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The archbishop and the UN, a tale of moral confusion
In these troubled times there may, perhaps, be a few people who still look to those in high places for moral guidance. There may even be some who look to the Church of England and to the new Archbishop of Canterbury. They will be disappointed, as usual.
Dr Rowan Williams, the man of the Anglican hour, has been widely acclaimed as an intellectual, an independent thinker and a man of great moral integrity. He has described himself as someone who will keep asking "awkward questions". Yet on the day of his promotion to glory he said something so thoughtlessly foolish that any hopes of moral guidance from Canterbury may have to be abandoned.
Dr Williams has declared that he thinks invading Iraq would be immoral and illegal. That is a reasonable moral view, even if one disagrees. But on Tuesday he said that he would in fact support military action in Iraq, but only if it is cleared by the United Nations.
Words fail me. Here we have a spiritual leader, from a free and open society, saying that something is morally wrong unless the UN says it's okay.
The future Archbishop of Canterbury, in other words, is looking to the UN for moral guidance. Clearly Dr Williams has not asked himself many awkward questions about the UN.
Of course politicians and governments have to carry on as if the United Nations had some moral authority, or pretend to; they need the UN as a fig leaf to cover up the nakedness of their real intentions, and the UN sometimes obliges.
However, Dr Williams is not a politician, or in government, and indeed he intends to distance himself and to question government policy relentlessly. So he has no political need of the UN. It must follow, therefore, that he goes along with conventional piety in believing that moral leadership is truly to be found among the so-called united nations.
There is one killer fact, as spin doctors say, about the UN that shows how morally bankrupt it really is. Post-war China, and more particularly Mao Tse-tung, holds the world record for mass murder, and of its own people. The number is 40m if you count one way. If you count another way the number falls to 20m. Either way the number is unimaginably terrible.
The Chinese have suffered a holocaust as shocking, in its different way, as the genocide of Europe's Jews. Yet, and this is an indictment of the UN, China has never once been criticised by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
In fact, China has almost always succeeded in blocking any debate about resolutions criticising its human rights record, although the United States has consistently introduced such resolutions. What is the purpose of a commission on human rights that can't or won't criticise flagrant and persistent genocide - not to mention China's terrible concentration camps, religious persecution, rape of Tibet and other monstrous abuses of human rights?
If the UN is about anything, it is about human rights. Personally, I think the notion of human rights is one of those noble ideas sent to drive us mad; it is wishful thinking that has led to endless bitterness, to broken dreams and broken promises that could never have been fulfilled. I think the negative idea of human wrongs is much more constructive and practical. However, the UN is supposed to stand unequivocally for human rights. But what happens? It goes in for such jaw-dropping hypocrisy on the subject that one is left unable to cry foul. What's worse is that so very few people even try.
Take the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban in September 2001. Many delegates were united with all the force of the Muslim world in an ugly rush to denounce Israel as racist and to demand an explicit apology for slavery from former colonial powers. Yet at the same time many of them were busily manoeuvring behind the scenes to keep off the agenda the many terrible human rights abuses that they themselves are guilty of today, not 200 years ago.
African nations were anxious to hush up accounts of their own present-day slave trading. India worked hard to promote silence about the misery of its own 160m untouchables, still living in humiliation and poverty at the bottom of the caste system in a kind of apartheid. There are also untouchables in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan - an international disgrace, but unmentioned.
Other delegates, anxious about trade and diplomacy with India, discreetly avoided mentioning lynching and tribal courts, which allow monstrous punishment, as do such courts in Pakistan and in parts of Africa, where an adulteress can be stoned to death. China vetoed discussion of Tibet. One could go on and on.
Was all this discussed, denounced or changed? In a pig's valise, as Raymond Chandler used to say. What happened was a ghastly international horse trading in human wrongs and silence.
At the 58th annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva this spring, the same kind of thing went on. Delegates pass vastly inflated resolutions about rights of the most extreme and undeliverable sort - such as "the right to establish cultural industries that (are) viable and competitive at national and international levels" or the right of women to have a place "in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peace-building" - and yet say nothing about what really matters.
Horse trading rules: tortured convicts for favourable trade; persecuted women for arms deals. The UN has turned moral outrage into a commodity in which its members deal.
This year, when for the first time the United States failed to get voted in as a result of European manoeuvring, not one single delegate even tried to criticise China for its human wrongs. Yet, almost astonishingly, the Chinese ambassador to the United States told The Washington Post newspaper before the meeting: "We prefer to have dialogue (on human rights). The United States does not."
Some dialogue; it is the sound of one bloodstained hand clapping. The effrontery is dazzling but then it is, after all, the lot of a diplomat to be paid to lie for his country.
No mention was made at this 58th meeting of Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia, all of which are among the worst offenders against civil liberties in their own countries. A resolution criticising the evils of Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe was scuttled by the African bloc. And so on.
None of this is surprising when you consider who is sitting on the commission - many of the worst offenders, dictators, kleptocrats, racists and incompetents. As Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, to whom I am indebted for information on this subject, has rightly asked: "What happens when such foxes guard the hen house?"
Our new archbishop has promised to ask awkward questions. Perhaps he should ask himself that one, and then another: what is the UN for? Surely not for moral guidance.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 28, 2002 | Comments (0)
Our public servants are being trained to death
Gordon Brown must enjoy his triumphant, self-satisfied smile while he can. It won't be for long. He cannot possibly keep his ambitious promises about world-class public services.
We won't get them, and he will have to take the blame. We won't get even vaguely adequate public services without radical reform, and the chancellor isn't offering that.
He and his supporters may pay lip service to reform, and to linking his stratospheric new spending to it, but he is remarkably unspecific. There is nothing radical or reforming about his proposals for yet more targets and centralised interference, which will only mean throwing more money down the same old drain.
The real problem with public services is the state sector mentality that pervades them. Without a massive shift in this culture there can be no real change for the better. I simply don't understand why ministers can't see this. Perhaps they can, but realise that they can do nothing; massive numbers of their supporters are to be found in the state sector and, as we saw last week, ministers dare not take on the public service unions.
It is perfectly absurd of the chancellor to declare a war on waste in the public services; he might as well spit in the wind. The public services are institutionally wasteful, institutionally incompetent.
There are many reasons for this. What particularly interests me is the waste caused by the intellectual orthodoxy of the public services. This orthodoxy - still, after all this time - puts an improper emphasis on a political agenda of social change at the expense of a proper emphasis on practical service.
Anyone who doubts this has only to look at the public sector and social work appointments section of The Guardian. It is no accident that this is almost the only place where these posts are advertised; it is from the Guardian-reading classes that people with "appropriate" attitudes can be recruited.
One must not exaggerate. Not all the jobs advertised are absurd or entirely unnecessary. Many of them are probably harmless, as far as one can guess. However, most of them display a prodigal obsession with networking and talkfests and consciousness raising, and an excessive preoccupation with race and gender and rights; and each of them represents an increase in the proliferation of ever more outreach, consultation and training for yet more such jobs.
Harmless or not, all this is very expensive. It is our taxes that are being foolishly squandered on all this, in the face of terrible unmet need.
I have been wondering for years about the roots of this overblown culture. Surely one would expect to find its deepest roots in training. It is in training, whether in colleges or at work, that an institutional culture is passed on. And now that there is so much emphasis on retraining, and yet more retraining, this culture gets regularly reinforced.
It is surprising that so little effective attention has been paid to training. Admittedly both the Conservatives and the present government have tried to intervene, but little has radically changed. While at the Home Office, Paul Boateng seemed to understand the ideological excesses of social-work thinking on adoption, and appeared to be about to get to grips with social-work training - when suddenly he left for greater things.
Then someone else had to rediscover the wheel, if he could be bothered. In my experience the civil service is riddled with the same old cultural orthodoxy, too, so any reforming minister will have an uphill struggle with civil servants, as well as with a very complex subject.
I have recently spent some time looking at training material for various public services. I don't recommend it as entertainment.
It is often obscured by incomprehensible, coded English. Try reading the literature or the textbooks, or the prospectuses. I cannot imagine how students with only modest A-levels can even begin to understand them, still less think critically about them.
There is, even now, old-fashioned agitprop talk of "counter-hegemonic anti-oppressive practice" in "a specifically feminist pedagogy" - this from the website of the Institute of Education in London. Much of this material is quaintly out of date, but it is still polluting the minds of future nurses, social workers and probation officers.
There do seem to have been improvements in recent years, and there is a new spirit of pragmatism about. But both training and services are weighed down by entirely unnecessary priorities. Of course racism and sexism are bad and should be opposed; there can hardly be a probation officer or teacher or nurse or social worker who thinks otherwise. But all these people have much more pressing problems, such as teaching maths, taking blood, staying in touch with the mentally ill or seeing that children in care go to school.
Many of these basic things don't get done properly, to put it mildly. Anti-hegemonic mentoring workshops and the aggressive pursuit of social justice can surely wait until these most basic services are delivered. Besides, contrary to the orthodoxy of training today, it is not the job of public servants to deliver social change.
If the chancellor really wants radical reform he should root out this orthodoxy. That in itself would mean savings and much greater efficiency. For a start, the government should abolish at a stroke all the equal opportunities quangos, and all their work and statutory requirements, starting with the Commission for Racial Equality; this country is being suffocated by unaccountable quangos. There should be a sweeping away of all targets and requirements about race, gender and so on. We have plenty of legislation in place to protect people from such abuse.
It is not that such things don't matter. It is that they're not central. This would cut down hugely on paperwork, as well as time. Every service should be pared to its most basic essentials.
I often wonder how many of our millions are squandered on perfectly unnecessary meetings in the public sector. Apart from the time off that each worker takes, there is the cost of travel and accommodation. Many of these meetings are merely chatfests and networking between professionals about ideas and aspirations and best practice, without a client in sight. Much of it is low-grade and repetitive, almost none essential. Much of it leads to demands for new meetings, new posts and new funding. Stopping cosy professional get-togethers would be a centrally important reform.
Equally vital would be huge cutbacks in training itself. Training is an idea that has got out of control. Most jobs do not need as much training as people currently think; at any rate, we can all see that more training has coincided with worse services. There's a case for saying that the training of public servants unfits them for public service. They certainly need less theoretical training, complete with social theory and incomprehensible gobbets of Foucault.
Training should be cut back to the purely practical, except for the most academic people. Then we might get more people who know how to do their jobs. All this might be a start. But it won't happen. The sight of the smile slipping from Mr Brown's face will be little consolation.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 21, 2002 | Comments (0)
Pensions crisis could create a new golden age for oldies
There are few certainties in this uncertain world, but one is that almost nobody really understands pensions. Quite a few of my friends are investment bankers and businessmen and even they, when nagged, will admit that they don't entirely understand their own pension schemes.
Even those who do perhaps understand pensions, and all the related financial imponderables, cannot seem to agree on what best to do about them. In my experience, people who are able to get out of pension schemes are doing so as fast as they can, regardless of the penalties.
Meanwhile the state pension is getting more and more "nugatory", to use Michael Portillo's famous word. All we know is that things look bad and may very likely get worse.
Two reports on such matters came out last week, both commissioned by the government. Neither was very reassuring. One was the report on pensions legislation by Alan Pickering, formerly the chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds. The other was a report on Britain's insurance, pension and investment businesses by Ron Sandler, formerly chief executive of the Lloyd's insurance market.
As far as any of us understands any of their proposals, I don't suppose they will do much to restore public confidence.
Pickering argued that employers' occupational pension schemes should no longer be compelled to pay pensions linked to inflation, or to make payments to widows. As the work and pensions secretaryAndrew Smith said himself: "On first reading (these proposals) are not attractive." Others have been less restrained in their comments.
Personally I think it is quite reasonable that employers should have some flexibility about what pension schemes they offer, especially if it stops them going bust.
But I am horrified by Pickering's suggestion that employees should be forced to contribute to employers' pension schemes, given all the fraud and incompetence we have seen, not to mention the losses people are forced to take on moving between employers - and this at a time of increasing labour mobility.
The Sandler report makes various ambitious proposals but arguably it does not address the central problem of pensions either.
The central problem is one that all of us can, at least, understand - even though we have been deliberately ignoring it for many years. This is that it takes a huge amount of capital to produce even a modest net income. Most people do not, cannot or will not save that kind of money.
Besides, managing capital is very risky - there are no guarantees, whoever controls your money, that it will produce a reasonable return, or any return at all.
I remember walking with a business friend in an expensive part of Scotland and asking him how much capital he thought would produce what Jane Austen would have called a modest competence. He surprised me by saying that at least Pounds 1m would be needed.
Actually, Pounds 1m conservatively invested at 4% would, in the absence of fraud or a collapsing market, yield Pounds 40,000, which, after tax at 40%, would produce Pounds 24,000. That is very much more than most people would consider a modest competence, probably including Jane Austen; on the other hand, it is very close to the national average wage (Pounds 23,600) - and shows what awesome capital sums are needed to produce income.
Put differently, if people are to retire on 60% of their final salaries in their early sixties, they need to save 15-20% of their gross annual salary throughout their working lives.
Most of us have not been doing this, or anything like it. There is supposed to be a Pounds 27 billion annual savings gap.
Even those people who have been saving in the most ferociously responsible way may well have begun to think that their pension schemes are a poor deal and a worse risk, rather like private health insurance schemes. The proposals that the government should now become more involved in personal finance, with more legislation and more micro-management, simply make the whole thing even scarier.
Savers face every kind of discouragement. The government has already robbed savers by removing billions of pounds of tax relief on pensions and on private health insurance; one can only wonder what the chancellor does with all that extra money. Meanwhile, he is apparently considering charging a sales tax as well as higher purchase tax on people's main asset - their home - and there is no reason to feel sure our houses will always be exempt from capital gains tax, either.
It has always seemed reasonable to me that our houses are savings that could, if necessary, see us through old age. The idea that people have some sort of absolute right to pass on property to their children strikes me as irrational. But there is no guarantee that a house which is valuable (and untaxed) today will still be either when the rainy day finally arrives.
In any case, people who have succeeded in saving, one way or another, know that they will probably get no better treatment from the state in the end than those who haven't. The wise virgins will have to subsidise the foolish virgins - and probably even more than they do now.
The truth is that we are all going to have to go on working for much, much longer, unless we want to survive on a pittance of a pension. In future people won't possibly hope to give up at 60, or even at 70. We shall all have to struggle on until we drop, or until we become unemployable - whichever happens first, just like in the bad old days when the idea of a modest state pension was first dreamt up.
The sight of merry widows living high off the company pension hog in valuable green-belt villas is one that is surely passing into history. So, too, is the image of sprightly, permatanned grandparents drifting from bowling green to cruise liner for 30 or 40 years of prolonged active life.
The workforce is going to become more and more grey, and the golf courses increasingly less so, whether anyone likes it or not, because most people won't be able to afford to retire. Besides, it is no fun having endless time on your hands unless you are rich or enterprising - and few of us are. Retirement is a concept whose time has passed.
Any profound change leads to others: I suspect that the time of the devaluation of old people will also pass. Ageism will be driven out by economics and the power of numbers. People who work are not seen, in the cruel Chinese description of the old, as "useless mouths", or encouraged, as in not-so-ancient Japan, to take a terminal walk up a snowy mountain.
Old people will have the self-respect and confidence of working, and what their maturity has to offer will once again be valued. Meanwhile, there will be smart pills that will keep us all alert - and personally I can't wait for these brain enhancers.
Old people's work will also reduce the need for young and fertile immigrants to come to this country to support them, which will reduce the strain on public services and housing. It is an ill wind that blows no good, even on a rainy day.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 14, 2002 | Comments (0)
Sorry, I can't get worked up about identity cards
Outrage is a sensation I enjoy as much as anyone and probably more than many; a craving for righteous indignation is the professional deformity of columnists. I, for one, am very grateful that this government does so much to feed our ugly appetite, throwing us a rich diet of hypocrisy, incompetence and sleaze.
However, its latest offering, the proposal for identity cards, just hasn't excited me at all, not even the weaselly new name of "entitlement cards". I really don't see what is wrong with them.
This feels odd. All the people with whom I would naturally side are passionately opposed to identity cards: libertarians, "small c" conservatives and all those who distrust government interference in general are up in arms. Nonetheless, I am still convinced that there is nothing wrong with ID cards in principle. There may be all kinds of genuine objections to them in practice. They might be unworkable. They might be so expensive that any benefits they have to offer might not be worth the cost -between Pounds 1.3 billion and Pounds 3 billion, according to the home secretary. They might be just a kind of make-work for bored, techy civil servants who don't have enough to do with their techy skills.
The technology might not be good enough yet or, even if it is, our education system may no longer be producing enough literate adults to get to grips with it. The cards might well fall victim in practice, like so much else, to the general incompetence of the state sector. And so on.
The serious argument in principle is that identity cards would be an unacceptable invasion of freedom and privacy. If they did indeed threaten such a new invasion that would be a knock-down argument against them. But they don't. The home secretary is not proposing anything for these new IDs that Big Brother doesn't already know and regularly expect us to admit to -name, address, place of birth and sex. We already have useful identity cards in the form of driving licences and passports which oblige us to confess to still more -such as our photographic likeness and our nationality.
Putting this modest amount of information on one card seems to me to be no different but more efficient. And what would be wrong with adding National Insurance numbers and National Health numbers, which we have to produce at various times anyway, or other such information -with consent?
Equally, making an identity more difficult to steal, borrow or fake by using new technology to measure the iris of the eye also sounds harmless and more efficient. It would certainly do something, at least, to protect us from fraud of many kinds, including illegal immigration. I admit I cannot understand why there is a sudden rush to introduce it, unless it has to do with the Schengen agreement on the free movement of peoples across the European Union. But otherwise there's nothing so very inflammatory about ID cards.
If there is a need for a blast of genuine public outrage, it is about the terrible invasion of privacy that has already overtaken us and continues with very little protest to speak of. ID cards pale into insignificance by comparison.
A great deal of this invasion has been government-led, as in the endless, irrelevant personal questions that are constantly being asked by local government officials, the police, GPs, hospitals, schools, the Inland Revenue and even parking controllers at the local town hall. All this information, much of it wrongly recorded, goes into the grinding maw of government information gathering machines. Who knows or asks what happens to it?
One answer is that some of it gets leaked; the idea that data is properly protected is childishly naive. For instance, when I worked in BBC television in the 1980s there was a quick and cheap former police "source" known to several documentary programme makers who could find out from a car registration number the name and address of its owner. This was useful for snooping-style documentaries and no doubt for private detectives, too.
That was before computerisation; now such intrusions must be infinitely easier. The temptation to sell private records must be much greater as well. Information is money and millions of people have access to it.
Commercial sources of personal information are leakier still. Last week I received an e-mail -I have no idea how the senders got my address -offering me, for Pounds 30, a database of 1.4m British e-mail addresses described as "an exceptionally good quality list with which to start your e-mail campaign". How did the senders get those "good quality" addresses and how do they know what's good about them? It is possible to trace an enormous amount about an individual just by following the websites he or she visits.
Credit card companies and supermarket loyalty cards track our spending patterns and our overspending; information obtained in such ways is regularly sold on. I hear that for about Pounds 500 you can get almost anybody's complete bank details. No doubt it is easy enough to get confidential medical and educational records, if only because the people in charge of such records are often lax, remaining online and vulnerable for most of the day.
Privacy in Britain has been drowned by a deluge of information flowing in all the wrong directions; to object to ID cards is like putting your finger in the dyke - a pointless gesture.
I am unsure why so many people are so viscerally opposed to ID cards anyway. There seems to be some deep folk memory, even among the young, of grainy black-and white films of Nazi-occupied Europe or the Soviet bloc, with uniformed soldiers brutally demanding papers, or of Big Brother and his all-seeing eye. It's accompanied by a faintly chauvinist conviction that having identity cards is simply not British; we do things differently here because we have a much deeper, subtler love of liberty than Johnny Foreigner.
I suspect these folk memories have been grafted onto a much newer visceral anxiety -technophobia. The home secretary has hinted at smart cards, and smart cards scare most people. Hardly anybody has the slightest idea what they are or how they work or just how terrifyingly smart they are, but we feel anxiously convinced that they could easily be used to outsmart us in ways we will never be smart enough to suspect. Now the home secretary is proposing by some high-tech black magic to shrivel up our identities onto a smart card.
Curiously enough I think the irrational fear of these smart cards might have the unintended consequence of making us smarter and more rational about the whole subject of privacy and data protection: we are suddenly being forced to reconsider it. David Blunkett offers his proposals for public consultation. As we know, consultation usually means absolutely nothing. But in this case we, the consulted public, could offer him a deal.
If we are given the legal right of access to all information held about us and the right to correct it and the right to know what is done with it, then we might agree to smart ID cards. Otherwise we will carry on enjoying our outrage.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 07, 2002 | Comments (0)
