You cannot blame Lord Turner, the Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, for defending the bonuses paid to his employees. He is new to the job and must work with his team. But when he said this week, ‘If you are saying we should now cut the bonuses, you are saying we should cut their pay by 15 per cent’, he was inviting the reaction he did not intend. Yes, that is, now you mention it, what we are saying. The FSA failed to do the most important job assigned to it. Therefore, broadly speaking, its staff should not only not get bonuses, but should get less money than before. It is a point so simple that it seems to elude the intellectual giants who preside over our financial system.
As with most government pre-announcements, it is impossible to tell whether the latest — aired on Panorama — is true. The documentary reported that the government is worried that its programme for tackling violent extremism in practice favours extremist types, and wants to change it. We will not find out what, if any, remedial measures the government is taking until some time next month. So the Conservatives were right to sound a note of caution in their reaction. They were wrong, though, to play it both ways. Their main spokesman, Baroness Neville-Jones, sensibly emphasised the need to tackle the extremist ideology which lies behind violent extremism. But her understrapper, Baroness Varsi, said: ‘It has taken centuries to guarantee religious freedom in our country and we must not let the government destroy it.’ How would it destroy religious freedom to withdraw government funding from Islamist extremists? Lady Varsi seems to be almost the echo of the Labour Muslim peer, Lord Ahmed, whose love of religious freedom is strictly one-sided.
Like millions of people, I enjoyed the film Slumdog Millionaire. It cleverly locks in the viewer’s sympathies and fulfils Wilkie Collins’s rule: ‘Make ’em laugh. Make ’em cry. Make ’em wait.’ Afterwards, though, I felt a little used. The film has the Four Weddings and a Funeral trick of being secretly more clichéd and consumerist than its surface wit suggests — how tacky and improbable, for instance, to have the two brothers becoming guides at the Taj Mahal, hundreds of miles from their native Bombay. And just as Four Weddings slips in a propagandist pro-gay message, so Slumdog Millionaire is a semi-concealed liberation movie for Indian Muslims, who are presented as being persecuted. The hero is hit by police for refusing to recognise the picture of the Hindu Gandhi on banknotes. There have certainly been attacks on Muslims in Bombay over the years, but it is irritating to reflect that no commercial director would dare do the same thing the other way round, and make a film about Hindus who are being picked on by Muslims. Finally, what is the moral? In Four Weddings, it is quite obvious that Hugh Grant should have gone through with it and married Duckface (Anna Chancellor), who is anyway far more beautiful than the heroine he skives off with. In Slumdog Millionaire, there is a comparable final flaw: is it really a good thing that he wins the money? Why are we expected to believe that it will bring him happiness?
This week, I went to Girton College, Cambridge, to speak in memory of a several times great-aunt of mine, Barbara Bodichon, who was co-founder of the college. Barbara was a painter, writer, feminist (a prime mover in the Married Woman’s Property Act), anti-slaver, and friend of George Eliot. Since my sister, Charlotte, is writing a book about Barbara and other members of my mostly radical family, and she was speaking first, I preferred to talk on the more provocative theme of Margaret Thatcher, feminist. I don’t suppose Mrs Thatcher and Barbara Bodichon would have got on, but it is very interesting that, as early as the 1930s, the Grantham grocer’s daughter could have believed so absolutely that she could and should get in to Oxford. This was highly unusual. Like Barbara two generations earlier, Margaret was brought up by her father to assume that women should learn as much as men, so she never doubted. She also subscribed absolutely to Barbara’s dictum that ‘Women want work for the health of their minds and bodies’ — work as an inner need more than a right. I find it touching that, even on the Left, there are now small signs of recognition that Mrs Thatcher’s progress as a woman was astonishing. There is a forthcoming BBC drama about her fall, called Margaret. The left-wing actress Lindsay Duncan, who plays Mrs T, seems in interviews to be wrestling with the — to her — new realisation that she has feelings. ‘She was a woman,’ she concludes. Others noticed that earlier, but it is good to see the glimmerings of understanding at last.
Kind people keep warning me of the dangers of my plan to keep my television but refuse to pay my television licence unless the BBC sacks Jonathan Ross. ‘You will get a criminal record,’ they tell me. ‘The bailiffs will come and take your things. The licence fee will be collected against your will.’ So I have checked these and other matters with the authorities at TV Licensing, the body which will eventually, I presume, come after me. Most of the fears are misplaced. What happens is as follows. TV Licensing’s inquiry officers have no special powers. If they suspect you of having a television and no licence, they must first caution you under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Only then can they proceed, as they do with 139,000 people a year, to take you to court. If you are convicted, you face a maximum fine of £1,000 and, although it is a criminal offence, no criminal record. The fine does not include the handing over of any money to the BBC: it goes only to the court. The unpaid licence fee is not a debt, and therefore it cannot be recovered by bailiffs. Once you have paid your fine, you can continue your defiance as before, and it will take TV Licensing somewhere between six months and a year to come after you again. It seems worth a try, and not too frightening. Being less well paid by the BBC than Ross, the inquiry officers are not allowed to ring you up and scream that they have ‘f***ed your granddaughter’, but must be polite at all times. What is worrying, though, is that the inquiry officers get more money the more people they catch. Yet another example of the dangers of the bonus culture.
‘Bishops back Christian in school religion row,’ said a headline this week. You might think that this was a statement of the obvious, and therefore not worth reporting. On reflection, though, I realised that it was an extremely unusual event, and therefore news indeed.
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