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Friday 22 August 2008

The Spectator's notes

The Spectator's notes

Charles Moore's thoughts on the week

James Watson has been excoriated for saying that science proves that black people are less intelligent than white. I have no idea whether he is right, but it is a natural consequence of the worship of the theory of evolution that such ideas gain currency. In the early 20th century, Darwinian views were endlessly used to back up race theory. A more religious idea of the worth of each human being — the sort of thing which makes Richard Dawkins furious — affords protection against the political imposition of these theories. I should like a scientific study to be made of why it is that clever atheist evolutionists, almost invariably male, love shocking us with ideas of this sort.

You can always tell the BBC’s attitudes by its nomenclature. Famously, it calls people who blow other people (and often themselves) up in the name of Allah ‘militants’, not terrorists. I notice that BBC reports have now started to refer to the ‘Scottish government’. It is true that Alex Salmond, the First Minister, has decreed that the body which he runs should be so called, but its legal name is the ‘Scottish Executive’ and the law has not changed. Would the phrase ‘provisional government’ be more appropriate? The BBC also reports Scotland as being a ‘country’ in the same breath as the United States (the two countries with the fattest citizens). A nation, perhaps. A country? Not yet.

Every Remembrance Day a drum and pipe band from a nearby town has played at the commemoration service in our village. The band first appeared in 1969, and was given uniforms and a silver bugle by the then head of the local British Legion branch. This year, the band will not be coming. It has closed down, and the British Legion has been informed that this is because Health and Safety regulations insist on a higher proportion of adults to children than the band can guarantee. Such stories are now so commonplace that people almost shrug their shoulders at them. But they illustrate how painful regulation is for any organisation which exists on a thin margin. It is the natural condition of most small local societies to lack money, legal expertise, clerical time and spare bodies. So things like Health and Safety become, in effect, a cultural attack on the voluntarism which, in other contexts, the government praises. It is a classic example of the best being the enemy of the good. Local organisations are seldom the best, but are almost always good. Now they are closing, and no one can even blow the Last Post for them.

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