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London needs an Olympian effort, but not the games
Warning: this government can seriously damage your health. Daily consumption of news about ministers or, worse still, seeing them on television wittering is very, very bad for the blood pressure.
Forget about the endless ministerial health instructions to take less salt or less alcohol, or more red wine and beer, or as you were with salt. The best thing this government could do for the nation's arteries is to do much, much less governing.
For our sakes, for we passive inhalers of government, kick the governing habit now.
Almost every day I feel a rush of blood to the head at some new government idiocy.
I actually had to sit down when I first read the shocking details of Tony Blair's plan to push us all into a United States of Europe by signing a monstrous constitution dreamt up by the preposterous Monsieur Giscard so-called d'Estaing.
It reduces me to tabloid-style rage and palpitations.
Then there is the terrible complex mess that the government is making of schools and hospitals and transport by excessive, incompetent, misguided interference. I had better not go on; I feel a dull ache under the sternum. I know it will be hard for new Labour and the men at Whitehall to stop governing - it's a habit that is notoriously hard to break.
Perhaps the government could start by giving up just a little bit of intervention.
Ministers could start by dumping all thought of having the Olympics in London.
That may be difficult for Blair because he is addicted to celebrity and grand gestures, but the others won't get much out of it - even if they don't mess it up. So they should dump the plan. They know they shouldn't do it. If they are honest, they know they can't. What was it that John Prescott said in 1999? I don't mean the time he blurted out that "the green belt was a Labour initiative and we intend to build on it". No, it was his farsighted comment that "if we can't make the dome work, we wouldn't be much of a government".
Well, he knows now. They couldn't and it isn't. A grey pall of deep incompetence seems to hang over all public projects these days. No doubt that is why the prime minister, even though he supports the London Olympic bid wholeheartedly, has told the cabinet to steer well clear of any involvement in case of tears before bid time.
Why, then, did Tony "young country" Blair ask his cabinet whether they were "a bunch of wussies" in their initial reluctance to support a British bid? And why was he so quick to call the president of the International Olympic Committee, himself and personally, to tell him of the decision to back London's bid? Why is total enthusiasm now on-message? Do the words dome, Wembley and Pickett's Lock mean nothing to him?
I am prepared to bet that if London wins the bid to stage the 2012 Olympics, it will turn out to be very bad for the health of all governments between now and then. Meanwhile, it is already bad for mine.
I admit I don't like spectator sports and I couldn't care less about the Olympics.
But quite apart from that, everything I have heard about the games is depressing, beginning with minor corruption and ending with major corruption. It also seems grossly unfair that as a Londoner I should have to pay a large amount of extra council tax to fund the bid.
We Londoners already had to pay a huge increase in this local tax, which we know is going to be redirected to other parts of the country - a serious abuse of local government. We badly need our local taxes to be spent locally in London.
Schools in London are underfunded and struggling desperately, overwhelmed with children who speak little English or have special needs. Social services are short of money, too.
The roads in many parts of London have been reduced to Third World quality and public transport is a sick joke - unpredictable, overcrowded, out of date and often out of commission; the Tube's Central line was shut for months and faces further closures.
When tourists descend in large numbers in the summer, London becomes almost intolerable at times with terrible traffic jams, buses belching diesel fumes and Tube passengers squashed into carriages (in temperatures at which it is illegal to transport animals) at the mercy of problematic signals.
Vast tourist coaches and delivery lorries have finally figured out alternative routes to avoid the jams, through narrow Victorian and Georgian side streets, and regularly bash their dangerous way into bollards and over pavements. Heathrow is the busiest airport in the world. And I haven't even started on the commuter trains.
There was an awful warning on television last week about what might happen if our grotesquely overladen and underfunded transport system were suddenly broken, like the camel's back, by a small but final straw.
The BBC broadcast a powerful fictional documentary, The Day Britain Stopped. It showed how quickly the country could be brought to a standstill and then to serious disaster by a few minor coincidences.
In the programme a rail strike drove everybody onto the roads, which led to huge traffic jams and several pile-ups, which closed several motorways for many hours in freezing weather. This meant that pilots, air traffic controllers, doctors and nurses couldn't get to work, which intolerably overstretched those staff who were already on duty and who were forced to work many hours of overtime.
Air traffic control problems caused a mid-air collision and fires over a densely populated west London suburb. Then ambulances, fire engines and the police couldn't reach the disaster because of a total traffic jam. It was all too plausible. It could easily happen.
Many billions of pounds would be needed to make our infrastructure work even adequately for the people who already use it. That's why so many governments have ducked the issue. Yet the people behind the Olympics bid seriously propose to flood the capital, from east to west, with millions more people all at once. It is insanity.
Of course, ministers claim that the sums they are going to raise from luckless Londoners, from national lottery gamblers and from taxpayers, will sort all this out. I simply don't believe it. Just say the words dome, Wembley, Central line, Jubilee line and Pickett's Lock yourself. Remember, if you were there, the terrifying massed crowds in London on millennium night and the total chaos.
Of course, if there were some great entrepreneurial figure, public or private, who everybody could agree was just the man or woman to make it all happen and solve all our transport problems at the same time, it might be worth taking the enormous risk. But nobody comes to mind. We seem to be surrounded by incompetents and incompetence.
So why take the risk? It could be a huge disaster waiting to happen. Besides, who needs the Olympics anyway? It is far from clear that the previous host countries have done well out of them. And in any case, as with most addictions, the very doubtful reward is certainly not worth the very obvious risks. We all know, really.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 18, 2003 | Comments (0)
There's something very silly about the Ministry of Swot
Who, or why, or which, or what Is the Akond of SWAT?
as Edward Lear asked in one of his nonsense rhymes. I feel curious, in the same spirit, about Charles Clarke. Who, why and particularly what is he for? I know that all the newspapers say he is the education secretary, but that is too absurd to be true. He cannot be the education secretary because he seems to be so very much against it.
In particular, Mr Clarke seems to be against the very idea of a university. Last week a report emerged of a most startling speech he made last month. "I don't mind," he said from his eminence, "there being some medievalists about for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them."
University courses, he explained, should have "a clear usefulness".
It seems that medieval history isn't useful to the modern economy, no doubt because it all happened so long ago, in funny language, before they had e-mail and anger-management training.
A spokesman from, if not precisely for, the Department for Education and Skills said last week that Mr Clarke stood by his words. "He is basically saying that universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change."
So, goodbye to all that, then. Away with medieval history, with learning for its own sake, with the love of knowledge, the improvement of the mind, the creation of ideas, with critical discourse, intellectual development and with cultural leaven.
Why bother with poetry, literature, anthropology, ancient religions or ancient languages? What relevance could they have to the world of commerce? The Akond of Education has already said he wouldn't much care if classics were killed off. All that is purely ornamental as well.
Mr Clarke suddenly emerges as a self-invented Minister for Swot, committed only to the basic slog and swot of qualifications for jobs, a most monstrous hybrid of Mr Gradgrind and Mr Pooter, with Edward Lear on the wrong side of the blanket - philistine, utilitarian, reductive and absurd.
What is particularly delightful, for those who prefer ridicule to rage, is that Mr Clarke has managed to eclipse Lady Thatcher. Until now, in the British bestiary of the bien pensant, Margaret Thatcher has been seen as the nastiest and stupidest beast, the scourge of the intelligentsia, the savager of universities. Now Mr Clarke has stolen her place as the biggest and beastliest brute in the Dangerous Philistines enclosure. All civilised people will gawp and gasp.
The brightest and the best of new Labour will be horrified as well - either that, or admit that they didn't mean a thing they said against Margaret Thatcher at the time. The prime minister will have to choose, too: either he must put Clarke behind bars or else he must admit that when he said: "Education, education, education," what he really meant was: "Swot, swot, swot."
Does he study the wants of his own dominion?
Or doesn't he care for public opinion a JOT?
These are going to be interesting times at the Ministry of Swot.
Clarke is, or was, presumably, rather clever. He went to King's, Cambridge, at a time when it was probably the most sought-after and difficult college to get into.
Politics, like ambition, does numb the brain, as we can all observe, but even so it is very odd that such a man speaks as he does.
He must have - does have - a less crudely utilitarian view of university education and life.
Someone from the ministry said as much last week: "Some might argue that universities are essentially communities of scholars that should go on without the involvement of the state in any way; that they are a group of people who come together to think thoughts in whatever way they do it. Mr Clarke thinks that is a perfectly legitimate definition of a university, but it doesn't of itself add up to an explanation for the state providing any resources for universities."
Precisely. That is the root of the problem: state intervention where it does not belong. Universities should be kept free of the state or it will destroy them, as it is doing in front of our eyes today. The only remotely good reason for the state having anything to do with them is to pay the fees of poor children who can pass a university's entrance test but who cannot pay to go there.
This has been the thin end of a very destructive wedge. And once the state gets its wedge in the door, endless other demands push themselves through behind it and any institution is doomed to become no more than an instrument of state, forced to follow a political agenda at whatever cost to its own standards and purposes.
That agenda may have nothing whatsoever to do with ideals of intellectual excellence and all the rest which is so obvious to those interested in a civilised society. Yet in the name of "usefulness", egalitarianism and that particularly oxymoronic new Labour educational slogan, "Excellence for All", this government has been following a simple recipe for wreckage of our universities. This is how it goes.
Announce that 50% of teenagers should go to university. Call every technical college and polytechnic a university. Encourage everyone to go. Discover they're not up to it. Lower the standards. Promote courses in "useful" non-academic subjects for the vast majority who are not intellectual. Bully universities into taking candidates they don't want and more candidates than they can teach. Realise you can't pay for all this.
So what do you cut back on? Traditional, highly intellectual, non-utilitarian, elitist courses, such as classics and medieval history, which were central to university life in the first place. Brilliant. Takeover complete.
I can hardly believe it is necessary to point out the value to society in general of a university-educated elite. So much ink has been spent on this subject - by Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold, for instance - but perhaps nobody is expected to read this stuff any more.
Admittedly, many traditional university courses are not useful in any obvious way; the study of the Albigensian heresy doesn't usually lead directly to anything in the jobcentre. But there is without a doubt a very profound use to society - to the taxpayer - in having a few well-informed people around who have been trained to think critically.
To give but one example: the parliamentary sketch writer, Quentin "Three Universities" Letts, wrote a brilliant demolition of the obfuscation and muddle of Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister. On the asylum crisis, Hughes dumped the shaming word "backlog" in favour of "benchmarking" a "reasonable workload in progress", given "push factors", "migratory frames" and "stringent contact management".
It takes a well-trained mind to cut a swathe through misleading new Labour verbiage and spot the evasion and incompetence, and even to make it interesting.
If he can put up with colleagues such as Hughes, one can only wonder what Clarke learnt from his time at King's. Or why?
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 11, 2003 | Comments (0)
Peace-loving Muslims can stop fanatics in their tracks
Every time there is news of a British Muslim taking part in some Islamist atrocity there is a hectic rush of the most highly esteemed members of the respectable British Muslim establishment to camera, microphone and print to reassure the rest of us. I cannot count the times they have told us that Islam is a peaceful religion, that suicide is forbidden and that these dreadful acts are committed by a few unhinged loners, or by a tiny lunatic fringe.
We long to believe them, of course, but our credulity is beginning to feel stretched.
Last week a young British Muslim blew himself up near Tel Aviv in an attempt to kill lots of young Israelis and another tried but failed to murder yet more.
Suddenly the list of such atrocities by British Muslims is beginning to seem quite long. There was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who organised the kidnap and murder in Pakistan of the journalist Daniel Pearl. There was Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber. There are seven British Muslims imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, captured fighting against their own country, and there were many more like them who escaped and came home.
And the alarming thing about the people on the list is how different they are.
There is no one common factor, such as poverty or social exclusion, or anything else of the kind conventionally used to explain away such atrocities. On the contrary, these terrorists come from a wide range of British backgrounds, including, in two cases, British public schools.
The truth, I suspect, is that nobody actually knows how many British Muslims there are who might be inclined to terrorism. They may be few, but they may not. I imagine the secret services may have a pretty good idea, though the Israelis have made plain their bitterness about the ineffectual and liberal approach Britain has for years taken to Islamic fundamentalist groups.
London has become known as Londonistan - a haven for terrorists. But even if they do know they are not saying; the only acceptable line for the authorities to take in public, for obvious reasons, is that dangerous fundamentalists are only a minuscule minority.
Yet after the conviction this year of the Jamaican Abdullah el-Faisal for incitement to racial hatred - he was one of those scary fanatics who go around publicly encouraging Muslims to kill western infidels - an investigator on the case said the authorities "simply do not know how many young, impressionable Muslims may have gone to training camp abroad and returned" well prepared for terrorism. They simply do not know how many. So there may be a few, but there be more than a few.
It is not very reassuring for the ordinary citizen. Nor are the potted lectures on Islam that we get from well-meaning people at times like this, explaining that the true way of Islam is enlightened tolerance.
I cannot pretend to know enough about Islam to discuss it with anyone who has studied it. Yet even a child could work out that the emollient things said by the well-meaning about Islam are very inconsistent. It may well be that suicide is not permitted, neither mentioned in the Koran nor allowed by other Islamic teaching.
But martyrdom in the name of jihad is widely praised and encouraged in Islam, even when it involves suicide bombing. Only this week on the Today programme on Radio 4, Anjem Choudary, the British leader of Al-Muhajiroun, said of the British suicide bombers in Israel that Muslims should support fellow believers in jihad and in their great sacrifice.
Of course he was denounced as a fanatic. Islamic scholars are always telling the British media that jihad, properly speaking and properly understood, means an inner spiritual struggle, not terrorist atrocity.
Yet there are clearly plenty of Muslims who believe there is Islamic authority for martyrdom through suicide, for holy war in literal terms, and very specific rewards in paradise as well. No less a person than the Saudi ambassador to Britain actually wrote a poem in praise of some suicide bombers in Israel, which was published not very long ago in London.
Religious text is not enough. And it presents its own difficulties anyway. Islam has the embarrassing problem, common to all ancient religions, of textual disagreement. The famous and mysterious biblical claim, that "in my Father's house there are many mansions", which is used to mean all manner of things, is almost certainly a garbling in translation.
In the same way, the 70-odd houris, or virgins or angels promised as a reward in Islamic paradise might well be something rather less exciting. According to Christoph Luxenberg, a learned German writer on the language of the Koran, it may well be that the houris are only white raisins, and that the joys of paradise are food and drink rather than young women. These uncertainties and ambiguities do nothing to reassure the sceptics who remember that Protestant and Catholic slaughtered each other in this country in the 16th century over the precise meaning of transubstantiation.
The point about all major religions, including Christianity, is that they are used, in the spirit of Humpty Dumpty, to mean what their adherents want them to mean. Islam, like Christianity, has been used to justify holy war and any number of atrocities. And religious adherents want their faith to justify different acts at different times.
Religion is the name in which people have always justified the good and the evil they intend to do anyway. The tragedy is that religion is usually at its most tolerant and most beneficent when it is at its emptiest - when its beliefs have become so feeble that very few people are prepared to kill and die for them, as with Christianity today. Contrariwise, strong religious beliefs can be deadly.
In the face of this unknown risk, and these varying beliefs, the question is what can actually be done to contain the fanatics. One of the best known and most obvious sources of the problem is in certain mosques and religious schools, with certain fanatical imams. Perhaps it would be possible to ask for the help of the great majority of British Muslims who hate terrorism as much as everyone else.
Perhaps they would agree to make a point of monitoring every place of worship and teaching.
I am assuming that just as Christians are free to attend any Christian service, so Muslims are free to go to any mosque or Islamic school. If so, they could keep an eye on those few places where trouble might be brewing.
The difficulties are obvious enough. Worshippers would not like to spy on each other, or to be spied upon. Nor would they enjoy the dilemma of whether to shop an obvious menace to the police for incitement to racial hatred or whatever. But if the great majority of British Muslims were known by everyone else to be doing all they could to recognise and to control any fanatics, they would not only be doing a great service to society in general. They would be doing a great deal for their own public image.
This would be worth any amount of worthy discussion about religious belief.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 04, 2003 | Comments (0)
