And another thing…

SUE TOLLEFSON is 59 years old. She gave birth for the first time 22 months ago and, with more help from a foreign-based IVF clinic, she hopes to have another.

So will you say it, or shall I? Oh, all right then… What a selfish woman.

Apparently, there’s a debate taking place in Britain about whether 60 is too old to become a mum. What a depresing thought. There has to be a debate about it? Why? Are we really so stupid and shallow that we need a debate before we reach the obvious conclusion of “Yes, of course 60 is too old to become a mum”?

Mrs Tollefsen, told The Sun: “Every woman has a right to be a mother.” No, they don’t. Having a child, becoming a parent is a privilege, not a right.

That is, of course, easy for someone who is already the proud father of three boys to say. I agree that it’s not fair that some women who desperately want to have children reach the age when they can collect their pension but still haven’t achieved that ambition.

But what’s even more unfair is knowing that a child is born with the near certainty of being left motherless before it reaches its teens, or will spend their formative years as a carer.

Children are not lifestyle choices. They’re not possessions to be added to our collections of material wealth as we grow older: first car (used), first flat, first house, second car (new), baby,  bigger house…  Children are precious for their own sake. The happiness and fulfilment they offer to their parents is secondary.

“But no-one says that a 60-year-old man is too old to have a baby,” say Mrs Tollefsen’s supporters. Well, actually, I think 60 is too old for anyone to become a parent. But to use drugs to fool a body into thinking it is young enough to be fertile is plain wrong. There is a very good reason why nature, in its wisdom, decided that women should face a cut-off point after which they can no longer conceive: it makes it far more likely that when a baby is born, one parent or another will be around long enough to look after it.

The only up side to this story is that Mrs Tollefsen had to go to Russia to receive this treatment because she wouldn’t have received it in the UK. I wish the same could be said for every country. There are those who are so wedded to the concept of “rights” for everyone (except the rights of infants, obviously) that they will campaign for such treatment to become available here also.

They must be opposed. That will be heartbreaking for many older childless women. But it is fairer to children, and in this equation, that’s all that matters.

THE JUSTICE Committee of the House of Commons has called for the release of up to a third of prisoners, and for a much greater use of comunity-based punishments for offenders.

Now, I confess to being an instinctive thrower away of the key. Like everyone else, I get angry at reports of some of the more violent crimes being inflicted on our citizens. But when you take a step back and try to take a more objective view, you realise that locking up record numbers of people, while satisfying the part of our brains marked “revenge”, does very little to make our streets safer in the longer term.

That’s what everyone, on both sides of this argument, wants, right? A safer, happier society for our children than the one we have today. And those who commit non-violent crimes, or who are drug addicted, will be far less a long-term threat to their own communities and families if we invest in programmes to get them off drugs insted of investing in more and bigger prisons. We will never lower recidivism rates through imprisonment alone.

But I’m no bleeding heart liberal. For Morlocks of the sort who tortured and murdered “Baby Peter”, I can think of no punishment (short of the capital variety) that would be too severe. Similarly with Myra Hindley: her many defenders in the media and the legal profession insisted she was unfairly treated. Yeah, maybe she was. But I don’t care, because she was Myra Hindley. If you want to be treated fairly, don’t torture and murder kids.

IMAGINE the scene: Nick Griffin and his henchmen sit round a table in a Barking bedsit (BNP HQ) discussing general election strategy.

What we need, suggests the Supreme President, is some kind of incident that will cause such anger and outrage against Britain’s Muslims that the electorate’s resentment will translate into support for the BNP.

Acknowledging that it’s a long shot, someone suggests a pro-Islam march through Wootton Bassett. Griffin stares at the speaker for a few long seconds. Silence descends. Everyone present stares at their hands, embarrassed. Some shake their heads silently.

“We don’t need time-wasters here, my friend,” says Griffin with a deathly cold smile. “We need ideas that aren’t completely bonkers.” The speaker, already pale, starts to tremble and tries to offer an apology. “Sorry, Mr Griffin, I was just thinking out loud. It won’t happen again.”

“Make sure the landlady doesn’t see you on the way out,” says Griffin. “I’m not allowed guests after six.”

You get the picture. The point being that Islam4UK might as well be a front organisation for anti-Muslim fascists, achieving in a single press release far more anger towards Muslims than the BNP have ever managed.

A more stupid and repulsive organisation it would be hard to imagine.

Russell "the T" Davies

ACCUSATIONS of a particularly nasty nature were chucked at Russell T. Davies during his four-year tenure as executive producer on Doctor Who.

Some of those accusations made their way onto this blog last week when I wrote about the first part of this year’s Christmas special. DW is now “too politically correct” and (God help us all) “gay imperialist” (what does that even mean? I have visions of stormtroopers breaking down people’s doors, charging inside and holding the residents at gunpoint while they re-arrange their furniture and populate their music collections with Scissor Sisters CDs…)

So, according to the uneasy-in-the-modern-world brigade, it is now offensive to portray gay or black people in positive ways. It’s unrealistic, they claim; not accurately representative of today’s society.

Presumably they’d be happier if there were no gay characters at all (yeah, because that would be so much more realistic, wouldn’t it?) and all the black characters were serving in McDonald’s?

What is so offensive about black actors finally being given a fair chance to play major roles? Black people were so excluded from television and film roles when I was a kid that when they started appearing more frequently, I noticed. I noticed the increasing number of black faces, and “black” was what defined them in my mind. Ronnie and Reggie, on the other hand, are so used to seeing black and Asian faces on TV (and yes, on Doctor Who) that I doubt they even register the characters’ colour. All they’re interested in is whether the characters portrayed are goodies or baddies or are entertaining.

Why shouldn’t fictional (even science fictional) scenarios be populated with at least a few gay characters, characters whose main function in the plot is not confined to their sexuality? Straight characters have been free to be straight since TV was invented, but no-one ever accused the makers of Z-Cars of being “straight imperialists”.

My gay friends grew up in a society where there were precious few positive gay role models on television. How awful it must have been for them to be given the unintended but very real message that they were abnormal and that there was no-one else out there who felt the way they did. And how fantastic that young, gay men and women can now see gay characters on TV who aren’t defined by their sexuality. Yes, Captain Jack is gay, but more importantly, he’s a soldier, he’s brave, he’s clever, he inspires love and loyalty, he’s a leader. He’s also gay. So what? Get over it. Donna Noble is brave, clever and funny. She’s also straight. Got a problem with that? No-one cares.

I don’t believe for an instant that black actors were hired by Russell T. Davies (brilliant writer and producer. Also gay, incidentally) out of any desire to “meet quotas” or anything so silly and offensive. He’s far too smart a guy to do anything other than hire the best actors available. But what I also have no doubt about is that, in the past, black actors were turned down for parts because of their colour. If those days are now behind us then I see no reason to do anything other than cheer.

And what does it say about those who are able to suspend disbelief enough to accept that Earth has endured alien invasions a dozen times in as many years but who can’t accept that black people can be successful, powerful or accepted as friends and equals by white people, or that gay people exist in the future?

SINCE we’re all supposed to be talking about class war this weekend, and since I can’t be bothered posting anything at the moment, I thought now might be a good time to republish a post from the recent past, because it deals with the issue of class – David Cameron’s in particular. It was orignally published on 3 October.

See below.

COMPARE and contrast the following two statements:

• The government should butt out of our lives and allow adults to make their own choices without nanny state interference.

• The government’s job is to tell us what kind of relationship would suit us best, and to spend our money doing so.

You see what I did there? I took a well-worn right wing mantra and I turned it back on the Tory leadership. Goodness me! I’m quite the John Bird, aren’t I? Well, maybe not…

But what strikes me about Cameron’s latest pronouncements is that he’s sounding more like a Tory blogger and less like a Prime Minister-in-waiting. “Ooh, isn’t this health and safety stuff annoying? You know, I had that Dan Hannan in the back of the cab last week – lovely bloke…”

And now we have his own version of political “dividing lines”, this time on the subject of marriage. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of marriage – I’ve done it twice, after all. But I’m not going to tell anyone else that if they don’t get married, they’re letting themselves, or their children, or society down.

Even when I wrote “The return of morality” a few months ago, I wasn’t suggesting that every teenage girl who gets pregnant should marry the father – I was saying that they should avoid pregnancy altogether because all too often (but not in every case) the state has to meet the cost of the choices they’ve made.

Just because the government isn’t going to restore the married couple’s tax alowance abolished by the current Shadow Business Secretary under the last Tory government, that does not mean we don’t want to celebrate marriage. In my opinion, and in the opinion of most people, marriage is (fanfare, please…) A Good Thing. But it may not be right for everyone. It’s simply not possible for some, so why should they be told that there is a better, superior government-designed template for adult relationships to which they should aspire?

Cameron is being dishonest. He told the Mail:

Labour’s pathological inability to recognise that marriage is a good thing puts them on completely the wrong side of their own dividing line. Ed Balls seems to see marriage as irrelevant. I don’t think it is

Labour’s “pathological inability”? What’s he on about? What’s “pathological” about saying that it’s not the government’s job to tell people who aren’t married that they should be? What’s “pathological” about saying that it’s up to individuals, not the government, to decide if marriage is for them? Given that most of the Cabinet are in married relationships (in Ed Balls’s case, with another member of the Cabinet) how can Cameron say Labour are refusing to recognise that marriage is a good thing?

Or does he just like using big words like “pathological”, even when he doesn’t know what they mean?

As a government, our focus should be on children, not on the legal relationship between their parents. Child poverty is a stain on our society and its eradication must continue to be a priority for every government. So how, exactly, at a time when sweeping budget cuts are being predicted across government, will it help to offer tax breaks to childless, married couples, gay or straight?

I understand the political instinct to want to wave a magic wand and instantly transform society so that everyone was married with two and a half kids and no-one ever got divorced and we all lived happily ever after. But we can’t. And even if we could, we shouldn’t.

THIS POST from Alex Smith of LabourList has caught my attention. It quotes Michael Merrick’s assessment last week about how Labour can connect with the poorest in scoiety, and this section struck a chord with me:

The Labour Party has embraced an ideology that actively undermines the beliefs and culture of ordinary working people. Immigration, whilst the most topical, isn’t the only battleground. One by one, it seems that the social and cultural outlook of many is scorned upon by an elite who, whilst laughably painting themselves as on the side of the ‘oppressed’, choose to studiously ignore this particular subjugation. On issues ranging from school/parental discipline (‘child abuse’), to capital punishment (‘barbaric’), to patriotism (‘Little Englander’), to Euro-scepticism (‘xenophobic’), to immigration (‘racist’), to morality (‘bigoted’) – across all these issues and more, the general beliefs of vast swathes of the electorate are demonised and ridiculed by an elite interested only in securing the dominance of their own particular worldview.

Now, I’m not saying Merrick is entirely right about this – he uses a pretty broad brush and generalisations are rarely helpful – but he clealry has a point. It was one to which I alluded in a post yesterday when talking about the need for the Labour Party as a whole, and at every level, to start talking the same language of the people we represent and to reflect their views.

And although Merrick talks of immigration as just one of the pressure points, it’s clearly near the top of an awful lot of people’s agenda today.

A few weeks ago, after Lord Griffin (to be) appeared on Question Time, I was forced to concede by commenters that Labour had, in the past, been guilty of attempting to shut down debates on immigration by shouting “racist”. Whenever that has been done it has been for well-meaning reasons. Nevertheless, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and it was stupid and wrong.

It’s a Monday, so no doubt I will now be accused of adopting the Daily Mail’s/BNP’s agenda by raising immigration here. Still…

Knocking on doors in my constituency on Saturday morning, I once again had to try to defend the government’s policies on immigration. This is a very regular occurrence these days, particularly in so-called “solid” Labour areas. These people are not racists by any stretch of the imagination, but they are worried. And they’re talking about their concerns now because it’s only now they feel they have “permission” to do so.

There is absolutely no point in simply responding: “Well, immigration has brought the country a lot of prosperity through extra taxes and productivity”, even though that is true. Because more often than not, the people expressing the concerns are the people least likely to have benefited directly from Britain’s economic growth to 2008. And they have as much right to have a say in this area – and to be listened to – as anyone else.

I detect a huge amount of snobbery from some on the liberal left towards such people and their views. They’re usually the same sort of people who criticise me when I uphold and promote government policy on asylum (essentially – if your application is approved, welcome to Britain; if it’s rejected, have a safe journey home).

And we are way, way past the point at which we can sneer “racist” at good people for daring to hold a view with which we’re uncomfortable.

Jamie Reed MP: "Hair gel's for losers."

MILLENNIA ago, during the summer recess, I roped in some parliamentary colleagues to write some guest posts with the aim of giving me less work to do highlighting the writing talents of other parliamentarians.

One of those I invited to submit was my partner-in-podcasting, Jamie Reed, the MP for Copeland. Quick as a flash, he immediately, four months later, submitted this post. Remember: the views expressed here do not necessarily etc, etc…

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Driving a stake through the rotten heart of the 1980s revival

Just prior to Harris and I watching Drag Me to Hell at the Leicester Square Odeon (no leg room and outrageous prices) we were ushered into a malodorous holding area whereupon we discussed Sam Raimi and the merits of the 1980s horror film.

Like Harris, the very mention of the film The Exorcist sends me running for a bible and some catarrh loosening medicine (the many merits of Exorcist 3 – a prequel of sorts – can be discussed later) but was the renaissance of the horror genre the only decent thing to escape the rotten, pus-filled boil of a decade which was the 1980s?

Under copyright law, Stewart Maconie or the late Tony Wilson should actually pop up and offer some random comment on the period throughout this written retrospective, but apologies in advance if they don’t.

If suitably petitioned, I will post how the 80’s horror revival was actually a cultural response of sorts to the prevailing political nightmare of the time, but for now, just take this assertion as fact. Best not to argue (not yet anyway).

The reason for such opprobrium is, of course, the nascent 80s revival and the horrific spectre of a new Spandau Ballet album. Now, I’ve nothing against Spandau Ballet. On the contrary, whist on holiday in Ibiza some years ago, I sat next to the one who used to be in Eastenders. He was with his wife who is/was one half of Pepsi and Shirley. You may recall that they were the backing singers for Wham at one point. They seemed like a great couple with fantastic kids. Nothing wrong there (and speaking of Eastenders, are they now officially recycling old scripts from the 1980s?). More to the point, a much slimmer Tony Hadley can be found masquerading as Rob Flello MP, Monday-Thursday in the House of Commons.

But that paragraph almost sums it up. How much better would it have been to be able to write: ‘…whilst sat in a London café next to David Bowie and Ronnie Wood who was at that time in a band called The Faces. You may recall that their lead singer was Rod Stewart and Ronnie eventually went off to join the Rolling Stones…”

But for the sixties, take the fifties, the seventies, even the twenties (“…whilst sat in a clinic for depression with F. Scott Fitzgerald…”). All were preferable to the decade that style, taste, decency and humanity forgot.

And yes, I’ll always choose ‘beer and sandwiches at No.10’ over ‘no such thing as society’. Molotov cocktails on the streets of Britain; Brixton, Toxteth, the Miners, Hillsborough, and almost four million unemployed. And, yes, militant, the Cold War, red braces, stock brokers, wet-gelled hair and, very briefly, the Krankies’ own TV show…

But (you say) the video recorder, MTV, the microwave, Michael Jackson at his peak, the advent of Indiana Jones, Live Aid, Gremlins, the A-Team, the Rocky films and more…

And that’s just it. Most of what was enjoyable and memorable from the 80s didn’t come from Britain. Most of that which was wretched about the 80s was home grown.

For most people, Ronald Reagan isn’t synonymous with Mr.T, VHS, Van Halen and the seminal body of work Clint Eastwood made with that orang-utan. However, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Howard’s Way, the ZX80 and so much more depressing, dreadful, awful rot is synonymous with that woman from Grantham.

But what about the fall of the Berlin Wall? Surely (you cry) credit where it is due?

Absolutely; that’s precisely my point. Those responsible for bringing about the end of the Cold War gathered together recently to remember it. Helmut Kohl, George Bush Sr. and Mikhail Gorbachev appeared together in public to remember the event. All of those people alive who really mattered were there (with the exception of David Hasselhoff).

So there you have it. Call a Priest, pass me the stake and the holy water and fetch me your New Romantics.

“The power of Christ compels you…”

Editor’s note: responses including the phrases “pity the fool” or “fandabbydozy” will be deleted.

THERE’S political correctness and there’s political correctness.

Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman would have us believe that PC is simply about avoiding offensive and derogatory language:

opponents of political correctness are opposed to progress; they yearn for a Britain of the 1970s or 1980s where offensive words such as “Paki”, “nigger”, “poof” and “spastic” were part of our mainstream discourse, with peak-time television programmes featuring blacked-up actors on The Black and White Minstrel Show and the racist rantings of Alf Garnett, on Till Death Do Us Part.

This is a pretty poor argument. I know of no-one outside the BNP who wants it to become acceptable to use these terms. But I know a lot of people who think it’s absurd to insist on relabelling black coffee as “coffee without milk”.

Did those who opposed Mehdi during the Cambridge Union debate argue in favour of the freedom to use the terms “nigger” or “Paki”? Of course not.

That debate, thankfully, has already been won; the spoils of that war have been banked. Such racist terms are unacceptable and no-one is arguing that that should not be the case. We’ve moved on. You might as well argue that political correctness is about opposing slavery. Well, perhaps it was once, but today PC is about using language to pervert meaning. It’s about sanitising language, just in case any word or combination of words might conceivably, hypothetically offend someone.

So CBeebies rewrite well-known nursery rhymes and fairy tales so that Humpty Dumpty “is happy again” rather than being left shattered and at the mercy of surgically incompetent horses. And Little Miss Muffet, the most famous arachnaphobe in children’s literature, befriends the spider instead of getting her father to squish it with a newspaper.

And classic photographs of The Beatles are doctored to remove from view the cigarettes that some of the Fab Four were smoking when the picture was taken, just in case any gullible youth is tempted to emulate his musical heroes by buying ten Benson and Hedges rather than taking guitar lessons.

The most frustrating this about all of this is that the Left, as usual, gift-wrap a weapon and hand it generously to our opponents, who then, perfectly understandably, use it enthusiastically against us. Then we (the Left) are seen by the public as defending something that the vast majority of the public just don’t accept should be defended.

By all means let’s celebrate the victory of political correctness in ridding us of the casually racist and sexist language of the ’70s and ’80s. And by all means let’s keep it in reserve in case any such nonsense raises its head again. But let’s not allow ourselves to be forced into defending the excesses of PC, just because it once served a serious and noble purpose.

AFTER all the hysteria and oh-so-clever observations about similarities to BNP policy, there’s actually been some intelligent analysis of Gordon Brown’s commitment to a new approach to teenage single parents.

The BBC Magazine website looks at Barking Foyer, a state-of-the-art complex where teenage parents get the kind of support GB was talking about in his speech.

After the furore caused by my earlier post on this subject, I had a discussion with a colleague about possible solutions to all of this. “I’ve thought about this for years,” he told me, “and the only thing that makes any sense would be supervised hostels. Announce that from nine months’ time, every new teenage parent would either have to ive with with their family or in a hostel, and you would see an immediate massive cut in teenage pregnancies.”

Shortly afterwards a young woman of 17 and her boyfriend came to see me at an advice surgery. Having suffered a miscarriage a year earlier, she was pregnant again and was seeking my help in getting a flat of her own, since there was no room for her and the baby in her mother’s home. I took the coward’s way out: I didn’t ask her why, at such a young age, and with no job or accommodation of her own, she had chosen to become pregnant. Not my buiness, I told myself.

But it was my business. For a start, I was being asked for help to find a flat for her. And my council and income taxes would be used to help support her in the lifestyle she had chosen.

I wish I had been able to point her in the direction of supported accommodation. Instead, she will probably get a flat of her own and her child will be far more likely to be brought up in poverty than other children whose parents chose instead to embark on careers before deciding to have a family.

Although the commentariat has calmed down since Gordon’s coments, there will be occasional and violent eruptions from those who are simply appalled at the notion that we should ever pass judgment on anyone else’s life choices, or put any obstacles in the way of single parents who want a flat of their own, even though they have no means (and often no intention) of paying for it.

Whether Gordon’s commitment will bear real fruit will be a matter for the electorate and the Treasury. “It cannot be right,” he told conference, “for a girl of sixteen, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.” Not only was he talking the language of moral absolutism – he was saying what the overwhelming majority of ordinary voters of all classes assume without having to jump through the intellectual hoops that many on the Left seem to regard as obligatory.