A s I write, no one knows what the result of
the local elections will be, but it seems safe to predict that the turnout will not be high. Politically minded people tend to worry about low turnout because they find it hard to understand that someone might just not care very much who represents him or her in Parliament or council. Yet, in a reasonably well-run society, it is rational to conclude that it doesn’t greatly matter who wins, and leave it at that. The right to vote, which is essential, only translates into a duty to vote in extreme circumstances (hence the traditionally high turnout in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, when the balance between unionist and nationalist could be tipped either way). Now the Blairite think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research points out that those who do not vote tend to be young and poor and members of ethnic minorities, and that their abstention therefore perpetuates their ‘exclusion’. The IPPR may be right that large groups feel that voting is pointless, but its solution compulsory turnout, with fines for those failing to do so — is gloriously producer-led. Just like the political parties who say that they must have state funding because otherwise they will accept private money corruptly, the compulsory turnout people do not consider that the conduct of the political class might have something to do with the problem itself. Political participation should result from persuasion, not compulsion. At present, our parties are not very persuasive. That’s their fault, not ours. Ah, says the IPPR, but it’s compulsory in Belgium. Quite.
One of the many indignities which a politician has to endure when caught in adultery is that fictions get mixed with the fact. Once the press is confident of the fact, it also knows that he has no redress. So it paints the lily, or rather blackens the pot, with impunity. I remember bumping into a particularly famous politician whose ex-lover had sold her story about him. I asked him if he’d known that the revelation was coming. He said he hadn’t, and added sorrowfully, ‘There was a grain of truth in what she said, but only a grain.’ For the papers, the grain will do. One suspects it was not true, for example, that David Mellor, in his ‘trysts’ (special tabloid word) with Antonia de Sancha wore a Chelsea strip, but what could he do if anyone said it was? Similarly, I choose not to believe the claim by Tracey Temple’s boyfriend that he first became aware of her affair with John Prescott when she moaned the initials ‘DPM’ in her sleep. But these embroideries quickly become part of ‘common knowledge’. No one quite accurately remembers what happened, only that something did. On television last week, for example, a Labour peer called Lord Anderson reminded us that John Major had an affair with Edwina Currie when he was Prime Minister, but this is not the case. He was a junior minister at the time. Since the papers trawled through various Other Women and the Mail on Sunday printed Tracey Temple’s diaries, Mr Prescott is furious at the various ‘allegations without substance’ and threatens to complain to the Press Complaints Commission. I bet his complaints are justified, but it is worse than useless to pursue them.
By the way, in keeping diaries, Tracey Temple was surely breaking her terms of employment as a civil servant. But again, it would be unwise for Whitehall to come down on her like a ton of bricks. Mr Prescott has already done that, with unhappy results.
Tracey Temple also feels affronted. In her interview with the Mail on Sunday, she seems genuinely angry at the suggestion that ‘I had snogged John Prescott in the lift the night of the Christmas party [of 2002], and that I had nuzzled his neck ... This is strictly untrue. I was furious about it ... Even if we were having sex, we wouldn’t have been stupid enough to do something like that. We’re not stupid people.’ Since, by her account, they did have sex in the DPM’s office with the door open and seven civil servants outside (though I suppose that’s more decorous than with seven civil servants inside), it is a struggle to understand why it was lese-majesty to suggest that they might have kissed in the lift, or what their definition of ‘stupid’ might be. One assumes that it is not true that anyone living in a house near a pylon will die of cancer, but the reports which claim that it is should be welcomed. At the millennium, when there was a great urge to spend heavily on a worthy project, one suggestion was that all pylons should be buried underground (which is, I believe, possible). This was ignored in favour of building the Dome. But health scares carry all before them in a way that projects to make life more pleasant never do. So let us start a ‘How many more kids have to die?’ campaign to eradicate all pylons from the landscape.
The Times, or rather its advertising department, is so excited about Islamic banking that it devoted an entire special supplement to it last week. ‘If one were to conjure up the image of a distinguished man of learning he would surely be personified by Sheikh Nizam Yaquby,’ it gushed. The sheikh is one of those who makes rulings about what financial instruments are compliant with the Sharia prohibition of charging interest (‘riba’). He says that the interest-based Western system of banking causes ‘untold suffering’ in the Third World. The Sharia-compliant ideas avoid the problem of interest by getting a bank to buy something that the customer wants (a house, for instance) and lease it to him with a service charge. Eventually it becomes his. It must be a good thing to help conscientious Muslims bank, but the rage for Islamic banking ignores one or two factors. The first is that, until recently, most Muslims in the West have been content to use Western banking methods, and felt sanctioned in doing so by their religion’s doctrine of ‘extreme necessity’, which makes allowance for life in non-Islamic countries. As the late, moderate Muslim leader Zaki Badawi pointed out, there is also legitimate disagreement within Islam about whether ‘riba’ means all interest or only extortionate interest, so why does it help if European capitalists start to favour the more rigid interpretation? Badawi was also worried by the fact that the Western entry into Islamic banking gives special privileges to Muslim scholars whose views may be dubious. For banking instruments to be declared Sharia-compliant, they have to be minutely examined for long periods by these scholars, some of whom get paid more than £500,000 a year for the privilege. Many of those sitting on the Sharia boards of Western banks are members of extreme sects, such as the Wahabis who dominate Saudi Arabia. Western capitalism therefore pays them well to extend their control over the lives of Muslims in the West. How inclusive is that?
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