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Hatred of things male has led to the rape of justice
'All men are rapists" was one feminist battle cry of the 1970s. Not many people actually thought so, even at the time, but it did express an animosity towards men that was widely shared and has taken a firm hold in mass culture.
What the gender warriors probably meant is that all rapists are men. Not only do men have a monopoly on rape, they also have a near-monopoly on mugging, grievous bodily harm, warmongering, torture and crimes against humanity. Illogical people might therefore be led, by the same upside-down syllogism, to think that all men are awful and the root of all evil. Many do, and increasingly.
Even little children sense this prevailing orthodoxy in the playground. I will never forget the moment my nine-year-old daughter told my four-year-old son that men do all the bad and cruel things in the world and are wicked. But not girls. The poor little fellow looked at her in shame and horror. Since then he has been growing up in a climate of increasing misandry, the opposite of misogyny.
We hear endless complaints about misogyny, but actually misandry rules. Or if not exactly misandry, a profound misunderstanding of masculinity.
Boys and men are increasingly blamed and belittled. Girls meanwhile have been doing better and better at school and university, making the most of positive discrimination, whereas boys have begun to underperform in most things, except in breaking the law.
The stereotypes of the co-operative, hardworking and sociable girl compared with the disaffected, lazy and antisocial boy truly exist across society. Testosterone has become a vulgar term of abuse. The reasons are legion but the result is the same; this is a bad time to be a boy.
An absolutely typical example of this uncritical misandry was to be found last week in the home secretary's new white paper on sex offences. It is true that many laws on sex crimes badly need revision and David Blunkett has proposed many very sensible and welcome changes.
But so great has been his determination to convict more date rapists, presumably to please our powerful feminist lobby, that he is prepared to violate two of the most sacred principles of English criminal law: the burden of proof and the presumption of innocence. So powerful is our public obsession with rape and date rape that most critics have said very little about Blunkett's rape of justice.
Under current law if a man accused of rape can convince a jury that he honestly believed his alleged victim had given consent, no matter how unreasonable his belief might have been, he will be acquitted. It is therefore very hard to convict in such cases, and, according to the white paper, that explains why conviction rates for rape are indeed very low - only 7% of reported cases. That is why Blunkett proposes to move the goalposts of justice.
The two central principles of criminal justice in this country have been the presumption of innocence and the requirement of proof "beyond reasonable doubt". The burden of proof, in every way, is upon the prosecution. Traditionally, as everyone knows, it has been felt that it is far better that the guilty should go free than that the innocent should be convicted - doubt should go in favour of the accused.
With rape this belief and these principles seem to be losing their ancient power. The white paper, in its attempts to get more convictions for date rape or acquaintance rape, is undermining the assumption of innocence and suggesting a new test of "reasonableness".
The white paper proposes that if the prosecution can show there is a reasonable doubt that an alleged victim did consent to sex, and that the alleged rapist did not take reasonable steps to make sure he had obtained consent, he is guilty of rape.
The law will list circumstances in which it would be presumed that there could not have been consent, such as when a woman was frightened, or unconscious through drink, drugs or sleep.
So, though the prosecution will have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that sex took place in some of these listed circumstances, the defendant would then have to prove his innocence by persuading the jury, on the balance of probabilities, that the victim did indeed consent. So he will be presumed guilty, it seems to me, until he can prove himself innocent, and under the most imponderable of circumstances.
It is true that rape is a particularly horrible offence, second only in its most flagrant forms to murder. But there are degrees of rape, and it is sometimes genuinely difficult to distinguish between them. For many years now there has been a strange sort of hysteria about it.
I was woken up to this by a women's magazine investigation of rape about 20 years ago, following a big survey of readers. The writer pointed out with furious indignation that a great many unhappy women had written in, after reading the series, to say that they hadn't realised until then that they had been raped. Call me conventional, but I think rape is the kind of thing you would notice, at least if you were awake.
I was shocked by another, more recent case of two students who got very drunk and collapsed into his bed in his room. "Penetration took place," as the men in wigs say, and the next morning the girl was friendly not only to him but to some of his friends who turned up, and she stayed around cheerfully for a couple of hours.
Only much later, after conversations with others, did she cry rape. The boy was convicted. So was poor notorious Angus Diggle, who went to jail for a four-minute fumble with a girl who took off her clothes in front of him, having come to his room to spend the night after a dance. Although he stopped touching her almost as soon as she protested, he was found guilty of attempted rape.
Guilty only of attempted consensual sex, I should say, (and foolishness and bad manners); her presence and her behaviour suggested consent, and when she protested he stopped almost at once.
Sex is full of ambiguities. Human relationships are full of vengefulness and lies, as well as love and tenderness. Some people are blinded by silly political agendas, or the bad advice of foolish friends.
On the wilder shores of sex, among the S&M and bondage "community", some people love precisely that "force or fear of force" that Blunkett would make a presumption of guilt (or at least a "presumption of lack of consent?") in the courts.
Hasn't Blunkett listened to Mozart's famous seduction scene in Don Giovanni, when the woman sings "vorrei e non vorrei", or "yes and no all at once"? Why should men always be blamed for these ambiguities of human nature?
Rape is a dreadful violation, date rape may sometimes hardly deserve the name and there is a spectrum of crimes in between. But no crime is bad enough, and men simply are not nasty enough, to justify undermining the most important principles of criminal law.
New laws like this will only increase the misunderstanding between the sexes, and the growing resentment men feel against women.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 24, 2002 | Comments (0)
The big academic lie that is killing our universities
Truth will out. It is a very nice idea that half of Britain's young people should go to university. It is nice to think that university need no longer be the privilege of the few. It is heart-warming to believe that inequalities are simply a matter of education or of environment and that all should have prizes at school, and all should have places at university. Unfortunately none of it is true. However well-meaning, these are effectively lies, and lies have a way of backfiring disastrously.
Britain's universities are fast approaching just such a disaster. Margaret Hodge, the minister for higher education, admitted publicly last week that universities are in crisis. Actually, this is not the first time the government has acknowledged it. David Blunkett said the same thing in 1997 following the Dearing report, when he introduced tuition fees and scrapped grants. Even so, funding per student is lower now than in 1996. Disaster still looms.
According to a government audit our universities are at least Pounds 1 billion a year short of what they need to maintain buildings and equipment. The audit suggests either that universities must cut back what they do (despite the government's requirement to expand yet further), or that they will require more public money.
The government doesn't believe it can ask the taxpayer for more - hence Margaret Hodge's talk last week of getting more money from students. That caused general outrage. Incredible though it seems, this vast explosion of university places has never been properly funded.
Standards, not suprisingly, are collapsing in universities. Over the past 15 years I've listened to despairing accounts - from friends who teach even at supposedly good universities - of how bad things have become. Many students arrive unable to write essays, or even to construct a paragraph. They need remedial teaching, but there is less time for it because there are ever more students in larger groups. Universities are cutting staff so dons are subject to more teaching and administration and senseless red tape, but they are horribly badly paid. Most of them must read with astonishment of the firefighters' demands for Pounds 30,000. They get much less.
The result is all too predictable, including a brain drain of university teachers and researchers to America. There is a brain drain of the brightest undergraduates too - those who've been well taught at private schools are often dismayed by the low level of other students, or of the undemanding curriculum. Such students, and others who fear reverse discrimination, now regularly consider top American colleges if their parents can afford it. Some bright students simply drop out altogether, appalled at the low levels of teaching and studying.
I don't see how anyone can deny that some A-levels are now much debased; just compare the exam papers of 30 years ago with those of today. Yet students get into university these days with achievements even below contemporary A-levels. And now we have "degree inflation"; while none must fail, more and more people are getting firsts and upper seconds.
It used to be a proud boast that Trinity College Cambridge had won more Nobel prizes than the whole of France; now it seems that these triumphs are not so regular. Britain won 11 Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine in the 1960s, 13 in the 1970s, four in the 1980s and two in the 1990s. These are complex matters, I admit, but the overall picture is clear: the debasement of the idea of a university in particular, and an irresponsible, destructive confusion about higher education in general.
I simply cannot understand why all this has been so obvious to so many people for so long yet has still been allowed to happen. It is not a party political matter - the Conservatives are every bit as guilty as Old Labour and New Labour. What happened in state schools, in the name of equality, is a national scandal.
Hugely expanding the universities in the name of equality, but without the money, was mad. And calling every poly and tech a university in the name of equality was just as insane if not worse; it has hugely inflated people's expectations without offering much to help them to fulfil those expectations. Young people are discovering that a pseudo-academic degree from a nonsense university is not much use. Most of them graduate without any marketable skills but with big debts and depressing prospects. In a recession this will be much worse.
Governing by egalitarian euphemism might seem kind at first; in the end it is very cruel.
For that reason the solution to these problems will have to be cruel too, or at least radical. It means reconsidering the idea of a university and then abolishing most of them. Then we could afford the few that survive and the whole problem of who pays would become negligible. At the same time every other school-leaver could be offered proper vocational training, perhaps in short college courses, current training schemes or new apprenticeships.
It is surely obvious that proper academic universities in the old-fashioned sense are suitable for only a very few people, maybe fewer than 10% of the population. (Currently 35% of people go and the target is 50%.) Yet in a spirit of uncritical optimism, the difficult question of what a university should be for has been ignored for decades. Instead, leftists and liberals - and conservatives, to their shame - have crudely assumed that university is a combination of meal ticket and finishing school, and therefore essential to middle-class aspirations, and should be free for nearly all. This is an extremely philistine, utilitarian view of university life, as well as financially reckless.
Universities for the academic few are of enormous general benefit to everyone. They should be the cultural leaven in society, raising our general consciousness with the best, most interesting ideas of the past and the future. These are elite places for elite students. I don't see why I should apologise for the "E" word even if the new minister of education insists on using it. Personally, I'd cut them back to about 15 to 20 and set them free from government intrusion altogether.
The rest of our so-called universities would also have to be cut right back to the most practical and vocational courses, just like the old techs, but with no more bogus academe, no more low-level sociology or "meeja studies". These further education colleges would indeed aim to produce meal tickets and practical guidance, not to mimic the universities. And university should no longer be thought of as a must-have.
After all, what is so wrong about not going to university? Lots of the best people didn't and still don't. What is so wrong with not being academic? Most people aren't. And surely by now we have learnt that intelligence and success and happiness come in all kinds of different forms in all sorts of different places.
The problem of how to pay and who should pay for further education would still be very painful and controversial. But it cannot possibly be solved until the government confronts the truths that have so awkwardly outed themselves.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 17, 2002 | Comments (1)
Royal blight is rotting away at my monarchist heart
God save the Queen. She is desperately in need of divine intervention, or at least a small miracle, since all the powers and principalities of this world seem to be hell-bent on bringing the monarchy down.
The Paul Burrell affair is a story of quite astonishing vanity, madness, greed, spite and incompetence all round, not to mention lust, acted out on Edwardian red carpets in fancy dress. That makes it the most wonderful gossip, and preposterously funny at times. But it must be inexpressibly painful for the Queen.
Her lifetime of service is being undermined from within, by many of those closest to her. There have been many scandals in royal circles in the past, but this one seems to become more and more serious every day.
It is difficult to know, of course, precisely what to believe. If you follow the saga addictively, as I am ashamed to say I have, it soon becomes clear that there are holes in everyone's story, even perhaps in what little we know about the Queen's story.
Burrell, for instance, claims that he was Diana's rock. But Diana's family counter-claimed that she was quite free with the use of the word rock, and that there were several other people she thought of as rock-like.
Then a policeman piped up and said that, in fact, he was Diana's real rock. I feel rather like joining in and claiming that I myself was Diana's rock. In the current atmosphere of fantasy, lots of people would probably believe me. I might come to believe it myself.
Even though it is hard to know what precisely to believe, one thing is clear. The monarchy has become extremely vulnerable. I don't welcome this, unlike some republicans in the media, who have been baying for royal blood.
I have always been a royalist. I have always thought, and still think, that a hereditary monarchy is infinitely better than the alternative - how the heart sinks at the thought of what the French have landed themselves with, or what the Blairs might become. I have always thought there is no point in changing things for the sake of change, and that the monarchy works well enough.
It's true that it is hard to square the idea of hereditary monarchy with a modern meritocratic democracy such as ours, but somehow the Queen has managed the trick. Besides, there is, or at least there was, a kind of mythical power behind majesty, which appeals to more people than metropolitan liberals can understand. That emerged clearly at the Queen Mother's funeral, and during the jubilee.
But following the ludicrous, shameful revelations of the Burrell affair, which go well beyond the wretched butler's tale, I am becoming a more and more reluctant royalist.
What stands out unmistakably from all the media feeding frenzy is that most of the main players appear to be very unpleasant people.
The traditional view of the monarchy was that it depends not on the person but the office. That might have worked in the bad old days when we didn't know much about the person, and the many other persons, involved.
But now that we know all too much about the royal family and their hangers-on - or think we do - the follies of the individuals appear far more important than the dignity of their roles; in fact, the follies undermine the roles and destroy them. That is what happened with the destructive Diana. And that is what is happening now.
The minute the case against Paul Burrell collapsed because of the Queen's private statement, even a royalist such as me felt a stab of cynicism. It is very hard to understand why a meaningful glance from the Queen - the deluded Burrell has said that he knew what all her stares conveyed - meant the man was off the hook.
His statements have varied, but if he was taking papers for safe keeping, presumably to avoid them being shredded by someone or other, and to avoid history being rewritten, as he put it, why did he have to take about 300 other items that weren't papers?
And if he was "keeping safe" all those other things, why did he not give back to the Prince of Wales and his sons the items that were clearly theirs for them to keep safe - the photographs and the touching letters from their mother, for instance?
Why was it so important to keep safe such a strange and miscellaneous collection - CDs and personal photographs, masses of handbags and clothes, assorted plates, hats, a sewing box, a white metal pepper grinder and a rug in a Versace bag, and more of the same? We may never know, probably, but it can hardly have much to do with the rewriting of history. But I do not understand how what Paul Burrell said to the Queen, whatever it was, can possibly have meant that he had no case to answer.
Why was it somehow all right for him to take those things on his own initiative? Why was it right for him to keep from Diana's legal executors this large collection of miscellaneous and trivial stuff (other than things she had given him as presents), without their permission?
The Queen could not possibly have advised him to do so, even with the most meaningful of stares. The fact that Burrell had no intention of selling these items cuts no mustard with me, either. Now I am left very puzzled about what theft actually is.
The Queen's amnesia caused many people to smell a rat, but royalists such as me have tried to persuade themselves that this was not a cover-up. Yet every day since then more has emerged about how much there is to cover up, and how discreditable it is. The details defy belief.
It is genuinely shocking that the Prince of Wales's wife was secretly recording the bedside confidences of a servant who said he'd been anally raped, to save up to use against her husband and his household, and that her paranoia may not have been entirely unjustified.
Charles's sybaritic self-indulgence, if not shocking, is very unappealing, and tallies with stories journalists have known for years, quite apart from his unconstitutional determination to have his say in public. His household sounds like a nest of vipers. And it is genuinely shocking that there appears to be so little contact between him and the Queen that they could scarcely protect their own interests in the Burrell affair.
Most of the leading players in this saga seem to be suffering from a kind of higher autism, unaware of other people's feelings or of what goes on in the real world. Their servants also appear to be prone to an equally mysterious malady, which can drive them to snobbery, delusions of grandeur, cliquish infighting, and even to betrayal.
It's something much more serious than Red Carpet Fever; it can only be described as Royal Blight, a disorder that affects almost everyone touched by majesty, including the royal family itself. The picture of the royal households that has emerged from all this, and of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the press is deeply depressing. Royal Blight has, it seems, corrupted them all.
Royal Blight seems to deprive people, high and low, of their common sense, their fellow feeling and their normal grasp of reality. Every day, with every new revelation, this blight seems to be spreading. It is hard to be a royalist these days.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 10, 2002 | Comments (0)
Rebel consultants signal death and rebirth of NHS
Last week the National Health Service arrived at a turning point. Ahead lies break-up. It was the health secretary who drove the NHS to this point, but it was heading there anyway.
By proposing to NHS consultants a new nationwide contract, with yet more intense micromanagement from Whitehall, Alan Milburn got the furious response from hospital consultants in England and Wales that has been so astonishingly slow in coming.
They refused to accept the contract by a vote of two to one, although consultants in Scotland and Northern Ireland agreed. Even the British Medical Association, which had negotiated the contract on their behalf, was taken aback.
Publicly slapped in the face, what was Milburn's response? To slap the consultants right back. He plans to force through his so-called reform anyway, partly by introducing a new "junior" grade of hospital consultant. This in turn will be extremely unpopular with junior doctors, who were particularly opposed to the original contract. The rumblings of serious rebellion can clearly be heard.
What is astonishing is the government's failure to understand even its own promises. Think of their favourite buzz words: "devolution", "localisation", "flexibility", "family-friendly", "choice", "diversity". This is just what any professional wants and needs. Yet ministers cling like old socialists to centralised control.
Everybody knows - surely even the Department of Health must know as well, because every independent think tank and expert is tired of repeating it - that the main trouble with the NHS is the crushing burden of centralised targets, regulations, guidelines and paperwork imposed by Whitehall, of relentless over-management.
Any reasonable manager might spot the fact that hospital consultants, like the rest of us, vary. Of course there are some things they have in common: one is that the vast majority (75%) do not do private practice, another is that most "overfill their contractual obligations" already - which is Whitehall weaselspeak for overwork.
Otherwise they have all kinds of varying needs and ambitions. The hours and conditions that suit them vary. Some are prepared to work long, unsocial hours if they are properly paid, or even if not. Many others, perhaps women and young parents, desperately want flexible and family-friendly hours and would accept less pay in exchange. This emerged very clearly from a Royal College of Physicians working party I sat on last year that investigated the lot of women in hospital medicine. Each person's working life goes through different stages.
So if you were to apply new Labour's buzzword promises to the consultants' conditions of work, the last thing you could possibly come up with is what Milburn produced - a single, one-size-fits-all contract that restricts and standardises consultants' working lives. At worst it's a recipe for widespread resignations from the NHS and probably a brain drain to less statist countries. At best it's a recipe for resentment.
This so-called reform is strangely at odds with the spirit of Labour's new GP contracts and foundation hospital contracts: these do free them (to some extent) to negotiate their own terms locally, in response to local conditions. That's what is meant by devolution, flexibility, choice and all the rest. New Labour can do it, a bit, if it tries. So why hasn't Milburn tried with the consultants? And why is there so little trust between them?
Perhaps he takes a dim view of doctors. There have traditionally been two views, one dim and one rosy. The dim view is that consultants are an awkward, self-important bunch who use the NHS as a launch pad for their highly paid private practices. They're an old-fashioned club that protects its own and must bear some responsibility for the shortage of doctors since they didn't, apparently, insist on training more years ago. They resist management and accountability - when they can't be found they are on the golf course. This is not my view, although I admit I've come across a few arrogant Lancelot Spratts and a couple of surgeons who were knife-happy chancers.
But after years of observing the NHS, and with several doctors in my family, I incline more to the rose-tinted view, not least of hospital consultants. They are dedicated people who push themselves far beyond the call of duty to serve their patients, while the NHS infrastructure collapses around them.
If operating theatres are empty, it is not for lack of willing consultants; it's for lack of all the essential back-up teams, starting with nurses. If consultants' time is not used efficiently you only have to look at the abysmal lack of IT support: without it, countless hours are wasted. As Professor Nick Bosanquet of Imperial College says: "It's an information-driven service with no drive."
Apart from a few consultants who have private practices too, most are not as paid as well for their highly skilled work as lawyers, accountants, dentists or even minor media folk. Even those in private practice tend to plough money back into the NHS - I've heard of several who simply forgo their NHS salaries and I've met many who fundraise aggressively among their rich private patients for NHS units. They also pay high taxes.
Meanwhile consultants have been increasingly frustrated by the intrusion into their professional autonomy by NHS managers who impose perverse priorities on them. To their despair they find themselves forced to treat as top priorities not their patients' illnesses, but the political targets of obsessive and misguided ministers.
This new contract offers them more money; what they want much more is less management.
Consultants may be angry but to me they don't seem nearly angry enough. It is a very odd idea, if you stand right back, that anybody should sell him or herself, body and soul and 24/7, to the state in order to heal the sick. I'd hate to do it. It's not just that state medicine hasn't worked, or that the NHS has been a noble failure. It's that selling yourself to the state goes against every serious idea of personal freedom and personal responsibility.
Everything the government says about the NHS suggests that it - or we the public - somehow own these people. To me that is an unacceptable assumption, all the worse because it is rarely questioned.
Of course there is the question of doctors' expensive training, paid for by us, for which the public (rightly or wrongly) expects some return. But the same question hangs over all other graduates. Regardless of that, consultants should have the right to be their own men and women, not pushed about to fill waiting list targets or be bullied like irresponsible children into contracts that don't suit everyone.
There is already talk of declarations of independence, with some consultants forming their own groups, like barristers, and selling services to the NHS on their own terms. This could be the beginning of the end of the old NHS, the beginning of the revolutionary reform that is so long overdue. Perhaps Milburn has taken the role that revolutionaries refer to as the useful idiot.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 03, 2002 | Comments (0)
