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Sorry, Suu Kyi, but love won’t topple the junta
Almost everyone seems to need heroes. There may be a few excessively rational beings who think they don’t or people who can never help noticing the clay about the feet of even the noblest. But the rest of us long for some incarnation of goodness and courage.
For most of us, it is genuinely inspiring to know that we are alive at the same time as someone who behaves outstandingly bravely and nobly in the face of great fear and hardship; that such people are not only characters of myth and legend, but flesh and blood and clay like us. They might make us better; they remind us of better things. At times when people feel oppressed by their own cynicism, they are signs of hope.
Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma is undoubtedly one of the world’s great heroines. In the past few terrifying and inspiring days in the streets of Burma, her name and her example have been on everyone’s minds, though she herself is not free to join the people in their marches: she has been under house arrest for most of the past 18 years. So I was sorry to discover that several young adults I know had never heard of her. It is rather as if they had not heard of Nelson Mandela.
It was not easy to explain quickly what is remarkable about her. To me the most astonishing thing is that of her own choice she sacrificed living with her much loved husband and two sons in England in favour of life – a half-life for nearly 20 years – under house arrest in Rangoon.
She could have seen her young boys grow up, she could have been with her husband during his last illness and death, she could have had an interesting and happy life in the West among friends and fellow academics.
This ought not to seem more poignant just because she is beautiful – she dresses exquisitely in the Burmese longyi, often with an exotic flower in her hair – and talented – she plays Bach in her captivity – and delicately charming. But because of the clay in our nature, it does.
She made this terrible sacrifice knowingly and deliberately and modestly for her people in Burma. As she said in 1988, when she first went back to Burma from family life in England, “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent.”
Her father was Aung San, a leader of Burma’s struggle for liberation from colonialism. He was assassinated when she was only two, and afterwards she lived and studied abroad for many years, being much influenced by Gandhi’s ideas of ahimsa and satyagraha – love for everyone, including one’s opponents, and nonviolent opposition – exactly what the Buddhist monks have demonstrated in the streets these past few days, until they were violently suppressed.
Aung San Suu Kyi came back to Burma in 1988 to nurse her dying mother and was immediately drawn, her father’s daughter, into politics. She headed a political party, the National League for Democracy, which won a general election with an enormous majority, but other leaders were jailed and she was put under house arrest. Otherwise, she would rightly be the prime minister of Burma. Instead it is run, or rather being destroyed, by a vicious group of genocidal, incompetent militaristic kleptocrats, backed by China and Russia.
What is particularly heroic is that Aung San Suu Kyi could have gone back to her family and to freedom at any time. The generals did not dare kill her. They only dared isolate her in her house, and she feared that if she left Burma they would never let her back in.
So the years have passed, with her children’s youth, her own youth, her husband, and all for something uncertain and fragile. It is all for the idea that truth and love and peace have overriding power against evil, and will prevail without violence. Truth and love and peace will set her country free.
This is difficult stuff for the western sceptic. All around the world, now and in the past, it seems that violence does indeed prevail, and turning the other cheek is, to say nothing harsher, distinctly quixotic. Tilting at windmills may be admirable, in a way, but it is futile. There is a big gap between Asian and western thought on this. Only yesterday Maung Zarni of the Free Burma Coalition published an article in The Times under the headline “‘Loving kindness’ will beat the generals”, and spoke of a new dawn on the Burmese horizon.
He wrote proudly of his Burmese great-grandmother who told him of a bloody encounter in the 1930s in Mandalay between the forces of the British Raj and some peaceful, unarmed Buddhist monks and nuns who – just as today’s “loving kindness army” of monks and nuns – stood up to them on behalf of Burma’s poor. Just as today they were shot and beaten down in pools of blood, unsung heroes but heroes nonetheless.
My response to that story is that the British Raj did not leave because of this noble protest, but for all kinds of other, unrelated reasons, many economic. One was the loss of the will to power, which had much more to do with necessities in Britain than with protests on the spot. The British wanted and needed out of empire, so voluntarily they left and then freedom didn’t follow anyway. Strictly speaking, I suspect, the brave Buddhists died in vain. The monks weren’t winning then, and I am afraid, despite the hopeful comments of Maung Zarni, and the long sacrifice of Aung San Suu Kyi, they aren’t winning now.
I don’t really believe that peace and love will prevail over the evil generals in Burma. I don’t really believe that the forces of heroism prevailed in South Africa, or in Northern Ireland, though they must have made a mark, where they were not ignored, forgotten and generally unsung. What brings change finally are political and economic forces. No amount of heroism will bring peace and plenty to Darfur, Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, and the worst of the African states. The only thing that might is the clout of foreign powers, and even that is doubtful. So with Burma.
I don’t mean to sound entirely pessimistic. Aung San Suu Kyi, and heroes and heroines like her, remind us of all that is best. They remind us what real courage is, and encourage us towards it, and that alone is enough to make them truly heroic.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 30, 2007 | Comments (0)
Too late to speak the truth about immigration
In our repressive world of thoughtcrime and guiltspeak, it now takes great courage to tell the truth, even when it’s obvious. Fortunately there are a few brave people prepared to do it, and Julie Spence, the chief constable of Cambridgeshire, is one of them. Last week she courageously said the unsayable and pointed out that the large numbers of recent immigrants are causing serious problems in her manor.
Dangerous crime, such as drink driving, human trafficking, credit card fraud and knife crime, has gone up substantially and her officers are now having to deal with people speaking nearly 100 different foreign languages. The cost in translation fees for Cambridgeshire is close to £1m a year.
Some people might discount the claims made by Spence and her detailed report into the impact of immigration on her force as a crude way of getting more money out of the government. Others might say that the police all too often use their resources badly anyway, and what’s needed is probably better management rather than more money. But all that is beside the point. What she has made clear is blindingly obvious - a large and sudden influx of immigrants, whatever advantages they might bring, will inevitably come at very great cost, in many different ways. What’s true of Cambridgeshire is true of the country as a whole, and not just in policing. How strange it is, and how late, that it is beginning to be possible to say such a thing without being denounced as a neo-Nazi.
The Labour government, in its 10 years of office, has allowed more than a million new people from all over the world to settle in this country. That is little short of a social revolution. Twenty-five per cent of babies born here have at least one foreign-born parent. Several large cities will have a nonwhite majority within a few years. We have seen almost uncontrolled immigration - Labour has lost control of our borders.
Whatever the positive results of this astonishing change, there are some very spectacular negative ones. Big city hospitals are weighed down with masses of new patients who don’t speak English, or who won’t see male doctors or who cannot get GPs and clog up casualty departments. Local authorities, as in the notable case of Slough, find they have large numbers of immigrants for whom they cannot get extra money to meet the new costs of housing, social care, welfare and so on.
As for schools, I cannot understand why nobody makes the obvious point that standards in schools are bound to suffer when many tens of different languages are spoken among the schoolchildren; how can any child progress in reading, writing and talking English, and being acculturated as an English-speaking Briton, when the rest of the class don’t speak it?
At our local school in west London there are more than 90 mother tongues, and a high proportion of recent immigrants or asylum seekers - dislocated, confused and homesick as they must be. It is a perfect recipe for collapsing standards in education, which is what we’ve got.
If the broken society means anything, it means one in which the civil bonds between individuals, their families, their neighbours and their institutions are seriously damaged. It’s perfectly obvious that multiculturalism was bound to sever the ties that bind; too much diversity means not enough solidarity, and a broken society, as we have seen, and will see more. The babel and bedlam of Damilola Taylor’s estate in Peckham is a terrible example.
Even Trevor Phillips has now spoken of sleepwalking to segregation and even his own outfit, the Commission for Racial Equality (soon to become the Commission for Equality and Human Rights), published a grim and angry report last week about a “fracturing” society, growing ethnic segregation and growing extremism.
It’s good that such people recognise it, but it is absolutely maddening that they, who contributed so much to it themselves, don’t understand their own responsibility for it. It was also quite sickening to hear Liam Byrne, the minister for borders and immigration, cravenly welcoming Spence’s comments last week: “It’s because we want to hear voices like Julie Spence’s,” he said, “that I set up the Migrant Impacts Forum.” It is “vital”, he said, “to consider the social impact of immigration when making migration decisions.”
Indeed it is vital, and was vital 10 years ago, and 30 years ago, when all governments, especially his, failed to do so. And it’s laughable for him to talk about some damned “forum” on the impact of “migrants”; some proper research should have been devoted to it in 1997.
Of the complex problems caused by mass immigration one of the easiest to see and to quantify is in housing. We all know there is a housing crisis and a terrible shortage of affordable homes. On Newsnight last week Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch UK pointed out – and his figures, based always on government figures, are not challenged even by Whitehall – that we will have to build 200 houses a day for the next 20 years to meet predicted housing needs.
Apparently this came as a surprise to the presenter Jeremy Paxman. Liam Byrne then pointed out that Gordon Brown has promised to build 3m new homes. What did not emerge in the programme is that one-third of all new households are being formed by immigrants and, therefore, 1m of Brown’s promised 3m will have to go to immigrants.
Nor is the government very keen to quantify the net benefit to the economy made by immigrants. They may swell productivity but they also swell the population, and will also need schools and hospitals and housing, and care in their old age. According to Migrationwatch, the net effect of immigrant labour on GDP is £1 per week per person.
It is shocking that this massive, historic change was forced upon us without consultation and without our consent.
Who wanted it? Who is responsible for it? And why? In casting about for an answer, perhaps it’s worth considering the Mori survey into black and ethnic minority attitudes to voting and to politics at the 2005 general election. Of those who voted, 58% chose Labour, 10% Conservative. I hope that isn’t a thoughtcrime.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 23, 2007 | Comments (2)
Madeleine, the detective story that grips
Stories are essential to us. Those who say our obsession with the extraordinary story of Madeleine McCann is shamefully prurient, sentimental or commercial may be partly right, but they are missing the point.
We need great stories, and have done so time out of mind, to enable us to understand the world and our places in it.
Our fascination with Madeleine’s unfolding story - most of it speculation and fantasy - has a great deal more to do with ourselves than with her or her parents. And her parents have deliberately awakened and fed this elemental appetite for a story, to the point where only the most high-minded or unimaginative can be indifferent to it.
Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist who worked with damaged children, wrote a wonderful book called The Uses of Enchantment in which he discussed how fairy stories - some of them extremely frightening - enable children to confront their worst fears and anxieties. The tales enable children to measure themselves against them from a place of safety in the real world, as opposed to the dark forests and treacherous icy wastes of the world of the fairy tale. That is the ancient function of all stories.
Madeleine’s story is not enchanting in the ordinary sense, but it has cast the spell of the fairy tale over the public imagination. And the adult version of the fairy tale is the detective story, the thriller, the whodunnit. That’s why this story has brought out the Miss Marple, the Sherlock Holmes or the Kay Scarpetta in all of us.
We are all - apart from the most implausibly high-minded - trying to take control of this nightmarish, archetypal story by understanding it and measuring ourselves against it. The public response to it, no matter how mawkish and gossipy, is not necessarily frivolous, any more than it is frivolous to read Hansel and Gretel or The Silence of the Lambs.
Thrillers are moral puzzles in which good contends with evil. The reader is invited to accompany the detective, and often to become the detective, to puzzle out the truth of some great wrong and put it right. It is probably because this idea is so simple and because, in real life, wrong isn’t always put right or understood that thrillers are usually considered an inferior form of fiction - not “serious”. I don’t think they are necessarily inferior. I even wrote one, in the 1980s, called The Eye of the Beholder but no doubt it has long been out of print.
As an avid reader of detective stories I feel there is something both fascinating and serious about seeing events as moral puzzles; it’s not just a tabloid taste. Reading Agatha Christie or Elmore Leonard may not be as sophisticated as reading Dostoevsky, but it is not so very different; it is where many people get their sentimental education.
The McCanns’ story so far, with all possible respect to their feelings, is an extremely good thriller. At every new development, every new rumour, a new question emerges, a new challenge for our forensic or psychological skills, for our Miss Marple-like moral intuition.
Why, for instance, did the grieving mother, the beautiful blonde mater dolorosa, wash Madeleine’s Cuddle Cat? Surely any innocent woman would want to cling to the last traces of the scent of her child; a guilty woman might want to hide forensic evidence. On the other hand, my dear Watson, perhaps the toy was just genuinely dirty, having been touched by so many superstitious wellwishers that any scent of the missing girl had long since disappeared as well. Is Kate McCann’s quiet self-control a sign of great courage, to which we should all aspire, or is it a sign of coldness? Would coldness suggest guilt?
Above all, this story tempts us to put ourselves in the McCanns’ place. What if, on one of those times when you or I left our children unsupervised, they had disappeared? What if, for that matter, in a moment of terrible bad luck I had accidentally killed my own child while in a hick town in Portugal? This story has made me realise that I would most certainly try to cover it up. I would almost certainly try to persuade my husband to help me. One does not have to be an ignorant xenophobe to find the thought of handing oneself over to the Portuguese criminal justice system unacceptable; one has only to look at the abysmal way in which the authorities there have handled Madeleine’s case to feel justified in doing almost anything to stay out of their clumsy clutches. Even in Britain the criminal justice system is not entirely reliable. My children’s and my husband’s lives would be ruined as well as mine in a nightmare of jail, foster care and disgrace.
The horrible suspicions surrounding Madeleine’s mother have made me understand that there are some circumstances in which I might feel entirely morally justified in trying to cover up such an accident. In the newspaper shop on Saturday morning a woman aggressively asked us all: “Innocent or guilty?”
In the real world such questions are, or ought to be, or used to be, impermissible in public. In the real world we must presume that the unhappy parents are innocent until proved guilty. I believe they are innocent, almost as wholly as I believe in the presumption of innocence. However, in the magical world of stories, people can and should imagine what they like. In this case they are doing exactly that. The swathes of speculation on the internet and the horrifyingly tasteless musical video tributes to Madeleine are nothing short of amazing.
It is the McCanns’ misfortune, and perhaps their miscalculation, that by seeking publicity and trying to manipulate it, by hiring media managers, raising money, starting a blog and encouraging others to meet in cyberspace, they shifted their predicament out of ordinary reality into the world of virtual reality - which is the unreal world of thrillers and fairy stories.
In virtual reality there are no rules; it is chaos, for us to make sense of as best we can. The internet is the Pandora’s box of our time. Nobody can shut it, but one of the many morals of this story is that anyone in trouble should stay well away from cyberspace.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 16, 2007 | Comments (1)
You’re taking liberties with our DNA
There is a conflict, it often seems, between science and freedom. The more scientists discover about us, down to microscopic genetic tendencies we might have to aggressive impulses or early dementia, the less secure we feel in our liberties.
Our secrets are not safe, not even the ones we didn’t know ourselves. The more such things are understood and recorded and electronically shared, the more anxious we feel. This information is power, for better or worse, and people will be tempted to seize it. That is no reason to become a Luddite, but it certainly ought to make us all particularly watchful about our liberties.
So it came as a toast-dropping surprise to hear a distinguished appeal court judge recommend on the Today programme last week that every person in this country ought to be put on the criminal DNA database, along for good measure with every foreign visitor. One might expect some hanging and flogging judge (if there are any left) to take an authoritarian line, but Lord Justice Sedley is known for his interest in human rights.
One of his concerns is that ethnic minorities are overrepresented on the database, and that this is unfair. To make things fair, he thinks we should all be rounded up and have our mouths swabbed, man, woman and child, so things are equally unfair for all of us.
It should come as no surprise to learn that Stephen Sedley once belonged to the Communist party. Compulsory equality is at odds with personal freedom, and while Sedley is no longer a party member, he has grandiose ideas; he lists “changing the world” as an interest in Who’s Who.
Admittedly there might be a case to be made for having everyone’s DNA profile available to the police; it might help to solve more crimes. However, Britain already has the world’s largest DNA database, yet since it was introduced 12 years ago the rate of solving crime has remained unchanged.
Much more powerful is the case the other way. Putting the entire population on the database is an abuse of the freedom of the individual in itself. It offers terrible and so far unimagined abuses in the future; the better the DNA code can be read, the more complex and extreme the abuses could be. The risks of conspiracy would conspire with the greater risks of cockup.
We know that British bureaucrats and politicians have an appalling record with computers and personal information. The massive NHS database is a shameful case in point. Everyone in their right minds will try to stay off it. So too are the many errors of the tax and benefit system, which makes mistakes that are almost tragic when poor people suddenly find themselves in serious debt. Only last week the parliamentary public accounts committee found that a new subsidy due to English farmers had been grotesquely mishandled.
And these are the people - the politicians and the apparatchiks - that Sedley proposes to let loose on the intimate details of our DNA! If Whitehall cannot manage the details of a few farmers one dreads to think what the nomenklatura would do with about 90m new genetic profiles, or indeed with our NHS medical details. Even when they did not abuse, lose, confuse or accidentally reveal our secrets themselves, other people would most certainly steal them to abuse them, through hacking or corruption as well as inadequate security.
That is surely why the government proposes to remove details of the children of celebrities from an education database. It takes breathtaking ignorance of what happens to powerful information in the real world to suggest that everyone’s most sensitive details should be exposed to such serious risk.
Last week, for instance, it emerged that the Chinese are particularly good at hacking into other countries’ sensitive information, including our own military and Foreign Office computers. Ministers tried to play this down, much as they tried to ignore a Chinese cyber-attack on the House of Commons computer last year.
In view of these embarrassments, you might imagine the government would stand firm against Sedley. You might expect new Labour’s self-styled champions of human rights to cut back the criminal database, by about 1m, to remove everyone except those convicted of a crime. On the contrary, ministers are “broadly sympathetic”, to Sedley’s suggestion, according to Tony McNulty, the security minister. He said the government has no plans to put everyone on the database, but the truth is that the Home Office is planning to add to it considerably. A review will be published in February.
It is wonderful to know so much about genetics. The risk that this knowledge might be abused must always be weighed against the advantages it offers. Here what is needed is practical evidence, not arguments of principle. In the criminal DNA profile case, the risks quite clearly outweigh the rewards. Nobody can guess at what DNA profiles will soon reveal and how that knowledge could be abused; having some criminals at large is one of the many prices of freedom.
However, in the case of hybrid embryos, which aroused fury last week - much more, oddly, than the DNA database - the risk-reward relationship is the other way around. It is alarming to think that geneticists are going to create embryos that are part human and part animal; terrible things might conceivably happen. If one distrusts Whitehall, why should one trust the men and women in white coats?
The answer is purely practical, based on experience. Scientists have a hugely better reputation than politicians or bureaucrats for intelligence, integrity, competence, truth-telling and sticking to the rules, especially when they are independent of the state. The hybrid experiments will not affect everybody; in fact they won’t even affect individual people. They may help to heal people with terrible diseases, and if they don’t the only loss will be minute quantities of living tissue and a great deal of time, effort and hope.
It is conceivable that knowledge discovered in these experiments might somehow be used against persons unknown. But the conflict in such matters is not between science and freedom, but between freedom and the abuse of science.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 09, 2007 | Comments (0)
Pushing mothers back into work is wrong
A photograph of a nasty-looking woman called Geraldine Rama appeared in a newspaper last week; she made the news because she had bitten a 10-month-old baby boy in her care “with considerable force”, according to medical evidence. It emerged that both his legs were broken as well.
Naturally, social workers were at first inclined to blame not the gruesome Rama but the baby’s unhappy parents and he was placed on the “at risk” register. Things were sorted out, after six months, and Rama has at last been taken off the childcare register, but the story is a terrible warning. You leave your babies and little children with childminders and crèche workers at grave risk — to them, to yourself and to society at large.
Not every child carer, I admit, is driven by fell impulses to savage infants. All the same, the nightmarish Rama had her moment of notoriety on the day when an Ofsted report announced that thousands of babies and children were at risk from “inadequate” childminders. About 20,000 children are left with carers who neglect them, leaving them crying and hungry, and a further 125,000 are left in care no better than “satisfactory” and with scope for improvement. I can’t help feeling dubious; if Ofsted’s assessment of schools is anything to judge by, I would be very sceptical of its notion of what is satisfactory or better than satisfactory.
Be that as it may, Ofsted has found that standards are declining significantly in an industry that has sprung up rapidly to look after children whose mothers and fathers are working. One in 12 workplace crãches was found inadequate as was one in 14 of the extended schools, which take in children before and after school hours. Standards are falling, particularly among childminders.
This comes when women feel unprecedented pressure to go to work, whether they want to or not; more than half of all mothers of children under five do so, leaving 0.5m children in daycare. What this means, often and even in allegedly satisfactory situations, is leaving children in their most impressionable and formative years in the care of poorly educated, poorly paid, poorly qualified or unqualified women, who come and go at a high rate.
Ofsted’s report came only a day after a six-year study by Durham University found that the government’s early years policies have been a £21 billion waste; Labour’s Sure Start scheme — along with its early years education and childcare — have had no impact.
This wasn’t news to those who have been following this fiasco. Two years ago a report by Birkbeck College in London found the same thing — and something worse as well. Not only did researchers find no discernible difference in children’s development, language and behaviour between those in Sure Start areas and those elsewhere. It also showed that some children of teenage mothers did worse in Sure Start areas than elsewhere — no mean feat.
Adding to this dazzling list of failure, it emerged last week that standards in the three Rs among seven-year-olds have dropped to their lowest level for seven years despite huge government spending in primary schools; one in four boys fails basic writing standards. Standards among 14-year-olds are dropping and employers complained recently that they have to retrain semi-numerate and semi-literate recruits. All this was overshadowed by discussion of knife and gun crime among feral children from malfunctioning families, one of whom murdered Rhys Jones.
Does one have to be a right-wing bigot to see a connection between these things? If mothers feel forced to rush out to work, many of their children will be seriously neglected and many seriously neglected children become damaged and destructive adults. Politicians bleat about good affordable childcare as the solution. But good childcare is in short supply and it is not affordable for most people, even when it can be found, without state subsidies. The result is predictable — bad childcare, or childcare that isn’t good enough.
If you leave your children to the fitful attention of strangers and take chances on the quality of care, you run the risk that they will be badly brought up and will do badly. We live in a society of state-driven and state-subsidised child neglect, promoted by Gordon Brown and his tax and benefit policies and his wraparound educare. He was a child-neglect chancellor for 10 years and he is now a baby-farming prime minister. The consequences are turning out to be disastrous.
There are many pressures on mothers to go to work, even when they have young children. Women both need to work and want to work and I would hate my sex to be shackled to the pushchair and the washing machine. All the same, the people who grumbled decades ago that feminism would destroy the family had a point.
Family life needs time and attention and so does raising a sensible, capable child; working life takes up time and attention, to the point where there’s not enough left for family life. The difficult job of socialising children has been abandoned by many women; along with it have disappeared the traditional functions of stay-at-home mothers — home-making, neighbourliness, elder care (as we have to call it now), charity work, community work and all the many things that make up civil society.
I don’t have any instant solutions. The irresistible force of a mother’s need and longing for work constantly comes up against the immovable force of her child’s need and longing for her. It also comes up against the demands of family life.
It is wrong to pressgang mothers into work with massive tax and benefit incentives; those incentives should be offered in the opposite direction — to mothers (or fathers) who stay at home to bring up children and who take on community work and charity work. Family life would become affordable; wider good works would become possible.
Some way would have to be found to discriminate against — yes, I mean it — the welfare queens who would have babies to avoid work. But if there were a will there would be a way. Then family life and family childcare and all the little kindnesses that make a good society would be — I can’t think of a better word — reincentivised.
At least the risk of baby-biting might decline.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 02, 2007 | Comments (0)
