One small sign of the approaching election is a renewed courting of the Muslim vote. Unfortunately, this seems to mean sucking up to the Muslim Council of Britain, even though that body’s ability to represent the real range of Muslim opinion is hotly contested (see Stephen Pollard, p20). Last year, the government suspended its dealings with the MCB after Daoud Abdullah, the MCB’s deputy general secretary, signed the Istanbul Declaration, which threatens those who impede the violent work of Hamas against Israel. At the time, our government said that the Istanbul Declaration ‘does call for attacks on foreign warships, potentially including the Royal Navy, and also advocates violence against Jewish people and their supporters around the world’. It refused to engage with the MCB so long as Mr Abdullah’s signature on the declaration stood. Last week, however, the government decided to ‘re-engage’ with the MCB. The MCB has made some encouraging new noises about condemning attacks on British troops, but Mr Abdullah has not removed his signature from the declaration, so it is the government that has backed down. Now the MCB-organised ‘Muslim Leadership Dinner’, fundraising for MCB causes, will take place on Saturday in the presence of what the organisers rather quaintly call ‘The Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain’, Jack Straw, and the Liberal leader, Nick Clegg. The good news is that the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, has refused to attend.
On Tuesday, I listened to two long items on the Today programme about restricting the sale of alcohol. The government now wants a mandatory code of conduct to imprison those who serve people under 18, make small measures compulsorily available and ban speed-drinking competitions and free drinks for women. Although the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, was brave enough to refuse minimum unit pricing on the sensible grounds that this would penalise normal drinkers as well as louts, no one, from beginning to end, even mentioned the word ‘freedom’ or the word ‘localism’. Yet both, surely, are central to the argument. Why should a society of adults (it is, almost by definition, a different matter for children) not work out its own ways of drinking, without a barrage of laws? And why should those laws which are needed be universal and centrally applied? Surely a county, or a town authority, is much more likely to understand what is going wrong with drunkenness in its own area than is Parliament or Whitehall. Yet Evan Davies lambasted Mr Johnson for not going far enough and listened indulgently as some fascist from the Royal College of Physicians tried to lay down a just price for drink. Almost every public argument about such matters runs in the same way: the media ushers the pressure group to the moral high ground, pillories the business interest for its selfishness and arraigns the government for doing ‘too little, too late’. The Conservatives keep saying that they want a strong society rather than a strong state. Surely this is a classic test case. The state should do almost nothing about drunkenness. Society should do a great deal.
It is not true, by the way, that smaller measures make people drink less. In Trinity, my old college at Cambridge, famous for producing more Nobel Prize winners than France, a scientific experiment was conducted a few years ago. Dons dining on High Table drank out of small glasses one month and then out of big ones the next. It turned out that, when given the small glasses, they drank a third more, presumably because they felt that they were never quite getting enough.
There is much criticism of the Met Office for forecasting cockily, demotically and incorrectly. There are jokes about its prediction of a ‘barbecue summer’, and now the BBC may not renew its contract. Weather forecasts have always been partially inaccurate, so I think one must look elsewhere for the real reason why people are cross. I suspect it is because the Met Office has broken the unspoken historic contract with the British people about the weather, which is that one can talk about it freely and happily because it does not involve politics. By making itself a propagandist for ‘warmism’ in the great climate change debate, the Met Office has forfeited this vital, trust-inspiring neutrality and turned propagandist. It has helped create a culture in which once-safe phrases like ‘Lovely weather we’re having’ are turned into contentious political statements. Its failures of forecasting also make one wonder: if it is not possible to tell whether it will be hot or cold in three months’ time, how can we possibly know that the world faces climate collapse by 2017, 2050, or whatever date various experts decide to put on it?
This column has noted before that anyone who broadcasts weather forecasts should be trained to pronounce the word ‘Ireland’ (hint: it should not sound the same as ‘Island’). For the first time last week, I noticed an even more startling deficiency. A forecaster on BBC Radio called Simon cannot say the word ‘England’. He calls it ‘Engerland’. Taking a cue from David Cameron, I shall be ‘unashamedly elitist’ and call for him to be retrained, or replaced.
More helpful responses to my proposal that a charity called Meeting People should be set up to provide volunteers to assist anyone who has to attend meetings with representatives of the public service. I am grateful to Alec Morrison for letting me know that Age Concern already offers an ‘advocacy service’ to help old people in this predicament. He says that the service should be better known. It can provide helpful insights for those trying to spread such help more widely. Thanks, also, to Rosa Monckton, who points out that one of the problems with meetings with social workers and the like is that they are frequently postponed and even more frequently not attended by the people whom the ‘client’ expected to meet, which often makes them a complete waste of time. The volunteers in my proposed charity could valuably record the meetings that didn’t happen, as well as those that did.
It is fitting that, in the age of Health and Safety, the main symbol of authority is the fluorescent jacket. It seems to be compulsory uniform for anyone employed by the state to deal with the public, and to confer on the wearer the right to boss everyone about. An interesting experiment would be to buy some fluorescent jackets, have them stamped with the word ‘CONTROL’, and then organise one’s friends to put them on and try to take over key installations, shouting orders at anyone who got in the way. I bet one could effect a coup d’état within an hour.
Comments