Marks and Spencer - not exactly kosher

My astonishment at yesterday's news that Marks and Spencer was allowing Muslim till staff to direct customers with alcohol or pork to other tills was swiftly followed by the conclusion that this was a policy which wasn't going to last.

Never mind the fury which erupted on Facebook, imagine the anger amidst the mayhem of Christmas shopping when the person queuing for ten minutes with a groaning trolley is told she must go elsewhere. Imagine too being the poor cashier who has to tell the customer.  Clearly this one wasn't going to survive 24 hours.

And so it has proved.  M&S now apparently say Muslim staff will be allowed to work in other areas of their stores (no doubt not shifting crates of champagne around in the back office).  With any luck the tide of ill-will which has flowed their way won't dent their Christmas figures too much.

Personally I have no objection whatsoever with someone not wanting to sell alcohol or pork.  The best way for an individual to avoid this is probably not to apply for a job with one of the UK's biggest food retailers. Marks and Spencer selling wine and sausages?  Who would have guessed?

A pluralist society requires all sorts of tolerances.  Perhaps surprisingly for someone who regards Islam's treatment of women with a certain amount of dismay, I think France's ban on the burqa is wrong.  I don't like the headscarf very much, but I wouldn't patronise those who wear it by assuming that all of them are coerced or brainwashed.  But selling pork and alcohol is not the same thing as eating them yourself (if it were so, tens of thousands of Pakistani corner shops would have gone out of business years ago); and declining to serve those who do sends out a signal to wider society about Islam which is totally counterproductive.

What were Marks and Spencer thinking of?  Michael Marks, a Belorussian Jew who founded the company with Thomas Spencer in 1894, must be turning in his grave.  

Clare Balding, UCL and a British version of Islam

A couple of weeks ago on a long motorway drive I found myself listening to Clare Balding's Desert Island Discs.  Why, Kirsty Young wanted to know, did Ms Balding decline to take part in coverage of the Open Golf championship at Muirfield, a club which refuses entry to women, whereas she was willing to go to the Winter Olympics in Russia, a country whose government is notoriously homophobic?

Balding's answer, that in the UK her stance had some resonance whereas in Russia no-one knew or cared who she was, seemed reasonable enough, and I forgot about it until the hoo-hah last week over the debate at University College London.  You may remember that UCL is in trouble for hosting a Muslim-organised debate where audience members were offered mixed or segregated seating.

Like most small "l" liberals I incline to the view that people should be able to do more or less what they like where possible, and as someone with religious sympathies if not actual religious beliefs that view extends to the practice of religion.  However where religious rights and other rights clash there's an ambigous middle ground that I suspect we will see increasingly fought over.

If you are inclined towards an absolutist take on religious freedom, consider the practice of compulsory female circumcision, a manifestation of religious belief in action.  Still think people should always be able to do what they like?  No, nor me.

In reality our willingness to tolerate other people's religious practices is not absolute, but depends on the extent to which those practices differ from our own.  Someone who thinks segregating a meeting is OK might not mind too much compulsory clitoridectomy; someone who finds segregation an affront to feminism is going to be horrified by it.

UCL seem to have followed the policy arrived at by Universities UK - namely that segregation is OK if it's voluntary and if there's a third area of mixed seating.  Subsequently UUK now seem to have withdrawn this policy in the face of criticism from David Cameron and Michael Gove. Lord knows what they are going to replace it with.

Areas where potential rights conflict, in this case female equality versus religious freedom, are probably not subject to being forensically unpicked: at root politics is about power, and about imposing your vision of society on others.  We haven't tried to accommodate those North African Muslims who practice female circumcision: we think it's wrong, so they can't do it legally. The UK government has essentially imposed its views on them.

Unlike Clare Balding, I personally don't think there's much wrong with Muirfield golf club having a men-only membership.  It's a private organisation; other golf clubs are available.  I as a man am free to take my maximum-handicap hacking elsewhere if I choose.  Nor would I mind a private Mosque having segregated prayers, if that's what its members want.

(Don't ask me why a men-only golf club is just about OK, but a whites-only one wouldn't be; let's stick to the topic)

A university on the other hand is, whatever the niceties of ownership, essentially a public institution.  If it wants to ban segregated meetings it should be able to do so.  Muslims are free to campaign against it and it's up to them to see if they can prevail.

As for Ms Balding, three quarters of an hour in her radio company was quite enough.  I couldn't quite put my finger on what I disliked about her.  And no, it wasn't that she was a lesbian.  I realised afterwards it was that she was a female version of a male type I have always envied and disliked - the Jock.  Cheerful, unreflective, competitive and enthusiastic, she played a series of quite dreadful records.

Lastly, a mention for the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, an organisation which is trying, in the face of some resistance, to promote what are effectively unisex mosques.  I have always thought that for the UK to come to an unacknowledged truce with Muslims a British version of Islam would have to emerge, and this is an enormously encouraging sign.

Radio Mandela makes the news

To get one thing clear at the outset, I admired Nelson Mandela.

I am also astonished and bored by the outpouring of flannel and hagiographies at his death. A serviceable but dull BBC4 programme about Byzantium on Friday night was interrupted by a banner advertising "Breaking news on BBC1". Was nuclear armageddon upon us? Was a tsunami roaring up the Mersey estuary? No. Mandela had died.

I can't think of any reason why I should have needed to know sooner rather than later. After all, the coverage was still going on on Monday morning, when Radio 5 was inviting listeners to share their "memories of Mandela". There was no chance of any of us missing the news. You might have thought the station had been renamed Radio Mandela; apparently the BBC has received over 1000 complaints about excessive coverage. I'm surprised it's so few.

Against my better judgment I watched News at 10 that night. Too many of the contributors struck the kind of solipsistic tone which Private Eye would satirise as "The day Nelson Mandela met me". Among them was John Simpson, who is experienced enough to know the pitfalls of personalisation but let his vanity get the better of him. In the Guardian of course it was even worse, although the paper redeemed itself by printing a magisterial obituary by David Beresford which you can read here, and which I urge anyone who thinks I'm unduly cynical to look at before giving up on this post.

As Beresford makes clear, Mandela was a complex man, absent from the world during much of his adult life, emerging from prison an ingenue, and finding himself the poster boy for liberal opinion the world over. This was a position he subsequently struggled to justify, with one striking exception, an exception so startling that it goes a long way to explaining the reverence felt for Mandela around the world.

It was that he forgave his captors, and by doing so made possible the peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa. No small thing.

But news organisations are not meant to be cheerleaders. When a great public figure like Mandela passes on, their job isn't to exalt.  I don't imagine though that Pravda's tributes to Josef Stalin were any more lavish than those the liberal media bestowed on Madiba.

Nowhere in the coverage I saw was there any mention of his penchant for hobnobbing with celebrities, his attempts to milk the rich for unspecific "good causes" (some of which appeared to have close connections to his own family), his cosying up to foreign governments like Indonesia, Taiwan and Nigeria in exchange for donations to the ANC or his reluctance to speak out about AIDS. Neither was there any mention of Mandela's endorsement, while still in prison, of Winnie Mandela's notorious necklacing speech - Beresford's obit alleges that proof of this endorsement was removed from journalist Anthony Sampson's official biography when Mandela threatened to withdraw co-operation from the project.

None of these things make Mandela more of a bad man than a good one. Neither does the corruption of his successors in the ANC make his legacy toxic. But their absence from the news coverage shames journalists' professionalism.

How could this have happened?

Most of us on who grew up politically in the 70s and 80s worshipped Mandela.  He appeared to stand for something decent and true, yet was unjustly imprisoned for fighting against something hateful and false. For we white liberals, he was a black man who was palpably westernised (a lawyer). His words at the Rivonia trial had the authoritative ring of Shakespeare and the King James Bible (not surprisingly since Mandela was assisted in his speech by the novelist Nadime Gordimer and by Anthony Sampson).

Growing up in a society which was learning to cope with black immigration, we young white people could admire Mandela from afar. He gave us the luxury of demonstrating our own Anti-Racism, whilst not actually having to have anything to do with him personally. Moreover because he was imprisoned, we had no opportunity to find out whether our idol had feet of clay or not.

My generation is now in charge in the media. When someone who was totemic for our far off youth dies, we are going to go for it in a big way. Does anyone remember the fanfares which accompanied Lou Reed's passing a few weeks ago?

The coverage of Mandela's death reveals as clearly as any story in recent years that what appears in the news media, both in quality and quantity, is a reflection of the personal history and opinions of the journalists and editors involved. Most of the time it's easy to forget this, but the coverage of Mandela's death reminds us that it's true, and it's true all of the time.

P.S.  The sight of the bogus sign-language expert gesticulating next to that old fraud Jacob Zuma at Mandela's funeral said a great deal about the quality of the people who have risen to the top in the new South Africa.  In a sentence, I'd say that a wicked regime has been replaced by one which is incompetent and corrupt.

Married with benefits

Is marriage a good thing or not? Sir Paul Coleridge, described by the Torygraph as "a senior High Court Judge", apparently thinks so, for he has waded into the debate with some pithy remarks after his Think Tank, the Marriage Foundation, published a report showing that children of unmarried parents were twice as likely to suffer family break up as those whose parents were married.

I didn't know judges were allowed to have Think Tanks, which just goes to show you learn something new every day, even if it isn't anything terribly interesting.

I'm sympathetically inclined to Mr Justice Coleridge's view, but the trouble with "research" like this is that it fails to take into account that people who get married are self-selecting: that's to say, the kind of people who make such a public commitment are precisely the kind of people who are likely to stick with it when the gloss wears off. Of course their children are less likely to suffer family break up.

Sir Paul is clearly aware of the controversy his remarks might stir up, for he insisted that he was not intending to "preach morality". 

"If your relationship is not stable enough to cope with children", he wrote, "you should not have them".  Well maybe, but the trouble is people's relationships tend to come under most strain after the children have come along.  If the state really wanted to minimise family break up it would discourage couples unlikely to stick together from having children in the first place.

How could it do this? By restricting child-related benefits to married couples. Young men are pretty stupid and irresponsible, but young women aren't. "I'm not having your baby", would be the cry, "until you marry me". Watch the birth rate plummet.

But of course this won't happen.  For one, the piteous plight of single unmarried mothers would soon be winging its way to a TV screen near you. Cathy Come Home Redux. In the face of such emotionalism the right of young men to father a child and then slope off without a backward glance or social censure will always be placed ahead of the desirability that children should have both parents in attendance. When some children suffer conspicuous poverty, a policy which nevertheless beggars many more emotionally will always be preferred.

"You have no right to have children", said Mr Justice Coleridge, "you only have responsibilities if you have them".

Not a widespread view in Britain now.

George Osborne's Autumn statement - squaring the fiscal circle

Amidst the kerfuffle surrounding the Chancellor's Autumn statement, it might be a good moment to take the political temperature.

George Osborne has been attacked by Labour for the last three and half years on the basis that his economic recipe wouldn't work.  It now looks as if they were wrong.  Plan A has got Britain back into growth.  Of course Ed Balls would say that it would have happened quicker if we'd done what Labour wanted, but that would have involved higher borrowing and higher interest rates.  The deficit, which has stalled at about £120 billion, might well have increased, sending out a disastrous signal to the debt markets, from whom we must borrow about £2.5 billion every week.

In middle-age my political sympathies tend to lie with the parties that have had the most credible economic plan, because it's only when you have an economy which works that you can afford the kind of public services most people would like to see.  In all my adult life I can't remember a single Labour policy devoted to balancing the books, and, looking back, I'm amazed to find that I voted for them so many times.

In the months leading up to the 97 election Labour promised to stick to Tory spending plans for a couple of years in order to head off a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 92, but since it was explicitly a Tory policy that was being copied, I don't think this counts.  Actually it's adoption led to a brief period - the last such - when Britain ran a surplus.

I think Osborne, like him or loathe him, has followed the least bad course of action open to him - none of them were good - and stuck to his guns despite overwhelming public, political and media hostility.  He deserves his political reward. We don't hear too much about Plan B nowadays. Of course we are having the wrong kind of recovery, whipped up out of QE and the housing market, but it is better than none, and when you consider that the EU, one of our principal export markets, is flat on its back, we should be grateful for what we've got.

But about Osborne's political reward. There isn't much of it. Ed Balls has given up telling the Chancellor he was doing the wrong thing and avoided the temptation to claim that growth would have happened sooner on his watch, seeing more fertile ground in the protest that, for most people, living standards are falling, growth notwithstanding. Labour's lead in the polls is modest but shows no sign of going away.

On several grounds this is an infantile objection. In the first place, an economy only a few months out of recession is not going to be uprooting many trees. In the second, wages have been stagnant at best (adjusted for inflation) for some years, and it didn't just start when the Coalition got into office. Thirdly, there are assumptions in Balls' criticism which are totally unwarranted, namely that we are entitled to eternally rising living standards - we aren't - and that there is some magic button Osborne could press if he chose which could restore them - there isn't.

As I've argued on here before, in the last half century we exported our manufacturing capacity and tried to fill the income gap with borrowing (that's what the bankers were doing before it all went wrong - finding more and more ingenious ways of lending us money).  The only way of returning to widespread employment is by restoring some lost competitiveness.  Lower wages is one way of achieving that.  Labour is so far from understanding this that it recently suggested that companies with "market power" should charge consumers more in order to raise wages for their staff.

Companies like, er, the big six energy companies?  They certainly have plenty of market power.

One of George Osborne's announcements today was of future increases in the pension age. This is one way of lowering the benefit cost of an ageing population. It sounds and is harsh, but bear in mind that at the time the welfare state was set up, life expectancy for working men was about 48.

Another way of making sure the UK will be able to pay its pensioners in future is by a dramatic increase in immigration. But the UK is already one of the most crowded countries in the world (the South East of England would I think be third, behind Hong Kong and Bangladesh), housing is increasingly unaffordable, building land scarce and expensive, and immigration very unpopular with most people.  Moreover immigrants themselves become old in time, and a future plan which proposes more of them to solve our budgetary problems looks increasingly like a demographic Ponzi scheme.

All of this - a senescent population, an overspending government, falling wages and a housing shortage looks to me like one of those situations which can't go on forever and which must therefore stop. Judging by Labour's lead in the opinion polls an awful lot of people don't see it this way.

There seems to me a divide between those who view this particular circle as one that can't be squared, and those who think an incoming Labour government can restore the natural pre-2008 order of things. But an incoming Labour government will, in 2015, face exactly the same problems the Coalition currently faces, and will I think swiftly discover that taxing the rich a bit more won't darn the hole in the fiscal sock.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the post-war welfarist society those of us of a certain age have grown up with cannot go on as it is. Pension age is merely a harbinger. From welfare benefits and care for the elderly to taxation and retirement, things are going to change whether we like it or not. I don't personally think it will be pretty.

Boris Johnson, IQ and meritocracy

Admirers of the floppy-haired neo-Wodehousian Mayor of London like to point beyond his foibles (the womanising and the gaffes) and cry, "But Boris is really intelligent!".  Personally I rather doubt this.  I once bought a book of his journalism at an airport bookstall, and over the following couple of hours it prompted many a Paxmanian "Oh come on!"  Ignoring the possibility that it's me that's not very intelligent, Boris is in hot-water again because of a speech he gave last week, and it's time to spring to his defence.

A report in the Guardian today describes Johnson as suggesting that "some people cannot do well in life because of their low IQ".  Is that what he said?  Here's the relevant passage.

"No one can ignore the harshness of that (free market) competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.

Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2% have an IQ above 130.  The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.

And for one reason or another - boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants - the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever.  I stress: I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.  But we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . "

It's worth noting that Johnson describes free market competition as "harsh", that it inevitably "accentuates" inequality, and that IQ tests might be of dubious value.  He also suggests IQ score does not equate to "spiritual worth".  None of these nuances are present in the reporting of his speech, which has been of the "Boris causes controversy by saying that thick people have no chance in life" variety.

(Actually what this means in practice is that journalists read his speech, tried to think of someone who might be offended, rang them up, read the passage over the phone and wrote down their response. Hey presto a controversy is born.)

Let's start with the facts.  Some people have high IQs.  Some people don't.  IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests are meant to measure intelligence, although it has often been pointed out that by the time children are old enough to take them, the overlay of family background and conditioning distorts the results.  IQ tests moreover only measure a certain kind of intelligence (essentially ratiocination) whereas other kinds abound. These points and others are made in a kind of Festschrift on the Guardian letters page this morning, where a lot of people who probably haven't read Boris's speech express how outrageous they found it.

No matter how many kinds of intelligence there are, home environment must have some part to play in their development; but so also must genetics. Let's not argue about the proportions please. Let's just agree that genetics has a significant part to play.  Let us also assume that while there are other forms of intelligence (emotional, hand/eye, fine motor for example) the one Boris was talking about is the one which can recognise patterns, think abstractly and process information.  Does possession of these abilities make it more or less likely for someone to prosper by comparison with a person who lacks them? I think the only answer one can give to this is yes.

So is Boris right when he says IQ is "relevant to a conversation about equality"?  Again, I think the answer's yes; but it's where the argument goes next that's really interesting.

Social reformers have tended to argue in favour of a meritocracy, which is to say that people should be allowed to rise up according to their abilities irrespective of their social class.  Now consider where this leads when you hitch the idea to the genetic wagon.

Able people tend to marry other able people, and have children who are, because of the inheritability of characteristics, rather like them.  Even if the parents were working class to start with, their children tend not to be. In time these children will grow up and will tend to marry other able middle class people.  According to this model, if you have something resembling a meritocracy for a century or so, the middle classes will tend to be more intelligent than the working classes.

I realise this will be a horrifying idea for many of the bien-pensants, who thought Boris was bad enough. But how could it be otherwise? If ratiocinating intelligence leads to social advancement, and if it is to a significant extent heritable, in time meritocracy is bound to lead to a stratified society with an underclass in which low intelligence is significantly over-represented.

Meritocracy, which looks such a good idea in principle, turns out in practice to lead to something out of a sci-fi novel.

The alternative, of course, is a society is rigidly stratified by social class, in which intelligent people are kept firmly in their place. This looks just as unattractive.

I don't of course have any answers to this. Like Boris, I think a society with total equality is impossible and undesirable. The centrifuge of capitalism, for all its faults, has made people materially better off to an extent that the Communists of the 1930s would have found it impossible to imagine. Even the most down-trodden of peasants in rural China prefer to work in the Apple factory than break their backs tilling the paddy fields. And capitalism has also proved to be an economic principle surprisingly consistent with the idea of self-determination and freedom, at least compared with the alternatives. But it's not pretty, it fetishes consumption and some people do much better out of it than others.

Interestingly, although Boris acknowledges the inequality that the economic centrifuge imposes, the last time I saw a survey on this it suggested that inequality was decreasing under the Tories - this is because the asinine way sociologists use to measure it depends on the median income, and if the median income falls so does inequality.  I have railed about this fruitlessly several times on this site.

I find critics of Johnson's speech both baffling and, yes, contemptible.  A great deal that's wrong about Britain today stems from our reluctance to face facts.  Everybody in the reality-based community knows that some people are brighter than others, and the bright people tend to do better in life.  Johnson's critics are in denial. Why?  Partly because they think it diminishes the less able to point out that such people exist (actually Johnson went out of his way to stress their "spiritual worth"), partly because they hate the idea of pre-determination which genetic inheritance rather ominously suggests, and partly because they belong to a political credo which still thinks that everyone must get a prize.

They are missing a trick.  If the kind of inherited inequality Johnson is talking about means anything, it is that some people are never going to be doctors, bankers or lawyers no matter hard they try.  As Johnson wrote, "we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . "  That looks to me like an argument for a more compassionate society rather than the reverse.

PS The day after I posted this, Nicholas Watt, the Guardian's political correspondent, wrote of Johnson that "the London Mayor mocked people with low IQs".  This is so far from the truth that I am tempted to give up reading the paper altogether.

Alex Salmond and the Groat redux

I have to confess that I haven't read the SNP's blueprint for an independent Scotland released today, but I have followed its press coverage (which puts me in the same position of most of the media, who haven't read it either but who have read what their colleagues have had to say about it).

There are two things which are immediately striking.  The first is that the attractive, solvent and fair country which Alex Salmond promises is not his to grant.  Which is to say, an independent Scotland will presumably have elections with changes of government from time to time, and the Labour party north of the border will have an agenda different from his.

The second is that Salmond is no nearer fixing the currency problem than he was five years ago.  Reading the Torygraph's online discussion boards (neither more nor less barking than the Graun's, which alas no longer allows me to post), I was astonished to find that almost none of the Nationalist posters understood the difficulties adoption of sterling posed for Scotland.  These are, in no particular order, that Scotland would have no central bank and no lender of last resort, that the Scottish economy would not be taken to account by the Bank of England in setting rates, and that its ability to borrow on the money markets (like rUK Scotland will not be breaking even any time soon) would be constrained, possibly by Westminster (which might make borrowing controls contingent on using sterling).

The question I could not get any Nationalist to answer this morning was, "Why would Scotland be better off swapping a system in which it has a modicum of influence over monetary decisions in favour of one in which it has none whatsoever?"

Here's another one: Why has Alex Salmond abandoned the Euro as currency of choice, presumably on the basis that a currency union without political integration eats its weaker members alive (see Spain, Ireland and Portugal for details), in favour of another currency union without politcal integration?

The situation would actually be worse for Scotland than it is for the PIIGS - at least the ECB is supposed to take into account what it is happening in the peripheral Eurozone countries, which is more than the BoE would be doing post-Independence.  You can see how this would play out immediately - a recovering rUK would probably need a higher base rate than Scotland, and if so Scotland would immediately have interest rates that were too high, and which had the effect of strangling its economy.

The only Yes-voting poster I could find who understood these problems favoured a short period of sterling usage followed by the setting up of Scotland's own currency.  There are obvious difficulties with this, but at least it has the merit of allowing monetary decisions to be made in Scotland rather than in Threadneedle Street in the City of London.

That most posters didn't understand the problem is rather depressing, and raises the unattractive prospect that the Yes vote could win without its supporters really understanding what they were getting into.

Electorate has no grasp of economics.  Who knew?