Dispatches from Britain's culture war. (Society).

THE STRANGE COMBINATION of permissiveness and Draconianism is evident in Britain's present culture war in all matters from crime control to the running of schools. There does, however, seem to be a consistent and strategic objective of destroying the established culture, largely by applying the Aqua Regia of political correctness, and replacing it with an adversary culture combining an elitist nihilism and proletarianisation.

Here are a few notes, taken from reputable British papers and journals. As might be expected in despatches from a war in progress, they are somewhat disconnected. However, general strategic thrusts are obvious.

A fifty,-year-old schoolteacher of thirty-five years' experience was told she could be sent to jail after slapping a ten-year-old boy, described by his mother as "a little monster", after he tried to push, punch and head-butt her. She was given a three-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay costs of 2250 [pounds sterling], the sentencing magistrate eructating that:

   You were charged as head in setting an example, but you failed completely
   the child, the school, your honourable profession and the community ...
   What you did was a total dereliction of the standards the community expects
   from people charged with looking after young lives.

The conviction was quashed on appeal, apparently on a technicality regarding evidence (not on the grounds that the principle behind the sentencing was wrong).

Publicity about outrageous cases appeared to make no difference in preventing further ones. In July 2001, a fifty-one-year-old woman teacher with a blameless record of twenty years' teaching, who prodded a disruptive pupil in the chest while telling him to behave, causing him to burst into tears, was ordered to pay him 100 [pounds sterling] compensation plus 750 [pounds sterling] prosecution costs, ordered to do 140 hours community service, and was suspended and faced the end of her career. She was a supply teacher and her solicitor said that with a conviction on her record she would be unable to gain further teaching work. The conviction was on the uncorroborated word of the child, and its consequences, as a precedent, for discipline in schools were obvious.

A Tory council leader, Michael Brundle, grabbed his fifteen-year-old daughter by the elbows in an argument when she tried to run away from home and he feared her getting involved with drugs. He was arrested and held for assault.

Columnist Peter Hitchens wrote that police in Devon cautioned a mother for having slapped her fourteen-year-old nephew who had been supplying her twelve-year-old son with drugs. The teenage drug-dealer was merely reprimanded. Hitchens commented: "police officers, who joined up to fight crime, are compelled to take action against a responsible adult acting in the interests of her own child ... It is quite mad."

At Christmas 2000, a sixteen-year-old carol singer verbally abused and then dropped his trousers and bared his buttocks to a thirty-eight-year-old housewife in Gloucestershire at her door after she refused to give him money. (He had also kicked in and damaged her fence. There was a major problem with vandalism in the area.) She threw warm coffee over the offending objects. The police responded promptly and fifty minutes later she was arrested.

Over the Christmas 2001 holiday period, gangs of teenage vandals invaded private farm properties for "rave" parties. One farmer who objected was threatened with arrest by police, another was actually arrested. Lincolnshire farmer David Benton's property was invaded at night by about seventy local teenagers who broke into an old hut, installing disco lights, a generator and alcohol. They broke down a gate, smashed the lock on the hut and lit fires using wood from the calf-pens. Highly flammable nitrate fertiliser was stored nearby. Police were called but did nothing. Girls at the party began putting their arms round the police and taking photographs.

When Mr Benton laid hands on one of the teenagers the police threatened him with arrest. Chief inspector

John Ginty said:

   Before we can shut down an illegal rave, the law says there needs to be
   more than 100 people in the open air, causing a public disruption. Those
   conditions were not met in this case. Criminal offences have taken place
   [but] we were faced with over filly people at 3 a.m. on one of the busiest
   nights of the year, and it was just not practical to bring in the fifty
   officers it would have required to arrest them.

Why charges of breaking and entering, of being unlawfully on premises or of having committed other offences were not laid was not explained.

At Great Dunmow, Essex, farmer Graeme Stephen found that for the second time in a month one of his barns had been taken over for a rave party by nearly 100 people on Boxing Day. He unplugged the generator supplying the sound system. He was taken to the police station and held there until five o'clock the following morning. In his absence his wife was jostled and threatened by the ravers. Again, a gate and padlocks had been broken. An Essex police spokesman said Mr Stephen had been arrested to prevent a breach of the peace, and that: "It wasn't so much a matter of right or wrong, but that a single officer and the landowner were up against seventy or more party-goers ... More officers were on their way, but the officer had to act immediately." It was easier to arrest victims than criminals.

Further, farmers were members of a class and culture whose protection--whether from foot-and-mouth disease or violent crime--could not be taken as a high priority. Tony Gladstone, of Church Crookham, Hampshire, wrote in the UK Mail of January 22, 2002:

   Going to bed the other night, I noticed some people in my shed stealing
   things. I phoned the police but was told no one was in the area to help.
   They said they would send someone over as soon as possible.

      I hung up. A moment later I rang again. "Hello," I said, "I called you a
   minute ago because there were some people in my shed. You don't have to
   hurry now, because I've shot them."

      Within minutes there were half a dozen police cars in the area, plus
   helicopters, and an armed response unit. They caught the burglars
   red-handed.

      One of the officers said: "I thought you said you'd shot them."

It was proposed to prohibit farmers from owning shotguns. (In Switzerland, where there is universal military, service for males, most men have high-powered military automatic weapons at home, with very little violent or firearm-related crime.) Following a radical banning of private firearms by the Conservative government in 1996, the criminal use of firearms in Britain greatly increased. Author and psychologist Mike Yardley, looking at the long-term cultural factors, wrote:

   In London in 1954 (when there were roughly double the number of legitimate
   firearm certificate holders), there were four robberies with firearms in
   the whole year. Now there are as many each day. The difference is not
   explained by the shooting sports but by a change in our culture.

It was reported in March 2002 that when a citizen in the village of Warlingham, Surrey, Mr Jason Hansford-Adams, saw a gang of vandals smashing up a line of private cars, he called the police and was told it was no longer the Surrey police's policy to respond to such incidents and that "We don't treat car crime as urgent." In the previous twelve months here had been 10,759 offences of aggravated vehicle theft in England and Wales, 629,651 of theft from vehicles, and 62,696 of vehicle interference or tampering reported.

Peter Hitchens reported the case of Harry Hammond, a sixty-nine-year-old sufferer from Asperger's syndrome (a variety of autism):

   Mr Hammond was prosecuted last month with the special zeal that our
   criminal justice system reserves for the law-abiding types who fall into
   its clutches. He was fined 300 [pounds sterling], plus 395 [pounds
   sterling] costs, by Wimborne magistrate's court after they convicted him
   for breaching the Public Order Act of 1986. This made it an offence to
   display any writing, sign or other visible representation that is
   threatening, abusive or insulting, within the heating or sight of a person
   likely to be caused embarrassment, harm or distress thereby. Mr Hammond's
   crime was to display a placard--now destroyed by order of the bench--on
   which was written: "Stop immorality. Stop homosexuality. Stop lesbianism."
   ...

      As Mr Hammond hoisted his six-word manifesto in the centre of town on a
   busy Saturday last October, a small crowd gathered round him, partly
   hecklers but mostly curious onlookers. The hecklers were rough with him. A
   young woman tried to tug the placard from his hands. During this tussle, Mr
   Hammond fell flat on his back and had to be helped to his feet ... Soon
   afterwards, Mr Hammond's enlightened liberal critics flung clods of earth
   at him, one striking him on the chest and one on the head. Another of these
   campaigners for tolerance crept up behind Mr Hammond and emptied a bottle
   of water over his bald cranium. It seems to have been a rather nasty case
   of spiteful and cowardly bullying, indulged in by arrogant and unkind young
   people with no respect for the old and no pity for a bemused and besieged
   fellow-creature.

      Yet when police were called, it was Mr Hammond who was arrested ... Mr
   Hammond's case may well be the most bizarre in the history of English
   policing, since the two officers involved disagreed over what to do. A more
   experienced male constable, Wayne Elliot, thought that Mr Hammond should be
   protected. His younger female colleague, Nicola Gandy, thought that he
   should be taken in. Her view prevailed, but at the trial the two
   officers--incredibly--gave evidence on opposite sides, PC Elliot appearing
   for the defence, while PC Gandy spoke for the prosecution.

      PC Gandy has since defended her actions, saying, "He was provoking and
   inciting violence with highly inappropriate behaviour. My agenda was to try
   to maintain the peace. I was not very impressed by Mr Hammond's conduct. I
   don't think he is a very good representative of the Christian faith."

Norfolk farmer Tony Martin was sentenced to life imprisonment for having shot and killed one of a gang of three burglars--with a total of 114 convictions between them, including convictions for assault and in one case for wounding--who had broken into his isolated farmhouse at night. (This total apparently did not include other offences taken into consideration.)

Martin, aged fifty-five and weak after a thrombosis, and who claimed that he had been burgled eight times, the last time three months previously, said: "I was frightened ... blind terrified ..." He appeared an intensely lonely man and many of his few heirlooms of sentimental value from his family, such as a grandfather clock, had been stolen in the previous burglaries. His victim, aged sixteen, had twenty-nine convictions for offences including assault, and had been released on bail for other offences a week before. Another of the gang allegedly claimed the robbery of the "old nutter" had been planned for weeks. They appeared to be professional violent criminals who targeted the isolated and vulnerable. It was claimed jurors at Martin's trial were intimidated.

In May 2001, one of the gang, Brendon Fearon, with thirty-four convictions for crimes including burglary and wounding, who was wounded in the leg by Martin and subsequently sentenced to three years' prison, was deemed a "victim" and had his views about any future parole for Martin solemnly sought by the Home Office. Fearon actually wrote a sanctimonious letter to Martin urging him to show remorse. However, Fearon's father told his son, "Mr Martin should not be in prison but you should."

It was reported that, while Martin was in jail, gangs of thieves and vandals were stripping antique slate tiles from the roof of his deserted farmhouse. A neighbour who tried to protect the property said, "The police never responded to his calls for help while he was living [there] ... He has lived a recent part of his life under siege in his house because of burglars and now he is just as helpless in prison." Martin remained in prison with a sentence of five years after the conviction for murder was quashed and one of manslaughter substituted in November 2001. His request for further leave to appeal on the grounds that he had acted in self-defence was denied. However IRA killers responsible for strings of deliberate murders were set at liberty.

In June 2002, police said they did not want Martin to be given parole because they believed they could not protect him from friends of the criminals if he were released--certainly an innovation in criminal justice. At about the same time legal aid was provided to Fearon to enable him to sue Martin, who quite conceivably stood to lose his house, or what was left of it, to Fearon following his release from prison.

SOMETIME BLAIRITE Paul Johnson wrote in late 1999 that a Londoner was ten times more likely to have his house burgled than was a New Yorker, a situation absolutely unthinkable only a few years previously, and that house-breaking in Britain was becoming more violent and murderous. For the first time ever, under the Blair government British crime rates in many other categories also exceeded American, with parts of the country as well as the inner cities in something like a state of siege. Criminal assault rates were in June 2000 estimated to be about four times higher on a per capita basis in Britain than in America. The crime figures published in July 2000 revealed a 16 per cent increase in violent crime, the largest rise in more than ten years, while American crime rates were falling.

Quite simply, by 2002 England and Wales had become the most dangerous places to live in the Western world. In 2002 statistics published in the Daily Mail for policing and crime in London and New York were as follows:

                     New York            London

Population           8 million           7 million
Police Budget        2.3 billion         2.1 billion
                     [pounds sterling]   [pounds sterling]
Number of Police     38,100              26,390
Total crimes 2001    161,653             1,042,429
Murders              643                 174
Robberies/muggings   27,859              49,694

In other words, London had about five times as many crimes as New York with a smaller population. It was also estimated that, with very similar budgets for police, New York had about 40 per cent more police on the streets (statistics on the number of New York police which I have seen vary up to 41,000 but the Daily Mail figures seem approximately correct and possibly erring on the conservative side).

London was worse for muggings by a factor of 25 per cent than the worst areas of New York. Lambeth and Brixton were four times worse than Harlem; Westminster, which included Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, had merely twice Harlem's rate of muggings.

The criminal law was not, however, totally impotent: at the same time, also reported in the Daily Mail, the father of a family with two young children was jailed for six months for having retrieved abandoned golf balls from a lake and re-selling them for a few pence each. He had been so lacking in criminal intent that he had declared the activity on a tax return.

Any prison sentence is a life sentence. It is never entirely forgotten or shaken off. It is hard to know whether to feel more contempt for the criminal justice system's impotence when confronted with endemic violent crime, outrage and even murder, or its imbecilic brutality in dealing with this harmless and victimless offence. (He was freed with a conditional discharge on appeal. It is not clear what subsequent scrutiny if any was directed upon the bench which had shown itself capable of imposing this barbaric and idiotic sentence.)

At about the same time a supermarket worker, living with his parents, who spent virtually all his money making obscene phone calls, and who plainly needed the services of a psychiatrist rather than a jailer, was imprisoned for four years. It appeared rampant political correctness did not inhibit a criminal justice system from operating with brutal stupidity as well as ineffectiveness. A vicar, Michael Daggett, who believed he was a target for burglars, was sentenced to prison for four months, not for carrying, but for keeping in his house, a two-shot, .22-calibre Derringer pistol. Two brothers were sued for $40,000 by a thief they allegedly injured when trying to stop him stealing from their yard.

It seemed likely that when the next statistics were complied London would be found to have caught up to New York somewhat in murder, the one area where it had seriously lagged. According to Home Office figures released in February 2002, crimes involving both guns and knives had almost trebled in London during the previous year and were greatly increasing in other British cities. The use of machetes was also increasing.

In February 2002, there were 200 muggings per day in London. Robberies and snatchings for January 2002 were up 49 per cent on the same time in 2001. Street crime increased 39 per cent between April 2001 and March 2002. The editor of Britain's leading black newspaper, the Voice, called for the return of police stop-and-search, which had been condemned as racist by the Lawrence inquiry. The Labour member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Diane Abbott, said a "lawless gun culture" was gaining a grip in parts of London. In March 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett admitted Britain's streets were unsafe, bleating: "We literally must reclaim the streets." It appeared much of the serious street crime was being committed by children. There were estimated to be 2.6 million offences committed each year in Glasgow, nearly all related to drugs, despite many parts like Sauchiehall Street having been cleaned up and rehabilitated.

THE REASONS for this huge rise in crime, quite unlike the law-abiding culture of Britain in the recent past, were probably only partly to do with policing policies and more to do with cultural disintegration. Mark Steyn commented:

   Criminals, police and magistrates are united in regarding any resistance by
   the victim as bad form ... A few months ago Shirley Best, owner of the
   Rolander Fashion boutique, whose clients include the Princess Royal, was
   ironing some garments when two youths broke in. They pressed the hot iron
   into her side and stole her watch, leaving her badly burnt. "I was
   frightened to defend myself," said Miss Best, "I thought if I did anything
   I would be arrested."

In May 2001, a Home Office study reported that the risk of becoming a victim of crime was higher in England and Wales than anywhere in the USA, Europe or Japan. The English and Welsh had a 26 per cent risk of becoming victims, compared to a 21 per cent risk in the USA, France or Belgium, or a 15 per cent risk in Portugal--despite Portugal being a far less affluent society. Violent crime was increasing in Britain at an annual rate of 16 per cent compared to a European Union average of 5 per cent, while in the USA the rate was falling by 7 per cent. Homicide rose 3 per cent in England and Wales compared to a fall of 4 per cent in Europe and a remarkable fall of 28 per cent in America. In the year 2000 muggings increased by 21 per cent in England and Wales.

In September 2001, the Independent Retail News reported that nearly half of all shopkeepers were the victims of violent crime in the previous year and the rate of conviction in these cases had fallen to 5 per cent.

Frances Lawrence, whose husband Philip was stabbed to death by a youth outside the London school where he was headmaster, was rung up by a probation officer and asked to apologise to his killer. Mrs Lawrence, said the officer, had criticised the youth, but an apology would make the youth feel "much happier".

It was reported in April 2001 that the government, which the Prime Minister had promised would be "tough on crime and the causes of crime", was giving free CDs, trainers and computer equipment to young criminals as rewards for them refraining from shoplifting and mugging.

Under European legislation incorporated into British law children might sue teachers who imposed detentions involving picking up litter or similar chores. If sent home they might sue for having their education interrupted. In Scotland, with violence in schools a growing problem, teachers and pupils could be suspended for using the word sissy. This was one of the first decisions of the new Scottish Executive (a more common Scots expression likely to result in work for dentists was Jessie). A French tourist was reported to have been arrested and held in prison for two nights in Edinburgh for smacking his eight-year-old son on the bottom. He was reported in October 2001 to have been released on bail but would have to return to face trial. Meanwhile, it has been estimated that, by the time they turn fifteen, nearly all children in Scotland will have been offered drugs, and one child in 100 takes drags before his or her eleventh birthday. There are 56,000 drug addicts registered in Scotland.

The Council for Awards in Children's Care and Education, supported by the National Day Nurseries Association, condemned the practice of telling children they had been naughty, because such language was seen as negative. Rather, the NDNA said, the formula should be: "I don't like the way you are doing that."

The National Union of Teachers claimed in September 2001 that children had become more violent and disruptive in school. A survey by Dr Sean Neill of Warwick University found four out of five teachers believed pupil behaviour had deteriorated since they joined the profession, and most said it was "very much worse".

While all sorts of disruptive behaviour were tolerated, it was stated that children who committed bullying were to be expelled from school. They were to be deprived of an education--what Blair had called a life sentence on a child. This was despite the fact that bullying in some circumstances may be quite minor or even unintentional (few children are accomplished moral philosophers) and in many cases can be stopped quickly by reasonable discipline.

The stories of Richmal Crompton's naughty schoolboy William Brown were attacked by the official Anti-Bullying Campaign, whose director claimed: "People have got to realise that William's anti-social behaviour is not to be tolerated." But the William stories were highly moral, and bullies were shown in a bad light and got their comeuppance. William's "anti-social" behaviour consisted of things like stealing fruit from orchards and trespassing in private woods. The point about the William stories as a target for Kulturkampf is that they uphold traditional values. There is about them an aura of middle-class, middle-England, cricket on long summer evenings, meadows, retired colonels, small boys playing pirates and outlaws but easily manipulated by little girls like the immortal Violet Elizabeth Bott, intact families and the odd sandal-and-string-vest-wearing vegetarian playing a classical Greek flute and vaguely attempting to wash dishes under a cold tap. The occasional "drug maniacs" who were referred to were not glamorised as existential heroes seeking the limits of experience but shown as people to laugh at, as were priggish children who lusted after good-conduct medals. There is a world of difference between nihilism and ordinary childhood naughtiness and mischief.

Reading more-or-less realistic novels of childhood written in the past, one is perhaps struck by the avoidance of topics like sex and drags in comparison to juvenile novels today. But one is also struck by how much freedom and independence the characters seemed to have in other ways. In Kipling's Stalky and Co, published in 1899 and presumably not a totally unrealistic portrait of the times, schoolboys bring "saloon pistols" to school and use them to shoot rabbits. When I was a schoolboy it was usual for us to settle our differences with fisticuffs. It was no doubt deplorable, but no real harm was done, and we left school, I will not say (in Molesworthian terms) "toughened up", but with, perhaps, a slight advantage in terms of self-confidence relative to some wet who has never swung a fist in anger.

A child faced criminal trial and possible imprisonment because, when taunted in a school playground at Ipswich on September 14, 2000, by an Asian child who likened him to a skunk and also to a Teletubby because of his overweight, the child--then aged ten--had retaliated by calling his adversary a "Paki bastard", and punching him twice in the back. The accused was charged with racially aggravated assault. By April 2001, when it reached the High Court, the case had cost 25,000 [pounds sterling] of taxpayers' money. The accused was so distressed that he had stopped attending school. It was reported police had advised the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute but the CPS had remained adamant. The case was eventually dropped in May 2001 after judicial criticism.

Children were protected in other ways. When, in commemoration of Princess Diana, a crude "replica" of a pirate ship was built in Kensington Gardens in March 2000, for children to play on, hearkening: back to Peter Pan's adventures with Captain Hook, it was decreed it would be without violent imagery such as cannon, walking the plank or the Jolly Roger. At Seagry, near Chippenham in Wiltshire, children were banned from playing on an old steam-roller which had stood in the school's playground without accident since a local colonel had donated it in 1964. It was deemed "not proper playground equipment" and "failed to meet any required standards whatsoever". Something called Sports England, evidently an official body, proposed eliminating games like sack-races, three-legged races and egg-and-spoon races from schools in order to prevent children learning a competitive ethos, proposing problem-solving exercises instead. These proposals were contained in a "sports day tool kit" unveiled by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell.

Progressive eyes lit at the example of New Mexico, where a schoolboy who had slapped a thirteen-year-old girl's bottom faced a two-year prison sentence for criminal sexual contact, and of New Zealand, where it was announced that children would have to have licences for toy guns. Presumably from fear of lawsuits, even the mildest physical games between children were frequently discouraged by authorities. On the other hand in a move to advance cultural proletarianisation and to destroy traditional values and standards of civilised behaviour, the Equal Opportunities Commission in March 1991 enforced the rights of a female boxer to pursue her vocation in Britain, despite overwhelming evidence that long-term boxing leads to irreversible brain-damage, detached retinas and other harm.

British children were issued with free condoms, while schools dismantled old bath-houses when authorities decided communal naked showering for boys after games was no longer appropriate.

A SURVEY PUBLISHED in May 2001 indicated 400,000 British schoolchildren under the age of sixteen were using hard drugs. Deaths among children from drugs multiplied about four times in four years. A survey of European children by various government authorities reported in February 2001 that British children had by far the highest rate of drug-taking in Europe for drugs apart from cannabis, and the highest rate for drunkenness except for Denmark. Russia, a by-word for dangerous, drunken chaos, had a rate of teenage drunkenness just over a third of that of Britain, while France, where children were frequently given wine from childhood, had a rate of just under a seventh. (The survey looked at fifteen and sixteen-year-olds who had been drunk more than twenty times in their lives. The percentages were Britain 29, Russia 10, France 4.)

It was announced in 2002 that the possession of cannabis would be downgraded as an offence despite the fact that medical research had shown it to be harmful and a leading cause of motor vehicle accidents, in many circumstances being more dangerous for a driver than alcohol: the point was, of course, that cannabis was an icon of the adversary culture, and its semi-legalisation would help damage and discredit cultural conservatism.

A booklet launched, by Margaret Hodge, the Education Minister, recommended that nursery teachers ban musical chairs because such games could encourage aggression. Senior Cabinet Minister Jack Straw's brother, William Straw, was convicted of indecently assaulting a girl of sixteen. In March he had confessed to assaulting a fourteen-year-old boy. He said his confession was "a cry for help", but it is not known if he blamed excessive nursery-school exposure to musical chairs. He was not to be confused with Jack Straw's son William, who was cautioned by police for selling drugs in 1997. It was not all bad news for the Straw family, however. In September 2000 Mr Jack Straw's wife was appointed to the second most powerful civil service job in Whitehall--Head of the Civil Service Corporation--at a salary of 127,452 [pounds sterling] a year.

A Sunderland greengrocer, Steven Thorburn, was prosecuted for possessing an imperial as well as a metric set of scales and for having sold eleven pounds of bananas. In the House of Lords, 115 Labor and Liberal Democrat peers voted to make it a criminal offence for shopkeepers to make any mention of imperial measures such as pounds and ounces, even as guidance to customers. Thus a greengrocer mentioning "a pound of tomatoes" would be a criminal.

A gang of IRA terrorists--including some of the provisional IRA's most notorious killers--shot in an SAS ambush in 1987 as they tried to destroy Loughgall police station in Co. Armagh and murder the officers inside with a 2000-pound car bomb, were found by the European Court in May 2001 to have had their human rights violated and the British government was ordered to pay their families $10,000 each. The bench making the decision included one British and one Albanian jurist. The latter's earlier career had reportedly been dedicated to tracking down opponents of the former Stalinist dictatorship in Albania.

PRIME MINISTER Blair seems much attached to "family values" for his own family, but when it comes to a national culture his focus shifts. The same day that one British newspaper reported that the government wanted doctors to warn children of the dangers of sexual promiscuity, Blair and his wife were reported attending a "discreet dinner party" for Mick Jagger, a multi-millionaire rock star generally regarded as an icon of the sex-and-drugs culture. Mr Jagger was subsequently knighted on Mr Blair's recommendation, his notably selfish and dissolute life thus being officially held up as an example. (Mr Jagger was, however, hardly cutting-edge by that time. An unkind suggestion was made that he was to be cast as Young Mr Grace in a remake of Are You Being Served?)

Blair has invited others who are leaders within that culture to Downing Street receptions. The milieu of a concert by Blair's Downing Street guests Oasis was set out by Anthony Daniels, who attended one in Glasgow on behalf of the Daily Mail. He wrote in part:

   In the lavatories, 13-year-olds queued for the cubicles. Like Russian
   voting booths, each had more than one person in it at a time, and they
   weren't answering the call of nature--unless, that is, you count taking
   drugs as answering the call of nature. Meanwhile, directly outside, a
   couple of policemen stood guard ...

He described the children in the audience as unkempt and by no means scrupulously washed. Their complexions were sallow and spotty. They were either thin and undernourished, like Lowry's stickmen, or had turn to flab. They looked like people raised on crisps and fizzy drinks, until they were old enough to take Ecstasy. They had each paid at least 17.50 [pounds sterling] for a ticket:

   Their eyes were somehow dead and furtive at the same time. They looked
   haunted, and I thought it wouldn't take much--a wrong word, a moment's
   frustration, a chance meeting with a hostile eye--to provoke them into
   senseless rage. When British youth gathers, menace is seldom far away ...
   Their language was prematurely so vile that you could almost yearn for
   political correctness.

Of the star of the show, Liam Gallagher, he reported:

   When he spoke, everything he said was of an unutterable stupidity and
   vulgarity. He dedicated a song, thus: "This is for the big fat **** that
   thinks he's good looking." He asked the audience "Have any of you *******
   for any drugs?" There were five-year-olds in the audience ... He was both
   different from the audience (famous and rich) and exactly like it
   (badly-dressed and foul-mouthed).

Dr Daniels concluded that the concert answered a question which had puzzled him: children emerging after eleven years of compulsory education from schools in the poorer areas appeared to have learned nothing. They could not read properly, spell, or do the simplest arithmetic, and their general knowledge was non-existent. What, then, did they know? "They know the words of Oasis songs."

A report in January 2000 referred to statements by Noel Gallagher and by Liam Gallagher's wife Patsy Kensit to the effect that their lifestyle involved "routine cocaine abuse" and that "the actress boasts of watching porn movies in their bedroom which is adorned with a huge crucifix ..." Miss Kensit stated of her husband:

   People say he's got a limited vocabulary but he's as bright as a button.
   Okay, so maybe he doesn't have a tremendous command of English in the
   conventional sense, but he can articulate his point as eloquently, in fact,
   much better, than anyone I've ever met.

Inviting Oasis to Downing Street could be seen as an act of Kulturkampf to dismay and intimidate middle-culture. It was a demonstration of power.

However a government spokesperson, head of the Government's Teenage Pregnancy Unit, in July 2002 blamed the increase on teenage pregnancies on--wait for it!--The Benny Hill Show!

Dr Daniels' comments on British education were not mere hyperbole. An official report in 1999 claimed one in five adults could not find the entry for "plumbers" in a telephone directory and that innumeracy was even more widespread. A Basic Skills Agency report calculated 24 per cent of the population was functionally illiterate and innumerate. An OECD report on "Literacy in the Information Age" published in June 2000 also demonstrated "astonishing" levels of illiteracy and innumeracy, with Britain thirteenth of nineteen countries surveyed and behind all the other major English-speaking countries. In November 2001 the government's chief adviser on exams and curriculum suggested the statutory school-leaving age be lowered to fifteen. How could Blair reconcile this with his claim made in April 1998, and on many other occasions, that "education is our number one domestic priority"?

A SURVEY PUBLISHED in Country Life in October 2000 said two-thirds of schoolchildren did not know where acorns came from and four out of ten did not know in which season harvest-time fell. It was reported in February 2001 that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority proposed Shakespeare be dropped from the English education system entirely, along with a requirement to study classical novelists and poets. The only requirement would be the study of a single novel.

Journalist and creative writing teacher Philip Hensher told of marking the work of a class of would-be journalists:

   These were people who were mostly studying for A-levels in media studies
   ... The standard of literacy in their written work was roughly what I would
   have expected to find twenty-five years ago in the work of one of the
   less-able classes of nine-year-olds in an inner-city state school.

In an extraordinary initiative the French and German ambassadors published an article in the Spectator on the poor knowledge of foreign languages in Britain, with fewer than 5 per cent of all British A-level students leaving state schools with a language qualification.

Other surveys showed large numbers of schoolchildren ignorant of the most basic facts of history and geography including in some cases, as Roy Kerridge recounted in The Story of Black History, published in 1998, what country they lived in. (A tactful and sensitive approach to history was shown in 2002, when a new 3 [pounds sterling] "visitor centre" was opened at Glencoe and a gentleman named Roddy Campbell placed in charge of it.)

In August 2001 the OECD released figures indicating that the proportion of seventeen-year-olds receiving education or training in Britain was lower than in almost all other industrialised countries, including Poland, Ireland, Spain and Italy, and barely ahead of Greece. According to official figures 7 million adults in Britain, out of a total population (including children) of about 59 million, lacked basic literacy and numeracy skills. Another OECD study of twenty-eight countries showed that an average of 66 per cent of those aged thirty-five to forty-four had "upper secondary" qualifications, with the British figure being 63 per cent, just below the average. With twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-olds the average was 72 per cent and the British figure was 66 per cent, showing a widening gap.

A survey in January 2001 indicated only one in six British school pupils correctly identified Sir Winston Churchill as Britain's Prime Minister during the Second World War, nearly one in twenty thinking it had been Adolf Hitler. A quarter of those questioned did not know in which century the First World War had taken place. Knowledge of geography seemed comparable to that of history: according to an NOP survey a few months later, 13 per cent of eight-to-sixteen-year-olds could not locate Britain on a map, 53 per cent could not locate London on a map of the British Isles, 60 per cent could not name the language spoken in Tokyo, and 82 per cent did not know the Acropolis was in Greece.

It is hard to escape the feeling that at some level education policies are being deliberately designed to produce a locked-in proletariat who are deliberately denied the chance of upward social mobility. Such was a feature of National Socialist Germany's plans for the population of Poland, and deliberately bad education was predicted by authors from Jack London in The Iron Heel to George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four as a means of keeping the lower classes under control.

In Blair's Britain a rotten education system seems designed to produce two highly-desirable things: assured job-opportunities for the caring professions and locked-in Labour voters, just as a series of anti-countryside policies and other initiatives seem strategically calculated to destroy the milieu of cultural conservatism which gives the Conservative Party its base of survival.

On the eve of the new school year, in August 2001, according to the Guardian, there was a reported shortage from more than 100 local education authorities of 3500 full-time teachers. The real figure was much higher. Other teaching posts were often filled by foreign teachers with dubious qualifications or command of English, from countries such as Bulgaria. Head teachers admitted in one survey in September 2001 that more than one in five teachers were not suitable for the jobs they would be asked to do. The head of one comprehensive school admitted appointing two people who "had walked in off the street with no qualifications". Not only mathematics, science and technology, but even English were among the hardest subjects to recruit teachers for.

In August 2001, John Randall, chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency, responsible for inspecting university teaching, resigned in protest when most of the higher education inspection system was scrapped. Mr Randall, who had headed the agency since it was established in 1997, said all students would suffer from being denied independent information about the quality of courses but particularly those who were the first in their family to go to university. Professor Anthony Gibbons, head of the London School of Economics and reportedly a close friend of Prime Minister Blair, had threatened to refuse to allow assessors on the premises. Miss Estelle Morris, Secretary of State for Education, proposed in a 2002 green paper the introduction of more vocational GCSs, such as "leisure and tourism" to counteract a "culture of snobbery".

A-level passes continued to rise as standards were lowered. Chris Woodhead, Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 to 2001, said:

   Bog standard comprehensive schools have failed, the Prime Minister's
   spokesman tells us, to deliver. The time of the bog standard university
   has, it seems, come ... if it were not so tragic it would be comical.

As far as juvenile knowledge of theology went, a survey conducted for a BBC documentary found a large number of children identified God with the Prime Minister. The producer said, "I think it is because they are all authority figures." However, asked what the Prime Minister did all day, one six-year-old said: "He wakes up, gets dressed, sits in his chair, reads the newspapers, switches on a very old-fashioned telly to see what's happening on the news, then says, `Oh Dear!'"

Hal G.P. Colebatch's Blair's Britain was chosen by Taki in the Spectator as among the books of the year for 1999.