The noble savage inhabits Vanuatu

At the risk of arousing the ire of colleagues with first hand knowledge of the island paradise of Vanuatu (which to my mind was memorable as the team with which it was hardest to win FIFA 98 on the Nintendo 64), I have just seen the most stupid article on the BBC News.

As my regular reader will know, the Beeb have set a pretty high standard, but this article leapt over its rivals with the grace of a gazelle.

The general premise of the article was a romantic paean for the simple life of the primitive islander. It stems from Vanuatu’s top place on the "Happy Planet Index" drawn up by the New Economics Foundation, which ought to set alarm bells ringing (for “new” read “no understanding of”). The people of Vanuatu are happier than any other nation on Earth, apparently, and yet they are poor and consume few resources. So begins a classic BBC dream-piece about the glories of the simple life and the happiness of the noble savage.

“I have food from my garden, no war, and nothing to fear” one islander tells us, and it is hard to deny that that sounds pretty idyllic. And perhaps I am a jaded Westerner who must always look for cold hard facts to counter an old woman’s perception of her homeland. But I do not have to look far to discover that the infant mortality rate is ten times that of the United Kingdom, or that life expectancy is a fifth shorter.

Not that I am denying that she is happy; I merely wonder how carefully Andrew Harding, the reporter, chose his interviewee. I note that he did not choose the woman whose fifth child had died, or who was widowed at 34. I do not doubt that many residents of Vanuatu are superbly happy, and even I can see the apparent attraction of their life (as painted by the BBC). But I also do not doubt that the reporters have carefully chosen their subject matter to present an Arcadian view of this furthest of tiny islands to their largely metropolitan audience. The article is not about life in Vanuatu; it is about dreams in Islington.

It was also strangely discomforting. The article particularly focussed upon the use of pig tusks as currency on the island of Pentecost. But it had an awkward feel to it; one was unsure whether this being presented as highly innovative or amusingly quaint. The only thing that was clear was that Harding seemed as confused as his viewers.

His lack of understanding of economics is also apparent. In the version of the article that appeared on the 10 O’clock News (which differs from the internet version), we were told that the country is becoming wealthier because there are more pig tusks. Those of a less mercantilist bent might wonder whether this explains the 15% interest rates that the banks are offering; the last time the UK saw 15% interest rates, we were fighting run-away inflation and a currency crisis.

“It all adds up to a stable and prosperous community,” Harding narrates. “There is a sense of harmony and happiness...” On the next island, development – which seems to include building modern housing – is described as turning the place into a dump. There is an interesting – some might say a stark – lesson here. What Vanuatu appears to have is a largely homogenous community, a traditional society and wide-spread poverty. As a result, there is no ethnic tension, no social unrest and nothing of which to be jealous. Harding implies that we could all learn from Pentecost, but are we really prepared to give up multiculturalism, our freedom to live an alternative lifestyle, and the ambition to improve ourselves?

In truth I must be a jaded Westerner, because I suspect there is a wilful blindness in Harding’s report. “There is no hunger here, no unemployment, no tax, no police, no crime or conflict to speak of,” he tells us, but I cannot help thinking that for these farmers and fishermen hunger must be a hazard of life, as it has been for all subsistence farmers and fishermen throughout history; that unemployment never exists if one is prepared to hunt and gather; that crime may be merely unreported, as the usual violence and petty wickedness that afflicts every society is considered routine; and that conflict may not be international, but must surely exist between individuals, families and gangs. If not, it would have to be more than just paradise. It would have to be unique in human history.

I don’t mean to knock the islanders. I hope they are as happy as Harding and the New Economics Foundation suggest. But I despise the glorification of their lifestyle by Western news crews that fly in for a brief taxpayer-funded film shoot before returning to their London flats where they will worry about their carbon footprints over cocktails atop the OXO Tower. This report says less about the levels of happiness to be found in Britain and Vanuatu than it does about what journalists consider to be The Good Life.

I note that Andrew Harding showed no desire to live there. I doubt the people of Pentecost would want him to.

Brown in, Reid out

John Reid has told the Politics Show that he will not serve in a Gordon Brown cabinet. However, he avoided attacking the Chancellor, even claiming that Brown had offered him a place in the Cabinet, which Reid declined. Reid has also said that he will back Brown for the leadership.

Speculation will be rife as to the motivation behind Reid’s announcement. One thing is certain: it has become clear even to the “anyone but Gordon” crowd that Brown is going to be the next prime minister. Usually, this would trigger a rush to embrace him before it is too late; few ministers easily give up the ministerial limo. But is may be that for the likes of Reid, serving beside Gordon Brown is too awful a prospect to face.

But why openly support Brown’s move to the leadership (it hardly warrants being called a “bid” anymore). There remains the option of retiring to the back benches, there to snipe and hope to undermine the Brown premiership. Yet Reid was categorical in his refusal to act as a lightning rod for anti-Brown New Labour sentiment (as opposed to anti-Brown old Labour sentiment, for which two lightning rods have emerged). Even from the back benches, he promised to be supportive.

Jaded political analysts among us might wonder whether this is mere window dressing, with Reid in fact planning to join the likes of Alan Milburn and Charles Clarke in fermenting dissatisfaction with Brown. But I doubt it. The Home Secretary is committed to the Labour Party, and may prove to be a wiser politician than either Milburn or Clarke.

I suspect Reid has accurately judged that any opposition to the Chancellor will damage Labour as a whole without necessarily protecting Labour or the country from the worst Brown has to offer. Battles between Brownites and Blairites have been at the root of many of Labour’s most difficult moments. It may therefore be the case that Reid is actually being frank when he says he will retire quietly to the backbenches and support Gordon Brown.

As Thursday’s election results showed, the pendulum is rapidly swinging from red to blue, and as the Tories demonstrated in the 1990s, that is not the time for party in-fighting. Reid may not like Gordon Brown, but he finds him infinitely preferable to David Cameron.

Admit the truth: We need Iran more than its leaders need us

The Have Your Say section of BBC Online can be a depressing place to spend one’s lunchtime, but rarely more so than when foreign affairs are in the news.

Statements condemning the 15 British naval personnel recently seized by Iran for not fighting to the death suggest a view of soldiers that bears no relation to the facts. Rather than being required to fight and die, they are bound by strict rules of engagement saying when they should and should not shoot, and anyway are entitled to surrender if heavily out-numbered. They may even have received orders to surrender. Yet one pompous idiot even had the gall to quote Churchill’s “never surrender” speech at former First Sea Lord Sir Alan West when he pointed out that our people were heavily out-gunned.

More depressing, however, is the desire to rescue the captives and punish Iran. A typical comment reads “why dont [sic.] we just wade in and get them out?”; another “Seize the next oil tanker out of Iran, then the next, then the next... They will soon yield when it comes down to loosing their revenue”; and a third “Enough is enough. Time for gunboat diplomacy. Unfortunately, it's the only thing these rogue states understand.” To be fair, there are no shortage of opposing voices, but the eagerness with which some would like to resolve this in the manner of a Tom Clancy book is depressing.

For one thing, the Iranians are wary of a rescue mission and have kept the location of the hostages a secret. This renders an extraction mission rather difficult. That being said, when the Iranians took 63 US diplomats and three other citizens hostage in 1979, President Jimmy Carter knew exactly where they were. The disaster that befell that mission should be a lesson to all armchair generals.

Back in the (good?) old days, if a British subject suffered at the hands of some foreign Johnny, the response would be a punitive expedition. We’d march a Brigade of the Black Watch up country, burning anything of value and salting the soil, and then return to the safety of home (or rather, to India) leaving nothing behind for the perpetrator to either enjoy or to take revenge upon. These days we don’t have a Black Watch. Instead we have the “surgical strike” and “sanctions”.

Do not rush out to subscribe to Newsweek just yet, however, for our response to this crisis will be far more symbolic than real. Sanctions are next to useless against Iran for three reasons: 1) the leadership are unconcerned by targeted sanctions, as they are not the types to do their Christmas shopping at Fayed’s; 2) broad-ranging sanctions would only drive the populous into the hands of their leaders, when we would really like to encourage domestic dissent rather than a Persian Dunkirk-spirit; 3) the only sanction that will really bite is oil sanctions, and at $66.10 a barrel, oil’s plenty pricey enough. In addition, we are already pushing the realistic limits of sanctions over Iranian plans to enrich uranium.

Military action is equally difficult. To my mind (he says, settling back into his armchair and imagining himself a general) a targeted military response would aim at the Iranian navy, striking at a few of its fast patrol boats. It would not need to be large; just symbolic. However, the consequences would be heavy. The population of Iran would be incensed by our response to what was the leadership’s (or part of its) crime; dissenting voices would fall silent as the population rallied round. British ships in the (narrow) Gulf would have to risk a response by surface-to-surface missiles. Shias Iraq would erupt. And the oil prices would escalate anyway.

The sad fact is that as long as Iran is not a democratic state, we need it more than its leaders need us. This is partly because we are in a weak position due to our Iraqi and Afghan commitments. But more significantly, it is because we are a democracy, and they are not. It is very easy for the Iranians to upset British public opinion – either oil prices or war casualties will put enormous pressure on our government. What is more, we are not united on this issue, and another military engagement or heavy sanctions regime would cause uproar in Britain. By comparison, it is hard for us to hurt the Iranian leadership directly, and public opinion has very little effect on their reasoning. Simply put, they have the advantage.

But as Robert Mugabe is beginning to learn, that advantage can slip away quickly. Tyranny usually leads to collapse: Iran’s economy is struggling despite its oil, and nearly half of its youth are unemployed. Iranians are already disaffected, and that disaffection will grow; many are undoubtedly ashamed by their governments contempt for the law, human dignity and Iran’s international reputation. In the long run, Britain and the West’s interests lie in encouraging that disaffection, not by attacking the symbols of Iran’s sovereignty, but by showing sympathy and support for the people while condemning their leaders.

Democracy is often criticised for leading to short-term planning: the “daily mandate” rather than the next generation. Yet autocracies, too, must constantly shore up their regime. In this instance, Britain can afford to play for time, to play the long game. Every effort must be made to get the hostages released quickly, of course, but gung-ho action will not hasten the end of the execrable Iranian regime.

Fortunately, the heads in charge of dealing with this crisis are cooler than those reading BBC Online.

The socialist approach to broadcasting

Lurking in the margins of The Times I saw this brief but depressing story:

YouTube rival call

A publicly funded rival to YouTube should be set up to
make up for a shortfall in quality television, the communications regulator has
said. Ofcom suggested that the organisation, called the public service
publisher, should have an annual budget for digital content of up to £100
million so it can rival the BBC.

Clearly socialism is alive and well in Ofcom!

The presence of YouTube is itself evidence that the market is responding to people’s desire for more copious and more varied content. YouTube reduces the barriers to entry into broadcasting to nearly nothing, enabling millions to make and broadcast material. Yahoo, MSN and other search engines are bound to launch rivals now that Google runs YouTube. Other providers will rise from outside the search engine world. The low cost of setting up an internet provider make competition inevitable. Furthermore, anybody may now post a video on their own website or blog. The market in broadcasting already provides. Indeed, it thrives.

The suggestion that a “public service publisher” is required to further diversify the market or increase supply is nonsense. So too is the suggestion that the BBC needs a rival: the BBC’s pre-eminence comes from the fact that government established it as a tax-funded public service broadcaster; the solution is to make it compete with commercial providers, rather than create further public service behemoths to encourage a clash of the tax-funded titans.

Indeed, with the proliferation of choice and the benign anarchy of the internet, it is the role of Ofcom that should be questioned. With the market making such a wide range and diversity of television available, the days when we needed a regulator have passed.

--

Meanwhile, for those fascinated by the recent rows about the licence fee and/or involved in some of the spirited blogging on the subject, journalist and author Richard D. North is due to publish a book with the provocative title Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free. It is bound to be a very strong attack on tax-funded and strongly regulated broadcasting.

This blog does not endorse it (Hell! I haven’t even read it!) but I can get hold of cheap and possibly signed copies if anybody is interested (watch out Amazon!). Just email tom.papworth-at-bromleylibdems.org.uk, substituting @ for -at- of course (this is probably a vain attempt to avoid spam!), and I’ll see what I can do.

Freedom of speech includes freedom to be wrong

Another day, another race row. Poor Channel 4 seems to be mired in bigotry at present. How will it cope?

After the furore of the Big Brother Race Row (which I feel now warrants the use of capital letters), it now appears that a contestant on Shipwrecked: Battle of the Islands has made some daft and probably offensive comments supporting slavery. She has also condemned fat people and called for a return to the British Empire, which suggests that she may not be all there, but it is the former comment – along with various anti-immigrant sentiments – that has caused the greatest uproar. In light of the BBRR, that is unsurprising.

Not having dipped my visual toes into this particular (cess-) pool of entertainment, I don’t know what she said, but if the transcript on BBC Online is accurate it looks like a tirade of idiocy rather than hate.

The question is, however, should Shipwrecked now be removed from the air? Should the offending contestant be throw off the island? Or reprimanded by producers and hauled into line? (Note that she already has been confronted by other contestants.)

I think not. As I commented before in another context, freedom of expression is most easily threatened when we seek to curtail expressions of opinion that are abhorrent or threaten our treasured beliefs. It is easy to rebuff the suggestion that Brian Haw or Behzti should be censored, but harder to defend David Irving or Vybz Kartel when they air their opinions. So too with the Shipwrecked contestant.

Appalling though we may feel her views are, I find more appalling the thought that media outlets might vet people against standards of opinion. It reminds me of an excellent posting by a fellow blogger (I’m afraid I forget who) arguing that while Simone Clarke’s membership of the British National Party might make most people’s stomach’s turn, it would be wrong to exclude her from employment with the English National Ballet merely because of her politics.

Let’s remember, this is supposed to be “reality TV”. Should we not allow these “real” opinions to be aired, taking the rough with the smooth, rather than hiding the seedy underbelly of British opinion away from the public eye? Is it not better that public debate be provoked rather than that it is avoided at all costs? I suspect that the contestant will learn more by witnessing the shock and opprobrium of her fellow islanders than she will by being hauled in front of the Channel 4 producers and given a dressing down.

Racism is a real part of British culture. It is also, let us be clear, a real part of all cultures. I have heard of no country where foreigners are universally trusted or welcomed. If we are to reduce its influence, or at least pull its sting, we need to witness it and admit the fact of it, and then to debate it – not just in the media, in politics and at great public meetings, but in pubs, at work and even around the camp fire as the sun sets over a glorious tropical beach.

Labour’s new gimmick: an education lottery that has nothing to do with one’s postcode

This lunchtime BBC London reported the latest idiotic wheeze planned for education. Apparently, the government is to do away with the “postcode lottery” (a misnomer for what is in fact a postcode auction) by replacing it with a real lottery!

Schools will be encouraged to offer places not based on local catchment areas but on a simply lottery basis: parents put down the name of their children and names are randomly selected.

There is no doubt that the current system is unfair. A friend of mine in Muswell Hill once pointed to a street where the houses on one side of the road were worth £100,000 more than those on the other side, because one side of the road was in the catchment area for a highly rated state school. This new system would, by comparison, be more equitable because access to good state schools would not be decided by wealth, with only the richest parents able to move into the catchment areas of the best schools. Instead, every child would have an equal chance of “winning” a place in the school of their choice.

This raises its own problems, of course. Children would not now be guaranteed a place in their local school but may have to travel for long periods each way for an education. This would be costly – a cost that would probably fall on the local authority and undoubtedly in the end on the taxpayer – and would expose children to stress and risk.

More to the point, however, it represents a complete U-turn by the government that only two years ago promised parental choice. While parents may now have the choice whether to participate in a particular school’s lottery or not, clearly the ultimate decision is now to be taken not by parents, teachers or administrators, but by chance. There seems something strangely fatalistic in a government admitting that a random process is better than a rational decision taken in the interests of a specific child (though I am confident that a random process could be no worse than a decision made about an unknown child by a faceless bureaucracy).

The real problem, though, is that it fails to get to the heart of the education problem – a problem that leaves a quarter of school leavers functionally illiterate, innumerate and without any decent qualifications. The reforms needed to improve educational standards and so enhance both children’s opportunities and our economy’s future are those that would raise standards across the board and tailor education to the pupil. In practice the only way to improve standards is by rewarding success and eliminating failure in education, which can only be achieved by injecting competition into the system. If schooling is to meet the specific needs of individual children it must enable parents to exercise real choice about both the school to which their child goes and the content and balance of the curriculum. In addition, both goals would be served if schools were free to innovate and so explore new methods of teaching.

This will never come about as long as education is provided by a state monopoly and children are allocated schools irrespective of their or their parents’ needs or desires. The solution is to establish a voucher system whereby parents can exercise choice about (for example) whether their child should attend the local school or a particularly good school far away, and whether they should attend one that specialises in science, the arts or language. As the cash would follow the pupil, good schools would expand and bad ones wither; eventually successful providers would take over failing establishments to improve and rejuvenate them – just as the failing Skoda car company was bought out and saved by Volkswagen and is now a successful provider of cars far superior to anything that Czechoslovakia’s state monopoly provider could produce.

A voucher scheme would represent a real revolution in provision that would enable all parents to access good schools and provide the best for their children. By comparison, this new government gimmick is a disgraceful effort to replace an unfair system with a system where nobody bears responsibility. It is the sign of a government devoid of ideas.

More heat than light in organic food debate

I wonder whether David Miliband leaked Ruth Kelly’s decision to send her child to a private school as a means of distracting people from the adverse reaction to his interview with the Sunday Times in which he argued that the consumption of organic food was nothing more than a lifestyle choice. If so it would be very “New Labour”, but to be fair I doubt it. He knew exactly what he was doing and will stick by what he said.

I have been kicking myself for not writing about this yesterday, when I had the chance. Today I have been at work and so unable to post, except with a brief intervention on Duncan's and Tristan's sites. Some of what follows incorporates those comments, but I have added further thoughts as well.

To start with, I cannot see why the question of whether organic food it better for the consumer, the environment or the future of farming should be incompatible with its consumption being a lifestyle choice. When I used to go to the gym five times a week (Oh halcyon days!) it was a lifestyle choice even though it was good for me. Similarly, a friend of mine is motivated to compost his own waste (and I do mean his own waste) for environmental reasons, but it is nonetheless a lifestyle choice.

The real controversy about organic food is the wealth of unproven claims made by those who oppose modern farming methods. One of these is that modern farming methods harm the environment more than the organic alternative. In fact, all agriculture damages the environment, if one’s image of the environment is one of natural habitats. Agriculture is inherently unnatural because “unnatural” is a euphemism for things done by man but not other creatures; we destroy “natural” habitat to grow “unnatural” crops that would not exist without our efforts.

However, this “unnatural” process was integral to the birth of civilisation, a process which began in modern-day Iraq and Egypt and has now spread to Brazil. I know some people think that man is just a parasite but most of us want to live in a civilised society. Most of us also want to feed the earth’s 6 billion people, though again I’ve heard a few (some among my own party!) who would like to cull the population of the earth by two thirds.

If we are to feed 6 billion we need to embrace the Green Revolution of the 1960s (that’s “green” because of all the crops in the fields, rather than because it serves a nature goddess). This entails the use of fertilisers and insecticides. Only modern agriculture can sustain the population of our planet; it is this kind of agriculture that has meant that the age of mega-famines in India and China (prevalent until only a couple of generations ago) is over.

Organic production cannot produce the yields necessary to feed the earth at all, let alone at an affordable price. Thus the (Hobson’s) choice is either to plough over more natural habitat – the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that we would need to farm an additional area the size of South America to produce the same amount of food organically as we do now by modern means – or watch billions starve.

In the UK, this is not the case. We are rich enough that we can always afford to pay a premium for produce that is grown by traditional (as opposed to by modern) means. This is a choice – a lifestyle choice. We can pay British farmers a premium so that they produce lower yields by methods that cause less harm to butterflies and song birds. However, if we do reduce the yields of British farmers, we will need to source more food abroad. We then have a mini-version of the Hobson’s choice: do we buy food that is intensively farmed or put more land (in the producing country, rather than our own) under the plough. To put it another way, do we export the use of artificial fertilizers and insecticides, or do we cultivate thousands of acres of foreign land.

The aim of this article is not to criticise those who wish to consume organically produced food. They are welcome to do so, and if they believe they are avoiding as-yet-unproven health hazards then that is a rational choice that they have made. I would not dream of curtailing their freedom to do so any more than I would expect them to curtail my freedom to eat food laden with 30 different chemicals.

The aim is to highlight the fact that many of the claims of the organic food lobby are spurious and probably have more to do with protecting their market share than the health of either their consumers or the environment. Meanwhile, many of those who have swallowed these claims (along with their organically produced tofu burger) react furiously when confronted with the (lack of) evidence. Many of these are in influential positions – as I have noted before, both organo-sceptic and free market arguments receive short shrift from the BBC.

What we need (domestically and globally) is free trade in agriculture (as in all things) and honesty in labelling, advertising and describing products. We also need a balanced debate about this important area of policy. Sadly, there is a lot of nonsense talked about food. David Miliband was right to point that out.

Ministers may fear science but the people still believe in progress

On Friday I reported that a general distrust of scientific progress caused by misunderstandings encouraged by anti-scientific groups was putting important scientific research at risk.

In this specific case, work aimed at finding cures for major diseases such as Motor Neurone disease, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s was being undermined because ministers (specifically health ministers Patricia Hewitt and Caroline Flint) had become spooked after a majority of the 535 respondents to an unrelated consultation on human fertility treatment reacted negatively.

At the time I implied that the majority of the 535 respondents to that consultation probably did not indicate a majority in the country. I would have guessed that most people in the country support this important and valuable research.

I am therefore glad to note that the BBC is running a poll on this question and so far there is clear support for the research. But there's everything left to play for, so please do go and cast your vote (whatever you believe).

Let down by the BBC (again!)

I am bitterly disappointed to discover that the BBC do not archive news programmes and that as such old URLs now take viewers to a new item.

On a few occasions I have included clips from the BBC in my postings, most notably when I was urging readers to listen to Roman Halter, an Auschwitz survivor, describe how wonderful he found Britain after the war and how much he cherished our strong tradition of liberty. His eloquent eulogising of freedom of speech was all the more poignant as he was arguing that the Holocaust-denier David Irving should be free to write and say that Mr. Halter and his deceased relatives were figments of a Zionist plot.

On another occasion I used clips to support my criticism of the confusion between “anti-social behaviour” and actual crime.

Sadly these and other clips are no longer available, and the links now take one to the latest version of that news programme (be it One O’clock or Ten O’clock News) as broadcast on the day one clicks the URL, not back to the original programme that generated the URL when I wrote the article.

This is a shame. Good internet practice, especially in this most ephemeral of media, urges content providers to maintain good archives, and websites not to change URLs, for this very reason. I cannot believe that if YouTube can store thousands of new videos a day, the BBC cannot store its (surely much-more-popular) news items.

My apologies to readers who have been left confused and frustrated.

David Irving’s freedom (and Roman Halter’s love of liberty)

After 13 months in prison, the holocaust denier David Irving is back in the UK, painting himself as the victim of an atrocity. The sad thing is that in this case he is telling the truth.

Atrocities are, of course, relative. 11 million people died in the Holocaust (or 14 million, or 20 million, or seven, depending on whom you ask) and by comparison 13 months in prison is small beer.

But there remains a qualitative link between banning a man’s freedom of speech (whether or not you think he is crazy or evil) and other, more savage, forms of oppression. The Nazis thought they were making the world a better place – for thoroughbred Aryans, at any rate. Undoubtedly a similar confidence filled those who criminalized Holocaust denial in Austria, Germany, France and elsewhere.

I can think of few justifications for these laws, most of them weak. That deniers are able to ferment fascism is unlikely; the most effective recruiting ground for the far right these days is anti-Muslim rhetoric, and it would take a truly masterful storyteller to tie Al Qaeda in with the Zionist Conspiracy. That it denigrates the memory of the dead or exacerbates the suffering of the living may be true, but this is no reason to ban free speech; we must all tolerate views that we dislike. As for the suggestion that these lies might confuse poor innocent minds that do not know better, this is both condescending and prevents people learning the most vital lesson of history, which is how to be discerning.

By comparison, I can think of a couple of very solid reasons for permitting free speech. The first is that the best way of exposing lies and mistakes is through refutation; by imprisoning those with whom we disagree we pass up an opportunity both to expose them and to sharpen our own arguments. We also give them a veneer of martyrdom. The second reason is that it makes a mockery of our exhortation to others to respect freedom of speech – either by allowing their own citizens to speak or at least not to fume when ours do so.

There are echoes here of the furore over the recent conference in Iran questioning the holocaust. We should have treated this with contempt, but by and large ignored it. It was a political stunt and by rising to the bait we played into the hands of Iranian hardliners. In the process we look like hypocrites. Earlier this year liberals across Europe were calling for tolerance of freedom of expression after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, and great amounts of angst ensued when Muslims across the world, including in Iran and the UK, were seen to argue that blasphemy was a sin punishable by death and that Western liberalism was mistaken, a contradiction of the word of God, or still worse a cynical excuse to justify attacks on their religion. We must prove at least this last concern wrong by applying freedom of speech impartially. If we defend one group’s right to offend Muslims we cannot then condemn another group for offending Jews.

Having said all this, my argument remains that of a remote observer. I am neither a Jew nor a Nazi nor a Muslim nor a cartoonist. I am passionate about freedom of speech but it is not my people’s suffering that is being denied by Mr. Irving. So if I have not convinced you, or if you are in the mood to be both moved and uplifted by somebody who did suffer first-hand, watch last night’s BBC 10 O’clock News and listen to Roman Halter. You will need to scroll 10 minutes and 40 seconds into the programme to hear this Jewish immigrant, who survived the concentration camps but saw his whole extended family wiped out, explain why Mr. Irving should be allowed to speak and publish, even if what he is saying is repulsive. In so doing, he speaks so lyrically of the freedom of expression that we all tend to take for granted that it is truly humbling.

Crime is not “Anti-social behaviour”

The BBC reported today (6 minutes and 10 seconds into the One O’clock News) that 55% of offenders are ignoring their Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), 35% repeatedly. Yet as the footage (6 minutes and 47 seconds) in the report demonstrates, the behaviour being exhibited may be anti-social, but it should not be being dealt with by using behaviour orders.

Breaking into cars; smashing window; throwing rocks at vehicles and passers by; theft: this is not “Anti-social behaviour”, it is crime. Children committing these kind of offences should be arrested and prosecuted. It is not necessary to send them to prison or a young offenders institute – adult prisons are already bulging with men who were given custodial sentences in their youth. But it is not enough to slap ASBOs on children who have been committing serious criminal offences.

Instead, they should be arrested, prosecuted, and then given community sentences. Hard, disciplined and valuable work to improve their local community – cleaning up litter, clearing graffiti – would be more effective than a paper ban on visiting the local park, and less likely to lead to further criminality than a custodial sentence. They should also be made to make recompense to the victims of their action, making them apologise to their victims and listen to how much distress they caused. Young offenders also need more effective social work and constructive activities. Most of all, they need to be given a sense of responsibility.

Shaun Bailey, a youth worker with the charity My Generation, whom the One O’clock News interviewed, was scathing of politicians attempts to understand the causes of crime: “‘Understanding the causes of crime’ is years long. We’ll never do it, because we live in a PC world where we can’t address our real issues… family breakdown, poor unemployment prospects, the fact that we live in a prevailing situation, now, that says that everybody’s a victim. Everybody’s a victim. Until we break that, we say to people ‘Actually, you need to raise your own personal standards’, then we’ll never deal with these problems.”

This is unexpected stuff from somebody who works closely with troubled children. Usually one associates youth workers with a mentality that blames structures and circumstances for criminality, rather than individuals and the choices they make. But Mr. Bailey is correct. While poverty, family breakdown and poor school performance present children with challenges, these do not in themselves cause anti-social or criminal behaviour. Many children do not turn to crime; some become leading lights in their community or go on to be very successful.

If we are to break the ‘cycles of deprivation’ that confront us, we certainly do need to tackle the problems of inner-city schools, urban blight, unemployment and youth poverty. But we also need to stop making excuses for the selfish and harmful choices that some people make. Individuals must take responsibility for their actions. It is essential that this is taught at an early age.