« December 2006 | Home | February 2007 »
Let us have fudge, hope and charity
Let a hundred flowers bloom, Chairman Mao once said to China’s repressed intellectuals, inviting diverse ideas. Sure enough, when the intellectuals obliged, Mao ruthlessly mowed them all down. Our rulers do not believe in diversity either, although they are constantly nagging us to join them in celebrating it. What they really believe in, on the contrary, is orthodoxy and they are increasingly prepared to enforce it. That is the alarming lesson of the uproar about Catholic charities and gay adoption.
For our orthodox masters in parliament and in the public services it is not enough that gay couples have the right to adopt children like anyone else. It is not enough that they do indeed successfully do so, with the help of various agencies and with public funding, like any other couple. It’s not enough that they have the right to have surrogate babies, too, like anyone else. It’s not enough that Catholic adoption charities are willing to help gay couples find other agencies to arrange adoptions, although they will not do so themselves. The orthodox want more. They want to force those who deviate from the new orthodoxy to recant and to bend their heretic knees to it publicly, or face excommunication.
The orthodoxy holds that gay couples should have the same rights as everyone else and that is the law, too. I subscribe to this part of the orthodoxy myself. I don’t know of any reason why gays should not make as good (or as bad) parents as straights and there are two lesbians in my extended family who are the parents of two happy girls. I hate Catholic and Muslim attitudes to homosexuality, although I believe they are entitled to their views, just as I’m entitled to mine. All that concerns the rest of us is whether these views actively harm anyone.
The answer is clearly no. There are plenty of places, starting with local authorities, for a gay couple to go to arrange an adoption, other than to the homophobic church of Rome and its charities. In fact it would surely be rather peculiar for any gays to turn to the church as prospective parents. However, some do. In a conversation straight out of Alice in Wonderland, the Bishop of Birmingham said last week that his agencies do place children with single gay people, but not with gay couples. The jaw drops at the folly of this position. One gay good, two gays bad? One parent better than two? One can only suppose it has to do with some sophistry about a single gay parent being celibate. Whatever the reasoning, the Catholic position on gays is untenable.
What’s more, I don’t think anyone should be given formal exemption from the law, as the Catholic church is asking in this case. It is and should be illegal to discriminate against gay people. However, there is (or used to) be a sensible British tendency to tolerance, which does not always insist on the letter of the law. In a very diverse society it is sometimes wise to turn a blind eye; there is a fine British tradition of fudge.
It’s a sort of acceptable wriggle-room; it’s offered to doctors who refuse on principle to do abortions, to doctors who ease people’s deaths, to Orthodox Jewish and Islamic butchers, to state schools where Muslim parents don’t allow mixed-sex sport, to state schools which accept children of one faith, to gay clubs which exclude straights, to black organisations which exclude whites (even in the police). This benign tradition has developed for just such a case as this, so that a private charity should not be forced to do something it thinks (wisely or foolishly) is wrong.
The significant words here are private and charity. There is an important difference between public and private, between state provision and private charity. Charity begins as a personal impulse, sometimes but not always linked with religion. It might be a determination to help street children, like Dr Barnardo, it might be a wish to raise money for cancer research, it might be a drive to support an old people’s club; all of these impulses are specific and of their nature discriminatory.
Barnardo was excluding adults, cancer research excludes other illnesses, the old people’s club excludes Asbo teenagers and so on. A charity and its donors are working to an end which, however good, is discriminatory, according to the beliefs of the well-meaning people involved. Since many charities are based on religious faith, their values are somewhat exclusive.
To try to change that is to try to destroy the charity. That is what is likely to happen to the Catholic adoption charities. The losers will be the most hard-to-place children, whom Catholic charities have an excellent record in helping. Those like Gordon Brown and David Cameron who want to make use of the energies of charity should be careful not to repress them instead.
I call them charities because they are not agencies of state. Increasingly, though, they are becoming so. For many years I have been involved with a charity for adults with learning disabilities, for some of those years as a trustee, and I have watched it being turned into a provider of services for the state sector and, in effect, an agency of state. It does excellent work, but its services and its clients are largely decided by local authorities. Its development has been both driven and restricted by the requirements of local authorities, who pay the clients’ fees and call the tune; the original pioneering ideal of the parent-founders, no longer politically correct, has been subsumed.
For some time there has been an orthodoxy in social work training and thinking; the result is that this orthodoxy is imposed, via social services’ funding, on private charities. If the Catholic charities are deprived of state funding by local authorities, they will have to close. That’s not blackmail on their side — the bullying boot is on the other foot entirely.
True charity is heartfelt and personal and for that reason may well be unorthodox, or even politically very incorrect. Charities should be allowed to do what they believe is right and not forced to do what they believe is wrong. Isn’t it enough they do good in some way, if not in all? The green shoots and flowers of charity are tender and very diverse; the state should not be allowed to mow them all down.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 28, 2007 | Comments (0)
Tragedy of the truthful immigrant
Compare and contrast, as exam papers used to say, the cases of Mark Coleman and Roberto Malasi. Both are young men from Africa who wish to live permanently in this country, but there the similarity stops. Otherwise they are as different as one could possibly imagine. One young man is law-abiding, willing to work if allowed to do so and has never claimed benefits. The other has led the sort of hellish and destructive life in Britain that makes people fear not only for themselves but for wider society. He has robbed and shot one young woman to death and stabbed and killed another. Guess which man is to be deported immediately and which will be staying.
Each of their stories is bad enough in itself; in conjunction, as they were last week, they are scandalous. On Thursday it emerged that Coleman has been told by the Home Office that he must return immediately to his native Zimbabwe. His applications to extend his visa, and later for asylum, have failed and if he does not go at once his removal may be “enforced”.
One could normally count on Home Office incompetence to spare him this fate, but Coleman’s problem is that by abiding by the law and reporting to a police station every two weeks and generally making his whereabouts known to the authorities, he has made things easy for them. He has not disappeared into the undergrowth. As usual no virtuous deed goes unpunished. Obeying the rules has made him easy to find. Unless someone intervenes he will be sent back to the hellhole that is Zimbabwe, where he no longer has any work or any family; they have all fled the Mugabe terror.
What makes this case particularly absurd is that Coleman is British, by any standards except those of the Home Office regulations. Although he was born in independent Zimbabwe, his father was born there while it was still the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and his mother was born in India; his father’s father was a British subject. His paternal great-grandfather was a British army surgeon, as was his maternal great-grandfather.
His mother’s family has been English since 1160 and her father served in the British Army and worked as a prisoner of war on the notorious bridge over the River Kwai. It is hard to imagine anyone more British in spirit and in fact, yet, because of a technicality, Coleman cannot have a British passport, cannot stay here and will soon be shipped back.
Not only does he have some historical claim on this country, he also has a compassionate claim; nobody can possibly imagine that a white man, whose family has fled, can live or work safely in Zimbabwe, in that nightmare of mayhem, anti-white racism and confiscation.
Rules are rules, admittedly, and hard cases make bad rules as well as bad law. But there is something sickening about the double standards with which this man is having the rules applied to him. We all know something of countless cases of immigrants and asylum seekers who flout the rules and break the law; they are literally countless, because the Home Office simply cannot count them. On Monday Sir David Normington, the senior civil servant at the Home Office, disclosed to MPs that one in five (30 out of 160) sets of figures covering crime, immigration and prisons is not, in a ghastly establishment euphemism, “up to scratch”, which is to say not fit for purpose.
In this depressing context consider the case of Roberto Malasi, the robber and convicted murderer. He and his family came to Britain in 1995, seeking asylum from Angola, and in 1999 they were given indefinite leave to remain here. Now 18, when he was 16 he shot dead a woman holding a baby at a christening, while robbing the guests with his younger brother; he escaped, went on the run boasting about this killing and soon afterwards stabbed to death a girl he thought had “dissed” him.
Before these crimes he was in and out of care, got little or no education and lived what police call a chaotic life. He will be sentenced for the killings next month and faces a long time in prison. He does not, however, seem to face deportation, much to the resentment of his victims’ families, also recent arrivals from Africa. His lawyers are likely to argue that Malasi would be subject to persecution as a notorious murderer if he were sent back to Angola. On past form they are quite likely to succeed where Coleman failed — even though it is his crime that would supposedly endanger Malasi.
When I called to check some facts, the Home Office would not comment on either case. I am not sure why — these cases are surely in the public interest — but we do know that the Home Office finds it difficult to keep “up to scratch” with checking things, which is why it has so little idea of how many illegal immigrants or returned criminals or escaped convicts are in our midst.
However, it was happy to explain that people such as Malasi who have been granted indefinite leave to remain can have that leave revoked if the home secretary does not feel that their remaining is conducive to the public good. In so far as there can be any certainties in life, it seems certain to me that Malasi’s presence here is not conducive to the public good.
Comparing and contrasting these two cases, and considering the home secretary’s wide discretion in such matters, not to mention the Home Office’s ability to “lose” people (which might be put diplomatically to good use in Coleman’s case), it’s clear that one man should be thrown out and one should be allowed to stay. And if, as I suspect, the wrong man gets thrown out, one will be able to conclude only that the Home Office is not merely incompetent, but also institutionally unjust.
There is a way out for Coleman: he could pretend to be gay and, as Zimbabwe is notorious for persecuting homosexuals, he would have an excellent case for asylum. I am sure he could find a gay friend to help him go through this charade. However, that would involve lying; a corrupt result of a degenerate system. It will be quite legal if Coleman goes and Malasi stays, but the comparison highlights the blindness and chaos of our immigration law and our immigration system and the muddled, guilt-ridden attitudes that underpin them.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 21, 2007 | Comments (0)
Sugar plum fairy v the forces of darkness
One of the strangest things about political activists is that they so rarely understand freedom, the very thing they think they are fighting for. Everyone in this country, even a sugar plum fairy, is entitled to freedom of thought and of speech under the law, but there are countless high-minded activists who do not think so. So it was that a group of Unite Against Fascism activists fetched up at the Coliseum in London on Friday afternoon to demonstrate against the fascist fairy, the “BNP ballerina” Simone Clarke.
She is an exceptional dancer who finds herself at the middle of an even more exceptional political drama. Having danced the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Nutcracker over the Christmas season, she was soon afterwards exposed as a member of the British National party. On Friday she appeared on stage for the first time since the revelation of her political views in the role of Giselle, only to be booed and hissed by UAF agitators outside the theatre and even inside from the stalls.
“The principal ballerina is a BNP member,” they cried, before they were removed. “No fascism in the arts.” Clarke bravely danced on, however, like a real trouper, smiling throughout; I suppose ballerinas are used to smiling through pain. She was supported in her ordeal, whether she knew it or not, by a bizarre group of champions — 25 members of the BNP, including some of its top brass, and not perhaps your average balletomanes.
How I wish I had been there. All this might be serious in its way, but it is a delicious absurdity too. For one thing the English National Ballet has dancers from 19 countries, some of whom must presumably be immigrants, and possibly dark of skin; I would love to have seen the BNP neo-balletomanes’ faces as they watched these migrant swans leaping about in swathes of floating net and little wings, not to mention several men in pastel tights. How wonderful to think of the skinhead BNP top team supporting all this.
What the UAF activists are trying to achieve is to get Clarke sacked. The English National Ballet has resisted very properly; it has refused to comment on its principal dancer’s opinions, saying her views do not represent the ENB’s views, which in any case does not express any political view. The ENB is in a difficult position though, because it receives £6m of public money each year from the Arts Council, and this can and will be used by activists to put pressure on the company to distance itself from Clarke.
Bectu, the broadcasting workers’ union, is making this demand and Lee Jasper, the race relations adviser to the mayor of London, joined this lamentable demonstration, saying: “The protests will continue . . . English National Ballet have got a real fight on their hands.”
This is a strange story in every way. Despite her fear of mass immigration, Clarke has an immigrant boyfriend of Chinese-Cuban descent, also a dancer; there is a hint of inconsistency here surely, and the BNP certainly finds it a touch embarrassing. And then the protesters in the street, who say that ethnic English people’s fear of immigration is nothing but irrational racism, rather undermined their own case by shouting “We are Muslim, black and Jew, there are many more of us than you” — by this threat confirming that a fear of mass immigration is not merely irrational racism. Brilliant.
All these big bold men lined up against a single rather underweight woman; it is not an edifying spectacle. If only they had the intellectual modesty that she has shown. Explaining to a newspaper that she’d been drawn to the BNP by watching the news and by their manifesto, she said: “I am not too proud to say that a lot of it went over my head, but some of the things they mentioned were things I think about all the time, mainly mass immigration, crime and increased taxes.” The world might be a better place if more people were not too proud to admit that things are complex and difficult to understand.
It is clearly too difficult for Friday’s activists to understand that free speech is indivisible. Perhaps they have forgotten the McCarthy era in America, when performing artists, particularly in Hollywood, were outed, sacked and ruined for their pro-communist views (real or alleged). That was entirely wrong, I hardly need say. But there are plenty of people, including me, who think that pro-Trotsky, pro-Stalin, pro-Mao communism, and all kinds of views expressed by people in the arts to this day, are hateful and despicable, and, I think, a great deal worse than the BNP.
That has never prompted real lovers of freedom to try to silence them; real lovers of freedom accept that to repress one hated view is as bad as repressing its opposite. It will only strengthen the hated view; by contrast the openness of freedom will weaken it, if it is wrong, as the heroic JS Mill so eloquently argued.
Besides, why should anyone take the political views of artists seriously? I know that everyone does these days, and pop stars such as Bono are called upon to pontificate on matters of global concern. But the fact that they are famous and talented does not mean that their views are worth paying attention to (rather as the BNP ballerina’s views are of no interest).
There is no law of nature according to which artists must of their nature be rational, sensible and well judging; rather the reverse tends to be true, because the arts have to do with risk, danger, experiment, originality and inconsistency. They are born out of anger, resentment, joy, contrariness and wildness, with the result that few artists have ever been balanced and well-informed political or moral philosophers.
In fact if artists were judged on their views, theatres and galleries and bookshops would be almost empty. If sensible people had tried to bring down artists of bad and daft political views we would have had no Vanessa Redgrave and no Harold Pinter. Should we ban Brecht from the stage because of his support for the odious East German regime? Come off it.
People who loathe their views may love their talents. It is high time that liberals, luvvies and political activists started either to defend free speech, or stopped pretending to.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 14, 2007 | Comments (0)
Only a dirty word can improve schools
For some time it has been widely believed that the prime minister is often away with the fairies. Increasingly in flight from nasty reality, Tony Blair flits from one messianic fantasy to another, wafted by hot gusts of his own rhetoric. The prime minister in waiting, by contrast, is said to be quite different. Gordon Brown, allegedly, is not a man to be inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity; he is prudent, practical and principled, not to mention spiritually abstemious. I was almost beginning to think so myself until Thursday when he put out a statement so vaingloriously, globally silly that I was reminded of the early Blair.
In a carefully placed article in The Guardian, and in briefings, Brown announced that free education for every child in the world would be one of the two central pillars of his foreign policy if he becomes prime minister, along with fighting climate change. He is aiming for “truly a world classroom”, as he puts it, “in time backed up by the world’s biggest petition”, which will involve abolishing child labour everywhere to mark the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. What’s more, he aims to achieve all this within 10 years. Poor man. He has taken leave of his senses and he is not yet in office. It is clearly not only power and glory that corrupt; it is the anguished manoeuvring for them.
Every halfway decent person would like to see an end to child labour and the beginning of universal education. But the idea that a British prime minister, or anyone or any country or any international organisation could begin to achieve such a thing, and in a mere 10 years, can be described only as a dangerous delusion. It sounds like Blair’s megalomaniacal aspirations in his Labour party conference in 2001, when he spoke of “healing the scar” of Africa, and of “our side” ending corruption, human rights abuse and bad governance practically everywhere.
Given what has happened in the intervening years, what “our side” has achieved, what the United Nations gets up to and what happens to charity money, you might imagine that Brown would have the wit to speak more modestly. How dare he grandstand about educating the children of the Third World when his government cannot educate our own children? Brown cannot claim that the failure of Britain’s schools is nothing to do with him; he came to power on Labour’s now notorious education mantra, he has been chancellor for 10 years and he is every bit as responsible as Blair for the squandering of our money and of our children’s prospects.
By a comic irony, on the same day that Brown announced his grandiose plans the head of the Office for Standards in Education published a review of schools recommending radical changes if hundreds of thousands of children were not to be failed by our system. That is proof enough, although the proof is already overwhelming, that education is not working. “It seems clear to us,” Ofsted’s 2020 review says, “that the education system will not achieve the next ‘step change’ in raising standards simply by doing more of the same; a new approach is required.” How true.
The report makes recommendations about testing, syllabuses, single-sex classes, different teaching styles for boys and some edu-babble called “personalised learning”. And so on. But the one radical and essential change is the one that the review does not mention. That is, to bring back selection.
For politicians selection is a dirty word. Some think it is divisive and wrong. All think it is electoral suicide, convinced as they are that the nation, particularly the middle classes, has not yet recovered from the trauma of the 11-plus exam. It was traumatic; I remember the tense faces and the tears when the results were announced and children were officially consigned either to white-collar or to blue-collar lives. But that does not mean that selection was wrong; what was wrong was how crudely and insensitively it was handled.
The point of selection, or at least its only acceptable point, is to be able to teach children of similar ability together and that can be done without traumatising or belittling them or writing them off. It cannot be done without revealing, however discreetly, that some children are better at some things than others, but children know that; there is evidence that in schools which avoid competitive positioning, children can nonetheless accurately rank each child in their class according to ability.
After the long failure of the egalitarian comprehensive experiment, it has become apparent that all children — not just the brightest or the most disabled — do best when taught with others who progress at a similar speed; it’s also easier to teach large classes when the children are of similar ability, whether low, medium or high. That ought to have been obvious long ago. And it is beginning to be obvious to most parents.
The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) published a pamphlet last week called Three Cheers for Selection which included an ICM survey from last June. According to this, 76% of people believe “more academic” children should be taught separately to stretch their abilities. Perhaps even more importantly, nearly as many people (73%) said weaker children also benefited from streaming or attending selective schools and 51% were in favour of schools setting their own admissions policy. What this means is that most parents want more selection, either in mixed schools or in separate schools.
What it also means is that politicians can relax about selection. It’s not toxic any more. It doesn’t mean “creaming off”. They should now be able to consider it on its merits, as central to educational reform, without fearing for their seats.
One of the many interesting findings of the CPS study is that poorer pupils benefit most from selective education; selection contributes to social mobility, which has declined in this country since it was largely abolished. What politicians need to do is take on the teaching unions, which are still entrenched in old-fashioned egalitarianism. Will Brown be bold enough to do that? I think it unlikely; he, too, is in the grip of old-fashioned egalitarianism, with its cruel inefficiencies, and has seen Blair fail. Like Lucifer, Milton’s thwarted hero, and like Blair himself, Brown seems to prefer hatching vain empires
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 07, 2007 | Comments (1)
