Arranged marriages keep immigrants in the ghettos
Multiculturalism is the subject that ought to have been on my mind this week, ever since David Blunkett's extraordinarily courageous remarks. We must all try to forget about his hard-Left past, and his astonishing reinvention of himself, and just be grateful that a Labour Home Secretary, in this benighted Labour Government, can talk such brave sense.
Of course he is right that new arrivals in this country should adopt British "norms"; of course he is right in saying that it would be a pity if political correctness prevented a debate on multiculturalism in this country, although it would have been better still if he had admitted that it has already done so: the liberal intelligentsia and the race relations industry have for years been silencing any such debate with cries of "racism".
It may be that the atrocities of September 11 have changed all that. Those who were cowed or embarrassed into silence on such matters have been shocked out of their weakness; it has become easier and more important to say what one means on cultural and moral matters. Perhaps this is a time for cautious optimism on the subject of race relations, though I am afraid I am sceptical. The Cantle report, which came up last week with explanations for last summer's racial disturbances that were as startling as they were obvious, sounded a note that rang false.
In calling for a national debate, the report said (and I had to read it twice): "There will be little value in those with old agendas trotting out their racist stereotypes, nor in the refusal to voice views for fear of recrimination."
One can hardly help smiling at the innocent lack of logic, but it isn't really funny. It has an unpleasant whiff of Mao Tse-tung's Thousand Flowers campaign, in which intellectuals were suddenly invited to let a thousand ideas bloom freely and to say the unsayable. Those unwise enough to take the Chairman at his word were soon mown down.
As Mr Bennett said to his daughter Elizabeth, an unhappy alternative is before you. If you wish to enter this national debate, you had better not trot out any "old agendas" or "racist stereotypes"; on the other hand, you must not refuse to do so for fear of recrimination.
Tricky. And trickier still when you consider that almost anything you say, however well intentioned, will probably be considered racist by someone or other: one of the most shocking developments in race relations, following the Macpherson report, was the new definition of a crime as racist if anyone claims to think it so.
There are plenty of bigots out there, of all colours, who will scream racist without the slightest real provocation. Several people actually said last week that Mr Blunkett's insistence on new arrivals learning English was racist. I have often been told that the very idea of a host culture, and even the word "foreigner", are racist. To oppose the idea of multiculturalism is almost universally considered racist, even though culture and race are quite obviously not the same thing. It will be extremely difficult, in the current climate of institutionalised ethnic anxiety, to have a reasonable public debate. Some things are unsayable.
Here is one. There is a view that an important obstacle in the way of integration into the wider community is arranged marriage. I don't mean forced marriage; Mr Blunkett was unwise to mention that. I mean arranged marriages - which are common - between a British citizen and someone from the Indian subcontinent who may be virtually a stranger. In 2000 about 16,000 spouses were accepted here from the Indian subcontinent, about 19,000 if one includes other dependants - up from 13,000 in 1999.
It's hard for people in this country to avoid suspecting that this is done largely for the purpose of giving the foreigner a British passport and other rights here. But whatever the motive, many new spouses arrive with little or no understanding of life here and little or no knowledge of English or interest in integration. Many of them are very poorly educated, if educated at all.
What this means is that communities in areas where this practice is common get stuck for generations in the early immigrant experience; they are prevented from moving culturally outwards into the greater confidence and success of third and fourth generations.
How can illiterate, marginal mothers and fathers help their children succeed at school or in the wider world? Such arranged marriages foster ghettos; they hinder integration. Parents who arrange marriages could equally well arrange them in Britain, with British brides and bridegrooms, if they chose. Yet who dares to speak out against arranged marriage?
I am sure this will be considered racist, though it isn't: this is a cultural question, not a racial one. I am pessimistic, I am afraid: the race relations lobby seems to exist to inflame, not to calm. Only days ago the Commission for Racial Equality issued 225 pages of yet more guidelines about racism awareness in public services; this obsession is almost pathological.
This is what ought to have been foremost in my mind this week. In fact, my mind has been on something else. I have been writing here and in The Sunday Telegraph for nearly 14 years, with great pleasure. But the time has come for a change, and this is my last column. I shall very much miss my colleagues and my readers, and I wish you a very Happy Christmas.
Saturday, December 15, 2001 | Comments (1)
You won't get me in the NHS - it's a deathtrap
One of the saddest memories of my childhood is of an old man, collapsed in sudden pain in his cottage garden, begging pitifully not to be taken to the hospital. It was clear that he was very ill, and perhaps dying, but the only thing on his mind was his terrible dread of the hospital. At the time, I thought him rather old-fashioned and, I am sorry to say, ignorant. I knew in my childish wisdom that hospitals were wonderful. The NHS was wonderful.
It wasn't very many years, however, before I came to share his view. As a youthful voluntary worker and as a visitor of friends in hospital, I soon began to see things which shocked and disgusted me, quite apart from staff shortages, bureaucracy and the endless waiting; I saw filth, incompetence, mismanagement, rudeness, unkindness and waste. I would now be absolutely terrified of going into any of the NHS hospitals near where I live. One of them is so bad that our GP refuses to send anyone there. Another is a favoured haunt of the so-called hospital superbug. I have boxfuls of hundreds of letters from Daily and Sunday Telegraph readers, describing heart-rending experiences in NHS hospitals.
And last week, if I wasn't dreaming, I heard some sort of expert telling Radio 4's Today programme that, according to the rules of chaos theory (if chaos has rules) the NHS, with its million employees, is essentially too chaotic to run.
It is absolutely amazing to me that it has taken everyone so long, so astonishingly long, to wake up to the inherent failures of the NHS, and most particularly of NHS hospitals. Many of them have been a national disgrace in one way or another for decades. Yet until very recently the very suggestion was considered a form of blasphemy; as with religious faith, people went on believing in the NHS regardless of the evidence, and became very angry when challenged by irritating people like me.
I imagine this wilful ignorance can only be explained by the fact that most influential people have always gone private, in medicine as well as in education, and just didn't know - or care - what really went on. It may also be that politicians and doctors themselves, when NHS patients, have often been better treated than most people, and so never quite understood. Perhaps they have lived in the better areas with the better hospitals. At any rate, it seems to me very odd that top doctors have not until recently gone in for any serious whistle blowing.
At last they have begun to do so. One of the most effective was Professor Lord Winston's public anguish about the way his mother was treated on the NHS - the Labour government which had ennobled him was very cross about that. Last week, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Sir Peter Morris, said after a long personal peregrination round the country's hospitals, that the NHS is in a desperate state and that the Government is unfit to run it: "Things are in such a mess, much worse than I would have imagined possible." Politicians, he says, "can't resist interfering or trying to interfere I wonder whether we don't need a health service that is funded by government but independent of it."
When a man of this stature speaks out like this, perhaps the time really has come when people - or, more to the point really, when voters - are prepared to think radically. Perhaps the public is at last losing its cherished faith in the old NHS; perhaps the public will at last accept the idea that a national health service need not be a nationalised health service. Who really cares how granny gets her hip op, so long as she's treated quickly and well? And who really is still under the old illusion that health care is free?
The real opposition comes not from the public but from the public service sector, for obvious reasons; they're even advertising in cinemas these days against private involvement in the NHS. Since they are Labour voters, this poses some delightfully insoluble problems for the Labour government. I am looking forward to seeing this monstrous crew brought down by the weight of their own squabbling insincerities. So much for 24 hours for Labour to save the NHS. It is the other way round now - four years for the NHS to destroy Labour.
I can't guess whether the Conservatives will make the most of this and come up, after their European travels, with really radical ideas; we must hope that despair has made them desperately bold. But there is no shortage of ideas here at home. Sheila Lawlor, director of the independent think tank Politeia, pointed out in a study published last week that European models are not very different from what Beveridge favoured before the war - a universal health care scheme, funded mainly by taxes, partly by insurance and charity, but provided by a mixture of hospitals, whether independent, voluntary or local authority. This scheme had cross-party support but was dumped by Aneurin Bevan after the war, in favour of nationalising the hospitals. It was grossly underfunded from the first; there never was an NHS golden age.
Another promising idea, in a very thorough study by Ruth Lea of the Institute of Directors, is the concept of an NHS passport. Everyone would be entitled to certain free "core" treatments, and could choose where to have them. People choosing a private hospital would have to pay extra; people choosing treatments beyond the guaranteed "core" services have to meet the cost themselves, as many do today where the NHS can't or won't provide. This would involve some painful choices, but there is no proposal about the NHS which doesn't. Meanwhile, and pending a long overdue revolution, NHS hospital remains for many of us a terrifying prospect.
Saturday, December 08, 2001 | Comments (0)
That Mickey Mouse operator has trampled on our dreams
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, we are told. Speak nothing but good of the dead. How absurd that is. What better time could there be than post mortem to say what one really thinks? And even if it is rather mean to do so when some, at least, are grieving for the dear departed, there can be very little wrong in doing so on someone's 100th anniversary.
So I would like to take the opportunity of his 100th anniversary to say that I absolutely hate Walt Disney. I do not mean the man, so much as his works, and most particularly his so-called animated feature films, or cartoons.
There is something loathsome about the homogenised, sanitised, reductive sentimentality that is the Disney vision. He has invaded the whole world, commandeered its great myths and turned them into stereotyped, saccharine schlock, and then forced them back on us in their new, soulless form.
It is a mystery that his work is called animation; animation should surely mean bringing life or soul to something. Disney has drained some of the world's best stories of both; he turns archetype into stereotype. He has colonised our imagination.
Loathing Disney is sometimes lonely. The only person I know of who hates him as much as I do, probably even more, is one of my favourite American writers, Carl Hiaasen, and I suspect he may be mad. People seem to think I am a bit mad about this, too. After all, billions of children love it, don't they? And it's a dazzling technical and imaginative achievement, isn't it?
Well, the same could be said of junk food and its marketing. Children love junk food, too, and so do squillions of adults all over the world. Disney to me is the revolting, unhealthy candy and cola of imaginative life - addictive, hugely profitable and very bad for you in ways that people are only beginning to understand.
One of life's mysteries is the way in which inferior Western products, such as junk food, Disney and bad pop music, can so easily drive out the better things that went before. There can hardly be a villager in Indonesia who would not now prefer to watch a Western soap on television than watch traditional shadow puppets with an old-fashioned wayang gulit orchestra.
If you have read or been told the story of The Little Mermaid, or Aladdin, or Charlotte's Web or 101 Dalmatians, you will have all sorts of subtle, shifting, half-formed images and feelings in your imagination; the imprecision, the shadowiness of your own imaginings are a large part of their power, their glamour.
But if you watch any of the Disney versions, your vision will be entirely blotted out by his folksy, cutesy monstrosities and his vulgar music. Soon you will not remember how you saw and felt; his response will have supplanted yours.
Of course this is true of the rest of the so-called animation industry, and Disney is not necessarily the worst. It's just that Disney has just become the generic term, like Hoover, for a certain product, and in my view a certain mutilated sensibility. If you look back over the most powerful examples of the Disney vision, and most of us have seen most of them, what we get is an extraordinarily limited universe.
It is a world of simpering fairies and sexless princelets, of squeaking infantile voices and silly walks. Almost all the heroines have bulging baby brows and childish mannerisms, and their eyes are too grotesquely manipulative for even Diana, Princess of Wales to have tried on.
I almost thought, watching Aladdin not long ago, that those slowly blinking eyelashes and sidelong glances that shy young Disney lovers always exchange were in this case being deliberately camped up. But probably not. Nothing is too excessively obvious or sentimental for Disney.
The humans are bad enough - Disney is useless on real heroism or adult love, and only any good on the bad and scary - but the animals are far worse. Disney takes the wildness and strangeness of animals and reduces them to domesticated pseudo-human ninnies.
A great deal of skilled observation and technical virtuosity has gone into depriving them of their essential qualities and their dignity. Think of the monstrous barnyard creatures in Charlotte's Web, or the vile singing lobster in The Little Mermaid, or the unforgivable King of the Jungle song in The Jungle Book.
Even as a little girl, I could see that there was something wrong about Lady and the Tramp; watching the two dogs sharing a plate of spaghetti with meatballs, eating in a most undoggy way and simpering at each other - she with fluttering eyelashes, upturned eyes and self-deprecatory smirk, as per the Disney formula - I knew then that neither dogs nor humans did or should behave like that. It was seriously untrue, and embarrassing. The same goes for most of Disney - invasive, embarrassing and profoundly untruthful.
Tread softly, as Yeats wrote, because you tread on my dreams. Walt Disney was quite incapable of treading carefully. In fact, he began by sending a fat, stupid mouse to mince and gesticulate and jump up and down all over the magic carpet of our private dreams.
But perhaps the public psyche has made its own protest. "Mickey Mouse" has gone into the language as an expression meaning preposterous, useless or a cheap imitation. That is Disney's fitting epitaph, the last, unscripted squeak of the damnable mouse that began it all.
Saturday, December 01, 2001 | Comments (0)
Why we have a family pact not to give Christmas presents
The New Seriousness did not last very long. For a few short weeks after the September 11 atrocities, there was a lot of earnest chat about things that really matter, and about returning to the enduring values of home and hearth. The powers-that-be were so worried about the flight from the high street (to home and hearth and enduring values) that they even felt obliged, in the name of patriotism, to urge us back to the shops.
They need not have worried. We didn't stay away long. The manicurists of South Kensington were empty for only a week. Ageing nightclubbers are drifting sedately back to Annabel's. And we are all shopping again, or at least most of us are; we are not just a nation of shopkeepers, we are a nation of shoppers.
That can be the only explanation for the extraordinary interest shown in a confession by my fellow columnist Andrew Marr that he intended to boycott early Christmas shopping. His many well-considered views on this and that, such as Afghanistan or enduring values, have not, it seems, excited anything like the passionate reaction of press and public to his feelings about shopping.
Columnists and feature writers took up the theme, letters followed and his own wife wrote to this newspaper, accusing him of insincerity and dereliction of duty. Clearly shopping, and Christmas shopping especially, touches a sensitive national nerve.
How sad it is. And how odd. Every year I am horribly depressed by the nonsensical fuss that intelligent people make about Christmas shopping. Mrs Marr, for instance, says that she has a minimum of 29 relations who all "need presents at Christmas". Who actually needs presents? I'm reminded of the maternity nurse in an Evelyn Waugh short story who presents the young mother-to-be with an enormously elaborate, expensive list of baby equipment and who, when asked whether it is all essential, replies grimly that it is quite essential for those who can afford it.
Of course it is important (and a pleasure) to give presents to some people at Christmas, even to children who have already got far more toys than they know what to do with: their over-sophisticated little faces will light up for at least a couple of minutes. But the idea that one has to buy expensive objects for one's entire extended family and inner social circle seems not only daft, but also faintly obscene, especially now. Christmas is not just about presents.
I had better be careful. Not only is it unpatriotic to seek to undermine shopping, but it will also soon be illegal to say anything about what Christmas is or is not, or how not to celebrate it, for fear of incitement to religious hatred.
I know that many people's Christmas arrangements are not really religious and that there is nothing in the Bible about Christmas trees, but with ill-considered, catch-all legislation such as the proposals currently in the Commons, and with the usual conflation of religion with culture, one cannot be too careful. So I will say it while I still can. Christmas need not be about shopping, about having and spending. Conspicuous consumption, though fun, is not a duty. Competitive present buying is something you can leave to other people, unless you enjoy it and have lots of time and money. Long ago in our family, we made an agreement that adults would not exchange Christmas presents; it has been wonderfully liberating.
However, the rush to the shops isn't merely in pursuit of presents. In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of expectation, and of choice, and Christmas now has to be "lifestylish". Even downmarket magazines and colour supplements print helpful shoppers' countdown calendars of how to plan your shopping days to Christmas.
These aren't merely the usual (and incomprehensible) instructions about when to make and freeze puddings and sauces and game pies for 12. They also compile thoughtful lists of this year's "must-haves" of motifs for tablescaping and Christmas tree bedizening, of new ethnic baubles, new embroidered tablecloths, new minimal napkins, new blown-glass candlesticks, designer crackers, customised scented candles, festive silver name-card holders, handpressed wrapping paper, shot silk and taffeta ribbons, competitive flower arrangements and staircase swathes. And on and on. And a wreath of contorted hazel twigs and dried persimmons for the front door, so long as it is entirely different from last year's and from everyone else's.
No one has to buy any of this stuff. Tablescaping is something we can all get by without. No one even has to buy very many presents. Most people claim to hate the whole thing and some of them, at least, must mean it. I can only think it must fulfil some deep inner need. A few years ago, I read a survey that claimed that the vast majority of people feel truly "empowered" only when in a shopping mall.
This remains a mystery to me; being in a shopping mall is the only time when I feel absolutely disempowered - helplessly confused and demoralised by extremes of senseless choice between thousands of pretty much identical objects, in pretty much identical chain stores.
Think of the hundreds of bottles of indistinguishable shampoo; was it for this that capitalism triumphed? Capitalist materialist sybarite though I am, all this strikes me as decadent, or at least as quite unnecessary. Christmas to me means family love and enduring hope: I suppose that's the old seriousness, in part, and it still survives.
Saturday, November 24, 2001 | Comments (0)
More religious schools will simply divide our children
Estelle Morris, the Education Secretary, and her masters are saying that there should be many more religious schools, as proposed in their Education White Paper and in the Dearing report. This is based on the assumption, apparently held by Tony Blair, that religious schools do better in exams and, in any case, that people like them. Actually, state religious schools are not as good as the Government thinks, according to a recent report by Civitas, but merely less inadequate than normal state schools. All the same, many parents will go to immense lengths to squeeze their children into the best Christian schools, as Tony and Cherie Blair have done themselves, sending their children several miles across London every day for the privilege of a very superior Catholic education at public expense.
However, it is not true that most people are keen on religious schools. At least, they are not keen on having any more. Labour got this wrong. A poll commissioned by the Observer this week found that 80 per cent of the sample did not support the extension of single-faith schools which would include religions such as Islam and Judaism. That's putting it delicately. People, starting with me, are positively against it.
Unaccustomed though I am to agreeing with trade unionists, Labour backbenchers, local education authorities and even Lord Ouseley, late of the Commission for Racial Equality, a very assorted multitude of us is extremely alarmed; it is blindingly obvious that single-faith schools will create ghettos, especially in inner cities. They will prevent integration and understanding.
Lord Ouseley has said that the emergence of "monocultural" state schools in Bradford was a key factor in last summer's riots. And these ghetto schools were not even intentionally single-faith religious schools: how much worse the tension might have been if they had been institutionally segregated. This policy of creating more faith schools is immensely dangerous, and it is quite rightly exploding in the Prime Minister's face.
However, it is Miss Morris who must take the flak for him, and in the face of it last week she announced that religious schools must be "inclusive". This is desperately silly. How does she propose to make them so? She must be thinking of compulsion: she cannot suppose that people will voluntarily send their children to a school of a very different faith, simply in the name of inclusiveness.
Besides, the whole point of religion is that it is not inclusive but exclusive (like the excellent Catholic state school down the road which won't accept my unchristened son): real conviction is in its nature exclusive; that is an uncomfortable truth that won't go away, no matter how often you repeat the weasel word "inclusive".
Would little Christians and agnostics have to be bussed in to Muslim schools, and little Hindus and Buddhists press-ganged into joining the little Blairs at the Oratory? And would the schools have to stop being quite so religious, in order not to offend pupils of other faiths, or of none? This may have happened in a lot of Anglican state schools, which (as their bishops lament) have lost the courage of their feeble convictions, but it won't be accepted without protest in religious schools where faith is still real. Besides, it is curious to insist that lack of conviction should be the price of survival for a religious school.
You might have thought that the current world crisis would have taught the Government to think more clearly about religion, and to take it seriously. Tony Blair may be going about with a copy of the Koran these days, but he is curiously obtuse about religious sentiment. There was something delightfully comic about him angrily denouncing Glen Hoddle not long ago for his wholly unacceptable views on reincarnation without apparently realising that exactly those views are held by hundreds of thousands of perfectly respectable British Hindus, many of them Labour voters. Other faiths and cultures believe things that Christians or agnostics or humanists or liberals do not approve of and do not accept, and vice versa. But in a religious school, such things will be taught and taught for truth.
The Government does not appear to have faced up to the question of what religious schools might actually have on their curricula. I was astonished to hear from friends who have taught in a 95 per cent Muslim state primary school in London where the parents almost all refused, for what they said were religious reasons, to let their children play musical instruments, sing, dance or make pictures. They would not allow their daughters to swim. This was not a religious school, so those activities were offered, but had it been, they would not have been on the syllabus.
Meanwhile, in after-school religious classes, children were made to do long hours of rote learning, and quite severely punished for inattention and mistakes. How inclusive could all this hope to be? Indeed, how acceptable is it? I can't help thinking that there must be, in contemporary cant, "issues around" human rights here.
While Britain was an almost exclusively Judaeo-Christian country, it was possible to have religious state schools, because there was little or no cultural conflict involved. That is no longer so. What we need, therefore, is not more religious state schools of any kind, but fewer, and preferably none at all. Religion must be kept out of state schools, in the interests of peace and community and, for those who care, in the interests of faith as well.
Saturday, November 17, 2001 | Comments (1)
What the Tories must do to avoid becoming history
Long ago, in the early 1980s, when I used to work for BBC Television, the head of my department used regularly to cross-examine me with amazement. "You can't really support that woman," he would say. "You can't mean it. You couldn't."
Nowadays this would be considered political harassment, especially since the man had my career in his control - in those days, it was absolutely standard, in my experience in the BBC, to point and jeer at people who supported Margaret Thatcher. Lots of people were nasty to me about it. I didn't mind too much, since I really did admire her, and I really did - in a way I had never dreamt of doing before - identify myself with the Conservative Party.
How astonishingly different things are today. People now despise Conservatives even more than then, yet Tories now have no true faith to cling to in their persecution. They have very little idea of what they are supposed to believe in, or of why it is so horribly despised, whatever it may be.
And there seems to be no one to articulate it with all the necessary eloquence and conviction. Listening to Iain Duncan Smith's debut at the Dispatch Box last week made me wonder not just whither the Conservative Party, but why. The whole thing is deeply embarrassing, especially at parties.
However, now may not be the moment to despair. Now may well be the moment to buy Conservative, while stocks are low. Overheated Labour shares will certainly plummet before long and there seem to be signs that the Conservatives are trying to reinvent themselves: I read an interesting collection of essays last week by various young Conservatives, called A Blue Tomorrow, highly recommended to the party mournful. It is always an exciting moment when things are so bad that people are forced to start thinking.
Thinking is always said to be something Tories are not very keen on. I don't agree. It's nonsense to say that the Tories are the stupid party; the best Conservative ideas have always been difficult to grasp and often counter-intuitive, unlike Labour platitudes such as "excellence for all", which is easy to grasp, oxymoronic and wrong. And Conservatives can sometimes take on ideology, if they must, as they did under Mrs Thatcher; hers was a revolution of ideology.
What Conservatism means to me, more than anything else, is freedom. I hate bullying, bossiness, snooping, tinkering and unnecessary, unwanted change, imposed by the arrogant man in Whitehall or in the town hall. I hate statism and look to Toryism for a defence against it.
Statists have an irresistible urge not only to interfere, but to change things for the sake of change, just as tree surgeons are driven to interfere with trees and hairdressers long to cut hair. That's why statists cannot help but be the enemies of conservation, of conserving what is good. (Tories should certainly hijack the conservation bandwagon.)
What is more, statists are always centralists and imposers of uniformity in the name of state policy, so they cannot help but be the enemies of what is quirky, local and pragmatic. Statism is the enemy of personal responsibility and personal enterprise, just as freedom is their protector.
All pretty obvious stuff, you may say. But the truth is that the Conservative Party has internalised too much of the statist mentality. There are lots of things the Conservatives have tried to control, thereby getting the worst of all possible worlds - the reputation for traditional Tory heartlessness without a compensating reputation for traditional Tory libertarianism. Harsh in the bedroom, lax in the marketplace - that is not my kind of Conservatism, and besides, it is a political suicide note.
The Conservatives have no business trying to favour family values, or sexual preferences, one way or another. These moral matters are none of the government's business. The idea of supporting marriage via minor tax breaks is both ludicrous and wrong. It is wrong for Tories to claim the power to decide who may and who may not marry; those who want to take on the responsibilities of marriage or of parenthood should not be prevented from doing so, whether or not they are homosexual.
The Tories ought never to have involved themselves with gay literature in schools and Section 28 - that is the business of school governors and head teachers; besides, their response has been out of all proportion to the facts, and driven more by emotion than by reason.
Supporting new religious schools at state expense is wrong: religion is not the business of the state. It is daft of Tories to go on supporting the whole, mad, tottering, gothic edifice of tax allowances and benefit qualifications, with all their intrusions and perverse incentives. And so on. Sadly Tories seem at heart all too often as bossy as the Left-of-centre statists. While that continues, they will continue to be without a constituency, and without interest.
Even worse than this tendency to interfere in private life has been the Tory failure to take on the deeply rooted statist mentality in public life - particularly in public services. Sometimes, I think that would have been quite impossible for anyone: it is probably as hopeless as ever.
But here is one heartfelt proposal for Tory thinkers. How about a serious investigation of the precise content of training courses in social services, probation services, education, nursing and so on, which is where the statist rot sets in? And how about some public exposure of it? That really would be of some service to the state.
Saturday, October 27, 2001 | Comments (0)
The many wrongs committed in the name of human rights
Since we are, astonishingly, about to have a law that will curb our freedom to talk about religion, what I am about to say will soon be unsayable, without at the very least a police caution. So I must get it said quickly.
I believe that the idea of universal human rights is a bad and dangerous idea; for all its nobility, it tends to lead to terrible confusion and cross-purposes, and to the most bitter disappointment. It is clearly a religious idea: it is something in which people have faith, as a revealed truth, which neither has nor needs a rational basis; it is self-evident to good people. (Self-evident was, after all, the word used by the writers of the US Constitution.)
Believers believe in it passionately, and despise unbelievers. And it will soon become almost impossible to declare that you do not truly believe in the idea of universal human rights, whatever the Home Secretary may decree; it is the only form of passionate, unself-consciously proselytising religious faith left to the faithless West.
I found myself last week at a Human Rights Watch fundraising dinner at the Natural History Museum, talking to the celebrated QC Geoffrey Robertson, who has had a distinguished career specialising in human rights. I asked him what was the origin of universal human rights, meaning (rather rhetorically) to challenge the assumption that there is any objective basis for the idea.
But the cavernous room in the museum was very noisy, and I failed to make myself either audible or clear, because he said - or at least I think he said - that the modern idea of universal human rights was conceived in 1939 at a meeting of British socialists, including H G Wells, Barbara Wootton and A A Milne.
The memory of this fragment was rather faint in the cold light of the next day, but it was all too plausible. There is indeed something altogether utopian and fantastical (Wells), as well as child-like (Milne) about the concept of universal human rights.
I don't mean human rights as part of a social contract in a particular society; in such a case, human, or rather civil, rights are based on tradition, consent and law, and breaches can be punished. But universal human rights, applying to everyone in every society, have always seemed to me perfectly absurd. It is all very fine for the UN to declare that every child has a universal human right to a home and a square meal, but it is meaningless verbiage in the real world.
Who conferred those rights? Who is to fulfil them? And who can be prosecuted for the failure to fulfil them? Besides, societies and cultures do truly disagree on human rights. And by what universal human right may the universalists inflict human rights on countries and cultures that think differently? Besides, even when people do agree on human rights, one tends to conflict with another. Such conflict cannot be resolved universally, but only locally and pragmatically.
This has been a confusing week for anyone interested in human rights. The Government seems to be both absurdly over-mighty and absurdly weak. On the one hand, it has suddenly decided to remove our right to talk freely about religion, let alone joke about it - how innocent things were when Pamela Stephenson was able to sing "Ayatollah, don't Khomeini closer" on Not the Nine O'Clock News.
On the other hand, the Government is quite unable to support our universal human right to life, limb and unjudgmental religious chat by deporting or extraditing suspected terrorists from our shores, since the European Convention on Human Rights makes it pretty much impossible. Instead David Blunkett proposes new legislation to lock up suspected terrorists indefinitely. Brilliant. What I want to know is whether the suspected terrorists have been consulted on all this. Surely that is no less than their right. What would they prefer? I shall be writing to my MP about this.
It is all very confusing. On Thursday, I went to a lunch at the think-tank Politeia, for the launch of a lucid pamphlet by Martin Howe, QC, depressingly called Tackling Terrorism: The European Human Rights Convention and the Enemy Within and I found myself huffing and puffing against the human rights orthodoxy. Yet later the same day, I found myself supporting Human Rights Watch. Inconsistent though this sounds, I cannot think of any charity more worthy of support.
Human Rights Watch sends quite astonishingly brave researchers all over the world to record the terrible things that are done to people in war and in peace - in Chechnya and Sierra Leone, for example - and then to make the rest of the world pay attention.
It also supports heroic men and women who try to fight these evils in their own countries, often at great risk to themselves. I was particularly touched by an Indian lawyer, himself a Dalit (once called untouchable), describing the deliberate degradation of many millions of Dalits in peaceful, prospering India. Three of his colleagues have been shot.
I am not really being inconsistent about universal human rights. What this charity does is right and immensely important. It's just that its name isn't right. I think it should be called Human Wrongs Watch. It is so much easier to agree on what is wrong. It's almost always intuitively obvious. It is often local. And it is so much easier to deal with specific negatives, than with vague, all-embracing, codified all-purpose positives. As in medicine, the more universal a panacaea, the less it tends to work.
Saturday, October 20, 2001 | Comments (0)
Anne Robinson: a woman of her time - and a monster
Anne Robinson has a curiously powerful grip on the public imagination. Her programme The Weakest Link is one of the most popular ever, here and in America, and has made her rich and famous. Her Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, serialised here this past week, have been hugely discussed and read. I have been wondering why.
There must be something more interesting about her story than just another knickers-round-the-neck, vomit-on-the-cot confessional. Perhaps there is something - excuse the word - iconic about her. She is, perhaps, an anti-heroine of our time. Her struggles reflect, perhaps, the conflicts of her time.
So, interrupting my study of Cherie: The Perfect Life of Mrs Blair (unauthorised), I read what Ms Robinson has to say about her extremely imperfect life. I can't quite decide which is more repellent. Oddly enough, both women went to the same Catholic convent in Liverpool; what an awesome responsibility for all those nuns.
It is true that Ms Robinson has lived through an extraordinary time of change for women. She went from an extremely repressive provincial religious school into a flurry of Fleet Street, sex, pregnancy, early marriage, abortion, alcohol, adultery and divorce, at a time, in the late 1960s, when male chauvinist piggery was still quite astonishing. Men were amazingly patronising to women, not least to women much cleverer than themselves. Different rules applied then; women under 45 can hardly imagine what that was like.
I am beginning to wish that someone would make an oral history collection of the appalling things that men have said, let alone done, to women at work in the second part of the 20th century. So many of us kept these things quiet, determined not to get mad but to get even, or better still, ahead.
Of all the nasty, and now actionable, put-downs in my own working life, one of my favourites was let fall by a senior colleague in BBC TV in the early 1980s. He had just told me he had lost an audition tape I'd made a few weeks earlier; I asked for studio time to make another. "What? You?" he exclaimed incredulously. "You're pregnant. You're finished." For a moment I had a happy little fantasy of how very silly this Leftish liberal would look in an industrial tribunal.
So I have some considerable sympathy with the fury Ms Robinson felt about men's attitudes in the 1970s, when it was worse. I can believe that it may well be partly true that she lost custody of her baby daughter to her former husband, Charlie Wilson, because the judge disapproved of her ambition, though not (of course) of his. In those days - so recently - an ambitious father was normal; an ambitious mother was a heartless harridan. There was however, something else that, by her own account, made her an unfit mother - her drop-down drunkenness.
But astonishingly quickly, and particularly in journalism, women suddenly began to become powerful. The period since the mid-1970s has been a remarkably good time for female journalists, because of positive discrimination in all journalism, lookism in the expanding world of television and the feminisation of the media.
For most of her adult life, Ms Robinson has been a great beneficiary of all this - hence her enormous salary and celebrity, even in her mid-fifties. In her immense good fortune, she has been a woman of her time. In her misfortunes, to judge from her own account, she has simply been herself - something of a monster.
At least she reminds me of some of the female monsters I have known. And what I'm quite sure of about female monsters is that they are born, not made. Their individual circumstances cannot possibly explain their monstrous behaviour; monsters are just differently wired.
I quite like female monsters, in a way. I almost admire them. They have an enraged and desperate grandiosity, like Ms Robinson's, that can be rather exhilarating. We would all like to be flamboyantly outrageous, or brutally frank, or fiercely tough; for most of us it is a spectator sport. For Ms Robinson, it has been a way of life, and to wealth.
What is intriguing about the female monsters in my life has been their tormented relationship with control and self-control. Usually they are controlling of anyone around them, and capable of heroic self-discipline as well. But what actually distinguishes them is their tendency to abandon all self-control at the slightest provocation. I write as one who has been thrown out into the snow on Christmas Day, more than once and with nowhere to go, as a result of a very minor disagreement about the Radio Times listings.
Wondering about Ms Robinson, and what on earth she is doing publishing these monstrous memoirs, it occurs to me that there is a match between her temperament and a contemporary mood in popular culture. We have seen a growing emphasis on feeling - the sentimentalisation of culture - and an insistence on confession and victimhood.
What next? one might ask, as a person with a finger on the popular pulse. Why yes - humiliation! Humiliation, meaning of course public and media humiliation, is the rich seam that Ms Robinson is mining. She humiliates her guests on her monstrous show, and now she is going on digging, mining her own humiliation in her own humiliating confessions of an "unfit mother" - a very weak link.
The combination of voyeurism, sadism and sympathy she is exploiting is truly monstrous, truly lucrative and truly a sign of our times.
Saturday, October 13, 2001 | Comments (0)
Blair's cultural colonialism is the right-on man's burden
A man can be very deeply moved by his own rhetoric. Gladstone was said to have been inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity. And Tony Blair was also deeply, visibly moved and shaken by his own eloquence in his extraordinary speech at the Labour Party conference this week. He was not so much inebriated as carried away on the wings of deathless poesy, in this case his own, and transported into a distant, inspiring, undefined blue yonder. And he got away with it. It was astonishing. Almost everybody agreed that it was an extremely fine thing. Yet an important part of what he was saying was outrageous nonsense.
This is the moment to make all the obvious hasty disclaimers. I am not an admirer of the Prime Minister, but I must admit that he has been extremely impressive ever since he heard the news on September 11. He has consistently taken the right line. He has consistently appeared strikingly statesmanlike and resolute, and it seems that he has been a very useful and tactful support to President Bush in many ways. And so on and so on. I admit it.
I also admit that this is a time when it is right, for once, for a politician to talk in the highest moral terms. But our Prime Minister seems to be unable to keep his moral terms down merely to the highest; he soars irrepressibly into the Olympian, the stratospheric. From a simple, clear ultimatum to the Taliban, he suddenly soars to an entirely global plan of peace and prosperity. Another dimension is appearing, it seems. If the international community chose to come together, he explains, it could sort out all the awful things that are going on all over the world today, everywhere.
Together, for instance, he says we could sort out the continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; we could sort out the whole of Africa, in fact. "Our side" - that's to say, a new partnership of the "international community" - could give more aid and debt relief to Africa, plus our "help" with "good governance", infrastructure, military training and conflict resolution. Africans, on their side of the deal, would have to put a stop to dictatorship, human rights abuses, corruption and bad "governance", and start being properly democratic, like us. With our help.
And not only could we - and should we - "heal the scar" that is the state of Africa (Mr Blair's imagery plummeted for a minute here, since scars are already healed, but you get the idea). We would also have a duty to heal scars of one kind or another right across the globe, with our Prime Minister as one of the leading moral Medicins Sans Frontieres. From Aghanistan to the Cote d'Ivoire, from the Falls Road to the Negev, we could just sort things out. Even the weather. Get them to do things our way. The right way. Simple, really - put like that.
I've been told repeatedly that all this was just feelgood conference waffle; no one takes it seriously or thinks it matters. But I think it does matter that the Prime Minister allows himself at such a time to indulge in irresponsible adolescent waffle. Worse still, I suspect he takes it seriously.
Anyone contemplating the evils in the world must agree that there are countless obstacles in the way of all the best intentions. One, of which Mr Blair seems oddly unaware, is the spectre of imperialism. His high-minded talk sounded, even to me, like the crudest of neo-imperialist cultural colonialism. I thought everybody in the Labour Party knew about that, and how wrong and racist it is. They used to talk of nothing else, and these days cultural colonialism is still one of the top grievances of the multicultural brigade. So it's very odd to hear a Labour prime minister recommending it; what he is urging us, so earnestly, to take up is the neo-colonialist version of the white man's burden - the right-on man's burden. I don't think all those lesser breeds outside the law are going to like it very much, or even pay much attention, not least because most of them will be members of the very "international community" that is supposed to be sorting these things out. With us.
How, for example, in practice would this new international alliance sort out the child slave trade in Benin and Gabon, to mention only two of the African countries that permit it? Both countries are democracies, both have signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but still it goes on, entirely legally. We think it wrong, but they find it acceptable. So what could the international community do? Or, to put it another way, by what international agreement, or laws, could outsiders barge into those countries, override their laws, and use force against their citizens?
Do we have the will to do it, even if we believe we have the moral right? And where should we stop? Do we rescue tens of millions of little girls all over the world from the dangers of genital mutilation? Do we round up all their grannies and throw them into UN-sponsored jails? Do we install a UN bride-burning watch team in those Indian provinces where it might be useful? Do we drop international paras into Chinese gulags where prisoners are shot to provide spare body parts for the rich? And who is going to pay for these quixotic expeditions?
History has taught us that even with the right and the will and the money, most interventions, no matter how high minded, have done little but harm. Look no further than Northern Ireland: that should have shamed the Prime Minister into a little geopolitical modesty in his rhetoric; clearly, he cannot be shamed into a proper silence.
Saturday, October 06, 2001 | Comments (0)
I used to get a lot of mileage out of sex (as a public speaker)
In the painful uncertainty surrounding everything these days, there is a lot of cancellation going on, and there have been a few moments, I admit, when I have been grateful for it.
Last week, for instance, I learnt that a fringe meeting to be held at the Conservative Party Conference, on the question of "Whither the Tory party?", or something of the sort, had been cancelled. This may well have been more because of lack of interest than the current international crisis, but, either way, it's off. As I was to have been one of the speakers, I was delighted and relieved: I have been wondering, ever since I was asked, what on earth made me agree to go. It must have been the usual shaming combination of vanity and weakness.
What is the siren call of public speaking? Why on earth does anyone do it? At least, why do I do it? I know that the delightful flattery of the invitation soon gives way to very nasty twinges of self-doubt, in my case at least.
I was rather relieved to discover that the writer Petronella Wyatt, witty and glamorous though she is and confident though she seems, is not impervious to these twinges. I met her just before she was about to give a speech last Tuesday at a Right-wing lunch in the Lanesborough. Although she didn't seem nervous, she did immediately agree that the way one lines oneself up for this kind of thing is very odd, considering that it is entirely optional.
What is worse is that, for some reason, I seem always to speak on rather depressing subjects. And it is entirely my own fault. On Friday, I had somehow set myself to answer the question, at a think-tank I find both admirable and alarming, of whether public service training renders people unfit for public service. At least I'd set myself up to ask the question, but it comes to the same thing. Important but depressing.
Petronella's speech, by contrast, was fun. She told jokes. People enjoyed it. She enjoyed it. But I defy even Petronella to inject some humour into the training of social workers. I am really beginning to think it is time to change my subjects.
Petronella claims that she has two speeches these days, one about being unhappy, which we got on Tuesday, and another about sex. Well, aspects of sex anyway. And that reminded me that there was a time when I used to give talks about nothing but sex. Well, aspects of sex anyway. Nice girls don't really talk about sex. Not as such. Even these days. They talk around it.
It's almost inexhaustible. Sex - as in gender - is a particularly useful term on the pages of The Daily Telegraph, where the word gender is used only in its grammatical sense. Then there's sex as in differences between the sexes and in attitudes to sex. Then there is sex as in sex wars, sex as in sexual freedom, sex as in abuse of - in advertising, or in patriarchal societies - and sex as in sexual identity.
All in all, I used to get a lot of mileage out of sex. As a public speaker, I mean. And it was so much more fun than talking about social services or teacher training. Perhaps I should go back to it. At least one cannot make terrible errors talking about sex or even about unhappiness - one's views are one's views and no awkward facts, or even errors, need ever intrude.
But with ideology in the social services, subjective though a lot of it is, and wildly unrealistic and doctrinaire though it appears, it is quite easy to make obvious, shaming mistakes. And oh, the humiliation. Oh, the withering remorse. We journalists are not as insensitive or even as insincere as our reckless vanity makes us seem.
I wonder how far wrong I could have gone with "Whither the Tory party?". It was to have taken place with some rather heavy-hitting young men, and I suppose that, if in doubt, I could have let them get on with it, in that show-off, young-man way, while sitting quietly on the platform and looking co-operative myself. I know absolutely nothing about party management and party funds, and I felt from the first, only moments after I had accepted the invitation, that this might prove a handicap.
What I had been planning to say was that, although the party itself might perhaps implode, as people seem to enjoy announcing, I don't think conservative ideas will wither and die, because most of them are right. Only the Conservative Party, and Conservative thinking, are based on an unsentimental and truthful view of human nature, and of the realities of the market, and on a commitment to freedom founded on a personal sense of responsibility and duty.
Other parties may have started to describe themselves pretty much like this, but they are deluding themselves and others. They are essentially statist and interventionist. Admittedly, there are some alarming Conservative tendencies towards authoritarianism, which I resent and fear: they have a long and resilient history in the party, and are hard to resist, but I do not think they are central to Conservatism.
No matter how glum or curtailed the party conference is, Conservative ideas will rise again, if only in some other form, because they are right. I have a rather naive idea, irrational and old-fashioned though it may be, that there is something death-defying about truth. So, too, there is something truly death-defying about humour. So in these serious times, I am now going to go away and try to think, for once, of something funny.
Saturday, September 29, 2001 | Comments (0)
