The Spectator's Notes
CHARLES MOORE 1 t is undeniably enjoyable to see Gordon Brown squirming about the £600,000 his party will have to pay back to David Abrahams, the man of many aliases. If Peter Watt, the resigning general secretary of the Labour party, really, as he claims, saw something devious about the practice of taking money under other names only when the letter of the law was pointed out to him, that shows how our culture has replaced conscience with compliance. And what is the point, by the way, of the treasurer of the party, Jack Dromey, who, despite his title, seems to be too grand to know anything about money, including the £5,000 which Mr Abrahams paid to his wife? But the Tories are not standing on firm ground. They must abandon their support for the state funding of political parties. When a man tries to buy himself power or baubles through donating to parties, it is, in a sense, honest: he is paying with his own money. When the parties conspire to get the taxpayer to fund them, they are ensuring their own power and comfort with our money. They say they must do this because otherwise they will behave dishonestly. It is contemptible. People should pay for political parties freely, or not at all.
Tast week, I went to a debate between Ed i Husain, author of The Islamist, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the apostate whom Islamists are always trying to kill. Both are unequivocal supporters of freedom of thought, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes that Islam cannot be reconciled with life in a free, modern society, and should therefore be abandoned. Husain argues that there are long, robust traditions of moderation, tolerance and adaptation in Islamic history. These have been suppressed in modern times by Wahabism etc., and by more recent extremist political movements like Hizb-ut-Tahrir, of which he was once a member. Both were impressive, and it struck me that this was just the sort of debate which Muslims in the West need. But it hardly ever happens. There are very few Muslim leaders who would debate with an apostate; some would not debate with a woman. Most of the main Muslim organisations wish to marginalise Husain and do far worse to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It is depressing to note that Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative front-bench spokesman on these matters, recently made a speech in the House of Lords in which she criticised the government for speaking to Husain. She quoted, with approval, the hard-left Guardian writer Seumas Milne, who says that people like Husain are 'off the map of Muslim opinion'. Perhaps Milne is right: all the more reason to try to change that map.
Mention of the Lords leads me to quote the following from Snowmail, the email which previews each day's Channel 4 News. Last Friday, the day after five ex-service chiefs had condemned the government's treatment of the armed forces in a Lords debate, Snowmail ran the headline 'Five Lords a-hiding', and said: 'Curiously the five men so eloquent in the House of Lords yesterday (when they were not closely questioned about what they had to say) have become terribly reticent today. You'd have thought that people used to running our armed forces would be prepared to defend publicly what they said so trenchantly in the relative privacy of the House of Lords.' This attitude by Channel 4 was revealing. First, it assumed an animus against the military. Second, it assumed that television has a right to summon anyone to appear before it. Third, it regarded a House of Parliament, all of whose debates are fully recorded (and could, if the media chose, be fully reported) as 'private'. Finally, the Snowmail was mistaken: Admiral Lord Boyce appeared on the Today programme and General Lord Guthrie wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph.
There is to be a new right of appeal to the BBC Trust for complaints about the collection of the television licence. (At present, the BBC sloughs off responsibility to the collectors, TV Licensing.) An email about this coincided with a new threat to me (for other threats, see previous Notes) over my television-free London flat. 'Sophisticated' equipment and inspectors, says the menacing letter, will soon come and seek me out. It made no allowance for the possibility that the recipient did not possess a television. Even if, unlike me, you think the licence fee is right in principle, surely it is against the general rule of English law that you are guilty until proved innocent. I am not going to write and tell the authorities that I do not have a television in the flat because I don't see why I should. I very much doubt that the BBC Trust will vindicate my rights, however.
Acampaign is on to persuade children that Shakespeare is not boring. The sage Alan Watkins is one of those who thinks that Shakespeare is boring, because people run onto the stage shouting the names of English counties — 'Ho! Northumberland', 'Have at thee, Middlesex'. Others find the jokes on the nay-thy-hand-is-in-thy-placketyet-marry-'tis-out-of-thy-placket lines highly tedious. But I feel that those of us who do enjoy Shakespeare are already losing the fight when we start asserting how unboring he is. Such an approach is itself boring. People who love football or chess or ornithology do not try to prove that their subject is interesting. They assume it. They teach people the skills required to discover the interest innate in the subject. But in academic study the lack of self-confidence is now so great that people cringe before ignorance and rework texts and curriculums to placate it. The true task is to get children to understand Shakespeare, which can be quite tough. Only when that has happened will they find it interesting.
As a member of the London Library, I have just received a long letter from Sir Tom Stoppard, our president. He is trying to answer the anger of members who find themselves presented by the trustees with an increase of the annual membership fee from £210 to £375. Sir Tom's argument that it is much better to fit the overspilling books into neighbouring premises than to move site or reduce stock is surely right. Lots of money is needed for this. But it does seem extraordinary that an 80 per cent increase could have been presented with so little preparation. Price makes a huge difference to people — to their pockets, obviously, but also to their attitude to what they are being asked to pay for. A rise of this order looks like the result of incompetence or arrogance, even if it isn't. The Stoppard letter says that 34 members have resigned. That is sad, but the serious change will come not from resignations on principle, but from members who just cannot afford to renew. Suppose, which is perfectly possible, that a quarter of the membership leaves. Is this intended, or unintended? Either way, it is bad.
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