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Dave’s playing poker with the Tory soul
Long ago, in the blissful dawn of new Labour, The Economist magazine printed a glamour shot of blue-eyed Tony Blair on its front cover. The background was blue too, I think, and the coverline was absolutely inspired. “The strangest Tory never sold”, it read.
I’ve often been reminded of it during the rise and rise of David Cameron. There is still, to put it mildly, a certain mystery about what Cameron really stands for and really means. There is a sense that we are being sold something other than what appears, just as with the youthful Blair.
As with Blair, whatever it is seems to be working so far. “Tory leader surges ahead of Brown as voters’ choice”, according to a YouGov poll last week. Admittedly, polls are unreliable. Admittedly, another poll last week suggested that Cameron was losing ground — particularly with women. All the same, no one can doubt that he has been, and is, cutting a definite dash. The Conservatives have been ahead of Labour, according to the YouGov poll, for six months in a row.
This is rather encouraging for the Conservatives and there is certainly a mood of determined optimism among the Cameroons at the centre of things Tory. But among others, among big and small “c” conservatives, there is a mood here and there of uncertainty and even of suspicion.
I cannot count the number of people I have talked to who will vote Conservative but wonder nervously what Cameron and George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, really mean to do. Since what they say sounds so much like new Labour, the party faithful and Tory sympathisers have to persuade themselves that the Cameroons are Conservatives really and will prove to be so when the time comes.
This unease was expressed in a debate last week run by Intelligence Squared at the Royal Geographical Society; the motion was “The Tory party is no longer conservative” and the hall was sold out. The party must be pleased that the motion was soundly defeated by Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, and Michael Gove MP, who presented conservatism as a big stretchy tent capable of sheltering all sorts from Enoch Powell and Macmillan to Thatcher and Boris Johnson. But there were a lot of awkward questions from the other side that were left unanswered.
It is quite true, as both sides agreed, that conservatism is a disposition, not a dogma. There are few, if any, Tory articles of faith. But there are two convictions that do almost amount to Conservative dogma: a belief in freedom, as far as possible, and a related belief in a small state, as far as possible. In my life there has been a truly astonishing growth of the state and its power to direct our lives and a concomitant loss of freedom.
Socialist doctrines of egalitarianism and statism have made their long march through the institutions with great success. We are now regulated and inspected and monitored and filmed and taxed and credited and cross-questioned and bullied into orthodoxy to a degree that has become almost frightening. What is even more frightening is how widely and how easily it has been accepted. One would expect nothing less of the Labour party. From true Conservatives, however, one would have expected a passionate, tireless resistance.
We have not had it, at least not consistently. A terrible image of Virginia Bottomley springs to mind, lecturing us when she was health minister on the size and number of potatoes we should eat each week, as the incarnation of Conservatism gone horribly astray into unthinking statism. She would have fitted perfectly well into a new Labour cabinet.
One of the evil consequences of post-war statism in this country is that it has laid such intolerable burdens on public services that they are collapsing under the weight. Schools and jails and hospitals and social services — the things that voters care most about — are beginning to crumble.
If public services are to be rescued, they need to be freed from the over-weighty hand of the state. That does not (or need not) mean cutting the services; it means reforming their delivery. That, at least, is or ought to be a classic Conservative position. And it is the most important thing a future Conservative government should try to do.
Yet this central question seems to have become unmentionable. We hear almost nothing from the Cameroons about rolling back the state, and their language to and about public servants has become positively deferential. The Conservatives’ 2005 review of waste in government spending is hardly mentioned, well considered and important though it was. No doubt it strays too near the dread work “cuts”.
Only recently the Cameroons were quick to dissociate themselves from the party’s own policy review document on tax because it used the C-word. Yet if one is honest, cuts must be conservative — cuts if not necessarily in tax, then certainly cuts in state intrusion, cuts in statist bureaucracy and cuts in politically correct agenda. That does not mean cuts in the money available for frontline public services and the relief of hardship — rather the reverse.
Of course it’s obvious why Conservatives avoid the C-word. They won’t get into office if they use it. It drives most voters into instant hysteria, especially public servants. And cunningly this government has created a huge constituency of public servants out there — 800,000 new jobs since 1997, with one in four people now working for the state — who have an understandable inclination to vote Labour. All that the Conservative party feels it can do about this in practice is to sound as new Labour as possible while hoping that traditional conservatives will not lose faith.
How depressing this is. In the debate, Moore, in his eloquent defence of the Tory party’s conservatism, said that “trust is much more important than precisely what you are saying”. How horribly that sounds like Blair’s demand that the public should trust him: “I’m a pretty straight sort of guy.”
As it happens I do think Cameron is a pretty straight sort of guy, as far as a politician can be. And the Conservatives might indeed still be truly conservative. But for the time being they feel obliged to try to sell a rather strange story because they think the public will not like the truth. It doesn’t say much for democracy.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 29, 2006 | Comments (0)
Let us pray we have an end to faith schools
An alarming image dominated the front pages of Friday’s newspapers. It was a photograph of a slim British woman shrouded in black except for a flash of her skilfully painted eyes, and naked toes. She was Aishah Azmi, the young Muslim teaching assistant in the now notorious veil dispute, on the day she won £1,100 for her hurt feelings. She might have been one of the emblematic figures of a medieval morality play, medieval as she looks. In contemporary Britain, she represents cultural chaos.
I’m not only thinking of the disjunction between the total veiling of extreme Islamic modesty, and the provocation of her eyes and toes. And I’m not questioning the woman’s freedom in a free country to wear what she chooses, any more than I question other people’s freedom to say how offensive they find it or their freedom to question her motives. What concerns me is her role as a teacher, and with faith schools in general.
Mrs Azmi was demanding the right as a Muslim to be fully veiled while working as an assistant in a Church of England junior school. One can hardly blame her, given the way that for decades multicultural orthodoxy has encouraged minorities to emphasise their cultural differences. All the same, it is quite absurd that a Muslim has been confidently attempting to impose a controversial Islamic convention in a Christian state school. It’s true that Mrs Azmi has just lost her discrimination case — mainstream culture has not yet entirely lost its nerve — but her lawyers are ready to take it to the European Court of Justice.
What Mrs Azmi stands for, so to speak, is what many people fear about Muslims, no matter how tolerant they would like to feel. A woman shrouded in veils represents deliberate cultural separation, voluntary apartheid, a pre-Enlightenment religion and a view of relations between the sexes that the mainstream culture in this country can no longer accept and rejects in law. Such a woman is teaching and setting an example to young children in a Christian school. Her image points up with extreme urgency the problem of faith schools.
State-funded faith schools never used to be much of a problem, if only because people in this country tend to wear their faith lightly. Even the education department’s definition of a religious school is faith-lite; it is merely a school with a religious character. Even those who would much prefer a secular system, as I would, still feel they owe a lot to the great ethical and aesthetic traditions of faith schools. And there’s some evidence that religious state schools are better than others, both academically and pastorally.
But faith schools are a British anomaly. It can’t be right that in a state education system there are some schools that are not open to everyone; that is divisive. However, the real reason for alarm now is the growth of Muslim schools.
There are more than 100 private Muslim schools and eight state-funded Muslim schools. Yet as David Bell, the then chief inspector of schools, said in January last year, the growth of Muslim faith schools runs the risk of undermining the coherence of British society. He worried that “many young people were being educated with little appreciation of their wider responsibilities and obligations to British society”. We “must not allow our recognition of diversity to become apathy in the face of any challenge to our coherence as a nation”, he added.
That would strike most people as blindingly obvious, although it must have taken considerable courage to say it before the impact of the July bombs changed everything. Now it seems ministers are so aware of the dangers of sleepwalking to apartheid, in Trevor Phillips’s phrase, that they can hardly stop talking about it. Yet what was Tony Blair’s response last year, after the July bombings, to David Bell’s cautious advice? It was not to put an end to new faith schools of any kind, as an anomaly which was no longer tolerable: it was to expand the numbers hugely.
He decided the government would offer voluntary aided status to 120-150 independent Muslim schools, bringing them in line with the existing 6,850 Christian and Jewish schools — in other words it will create masses of Muslim state schools. The heart sinks. How, in the name of integration, familiarity and trust, can it possibly be a good idea to have lots of state schools that are exclusively Muslim, with Muslim teachers, Muslim traditions and intense Islamic education?
Presumably realising that this might segregate Muslims more than ever, Alan Johnson announced that all new faith schools (for which read Muslim) would have to make a quarter of their places available to those outside their faith. At least they will sort of have to, by agreement or on demand. Then, almost immediately, Johnson hinted that all faith schools would have to do the same — to be fair to new Muslim schools.
Misguided tinkering leads to more misguided tinkering, and to glaring new injustices. It is plainly unjust to permit faith schools, and then exclude some of the children of the faithful, so as to shoehorn in some reluctant unbelievers. Quota is a dirty word. Jews and Christians will resent this just as much as Muslims. Do ministers seriously think they could make this work? No, clearly they don’t, because in an amendment to the education bill before parliament, they are passing the buck for dealing with it to education authorities, empowering them to impose the 25% quota where necessary on new faith schools.
Nice one. Education authorities will also be responsible for urging schools to get together, arrange “twinning”, exchange teachers and “promote community cohesion” — in other words for endless fuss, bother, travel and jobsworthy bureaucracy rather than education proper.
There is an alternative to all this meddling. It should be possible to agree that for various reasons, many of which are politically embarrassing, the time of state-funded faith schools is past. Faith is no better a criterion for attending or running a state school than race. No new ones should be created; the old ones should gradually lose their religious identity as many have done already and as they probably will do naturally. Religious indoctrination and observance don’t belong in state schools, in a multifaith society, not any more.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 22, 2006 | Comments (1)
Mental illness is hell. Don't diminish it
Last Tuesday was World Mental Health Day and in this country a couple of attention-seeking politicians have been holding forth about mental illness, which is what the phrase mental health now means.
David Blunkett, in his self-pitying diaries, confessed that while a cabinet minister he had been “clinically depressed” during his deluded affair with a society minx. Alastair Campbell shared with the nation his experiences of a psychotic breakdown in the 1980s, when he was arrested for driving the wrong way round and round a roundabout and sent to hospital, and also his deep depression in Downing Street at the time of Dr David Kelly’s famous suicide.
This only confirms one’s worst fears that new Labour has for a long time been in the grip of a collection of unstable chancers. One only has to think of the neurotically disabling mutual loathing of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
I had not realised that Campbell was subject to periods of depression, still less that he had suffered a psychotic collapse. I had only known he was an alcoholic. But his revelations do a great deal to explain his alarming behaviour when in power. Reports of his conduct constantly suggested extreme aggression, paranoia, ill-controlled anger and an eccentric attitude to truth, which one might expect of someone prone to mental disorder. The deep depression he described at the death of Dr Kelly can only, for someone in Campbell’s awkward position, be seen as normal. Otherwise one can all too easily appreciate that he may suffer intermittently from mental illness.
Blunkett’s claim to “clinical depression” is less easy to accept. It is hardly surprising, in a painful intrigue with a married woman, involving a disputed baby or two and a huge threat to one’s political ambitions, that a man might feel a bit low. That would be normal. But this phrase “clinical depression” is thrown around too vaguely, and indeed its meaning is rather vague.
The truth is that anything more than mild to moderate depression is seriously debilitating. It would involve, among other things, a sense of futility and self-loathing, impaired judgment, impaired relationships with other people, mild paranoia, a loss of drive and energy, indecisiveness and chronic fatigue, precisely what one would not want in a cabinet minister, or a surgeon or head teacher for that matter.
Perhaps Blunkett did not feel quite as bad as all that. After all, he says he refused the offer of antidepressant pills. But if he was more than mildly depressed, he should certainly have resigned or have been told to stand down, and so should Campbell. People in the grip of mental illness can’t function properly. They should most certainly not be doing extremely responsible and demanding jobs.
Yet both Blunkett and Campbell have praised Blair for being so understanding about their mental problems and enabling them to go on working. Indeed, in Blunkett’s account Blair seemed to think that being a cabinet minister might be good occupational therapy for his old friend — not perhaps the best use of one the great ministries of state. Blunkett and Campbell, like Stephen Fry in his television series on mental illness, have said they have spoken out because they want to help remove the stigma of mental illness; that is after all the point of World Mental Health Day.
Ironically, the efforts of Campbell and Blunkett confirm my sad belief that the stigma is useful. It warns us, however crudely, of the dangers mentally ill people often present to themselves and others. What Blunkett, Campbell, Fry and others are expressing is the current orthodoxy: people with mental illnesses must not be subject to any kind of discrimination, least of all at work.
I cannot agree. Of course unfair or undue discrimination is wrong; and of course it is true that until very recently people’s attitudes to mental illness were brutal and ignorant. The lunatic asylums of my childhood were often places of horror and there was a tendency to assume that everyone who was a bit “mental” could turn into a homicidal loony. Even now people can be very cruel. But that is no reason to go into denial, covering up painful realities with soothing euphemism.
These days you hardly ever hear the phrase mental illness, at least not in public sector and right-on circles. People almost always talk instead of “issues around mental health”. Illness bad, issues okay. This is quite absurd; it is as if an alcoholic were to talk of “issues around sobriety”. There are no issues about sobriety. The issue is alcoholism, or mental illness.
Campbell pointed out that six out of 10 employers say they wouldn’t take on someone with mental health problems, as if that were self-evidently unfair.
Baroness Neuberger wrote to The Times saying: “There is no reason why having a mental health diagnosis (sic) should stop a person working, at any level. With the right support and good management, people with mental health problems can work as well as anyone.” Yet, she continued, myths abound, “making employers wary of keeping, let alone hiring, those with mental health conditions (sic)”.
No doubt myths do abound, but one of them is that mentally ill people are all just as employable as everyone else. They aren’t.
Those with mild, intermittent problems may be able to hold down certain, but not all jobs, with help and understanding. They may not present much of a problem to their employers, or they may choose self-employment to keep their problems to themselves. But people suffering from anything worse are clearly a liability to themselves and others.
Anyone who has known people with bipolar disease, chronic acute anxiety or severe obsessive compulsive disorder, to pick just three common “conditions”, will know that these people’s lives are a constant struggle. I have nothing but sympathy for them. There is plenty of mental illness in my family and among my friends and I have personal knowledge of what it can mean. But I have been forced to understand that mouthing euphemisms and talking of rights is worse than useless.
It’s based on an unwillingness to face reality and creates false expectations and false obligations. It’s crazy, really.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, October 15, 2006 | Comments (0)
Baby trafficking may not be all bad
Having a baby is an awesome responsibility. Adopting one is in some ways even greater. It means taking in for ever a person about whom you know little or nothing; it means choosing a child without having any real understanding about the choice you are making, knowing nothing of its family.
It is true that some aspects of the choice are obvious; if you go abroad you can select for sex, beauty, race and country of origin. But there is something distasteful about that kind of designer baby shopping. In any case it has nothing to do with the real nature of the child — its inherited qualities of character, intelligence or the damage it may have suffered. That cannot be chosen (or traded) because it cannot even be guessed at.
Last week it was reported that Madonna had adopted a one-year-old boy from Malawi. For a long time the media have been saying that she wants a third child but at 48 is having difficulty conceiving. That may or may not be true but Malawi government officials reportedly said on Wednesday that Madonna had flown to southern Africa by private jet to “locate a suitable candidate” and inspected a shortlist of 12 tiny orphan boys.
She had at first wanted a girl but changed her mind two weeks ago. Changing one’s mind in such serious circumstances might sound a little frivolous but so, allegedly, she did. The chosen baby would have to spend the next 18 months in Malawi while checks were made on Madonna and her family, before he could finally be adopted. Meanwhile he would be looked after by a network for vulnerable children that Madonna has set up in Malawi.
The next day, however, a spokesman for Madonna denied all this. So the story is shrouded in mystery, but if Madonna were indeed to adopt a Third World child, she would not be the first superstar to do so. Angelina Jolie, Meg Ryan and Mia Farrow have. So, too, have countless well-off western women who have gone to Latin America, the Far East and Africa, as well as to the poorer parts of Europe.
One could say that international baby shopping is fashionable. Indeed the demand is so great that in some places it has turned into a racket. Last week The Sunday Times reported on illegal baby traffic in Bulgaria, where some mothers are forced to sell their babies to dealers to pay debts, and others are cruelly tricked into handing them over for ever. Until two years ago baby trafficking was not a crime in Bulgaria. In Romania, where there are countless orphans in need of a home, the government stopped international adoptions in 2001 after allegations of trafficking.
On the one hand it’s hard to avoid being suspicious of rich white celebrities who publicise their adoption of little black or brown babies — demonstrating as they smile for the cameras their charming maternal longings, their compassion for the poor and their impeccable non-racist credentials. They make adoption seem easy and glamorous when it is neither; it is hard, demanding and risky for all concerned.
But perhaps such cynicism is misplaced. Perhaps what these women are doing will encourage the rich world to spare a thought for lost and abandoned children in poor countries. Perhaps, too, the fear of money changing hands in the process of adoption is exaggerated. Human rights activists are outraged and of course it is wrong to buy or sell a person; traffickers interested only in money are beneath contempt.
All the same I sometimes think it might be better not to be too squeamish. After all, if there is one thing worse than an imperfect home in a rich country, it is no home in a poor country. The child who finds a happy home in Europe or America would care nothing at all that her adoptive parents in some sense paid for her.
A relation of mine in America recently adopted two tiny girls from a respectable orphanage in one of the poorest cities in India. I don’t know what she and her husband paid, but someone described it as “expensive”, as well it might be. The prospective parents had to be vetted by the charity concerned over many months, there was endless form filling to pay for and I think the charity expected a standard contribution to help to look after the other less lucky orphans.
Having been abandoned as babies by their destitute mother, these two little girls were spared a life of desperate poverty and are now growing up happily in America. Perhaps that is what their birth mother hoped. Yet at the time a member of their new family said he disapproved of adopting babies in this way because he believed it would encourage trafficking.
He was both right and wrong. Where there is demand there will be dealing, and some of it will be dirty dealing. But surely the answer is not to ignore the demand and prohibit all dealing, but to stop the dirty dealing that springs up around it. Just because villains get involved, that’s no reason to deny unwanted children the chance to be wanted. The human rights activists in the West, in their horror at trafficking, have by the law of unintended consequences done considerable harm.
Romania is a case in point. Thousands of western families were anxious to adopt orphaned and abandoned children in Romania, especially when the media exposed the terrible conditions in orphanages there. But because a black market grew up around adoption, the Romanian government was obliged by pressure from the European Union to stop foreign adoptions altogether in 2001.
I can’t think of anything sadder than the story of several teenage orphans who were approved for adoption by western families before 2001, but who were kept in Romania by the ban. This unlucky timing meant that instead of a reasonable home in Italy, France or America, they were sexually abused and beaten for many years in their orphanage. They found out only recently that they had at one time had a chance to escape which was then taken away, as reported in this newspaper last month; one can barely imagine their reaction.
Adoption is a good but hard thing; nobody should be either sentimental or squeamish about it. And it should have nothing to do with celebrity or publicity.
The Sunday Times | Monday, October 09, 2006 | Comments (0)
Judges, police: two of the rule-free classes
It was the sinister Captain Segura, in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, who pointed out that citizens divide into two classes — those you can torture and those you can’t. In the same way in this country there are those who have to abide by the rules and those who don’t.
There are those who feel that regulations and tax and laws are for other people — for “the little people” as the American hotelier Leona Helmsley once notoriously said. It is irritating for the rest of us, which is why there was so much glee about the downfall of two British judges in a blackmail case last week.
This was the most titillating of tales, with plenty of two-timing rumpy-pumpy and saucy home videos and a light dusting of cocaine, apparently. Judge J (a woman) had an affair with Judge I (a man) and shared a bed and a cleaner (a woman) with him. When Judge J moved out, the sexy young cleaner moved in, and later turned to blackmail. Since all this was going on between adults, it is not strictly any of our business, hilarious though it may be. (I will never understand why people who are no longer young or beautiful persist in filming themselves in flagrante delicto, as Judge I did more than once. In a judge it shows an unduly relaxed attitude to evidence.) What does concern the public, however, is the fact that these two judges both sit in judgment on immigration. It is their solemn duty to defend the realm from those who seek to enter this country illegally and to send them empty away, yet they both employed just such an illegal immigrant as their cleaner. It is beyond hypocrisy.
Naturally they both testified in court that they did not know that their blackmailing Brazilian nemesis, the “chilli-hot” Roselane Driza, was an “overstayer”, in contemporary cant. But they should have known. Ignorance, as they both must know, is no defence under the law, and it is not difficult to check, as one ought, whether a person is entitled to work here. Hiring an illegal immigrant is a criminal offence, which they must also know; less illustrious employers are regularly prosecuted for it.
Yet both these judges, in senior positions in the contentious and unhappy mess that is immigration law today, felt that the usual rules were not for them. Indeed they would certainly have got away with breaking the law, in their own chosen legal field, had not the terrifying Roselane decided to blackmail them on that very point. Since Roselane was found guilty of blackmailing the woman, but not the man, Judge J’s identity has not been revealed, though no doubt everyone who matters to her knows about it. The goatish Judge I has been outed as Mohammed Ilyas Khan. Both now face a disciplinary inquiry.
I suppose one should be grateful that Britain isn’t remotely Captain Segura’s Havana, and that in this case at least, judges who imagined they belonged to the legislation-proof classes have been shown to be wrong. But one wonders. It seems for instance that the police sometimes see themselves this way. In an impressive piece of investigative journalism last week, Newsnight showed that while most of us suffer the constant annoyance of speed checks and penalties, some policemen consider themselves camera-proof.
The reporters found that the police sometimes use loopholes in the law to avoid being done for speeding. In what was sometimes a rather comic programme, with coppers solemnly discussing whether to prosecute themselves for not admitting which of them was driving a speeding police van, as caught on camera, the nasty feeling was reinforced that there is one law for them and one law for us.
Camera records are sometimes wiped. Prosecutions aren’t always prosecuted. Whining police cars speed terrifyingly up and down inner-city streets. And if some persistent and cynical Newsnight journalists had not pursued various cases for weeks, undeterred by complexity, obfuscation, nit-picking, tedium and all the miseries that investigative journalism is heir to, we would have been none the wiser. Remember the time that Jack Straw’s police chauffeur (when home secretary no less), was somehow excused for speeding?
The rest of us are left feeling confused and resentful; angry that law-makers and law-enforcers can get away with breaking the speed laws while we can’t, and resentful at being tempted, very often, to put the foot down illegally too. The final irony — the final supreme annoyance — is that the argument for speed cameras has suddenly collapsed. Government figures revealed last week that only 5% of accidents are caused by speeding; drivers who let their attention wander cause six times as many accidents.
The rule-proof classes do not have to pay much tax either. They can hire clever accountants to find ways of avoiding tax legally and semi-legally, or else they don’t earn enough to pay tax, or pretend not to. High and low take a relaxed view of tax; only the wretched rule-ridden classes, respectable middle Britain, the petit bourgeois, have to pay their taxes in full. Not for them the Cayman Islands, or the trust funds or the life-time gifts; they live under the discipline of PAYE and Inland Revenue form filling.
While at either end of the social scale the rich and the improvident are not much affected by death duty, the respectable classes have to pay inheritance tax even on their parents’ modest house or flat. When it comes to pensions, citizens divide into two classes in the same way. The rule-ridden have to look to a bleak future on an ever more modest pension; politicians, having raided our pensions, warn us to tighten our belts against an impoverished old age. Meanwhile, they expand their own bellies with ever bigger, ever better, gold-plated, inflation-proof pensions, and put up their salaries for good measure.
There are endless examples of this shameless sense of entitlement among people who denounce it. Tony Blair chose a backdoor form of selective schooling for his children at a faith school, while the latest education bill denies those schools the right to interview. Restrictions are for others. But the sad truth is that many citizens would, if they could, join the ranks of the rule-proof. Nobody can feel quite as pleasantly indignant about the fate of the judges and their illegal cleaner as he or she might like.
The Sunday Times | Wednesday, October 04, 2006 | Comments (0)
