Minette Marrin

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)

It is decadent to tolerate the intolerable

In all the monstrous accusations that have been hurled since September 11 at the United States, and at the West in general, there is one that has an uncomfortable grain of truth in it, at least as far as Britain is concerned. It is the accusation of decadence. What our accusers have in mind is usually greedy, destructive, licentious, capitalist self-indulgence. I wouldn't agree entirely with that, though I suppose one would have to admit there is something in it too. What I mean is that there has, for a long time, been something decadent in Britain about our failure of conviction, our failure of self-respect.

The usual explanation for this is liberal guilt. I find it difficult to understand, partly because I don't suffer from it for some reason. I don't, for instance, feel inclined to apologise for Britain's part in the slave trade, unspeakable though it was. To feel guilty about it is to have a very weak understanding of history, or of historical responsibility. Besides, if one is going to talk in such irrational terms, several of my forebears did their best, in the Royal Navy, to stop the slave trade. But for many Britons there has been, throughout my adult life, a profound self-doubt, which can be explained only by some sort of misplaced sense of guilt, and which has deprived the indigenous Judaeo-Christian culture of confidence in itself, and in its true and admirable values.

The signs of this loss of conviction are legion and many of them have to do with anxieties about race; there is the obsession with race and "institutional racism", the Orwellian rush of every major institution to confess racist thought crimes, the adoption of the word "winterval" instead of Christmas holidays by a Midlands town council, a Christian Prime Minister using "Season's greetings" on his Christmas cards for fear of - well, fear of what? - and any number of unnecessary capitulations to what you might call the spirit of Durban.

This first struck me forcibly at the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. That a foreign power should openly promise to reward the murder of a British subject was bad enough. Much worse were the astonishingly symbolic images on television of other British subjects publicly burning copies of his book on great bonfires in the streets, and openly baying for his blood, supposedly in the name of Islam. Here in Britain, people howled openly, in groups, in pamphlets, on television and in demonstrations, for a man's death. Worst of all was that nothing was done about it. No one in Britain was arrested - as far as I remember - and no one was tried for any of the obvious offences involved.

Criticism of the book-burners was surprisingly muted. Efforts were made to understand. People argued that it was wise to play things down. Confrontation might be inflammatory. Racial tensions might be exacerbated. Ethnic sensibilities might be offended. All that happened was that Rushdie got bodyguards. I now wonder what lesson was drawn from this feebleness at the time by extremists, Muslim or other. And I wonder whether there is any connection between that decadent failure of nerve then and the way Britain has since acquired a shameful reputation as a haven for terrorists.

More than half a dozen foreign governments have filed diplomatic protests with the Foreign Office about the presence in Britain of terrorist groups. The list of known or suspected major terrorist individuals or groups in the country is long. At the same time, it is still possible to say outrageous and unspeakable things here with impunity.

Omar Bakri Mohamed, for instance, a man denied asylum in the 1980s but still living here and apparently seeking British nationality, is the spokesman for the UK-based sister organisation of Osama bin Laden's Islamic Front for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders. He leads the Al-Muhajiroun group, which aims to overthrow Western society and create a worldwide Islamic state, and has issued a fatwa against the president of Pakistan as a "puppet" of America; last week his group called for holy war against Britain and America. Yet, for all the Home Secretary's warnings, the man is still at large.

It's true that the Government has recently tried to tighten the law against terrorism. It is also true, as Oliver Letwin has argued here, that the recent incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law now makes it more difficult for the Government to crack down on terrorists. But I suspect there is, or was, an underlying problem - a deep-seated reluctance among the educated to speak up against cultural assaults and for the host culture, and an unwillingness to criticise members of ethnic minorities at all, even under provocation. Paradoxically, this is extremely dangerous, particularly now, for ethnic minorities; the ordinary law-abiding majority of them can come to be lumped in with the tiny minority of fanatics, as if they were all the same.

What I think of as Western decadence has come together, most unfortunately, with Western tolerance. Tolerance is not only one of the greatest achievements of our civilisation and the bedrock of freedom; it is also its Achilles' heel. As the old sixth-form debating society cliche points out, it does not make sense, in the name of tolerance, to tolerate the intolerant. It does not make sense to allow intolerant people or ideas to undermine our all-too-tolerant culture. We should, in the name of tolerance, insist on the freedom to stop them. If we lack the will to do it, and the wisdom to do it right, then we are decadent, softened up by our soft lives.

Saturday, September 22, 2001 | Comments (0)

We need teachers: we're hiring 'part-time lesbian advocates'

Local government doesn't interest anyone very much. In fact, it is probably a mistake even to mention it in the first sentence of a column on a hopeful Saturday morning in an Indian summer.

Most otherwise civic-minded people would probably be unable to come up with the name of a single one of their local councillors. The whole thing is unglamorous, complicated and boring; if the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the price of understanding local government is eternal tedium.

Yet local government is increasingly where, as we used to say, it's at. A huge proportion of Britain's failing public services are provided, and often decided, locally. All those who pay not the slightest attention to what is going on in local government will get - are getting - the public services they deserve.

It hardly needs repeating that public services are not working very well. We all know that there is a shortage of teachers, nurses, social workers, care workers and home helps, and all the many others we desperately need. It is hard to recruit them and hard to find the money to pay them properly.

Lack of money - or "resources", "funding" or "investment" in New Labour speak - is a large part of the problem. But I think it is compounded by a management culture of waste and muddle.

Most particularly, I mean muddled priorities, which make for waste. When you are confronted by serious problems and a very tight budget, priorities ought to be plain and simple. Indeed they are, to any one whose mindset has not been corrupted by the state sector mentality. But by the time they have been trained - in other words, indoctrinated in a politicised agenda of social change - state sector managers (and with voluntary sector managers, too, who move in and out of the state sector) are often unable to see the wood of real need for the trees of ideology. One does not need to argue with the ideology, though I do. One has only to argue with the skewed priorities.

Anyone who doubts this ought to take a look at a heavy supplement of more than 1,000 state and voluntary sector job advertisements, weighing almost a pound, published by the Guardian last week. These pages were not actually a testament to the most ludicrous political correctness, as some on the Right might think. Many of the jobs have some value to someone, if only in providing employment for the otherwise not very employable. However, most of them are inessential. How can they be justified, at public expense, at a time of such terrible staff shortages on the front line?

It is true that some of the jobs sounded predictably silly. There was at least one post for a "part-time lesbian advocate/caseworker", several for income maximisation welfare rights advisers in Newham, and one, in comic contrast, for a benefits overpayment team leader in Tower Hamlets. A "cafe drop-in co-ordinator" for young black and Asian people is needed in Manchester: according to the small print, "despite high levels of black and Asian young people accessing both our supported housing scheme and resettlement service, they are under-represented in the take-up of building-based services".

A Rhondda council was advertising for a "head of partnership and social inclusion"; her or his job would involve supporting the work of a multi-agency partnership for services for young people "with a unique opportunity to forge effective partnership working between different agencies".

I especially liked the "health promotion specialist: Irish communities" sought by a Birmingham NHS trust, to "improve understanding of HIV, sexual health, sexuality and drug-related issues among agencies and organisations working with Irish people in Birmingham" - not, you note, with Irish people themselves, but with "agencies and organisations".

It may be that sex is something the Irish do differently from the rest of us, and need special advice about. It may even be that some of them would be prepared to listen, in special ethnic drop-in centres, to worthy instruction along such lines from Brummy apparatchiks, and that lots of agencies ought to be dreaming up lots of such schemes.

On the other hand, it is a fair bet that Irish people's problems with drugs and sex are much like everybody else's, and that the existing deluge of information might well be enough for them to be going on with, considering that there are ailing grannies, some of them doubtless Irish, who shiver alone and unwashed in their unheated flats, and mentally ill people with no one to turn to and nowhere to go.

This case is typical of what is wrong with the local government-state sector mentality. It pursues low priorities at the expense of high ones. It draws staff further and further away from the people they should serve, behind increasing mountains of paper work, into ever proliferating "agencies", "organisations" and all the further agencies for networking, outreach, EU co-operation, self-assessment and monitoring of best practice and quality assurance that follow - everyone taking in each other's washing, in other words.

It is our money that is being wasted. It is our sick and old and dispossessed who are neglected as a result of all this. Yet there has been no suggestion, from any political party, about how to deal with this problem, the central political question of today, I believe. It's because it's boring.

Saturday, September 08, 2001 | Comments (0)

Here for Notting Hill Carnival, but wishing I was still in Spain

This year, for the first time, I have a bad feeling about the Notting Hill Carnival, which starts today. For 20 years or more, we have lived in the middle of carnival territory, and I have always had a certain affection for it. This is despite the fact that I hate crowds, can't stand the noise or the smells and that any local people with any sense board up their houses and go away if they can.

We often do so ourselves, and go to southern Spain, where the fiestas are in every way more civilised. But there have been many times when we have stayed and joined the crowds at the end of our street; I have always felt, somehow, that I ought to enjoy it, if only in a literary way. Charles Dickens would have enjoyed it, for instance.

Despite the fearful noise - I can usually feel the reverberations of the music in our floorboards through the soles of my shoes, even with doors and windows closed - there is, or always has been, a real sense of event, a sense of fun.

The general mood always seems relaxed: people smile as they wander about with beer cans, eating food from street stalls and cheerfully dispersing litter or smoking dope. Huge armies with grungy T-shirts and extensive body piercing line both sides of Ladbroke Grove to watch the enormous carnival floats proceeding past, hour after hour.

There is dancing in the smaller streets, if dancing is the right word for the overt, if clumsy, simulation of sex that people go in for: where there's room enough to shake your booty, hundreds of thousands of booties get ineptly shaken.

The numbers are astonishing. About two million people descend for three days on a very small part of Notting Hill - in no sense is all this local any more, except in the planning. And what an acrimonious can of worms that is. For three days, the neighbourhood is taken over by swarms of people so dense that it is almost impossible to walk through them. It is not safe to let children wander about unaccompanied, or to let go a small child's hand, even for a minute.

The intense din must surely be unsafe, too; I come away deafened, with my ears ringing and my heart pounding. In such a state of excitement, the crowd seems to have an impersonal will of its own; it may allow you to move, or it may not. I can never help wondering what would happen to the will of this vast throng if its mood changed.

It may be, I admit, that my own change of mood about the carnival has something to do with my experience of two years ago. I was in our basement, putting some clothes in the washing machine, to the throbbing of the drums outside, when I noticed a loud trickle of water in the wrong place - obviously the plumbing had gone wrong while we were away, as plumbing always does.

The noise seemed to be coming from the door into the basement area. When I looked through the door's glass panels, I was suddenly confronted, fully and frontally, with the source of the flow; a hugely tall and cool young man with awesome dreadlocks, only inches away from me on the other side of the glass. He laughed at me, deliberately peeing against my door. I banged crossly on the glass, but he only laughed harder, gave himself a little shake, adjusted his clothes and leapt off into the gathering din.

That rather took the shine off things. Lots of people who live here are disgusted by the sight and smell of human urine and faeces on their doorsteps or front gardens, and that is to say nothing of the less revolting debris of the carnival.

The litter is truly astonishing. I have never seen anything like it, anywhere in the world, at any festival. Shopkeepers feel forced to board up their shop fronts and, increasingly, ordinary householders are doing it as well. People always say that there isn't much trouble, considering the vast numbers of people. But that may be because of the heavy - and very expensive - police presence.

This year, there will be 10,000 policemen and women on duty, 1,500 more than last year; it will cost the public pounds 4 million, more than the policing of any other event, including the Millennium celebrations and Diana's funeral. Even so, with all this police power, there were two deaths and 19 stabbings last year, quite apart from the mugging, pocket-picking and steaming that no one bothers to report. This year the police are said to be alarmed about the possibility of armed gangs turning up, to say nothing of the risks of being crushed.

What is all this for? And for whom? The old answer would have been that it is for fun. It is worth putting up with a bit of mess and inconvenience for that. Other people would answer that it is largely for celebrating Afro-Caribbean identity, though personally I have always felt that is rather divisive.

Now I am beginning to feel that the answer is becoming uncertain. The cost to the public has become immense, and there is a new sense of racial tension in the air, in some cities at least; even here, at last year's carnival, a young Asian man was killed by some Afro-Caribbeans, apparently without any provocation. There is also a growing sense of menace about Yardie gangs and similar organised crime.

And with heat, drink, dope, youth, sex and crowds, the Notting Hill Carnival is a potential tinderbox. I have a bad feeling about it. I hope I'm wrong.

Saturday, August 25, 2001 | Comments (0)

Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds? Hmm

Home thoughts from abroad are supposed to be pleasant. However beautiful the part of France or Spain we have stayed in for the summer holidays, however scented the warm breezes, I have always thought happily of England, and been glad to come home. Sometimes, walking on the baked red earth among the chestnut trees and cork trees, I have even missed the green damp of Britain.

So when it is time to come home, I am quite content for the last rays of the Mediterranean summer sun to give way to the more subtle beauties of the English autumn. (I say English only because I live in England; in no way do I mean to exclude the beauties of the Welsh, Irish or Scottish autumn, or of any other country's, or of the Cornish summer, either; like the Prime Minister, I try to be inclusive and non-discriminatory, not least about the weather.)

But this summer, for the first time, my home thoughts from abroad have not been very pleasant. Fortunately they have been few, since not many British or international newspapers make their way to this part of Andalucia, and the telephone connection here is erratic enough to keep us away from our laptops and the internet news. But occasionally someone arrives from the airport with a bundle of English papers. How the heart sinks. And how the blood boils.

I saw, to my horror, that John Birt is to go to Downing Street as some sort of something important; I could not bear to read on. Nor could I face the discussion of Margaret Jay's chances of getting hold of the entire BBC. It is too hot here for that kind of shock.

And there ought to be a health hazard attached to holiday portraits of Cherie Blair grinning maniacally, with her arms ostentatiously wound round her grimacing husband, who meanwhile, according to headlines, has "broken off" his holidays to help save a bone marrow girl. The worst of this shameless, cynical posturing is that it seems to work.

Any piece of news or comment about the Conservative Party is also enough to make me feel quite faint: the whole subject is depressing, not least because it gives all our unconservative friends who come to stay such tremendous, contemptuous merriment. It's almost like being a communist apparatchik at the height of glasnost.

Then there has been some sort of sanctimonious nonsense about Brass Eye, and the trial by press of the Hamiltons, and the compulsive picking over of the private life of the Prince of Wales. The unthinking, prurient injustice of it all - and the Government's unthinking, ceaseless intrusion - make me begin to feel a faint sympathy with my husband's plan to live in Spain. At least they are nice about the King here; that may not mean much in itself, but it suggests a sophisticated, civilised world view that is disappearing from Britain.

However, when I was holding forth in this Eeyore mood this week, claiming that everything is going wrong in Britain and that there are at least 27 reasons not to go home, everyone suddenly began to turn Pollyanna and attack me. Everyone means about 14 people around a shady Andalucian table, and nearly all of them were claiming that we in Britain have never had it so good.

It is not only that we have bifocal contact lenses and ready-washed designer lettuce in bags and cash dispensers and thickly filled sandwiches and text-messaging and are richer than ever before: it is also that even the things we complain about are actually improvements.

The devaluation of A-levels, for instance, (it was explained to me) is an excellent thing. A-levels are indeed now very much easier, and some of the questions of today are the O-level questions of yesterday. But that means that those of us who passed A-levels a long time ago can feel very smug, and much cleverer than the young, who might be inclined to patronise us; meanwhile, it is much easier for our children to get into some sort of university.

At the same time, the devaluation of almost all university courses (see above) means that you no longer really need to do one, and, if your children aren't very bright, you can simply tell them - which is true - that it is now becoming cool not to go to university at all.

A cheering headline in the Guardian - how odd to be consoled by the Guardian - made this very point. A Californian friend tells me that having a degree is actually a handicap in the creative world of Hollywood, since all the successful types there are dyslexic or have learning difficulties or something, and don't much like exam passers, who are often thought of as "anal".

And that is all to the good, because, since YPT (Young People Today) have short attention spans and want to do something creative but not anal, their general lack of education will only help them on their way. Accountancy and law and tedious, heavy work such as that can be left to recent immigrants, which, according to recent examination lists, they seem to be willing to take on in immense numbers - so that's all to the good, too.

As for the emasculation and/or the feminisation of Westminster, that is all for the best as well. Politicians have always been frightful, and now they are getting worse (see collapse of moral and educational standards generally, as above).

So the growing irrelevance of Westminster forces politicians into the outer darkness where they belong and cannot trouble us. (There are some exceptions, of course - brilliant but deluded young men and women, often Telegraph writers, who do not yet realise they could serve their country better in other ways.) So things could hardly be better, really.

Saturday, August 18, 2001 | Comments (0)

In praise of those on whom reality has too weak a grasp

There are lies, damn lies and then there are those people who simply have a weak grasp on reality. Lies and bare-faced liars are interesting, of course, and it is quite thrilling, in a prurient way, to watch someone tell shameless lies, as Bill Clinton did.

But there is something even more intriguing, in the human bestiary, about that large group of people who appear to have a weak sense of reality. For them, the boundary between lies and truth, between fact and fantasy, seems to be blurred by the blinding power of their own wishes.

Yet they don't seem irrational, or obviously dotty, or stupid. They always have explanations, often very clever ones. Quite often it is clear that they know they were lying. But what's odd about them is that it seems as though they really believe, some or most of the time, what suits them - they have a weak grasp on reality, or perhaps it is that reality has a weak grasp on them.

There are enormous numbers of people who fall into this group. Included without a doubt must be all unreconstructed socialists, whose lack of understanding of reality is tragic, and several members of the present Cabinet, in whose case it is more often comical.

The same could be said for much of the Conservative Party: this is an affliction to which politicians are particularly prone. But I am trying hard not to think about politics, to avoid weakening my own rather intermittent grasp on reality, and I am now trying to stop thinking about Lord Archer, who inspired these thoughts.

It was a tremendous shock to me, as a child, that there were people who actually believed their own lies. It was an even worse shock to me, as a teenager, to find that I was one of them.

Once, as a student, I borrowed a bicycle from a girl in my college, and promptly forgot where I had left it. A few hours of anxiety were followed by several days of refusing to think about the problem; and, by the time the bicycle must certainly have been stolen, the girl demanded it back.

I had to admit that I hadn't got it, but that I had left it - and then I made up an inexcusable lie - I had left it on King's Parade. Bad enough. Worse still was to find myself soon afterwards on King's Parade, by myself, actually looking for it. As if it ought to have been there. And, for a moment, I was genuinely surprised at not being able to find it.

It is true that, at the time, a lot of students had their fix on reality regularly skewed by drugs, but I had no such excuse in this case. It is also true that the period of late adolescence, like childhood, is often very oddly dreamlike and unreal.

But the truth - the reality - is that there are people who believe what they prefer to believe, and I had just realised that I was one of them, if only briefly and in a moment of madness, to use Ron Davies's deathless cliche. This was a very instructive lesson in the stone-throwing category - I have been amazed and astonished by the great fantasists ever since, like everyone else, but I have never been able to feel very censorious.

My favourite famous fantasist is Sir Edmund Backhouse, the remittance man and so-called Hermit of Peking, who died in Shanghai in 1944 and who was very elegantly exposed by Hugh Trevor Roper in almost my favourite historical biography.

Backhouse spent a great deal of his disreputable and largely imaginary life in China; his best memorials (to my mind) are large tracts of pure make-believe about the Imperial Court in the Times reports from Beijing in the early part of the 20th century, which he fed to hapless and awestruck correspondents, and huge amounts of ancient Chinese calligraphy in the Bodleian, much of it probably fake. He must have had such fun, making it all up and bamboozling all those self-important people who ought to have known better.

I suppose fantasists did have a lot more fun in the days before advanced telecommunications; no one could check anything for months. Today, the great fabulists have to rely on other people's idleness and gullibility, or the corruption of friendship and charm.

Still, that seems to work pretty well, too, if not for quite so long. I find my mind unaccountably drifting to memories of the Prime Minister in his performance as St Tony of Albion, delivering himself to the nation beneath a cross and a stained-glass window, and a clutch of hymn-singing black schoolgirls. To other fabulists, of lesser ability but like mind, such prodigious people are closet heroes.

That is why I think so many journalists - fabulists manques - had a soft spot for Archer and Aitken and indeed Blair; journalists, too, feel reality would be so much better if one could only construct it oneself, if one could edit out those awkward and unaesthetic details that do nothing but spoil the charm of the story.

What journalist has not occasionally felt that facts are nothing but an annoyance? What documentary director has not set and directed a supposedly real-life scene, giving people pretend parts in the drama of their own lives, in the interests of presenting the story as he thinks it ought to appear?

There ought to be a word for this tendency - not Archer, but Sagittarian perhaps, after the desire to aim so singlemindedly at the stars that one is blinded to reality not only by ambition and greed, but also by stardust.

Saturday, July 28, 2001 | Comments (0)

If you want to keep the traffic moving, ban buses (and bicycles)

The Mayor of London, in announcing his grand new traffic congestion scheme, claims that he has finished his long consultation with Londoners. Not so. No one has consulted me, despite the fact that I have been driving around central and greater London and using public transport almost all my adult life, and could be said to know something about it. I am even beginning to find that I know parts of London better than some black-cab drivers.

So, I propose to offer Red Ken the benefit of my experience of London traffic, at this 11th hour. It is not too late, even though he has already issued his ambitious plan, because it is almost entirely unworkable, and he will have to change it. I apologise to readers who, like most people, don't live in London. It must be very irritating when metropolitans carry on as if there were nowhere else on British earth, but, all the same, what happens in London affects most people, directly or indirectly. When London sneezes from congestion, the whole country will catch cold.

By far the major cause of congestion, pollution and road rage on the streets of London is not the cars, as Ken seems to think, but the buses. Belching out diesel, buses sit for unaccountably long periods, idling extravagantly and holding up the traffic.

It is daft that huge vehicles should be allowed to obstruct large parts of the public thoroughfare at regular intervals, while people must individually pay the driver before they can get on. At every stop, the entire nation is held up while people struggle for the right coins or the right exemption card, or while the occasional ignorant toff, suddenly reduced to public transport, produces - to hisses of derision from the entire queue - a pounds 20 note.

Without the nonsense of buses, London traffic would bowl along quite nicely; anyone vaguely inclined to accept the idea that we must put up with the obvious obstruction of buses for the greater public good will soon be disabused.

Buses are quite useless to anyone who is obliged to stick to a timetable. Two weeks ago at Russell Square, I found three parked together, at the same stop with the same number, any of which could have taken me close to my destination. All three were quite unmanned.

In one meekly sat a couple of broken-spirited public transport users, apparently unaware that they were alone and that there was no one to drive the bus. For 20 minutes they sat there humbly, and when I unhumbly hailed a taxi, they were sitting there still. Waiting for Ken?

Meanwhile these useless buses were obstructing a large square footage of public highway. Perhaps it is a sophisticated form of covert traffic calming, like the mysterious road works everywhere, which are quite clearly unnecessary. I say nothing of the folly of the bus lane, a constant nightmare for cars and cyclists as they have to swerve suicidally in and out of them, if ever they are to turn left.

It is not, however, simply that buses are hopelessly, inexcusably unreliable and obstructive. They also seem to be getting more and more dangerous. I don't know how bus drivers are trained or recruited these days, but to see them lurch in and out of the bus lane without proper signalling, or heave vertiginously round narrow intersections of ancient streets, swinging up on to pavements and biffing bollards as they go, is to despair and to hold your children close.

Buses are too big for these streets, and these drivers, and these days. The same applies to the ghastly tourist coaches, which grow bigger and bigger every year. In dumping wretched trippers at their hotels, they clog up, for half hour after half hour, entire narrow streets. They, too, are too big to be allowed.

Almost as bad are the delivery lorries and builders' vans. London's booming economy has hugely swelled their size and numbers, too. But London remains, especially in its side streets, an 18th- and 19th-century city, quite unable to take refrigerated pantechnicons or double-parked commercial vans servicing conspicuous consumption.

I sit in gridlocks amazed, as vast, blind Tesco and Marks & Spencer's monsters ease themselves, bleeping, into Dickensian alleys; it is insanity. Quiet two-way streets, just passable for two modest vehicles abreast, are now clogged for hours on end when immense lorries blunder and bully their way through, bringing local - and, yes, "community" - life to a standstill.

We know that modern education means that many millions are unable to use the telephone directory, but it seems that, in the past five years, monster lorry drivers have somehow learnt at last how to consult the London street map, and now imagine they can negotiate tiny side roads and clever local routes. Meanwhile, greedy builders double- and treble-park their vans for hours.

And what is Red Ken's solution to all this? Not to keep out the real culprits, but to exclude the cars. And without a remotely usable public transport system in place instead. It is mad. Cars are not the problem; dependence on cars is a symptom of the problem.

Here is my suggestion. We should dump the red buses and allow much smaller, privately run, Hong Kong-style people-carriers instead. We must pour squillions into the Underground. Until then, the Mayor must not force yet more people on to public transport; if he does, there will be riots and deaths from overcrowding, overheating and public panic.

Meanwhile all large coaches, all outsize lorries and vans, and all day-time deliveries should be excluded from London: small vehicles only. Oh, and no cylists; they are the most irresponsible, lawless and dangerous of the lot. That should do it.

Saturday, July 14, 2001 | Comments (1)

The Left has no time for liberty: just ask the Gordonstoun Girl

For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? My sentiments exactly. There have been a great many uncertain sounds buzzing about lately, not least in the Conservative leadership battle, even to the point where people seriously imagine that there is little difference between Conservatism and New Labour. It is hard to prepare to do battle about very little. But there is in fact a very great difference, which needs to be trumpeted about loudly and clearly. It has to do with freedom.

New Labour, like Old Labour, is the party of unfreedom, of intrusion, of excessive legislation, regulation, standardisation, conformity, guidelines, goals and repression generally. The Conservative Party is, or ought to be, the party of freedom. And freedom is under attack in this country.

It is, however, being defended in The Daily Telegraph. This week, the editor sounded the trumpet very certainly for A Free Country, for a major campaign for freedom. He insists this campaign is not partisan; freedom lovers from across the political world can and should unite.

But I find it difficult not to be partisan, because I do not really believe that people of vaguely socialist, social democrat, meliorist or egalitarian tendencies can ever be genuinely interested in freedom, except for themselves personally. The love of freedom, whatever anyone else's rhetoric may be, is a Conservative virtue - one of the greatest - though rather an alarmingly large number of Conservatives don't seem to be all that keen on it.

Be that as it may, at almost exactly the moment that the Telegraph announced its campaign for A Free Country, a perfect example of British unfreedom hit the news. It is the case of the Gordonstoun Girl.

A clever 16-year-old in foster care in Wrexham won a place and a bursary at Gordonstoun, Prince Charles's old school in Scotland. The Prince may have been rather miserable there, but these days it has an excellent reputation. In any case, the girl, her foster parents, her own parents, her grandparents and her teachers all wanted her to go; the grandparents and Gordonstoun were prepared to cover the fees.

But then down came the squelching dead hand of the local council. Wrexham social services refused to let her go. It knew about her offer of a place eight months ago, but only recently told her that she could not take it up.

One could get very excited about its reasons for this extraordinary refusal, but that seems to me to miss the point. A resentment of private schools, or of elitism, or even (quaintly enough) of Telegraph readers, all of which have been mentioned, may lie behind it. But we all have our prejudices. The point is that the council had no right to impose them on this young girl, against her express wishes and against the known wishes of what they would call, in carespeak, her "network of support", anglice her family and friends.

Social services has no right, because it has no statutory duty, to impose any ideology on anyone in its care: its overriding duty here, as Wrexham's director of social services says himself, is to safeguard and promote the safety and welfare of the young person in question.

Going to Gordonstoun (not at council expense) could not conceivably represent any threat whatsoever to her safety and welfare, to put it no more strongly than that; more positively, one could say it offers her a chance of academic excellence, and specialist teaching in her chosen subject, in a safe and respectable environment, which she wouldn't otherwise get.

What was wrong here was the complete absence of a presumption in favour of freedom - the young girl's freedom, and her family's, to do what they legally and reasonably want, regardless of the personal orthodoxies of social workers.

In fact, this is a presumption against freedom, and you see this unthinking, institutionalised disrespect for freedom in social services departments up and down the country.

I apologise to all those social workers who, by contrast, think carefully for themselves, and act wisely; because they think independently, they will know there is a lot of truth in what I am saying. I have met one or two who will admit it. There is a mindset of unfreedom firmly institutionalised in our care services, and the case of the Gordonstoun Girl is a perfect example of it.

The case has a happy ending, up to a point. The council has now backed down. The reason is not edifying, however. The Gordonstoun Girl (or her "support network") was smart enough to contact the new Children's Commissioner, Peter Clark, and make a very effective fuss, whereupon he made a very effective fuss; unpleasant publicity followed, the young girl has spoken very quotably to the press and, lo and behold, social services has bowed to public pressure. But we are left knowing that a less clever girl and a less capable family would have achieved nothing; most people in the clutches of social services do not belong to the fuss-making classes.

I admit that it was the Labour Government that appointed the Children's Commissioner, and he has done a good job here - he is obviously Labour with a small "c". But the sensibility behind this nonsense is of the Left. I can think of other, much more distressing examples, where choice is systematically, routinely denied, and freedom ignored. It is made all the more infuriating by the constant official prattle of choice, inclusion, consultation and diversity: most of that means just the opposite, like much of carespeak. This is where the battle for freedom should begin. I wonder who dares.

Saturday, July 07, 2001 | Comments (0)

Public sector partnerships are a dangerous medicine

Universal panaceas are what we all crave - something simple, to make everything better, fast. Unfortunately they tend to be unreliable; the rule in medicine is that the more ailments the panacea claims to cure, the less likely it is to have any effect at all.

It is hardly likely that snake oil can cure impotence and gall stones and cradle cap. So it may well be with the fashionable universal panacea of the moment - public private partnerships or PPPs. It would be very comforting to think that all the ills of public sector services could be cured by partnerships of one kind or another with the private sector. It is perfectly obvious, and now at long last most people are prepared to admit it, that the private sector does things much better. Perhaps by cosying up to this much healthier sector, public services will take on some of the same much-needed vigour.

My fear, however, is that, on the contrary, this cosying-up will merely transfer the infection of the public sector mentality to the private sector; it will be merely to spread the old British sickness. And this would have the result in some cases - to switch metaphors - of killing the golden goose that was supposed to lay some nice New Labour public service eggs.

I hope I am wrong. But I do feel that, in the current talk of public private partnerships and private finance initiatives, this is a point that is being overlooked. Why should we all blithely assume this partnership will necessarily be beneficent? Isn't it just wishful thinking in some cases? The central difference between the private sector and the state sector - and which explains why one works and one doesn't - is one of mentality. There are other factors of course, but the main difference is one of entrenched, institutionalised attitude.

The battle to put the public services right is seen these days as taking on the unions, as the Government is painfully trying to do as I write, over platters of top-secret canapes. But this battle is not merely a matter of taking on the unruly union barons over questions of pay and working conditions and jobs for the boys. It is - much more importantly - a wider matter of taking on a statist, intrusive, wasteful, self-protective mindset, which I believe now flourishes quite independently of union power, as well as in the unions themselves. It is this mindset that explains, in large part, the failure of the state sector. Yet in PPPs this mindset has, and will have, the force of the state, and of state money behind it.

Speaking of failure, I once asked my favourite City pundit, at a time of spectacular bankruptcies, what he thought was the most dangerous error in running a company. Pursuing something other than the job in hand, was his answer. What he meant was when executives, instead of concentrating on virtual widgets or pork belly futures, are absorbed in other goals of doubtful relevance to the business, or of no relevance at all - the pursuit of personal prestige, empire building, external political manoeuverings, job protection, getting permanent seats at the opera and so on. Taking one's eye off the ball, in other words.

That's what happens persistently - and I would say institutionally - in the state sector. Surely I hardly need list all the gender awareness and racism awareness and social inclusion and anti-oppression and social change agenda issues under which police and nurses and social workers are staggering. The amount of time, money, effort, training and paperwork consumed by these very peripheral concerns is simply astonishing; an idea of the best (misguided or not) drives out a very modest idea of the good, or even the faintly acceptable. And it's not always an ideal of the best; it can be something less altruistic. Why, for instance, are some trainee nurses made to read impenetrable French structuralists on sociology, but not taught how to take blood samples? I suggest that is all in pursuit not of nursing, but of higher status and professionalisation, imposed on them from the top by ideologues interested in things other than nursing.

To take another example, a training pack for workers with people with learning disabilities emphasises that the primary focus - the central value - of their work lies in creating social change. Yes, social change. You might have thought the primary focus lay in providing the best attention, support and encouragement for people with intellectual disabilities - an immensely demanding and time-consuming job in itself. But that, it seems, must take second place to the uphill work of creating social change. Quite aside from whether public servants should attempt it, this requires further training, monitoring, workshops, accountability, paperwork and, therefore, further employees, without any direct benefit to the client, but at ever increasing cost.

So what happens when public sector workers team up with a private sector organisation to provide a public service? Is it likely they will leave all that baggage and all that make-work behind? Isn't it more likely they will bring it and try to impose it? This is precisely what has been happening for some time now in parts of the voluntary sector, where PPPs have been going on for years. I've seen this in all sorts of charities, to my intense frustration, for many years. Any charity that depends on contracts from the public sector will find itself forced to adjust its ideals and aims to whatever the public sector orthodoxy happens to be. Ministers know this. Pressure groups know it. Charities, apart from those who go along with it, admit it. It is not partnership. It is nothing less than the nationalisation of compassion in other terms. People interested in freedom and choice should be wary of the notion of public private partnerships. They should look elsewhere for solutions.

Saturday, June 30, 2001 | Comments (0)

What do women doctors want? The chance to work part-time

Since the Government has rashly promised us "world-class public services", it will have to do something urgently about Britain's doctors: their morale is low; they frequently work in conditions that force down their standards; they are leaving the profession in droves; and there aren't enough of them to begin with.

The British Medical Association recently completed a survey of young doctors that showed a very significant collapse in their idealism about their careers since 1995. It also showed that life as a GP has become so unattractive that not enough medical students are opting to train for the job; before long, there won't be enough GPs to maintain present numbers, which are already inadequate.

Something will have to be done soon about attracting more doctors and making them happier. Opportunely, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) is to publish a report next week - Women in Hospital Medicine - chaired by Professor Carol Black, which will contain some detailed recommendations for training and employment. Since more than half of all medical school graduates are women, the question of what women doctors need and want is something the Government will not be able to ignore. It might even find the answers constructive.

I was one of the people who sat on the RCP working party that prepared the report. As I listened to one expert witness after another, men as well as women, it was forced on me, although I thought I knew it already, just how punishing most doctors' schedules are. There was something immensely gallant about the way these women doctors uncomplainingly found time away from their brilliant careers - and these were all successful women - to further other people's interests probably rather more than their own.

The hours of work demanded just to get by as a doctor are extreme; the extra hours needed to achieve something more - to take on extra academic work or to develop a special interest - are punitive. There will always be those few who are willing to dedicate most of their waking hours to medicine, often to achieve great things. But for most doctors, and certainly for most women doctors, something has to give.

Figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development strongly suggest that, while British doctors are well paid by European standards, they have to work about twice as hard. Literally: they have twice the workload. In Britain, there are only about 1.8 doctors per 1,000 people, whereas the average in Europe is 3.4 doctors. That corresponds with most people's personal impressions: it is hard to get much time with your doctor. Both GPs and hospital doctors are often desperately hard-pressed for time.

This is bad for the patient and also bad for the doctor; it means increasing strain at work, and increasing misery at home, too. That is because, obviously enough, the populace in general has recently been waking up to the idea that children need their parents; doctor mothers and (increasingly) fathers are less and less prepared to be out of the house for 12 hours a day, in the way that previous generations of doctors were.

The obvious solution is part-time work. Surveys among working women in general are pretty unanimous in finding that women would prefer to work part-time. Men are beginning to feel the same. The trouble is that part-time work is difficult to find, because most employers find it relatively uneconomic. You can impose it on employers, as this Government has tried to do, but those of us with Right-wing views are wary of trying to kick the market; it's usually counter-productive.

However, women doctors are in a powerful market position. They are (like men doctors) desperately needed and therefore, in a real market, they would have the power to renegotiate their terms of employment. Perhaps they don't really sense this, because life under the NHS dries up people's commercial instincts.

For all the reforms and talk of internal markets, the culture of the NHS remains profoundly statist; the state thinks it owns doctors - the Government's suggestions before the election that consultants should be handcuffed to the NHS for the first seven years of their careers is a perfect example of this attitude. Doctors' traditions of public service are easily exploited by this public sector mentality.

My own view - not, I must stress, the view of the RCP working party - is that doctors are effectively enslaved by the NHS. In an open market, women doctors (and male doctors and nurses, too) would long since have been able to insist on the working conditions that they actually wanted, from a position of great market strength.

Admittedly, that would end up being much more expensive for patients, whether we paid through our tax bill or our insurance bill, but we will be paying more in future whatever happens. I am reminded of a Calman cartoon in which a little man walks past a feminist holding a poster saying "Free Women Now!" and asks excitedly if he can have one. Free women doctors now. And men, too. Then perhaps we would have some when we need them.

Saturday, June 23, 2001 | Comments (0)

Boys will be boys, but they don't have to be little devils

For the past few days, I have been re-reading a remarkable book by Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence. It looks like the kind of book that sensible people normally avoid, the sort of popular, American, self-improvement bestseller you find on the "How To" shelves, with a seductive hint of a promise in the subtitle; in this case, Emotional Intelligence - Why it can matter more than IQ. However, I ignored my prejudices and bought it.

This is a book I would like to give to every teacher, and above all to those who arrange school curricula - for a start, to those responsible for the current misery of the new A-level system. It has made me think, what I had long since suspected, that most schools are pursuing the wrong things in the wrong way. Most schools are unsuitable for many children, particularly for boys, and that is why so many schoolchildren are doing badly, and growing up to behave badly. I think it was my hero, J S Mill, who said that a school ought to be very good indeed, to justify depriving a child of his liberty.

When I first read the book, in 1996 when it came out here, I was interested in why boys underperform academically at school. This time, I found myself reading it in a week when newspapers were full of boys who had gone badly wrong - Timothy McVeigh, the killers of James Bulger, young Yardie assassins in south London, a suspect in the murder of Damilola Taylor, and the unhappy Prince Dipendra, to mention only the most startling.

Of course I can't pretend to understand much of these particular cases. But they do stand as representatives of a world of increasingly enraged, impulsive and un-self-controlled boys and men, who are increasingly alienated, unable to form relationships, miserable, resentful and violent - and most of them are not psychopaths, but began life as perfectly ordinary boys. There are all kinds of explanation on offer for this nasty new world: I am particularly struck by the suggestion in this book that the problem is, in part, a lack of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is a neologism, obviously, but not all neologisms are irritating and empty. This one has a faintly self-explanatory air. It is obvious enough that all kinds of highly intelligent people seem to fall by the wayside, and fail to use their gifts, while, contrariwise, many people of only modest intelligence make more than the most of theirs.

Cognitive intelligence (of the sort supposedly measured in IQ tests) may be genetically given, but it cannot be effectively used without qualities of character, such as self-control, persistence, the ability to recover from setbacks, to deal with powerful emotions and to recognise other people's feelings. These qualities of character make up emotional intelligence. And without these qualities, a person will, as they used to say in Dorset, be all brains and no intelligence.

So, obviously, a clever girl who is unable to handle minor failure and criticism, and who is overwhelmed by her own anxieties, will underperform intellectually. Exams are a test of character quite as much as of intelligence. Similarly, a boy of average intelligence who has never learnt how to resist passing impulses and distractions, who cannot discipline his efforts, who has little understanding or sympathy for others, will also underperform, but with much more disastrous results for himself and others: failing entirely at school, he will turn into one of those feral thugs and bullies we read about in the press. Without emotional intelligence, these children cannot make the best of themselves and their lives; rather they are destined to make the least even of what they have.

However I am convinced, like the author of this book, that emotional intelligence, unlike general IQ, can be developed. That is what was meant in the past by a moral or a sentimental education, although it has always been rather rare in practice. A painful mixture of bullying and neglect used to be the norm in education and, despite everyone's best intentions, is probably very often the norm today. A child needs a great deal of careful, personal attention, and constant good example, to learn self-control, proper self-respect and respect for others.

Children today cannot possibly get the attention they need, flung as they are into enormous classes, with children of all abilities, including the intellectually disabled and the emotionally disturbed, in one single Bedlam, subject constantly to ceaseless measurements, tests, assessments and exams of ever-decreasing value. What are none-too-bright, impulsive boys to make of this noisy, boring, impersonal muddle? What is the point of subjecting them to it? They will just opt out, like James Bulger's schoolboy murderers.

It is daft to aim at sending half the country's children to university, in the quixotic pursuit of equality. It is daft to expect so many to get some A-levels, and dumb the exam down to that end. Actually, it is daft to keep all children at school until 16. Intellectual attainments, especially bogus ones, are irrelevant for many children. What is needed much more urgently is a careful, discriminating attempt to show struggling children how to deal with their own powerful emotions, how to stay calm under pressure, how to avoid conflict with each other and how to try.

All children need this. Only then can they use their abilities, such as they are. Those who need it most - the least intelligent and most deprived - get it least. I am sending a copy of this book to Estelle Morris, in a spirit of public service, empathy and conflict avoidance.

Saturday, June 16, 2001 | Comments (0)

Out of touch with touchy-feely times

After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales there was a shocked and uneasy sense across the country of enormous change. At first it was difficult to describe, let alone understand; gradually it became clear that a major shift in sensibility had taken place, causing some new sort of geological divide between British responses. There was something of the same feeling about the election; it has been called a landslide, and so it was, but not in the usual sense.

The result wasn't a Labour landslide, whatever Labour might like to claim; in an astonishingly low turnout, only 24 per cent of the electorate voted for Labour. That was rebuke, not a mandate. The result could instead be seen as a Conservative landslide, but only in the sense that the force of their defeat has tipped the Tories almost off the map, to flounder in the disputed Channel; supported by only 18 per cent of the electorate, they have only one seat west of Bristol and few north of a line from the Bristol Channel to the Wash. But the election was also a landslide in the sense of a major cultural upheaval, reflecting a new political geography for Britain.

I came to see, during the election campaign, something I didn't understand before. It is not just that the Tories are hated sometimes, or that they are embarrassing sometimes, or even that they are unelectable. It is that they are beginning to seem irrelevant, for several reasons. The one usually offered is that Labour has stolen their clothes, and it's true that that is the central difficulty. But another important one, I think, is that to many of the young, and the young middle-aged, the Conservative Party has come to seem like a superannuated freak show. Sometimes you can see what they mean.

I do not enjoy thinking this or saying this; I feel great affinity with Tories, and great gratitude for the enormous achievements of the Thatcher revolution. But four weeks of listening and watching have convinced me that it's true. It has something to do with the Diana divide; the contemporary obsession with being in touch (or out of touch), especially with feelings, but also with mass culture and mass fashion, breeds tremendous prejudice against anyone or anything which is not touchy- feely-demotic, and cool, such as the average Tory candidate.

However much conservatives and fellow travellers like me may despise Tony Blair and his camp for the lip-trembling tendency, we have to admit that it showed a better understanding of the electorate. Voters seem to want to be talked to differently these days. Many Conservatives, both insensitive and resistant to change, seem to have astonishingly little idea of how they now appear to others or how narrow is the sector which can even tolerate them. How, for instance, could any intelligent Tory publicist have permitted the embarrassingly genteel voice-over on the feral schoolchildren broadcast? Was it a joke?

I don't like the politics of the trembling lip either. But as La Rochefoucauld said, a man who doesn't accept the conditions of life loses his soul; so, too, politicians who do not accept the conditions of life - which include change, and maybe rapid and unwelcome change - lose their seats and their raison d'etre.

However, a change in style will be the least of the challenges which confront the Tories. Much the worst is the political muddle at the heart of the party. In crude terms - and the crude terms of politics are always unfair, of course - the Conservatives have managed to appear both uncaring and interfering. A political party can cope with one or other of those accusations, but not with both at once, obviously enough; people might vote for uninterfering-but-uncaring, or caring-but-interfering, but, to offer uncaring-and-interfering is electoral suicide, as we have seen.

There has been endless debate since 1997 about the balance in the party between authoritarianism and libertarianism, between liberty and traditional values. It is indeed a difficult debate, and muddle still appears to prevail; hence the confusion in the election campaign and the disastrous " pounds 20 billion cuts" story, and the ordeal of Oliver Letwin. No one quite liked to speak up about tax, because no one quite dared or quite agreed.

The Conservative Party has failed so far to meet the challenge posed by New Labour to reinvent itself. It failed to be radical, or bold, presumably because it thought it had some hope of office. Now that it has none for four years, or maybe for eight if Mr Blair has any success with the public sector, freed of the albatross of Europe, Tories can at last think the unthinkable; as the Sixties song put it "Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose". These coming years in the wilderness ought to be very invigorating for the Conservatives, if any stay to find out.

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention. Admittedly it raises the obvious question of what happens to the unfortunate. What happens to compassion and community? Tony Blair talked of the Third Way, but that has proved to be an empty concept, just so much statist waffle. The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion. The voters think, wrongly, that Conservatives don't care about it. But actually they do, and have plenty of ideas about it. This is what the Tories should be questing for, in their wilderness. Then they might also find a new Jerusalem; they might again change the direction of British political thought. And feeling

Saturday, June 09, 2001 | Comments (0)

My husband is voting Blair to keep out the socialists

Cassandra's fate was that people never believed her, even though she was always right. Mine seems to be that people are never quite sure when I am trying to be humorous. Not long ago I wrote on this page a long list of reasons for voting Labour, never imagining that anyone could take them seriously. Yet, to my dismay, I find that someone has, someone very close to home. I have been nourishing a viper in the bosom of my family: my husband has announced that he is going to vote Labour.

It has been some consolation to discover that he is not really planning to do so for any of the reasons that I had suggested here. But he is quite serious. It is not that he is against our Tory candidate, Michael Portillo; he thinks he is a very civilised fellow. It is not that he is actually for our Labour candidate; he doesn't even know his name, which is hardly surprising as whoever-he-is has not troubled us at all with his campaign. The truth is that my husband is not simply voting Labour; he's backing Blair.

It is not, of course, that he likes Blair at all. He is as contemptuous as everybody ought to be of Blair's unprincipled populism, his cynical religiosity, his sentimentality and his lies. He is as contemptuous as everybody ought to be of Labour's shameless sleaze in office. He's well aware of Labour's failures in schools and hospitals. But he's going to vote Labour, and goes about saying so.

This is not good news for peace on the home front. Nor, probably, is it good news for the Conservatives. My husband, after all, is a convinced conservative, like me, and has always voted Conservative, since long before the glorious revolution of 1979. He is not only a long-standing Tory voter; as someone who has always worked in banking and business, and who hates statism and bureaucracy, he ought also to be a natural Tory voter. Judging by his defection, the Conservative Party seems to have lost Metropolitan Man, or Wine Bar Man or Central Line Man, or whatever my husband might be thought to stand for. It takes some explaining.

We met long ago as students, at a Left-wing demonstration in Cambridge in protest against the Right-wing policies of Harold Wilson. I forget now what they were. But we felt, like all young people with half a heart, indignation about the poverty and lack of opportunity among those without our advantages. So we thought we were Left-wing.

Then, on his train journeys from work in the City to visiting me in Cambridge, my future husband discovered Hayek. He became a convert to the open market and the Conservative r