You cannot beat your wife and still be a good citizen
Here is an important question. Think carefully, because a very great deal might depend upon your answer. Is a man allowed to punish his wife physically, as long as it is in his own home? Answer from one of the following choices: A: Yes, although not with any recognised weapon; B: Yes, although only under provocation; C: No.
It is a trick question actually. There is no right answer, or at least none was given. It was one of some questions posed by Radio 4's Today programme yesterday morning - now answered on its website, and it is C for those who were unsure - as part of a little item about a British citizenship test. It was the only good question actually: the others were about silly things, I thought, such as who burnt Alfred's cakes, and was King Arthur a hobbit and are we subjects or citizens. No one can really be expected to know that sort of stuff, whether recent immigrant or claimant of Norman blood. But this particular one, number six, about the physical chastisement of wives (right or wrong) seemed to me to get to the unbelievably awkward heart of the matter.
British nationality, and a British sense of belonging, has become hugely contentious. That was already so even before September 11, but very much more so now. News of British boys going off to fight for the Taliban, or film footage of British people cheering for Osama bin Laden, and openly selling bin Laden propaganda videos in England's cities, have given a new and harsher spin to the question of what it is to be British.
It has unfortunately become worth asking what are the minimum requirements of a British citizen, or subject, as we used to say - those of us who knew the correct but long since out of date answer to question four.
It cannot be right any longer to depend, as we used to do, on an assumption of a shared understanding of such things. Multi-culturalism has put an end to that unspoken sense of community and shared values. The Today programme may have been trying to be funny, but it is now genuinely possible for a person to enter this country who is genuinely quite innocent of the idea that it is wrong to beat your wife, even if provoked, and even in the privacy of your own home. Such a person might well be ignorant that it is a criminal offence. Such a person might never learn enough English to find out. He might actually be discouraged from learning enough English to find out. Alternatively, such a person might well know wife beating is illegal here, but might believe that British law ought to be ignored, or bent, or even changed, to the requirement of a different culture. He would have every excuse for thinking so, because liberals generally, and the race relations lobby and multi-culturalist activists in particular, have bullied everyone who disagrees into silence, with accusations of racism. So many, many un-British things have taken root; so many British assumptions have been allowed to wither away.
Late in the day, and probably too late, former liberals have woken up to the idea that something ought to be done about the best of British common assumptions. The Labour Home Secretary - and how unthinkable this would have been only recently for a Conservative minister - has proposed citizenship classes and English lessons for immigrants. Hence the Today programme's little item on what a citizenship test, on the American model, might be. Personally, I think a test would be a mistake. There is the very obvious problem about what should happen to a would-be British citizen who fails the test, starting with those who don't speak any English, not to mention the dead certainty that most existing British citizens would probably fail it as well.
There is a part of the American model that I think would be well worth copying, and that is the idea of a ceremony of welcome. Becoming British, as we all know, is to draw a winning ticket in the lottery of mass migration, if not of life, but here it is nothing but a sad, dull, bureaucratic little event. It is well worth celebrating. And taking advantage of this happy moment, with town hall, British flag, gold braid, lady mayoress and local steel band, all new Britons could be subjected to some welcoming remarks, including thoughts about the way we do things here.
The depressing thing is that it is very hard to think of anything upon which almost everyone would agree. However, I have tried. It ought to be possible for the lady mayoress to insist, with as much charm and encouragement as possible, on a certain modest, conflict-avoiding minimum.
I suggest: it is essential to learn good English. You can get help with that. It is prudent to avoid rubbishing British or English culture - presumably you came here because you thought we had something to offer you; it is now your adopted culture, and you are about to become part of it. Obvious ingratitude or contempt will make you extremely unpopular; the public mood has changed on such matters. To insist, ceaselessly and vociferously, on how racist this country is will certainly make it so. There are plenty of existing laws here against racism, and plenty of help in how to use them. It is a criminal offence to go off to fight for other countries against this one, or to call publicly for people's murder, no matter how irritating they may be. Oh yes, and it is a criminal offence to beat your wife, no matter what the temptation. Or your husband.
Saturday, November 10, 2001 | Comments (2)
Cherie in the shadows
Cherie: The Perfect Life of Mrs Blair by Linda McDougall
Politico's, £17.99, 223 pp £15.99 (£1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222
The usual drill in journalism, when trying to write about something, is to give up when you cannot find out anything that most people don't already know. The same rule may not apply so strictly to biography proper, but in the grey area of bio-journalism, about people constantly in the public eye, the reader expects revelations, especially if paying pounds 17.99 for a book in hard covers.
Linda McDougall's problem, in writing this biography of Cherie Blair, is that she was actively prevented from finding things out. Everyone knows that the Blairs and their entourage exert strict control upon everyone around them, and guard their privacy very fiercely, except when it suits them to appear in glory as a latter-day Holy Family. Herself married to a long-standing Labour MP, Austin Mitchell, Miss McDougall can hardly have been surprised to be told very firmly by Mrs Blair's minder (who is also Alistair Campbell's partner) that Cherie did not want her biography written and planned to tell her friends not to co-operate.
Sure enough, they didn't. Only a few spoke off the record about their "good friend Cherie", and the few on-the-record comments the author records are bland. How could it be otherwise? Ms McDougall explains that she and her MP husband are distrusted outsiders, who have little to do with Blair's government. This is no doubt partly because soon after the 1997 victory she wrote a "light- hearted" newspaper article about a private New Labour gathering attended very briefly by Cherie, and was instantly cast into outer darkness for her disloyalty.
Ms McDougall is reduced to saying in her acknowledgements that "being thanked by me could well be the kiss of death for a Westminster politician or journalist, so . . . I have refrained from thanking some of the people who helped me most". This gives a chilly impression of the repressive paranoia controlling New Labour Westminster, but it is hardly the basis for a reliable book.
We learn nothing here of the many intriguing questions of Cherie Blair's life. Does she, for instance, still collect child benefit, rich as she is? Do people fall in love with her? How many minutes a day does she actually spend with her children, what with early morning gym, punishing hours as a QC, personal grooming sessions, grand receptions and international travel?
Anyone who has followed the strange story of the Blairs in the papers or on television will have come to many of the same conclusions as Ms McDougall: that Mrs Blair had a complicated Liverpool childhood, and an early acquaintance with celebrity through her notorious father Tony Booth; that she has done well as a lawyer; that, like many a Bollinger Bolshevik before her, she has developed a marked taste for luxury; that success has done a great deal for her dress sense and that she takes herself extremely seriously and is very tough. And so on.
Ms McDougall appears to have made some efforts to dig further, in Cherie Blair's hometown, in her school and elsewhere, and she managed to finesse a terrified constituency neighbour of the Blairs into admitting that Cherie now arrives in Sedgefield with a cook and a dresser; but almost nothing is considered in any depth. As to whether the young Cherie's ferocious ambition was encouraged at her excellent Liverpool convent school, for instance, there are conflicting accounts, but without any comment.
Ms McDougall says again and again that Cherie Blair could and should be a role model for other women, but refuses to be one. If only, she claims repeatedly, Cherie were not so determinedly silent in her role as the Prime Minister's wife, if only she did not guard her personal privacy so fiercely, if only she would throw away "the empty shell which is 'Mrs Blair' ", and reveal herself, she "could play a really useful part in the liberalisation of British society and start campaigning for some real equality for women".
But why on earth should she? Either this is sanctimonious humbug, or else the author, in the face of this silence, is desperately searching for a theme which could justify the book. One begins to feel that Mrs Blair and her minders were entirely right about Ms McDougall.
Sunday, October 21, 2001 | Comments (0)
Say it again, this time in English
Global Sex by Dennis Altman
Chicago UP, £15.50, 216 pp £14.50 (99p p&p) 0870 155 7222
A good writer ought to be able to avoid jargon, whether academic or pseudo-academic, especially in a book aimed at a popular market. Otherwise the book, whatever its merits, will be a waste of precious reading time.
Global Sex deals with a very important and interesting subject. The process of globalisation may very well have changed our attitudes about sex, perhaps very greatly, and it is important to consider how, and, if so, whether it matters. Yet from the beginning, this book is a hard and unrewarding read; before it reaches any conclusions it has long since lost the reader.
As far as I can understand it, the author - who is professor of politics, sociology and anthropology at La Trobe University in Australia - is searching for a "global sexual politics" which would restrain the painful inequalities and social dislocations brought about by globalisation. But Professor Altman's language is inelegant, peppered with confusing jargon and constantly interrupted with quotations that are often even worse.
What, for instance can be the point of quoting with agreement, as he does, someone who writes like this: "What is new about the modern global system is the chronic intensification of patterns of interconnectness mediated by such phenomena as the modern communications industry and new information technology and the spread of globalisation in and through new dimensions of interconnectedness: technological, organizational, administrative and legal, among others, each with their own logic and dynamic of change"?
Why couldn't he say it more simply himself? This astonishing verbosity serves only to obscure what is blindingly obvious, and to infuriate the reader.
It might hardly seem worthwhile for a reviewer to devote space to a book only to attack it. But I would like to register a protest against this idiom. It seems to have become acceptable in the academic world to write, and in publishing to print, general books on major subjects which are almost incomprehensible to the educated reader. This is partly because lazy, undisciplined writing has, with the fall in general standards of literacy, become acceptable; partly because many of the ideas now current in the academy, as they say, are often extremely tendentious, and the language in which they are expressed is unclear for that reason.
It is a fair bet that the reader is in for obfuscation when someone uses the word "hegemonic". There's not all that much wrong with the word itself, but it became politicised years ago, and is now a useful marker for muddled thinking. "Hegemonic masculinity" is a central idea in this book and in the introduction the author gratefully pays tribute to the writer who defined this phrase as "the con figuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women".
I defy anyone to translate this into plain English. Yet this is the way politicised academics talk these days, and with the globalisation of English, it is probably all too hegemonic.
There are other words which are often markers for this kind of writing. The neologism "gendered", much used here, is one and is equally confusing. What is the general reader to make of the statement, made in passing in this book, that religious "fundamentalism is gendered"? If it has any real meaning, surely it can only be either trivial or extremely complex. Either way the phrase is only comprehensible if you already know what it means, if you are already familiar with the particular jargon of political activism.
There is nothing wrong with having a particular political attitude, and Professor Altman describes his own as neo-Marxist. What's wrong is that an important opportunity to discuss an important subject has been wasted. What's wrong is that there are scores of books like this. People are encouraged to write theses like this. The standard of general debate is gradually lowered. People turn more and more away, frustrated, from verbiage, where they might have found enlightenment. Hardly anyone protests.
Sunday, May 27, 2001 | Comments (0)
A rough rural ride
A Countryside For All: The Future of Rural Britain ed by Michael Sissons
Vintage, pounds 7.99, 188 pp pounds 6.99 (99p p&p) 0870 155 7222
The publication of this book of essays on rural Britain could hardly be timelier: the countryside, as we now seem to have to call it, is in crisis. Villages are dying and traditional country pursuits face many threats. Farmers are being forced off their land, driven to bankruptcy and suicide; perverse subsidies have distorted food production. Because of intensive farming, unhealthy animals are reared in misery; hedge rows and fens and wildlife and wild flowers are disappearing.
The land itself is vanishing at an astonishing rate under a rising tide of suburban concrete; each year an area of green fields as large as Bristol is lost forever to new buildings. Yet at the same time a landowner cannot fell a wood, grow a crop, graze a sheep, move a footpath, catch a trout or dredge a pond, without permission from bureaucracy.
This has been going on for years, but now the national mind has been powerfully concentrated upon the countryside by the mass execution of harmless beasts. Now we have horrifying visions, following earlier images of cows staggering helplessly under BSE, of piles of millions of rotting pigs and cattle, unburied and unburnt, dripping poisons into the soil and scattering the foot and mouth virus to the winds.
The Government dithers between one indecision and another, culminating in the recent moo-turn, as the tabloids contemptuously called its change of heart about mass slaughter. There is great and growing anger on all sides about all these things.
A Countryside for All brings together some very distinguished contributors to contend with these questions, including Lord Skidelsky, Professor Roger Scruton, Simon Jenkins and Dr Matt Ridley. The editor, Michael Sissons, has said that the book's tone is "moderately right of centre", but it did not seem to me to have any united voice, or any shared political bias, and certainly not about what should be done.
It does seem very odd that the Social Market Foundation, a Government funded think-tank, which originally commissioned this book, should in the end have decided not to publish it, whereupon Vintage hastily did; perhaps this is a sign of this Government's uneasy ineptitude with anything rural, but equally it may be no more than a storm in a disused cattle trough.
Who does the countryside belong to? What is it for? Who may use it? What does it mean to us? Without answers to these obvious questions there can be no solution to the problems of rural Britain. But the difficulty with this immensely complex subject is that there is almost nothing anyone can say that is not contentious, and almost nothing anyone can suggest that is not statist.
Almost all the proposals put forward in this book involve state intervention of one kind or another, which is why this book does not strike me as conservative in spirit. Most of them appear to support abandoning discredited state subsidies for food production, in favour of state subsidies for good landscape maintenance, and for promoting rural community.
It's true there are two very interesting essays, by Matt Ridley and Mark Pennington, proposing denationalisation and deregulation of the land. They are clearly right in their argument that many of the problems in both country and town have been directly caused by constant state intrusion (covert nationalisation) and excessive regulation. But, equally, much of the destruction of rural Britain - and inner-city Britain too - has been due to a lack of planning restraint.
And the idea that the free market and private landowners, even when freed from perverse incentives, could always be trusted to do what is best for the land seems to me to be so obviously untrue as hardly to need denial. Some could, some couldn't. Besides, both authors go on to propose state rewards for good behaviour, so replacing one kind of intervention with another.
There are many interesting discussions in this collection, including an excellent scholarly piece on foot and mouth disease by Abigail Woods, of the University of Manchester. But the most interesting, because the most pressing, must be those which deal with the central question of how (or whether) to stop the country disappearing. There will be little point in arguing about a countryside which no longer exists.
Simon Jenkins makes an impassioned case for putting an absolute stop to building on green fields altogether. Suburbanisation is not inevitable. He argues, like others here, that it is urban decay that has caused rural decay, in the flight from the city, and only regeneration of the cities can save what little is left of Britain's countryside. There is plenty of room for new housing in cities, as Richard Rogers has powerfully argued in Cities for A Small Country.
Michael Sissons proposes a new Department and Secretary of State for the Countryside. This is a radical and impressively well-informed collection of essays.
Sunday, May 06, 2001 | Comments (0)
He who must be obeyed
A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom
Pandora, £20, 441 pp £18 (free p&p) 0870 155 7222
The history of women as wives is truly astonishing. From the point of view of a little girl growing up in the richer, freer parts of Europe today, the story of what happened to her female forebears will seem almost incredible.
Until very recently in the Western world, wives had in various degrees been bullied, disposed of, beaten, betrayed, mutilated, infected, impregnated, dispossessed, exploited, ignored, insulted, patronised, denied education, unenfranchised and silenced. None the less, they have never been entirely repressible, and often, even in the worst of times, also loved, desired and respected. It is all truly sensational, and Marilyn Yalom's A History of the Wife makes pleasantly sensational reading.
The author has the journalist's knack of reducing an enormous amount of complex and controversial material to something simple and digestible, and, wherever possible, personal. The book is a pudding bursting with little plums of scandal, confession, atrocity and passion. In this sense it is good.
The writer is spoilt for dramatic choice. There is the passionate sexual and intellectual longing of the brilliant Heloise for her husband, the castrated Abelard - a story which is still powerful even in translation after 900 years; there is the stoicism of the Mormon women, and their love for their sister-wives rather than their husbands; there is the resourcefulness of the semi-literate pioneer woman in 19th-century America who wrote a misspelt letter to her friend about the way to get primitive contraception.
There is the persecution and punishment of brave women who tried to defy their lot throughout the ages. But there is also the recurrent tenderness of married love, for example the passionate respect of the French revolutionary scientist Lavoisier, soon to be guillotined, for his clever and beautiful wife, portrayed in the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.
However, there are far more plums than there is pudding. Perhaps that is just as well, because (as in her recent history of the female breast) when Marilyn Yalom moves from the plum of exciting detail to the pudding of commentary, she displays her lack of critical perspective. "Simone de Beauvoir," she writes, was "right on the mark . . . in her understanding that gender is almost entirely socially constructed, as she phrased it in the now famous statement, 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.' "
Of course anyone is entitled to hold the view that gender is socially constructed despite all the evidence to the contrary, but it is highly controversial; to express this view uncritically, as if the matter had been long since settled, in an ambitious and would-be scholarly work on the history of women as wives, is to beg a central question of that history. It is intellectually shallow, or lazy, or both.
Marilyn Yalom does not inspire intellectual confidence. For instance she discusses Alfred Kinsey's famous works on sexuality, which, she says, established a baseline for all future sexologists. What she does not say is that there has recently been scholarly criticism of Kinsey's methods and findings which casts some doubt upon them.
But this is, for better and for worse, popular writing. Only a popular writer, in the worse sense of the word, could begin her final chapter with the sentence "It's no secret that the American wife has been radically transformed during the past half century." It reminds me of the dreadful first sentence of her history of the bosom: "I intend to make you think about women's breasts as you never have before."
Popular writing like this is condescending, presumptuous, inelegant and silly. Fortunately it is also ephemeral.
Dr Fox loses my vote
One of the better things about British politics is that it is, or was, rather different from American politics. The United States is a wonderful country in countless ways, but it is hardly inspiring in its politicking and its electioneering.
To many people here the whole thing seems very alarming, from the spendthrift, vulgar razzle-dazzle of campaigning to the astonishing clout of the commercial lobbies, from the blindness of single-issue passions to the scary power of the authoritarian religious Right. It would be good to think we don't go in for that sort of thing over here. But we do, or are beginning to; most things American turn up here in the end, and some British politicians have been determined to hasten the process.
The Labour Party has been at it for some time, drinking deeply at the well of American political intoxication, with very cheering results. I suppose it was inevitable that the Conservatives should have a go too, but it is depressing. Things took a turn for the worse with the shadow health secretary's call last week for a "huge restriction, if not the abolition, of our pro-abortion laws". It sounds so unmistakably American. It is true that Dr Liam Fox did not say that Conservatives would make this official party policy, and it is true that William Hague has always said that there should be a free vote on matters concerning abortion. All the same, it looks very much like an attempt to exploit abortion for political ends, exactly as all sides do in the United States, particularly on the religious Right.
Otherwise I cannot imagine what Dr Fox was doing, in making his pro-life call in the form of a prayer, in a book put out by the Conservative Christian Fellowship. This fellowship, which now has offices in Conservative Party headquarters here, is in close contact with the Right-wing Christian Coalition in the United States, and with the alarming Marvin Olasky, an immensely important figure on the religious Right in the Republican party, and a close adviser to President Bush. Dr Fox appears to be well up on American politics; it was he who arranged the first meetings between Mr Hague and Mr Bush. Dr Fox's prayer hit the news very soon, and very opportunely, after Mr Bush's announcement that he would withdraw state funding from pro-abortion charities overseas.
Dr Fox is absolutely entitled to his views on abortion, but if the party leader has promised a free vote, keeping this an issue of conscience as it always has been here, why is the shadow health secretary so publicly inflaming the hopes of the anti-abortion lobby? Why did he say anything at all?
It looks very much as if he calculates that if the religious, anti-abortion Right can deliver conservatives votes in America it could do so here. In the recent US election, voting was extremely closely correlated with church-going: the more church-going the more anti-abortion, and the more church-going the more a vote for Bush. Perhaps Dr Fox feels the Conservative Party has little to lose and much to gain from imitating the Republicans and repositioning itself accordingly.
Let's hope not. Conservatism here, as opposed to over there, is about less government, not more. It is about personal freedom, and personal responsibility; the less state intrusion, the better. Having a baby is one of the greatest personal responsibilities one can take on - hence the enormous importance of the freedom not to take it on. It is perhaps the most important freedom that women have. It is not as though anybody likes having an abortion. There may well be a case for restricting the period in which it is legal to abort a baby. But there can be no case for even hinting to the electorate that a Conservative government would see the anti-abortion lobby right. In the traditions of this country, that is un-Conservative.
It is not right, it is not Right and I don't think it is politic either. People in this country do not like religion in politics; we fear religious dogmatism and we don't like the Government trying to make windows into our souls. Plenty of Conservatives, Christians and those who loathe abortion will feel that it is neither Conservative nor British.
Sunday, January 28, 2001 | Comments (0)
Why does it all end in tears?
Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears by Tom Lutz
W. W. Norton, £18.95, 352 pp £15.95 (free p&p) 0870 155 7222
Ours is such a supremely self-conscious era, that it might seem that there could hardly be any aspect of human life which has not been anatomised almost out of existence. But, it seems, there is still one: crying.
"Perhaps no other fundamental human activity has received so little direct and sustained attention", says the American writer Tom Lutz, who has produced a natural and cultural history of tears. In fact, on the evidence of this book itself, it seems that a great deal of attention has been paid to tears, time out of mind, but perhaps this fascination has not been very sustained, or coherent, and certainly it has not been packaged in such a popular form.
Tom Lutz's range is enormous; he can do psychological, anthropological, historical, neurological, theological, sociological, physio logical, philosophical, literary, cinematic, arty and pop. He writes well, too, and has a light touch with complex theory, and a good eye for quirkiness, and the connectedness of things in general.
As Lutz points out weeping is universal among humans, and peculiar to us - claims that elephants, beavers and dolphins weep are quickly dismissed - but quite self-evidently, weeping has no universal meaning or function. It does, however, have universal fascination; we know and feel that it means something important, but we also know that it is almost impossible to know what.
Crying may appear to have the glamour of spontaneity, of artless emotional truth; it may appear to be something beyond conscious control and so one of the few windows into the soul. But you don't need to read poetry or philosophy to know that it is just as often ambiguous or even dishonest, like the mythical tears of the crocodile. What appears to be an overflowing of emotion is actually controlled, at least partly, at least sometimes, by convention.
The crying of a new-born baby is clearly not the same as the ululations of a paid professional mourner in the Third World; contrariwise the stoical dry eyes of a bereaved First World War father do not truly suggest less sensibility than the sensual, manly weeping of an 18th-century intellectual contemplating an elevating landscape. A woman may weep in public from frustration, or for emotional effect, but she may also weep entirely alone; these different tears have different meanings, and may feel very different to her.
Tom Lutz covers the strange variety of weeping very well; he writes of the 20,000 French knights of Childe Roland, in the 11th-century Song of Roland, all fainting and weeping together in grief, of recent American presidents, orchestrating their tears (and of Jacqueline Kennedy restraining hers), of the "Nabob of Sob" (the pop star Johnny Ray, later outsobbed by Elvis Presley) and of teenagers going time after time to see Titanic, expressly for the pleasure of crying. All this raises fascinating questions.
Where this book is unsatisfactory is in its answers. The philosophical section, as is the way with the philosophy of emotion generally, is frustrating and comes to no conclusion. The same goes for the body science of crying: as the author says, "the current state of physiological research into such matters leaves us with more questions than answers". Nobody knows, for instance, why women weep more than men, or why their tears are chemically different from men's, or whether tears are part of arousal, or part of relief. And so on.
An editor I worked for long ago said that all journalism falls into one of two categories - Why oh Why? or Fancy That! This book, which is very high-quality journalism, attempts both, but only really succeeds at Fancy That!
Sunday, December 17, 2000 | Comments (0)
My mother warned me
I have always been extremely sceptical of anything millennial
H ARD to believe though it may be, there were many people who were genuinely worried last week that the world might come to an end today, as predicted by Nostradamus. In the midst of all this fuss, I was reminded of my poor mother, whose nanny was convinced that the end was nigh. Not only did she terrify my mother with this prospect; she gave it a precise date. I don't think her calculations had anything to do with Nostradamus; she was some sort of Christian fundamentalist, though other surviving relations may disagree, as families usually do about such stories. Anyhow, when my mother was still a little girl, a day dawned when her nanny told her that the latter day had arrived, and that she was to dress up warmly and come quickly to the top of a nearby hill, to await the wrath to come in penitential prayer.
After a considerable time of anxious apprehension, even the nanny had to admit that she must have got the wrong day, and my mother was allowed to come down the hill and return home. But that was not all. On at least one other occasion, and perhaps more - there is always something vague and incomplete in such accounts - the nanny repeated the performance, leading my mother up the same hill, with the same results. If this story is true, and I have no reason to think otherwise, it is really hardly surprising that my mother was prone to fits of cynicism in later life and joined the Communist Party at a tender age, if only briefly.
Partly, perhaps, because of my mother's early experiences, I have always been extremely sceptical of anything millennial. And for months, for years, I have been saying to myself that the present millennium fever is perfectly ridiculous. It would never, I felt sure, infect me, even though I am just as worried about when the invitations are going to start arriving as anybody else - anybody else who hasn't got one, that is. For one thing, I am not a Christian, another indirect result of my mother's nanny millennial hysteria, which so blighted my mother's religious sensibilities that she was unable to encourage any in her children. For another thing, I have never enjoyed ordinary New Year celebrations very much; I don't like the feeling that one ought to be enjoying oneself on prescribed occasions, least of all on evenings when it is impossible to get a baby sitter. (I don't count Christmas because one is not required to enjoy oneself, merely to be nice.) And for yet another thing, arbitrarily rounded-off date concepts, such as the swinging Sixties or the 19th-century mind, are clearly largely meaningless.
Yet I find I have been wrong. There is something about such a solemn sounding date as the year 2000 that does insinuate itself into the imagination. It makes one take stock, something best avoided usually, as it tends to be depressing; it certainly depresses me. One reader told me that he thought I write best in a mood of lamentation, which is depressing in itself. And it is true that looking back over this passing century there is plenty to lament. However, I would prefer to think of what seems promising about the century to come.
Cumbersome and irritating though it is, the Internet must be one of the best hopes for the future. Designed to enable people to communicate with each other in the absence of any central control, it is the best and the most powerful weapon against central control - against statism . Socialism may have been finally discredited, at the end of the 20th century, but statism, and statist impulses, are much harder to destroy. The Internet is the natural enemy of statism, and of corporatism, and it is the servant of freedom. No doubt it will quickly become much easier to use, and the technophobia that even today prevents people from using it will soon seem incomprehensible, as computers become less primitive and unreliable. The biological sciences too offer enormous hope for the future, and they too are suddenly emerging from a primitive state into a time of dazzling exponential growth. I hope I live long enough to see some of the miracles - as they would seem to the millennium that is passing - which genetics and brain science will certainly achieve in the next. Space exploration interests me personally much less, but it is still a wonderful thing that the eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens us no longer, but seems instead to offer infinite possibilities. I agree that none of this will seem any nearer at breakfast on January 1, 2000, than it was at tea time on December 31, especially as most people will have done absolutely nothing in the interval. But for those of us inclined to pessimism, it is worth remembering that the end really is not at hand.
IT occurred to me not long ago that I have been writing this column for more than six years. Before that I was writing a similar column on a different page, which makes 10 years. That is a long time. I have hugely enjoyed your letters, most of them at least, since most of them have been instructive, witty and kind; I hope and think I have replied to almost all of them. I have also very much enjoyed writing here, and having the freedom of this space. All the same, I have come to feel that it is time for me to stop and to do different kinds of writing. So this is my last column here. I hope to write some longer pieces occasionally in The Sunday Telegraph: I am working on a one at the moment, and may perhaps write more book reviews. But I think that after so long in this space, it is time for me, at least, to come to a final full stop.
Sunday, July 04, 1999 | Comments (0)
The trouble with money
The area, once pleasantly shabby, is now awash with money
A Tory friend once said to me that everyone, however Left wing in general, is always Right wing in his view of anything he knows about. Though that is unmistakably Conservative triumphalism, it is also usually true. The one exception is in one's own backyard. We all know a lot about our own parish pumps, yet we think that the inexorable laws of competition, of free enterprise and of the free market, should somehow be suspended on our own private patch. No motorways or paedophile resocialisation centres for us, thank you very much, and no big supermarkets or sex shops either, even though all these things may be most excellent elsewhere - an awkward view for a Right-wing libertarian to take.
This embarrassment has raised its head dramatically in Notting Hill, where I live. One evening last week I walked to a public meeting at a local church, which, though enormous, was packed with local people of all descriptions - multi-millionaires, Rastafarians and the middling sort - all deeply upset at what the free market is about to do to our neighbourhood. It is about to change it irrevocably. North Kensington is about to lose much of what made it precious to those of us who live here. It's about to lose the qualities that have made it so expensive and finally so famous and so overrun with tourists; it is about to lose its idiosyncrasy: it's about to stop being something that until even now it still is - a remarkable model of integrated inner-city community life. The reason can be summed up in a single phrase: commercial rents.
As commercial leases here are beginning to run out, landlords are putting up their rents, doubling them and more. They would be mad not to. Property values here have rocketed. Commercial profits have soared. The neighbourhood, for so long pleasantly shabby and eccentric, is now awash with money, with property developers, designers, shoppers and tourists, all delighted by this remarkable place, and hell-bent, in their delight, on destroying it with their very interest. Their interest fuels the rent increases that have already driven out local residents and is now beginning to drive out local small businesses, to be replaced by rich, big international businesses. Three well- known shops just off Portobello Road will soon disappear. A flower shop there has already been replaced by a glass-fronted organic juice bar. Several other small traders, including a much loved bicycle repair shop in the now famous All Saints Road, already face closure. The bookshop and the delicatessen will go. And what will happen to the pitches on the Portobello Road itself? Is it true that someone has an air-conditioned Olde Worlde-style shopping mall already designed to take over the old antique and vegetable market?
Many people at that meeting at St Peter's church last week were inclined to blame that damn film, but the film is not so much a cause of these changes as an expression of them. This is a pattern of destruction we have seen again and again in this country. It has been happening here, for at least a quarter of a century. I have protested about it before. The process is always much the same, as is the question: what if anything could, or should, be done about it? What justification is there for the protectionism and social engineering that resisting such change would certainly demand? What justification can there be for keeping McDonald's or Wal-Mart out of the Portobello Road?
I should point out that at the moment, whether or not there is any justification for doing anything about all this , there is no way one can. The powers of the council, under planning laws, are extremely limited. The Department of the Environment could do little or nothing, even if it wished to. There would need to be new legislation, with all the risk, injustice and bureaucracy that that would involve - very awkward for a libertarian to support. All the same, I think it can be supported.
First of all, it will without question be a social evil to drive out local people and local small businesses, to impose homogenised high-street blight and rip up the delicate social fabric here. In Blairspeak it will be a terrible squandering of social capital, that saved up and reinvested goodwill that enables people to live in peace and help each other. This area is actually a shining example of how mixed race, mixed income, integrated inner-city neighbourhoods can work. The Government has recently pledged itself, whatever that means, to urban regeneration. What is about to be imposed on North Kensington is urban degeneration. As well as painful to us, it will be expensive to the taxpayer, in remedial handouts of every kind.
Freedom for the investor or the landlord must be restrained by some obligation not to harm others. We restrict aircraft flying at night; we try to prevent factories from polluting rivers; we try to prevent sweatshops; some councils already prevent property developers from building inner-city ghettos, by giving planning permission for mixed housing only.
We could in theory protect a family-run toyshop from the crushing might of Toys R Us; we could protect our tiny ethnic coffee shops and exotic delicatessens from Coffee Republic and Starbucks. That would be restraint of trade. But the freemarket can never be entirely free. It has always been and must be based upon and restrained by moral agreements. Perhaps it's time to reconsider, in the case of inner-city planning, what those agreements are. And quickly, before it's too late for Notting Hill.
Sunday, June 27, 1999 | Comments (0)
Playing the race card
Whatever one may think of Livingstone, he isn't a racist
It may be possible to reconcile oneself to the inevitability of having a Mayor of London, unnecessary, expensive and ridiculous though it will be. It is another thing, however, to reconcile oneself to any of the candidates that have been emerging.
Lord Archer and Ken Livingstone appear, in their different ways, to have a curiously weak grip on reality, to say nothing of their other failings, and though that may not matter much in itself, it is hardly a recommendation for public office; the thought of either having any serious power over our lives - if indeed the job of mayor actually offers any - makes me feel rather faint. By contrast the broadcaster Trevor Phillips, while in no way actually appealing, seemed a less bad bet that the rest. At least so he seemed until last week. But last week he too revealed his own unsuitability. He accused Ken Livingstone of racism.
The ironies here are so rich that one hardly knows where to begin. Phillips and Livingstone are Labour rivals for the job of Mayor of London. Earlier this year, in an open letter to Tony Blair, Livingstone suggested that while he himself should be allowed to run as Labour's official candidate, for all his Leftist views, he would be happy, for the sake of balance, to take on as deputy his rival Trevor Phillips, "who", he said, "I understand is your preferred choice". Reports vary as to how Trevor Phillips originally responded to this offer; some said he was at first and privately rather keen to accept; his supporters, reportedly, deny that entirely. However that may all have been, last week Trevor Phillips angrily protested in an interview that this offer was "arrogant and patronising".
"I think there is a rather serious point", he said, "that I will put as mildly as I can. All of us who come from minority communities get rather used to, and fed up of, any time we emerge on the public scene - people treating us as apprentices." If, he continued, Ken Livingstone "wants to be leader of a city where a third of the people are from ethnic minorities, I think he is going to have to be a little bit more sensitive, isn't he?"
Mr Phillips has since denied, through a spokesman, that what he said amounted to an accusation of racism, but it is hard to understand what, otherwise, he meant. How otherwise can his words be understood? And what would his point sound like if he put it less "mildly"? No one can deny it is a serious point, however one puts it. Allegations of racism are always serious, but particularly here and now, in London, after the Lawrence case. Memories of the Macpherson Report are still raw in the public mind, with its astonishing allegation of institutional racism in the police, and the even more astonishing confessions of institutional racism in schools and nursing and elsewhere.
Worst of all was the suggestion, often put forward by the race relations industry, that people cannot avoid being racist, and that when they deny it, that only means they are unconscious of it. These were explosive group slanders. It is a dangerous thing to accuse people with good intentions of harbouring bad ones; it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Bullying well-meaning people about racism will eventually breed it.
Whatever one may think of Red Ken Livingstone - whether one smiles at his charm and his newts, or shudders at his socialist record - nobody could possibly imagine for one minute that he is a racist. Nor do I imagine that a skilled political operator such as Livingstone could somehow "make a mistake", in public along racist lines, as Phillips has suggested, offering him "the benefit of the doubt". No. The doubt here must be about Mr Phillips and his good sense. There is nothing insulting with the suggestion that Phillips might run for deputy mayor; it was simply an attempt at political horse-trading, which he has every right to reject, on the reasonable ground that he aims higher. Equally, he might have accepted it, conscious of his own superior talents, as a stepping stone - the world is littered with deputies of all colours who consider themselves superior to their superiors, regardless of colour. Of course Trevor Phillips is right when he says that people from minorities feel fed up - angry might be a better word - and with good reason, all too often, about the disadvantages they suffer.
For that very reason it is all the more important not to complain of unfair racial discrimination, or to hint at it, when it does not exist. This has happened all too often with complaints of sex discrimination. It is true that sex discrimination is pervasive and hard to contend with; what is sad is that the difficulties reasonable women face have been made much more intractable by the many false and frivolous accusations of unfair discrimination brought by unreasonable women. It reflects badly on other women. It hardens men's hearts, and women's hearts too. It exaggerates resentment and undermines people's good intentions.
I don't know why Trevor Phillips has made these insinuations. He is a clever man and must know what he is about. I hesitate to accuse him of cynicism, or of trying to exploit racial tensions for political advantage. But I do feel sure of this: the advantages of playing the race card are short-lived. The losers - those who are most cheated - are always the ethnic minorities. To use Phillips's own words against himself: "If he wants to be leader of a city where a third of the people are from ethnic minorities, I think he is going to have to be a little bit more sensitive."
Sunday, June 20, 1999 | Comments (0)
