Heresy Corner

Nadine Dorries: Still blaming the patriarchy

2012-01-25T15:45:00.005Z

The Guardian is is puckish mood today, publishing (almost in the style of a Comment is Free piece but without the comments) an extract from Hansard in which Nadine Dorries MP takes on the BBC for being sexist.

Dorries begins with an anecdote about the "shocking" tale she had from an unnamed (but well-known) broadcaster, who said that sexism was rife at the corporation, adding that "should he raise the issue within the BBC, life would be made so difficult for him that the end of his career would be just around the corner." Dorries goes on to point out that many of the Licence Fee payers who compulsorarily fund this alleged behaviour are women.

Dorries' main criticisms are (1) that there are too few female presenters, especially on BBC radio and (2) that middle-aged and older women are particularly discriminated against. On the telly, "it would appear that in the minds of TV bosses, the viewing public only enjoy watching ageing male hosts accompanied by young blonde females." And even if, as with Today, there are women as part of the presenting team, "if the female presenter is away from the presenting team, one can go two whole hours in the morning when listening to the "Today" programme without a single female voice, and have male voices speaking at you throughout all that time."

Which is of course a horrible prospect. Still, there's always Woman's Hour. And sometimes Kirsty Young has a female castaway on Desert Island Discs.

Her evidence for this comes not just from listening to the radio a lot but from a Guardian article by Kira Cochrane, which she describes as "research" (though Cochrane herself admits that it "wasn't a scientific study"). Actually, she doesn't mention the most striking of Cochrane's findings (striking, that is, if you're coming from a Guardianista perspective), which is that off all the media she surveyed the most gender-balanced was the Daily Mail. As Cochrane somewhat grudgingly admits, "whatever the Daily Mail's style and tone, it clearly recognises the commercial importance of its women readers, targets a mass of material at them, and is rewarded as the only daily national, besides the Daily Express, whose female readers currently outnumber male readers."

Nadine Dorries has a similar point of her own, though, which must have caused a bit of wincing at King's Place:

The BBC is seen as the holy grail by the left. I believe that an irrational desire by the left to protect the BBC and not attack it or highlight its faults has allowed the present situation to occur, under the prolonged former governance by Labour. It is a worrying theme that the left irrationally protects what it regards as the issues on its turf, sometimes to the detriment of women.

That's moral blind-spot on the Left doesn't just apply to the BBC, of course. But that would be to digress.

There's a strong personal element in Nadine's critique, and it centres on one ageing male host in particular. While she is "not proud of the fact" that she once described Andrew Neil as an "ageing, overweight, orange toupee-wearing has-been" (though she's not sufficiently ashamed of the fact to avoid mentioning it) she's happy to complain that the ex-Sunday Times editor is "aggressive, abrasive and often rude" - and, moreover, "massively turns women off". He accuses him of only having Diane Abbott on his show to use her as a punchbag. She recalls her own run-in with him:

I ran over to College green and did a little piece to camera and gave a quick quote on David Cameron's election campaign. Mr Neil thought I could not hear him as I finished, but I still had the earpiece in, and heard him say, "Well, she looked tired and out of breath there didn't she?" Would he have said that about a male politician who had run over to College green to do that piece? No. It was another sexist, negative Mr Andrew Neil pearler, saved just for the women politicians.

She speculates that the sight of male political journalists making sexist comments about female politicians will put women off entering politics: "Why would any woman want to join us in this place when that is how they are regarded and spoken about?"

This is all vintage Nadine. It also confirms what I've long thought about her, which is that she is essentially a feminist. She uses not just the language and assumptions of feminism in her public utterances, but also (perhaps especially) its basic emotional propulsion, which is its sense of grievance. Rightly or wrongly, but either way like a classic old-style, Guardian feminist, she sees sexism everywhere, she interprets the basic operating system of the world as men taking advantage of women. She blames the patriarchy.

Hence, of course, her passionate belief that girls should be taught to withstand the pressure coming at them from the media, from their peers, but above all from boys and Say No To Sex:

It's girls who get pregnant, girls who lose their education, girls who are left to bring up a child on benefits, girls who reach old age in poverty, girls who are subjected to a string of guesting fathers as they throw in the towel in a life of welfare misery, girls who seek abortion, girls who suffer the consequences of abortion, girls who are subjected to the increased medical risks of giving birth at a young age, girls who have little control over condom use, girls who are pressurised, girls who are targeted by lad mag marketing, it's seven year old girls Primark made alluring padded bikinis for, girls who are targeted by paedophiles...

It's something of an irony that Nadine Dorries gets so much flak from feminists on the Left, who typically accuse her of being some sort of misogynist. I would say something about Caliban raging at his reflection, but I suppose that, too, would be sexist. Or something.

Presidential election: bored already

2012-01-18T13:12:00.003Z

It occurs to me that I have next-to-no interest in the forthcoming American presidential election. Perhaps it's just me, but I don't think so. The coverage so far has been notable for its going-through-the-motions quality. Synthetic arguments and desperate hyping-up of no-hopers have so far failed to inject passion or suspense into the race for the White House. The United States stands at a crossroads both economically and geopolitically; the issues involved are stark, the prospect darker than at any time since World War II. Who will be the next incumbent of the Oval Office ought to be a matter of pressing concern. I find myself yawning.

You might say it's early days yet, given that the final vote won't take place till November. But this time four years ago I was hooked. Partly it was the fascinating and then unresolved struggle on the Democratic side between Obama and Hillary Clinton. Partly it was a sense of an era closing and a genuinely new and exciting phase in US history beginning. Partly - though this came later - it was the explosion onto the world stage of the scintillating, freakish, incomprehensible Sarah Palin (whom I originally quite liked). But above all, I think, it was the sense that all this mattered.

Where are we today? Barack Obama will be the Democrat nominee, and he will probably (but not definitely, not even almost certainly) keep his job. But he's no longer the fresh, inspirational, world-changing icon that he was four years ago. It was apparent even then that he had been oversold, that it was unlikely that his performance in office would remake the map of the world. Yet it was hard not to be swept up in some of the excitement. His emergence and slow-motion destruction of the natural front-runner was awesome to behold. And there was, besides, the ongoing soap-opera of The Clintons to enjoy.

Similarly, on the Republican side there was some enjoyment to be had from not knowing which of the middle-aged white men would ultimately triumph. Even then, the early picking-off of the Revivalist loonies robbed the race of much of its colour. But for a time Rudi Giuliani looked to have the potential to be an exciting candidate, and the long tussle between John McCain and Mitt Romney for the chance to be on the losing side provided a rare spectacle of the victory of substance over money. This time, the fight was over before it really began. Sarah Palin's less-inspiring doppelganger Michele Bachmann provided some early frights, as did the (for a while) scarily plausible Rick Perry. But it's still January, and we know it will be Romney - a man who, aside from his adherence to the wacky religion of Mormonism, offers no interest whatever.

So we're left with a months-long war of attrition between the newly-boring Barack Obama and the always-boring Mitt Romney, for a job that doesn't seem to matter as much as it once did. Stand by for the most boring set of debates ever.

No end in sight to unfair extradition rules

2012-01-16T15:30:00.007Z

A few days after a student was told he faced extradition to the United States for alleged copyright violation committed in his own front room, which the British authorities show no inclination to prosecute and which may well not even amount to crimes under UK law, it is reported that the Coalition is about to abandon its longstanding promise to reform the system.

Despite strong backbench feeling on all sides (as evidenced in the debate organised by Conservative MP Dominic Raab) and despite her own previous public position, Home Secretary Theresa May is, it is reported, about to rule out any change in the extradition arrangements with the United States or with other EU countries. Instead, she is set to follow the conclusions of a report produced late last year by the senior judge Sir Scott Baker, who decided that everything in the world of extradition was absolutely fine. This should be massively disappointing to anyone who cares about justice.

In a sense, May's hands are tied because of the prevalent (but absurd) political doctrine that once you set up an "independent" inquiry into something you have to do whatever the inquiry recommends - or, at least, that it's politically dangerous to go against the suggestions of the inquiry, even when (as here) the inquiry's recommendations are abysmal. Indeed, the Evening Standard notes that "ministers acknowledge that they will have to take a few hits politically because of the decision, but that they feel bound to accept the former judge's verdict because of the detailed way in which he conducted his analysis of the law."

It would have been popular as well as principled to have introduced new safeguards for British citizens sought by foreign courts. I suspect it would have better reflected her own private views - to say nothing of Lib Dem colleagues such as Nick Clegg. But policy-making in this area as in others has largely been contracted out to "experts", and Baker has spoken. The manifold injustices of the extradition process will remain uncorrected.

A lot of the commentary - and indeed the criticism - surrounding cases such as that of Gary Mckinnon, the "NatWest Three" and now Sheffield student Richard O'Dwyer has missed the point, concentrating on the allegedly unequal nature of the 2003 Extradition Act. There certainly is inequality: British authorities seeking extradition from the USA have to show that they have a prima facie case; US authorities have merely to show British courts that they have correctly identified a suspect. But as the Baker report demonstrated, while formally unequal the rules have relatively little practical impact (though I do wonder what would have happened to Lotfi Raissi). Certainly, several defendants have been able to spin out the legal process in the UK for many years, even under the current regime.

No, the problem with the extradition arrangements between Britain and the USA is not that they are "unequal". If they are unequal, it is merely because Americans enjoy certain constitutional safeguards that we lack; that it good news for Americans, but it does not constitute some sort of dastardly US plot for world domination. Worse, excessive concentration on the "unequal" nature of the treaty with the USA distracts attention from the problems with the European Arrest Warrant, under which a British citizen can be hauled off to any other EU country with even less formality, and fewer safeguards, than if they're being sought by the USA. Sometimes for very minor offences. Take Tracey Molamphy, who spent two weeks in a German prison cell because of a minor incident that had occurred twelve years previously in Portugal. The EAW system is not "unequal", but it is illiberal, arbitrary and dangerous - and the number of people affected is much greater.

Sir Scott Baker's lamentable report (all 400 pages of which can be read here) failed to see what was wrong with either system, perhaps because he was asking himself the wrong questions. On the arrangements with the USA, Baker concluded that there is no significant difference between the US "probable cause" test for arrest and the UK's "reasonable suspicion" test, and that it was not significantly more difficult to extradite someone from the USA to the UK than vice versa. All of which may be true. But these are purely procedural points.

Baker took no account of the aggressive way in which the US authorities seek to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction, for example in seeking the extradition to face trial of people who have never set foot in the United States. Nor did he recognise the huge difference between standing trial in your own country, with full access to such things as bail, financial support and family, and being hauled off to a foreign land, there to be treated as a fugitive from justice. To someone who may in fact be not guilty, the trauma and life disruption that will inevitably result from such an experience cannot be wiped away by an acquittal. Even where guilt is clear, the process of extradition is often in itself wholly disproportionate to the offence. Nor should it be forgotten that the sentences imposed by US courts, and the prison regime itself, are often much tougher than those in the UK.

Baker even rejected the straightforward amendment of a "forum bar", under which cases would if possible be tried in the UK. He did so apparently on the basis that it would "create delay". For the report, it didn't much matter where a case was tried, so long as the end result (acquittal or conviction) was likely to be the same. And I suppose that as a piece of abstract legal reasoning that might be so. Once again, however, the conclusion completely ignores the massive difference between the two situations from the point of view of the accused. Astonishingly, Baker even suggested that prosecutors were "far better equipped" to make the decision as to the appropriate forum than a neutral court. The lack of imagination, of empathy, of basic decency on show in this chilling report beggars belief.

The judge was much impressed by "the public interest that lies in having and operating effective extradition procedures", but seemed wholly unmoved by the human cost of such streamlined administrative processes on individuals and families caught up in them. Nor did he seem to care about the violence to the rule of law and to basic civil rights that inevitably follows. But in any civilised legal system the rights of individuals must outweigh the convenience of the system. Humanity matters more than efficiency. It is absurd and outrageous that basic and sometimes ancient protections (such as the right to know the evidence against you, the right of habeas corpus and to bail) are set aside when the word "extradition" is invoked.

It's simply not good enough for government ministers, Tory and Lib Dem, who for years have made valid and well-informed criticisms of both the US/UK treaty and the EAW, now to hide behind the drily legalistic and illiberal conclusions of Sir Scott Baker. Politicians, and lawyers, need to appreciate that extradition is a serious matter. The basic rights of citizens should not be so lightly or casually tossed aside.

UCL atheists face down censorship

2012-01-13T11:15:00.006Z

UCL's Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society seems to have won its tussle with the student union over its "right" to use an image taken from the popular "Jesus and Mo" cartoon strip.

The union had demanded that the image be taken down, following a "number of complaints" from Muslims suggesting that the image was offensive to their sensibilities. There's no mention, incidentally, of any complaints coming from Christians, although the image of Jesus in the cartoon is every bit as satirical and thus potentially "offensive" as that of Mohammed.

(Of course, some Muslims object to the depiction of Mohammed at all, even by non-Muslims, but that is an entirely bogus argument. Muslims may make a point of principle and theology of not depicting their prophet, but such a principle cannot apply, or even have any meaning, to those who do not adhere to the religion.)

A post on the ASHS Facebook page thanks supporters, including Richard Dawkins and New Humanist magazine, and states the following:

We can now tell you that the University College London Union has recognized that mistakes were made and that the initial correspondence with our society was flawed. The Union is to review its stance on such matters and has said that this will not happen again. They can no longer call on us to withdraw the image. We welcome these developments, which set an important precedent for other universities. We also feel it appropriate to recognize the swift response of the Union, which certainly helped us reach this positive conclusion.

It is astonishing, or should be, that the right of people to be mildly satirical about sacred figures should even be in question in this day and age. No doubt UCLU thought it was being sensitive, inclusive and progressively liberal in demanding the atheist society remove the cartoon. But it was not. It was the action of illiberal bullies.

Incidentally, Jesus and Mo have their own unique take on the row, here.

And it's not over yet. Apparently, UCLU are still threatening the humanists with disciplinary action on the basis that the image might "constitute an act of bullying, prejudice, harassment or discrimination." This "could lead to the forced resignation of committee members, or disaffiliation from the Union." However, "in light of our now constructive relationship with the Union, such an event seems unlikely." Well, let's hope so.

The important message to take home from this case is that knee-jerk censorship in response to claims of religious "offence", whether genuine or (as here) plainly bogus, can and should be resisted. As Cranmer points out this morning, "it has taken many centuries of religio-political evolution, but liberal democracy has learned to permit expression of the God who laughs... So why are the thought police (aided and abetted by government) collaborating on the ascendancy of a god in whom there is no humour?" Offensiveness, in and of itself, is not something to be scared of.

Any strongly-held belief is likely to be offensive to someone. Avoiding of offence, either in words or images, is impossible in practice and undesirable in theory. People who complain about trivia, whether to the UCLU or to Ofcom or the Advertising Standards Authority, should be told to get over themselves. UCL's Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society deserves to be congratulated. They have proved, not merely that they had nothing to apologise for, but that if you stand up to bullies they tend to back down.

Salmond fishing

2012-01-12T17:52:00.003Z

In an excellent assessment of Alex Salmond's present dominance of the Scottish political scene (and how many people in England can even name another Scotland-based politician?) Jonathan Friedland wonders if full independence would really be in the SNP leader's interests:

Such an outcome ["devo-max"] might even suit Salmond better than independence, for his appeal rests, in part, on his status as the underdog, the plucky (Scottish) man against the mighty (London) machine. All-powerful first minister he may be but, as long as he is campaigning for independence, rather than achieving it, this appeal remains intact. For Salmond, truly the journey is as important as the destination.

There's some truth here, but not, I suspect, much. However much he enjoys his complete dominance over the Scottish political scene, what Salmond would love above all, I suspect, is to go down in history as the man who led Scotland to independence. He imagines standing in the company of Wallace and Bruce, or even of Washington, Gandhi and Bolivar, as the Father of the Nation, one whose deeds will echo in eternity.

Friedland writes that never since Tony Blair was in his pomp has Britain beheld a more naturally gifted politician. Or one, I would add, with a bigger ego. But Blair was ultimately a trivial figure, who went off to make his millions and was rarely to be seen again. He lacked much sense of history. He had a vision of the world, and his place in it, but it was a vision made up of slogans and generalities. Salmond's big idea is easy to understand and (unlike Blair's remade world) seemingly obtainable.

An independent Scotland would be terrible news for English politicians who aspire still to play the global game of great-power politics, and it could keep Labour out of office in London for a generation or more, but it wouldn't be obviously disastrous for either the Scots or the English. If you conceive of Scotland and England as separate countries, as most people in the UK do, it is the continuance of the union that appears anomalous. If Austria and Hungary can go their separate ways, or the Swedes and the Norwegians, or the Czechs and the Slovaks, or the Russians and the Ukrainians, then why not England and Scotland? It might largely be an historical accident that England, Scotland and indeed Wales entered the modern age with a consciousness of separate identities, but they did, and from that happenstance Scottish independence logically follows.

Staving it off will largely be a case of exaggerating the dangers. That said, inertia is a powerful force in politics. The two parts of Canada don't even speak the same language, nor do the two parts of Belgium, yet somehow both these unnatural entities stagger on, and have done for decades, despite strong independence movements. The union between Scotland and England makes far better geographical, racial and linguistic sense than either of those. Unless David Cameron manages to antagonise the Scots unnecessarily there's little prospect of an independence referendum going through. He's made a good start, though, with his refusal to countenance a two-part referendum. If "devo-max" is seen to be popular and workable, and the Scottish people are not allowed to vote on in, a retaliatory, "screw-you" vote for independence can't be ruled out. I'd be tempted, were I a Scot.

Especially if it meant Alex Salmond taking his place in history, and finally leaving the political stage.

Defending Obscenity

2012-01-09T15:46:00.014Z

The venerable Obscene Publications Act 1959, a legislative dinosaur that is now almost of pensionable age, is now on its last legs. That, at least, was the immediate consensus following the acquittal last Friday of Michael Peacock, a gay escort known professionally as "sleazy Michael", on charges of supplying obscene DVDs.

The material in question depicted acts that are legal to perform, which did not fall within the definition of "extreme pornography" contained in the more recent Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2009 (as not involving the threat of serious injury), but which nevertheless came within the CPS prosecuting guidelines for obscene publication - namely, "fisting" and urination. (Peacock mentioned in evidence that the two tastes are curiously linked, with a predilection for one usually indicating an enthusiasm for the other, too. Quite why this should be so is unclear, but it would make a fascinating research topic for a broad-minded psychologist, would it not?)

Live-tweeted by journalist Nichi Hodgson and Backlash's Alex Dymock, the case made for compulsive online reading all last week. Blow-by-blow accounts of the allegedly obscene videos (which were shown, not just to the jury, but to anyone in the public gallery at Southwark Crown Court, making the courtroom briefly into the country's only free, non-membership sex cinema) alternated with sometimes hilarious exchanges between witnesses, lawyers and the judge. If you missed, it, there has been much coverage elsewhere, which I won't repeat here - not least because I'm very late to this particular party. The must reads are from Chris Ashford (perhaps the fullest account of the case itself and the issues), Myles Jackman (who advised the defence) and Nichi Hodgson herself.

It's not clear why the police and CPS decided to target Michael Peacock or, having done so, why he was charged under the Obscene Publications Act. He might have been charged under the Video Recordings Act 1984 with supplying unclassified material, which would have been an easy prosecution win. Peacock himself is no porn-baron. In his fifties, he's a previous winner of a coveted "Flying Golden Penis" as the Erotic Awards' male sex-worker of the year, 2007. He supplied the DVDs as a sideline, advertising them in Craigslist as well as selling them to his regular clients. And as the case unfolded it became clear that Peacock wasn't exactly handing out the porn on street corners.

To gather their evidence, the police had resorted to an elaborate piece of subterfuge. An undercover officer, calling himself Dave, responded to the Craigslist ad via email, asking for details of his DVD stock. He was sent a list. He then (as Peacock's requested) telephoned, saying he was interested in buying the "five most popular fisting DVDs" and was invited to call personally at the defendant's flat. He went round wearing a wire. The defendant made himself coffee and asked what "Dave" wanted. Dave replied: "fisting". The undercover policeman also asked for "extreme" bdsm and fisting material. The requested DVDs, which form the basis of the prosecution case, were then handed over for cash.

It would seem, then, that police mounted a major sting operation to trap a male prostitute into selling hardcore DVDs to someone who had expressed a serious and persistent desire to obtain them. Bizarre.

By far the majority of the coverage so far has welcomed the verdict, seeing it as another nail in the coffin of a paternalistic, judgemental and outdated piece of legislation, as a victory for free sexual expression, as a sign that the law may be at last coming to grips with a more liberal society. It was described, before and after the verdict, as a "landmark" case that would either reaffirm or re-write the law on obscene publications. Legally, the case doesn''t create precedent - jury verdicts are findings of fact, not law. But the guidelines used by the police, the CPS and the British Board of Film Classification are based on the current "best guess" of what would be judged obscene by a British jury. At the very least, it would seem likely that fisting and urination will now be removed from the list of no-nos, bringing the material criminalised by the OPA into closer approximation with the list of activities prohibited under s.63 of the CJIA.

Indeed, it might well happen that prosecution under the OPA will in future be limited to material that would be illegal under the newer law. The OPA is increasingly unimportant as a criminal charge in any event. The number of prosecutions has dwindled in recent years, and the number of contested prosecutions is very small indeed. A couple of years ago an attempt was made to use the OPA against a civil servant from Tyneside who had written a story in members of Girls Aloud were raped and tortured. It collapsed.

At one time, the OPA was used to ban even straightforwardly explicit depictions of normal sex, but the police gave up that particular fight more than a decade ago. Indeed as Chief Supt Martin Jauch of the Met's Clubs and Vice Unit (now trading as SCD9 - Human Exploitation and Organised Crime) told Panorama in 1998, even then juries could be frustratingly reluctant to convict:

At the end of last year we had one particular tape which involved the insertion of a fire extinguisher into a body orifice. It was quite outrageous, it was degrading, it was really beyond anybody’s experience and that was found to be not obscene, it makes you wonder if they’ll find some of this material to be not obscene, then what will they find to be obscene.

All of which makes you wonder why the police and the CPS bothered in this latest case.

The OPA's true significance doesn't lie in the small number of prosecutions that are brought under it, but rather in that it sets the standard by which the police and the BBFC judge the shifting boundary of what is or is not to be considered "obscene". It is unusual - and increasingly anomalous - legislation in that it bans nothing outright but instead employs a notoriously subjective test, that of "tending to deprave and corrupt" anyone likely to see the material in question. Therein lies the law's uncertainty - and, for many, its inappropriate moralism. On the other hand, the very subjectivity of the test does make allowances for changes in society. It gives it flexibility.

It was possible for prosecutors to argue in 1960 that the book Lady Chatterley's Lover was depraving and corrupting - at least, that it might deprave and corrupt the wives and servants of members of the jury, if not the upright male jury-members themselves. It would not be possible so to argue today - and that is surely not just a consequence of the Chatterley verdict going the way that it did. That case was more a symptom than a cause of shifting public standards. On the other hand, one might argue that a consensual, staged act which appears to "threaten serious injury to anus, breast or genitals" - the test set out in the CJIA - does not "deprave or corrupt" someone whose personal kink it reflects any more than would fisting or urination. But to no avail, legally, because that law makes no allowances for taste (nor does it insist on actual harm). And unlike the OPA it targets the possessor - even an inadvertent downloader - rather than the producer or the distributor. Though apparently narrower in remit, in respect of those activities it proscribes (which may now go beyond what a jury would consider obscene) it is harsher and more regressive.

What of the concept of "obscenity" itself? Many would consider it outdated and illiberal by definition - as well as questioning the law's near-exclusive concentration on sex as the vehicle of the obscene. But now that the OPA has had the life almost squeezed out of it - between more liberal social attitudes on the one hand and the new extreme porn laws on the other - it's worth asking, I think, whether something of value is being lost.

The crux of obscenity law is that it bans the depiction of acts which, in themselves, are not illegal; it declares to be depraved and corrupting activities which it nevertheless acknowledges that consulting adults might indulge in, and still remain decent members of society. Something not quite logical there, perhaps. Yet is this not also a way of saying that the needs of society and the needs of individuals might not always coincide, and that there might be a space between what must be privately allowed and what may be publicly depicted? Not everything that is socially unacceptable ought to be illegal, after all: that way lies totalitarianism. But by the same token, the fact that something is legal does not - ought not, in a truly liberal society - render it socially acceptable.

For all its many faults, the Obscene Publications Act sought to strike a balance between private and public rights. It recognised that citizens might lawfully get up to things that the majority of their fellows might consider depraved and corrupted while asserting that the majority also had the right to have their sensibilities protected. Most importantly, by leaving the final decision to a randomly-selected jury of ordinary citizens, it granted custodianship of the standards of decency to the people as a whole rather than their being decided unilaterally by politicians and police. These are principles worth clinging on to even if, by the beginning of 2012, the Act itself had ceased to serve a useful function.

Divide and Rule

2012-01-06T13:09:00.002Z

I do have a modicum of sympathy for Diane Abbott as the latest victim of Twitter's thought-police, ever-watchful for any signs of deviation from the mindless pap that passes for permissible opinions these days. Her public dressing-down by Ed Miliband was an inevitable demonstration of the pieties of modern discourse: she had Tweeted something stupid and "offensive", and while stupidity is tolerated (even encouraged) offensiveness is unforgiveable, or at least forgiveable only after a sufficiently abject apology.

Of course, she was being called out for double standards as much as for mere offensiveness. An acute racism-spotter herself, she appeared, in her comment that "white people love playing divide and rule" she was indulging in the sort of generalisation that she would undoubtedly find outrageous if aimed at black people. So to some extent she deserves her humiliation. But it's dismaying that all the noisy, self-righteous demands for her to withdraw the remark should have crowded out any consideration of whether, in fact, she might have had a point.

To say that "white people" monolithically do one thing or another is absurd rather than actually offensive. In the context of playing divide and rule it doesn't actually make any sense whatever. Which white people? When? But I imagine that when Abbott thinks about "white people" what she is imagining is the British establishment. In the days of the British empire, in non-white colonies (for example, Abbott's own ancestral Jamaica) "white people" and "British establishment" would have been virtually synonymous. And the British authorities certainly did find that "divide and rule" was a useful tactic for governing societies that might otherwise develop a single identity in opposition to the colonial power. The policy has left a long and unfortunate aftertaste in some parts of the world, most notably perhaps in India and Pakistan where British administrators deliberately taught the natives to think of themselves first and foremost as Hindus or Muslims.

The equation of "white people" and "British establishment" doesn't really work in Britain, especially not in modern Britain, where the establishment is no longer uniformly white. Yet successive British policy-makers have indeed found a policy of "divide and rule" to be useful in the context of a multi-ethnic society. Although of course it's no longer called "divide and rule". It's called "multiculturalism".

Bim Adewunmi, whose exchange of tweets with her MP precipitated the Twitterstorm, writes that her concern had been with the term "the black community" - implying as it does a monolithic entity. She writes:

Here's how it goes: a) something deemed to be a "black issue" is on the news agenda; b) Without fail, "community leaders" and the now standard "ex-gang member" are wheeled out to be interviewed. ... I hardly ever recognise any of the so-called "community leaders" on these programmes – I doubt many ordinary black people, ie those they purport to represent, ever do.

The view from Whitehall, and indeed from the BBC (and other establishment peaks as well, no doubt) is indeed something like that. A concept like "the black community", or "the Muslim community", or for that matter "the gay community" is easier to conceptualise than the notion that the public "out there" is a collection of individuals with complex, varied identities. Today, "divide and rule" politics has never been more institutionalised.

The other day, the former Met commissioner Ian Blair was on the radio, in response to the Stephen Lawrence verdicts, boasting that "this was the most profound change to the police in thirty years, as they moved from a kind of colour-blind policing that treated everyone the same to one that understood the previous experience and expectations held by different communities." So the legacy of that brutal racist murder was that citizens are no longer to be treated equally under the law? It's worth reminding Blair, and others like him, that it was not "colour-blind" policing that led to Stephen's killers escaping justice for so many years. It was policing that treated him first and foremost as black, and only secondly as a human being.

But that sort of thinking, often masquerading as liberal and progressive, is all too prevalent, and is enshrined in law, notably in the 2010 Equality Act. It comes naturally to the British establishment precisely because it is a continuation of the old idea of divide and rule. Here lies the irony of Diane Abbott's claims: she believes (or appears to) in the myth of a monolithic black community. The myth gives her a power-base, after all. She is fully engaged in the game of divide-and-rule when it means dividing blacks from whites. She seems to think of black people rather in the way that old-style trade union bosses used to think of their members, in fact. Hence her contemptuous attitude to any member of "her community" who engages in the race-relations equivalent of crossing a picket-line.

Charlotte Church clock: the final countdown

2012-01-03T15:09:00.009Z

Since my New Year's Day post, evidence has continued to emerge about the "Charlotte Church countdown clock", which the singer herself told the Leveson Inquiry had run on the Sun's own website in the period leading up to her 16th birthday in 2002.

It turns out that there were two of them, neither of which, needless to say, were in any way connected with the Sun. One, which seems to be the earlier version, was hosted on Yahoo's much lamented (by some) GeoCities pages. It was plain and amateurish in style, merely showing a picture of the young singer, the message "how long left until Charlotte Church is legal?" and a ticking clock. This seems to be the clock featured in most of the reporting. It is certainly the site that was referred to in a report in the South Wales Echo of 2nd January 2002, in which the creator of the site is named as "William". There was a link on the site (which can be accessed via WayBackMachine), which takes you to a log-in page for the gossip site PopBitch. This may or may not be significant.

But there was also another clock, much more professional in appearance and with its own domain-name, www.charlottechurchconsentcountdown.com (thanks to Cath Elliott for unearthing this). This site, no less sleazy than the first, claimed to be "dedicated to the most beautiful girl....soon to be woman in the world." It carried a disclaimer to the effect that it was "no way related to Charlotte Church and does not promote sex with minors." There's no hint as to the identity of the person or persons behind the domain.

Despite reports around 2nd January 2002 from outlets including the BBC, which I naively took at face value, that the "countdown clock" had been taken down after intervention by Charlotte Church's lawyers, it's clear that both these sites were still up and running up to and indeed long after her 16th birthday. The second was last archived on 28th November 2002. The countdown was replaced by different photos and the message

Charlotte is legal! As of 21st of Feb 2002 Charlotte Church is all woman. Hip Hip Hooray!

The earlier site was still visible as late as October 22nd 2004, by which time Charlotte Church was 18.

Cath Elliott notes that this site was selected as his "website of the day" on 2nd January 2002 by Matt Kelly, who was internet columnist for... the Mirror. "Should we be afraid of this website or treat it as a weird joke?" he asked. Either way, he was happy to publicise it and publish its address.

So it seems that the tasteless countdown clock was indeed promoted, if not actually hosted, by a tabloid newspaper. Just not the evil Murdoch Sun.

I suspect most of my readers won't need reminding that the editor of the Mirror at the time was one Piers Morgan.

The Truth about that Charlotte Church "countdown clock"

2012-01-01T19:48:00.023Z

Here's how Laurie Penny begins her latest Guardian tirade against (anti-female) sexism in the media:

Charlotte Church was 15 years old when Britain's best-read daily newspaper began a public countdown to the day on which she could be legally fucked. The singer, now 25, told the Levenson inquiry into press ethics and standards that the feature made her "feel horrible", and described over a decade of bullying by the Murdoch media group and others.

Laurie is, of course, referencing Church's evidence to Lord Justice Leveson on 28th November, in which the singer claimed that The Sun had run this sleazy feature on its website in the weeks leading up to her 16th birthday. Like almost everyone else who has covered the story, she accepts Church's recollection completely at face value. Few if any questions have been asked. Even News International has been subdued in its denial, a spokesman stating merely that the company "had uncovered no evidence" that it had ever run such a countdown. Perhaps, like sensible MPs during the expenses scandal, NI wants to keep its head down. It was left to others, after all, to rebut the Guardian's false claim that the News of the World deleted messages from Milly Dowler's voicemail.

I suppose it's easy to think badly of the tabloid press, given some of the revelations. Almost any claim, in in present atmosphere, seems plausible. But it's possible to exaggerate their villainy. And there is no evidence whatever that The Sun (or for that matter any other tabloid newspaper) ran a "countdown clock" around the time of Charlotte Church's 16th birthday. There's no evidence because (almost certainly) it didn't happen.

There was such a clock, but it was not (so far as anyone can tell) associated with any newspaper or media organisation. "Charlotte Church Countdown" was an anonymous website. Its existence was extensively reported in the media (including by the BBC), but almost entirely in terms of the Church management's response to it. Thus the Mirror reported on 13th December 2001:

A TWISTED new website is counting down the hours and minutes until Charlotte Church is old enough to have sex.

The lewd internet countdown features a picture of the 15-year-old star and a 24-hour clock, running backwards to her 16th birthday - when she reaches the age of consent - on February 21.

Under the heading "Charlotte Church Countdown", a message tells how long is left until "Charlotte Church is legal".

Charlotte fan Mark Adams, 38, from Penarth, south Wales, said: "It's nasty. She's still a schoolgirl."

A spokesman for her record company said details of the website would be passed to the Cardiff star's legal team.

Charlotte is preparing for a busy Christmas. She will be interviewed by Michael Parkinson on BBC1 on Christmas Eve and a concert from New York will be broadcast on ITV the same day.

I quote that report in full, including the final sentence, because it raises the intriguing possibility that the publicity surrounding the "countdown", however unwelcome it must have seemed to Charlotte Church, was treated by her management as nevertheless being in some sense a marketing opportunity. But perhaps it was "Charlotte fan" Mark Adams who spotted it and was responsible for alerting the press.

Be that as it may, the site was closed down after Church's management took legal action, as was reported on 2nd January 2002 [but see update 3 below] . The Sun's own coverage of the incident is no longer online, but it is unlikely to have differed significantly from that in the Mirror.

Might Charlotte Church have been mistaken? Quite possibly. Human memory is notoriously fallible. And Church's witness statement (pdf) is inaccurate in other respects, too. She claims to have been fourteen at the time of 9/11, for example, when in fact she was fifteen. The questioning to which she, along with other celebrity witnesses, was subjected by the Inquiry can hardly be described as rigorous.

The Sun has many things to be ashamed of, but running a Charlotte Church Countdown Clock is not one of them.

UPDATE: The Guardian has now removed the first paragraph of Laurie Penny's article in response to my findings and at Laurie's request. See her comment below. Charlotte Church's (almost certainly false) claim about the Sun "countdown clock" however remains part of the formal evidence submitted to the Leveson enquiry and largely unquestioned elsewhere. Major journalism fail.

UPDATE 2: Simon Hinde on Twitter points out that Chris Moyles made distasteful comments about Church's 16th birthday on his Radio One show. This is true. He told listeners that he wanted "lead her through the forest of sexuality now that she had reached 16". The remark was the source of a complaint to Ofcom that was upheld. As Simon says, the BBC here was a worse offender than the Sun. Not for the only time.

UPDATE 3: (2nd Jan) An anonymous source sends me a clipping from the South Wales Echo, dated 2nd January 2002 - the date on which several outlets reported that the site had been closed down. It basically repeats the details given above, but includes an interview with CC's mother who is quoted as saying "This is disgusting. This is the first that we have heardabout this site and I think it is sick. We will do everything in our power to have it shut down."

Significantly, the report says that the site "was still running this morning despite assurances from her record company that it is being shut down."

UPDATE 4 (3rd Jan): Brendan O'Neill has written on the issue in Spiked. Since he was apparently unaware of my findings he is unable to explain how the countdown-clock mistake came to be noticed and removed, merely repeating the Guardian's own explanation that it was taken down "because News International denied it". (Amended 9/1/2012)

He has, however, found an archive copy of the original clock, here. This is a significant discovery, and should put to rest any lingering suspicions that the Sun may have had anything to do with it. In fact, if you follow the link to "William", the page's alleged creator, you reach a log-in address associated with the gossip site Popbitch. Moreover, the archive proves that the site was still visible as late as October 22nd 2004, by which time Charlotte Church was 18, despite claims that Charlotte Church's lawyers had had the site removed. This, of course, raises issues about the accuracy of the original reports - most of which, I suspect, were based on press releases put out by Sony.

David Cameron's fatal addiction

2011-12-28T15:35:00.006Z

It's a general rule of policy-making in a state run by the medical-bureaucratic complex (which is most Western states these days) that the sledgehammer is only brought out once the nut has already been cracked.

Thus it has been with smoking. When a high proportion of the population smoked, measures aimed at tackling the carcinogenic habit were relatively benign: small health warnings on cigarette-packets, no-smoking areas on trains, a ban on prime-time adverts for cigarettes (but not, interestingly, cigars called Hamlet). Once the numbers of tabacco-addicts (for no-one could possibly want to smoke for any other reasons) had been reduced to a small but stubborn hard core - largely as a result of changing social mores and the spread through the population of awareness of the health risks - it was time to bring out the Big Bazookas: complete bans on smoking in public places, plain packaging, under-the-counter transactions, intentionally prohibitive levels of taxation.

The official discouragement of smoking has now gone way beyond anything necessary for the protection of health and amounts to the persecution of an increasingly unpopular minority. But of course. As the harm reduces, so the zeal of the harm-reducers increases, as they focus all their energy and determination on ever-smaller numbers of the recalcitrant. At the same time, new targets come into their sights, as though in compensation.

So it now is with alcohol. Alcohol consumption in the UK in fact peaked in 2004 and has been declining ever since. It's now 11% lower than it was. There was an especially large fall in 2009. The UK ranks also below the European average in terms of consumption, an underreported fact that may have something to do with Britain's having the second-highest level of alcohol duty in the EU. The fall in consumption has been most dramatic among young people (the same is true of smoking) as a combination of draconian ID-checks (these days, you're lucky to be sold a bottle of wine no questions asked if you're under 40), rising prices and a media obsession with teenage drunkeness has made the traditional slow transition to the adult world of social drinking far more difficult to accomplish. This, of course, may help to explain why, when they finally are allowed to drink, so many young people seem unable to handle it.

And what of the commonly bandied-about claims about ever-increasing rates of "alcohol-related" disease and hospital admission? We may, of course, be dealing with the legacy of a former wave of alcohol consumption that has largely passed. The most serious impact of alcohol on health is gradual and reflects a lifetime of immoderate drinking and can take decades to manifest, for all the media's enthusiasm for scare-stories about (very rare) 25-year olds with cirrhosis.

"Britain’s problem with alcohol is not due to price, but a culture of excessive consumption," says the Telegraph. Actually, excessive consumption isn't the problem (by European standards, it is not excessive). Culture, though, is. What causes the Hogarthian scenes that disfigure town centres of a Friday or Saturday evening? Not alcohol, but rather a set of cultural beliefs about alcohol that produces (prompts, encourages, excuses) loutish behaviour. Read Kate Fox's Watching the English if you don't believe me. She discusses psychological experiments that show people will get drunk on placebos while staying sober on alcohol that they believe to be water, and notes that "many other nations manage to consume much larger quantities of alcohol without becoming rude, violent and generally disgusting." She writes:

These basic facts are, among my fellow cross-cultural researchers, so obvious and commonplace as to be tedious. We are certainly all very weary of repeating them, endlessly, to audiences who either cannot or will not accept their validity. Much of my professional life has been spend on alcohol-related research and my colleagues and I have been trotting out the same irrefutable evidence for over a decade, every time our expertise is called upon by government departments, police conferences, worried brewers and other concerned agencies.

Everyone is always highly surprised... and politely determined to let nothing shake their faith in the evil powers of the demon drink. It's like trying to explain teh causes of rain to some remote mud-hut tribe in thrall to the magic of witch-doctors and rain-makers.

As for those figures about hospital admissions, Tim Worstall explains why they cannot be trusted here. You really must read it.

A second general rule also applies here: the more alarming the statistics appear to be, the less alarming the statistics actually are. I suspect there are two reasons for this. First, because of the sledgehammer rule: the less serious the problem, the more motivated the campaigners (who are never satisfied) will tend to be. Second, because where statistics speak for themselves (because they are truly alarming), they speak for themselves. When they aren't actually too bad, the campaigners can only get their point across by shouting loudly, exaggerating, talking up the worst case scenario and playing down the good news. So they present the media with generous dollops of juicy alarmism.

Two media organisations in particular enjoy scaring their audience with exaggerated levels of gloom. The Daily Mail and the BBC. Draw your own conclusions about that unholy alliance.

It's not just alcohol and tobacco that regularly get this level of alarmist coverage. It's also... illegal drugs, obesity, sex-trafficking, climate change, internet porn and the "sexualisation of childhood".

Which is where David Cameron comes in. Today the Telegraph reports that he "has ordered officials" to draw up plans for minimum pricing of alcohol, against the opposition of the Buisness Department (which worries that it might be illegual under EU regulations) and the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, who favours a voluntary approach. This is being presented as part of a personal moral crusade by the prime minister, who (the Telegraph ominously reports) "is thought to have opted for a big bang approach to the alcohol problem after noting the success of the ban on smoking in public places."

This comes days after Cameron's plans to implement to the max the recommendations of Reg Bailey's seriously flawed review into the "commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood" - including, I note, a ban on allowing under-16s to earn money as "brand ambassadors" in peer-to-peer marketing. This idea has long been a particular obsession of David Cameron's. Rumour has it that he had specifically asked Bailey to recommend such a ban when he set up the review - and Bailey duly obliged, although if you read the report carefully you'll discover that the proposal attracted almost no support among parents.

Nanny statism, of course, is what happens when the government takes the regulation of morality away from bishops and gives it to doctors, social workers and professional experts. Cameron champions personal responsibility, but proposals like these suggest that he instinctively doesn't trust people to make their own decisions. His clumsy, ill-directed moralism is increasingly irritating, even to many Conservatives.

But then who ever became a politician because they disliked telling other people what to do?

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of Kim Jong-Il

2011-12-22T12:29:00.015Z

According to tradition, the assassination of Julius Caesar was attended, both before and after, by frightening and mysterious portents. Suetonius records that an ancient prophecy had been unearthed warning that "a man of Trojan stock will be murdered by his kindred"; that a herd of horses released by Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon had run amok; that a wren clutching in its beak a sprig of laurel had flown into the senate house pursued by a flock of other birds which tore it to pieces. And after his funeral a comet appeared, interpreted by many as representing the soul of Caesar ascending into heaven and taking its place among the gods.

Plutarch's catalogue of wonders is more dramatic still, featuring "lights in the heavens, crashing sounds borne all about by night, and birds of omen coming down into the forum". Shakespeare put these and other portents into the mouth of Calpurnia, Caesar's wife:

A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn'd, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.

Calpurnia is sure that these events portend some dire event affecting her husband, because the gods take special notice of the passing of great and powerful men:

When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

Perhaps it's only to be expected that the passing of North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il should in a similar manner be reflected in strange natural phenomena, as the North Korean news agency KCNA reports.

On Saturday morning when Kim died, we learn, layers of ice ruptured with an unprecedented loud crack at Chon Lake on Mount Paektu - the place where the country's founding father Kim Il-sung established a secret base from which he fought a guerilla campaign against the Japanese during the Second World War - and a snowstorm and strong winds hit the area.

In official histories, Mount Paektu was also the birthplace of Kim Jong-il in 1942.

The snowstorm is said to have ended suddenly at dawn on Tuesday and the sunrise lit up the horizon and the mountain peaks - no doubt suggestive of the Dear Leader's blessing upon his anointed heir, Kim Jong-Un, and of the bright new dawn awaiting the nation under the wise leadership of the Great Successor. Indeed, we're told that a message from Kim Jong-il carved on the rocks - "Mt Paektu, holy mountain of revolution. Kim Jong-il" - glowed brightly in a phenomenon that lasted until Tuesday evening.

A glow was seen atop the mountain's Jong-il Peak for half an hour on Monday when the death was announced by Pyongyang, while on Tuesday a crane was observed flying three times around Kim Il-Sung's statue on Tonghung Hill in the northeastern city of Hamhung.

The crane stayed there for quite a long while with its head bowed and flew in the direction of Pyongyang. Observing this, the director of the Management Office for the Hamhung Revolutionary Site and others said in unison that even the crane seemed to mourn the demise of Kim Jong-il, born of heaven, after flying down there at dead of cold night, unable to forget him.

The phrase "born of heaven" interestingly recalls the traditional title of the Chinese emperors, "Son of Heaven".

If the official reporting of omens seems bizarre, it also seems of a piece with the peculiar cultlike atmosphere of the North Korean state. Officially the country is a people's republic founded on the Communist principles of Marx and Lenin, but the accession of the grandson of the founder is no less monarchical an event than was the succession of Roman emperors (who also claimed, for several centuries at least, to be merely the first citizens of a republic - while at the same time being worshipped as gods). The Kim is dead, long live the Kim.

The contrast between the pretensions of the Kim dynasty and the reality of the creaking, poverty-stricken and miserable country over which they preside (about which even Noam Chomsky was unable to say anything complimentary) makes the effusion of grief for the Dear Leader seem risible as well as sinister and sad. It is orchestrated, compulsory, suspiciously over-the-top grief. In such a climate, hyperbolic claims that nature itself is mourning appear as yet more evidence of the regime's detachment from reality, its absorption in a bonkers cult of personality. Kim Jong-Il himself seems to have been more Caligula than Augustus.

But are we looking at superstition or manipulation? The omens that were said to have attended the passing of Julius Caesar may have had their basis in rumours that were circulating at the time (with or without official encouragement) but there's no doubt that belief in Caesar's cosmic significance played an important part in rallying support to his official successor, Octavian (later Augustus). After Octavian won his struggles with Brutus and later Mark Antony and sought to consolidate his own dynastic rule, building up the cult of a deified Julius Caesar was a means of establishing his own legitimacy as ruler. That celestial events attended his death was evidence not just of Caesar's own greatness but of his successor's reflected glory.

All three generations of Kims play their part in these reported omens. Mount Paektu was the scene of Kim Il-Sung's heroic wartime battles and one of its peaks was named after his son, while the bright glow that was seen there is suggestive of future promise. And it's surely significant that the crane was seen to fly three times around the statue of Kim Il-Sung - once for the father, once for the son, and once for the grandson. The crane may have been "mourning", as the official account claims. But in Eastern mythology, cranes are symbols of prosperity and good fortune - and also of long life. The message is clear. Heaven smiles upon the House of Kim, and will continue to do so for many years to come.

Book Review: This Saint Will Change Your Life

2011-12-21T10:34:00.006Z

This Saint will change your life by Thomas Craughwell (Quirk Books £13.99)

This sometimes fascinating, often bizarre collection of 300 patron saints is written in an light but not overly sceptical style: just pious enough to satisfy believers without quite concealing the far-fetched and accidental nature of many of the saintly affiliations. Dark humour abounds, especially in the gruesomely baroque tales of martyrdom. St Barbara was beheaded by her own father, who thereupon exploded: she is now the patron saint of gunpowder. St Quentin is patron saint of coughs, because according to legend his torturers poured a mixture of lime, vinegar and mustard down his throat (which makes one wonder, adds Craughwell, why he isn't also invoked against gagging).

Patron saints are probably, in essence, a diluted survival of paganism, where there was a god for everything, but they are still being awarded contracts today. There's a patron saint of blogging, apparently (it's St Augustine of Hippo, on account of his prolific and sometimes confessional output) and, believe it or not, of disputed elections. Though that one seems to be a little tongue in cheek: it's St Chad, as in "hanging" chad, and he's only had the job since the Bush/Gore stand-off in 2000. A better-deserved affiliation is that between St Bernadino of Siena and the advertising industry. Bernardino invented (or at least popularised) the IHS logo often found on altar-cloths and clerical vestments.

There's a strange specificity - and ingenuity - on display in such cases as that of St Elizabeth of Hungary, patron saint of those who get on badly with their in-laws, or St Dominic Savio, the patron saint of hoodies (who sounds from the account like he should really be the patron saint of swotty kids in glasses). The shortest straw may have been drawn by St Germaine Cousin, in life cursed with "a withered right arm and a disfiguring skin condition" and unsightly swellings on her neck, abused by her family for her whole life and dead at twenty-two. Even in death there's no escape for the poor girl, who now rejoices in the title "patron saint of the physically unattractive."

There are some signs of bowdlerism in this book. Mary Magdalene is listed only as patron saint of hairstylists, on account of her traditionally luxuriant tresses. "She was not a prostitute", insists Craughwell. But how does he know? There's more evidence for that than for the idea that she had good hair. And no implications should be drawn from the fact that hairdressers and prostitutes share the same patron saint.

Another puzzling one: St Thomas is listed here as patron saint of construction workers, on the basis of a bizarre legend in which he defrauded an Indian king, promising to build him a palace but actually giving the money to the poor. When the king understandably objected, and threatened to have Thomas killed, the saint explained that a glorious palace awaited him in heaven. That was good enough for the king, it seems: a more gullible character, obviously, than Thomas himself, who I always assumed was the patron saint of sceptics. But he should really be the patron saint of con-men.

There's plenty more unsaintly behaviour on show. St Vladamir was a rapist and murderer. Pope Callixtus I, as a slave, stole his master's money and spent it on dodgy investments. Saint Camillus de Lellis was an out-and-out con man who "liked whoring and drinking, and was blessed with a gift for gambling and swearing". The Blessed Angela of Foligno was a sort of Anna Nicole Smith figure who cheated on her rich but aged husband and, too embarrassed to confess, carried on going to communion. (That, from a Catholic point of view, was of course far worse than the adultery.) But they all repented in the end, so they got to be saints. No entirely fair.

St Sebastian is the patron saint of atheists. That sounds promising. But no, he is "invoked for the conversion, or at least the confounding, of atheists and all enemies of Christianity", which isn't the same thing at all.

This Saint Will Change Your Life is available on Amazon here.

Is carol-singing in pubs proof that we still live in a Christian country?

2011-12-18T11:07:00.003Z

How do Christians get away with it? asks Rev. Julian Mann

It came home to me as a group from our church were singing Christmas carols in our local pub: profoundly counter-cultural words and socially subversive truth-claims are wrapped up in an acceptable packaging of nostalgia and collective memory.

The look on the face of the barman, though, made me suspect that the cultural wrapping paper might be wearing a bit thin. But that could have been my singing.

Consider the second verse of the Christina Rossetti poem ‘In the Bleak Mid-winter’, sung magnificently incidentally by Annie Lennox on her 2010 Christmas album: ‘Our God, heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain, heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign; in the bleak mid-winter a stable-place sufficed the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.’

The outcry if that were sung in a Hallal supermarket in Tower Hamlets would in a sense be more honest than the passive acceptance of a village pub. The drinkers there do not actively believe the astonishing claim of the Rossetti poem – that a human baby, born 2000 years ago, was God Incarnate, the exclusive self-revelation of the Divine.

Consider too ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, which is hardly flattering about human nature: ‘O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray: cast out our sin, and enter in; be born in us today.’

Phillips Brooks’s 19th century carol might not be highly favoured by anti-Israeli English clergy but it proved utterly uncontroversial to the Sunday evening crowd at a 21st century public house.

Perhaps the majority of the regulars ticked the Christian box in the census, but the truth-claims in carols like those certainly make little practical difference to their daily lives or even to their lives for an hour or so once a week.

They don’t even attend Sunday worship.

Arguably, the fact that English Christians can get away with carol singing in a pub is a sign of the weakness of English Christianity.

If we Christians were making more impact on our local communities for the counter-cultural truths the Christmas carols communicate, would the residents be quite so comfortable with us?

Is it because we pose no threat that they allow us to come and sing our beliefs in their social space?

A polite refusal from a pub landlord or at least a complaint might actually be a sign that a local church is making an impact for Christianity in its community.

Farewell to the Hitch

2011-12-16T14:32:00.006Z

When I woke up this morning it was snowing and a voice on the radio was saying that Christopher Hitchens was dead. We had all been expecting it, but it's still a shock. The world is full of tributes to today and I don't want to add to the pile, except to say that reading him, or (even more so) watching him talk, invariably left me feeling pointless and inadequate. He was, at times (to borrow Disraeli's famous put-down of Gladstone) inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. But the world offered few sights more exhilarating than Hitchens in full flow.

On Radio 4 this morning, Hitchens' friend Ian McEwan gave us a moving glimpse of his last days, hooked up to morphine, lapsing repeatedly into unconsciousness, yet somehow finding reserves of strength to tap out his final articles. The mind was working at full capacity right to the end, still challenging lazy assumptions, still interrogating himself and the world.

Not a good way to go, perhaps, but a way to go well. What a contrast, though, to the iron constitution described by Toby Young in his poignant but clear-eyed tribute:

Alcohol had the opposite effect on Christopher that it has on most people. Instead of making him fuzzy and sentimental, it seemed to clear his head – and the drunker he got, the more accurate and deadly his mind became. He wasn't merely born a couple of gin-and-tonics below par. He was born a bottle of vodka below par – and I do mean a whole bottle. Quantities of alcohol that would leave ordinary mortals face down in their own vomit had the same effect on Hitchens as a strong cup of coffee. I remember one drinking session at the house of the journalist Nicholas Lezard in Shepherd's Bush. We sat up all night arguing – Hitch didn't really do small talk – and, at 7am, when I staggered out into the dawn, Christopher asked if he could share a cab with me. He was due at Television Centre to do an on-air review of the morning's papers at 7.30am.

Truly a creature from another age.

If God exists, I hope He won't be giving Christopher Hitchens too hard a time of it today. No-one less deserves an eternity of hellfire and damnation. Any God who sentenced Hitchens to such a fate would surely merit every last ounce of vitriol the writer ever flung at him, and more. There is, perhaps, a special place in heaven reserved for morally courageous atheists like Hitch, a place from which they can sit for eternity throwing insults at their creator.

It could be that the Almighty has a more ironic fate in store for one of his most eloquent critics - an eternity sitting in the divine chariot, perhaps, whispering "Remember, God, that You do not exist!" into the Sempiternal ear. A God like that would almost be worth believing in. Almost. Mind you, I don't think that Hitchens would have anything to feel embarrassed about as he approached the pearly gates. His main point, after all, was not that God did not exist but that He was Not Great.

Better for God that He does not exist than that He now has to look Christopher Hitchens in the face.

British Muslims and the politics of patriotism

2011-12-15T09:50:00.005Z

This is a guest post by LibertyPhile.

The Daily Mail ran “Muslims 'are more patriotic than most British people'” The Sunday Times said “Muslim's prove to be Britain's greatest flag wavers”. And the Daily Star shouted “MUSLIMS TOP PRIDE CHARTS”.

All this sprung from survey results published in November by Demos, a think-tank that claims to be “focused on power and politics”.

If you visit the Demos website press release that was issued with the publication of the report, A Place for Pride, you will find the following:

One of the press releases …. made reference to the fact that 83 per cent of Muslims covered by the poll responded that they were 'proud to be a British citizen', comparing that figure to a baseline - drawn from the whole sample [of 2086 British people] - of 79 per cent. This aspect of the Demos report was widely reported in the press.

It should be noted, however, that the sample size for British Muslims was relatively small, just 48 people, and it is questionable whether confident statements can be made on that basis about one group being more proud of their British identity than another.

48 Muslims! Anyone with any knowledge of statistics or market research will cringe at this. Even people with a modicum of common sense might do the same.

Comparing 83% of 48 with 79% of 2086 is statistical nonsense. And statistics apart, there is the enormous difficulty of recruiting representative samples which Demos doesn’t mention. Exactly how representative of the British Muslim population might these 48 be!

Based on my personal experience of Muslims I am willing to believe that most of my Muslim fellow British citizens are as patriotic and as proud of their country as the next man.

There will be differences - different understandings of patriotism, and pride in one’s country, and people will come to it in different ways.

Various factors play a part. History is important for some; your country’s achievements, what earlier generations endured and came through, what individuals did. The character of its people and their social mores may be important. You can also be proud of your country because it is a decent place to live here and now.

And there is no reason why two citizens of equal patriotism, pride in their country, cannot still hold starkly different views on good and bad behaviour and what is best for their country.

The Demos report is all about patriotism and the role of personal and national pride and the “misreporting” concerning Muslims is a minor feature.

A more interesting result is 88 per cent of Anglicans (and Jews) agreed that they were “proud to be a British citizen” alongside 84 per cent of non-conformists (and the 83 per cent of Muslims already mentioned) compared with 79 per cent for the population as a whole (p39). One assumes there were more than 48 Anglicans. It is a fact that religious people are more likely that non-believers to be proud of their country.

It is a tedious read (a 90 page pamphlet!) but you can also hear one of the authors, Max Wind-Cowie, and Telegraph columnist Charles Moore discuss some of the issues here.

Amongst a range of findings which the report itself admits “your granny could have told you” and opinions, it criticises what it believes is the right wing attitude to patriotism.

…. the right’s pantheon of patriotism is largely determined by a narrow, historical and sometimes mythological set of beliefs about Britain, which are unbendable, unchanging and increasingly inaccessible. The royal family, spitfires, the Houses of Parliament and the Union Jack …. (p76)

Those on the right have insisted that people attach their pride to a set of institutions and persons that are less and less relevant to people’s experience of Britain or to the sources of their everyday pride. (p79)

This isn’t the result of dodgy sample analysis, it is the prejudice of the authors.

They should have specifically surveyed right wingers. They might have found that where symbols are concerned they symbolise something, more often than not what people have done, those spitfire pilots for example.

Indeed, the research for the report shows what people do is of paramount importance. Behaviours and actions make people feel proud of their community or country; volunteering, for example.

I didn’t know until I read this report that the British are among the most likely people in the world to give up our time to volunteer. We have significantly higher levels of social action – and a greater independent charitable sector – than most European countries.

They quote one respondent saying “When you ask about what’s best about being British I think of all the people that give up their time to help other people, or to do good things in the community. That’s what makes me proud of this country.”

Also on the positive side the report makes some useful recommendations highlighting the importance of oral history, what older people have to tell children about their experiences of events. Though one’s enthusiasm for what Demos have in mind is somewhat blunted by the examples they give.

My grandson, he doesn’t know anything really about my life. The Miner’s Strike, the Winter of Discontent, even the referendum on Europe – he’s never been taught about any of it. Ask him about the Victorians and he could tell you though. (p56)

The research work for the pamphlet, the poll of 2080 citizens and an (unspecified) number of focus groups, produced several findings which Demos have not publicised, though in the body of the text they say “This is a worrying set of results”.

They concern integration and the poll result that “Only two in five people believe ‘immigration contributes to Britain’s culture’.

…. they too [the focus groups] highlighted genuinely held concern that local and national pride are being damaged by mass immigration and, particularly, by a perceived failure of arrivals to fully integrate into British life and the communities to which they move. (p30)

British people associate their pride heavily with actions and behaviours rather than with esoteric concepts …. social action, common manners and customs are vital to British people understanding and celebrating their communities and national sense of self: the perceived lack of integration among migrant communities therefore is a real threat to collective pride: (p32)

In a report summary Demos say “…. patriotism does not, and should not, come from either top-down narratives about Queen and country nor from so-called ‘progressive’ notions based on values.” Demos seem to have mixed feelings about values.

But, values do come in to it. The report reveals “82 per cent of respondents agreed that the naturalisation process should include a ‘values test’. Our qualitative research reinforced this. …. Far more important, they argued, was that the [citizen] test should ensure a person shared British values and was involved in British society. (p53/54)

Regarding integration and values we can return to those headlines at the beginning. The Gallup Coexist 2009 survey is quoted by some sources some sources as confirming them. The Gallup survey is based on a sample of 500 British Muslims, not an enormous number but a big improvement on Demos. Gallup also interviewed 1000 non-Muslims. It did similar Muslim non-Muslim surveys in France and Germany

The Gallup survey claims 80% of British Muslims are loyal. It doesn’t define or explain what is meant by loyalty. Patriotism, pride in one’s country, may or may not have been a factor. It comes up with other, quite specific, results too, that show there are serious differences between many British Muslims and their fellow citizens.

Even though hiding your face in public is considered rude unless you are ill, in mourning or it’s very cold, British Muslims don’t care. See here. Only 12% think not wearing the veil is a necessary condition of integration. For French and German Muslims, 32% and 29% see it as necessary.

British Muslims show less respect for other religions than Muslims in France and Germany. See here. Almost 80% of German Muslims strongly agree that they respect other religions but only 50% of British Muslims feel the same.

There is a striking difference between British Muslims and the British public over freedom of speech. See here. Only 9% of British Muslims agree that integration means accepting public comments they perceive as offensive about their faith.

British Muslims are the least integrated in Europe. See here. Using a battery of related questions Gallup determined that only 10% of British Muslims are “integrated”. Gallup give a definition of integration. In France and Germany Gallup found 46% and 35% of Muslims respectively are integrated.

Who’s proud of this?!

Rowan Williams' response to the riots

2011-12-07T20:41:00.004Z

Rowan Williams has been reflecting on the summer's riots in the Guardian. He asks:

How do we as a society back up good lessons in the home and show that we corporately want what a good family wants – mutual attention and affirmation, stability and emotional literacy, a sense of value that doesn't depend on accessories?

His answer is vague, indeed tautological, in the extreme:

We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have.

More interesting is what he doesn't say, which is that religion might have any role to play in instilling a sense of values and responsibility in young people.

In the course of an eleven hundred word article, Williams avoids mentioning "God", "Jesus", "Christianity" or "religion" even once. There are no Biblical quotations, no drawing on the wealth of Christian social teaching, no examples drawn from the life of Christ or the writings of any major theologian. Nothing that could not have been written by a fully-committed atheist of similarly left-leaning persuasion. The archbishop mentions a report compiled on behalf of the Children's Society without hinting at the charity's close links with the Church of England.

Nor is there a single reference to the work of clergy in inner cities. Yet the churches have a good story to tell here. It's unlikely that many of the rioters were committed Christians or regular churchgoers. Many Christian clergy and leaders of other faiths have done remarkable work among the socially excluded, and have been doing so at least since the foundation of the Salvation Army way back in the 19th century.

Coming from a Christian leader - indeed, the country's most prominent and senior Christian leader, the religious head of the established church - these omissions are rather striking.

Rowan Williams' politics are one thing. Some will nod in agreement at the archbishop's characterisation of the rioters as disappointed, disaffected youth, whose "vague but strong longings for something like secure employment" have been thwarted by unstable families and a failed education system. Others will note that the commandment Thou Shalt Not Steal does not come hedged about with sociological caveats. But that's a different argument. The Bible and Christian tradition contain resources enough to support both conservative and socialist arguments. So why not use them?

Without any explicit religious underpinning, or any other, Williams' comments are mere verbiage. For he fails to offer the solutions that, presumably, he believes would make a radical difference to the lives of young people trapped in a cycle of inner-city deprivation. "Young people need love," he writes. Do they, perhaps, need the love of God? They need "a dependable background for their lives, emotionally and socially... that helps them take certain things for granted so that they know they don't have to fight ceaselessly for recognition." Might religion help to shore up such a background? Williams doesn't tell us. He appears not to have even considered the question. Surely one would expect a leading clergyman to argue, and think, that the hopelessness that blights so many lives is as much spiritual as economic.

It has been suggested to me that there is indeed a deep theological perspective lurking behind Williams' pop sociology. I've no doubt that there is - in, for example, his comments on the shallowness of consumerism and its "fierce Darwinian hierarchy of style" (great phrase, that). But it takes a theologian to spot it.

Bishops are expected (or assume themselves) to be experts on morality, but they derive that status from the ancient and still resonant association between morality and faith. Rowan Williams is posing here as a standalone moral philosopher, or, worse, as an opinionated columnist. He fails to make clear the connection with his views on society and politics with his Christianity. He seems almost to be embarrassed by it. Yet without God he is nothing. Just what is the point of an archbishop who doesn't do God?

An Onion for Christmas

2011-12-06T10:53:00.002Z

That hyper-modern news outlet the Onion has an old-fashioned seasonal book out, Christmas Exposed. A compilation of spoof Christmas stories from the past decade, it's rather a hit-or-miss affair (and somewhat adolescent at times), but there are some cracking entries, graced with such surreal headlines such as "Feds uncover secret Santa ring" and "Vatican employees unable to relax at party with pope around". Some of the topicality has faded, but a story such as "Christmas brought to Iraq by force" still retains much of its original bite.

The focus is overwhelmingly Stateside, but many of the situations it parodies are universal. In the Onion, it is an activist judge who has ruled Christmas to be unconstitutional, rather than a politically correct local council. One of my favourite headlines reads "fun toy banned becasue of three stupid dead kids"; it might almost have come from Jeremy Clarkson.

All told, an ideal stocking-filler for someone who won't be offended by jokes about masturbation and prostitutes. Available in the UK from Amazon.

Women driving means immorality, say Saudis. Could they be right?

2011-12-05T15:12:00.013Z

The latest piece of nonsense from the parallel universe that is Saudi Arabia concerns a report - prepared for the government by a leading academic - on the possible effects of rescinding the country's iconic ban on women drivers. The news was not good. Allowing women behind the wheel, thought Professor Kamal Subhi would "provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce". It would also mean that, within ten years, there would be "no more virgins" in Saudi Arabia. Since Saudi is a country that smiles upon the forced marriage of nine year old girls, that prediction may be even more alarming than it at first appears.

Subhi's report comes with the authority of the kingdom's highest religious council, so the king would be mad, mad I tell you, not to treat its conclusions with deadly seriousness. And Subhi certainly did his research thoroughly. He described sitting in a coffee shop in another Arab state - one of the decadent ones, obviously - where "all the women were looking at me". "One made a gesture that made it clear that she was available," he said. "This is what happens when women are allowed to drive."

Indeed. One minute they're sitting at home, fully veiled, waiting for their husband to give them permission to have a cup of tea. The next they're eyeing up strange academics in coffee shops. I'm reminded of Bishop Richard Williamson, who once blamed Europe's moral decline on the perverse desire of women to wear trousers.

Subhi's message is a fairly simple one, it seems. Women need to be very fully repressed indeed, because once you allow them even the tiniest little bit of freedom society becomes awash with decadence and immorality. The minxes can't help themselves. It's in their nature.

Now let's conceed he may have a point, or at least examine the possibility that there might be a link between women having cars and the general decline of moral standards in society. After all, look at the West, where women have been allowed to drive ever since there were such things as motor cars.

In the beginning, a woman driver was quite a rare sight, since cars were expensive and manly things. Almost as rare as a female high court judge or member of Parliament. In those much-lamented days when men were men and women were housewives there was very little immorality. No hardcore porn on the internet, no "objectified" late-teenage slappers falling drunkenly out of nightclubs, few if any teenage mothers. Divorce was legal, but led to social death in most circles. There may have been prostitutes (when were they not) but they didn't write bestselling memoirs that became the subject of racy television adaptations. And of course (Subhi will be delighted at this one) there were no homosexuals. Or if they were, they lived in justified terror of being banged up in Wormwood Scrubs, and quite right too.

So the correlation works. Women having the freedom to drive is positively correlated with many of the things that Professor Kamal Subhi disapproves of. Coincidentally, most of these evils resemble things that feminists of the Gail Dines persuasion campaign against, everything from hardcore porn on the internet to Lady Gaga's costume preferences. Dines recently wrote (Guardian, obviously) that "hypersexualism" - which she blames on corporate culture, rather than women having driving licences - undermined "women's rights to sexual autonomy, physical safety and economic and social equality."

Her argument, being "politically progressive", should never be confused with "rightwing attempts to police sexual behaviour." Yet it's an easy confusion to make, because leftwing feminist anti-sexualisation campaigners and rightwing religious anti-sexualisation campaigners are by-and-large talking about the same thing, and it's much the same thing that Subhi fears will happen in Saudi Arabia if women are allowed to drive. To wit, an epidemic of overt public sexuality.

Why is it that when women become emancipated, so many of them use their new freedom to remove their clothes? Can it all be explained by corporate culture perpetuating the malign reign of the patriarchy, as Gail Dines would have you believe, or is it perhaps that Eve wasn't framed after all, that women's rampant and destructive sexuality will loose itself at the earliest opportunity unless kept under the firm control of men and religion? I wouldn't presume to know. But the correlation, if not the causation, is clear. A free society is a sexualised society. Where women are forced to cover their bodies their choices in other aspects of their lives will be equally circumscribed. In extreme cases, they might not even be allowed to drive.

Put it the other way, allowing women to drive would signal (and also in contribute to) a wider liberalisation of manners and morals that could lead eventually to Western-style decadence. The one may not lead directly to the other, although undoubtedly having a car makes it easier for both men and women to conduct illicit sexual relationships (and I don't just mean on the back seat). But why take the risk?

When it came to his shocking tale of being brazenly looked at by some hussy in a coffee shop, I don't know if Professor Subhi was referring to Egypt, where women are still (for the time being) allowed to drive. But a recent article by Yahia Lababidi, regarding the creeping Islamisation of Egyptian society, may offer alternative perspective on the sexually-charged atmosphere that made him feel so uncomfortable. She describes the remarkable transformation of the once "open-minded and cosmopolitan" Egypt of a few decades ago - where women could be found "happily prancing around in minis and bikinis" - to one in which "sexual repression is absurdly rampant", segregation and veiling has reached almost Saudi proportions and, in consequence, "seemingly innocuous everday activities acquire sexual connotations, such as: the slapping of slippers on a woman’s feet, the smacking of chewing gum, or smoking of a cigarette."

Lababidi argues that Islamisation is producing an unhealthy atmosphere of rampant innuendo, where soldiers ogle prepubescent girls, women wearing full veils shop in department stores for erotic lingerie "that in other countries you’d only find in sex shops" and people are unable to conceive of "a mixed crowd spending an innocent weekend at the beach or a night out dancing, without an eruption of dark depraved desire colouring everything." In such an environment, even a man like Kamal Subhi might find himself the unwitting object of a frustrated woman's transitory longing.

There was, though, something a little counter-intuitive about one of Professor Subhi's fears. How, precisely, might women driving lead to an increase in homosexuality? Has he been out and about in newly-repressive Egypt, perhaps, where as Lababidi observed:

With female flesh under wraps, and no promise of release in the near future, sensuality spills into unexpected spaces. In Cairo, the human need for physical contact often manifests in intense same-sex intimacy. It’s not the least bit unusual to encounter men holding hands, pinkies interlocked, hugging and kissing, while calling each other unusually sweet names: sokkar (sugar), a’assall (honey) or rohe albi (my heart’s soul). Equally common to witness men affectionately wrestling like scrapping puppies, or playfully grabbing each other like testosterone-maddened teens, well into middle age.

Nothing like that would ever happen in Jeddah.

Jeremy Clarkson: a public-sector worker speaks his mind

2011-12-01T16:07:00.005Z

Clarkson was not "joking", as some of his defenders are suggesting, when he suggested that striking public sector employees (with their "gilt-edged pensions") should be shot in front of their families. He was employing hyperbole, just as (to take another example) Paul Chambers was employing hyperbole when he Tweeted the remark that absurdly left him with a criminal record:

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!

That was no more a bomb-threat than Clarkson's expression of exasperation with public-sector strikers is an incitement to murder, or a call of the introduction of capital punishment for members of Unison. It was Clarkson being Clarkson; doing what he's most handsomely paid for, which is amusing one section of the populace by winding up another. That the BBC even employs him is an acknowledgement on their part that the Licence Fee cannot be an entirely arbitrary tax. That there has to be a quid pro quo for all the Euro-propaganda and institutional anti-Toryism.

Although of course it would be naive to suggest that his many detractors don't also get their kicks from putting the boot into the motormouth. Twitterstorms aren't merely an expression of genuine self-righteous indignation, though there's always a large element of that. They're also fun for all concerned, a sort of right-on group hug.

From Peter Serafinowicz: So sad to hear the news about Jeremy Clarkson. He's still alive.

This is all good clean fun. And Serafinowicz is a comedian, so he was obviously joking. But it ceases to be fun when you start arguing, as public sector union UNISON is doing, that Clarkson deserves to be sacked and, if possible, prosecuted form his characteristic remarks. Here's an extract from their press release, put into the mouth of general secretary Dave Prentis:

Public sector workers and their families are utterly shocked by Jeremy Clarkson’s revolting comments. We know that many other licence fee payers share our concerns about his outrageous views. The One Show is broadcast at a time when children are watching – they could have been scared and upset by his aggressive statements. An apology is not enough - we are calling on the BBC to sack Jeremy Clarkson immediately. Such disgusting statements have no place on our TV screens.

Jeremy Clarkson clearly needs a reminder of just who he is talking about when he calls for public sector workers to be shot in front of their families. Whilst he is driving round in fast cars for a living, public sector workers are busy holding our society together - they save others’ lives on a daily basis, they care for the sick, the vulnerable, the elderly. They wipe bottoms, noses, they help children to learn, and empty bins – they deserve all our thanks – certainly not the unbelievable level of abuse he threw at them.

It's all there. The presumption that the union boss is capable of reading the minds of millions of people, many of whom - even if they did go on strike - will have been laughing. There's the "think-of-the-children" kneejerk - for we all know that children are incapable of recognising the nuances of English idiom. There's the hysterical characterisation of Clarkson's words, quite bereft of their context - "aggressive", "disgusting", "unbelievable abuse." There's the sentimental invocation of selfless, low-paid public employees - "they save others’ lives on a daily basis, they care for the sick, the vulnerable, the elderly" (some do, but others are employed sending out diversity monitoring questionnaires). There's the demand for instant dismissal.

Above all, there's the refusal to view things in any kind of proportion, the earnest literalism that characterises so much of officialdom in modern Britain. By rights Prentis (or his press officer) should be taken out and hung, for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.

Or as I wrote apropos the Twitter Joke Trial:

This is not about modern technology, but about the new threat to deep-seated English habits of mind. What has changed is officialdom's loss of a sense of proportion, or of their ability to use discretion and common-sense. That represents a more radical change than the coming of Internet. And the police, the CPS and the judges are on the leading edge of it. The old-fashioned traditionalist who doesn't get it is Paul Chambers, doing what comes naturally to almost any English person and finding himself in the kind of situation once described so eloquently by Kafka. Who wasn't English at all.

Jokes, light-hearted remarks, hyperbole, colourful language: such things are perceived as threats to the bureaucratic mind, and an example must be made of their perpetrators. Clarkson is not Paul Chambers, an unknown and powerless figure who can be pilloried with impunity. This row, indeed, is unlikely to do him much permanent damage. His popularity, as I suggested above, helps to justify the licence fee. He might even be described as a type of licensed rogue, empowered to keep the lower orders quiescent by saying what they'd like to say but would never dare. He's basically a safety-valve for the pent-up frustration that he articulates.

That said, he is lacking in self-awareness if he believes that while lollipop ladies are sitting pretty on gold-plated pensions while he - paid a huge amount of money to drone on about cars on BBC2 - has to "work for a living." Because he is, at least partly, a public sector worker himself. A significant chunk of his income comes from a flat-rate tax imposed on every household in the country, whether they want to watch him or not. He may not technically work for the state - but nor do employees of Serco and Capita, legal-aid solicitors or employees of fake charities technically work for the state, either. Or, for that matter, public-sector union leaders. There are many people in Britain who believe themselves to belong to the private sector who are in fact wholly dependent on the taxpayer to keep them in business.

I often wonder who exactly is paying all these taxes. And then I start thinking about the deficit, and conceive a sudden desire to go outside and shoot myself in front of my family.

Taking money from the Gaddafis. And the rest.

2011-12-01T11:59:00.004Z

It's obviously embarrassing for the London School of Economics, an institution that used to have some of the world's most outstanding dictators among its alumni, to have been caught out taking large sums of money from the Gaddafis around the time Saif al-Gaddafi was awarded a PhD. They couldn't have known that within a couple of years the regime, at that time a favourite partner of the British government, would have crumbled, that Saif's father, publicly embraced by Tony Blair, would have been tortured to death by a vengeful mob and that Dr Saif himself, who by all accounts was one of the nicer Gaddafis, would be facing a show trial in Libya (or, if he's astonishingly lucky, the Hague).

The gift was generous and was not offered until after Saif had written up his thesis. The LSE, like all institutions of higher education in this country, can always do with more money. It didn't come with any strings attached. Why on earth should they not have taken it?

There's always a risk when it comes to taking money from dubious regimes, of course: the risk that the regime might collapse and that all sorts of embarrassing human rights abuses be revealed, tainting its beneficiaries by association. But the potential advantages are likely to be more obvious at the time: not just financial, but in terms of building long-term links with the countries concerned, raising the institution's international profile and the advancement of learning that the money will facilitate. Even if a regime does bad things, funding an educational institution is not in itself a bad thing.

The silliest claim in the Woolf report into the LSE is that the money was tainted because it might have "come from bribes". The bribes in question would have been paid by international business to members of the Gaddafi family in return for favours. Some of the companies concerned might have been in the oil business and even have had British connections. So we're really talking about a convoluted form of corporate sponsorship. Henry VIII committed many crimes, but his endowment of Christ Church, Oxford and Trinity College Cambridge (with money stolen from monasteries) are not generally considered to be among his worst. Some of America's most famous universities were built on the proceeds of slavery. Pecunia non olet.

It is, though, a little bit strange that Middle Eastern governments, some of whom have been having a tough time lately, have been quite so generous to Western (and particularly British) universities. A few weeks ago Christopher Davidson (reader in Middle East politics at Durham University) tackled this question in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. He wrote of the "fascination in many of the Gulf monarchies ... with spending vast sums on overseas education projects, even if the domestic sector is left to languish."

It was reported in 2008 that eight British universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, had between them accepted more than £233.5 million from Arab sources since 1995, most of it from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Major donations included £20 million from the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia towards the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

Davidson writes:

The historic links between the UK and the region have meant that the Gulf monarchies have often been particularly attracted to funding new buildings in UK universities (often centres for Islamic or Middle Eastern studies or libraries), the endowment of chairs and postgraduate scholarships. In fact, it would now be difficult to find a top UK university that did not have examples of all three types of gift.

He suggests that UK universities are particularly attractive to autocrats with large chequebooks because they represent "a much softer underbelly, with less potential for embarrassment" that the United States. Several American universities have set up campuses in the region, with generous funding from their hosts, but when it comes to direct investment there have sometimes been problems.

In 2003, for example, the Harvard University staff and student body rejected a chair in Islamic studies from Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan on the grounds of anti-Semitism and well-documented human rights abuses in the UAE, including the use of child slaves as camel jockeys. Similarly, in 2007 the University of Connecticut pulled out of a relationship with Dubai for much the same reasons.

British universities are less squeamish, it seems. Perhaps they just need the money more, or are even disposed to be sympathetic ("Boycott Israel" campaigns tend to be popular with British academics, after all). Until this year, such concern as was expressed about Middle Eastern funding related to things like the Saudis' enthusiasm for spreading hardline Wahhabi Islam or the danger to academic freedom posed by too much dependence on external souces of income. Now the objections are likely to be more pragmatic. Davidson warns:

Having been badly wrong-footed by the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, and with Gaddafi's collapse exposing an awkwardly friendly British foreign policy towards a terror-sponsoring regime, there is an acute and perfectly understandable possibility that the people of the new Arab democracies, probably led by Egypt, will be distrustful of those Western institutions that continue to do business with the Middle East's remaining autocrats.

There's another way of putting it. The money flowing into British universities was both evidence of, and contributed to, the maintenance of the fiction that this country really mattered in the region. British influence has been based largely on personal links with rulers who, however unattractive and undemocratic, often suffer from a misty-eyed Anglophilia that leads them to want to fund our universities, buy Premiership football clubs or national icons such as Harrods. We will miss them when they're gone.

The full Mosley

2011-11-25T14:50:00.008Z

Since leaving the FIA - since the News of the World sting operation in 2008, in fact - Max Mosley has embarked upon a curious second career as a campaigner for privacy, and most especially his own. His appearance yesterday before the Levenson inquiry was one of many he has made before committees and in interviews on radio and TV over the past three years. He has become a polished performer, his case increasingly honed, his determination to force the tabloid press to change their behaviour undiminished.

So we weren't expecting surprises. Nevertheless, his evidence (both oral and written [pdf]) contained some fascinating details that haven't been widely circulated before. A few highlights:

- Mosley has taken legal action in more than twenty different countries not only to seek damages but also to remove the News of the World's covert video footage from the Internet. The video was hosted in at least 193 websites in Germany alone. So far, this litigation has cost him at least half a million pounds. Despite this, he is resigned to the fact that it has not been successful and will probably never be. He's particularly angry with the "intransigent" attitude of Google persist in cataloguing the video, and called for new laws targeting search engines.

- He complained that whenever he walks into a shop or restaurant he has to prepare himself for the fact that "everybody knows" about his sex-life and most have probably seen the video. He believes that victims of press intrusion "suffer a terrible penalty. It is comparable to the penalties courts can impose on convicted criminals, if not worse."

- Mosley was disappointed to be awarded a mere £60 thousand by Mr Justice Eady in damages against the NotW and at the judge's "refusal" to award exemplary damages. The award left him out of pocket and represented neither proper punishment nor deterrent. "It is impossible to pretend that paying a large bill is a remedy."

- He suspects that the NotW's evidence in court was partly submitted with a view to the next day's headlines, and represented an attempt by the paper to cause him further embarrassment.

- He also claimed, on the basis of a conversation with "a former senior employee of NI", that Rebekah Brooks colluded with Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre to attack the character and reputation of Mr Justice Eady (as seen, for example, in Dacre's notorious speech to the Society of Editors in November 2008, which Mosley thinks was "a deliberate and calculated attempt to intimidate the judiciary.")

- In a hilarious aside, Mosley speculated about what the "smutty" content of the Mail's own website might suggest about Dacre's own sex-life. He also (as I myself have done) mocked Dacre's poverty of imagination if he thought that a spanking party in Chelsea represented "acts of unimaginable depravity". And he reminded the inquiry that the women concerned were, far from being exploited or degraded, if anything even more enthusiastic about being spanked than he was. This, of course, is true. Indeed, there's plenty visual evidence out there to prove it, though it would be breaking at least one Mosley's injunctions were I to tell you where to look.

- Mosley refers to the remarkable evidence - detailed at length in the Eady judgment - of NotW reporter Neil Thurlbeck's attempts to blackmail two of the women concerned and the even more remarkable manner in which this evidence seems to have completely ignored. Not only was Thurlbeck not prosecuted (or even investigated by the police) but his bosses apparently remained under the impression that his behaviour was acceptable.

- Mosley even wrote to Rupert Murdoch suggesting that Thurlbeck's use of blackmail ought to be investigated by News International; Murdoch "did not deign to reply. One can imagine that if one wrote to the head of a Mafia family complaining about criminal acts by an employee one might get no response. But I was surprised to receive no acknowledgement from the CEO of a major international corporation in response to serious allegations of criminal conduct within his organisation." Murdoch's attitude "leads inevitably to the conclusion that criminality was tolerated if not actively encouraged within Newscorp and its subsidiaries."

It's worth reading this in conjunction with Thurlbeck's own self-justification which appeared recently in the Press Gazette. Neville denied writing the "blackmail letters" to the Mosley women, instead blaming "a certain executive, who I shall not name here for legal reasons."

Max Mosley was, as ever, an impressive witness, even if you don't share his enthusiasm for prior restraint. But I increasingly think there's something a bit strange about his whole approach. On the one hand, he wants to preserve his (and to be fair other people's) right to a private life, in particular the private indulgence of sexual tastes that, so long as they are between consenting adults, should be no-one else's business. On the other, he recognises that, as he put it, his own privacy is irretrievably lost.

As he put it, whenever he walks into a shop or restaurant "everyone knows". He must also recognise that his high profile as a privacy campaigner has not only cost him a great deal of money, which must be subject to a law of diminishing returns (a recent victory in France netted him a mere €7,000) but has also placed his sexual preferences permanently before the public gaze. It's not his fault that the News of the World exposed his love of spanking and accused him falsely of taking part in a "Nazi-themed orgy". But the fact that he remains the public face of British S&M is directly attributable to his inexhaustible enthusiasm for talking about his humiliation in public. One word for this is "masochistic".

Mona Eltahawy beaten and assaulted by Egyptian police

2011-11-24T14:13:00.003Z

A remarkable series of Tweets from by Egyptian-born journalist Mona Eltahawy gives a disturbing insight into how Cairo police are dealing with people involved in the Tahrir Square protests.

Eltahawy, who now lives in New York, returned to Egypt to cover the latest events in the country's stillborn revolution. Yesterday she was at Mohamed Mahmoud St, just off the square, where there were clashes between demonstrators and police. She was arrested - it's not yet clear how or why - and found herself at the tender mercies of the riot police.

Twelve hours later she emerged with two broken arms and descriptions of the sexual abuse she says she was subjected to during her detention.

Despite finding it difficult to type (for obvious reasons) she was able to Tweet the following:

Beaten arrested in interior ministry. 12 hours with Interior Ministry bastards and military intelligence combined. Can barely type. My right hand is so swollen I can't close it. I can barely imagine what my family and loved ones were going through those 12 hours-I know they were worried about me to begin with. Sorry.

Besides beating me, the dogs of CSF subjected me to the worst sexual assault ever. Yes sexual assault. I'm so used to saying harassment but those fuckings assaulted me. 5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers. They are dogs and their bosses are dogs. Fuck the Egyptian police.

[It seems that things improved slightly when she was handed over to military intelligence]

Didn't want to go with military intelligence but one MP said either come politely or not. Those guys didn't beat or assault me. Instead, blindfolded me for 2 hrs, after keeping me waiting for 3. At 1st answered Qs bec passport wasn't with me but then refused as civilian. Another hour later I was free with apology from military intelligence for what CSF did. Took pics of my bruises and recorded statement. On sexual assault and said would investigate it and said they had no idea why I was there. Then who does??! WTF!

The past 12 hrs were painful and surreal but I know I got off much much easier than so many other Egyptians. God knows what wuld've happened if I wasn't dual citizen (tho they brought up detained US students) & that I wrote/appeared various media. Egypt must be free of those bastards. The whole time I was thinking about article I would write; just you fuckers wait.

In the meantime, definitely worth following Mona's timeline.

Two Brains v No Brains

2011-11-23T17:02:00.012Z

I was looking forward to hearing David Willetts outline his vision for the future of universities in Cambridge last night, and to the lively - perhaps even angry - question-and-answer session that would have followed. It's rare these days to find a politician willing to engage with an unpredictable and unscripted audience, and Willetts had promised to take questions for up to an hour. It was not to be. Before the universities minister had a chance to open his mouth he was interrupted by protesters reading out a long and frankly rather pretentious statement accusing the minister, among other things, of trying to "steal our honey". About twenty of them in all, seated strategically throughout the hall. Then they invaded the stage, as you can see below. Willetts left soon afterwards.

Juvenile, pointless gesture politics, I thought. A piece of collective bullying by smug and self-righteous hooligans, ostensibly aimed at David Willetts but in reality targeting the many people who had come to hear what he had to say and indeed to challenge him. No free speech for them. After the activists been droning on for several minutes, a few audience members began asking them to sit down and give Willetts a chance to speak. They were ignored, just as the protesters claim that Willetts and the government have ignored them.

Note to protesters: Not doing what you say is not the same as ignoring you.

The protest was loud, boring and uncomfortable for all concerned. Towards the end the chanters' "epistle" veered into Braveheart territory:

You can try to intimidate us; you can threaten to shoot us with rubber bullets; you can arrest us; you can imprison us; you can criminalise our dissent; you can blight a hundred thousand lives, slowly, and one-by-one, but you cannot break us because we are more resolute, more numerous and more determined than you.

But there were no rubber bullets, although by the end I found myself wishing there had been. No arrests were made; no security guards appeared; no attempt was made to restore order. The surrender was total even before the moderator, Professor Simon Goldhill, stepped forward to announce that Willetts had gone home.

They're still there. Apparently they're calling themselves Cambridge Defend Education. They've got a website and everything, and are planning to stay at least until next week, holding poetry-readings and impromptu activist training courses to while away the time. The usual stuff. The university authorities have still made no move to evict them, or even (according to Lorna, who is a research fellow in philosophy at King's and was deputed - or just volunteered - to speak to me) to ask them to leave. There has been no contact whatever. I'm told there are now around forty people there, taking turns to be on "door duty". When I went down there a lone security guard in a high-visibility jacket was wandering around outside, looking profoundly bored.

Here's the full text of my interview with event organiser Professor Goldhill this morning:

H: Was it anticipated that Mr Willetts' talk would be disrupted or interrupted by protests, and were there any contingency plans for dealing with trouble? Had there been any negotiation with the protesters prior to the event?

SG: It was anticipated that there might be some disruption, but not that there would be an attempt to stop the lecture altogether. This did not happen even in 1968 (which was in 1969 in Cambridge,...)

H: When was the decision made to cancel the talk and was it a unilateral one by Mr Willetts?

SG: The decision to stop the lecture was taken by Mr Willetts and myself when it became clear that the handful of students had no intention of allowing any views but their own to be heard.

H: Do you have a message for the protesters and/or a more general comment about what happened last night and what it might say about the debate on the future of universities?

SG: I regard the form of the protest first of all as an extraordinary opportunity missed. Mr Willetts had agreed to take questions for up to an hour, and there were many of his most articulate critics in the audience. What a pity we could not see for once how these questions are to be answered. If the minds of the public are to be informed and changed, it needs proper public debate.

Second, I regard not the fact of protest but the form of protest as an absolute abuse of the freedom of the university. The university is nothing if not a place for the free and frank exchange of critical ideas. This was an attempt to stop the exchange of ideas, and was done against the overwhelming wish of the majority of people in the hall. It was made in the name of the values of the university, but distorted and destroyed those values. It was politically not just misguided by giving all the strong lines to Willetts, but the sort of totalitarian behaviour that we all should hate. In the name of giving voice to their so-called non hierarchical and open views they refused to let anyone who disagreed with them speak. You cannot shag for chastity.

Of course I wanted there to be an extremely robust rejection of what Willetts and his Government stand for in educational terms, but by rebuttal and argument. The students claimed very loudly to support critical thinking: what they showed was unfortunately reminiscent of the most extreme forms of totalitarian abuse of democratic openness. I also note that I have received dozens of comments from other students (and others in the audience) saying how ashamed and angry they were by this handful.

H: Writing for Varsity, Lawrence Dunn has described the protest as "sadly necessary"and writes: "I would-and I think Dr Goldhill would too- have been more embarrassed with the lack of political activism at Cambridge were Willetts' talk allowed to go ahead unimpeded". Do you have a response to that?

SG: From the quotation you have given me, Mr Dunn shows the lamentable confusion in thinking that motivates the handful. Of course I am happy to see student protests: protest, as Naomi Wolf said in Cambridge recently, is a democratic necessity. But because protest as a notion is supportable, it does not mean that any form of protest is acceptable or productive. A political act that destroys the values it is enacted to support has been shown repeatedly by the history of the twentieth century as well as by any decent theory to be misguided.The word that most people have used in response to the event was "ashamed" -- ashamed of the protest and angry for the opportunity lost.

The Coming Revolution

2011-11-22T15:09:00.006Z

The huge election victory by the Spanish conservatives represents a rejection of the institutional left. For Daniel Hannan, it also represents a rejection of the Indignados movement that has, since the summer, been clogging up the public spaces of Madrid and Barcelona - and whose pale shadow can currently be seen clinging to the pavement outside St Paul's Cathedral. Hannan writes:

Happily, no one can now question the PP's mandate. Throughout the campaign, Rajoy promised to cut the debt and get people back to work by reforming Spain's sclerotic labour laws. The indignados turn out to be very much minoritarios: the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

EU Referendum is scathing:

It is the complete inability of the likes of Hannan to understand or even recognise this deeper mood which guides him to the belief that we are seeing a standard shift in between the normal left-right paradigm. But the mood for change is indeed much deeper. Standard politics no longer has a grip and the average politician is the object of contempt which is fast becoming universal.

Instead, we're pointed to a Guardian article claiming that, au contraire, the result was actually "a mandate for the Indignados". The evidence for this is that, while conservative voters were casting their ballots in the usual way, the creative dissidents of tent city were busy scrawling the words "ballot box" on drainpipes and encouraging people to spoil their election papers. As a result (it is claimed), there were eleven million abstentions and spoiled papers, more than twice as many as last time and more than voted for the winning party.

Nothing new there. In 2005 in Britain more people voted for no-one than voted for Tony Blair's Labour Party. This, too, was looked upon as proof of massive disenfranchisement. In the United States, the very home of democracy, it's now rare for any presidential election to have more than a 50% turnout. But abstentions and spoiled papers don't count. However much a result may be said to lack "legitimacy" as a result of widespread non-voting, it does not lack the legal legitimacy that comes with gaining the largest number of votes that are actually cast.

So are we seeing politics as usual, one mainstream party temporarily obliterating another as the pendulum swings its inevitable swing? Or is this the beginning of the great cataclysm, as the various campers-in would have it?

Over the past week I've been attending some lectures given by Professor Manuel Castells, veteran Spanish sociologist and guru of "network power", currently the leading theorist of the transformation of politics in the digital age. Castells is an old Sixties radical, and there was more than a hint of Sartre saluting the Soixante-huitards in his somewhat misty-eyed evocation of the Indignados and their primitive democracy. Indeed, he'll be giving a potted version of his lectures to Occupy London itself on Friday. (Anyone going along should be warned that his analysis is in places quite theoretical and despite many years in the United States he has a thick Spanish accent, both of which made him quite hard to follow.)

Katharine Ainger, in the Guardian, writes that the Indignados have been "exploring ideas that go far beyond party politics or even changing electoral law, such as participatory budgets, referendums, election recalls and other forms of citizen-initiated legalisation." Castells described this process in some detail: no formal leadership beyond rotating "moderators" ; decisions made by ad hoc assemblies after lengthy discussions, but which might be overturned another day if a different bunch of people turn up; no coherent ideology ("the ultimate anarchism is when they aren't even anarchists").

In the Internet age, Castells maintains,

Social change comes from communicative action that involves connection between networks of neural networks from human brains stimulated by signals from a communication environment through communication networks. The technology and morphology of these communication networks shapes the process of mobilization, thus of social change, both as a process and as an outcome.

All very interesting, I couldn't help thinking, until the police turn up and start whacking people over the head. In the end, there's a limited amount that can be achieved by passing resolutions. As distinguished and intellectually opaque as he is, I fear Castells ended up sounding all too like Laurie Penny.

But he did make one fascinating point. He compared what is happening today with what happened to European liberalism in the period before the First World War. Parties that had been what might loosely be called the "establishment left" or the progressive wing of the ruling elites, lost credibility, support and then political power as they were outflanked by new political organisations rooted in the working class. This is the scenario described by George Dangerfield in his famous study The Strange Death of Liberal England.

Castells' point is that this was a crisis in politics on the Left. Bourgeois liberal parties were eclipsed and either disappeared or went into a decades-long decline; their support fragmented, some going to the new working-class movements like the Labour party, the rest being absorbed into the mainstream centre-right. But the conservatives didn't go away, because conservatives never do: conservatism represents something eternal in politics and in the human soul.

Ultimately, then, politics reorganises itself into something new. But this process invariably takes the form of one vehicle of progressive politics losing its legitimacy, to be replaced by something that better articulates radical aspirations. It looks like transformation, but only half the political spectrum really changes, and it's always the same half.

The Spanish election result may well bear this out. Hannan is correct to see it as a rejection of the Socialist party, but the Indignados are equally right to see it as further proof that the old politics is dead. The old Left politics, at least.

Why bankers used to be good

2011-11-21T15:38:00.001Z

This is a guest post by Rev. Julian Mann.

Hopefully Private Eye editor Ian Hislop's BBC programme about Victorian financiers - When bankers were good - will properly explain why they were.

The answer very clearly is that Victorian Britain was saturated with Biblical values in the wake of the 18th century evangelical revival. Evangelical Christianity teaches that the whole of life is impacted by the truth of the gospel. That means one should earn one's money in an ethical manner and use it for the love of God and of one's neighbour.

Such a spiritual and moral culture thus conduced to bankers with active consciences moved to virtue, in contrast to the financiers spawned by de-Christianised Britain.

My Hislop's own position in relation to Christian Britain is interesting. He clearly has some sort of spiritual sympathy with it, having presented a previous BBC series about Victorian philanthropists.

But the magazine he edits was a product of the 1960s, the decade which set the hounds on Christian Britain. Private Eye, launched in 1961, belongs to the Beyond the Fringe satirical movement championed by its former proprietor, the late Mr Peter Cook, which set out to lampoon authority and undermine respect for the then British establishment.

The current corrosive cynicism about politicians, in fact more accurately the nihilism about political engagement, has its roots in that godless movement.

The antidote to greedy bankers, corrupt politicians, and a cynical public is evangelical Christianity. That antidote was active in Victorian Britain when rich people were more inclined to listen to Jesus Christ: "Take heed and beware of covetousness; for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth (Luke 12v15 - King James Version)."

Mr Hislop's moral position would be more consistent if he preached that message, forsaking the cynical cultural Baal of Private Eye, now ironically a journal the Ahabesque British establishment is quite comfortable with.