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Monday 13 October 2008

The Spectator’s notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

On a similar subject, did you know that the Foreign Office’s counter-terrorism department has a ‘Grievances and Counter-Narrative Team’ which employs at least six people? Now that you do, do you sleep more soundly in your bed?

In the row about the charitable status of independent schools, I think I understand — though I do not agree with — the idea that ‘public benefit’ must be defined only by what is available to people without money, rather than by the provision of education in itself. What I do not understand is why helping state schools should be considered a charitable activity. In her latest interview, Dame Suzi Leather, the head of the Charity Commission, encourages private schools to ‘let state schools use their facilities’, and chat to the local state head teacher ‘about the most useful things to do’. Partnership with state schools can indeed be a very good thing — though many state schools resist it fiercely — but why should charity be given to a state institution? Surely that is what taxpayers’ money is for? Help the children, by all means, but not the schools.

Dame Suzi makes a further point which chillingly answers all those who, fed up with her new definition of ‘public benefit’, advocate that independent schools should end their charitable status and become businesses. In law, they can’t. As Dame Suzi puts it, ‘The law does not allow a school to walk away from being a charity and take assets with it. We can take those charitable assets and redistribute them.’ So your charitableness can be redefined, and then your assets can be sequestrated if you object to this redefinition. It is a stealthy form of nationalisation.

It often takes years of looking at a public monument before you recognise its strengths and weaknesses. The memorial to ‘The Women of World War II’ in Whitehall, erected three years ago, invites comparison with Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph, a few yards on towards Parliament Square. It is only after walking past many, many times that I have realised quite how clumsy and awkward is the new monument and how subtle and moving the old. The new one has bronzes of women’s uniforms hanging lumpily from it, almost like strange-shaped corpses pinned to a wall. The Cenotaph, perhaps because of its ‘entasis’, by which the verticals are not, in fact, straight lines, but slight curves, is very graceful. The stone is very simple, yet somehow it soars. The women’s memorial just squats.

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