The fine mess into which French president Francois Hollande has got himself with a young actress (OK, she's 41, but from my lofty vantage point that's still young - she can probably climb the stairs without holding on to the rail), invites all sorts of thoughts about the stupidity of the middle-aged male.
But spare a thought for the stupidity of the woman. Of all the men with whom actress Julie Gayet could have elected to play the role of Other Woman, she goes for, what, a penguin with a face like a potato, beady eyes and dyed hair a la Berlusconi?
Would Ms Gayet have looked at Hollande twice if he'd been a dustman? Not on your life.
"So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?", Caroline Aherne asked Debbie McGee on live TV.
Unfortunately re-runs of Mrs Merton are not currently available in French.
Thursday 16 January 2014
Friday 10 January 2014
Mark Duggan - care in the community
I once made the mistake, in front of a friend who comes from Tottenham via Accra in Ghana, of referring to "the black community". I can still see him now, leaning back in his chair and laughing uproariously. "There ain't no such thing as the black community", he said. And of course when you think about it, it's true. Just as there's no such thing as "the angling community" or "the mountaineering community".
It's funny then how in the wake of the Mark Duggan inquest "community" is one word I think I've heard more than any other. That and "justice" perhaps. And with "community" comes the word "leader". "Community leaders" tend not to be elected people like parish councillors, but the self-appointed who like the sound of their own voices. They are often encouraged by government and local authorities, desperate to find some way of getting a purchase on the part of the population which doesn't have the same skin colour they do.
Usually "community leaders" are mediocre and self-serving people of the Bernie Grant or Jessie Jackson type who prefer the attention and money which being the link between authority and the huddled masses confers to a low wage job somewhere in the service industries. I guess you can't blame them.
Community leaders have been much in evidence in the last 48 hours. I heard one of them, Stafford Scott, say that the inquest verdict was a joke, that "everyone knows what's happening to this country" and that David Cameron was to blame. Really?
What you didn't hear community leaders saying was, "Mark Duggan was a bad man. He wasn't carrying a gun to hand it in to the police. The community is better off without him". Why is that? Well partly perhaps because their own status and position depends on articulating the fears and prejudices of their peers. Understandable, but not exactly leadership. But also because part of community leaders' function seems to be to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood.
I heard one poignant vox pop post-Duggan on Wednesday night. It was a young black man who said, "There ain't nothing up here. No jobs. Nothing". Now I lived in Hackney for four years and in London for sixteen. As I recall Tottenham Hale tube station is about seven stops from Oxford Circus. That's about fifteen or twenty minutes travel at the most.
Recent visits to London suggest the capital is booming. The people who serve you in pubs, restaurants and coffee shops are overwhelmingly from Europe or Eastern Europe, confirming anecdotally what figures show to be true, namely that we imported a workforce during the Blair / Brown years instead of getting British people, many of them with brown skins, off the dole.
But you can't just blame European immigration. "Community leaders" contribute to a narrative of helplessness. Complaints that no jobs are available a twenty minute tube ride away from the centre of the richest city on earth outside North America are utterly ridiculous. The truth is that jobs are there, but starting working life for little money in an unglamorous circumstances is at odds with "the community"'s self-mythology.
A culture which glamourises guns, violence and wealth, with the occasional detour denigrating women along the way, is not going to encourage young people to wait tables or serve behind a till. A culture which legitimises absent fathers is not going to give young men decent role models. The problems of places like Tottenham are complex, but they start from within.
It's funny then how in the wake of the Mark Duggan inquest "community" is one word I think I've heard more than any other. That and "justice" perhaps. And with "community" comes the word "leader". "Community leaders" tend not to be elected people like parish councillors, but the self-appointed who like the sound of their own voices. They are often encouraged by government and local authorities, desperate to find some way of getting a purchase on the part of the population which doesn't have the same skin colour they do.
Usually "community leaders" are mediocre and self-serving people of the Bernie Grant or Jessie Jackson type who prefer the attention and money which being the link between authority and the huddled masses confers to a low wage job somewhere in the service industries. I guess you can't blame them.
Community leaders have been much in evidence in the last 48 hours. I heard one of them, Stafford Scott, say that the inquest verdict was a joke, that "everyone knows what's happening to this country" and that David Cameron was to blame. Really?
What you didn't hear community leaders saying was, "Mark Duggan was a bad man. He wasn't carrying a gun to hand it in to the police. The community is better off without him". Why is that? Well partly perhaps because their own status and position depends on articulating the fears and prejudices of their peers. Understandable, but not exactly leadership. But also because part of community leaders' function seems to be to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood.
I heard one poignant vox pop post-Duggan on Wednesday night. It was a young black man who said, "There ain't nothing up here. No jobs. Nothing". Now I lived in Hackney for four years and in London for sixteen. As I recall Tottenham Hale tube station is about seven stops from Oxford Circus. That's about fifteen or twenty minutes travel at the most.
Recent visits to London suggest the capital is booming. The people who serve you in pubs, restaurants and coffee shops are overwhelmingly from Europe or Eastern Europe, confirming anecdotally what figures show to be true, namely that we imported a workforce during the Blair / Brown years instead of getting British people, many of them with brown skins, off the dole.
But you can't just blame European immigration. "Community leaders" contribute to a narrative of helplessness. Complaints that no jobs are available a twenty minute tube ride away from the centre of the richest city on earth outside North America are utterly ridiculous. The truth is that jobs are there, but starting working life for little money in an unglamorous circumstances is at odds with "the community"'s self-mythology.
A culture which glamourises guns, violence and wealth, with the occasional detour denigrating women along the way, is not going to encourage young people to wait tables or serve behind a till. A culture which legitimises absent fathers is not going to give young men decent role models. The problems of places like Tottenham are complex, but they start from within.
Wednesday 8 January 2014
Justice for Mark Duggan
A quick search through this blog would reveal that its author is not much impressed by the police. All my experience, as a former lawyer and as a citizen, is that when they are not corrupt, racist and dishonest, they are incompetent and lazy. The following remarks about tonight's verdict by the Mark Duggan inquest jury need to be read in that context.
I'm not at all surprised that the jury found Duggan to have been lawfully killed. Or that it found the gun discovered 20 feet away wrapped in a sock was thrown by Duggan before the police fired the fatal shots. If someone told me that the police had put the gun there to justify their actions that wouldn't surprise me either (although I'd be wondering why they chose not to put it in the taxi, which would have been the obvious place). I believe the police to be capable of pretty much anything.
And yet I think Mr Duggan's family and his lawyers are protesting too much.
It's not surprising that his family now like to portray Duggan as a good man, a pillar of the community rather than a violent and feared drug dealer. That would be the inevitable reaction of people who have lost someone they loved. But I'd like to ask them (from a safe distance), whether they believed Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi. If not, well, the evidence is against them. But if he was, what do they think he was doing with it? And do they not think that someone carrying a gun around with them can't have too many complaints if the police decide that person might just be carrying it to hurt someone else?
I was listening to Radio 5 when the news broke, and the station was clearly caught expecting an Unlawful Killing verdict, since it had prepared pre-recorded interviews with Duggan's mother and with a friend, and also played an actor-voiced exchange between Leslie Thomas, the family's barrister, and a witness who described seeing the killing and said it looked like an execution.
The station did not however re-enact cross-examination of the same witness, reported in the Guardian, in which it was put to him that he had changed his story since he first gave a statement. Why not? I'm guessing because it thought the jury would accept the witness's evidence. Instead it went live to a reporter in Tottenham who was presumably hoping something would kick off down there. It also broadcast part of a statement by Marcia Willis Stewart, the family's solicitor, who declared it was a "murder" of "an unarmed man", a remark that is libellous if false and inflammatory in any event. Radio 5 stopped broadcasting the statement after the "murder" remark. In the circumstances Ms Stewart may well have committed a public order offence. Certainly she brought her profession into disrepute.
The BBC's reporter, Danny Shaw I think, said that the crucial question was whether Duggan was holding the gun when he was shot. This statement, repeated later on PM, is wrong. In the context of the riots which started after Duggan's killing it's also irresponsible. The crucial question was whether the firearms officer reasonably believed Duggan to be carrying a gun. This distinction is crucial to understanding of the jury's verdict, and failure to understand it isn't just confined to the BBC. Diane Abbott has also declared herself baffled by the verdict. That's a shame, because in fact, whether right or not, it's clear and readily comprehensible to anyone of a modest intelligence.
The family complained essentially that the police had imposed their own version of justice on Duggan. But consider this. There is an inquest, held over two months at enormous public expense. Witnesses are compelled to come, and are cross-examined. The Coroner sums up. The jury goes out. There is a verdict. In damning the jury's verdict the Duggans are essentially saying, This isn't the kind of justice we wanted. It didn't give the result we wanted. Ironically, they are guilty of exactly the same thing they accuse the police of having done, which is to say demanding justice to suit their personal needs. But that isn't the way justice works. Justice stands outside the needs of the individual, be they police officers or drug dealers. It even stands, so far as possible, outside the needs of the state. A fair process fairly applied is all that can be asked of the justice system, and I haven't heard any suggestion, from Duggan's supporters or from anyone else, that this Inquest failed on either count. At least not until the jury delivered a verdict they didn't like.
It does not seem to have occurred to Duggan's family that he might have been a drug-dealing gang member who was carrying a gun at a time when he was shot down by a policeman (who knew such things might happen?) Or that, whatever their own devastating loss, the rest of us might be better off without him.
You may say that we don't want a society where people are shot down by the police in cold blood. On the whole I agree. But where the police are pretty sure those people have a gun on or about their person, I'm willing to make an exception.
I'm not at all surprised that the jury found Duggan to have been lawfully killed. Or that it found the gun discovered 20 feet away wrapped in a sock was thrown by Duggan before the police fired the fatal shots. If someone told me that the police had put the gun there to justify their actions that wouldn't surprise me either (although I'd be wondering why they chose not to put it in the taxi, which would have been the obvious place). I believe the police to be capable of pretty much anything.
And yet I think Mr Duggan's family and his lawyers are protesting too much.
It's not surprising that his family now like to portray Duggan as a good man, a pillar of the community rather than a violent and feared drug dealer. That would be the inevitable reaction of people who have lost someone they loved. But I'd like to ask them (from a safe distance), whether they believed Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi. If not, well, the evidence is against them. But if he was, what do they think he was doing with it? And do they not think that someone carrying a gun around with them can't have too many complaints if the police decide that person might just be carrying it to hurt someone else?
I was listening to Radio 5 when the news broke, and the station was clearly caught expecting an Unlawful Killing verdict, since it had prepared pre-recorded interviews with Duggan's mother and with a friend, and also played an actor-voiced exchange between Leslie Thomas, the family's barrister, and a witness who described seeing the killing and said it looked like an execution.
The station did not however re-enact cross-examination of the same witness, reported in the Guardian, in which it was put to him that he had changed his story since he first gave a statement. Why not? I'm guessing because it thought the jury would accept the witness's evidence. Instead it went live to a reporter in Tottenham who was presumably hoping something would kick off down there. It also broadcast part of a statement by Marcia Willis Stewart, the family's solicitor, who declared it was a "murder" of "an unarmed man", a remark that is libellous if false and inflammatory in any event. Radio 5 stopped broadcasting the statement after the "murder" remark. In the circumstances Ms Stewart may well have committed a public order offence. Certainly she brought her profession into disrepute.
The BBC's reporter, Danny Shaw I think, said that the crucial question was whether Duggan was holding the gun when he was shot. This statement, repeated later on PM, is wrong. In the context of the riots which started after Duggan's killing it's also irresponsible. The crucial question was whether the firearms officer reasonably believed Duggan to be carrying a gun. This distinction is crucial to understanding of the jury's verdict, and failure to understand it isn't just confined to the BBC. Diane Abbott has also declared herself baffled by the verdict. That's a shame, because in fact, whether right or not, it's clear and readily comprehensible to anyone of a modest intelligence.
The family complained essentially that the police had imposed their own version of justice on Duggan. But consider this. There is an inquest, held over two months at enormous public expense. Witnesses are compelled to come, and are cross-examined. The Coroner sums up. The jury goes out. There is a verdict. In damning the jury's verdict the Duggans are essentially saying, This isn't the kind of justice we wanted. It didn't give the result we wanted. Ironically, they are guilty of exactly the same thing they accuse the police of having done, which is to say demanding justice to suit their personal needs. But that isn't the way justice works. Justice stands outside the needs of the individual, be they police officers or drug dealers. It even stands, so far as possible, outside the needs of the state. A fair process fairly applied is all that can be asked of the justice system, and I haven't heard any suggestion, from Duggan's supporters or from anyone else, that this Inquest failed on either count. At least not until the jury delivered a verdict they didn't like.
It does not seem to have occurred to Duggan's family that he might have been a drug-dealing gang member who was carrying a gun at a time when he was shot down by a policeman (who knew such things might happen?) Or that, whatever their own devastating loss, the rest of us might be better off without him.
You may say that we don't want a society where people are shot down by the police in cold blood. On the whole I agree. But where the police are pretty sure those people have a gun on or about their person, I'm willing to make an exception.
Michael Gove and the re-writing of history
How to celebrate, if that's the word, the centenary of 1914? Michael Gove seems to think our perspective on the Great War has been skewed by pacifist nonsense like the famous episode of Blackadder, one only of a number of fictions, from Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That to Oh What a Lovely War, which have peddled the "lions led by donkeys" line.
It so happens that I am in the middle of reading Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War and am therefore slightly less ill-informed than usual on this topic.
Ferguson is a strange writer. His principal motive seems not to be to find out what happened, but to point out where earlier historians got it wrong. This contrarianism can be a tiresome end in itself, and moreover its methods sometimes seem strained. Here he is on events in 1918:
"It was not Allied tactical superiority which ended the war . . . it was a crisis of German morale"(p.313). "A tired and sick man after the failure of his offensives, Ludendorff jumped to the conclusion that the army would collapse if he did not secure an armistice; it seems more likely that his desire for an armistice was what made it collapse".
The neat paradoxical inversion is typical of the style. But Ferguson doesn't show how Ludendorff's personal troubles communicated themselves to rank and file German soldiers many miles away. It seems unlikely that the figurehead of Germany's Junker class was articulating his personal troubles to subordinates in the touchy-feely Californian manner.
Then there is the vexed issue of surrender. Ferguson shows that after the failure of Ludendorff's 1918 offensive, German troops began to surrender in large numbers. He attributes this partly to the dawning realisation that it was safe to do so. This may seem surprising, since we fondly imagine the British treated their prisoners well, but Ferguson sets out in some detail how the killing of prisoners was routinely carried out on both sides. What he does not do however is show whether there was any policy change in 1918 by the British and French towards prisoners, and if so how that change was communicated to the Germans. Strange.
As Ferguson must know, asserting something without evidence is OK for a blogger but not good enough for a historian.
Where Ferguson really does score is in showing just how much better Germans were at killing our chaps than the reverse. Undoubtedly we started the war badly and slowly got better as it went on (developing the tank, learning how to co-ordinate artillery and infantry), but even then the Germans were still better than we were. They lost because their ordinary soldiers weren't in the end willing to put up with the horrendous conditions any more, preferring to surrender than fight.
Does this make the Great War a glorious episode in British history? Well no. To read yourself back into the mind of politicians a hundred years ago is to find that the great European powers were punch-drunk on territorial expansionism. The conflict was as much about Imperial ambitions as about Gavriol Princip and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Germans wanted ports on the Channel coast of France. Had Britain stayed aloof France would have been overrun. You can argue until you're blue in the face that such an outcome might have been better than the Nazism which followed Versailles, but politicians have to deal with the way things are now. They are not gifted with foresight. Britain's involvement was bungled, but also understandable and even necessary.
As for Blackadder, I watched the offending episode again the other night. I have always loved it. But Rowan Atkinson's dead-eyed and doomed soldier is an attempt to impose today's values and knowledge on an era which had the luxury of neither.
It so happens that I am in the middle of reading Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War and am therefore slightly less ill-informed than usual on this topic.
Ferguson is a strange writer. His principal motive seems not to be to find out what happened, but to point out where earlier historians got it wrong. This contrarianism can be a tiresome end in itself, and moreover its methods sometimes seem strained. Here he is on events in 1918:
"It was not Allied tactical superiority which ended the war . . . it was a crisis of German morale"(p.313). "A tired and sick man after the failure of his offensives, Ludendorff jumped to the conclusion that the army would collapse if he did not secure an armistice; it seems more likely that his desire for an armistice was what made it collapse".
The neat paradoxical inversion is typical of the style. But Ferguson doesn't show how Ludendorff's personal troubles communicated themselves to rank and file German soldiers many miles away. It seems unlikely that the figurehead of Germany's Junker class was articulating his personal troubles to subordinates in the touchy-feely Californian manner.
Then there is the vexed issue of surrender. Ferguson shows that after the failure of Ludendorff's 1918 offensive, German troops began to surrender in large numbers. He attributes this partly to the dawning realisation that it was safe to do so. This may seem surprising, since we fondly imagine the British treated their prisoners well, but Ferguson sets out in some detail how the killing of prisoners was routinely carried out on both sides. What he does not do however is show whether there was any policy change in 1918 by the British and French towards prisoners, and if so how that change was communicated to the Germans. Strange.
As Ferguson must know, asserting something without evidence is OK for a blogger but not good enough for a historian.
Does this make the Great War a glorious episode in British history? Well no. To read yourself back into the mind of politicians a hundred years ago is to find that the great European powers were punch-drunk on territorial expansionism. The conflict was as much about Imperial ambitions as about Gavriol Princip and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Germans wanted ports on the Channel coast of France. Had Britain stayed aloof France would have been overrun. You can argue until you're blue in the face that such an outcome might have been better than the Nazism which followed Versailles, but politicians have to deal with the way things are now. They are not gifted with foresight. Britain's involvement was bungled, but also understandable and even necessary.
As for Blackadder, I watched the offending episode again the other night. I have always loved it. But Rowan Atkinson's dead-eyed and doomed soldier is an attempt to impose today's values and knowledge on an era which had the luxury of neither.
Tuesday 7 January 2014
RIP Simon Hoggart. And the Christmas Round Robin.
So farewell then Simon Hoggart. Like most right-thinking people I mourn the death of the Guardian's great parliamentary sketch writer.
But here are two views you won't read in the hagiographies which inevitably accompany his passing.
One, Hoggart didn't really write about politics. He wrote about personalities. He was at his most amusing when describing the way politicians talked or looked. His most memorable pieces concerned things like the way Sir Peter Tapsell spoke, or Michael Fabricant's wig. Without wishing to sound sanctimonious, I'd rather read someone laying into what politicians do. Satire of the type employed by Private Eye is much cleverer, much more useful and much funnier. We think poorly enough of politicians anyway without someone like Hoggart mocking their personal qualities.
Two, Hoggart has single-handedly killed the Round Robin letter. Ten years ago no Christmas card opening was complete unless accompanied by the exultant shout of "It's a Round Robin!". At which point every sentient being would gather round to read the smug, complacent and vainglorious outpourings of friends and relatives. Hoggart used to publish a selection of these in the Guardian early in the New Year, and latterly produced two compilations, of which The Cat That Could Open the Fridge was one.
My favourite shocker was the one about the writer's offspring who had "spent the summer on a yacht in the Ionian Sea with some other beautiful young people from Balliol, and beat the Poet Laureate's son at Scrabble!"
If you went round with an axe and beat the sender to a bloody pulp, no jury would convict.
Where are the Round Robins now? The public ridicule Hoggart heaped on them as made even the least self-aware keep schtum. We had only two in 2013, one from some very nice people who write in full knowledge of the medium's absurdity, the other from a Lib Dem councillor in Watford who wouldn't know what self-awareness was if it landed on her head from a great height. We are all poorer as a result.
But here are two views you won't read in the hagiographies which inevitably accompany his passing.
One, Hoggart didn't really write about politics. He wrote about personalities. He was at his most amusing when describing the way politicians talked or looked. His most memorable pieces concerned things like the way Sir Peter Tapsell spoke, or Michael Fabricant's wig. Without wishing to sound sanctimonious, I'd rather read someone laying into what politicians do. Satire of the type employed by Private Eye is much cleverer, much more useful and much funnier. We think poorly enough of politicians anyway without someone like Hoggart mocking their personal qualities.
Two, Hoggart has single-handedly killed the Round Robin letter. Ten years ago no Christmas card opening was complete unless accompanied by the exultant shout of "It's a Round Robin!". At which point every sentient being would gather round to read the smug, complacent and vainglorious outpourings of friends and relatives. Hoggart used to publish a selection of these in the Guardian early in the New Year, and latterly produced two compilations, of which The Cat That Could Open the Fridge was one.
My favourite shocker was the one about the writer's offspring who had "spent the summer on a yacht in the Ionian Sea with some other beautiful young people from Balliol, and beat the Poet Laureate's son at Scrabble!"
If you went round with an axe and beat the sender to a bloody pulp, no jury would convict.
Where are the Round Robins now? The public ridicule Hoggart heaped on them as made even the least self-aware keep schtum. We had only two in 2013, one from some very nice people who write in full knowledge of the medium's absurdity, the other from a Lib Dem councillor in Watford who wouldn't know what self-awareness was if it landed on her head from a great height. We are all poorer as a result.
Monday 23 December 2013
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.
Tuesday 17 December 2013
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.
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.
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