Perhaps it will take allegations of ball-tampering to focus on the role of Pakistan in modern British life. There is a certain sort of upholder of national sovereignty who thinks that ethnic and religious problems can be solved if only the national borders are shaped to reflect the divisions. The British partition of India surely proves that life is not so simple, and we are now paying for our mistake. Partition created a confessional state, and gave that state a motive for acquiring a nuclear bomb, the only Muslim Bomb until we allow Iran to get there. Thus armed with righteousness and with actual kit, the state persecutes its small remaining minorities (mainly Christians) and helps foment trouble elsewhere. The Pakistani intelligence services backed the Taleban in Afghanistan and, despite President Musharraf’s robust declarations of support for Western allies, his country’s attitude to everything to do with terrorism is at best ambiguous. Because of Britain’s history, most of our Muslims come from Pakistan, and so we have become the prime field in Europe for their sometimes fanatical religious groupings. The latest to attract attention is Tablighi Jamaat (which means proselytising group). They run courses in Pakistan at which, it is alleged, terrorists have been recruited. Some of the 7 July bombers were members, and so are some of those detained in the recent swoops. Tablighi Jamaat wants to build a mosque in East London which could accommodate what is variously claimed to be 4,000 or 10,000 people as part of an ‘Islamic village’ in time for the London Olympics. Ken Livingstone thinks it is a wonderful idea, yet Tablighi Jamaat operates in conditions of almost total secrecy. It would be a grim revenge for the Raj if an Islamist cantonment were permitted to set up in our capital.
Last week, A Levels; this week, GCSEs. I notice that any news report of the subject has been bullied into rhetorical submission and so refers to those who say that standards have fallen as ‘harrumphing’ or ‘ritual carping’. As the father of two children getting results this week, I do see that it is galling to be told that your successes, which may well be genuine, are unreal. But the system no longer gives you reliable information. That the exams have got easier has been established by a study conducted last year by the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre at the University of Durham. Although all such suggestions are described by the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, as ‘100 per cent hogwash’, his department does, in fact, admit that literacy and numeracy are not all that they should be, and is attempting to change what is tested accordingly. The problem, though, is succinctly expressed by the think-tank Reform, which pointed out last week that the grade inflation dates from the time (1988) when the department itself took over responsibility for regulating exams: ‘Standards were bound to be undermined when the department and its agencies were responsible both for regulating exams and for increasing the numbers of students who pass them.’ So long as this continues, it is certain that pass rates will improve, because no politician will wish to preside over a year in which they fall.
By what was probably a coincidence, a news page of the Times this week ran, side by side, stories about how schools need more men to teach in them and how the Conservative party needs more women candidates. Is a swap the answer?
As a convert to Roman Catholicism, I find myself surprisingly distressed by the decision of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to declare Ascension Day, Corpus Christi and the Epiphany to be no longer Holydays of Obligation. The faithful will now not have to attend Mass on those days, but only on the nearest Sunday (which is always obligatory anyway). ‘Obligation’ is a strong word and, except for two occasions when I forgot, I have always fulfilled it on Holydays. This attendance has taught me more about the particular feasts, and about the Mass, than I would otherwise have learnt. It is true that I could (and should) go to Mass without it being an obligation, but I know that, for the most part, I won’t. It is particularly unhappy to shift the days of celebration because Epiphany and Ascension Day mark precise spaces of time (the 12 days of Christmas and the 40 days after Easter mirroring the 40 days of Lent). Faith needs these props.
When one reads some of the pathetic cases of the men shot for cowardice in the first world war, one sympathises strongly with the families who have at last succeeded in winning them pardons. But there seems to me something pharisaical in the suggestion that we, nowadays, understand these things better than our forebears. We are not as men of the past, we say, forgetting what it must have been like for a nation to endure total war for the first time and to try to win it. A particularly self-righteous BBC ‘Thought for the Day’ by Elaine Storkey on the subject suggested that the whole idea of punishment for desertion or cowardice was wrong and that the only people guilty of anything in war are the leaders. If she is right, it follows that the rewards handed out by the leaders are as flawed — motivated by politics or propaganda, based on poor evidence, imposed by the officer class — as the punishments. The logic of the Pharisees is that all those VCs, MCs and DSOs were as invalid as the shootings at dawn and should be publicly cancelled.
As we sat round the other day noticing how smelly our dog was, someone pointed out that human smell — ‘B.O.’ — has almost vanished from modern life. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, at any public gathering you smelt stale sweat. People wore more, and washed less. At about this time, underarm deodorants — especially one called Brut — became popular and there was a battle at my school between those who used them and those who considered them unmanly (‘poof juice’). The poofs won, I am glad to say. Later we were told that the spray from the aerosols was destroying the ozone layer. This may be so, but I feel that the destruction of the planet is a small price to pay for less armpit. It is an interesting conundrum for Greens that the attempt to make things clean so often causes pollution.
Another problem for environmentalists is nature’s own wastefulness. It is particularly noticeable at this time of year. Our plum trees, apple trees and bramble bushes cast their fruit upon the ground with astonishing prodigality. Even if you allow for the need to overproduce in order to reproduce, the superabundance is gigantic. The Green creed urges human beings never to waste anything. But why should this rule apply to us since it applies to no other living organism?
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