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I used to get a lot of mileage out of sex (as a public speaker)
In the painful uncertainty surrounding everything these days, there is a lot of cancellation going on, and there have been a few moments, I admit, when I have been grateful for it.
Last week, for instance, I learnt that a fringe meeting to be held at the Conservative Party Conference, on the question of "Whither the Tory party?", or something of the sort, had been cancelled. This may well have been more because of lack of interest than the current international crisis, but, either way, it's off. As I was to have been one of the speakers, I was delighted and relieved: I have been wondering, ever since I was asked, what on earth made me agree to go. It must have been the usual shaming combination of vanity and weakness.
What is the siren call of public speaking? Why on earth does anyone do it? At least, why do I do it? I know that the delightful flattery of the invitation soon gives way to very nasty twinges of self-doubt, in my case at least.
I was rather relieved to discover that the writer Petronella Wyatt, witty and glamorous though she is and confident though she seems, is not impervious to these twinges. I met her just before she was about to give a speech last Tuesday at a Right-wing lunch in the Lanesborough. Although she didn't seem nervous, she did immediately agree that the way one lines oneself up for this kind of thing is very odd, considering that it is entirely optional.
What is worse is that, for some reason, I seem always to speak on rather depressing subjects. And it is entirely my own fault. On Friday, I had somehow set myself to answer the question, at a think-tank I find both admirable and alarming, of whether public service training renders people unfit for public service. At least I'd set myself up to ask the question, but it comes to the same thing. Important but depressing.
Petronella's speech, by contrast, was fun. She told jokes. People enjoyed it. She enjoyed it. But I defy even Petronella to inject some humour into the training of social workers. I am really beginning to think it is time to change my subjects.
Petronella claims that she has two speeches these days, one about being unhappy, which we got on Tuesday, and another about sex. Well, aspects of sex anyway. And that reminded me that there was a time when I used to give talks about nothing but sex. Well, aspects of sex anyway. Nice girls don't really talk about sex. Not as such. Even these days. They talk around it.
It's almost inexhaustible. Sex - as in gender - is a particularly useful term on the pages of The Daily Telegraph, where the word gender is used only in its grammatical sense. Then there's sex as in differences between the sexes and in attitudes to sex. Then there is sex as in sex wars, sex as in sexual freedom, sex as in abuse of - in advertising, or in patriarchal societies - and sex as in sexual identity.
All in all, I used to get a lot of mileage out of sex. As a public speaker, I mean. And it was so much more fun than talking about social services or teacher training. Perhaps I should go back to it. At least one cannot make terrible errors talking about sex or even about unhappiness - one's views are one's views and no awkward facts, or even errors, need ever intrude.
But with ideology in the social services, subjective though a lot of it is, and wildly unrealistic and doctrinaire though it appears, it is quite easy to make obvious, shaming mistakes. And oh, the humiliation. Oh, the withering remorse. We journalists are not as insensitive or even as insincere as our reckless vanity makes us seem.
I wonder how far wrong I could have gone with "Whither the Tory party?". It was to have taken place with some rather heavy-hitting young men, and I suppose that, if in doubt, I could have let them get on with it, in that show-off, young-man way, while sitting quietly on the platform and looking co-operative myself. I know absolutely nothing about party management and party funds, and I felt from the first, only moments after I had accepted the invitation, that this might prove a handicap.
What I had been planning to say was that, although the party itself might perhaps implode, as people seem to enjoy announcing, I don't think conservative ideas will wither and die, because most of them are right. Only the Conservative Party, and Conservative thinking, are based on an unsentimental and truthful view of human nature, and of the realities of the market, and on a commitment to freedom founded on a personal sense of responsibility and duty.
Other parties may have started to describe themselves pretty much like this, but they are deluding themselves and others. They are essentially statist and interventionist. Admittedly, there are some alarming Conservative tendencies towards authoritarianism, which I resent and fear: they have a long and resilient history in the party, and are hard to resist, but I do not think they are central to Conservatism.
No matter how glum or curtailed the party conference is, Conservative ideas will rise again, if only in some other form, because they are right. I have a rather naive idea, irrational and old-fashioned though it may be, that there is something death-defying about truth. So, too, there is something truly death-defying about humour. So in these serious times, I am now going to go away and try to think, for once, of something funny.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, September 29, 2001 | Comments (0)
It is decadent to tolerate the intolerable
In all the monstrous accusations that have been hurled since September 11 at the United States, and at the West in general, there is one that has an uncomfortable grain of truth in it, at least as far as Britain is concerned. It is the accusation of decadence. What our accusers have in mind is usually greedy, destructive, licentious, capitalist self-indulgence. I wouldn't agree entirely with that, though I suppose one would have to admit there is something in it too. What I mean is that there has, for a long time, been something decadent in Britain about our failure of conviction, our failure of self-respect.
The usual explanation for this is liberal guilt. I find it difficult to understand, partly because I don't suffer from it for some reason. I don't, for instance, feel inclined to apologise for Britain's part in the slave trade, unspeakable though it was. To feel guilty about it is to have a very weak understanding of history, or of historical responsibility. Besides, if one is going to talk in such irrational terms, several of my forebears did their best, in the Royal Navy, to stop the slave trade. But for many Britons there has been, throughout my adult life, a profound self-doubt, which can be explained only by some sort of misplaced sense of guilt, and which has deprived the indigenous Judaeo-Christian culture of confidence in itself, and in its true and admirable values.
The signs of this loss of conviction are legion and many of them have to do with anxieties about race; there is the obsession with race and "institutional racism", the Orwellian rush of every major institution to confess racist thought crimes, the adoption of the word "winterval" instead of Christmas holidays by a Midlands town council, a Christian Prime Minister using "Season's greetings" on his Christmas cards for fear of - well, fear of what? - and any number of unnecessary capitulations to what you might call the spirit of Durban.
This first struck me forcibly at the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. That a foreign power should openly promise to reward the murder of a British subject was bad enough. Much worse were the astonishingly symbolic images on television of other British subjects publicly burning copies of his book on great bonfires in the streets, and openly baying for his blood, supposedly in the name of Islam. Here in Britain, people howled openly, in groups, in pamphlets, on television and in demonstrations, for a man's death. Worst of all was that nothing was done about it. No one in Britain was arrested - as far as I remember - and no one was tried for any of the obvious offences involved.
Criticism of the book-burners was surprisingly muted. Efforts were made to understand. People argued that it was wise to play things down. Confrontation might be inflammatory. Racial tensions might be exacerbated. Ethnic sensibilities might be offended. All that happened was that Rushdie got bodyguards. I now wonder what lesson was drawn from this feebleness at the time by extremists, Muslim or other. And I wonder whether there is any connection between that decadent failure of nerve then and the way Britain has since acquired a shameful reputation as a haven for terrorists.
More than half a dozen foreign governments have filed diplomatic protests with the Foreign Office about the presence in Britain of terrorist groups. The list of known or suspected major terrorist individuals or groups in the country is long. At the same time, it is still possible to say outrageous and unspeakable things here with impunity.
Omar Bakri Mohamed, for instance, a man denied asylum in the 1980s but still living here and apparently seeking British nationality, is the spokesman for the UK-based sister organisation of Osama bin Laden's Islamic Front for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders. He leads the Al-Muhajiroun group, which aims to overthrow Western society and create a worldwide Islamic state, and has issued a fatwa against the president of Pakistan as a "puppet" of America; last week his group called for holy war against Britain and America. Yet, for all the Home Secretary's warnings, the man is still at large.
It's true that the Government has recently tried to tighten the law against terrorism. It is also true, as Oliver Letwin has argued here, that the recent incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law now makes it more difficult for the Government to crack down on terrorists. But I suspect there is, or was, an underlying problem - a deep-seated reluctance among the educated to speak up against cultural assaults and for the host culture, and an unwillingness to criticise members of ethnic minorities at all, even under provocation. Paradoxically, this is extremely dangerous, particularly now, for ethnic minorities; the ordinary law-abiding majority of them can come to be lumped in with the tiny minority of fanatics, as if they were all the same.
What I think of as Western decadence has come together, most unfortunately, with Western tolerance. Tolerance is not only one of the greatest achievements of our civilisation and the bedrock of freedom; it is also its Achilles' heel. As the old sixth-form debating society cliche points out, it does not make sense, in the name of tolerance, to tolerate the intolerant. It does not make sense to allow intolerant people or ideas to undermine our all-too-tolerant culture. We should, in the name of tolerance, insist on the freedom to stop them. If we lack the will to do it, and the wisdom to do it right, then we are decadent, softened up by our soft lives.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, September 22, 2001 | Comments (0)
We need teachers: we're hiring 'part-time lesbian advocates'
Local government doesn't interest anyone very much. In fact, it is probably a mistake even to mention it in the first sentence of a column on a hopeful Saturday morning in an Indian summer.
Most otherwise civic-minded people would probably be unable to come up with the name of a single one of their local councillors. The whole thing is unglamorous, complicated and boring; if the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the price of understanding local government is eternal tedium.
Yet local government is increasingly where, as we used to say, it's at. A huge proportion of Britain's failing public services are provided, and often decided, locally. All those who pay not the slightest attention to what is going on in local government will get - are getting - the public services they deserve.
It hardly needs repeating that public services are not working very well. We all know that there is a shortage of teachers, nurses, social workers, care workers and home helps, and all the many others we desperately need. It is hard to recruit them and hard to find the money to pay them properly.
Lack of money - or "resources", "funding" or "investment" in New Labour speak - is a large part of the problem. But I think it is compounded by a management culture of waste and muddle.
Most particularly, I mean muddled priorities, which make for waste. When you are confronted by serious problems and a very tight budget, priorities ought to be plain and simple. Indeed they are, to any one whose mindset has not been corrupted by the state sector mentality. But by the time they have been trained - in other words, indoctrinated in a politicised agenda of social change - state sector managers (and with voluntary sector managers, too, who move in and out of the state sector) are often unable to see the wood of real need for the trees of ideology. One does not need to argue with the ideology, though I do. One has only to argue with the skewed priorities.
Anyone who doubts this ought to take a look at a heavy supplement of more than 1,000 state and voluntary sector job advertisements, weighing almost a pound, published by the Guardian last week. These pages were not actually a testament to the most ludicrous political correctness, as some on the Right might think. Many of the jobs have some value to someone, if only in providing employment for the otherwise not very employable. However, most of them are inessential. How can they be justified, at public expense, at a time of such terrible staff shortages on the front line?
It is true that some of the jobs sounded predictably silly. There was at least one post for a "part-time lesbian advocate/caseworker", several for income maximisation welfare rights advisers in Newham, and one, in comic contrast, for a benefits overpayment team leader in Tower Hamlets. A "cafe drop-in co-ordinator" for young black and Asian people is needed in Manchester: according to the small print, "despite high levels of black and Asian young people accessing both our supported housing scheme and resettlement service, they are under-represented in the take-up of building-based services".
A Rhondda council was advertising for a "head of partnership and social inclusion"; her or his job would involve supporting the work of a multi-agency partnership for services for young people "with a unique opportunity to forge effective partnership working between different agencies".
I especially liked the "health promotion specialist: Irish communities" sought by a Birmingham NHS trust, to "improve understanding of HIV, sexual health, sexuality and drug-related issues among agencies and organisations working with Irish people in Birmingham" - not, you note, with Irish people themselves, but with "agencies and organisations".
It may be that sex is something the Irish do differently from the rest of us, and need special advice about. It may even be that some of them would be prepared to listen, in special ethnic drop-in centres, to worthy instruction along such lines from Brummy apparatchiks, and that lots of agencies ought to be dreaming up lots of such schemes.
On the other hand, it is a fair bet that Irish people's problems with drugs and sex are much like everybody else's, and that the existing deluge of information might well be enough for them to be going on with, considering that there are ailing grannies, some of them doubtless Irish, who shiver alone and unwashed in their unheated flats, and mentally ill people with no one to turn to and nowhere to go.
This case is typical of what is wrong with the local government-state sector mentality. It pursues low priorities at the expense of high ones. It draws staff further and further away from the people they should serve, behind increasing mountains of paper work, into ever proliferating "agencies", "organisations" and all the further agencies for networking, outreach, EU co-operation, self-assessment and monitoring of best practice and quality assurance that follow - everyone taking in each other's washing, in other words.
It is our money that is being wasted. It is our sick and old and dispossessed who are neglected as a result of all this. Yet there has been no suggestion, from any political party, about how to deal with this problem, the central political question of today, I believe. It's because it's boring.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, September 08, 2001 | Comments (0)
