‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked.
‘You can be young, optimistic and oppose AV’, says the magazine spiked. I am sorry to hear it, because we anti-AV people were hoping not to be pestered by any young, optimistic people, but to oppose change in an elderly, unthinking and sullen manner. ‘Non tali auxilio!’, we cry, confident that young, optimistic people will not know what we mean.
But one might feel more optimistic if one could have referendums on subjects for which there is real popular demand. The AV vote is so obviously and solely the result of a treaty between politicians that it just isn’t reasonable to ask the rest of us to interest ourselves in the details of the matter. Yet the fact is that referendums have now become quite a large part of our democratic system. There were four referendums in the United Kingdom up to 1979. Since 1997, there have been 39. They’re here to stay, so let us have the ones we want. The late Sir James Goldsmith’s intervention in the 1997 general election meant that all the main parties were frightened into promising a referendum on Britain’s proposed entry into the European single currency. As a result, we have never gone in. Although we have been told by this government that we shall from now on have a referendum on any EU treaty which would take more power away from Parliament, it must be doubted whether it means what it says. On Tuesday, an organisation run by Mark Seddon, the former editor of Tribune, and backed by MPs from most parties (including Zac, son of Sir James, Kate Hoey, and Caroline Lucas) was launched. It is called The People’s Pledge, and it calls for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union to be the policy of all parties at the next election. The real power of this campaign will be seen in the selection of candidates. If constituencies can muster a few thousand Pledgers, anyone wishing to be an MP next time round will be wise to favour a referendum whether he or she wants in or out.
My new passport has just arrived. Each page now depicts a British scene, with a word or two of explanation — ‘FISHING VILLAGE’, ‘REEDBED’. You would think from these pictures that this country was entirely pastoral or piscatorial: only the page saying ‘CANAL’ hints at anything industrial. Like the new Census, which offers ever more recherché forms of ethnicity, the passport has an extra layer of political correctness added since last time. As well as saying ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ on the first page, it now says the same thing in Welsh and Gaelic, presumably because these are now, under devolution, official languages. Perhaps only 15,000 people speak Gaelic as a first language. Yet officialdom has to defer in this way. It isn’t even consistent. In Northern Ireland, as a result of the Belfast Agreement, official status has been granted to the Irish language, though it is no longer native to any part of Northern Ireland, and to Ulster Scots, a semi-moribund dialect. Why don’t these clutter up our passport too? The passport also contains the same words in all the EU official languages. But the words about what ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and Requires’ remain untranslated — a poignant survival, like an old pub in a street in which all the surrounding terraced houses have been razed to the ground.
A press release from the Muslim Council of Britain reminds readers that it was because of the MCB’s pressure that the question about religion was included in the Census for the first time in 2001. The MCB urges all Muslims to fill in the religion question (which is voluntary) this time round. It points out that the information collected has ‘supported advocacy work for more effective policies to tackle socio-economic and educational inequalities’. Does this country really want money directed to people on the basis of their religious affiliations? Not but what some of the Census answers won’t be interesting: how many Muslims, for example, are ‘in a registered same-sex civil partnership’ and will have the courage to say so on the form?
When David Cameron made his bold speech in Munich last month, his main theme was a call to his own bureaucracy to get better at picking the right Muslims with whom to fight extremism. The Prime Minister is worried that the various agencies in the field do not pay enough attention to the links between non-violent and violent extremism and so end up empowering the very people who stir up so much trouble. In the reaction to this speech, only one Muslim organisation in the whole country supported Mr Cameron. This was Quilliam, the brave and articulate group run chiefly by former Islamist extremists who know exactly what the problem of bad influence on the young is about. Quilliam’s reward for its response has been to have its government funding removed: it will now have to sack all but one of its employees. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, seems to defer more to her own officials than to her leader. This wretched little story indicates how right Mr Cameron was about the problem he identified, and how he remains in a weak position to do anything about it.
A friend, visibly Jewish because of his hat, recently walked into Housmans, the left-wing bookshop in Pentonville Road. A woman in a hijab was talking to a white man behind the desk. ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ she asked my friend. ‘100 per cent,’ he answered. ‘Is it true,’ she went on, ‘that the Jews invented the international banking system?’ My friend thought that her tone was more one of inquiry than accusation, but it is striking that she felt permitted to ask such a question. Imagine the rumpus if she — or anyone — had gone up to a black man and said, ‘Is it true that blacks have a wonderful sense of rhythm?’
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