summer holidays to encounter a loud new political buzzword, and one which is - in the way of all feel-good political jargon - profoundly misguided and misleading. That word is exclusion. The Prime Minister and Peter Mandelson, the minister without portfolio, have unveiled exclusion as a new-found social evil (as in "social exclusion"), and as something that New Labour will bring all its might to combat. However well-intentioned, this seems to me to be a major mistake, and part of a destructive tradition of intellectual muddle.
Of course, something must urgently be done about the people now to be called "the socially excluded", formerly known as the underclass. But to use the word "excluded" suggests, not least to them, that somebody has deliberately excluded them; and not only that, it suggests that they have a right to the life from which they are said to be excluded - a good job, a good income and so on. Most people would say that this certainly should be so on the face of it - that the very poorest do have some sort of right to a better life, or at least that the better-off have a moral duty to help them towards one.
However, the idea of the right not to be excluded means, by extension, the right to be included. This is dangerous because it is so arbitrary; the right to be included is as long as a piece of string. Just how far does each of us have a right to be included? Why, come to think of it, have Dodi Fayed and Diana, Princess of Wales excluded me and all my friends from Mohamed Fayed's yacht? For years I felt deeply excluded, and indeed I was actually excluded, from all the sports teams at my school. As far as the games staff were concerned, I was a non-person, distinguished only by my high weekly mark in deportment, which didn't count.
I was excluded because I was naturally very bad at sports like hockey and lacrosse, and extremely short-sighted as well. However, no matter how left out I may sometimes have felt, it never occurred to me that my exclusion was unreasonable, still less that I ought instead to have been included on some principle of fairness. It would have been quite obvious to me, had I thought about it, that the success of our school team depended on exclusion of people like me. The school choirs and the school orchestras also depended for their excellence on the exclusion of many girls who would love to have belonged to them.
I am not trying to argue by analogy that the very poor should be abandoned to their poverty. What I am trying to suggest is that excellence very often depends on exclusion; exclusion is very often a necessary thing. To make a bogey of the word, and to suggest that exclusion is always unfair, is wrong. It creates a wholly misplaced resentment. And it is just another example of that long-lived, vaguely egalitarian thinking which has dominated public debate for so long.
Like most bad political thinking, it has its roots in good intentions. The pain of rejection is all too clear to everyone - that miserable sensation of not being invited to life's party, when everyone else seems to be going. Failing the 11-plus, failing to get any GCSEs, failing to get a first at Oxford or Cambridge, failing at work, failing to get one's chosen work - these are all very painful forms of exclusion. And in their desire to spare people the pangs of exclusion, liberals have sought since the war to promote inclusion by lowering standards. This has made a lot of people feel better, in the short term, but otherwise the results have been disheartening.
Education is the obvious example. Many more pupils are now included in the ranks of exam passers but school children are less literate, students are more ignorant (as are their teachers), exams are much easier, and standards have almost collapsed in some universities. The idea that no one must be excluded or, as the Guardian journalist Melanie Phillips has put it, that "all must have prizes", has debased standards for everyone. In some places, it has brought public education close to a state of emergency. But the great education fiasco is only one instance of our muddled thinking on exclusion.
The disastrous community care policies are another. People who are wholly unsuited to community life have been, and are being, pushed out into it, in the name of their right to inclusion in normal society. People with mental illnesses are thrown, in all their vulnerability, upon the kindness of strangers, when what they really need is residential medical care, or even restraint. It is significant that professionals in this field, and charities like Mind, prefer to use the phrase "mental health problems", since "mental illness" sounds exclusive. And once you have obscured the notion of illness, the possibility of inclusion among the healthy seems less absurd.
Similarly, people with mental handicaps are encouraged to live independently in the community, exercise their legal rights to marry and to have children, and vote and sit on juries, since any other course of action would apparently exclude them. These developments all too often end in unhappiness and disaster.
The same appears to be true of the activists among the rambling fraternity, who are agitating with growing success about their exclusion from private land. I sympathise, up to a point: I own no land, and often see beautiful land belonging to other people which I would love to explore. But it is only by excluding the public that land and its wildlife can be preserved. Anyone who thinks otherwise has only to remember the wrecking of the Lake District, or the rape of England's few remaining wild places in public ownership.
Many things retain their value only by excluding people, as Fred Hirsch, the economist, argued more than 20 years ago - whether a silent forest, or a Cambridge science project, or a monogamous marriage: without the exclusion of most people, or indeed of all other people, they are lost. Equally, some people effectively exclude themselves from many of life's opportunities.
To give such people the idea that they are suffering from deliberate exclusion by other people, by creating a Social Exclusion Unit, and waving the word exclusion about, is only to add to their problems and resentments, and to confuse the general public.
Euphemism and wishful thinking solve no problems; they create them. I had expected better from Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson; I was beginning to think New Labour might mean new realism. But by their buzzwords shall ye know them.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, August 28, 1997 | Comments (0)
Why all the outrage about teenage sex?
Economics, not morality, will reduce early pregnancies
Times do not change as much as people seem to think. It may be regrettable that there are so many more gymslip mums - as the tabloids, in their quaintly old-fashioned way, refer to pregnant schoolgirls, as if there were many people left alive who can remember what a gymslip was. And it may be regrettable that the age record for schoolboy paternity is now, as announced to public shock and horror last week, held by Master Sean Stewart, a two-timing Lothario of 11. But there is nothing very new about any of it; it does not yet mark the end of civilisation as we know it. On the contrary, I believe what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of a certain swing in the pendulum of Western civilisation, which - according to all historical precedents - will soon start to swing back towards to something more repressive. Indeed there was a drop in the number of teenage parents between 1971 and 1995, from 83,000 to 42,000.
Childhood sex is as old as the hills. So is child motherhood and, of course, child prostitution. Historically speaking they are the norm, along with a wide variety of muddle and compromise. But in this country the norm is often, wrongly, considered to have been established in the middle third of this century, a period almost unprecedented in its low levels of illegitimacy and crime and its high level of respectability and literacy in every class. This was achieved by what was a quite atypical balance of carrot and stick. Even then, if only to judge from my experiences in pony club camp, there was a great deal of wantonness among young children from the best regulated of homes.
There have been many periods in our history, and prosperous ones too, when young teenagers have had sex, and illegitimate children, without suffering particularly harsh consequences. As anthropologists point out, chastity has traditionally had to do with property, status and prospects. Those who had a great deal to gain from self-restraint very often practised it. Those with little to lose had, therefore, just as little to lose through unchastity, unless they had the misfortune to live at one of those periods when their betters saw fit to threaten them with punishment and disgrace. The same applies today. It is not surprising that the largest number of pregnant girls under 16 is to be found in the north-east of England, one of the most benighted areas of the country, where there is least to lose and therefore most to gain from sexual irresponsibility.
I suspect that what moralists really resent in all this is neither the disturbing lubriciousness of children, nor the fecklessness of their parents; it is the enormous cost to the taxpayer, who will have to pay the price of the behaviour of uncontrolled children. The fact that this careless sexual freedom is highly enjoyable, and highly to be envied, only adds insult to the injury of the enormous bill. People are already showing signs of being unwilling to pay. It is this resentment, rather than any shift in morality, or any Government educational outreach, that will bring down the number of early teenage pregnancies. If benefits to schoolgirl mothers and to their families were cut or abolished, we might see a sudden change in their behaviour.
Those girls who know that they will be much worse off with a baby than without one, and a burden on their families, who know they will face extreme poverty or a compulsory mother-and-baby home, who may not even be able to keep their babies, will be less inclined to risk having one. And those parents who discover they are personally responsible for grandchildren born to their own schoolchildren may take some interest in trying to control them.
It may be, of course, that some people will always be incapable of acting in their own best interests. Many mothers and fathers - and not only 11-year-olds - are not much use at being parents. I am quite unable to understand, for instance, how the girl of 14 who was much discussed last week went through an entire pregnancy and gave birth in the bathroom while her family was in the house, without her mother having the slightest idea. Equally baffling was the mother who was quite unaware that her 11-year-old son was having sex with not one but two girls, and could impregnate them. Curiously, she says that she worries "as any mother would".
Actually it is perfectly obvious that nobody is worrying nearly enough. Worrying is the essential bourgeois virtue; all foresight and self-discipline, and even contraception itself, are due to worry. And if worry cannot be instilled through reason and self-interest, it will in the end, when the kissing and the benefits have to stop, be enforced by fear and insecurity. Plus a change. . . .
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 24, 1997 | Comments (0)
