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Why does Cherie need any public role whatsoever?
In the bad old Soviet Union, writers and journalists who offended the government were frequently declared mad and were locked away in monstrous lunatic asylums. Fortunately, we have hardly any lunatic asylums left here and no spare room at all in those that do exist. However, we do have a home secretary who says we journalists are on the edge of insanity; he seems to think we are mad to have any doubts about the government and its honesty.
Denouncing critics as mad is unwise as well as Stalinist; it tends to make them really mad and drive them to real excesses. I, for example, had decided to say no more about the prime minister's wife. There is something vaguely undignified about women criticising other women. Besides, attacking Cherie Blair has become a national sport and I am rather wary of national sport. But now, infuriated by David Blunkett, outraged by Charles Clarke's deceitful attack on the press and sent wild by the prime minister's tittering and condescending evasions at his absurd new press conference last week, I think I will return to the subject of Cherie. They have driven me to it.
Mrs Blair was much photographed last week at a big charity do with the dazzling Queen Rania of Jordan; she was splashed over all the front pages because she made an indiscreet comment about suicide bombers for which she had to apologise. Queen Rania managed to say something compassionate that could offend nobody, while Cherie Blair blundered into controversy; she was extraordinarily injudicious for an aspiring judge, as well as for a politician's wife.
To express sympathy for the Palestinian suicide bombers, however obliquely, is to express sympathy for deliberate mass murderers and killers of babies and children who, so far from being desperate, believe that they will go straight to heaven as a reward. It is as if she expressed sympathy for the Enniskillen bombers or for the September 11 murderers. But my objection is not so much to what she said, inflammatory though it was. It is to her saying anything at all and indeed to her being there at all.
All the things for which Cherie Blair has been criticised point to her failure to understand her proper role and her proper place, and the divisions between her professional self and her married self. The fact that she has writing paper headed Cherie Booth QC, 10 Downing Street, is a perfect example of this failure. It is not such a small matter as it seems. She has one role as a barrister, with an address at her chambers, and another as the wife of the prime minister who physically lives at 11 Downing Street; she has no claim at all to the address of 10 Downing Street, least of all as a professional person. However, one can easily understand why she uses it. The address enhances her status, professionally and privately.
It is wrong of her to use it. But in many other ways she really cannot help the fact that her husband's position brings her opportunities and invitations she would not otherwise have had. That is often the way with successful husbands, whose wives - especially wives with a high opinion of themselves - equally often tend to lose sight of the fact. It is only because Cherie Blair's husband is prime minister that she was standing next to Queen Rania last week.
As an ordinary barrister she would not have been considered. She was there to fulfil a ceremonial role, like Queen Rania. Cherie Blair's problem is that she doesn't seem to understand, or else she doesn't seem to care, where the limits of her different roles actually are.
I have some slight sneaking sympathy. Perhaps it is genuinely confusing. Things have changed very fast. Women's independence and women's success have hugely complicated the relationship between a successful man (or woman) and his wife (or her husband). Not so long ago you could choose an MP or an admiral or a headmaster or a vicar in the confidence that you were getting two for the price of one - the second carrying on like a loyal, discreet, self-effacing personal assistant.
Nowadays the wife may not wish to co-operate at all, or only on her own terms. This might well present problems. Can the vicar's wife be a lap dancer and still preside at tea parties and go to the bishop's summer jamboree and be the chair of the local sex workers' co-operative? That is the contemporary conundrum.
Nobody in these enlightened times would deny the inalienable human right of any vicar's wife to be a lap dancer. But as is the way with inalienable human rights, it clashes with her duty to her husband and his parishioners. There are indeed hard choices to be made by the wives of public men. For instance, if Mrs Blair were - heaven forfend - a Conservative, she would simply have to bite her lip and think of England, just as Clementine Churchill kept quiet about her Liberal political convictions. But she seems unable to see that as Mrs Blair she is not entitled to do and say what she is entitled to do and say as Miss Booth.
There is a simple solution to all these problems. It is for wives to stay completely out of their husbands' working lives and vice versa. There is absolutely no need for Cherie Blair, or for any politician's wife or judge's husband, to go out and about holding hands ostentatiously, pressing flesh and showing off. The wives of public men never used to, except on rare ceremonial occasions. It is only recently, and only now that it is genuinely problematic for successful wives, that anyone imagines it's necessary. I think it all comes from America, and it's sickening.
Remember the frightening spectacle of Hillary Clinton, impersonating a lovesick teenager when in public with the president, and clutching for dear ambition the hand that had clutched so many others, simpering uxoriously. A wife (or a husband) can just as easily be a public relations liability as an asset, as Tony Blair is discovering.
What, in the end, is the point of having wives (or husbands) around at all? There really is no need for the wives of public figures to go to lunches and dinners and jamborees, to be patrons of charities, to go on public parade and to travel abroad with them; there is no need to pretend to be friends with the wives of foreign thugs and dictators and go on ghastly wives' tours with them. We have a large royal family that is very good at all that, if it must be done at all.
There is no good reason for an independent career woman to take on any public role that comes only through her husband's position. If she does, either he is exploiting her (using up her valuable time on something she wouldn't have done otherwise) or she is exploiting him and us, the public (doing something she wouldn't have been able to do on her own merit). It is demeaning either way, and it is hypocritical. It is also a betrayal of feminism. Cherie Blair herself is no sister.
She may like to think of herself as an independent woman, but the truth is that she grabs eagerly at the windfalls of her husband's office without seeing the obvious problem. For women who expect a great deal of other women in high places, it is indeed maddening.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 23, 2002 | Comments (0)
Today's football roar can be tomorrow's Nazi rant
At this time of football mania, I have been taking refuge in an extraordinary new book. It is Sebastian Haffner's posthumous memoir, Defying Hitler. He wrote it in England in 1939, when he was only 32, having recently fled here from Nazi Germany.
The maturity of his voice is astonishing; it is hardly credible that such a young man could have so much wisdom and such prophetic insight, combined with irresistible eloquence. Not surprisingly, this memoir has become a bestseller. There are many books about this period but few, I think, that produce such a shock of enlightenment, all the more electrifying because it was written without the benefit of hindsight.
As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has said: "Sebastian Haffner makes one understand how Hitler became possible" - a question that has been tormenting Europe ever since he rose to power. Now, when extreme right-wing groups are having new successes all over Europe, the appearance of this book is timely: it offers some subtle warnings from the past, including some reflections on the dangers of a national obsession with sport.
The painful and enduring question that Haffner discusses is how a whole generation of ordinary people was prepared to answer, some with enthusiasm, the call of Nazism.
His arguments are subtle and complex but there were two that particularly struck me.
Haffner explains that after the violent upheavals of the first world war and post-war hyperinflation came a period of peace and stability between 1924 and 1929. At last, as Haffner put it, "everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness".
"Now," he continued, "something strange happened - and with this I believe I am about to reveal one of the most fundamental political events of our time, something that was not reported in any newspaper: by and large that invitation was declined. It was not what was wanted. A whole generation was, it seemed, at a loss as to how to cope with the offer of an unfettered private life."
Because of the catastrophic, intense and public excitements of life for young Germans since 1914, his generation had become used to having their entire lives - their hopes, fears and most powerful sensations - delivered by the extreme disorders and excitements of the public sphere.
That generation was impoverished because it had never learnt to construct and to enjoy a private life. And so, if I've understood Haffner correctly, huge numbers of Germans in the 1920s found themselves in need not of stability but of public excitements and sensations, in default of a habit of private fulfilment. The danger is obvious.
Haffner also believed that among Germans the capacity for individual life and private happiness was in any case less developed than among other peoples. He cites with admiration the private pleasures of the French in conversation, food, wine and the art of love; or the individualistic love of the English of their gardens, their animals and their eccentric hobbies.
The average post-war German knew nothing of the sort, according to Haffner. Outside a minority cultured class, he said, "the great danger of life in Germany has always been emptiness and boredom; the menace of monotony hangs over the great plains of northern and eastern Germany, with their colourless towns and their all too industrious organisations ... With it comes a yearning for 'salvation' through alcohol, superstition or, best of all, through a vast overpowering, cheap mass intoxication".
As part of this longing for cheap mass intoxication, Haffner talks of the mania for sport that overtook Germany during this period - an obsession with sports triumphs, with "the aristocracy of the biceps", with all the trainspotter's facts and figures about sport, all of which dominated the news.
Although later he came to see this obsession with sport as a herald of coming calamity and a sign of blind, dangerous passions seeking an outlet, Haffner himself at first succumbed: "I felt the utter joy of being in harmony with thousands, tens of thousands of people," he wrote. "It was almost as grand as the (1914-18) war. We all understood each other without the need for words. Our spiritual nourishment was statistics ... our souls perpetually aquiver with excitement. Would Pelzer beat Nurmi? Would Kornig do it in 10.3?"
Does any of this sound familiar? Does any of this sound like Britain today? The English may once have been able to amuse themselves with their quaint private pursuits but today almost everyone seems to lament the inability of great masses of British youth to create their own entertainments. They don't need to; it's all created for them, at enormous profit.
We hear ceaselessly how easily bored they are, how easily distracted and how addicted to the cheap intoxication of computer games and television; in my observation that is true even of many well-off children. They spend hours and hours in front of flickering screens; if they go out it is to clubs where they surrender their individuality to another form of cheap mass intoxication - the combination of drugs and noise.
Increasingly illiterate, increasingly sedentary, many of the young make up a lumpen generation of passive couch potatoes. The only thing that really rouses them from their unhealthy torpor to a pitch of intense public excitement - of cheap mass intoxication - is football. Particularly national football. And with that excitement very often comes drunken hooliganism and casual violence that brings to mind the marauding gangs of Brown Shirts in the early Nazi period.
Does an aversion to Scrabble or a mania about football make one a neo-Nazi? Hardly. You could argue, and people do, that football mania is simply an expression of a longing in a fragmented world for ties that bind people together, of a very innocent need for a national identity that is no more threatening than a game.
You could argue that it is not very different from the emotion that surrounds the royal family, which expresses a need for some sort of all-embracing national myth, no more threatening than a good fairy story.
All the same, if Haffner is right about the wider cultural conditions that prepared Germans for Nazism, there is perhaps some cause for alarm: some of those cultural conditions are clearly to be seen here among the British, in a way they weren't in Haffner's youth. We live now in a mass culture that promotes mass emotion all too successfully, through mass communications, to a public that is encouraged to crave mass stimulus.
As everybody knows, mass emotion can be easily exploited and people in the grip of it can be very easily led; it can turn very fast into the mood of the lynch mob or the race riot or the ethnic cleansing brigade, and regularly does. There was something disturbing about the hysterical religiosity and free-floating anger following Diana's death. The maniacal roar of the football crowd never sounds very innocent to me.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 16, 2002 | Comments (0)
Nanny's drug rationing can make you sick-or dead
All over the Third World and the Second World there are sick and dying people who know that there are modern drugs that could save them, if only they could afford them. But they are too poor to pay for them. This is a misery we associate with people dying untreated of Aids in Africa or of tuberculosis in Russia, or with harrowing 19th-century novels about life in European slums. That is a mistake.
The truth is that this is a misery that sick people suffer from in this country today: there are drugs that might help them, there are treatments which might help them, but the National Health Service cannot or will not pay for them.
Last week 28 cancer specialists wrote a despairing letter to The Daily Telegraph. They say that patients in this country who have cancer of the colon and rectum are being condemned to inferior treatment and an earlier death by a decision made by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (Nice). There are some excellent new drugs for the treatment of colorectal cancer, which are widely used in America and in all the big European Union countries except England and Wales.
Here Nice has severely limited the use of three of these drugs; they are to be available only for the very late stages of the disease or for clinical trials. Oncologists at a conference last week described this decision as "monstrous, mad and perverse".
Meanwhile, the five-year survival rates for people with colorectal cancer are poor in this country - 6% lower than in Europe and 22% lower than in the United States. Needless to say, these new and better drugs are extremely expensive; they would cost Pounds 1,200 per patient per year, instead of Pounds 70 for the traditional treatments.
This depressing news comes at a time when cancer treatment generally in this country has become a national scandal. An international survey published last week in the Annals of Oncology showed that England and Scotland are close to the bottom of European cancer survival rates, well behind Spain, Italy, Germany and France; only the backward former iron curtain countries are worse.
How very shameful this is. Who was it who said "24 hours to save the NHS" - and how long ago? Of course there are all sorts of reasons why the NHS delivers such poor care and so erratically. It is appallingly badly managed in many places because of its state sector culture. It is crippled by inefficiency and waste but it is also very short of money everywhere. It would be a great mistake to assume that money alone would solve the problems of the NHS but it is certainly true that there is not enough to go round.
We spend much less of our gross national product on medicine than most European countries with which we would care to be compared, and even some countries we wouldn't want to be compared with. We have far fewer doctors and nurses and hospital beds per 1,000 people. We are still not training enough doctors and nurses after five whole years of new Labour. Rationing of some kind is quite inevitable.
All this raises the obvious question of what Nice is all about and how nice it really is. The government set it up three years ago to deal with the notorious problem of postcode medicine; at the time there was a lot of talk about clinical excellence and fairness. But it was, and remains, unclear whether setting up Nice was also about rationing or "pharmo-economics".
It has already made some unpopular decisions such as the one not to allow an expensive drug for multiple sclerosis. At the same time it has made a popular decision about much better drugs for schizophrenia - a much more politically fashionable disorder than rectal cancer, incidentally. As the head of clinical programmes at the Cancer Research UK charity said last week: "Nice says there are no (financial) thresholds, but there must be some. We don't know what they are."
What we have had in this country for many years, and what Nice is continuing, is a form of covert rationing. Until very recently, when most of us were still pretty ignorant about medicine, few people realised what treatments were available. They deferred to their doctors. They didn't expect to look at their own medical notes. Doctors therefore went in for discreet control over local resources.
I know for certain of people who were not treated aggressively for coronary artery disease on the grounds that they were pretty old anyway with not much to live for. We all read of cases where children with handicaps are not offered surgery that a normal child would automatically get; these days parents make a fuss but until recently they didn't. This controlling mentality extended, and still extends, into the private sector.
I have a friend with secondary cancer who learnt of a new and extremely expensive drug used in the United States. Having researched this drug thoroughly with many medically minded friends and having spoken to leading American consultants, she asked her consultant here for it; there is no other treatment she could try and her health insurers were prepared to pay for it. He refused. His underlying view seemed to be that since he cannot prescribe this for his NHS patients (too expensive), he was not prepared to let her have it either.
It is difficult to know in these painful situations what is going on. But a consultant working for both public and private sectors is in an impossible position. His problem may be that his other patients don't know about a certain treatment; maybe he is relying on their ignorance. But it won't last long; one of his NHS patients will soon find out and the newspapers will go mad. Meanwhile, this doctor has denied an intelligent person the only treatment available to her which she understood, wanted and could pay for.
There is a terrible muddle in all this. If there must be rationing - and there must - it should be done openly. And it should not be done by the state, which is to say by vote-hungry politicians leaning on quangocrats, and highly controlled state sector doctors.
It has been the state that has impoverished medicine in this country. I believe there would now be much more money for drugs and radiotherapy and doctor training, and much less ill-considered waste and inefficiency, if the state had stayed out of healthcare as it has done elsewhere in Europe.
It seems to me that the only way to make hard choices about rationing is locally; local hospital trusts and local community boards and local people should decide what to spend tax money on first. Those who can pay for themselves or raise loans or charitable money should be free to choose their treatment. This is what is known as devolution or power to the people - and it does, incidentally, necessarily involve postcode treatment and unfairness. Local variation is precisely what devolution means.
Choice means variation and unfairness. This government keeps on talking about devolution, responsibility and choice but it simply does not believe in any of them. If it did it would remove the controlling hand of the state from our sickbeds; among other things it would also abolish Nice.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 09, 2002 | Comments (0)
Which racial sub-group would you like to park in?
Britain is in the grip of an almost pathological obsession with race. Nothing could be more dangerous to good race relations, especially since September 11 and also the panic about asylum seekers. This neurotic frenzy stirs up anger and resentment in people of all ethnic groups, who are never allowed to forget about race. Yet it is actively promoted by the race relations industry, sanctioned and encouraged by the government, and we have all become so used to it that we hardly notice our own malaise.
Take, for instance, the leaflet that came through my letter box recently, a Parking Operations Public Consultation conducted by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. A parking questionnaire sounds harmless enough. Yet to my intense fury, question 30 suddenly demanded: "To which ethnic group do you consider you belong (tick one box)?" Then followed the usual crude, muddled categorisation: Asian, any other Asian, Chinese, other ethnic group, any other mixed, and so on.
What possible relevance could race or ethnicity have to parking? Surely parking, of all things, is colour-blind? Who was it who thought that this racist intrusion into our private lives served any good purpose?
The answer, I feel sure, is not the parking supremo at the town hall. He and his team were no doubt only obeying orders or following conventions in the state sector. These orders and conventions and fiats, these monitorings, outreaches, goals, targets and training, all driven by this obsession with race awareness, come from the race relations industry, led by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). It is a tragedy that those who are most actively concerned to combat racism do more than most to promote it.
Last week a BBC survey on race relations suggested that one in three people believes the police are racist. Of course they do. They've been officially told so by the Macpherson report, which accused the Metropolitan police of institutional racism. The police admitted it. Once they had done so, a whole crowd of other public bodies rushed forward in a frenzy of guilt to accuse themselves of the same crime.
Nurses, teachers, hospitals - all guilty by their own confession. The obvious consequence of this is to spread guilt, confusion and anger on all sides. For it simply is not plausible, at a time when nobody in this country would dream of defending racism and when we have long since set up elaborate legislation to punish it, that nurses and teachers and hospitals are likely to be racists en masse. Or even the police.
On the contrary, and long before the Macpherson report, they were already overwhelmed with forms, guidelines and training schemes to combat racism. Yet this nonsense continues. Last Friday was the final deadline for compliance with yet more race regulations that were recently imposed on the public sector.
In 2000 the government amended the 1976 Race Relations Act, which created the CRE. The new act imposes statutory duties on almost all public bodies to promote racial equality and gives the CRE extensive powers of enforcement, including the power to order people to produce documents and give evidence (with the authorisation of the home secretary). It also has extensive powers to investigate those it suspects.
You might have thought there were enough duties laid on public servants already. But no: the more regulation we have the more racism we have, it seems, as is always the way. The 1976 act was concerned to make racial discrimination unlawful, but the amended act aims more proactively to prevent discrimination happening in the first place. The TUC is calling for these same compulsory duties to be imposed on the private and voluntary sectors as well.
Among many other things, public authorities must monitor the ethnic composition of their workforce to ensure it reflects the ethnic make-up of their local community. By now they should all have produced their Race Equality Schemes, laying out in public their approach to racial equality and, in detail, their plans to fulfil their new duties.
You could hardly make it up. The difficulties and the misconceptions involved are legion. How, for instance, can this policy possibly be implemented in schools without undermining other rights and duties?
Schools are required to construct an admissions policy that reflects the ethnic mix of their community. But what about church schools, selective schools, specialist schools or, most importantly, the parental preference system - parents' rights to prefer one school to another? Many schools do not have a precise catchment area or, therefore, an identifiable ethnic mix. What would you do, say, with a school in Tower Hamlets, east London, whose pupils are 95% Bangladeshi, unlike the local population. Would you throw lots of them out against the wishes of the parents and the governors? This requirement amounts to busing by the back door and there could be nothing more inflammatory than that.
Besides, trying to control schools in this way is micro-management, and a denial of autonomy to individual schools, which new Labour claims to favour. More broadly, it is hardly likely that teachers will be racists, and if they are there are extremely powerful sanctions already; racism is a dismissible offence and for employers who are inclined to turn a blind eye there is the risk of unlimited damages claims. Not surprisingly, the National Association of Head Teachers is extremely concerned.
Similar problems will be inflicted on other public bodies, quite apart from the mountains of paperwork and the inexcusable waste of public time and money. All this is typical of the race industry's undisciplined, unthinking confusion. A particularly absurd example of this confusion - if it doesn't deserve a nastier name - lies in the composition of the CRE.
This august body and its new powers are devoted, let me repeat, to making sure that public servants reflect the ethnic make-up of their community. In this case that is the nation, because the CRE is a national body, and the proportion of ethnic minorities in the nation at large is about 7%. Of the CRE's 13 commissioners, at least 10 belong to an ethnic minority. That is 77% - 10 times over-representation. Rather quaintly, a CRE spokesman treated this information as if it were an official secret. Clearly, some ethnic representatives are more equal than others.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? All the commissioners have long histories as racial equality, "diversity" and rights activists; no reasonable person can think them a balanced or politically representative group. They are all appointed by the Home Office: one can only wonder why the government made so little attempt at political or ethnic balance.
The truth is that the CRE has enormous and growing influence, for better or worse, upon the fevered temperature of race relations in this country and great power to interfere in our lives. And its commissioners are unelected, wholly unrepresentative quangocrats.
They should clearly conduct a statutory investigation into themselves at once. It might even lead them to disband themselves.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 02, 2002 | Comments (0)
