Sorry, but we can’t just lock up pyschos

It takes a strange kind of mother to force her tiny children to hit and punch each other, to goad them with insults to fight harder and to film them as they weep, laughing all the while. That is what Zara Care did to her two-year-old boy and her three-year-old girl, egged on by her own mother and two of her sisters.

Quite rightly, her children were taken away from her for ever at Plymouth crown court last week and given into the custody of their paternal grandparents. The unfortunately named Ms Care also pleaded guilty to other offences of child cruelty, including ill treatment, neglect and abandonment.

In such circumstances it is usual to point an accusing finger at social services. Why did they not prevent this happening in the first place? Wasn’t it obvious that Care’s family was extremely dysfunctional?

However — and without knowing all the facts — I doubt that would be fair. There are countless young mothers (and fathers) who come from horribly dysfunctional families, who may suffer from personality disorders or low intelligence, not to mention poverty, illiteracy and drink or drug abuse. It must be difficult for social workers, doctors, nurses or teachers to predict that, of all these inadequate mothers, this particular one will do her children serious harm.

Even if, most improbably, one could make such a prediction with any confidence, what should one then do? Lock the woman up, or take away her babies before she has done anything wrong, just in case?

Zara Care’s story made me think again of the Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-hui. There were many indications that he was disturbed. Several times his teachers warned the university’s counselling services, the police and the dean of studies about his frightening behaviour. It emerged that nearly 18 months ago Cho was declared mentally ill and “an imminent danger to others” by a judge, and was admitted to a mental health unit. But before long he was released for outpatient treatment after a doctor certified that although Cho was mentally ill, “he does not present an imminent danger to himself or others”.

I mention this not to point blame at Virginia Tech or those responsible for Cho and for the safety of all students. It must be obvious to any fair-minded person that it is extremely difficult to determine whether a disturbed person is dangerous and, having done so, what to do about him.

Does he suffer from a mental illness that can be treated? Does he suffer from a personality disorder that cannot? These diagnoses are hard to make. What’s more, the fashions in diagnosis change. So, too, do ideas of what can and cannot be treated. It is still not legal in this country to detain someone without being able to treat him.

Professional judgment is very erratic — Cho’s doctors disagreed, for example, and scientific understanding of the human psyche is still primitive. In America, the FBI and secret services have considered profiling school shooters like Cho, to stop them before they start, but have concluded that it is not possible at present.

By coincidence, these questions were well debated in the House of Commons last week. For nearly 10 years the government has being trying to change the law on mental illness, or what we now have to call mental health. Last Monday its controversial mental health bill received a second reading. The bill’s main purpose is to lay down the circumstances in which a mentally ill person can be compulsorily detained or treated without consent.

The government is partly responding to outrage at the terrifying murders committed by mentally ill people who have been released from mental hospitals or were supposedly being treated in the community. It’s not possible to be sure how many people are killed this way each year, but the number for the past eight years in England and Wales seems to be about 50.

True to form, the government and Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, incline in the direction of compulsion and control. Their many critics on all political and medical sides, especially in the Lords, have tried with some success to soften the terms of the bill in the direction of freedom and civil rights.

Professor Sheila Hollins, the mother of Abigail Witchalls who was paralysed in an attack by a disturbed young man, is also president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She argues in support of the Lords amendments in the interests of patients’ rights. So does Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, and an alliance of medical professionals and civil libertarians. My heart and instincts are with them — for now.

In future, I suspect, their convictions and my inclinations will change. In future it will become easier and easier to recognise from their earliest years, with proper scientific predictors, the men and women who will almost certainly do harm to others. Then, I suspect, the balance between personal freedom and security will change dramatically.

It is already happening. A few years ago American studies of children with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder argued that they were much more likely than others to commit violent crimes later and that this could be identified by brain scans. The scans could even suggest the degree of probability.

Dutch studies of a family of highly aggressive and impulsive (but mentally healthy) men claim to have found clear genetic markers for their condition. What’s more, it will probably become easier to treat or to control such people by new scientific means — one of the objections to locking up psychopaths is that they cannot be treated. Then the question of their civil liberties will fade and with it our objections.

Meanwhile, in America there is a voluntary gated community of convicted paedophiles, who have come together for protection from themselves and others. Outside their ghetto they know they will almost certainly attack again and be attacked in turn. Perhaps this solution could be offered to others with dangerous and untreatable problems — shooters, sadists and psychopaths.

It is a miserable image, but perhaps it’s better than the alternative — being locked up, being given compulsory community treatment orders or being lynched.

The good wife is an old fashioned realist

How to be a perfect wife is not, you might have thought, a very contemporary question. Decades of feminism have been much more concerned with how to be a perfect career woman, exotic lover, fully fledged fashionista, alpha female and, latterly, yummy mummy; being a wife has been somewhat incidental, even for those who get married or stay married.

Gloomy research appears from time to time, suggesting that when women who try to have it all find they can’t, the first thing they give up on is their husbands, not least on sex with their husbands. That may be partly why two marriages out of three end in divorce and most people don’t marry at all; marriage rates are at their lowest since records began.

So was rather quaint to read in The Times last week an article entitled “In search of the good wife”, complete with a questionnaire from 1958. “Do you renew your nail varnish as soon as it chips?” it demands. “Do you go through his clothes every month or so to check on minor repairs? And then do you make them? Would you stay on at a party when you knew he was tired and wanted to go home? Do you use table napkins? Do you know the cheapest cuts of meat? Do you clean your handbag as often as you clean your shoes? Do you resent it when he has a night out with the boys?”

A familiar picture soon emerges of a carefully groomed woman with primped hair and a wasp waist who calms down the children and touches up her lipstick when her husband comes home from work, listens charmingly to his day’s debriefing, and then offers him a well cooked but thrifty dinner.

There was a time not so long ago when that would have been simply ridiculous. This traditional vision of matrimonial labour was considered not just laughable but repressive: a woman’s abilities and ambitions were sacrificed to her husband’s, without any security other than his goodwill.

Now, though, it seems that this vision is being revisited, and not only by Stepford wives, or those alarming “surrendered wives” of the American religious right. Ordinary women are at last beginning to realise that feminists, in their passionate rejection of traditional marriage, may have thrown out the man with the bathwater, and that they rather wish they hadn’t. A man, like a woman, needs an incentive to get married and stay married; feminism forgot that, and forgot too that marriage is more in women’s interests than in men’s.

So the old fashioned question has become interesting again, at least for women who want to find and keep a husband and realise, increasingly, how difficult that is: what makes a good wife? I think women should start by facing some awkward facts.

It’s a mistake in any relationship to insist too much on egalitarian principles. Feminism, understandably, has concentrated too much on women’s rights and, by extension, too much on husbands’ duties. Why, on top of working long hours and forsaking all others, would a man put out the garbage and change the nappies for a woman who is too busy with her own career and too tired by her own schedule to bother much about him? Or, to be blunt, to have sex with him?

It may be his duty to put up and shut up and keep on doing the late night feeds and the early morning commuting, but it’s hardly very appealing. Nor is insisting on these duties a very clever way of trying to hold on to a husband, if that is what a woman wants.

One hard fact a would-be wife has to face — and I was absolutely horrified to realise this myself — is that it’s not possible for a married couple to have two demanding jobs and children and a good relationship. Something has to give. If the relationship has to be neglected, then the marriage will fail, which will be very bad for the children. If the children are neglected, then the marriage is worthless anyway.

So something must give on the work front and this is probably, for many women, the price of being a good wife and having a good marriage. Unless a couple are extremely well paid, and have plenty of domestic help, her brilliant career will have to be less brilliant for a while; she will have to spend some time in the Mummy lane.

It could, of course, be the other way round. But another harsh truth is that alpha males won’t stay at home in the Daddy lane and nor will plenty of other males of all descriptions; they refuse to be ersatz housewives. They would rather not get married, and as the figures show, increasingly they aren’t, and increasingly, if they are, they move out. So rule number one for a wife is to forget about equal rights and entitlements. Think instead about motivation.

When you want to please your child, or your lover, you think hard about what might make them happy and then do it. It’s not a chore, or even if it is that hardly matters; it’s an act of love or of loyalty. Yet strangely, in marriage this obvious motivational technique seems to wither away with the wedding flowers. Women are convinced it is their right not to have sex when they don’t feel like it, and it is a man’s duty to wash up, though he hates it — and so it is, of course. But that’s not the point. Granny was right; never say no, and never nag.

I think that my generation, and later ones even more so, have been led astray by romantic 1960s notions of sincerity and authenticity; it began to be believed that in the name of existential good faith and psychological well being individuals ought always to act and speak in accordance with their feelings — telling it like is and letting it all hang out. So sex without passionate desire — the boffe de politesse of a kindly marriage — is inauthentic.

Similarly, talking without expressing all one’s resentments and expectations and anxieties is a kind of insincerity, or dishonesty even. But this rather adolescent attitude is entirely at odds with the tolerance, discretion and generosity of body and spirit needed in a good marriage.

Husbands are mostly quite simple. Generally, what they want is unlimited, enthusiastic sex, constant reassurance, good food and plenty of freedom, of at least three of these four. Some can be trained to be very helpful domestically and some even enjoy it; but most are not bred for it. But they have many excellent and endearing qualities; the rewards of living with a well-motivated husband, if not quite above rubies, are very considerable, high though the price may be.

Sentenced to rot in their failed schools

‘An education ought to be very good, to justify depriving a child of its liberty.” I copied this down as an angry schoolgirl, when I was reading John Stuart Mill, though I am no longer sure it was he who wrote it. In any case, it is true.

There can be no justification for sentencing children to long hours in schools that are no good to 11 years of compulsory boredom, mismanagement and bad influences. There can be no justification for spending billions on this long incarceration only to let the prisoners out, having blighted their best years, unfit to deal with the world. Yet that, in this rich country, is precisely what we do.

All too many children leave school at 16 – and later – barely literate and numerate. Employers complain about school-leavers’ “skills gap”, meaning the wretched young things are so ignorant, incompetent and ill-disciplined that they are useless in a job, and need basic remedial training.

Colleges and universities complain that students arrive unable to construct a sentence, let alone write an essay. The brightest of undergraduates – the cream of our education system – need remedial teaching at university. Meanwhile the number of Neets – young people not in education, employment or training – has risen by a quarter since Labour came to power. Surely the disgraceful failure of education in this country is now an established fact?

Yet what is the response of the education secretary to this astonishing failure? It is to make it compulsory for all children to stay in our abysmal education system until the age of 18. Alan Johnson announced plans last week to raise the school-leaving age from 16 to 18. Children must choose between school, college, apprenticeships or work-based training. Teenagers who refuse to do so will face on-the-spot fines, Asbos and even jail. Employers who do not comply with work-based learning schemes will face sanctions, as will parents who put their children between 16 and 18 to work, without offering them training.

It beggars belief. Of course in an ideal world, all children should receive education until at least 18. Tertiary education or training ought to be available to everybody, according to his or her interests and abilities, and I firmly believe the taxpayer should pay for that. However, in the real world of British education, it makes little to sense to impose, by compulsion, the tedium and misery of British schooling for two more long years on those whom it has already failed and humiliated.

If the Department for Education and Skills cannot now make people literate and numerate by 16, if our schools cannot avoid producing disorderly children who wreck classes or play truant, how does it expect to change anything by enforcing two more benighted years of the same damn thing?

Bright schoolchildren and their teachers often talk of the relief they feel when the Asbo set leaves school at 16, so they can get on with their A-level classes in relative peace and quiet. Forcing class-wreckers to stay around would damage still further the chances of those children who want to study. The same applies to sending unwilling teenagers to colleges; they will undermine them. As for workplace training, the government has been making ambitious promises about apprenticeships for 10 years; why does it expect, suddenly, to be able to fulfil them now?

It is hardly fair to anyone to impose angry and unwilling 17 and 18-year-olds on schools and colleges they don’t want to go to. School is simply all wrong for some children. It is economically unsound to impose them and their needs on employers who would rather not hire them. Though these teenagers need help and attention, forcing them to stay in education against their will is not the answer.

The real answer, which seems beyond this government or its predecessors, is to make early education work. What all children need is basic literacy, numeracy, good manners and self-discipline. Everything can follow from that, in or out of school, whatever the child’s abilities. Since, however, we must despair of schools producing children who are educated in this fundamental sense, we are I suppose looking at damage limitation.

What do you do with problem teenagers of 16 to 18? Clearly it is a good idea to give them something constructive to do, and keep them off the streets. I often think it would be a good idea to offer them something that was fun, along the lines of what privileged children do. I mean extreme sports or adventure holidays. People usually harrumph with indignation at delinquents being taken by social services on expensive rock-climbing and whitewater rafting adventures, like rich kids. But these things develop character and confidence. They teach cooperation (which is why rich parents pay for them).

It is particularly good for children who have been neglected on sink estates to have some good clean fun – something more interesting than drugs and gangs. If I were education secretary I would be funding activity clubs for the Asbo set, like the Rugby Portobello Trust near me in central London, which would be so much fun that Neets would go to them willingly, and maybe get a little education by stealth. The Rugby Portobello offers sessions in music, IT, cooking and even mentorship for young people in running a charity.

Above all, as education secretary, I would consider why so many children, particularly boys, come to hate school. I do agree with the suggestion that the model of schoolroom teaching is unsuitable, after a certain age, for some children, many of them boys, and many of them the least bright or the most bright.

Mixed ability teaching is of course a nonsense, and so I suspect for many children is the feminised, politically correct conventionality and Gradgrind tedium of what passes for liberal education. So are the national curriculum and the mark-grubbing GCSE and A-level. I wouldn’t blame any child of mine for opting out.

The education secretary, clearly a fairly able man, ought to understand this. He opted out of school at 15, without any qualifications. Forcing teenagers into this nonsense for still longer, until 18, is an unjustified assault on their freedom.

Bad parents should be taught a lesson

Clichés often contain some truth; the well worn stereotype of the British as people who don’t much like children is, sadly, just. We hardly needed last week’s report from Unicef on the wellbeing of children in rich countries to tell us that we neglect our own quite shamefully. If neglect is abuse, then we are a nation of child abusers, both rich and poor. The children of the well-off suffer mildly from affluent neglect; the children of the poor suffer much more from the ordinary kind. They have no one to come home to, no one to look up to, nowhere to go except to hang out in the street.

Although I have some serious reservations about the report, the overall picture is so conclusively bleak, as far as a minority of British children goes, that we must accept some of its conclusions. In overall wellbeing, British children are the worst off in a list of 21 rich countries, and they are worst off, too, in the individual categories of relationships, behaviour and subjective wellbeing. Life is lonely, scary, unhealthy and dangerous for a large minority of British children.

Only 65% of British children eat the main meal of the day with their parents several times a week; thrown upon the company of other youngsters, only 42% of British children find them “kind and helpful”. In a survey by Britain’s National Family and Parenting Institute, quoted in the Unicef report, only 65% of children said they felt their parent(s) made them feel loved and cared for and only 76% said their parent(s) were always there when they needed them.

That makes a quarter or more of children who feel uncared for and neglected. When it comes to having an orderly, healthy breakfast before school, only about half of British secondary pupils say they get any. They may have been lying to shock the pollsters, but if not that means nearly half of all British parents cannot be bothered to ease their children into the day with breakfast.

Not surprisingly, British children are way ahead of others in the rich world in what are called risk behaviours. In plain English this means smoking, binge drinking, underage sex, eating junk food, obesity, teenage pregnancy, bullying, fighting and getting into trouble. In some cities the children are becoming feral. The recent shooting dead of two 15-year-old boys in the hellish estates of south London are the extreme manifestation of this terrible neglect.

What stands out from the Unicef report is that in this country parents either do not care enough about children to make time for them, or they cannot afford to make time for them. With high numbers of single parents and stepparents, with high numbers of irresponsible and absent fathers and full-time working mothers, that is understandable. All these things impose tremendous stresses on parents. Children get pushed out of their rightful time and place in their parents’ lives, more so here than in the rest of Europe. What can be done?

It would be a start to enable — if not to force — parents to spend more time with their children. It seems blindingly obvious that this government’s policy of driving as many women out to work as possible is counterproductive. The only acceptable reason for doing so is to control the welfare queens, who think having lots of babies will win them a meal ticket for decades — and that could surely be dealt with differently.

Most women want to stay home with their babies. Only 6% want to work full time and all mothers know that childcare is an expensive lottery. Yet 55% of working women are in full-time jobs. It is nonsense to shift money about to provide “affordable childcare”, which is neither good nor affordable; it is less good than what most mothers provide themselves and it costs more, all in, than letting her stay at home.

The result is that working mothers are harried and tired, especially if they are single, and short of the time their children — and their wider families — need. Part of the reason for so many women working such long hours, against their real wishes, is the high cost of housing. That is the root of many social evils and there is no question that a big housebuilding programme must be a top priority for the next government.

It also seems obvious to me that fathers should be held firmly accountable for their children, as David Cameron argued on Friday. I believe that process should start with dismantling the crazy benefits system which makes a man substantially better off — cash in hand at the end of the week — if he abandons his wife or girlfriend, and which enables a feckless never-married girl to be just as well off as a respectable abandoned wife or quasi-wife. Unfortunately the government has proved quite unable to run the Child Support Agency and there seems little reason for optimism about this.

What is needed — and it is something governments cannot and should not try to engineer — is cultural change. We need a lot more of what John Stuart Mill called moral disapprobation; these days it is called stigma. It is a good thing to show disapproval, even anger. It is wrong for men to abandon their children. It is wrong for a girl to have a baby without having another parent for it. It is wrong to have children whom you cannot afford to support. It is wrong to neglect your children, to fail even to give them breakfast and make sure they get to school.

In the past 30 years there has been a general horror of being judgmental, but why? These actions, wrong in themselves because they cause suffering to children, are also wrong because they cause serious social problems for the rest of us. Society should express disapprobation, forcefully.

Governments can follow in expressing such disapproval. They could deny irresponsible single mothers the privilege of independent housing and offer them educational care hostels only. They could try punishing irresponsible fathers in their pockets. They could order schools to provide after-school exercise and clubs and hobby groups, every day, year round. They could give massive tax breaks to stay-at-home mothers and to marriage. They could support charitable mentoring schemes.

Above all, they could scrap the laws that terrify responsible adults out of trying to control other people’s children. All this does, however, involve being judgmental so I don’t suppose it will happen.

We’re far too nice to Muslim extremists

It is hard not to feel a desperate anger at last week’s news. Nine British Muslims have been arrested on suspicion of plotting to behead a British Muslim soldier, as a traitor to Islam, and to show a videotape of the act on the net to terrify us.

In the same week Policy Exchange, the think tank, has published a poll-based study that shows young British-born Muslims are far more alienated from mainstream society than their parents. Of British Muslims aged 16-24, 37% would prefer to live under sharia in Britain, 37% would like to send their children to Islamic state schools and — most incredibly — 36% think Muslims converting to another religion should be punished by death. Young British Muslims who say they “admire organisations like Al-Qaeda, which are prepared to fight the West” amount to 13%. For British Muslims aged over 55, the figures are much lower, at 17%, 19%, 19% and 3% respectively.

The usual immigrant experience of gradual integration has failed for more than a third of Muslims. All the exhaustive and intrusive efforts of the race relations industry have been counter-productive.

The Policy Exchange report argues that this alienation is largely due to more than 20 years of official multiculturalism. This benighted orthodoxy has emphasised differences and divisions and promoted a sense of grievance that is sometimes almost paranoid. This amounts to full-blown victimhood, whipped up not just by Muslim spokesmen but also by nonMuslim journalists and commentators and human rights activists in the victim industry, who complain, in defiance of the evidence, of growing Islamophobic attacks and persistent police harassment; they make comparisons with Nazi Germany. The mayor of London, no less, called at a recent conference for an end to the “media’s orgy of Islamophobia”.

These inflammatory accusations persist. For example, the supposedly moderate Dr Mohammad Naseem, a champion of interfaith dialogue, an honorary doctor of Birmingham University and chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, said last Thursday that he believed the government was “pursuing a policy of maintaining a perception of a [terrorist] threat to justify the draconian antiterror laws they have been passing”. It had, he said, embarked on “a campaign to strike terror into the hearts of the Muslim people”, and he compared Blair’s Britain with Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. He is encouraging people to disbelieve the police’s assurances last week that they are “not targeting faith communities but suspected criminals”. This is paranoia gone mainstream.

If this is what comes from a man supposed to be the voice of Islamic moderation, what can one feel but rage? However, unaccustomed though I am to looking on the bright side, I suppose I should try. There are some encouraging signs. This alleged plot to behead a British soldier was uncovered with the help of a brave Muslim soldier who allowed himself to be used as bait to draw out the suspected kidnappers. That was courage and patriotism well beyond the call of duty. We ought to be grateful, too, to the Muslim informants who give police and secret services invaluable information; a source told me last week that there is no lack of volunteers despite the intimidation.

The findings of the Policy Exchange report are not all negative. Despite the sense of victimhood that some Muslims feel and others try to excite, 84% said that on the whole they felt they had been treated fairly in this society, regardless of their beliefs. Even more strikingly, more Muslims (37%) than people in the general population (29%) feel that “one of the benefits of modern society is to criticise other people’s religious or political views, even when it causes offence”.

All the same, there remains a terrifying minority of disaffected young Muslims. What, if anything, can be done that isn’t already being done?

My counterterrorist wish list goes as follows. Silence all imams who break the law in their preaching with incitements to violence (the government’s record has been abysmal). Monitor all mosques; refuse visas to foreign imams who speak poor or no English (the government lost its nerve over this, as over so much). Control and monitor imams visiting prisons (the Prison Service is so shambolic that it is impossible to know whether all its 130 or so visiting imams have been security vetted). Segregate Islamist prisoners in jail (this is done in the best prisons but is out of control in the rest). Isolate radical Islamist prisoners (this is against the Human Rights Act). Stop them having internet access (not all prisons do).

More widely, recognise that the problem now lies with “self-radicalisation” in suburban front rooms. Stop the creation of religious schools (Blair sold the pass on this). Monitor madrasah schools. Restrain the practice of importing brides and bridegrooms in arranged marriages from the Third World (this is well known to inhibit integration, but the government abolished the “primary purpose” rules preventing such marriages, presumably for electoral advantage); this could be done by following the Danish example of strict entry requirements and a minimum age of 24, which enables young people to choose more freely. Spend much more money monitoring young dual-passport Britons’ trips to Pakistan and deport them for attending training camps (these routes are watched but it is expensive and the Pakistani government is unable to help).

Teach schoolchildren the facts about conditions in Muslim countries (as opposed to right-on grievances about the “black hole of Calcutta”). Teach them what happens in jails in Muslim states, compared with what has happened in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. Teach schoolchildren and young adults what sharia involves; stop listening to the so-called representative bodies of British Muslims, not least the Muslim Council of Britain. Require the government to reveal the names and CVs of its advisers on Islamic affairs. Censor the violent Islamist recruitment sites on the internet, including the insidious hip-hop and rap sites. America and even China manage it for different reasons.

But all this is too little, too late. How can one not feel a furious, frustrated rage at the betrayal of our civilisation and our safety?

Tragedy of the truthful immigrant

Compare and contrast, as exam papers used to say, the cases of Mark Coleman and Roberto Malasi. Both are young men from Africa who wish to live permanently in this country, but there the similarity stops. Otherwise they are as different as one could possibly imagine. One young man is law-abiding, willing to work if allowed to do so and has never claimed benefits. The other has led the sort of hellish and destructive life in Britain that makes people fear not only for themselves but for wider society. He has robbed and shot one young woman to death and stabbed and killed another. Guess which man is to be deported immediately and which will be staying.

Each of their stories is bad enough in itself; in conjunction, as they were last week, they are scandalous. On Thursday it emerged that Coleman has been told by the Home Office that he must return immediately to his native Zimbabwe. His applications to extend his visa, and later for asylum, have failed and if he does not go at once his removal may be “enforced”.

One could normally count on Home Office incompetence to spare him this fate, but Coleman’s problem is that by abiding by the law and reporting to a police station every two weeks and generally making his whereabouts known to the authorities, he has made things easy for them. He has not disappeared into the undergrowth. As usual no virtuous deed goes unpunished. Obeying the rules has made him easy to find. Unless someone intervenes he will be sent back to the hellhole that is Zimbabwe, where he no longer has any work or any family; they have all fled the Mugabe terror.

What makes this case particularly absurd is that Coleman is British, by any standards except those of the Home Office regulations. Although he was born in independent Zimbabwe, his father was born there while it was still the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and his mother was born in India; his father’s father was a British subject. His paternal great-grandfather was a British army surgeon, as was his maternal great-grandfather.

His mother’s family has been English since 1160 and her father served in the British Army and worked as a prisoner of war on the notorious bridge over the River Kwai. It is hard to imagine anyone more British in spirit and in fact, yet, because of a technicality, Coleman cannot have a British passport, cannot stay here and will soon be shipped back.

Not only does he have some historical claim on this country, he also has a compassionate claim; nobody can possibly imagine that a white man, whose family has fled, can live or work safely in Zimbabwe, in that nightmare of mayhem, anti-white racism and confiscation.

Rules are rules, admittedly, and hard cases make bad rules as well as bad law. But there is something sickening about the double standards with which this man is having the rules applied to him. We all know something of countless cases of immigrants and asylum seekers who flout the rules and break the law; they are literally countless, because the Home Office simply cannot count them. On Monday Sir David Normington, the senior civil servant at the Home Office, disclosed to MPs that one in five (30 out of 160) sets of figures covering crime, immigration and prisons is not, in a ghastly establishment euphemism, “up to scratch”, which is to say not fit for purpose.

In this depressing context consider the case of Roberto Malasi, the robber and convicted murderer. He and his family came to Britain in 1995, seeking asylum from Angola, and in 1999 they were given indefinite leave to remain here. Now 18, when he was 16 he shot dead a woman holding a baby at a christening, while robbing the guests with his younger brother; he escaped, went on the run boasting about this killing and soon afterwards stabbed to death a girl he thought had “dissed” him.

Before these crimes he was in and out of care, got little or no education and lived what police call a chaotic life. He will be sentenced for the killings next month and faces a long time in prison. He does not, however, seem to face deportation, much to the resentment of his victims’ families, also recent arrivals from Africa. His lawyers are likely to argue that Malasi would be subject to persecution as a notorious murderer if he were sent back to Angola. On past form they are quite likely to succeed where Coleman failed — even though it is his crime that would supposedly endanger Malasi.

When I called to check some facts, the Home Office would not comment on either case. I am not sure why — these cases are surely in the public interest — but we do know that the Home Office finds it difficult to keep “up to scratch” with checking things, which is why it has so little idea of how many illegal immigrants or returned criminals or escaped convicts are in our midst.

However, it was happy to explain that people such as Malasi who have been granted indefinite leave to remain can have that leave revoked if the home secretary does not feel that their remaining is conducive to the public good. In so far as there can be any certainties in life, it seems certain to me that Malasi’s presence here is not conducive to the public good.

Comparing and contrasting these two cases, and considering the home secretary’s wide discretion in such matters, not to mention the Home Office’s ability to “lose” people (which might be put diplomatically to good use in Coleman’s case), it’s clear that one man should be thrown out and one should be allowed to stay. And if, as I suspect, the wrong man gets thrown out, one will be able to conclude only that the Home Office is not merely incompetent, but also institutionally unjust.

There is a way out for Coleman: he could pretend to be gay and, as Zimbabwe is notorious for persecuting homosexuals, he would have an excellent case for asylum. I am sure he could find a gay friend to help him go through this charade. However, that would involve lying; a corrupt result of a degenerate system. It will be quite legal if Coleman goes and Malasi stays, but the comparison highlights the blindness and chaos of our immigration law and our immigration system and the muddled, guilt-ridden attitudes that underpin them.

Let us have fudge, hope and charity

Let a hundred flowers bloom, Chairman Mao once said to China’s repressed intellectuals, inviting diverse ideas. Sure enough, when the intellectuals obliged, Mao ruthlessly mowed them all down. Our rulers do not believe in diversity either, although they are constantly nagging us to join them in celebrating it. What they really believe in, on the contrary, is orthodoxy and they are increasingly prepared to enforce it. That is the alarming lesson of the uproar about Catholic charities and gay adoption.

For our orthodox masters in parliament and in the public services it is not enough that gay couples have the right to adopt children like anyone else. It is not enough that they do indeed successfully do so, with the help of various agencies and with public funding, like any other couple. It’s not enough that they have the right to have surrogate babies, too, like anyone else. It’s not enough that Catholic adoption charities are willing to help gay couples find other agencies to arrange adoptions, although they will not do so themselves. The orthodox want more. They want to force those who deviate from the new orthodoxy to recant and to bend their heretic knees to it publicly, or face excommunication.

The orthodoxy holds that gay couples should have the same rights as everyone else and that is the law, too. I subscribe to this part of the orthodoxy myself. I don’t know of any reason why gays should not make as good (or as bad) parents as straights and there are two lesbians in my extended family who are the parents of two happy girls. I hate Catholic and Muslim attitudes to homosexuality, although I believe they are entitled to their views, just as I’m entitled to mine. All that concerns the rest of us is whether these views actively harm anyone.

The answer is clearly no. There are plenty of places, starting with local authorities, for a gay couple to go to arrange an adoption, other than to the homophobic church of Rome and its charities. In fact it would surely be rather peculiar for any gays to turn to the church as prospective parents. However, some do. In a conversation straight out of Alice in Wonderland, the Bishop of Birmingham said last week that his agencies do place children with single gay people, but not with gay couples. The jaw drops at the folly of this position. One gay good, two gays bad? One parent better than two? One can only suppose it has to do with some sophistry about a single gay parent being celibate. Whatever the reasoning, the Catholic position on gays is untenable.

What’s more, I don’t think anyone should be given formal exemption from the law, as the Catholic church is asking in this case. It is and should be illegal to discriminate against gay people. However, there is (or used to) be a sensible British tendency to tolerance, which does not always insist on the letter of the law. In a very diverse society it is sometimes wise to turn a blind eye; there is a fine British tradition of fudge.

It’s a sort of acceptable wriggle-room; it’s offered to doctors who refuse on principle to do abortions, to doctors who ease people’s deaths, to Orthodox Jewish and Islamic butchers, to state schools where Muslim parents don’t allow mixed-sex sport, to state schools which accept children of one faith, to gay clubs which exclude straights, to black organisations which exclude whites (even in the police). This benign tradition has developed for just such a case as this, so that a private charity should not be forced to do something it thinks (wisely or foolishly) is wrong.

The significant words here are private and charity. There is an important difference between public and private, between state provision and private charity. Charity begins as a personal impulse, sometimes but not always linked with religion. It might be a determination to help street children, like Dr Barnardo, it might be a wish to raise money for cancer research, it might be a drive to support an old people’s club; all of these impulses are specific and of their nature discriminatory.

Barnardo was excluding adults, cancer research excludes other illnesses, the old people’s club excludes Asbo teenagers and so on. A charity and its donors are working to an end which, however good, is discriminatory, according to the beliefs of the well-meaning people involved. Since many charities are based on religious faith, their values are somewhat exclusive.

To try to change that is to try to destroy the charity. That is what is likely to happen to the Catholic adoption charities. The losers will be the most hard-to-place children, whom Catholic charities have an excellent record in helping. Those like Gordon Brown and David Cameron who want to make use of the energies of charity should be careful not to repress them instead.

I call them charities because they are not agencies of state. Increasingly, though, they are becoming so. For many years I have been involved with a charity for adults with learning disabilities, for some of those years as a trustee, and I have watched it being turned into a provider of services for the state sector and, in effect, an agency of state. It does excellent work, but its services and its clients are largely decided by local authorities. Its development has been both driven and restricted by the requirements of local authorities, who pay the clients’ fees and call the tune; the original pioneering ideal of the parent-founders, no longer politically correct, has been subsumed.

For some time there has been an orthodoxy in social work training and thinking; the result is that this orthodoxy is imposed, via social services’ funding, on private charities. If the Catholic charities are deprived of state funding by local authorities, they will have to close. That’s not blackmail on their side — the bullying boot is on the other foot entirely.

True charity is heartfelt and personal and for that reason may well be unorthodox, or even politically very incorrect. Charities should be allowed to do what they believe is right and not forced to do what they believe is wrong. Isn’t it enough they do good in some way, if not in all? The green shoots and flowers of charity are tender and very diverse; the state should not be allowed to mow them all down.

Only a dirty word can improve schools

For some time it has been widely believed that the prime minister is often away with the fairies. Increasingly in flight from nasty reality, Tony Blair flits from one messianic fantasy to another, wafted by hot gusts of his own rhetoric. The prime minister in waiting, by contrast, is said to be quite different. Gordon Brown, allegedly, is not a man to be inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity; he is prudent, practical and principled, not to mention spiritually abstemious. I was almost beginning to think so myself until Thursday when he put out a statement so vaingloriously, globally silly that I was reminded of the early Blair.

In a carefully placed article in The Guardian, and in briefings, Brown announced that free education for every child in the world would be one of the two central pillars of his foreign policy if he becomes prime minister, along with fighting climate change. He is aiming for “truly a world classroom”, as he puts it, “in time backed up by the world’s biggest petition”, which will involve abolishing child labour everywhere to mark the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. What’s more, he aims to achieve all this within 10 years. Poor man. He has taken leave of his senses and he is not yet in office. It is clearly not only power and glory that corrupt; it is the anguished manoeuvring for them.

Every halfway decent person would like to see an end to child labour and the beginning of universal education. But the idea that a British prime minister, or anyone or any country or any international organisation could begin to achieve such a thing, and in a mere 10 years, can be described only as a dangerous delusion. It sounds like Blair’s megalomaniacal aspirations in his Labour party conference in 2001, when he spoke of “healing the scar” of Africa, and of “our side” ending corruption, human rights abuse and bad governance practically everywhere.

Given what has happened in the intervening years, what “our side” has achieved, what the United Nations gets up to and what happens to charity money, you might imagine that Brown would have the wit to speak more modestly. How dare he grandstand about educating the children of the Third World when his government cannot educate our own children? Brown cannot claim that the failure of Britain’s schools is nothing to do with him; he came to power on Labour’s now notorious education mantra, he has been chancellor for 10 years and he is every bit as responsible as Blair for the squandering of our money and of our children’s prospects.

By a comic irony, on the same day that Brown announced his grandiose plans the head of the Office for Standards in Education published a review of schools recommending radical changes if hundreds of thousands of children were not to be failed by our system. That is proof enough, although the proof is already overwhelming, that education is not working. “It seems clear to us,” Ofsted’s 2020 review says, “that the education system will not achieve the next ‘step change’ in raising standards simply by doing more of the same; a new approach is required.” How true.

The report makes recommendations about testing, syllabuses, single-sex classes, different teaching styles for boys and some edu-babble called “personalised learning”. And so on. But the one radical and essential change is the one that the review does not mention. That is, to bring back selection.

For politicians selection is a dirty word. Some think it is divisive and wrong. All think it is electoral suicide, convinced as they are that the nation, particularly the middle classes, has not yet recovered from the trauma of the 11-plus exam. It was traumatic; I remember the tense faces and the tears when the results were announced and children were officially consigned either to white-collar or to blue-collar lives. But that does not mean that selection was wrong; what was wrong was how crudely and insensitively it was handled.

The point of selection, or at least its only acceptable point, is to be able to teach children of similar ability together and that can be done without traumatising or belittling them or writing them off. It cannot be done without revealing, however discreetly, that some children are better at some things than others, but children know that; there is evidence that in schools which avoid competitive positioning, children can nonetheless accurately rank each child in their class according to ability.

After the long failure of the egalitarian comprehensive experiment, it has become apparent that all children — not just the brightest or the most disabled — do best when taught with others who progress at a similar speed; it’s also easier to teach large classes when the children are of similar ability, whether low, medium or high. That ought to have been obvious long ago. And it is beginning to be obvious to most parents.

The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) published a pamphlet last week called Three Cheers for Selection which included an ICM survey from last June. According to this, 76% of people believe “more academic” children should be taught separately to stretch their abilities. Perhaps even more importantly, nearly as many people (73%) said weaker children also benefited from streaming or attending selective schools and 51% were in favour of schools setting their own admissions policy. What this means is that most parents want more selection, either in mixed schools or in separate schools.

What it also means is that politicians can relax about selection. It’s not toxic any more. It doesn’t mean “creaming off”. They should now be able to consider it on its merits, as central to educational reform, without fearing for their seats.

One of the many interesting findings of the CPS study is that poorer pupils benefit most from selective education; selection contributes to social mobility, which has declined in this country since it was largely abolished. What politicians need to do is take on the teaching unions, which are still entrenched in old-fashioned egalitarianism. Will Brown be bold enough to do that? I think it unlikely; he, too, is in the grip of old-fashioned egalitarianism, with its cruel inefficiencies, and has seen Blair fail. Like Lucifer, Milton’s thwarted hero, and like Blair himself, Brown seems to prefer hatching vain empires