Oh Dear ...

Driving home, listening to Eddie Mair (a Radio 5 person if ever there was, Nikki Campbell sans offensiveness), interviewing a Spanish liberal leftist, who spoke of the 'illegal war' in Iraq and how the best path was to address the injustices and grievances which were the root cause of terror, rather than taking up arms, which would only create more terrorists and make more people hate us.

Some Spanish Fisk-equivalent, I thought. They've been all over the BBC since last Sunday.

"And that was Jose-Angel Cantarememba, shortly to become the new Spanish Foreign Minister".

Ay Caramba !

I Can't Believe This ....

BBC Today programme, 8.35.

"In the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, we discuss the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist."

"We" being Leila Khaled, Palestinian hijacker and hostage-taker, and Danny Morrison, Sinn Fein/IRA publicity head (and the man who has the last word on what happens to republican 'informers').

Words fail me. RealAudio link here.

If The Victim Hadn't Been White ....

Would this be a racist murder ?

UPDATE - It's certainly a mystery to the BBC.

UPDATE 18/3/04 - The Scotsman has more. And the Guardian has wise words from Labour MSP Gordon Jackson. "Every area, particularly in a city, has young men getting into bother from time to time." He's right of course. In Gloucester the council have a regular van runnng to collect the bodies of abducted schoolboys. Just a bit of 'bother' Kriss Donald got into. Nae worries. The Indie, like the Guardian and the BBC, is worried by the potential for damage to race relations rather than the hideous murder of a young boy, but a local resident doesn't agree.

James Boyd, a neighbour of the dead teenager, said: "Whenever a white guy hits an Asian kid, it's a racial incident. But when Asian kids attack us, it is passed off as a gang fight".

Got it in one.

A Triumph for Democracy ?

The Arab press give differing views, none of which are very comfortable, about the message of Madrid.

Jordan's semi-official al-Rai said in a commentary Tuesday that the fall of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in elections was "a political and moral victory for the Iraqi people, and for all people who suffered and will suffer from to the American arsenal."

The United Arab Emirates' al-Khaleej Times said in its editorial that "it took a tragedy of unthinkable proportions for the people of Spain to awaken to the poor judgment of retiring Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar." The English-language pro-government daily said that by aligning itself with the American administration's policies, Aznar's conservative government distanced itself from its European neighbors and drew the "wrath of the masterminds of Thursday's synchronized bombings in Madrid."

The London-based al-Hayat daily also ran a commentary on the outcome of the Spanish elections, saying they constituted a "loss to President Bush's administration." The Saudi-owned paper, however, asked whether al-Qaida network, if proven that it was behind the Madrid train attacks, had any impact on the results of the Spanish polls. It asked if that would "encourage transferring the experiment to move the war to the streets of countries that are allied with the U.S. in occupying Iraq or the war on terror." The Arabic-language paper asked if that meant the results would encourage bringing down the British and Italian governments by adopting the same method of terror attacks.

Return Of The Domino Theory

In this Norwegian blog entry by Bjorn Staerk, quoting a document harvested from a trawl of Islamic websites.

"What we found was a 42 page strategy document, where an anonymous author discusses what strategy to use to force the coalition lead by the US out of Iraq, says researcher Thomas Hegghammer. .. It concludes that one should go for a domino effect, where one first pressures one country to pull out, so the others may follow. The author points to Spain as that country in the coalition which it would be most convenient to attack. "

"To make the Spanish government pull out of Iraq, the Muslim resistance forces must direct blows against the Spanish forces, and these must be joined by information about the situation in Iraq .. one must take maximum advantage of the approaching election in Spain in March next year .. we expect the Spanish government won't withstand more than two, maximum three, such attacks, because of pressure from public opinion. If they nevertheless should remain in Iraq, their continued presence will become an important issue for the Socialist Party."

Hat-tip to Anthony Cox.

I know nothing about ETAs modus operandi, but I can't get over the fact that the explosive used in the Madrid attacks appears to have been sourced in Spain, and has been used extensively in the past, though not in recent bombings, by ETA. How would AQ get hold of it ? Some dissident 'Real ETA' faction ?

There's more to this story than either/or, I'm sure. It was only a month ago that two ETA people were arrested heading for Madrid in a truck with 1,000 lbs of explosive. Has there been collaboration ?

Unthinkable, you may think. But the IRA collaborated with the Nazis during WWII (and de Valera, to Ireland's eternal shame, was still sending Hitler birthday greetings in April 1945).

Maybe 'Spain's difficulty is the Basques opportunity'.

PS - interesting analysis at this Irish libertarian blog.

UPDATE - Times commentary on the 'Al Quaeda election', giving a slightly chilling list of US allies with elections coming up. And Tim Hames considers the results 'a landslide win for Bin Laden'.

UPDATE2 - so, however unwillingly, does Natalie Solent. who also has an excellent post on the decline in physics teaching.

Perfectly Legal

Two morality tales about culture and the free market. Some libertarians believe that a free market and enforceable contracts are all that's needed for virtue to triumph. I have never agreed.

Peter Hitchens has spoken of police who enforce the letter of a beaureaucratic law rather than the spirit of an agreed moral code. Adam Smith believed that free markets were, and should be, underpinned by Christian morality. Let's have a look at these two business deals and see what you think.

It was the late 1980s, and Mrs Thatcher's government had passed legislation enabling council tenants to buy their homes at a hefty discount to the market price. The longer you'd been a tenant, the greater the discount. Our hero, a young Tory MP who had made a million from oil trading by the time he was thirty, was living in a block of Westminster flats, some of which were still council owned. Like his elderly and impecunious neighbour's. So a deal was struck. The MP would put up the money for his neighbour to buy the freehold at a huge discount to the open market price. The elderly man would live rent-free for the rest of his life, and on his death the Tory MP would become the owner of a very desirable bit of property.

At the time (I was then a Labour Party member) I considered the transaction despicable. I still do. Remember, he was an MP for a government who had passed the legislation with the express intention of enabling poorer people to become homeowners, not to further enrich millionaires. But, in a phrase we were destined to hear more and more in the ensuing years, he had 'done nothing illegal'. Today the MP is a Tory Front Bench spokesman.


Move forward fifteen years or so. The pension transfer scandal (where clients were mis-sold personal pensions or wrongly advised to leave company schemes) has been on the public radar for a long time now.

Some firms of Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs) have closed or gone into liquidation, and so are unable to compensate the victims of mis-selling.

To help such people the Government regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), have set up a scheme called the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), funded by a levy on existing IFA firms, which will enable the investors to be compensated.

There was until recently a firm of IFAs called Berry Birch and Noble Financial Services, owned by a holding company called Berkeley Berry Birch (BBB). The directors of the holding company looked at the outstanding compensation liabilities of BBN, and obviously didn't like what they saw.

So a decision was taken to
a) transfer the IFA salesforce from Berry Birch and Noble Financial Services to the previously dormant company Berry Birch and Noble Financial Planning, also owned by BBB.
b) Put Berry Birch and Noble Financial Services into liquidation
c) At which point the outstanding pension transfer liabilities would fall onto the Financial Services Compensation Scheme rather then remaining within BBB.

All perfectly legal. But, as the firm's (retired) founder Derek Berry said, 'The stigma will make the firm's name stink'. And so it should. Would you trust these people with your money ?

BBB are publicly quoted. According to the trade paper Money Marketing (from which this story is taken), shareholders include Clerical Medical, Norwich Union, Friends Provident, Scottish Widows and Standard Life. Some of your money is probably invested with BBB. Should it be ?

Victory for Murder

Whether or not the Madrid bombings turn out to have been the work of Islamic terrorists, the results of the Spanish elections will undoubtedly be seen by Al Quaeda as a sign that Western democracies don't have the stomach for the fight. If 10 bombs produce a 10% change in voting, why not try this tactic elsewhere - say on a Coalition-supporting country with elections coming up in June ?

The BBC, Guardian and Mirror are salivating over the Socialist victory. Even were the Spanish Socialists the best possible government for Spain domestically, globally this result is bad news.

Harry, the Gangster and Cuthbertson are all perturbed.

I'm surprised - always thought of Spaniards as proverbially brave under fire.

Meanwhile back in Blighty the Tipton Taleban are given big air, and more is revealed about the non-existence of our immigration and asylum 'system'.

Interesting Guardian survey, showing that Muslim support for Labour has fallen from 75% to 38%. Of the lost 37%, 26% has gone to the Lib Dems and 11% to the Tories. And 13% ('a small minority') would support further terrorist attacks on the US. I'm assuming few of those will be Tories.

Let me see, 13% of 1.6 million - that makes 208,000 terrorism supporters living in the UK. Compared to, say, 400,000 Muslim Tory supporters. Thank heavens its only a small minority.

Mirror, Mirror

The Mirror is at it again. Never mind the 200 dead in Madrid - the first seven pages of the Sunday Mirror are given over to the Tipton Taleban's version of events in Guantanamo.

You'd think Tina Weaver would have learned from the Daily Mirror's sales plunge this time last year, when the paper remained anti-war while our troops were fighting. They obviously didn't teach Kipling at Piers Morgan's public school.

For it's 'Tommy this' and 'Tommy that' and 'Chuck 'im out, the brute !'
Yet it's 'Saviour Of 'Is Country' when the guns begin to shoot

You can see why Guantanamo revelations might add sales at the Observer or Indie - and indeed while the Sunday Indie has Madrid as the main story, the Observer gives its front page to the Tipton detainees. The story speaks to the core demographic of self-hating white liberals, a most numerous and influential class. Yet the average Mirror reader won't give a flying one about the Tipton Three, and those who do have a view are much more likely to think they should have stayed locked up. Mirror Group Newspapers are taking on the aspect of a gigantic vanity publisher.

The People have the headline Mirror readers would really rather see -

PETER AND JORDAN - THE FIRST SNOG

Letters To The Times

Dear Sir,

On Saturday 13th March I read the first Independent article suggesting that 'The pro-US policy has already appeared to place Spaniards in jeopardy' - with its unstated but implied corollary that it's safer not to annoy mass-murdering theocratic fascists in case they hate us even more.

Is this a record ?

Yours etc.

Speaking Truth To Power

Radio 5 on Friday morning.

'Nikki' Campbell - '... and of course, ETA have had links with the IRA'

Frank Gardner (BBC Security Correspondent) - 'That's right - in fact Gerry Adams said in a speech - not that Gerry Adams is IRA, but Sinn Fein do have contacts with them ...'

With a Security Correspondent like that, who needs enemy propaganda outlets ? If he can't tell the truth about Gerry Adams, can he tell the truth about anything ?

BBC Disses The English Again

England cricket follower ? Looking for live BBC radio coverage of the Windies series today ?

Forget it. They weren't prepared to go head to head with Talk Sport for the rights.

Of 'Asian Heritage' ? Failed Tebbit's cricket test ? Ball by ball coverage of Pakistan v India ?

No worries. Live coverage as I type, on the BBC Asian Network. Pakistan are chasing 350 and it's going to be close, though India have the edge.


Still, it's nice for an oppressed minority, subject to all kinds of violence and abuse from the majority population, living in a land where the State religion automatically discriminates against them, to have something like this to celebrate.

I'm not talking about British Asians of course - I mean Pakistani Christians.

Devout Catholic Yousuf Youhana's brilliant 73 from 69 balls (including four sixes) is the highlight of coverage so far. Must get back for the finish.

PS - Latif's blog is worth a read.

UPDATE - India won a nailbiter by six runs. As a cricket lover I shall be listening to the whole series, but in what other country would the national broadcaster devote such time to meeting the needs of people who support a foreign rather than the national team ?

Those Caring Social Workers

I never fail to be amazed at our punitive criminal justice system. Just because you beat someone to death in an unprovoked attack doesn't mean you should necessarily go to jail, does it ? Especially when you were only fifteen at the time. A fine, probation or community service should surely be sufficient.

After all, he looks like a nice boy.



Yet when social workers included these in a range of suggested sentencing options, fuddy-duddy old High Court judge Lord Hardie spat the dummy.

"He said that for a social worker to consider the options of fines, community service or probation was absurd.
The only sentence available for murder, he insisted, was life imprisonment."

To think we pay taxes for a judge like that when we could spend the money on social workers !

They're Back !

The Tipton Taleban return. Initial reports are that their first question on arriving at Northolt was 'Can you tell me the time of the next flight to Baghdad ?'.

Littlejohn doesn't seem too chuffed, but all right-thinking people will be delighted that these innocents, so cruelly snatched from their backpacking holidays, are out of the clutches of the Great Satan. Allahu Akhbar, as Terry Waite would say.

UPDATE - The Sun has the sort of details you won't find in the Guardian - like the convictions for violence of two of the three Tipton boys. Good to see they released the web designer (Jamad al Harish ne Ron Fiddler) though ...

What has the world come to when you can find real news in the Sun ?

Plastic Gangster

Has a couple of interesting posts - one on the dreadful Jon Snow, and a link to this story on Iraq. I must say that these Shi'ite clerics do have a few ideas on how to deal with the social issues of our time. I can see why Pilger and Co. are so supportive of them.

"Saddam Hussein had two advantages over the coalition: In his time, anyone who took drugs was executed, and anyone with AIDS was burned."

I confess I only link to the Snow story because the Gangster appears to be a fan of Frank Zappa's "Apostrophe".

Bloggers Against Fascism

Debate at Harry's and Peter Cuthbertson's.

Two points

Firstly, what do we mean by fascism ? Is it a state of things where telling the truth can be a criminal offence, or where the State takes it upon itself to decide what truth is ? Is it a state of affairs where free speech is suppressed by the organs of the State ? Is it where thought crime exists in law ? Or where senior members of the Government meet at the House of Lords to be advised by someone who believes that supporters of some political parties should be beaten up in the street ?

If so it appears to have arrived early, with a caring liberal face. Yet not a dog barks on the Left, with the notable exception of Peter Tatchell. "Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear", says the admirable Harry's Place. Yet the case of Harry Hammond passed him by totally, as it's passed by Amnesty International and Liberty. The days of 'I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it' are long gone. It's a very bad portent when 'freedom of speech' becomes 'freedom of speech for some but not others'. The infrastructure is being built.

Secondly, the culture war waged over the last thirty years by the Left (I dissociate Old Labour from this - this is a phenomenon with its genesis in student politics) has objectively created conditions which make a form of fascism much more likely. The celebrated decline of deference cuts more than one way. Society is much less gentle, more violent, than it was fifty years ago. Political allegiance is much less deep-rooted, more volatile, than it was. Our children are being taught to identify themselves as members of a particular ethnic group (my older children were given a form at school to fill in) rather than as Britons. There is enormous cynicism about politics and a culture which demands instant gratification. Ancient institutions which have served to preserve liberty over centuries have been emasculated or abolished. It's possible that given such a cultural background, national self-confidence (something we currently don't have) could take unpleasant forms.

Though at the heart of the BNP are some very nasty ideas (I keep coming back to this document) I don't see a big BNP vote as directly bringing fascism nearer, though it may help tilt the cultural balance of forces a little in that direction. What it will do is unleash a long-overdue debate on the Left. If their website is any guide, the average BNP member/supporter is from 'the old school' - a remnant of the culture which the left are attacking. A typical example was the charming elderly BNP councillor who told Radio 5 that her most admired person was Nelson Mandela. These people just aren't natural fascists, unless you consider the England of Attlee or Harold Wilson was fascist. Elderly Englishmen and women - the Middle England of the Daily Mail - don't do fascism. For younger surfers, fascism isn't not being allowed to marry your gay partner in church, or being cold-shouldered at the PTA. It's being beaten in the street, sacked from your job, having your windows smashed or your property torched. Middle England ain't big on any of that.

A big BNP vote (and I'll be surprised if we don't see a couple of Euro-MPs elected) won't be a vote for fascism in the minds of their voters, any more than the million Stop the War marchers were supporters of Saddam or the SWP. It'll be a gigantic 'Not In My Name !' aimed at the mainstream political parties, who will need to look again at the vast swathe of political terrritory they've vacated and left to the BNP.

For those who read their history, fascism was always about youth. Currently the nearest thing to a fascist youth movement is the area where animal rights, anti-globalisation and environmentalism meet. The kind of people who will hit an elderly hunt follower in the face with a hammer, surround a house containing terrified children and smash all the windows, burn foreign-owned property (if it's American owned, that is), publish lists of enemies to be dealt with, or wear 'Hurry up and Die, Queen Mother' t-shirts. These movements all belong to the cultural Left.

I see no sign at all of any similar youth movement on the Right. When the coolest kids in school self-identify as nationalists, when their bands are in the charts and girls wear 'My Boyfriend Is An Englishman' shirts - that'll be where the kind of fascism the Left disapproves of begins.

So if you want to prevent fascism, stop creating the objective conditions for it. And roll back the existing manifestations.

It won't happen of course. We will continue down the broad and pleasant path, eyes wide shut, until the rough beast finally arrives, in whatever form, and we wonder like children what's gone wrong. In my worst visions my sons are on the streets, trying to stop people being attacked because of their race (and in danger of attack themselves), while in a thousand council offices ex-liberal careerists are hastily applying for the new Anglicisation Policy Co-ordinator posts ("under the Race Relations Act 2016, this post is only open to those of Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage") and the UN is wondering whether troops should be sent in.

Have a nice day.

Brits Give Muslim Women The Vote

Poorly and in bed for the last couple of days, with time to read Churchill's 'My Early Life', Charles Allen's excellent 'Soldier Sahibs', about the young Victorians who policed the North West Frontier, and Dilip Hiro's 'Between Marx and Muhammed', a review of the Central Asian republics and their Muslim neighbours, all the more valuable for being written before 9/11, an event which inevitably colours recent coverage of Muslim affairs.

The Churchill book is fascinating. What a life that man led. And it's all described with such humour and irony. His description of finding himself alone, sword in hand ('after all, I was Public Schools Fencing Champion'), against a dozen NW Frontier tribesmen, and of his rapid retreat, is a classic.

Dilip Hiro's book is full of unexpected information. Where was the first election in a Muslim country with universal suffrage including women ? The Democratic Republic of Azerbijan, capital Baku, which lasted from 1918-1920 and was underpinned (or occupied if you prefer) by British Imperial troops led by General Thomson. The tension between Islam and the Soviets is another theme of this book, from the massacre of 14,000 Muslims at Kokand (Uzbekistan) by Soviet troops in 1917 to the 1992 civil war between Islamists and Russian-backed forces in Tajikistan, in which 30,000 died. And a certain Commissar of Nationalities, one J V Stalin, plays a leading role in the story.

This Government ...

gets more corrupt every day, and they are now deliberately corrupting the Civil Service. Can we belive anything they say about migration any more ?

Steve Moxon's revelations on how the borders are being opened to Eastern Europe in advance of EU enlargement, so that there won't be a sudden increase in the figures post-June, are here, here and here. This appears to be a political decision taken on a deniable basis with no official documentation. Words fail me.

A Girl (Sappho, approx 600 BC, translated by CM Bowra)

I have a child; so fair
As golden flowers is she,
My Cleis, all my care.
I'd not give her away
For Lydia's wide sway
Nor lands men long to see.

It's not giving her away but being taken away from her I'm more worried about, following reports that Blunkett has surrendered to the anti-smacking lobby.

I have smacked her in the past and I'm sure I'll have to do so on a future occasion. Her rages are titanic, magnificent - like a force of nature, yet there are some boundaries she's not allowed to go beyond - in speech or behaviour. She's six years old and I love everything about her.

Yet a lot of people think I, and the other 70% of parents who occasionally smack their children, should be locked up and are campaigning to that effect.

After all, how can you teach a child that hitting people is bad when you hit them yourself ?

What a good argument. How can we teach our young people that taking other people's money or property is bad and yet fine them for not having a tax disc, or send the bailiffs in when they don't pay the gas bill ? How can we teach them that kidnapping people and holding them captive is wrong, yet support the processes of arrest and imprisonment ?

How can we teach them that invading other countries is bad and yet support the overthrow of Saddam ?
Maybe that last was a bad example, because I'm pretty sure there's a hefty correlation between the anti-family crowd and the anti-war crowd.

A quick flick down the list of supporters provides a few rough categories.

People whose living and career is funded by increased family breakdown (the largest category - all those professors, paediatricians and parenting co-ordinators). I think the economists call it 'producer capture'.

Old rich hippies (Branson, Peel, Gabriel, Melvyn Bragg, three-quarters of whom make their homes in leafy (or hilly) conservative shires.)

Homosexual activists who might not be too displeased at higher levels of family breakup, though I can't imagine why.

Radical feminists who see the family as the source of all oppression (Beatrix Campbell, the various Domestic Violence specialists), whereas I see it as the place where children learn to be good.

Agony Aunts and sobbing abbesses (Virginia Ironside, Susie Orbach).

Jenny Tonge MP - it's bad to smack children but she might consider blowing them up.

What they all have in common is an income considerably above average, enabling them to to insulate themselves from the effects of family and social breakdown.

Organisations such as NSPCC and Barnardos are leery of actually releasing any of the research on which their policies are based (I wrote in vain to them asking for the references). I get the impression that they rely upon studies of dysfunctional underclass 'families' (remember that for today's liberal class 'family' usually means Mum, child and whoever Mum's shacked up with at the time), the sort of family where a child may be smacked for anything, everything and nothing. If you don't know what I mean skip Tesco and get down to your local Lidl on a Friday between 4 and 6. To rely on such studies is the equivalent of studying Ugandan and Congolese militia, plus the Red Army's advance through Germany in Spring 1945, and concluding that the British Army should be disbanded because of the unacceptably high risk of atrocities being perpetrated on civilians.

Of course targeted and controlled violence, which is what smacking is, is probably the most effective modifier of behaviour ever devised. Parents wouldn't use it if it didn't work. The problem is that a growing number of people don't believe it's a parents role to try and modify a child's behaviour, especially not in such a mechanistic way. After all, if a child's behaviour causes concern, there's obviously some deep-seated ... blah ... underlying cause ... the poor creature needs help from experts - people who really have the child's interests at heart. Have you considered these new behaviour-modifying drugs ? Now that's what I call child abuse - a nine year old on Ritalin . There are tens of thousands of such children in Britain, probably a couple in every primary school.

Peter Hitchens wrote in 'The Abolition Of Britain' of the conflict between the therapeutic and judgemental approach to discipline in schools :

"The rebuking slap or smack, or even the blow of the ruler on the hand, are all symbols of authority imposed from above, unquestioned and unquestionable. They define the limits of a child's behaviour and make it plain that the child is subject to the adult, who acts in the place of the parent. The doctor and psychologist, the use of pseudo-scientific discipline, are symbols of an entirely different form of government. If a child needs a smack, he is a free individual who has overstepped the line. If he needs a child guidance clinic, there is something wrong with him which must be cured."

The abolition of smacking has long been the aim of the anti-family lobby. It's an extremely effective weapon. The aim isn't to protect children - there are laws in place for that already. The real target is the family as a transmitter of the existing culture, with particular emphasis on the role of the father. For the radical anti-patriarch 'Wait till your father gets home !' is anathema. In practice we see that violence up to and including mass murder carried out by a mother is always understandable and sometimes excusable. After all, isn't the mother a victim too ?
Similarly ethnic minorities, who are generally great believers in the physical punishment of children, will be cut a fair amount of slack. We have seen in the Climbie case that an African couple can torture a child, and her fear will be ascribed to the cultural respect for elders so prominent in Caribbean communities.

To some extent the State is already mediating between parent and child. Your child may be offered contraception or abortion without your knowledge, as the parent who found 'killed my baby' in her daughter's diary recently discovered. In an age where 'grassing up' your mates is the greatest playground and street crime, organisations like Childline offer you the chance to, like Pavel Morozovich (who became a Hero of the Soviet Union for denouncing his parents to Stalin's secret police), grass up Mater and Pater. If you are sixteen and wish to leave home, your age makes you a 'vulnerable person' and catapults you to the top of the housing list, as the great Dalrymple noted when he asked an Asian girl what kind of relationship with her parents she wanted. 'Like an English girl' she replied. 'And that is ?' 'They look after you till you're sixteen and then you get a flat'.

Not so long ago I read in my local paper of the death of such a sixteen-year old from a heroin overdose. (He hadn't got on with his parents and had made himself homeless, knowing he'd be offered accommodation. Our nearest town has about a dozen such deaths a year). And a friend's daughter left home at fifteen, moving in with her boyfriend and his father. Social Services considered it an acceptable arrangement.

For me this mooted law change is a little late to modify my child-rearing, as they're mostly beyond the smacking age, though I wouldn't put it past my poppet to call the police. In a rage she's capable of anything. But for society the effects will be profound. They will be

a) a lower birth rate as parenting becomes not only hard work but hard work with no effective available control mechanisms. People will be less likely to have children as the relations between uncontrollable children and powerless teachers in State schools become replicated within families.

b) Increased family breakdown.

c) Increased crime and disorder.

d) Increased rates of drug abuse and STDs among the young.

e) Increased emigration of native Brits.

It began with a poem and it will end with a poem. On occasions, hopefully rare ones, a parent will smack a child unwisely, and suffer for it. So for all parents who've ever been there here's what Alice Bachini would perhaps characterise as a 'message of evil' .

The Toys (from the Unknown Eros, by Coventry Patmore 1823-1896)

MY little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
—His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
-'I will be sorry for their childishness.'

Two Deaths

Anwar Islam was found hanged last week in Long Lartin jail. An enquiry will be set up. The Prison Governors' Association will express regret. The Prison Reform Trust, the Howard League, NACRO and other pro-criminal groups will castigate the Home Office, and their complaints will be amplified by their friends in the media.

Johanne Powell didn't have anyone to campaign for her. She was 19 when Islam beat her to death over a 24-hour period before dumping her body in the street. She had over sixty bruises on her body, six broken ribs, liver damage and a broken arm.

As I think John le Carre wrote, that's not a killing. That's a party.

There are over probably over a hundred charities designed to keep the criminal out of prison or to assist him when he's sent there, from the forty or so 'nationals' to groups like the Quakers.

You can count the number of pro-victim organisations on the fingers of one hand. Does that say something about us ?

And the only one with any funding, the government sponsored (and therefore useless - I don't want a counsellor, I want the offender caught and punished) Victim Support, send people to counsel burglars who've been injured by their victims in the course of a burglary.

(They're also, far from being a campaigning organisation, bound by their rules not to campaign for changes to the law. Strange then that according to this site they wish for the majority of UK parents to be criminalised ...)

UPDATE - interesting one, this. I note the name of ex-Sussex Chief Constable Paul Whitehouse appears both on the 'Children Are Unbeatable' supporters list and as a trustee of Victim Support. He obviously deeply disapproves of any form of physical violence. His daughter doesn't seem to, though. Or did she leave home to find what she'd been deprived of in her formative years ?

I only asked.

Almost Forgot This ...

BBC correspondent Rageh Omar was being interviewed on Radio Five (Julian Worricker) yesterday lunchtime. He was asked what he thought about Saddam. Hadn't he realised, as the US and British diplomatic offensive marched in step with the military buildup, that his regime was doomed ?

I haven't a transcript so I'll paraphrase.

"I think he (Saddam) lived in a world of self-delusion, of fantasy ... he only heard what he wanted to hear and his people only told him what he wanted to hear .."

"He had these ideas that his forces would fight the Americans to a standstill, there'd be a quagmire (sic) - or that the Arab street would rise up as one to support him ... the whole Middle East would be aflame ..."

"He would be able to strike at the Americans and Zionists with some deadly weapon .."

Wasn't a quagmire and the "Arab Street" exactly what the anti-war movement was predicting ?

And doesn't the description of Saddam's mental world match the anti-war movement pretty well ?