Fare Well

So the great Theodore Dalrymple is retiring and moving to rural France. As he says 'the French are some years behind us in the race to cultural oblivion. No doubt they will catch up with us in the end, but I hope not to see it in my rural fastness'.

Anyone who's spent time in rural France will know what he means. A couple of years ago we were in Sourdeval and attended the carnival. Several thousand people were on the streets all day, much lager and wine was consumed. We sat on the pavements until ten o'clock with our small children in an (admittedly noisy and smoky) atmosphere of perfect goodwill and freedom. Don't try that at Whitby Regatta.

I shall miss his despatches from the urban front line. What will he find to write about in rural France, where drive-by shootings or predatory youths disfigured by tattoos and/or facial ironmongery are rare ?

He is not alone in his decision. I must know of ten or more couples who have upped sticks to France. But he is rare in being totally upfront, not about why he is moving to France, but why he is leaving Britain (he currently works in a prison and hospital in inner-city Birmingham).

My university generation (mid-late 70s) has been (and is mostly still) saturated with the kind of leftism which assumes that most of society's problems stem from straight white males and the culture of our parents and grandparents. So it is strange that so many of us have ended up in the shrinking rural areas, whether here or abroad, where remnants of such culture cling on.

Dave - in turns hippy, probation officer, co-counsellor, radical therapist, musician, prison visitor - last year left Brixton for rural, white and conservative Lincolnshire while the children were still small. Pauline and Barry, impeccably liberal, in a Languedoc village whose inhabitants voted almost to a man for Jean-Marie Le Pen. Beth, ex-social worker in children's homes, travelling street magician and entertainer, from the heart of multiculti (and dangerous) Chapeltown to the isolation of the English Lakes. Gabrielle from London to the Presceli Hills, Sue from central Leeds to Perthshire. Dave and Louise from urban Bradford via rural Whitby to France. Carol from Bradford to rural California, Felicity from Vauxhall to Eire. Jill from Telford to the high Yorkshire fells (where only outcomers can afford houses now), Jenny from Peckham to Dartmouth. I could go on ...

But with the exception of Carol, who married a Californian only slightly to the left of Genghis Khan, my friends have maintained their 70s politics. The Guardian is now read on a slate worktop, overlooking a green-grey valley, or a pine table with pretty estuary views, but it's still the Guardian. They know something was wrong with the city, but it was only wrong for them as individuals. They haven't made any connections.

Similarly Billy Bragg chooses to raise his children in Dorset, Joe Strummer lived (and died) in rural Somerset, Rod Liddle (ex-Today editor) castigated English racism from Wiltshire. A couple of weeks ago I read a Jenni Murray interview in which the Woman Sour presenter and all-round PC exemplar described her decision to move from Wandsworth to rural Derbyshire (and send the kids to Cheshire grammars when they reached secondary school age). And or course every rock star buys a rural retreat or estate on getting the first million or two.

As Patti Smith (another one who headed for straight white society to raise the kids) would have said - 'Ain't It Strange'.

UPDATE - already he's found problems - namely the opening of a Starbucks in Paris. Link via Harry.

Surrender On All Fronts

David Blunkett today threw up his hands and agreed that no more criminals should be sent to prison. He also agreed to subordinate the Prison Service, which currently protects millions of people from crime by locking up some (admittedly a minority) of those who commit it, to the Probation 'Service', an organisation which vies with Social Work departments in political correctness and practical ineffectiveness. On a separate front, IRA/Sinn Fein apologist and domestic violence specialist Ken Livingstone has been readmitted to the Labour fold.

At last, a decision on prisons. The prison population has risen continually since Michael Howard's reforms first started to reduce some crimes, despite the efforts of Scots jurists. At some stage it was obvious that either the trend would have to be reversed, or new prisons would have to be built. Both Straw and Blunkett have sat hypnotised as the prison population rose, and have refused to sanction the major building program which was neccessary. They are left with no option but to try to send fewer people to jail. The methods used, mainly so-called 'community' service, are proven failures and their even wider adoption will result in more people becoming victims of crime.

It is difficult to realise the extent of the rot in the Criminal Justice System unless you have direct experience of it (usually as a victim), but one of the glories of the Web is that the grim facts are there for all to see. Image of magistrates as hard-headed traditional types ? Forty years too late mate - this gives more of a flavour of today's Bench.

"Magistrates rate Probation as having a greater effect on reducing crime than Prison.
Eight out of ten agree that community sentences punish offenders.
Eight out of ten agree that community sentences enable offenders to pay back to the community.
Seven out of ten agree that community sentences help to rehabilitate offenders. Magistrates are not aware yet of the evidence that Probation programmes reduce re-offending.
Magistrates seem to want wider public support for their use of community penalties."

I like "Magistrates are not aware yet of the evidence that Probation programmes reduce re-offending." That's because there isn't any.

If you check out the Youth Justice Board you'll find they're Guardianistas to a man - or more usually, to a woman. And as for the training of Probation Officers - take a look at this management-babble and see if you can find any mention of how they're actually going to prevent reoffending. All I gathered from it is that the male probation officer is an endangered species, outnumbered three to one in the 2000 intake. They also monitor by race and disability, though sadly not by all three - so the spectre of the disabled - no ! Don't go there !

More information on community sentencing is available at Peter Coad's invaluable links page at the Criminal Justice Association.

At It Again

Aaronovitch started his Indie columns writing about politics, but since his move to the Grauniad sex seems to be occupying him more. Today the Great Masturbator is joining Dot Comrade at Hari's Place in calling for a "regulated sex industry, with brothels and massage parlours subject to council inspection." Applicants for the post please start queueing now. Those rejected may re-apply for the Gender Recognition Panel.

He must be a bit tired after New Year to end like this.

"Finally, I want to anticipate an inevitable rhetorical objection to this line of argument. It is the one that says: 'That's all very well, but what would you say if a legal brothel opened next door, or if your daughter became a prostitute? Where would your liberalism be then?'

To which the liberal can answer with her own questions. 'How far away do you think the brothels are now? And what kind of prostitute would you rather your husband visited?' "

Sorry David, but most of us don't live in London. My nearest brothel is a good six miles away. And the last question implies that the husband in question is already frequenting brothels - not a good response to a 'what-if' question ?

Anyway, Aaro - if you really want to know who a woman might want her husband to play away with, I believe this sort of thing is popular with some couples, and is available as an anniversary or birthday gift if your darling is so inclined. Certainly a change from a romantic trip to Paris or Florence - but at about the same price.

Technical Failure ?

In what must be the most amazing bit of detective work since Inspector Morse was shifted to traffic duties, French and Egyptian officials have diagnosed the Red Sea 737 crash as a 'technical failure', despite

No black box recovery
No other telemetric data from the plane
No distress messages

In fact the only available information was that the plane took off, gained hight normally, then suddenly fell into the Red Sea.

The plane had taken off from Sharm el-Sheikh, where by chance Tony Blair is on holiday.

Now it may be that this is all a tragic coincidence. (The American Airlines crash two months after 9/11 appears not to have been terrorist-related, though interestingly a final report is still awaited more then two years later.)

But I can't see that the official Egyptian and French responses are anything more than wishful thinking, unless they know more than they're telling us.

UPDATE - AP have reported that the plane was trying to return to the airport when it crashed, which would explain how it hit the Red Sea (its route to Cairo was nearly all over land).

UPDATE2 - an obscure Islamic group has claimed responsibility. Link via Jerusalem Posts. TASS has other bits of news on the tragedy.

Left-Wing Anti-Semitism - A Spanish View

Fascinating Frontpage interview with Catalan leftist Pilar Rahola, who hits a few nails on the head.

On language - "there is also a problem of terrorism in Spain, but when the crimes of ETA [translator's note : the Basque terrorist group] are mentioned, one speaks of terrorism, while when the crimes of Hamas are mentioned, one speaks of militants, activists, resistance, struggle…When one mentions the Palestinian victims, one speaks of children, civilians, innocents, but when one mentions the Israeli victims, one speaks of people without a name"

For a UK example, see the BBC, with its Palestinian 'militants', 'fighters' and 'gunmen'.

On the Left - "it is necessary to be anti-Semitic to have credibility. Things have reached the point where, for instance, Sharon is always guilty of being guilty, while Arafat is seen as an honest figure, innocent, a tireless old resistance fighter, a heroic figure, a kind of Gandhi — when in reality he is head of an oligarchy that has so much blood on its hands. "

On moral blindness - "The most absurd thing is to watch leaders of the Left today greet and celebrate Arab leaders, even when they are fundamentalists. And there were those who tried to downgrade .... the danger embodied in individuals like bin Laden, who is, in fact, an authentic fascist. I believe that for the moment the world remains blind to the biggest totalitarianism of the twenty-first century, which is Islamic fundamentalism."

See the emerging alliance of the far left and the islamic right, as typified by the Stop The War Campaign.

Farewell Jennicam

You certainly started something .... internet exhibitionism has never been so popular.

The People Have Spoken, The Bastards !

The flagship of left bias and political correctness on the BBC, Radio Four's Today Programme, decided it would be a good idea to ask listeners what new laws they would like to be enacted, and from the 10,000 suggestions received chose five for the listeners to vote on.

They were

1) Ban all Christmas advertising before Dec 1st
2) make voting compulsory and limit a PM to two terms, as in the US. (suggested by G. Brown of W1)
3) Ban smoking in bars and restaurants
4) Make organ donation a matter of 'opting out' rather than 'opting in' as now.
5) Authorise homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders.

27,000 people voted - or 27,000 votes were received. The 'Tony Martin law' won with 37%, provoking Stephen Pound MP to the above comment (real audio here). He's supposed to be introducing it in a Private Members Bill - I bet he won't. If he does the Tories should have a three-line whip out in support - it could be a PR disaster for Labour when they have to vote against it.

The programme's producers - and Mr Pound, convinced the organ donation law would win, had already arranged a debate between Evan 'Dr Death' Harris and a former Tory health minister, which had to be hastily rebilled on the website as 'the listeners' law for 'opt-out' organ donation came second - but a possible proposal nonetheless?'. And Mr Pound had actually already had preliminary discussions with Heath Secretary John Reid about the donor law.

Still, Today did the best they could, finding a critical barrister (audio here), and putting negative reaction top of their emails.

But the emails are illuminating themselves. Top is the horror of one Deborah Stux.

I am horrified at the winning "Listeners' Law" That Today listeners could endorse vigilantism is incredible. I notice that both proposers mention Tony Martin as if he were some sort of hero, he shot a 16 year old boy, in the back - how can that be reasonable force? Please don't repeat this exercise next year or no doubt somone will suggest bringing back hanging or the birch.

Of course, she's right - if people had a direct say in the laws that were passed it is quite likely that homosexuality would still be illegal, hanging would still exist and we might still be stuck in those dreadful 1950s. That would never do.

Unusual name, Deborah Stux. Only one in the whole Google world, a Transport and Travel Manager with Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust, funded by the taxpayer and dedicated to reducing the waiting list via the innovative method of encouraging key medical staff to walk or cycle to work rather than drive. (This is called 'investing in the NHS'.)

Probably a completely different person. Does the BBC Stux sound as if she'd write "cycling also promotes psychological well-being, notably self-esteem." ?

But Joe Nutt (presumably not the Donne expert) responded "Was I the only listener standing open-mouthed with impotent fury in my kitchen this morning listening to Stephen Pound's disappointment because the result of the listeners' law poll did not go the way he had wanted? That he wasn't the least bit embarrassed to say so, or admit that he had already been discussing organ donor legislation with Dr John Reid displayed precisely the kind of contempt for voters which exemplifies contemporary political behaviour. "

UPDATE 2/1/2004
Simon Jenkins hits the nail squarely on the thumb in the Times. He rightly criticises the BBC and Mr Pound for taking part in an exercise which (IMHO) demeans Mr Pound and cheapens democracy, but what really disturbs him is the prospect of people having too direct an influence on the law.

"I wonder what stopped the Today programme from putting capital punishment to the vote?" he asks ? After all, poll after poll shows a majority of voters in favour. And of course such a thing is quite unthinkable in a civilised society like ours. Can we doubt that if the result had been right - victory for the 'sensible' law on compulsory organ donation - we wouldn't have heard a peep from Simon Jenkins ?

He also blames the result on the "work of the Tony Martin lobby". As a founder member of said lobby, I can assure him that no effort at all was made. Difficult to comprehend as this might be, there are large numbers of people in Britain who are deeply concerned by what happened to Tony Martin and the message sent by his conviction to law-abiding householders.

But as ever, there's wisdom to be found if you look.

"The listeners’ law may be game-show legislation but it has reminded us that law and order hold public priority. As long as government refuses to let local people dictate what sort of local policing they want, governments will be blamed for the public’s patent sense of insecurity. If the police sit hidden in offices doing paperwork for David Blunkett, the public will put its faith in ever more draconian legislation and ever longer prison sentences. "

Too right they will !

Responses To Tragedy - Then And Now

George Gibbs, who has just died aged 86, came home on leave from the Merchant Navy in 1942 to find his wife had ben killed in an air-raid. After the war he took to the road, and walked rural Wales for over 30 years, carrying all his possessions in a pram.

22 year old Paul Davies' girlfriend and baby died in a car accident. He took to heroin, burglary and shoplifting, even stealing from his brother and grandmother.

One harmed no-one but himself, and died mourned by many. The other betrays and damages even those who raised him. How Welsh culture - and our culture - has changed.

Two Sensible Guardian Articles In One Day Shock Horror

Polly, Maddie, Moonbat and co. must all be on hols ...

Martin Kettle on the responsibilities of power.

"It is all very well complaining that the transport secretary, Alistair Darling, is making life more dangerous in the air. In some ways, he may be. Yet if a suicide hijack succeeds, killing hundreds of people, the first question that will be asked is why stronger measures were not taken to protect the victims.

Questions of this kind mark the difference between the lives that ministers and the rest of us live. Most people give these risks only occasional and passing attention. To us, the thought that we may all be murdered in our beds is remote. To hapless ministers, it is a serious possibility for which they must try to prepare, and for which they will be held accountable when it occurs.

In 2004, there is a greater likelihood than at any time since 1945 that large numbers of civilians will be the victims of an act of pitiless aggression. Most of us deal with this fear by ignoring it. For a Blair or a Darling, there is no such luxury. Just occasionally, perhaps, we should have the humility to see the awfulness of the world that they inhabit, and which they strive so unavailingly to control."

And the great Aaronovitch on Iran, with a wee side-dig at the Monbiots of this world.

"Iran is still being ruled by a useless, incompetent semi-theocracy, which is fatalistic, complacent, unresponsive and often brutal. And such a system does not deliver to its citizens one fraction of what the Great Satan, for all its manifest faults, manages to guarantee to ordinary Americans.

Following the fall of the Berlin wall there was, as the philosopher John Gray put it, a "false dawn" of the New Age of Liberal Democracy, in which all problems everywhere could be expected to be solved by a free market and free elections. But this triumphalism has been replaced, in some quarters at least, by the equally vacuous tropes of the anti-globalisation movement and its demonisation of liberal capitalism.

What, I wonder, has Arundhati Roy to say now about the superiority of traditional building methods over globalised ones? Some Iranians might think that it's a shame there wasn't a McDonald's in Bam. It would have been the safest place in town. "

Links via Normblog.

Wouldn't It Be Nice ...

If the Times archives were free, as they were until a couple of years ago. Then I could scan Simon Jenkins' old columns for disastrous Iraq forecasts as Mark Steyn has done.

"Baghdad Will Prove Impossible To Conquer". Simon Jenkins, The Times, March 29.

"The coalition forces confront a city apparently determined on resistance. They should remember Napoleon in Moscow, Hitler in Stalingrad, the Russians at Grozny"

"I Predict The Pundits Will Carry On Getting It Wrong", April 2nd

"Prepare for Beirut, the West Bank or Stalingrad". Our boys will be "trapped far from home and in hostile territory, like the Russians in Chechnya."

And in May, the 'looting' of the National Museum was "the destruction of the greatest treasure from the oldest age of Western civilisation, the greatest heritage catastrophe since the Second World War". As Steyn says, the story was "2003's Jenin Massacre".

But as Norman Geras among others has pointed out, "The real story of this past year is not Saddam, but something deeper, symbolised by the bizarre persistence of the "anti-war" movement even after the war was over. For a significant chunk of the British establishment and for most of the governing class on the Continent, if it's a choice between an America-led West or no West at all they'll take the latter. That's the trend to watch in the year ahead."

Todays Papers ...

Deadly dull, mostly. Robin Cook thinks the government has lost trust (since he left it) .. yawn ... Gary Younge thinks the Democrats need to win a few seats in the South ... zzzzz .... only Katie Grant and Lord Rees-Mogg awake me from my overfed somnolence.

Katie sees the Brideshead inhabitant Hooper as a portent of the horrors to come, in words that Dalrymple himself could have written.

"Hooper, you may remember, was a perfectly nice chap, but one who had "not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side". He did not weep for "Henry’s speech on St Crispin’s Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae". The names Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevalles and Marathon meant nothing to him. He never learnt to salute properly. After all, why salute, when you can just say okey-dokey?

Hooper was Tony Blair’s forefather. His education was filled not with the exploits of heroes to lift him up and set him aglow, but consisted of "a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change", the prime objective being to equip him for a career dedicated to making things "safe for the travelling salesman".

Now we see the result. Hooper’s Britain is Blair’s "young country", a place without a soul, brilliantly characterised in all its mundane, hideous, plodding inanity by EastEnders and Ricky Gervais in The Office.

Hooper/Blair’s contribution to civilisation is the Turner Prize, speed bumps, equality officers, Holyrood, Big Brother and Pop Idol. Britain’s Bridesheads are only acceptable if blanded down by the National Trust, just as history is only acceptable if delivered in politically correct sound-bites. If this is progress, give me less of it.

In 1959, Waugh famously thought Brideshead Revisited "a panegyric preached over an empty coffin" because the cult of the country house had not yet been utterly destroyed, as he thought it would be, by the war. But the coffin was not empty. It was already filling up with all the things that Hooper felt superfluous to his world: religion, chivalry, standards, patriotism, manners, self-discipline and deference. Now the coffin is so full (only fox hunting to go) we can barely get the lid down. It’s taken him half a century, but finally Hooper is triumphant. "


Rees-Mogg tells us "One forecast for the coming year can be made with some certainty. 2004 will be a bumper year for immigration into the United Kingdom, legal and illegal. Another forecast can be made with equal confidence. The Government will be taken by surprise."

I think he's probably right - and I think it likely that it will also be the year the BNP go mainstream, although the main influx of migrants (from 'New Europe' aka the former Warsaw Pact nations) will take place after the June elections.

"A large-scale immigration, such as we are experiencing, is almost always an economic advantage. The new people are younger than the host population, more highly motivated, and will have developed particular skills. "

He may well be correct. There's no doubt that migration to America and Australia raised the GNP of those nations. I'm just not sure the natives appreciated the favour we were doing them.

"There is a common fear that a national culture will be destroyed, or weakened, by the intrusion of a new culture. This might be true if all the newcomers came from the same culture as each other, or had the same religion. But that has been relatively rare in human history, except in cases of invasion or conquest.

It is certainly not the case in the modern immigration to Britain. The British culture does itself change over time, but it has nothing to fear from coexistence with small minority cultures, none of which have the scale to challenge the host, and few of which have much appeal for each other."

Again he makes a good point. A self-confident national culture should have no difficulty in absorbing quite large numbers of migrants, especially if they are from varying cultures.

The problem is, we don't have a self-confident national culture. A nation whose charity shops hide the Christmas cribs, and whose hospitals refuse to hand out charity CDs because Jesus gets a mention, is in trouble. As David Farrer and Private Frazer rightly point out, 'a culture or a religion that does not stand up for its own values is doomed.'

Aaro vs Riddell

Over 8 rounds, protective gear to be worn, our hero and Mary ('Some of my best friends are Americans but ..') Riddell battle over Iraq. Well worth a read - I'll just pick up on one point, because it was on my mind when blogging about potential attacks on churches.

"On the war against terror I fear a descent into arbitrary government, and I also fear the popular consequences were a large-scale terrorist outrage to happen here in Britain. Do you remember how the David Copeland bombs a few years back provoked Ken Livingstone to call for the banning of far-right political parties? Can you imagine what a lorry-load of explosives in a London cinema, driven there by a Muslim from Derby, would lead to?

This means that I am torn on the question of how far civil liberties may be compromised in the battle against terror."

Aaro, like all right-minded middle class people, is worried about the BNP. I think what he's getting at here is that it might only take one outrage to give them a boost which would be reflected in next year's council and Euro elections. And that therefore it is in the interests of decent people to ensure this does not happen, even at the risk of compromising some people's civil liberty. (I also like to think he'd be against terror even if it didn't help the BNP, but feel that's probably top of his agenda.)

Some people on the liberal left, like Rasputin, just don't get this point. The Telegraph gives the Mad Monk a richly deserved shoeing.

"On Christmas Day the Pope appealed to God to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism. The Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand, reserved his clearest condemnation for the West's counter-terrorism campaign. Imprisoning terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay and Belmarsh prison, he complained, "sends out the wrong message" to Muslim societies. Those of the Christian faith, he said, should show themselves to be "on the side of humanity" by "making sacrifices for the sake of justice".

The "sacrifices" to which Dr Williams refers presumably involve risking another terrorist attack on the scale of September 11. So far, the counter-terrorist campaign has been remarkably successful in preventing al-Qaeda attacks in Europe and America, in spite of that organisation's strikes elsewhere in the world. Moreover, this has been achieved without any curtailment of the rights of ordinary Muslims in Britain and America, who are free to practise their faith with a degree of freedom of which Christians in many parts of the Islamic world can only dream."

Whether or not all of Blunkett's arrests and detentions have been justified, they have been successful thus far. There's no doubt that some bad people would like to commit terrorist acts, and that some of those people in the past have been British. We have had no atrocities as yet. That is not victory over world terror, but it's a good start.

Much More Idiocy

Jonah Goldberg with the easiest prediction for 2004.

"More dumb things will be said by more educated people about the trial of Saddam Hussein than all dumb things about all other major subjects combined. "

Our New Religion II

Occasional posts on the parallels between our secular liberal pieties and the doctrines of Christianity and Judaism.

Over the holiday I had time to read Lord Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" - the book of the TV series which was all the rage in the early 70s. I doubt if the BBC would now commission a series under that name which is wholly focused upon Western Europe. A good read, though any catalogue of culture over three millennia will inevitable miss out personal favourites - where Hildegarde of Bingen and her glorious erotic imagery ? Where Perotin ?

His chapters 'The Smile Of Reason' and 'The Worship Of Nature' examine rationalists like Voltaire and the decline in religious faith among the eighteenth-century intellectual elite. It is of course exactly at this time that Rousseau's ideas became influential.

"Rousseau first argued that civilization had corrupted human beings in his essay, Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences in 1750. This corruption was largely a moral corruption - everything that civilized people have regarded as 'progress' - urbanization, technology, science, and so on, has resulted in the moral degradation of humanity. For Rousseau, the natural moral state of human beings is to be compassionate; civilization has made us cruel, selfish, and bloodthirsty".

Here we can see again fallen man, who has eaten of the tree of knowledge and lost his primeval, compassionate Eden.

Not everyone was so keen on the noble savage myth. Clark quotes a letter from de
Sade to Rousseau (I paraphrase) "Nature averse to crime ? On the contrary, she yearns for it and lusts for it". And Voltaire famously wrote to him "Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours."

But Rousseau is the spiritual begetter of our new enviro-religion. He also had a pernicious influence on education which is alive and well today, thanks to his novel Emile. "Both European and American educational ideas were greatly influenced by this work; the American public school system, established in the first part of the nineteenth century, drew heavily from Rousseau's educational ideas." As Melanie Phillips has pointed out, the great educator had five bastard children, all of whom he put in an orphanage as soon as they were weaned. But hey, whoever said that the personal was political ?

Merry Victorian Christmas To All ....

Another glass of gluhwein to take away the vision of all the children's presents yet to be wrapped. And to try and lessen the bile-count induced by Madeleine Bunting's idiotic Guardian piece. Not worthy of a full fisk, but her take on the Victorians deserves a shoeing.

"The blame lies first of all with the Victorians. They pretty much invented Christmas - trees, Santa Claus, puddings, turkeys, decorations, cards, presents, family togetherness - ingeniously turning what had become a sober religious feast into a great festival requiring months of preparation. If women were to be kept at home, they had to have something to do."

It's true that many of the accoutrements of the modern Christmas have Victorian origins - indeed Christmas cards only became common in the 20th century. But families gathering to eat well (or as well as they could) together, such presents for the children as could be afforded - the heart of the secular Christmas - has been with us for much longer. "It was Christmas Eve, with its loads of holly and mistletoe ..." wrote Hardy in Tess of the D'Urvbervilles. His short story 'The Grave By The Hand-Post' is about a son returning to see his father for Christmas. And hasn't Ms Bunting read 'A Christmas Carol' ?

"But the crucial point about the Victorian Christmas, which always gets overlooked, is that it was only the middle classes who had one ..."- see above. There's a good reason why it always gets overlooked - because it isn't true.

"The Victorian rebranding was a response to industrialisation: the family was no longer the wealth-producing unit; people were swapping work at home for factories and offices; and urbanisation was disrupting the old domestic structures. Social relations needed strengthening, so the home was relaunched with rituals such as regular family meals and the Sunday lunch. Home was idealised as a sanctuary from competitive market capitalism - a place where vulnerability, innocence, and sentiment could be safely expressed. At the same time, childhood was idealised as a life-stage free of responsibility, a time of imagination, magic and enchantment. All of this came neatly together in the rituals the Victorians developed for Christmas. "

Ah yes. Victorian culture as 'rebranding', as some small group of people kicking ideas around, followed by the Victorian equivalents of posters, advertisements, handouts in schools and doctors surgeries, interviews on the Today programme. Such a metaphor betrays a complete lack of understanding, of empathy, with Victorian culture. Or she could just be pig-ignorant.

The home was 'relaunched', was it, with regular family meals ? Just where the hell do you imagine families ate in Georgian times - McDonalds ?

And the last liberal myth, continually regurgitated in true bulimic style, that "childhood was idealised as a life-stage free of responsibility, a time of imagination, magic and enchantment". I'm sorry, your forebears must have lived in a parallel universe to mine. Is this the Victorian age of the Little Match Girl ? Of Tom and Mr Grimes ? Of Shaftesbury and Barnardo ? Of a hundred weepy parlour ballads about orphans, disasters and death ? Of "Father's a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead" ?

But there's one thing we have in common with the Victorians. Our old people are still dying of cold.

Happy Christmas. And check out those old people over the road.

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, (because he was of the house and lineage of David,) to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Comradely Solidarity

Fascinating stuff in Weekly Worker on the proposed 2004 European Social Forum. It appears the comrades of the UK Left would have trouble arranging a drinks party in a Majestic warehouse.

"During the lunch break, comrades from the autonomist tradition (the tradition formerly known as 'anarchist' - LT) unilaterally decided to turn all 200 chairs to face the middle - apparently in order to “facilitate consensus decision-making”, and because it is “anti-hierarchical”. That might well be true for meetings where participants have some common ground. In our case, it helped to turn an already tense situation into a snake pit. Emotions ran high, with people generally communicating by shouting and jumping to the front to snatch the mike from the chair."

There are problems with money, timetabling and the structure of the proposed Forum.

"Not a few left on Sunday afternoon still unsure if the ESF in Britain will actually become a reality. Besides the absence of hard cash there is certainly not enough trust between the different groups and viewpoints to ensure smooth and effective planning. And a deadline of March 1, by which we have to find a “substantial amount of money”, is looming large.

It all started so well ... "

Democracy was an issue. "Speaker after speaker expressed the desire for our ESF in Britain to be more democratic ..." The trouble is, how does a left-wing faction implement democracy ? Whose democracy ? If enough people join, you may find they democratically disagree with you. At which point you expel their leaders or leave yourself and found another splinter group. If everyone who voted in the last General Election joined the SWP tomorrow, and the SWP was democratic (which of these two is the most unlikely ?) the leadership might find they were being outvoted by 10 million people who wanted a conservative SWP, 12 million who wanted a Labour SWP and 7 million who preferred a Lib-Dem flavour. Which is why the SWP (which controls among other things the Stop The War Campaign) isn't democratic. They would like your money and support - but you don't really want that 'bourgeois' democracy, do you ?

Open Targets

The Archbishop of Canterbury might be better employed worrying about the physical security of his flock this Christmas than in assuaging what he perceives to be Muslim sensitivities. Church attacks are a favoured tactic of Islamic militants in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Indian subcontinent. The authorities seem convinced that some form of outrage is planned for the UK, churches offer the softest targets – and what could be more richly symbolic than a Christmas Eve bomb at, say, Canterbury or St. Paul’s ? The very diversity of the congregations at London churches means that any form of profiling would be pointless, and the entire congregation would have to be searched on entrance to provide meaningful security.

I attend Easter Mass each year at a Catholic church (in a part of London with a large ethnic minority population, gangs of whose young people stalk the High Street each Sunday. The ethnic minority in question being Korean, the gangs are usually playing guitars, singing hymns, and inviting passers-by to find Jesus at a local church. But I digress.) The congregation is incredibly mixed – English, Irish, Polish, Filipino, Chinese, Indian, Italian, African, Brazilian (yet the Mass unites every race in a shared culture. What was that about ‘Westerners’, Archbishop ?). No way could door security play ‘spot the terrorist’.

I’m not saying it’s likely, let alone a certainty. But it’s easy to do and has, from an Al-Quaeda perspective, great symbolic value. I hope the leaders of all Churches, and our security forces, haven’t overlooked this possibility.

He's At It Again

Rasputin warns of the inevitable alienation of Muslims by David Blunkett's racist, Islamophobic strategy of arresting Muslims in reponse to a campaign of terrorism explicitly carried out in the name of Allah.

“If we want to persuade moderate Muslims to sign up to toleration and pluralism of the right kind, anything that gives the impression that we are targeting Muslims is problematic. We have a lot of ground to make up.”

Of course, the Archbishop is quite right. Only about 6% of the population of Britain are Muslim. Most, including the Archbishop, are nominal Christians. It therefore follows that the majority of arrests made under anti-terrorist legislation should be Christian, and that the resources of MI5 and Special Branch should be mainly targeted on extremist religious groupings such as the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Quakers. Anything else would be 'profiling' of the most racist and bigoted kind.

Acording to the Sunday Times, Williams also believes that "westerners find it difficult to grasp that for a Muslim, being religious is not something that is done in addition to everything else: “It just is the fabric. For the Muslim everything is seen through that lens.” "

You know, Archbishop, once upon a time, even some Christians were like that - their religion was the core of their being. Obviously you were never one of those, though. And British Muslims are "Westerners" - or is that a code word ? I wonder what it could mean ?

But it looks as if religious faith, like culture, is becoming another one of those things which is OK for 'them' to have, but not for 'us'. Minette Marrin makes this point in the Sunday Times. She also quotes Mathew Arnold's 'Dover Beach', and I can't resist it either. Poets are prophets.

"The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. "



UPDATE 27/12/2003 - The Magna Mater Melanie also gives Rasputin a good telling-off.

A Guide To Glasgow Gang Websites

By Stewart Kirkpatrick in today's Scotsman is one of the most entertaining articles about the Web I've seen for a fair while. Read it and smile. In fact his series 'The Lazy Guide to Net Culture' all seem to be worth a read - loved his link to the Victorian Web.

Imagine if the unpleasant fourteen year olds hanging around the Tesco car park at all hours had a home page ? In Glasgow they have, and Kirkpatrick takes us on a tour of the sites of the Young Toryglen Toi, the Young Posso Fleeto, the Duke Street Firm and the Young Rutherglen Scheme Team ('Scheme' = housing estate).

I think we can safely say that these sites won't win many awards, but they do have a certain rude charm. How about the apology from the Young Toryglen webmaster ?

"anno this is pish the noo but ave just f*in started so bear wae me. wanst anno how tae dae s*** on this hing it will be f*n dynamite."

Which I translate as 'apologies for the current poor design as I'm only a beginner, but once I get going it'll be much better".

Do You Sincerely Want To Kill Children ?

Without that awful judgemental media coverage ?

Move to the West Bank and become a militant, or at worst a gunman.