T he worst thing about being conservative is that it is
so bad for the character. This is because conservative political predictions are far more often correct than left-wing ones since they are grounded in pessimism about what politics can do, so one is proved smugly right. We at the Daily Telegraph were the only newspaper, so far as I can remember, that predicted in the 1990s that the incorporation of the European Declaration of Human Rights into English law would be a disaster. We said it would make judges political, and it has. We said it would undermine our own more practical, precedent-based attitude to rights, and it has. And we said that it would turn the law into a means of imposing social policies which would be disliked by most people; it has. As has been his habit throughout his career, Tony Blair now recognises this conservative fact about ten years after conservatives pointed it out. But it is too late in his career for him to be able to reap the advantages of plagiarism that he has gained in the past. He has been in office for almost all those ten years. His angry condemnation is of his own conduct. He has pursued a parallel course about animal rights. By letting the anti-hunting lobby Pal buy the hunting ban in return for a large donation to the Labour party, he secured a highly emotional constituency. But he also gave official sanction to a form of fanaticism. The violent protests about animal testing, including Huntingdon Life Sciences and the extraordinary story of the body-snatching of a guinea-pig farmer, did not begin in 1997, but they got huge impetus from the Labour victory. In both the animal and human cases, Mr Blair’s idea of rights was wrong. Too late, he recognises it.
To be fair to Gordon Brown, his preoccupation with ‘core British values’ is not a recent fad to please the Daily Mail, but something he has talked about the whole time Labour has been in office. But it is not very clear what he means. Now he wants these values to be taught in schools. They include ‘freedom, fairness, civic responsibility and democracy’, apparently. No doubt these are British values, but aren’t they also American values, Dutch values, maybe nowadays even German values (though not French values, obviously)? What’s the distinctively British bit? Besides, I don’t really see how values can be directly taught. Values are visible in institutions and in the history of those institutions; they can’t be found in the wild and then served raw. Those institutions — Parliament, good universities, a non-political Civil Service, ‘alues’ tests are becoming more popular, V though, as a means of working out which immigrants will make good citizens. A common theme is emerging. A key test of your suitability is thought to be your attitude towards homosexuals. In Holland, would-be immigrants have to watch a video which includes men kissing. If they don’t like it, they are suspect. In Hesse in Germany, a naturalisation test asks, ‘Your adult son declares he is a homosexual. He says he would like to live with another man. How would you react?’ And here in Britain, Ruth Kelly is catechised about her views on homosexuality and, when she declines to answer, is considered unsuitable to preside over public policy. I haven’t seen the Dutch video, and I don’t want to, partly because I can’t get out of my head the line from The Revenger’s Tragedy, ‘That will teach you to kiss closer, not like a slobbering Dutchman’, but the point is that these tests, if honestly answered, would render probably more than half the existing population unsuitable citizens in the minds of the people who set them. Merely 30 years ago, films of men kissing would have been banned in most European countries; almost no one would have been pleased that his or her son said he wanted to live with a man, and would not have been embarrassed to admit it. Even today, no orthodox adherent of mainstream Christianity, Islam or Judaism can be pleased either. There are radical disagreements about values in our society which the test-setters seem not to recognise, or to wish to stamp out. Surely the real test of citizenship and homosexual acts is to do with respecting freedom and privacy — the difference between tolerance and approval. In a truly free society, shared approval is impossible: tolerance is the key. You don’t have to like the idea of Dutchmen kissing one another but, within reason, you should grin and bear it.
Given how much effort is put into teaching children to look right, then left, then right again, it is surprising how few seem to be taught how to walk safely down a road without a pavement. If you drive through country lanes at a weekend, you nearly bump into families walking, with the traffic, on the left-hand side of the road. Unless they walk facing the traffic, they are semi-invisible, but they appear not to know this. This fact is counterintuitive, perhaps, like the truth that it is easier to carry a heavy object walking backwards, but that is only more reason to teach it.
Correspondence rages in the Daily Telegraph about the expression CE (Common Era) replacing AD in schoolbooks, etc. Those who support the change say that it is arrogant of Christians to expect everyone to accept a date deriving from their religion. But that derivation continues even if the phrase chosen to describe it conceals this fact. In what sense did the birth of Jesus (or rather the supposed date of the birth of Jesus, since it is almost certainly wrong by four years or more) usher in a Common Era? If I were a Muslim, I would resent the suggestion of commonality more than the explicit reference to Christ (some Muslims send out Christmas cards with greetings ‘on the birth of the Prophet Jesus’). A truly multicultural society would insist on different dating systems being given ‘parity of esteem’. By the way, as a Christian, I vehemently object to several days of the week being named after Viking gods.
The other day I heard the sad story of a doting Jewish father who bought his daughter a flat to celebrate her engagement, and arranged for a telephone line to be put in. Her caddish fiancé then broke the thing off, and the girl no longer wanted the flat, so the father rang to cancel the order for the line. The female voice in the call centre, which seemed to be in India, asked whether the company could provide any other service. ‘Can you mend a broken heart?’ asked the father. ‘Hold on, please,’ she said, ‘I’ll just check with the manager.’ She returned a moment later and said, ‘I’m afraid we don’t provide that service, sir.’
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