It’s not a phobia, Lady Warsi – it’s rational to fear Islam

It is lucky for Baroness Warsi that her inflammatory speech on Islamophobia last Thursday was eclipsed by even more sensational political news stories. Otherwise Sayeeda Warsi’s muddled comments at Leicester University would have attracted even more attention and rage than they did and her political future might be at even greater risk than it is.

Only yesterday, it seems, Warsi was the Conservatives’ blue-eyed girl. More precisely, since she is a Yorkshirewoman of Pakistani ancestry, she was their best brown-eyed girl and perfect for the new Conservatism — a woman, a solicitor, an attractive personality, a good public speaker, a member of an ethnic minority and a Muslim. Her views seemed moderate and sensible. If none of this precisely qualified her for instant elevation to the House of Lords, one can only say that she seemed hugely preferable to most of the placemen and placewomen already there.

But what terrible damage a single speech can do. Leaking it in advance can do even more. Warsi, without checking her remarks first with No 10, took it upon herself to let a newspaper know what she intended to say about the growth of Islamophobia in this country. “It has now crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability… Islamophobia has now passed the dinner-table test,” she said. “It is seen by many as normal and uncontroversial.”

In her actual speech, to judge from a transcript, these remarks were changed to soften them, but she still claimed that Islamophobia was now socially acceptable, its flames fanned by the media and fuelled by bigotry and religious ignorance among everyone else.

What on earth was she up to? As a politician she has made herself look an idiot — her party will never wear this. As a prominent citizen she reveals herself not as the voice of moderate common sense but as a menace, because this kind of stuff is misleading and inflammatory. It is likely to whip up the very antagonism towards Islam and Muslims that she claims to detect. What is striking in Britain, actually, is the general tolerance towards Muslims, even though many people are understandably anxious about them in some ways.

The word Islamophobia is infuriating. It has become a tool with which to bully people and silence them, rather like the phrase institutional racism. It has become insidiously conflated by the race relations industry with racism and extended to mean more or less anything; anyone interested in these manipulative terms should look up their contentious history since 1997. But if Islamophobia truly means anything, it means an irrational, baseless and pathological terror of Islam the religion, just as arachnophobia is an irrational, baseless and pathological terror of spiders.

It may seem to many Muslims that criticism of Islam is in itself baseless and pathological and possibly forbidden. It may seem to them that criticism of Islam is the same thing as criticising and disrespecting Muslim people, which is a dangerous confusion. But it should be said, as plainly as possible, that criticism of Islam, or disapproval of its doctrines, is not necessarily irrational or baseless or pathological (still less racist) from a thinking westerner’s point of view.

I wonder whether, in accusing us of mass Islamophobia at our middle-class dinner tables, Warsi has the slightest idea of what Islam means to a decent, well-informed, thinking product of the host culture. What people here feel is a rational fear — or if not quite a fear, then a rational anxiety, a wariness — of Islam. Leaving aside entirely the question of Muslim terrorists, the fact is that many (if not all) forms of Islam teach doctrines that upset westerners — doctrines that they fear may destabilise our society or threaten the best aspects of western culture and inquiry.

Does Warsi imagine that in any Muslim country she would be offered the immense opportunities and respect she has received here — things Britons have struggled for centuries to achieve? What Muslim country would even allow her to speak her mind or chastise the host culture so aggressively? This is what makes people in this country wary of Islam in many of its forms, in one place or another: the centrality and inescapability of religion, the loss of freedom of thought and expression, the harshness of sharia (Islamic law), the patriarchal suppression of women, including their inequality under sharia, the medieval punishments for apostasy, adultery and even theft, the insistence on a cruel form of animal slaughter, the violence and anti-Semitism of many sacred texts, the disinclination to integrate with the host culture and finally — one can argue — the incompatibility of theocratic Islam with democracy. To find all those things alarming as possibilities is not to be Islamophobic or racist. It is to be reasonable from a western point of view.

Of course, Islam means different things to different Muslims and an outsider cannot know quite what any particular person or group holds dear. But it is clear there are Muslims in Britain who wish to silence free speech (by terrifying those who criticise Islam, starting with Salman Rushdie) and many other Muslims who will not stand against that. There are many who trample on the rights of women and there are many others who appear to have no interest in belonging to the wider society: there is subtle and increasing pressure for the introduction of sharia here, with some success already, and this is alarming to anyone concerned with the idea of equality under the law and the virtues of English law.

There is evidence for such fears. A study by Policy Exchange showed that 37% of British-born Muslims aged 16-24 would prefer sharia here, 37% would like to send their children to Islamic state schools and — incredibly — 36% think Muslims converting to another faith should be punished by death. What’s more alarming is that older Muslims are much less likely to take these attitudes and are far less alienated than their children’s generation.

The efforts of the race relations industry and multiculturalism seem to have been distressingly counterproductive; we haven’t seen the usual immigrant experience of gradual integration. The Policy Exchange report attributed this in part to the growing sense of victimhood among young Muslims, whipped up by those who complain constantly of Islamophobia, often without evidence. It is dangerous and it is wrong, as a sensible Yorkshirewoman ought to know.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Now we have two kinds of elderly – the wanted and the unwanted

‘Pop on a hormone patch and get over it, dear.” That was the cruel advice given by a tabloid headline last week to Miriam O’Reilly, the 53-year-old television presenter who has just won an ageism case against the BBC at an industrial tribunal. She had been dropped from a programme called Countryfile, together with three other women of mature years, in favour of two much younger presenters and was so outraged by her treatment that she brought formal complaints of age discrimination, sex discrimination and victimisation.

The whole thing was very nasty, as is always the way in the cut-throat world of screen and stage, not least in the supposedly paternalistic and politically correct BBC. At one point, according to O’Reilly, a director asked her whether it was time for Botox. On another occasion a cameraman offered her a can of black dye to spray her roots. Another director warned her that she would “have to be careful about those wrinkles when high-definition comes in”.

Jumping in and out of helicopters, climbing 60ft trees and cheese-rolling to show her physical fitness had not succeeded in proving her energy and her worth, she told the tribunal. She was sacked, a director said in an indiscreet moment, because they wanted to “refresh” the programme.

On the face of it, this looks quite clearly an open and shut case of age discrimination — and sex discrimination, too, although the tribunal threw out the charge of sexism. Television producers and directors — and most people in the media — are obsessed with youth, particularly in women. As another headline nastily put it, “Forget Miriam O’Reilly’s wrinkles — what about fatty Mark Mardell?” It’s quite true that no woman, no matter how brilliant, could appear on prime-time television looking remotely as overweight, sweaty and red-faced as he does. And it’s obviously true that viewers, and people in general, are much more forgiving of signs of ageing in men. All the same, I don’t feel there is much to celebrate in O’Reilly’s triumph. It feels wrong for the right reason: age discrimination in general is horrible, but age discrimination in any one case — such as this one — might actually be justifiable.

Admittedly, it is disgraceful that people in the BBC were vile to O’Reilly. But if, in their ghastly way, the producers wanted to refresh their show and put it on prime time, they may have been right in their view that O’Reilly might not be as much of an audience-grabber as her replacements. I’ve never heard of any of them, so I can’t tell, but television is showbiz, not Girl Guiding. Producers must be allowed to back their judgment, even if it seems unfair to some and mistaken to others — I almost called it their artistic judgment, but the proper word is commercial. By definition there cannot be proper evidence for such judgments.

Besides, O’Reilly should know that presenting is a high-risk, high-reward activity. It is ferociously competitive. No one’s entitled to hang on to a nice presenting job indefinitely. So it goes in show business. Those who want security, transparency and fairness ought to take up something else.

Predictably, having lost the case, the BBC has issued a pusillanimous apology and has promised to “ensure that senior editorial executives responsible for these kind of decisions in the BBC undergo additional training in the selection and appointment of presenters” and “produce new guidance on fair selection”. How the heart sinks. Yet more public money will be wasted on the wrong solution. In its usual confusion, the BBC is promising to be a model politically correct employer and also a top contender in the harsh market that is show business.

However, the curious case of O’Reilly did help to focus minds on the question of older people having the right to go on working for longer. Her victory coincided with the government’s promise on Thursday to abandon the default retirement age by October this year; this means that employers will no longer have the right to make someone retire when they reach the state retirement age. If they want to sack them then or afterwards, they will have to justify doing so. (There will be exceptions for some employers, such as the police and air-traffic controllers.) On the same day the government published its Pensions Bill, which will raise the state pension age to 66 for men and increase it gradually for both men and women.

This really is something to celebrate. As Ed Davey, the employment minister, said, it’s great news for older people, great for business and great for the economy. For those of us who know we will have to work well beyond retirement age (if we can) and for those of us who want to continue anyway, this is a real liberation. The idea that nature and employers are through with us at sixtysomething is idiotic. The process of ageing seems to be slowing for many people in the rich world. A lot of us will be just as useful — or useless — at 80 as we were at 40.

The advantages to the rest of society are obvious — much less crippling expenditure spent on the elderly, much more income for the exchequer, much less of a burden upon young people. The idea that there is a fixed number of jobs to go round and the old should make way for the young is Luddite.

But old people do vary greatly. The ageing process affects some individuals earlier and disproportionately for all sorts of complex reasons. Instead of letting weak employees carry on until retirement, employers will have to decide how useful they are and tell them so. Employers and employees will have to face painful facts to add to the sorrows of getting old. Many older people who are convinced they are as good as ever will be cruelly disabused, perhaps in expensive tribunals.

No longer will people talk sentimental nonsense about old people having so much to offer and so much wisdom; it will soon be clear that some old people do and some don’t. Two classes of old people will emerge — those that employers want and those that employers don’t. We will have the youthful old and the conventionally old, the active old and the dependent old. And this change will be no respecter of education or class. It will be driven by genes and the environmental accidents of long ago. This new freedom to keep on working will certainly be much fairer to old people, but it is a fairness that will prove quite harsh and will have nothing to do with feelgood sentimentality — rather like television and show business, in fact.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

White girls have become ‘easy meat’ — and we’re to blame

Many Muslims despise western cultures for our decadence, and with some reason. By decadence I mean a decline in morality and culture. They see in us moral equivocation, infirmity of purpose and a general lack of courage. However, what is truly decadent is that for many years there have been repeated cases — well known to police, social workers, charities and court reporters — of young men of Pakistani origin grooming and pimping hundreds of very young white girls. These have been hushed up in a conspiracy of silence. Even when shocking convictions have been reported, silence has prevailed. The reason is, quite simply, fear of causing ethnic offence.

Almost alone, the heroic Ann Cryer, formerly MP for Keighley, near Bradford, has bravely talked about this since 2003 only to be met by denial all round. Until her protests, Bradford police had said there was nothing they could do, and local Muslim elders said the problem was nothing to do with them and was probably the fault of the girls themselves. Yet if such terrible crimes had been systematically committed by white men against underage Asian Muslim girls, public outrage among the white majority here would have been almost hysterical.

The silence surrounding the sexual crimes of British Pakistani Muslims against hundreds of white teenage girls is reverse racism — racism against one’s own kind, a particularly pusillanimous form of decadence. Who, in their guilty, anti-racist zeal, cared about those young white girls whose lives were being ruined? Now, after an investigation by The Times, our sister paper, the facts can no longer be ignored. Since 1997, in 17 court cases involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11-16 by groups of males, 56 men have been convicted of crimes including rape, child abduction and sex with a child. This involves hundreds of prostituted girls, some as young as 13. Of the men found guilty, 50 were Muslims, mostly of Pakistani descent.

Detective chief inspector Alan Edwards of West Mercia police has called for an end to the “damaging taboo” surrounding these crimes. “These girls are being passed around as meat … but everyone’s too scared to address the ethnicity factor. No one wants to stand up and say that Pakistani guys in some parts of the country are recruiting young white girls and passing them around their relatives for sex.” Other police sources said that those convicted represented only a small proportion of a “tidal wave” of organised crimes in some cities.

The Home Office said that it had no plans to commission research into the ethnic and cultural background of sex criminals. But someone should, because this is precisely a cultural issue. There are sacred cows involved — western liberal sacred cows as well as sacred cows from Muslim cultures — and they should rapidly be slaughtered.

Among young Muslim men from backward rural Asian cultures, there is a tendency to regard white girls as silly slappers who deserve no better. In the Netherlands, which has a similar problem, the researcher Linda Terpstra says that these men have “absolutely no respect for women”. She says pimps would ask what it mattered if a girl had sex with a few men or a hundred: “Either way she’s a whore. Women should be virgins when you marry them. Girls here are all whores.”

Combined with this contempt and the insistence on virginity is the sexual frustration caused by long-range arranged marriages. According to Cryer and to various Muslims I have spoken to, an arranged marriage to a girl from a backward village in Kashmir or Pakistan, who is probably illiterate and will have nothing in common with a young British boy, causes sexual and emotional frustration among young men.

Longing for sex, it’s easy through their eyes to see western girls, with microskirts and skimpy tops, as easy meat, a word constantly used by people talking about this. Good Muslim girls cover their entire bodies and sometimes their faces, too. Western slags, unchaperoned and dressed like jailbait, might seem the rightful prey of pimps. Islam does not condone such crimes, but in all its forms it is censorious of immodesty and sexual freedom in women. Islam teaches such women are unworthy of respect; under sharia law they would be severely punished.

However, if many Muslims have taken such attitudes to extremes, western culture has taken immodesty and sexual incontinence to almost equally astonishing excesses. It has been a huge disappointment to me that feminism has degenerated into extreme sexual licence. Tiny children are hypersexualised, and young girls now boast proudly of “shagging” — a word I associated at their age only with sheep. It is commonplace in some city centres to see young women stumbling about with their breasts bursting out of their tight dresses, screeching, vomiting and falling down.

We should have seen it coming with Germaine Greer, the women’s liberation goddess of my youth. Of course, she was right, along with anthropologists, to see enforced virginity and extreme modesty as tools of male repression and control. But was she right in the late 1960s to celebrate promiscuity, and pose naked in the underground magazine Suck? Was it for that freedom that feminists endured force-feeding in prison? Around that time Oz magazine had a front-page headline announcing that “All God’s children got de clap”. That was true, with the infertility and chronic illness that followed; it was hardly liberation, but a consequence of a supposed liberation that had degenerated into licence and licentiousness; in its modern forms it has made us all unhappy and despicable. If many Muslims are very disappointed by the extremists among them so too are many western women by the feminists among them.

Little perhaps can be done about such great cultural differences. But it would surely be right to slaughter the following sacred cows. First, the curious western belief that it’s better to have double standards and injustice than to criticise another culture. Second, the insistence of western women that they have an incontrovertible right to dress like hypersexualised jailbait, regardless of its effects. Third, the insistence of some cultures on their right to arranged marriages across continents, regardless of their antisocial consequences here. And finally, the assumption of multiculturalism that all cultures, in all their manifestations, have a right to equal respect. This might perhaps help in the struggle against our own decadence.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Smash the charity establishment and real giving will bloom again

Charity begins at home and in the heart. It does not begin or have anything much to do with the high-street cash machine, or so one would have thought. Last week Francis Maude, paymaster general and Cabinet Office minister, stirred some public outrage with a government green paper on charitable giving; it was widely reported that he was proposing to get people to give money to charity when withdrawing cash at ATMs.

Not surprisingly, many people objected.

“Is it the job of government to force us into giving?” asked one newspaper. “Charity cashpoints are blasted as Big Brother”, said another. There were the predictable objections to the government demanding charity on top of high taxation. The money would presumably go to a large centralised pot, doled out at government or quango discretion. It would in effect be another form of taxation — and a clever one because fairly painless.

However, most of the outrage was misplaced. Cash-machine giving was only one idea in a green paper full of other suggestions for encouraging social action. The government is trying to bring about a cultural shift in our attitudes to charity; in the green paper’s clumsy language, which is alarmingly like the meaningless blather of the early Blair years, it says it is after “a collective approach to building culture change”. Oh dear. It is true there needs to be a radical change in the culture of charity. But it is much less certain who should or even could bring about such change. One can only hope Maude means it when he insists that the main lesson his department has recently learnt is the importance of acknowledging the limits of government.

Although there are many limits to what government can or should try to “build”, it is not particularly limited in its ability to destroy, especially in social and cultural spheres. An unintended side effect of the post-war welfare state was to do great damage to the idea of charity. It did not destroy it; the British are still much more generous in giving to charity than most other countries, including Germany and France, although at 29th we come low on an international list of volunteering.

All the same, charities are and have been under constant threat from the intrusion of the state in various ways — to control them, to change their purposes, to professionalise them, to impersonalise them, to starve them out of business if not considered worthy and to drive them out of business with red tape.

When, after the war, the state took over responsibility for the sick and the needy, including the schools and hospitals that had been set up by personal charity, it removed from people the traditional obligation of giving to others. It nationalised charity, much as it nationalised family obligations.

Before long charity was openly despised as do-gooding by Lady Bountifuls and volunteering was discouraged by many charities as they became ever more professionalised. By the time local government was contracting out vast amounts of social care work to charities, which became known as voluntary sector service providers, such charities had indeed become extensions of local government, entirely dependent on it for approval and survival. Meanwhile, smaller charities have been edged out as inefficient and harder to institutionalise and volunteering is now low.

Maude’s green paper asks for our ideas, so here are a couple of mine. What’s needed is some serious creative destruction — a break-up of the state charitable establishment and its institutional mentality. First, the government should get a firm grip on the Charity Commission and the formidable Dame Suzi Leather and strip back its present over-mighty powers to simple inspection on simple principles strictly decided by parliament. When quangocrats can and do attempt to control charities, or change their purposes, they are not just abusing their powers. They actively discourage charity and contribute to a culture of anxiety and bullying.

My own direct experience of the Charity Commission has been small but depressing. Recently, in the course of renaming a small grant-giving trust and making a few minor changes to our articles of association, my colleagues and I applied to the commission for approval. We used an expensive solicitor to avoid the usual delays and errors, but were told by the commission several times to rewrite our charitable purposes.

These purposes are simple and uncontroversial but somehow not absolutely to the taste of the commission and we wasted charitable money going to and fro negotiating the wording — in effect it wanted to instate promoting health as one of our aims, although the trust was not set up for that purpose.

Who are the employees of an unelected quango to say what our charitable purposes should be in any case, so long as they are legal? This is a sign of the mentality — the culture — that seeks to control charities, to cut and prune them into uniformity rather than to let a hundred flowers bloom.

Maude’s paper points out that the government has launched a “red tape taskforce” — again, those dreadful tones of early Blair blather. Whenever I hear the word taskforce I am immediately convinced that nothing will change.

If you look at the red tape tying up charities, it is not the detail that matters, loony though it is. One youth club for delinquent teenagers has to report regularly — for example — on what percentage of its “clients” understand its “mission statement” and, of those, what percentage approve of said mission statement. There are about 17 double-sided pages of this insane self-auditing to fill in. All this for a tiny outfit, partly staffed by volunteers, which is dealing with disturbed, illiterate children from sink estates.

The problem is not in such detail. The problem lies deeper, in the mentality of those civil servants who are so institutionalised that they seriously think it is worthwhile dreaming up such daft rules.

It is, after all, their job to write such nonsense and, of course, no nonsense would mean no mortgage and no pension.

This stuff is a monstrous hybrid of risk avoidance and unnecessary jobsworth “professionalisation”. It’s not enough to talk of cutting red tape. The sources of red tape must be rooted out and burnt. Any jobs and initiatives producing it should be abolished in the name of the big society. What we need is demolition, not “building”, so that a real, organic charitable culture can take root in the rubble and grow — locally, independently and in the heart.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk