George Bush - recovering alcoholic ?

James Hamilton with an excellent post on using psychoanalysis as a political weapon.

" ... another example of a psychotherapist thinking that the 'insights' of the trade have a prevailing overview on politics; the idea that politicians and political views can be sorted into those that are psychologically healthy and those that are not, on the basis of diagnosis from a distance. "

I'd dispute that it's valid even from close range. Most of our great men and women (from Boadicea (mass slaughter) through Drake (religious mania) to Churchill (alcohol dependency)) would probably be regarded as psychologically disturbed in one way or other.

And Another One ...

(An occasional series about good liberals getting out of the city).

I could never live in suburbia.

Daily Mail-type bigotry is more commonplace in "the provinces".

I don't think there's much difference with other cities.

I've done small towns and they hold no appeal.

Yet "London no longer holds the appeal it did. There is too much human excrement swilling around in the cesspool." (the kind of thing a 'right-winger" could never say).

But we are certain that neither of us can go on as we are.

"Enough misery and loathing to destabilise the planet"

AL Kennedy is back - and madder than ever. I hope Mr Rochester's got some Jeyes Fluid - that attic room's a health hazard. Get that stuff off the walls for starters.

Read the whole thing - then call an ambulance.

BBC Bias Part 391

This morning I listened to 'The Long View' - Radio Four's programme in which the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland takes a historical subject and examines it from the standpoint of a 21st century liberal. Each week guests and experts are brought in. And who better to talk about the Jacobites, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 'Forty-Five' than IRA/Sinn Fein's own Danny Morrison ?

Next week - the work of nineteenth century children's campaigners Barnardo and Shaftesbury - with special guest Marc Dutroux.

How To Grow An Underclass

A wonderful Today report (RealAudio link) on the failure of the latest 'alternative to prison' scheme. Apparently the results are worse then with 'standard' community sentences (which themselves are useless). Listen and marvel.

Just a few highlights.

The remark that 'Youth Justice workers' don't see eye to eye with 'the community' (aka the victims) over non-custodial sentences.

And an interview with an inarticulate chavette which you couldn't make up.

How an old assault charge 'caught up with her'. Those pesky assault charges, chasing people about the streets.

How the presssure of having to keep three appointments a day drove her back to her anti-social ways - and how she was given another chance.

And the happy ending - she's 'getting a flat' and she's four months pregnant. She's sixteen years old.

Conspicuous by their absence - mentions of her victims, of the people who'll pay for her flat and child support or of the idea that she's in any way responsible for her own life decisions.

A wonderful piece because it illustrates both the current dire state of the Criminal Justice system, and the reflex pro-criminal liberalism of the BBC.


UPDATE - this old Polly Toynbee interview sheds a little inadvertant light on the liberal view of crime.

Journalistically, she says, her experiences also highlighted how little interest the modern media has in poverty. "Just look what happens if television ever makes a documentary about the poor - they invariably choose grotesque cases, people with real social or criminal problems, because that makes good telly. The reality is that the biggest single group of poor people are actually in work."

Here Polly makes the distinction between 'people in work' and people with 'criminal problems' in a way that makes it plain that by people with 'criminal problems' she actually means the people who commit crime.

I would suggest that in any poor area the people with the real 'criminal problems' are likely to be the law-abiding, including those who go out to work for a (poorly-paid) living and who Polly claims to care so much about.

Another little sidelight here.

"I've been incredibly lucky," she says of a career that has taken her from there to the Guardian, then the BBC, Independent and back to the Guardian again. "I've never had to work for anyone I haven't liked.

A Few More Links ...

To the Social Affairs Unit blog, where among others the great Dalrymple wields the pen, and to David Warren's essays.

Dalrymple needs no introduction, while David Warren appears to have done it all - schooled in Lahore, Bangkok and Canada, youth spent wandering the East, acquiring 'non-leftist politics and religious beliefs' - doubtless among other things. We do however have in common the experience of squatting in Vauxhall - though he spent his days studying Aristotle while a few years later I studied Assembler.

To this august duo add Adrian Harris' visual art blog, because he's got some nice art links, he's from just up the M5 in Worcestershire, and he links for some reason to me.

He also has a link to this powerful and scary New Scientist story - from one of the few survivors of the Chernobyl control room.

"To get a clearer idea of what had happened we walked outside. What we saw was terrifying. Everything that could be destroyed had been. The entire water coolant system was gone. The right-hand side of the reactor hall had been completely destroyed, and on the left the pipes were just hanging. That was when I realised that Khodemchuk was definitely dead. The place where I was told he'd been standing was in ruins. The huge turbines were still standing, but everything around them was rubble. He must have been buried under that. From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot because of gamma rays ..."

Robert Fisk ...

.. really is - well, let's say I find much to disagree with. I've just read his description of how on the morning of Sept. 11, flying to the States, he "told the captain, and how the crew and I prowled the plane to look for possible suicide pilots. I think I found about 13; alas, of course, they were all Arabs and completely innocent. But it told me of the new world in which I was supposed to live. "Them’’ and "Us’’. ".

Who told you ? You found 13 potential hijackers. How ? What criteria did you use ? Was it just coincidence they were all (alas) Arabs ? Or is that (as I assume) what you were looking for ?

If so, that was your choice, your decision (and in the circumstances a wise one). Don't tell me someone told you 'of the world you were supposed to live' in. You were perfectly at liberty to check for crucifixes or yarmulkas if you thought that was a more likely indicator of a potential hijacker. Don't try to blame someone else for your decisions.



But this - at his mother's funeral - is - well, I could find words for it.

"But I also remember, at the service in the chancel of the little stone Kentish church, that I angrily suggested that if President Bill Clinton had spent as much money on research into Parkinson’s disease as he had just spent in firing cruise missiles into Afghanistan at Osama bin Laden (and it must have been the first time Bin Laden’s name was uttered in the precincts of the Church of England) then my mother would not have been in the wooden box beside me."

That little anecdote says more about Robert Fisk than all of his Indie pieces put together.

UPDATE - Harry (we can't go on linking like this - people will talk) and Natalie (at samizdata) both give Fisk the wet-fish treatment. So does Norm.

Racist Teachers Part 798

We're here again.

Jamie Whyte in the Times on the 'London Schools And The Black Child' conference, and the pre-conference report, which inspired headlines like "Black boys betrayed by racist school system". Can you guess the newspaper ?

These results suggest that teachers do not have lower expectations of black students than white, that they do not show lower levels of care. When this was the only serious data available, how could anyone draw the opposite conclusion? It requires a scandalous degree of either stupidity or mendacity.

The victims of this fraud are not only the teachers falsely accused of racism, or the ratepayers of London, whose money has been wasted on this bogus research. It is anyone who genuinely wants to know why black boys are failing at school.

There was at least one dissenting voice at the conference.

BBC sports presenter and former Tottenham Hotspur striker Garth Crooks said there was a direct link between films and rap music glorifying violence and the drift of black boys away from education and into crime and violence.

'There is an epidemic out there, and it is killing some of our children. Do you think there could be a correlation between this and the growing dissipation of our cultural values?' he said.

Crooks joins Tony Sewell and Guardian journalist Joseph Harker in the awkward squad who think there may be factors other than the obvious racism of the average London teacher at work.

Sewell - The gospel I preach is a simple one. It asks black young men to look beyond the street and beyond immediate gratification. It asks some hard questions about their own responsibilities: homework, bedtime, respect for peers and adults, good manners, self-control and how to succeed in the system. Nobody is asking our boys these questions. We just get more politicians telling them they're victims of racism.

Harker - At the top of the list must surely be the breakdown of the black family: 50% of Caribbean mothers under 35 have never been married - five times the white figure - and the number is increasing.

The conference recommended that teachers should be paid differently according to their skin colour, and that black children should not be excluded for a first offence unless the offence involved a knife or a gun.

The latter recommendation soon flushed out the [irony]closet racists[/irony].

Behaviour management and discipline are a huge issue and the idea that a pupil should only be permanantly excluded on the first offence if he or she is carrying a gun or a knife is frankly terrifying. Words fail me at what teachers are expected to put up with in the name of inclusion.

God, that is just so blatant !


UPDATE - the Bunny isn't too impressed either. And let's hope this isolated incident didn't involve a knife or a gun. (No, Judge Hathorne, I wasn't implying anything about the ethnicity of the boy - just a comment on the exclusion rule ... what's that bonfire and stake for ?)

The iGeneration ?

The Times produces yet another survey about yoof, provoking a remarkably idiotic comment by Paul Whitely of Essex University.

He 'said that the interviewees’ opposition to taking up arms for their country reflected the emergence of a new post-materialist value system, in which quality of life assumed a greater value than material goods.'

What ? Has he listened to the chat in any playground, where brand names - cars, clothes, phones, trainers, soccer boots - are obsessively compared ? Has he walked the streets of Essex towns, and noticed that the chances of having your head kicked in a given area is inversely proportional to the number of Sky dishes and £100 trainers ? Obviously not. I'm reminded of Joan Didion, in 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem', commenting on a newspaper report (the year is 1967) which says 'Hippies despise money - they call it 'bread''. This observation, she said, was proof that the wires between the generations were completely down.

I think what Whitely hasn't grasped is that for many young people the quality of your life is defined and determined by the brands in it.

The Guardian has a different report - surprise surprise, our children aren't happy bunnies. Madeleine is worried.

"Put this research into the hands of the Daily Mail and it would be ample grist for those peddling tales of Britain's moral decline: kids don't know right from wrong; they lie, they steal, they're disobedient. Or another favourite: the breakdown of the family is making our teenagers miserable, and working mums should bear the most blame as the rise in maternal employment virtually parallels the increases in emotional and behavioural problems. "

What a brilliant caricature of the Mail. Whereas as Madeleine reports, the reality is very different.

"The chances that 15-year-olds will have behavioural problems such as lying, stealing and being disobedient, have more than doubled."

See ? The Mail babble about right and wrong - but it's a behavioural problem, not a moral one.

Don't worry - I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the fact that (as the Times reports) 74% of children now have working mothers. Moral panic ! Moral panic !

I think what we're seeing here is parenting by people with no 'cultural narrative'. The kids in the 74 study were born in 59 - to parents who were themselves brought up in the old culture. By 1999 we're talking about kids born in 84 - to parents brought up in the changing 1960s and 70s. But we're only just starting to experience a generation brought up by parents with no memory of antediluvian Britain.

Just you wait until the 84 generation start having kids.

Barbie Tarts and School Uniforms

A Guardianista praises the blazer and tie. Never too late I suppose. She's not too keen on girlie culture either.

"The current passion for reintroducing uniform is at least partly because school heads see no other way round the current BarbieTart look: nine-year-old girls in FCUK T-shirts with "Juicy" appliqued to their tiny bottoms. Actually, I'm in favour of uniform purely because it lessens French Connection's profits. I find myself wondering alarmingly often if there isn't a way the company could be prosecuted, for living off immoral earnings or something, for their massive and hideously irresponsible contribution to the nation's crashing hurtle into total vulgarity.

Here are some T-shirt slogans I've seen on the street recently: FCUKing like bunnies; Big Dick (See Below); Stop Staring At My Tits; Remember My Name (You'll Be Screaming It Later) - oh God, I can't be bothered to go on. "

When my daughter and I were at the seaside recently, we saw a family whose daughter (10? 11?) had the slogan 'F*** Off - I'm Fussy' on her shirt. They weren't typical underclass - no visble studs or tattoos - Dad wasn't shaved bald, Mum didn't have vast hoop earrings bought from the Seti Surplus Store. Just ordinary folks.

It's difficult to slag off little girlies for reflecting the culture around them. On the subject of which, the Guardian notes the death of TV executive Andrea Wonfor, who 'stamped her mark on British TV'. You said it.

She leaves behind such culturally enriching landmarks as The Word (whose influence has long spread from TV to magazines like Zoo and Nuts), Byker Grove, Eurotrash and a largeish output of 'ground-breaking' TV production featuring women swearing and talking about sex. Before she came along, no-one knew that women did any of these things.

In her own not so small way she helped get the 'Porn Queen' t-shirt onto the chest of many a chavette.

Tasteless Or What ?

Barry Beelzebub hits a brilliant new low with this piece on the Health and Safety Executive.

Let me give you a couple of examples of how far this cotton wool culture has permeated our daily lives. A friend of mine who works for a prominent firm of granny-stranglers (or financial advisors as some call them) recently managed to blag a couple of very fancy tickets to a football match. You know the ones: padded seats, luxury bar, free programme, post-96 middle-class muppet behind you, that sort of thing.

He thought this might be an ideal opportunity to introduce his four-year-old son to The Beautiful Game on the grounds that if the boy became bored with proceedings, his mother could take him downstairs to the luxury bar where they could play Stick The Tail On Emile Heskey while father watched the rest of the match in peace.

A quick phone call to the football club in question stymied the scheme. A four-year-old sitting on his father's lap? Out of the question. The child would be a clear and obvious fire hazard.

A what? A fire hazard? This is the country that became rich by sending four-year-olds up chimneys. Now I know that disabled people in cinemas are often regarded as potentially combustible, but a four-year-old kid? How many of those have you seen go up in flames in the last week? (An uneasy silence settles on the readership, understandably so.)

Fools Rush In ...

I noticed the gloating headline in yesterday's Guardian.

"Now it's Bush's turn to squirm" announced former Clinton staffer Sidney Blumenthal, revealing that "Evidence of the president's fudged war record emerged in time to undermine the Republicans' triumphal march".

The BBC and Indie echoed the claims - that new documents shed a bad light on GWBs performance as an Air National Guard in the early 1970s.

But as Natalie Solent points out, they weren't up with the story.


UPDATE - Ed Thomas has more at Biased BBC.

Thanks Harry ...

For the links to the Socialist Workers Party Joe Strummer tribute pages. The Clash were the ideal band for the Student Grant generation - from the idiotic cliches -

"After taking part in the riot at the end of that summer’s Notting Hill Carnival, lead singer Joe Strummer proudly announced:

“I think people ought to know that we’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence ..."

to the carefully concealed upper middle class background and the decision to forsake the Westway for rural Somerset. Turning revolt into not so much an art as an attitude struck - a pose, albeit one maintained for years ... you think it's funny ? Turning webellion into money ?

And the Clash could NOT do reggae. 'White Man In the Hammersmith Palais' is as embarrassing as the Boomtown Rats 'Banana Republic' or the Members dire 'Offshore Banking Business' ('kinda financial t'ing, yeah ?').

The Ruts were miles better.



UPDATE - Apologies for this descent into old animosities. But the Clash and the SWP were made for each other.

Brave Journalism At The Guardian

It's easy to knock the Guardian, purveyors of radical ideas such as 'Never Trust A Christian Cowboy', ideas which would otherwise never be heard in the mainstream media. Its pages are full of people who think it's brave to attack the war in Iraq or condemn people who take the Bible seriously.

But Catherine Bennett on 'animal rights activists' is a truly brave article. Because if the activists - who she rightly calls terrorists - run true to form she may well be in physical danger as a result of what she's written. The people whe writes about are seriously nasty.

In most English towns you'll see a young person on a weekend with a stall in the High Street, Stop Huntingdon leaflets and a petition against foxhunting. The other face of the movement you can read about here, or here, or on their own websites. If an entire community was - and still is - terrorised by racists or homophobes because it contained one black or gay resident, it would never be off the news. Yet what's happening at Newchurch in Staffordshire is remarkably low profile, and it's only one of many similar campaigns.

WAITE
Horrendous it may be but it's by no means unique. Other targets in the community here include the local golf club where John Hall used the gym. When threatening letters were ignored turf on its greens was dug up and red paint poured over the fairways. Mr Hall chose to resign. His newsagent was targeted and no longer delivers the papers. His solicitor bowed to pressure and no longer acts for the family. The glazier, who repaired the farm's vandalised windows, was threatened and withdrew his labour, so did the local vet. And the Halls have been stopped from visiting the nearby hotel when it too received warnings. Indeed the entire community here received letters of abuse and accusation about the Halls and their alleged cruelty to animals, including the village pub, the Red Lion, where landlords, the Marklews, tried at first to resist the pressure.

MRS MARKLEW
We had a letter to say that the Hall family have been using the Red Lion and that we'd got to stop them coming in, which we ignored it. So then we got intimidating letters and threats, what they were going to do - they were going to burn the place down, they were going to trash the cars, they were going to smash the windows. Then after that they sent letters to everybody in the village telling them not to use the Red Lion because we're serving scum - i.e. John and his family.

MARKLEW
And that's when the bricks started coming through the window. The phone calls was horrendous, you'd get them 24 hours a day non-stop and every time you picked the receiver up, because you had to because I was running a business, you got silence or abuse.

WAITE
But the Marklews stood their ground and point blank refused to bar the Halls. However, when senior management at the Union Pub Company, which owns the Red Lion, also became the target of hundreds of hostile letters, phone calls and e-mails, officials met the Marklews and told the couple that it would be best if they left their tenancy.

Bennett's view of this is

"Perhaps, in the context of al-Qaida's massacres, the blowing up of Israeli buses, and the slaughter and abuse of children which Tony Blair has described as "extreme terrorism", milder terms seem more appropriate for our domestic product. But if terrorism must now be identified with acts so unspeakable they seem to render the word, by itself, inadequate, this should not prevent our home-grown, less extreme specialists in fear from being known for what they are."

I'm reminded by her bravery of the famous 1960s Private Eye article which named the Kray Twins as the people behind a series of tabloid headlines about the 'reign of fear' in London's gangland. They closed the item with a statement to the effect that 'if the Krays live up to their reputation, this may well be the last issue of Private Eye under the present management'.

Careless Talk Costs Lives

The saintly Rev Peter Mullen of Reform on Rasputin's view of 9/11.


Would Dr Williams argue that the brave men who fought back against the terrorists in the fourth aircraft to crash were in the wrong? He reckons that the terrorists had no choice: “We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option.”

This is a high-grade sample of the drivel we have heard these past three years from those in the West who despise the civilisation which is their inheritance. Of course the suicide bombers had “other options”: not every impoverished Muslim thinks the only answer to his problems is to destroy New York. If the atrocity were not the terrorists’ fault, what next? “We begin to find some sense of what they and we might together recognise as good.” Really? But it is impossible to make common moral cause between democratic freedom and the rule of law on the one hand and nihilistic killing on the other.

Dr Williams is praised as a man of superior intelligence. But there is no intelligence in Writing in the Dust, only romantic faux naivety. As his writings reveal, he is an old-fashioned class warrior. He dislikes our Western way of life and romanticises the Islamic world as much as Marxists used to romanticise the USSR. This wouldn’t matter much in normal times, but these days we live on the edge of destruction.

Great stuff, Dr Mullen. But I think the bishopric may be some way off.

Islamophobia Part 734

Norm and newbie clever-clogs Jonathan Derbyshire do a pretty good job on Madeleine Bunting's tastelessly timed Guardian piece.

But five stars for the following - Jack Straw, as spotted by Harry.

Sometimes we are too swift to move away from the original and fundamental causes of such terrorism, namely the terrorists who perpetrated such an act, and shift away to other things - in a sense taking for granted their culpability.
There are some things which happen amongst human kind which are almost inexplicable according to any basic moral norms - Nazism was and this is.

And the wondrous Yasmin Alibhai Brown, a burning bright flame amidst the hideously white self-haters of the Indie. No liberal guilt there.

When confronted by such abominable crimes, we have an obligation to cross over the horror which wells up and try and comprehend (not forgive, but understand) the perpetrators and the circumstance which led to the violence. Today I find such searching analysis almost impossible. For some people that line was crossed with the Sept 11 attacks (which, it will be remembered, Yazza believed the US brought upon themselves - but it's never too late to repent). There are events which silence the voice ... for now, for me, this crime has no place even within the farthest boundaries of human behaviour; it has destroyed the fundamental definition of what it means to be human.

For Yazza, for Jack Straw, and for me, the crime is too disgusting, too unspeakable, to be balanced in some equation against Russian actions in Chechnya. Not so the Indie's vile cartoonist, who I presume is the same guy who did the baby-eating Sharon.

Putin stands, dunce's cap on head, in the corner of a bombed-out classroom, blood and glass on the floor. Surprisingly there are no dead children, not even being eaten by Mr Sharon.

The blackboard contains the equation

LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE + REPRESSION = TERRORISM

The caption ? "Back to School".


UPDATE - as I've said before, what Ms Bunting knows about history could be tattooed under a child's armpit.

" ... the particular association of Islam with violence is a colonial hangover, dating back to the 1857 Indian Mutiny, when Muslims rebelled against British imperialism."

Two points. The Indian Mutiny involved Hindu and Muslim troops. As the Army Museum site says "Fortunately for the British the Mutiny was almost exclusively confined to the Bengal Army. The Company’s Madras and Bombay Armies were relatively unaffected and other units, including Sikhs, Punjabi Moslems and Gurkhas, remained loyal.". Nicholson's force at Delhi mainly consisted of Muslim tribesmen from what is now the Afghan border region.

To say the revolt was against imperialism is incorrect. Imperialism of one sort or other - Sikh, Muslim, Hindu - was the usual form of government on the subcontinent. The mutineers proclaimed the re-establishment of the Moghul Empire under Bahadur Shah. In Charles Allen's words 'the root cause was a growing unease among both Hindu and Muslim sepoys about the way their traditional way of life was being interfered with .. a real fear that religion and caste were being actively undermined. The British Government was forcing the pace of change in ways that threatened the customs of centuries, bringiong reforms such as the banning of suttee and female infanticide ...'.

Caste, suttee (the burning of widows), female infanticide. Can't say Madelaine doesn't know a good cause when she sees one.


And as for the particular association of Muslims with violence, I'd better quote again the Archbishop of Canterbury. No, not Rasputin - Queen Elizabeth I's Matthew Parker, nearly 300 years before the Mutiny.

" Better it is for us to fall into thy hands, than into the hands of men, and especially into the hands of Turks and Infidels thy professed enemies, who now invade thine inheritance... First, the Turke with his sword, what landes, nations, and countreys, what empires, kingdomes, and provinces, with cities innumerable hath he wonne, not from us but from Thee! Where thy name was wont to be invocated, thy word preached, thy sacraments administered, there now reigneth barbarous Mahumet with his filthy Alcoran. The florishing churches in Asia, the learned churches of Grecia, the manifold churches in Africa, which were wont to serve thee now are gone from thee."

Or what about the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who wrote 'The Fireworshippers' in 1817, describing the conquest of Zoroastrianism in Persia by Islam. He described

One of the saintly, murderous brood,
To carnage and the Koran given,
Who hold through unbelievers blood
Lies the directest path to heaven

I'm not saying I agree with Moore or Parker. But to suggest that Islam only became associated with violence in 1857 is ridiculous. She's making it up as she goes along.

A Couple More links ...

To Susurration and new kid on the blog Eric The Unread, both of whom are posting some good stuff. Though Eric, I'd question whether the market for posts attacking the Daily Mail isn't somewhat saturated.

I'm not sure about Susurration's description of this site as 'Conservative' though, nor Coppersblog's 'Superior (liked that bit) Conservative UK Blog.

What on earth is there about Britain in 2004 which is worth conserving, apart from the countryside ? The few shreds and tatters of pre-1960s culture, I suppose.

And from the Policeman's blog, a little Dalrymplesque vignette of British underclass 'family life' in 2004.

“Did you hit her?”
“Basically, I really love her, but she just pushed me too far this time.”
“I see, so you didn’t really mean to do it.”
“No, I just lost it, I really love her.”
“So you say. Are you drunk?”
“Well, I’ve had a few.”
“So you’re a violent drunk?”
“You’re twisting my words.”
“And you’re under arrest.” Strike one for justice.
Returning to take the statement from the battered (and not in a fish and chips way) female, I ask penetrating questions:
“How long have you been together?”
“On and off for 18 months.” (It’s always “on and off” in these cases).
“Has he always been violent towards you?”
“Yes, pretty much.”
“And at what point did you decide he would make an ideal father for your child?”
“Well it just sort of happened.”

It's Dreadful, But ...

"But depraved terrorism of this type does not come unannounced. Russian forces fighting the two wars in Chechnya have distinguished themselves with their own brand of brutality ..." - Observer editorial.

"The hostage-takers committed crimes beyond the capacity of any judicial or spiritual authority adequately to condemn ... But it cannot be enough simply to condemn the wickedness of the hostage-takers ... " - Independent editorial.

Note that to the Independent (and the BBC) the people who slaughtered maybe as many as 500 innocents are 'hostage-takers'. To the Guardian they are 'militants', just like the 'militants' who target little girls in Gaza, or Afghanistan.


Thank God for the great Aaronovitch.

The Script Is Written

It was

a) the fault of the incomptetent and disorganised Russian security forces (cue SAS man in studio to say how much better we'd have done it)

b) anyway, such attacks are inevitable because of what the Russians are doing in Chechnya (© one Lord Judd, who seems to be all over Radios 4 and 5)

c) anyway, Putin, Bush and Sharon are the real terrorists. As Isabel Hilton so rightly points out in the Guardian "As the drama of Beslan was entering its final hours, George Bush was bidding for re-election on the promise of security to the American people, a security premised on the willingness to use overwhelming military force. It was the same promise that Putin gave to the Russians and Ariel Sharon to the people of Israel. All three have used violence freely in pursuit of electoral reward: Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple of the Mount that triggered the second intifada, Putin's reckless adventurism in re-launching the Chechen war in 1999, and the Bush invasion of Iraq."

I'm particularly impressed with her insight into the moral equivalence between a peaceful visit by a Jewish head of state to a Jewish religious site and the deliberate slaughter of hundreds of innocent children, teachers and parents.



UPDATE - Following Isabel Hilton's description of a visit to the Temple mount as 'using violence freely', Joan Smith in the Indie takes things one step beyond.

President Vladimir Putin's contribution to the war against terror, prosecuted with wanton violence in Chechnya, has created carnage: in less than two weeks, Chechen terrorists have blown two passenger planes from the sky, bombed a metro station in Moscow and murdered hundreds of men, women and children at a school in southern Russia.

Leaving aside the valid criticisms that can be made of Russian policy in Chechnya (after Friday's events it's obviously much too soft), such a sentence turns logic on it's head. All the acts of which Ms Smith writes were carried out by Putin's enemies. In Ms Smith's world the perpetrators aren't responsible - Putin made them do it. If only she'd been around in 1940.

Prime Minister Churchill's contribution to the war against Hitler, prosecuted with wanton violence in Norway, has created carnage: in less than six weeks, German forces have overrun France, burned thousands of soldiers at St Nazaire and forced Jewish men, women and children into the Lodz ghetto.

Mary Whitehouse Was Right II

Following in the footsteps of Yasmin Alibhai Brown, John Humphrys wonders where it's all gone wrong in his MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival.

Humprhys acknowledged that his comments could be characterised as "coming from the collected works of Mary Whitehouse", the veteran clean-up campaigner. "She said television was on a downward moral spiral. Foul language and fornication would become routine if nothing were done to stop it. They said she was wrong. Was she?"

Of course she was right, John. Let me tell you why. When you, and I, and lots of young people, and some not so young, cheered on the defendants in the Lady Chatterley and Oz trials, mocked Mrs Whitehouse and the Festival Of Light (I remember counter-demonstrating as the 'Festival Of Life'), we'd all been brought up in what was still a Judaeo-Christian culture. We were under the illusion that you could open the floodgates just as much as we wanted and no more. Mrs Whitehouse, with an explicit Christian analysis, correctly reasoned that without a Christian culture (or a strong culture replacing it) there were potentially no limits to what was permissible.

Christianity and the other major world religions have been around a long time. They understood, accepted and respected the power of sexuality, which was precisely why it was bound in with all manner of prescription, proscription, culture and custom. Procreation, the link between sexuality and the family, then and now still the chief transmitter of culture between the generations, was similarly attended.

Then two things happened - the decline in religious belief coincided with the invention of cheap and reliable contraception, an invention which appeared at the time to sever the link between sex and procreation. Sex could become, according to your nature, a means of deepening a fulfilling relationship, good fun, better than sleeping alone, or something different to all of these. The choice was yours.

If you have no religious perspective and sex is a pleasant leisure activity, why should you not explore its dimensions, watching, participating, selling, buying ? After all, these dimensions have been around for a very long time. Mrs Whitehouse would have been well aware of these issues. As time passes the Humphrys view (1960s version) looks more and more out of touch with reality, and the Whitehouse version more and more realistic and worldly.

What's happening now is different. This is a battle between people who are concerned about society and those whose interest is simply to make programmes that make money. Those who fought for the word f*** in Lady Chatterley didn't do it to make money. Now the cash registers go ker-ching every time there's a fumble beneath the bed sheets.

How naive can you get ?

There has always been a clash between freedom, especially freedom of expression, and the conservative wish to preserve values. In the 60s, Mary Whitehouse was taken apart by the liberal elite, who defended Lady Chatterley and the Oz publishers, arguing - in my view rightly - that it was not just censorious but stupid to pretend that sex happened only in the marital bed. This was a genuine debate between different views of what was good for society.

I'm beginnning to see a picture here - that it was alright when my mates were opening the gates, but now the peasants have all rushed in. Let's have a look at two parts of that argument.

" ... it was not just censorious but stupid to pretend that sex happened only in the marital bed." I don't think anyone, even Judge Griffith-Jones, ever pretended that sex only happened in the marital bed. The point of the Chatterley trial was more the (for the time) graphic descriptions of the sex than the fact that it was adulterous. And hang on a mo. What did you write a paragraph earlier ?

"You can't use people with real lives and real problems and real children as "just entertainment". Well, you can, but it's corrupting. The first time I watched Big Brother live there were two men lying on beds and talking about women. Or rather "f*****g women". And talking about their responses to them. Or, rather, "my f*****g stiffy". My, how we've pushed back the boundaries of television. How proud we should be."

I hate to say it John, but it is not just censorious, but stupid to pretend that some men don't talk like that. Why is that speech, apart from a certain inarticulacy, so much worse than Lawrence's description of a tumescent Mellors ?

"This was a genuine debate between different views of what was good for society."

Your point being ? In a post-Christian culture, it seems generally agreed that giving people what they want is good, and there can be no doubt that people like watching sex and fighting (not usually simultaneously).

The old culture was quite comfortable with the idea that what people wanted wasn't necessarily what was good for them - or as Humphrys puts it "in the bad old days we had paternalists trying to capture the masses for what they believed in their patrician way to be good". Wrong again, John. By the 1960s the ruling elite didn't give a toss, and it was the despised lower-middle and respectable working class who provided the bulk of Mrs Whitehouse's support.

But without a Christian or other religious culture I really can't see how you can object to Stu and Shell on grounds of anything but taste. This is probably only a beginning. Humphrys has called for assisted suicide to be made legal. I'm sure there are people who'd pay good money to watch the death in real time - with perhaps a lottery involved, the lucky winner to remotely operate the barbiturate driver from their PC or mobile. Poor countries which still retain the death penalty have a sure-fire media earner. And how long before sex is classified as a sport ?