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Strange, but Captain Hook has done Britain a favour
Abu Hamza, alias Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, the Egyptian-born Muslim cleric known to the tabloid newspapers as Captain Hook, is almost everybody’s idea of a pantomime villain.
Until his arrest last week at the request of the United States he preached hatred with impunity, he spat loathing at our society while exploiting us shamelessly — and he is a disgrace to British Muslims. It is a great pity that he managed to obtain British nationality and it is even worse that the home secretary is having so much difficulty stripping him of it, even after changing the law.
Hamza makes a nonsense of British law. Only last month he managed to get a nine-month stay of process as a reward for failing to turn up in court for his appeal against the loss of his British nationality, failing to send his lawyer along and refusing to prepare papers for his case. Such is his deep contempt for this country’s scrupulous liberalism. There can hardly be anybody in Britain who does not think we would be better off without him.
You might think, therefore, that we would all be very grateful that the Americans have suddenly come like the cavalry galloping over the hill to rid us of this turbulent priest, perhaps permanently. They will throw away the key if he is found guilty in a US court of the serious terrorist charges the Americans want to bring against him.
Thank you, Uncle Sam, is what we should be saying. And Uncle Sam will probably be quite grateful, too, thanks to David Blunkett’s new one-sided extradition treaty, to have a larger-than-life cartoon-style Muslim baddy to display to the American populace as a glittering trophy of the war against terror.
Yet in this country the sensational “pre-dawn raid” on Hamza’s home in Shepherd’s Bush has been followed not by jubilation but by angry and suspicious questions. Why did we have such an attention-grabbing raid at all? And why now, suddenly? If Hamza has done such very terrible things as the Americans allege, why did not we know?
Assuming that British police and intelligence services did, in fact, know at least some of it, why has Hamza never been charged with even the smallest crime in this country? At the very least the man has been obstructing the traffic and causing a public nuisance in Finsbury Park, north London, for hours every Friday.
During the recent hearing about Hamza’s citizenship appeal, the Home Office’s QC gave a list of reasons why he should be stripped of his citizenship; some were criminal offences and presumably the barrister had good evidence for his remarks. Why couldn’t, or didn’t, we nab and nail him here? What is wrong with our evidence? We now learn that the Crown Prosecution Service is studying a file on his preachings — but why only now?
Various men from various ministries say that Hamza always, in his obvious incitements to hatred and violence, cunningly kept within the letter of the law — but it didn’t sound like that to the man on the Finsbury Park omnibus.
The official answer to some of these questions, as supplied by Blunkett with skilful obfuscation on Radio 4, is:
1) that Britain does not have the evidence the Americans have, at least not for some of the charges, but that
2) Britain did have evidence enough, of some sort, to lead Blunkett to try to withdraw Hamza’s citizenship and that
3) some of the American evidence, being intercept material, would be inadmissible in open court here.
That may soon change. A Home Office review of ways of using intercept evidence is now concluding. It seems likely that there will be a recommendation for legislation to permit some use of such evidence in open court here, as happens in most other countries. So Britain can hardly be accused by scrupulous liberal souls of sending a man off for trial on evidence that would be inadmissible here. By the time Hamza crosses the Atlantic, if his extradition goes through, the evidence will be admissible in Britain.
However, there are other doubts about sending the man off to the mercies of the US criminal justice system. Although there is no risk that he would be executed, much of the evidence against him comes from terrorist prisoners in American jails who may have been swayed by duress or by deals and might not carry a lot of weight in a British court.
Even if Hamza is in the end spirited away, he will leave some awkward questions behind him. In any liberal democracy there is a difficult compromise to be made between freedom and security and the bad smell behind Hamza is that we have got it wrong, somehow.
We have been both too lax and too quick to change the law, when hard cases make bad law. The extradition treaty of 2003, which came into force earlier this year, is one-sided and was not debated in parliament. Detention of foreigners without trial under recent anti-terrorist legislation is a shocking thing and we seem quickly to have forgotten about the men languishing in Belmarsh prison.
What is long overdue is a tough-minded determination not to let the wrong people enter Britain in the first place. In particular we should refuse entry to the wrong imams. A significant minority of imams are doing great damage and bear responsibility for the alienation of some young Muslims, who are being told to hate this country and are being driven into the hands of extremists and terrorist sympathisers.
There is an increasing number of second and third-rate Islamic clerics who come to this country for dubious purposes, by dubious means. Ignorant and prejudiced, they are not spreading the true teaching of Islam but are perpetrating the outdated notion that Muslims are victims of British colonial oppression and encouraging people to rise up against the rule of the white man.
The reason why the imams are not prosecuted is because the non-Muslim community has no idea of what goes on in mosques. If they did know, the authorities would be scared to intervene for fear of being called racists.
All the above comments about imams are not mine, but those of Lord Ahmed, the Muslim Labour peer, made very courageously about a year ago. The way that imams are recruited for British mosques desperately needs reform. The traditional system — hardly a system at all — is disastrous.
There is nothing to stop a mosque recruiting an ignorant, even illiterate person from a Third World village, who knows nothing of the English language or of Britain or of the spiritual and social needs of British Muslims. If nothing worse, he will be an obstacle to the process of integration here. At worst, he might be another Hamza.
Ahmed and others have long been pressing for something to be done about this obvious problem. Now, at long last, it seems that Tony Blair does have a plan for legislation, seen by The Sunday Times, to stop the wrong sort of imams coming. They will be barred unless they are moderate, English-speaking, educated and sympathetic to the British way of life. How late this is, how limited. Still, better late than never.
Perhaps by forcing us to face these difficult questions and giving us every reason to be tough, Captain Hook has done us some service after all.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 30, 2004 | Comments (0)
Children are at the heart of the battle for Islam’s soul
Last week the home secretary boldly urged Muslim leaders in Britain to increase efforts to restrain the extremists in their communities whose teachings inflame racial tension.
A paper published by the Home Office said Britain needs “to break out of the cycle of ignorance and prejudice that fracture communities”. David Blunkett singled out Muslim leaders and called on them as well as the media to deal with the “myths and misrepresentation” that divide communities.
The day before, a public forum called Intelligence2 had held a debate in London to an audience of 700 on the motion that “Islam is incompatible with democracy”. The motion was carried, the majority swayed I suspect by some powerful arguments from Amir Taheri, a distinguished Muslim journalist. After heated debate it became clear how difficult it is, even for well meaning and well informed people, to deal with myths and misrepresentations.
There are serious problems in this country between some British Muslims and the rest of the population and a better accommodation must urgently be found. Some Muslims, particularly the less educated, find it hard to integrate here and to become British in ways that matter. Instead there are too many who are indifferent, contemptuous or enraged to the point of violence and conspiracy.
This sense of disengagement seems to be more marked and growing among the young, according to surveys. Hence the new insistence on the hijab, for example. (Of course there are many who have settled into being British successfully; they are not the problem but part of the solution.) At the same time there is suspicion and anger among the non-Muslim majority, among the educated as well as the uneducated. Anybody who dismisses this as Islamophobia is refusing to face the problem.
Here public discussion is long overdue, however provocative. And it certainly is provocative to suggest that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Belief in the virtue of democracy is a central article of faith in the West, so deeply rooted as to be hardly noticed. Anyone who dissents from belief in democracy is, in western terms, apostate (however much westerners try to avoid that sort of talk). It is to deny those western absolute values — equal rights, equality under the law and the sovereignty of the people.
Of the 57 Islamic states in the world today hardly any have a full democracy in the western sense. Many others are shameful tyrannies. This does not by itself demonstrate that Islam is incompatible with democracy — there could be many historical explanations for that, including interference by western colonialists — but it is suggestive.
Islam, according to the winning debating team, has traditionally not had the language for discussion about democracy. There was no word for democracy itself in Muslim languages until modern times nor even apparently a word for equality. Democracy depends on an idea of equality but, they argued, in Koranic teaching the idea of equality is unacceptable; an unbeliever cannot be equal to a believer. There are other inequalities. To this day Muslim women are not the equals of Muslim men, strictly speaking.
One of the speakers drew up an Islamic hierarchy, from Muslim free men at the top, followed by Muslim slaves and Muslim women, then Jews, then Christians and so on down. There is even a hierarchy for animals and plants. This does not mean inferior beings are to be treated badly, merely differently, according to Koranic teaching. Muslims have shown at some stages in their civilisation far greater tolerance (although not equality) to their subject infidels than have Christians.
However, sovereignty cannot be given to the people under Islam. That would be blasphemy because sovereignty belongs to God and he has laid down the law and the Koran is the last word.
If correct, these are all knock-down arguments. However, they are difficult to square with my experience of Muslim friends and acquaintances — pretty much secularised I suppose — who do not appear to think like this at all and who are clearly thoroughly at home in western culture. The problem seems to be not Islam but religion, and not just religion but religion in its most fundamentalist, literal-minded, proselytising forms.
“Once again wars of religions are ready to devastate Europe. Boheman, leader of a new sect of purified Christianity, has just been arrested in Sweden, and the most disastrous plans were found among his papers. The sect to which he belonged is said to want nothing less than to render itself master of all the potentates of Europe. In Arabia new sectarians are emerging and want to purify the religion of Mahomet. In China even worse troubles, still and always motivated by religion, are tearing apart the inside of that vast empire. As always it is gods that are the cause of all ills.”
That could have been written today, but it was in fact the Marquis de Sade in the 18th century, quoted by Max Rodenbeck in his magisterial piece “Islam confronts its demons” in a recent New York Review of Books.
There seems to be a trajectory in most religions — I won’t say development or progress, although that is my bias — from early dogmatic fundamentalism, through some sort of reformation and enlightenment to a period of tolerance made possible by a trickling away of faith — that long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach — so that in the end there are no articles of belief for which anyone is prepared any longer to kill or die.
In fact there is by then little common belief at all. The teaching of the holy texts, once sacrosanct, are reinterpreted metaphorically, personally, privately. Religion withdraws from the public space and so church and state can be separated, which is pretty much essential for true democracy, although we have interesting fudges here and there. Britain is technically a theocracy.
Believers in any faith, Muslim or other, hotly resist such “reform” and fight for their own “reform”, a return to the early certainties, like America’s Christian fundamentalists. All religions have seen long battles between the literalists and those inclined to metaphorical interpretations, tending towards humanism and finally secularism.
In the Muslim world today the literalists appear to be in the ascendant. In fact, however, among educated Muslims, particularly in the West, the metaphorists (or humanists) seem to be increasing. So much crucially depends, hard though it is for British post-Christians to understand, on the religious education of Muslim children here (and all across Europe).
RE is not a soft subject, a time to doze off; it is a matter of cultural survival, of life and death.
Blunkett should therefore take the advice of Lord Ahmed, the new Labour peer, and look as a matter of urgency into the training, recruitment and licensing of imams in Britain. The accommodation we all need is in their hands.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 23, 2004 | Comments (0)
A caring Dracula is draining the lifeblood from families
Bad ideas die hard. One that remains undead, no matter how many stakes are driven into its bad old socialist heart, is the idea that the state knows best. It’s an idea that haunts this country still, despite all the bitter lessons of the 20th century.
Dracula no longer goes about revealing his fangs, however; he is now dressed in a sympathetic disguise. He wears a face of caring and social inclusion and is wrapped in the vast, all-embracing cloak of human rights. Under the guise of the human rights agenda, and all its good intentions, the spirit of socialism is undead and well, here in Britain.
Last week’s news of the 14-year-old schoolgirl who, without her mother’s knowledge, had an abortion arranged by a 21-year-old “health outreach worker”, is a case in point. This girl is still a child legally, still in the care of her mother, and yet her school and her outreach worker and the medical staff involved were all prepared to exclude her mother from the serious crisis she faced, and to take it upon themselves to advise and direct her child in her place.
I suppose it is possible that there might be some special circumstances which haven’t yet emerged that might justify such an outrage. There are, sadly, a few mothers who are so inadequate or so threatening or so mentally disturbed that they ought to be kept away from their daughters, particularly at times of great need. However, this girl’s mother appears to be perfectly normal, and is even a care worker herself. Admittedly it doesn’t say much for her judgment that she has given details of the story to a tabloid newspaper, but that is — after all — sadly normal these days.
It is news to me that a girl well under the age of majority can, by law, have a serious medical intervention, like an abortion, without the consent or knowledge of the mother (or father). Doctors are usually extremely wary of proceeding without parental consent, without careful legal advice, and rightly so. Abortion can have many psychological repercussions and carries some medical risks.
Quite apart from that, there are moral questions about abortion, and practical questions about how a girl’s parents might help her or which doctor they’d prefer her to see. Any mother who is deliberately excluded from such discussions, just because her young and irresponsible daughter is afraid that she might be angry and upset, is being deliberately deprived of her responsibility for her child, by people who might not even know her. For this to be a matter of normal practice is absurd. It is taking the idea of patient confidentiality to the point of stupidity.
As the law stands, it seems a minor can have an abortion without parental consent if two doctors agree that it is in her best interests and she is competent to understand the implications.
It is glaringly obvious to me that a young and irresponsible girl, irresponsible enough to have knowingly “taken a risk”, is unlikely to understand the implications, even after quite a lot of caring chats with health workers. Indeed in this case the girl soon afterwards said she hadn’t been ready to make the decision, and would probably have told her mother and kept the child, given another chance.
The best people, normally, to help a young girl understand the moral, social and emotional implications of life are her family, particularly her mother. That ought to be the presumption. Here, the presumption seems to be the other way. It is a totalitarian presumption; you can almost see Dracula’s cloak twitching.
I don’t mean to suggest that we live in a totalitarian state. Nonetheless, undermining the family is something that totalitarian states have always tried to do, and driving a wedge between parents and children is one of the traditional ways of doing it.
The reason is obvious; the united family has always been strongly resistant to the power of the state. I don’t really suppose that there has been any well-articulated conspiracy in this country to undermine families, or any conscious attack on family values. But quasi-socialist policies have served those purposes well since the war, in particular the attempted nationalisation of the family by the welfare state.
Today it is not ideals of welfare, specifically, but ideals of human rights that threaten the family, and swell the power of the state and the intrusive armies of quangocrats and functionaries, to impose those rights on us.
Poor foolish 14-year-old Melissa has the “right” to patient confidentiality, the “right” to a lonely trip to a clinic, supported by a text message from her outreach worker, and the “right” to deceive her mother, because she has a “right” to underage sex; a case was reported last week of a girl of 13 who was taken away from her adoptive parents because she has a “human right” to a sex life and they were trying to stop her.
The disabilities lobby is obsessed with rights. In a field I know quite well, people with learning disabilities have pressed upon them their “right” to have a baby (though not necessarily their “right” to keep it), and even their “right” to sit on juries or to be trustees of complex organisations, even though their disabilities, sadly, disqualify them.
A right appears to be something that someone rather fancies, or thinks is a right, no matter how unrealistic, and they seem to be limitless. New ones emerge all the time, as do jobs to “support” them.
However, some rights are more equal than others. We do not often hear of a mother’s right to the authority of a mother, or a mother’s right to information about her young child, or a mother’s right to contest the decisions of doctors or nurses or teenagers.
Last week the creation of a new monster superquango was announced. A new and powerful Equality and Human Rights Commission will take over in 2006 from the three “rights” quangos we have already — the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission. It sounds even more aggressively active than they are.
It will be “a strong and authoritative champion for equality and human rights”. It aims at “creating a society that is able to respect and celebrate difference while at the same time recognising and challenging discrimination”.
How the heart sinks. The only hope is that the entire human rights superstructure, here and across Europe, will before long collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions (as expressed in the self-contradictory mission statement, quoted above).
Even in the deluded world of rights activism, it is clear that rights constantly conflict, as people’s interests do. Equality cannot coexist with diversity. The right to be different conflicts with someone else’s right to be equal. And what about my human right to discriminate? Under what article of faith must I be denied my right to discriminate between doctors, au pairs, care workers, assistants and friends? And so on.
Even the vastest of armies of outreach workers will in the end be defeated by battling against the impossible. Meanwhile, we should reach for the garlic when people talk of “human rights”.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 16, 2004 | Comments (0)
I had faith in America’s plan for Iraq. I was wrong
Before the bombers went in, there were many obvious and powerful arguments against invading Iraq. There were many people who expressed those arguments forcefully, in good faith and in bad.
But there were many people who, like me, supported the invasion nonetheless because we had faith that the Americans knew what they were doing and believed it was in our best interests and right for Britain to support them.
It seems I was wrong.
It would be hard to imagine anything more absurdly trivial, in the light of the misery in Iraq, than the recantation of one journalist in a London suburb or even the recantation of a handful of us, now there is beginning to be a fashion for it.
However, I believe that the disillusion I feel is spreading fast among Britons who are admirers and supporters of the United States and that, in so far as British attitudes matter much to the Americans or to international affairs, real harm has been done.
I never imagined that the real reasons for the Iraq invasion were idealistic. The messianic rhetoric of George W Bush and Tony Blair about a conflict between good and evil — and their neo-colonialist mission to be a light unto the nations, beginning by conferring democracy and western values on Iraq — always struck me as absurd.
Blair has a terrible tendency to take off on the wings of this sort of poesy. Sometimes I thought they were both deluded enough to believe it; at other times I assumed it was just demagoguery, manipulating the masses.
Nor did I imagine, whatever they said, that their primary purpose was to deliver a suffering people from its oppressor. They could have done that elsewhere in the world, for example in Zimbabwe.
Of course, the Iraqis’ liberation from the cruelty of Saddam Hussein sounded like a welcome byproduct of war, not to mention a useful justification for it. But the real purpose of regime change, I imagined, was enlightened self-interest, as Bill Clinton had also believed.
From a western point of view, especially after the September 11 mass murders, the Middle East needed sorting out somehow.
It is an unstable, enraged part of the world that produces terrorists, rogue regimes and oil, along with a threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and nuclear proliferation.
It may not be high-minded, but there is nothing necessarily wrong with self-interest. Those liberals who professed to be shocked that the proposed invasion was “really” about oil had clearly not given much thought to what western democracy, and western hospitals and factories, would be like without secure oil supplies. As for the warnings of the fury of the Arab “street” if infidels were to invade the holy lands of Iraq, there was hope that it might be calmed if the country became safer and richer for Iraqis in the process.
It wasn’t at all obvious to me before the invasion that Iraq was the place to start dealing with these threats but Saddam was clearly aggressive and dangerous, and I assumed — to the incredulity of my anti-war friends and now to my own — that the US government had a cunning strategic plan.
Not being privy to state secrets, I hardly expected to know what it was. It did seem rather a mystery, the more I thought about it. But, in the end, you have to trust your government (however deceitful and manipulative, like Blair’s) and its chief ally to know what to do and how to do it, without being forced to reveal secrets.
To my amazement, it has become clearer and clearer that any such trust was misplaced and that the Americans really did not have a cunning plan, or much of a coherent plan at all, any more than Saddam had WMD.
Such plans as they did have, following a swift early victory, have been executed with what one commentator has called unfathomable incompetence.
Perhaps it is too early to despair. Perhaps in time the threat of “Balkanisation” and civil war in Iraq may recede.
Perhaps it is irresponsible to add, however minutely, to the demoralisation of coalition forces while there is still some slight hope of an acceptable outcome.
The occupation of Iraq appears, certainly, to have collapsed into chaos and shame but that appearance may have a lot to do with the professional deformity of many reporters — exaggeration and media machismo, complicated often by political bias and a convoluted desire to believe the worst of any situation, and particularly of the West.
All the same, it is impossible to discount the terrible news of recent days. The siege of Falluja has proved a disastrous humiliation.
For all their might, the Americans felt obliged to retreat and then went through a terrible black comedy of handing over security first to one former general of Saddam plus motorcade, only to dump him suddenly and pick another one instead.
Meanwhile, Iraqi support for the coalition appears to be dwindling. According to an opinion poll for the newspaper USA Today (published before last week’s torture photos appeared), 82% of people in Baghdad said they saw the coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators and more than 60% of Arabs across the country, both Sunni and Shia, said the American and British troops should leave immediately. The handover sounds like a dangerous mess and there is talk of partition.
ITN reports that the Americans have lost control of many key highways, and that reconstruction work has virtually ground to a halt. About half of all foreign workers have left Iraq temporarily or for good.
The world is awash with shock and schadenfreude at the pictures of an American trailer-trash Jezebel humiliating helpless
Arab prisoners; and Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, had to apologise abjectly on Friday for what Senator Edward Kennedy has called “a catastrophic crisis of credibility for our nation”.
The public figure who mentioned My Lai was none other than Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, who was clearly tormented. President Bush is now calling for more troops and another $25 billion.
Where is the plan here? What was the plan? It remains a mystery. The coalition seems to be failing even on the simplest grounds of self-interest, let alone on any idealistic grand project. I trusted the Americans to know what they were doing and how to do it.
Instead, it seems, there has been a long, unresolved struggle going on in the US administration between different planners and different plans, between neo-conservative visionaries, old-fashioned conservatives and various vested interests. There has been a tragic tension between the messianics and the minimalists.
As a result, there has been not just mission creep but mission lurch and mission muddle, followed ignominiously now, in the fog of war, by mission shrink — the temptation to cut and run. That would be very wrong.
I wish we could trust the coalition not to do it, but trust has been one of the many casualties of this war.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 09, 2004 | Comments (0)
Britain’s new apartheid makes strangers of us all
Sometimes something happens which is a perfect incarnation of an idea, an attitude made flesh. This happened in the unlikely person of Clive Wolfendale, deputy chief constable of north Wales, who decided to favour the inaugural meeting of the North Wales Black Police Association with a rap performance.
It is hard to imagine the scene, but a white middle-aged senior officer in uniform regaled a group of policemen from various ethnic groups with some cod hiphop about the difficulties of “bein’ in the dibble” when you’re black: “You’re better chillin, lie down and just be passive / No place for us just yet in the Colwyn Bay Massive”.
The bottom line was that police of all backgrounds must trust each other and work together, to which nobody could possibly object. But the lyrics seem to me lamentable and the idea itself even more so.
It is not merely embarrassing that a senior policeman chose to ape a disaffected young black rapper in front of a mixed group of junior colleagues, whose only common feature was that they were not white. The whole occasion was a perfect illustration of the confusion and cultural loss of nerve in this country. It stands for all the patronage, misguided ingratiation, guilt and double standards that bedevil the way officialdom deals with race relations.
The case of Abu Hamza, the Egyptian-born Muslim cleric, is an even more glaring example of this cultural funk. Known to the tabloids as Captain Hook, Hamza is without question a serious menace to this country.
He has been preaching racial and religious hatred for many months in public (causing regular traffic jams in the process), and the Home Office has for long been convinced that he is closely linked with several international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda. He gives comfort to our enemies.
At last the home secretary has decided to strip him of his British nationality in order to deport him. However, under British law Hamza is entitled to appeal, no matter how undesirable he may be, and his appeal hearing was due to start last Monday. Yet neither he nor his solicitor turned up in court, nor did he submit any evidence to support his appeal (although he was ordered to do so many months ago).
What is the result of this astonishing contempt of court, and of this country? A postponement of his case until January. Until then he will be free to carry on as before.
For there are the summer holidays to consider, and then the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and then it will be Christmas, and then the Treasury might kick up about legal aid but hasn’t decided yet, so really it will not be convenient to get round to dealing with this fellow for nearly nine months.
In a moment of exquisite understatement the judge commented that Hamza’s delays were “regrettable”, and the Home Office’s QC said with almost equal severity that “if he (Hamza) carries on like this, maybe the time will come when we might be making an application to you to dismiss the appeal”.
How about tomorrow? Why this astonishing lack of nerve? It is incredible that officialdom lacks the resolve to dismiss the case or to settle the legal aid problem in advance or to try the man under existing laws against incitements to violence, or even to call a witness to court during the month of Ramadan. This is a multicultural nonsense which is new to me and a bad precedent.
As a result, for his insolent, triumphant contempt of the appeals court and of the manners and morals of this country, Hamza has not been punished. He has been rewarded with nine further months to do his worst here, unchecked, at vast public expense.
A gaggle of Christian clerics got together last week to denounce the British National party. They did not, however, for all the scary allegations about his terrifying secret “war cry” tapes, denounce Hamza. The BNP at its worst has never articulated, still less preached, anything like as bad or as racially inflammatory material as has Hamza. It does not advocate breaking the law, while Hamza incites atrocities.
Yet it is the BNP, in divided and guilt-ridden Britain, that excites more righteous indignation. One can only wonder what is wrong with the sense of perspective: white bigots evil, but un-white bigots un-evil. There seems to be one standard for white people but another standard for others.
One can only wonder, too, at the skewed perspective of the functionaries in Manchester who have been planning to set up a school in Bangladesh, at British taxpayers’ expense, for British-born Bengali children who miss many weeks of school because their parents take them for long trips to the old country to learn about their heritage and culture.
Out of respect for their lengthy cultural researches during term time, therefore, we the taxpayers must pick up the bill for special schooling in Sylhet.
Not only Manchester council and the local head teachers, but also John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads’ Association, thought this was a good idea. He advised other education authorities to do likewise.
Things are rather different here for white children who bunk off school and for their parents. A white Englishwoman has recently served not one but two prison sentences for failing to make her teenage daughters go to school.
I don’t suppose anyone thought to ask whether the girls were having culturally important experiences down the shopping centre with their mother at the time, or offered them home tuition to fit in with their leisure activities. (I should point out that a huge proportion of truants in this country are caught when shopping with their parents, which is to say with their parents’ consent and in accordance with their “culture”.) In the view of the educational establishment in Manchester, at least, it seems that there is one law for indigenous whites and another for non-whites.
Various people who should have denounced this nonsense have done so, including the Department for Education and Skills. The head of the Commission for Racial Equality has condemned it. But the fact remains that this sensibility exists and is widespread inside and outside officialdom.
Take, for instance, the case reported last week in Tower Hamlets of an old people’s housing block that is to be built for Asians only at public expense. It will be run by Bengali-speaking staff with halal food and Muslim religious facilities. The council says in its defence that it is responding to the needs and wishes of local residents, 30% of whom are Bangladeshi.
Yet if some local residents said they wanted a white-only, or Christian-only, purpose-built old people’s unit at public expense, they would be told that their needs and wishes were “inappropriate” and indeed against the law. In fact there would be a massive public outcry. Yet again there seems to be one rule for whites, another for non-whites.
What all these cases amount to is not merely confusion or bad faith or hellish good intentions; it is nothing less than the new British apartheid.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 02, 2004 | Comments (0)
