Gordon Brown is no Tony Blair. And he never will be.

Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour Party conference this week was a polished, poignant and witty farewell to the party whose leadership he will be relinquishing at some stage next year. He arrived at the start of conference week an embattled figure, despised by his party, but within the first sixty seconds of Fuhrerkontakt, they were putty in his hands. This is Blair’s special gift that sets him apart from his peers. His charisma can penetrate all but the most meat-headed of audiences (here I mean of course the TUC). This is indeed a phenomenal asset to the Labour party that it shown not dispose of lightly, although it now seems inevitable that it will. All politicians make mistakes, and Blair has been the author of some real howlers, but not all politicians can talk away their mistakes in a few minutes.

Blair’s likely successor, that grim tyrant of the Treasury Gordon Brown, from all evidence so far, does not possess this quality. His speech was thoroughly unremarkable and it was not remotely surprising that its contents was totally eclipsed by Cherie Blair’s reported indiscrete squawks from the sidelines. The leitmotif of Brown's address was something about “empowering communities”. I ask you this: have you ever heard anyone use the word “empowering” without reading it off a piece of paper and/or power point projection? At best it’s a bland, technocratic piece of jargon that is attempting to seem both populist and progressive at the same time. At worst, the term “empowering communities” evokes images of the harrowing final scenes of the Wicker Man, with Edward Woodward pleading for his life before the fanatically swaying inhabitants of Summer Isle.

Brown’s other “big idea” emerged this week: to transfer control of the National Health Service to a board of directors from the department of health, similar to his removal of the Bank of England in 1997 from political control. This would seem to be at odds with the meaning of “empowering communities”, in so far as it has a meaning, since it would involve taking control for the NHS away from the elected representatives of society to an appointed panel of pinstriped bigwigs. Admittedly, the independence of the Bank of England was a good move, but as Daniel Finkelstein pointed out in the Times earlier this week, the central bank and the NHS are very different beasts. One is an expert, pointy-headed monetary policy setter that people only really hear about once a month, while the other is a vast, sprawling organisation, employing tens of thousands, costing billions of pounds to run and interacts with the public in hundreds of ways every day. Giving the two identical management structures strikes me as flawed an idea as running an oil rig and a ballet company in the same way. One size does not necessarily fit all. Lastly on this point, he’s already had the board idea, ten years ago. It gives the impression that he’s only got one idea. Enough with the boards. Move on. Let it go.

The lacklustre, slightly aspheric nature of Brown’s policy making could be a product of his working style. Blair has often been criticised for trying to be all things to all men, for paying too much heed to the tabloids and for slavishly following the opinion polls. Brown on the other hand, is said to formulate his ideas by shutting himself off with eight like-minded technocrats, nerdishly assembling his pet projects, in almost total isolation of other cabinet members. The policies resulting from this process therefore have the popular relevance and resonance of a matchstick model of Winchester Cathedral. However intricate and time-consuming they may have been to create, their significance only seems to be recognised by the maker.

This may help explain Brown’s failure to inspire a focus-group conducted by the BBC’s Newsnight earlier this week. At first he was the only one of the potential candidates whose face was recognised by the audience. The other, if I recall correctly, were John Reid, Alan Johnson, Alan Milburn, David Miliband and that Left-wing guy whose only running for the hell of it. However, excerpts from his speeches and interviews saw Brown’s initial albeit tepid support evaporate almost entirely, especially when he was contrasted with the increasingly impressive John Reid. Brown, who has been consistently upstaged by Blair for over ten years, was overshadowed by Reid in less than fifteen minutes. This impression has been strengthened by Reid’s hard-hitting speech on the last day of the conference.

Perhaps this is not altogether unusual. Reid is home secretary and as such, if he plays his cards right he is guaranteed a high profile, simply because the job description - locking people up and kicking people out - is more sensational and tabloid-friendly than the work of the treasury. Nevertheless, what should be more unsettling from Brown’s point of view is the fact that the public, and certainly the Newsnight focus group, overlook in Reid his Scottishness and relatively advanced age while holding these attributes against Brown, who is still widely regarded as a dour and forbidding Scots git. The Chancellor just cannot seem to talk these things away. The public struggles to warm to him and has unmoveable reservations about him.

I am not denying that Brown has been an effective Chancellor of the Exchequer. But in political terms, he’s a character actor not a romantic lead. He couldn’t open a picture, so to speak. The problem is, in David Cameron, the Tories have found someone who just could.

Banning size zeros makes zero sense

My summer of blog is over. This week I returned to university to prepare for a year of slog instead. This is likely to result in a deterioration in both the quality and quantity of my bloggery. Nevertheless, I have managed to carve enough time out of my busy schedule to pen a quick rant on the growing calls in the media for very thin or “size zero” models to be banned from major catwalk events in Britain. The London Evening Standard is running what it has generously described as a “campaign” on this, which means that five pages of each edition is devoted to quoting dozens of shrieking, like-minded hysterics all parroting the same half-baked, self-righteous twaddle. This may all sound a bit strange considering that I have in the past and on this very blog decried the race to the bottom of the scales that has gripped celebrity culture. That does not mean, however, that I would ban images of those engaged in that race because I doubt what it would achieve and cannot support it on principle.

First of all, formally preventing women of below a certain size from pursuing their modelling careers would be a form of discrimination. There are no good forms of discrimination or bad forms of discrimination, just discrimination plain and simple. The basis on which this would be done is to look at their BMI, which if below 18 would be considered too thin and they would be sent home. Arguably, ordering someone to be weighed and measured in this way is rather intrusive. There was a case in New York widely reported last week of a waitress who was pestered by her employers to lose weight and ordered against her will to go on the scales and declare her weight. This practice was universally condemned in the press and in the court that heard her harassment claim. But what is the difference in principle between ordering someone to be weighed in order to see if they’re too big or doing it to see if they’re too thin? Furthermore, there will be many models who are not anorexic but just happen to be very tall and spindly. It happens. They will find themselves branded as unhealthy degenerates and barred from their livelihood for having a mental illness that they do not have.

Banning skinny models would also be a form of censorship, no matter how cooing, concerned and motherly the words used to justify it are. Indeed, most forms of censorship are presented in terms of social concern, rather than as a desire to be authoritarian just for the whip-cracking fun of it. Fashion is, after all, an art form. Admittedly, sending squadrons of scantily-clad teenage girls gormlessly to walk up and down a glorified plank to a sound track of the Pet Shop Boys is not, in artistic terms quite up there with Rodin’s The Kiss, but it is nevertheless a means through which designers express themselves creatively. It therefore should not be subjected to censorship. If some woman-hating weirdo of a fashion designer thinks his post-punk, neo-goth, mortuary-chic creation would be best displayed on a seventeen year old who looks as though she is in the final stages of pancreatic cancer, then so be it. We would not accept the government dictating the physical appearance of ballet dancers, who tend to be absolutely tiny and do all manner of ghastly things to their bodies. Neither would we accept the government setting criteria for what sort of actresses should be employed in the film industry, or pixellating images of whippet woman Paula Radcliffe running the London Marathon, or ordering the destruction of the works of Giacommetti. True, fashion may be more influential on young women than ballet, athletics or art, although arguably film exerts a greater influence still. But it is not a principled argument to say that fashion should be singled out. You are not treating people the same.

Yes, seeing xylophone-ribbed models does make me feel a bit queasy, but so does the idea of having Tessa Jowell and Harriet Harman guarding the entrance to London Fashion week, bouncing all those that they do not consider to be of sturdy child-bearing, hockey-playing stock. Just as it is dubious to subject the fashion industry for this kind of scrutiny, it also raises the question of why excessive thinness is being singled out for stigma. Numbers of anorexics are on the rise, but then so are the number of people who are overweight or obese. Why not ban size 16-20 models as well for setting a bad example? May be everyone who is not a classic size 14 British pear shape should wear a burkha when venturing out in public, lest they should send out the wrong message or, God forbid, make someone feel bad about themselves.

Arguably, the models are not even primarily responsible for the complex and perverse trends that are shaping attitudes towards female body image. It is not what they are that is the problem, but the way in which they are perceived, which is beyond the control of the models themselves as it takes place in other people’s heads. The real question is not why designers use slender models but, rather, why is it that some women cannot look at a picture of Kate Moss without wanting to punish themselves somehow? A man can gaze for hours at a time at footballers, tennis players and other athletes without reading into them a critique of his own physique, no matter how pot-bellied, pigeon-chested or generally sub-standard it may be. Could it be that, in very general terms, physical appearance constitutes a smaller a part of men’s overall sense of self-esteem than it does in women? If so, they are making the right choice, since, apart from things like weight, your physical appearance is on the whole beyond your control, and therefore it is unwise to have your entire sense of self-worth hanging on it. The real question that people should be asking is how come, despite feminism’s triumph on the statute books for several decades now, physical appearance forms such a disproportionately large component of many women’s sense of self-esteem?

I don’t pretend to know the answer to that one, but I strongly suspect that banning skinny models is not going to get us there, not least because such a measure is based on a number of rickety assumptions. It treats women as passive victims of a male-dominated fashion industry and overlooks the fact that women have some choice over what influences they want to take on board and that women, as consumers, fuel the demand for which the fashion industry merely caters. Women have become fixated on skinniness even though there are many attractive women in the public eye who are in fact quite voluptuous and have far larger male followings than most models. Indeed, for whatever type of female body shape there will be thousands of men who are absolutely potty about it and will treat that woman like a duchess. And yet, women ignore all this and instead obsess over the snidey asides made by the hags who write Heat and Closer. Furthermore, it has been shown that shops which have experimented with using larger, more realistic and representative dummies to display their merchandise actually experienced a drop in sales compared to when they used stick thin ones. The thin obsession is something that women are choosing to buy into because, for various sick and depressing reasons of their own, they want to be the thinnest girl in the room and to be seen buying the smallest-size close in the shop. It is more likely that this frenzied, neurotic competition amongst women is the real dynamo behind the size zero trend and models are a reflection, rather than a cause.

Moreover, as Mick Hume pointed out in yesterday’s Times, banning certain types of model would actually re-enforce the idea that they are and should be role models for other women. It would send out the message that models are more than functional clothes horses, and that women and girls should be encouraged to learn lessons from the way they look and to identify with them. Turning models from a source of negative self-esteem to a source of positive self-esteem does not really challenge the problematic centrality of physical appearance in women’s sense of self-worth.

Finally, the campaign to ban skinny models highlights another pernicious trend of our times, namely the way in which almost all campaigns take the form of a bid to snuff something out or to prescribe people’s behaviour. Whereas the great campaigns of the last century such as women’s suffrage, civil rights for ethnic minorities and gay rights were all fuelled by a desire to extend people’s freedoms, campaigns these days invariably take the form of calls to ban this or that. There are campaigns to ban smoking, junk food advertising, advertising to children generally, smacking, hunting and fishing, the list goes on. Perhaps this reflects an intellectual laziness that tries to pin on various persona non gratas personal responsibility for broad social trends. Or maybe, and more worryingly, the language of rights, equality and social concern has morphed away from their original context into a way of cloaking an underlying impulse to clamp down, to rein in and to stigmatise.

The Pope has nothing to apologise for. Deal with it

How times change. Who would have thought that in the 21st century the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church would actually be a symbol of beleaguered free speech? Following the explosion of demonstrations and effigy-burnings across the Muslim world, Pope Benedict XVI did not issue a full apology for the remarks he made in a speech on interfaith dialogue earlier this week, nor should he. This latest pan-Islamic hissy-fit was sparked by allegations that the Pope had been Islamophobic by quoting a Byzantine emperor who described Mohammed’s additions to the Abrahamic family of faiths as “evil and inhuman”. As usual in these instances, the outcry as snowballed monstrously, leaving the flattened twig of what actually happened miles behind. Those who have jumped on the anti-Pope bandwagon have probably either wilfully misconstrued what he actually said, or didn’t bother to find out. And why should they? Against the backdrop of the West’s growing reticence to defend values such as freedom of expression, its militant opponents know they stand to gain far more through violent fits of righteous indignation than through truth-seeking or conciliation with other religions.

First off, there is nothing to suggest that the views of Manuel II quoted by the Pope are those of the Pope himself. He just used the quotation as a historical example in an academic speech. Because Manuel II was a 14th century Byzantine he, surprise, surprise, spoke and thought like a 14th century Byzantine. The Pope did not say whether or not he agreed with Manuel’s views on Mohammed’s teachings being “evil and inhuman”, because, from what I have gathered from having read the speech, that would have meant interrupting a vignette that he was using to lead into another point. Indeed, to have launched into a detailed discussion on the merits of Islam or an appraisal of the life and times of Manuel II would have meant going off on a massive tangent in a speech that was supposed to be about something else altogether, namely dialogue between faiths and the relationship between spirituality and reason.

Furthermore, the second part of the quote concerns Manuel’s distaste for the idea of spreading religion “by the sword” adding that “faith is born of the soul and not the body whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly without violence and threats.” This is clearly the more important part of the quote, as opposed to the “evil and inhuman” part, because what then follows is a discussion on the wrongs of spreading religion (any religion) by violence. Again, the Pope did not say whether he shared the emperor’s view that this belief constituted one of Islam’s fatal flaws, but then we should not be surprised at this either. The Pope was addressing an academic gathering at a prestigious German university, not the audience of Sesame Street. He did not need to graft some clodhopping, anachronistic running commentary of his own over the words of Manuel because it was reasonable to assume that the audience was capable of interpreting and contextualising the quote for themselves. Allowing historical figures to speak for themselves is an entirely proper way to treat source material.

There have also been questions about why Benedict chose to quote that particular piece of dialogue. First of all, it’s his party and he’ll quote who he wants to. That should really be the end of the matter, but I am aware that such a view belongs to a by-gone, sepia-tinted lost world of intellectual freedom that I will one day recount to my disbelieving grand-children. In any case, the choice seems fairly apposite. It was taken from a dialogue between Manuel and a Persian scholar, and the Pope’s message was supposed to be about interfaith relations. It also touches on the theme of holy war, and in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s quite a bit of that around lately.

Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the controversial part of the speech is just one very short stylistic device in a talk that was overwhelmingly conciliatory and peaceful. He called for a “genuine dialogue of cultures and religions, so urgently needed today” and the speech as a whole was arguably more a critique of positivistic atheism and not a critique of Islam. The Pope’s critics have ripped one tiny part of it out of context and blown it out of all proportion. This seems to be the constant style of the fanatics who drive these hate campaigns. Words in a fictional book by Salman Rushdie were seized upon as evidence of the author’s own apostasy. The Danish cartoons that set the Muslim world a-froth earlier this ear were interpreted as an attack on Mohammed (as though a bunch of Danish satirists cared one way or the other) rather than for what they were, namely a means of testing the limits of free speech in a multi-cultural society (and test it they did).

I am beginning to suspect that the uproar in all of these cases has little to do with the content of the offending statement or image, as this is largely ignored or distorted by the protestors. It seems that the frequency with which these protests take place could have something to do with the fact that they do indeed scare the West and get it on the back foot like almost nothing else. In the West, there is near universal condemnation and horror at terrorist atrocities, but the response to accusations of Islamophobia, no matter how menacing and spurious, is far more equivocal, as was evidenced by the patchy support received by Salman Rushdie during his fatwa and later by the Danish cartoonists, whose publishers were actually criticised by the British government. The West, and Europe in particular, is increasingly meek when it comes to defending its own values, not least because there has been a culturally relativist historiographical orthodoxy for two generations that associates those values with colonial oppression. With the Salman Rushdie affair, the West’s more militant critics in the Muslim world and in the European Muslim diaspora have discovered its soft underbelly and thus a way to flex their muscles. This is compounded by the fact that each wave of protest carries with it the veiled threat of more terrorist atrocities against the western states, so the West’s cultural relativism becomes a convenient disguise for the instinct to appease. This, I would argue goes some way to explaining why, when violent protests such as those we have witnessed this week over Pope break out, Muslim leaders do not call for calm and reason from the protestors, but press for apologies and concessions from the scapegoat.

Although the protesters claim to feel oppressed and stigmatised by those they believe to have offended them, theirs is a very aggressive state of victim-hood, so much so that it leads one to doubt whether it is a state of victim-hood at all. It’s like when someone glasses a stranger in a pub because they think that person looked at them a bit funny; it prompts one to re-evaluate just who was victimising who. So does the tendency of the aggressive “victims” to project on their supposed oppressor traits which might more accurately be associated with themselves. It has been the supporters of the effigy-burning rioters who have accused the Pope of being “medieval” and wanting to revive the Crusades, overlooking the fact that they are the ones trying to religiously censor free speech, while the central arguments of the Pope’s address were the need for faith to embrace reason and eschew holy wars.

The aggressive character of the protests is further revealed by the nature of what it is that the protesters are demanding. This is not a defensive reaction against an act of persecution but an attempt to seize an opportunity radically to alter the way in which history, religion and Islam in particular have been approached in Europe since the Enlightenment. The gist of the protest is that any comment on Islam or Mohammed has to be prefaced with adulation or at least an expression of approval, otherwise it is offensive. In addition, not only is it impossible for one to criticise Islam oneself, it is also impossible to cite a historical criticism of Islam without having to editorialise it in a way that celebrates Islam. It is not just criticism that is now becoming unacceptable, but neutrality.

Moreover, the Pope’s critics say that his failure to disassociate himself from the views of Manuel II is compounded by the fact that he is an opponent of Turkish entry to the EU on cultural grounds and that on past occasions he has not dismissed out of hand suggestions that Islam has some violent aspects. Why is all of this so astonishing? It is entirely possible that the Pope is lukewarm or even critical of other religions (why, I am sure that there are probably even some Muslims out there in the world who are not outlandishly affectionate towards unbelievers). He is the head of the Roman Catholic church which, unless he lied on his CV, suggests that he made an active choice at some stage in his life to embrace Catholicism over other religions. For him, Catholicism is obviously going to be more convincing, more inspirational and more truthful than other religions, unless he’s just in it for the funky hats and stuff. The Pope of the Catholic church is not going to have fits of devotional ecstasy over Mohammed or dedicate hours and hours of his public speaking to singing the praises of the Islam. When he is going through the archives of Byzantine emperors, he is not going to do it with a Muslim mindset, but one of detached objectivity and scepticism towards that faith.

The list of activities that some people are trying to proscribe now includes, in addition to criticism of and neutrality towards Islam, a simple and undisguised preference for your own faith over Islam. What this whole episode hinges on is not that the Pope insulted Islam, but that he does not conduct himself or his scholarship in an Islamicised way. The phrase “is the Pope a Catholic?” used to mean that something is obvious and self-explanatory. Apparently, it’s not obvious to everyone.

Cameron: A featherweight on foreign policy

When I heard that Conservative Leader David Cameron had returned from the Orient, I was curious to see the outcome. Eastern encounters can change a man, you know. They leave brimming with bright-eyed youthful arrogance and enthusiasm, and return older, chastened and sage, with a remote stare that suggests that though their body is back in London, their heart is still in the Indies. “One never truly returns from India” they murmur, before their eyes fill up with tears as they whisper over and over “the things I’ve seen, these things I have seen…” But not Cameron, who judging by his speech earlier this week on foreign policy is back to his bland, slippery self. Not surprising really, since during his travels he studiously avoided doing anything controversial. The highlights of his grand tour included, when in South Africa, a visit to Robben Island and Nelson Mandela, before moving on to India to pay his respects at Ghandi’s tomb. In other words, posing for photos next to symbols of causes around which there has been a favourable consensus for decades. The biggest impact he made on his trip was in the literal physical sense when a van in his entourage ploughed into an Indian pedestrian.

Admittedly, the task facing Cameron in crafting a new conservative foreign policy is difficult, as it involves squaring his party’s traditionally robust support for the United States and Israel with increasingly public hostility to both. So how did he tackle this? From what I can see, he didn’t bother. He just stated one thing in one paragraph and then stated the opposite in the next. It was rather like a badly constructed sixth-form essay which presents a balance sheet of disparate ideas without ever attempting to argue a coherent case or even assess the relative value of those ideas. At one point he asserts that anti-Americanism is nothing more that “intellectual and moral surrender”. Quite so. But he then says that the UK’s currently very pro-US stance, the very antithesis of anti-Americanism. is “slavish”, and attempts to distance himself from the US by describing himself as a “liberal conservative” rather than a “neoconservative”. So let me see if I’ve got this straight: First of all, according to Cameron, anti-Americanism is defined by moral and intellectual cowardice, which also somehow is the defining characteristic of its opposite, namely “slavish” Blairite pro-Americanism, posing the question how can two things that are clearly opposites have the same definition. Secondly, Cameron is saying that he is a staunch supporter of the US, except for its foreign policy and its prevailing political culture, which wouldn’t appear to leave very much that he does approve of. His views could then be summarised thusly: he is anti anti-Americanism, while also being anti pro-Americanism, because although America is quite good, it is also quite bad. How profound. Snappy too.

The key to the speech’s incoherence is the fact that it is more about public relations, as ever with Cameron, than it is about content. Essentially, it is a sop to the Notting Hillites and the Islingtonians who think that Bush is the new Hitler only worse because at least Hitler was a vegetarian. The speech certainly does not reflect Cameron’s own political behaviour. When he says the UK is guilty of following the US slavishly, is he referring to the Iraq war, which he supported, or the Afghan war which he also supported? In his address, he stated that “bombs and missiles are bad ambassadors”, which also begs the question of what Cameron thought the Iraq war would achieve when he voted for it. Arguably, trying to weasel out of his support for an unpopular war, while the troops, who he helped to send there, are still fighting and dying represents a form of “intellectual and moral surrender.”

Cameron also does not give the impression of having thought through properly the idea, scarcely an original one at that, that through constructive criticism of the US, the UK will be more influential and get more out of the “special relationship.” I’m not sure it works that way. I suspect that reciprocity between nations is something of a myth. International relations do not work like dinner parties where if you invite someone round for dinner, it’s their turn to invite you next time. A nation is not going to feel it owes another country anything simply out of reciprocity. It will only repay favours if it feels that to not do so will lead to a rupture of that alliance and that the repercussions of the end of that relationship would be far more onerous than making the reciprocal gesture would have been. This is probably especially true of the US because it is a super power. Indeed, if the US had to bend to the interests of others it wouldn’t be a super power.

True, Britain does not have to go along with every foreign policy jaunt of America’s, but this does not mean that abstaining will increase the influence of Britain in the world. The choice seems to be a stark one, either accept to accept a junior role in a US-led venture, or be sidelined. Sometimes, accepting to be sidelined is the sensible thing to do, but it won’t necessarily increase influence. France may now be playing a leading role in the Lebanon peace-keeping initiative, and this is partly to do with its opposition to the war in Iraq. But it only assumed its current role because the US summoned it back to the table. If the US did not back its presence in the region, it would not be there. Moreover, Cameron lamented that we have “lost the art” of being a critical ally of the US. Who ever mastered it? Even Churchill didn’t really master that art . Once the US entered the second world war, British influence over strategy was steadily eroded and Roosevelt became more interested in courting Stalin than he did Churchill, whose loyalty could be taken for granted.

Has any of this occurred to Cameron? If not, then he seriously naïve, to the point of probably thinking that the film Love, Actually is a groundbreaking and weighty political treatise. More likely, he is trying to win over all his charming dangly-earringed North London friends who keep telling him “oh David, but you’re too nice to be a Tory.” However, his stance could equally alienate a lot of traditional Tories, some of whom have already expressed disquiet over Shadow Foreign Minister William Hague’s tentative criticism of Israel earlier this summer. Support for America and Israel are regarded by many Conservatives as two of their party’s most important supporting walls. A vivid reminder of the sacred cow status of the special relationship among Conservatives came on the same day that Cameron delivered his speech when Margaret Thatcher - who continues to haunt the party that slayed her like Mrs Bates haunted Norman - stood shoulder to shoulder with Dick Cheney to commemorate September 11th. This suggests that Cameron could have a fight on his hand within his own party if he rides roughshod over its deeply held convictions on national security just to impress a few Channel 4 News viewers. Oooh, I do hope so. Fight, fight, fight…

The French Presidential Race: More than a swimsuit contest

The British coverage of the start of the 2007 French presidential election race has so far been issue-lite. One of the worst and most persistent offenders has to be the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt, who carefully swerves around the real issues, lest they should undermine the British sense of superiority over the French, and prefers to just chortle her way through a catalogue of cliché s about suave politicians, Chanel-clad women and moustachioed farmers. The main story to have been picked up by Wyatt and her colleagues in recent weeks is that of French Socialist contender Ségolène Royal being snapped on the beach by the paparazzi looking rather fetching in a bikini. The fact that UMP candidate and Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy poured forth about his rocky relationship with his wife Cecilia in a bestselling book also captured the imaginations of the British press pack. Although why this particular story should have surprised them, I don’t know. Sarkozy has, for as long as I can remember been a tireless Duracell bunny of self-promotion who can’t go to the toilet without calling a press conference about it. Nevertheless, these developments have triggered reams and reams of hackery about how the snooty French and their elitist politicians are finally going ga-ga over celebrity culture.

True, the French political class is coming under more press scrutiny than in years gone by. The days when a top ranking minister could arrange to have his mistress put in a convent and the lovechild raised by a blind old woman in the forest with the press kept entirely in the dark are probably gone for good. Nevertheless, when I was over in France earlier this year, the impression I got was that, despite the proliferation of celeb magazines, these rags were still widely considered to be sub-mental and only taken seriously by soft-headed sad cases who want to know whether Princess Caroline will ever find happiness, because, like, they lost their mother when they were young too, so they’re like sisters kind of. As a result, the impact of the celebification of politicians is likely only to prove slight and fleeting.

My proof? About a year ago, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was caught on camera emerging from the Atlantic like a chiselled-chested Poseidon. This set many tongues a-lolling and generated favourable comparisons with his colleague and rival Sarkozy, who, and there are no two ways about it, is a bit of a mong. Villepin’s cachet received a further boost by his daughter, quite a stunner herself, who is a model and now the face of a major French perfume brand. However, Villepin’s media-licious lifestyle did not prevent him from rapidly becoming, rightly or wrongly, one of the least popular and most derided prime ministers of modern France, after having been dragged through an almost slapstick succession of setbacks and scandals. These hinged on the core issues of unemployment, labour law reforms and social exclusion, as well as the very public Roadrunner-Wily. E. Coyote thing he has going with Sarkozy. This would suggest that the French public’s political awareness has not been replaced by an obsession with celebrity style tips and cellulite and that the onset of paparazzi politics does not merit the attention it has been given.

In fact, the coming election is arguably more likely to see a repetition of past agonies and disappointments than it is to be defined by new trends. Not that there haven’t been any interesting developments. The emergence of Royal has been quite exhilarating. Initially, I was sceptical and dismissed her as just another one of those ghastly female politicians - you know the kind - who gushes about consensual politics and how if mothers ruled the world there wouldn’t be any wars. But then she started saying some interesting things about following the Blairite model and clamping down on delinquency, which has reached chilling proportions in France’s gruesome suburbs.

Royal, who has been nicknamed the “gazelle” for her political agility and lightness of touch, has been fiercely resisted by the “elephants” of the party such as Laurent Fabius, Lionel Jospin and Jack Lang, people who are so encrusted into the edifice of Socialist politics that they are not going to be dislodged without a fight. Despite Royal’s popularity - opinion polls have consistently put her as the front runner, slightly ahead of Sarkozy - broad swathes of her own party are determined to thwart her, even if it means fielding a candidate who is almost universally despised by the general public.

Laurent Fabius would be the candidate most likely to stand if Royal fails to receive her party’s backing to be its official candidate. He led the victorious “non” campaign against the European Constitution last year, which he attacked from the left for being too liberal and anglo-Saxon (what constitution was he reading?). However, the campaign proved to be a bit of a cul de sac, as it was essentially just a knee-jerk negative stropfest, and now he is trying to regalvanise support behind him by running for the presidency and doing to Royal what he did to the Constitution. But the polls are not behind him. According to a survey conducted recently by TNS Sofres and published in the Nouvel Observateur, if Fabius stood next year he would be knocked out in the first round on a meagre ten percent (twelve per cent if José Bové secures the Trotskyist candidacy instead of Olivier Besancenot but still knocked out). The second round would be a run off between Sarkozy and the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. This would be a repeat of the nightmare of the last presidential ballot in April 2002, when former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin crashed out in the first round after coming third after Jacques Chirac and Le Pen.

No doubt that if this happened again, Sarkozy would thump Le Pen in the second stage, but the episode would still be disastrous for France, confirming the impression that sensible, centrist politics is being reduced to a rump between the demagogic, nihilistic extremes. The causes would be the same, one of which being the refusal of Socialists to adapt to economic reality and their insistence on maintaining a social model that has been tested to destruction, thereby causing them to haemorrhage votes in all directions.

Politically exhausted, irrelevant and increasingly turning in on themselves, the Socialists are in real danger of allowing personal grudges to obscure the bigger picture. Their attitude is reminiscent of that of the German Communist party in the early thirties, when it refused to form a united front with the Social Democrats against the Nazis on the grounds that real Fascists were preferable to “social fascists". The French Socialists’ problems are compounded by the fractious state of the entire Left wing, where the Socialist vote is split by a host of far Left looney-toon cartoon characters, such as Marie-George Buffet and Arlette Laguiller.

Royal is the last real hope of saving the respectable French Left, which is both ossifying and fracturing at the same time, but she faces an uphill struggle even to be allowed to run. The coming French election is not a swimsuit contest. It’s Russian roulette.

Notes on Progress

With the Tony Blair era now deep into its bunker stage, there we were, the few remaining loyalists, nervously huddled in waiting for the Leader, cyanide capsules close to hand, as the advancing Brownite tanks rumbled in the distance. I am referring to the tenth anniversary meeting of Progress, a modernising group within the Labour party. The Blairite star was on the rise when Progress was founded back in 1996, but the in-fighting of the past week threatened to hang like a pall over yesterday’s proceedings. What was supposed to be a wonktastic festival of centrist think-tankmagoria was now primarily viewed by the media as an opportunity to gauge the damage done by the escalating acrimony that has gripped the party as a whole.

I have to admit, I half expected to see a Blair at bay, a wounded lion staggering around looking for a place to die. However, the prime minister confounded expectations. Proving once again that he is at his best when his back is against the wall, Blair sprang onto the stage and addressed the audience - admittedly not a tough crowd - in a defiant yet constructive manner. It was the first time I had seen Blair speak live and he definitely has that charisma thing, a way with words that words themselves cannot fully describe. He drove home the importance of the party continuing in a modernising and economically realist vein and did not shy away from defending the government’s more hard-line and controversial policies on anti-social behaviour and security. But above all, and most significantly, he called on the party to draw a line under the past week’s bickering or else face losing the next election. This was particularly commendable. When staring down the barrel of their own downfall, some politicians lose their judgement and sense of proportion. He resisted the urge to take the whole “bunker stage” to a climax by setting in train the destruction of the party for having failed to fulfil the task that destiny had set for it, and instead rallied the troops and called for calm. After his address we bounced out of the hall reinvigorated and singing “the future belongs to us”. Well, not quite.

The speech also concentrated the mind on the vacuum that will be left by the now inevitable departure of Blair. Centrist politics is not in itself especially glamorous, as it is largely about messy compromises and represents a rejection of seductive utopian ideologies. New Labour was arguably a mode of reflection than a coherent all-encompassing ideology with a theory of history, human nature and the future of mankind. Blair’s inimitably charismatic style helped bind New Labour together, which when stripped of that is essentially a bunch of unoriginal, consensual (and for that reason often sound and necessary) ideas that could be pinched by anyone. Unless Gordon Brown can shake his image of being a bitter and twisted Miss Haversham - unable to enjoy what he has because of a pathological and overblown sense of frustration with what should be and might have been - the party will lose what is left of its cachet. For better or for worse, much of Labour’s popular success and competitive edge over other parties over the last decade was due to its cachet.

With the charisma factor set to evaporate from the party, it will have to rely doubly on internal discipline and cohesion to press home its remaining advantages over Cameron’s Tories at the next election. The head start that Labour has simply by being the incumbent and therefore guarantor of stability and continuity will be completely blown if the party is in disarray. Moreover, when the Tories are forced to be more specific about their policies as the election approaches, rebellion and discontent from its back benches and grass roots could become a spanner in the works of the Cameron juggernaut, but only if the Labour party is not in a similar or graver state of civil war. Hence it is in both Blair and Brown’s interests to secure as harmonious a leadership transition as possible, rather than the kind of Saint Bartholomew’s Night Massacre that threatened to break out last week.

A dignified and good-natured transition is easier said than done of course. If I was in a similar position to Blair I know that deep down I would think “f*** dignity” and willingly go down in a blaze of operatic, bosom-clutching high melodrama. That would serve to elongate the shadow my legacy would cast over my treacherous successor. I would want to be the ghost at every table, gnawing away at his conscience, preventing him from enjoying his ill-gotten spoils. Either this would drive him mad or, better yet, he would be smited by a just and vengeful Lord: “And lo did it come to pass that the usurper did fall suddenly to the ground, gripped by fever, plagued by boils and riddled with worms…and there was much rejoicing…” But I digress.

The rest of the conference was a slight anti-climax, but fitfully interesting nevertheless. I attended a seminar entitled “Security versus Liberty: Will we be forced to choose?” featuring, brace yourself and set your face to stunned, Shami Chakrabati. I found the seminars a bit of disappointment. I know they are supposed to be grass roots participatory democracy in action. They are indeed that, but they are also a bit rubbish. The speakers invariably go on for far longer than their allotted time and matters unravel further when the discussion is thrown open to the floor. Unfortunately, most people who attend seminars do not ask questions, well not in the strict grammatical sense anyway. Rather, they give five minute long verbal ejaculations, giving a potted biography of themselves and a panorama of their political views. Why do they do this when there are professional public speakers there who everyone else has paid to hear? Do they think that there is a Labour party talent scout hidden in the audience who, on hearing them proclaim their views on Iraq, will jump up and say “By Jove, here is our new leader! He’ll show us the way!” Instead, a discussion that initially threatened to be quite interesting was submerged by pointless verbiage. But there were some interesting moments. David Aaronovitch, one of the speakers, was particularly good on the perils of fetish-ising the form of the law over its aim. During this Ms Chakrabati displayed an ill-mannered and distracting habit of tutting and scowling as her opponent (or actually just fellow guest since this was not a formal debate) spoke. That said, even the most polished, Swiss finishing school graduate would have struggled not to roll their eyes when, towards the end of the seminar, Chakrabati exclaimed “we are all Muslims now!”

The afternoon started with a platitudinous address from Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander, which was followed by more seminars. I went to “We don’t do God: Is faith finding politics?” This seminar was worse than the first. Nick Cohen, who I had very much been hoping to hear, did not show up and the other speakers were pretty dreary. It was chaired by Chris Bryant MP, which vexed me enormously. He was one of the signatories of the leaked letter that called on Blair to stand down. I toyed with the idea of marching up to the front table where he was seated and just decking him: “So, you like stitching people up, do you? Stitch that.” But the urge subsided.

All in all, it was a pleasing day. There were a few freebies going. Copies of the New Statesman were being given away, which is the only way in which I'd ever end up reading that demented rag. Between the speeches and seminars the lobby thronged with minglers and net workers. It was like a centre-Left theme park. There was a coterie around Stephen Twigg and I saw Estelle Morris in the Ladies’ Room. As I returned to the lobby, there was Alan Milburn and Michael Portillo, elegantly sashaying across the floor And at noon, we all made way for the Guardian Journalists’ parade. Of course, I didn’t summon the courage to speak to anyone well-known or otherwise. I’m so shy it sometimes feels as though I am wearing an iron mask. If someone struck up a conversation with me, I’d think nothing of it, other than “what a nice fellow.” And yet, I imagine that if I tried to talk someone, they’d click their fingers and before I could do anything, I’d be bundled out by security and thrown in the clink with the exhibitionists and stalkers.

The highlight of the day was, of course, hearing Blair speak. Prior to that the only time I had ever witnessed something even remotely newsworthy was in March when I was tear-gassed in a Paris metro station after accidentally bumbling into a three-way clash between the French riot police, protesting students and hoodies from the suburbs. Yesterday was a far more agreeable way to witness history.

Après Blair, le déluge?

With Tony Blair’s authority unravelling, the Labour Party is staring into the abyss. Momentum behind the Blair must go now bandwagon is gathering following the resignation of junior defence minister Tom Watson (yes, that’s right the Tom Watson) and six other aides, who were also signatories of a leaked letter calling on the PM to go now for the good of the nation. Of course, Tom Watson in no way embodies the will of the nation nor does he have oracular powers over where its destiny lies. He is just another little man looking for his place in history, and possibly on a Gordon Brown front bench. It is rumoured that the letter was Brown’s engineering, and his silence on the matter could be a signal for his amassed armies of the opportunistic and the resentful to march on Blair.

This crisis was precipitated by the leaking yesterday of a memo from a Blair adviser suggesting ways in which Blair could leave Downing Street, as he has indicated that he will do at a time of his choosing - quite possibly next spring - , on a high note. These plans, which included public addresses and television appearances, were, predictably scoffed at and portrayed by his Brownite foes as evidence of Blair’s Caligula-esque delusions of grandeur. However, when the Brownite filter is removed, the memo is perfectly innocuous. It was from a Blair aide, not the man himself, and the Labour leader is in no way bound to follow it. Indeed, we do not even know what, if anything, his response was. Even if he did approve, what is wrong with Blair wanting to end his premiership in an upbeat fashion? It goes without saying that he does not want to stagger out of Number Ten weeping and cursing the gods, especially when, by the standards of the post he has occupied, he has hardly disgraced himself. No one wants to leave a job that way.
The memo also revealed that Blair’s plans to resign are real, something which his opponents in the Labour party have long been clamouring for. There was then further indication from his inner circle that resignation would come in April next year and the handover to his successor in the following. Despite having got what they have always wanted, Blair’s internal enemies now want more. His resignation is not enough, it has to be as immediate and humiliating as possible. No doubt, if it was up to Gordon Brown, Blair would be forced to shuffle out of Number Ten with his trousers rolled down, sucking his thumb and saying “I’ve been a bad widdle boy”.

True, Watson does not say that he is a Brownite and describes himself as a “party loyalist”, but this is what makes his actions doubly ominous for Blair. The Brownites have been snapping at the PM’s heels since day one. Practically as far back as May 1997 there have been pompous editorials in the New Statesman entitled “Why Blair must stand aside”. Now, however, the non explicitly pro-Chancellor tranche of the party is crumbling away from Blair, succumbing to Brownite scare mongering about how his tenure is rendering the party unelectable. The Watson letter said that Blair’s resignation in a year’s time would not be in the interest of the UK and that he must go before.

Disingenuous claptrap. In stabbing Blair in the back, the Labour party would be killing the golden goose. Blair has enjoyed unparalleled electoral success for a Labour leader, winning three consecutive general elections, with popular mandates ranging from spectacular to solid. Admittedly, Labour has recently lost its opinion poll lead, but not by more than you would expect for a government that has been in power for nine years. It is trailing the Tories by four percent and in any case, polls also show that a Blair-led government would be more popular than a Brown-led one. Furthermore, there is no major policy divide to warrant a schism from the present leadership. In addition to the electoral success, I would argue that Blair remains the outstanding British politician of our times (admittedly, the competition is not up to much). After all, who his Tory leader David Cameron* trying slavishly to imitate? Blair, not Brown. Who in the US and above all in Europe is the statesman held up as the figure to which to aspire by politicians of both Left and Right? Shaft. I mean Blair. Above all, the British public renewed the Blair-led government’s mandate only last year, with the general expectation that the PM would remain at the top for longer than a mere sixteen months. It was also widely expected, and signalled by Blair himself, at the last election that he would stand down before the next ballot, and in a way that would give his successor sufficient time to settle into the job. What kind of dolt needs over three years to settle into a job? Obviously Brown feels he does. In that case, should people just go along with that, or should they question whether he really is the chap for the job?

I am not saying “crisis, what crisis?” There is indeed a crisis in the Labour party at present, but it is one of Gordon Brown’s instigation and reflects more his personal frustration than Blair’s failures. Against the backdrop of general satisfaction among the population for the government in its current form, Brown and his allies have sought ceaselessly to create a rift in party unity and to deepen it further at every attempt to heal it. First came the calls for a pledge from Blair to stand down. When that came, the new demand was for a time-table. When that came, the time-table wasn’t good enough.

Blair’s right to leave of his choosing is as reasonable as Brown’s claim to the top job is weak and rooted in his ludicrously indulged and spurious sense of entitlement. This originated, according to legend, from a verbal agreement with Blair twelve years ago when the two were in contention for the leadership of the Labour party. But that agreement was itself a recognition of the fact that Brown could not win a leadership contest against Blair. Since then, Brown has remained largely silent on issues not relating to the economy and has made few memorable public contributions to foreign policy, education or social cohesion discussions. Brown does not, therefore, have a popular or ideological claim to lead the party. Rather, he has had to rely on the inevitable drip-drip of resentment and petty frustrations that build up in a governing party over a long period of time. He has had to wait for a swelling of the ranks of the chronically disloyal and of those hoping that their mediocre talents will be more generously rewarded by a less discerning patron. Those are his people.

So, it is looking increasingly likely that Blair will fall sooner, rather than later. It will be whenever the salon de refusés becomes bigger that the main exhibition and its central attraction. We may have already reached that tipping point. And once the discipline goes, it all goes. But I fear that Blair’s departure will not prove the miracle cure to the party’s internal problems. In a case faction-fighting, simply empowering one faction at the expense of another does not necessarily heal the rift between them. In fact, it could make it worse, especially if Blair is perceived by his allies to have been stabbed in the back. It is precisely that sort of bad blood that plunged the Tories into a prolonged crisis after the ousting of Thatcher, a crisis from which they are only just beginning to emerge. The fall of Blair could pave the way to their complete recovery.

(*where the bloody hell is Cameron anyway? In India, apparently on another gap year-tastic caper. He does have an incredible flare for engaging in the bland and irrelevant while seismic events are unfolding elsewhere. I mean, the prime minister is seriously on the ropes, he may survive, he may not, and the leader of the opposition is on the other side of the world, probably stuck in a tent somewhere having henna patterns painted on his man-boobs. What a waste)

Molly Campbell affair: Infidels love their children too

Molly Campbell or Misbah Iram Ahmed Rana as she likes to be known says she’s safe and well in Pakistan and happy to have escaped the “living hell” of life with her non-Muslim mother in the Outer Hebrides. Case closed then, or so it would seem. The newspapers certainly seem happy enough to think so and are eager to put behind them their earlier frenzied speculation that the twelve year old had been kidnapped to be sold to the Sultan for a thousand camels.

But none of this changes the fact that the law (of these isles) has been flouted. The Scottish courts awarded Mrs Campbell, Molly’s mother custody, not her father. The law says Molly should be somewhere and she's on another continent altogether. Molly (Misbah, whatever) may not have been entirely satisfied with the Scottish court’s ruling, but when it comes to rulings on family breakdown, few of those concerned ever are. These are messy situations where loyalties are divided and emotions run high, which is why we have courts to arbitrate them in the first place. A child may have a preference about which parent they want to stay with. However, the “minor” status given to children exists for a reason, namely that children, who can be impulsive or easily swayed by one parent against another, are not always the best judges of their own interests, and how they may feel at twelve may not necessarily be how they feel when they are fifteen or sixteen. That is why the courts assume responsibility for allocating custody in such cases, and it is not the court’s role to give a verdict on which parent the child loves the most.

Generally speaking, people who use the family courts obey their rulings even if they are not wholly pleased with them. The Rana family has not obeyed the custody decision, rather, it would seem, it has conspired to break it. I am sure that there are many of divorced fathers, who have watched their children beg them to stay or for to let them live with them. In the vast majority of cases they overcome the impulse to make a dash for Heathrow and return the child to its mother at the end of their visit, however badly they feel treated by the courts. This is because we live in a society of laws and there are very good reasons why children should be living where the authorities expect them to be living and that their official custodians know where they are. Otherwise, instead of a society laws, we have a jungle, where anyone can skip off with any child they think they have a claim to. Yes, custody decisions can be painful and rigid, but just think what the consequences would be of a breakdown in certainty regarding the laws of child abduction, which is what the Rana family seems to be lobbying for.

Furthermore, the family cannot complain that it has been demonised or that the press has over-reacted, because, quite frankly, they have not behaved well, not only by not returning Molly to her rightful home, but by concealing her whereabouts from the mother over several days, causing her incalculable distress. They may complain that Mrs Campbell jumped the gun in expressing her fears of a forced marriage but what evidence had they given her not to believe the worst? Every good parent fears for the worst when their child disappears, to do otherwise would be complacent. Infidels love their children too. In addition, the Rana family, it would appear, waited until Molly was installed under Pakistani jurisdiction before going public, in a bid, it seems, to obtain from a court in that country that which was denied to them in Scotland. Moreover, since going public they have given the impression of ceaselessly pandering to local sentiment to discredit the mother, portraying her in press conferences as a wanton Messalina of gargantuan depravity. She has been described as a corrupting, dope-smoking apostate who would raise Molly as a “nothing” and instead of as a good Muslim.

These actions have been deplored by leading Pakistani human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, who is quoted in today’s Times as saying “frankly I find this case completely disgusting…every time there is a case (of this nature) involving a woman not from Pakistan she has been accused of all kinds of behaviour which is anti-Islamic.” Jahangir adds “there’s an anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK but there’s such a racist sentiment here. Those who are not Muslim are looked down on as if they have no right to exist.” She warns that “Pakistan is a country where there is no law, it is just a question of who can frighten the most.”

Judging by the timidity that is now prevailing among the press and the government on the issue, Mrs Campbell will struggle to “out-frighten” the Rana family. Her early fears of a forced marriage have been cast in an “Islamophobic” light, while it has apparently become entirely acceptable for a mother to be deprived of her lawful right to look after her child on grounds of being an apostate of Islam. I don’t imagine that many non-Muslim British families would agree to have their custody disputes conducted on these terms. To acquiesce to the Rana/Campbell case being carried out on these lines is to accept tacitly that one set of laws applies to Muslims and another to non-Muslims and then when there is a conflict between the two, Muslim sensitivities should prevail over secular law. This episode, if it is resolved in favour of Mr Rana and this is uncontested over here, is hardly likely to discourage other British Muslim families who are so minded from getting, by hook or by crook, their family proceedings relocated to Pakistan. If this practice is accepted unquestioningly, it could, in turn, fuel calls for sharia courts in Britain, to save families the bother and expense of going to Pakistan.

It is indeed strange that the government has not been more vocal in decrying the way in which the Rana family is making a mockery of British courts. Indeed, there has only been one intervention, an informal one, by Mohammed Sawar MP, who travelled to Pakistan for “dialogue” with the family. Sawar, who reportedly has been a personal acquaintance of Molly’s father for fifteen years, did not return from Lahore with Molly, but rather with Pollyanna-ish ejaculations about how happy Molly is with her wonderful father and that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. This suggests that all that talk from “Communities” Minister Ruth Kelly about promoting integration as opposed to separate development of ethnic and religious groups was just that, talk.

Super Casinos: Why we should refuse them an accommodation

Casinos are not portrayed in a favourable light in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather parts 1 & 2 (I think we can all agree that part 3 should be stricken from the record; yes Sofia Coppola, you stank it up like you stink everything up). They are pawns in the machinations of the Corleone crime dynasty, as it blackmails and garrottes its way to owning three of Las Vegas’s major casinos. These are then used to launder money, further the careers of the Corleones’ show biz pals and as a station of exile for out of favour relatives and associates (ah, poor Fredo). It is partly because I have this image of gambling culture in the back of my mind that I view government plans to build a “super casino” somewhere in the UK, possibly Greenwich, with apprehension. I know that major policy and planning decisions should not be based on the fictional scenarios of Hollywood films, no matter how iconic. But the counter-argument is hardly persuasive either. Culture secretary Tessa Jowell has largely avoided the difficult questions about the social and cultural impact of such establishments, preferring to be endlessly photographed by roulette tables and bars like a Rai Uno game show hostess.

According to Jowell, a super casino will be as wholesome and family-friendly as a village fete, just with cocktail waitresses and slot machines. However, before the decision has even been taken on where the casino should be built and by whom, the process has already become steeped in (alleged) sleaze. There has been the on-going controversy over the several visits paid by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to the US ranch of Philip Anschutz, the owner of the Millennium Dome, which he is bidding to have converted into a super casino. Then there was news that the AEG, part of that consortium, have already started building work on the conversion, while the selection panel is still claiming the race to be wide open. And then it emerged that in its supporting documents, AEG had misrepresented the views of local religious leaders (apparently if Jesus was on earth today he wouldn’t be a croupier and slot jockeys are not the dearest of God’s children). If the bidding process is so apparently lacking in transparency, how likely is it that things will improve once the licence to build the monopolistic temple of mammon is granted?

To counter its critics the government has talked up the urban-regenerating properties of building the super casino. Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who is lobbying loudly for the super casino to built at the Greenwich dome, has cited the regeneration of the area as one of the main reasons to support the bid. I’m not sure how that works. When aspirational, upwardly mobile families go house hunting, how regularly do they ask their estate agent the following: “ok, you say you’ve found somewhere near good schools and public transport, but tell me, where’s the nearest casino? You see, our little Jeremy wants to be a wide-boy when he’s older, and as parents, we want to encourage him in any way we can.” Probably not very often.

The casino’s supporters also like to go on about how fantastic the venture would be for attracting tourists, just like Las Vegas, and that it may even compete with Las Vegas. But then are those really the sort of tourists we want to attract? Medallioned Vinnies from New Jersey, getting pissed and surly, and then picking a fight as they are man-handled to the exit by Security: “Hey, you tink you’re better dan me? F**kin’ wise guy. You know what I tink? I tink dat’s a f**kin’ faggot casino, dat’s what I tink.” A splendid addition to the Greenwich peninsular, gentrification guaranteed.

Besides, rival Las Vegas, who are we kidding? That people are talking about it in those terms means that it is more or less certain that the casino will turn out to be a half-arsed, Get Carterish piece of tawdry Americana. Is it really going to attract cabaret performers of the calibre of Dean Martin and Elvis Presley? No. It’s going to be people like Jim bloody Davidson and H from Steps trying to revive their stinking careers.

I do have deeper concerns about the licensing of a super casino. Not for nothing are casinos known for being organised crime magnets, offering as they do, a vast potential for money-laundering. We would be removing any lingering reservations the Russian mafia may have about relocating officially to London. It seems particularly bizarre that while the Home Office is looking to clamp down more effectively on fraud and financial shenanigans - notoriously difficult to detect and prosecute - the culture ministry is determined to bulldoze through what could be the first of several super casinos. All that talk of “joined-up” government seems today a distant memory of childhood.

As for the wider effects on society, my hunch is that the super casino is bad news. I’m not the sort of person who marches up and down Oxford Street with a megaphone raving about the Seven Signs of Evil. My objection is not that it will be a seething pit of mammon-worship, idolatry and whoredom that shall displease the Lord. Rather, I am simply not convinced that the revenues generated will offset the negative social consequences of a major relaxation in gambling laws combined.

There is this James Bondian myth about casinos being glitzy and glamorous, that the typical casino-goer is a tuxedoed cad of international renown, standing at the roulette table as he “accidentally” drops a chip down the cleavage of the beautiful countess seated in front of him. Not so. A substantial component of the casino-going demographic is people of limited resources, squandering those resources compulsively on slot machines. Jowell says it is more desirable for gamblers to be drawn to a supervised, adult-only environment rather than have slot machines dispersed where children may use them in pubs, arcades and chippies, a practice which the government wants to clamp down on. However, while children nicking money from mummy’s purse to spend on fruit machines is to be condemned, arguably there is a lot more at stake when adults gamble. Casinos aren’t run by social workers. An expansion of casinos will lead to more gambling addiction, spiralling personal debt, loan-sharking, homelessness, family breakdown, kids being taken into care and the like.

Does saying all this make me an advocate of the nanny state? No. I don’t think that gambling should be prohibited, but equally I don’t think that the status quo is so oppressive for gamblers that it needs to be substantially relaxed. In any case, the argument that opposition to super casinos is anti-libertarian only works in theory. In practice, the social consequences of these kinds of casinos will necessitate an increase in various other kinds of state intervention, in the form of more social workers, debt counsellors and so on which in turn will create more demands on the public purse. Indeed, it is an impoverished form of libertarianism that wants to create an anything-goes-fantasy land where people can indulge their most self-destructive whims on an endless horizon, while devolving responsibility for dealing with the consequences to outside agencies and the wider community. So, for all these reasons, I don’t want some seedy, charmless, misery-breeding super casino to be imposed on London, my home, where my children come to play with their toys.

Notes on Metroland

During the celebrations of the centenary of John Betjeman’s birth, the poet has been paid the backhanded compliment of being a “national treasure”. I say backhanded because few self-respecting writers would like to go down in posterity as the literary equivalent of Oxo or Branston’s pickle. While Betjeman was penning his gentle reminiscences about holidays in Cornwall, his contemporaries, such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes were being more adventurous in form and content (not that I’m a huge fan of Hughes with all that mystical conservationist stuff about crags and crows). More reassuringly familiar than cutting edge, Betjeman is only likely to be regarded as a major poet by people who think that Beryl Cook is the greatest artist of modern times and that Newsnight should have more stories about cats.

Although a minor poet, Betjeman did nevertheless have a flair for evoking lost worlds, an Alan Bennett-like ability to write in sepia, without spilling over into sickly sentimentality. Betjeman displayed this not only in his poems but also in his television pieces, an example of which, Metroland, was replayed this week on BBC4. I took an interest in this because I myself have spent most of my life in Metroland, the suburbs of north-west London that hug the Metropolitan railway line. It is not the most glamorous part of the city: one wind-swept parade of shops after another where, whatever the time of year, it always feels like a dreary Sunday afternoon in early February.

Betjeman looked beneath the common perception of places like Wembley and Neasden, which even in 1973 - when Metroland was aired - were regarded as a stretch of unsightly suburban flab that one had to cut through in order to get to the city's beating heart, and succeeded in bringing to the fore the area’s well-hidden charms. He focuses on the origins of Metroland in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the high summer of zany British confidence when it was thought that the main purpose of land (anywhere in the world) was to be transformed by English ingenuity. At the time, the Metropolitan line was a peerless achievement, which its developers, getting rather carried away, envisaged one day going as far north as Manchester, while also connecting London with Paris. Equally ambitious were the property developers’ plans to turn the fields, farm houses and hamlets along the railway into a suburban idyll. Instead of the ad hoc squalor of the inner city, members of the burgeoning professional classes would each be able to buy their own little villa, set among parks, lidos, empire exhibitions and general pleasant barminess and still be connected to central London by the Met line.

Of course, the vision did not last. The Metropolitan line never reached Manchester and only goes as far north as Amersham. There is a train link between London and Paris, but the Met line has nothing to do with it, which is probably for the best. The Met line has become so outdated and poorly maintained that it would be quicker to get to Paris on a combination of mule-back and pedalo. Many of Metroland’s other hair-brained schemes never came to pass either, such as the plan to build a tower larger than the Eiffel tower on the site where Wembley stadium is now. They got as far as building the first storey before the public lost interest and the money ran out. As the forces underpinning British confidence declined - the empire, the military and commercial supremacy - so too did Metroland.

Betjeman’s Metroland was broadcast when Wembley, Neasden, Kenton and parts of Harrow had already become a byword for mundanity and were starting to become rather down-at-heel. But in recalling vividly the age when Metroland was once brimming with bank clerks with bowler hats, waistcoats and watches on chains, striding home in the evenings to Bovril and aspidistras, he redeems it. He confers on Metroland the tatty dignity of a once-loved toy.

In the decades since Betjeman’s Metroland, the area’s downward trajectory has continued, accelerated even. It is in real danger of becoming little more than a suburban wasteland of Asdas, discount linen stores and roaming gangs. What was left of the original vision was dimmed further by the next great wave of demographic change and urban sprawl. I’m not trying to sound all “I remember when these second generation immigrants was all fields.” I am not a hedgerows-are-better-than people type. I would not swap the diverse population of contemporary Metroland for monocled, unicycling Edwardians. It’s just a shame that the visionary confidence and positivism of the era have only been replaced by a fatalistic neglect. The woolly-headed ninnies that run Brent county council may pride themselves on being the antithesis of the patriarchal imperialists of the 1910s, 20s and 30s and cringe at their restless (and now deeply unfashionable) quest to showcase British civilization. However, there is no escaping the fact that it was that generation who created Metroland and later generations who allowed it to slide in to dilapidation.

I still recommend the Metropolitan line as a train journey, if you are into trains and that sort of thing. OK, it doesn’t offer vistas of the Siberian wastes or the sloping vineyards of the Rhine. But it does trundle through back gardens and building sites, housing estates and golf courses, through the haves and the have-nots. It takes you through the growing pains a great city, but a city that is also overshadowed and outshone by a past with which it is still deeply uncomfortable.

Nasrallah: The pied piper of Lebanon

Do not be taken in by Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s statement of “regret” over the month long conflict between his organisation and Israel that followed his decision to order the unprovoked kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. He said “we did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if had known on July 11...that the operation would lead to such war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.” But saying, as he essentially is, “I’m sorry that Israel felt it had to go all psycho over our innocent little game of hide-the-soldiers” is not really an expression of regret, but rather yet another attempt at blame deflection (I‘m sure will agree that there is nothing more slap-triggeringly exasperating than the “I‘m sorry you over-reacted“ non-apology). Nasrallah’s words display the cod-remorse of a career criminal who only expresses “regret” when his actions are challenged and punished. They are weasel words that do not stand up scrutiny.

Nasrallah was picking a fight and he got one. Israel’s response to the kidnappings was entirely predictable. Everyone knows that when its citizens are attacked its government comes down pretty hard. It’s a long established Israeli policy that when you mess with the cubs and you have to deal with mummy-bear. This was the policy in place during the most recent intifada between Israel and the Palestinians and can be seen as far back as Black September. In fact, only days before Nasrallah ordered the kidnappings there was a (suspiciously similar) kidnap incident in the Gaza strip, which triggered a robust, armed response from the Israelis. Over the years, Israel has also affirmed time and time again that it does not negotiate with terrorists not under ceasefire and will therefore react to terrorist outrages through other means, such as military force. This means that kidnappings and rocket attacks will only achieve one thing, namely an armed response, which in turn strongly suggests an armed response is the only thing that Nasrallah could have been hoping to achieve. If Nasrallah is sincere in pleading ignorance, then that means he has the memory of a goldfish. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you do not believe that Hassan Nasrallah is a goldfish, then you must convict.

Secondly, the Lebanon conflict went on for over a month. If Nasrallah genuinely found the destruction and loss of life it caused so heart-wrenching, he could have ordered the release the hostages or a cessation of attacks at any stage. He didn’t because to so would have meant a loss of face for his organisation, whose prestige he places above all other considerations. When Israel had its 48 hour suspension of aerial bombardments, Hizbullah did not make any corresponding gesture and continued to fire missiles into northern Israel with undimmed enthusiasm. In other words, it did not use this opportunity to wind down the hostilities but rather to draw Israel back into them. It should also be noted that Nasrallah did not initiate the eventual ceasefire, did not contribute to the brokering of the truce agreement and only signalled his assent after the Lebanese government (the real one) and Israel had signed it.

As a result, Nasrallah’s oh-the-humanity soul-searching over a conflict that he did so much to spin out, leaves me quite cool. But no doubt there will be many who will swallow it and praise the compassion and common touch of Nasrallah the People’s Warlord. That is where the real danger lies. He does not resemble the jihadi stereotype derived from footage of the Afghan Taleban. He is not a swivel-eyed troglodyte, firing a blunderbuss into the air while pledging to slay the king of America. Nasrallah is a more sophisticated media operator than that. I’m not saying he’s Cary Grant, but as far as Islamist public relations goes, he’s a step forward.

His statement is designed to polish the pro-Hizbullah lens through which much of the world’s media already sees the conflict, while the fragile ceasefire gets underway. It may also be aimed at placating any disquiet among the Lebanese population that Hizbullah are not to be disarmed by the UN babysitting - sorry peace-keeping- force. Without Israeli bombardments to galvanise a united front among the otherwise fractious Lebanese, there is a risk that anti-Hizbullah sentiment in some quarters could re-emerge.

Furthermore, Nasrallah’s superficially dovish words could also be aimed at cloaking southern Lebanon in an illusion of safety while its inhabitants return after having fled the conflict zone. Hizbullah is stepping up its “charitable” activities, offering to pay those who fled their rent for a year. But before you go misty-eyed with admiration, remember that it is in Hizbullah’s interest to lure them back in order to hide behind them, because no civilians means fewer opportunities to conceal the illicit nature of their terrorist activities and no more potential civilian casualties with which to emotionally blackmail world opinion. To buy the cover of the southern Lebanese population, Hizbullah goes out of its way to make the role of human shield agreeable. It runs schools, hospitals, orphanages and the like (it’s odd that left-wing opinion is so suspicious about greater private sector involvement in public services, but views the ownership of orphanages by a terrorists who specialises in human bombs as an act of selfless, unqualified benevolence). The population comes to be dependent on the very force that is most likely to bring about its destruction, and to identify with those who are trying to subvert and colonise the country from within.

However seemingly contrite and reasonable Nasrallah’s latest remarks may appear, remember that he is still the man who said “if (the Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” Charming, huh?

To show true class, split your infinitives and talk loudly on your mobile

Speaking on last week’s Desert Island Discs, A.A Gill (no relation) took an admirable pop at Lynn Truss and the kind of grammar fascism that she expounded in that miserable tome of hers, Eats Shoots and Leaves. Gill (a bastard, one suspects, but an entertaining one) spoke of how, as a dyslexic, he dictates his articles, which gives them a highly readable, conversational style, but, apparently also leaves them prone to the odd grammatical slip (I hadn’t noticed, but then I’m not really on the look out for that sort of thing). He then let rip against the mean-spirited weasels who write in to complain about things like split infinitives and punctuation errors as if they had some sort of “ownership of the language.” I know what he means. They are the sort of people who always crowbar their membership of Mensa into any conversation and write letters to Radio 4’s Feedback about how there are too many Liverpool accents on the air when children may listening.

I know that in my last article, I went on at some length about the intellectual value of rigorous language learning. I see no contradiction between that and my opposition to grammar fascism. During their formative years, children must be taught how to express themselves clearly and effectively, how to understand and construct complex sentences, to read widely and to analyse and argue. If you cannot communicate properly you risk selling yourself short and anyone who may come to depend on you. But this is not the same thing as feigning mortal horror when someone overlooks a grammatical convention without it in any rendering what they said incomprehensible or distorting its meaning.

Pedantry of that kind ignores the fact that languages evolve and that some rules become antiquated and are dropped. The split infinitive rule is the little toe-nail of the language. It doesn’t really do anything, whatever it was that it was supposed to do no longer matters and you wouldn’t miss it if it wasn’t there. The same applies to the changed use of the word “hopefully” which so offends Today programme anchor John Humphrys. When someone says “hopefully it will stop raining soon” you know what they mean. There is no real confusion about whether they are saying that they hope it will stop raining soon or whether they are suggesting that the rain that is to stop will be in a hopeful frame of mind as it does so. If you are confused, then you are the pillock, a pillock, what’s more, who does not have an idiomatic grasp of their own mother tongue.

The grammar pedant is less interested in what the person is saying than in identifying where they come from and what kind of education they might have had. Not only is that the linguistic equivalent of watching Chinatown solely to spot any continuity errors, but it reveals an underlying social conservatism. Further proof for this comes in the form of the Spectator’s Charles Moore who week-in week-out thrills the readers of his diary column with details of a riveting exchange he has with one of his readers over the correct usage of “might” and “may”. How is this proof that grammar pedantry is a function of social conservatism? Because we are talking about Charles Moore. Everything he does is a function of his social conservatism. He makes Evelyn Waugh look like a freaky hippy.

Grammar fascism is just one manifestation of a creeping trend of taking offence at things that simply are not offensive or even ill-intentioned. Underpinning it is an attempt to shift the boundaries of what is considered vulgar. This also includes the way some people wince when someone is talking on a mobile phone on public transport. Why this reaction? You hear people talking to other people - sometimes just to themselves - all the time on the train, what’s the difference when they are talking on a phone? Eavesdropping is on of the great joys of life and a sign of an enquiring mind (I say as a keen eavesdropper). And yet (I’m starting a sentence with “and” - deal with it) from the looks on some people’s faces you’d think that the phrase “I’m on the train” is an obscenity on a par with “go f**k your mother.” The same applies to the snobbery towards text-message speak. Any sane person would conclude that text message abbreviations are a practical, speedy and cost-effective way to communicate. Not so, says Rory McGrath, a barnacle on the lower decks of the punditocracy, who on BBC 2’s Grumpy Old Men boasted about the pride he takes in typing out all of his text messages in full. Well, I’m happy for him and will be happier still when, as a result of excessive typing, his hands wither into arthritic claws and he has to be spoon-fed by social workers for the rest of his natural life. (What does Rory McGrath actually do anyway?)

But it hasn’t always been this way. Back in the late eighties and early nineties mobile phones were a rare and expensive social status symbol. To own one meant you were some kind of high-powered business class-flying exec with cuff-links, a leather wheely chair and everything. When someone took out their mobile in public it commanded the same kind of bewildered awe that the black monolith did from the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, however, everyone has mobile phones. The cachet is gone. Mobile phone ownership has become democratised. Today, the smug exclusive thing to do is to point and scoff when someone uses one in a way that suggests they may be a member of the mongrel poor.

The same applies to grammar fascism (which I opened with but have since lengthily digressed). Education is no longer the preserve of the great landed families and the wealthiest silk merchants of the bourg. Despite the gross inequalities in the provision of education, everyone is taught how to read and write. The way to lord it over others is to display your knowledge of obscure grammatical niceties that many schools have neither the time, resources or academic freedom to teach. Grammatical pedantry, like mobile phone snobbery, is a sign of aspiration and insecurity. The pedants restlessly seek to police social and cultural boundaries, but like a crooked Texan sheriff, they do so in a way that always ensures that they are on top.

But they won’t win, these types never do. Their bizarre fixation with antiquated grammatical rules will appear ridiculous to future generations. To draw another comparison, they are the contemporary version of the hufty-bufty Edwardian reactionaries lampooned by E.M Forster - you know what I mean, they said things like: “Eleanor, I forbid you to see that Edward chap ever again. He’s a coarse sort, in trade and doesn’t take his jacket off after tennis. Your marriage to Lord Marchmont will proceed as planned and I shall hear know more of your foolish prattle about love.” Like the Forsterian reactionaries, Lynn Truss and her kind abhor change for fear that it may render future generations less miserable than themselves. Truss used to have a weekly whinge on Radio 4. On one occasion, her gripe was with what she perceived as the insolence and incompetence of shop assistants. Perhaps they immediately sensed the contempt with which she viewed them and simply offered her the level of service she deserved.

The strange death of modern languages

The day after I used this blog to bemoan the rise of soft-subjects and the lack of adequate careers advice, Cambridge University issued a warning to prospective applicants that A-levels in media studies or PE would not be as highly regarded as those in maths or languages (although I have yet to establish the precise link of causation between the two events). It was heartening to see the edifice of lies that surrounds secondary education finally start to crumble. But alas the pleasure would prove short lived, when on Thursday it was announced that the pass rate for this year’s crop of GCSEs had risen to 98.8 percent. GCSEs have been blighted by the same pestilence of dumbing-down and grade inflation that afflicts A-levels. More worrying still was news of a collapse in the numbers of pupils taking modern languages.

The trigger of this calamity was the government’s decision two years ago to make the study of a modern foreign language at GCSE optional, whereas previously it had been compulsory to study at least one. Presumably this was to make room on the curriculum for the ancient wisdom embodied in television studies and design and technology (you see, these kinds of subjects only emerged recently because it has taken over 1,000 years to translate and interpret the manuscripts of the first media theorists, sports scientists and food technologists from the original Persian).

While shrewd and ambitious state and an independent schools continue to push their students to take languages to mark them out from the “dross”, the charlatans who are in charge of many of our comprehensives have done no such thing. For them, fewer students taking harder subjects where they may risk lower grades helps to puff up their position in the league tables. This, in turn, disguises their academic poverty and puts them in contention to be awarded some meaningless bauble like “Beacon School” or “Superhead” status.

However, poor leadership is not the whole reason for the haemorrhaging of entrants for French and German, a decline which also reflects the fact that many students just do not find them interesting. And they could be forgiven for thinking that. The modern language syllabus goes out of its way to strip out anything that may threaten to stimulate the imaginations of the students. Most of the teaching revolves around how to purchase comestibles, ask for directions and converse stiffly with a fictitious pen-friend who only exists for the purpose of the written exam. The message was always that if you ever are unfortunate enough to find yourself up foreign, here’s how to instruct the natives and, if absolutely necessary, exchange banalities. There is scarcely any attempt to look at the history or literature (even at A-level this was largely a token effort) of the country whose language is being studied, because these things are not considered “relevant” to the kids today. Of course relevance is what matters most to children. It’s not like children are renowned for their sense of imagination or curiosity. Heavens no.

Is it any wonder that (some) British people behave so appallingly abroad when all they are taught to say in a foreign tongue is how to order beer and book a hotel room? We may as well take this to its logical conclusion and introduce a module where pupils learn how to instruct their defence counsel when facing charges of GBH and drunken affray. Students who go on to study languages past GCSE tend to do so because they have a fascination with the country, a natural aptitude or an inspirational teacher, in other words, they do so in spite of the syllabus rather than because.

It may be argued that the decline in modern languages is of little consequence because “everyone” speaks English these days. First of all, no they don’t. Such an attitude implies that people who don’t speak English are not worth knowing and that books, plays and films in other languages are not worth bothering about. By not encouraging young people to learn languages we are instilling in them an insular and parochial mindset and the education provided will fail to deliver its central purpose of expanding their horizons beyond the immediately familiar. It seems odd that an educational establishment so obsessed with promoting “dialogue” with different communities should be so complacent about language learning which is by far the most intellectually liberating means of acquiring an authentic knowledge of a foreign culture.

Secondly, while English is without a doubt the international language of commerce, it is equally true that business is becoming increasingly globalised, with exposure to foreign countries ever on the increase. To expand abroad or invest in foreign bonds, currencies and businesses with any confidence requires a firm grasp of the political, legal and commercial environment of that country. Command of the relevant language is surest way of acquiring that understanding, otherwise you have to cobble it together from Reuters reports and hope for the best.

Of course students have a right to choose the subjects in which they want to specialise, but some subjects remain compulsory up to sixteen with good reason. Take maths as an example: whatever the yawns and strops incurred along the way, failing to provide children a basic grounding in numeracy will leave them ill-equipped in later life. Like maths, many aspects of language learning can be a bit of a grind as, unlike media studies, it is one of those subjects where either something is correct or it isn’t. But languages open too many doors later in life for them to be cast aside lightly at the age of 14, an age when if asked what they want to do when they grow up children will probably first insist that they are grown up and then say that they want to be a pop star/TV presenter/choo-choo train driver. One final advantage of learning a foreign language is that, however uninspired the syllabus, you cannot avoid learning about sentence structure, verb conjugation, cases and the like. For many young people, secondary school French and German classes are the first time that they are taught the fundamental mechanics of language in a systematic way. They certainly don’t get taught that in the English syllabus, which is a national disgrace, but that’s a different story for another day…

Long live death duties

At last an obstacle has cropped up in the path of my rightward lurch: the proposal by former cabinet minister Steven Byers to abolish inheritance tax. In last Sunday’s Daily Telegraph, Byers argued that inheritance tax was unjust because it penalises a lifetime of hard work and that more and more middle class families have seen the value of the properties have risen above the £285,000 threshold for inheritance tax as a result of the house price boom.

All of this sounds well-meaning enough, but what about the practical implications of its abolition? The duty is levied on just six percent of the population and yet it generates some £3.3 billion in revenues to the treasury (hence the treasury is mighty mad at the Byers proposal). Other taxes would have to go up in order to make up the shortfall. Byers attempted to address this by calling for a rise in environmental taxation. The problem is that this kind of taxation tends to be indirect, in other words not determined according to the means of the payer, and therefore is in fact less progressive than inheritance tax. Furthermore, any kind of government-driven environmental initiative seems to be afflicted by some sort of gypsy curse whereby it always takes far longer to make any kind of impact than anticipated and that impact invariably falls far below what was hoped for. If the revenue shortfall is not made up through alternative tax rises, then it will require a corresponding cut in spending on public services. The result of that will mean, for the ordinary citizen, more time spent on broken-down tube trains stuck next to a prematurely released violent mental patient. Is that a price worth paying just so that young Marcus will have enough money in his trust fund for that gap year in Patagonia? You decide.

The argument that inheritance tax is a penalty on hard work does not quite stand up to scrutiny either. Most taxes are, when you think about it, levied on productive, wealth-creating activities. This is because a policy of only raising revenues from destructive, loss-making follies would prove unsustainable.

Strictly speaking, inheritance tax does not take money from the wealth creator but from his or her heir, who may, for all we know, be a feckless, indolent waste of space who would otherwise use that money for strip poker, cock-fighting or to pay homeless people to dance for them. Of course, they may not be like that at all, but nevertheless, inheritance does represent something of a windfall for them and the treasury taking a nibble out of windfalls is an established practice, one that it is positively clamoured for by the middle classes themselves when the beneficiary of the windfall is a Big Nasty Oil Company.

A stable, relatively harmonious society requires at least some mildly redistributive checks on sharp polarities of wealth in order to avoid a situation where certain key advantages in life are only available to those who can already afford them and are effectively prohibited to those who can’t. Without such checks, ever-increasing levels of wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a narrow group of people in a manner that is divorced from any notion of merit. Abolishing inheritance tax would therefore mean that future generations of children will be born in to a grossly uneven playing field, which some would argue they already are, but we would be abandoning any pretence that we believe it should be otherwise.

Is this the language of class envy, or class war even? No. Class war would mean rounding up everyone with a white collar and clean finger nails and forcing them onto collective farms. I am not suggesting this. All I am suggesting is that those who have been untrammelled net beneficiaries of a massive boom in house prices are not in need of the additional perk of the abolition of inheritance tax. There are worse misfortunes that can befall a man.

Indeed, what does smack of class bitterness is the argument that the tax should be scrapped because more and more middle class people are paying it, rather than it being exclusively targeted at “toffs”. How exactly does this make the tax morally unacceptable? Inheritance is a form of wealth, so it is taxed. That is the basis on which taxes are levied. They are not levied according to which anthropological group you belong and whatever subjective moral connotations it carries. The rich are not taxed more because they are rakish villains who do unspeakable thing to chambermaids and like blasting birds out of the sky. The middle classes are not taxed less because they are really very nice and shop organically at Waitrose, or failing that, buy Sainsbury’s taste-the-difference range. They are taxed differently because there happens to be a disparity of wealth between them, and if that disparity narrows, then so should the difference between their respective tax burdens.

The real double standard on Israel

Following news that British airports were being used as a stop-over by US planes carrying military equipment to Israel, there was outrage on the left that the allies of the Jewish state would demonstrate that allegiance while Israel was fighting those loveable scamps in Hizbullah. This incident became a rallying cry for the Islamo-trots who converged for weekly right-on-athons during the month-long crisis. The government’s critics maintained that this was yet another example of the preferential treated accorded by Britain and the US to Israel (nobody likes a teacher’s pet), thereby illustrating the so-called “double-standard” in Western attitudes that gives the Israeli army free rein but condemns pro-Palestinian violence as terrorism.
Compared to the outcry over the use of Scottish airports, news that British-supplied military kit was reportedly found in Hizbullah bunkers as barely made a squeak. The Times have tried to run with it, but so I have not heard it mentioned on either the BBC or Channel 4. Of course, the ministry of defence did not knowingly supply Hizbullah with the kit - 250 night vision systems - but rather they were persuaded to provide them for Iran in 2003 in order to aid that country’s efforts to police its border with Afghanistan as a means of clamping down rampant heroin trafficking. It is suspected that Iran then diverted the night vision systems to Hizbullah, which is widely acknowledged to be an Iranian proxy.

The silence of the left on this matter has been deafening. There have been no demands for an inquiry into British complacency or condemnation of Iran’s duplicity. Surely if anyone is guilty of double standards and selective blindness it is the anti-Israeli lobby itself. Indeed, this goes beyond a mere double standard to a total moral inversion, pure Alice in Wonderland. The night vision discovery is simply being ignored, while bien-pensant liberals continue to hop up and down about Britain’s assistance in transporting defence equipment from the US - a democracy and an ally - to Israel - also a democracy and an ally. Apparently, having equipment supplied to Iran in good faith being diverted to aid terrorist attacks on civilian targets is AOK. Not only does this attitude display an indifference to Israeli suffering, but also to that of the 3,500 Iranian counter-narcotics police who have been killed on the job since 1997 (according to the Times), not least, one suspects, because equipment they sorely need is cynically being diverted for terrorist ends. It also seems that we are indifferent to the political manipulation by Iran of a problem, namely heroin trafficking, that devastates lives and families in our own country and fuels both organised and casual street crime in our inner cities. It is estimated that sixty percent of the heroin that hits London and other European cities has travelled from Afghanistan via Iran. All of these considerations come a dim and distant second to the giddy thrill the self-indulgent left derives from watching Hizbullah give Israel a bloody nose.

This charitable attitude towards Hizbullah (which many on the left probably do regard as a charity, you know like Oxfam but with grenades) is only sustainable among those who have no direct, constructive role in resolving the conflict. Among those who do, it is melting away rapidly. However, they are finding their hands increasingly tied by the wider insistence by global public opinion that Israel and Hizbullah should be treated as equals.

France had originally joined the rest of Europe (except for Britain) in calling for an immediate ceasefire, and as a track record in opposing hawkish interventions in the Middle East. Because of this, and also partly for historical reasons, France assumed a leading role in brokering the ceasefire agreement and organising the international force that will supervise the peace and oversee the disarmament of Hizbullah. Yet, it is hard to escape the impression that the more France becomes involved in the situation, the more it wishes Israel had been allowed to have more of a crack at the terrorists, who are not the fluffy cuddlebunnies that John Pilger, Robert Fisk et al would have us believe.

France did not seem to welcome the insistence of Lebanon, after having read the initial wording of the ceasefire proposal, that all Israeli troops leave Lebanese soil prior to the deployment of an international force. No doubt it will have noted the Israeli commando raid on a Hizbullah hideout that was allegedly being restocked by Iran, an episode that would appear to vindicate concerns that the Shia-dominated Lebanese army (sent to the region to fill the vacuum as the Israelis leave) may not be up to the task of disarming the guerrillas who have colonised the country’s south. Following these ominous developments, France has toned down its commitment to the international force by sending only 200 of its military personnel to the Lebanon. There is now talk of Italy leading the force (are people hoping that if it is impossible to remain neutral, at least the Italians will change sides so many times that it will eventually balance out?)

One can only hope that the international community are beginning to accept that Hizbullah and Israel are not moral equivalents. Israel is a signatory of the agreement and its military is controlled by civilian politicians who are accountable to their population and to the international community. Hizbullah, on the other hand, may have signalled their assent to the truce, but are under no such constraints. The fact that the Lebanese government has ratified the ceasefire agreement is immaterial since the Hizbullah did not consult it when it initiated its aggression last month. Its strings are pulled by Syria and above all Iran who are not parties to the ceasefire. Iran, moreover, is in a mischievous mood at the moment and French involvement in the force makes the Lebanon-Israel situation all the more vulnerable to manipulation by Tehran as it wrangles with France, among other Western powers, over its nuclear ambitions. Despite the fact that Israel is painted as the rampaging ogre in this conflict, it is in fact Hizbullah that has more room for manoeuvre and fewer constraints on its actions. This makes it a greater threat to any European peacekeepers, who will also be aware of the potentially explosive impact on domestic Muslim and left-wing opinion if they so much as blow a raspberry at poor widdle Hizbullah.

And yet, if France or any other party contemplating becoming involved in the resolution of this conflict, diverges from the fiction Hizbullah are a morally pure citizen army of che guevaras, war orphans and blind widows, a global tsunami of righteous indignation would be unleashed, accusing it of being in the thrall of the Zionist baby-butchers. As a result, the rules of engagement remain unclear because so much is not allowed to be said, in particular whether or not a peace-keeping force will be allowed to defend itself should it come under fire and who, if anyone will be responsible for disarming Hizbullah - an admission that it is not a legitimate organisation and cannot be trusted. This makes southern Lebanon very treacherous terrain indeed for potential peacekeepers and the prospects of a lasting peace look slender.

A-Levels: The sourpusses are right

So the A-level pass rate has risen again, this time to 96.6 percent. If that was the result of a central Asian election, the OSCE would be having kittens. If grade hyper-inflation continues at the current pace, soon students will be running around with hundreds of A-Level certificates, carried in baskets that are worth more than the sum total of the results themselves. The government has dismissed this kind of criticism as a mean spirited attempt to denigrate the achievements of hard-working youngsters. But it is not mean spirited. On the contrary, it is the government and the educational establishment that are being profoundly regressive in allowing standardised testing - the hard currency of our meritocracy - to become so devalued.

A-level results are no longer trusted by our universities and yet they are the only exam that all English sixth-formers have to undergo. If they are no longer seen as an accurate indicator of academic ability and future performance then universities will have no choice but to attach more weight to applicants’ extra-curricular activities, the record of the school submitting them and their performance in the entry assessments that universities are increasingly setting themselves. This state of affairs is a gift to well-off families who can afford to send little Ptolemy and Athenaïs to good private schools or to move to the catchment area of an academically ambitious state school. These institutions place a strong emphasis on extra-curricular activities and Oxbridge preparation as well as opting for harder subjects and exam boards, all in order to distinguish their students from the rest during the university entry process. Not only does this demonstrate that the A-level curriculum, to which sixth-formers still devote the majority of their time and energy are increasingly regarded as pointless hoop-jumping, but it also means that students who are poorly served by their local schools and cannot afford an alternative are seriously disadvantaged.

So why the reluctance to raise standards? I suggest that dumbing down is a conscious strategy to mask the catastrophic failure of the comprehensive system to provide an education of the same standard as the grammar schools or contemporary private establishments. More rigorous assessment and honest marking would lay bare the discrepancy between private schools and back-door selecting state schools on the one hand and comprehensive schools on the other. This divide is easily cloaked if you drag the threshold for achieving an A grade in, say, maths down to forty percent instead of sixty-five or seventy.

This sort of practice is just the tip of an iceberg of deceit and slight-of-hand in a secondary education system that has effectively made cheating legal. Dictionaries are allowed in language exams. Schools are allowed to choose children’s books as the set text in French and German. In English, annotated copies of the set text are allowed in the exam room, which makes the hysteria over taking in mobile phones hard to understand. In History, the students regularly cover the same period that they did at GCSE. Moreover, with the heavy weighting on coursework, students are literally allowed to take their exams home with them, and with the modular system, they are assessed not on the completeness of their understanding of the subject, but on one chapter of the textbook at a time, with plenty of opportunities to retake, naturally. All of this is a tacit admission that legalised cheating is the only way that comprehensive students can put something on their UCAS forms that will save the face of the system as a whole and allow them to progress to a university where they may have some hope of catching up the ground they have lost.

Furthermore, many of this year’s A-level passes will have been achieved in non-subjects such as media studies, film studies and classics (which is the study of translated texts without requiring any knowledge of Latin or ancient Greek). This also includes subjects that cannot meaningfully be studied at A-level, like law, and which are not respected by the professions to which they are supposed to correspond. Meanwhile, the number of entrants in hard sciences and languages declining further.

One deception breeds another: poor careers guidance. Pupils are simply encouraged to do what they feel like and are not told that some subjects are more respected than others. It is after all easier to hide a school’s failure if its pupils are all getting Bs in media studies rather than Ds in physics. These trends in secondary education are having profound knock-on effects at university level. I am referring to the explosion in “mickey mouse” courses catering to the growing ranks of students with worthless grades in pointless subjects. If a student is not discouraged by their school to take media studies A-level, how can the school deter them from reading it at university? The result is that thousands of young people are sleep walking into massive debt with no guarantee of meaningful and fulfilling employment at the end of it.

This system is not only supported by sandal-wearing educationalists who cannot see beyond the child-centred mantras of that were drummed into them in the seventies. Conservative shadow minister for education Boris Johnson seems to have had is common sense wined and dined out of him by the Vice-Chancellor lobby and now advocates the status quo in universities, citing student choice as a justification. If a student decides to get £15,000 in debt studying sports journalism at the university of the M25, then who are we to stop them?

Yes, the system should be based on choice, but on informed choice, which students are not getting from an educational establishment bent on disguising its own catalogue of escalating, self-feeding failure. This failure is exposed by the repeated criticism from those outside the educational establishment such as the employers’ association, the Confederation of British Industry, which bemoans the lack of basic skills among high school and university leavers. Of course education is a virtue in itself but overlooking the social utility of that education can have dire consequences. Look across the channel to the French education system, which has undergone a similar deterioration in standards. Most universities are not even selective and students are entitled to go simply by passing the Bac. The French economy, not the most strident beast at the best of times, cannot digest the numbers sociology and psychology graduates churned out by the universities. The result is youth unemployment at twice the national average, with those graduates who do find work often having to do so as unpaid stagiares for months on end. The discontent in this section of society is running high, with graduates frustrated that the false sense of security instilled in them at Lycee and university does not carry over into the world of work. Earlier this year, their morbid fear of job insecurity resulted in mass demonstrations that paralysed the government’s attempt to introduce greater fluidity and competition into the labour market.

Such are the pitfalls of a system that encourages students to waste their lives and their one shot at education and we should take note. A system that values its students would subject them to rigorous, academically ambitious testing rather than allowing their talents to go untapped in some misguided quest to make them conform to the lowest common denominator. There is nothing mean spirited about saying that students deserve better and are capable of better. It is the supporters of the current system that say that they do and are not. This is, in its own way, revelatory. The bien-pensant left’s espousal of comprehensive education is rooted in its belief that it is non-elitist and therefore more favourable to children from modest backgrounds, in other words that children from modest backgrounds cannot aspire to be part of the elite and can only thrive in an intellectually barren environment. Prior to the bien-pensant led introduction of comprehensive education, many working class children were more than capable of competing with their wealthier counterparts and often beat them to coveted places at grammar schools. But then, the bien-pensant left is not really about social mobility. It is about keeping the poor in their place, telling them to valorise their cultural identity, which the left basically equates with mediocrity. That way, poor kids won’t be threatening the chances of little Ptolemy and Athenaïs of getting into Oxbridge.

Keep a low profile

For both business and leisure, I travel regularly to and from Paris and have been searched several times passing through customs. In fact I must have been searched three times over the past five years. This strikes me as disproportionate and I assume it must be because I, as a young female travelling alone from the continent, fit the profile of a drugs mule. I find it rather unflattering, verging on hurtful, that trained best-of-the-best security personnel should look at me and think “now there’s the sort of girl who forages through her excrement looking for coke pellets”. However, I do derive some satisfaction from the knowledge that the person conducting the search has rummaged elbow deep in my ladies’ articles and dirty washing entirely in vain. Plus, being searched gives me my five minutes of notoriety, during which I return the judgemental stares of my fellow travellers with an icy “yes, that’s right, I’m a bad girl” scowl. So, all in all it does not warrant throwing a spaz. I recognise that these kinds of searches are a valuable tool in the war on drugs, which is a war worth fighting. If I fit the profile for people who should be searched for drugs, then so be it. That particular search will prove fruitless, but more futile and illogical still would be to subject 70-year old Sister Assumpta to a full-body cavity search as she hobbles back from her pilgrimage to Lourdes, when the chances of someone of her background being a major player in international narcotics smuggling are slim to nil.

What prompted me to make these reflections is the news that transport officials are considering expanding their use of passenger profiling at air ports in a bid to catch out would-be suicide bombers before they board the plane. This has raised the hackles of Liberty’s Shami Chakrabati (I know, I couldn’t believe it either, but then she’s full of surprises) Muslim organisations, and sections of the police, with one high-ranking Muslim police officer, Chief Supt Ali Dizaei warning that passenger profiling will create the crime of “travelling while being Asian”. No it won’t. Being searched does not mean that you have committed a crime. It is a minor inconvenience that once over need never be spoken of again. Unless of course, you have strapped yourself with semtex or are carrying Ribena bottles of nitro glycerine, in which case, it’s probably a fair cop.

That said profiling, especially if there is a large ethnic component involved in the decision-making does carry with it a risk of offending the communities targeted. It is not a power to be abused. Perhaps the police should keep records containing explanations of the grounds for each search, even though that suggestion is bound to be met with neighing and whinnying about excessive red tape. The police have said that if they do expand the use profiling, they will do so in a sophisticated way that also pays attention to suspicious behaviour patterns and not just physical appearance. I imagine that this would include lone male travellers who pay for their one-way ticket in cash, shudder at any physical contact with female staff or repeatedly mutter under their breath that the hour of purification is nigh. This type of profiling is clearly important, as the shoe-bomber Richard Reid and two of those arrested last week for the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic flights are white converts would not have been spotted by appearance-based profiling.

However, even with more nuanced search criteria it will still be highly likely that a large majority of those searched will be of Asian appearance and/or with Muslim sounding names. But there is a reason for this. While there have been a few white Muslim converts implicated in terrorist activity in Great Britain, the large majority have been of South Asian extraction. And they have all been Muslim. I know there are still those who say that the term Islamic terrorism is unhelpful or even wholly inaccurate, but, let’s face it, Al Quaeda ain’t Buddhists. There is a time when it becomes necessary to stop dancing around the obvious and I would suggest that time is at airports prior to embarkation, as this is the last point that the transport police can intercept the terrorist before 300-400 civilians become trapped in his presence at thousands of feet up in the air. Prioritising community sensibilities above very obvious security concerns is unacceptable. To do so would mean that the government places the desire not to offend a section of the community above its fundamental responsibility - arguably it’s raison d’etre - of defending the whole of society from physical attack. The fact that the proposed profiling system may have flaws in terms of catching out the small number of terrorists who are Muslim converts does not mean it should be abandoned if it could prove useful in apprehending the larger number of extremists who could be caught through profiling.

Whatever its practical advantages, there remains the fear that profiling, if perceived as unfair by Muslims, could act as a “recruiting sergeant” for the terror organisations who supposedly thrive on the alienation of the Muslim community. But I don’t fully understand this argument. If the majority of ordinary Muslims abhor terrorism, I don’t see how being politely asked to open their toilet bag before boarding a plane is going to drive them to turn themselves into human bombs. To maintain that it would implies that there is a stronger identification between the mainstream and the violent extreme than we have been led to believe. When there is no sympathy between a terrorist organisation and the wider community, a government clampdown on the former should not lead to a radicalisation of the latter. This was in evidence with the consistently indifferent attitude by French Basques to the activities of ETA and by the hostility of ordinary Corsicans to the island’s violent separatists. To take an example from our own nation’s history, the imprisonment of the Moselys during the second world war did not lead to a ground swell in support for the British Union of Fascists. If the majority of Muslims believe that suicide bombings are an absolute evil, do not want a restoration of the Caliphate and do not want to see the imposition of Sharia law in the UK, stricter security measures in the face of the terrorist threat is unlikely to make them forget that.

The strongest argument against profiling is that if the terrorists twig the criteria that the police are looking for, they will find ways of circumventing them and using people for their missions who do not correspond to expectation, possibly even women and children. This leads me to conclude that, while the kind of passenger profiling that is being proposed may be have its merits, it has one obvious flaw: the fact that the authorities are telling every one about it, in other words, showing their hand. This is not the way to the wrong-foot the enemy. The Churchill administration did not publish its plans for D-Day in the Times in order to gauge the opinion of the German community prior to launch. However far such a measure would have gone in building bridges of inter-communal dialogue, it would probably have seriously compromised the operation's chances of success. In short, those who profile would do well to keep a low profile themselves.