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If Betsy is investigated, then Patsy should resign
Betsy and Patsy are in a terrible pickle. Betsy stayed at home and kept house and stood by her man in the old-fashioned Conservative way.
Patsy didn't stay at home and keep house. Instead, in the modern Labour way, she went out and got a job. What's more, she got a top job telling the rest of us to go out and get a job as well and was very rude about those of us who didn't and wanted to stay at home.
Now, suddenly, everybody's cross with both of them. Betsy's being publicly investigated and Patsy's been publicly humiliated. This is all very odd. Can they both of them be wrong at the same time?
Betsy says she hasn't done anything wrong and Patsy says she hasn't either, but if she has she's sorry. This is a story with a missing moral.
Betsy Duncan Smith's problem is that politicians and journalists are hotly demanding to know exactly how much secretarial work she did for her husband to earn the £15,000 she was paid by the taxpayer. On Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman demanded to know whether she had filled out time sheets, as if homebound multi-taskers with one hand on the telephone and the other on the Brillo pad can usually be expected to aspire to the higher levels of self-auditing. So Betsy has had a bad week.
Patricia Hewitt's week has been worse, I hope. She has had to make a public recantation of faith about working mothers, a subject dear to her new Labour heart. Hewitt is the minister for women (as well as the trade and industry secretary) who announced only last June that mothers who stay at home looking after their children are a "real problem", a "persistent problem".
All these feckless, unwaged nurturers and cuddlers, it seemed, were letting the nation down. Her underlings in the women and equality unit announced at the time, in a paper called Delivering on Gender Equality, that not enough women with dependent children were out at work, boosting the economy and paying back the cost of their education.
In ApparatchikSpeak they were not "enhancing competitiveness and productivity" and "maximising returns on public and private investment in education and training".
It was blindingly obvious then, as now, that most women with children do not want to work full-time. They do so only for the money. A national survey of working mothers published last week showed that only 1% of mothers would choose to go back to work full-time after giving birth.
The vast majority say they feel terrible guilt and anxiety about leaving their children to go to work and two-thirds of all mothers would prefer to look after their children and families full-time.
It is equally blindingly obvious that stay-at-home mothers bring enormous advantages to their own families and to society generally.
Similarly obvious to anyone of common sense are the disadvantages to children, and to society generally, of their mothers' absence, of indifferent childcare and various forms of neglect.
Our high numbers of working mothers have coincided with our fast-growing numbers of delinquent children, teenage pregnancies and failures at school, especially among boys.
Yet this Labour government has since 1997 been pushing and nagging and legislating women out to work, against their wishes and against the general social good.
Bullying and bribing and bad-mouthing women out of their homes has been a top new Labour priority, with a whole stream of policies and tax credit and childcare subsidies.
Now suddenly, for some reason, the government has seen the light. Now suddenly Hewitt has the effrontery to recant, to presume to reinvent the spinning wheel.
Last week this rash, interfering woman was reduced to saying that Labour has been wrong to foster the view that all women should work.
Government, she says, should not dictate to women how to live their lives. Fancy that. I suppose we should try to be grateful for the return of any lost sheep to the fold.
However, one cannot help suspecting that Hewitt and her government have woken up to another blindingly obvious point -stay-at-home mothers also look after old people and neighbours and disabled people, too, thereby saving the exchequer many billions. If Betsy should be investigated, Patsy should certainly be made to resign.
The moral of these strange coincidences is, surely, that we are in the middle of a serious confusion about motherhood and partnership. The Duncan Smiths have an old-fashioned marriage in which she supports him in everything he does, in any way she can.
And it's understandable, and was once entirely conventional, that in politics you got two people, and two people's efforts, for the price of one.
That doesn't mean it is right, these days, for anyone to accept money for a purely nominal job, but in old-fashioned terms it was once felt to be acceptable for perfectly respectable reasons, if the wife was indeed doing a great deal of something useful. It's just that times have changed.
Hewitt, oddly enough, is the victim of old-fashioned attitudes as well. She belongs to a generation of feminists who simply didn't make allowances for children. Gloria Steinem, a great and childless feminist of the 1970s, was once asked by a frustrated sister why feminism hadn't taken into account the problems of child rearing. And Steinem said, quite frankly: "Honey, we just didn't know."
I've always thought it was something beyond ignorance. I think that feminist leaders then, and prominent women in the chattering classes today, have never been representative of most women.
They are highly unusual alpha females who are clever and ambitious enough to long to work, and successful enough to be able to afford good childcare. They are atypical women. They do not, like most women, long to spend more time with their children and elderly aunts. And what they don't understand is that they are different from most other women. They have different needs and desires.
Whatever Hewitt may have said last week about wishing that she'd spent more time with her children when they were young, alpha females are not necessarily very maternal. If they can provide good nannies or grannies, they don't tend to feel bad about being away from their children. I've met a lot of women like this.
I believe it is because unrepresentative women have been calling the shots that we have the confusions into which Betsy and Patsy have fallen so recently.
If stay-at-home women's important contributions to their families and to the wider world had been taken seriously for the past 30 years, these confusions wouldn't have arisen.
A politician would have been able to accept a general payment for his wife's support without too many time sheets being demanded. And a minister for women would not have been so dismissive of the enormous unsung, unpaid contributions of her own sex for so many disgraceful years.
And that is the moral of the story of Betsy and Patsy.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 19, 2003 | Comments (0)
It's not football I hate, it's the phoney-as-hell fans
The Chinese sage Confucius advised us, in the pursuit of virtue, to avert our eyes from what is unseemly. Unfortunately with football this is impossible.
There is no escape from football. Everything you can see and hear is dominated by footie news, and when there are two or three footie scandals running at the same time, the media can hardly pay attention to anything else, so obsessed are they with what they mysteriously call the beautiful game.
Perhaps, thinking of ancient China again, they use the word beautiful as a delicate euphemism, rather as the Chinese used to call human excrement wagons "flower carts". The game itself may be beautiful at times, like many games, but what surrounds football these days is an ugly stink.
I'm not so much thinking of the usual nastiness of corruption, greed and beastly behaviour.
All proletarian spectator sports attract all three, for obvious reasons. I'm sure that the ancient Romans had just as many trouble-making hooligans, in and out of the arena, as we do.
Gladiators made equally sensational sums of money and were just as keen on the ancient Roman equivalent of "roasting"; gang-banging groupies is hardly new. And star-stalking was not invented by Rolling Stones fans; at least one Roman empress was rumoured to have boffed a top gladiator.
One despairs of today's silly little slags, who dress like tarts and go to the hotel of a celebrity they have just met, even though such girls deserve the full protection of the law. But it is hardly worth getting upset about the silly salaries of greedy managers and coaches. Who cares, really? Nor does it matter much if they fill the tabloids with love-rat shenanigans. That is at least a form of light entertainment.
Perhaps it is rather sadder that talented young boys from nowhere who suddenly become football stars go equally suddenly wrong, with their defenceless heads turned by money and fame. It's not easy to go from a sink estate and a single mother to fame and Pounds 50,000 a week. You might have thought that their coaches and managers could advise them and guide them. But then with role models like Sven-Goran Eriksson, one can hardly expect much.
Why I hate football has nothing to do with any of that. What I hate is the strange football orthodoxy of today.
Somehow we're all supposed to toe the same line about this damn game. You must know about football. You must care about football. You must think football is really, really important. Otherwise there must be something wrong with you. Worse than that, you must be an out-of-touch toff so no one can possibly take you seriously.
Declaring your love for football is these days tantamount to declaring your love of humanity, your deep belief in things that really matter. Of course you may admit you're not an active supporter, you may not go to matches, but you care. You understand. Failing to declare your faith is deeply suspect.
I first became aware that some strange new ideology was growing up around football about 20 years ago. I was talking to a group of young men friends, all aspiring writers like me, and foolishly let it slip that I knew nothing about football and cared less. "What?" cried one literary Young Turk (now well known), in shock and contempt. "You want to be a serious writer, you seriously want to write, and you don't know anything about football? I can't believe it!" Neither could I.
When I started to unpick what he was saying it became clear -and it's become much clearer in the intervening two decades -that football has come to stand for something quite other than men in shorts with a ball, or reasonable national pride.
Football means demos, the masses, the people. If you love footie, understand footie, you care about the people. You are of the people; with your belief and your passion you can somehow identify yourself with the people, even if you were born a bit of a toff, or went to Fettes. Ich bin ein footballer. To claim your love for football these days is to claim serious prole cred, or so people are stupid enough to imagine.
Politicians have been doing this since the first Roman senator sponsored the first gladiator. Our own people's prime minister leapt eagerly onto this bandwagon, if rather clumsily. He famously rhapsodised about watching the great Jackie Milburn play, when in truth the Newcastle player retired when Blair was four.
Our Tone also reminisced happily about sitting at the Gallowgate end of the Newcastle ground -quite impossible since you could only stand there in those days. Still it's the thought that counts, and the thought is that faux footie cred will give you prole cred and voter appeal because it will somehow magic away toff taint.
In other words, this is all about middle-class guilt and middle-class fear of the masses. It's the same thing that made people in the 1960s prole down their accents. It's the same thing that makes otherwise intelligent middle-aged toffs go about boasting they simply love hip-hop and rap when they don't. All sorts of top media intellectuals and novelists, often Oxbridge white males, go about publicly proclaiming their love of gangsta-rap. Maybe they do. But in fact it doesn't matter what you actually like; it's what you publicly say you like.
Alastair Campbell had himself pictured after his resignation watching footie with his son. Campbell does truly love football, but that doesn't matter either way. It was the prole cred (and incidentally the dad cred) that mattered. Football these days is one of the most efficient ways of getting prole cred.
We can all understand why politicians are in hot pursuit of prole cred, misguided though I hope they are. I hope the few genuine proletarians left in this country despise them as frauds. What is much more hateful is why intellectuals and film makers and writers, and even normal people, seem increasingly to feel driven into the same pursuit.
Call me naive, but these are the people we depend on to tell us deeper truths. And this is a particularly dishonest form of political correctness. Wisdom cannot thrive on pretending to be something you aren't, by pretending to like something you don't, or don't care about.
Why must a novelist be interested in football to be any good? One might as well say he ought also to be interested in military history, or musical counterpoint, both just as important and a lot more interesting, but entirely lacking in prole cred.
This is not to belittle football, or the pleasure of football fans. Good luck to them. And good luck to all the rugby players and ice skaters and showjumpers and skateboarders too. Sport is wonderful. At the same time, it creates lots of work and wealth, some of it perfectly respectable.
In the absence of any real religious sense, or national sense, or feeling of shared identity, there's something very shabby in trying to create a false one out of a game. And it's intellectually very shabby to impose on a game more significance than it has and to sneer at those who refuse to do the same.
If football were only a game, I wouldn't hate it. I would just ignore it. If only they'd let me.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 12, 2003 | Comments (0)
Identity cards: passport to better public services
Different times, different customs. There was a time when it was entirely reasonable to fear and resist the idea of identity cards. For many years there was absolutely no need for them. Besides, we have in Britain deep-rooted folk memories, some of them from old movies about occupied Europe and bullies in uniform barking demands at the defenceless for their papers.
Furthermore, the traditional Anglo-Saxon attitude has been one of intense objection to being interrupted by some state functionary demanding -as of right - to know who you are and what you are about. That has always been considered dismally continental and illiberal. Not the way we do things here.
But times have changed and the way we do things here has changed. So have the arguments. The case against ID cards is now largely emotional. British society has changed so radically and so fast that we are confronted with an entirely different collection of needs and risks.
Most obviously, the struggle to keep our details to ourselves was lost long ago.
Big Brother and his host of incarnations who run supermarkets, telephone companies, credit agencies, schools and hospitals have all our personal details.
They are already manipulating them and us, and there is very little we can do about it. Civil libertarians have lost their honourable battle to the superior forces of commerce and technology. Data protection has become a pious myth.
Meanwhile, there is, rather suddenly, a genuine need for ID cards. Even a Labour home secretary is admitting that we have a grave problem with immigration. The entire system is inefficient and unsystematic, and being efficiently and systematically abused. David Blunkett has admitted that he hasn't "got a clue" how many illegal immigrants are here.
The worst problem with this mass influx is that social services, the public services generally and the taxpayer cannot cope with the overwhelming extra demands put upon them.
The National Health Service cannot cope with people who come here specifically for long-term free NHS treatment. Inner-city schools cannot cope with the extra burden of a Babel of foreign languages -160 different mother tongues at my local comprehensive, for instance. There are those who say let everyone come here, and welcome -everyone else must admit that we urgently need some system of entitlement.
ID cards are the obvious solution, and the home secretary has just announced that he plans to put an ID card proposal to parliament in the autumn, no matter what protests there are in cabinet. What he proposes are in effect "entitlement cards", which make perfect sense. You would have to produce an ID card to prove your entitlement to schools, hospitals and social services.
Critics have been quick to call this a "disentitlement card", as if that were a knockdown argument against it. On the contrary. Of course it has to do with disentitlement. Entitlement for some necessarily means disentitlement for others.
That is the point of it. ID cards would protect our entitlements.
Blunkett's plan, so far, is not for some continental kind of stop and search. It would not be compulsory under his proposals to carry and produce an ID card at any time. There would be fierce resistance against that.
You would simply need to produce one to prove your entitlement to services and benefits. This would be a powerful deterrent to illegal immigrants. It would be almost impossible to live here without ever needing to apply for some sort of public service, at which point your lack of official identity would emerge.
People with children are legally obliged to have them educated, for instance. And people from elsewhere who are simply trying to get a free elective operation, in competition with all the long-suffering British taxpayers in the queue, would either have to pay for it or go away.
Equally obviously, ID cards would deter some criminals and terrorists, however imperfectly. Miscreants need the right kind of sea to swim in -cloudy, calm and camouflaged, with easy, anonymous access to free necessities. ID cards would clear up these muddy waters and the piranhas and scavengers would suddenly be very visible. Although ID cards cannot deter all fraud, it doesn't mean they would not deter a great deal.
This is all that Blunkett is proposing, so far at least. It goes against the grain to quote Tony Blair with faint approval, but he did say at Labour's party conference: "In a world of mass migration, with cheaper air travel, and all the problems of fraud, it makes sense to ask whether now, in the early 21st century, ID cards are no longer an affront to civil liberties but may be the way of protecting them."
That is a bit weaselly, as ever. What he should have said is that ID cards need not threaten civil liberties and would protect some of our entitlements. That is a fair trade. However, the government is roughly on the right track.
Passionate opponents of ID cards have now moved away from questions of principle to practicality -usually a sign of losing the argument. Their first and best point is that the government couldn't be trusted to put a minimum of information on the card's microchip, but would bring together a collection of personal details to monitor and micromanage us better.
The answer is we should have entirely independent ID card scanning services, which can tell you exactly what is on your card. And there should be nothing more on it than the most basic details of identity, nationality and National Insurance number. Medical records and criminal records, for instance, should certainly not be there. These cards must be nothing more than passports to public services.
Then there's the question of fakes. As I understand it, it is impossible to fake ID cards with unique biomarkers on them, such as the shape of your iris. When you try to use your card, your body in person with your unique biomarker has to match the unique biomarker in the plastic, as read by the screen that is checking as you stand there. Even the wildest forensic thriller writers haven't come up with a way round this.
Then there's the cost argument. Nobody seems to agree on what the cost will be.
But in any event, it seems almost self-evident that the cost of ID cards, however sophisticated, would quickly be paid for by the enormous savings to the health service alone, quite apart from the savings in social services and schools, both in cash and staff. An unentitled Aids patient costs the NHS about Pounds 50,000 a year, for instance.
If Victoria Climbie and Marie Therese Kouao had had to produce unique ID cards when they went to social services for help, Victoria would be alive today. It would have emerged, instantly, that Kouao was lying and Victoria was not the fake daughter on her faked passport. Without cards they would have been sent back to their two different homes abroad.
Alternatively, had they stayed, Victoria would not have got disastrously lost between the five separate "unique identification numbers" she was, amazingly, given by overburdened social workers. The arguments against ID cards were once very powerful; they are now out of date and irrelevant.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 05, 2003 | Comments (0)
