Many people watching Jeremy Corbyn’s interview on Marr last Sunday will have been shocked by his remarks about the need to begin a ‘dialogue’ with the leadership of the Islamic State. ‘I think there has to be some understanding of where their strong points are,’ he said.

Afterwards, when these comments were widely reported, Corbyn’s supporters said they’d been taken out of context — the standard defence whenever he is criticised for saying something positive about Islamist terrorists, such as describing Hamas and Hezbollah as his ‘friends’ or the death of bin Laden as a ‘tragedy’. But there are only so many times this excuse can be used to explain these apparently supportive remarks. It’s beginning to look as though the Labour leader really does sympathise with terrorists.

It’s particularly difficult to make allowances for Corbyn when you take the broader context into account — the historical links between the hard left and Islamism. I’m currently reading The Flight of the Intellectuals by Paul Berman, which, in large part, is about the failure of the European left to see Islamism for what it is: namely, a Middle Eastern form of fascism. Berman documents in painstaking detail how Islamism was transformed into a mass movement by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s to foment anti-British insurrection in the Middle East and as an instrument for carrying out the extermination of the Jews.

The evidence linking Hassan al-Banna, the intellectual architect of Islamism and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, to Nazism is substantial. For one thing, he singled out Hitler as a political role model in one of his political tracts. For another, he was a close ally of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who helped set up a Muslim division of the Waffen SS in the Balkans. The Nazis gave the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies a good deal of resources, including a network of radio stations that the Grand Mufti used to disseminate pro-German propaganda. In 1942, one of these stations broadcast a speech telling all Arabs: ‘You must kill the Jews before they open fire on you. Kill the Jews who appropriated your wealth and who are plotting against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for?’

Initially, the hard left had no difficulty in condemning Islamism. Tony Cliff, the founder of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote a pamphlet in 1946 drawing attention to the fascist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. But various Trotskyist sects began to warm up to Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in a full-blown coalition in the run up to the Iraq war. In mass protests organised by the Socialist Workers Party and its European counterparts in 2003, Islamists carrying the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah marched with veterans of the European internationalist left, including Jeremy Corbyn. For the most part they got on well, although there were occasional flare-ups. For instance, during an anti-war demo in Paris a gang of Islamists broke off to beat up a group of yarmulke–wearing Jews, even though the Jews had turned up to support the cause.

One reason for the hard left’s change of heart about Islamism was straightforward political expediency. Here was an anti-western political movement boasting huge support among disadvantaged groups of young Muslims in Europe’s major cities. If Trotskyist front groups like the Stop the War Coalition could harness these disaffected youths to their cause, it might lead to a much-needed injection of energy and resources. And to a limited extent, that tactic succeeded, with new hybrid political groups springing up, such as Respect.

But as Paul Berman points out, it was also an expression of a wilful political blindness. The hard left had so much in common with the Islamists — a history of fighting colonialism, a hatred of Britain and America, a contempt for liberal democracy, a romantic attachment to revolution and a willingness to countenance violence as a tool of political change — that they were prepared to overlook some of their less savoury beliefs, such as virulent anti-Semitism. They were also prepared to make excuses for the activities of their more radical elements, such as the Taleban and al-Qaeda.

Back in the 1940s, few would have predicted that this bastard child of Nazism would find an ally in the leader of the Labour party. But it looks increasingly as though that has happened and I doubt if Labour will ever recover.

The post The Islamist Nazis and Corbyn’s wilful blindness appeared first on The Spectator.

Are we living in a golden age of protest? A bunch of aggrieved citizens only has to raise a murmur of protest, whether it’s about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or Islamophobia, and the institution they’re targeting instantly capitulates. A case in point is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. No sooner had a group of prominent African-American actors and directors complained about the lack of black Oscar nominees this year — ‘whitewash!’ — than the president of the Academy announced she would be taking ‘dramatic steps’ to address the problem. The Academy will enlarge its membership to include hundreds of entertainment industry figures from diverse backgrounds.

To date, the only note of dissent has been sounded by Best Actress nominee Charlotte Rampling, who complained that the uproar over this year’s nominees was ‘racist to white people’. Not that outrageous a comment. After all, if you’re claiming that the only reason this year’s acting nominees are all white is because of racial bias and not because they’ve actually given the best performances, that is kinda racist. Certainly, if Jeremy Clarkson claimed a black actor had only been nominated for reasons of political correctness, the same figures who’ve been complaining about the whitewash — Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith — would be the first to denounce him as racist. Yet Rampling has been forced to produce a grovelling recantation, abasing herself at the feet of the professionally outraged Twitterati and begging for forgiveness. Her chances of winning an Oscar this year are now zero.

More or less everyone else has accepted that the Academy is guilty as charged, but on what grounds? The difficulty is that there are no objective criteria you can appeal to when deciding whether the absence of black nominees is fair or not. Should Idris Elba have been nominated for his performance in Beasts of No Nation? That’s an entirely subjective question. Had I been a member of the Academy, I would have nominated Elba and ignored the finger-wagging environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, but I’m not so certain I’m right that I would accuse anyone who makes the opposite choice of racism. There is no right and wrong answer when it comes to matters of taste.

One way of assessing the accusation more objectively is to take more than one year into account, allowing for the fact that 2016 might be an outlier. And if you look at the number of black actors nominated for Academy Awards since 2000, it’s 10 per cent. Bearing in mind that African-Americans make up 12.6 per cent of the US population, that suggests there isn’t much bias. If anything, the bias is the other way. According to a study by the Economist, 9 per cent of the top roles in the highest-grossing films of 2000 to 2013 — the kind of roles that might lead to Oscar nominations — went to black actors. On that basis, it looks as though African-American actors are punching slightly above their weight when it comes to nominations.

Ironically, a big reason black actors don’t receive more recognition is because of politically correct casting. I remember buttonholing the late Alan Rickman at a party and asking whether it bothered him that he was only ever cast as the villain in Holly-wood movies — in Die Hard, for instance. Absolutely not, he said, and went on to explain that it’s much more challenging to play those roles because bad people are more interesting. As an actor, it stretches you in a way that playing a steely-eyed leading man never could. That’s why actors cast as villains are so often nominated for Oscars — a case in point being Tom Hardy, who’s been nominated this year for playing the baddie in The Revenant. (Idris Elba also played a villain in Beasts of No Nation and he’s been nominated for a Bafta, if not an Oscar.)

Unfortunately, African-American actors are rarely cast as psychopaths or murderers, presumably because directors don’t want to be vulnerable to charges of racial stereotyping. In Die Hard, for instance, the only African-American among the terrorists is a computer nerd. The black techie has become almost as big a cliché in Hollywood movies as the black judge — heaven forbid that black actors should be cast in less cerebral roles. But playing a brainiac in a supporting role isn’t going to get you nominated for an Oscar. Paradoxically, if Hollywood filmmakers were less anxious about being accused of racism, members of the Academy would be in a position to honour more black actors.

The post Is this a golden age of protest? appeared first on The Spectator.

David Cameron can be a frustrating figure at times. He wrote an article for the Sunday Times this week in which he drew attention to the under-representation of disadvantaged students in Britain’s universities, which he was quite right to do. But he is wrong about the ethnicity of those students and wrong about where the problem lies. It’s working-class white boys who fare the worst, not black boys, and when it comes to broadening access, the track record of our tertiary education sector is pretty good. It’s state schools that could be doing more.

First, a few facts. If you broaden the definition of non-white Britons to encompass all ethnic minorities, including British Asians, they’re significantly more likely to go to university than white Britons, according to an Institute of Fiscal Studies report published last year. That report found that Chinese pupils in the lowest socio-economic quintile are 10 per cent more likely to go to university than white British pupils in the highest quintile. The weakest performers are not black pupils, but white Britons in the lowest quintile. They’re 10 per cent less likely to participate in higher education than any other ethnic group.

Overall, 20 per cent of British students at UK universities are BME (black or minority ethnic), which is significantly higher than the percentage of the population that’s BME — 13 per cent, according to the 2011 Census. The figure for Russell Group universities is marginally lower — 18 per cent — and Oxford lower still, at around 14 per cent. But that figure is the same as the Russell Group average if you strip out London universities. True, black students are under–represented at Oxford and the success rate of black applicants is below average, but that’s largely because so few apply — only 281 last year, out of 11,729 applicants in total. And those who do tend to apply for the most oversubscribed subjects like law, medicine and PPE.

Oxford spends over £6 million a year on outreach programmes target-ed at disadvantaged groups, and the university takes contextual data into account — such as the quality of school the applicant goes to — when deciding whom to interview and whom to make offers to. But the university doesn’t flag applicants’ ethnicity, partly because that’s legally problematic. Having said that, there’s no evidence that BME students are under-represented among the 10 per cent of British Oxford undergraduates from the most disadvantaged households. On the contrary, they’re over-represented. It’s white boys from these households who are almost unheard of at Oxford.

The same is true of Cambridge. I appeared on Channel 4 News earlier this week to discuss this issue and a Cambridge graduate called Tony emailed me to say that in the three years he spent there, he never met a single white working-class student. ‘I am from Bermondsey and I never met one student at Cambridge who was authentically working class,’ he wrote. That’s anecdotal, but it’s borne out by other stories I’ve been told by the handful of white working-class boys who’ve made it to Oxbridge.

According to a report published last year by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, poor white boys are the lowest-achieving group in Britain, with just 28 per cent getting five GCSEs at grade C or above, including English and maths, in 2013. That was lower than poor Pakistani boys and poor black Caribbean boys (who were, until recently, the worst performers). By contrast, 74 per cent of Chinese boys on free school meals hit that target, and poor Chinese girls are the highest-achieving group in Britain.

The Prime Minister talked about ‘ingrained, institutional and insidious’ attitudes being partly responsible for the under-representation of disadvantaged groups at top universities, but if he meant racism directed at non-whites, he is mistaken. Inverse racism, whereby academics interviewing applicants from deprived backgrounds are more likely to be favourably disposed towards non-whites than whites, may be closer to the mark.

The real problem, though, is that poor white boys underachieve at school from the age of four onwards. There are lots of reasons for this and most are beyond the scope of the state to do much about, but schools could be doing more. What’s needed is a co-ordinated effort by the Department for Education, local authorities, academy groups and school leaders to raise the attainment of this group. Plenty of powerful people speak up for black boys, now including the Prime Minister. No one speaks up for poor white boys.

The post Why does no one speak up for poor white boys? appeared first on The Spectator.

Not long ago I was asked if I wanted to participate in a Channel 4 reality show called The Jump. Rather embarrassingly, I’d never seen it, but my agent’s description of it sounded quite appealing. A bunch of micro-celebrities are taught a variety of winter sports, including skeleton, bobsleigh, speed skating, giant slalom and ski jumping. Once they’ve mastered the basics, they’re flown to an Austrian ski resort where they compete against each other in a D-list version of the Winter Olympics.

A lot more appealing than Celebrity Big Brother, I thought, and less risk of ruining your reputation (yes, George Galloway, I’m thinking of you). However, there was a chance of damaging something more concrete. During the first series, which was broadcast in 2014, four of the contestants had to withdraw midway through filming as a result of their injuries. During the second, two more contestants fell by the wayside, including Sally Bercow, who fractured several ribs.

I met with the producers and told them I was willing to do it, but never heard back. Perhaps they thought that with my butterball physique and titanium ego, I just wasn’t fragile enough to provide the viewers with five-star entertainment. As fans of the reality genre will know, the producers like to put the contestants through the wringer in the hope that they will collapse, both physically and psychologically.

And they seem to have got it right in the case of The Jump. We’re only part-way through the third series, but already there have been seven casualties, including the Olympic bronze medallist Beth Tweddle, who suffered a broken neck. The only reality show to top this was the short-lived Pirate Master, which aired on CBS in 2013. One of the contestants on that committed suicide after she was eliminated from the series.

I don’t mean to sound disapproving. On the contrary, I think we’ve become far too precious about health and safety in contemporary Britain. If someone’s willing to risk life and limb in return for a bit of fame (and a decent fee), that’s their right. It would be one thing if the producers of The Jump had misled the contestants about the degree of risk involved, but as I recall they were completely up-front about it. Admittedly, they didn’t say: ‘You could break your neck’, but they told me about the injuries the previous contestants had sustained. In any case, you’d have to be some kind of moron not to realise that attempting a ski jump without having gone through years of training is incredibly dangerous.

I was pleased to see Eddie the Eagle pop up to express this point of view after Beth Tweddle’s accident. Eddie’s a hero of mine. A man with no discernible athletic ability who, through sheer effort of will, represented Great Britain at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Yes, he came last in both his events, but that just made him all the more inspiring, because it demonstrated how little aptitude he had for the sport. It was as if the man who worked behind the counter at the local corner shop had elbowed his way on to Britain’s Olympic ski-jumping team. If he could achieve his dream, anyone could.

‘They signed up for this, they’re being paid for this,’ he said. ‘I’ve fractured my skull twice, damaged a kidney, snapped a cruciate ligament in my knee, and broken all manner of bones, including my jaw. And I count myself very lucky it hasn’t been worse!’

Eddie’s about to experience a second dose of fame, as the subject of a biopic based on his Olympic adventure written by two friends of mine, Simon Kelton and Sean Macaulay. Simon and Sean’s stories aren’t dissimilar to Eddie’s in that they’ve been trying to make it as Hollywood screenwriters for more than 20 years.

Which isn’t to say they aren’t talented — they’re among the smartest people I know — only that it takes guts and tenacity to hang on to your dream for that long. And without wishing to jinx things, it looks as though their picture will be a hit. Twentieth Century Fox are so pleased with it that the studio booked a 30-second advertising spot during the Super Bowl. It’s due to be released in the UK on 26 February.

So here’s to the risk-takers, including Beth Tweddle. It doesn’t always pay off, but the important thing is to have a go. As Samuel Beckett said, ‘Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

The post Would I break my neck for a bit of TV fame? appeared first on The Spectator.

At first glance, Emma Thompson’s intervention in the Brexit debate earlier this week didn’t make much sense. Asked at the Berlin Film Festival whether the UK should vote to remain in the EU, she said we’d be ‘mad not to’. She went on to describe Britain as ‘a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island’. She added that she ‘just felt European’ and would ‘of course’ vote to remain in the EU. ‘We should be taking down borders, not putting them up,’ she said.

I think I get the bit about Britain being ‘rainy’. That’s true, obviously, and some people dislike our islands for that reason. Not sure that is the most persuasive reason for voting ‘in’ — will it rain less if we elect to stay? — but perhaps she’s worried that it will take her longer to get to her friend George Clooney’s house on Lake Como if we leave the EU, what with the end of free movement and so on. As any Eurosceptic will tell you, that’s a red herring, but it kind of, sort of makes sense.

No, the bit that confused me was her use of the phrases ‘cake-filled’ and ‘misery-laden’ side by side. Surely a nation that eats a lot of cake is, almost by definition, not miserable? I think it’s unlikely that the average Brit consumes more cake during a typical week than the average German, but even if that were true I don’t see how our love affair with cake makes us miserable. What’s going on in that voluminous brain of hers?

The only explanation I can think of is that she has a fixed idea about the sort of people who are in favour of Brexit — lower-middle-class, backward-looking, bigoted — and she thinks one of their characteristics, along with having lace curtains and using words like ‘serviette’ and ‘settee’, is that they eat a lot of cake. That would also explain the note of surprise when asked which way she’d be voting. Didn’t the questioner realise that all successful, Cambridge-educated, upper-middle-class women are in favour of the EU? Had he been living under a rock?

Thompson has come in for a fair amount of criticism since uttering these remarks — and rightly so — but she is hardly alone in suffering from such snobbery. As Orwell wrote about the liberal intelligentsia in England Your England: ‘They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.’ He continued: ‘In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God save the King” than of stealing from a poor box.’

Exactly this attitude — a sniggering contempt for the patriotism of ordinary people — was the subtext of Emily Thornberry’s famous tweet that got her fired from Labour’s front bench. And I’ve noticed it among my own social circle whenever Brexit comes up. It’s as though expressing any scepticism about our membership of the EU, particularly if it involves a concern about uncontrolled immigration, is a bit Non-U. On the surface, people claim to be concerned about jobs and the impact on our financial sector but really, deep down, they’re just advertising their membership of the educated elite. They’re not anxious about the consequences for the British economy. They’re anxious about being perceived as petit bourgeois.

It’s not surprising, then, that the cabinet is split along class lines when it comes to the EU. A majority of those in favour — David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt, Amber Rudd, Nicky Morgan — were privately educated, whereas most of those against — Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel — were state educated. Within the Conservative party, the schism over our membership of the EU is a proxy for the class antagonism between the different wings that’s always been present but rarely rises to the surface.

I’m not entirely immune to these influences myself. As a state-educated Tory, I identify more with the flag-waving, ‘Rule Britannia’ wing than the sophisticated, Europeanised types who dominate Cameron’s inner circle, and that’s partly why I’m a Eurosceptic. Unlike Emma Thompson, I think it’s entirely honourable to feel patriotic for tribal reasons, but rather odd to regard your membership of a British clique as requiring you to pour scorn on your country.

The post Emma Thompson’s wrong, and not just about the EU appeared first on The Spectator.

I don’t remember the last European referendum being nearly as dramatic as the current one. In 1975, we were being asked about our membership of the Common Market, not the -European Union, so there was less at stake — at any rate, that’s what the inners -wanted us to believe. The battle was also much more one-sided. Then as now, the pro-European side included the Prime Minister and the leaders of the other two main parties, but there were fewer cabinet ministers on the other side and it was easier to -caricature the antis (Tony Benn, Enoch Powell) as extremists. In 1975, the national press was overwhelmingly in favour of staying in and the ‘yes’ campaign was able to outspend the ‘no’ campaign several times over, neither of which are true today. The result, in which 67 per cent voted to stay in, was a foregone conclusion.

Then again, I was only 11 at the time. Like most of my -contemporaries, I felt closer to the continent across the Atlantic than the one across the Channel. For me, this was the era of Lost in Space and The Six Million Dollar Man. Trends in popular culture seemed to blow across from America with the Gulf Stream and found eager followers among my friends and me.

The big new thing in the -summer of 1975 was skateboarding and I remember pulling apart one of my sister’s roller skates and nailing each half to a piece of wood. The first time I took this contraption out for a test drive I didn’t wear any shoes and when it fell apart, as it inevitably did, I almost severed my little toe.

America felt accessible and exciting, the sort of place I could imagine living when I was older, whereas Europe was strange and foreign. It felt further away, somehow, which was odd because my parents had a summer house in the south of France. Perhaps it was because we always drove there — a two-day journey in our Morris Marina, described by Top Gear as one of the worst cars of all time. Being cooped up in the back for the best part of 48 hours, with nothing to stave off the boredom, left me with a lifelong horror of long car journeys.

The French were -considerably more hostile to British visitors then than they are now. Our house was in a small village at the foot of the Luberon called Auribeau and we were the only English residents. There was a French boy called Frédéric of about my age who lived opposite, but we weren’t friends. On the contrary, we were constantly coming to blows. Our two homes shared an outside lavatory and whenever I had to use it, particularly at night, I was terrified that Frédéric was going to push a scorpion under the door.

I daresay that any Francophiles reading this will point out that relations between our two countries are much better now, thanks to our membership of the European Union. Back then, most Britons didn’t think of ourselves as being in Europe — the headline ‘Storm in Channel, Continent isolated’ made complete sense to me — but as an independent country, comparable in stature, if not greater, than the land mass just off our eastern and southern coasts. Our membership of other regional blocs — the British Isles, the Commonwealth, Nato — loomed larger in the national psyche. Today, that’s no longer true. The Anglosphere has receded into the background and Europe is pressed up against our borders.

Eurosceptics like me are often accused of nostalgia, as if that’s a terrible thing, but I think we’d benefit from feeling a little more exceptional, like we did in 1975. One of the aims of the European project is to blur national differences, to reduce the gravitational force of our separate histories, to pool our identities as well as our sovereignty. All this is justified, say the federalists, to avoid a repeat of the bloody conflicts that tore the Continent apart in the last century. But is it really such a binary choice? Must we water down our sense of national identity almost to the point of nothingness in order to preserve the peace between us?

This, above all, is why I’ll be voting ‘leave’ on 23 June. It’s not just the inevitable erosion of our parliamentary sovereignty that I fear, but the gradual ebbing away of everything that makes Britain different and special. I want my children to feel they’ve won the lottery of life, not because they have a European passport, but because they have a British one.

REFERENDUM 2016: THE BATTLE AHEAD

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On Tuesday night I went to a birthday party for my father at the House of Commons. Hosted by the Labour MP Rushanara Ali, it was an enjoyable affair, full of left-wing journalists and maverick social entrepreneurs. I chatted to the Independent’s Andy McSmith, Prospect founder David Goodhart and the newly ennobled Lord Bird of Notting Hill, who set up the Big Issue.

My dad wasn’t there, unfortunately. He died in 2002 and this was an event organised by the Young Foundation, a sort of incubator for social enterprises that he set up in 1954 and which is still going strong. It was to celebrate the centenary of his birth and I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have thought of me if he were still alive.

I’m sure most people whose fathers are no longer around occasionally think about this. But I don’t have a choice because a day doesn’t go by without some wag on Twitter claiming my dad would be ‘spinning in his grave’ thanks to my latest outrage — standing up for Boris Johnson on Channel 4 News, for instance, or writing an article in the Daily Mail. Remember the abuse Hilary Benn got when he spoke in favour of Syrian airstrikes in the House of Commons? Well I get that all the time.

The first thing to be said about this kind of attack is that it’s a species of ad hominem. You’re not being criticised because your position is poorly argued or unsupported by the evidence, but because it’s a point of view your father would have disapproved of. The correct response is: ‘So what?’ Not only is that completely irrelevant from an intellectual point of view — the Labour son of a Conservative isn’t wrong because his father would have frowned upon him, so why should the opposite hold true? — it’s also a poor psychological argument. Surely, a man who holds exactly the same views as his father is likely to be less thoughtful than one who disagrees with him on some issues?

Another irritating thing about this complaint is that when you think about it, it’s actually a criticism of my father, not me. What the opponent is really saying is: ‘Your father was such an unbending fanatic that fealty to his socialist principles would have trumped filial love.’ No doubt such monsters do exist, particularly on the left, but my father wasn’t one of them. Having known him for the first 37 years of my life, during which time we disagreed about a great many things, I can confidently say that wasn’t true. On the contrary, he liked nothing more than a good political argument, a trait he passed on to me. That’s one of the reasons we enjoyed each other’s company. Indeed, if we’d seen eye to eye about more things, I doubt we would have got along so well.

In spite of all this, the criticism does sting, as you can probably tell. Deep within all of us is a desire not just to be loved by our fathers, but to win their approval, too. According to Freud, this is the origin of Protestant morality. We start out wanting to kill our fathers so we can have our mothers to ourselves — this is the Oedipal phase, which peaks at age four or five — but learn to suppress these atavistic impulses in deference to our father’s authority. As we get older, this authority figure becomes internalised in the form of the conscience. That voice we hear inside our heads, telling us not to give in to temptation, is the voice of our father.

So, inevitably, at this House of Commons event, as I talked to my father’s surviving friends about what I’ve been doing since we last met, I was scanning them for signs of approval or disapproval, as if that would have provided a clue to how my father would have felt. The six–million-dollar question is: ‘What would he have thought of free schools?’ It’s my advocacy of that policy, above all else, that has prompted the ‘spinning in his grave’ comments.

Imagine my delight, then, when a former chief executive of the Young Foundation shook me warmly by the hand and told me he was setting up a free school in Dulwich. That clinches it, as far as I’m concerned. Henceforth, anyone claiming my father would have disapproved of free schools can go hang.

The post What would my socialist dad think of me now? appeared first on The Spectator.

Whenever I hear a leftie complain about being abused on Twitter, I think: ‘You should try being me.’ A case in point is the journalist Caitlin Moran, who has often taken up the cause of feminists threatened with violence. Among other things, she campaigned for a ‘report abuse’ button in the hope of making Twitter a safer place, more in keeping with ‘the spirit that the internet was conceived and born in — one of absolute optimism’.

A noble sentiment, but I couldn’t help taking this with a pinch of salt after the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of feminists on Twitter. Take the time I appeared on a BBC2 discussion programme with Germaine Greer. My ability to irritate is so reliable, one irate female viewer tweeted, that it ‘could be used to power an atomic clock’. She then added: ‘Oh, Germaine Greer. You’re still MAGNIFICENT. Please end this brilliant monologue by running a sword through Toby Young’s face.’ Needless to say, the author of these offensive tweets was Caitlin Moran.

But I had an experience recently which made me think perhaps those on the left who complain about their treatment on Twitter have a point. It all began perfectly innocently when I tweeted a picture of my ten-year-old son Ludo. This was on the morning of World Book Day when primary schools encourage their pupils to dress up as their favourite literary characters. A girl in Ludo’s class bet him £1 he wouldn’t dare come to school as a female character so he decided to go as Goldilocks. In the picture he’s wearing a blond wig, a flowery dress and long white socks. The message accompanying the picture read: ‘My son Ludo is going to school as Goldilocks #WorldBookDay.’

I got a couple of nice replies — ‘Fabulous wig!’, ‘Great effort Ludo!’ — and then it turned nasty. Someone tweeting under the name of @Littlebackstory wrote: ‘You belong in front of a firing squad, sicko. Kill yourself immediately #ChildAbuse #ManchausenByTyranny #Attention WhoreParents.’ Another weighed in: ‘This twat wants castrating.’

What was going on? Why would a picture of Ludo looking rather adorable prompt such vituperative language? The next tweet I got was from someone calling themselves @Celto-Germanic: ‘You are one abusive piece of shit,’ he said. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked. ‘Because you are dressing your son up as a woman and sending him to school in order to virtue signal to impress other leftists.’

The phrase ‘virtue signalling’ kept coming up again and again. ‘Using your kid as a prop for your virtue signalling is #ChildAbuse,’ tweeted @ time-forgravy. ‘Those who abuse children so they can social signal need to be thrown into an oven,’ said @SoapMerchant. Finally, the penny dropped — they thought I was the father of a transgendered child. In their eyes, my sins were twofold. First, I had -decided to dress Ludo as a girl, presumably because I’m one of those liberal parents who thinks that’s what you do if your ten-year-old thinks he was born in the wrong body. Second, I was advertising how ‘virtuous’ I was. ‘Wow,’ tweeted @AgentofReality1. ‘Enabling a son’s mental illness for brownie points with the Social Justice Warrior pussies. Child abuse IMHO.’

What was so bizarre is that Ludo was clearly dressed as a fairy-tale character. Not only did I use the word ‘Goldilocks’ in my original tweet, but in the picture he is smiling broadly and clutching three teddy bears. Surely it was obvious, even to the most dim-witted Twitter user, that it was just a bit of a lark? I daresay there are some transgendered ten-year-old boys who go to school dressed as girls, but Goldilocks?!? I mean, come on.

I have to admit, these tweets were more unpleasant than anything I’ve ever received from left-wingers. At least Caitlin Moran urging Germaine Greer to decapitate me was quite funny. These were just downright nasty. I felt as if I’d been given a taste of the kind of abuse parents of transgendered children must get every day.

I haven’t become a leftie as a result, but I enjoyed taking up the cudgels on behalf of a group I’m not in the habit of defending.

‘If you think your son is likely to come (mentally) unscathed out of this, you’re not only a bad father, you’re delusional,’ tweeted @torslayer.

‘You’re right,’ I replied. ‘He might develop a nasty habit of dressing up as a woman for a lark. But being British, he’ll fit right in.’

The post A new taste of Twitter nastiness appeared first on The Spectator.

It was like being on the set of an inspirational Hollywood film about a visionary teacher who transforms the lives of disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic children in a run-down part of Los Angeles. The young woman leaping about at the front of the class, who had somehow got a group of 12- and 13-year-olds speaking fluent French, looked a bit like Emma Stone. If this was a film, she’d be a cert for an Oscar.

But this was no movie and I was in Wembley, not LA. The French class I was observing at Michaela Community School — a free school opened in 2014 by Katharine Birbalsingh — was the most impressive I’ve ever seen, and I’ve visited dozens of schools across the world, including some of Britain’s top public schools. Children on free school meals who had arrived wth a reading age of six were rattling off French verbs and sentences that would have shamed an A-level group. And this wasn’t even the top set!

I was suspicious at first — was this a dog-and-pony show put on to impress visitors? — but I popped into another class and then another. It was the same in every one. Children sitting up straight and listening in respectful silence, then a sea of eager, outstretched hands. It was like a model school showing just what it’s possible to achieve in the most challenging circumstances; the opposite of the dystopian classroom jungles in Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Progressive educationalists claim that traditional teaching and strong discipline stifles children’s creativity and turns them into North Korean drones, but the children I saw could not have been happier or more engaged.

Even the lunch hour felt too good to be true. First, the children collectively recited poetry from memory — ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair’ — then, at the behest of a teacher, they discussed the topic of the day as they ate their lunch. In this case, the subject was the importance of dressing ‘professionally’, e.g., not wearing hoodies and low-slung trousers. At the end of the meal, pupils took turns to stand up and ‘give appreciation’ — thanking a fellow student or member of staff for teaching them a valuable lesson. One African-Caribbean boy stood up and said: ‘I’d like to thank Miss Dyer for showing me it’s easy to react in a crazy way if you’re accused of something you haven’t done, but it just makes people think you’re guilty.’

The government’s education reforms have been in the news this week following the announcement that all mainstream local authority schools in England must become academies, and the critics have been out in force. Once again, the dysfunctional public education system that New Labour bequeathed to the Tories in 2010, in which a fifth of children left school unable to read or do basic maths, is being portrayed as a golden age. According to these nostalgics, England had the best state schools in Christendom before Michael Gove and his Visigoths were let loose with axes and wrecking balls.

But Katharine Birbalsingh taught in a number of those schools and knows it to be a lie. ‘I’ll tell you what drives me,’ she said in her office overlooking Wembley Park tube station. ‘I failed hundreds of children in my lifetime because I was part of a system that failed children. I’m determined never to fail another child and if I can do that, Michaela won’t just save them; it will save me. It can be done. We just have to think differently.’

I’ve known Katharine since she bravely stood up at the 2010 Conservative party conference and spoke in support of Michael Gove. At the time she was the deputy head of a large south London comprehensive, and though no Tory, she had seen how bog-standard comprehensives had consistently failed the least well-off. Needless to say, she parted company with that comp soon afterwards. She earned a living as a journalist for a while, but I advised her to start her own school and, after getting nowhere in Labour-controlled Lambeth, she finally managed to open Michaela in Brent in 2014.

This school is nothing short of miraculous — a beacon of light made possible by Conservative education reforms. I hope that in three years’ time, when Michaela gets its first set of stellar GCSE results, Katharine will be invited to speak at the 2019 Labour party conference to explain how she and her staff have done it. Her opening line should be: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’

The post The miracle of Michaela appeared first on The Spectator.

According to figures obtained by BBC Breakfast last week, more than 500 people were arrested in England and Wales in 2014–15 for leaving children unattended. In the majority of cases, the children concerned were aged ten or under, but some parents got into trouble for leaving their 15-year-olds home alone. It’s hard not to conclude that the police are being a bit heavy-handed, trying to take on responsibility for something that properly belongs to parents.

As regular readers will know, Caroline and I have four children aged 12 and under and we don’t see eye to eye about this. Her level of anxiety about the various disasters that might befall them is about average for a west London yummy mummy, whereas I’m at the intensely relaxed end of the spectrum.

For instance, it’s our 15th wedding anniversary coming up and I suggested we spend a long weekend in Les Trois Vallées. We both used to ski regularly, but since Sasha was born in 2003 we’ve been only once, and that was a disaster.

‘What about the kids?’ she asked.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Sasha can look after the boys and we can get a neighbour to check up on them. They’ll be fine.’

If looks could kill, I would have resembled an extra in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

One of the reasons I’m OK about leaving the children to fend for themselves is because my parents were so cavalier with me. When I was ten I was doing a paper round and walking to and from primary school by myself. Admittedly this was in Highgate, not Peckham, but the school was over a mile away and the journey involved plenty of main roads and a shortcut through a council estate. It would never have occurred to my parents to put me on a bus, let alone take me in the car.

I remember coming back from school one day to find two intruders in the empty house. Luckily, they ran out of the back door when I let myself in the front, but it could have gone another way. When my mum got home about an hour later, the police were already there, dusting for fingerprints — I dialled 999 as soon as I realised we’d been burgled.

I suppose in some families this would have led to a reassessment of the childcare arrangements, but not ours. I enjoyed the whole experience immensely and it confirmed my mother’s view that I was capable of looking after myself. In any event, as she said: ‘Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.’

I think my mum had the right idea, but I’ve never been able to convince Caroline of this and I can see her point. One of the main arguments for being a laissez-faire parent is that it teaches your children to weigh up risks and act responsibly, but my own upbringing didn’t exactly have that effect. When I first studied economics at university I was amazed to discover that rational human beings were only allowed to have two attitudes to risk: risk-averse and risk-neutral. ‘What about risk-positive?’ I asked. My economics tutor gave me a puzzled look and I explained that if a particular activity was dangerous — if there was a high chance it could lead to sudden, violent death — I found it more appealing. ‘That doesn’t fall within the spectrum of rational behaviour,’ he said.

It was several years before I was able to persuade Caroline that it was OK for her to go away for the weekend, leaving the kids in my care. When she eventually did, she phoned and texted throughout and I told her everything was fine. I thought it was, too, but on her return she discovered that my definition of ‘fine’ wasn’t the same as hers. The three boys merrily told her that on Saturday morning I’d taken them to Westfield, the second- largest shopping centre in the UK, and promptly ‘lost’ them. That was a complete exaggeration, I protested. I’d only mislaid them for half an hour and I found them all playing video games in the Apple store, as happy as Larry. Needless to say, she hasn’t taken another weekend break since.

I’m still holding out hope for the ski trip. We have a new au pair called Anna, employed solely to look after our Vizsla puppy, and I think I’ve convinced Caroline that if we leave the dog with her sister, Anna can cope with the children. Now all I have to do is persuade her I won’t be too ‘risk-positive’ on the slopes.

The post Why I’d like to be a more dangerous dad appeared first on The Spectator.

As someone who believes in limited government, I feel conflicted about universal academisation. I’m a fan of the academies policy because it reduces the involvement of politicians and bureaucrats in taxpayer-funded education, but there’s something a little Stalinist about the state forcing all local-authority schools to become academies. It’s using socialist methods to bring about a conservative goal. It reminds me of that paradox first-year philosophy students struggle with — is it right to force a slave to be free?

Jeremy Corbyn and the teaching unions have decided that this is a good issue for them and are planning a national campaign against ‘forced academisation’. But the emphasis on the word ‘forced’ is curious because that’s the bit of the policy you’d think they’d like. Last week, as I did a tour of TV and radio studios to defend academies, I found myself facing left-wing opponents who were complaining about central government diktat and one-size-fits-all schools. Suddenly, diversity of provision and parental choice had become good things. Hang on, I thought. That’s exactly what I was arguing in 2009. It was as though I had switched places with the anti-education reform campaigner Fiona Millar.

A moment’s reflection reveals that this can’t be what the left really objects to — after all, Labour’s education policy, insofar as it has one, is to restore local-authority control over all taxpayer-funded schools. Given that nearly 70 per cent of state secondaries in England and 15 per cent of primaries are already academies, that would involve almost as much coercion as the measure it opposes. Critics of academies have demanded a uniform system of state provision for decades, so it’s a bit rich for them to complain about the universality of the policy. They’re just annoyed that the monocultural system we end up with won’t be Finland.

But if the left is only pretending to dislike academies for that reason, why does it really dislike them? It’s a bit perplexing, because nearly all the other reasons they put forward are based on misunderstandings.

Corbyn used the phrase ‘asset stripping’ in his speech to the NUT last week, but that’s flat-out wrong. When a school becomes an academy, the land and buildings aren’t transferred from a local authority to a private company. Rather, the freehold is retained by the authority, which offers a lease to the academy or multi-academy trust it’s decided to join. ‘Asset renting’ would be more accurate, but that it have the same ring.

I used the phrase ‘private company’ just now and it’s true that academies and multi-academy trusts are limited companies, but that phrase needs unpacking because Corbyn and his allies use it as a synonym for ‘profit-making’. In fact, academies are a specific type of company more commonly known as ‘charities’ and, as such, they’re prohibited from making profits. So accusing the government of ‘privatising’ state schools makes little sense, unless by that you mean entrusting charities with stewardship of our public education system. Not much of a rallying cry either.

More sophisticated critics admit that academies cannot make profits, but point out that the people who run them can let contracts to profit-making companies. Quite true, but then so can local-authority-run schools. So can NHS hospitals, for that matter. And what’s wrong with that, providing they’re getting value for money? As someone who’s helped set up four academies and is now the CEO of a multi-academy trust, I can assure you that there are strict rules in place to ensure we do get value for money when letting contracts. We’re audited once a year to make sure we comply. That’s more frequently than local-authority schools.

Reluctantly, I’ve come to the conclusion that Corbyn and his allies don’t actually know what an academy is. All they know is they were invented by Tony Blair and that’s good enough. The funny thing is, if they did their homework they’d discover that buried in the fine print of the funding agreements that all academies have to sign are clauses granting the Secretary of State for Education sweeping powers over them, should he or she choose to use them. If Corbyn actually won an election, all he’d have to do is ennoble Fiona Millar and install her in the DfE, and it would be a one-way ticket to the Finland Station. Which is why I’m a bit ambivalent about them.

The post Why I’m uneasy about academies for all appeared first on The Spectator.

Something odd happened at the Guardian on Monday as the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their just-published splash about the Panama papers. They were understandably excited, having sat on the revelations for months, and were about to put flesh on the bones of the stories that had broken on Sunday evening about the elaborate tax-avoidance schemes of assorted Tory bigwigs. The Guardian was one of 107 media organisations that had been secretly going through the cache of 11.5 million documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca last August and these were the golden nuggets: disclosures guaranteed to cause the government maximum embarrassment and — an added bonus — give a much-needed boost to Jeremy Corbyn. With a bit of luck, the paper’s associate editor Seumas Milne, who is widely disliked on the editorial floor, would remain on secondment to the Labour leader’s office for some time to come.

But even allowing for all that, what happened next was still perplexing. They gave themselves a round of applause. That’s right, the Guardian’s editorial staff put down their cups of fair-trade coffee and started clapping. In their eyes, these revelations about the use of offshore tax shelters by various grandees were a cause for self-congratulation.

Now, I can think of three possible explanations. First, they either didn’t know or had forgotten about the Guardian Media Group’s use of a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying corporation tax when it sold its 50 per cent holding in Auto Trader to Apex Partners in 2008 (hat tip to Guido Fawkes). Further, they were similarly ignorant about the hundreds of millions GMG has invested in offshore hedge funds over the years. But that seems unlikely. After all, right-wing hacks like me lose no opportunity to draw attention to the paper’s creative tax affairs, particularly when confronted with self-righteous columnists like Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee wagging their fingers at Vodafone and Starbucks for avoiding paying their ‘fair share’.

A second possibility — and, admittedly, this is farfetched — is that the paper’s hacks have actually read and been convinced by the former -editor Alan Rusbridger’s long, rambling explanation of why the directors of GMG aren’t tax-dodgers after all. In his 2,000-word essay on the subject, published three years after the allegations were first put to him (so much for transparency!), he claims it was perfectly right and proper that GMG didn’t pay a single penny in corporation tax on its £302 million profit from that sale. Insofar as I understand it (and I’ve read it three times) the gist of Rusbridger’s argument is that GMG’s tax affairs are all fine and dandy because they’re perfectly legal. Hmm. Couldn’t exactly the same defence be made of the Tory bigwigs?

No, the correct explanation, I believe, is that the paper’s hacks were applauding the sheer brazenness of their hypocrisy. This wasn’t common-or-garden two-facedness, like attacking the government’s decision to give council-flat tenants the opportunity to own their homes while owning two or three yourself. Or pouring scorn on free-school founders desperately seeking an alternative to sink comprehensives while sending your own kids to a top public school. No, this was hypocrisy on an audacious scale.

When those Guardian journalists thought about the Panama stories, they must have experienced the thrill felt by the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart as he railed against adultery from his pulpit having just slept with a New Orleans prostitute.

Even more deliciously, the charge they level at the Prime Minister — financially benefiting from a tax arrangement he had nothing to do with — is one they were all guilty of themselves. After all, the Guardian would have long gone out of business without the financial fleet-footedness of GMG’s directors. And on top of that, the icing on the cake, they were holding a leading politician responsible for the alleged sins of his father, something many of them condemned in a fit of high dudgeon when the Daily Mail ran its story about Ralph Miliband in 2013. What larks! This was the hypocritical equivalent of a triple word score. In for a penny, in for a pound, and no tax payable on the winnings thanks to GMG’s fiendishly clever offshore tax arrangements.

On reflection, I’m amazed the Guardian hacks don’t give themselves a round of applause every morning.

The post A big hand for the two-faced tax hacks appeared first on The Spectator.

As someone who still entertains hope of becoming a member of Parliament one day, I’d better come clean about my own tax affairs. It’s a torrid tale, as you’d expect, but rather than wait for my political opponents to winkle the story out of me bit by bit, I thought I’d get it all out in the open.

I blame the Cub Scouts for starting me on the wrong path. As a boy of eight, I was an eager participant in bob-a-job week, which involved going from door to door on my street offering to do odd jobs. I turned all the money over to my Cub pack, but I realised I could earn extra pocket money from then on by washing cars and weeding gardens. Before long, I’d earned enough money to buy my own portable black-and-white tele-vision — about £40, if I recall. But reader, I have a confession to make: I didn’t declare that income to the taxman.

It was all downhill from there.

On a school journey to Brussels aged 14, I persuaded an older gentle-man to buy 200 More Menthols for me in duty-free and then sold them, one cigarette at a time, to my schoolmates at a 100 per cent mark-up. Did I hand over the tax I would have paid if I’d bought them in the corner shop? Did I hell. This was in spite of the fact that the bicycle shed I sold them behind at King Edward VI Comprehensive School in Totnes had been paid for by the taxpayer. Typical Tory hypocrite, eh? Profiting from the infrastructure built with the taxes of hard-working families while not paying any tax myself!

When I was 26, my father gave me £20,000 to put down as a deposit on a flat in Shepherd’s Bush and — a shocking dereliction of duty, this — I didn’t inquire where the money had come from. Had I realised a career in politics beckoned, I would have demanded he account for every penny and if any of it had been funnelled through an offshore trust I would have denounced him in Pravda –– I mean, the Guardian.

I’m on safer ground when it comes to the estate he left when he died because it consisted of a small house in the South of France worth £140,000. Half of it had to be divided between five children — that was the half my mother left to him when she died and those were her wishes — and the other half between six children, because he’d remarried since my mother’s death and had a daughter. That meant I was entitled to 11/60ths of £140,000 — or would have been if another, French, will hadn’t turned up. After the house was sold, the lion’s share of the money went on paying the English and French lawyers to sort this out. I think it’s safe to say he didn’t engage in careful tax planning.

That’s the big stuff, but there’s plenty of small stuff, too. At various points in my career I have diverted some of my income into a pension pot, thereby avoiding paying income tax on the diverted portion. A mealy- mouthed Tory might try to justify this by pointing out it was in keeping with the intentions of whichever Chancellor created this tax break, but I realise that won’t cut it. In our new transparent age, anyone who doesn’t arrange their affairs so as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his stores — to quote Lord Clyde — is a loathsome tax dodger.

Then there were the numerous occasions when, the day before fuel duty went up, I made a special trip to the local garage. An honest Labour man would have put in just that amount he knew he would use before the rise took effect, but not a Tory toff like me. I ordered the cowering petrol pump attendant to ‘fill ’er up’ and, by heaven, if he refused to tug his forelock afterwards he didn’t get a tip.

Finally, there’s the Apple Watch I bought my wife as an anniversary present. Had I got it from the Apple Store it would have cost £259, but because I bought it in duty-free at Heathrow it cost only £233. That’s £26 I cheated out of HMRC.

Reading this back, I realise a wrong ’un like me has no place in our public life. Forget running for Parliament. I will spend the rest of my days atoning for my sins. I wonder if there are any openings at Toynbee Hall?

The post My confession: I began dodging tax aged eight appeared first on The Spectator.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of this I am certain, that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority whenever strong divisions prevail,’ he wrote. He compared demagogues to ‘court favourites’ — gifted at exploiting the -insecurities of the powerful, whether the people or the monarch.

For Burke, the risk of democracies being captured by demagogues then degenerating into tyrannies was a good argument against universal suffrage. The multitude would always be susceptible to being swayed by feeling rather than reason; they could no more be trusted with absolute power than a king or a queen. The answer, he believed, was a mixture of democracy and aristocracy, the one acting as a counterweight to the other.

It’s a curiosity of Burke’s essay that in the 226 years since it was published, his pessimism has proved well-founded about almost every country that has embraced universal suffrage except Britain. Looking at Europe and its neighbours, it’s tempting to conclude that this problem afflicts only immature democracies. I’m thinking of Russia and Turkey, but it’s also a problem in Poland, Hungary and Romania and may yet prove the undoing of France’s fifth republic. Indeed, I suspect the reason arch-federalists like Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk aren’t that keen on democracy is because it paved the way to dictatorship in Italy, Spain and Germany. You could argue that the EU was established to ‘save’ the Continent from the excesses of mob rule, with unelected commissioners and senior officials standing in for Burke’s hereditary elite.

But Donald Trump’s success suggests that even mature democracies are vulnerable to demagoguery. He is the latest in a long line of populist firebrands stretching back to ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Tillman, the senator who led a paramilitary group and boasted of killing African-Americans during the 1876 election. None succeeded in capturing the presidency, and Trump looks unlikely to do so, but only a fool would rule it out in perpetuity.

Yet Britain has never suffered this problem. The nearest we’ve come is probably Oswald Mosley, but his New Party didn’t win a single seat in the 1931 general election and the -British Union of Fascists — his second attempt to break the mould — was equally unsuccessful. Rabble rousers of the left –— Tony Benn, for instance — have fared a little better, but never wielded much power. The closest we have today is probably George Galloway, and he couldn’t even win Celebrity Big Brother, let alone the London mayoralty. Nigel Farage? He’s less like a demagogue than an old-fashioned music hall entertainer — more Archie Rice than Alf Garnett.

How have we remained immune? George Orwell pondered this question in England Your England and suggested that, for one thing, our love of liberty runs too deep. We are a nation of people who loathe being bossed about, and that makes us inherently suspicious of those seeking to wield power over us. For another, there’s the inherent gentleness of the English character. ‘You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil,’ he wrote. ‘It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the police carry no revolvers.’ We are patriotic, but our patriotism is expressed as affection for heroic failures and military disasters rather than tub-thumping jingoism — Eddie the Eagle, not Richard the Lionheart. Above all, we have a respect for the law, for constitutional legality, even without a written constitution. It’s simply inconceivable that a British Prime Minister would get away with nobbling the highest court in the land, as Poland’s did last year.

I’d add another reason, which is our sense of humour. For the British to become beguiled by a silver-tongued crowd-pleaser they’d have to ignore his or her inherent absurdity — the populist slogans, the arm-waving, the faux sincerity. We could never bring ourselves to vote for Trump — not in large numbers, anyway — because of his ludicrous self-importance. For most of us, the over-engineered hair would be reason enough to laugh him out of court.

So Burke was right about the pitfalls of democracy, but wrong about the one country he hoped would heed his warning. Long may it remain so.

The post Long may we laugh at our absurd demagogues appeared first on The Spectator.

A new book published today by the Institute of Economic Affairs called In Focus: The Case for Privatising the BBC includes a chapter by the economist Ryan Bourne on the BBC’s left-of-centre bias. As you’d expect, Bourne’s contribution includes plenty of fascinating data, such as the fact that ‘Thought for the Day’ contributors are eight times more likely to offer a negative view of market-based and capitalist activity than a positive view.

However, Bourne doesn’t accuse the Beeb of straightforward left-wing bias. Its partiality is more subtle and complicated than that. He cites an example of the BBC’s coverage of immigration provided by Roger Mosey, a former editorial director. In his recent memoir about working for the broadcaster (Getting Out Alive), Mosey recalls overseeing an evening news report about the impact of immigration in a racially diverse part of Britain. The package featured only one white working-class voice, who said he was ‘perfectly happy’ about current levels. Mosey asked the reporter whether this was representative of the white working-class people he’d interviewed and the reporter admitted it wasn’t. The problem was, all the other vox pops had been ‘fairly rabidly racist’ so couldn’t be used.

Not a representative view, then, but not necessarily a left-wing one. Bourne points out that his own organisation, the IEA, is both pro-capitalist and pro-immigration, as most classical liberals are. Then again, most BBC news editors probably don’t realise that there are pro-immigration voices on the right and they certainly don’t invite them to discuss the issue very often. So their lack of partisan bias on this issue could just be a mistake.

The same ambiguity applies when it comes to the EU. Bourne commissioned a research company called Newswatch to analyse the discussion of the EU on the Today programme between March 2004 and last June. In the monitored sample, 4,275 guests appeared to talk about the EU, of whom just 132 were in favour of British withdrawal. That’s 3.2 per cent of the total, even though opinion polls in the same period put the level of public support for withdrawal at between 33 and 50 per cent. Of those 132, some 95 were members of Ukip and over a third of the pro-Brexit contributions were from one man, Nigel Farage.

Again, that’s not really an example of partisanship because plenty of senior Tory politicians are pro-EU. It’s a bias in favour of the views of the metropolitan elite, both Labour and Conservative, and against those perceived to be unsophisticated and uneducated. And, of course, it’s not conscious. As former Today editor Rod Liddle says: ‘The BBC’s bias was arrived at through a sort of inherent wet liberalism, rather than an actual plot, as such.’ The same observation has been made by Andrew Marr, who acknowledges the Beeb has ‘an innate liberal bias’, but attributes it to the fact that, as a publicly funded urban organisation, it has ‘an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’.

What can be done about this? Bourne and his colleagues think the BBC should be privatised but, as he points out, that wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem. Tim Groseclose, an American media analyst, wrote a book on this subject in which he concluded that the vast majority of US national news organisations leaned to the left when benchmarked against the views of the general public. The truth is, the Beeb would probably still suffer from a liberal bias even if it was owned by Rupert Murdoch because of where it draws its workforce from. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the broadcaster’s stellar global brand is partly contingent upon its sophisticated, metropolitan viewpoint being preserved. If it suddenly became more like Fox News, or gave off a less de haut en bas air, it wouldn’t be so revered by opinion leaders around the world, most of whom share the BBC’s liberal biases.

Nevertheless, Bourne thinks the Beeb should be sold off. As a private company, its dominant position in the media market would lead to competition concerns and it would probably be reduced in size. In addition, is it fair to ask the man in the street to fund an organisation that regularly expresses contempt for his views? I’m undecided on the issue, but there’s no doubt that Ryan Bourne has written a thought-provoking essay.

The post What if Murdoch owned the Beeb? appeared first on The Spectator.

Tuesday’s protest against Key Stage 1 Sats was moronic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. For one thing, it wasn’t a ‘kids’ strike’. Did a national committee of six- and seven-year-olds get together and decide on a day of action? Even in Brighton, the centre of the boycott, that seems a bit far-fetched. The grown-up organisers of the protest clearly believed that was a cute way of packaging it for media consumption, but the thought of such young children engaging in political activism is actually a bit sinister. It’s like something out of a dystopian satire — a cross between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Then there’s the sheer selfishness of the whole thing. Thousands of parents get to indulge in a day of virtue-signalling while schools are left to pick up the pieces. Are the organisers aware that if unauthorised absences at a school exceed a certain threshold, that school is ineligible for an Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ grade? Not only that, it could be plunged into special measures if its pass rate in the KS1 Sats falls below the floor standard. Schools live or die by their Ofsted rankings, particularly in middle-class cities like Brighton, so this protest could end up doing serious damage.

The organisers claim that child-ren find taking an exam at this age ‘stressful’ and worry about being branded ‘failures’, but that wasn’t true of my four kids. If only! Then they might have done some revision. This time last year, I asked seven-year-old Charlie how he thought he’d done and he looked baffled. He didn’t know he’d done an exam, and when I explained that he had, he exhibited no curiosity about the results.

That’s anecdotal, of course, but I’ve seen no evidence linking the KS1 Sats to elevated stress levels. And if they really do cause psychological harm, why protest now and not when they were first rolled out 25 years ago? The main difference this year is that the results are being externally moderated rather than relying on teacher assessment — which is a good idea, since numerous research studies show that teachers assess children from low-income families as being on average less bright than those from richer families. Not because teachers are snobs, but because they’re prone to unconscious bias, like most people.

If you accept that it makes sense to teach children to read, write and add up in primary school, the case for testing them is unanswerable. How are teachers supposed to know how much of the curriculum their pupils have mastered, and to differentiate between them, if they don’t have any test results to go on? Just as importantly, how will parents and Ofsted hold schools to account in the absence of this data? It’s no good just testing children once, at the end of their primary school careers, since how children perform in exams is linked to factors schools have no control over, such as IQ and parental socio-economic status. Much fairer from the schools’ point of view to test them at the end of KS1 and then again at the end of KS2, so you can measure how much progress pupils make, regardless of their different starting points. That also produces more useful data when it comes to assessing how effective different teaching methods are.

But listening to the protestors on the BBC news, it was clear that they don’t think primary schools should be teaching the three Rs. Their rallying cry was ‘Let our kids be kids’, by which they mean that children shouldn’t be taught anything at that age, just encouraged to express themselves and engage in ‘creative’ play. As far as they’re concerned, lessons should be fun, not difficult. The purpose of primary education is to produce emotionally well-adjusted, happy children, and anything which detracts from that, such as asking them to learn grammar and then testing them on it, should be verboten.

Trouble is, it’s kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who are penalised by this therapeutic approach. The children of the middle-class protestors will be fine if they spend all day finger-painting because they’ll pick up the basics at home; it’s their less affluent peers who will suffer. The point of the new, more rigorous primary curriculum is to reduce the yawning chasm between rich and poor children when they start secondary school. The anti-Sats brigade think of themselves as ‘progressive’, but if they succeed they will end up entrenching class divisions.

The post Middle-class warriors appeared first on The Spectator.

One of the interesting features of the Brexit debate is that it has laid bare a schism in British society which runs much deeper than the conventional Labour-Conservative divide. On the one hand, we have the prosperous, educated elite, mainly based in cities and university towns, who are liberal on social issues, pro-immigration, believers in free trade and internationalist in outlook. On the other, we have the white working class, clustered in areas of economic stagnation, particularly seaside towns, who are socially conservative, anti-immigration, suspicious of free trade and staunchly nationalist.

This isn’t a perfect summary. Dan Hannan, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove fall more naturally into the first category, whereas Scottish and Welsh nationalists are mainly pro-EU. But it’s broadly true. Two years ago, the political scientist Chris Hanretty ranked all 650 British constituencies according to how likely they were to support Brexit. The five least eurosceptic are Edinburgh South, Manchester Withington, Edinburgh North and Leith, Bristol West and Hornsey and Wood Green, whereas the five most are Clacton, Castle Point, Great Yarmouth, Christchurch and Blackpool North and Cleveleys.

On the face of it, this is a good argument for Remain. ‘Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere,’ wrote Matthew Parris in an infamous Times column about Ukip’s only seat. ‘This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.’

He is right, up to a point. Brexiters are less educated (only 15 per cent are graduates, says YouGov, against 37 per cent of Remainers) and older (Clacton has the highest proportion of retirees in England and Wales). These elderly, uneducated, lumpen proles are dying off, goes the argument, so why pander to their Little England prejudices? It would be crazy to risk trading links, renege on international obligations and clamp down on immigration just to make a bunch of losers feel less out of place in the modern world. (Parris: ‘A Britain that has forgotten the joys of Ken Dodd, meat pies, smoking in pubs and the Bee Gees.’) Whereas a vote to Remain is a vote for the Britain of tomorrow: young, educated, multi-ethnic, pansexual and cosmopolitan.

But is that really a good reason to stay in? It’s a peculiarly heartless argument and sits oddly with Europhiles’ self-understanding as the nice guys. It’s a toxic mixture of snobbery and ad hominem: let’s vote Remain because the people who want to Leave eat too much cake, to channel Emma Thompson. Swap white working class for another demographic (African-Caribbean, for instance) and it’s straightforwardly racist, though good luck trying to persuade the police to take a charge of anti-white racism seriously. They’d probably arrest you for being ‘offensive’.

In fact, I think the growing chasm between the winners and the losers from globalisation is a reason to vote Leave. The Europhiles naively imagine that in 30 years the whole country will look more like them. But as mass immigration continues and more and more menial jobs are done by robots, Britain will come to look more like Clacton, not Edinburgh South, and the white working class will be joined by members of other ethnic groups.

For a glimpse into the future, take a tour of America’s rust belt, where communities like Port Clinton, the subject of Robert Putnam’s book Our Kids, have come to resemble a post-apocalyptic dystopia. The rich are happily married with successful, college-educated children and live in gated communities protected by security, while the poor sprawl out over sink estates, unable to sustain relationships or hold down jobs, prone to alcoholism and substance abuse, passing on their problems to the next generation like poisoned heirlooms.

For Britain to avoid this fate, the metropolitan elite must take some responsibility for the residents of England’s depressed seaside towns, not scorn them. And they’re more likely to do that, to feel the tug of moral obligation towards their fellow countrymen, if they identify as Britons first and Europeans second. Nationalism, for all its shortcomings, creates a shared sense of belonging that’s essential if the haves are ever going to give a helping hand to the have-nots. Let’s embrace the people who’ve been left behind by globalisation by voting Leave on 23 June, not cut them adrift by voting Remain.

The post These heartless Europhile snobs appeared first on The Spectator.

Leo, the Hungarian Vizsla my wife brought home unexpectedly last year, is approaching his first birthday and not getting any easier to manage. Caroline decided to buy him on the spur of the moment because she ‘liked the way he looked’, by which she means he looks like her. Not the face, obviously, but his figure — thin, athletic, muscular, big ears, big feet. Indeed, she was walking Leo in Gunnersbury Park a few days ago when another dog -walker, spotting them together, burst out laughing. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen an owner who looks more like her dog,’ he said. This may have been his attempt at flirting — always hard to tell with dog owners. She noticed he had a pug, but managed to avoid the obvious -rejoinder.

To describe Leo as a handful would be an understatement. I was walking him in Acton Park the other day when he bounded up to a small child and his mum. ‘Oh no,’ I thought. ‘Not again.’ On a previous outing, he’d wrestled a toddler to the ground and then started licking the residue of a Flake 99 off his face, which didn’t go over particularly well with the mum. But this was worse — far worse. The child was eating a sandwich and Leo had it out of his hand in an instant, whereupon he devoured it like a shark eating a raw steak.

‘How dare you?’ screamed the mother. ‘How bloody dare you?’ I instinctively threw up my hands, as if to say, ‘Nothing to do with me, Guv’, which did nothing to placate her. ‘That’s a dangerous dog you’ve got there and you should have him put down,’ she said, shaking her head.

I mumbled something about being sorry and offered to pay for the sandwich, at which point she demanded £5, which seemed a bit steep. I was tempted to say, ‘Branch of Ottolenghi opened in Acton, has it?’ but forked over the cash instead. As I dragged Leo away, she told me I should be ‘ashamed’ of myself.

I’ve got dozens of these stories. My 11-year-old son Ludo was walking Leo in the same park a couple of weeks ago when he decided to mount an Entebbe-style raid on the newly opened café for Acton yummy mummies. (Yes, we do have some.) The first Ludo knew about it was when Leo came screaming out of the café with a leg of Iberico ham in his mouth, followed by the café’s owner in hot pursuit. No prizes for guessing who won that race. Vizslas have been clocked at 40mph. After the middle-aged owner had given up the chase, he told my son that his dad had -better pay for the damage in the next 24 hours or he’d call the police. That cost me £35.

It’s not as if Leo isn’t getting enough food at home. In addition to the ‘dog muesli’ Caroline has him on — a snip at £20 for a 12.5kg bag — he helps himself to anything we’re stupid enough to leave within reach. And boy is he quick to exploit an opportunity. Most of the time he’s a soppy, affectionate dope, but when it comes to food he’s a deadly predator. Just this morning, I left him alone in the kitchen to answer the door to the postman and when I returned he’d devoured half a loaf of bread and was busying himself with a tub of butter. I swear he was fast asleep when I left the room. He’s the canine equivalent of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

I daresay there are lots of responsible dog owners reading this and thinking, ‘Why don’t you train him?’ but believe me we’ve tried — and are still trying. My wife used to take him to ‘puppy school’ in the local church, but had to withdraw when Leo started trying to hump all the other dogs.

One thing that might calm him down is to get him done — and Caroline is keen as mustard — but I feel a sense of male solidarity that makes me reluctant to go along with it. He has a certain masculine swagger, as well as an indomitable spirit, that might not survive castration. I didn’t want Leo in the first place, but now that he’s mine I feel a duty to protect him, and that includes his bits.

The truth is, I’ve grown quite fond of the stupid mutt. Around the house he can be a pain in the arse, but when I take him somewhere he can really stretch his legs, like Hampstead Heath, he’s a joy to behold. I hadn’t realised how much simple pleasure you can get from watching a dog tearing round in ever-increasing circles with another dog, or just watching them run towards you when you call their name. If only I could get him some sort of gastric band, he’d be perfect.

The post My soppy, dopey, deadly predator appeared first on The Spectator.

I was in Paris last week to take part in an EU referendum debate at Sciences Po, a French university that specialises in international relations. It’s not an exaggeration to describe Sciences Po as a finishing school for Europe’s political elite. Twenty-eight heads of state have studied or taught there, its graduates include five of the last six French presidents and the current dean is Enrico Letta, a former prime minister of Italy. My fellow panellists included Ana Palacio, the Spanish minister of foreign affairs from 2002 to 2004, and Hubert Vedrine, the French minister of foreign affairs from 1997 to 2002. I think it’s safe to say I was the only Eurosceptic in the room.

I was listened to with polite amusement, but almost no one took the threat of Brexit seriously. For them, the advantages of staying in are so obvious that they found it difficult to engage with anyone who didn’t agree. When I pointed out EU deficiencies such as its lack of transparency, the fact that laws can be introduced only by unelected European Commissioners and the widespread corruption that has confounded its auditors for 21 years, the panellists nodded in agreement. Yes, yes, no one’s saying it’s perfect. But on balance it’s been such a success that only a swivel-eyed loon would want to leave.

I did my best to shake them out of their complacency by pointing out the revolt against political elites that’s gathering steam across the Continent, with numerous anti-EU parties on the left and right chalking up victories. In France, the Front National took 25 per cent of the popular vote in the 2014 European elections, putting them in first place, while Syriza did well enough in last year’s Greek general election to form the government. The Sweden Democrats had 13 per cent of the vote in the 2014 Swedish general election, the True Finns won 38 seats in the 2014 Finnish parliamentary elections and the AfD received 24 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt in this year’s German regional elections. Wasn’t that cause for concern?

Hubert Vedrine, who now runs a public affairs firm specialising in foreign, economic and geopolitical affairs, responded by pointing out that no anti-EU party had won more than 40 per cent of the vote in a European election and they usually got much less. Unfortunately, this was a week before the Austrian presidential election in which the Freedom party’s Norbert Hofer came within a whisker of defeating his Green opponent, with 49.7 per cent. I wonder how the panel would have reacted to that?

My view is that sooner or later an anti-EU party or politician will gain power in a European state that isn’t an economic basket case and that will trigger a crisis in the EU. The success of Syriza in Greece’s two elections last year was just about containable, because Greece is economically dependent on the goodwill of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. But if Hofer had won that would have been harder to manage, because Austria is the 14th richest country in the world. Indeed, he may yet become chancellor in 2018. What if he refuses to accept Austria’s EU quota of refugees, then refuses to pay the fine? That would directly challenge the EU’s legitimacy.

This goes to the heart of the EU’s problem, which is that the political elite in each member state has transferred decision-making power across a range of important areas from their national parliaments to various undemocratic institutions in Brussels, effectively disenfranchising their electorates. In some cases, this transfer of sovereignty took place with the consent of their voters, in some cases not, but an increasing number of Europeans now want their democratic rights back. They’re not happy that unelected officials in Brussels, over whom they have no control, are making decisions they profoundly disagree with, such as insisting they take their fair share of asylum seekers or accept brutal austerity measures.

Over the past half-century, many Europeans entered into a Faustian pact: they gave up their rights as free people in return for prosperity and security. But the devil hasn’t kept his side of the deal and Dr Faustus is getting restless. How will people react when the EU tells them the pact is irreversible? My guess is, not well, and whether Britain votes to remain or to leave, the EU cannot survive in its present, undemocratic form. Unfortunately, the grands fromages from ages at Sciences Po seemed unconvinced of this.

The post The only Eurosceptic in the room appeared first on The Spectator.

I received a phone call the other day that I wasn’t expecting. It was a BBC producer calling about a Radio 4 series called Great Lives, presented by Matthew Parris. Each week, a distinguished guest is asked to nominate someone they believe is truly deserving of the title ‘Great Life’ and then they come on the radio to discuss that person, along with an ‘expert’.

I got rather excited as she was explaining this. Had someone really nominated me? When she told me the name of the guest I was even more thrilled — Brian Eno, the founder of Roxy Music.

‘The rock legend?’ I said. ‘That’s awfully flattering.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she replied. ‘And we were wondering if you’d like to be our studio ‘expert’?’

‘Yes, delighted, obviously. [Pause.] But, er, hang on, wouldn’t that be a bit odd?’

‘No, not at all. You are his son, after all.’

The penny dropped. Brian Eno hadn’t nominated me. He’d nominated my dad.

I was happy to do it, obviously, but I also felt a pang of jealousy. In 50 years’ time, would anyone as talented and famous as Brian Eno nominate me for similar treatment? Matching my father’s accomplishments, with only 30 or so remaining, seems a distant prospect.

Michael Young was born in 1915, the son of an Irish bohemian painter and a Daily Express journalist. He had a miserable childhood, being packed off to the sort of prep schools that George Orwell wrote about in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, but was saved at the age of 13 by a fairy godmother in the form of Dorothy Elmhirst, an eccentric American millionaire. She had started a school in South Devon called Dartington Hall that was the only school in England that taught fruit farming. As luck would have it, my father had a rich Australian uncle with a fruit farm who offered to pay the fees.

Dorothy and her husband Leonard, a Yorkshireman, more or less adopted Michael. Instead of sending him home in the summer holidays, they took him with them on their annual jaunt to America and treated him like one of their own. He travelled in a first-class berth on RMS Aquitania, learned how to sail on Martha’s Vineyard and, on one memorable night, dined at the White House with Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he left Dartington at the age of 18, Dorothy set him up with a small trust fund, as well as a lifetime’s supply of Sobranie cigarettes.

Michael’s first notable achievement was writing a pamphlet for a pressure group called Political and Economic Planning at the age of 22, in which he argued that if war broke out the government mustn’t delay introducing conscription. Churchill read it and was so impressed that he immediately offered my father a job as his private secretary. He accepted, but the offer was withdrawn when Churchill discovered he was a member of the Holborn branch of the Communist party.

Michael went on to run the Labour party’s research department and, in that capacity, wrote the 1945 Labour manifesto. He spent the next six years at the heart of the Attlee government, laying the foundations of the welfare state, then left in 1951 to do a PhD at the LSE. His doctorate formed the basis of a book called Family and Kinship in East London which, to this day, is referred to by sociology students as ‘Fakinel’.

But it was his next book that really made his name — The Rise of the Meritocracy. A dystopian satire in the same mould as Brave New World, it purported to be an historical essay written by an academic in the mid-21st century about the emergence of a new ruling class whose claim to power was based on their superior intellect. The book was intended as a satirical critique of what my father regarded as a pernicious way of justifying inequality and it irritated him for the rest of his life that the word he’d coined to describe this ghastly new phenomenon — meritocracy — was generally used by politicians to describe something wholly desirable.

At this point, Michael’s place in the history of post-war Britain was guaranteed, but he was just getting started. He set up a research institute in Bethnal Green that, for the next 50 years, became a kind of organisational supernova, pumping out an endless stream of new institutions: the Consumers Association, Which? magazine, the Social Science Research Council, the University of the Third Age, the School for Social Entrepreneurs, Grandparents Plus… it goes on and on. The historian Noel Annan compared him to Cadmus, the founder of Thebes in Greek mythology: ‘Whatever field he tilled, he sowed dragon’s teeth and armed men seemed to spring from the soil to form an organisation.’

And if you think all of that is impressive, he also co-founded the Open University. Whenever I’m at risk of feeling a little too pleased with myself because I’ve helped set up a handful of schools, I remind myself that Michael helped establish the single largest educational institution in the world. At any one time, the Open University has a quarter of a million students, an astonishing figure.

I was the product of Michael’s second marriage and shared a home with him for the first 18 years of my life. At the time, I thought he was a great dad, a figure of towering authority, but now that I’m a father myself I realise how little time he spent with his children. I can clearly remember playing football with him in Waterlow Park on my ninth birthday. A lovely memory, to be sure, but the reason I can recall it is because it was one of the very few occasions he took me to the park. My children, by contrast, will have no specific memories of playing football with their dad, because we do it every weekend.

For Michael, the work always came first. He’d been given a great gift by Dorothy Elmhirst, who’d saved him from neglect, and that left him with an overwhelming sense of obligation to do the same for others. If I’m going to achieve anything else in the next 30 years, it must be driven by the same philanthropic impulse.

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