Archbishop, you’ve committed treason
My text for today is “Hold fast that which is good”: 1 Thessalonians 5:21. These are words I heard so regularly in prayers at my Anglican girls’ school that I have been unable to forget them. I draw them to the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to have forgotten them. At least, he seems to be losing his grip on what is good in this country and, indeed, to be throwing it away with both hands in his curious suggestion that aspects of sharia should be recognised in English law.
In an interview on Radio 4 last Thursday, Rowan Williams said that the introduction of parts of Islamic law here would help to maintain social cohesion and seems unavoidable. Sharia courts exist already, he pointed out. We should “face up to the fact” that some British citizens do not relate to the British legal system, he said, and that Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.
What he went on to say was more astonishing. He explained to the interviewer, in his gentle, wordy way, that a lot of what is written on this confusing subject suggests “the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody”. He went on: “That principle is an important pillar of our social identity as a western liberal democracy.” How true.
However, he continued: “It’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society, and the law needs to take some account of that.”
Stuff like this is bad for the blood pressure, but I listened on. “An approach to law which simply said there is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said . . . I think that’s a bit of a danger.”
What danger? And to whom? The danger, surely, is rather the archbishop and those who think like him, who seem unwilling to hold fast that which is good. What is good and best and essential about our society � it isn’t merely a matter of “social identity” � is the principle of equality before the law. That principle and its practice have made this country the outstandingly just and tolerant state it is; it is one of the last remaining forces for unity as well.
What is also good and essential to this country is the law itself. It has evolved over centuries from medieval barbarities into something, for all its faults, that is civilised. Our law expresses and maintains the best virtues of our society. Anybody who does not accept it does not belong here.
When other legal systems or other customs clash with ours, we prefer ours, to put it mildly. At least we should; what has troubled me for years is the way that exceptions and excuses tend to be made, in the name of multiculturalism, for practices of which we do not approve. Victoria Climbié’s terrible bruises were ignored because of assumptions about the cultural norms of African discipline. Last week it emerged that someone in government has sold the moral pass on polygamy: husbands with multiple wives in this country are now to get benefit payments for each wife.
In the midst of all this moral confusion and relativism, is the premier prelate in the land holding fast that which is good? Far from it. He is recommending multiculti legal cherry-picking, in which individuals would be free to choose the jurisdiction they preferred for certain matters. He even admits that his proposal introduces, “uncomfortably”, the idea of a market in the law, “a competition for loyalty”.
One encouraging sign is the almost universal fury that our foolish archbishop has aroused: he has miraculously united the irreconcilable in opposition to himself, from Christian extremists to mainstream Muslims, from Anglican vicars to godless Hampstead liberals, from Gordon Brown to backwoods Tories.
The archbishop and his few supporters insist that the media have misrepresented him and not many people have actually read the learned speech that he gave to a learned audience after his inflammatory radio interview. They are wrong. I haven’t seen any serious misrepresentation in the media, and reading his speech several times doesn’t exonerate him. Nor does it increase respect for his judgment, his command of English or his powers of ratiocination; he is woolly of face and woolly of mind.
In any case, you do not need to follow anybody’s argument to understand that legally recognising aspects of sharia is either unnecessary or undesirable. If the aspects in question accord with English law (the Anglican archbishop is speaking of England, presumably), there is no need to offer any extra provision or recognition for religious courts. They are of no interest to the law. If they don’t accord with English law, they are unacceptable and should be repudiated, or even prosecuted.
All this has nothing particularly to do with it being Islamic law at issue. The same would apply to any other religious law: Hindu, Mormon or wiccan. However, there is a lot to be said against sharia and the desire of a reported 40% of British Muslims to live under it. That explains, in part, the present outrage. Sharia is rightly feared here: it is disputed, sometimes primitive, grievously in need of reform and wholly unacceptable in Britain.
So what possessed this troublesome priest to stir up this predictable fury with his divisive and unnecessary suggestions? Why did he choose to speak not just in a quiet academic meeting but also in the public glare of The World at One? And cui bono? It has most certainly not been good for ordinary British Muslims, as they well understand. It has, however, given comfort to Muslim extremists, who will see this as the thin end of their Islamist wedge.
Williams’s behaviour looks like vainglorious attention-seeking, but it is also something much worse. To seek to undermine our legal system and the values on which it rests, in a spirit of unnecessary appeasement to an alien set of values, is a kind of treason. It is a betrayal of all those who struggled and died here, over the centuries, for freedom and equality under the rule of law and of their courage in the face of injustice and unreason. Theirs is the good that we should hold fast and so of all people should the Archbishop of Canterbury. Otherwise, what is he for?
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 10, 2008 | Comments (1)
The joyous freedom of the frisky fifties
There is a sense at fiftysomething of burdens falling away, of old struggles abandoned
In these gloomy days it is cheering to be told that it’s fun to be 50, particularly if one is 50. It is not, we were informed last week, that 50 is the new 40 or the new 30; it seems that fiftysomething is positively better than fortysomething or thirtysomething – friskier, flirtier, fitter and much less depressed than those unhappy people clinging miserably to late youth, as we now call it. And that’s not all: old age is apparently happier than middle age and just as happy as youth. Things can only get better, as the Labour party used to say.
The two sources for this uplifting news are what one must call mixed. One is a survey commissioned by Saga magazine, the sprightly publication for the overfifties; it found that 65% of those questioned who were aged 50 or more said they were sexually active, with 46% of these saying they “got between the sheets at least once a week”. That doesn’t sound frightfully frisky to me, but does at least suggest signs of life. What’s more, many of the respondents said they found sex more fulfilling and “less pressurised” than in their youth.
Emma Soames, the glamorous editor of Saga, said: “These findings shatter the myth that once you hit 50 your sex life is over. There is less pressure than when people were younger and it is likely that you feel more comfortable about your body.” She went on: “Forget about the dirty thirties or the naughty forties. The frisky fifties are having the most fun.”
There is a downside to all this. More and more of the frisky fifties, not to mention the sexy sixties and scintillating seventies, are getting STIs, or what they in their youth used to call VD. Lots of respectable elderly ladies and gentlemen are now shyly visiting clap clinics because, apparently, they were under the impression that only young people got herpes and gonorrhoea. Perhaps the government should start free refresher sex education classes, along with free bus passes. But the encouraging aspect of all this is that older people are getting about a bit, making new friends and taking gentle exercise in this way.
The other source of consolation about time’s winged chariot is a rather weightier psychological survey of 2m people in 80 countries, by two economists. Professor Andrew Oswald and Professor David Blanchflower have found that 50 really is more fun. They don’t exactly put it that way; they argue that a miserable middle age is a global phenomenon, regardless of money, gender, family and health.
What they mean by middle age, confusingly, is not fiftysomething, but forty or even thirtysomething. They have found a worldwide, U-shaped curve of psychological wellbeing with the most miserable period in the forties. This midlife depression is universal, it seems, and Britons are most depressed at 44. “Only in their fifties,” says Oswald, “do most people emerge from the low period,” and by 70, someone in good health is as likely to be happy as a 20-year-old. So the fifties really might be friskier.
This idea that there is something better and brighter about advancing old age is too good to disbelieve. I intend to get up every day reaffirming my faith in it. Sceptics of course might well say that the fifties and the sixties are an awkward age, at least in this country. Many baby boomers are caught between the needs of elderly parents and dependent adult children who can’t afford to leave home. What lies ahead does not look good – rising taxes, low-earning children, a much reduced pension, filthy hospitals, nasty old people’s homes and almost no chance of social care at home.
All the same, among fiftysomethings who are reasonably well and well off there are signs that life is getting better, both relatively and absolutely. And they call themselves middle aged for far longer – well into their sixties, it seems. Recently, skiing in Austria, I noticed that underneath the bobble hats of the people swooping confidently down the slopes, the hair was almost always grey, or else expensively streaked Knightsbridge blonde. Thirty or 40 years ago one didn’t see grey hair on ski lifts. Now it’s quite common to see skiers of 70 or 80, and 50-year-olds feel quite young.
People over 50 often look surprisingly young as well, compared with their parents’ generation. That is partly because they – perhaps I should say we – reject the idea of getting old; it is anathema to baby boomers who remember the Who in 1965 singing “Hope I die before I get old”. This extended youth isn’t only a matter of attitude; it’s also largely due to modern medicine and modern nutrition, if not always a little modern cosmetic intervention.
However, clinging to youth is clearly not the secret of happiness in middle age, although looking young may contribute to it. The secret, I suspect, has more to do with letting go. We seem to be hard-wired to do it. There is, at least for the fortunate, a sense at fiftysomething of burdens falling away, of old struggles abandoned, of a new freedom from the torments of ambition, or at any rate a better way of dealing with them. For women the oestrogen wars are over and men are less the slaves of their own hormones too; this makes relationships all round a great deal less complicated.
There is something liberating about feeling that one is on the home straight; the race isn’t over yet, but most of it is behind us, like the anxieties along the way, and the outcome seems much more understandable and somehow much less important.
Our sons and our daughters are beyond our command, as Dylan said, and while it is sad to lose them to independence, it seems to come at the right time, again as if we were hard-wired to accept it. Years of the exhaustion and daily preoccupation of looking after young children fall away and suddenly there seems to be more time. We may worry that our little grey cells are dying in their millions, but there’s plenty of evidence that older people, until dementia sets in, often use their brains and talents more efficiently than the young.
These days some people probably do have the powers of late youth with the freedoms of middle age and old age. As to whether the fifties are any friskier than before, however, I doubt it.
As an old lady supposedly said to George Bernard Shaw, when he asked her at what age women lose interest in sex: “I haven’t the least idea. You see, I’m only 83.”
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 03, 2008 | Comments (0)
