Summer 2009 - The Salisbury Review

Transcription

The
The quarterly magazine
of conservative thought
Doorstepping in
Wakefield
Alexander Story
Toadyism
Triumphant
Oleg Gordievsky
Will Obama
follow California?
Russell Lewis
Darwin’s
Anniversary
Richard Courtnay
Capturing
Lincoln’s Legacy
Grant Havers
Criminalising
Family Justice
Jan Davies
Summer 2009
Vol. 27 No 4
£4.99
Contents
3
Editorial
Articles
4 Doorstepping in Wakefield
Alexander Story
5 Toadysim Triumphant
Oleg Gordievsky
7 Will Obama follow California?
Russell Lewis
8 Estonia, the Russians and Us
Christie Davies
11 Darwin’s Anniversary
Richard Courtenay
14 The New Obscurantists
Mark Baillie
16 Wonder: ‘The Seed of Knowledge’
David Falla
18 The School of Freedom
Anthony O’Hear
21 Criminalising Family Justice
Jan Davies
23 Kant for our Times
Tom Nolan
25 Lincoln’s Legacy
Grant Havers
28 Charity Shops
Audrey Parry
Columns
Arts & Books
29 Conservative Classic — 35
William Dunning’s Reconstruction
31 Reputations — 24
‘Chic’ Guevera?
33 Roy Kerridge
34 Eternal Life
Peter Mullen
36 Letters
37 Charles Cecil
on Niall Ferguson
38 Christie Davies
on the Bell Curve
40 A W Purdue
on Wartime Leaders
42 Edward Clay
on Aid
43 James Houston
on the Legacy of the French Revolution
44 Nigel Jones
on Vichy Intellectuals
46 Michael St John Parker
on Himmelfarb
47 Harry Cummings
on Moderate Muslims
49 Robert Hugill
on Square Pianos
50 Robert Crowcroft
on Philip Bobbitt
51 Film: Marc Sidwell
on The Young Victoria
52 Music: R J Stove
on Sir Thomas Beecham
55 Art: Andrew Wilton
on a Parable of a Sculpture
57 In Short
The Third Marquis of Salisbury
Managing Editor
Consulting Editors
Literary Editor
Merrie Cave
Roger Scruton
Lord Charles Cecil
Myles Harris
Mark Baillie
Christie Davies
Ian Crowther
33 Canonbury Park South, London N1 2JW
Tel: 020 7226 7791 Fax: 020 7354 0383
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.salisburyreview.co.uk
T
he extraordinary scenes that attended the state
funeral of Jade Goody last April (for what is a
state funeral if it is not crowds lining the route
since dawn, a flower strewn cortege, coverage on all
TV channels, a eulogy by Max Clifford, and the public
condolences of both Prime Minister and the Leader of
the Opposition) remind us that this is the decade when
western civilisation will fail. Coming a few days after
the G20 conference in which the savings of millions of
honest people were thrown to the inflationary winds,
it and the passing of a woman idolised for being foul
tongued, illiterate, having a robber and a drug addict for
a father and a violent criminal for a husband, mark the
triumph of the modern public lie. This example echoes
even more strongly in the recent mock turtle regrets of
our politicians over their misuse of taxpayers’ money.
The anaconda like grip of our media makes any
comparison of the modern public lie with an outside
standard impossible. This was why, through the lens
of the Big Brother House, Goody was voted 25th most
influential person on earth. The successful politician
must master this world. He must rule by TV with teams
of professional liars ready to bury bad news behind
fortuitous public tragedies. He learns never to give a
straight answer, and to always have somebody else to
blame for his mistakes. Above all he learns the first law
of Dr Goebbels, that a lie, repeated often enough, is
the truth. Goebbels only had the microphone and a few
thousand metres of 8mm film. Today a public lie can be
repeated 24 hours a day on TV, and repeated to every
pocket and handbag where there is a mobile phone.
There have been many lies in the past decade: That
mass immigration benefits societies, that dismantling
trade barriers leads to more and more jobs, that giving
condoms to children stops them having babies, that
lowering the standards of entry to our universities will
cause a massive rise in literacy. There have also been
fairy tales to titillate the public, that like all good fairy
tales, have exerted a powerful grip. The greatest of
them all has been that of the victim. The first secular
The Salisbury Review — Summer 2009
canonisation of a victim, that of Diana Princess of Wales,
was conducted on TV. Jade Goody, who gained fame by
cavorting naked and drunk on TV followed.
Goody’s cortege passed only two miles from London’s
docklands where three days earlier the G20 conference
was held. Here was a feast of public lies. While
European tax havens were excoriated, the gangster
regime in Beijing was allowed to keep its money
laundering facilities in Hong Kong and Macao. Then a
blessing was given to the printing of huge quantities of
false paper for the west, while at the same time a massive
transfer of real wealth was approved, via the IMF, to
corrupt African and Asian dictatorships.
The worst lie of all followed two days later four
hundred miles away in Strasbourg. Here the governments
of the European Union refused all but token help to
the Americans in Afghanistan but publicly declared
unstinting friendship for President Obama. Meanwhile,
in its role of Public Liar in Chief, the viscerally anti
American BBC concentrated its news coverage on
the fate of women under an allegedly pro rape law put
forward by the Afghan parliament. Why, asked the BBC,
should our troops defend a country whose human rights
are not the same as ours? The corporation knows full
well we are not in Afghanistan to create democracy but
to suppress a dangerous and lawless Taliban. If the West
is not successful then American troops will invade north
west Pakistan. This will set the scene for a full scale
war between India and Pakistan, for Islamist mischief
makers might seize the chance to stir up trouble between
the two nuclear armed states.
There are those who speak of the danger Islamic
terrorism will bring to Europe. Worse awaits. If nuclear
weapons are fired on the Indian subcontinent, there will
be a huge exodus of refugees. Millions already have the
right of instant settlement in Britain. Following a nuclear
war they will come in overwhelming numbers. Then a
new lie will be spun, that the indigenous people of these
islands have no prior right of settlement, and we will
find ourselves strangers in our own home.
3
Doorstepping in Wakefield
Alexander Story
I
n the good old days, before the world woke up to
the dangers of fundamentalism, when the dot com
bubble was still expanding, and when New Labour
was still an interesting phenomenon, Wakefield,
Yorkshire, was immutably Labour.
Wakefield returned a Labour MP every year since
1935. In 1997, David Hinchcliff, a popular local
Labour man, was re-elected to Westminster with a
vast 14,000 majority. The council, that same year, was
practically all red. The ‘International’ still echoed in the
council’s corridors. Fast-forward 11 years to the local
election of May 2008 and the Labour Party managed
to hang on to this once impregnable fortress by just
one seat, which it held by a mere 37 votes. Since 2000,
the Labour Party has been haemorrhaging support to
the Conservatives at an exponential rate. Initially, the
Conservatives won a couple of seats, in the ex-mining,
but rather rural, towns of Crigglestone and Netherton,
and in the Western part of Wakefield, including Lupset,
one of Britain’s largest council estates, where an
increasing number of inhabitants became owners of
the property in which they lived.
From these unlikely springboards, at a local level,
the Conservatives expanded in neighbouring seats,
putting the Labour party to flight in all but its safest
wards. Today, Labour has no seats in the Western part
of the District. In 2008, the Conservative Party won
an extra 7 seats. Power locally is now within reach for
the Conservatives.
How did it happen? The actors in this drama have
been extremely important. People like Michael Walker,
a charismatic local politician, have been instrumental
in destroying Labour where they felt strongest. People
like him have canvassed every single door for years
now. It is no exaggeration to say that everybody knows
Mike in West Ward. Walker won first time round by
a mere four votes. He and his colleagues now win by
nearly 2000. There isn’t a day, apart from Sundays,
when there isn’t a Conservative man or woman
campaigning in the streets of Wakefield. However,
the fall in Labour’s support can be attributed to more
than campaigning methods and demographic changes,
important though these might be. The forces that are
threatening to blast the Labour Party on to the rubbish
heap of British political history have been unleashed
by the party’s perhaps unwitting decision to sever itself
from its core constituents.
Each campaigning sortie reinforces the view that
Labour speaks for focus groups, the views and values
of which are understood to be fundamentally at odds
with those of the common man. Labour stands accused
of turning against its core vote, whose moral values
are naturally conservative. By cutting themselves
off from their base, they can no longer speak to their
natural voters, whom, as a result, they now view with
suspicion. How can the local MP, Mary Creagh, speak
on behalf of constituents who are worried about crime,
immigration, and political correctness, when she thinks
criminals are victims, the immigration issue is a rightwing plot, and when she was leader of the Labour
Group on Islington Council, the fortress of militant
Champagne Socialism.
Over the last 12 years or so, hard work, thrift, and
dare we say it, moral rectitude, have been attacked
by the establishment. Hard-working men and women
feel persecuted and discriminated against by the party,
whose task it was to look after their interests. The
perception of many in Wakefield is that in today’s
Britain cheating, lying and self-victimisation are a
necessity to get the most, financially, out of life. With a
government insistent on pushing its ‘diversity’ agenda,
totally detached from any historical, cultural or national
context, it is alienating a large swathe of the population.
Fashionable dogmas, which demand acceptance of
everything and insist on a bogus non-judgementalist
ideology, are creating a gulf between the state and its
own people. This cannot continue without causing
serious prejudice to the peace and stability of our
country in the long term.
The case of Karen Matthews, which dominated the
headlines from mid 2008 to January 2009, is a graphic
illustration of both the corrupting effect of the welfare
state and the aloofness of the establishment. Matthews
is a 33-year-old mother of five, who drugged and
kidnapped her own daughter, with the connivance
of her latest secret boyfriend, whilst living with a
child porn enthusiast. She lived on benefits, had her
rent, council tax, utility bills and more, paid for by
the taxpayer. She called this monthly pay packet her
‘wages’. The abduction plot unravelled rather fast, but
enabled polite society to have a glimpse of the side
effects of a welfare state based on a moral vacuum.
Mr Justice McCombe sentenced Matthews to eight
years in gaol, calling her actions ‘despicable and
inconceivable’. However, this type of behaviour is
surely to be expected in a society where Right and
Wrong mean different things to the authorities than
they do to the vast majority.
Karen Matthew’s life style, if not the kidnapping
attempt, are a reality and are utterly incomprehensible to
her hard-working neighbours, who are simultaneously
poorer and taxed to the hilt to fund this absurdity. Hard
workers are paying for amoral idleness on their very
own doorstep.
Unfortunately, every major state institution oozes
moral ambivalence. This situation is fast destroying
people’s trust in the police and the educational
establishment. This feeling of suspicion will only
grow, now that it is a potential offence to photograph
police officers.
In addition, people are not completely certain that
the teaching profession has their children’s best interest
at heart. They ask why their children should be taught
about sex at the age of 5, with a gradual introduction
to same sex relationships at the age of 7, thanks to
visionaries such as Ed Balls.
Finally, they can’t understand why certain groups
have been allowed the privilege of free speech, when
theirs has been gradually taken away. It is acceptable
for people to threaten mob rule in the streets of London,
should a Dutch parliamentarian come to the UK to
expand on his controversial views. But it is seemingly
illegal to question those same people’s religious views.
These kinds of double standards have been grating for
over a decade now; the anger at this State-imposed
unfairness is palpable.
Examples of decisions that defy commonsense, such
as the latest case of grandparents in Scotland being
forbidden to adopt their own grandchildren by the local
council to enable a loving gay couple to adopt them
instead, are endless. This sort of nonsense is feeding a
grass roots anger that will be devastating for Labour’s
chances in the future.
Why should a hard working person vote Labour next
time? This is a question that the Conservative men and
women campaigning in the Streets of Wakefield keep
asking. The reply from the doorstep, in short, is: There
are no reasons. And they won’t!
Alexander Story is prospective Conservative
Parliamentary candidate for Wakefield
Toadyism Triumphant
Oleg Gordievsky
A
bout ten years ago, as I was tuning in to various fair amount of toadyism as well. Remember Anton
Russian radio stations, I first started hearing the Chekhov’s short story ‘The Death of a Government
name of a mysterious Vladimir Vladimirovich. Clerk’, in which a clerk accidentally sneezed on
Initially I thought the broadcasters must be referring to the neck of an important official sitting in front of
the poet Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930, him. The clerk apologized profusely, and the official
but I quickly realized that they were talking unctuously magnanimously forgave him, but the clerk still felt
about Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who was guilty and frightened. He went home and died of
appointed pretty much out of nowhere in August 1999 distress.
But before 1917, even the tsars did not enjoy the
by President Boris Yeltsin to be the prime minister.
adoration and adulation that
I was struck by the
There is plenty of evidence that Russia’s
Putin receives. After the
way the radio, television,
cultured and quite sophisticated elite are no
Revolution, and especially
newspapers, politicians and
different than their predecessors were in 1937
after Josef Stalin replaced
even prominent people from
in terms of their grotesque flattery of Putin.
Vladimir Lenin, the
the world of culture from the
very beginning referred to this youngish, low-ranking personality cult around the vozhd, or great national
former intelligence officer not by his position or even leader, exceeded anything that Adolf Hitler or Benito
by his surname, but in such an ingratiating way, devoid Mussolini enjoyed, suggesting that the Russian
of self-respect and any remnants of dignity. It seemed mentality had changed and sycophancy had become
a prime example of total toadyism. But as the years a pattern of thought and even a way of life. Indeed,
went by, the glorification of Putin grew even greater, Russia today is full of Putin’s portraits and busts and
slogans praising the great Vladimir Vladimirovich.
becoming almost universal and almost obligatory.
Maybe this is to some extent a Russian tradition. (Even the economic crisis has barely touched his
Well before the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a popularity ratings.) This is comparable to the contrived
personality cult of Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled from quotations.
1964 to 1982.
People abroad are amazed by Putin’s periodic threeUnder Stalin, people resorted to exaggerated eulogies hour ‘impromptu press conferences’ in the spirit and
of the Great Leader out of fear for their lives. Over style of Fidel Castro, but in Russia it is widely known
20 million people died in the gulag, and if you didn’t that they are carefully rehearsed. Even implicitly critical
praise Stalin you were almost asking to join the list of questions are unacceptable in any circumstances. I quote
his victims. Under Putin, many people often demean a provincial reporter about the preparations for such an
themselves in order to keep their jobs, to get a promotion event: the selection process to decide which journalists
or to get access to the country’s vast wealth. When he would be allowed to attend ‘took about a fortnight and
was asked why he was encouraging such uncivilized was conducted in the most painstaking fashion. They
behavior, Putin implied that the majority of Russians took only morally stable citizens of tidy appearance....
are not very cultured or
They turned down both
sophisticated, similar to
unacknowledged poets and
what Stalin told German
people who like wearing
novelist and playwright
the same old pair of jeans
Leon Feuchtwanger.
the whole year round. But
There is plenty of evidence
on the eve of the president’s
that Russia’s cultured
arrival, even the morally
and quite sophisticated
stable and neatly dressed
elite are no different than
people had an extremely
their predecessors were
strict briefing session: they
in 1937 in terms of their
were not to leave their
grotesque flattery of
designated spots, they had
Putin. In its December 22
to move around only as an
issue, Kommersant Vlast
organized group, they must
published a rating of the
keep their voices down
top 25 most sycophantic
and refrain from using any
phrases from Russian public
[mobile] phones.’
figures in 2008 in praise of
After reading and
Putin. Here is a sampling of
listening to the Russian
some of the more colourful
media for the past few
quotes on the list:
years, I have decided it is
• St Petersburg Governor
a waste of time and given
Nikolai Gogol
Valentina Matviyenko:
it up. Now I’m reading
‘Your democracy knows no bounds.’
good literature instead, including works by that other
• State Duma Deputy and Kremlin spin doctor Sergei Vladimir Vladimirovich — Mayakovsky.
Markov: ‘In order to attain the level of Putin,
[President Dmitry] Medvedev will have at the very
least to carry out the same sort of heroic deeds that
Putin accomplished during his eight years of rule.’
(I wonder exactly which ‘heroic deeds’ Markov had
in mind?)
Oleg Gordievsky spent eleven years as a British secret
• Celebrity film director Nikita Mikhalkov: ‘I thank agent inside the KGB. He was exposed in 1985 and
God for Putin.’
placed under house arrest in Moscow, facing an
• Vladimir Yevtushenkov, a leading oligarch and imminent death sentence. However, with the assistance
shareholder in Sistema, put it more simply: ‘Putin of British intelligence he escaped and was brought
is a giant!’
to London to tell the tale, and has since written four
• Danil Granin, a Russian writer best known as the books, three of them in partnership with Christopher
author of stories about the Soviet intelligentsia: Andrew. Gordievsky is the recipient of the Order of St
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich! It’s very good that you Michael and St George and an honorary degree from
were born!’
the University of Buckingham.
Former Patriarch Alexy II outdid all of these members
of the Russian beau monde in terms of flattery, but in
A different version of this article first appeared in
light of his recent passing, I will refrain here from any the Moscow Times
Will Obama Follow California?
Russell Lewis
A
s goes California so goes America’ or so
they say. At first blush that might seem like a
message of hope. The Golden State has long
seemed to many the nearest thing to paradise on earth.
It has mountains, beaches, sunshine almost every day
and temperatures in the seventies and eighties. Some
experts believe that there is more oil and natural gas
offshore there than in Saudi Arabia. And in addition
to these natural endowments there has been the
stupendously successful high-tech Silicon Valley. In
Hollywood, it boasts the world’s entertainment centre.
And it has some top-notch universities like Stanford
and Caltech. To cap it all, it is ruled by the popular
film star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet the
Golden state is in deep trouble. It is swimming in a
Pacific Ocean of red ink as the economist Arthur Laffer
put it, with half a trillion dollars of outstanding bonds,
making it the most indebted state in the Union — and
Moodys has already down rated those bonds twice.
These are just pointers to something badly adrift. What
has gone wrong?
First of all, as one political analyst put it: The
politicians in Sacramento are the most left-wing
collection of people ever to gather together in one place
in North America. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
has tried but failed to resist much of the idiocy of the
state’s legislators. They have one of the highest levels
of progressive income tax in America which they now
propose to bump up by 2.5 per cent or 5 per cent if
the federal government doesn’t oblige with a stimulus
package big enough to fill the fiscal deep hole.
They are also busy installing a big health care
programme, as well as the most severe carbon
emissions restrictions in America (which even for
those who believe in the global warming fantasy,
will, at great cost, have only minimal impact even
in a hundred years’ time). They have also of course
been pushing for a big increase in the minimum wage,
though the California rate of unemployment is well
above the American average. Then again, California’s
welfare provisions are both extravagant and a magnet
for layabouts from other states as well as low value
immigrants.
Not long ago the San Francisco Business Times
noted that the Bay Area wealthy were taking their
gold out of the Golden State, while their departure was
creating a surge of millionaires in Nevada, Wyoming
‘
and even Canada. The main reason for this migration
was the urge of the rich to escape high taxes and red
tape. Significantly there has been a big exodus from
California into Las Vegas — where there is no income
tax at all. Meanwhile the annual loss of California state
revenue, resulting from so many of the rich list leaving,
has been an estimated $6 billion. Yet not only the
affluent but also the less affluent but creative strivers
have joined the stampede. From 2005 to 2007, a net
quarter of a million Californians followed the lead of
Tiger Woods and moved on. The most telling evidence
is that it costs at least three times as much to rent a
U-Haul trailer to go from LA to Austin, Texas, as to
make the reverse trip. In short about 1.5 million more
Americans have left California in the last decade than
entered. Americans, don’t forget, are exceptionably
mobile. Statistics show that all over the country people
are abandoning high-tax states for states with lower or
zero taxes. So the reverse gold rush from California
shows no sign of abating as the fiscal deficit there yawns
wider and the tax burdens mount. As Schwarzenegger
put it in a State of the State speech as long ago as 2006
‘Our systems are at breaking point.’
Since then there has been further movement
towards break-up. The most startling has been
Schwarzenegger’s panic decision to cut expenditure
by making bureaucrats, teachers and other public
servants take unpaid leave and closing state offices
two days a month. Meanwhile the unemployment rate
has zoomed to 9.3 per cent, fourth highest in the US.
The Tax Foundation has rated California the 48th of
the 50 states for its business tax climate. Neighbouring
states are advertising to lure California companies to
relocate to where business costs are lower. The dot
com boom which faded some years ago shows no sign
of returning.
So does California’s disastrous dally with leftist
policies foreshadow what’s to come for America? Well,
with Barack Obama, America’s first ever Socialist
President, installed in the White House, there is every
reason to think so. Especially with the present radical
bunch of Democrats on Capitol Hill straining at the
leash to duplicate the follies of their Californian
brethren.
First of all there is the doctrine of spend, spend,
spend, for which there is now the perfect excuse – It’s
all to stimulate the economy. The other side of that
coin is tax the rich: Barack Obama aims to raise the
marginal income tax to 45 per cent — all in aid of his
declared aim of ‘spreading the wealth around’. His
right, or should one say ‘left’ hand woman, Hillary
Clinton, has said that she would love to go back to the
seventies when there was ‘confiscatory taxation’.
Obama doesn’t like the multinational corporations,
which, he believes, export jobs. So they can expect a
doubling of the tax on their world-wide profits. This
policy will go hand in hand with his protectionist
approach to foreign trade already taking shape in the
ban on Mexican truckers. The oil companies should
watch out for a windfall tax (which would scotch any
development of offshore oil, making the US even more
dependent on foreign energy).
Doubtless the latter will help pay for more windmills,
as part of Obama’s green agenda. In pursuit of that goal,
he has already put forward proposals for cap and trade
which will be a further burden on business. Obama’s
pursuit of a European style welfare state, including an
NHS with an American accent, will be big items, but
not the only ones, in a policy-fest of big government.
The unions who supported Obama’s election campaign
have already got handouts for failing auto-makers.
They also expect to be given stronger powers in the
workplace. Also in waiting are the possible doubling
of the minimum wage and automatic prosecution for
any examples of a gender gap in pay.
Currently there are two delays to Obama’s legislative
programme which give at least some grounds for hope.
One is the hold-up in the Senate by Democrats from
coal-producing states, of the cap and trade scheme to
curb global warming. The other is the stalling of his
legislation to eliminate secret ballots of the work force
over union membership. However, these hold-ups to
his socialist programme may be only temporary. All the
indications are that Obama and the Democrat Speaker,
Nancy Pelosi (a Californian limousine liberal if ever
there was one), are determined to follow the West
Coast road to ruin.
The snag is that this time the millionaires, the
innovators and the wealth-creators will not just be
fleeing the sunshine state: they will be bidding farewell
to America.
Russell Lewis is a former General Director of the
Institute of Economic Affairs and the first biographer
of Margaret Thatcher. He can be reached by email on
[email protected]
Estonia, the Russians and Us
Christie Davies
E
stonia emerged in 1991 from the long night
of socialism to become a free and democratic
country with a modern economy. It deserves
our support against its overwhelming Russian
neighbour, who ruled Estonia before the Estonian war
of independence 1918-20 and re-occupied it again in
1940-41 and 1944-91 with a brief interval 1941-44
when the invading German army displaced them. Yet
there is much carping about Estonia from within the
UN and the EU and from leftists and equality-mongers.
Their whingeing focuses on the difficulties and alleged
discrimination faced by Estonia’s large Russian
minority, 350,000 strong, over a quarter of a population
of only about 1,300,000. Another connected problem
has been the Estonian determination to move the huge
Soviet war memorials forcibly and prominently placed
in their cities after World War II to more remote places.
In 2007 the main Soviet monument the ‘Bronze soldier
of Tallinn’, which in 1947 had been arrogantly placed
by the Russian occupier in the ironically renamed
Liberator’s Square in the town centre, was moved
by the now free Estonians from the city centre of the
capital to a more obscure place. It split the country.
Native Estonians and members of Estonia’s Russian
minority fought in the streets for two days afterwards.
For the Estonians it was a just redress for the Soviet
Union’s total destruction in 1945 of all the war
memorials to those who had fallen in Estonia’s war
of independence from Russia in 1918-20; it would
not have been in any way unjust if the Soviet ‘Bronze
looter, robber and rapist’ had been simply melted down
for scrap. Why should the Estonians respect a statue
erected by those who had systematically destroyed
their own sacred monuments in an attempt to erase
their identity? Why should they live with a memorial
to a foreign army whose behaviour in their country
had been bestial?
For the old Soviet Union these monuments represented
the solitary success that that regime ever enjoyed,
victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 against the
German invader. Within Russia there are still those were not going to interfere in local affairs, but in 1940
who revere Stalin because he finally if incompetently the Communists took power and Estonia was absorbed
won that war and freed Russia from foreigners. In into the Soviet Union. Mass killings followed and
a recent television poll to decide who ‘the greatest anyone seen as a potential dissenter was sent to Siberia.
Russian’ was, Stalin, who was a Georgian, came When the Nazis drove the hated Red Army out in 1941
third. Only Alexander Nevsky who had repelled much they were at first seen as liberators, even as potential
earlier invaders and Pyotr Stolypin, a prime minister restorers of Estonian independence. The Estonians
of the last Tsar, were rated higher; Dostoyevsky and were, of course, soon disillusioned, much as the Czechs
Pushkin were mere also-rans. Other more reliable polls were to be in the years after the Russians’ tanks had
in Russia have shown continued admiration for the been cheered into Prague in 1945. When the Germans
mass murderer, Stalin, because he made Russia strong retreated in 1944, the Soviets heavily bombed the
and feared by the rest of the world, which is what Estonian capital Tallinn, not because it was a legitimate
Russians seem to respect
military target but to
most. Thus the Soviet
crush any possibility
memorials in Estonia
that the Estonians might
not merely record the
try to recover their
tragic and heroic deaths
independence.
of individual soldiers
When the Soviets
that occurred in the war
replaced the Nazis as the
but are a form of savage
occupiers of Estonia it was
triumphalism — ‘look,
not liberation but the rewe Russians came and
imposition of Communist
conquered. We are the
terror and oppression. So
masters now.’
much for the leftist myth
For the Estonians the
that the Red Army saved
Soviet conquest led to mass
Europe from ‘fascism’.
murder and deportations,
The Soviets first helped
Tallinn
totalitarian rule and the colonial exploitation of their
the Nazis in the war and then replaced them with an
economic resources. Life under the German occupier equal evil. No wonder that leftist subscribers to the old
1941-44 had been bad but under Stalin it was worse. lie, here as well as in Russia, are upset at the Estonians
The Estonians knew that the tale of the great Red Army moving Soviet war memorials. The Estonians resisted
‘liberating’ Eastern Europe was a lie. In Gorbachev’s with guerrilla warfare on the Red Army’s return and
time of relative openness one of the key demands of formed the 30,000 strong Forest Brothers, freedom
the Estonian nationalists was that the full terms of fighters who hid in the woods and emerged suddenly
the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, of 1939-41, should be to hit Soviet forces and transports, much as the French
revealed and widely publicised. This pact nearly led to resistance movement would have liked to do if it had
Britain’s defeat; in the Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe enjoyed a comparable degree of popular support. The
flew on Soviet petrol and until 1941 German U-boats Estonian Forest Brothers killed 3,000 Soviet soldiers
used Russian ports. For the Estonians this amicable and regularly harassed the army of occupation. In the
agreement was a death sentence, for under the terms end the Russians defeated the patriotic forces only by
of the pact and a later protocol, Estonia together with persecuting and deporting any local peasants, including
the other Baltic States, Latvia and Lithuania, Eastern women, children and the elderly, who might have been
Poland and Bessarabia (Moldova) were handed over to in a position to provide the freedom fighters with food,
the Soviets. The Left argue that Stalin merely wanted information or a place to hide.
breathing space and buffer territory against any later
Britain did nothing to help these Estonian heroes,
German attack. If that were true, the Russians would even though the British-American Atlantic Charter
have taken care to treat the local people decently, as of August 1941 had promised to restore sovereignty
Britain did after our armed forces took over Iceland and self-government to all occupied countries. It was
and the Faeroes in 1940 and later when we freed a particularly bitter betrayal, since the British navy
Syria and Lebanon from French rule. The lands that had helped to save the new Estonian nation from the
the Soviets sought (including Finland) were exactly Bolsheviks in the Estonian War of Independence 1918those that had gained their freedom from Bolshevik 20. In the main Lutheran Church in Tallinn there is a
domination twenty years before. The Soviets first put memorial to the 106 British sailors and five airmen
military and naval bases in Estonia, declaring that they who died while blockading the Soviet Baltic fleet and
bombing the Soviet naval base in Kronstadt. Many of
our men were awarded the Estonian medal, the Cross
of Liberty. In this one country Churchill had indeed
helped to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle. It should be
a matter of pride to us and a contrast to our shameful
indifference in the 1940s.
The Soviet Union tried to Russify the country out of
existence by bringing in large numbers of immigrants
with a policy of forced ‘bilingualism’ to undermine
the Estonian language. Between 1945 and 1989 the
proportion of ethnic Estonians in the population
dropped from 96 per cent to 61 per cent. A few more
years of Soviet rule and Estonia would have drowned
in a tide of Russians much as the Russians had done
to their colony of Kazakhstan. Russians respect no
one’s national feelings and identity except their own.
Estonia’s renewed independence in 1991 was only
achieved without great bloodshed because a local
Soviet commander General Dzhokhar Dudayev, who
had learned Estonian, was a Chechen and refused
to obey orders from Moscow to crush the Estonian
nationalists.
When Estonia became independent its people
naturally wanted to assert the primacy of their language
and citizenship but that has led to disapproval and
pressure not just from Russia but from the EU and UN.
The UN and the assorted asserters of rights had been
silent when other settler minorities were mistreated
after a former colony had become independent, even
though their plight was far worse than that of the
Russians in Estonia. In Estonia the Russians are entitled
to become citizens and to vote but only if they pass
a language test in Estonian, a test of their knowledge
of the Estonian constitution and the country’s history
and swear an oath of loyalty. Most government jobs
in Wales require a rigorous examination in Welsh, a
language far more difficult and obscure than Estonian,
even though there is no practical reason whatsoever
for knowing it. Many Russians have refused to learn
Estonian and either declined to take the test or failed it.
A quarter of Estonia’s inhabitants are in consequence
non-citizens but they have made a wilful choice. The
non-citizens are free to leave with all their assets for
nearby St Petersburg and dwell happily in that Russianspeaking paradise.
Not surprisingly the Russians are unpopular in
Estonia, but not on racial grounds for the Estonians
have a benign regard for the Russian ‘Old Believers’
who came to Estonia as religious refugees in Tsarist
times. Rather it is because the Russians who came after
1945 will not give up their regard for a Soviet past in
which Russians were the arrogant masters and insolent
rulers. In those days even a badly paid, unskilled nearilliterate Russian worker could see himself as one of
10
the imperial rulers and feel superior. When in 1989,
just before Estonia finally seceded from the Soviet
Union, Estonian Independence Day (celebrating the
independence declared in 1920) was made a national
holiday, the Russians of the so-called ‘International
Movement’ called a strike to oppose it. They are
still quite unable to see that Soviet rule was evil and
for the Estonians a time of savage repression and
deepest humiliation. In the city museum of Sillamäe,
a Russian-speaking town riddled with radioactive and
chemical pollutants from the Soviet era, there is still
a museum celebrating the supposed achievements of
Soviet technology and preserving relics of the former
USSR. It is not a way to win friends and acceptance.
Many of the Russians have become an underclass
because the technically backward industries in which
they were employed have collapsed and they have no
modern skills or willingness to learn English let alone
Estonian. They have sunk into crime and alcoholism,
much as they have in the decaying old industrial towns
of Russia itself. No wonder the Estonians with their
Lutheran work ethic do not respect them.
However, anyone born in Estonia since 1991,
including those of Russian ancestry, is automatically
a citizen. In time the older recalcitrant Russians will
die off. Their grandchildren, a very large number of
whom live in Tallinn, the capital and the centre of the
modern economy, will become fluent in Estonian (and
also in English) because it pays to do so and because
their ties with their distant kin in Russia will have
become attenuated.
Estonia is not ‘a small and faraway country about
which we know nothing’ but a place where conflicts
central to our own history and identity have been and
continue to be played out. The history of Estonia is
a reminder to us of the false perceptions of our own
history propagated by the left. Churchill was right
when he intervened to thwart the Bolsheviks after the
First World War and it is a pity his colleagues would
not back his crusade against Bolshevism. It was not
mere adventurism but our moral duty. The Soviets were
never our genuine allies in World War II. We merely
had a common enemy after 1941 and before that we
were on opposite sides.
Today we are confronting the same difficulties
Estonia faces. How do you deal with a large, recalcitrant
immigrant minority, who refuse to integrate, are firmly
stuck at the bottom of the social and economic ladder
and cherish an allegiance to a potentially threatening
foreign phantom?
Christie Davies has recently been an examiner at and
lectured at the University of Tartu in Estonia. (See the
review on page 57.)
The 150th Anniversary of
Darwin’s The Origin of Species
Richard Courtenay
2
009 marks the 150th anniversary of the
publication of Charles Darwin’s seminal work
The Origin of Species, and an excited scientific
community is celebrating the astonishing triumph of
his theories and their establishment at the very heart
of science. So pervasive is Darwin’s triumph that
any remaining debate seems to involve little more
than truth-seeking scientists patiently explaining
the ‘fact’ of evolution to religious creationists with
their irrational, faith-based beliefs. Such public
triumphalism, however, ignores the very real debate
between scientists in which Darwinian evolutionary
theory is being seriously challenged.
Darwin’s theory of evolution consists of several
theories, the most important of which are random
mutation, natural selection and common descent. Together
these theories, in their current interpretation, hold that
life somehow started by chance and, through a process
involving random mutation and natural selection, basic
organic matter gradually evolved into the wide range of
life forms on earth. The process of evolution is essentially
blind, its only purpose being to favour the most successful
mutations through natural selection. Darwinists maintain
that their theories are scientific, which suggests that they
are supported by solid evidence.
The most obvious place to look for evidence of
evolution must be the fossil record which, if Darwin’s
theories are correct, should confirm his contention that
‘the number of intermediate and transitional links,
between all living and extinct species, must have been
inconceivably great.’ Darwin himself did not have any
examples of these ‘missing links’ but expected that
with time they would be found; this, however, has not
been the case as the fossil record only seems to show
distinct species that do not appear to be imperfect or
unfinished versions of more perfected ones. The few
fossil remains that have been put forward as missing
links have either been notable frauds like Piltdown
man in the early twentieth century, or are the subject
of such debate among biologists that they cannot
be reasonably claimed as definite evidence — for
example, the Archaeopteryx, sometimes put forward
as an example of a link between reptiles and birds, is
now more usually thought to be a member of a totally
extinct group of birds.
Fossils are not objects that can be interpreted
objectively, which means that it is often a biologist’s
subjective interpretation that decides what fossils
actually represent, or whether and in what sequence
they should be grouped with other fossils often of
differing ages and from different parts of the world.
This is the subjectivity that enabled biologists to
recreate the well publicised Homo erectus, or ‘Java
man’ from no more than the fossil remains of a skull
cap, three teeth and a thigh bone (the last one was
actually discovered 50 feet away from the others a
year later).
The same subjectivity applies to artist’s recreations
of the ‘living’ version of a fossil. Exercises involving
several artists working from the same fossil have led to
such varied results that it is clear the artist’s imagination
is at least as important as the fossil itself. Sometimes,
as in the case of the widely used drawings of a series
of apes gradually developing into man, drawings are
the pure creation of artists and not directly based on
any actual fossils.
Another major problem with the fossil record is what
is known as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ that occurred
around 600 million years ago. During this period
the fossils show that large numbers of ready formed
species of many different groups seem to have appeared
suddenly, whereas in previous periods only remains of
very basic organisms have ever been found. Darwin
was aware of this and in The Origin of Species wrote:
‘The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may
be truly urged as a valid argument against the views
here entertained.’ He expected that with time either
earlier fossils would be found or another explanation
put forward, but in fact the problem has only worsened
as the sudden appearance of fully formed organisms
has been revealed as even more abrupt and extensive
than previously believed.
The fossil record, therefore, does not convincingly
and unambiguously document a single transition from
one species to another; rather it seems to indicate
sudden appearance, unchanging species (stasis) and
extinction often due to some sort of catastrophe.
Darwin put the lack of fossil evidence down to ‘the
11
imperfection of the geological record’ and it seems that
this is still the only plausible ‘scientific’ explanation.
It is not surprising that Darwinism’s most formidable
opponents were initially fossil experts.
Darwin also sought evidence for his theories by
comparing structures (homology), such as forelimbs in
different animals, in the belief that such similarities were
evidence of common descent. While there may be some
superficial plausibility to this view, research has shown
that the actual development of such structures during
growth varies considerably from species to species.
Furthermore, there is nothing to indicate that such
similarities are evidence of common descent rather than
simply a common design model, or indeed how such
similarities could have come about (the argument that
they are the result of evolution is circular reasoning).
Another field used by Darwin to prove common
descent was embryology, which, he claimed, showed
that ‘the embryos of the most distinct species belonging
to the same class are closely similar, but become,
when fully developed, widely dissimilar.’ Darwin
reached this conviction on the basis of drawings by
the German biologist Ernst Haeckel; it has, however,
been conclusively demonstrated not only that Haeckel
had faked his pictures but also that embryos are most
dissimilar in the early stages, and only in the middle
stages do some embryos bear some resemblances to
those of other species (even then not necessarily at
the same time).
The scientific evidence for the theory of natural
selection where in the struggle for survival only the best
adapted will survive is equally tenuous. Darwin himself
had no direct evidence for this and in The Origin
of Species could only ‘give one or two imaginary
illustrations’. Since then one of the best known
examples purporting to show natural selection has
been that of the peppered moths. In the 1950s a British
biologist, Bernard Kettlewell, conducted a series of
experiments supposedly showing how natural selection
accounted for the higher proportion of darkly coloured
moths to lightly coloured moths in polluted areas: the
darkened bark of trees in polluted areas made lighter
coloured moths more conspicuous to predatory birds
and consequently the darker variety were more likely
to survive and reproduce. His conclusions, however,
have since been largely discredited by scientists who
have found that these moths are nocturnal and do not
typically rest on tree trunks but under small branches;
Kettlewell conducted his experiments during the day
causing the moths to behave abnormally. It has also
been shown that the proportion of darker coloured
moths is high in some unpolluted areas, suggesting
that other factors are involved. In any case, even if
Kettlewell’s results were scientifically acceptable, they
12
only show how the relative proportions of existing
varieties within a species can vary, and there is no basis
for extrapolating them to explain major evolutionary
change. More solid evidence of natural selection comes
from bacterial resistance to antibiotics and insect
resistance to pesticides, though, as with the peppered
moth, this only shows relatively minor adaptation
within a species, not major evolutionary change.
The challenge to Darwinism, however, comes not just
from the weakness of the scientific evidence presented
in its support, but, ironically, from science itself with
stunning discoveries from biochemistry. Over the last
sixty years new techniques have enabled scientists to
discover and analyse thousands of complex, automated
molecular systems at work at the cellular level of
life; none of this was even imagined in Darwin’s
time. The main question raised by all this molecular
complexity is how could it have arisen by chance as
Darwinism believes? Everywhere in life, from the most
basic single-celled organism to structures such as the
human brain, the fact that such highly complex and
elegant molecular systems play a crucial role poses a
significant challenge to evolutionary theory.
The nature of this challenge, and its wider implications,
has been well presented in two books by an American
biochemist, Michael Behe. In his first book, Darwin’s
Black Box (1996), he questions how a Darwinian
process of random mutation could have given rise to
such complex molecular systems. Molecular systems
such as sight, blood clotting, the immune system or the
bacteria flagellum (tail), which might involve hundreds
of different yet tightly integrated proteins and numerous
intricate steps, can, he argues, only work if all the pieces
are in place; this makes them ‘irreducibly complex’,
meaning that if any of the pieces are missing then there
would be no useful function. Darwinism, however,
supposes that evolution occurs through an incremental
series of small steps each of which must confer some
advantage to the organism possessing it; Behe argues
that such a gradual process could not build an irreducibly
complex molecular system as each small step before
the final completed system would have no function
and therefore be of no benefit to the organism (it is
inconceivable that the systems evolved in one go).
In a second book, The Edge of Evolution (2007), he
considers whether random mutation, which involves
errors occurring in DNA (genes) during replication,
works in such a way that it could even be capable
of constructing complex systems. Using up to date
scientific research into organisms with short life spans
and high populations such as the malaria parasite
— in one year it has a population size equivalent to all
mammals over the last 200 million years — he shows
how random mutation works by breaking things, not
building anything new; furthermore, the probability of appeal to those who reject the idea of there being a
even simple beneficial mutations involving more than supernatural force at work in the universe; for such
one specific change to DNA is extremely low even in people they provide a purely rational and materialistic
the enormous malarial population. Extrapolating these explanation for the existence and diversity of life on
findings, Behe concludes that the probability of the type earth, something which no other theory comes close to
of mutations required to produce any of the countless doing as well. Thus for at least some of its defenders,
complex molecular systems found in living organisms Darwinism simply has to be correct otherwise the basis
is so small as to be effectively impossible, even given of their philosophical outlook in life, which depends on
all the time the universe is supposed to have existed exclusively rational, ‘scientific’ explanations, would be
and all the organisms that have ever lived.
fatally undermined. Indeed, without Darwinism much
Science has not shown the Darwinian evolutionary of modern science, whose prestige is to a large extent
model to be completely wrong; it is very probable based on the premise that it can ultimately explain
that variations within a species are the result of some everything, would be seriously questioned.
process involving random mutation and natural
Much is at stake which may well explain the
selection; but there is absolutely no evidence from dogmatic way Darwinists express themselves and the
biochemistry to support the
visceral hostility they display
idea that this is the driving force
towards any view hinting of
from the origin of life (the most
‘creationism’. The epitome of
basic life forms are themselves
this attitude can be found in the
irreducibly complex) to all of
intolerant behaviour of Oxford
life’s diversity, as Darwinism
professor Richard Dawkins
claims.
who has described people who
Faced with all this inexplicable
don’t believe in evolution as
complexity, some scientists
‘ignorant, stupid or insane
argue that it is only a matter of
(or wicked, but I’d rather not
time before scientific advances
consider that)’, and who refuses
find an explanation. However,
to engage in debate with anyone
there is no indication of when
he labels a creationist.
Darwin’s drawings of Galapagos Finches
this might happen, as advances
In The Origin of Species
in science only seem to uncover ever increasing layers Darwin wrote: ‘If it could be demonstrated that any
of complexity. Other scientists, including Behe, have complex organ existed which could not possibly
argued that design by an intelligent agent (Intelligent have been formed by numerous, successive, slight
Design) is the only plausible explanation for the modifications, my theory would absolutely break
molecular systems at the most fundamental level of all down.’ The inability of Darwinists to show how the
life. Although such ideas have been either ignored or, irreducibly complex molecular systems that underpin
more usually, dismissed as ‘creationist’ or ‘unscientific’ life could have arisen by a series of random mutations
by Darwinists, it is noteworthy that to date there has surely indicates that Darwin’s theory has, in fact, broken
not been one single scientific publication detailing how down, if indeed it ever worked. The failure of the 150complex molecular systems could have evolved in a year search for unambiguous evidence from fossils and
Darwinian fashion.
other areas in support of major evolutionary change only
Because of the lack of scientific support for Darwin’s emphasises the sense of crisis.
theories and strong evidence pointing in another
It would perhaps be more appropriate to take the
direction, one wonders why so many scientists still 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of
believe them, even to the point of proclaiming them to be Species as an opportunity for a proper reassessment
‘facts’. One reason must be the Darwinists’ domination of Darwin’s theories, rather than an occasion for
of the scientific community, a reality which exerts triumphalism. It would then be possible to determine
considerable pressure on anyone wishing to make a whether Darwinism warrants its dominant position in
living from science to conform (at least outwardly) to science as well as in other areas, such as the classroom,
the orthodox viewpoint; dissent means lack of funding, where it is currently presented as a ‘fact’. If this
limited career advancement or, as in the recent case of happens 2009 could mark the end of Darwinism rather
Professor Reiss of the Royal Society, exclusion.
than a celebration of its birth.
The Darwinist domination, though, cannot have come
about by accident and must have its roots in something Richard Courtenay owns and runs a small chain of
deeper. Darwin’s theories have always had an immense hotels in London
13
The New Obscurantists
Mark Baillie
I
t would seem silly to bother explaining that
astrology, alien abduction or flat-Earthism were
fantasies but sometimes delusions become a threat
in real life, like Intelligent Design (ID), the pseudoscientific mask for Creationism.
Debunking this theory demands no qualification
in religion or science, because the issues are pretty
straightforward when stripped of false arguments,
but many who are highly qualified are peddling those
fallacies.
The American Christian-fundamentalist campaign
has reached Britain, through our shared language, as
Islamists are resisting science lessons in schools all
over Europe (chronicled by the Council of Europe in
2007). ID, shrewdly, bypasses Genesis (and ‘Young
Earth Creationists’ — don’t laugh, there are plenty
of them: a third of Brits, not just Americans) to claim
scientific proof of a designer of life and disproof of
evolution.
Indeed, science cannot disprove the existence
of a Prime Mover. But Intelligent Design offers a
conspiracy theory that science proves supernatural
intervention but is covering up this evidence and
alleged flaws in evolution (dubbed a secular religion,
‘Darwinism’).
Any of the many real scientific debates is hailed
as fatal: the New Scientist’s jokey 21 January 2009
cover screamed ‘Darwin Was Wrong,’ meaning he was
right but his Tree of Life was even more complicated.
On cue, a Creationist told me this was like St. Paul
admitting he had made it all up. ‘Expect to find excerpts
ripped out of context and presented as evidence that
biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en
masse. They are not,’ the editorial sighed.
Thus ID combines the desiderata of any sect: Hidden
Truth and persecution.
By confusing faith and evidence and by pushing
confusion into schools and public discourse, ID
brings reason and science into doubt when British
and American education are at their weakest in
modern times and we face widespread superstition and
populism (both Obama and McCain gave comfort to
the anti-MMR campaign).
Intelligent Design may sound like just another mad
American idea like Kabbalah but the Royal Society’s
education spokesman last September advocated
‘openly discussing creationism and intelligent design
14
as alternatives to evolutionary theory’ in science at
school — apparently just to show it is not science:
Professor Revd Michael Reiss did not, however,
propose discussing German declensions in French
classes, nor astrology in astronomy, numerancy in
maths or alchemy in chemistry.
Perhaps Professor Reiss embraces the English notion
of compromise. But open-mindedness cannot reconcile
fact and fallacy: if some say 1+1=2 and some say
1+1=3, there is no middle ground of 2.5. If you open
your mind too much, your brain falls out.
If Reiss was suggesting such a middle ground, or a
relativist respect for any notion, he was foolish; if he
was suggesting such notions were indeed alternatives,
he was betraying science and pupils; if he has a soft
spot for Creationists because they are religious then he
is helping bring religion into disrepute. ‘Just because
something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me
a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson,’ he
said, revealing perfect confusion (he resigned before
getting sacked).
This resembles the US Discovery Institute’s latest
campaign for introducing ID in schools under the
banners of academic freedom and free speech, as if
they mandate taking every fancy seriously.
Reiss is not merely an oddity. A December 2008 poll
showed 29 per cent of UK science teachers believe
that: ‘Alongside the theory of evolution and the Big
Bang theory, creationism should be taught in science
lessons.’ Most of the rest disagreed with teaching it
but agreed it should be ‘discussed.’ Another IPSOS /
Mori poll in 2007 found only 25 per cent of the general
public would oppose teaching Creationism in science
classes. Sadly, neither poll asked about astrology. In
2009 a ComRes / Guardian poll found 33 per cent of
the public believe ‘God created the world some time
in the last 10,000 years.’ Polls are just estimates but
there is clearly a problem.
Happily, it is no more necessary to step into the
circular arguments of Intelligent Design than it is to
investigate palmistry.
We can ignore the unintelligence of our design (eg
food passing our airway or the layout of our nether
regions) because we have the confession of ID’s own
greatest prophet, Professor Michael Behe, a biochemist
(of all things): ‘There are no peer-reviewed articles by
anyone advocating for intelligent design,’ he admitted
under oath in a six-week court case in 2005, brought by
parents fighting its introduction by the Dover School
Board, Pennsylvania.
Behe and his associates claimed ID was science
independent of religion but Judge John E Harris noted:
‘Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims
that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends
upon the extent to which one believes in the existence
of God.’ Best of all, Behe ‘admitted that his broadened
definition of science, which encompasses ID, would
also embrace astrology,’ as did fellow professorial
witnesses. Remember that these charlatans were the
best scientists the heavily-funded Discovery Institute
could find.
As for the Turkish Adnan Oktar, writing as Harun
Yahya for the Muslim world, his sumptuous and free
Atlas of Creation includes a photograph alleging
something about some insect that actually shows a
fishing lure, not an insect.
But this is not funny.
Like any good delusion, from Communism to Wicca,
ID marches on, slaughtering straw men with alarming
success, and Behe still gets cited. It exploits general
ignorance by playing on the normal usage of scientific
terms such as ‘random’, ‘theory’ or the unfortunate
jargon ‘falsifiable’ (meaning testable, not fraudulent)
and by inventing claims by ‘Darwinists’.
One favourite straw man is the alleged fossil-gap,
explained by Darwin but complemented by later
discoveries way beyond his pessimistic expectations.
Another successful lie is that ‘Darwinists’ claim
our advanced eye (or ear) sprung into existence by
chance: this shows the power of repetitive propaganda
because Darwin himself addressed the evolution of
the eye, showing stages found in currently existing
organisms.
This is similar to the English astronomer Sir Fred
Hoyle’s much-cited false analogy: ‘The chance that
higher life forms might have emerged in this way is
comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping
through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from
the material therein.’ Hoyle’s Flaw is an argument
from improbability plus cart-before-horse-ism (the
argument a priori), attacking a straw man: it relies on
the components of the organism (the aeroplane) having
no function or survivability of their own, on small or
large combinations of those components also having no
survivability and on having a determined outcome.
This mumbo-jumbo is in every respect the opposite
of evolution, where components only survive if they
are successful in their own right and alterations only
evolve if they too are successful at every gradual stage,
stages that are in no way ordained (branches appear
constantly). Furthermore, there is no final outcome (a
Jumbo jet) in evolution (except extinction): we are no
more the final version of Mankind than H5N1 is the
final version of the bird-flu virus.
Hoyle mastered more than most of us can even
understand yet he could not see this argument was
false and he published it at least twice. To be fair, he
was also arguing against abiogenesis, the first spark
of life, but he mentions ‘higher life forms’ and spoke
separately of Intelligent Design (or life arriving in
comets, which resolves nothing). There are a few ideas
about the extraordinarily improbable genesis of life but
there is indeed no proof. But, when faced with gaps in
science, Hoyle plugged them with the God-of-the-gaps
fallacy instead of the scientific method: to admit not
knowing the next step and to seek evidence, as with a
crime or a code.
Darwin did not know the next step after his
discoveries (geological as well as biological) either and
might be amazed to find that every relevant branch of
science, and discoveries he could barely imagine (such
as DNA or tectonic drift), had confirmed and amplified
his findings and his hypotheses (and he would not be
amazed to find some corrections).
He would certainly be amazed by the endurance of
the canard that survival of the fittest is the law of the
jungle and only religion can tame Man’s vile urges.
The Godless Confucians and Buddhists have plenty of
morals, the pagan Ancient Greeks stated the Golden
Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto
you) and David Hume and Adam Smith had explained
humanism again in plain English in the mid-18th
century. Yet on evolutionary criteria alone, humans
who co-operate best prosper best, like meerkats or
dolphins.
Sane readers must be wondering why they are
wasting their time reading about Creationism but
British tolerance of eccentricity allows many dangerous
ideas to take root: socialism, Multi-Culturalism and
Islamism are obvious examples in Britain, while ID
dogs education in the USA and has fooled many here,
as well as Canadian Science Minister Gary Goodyear.
Such ideologies demand victim status, perverting and
undermining respect and tolerance.
Furthermore, in an increasingly complicated world
with increasing masses of information, many feel as
helpless and bewildered as our ancestors who gave
spirits to inexplicable phenomena: Thor and Gaia
have been replaced by crystals, horoscopes and even
a contemporary pseudo-scientific Gaia.
Perhaps that same bewilderment inspires conspiracy
theories, alternative medicine and fear of science,
such as campaigns against MMR vaccines (helping
measles rise tenfold in the UK in the last 10 years) and
genetically-modified foods (which are demonstrably
15
safe, while many ‘natural’ foods are demonstrably
dangerous: after some 10,000 years of consumption,
many are still intolerant of milk and wheat, not to
mention the poisons in coffee, rye bread and the
splendid potato).
Some religious people believe that science is trying
to extinguish religion and they can cite some scientists
who are, so they attack science itself (while using
iPods and vaccines). Some scientists make mistakes
and extravagant claims, like most people, usually when
they ignore or betray the scientific process (as when
hijacked by politics). It remains, however, a mystery
that scientists such as Hoyle and even Behe do not seem
to be conscious frauds: there is a cognitive dissonance
that does not diminish with education.
On the 150th anniversary of On The Origin of
Species, we conservatives who value tradition and
thought should acclaim rational thought as the greatest
characteristic of Western civilization.
Some claim the success of science (and Western
civilization) for Christianity but that debate must
address Europe’s weather, soil and epidemiology, the
pagan Ancient Greeks, their humanism and science
eradicated by Christianity (including heliocentricity
and the measurements of the Globe), feudalism, the
Inquisition, the savage Reformation, slavery, reason
and economics. Either way, the present and last Popes
accept evolution in full, with God tacked on at the
beginning and a soul tacked on to Mankind.
The much-misquoted Einstein, guilty of ambiguous
statements about a God but also the victim of
unverifiable quotations, wrote in exasperation in
his last year: ‘It was, of course, a lie what you read
about my religious convictions, a lie which is being
systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal
God and I have never denied this but have expressed
it clearly. If something is in me which can be called
religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the
structure of the world so far as our science can reveal
it.
The religious can share that admiration, adding
whatever trimmings they wish without rejecting facts.
Indeed, the history of Mankind’s evolution, creations
and discoveries is the greatest story ever told.
Mark Baillie works for the International Policy
Network.
Wonder: ‘The Seed of Knowledge’
David Falla
W
ho has not, at some time or other, gazed in
wonder at a clear night sky and realised the
immensity of even that part of the Universe
which is visible to the naked eye? Some are fortunate
enough to have experienced the magic of a total
solar eclipse when, in the words of the astrophysicist
Francisco Diego:
.......... under the shadow of the moon all
becomes still, calm, quiet: deep silence.
A moment of contemplation, of wonder.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘wonder’
as ‘emotion excited by what surpasses expectation
or experience or seems inexplicable’. The emotion
that excites this sense of wonder is as old as Man,
the natural reaction of a being set down in the midst
of the natural world. Objects of wonder can also be
closer to home, and readily apparent in mountain or
rural landscape, or perhaps on the seashore where, as
described by John Oxenham:
.... Deep in the rocks, in darkling caves enshrined
Lie wonders of delight, and mysteries.
We could easily add to these examples many others
16
recalled from our own personal experience, when
wonders of Nature have impressed themselves upon
us. The sense of wonder is indeed familiar to all but
the most insensitive.
The Dictionary definition continues: to be filled with
wonder is also to ‘be curious, desire to know’. We not
only wonder at; we also wonder what, we wonder how
and we wonder why. We could say that wondering,
in this meaning of the word, engages the mind as
well as the senses; and that it can, moreover, provide
much mental stimulus for scientific enquiry. A sense
of wonder is indeed a manifestation of the scientific
mind: after all, what is the role of the scientist if not
to ‘wonder why’ and, following the earlier definition,
to try to explain the hitherto inexplicable? Perhaps it
was some such line of thought that led Francis Bacon
to describe wonder as ‘the seed of knowledge’.
This sense of wonder, the seed which when planted
produces that curiosity and desire for knowledge, has
inspired the building of the great structure that is modern
science; indeed, it lies at the very foundation of science
and acts as the spur to most of its best endeavours.
Science is essentially a work of construction devised
by the human mind and results from the application
of human intelligence and enterprise. Often, it must
be admitted, we find ourselves fascinated more by
the wonders of science itself than by the wonders
of Nature which science has revealed. There is an
arguable distinction here between pure and applied
science, if the definition of the latter may be extended
to include technology. In the pursuit of pure science we
explore the wondrous works of Nature. In technology
we admire the wondrous works of Man: these works,
which are the result of much energetic and inspired
innovation, have brought many practical benefits
to humanity; but they are often found to be mixed
blessings, as we are by now only too well aware.
Can scientific knowledge ever detract from our
appreciation of wonder in the natural world? John
Keats seems to have been of the opinion that it did:
.... Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
Most physicists, the ‘natural philosophers’ of our
age, would probably not sympathise with this view
expressed by Keats. Should not scientific knowledge
increase, rather than diminish, our sense of the
wondrous and enhance our appreciation of Nature?
Is a rainbow any less wonderful when we learn how
it is produced? That primitive sense of awe at the
apparently inexplicable (the ‘awful’) may well be
diminished by scientific knowledge; but it is replaced
by what could perhaps be called an ‘informed sense’ of
wonder, arising from an appreciation of basic processes
which operate in the natural world and which, in
their own right, deserve a place in our consciousness.
The beauty of a rainbow is surely not diminished by
the knowledge that it is formed by the refraction of
light by water droplets in the atmosphere. Scientific
explanations invariably sound prosaic — the unpoetical
language of science is illustrated by the above example
— but the deeper reality that each such explanation
provides still leaves the subject of interest with its
beauty undiminished. While the solving of any mystery
does mean, as we must admit, that some of the charm
has flown, an elegant scientific solution has an austere
beauty of its own.
Thus has a more sophisticated appreciation of the
natural world come to displace that child-like sense
of wonder felt by those who, though they may be
overawed by works of Nature, are yet innocent of
the explanations that science provides. The danger to
ourselves in our present advanced state of knowledge
is that we could lose the quality of humility, which is
essential if we are to appreciate the wonders which
surround us, and if we are to allow ‘the seed of
knowledge’ to germinate, or even to be planted.
A fine example of someone in whom humility
was combined with great scientific achievement is
provided by Isaac Newton who, late in life, expressed
the sentiment that:
.... I do not know what I may appear to the world,
but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy
playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now
and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell
than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.
Many years of research in ‘natural philosophy’ had
not dulled Newton’s sense of wonder.
Nowadays we have a much greater awareness of
the extent of that ‘great ocean of truth’ perceived by
Newton three centuries ago. Modern astronomy has
revealed fresh wonders in the wider Universe, many
of which could hardly have been imagined until recent
decades. As Fred Hoyle has written:
.... No literary genius could have invented a story
one-hundredth part as fantastic as the sober facts that
have been unearthed by astronomical science.
Greater than any individual discovery, however,
is a quite recent realisation regarding our place in
the Universe: this is that Man is not just a detached
observer of the Universe and its wonders, but rather
a being whose very physical existence is intimately
bound up with what is observed. The essential idea
is that, when we consider the past evolution of the
universe, we can quite logically deduce from the simple
fact of our existence that it evolved in such a way as
to produce beings able, as we are now, to observe
it. That simple fact, however obvious it may be, has
profound consequences, for it implies that the Universe
had to follow a particular course in its evolution. The
inevitable restraints on the evolving Universe were
so critically defined, as the cosmologists have now
discovered, that we are left in a renewed state of
wonder, that we should exist at all.
David Falla is a retired university lecturer in
physics.
Autumn Meeting
Readers might like to know that we are planning a
meeting on the state of the National Health Service
in the final quarter of this year. We will put the
details on the web site and in the Autumn issue. Any
suggestions or contributions would be welcome.
17
The School of Freedom
Anthony O’Hear
W
e perhaps have a clearer sense of what
liberal education is not than of what it
is. It is not training for a particular skill
or profession, nor is it a device for making society
more equal. In short order, most of what modern
governments propose in the educational field can
reduced to one or other of these ambitions. These are
both instrumentalist conceptions of education, which
treat the pupil as if he were to be taught according to
some pre-determined conception of what he should
be, either economic or political (or both). A practice
of education based on such instrumentalism is bound
to to be constricting, both of the content of what is
taught and of the imaginative development of the
pupil, who might have ambitions and potential beyond
the acquisition of economic skills, and also beyond
subserving some greater collectivist aim.
Once we get beyond these obvious points things become
more difficult. Let us assume that liberal education has
something to do with the liberation of potential in the
individual pupil. No doubt many teachers, from the most
progressive to the most traditional would agree with
that, but they would mean and do very different things.
At the extreme, ‘progressive’ liberation would place the
highest value on pupils making their own choices, even
on curriculum and discipline. From this perspective, an
imposed content (such as traditional liberal educators
would insist on) will seem an intolerable imposition
on individual freedom and creativity; ‘learning how to
learn’ will take precedence over being instructed in facts
and authorities, which if not reprehensibly Gradgrindian
will certainly be outdated in a few years.
Liberal education receives its earliest formulation in
ancient Greece. In 380 BC Isocrates wrote that ‘men
who have received a liberal education… are most
clearly recognised by their speech’, going on to point
out the public and political benefits of this. Plato and
Aristotle, in their different ways, both emphasised
the benefit to the polis of the educated man, while
at the same time insisting that the learning involved
had a value to the individual which made him or her
in that respect a better, more fulfilled, freer person,
irrespective of any social benefit. This oscillation
between the mental and emotional personal freedom
which ideally results from a liberal education and the
political-cum-social superiority of a society with such
an educated elite has characterised debates about liberal
18
education from then until the present day.
Liberal education’s staunchest advocate, Newman,
said that education is called liberal in which the
student ‘apprehends the great outlines of knowledge,
the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts,
its lights and shades, its great points and its little’;
so educated, he develops ‘a habit of mind… which
lasts through life’, whose attributes are ‘freedom,
equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom’.
Newman says (and he was talking, remember, to
the Catholics of Dublin) that ‘gentlemen’ formed in
this spirit by the ancient universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, have formed ‘a succession of heroes and
statesmen, of literary men and philosophers, of men
conspicuous for great natural virtues… for practical
judgement… who have made England what it is — able
to subdue the earth, able to domineer over Catholics’.
Yes, for the philistines in the Dublin hierarchy, the
sting was in the tail.
Newman’s contemporary, Matthew Arnold, might
not have shared the triumphalism, but he would not
have dissented from the general spirit of Newman’s
discourse. ‘The best that has been thought and known’
should be disseminated in education, as widely as
possible, without tracking down to what their betters
think is appropriate to the lower orders. Individuals will
benefit thereby, and through their activity and influence,
so will their society. Coleridge, Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin;
mutatis mutandis, they all said the same thing, as in
earlier days had Erasmus, John Colet and St Thomas
More, and as in the 20th century did R H Tawney, C S
Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, T S Eliot, F R Leavis and, most
eloquently of all, Michael Oakeshott. Some may jib
at Oakeshott’s occasional mischievousness. But the
difference between Oakeshott and the great sages of
the nineteenth century was that by the time he wrote
Education, the Engagement and its Frustration (1972),
the battle for liberal education had been all but lost in
the face of the same economic and political imperatives
which rule to-day.
One can argue about how far the study for its own
sake of the classics and the arts and of serious science
and maths advocated by the liberal educators can go
in any modern society. One can also point out a liberal
education does not necessarily make people morally
better. But neither of these points would have worried
Newman. Indeed, he dealt at some length with the latter.
Liberal education is not about the cultivation of the
religious or even directly of the moral sense but about
the cultivation of the intellect, and that is a good in itself.
We here touch on the age-old battle between Aristotle
and Locke; whether there is a type of pure desire to know
in worthwhile areas, the cultivation of which is part of
any fulfilled life. I think that there is something deeply
limiting and constricting about the utilitarian position
here. As far as what might be called social penetration,
it is true that many people will not be able to get far in
the sort of disciplined and often difficult study liberal
education requires. But that is not a reason for refusing
those entranced by it on egalitarian grounds, to pursue it
as far as they can. Every pupil should be given the chance
to see what education has to offer; in Victorian times and
even later the movement for workers’ education (often
via self-help groups) was largely driven by the urge of
working people to imbibe the great classics which their
formal education had denied them. The tragic paradox
is that now we have compulsory formal education up to
16, that desire seems largely to have been extinguished,
perhaps by ‘education’ or by what passes for it.
Partly because of the prevailing mentality of those
running education, and also because of the populism
rampant in the media and in politics more generally, we
are a long way from the motto of Keynes’ Arts Council,
that it should offer ‘the best for the most’ (and with
no qualms or hesitation as to what the best was). And,
unless Michael Gove can prove me wrong, no politician
of any party could think, let alone utter what Ellen
Wilkinson, the post-war (Labour) minister of education,
proudly expressed about wanting to produce a Third
Programme society through her education policies. The
Third Programme she was referring to ceased to exist in
1970, so most people now do not even remember it.
This populism is itself a symptom of the deepest
reason for the disappearance of liberal education,
which returns to the form of progressivism mentioned
earlier. At a deep level, this is based on the belief that
in order for creativity and self-expression to flourish
in individuals, we need to clear away the obstacles
which exist, not just in socio-economic terms, but even
more in the imposition on the individual of alien and
dead forms of knowledge and expression. Freedom
— liberation — is fundamentally liberation from the
prescriptions of past models and cultures. Where the
humanists of the Renaissance found a cultural Eden
in the rediscovery of the Greek and Latin classics, today’s educational progressives find only a prison of
ancient and decaying chains. (Or they would if they
actually went there.)
There is, indeed, a deep division, between those who
think that the focus in education should be the unashamed
transmission of a great and vast cultural heritage (the
liberal educators), and those (like Dewey in some moods
and like many educational ‘experts’ of 2009) who see in
the culture of the past something inherently rotten and
ill-adapted to present political and personal needs. This
difference is, in a way, encapsulated in a fascinating
sentence of Emerson’s (on which Geoffrey Hill has
expatiated at some length): ‘In every work of genius we
recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back
to us with a certain alienated majesty’.
You can see, perhaps, what Emerson is getting at.
Unless the work of genius resonated with me (us),
maybe even sometimes in a certain sense reminded
us of things in our own lives, we could not appreciate
it at all. But does that mean its content is our own
rejected thoughts, albeit returned to us with alienated
majesty? If this is all there was to our cultural heritage,
the progressives would be vindicated by Emerson. For
in that case, there are only our own thoughts, refracted
here and there, but at bottom our own thoughts. There
is something totalitarian about this, as if the whole
race has only thoughts in common, a deeply illiberal
notion (though one well suited to the collectivism so
prevalent in to-day’s politics).
What liberal education promises is the imaginative
freedom to transcend our own thoughts and mentality.
That is the deepest sense of liberal, and one which
is denied to pupils whose teachers insist on making
everything contemporary and relevant to their needs
(or supposed needs). It is because I could not imagine
Homer or Virgil or Dante or Titian or Bach or Schubert
or Turner for myself that I can learn so much from them.
These are not my (rejected) thoughts coming back to
me, but intimations of worlds way beyond anything
I (or we) in 2009 could conceive. To commune with
these souls and their works is inherently liberating,
both personally and socially; for as well as affording
us each endless insights and delights, they also present
worlds and mentalities radically distinct from our own
— entering which is itself a form of liberation of mind
and sensibility from the present. They may even induce
in us the sort of calm and mature judgement Newman
was looking for. This is the core of liberal education and
the basis of its claim to be liberating. If liberal education
is entirely snuffed out in the few places it remains,
people today will be denied this form of liberation; but
even worse we will have torn up the living fibres linking
our descendents with their cultural roots.
The School of Freedom, A Liberal Education Reader,
edited and introduced by Anthony O’Hear and Marc
Sidwell, will be published by Imprint Academic in
July 2009. Anthony O’Hear’s The Great Books, From
The Iliad to Goethe’s Faust, A Journey through 2,500
years of the West’s Classic Literature, was published
by Icon Books in 2007 and in the USA by ISI books
in 2009.
19
Criminalising Family Justice
Jan Davies
M
any criminal lawyers can remember the days and the CPS inspectorate noted that previously CPS
when any violent incident within a family prosecutors agreed that a bindover would suffice.
would be dismissed by the police as ‘only Now over half of the cases received by the CPS result
a domestic’. Typically, someone — not necessarily in convictions which is described as ‘a much more
inside the house — would call the police and the man positive picture’. Cautions, it is said, will rarely be
(almost always the man) would be removed to spend appropriate because most cases are not the first instance
the night in the police station. In the morning he would of domestic violence, an assertion which suggests that
be produced at court for causing a breach of the peace, the police will be turning the pages of a training manual
would admit that yes, he had been drunk and although rather than understanding that labelling every person
he denied assaulting his wife he had been ‘out of order’. arrested for alleged assaults within a family as a serial
He would then be bound over to keep the peace for a offender is replacing one stereotype with another.
set period, and released. His wife would have had a
This report has a passage about children being
breathing space, the police would have prevented any harmed by witnessing violence, but there is nothing
serious harm and the man would not have a criminal about the effect of separation from a much loved father.
record. Often this was what his wife wanted.
Bail conditions are usually placed on a defendant
A bindover operates like a formal warning from the obliging him to live away from his family and he is
court and a record is kept at the court which issues prohibited from contacting his wife either directly
it. The person must admit some culpability, though or indirectly. ‘Prosecutors,’ says the report, ‘should
this is sometimes an unseemly fudge, and a sum is remember that establishing conditions to make child
then fixed which the court can order him to pay if he contact permissible could dilute bail conditions.’
‘breaches’ the bindover by subsequently committing a Nobody asks whether no contact at all is what the
criminal offence. The local police now know who he man’s wife or girlfriend wants. More than once when
is and will take any further
I have been representing a
... many cases brought under the Protection
incident more seriously. It
man accused of assaulting
from Harassment Act 1997 would be better
a member of his family, I
is a convenient procedure
dealt with by the civil courts, if at all. This
for a wife who is financially
have been telephoned by
Act was intended to stop stalkers. In practice
dependent on and intends to
a distraught wife asking
it is often misused to deal with conduct that
stay with her husband. As it
‘What am I supposed to do
most people would not regard as criminal.
is not a conviction it does not
about the gas bill?... I need
have to be declared on job application forms. (I do not money to pay the rent... The children want to see him.’
use the word ‘partner’. Most of my clients refer to long Sometimes a magistrate will airily announce a bail
term girlfriends as their ‘wife’ even though there has condition as ‘not to contact your wife either directly
been no legal marriage ceremony.)
or indirectly, save through solicitors to arrange contact
Now, however, it is suggested that courts should ‘bin with the children...’ Alas, the days when solicitors doing
the bindover’. Statistics matter more than individual family work could get involved in arranging contact
justice and for the statistics a bindover counts as a to children in the absence of divorce proceedings and
failed case. In 2004-5 according to information from legal aid are gone. There is no longer any ‘green form
the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) 18.2 per cent scheme’ — the legal aid which could help a person on
of domestic cases resulted in a bindover; by 2007-8 a low income with minor legal problems. Likewise,
it was 5.3 per cent. Every year, we are told, there is social workers have no time. A case can drag on
‘improvement in successful outcomes’.
for months with children punished for their parents’
According to police officers a successful outcome arguments.
Once they have cooled off, parents often disregard
is a conviction, or at the very least a charge which
can count as a ‘sanctioned detection’ for which there the bail conditions and make their own arrangements.
are targets. Whether the conviction does any good It makes little sense to continue to prosecute when
within the family is not the police’s concern and there they arrive at court together, perhaps separating as
is no mechanism for any kind of follow up. A joint they approach the court building. The prosecution may
report of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary still be attempted despite statements by the wife that
20
she does not wish the case to continue. Cases can go
ahead without the complainant where there is medical
evidence of even minor injuries, or even just statements
from police officers — some redness under one eye,
a bruise on an arm. It is even possible that if the wife
decides that she does not wish to give evidence, refuses
to come to court despite having been served with a
witness summons and threatened with arrest if she does
not co-operate, there may be an application to use the
statement she initially gave to the police by reading it
as ‘hearsay’. The defendant is effectively deprived of
a fair trial since no cross-examination is then possible,
but a conviction will be regarded as a ‘good result’.
A woman who has been through the experience of
being threatened with arrest
if she does not attend court
and of having her own wishes
disregarded is not going to
call the police a second time.
And the second time could
be when an assault really is
serious. Women in fear need to
be supported, not bullied.
It would be interesting to
know how much money the
government is saving by
forcing family matters into the
criminal courts. Breach of a
non-molestation order granted
in the civil courts is now a
criminal offence, although
busy magistrates courts,
with their lack of privacy
and attention from the local
press, are not the place for
family matters. There is even
anecdotal evidence from civil
practitioners that some women
are deterred from seeking civil injunctions when they
are advised that any breach will result in saddling their
former husband and the father of their children with a
criminal record. In the county court a case can be dealt
with by way of undertakings and hearings are closed
to the general public, but the government is doubtless
anxious to cut back on civil legal aid and prefers
criminal proceedings which are cheaper.
Similarly, many cases brought under the Protection
from Harassment Act 1997 would be better dealt with
by the civil courts, if at all. This Act was intended to
stop stalkers. In practice it is often misused to deal with
conduct that most people would not regard as criminal.
There are serious cases, when a man or woman will just
not accept that a relationship is over and obsessively
pursues the former wife or husband. When she
changes her telephone number and he can no longer
send threatening or obscene text messages, he starts
harassing her at her place of work, tells slanderous
stories about her to her relations and bombards her with
unwanted letters. It is difficult to have any sympathy
with such defendants. But equally the man who returns
home to find that after many years of living together his
wife has moved out with no warning does not deserve
to be dragged down to the police station. Naturally he
wants to try to find her, to talk to her parents and to
try to persuade her to come home. A warning from the
police may be all that is needed, some advice to ‘back
off’, but this will not count as a sanctioned detection.
A favourable statistic will be for him to be arrested and
charged or cautioned.
Part of the disposal of
harassment cases in criminal
courts is usually a restraining
order preventing the man
from communicating with
his former wife or girlfriend.
Again no one considers the
effect on the children. Such
orders are routinely made
with no information about
their feelings. Information
about the family is usually
taken from the wife. Probation
reports are prepared before
sentencing, but the probation
officer does not have the same
role as the court welfare officer
in the family court. He will not
carry out any home visit, nor
will he talk to the children on
their own or indeed at all, and
the pre-sentence report will
often be full of jargon taken
from training material about domestic violence or
harassment cases.
Sometimes the defence solicitor will have given the
court what is called a written ‘basis of plea’. This sets
out what the defendant is accepting by pleading guilty.
The court can only sentence him for the offence on the
basis of the facts he has admitted. The probation report,
however, may ignore the basis of plea, and have some
paragraph about how the defendant had ‘minimised’
what had happened when the probation officer spoke to
him. It will be assumed that the incident which caused
him to come to court was the culmination of many
previous incidents, even where there is not a shred of
evidence to support this.
Nobody is required to review restraining orders after
a period of time to see if they are still necessary. A civil
21
court will make an order often lasting for a fixed period: couple were reconciled and the ‘victim’ was adamant
the criminal courts make orders that last for ever. It is that she did not want the case to go ahead. From
no good a judge or magistrates saying that either of the Carlisle to Plymouth the picture is a depressing one
parties can apply to the court. Legal aid is not available — prosecution at any human cost, with convictions
for such applications and most people who come being viewed as a positive outcome regardless of the
before the courts are not sufficiently articulate to make consequences for individuals.
applications themselves and cannot afford the court and
Many years ago I was called down to Reading police
solicitors’ fees. In practice, couples ignore the court station late at night. One of my clients had been arrested
order and reconcile. I have frequently encountered for breach of the peace. His girlfriend was moving
couples who should not be together, and have dived out of his flat to live with his best friend. He had been
round the other side of a shopping aisle in my local making threats and throwing her clothes downstairs.
supermarket to avoid the embarrassment of meeting The police decided to remove him. The officer dealing
them. In the Domestic
with him — then a young
This report has a passage about children
constable — took me into
Violence and Victims Act
being har med by witnessing violence,
there is a clause which says
a side room. ‘I don’t want
but there is nothing about the effect of
that the court should be able
to keep him in all night,’ he
separation from a much loved father.
to make a restraining order
said, ‘because that will just
even where there has been an acquittal. I hope that with make him worse. Can you keep his house keys until
no welfare officers to inform the courts of the children’s after 9.30 tomorrow morning? She will have left by
wishes, no one will be stupid enough to bring this then.’ We then had a three way discussion around the
provision into force — but this government believes table. I told my client he would have to go and stay
in intrusion and is mad enough for anything.
at his father’s for the night and that I would keep his
The Criminal Law Solicitors Association (CLSA) is a keys, and that if he didn’t want to get arrested again
representative group of criminal hacks. Members from he should stay away from his flat until the morning. It
all over the country regularly explore legal problems worked and there was no further trouble.
and developments in lively email discussions. I asked
It would be impossible now to deal with the
my CLSA colleagues about their experience of the situation in this pragmatic way. Common sense and
newly established specialised domestic violence human sympathy have been abandoned. No police
magistrates courts. To my dismay not one of the officer would now take what would be considered an
many solicitors who responded had anything positive unacceptable risk. Old fashioned policing has been
to say. One court is known locally as the court of replaced with statistics for sanctioned detections and
‘reversed evidential burden’ where men have to prove outcomes that are easily recognised by computers.
their innocence rather than being presumed innocent
until proved guilty. This perception was shared by Jan Davies is a solicitor and the author of The Criminal
colleagues in other areas. Prosecutions were being Advocate’s Survival Guide. (See page 59)
pursued even where the allegations were trivial, the
#
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22
Kant for our Times
Tom Nolan
I
mmanuel Kant has a deserved reputation for being
a difficult philosopher. Not that his key ideas are
impenetrable. On the contrary — and this is a proof
of how well-founded they are — they can be explained
and re-explained from different perspectives and gain
in clarity each time. The difficulty lies not in Kant’s
ideas, but in his style, which takes for granted the
mentality and culture an eighteenth century German
university student could be expected to have, and which
non-specialist readers today are unlikely to share.
However, by no means all his works were written for
an academic audience. Two of his later essays: What
is Enlightenment? and Concerning a Recent and
Mistakenly Aristocratic Tone in Philosophy are written
with an engaging and appropriate forthrightness.
‘Appropriate’ because their purpose is to defend reason
as the true birthright of every man and woman, and
to castigate those mystics who, refusing the rational
scrutiny of others, would make of philosophy a matter
of their own authority and insight. They are essays
which have lost nothing of their power in the two
centuries since they were written. For, as we know,
the mystics of Kant’s own day were far from the last
to bedevil the world of philosophy.
The 18th century pseudo-philosophers with whom
Kant took issue were comparatively harmless. NeoPlatonists such as J G Schlosser were merely persuaded
that they had an ability to feel the dictates of Justice
and Goodness without recourse to reason. The hugely
influential late 19th century thinker Nietzsche was
more irrational and tyrannical than any of them. And
though Kant, of course, could not have known it, his
criticism of the aristocratic tone in philosophy could
have been tailor-made not just for Nietzsche himself,
but for the sort of mystical charlatanry Nietzsche
helped make respectable. When Nietzsche writes ‘It
would be repugnant to the pride of the philosopher of
the future, not to mention to his good taste, when their
truth should be a truth for any Tom, Dick or Harry…
“My judgment is my judgment: it is by no means easy
for someone else to lay claim to it” he declares’ — it is
hard to resist thinking of such obscurantists as Derrida
and Lacan (each the focus of an academic mysterycult), whose pupils can never give an intelligible
account of the master’s thinking but are nonetheless
convinced that it must be right. Equally, when we read
Kant’s indignant and prescient demand: ‘Who does not
here recognize the mystagogue, who enthuses not just
for himself, but founds a club and, as he speaks to his
adepts (in contrast to the people, that is all those who
are not initiates), puts on a very aristocratic show with
his pretended philosophy!’ — we are tempted to raise
a cheer of thankful recognition.
Kant’s quarrel is not with those thinkers whose views
differ from his own; the conclusions of philosophy are
of secondary importance to him. Rather, he attacks
those pseudo-thinkers who fail to recognize what is
essential to the process of philosophizing. It is an
important distinction, because Kant has no difficulty
in approving of Plato and Aristotle, who may have
been misguided in some respects, but at least argued
in a way he considered legitimate. What he cannot
accept are those who deck themselves out in the
trappings of philosophy without accepting the duties
of a thinker: ‘There is an important difference between
philosophizing and playing the philosopher. The
latter is what the aristocratic tone entails — whenever
despotism, having successfully shackled reason
(even its own reason) to blind belief, is passed off as
philosophy.’
The intended targets of this passage are the mystics
(‘Philosophers of Feeling’). They claimed to have
special access to other-worldly truths. But the
metaphysical, according to Kant, ‘cannot, by definition,
be an object of experience’: there can be no question of
anyone knowing it directly and without the operations
of reason. And even if such a unique experience were
possible how could it be philosophically validated?
Mere subjective conviction on the philosopher’s part
will never do. As Kant says, ‘Who can quarrel with
feelings?’ Given that we have no direct access to the
philosopher’s experiences and emotions, to accept
them as true amounts to taking his word on the matter
— and such credulity, though it might be appropriate to
religion, has nothing to do with philosophy. Kant goes
on to accuse the ‘Philosophers of Feeling’ of showing
an aristocratic disdain for the hard work genuine
philosophizing entails. ‘Everyone considers himself
aristocratic in so far as he believes that he doesn’t have
to work, and, in accordance with this principle, things
have come to this pass: that a pretended philosophy is
frankly and publicly proclaimed, in which one (ie the
pretended philosopher) need not work but only listen
to and enjoy one’s own inner oracle in order to take
23
possession of philosophy’s entire wisdom.’
What does Kant take for granted when he makes such
an accusation? There are two elements which have
traditionally been accepted as indispensable for valid
philosophizing. On the one hand: common ground
must be established between the philosopher and his
interlocutor. Both must accept certain presuppositions
before explanation can begin. If the student refuses the
premises of a given argument, why should he accept
its conclusions, no matter how cogent the route from
the one to the other? On the other hand all that follows
from those premises must be regulated by reason,
which is at bottom no more than the principle of noncontradiction.
It is easy to understand why very few philosophers
ever bothered to spell out these limitations: they are not
unique to philosophy but apply in virtually every walk
of life. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about
how to identify the Supreme Good or how best to get
a good price for our fish at the market: if one person
is to persuade another, then both must have common
assumptions and both be capable of reason. It is this
universality of reason which allows the philosopher to
instruct his pupil. If the pupil was not already capable
of reason, then the philosopher could not even begin
to educate him. But given that philosophical reasoning
is in principle no different from the reasoning that
obtains in more mundane explanation, there is a natural
progression from one to the other. For Socrates, to
take the outstanding example, everyday thinking
was as much a test for philosophical speculation as
it was tested by philosophical speculation, and the
philosopher could only be said to have fulfilled his role
if he took into account the objections of an interlocutor
who knew, perhaps, less than the master but whose
reasoning was just as good. This is why the dialogue
is such an important philosophical form: a form in
which the philosopher enlightens firstly by establishing
that the two speakers share certain presuppositions
and conceptions and secondly by reasoning towards
conclusion that both will then accept.
But whether dialogue is employed as a pedagogical
device or not, philosophizing has always been a
matter for two voices, given that the philosopher must
ask himself: ‘what are the possible objections to my
position?’ ‘Is what I say at this point not contradicted
by something I have said elsewhere?’ He has an
internalized interlocutor who raises objections on
behalf of the public. Indeed, it is the presence of
an interlocutor (whether real or imagined) which
made philosophizing possible in the first place. For
philosophical hypotheses, unlike scientific ones, are
beyond material proof: the only test for them — the
only thing that will prevent them from degenerating
24
unchecked into mere fantasy — is another intellect.
It is to this link between reason and explanation that
Kant alludes when he says that philosophical despotism
is a suppression of the thinker’s own reason: unless
the philosopher can explain an insight to a real or
possible other, he himself is not in a position to judge
its validity.
Now it is remarkable that Kant defends this position,
that valid philosophy is a matter of explanation
from common ground between two rationally equal
intellects, by using the language of class and politics.
The ‘philosophers of feeling’, he says, ‘are like lazy
and imperious aristocrats who despise hard work and
cannot brook contradiction or interrogation’. He speaks
of their despotism, and declares that the ‘philosophy of
feeling’ is something ‘which the rules of civility that
reign in the empire of knowledge cannot suffer,’ a phrase
which creates a vivid sense that in the realm of thought
all inequalities of power are illegitimate. And it is hard,
having read What is Enlightenment? and Aristocratic
Tone, to resist the conclusion that so far as philosophy
is concerned Kant is an out-and-out democrat. The
opening paragraph of What is Enlightenment? makes
the matter clear: ‘Enlightenment is mankind’s escape
from his self-imposed intellectual minority. Minority
is the inability to use one’s intellect without having to
rely on someone else’s direction.’
Every man and woman, in other words, should be
intellectually independent: in the world of thought
there is no hierarchy of power and no obligation of
obedience. Kant’s pupil Hamann took his old teacher’s
rallying cry ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your
own intellect!’ as a disingenuous attempt to blame the
masses for their own ignorance, but this is a perverse
reading. Kant’s words are an attempt to stir up those
masses by assuring them that the remedy for their
intellectual minority is in their own hands; his words
are inspiring for the same reason that ‘Workers of the
world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains’ is
inspiring — because it assures the apparently helpless
that they are strong.
We know, of course, that Kant was by no means a
declared democrat in the social and political sense,
and that in What is Enlightenment? he makes a
famous distinction between the public and private
worlds (where public has to do with the general life
of the mind, and private has to do with civil office and
position). But we only need reflect on the universality
of reason to understand that Kant’s caveats are
more apparent than real. For who would reject the
proposition that the state ought not to be governed
by blind passion, that the prince, the minister and the
bureaucrat ought to be able reasonably to evaluate
their own conduct? And what can that mean but a
commitment to a rationality which all share? If the state
should be governed according to reason and if reason
is the common heritage of all its inhabitants, then it is
but a short step to the idea that the judgment of all its
inhabitants should regulate the state. Whatever Kant’s
expressed intentions may have been, it seems clear that
his views in What is Enlightenment? taken together
with Aristocratic Tone provide an outline justification
for social and political, and not just for intellectual,
democracy. They are a lucid and forceful defence of
rationality in philosophy and in life (the two are, at
bottom, one), accessible to anyone with the patience to
follow a strong argument clearly expounded. And they
leave a vivid sense of this truth: that the betrayal of
our reason is the betrayal of our humanity. That every
time we bamboozle our way to imposing a rationally
unjustified position on others, every time we reverence
an opinion that we have not had the energy or courage
to test rationally — that every time we do these things
we have cause to be ashamed.
Tom Nolan is a research Fellow at St John’s College,
Cambridge
Lincoln and the Conservative
House Divided
Grant Havers
D
ebates over the legacy of Abraham Lincoln
are unlikely to end with the Bicentennial
celebrations of this president’s birthday in
2009. From the end of the Civil War to the present
day, all sides of the political spectrum have denounced
as well as embraced him. On the Left, diverse voices
have portrayed Lincoln as a progressive democratic
champion of the oppressed, while others have spied
in him an astute defender of industrial capitalist
interests bent on destroying the feudalist South. On the
Right, many have credited the president with saving
the Union and even the cause of conservatism, while
others have denounced him as a Jacobin destroyer of
tradition and community. Although the Bicentennial
Commission has gone out of its way to represent
Lincoln as the Great Emancipator of the modern age,
informed historians and political scientists know that
the estimated 14,000 books on the president have not
been wholly favourable.
The gap between the president’s historic speeches
and his actions has heightened debate over his legacy.
It is unlikely that Lincoln’s intended to inspire bold
dreams of recreating the world, at least in the minds
of the Americans of his age. The president’s overall
aim was always to keep the Union together, even if
it meant the preservation of the evil institution of
slavery. The president despised radical abolitionists,
a small minority of Americans in the northern states
who had always demanded uncompromising justice
for slaves even if it meant the destruction of the
South. Yet Lincoln was too much the pragmatist to be
associated with the forces of revolution. His attempts
at compromise over the preservation of slavery
early in his presidency, his willingness to expatriate
the freed slaves back to Africa or Central America,
and his defence of the superiority of the white race
do not sound like the positions of a woolly-headed
radical. Even as he eventually embraced a policy of
emancipation for slaves, Lincoln desired to be seen as
a conservative.
Nevertheless, the sheer power of his rhetoric
on human equality has encouraged revolutionary
movements that he could not have anticipated. Few
readers of Lincoln’s writings can remain unimpressed
at his ability to marshal the power of faith for political
purposes. Ever mindful of his audience’s fear of
demonic attempts to divide God’s people (Matt 12:25),
Lincoln famously preached in his ‘House Divided’
speech of 1858 that America must be either free or
enslaved: ‘It will become all one thing, or all the
other.’ Lincoln’s appeals to a higher biblical justice as
the moral foundation for egalitarian democracy have
continued to resonate across the political spectrum in
America.
Lincoln’s most ambitious rhetoric has made it more
difficult to challenge the mythology of ‘chosenness’,
or belief in America as the land of a chosen people.
Although many Americans in the antebellum period
had believed that God had chosen them to build a
‘City on a Hill,’ the Civil War ushered into history
25
a political theology that crystallized this belief in
a chosen nation. The carnage of the war was so
devastating that it would have been difficult to explain
the unprecedented death and destruction without
recourse to theological rationalization. Perhaps, as
Lincoln himself occasionally suggested, God had
punished America for the crime of slavery with this
terrible war. A careful reading of the president’s
speeches reveals that he was often cautious in his
appeals to divine favouritism, just as he was cautious
in claiming to know God’s will. His second inaugural
address soberly pointed out that both sides in the war
‘prayed to the same God’ and were confident that they
both served the same Providence. Lincoln knew, as
an American who grew up in an age of evangelical
revivalism, that a religiously fervent people suffer few
doubts about their chosen status in the eyes of God. He
also knew that America’s leaders ignored the power
of this faith at their peril. As an astute politician, even
Lincoln at times appealed to this mythology, although
his reference to ‘the almost chosen people’ perhaps
betrays some scepticism on just how divinely favoured
he thought Americans were, as they veered towards
the bloodiest war in their history. Nevertheless, the
president’s reluctance to use biblical symbolism has
yielded to revisionist readings of the president as a
revolutionary figure. Unsurprisingly the most radical
elements in American politics have expropriated
his most dramatic rhetorical flourishes, even if they
portray themselves as faithful to the nation’s highest
conservative traditions.
Neoconservatives are, without exception, champions
of the president. In their collective view, Lincoln
breathed new life into the most cherished tradition
of the republic — the moral commitment to the
natural rights of all human beings. Were it not for
this president, America would have remained a
hypocritical house divided, failing to live up to the
egalitarian promises of its founding. Natural rights, as
enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, would
have been mere words had Lincoln not denounced
the evils of slavery and committed his presidency to
their eventual abolition. Yet the Civil War was a war
of liberty for both America and the world, which calls
upon Americans to universalize the credos of liberty
and equality so central to the natural right tradition.
The students of Leo Strauss, the foremost defender of
natural right philosophy in the twentieth century, have
been particularly determined to persuade Americans
that both the moral duty and self-interest of the republic
requires the indoctrination of peoples everywhere in
democratic ideals, whether through peaceful means or
by force. Anything less would betray the conservatism
of the nation and Lincoln’s legacy. Even non-religious
26
neoconservatives have looked to Lincoln as the quasireligious prophet who calls upon Americans to liberate
the world from tyranny.
This neoconservative view has become so dominant
today that it is hard to imagine a time when conservatives
opposed the Civil War and blamed Lincoln for using
this conflict as a pretext for transforming the republic.
The self-described ‘paleoconservatives’, who applaud
the American founders for opposing the centralization
of power in the hands of the federal government,
view Lincoln as a revolutionary figure who elevated
equality to the status of a political religion, an act
which destroyed forever the true intent of the founding
generation. Conservatives like Mel Bradford claim that
the president forced a showdown with the South over
slavery in the hope of creating a new regime no longer
committed to states’ rights and minimal federalism.
Instead, Lincoln unconstitutionally rejected the legal
right of the Southern states to secede from the Union
in order to crush any resistance left to his dream of
creating a powerful new federal government. This
regime would go on to increase its influence with
policies that imposed egalitarian leveling, promoted
wars to spread democracy, and set up the presidency
as an office with powers that would rival those of
monarchies. Far from being a conservative, Lincoln
was the first and gravest threat to the old conservative
values of liberty and the rule of law. The rhetoric
of chosenness has led only to violence and statist
tyranny.
The success of neoconservatism in capturing Lincoln’s
legacy has benefited from deeply rooted beliefs about
American ideals shared across the political spectrum.
Since America took on the role of superpower in the
20th century, it has become useful propaganda to teach
that Lincoln would have supported a foreign policy
wedded to the globalization of American values. Cold
War liberals like the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
claimed Lincoln as their ideological ancestor when they
sought to defend liberal democracy as the best regime
for all of humanity. While foreign policy realists like
George Kennan were urging American leaders in the
postwar era not to assume that the rest of the world
automatically shared republican values, the vision
of remaking the world in the face of Soviet tyranny
gained sway over the leadership class of both parties.
In language that anticipates the neoconservatives
today, the interventionist wing of the Democratic
party from the Wilson presidency until the Vietnam
debacle exuded supreme confidence that Lincoln would
have sanctioned the preservation and encouragement
of liberty throughout the world. As interventionist
liberals became disillusioned with the crisis of spirit
that wracked the Democrats after the Vietnam era,
many of them migrated to the historic party of Lincoln they still fume over the centralization of federal power
in order to press their view of history. In joining the which Lincoln achieved while in office. A few leftists
Republican party in the post-Vietnam period, liberals might even agree with radical historians like Howard
metamorphosed into neoconservatives who drove out Zinn that Lincoln’s defence of racial equality was an
any remnant of paleoconservative opposition to the ideological masquerade which quickly dissipated after
aggressive promotion of American ideals throughout the Civil War ended and the Jim Crow segregationist
the world. In the post-Cold War period, rhetoric about system was institutionalized in the South. Nevertheless,
democracy-building and marching in the footsteps of the neoconservative and liberal portrait of Lincoln as
Lincoln has reached dizzying heights.
global democrat shows few signs of abatement.
The irony is that the neoconservative representation
This consensus helps to explain why Barack Obama
of Lincoln as a defender of universal democracy has so persuasively used Lincoln’s image for his own
would not have succeeded if prominent leftists had political purposes. Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric,
not bought into this vision at the same time. Whereas at least when he was campaigning for the presidency,
the prewar Marxist and socialist leftists were more sounds like a throwback to the old Cold War
inclined to criticise Lincoln
liberalism of the Democratic
as a defender of Northern
Party (certainly his choice
capitalism who crushed the
of Joe Biden as his viceanti-capitalist hierarchy of
president reveals his respect
the South, postwar leftists
for the old interventionist
have rarely challenged the
liberalism). Obama shows
image of Lincoln as the most
as much commitment as
brilliantly articulate defender
George W Bush to the vision
of American democracy.
of America as a universal
When Harry Jaffa, a student of
model for the world. His
Leo Strauss, defended Lincoln
vision of a ‘more perfect
as a democrat committed to
union,’ which he expressed
equality for all human beings,
near Independence Hall
old-style conservatives like
in March 2008, measured
Willmoore Kendall and Mel
perfection in terms of the
Bradford worried about what
achievement of equality
this version of revisionist
in our time. The candidate
A little incident at the White House
history might mean for the
of ‘change’ presumably
future of American society, its political system, and believes that America cannot be a truly just nation
its foreign policy. By contrast, the leftist theologian until it reaches this nebulous goal of perfect equality.
Robert Bellah has praised Jaffa for helping Americans
Obama’s high-flown rhetoric may be the mere words
‘recover’ their tradition of promoting equality and of a politician who cannot resist pointing out that he
democracy at home and abroad.
shares the state of Illinois with one of her most famous
Neoconservatives and leftists in America have sons, although he has criticized his opponents for
often regarded each other as rivals. The English empty verbiage. Lincoln’s equally ambitious terms
neoconservative writer Michael Gove makes this of discourse about racial equality were, as Richard
clear when he observes that the Left is angry about Weaver noted, quickly forgotten as the Republican
the neoconservatives taking away its monopoly Party became the party of big business in the postof concerns over human rights, democracy, and bellum period. Yet the power of rhetoric itself does not
liberalism. Nevertheless, this rivalry presupposes a just wither away. Even in a time of national anxiety
deeper consensus over shared values. Few postwar over the failure of the Iraq intervention and economic
leftists and no neoconservatives would ever challenge recession, few American leaders exude doubt over the
the assumption that Lincoln represents the ideals of the status of their nation as divinely favoured. Lincoln
world, not just an historically Protestant republic.
still remains the most powerful symbol for inspiring
There are still a few voices on the Right and the changes that may well have been incompatible with his
Left who do not share the neoconservative-left liberal cautious realism about his almost chosen people.
position on Lincoln’s legacy. While a few old-style
conservatives agree with the American southern
conservative Richard Weaver that no American leader Grant Havers teaches philosophy and politics at Trinity
has surpassed the President in rhetorical brilliance, Western University (Canada).
27
Charity Shops
Audrey Parry
A
n old friend, financially challenged but elegant
of dress, complained that he could no longer
call on charity shops as their clothes were too
expensive. A visit to a Torquay shop showed that the
prices were indeed stiff and there was a formidable
notice telling people not to ask for reductions in price.
Presumably my friend now went to retail shops or
market stalls, yet in his youth it must have seemed
non-U to wear second-hand clothes. When Alan Clark
snubbed Heseltine by saying that the fellow had to
buy his own furniture, he would not have applied the
same rule to clothes. Gentlemen were expected to buy
their own suits.
Clothes rationing during the last war made wearing
old clothes patriotic and any garment was permissible
provided that it kept one warm. Rationing continued
after the war and charities whose primary function had
always been to supply the poor with raiment found
it easy to open shops, councils being obliged to give
them very favourable rating terms. They could often
rent an end of term lease and labour was supplied by
pleasant middle-aged ladies. There were no irritating
rules about conditions of employment and there were
perks like the first choice of the goods, it always being
understood that an economic price would be paid.
Charity shops could offer clothes, shoes, costume
jewellery, books and household items while the larger
pieces went off to a Valhalla of their own. The luvvies
quickly caught on, boasting that they were buying
their Christmas presents there. Even in the present
drear economic conditions sales have held up although
donations have fallen. They appeal to many human
instincts: a useful means of disposal of the unwanted
effects of the defunct, an attraction to the parsimonious
who cannot bear to part with a piece of string. The rich
like to help the poor and those who regret an extravagant
purchase can repent by giving away something else.
It is uncertain whether donors care much about which
specific charity runs their shop, provided that it is not
al-Qa’eda or Animal Liberation. Easy access, good
parking, pleasantness of staff may be important factors.
Since donors may be buyers quality of the goods may
also count. Do they care how the charities spend their
money? Recently OXFAM was rebuked for spending
money on expensive advertisements with a political
message on Gaza which could have gone on education
and famine relief.
The government and charities seem wary of each
28
other. Charities continue to press for relief from VAT
with little hope of success. The government wants the
money, the commercial interests already resent the
charities’ rates privileges and there is little hope of their
helping the unemployment figures. Recycling, however
virtuous, is no promoter of industry and jobs, though
government sees a chance of charity shops helping
with the problem of landfill sites, the EU being about
to fine us for their misuse. Bulky objects like TV sets
are a problem; charity shops sometimes rehabilitate
them and give them to pensioners.
Some commercial interests maintain that Charity
shops drag down a particular area. Ordinary secondhand bookshops have been closing down in recent
years and OXFAM is now the biggest second-hand
bookshop with a huge depository at Dorking frequented
by bookaholics in search of an out of print edition.
Charity shops are themselves being threatened by
non-commercial interests: car boot sales, E-bay and
other websites, but they are taking much more interest
in what is handed in. Because of programmes like the
Antiques Road Show, people now think twice about
handing in what might be a treasure: old vinyl records,
china, first editions, and couture and vintage clothes.
Many of these things were themselves bought from
charity shops, the public rarely offering to share the
windfall profit that they might have made. Experts
now visit the shops to advise them what to charge or
removing items to ‘superior’ shops so that suburban
Madam Bovarys no longer have a chance to buy a
designer dress.
This is not the only occasion in which interpretation
of their role clashes with popular perception. Some
wealthy people, perhaps disillusioned with their nearest
and dearest, choose to leave their money to a charity.
The treasurers of the charities have been accused of
harrying the executors into an early settlement of the
estate. The executors are often amateurs, old friends
of the deceased without technical knowledge. One
widow complained that such hounding contributed
to her husband’s death. Reading these stories induced
some wealthy people to alter their wills so that the
charity forfeited the richer prize for the sake of some
small amount of interest.
Charities exist for the relief of distress in the widest
sense and this aim always ought to be kept in mind.
Audrey Parry was a barrister
Conservative Classic — 35
William Dunning’s Reconstruction: Political and Economic (1907)
Paul Gottfried
A
mong American historians and thinkers,
William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922)
deserves respect as a versatile, scrupulous
scholar. Even if he had not produced his highly
influential three volumes on the Reconstruction era
The Constitution of the United States in Civil War
and Reconstruction: 1860-1867 (1885), Essays on
the Civil war and Reconstruction and Related Topics
(revised edition, 1904), and Reconstruction, Political
and Economic:1865-1877 (1907), he would still
be remembered for his detailed surveys of political
theory. As an intellectual historian, Dunning defended
the uniqueness of the West as the source of political
freedom and as the cultural framework for a theoretical
approach to political life.
His most widely read survey of political thinkers,
examining ideas about the state from Luther to
Montesquieu, highlights the role of the Protestant
Reformation for representative government and
ordered liberty. Contrary to the condescending
treatment of them as ‘dull’ and ‘hardly read anymore’,
in a sketch of Dunning’s life in the Dictionary of
Literary Biographies, his volumes on political thought
still have much to teach us. At the very least they
cast light on a self-confident, Euro-American class of
learned gentlemen who valued their intellectually rich
civilization at its high-noon.
Even a cursory reading of the Dictionary’s biography
of Dunning indicates how far our academic community
has strayed into PC gibberish. Although we are told
that Dunning, who studied and taught at Columbia
University, was ‘objective’ and ‘exceedingly careful’
in his research, supposedly his work remains mired
in ‘the social and intellectual climate in which it was
produced’. Dunning ‘shared an assumption that the
Anglo-Saxon human type was innately superior to
all others’, and his writing witnessed his ‘fear for
the preservation of the dominant culture’, a fear
that nurtured ‘anti-immigration organizations which
tried to prevent the admission of “inferior” peoples
from Southern and Eastern Europe and in scholarly
and popular works which pointed out the threat to
the “superior” Anglo-Saxon character of the United
States’.
Dunning’s thinking, it is claimed, also led to
‘imperialism and expansionism’ and, most ominously,
to his three-volume justification of ‘the poverty and
deterioration in the position of Negroes in the United
States in the 1880s and 1890s, as they were deprived of
the few political and civil rights they had gained during
Reconstruction’. His writing was later widely cited, or
so we are told, to demonstrate the ‘innate inferiority’ of
the black race. A particularly vitriolic entry on Dunning
in Wikipedia reaches beyond these charges. This entry
asserts that he criticized so vehemently the occupation
of the defeated South because of his fondness for
slaveholders and the bondage of blacks.
Such comments about Dunning’s intentions have
become increasingly hysterical as Political Correctness
has spread. In the last forty years, ideologically driven
historians, whose political motives have been far more
blatant than those of the authors they have replaced,
have devised a new interpretation of Reconstruction.
From the black Marxist William Dubois down to the
onetime Stalinist and now highly acclaimed advocate
of a ‘new Reconstructionist agenda’ Eric Foner, the
post-Civil war occupation of the South, including
the stripping of civil rights from its white population
and the elevation of black politicians as a front for
Radical Republican control of the Southern states, are
depicted as high points in America’s unfinished civil
rights revolution.
It was unfortunate for the triumphant revisionists
that the Union army didn’t continue to reconstruct the
South indefinitely. Because of widespread racism in
the North as well as in the South, armies were pulled
out of the former Confederate states in 1877, allowing
the Southern whites to disempower the recently
enfranchised blacks. Foner, who is a ‘favorite author’
of GOP strategist Karl Rove, believes that our new
black president must continue the work of the Radical
Republicans, by pushing for sweeping economic and
cultural changes. Foner and a likeminded historian of
the Civil War period, James McPherson, have taken
a first modest step in this direction by introducing
instructional materials at Civil War battle-sites,
stressing the importance of the Union victory as the
precondition for the war against white racism.
The trouble with all of these anti-Dunning philippics,
however, is that they abound in exaggeration if not
29
outright lies. Dunning and his family, who hailed from
Central New Jersey, were Lincoln Republicans, who
had opposed slavery. They were also identified with the
reform wing of the Republican Party, the Mugwumps,
who had fought the alliance between Big Business
and the Reconstructionist administration. Among
Dunning’s works was an admiring biography of the
German immigrant abolitionist Carl Schurz, who had
opposed slavery but also condemned the exploitation of
the defeated South by Radical Republican industrialists,
like Thaddeus Stevens, who is the pro-black hero in all
revisionist accounts of Reconstruction.
What the haters of Dunning and of the considerable
school he left behind at Columbia are really lamenting is
that his work cannot be fitted into the current anti-racist
interpretations of the 1960s and 1970s. Dunning’s work
is not dishonest or factually incorrect in its assessments.
It just belongs to an age before the rise of the present
Left; and such a distinguished pre-PC Marxist as Gene
Genovese found much that is valuable in Dunning’s
investigation of the relation between expanding
capitalism and the Reconstructionist plundering of the
South. Those who are now playing the race card cannot
adapt Dunning’s picture of the occupied South to
their own usable past. His painstaking research on the
Reconstructionist governments after the Civil War, his
examples of the corruptness of these administrations,
his highlighting of the role of former black slaves,
ill-suited for running governments on their own, in
facilitating the delivery of booty to Radical Republican
industrialists and extorted money for the coffers of the
Republican Party are all the more appalling because
they are true. In his magnum opus, Reconstruction,
Political and Economic, Dunning is not presenting
a racist theory and certainly not recommending the
reintroduction of slavery. He is underlining the results
of Radical Republican greed and vengeance, including
the harm that it did to interracial relations after the Civil
War. It is not at all clear that he opposed all efforts by
the victorious Union to help Southern blacks. What he
is exposing is the form that Reconstruction took.
And, yes, he is defending Lincoln’s successor Andrew
Johnson, a Southern Republican who had sided with the
Union during the Civil War and who when I was young
was celebrated by, among others, John F. Kennedy as
a man of character. Because of Johnson’s attempt to
check the extent of Reconstructionist projects and his
willingness to grant pardons to former Confederate
officers, Foner considers Johnson as ‘by far the worst
president’ in American history. Johnson was a ‘white
supremacist,’ according to our now widespread
academic judgment, and someone who fully deserved
the impeachment trial that the Radical Republicans
imposed on him in 1868. The Harvard law professor
30
Raoul Berger wrote a detailed work Impeachment,
which points out the numerous irregularities in
Johnson’s trial.
Dunning’s response would have been that it was
irrelevant what Johnson, and most white people of the
time, thought were the potential political capacities of
the former slaves. Handing the South over to former
black slaves at bayonet point under Radical Republican
supervision, while treating Southern whites as pariahs,
was a recipe for disaster. Such transformation could
not work by any means short of the permanent
subjugation of the white South, something that even
Northern Republicans, outside of their radical wing,
were unwilling to pay for. Dunning and his students
and, more recently, the historian Ludwell Johnson have
shown that their depredations were so outrageous that
even anti-slavery Republicans, like Dunning’s family,
turned against them.
Although Dunning was not a classical conservative but
a reform Republican with a critical view of imperialism,
one might treat his studies on Reconstruction as
conservative in one sense. They were the work of a
WASP patrician who was pointing out the folly of
the post-Civil War era. As an honourable historian,
moreover, he did not allow his distaste for slavery to
blind him to what ungenerous victors had inflicted
on the South. He understood that Northerners and
Southerners who had lived in the past as one nation
would have to become that again if an American nation
were to survive. And he did not believe that putting
recently liberated black slaves nominally in charge of
a military government in the South, while degrading
their former owners and white Southerners in general,
would heal the wounds of an internecine war.
His judgments about the future were correct at one
time but may apply no longer. For under the new
order here and in Western Europe, we have submitted
to intensive socialization by a centralized public
administration, and so what an earlier generation
understood as limited government and the rule of
inherited social authorities have all but vanished.
Judging by the willingness of Southern white
Republicans to follow party orders, when told in a
mailing in 2006 to allow George W Bush to complete
the unfinished work of Reconstruction in Iraq, even
the descendants of those who had fought and bled in
the Confederate army and who had suffered under
Reconstruction have become disciples of Dubois and
Foner. So much for the research of the anti-slavery but
anti-Reconstructionist Dunning! This child of an age
more devoted to its ancestors than our own could not
have foreseen Southern whites embracing the most
insulting view imaginable of their collective past.
Reputations — 24 ‘Chic’ Guevara?
David Ashton
O
n May Day 2001 Russell Brand was arrested
during an ‘anti-capitalist’ protest in Piccadilly
Circus with ‘Che Guevara Y-fronts’ around his
spidery ankles, later on reportedly ‘dated’ his hero’s
grand-daughter, and last April reappeared at another
‘anti-capitalist’ demo in the City near a ‘Consumerism
Sucks’ banner. Described as ‘a comic and emerging
Hollywood star’, he has been associated with Jonathan
Ross, the BBC TV cinema ‘critic’ who effusively
acclaimed Steven Soderbergh’s tedious two-part
biography of the Marxist ‘martyr’ and his screenimpersonator. These performers, incidentally, are far
from being impoverished proletarians.
On 4 October 2007 the New Statesman gave
prominence to this artless drivel from the musical
director of DM Ahora! Records:
Che Guevara, along with other celebrities with his
idealistic spirit – Malcolm X, Lennon, Marley and
Hendrix – is a great idol for generations of Latin
Americans, including my own. That is why for many
years I have worn a beret similar to the one he wore
in the second half of the 1950s, when the shade of the
ceiba trees sustained him and his dreams of liberty
and adventure.
On 9 November 2007 nearly thirty MPs solemnly
requested their colleagues at Westminster to note the
‘inspiration that Che Guevara has brought to national
liberation movements and millions of socialists around
the world’.
Earlier this year Rupert Murdoch’s $1 billion-a-year
global publishing house prepared a special edition
of Che’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary
War. This comes with an exhortation for those still
determined to make ‘revolutionary struggle their
weapon’ from his daughter Aleida, a tie-in advertising
Soderbergh’s ‘major motion picture’, and a fatuous
tribute from the similarly totemic Nelson Mandela.
You cannot make it up, or perhaps in the special
case of this medico-cum-murderer, many can and too
often do.
What was it about Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y
Lynch, apart from their shared indifference to personal
hygiene, that induced Jean-Paul Sartre to call him the
‘most complete man of his time’, and generated so
much pictorial illusion and literary delusion?
Although his ubiquitous student-bedsit visage, which
caps his venerated locks beneath the red star instead of a
crown of thorns, was cunningly enhanced for publicity
purposes, Che undoubtedly enjoyed considerable
photogenic fortune, whether puffing asthmatically on
a giant cigar or posing with a telescopic rifle. And
his hagiographers have managed in combination to
hype him up as Adonis, Zapata, Vo Nguyen Giap and
Jim Morrison, all rolled together into a composite
‘character’ in its own weird way almost as fictional as
Don Quixote or Jack Kerouac’s Sol Paradise.
After citing several banalities to demonstrate the
man’s ‘gift’ for encapsulating his ‘philosophy’ in
‘pithy’ aphorism, the religious writer Paul Vallely
explained that the ‘final truth’ is found in the slogan
‘Che Lives!’ — an irenic formula of immortality
applicable to very few historical figures, like ‘Jesus
and Elvis’ (sic). A Mexican-American artist put him
in place of the bearded Saviour in a university mural
entitled Last Supper of the Chicano Heroes, while
his photographed corpse ‘fallen among evil men’
has been compared repeatedly to Andrea Mantegna’s
painting of the Lamentation over the Crucified Christ;
such pictures, which resonate subliminally with selfmortifying, often sanguinary images of Hispanic
worship have, of course, their international impact.
Che has been promoted not only as the exemplary
‘new man’ for our hitherto ‘decadent and diseased’ 21st
century but also as a secular substitute for the Son of
God. Austere, driven, impractical, authoritarian and
world-utopian, he has nevertheless become a fetishfigure for both Communists and commercialists in their
mutual materialism. Unlike Jesus, however, he made
himself into a ‘violent, selective, cold killing machine’.
Here was a terrorist who ushered in collective economic
disaster, initiated labour camps for dissidents (who
included, ironically, rock-musicians,) and then tried to
foment civil wars in other people’s countries with his
— fortunately fallacious — foquismo dogma.
No Salisbury Review sympathiser, David Aaronovitch
commented (Times, 28 October 2008) on London’s
opening night of Soderbergh’s biopic, when the killer is
shown ‘executing’ a couple of wretches in the forest:
Their crime was rape, and in movies rape can only
be punishable by death. It was interesting that
while the audience laughed at the condemned rapist
wanting more rum, they went very quiet when the
31
unreconstructed Che used the word maricon (faggot)
as a term of abuse. Death yes, homophobia no….
At La Cabana fortress in Havana [he] processed the
death sentences of dozens — possibly hundreds — of
prisoners after the most cursory of trials. A leftwing Basque priest officiated for the condemned. ‘I
pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners,’
he said later. ‘I remember especially the case of Ariel
Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge.’…
Che was prepared to countenance a first nuclear strike
by Soviet missiles against the United States.
Johann Hari’s formidably detailed indictment of this
‘totalitarian with a messiah streak’ (Independent, 6
October 2007) deserves at least brief quotation:
His diaries show that he was constantly appalled to
discover that almost everyone around him, including
the revolutionaries fighting by his side, did not share
his Maoist vision for the future… He said that ‘the
people you see today tell you that even if they should
disappear from the face of the earth because an
atomic war is unleashed…they
will feel completely happy
and fulfilled’… Che did not
say how he knew the Cuban
people would be delighted to
die of radiation sickness, their
hair burning on their heads and
their skin slopping from their
faces…
He was an actual person who
supported an actual system
of tyranny, one that murdered
millions more actual people.
Disabusing ‘liberal progressives’
of their romantic self-deceptions is rarely simple or
entirely successful, and evidence that this guy was not,
in fact, ‘very nice’ will hardly deter those attracted to
‘political’ sadism, through either vicarious spectacle
or personal participation in ‘armed struggle’. There
is a persistent ‘parasite partnership’ between the least
commendable fantasists of capitalist entertainment and
the most ruthless partisans of communist insurrection.
Despite Aleida’s disapproval of the degree to which
Guevara memorabilia, though bolstering Castro’s
tourist trade, have become pop-cult kitsch and fashionaccessory commodities, their global glamorisation
is unlikely to suppress their eventual contribution to
global convulsion.
Leftist ‘poster-boys’ do not, of course, necessarily
retain ‘market’ value. Uncle Joe may still charm
some old comrades in Muscovy, but we no longer
need a ‘Second Front Now’. Stupid students are
never again going to brandish thousands of ‘little red
32
books’ containing inanities from their Great Helmsman
(though Beijing may have another unwelcome role
to play). But Che’s symbolism, if not his pristine
package, could be resurrected for a ‘second coming’
of Tri-continental violence, especially if economic
depression links into hostility towards the remnants
of ‘western civilization’ amid the ‘greatest peril’ when
‘class war unites with race war to finish off the white
world’ (Spengler).
The danger is not ‘more Vietnams’ around the rural
peripheries of long-abandoned tropical empire, but
conflict brought deep inside the multi-ethnic and
overcrowded metropolitan nerve-centres of northern
America and western Europe. This will not simply
entail anarchist mobs of lumpen louts breaking
windows or firebombing the fuzz, but cyber-organised
urban guerrillas, assisted by unprecedented travel
and migration flows, and sustained by a third-world
demographic explosion that is rapidly reducing the
‘blue-eyed gringos’ and their transoceanic relatives
to a tiny minority on planet earth in envied and guiltridden possession of comparative
wealth. The original Black
Power militants within the USA,
which Che labelled the ‘enemy
of the human species’, were
far from averse to obtaining
insurgency guidance from this
aristocratic Argentine criollo.
And notwithstanding his periodic,
and indeed ultimate, failure to
trigger peasant uprisings, useful
operational tips for urban warfare
are provided by his main military
textbook, conveniently also
available from the above-mentioned publisher.
Conservative shadow defence minister Liam Fox has
drawn urgent attention to the arrival of enemies who
irreconcilably ‘hate our culture, our way of life, our
history and our traditions’, in short hate ‘who we are’,
and to the unprecedented menace in this context of
miniature WMD manufacture and mobility. One ‘dirty
bomb’ alone can be made from ‘radioactive materials of
the sort found in a range of hospital equipment or even
discarded on industrial sites’ and its detonation could
be ‘socially and economically devastating — while
relatively simple to carry out’ (Spring Address to
Politeia, 2009).
It is salutary therefore to recall, and reapply to the
new situation, the words (quoted by Prensa Latina,
8 October 1968) of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara himself
that ‘rivers of blood will have to flow’ and ‘we must
follow the road to liberation, even if it costs millions
of atomic victims’.
E
verywhere I turn these days, I find myself bullied there is maternal love and unselfishness in Nature as
by dogmatic Darwinians. Supporters of Darwin’s well as cruelty.
The nearby Catholic church prospers, for Darwinism
Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection often
is
an Anglican heresy and scarcely affects other
assume that people who disagree with them must be
simple-minded Christian fundamentalists. However, denominations. As a very young man, Darwin expected
to become a vicar and
non-Christian novelists
in later life lived rather
like Samuel Butler and
like one, finding scientific
Joyce Cary once enjoyed a
sermons in earthworms.
modest success as literary
In another novel, The
opponents of Darwin’s
Moonlight, Cary depicts
soul-destroying theory.
a family of West Country
In his autobiographical
landowners whose menfolk
masterpiece, The Way of
are all Darwinian scientists,
all Flesh, Butler devotes
vain, petulant old scholars
chapter upon chapter to
who scrabble irritably for
ridiculing the Anglican
ever-higher footholds on
orthodoxy of his younger
the slopes of Academe. A
days. Towards the end
female relative is despised
of the novel, the author
by the rest of the family
suddenly notices that a new
for secretly disbelieving
and worse Orthodoxy has
Darwin. This theme, I
arisen, that of Darwinian
should say, is only a minor
Science. All of a sudden
one in a novel that chiefly
the C of E doesn’t seem
celebrates Woman in her
so bad after all, and the
capacity as mother and
book loses something
home-maker.
of its force. Subsequent
I may be unfair in
anti-Darwinian writings
describing Cary as a nonby Butler have long been
Christian, for he writes
out of print and have so
in a Christian spirit and
far proved impossible for
emphatically believes
me to obtain.
Joyce Carey
in
God. He approves of
Joyce Cary, though
Christianity,
but once
looked on as a ‘thirties
declared in an interview
writer ’, continued to
that
he
would
be
very
surprised
to find that his soul had
produce masterpieces to the end. In addition to his
survived
his
bodily
death.
In
one
of his African novels,
West African stories and the less attractive Gully
Jimson saga, Cary wrote several ‘sweep of history’ he describes a Muslim who bravely faces martyrdom
novels. In the posthumous and never completed at the hands of fanatical Christian converts. Joyce Cary
Castle Corner he deplores the fiercely competitive sees God as a mighty Life Spirit, Man as instinctively
spirit brought to public life by the wildfire success religious.
Why should we be so sure that some person
of Darwin’s iniquitous theory, with its harsh doctrine
somewhere
knows exactly how we came to exist,
of Survival of the Fittest. Cary shows an Anglican
whether
that
person be a scientist or a priest? We are
church in Ireland emptied of its congregation, despite
an admirable sermon by the vicar who points out that a part of Creation, and can never see the whole.
33
ETERNAL LIFE
W
hile we take for granted our freedom to
meet for worship each Sunday, Christians
are enduring persecution worldwide.
The authorities in Libya are torturing four men for
converting to the Christian faith. Before the Sri Lankan
parliament there is a bill to make Christian conversion
a criminal offence. Recently a seventy-five year old
woman in Saudi Arabia was given forty lashes for
socializing with her men friends. Christianity is illegal
in Saudi – one of our most important middle-eastern
allies with whom we do massive trade in weaponry.
If you are caught in that country with a Bible, or with
the Cross around your neck, you will be arrested by
the religious police and thrown into prison.
In Pakistan, a thirteen year old girl was taunted for
being a Christian by five Muslim youths who then
raped her. The rapists were not charged. Churches
are burned down every week in Pakistan. A man is on
trial for his life in Egypt for converting to our faith. In
China a house church pastor has been slung into prison
for ‘utilising superstition to undermine the law’. There
have been ancient and established Christian churches
in the Middle East since the time of St Paul. Now these
are breaking up as never before in 2000 years as many
Christians try to leave to escape persecution.
In the face of endemic violence from the radical
Islamists, the archbishops and bishops have set up an
everlasting talking shop to promote Christian-Muslim
dialogue and they issue vacuous communiqués from
time to time. The uselessness of this project arises from
the fact that it is only ‘liberal’ Christians engaging in
polite chit-chat with ‘moderate’ Muslims. All ignored
by the militants, naturally. I was once asked to help the
Muslim, Professor Akbar Ahmed, who told me that he
had more trouble with his own extremists in Bradford
than with any number of Christians.
Nearer home a Muslim girl who converted to
Christianity from Islam has been removed from the
home of her carer after she chose to be baptised. She
was placed in a foster home because her father beat
her and threatened to send her to Pakistan for a forced
marriage. Her carer, who has fostered more than eighty
children, did nothing to encourage her to convert. In
Sheffield, a primary school head teacher, described
by her colleagues and pupils’ parents as marvellous,
has resigned after being accused of racism by parents
of Muslim students. The accusation comes after
she proposed that the school stop holding separate
assemblies for Muslim children and replace them
34
with assemblies which would include all pupils. Three
Coptic Christian children have been placed by social
services with a Muslim foster family after their parents
divorced. They were originally placed in the custody
of the city mosque but the authority has refused to
return the children to the custody of the Coptic Church.
The nurse who offered prayer to a patient, as part of
her ministry to body and soul, is sacked. The airline
worker who wears a discreet Cross is sacked also. A
child was reprimanded for discussing God at junior
school. Public libraries have been instructed to place
Bibles on the highest shelf, as if they were some sort
of pornography likely to deprave and corrupt.
In the face of all these terrible persecutions, it is
easy to be seduced by the arguments of those who
tell us there is a clash of civilisations between the
Christian West and Islam. This is not true. Most
practising Muslims desire only to say their prayers
and go to the mosque and to have good relations with
their neighbours of whatever faith or none. I have not
come across many Muslims who object to Christmas
decorations or the wearing of the Cross or the public
exhibition of the Bible. The truth is more sinister. We
are dominated by a secular élite which hates Islam
every bit as much it hates Christianity. This élite of
atheists and metro-political despisers is also a cowardly
elite and dare not attack Islam for fear of getting its
corporate throat slit. But it finds it useful to invoke
an allegedly outraged Islamic sensitivity in order to
persecute the Christian faith.
This secular élite — the Dawkins, Pullmans,
Toynbees, Graylings and the entire BBC, targets
Christianity because it sees Christianity as the
embodiment of those traditional values which, until
the contemporary reversal, made this country a place
worth living in. A few years ago there was an obscene
theatrical show called Jerry Springer: The Musical.
In this — broadcast incidentally by the BBC whose
Director General claims to be a Roman Catholic
— there were some 3500 blasphemies of God and Jesus
Christ and many insults directed at The Virgin Mary.
A case was brought and the programme was judged
to be inoffensive.
The law of the land says we must not discriminate
— except in favour of secularism. Did you know it is
an offence to teach Christianity in schools as something
that is true — though the 1944 Butler Education Act
assumed it is true? Christianity now must be taught
only as one among many religions and this can only
be done from the secular perspective — atheism by
state decree.
The secular Establishment has been helped by the
very people who might have been counted on to
oppose it. The Bishops and Synod have sidelined The
Book of Common Prayer and The King James Bible
and introduced their mindless jogging for Jesus, new
liturgies, and unreadable versions of Scripture. These
people are unbelieving in any sense that St Augustine
would have understood. For them, Christian doctrine
is a sort of long-running metaphor for the social
policies of the soft left. And their eschatology amounts
only to a slavish acceptance of the pagan fantasy of
global warming. The Bishops and the Synod have also
accommodated the church to the secular social agenda
which gnaws away at the fabric of the family and public
life like the moth fretting a fine garment.
Europe, and particularly our nation, was formed out
of Christian values. The secular assumption nowadays
is that you can remove Christianity and all the other
good things will stay in place. If Christianity goes, the
lot goes with it.
As T S Eliot observed sixty years ago:
An individual European may not even believe that
the Christian Faith is true, but what he says and
makes and does will all spring out of this history of
European culture and depend upon that culture for
its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have
produced a Nietzsche or a Voltaire…
Our civilization has developed a culture of self-hatred,
a death-wish in which the present assaults on Christian
freedom are only to be expected. As in St Augustine’s
day, the repression of freedom is accompanied by the
lewdest public spectacles. We inhabit the electronic,
techno-digital version of the bread and circuses of
Augustine’s time like the celebration of low life in
mass entertainments such as Big Brother. A serious
civilization and culture can overcome any amount of
aggression from external enemies but it cannot survive
its own suicide.
Christianity in Britain today is under severe
persecution which will get much worse, but I welcome
it for it will weed out the pseudo-Christians, the
wimpish bishops and the caved-in Synod. We will
discover who our true friends really are. If there should
come the day when we are murdered by the unholy
alliance between the Islamist terrorist and the secular
commissar, then so be it. For the blood of the martyrs
is the seed of the church.
Peter Mullen
Conservative Thoughts
...........through the influence of the teachings of degenerate half-fools, conditions arise which do not,
like the cases of insanity and crime, admit of expression in figures but can nevertheless in the end be
defined through their political and social effects. We gradually observe a general loosening of morality, a
disappearance of logic from thought and action, a morbid irritability and vacillation of public opinion, a
relaxation of character. Offences are treated with a frivolous or sentimental indulgence which encourages
rascals of all kinds. People lose the power of moral indignation, and accustom themselves to despise it as
something banal, unadvanced, inelegant and unintelligent. Deeds that would formerly have disqualified
a man forever from public life are no longer an obstacle in his career, so that suspicious and tainted
personalities find it possible to rise to responsible positions, sometimes to the control of national business.
Sound common sense becomes more rarely and less worthily appreciated, more and more meanly rated.
Nobody is shocked by the most absurd proposals, measures and fashions, and folly rules in legislation,
administration, domestic and foreign politics.
Max Nordau, The Degeneration of Classes and Peoples, 1912
35
LETTERS
Sir,
According to Harold Macmillan, criticism is never
inhibited by ignorance. The letters attacking my
article ‘Monkey Business’ prove him right. None of
them discriminates: they are equally ignorant of both
religion and science.
Gordon Haines agrees that ‘the equating of apes and
humans is daft’ but fails ‘to see the connection with
Darwinism’. The connection is that Darwinism reduces
man to his biological makeup. As we are practically
identical to chimpanzees there, why not grant them
human rights? Darwinism, he says, ‘encompasses the
whole of life, past and present, [so] it is unsurprising
that everything is not yet accounted for.’ A word of
friendly advice: beware of all-encompassing secular
theories. They’re always long on ideology and short on
proof. I could recommend a list of books by scientists
who take Darwinism apart from every direction, but
I doubt books can help a man who has to ask ‘who
created the creator?’. An averagely smart child would
not have asked this question 50 years ago.
Marc Sidwell objects to my ‘frenzied inventions
about science challenging evolution’. The same
remedial reading programme would disabuse him of
his fervent faith, and also of the notion that Darwin’s
‘insights remain the basis for… biology and much else
besides.’ Out of interest, what else? Social Darwinism,
such as Marxism and Nazism?
And J Robertson seems not to grasp the difference
between microevolution (species adapting to
environment) and macroevolution (one species
becoming another). The former has been known since
Lucretius and Plutarch; for the latter there isn’t a shred
of proof. To balance that ignorance, Robertson then
attacks the Scripture using the kind of literalism that puts
Lenin’s League of the Militant Godless to shame.
Still, in the spirit of this anniversary year I suggest
a compromise: Most people were indeed created by
God, but Messrs Haines, Sidwell and Robertson may
have descended from the chimpanzee. This way we
can all be happy.
Alexander Boot
Sir,
While it can prove hazardous to comment all too briefly
on certain ‘Jewish’ issues, isn’t it fair to say that the
anti-racism paradox pushed by Christie Davies (SR
Spring 2009) exceeds common-sense in asserting that
36
an attack on a specific claim found in Hebrew writings
‘is an attack on us all’?
Since the texts called the ‘Old’ Testament, though
historically unique, are hardly infallible, are we obliged
to believe statements attributed to an ancient ‘ethnic’ deity
even if Davies thinks Christianity depends on them?
His narrow criteria for membership of our civilization
might qualify Disraeli and Balfour, but where would
he put Origen, Justinian, Luther, Voltaire, Kant and
Freud to make an infinitesimal selection from our great
predecessors?
What about those modern scholars, Jews and Gentiles
alike, who rightly or wrongly attribute even ‘left-wing’
anti-Semitism largely to the ‘New’ Testament, like the
late Hyam Maccoby who said the ‘only permanent
solution’ to anti-semitism was to ‘dismantle’ the
Atonement doctrine of Christianity?
It is rather more complicated than Davies might
suppose, but when he condemns even Jewish critics of
Zionist or Israeli policies as anti-Semitic, his otherwise
shallow tirade strikes a dangerous note; especially
since the last war, the ‘anti-semite’ label should not
be pinned loosely on anyone.
J Robertson, Norfolk
Sir,
I applaud the article on racism by Christie Davies.(SR
Spring 2009) In the 1960s my father was a guest at the
wedding of a Prince in Uganda. Some of the courtiers
were aghast at the union; the ebony Prince was marrying
‘a black woman’ — from a tribe of even darker hue.
Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape commented that,
if a ‘foreigner’ joins a circle of 10 ‘natives’, he will be
feted and given special treatment. Two foreigners will
be tolerated. If three foreigners come along they will be
rejected. This he says is human nature. I believe that, in
private gatherings, we need to be able to associate, or more
important to ‘disassociate’, in whatever way we wish.
Tom Burkard makes interesting points in ‘The
Housing Trap’. Here in Hastings, we were recently
asked to comment on plans to build on a greenfield
site, so that everyone here would be adequately housed.
I said that we should build no new houses at all. We
should do nothing which might facilitate population
growth in this benighted country.
Needless to say my view has been scorned.
Michael Plumbe, Hastings
ARTS AND BOOKS
Bursting Bubbles
Charles Cecil
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the
World, Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, 2008, £25.
The conception of this book could hardly have been
more prescient in its timing. The long view that
Professor Ferguson takes of the development and
achievements of the financial world is evidently not
shared by all his readers or interlocutors who queried
whether he had given the book the wrong name. Indeed
his afterword is entitled ‘The Descent of Money’
though it is clear that there is a question mark or tongue
in cheek silently present. The book demonstrates a wide
range of research and erudition that have always been
the author’s hallmark.
Ferguson communicates with great clarity how
ancient are the roots of finance, and how early in
history financial sophistication and complexity were
achieved. He cites the promissory notes effectively in
place in Babylon four millennia ago and international
banking developing in mediaeval Europe. He traces the
origins of the bond markets and of stock exchanges, of
insurance, life assurance (and mortality tables).
Ferguson covers a number of colourful venues
— Potosi in Bolivia, Canton, Florence, New Orleans
— to illustrate aptly key aspects of financial history
(and effective for the television series which was
successfully created alongside the book). No less
colourful are the myriad scandals, bankruptcies and
other forms of ruin. The John Law affair in 18th
Century France involved the whole machinery and
credit of the state and undermined France’s ability to
develop the financial flexibility and effective systems
which might have helped the Ancien Régime survive.
Inevitably this book is weighted towards the last
100 years and especially to more recent years still.
The various aspects of money in all its forms have
flowed into the globalisation of finance, the blurring of
boundaries and the creation of greater interdependence
and risk.
There is a fascinating example of how the Harvard
Business School teaches its students about how
easily and rapidly possible credit and money can be
created and the crucial issue of liquidity (for bank
and borrower) when deposits are withdrawn and
loans called in. It would appear that the lesson was
quickly forgotten by some of the pupils who rose with
comparable swiftness in the financial world.
What this book does very well is to remind the reader
how extreme volatility, crashes, scandals, tumbling
markets, fallen financial titans have always been a
feature of finance. Yet despite the set-backs, the hugely
increased prosperity of the world is shown to have been
impossible without the ingenuity and risk-taking that
accompanied it. This is not to deny that matters could
have been achieved with less financial blood spilt,
fewer governments or countries destabilised. However
this would have required an unheard-of degree of
effective supervision and regulation and bankers of
impeccable wisdom and prudence. The systems and
training were not developed in earlier centuries and are
shown to be lacking again — potentially on an even
larger scale than ever seen before.
Practical memories in finance are very short and
probably have become shorter over the last 30 or 40
years. Ferguson points out that the average career of
a Wall Street CEO is 25 years — not long enough to
have first-hand experience of the 1970s oil and gold
price peaks. He could just as well have mentioned that
many of the traders, loan and bond issue chiefs have
only now encountered for the first time a severe and
prolonged credit downturn. The Laws of Hammurabi
instructed debt forgiveness every three years — rather
too frequent for today’s market but the principle is
perhaps being applied willy nilly. Recourse to the
lessons of history seems always to have been made too
late and with the intention either to see whether they
can be applied to staunch an already full-blown crisis
or to allow commentators who failed to predict disaster
to take refuge in analysis of its causes.
The well-known warning signs do not seem to change
much: claims that ‘this time it is different’, stock
market tips from dubious and unqualified sources,
a tendency to ignore the primacy of liquidity and
the potential (because rare) of catastrophic systemic
failures. Ferguson rightly emphasises the sometimes
disastrous effect of human nature (especially en masse)
— the panic. He makes it clear that he believes that the
current crisis is potentially one of the most important
dislocations in the history of money and finance.
Major changes not just in regulation but in types of
financial institutions are likely. In an article elsewhere,
he makes the valid point that a reduction of debt must
37
be a more logically prudent policy than replacing
an over-leveraged private sector with an even more
overleveraged public sector even though the reduction
of debt will cause major casualties.
It would have been interesting to have seen more
of a discussion of the ethical aspects of finance —
especially in relation to bubbles and collapses. Moral
hazard in particular — relating in its narrow definition
to banks and lending — has greater relevance today
than before since the systems that create it are more
fully developed. A globalised and interconnected
financial system makes moral hazard a greater threat.
The historic ambivalence of certain religions is well
covered here, and the implications for the development
of money; but perhaps there is another short book to be
written on the ethical angle which has strong potential
effects and implications.
This is a highly readable and important book,
bringing proper historical perspective to a topic which
in normal times has commentators looking back no
more than the inside of a decade.
Race and Equality
Christie Davies
The Global Bell Curve, Race, I.Q. and Inequality
Worldwide, Richard Lynn, Washington Summit, 2008,
hb $49.95, pb $19.95.
Richard Lynn has followed up his earlier books
demonstrating the difference in average intelligence
levels between nations and ethnic groups with a very
comprehensive work indeed, covering every continent
and many countries. The most striking thing about
his work and that of his colleagues who believe
that intelligence is largely inherited and affected by
environment only to a limited extent is that they have
a research programme that makes progress. Their
predications are regularly confirmed and as new
evidence is gathered it fits snugly into place in the
existing theory and is congruent with previous findings.
Every time a measurement or an experiment is made, it
is open to repetition and independent researchers nearly
always then come up with the same findings.
By contrast Lynn’s opponents are in serious trouble.
They lack coherence and are forced into speculative
philosophising or picking holes in occasional past
studies that went wrong. They love such foolishness
as ‘we do not really know what intelligence is’. It does
not matter. The important point psychologists have
established is that if general intelligence is measured
38
using standard tests, they can predict with some
accuracy how well individuals are likely to perform
in life at a great variety of practical and commercial
as well as academic tasks. This holds true even if the
results are kept secret and only consulted many years
later. The test scores are not perfect predictors and
no one has ever claimed that they are, so that citing
individual exceptions is irrelevant; other personal and
social factors are also important, all that Lynn and his
colleagues claim is that IQ is the best single predictor
of performance. Races and ethnic groups can not in
themselves possess an intelligence score for they are
social entities, not individuals; but Lynn indicates how
it is possible to measure the intelligence of individuals
who belong to such a group and calculate both the
average intelligence of its members and the standard
deviation, the degree of variation within the group.
Such findings are unwelcome to the leftists for whom
it is a dogma that all classes, ethnic groups and races
have the same average intelligence and that we have
only to tweak the educational system a bit and all
will have equal numbers of prizes. A Labour schools’
minister, Lord Andreas Adonis, fumes that ‘There is
no genetic or moral reason why the whole of society
should not succeed to the degree that the children
of the professional classes do today.’ Unfortunately
there is. Many normal people are seriously stupid in
exactly the same sense that I am completely unmusical,
even though my hearing is not in any way impaired.
However much training in music I might be given, I
would fail dismally. The children of the professional
classes contain a larger proportion of innately bright
children than the classes below them which is why they
are more likely to succeed. Due to the regression effect
(which is essentially genetic) there are of course, a
sizeable number of bright children among the offspring
of not so clever parents, something that would not
happen if environment predominated. One of the most
important uses to which IQ tests can be put is to identify
bright children from poor families and help them to
overtake dimwits from professional families who have
Cameronian social accomplishments that make them
look good but who are basically incompetent.
Lynn now claims to have shown how innate
differences in average intelligence between groups
explain a very large part of the differences in their
economic performance, indeed far more than does
alleged discrimination by one group against another
and more than can be explained by looking at cultural
differences. IQ is the variable with the greatest
explanatory power.
Let us take Lynn’s detailed studies of the East
Asians, the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans who
are significantly more intelligent on average than
Europeans. Everyone knows of the very rapid economic
development of these countries and economists and
sociologists wrangle about the reasons but they are
usually unwilling to admit or even to consider that
one of these is their high intelligence. The East Asians
are culturally quite dissimilar but genetically similar,
which accounts for their common high ability. Even
more significant is the rapid economic advancement of
the descendants of these peoples who have migrated
to countries with a very unfamiliar culture and where
they have suffered considerable discrimination. Lynn
goes in detail through the Canadian and Brazilian
data. The Chinese came to Canada in the early years
of the twentieth century as poor and illiterate labourers
and took on unskilled menial work. Both official and
informal discrimination excluded them from many
opportunities. Yet by 1981 the Chinese had higher
educational attainments and qualifications than other
Canadians and a higher proportion in the professions
than any other group except the Jews. How else can
this be explained, given that other groups of Canadian
immigrants less handicapped by poverty and illiteracy
and possessed of more ‘cultural capital’ on arrival tend
to produce individuals who often fail quite badly?
What is the underlying difference between these latter
who fail and the East Asians who have succeeded?
Likewise the majority of Japanese immigrants to
Brazil were indentured farm labourers drawn from
the most desperately poor strata in their home country.
Yet their descendants have far higher earnings than
the Europeans in Brazil and though only 0.7 per cent
of the population, the Japanese provide 17 per cent of
the students at the prestigious University of Sao Pãolo.
Sociologists have tried to explain this remarkable story
entirely in cultural terms — the Japanese emphasis
on adaptation and education and qualities of ambition
and perseverance. They do not even mention their
much higher IQs. Now Lynn would not deny that the
Japanese cultural virtues are important but would, I
think, say ‘Yes both culture and innate intelligence
are important but let us try and assess (allowing for
their interaction) how big a part of Japanese success is
explained by culture and how big a part by IQ.’ Lynn
and his colleagues think IQ is the more important but
they have an entirely open-minded approach. It is only
the sociologists and economic development theorists
who are utterly closed minded and are only willing to
consider culture to the utter neglect of IQ.
Their dogmatism is even more remarkable when
it comes to explaining why the Chinese dominate
commerce in South-East Asia and are so heavily overrepresented in higher education and in professional
and managerial occupations in the region, despite in
many cases considerable legal discrimination against
them. Lynn has read and lists here all the conventional
sociological and development-guru explanations
— Confucianism (once seen by Max Weber as a
source of backwardness), family ties (elsewhere
often a hindrance), greed (it is acceptable to call them
greedy but not intelligent — shades of Europe’s antiSemitism?) minority status (yet most minorities fail)
and even mere luck (like having eight winning lottery
tickets in a row, possible but very unlikely). What is
left out, as Lynn forcibly reminds us, is that the Chinese
in south-East Asia have median IQs of 105 and the
indigenous peoples median IQs of only 89 (based on
British base figure of 100). Sixteen IQ points is a very
large gap indeed and must have a correspondingly
large effect on economic performance. Why has it been
ignored? Only a blunt Singapore political leader said
of the poor performance of the Malays relative to the
Chinese in examinations and especially in mathematics
that it could be attributed to ‘innate differences in
learning aptitudes’. He added that the government
should resign itself to the fact that the Malays were
grossly inferior to the Chinese in mathematics. It is
not about nutrition, the most important environmental
factor. Europeans are not going to catch up with the
East Asians by eating at their local Chinese take-away.
Most Europeans eat far better than most Chinese but
on average they are not as bright.
Why are European and American researchers, who
have no interest in a racial competition that does not
involve them, unable to see and admit that Lee was
telling the truth? Is it because they are afraid that
conceding the point might have ideologically dangerous
implications for their own ethnically and racially mixed
societies? They are also probably uncomfortable with
the fact that the Chinese in Singapore score as much as
ten IQ points higher than Europeans; the standard leftwing rant about IQ tests is that they are Eurocentric and
merely a way of legitimizing a European sense of racial
and cultural superiority. Why should Europeans design
tests in which they are easily surpassed by the peoples
of East Asia? Are these super bright folk not the same
ones who used to be unpleasantly denigrated as chinks
and coolies and scorned by the bigoted former French
Prime Minister, Mme Edith Cressant as ‘the little
yellow men’? Why do the Ashkenazi Jews score so
much higher on tests designed by gentiles in societies
where Jews have often suffered discrimination and
exclusion?
Richard Lynn stresses the sheer consistency of
relative IQ scores throughout the world and their strong
predictive power about which groups will produce
the largest proportion of successful individuals and
which will produce very few. His opponents have
nothing with which to match this, merely a ragbag of
39
unconnected objections. Yet as Lynn notes ‘the history
of science tells us that new theories that undermine
cherished and strongly held beliefs are typically either
ignored or viciously attacked’. The sociologists and
development theorists tend to ignore IQ and some of
them pretend that they do not understand it because
it is outside their field. Either they are negligent or
they are liars. Even more disturbing are the dishonest,
shameful smears they produced to discredit individuals
who work on innate intelligence. One is a trick familiar
from my own very different field of research that I
term ‘one-eyed rigour’. It means that if a survey or
an experiment gives results that are politically correct
and convenient, those in power ignore the grossest of
errors in method or data. If the results contradict some
egalitarian dogma, they desperately hunt for some
minor statistical error, in some small sub-section of
the study, that has an insignificant effect on the final
results and then denounce the author for fraud and try
to get him sacked. Most studies of any complexity will
have a minor error somewhere that does not matter very
much, so it is an easy if disreputable trick to play. The
recent Danish witch-hunt against the eminent Professor
of Psychology Helmuth Nyborg of the University of
Aarhus was of this kind; it was curiously similar to
the earlier dishonest attempt to destroy the sceptical
environmentalist, Dr Bjorn Lomborg. If the same kind
of grubby campaign had been mounted against Gregor
Mendel, who almost certainly rounded his figures, plant
genetics would have been eliminated at source. The
worst case of all was when a British academic asked
the East Germany Communist authorities to silence the
University of Leipzig psychologist Professor Volkmar
Weiss because his work was showing that intelligence
is innate and inherited. Equality has become the
enemy of truth, and is the Big Lie of our time. Still, at
least Richard Lynn has stood his ground against the
hegemonic power of the egalitarians.
Western Allies
A W Purdue
Masters and Commanders. How Roosevelt,
Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the
War in the West, Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane, 2008,
£25.
In democracies politicians are the masters who direct
wars and their aims are implemented by their senior
military officers, the commanders. The bitter conflict
between the ‘Frocks’ and the ‘Brass Hats’ in Britain
during the First World War suggests that theory and
40
practice do not always coincide. In the Second World
War relations between the elected civilian leaders of the
USA and Great Britain and the professional warriors
were more, but far from entirely, harmonious. The
US Admiral King, who thought that civilians should
be told nothing of the war until it ended and then only
who had won, was exceptional, though General Alan
Brooke’s comment, that ‘the more you tell that man
[Churchill] about the war, the more you hinder the
winning of it’, runs it close.
Andrew Roberts’s book deals with the four men who
he considers were responsible for victory in the West
in the Second World War: Winston Churchill, Franklin
D Roosevelt, General Sir Alan Brooke and General
George C Marshall. This is a study of the complex
and often stormy relations between four strong and
determined men. Two were British and two Americans
and two were politicians and two generals but their
disagreements and alliances were not always aligned
with their nationalities or professions. Whether any two
actually liked each other is uncertain, but they worked
together from the end of 1941 until Roosevelt’s death
in April 1945. Roberts sees the four men, until the
winter of 1943-44, as dancing a complicated minuet
with the three who were in step forcing the reluctant
acquiescence of the fourth. From this point the strength
of the American economy and the might of the US
armed forces made Britain very much the junior partner
and Churchill and Brooke had reluctantly to give way
to Roosevelt and Marshall.
Churchill considered that he had established a
warm and close relationship with Roosevelt even
before he became Prime Minister, when as First Lord
of the Admiralty he started writing to the American
President, signing himself, ‘Former Naval Person’.
He overestimated the strength of this connection,
much as he exaggerated the special relationship
between Britain and the USA, but during 1942 and
1943 it was Churchill’s and Brooke’s arguments
against a precipitate invasion of France and for action
in the Mediterranean that gained Roosevelt’s support
and prevailed against the view of Marshall and the
American Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Brooke became Chief of the Imperial General Staff
late in 1941, replacing General Sir John Dill, whom
Churchill found insufficiently vigorous and nicknamed
‘Dilly-Dally’. He certainly found the forthright
Ulsterman too vigorous because Brooke stood up to
him and contradicted him. Views on the relationship
between Churchill and Brooke run along a spectrum:
loved, liked and respected, respected, grudgingly
respected. Because you can find a warm phrase from
Brooke to balance a critical one, most historians seem
to settle for mutual respect. Roberts leaves the reader
to decide. The problem was that Churchill, despite
a rather dire record in this department, considered
himself an expert in military and naval matters and
Brooke was always having to dissuade him from illjudged initiatives, particularly schemes for landings in
Norway. Churchill had, at any rate until the surrender of
Singapore, total faith in the ability of the British army,
while Brooke knew only too well its weaknesses and
also appreciated the amazing ability of the Wehrmacht.
Yet the two men complemented each other: Churchill
had enthusiasm, tenacity and the ability to inspire;
and Brooke had caution, cool judgement and
professionalism. Brooke would have made a terrible
prime minister and Churchill a hopeless CIGS but
together they were a formidable partnership.
Only Roosevelt amongst the four laid no great
claim to military judgement. Each of the other three
considered himself the only man who really knew
how to win the war. If Brooke took a dim view of
Churchill as a military expert, he had no regard for
Marshall’s abilities as a strategist either. Brooke saw
Churchill nearly every day, while weeks might go by
without Marshall seeing Roosevelt, something which
made Brooke rather envious, and the relationship
between them was formal. Marshall and the US
Joint Chiefs rather resented what they considered
to be Churchill’s influence over Roosevelt, which
they blamed for the President siding with the British
over putting off the invasion of France in 1942 and
again in 1943. It may well have been, however, the
President’s own instincts together with the arguments
of the British Chiefs of Staff, backed up as they were
by the detailed assessments of the British planning and
intelligence staff, that convinced him that landings in
France might fail and that the Mediterranean offered
the better opportunity for allied forces. Certainly at
the Casablanca Conference Marshall felt he was outmanoeuvred. The United States had adopted a ‘Europe
First’ policy, only, so it appeared to Marshall, to be
led down a Mediterranean garden path, a strategy
that favoured the interests of the British Empire, with
a direct thrust at Germany put off to an indefinite
future.
Relations between both Brooke and Churchill and
between the American and British Chiefs of Staff
were particularly cantankerous at the first Quebec
Conference in August 1943. At one point Churchill
shook his fist at the CIGS saying, ‘I do not want any
of your long term projects. They cripple initiative!’ A
Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting became so heated
that Brooke and Marshall had to tell their staffs to
leave while they had a closed session. After this, the
impulsive and flamboyant Mountbatten demonstrated
the new invention Pykrete, a mixture of wood and ice
from which it was proposed to create a floating airfield
codenamed ‘Habbakuk’. Ushering the Combined
Chiefs into a room in which there was a block of
ice and a block of Pykrete, he proceeded to draw his
revolver and fire at the ice and then at the Pykrete.
The shots ricocheted off the Pykrete and, as Brooke
recalled, ‘buzzed round our legs like an angry bee’. A
staff officer outside exclaimed, ‘Good heavens, they’ve
started shooting now!’
Roberts thinks that the British reluctance for an
invasion of France and enthusiasm for operations in
the Mediterranean and Italy were justified until 1944,
but wrong when they endured into the first months
of that year by which point Roosevelt had swung
towards support for Marshall and for Overlord. There
is inevitably a degree of hindsight in this judgement:
there were no invasions in 1942 or 1943 and the
Normandy landings in 1944 were successful. Churchill
and Brooke were never against landings in France but
were ever conscious of the difficulties and the dangers
of failure. In the end the British Staff organised the
bulk of the detailed preparations and most of those
who made the initial landings were British and
Commonwealth troops. Whether earlier landings
would have been successful is imponderable but the
odds against success were greater. Equally, changes in
the weather or better tactics by the German defenders
could have led to a different outcome in June 1944. It
is always easy to regard a battle won as a battle always
likely to be won.
The other major Anglo-American difference
concerned the Soviet Union. Churchill’s post-war
writing exaggerated the degree to which he anticipated
Stalin’s intention to dominate East-Central Europe and
realised his innate hostility to the western allies, and
Brooke was much more consistent in his distrust of the
Soviet Union, but Churchill realised the need to align
military strategy to political goals. Neither Roosevelt
nor Marshall thought in such terms but only considered
the means of winning the war with the President putting
his faith, in a manner reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson,
in a new world order that would reconcile political
differences. From the Teheran Conference in 1943,
the USA moved closer to the Russians, leaving Britain
increasingly the odd one out. Churchill’s realpolitik
approach to Stalin with the ‘Percentage Agreement’
in October 1944 was a last attempt to gain agreement
on the shape of post-war Europe and one, he could
later claim, that saved Greece from the ‘flood of
Bolshevism’.
Despite all the differences the Anglo-American
Alliance held and until Roosevelt’s death the four
remained the same but with the Americans firmly
in charge. Brooke and Marshall sacrificed their
41
ambitions for the common good for both wished
for field commands but neither trusted his master’s
judgement sufficiently to leave his side. Brooke turned
down command of the Eighth Army to remain CIGS
while Marshall could have had command of Overlord
but decided that he could serve his country better
by remaining Chief of Staff; Brooke had been twice
promised that command by Churchill who not only
failed to keep his promise but made little effort to do
so. One result is that there is a far greater association
of the names Eisenhower and Montgomery than those
of Marshall and Alanbrooke with victory in World
War II.
Rich People in Poor Countries
Edward Clay
It’s Our Turn To Eat — The Story of a Kenyan
Whistleblower, Michela Wrong, Fourth Estate Ltd,
2009, £12.99.
‘It’s our turn to eat’ is about corruption in Kenya. The
title quotes the appeal his ethnic peers made to John
Githongo — the man they had appointed as presidential
adviser on corruption — not to betray their collective
interests by doing that job properly. The election
of a reforming government in late 2002 had raised
high expectations of change in that most distinctive
characteristic of Kenya’s political culture, corruption. It
was expected that past scandals would be investigated
and resolved and the first steps taken in preventing
future corruption. At last, evidence emerged which
seemed strong enough to sustain action. Inquiries in
these years began to inform us about the Goldenberg
scandal — the definitive scandal of the Moi era — and
the Anglo-Leasing scams which came to light under
the new President, Mwai Kibaki, but the government
prevented action.
There is inevitably much detail and Michela Wrong
handles it beautifully, with the style that made her
two previous books so engrossing. There is a grand
theme too in ‘It’s our turn to eat’: betrayal. The story
is Shakespearean in its sweep. John Githongo was
brought from a post as a well-known campaigner
against corruption to one of the most exposed jobs in
government. He came from the right background to
work from within the new establishment. Enormous
hopes reposed in him. Yet, as he turned over the stones,
it was borne in on him that he was being impeded not
just by inertia and the culture of ingrained acceptance
42
of wrongdoing, he was being obstructed, deliberately,
by the very people at the heart of the government
which had appointed him. At first, they cautioned him
with Talleyrand’s advice to his diplomats: Surtout,
messieurs, point de zèle (Above all, gentlemen, no
zeal). Then they turned on him with accusations of
betrayal — of his President, of his government and,
above all, of their ethnic and economic interests.
Ironically, the betrayal was theirs. Its ugliness led to
Githongo’s flight in fear of his life in early 2005.
Michela Wrong does this grand theme proud. She
brings the protagonists to vivid life. The heroes are all
the better for being portrayed without sentimentality
and with warts. The question by the last page is: was
it all worth it? Does the story end in disillusionment?
For some who believed in Githongo’s campaign, and
admired his steadfastness, quite possibly. The price
was high for its central figure. But Githongo is not
disillusioned. For him, the struggle is to stop politicians
robbing their own people. Githongo admits his error
in believing that elaborate institutions could effect
reform. The state’s institutions, including the law, can
be and have been deformed by corruption. He now
says he puts his hopes in ordinary people and their
growing anger about their rulers’ abuse of the trust
laid on them.
Now the cat is out of the bag. It is for Kenyans to
hold to account those who make them poor by diverting
public money from the public good to private ends.
There are lessons for Kenya’s overseas friends, too.
We development partners must re-examine our official
national and multilateral aid programmes, and the
implicit and explicit understandings on which they
are predicated. And we should raise our own game.
Britain is shamed by the OECD’s fierce criticisms of its
failure to carry out our international obligations against
corruption. With the banking system in pieces, perhaps
now is the time to cleanse its dark corners — and the
dark corners of other professions traditionally held
in high regard — of their readiness to handle money
stolen from struggling people in poor countries. That
money has been appropriated by the indecently rich in
poor countries who regard government not as a trust
or contract with the governed, but as their private
possession. We should have nothing to do with the
money nor the thieves beyond returning the first,
exposing and isolating the second.
We should stop sheltering bad governments from
the consequences of their people’s dissatisfaction. The
so-called donors should align their taxpayers’ interests
with Kenyans’. Kenyans are hard-headed people.
They do not understand the perverse and indulgent
waste of donor money on their corrupt leaders. They
see our ministers and similar signing cheques and
glad-handing those they know to be on the take. They
are confused about the message their donor friends
wish to send. If John Githongo is right, then ordinary
people must be encouraged to exercise more rigorously
and effectively their democratic right to hold corrupt
governments to account. The aid-givers should get out
of the way. They should no longer come between the
lion and his wrath.
Sir Edward Clay was Britain’s High Commissioner
to Kenya from 2001-2005 when he was outspoken on
governance questions including corruption.
Republics and Empires
James Houston
Children of the Revolution: The French 1799 to
1914, Robert Gildea, 2008, Allen Lane, £25.
In 1944 after liberating Paris, General De Gaulle
decided to use the Ministry of War in the Rue St
Dominique as his HQ. As he mounted the steps to the
building he reflected that this was the spot from which
he had boarded the car which took him to the airport and
exile, in 1940. A gendarme came smartly to attention as
he approached and De Gaulle was astonished to note
that it was the same man who had saluted him as he
left the Ministry in four years previously. ‘From that’,
he later wrote, ‘I came to understand the continuity of
institutions’.
The themes of continuity and change in the life
and politics of France are central to this meticulously
researched study. Gildea examines the impact of the
Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic regime and
charts the failure of the successive regimes of restored
Bourbons, Orleanists, a Napoleonic restoration and
another republic to achieve the legitimacy necessary
to sustain them in the face of economic distress, defeat
in war (the Second Empire) or just the onslaught of
their opponents. Not, he argues, until the institution of
a Third Republic in 1871 in response to a disastrous
war which had precipitated the disintegration of the
second and last Napoleonic Empire, was a political
system established in which the various factions
could contend for power within a flawed, but broadly
legitimate, constitutional framework.
France faced a particularly acute crisis in 1815 in
the aftermath of Waterloo. A new governing class had
to emerge and grip the mass of political and social
problems stemming from a quarter century of war and
revolution. This process was complicated by the refusal
of certain émigrés to serve a regime which was, from a
very early stage, clearly not going to turn the clock back
to 1789 and by the exclusion of most revolutionaries,
Bonapartists and Orleanists from office unless they
had swiftly sworn allegiance to Louis XVIII, and not
always then. There were also bulwarks of the Empire
(such as Marshal Ney) who embraced the Bourbons
in 1814 and then, in the Churchillian phrase, ‘reratted’
during the Hundred Days. No wonder that Talleyrand
concluded that treason was a matter of dates.
France was fortunate in her first restoration monarch.
Chateaubriand identified his two great qualities as: la
modération et la noblesse. How much of the former
stemmed from natural lassitude or his indifferent health
(he suffered from gangrene towards the end of his life
and his valet frequently found bits of toe in his socks) is
hard to gauge but despite the numerous misjudgements
of a succession of ministers whose autocratic instincts
sat uneasily with the irreversible changes in French
society which the Revolution and Napoleonic regimes
had brought about, his conciliatory approach left the
monarchy in a relatively secure position at his death
in 1824. His brother and successor Charles X, truly
drawn from the strain of Bourbons who had learned
and forgotten nothing, swiftly upset the delicate
equilibrium and was the first of three successive
French monarchs to enjoy Albion’s hospitality after
an ignominious flight from Paris.
The instinct of both the Bourbons and their Orleanist
successor, Louis Philippe, was to severely restrict the
franchise to the wealthy. Enrichissez-vous! was the
famous advice of Louis Philippe’s able premier Guizot
to those who aspired to the vote. The mass electorate
which had voted in plebiscites under Napoleon
(beginning a tradition of plebiscitary dictatorship in
France which flourishes to this day) must have been
puzzled and aggrieved by the restrictions by which
the royalist regimes attempted to secure reactionary
majorities in successive assemblies, sometimes
producing Chambres which were too extreme even
for the Monarchy such as the celebrated chambre
introuvable of 1815. Ironically, as other regimes have
discovered, a brief reversion to a broad, if not universal,
(manhood) suffrage in 1848 produced a result which
did not differ markedly from the outcomes of much
more restrictive franchises. Two newly elected deputies
in that year, one a Legitimist, the other Orleanist,
recorded that they ‘could not help laughing... so little
had been changed by the revolution’.
Yet it had. Although after the collapse of the Second
Empire in 1870 France nearly restored the Bourbons
(a plan which characteristically foundered on the
insistence of the elderly Pretender, the Comte de
Chambord, that France should discard the tricouleur
in favour of the fleur de lys), a republic was eventually
43
founded which, with two major constitutional
mutations, endures to this day. So, in substance, do
Napoleon’s judicial system, and his system of local
administration by which a préfet, firmly accountable
to central government, supervises regional and local
councils which enjoy (despite recent reform) more
limited powers than in many other democratic states.
Between 1799 and 1914 France endured a succession
of regime changes, during each of which elements of the
outgoing governing class were excluded from power,
while exclus from previous regimes resumed control.
After 1871, under the form of government which
the veteran statesman Adolphe Thiers assured them
‘divided them least’ the French began a final process
of reconciling differences founded on adherence to
previous monarchies and forging a degree of national
unity and national focus which, Gildea argues, enabled
them, rallying to a union sacrée, to win the most
sanguinary war in French history (completing the
demographic catastrophe of the Napoleonic Wars).
That is true as far as it goes, but Gildea makes the
surprising decision to end his study in 1914. This means
that he takes no account of the effects of the horrific
loss of French life which, triggering mutinies at the
Front and rising defeatism at home, had brought France
to the verge of collapse by the time of Clemenceau’s
rise to power in 1917.
Furthermore, France between the wars could scarcely
be described as a united or stable polity. Neither the
powerful extreme Right nor the extreme Left were
prepared to play by the rules of the bourgeois republic.
When the Front Populaire won power in 1936 certain
leaders of society and industry really did murmur
‘better Hitler than Blum’ while in 1940 Communist
workers in French munitions factories were under
instructions from the Party to sabotage production. It is
true that the disputes were not now founded on which
previous royal or imperial dynasty should replace the
Third Republic, but the latter’s legitimacy was fatally
undermined.
With that qualification, this work offers not only a
masterly survey of the intricacies of the political and
diplomatic history of France from 1799 to 1914 but
also valuable insights into the economic and social
development of French society in the period. Sections
on cultural life and the effects of the rise of the mass
media and popular entertainments on music, painting
and the theatre are of particular interest.
However, given Gildea’s central thesis about
France’s process of reconciliation of the demons of
the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, one lays
down the book feeling that it has come to an end before
finishing the story. Was it perhaps only in 1958, when a
man assumed power who, understanding the continuity
44
of institutions and with ‘une certain idée de la France’,
founded a regime which, although termed a republic,
incorporates many of the powers and attributes of
monarchy, that a truly satisfying synthesis of French
traditions was achieved?
Trahison des Clercs
Nigel Jones
A Shameful Peace: How French Artists and
Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, Frederic
Spotts, Yale, 2008, £25.
France is well known for its illicit love affairs. No
passion was conducted more openly, nor caused more
subsequent shame, than the relationship between
its writing, daubing and chattering classes and the
Nazi forces who occupied the country between 1940
and 1944. In his spirited and refreshingly moralistic
account of these years, cultural historian Frederic
Spotts both chronicles and fearlessly castigates the
surprisingly large number of French intellectuals who
collaborated — or at least co-operated — with their
Hitlerite conquerors.
There is a danger in such hindsight history. It is all
very well to condemn the craven behaviour of various
half-forgotten scribblers, sculptors and film-makers
from the comfort of contemporary France, where
Spotts now lives. How would we have acted had an
accident of geography not cut Britain off from our
continental cousins across the Channel? Can we be
certain that our socialists — especially the middleclass Fabian variety — would not have emulated
their left-wing French counterparts like Laval, Doriot
and Deat and discovered that socialism could easily
morph into National Socialism? Shaw, Wells and the
Webbs had always nurtured a tendresse for totalitarian
tyrannies, and an enthusiasm for such eugenic Nazi
ideas as sterilisation of those considered unfit to breed.
Rather than heading for the hills and joining a Home
Counties Maquis, is it not far more probable that the
Fabians would have joined Goebbels’ front committees
promoting such ideas here in Britain?
We can well imagine such a counter-factual scenario
by examining, as Spotts does in forensic detail, how the
French creative and thinking classes behaved in cold
reality. There was something almost sexual about the
way that most French men and women accepted their
national humiliation at the hands of the jackbooted
victors. In Sartre’s Roads to Freedom the homosexual
character Daniel, who has already married the pregnant
girlfriend of the novel’s main protagonist Mathieu out
of sheer misogynistic masochism, rhapsodises about
the physical charms of ‘our conquerors’ — their blonde
locks, their lithe, sweaty flanks — and glories in his
subjugation. This attitude, the notion that France was
a woman opening her legs and welcoming a justified
rape by a virile and worthier victor, was widespread.
Sartre himself knew whereof he wrote. Unlike
his friend and literary rival Albert Camus, who
courageously edited the underground newspaper
Combat, the resistance activities of the bug-eyed author
of Being and Nothingness consisted of sitting around in
the Café Flore and grovelling to the German authorities
for permission to produce his play Huis Clos with its
dictum that ‘Hell is other people’. The Nazis graciously
decided that there was nothing in the piece to contradict
their ideology and allowed its première to go ahead.
The same permit was granted to the première of Jean
Anouilh’s masterpiece Antigone.
Most of France’s intellectuals followed Sartre’s
road to freedom rather than that of Camus. In a time
pretty short of French heroes only a tiny minority — of
whom, perhaps surprisingly, the nihilistic Samuel
Beckett was one — became active résistants. A slightly
larger number, including the writers Robert Brasillach,
Drieu la Rochelle and Henri Montherlant — a real life
version of Sartre’s fictional Daniel who adored the
Nazis for their physical chic as much as their ideas
— enthusiastically embraced the full Nazi agenda. In
Brasillach’s case — which cost him his life after the
war — this even extended to naming Jews in hiding in
the columns of his repulsive collaborationist rag Je Suis
Partout. A few more managed to avoid such unpleasant
choices by escaping across the Atlantic to the hitherto
despised USA. This group included a surprisingly large
number of artists: the Surrealists André Breton, Yves
Tanguy, and Max Ernst, along with Marc Chagall,
Fernand Leger, and André Masson.
Other painters took Goebbels’ shilling — to the
extent of touring Germany on one of the little doctor’s
propaganda junkets. This group included Maurice
Vlaminck, Kees Van Dongen and André Derain. Other
painters — Braque and Matisse among them, adopted
an attitude of aloof detachment, and attempted to ignore
the whole sordid business. The daddy of them all,
Pablo Picasso, remained in his Paris atelier throughout
the occupation, painting and womanising as he had
always done. Visited by a group of German officers,
an apocryphal story has them spying the canvas of
Guernica in a corner of the studio and asking in some
astonishment ‘Did you do that?’ No, responded the
master. ‘You did’.
It is perhaps not wise to make too much of this,
but France’s attitude to the Nazi occupation reflects
a worrying recurring pattern in the behaviour of
its intellectual élite — which, in a country which
prides itself on its cerebral distinction, is another
way of saying its ruling class. Ever since Diderot’s
encyclopaedists went overboard for the French
revolution, its leading thinkers have rushed to embrace
doctrines at complete variance with the supposed ideals
of liberty and fraternity. The Rousseau fans applauded
the Jacobin Terror; Stendhal revered and served the
murderous Bonaparte; le tout Paris swooned before
the Bishop-slaughtering Commune; the pacifist Henri
Barbusse loved the blood-bolted Lenin; the three
Andrés — Gide, Malraux and Breton — became mistyeyed Marxists, and lent their names and reputations to
Stalinism.
Even after the nightmare of occupation, when, one
would have thought, lessons would have been learned
about freedom and dictatorship, Sartre, de Beauvoir
and their many cohorts flung themselves at the feet of
the monstrous Mao. There is, of course, a recurrent red
thread in all this: an envious hatred and hostility of les
Anglo-Saxons who have become the global role model
and superpower rather than la civilisation Française
(as one of my French school textbooks vaingloriously
called itself). All this is most evident in Spotts’s pages.
Many — far too many for comfort — of France’s
intellectual elite were bought off by the Nazis with
a few cultural bon-bons. In hungry, ration-pinched
Paris there was little that a French homme des artes
like Cocteau or Barrault would not do for the chance
of slurping sekt and wolfing canapés at a German
embassy reception.
Spotts does not hesitate to name and shame. The
whores who nibbled the crumbs that fell from the
occupiers’ table included not just the honest actress and
singer Mistinguett who, after the war when taxed with
her affairs with German officers sweetly responded ‘My
heart is French, but my body is international’, but such
famous names as Sacha Guitry, Maurice Chevalier and
Georges Simenon. Frankly, one feels more respect for
the open fascists: Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Lucien
Rebatet, rather than for these slippery opportunists who
sold their souls for an invite to a Nazi party. Spotts’s
eye-opening book shows why Vichy and Occupied
France remained closed books in France for so long
after the war, and why the French were so grateful
to accept De Gaulle’s myth of a nation of patriotic
resisters. One can also breathe in some relief: ‘There,
but for the grace of God, went I’.
Nigel Jones is author of Countdown to Valkyrie: the
July Plot to Assassinate Hitler, (Frontline Books,
2009).
45
Reason’s Light Rekindled
Michael St John Parker
The Roads to Modernity, Gertrude Himmelfarb,
Vintage Books, 2008, £8.99.
Time was when a Prime Minister’s recommendation
might have added academic as well as social kudos to a
newly-published book. The present occupant of Number
10, although he notoriously aspires to an intellectual
reputation, hardly measures up to a Gladstone or a
Salisbury. So it is unbecoming in Gordon Brown
to patronise so distinguished a scholar as Gertrude
Himmelfarb by assuring us, in his Introduction to her
Roads to Modernity, that the book, which was first
brought out in the United States, ‘is now rightly being
published in Britain’. Still more impertinently, Brown
claims that his government has finally succeeded in
giving practical realisation to the system of values
evolved during the British Enlightenment as described
by Himmelfarb. As if all that was not enough, we are
treated to a non sequitur that must almost rank with his
famous slip of the tongue in the House of Commons:
‘Coming from Kirkcaldy as Adam Smith did, I have
come to understand that his Wealth of Nations was
underpinned by his Theory of Moral Sentiments.’
Good wine needs no bush, and while Himmelfarb’s
publishers may be regretting giving a transient
politician the opportunity to parade his self-importance,
the book itself is vintage Himmelfarb. Its aim is ‘to
reclaim the Enlightenment — from critics who decry
it and defenders who acclaim it uncritically, from
postmodernists who deny its existence and historians
who belittle it, above all, from the French who have
dominated and usurped it’. This is no small programme,
given the weight of study that has been devoted to the
Enlightenment, since Betty Behrens’s ground-breaking
article in the Historical Journal in 1968. Himmelfarb’s
230 pages of elegant prose, admirably supported by
notes and references, hardly offer more than a critical
recension of ideas that have been much debated
by historians in recent years, but her commanding
oversight makes this a most valuable study.
Himmelfarb’s Enlightenment is firmly placed in the
eighteenth century — she sets aside the views of such
writers as Ira Wade and Jonathan Israel who identify
its origins in the seventeenth century or earlier — and
locates its epicentre in Britain rather than France
(though disagreeing with Roy Porter that the British
Enlightenment was responsible for ‘the creation of
the modern world’). It is a matter above all of ideas
46
— not, as Daniel Roche or Robert Darnton would have
it, an expression of social activity, still less a name for
certain vogues in architecture or music. Himmelfarb
is ‘unapologetic, and unironic, in dealing with those
ideas about religion, liberty ... which, in different times
and degrees, shaped the distinctive Enlightenment of
the three countries that were so dramatically affected
by them: France, Britain, and America’.
If earlier historians like Alfred Cobban or Franco
Venturi now look outdated in their denials of the
existence of an Enlightenment in England, there
is still room for dispute about the precise nature
and significance of the phenomenon, and about
its relationship with the Scottish Enlightenment.
Himmelfarb follows Pocock and Porter in asserting
the unity of the two in a single British Enlightenment,
and makes it unambiguously clear that she sees it as
a ‘progenitor’, not merely in the sense that Bacon,
Newton and Locke gave fresh directions to thought
across all Europe, but more specifically in that Smith,
Hume and their British colleagues exercised influence
more seminally, in the long perspective, than their
French contemporaries.
Himmelfarb argues that French-based definitions
of the concept of Enlightenment cannot adequately
describe the reality of what was happening in
eighteenth-century Britain. Her pragmatic approach
leads her to consider, as within the bounds of ‘her’
British Enlightenment, figures who have more usually
been regarded by historians as ‘non-Enlightenment’ or
even ‘anti-Enlightenment’ types: Burke, Price, Priestley,
and even John Wesley and William Hogarth.
The British Enlightenment represents ‘the sociology
of virtue’, the French ‘the ideology of reason’,
the American ‘the politics of liberty’. The British
moral philosophers were sociologists as much as
philosophers, concerned with man in relation to
society and looking to the social virtues for the basis
of a healthy and humane society. The French had a
more exalted mission: to make reason the governing
principle of society as well as mind, to ‘rationalise’ the
world. The Americans, more modestly, sought to create
a new ‘science of politics’ that would establish the new
republic upon a sound foundation of liberty.
Himmelfarb presents Shaftesbury’s assertion of
the existence of an innate social ethic in all men as
the predominating concept in eighteenth-century
British thought, prevailing over both the experiential
theories of Locke and the Hobbesian materialism of
Mandeville. Exploration of this concept of a social
ethic, and of its practical applications, is seen as the
common preoccupation that united the Scottish moral
philosophers with contemporary English political
thinkers including Burke, the historian Gibbon, with
radical dissenters such as Price and Priestley, and with
movers and shakers of popular culture including Wesley
and Hogarth. Only the extravagantly Francophile and
reason-addicted Paine and Godwin stand outside this
comprehensive fold.
The British Enlightenment commands Himmelfarb’s
sympathy, equally for its intellectual depth and for
its practical benevolence, and she writes of it with
discriminating warmth. The frigid rationalism of its
French analogue, on the other hand, impresses her
more by its limitations than by its achievements,
and she treats it with a curtness that verges on the
censorious. The narrowness of the Encyclopaedists’
social sensibilities — exemplified in their inflexible
contempt for those they called the ‘canaille’, their
occasional vicious anti-semitism, their refusal to
advocate education as a route to social improvement —
comes in for scathing condemnation. For Himmelfarb,
these French rationalists were as unwise as they were
unkind in their indifference to the condition of their
society. They evinced a fatal political ineptitude in
their almost unanimous adhesion to the so-called thèse
royale, which aligned them with the fortunes of the
Bourbons and brought some of them to destruction
in the Terror.
In the last resort, however, Himmelfarb’s tolerance
shines through in her judgement of the French
Enlightenment: ‘The philosophes, living in a country
that was neither autocratic nor free, that was erratic
in its exercise of censorship and prosecution, that had
never experienced the kind of reform of either church
or state which might encourage another generation
of reformers, could hardly aspire to influence policy
as their counterparts in Britain or America could....
They were, in effect, all the more free to theorise and
generalise precisely because they were less free to
consult and advise.’
In the emergent United States realism triumphed over
ideology in the pursuit of liberty. Himmelfarb does not
minimise the differences between Federalists and antiFederalists, any more than she shirks recognising that
practice sat uneasily with theory in lives such as that
of the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson. The essence
of the American Enlightenment was the successful
establishment of a working polity of fundamentally
libertarian quality in a brand-new nation — something
entirely different from, however much it may have
been influenced by, the socially-orientated thought and
activity of the British Enlightenment, or the abstract
ratiocination of the French.
The place of religion in the American Enlightenment
is of particular interest and significance. The Founding
Fathers were steeped in a tradition of thinking that
Himmelfarb traces back to Shaftesbury’s ideas about
innate virtue, religion was understood as something
‘rooted in the very nature of man and as such… reflected
in the moeurs of the people and in the traditions and
informal institutions of society. To make either virtue or
religion the direct objects of government — and of the
national government especially — would be counterproductive, undermining the natural impulses that gave
birth to them and kept them alive’. So there is little
express mention of religion in the founding instruments
of the United States, not because its importance was
denied, but rather because it was assumed.
Himmelfarb treats the religious phenomenon with
careful respect. She is particularly interesting on the
millenarian beliefs of Price and Priestley; on Hume’s
support for an Established Church; and on Gibbon’s
respect for private, as opposed to institutional, forms
of religion. She expects her readers to know their
Arianism from their Socinianism, though, without
resort to explanatory footnotes.
If the American Enlightenment can claim, in
Himmelfarb’s interpretation, to have shaped the
institutions of a nation — a novus ordo saeclorum
— why is it that the British Enlightenment occupies the
greater part of this volume? The answer is given clearly
in a closing passage: ‘If America is now exceptional,
it is because it has inherited and preserved aspects of
the British Enlightenment that the British themselves
have discarded and that other countries (France, most
notably) have never adopted’. Had Gordon Brown
read the book, one wonders, before he made the quasimessianic claims that adorn his Introduction? Will the
Cameroons show any interest in the thinking of the
giants who came before them?
The Success of Failure
Harry Cummins
In Search of the Moderate Muslim, Jon Gower
Davies, Social Affairs Unit, 2009, £10.00.
In July 2004, I published four pieces in The Sunday
Telegraph summarising what I had learned from
working with Muslims over three decades. This not
only led to my being sacked by the British Council
for, in its words, ‘offending against Islam’ but to a
frenzy of denunciation, not only from the BBC and
The Guardian, but by a columnist on The Sunday
Telegraph itself. Jenny McCartney was incensed by my
description of even mainstream Muslims as parasitic
bullies. How dared I not confine my criticism to the
world’s ‘Christian extremists’, she raged? To which I
replied: ‘An extreme Christian believes that the Garden
47
of Eden really existed; an extreme Muslim flies planes
into buildings — there’s a big difference’.
Davies has found that there is also a ‘big difference’
between a moderate Christian — one of ‘the millions
of ordinary, moderate, middle-class British people like
me’ — and a ‘moderate Muslim’, even were the latter
as predominant as officialdom insists. (He points out,
by the way, that there is not even a scrap of evidence for
this assertion, citing the regular opinion polls in which
staggering percentages of Muslims endorse fascism
and mass murder — not to mention the majority who
signal therein that they utterly despise us and remain
loyal only to their ‘Muslim brothers’ overseas).
In any case Davies has deduced that there is not much
difference between what is called an ‘extreme’ Muslim
and what Mark Baillie has called a ‘Moderatist’. He
notes that al Qa’eda and model ‘Moderatists’ such
as the Quilliam Foundation differ on the wisdom of
different forms of jihad at different times, but not on
the justice of each and the object of all: the Islamisation
of mankind.
The contention of ‘Extremist’ and ‘Moderatist’ is
a conversation within Islam itself: a self-contained,
supranational world in Davies’ eyes which seems to
drift perpetually above the Earth like some disastrous
Plague of Frogs. Davies finds that neither ‘Islamist’
nor ‘Moderatist’ think the debate has much to do with
Britain, which is to both but a tabula rasa, a wishing
well reflecting ‘Ourselves Alone’ and ripe for toadlike spawning, its soon to be smothered ‘Kaffir’
culture and history of no value or interest. Given
such Islamic arrogance, writes Davies: ‘There are no
Moderate Muslims for us, just now’. Nor by Davies’
reckoning are there real (ie British-style) moderates in
Her Majesty’s Government, where the ‘Moderatists’s’
Islamic solipsism has been profoundly internalised. Our
Ministers condemn the behaviour of the ‘Extremists’,
not because it violates British norms, but because (or
so the Government says) it violates Islamic norms.
Hence the official description of terrorism as ‘antiIslamic activity’ (much as Chamberlain might have
condemned Hitler’s promise-breaking dash to seize
Prague in 1939 as ‘anti-Nazi activity’).
As Davies protests, this is to imply that, were
terrorism indeed ‘only’ anti-British (which the good
doctor reckons almost all Muslim ‘activity’, moderate
and immoderate, to be), the Government could not
condemn it, as its adoption of Islamic criteria concedes
that we native infidels have no right to define the
terms under which the Muslims must behave here. Of
course, one might object that Islam’s contemptuous
solipsism is a characteristic of all the great religions,
Christianity included. But this would be to ignore the
worldly and totalitarian focus that Davies ascribes
48
(rightly I think) to Muslims alone. Christians, Hindus
and Buddhists seek to conquer a future or parallel
world for man; Muslims seek to conquer this world,
politically, for Allah. ‘Islam is empire’, says Davies.
‘There is no sharing in the guilt we liberal westerners
feel about the imperial venture’. (A guilt that is only
produced, of course, by Christianity). ‘Where Western
nations seem to want to move on from their imperial
pasts’, he writes, ‘Muslims seem to wish to recover
and relive them’. This means that, pace received
opinion, resolving the problems in Afghanistan or
Palestine to the Muslims’ satisfaction will never end
‘anti-Islamic activity’ here, as the Muslim critique of
‘our’ imperialism proceeds, not from a hostility to
imperialism per se, but from a commitment to their
own, which is seldom bloodless.
This imperialist agenda, Davies suggests, explains
what might otherwise seem puzzling about Muslims:
their wish to live in a country which most of them are
proudly disloyal to and openly despise; the endless
praise they heap on an Islamic world they voted
against with their feet; their ability to reconcile their
glutinous religiosity with their staggering criminality
— for isn’t looting the infidel the duty of the pious
Muslim? Davies quotes Marie Macey’s study of
Islamic offenders in Bradford, noting that there is
‘a perception on the part of those involved of some
sort of religious requirement’. While only two per
cent of England and Wales’ population are Muslim,
Davies says they form ten per cent of its incarcerated
criminals. Proportionately, Muslims are twice as likely
to become criminals as Christians, four times as likely
as Sikhs and six times as likely as Hindus. Above all,
their supernaturally sanctioned imperialism explains
what, for Davies, is the greatest Muslim mystery of all:
their determination to reproduce in Britain the same
disastrous Islamic environment that caused them to
flee here in the first place.
But perhaps something even more astonishing is
taking place, such as Camus writes of in La Peste,
when he says of the ingenious plague bacillus that,
time after time, ‘it roused up its rats... and sent them
to die in a happy city’. After all, once the Muslims
have, as Tacitus puts it, ‘created a desert and called
it ‘peace’ — (‘Islam’ according to Muslims, though
actually the word means ‘submission’) — the Faithful
are naturally compelled to flee to the next Islam-free
oasis, which they just as swiftly wreck. Eventually,
even the remotest corners of the Earth will have to be
invaded — and ruined. Failure is the secret of Islam’s
success.
A Broadwood’s Salad Days
Robert Hugill
Mr Langshaw’s Square Piano, Madeleine Goold,
Corvo Books, 2008, £13.99.
In many ways this is an unlikely book; a sculptor falls
in love with 18th century square pianos, restores one,
investigates the piano’s past history and then writes a
book. From the unpromising raw material of a broken
down square piano from 1807, Madeleine Goold
has managed to produce a lively document which
mixes music and social history in an entertaining and
instructive way. Goold has crafted a mixture of detective
story, travelogue, musical history and biography, which
encompasses not only the history of a particular piano
but a general history of the instrument.
Square pianos, which are not square but rectangular,
were an early, affordable form of piano. First produced
in the late 18th century by Broadwoods, they represent
the first time that a keyboard instrument was not
produced as an individually crafted instrument,
but instead by out-workers and piece-work. These
instruments were significantly cheaper than a handbuilt harpsichord or the larger scale grand pianos.
There is a surprising amount of social history in the
book. The portability and affordability of the piano
led to a democratisation of music; parlours all over
the country could suddenly afford to buy a piano,
thus promoting a social revolution. The original John
Broadwood was a canny businessman who decided
to continue producing expensive instruments, thus
ensuring the brand retained the cachet at the upper end
of the market. In the early years of the firm Broadwoods
sold their pianos using a network of contacts all over
the country. These were usually local musicians who
ran a piano sales agency alongside their other business.
One of these was John Langshaw, the organist of
Lancaster parish church. Madeleine Goold’s square
piano was ordered by him from Broadwoods in 1807.
Like most musicians of his ilk Langshaw was parish
organist, repaired the organ, wrote and published
music, gave music lessons and could, if you wanted,
sell you a piano.
In the travelogue part of the book Goold details
how she tracked down the Langshaw connection
to Lancaster and found a wealth of documentation
on what was a local musical dynasty. There is not
enough material to write a full scale biography of John
Langshaw, but Goold paints a vivid picture of what
life was like for local musicians like John Langshaw
and his father, John Langshaw senior. Both Langshaws
were organist in succession at Lancaster parish church.
John senior’s career encompassed pinning barrels for
a huge self playing organ for the Earl of Bute and his
musical contacts included Sir John Hawkins and John
Smith, both from Handel’s circle.
Back in Lancaster he was responsible not only for
playing the organ but maintaining it. He and his son in
fact built the organ in one of the parish church’s small
daughter churches. Goold’s research has brought out
the precarious nature of the local musical profession.
The financial rewards were not great, but socially the
role of the professional musician was changing. John
Langshaw senior was old enough to be aware of the
period when a musician was regarded as an artisan
rather than anything approaching a social equal.
Goold runs the Broadwood and Langshaw threads
in parallel, giving us much fascinating background
on the early development of the Broadwood company
taken from their surviving account books and ledgers.
The two dynasties were aware of each other even
if they did not interact socially and John Langshaw
senior was one of the earliest of Broadwood’s regional
agents. This parallel history forms the centre piece of
the book, giving us a fascinating small piece of social
and musical history. Also included in the mix are the
Wesley family. John Langshaw junior was taught by
Charles Wesley junior, and his father Revd Charles
Wesley (John Wesley’s brother) became a friend and
long term correspondent of John Langshaw senior.
Goold paints a lively picture of the musical life of the
Wesley household, in which John Langshaw junior
participated.
This is a charming and highly readable book. Goold
was lucky with her piano in that its history touches on
a number of interesting people. She runs a number of
narrative threads in parallel throughout the book and
generally does so with dexterity. She has a nice eye
for detail and gives us a number of historical vignettes,
filling in the background to the story; these range from
the development of the city of Lancaster to the Gordon
riots. Occasionally she lets herself be seduced by a
historical byway; there is a short detour to Barbados
describing musical life there in the late 18th/early 19th
century — fascinating, but hardly germane.
The later history of the piano expands the story to
include the wife of a vicar in a poor parish in Lancaster,
thus helping to bring things almost into living memory.
Goold opens and closes the book with passages of
imaginative historical reconstruction. Whilst these
are charming, their charm wears thin pretty quickly.
Luckily Goold keeps this style of writing to a
minimum.
49
The Way to Salvation
Robert Crowcroft
Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First
Century, Philip Bobbitt, Allen Lane, 2008, £12.99.
Philip Bobbitt is a hawkish Democrat and a distinguished
professor of both US constitutional law and security
policy who has produced perhaps the most powerful
tract on international relations published since the end
of the Cold War. Cognisant of the fact that, although a
large number of ‘grand strategies’ and ‘explanations’
of the West’s current predicament have been thrown
around since 9/11, none of them have felt quite right
— or at least incomplete — Bobbitt has fundamentally
rethought both the problem and our approach to it.
The result is a book of genuine originality but more
than that, though, it offers something else as well: a
bipartisan strategy that responsible people, of whatever
political hue, could sign up to. The tragedy of our time
is that the bitter contemporary partisanship of Western
polities has prevented the articulation of a generally
accepted doctrine along the lines of US diplomat
George Kennan’s 1940s policy of ‘containment’ that
provided the intellectual basis for successful long-term
resistance to the Soviet Union. This is probably one
of the few areas where partisanship causes more harm
than good. In addressing that, Bobbitt has come close
to achieving the impossible by crafting a remarkable
synthesis of political persuasions.
This book has rightly won rave reviews. The thesis
it propounds is that the ‘Wars on Terror’ are, in reality,
not purely a military struggle, or — as some on the Left
and Right assert — even about policing, intelligence,
poverty or ideology. Rather, they are a conflict for the
rule of law itself and the rights of civilians to give
their consent to those who rule them. Ranged against
that are Islamists who want to impose terror not as a
tactic — like the IRA — but as a strategic end in itself,
as part of constructing a global Caliphate, abolishing
freedom and rights, and crippling Western power.
There is something else. Bobbitt sees the West as
engaged in multiple such ‘Wars’; his diagnosis is that
we are fighting ‘terror’ itself. This might at first seem
absurd, as Bobbitt is at pains to stress: one cannot be at
‘war’ with an emotion. But the enemy — whether alQa’eda, expansionist dictators, and marketers of WMD
— all serve to bring about a state of terror wherever
they exercise influence. Even worse, epidemics and
natural catastrophes provide other breeding grounds
for the empowerment of Islamists, just as European
50
instability did for fascism. If this all sounds like a
recipe for endless war and interventionism, quite
the opposite is true: Bobbitt argues that involvement
must be dictated by strategic interests, but we need to
recognise who we are fighting, what the parameters
of the conflict are, and how we are to resist. Bobbitt’s
response is that by defending the rule of law, we will
win and the Islamists inevitably lose. Hence the West
requires a strategy of preclusion — acting to reshape
problems before they mature into mortal threats — that
will draw upon military force, intelligence gathering,
alliances, and cautious diplomacy.
Bobbitt argues that the West needs to establish clear
legitimacy for its actions. Many on the Left — and some
on the Right — tend to perceive the US as a dangerous
rogue state. The damage to US legitimacy in the past
six years has been grave as the Bush administration
concentrated upon national security; Bobbitt suggests
that this was because contemporary international law
was written for an earlier era that does not reflect the
modern reality of globalized states. We need to rewrite
it to ensure that Western actions have legitimacy — are
not seen as simply those of the biggest bully in the
playground — but are also effective. And, make no
mistake, Bobbitt recognises that we are at war; this is
not a law enforcement struggle, and the international
and domestic realms are inextricably connected through
the Muslim Diaspora and information mechanisms like
the internet. He advocates a public debate on what
constitutes ‘torture’, and wants it to be emphatically
banned by the West. He also acknowledges that under
certain conditions — the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario
— the need might arise for individual officials to break
those laws; insightfully, Bobbitt sees no contradiction
between law and security here because, as he points
out, no jury would convict those who use force against
a maniac to prevent a disaster. The theory of law allows
for occasional deviations in practice. Bobbitt does a
great service in rescuing classical jurisprudence from
the hands of the more extreme civil libertarians who
have distorted the true meaning of ‘law’ and hindered
action against a dedicated enemy. Similarly, he rescues
it from those who might repress us in the name of
protecting us. He asserts that Western governments
should start ‘stockpiling’ laws as we stockpile
vaccines so that, if a cataclysmic attack occurs, we
do not lapse into measures such as martial law that
will become necessary if we do not plan for such
contingencies at a moment of relative calm. Given the
probability of nuclear or biological terrorism targeted
against the West in the coming decades, such forward
planning to maintain the rule of law seems prudent.
Indeed, Bobbitt’s investigation of the black market
in WMD, and the easy availability on the Internet of
the information needed to create deadly biological
weapons, is terrifying.
In its nuance and complexity, this challenging book
is as much a work of political philosophy as anything
else. It establishes a durable framework for thinking
through current threats that has been sorely lacking.
Disagreement about application in individual cases,
as was rife throughout the Cold War, is one thing; but
even now most of us still remain unsure about the
basic problem. That is what poses the greatest danger.
‘I am attempting to provide a fundamental rethinking
of this subject, and I am well aware that the odds are
against me’, Bobbitt writes. Perhaps so; but he has
succeeded magnificently. George Kennan has been
found at last.
FILM
The Young Victoria
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallé
Marc Sidwell
Period drama is a limited genre, but it does have
certain standards to maintain. Be assured, then, that
this film doesn’t let the side down. The Young Victoria
offers the three requisite Cs — costume, castles and
cameos — in plenty. The men are in silk hats and
gold braid; the soldiers are dressed in red; the women
dazzle in shimmering gowns. Everyone has chosen
a state banquet or at least a palatial room where they
can plot and intrigue to maximum effect. When Jim
Broadbent is finished yelling over the best crystal as
William IV, Harriet Walter is still around to dispense
motherly advice as the Queen Dowager, and Julian
Glover combines with an excellent false nose to give us
a few glimpses of the Duke of Wellington as an ageing
politico. Paul Bettany is terrific as Lord Melbourne,
a charming, brutal manipulator and the perfect foil to
Prince Albert in the war for Victoria’s affections.
In almost all respects The Young Victoria is very
well made, only let down slightly by Julian Fellowes’s
screenplay, which in the early stages struggles to digest
chunks of exposition about the ambitions of the royal
houses of Europe. It is always attractively shot and
neatly edited, qualities that rapidly establish it as a
delightful film. It runs rings around Keira Knightley’s
Duchess, a ham-fisted attempt based on far more
promising material.
What marks this film out as more than just a fine
example of its kind is the portrayal of the central
character. The Young Victoria is an attempt to reinvent
our longest-reigning monarch in the public mind. The
iconic widow in black, which Mrs Brown revived
rather than replaced, is here a young and lively woman,
reminiscent of Elizabeth II when she ascended the
throne. Emily Blunt is excellent in the role, combining
the uncertainty of youth with a steely determination not
to be manipulated by the power brokers who come at
her from all sides. As the story progresses, and her love
affair with Albert (Rupert Friend) mirrors the tensions
of her royal responsibilities, she must negotiate a very
modern compromise: a powerful woman who needs
someone she can trust without losing her autonomy.
In interrogating that dilemma, Julian Fellowes and
the director Jean-Marc Vallé have crafted a film that
does more than just show Victoria as a vivacious and
rather modern young woman; they have made a drama
that celebrates the transforming power of the individual
will. Victoria’s struggle, in her marriage as in her
life, is to maintain control of her own self-fashioning
without lapsing into self-indulgence. Her demons
are the seductive assistance of Lord Melbourne,
always offering to lead her into the service of his
private agenda, and her mother, long-beholden to her
household Controller, whose vanity and greed are
symptoms of a besetting weakness of willpower.
Victoria herself, from the beginning, is a woman
who dreams of being in control of her life, and who is
determined to judge others by the same high standard.
She will have no truck with Albert when he first
appears, stammering out agreement, as he has been
taught, kowtowing to all of her personal tastes. It is
only Albert’s willingness to acknowledge his own
existence, to announce his enjoyment of Schubert,
which he knows she does not share, that allows for
the first possibility of friendship between them. When
it is suggested that her mother will not give up her
Controller, Victoria’s answer is not to give way, but
to acknowledge (and despise) her mother’s decision:
‘that will be her mistake, not mine’.
Such a woman is a valuable role model for our
times, but one whose values are all too out of fashion.
This film places Victoria rather closer to the austere
individualism of Ayn Rand than the self-indulgent
celebrities we are becoming inured to. It is ironic
that Sarah Ferguson should have been the woman
who came up with the idea for the film. Her own life
51
of tabloid scandal and product endorsements seems
truly representative of our times. Victoria represents
a higher and very different ideal. Her film reminds
us that what built the power and success of such a
preposterously outnumbered people was ultimately
a belief in individual liberty. Only a polity that did
not see itself solely as a people but also an island of
responsible individuals could have reached so far. It
was the bedrock for the exceptional ingenuity and
entrepreneurial zeal that set out to master the globe.
Perhaps the most cheering thing about this film is
that, by making Victoria young again and fresh with
the indomitable spirit that drove her era, it reminds
us that its central ideal is evergreen. The chronicle of
human achievement is not yet finished, and those who
add more to its pages are those who accept their destiny
as self-directed individuals. The Young Victoria offers
a modern role model, a woman who became famous
not through seeking fame but out of a determination
to rule herself.
Amateur of Genius
R J Stove
Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, John
Lucas, Boydell Press, 2008, £25.
Twenty-five years ago this engrossing book, one of
the best about any British musician, could never have
been published. The mid-1980s represented the new
dawn of the Compact Disc, whose makers were then
afflicted with a neophilia (to use Christopher Lasch’s
inspired coinage) unimaginable today. Anyone who,
a quarter of a century back, had predicted that CDs
would ultimately achieve their main musical value
as storehouses of pre-1980s performances would
have been considered insane. By unhappy chance,
this neophilia coincided with the nadir of modern
Anglo-American musicology, which at this stage
was dominated by what Chesterton vividly called ‘a
mere anarchist itch to upset a traditional and universal
verdict.’ Almost no biographies of distinguished past
performers could then appear at all, except those which
poured ridicule on the very notion of a past performer
being distinguished. Joseph Horowitz’s misleadingly
titled diatribe Understanding Toscanini (1987)
embodied the genre at its worst: glib reductionism
redolent of Lytton Strachey, combined with pompous
Marxism deriving directly from Theodor Adorno.
Fortunately the use to which the CD has since been
put differs in almost every respect from what its
original manufacturers had in mind. While new fullprice classical releases from the major labels have
slowed to a trickle, reissues from the archives abound,
and have made possible (for those who take advantage
of them) a life-enhancing depth of perspective on
musical history. In no area of musical effort has this
52
enrichment been more obvious than in the recent
rediscovery of eminent pre-modern conductors. Bored
to sobs by the egalitarian, consensus-crazed blandness
of most figures on the podium in our own time, a
fairly small but diligent category of collectors around
the world avidly seeks out gramophonic evidence
of tougher and more courageous musical leaders
from past generations. Never has it been so easy to
acquire on disc a good cross-section of recordings by
Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm
Furtwängler, Leopold Stokowski, Guido Cantelli,
Dmitri Mitropoulos, Hans Knappertsbusch ... and, Sir
Thomas Beecham, who died in 1961 after a career that
began in Queen Victoria’s reign.
John Lucas’s industry has been amazing. As raconteur,
Beecham, like Pooh-Bah, adored adding ‘corroborative
detail… to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise
bald and unconvincing narrative.’ A Mingled Chime, his
1943 memoir, constitutes a small masterpiece of witty
musing undisturbed by the slightest self-revelation, let
alone chronological precision. His critic friend Neville
Cardus later produced what purported to be a serious
biography, only to weigh it down with anecdotes that
Cardus had invented himself. It does Lucas credit that
the Beecham who emerges from the present work
proves a more, rather than a less, fascinating figure
than the mere wisecracking automaton which Cardus
— and, afterwards, Cardus’s journalistic inferiors
— popularised. If anything, it does Lucas still more
credit that the mysteries of Beecham’s gifts endure,
even after being subjected to the acetylene flame of
scholarship.
How did Beecham (born 1879) learn conducting,
and how did he learn to use the English language
much more elegantly than most people ever manage
to do? He maintained a comprehensive reticence about
these topics, and so covered his tracks as to enforce
a similar reticence upon subsequent chroniclers.
He obtained almost nothing from what little formal
education he had. He took some private lessons in
orchestration, counterpoint, and the piano, all of the
most desultory, inconclusive kind. His undergraduate
period at Wadham College, Oxford, was academically
null. Eventually the college’s Warden assured him
(with a certain orotundity of phrasing which is
itself rather Beechamesque) that
‘Your untimely departure has
perhaps spared us the necessity
of asking you to go.’ There had
been no ancestral tradition of
either musical or literary interests.
The family owed its fortune to
having invented Beecham’s Pills,
a laxative fantastically popular
from the 1840s onwards. An
advertising jingle ran ‘Hark! The
herald-angels sing / Beecham’s
Pills are just the thing’; Lucas
denies the frequent allegation
that young Thomas wrote it, but
it sounds like the sort of thing he
could well have written.
Then, suddenly, in 1899,
Beecham discovered what he had
been put on earth to do: conduct.
When he faced down orchestral
players, his pedagogical lacunae
no longer mattered. Henceforth he remained a
driven man, obsessed with music, as Lucas’s subtitle
emphasises. At the same time his inherent amateurism
marked him out from German, Austrian, and Italian
maestri, who in youth had paid their dues by acquiring
large repertoires in opera houses (before World War I
on the Continent, the idea of a non-theatrical conductor
was almost oxymoronic). In some respects Beecham’s
modus operandi stayed fallible. New York Times
correspondent Olin Downes analysed the Beecham
approach:
Judged by the highest standards of conducting, his
technic [sic], if such it can be called, and his style
are precise examples, at least to the casual glance, of
what a conductor should not do … He may indicate
a sforzando [sudden accent] in the manner of a man
hurling a brick or a bomb at a foe, or beat the measure
freely with one arm while holding the baton in a
clenched fist, invisible to the orchestra, at his back. It
remains that the orchestra understands him, and that
singularly inspired music floods torrentially and with
precision from him and the instrumentalists.
His score-reading ability coped unflustered with the
most complex inspirations of Wagner, Stravinsky, and
Richard Strauss. (Lucas quotes a memorably inane
attack on Strauss’s Elektra by Wagner’s biographer
Ernest Newman: ‘Is, then, the opera worthless? I make
bold to say that quite half of it is, and that few will
want to hear this half more than once or twice.’) Many
a better-schooled orchestral director than Beecham has
floundered badly in Delius; Beecham became Delius’s
most passionate and idiomatic advocate.
Nor did Delius exhaust Beecham’s
enthusiasm for his compatriots.
Elgar’s output irked him, and he
never performed it with any joy.
Nevertheless, before the age of
thirty Beecham had led the world
premieres of compositions by
Vaughan Williams, as well as by
other figures once considered
Vaughan Williams’s peers, such as
Ethel Smyth, Cyril Scott (whom his
original admirers called ‘the English
Debussy’, as Lucas observes), Josef
Holbrooke, Charles Wood, and
Granville Bantock. Later he gave
a jocularly sympathetic ear to the
young William Walton, urging him
to amplify the orchestration of his
oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast: ‘As
you’ll never hear the thing again,
my boy, why not throw in a couple
of brass bands?’ Such a background
inoculated Beecham in old age against the myth so
widespread after 1945 — on ideological and sexual
rather than on artistic grounds — that the history of
worthwhile English music began only with Benjamin
Britten.
Delius aside, Beecham lavished his firmest affections
on Handel and on the French repertory. He felt at home
with French music in a way that few other English
interpreters ever are. Berlioz’s initial popularity
in Britain owed more to Beecham than to anyone
else; Beecham even championed the Berlioz works
previously and ignorantly condemned as white
elephants, such as Les Troyens. Manifesting either a
rush of blood to the head or (more probably) a deliberate
tease, Beecham insisted that he would trade all of
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti for Massenet’s opera
Manon, ‘and consider that I had profited vastly by the
exchange.’ (Elsewhere Beecham airily dismissed Bach
for perpetrating ‘counterpoint — and, what is worse,
Protestant counterpoint.’) Among obscure French
53
composers, André Grétry, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, and
the only slightly better remembered (in Beecham’s
youth) Jean-Philippe Rameau often turned up on
Beecham’s programmes, and on his alone. He had what
few rivals, even the finest, possessed: a determination
to tackle only material which he liked. If masterpieces
bored him — as several of Beethoven’s and Brahms’s
did – he said so, and usually avoided them. He can be
faulted for lack of imaginative sympathy, but at least
his candour spared the world a great many tedious and
insincere performances.
Hedonism being the key to Beecham’s art, it followed
that he would enjoy a special success in opera. What
made his operatic ventures at Covent Garden and other
theatres even more extraordinary than their dominant
vocal and instrumental excellence was that he financed
them from his own pocket. ‘Some men spend their
money on horses, some on yachts. I go in for music,’
he informed an American reporter. The resultant perils
— including the threat of bankruptcy — he accepted in
good part, without whining, indeed with positive relish.
Little wonder that he identified with the similarly risktaking and munificent Handel. It all amounted to the
most benevolent musical despotism London had seen
since Handel’s own years of triumph. Consequently,
when successive post-1945 governments carried out
their programme of turning music into merely one more
department of the Servile State, Beecham resisted them
with all his considerable articulacy and shrewdness. He
realised from the early days of welfarism that a society
of free men and women has no more need for a Ministry
of Arts than it has for a Ministry of Truth; that it is
immoral to make the ninety per cent of citizens who
are not remotely interested in high culture subsidise
the ten per cent who are; that any arts apparat’s bosses
will differ from Goebbels and Zhdanov only in degree,
not in kind; and that trying to dragoon the masses’
tastes in classical music leads invariably to the sort
of power-mania epitomised by the old joke about the
soapbox Bolshevik:
SOAPBOX BOLSHEVIK: Come the revolution,
you’ll all have caviar!
MEMBER OF AUDIENCE: But I don’t like
caviar!
SOAPBOX BOLSHEVIK: Come the revolution,
you’ll all like caviar!
It would be pleasing to imply that the thought
processes of the Conservative Party, six decades later,
had managed to catch up with Beecham. Pleasing, but
false.
The most valuable of all Lucas’s chapters deal with
Beecham’s numerous foreign travels, including those to
Germany, Australia, Canada, and the USA. (It gives the
mere reviewer a sadistic thrill to point out a secondary
54
source that appears to have eluded even Lucas’s
meticulous researches: Australia’s Music: Themes of a
New Society, by Roger Covell [Sun Books, Melbourne,
1967], which includes commentary on Sir Thomas’s
antipodean visit.) Whether abroad or at home, Beecham
seldom varied his rehearsal methods, which consisted
in about equal portions of chaffing and businesslike
efficiency. To the exuberance of a Wooster, he added
the omniscience of a Jeeves. Unpredictable instructions
would keep musicians on their toes: the composer Eric
Coates recalled Beecham as preceding a performance
with the imperious command ‘Now, gentlemen, do your
worst!’ On the rare occasions when these strategies
failed him, he could disconcert troublemakers by
what American record producer Charles O’Connell
called ‘[his] exophthalmic leer’, Lucas’s publishers
generously supply a CD containing various Beecham
practice sessions. Broadcasting administrator William
G James — creator, incidentally, of some delightful
Christmas carols — witnessed Beecham direct in
1940 the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (which
Lucas, through an utterly atypical lapse, misidentifies
as ‘Brisbane Symphony Orchestra’), and found the
outcome most impressive:
He gave the players confidence. He didn’t try to
get impossibilities out of them. He told me that
his method of conducting was to “give them their
heads” from the first rehearsal. Then he decided
what standard of work he could obtain from them,
and worked for that. “If I can get higher”, he said,
“well and good”.
Mutatis mutandis, Beecham used elsewhere the
same methods to which he treated the Queenslanders.
With the unglamorous chores of sustained orchestrabuilding — such as Sir John Barbirolli carried out in
Manchester, Sir Georg Solti in Chicago, Stokowski in
Philadelphia, and the incomparable George Szell in
Cleveland — Beecham did not concern himself. His
special genius lay in making second-rate and third-rate
ensembles sound like first-rate ones when, and solely
when, he directed them. Ensembles already first-rate
could now and then make him stumble badly, as when
he led Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw band.
Unpropitious though particular times have been
for Beecham’s posthumous reputation, some of his
recorded legacy has almost always been in print. If
Lucas’s study has a shortcoming, it is that he devotes
less space to his subject’s records than could have
been wished. (A fully annotated discography, such as
is now standard procedure with American biographies
of important executants, would have helped.) Unlike
Klemperer, whose vivacity and breadth of musical
comprehension were blatantly misrepresented by the
repertoire — and, too often, the style — of his later
recordings, Beecham retained in the 1950s much the
same attitude that he had brought to the studio in
the 1920s and 1930s. Most spectacular of his studio
offerings is his 1959 Messiah, using a re-orchestration
by Sir Eugene Goossens so convoluted, so gaudy, and
so anachronistic — harps, cymbals and triangles in
every direction — that it makes Stokowski’s Bach
transcriptions seem like the epitome of asceticism. The
result indicates how many years have elapsed since
Beecham dwelt among us: no living maestro would
dare thus to thumb his nose at musicologists en bloc,
however robust his private disrespect for them. In this
respect, although in no other, Beecham seems to inhabit
an unimaginably distant past. Paradoxically, Lucas has
stressed Beecham’s importance to the present, so that
Sir Thomas veritably leaps off the page, brisk, raffish,
goateed, the grand seigneur of his profession. Many
another conductor surpassed Beecham in depth and
spiritual insight; no conductor surpassed him in his
capacity for having and generating fun. His demise,
no less than that of David Garrick as described by
Dr Johnson, ‘eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and
impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.’
R J Stove lives in Melbourne, and is the author, most
recently, of A Student’s Guide to Music History (ISI
Books, Wilmington, Delaware, 2008).
An Art Parable for our Times
Andrew Wilton
P
ublic scepticism about the relationship between
museums and contemporary art has been rife
for several decades, but it seems now to have
reached a critical point, at which several prominent
commentators have voiced their dissatisfaction with
a state of affairs that is evidently less about art than
about money, and where the interaction of artist and
society has been short-circuited by museums founded
specially to accord instant ‘immortality’ to works that
have barely left their creators’ studios.
On 13 September 2008 the Guardian published a
piece by the respected Australian historian of modern
art Robert Hughes, denouncing the much-publicized
sale of works by Damien Hirst at Sotheby’s that month
as the shameless exploitation of ‘newbie collectors
who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged
and resonance-free’. The work, ‘both simple-minded
and sensationalist’, was notable for ‘the extreme
disproportion between Hirst’s expected prices and his
actual talent’.
That was perhaps an extreme case, but Hughes went
on to list other artists who are exploiting ‘the fatuity
of art-world greed’. They all highlight an unhealthy
streak in contemporary attitudes to art that runs deep
in our culture today, and it is not only the ignorant and
competitive collector who is at fault. An illuminating
story appeared in The Art Newspaper last December.
It concerned one of Europe’s leading contemporary
art museums, the Reina Sofía in Madrid. The
contemporary art museum is itself a curious Modernist
phenomenon. While objects of recent date have from
time to time been acquired by public collections,
the traditional role of museums has been to preserve
cultural objects that society continues to value after
their usefulness has been exhausted. It was Alfred H
Barr who, by founding the Museum of Modern Art in
New York with an unrivalled collection of ‘classic’
early modernist works acquired from, or with the
help of, many rich benefactors, invented this new sort
of art gallery in 1929. Barr created a great museum;
the idea has caught on and now no self-respecting
metropolis, or even small regional centre, can fail to
possess a ‘Contemporary Art Museum’ of one kind
or another. A consequence has been a world-wide
thirst for contemporary works to fill these necessary
institutions, and, of course, a radical redefinition of
what a ‘museum’ can be.
At the same time, it seems that ‘art’ itself has been
redefined to fit the new circumstances. The Reina Sofía
story illustrates the relationship between museum, artwork and public with the crisp perfection of a parable.
The Reina Sofía commissioned a ‘piece’ (as works of
art are called now) by the celebrated American sculptor
Richard Serra. Serra is an artist of considerable power,
his huge blocks, strips and spirals of Cor-Ten steel
possessing, on occasion, real grandeur and a certain
sublimity. The Art Newspaper story told of one such
piece, weighing 38 tonnes, that the Reina Sofía had
commissioned direct from the artist in 1986. Museums
commissioning works of art has become commonplace;
no one thinks of it as odd, but it is a little strange that
a public museum (as opposed to a private collection)
55
should spend a very large sum of money (220,000 euro
The idea of the replica is not itself surprising:
in this case) on a work that has had no history of use, of sculptures are often made in editions, sometimes
being measured against social needs or public taste in a large ones, and many of the most celebrated works of
practical context. The hundreds of thousands, or even twentieth century artists like Henry Moore, Willem
millions, that people are willing to spend on a work de Kooning or Joan Miró have been repeated (under
by an Old Master by virtue of the historical hindsight pious rubrics eliminating — heaven forfend! — the
that confirms its value, can now be spent on a brand- possibility of mere commercial exploitation) so that
new object that someone — artist, dealer, curator or half the collectors and museums in the world can have
critic — claims to possess properties comparable to examples of accredited ‘masterpieces’. Nevertheless,
those of an Old Master: the enduring relevance and the notion of an artist simply replacing a lost work to
interest, the technical mastery and aesthetic power, that order strikes one as insensitive. Perhaps that idea seems
the passage of time assures us are present in a Titian unnecessarily cynical. But the last line of the report
or a Rembrandt. Nor are these acquisitions mediated tells us otherwise: ‘If the original sculpture reappears’,
by private ownership, donation or bequest, which are we are assured, ‘it will be destroyed.’
entirely legitimate channels through which a museum
So the legitimacy of ‘editions’ of a sculpture is not
may add to its collections.
relevant in this case. We are invited to see the piece
Richard Serra’s name, then, was enough to satisfy as ‘unique’, although it is effectively mechanically
the Reina Sofía that it would be acquiring its money’s produced. And its intrinsic value, the sheer aesthetic
worth of Cor-Ten steel. The piece he came up with and cultural merit of the thing that justifies the 220,000
was not one of his most interesting: not a twisting euro price tag (1986 prices), is equally fictitious, if
labyrinth of high walls, or
any given version of it can
The hundreds of thousands, or even millions,
a subtly balanced tower of
be simply ‘destroyed’ if it is
that people are willing to spend on a work by an
tall steel blades, but four
found to be redundant.
Old Master by virtue of the historical hindsight
low rectangular steel blocks,
The same page of the Art
that confirms its value, can now be spent on
about a metre and a half
Newspaper carried another
a brand-new object that someone — artist,
wide, disposed in an empty
story, from Versailles, where
dealer, curator or critic — claims to possess
space. (More recently, the
a row had blown up when
properties comparable to those of an Old Master
Guggenheim Museum in
tour guides in the Louis
Bilbao has invested in a
XIV palace took it upon
series of huge installations by Serra, which occupy themselves to make disparaging comments on some
an immense amount of space but have the advantage large metal ‘balloon toys’ by the pop artist Jeff Koons
of being rather exciting to experience. Robert Hughes that had been installed there. Koons is famous, or
admires them, though he thinks they are like ‘a notorious, equally for his consciously kitsch sculptures
rhinoceros in a parlour’ in Gehry’s quirky building.) and for his highly successful self-promotion. One
After four years, the Reina Sofía piece was consigned would think it would be grist to his mill if the Versailles
to a private storage facility. But when, in 2005, a new guides indulged in a little hostile criticism, but the
director decided to include it in a revamped display tour guides’ union directed its members to respect ‘the
it was found that the storage company had gone into cultural decisions of the public body of Versailles’.
receivership and the work was ‘nowhere to be found’. Respect for the character and history of the building
Payments for storage seemed to have ceased in 1992; itself was clearly not a concern. The report adds that
those responsible denied all knowledge.
‘exposure of Koons’s first major show in France may
The tale of the museum that was willing to pay a large increase the value of six works on loan from billionaire
sum for an unseen work, and which then proceeded to Francois Pinault’. Koons is another artist on Robert
lose it, despite its size, is extraordinary enough. Still Hughes’s list of charlatans.
more bizarre is the sequel: ‘at the end of 2006 Richard
Serra... agreed that an identical copy could be made
by the German foundry with which he usually works’
(this is not, of course, the kind of sculpture to which the
artist himself takes hammer and chisel). He would not
be paid for the new commission, though the museum
would have to pay fabrication costs of 83,500 euro.
This seemed a bargain to the director, since, as she
pointed out, its ‘market value today would be beyond
our reach’.
56
IN SHORT
A Tangled Web. A British Spy in Estonia, Mart
Mannik, translated by the Earl of Carlisle, Grenader,
2008 (Available from Grenader Publishing, Lai 33,
Tallinn.10133. email: [email protected]).
This story has considerable rarity value. It is a brief
autobiography of a brave, intelligent and resourceful
man who was conscripted to work for MI6 , and
appears to have been very badly supported by that
institution.
He had been pressed into the German Army at the
age of fourteen in 1944, and after various vicissitudes
ended the war in a large camp near Kiel. In June 1947
he was recruited for work in England and was soon
earning £12 a week, a large wage at that time, at the
London Brick Company near Bedford, and later at a
textile factory near Chorley. In 1951 he was selected
to meet Col. Alfons Rebane, a talented former army
commander, in order to work for MI6 back in Estonia.
The details of his training are interesting: first in
radio transmission, later in the use of small arms,
parachuting, and other necessary skills.
The story becomes exciting when he and his team
were landed, from a former German E-boat, on the
coast of Courland. He joined the Forest Brethren, an
illegal resistance movement apparently devoted to the
task of restoring an independent Estonian Republic, but
in fact penetrated by the KGB before Mannik got there.
The KGB had also cracked the cypher code in which
Mannik and his team communicated, at long intervals,
with London. They were eventually arrested, and in
order to save his skin Mannik agreed to be ‘turned’
by the KGB and to work for them, though no details
of this work are given. Nor is it clear whether or not
any of the information which Mannik did succeed in
sending to London was of any particular use, though
it must be doubtful if any Estonian connections
affected the larger picture of Anglo-Soviet relations
in any significant way. As elsewhere, it all sounds like
spying for the sake of spying, and indeed what the
KGB required of him was to ‘play radio games’ with
London. More than this the book does not reveal. In
1958 he was provided with a wife (with whom he was
soon on uncomfortable terms), and in 2003, by then a
widow, she was presented with a cheque for £11,000 by
Matthew Kirk, at that time our ambassador in Finland,
in consideration of the length of his service in MI6.
The ambassador, now retired, does not reply to letters
about the affair.
Without much education Mannik mastered English,
Russian and German, as well as the necessary
professional skills. However his account is strictly
factual, with virtually no personal details; he had no
gifts as a story-teller, and no apparent knowledge at
all of the wider world. How could he? The result is
stodgy, but it will be interesting to those who have
any previous connection either with Estonia or MI6,
who for whatever reason closed down their ill-fated
operations there as early as 1956.
The text has been translated and edited, more or
less, by the Earl of Carlisle. On leaving the army and
standing without success as a Liberal candidate, he
was later deprived of his hereditary seat in the House
of Lords, settled in Estonia and has resided at the
Euro College at the University of Tartu ever since.
His adopted country should at least be grateful to him
for throwing this much light on a rather melancholy
episode in its history in the period some years before
its liberation from the Soviet Union.
John Jolliffe
The Criminal Advocate’s Survival Guide, Jan
Davies, Carbolic Smoke Ball Co, 2007, £9.99.
This handy book does exactly what it says on the tin.
In the author’s words, it is a ‘little guide’ to the basics
of the criminal justice system and how to appear in it
as a new solicitor or barrister. Much of it is made up
of the sort of anecdotes that any good and experienced
advocate like Davies will accumulate, but she has
marshalled hers into a sensible order and tells them
with vim and wit. Attractively bound in a robust red
jacket, it will certainly endure being tossed into a bag
with robes and a brief as the newly admitted advocate
heads off to court, and would be most useful to said
advocate — certainly, I realised as I read some of
these nuggets of advice that they were precisely what
I should have been told at the start of my career but
was not, and had to learn them the hard way instead.
However, as so often with insights into the criminal
justice system, this book will also prove of interest
to the informed lay reader. The section on mentally
disordered offenders, for example, should be heeded
far and wide: ‘Typically... the case is adjourned for
medical reports... He does not co-operate and won’t
57
keep appointments with the doctor. Eventually he
ends up in prison because that is the only solution for
making sure the report is done and for dealing with his
constant breaches of bail. Then he will have served the
equivalent of a six month sentence... and he will end
up being released, only for the whole miserable cycle
to begin again’. In my experience, and that of many of
my colleagues, that is exactly and tragically correct.
Alexander Deane
Central Banking in a Free Society, Tim Congdon,
Institute of Economic Affairs, 2009, £12.50
The title of this lengthy pamphlet makes it sound as dry
as dust, but it is a stimulating and perceptive account
of and explanation for the current financial crisis.
As is usual with this author the content is clear and
underpinned by a profound understanding of financial
and economic systems, especially those of the UK.
Congdon’s central thesis is that a Central Bank is a
vital component of a free banking system. One of its
most important functions is to act as Lender of Last
Resort to commercial banks which may experience
difficulties of liquidity. They can as a consequence
operate with less capital, that is more efficiently,
than would otherwise be required. This in turn leads,
other things being equal, to increased bank profits
and economic gains all round. The relevant statistics
are set out clearly. They show that by the early 2000s
UK banks operated with what would traditionally be
regarded as very low capital ratios. The consequence,
that the Central Bank’s function as Lender of Last
Resort thereby assumed greater importance (since
the lower a commercial bank’s capital ratio the more
likely it is to become temporarily illiquid), seems to
have escaped notice.
While it is a fundamental task of a Central Bank to
lend to illiquid commercial banks it ought not to offer
such assistance to ones that are insolvent. This requires
it to have a detailed knowledge of the commercial
position of every commercial bank so that, if required,
judgements can be made about the status of any appeals
for help.
This brings us to our present discontents. Congdon
somewhat pulls his punches at this point but he clearly
believes the present Governor of the Bank of England,
Mervyn King, made serious errors of judgement in
the case of Northern Rock. The Rock in his view was
almost certainly illiquid rather than insolvent and
hence ought to have qualified for help from the Bank
which, in the event, it did not get. The effect of letting
58
Rock go to the wall was a collapse in confidence which
made everything much worse that it need have been.
Congdon also regards King’s espousal of insurance
schemes (like the schemes recently adopted with
HMG ‘insuring’ some commercial banks’ assets) as
fundamentally less satisfactory than the traditional
Lender of Last Resort approach. Indeed in his view
‘moral hazard’, King’s own term, can most accurately
be used in relation to the effects of such insurance
schemes which he (King) favours.
While in Congdon’s view King may have fallen
short in some respects, part of the reason he did so
was because, following the ‘reforms’ of banking
supervision introduced in 1997 by Gordon Brown, the
Bank of England had had many of its responsibilities
for the commercial banks transferred to the Financial
Services Authority. Much of the Bank’s banking
expertise was lost at this point. Thus some, perhaps
much, of the responsibility for the current crisis
comes home to Brown, who introduced far-reaching
changes to major components of our financial system
on the basis of equal measures of self-confidence and
ignorance. Needless to say these errors show no sign
of being acknowledged.
Finally Congdon makes a good academic case for
re-privatising the Bank of England which should, as
argued earlier, re-acquire responsibility for banking
supervision. However, at a time when for whatever
reason hundreds of billions of public money is at
risk from the past activities of commercial banks,
privatisation of banking regulation is not within the
realm of the politically possible.
Richard Packer
The Assault on Liberty, Dominic Raab, Fourth Estate,
2009, £8.99.
‘Since 1997,’ states Dominic Raab, ‘the government
has pioneered the rise of Big Brother government, the
database state — and, increasingly — a surveillance
society.’ The words ‘Big Brother ’ carry dual
connotations in the Britain of 2009: against Orwell’s
authoritarian Panopticon we may now set a reality
wherein the unending intrusion of electronic images
and fly-by-night media-manipulation has isolated us
from others and scooped out common culture, whilst
accompanying the rise of a society where the inflated
state and the individual fight over the ensuing void. The
political landscape seems to have been entirely claimed
by countervailing and pathologically symbiotic
voices of authoritarianism and licentiousness; leaving
advocates of authority and liberty without foothold.
Raab’s book attempts to resolve the ‘paradox’ of
a nation more surveyed by CCTV than any other,
yet meanwhile crippled under the weight of an
unsustainable culture of human rights and duty-less
individual entitlement. In order to rationalise the
combined defence of liberty by such odd bedfellows
as David Davis MP and Shami Chakrabarti, Raab must
first dispel the myth that liberty proper is something
to be perennially ‘balanced against’ security or
‘toughness’ towards crime or terrorism. This he does,
legitimately reiterating the usual list of ineffective
abuses: (Labour’s attack on jury trial, the extension
of pre-trial detention, the casual injustice of ASBOs,
etc).
Though Raab’s critique is sharper than other similar
titles, it could have better shown connections between
its two halves: the over-extension of executive power
for largely evasive and cosmetic reasons, and the
destructive politicisation of judiciary processes by a
human rights culture. Admittedly, the basic connections
are strong — built on as sound an advocacy of the
separation of powers and liberal democracy as you
are presently likely to read — obligatory reference
to Mill’s useless ‘harm principle’ notwithstanding
33 Canonbury Park South, London N1 2JW
Tel: 020 7226 7791 Fax: 020 7354 0383
E-mail: [email protected]
— though they lie timidly beneath the surface for much
of the book, announced only obliquely through Raab’s
case for a new British Bill of Rights.
If used to clearly delineate fundamental rights and
re-vitalise the sphere of ‘negative’ liberty by returning
complex matters of public policy and political
aspiration to a legislative parliament, then such a bill
might secure precious freedoms, whilst also halting
the devaluation of the currency of rights, opportunistic
litigation, factionalism, and the ossification of public
life into a fractious terrain of bureaucratic control and
atomistic dependency. Entailing neither retreat from
Europe nor severe political consequences, it could
still be more than an expression of toothless or cynical
(Brown-esque) symbolism.
Raab seems unduly optimistic about the chances of
any new Bill of Rights being formulated amongst our
political class on anything remotely resembling his
libertarian model. Yet his book stands out amongst
other popular polemics in eventually working through
an answer that gives cogency to his attacks as well as
hope for the future.
Gabriel Williams
Published quarterly in September, December, March & June,
volume commencing with September issue.
Annual subscription rates: £20, Europe/surface rest of world £22. Airmail rest of world: £27, Single issues £4.99.
ISSN: 0265-4881. All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in
any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or other without the prior written permission of the
copyright owner.
Copyright ©The Salisbury Review
Printed in the UK by The Warwick Printing Company Ltd.
Typesetting — DASH
Design — Jessica Chaney
Web site: http://www.salisburyreview.co.uk
59

Summer 2009 - The Salisbury Review

Transcription

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