Heresy Corner

Permissive Britain is a fertile recruiting ground for Choudary

2013-05-25T18:48:00.002+01:00

This is a guest post by Julian Mann

The cub scout mistress who confronted one of Drummer Lee Rigby's killers was a brave lady but in the long term her observation is probably wrong.

Writing in Friday's Daily Mail (24/5), Sir Max Hastings claimed she spoke for the nation when she said: "It is only you versus many, and you are going
to lose."

One would have to question Sir Max's faith in the current national majority. What if the religiously committed minority becomes larger, better equipped and better organised? What if the ideologically fragmented, uncommitted majority proves too flabby to be able to resist? It is to be feared Sir Max is projecting the more morally cohesive nation he grew up in onto the present one.

By contrast, in Saturday's Mail, Andrew Malone appeared more in touch with the reason why permissive Britain is proving a fertile recruiting ground for young male Islamist killers. In a piece asking "why, in the name of sanity, is Anjem Choudary, whose poisonous teachings influenced the Woolwich killers, free to draw benefits and tour BBC studios spouting murderous hatred against Britain?", Mr Malone described the case of Richard Dart, a white British 26-year-old from Weymouth, Dorset and one of Choudary’s proteges:

"Dart converted to Islam in 2009. He joined Choudary in a private house in East London and, after swearing oaths on the Koran, was re-named Salahuddin Al-Britani.

For years, ‘Salahuddin’, the son of teachers, had drifted from job to job. A confused young man, with strangely glazed eyes and sallow skin, he once explained to me his bizarre reason for converting to radical Islam.

‘Michael Jackson’s death to me was a sign — he said he was a Muslim, but he didn’t live the life of a good Muslim.’

Surrounded by members of the ‘Islamic brotherhood’, Dart also told me he would be happy to fight — and die — overseas for the cause, and that Islam must defeat Western aggression.

In a chilling portent of the horrors that unfolded in Woolwich this week, Dart also told me that British soldiers were a fair target.

‘The soldiers taking part in these wars are the enemies of Islam, so I don’t support them in any way, nor any man-made government or law,’ he said. These governments are the terrorists.’

Therein lies the attraction of militant Islam to spiritually and morally rudderless young men in a permissive society. Choudary's religion provides a combination of a command structure based on transcendent certainty and an element of adventure and risk.

In an increasingly feminised society, this is a combination in militant Islam that will, unfortunately, prove attractive to a growing number of disenfranchised young men. A posse of nannies of both sexes in charge of Britain is surely unlikely to inspire them to enter into the promised land of health and safety and Blairite social democracy, a land flowing with all-female shortlists.

The Christian churches of Britain should be providing an attractive spiritual and moral alternative, but sadly, with exception of some of the newer churches, they are not. The older denominations such as the Church of England are unattractive to young men and are now largely attended by and increasingly led by middle-class women.

It is worth considering how different in this respect the older churches of Britain are from the founder of the Christian faith. Jesus of Nazareth inspired a group of young men to take great risks in his cause. But persuasion not violence was the means they used to spread his message, particularly by witnessing to his resurrection from the dead.

Julian Mann is vicar Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire, UK.

My application to Eton

2013-05-24T17:58:00.001+01:00

An entrance exam question from 2011(pdf):

The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but 25 protesters have been killed by the Army.
You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.

A:
Good evening everyone.

I'm sure you all know why I'm talking to you tonight. Like you, I've been deeply shocked by the images we've all seen on our EyeScreens over the past few days. The random, unconstrained violence. The lawlessness and criminality. Streets taken over by gangs of feral thugs. Public buildings attacked. Ordinary hard-working people unable to go about their lives. Children terrified to go to school. Doctors and nurses unable to get to work. Old people afraid to leave their homes.

Worst of all, we've all seen the unprovoked and despicable attacks on members of the Metropolitan Police, our society's first line of defence against anarchy. I'm sure I speak for everyone when I offer my thanks and gratitude for these brave men and women, who selflessly put themselves on the front line on behalf of us all. It's often said that Britain has the finest police service in the world. Well, this past week has proved it. Tragically, five fine officers lost their lives in the violence. Sgt Paul Franks, a 33 year old husband and father whose wife Sue spoke so movingly this morning. PC Brian Blogs, just 21 and the apple of his mother's eye. PCs Bob Southwell and Kevin Manx, two exemplary officers. And Sgt Tony Fallguy, who has been described as one of the most promising officers in the district. Let me be quite frank with you: These unarmed men were murdered. They were murdered mercilessly and cold-bloodedly by thugs who shame our society. So my first promise to you is simple: their killers will be hunted down and brought to justice. They will have no hiding place.

Some people have asked if these deaths were necessary. Whether the police were properly protected. Whether all possible precautions were taken to keep them safe. Whether new laws and powers are needed to deal with violent disorder. Whether the army should have been brought in sooner to reinforce the police. I have already ordered an inquiry into all the circumstances of their deaths. Lord Justice Cocklecarrot has agreed to lead the review, and we can all be confident that he will ask the necessary questions. No doubt there will be lessons to be learned for the future. But without prejudicing the inquiry, I think I can say that the only responsibility for the deaths of those five officers lies with the criminals who used the cover of a mob to perpetrate acts of extreme violence.

It was of course with great reluctance that I decided to call upon the regular army to restore peace after the rioting had continued for four days and nights. I cherish the British traditions of our unarmed police force. But I'm sure you all understand the nature of the emergency that this country was facing. The rioters were a tiny proportion of London's population, in no way reflective of the law-abiding majority. Yet for the best part of a week they were able to paralyse the nation's capital. The riots threatened not only peace and order, but our infrastructure and our economy. As prime minister, my first duty is to secure law and order. To preserve the King's peace. To keep the country safe on behalf of all our hard-working families. I have no doubt that bringing in the army was the right thing to do. And I'm sure that you'll join with me in thanking our brave soldiers for their swift and professional job. Along with the police, the armed services represent the best of us.

Inevitably, there were a number of casualties among the rioters. Of course, I regret any deaths. And the deaths will of course be investigated. But I want to make one thing crystal clear: everyone who took part in those riots chose to be there. The young men and women who sadly lost their lives chose to put themselves in danger; chose to take up sticks and stones against the police and, later, the army; chose to ignore repeated requests to disperse. No-one forced them to threaten innocent members of the public, to trash key buildings or to disrupt the life and work of London. I make no apology for asking the army to restore order. It was not only the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do. I have no doubt that taking this action helped to save many more lives than were unfortunately lost. And I think I can be confident of your support.

So let me conclude by once more paying tribute to the murdered police officers, and also to the courage and resolution shown not just by the police and the army but by every one of you in recent days. Now more than ever I'm incredibly proud to be the prime minister of this great country. I know that, together, we will get through this difficult period. Good evening to you all.

The Problem with Humanist Weddings

2013-05-21T19:09:00.002+01:00

This afternoon, an amendment to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) bill was debated which would have allowed humanist celebrants to officiate at wedding ceremonies in England and Wales, as they already do in Scotland. The move, restricted to well-established charitable organisations embodying humanist principles (of which the British Humanist Association is the main but perhaps not the only example) attracted widespread support on all sides of the House. But it was withdrawn following government objections, some of which had a last-minute flavour. In particular, the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, maintained that by singling out humanists for special favour in this way the amendment would fall foul of equality legislation.

This line of reasoning surprised many humanists, especially as it was apparently on ministerial advice that the BHA's clause restricted the opportunity to conduct weddings to humanist groups. I debated this with them on Twitter earlier today. I suggested that sponsoring an amendment that would benefit only them looked like privilege-seeking and wanting to join an exclusive club. What about pagans or spiritualists, whose designated representatives are in fact permitted to conduct legally valid weddings in Scotland? They shot back that they had originally called for all "belief groups" to be allowed the same right, but that the government said that this would create too many difficulties. In particular, it would allegedly have interfered with the Bill's carefully-balanced "quadruple lock" requiring religous organisations to opt in to same-sex marriage - which is, after all, what the bill is supposedly all about. Fair enough, although one might have hoped that the BHA would stick to its principles rather than accept a squalid compromise that was in no-one's interest but its own.

As I said, the amendment attracted a lot of support in the Commons. Conservative MP Crispin Blunt thought that it was "glaringly obvious" that humanist weddings should be allowed. Many of the MPs who spoke in its favour, on the other hand, were keen to dispel fears that the move would open the floodgates to pagan weddings, Spiritualist weddings, or even Jedi weddings. Quite why pagan weddings should be characterised as such a danger while the prospect of humanist weddings was genuinely welcomed and (leaving aside the supposed difficulties) uncontroversial isn't clear. Perhaps it's because Humanism is now respectable. Even the Bishop of Chester, the House was told, supports the idea of humanist weddings; whereas most right-thinking people still think of pagans as a bit weird, at best eccentrics with bad hair and silly robes, at worst partial to nude orgies and the odd bit of cat sacrifice. Perhaps it's because there are lots of humanist MPs but (as far as I know) no pagan ones.

My own instinct is the other way round. If you believe in religious freedom, as we all do, then there's an obvious need to allow pagans to celebrate legally valid marriages on the same basis as more conventional religious groups. Pagans have their gods and goddesses to evoke, a sacramental conception of marriage (in pagan theology, if I have this right, the union of the sexes embodies the procreative spirit of the cosmos which is the primary object of pagan worship) and distinctive rituals, such as "handfasting" and jumping over a broomstick. A humanist wedding, on the other hand, is very much what you make it.

I don't doubt that there is enthusiasm among some for Humanist weddings; nor do I doubt that Humanist weddings in Scotland are very popular and conducted with aplomb. But I do question whether the need is quite so pressing as Humanist leaders seem to think. Civil ceremonies, which are available in a multitude of fine locations, already offer couples considerable flexibility of form and content, provided only that the prescribed words are said by an official registrar. People can choose their own songs and readings. And civil ceremonies already embody, in their very essence, what must be the underlying principle of humanist weddings as such, which is that it is possible to conduct such rites of passage without any reference to God. Indeed, the rules strictly forbid any mention of religion, and registrars can be notoriously severe and jobsworthy in their adherence to secular principles, to the extent of banning such popular tunes as Robbie Williams' Angels.

When I put these points to BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson the other day, he replied that Humanist content is now equally disallowed, because recent equality legislation expands the category of "religion" to include "religion and belief". He also stated that some registrars had now developed an eagle eye for anything that smacked of Humanist content and exerted themselves to ban it. Now, I'm always ready to believe tales of sour-faced activism on the part of petty officials; it's what many of these sad people seem to thrive on. But it also strikes me as an over-reading of a law that specifically refers to a ban on religious content in secular wedding ceremonies, and does so for the good reason that if you want religious content in your wedding, you can do it in a church (or synagogue, or gurdwara, or whatever you happen to be). The law is anxious not to mix up the sacred with the secular. And Humanism is not a religion. Let me say that again. Humanism. Is. Not. A. Religion. It is a belief system, a philosophical approach to life but so is vegetarianism. So is Environmentalism. Idiot registrars who think that Humanistic messages should be banned as being "religious" should be argued with, not indulged by the British Humanist Association.

Unless the BHA does believe that Humanism is a religion, of course.

Unlike Humanist funerals, which do answer to a particular need, Humanist weddings strike me as inessential. I should stress that I don't have any objection to them. But then I don't have an objection to any other group conducting weddings either. Why shouldn't Freemasons or Jedi Knights depute officials to conduct weddings? Why shouldn't you, so you desire, be married by an Elvis impersonator, or by a Paris Hilton lookalike, or by Mr Spock? Why not have Socialist weddings, in which the parties promise to have all things in common, or Conservative weddings in which wives promise to obey and husbands to be economically productive? Why, for that matter, shouldn't Virgin or Tesco employ wedding celebrants and offer package deals? I'm quite serious. If you want to open up marriage, in a modern world in which free citizens will often have their own wishes on how to celebrate one of the most significant moments of their lives, then open it up. Don't privilege one particular quasi-religion, give it special legal status as a marriage registrar, because not believing in religion is so personally important to some people that an entirely secular wedding just won't do.

Humanism is not a religion. It is a set of beliefs, coherent enough but varying from individual to individual (as true humanism should) that can provide a basis for life, including married life. But having a humanist wedding is not part of the core belief of Humanism. (Having a secular wedding might be, but they can already have that.) I don't think I'm splitting hairs. I have great respect for individual humanists and for Humanism as a philosophical system but I am uneasy about the way that, partly because of the way modern equality and identity politics has developed, it is increasingly treated, an acts, like a pseudo-religion. There may be a somewhat indistinct line between religion and non-religion, but Humanism is on the non-religious side of it. And that is where it should stay.

How does this apply to marriage? To answer this question, we have to ask another one: why do religions conduct marriages at all? What business do churches, synagogues, mosques, Hindu temples and the like have in conducting legal formalities? Some people would of course rather that they didn't, and that there was a strict distinction between civil registration and religious (or humanist) ceremonies, as there is in many other countries. But that's not my point. My point is this: religions concern themselves with marriage because traditionally religions assert the right to regulate the sex lives of their adherents. That's what religions do. They maintain that sex before marriage is wrong, that adultery is sinful, that children should be born inside marriage, that God cares about this stuff. It is because religion has claimed this prerogative that people are married in church rather than at the local tiddlywinks club (a facetious point raised by Dominic Grieve).

Does Humanism, even in its latest, quasi-religious incarnation, claim stewardship of humanists' sex lives? Of course not. Sexual ethics will feature in most humanist philosophies, but Humanism doesn't exalt the state of legal marriage as the ideal to which humanists should conform. I know many humanists who are into polyamory and the like. On what basis, then, do Humanists wish to marry people, a power they would presumably deny to Tiddlywink clubs if not to pagans? At most, on the somewhat naive basis that Humanism is a replacement for religion, and marrying people is what religions do, so Humanism should do as well. In its push for Humanist weddings, the British Humanist Association, not for the first time, seems to be suffering from a big case of religion-envy.

Carry on snooping

2013-05-08T18:43:00.002+01:00

The Snoopers' Charter is dead, right? Nick Clegg killed it the other week, putting an end to the Communications Data Bill, the latest incarnation of the Home Office's long-term plan to store details of everyone's website visits and email communications. Instead Her Maj today announced some modest-sounding (though in practice rather tricky) idea about solving "the problem of matching internet protocol addresses". But lest this lull people into thinking that the grand design of the CDP had been ditched after its original draft was ripped to shreds last year by a Parliamentary committee, the Home Office was soon spinning that the Snoopers' Charter was very much still in play.

A superficially vague assertion that the government was "committed to ensuring that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the powers they need to protect the public and ensure national security" raised many reporter's suspicions, and the Home Office has done nothing to disabuse them. Thus the BBC's Jane Wakefield writes of the "government's determination to increase surveillance powers to take account of new technologies such as social media, web mail and internet phone calls". Meanwhile, a Home Office spokesperson "confirmed to Techworld that the government is still looking closely at ways to provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies with the information they need to ensure public safety, and this may involve legislation".

Says Emma Carr of Big Brother Watch:

It is beyond comprehension for the Home Office to think that this gives them licence to carry on regardless with a much broader bill that has been demonstrated as unworkable and dangerous by experts, business groups and the wider public. It is not surprising that some officials may want to keep trying, having already failed three times under two different governments, to introduce massively disproportionate and intrusive powers, but that is quite clearly not what Her Majesty has put forward today.

But is it really "beyond comprehension". Is it not rather just what one would expect?

As Mark Wallace notes, this is "a classic example of a policy which the Civil Service has decided to pursue at all costs, hence the fact it crops up so regularly, regardless of which party is in power, and is proving so hard to shake." Indeed. It's worth digging up an old quote from Henry Porter, who used to be the Guardian's civil liberties guru during the dark days of New Labour (whatever became of him), and who wrote in April 2009 of what was then called the Interception Modernisation Programme,

The civil servants behind the scheme have a very long horizon indeed – an agenda that is designed to survive cuts in public spending and any change of government. They will argue the urgent necessity of the case with force and plausibility to inexperienced Conservative ministers, as they have done to the co-operative second raters in the present government."

Theresa May, despite a promising start, has proved to be both abject and gullible when it comes to Home Office advice, to the extent of making it seem to all the world that the Communications Data Bill was her own baby. This of course suits the simple-minded approach of the political commentariat, who can only conceive of such measures in terms of jockeying for position between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. (The Telegraph, for example, heading its account of today's Home Office spin as "'Snoopers' charter' resurrected by Conservatives".) More cannily, Mark Wallace points to the role played by the ex-spook Charles Farr, described as the architect of the grand design and as the "Home Office's top securocrat." Farr, who is also said to be the brains behind the recent secret courts legislation, happens to be the partner of Theresa May's special adviser Fiona Cunningham, something that is rumoured to have stymied his chances of becoming Permanent Secretary at the HO, but which is unlikely to have prevented his advice getting through to May herself.

The Snoopers Charter may be both intrusive and impractable, as well as hard to justify in terms of cost, not to mention bad for the economy, but all the signs are that the permanent government remains enormously committed to it. In opposition, the Conservatives were as solidly opposed to the plans as Nick Clegg (with much prompting from the grassroots) latterly turned out to be, but that didn't stop them falling for the Home Office schtick. Labour are barely even going through the motions. "Labour has missed a huge opportunity to redefine itself as a party of civil liberties" complains Ed Paton-Williams (there's a nice proletarian name for you) on Labour List; they "remained silent" when they should have been a leading voice against the Bill and "started the process of positioning itself as the party of civil liberties that Ed Miliband clearly wanted to lead."

Indeed. Given how easy it would be for Labour to discover, once they won the next election, that there was after all for a pressing need for the Snoopers' Charter, there's no reason for them to oppose it so half-heartedly now (unless, of course, they're still in thrall to Blairite fears of being found anywhere to the left of the Tories on questions of law and order). But then we remember how genuinely enthusiastic Labour was about pursuing an authoritarian agenda when in government; it would be expecting too much for them to change now.

Explaining the peace paradox

2013-04-24T18:49:00.001+01:00

Much talk today about the so-called "UK Peace Index", a piece of research put about by something called "Vision of Humanity". It shows that Britain has become "11% more peaceful" over the past decade. In particular, there have been dramatic falls in the rate of recorded crime, especially dramatic crime - since the middle of the last decade. The trend is a global one - at the very least, it is mirrored in other Western countries - but the fall in crime in the UK is particularly marked.

The reports led to much head-scratching among the constitutionally pessimistic media, who rely on everything becoming progressively worse. "Despite the fall in violent crime across the country, the public tends to perceive that Britain is much more violent than it is in reality," reports the Daily Mail, with a completely straight face. Why might the British public have an exaggerated fear of crime, I wonder?

Still, there was a crumb of comfort for the Mail, which was able to report "wide variations between dangerous inner-city areas and far more quiet rural regions" (and to dub Lewisham the violent crime capital of England). But highlighting these unsurprising statistics misses the point that crime has fallen everywhere, even in Lewisham, which was always going to be more violent than the sleepy Norfolk village identified as the most "peaceful" part of the country. Midsummer Murders is supposed to be fiction, after all.

So yes, crime has fallen. But why? When crime was rising in the 1980s, it was fashionable to blame Thatcherism, de-industrialisation, unemployment, rising inequality and other economic causes, but as the tooth-sucking Mark Easton was forced to admit, crime has continued its recent downward path despite the economic woes of the last few years and despite the fact that inequality continues to increase. Easton however has found another convenient Lefty comfort-blanket:

Could it be that global communication, particularly the internet, is having a civilising and calming effect on people's behaviour? We live in an age when, for the first time in history, people from all backgrounds can get an understanding of how the rest of the world lives without needing to leave the comfort of their living room.

This mass socialising may be changing attitudes. In the UK there is good evidence that people are becoming more tolerant of difference and less tolerant of violence.

What this might have to do with the crime-rate is unclear, though it makes a nice change from the usual tendency to see modern communications as a horrid threat. The internet has also spread a lot of porn, after all, which isn't usually credited with having a "civilising and calming effect" on people. But perhaps it does. As I noted, somewhat facetiously, this morning, most violent crime is committed by young males, who are also the biggest consumers of online pornography. Are they masturbating themselves into a torpor, and so can't find the energy to go out and bash things about? It's a definite possibility, I'd say. At the very least, the figures don't lend any support to fears that a generation reared on violent and misogynistic online porn is a danger to society.

The huge fall in drinking among young people over the past decade, another thing the doom-mongers don't like to talk about, may also be connected with reducing crime-rate; but is it cause or effect, or are they both merely manifestations of an increasingly controlled and conformist society?

More excitingly, perhaps, there's the lead pollution theory put forward by George Monbiot in January. This is the idea, for which there is surprisingly good evience, that the generation that has grown up since petrol was deleaded is less predisposed to violence than those whose infant brains were subjected to high levels of lead in the environment.

Lead poisoning in infancy, even at very low levels, impairs the development of those parts of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex) that regulate behaviour and mood. The effect is stronger in boys than in girls. Lead poisoning is associated with attention deficit disorder, impulsiveness, aggression and, according to one paper, psychopathy. Lead is so toxic that it is unsafe at any level.

Who knows, such a theory might help explain the hyper-violence of the Roman Empire, whose population drank water conveyed in leaden pipes.

There's an important caveat, though, which has scarcely been noticed in the coverage of the Peace Index. A trend is not the same as absolute numbers, as this graph (provided by the researchers) shows quite dramatically:

While the graph does show big falls in recent years both in recorded crime as a whole and, most dramatically, in violent crime, these falls come at the end of a decades-long increase in both. The trend since 1950 (admittedly, a historically low base) was consistently upwards in overall crime and, even more, in violent crime until the end of the last century. It rose in good times and bad; during the buttoned-up, militarised Fifties and the Flower Power Sixties, under Labour governments and Conservative ones. The overall crime rate took off in the Seventies and then accelerated further in the Eighties, reaching a peak ten times the 1950 figure about twenty years ago. It fell off a bit under John Major and before rising under Tony Blair to its previous peak; but then it began falling again, and has fallen consistently for a whole decade. It's now down to levels last seen in the early Eighties, but is still much higher than it once was.

Violent crime shows a different profile, rising even faster with a sharp spike and peaking in 2005 at a level 28 times the 1950 level. It has fallen sharply since, but is still above 2000 levels. It's still around three times as high as in 1980 and sixteen times that in 1950.

Crime, then, is still high, and violent crime is still extremely high. Despite today's superficially good news, modern Britain is still a crime-ridden, ultra-violent hellhole compared with the paradise that is was the 1950s, when Peter Hitchens was growing up and everything was safe and secure. Nil desperandum.

Dawkins and the Flying Horse

2013-04-22T19:39:00.001+01:00

When religious people complain about Richard Dawkins, they generally have in mind a crude caricature of a sneering, simplistic, arrogant, complacent, rich, intolerant, unimaginative mocker of other people's beliefs. And caricature it is, to anyone who has read the man's finer books or listened to him engage in polite and respectful debate with, for example, Rowan Williams or Jonathan Sacks. (A few weeks ago I was at an event which featured the latter two and remember thinking at one point, What a shame Dawkins isn't here.)

But then Dawkins' Twitter persona is scarcely less of a caricature.

Recently, for example, he complained about his tube train being delayed because, according to an announcement, a passenger had been "taken ill". Why should a sick passenger cause a delay? he wondered. It took others to point out to him that the phrase was code for a very serious medical emergency.

Yesterday, he wondered whether it was appropriate for the New Statesman to print "as a serious journalist" articles by its former political editor Mehdi Hasan, a man who "admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse." Rejecting the inevitable accusations of Islamophobia (as well as the comment by Tom Watson MP that he was "a gratuitously unpleasant man") Dawkins went on to claim that he was merely drawing attention to double standards where religious beliefs are concerned. ("Oh for goodness' sake, I didn't say Muslims can't be journalists. I questioned the credibility of a man who believes in winged horses.")

Al Buraq, the "winged horse" that carried Mohammed to heaven

According to Andrew Brown, "the real comedy comes when he lifts his face from the pie, dripping scorn and custard, to glare at the audience who can't see how very rational he is. Because there are some people who don't understand that everything Dawkins says illuminates the beauty of reason." Sunny Hundal has also leapt on board, accusing Dawkins of indulging in "a bizarre rant" and of turning into "a pathetically confused bigot".

But neither of these pieces is much more helpful than Dawkins' own Tweets in getting to the bottom of this little spat.

For clarity, and at the risk of making it all seem rather more considered than it appeared at the time, here is a tidied-up version of Dawkins' argument regarding Hasan and the winged horse. The words are his but I've changed the order somewhat and removed the names of other Twitter users who engaged him in debate.

Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. It's true. He admitted it to me in person and now he has repeated it in print. And the New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist. Would you take seriously a man who believed in fairies at the bottom of his garden? You'd ridicule palpably absurd beliefs of any other kind. Why make an exception for religion? Why?

Conan Doyle did indeed believe in fairies. And has been rightly ridiculed for it ever since. Isaac Newton believed in various occult things. But he did not believe in a winged horse. Yes, a talking snake is as ridiculous as a winged horse. But respectable religious journalists don't believe in a talking snake.

Some people might see no problem with going to a dentist who believes in the tooth fairy. They are welcome. I would change my dentist.

Mehdi Hasan talks a remarkable amount of good sense on most issues. But he believes in a winged horse. A winged horse! The amazing paradox is that the same individual can be very sensible on most things yet believe in a winged horse.

What intrigues me is the double standard whereby we all happily ridicule daft beliefs EXCEPT when protected by the label "religion". A believes in fairies. B believes in winged horses. Criticise A and you're rational. Criticise B and you're a bigoted racist islamophobe. The people disagreeing with me think winged horse is just as absurd as I do. Someone suggests he doesn't truly believe in the winged horse but has to pretend. I'd like to believe that because he's a nice guy and good writer.

Last word: Mehdi's absurd belief in winged horse deserves ridicule. But his being a Muslim of course does not mean NS shouldn't hire him.

That "last word" reads like some kind of climbdown, given the initial complaint that "the New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist." But I don't want to waste time making the obvious point that someone can be competent in one field while holding eccentric or irrational views about something else, especially since Dawkins himself appears to have conceded it. (I'd just say that even a dentist who believed in the tooth fairy could still be a perfectly competent dentist.)

You may, though, be wondering just where this winged horse business comes from.

It's not clear to me why Dawkins' Twitter rant happened yesterday, given that the encounter which provoked it took place last year. Hasan wrote about it in the Huffington Post in December in an article the main purpose of which was to argue that religion was rational, or at least not irrational. Here's how it began:

You believe that Muhammad went to heaven on a winged horse?" That was the question posed to me by none other than Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago, in front of a 400-strong audience at the Oxford Union. I was supposed to be interviewing him for al-Jazeera but the world's best-known atheist decided to turn the tables on me.

So what did I do? I confessed. Yes, I believe in prophets and miracles. Oh, and I believe in God, too. Shame on me, eh? Faith, in the disdainful eyes of the atheist, is irredeemably irrational; to have faith, as Dawkins put it to me, is to have "belief in something without evidence". This, however, is sheer nonsense. Are we seriously expected to believe that the likes of Descartes, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Rousseau, Leibniz and Locke were all unthinking or irrational idiots?

Slight ambiguity here. Does Mehdi Hasan believed in winged horses or not? You can watch the encounter on YouTube.

"Do you believe that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse? I'll do you the compliment of assuming that you don't."
"No I do. I believe in miracles."
"You believe that Mohammed went to heaven on a winged horse?"
"I believe in God. I believe in miracles. I believe in revelation."

Again, Hasan certainly implied that he believed in the winged horse story, but he didn't explicitly affirm it, either. In a Tweet yesterday he finally declared that he was "not sure if I even do believe in winged horses but I do - Hot Chocolate! - believe in miracles."

To be fair to Dawkins, Hasan gave the distinct impression that he believed something that's patently ridiculous; and his attempt to make it seem all part of some wider, less obviously daft, belief in God and miracles was a bit clumsy.

It's worth asking at this point what belief in Mohammed's winged horse would actually entail. We're not talking about the general existence of Pegasus-like creatures. The existence of such a mythical beast isn't merely unsupported by scientific evidence, it would break all the laws of aerodynamics. Rather, the reference is to the significant event in Mohammed's life known as the Night Journey. In Islamic tradition, at one point in his ministry Mohammed was spirited at night to Jerusalem and thence taken on the tour of the heavens in the company of the Archangel Gabriel. In the course of the journey, which has structural similarities to that described in Dante's Paradiso, the prophet has meetings with Biblical characters including Moses and John the Baptist. The most significant part of the story, from the theological point of view, comes when Allah makes a demand that human beings pray fifty times a day. Mohammed, with a bit of help from Moses, argues that this would be a bit much, and succeeds in haggling his way down to what became the canonical Islamic practice of five prayers a day.

The story is alluded to in the Koran, but the fullest accounts are two passages in the Hadiths (the collected sayings of the Prophet, which have the status of secondary scriptures in Islam). They are fascinating in themselves. The story has features that many people would instantly recognise as shamanistic. As in a shamanic initiatory ordeal, for example, Mohammed's body is broken down and reassembled: "A golden tray full of wisdom and belief was brought to me and my body was cut open from the throat to the lower part of the abdomen and then my abdomen was washed with Zam-zam water and (my heart was) filled with wisdom and belief."

We are clearly in the realm of visionary experience. The journey takes place, by Mohammed's own account (as recorded in the Hadith) "while I was at the House in a state midway between sleep and wakefulness." The Night Journey might be described in modern terms as a lucid dream; certainly the prophet seems to have been in a state of consciousness associated with strange experiences, a state in which modern people sometimes report alien visitations or out-of-body experiences and earlier generations had encounters with hobgoblins and vampires. The commonest form of the experience is known as sleep paralysis: if it's happened to you, you know exactly what it involves. If you haven't, imagine being fully conscious while under general anaesthetic and struggling, but failing, to move.

The prophet's mode of transport, we are informed, was Al Buraq, described as a white animal, "smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey." The texts don't explicitly say it was a horse (in fact, it seems to be smaller than a horse); they merely offer equine comparators as to the scale. However, in art Al Buraq is invariably depicted as something like a flying horse (usually with a human face, indeed, which would make Dawkins even more apoplectic, I suspect). Again, Al Buraq seems to have shamanic antecedents. Comparison might also be made with Sleipnir, the eight-hoofed horse of Odin in the Norse myths.

As should be obvious from all this, to believe in the Night Journey is not at all the same as believing in a flying horse in a literal, physical sense. Rather it is to believe that Mohammed was vouchsafed a vision of heaven, a vision that was more real than an ordinary dream, a vision that came from God and that may therefore be described as being "real". To suggest that, in his physical body, Mohammed climbed astride a physical winged horse and was carried to first from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence through the seven heavens, where he had physical encounters with physical dead prophets and was then ushured in the presence of an equally corporeal Allah, with whom he proceeded to haggle like an Arabian carpet salesman, would be absurd indeed. I don't think Mehdi Hasan actually believes that (though he's free to correct me) and I don't think any other Muslim believes that either.

To believe in the Night Journey in this literal sense would entail more than the existence of a magical horse. It would entail belief in a cosmological set-up that was disproved when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew to the Moon, or indeed when Galileo looked through his telescope. And if the story were literally true God himself would cease to be God and would be just another thing in the universe, sitting up there on his cloud, someone you can go and visit if he lends you his flying horse.

Dawkins is right that a belief in flying horses would not be rendered respectable or beyond by the mere fact that it features in the scriptures of a major world religion, or that it was many people's "sincerely held" belief. And there's plenty one can validly (and far more relevantly) object to in Islam, as there is in other religions. But his singling out of the flying horse story, without apparently bothering to find out what the story relates to or what believing it it actually means, is depressingly typical of his recent descent into attention-seeking superficiality.

Why Thatcher deserves a proper funeral

2013-04-11T15:00:00.001+01:00

Two reasoned objections to the forthcoming quasi-imperial pageantry of the Thatcher funeral in today's press, coming from different places politically but reaching very similar conclusions.

In the Guardian, Martin Kettle calls the funeral's planners "foolish" and "naive" in not seeing that the Thatcher funeral "plainly risks being an avoidable public wound that disrespects the dead and that this country, in the wider sense, does not need." She deserves a publicly funded funeral but he worries about "the symbolism of an imperial, military funeral for a civilian politician in a 21st century democracy." He thinks it a good principle that "public funerals for politicians should be civic, restrained and unifying, rather than military, bombastic and controversial." He suggests a precedent in the 1898 funeral of Gladstone, who lay in state but whose obsequies were a purely civilian affair: his simple coffin "was carried across the road to Westminster Abbey on a plain funeral car, with civilian bearers for a service."

Kettle blames the present Conservative-dominated government for putting on next week's potentially divisive show, but it was actually under Gordon Brown that the arrangements for Thatcher's send-off were drawn up. She was, according to Charles Powell, offered both a lying-in-state and an RAF fly-past, but objected to the former (which might well have degenerated into a fiasco as protesters attempted to smuggle eggs and tomatoes into Westminster Hall) and thought the latter an unnecessary expense. That's a shame. A salute from a Vulcan bomber and a Harrier, assuming there are any still flying, would have been entirely fitting with her triumph in the Falklands.

Indeed, Kettle is surely wrong to see her, like Gladstone, as a purely civilian figure. The Falklands war lasted only a few weeks in 1982, but it remains the defining image of her premiership. She may not have the direct military experience of Churchill, the last prime minister buried with comparable honours in 1965, or indeed of Mountbatten, who was given a full ceremonial military funeral in 1979 after he was blown up by the IRA. But she was in every other sense a war leader, revelling in her relationship with the military and in her own image as an Iron Lady. And she was greatly beloved by the armed forces.

Churchill's funeral involved far more troops than will be at Thatcher's

The Telegraph's Peter Oborne objected to the plan to give Maggie a state funeral (and technical quibbles aside, this will be a state funeral) back in 2011, "even though I accept that she was a very great woman, one of the six or seven most important and admirable prime ministers to occupy Downing Street in the almost 300 years since the office was invented." Greatness is not enough, he maintained: "State ceremonies can be very damaging unless (as with the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton) the whole nation can come together." It would be an insult to former miners and others who failed to share in the benefits of Thatcherism to parade her body through the streets to St Paul's.

Strong arguments, repeated today. The official nature of the funeral, and the Queen's personal attendance, "will create very serious problems," he writes. It "marks a betrayal of one of the most essential principles of the British state: the division between the executive and ceremonial functions." It even calls into question the Queen's political impartiality, he thinks, and there's a risk that it will "turn into a triumphalist Tory occasion that inflicts permanent damage on the monarchy and also our system of government."

What will happen next Wednesday is, undoubtedly, very unusual. This country, historically, does not go in for grand public funerals for politicians. Gladstone got a pared-down state funeral, as did William Pitt the Younger and the ludicrous Lord Palmerston, but there were no state honours of any kind for Disraeli, Lloyd George or Clement Attlee, all Thatcher's peers in the pantheon of historically great prime ministers. Aside from royalty, only Nelson, Wellington, Churchill and Mountbatten (who was a sort-of royal) have had the full treatment, a select group that will now include Margaret Thatcher. She will probably be the last, though that was also said about Churchill.

Looked at in purely domestic terms, then, Thatcher's funeral looks anomalous, provocative and divisive, as well as a security nightmare. Unlike in 1965 or 1997, the country will not come to a standstill and crowds are unlikely to line the route of the funeral procession ten deep. There will be protesters. I particularly dread the prospect of pre-emptive arrests, as happened before 2011's Royal Wedding when people were rounded up by police for dressing as zombies. Nevertheless, Wednesday's pageantry will be no more than her due, and it will be an occasion rich in history. As most people acknowledge (including Ed Miliband, in his remarkably touching and well-delivered speech in the Commons yesterday), Margaret Thatcher was for many years a dominating presence not just in British politics but on the international stage. This is simple fact. Her achievements, both personal and political, were astonishing; not to mark the passing of such an extraordinary figure with extraordinary ceremonies would be unimaginative, myopic and cheap.

It would also lead to head-scratching abroad. World leaders and former world leaders will naturally wish to pay their respects one of the outstanding political figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Reagan, Mitterand and Pope John Paul II - her deceased contemporaries - all had lavish funerals as befitted their international status. Does she not deserve to rank alongside them? To deny her a grand funeral for reasons of precedent or etiquette would be undemocratic as well as mean-spirited. It's a shame that neither Attlee nor Lloyd George got a state funeral (most likely because they opted for a private burial instead), but these omissions are not Margaret Thatcher's fault, and they cannot be retrospectively corrected.

When Princess Diana was killed in 1997, it was initially suggested that she be given a modest private funeral. As the divorced wife of the Prince of Wales, she was no longer even Her Royal Highness: to grant her a state or royal funeral would be as anomalous, pedants pointed out, as to fly a union jack at half mast from the Buckingham Palace flagpole (a gesture that public opinion demanded and eventually got). Such unimaginative arguments were soon swept aside not just by the vast upswell of public mourning but also because courtiers and ministers came to grasp the global significance of the event. The world expected Diana to receive a proper send off and it would have undermined Britain's reputation had she not been given one. Unlike in 1997, the country is not united in grief; nevertheless, the death of Margaret Thatcher is an event of historic moment that must be publicly marked.

That Thatcher will be the first non-royal woman to be given such honours ought to be a source of feminist pride: not only did she smash the glass ceiling in British politics and in the Conservative party, she will also now smash the glass coffin. About time too. One of Oborne's complaints is that honouring Thatcher is a "betrayal of one of the most essential principles of the British state: the division between the executive and ceremonial functions". But what this really means is that only monarchs and other royal personages are worthy of being celebrated with state pomp: that no mere commoner, however distinguished or outstanding, can hope to aspire to a state funeral. Is that a good message to send out in what Kettle calls a 21st century democracy? It seems rather feudal to me.

Perhaps the answer to the inevitable divisiveness of Margaret Thatcher's state funeral is to have more of them. It's admittedly hard to see who else currently alive would qualify on the grounds of historic and international status. Greatness seems to be in fairly short supply at the present time. Tony Blair, an almost equally dominant and divisive figure when he was in power, sadly pales by comparison, but who knows where his reputation will stand in thirty years' time? But then the Republic of Ireland gives state funerals to the likes of Charles Haughey and Garrett Fitzgerald.

There are good grounds, too, for recognising contributions from outside politics. India gave a state funeral to Mother Teresa while last year Mexico held such an event for the novelist Carlos Fuentes. Brazil honoured Ayrton Senna in this way and will probably do the same for Pele. I think it would be entirely appropriate for Britain to hold a state funeral for Bobby Charlton or Paul McCartney.

We live in a country that prides itself, rightly or wrongly, on the quality of our public pageantry, and on an ability (shown at last year's Olympics) to put on a good show for the world. As the funerals of Churchill, Diana and the Queen Mother all showed, the UK knows how to orchestrate the pageantry of death before a global audience. The funeral of Margaret Thatcher will also be a grand spectacle, watched by the entire world. And that is something that she would surely have relished - not for any reasons of personal egotism, but for its expression of national pride and dignity.

Thatcherism in theory and practice

2013-04-09T14:36:00.000+01:00

As a postscript to yesterday's offering, here's a telling extract from the article that George Osborne wrote for today's Times:

The word "Thatcherite" has become so overused and misapplied that it bears only a partial resemblance to the programme of government she undertook. Indeed, the other day before my recent budget I was told by someone that I needed to deliver a real Thatcherite budget, "like 1981" they said, and slash taxes. I politely pointed out that the famous 1981 budget had actually increased taxes substantially, in a determined attempt to bring the deficit down and lower interest rates -- and that I was trying to do something similar by cutting spending.

Was she ever a Thatcherite at all? I think there's a useful distinction to be drawn between "Thatcherism", the pragmatic and cautious response to economic and diplomatic affairs that characterised Mrs T's government during at least the majority of her rule, and "neo-Thatcherism", a set of ideological beliefs and somewhat simplistic policy prescriptions based on a somewhat idealised or (as in Osborne's case) barely remembered notion of what she was like.

Maggie the moderate

2013-04-08T20:10:00.000+01:00

So Maggie is dead. The lady's not for returning. She has gone to the great grocer's shop in the sky, where the books always balance and the supply of jam never runs out. And we who are left on this sublunary orb cannot but be aware of the diminishment. Twitter today has not seen quite the orgy of grave-dancing that many had predicted, but even her harshest critics have had nothing else to talk about since lunchtime, and that is a mark of her historic stature. A giant has departed, the principal figure of a lost heroic epoch: as Boris Johnson put it earlier today, "her memory will live long after the world has forgotten the grey suits of today's politicians." Indeed, it will surely endure even after the world has forgotten Boris.

It's important not to exaggerate. She didn't single-handedly save Britain (had she done so, let's be honest, we wouldn't be in quite the mess we are today); nor did she single-handedly destroy the postwar settlement, a task that has been largely left to her successors, New Labour and Coalition alike. Her premiership answered some questions, but raised others that remain unresolved. She made massive political blunders (such as the poll tax) and her persona was sometimes ridiculous (but then, as Roy Jenkins wrote in his biography of Churchill, great men often have about them "strong elements of comicality"). But her achievements were real and lasting, in the eclipse of undemocratic union power and, abroad, in the defeat of communism. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment, though an accidental one, was that victory in the Falklands destroyed the credibility of military dictatorship not just in Argentina but throughout Latin America. She helped to bring democracy to two continents.

In Britain she failed, in large part because the people were not worthy of her. She wanted to create a property-owning democracy, populated by small business owners and respectable workers with their own homes and share portfolios, in which "society" was not a synonym for the state but rather a network of self-reliant and charitable families supporting themselves and looking out for their neighbours. That's what she meant when she said that there was "no such thing as society". Unfortunately, the people she emancipated sold their shares at the first opportunity and invested the proceeds in drink and cheap holidays; while those who made fortunes under her government too often failed to see any obligation to their fellows. The freedom she offered required a discipline and moral conscientiousness that she herself possessed but that too many, not being of her own wartime generation, lacked. Today's selfish and deracinated society is her legacy but was never her intention.

The Britain which Margaret Thatcher came to lead in 1979 was a vastly different place. In retrospect, the politics of her time seems strident, violent even. The language was polarised and impassioned, the issues at stake starker and more real. This is to some extent an illusion. Politics was not nearly so professionalised then. Her rhetorical style was abrasive even at the time, but less outrageously than it would be today. Politics had not yet become wholly dominated by inoffensive platitudes. Quite the reverse, in fact: Mrs Thatcher often preferred the language of confrontation to its reality, and her policies tended to be less radical than her rhetoric. If a time machine could bring the Thatcher of the mid 80s into the present day, many her policies would be revealed as well to the left, not just of the current coalition government, not just of Tony Blair, but even of Ed Miliband.

Today we appear to be in the midst of an impassioned debate about welfare, but the one thing that all parties agree upon is that benefits are too generous and their claimants largely undeserving. Yet under Thatcherism, sickness benefits were generous and nodded through by family doctors, single parents were allowed to stay at home on Income Support until their children reached 16 (Harriet Harman ended that one), while unemployment benefit was worth 50% more in real terms than it is today. There were often three million unemployed, but this woeful figure didn't lead to their demonisation nor to a Dutch auction among politicians over who would be most punitive. (Norman Tebbit suggested that the unemployed should get on their bikes to look for work, but he neither cut their benefits nor forced them to work for nothing.)

The Thatcher government increased spending on the NHS in real terms every year that she was in power. She herself talked tough on law and order, yet under her the Home Office was a bastion of liberal reform. The prison population was half what it now is (even though crime was higher) and it was her government that introduced the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which for the first time laid down in a detailed statute the limits of police power. She faced IRA terrorism with fortitude but not with repression. Even after the Brighton bomb almost killed her and her entire Cabinet, the country didn't see the draconian laws that the Blair government introduced after 9/11. The most controversial measure was silly but harmless: a notorious stipulation that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness could not be heard on the airwaves but their words must be spoken by actors. Under Blair, they would probably have been in Belmarsh. On social issues she was not instinctively liberal, and many will never forgive her government for Section 28; yet she was one of a minority of Conservatives to vote for the decriminalisation of male homosexuality, and was personally sympathetic and supportive to many gay (but closeted) Tory MPs.

The first major politician to talk up the threat of global warming, Mrs T also did more than any previous British leader (apart from Ted Heath) to promote European integration, passing the Single European Act which opponents at the time feared would mean the end of British independence. Until Nigel Lawson's 1988 budget, the top rate of Income Tax was 60%, which today would seem impossibly high, and it was paid by all higher-rate payers, not just by millionaires. Lawson's tax-cut, moreover, came at a time when public finances were (astonishingly, it now seems) in credit. And even despite it, the total tax take was 2% higher as a percentage of GDP than it had been when she came to power. This was no profligate or ideological small-stater. Her government freed public utilities from sub-Soviet nationalisation and inefficiency, but privatisation was pursued with caution. She once said that some things could in principle never be privatised, and the example she chose was the Royal Mail.

Today President Obama paid tribute to a "true friend" of the United States, which is no more than just. But she was no-one's poodle. She opposed President Reagan's invasion of Grenada, even though he was her greatest foreign friend (would Blair have been so forthright?) and the Iron Lady was the first Western leader to cultivate the friendship of Mikhail Gorbachev; without her influence, Reagan might never have moderated his own implacable opposition to the Evil Empire.

Seventeen years after she left office, people who had looked at her as the embodiment of the Antichrist finally had a taste of power; and, their backs ensconced comfortably on ministerial chairs, began to implement policies of which she would never have dreamt. They ignored Parliamentary conventions and ride roughshod over ancient civil liberties in a manner which would have horrified the Iron Lady. But they faced not even a fraction of the screaming, hysterical opposition Margaret Thatcher had to endure.

That's partly because, being (theoretically) of the Left, they benefited from a halo effect (because they weren't evil Tories). But it's also because, unlike Thatcher, they used emollient language. Speaking in reasonable and moderate tones, they got away with far more than she ever could have done. Cameron learnt the lesson well, so that today, pursuing social policies far more right wing that she ever attempted, he yet retains the image of a moderate Conservative. And in terms of the centre of political gravity, that is indeed what he is. Margaret Thatcher set the country on a rightward course, but it was Tony Blair who made it impossible ever (or at least for the foreseeable future) to change tack.

Class consciousness

2013-04-04T19:11:00.002+01:00

Britain's famed obsession with social class is alive and well. That at least seemed apparent from the response yesterday when the BBC unveiled its swanky new class calculator. The scheme, designed by a couple of academics on the back of an online survey of around 160,000, divides the country into seven groups defined by a combination of money, social behaviour and cultural interests. There's a financial and cultural elite at the top, and an economically and socially disadvantaged "precariat" at the bottom. In the middle there are five supposedly distinct forms of middle class.

To judge by the reaction on my Twitter timeline at least, the result was widespread head-scratching and dissatisfaction. And to judge by my own experimentation, the scheme is fairly arbitrary. Many people are fairly borderline. Tweak a couple of results - express an interest in jazz, say, or discover an acquaintance with the BHA's Andrew Copson - and you might move from the "emergent service workers" category into the "established middle class", or even the elite. Lose interest in the theatre and you might be consigned to the outer darkness that is the "technical middle class", where dwell computer geeks, friendless civil servants and, apparently, the Spectator's Nick Cohen. A mortgage can make all the difference between the "precariat" and the "elite". Which I suppose kind of makes sense.

The devisers of the new class system, Mike Savage from the LSE and Fiona Devine from Manchester University, claim that the scheme "doesn't define class just by the job that you do, but by the different kinds of economic, cultural and social resources or 'capitals' that people possess." But it doesn't really define "class" at all; rather it seeks to redefine it as lifestyle.

The traditional tripartite division into aristocracy, middle class and proletariat may be anachronistic, but it does at least describe something real. Historically, the upper classes enjoyed not just power but cultural prestige, while the middle classes may have envied the lifestyle and taste of the aristos but at the same time cultivated their own distinct moral values, as did members of the working class who, if (as the immortal sketch had it) "knew their place", also knew that place to be one of strong and authentic community life. Even in a society in which "everyone is middle class" (or at least in which most people are supposed to be middle class) the psychological pull of the old system remains, so that Labour peers and millionaire Guardian columnists preen themselves on their working class credentials, while old ladies living in penury and afraid to turn the heating on consider themselves solid members of the traditional middle class, though they may be thinking of breaking the habit of a lifetime by voting for UKIP.

Meanwhile, the utilitarian ABC1-C2-DE demographics used by advertisers, pollsters and social scientists, with its occupational division of society, may miss the subtlety of separating out the "technical" from the "established" middle class, but again captures the brutal reality that whatever one's cultural affectations in the final analysis it all comes down to cash. Money is the one class indicator that can't be faked - unless you're a banker, of course, in which case faking money is more or less what you do for a living. Congratulations.

For once I'm tempted to agree with Liberal Conspiracy, which concludes that the BBC class calculator "shows a poor understanding of how class actually operates" in this country (or, for that matter, in any other). For LibCon, the problem is that the widget "takes a snapshot of people at a particular time." Thus an indebted think-tank intern with a privileged background and a first in PPE from Oxford isn't likely to come out of the calculation well, even though in twenty years' time they may well be in the cabinet, while a train driver with his own home and a decent household income ranks highly (as "technical middle class", probably, unless he has an unstereotypical interest in opera and hangs out at the weekends with Andrew Copson).

At the very least the scheme looks designed to give maximum comfort to members of our preening liberal elite that their tastes and social milieu renders them superior to the benighted technocrats who have "high economic capital but seem less culturally engaged". It also seems calibrated to reassure the generation of young urban strivers that their "high levels of emerging cultural capital and high social capital" (ie, the fact that they have friends and go to gigs) compensates for their hand-to-mouth existence, minimal savings and daily-shrinking chance of getting onto the housing ladder.

The full paper on which the calculation is based is available here. It's a much more sophisticated piece of work than the "class calculator" which derives from it might suggest, and there's a good introductory section that looks at the changing understanding of class within sociology. That reveals that the authors took their inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu, who devised the categories of economic, cultural and social capital in a 1984 paper. In other words, the new model is almost thirty years old. Even if Bourdieu was on to something, the world was a very different place then.

On the plus side, the scheme does enumerate the characteristics of the elite quite accurately (not hard!) and concludes that the country is now dominated by a socially rather narrow group. Members of the elite went to Oxbridge or one of the top London colleges, are predominantly white and live in the South East. They are "a relatively exclusive grouping, with limited social mobility into its ranks"; more than half of its members were born into it. This is obviously true, and truer with every passing year.

But ironically, what this survey defines as "elite" is what most people in this country, and certainly most members of the elite, would call "middle class".

This song sums up quite neatly the characteristics of the new elite. Note the title:

Melvyn Bragg on Mary Mag: A cause for Concern

2013-03-28T20:46:00.004Z

The BBC is showing a documentary about Mary Magdalene tomorrow lunchtime. Typical, pious, Good Friday viewing, reminding the public that Easter isn't all chocolate and bunnies but (for Christians at least) has something to do with Jesus, you might think. It's presented by Melvyn Bragg, for one thing, which is British broadcasting's ultimate stamp of intellectual seriousness. Better than Botney, even. But the loopy evangelical pressure group Christian Concern are aghast. In an "action alert" email tonight, they urge supporters to complain to the BBC about this forthcoming outrage, the timing of which they suggest is "highly inappropriate and inflammatory."

"The BBC's online complaint form only takes a few minutes to complete," they remind people. "The BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives."

Because the Beeb is entirely unfamiliar with the concept of an organised write-in campaign.

"Inappropriate timing" is hard to sustain. The Gospels state that Mary Magdalene stood at the foot of the cross while Jesus was being crucified, and that she was the first person to see (or imagine she saw) the risen Christ. And those are the only definite references to her in the New Testament. So it's hard to see what would be a more appropriate time to celebrate her.

So what's so outrageous about it?

Christian Concern are disturbed by a Telegraph piece in which Milord Bragg discusses the "tantalising and elusive" evidence about Mary M, and the "fragments which increasingly hint at radical new truths about the woman who has been called the apostle to the apostles."

This is certainly over-egging the pudding. The "radical new truths" have been around for donkeys' years: a few passages in apocryphal gospels that hint at a unique closeness in the relationship between Mary and Jesus. Yes, all that Holy Blood, Holy Grail/ Dan Brown stuff that has been the stuff of speculative history and conspiracy theorising since I was a lad and probably long before. There is, Bragg offers, "one taunting scrap of record which may well lead to the conclusion that she was his wife."

Well, knock me down with an archangel's feather.

If there's anything to be aghast about, it's the fact that this utterly familiar idea, for which there is, of course, no definitive proof (nor will there ever be) is still being presented in TV documentaries and newspaper articles as new and shocking. Given that half the population of the planet seems to have read Dan Brown's poorly-written thriller, that ought to be a genuine scandal. But, of course, that isn't the scandal that Christian Concern is concerned about.

Their concerns are as follows:

1) In a broadcast at the precise time Christians are remembering his death on the cross, this programme questions the purity of Jesus.

The programme suggests that Jesus might, just possibly, have been married. To a woman. How does this "question his purity", exactly. I thought that Christian Concern approved of heterosexual marriage. Barely a day goes by without Christian Concern voicing their supposedly Christian concern about the "threat" to traditional marriage posed by the government's proposal to extend it to gay couples. Only this Tuesday they sent out a "prayer alert" urging people to pray that the US Supreme Court uphold California's ban on same-sex marriage "and that God's good pattern for marriage and family is not further corrupted."

Yet somehow God's good pattern is not good enough for the Son of God, that if Jesus had married it would have exposed him to "impurity". As Cranmer Tweeted to me earlier this evening, one might expect Roman Catholics, with their ideal of the celibate priesthood, to reason thus (though celibate Catholic bishops, like the very pure ex-Cardinal Keith O'Brien, have put themselves at the forefront of the campaign for traditional marriage). But Christian Concern is a largely Protestant outfits, and Protestants have never thought that marriage might be somehow "impure".

It's an odd objection.

2) The claims about Jesus are based on dubious scholarship... it feeds on Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code' hypothesis rather than taking account of sensible scholarship.

Well, they're on slightly firmer ground with this one, I suppose. The scholarship itself isn't dubious: the apocryphal gospels which imply a wife-like status for the Magdalene do exist, and to regard the statement that "he often kissed her on the [mouth]" as suggesting physical as well as spiritual intimacy is not wholly implausible. What is dubious is the notion, which no serious scholar makes, that these texts are historically reliable. But to say that is not to say definitively that Jesus was not married.

What we can say is that the mainstream Christian tradition has always assumed Jesus to have been celibate; but that there were, in the first few centuries AD, contrary ideas floating about. The Gnostic and other apocryphal gospels record some of these ideas. So while there is no real evidence that Jesus was married, there's also no direct statement in the canonical gospels that he wasn't.

How does this matter? What Christian Concern and their ilk can't abide is that, for many people, Jesus is a fascinating historical (or quasi-historical) figure about whom little is known but about whom many would like to know more. I suspect that very few people would be scandalised if proof emerged that there was a Mrs Christ. Most of us would be quite pleased, I would guess, because most of us (even including Richard Dawkins) feel quite warmly about the Jesus depicted in the gospels, and wouldn't begrudge him a little connubial happiness. The theory that Jesus was married keeps getting trotted out, in other words, not because it's scandalous but because, credible or not, it has popular resonance. It's also plausible that a church that acknowledged Jesus as married, or even gave equal prominence to his female disciples (a role which Mary Magdalene, as depicted in the New Testament, undoubtedly fulfilled) might have had fewer problems down the centuries with sexuality and the role of women.

3) It makes indefensible claims about the nature of the Bible (e.g. the process by which the books of the Bible came to be recognised and collated)

Bragg:

The Gnostic Gospels which were rejected by those who put together the authorised versions include the Gospel of Mary, found in Cairo in 1896 and widely argued to depict the character of Mary Magdalene, and, as important for her story, the Gospel of Philip – which was among the texts found by an Arab shepherd in the desert in 1945. These, like others, were excluded from the final political version of the Bible. When you read them you can understand why. Philip tells us that Christ “loved her” more than all the other disciples. In Mary’s Gospel she speaks of close and long dialogues with Christ himself. But the forces of men, later abetted by the forces of the manly state of Rome, and the masculine structure of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, were going to bring her down.

If all Christian Concern are saying is that the compilation of the canon of scripture was more than just a patriarchal plot to exclude female voices (even if that was the effect) they may have a point. But Christian Concern's idea of a "defensible" claim about the Bible is that it is the revealed Word of God, literally true in every particular, that may as well have floated down on a cloud, leather bound and written in Jacobean English. Compared with the view of scriptural fundamentalists, Bragg's "political" interpretation, simplistic caricature as it is, is rather closer to what modern scholarship has discovered.

I would however urge my few remaining readers (sorry about the patchy service of late) to bear in mind Christian Concern's valid points: that the BBC complaint form doesn't take long to fill out, and that "the BBC's response will depend on what level of feedback it receives."

A genuine chance of a job

2013-03-25T18:07:00.002Z

In his big immigration speech today, David Cameron took an axe to the rhetorical and philosophical basis of the Coalition's welfare reforms. I don't think he intended to do so, and few people seem to have picked up on it, but the implications of his remarks are nevertheless profound.

I'm referring to this. Rhetorically addressing an East European migrant, the sort who might be tempted to "come and take advantage of our generosity without making a proper contribution to our country" he first reminds them of what conditions are already imposed on British jobseekers:

You will be subject to full conditionality and work search requirements and you will have to show you are genuinely seeking employment.
If you fail that test, you will lose your benefit.

But then he goes further:

And as a migrant, we’re only going to give you six months to be a jobseeker. After that benefits will be cut off unless you really can prove not just that you are genuinely seeking employment but also that you have a genuine chance of getting a job.

But why would that help reduce the benefits bill? Surely anyone who is genuinely seeking work has a genuine chance of finding it? After all, the whole sanctions regime, which has been steadily cranked up during the past decade (under Labour and Coalition governments alike) and which can now lead to a claimant being thrown off jobseekers' allowance for three whole years, is based on the assumption that such incentives will encourage people to get back into work. An assumption that being out of work for a long period is a personal failing that can be corrected by a strong kick up the backside.

But in that case, what does having "a genuine chance of getting a job" mean?

It means, presumably, that you can be genuinely seeking work, genuinely doing everything that the DWP requires of you, and more, to get off benefits and into employment, and still not have a genuine chance of a job.

Cameron is talking about migrants. But there's no logical reason why it this applies only to migrants. He mentions inadequate spoken English as one possible barrier to finding work, which will form part of a "robust" test applied to unemployed migrants. He doesn't mention the other criteria that will be applied, but it's not hard to think of ones that apply equally to native jobseekers. Such as: low educational attainment, age, a drink problem, a patchy employment record, or (most of all, perhaps) lack of available jobs.

Because it is a truth universally unacknowledged (by mainstream politicians, at any rate) that there are many unemployed people who have no real chance of getting a job, however often they have their benefits stopped and however many workfare schemes they are sent on. To acknowledge this fact, though, would make a nonsense of much of the political debate around welfare, which seems premised on the assumption that the way to reduce unemployment is to make life as difficult as possible for the unemployed.

Foreigners can be told to leave or starve, but what is to be done with British-born people who, according to what are now going to be formally devised criteria, have "no genuine chance of a job." Informally, we have the answer: they are going to be forced to work, not for the national minimum wage (which would at least be reasonable) but for the inadequate benefits that they had hitherto been given while "looking for work". But workfare programmes, thus far, have been justified on the principle that they exist as a stepping stone towards proper paid employment, even though someone working a full week at a fairly intense (if unpaid) job is likely to have insufficient time and energy for useful job-hunting. No politician has yet suggested that performing state-directed labour for around a quarter of the national minimum wage is meant as an alternative to normal employment. Not yet.

But perhaps the way is now open for such an admission, as the new concept of "genuine chance of employment" is tried out, initially on migrants from other EU countries. The next development in benefits conditionality might be precisely this, that after a period (perhaps two years, perhaps one, perhaps even six months) of permitted job-hunting a claimant will be subjected to a "genuine chance of employment" test, and anyone failing it will be put onto underpaid work for life.

I can imagine some employers being quite enchanted by the prospect of not having to pay unskilled workers properly, or at all. Of course it will distort the labour market, taking away jobs from paid employees: but they needn't despair, because after a suitable interval they'll become eligible for workfare too.

How Implementing Leveson threatens religious freedom

2013-03-18T10:20:00.002Z

This is a guest post by Julian Mann

A broadcaster on the BBC, which is regulated by statute, abuses a Conservative cabinet minister on a comedy show in disgusting terms and gets away with it. But how would a traditionalist Christian who in a press article criticised abortion, sex outside heterosexual marriage, the use of cannabis or religions that deny the Trinity - without resorting to personal abuse - fare under a regulated press regime?

One suspects that he or she would have a much harder time than the leftist comedienne who abused Michael Gove.

The way in which any new UK press law would be enforced would inevitably reflect the values of the 'progressive' metropolitan elite in the political, media and legal establishment. That establishment intensely hates the so-called 'right-wing' press, which continues to provides a platform for the articulation of traditional Judaeo-Christian values.

Surely such hatred does not give much ground for optimism that freedom of Judaeo-Christian speech will flourish if the press becomes regulated by law. Even if the statutory regulator were to come down on the side of freedom of speech in a particular case, editors could become overly cautious about publishing views that offend against political correctness. The threat of legalised censorship could lead to unnecessary self-censorship.

This concern about the preservation of trenchant counter-cultural comment in the press is very separate from the question of celebrity news reporting. I personally have no interest in the details of the depravities of famous people. But if a famous person is, on a point of fact, an adulterer or promiscuous or otherwise morally errant, surely a journalist should be free to point that out.

Do I believe the comedienne who abused Mr Gove should be prosecuted under a hate speech law? Certainly not. That would be dictatorial.

Do I believe the media organisation which employs her should be forced to dismiss her? No, because again that would be governmentally heavy-handed, even though the media organisation in this case is funded by a statutory licence fee.

But do I believe the BBC should voluntarily dismiss her from her position? I certainly do because she crossed a moral line of personal abuse.

The recent parliamentary manoeuvrings towards a press law have the feel of something the Russian Duma might have got up to prior to the Bolshevik revolution. The UK Parliament currently seems well capable of sacrificing the precious privilege of freedom of speech on the altar of short-term political posturing and petty pay-back for the exposure of the expenses scandal.

As a Christian minister, my main concern is the preservation of the freedom to proclaim the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ and the spiritual and moral entailments of His message of salvation. For example, it is impossible faithfully and coherently to proclaim the glorious message of the forgiveness of all sin through faith in Christ unless the judgement of Almighty God on human sin and His displeasure towards mankind's spiritual and moral rebellion are also clearly asserted.

What if a lobby of celebrities decides to get hacked off about being told in a press article that all men and women are guilty, in the words of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer, of 'provoking most justly (Almighty God's) wrath and indignation against us'?

The precious freedom of expression for Christians like me looks decidedly precarious under the politically correct values driving the Gadarene rush towards a press law.

Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire -

Hubris and a Woman Scorn'd: Narrative cliché in the sentencing remarks of Mr Justice Sweeney

2013-03-12T15:10:00.004Z

The normally level-headed Charles Crawford was sent into raptures by the performance of Mr Justice Sweeney as he sent Chris Huhne and Vicky (aka Vasiliki) Pryce down for eight months yesterday. "When a British judge is on top form," he writes, "the result is peerless: clarity, precision, nuance and above all a strong sense that, yes, a good and fair decision has been reached."

Hmm. What I saw is a judge indulging himself, as sentencing judges often seem to, in a crowd-pleasing display of moralistic finger-wagging that ultimately had little to do with the facts of the case before him. Whether or not the eight month sentences were justified as a deterrent (and to what? Not keeping shtum about a crime you committed years ago?) or as proper punishment for the acts committed is another matter. Had he confined himself to the offences and the appropriate penalty that they attracted, he would have completely discharged his obligations to the public interest.

He seemed to sense, though, that more was expected of him.

To the media, the Huhne/Pryce case has only ever been tangentially concerned with the crime of perverting the course of justice by exchanging speeding points with a spouse. Rather, it is somewhere between a soap opera and a Greek tragedy. Chris Huhne, a high-flyer brought low by his own arrogance and sense of invulnerability, his stellar political career wrecked not so much because of his manipulation of the criminal justice system but because of the way he left his wife. Vicky Pryce, herself a high-flying economist but now reduced to living out a misogynistic cliché: a modern-day Medea, deranged by jealousy and deformed by hate, wreaking her hysterical revenge on the man who rejected her; or else a cool, cynical manipulator, plotting with her neighbour Constance Briscoe, a publicity-hungry barrister and part-time judge, to bring her ex-husband down while escaping the consequences of her own actions.

All journalists like a neat narrative hook, of course. They're in the business of telling stories, and stories are easier to tell when they fit (or, more often, can be fitted) into a pre-established narrative framework. The wronged wife is such a stock character in fiction, and Vicky Pryce's ultimately self-destructive behaviour fits so comfortably into the time-honoured pattern, that it would be expecting too much for the media not to latch onto it. Especially as it takes attention away from the role of the newspapers themselves in the downfall of both partners, above all the inducements and implicit guarantees offered Pryce by Isabel Oakeshott of the Sunday Times under the guise of friendship, followed by a failure of both Oakeshott and her editors to go to the wire to uphold the once-sacred principle of journalistic confidentiality.

(Although a narrative template can be fitted to that, too: witness Sarah Ditum, who eschews any discussion of journalistic ethics by painting the Pryce/Oakeshott relationship as a "horrible parody" of female friendship.)

But however tempting it is for the media to frame the Pryce/Huhne implosion as a modern morality tale, as the two protagonists act out their hoary roles of fallen hero and vengeful wife, we should expect better of a high court judge. Yet Sweeney J was only to eager, it appears, to lard his judgment with the same narrative clichés and trite amateur psychology.

For him, the fate of Huhne touched on the tragic. The former Cabinet minister had "fallen from a great height", his ambition (originally, concern about possibly losing the Lib Dem nomination for Eastleigh) leading him to embark on the course of criminality and lying that ultimately ended in the dock. The judge expressed no sympathy for Huhne, indeed asserted that "to some extent" he was the more culpable of the two (they were his speeding points, after all). Nor did he seem very convinced by Huhne's expressions of remorse ("It's easy now to apologise"). Nevertheless it's possible to detect in the tenor of his remarks a certain sadness at the predicament in which Huhne now finds himself. Indeed, he gives Huhne a 10% discount for pleading guilty, even while detailing the lengthy and mendacious attempts he made right up to the day of the trial to frustrate justice, by lying to the police and then trying to have the case struck out, attempts that "will not add a day to your sentence."

The relish with which the judge lays into Vicky Pryce, by contrast, is evident in every twist of his rhetorical knife. Her behaviour, he has "no doubt", demonstrates a "controlling, manipulative and devious side to your nature." Having decided that she is motivated ("I have no doubt") by "an implacable desire to revenge", he admits that the circumstances under which Huhne dumped her must have been "horrendous" but is nevertheless unmoved. Pryce had "little consideration for the position of your wider family", he tuts (meaning, I suppose, that she was a bad mother, who let her vindictive desire to get one over on her ex override her duty as a woman to keep up a dignified façade for the sake of the children).

Armed with this interpretive framework, Sweeney then relates Pryce's dealings with the press in a manner that makes no allowance for the subtlety of her relationship with Isabel Oakeshott. While Pryce did indeed make the first move, Oakeshott's dogged pursuit of a story, her willingness to flatter and cajole a sometimes reluctant source are all too obvious from the leaked emails between them. As Janice Turner put it in Saturday's Times, "from the needy tone of her emails... it seems Pryce sought solace besides revenge. So much so that she didn't notice this consummate journalist expertly reeling her story in." Turner, though detecting "little sexual jealousy" (but much jealousy of Huhne's political career) thinks that Pryce lost both her cool and her common sense. Had she displayed more "propriety and grace", her warmth and expertise on the Greek economic problems would have seen her star rise as Huhne's set.

Well, maybe. Sweeney J, though, has Pryce down as a cold and devious manipulator, which makes the press the victim as well as the instrument of her calculating manipulations. Pity the poor journalists who became the puppets in Pryce's theatre of revenge:

Your weapon of choice was the revelation of his part in the offence in 2003. But it was a dangerous weapon because it had, in truth, been a joint offence. Thus you did not go to the police, because (as you admitted during your second trial) you appreciated the risk that you would both be prosecuted. Instead you went first to The Mail on Sunday then, when they didn’t publish, to the Sunday Times and then, after they published, back to The Mail on Sunday. Hence it was that over the period of six months from November 2010 to May 2011 you, I have no doubt, sought to manipulate and control the Press so as to achieve that dual objective, hoping all the while to be able to hide behind their duty of source confidentiality, which you tried long and hard to do, as well as laying the ground, if that failed, for a false defence of marital coercion.

It's hard to square this simplistic notion of newspapers lamely doing Pryce's bidding with the language used by Oakeshott in her emails, which seems more calculated, devious and manipulating than anything attempted by Pryce (eg: "It's an entertaining thought, cornering him at a press conference - his expression would be a picture.")

Sweeney then goes on to attribute Pryce's attempt to use a defence of marital coercion as part of the same "controlling, manipulative and devious" character. Her original act of taking the points on her husband's behalf is impelled by nothing more than "shared ambition" (as if a woman of Pryce's professional standing, a senior economist who before Huhne became an MP was arguably in a more prominent public position than he was, cared only for her husband's career) and because she would find it inconvenient were he unable to use the car to ferry the children around.

It doesn't occur to the judge that, even without coercion, there are subtle pressures at work in a marriage, which while not excusing the crime perhaps render it less morally damning: the loyalty that exists between spouses, a sense of mutual obligation, of being a team. The fear, perhaps, of otherwise feeling guilty at having let her husband down, of letting him suffer the consequences of her own moral punctiliousness; the fear of the look in reproach in his eyes, of what would be the long-term effect on their relationship if she refused to back him up. She was doing him a favour, it should be remembered: lying to the authorities, committing a crime, at some considerable risk to herself.

Even Sweeney accepts that swapping the points was almost certainly Huhne's idea. It would have been quite open to him to deplore her action in placing marital loyalty (or even harmony) ahead of honesty and obedience to the law, to say something along the lines of "It is no excuse that you acted out of misplaced love and a sense of obligation to your husband." But such a conclusion would fit ill with his favoured interpretation of Pryce as a cold, calculating and manipulative woman: she couldn't possibly, on this view, have ever helped Huhne for his sake; she must have had selfish and devious reasons of her own, like not wanting to have to drive the kids to school.

Constructing a pat little narrative that draws on age-old misogynist stereotypes but which is pitched perfectly to appeal to modern newspaper readers (at least as journalists imagine their readers to be) does nothing to advance justice or understanding. It's a judge's job to pass sentence, not to carry out gratuitous acts of character assassination based on little more psychological insight than a daytime talk-show of the Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle variety.

Huhne and Pryce were only in court, of course, because of Pryce's desire to hurt her ex-husband and her resentment at his treatment of her led to an old offence being brought to light. The judge notes this in passing, and somewhat strangely: "To the extent that anything good has come out of this whole process, it is that now, finally, you have both been brought to justice for your joint offence." The phraseology implies that the conviction and jailing of Huhne and Pryce is merely a minor, if benign, side-effect of the disastrous train of events that has destroyed the careers of both of them. That certainly reflects the story as told by the press, and perhaps as experienced by the ex couple themselves. Legally, though, the exposure of the crime is the only thing that really matters: the collapse of the Huhne marriage was merely the mechanism that brought the crime to light. If there's little sense of that in Justice Sweeney's remarks it's probably because, like almost everyone else who isn't Chris Huhne or Vicky Pryce, this has been less a trial than a narrative event.

Is marital coercion a feminist defence?

2013-03-07T19:58:00.003Z

The conviction of the former Mrs Huhne today for perverting the course of justice has put a spotlight on the defence she attempted to rely on, that of "marital coercion". For many, the notion that a wife (but not a husband) can escape justice by claiming to be under her spouse's control when committing a crime is anachronistic and patronising, even offensive. It recalls another age, when women lacked social and economic freedom, when a wife might indeed claim to be wholly dependent on her husband and subject to his overbearing will. Today, however, we have feminism and equality.

Joshua Rozenberg for example, thought it was "an extraordinary defence for any woman, let alone a former joint head of the government economic service", and points out that the Law Commission wanted to abolish the defence (found in the Criminal Justice Act of 1925) as long ago as 1977, a time when there was considerably less sexual equality than there is today.

Last week, Rozenberg wanted to abolish juries because the first jury in the Vicky Pryce case failed to reach a verdict. This week he seems to want to abolish a defence because the second jury didn't buy it.

Well, that's one way of looking at it. Viewed from another perspective, though, the defence of marital coercion is surely one of the most feminist laws on the statute book. It recognises, after all, that in heterosexual relationships there is inevitably a power imbalance, and that in marriage, with its legal and historical baggage, that imbalance is likely to be especially great. We may like to think that all that belongs in the past, but the evidence suggests otherwise. As Jack O'Sullivan notes, even the most modern, right-on and egalitarian-minded couples tend to revert to stereotypical roles once they have children, such is the pressure of social expectation.

Dad gets "provider fever", works harder, and gains economic power over his partner – and enhanced relative power in the public realm. It's a disheartening reversal: a "patriarchal moment". Meanwhile, mum has her "matriarchal moment", winning domestic control, largely taking over the private and social realms. Ancient norms reassert themselves despite the couple's vows to do things a different way.

Men don't just (still) have more financial power, on average, than women, they are also bigger, stronger, more aggressive and dominant. Again, I'm talking about the average man and the average woman here, but it's a significant average. Domestic violence is overwhelmingly committed by men against women, and even without physical abuse women are more likely than men to be trapped in mentally abusive and controlling relationships. At least, that's what feminists tell us:

Feminist theory in domestic violence emphasizes gender and power inequality in opposite-sex relationships. It focuses on the societal messages that sanction a male’s use of violence and aggression throughout life, and the proscribed gender roles that dictate how men and women should behave in their intimate relationships (Pence & Paymar, 1993). It sees the root causes of intimate partner violence as the outcome of living a society that condones aggressive behaviours perpetrated by men, while socializing women to be non-violent.

Proponents of feminist theory acknowledge that women can also be violent in their relationships with men; however, they simply do not see the issue of women abusing men as a serious social problem, and therefore, does not deserve the same amount of attention or support as violence against women.

If we do indeed live in a society which condones aggressive behaviour by men and encourages women to be submissive, we should expect to see male criminals (who, I suspect, may be more violent and less receptive towards feminist messages of equality than the average male Guardian reader; just a guess) regularly using their physical dominance to overawe their wives. We should expect the wives of such men to often aid and abet their crimes, not out of personal criminal intent but through fear, or because they are wholly under the thumb of the brutes they married.

In a society in which women are habitually the victims of male supremacy and aggression, the defence of marital coercion remains not just plausibly relevant but also necessary. Even if you don't fully accept the radical feminist argument about the pervasiveness of the patriarchy with its prescribed gender roles and male privilege, you might still agree that such a social pattern persists to a greater extent among the criminal underclass. It's probably less relevant where the male criminal is a Lib Dem MP like Chris Huhne; perhaps this explains why the second Pryce jury declined to accept the defence. But that shows that the law is working, not that it is obsolete.

Far from being an offensive anachronism, the lack of balance in the law of marital coercion, its explicit privileging of women, is surely a sign of its radical and progressive nature. Unlike most laws, which pretend to objectivity ("everyone is equal before the law") while in truth representing the interests of white, heterosexual men, the defence of marital coercion recognises the unequal nature of society as a whole and the particular inequality of marriage, and in a very 21st century manner attempts to correct it.

There's only one problem I can see with this unimpeachably feminist line of thought. The defence of marital coercion replaced an earlier, indeed ancient, principle which assumed that a woman always acted under the direction and control of her husband. It was to this concept that Dickens' Mr Bumble gave the immortal retort that "If the law says that, then the law is an ass." It was, in other words, an expression of patriarchy in law; at best, a form of legal gallantry, like holding open a door for a lady, that disguised condescension with courtesy.

It's no real contradiction, though, that a system that oppressed women also wanted to protect them. It merely shows that patriarchy was not necessarily uncivilised: that having conceptualised women as the weaker vessel, whose default position in relation to men was one of subordination and victimhood, it drew the logical inference that they were not necessarily responsible for their own actions, at least not when their husband was in the room. The law needed to recognise this.

When discussing domestic violence, or sexual objectification, or the need to eliminate pornography and sex work, or rape conviction rates, or positive discrimination in the workplace, modern feminists often make precisely the same case. Or so, at least, it often seems to me.

City bonuses pay for our schools

2013-03-06T15:14:00.002Z

If Julia Llewellyn Smith is to be believed, the era of Loadsamoney triumphalism is dead, to be replaced by one of shoe-shuffling hypocrisy. Perhaps it's a return to traditional British discretion. Talking about money is so vulgar, after all, especially when you've got a lot (or when you've got none). Maybe the rich (or just the comfortably off) wish to spare their friends and neighbours from feeling like losers in this time of austerity. Or it's an attempt to preserve the illusion that "we're all in this together", when plainly we're not. Do they even have a sense of shame, those bonus-rich bankers and hedgies, that having got the country - the continent, the entire Western world - into an economic death-spiral from which we may never escape it is they who are least likely to be suffering personally? It would be nice to think so. But perhaps they're just a bit worried about being the first people to be put against the wall and shot when the revolution comes.

Because we all hate rich people, especially bankers with their bonuses. If anything's likely to restore the public reputation of the European Union, especially in this country, it's the latest move to restrict City bonuses. The sight of George Osborne going into battle on behalf of greedy plutocrats while he's hammering some of the poorest people in the country for having a spare bedroom, even when there's no smaller property for them to move to, serves only to confirm prejudices about Tory priorities. It may even convince people once again that the EU is a force for equality and progress, even while it's obsession with preserving the Euro pulverises and pauperises the whole of Europe south of the Alps.

Banker bashing is cheap and easy populism. I'm not a great fan of the narcissistic and uber-Darwinian mindset cultivated by many of the City's bonus boys, as it happens, but I know a dangerous policy when I see one. The new EU rules, which Osborne is powerless to resist, are a pistol aimed straight at the heart of the City of London, and at the British economy. To most European leaders, who hate the City, or are jealous of its success, if reducing bonuses results in banks relocating to New York or Switzerland then the policy will have been a success. From where they sit, the harm wrought by the Square Mile's financial buccaneering over the past two decades deserves exemplary punishment. And the harm wrought to the British economy though lost jobs, lost tax revenues and lost economic activity is no concern of theirs.

But we should care. To exult in the (marginal) impoverishment of some of the most overpaid people in the country is understandable, but it is also deeply stupid. Bankers' bonuses keep much of London's service economy in business: the fancy restaurants, the car dealerships, the jewellers, the high-end travel agents, the private art galleries, the fashion business, traders in superior hi-fi, Saville Row and much else. And these, in turn, keep other, humber businesses trading, and thousands of people in work. Remove them, and you remove a major source of income for the British economy.

The undestand these things in China, where the initial fruits of prosperity and economic growth have produced obscene displays of conspicuous consumption.

Bonus money doesn't just benefit London, of course. Many of those they support with their spending live outside the capital, while most obviously the tax levied on bankers' pay and bonuses is redistributed to other parts of the country. Large parts of Britain no longer have a functioning economy: they depend on public spending, which in turn is heavily reliant on the revenue from the profitable parts of the economy. The top 1% of earners contribute 30% of income tax paid in the UK. Factor in the amount they are paying in VAT through their conspicuous consumption, in stamp duty through their property purchases, in capital gains tax and elsewhere, and it's clear that the rich are to a great extent funding public services in this country. Needless to say, a high proportion of this 1% work in the City of London, and receive hefty bonuses.

Take that money away, and frankly we're screwed. We're screwed even more than we already are, which is bad enough as it is.

There's an almost plausible argument for the EU policy that blames the bonus culture for encouraging risk-taking among City traders, and blames risk-taking for the mess we're currently in. Restrict bonuses, the argument goes, and the result will be more cautious banking, no more crashes, no more bail-outs by taxpayers. Allied to that are predictions that nothing much will change: banks will merely pay their top earners higher salaries and smaller bonuses, and the merry-go-round will continue much as before.

But risk-taking is inseparable from profit, and with lower bonuses there will be less incentive to chase profit. There might be fewer disasters if traders were more risk-averse, but there will also be fewer jackpots. This will soon make London-based banks, constrained to pay their traders and executives the same however well or badly they perform, less profitable than those based in New York or Switzerland. London will steadily become a backwater. The money to be made from casino banking will still be made, but it will not be made, or spent, or taxed, in Britain. And we'll all be the poorer.

It's true that the UK economy has been far too dependent on the City, with the result that the financial crash has plunged the country into an era of permanent low growth. Diversity is good, and the government needs to help stimulate other sectors of the economy. But we are where we are, and you can't encourage wealth creation in other areas by taking away one of the few genuine sources of wealth that the country already has. It's not good to have all your eggs in one basket, but the answer is not to smash all the eggs and throw away the basket. The only viable solution is to hatch a few of the eggs and give the resulting hens some new baskets to lay in.

Nicola Edgington, mental health and the failure of justice

2013-03-04T18:29:00.001Z

Nicola Edgington was an accident waiting to happen. In 2005, suffering from severe mental illness she killed her mother, stabbing her nine times in the face, neck and chest with a kitchen knife. She was sent indefinitely to a secure mental hospital where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but was released after just four years with what seems like inadequate supervision. Two years later, she murdered 58 year old Sally Hodkin in the street with a stolen butcher's knife and attempted to kill another woman, 22 year old Kerry Clark.

Just prior to these attacks, Edgington made repeated attempts to get help. First she contacted the police, who accompanied her to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich in the early hours of 10th October 2011. Despite her professed desire to be detained under the Mental Health Act, hospital staff told her to wait. Increasingly worried about what she might do, she then made no fewer than five 999 calls from the hospital asking for further help from the police. The calls were replayed during her recent trial for murder.

Here's a selection of her pleas:

"I need to go to a mental hospital. I need the police to come now. I done a murder five years ago."

"I need for the police to come because I have had a nervous breakdown before and I killed someone."

Could you please send a car here now please this is very important.'

I don't want to start hurting anyone. I want to hand myself in now before I start hurting anyone else.

Do you want me to hurt someone here, I'm telling you if you don't come to Queen Elizabeth Hospital I'm gonna end up hurting someone

'I'm a very dangerous schizophrenic and if you don't come and help me I'm gonna end up hurting someone.

'I'm having a nervous breakdown. I'm really really not well.
You know the last time I was feeling like this I killed someone, the last time I was feeling like this I killed, I killed my mum.

'I have got very strange ideas, I think I'm at the gates of heaven, I think.'

Nevertheless, it was deemed that the hospital waiting room was a "place of safety", so there was no need to involve the police further. Eventually, some attempt was made to arrange a specialist assessment, but shortly before seven in the morning Edgington simply walked out of the hospital, found a suitable knife and selected her victims.

Much of the attention tonight is on the failures of the police, detailed in an IPCC report, for example the failure to carry out a police national computer check which would have alerted them to Edgington's conviction for manslaughter on the basis of diminished responisbility. Other, more striking failures might be laid at the door of hospital staff who failed to give Edgington the help she plainly needed, or indeed the decision to release her from the secure hospital two years before. It might be asked what kind of care she was receiving in the community. But I'd like to focus on the outcome of the trial and the sentencing remarks of Judge Brian Barker, which betray an outrageous and profound ignorance of the nature of severe mental illness and display attitudes quite astonishing in a supposedly advanced and civilised society.

That Edgington was charged with murder at all, given the strong evidence of her long-term psychosis and previous hospitalisation, is remarkable enough. It is especially remarkable since, it turns out, the trial had been postponed because Edgington, who has been detaine in a secure mental hospital since the tragic events of that October day, was at first considered too ill to stand trial. The CPS argued, against all logic and the medical consenus, that she was suffering merely from a borderline personality disorder - and that she was therefore in full command of her faculties. Why they should have come to this conclusion is a mystery, though Edgington's conviction for intentional murder might be said to take some of the blame for her crime away from the failures of the NHS, the police and the criminal justice system. The defence was able to produced two senior psychiatrists who said it was almost impossible for Edgington to have been misdiagnosed as schizophrenic.

When the jury, who were perhaps influenced by a sense of outrage at the barbarity of the slaying, returned a verdict of murder, the judge had no choice but to impose a life sentence. But he had considerable discretion as to tariff and remarks. He proceeded to use that discretion to ignore all the evidence before him of Edgington's condition and of her attempts to get help before it was too late, preferring instead to treat her as fully responsible for the crime, almost as though she had no mental illness at all.

In his sentencing remarks (pdf), judge acknowledged that Edgington had been diagnosed in 2005 as suffering from "paranoid schizophrenia with a prominent mood component" and that despite the apparent improvement that had enabled her early release she subsequently suffered "a relapse of some sort". He also stated that "it may well be" that both before and after the attacks she was "experiencing some form of transient psychosis". In other words, she was not in control of her actions. Yet he went on to describe her as "manipulative" as well as "exceptionally dangerous" and concluded that she had pursued "a consistent and calculated course of criminal conduct." Barker noted the submission made on Edgington's behalf by her barrister, John Cooper QC, that she "had a significant condition and at the time were a woman in crisis trying to comply with directions in the care plan." He then dismissed this self-evidently true proposition:

I disagree that responsibility for these acts can be laid at the door of others. You made a choice and the fact is these were terrible acts, and you must take responsibility for what you did. I cannot ignore the fact that you have killed before and that overall you have come as near as can be to having three deaths at your hands.

He went on:

The main mitigating feature is that you suffer from a mental disability, but on the particular facts of this case there is no convincing case to conclude that the abnormality reduced your culpability to any significant extent.

He then sentenced her to a minimum term of 37 years. In prison, presumably, although she clearly belongs in a hospital.

A tragic and senseless murder of an innocent woman, whose profound misfortune it was to cross the path of someone in the grip of profound psychosis, inevitably produces anger and a desire to blame the perpetrator. But I cannot see how justice is advanced by a legal fiction that treats such a troubled individual no differently from the most sane and cold-blooded killer. It is evident, or should be, that in moments of lucidity before her descent to homocidal actions she had attempted to get help: that is scarcely the behaviour of a pre-meditated and "manipulative" criminal.

Besides the profound injustice of sentencing a mental patient as though she were at all material times fully compos mentis, and the unforgivable ignorance and prejudice displayed in Barker's remarks, there's also a demonstrable failure of logic. If, in the judge's view of the evidence, Edgington was suffering from "transient psychosis" at the time of the murder, it surely follows that she cannot be held fully responsible for her actions.

This is a truly appalling judicial decision.

Rennard the Fox?

2013-02-26T16:09:00.001Z

Chris Rennard, to judge from the photographs, not exactly an oil painting (unless it's the one Dorian Gray kept in the attic, of course). He looks like a younger version of Eric Pickles. But perhaps I'm being unfair, and in person he's blisteringly charismatic, or at any rate able, like the famously ugly and famously popular with the laideez John Wilkes, to talk away his face in under twenty minutes. On the other hand, I may be being unfair to Mr Pickles.

The precise number of women who claim to have been at the receiving end of Rennard's unwanted attentions (and of course he denies the allegations) is changing all the time. The figure of ten was quoted this lunchtime on Radio 4's World At One. The programme featured an extensive interview with one of them, so far known only as Susan, who described being propositioned rather clumsily by the peer at a training conference in Peterborough. He touched her leg and tried to invite himself up to her room. That seems to have been about it. It was an unpleasant enough experience for someone who plainly didn't relish the attention, and one that, by her own account, left her a bit shaken. Entirely unacceptable behaviour on his part, of course. Come the revolution, only attractive men will try to hit on women, and then only when they've already said yes.

Susan's main complaint seems to be that the man who tried to have his wicked way with her, even though he eventually took No for an answer, was also deeply involved in the selection of Lib Dem parliamentary candidates. She was worried that she could have "knocked my chances of any future success in the party by having said No."

She said:

Of course men do try it on, but this is a man with an almighty amount of power. At the time he held the purse-strings for any winnable seat, and he could choose which were the starred seats... So this was a man who could control your future, and if he said, "I'm not too sure about this candidate," people listened to him, and people still listen to him, because he has commanded a great deal of respect.

The implicit allegation here is that Rennard was using his position to operate a casting couch for would-be female MPs. Susan understood (though of course nothing of the kind was said) that had she agreed to sleep with his lordship it would increase her chances of getting on in the party, or alternatively that if she didn't sleep with him her career would be damaged. As yet there's no evidence whatever to justify this suspicion on her part. It's one thing to suggest that Rennard was a sex-pest (which of course he denies); quite another to claim that he was offering favours in return for sex. Establishing the truth of the claim would be difficult. It would, for example, involve asking women who have succeeded in being selected for winnable seats in the past decade or so whether they slept with Chris Rennard. I can't imagine many Lib Dems wanting to go there.

But who knows? There's a quote in the Mail from an anonymous "Lib Dem insider" who spoke to Jo Swinson, now Equalities Minister, as long ago as 2004. That was before Swinson, then just 24, was even an MP, though she was already a rising star in the party, famous among other things for wearing a pink T-shirt with the slogan "I am not a token woman". The source said: "Jo Swinson said to me that Rennard had an issue about women but you have to put up with it if you want to get on in the party." The following year she became the youngest MP in the House of Commons.

According to the Mail, Swinson stands "accused of assisting with a cover-up that rivals the Catholic Church’s approach to abuse allegations," which seems a bit OTT. Until now, Swinson has had impeccable feminist credentials, for example spearheading a drive to ban adverts featuring airbrushed models. But then, as I'm sure she realises, you don't get very far in feminism by being sisterly with other women.

Sex and power always make for an unstable mixture. It's easy to tell a story in terms of vulnerable young women being exploited by older, predatory males; and perhaps this narrative itself is part of the problem. To take one obvious example: it was so easy to fit the Bill Clinton/ Monica Lewinsky affair into that stereotype that even commentators disgusted by the President's behaviour ended up by pigeon-holing her as a bimbo. As a result, her subsequent life has been entirely defined by that one incident, or to be more precise by the fallout from it. If the story had never come out, who knows what might have become of her? She might even be a Democratic congresswoman by now, whatever helping hand Clinton gave her on the way up long ago outweighed by her own achievements and hard work.

As for Lord Rennard, I can't help wondering how he imagined that he could get away with his sleazy behaviour towards women over so many years. Unless, of course, his clumsy advances didn't always meet with such a negative response. Two aphorisms: "Politics is show business for ugly people" (variously attributed to Jay Leno and the political consultant Paul Begala, though it may well be older) and "Power is the greatest aphrodisiac" (Kissinger, supposedly). Little known outside the Lib Dems, inside the party Rennard had about him an almost shamanistic aura as a strategic mastermind and fixer, a man with a Midas touch when it came to the arcane art of fighting and winning by-elections. He was a party celebrity, who brought with him the buzz of potential power and personal success. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that a few ambitious and impressionable women (the two categories are not mutually exclusive) were genuinely turned on by his wandering hands and quivering flesh. Though it's important to stress that he denies the allegations.

One Year Later: Why We Made a Gospel Version of Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer

2013-02-22T10:22:00.002Z

This is a guest post by Irreverend James

You’ve heard of Pussy Riot, but have you ever actually listened to the music? It’s brash, raw, performance punk. Not exactly my cup of tea. Or so I thought, until I read British poet Carol Rumens’ translation of Punk Prayer on the Guardian’s website:

Congregations genuflect

Black robes brag gilt epaulettes

Freedom’s phantom’s gone to heaven

Gay Pride’s chained and in detention…

Forget the cup, I thought. I’ll take the entire kettle. Here you have protest music in its purest form. Challenging the collusion between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian State. Something had to be done with this. And something has. But first, a little back-story you likely haven’t read before.

Last February 21st, Pussy Riot called out Vladimir Putin in terms that could not be ignored. By then, he had rigged elections, set up a puppet in his stead to avoid having to rewrite the constitution, then had it rewritten anyway so that he’d be in de facto power for all of 24 years (instead of the constitutionally mandated 8). Now he had the Orthodox Patriarch declaring him “a gift from God”. Though most Russians could see through the charade, they acted as Americans do in regards to congressional redistricting and lobbying: they shrugged, sighed in disgust, and went back to playing with their smart phones. Except Pussy Riot. Their prank was meant as an electro-shock. As we all know, it did not go over well.

Since their highly mediatised trial – and in part because of the West’s infatuation with the girls – the backlash in the Russian mainstream has been eerily similar to the beating Red-State America gave the Dixie Chicks in 2003 after they made an innocuous – and in hindsight, rather justified – statement about then-President Bush. Few Russians are fans of Pussy Riot and fewer still would dare speak up in their defence. Indeed, the zeitgeist in Russia today reeks of French Freedom Fries: it is depressingly fatuous, unhealthy, cheap and badly mislabeled. It’s okay that Russia is a kleptocracy; but it is definitely not okay for you to call it that.

Most relevant to us is the fact that Pussy Riot were ultimately charged and sentenced by the Russian State with crimes against religion. In doing so, the government managed to shield itself from accusations of political prosecution. What, us? No, we’d never!

It’s much like those dozens of investigative reporters who keep getting accidentally murdered. The message to everyone else in Russia is quite clear. Delve into corruption – be it governmental or otherwise – and you may not get to see your next birthday, though no irrefutable proof will ever be found that your execution-style suicide was anything more than a robbery gone afoul. Ask me again why all those Russian cars have dashboard video cameras.

What’s shocking to me about this case is not only that the Russian judiciary is fatally flawed, but also that religion is once again muddying the socio-political waters. While refusing to back down from their criticism of President Putin, the convicted Rioters have apologized for offending the faithful with their reference to “Holy Shit”. We didn’t mean to blaspheme, they’ve said, it was merely collateral damage. The reason for their backpedalling? Religion in Russia today is akin to Religion in America. It is not to be trifled with.

And just like it’s not well received in America-the-Faithful to call out Scientologists as delusional, Latter Day magic undergarments as goofy, and the Bible, Qu’ran and Torah as historically significant works of utter fiction, so is it not well received in Russia to sing punk songs against authoritarianism in an Orthodox Cathedral.

Only we’re Canadian. So don’t mind if we do.

You can download the song for free here: www.criticalmasschoir.com/punkprayer

In solidarity,

IRREVEREND JAMES and the CRITICAL MASS CHOIR

a Montreal-based subversive gospel music band. www.irreverendjames.com - freethink everything.

Mantel on Kate: Mean but not meaningless

2013-02-19T16:13:00.000Z

Thank goodness for the Daily Mail. I awoke this morning to outraged headlines about Hilary Mantel, who had apparently "launched a scathing attack" on Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, comparing her, among other things, to "a jointed doll on which rags were hung." The Mail had swiftly rounded up some people prepared to be outraged, including the boss of one of Kate's charities, in return for some free publicity. By lunchtime, David Cameron, far away in India, had "waded in", as they say, describing the comments (or at least the version of the comments that was put to him) as "completely misguided and completely wrong."

But the hive-mind of Twitter had been on the case long before, having come to the conclusion that this would be an excellent topic for today's ritual Mail-bashing. And I, meanwhile, had had a chance to look at what Mantel had actually written, and spoken, at length in the London Review of Books. Needless to say, this was no scathing attack on the former Miss Middleton. Rather, it was an discursive treatment of the public image of royal women, drawing on her extensive knowledge of history as well as a comparison between Kate and Diana. It offered some memorable vignettes, such as a function for writers at Buckingham Palace at which most of the guests tried desperately to avoid the embarrassment of having to talk to the Queen, while the servants failed to offer them a plate for used cocktail sticks. "The queen's revenge," thought Mantel, as though it were anything to do with her. There's a good line about Marie Antoinette: "one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny." We also learn that a genetic condition may have been behind both Henry VIII's difficulty in fathering a healthy heir and the fact that in middle-age the once dashing monarch turned into a monster.

In discussing Kate, Mantel was talking less about the Duchess herself than about how she is fitted into media templates, "draped in a set of threadbare attributions", in the absence of any clearly-defined personality. She writes that Kate "appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen." There is indeed something curiously identikit about her public persona: a perfectly pleasant young woman, much like perfectly pleasant young women are supposed to be, with nothing exceptional about her apart perhaps from an elevated ordinariness. Even the compliments offered by the people outraged in the Mail had a bland and formulaic air, as though in confirmation rather than refutation of Mantel's essay. To the prime minister she was "bright, engaging and a fantastic ambassador for Britain." The charity boss described her as "engaging, natural and genuinely interested"; she asked "really good questions, the questions of someone who wants to learn."

What was it that Mantel said? "Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary." In other words, "engaging".

The worst that can be said of Hilary Mantel is that she is as guilty of the same objectification of which she accuses the media. To her, Kate is not so much a clothes-horse or a walking womb as an illustration of the childishness and artificiality of public discourse around, and expectations of, royalty:

When her pregnancy became public she had been visiting her old school, and had picked up a hockey stick and run a few paces for the camera. BBC News devoted a discussion to whether a pregnant woman could safely put on a turn of speed while wearing high heels. It is sad to think that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken. And in the same way one is compelled to look at them: to ask what they are made of, and is their substance the same as ours.

Which is true as far as it goes, but rather overlooks the fact that Kate herself is an entirely blameless woman, doing her best to make sense of her bizarre role in national life, "engaging" indeed, and that however bland her public persona may be she herself presumably has feelings: some of Mantel's comments seem gratuitously mean.

At the root of Mantel's problem with Kate is regret that she's not Diana. Nor is she Marie Antoinette or Anne Boleyn, both of whom, you won't need reminding, ended up losing their heads. Diana, of course, lost her own head in a more metaphorical but no less fatal manner. In comparison with such divas, Kate is too dull for this novelist's interest:

she appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture. Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.

Diana was "fitted to be the carrier of myth," thinks Mantel: a character of archetypal power who brought with her the archaic numinousness of royalty. Kate, on the other hand, is fit to open supermarkets and carry an heir, but that's about it.

The same might be said of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour, a parallel that Mantel fails to draw explicitly, though she does mention her in passing in the second part of the essay:

No one understood what Henry saw in Jane, who was not pretty and not young. The imperial ambassador sneered that ‘no doubt she has a very fine enigme’: which is to say, secret part. We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina. Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.

Which, it seems to me, is precisely what Hilary Mantel is doing to Kate.

Kate's lack of a vibrant personality may be her greatest asset. She has something of the freshly-scrubbed quality of the earliest Diana. But Diana was a 19 year old virgin when she was thrust into the spotlight. When she finally married Prince William, Kate was a whole decade older. Yet she was almost equally devoid of a past. She had spent all that time (apart from a brief hiatus) first as Official Royal Girlfriend and then as Princess-in-Waiting. There were no previous long-term relationships to complicate the picture or pique tabloid interest. Though her face and figure were already world-famous, she was almost as blank a canvass as her deceased mother-in-law had once been when she stepped out of her wedding coach.

It must be said, though, that this is just as true of Prince William, who despite a lifetime in the public eye has accumulated no visible personality quirks, has provided no fodder for the tabloids, has had no other long-term girlfriends and hasn't even ever been drunk in public. If Kate is a "shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore" - well, so is the future king, though in his case the wardrobe is entirely functional and semiotic: well-cut suits, military uniforms, black tie, the fatigues he wears when flying his helicopter. If he is spared the constant scrutiny his wife attracts for her dress (and undress) it is at the price of having no real public image at all. He is a cipher.

He is not a cipher because of his sex or royal status. His father is not a cipher: he has a sharply defined persona, both comic and tragic, that had already assumed its well-known lineaments when he was the age that William is now. The eccentric opinions, the tortured public introspection, the seemingly interminable wait to "fulfil his destiny" as king. The British royal family is not short of cartoonish personalities. Think of Prince Philip, or Harry, or Princess Anne. Prince William alone has his grandmother's aloofness and unknowability, though not her aura of alien unapproachability. In Kate, he has found a consort as bland and self-effacing as himself. No doubt this is why they get on so well (c.f. Charles and Diana.) They are walking, talking cake decorations, which makes them probably the perfect royal couple, in a world where the function of royalty is to smile, act pleasantly and to provide some nice pictures to look at.

Hilary wonders if monarchy is "a suitable institution for a grown-up nation." I don't know, either, not because I'm unsure about the monarchy (it's silly) but because I'm far from convinced that we live in a grown-up nation. Such is the infantilised nature of our public life that it has become the preserve of the blandly inoffensive. It used to be said, following Bagehot, that the purpose of monarchy was to be decorative and the purpose of politicians was to be utilitarian and "efficient". But in those days there were politicians like Disraeli, or later Churchill, personalities far more vivid and even "decorative" than any modern royal. David Cameron is to politics what Kate and William are to royalty. He too might have been precision-engineered on a production line, and his conception of his own role closely resembles that which he ascribed to the Duchess of Cambridge: as "an ambassador for Britain."

Glamorous fashionistas: the right kind of sexism

2013-02-13T16:33:00.002Z

An unlikely feminist ally

Unlike his near-contemporary in the Vatican, Rupert Murdoch shows no sign of wanting to relinquish his grip on his huge multinational empire. But he takes a similarly spare and pontifical approach to Twitter. So when he suggested that in future naked breasts might be replaced in the Sun by "glamorous fashionistas", many took it as a sign that Page 3 was on the way out.

Murdoch himself professes to be amazed that his ruminations could be considered "breaking news - Typical OTT reaction by the UK PC crew. Just considering, as we do every page daily Buy it and see...." I assume he's not that naive. He knows what attention his gnomic utterances invariably receive. His timeline attracts hundreds of unsolicited comments every day. He very rarely replies to any of them, but he chose to respond to a suggestion from anti-Page 3 campaigner Karen Mason (who goes by the name of @Kazipooh) that the feature was "so last century". And in doing so, he put the future of Page 3 under a bigger question mark than Clare Short managed thirty years ago by her attempts in Parliament to get it banned.

These days, of course, Page 3 is little more than a charming anachronism, much like Uncle Rupert himself. Its abolition would represent above all the embourgeoisement of the Sun, a step in the direction of the Daily Mail. The Mail has always preferred glamorous fashionistas over naked breasts. Dropping Page 3 in favour of pictures of celebrities in dresses isn't going to hasten a feminist revolution: at least not the feminist revolution that Page 3's opponents claim they would like to see. But it would signal an attempt to appeal to middle class female readers in preference to its traditional, but shrinking, market among the male working-class. The main losers would be the "glamour models" themselves, for some of whom Page 3 used to offer a route to easy and otherwise unobtainable fame and the possibility of dating a footballer. But there's always reality TV.

Hadley Freeman doesn't think getting rid of Page 3 will lead to a feminist utopia. It isn't even the main problem: "Page 3's sheer obviousness makes it one of the less viciously misogynistic elements in the British media." She's thinking, of course, as Guardian writers obsessively tend to, of the Daily Mail, whose sexism she proceeds to enumerate: paparazzi stalking of actresses, an obsession with celebrities' weight, the ever present implication that women "exist only in relation to men and children". But she also acknowledges the important truth, which is that both the perpetrators of and the audience for the Mail's sexism are women.

As she writes:

The issue of the paucity of female bylines in the British media is, to my mind, something of a canard considering how much misogyny is uttered by so many female columnists, especially on the tabloids, who often act as Trojan horses for the paper's condescension and cruelty. Publications that are explicitly aimed at women, such as the Daily Mail's Femail and the women's section in the Sun, generally consist of little more than body obsession and female celebrity snarkiness.

Her mistake is to imagine that Page 3 is "the most stupid example" of a more general media sexism. It's an entirely different kettle of fish: an increasingly anomalous example of sexist imagery designed to appeal to men.

Mail Online's "Sidebar of Shame", with its parade of cellulite, celebritiy break-ups and creepy obsession with six-year-old Suri Cruise, is of course notorious. Who have we today? Kelly Rowland, who was apparently "in tears" after a birthday lunch with Beyoncé. Kim Kardashian, of course, who like Kate Middleton is pregnant (but, unlike Kate, you're allowed to stick a camera at her swelling tummy). Lauren Goodger. Naomi Grossman. Rita Ora. I'm afraid I haven't heard of any of those women. Nor have I the slightest interest in the fact that Katy Perry apparently has a new boyfriend or that "chic" Emma Watson has been snapped wearing knee-high leather boots. But then I'm not the intended market.

Feminists tend to see the attitude towards women exemplified by the Mail in terms of "misogyny" and, at a slightly more abstract level of analysis, as part of a societal set-up in which women's behaviour and bodies are "policed" for the benefit of men. Men have little or nothing to do with it, however. If anyone is oppressing women (and that's an open question), then largely it's other women. So if women are indeed being treated in the media as existing "only in relation to men and children", the problem lies in a quirk of female psychology - which the mass media finds it profitable to exploit - rather than in patriarchy, capitalism, male supremacy or any other feminist boo-words.

Why would heterosexual women objectify other women in such ways? Plenty of reasons. Human beings are primates, and primates are intensely hierarchical. In our culture, weight, attractiveness, relationship status and so on are important status-indicators for women. Sizing up the competition is something that men and women equally indulge in, but it may express itself in different ways because society still has subtly different expectations of the sexes. At the same time, many psychologists argue that women are, on the whole, more interested than men in the maintenance of social networks. Knowing the names of other people's children (especially when they're the children of high-status individuals), enforcing community norms via mechanisms of shaming and emulation, and gossip are all ways in which women can indulge this deep-seated need for making connections.

But I'm leaving something out, as indeed is Hadley Freeman. Take another look at the Sidebar of Shame. It's not all women; there are men there, too. Today there's Steve Martin, who has become a father for the first time at 67; pretty-boy Ashton Kutcher (cuddling up to girlfriend Mila Kunis at a basketball game); someone called Aaron Paul who has bought a new house; the actor Mark Wahlberg watching his young son dribbling a basketball; and "Denise Welch's toyboy fiancé Lincoln Townley" who is "undergoing tests after being rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack." That one is especially interesting: for what is a toyboy fiancé if not a man viewed solely in relation to his female partner. The same might be said of "business Anton Kaszubowski", whose presence in the Mail is due not to his own achievements in the world of (I discover) internet gambling but because he's currently to be seen in the company of a retired Spice Girl.

And it's a rare day that the Mail doesn't offer its readers a glimpse of David Beckham, either in a pose redolent of sexual objectification or (more often these days) with his wife and children. Just like the women whose media image Hadley Freeman complains of. So when she writes, "Once a female celebrity has children, she is always, in the eyes of the media, a mother first and foremost, no matter what else she accomplishes, but a man is always a man," she is quite wrong. A man isn't "always a man"; in the Mail or even these days the Sun he's as likely as any female celebrity to be judged on the basis of his looks or by reference to his partner and/or offspring.

A glamorous fashionista?

I don't think all this means that men are being seen as sex objects. It just means that they are being judged (by women) in the same terms that women are invited to judge female celebrities. Sexual objectification of women by men is increasingly frowned upon in polite society, or at least in the mainstream media; these days, the only acceptable reason to display naked or highly semi-naked female flesh is to condemn it. In the Mail, raunchy pictures of (it tends to be) Rihanna exist primarily (or at any rate ostensibly) as illustrations of the dangers of a "hyper-sexualised" society and the supposed pressures on young girls to look or act in sexualised ways. And it's not just Rihanna. Even a fairly demure advert featuring a back view of Keira Knightly is too much for the maiden-auntish standards of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Meanwhile, sexual objectification of men by women is scarcely admitted to exist; instead, the constant message offered by psychologists (as representatives of "science") to readers of these titles is that female sexuality isn't "visual" in the way that male sexuality is assumed to be. Sexual objectification of men by gay men (cf Tom Daley) is permitted to exist de facto while never being referred to explicitly. That's a paradoxical loophole, however, largely made possible by the prevailing view of gay men as respectable citizens whose principal desire is to get married.

Despite all the claims of a hyper-sexualised society, then, the overwhelming message from the media is that overt sexuality is bad and dangerous: that men who enjoy to looking at semi-naked women are misogynist dinosaurs in want of re-education, while women who make a living by taking their clothes off for photographers are simulateously victims of oppression and bad role-models. Sex sells, but disapproval of sex sells even more. Disapproval of sex illustrated by sexy pictures sells best of all. But what is really being disapproved of is a failure of social conformity. It's not just that Page 3 had become irrelevant in terms of the way that women are presented in the mainstream media. The campaign against Page 3 is actually part of the same censorious mindset that lies behind the Mail and its Sidebar of Shame.

It's testimony to the success of that mindset that Rupert Murdoch now believes it may be in his commercial interests to replace the seaside postcard sexuality of Page 3 with a parade of "glamorous fashionistas", who will be presented not for the delectation of men but for the critical appraisal of other women. Which is indeed feminist progress of a sort, I suppose.

Benedict XVI: Quitter

2013-02-11T19:28:00.000Z

What do you call an ex-pope? Papa Emeritus? Pontiff-Ex? Maybe in Joseph Ratzinger's case, Ex-Benedict? I hear his official title will be Cardinal Ratzinger, Emeritus Bishop of Rome. So the name goes along with the job. Presumably someone else will be taking over the official Twitter account, too.

Unlike Rowan Williams, who has retired in the fullness of his health and vigour well before the official age of 70 and will no doubt pop up from time to time to offer the world nuggets of his wisdom (Heffers in Cambridge is charging punters £12 a ticket to come and hear him talking about his favourite books in a couple of weeks' time), Ratzinger is likely to vanish into the Vatican monastery currently being spruced up for him, or into some future old pope's home. He is going, after all, because by his own account his physical and (perhaps this is more significant) mental strength have deteriorated "to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me." I suppose he might recover sufficiently, after a long rest, to write his memoirs. He could probably do with the money. I don't think there's such a thing as a papal pension plan.

In other words he doesn't want to repeat the drooling spectacle of the last days of John Paul II. Some unkind souls might suggest that Benny was already past it when he got the job seven odd years ago. But then by that stage JPII had been sunk in decrepitude for so long that most younger people struggled to recall a time when the pope wasn't a doddering old wreck. Perhaps that's why Ratzo was elected: while not actually senile, he at least looked plausibly pontifical. He came to the role fully formed, unlike his predecessor who during his first decade might easily have been mistaken for an East European mafia boss, were it not for the robes.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about the departing pontiff. On one hand, he was a distinct improvement on his horribly overrated predecessor, who by most objective accounts was a fanatical and egotistical paedophile-enabler who turned the papacy into a creepy personality cult. His books as pope were collections of soupy platitudes with titles like Crossing the Threshold of Hope and his open-air masses closely resembled convocations presided over by the late Sun Myung Moon, albeit choreographed with rather less taste. He was quite sound on communism, I suppose. But, unlike Benedict, he protected notorious paedophiles including Maciel Degollado of the Legionaries of Christ and Austria's Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer. The present pope's record in the matter isn't spotless, but he did at least belatedly (around 2000) recognise that the child abuse scandal was deadly serious and attempted to address it, which John Paul never did.

Ratzinger, moreover, is a proper intellectual, who writes proper, well-considered books and has an excellent taste in music. He has some charming foibles, such as a love of obscure papal regalia discarded by his modernising predecessors, but by and large he's a serious man out of place in these superficial times. I can really relate to comments he made the other week about social media - though I also recognise that they are hopelessly naive:

Often, as is also the case with other means of social communication, the significance and effectiveness of the various forms of expression appear to be determined more by their popularity than by their intrinsic importance and value. Popularity, for its part, is often linked to celebrity or to strategies of persuasion rather than to the logic of argumentation. At times the gentle voice of reason can be overwhelmed by the din of excessive information and it fails to attract attention which is given instead to those who express themselves in a more persuasive manner. The social media thus need the commitment of all who are conscious of the value of dialogue, reasoned debate and logical argumentation; of people who strive to cultivate forms of discourse and expression which appeal to the noblest aspirations of those engaged in the communication process.

Of course, much of what he stands for is repellent: he has called same sex marriage an "offence against the human person", continued his church's lethal opposition to the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS, given pep talks to the American bishops on the need to destroy President Obama's healthcare reforms. His vision for the church has involved reaching out to disaffected Anglicans (the kind who imagine that the likes of Rowan Williams and now Justin Welby are somehow liberals) and the neo-Nazis of the Society of St Pius X, but excluded many forward-thinking Catholics. His papacy marks a full-scale repudiation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Second Vatican Council which met a full fifty years ago. His greatest supporters on the Internet are found among reactionaries and fogeys, whose love for Ratzinger is often expressed by pouring uncharitable and unChristian bile upon Catholic leaders closer to home. I don't just mean Damian Thompson.

Still, I've always admired his style (those red shoes! those hats!) and his steadfast refusal to compromise. And his age, I think, was a positive asset.

Personally, I'm all in favour of gerontocracy. It worked well for the Soviet Union, after all: it was only when (inspired, perhaps, by the evident popular success of JPII) the Russians went for the dynamic young Gorbachev that things began to go tits up. The Americans, meanwhile, stuck with the increasingly confused Ronald Reagan and proceeded to win the Cold War without really trying. Who set modern China on the road to its current prosperity? Why Deng Xiao Peng, who was probably born a nonagenarian. Meanwhile, our own current enthusiasm for young and telegenic leaders has brought us Blair and now Cameron.

The Papacy was one of the last institutions on earth to uphold the ancient principle of dying in office. Other ancient churches feel the same way: last year alone saw the deaths of Pope Shenouda III of Egypt at 88 and Patriarch Maxim of Bulgaria, who reached the grand old age of 98. We still have the Queen, of course, who seems in no hurry to follow the example of Beatrix of the Netherlands who is preparing to step down in the spring at 75. For her, we're always told, the Crown is a sacred trust given to her by God at her coronation; only death can dissolve her marriage to the kingdom. But presumably the Pope felt much the same way. The divine right of kings is a long-defunct concept, even in Britain (where succession is officially based on descent from the Electress Sophia of Hanover). But the divine appointment of popes is official Catholic doctrine: the cardinals meeting in conclave are supposed to discern the will of the Holy Spirit in their deliberations. Prince Charles, who will probably be our official representative at the installation of the next pope, might be thinking such wistful thoughts.

The Marriage Man: Cameron and heterosexual civil partnership

2013-02-06T19:35:00.000Z

Never do the right thing for the wrong reasons. You invariably end up by alienating your friends, annoying the people you're trying to court, and looking like a stinking hypocrite, all the while tying yourself up in the knots of your own inconsistency. Observe David Cameron's predicament over same sex marriage. The principle might be good, but the government's proposals are rushed, incoherent and, I increasingly believe, prompted by expediency. Let's look at one glaring problem with the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. In Prime Minister's Questions this lunchtime, Cameron admitted that the reason his government has refused to consider granting heterosexual couples the right to enter into civil partnerships, as their gay counterparts will still be able to after same-sex marriage is put into law, is that he fears that it will undermine marriage.

"Frankly I'm a marriage man," he said. "I am a great supporter of marriage. I want to promote marriage, defend marriage, encourage marriage... I think we should be promoting marriage rather than looking at any other way of weakening it."

Cameron thus confirmed the opinion of Sir Tony Baldry, the Second Church Estates Commissioner (the C of E's man in the Commons) who suggested in yesterday's debate that "policy makers considered that allowing heterosexual couples to enter into civil partnerships would undermine the institution of marriage." A little later, Christopher Chope recalled a conversation during which the prime minister had expressed his distaste for "marriage-lite".

I have suspected as much for some time. There is, however, another possible explanation. Ben Summerskill, of the gay campaign group Stonewall, suggested at a Lib Dem fringe meeting in 2010 that opening civil partnerships to heterosexuals could cost the Treasury up to £5 billion in pensions and other entitlements. This would only be true, of course, if there were many heterosexual couples who would like a civil partnership (and are prepared to accept all the rights and obligations of marriage) but who nevertheless don't want to get married. Presumably they want the legal protections without the historical baggage of sexual inequality and bourgeois conformism that the word marriage implies to some people.

If there are many such couples (as opposed to those who might prefer a civil partnership if offered the choice, but are currently getting married anyway) the why should a government and a prime minister desirous of promoting commitment want to prevent them? Here's what David Cameron said in 2011 in his Conference speech announcing his support for "gay marriage":

Yes, it's about equality, but it's also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other.

Civil partnership might look like "marriage-lite" to Cameron, but it still represents real, formal, long-term commitment, something the prime minister says he wants to encourage, and is as difficult as marriage to dissolve. The number of marriages being contracted each year has declined by a third in the past forty years. If the prospect of civil partnership entices more couples to formalise their relationship - and there's a whole other debate that needs to be had about the rights of cohabitees - insisting on marriage or nothing is counterproductive. And if it is about saving the Treasury money, as Summerskill believes, then Cameron's talk of prioritising commitment sounds rather hollow.

Until yesterday the official explanation for creating a new legal anomaly was that there was either no demand or no "identifiable need" for legally registered opposite-sex partnerships. This justification was flimsy in the extreme. If there's no need for straight civil partnerships, because heterosexuals can gain the same legal protections by getting married, by the same token there's no need for same-sex marriage. This, of course, is precisely what opponents of same-sex marriage argue, even those who opposed civil partnership when it was first introduced. But the fact that marriage and civil partnerships have a similar effect is not the point; not if you support same sex marriage it isn't. As for there being no demand, there clearly is. In countries where equal civil partnerships have been introduced, such as France, they have proved very popular.

Cameron's statement is consistent, I suppose, with his earliear claim in that "I don't support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I'm a Conservative". Civil partnerships were a Labour innovation, after all. But it's not consistent with either logic or fairness to continue to offer civil partnerships to gay couples who don't want to get married, while at the same time telling straight couples that it's marriage or nothing. Nor has the government explained how its proposals are consistent with Article 14 of the European Convention, which specifies that laws concerned with human rights (in this case, the Article 8 right to a private and family life) must be "applied without discrimination."

One of the striking ironies of yesterday's debate was many upholders of traditional marriage grasped these points very well, and were even prepared to consider radical solutions. Matthew Offord said that the government's proposals would lead to "greater inequality" and were "hardly fair." If we were truly seeking equality, said Andrea Leadsom, "surely we would also be legislating for heterosexuals to enter into civil partnership." Craig Whittaker suggested renaming civil partnerships "state marriage", open them to everyone, and keeping "traditional" religious marriage "for its true intended purpose." Christopher Chope preferred to abolish civil partnerships entirely. Roger Gale proposed something even more radical ("I do not subscribe to it myself"):

The argument is that if the Government are serious about this measure, they should withdraw the Bill, abolish the Civil Partnership Act 2004, abolish civil marriage and create a civil union Bill that applies to all people, irrespective of their sexuality or relationship. That means that brothers and brothers, sisters and sisters and brothers and sisters would be included as well. That would be a way forward. This is not.

That would indeed be logical. It would also be very difficult to implement. It would imply a major change in marriage law, stripping the Church of England of its historic right to conduct weddings, for example, and requiring couples who wanted a religious marriage to go through two ceremonies. Nor would it be in keeping with David Cameron's desire to defend traditional marriage. As a way of dealing with the anomalies created by allowing same-sex marriage it seems like overkill.

Abolishing civil partnerships would be much easier. Existing partners might be left alone (assuming they didn't want to "upgrade" to marriage) or they could be offered a choice between converting their civil partnership to a marriage or reverting to their former state. No new civil partnerships would be created. That would, no doubt, disappoint some couples; but as a quid pro quo for offering marriage on equal terms to everyone it seems a price worth paying.

I still think that allowing everyone the option of a civil partnership is the fairest and most liberal way to go. Indeed, civil partnerships could be extended in other ways: to relatives (for example two siblings sharing a house, one of whom would otherwise face crippling death duties when the other died) and to arrangements involving more than two people. That way, the state would validate, but not proscribe, people's living arrangements. Marriage would remain confined to two non-relatives in an (assumed) sexual relationship. If David Cameron wants to prioritise it he could offer tax incentives, as he has often promised but so far failed to deliver.

The current proposals are surely unsustainable. A case involving a heterosexual couple refused a civil partnership is already before the European Court of Human Rights. Now that the government has promised to legislate for same sex marriage, how can that case possibly be defended? Cranmer raises another intriguing point: there are apparently proposals being debated in Brussels for mutual recognition of marriage and partnership across the EU. It "would see all marriages and civil contracts conducted in any EU country become legally binding in all other member states". So a heterosexual couple wishing to have a civil partnership will be able simply to pop across to France or the Netherlands for the weekend and fill in the paperwork.

Michael Gove, "Hero of government".

2013-02-01T14:15:00.002Z

Michael Gove has had a few bad headlines this past week. Members of the Commons Educations Select Committee complained that his plans to replace GCSE's with a new English Baccalaureate (EBacc) threatened to "wreck the stability" of the exam system, as the Indepdendent gleefully reported. In the Guardian, Suzanne Moore accused him of "destroying our school system" and of committing the fearful crime of never having been a teacher. The "entire education system," she wrote, "is now one vast experiment without any aim except the reach of Gove's ambition." The "hawkish neo-con" is trampling on her children's "hopes and dreams", she wailed.

These complaints are remarkably short-term, and should be set against Gove's actual game-plan. The world is changing rapidly, and few of the education secretary's detractors seem to understand how or why. This week I've been attending a series of lectures by Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt on where it's all headed, connectivity-wise: he summoned up a near future where criminals specialised in virtual kidnapping and "virtual honour crime", where parents would give their children weird names in the hope of getting them a high ranking on Google search and repressive governments will find it easier to control their populations but harder to commit atrocities with impunity. Too much to really summarise, but you can watch the first lecture on YouTube.

In 2011, Schmidt gave the McTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival, during the course of which he lamented the decline in computer science in British schools. Since the glory days of Acorn's BBC Micro way back in the 1980s computing had largely been replaced by IT ("teaching how to use software, but with no understanding of how it is made.") Britain was "throwing away its great computing heritage", said Schmidt. This Wednesday, however, he had better news to relate. He was thrilled to discover that "you have a hero in your government. His name is Michael Gove."

Gove had just announced that computer science would be one of the basic scientific subjects in the Ebacc. A DfE spokesman suggested that millions of children would now become "active creators and controllers of technology instead of just being passive users." It "will help restore the spirit of Alan Turing and make Britain a world leader again." Eric Schmidt was just as effusive. Gove's move was "phenomenal news", he told the audience (some of whom predictably groaned); it was a "key decision" that in future decades will be seen to have secured Britain's future economic development.

So three cheers for Michael Gove, who once again has shown himself to be one of the most effective and far-sighted members of the government. Far from trampling on the dreams of Suzanne Moore's children, he might just have secured their, and all of our, futures.

George Galloway has a point

2013-01-30T16:05:00.001Z

The highlight of today's Prime Minister's Questions was undoubtedly David Cameron's blistering response to George Galloway, the rarely-sighted (in the Commons chamber, at least) Respect MP for Bradford West.

Galloway had asked a characteristically orotund question, inviting the PM to "adumbrate" the differences between the "hand-chopping, throat-cutting jihadists" of Mali, currently being suppressed by French forces with alarmingly growing amounts of British support, and the superficially similar jihadists in Syria whom we are currently aiding in their struggle against the Assad regime. He wondered if Cameron had ever read Frankenstein.

Cameron's reply: "There is one thing that is certain: wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world, he will have the support of the honourable gentlemen".

A fair enough point, though one can quibble that George can be equally keen on non-Arab dictators such as the current rulers of Iran. Tony Blair used to say much the same thing about Galloway's support of Saddam Hussein, usually just before he jetted off to Tripoli to have a cosy chat with his friend Muammar Gaddafi about which dissidents the colonel wanted the British secret service to help him round up that week.

But it would be wrong to accuse David Cameron of similar double standards. Not on the day he boards a plane to Algeria to hold talks with the famously human-rights friendly government there about the next steps to be taken against the "existential threat" posed by al-Qaeda linked militants in North Africa. Fundamentalist Islamic militants in Syria pose no similar threat to Western interests (keep up, George, you ought to know this) because they are Salafists, funded largely by our great ally Saudi Arabia. If they want to torch a few churches and stone a few adultresses as part of their purification of the country from the Assad family and its heretical Alawite hangers on, well, that's their business, not ours.

Congratulations to Asma Assad, by the way, on her happy news. I know it's unforgiveable, but Asma evokes in me sentiments similar to those produced in Edmund Burke by the sight of Marie Antoinette in the hands of the French revolutionaries. "Surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision", and all that. In any case, whatever you think of her husband (largely a prisoner of circumstance, I'd say, rather like the hapless Louis XVI, who inherited a circumscribed system that was beyond his power to reform) her children are obviously innocent. The thought of them falling into the hands of jihadi "revolutionaries" is not a nice one. But well, that's the Arab Spring for you. (See also Tahrir Square, home of the People's revolution, where any woman, however impenetrably veiled, now takes her life in her hands. "Muslim patrols" aren't just a feature of East London.)

Galloway has a point, of course. The Malian army, given the upper hand over the library-burning fundamentalists by the French on their post-colonial jolly, have indulged themselves in random killings and revenge massacres every bit as brutal as those perpetrated by Assad's bashi-bazouks, and far worse than anything laid at the door of the official Syrian Army, which has by all accounts remained fairly well-disciplined. As one woman of an ethnic group targeted by government forces put it, "we have stopped wearing our traditional clothes—we are being forced to abandon our culture, and to stay indoors." Well, "there's a risk" of that sort of thing taking place, said the French defence minister with a Gallic shrug. Stuff happens, after all, as the much-missed Donald Rumsfeld used to say.

It's not the realpolitik that offends me. It's not even the hypocrisy. It might be that a sober calculation of the national interest really did require propping up dictatorships against fundamentalist militants in one part of the Muslim world, and supporting Jihadist insurrections against dictatorships in another. It used to make sense to treat Mubarak (in no sense a Gaddafi) as an important and valued ally; just as it now incumbent upon our leaders to make clear that he was a rotter all along and deserves to be in a jail cell. In the case of Mali, Cameron seems to be driven by a combination of the usual Churchill-envy (or perhaps more immediately Blair-envy) and under-the-table commitment to an EU partner that may well be out of its depth. Or perhaps he just wanted to tick Mali off the list published last year of the 22 countries that Britain had never invaded. Whatever. The liberation of Timbuktu, although marred by the destruction wrought by departing Islamists, has been sufficiently exhilarating to produce a rush to the head similar to a lucky streak at a casino. Now is actually the time to get out, not to pile in. As Afghanistan shows as clearly as could be shown, what comes next will be a long drawn-out and infinitely frustrating. The rebels may have run away, but they'll be back.

But interfering in Mali, right now, is almost irresistible. The game's a familiar one. Choose your friends, overlook their atrocities (while playing up the atrocities committed by your enemies), dig out Orwell's dictionary of political clichés ("standing shoulder to shoulder", "freedom and democracy", "bloodstained tyrants": they were all present and correct in 1946) and make out that while the Western world is engaged in an "existential, decades-long struggle against" against this group of extremists, that group of similarly-motivated extremists are freedom fighters. Sometimes it's the exact same people, as when a "terrorist" handed over to Gaddafi for torture turns out to be a key figure in the emergent democratic regime. Oops.

Galloway is right about Frankenstein. The point isn't just that Al-Qaeda, or the Arab dictatorships that the West used to support (or in Algeria's case, still do) are to some extent our creatures, bound to turn against us in the end. The trouble with Victor Frankenstein was that, intoxicated with his own brilliance, he was unable to see that anything could possibly go wrong.