An eviction notice to the well-heeled Labour traitors

What is a Labour party politician for if he does not defend the poor and the homeless? The Labour movement sprang up to fight for the unfortunate many against the selfish indifference of the rich few: its heroes and heroines, whatever their backgrounds, were determined that poor people should have decent lives and roofs over their heads and that the richest people should sacrifice some of their privileges to that end. That is what the party was always supposed to be for. So what, then, is the point of Frank Dobson? Dobson is a senior Labour politician of solid left-wing credentials and a high income, who refuses to give up his extremely desirable council flat in central London. The image of a dog in a manger springs instantly to mind and a supposedly socialist dog at that. There are 5m people on council house waiting lists in this country, yet council housing is often occupied by the well-off, paying hugely subsidised low rents at the expense of the poor.

To deal with this obvious injustice, the Conservative-led government — Labour would never have done it — has recently proposed giving new powers to councils to force rich people to leave their council houses and flats — their social housing — to make room for poor people in desperate need. Rich in this case really does mean rich by national standards: it means tenants whose earnings are above £100,000 a year — a tiny number of people at the top end of society. Eighty per cent of households have net incomes well under £40,000 and 60% of households have well under £30,000.

Yet Dobson refuses to budge. He says he earns £66,000 a year and therefore cannot afford to move out and pay rent in the private sector, because property prices and rents in London are “insane”. The market rent for his present flat would be about £1,000 a week, while he probably pays about £160 to the council. He claims to feel wholly entitled to stay and makes no apology for taking up space that was originally intended for the poor. I wonder what the long-dead heroes of the Labour movement would say to that.

Of course Dobson is being disingenuous: £66,000 a year is not all he gets. His wife is a university lecturer, he claimed about £70,000 in parliamentary expenses last year, he is entitled to his state pension and presumably a parliamentary pension and so his total household income is highly likely to be at least £100,000 a year. Only about 1% of the population is in that position. His finances are so secure that he seems hardly to need to budget: he said last week he “does not know” exactly how much rent he pays to Camden council for his handsome 19th-century mansion block flat. Why doesn’t he know? Poor people in real need of council housing count every penny.

One can only wonder about Dobson’s understanding of social reality, either now or, more important, when he was a stalwart cabinet minister. Did the chauffeured cars and red carpets of ministerial life rob him of whatever common sense he started with, as they usually do? How does he think ordinary people survive in London on incomes far, far smaller than his? And why does he think he has some inalienable human right to live in a highly desirable, luxurious building in one of the most expensive parts of central London at public expense — which is to say at the expense of the 99% of the population who have less money than he does? He could perfectly well, like everybody else, live somewhere cheaper, and on his income he could certainly afford to stay in his neighbourhood, no matter what he says.

The greedy shamelessness of Labour politicians is one of life’s many mysteries. Cherie and Tony Blair spring to mind, clawing their way into the ranks of the super-rich despite their youthful ideals. Then there is the case of Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader who managed to destroy his industry, who was thrown out of his union in the wake of a dispute over the £250,000 he was claiming for renting a smart second home in London after his retirement.

Bob Crow, too, was recently exposed by this newspaper for this same extraordinary sense of entitlement: he is the militant head of the RMT transport workers’ union who, despite his income of £145,000 a year, is living in social housing at an estimated rent of £150 a week. He, too, is quite unrepentant: an RMT spokesman said that “Bob Crow makes no apology for living in social housing at the heart of his local community”. But why not? Perhaps he thinks the benefit of his reassuring presence at the heart of his community is consolation enough for those on the council house waiting list who have nowhere to lay their heads at night.

Behind such awesome figures as these there are, for me, all the countless Bollinger bolsheviks I have ever come across, who while denouncing the privileges of the posh are themselves to be seen at the best addresses and the best seats at the opera, accepting peerages after decades of sneering at lords and ladies and generally displaying a shameless indifference to the poor that is particularly breathtaking in people who claim to be champions of the people.

I remember when the young socialist Denis MacShane, later a Labour minister, was attacked by a friend of ours for wearing an extremely expensive designer tie in the impoverished 1970s. “Nothing is too good for the representative of the people,” he replied. That was a joke, but there was altogether too much truth in it.

Housing prices in London are indeed insane, as Dobson says. However, they did not become so overnight. His own government presided over the biggest property boom, particularly in London, ever seen and encouraged a huge influx of immigrants who now need housing. Yet both the Blair and Brown governments spectacularly failed to build social housing, creating half as much on average each year as the Conservatives when in office — 51,000 a year under the Conservatives but only 23,000 a year under Labour, according to government figures.

That was painfully inadequate in both cases — it is a national disgrace — but as he was one of the senior Labour ministers responsible for this Labour failure, it is shameful for Dobson to display the selfish indifference of the very rich, against which Labour fought for so long, simply because he has acquired a false sense of entitlement like Orwell’s pigs in Animal Farm. There is absolutely no point in Labour politicians like him.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Go, archbishop, and take your church from the lords’ house

The present Archbishop of Canterbury is not merely a threat to the body politic. He is also a threat to the Church of England. This wordy, holy, hairy man is hustling his tiny flock towards the cliffs of disestablishment with the foolish, self-destructive recklessness of Don Quixote. Rowan Williams’s sensational attack on the government last week, in an issue of the New Statesman that he guest-edited, made plain once again that the Church of England can no longer have any place in the political establishment and must at last be disestablished. However sad, that is now necessary.

Since there are so few committed Anglicans in this country, there cannot be many people who think it would matter much if the Church of England were reduced to a religious sect like any other. However, I myself, though an unbeliever, have until recently I thought it would be a pity. I share the sentimental attachment to the C of E of many English men and women who are unbelievers and not mawkish about old maids on bicycles and warm beer either but who do see the glories of the old liturgy, the splendour of church music and the punctuation of the year by church festivals as part of their inheritance and their identity — the “customs of my tribe” as Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, recently put it. And the customs of our tribe are worth protecting.

Besides, there is the question of “the plant”, as trendy 1970s vicars used to call ecclesiastical buildings. What, if the church were relegated to the ranks of “other”, would happen to the much-loved churches and cathedrals of St John Betjeman? Would they become sports centres or homes for new age sects or mansions for Russian kleptocrats? Even so, the time for disestablishment has surely come. It has long been clearly absurd that a priest without any mandate from anyone, other than a few quarrelsome men in frocks, should have any ex officio position of power. Yet the Archbishop of Canterbury sits in the House of Lords and so do 25 other Anglican lords spiritual by right of unelected office. So it was rather silly of Williams to claim in his outburst last week that “we are being committed to radical long-term policies for which no one voted”.

One can only ask who voted for him or for other lords spiritual and how many people he represents. According to the church itself, there are about a million communicants on Easter Day, the most important festival of the year: that is just under 1.7% of the population. This does not give Williams any democratic entitlement, of the sort he seems so anxious about, to preach politics from his throne at Canterbury or even from a desk at the New Statesman. As usual, his position is helplessly muddled: there was nothing democratic about the establishment of the Church of England, or about its appointed hierarchies and internal squabbles — the way that men of the cloth elbow their way to the top reminds me of Alan Bennett’s gloomy vicar’s wife in Talking Heads, who said: “If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.”

What precisely the archbishop said last week does not really matter in itself, although some of it was rather silly, as one might expect. He is, after all, the man who opined that invading Iraq would be immoral and illegal, but said he would support it if the United Nations thought it all right. It was immediately clear that one could not expect much critical thought from a spiritual leader who turned to the kleptocrats and dictators of the UN for overriding moral guidance.

He, too, is the man who notoriously volunteered the suggestion that aspects of sharia should be recognised in English law because some people have “other affinities, other loyalties … and the law needs to take some account of that”.

“An approach to law,” he remarked, “which simply said there is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said … I think that’s a bit of a danger.” And this though he had earlier in the same speech said the principle of equality under the law “is an important pillar of our social identity as a western liberal democracy”.

Clearly judgment is not his strong point, so it is hardly surprising he has now been unwise enough to lurch into party politics.

However, that Williams is not the steadiest of moral compasses and is capable of making remarkably foolish pronouncements with what looks like misguided vanity is not the point. The problem is not what line he takes. The problem is that, with his constant meddling in politics, lacking any mandate but using his historic position within the Establishment to do so and to court publicity, he will encourage other religious figures here to feel they have the right to do the same. That is dangerous.

For centuries a useful hypocritical muddle surrounded the throne of Canterbury, rather like the unspoken self-restraint that surrounds the throne of the monarch: it was generally agreed that both would remain outside politics. A few archbishops in the past refused to accept this muddle and made a fuss about something, but broadly people have agreed that religion should be a private matter, even though no strong religious belief ever can be. The time for these useful English muddles is over; they worked only in a coherent and monocultural society.

We now live in a mixed, divided and multicultural society. Among us are people for whom religion is certainly not a private matter or an unimportant one; for them religion, politics and law are all bound up together, particularly for Muslims. If they see a figure such as Williams, complete with ecclesiastical trappings, holding forth about the government and using what is unmistakably a political position to sway political feeling, some of them will very understandably want a piece of that action.

If members of a small, dwindling, minority faith such as the Church of England can have seats in the Lords and ritual authority, why not Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, or Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses for that matter? Some of their faiths are growing. Equality and equal representation rule in every other walk of life. Why not in religious status, too? The antics of the Archbishop of Canterbury have now made that question unavoidable.

The best answer to the question, for the safety of the body politic, is the disestablishment of the Anglican Church to avoid the establishment in any sense of any other. Perhaps Rowan Williams has inadvertently done us all a service in making this awkward truth so plain.

The cryptic cleric is a martyr to his mitre, Profile, page 23 minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Without blame, carers are free to carry on being cruel

The notorious Bosnian Serb general, Ratko Mladic, appeared in the dock in The Hague last week, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But there can be peace crimes of this kind too — barbaric and institutionalised offences that cannot even be excused by the red mist of war. Last week a few men and women appeared in the dock of public opinion in peaceful Britain, for horrifying crimes against adults with learning disabilities in a Bristol hospital.

The evidence against them is incontrovertible, thanks to weeks of secret filming in a locked ward for a documentary shown by BBC’s Panorama. The camera caught them abusing and torturing very vulnerable men and women, who were entirely at their mercy, unable to escape or to protest: no one who saw it will ever be able to forget the images. It became clear that the abuse was constant, persistent and part of the culture of the so-called care staff. They seemed positively to enjoy taunting and tormenting their victims, making a game of it, ignoring their screams of pain and anguish. Senior nursing staff and management either ignored or condoned it.

Forcing a woman into a cold shower, pulling her hair, leaving her in a freezing garden, trapping people under chairs while treading on their hands and legs, squashing their necks and carotid arteries, taking away precious possessions with cruel taunts as a punishment, picking fights, punching, slapping, dragging, bullying and shrieking “nein, nein, nein” — this was all part of the fun. And this was done to people whose behavioural problems it was certain to make infinitely worse — the very reverse of treatment for challenging behaviour.

These crimes against humanity would be still going on today, had it not been for the persistence of a brave whistleblower, Terry Bryan, an experienced senior nurse who worked briefly at Winterbourne View. Having warned the management in vain, he resigned and contacted the Care Quality Commission (CQC), three times. Again he was ignored, so he finally went to the BBC.

How the heart sinks at the very mention of the CQC. This unforgivable incompetence is what one has come to expect of it. At the end of 2009, when the new commission had itself discovered appalling conditions and needless deaths at Basildon and Thurrock National Health Service hospitals, it posted a largely favourable report on the offending trust on its own website, with top marks for cleanliness and health, and actually kept it there, even after the scandal. This hardly inspired confidence. Nor did last week’s revelations. Missing three professional alerts about Winterbourne was bad enough, but giving the hospital a good report only weeks earlier, despite the recent conviction of a carer, is almost beyond belief.

What good is the CQC? What good, even, is its website? It is very unclear to the ordinary mortal how to make a complaint, or to whom; it would defeat anyone except the sharpest-elbowed of the professional classes. Last Thursday the page on the CQC’s enforcement consultation was down — surely rather embarrassing under the present circumstances. And the site actually says that, in accordance with recent legislation, the “CQC cannot consider individual complaints about the services we regulate”. Why on earth not? The only exception to this is for complaints involving the Mental Health Act — as with the “patients” at Winterbourne. The final insult is CQC’s website claim that “we act quickly”, which to it means responding within 25 days, “if necessary”.

But cruelty to the vulnerable demands an urgent response, or urgent redirection.

Grateful though everyone must be to Terry Bryan, it seems rather odd that he went to the CQC. The obvious first step for a trained professional after alerting his managers would have been to go to the local safeguarding team — one of the Safeguarding Boards for vulnerable people which every local authority has had in place since 2006 (if he did so, it hasn’t been reported). These teams normally act very fast and their websites are usually clear and user-friendly, unlike that of the CQC.

When something terrible happens like this, the cry goes up that lessons must be learnt — not that they ever are. But there are some clear ones in this case, apart from the uselessness of the CQC and all the other regulators and overseers involved.

The first is the lesson of Sharon Shoesmith, of Baby Peter notoriety, who so chillingly said: “I don’t do blame. I’m not in the blame game.” But blame is precisely what is needed in these cases. Blame should at long last be reclaimed: it is the proper sanction for incompetence, irresponsibility or inexcusable behaviour.

Shoesmith seemed to think that because health and police services, as well as her own social services department, were at fault, she deserves no blame — which is nonsense. In the same way, with the patients at Winterbourne, no one person or agency was responsible, or felt overall responsibility, for each individual, which means that nobody needs to accept any blame. This must change. Otherwise accountability means nothing; we need joined-up culpability.

The taxpayer was contributing £3,500 a week per patient at Winterbourne. Who was in charge of that money in each case, and how was it being used? Those people are blameworthy. In future there ought to be a named person for all very vulnerable people with complex needs, to take overall responsibility for everything that happens to each of them — not a regulator, not a team, not a complaints department, but a real person, who makes sudden checks, who listens and who notices what is happening to other real persons. And every one in the country should know exactly where to complain about bad care — at the moment there is total confusion.

The second lesson, despite all the uproar about it, is that the Winterbourne scandal has nothing to do with the pros and cons of private care providers. Most other recent scandals in old people’s wards and social services have been in the public sector.

And the most important lesson is that a learning disability is not an illness. It doesn’t need hospital treatment, it needs social care. Nor does challenging behaviour, as it’s called, need hospital treatment either, except perhaps in a few, extreme cases.

A final irony of this tale is that the Winterbourne “patients” are the only ones who ought not to be blamed for anything — yet they are the ones who have been most horribly punished.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Our flawed, uncaring NHS is a self-inflicted wound

Most people must know by now that the treatment of old people in National Health Service hospitals is all too often scandalous: it is frequently abusive neglect rather than care. Even so, it came as a surprise last week to learn that a doctor in a Worcestershire hospital actually had to prescribe water for patients on medical charts to make sure they got enough to drink to keep them alive.

This was one of the many sickening findings of an official Care Quality Commission report published last week. It said three of the 12 hospitals in the report had failed to meet legal minimum standards of care. Serious concerns were raised about three others. If these 12 are representative of hospitals nationwide, then a quarter are breaking the law in their so-called care of elderly patients.

What is so infuriating is that we’ve heard it all before. The NHS ombudsman came up with much the same horrifying findings in his Care and Compassion report of February this year. Then there was the astonishing Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal of 2006. The Patients Association has produced damning evidence, time and again, but the scandals keep coming.

Such scandals always whip up a storm of public indignation but this time it occurred to me for the first time that the public should be directing its fury at itself. The painful truth is the British public has got the NHS it deserves. The misery of countless patients, lying in pain and fear, is the fault of the British voter and of the British medico-political establishment. Reform of the NHS is politically nearly impossible — as we are seeing — because of the inflexible, deeply held, quasi-religious beliefs about it that much of the public holds. More or less any proposal for change is blocked by a large swathe of the electorate, or of the medico-political establishment, clinging obstinately to articles of NHS faith. It is a faith that no politician can openly afford to question, as we see daily.

Nigel Lawson famously said the NHS was the religion of the British people. It was in that sense that Tony Blair later said he believed in it, as did David Cameron as well. But religion can be dangerous: it is based on faith, not on evidence. The NHS quasi-religious belief system has many misguided items in its creed, all of which resist argument and change.

The first and most obvious article of faith is that all medical care ought to be run by the state, as a state monopoly. It is equally dogmatic to say nothing must be run by the state, as some right-wing ideologues hold; but it is clear from Germany and France, where medical care is much better, that socialised medicine for all can be delivered in different ways. Even here our excellent hospices, always free, are privately run. Labour itself did a lot of outsourcing.

It is perhaps worth saying that if there is only one health employer, as here — very largely — with the NHS, any constructive critics or whistleblowers among the employees risk everything if they speak out. They will not be able to work anywhere else in the system. I imagine it is that which explains the failure of NHS staff to say what they knew. Otherwise why have doctors and nurses not protested in public about the disgraceful scenes on their wards? Lord Winston did, but late in his career and about his own mother.

Opening up the NHS to competition would mean that unhappy employees could choose to go elsewhere, just as unhappy patients could. But competition is anathema to much of the public and to the vested interests of the NHS priesthood: the unions and the royal colleges. Politicians have to renounce the idea almost daily to stay in office and can introduce it only by stealth.

This faith in state control is related to the conviction that profit is wrong in healthcare. It’s an unthinking belief because NHS healthcare already provides profit — to drugs manufacturers, medical suppliers, transport services and so on, as well as to medical staff who, in accepting pay for their work (quite rightly), are spending their time with patients profitably rather than charitably.

Beyond this it is bizarre to imagine that just because a person makes a profit from his work — making a cake, designing a building or running a group of excellent schools for children with disabilities, say — he must necessarily be providing a poorer service, or a more expensive one, or both. In countless cases the evidence goes the other way.

Then there is the most unexamined article of faith, mouthed by everyone including Cameron, that “cherry-picking” patients is wrong: on no account must private medical providers be allowed to cherry-pick. But why not? If they do, and if they thus leave more difficult cases and medical training to NHS hospitals, that cost could and should be factored into any deal with them. That could easily be done but for quasi-religious objections. It might even be good for the big NHS teaching hospitals by focusing their attention on what is most skilled.

The faithful usually believe that private care is no better, and often worse, than NHS services. This is wilful ignorance. Of course there is bad private care, but the word soon gets around and people won’t pay for it any more — unlike in the NHS. In my wide experience of both, private treatment has been hugely preferable: apart from excellent nursing and the choice of a consultant, it offers better record-keeping, less hospital infection and better medical treatment. But the NHS faithful continue to say in surveys — 80% of those polled — that they are very satisfied with the NHS as it is. They believe, despite the evidence, that all that’s needed is a lot more money in the offertory box.

The uncritical faith in NHS nurses as angels of selfless mercy is finally beginning to fail. But there’s little hope of serious change unless the NHS faithful abandon the belief that all nurses should be of degree level. Of course many should, but taking all nurses out of hospital training into universities and insisting that all must have degrees has been disastrous for skilled bedside nursing. It has devalued it in the eyes of nurses themselves and consigned it to lowly skilled, barely supervised nursing auxiliaries, with the results that everyone is being forced to acknowledge.

We the public have failed consistently to make it clear to politicians, and to the NHS, that the status quo is unacceptable. That’s because we don’t yet quite believe it, not enough of us. Until then, or until the money finally runs out, nothing will change. We have the NHS we deserve.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Last gasp of the seigneurs who trample on women’s feelings

At first blush there might seem to be little if any resemblance between Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the disgraced French politician, late of Rikers Island jail, and Ken Clarke, Britain’s beleaguered justice minister. Superficially at least, they are very different, and while both have risked the annihilation of their political careers because of questions to do with rape, only one is facing criminal charges of sexual assault.

It is quite impossible to imagine cuddly Ken Clarke in the dock for sex crimes, while with the priapic DSK it was an accident waiting to happen, according both to his enemies and to his friends.

But last week, as I wondered what could possibly explain the wildly irrational fury here over Clarke’s remarks about rape, it struck me that there is indeed a curious resemblance between the two men, and that this resemblance might partly explain the violent uproar at what Clarke said. I think that from a woman’s point of view, particularly that of a younger woman, KC and DSK may be birds of a feather, even though their plumage looks so different.

In the past I’ve always found Clarke easy to like. Blokeish, approachable and self-indulgently podgy, clever and fluent, but also an easygoing man of the people, he could hardly in some ways be further from the Olympian DSK.

A suave and exquisitely dressed, much-married Frenchman of great wealth and hyper-sophisticated tastes, reeking of the extraordinary sense of entitlement that exudes from the lords of the European universe, Strauss-Kahn has an image far removed from Clarke’s battered Hush Puppies, beer and blameless domestic life. One could hardly call Clarke a “chaud lapin”.

But I suspect both men owe their present, different, predicaments largely to the same thing — an indifference, real or apparent, to women’s feelings. Clarke’s real crime last week was to appear, if only to appear, not to take women’s feelings seriously. This was an impression he gave again and again and it was disastrous politically. Clarke’s language, his body language and the self-satisfied cadences of his voice were all somehow dismissive on various questions of rape, until a day later when he began doing contrition.

Perhaps he was unaware, at first, how passionately most women feel about rape and the way rape is so often condoned, or half-condoned; if so, he should not have been. That in itself shows a surprising ignorance of women’s feelings, or an indifference to them. He seemed irritated in interviews — brusque, faintly contemptuous at moments and unable to disguise his sense of superiority to the women interviewing him and his impatience with the fuss they were making. He was unfeelingly glib, in interview after interview.

Indifference to women’s feelings, of an infinitely more serious degree and perhaps to a pathological degree, is both the crime and the Achilles heel of DSK as well.

Whether or not he sexually assaulted the Sofitel chambermaid in New York, there are plenty of other stories and allegations about him, some of which suggest that, when possessed by the spirit of the hot rabbit, DSK is wholly uninterested in a woman’s feelings. He simply ignores them and arrogantly imposes himself on her, groping and grabbing in a seigneurial way, like a latter-day Don Juan who sees nothing wrong in “taking” a woman, whether she likes it or not; perhaps he cannot even understand whether she likes it or not. In any case, it doesn’t matter. It’s not serious. It’s an alpha male game, the spoils of success.

One ought not to assume that DSK is guilty of any of the allegations against him. But in his case it is difficult to cling with much conviction to the great principle of the presumption of innocence.

Perhaps one ought not to believe the allegations of the young French journalist Tristane Banon, goddaughter of DSK’s second wife, who now says publicly that she was jumped on and assaulted by DSK not in hot rabbit but in “rutting chimpanzee” mode. But it is difficult to disbelieve her: her own mother, part of the French elite herself, now says she advised her daughter at the time to say nothing, for fear of DSK’s enormous power.

In any case DSK is notorious for his aggressive pursuit of women, for not even being safe in lifts. A New York prostitute allegedly complained to her madam about his roughness and aggression, and he is famous for being a “seducer”. His third and current wife even said once that she was proud of it.

This is what most women hate and fear so much, even if they haven’t directly experienced it — a seigneurial, bullying, bulldozing over women’s feelings and bodies, for whatever purpose or pleasure, which until recently was common in western cultures, and which still goes on in large parts of the world.

Think of the European proverb, of not so long ago: “A woman, a donkey and a walnut tree, the more they’re beaten, the better they be.” Think of the punishment gang-rape of the Indian girl whose relations had offended another family, which took vengeance in this time-honoured way.

The extreme obsession with rape that now characterises the women’s movement, and often blights it with absurdities such as last week’s vilification of Clarke, has its roots in something real — a long folk memory of the way men have systematically abused women, not least physically and sexually and psychically, until recently. Any woman over 60 can remember truly horrifying attitudes and behaviour, even among educated men in this country.

These are the subliminal anxieties and resentments that men as different as Clarke and the vulpine DSK stoke up in women and that arouse such a passionately irrational response. Both men share to some degree an old-fashioned attitude towards women that most of us in this culture hoped had been consigned to the past.

It’s a generational thing — Clarke is 70 and DSK looks it, while Arnold Schwarzenegger, in similar trouble, is 63 — a combination of arrogance, a patronising attitude and unthinking self-regard.

Above all it is a lack of feeling, wilful or otherwise, about women’s feelings and an unrecognised assumption that they don’t matter. The sleep of reason may breed monsters, but so too does a lack of feeling.

Enough of the hysteria, girls — Ken is trying to help us, India Knight, page 22 minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

With every step SlutWalkers betray the liberty of women

Reclaim your inner slut! That is the message of the London SlutWalk planned for June 11, starting in Trafalgar Square. The organisers hope that masses of people of “all genders, races and sexualities” will be “marching, stamping, rolling, shouting and hollering through the streets of London” in support of sluttishness and the freedom to walk about dressed like a bit of a slag.

This impassioned movement began not in London, but in Toronto, where an unfortunate police constable made a sensible but wholly unacceptable remark recently, while addressing a group of students. “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this,” said PC Michael Sanguinetti. “However, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.”

The outrage caused by this remark was so great that Sanguinetti has been disciplined and made to apologise. The Toronto police chief said there might be “training issues” here, in case there were other officers who needed sensitising (sic) to such “archaic thinking”.

Three thousand people took to the streets in a SlutWalk in Toronto, quickly followed by others in American cities. Amsterdam will be next. SlutWalking is “rooted in ‘riot grrrl’ attitude”, apparently.

Their charge is that advising women in their own interests to avoid dressing like streetwalkers is to blame the victim. The wretched policeman did not use the word rape, but he has been understood to mean it. And that is what has provoked the outrage — the idea that women who dress like sluts or get drunk are partly responsible if they are sexually harassed or raped. This idea, according to feminists, diverts attention from the real cause of rape — the rapist. In the words of London’s SlutWalkers, “it creates a culture where rape is okay”.

It is hard to know where to begin with the absurd muddles in all this. For a start, nobody in the UK thinks rape is okay. At least, everyone within the mainstream culture thinks that rape is always wrong; it is a serious criminal offence in English and Scottish law. Even if one did think that a particular woman had put herself in harm’s way, by dressing suggestively, getting drunk and hanging about late at night, that would not alter the fact that raping her is, rightly, a serious crime that must be punished. It simply means her obviously risky behaviour makes her partly responsible, morally, for what has happened to her.

There is no universal human right to dress and behave like a sluttish, half-naked, drunken streetwalker touting for sex, without occasionally being taken for one.

“My short skirt and cleavage have nothing to do with you,” was the banner one girl carried on the Toronto SlutWalk. Within limits (and in private) that’s true in an open society. But what you wear in public sends out messages about who you are, how you see yourself and how you are likely to behave.

Nuns’ habits, and burqas, are meant to send powerful messages about a woman’s seclusion and status. And sluttish dressing is all about sending sexual signals. Sluts are displaying and emphasising their sexual characteristics, from reddened lips to visible thongs. In the case of rubber kit, tottering heels and nipple piercings they are flaunting their sexual inclinations.

All this makes, and is designed to make, the onlooker think of sex and of sex with that person. Provocative behaviour provokes. There’s something childish about showing off in public and then getting cross because people pay attention. In sexual terms such behaviour is not only childish but wrong and sometimes dangerous. The idea that it concerns nobody but the slut is a wilful misunderstanding of social interaction and public spaces.

When I was of demonstrating age, feminists were angry that women were seen as nothing more than sex objects. Some took this resentment (which I shared) to the point of refusing to wear make-up or shave their legs and armpits (although I didn’t), as to do so would be colluding with a patriarchal society in attempting to please the demeaning tastes of men.

Now it seems that women passionately want to dress up as sex objects, and see that as liberating. This is a deep confusion in feminist thinking.

The same applies to the SlutWalkers’ idea of reclaiming the word “slut”: feminists always seem to be reclaiming impossible things, like the night or the streets or even their own breasts. It is all daft. The word slut has purely negative, abusive connotations.

Its ultimate etymology is not certain although it had become an English term by the 15th century. It has almost always meant someone with filthy habits, sexual or otherwise, and is not a name even the most liberated of women ought to want.

When women are victimised by rape it is indeed wrong to blame the victim, but it is foolish to imitate the victim if she has put herself in harm’s way by behaving like a slut.

There is something equally unrealistic about taking the line that men ought not to be aroused by provocative behaviour: the fact is, it is provoking. Men ought not to let themselves be provoked into sexual attacks of any kind. But not all men are sensible and rational, or in much control of themselves. They may, like sluts, be drunk.

There is increasing evidence of large numbers of troubled, neglected males with poor impulse control and lack of empathy — in other words, dangerous men. To insist sanctimoniously that women have the right to ignore such dangers, and that someone ought miraculously to prevent them, is not to live in the real world of an open society.

What’s more, our society is now mixed and multicultural, and what says saucy to one man says slapper to another and low-class sex worker to yet another. Given all this, what is so precious about the “right” to expose one’s skimpy gusset on public transport when drunk? The SlutWalkers see their demonstrations as a protest against rape. But they are a symptom of something quite different. They are part of society’s growing obsession with sex — with what is becoming its hypersexualisation and its inability to leave sexual feelings and concerns out of any situation, which seems to me the opposite of liberation.

There is nothing emancipated about being a slut or pretending to be: the SlutWalkers are betraying the struggles of genuine liberationists from the best of the feminist past.

The danger of deshabille, Message Board, page 27 minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

One in, all in: the family rules giving immigrants easy entry

Last month David Cameron boldly promised to cut net immigration into this country from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands a year. He also undertook to deal with forced and sham marriages. Such boldness is long overdue and has huge popular support, but it is all too likely the prime minister may not in practice be able to achieve very much.

Sure enough, from tomorrow his promise will be seriously weakened. After a Court of Appeal ruling, the government must abandon the current requirement that any marriage or civil partnership involving someone subject to immigration control must have prior permission from the Home Office in the form of a certificate of approval. So one more entirely reasonable obstacle along the sham-marriage route into this country has been removed. The prime minister may propose but human rights law often disposes.

Such pettifogging bureaucracy is of no interest to most people. But the detailed rules and regulations of immigration are important. In constantly pointing them out, the think tank MigrationWatch UK has gradually changed public consciousness about the facts of immigration, not least because the Home Office has been forced to acknowledge the accuracy of its statistics.

Calling public attention to tomorrow’s demise of the certificate-of-approval scheme, MigrationWatch’s chairman, Sir Andrew Green, called this weekend for registrars to have new powers to delay suspicious marriages for three months. He also calls for tougher checks when immigrant spouses apply for extension of stay or indefinite leave to remain — the next steps to citizenship. MigrationWatch believes that the granting of this permission to remain has been almost automatic in the past.

Green has also suggested that immigrant spouses should have to wait not four but five years before being granted indefinite leave to remain. This is the time that the spouses of European Union nationals currently have to wait, so it can hardly contravene human rights laws. Tightening this up should clearly be on the government’s to-do list. But there are also many things that could or should be done about other aspects of family immigration — both family visits and family reunion. Both are surprisingly overgenerous.

Foreign nationals are entitled to visit relations in this country as “family visitors” with special visas. Who could object in principle? But as defined under Tony Blair’s welcoming Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 this can mean an astonishing number of people. An application must be made for the visitor by a sponsor here, and the list of eligible relatives includes spouse, parents, children, grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces and first cousins, and the parents, siblings, children and stepfamily of his spouse.

In a family of four or five children the number of Mr X’s foreign relatives entitled to visit this country would be anywhere up to 120, according to MigrationWatch. There could be many more with the large families of the Third World. What is astonishing is that the sponsor/applicant who can invite all these people here does not have to be a British citizen; he or she does not even have to be settled in Britain.

The room for abuse is clearly enormous. So it is hardly surprising that many requests for family visitor visas are refused. However, there is a free right of appeal against a refusal, introduced in 2002 under pressure from ethnic communities, and since then there has been an enormous growth in applications to make such appeals. Ten years ago there were only 100; last year there were 50,000. The cost to the British taxpayer has been estimated at about £50m a year. The cost to the overseas applicant is nothing.

Nor, amazingly, is the family visitor required in law to have visiting a family member as a sole or primary purpose of their trip — a quick look-in on a half-remembered auntie would presumably be enough. Given the possibility of staying on illegally, and the absence of departure checks, this all seems not so much a visa system as an open door.

The family rules for asylum seekers are startling, too. Of course it is understandable that a refugee fleeing from oppression and shock needs his close family, but the rules are generous. Pre-existing families — spouses and children — can apply for indefinite leave to enter Britain, not merely a special visa to visit. In effect they can stay here. And the UK Border Agency may let in other dependent family members as well, if there are compassionate reasons. Such relations include parents or grandparents over 65 — and sometimes even parents or grandparents under 65 — and children, aunts and uncles over the age of 18. The number could be vast.

And this is to say nothing of the normal route whereby dependent parents and grandparents over 65 of people permanently settled here can apply to settle here permanently as well. I am not trying to point a finger of moral blame at foreigners who try to get into this country by exploiting our misguided immigration rules. In their place I would do the same. The finger of blame and anger should be directed at our policy makers in recent years and their contemptible combination of wishful thinking, political opportunism and incompetence.

The government intends to consult on family-related migration over the summer. Perhaps it would be unduly pessimistic to assume it won’t achieve much. But bold intentions are one thing; challenging the vested interests and political taboos surrounding immigration are another. I don’t suppose the government will dare to do the most obvious thing and bring back the “primary purpose” rule: this is the rule, abolished in 1997 by Blair, that foreign fiancé(e)s would be refused entry to the UK unless they could satisfy entry officials “that it is not the primary purpose of the intended marriage to obtain admission to the UK”.

However, the government could at least tighten up the definition of family visitors and make them pay for their own appeals if they don’t get visas. It could, like Austria, insist that citizens wanting to import an overseas spouse must prove that they themselves have an income of at least the minimum wage: this would encourage those on benefits here either to work or to declare their incomes if they work illegally.

Finally, the government should beware of easy assumptions about the restrictions imposed by human rights considerations and of officials who tend to gild the human rights lily and frighten politicians out of their boldest intentions.

Over here and overhyped, News Review, page 7 minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

The monarchy is secure if Kate got a behaviour prenup

‘Of course,” said she. “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” said he. These were the answers given by Lady Diana Spencer and the Prince of Wales in answer to a television interviewer asking whether they were in love, soon after their engagement. It should have been obvious right then that they appeared to have very different views about what was going on between them. In retrospect it is clear that what they urgently needed was a prenuptial agreement outlining what they understood about their marriage and its obligations.

Had each of them better recognised the motives and intentions of the other, by forcing everything out into the open in a carefully considered prenuptial agreement, they might have avoided a great deal of misunderstanding and misery all round — and grave damage to the monarchy as well. Watching the idyllic and very different wedding of their son William to Kate Middleton on Friday, I found myself hoping very much that the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had been wise enough to make a prenuptial agreement, as some of the media have speculated.

Prenups, as they are now called, are usually about money and what happens to it in the event of a divorce. While not legally binding here, they are increasingly likely to be taken into account by the courts since a ruling last October in which the Supreme Court in London upheld the prenuptial agreement of a German heiress, after her divorce. It is, of course, good to make clear where the money goes in the event of separation and to lay down various other practical conditions, both of the marriage and of any divorce.

After all, marriage is among other things a contract, and those entering into a particular marriage ought to be aware of the particular terms of that contract. So I favour prenups for practical reasons. They concentrate the mind in advance on subjects over which desire and romance would prefer to cast a veil and they can, insofar as they are enforceable, dispel doubt and mistrust and bitter squabbles when things go wrong.

I am also in favour — even more in favour — of prenups for emotional and moral reasons. Marriage is meant to be for life, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish and for most of the purposes detailed in the beautiful Anglican wedding service. But such is the confusion surrounding marriage these days that people don’t actually agree on what it means or even know that they differ on important points. Does one sexual peccadillo mean instant divorce? Do children come first, or does the hungry heart? How much time does each person need to have to himself or herself? What compromises can be reached about parents-in-law or between careers? What does each person think is unacceptable behaviour? And what matters most to each person? This is something many people clearly don’t consider enough before getting married. Recognising such things in advance might help to make marriage a better, more emotionally binding contract.

The late Princess of Wales succeeded in promoting the narrative, and getting a lot of sympathy for it, that she was a young innocent, very much in love with Prince Charles, who was shocked and horrified to discover that marriage for him was very different. Whether or not it began for him as a marriage of reason to a suitable girl, or whether he tried to make it a romantic, companionate marriage, it soon turned into something more old-fashioned — a traditional upper-class arrangement, still favoured by many people of his class and age and certainly by many of their parents, in which divorce was pretty much out of the question and sexual infidelity was not reason enough to end an otherwise tolerable marriage.

I never quite believed that Diana had no idea of what she was getting into. Her noble family had been courtiers for hundreds of years. It seemed to me that anyone from her background — her sister had even dated Charles — must have known that divorce was unthinkable and therefore that by taking on the “intolerable privilege” of marrying the future king, as the late Queen Mother called royal life, she was accepting that she might have to put up with a lot that an ordinary person might find intolerable.

Any ordinary person can decide to abandon a marriage that goes wrong in that way, or in any other. But a royal bride or groom cannot or, rather, certainly should not. The marriage of Kate and William, and the contract it self-evidently contains, is — like Westminster Abbey itself — a Royal Peculiar. It would be disastrous for the monarchy, as well as for the royal couple, if their marriage were to end in divorce. Almost uniquely, their union has to survive, if necessary, the loss of passion and the loss of love — both emotions which are not in the power of duty to command.

Duty can, however, command all kinds of virtues which could ease the pain of a failing relationship and the frustrations of an intolerable privilege. And these are things which could be worked out in a royal peculiar prenup, or an immediate postnup.

What are needed are kindness, forbearance, tolerance, courtesy and affectionate solidarity. A list of marital misdemeanours could be drawn up which each would promise to avoid or atone for — for a royal couple the ones that come immediately to mind are hogging the limelight, competing with each other in any way, secretly briefing the press, getting high on deference or infected with red carpet fever, allowing separate cliques of courtiers or advisers, resenting each other’s time away or other interests, or neglecting one another.

So would letting either family come between them. Other scenarios should be clearly considered. If adultery is ever permissible, given the impossibility of divorce and the unreliability of passion, under what terms is it intolerable — when it is very public, for instance? On their wedding day William’s and Kate’s radiant happiness must have touched even the most hardened of republican hearts. Outsiders cannot claim to know them at all, but it truly does seem that they combine maturity and wisdom with an enduring love for each other. That love has been tested in many ways over many years and if any couple could make a success of married life as a future king and queen, perhaps they can. Many millions of people are hoping so and wishing them every happiness in their Royal Peculiar marriage.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

The life or death decision facing the grey cuckoos in our midst

When people protest against cuts in public services, they are ignoring an enormous grey elephant in the room. The unmentionable fact is that the generous welfare systems of the rich world are doomed in their entirety. This is simply a matter of demographics. Welfare is paid for by people who work, in order (among many other requirements) to support older people who have retired.

However, the relationship in the rich world of old to young is changing so fast that by 2050 every couple will be supporting a pensioner, on top of all the payments they must make to support needy people who are younger. Clearly that will be impossible in terms of the way we live now.

We are seeing the greying of the rich world, as the baby boom generation retires. Everyone knows that, but not everyone is prepared to admit the consequences. In 1950 there were 7.2 people of working age (20-64) in the OECD member states for every person more than 64 years old. By 1980 the ratio had fallen to 5.1; now it is about 4.1 and by 2050 it will be 2.1. In the European Union (which has more generous welfare systems than most of the rest of the OECD) there will be 1.8 people and in Germany it will be 1.6.

On top of all the other requirements of the welfare state, old people’s needs are huge. Quite apart from the costs of pensions and social security, an enormous part of National Health Service annual expenditure goes on the elderly. Department of Health statistics for 2002-3 — I have found it difficult to get any comparable figures recently — show that nearly half the entire NHS budget, 46.7%, was spent on people over 64 and nearly a third of NHS spending, 30.3%, was spent on people of 75 or older. These proportions had gone up noticeably since 2000-1, when the corresponding figures were 41% and 27%.

NHS spending in England by age group in 2003 was equally startling. The average cost of healthcare per capita rises drastically once people are over 65 (for 65 to 74-year-olds the annual spending is £948; for 75 to 84-year-olds it is £1,684). That means the cost per capita of those aged 65 to 74 is almost three times the average cost of those aged 16 to 44; even the 45 to 64-year-olds cost only £459 a year each. The rapid demographic changes in this decade mean that the amount spent on the over-64s is rocketing.

One sign of this is that NHS primary care trusts are struggling with huge drugs bills. Last week it emerged they are trying to restrict the use of more expensive (often more effective) drugs even when those medicines have been approved by Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence). Several trusts are adding more drugs to their “red lists” of medicine that can be prescribed only by a consultant, not by a GP. Many of these drugs are used by millions of older people to treat Parkinson’s, coronary artery disease, diabetes and osteoporosis.

Baby boomers are increasingly resented for having grabbed the best of everything at the expense of the young, but far from all the baby boomers have a generous pension or capital assets. All those who don’t will become outsize grey cuckoos, crowding out the nests of the overworked young. In view of all this, the mind turns to the tradition of old people taking a walk up the snowy mountain to fall asleep and die in the snow. I associate this custom with Japanese history, but in plenty of other cultures when old people had become what the Chinese so cruelly called “useless mouths”, they voluntarily went out to meet their deaths. The Innuit took advantage of the extreme cold outdoors for this purpose.

I am not remotely recommending that anyone in a good society should be expected to take a walk up the snowy mountain, still less be obliged to. Any new laws on assisted suicide ought to be careful to protect old people from pressure. Last week it emerged that state-subsidised care homes in the Swiss canton of Vaud may well, after a poll, be given the right to help residents kill themselves. There is something chilling about that. People in such homes might come to feel assisted suicide was the decent thing to do. But old people who, entirely of their own free will, decide to take their lives without pressure from anyone else are, I think, to be admired and thanked. They are sparing themselves and their families a great deal of suffering and are relieving those around them and the welfare state of a burden. Surely that is an honourable act.

I hugely admired the right-to-die campaigner Nan Maitland, who ended her life in Switzerland on March 1. She did not have a terminal illness, although she was in great pain from arthritis and growing ever more disabled. The point she made in public was she didn’t want to suffer “a long period of decline, sometimes called a prolonged dwindling, that so many old people unfortunately experience before they die”.

For many old people — long before they become mortally ill — that prolonged dwindling is a worsening nightmare: a time of maltreatment in geriatric wards, lying on their bedsores in urine and excrement, of dependence on indifferent foreign minders in expensive care homes, a period of painful confusion, feeling ignored, unwanted and lonely. In a less rich society, such things will become more common.

Given all this, the taboo against suicide or assisted suicide seems incomprehensible. Religious people may think it wrong, although I have never quite understood why. It seems odd to me that they are not eager to meet their maker as soon as possible, if heaven is so devoutly to be desired. Perhaps it is different if one’s religion teaches that one might after death come back as a toad. But, believers apart, for everyone else there is no philosophical reason against suicide that I can see. The usual slippery slope argument is purely emotional: we are all already on the slippery slope as far as any moral decisions go and constantly have to choose between two evils.

Nor can I see any reason for restricting the right to die to people with terminal illnesses. Degenerative illnesses, constant pain and the nightmarish dwindling we all dread are excellent reasons for wanting, very rationally, to die. So I feel great admiration for all those brave people who decide to end their lives at a time of their choosing and who, for now, often face the seediness and loneliness of a Swiss clinic to do so.

We should treat them better, without disapproval but with more consideration, understanding, help and, above all, with more gratitude. We will need that if we are to be able to choose a good death in an impoverished society.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Rejoice, those striking teachers are making education better

With the beautiful spring weather last week some of the first green shoots of recovery burst out, not in the world of economics but in the world of education. At last. We may be about to see a new education spring of revolutionary reform. This has nothing to do with Michael Gove’s proposals or Whitehall’s disposals. It has, strange to say, to do with workers at the educational coalface, supported and organised by their unions. About 70 angry teachers at Darwen Vale high school near Blackburn, Lancashire, actually went on strike for 24 hours, complete with picket line, against the dreadful behaviour of their pupils.

The striking teachers say a small minority of violent and abusive children is making teaching impossible and classrooms unsafe. Worse still, they say, the head teacher and the school’s management keep undermining teachers’ attempts to impose discipline, and their strike was in large part a protest against that. Hallelujah, is all I can say, odd though it feels to be cheering on trade unions.

Darwen Vale high, according to one teacher, is a school “on the brink of a nervous breakdown”. Not all the children behave badly, but those who do are every teacher’s nightmare. Apart from pushing and shoving and swearing at teachers, challenging them to fights and throwing chairs around, they film them and their chaotic classes on their mobiles and post them on Facebook to humiliate the staff. They smoke, drink beer and deal openly in weed, watch porn on their mobiles, torment other children and carry knuckledusters and knives. One teacher in the past few days was headbutted and seriously injured by a pupil and another was assaulted for trying to stop children throwing food trays in the dining room.

The usual response when hearing of schools like this is to blame the teachers for anti-authoritarian views — with some justice perhaps in the past. But in this case teachers say they are anxious to try to impose discipline. The problem, the NUT says, is that Hilary Torpey, the new head, and the school’s senior management do not support the teachers but tend to side with the misbehaving children. “She is draconian with staff and namby-pamby and inconsistent with pupils.”

Since Torpey’s arrival in September she has suspended 10 members of staff over claims that they had used excessive powers in disciplining pupils — claims made by children in a process all too easy for wised-up young troublemakers to abuse.

Stories such as this are usually more complicated than they seem. Even so, if teachers (and pupils) are terrorised in the classroom, someone should stop it. Someone should protect them. In this case it seems management can’t or won’t. The head teacher’s behaviour is at issue, one of the school governors has actually blamed the wet and windy weather for the pupils’ terrible behaviour and the local education authority calls the strike “disappointing”. Given all this, it’s only right and proper that the unions should move in. That is what unions are for, or at least what unions were originally for.

In the bad old days of the industrial revolution, unions were created by cruelly exploited workers who came together in places such as Blackburn to stand against the overmighty power of the factory owners. Men, women and even children were forced to work 12 hours or more in noisy and dangerous conditions and were given little more consideration than useful animals.

Since those early glory days, unions have gradually brought about their own demise by trying to do quite different things — bullying prime ministers, overturning governments, cosying up to the Soviets, protecting lazy or incompetent employees and turning a blind eye to extraordinary workplace abuses called Spanish practices, to name just a few. They ignored their primary purposes, not least safe working conditions for teachers.

In the early days of sensible trade union leadership, if coalminers were forced to work down pits where conditions were unsafe, their representatives would tell the boss class, and rightly so.

Yet for decades now the union movement has shown little interest — or at least little success — in standing up against the dreadful conditions that all too many teachers have to face in their classrooms. Two-thirds of teachers say bad behaviour is driving them out of teaching. In 2009 more than one teacher a week received hospital treatment after being attacked in school and almost four in 10 members of school staff faced physical aggression from pupils. Even lenient Ofsted inspectors concede that pupils’ behaviour in 21% of schools is not good enough.

Still, the prodigal son is always welcome and if teachers’ unions are beginning to see that teachers must unite against bad behaviour, one can only be grateful. This short strike — the first of its kind in Britain — is a hopeful sign even to those who, like me, grew up at a time of overmighty unions. It would be even better if the unions could find the generosity of spirit to accept that Gove’s reforms, aimed at making discipline easier for teachers, are a good thing, even though they were dreamt up by a member of the Conservative party.

In the same spirit, one can only hope against hope that the NUT and the NASUWT will come out publicly in support of the redoubtable Catherine Jenkinson-Dix, head teacher of City of Ely community college. Perhaps the new education spring is not yet well enough established for that. But the unions should show support. Last week Jenkinson-Dix introduced a zero-tolerance policy at her school to improve standards.

In four days she was brave enough to hand out 717 detentions, in which children had to go at once to the school hall for five hours and read a book about good behaviour. On Monday she imposed 230 detentions. The figure fell the next day and was down to 115 by Thursday. Children are not allowed to smoke, chew gum, drop litter, wear the wrong clothes, carry IT gadgets, turn up late or be rude to staff and so on.

Most parents support her but a dissident few describe her rules as turning the school into a prison. One can only say that if that is a prison, then prison is what pupils need if teachers are to teach and children are to learn, unless they are prepared to behave well without such rules. If not all the parents support the courageous Jenkinson-Dix, at least the teachers do.

A few green shoots of change like this do not, perhaps, make a spring but they are at least signs of hope.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk