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I’d rather PC Plod than PC Clever Clogs
If the price of freedom is constant vigilance, the price of constant vigilance seems to be constant confusion, at least in Blair’s Britain. I mean Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the Metropolitan police. His Dimbleby lecture last week was most confusing. Calling repeatedly for a public debate on policing, he made an impassioned protest against the silence that has for too long surrounded the police service.
“The silence can no longer continue. The citizens of Britain now have to articulate what kind of police services they want.” But that is odd, because there has in fact been a great deal of vociferous public debate about the police for years, and — contrariwise — if anyone has been rather silent, it is Blair himself.
He was extremely reticent about the shocking death of Jean Charles de Menezes and about the use of the “dum dum” bullets that killed him. And when confronted last week with accusations on all sides that the police cravenly agreed to put pressure on MPs to support the government’s notorious 90 days’ detention without trial — the Met’s most senior anti-terrorist officer was sent to Westminster to lobby Labour rebels — Blair’s response was to resist all calls for an interview and stay silent until Wednesday.
We have learnt from this government the hard way to be suspicious of official calls for a public inquiry. We should by now be even more suspicious, surely, of officialdom’s constant call for public debate, or worse still, in contemporary cant, for a “national conversation”. It is almost as bad as the official obsession with consultation.
All have become weasel words meaning pretty much the opposite; the public is invited to have a say and get its feelings off its many chests and then the apparatchiks will carry on as before, but with a permanent “mandate” — that is, a permanent excuse for doing just what they wanted in the first place. Public consultation has become a way of protecting one’s rear end with a pretence of democracy. “But we consulted,” the cry goes up when there’s trouble.
Yet with anything that really matters, there’s usually very little inconvenient “conversation” or “debate”; a classic example, in a case which really matters, is the home secretary’s proposal, keenly supported by Blair, to reduce the police forces in England and Wales from 43 to 12. There hasn’t been much public debate there, still less an invitation to one. Perhaps there is something revealing in what Blair said about police reform to an interviewer last Wednesday: “I haven’t got time for royal commissions. I want to get on with it.”
In all this — which is, in effect, new Labour think — there seems to be a schizophrenic attitude to popular democracy. On the one hand the public must be consulted and listened to and empowered at the grassroots. On the other hand the man in Whitehall still knows best. Reducing the police forces in England and Wales to only 12 regional bodies is entirely at odds with the ceaseless wittering at all levels of government about localisation.
I don’t suppose for one second that Blair wants my opinion on policing, but since he has unwisely asked for it, I will give it, and not for the first time. He asks whether we think the police are there to fight crime or to fight the causes of crime, to help build stronger communities or to undertake zero tolerance. The question itself is wrong.
The police are not there to “fight the causes of crime”; the police are not social workers or teachers or foster parents or psychiatrists, nor should they be even if they had the time or the money or the manpower. The police are not there to build communities of any sort: a monstrous idea.
The idea that officials of any kind can “build” communities — another piece of modern cant — is alarming. It is part of the unthinking statism of our time. A community is made, almost unconsciously, by its members not by public servants or officials. Officials can destroy communities by bulldozing terraced houses, as John Prescott did, or by throwing poor people into high-rise ghettos, or by ruining schools, but they cannot create neighbourliness no matter how much they spend.
What the police can do is remove the obstacles to community, such as violence and disorder and public nuisances. What they can do — could do much more — is stay so close to the community they police that they can anticipate crime and deter it by their close knowledge of who’s who and what’s going on. Failing that, they are there to catch criminals. You do not need a public debate to discover that that’s what most people think.
Labour’s verbiage about the role of the police — “to build a safe, just and tolerant society, in which the rights and responsibilities of individuals, families and communities are balanced, and the protection and security of the public are maintained” — is just unthinking, undesirable guff.
The question Blair should have asked is not what kind of policing we want. The bottom line — the thin blue line — is clear enough. The proper question is whether the police are effective enough, and if not why not. And if he wants informed discussion he need look no further than a recent report by the think tank Politeia, called Policing Matters. I think he must have read it, judging from some of his remarks in his Dimbleby lecture. But it makes a nonsense of his complaints about silence and the need for informed discussion.
You could hardly get a more expert group of contributors, including a former chief constable and president of the association of chief police officers, a former deputy chief constable and a former chief inspector of prisons. Their research is complex but their recommendations are simple. Better recruitment, higher entry standards, better training, better fast tracking for the most able, better management, less bureaucracy, and above all more local responsibility and accountability and less Whitehall control. Not much about building communities there.
One point on which they would agree with Blair is that the police service doesn’t attract enough high-flyers or intellectuals like himself. Clearly, in the public mind, a policeman’s lot is not a classy one and this has evidently been a thorn in the side of Blair’s vanity for many years. But if high-flyers think and talk like Blair, perhaps the police don’t need many more of them. It would just be confusing.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 20, 2005 | Comments (0)
Muslim apartheid burns bright in France
For many years our family had a house in southern France on the edge of the marshes of the Camargue, not far from the beautiful city of Montpellier. When we first arrived it seemed lost in time. It was bull fighting, sea fishing, farming country with hot summers, cold winters and the treacherous mistral wind — la France profonde.
Then the government rapidly developed the beautiful coast for mass tourism and a lot of building went on everywhere. But our village remained much the same, with a bull ring and a church in the main square full of plane trees, a few cafes, a smart pharmacy and not much else. For years we were the only foreigners and while nobody paid us much attention, everyone was pleasant enough. By the end we were on friendly terms with quite a few people.
I say by the end, because we left. We sold the house a few years ago because the atmosphere of the village had gone sour. There was something almost frightening in the air. It is strange to me that people have been so surprised by the past few weeks of burning and rioting in French cities, including Montpellier. It has been obvious for at least 10 years, even to a foreign visitor, that something was badly wrong.
The first sign I noticed, one Easter, was the arrival of a lot of new people, north Africans to judge from their appearance, who seemed to spend most of the time hanging around in the streets looking lost and forlorn. That was not surprising; unemployment in France was about 14% at that time and much higher round there.
What surprised us was the animosity that people in the village felt for the Arabs, as they called them when they didn’t use worse words. Nobody talked to them or played with their children. I think ours were the only children in the main square who did. In every shop there would be angry mutterings among indigenous people about them and us — how they were parasites, thieves and ignorant; they wouldn’t even have their children inoculated. You had to lock your doors. And there were so many of them.
Whatever righteous attitudes we tried to strike, we too became angry when our house was burgled. We had to start locking our door and our car wheels were slashed. Worst of all the benign neglect we had enjoyed for so long — nobody can accuse the French of being excessively welcoming even to white foreigners — changed subtly into something faintly unfriendly. It was as if the locals were suddenly sick of all foreigners, inoculated or not, of the changes they bring and the threats they represent to a nation undergoing a crisis of confidence. Then we began to hear of attacks on local synagogues, usually downplayed. Finally a synagogue in Montpellier was firebombed. We were glad to be out of there.
There is nothing new about the rage and resentment that have set France alight. Our part of France had been Le Pen country for years. La Haine, the celebrated film about a French ghetto just like those which have been ablaze for days, was made in 1995, 10 years ago. So it is odd that it has taken the French so long to wake up to the alarming failure of their much vaunted un-Anglo-Saxon society to accommodate its Muslims.
Perhaps it is unfair to single out the French. The multicultural social model has not worked either and all European countries have been unforgivably slow on the uptake. The riots have spread to Denmark, Belgium and Holland; we have already had riots in England and bombings in Madrid and London.
It is perhaps pointless to look back at the shamefully irresponsible immigration policies that have brought so many European countries to this explosive point. It is pointless to wonder how anyone in authority could have imagined that it would be a good idea to dump enormous numbers of poorly educated Third World immigrants from different societies into unprepared and unwilling, sometimes racist, European host cultures, into hellish high-rise suburbs from Seville to Rotterdam, in numbers so huge that integration became ever more unlikely and ghettos more inevitable. It is done now.
However, we might at least recognise the problem. As usual a great many people are deliberately avoiding it, in particular by editing the word Muslim out of their debates, as if Islam had nothing to do with the dangerous mood sweeping Europe. Poverty and rejection have played a significant part, but there is an unmistakable sense in which the riots are Muslim, consciously so.
Muslims vary and their beliefs vary. But the response of some Muslims to frustration — whether or not the fault of westerners — has been to retreat into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists. Yet although we know this, and despite the Salman Rushdie affair, despite the bombs and assassinations that led up to 9/11, despite the recent atrocities, we seem unwilling to recognise that what this can mean is deliberate separatism — apartheid.
Islam in the European ghetto can mean an unwillingness to integrate at all, a desire to practise the faith with as little interference from the geographical host country as possible. An internal security agency in France reported in 2004 that there were 300 communities across the country — roughly the number that rioted — which were “in retreat”, meaning communities marked by fundamentalism, anti-semitism and violence, coupled with hatred of France and the West. It is hardly surprising that there were effective no-go areas normally avoided by police in some of the French riot areas.
Even when Islamism does not aim at anything so extreme as striving for an Islamic caliphate in Europe, it can mean trying to impose Islamic practice and law. According to Amir Taheri, the Muslim writer, some French Muslims are calling for local religious autonomy, as in the Ottoman empire, and it already exists in some parts of France where radicals have imposed Islamic dress, chased away French shopkeepers selling alcohol and pork and shut down “places of sin” such as cinemas.
Even more startlingly, in Canada this year the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice proposed that sharia should take precedence over Canadian law in civil disputes between Muslims. There are sharia courts and councils operating informally in Britain. If Europeans lack the conviction to stand against apartheid and for integration, perhaps before long there will be one in our old village in France.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 13, 2005 | Comments (0)
Beware the wrath of the ginger Ninja
The autumn gloom was relieved last week by one of the funniest news stories for many years. On a dark damp street I found myself laughing out loud at the evening headlines. Rebekah Wade, 37, the pouting, flame-haired editor of The Sun, known for her public campaign against domestic violence, was arrested in the wee hours of last Thursday on suspicion of duffing up her soap star husband and giving him a thick lip.
Summoned to the matrimonial home at approximately 0400 hours by two 999 calls, the police felt obliged to take Wade into custody to a local police station, where she spent the morning behind bars. By lunchtime she was released without charge, but not soon enough to make a Women of the Year lunch. The same morning, Steve MacFadden, her husband’s fictional brother in the soap EastEnders, was also reported to have been attacked by his estranged partner. You couldn’t make it up, as The Sun would say. You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh, as Oscar Wilde did say, although for those caught up in the drama it can’t have been funny at all.
TV tough guy decked by Ginger Ninja! Top totty turns tough! Redtop queen floors hardman hubby! Alpha female runs amok! What a pity The Sun’s inspired headline writers were unable to exercise their famous skills on this sensational story; how frustrated they must have felt.
Many aspects of this life-enhancing tale have yet to emerge. For instance, it is not yet clear who called the police. The obvious candidate would be Wade’s husband, Ross Kemp, in need of assistance. It is true that he looks a bit of a bruiser and has played the role of a hardman in EastEnders, but that is only make-believe. In real life he may not be quite so macho; he may have been truly terrified of the fury of the Ginger Ninja.
On the other hand it may have been Wade herself who rang, keenly aware as she is of the danger and the social evil of domestic violence, and anxious to stop herself in her own tracks before she did anything worse. Perhaps it was both of them. We may never know, just as we may never know what the row was about. But it has been fun speculating — the journalistic airwaves have been buzzing with gossip and giggling and the sweet sound of schadenfreude.
Wade has toughed it out and made light of it, as has her proprietor, and her husband has said it was a lot of fuss about nothing. But domestic violence, as Wade in her famous campaign was so determined to point out, is not nothing. If it is serious enough for someone to call the police about, it is quite something. And if the police take it seriously it must be quite something; the police don’t tend to arrest alpha females for nothing.
All the same I admit to a sneaking sympathy for Wade. There can hardly be a journalist alive who hasn’t at some time said one thing publicly but done another; that is human weakness but it isn’t necessarily hypocrisy. And there can hardly be a married woman alive who hasn’t, many times, felt inclined to duff up her husband, if not actually to wring his neck. The old-fashioned idea that women aren’t inclined to violence is a serious mistake. Female domestic violence is much more common than one might imagine.
I learnt that the hard way from my future mother-in-law, a formidable, bad tempered rather large woman. When she had come to terms with the idea that I was about to marry her son, she made the best of things and, to my surprise, offered to pay for me to have plastic surgery on my nose. It was not, in her view, distinguished enough for someone about to enter her family. I muttered in a cowardly way that it was all too risky, and too difficult to find someone reliable.
At that point my future father-in-law, who normally kept quiet on the precautionary principle, for some reason brightened up and said he knew of an excellent plastic surgeon who had done a good job on his nose. When I asked him what had been wrong with his nose he fell silent. So for once did his wife. For what he had unaccountably forgotten, and then just remembered, and what I learnt later, was that she had taken a knife to him and slit his nose quite badly. Fortunately my mother-in-law took no further interest in mine.
So it is that in the best regulated of homes — and my mother-in-law’s household was extremely well-regulated — women can be unpredictably violent. The evidence is rather alarming. One in six men will be the victim of domestic violence at some time in his life, according to Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, then president of the family division of the High Court, in a lecture she gave at 10 Downing Street in 2003. Butler-Sloss extended the term much further than I would, to include emotional and psychological abuse, threats and verbal abuse, but even so her point is right. There is far more female violence at home than our preconceptions allow us to imagine.
Those preconceptions are bound up with a useful taboo against female violence — a taboo that explains the fascinated reaction to Wade’s arrest. Women are constantly tempted to attack men who enrage them, but it isn’t usually in their interests to do so, for obvious reasons. Men are usually stronger and their inhibitions about violence are usually weaker. So women’s inhibitions about violence have to be correspondingly stronger, because they are physically weaker. But I am beginning to wonder whether that taboo isn’t itself becoming weaker.
In the same speech Butler-Sloss said she was concerned about attitudes to domestic violence among young people. I don’t know where her figures came from, but she said that 10% of young women thought it was acceptable to hit their boyfriends or husbands. (The figure for young men was 20%.) For young women that seems extraordinarily high and it doesn’t even count all the young women who don’t think it “acceptable”, but might give in to temptation occasionally.
It wouldn’t be at all surprising, given the growing number of films devoted to women whacking men, and given the increasing amount young women drink, if the number of women desensitised to the taboo were not growing too. The irony of Wade’s arrest is that it has done far more to raise awareness of domestic violence (female) than her entire newspaper campaign. It has also added a little to the gaiety of nations.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 06, 2005 | Comments (0)
