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Why we have a family pact not to give Christmas presents
The New Seriousness did not last very long. For a few short weeks after the September 11 atrocities, there was a lot of earnest chat about things that really matter, and about returning to the enduring values of home and hearth. The powers-that-be were so worried about the flight from the high street (to home and hearth and enduring values) that they even felt obliged, in the name of patriotism, to urge us back to the shops.
They need not have worried. We didn't stay away long. The manicurists of South Kensington were empty for only a week. Ageing nightclubbers are drifting sedately back to Annabel's. And we are all shopping again, or at least most of us are; we are not just a nation of shopkeepers, we are a nation of shoppers.
That can be the only explanation for the extraordinary interest shown in a confession by my fellow columnist Andrew Marr that he intended to boycott early Christmas shopping. His many well-considered views on this and that, such as Afghanistan or enduring values, have not, it seems, excited anything like the passionate reaction of press and public to his feelings about shopping.
Columnists and feature writers took up the theme, letters followed and his own wife wrote to this newspaper, accusing him of insincerity and dereliction of duty. Clearly shopping, and Christmas shopping especially, touches a sensitive national nerve.
How sad it is. And how odd. Every year I am horribly depressed by the nonsensical fuss that intelligent people make about Christmas shopping. Mrs Marr, for instance, says that she has a minimum of 29 relations who all "need presents at Christmas". Who actually needs presents? I'm reminded of the maternity nurse in an Evelyn Waugh short story who presents the young mother-to-be with an enormously elaborate, expensive list of baby equipment and who, when asked whether it is all essential, replies grimly that it is quite essential for those who can afford it.
Of course it is important (and a pleasure) to give presents to some people at Christmas, even to children who have already got far more toys than they know what to do with: their over-sophisticated little faces will light up for at least a couple of minutes. But the idea that one has to buy expensive objects for one's entire extended family and inner social circle seems not only daft, but also faintly obscene, especially now. Christmas is not just about presents.
I had better be careful. Not only is it unpatriotic to seek to undermine shopping, but it will also soon be illegal to say anything about what Christmas is or is not, or how not to celebrate it, for fear of incitement to religious hatred.
I know that many people's Christmas arrangements are not really religious and that there is nothing in the Bible about Christmas trees, but with ill-considered, catch-all legislation such as the proposals currently in the Commons, and with the usual conflation of religion with culture, one cannot be too careful. So I will say it while I still can. Christmas need not be about shopping, about having and spending. Conspicuous consumption, though fun, is not a duty. Competitive present buying is something you can leave to other people, unless you enjoy it and have lots of time and money. Long ago in our family, we made an agreement that adults would not exchange Christmas presents; it has been wonderfully liberating.
However, the rush to the shops isn't merely in pursuit of presents. In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of expectation, and of choice, and Christmas now has to be "lifestylish". Even downmarket magazines and colour supplements print helpful shoppers' countdown calendars of how to plan your shopping days to Christmas.
These aren't merely the usual (and incomprehensible) instructions about when to make and freeze puddings and sauces and game pies for 12. They also compile thoughtful lists of this year's "must-haves" of motifs for tablescaping and Christmas tree bedizening, of new ethnic baubles, new embroidered tablecloths, new minimal napkins, new blown-glass candlesticks, designer crackers, customised scented candles, festive silver name-card holders, handpressed wrapping paper, shot silk and taffeta ribbons, competitive flower arrangements and staircase swathes. And on and on. And a wreath of contorted hazel twigs and dried persimmons for the front door, so long as it is entirely different from last year's and from everyone else's.
No one has to buy any of this stuff. Tablescaping is something we can all get by without. No one even has to buy very many presents. Most people claim to hate the whole thing and some of them, at least, must mean it. I can only think it must fulfil some deep inner need. A few years ago, I read a survey that claimed that the vast majority of people feel truly "empowered" only when in a shopping mall.
This remains a mystery to me; being in a shopping mall is the only time when I feel absolutely disempowered - helplessly confused and demoralised by extremes of senseless choice between thousands of pretty much identical objects, in pretty much identical chain stores.
Think of the hundreds of bottles of indistinguishable shampoo; was it for this that capitalism triumphed? Capitalist materialist sybarite though I am, all this strikes me as decadent, or at least as quite unnecessary. Christmas to me means family love and enduring hope: I suppose that's the old seriousness, in part, and it still survives.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, November 24, 2001 | Comments (0)
More religious schools will simply divide our children
Estelle Morris, the Education Secretary, and her masters are saying that there should be many more religious schools, as proposed in their Education White Paper and in the Dearing report. This is based on the assumption, apparently held by Tony Blair, that religious schools do better in exams and, in any case, that people like them. Actually, state religious schools are not as good as the Government thinks, according to a recent report by Civitas, but merely less inadequate than normal state schools. All the same, many parents will go to immense lengths to squeeze their children into the best Christian schools, as Tony and Cherie Blair have done themselves, sending their children several miles across London every day for the privilege of a very superior Catholic education at public expense.
However, it is not true that most people are keen on religious schools. At least, they are not keen on having any more. Labour got this wrong. A poll commissioned by the Observer this week found that 80 per cent of the sample did not support the extension of single-faith schools which would include religions such as Islam and Judaism. That's putting it delicately. People, starting with me, are positively against it.
Unaccustomed though I am to agreeing with trade unionists, Labour backbenchers, local education authorities and even Lord Ouseley, late of the Commission for Racial Equality, a very assorted multitude of us is extremely alarmed; it is blindingly obvious that single-faith schools will create ghettos, especially in inner cities. They will prevent integration and understanding.
Lord Ouseley has said that the emergence of "monocultural" state schools in Bradford was a key factor in last summer's riots. And these ghetto schools were not even intentionally single-faith religious schools: how much worse the tension might have been if they had been institutionally segregated. This policy of creating more faith schools is immensely dangerous, and it is quite rightly exploding in the Prime Minister's face.
However, it is Miss Morris who must take the flak for him, and in the face of it last week she announced that religious schools must be "inclusive". This is desperately silly. How does she propose to make them so? She must be thinking of compulsion: she cannot suppose that people will voluntarily send their children to a school of a very different faith, simply in the name of inclusiveness.
Besides, the whole point of religion is that it is not inclusive but exclusive (like the excellent Catholic state school down the road which won't accept my unchristened son): real conviction is in its nature exclusive; that is an uncomfortable truth that won't go away, no matter how often you repeat the weasel word "inclusive".
Would little Christians and agnostics have to be bussed in to Muslim schools, and little Hindus and Buddhists press-ganged into joining the little Blairs at the Oratory? And would the schools have to stop being quite so religious, in order not to offend pupils of other faiths, or of none? This may have happened in a lot of Anglican state schools, which (as their bishops lament) have lost the courage of their feeble convictions, but it won't be accepted without protest in religious schools where faith is still real. Besides, it is curious to insist that lack of conviction should be the price of survival for a religious school.
You might have thought that the current world crisis would have taught the Government to think more clearly about religion, and to take it seriously. Tony Blair may be going about with a copy of the Koran these days, but he is curiously obtuse about religious sentiment. There was something delightfully comic about him angrily denouncing Glen Hoddle not long ago for his wholly unacceptable views on reincarnation without apparently realising that exactly those views are held by hundreds of thousands of perfectly respectable British Hindus, many of them Labour voters. Other faiths and cultures believe things that Christians or agnostics or humanists or liberals do not approve of and do not accept, and vice versa. But in a religious school, such things will be taught and taught for truth.
The Government does not appear to have faced up to the question of what religious schools might actually have on their curricula. I was astonished to hear from friends who have taught in a 95 per cent Muslim state primary school in London where the parents almost all refused, for what they said were religious reasons, to let their children play musical instruments, sing, dance or make pictures. They would not allow their daughters to swim. This was not a religious school, so those activities were offered, but had it been, they would not have been on the syllabus.
Meanwhile, in after-school religious classes, children were made to do long hours of rote learning, and quite severely punished for inattention and mistakes. How inclusive could all this hope to be? Indeed, how acceptable is it? I can't help thinking that there must be, in contemporary cant, "issues around" human rights here.
While Britain was an almost exclusively Judaeo-Christian country, it was possible to have religious state schools, because there was little or no cultural conflict involved. That is no longer so. What we need, therefore, is not more religious state schools of any kind, but fewer, and preferably none at all. Religion must be kept out of state schools, in the interests of peace and community and, for those who care, in the interests of faith as well.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, November 17, 2001 | Comments (1)
You cannot beat your wife and still be a good citizen
Here is an important question. Think carefully, because a very great deal might depend upon your answer. Is a man allowed to punish his wife physically, as long as it is in his own home? Answer from one of the following choices: A: Yes, although not with any recognised weapon; B: Yes, although only under provocation; C: No.
It is a trick question actually. There is no right answer, or at least none was given. It was one of some questions posed by Radio 4's Today programme yesterday morning - now answered on its website, and it is C for those who were unsure - as part of a little item about a British citizenship test. It was the only good question actually: the others were about silly things, I thought, such as who burnt Alfred's cakes, and was King Arthur a hobbit and are we subjects or citizens. No one can really be expected to know that sort of stuff, whether recent immigrant or claimant of Norman blood. But this particular one, number six, about the physical chastisement of wives (right or wrong) seemed to me to get to the unbelievably awkward heart of the matter.
British nationality, and a British sense of belonging, has become hugely contentious. That was already so even before September 11, but very much more so now. News of British boys going off to fight for the Taliban, or film footage of British people cheering for Osama bin Laden, and openly selling bin Laden propaganda videos in England's cities, have given a new and harsher spin to the question of what it is to be British.
It has unfortunately become worth asking what are the minimum requirements of a British citizen, or subject, as we used to say - those of us who knew the correct but long since out of date answer to question four.
It cannot be right any longer to depend, as we used to do, on an assumption of a shared understanding of such things. Multi-culturalism has put an end to that unspoken sense of community and shared values. The Today programme may have been trying to be funny, but it is now genuinely possible for a person to enter this country who is genuinely quite innocent of the idea that it is wrong to beat your wife, even if provoked, and even in the privacy of your own home. Such a person might well be ignorant that it is a criminal offence. Such a person might never learn enough English to find out. He might actually be discouraged from learning enough English to find out. Alternatively, such a person might well know wife beating is illegal here, but might believe that British law ought to be ignored, or bent, or even changed, to the requirement of a different culture. He would have every excuse for thinking so, because liberals generally, and the race relations lobby and multi-culturalist activists in particular, have bullied everyone who disagrees into silence, with accusations of racism. So many, many un-British things have taken root; so many British assumptions have been allowed to wither away.
Late in the day, and probably too late, former liberals have woken up to the idea that something ought to be done about the best of British common assumptions. The Labour Home Secretary - and how unthinkable this would have been only recently for a Conservative minister - has proposed citizenship classes and English lessons for immigrants. Hence the Today programme's little item on what a citizenship test, on the American model, might be. Personally, I think a test would be a mistake. There is the very obvious problem about what should happen to a would-be British citizen who fails the test, starting with those who don't speak any English, not to mention the dead certainty that most existing British citizens would probably fail it as well.
There is a part of the American model that I think would be well worth copying, and that is the idea of a ceremony of welcome. Becoming British, as we all know, is to draw a winning ticket in the lottery of mass migration, if not of life, but here it is nothing but a sad, dull, bureaucratic little event. It is well worth celebrating. And taking advantage of this happy moment, with town hall, British flag, gold braid, lady mayoress and local steel band, all new Britons could be subjected to some welcoming remarks, including thoughts about the way we do things here.
The depressing thing is that it is very hard to think of anything upon which almost everyone would agree. However, I have tried. It ought to be possible for the lady mayoress to insist, with as much charm and encouragement as possible, on a certain modest, conflict-avoiding minimum.
I suggest: it is essential to learn good English. You can get help with that. It is prudent to avoid rubbishing British or English culture - presumably you came here because you thought we had something to offer you; it is now your adopted culture, and you are about to become part of it. Obvious ingratitude or contempt will make you extremely unpopular; the public mood has changed on such matters. To insist, ceaselessly and vociferously, on how racist this country is will certainly make it so. There are plenty of existing laws here against racism, and plenty of help in how to use them. It is a criminal offence to go off to fight for other countries against this one, or to call publicly for people's murder, no matter how irritating they may be. Oh yes, and it is a criminal offence to beat your wife, no matter what the temptation. Or your husband.
The Sunday Telegraph | Saturday, November 10, 2001 | Comments (2)
