Francis Beckett's Blog

What happens when there are no policies to fight over

2009-06-05T01:52:00.000-07:00

When Labour was relieved of all its ideological baggage, more than ten years ago now, part of the plan was that it would now be united. Since the Party for nothing, there would be nothing to cause splits. What now splits Labour is the visceral loathing between Brownites and Blairites. Whichever of these two are in charge, the policies that will be pursuied are the same, but the viciousness of the tribal war between them is as great, perhaps greater, as when the Party has policies to fight over.

The simple fact is that the "Brown must go" agitation really is a Blairite ramp, and they don't give a bigger if they put Cameron in charge of the country, so long as they defeat the hated Brownites. They want this, not because it will change anything in the real world, not because it will change the lives of a single person in Britain, but because they want their tribe to triumph and the other tribe to be humiliated.

SATA - New Labour's education failure in microcosm

2008-07-21T03:06:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for the reason why New Labour has spent more on education yet failed to improve it, look no further that the present entirely predictable crisis over SATS – Standard Assessment Tests. All the three notions that are wrong, and foolish, and muddled about government education policy are there:

First, the notion that if you hand anything at all over to the private sector, it will magically improve. Second, that if you want to make teachers and schools perform better, you set them arbitrary targets, and kick them if the targets aren’t met. And third, that everything in education can be measured in crude tick-box forms, which can be completed by anyone who can read, because no sophisticated judgements are required.

How else could we have got to a situation where schools have to revolve round the demands of simplistic little tests on their pupils; where those tests can be marked by people who have no qualifications or experience in education; and these people can be employed at a pittance by an American company to do work which could be done far better and with much greater understanding by experienced and qualified people whom the British taxpayer already employs?

And that is not the worst of it. Our government not only insists on finding someone – anyone – from the private sector to do work which the public sector could do better and cheaper; it then gives them a contract which means they can foul up as badly as they like, and still not be fired without a golden goodbye of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

SATs are the tests taken at ages five, 11 and 14, to chart the progress of both schools and their pupils. They have always been unpopular with teachers, pupils and parents, but popular with politicians, for whom they provide a source of meaningless statistics which can be deployed to prove more or less anything. The administration of these tests has been outsourced to an enormous multinational company called ETS, or Educational Testing Services. ETS have been given a five year contract which is apparently binding no matter how badly they foul up. Nice work if you can get it.

As schools break up for summer, almost one in five primary schools still does not have a full set of marks, and many of the results for 14-year-olds are likely to be delayed, perhaps until September. The results we have are clearly flawed, and teams of ETS employees are searching for thousands of test papers which have apparently been lost. We know of incomplete marking, of pupils wrongly marked as absent, of pupils’ work being left to moulder in the schools, and much more. Any school putting in this sort of performance would be in special measures, and rightly so.

We hear calls for the resignation of the education secretary, Ed Balls, but that will change nothing. What we need is what I fear we’re not going to get – a change of policy.

Can Gordon unleash the radical within?

2008-05-04T01:06:00.000-07:00

Making Labour once again a Party that cares about the poor and the underdog is no longer just the right thing to do; it's also the only way Labour politicians stand a chance of saving their Party and their hold on power.

Gordon Brown could do this. Somewhere inside him still lurks a radical reformer who cares about poverty and inequality. But Gordon kept him firmly locked up for 13 years, from 1994 to 2007, and now he's forgotten what he did with the key.

The reformer made a few tentative bids for freedom in Gordon's first weeks as Prime Minister. Remember early messages about limits to the privatisation of health and education, affordable housing, civil liberty, the cancellation of the Manchester supercasino?

Of course he was attacked by the Guardians of the Blairite flame, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn. But the polls went the Prime Minister's way.

And then, when he cancelled the general election, he withdrew inside his shell and - we are told - says now to his advisers: what is there for him to do but follow the Blairite agenda?

He is Prime Minister because the nation is sick of the Blairite agenda. Iraq, privatisation of public assets, attacks on civil liberties and the rest were not what the people wanted, and Labour knew Blair had to go.

The message of Thursday's elections couldn't be clearer. Ken Livingstone's vote was far better than that of most Labour candidate precisely because people think he has an Old Labour agenda. (The miracle isn't that Livingstone lost, but that he came so close to winning despite his Party.) In Barrow-in-Furness, four councillors were elected on the single platform of opposing academies. The messages couldn't be clearer. Everywhere where Labour candidates were identified with Labour's agenda of thre past decade, they were routed, because Labour's natural supporters - the radicals, the poor, the dispossessed - won't vote Labour any more.

Anthony Seldon and the academy scam

2008-01-15T12:58:00.000-08:00

Anthony Seldon’s call today for fee-charging schools to get involved with state education has nothing at all to do with helping children from poor homes. It’s got everything to do with fee-charging schools like his hanging onto the perks and tax breaks which the schools for the wealthiest have become dependent upon.

He advises them to sponsor academies, and when they wake up and realise what’s going on, they’ll rush to do so, for this is a wonderful scam, giving them a huge political and public relations boost and costing them little or nothing. Dulwich College in South London worked this out ages ago. It’s sponsoring some of Kent’s academies, and has reaped a considerable local public relations advantage from doing so.

So is it coughing up £2 million – which academy sponsors are supposed to do? No, actually, not precisely two million. No one in Kent wanted to tell me exactly how much, but I do now have the figure, as a result of a Freedom of Information request from Kent Messenger political editor Paul Francis. The actual sum of money this school is giving to the academies as its sponsorship is, er, nothing at all. Not a penny.

Nor is it handing over expensive equipment. It’s offering advice. Expertise. Chaps from Dulwich College, with years of experience of teaching the children from the wealthiest families in London, will trot languidly off to the poorest bits of Kent and tell state school teachers how it ought to be done.

This is a wonderful bargain. No one but the saintly-sounding Dr Seldon could make this sort of initiative look like anything but a cynical exercise in public relations, designed to divert proposals to change the ludicrous situation where fee-charging schools, which educate the children of the wealthiest, count as charities.

I suppose we will now see legions of private school teachers lording it round state schools, where the classes are twice as big as they are used to and the facilities half as good. The resentment this will cause in state schools will be enormous – especially as these bringers of wisdom to the poor are paid quite a lot more than their state school colleagues.

That, of course, is one thing the government could put right quite quickly. It’s far easier to teach in fee-charging schools, and it pays far better. The government could have put that right in the latest teachers’ pay settlement, announced yesterday. It could pay for the salary hike by simply diverting some of the money it’s wasting on the academy programme. This, of course, hasn’t happened. So as well as being considered better than their state school colleagues, and able to tell them how to do their job, fee-charging school teachers will continue to be far less stressed and far better paid. Who says we’ve got a government that gives a damn about state education?

Sir Cyril's long goodbye

2007-12-26T05:45:00.000-08:00

Two great salesmen boarded a train from London to Darlington in December 1996, and one of them exerted all his skills on the other. By the time they arrived, Sir Cyril Taylor had a convert in the man who was by then almost certain to be the next Prime Minister. Tony Blair got off the train certain that specialist schools were the answer, and Sir Cyril was the man to deliver them.

In the same month as his momentous train journey with Sir Cyril, December 1996, Blair saw an article in the Observer headlined "Let Blair be his own education chief". It began: "Tony Blair should take two posts in the next Labour government: prime minister and education secretary." If he did not want to take the title, Blair should at least control the policy. He could find a cipher to implement his policy: “Enter David Blunkett.” Blunkett was Labour’s education spokesman. Blair appointed the clever young journalist who wrote it – Andrew Adonis – as his education adviser.

So in that month, the team was brought together which, for the ten years of Blair’s premiership, dictated what happened in the British education system. Now Sir Cyril has been fired. It’s a seminal moment, arguably even more significant than if Adonis had been fired.

For 20 years, Sir Cyril had the absolute confidence of three Prime Ministers – Thatcher, Major and Blair. He was therefore listened to closely by all their education secretaries, from Kenneth Baker in 1987 all the war through to Alan Johnson in 2007. All these education secretaries made him their adviser on specialist schools, and he had the ear of all of them whenever he required it.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in the summer, he was the first occupant on Number Ten for two decades not to have listened to Sir Cyril before taking any education decisions. He appointed Ed Balls as his schools secretary, and Balls became the first minister responsible for schools to decline to make Sir Cyril his adviser. Sir Cyril was bullish – he always is – but he knew the writing was on the wall.

And this week he has been fired as chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. The deed wasn’t formally done by the government, of course. Theoretically the SSAT is independent of government and the deed was done by its 12-strong board of trustees. But it’s inconceivable that the Trust could have done this when Tony Blair was PM.

The idea that the SSAT was independent was fostered by Taylor, who boasted that he raised a considerable portion of its income from the city. Actually, he didn’t. The private sector money going into it – just like the private sector money going into Sir Cyril’s pet project, academies – was mostly smoke and mirrors. If you look closely at the figures, you find that the taxpayer – that is, the schools budget - coughed up £36 million out of a total SSAT income of £39 million last year.

So what does it mean, this startling dismissal of a man thought to be invulnerable? Here’s what I hope it means.

It means that we are going to stop the foolish pretence that benevolent companies are going to pay for our education system voluntarily, without the need to tax them. It means a slow but sure death to the Blairite policy of creating a few showpiece well-funded schools in each area for the lucky or clever few. It means an eventual end to the idea of specialist schools: as Alan Smithers, director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, put it, “Cyril Taylor is a superb salesman and has been selling this essentially daft idea of specialist schools to secretary of state after secretary of state.”

It means an end to the idea of state schools being independent, as academies are, with boards of governors on which the sponsor has an inbuilt absolute majority, and parents and teachers are squeezed out. It means the state and the community once again making themselves responsible for what is its responsibility: the education of our children.

If this is what it means, a good start has been made. The state has made itself responsible for who runs the SSAT, and spends £36 million out of our education budget.

Doing marginally less harm to schools

2007-11-20T15:46:00.000-08:00

This is going to hurt. I’m already shivering in anticipation..

I am, after all, a Labour tribesman. Tony Blair threw everything at he that he could in order to get me out of the Party, and I remained, rooted to the spot, until at last he was forced to achieve his objective by the desperate stratagem of invading Iraq.

But, painful though I know it’s going to be, it has to be done, and I might as well get it over with. Here goes.

Congratulations on your speech about education, Mr Cameron.

Not – I rush to say – that you’ve produced a good or even a workable education policy, because you haven’t. You haven’t because it’s based on the same grubby little lie that underpins New Labour education policies: the lie that governments can deliver a choice of schools to parents.

They can’t, and in your heart you know they can’t. The Policy Exchange report on which you based your policy calls for an end to “barriers to supply-side reform” as though state school places were a commodity, like pre-prepared meals in supermarkets, and you can put one back on the shelf if another looks more appealing.

School places don’t work like that. All you will achieve by your policy of planting a new school in an area which already has enough school places is the decline and death of one school or the other, and the destruction of the life chances of all those pupils unfortunate enough already to be in it – for once a school is doomed, it turns into a failing school, if it was not one already.

Governments can’t deliver choice, and most parents don’t want them to. They want a good school in their area, where their children will be safe and well taught. It’s not much to ask, and, as you say, Mr C, it’s a scandal that after a decade in power and a huge amount of extra investment, Labour hasn’t achieved it.

Still, there are two good reasons for congratulating the Conservative leader.

While his proposal sounds like simply an expansion of academies, it actually removes some of the most harmful features of Lord Adonis’s model, by changing the role of sponsors.

Lord Adonis’s model was based on sponsors putting in £2 million to capital costs, and in return for this having total ownership and control of the school in perpetuity, with an inbuilt majority on the governing body.

This was because Lord Adonis peddled another grubby little lie: that philanthropic businesses were willing to put money into state education, and expect no return. Of course, most sponsors don’t put in anything like that, and business sponsors can divert their money into their own enterprises. Take, for example, car dealer and evangelical Christian Peter Vardy, who sponsors, owns and controls five academies in the north east.

His schools have paid £111,554 for "support services such as marketing and recruitment" to his car dealer firm, Reg Vardy Plc. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, set up by the world-famous American preacher, was paid £14,039 as reimbursement for time on academy business spent by Sir Peter's brother David. None of this work was put out to tender, which is a legal requirement in state schools.

The Tory leader at least seems to want to bring parents back into decision-making, with a powerful voice on governing bodies, and to end the dominant role of sponsors. And that makes his model marginally less damaging than Lord Adonis’s model. One and a half cheers for Mr C.

Ditch the dogmas, Ed

2007-11-14T00:45:00.000-08:00

So children’s secretary Ed Balls wants to know why, despite putting unprecedented amounts of money into education, we still have failing schools and children who have been failed by our system.

I can tell him. And I can tell him what to do about it.

The government put in enough money. It could have solved the problem if spent wisely. But instead, the government tacked on a set of outdated political dogmas, requiring schools to jump through doctrinal hoops. The money still did some good, but not as much as it could have done.

So the trick is to uncouple the money from the dogmas, to retain the former, and throw the latter on the fire. Here are the three crucial dogmas that did the damage.

First, the dogma that ultimate control of schools must be wrested away from the parents, teachers and local council representatives who used to run governing bodies, and handed over to a company, church, or other external body, usually with no particular relationship to the area. Trust schools changed the balance on governing bodies to the detriment of local people, and academies went the whole hog, providing the sponsor with an inbuilt majority on every governing body (as shown in my book The Great City Academy Fraud.)

Now, it is simply not true that the local people who use the school are less able to make a success of it than a body like the United Learning Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Church of England which is the biggest academy sponsor, or Sir Peter Vardy, the evangelical Christian car dealer who is in the top few academy sponsors. And the proof is in the result. Despite absorbing many times as much public money as other schools, academies do not do particularly well, often no better than the cash-starved schools they replace.

Second, the dogma – especially close to Lord Andrew Adonis – that we need to separate out brainy kids from thick ones at an early age. This is why many areas, like Kent, still have the eleven plus exam, and why trust schools and academies were given the power to select ten per cent of their intake.

This dogma is only sustained by a lordly disregard of the facts. We know that those who fail the eleven plus are overwhelmingly those from poor households, and that the schools they go to are known locally as schools for failures. And therefore, we know that selection embeds failure and makes it hereditary.

And third, the dogma that there is nothing the public sector can do which the private sector cannot do better. Therefore if we have a school in a poor area – say, for example, the Isle of Sheppey – then the way to improve it is to get a very expensive private school – Dulwich College, to pick an example at random - to come in and show them how it’s done. The fact that no one at Dulwich College has ever seen a class like the ones you get on the Isle of Sheppey has not previously occurred to policymakers.

Get rid of the dogmas, Ed, and watch things get better.

The Blairites strike back

2007-10-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

For Gordon Brown, the brief truce is over. I don’t mean the truce with the Tories, but with the Blairites. Ever since Brown took their man’s job, they’ve been circling warily, not daring to strike while he looked strong, but waiting, like vultures, until he looked wounded.

When he ruled out an early election, for the first time, he looked vulnerable, and they pounced. A brave and decisive leader (read Tony Blair) would have seized the moment and held an election. A principled leader (read Tony Blair) would have known that an early election was just crass opportunism, and ruled it out weeks earlier. (Consistency has never been their strongest suit.)

It’s back to the days before it became obvious that neither Alan Milburn nor Charles Clarke, nor anyone else among those whose hatred of Brown now defines their other politics, could mount a credible challenge for the top job. The days when Brown had “psychological flaws” (remember those?) and when the ideal leader was a mythical character whose existence I revealed for the first time in my Gordon Brown, Past, Present and Future, called Notgordon Brown. (“Who do you want for leader?” “Notgordon Brown.”)

What they really hold against Brown is that somewhere deep inside him, though pretty well disguised by now, he still thinks that the purpose of Labour politics is to fight for the underdog.

The weekend was vicious. It was as though the Blairites fanned out all over London to make sure no one missed the message that Brown was a dangerous lunatic who bit his fingernails and kicked the furniture. “He knows he’s not fit for the job, but he was too vain not to do it” someone close to the Blair circle told me at a party, before regaling me with a story about how he recently grabbed BBC political editor Nick Robinson by the lapels and threw him against the wall. (No, I don’t believe it either.)

In public, the Daily Mail ran lurid tales about Brown’s alleged hysteria, put together from conversations with Blairites by Anthony Seldon, author of a sycophantic Blair biography. Lord Falconer talked about how the government was “drifting” (I’m not sure what a drifting government looks like, but it sounds nasty) and the Clarkes, Mandelsons and Milburns were huffing about the things they might say soon; what they are as yet they know not but they will be the terrors of the earth.

But most deadly of all was Blair himself. Naturally he isn’t going to get down in the dirt, not while he’s got the likes of Falconer to do it for him, but he knows where the jugular is. To the cheers of the most influential people in New York, he said – the words bear no other interpretation - that Iran was the new Nazi Germany, and it is as dangerous to appease it as it was to appease Hitler.

Iran today – in strength, in ideology, in stated intentions – doesn’t look at all like Germany in the thirties. To say it does is as foolish and dangerous as Anthony Eden saying in 1956 that President Nasser of Egypt was the new Hitler, and leading Britain into the most disastrous and misconceived war in modern times until Blair’s Iraq adventure.

One of the reasons Blair had to resign before he was pushed is that Labour didn’t trust him not to follow Iraq by war with Iran. Brown’s living, waking nightmare is that George Bush, in a last act of presidential hubris, is going to attack Iran – or, even worse, that a successor will be elected who will do so. The president will ask Brown for support. Brown (I think) will say no. Brown (I hope) may even speak out against it. He may already have made his position privately clear to Bush, and if so, Bush will have told Blair.

By speaking as he did, Blair is deliberately weakening his successor’s hand with the USA if that moment comes. He is also preparing the ground for the Blairites to turn on Brown at that moment and tear him to pieces. Thus will the next election be lost, and a Conservative government elected which will be obliged to mend the transatlantic alliance by a display of utter servility. Blair’s task will then be done.

Herman Ouseley's joke

2007-09-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

Time to try and blog every day again, like Iain Dale told me...

To the farewell dinner of the Commission for Racial Equality this evening (it's to be merged into the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights.) The CRE's former chairman Herman Ouseley claimed he was once called as a witness for a policeman accused of telling a racist joke. The cop said it couldn't be racist because he had heard it from Herman Ouseley. And this was the joke.

An airliner started a steep dive to the ground. To lose weight, the pilot threw out all the luggage, but still it dived, so he got on the tannoy and told the passengers that some of them would have to jump out, so he could save the rest.

"Now, to show this is above board and there's no racism, we're going to do it alphabetically. When you hear yourself, jump. Right: All Asians and Africans."

A dozen people jumped, but still the plane dived, so he shouted "All Blacks" then "All coloureds" and still it dived. In the back of the plane a small black boy whispered to his father: "What are we, Dad?" And his father whispered back: "Today, we're Zulus."

Ouseley's speech was the one light spot in a dreadful two-and-a-half hour marathon of speechifying. At seven we were told "Dinner is served" and we all sat expectantly in our places and heard dreary speech after dreary speech. One speaker talks of "the battle against racial equality" (she meant, of course, the battle for racial equality - at least, I assume she did.) The last formal speaker spent what seemed like weeks introducing highlights of the CRE's history in a monotonous shout, amplified to unbearable levels by the huge speaker above my table.

By the time the standup comedian came on, at 9 pm after two hours of this, when no one had had a morsel to eat, she didn't stand a chance - though I'm told she was very good. I had long since repaired to the bar, where my friend Lionel Morrison, the CRE's first ever director of communications, told me the history was not only tedious but also inaccurate.

The dinner, when it came, was excellent, and I left the younger members of staff dancing, energetically and imaginatively, all their cares forgotten along with the pompous tedium they had been forced to undergo as the price for the dinner and the dancing.

Purity rings and vicious circles

2007-07-17T00:43:00.000-07:00

The price of liberty isn’t just eternal vigilance. It’s also not minding being wrong-footed.

Getting 16-year-old Linda Playfoot to take her school to court for not letting her wear a “purity ring” to classes was as clever a way of wrong-footing liberal folk as I’ve seen. Strict adherence to school uniforms is the sort of thing religious schools are famous for. A liberal is far more likely to want to allow a child to wear what he or she wishes than is an evangelical Christian. So a case was designed to make us look like the persecutors, trampling on the right of the young to proclaim their faith.

You could argue – I do argue – that schools shouldn’t ban jewellery. School uniforms, almost extinct in the seventies, have made an unwelcome comeback in the era of Thatcher and Blair, just as faith schools have also increased their influence. So when my children went to school, my son’s teachers sometimes seemed to have little better to do than write me long letters about the length of his hair (it was too short, just as mine, forty years ago, was too long.) My daughter once refused to wear a coat to school on a freezing December day, because the only one we could find was dark blue and she knew she would get into trouble because it wasn’t black.

I’d like to free teachers from the task of policing their pupils’ apparel, so they could get on with teaching. But that’s not what those manipulating Ms Playfoot want. They positively like policing apparel. They just want to police everyone else’s. They’d be the first to insist on the banning of other people’s jewellery. They want their ring to be the only one allowed. And if that leads anywhere, it leads to people being forced to wear the purity ring.

More priestly child abusers

2007-07-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

Two more stories this morning about child abuse in the Catholic church remind us, first, that the church successfully hid this scandal for decades and ruined many lives in the process; and second, that it's still going on.

How did the Church cover it up? And how did it cover the enduring scandal of Catholic schools of the middle to late twentieth century, where even when children were not being sexually abused by their teachers, they were being beaten to a pulp by the Christian Brothers, or more formally whacked by the Jesuits and the Marists? And they were not being cared for. I saw childhoods stolen at my Jesuit boarding school at the start of the sixties, just as effectively as if the children had been abused, simply for lack of what today would be called a duty of care.

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And if Roberth, who posted a comment after my last post on Catholic schools, would get in touch again (email me at francis@francisbeckett.co.uk), I'd be pleased to hear from him - he hasn't made his profile available. His Father Bamber and mine aren't the same man - mine was a Jesuit - but I'd love to know more about the Salesians at Battersea.

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Thanks to a conversation with the splendid blogger Iain Dale, I now know the secret of successful blogging - and from today I'll be posting a blog every day.

The cruelty of the Catholic church

2007-06-05T01:34:00.000-07:00

This week I heard the authentic voice of the Catholic Church I was brought up to believe in. I heard it twice. The first time, everyone else heard it too. The second time, only I heard it - and I want to tell you about it.

But first, what everyone heard. Cardinal Keith O'Brien's statement on abortion was everything the Jesuits taught me to believe in: a cruel, harsh faith in which a politician must either vote the way the church tells you, or fry in Hell forever (for that's what people do if they are denied the sacrament of holy communion); and in which life, however unbearable, must be lived right up until the point where God chooses to relieve you of it. I have not heard it more clearly since Father Bamber sent me to be beaten for failing to memorise the exact words of the creed, in order to teach me about a loving God.

Then I spoke to Graham Wilmer. Wilmer, a man in his fifties, was abused as a child by a teacher at his Salesian school in Chertsey. (Salesians are an order of Catholic priests.) "Abused" is a euphemism. He was buggered, several times, and his life was detroyed.

The many who did the deed, Hugh Madley, owned up to the principal of the Salesians in England after Wilmer at last complained. Wilmer was expelled from school. Madle he was moved to another Salesian school, in Battersea, and his personnel records wiped clean. The Salesians did everything they could to block Wilmer's quest to find out what had happened to him and get justice.

But at last, decades after the event, Madley confessed. Wilmer's remarkable book Conspiracy of Faith (Luttorworth, 2007) is able to name him. The Salesians have now given Wilmer £10,000 a year for four years to run his charity, The Lantern Project, which helps victims of child abuse. And the stories that come to him through this project suggest that the cancer in the Salesians went much, much higher than the wretched Hugh Madley. It's as though the church is determined to ensure a constant supply of children for the likes of Madley to abuse.

The church had compassion for Hugh Madley - so much so that it knowingly put children at risk from him. It has none at all for girls who find themselves pregnant, perhaps as a result of rape, when they have neither the means nor the maturity to cope. The Catholic Church really is the cruel, self-righteous, stalinist outfit I was brought up to believe in.

God trumps all

2007-01-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

When I was having religious intolerance beaten into me by the Jesuits at the start of the sixties, Catholics said simply that homosexuality was unnatural and evil, and those afflicted with it should be forced into celibacy or incarcerated. I'm not sure if they actually told me not to shake hands with one for fear of catching it, but that was the spirit of it.

Catholics took a while catching up with the idea that discrimination isn't fashionable any more, but the adoption agencies row is the second very recent example of a new, and clever, way of turning the discrimination argument against those who use it.

Here's how it works. Yes, the Catholic Church wants to discriminate against homosexuals. And yes, of course discrimination is bad. But if you don't let us discriminate, you're discriminating against the beliefs of Catholics, and that's worse. In the various forms of discimination - sex, race, disability - religion trumps all. Neat, really.

It was trialled a few weeks ago, when the Catholic Church was working on wrecking anti-discrimination laws. You can imagine the nights of anguish (and, I assume, prayer) that went into finding possible scenarios to show that these laws actiually discriminated against Catholics. The regulations, they said, would "force a family-run B&B to let out a double room to a transsexual couple, even if the family think it in the best interests of their children to refuse to allow such a situation in their home."

Now it's us who are doing the discriminating, against Catholic bigots who think homosexuals must not be allowed to bring up children.

The Church of England is convinced, apparently. We don't agree with the Catholics about homosexuality being sinful, they say - but we're not going to stand by and watch co-religionists being discriminated against. For discriminating against homosexuals. "The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning" they say. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,,1997404,00.html.) Sounds good. I dislike what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it. Except, of course, in Catholic countries, where the Church demands legislation to outlaw abortion.

I look forward to the Muslims jumping on the bandwagon. I suspect the Church of England will tie itself in knots trying to find a way not to support them. How's this for a start? A married woman teacher dresses in a way that Muslims consider immodest. If the school refuses to fire her at the request of Muslim parents, who is being discriminated against? Naturally, the Muslims, whose beliefs are being offended.

If we're trying to trump discrimination, two can play at that game. How’s this? A gay couple runs a restaurant, and a Christian family insists on saying grace before they sit down. The gay couple throw them out, on the grounds that, to them, religion means persecution. If we refuse them the right to do this, who is being discriminated against most? Why, the gay couple, of course. OK, there are some rough edges to iron out, but the germ of a trump is there.

Quite how Catholics have the brass nerve to be moralistic about homosexuality after recent revelations about the activities of paedophile priests worldwide, I don't know. Now do I understand how Cardinal Murphy O'Connor manages to do so when he defended his decision to allow a known paedophile to continue working as a priest, despite warnings the man would re-offend. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/840594.stm.)

But perhaps we should hold fire for a bit. The Catholic Church is throwing everything it has into this battle because its power in the land, on which it has grown fat for ten years, is waning every day. It has a Prime Minister who (as David Hencke and I showed in our book The Survivor) is, to all intents and purposes, a Catholic. The Church discreetly boasted about it. Most of our sources for this information were Catholic ones.

But Tony Blair's power is visibly draining out of him, and with it the power to enable the Catholic Church to discriminate against anyone. The Catholic Church may win this battle. It will lose the war.

Why Ruth Kelly is different

2007-01-09T01:25:00.000-08:00

Margaret Thatcher was education secretary in Ted Heath's government and sent her children to private schools. No one turned a hair. Today, left wing Labour backbencher Dianne Abbott sends her child to a private school - "I lost my nerve" she told me" - and she's been more or less forgiven.

But Ruth Kelly was a Labour education secretary. She was put there by a Party dedicated to making state education as good as private education, and she was given the power to achieve it. As Jack Straw put it when he was shadow education secretary, Labour's job is to make state education so good that only a fool or a snob would want to go private. That applies to all children, including those with learning disabilities.

She did the job, and moved on. Now she has told us clearly that the system she left behind her is good enough for others, but not good enough for her children.

I can forgive Thatcher. I can even forgive Abbott. But I'll never forgive Kelly.

Why we hate our children

2007-01-07T02:29:00.000-08:00

Of course every generation hates its children, but there seems to be a special venom in the loathing shown to its offspring by the sixties and seventies generation.

Our parents disliked our long hair, our scruffy couldn't-care-less clothes. They sneered that we went on anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in our "uniforms" of faded jeans, and longed to encase us in the uniform of the forties and fifties, when you wore grey suits and white shirts and thought yourself lucky to have the chance.

But we were young and free of spirit. We were the beneficiaries of the victory over Nazism and the Attlee settlement. As teenagers we had a bit of spare cash, and fun ways to spend it - things that our parents and grandparents could only dream about. As students we had a grant, and the taxpayer picked up the bill for our teaching. The most phrase most often heard among our parents was: "I want him (and, increasingly often, her) to have the opportunities I never had."

As we got older, they still worried about leaving us money. My mother and my partner's mother, neither of whom were rich, tried to save out of their tiny pensions in the hope of making our futures easier.

Our parents may have grudged us our freedom, but they never grudged us their money.

Now we're the parents, a popular car sticker says gleefully: "Spending the kids' inheritance." The most frequently heard sneer about those of our children who are students is: "He (and, increasingly, she) has come home for another handout" followed by a cynical and intolerant laugh. Yet the only reason they have to come cap in hand to us for money is that we have kicked away the ladder we climbed. As a student, I had enough to live on (my widowed mother being demonstrably penniless) and did not have to work in termtime, or beg from older relatives, or build up a mountain of debt.

That freedom from humiliation and worry, we decided, was too good for our children. We pulled away the ladder we climbed. We kicked away their legs, then sneered at them for being lame.

The intolerance our parents showed towards our clothes is as nothing to what we display. "Hoodie" was just a name for a coat in fashion with children and teenagers, until it was adopted by dishonest politicians anxious to create a shadow enemy they could fight on our behalf.

Teenagers under legal drinking age cannot go anywhere - pubs and clubs are barred to them. What is our solution? To condemn them for hanging about on street corners and making us feel uncomfortable, and to talk darkly of imposing a curfew on them.

Our schools have been turned into education factories, forcing grounds in which a set of predetermined information is crammed into young heads, in which there is no place for flights of fantasy or inspirational teaching. Our children are increasingly being forced back into school uniforms, against which our generation successfully rebelled. And the penalties for truanting are growing, with police now rotuinely frogmarching truants to their school. One of the argument used in favour of school unforms is that it will help the police to recognise those who ought to be at school. We are forcing our children into prison uniform so they will be instantly recognisable when they scale the walls.

Why are we doing all this? I have a theory. We were the generation that had everything. We thought the world could only get better. Under our guidance, it has got a great deal worse. We have squandered the fine legacy left us by the thirties and forties generation. What can we do about our guilt, except hit out at those we feel guilty about - our children?

Saddam's victory

2007-01-01T06:13:00.000-08:00

I can't recall feeling so angry as when I woke this morning to a new year and read about the way they killed Saddam Hussein.

Masked men taunted him as he stood on the scaffold, and opened the trap door while he was saying his prayers.

It's no defence that the brutal dictator killed thousands, for no one made me complicit in his crimes; but Tony Blair has made me and all my countrymen complicit in this grotesque piece of sectarian vengeance.

Blair told us we were fighting in Iraq to elminate weapons of mass destruction. When none were found, a tinkly New Labour soundbite was invented to cover the gap, with an attractive bit of alliteration: Iraq, they said, was better off with "Saddam in prison than with Saddam in power."

Then they stopped saying that, because it became obvious that even this modest boast was the opposite of the truth. As the Iraqi academics I interviewed for the Guardian last week told me, things were bad under Saddam, but a thousand times worse now. No one even pretends that letting yet more British and American soldiers be killed will improve matters.

And now comes this revolting spectacle, which diminishes and brutalises those who created it - the British and American governments, speaking for their people.

Saddam Hussein was the only man in that grisly execution chamber to behave with dignity. He showed courage in the face of death, when all around him were men trying to make him behave badly. Compare him to the screaming, vengeful masked men, and their backers, the lying politicians in Britain and America. We have turned a brutal, murdering dictator into a martyr. Saddam could not have achieved that. It took our Prime Minister to do that. Yet still we let Blair prance about the world as our representative. Have we no pride left?

Comment isn't free

2006-12-24T02:52:00.000-08:00

When The Guardian set up its “Comment is Free” bloggers’ site they wrote to some of their regular writers, including me, asking us to contribute. There was much generous talk about how the internet was democratising opinion. Ordinary people were to take over from the editors, the star columnists, the great and the good who define the parameters of respectable debate.

So I wrote a blog, and they put it up, with a nice picture of me. It was a way of getting professional writers to write for the Guardian for free, which, as a former president of the NUJ (as well as a penurious freelance writer) irritated me. But at least it freed us from the tyrrany of commissions. We could say just what we liked, and no one could stop us.

Or could we? One day my friend Nick Cohen, star columnist on the Guardian’s sister paper the Observer, inadvertently let us all into a terrible secret. It’s a gigantic, cynical confidence trick.

Cohen - once a refreshing and radical voice in the grey mulch of conventional columnists' opinions, now part of the grey mulch - used his column to sneer at the blogs turning up on Comment is Free. Apparently, when terrorost threats caused the closure of airports over the summer, some of the Guardian's bloggers took the line that the threat might have been invented or exaggerated by the government.

Precisely what these bloggers said, I do not know, for Cohen satirised them rather than quoting from them, adding his own comment: “Modern technology allows every fool with an internet connection to broadcast his or her ravings.” These bloggers, he says, were not “isolated crackpots;” there are dangerous because their lunacy goes “deep into the mainstream.”

We are back with a bump in the age before computers, when columnists used to sneer at the angry letters they got from people they used to call “the green ink brigade.” Why the use of green ink was supposed to indicate terminal idiocy, I never understood. But the point is that the writers held views which the wise people who wrote columns in newspapers considered foolish, and if they were referred to at all, it was only to mention in passing how laughable and hysterical they were.

The internet, and especially the Guardian’s blog, was going to change all that, and put power back in the hands of the people. But the harsh truth, which Cohen has understood and perhaps unwisely revealed to us, is that the power of the establishment writer is unchanged: he can caricature what they say, denying them the chance to say it to the reader in their own words, and then dismiss them as loonies, just as he used to do with the green ink brigade.

Perhaps these bloggers were as stupid as Cohen paints them. Perhaps, though, they were arguing along these lines. We have not been absolutely sure that our government tells the truth over threats ever since Tony Blair made his famous claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and could launch them in 45 minutes. We know that Blair (I am choosing my words carefully here) could not have been certain, at the time he said it, that this statement was true; and it turned out to be untrue.

If we have even a lingering suspicicion that the government would make such a thing up, or exaggerate it, for political purposes, then we are into a nightmare. And we do.

If that's what they were arguing, then their argument falls well on the right side of lunacy.

I wrote down these thoughts, and sent then to Nick. Nick wrote back that I reminded him "of a mad book which came out a couple of years ago from a Chomskyan professor at Birmingham called 'the Suppression of Dissent'. Was dissent being suppressed by secret policemen and censors? Not quite. He disagreed with arguments that Christopher Hitchens, me and others had made and said the very fact that we were criticising his positions was a suppression of his dissent." I feel pretty certain the professor isn't mad and his argument a lot more coherent than Nick allows it to appear.

Having a column is very bad for the character. It makes you think your views matter, and anyone who attacks them must be mad or bad. It turns quite decent men and women - look at Nick, Dave Aaronovitch, or poor, tense Melanie Phillips - into self-righteous establishment harpies.

That's what convinced me that my blog needed to be independent of the Guardian. Of course, doing something about it had to wait until my son Peter (blog.myspace.com/spacecadetuk) came back from Brussels and showed me how. Meanwhile I chucked another little thought at Comment is Free - something to do with Blair and Iraq, and quite ill-tempered; Nick would certainly have called it "mad." But he never needed to comment on it, because it didn't appear, because, apparently, it took no account of other arguments on the site.

So much for Comment is Free democratising opinion. Here I shall say whatever I feel like. This blog will be a poor thing, but mine own.

2006-12-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

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