And another thing…

YESTERDAY I poked fun at right-wing and Tory blogs for their refusal to criticise Philip Davies MP for his green-inked rants against political correctness.

Today it may be the other side’s turn for criticism. This story in the Mail on Sunday may not be entirely accurate. There may be some details left out. But for the moment, it’s all we have, and the facts appear to be that a Christian teacher has been sacked after offering to pray for a sick child’s recovery. This, apparently, could have been interpreted as bullying (hat-tip to Iain Dale).

So the question I want to ask is: what do the left-wing and Labour-supporting blogs have to say about this apparently appalling example of moronic discrimination against Christians? What is the left-wing saying? There is no left-wing intellectual analysis that would justify this chain of events as they have been reported this morning. Are there any who are expressing indignation? Given that the overwhelming majority of voters – including a massive majority of traditional Labour voters – will share my own anger at this story, the Left risks looking utterly out of touch by remaining silent.

Why must we allow the right wing to claim that white, middle class Christians are the only minority group in the country that the Left don’t give a damn about?

Someone offering to pray to a God in whom you do not happen to believe is not bullying, even when you haven’t invited such intervention on your own behalf. I have prayed for lots of people who are not Christians and I will continue to do so, with or without their permission.

Christians are also accused of “bullying” whenever they seek to evangelise. “How dare a Christian tell me I should convert to their faith!” is the shrill, defensive nonsense we often hear. Well, I’ll tell you what: if you don’t want to become a Christian, don’t become one, okay? Problem solved. No bullying, just an exchange of views with no minds changed. Move on.

Christians are instructed by Jesus Christ to evangelise on His behalf. If non-Christians – and yes, that includes Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Seikhs and buddhists as well as atheists – feel offended by this form of outreach, well that’s a pity, but they’ll just have to deal with it as best they can.

UPDATE: Humble pie time for Harris, it seems, and rather than delete the above post (which was my first instinct, to save my blushes) I’ll simply add this: Bob Piper has done the rest of us a favour and has actually read to the very end of the article – which is what I should have done had the red mist not descended after the fourth paragraph and motivated me to open my laptop. Bob rightly accuses Ian Dale (and by inference, me) of a Pavlovian response to this story, and of failing to acknowledge that the (supply) teacher in question is simply under investigation – the normal procedure when a complaint is made.

Still, an object lesson in blogging to end the year on. Thanks to A Very Public Sociologist for alerting me to my mistake.

Still, I trust lots of left-wing bloggers (including Bob) will come out in support of this woman in the run-up to the internal investigation…

I’M NOT thin-skinned, but if I’m to be the victim of a lazy hatchet job by a journalist, I think I have the right to expect at least a minimum level of accuracy.

Under the headline “Proof at last… our MPs really are a bunch of prize twits”, the Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday today ran a critical piece on me and two parliamentary colleagues, Jo Swinson (LibDem, East Dunbartonshire) and Eric Joyce (Labour, Falkirk) for having the brass neck to Twitter from the Commons chamber.

It’s not available online (wiser heads prevailed, I presume), but the gist of the story is that we three have been “caught posting messages on the social networking site during PMQs.”

Caught? Doesn’t that imply a desire to avoid detection? I posted this Tweet last Wednesday in advance of PMQs. It automatically appeared on the front page of this blog — you know, the blog that many reporters read every day. Yet because this particular reporter accepted my open invitation to follow my Twitter feed on PMQs, he felt able to report:

In the middle of robust exchanges between Gordon Brown and David Cameron, Labour MPs Tom Harris and Eric Joyce and LibDem Jo Swinson were actively updating their followers with ‘tweets’ reporting the day’s events.

This is despite the fact that mobile phones, which can be used to post messages on Twitter, are banned from all but a few areas of the House.

Note the careful phrasing of that last line: “banned from all but a few areas of the House.” It’s intended to lead the reader to believe that phones are banned from the chamber itself, even though the reporter doesn’t explicitly say as much. In fact, mobile phones are now allowed in the chamber and I happen to know that the reporter did know that this was the case. How do I know that? Because I told him so when he called me at my constituency office on Friday.

In fact, the entire story is predicated on the assumption that using one’s mobile phone in the chamber is against the rules, otherwise there’s actually no story at all. Hence the deliberately vague wording above.

So, to recap: 

1. Three Scottish MPs were Twittering during PMQs.
2. They were entirely open about their activities. I advertised the fact I would be doing so in advance.
3. Twittering during PMQs does not break any rules (unless you’re Twittering while asking or answering a question which, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t happened. Yet). 

And I will continue to Twitter during PMQs whenever I can, as will Eric and Jo, I hope. If we were remotely worried about the kind of silly criticism we received today from the Mail on Sunday, we probably wouldn’t even be on Twitter at all. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I think they would agree with me that if MPs can draw others into a political debate about PMQs or anything else using social media, then that is A Good Thing, however the media may wish to over-react or feign indignation.

LATER on tomorrow, I’ll post the slightly longer, original article I wrote for this week’s Mail on Sunday. In the meantime, you can read the published version here.

UPDATE at 9.05 pm: Most of you who are interested enough will have already read the version at the MoS’s site, but. as promised, here’s the full, original, slightly longer version of the article:

——————————————————————————–

A PROMINENT Labour politician in Glasgow once told me of a family he knew, every member of which was claiming incapacity benefit. When one of the sons managed to get a job, he was pressured by the rest of the family into giving it up, since an adult in the household gaining employment put the family at risk of being deprived of other benefits, including council tax.

The benefits culture remains Glasgow’s shame, and it is not confined to my city; many other post-industrial areas of Britain suffer the same malaise of second and third generations of families being brought up to believe a life on benefits is acceptable.

It isn’t, as I said a few days ago on my blog. I was not just trying to make the point that young women’s lives are wasted by early pregnancy and a subsequent life dependent on benefits. I was also seeking to reverse what I see as a culture of tolerance, where we are now expected to accept everyone else’s choices without criticism or judgment, even when those choices have a negative effect on the wider community.

This has led us to a place where children are giving birth to children. There is no criticism of 16, 15 or even 14-year-old girls (and boys) who become parents. Yet why is it so difficult for us to admit that when a 14-year-old becomes pregnant, or gets his girlfriend pregnant, it is a personal tragedy and a social failure?

This is where politicians are completely out of step with the public. I have been taken aback by the number of people who have told me how relieved they are that I have come out and said what to most people has been blindingly obvious for years.

Politicians are not expected to talk about moral absolutes. Raising questions about other people’s choices, after all, could offend someone and nothing is less acceptable these days than causing someone offence.

I certainly seem to have offended a lot of people in the last few days. I was severely criticised by some on the Left and a number of women have contacted me to say they felt insulted, pointing out that since becoming single parents at a young age, they had gone on to further and higher education and made a success of their lives. Which is brilliant. I have nothing but admiration for them.

And if there are some, albeit a minority, of young men and women who can overcome such a huge disadvantage inflicted at such an early age, does that mean the issue doesn’t have to be addressed at all, that we simply assume that if some can succeed, then all can?

I was very specifically criticising our acceptance of those young women who lose all their educational and career opportunities because of their pregnancies and who spend the rest of their lives on benefit.

So why are so many on the Left angry at me? For some it is because they don’t feel it is a problem; they believe that, as a rich society, we can afford to fund this ‘lifestyle choice’.

Others are uneasy at a Labour politician making judgments about other people’s choices; I have ‘no right’ to put greater value on one person’s choices than on another’s, it seems.

Still others fear I am adopting the rhetoric of the Right-wing by ‘doing a Peter Lilley’, the Social Security Secretary who caused controversy by lampooning benefits cheats with his ‘I have a little list…’ Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche at the 1992 Tory conference – and by attacking vulnerable young women.

But I’m attacking no one. I am pointing out that we have an unacceptably high level of teenage pregnancies. I am stating a fact that for many of these young women (and far fewer young men), parenthood will mean fewer opportunities and a higher chance of life on benefits.

There is no doubt that raising yet another generation of young men in fatherless homes is a recipe for social disaster. Yes, I’m generalising and yes, there are plenty of homes where the absence of a violent, abusive father is a blessing to the mother and children. But common sense dictates that, in general, children benefit from having the love of a mother and a father.

Yet what kind of society have we created when the above paragraph will inevitably be seen by some as offensive, narrow-minded and intolerable?

AS FOR the accusation of giving comfort to the ‘Right-wing’, when did it become ‘Left-wing’ to tolerate such a colossal waste of lives? Why is it ‘Left-wing’ to allow millions of people to remain on benefits instead of working? When did ‘Labour’ stop meaning ‘work’ and start to mean ‘benefits’?

There are many others who believe the gradualist approach to moving people off benefits and into work is the right way to go. But my instinct tells me more radical measures will have to be introduced to see the step-change needed to make a real difference to the number of claimants. I know of some Ministers who would prefer this issue not to be raised, who would rather be able to get on with quietly and doggedly chipping away at the mountain of claimants, encouraging here, facilitating there, empowering here…

But if more extreme measures, such as financial penalties for long-term claimants, need to be taken in future, they will need public support. That means being absolutely honest about the scale of the problem and the devastation that long-term benefit dependency can cause. I have written before about the responsibility the Thatcher Government bears for initiating the benefits dependency culture in the 1980s, when millions of redundant workers with no hope of further employment were encouraged to claim invalidity benefits to keep the headline jobless figures at a ‘politically acceptable’ level.

That argument is still valid. But I don’t care which government or politician was responsible for the problem 25 years ago. I don’t want to know who is to blame for the fact that the problem has barely receded since then.

The only thing that matters is that children are still getting each other pregnant and that their children will grow up without the life chances I think they deserve. And another generation is about to be lost to the benefits culture.

No matter who wins the arguments in the TV newsrooms and the Commons about who should accept the blame, our society will remain hobbled by benefits dependency.

No single party, I’m convinced, has all the answers. James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has proposed some of the most radical changes yet to the welfare state. But just because Labour is in government does not give us a monopoly on solutions. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May, the Shadow Work and  Pensions Secretary, have much to add to this debate, as has Frank Field, the Labour MP who was asked by Tony Blair to ‘think the unthinkable’ back in 1997, who did – and was sacked for his efforts.

It has taken nearly three decades of failure to get to this point. It could take us a similar time to repair the damage. So the sooner we start, the better. 

Instead of our political leaders blaming each other for our past failures, far better, surely, for them in years to come to be able to share the credit for their success by giving back hope and ambition to our young people.

I WAS invited by The Mail on Sunday last week to write a review of Alastair Campbell’s debut novel. It’s in today’s edition, if you’re interested.

“All In The Mind” is a cracking read. Highly recommended. (That’s a summary, incidentally – not the full review. I may publish it here later.)

UPDATE at 5.50 pm: Et voila:

Given Alastair Campbell’s notorious history of mental health issues, it is perhaps understandable that the publishers of his debut work of fiction, “All In The Mind”, chose to insert the subtitle “A novel”; this is neither a psychological textbook nor, on the face of it, an autobiographical account of the battle with his own demons.

Yet it is infused, on every page, with a level of understanding of the nature of depression and an empathy with its victims that one is never quite sure how much of the detailed, intimate nature of the central characters’ thought processes is the result of research or of experience.

“All In The Mind” is a short novel detailing the lives of its main protagonists over the course of a weekend that is dramatic and consequential for all concerned. There is Arta, an asylum seeker who, having fled Kosova with her husband and child, finds herself the victim of a brutal rape in her adopted homeland; Emily, a young primary school teacher who cannot come to terms with the terrible facial scars she suffered during a house fire; David, a lonely, sensitive and intelligent man whose abandonment as a child by his father seems to be the root cause of his debilitating bouts of depression; and Ralph, a chaotic alcoholic who just doesn’t want to admit it, and whose self-destructive behaviour threatens not only his marriage but his career as a member of the Cabinet.

Linking all of these characters is Professor Martin Sturrock, a revered and successful consultant psychiatrist whose devotion to his patients not only threatens his own home life but hides the fact that he is fighting a few serious demons of his own.

But despite the dark tone of much of the book and the serious issues it seeks to illuminate, “All In The Mind” is often very funny and charming. At least one figure, Matthew Noble QC, is strangely inconsequential to the wider narrative and seems to have been included to lend light relief. But his labelling as a sex addict by his cuckolded wife and his consequent attempts at a “cure” are nevertheless highly entertaining.

It is Campbell’s eloquent and touching depiction of depression’s victims and the description of their thought processes that define this novel; anyone tempted to dismiss mental ill health as somehow less serious than various physical ailments would do well to read “All In The Mind”. Possibly more than once.

He inevitably, and fruitfully, delves into his own political and media background, referring to the prime minister (who we never meet) as “young” and whose strategy for sacking a Cabinet colleague is choreographed for maximum positive publicity. And Campbell can’t resist a dig at the cynicism of the tabloid press with a disparaging reference to The Sun hiding behind a local news agency in an attempt to avoid direct culpability for a “sting” operation against a politician.

The prose flows smoothly and naturally, Campbell showing off writing skills he would not have been able to use to full effect when a tabloid journalist himself. His harrowing depiction of the rape is intimate and personal without being mawkish or explicit.

His most courageous decision as an author, though, is in piling on the paradoxes of his central character. Here is the hero of the piece, a healer who needs healing himself, but who is not only a regular user of prostitutes but who also lusts after one of his own patients who has herself been raped and forced into prostitution.

Campbell’s triumph is in his portrayal of ordinary people’s ordinary lives, and his exploration of the imperfection of heroism. They could only have been successfully delivered by someone with the appropriate levels of skill, sensitivity and empathy, which Campbell clearly has in spades.

For all its dark subject matter, “All In The Mind” is surprisingly uplifting and optimistic. It is also one of the few books I have ever read which has brought me close to tears in its closing pages.

 

“All In The Mind” by Alastair Campbell is published by Hutchinson. Available from Amazon.

Success! One Genesis CD procured. I already have all the tracks already, of course, but it’s the principle that matters. I haven’t actually listened to it yet, but it’s possible the disc has one or two rare mixes of the longer racks that aren’t normally available.

I very, very rarely say this of a Sunday morning, but I really hope I’m in time to get a copy of the Mail on Sunday.