Guest post by pagar

The policy of multiculturalism is built on two theories.

Firstly, there is the idea that human beings need, at a very primal level, some sort of attachment to cultural heritage. Without such attachment, the argument goes, people are likely to be less fulfilled and lack personal foundation. Without our cultural reference points, we are but leaves blowing in the wind.

Secondly, multiculturalism demands that all cultures have equal value. Indeed, it says that the value of a culture cannot be empirically measured because there is no fair starting point. The person making the comparison and value judgment will necessarily do so from a position that is informed by their own culture.

When these two theories are put together, we are logically driven towards embracing diversity- where everyone is encouraged to celebrate and codify the differences between cultures. Divergence is seen as positive and homogeneity is outlawed. In this climate immigrants are not required to integrate into the host culture and it is considered wrong and regressive for anyone to ask or expect them to do so.

But for liberals, the multiculturalism agenda brings with it some difficulties. continue reading… »

The rising number of repossessions is the forgotten issue of the pre-election campaign.

In a different world, this incredibly insightful piece of research by the housing and homelessness charity Shelter would be front page news.

Referring to 1971 as a starting date, Shelter discovered that if food and other essential items had gone up as fast as the average property price, a box of washing powder would now cost £28-53, a jar of coffee over £20 and a pint of milk £2-43. continue reading… »

Picture this. You open the newspaper one grey morning, and there in a bright pixel smear on the third page is a full-length photograph of a young man. The young man is almost naked; a flesh-coloured thong clings tightly to his hairless cock and balls; he looks over his shoulder at you, his jaw a perfect masculine square, his dark eyes smouldering. Everywhere, this young man is hard, smooth, impenetrable and yet submissive, wanting you to consume him. You turn the page.

There are more young men on each of the pages that follow, naked or scantily clothed, poreless, flawless, with broad shoulders and rock-hard arses and muscles that bunch and gleam under oiled skin. You are used to the sight of these young men; these days, they hardly even arouse you. Their glassy eyes follow you on public transport, on the internet, on television, in the fashion spreads of magazines.

Picture this. Every one of the men and boys whose images you see repeated thousands of times a day is impossibly perfect, hewn from some arcane piece of rock on the platonic plane. Not one of them is over thirty-three. In the shadow of their hard, robotic masculinity, the possibility of paunches and puppy fat and male-pattern balding is unthinkable . They rarely speak, and when they do speak, they ventriloquise; they implore you to look at them, to understand their silent semiotics of commercial masculinity; they threaten and seduce you in a boring parade of billboards, adverts, music videos.

These men don’t seem to be doing very much. Usually, they are moronically thrusting and jerking around cereal boxes, insurance packages, bottles of shampoo and soap. They seem to beg to be penetrated, but it is they who have invaded your body and brain, as if the images were trying to force themselves out through your skin. Some of them are known to you by name or sobriquet, as singers or actors, or as the sons or lovers of powerful women. They grimace beautifully as they drape their impossible bodies over stages and sets, showing off watches and shoes and beautiful clothing that hangs from their perfect torsos in artful folds and flutters in artificial winds. Their images cluster in everywhere , unseeing, bored, as if they can’t quite decide whether to fuck you or punch you.

You know that it’s not real, of course. continue reading… »

The 7^th of March marks the end of fair trade fortnight; and what a noble campaign it is too, not simply serving to allow indifferent middle class westerners to drop a couple of coins in a pot, but actually a way of addressing some of the pitfalls of our trade system in a way that promotes fair remuneration for hard work in the world’s most impoverished countries.

But the sort of indifferent charity that the fair trade campaign seeks to undercut is very much an ongoing, prevalent part of our society that, despite all of its pretences, must be challenged in a very particular way. continue reading… »

Something terrible is happening to young women. Despite the dazzling gains made for bourgeois white women by reformist feminism, we’re….well, we’re turning into sluts. Look around you: the streets are littered with half-naked young hussies vomiting their A-levels into spillovers with their skirts hoiked round their waists. At the merest flash of a web-camera, young ladies from nice homes will flash their tits for Nuts magazine.

Conservatives and a small number of high-profile feminists are unanimous in their assertion that contemporary culture has made desperate sexual victims of all women under thirty. The reaction to the Home Office report into the ’sexualisation of children’ has been gleefully priggish, with Conservative leader David Cameron telling the BBC that: “We’ve all read stories about padded bras and Lolita beds…children are growing up too fast and missing out on childhood.” Oh David, with your nice hair and your nice wife and your house in Knightsbridge, only you can save Broken Britain from the march of the underage slags.
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contribution by Andy Wimbush

On Monday, the Financial Times ran an article revealing that the EU were planning to increase maternity pay, boosting “the minimum statutory benefits for new mothers, which vary markedly between the European Union’s 27 member states.”

The other papers have since picked it up, and have done the rounds of various business lobby groups, asking for quotes that condemn the EU plans and warn of the burden that the increased costs would place on businesses and the economy.

I’ll examine some of the claims made by lobby groups and see whether they stand up to the evidence.
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The House of Lords is to consider an amendment to the Equality Bill on March 2nd next week, which would make it legal for civil partnerships to be registered on the premises of those religious associations who wish to do so.

Tuesday’s Times carried a letter in support of the reform, which saw current and former senior Anglican Bishops joining other voices who represent faith traditions which want to be able to register and celebrate civil partnerships. These included liberal Judaism, Quakers and Unitarians who believe the measure is required to uphold their own religious freedom and individual rights.

The Times also reported that “the government has yet to decide whether to back the amendment. It wants to avoid another confrontation with church leaders.”

However, the Bishop of Leicester, who convenes the 26 bishops in the House of Lords, is publicly supporting the amendment. The case that opponents of the amendment entirely contradict themselves on the principle of freedom of belief has been made powerfully by Iain McLean in an open letter to the Bishop of Winchester and by Stuart White.

I have sent this letter to Harriet Harman, as Minister for Equality, to urge that the government support the amendment.
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Last week, I looked at the some of the evidence for the apparent relationship between socio-economic deprivation and conception/abortion rates for English local authorities and arrived at two main conclusions:

1) There is a strong positive correlation between deprivation and conception rates in under 18’s – the more deprived the area, the higher the conception rate.

2) There is, when you exclude London, a solid negative correlation between deprivation and abortion rates – the less deprived the are, the more likely a pregnant teenager is to terminate their pregnancy.

One question that came up several times in comments was, inevitably, that of why England has the highest conception and abortion rates in Europe.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that one follows the other, if you measure both in rates per 1,000 teenagers but that’s only part of the story.

Relative to much of Europe, England has a fairly modest rate of abortions relative to the annual number of conceptions amongst teenagers.
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‘Conservatives champion gay equality,’ according to the title of a speech Tory frontbencher Nick Herbert will deliver in Washington today. If he was being entirely honest, he would add the words ‘but only after Labour actually delivered it and didn’t leave us any choice in the matter’.

Of course nobody can credibly argue that David Cameron and his Notting Hill Set coterie personally harbour the type of crude homophobia that was dominant during the hey-day of Thatcherism.

But it remains a fact that the Tories are the party of Section 28 and Labour are the party of equalised age of consent, civil partnership, gay adoption rights and a prohibition on anti-gay discrimination in the provision of goods and services. And don’t forget that it was Labour that decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in the first place.

In short, every single advance for gay rights in this country has occurred under a Labour government. Labour has set the agenda for decade after decade, often in the face of concerted opposition from the Tory right.

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It is funny that the Tories put out a policy document claiming that the conception rate among under-18 girls in the 10 most disadvantaged areas was 54%, when the real figure was 54 per 1,000. It is kind of a fair point, though, that focusing on this is pretty trivial, and that rather than playing ‘gotcha’ with statistical errors, politicians, the media and so on should actually be concentrating on the more important issues.

Happily, a new book has just come out about teenage pregnancy, summarising the latest research on the subject. The authors set out the conventional view of teenage parents, that mothers are ignorant and irresponsible, fathers are feckless, that teenage parenthood is a negative experience for the mothers themselves, their children and for society as a whole, and that the whole thing is a moral, social and economic problem. They then go on to say:

“There is a severe problem with this ‘public’, axiomatic, view of teenage parenting, however—the evidence does not support it. As the chapters in this book show, there is little evidence that lack of knowledge ‘causes’ pregnancy, or that increased knowledge prevents it. Teenage birth rates are much lower than in the 1960s and 1970s, and overall are continuing to decline, while few teenage mothers are under sixteen. Age at which pregnancy occurs seems to have little effect on future social outcomes (like employment and income in later life), or on current levels of disadvantage for either parents or their children. Many young mothers and fathers themselves express positive attitudes to parenthood, and mothers usually describe how motherhood makes them feel stronger, more competent, more connected, and more responsible. Many fathers seek to remain connected to their children, and provide for their new family. For many young mothers and fathers parenting seems to provide the impetus to change direction, or build on existing resources, so as to take up education, training and employment. Teenage parenting may be more of an opportunity than a catastrophe.”

They go through, point by point, research report by research report, the real facts about teenage pregnancy. I’ve put some of the key quotes on my blog, here, or you can read the introduction here (pdf). Here are six key facts:

*Teenage pregnancy rates have been falling for nearly thirty years, and are lower than in 1956, during the supposed ‘golden age’ of the family.

*There is little evidence that low levels of knowledge ’cause’ teenage pregnancy, and meta-analysis of preventative strategies focusing on sex education, and improved access to advice and contraceptive services, concluded that this did not reduce unintended pregnancies among young women aged between 11-18.

*Studies of teenage mothers showed how they made moral and thoughtful decisions about contraception, proceeding with their pregnancy, and engagement with health and welfare services. Rather than suffering ‘broken’ family circumstances, teenage parents were often embedded in networks of support, and were optimistic that parenthood would shift them onto a positive life trajectory.

*Social research in the USA, found that the social outcome effects of mother’s age at birth were ‘often essentially zero’. Indeed, by their mid/late twenties teenage mothers in the USA did better than miscarrying teenagers with regard to employment
and income.

*Research using the Milennium Cohort Study found that those children with teenage mothers are indeed born into families experiencing multiple disadvantages. However, it is not the mother’s age at first birth which is the main driver of these disadvantages — rather it is the prior disadvantages experienced by the young mothers during their own childhoods.

*Qualitative studies find that many mothers express positive attitudes to motherhood, and describe how motherhood has made them feel stronger, more competent, more connected to family and society, and more responsible. Resilience in the face of constraints and stigma, based on a belief in the moral worth of being a mother, is one overriding theme.

*

I know that actual research evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, is much less compelling to politicians that “I saw a teenage mum once and I was disgusted”, but if you want something a bit more informed than what the Conservative Party has to offer on this subject, this book is a good place to start.

For months, the right wing newspapers have been inventing horror stories about what the consequences of what they call ‘Harriet Harman’s equalities bill’ will be. None, however, have managed to come up with as ludicrous a suggestion as that of Polly Toynbee.

She wrote today in the Guardian that she thinks that providing free personal care for elderly people might contravene the government’s Equalities bill, which expects public bodies to consider the effect of their policies on inequality.

Presumably, by the same logic, the NHS, schools, child benefit, free bus passes and every other popular and effective public service which reduces inequality should be changed so they are free only for the poorest, with everyone else having to pay.

With friends like this…

This kind of imbecility is merely an extreme example of a set of beliefs which are widely held amongst the political elite, which can be summarised thus:
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There’s an old joke about the Pope’s attitude to contraception, attributed variously to Irish comedian Dave Allen or the Italian-American community at large. The punchline runs: ‘If he doesn’t play the game, he shouldn’t try to make the rules.’

I am inescapably reminded of the quip after reading about the intervention of the world’s most prominent former Hitler Youth into current UK debates about employment equality and gay adoption.

Well, New Labour in office has been adamant about its wish for ‘dialogue’ with ‘faith communities’, so it can hardly feign surprise when a religion with over 4m adherents takes it up on the idea.

I’ve heard it said that Catholic adoption agencies do good work, frequently finding homes for severely handicapped kids that are the hardest to place.

But why have specifically Catholic adoption agencies in the first place? Aren’t they a throwback to the days when knocked-up Catholic schoolgirls needed somewhere to dump the unfortunate sprog before getting carted off to the nearest Magdalene Laundry?

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The 26th British Social Attitudes Survey has just been published, and has some interesting findings.

They show strong support for liberal social values, a decline in support for redistribution and traditional left-wing economic intervention to help the worse off, and overwhelming opposition to spending cuts in health and education.

It has prompted a mixture of gloating about how Britain is shifting to the right and whining about evil librulses not “tolerating” homophobia from our friends in the conservative movement, so let’s have a look at what it really says:

On social attitudes, Britain is becoming more liberal, except for when it comes to drugs:
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contribution by Bob Piper

When Tony Blair and his small band of ‘New’ Labour modernisers swept into power in 1997 they had all sorts of wild and wonderful plans for Britain. In one area though, Tone and the Gang were decidedly conservative in their promises.

Despite all the pledges to ‘modernise’ Britain, our democracy was still going to contain an outdated and illogical second chamber. The ‘modernisation’ of the House of Lords was simply going to remove the rights of hereditary Peers. That was it.

All the rest of the stuff on the House of Lords was the usual Blairite flim-flam about having a wide-ranging review of possible further change.

And so it came to pass, that 12 years later, an attempt to introduce measures to prevent the Church discriminating against gay and transsexual people in employment floundered in the wake of opposition from the Christian Taliban and old duffers appointed on the basis of political patronage and grace and favour appointments.
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In responding to John Denham’s speech last week on class, Chris Dillow said this on his blog:

…how could anyone have ever thought that class wasn’t important, or that race and disadvantage were the same?
To cut a long and tragi-comic story short, I fear the answer originates in the Left’s reaction against orthodox Marxism in the 1980s. Inspired in part by Hobsbawm’s essay, the Forward March of Labour Halted? (pdf), many on the Left gave up on the idea of the working class as a revolutionary force, and looked instead to what they called “new social movements”: women, blacks and gays (yes – to many the three were somehow homogenous!)

He then goes on to list three disastrous effects it’s had: a privileging of identity politics over class; the belief that government should get involved in everything; giving us a target-driven bureaucratized public sector which is plundered by “consultants”.

While I share concerns about the second and third issues, I want to discuss the first one. What frustrates me about Chris Dillow’s post is that while many on the Left instinctively support identity politics: they don’t seem to know why, or the thinking behind it.
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contribution by Nick Cowen

Via Tom Palmer and Marginal Revolution, we learn that global poverty is falling, is doing so fast, and much more so than previously expected. Equality is increasing as a consequence.

This is very cheering news, and it means far more for so many people in the world than all the news stories about bad laws, rapacious corporations, and even attacks on civil liberties. The story probably has countless more implications for human prosperity than climate change.

Yet while this is a moment of celebration for anyone who can appreciate that slowly but surely more people are having the opportunity to pursue their own happiness, news of this sort receives a rather muted response in all sides of the MSM.
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I disagreed with a whole heap of stuff in Ellie Levenson’s “The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism” when it came out last year (see my Mswoman comments under this CiF piece for specific examples).

But apart from her odious assertion that “we do women an injustice when we say that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is, after all, just a penis.” top of the list was her claim, repeated in the Independent, that in some contexts so-called rape ‘jokes’ can not only be deemed to be acceptable, but they can also in fact be funny.

Because they’re not. Ever. They never have been and they never will be. They’re not funny when Ricky Gervais tells them, and they’re not funny when a Tory Councillor tells them either.
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Since the Guardian revealed on Friday afternoon that Rod Liddle was seen as Alexander Lebedev’s main choice as editor, there has been a flurry of emails and tweets in horror.

It’s not absolutely certain Lebedev will take over the Indy, and neither is it certain Liddle will be appointed. But more than one writer/journalist at the newspaper has been in touch with me saying it is a serious prospect and they are very worried.

A Facebook group entitled ‘If Rod Liddle becomes editor of The Independent, I will not buy it again‘ has started – and accumulated over 1,400 followers in a short space of time. I tweeted the same on Friday – I’d never buy it again nor link to it if Liddle becomes editor.

The Indy is Britain’s only other progressive/liberal/left newspaper. Rod Liddle is the anti-thesis of all that (quotes by Liddle at the end).
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One story I didn’t get a chance to add my tuppenceworth to, over the vacation, was the news that Iris Robinson MP is to step down from her parliamentary position as a result of, “an ongoing battle with severe depression” (BBC). Robinson is a DUP member, wife of the current leader of that party, and is probably most famous in British politics for her hateful remarks about homosexuality.

What interested me about this story was the outpouring of well-wishes from Iris Robinson’s colleagues at Stormont and Westminster. Danny Kennedy, David Ford, Shaun Woodward, Nigel Dodds and others have held forth on their wishes for a speedy recovery and/or admiration for Robinson as a “dedicated” parliamentarian. I’m curious as to how honest they are each being.

It is rather expected that, when someone from the opposition is ill or suffers a bereavement, you wish them well. But how many of these wishes are genuine? I certainly don’t wish Iris Robinson well; I’d happily see the entire DUP dropkicked into the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed were she gay, and not such a vigorous gay-basher, there’d probably be some obscure Free Presbyterian Minister claiming her ill-health was vengeance sent by God.
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A couple more thoughts on class war following on from yesterday’s post.

Sunny picked up the tenor of my argument about how 21st century appeals to privilege and minority interests is neither a disastrous retreat to 1970s antagonisms nor the suicidal doom-and-gloom message that New Labour dinosaurs claim. Yet he seems insistent on labelling the overall strategy one of “class war”.

To be fair to Sunny, he does say that this is intended merely as shorthand, holding his nose and agreeing with Ed Ball’s on this matter. But even then, I’m suspicious of using the term even as shorthand in strategy-debate. For terms have a tendency to stick. Especially when a predominantly right-wing media has already shown itself desirous of squawking about the “class war” label.

And there’s (at least) two more reasons why “class war” is an unwise use of language, on top of yesterday’s list.
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