The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

August 9th, 2009

Women aren’t equal to men – especially not the feminists

It is Harriet Harman’s misfortune that she is the sort of woman who gives feminism a bad name. Her intentions may be of the highest, her motives of the most disinterested, but when she holds forth from her political heights about rape, the superiority of her imaginary Lehman Sisters to Lehman Brothers and the impropriety of a mere man running the country without a woman at his side to restrain him, there are many who mutter to themselves that if this is feminism, it is barking. Harman’s agenda seems at times quite daft: must tiny children really be taught at school about daddies’ nasty way of hitting mummies? As the nation’s newspaper of record itself was prompted to ask, has feminism gone nuts? The simple and depressing answer is that feminism has always tended to go – if not nuts – then wildly astray, from one extreme to another. Feminism has been the most wonderful force for freedom and I (like millions of others of my sex) am hugely grateful to all those women who struggled to liberate us from outrageous injustices of the sort we still see in the rest of the world. I admit, too, that the battle isn’t over, even here: women still often earn less than men for the same work, or don’t get the same work, and are still often patronised, exploited and demoralised by men, although that boot is now often on the feminine foot instead. But somehow along the way feminism has lurched from silly excess to silly excess, so that no matter how much I have wanted to belong to the cause, I have had to dissociate myself from the wilder attitudinising of the sisterhood, from the monstrous regiment of women such as Harman. The bullying, censorious tone of the activists, their bossy, micromanaging intrusion into household, workplace and schoolyard, their attempts to colonise speech, their feminisation of certain industries and their demoralisation of boys and men have all combined to make women today opposed to feminism. This is a great pity. Women still need feminism and perhaps, given the profound differences between women and men, we always will. It will have to be different from the feminism of the past, though. So an important question is why feminism so far, for all its just cause, has gone so wrong. My view is that it’s because there are several important facts that feminists forget, or wilfully ignore, or just don’t know. The first such fact that feminists forget, or won’t accept, is that some things in life cannot be fixed. There is, for example, a tragic opposition between a woman’s desire and need to work and her baby’s desire and need for her, not to mention her love for her child. You can tinker around the edges of this problem – by subsidising nursery care, or giving mothers preferential treatment at work, which merely causes other problems in a free society – but you will not escape the serious problems of babies with attachment disorder; toddlers cognitively damaged by inexperienced carers; children unsocialised by their overworked mothers; schoolboys and girls with little encouragement in reading, writing and even simple conversation at home; and all the rest. Nor can ambitious women escape the problem that serious success can never, of its nature, be a part-time option: she must choose between home and work, just as successful men must do. The idea that a heart surgeon or a cabinet minister or a Lehman Sister could be home regularly for bath and story time and weekend bonding is nonsense. The world isn’t like that: while she is reading Winnie-the-Pooh, her competitors will be working or networking, and if not here, then in Shanghai or Mumbai. This, sadly for women, is something that cannot be fixed. No amount of social engineering, no matter how horribly illiberal, unjust and intrusive, can sort it out. The second, centrally important fact is that biology is destiny. I don’t mean that in the crude sense which women’s liberationists of 40 years ago resented so much. Having babies and suffering all the hormonal upheavals that female flesh is heir to does not in itself disqualify women from anything, except possibly from periods of heavy lifting. I mean biology in a sense that was wholly denied back then, and that is only beginning to be recognised. Men and women really are different. The findings of hard science – in endocrinology, brain structure and function and genetics, for instance – have forced rational feminists to admit that, statistically speaking, men and women have different aptitudes, interests and responses, little though this is yet understood. Such generalisations never apply to an individual, of course, and although – for instance – women are underrepresented at the extremes of intelligence and statistically are less good at higher maths, chess, musical composition and physics, any one woman might be brilliant at any or all of those things. Similarly, while women tend in general to be less aggressive and more conciliatory, there are plenty of ferocious females and Wodehouse aunts, and plenty of men who are shrinking violets – with obvious implications for their working lives. The point here, and it’s another centrally important fact, which feminists either don’t know or refuse to admit, is that you would not therefore necessarily expect men and women to be equally represented in any particular occupation. The fact that just two out of 25 top maths dons or bond traders or gangmasters are men, say, is not self-evidently due to discrimination against women mathematicians, bond traders or gangers (although it may be). And this underlies an obvious killer fact for the politics of equality: equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcome. It is a dangerous mistake doggedly to pursue equality of outcome and equal numbers of men and women in everything. The entire basis of the gender equality movement, equality by numbers, stems from an unquestioned and wrong assumption, taken as fact in defiance of the actual truth. The tragedy of feminism is that it has been dogged, or perhaps I should say bitched, by a lot of fixed ideas and unquestioned beliefs. Only when it becomes intellectually rigorous will feminism have some claim to intellectual respectability and then perhaps some claim to justice. It is a shame to my sex that the women’s movement has been brought low by muddled and emotional thinking – so often said by misogynists to be characteristic of the female mind and, I believe, a characteristic of Harman’s.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

July 19th, 2009

Maria Carmen del Bousada de Lara was a poor spinster of 66 who desperately wanted a baby. As a retired shop assistant she had little money, so she sold her house in Cadiz to buy some IVF treatment and donor eggs and sperm in California.

Maria Carmen del Bousada de Lara was a poor spinster of 66 who desperately wanted a baby. As a retired shop assistant she had little money, so she sold her house in Cadiz to buy some IVF treatment and donor eggs and sperm in California. Without telling her family, she flew to the Pacific Fertility Centre in Los Angeles, and before long her wish came true. She gave birth to twin baby boys, who are now two years old, and was photographed with them in a youthful leopard-print outfit. People said she was too old but she didn’t care. She said she thought she’d live to be 101. But last week at the age of 69 she died of ovarian cancer. She believed the powerful drugs she took during her IVF treatment hastened the spread of the cancer. IVF treatment has many risks and, besides, nobody really knows how an aged body will respond to the strain of pregnancy. The consequence was that Bousada left behind her two little boys with no mother, no father and no money, to the care of a disapproving and angry family and to the kindness of strangers. And the world said, as it usually does these days, that it should never have been allowed. The world, as so often, is wrong. Of course this wretched woman was unforgivably irresponsible, self-centred and unimaginative. Of course it was daft of her to think that a woman on her own, past retirement age and of modest means, could possibly hope to look after any child properly, still less twin boys. Perhaps she was unhinged. But, wrong though she was, it is also wrong to think she should have been stopped. Stopping people having babies is a serious matter. It is, for one thing, impossible unless you have compulsory abortions, as in China, or compulsory sterilisations, as in Indira Gandhi’s India. And although it is quite clear that some people would be, or are, unfit parents – such as poor, misguided Bousada – nobody who loves freedom can possibly want the state to get involved with stopping people having babies. Most of all, no one who loves freedom can want the state to have any part in deciding who is or is not fit for parenthood. That way lies totalitarianism. The state can, of course, justifiably say that it won’t use public money to pay to help people to have babies and it can say that it won’t allow clinics and doctors to help them to do so. I think the state should go further in this country in refusing to pay taxpayers’ money for IVF treatment for single parents. But the state cannot, in a country with any pretensions at all to freedom, stop people resorting to their own money, to the turkey baster or to cut-rate flights to clinics in countries where they do things differently. It is true that the victims in all this are the children who are produced for and acquired by highly unsuitable people, such as Michael Jackson. But if one is not prepared to assert a legal right to stop unsuitable people having babies in the natural way, how could one reasonably assert such a right over those resorting to privately paid-for unnatural methods? Besides, in the case of the Bousada twins, they can at least hope for a rather younger and more sensible parent than the one they have just lost – or, with any luck, two. And there may be some money for their upbringing: one of their uncles has signed a story deal with a Spanish television channel to provide for the boys, and who is to say he will not use the money for that purpose? The strange truth about Bousada is that she has unintentionally provided the world with a powerful cautionary tale. By exercising her freedom to buy babies when she was pushing 70 and perhaps killing herself in the process she has, by example, done far more to show the world what is wrong in all this – and to stop other people doing the same thing – than any amount of state interference could ever do. Everyone will now know of her shocking story and everyone remotely interested in late motherhood will now understand clearly how risky IVF treatment is and how wrong it is to think of a baby as a must-have. What’s more, people won’t just know this, as they could have done already – given the amount of information there is around on the subject. They will also now have the greater awareness of knowledge combined with feeling – the feeling that this cautionary tale arouses – and that kind of awareness is not something that always comes with rational argument. Sensational stories usually have more power than sober information. Anyone who believes strongly in freedom, as I do, faces a problem with individuals who, like Bousada, abuse it. Such obvious abuse invites state intervention. So those who love freedom will value any reasonable checks on the abuse of freedom that have nothing to do with the state and that therefore cut the state out, so to speak. One of them, as my hero John Stuart Mill pointed out in his essay On Liberty, is public disapprobation. We are all free, for instance, to burp loudly at concerts and funerals, but the thing that stops most of us is disapproval. I’ve always felt that this disapprobation of Mill’s was risky; when powerful enough it surely might amount to something that he feared – the tyranny of the majority. But these days there is so little disapprobation about anything that some genuine public disapproval might be a very good thing; at least it is better than the heavy hand of the state. For years and years there has been a sense in this country that disapproval is wrong. It is judgmental; it is discriminatory. Perhaps a case like Bousada’s, in which disapproval is so obviously the only response, will make us all feel a little more free and inclined to show our disapproval of selfish, antisocial behaviour. It is high time. When, decades ago, people were extremely judgmental about illegitimate babies, harsh though that often was, there were many fewer such babies and many fewer chaotic families. When eating in the street was strongly condemned, there was far less obesity, drunkenness and litter. It is true that what the neighbours say can be nasty and repressive, but it is not half so nasty and dangerous as the repression by an intrusive state such as ours, which finds an excuse to curtail our freedoms in our abuse of them. Let’s not have more political control over fertility or anything else; let’s have more moral judgment and the freedom to express it.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

June 14th, 2009

A tax on junk food will help offset those looming NHS cuts

Debt means cuts. There is no way around this obvious fact of life. If you have run up serious debt on jam yesterday, there will be no jam today nor any jam tomorrow, for many tomorrows to come. You will have to spend more of your income on debt and less (if any at all) on jam. Vast public debt such as ours means huge public-services cuts. Yet most politicians seem either unwilling or unable to talk about it like responsible adults. There will, for instance, have to be cuts in the National Health Service, no matter what they pretend. Last week the NHS Confederation predicted an enormous shortfall in NHS funding starting in 2011 – the equivalent of a cut of £8-£10 billion. The government is trying to get out of admitting this, but failing. The Tories have admitted something of the sort but are backtracking. All that’s clear is that the golden years of NHS spending are over. Yet at a timely conference about the NHS run by the think tank Reform, Mike O’Brien, the health minister, made an asinine remark: “The future of the NHS has never been brighter.” Perhaps one should not blame him: he was standing in at short notice for Ben Bradshaw, who had just been shuffled – in itself something that’s wrong with the NHS: new people constantly stepping in at the last moment and in a hurry. Since Labour came to power there have been no fewer than five health secretaries, all serving only two years or less (apart from Alan Milburn, who served about four), and now we suddenly have a sixth. It is daft. The NHS is the fourth-largest organisation in the world, after the Russian army, Indian railways and Wal-Mart. The idea that anyone at the top can begin in two years to understand what should and shouldn’t be done, let alone do something, is madness. For secretaries of state to skip at speed from post to post, using each ministry as a stepping stone in their career or as a way to prop up a self-serving prime minister, is not government; it is musical chairs. Under Labour, spending on the NHS has nearly tripled while productivity actually fell by 4.3% between 1998 and 2007. Last week the Office for National Statistics issued a truly frightening report outlining the failure in productivity across the public services, despite huge spending increases. From 1998 to 2007, public-sector spending went up by 75% while productivity fell by 3.2%. At the Reform conference, well-qualified people proposed all kinds of ways in which the NHS could achieve more for less, many of which we’d heard before. The most important were cultural – shifting mindsets, decentralising money, responsibility and information, empowering the patient, persuading people to abandon layers of bureaucracy, stopping national pay bargaining, renegotiating daft contracts with GPs and consultants that pay them more to do less, removing perverse incentives and introducing good ones and so on. Admirable though much of this was, many people were pessimistic: cultural change inevitably takes time. I think what’s needed now is a quick fix or two – something simple and fast-working, something even a health secretary with attention deficit disorder can understand. The most obvious, I realise, has to do with preventing chronic illness in the first place. Until last week I had always thought this fell into the category of bossy government intrusion – wasting squillions on telling people how many potatoes to eat and on useless quangos. To me the phrase “public health” had come to mean “public nuisance”. However, my mind was changed by Christine Hancock, a former senior nurse and NHS manager and now European director of the Oxford Health Alliance, an international public health charity. She began by saying – and who can disagree – that she was exhausted by NHS reform. The service is obsessed by structures and finance, to the detriment of primary care. Yet the main burden upon the NHS comes from chronic diseases – cardiovascular disease, lung disease, diabetes and cancers – which, apart from causing drawn-out suffering and death, are hugely expensive to treat. All these conditions are often caused or made worse by smoking, inactivity and a bad diet. Everyone knows that, but few people seem to care. The acute hospital ward where I spent three weeks as a visitor recently was full of people almost too big for their beds, and certainly too heavy to lift, regularly visited by their outsize relations: people of normal weight were in a minority, except among the nurses and doctors. Our streets and shops are full of people who are not just fat but obese, waddling from groaning sweetie counter to busy burger bar, eating food that is in effect poison. Sugar is full of calories that make you fat and sick and it’s addictive. And it can give children serious mood swings. Most fizzy drinks are bottled disease. There are about 550 calories in a Big Mac, which by itself is well over a quarter of a woman’s or a child’s daily energy needs. Yummy thingies and treatlets and biccies are swimming in invisible fat to fuzz up your arteries. To give such things to children is nothing short of child abuse. As for good food, according to Hancock, only 25% of the population eat five portions of fruit or vegetables a day, and 50% of children – an astonishing figure – eat no fruit or veg at all in the week. I am sick of people talking about health education and “lifestyle choices”. What’s clearly needed, contrary to everything I’ve always thought, is a little compulsion. Our NHS and our economy cannot take the consequences of poor lifestyle choices. First, all schools should make healthy meals compulsory and should offer pupils one meal only – no choice – and make them eat it. (Allowances would be made for religious taboos and ill health.) Second, the polluter must pay, as the Greens always say. The polluters who manufacture junk food of all kinds should be forced to label it, like cigarette packets, with simple information about calories. And the food itself, the pollutant, should be made extremely expensive, by high taxes, so that those who are polluting their own bodies would have a powerful incentive to stop. Admittedly this is hard on the poorest, who eat the most junk food, but bad diets are not only bad for them. They are also expensive for the NHS and us. Healthier diets will not provide a quick fix, but the taxes from junk food could go straight to the coffers of the local NHS organisations, and that would do something fast to ease the pain of the inevitable cuts to come.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

June 7th, 2009

Sadistic Sonnex is the face of Labour’s greatest disgrace

When punishment comes – such is the arbitrary nature of things – it is often for the wrong offence. Gordon Brown and new Labour are being most terribly punished at the moment, but not for the crimes of omission and commission of which they are most guilty. Expenses fiddling and cabinet squabbling, low though it all is, seem to me rather trivial in comparison with Labour’s incompetence since 1997. Why, for instance, huff and puff about hog-swilling and backstabbing when this government’s incompetence led to the slaughter of the two French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez? Last week the government had to face the fury of the bereaved parents, who are understandably threatening to sue. The unspeakable deaths of these two young men could almost certainly have been avoided: they died in agony because the system that should have protected them has collapsed. That is why Brown and his colleagues deserve to be thrown out in disgrace. Dano Sonnex, one of the two murderers, was quite clearly an extremely dangerous and disturbed young man from a violent and criminal family. Again and again he came to the attention of people who knew that or ought to have known it or worked it out and done something about it, but who again and again failed in their responsibilities. Time after time Sonnex fell through – or was allowed to escape through – the holes in the net that is supposed to keep us safe from people like him. When he and Nigel Farmer stabbed the two Frenchmen to death, he should have been in jail. Instead he was on probation, under the low-level supervision of a lowly paid, newly qualified, inexperienced young case officer in a tough part of London, who had to deal with 126 other cases. Does this sound familiar? Before being put in her charge, this psychopathic young man had been passed from person to person, from agency to agency, in a way that seems almost random, even though it is in fact the way the system “works”. Does this remind you of anything or anyone? In 2004, while serving an eight-year sentence for a stabbing and for four knifepoint robberies, Sonnex told a prison doctor that he felt his anger meant he could kill, but this information, although filed, was never passed on to prison or probation officers. While in prison he got into official trouble 40 times for drugs, violence and setting fire to his cell – something that ought to have led someone to wonder about his state of mind and consult his file. Nonetheless, probation officers assessed Sonnex as a medium risk to the public, rather than a high risk, which meant he was placed on a “Level 1 multi-agency public protection arrangement” – the phrase multi-agency itself suggests some of the institutional problems – without even a proper assessment meeting taking place. Upon release this violent criminal was handed over to the unlucky young probation officer in Lewisham. She was able to see him only for about 20 minutes a week because her caseload was so huge. The vast increase in the probation services budget has been accompanied by a yet vaster increase in their duties. Even when Sonnex tied up a pregnant woman and her boyfriend and menaced them at knifepoint, only three days after his release, and even though the police knew a lot about the extreme violence and crime within his extended family, and even though he should have gone straight back to jail from probation, and even though he did go back briefly for something different, magistrates let him out on bail and he was able to torture and kill. This is not just one of those rare concatenations of accidental mistakes. It is all too familiar. It’s institutional, or perhaps one should say multi-institutional. It’s just like the story of Victoria Climbié. Like her, Sonnex was passed from one agency to another, dragged from one professional to another – one busy, one on an away day, one from an agency, one a temp, one blind to her injuries, another unable to get through to a social worker in an emergency, and no one in all this multi-agency nightmare able or willing to grasp responsibility, other than the unlucky person least qualified to do so, upon whom it was dumped. “Multi-agency” and “interface” and “joined-up government” – those watchwords – have come, despite Labour’s promises, to mean their own absence or opposite. It means promising everything, attempting too much and achieving all too little. The Brown and Blair governments have no excuse; they were warned of these systemic problems from the first, yet they succeeded only in making them worse. Jack Straw, who as justice secretary apologised so inadequately last week to the parents of the murdered Frenchmen, was the very man who as home secretary nearly 10 years ago called for an investigation into Victoria Climbié’s death. Precisely this same “multi-agency” failure was revealed in exhaustive detail back then, in Lord Laming’s magisterial report of 2001. Yet Laming’s warnings fell on stony ground. They did not prevent the horribly similar death of Baby P in 2007. Nor did the wider lessons prevent the all too similar murders of Bonomo and Ferez. It’s like seeing the same horror movie run over and over again. The name Sonnex will now stand with Baby P for the real disgrace of new Labour. There is a lot to be said about why all these different agencies failed. First, one should not hurry to blame the individual social worker or probation officer. Second, whatever the long-standing failings of such services, they have since 1997 been overwhelmed by new policies, new demands, new increased workloads and demoralising micromanagement brought on by Labour initiativitis. Admittedly the government is trying, with its new social work taskforce (brought together after Laming’s report on the death of Baby P), to think radically about such matters. But how late it is, how late. Actually it is too late. It is too late to talk, as politicians usually do on such occasions, of learning lessons. In 12 years of office Labour has failed to learn the most important lessons, even when they have been clearly spelt out. Brown should acknowledge that Labour governments have failed in a Labour government’s primary purpose – to protect the most vulnerable and to keep the public safe from the most avoidable harm – and resign primarily because of that.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

May 31st, 2009

No privacy and no power – there’s no way I’d be an MP

On the day of her well-deserved downfall last week, the MP Julie Kirkbride published an article attempting to explain herself and her expenses. It reminded me of Cherie Blair’s unfortunate comment to the cameras, when tearfully apologising for the episode of the Bristol flats and the conman, saying she had too many mumsy balls in the air to get everything right. Kirkbride, according to her own account, has a vast number of mumsy balls in the air, which explains her high-maintenance requirements, and she is now worried about the millions of working mothers who, like her, might aspire to political office. “What effect,” she asks, “will stories like mine have on mothers who aspire to be MPs?” A very good question. I am sorry to say that some cynics around me have suggested her story is likely to draw mothers into parliament in droves – most of us had not the slightest idea until now that there were such rich pickings for MPs. And we women can count for the time being on tremendous discrimination in our favour. Although it is not likely that a woman MP will any longer be able to get away with such flamboyant expenses claims as Kirkbride’s, all the reforming proposals discussed so far suggest that the Commons is likely to continue to be a nice little earner for a working mother. However, and less cynically, Kirkbride’s question reminded me of one I’ve been asking myself for 20 years – do I want to stand for parliament? Many people have encouraged me to try, including readers; I will add myself to the list of columnists who make this boast. Did I – do I – want to follow in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher and Betty Boothroyd? There are so many things in public life that I would like to see done and undone. My work has given me countless opportunities to learn and think about such things. But my answer is always, regretfully, no. The first and unfailing reason has to do with privacy, and Kirkbride’s story very much strengthens this reason. It has always been true that MPs must accept a high risk of the loss of privacy. Their private lives are regularly exposed for public entertainment, not necessarily in the public interest. I have the same low tabloid tastes as anyone else and have loved scurrilous stories about honourable members in dishonourable dramas. But it isn’t right to break into people’s private lives without good reason. I’ve always hated the idea of giving up my privacy so much that I’ve had to put aside any political ambitions. It is not that I have many secrets or am particularly consumed with guilt and shame. In fact I rather wish my life had been more outrageous. But everybody has secrets, and not just her own but also the secrets of those close to her – father, mother, cousins, siblings, husband – and secrets that might cause pain. Everybody is entitled to keep secrets within the law until she or he stands for public office. Traditionally in this country there has been some, if not much, respect for the private lives of politicians: now, after the expenses scandal, I suspect there will not. While our frenzied interest in lavatory seats, moats, moles and dirty videos throughout this scandal has been entirely justified, I am afraid it is creating an almost total contempt for privacy that would deter me from standing. The Rev Joanna Jepson, an antiabortion campaigner, demanded last week that the Department of Health reveal information about details of certain late-term abortions, citing the expenses scandal as a justification for this extraordinary breach of privacy. This, I am afraid, will be the first of many justifications to make anything and everything public, for the inspection of the people. We are about to see the deliberate abandonment of privacy in a tragic overreaction to the current scandal. What sensible, sensitive woman, with a couple of innocent secrets, would provoke the interest of the angry masses by contesting a seat? However, even if I weren’t troubled by the loss of privacy, I’ve become increasingly convinced that there is little point in standing for parliament, woman or man, unless one had a good chance of becoming a senior minister – perhaps not even then. Having heard all the fascinating snippets about how MPs spend their time in their constituencies, I am beginning to think they are wasting most of it. What I think an MP should most importantly do – what I would like to do – is to help change the law so that citizens get better government and a great deal less of it. It would mean trying to return to the people freedom and power taken from them, without leaving the needy in need. To do that would mean having a broad and deep understanding of all kinds of complex matters – disability, unemployment, education, health. It means struggling against great opposition to understand the mindsets, prejudices and covert intentions of the various establishments that are actually in charge of these things and how they work. I know as a journalist that this takes years. It is a full-time job in itself and this kind of commitment is necessary to scrutinise legislation, sit on select committees and propose radical reform. MPs simply do not have the time to do it, even if they had the will, the ability and the power. Nor do ministers – for a different reason: they rarely stay in the post for long enough to have any understanding of their subject or ministry. MPs are consumed with parish-pump stuff, helping constituents with local and personal concerns, which other people could and should be doing. Of course constituents ought to bring their concerns to their MPs, but the MP should get involved only when there is some genuine political issue, some serious wrong or something of national interest. Sorting out a squabble with neighbours or getting involved in local ethnic minority disputes is not proper work for MPs. There is also the inbuilt conflict of interest for MPs, between what constituents want (a rescue for the car industry, say) and the national interest. Even if all this were miraculously solved and I, the aspiring Margaret or Betty, were in parliament, there would still be little point in bothering, or in neglecting my children as ferociously as women MPs must. The truth is that the great majority of legislation is not decided in Westminster, anyway. It’s decided in Brussels. Now there’s a thought. And it would be a much nicer little earner, too, with no questions asked.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

May 24th, 2009

One TV channel and three radio stations, that’s all the BBC needs

Few things in life are simple. That’s partly because humans are not just problem-solving but also problem-seeking creatures. We seem to be driven to make mountains out of molehills. However, there is one thing in our national life that is extremely simple, and that is what to do about the BBC. Last week, after lengthy and worthy debate, MPs rejected by two votes to one a Conservative proposal to freeze the TV licence fee for a year. David Cameron had suggested this in March, saying the BBC and other public bodies must in these hard times try to do more with less. The BBC itself was naturally opposed to any such self-denying ordinance, calling it a “recipe for curbing the BBC’s editorial independence”; though it is difficult to see quite how such a disaster could be brought on by such a modest suggestion. And in the Commons, the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, warned that “ripping up the licence fee settlement” would undermine the BBC and “take away its creativity and stability”. So our MPs voted in favour of the licence fee rise as planned in the current six-year settlement, in line with inflation. All this is nonsense. Both sides are quite wrong. The BBC should not have its licence fee put up at all, in line with inflation or with anything else. On the contrary, the licence fee should be savagely cut back, permanently. I am not saying this because I resent or dislike the BBC. On the contrary, I trained there, worked there for several years, watch it regularly and regard it, for all its glaring faults, as a national treasure. It does many important things superbly well. You could almost say the BBC is, or was and could again be, a light unto the nations. The BBC is, however, far too big and it does far too much, in a pointless and vastly expensive frenzy of misguided activity. It fills the airwaves almost round the clock with programmes it should not be making and it fills its corridors with people it should not employ. It wastes millions on layers of management and on unnecessary salaries, initiatives, away days and jollies. All this should stop. Leave it all to commercial media producers, if they can make money out of it or want to waste their own money on it. What the BBC should do is what commercial producers don’t do, can’t do, can’t do equally well or won’t do properly, and only that. For that it deserves protection from the rough winds of commerce and competition, and only for that. Everyone knows what the jewels in the BBC crown are. Audience numbers don’t matter; the BBC should be aiming at the highest quality in everything it does, from news, science and drama to education, arts and minority programming. There is no reason a public subsidy should be used to make low-level chat shows, populist lifestyle programmes, asinine breakfast-time witterings, dumbed-down pop music channels, undistinguished cooking and travel shows and all the rest. Other producers can do these undemanding shows just as well, or better, and the BBC shouldn’t waste its resources on something that has strayed so far from its Reithian ideal and its national-treasure status. The problem, of course, is not just that the BBC is wasting our money on programmes we can see elsewhere and on programmes that aren’t much good. It is not just that in its misguided attempts to compete with the commercial sector for mass audiences the BBC has consistently dumbed down what it has always done best, often for smaller audiences – viewers of the BBC’s more serious political programmes must agree that many of these have gone down noticeably in quality. The really important problem is that it’s both daft and wrong in principle to pay a public institution public money to compete directly with the private commercial sector. It is illogical and unfair. The more the BBC tries to compete with commercial producers, the more illogical and unfair it is being, to them and to us, the licence-fee payers. As with all principles, there can be exceptions. The BBC’s website is a glaring exception: its established existence and its dazzling superiority make it difficult for other media organisations to develop in this hugely important market of the future. In this the BBC is doing exactly what commercial competitors are desperately trying to do and must do successfully to survive. Yet I believe it is in the national interest to have this website, because it is both wholly independent editorially and wholly accountable to the British public. So, too, it is essential to have truly independent news-gathering of the sort the BBC can and mostly does provide – something hugely expensive to do and so tempting to abuse that the protection of the fee-paying public must be a public good. There are other public goods the BBC has always provided. One is its excellent training. Film and video editors, lighting and set designers, make-up and costume artists, floor and studio managers, special-effects experts, IT wizards and technicians of every kind have been trained by the BBC and sent out all over the world: the commercial sector depends on this tradition. Another public good is the World Service, which is so good that BBC supremos are constantly tempted to cut it. Yet another is the great benefit of watching programmes without the mental damage done by constant advertising. And it is quite reasonable to expect the public to pay, one way or another, for a great public good; the advantage of cutting back the BBC is that we would get this national treasure for a lot less. This simple and glaringly obvious idea is not new. Antony Jay, creator with Jonathan Lynn of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, and author of Corporation Man, one of the best management books I’ve read, has thought so for some time. Last year he wrote a pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies, suggesting the BBC should reduce itself to one national television channel and one speech radio channel: judging by the cost, then, of BBC1 and Radio 4 combined, this would reduce its annual budget by about 65%, a saving of around £2.7 billion a year of our money, or 80% of our licence fee. I don’t think such a scheme is unreasonable, though I’d hang on to Radio 3 and the World Service as well. Nor do I think it would damage the BBC: harsh and radical pruning leads to re-invigorated new growth – another simple idea that could well be considered by other public institutions in these hard times.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

May 17th, 2009

When today’s left speaks it is right-wing bigotry we hear

Bigotry, like poverty, is always with us. It is not often in this country that you come across open, unselfconsciously brutal bigotry, but it is always there somewhere, lurking in the most respectable of places, and sometimes it drops its mask and bares its vicious teeth. Twice last week I was astonished by glimpses of this vindictive grimace. I had begun to think this country was largely free of the ideological hatred and class war that so disfigured it in the 1960s and 1970s. Even the ban on foxhunting has failed. But now I realise that impression is all too superficial. Bigotry will out, and it wants to condemn, punish and control. It is the mindset of the totalitarian. The Guardian published a column by Zoe Williams on Tuesday that ought to make any right-minded person gasp with shock, no matter what his or her political views. Quite a few Guardian readers were indeed shocked, to judge by their comments online. Williams was discussing the fact that many parents who would prefer to send their children to private schools – she calls them privateers – are obliged by the economic slump to send them to state schools. Her view is that the children of such privateers should be forced to the bottom of the waiting lists for state primary schools. Never mind, she says, whether such children are “swamping” state primaries, or might do in the future, or not at all: this has nothing to do with the availability of school places and everything to do with ideology – such children must be put at the back of the queue. Her view, unpleasant though it is, might be worth rational discussion. But Williams’s tone is far from rational. It is frightening. She writes like an old-fashioned class warrior who believes children must be punished for the class guilt of their parents, and if that sounds vindictive, she admits she means it to. “Ha! Good,” she exclaims unselfconsciously. Perhaps this is an opportune moment to point out that Williams was privately educated at the expensive and selective Godolphin and Latymer school in west London, which no doubt helped her to get a place at Oxford and a job at The Guardian; should she, too, be punished for the class crimes of her parents in educating her privately? Which queue should Williams be shoved to the back of to atone for her inherited class guilt? What horrifies me more than her general approach is the totalitarian detail in which she indulges her class hatred. Her list of exclusion for privateers’ children is precisely graded. To the bottom she dispatches those who have been recently removed from private schools; “above them but below everybody else” should be children with siblings at private schools; and somewhere near them should be children whose parents’ first choice was a faith school. It reminded me at once of the careful protocols of Nazi selection systems, or the elaborate plans put forward by Stalinists and Maoists; it reads like those chilling, heart-rending accounts of life in the USSR and communist China, from Solzhenitsyn to Jung Chang. “There are other questions”, Williams goes on, apparently ignorant of similar interrogations during the worst of 20th-century totalitarianism, that “an admissions process could use to whittle out privateers. Do they have a 4×4? Can parents provide a letter from any local left-wing organisation attesting to their commitment to open-access state education? Did they go to any meetings? . . . come on, you lefties . . . what happened to your sharp elbows?” I rest my case. This is hate speech, class war and political bigotry of the most vicious sort. What is one to make of the suggestion that “local left-wing organisations” should stand in judgment on parents and their thoughts? Just as astonishing was a comment made in a guide to adoption published by a state-funded national agency, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. Its new booklet, the Pink Guide to Adoption for Lesbians and Gay Men, describes people who oppose gay adoption as “retarded homophobes”. The association repeated this choice phrase on its Be My Parent website, although it has since been removed. This again was a shocking glimpse of the unmasked teeth of vicious bigotry, made even worse by unselfconscious hypocrisy. “Retarded” is a word that no decent person would now use to describe another. It was a cruel and largely American expression for people with intellectual impairments. For years it has been considered inaccurate, ignorant and offensive and demeaning to people with learning disabilities. I find it amazing that anyone would use it at all, let alone in public or in print, let alone the people in the adoption association, which is about as politically correct as an organisation can be, and still less in a booklet aimed at a minority that has good reason to notice and resent demeaning words. It seems the phrase was written by a contributor, not by the association, but that is no excuse – the word “retarded” should have leapt out at those responsible for producing the booklet. And how much worse it is to use the word “retarded” as a conscious insult. How can any outfit subsidised by the taxpayer and run by the supposedly politically correct use any disability as an insult? And how much worse again it is to use such bizarre insults against people to discredit their arguments and their beliefs. Does the association think that people who disagree with it are, ipso facto, “retards”? Is disagreement with it a sign of cognitive impairment? Does it perhaps think that people who disagree are not merely mentally handicapped (in another old-fashioned expression) but mentally ill as well, in need of locking up in an insane asylum as in totalitarian countries? Whether people who oppose gay adoption are right or wrong is not the point. I happen to think they are wrong, but it will not do to dismiss their arguments with insults – insults that are not only offensive to them but also even more insulting to innocent bystanders. I am glad, however, that these bigots have done so, because those who wrote these words and published them and publicised them on the internet have revealed themselves in their true colours. For the same reason I am glad that Williams felt free to publish her spiteful rant and that The Guardian printed it. By their words shall ye know them. That is one of the great beauties of free speech. If we must have bigots and totalitarians in our midst, it is good to know who they are and what they think, so we can beware of them.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

May 10th, 2009

Spare the public purse – bulldoze this equality maze

Hard times mean hard choices. It is very hard, now that the public coffers are empty, for any party to decide which public services to cut. All the same, not all hard choices are equally hard. I have a suggestion. It is to cut the whole of new Labour’s equality agenda as it affects public services. This is not as inflammatory as it may sound. Of course there are those in the equality industry who could not possibly accept that what they do is not an absolutely priority for public spending. Only 10 days ago Harriet Harman introduced an equalities bill with which she hopes to impose astonishingly heavy and expensive obligations on public bodies in the name of equality, if it becomes law. But there are many more thoughtful people, wholly committed to an ideal of equality, who might be persuaded to reconsider whether this agenda is really essential at a time of financial crisis, especially if they knew what it actually involved. Surely they would not argue that this vast agenda, with all its elaborate provisions, is anywhere near as important as looking after lost and damaged children, or protecting them from abuse. Nor can it be as urgently indispensable as paying for halfway decent nursing care homes for the elderly, or looking after people with mental illnesses. Our social services and mental health services and our care homes are quite horribly underfunded. Compared with these burning needs, the costly details of Labour’s equality agenda pale into insignificance. As things stand under legislation introduced in 2000, 2006 and 2007, public sector bodies, all 43,000 of them, are subject to statutory public sector duties. These formal duties place upon them wide-ranging legal obligations to promote race equality, disability equality and gender equality in everything they do or plan; all this is, in effect, driven and policed by the new mega-quango, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). I suspect many people don’t appreciate how hugely this has all developed since the Macpherson report of 1999 into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Post-Macpherson, according to the EHRC, it was clear that a “radical rethink” was needed about the way the public sector approached discrimination. That rethink was a great deal more radical than many of us have ever quite appreciated. A rejection of wrongful discrimination has somehow been transformed into a compulsory imposition of equality – an endless task, in any case, since it is quite impossible. The EHRC itself explains that those trying to drive forward radical change post-Macpherson felt that the emphasis of existing legislation on equality was on dealing with cases of discrimination after the event, not on anticipation and prevention. And they felt existing legislation was aimed at dealing with individual cases, rather than with issues within organisations such as institutional racism. So the new race equality duty of 2000 was designed to shift the emphasis: public bodies would now have a statutory duty positively to promote equality, not merely to avoid discrimination. “The effect of this was to place race equality at the centre of all policy development and decision making, resulting in organisational change.” In the same spirit a disability equality duty was imposed in 2006, followed by a gender equality duty in 2007. All this was imposed on top of existing legislation against racial and other discrimination. Whatever one might think of the underlying intentions, the effect of all this was to create a bureaucrat’s paradise – a maze without any exit, winding among compulsory equality schemes, policy statements, codes of practice, statements of objectives, impact assessment, “enforcement toolkits”, confessions of failure, internal consultations, restatements, information-gathering, ethnic bean-counting (as if that were really possible), gender bean-counting, the pursuit of numerical representation, interaction with stakeholders, external consultations, new plans, revisions of plans, reassessment of plans, networking, disability monitoring, training, self-assessment, review of progress, compliance and external inspection and all the correspondence pertaining to the above, in order to “pay due regard to the need to take action on race, disability and gender equality”. That, as anyone can see, is a requirement as long as a piece of string. One’s head aches at the thought of all the tedious, repetitive reading and writing and discussion involved for countless men and women, not to mention the incessant meetings. The cost is not merely astronomical – it is infinite. For when could any local authority put its hand on its heart and say its equality duty was done – total equality had been achieved in the new Maoist heaven of West Barsetshire? Surely it would be better, at least while public money is so scarce, to rely on the earlier legislation, pre-Macpherson, and on the goodwill of public servants, who, after all, are better known for political correctness in such matters than its opposite. It seems to me rather insulting to them to suggest that they need constant surveillance to do their jobs like decent human beings. I cannot imagine there can be many nurses or teachers or social workers who have racist or sexist inclinations and, if they do, they will soon be faced down by the anger of their colleagues, their bosses and their clients, not to mention the massed forces of unions, campaigning charities, advisory charities, industrial tribunals, the attention of the media and the majesty of the law. To say the equality agenda should be scrapped is not to suggest that anyone ought to abandon his or her ideal of equality. And it is most certainly not to suggest that we as a society should abandon our shared belief that unfair discrimination against people on the grounds of race or sex is wrong. Of course it is. I firmly believe that we are almost all united against unjust discrimination. That, of course, is not the same as being united in favour of a proactive equality agenda; many people have grave doubts about that, if they are not entirely opposed. But that is not the point here. The point is that this agenda, right or wrong, is dispensable. Just how much dispensing with it would save is difficult to discover. I challenge the National Audit Office to tell us. For if the great British public did know, I suspect there would be no political difficulty for any party in axeing this agenda, to make a huge and popular saving.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

April 19th, 2009

One song and she breaks the grip of this sneering world

If you haven’t seen it already, watch it now. Don’t miss it. If you don’t have a computer, see it on someone else’s. I was sent the link last week, without explanation, in a short e-mail from a friend, and idly double-clicked on it, imagining it was another of the internet jokes with which friends distract one another from working. In fact, this short video clip of a middle-aged spinster singing, posted on YouTube only a few days ago, is one of the most moving and astonishing things I have seen for months. It made me cry. I’m not alone: the film star Demi Moore tweeted that it made her “teary”, and everyone I’ve shown it to has clearly been very moved, from girls in their early twenties to several late-middle-aged businessmen at a dinner party on Thursday. What I saw on their faces as they watched was incredulity and a dawning, I truly think, of joy. The public response is making internet history. By this weekend more than 25m people had hit YouTube to watch. For the few people who don’t know about this clip, I should explain. To me, watching without any idea of what was coming, it was at first rather puzzling: an odd, dumpy, middle-aged woman, wearing an old-fashioned frock and unfashionably cut grey curls, is being interviewed, casually, in a busy TV studio by two patronising young media men. It quickly emerges that her name is Susan Boyle; she is nearly 48, unemployed and just about to sing on a huge stage in the Britain’s Got Talent show. There is something quaint about her manner, or, as people used to say, a bit simple, and something vulnerable too, as she keeps hitting slightly the wrong conversational note. She reveals that she lives alone with her cat Pebbles and has never been married nor ever been kissed, with a strange, self-deprecating smile that I recognised in retrospect: it’s the secret smile of someone who has often been laughed at. But she is full of a surprising confidence. “I’m going to make that audience rock,” says this most unlikely person. Anyone of any sympathy would at this point have felt sorry for her – sorry for her misguided confidence, sorry for her delusion that she could possibly hold her own performing in a talent contest and sorry about the growing obsession with celebrity among people who can only be hurt and disappointed by their immeasurable distance from it. An unsympathetic person, by contrast, might have sneered slightly, but the derision and jeering contempt that actually met this poor woman, seconds later, when she appeared on stage was quite shockingly brutal, especially for these sentimental times. She might as well have been a martyr in a Roman arena. As she clumsily answered a few questions, and said she wanted to be like Elaine Paige, TV cameras filmed open contempt on the faces of the young audience and there were audible boos and jeers. Worse still, the judges were also laughing at her, Simon Cowell rolling his eyes in affected disbelief and Piers Morgan openly sneering. All this because a plain and middle-aged lady, the living antithesis of youth and cool, had the effrontery to enter a talent contest. Yet Miss Boyle, with her strange serenity, seemed oddly untroubled. Then she began to sing, and after only two or three notes of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables, it was absolutely obvious that she was a star. As one of the judges said later, and most revealingly, they knew at once that they had “found gold”. She has, without any doubt, a beautiful and powerful voice, and all the confidence, the authority, the self-discipline and the presence of a great performer; her talent transforms her. The judges and audience could not fail to recognise this and very soon they were standing and cheering rapturously, astonishment all over their faces. What really interests me about the clip is not so much her talent as her story and people’s passionate reaction to it. Susan Boyle’s experience has all the symbolic power of a fairy story. It’s a story of transformation – always one of the most powerful – both for her and for her studio audience. She, in fairy-story terms, is the ugly old lady, despised by all, who turns out to be a beloved and powerful princess; the spell that sets her free and makes her great is her magic talent. And the special magic of this talent is that it is makes no distinctions of age or beauty or disability; anyone might have this magic power, whether or not anyone else knows. Aspirations and dreams need not always grow old, though we must. It is a fairy story to make grown men and women weep, and it did. Similarly, the jeering audience of vain young people trying to catch the camera’s eye and the preening judges of this contest are the nasty boys and girls of fairy stories who mock the poor old lady because she is not young and beautiful, only to be punished when her real self is revealed. And their punishment is to be revealed as they truly are – heartless, thoughtless and superficial – the flotsam and jetsam of the polluted seas of celebrity, likely to sink without trace into toxic foam. They will grow old too, to be ignored in their turn, and then they will understand that appearances are not everything. And those who despise people who are not thin, not young, not beautiful and not cool will one day find themselves despised in exactly the same way, by people just like their younger selves. That is enough to make young people think. This side of the story became even more forceful for me when it emerged that Miss Boyle suffered mild brain damage at birth, causing problems that meant she was bullied and belittled at school. In retrospect I think that is enough to explain her slightly unusual manner, and the bullying and belittling sneers of the studio audience; it’s what they were laughing at. But Susan Boyle managed to rise above people like them. She found herself in church choirs and karaoke, restored and triumphant in music; it’s a story of the undefeated spirit. Hers is also finally a story of the astonishing power of music to bring people together, transcending all differences. Everyone should sing. Everyone certainly can sing – there is almost no one who cannot learn to sing in tune. And the joy of singing in itself, or in a choir, is one of the best consolations I can think of for life’s sadnesses; I started singing lessons a couple of years ago and am amazed by what it has come to mean. As a nation, as individuals, we don’t sing enough. We should be inspired by the surprising Susan Boyle.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

April 12th, 2009

Public opinion gets burnt to a crisp by the Chelsea Toaster

People are angry, increasingly so. The new rage has to do with a growing sense of unfairness and powerlessness and it expresses itself about all kinds of concerns, both large and small, from Mr Jacqui Smith’s rude videos to the army’s inadequate equipment. What happens to the site of the old Chelsea Barracks in west London is a small matter, relatively speaking. One could say that whatever is finally built there will affect only a few Londoners who live nearby and even fewer plutocrats who want a luxury flat close to Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal hospital. I would say it will affect a great many more people, and for generations to come, but whatever the number, the cause is one that rallies people all over the country in spirit. That’s because the proposal for Chelsea Barracks is a perfect symbol of the contempt in which the Establishment holds us. To start from the beginning, the land on which Chelsea Barracks used to stand is our land. It was held by the government in our name to house soldiers. When the army moved out, the government could easily have kept the land in our name for some other good purpose: school playing fields, for example. Instead, it flogged the site last year for as much as it could get from some Qatari developers, who in turn planned to cram every possible inch of the land with buildings for the best return on their huge investment. A brief glance at the original proposal, designed by the architect Richard Rogers and team, will explain why it was nicknamed “the Toaster”: it shows a line of ugly, utilitarian multistorey metallic buildings, crammed in such close parallel lines onto the site that there seems only just room to toast a thin slice of bread between each of them. After prolonged public objections, the architects made some of the buildings a bit lower and some smaller. Even so, the whole thing remains an offence against the eye and the spirit. It is a predictable design of huge, harsh, soulless glass and steel rectangles – too shiny, too tall and entirely impersonal. Cities all over the country have been made desolate by these inhuman buildings. But the ordinary person can do nothing. Petitions and consultations mean nothing. Planners do their worst and local elections make no difference. We just have to stand by while these buildings go up. Not only that. We have to accept the contempt of architects and planners for our philistine lack of taste. They make it quite clear that we, the public, are too ignorant to appreciate good architecture. We must leave such things to those who know better, such as those who make their money out of designing or building these monstrosities. Which of these buildings is lovable, though? Which raises the spirit, as you walk about or cross London’s bridges? They merely interrupt the celebrated view from Westminster Bridge, unwelcome in themselves and a reminder of worse to come. Earth hath not anything more unfair, one might say. I don’t think I am opposed by nature to modern architecture. There are a few modern buildings I like, particularly in other countries. But ask anyone, even someone who claims to like new buildings, to name a couple they particularly love in this country – as one loves Sherborne Abbey or a 19th-century terrace in Bristol – and it is surprising how few they will come up with. In London, some mention the Lloyd’s Building, which is at least interesting, but the Gherkin is vulgar, suggestive and pointless – there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it to be that silly shape. The Barbican is ugly and depressing but at least not as hideous as the South Bank complex. Canary Wharf will be seen before long as a monument to all that was greedy and ignorant about the derivatives bubble and the masters of the universe of our time – oversized, opulent and heartless. The Islamic Centre opposite the Natural History Museum is shuttered, blind and psychologically closed, despite its eye-catching veneer. As for the Millennium Dome, it is a ghastly reminder of the worst of bad planning and bad design. These are, of course, public buildings. The record is far worse when it comes to places where people live – machines for living in, as Le Corbusier said, in a phrase that encapsulates the inhumanity of modernism. I can hardly think of a single beautiful housing development in the country, apart from a few four-storey council flats in 19th-century streets. On the contrary, most modern housing estates express a desolation that would have astonished even Dickens. So now we have a particularly charming part of London, loved for its low-rise, human scale, its easy elegance and its history, about to be overwhelmed by the type of edifice that has blighted so many other pleasant places. For once, at least, not all leading architects are united in favour. The highly regarded Will Alsop has said he is not a great admirer of the Rogers plan, and David Chipperfield has expressed concern too. But public protest will achieve nothing and the government’s architecture watchdog has just announced its support for a new, improved Toaster scenario. When looking for a representative of the people to stand against all this, one would not automatically turn to the Prince of Wales. He is uniquely unqualified for the role; his inherited position prevents him from taking sides and using his influence to do so. That – although he doesn’t seem to recognise it – is part of the understanding accepted long ago by the Windsors: to stay in office they abandoned all power, including power they might exercise through taking sides in public. So it was wrong for Prince Charles to speak out against genetically modified crops, a controversial political issue. And it’s wrong for him to speak out against this architectural proposal, even though he is quite right. Yet he alone seems to have captured the public mood. He cannot tell the planning department at Westminster council what to do, but he has asked his royal friends in Qatar to dump Rogers’s development and, one way or another, he’s proving a powerful supporter of what most people want. I can’t feel this is right, although I am grateful nonetheless. How odd it is that the growing democratic deficit in this country should, in this case at least, have been filled by a most undemocratically chosen prince.