David Cameron’s bold speech in Munich last Saturday has been somewhat misrepresented as a call to British Muslims to drive out their own extremists.
David Cameron’s bold speech in Munich last Saturday has been somewhat misrepresented as a call to British Muslims to drive out their own extremists. It was really directed at his own bureaucracy and even (though he did not say this) at some in his own party. He is exasperated that administrative efforts to isolate violent Islamist extremists so often end up empowering non-violent ones, thus creating the mental conditions for the very horrors which they are trying to avert. His speech will need a huge amount of follow-up. An early test emerges in parliament, rather than Whitehall. The new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia took on a body called IEngage as its secretariat. IEngage is led by people who consistently offer support to Hamas and protest at criticisms of extremists. One of its trustees, Mohammed Ali Harrath, is the CEO of the Islam Channel which was rebuked by Ofcom last year for advocating marital rape and justifying violence against women. Islamists of the sort Mr Cameron attacked were being tasked to define Islamophobia. Realising what they had got into, the chairman and vice-chairman of the group resigned, thus effectively ending the group’s existence. Now attempts are being made to revive it, with IEngage in the same role. If the government whips permit this to go forward, it will be clear that the Munich speech is already being ignored.
Supporting Mr Cameron’s argument, I named and criticised Charles Farr, the Director-General of the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism at the Home Office, as the boss of the policy which the Prime Minister does not like. This upset some of Mr Farr’s supporters. What I wrote was, said one, ‘a cheap shot at a brave public servant who cannot answer back’. On the whole, I agree that officials should enjoy some protection from public vilification (though I should point out that I said nothing personally rude about Mr Farr: I merely described his approach unfavourably); but there is a real problem nowadays that top officials have often become more ‘proactive’. Politicians, exhausted by their own low reputation, hand policy decisions to the permanent bureaucracy. If one cannot criticise the heads of that bureaucracy, one finds that no one is answerable at all. The extreme example is Sir Ian Kennedy, the head of IPSA, the body which tells MPs what expenses they may claim. Although MPs’ allowances were corruptly abused, it is a constitutional affront that a body should be set up which can tell parliament what to do. Civil servants must be just that — servants, not masters. If they are masters, they must be attacked.
In the latest issue of the newsletter of the Cambridge English Faculty, the outgoing chairman Adrian Poole writes, ‘About this time last year, the faculty was invited (a euphemism) to take part in a pilot scheme for assessing the impact of research in English “on the economy, society, public policy or services, culture, the environment or quality of life”.’ He goes on: ‘It is particularly disheartening to find the argument rejected that the greatest impact we in English have on the world beyond the academy is through the students we teach, and that this teaching is nourished (or “underpinned”, to use the jargon) by our research. That doesn’t count, we are told.’ In other words, government sees the educational impact of education as inadequate — it must improve the trade figures, reduce inequalities, alter ‘behaviours’ etc as well. The same attitude lies behind the policy of the Charity Commission, under the left-wing Dame Suzi Leather, that the public benefit which is required for independent schools to have charitable status is now defined not by the education they give to their pupils but by other things such as sharing playing fields with comprehensives. It is as if government assessed hospitals’ public benefit but ignored the argument that they made ill people well. Why doesn’t the coalition get rid of this stuff?
Elsewhere, I have attacked The Language Wars, a new book by Henry Hitchings, for his disdain for English ‘prescriptivists’, but I am glad that he comes to the defence of the much-maligned Donald Rumsfeld. He points out that the rather bullying Plain English Campaign often identifies as ‘gobbledygook’ perfectly reasonable remarks. The campaign famously attacked Rumsfeld for saying ‘Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because… there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ As Hitchings justly says, ‘…this was an astute observation, and it could hardly have been better expressed’. Rumsfeld’s memoirs are just out. It is good to hear that he has called them Known and Unknown: his own distinction between different types of unknowns explains much about the Iraq war.
No doubt this is old hat to most Spectator readers, but I have only just discovered the ‘smileys’ on my Blackberry. I find that the ‘Smile’ face, which I first remember seeing when stuck on the back of letters by teenage girls in the 1970s, is one of a repertoire. It is yellow, the face for ‘Angry’ is red, and for ‘Sick’ is green. Another yellow face, wearing dark glasses, is ‘Cool’. It would be a good Spectator competition to compose a short story using only these symbols. Here is a modest example, about misunderstanding between the sexes: .
The other day, we went to a popular new restaurant called Les Deux Salons near the Strand. We all ate well, but I ordered andouillette, a dish which, because it always borders on the disgusting, has a risky pleasure about it. I could not fault the way it was cooked, but the smell immediately reminded me of prep-school geography teachers, late-1960s vintage. Proustian, I suppose, but not in a positive sense.
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