Reading the Declaration of Independence

Just in time for the Fourth of July, it has been revealed that an early and beautifully preserved copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered in the National Archives in Kew - one of the original "first edition" of 200 printed by John Dunlap on the very day the document was adopted and promulgated in 1776. It was found by an American researcher, apparently among correspondence seized by the Royal Navy during the War of Independence. "The Americans are very excited by it," said a spokesman. Unfortunately it's not for sale, despite the fact that the Archives has at least two more copies and the last one to be auctioned, almost a decade ago, fetched almost £5 million. Every little helps.

The Declaration is a quasi-sacred text, not far beneath the Bible in the reverence with which it is regarded by Americans of all political persuasions. But what does it actually say? To mark this weekend's Independence Day, I thought I'd take a closer look.

Of course, we all know the rolling, inspired phrases of the preamble. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." But while those words are among the most memorable ever set to paper, and have made the Declaration one of the most precious documents of the human spirit, it is not essentially a statement of abstract principle. It is an argument about the nature of government, about what makes a valid revolution different from treason, and what are the circumstances in which it is not only permissible but beholden upon a people to depose their rulers. But above all it was intended to show how these principles justified the American revolution in particular. In this, as I hope to show, it manifestly fails.

In his first sentence, the Declaration's main author Thomas Jefferson stresses that the purpose of his document is to set out the facts:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

But before we come to the causes - which form the heart of the document - there comes the famous claim that "all men are created equal". Quite why that, or the pre-eminence of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" among "unalienable rights" should be "self-evident" (a phrase said to have been thought up by Benjamin Franklin) is unclear. If anything, it is the inequality of human beings, in terms of natural endowments, that is self-evident. Equality is not something bestowed by Nature (or "Nature's God", as the deist Jefferson had it); it is a philosophical position which requires a conscious determination to override the order of Nature to bring even partially into accordance with reality. We may all be equal in terms of fundamental rights - but these are not "natural" rights, however they might be referred to as "human rights", but political rights, belonging to citizens.

The language of human rights is these days mouthed by everyone: by lawyers making a career of it; by campaigners against anti-terror laws; by the members of the equality industry; by governments justifying the very repressive measures that others are campaigning against; even by apologists for some of the vilest of contemporary regimes. So the ringing declamation of self-evidence does, indeed, seem self-evident. But it wouldn't have done in 1776. The prevailing sociological theories of the ancien régime - against which the Enlightenment had set itself - descended from earlier views of the Chain of Being, in which status was something inherited and, to a greater or lesser degree, fixed, and in which claims to what we would call "human rights" were based not upon abstract principle but upon the particular privileges to which members of all classes of society, whether peasants, bourgeois, clergy or kings, felt themselves entitled. Even equality before the law was not assumed, although in Britain the principle existed to some extent - more than on the continent - and the American colonists had developed it further. At least among themselves: few extended it to the indigenous inhabitants of the land, still less to the African slaves that many, including (notoriously) Jefferson himself, owned.

But the reference to human equality and the attendant natural rights, though it has earned the Declaration much of its totemic status, is in any case not much more than a debating point. It is there to support Jefferson's next claim that it is "to secure these rights [that] governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". Which is more airy Enlightenment rhetoric, of course. It's not hard to spot the influence of Rousseau and his theory of social contract, although more direct antecedents of the Declaration can be found in the philosophy of John Locke. And, given that it is presented as another of the "self-evident" truths, it may again be wondered precisely what is meant to be self-evident about it. Far more self-evident, to any neutral 18th century observer, would have been the perspective of the servile Persian courtier in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which also came out in 1776), whose "language afforded not words for any form of government, except absolute monarchy" and whose history "informed him that such had ever been the condition of mankind".

Jefferson then asserts that, "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..." This is the most truly revolutionary statement in the entire document, for it asserts not merely that government to be legitimate requires the consent of the governed, but that government actually belongs to the people as a whole, and that rulers hold it by delegation from the governed. That the basis of authority in society is, in Abraham Lincoln's equally famous formulation, "government of the people, by the people, for the people". But while the Gettysburg Address claimed this as the unique achievement of the United States (which "shall not perish from the earth") the Declaration of Independence asserts it as "self-evident" and the property of all mankind. Which clearly it isn't, or wasn't.

Jefferson himself later claimed that his draft aimed at neither "originality of principle or sentiment" and was rather "an expression of the American mind". There had indeed been previous, equally stirring, expressions of independence or the importance of government by consent, such as the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) with its somewhat conditional pledge of allegiance to Robert the Bruce:

To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand.

Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

But while there are several interesting points of similarity between the two declarations, they rest (as might be expected given their very different historical circumstances) on different foundations. The Scots conceived of a bond of reciprocal obligation between subject and king: if the king failed to uphold the people's rights or govern justly he could be deposed - but only in favour of some other king. In 1776, the American rebels were not looking for a different king.

Having established (to his own satisfaction, at least) the right of the people to determine their form of government, however, Jefferson then advances a rather conservative principle, one that acknowledges, almost apologetically, that the pragmatic need for stability might trump the very principles he has just been outlining. He writes:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

So, revolution - "regime change", indeed - must be a last resort. But now Jefferson has a problem - because the wish of the Americans to govern their own affairs is no longer sufficient justification to rebel. There must in addition be abuses - abuses so intolerable that it has become difficult if not impossible to endure them. There must be insufferable evils, and "a design" for "absolute Despotism". And it falls to Jefferson to enumerate them. This is where the Declaration begins to fall apart at the seams. Once you get past the philosophical argument, it turns into a more-or-less random collection of gripes. The contrast between the inflated assertions made by the revolutionaries and the actual facts that they are able to adduce gives the Declaration an unexpected air of bathos.

Jefferson's case is that the colonists have been deprived of their natural and legal rights by the government of George III. He refers to the "patient sufferance" of the the Americans under the royal yoke. "The history of the present king of Great Britain", he asserts, "is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states". And, to put it bluntly, whatever one thinks of the policy of George III, Lord North or the British representatives in the thirteen colonies, or of the Stamp Act and the tea tax, that claim is patently absurd.

"To prove this" - Jefferson continues, determined to dig himself deeper into the hole of his own creation - "let facts be submitted to a candid world".

King George, we are told, has "refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good" and has "refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people". Very well, Mr Jefferson, which laws did you have in mind? He doesn't say. Instead he accuses the king of having "called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures." Which measures? Where were these unusual places, and who was summoned to them, and when? We are not told. But in any case, if your aim is to establish an "absolute tyranny", the summoning of legislative assemblies would seem to be a strange way of going about it. Why not just send in the troops, and shoot anyone who protests? That would at least have given Jefferson and his friends something to complain about.

But there's more. The evil King George has "dissolved legislative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people" (Which ones? When?) He has "endeavoured to prevent the population of these states, for that purpose obstructing laws for the naturalization of foreigners". (These days, anti-immigration policies tend to be popular.) He has "made judges dependent on his will along... for the amount and payment of their salaries". (He has paid people's salaries? Shocking.) And he has "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance". That complaint I can empathise with, even if it does make George III sound improbably like New Labour. But, once again, it would be nice to have some specific details.

Even when it's possible to see his point, Jefferson manages to couch his complaints in willfully opaque language. Thus, instead of stating plainly that the Westminster parliament should have no right to legislate for the colonies (which was one of the main American complaints) he writes that the king "has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation." And for just a moment, you're wondering what the hell he's talking about. And he lists those acts ("for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us"; "for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world"; "for taking away our charters" etc etc) without troubling to name them, or describe how they have been implemented in practice. It's almost as though, knowing that the facts can't possibly justify revolution in the light of the preamble, he prefers to take refuge in vagueness and obscurity.

And then he goes completely over the top:

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworth the head of a civilised nation.

The most barbarous ages? What does he have in mind? The decadence of ancient Rome? Genghis Khan? Montezuma's Mexico? The world of Gibbon's Persian, perhaps, who "never departed the king's presence without satisfying himself that his head was still upon his shoulders"? The Declaration of Arbroath had a similar denunciation of the misdeeds of Edward the First:

The deeds of cruelty, massacre, violence, pillage, arson, imprisoning prelates, burning down monasteries, robbing and killing monks and nuns, and yet other outrages without number which he committed against our people, sparing neither age nor sex, religion nor rank, no one could describe nor fully imagine unless he had seen them with his own eyes.

But in that case it was no more than the truth. Even by the standards of the 18th century, when French criminals were still being ripped apart by wild stallions or broken on the wheel and the Enlightenment's most popular It-girl, Catharine the Great of Russia, was presiding over a major extension of serfdom, British behaviour in the American colonies was fairly mild. Milder than their behaviour in some other places, indeed, including Scotland (not to mention India). Once again one wonders how a man as intelligent as Thomas Jefferson could have expected anyone to take this sort of language seriously.

Now for a bit of political incorrectness:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

You won't see that quoted very often.

The litany concludes with a description of the amiable Farmer George as "a prince whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant". (Like Commodus, perhaps, "immersed in blood and luxury".) Finally, the Declaration asserts that the colonists' many petitions have fallen upon deaf ears: "We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations". There is nothing for it but to "acquiesce in the necessity... and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends".

There follows the declaration of independence proper, "that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states" and that the leaders of the rebellion "mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor". Thus the Declaration ends on a suitably high moral tone. But that, like the elevated, universalist sentiments of the preamble, only makes the disingenuous or at least exaggerated nature of most of Jefferson's actual complaints more glaring. Read the rest of this article

MPs with second jobs

Do we want "part time MPs"? Or should they be giving their whole time to the important business of representing the people who elected them? It's a simple message, and one that seems to be gaining ground. New rules have just come into force that MPs have to disclose all income and time devoted to their second jobs, giving rise to more potential embarrassment. Already, members of the Conservative front bench have divested themselves of outside interests, and it is being suggested that extra-Parliamentary earnings, and jobs, should be banned.And it is said that a blanket ban on MPs having second jobs is being seriously considered by Gordon Brown. Such a ban, after all, would hurt the Tories more than it would hurt Labour - although David Blunkett, to take but one example, would have to forego the £30,000 he gets from Entrust, the American IT security firm keen to profit from ID Cards.

Here's Willie Sullivan expressing a common view:

No one expects MPs to spend every waking moment poring over casework. But when some politicians are holding down what are effectively full-time jobs in between representing their constituents, scrutinising legislation and keeping the government in check, something has to give. And that, it seems, is the voters.

...Constituents will continue playing second fiddle until we see a voting system that obliges politicians to focus on what's really important – the interests of their voters. And these interests are best served by representatives busy in their surgeries, in the committees and on the back benches, not in the Inns of Court, the broadsheets or the boardroom.

There are basically two arguments that can be made against the principle of MPs having second - or third - jobs outside Parliament. The first is that spending time on other things leaves them with less to lavish on their constituents. The second is that, in some cases, it may lead to a conflict of interest. For example, an MP may be a board member of a construction company that is seeking permission to build in an area of natural beauty, a development opposed by many people in the local area, which is also his or her constituency. Or the MP might be paid by a private company with an interest in promoting or preventing a particular item of legislation.

MPs have lots of second jobs. Some of them are doctors, some lawyers, many have a portfolio of directorships, a few appear on Have I Got News For You. And a not inconsiderable proportion of Labour MPs have second jobs working for the government. One of them, the MP for Kirkaldy, spends so much time at his second job, being prime minister, that it's doubtful his constituents ever see him.

If being a board member of a construction company might potentially give rise to a conflict of interest, being a government minister is one long conflict of interest. Say you're a health minister, and a hospital in your constituency is earmarked for closure. What do you do? If .you exert your influence to save the hospital, you are serving your constituents all right, but at the expense of people in other constituencies who also pay your ministerial salary. Alternatively, if you do nothing, then your constituents can quite justifiably complain that they have been deprived of the aid of their local MP in an important matter of concern to them. It's a no win situation. As a popular Jewish preacher once put it, "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other."

Ministers have various ways of dealing with this dilemma. In 2006, Hazel Blears joined a picket line in Salford to protest against the closure of a local maternity ward. But of course she wasn't a health minister. If she had been, it's likely that the ward would have been saved. Some other maternity ward would have had to close instead. I doubt that even Blears would have had the chutzpah to stand on a picket line holding up a placard denouncing a decision that she herself had made.

But if the choice facing ministers is between serving their constituencies and serving the wider interests of the government, the expectation must be that they will resolve it in favour of the state as a whole. Similarly, European commissioners are appointed by national governments, but thereafter their loyalty is explicitly to the EU as a whole. So any argument against MPs holding second jobs must, perforce, applies to government ministers. And that is even before one considers the other supposed impediment to outside employment, that of time.

Being a minister is a full-time job. It is, in fact, a more than full-time job. Senior ministers are supposed to be on call 24 hours a day. As Foreign Secretary, David Miliband spends much of his time contributing to Britain's carbon emissions. Other ministers travel around almost as much. And even ministers who aren't jetting around the world will be working tirelessly on their administrative duties, their legislative plans and (more often) their political positioning. Their constituents will be a long way down their list of priorities.

The Telegraph argued the other day that for MPs to have outside interests is both proper and good. It enables them to bring a wider perspective on life outside the Westminster village. And it warns that there is "a real risk" that treating such interests as analagous to the expenses scam "will deter high-achieving individuals from entering politics" I agree. Moreover, to ban MPs from having any second career or source of income would leave them completely reliant upon public subsidy - and upon their party whips. But the leader also comments:

It is obviously wrong if a member's outside interests start to affect his ability to perform his primary tasks, which are to represent his constituents; to play an intelligent and informed part in parliamentary debate; and to hold the government to account.

There is one category of outside interest - and only one - that is incompatible with all three of these parliamentary duties. And that is being a government minister. Unlike other "outside interests", moreover, being a minister cannot be said to confer the benefit of wider experience of life outside the tight and myopia-inducing circlces of career politics.

The framers of the US constitution, in their wisdom, decided that the jobs of representing the people and governing the country were and should be wholly separate. The British system has devoloped differently, without much attempt at logic, from a system not unlike the American one (in which ministers were dependent on the favour of the king) to a system in which most ministers were directly accountable to the electorate through their membership of the House of Commons - although the paucity of willing talent available to Gordon Brown has altered the picture somewhat today.

If you accept that being an MP carries with it no specific duties or responsibilities beyond membership of the House of Commons, and that the majority of constituency work is largely irrelevant time filler, then the present system, with its part-time MPs and full-time ministers claiming to "represent" the people who elected them is not objectionable. But in that case, why bother paying them at all?
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Losing Identity?

So, has he or hasn't he? The snap assessment from most news outlets is that Alan Johnson has indeed signalled a major policy U-turn from the government's "flagship" ID card scheme. "The end of ID cards?" asks the Mail. "Climbdown on ID cards" says the BBC news website. But others aren't so sure. As the Guardian points out, while the most controversial part of the scheme's rollout - forcing workers in selected airports to register for the cards this autumn, Johnson "intends to accelerate other elements of the scheme, including plans to issue £30 voluntary ID cards to young adults across north-west England."

There are two ways in interpret Alan Johnson's announcement. Either it marks another stage in the slow retreat of the Home Office from their plans to introduce quasi-compulsory identity registration, or it is basically a PR move designed to make the cards seem less objectionable without sacrificing the central goal of having the population hooked up to the database as quickly as can be managed. At this stage, it's difficult to tell, partly because, government being government, they would attempt to disguise a U-turn even if they were embarking on one, and partly because the announcement was made in such vague terms.

The ID card scheme has always had two elements - the ID database, and the card. The card scarcely matters. It does no more than a passport does in identifying the person holding it. Given that the government still wants to introduce biometric information to passports, the process of building up the National Identity Register is scarcely affected by today's announcement.

The problem isn't not the card, it's the database. Will applying for or renewing a passport entail registering for life with the ID database, which you will be compelled to keep informed of your address and any change in circumstances, on pain of a £1000 fine, whether or not you choose to renew the passport? If so, says Liberty's Isabella Sankey, the scheme "will be compulsory in practice. However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant."

Indeed, the generally promising new Home Secretary was at pains to insist on his personal attachment to the scheme - which might be bluster, of course. The Home Office press release accompanying today's announcement is headed "Home Secretary affirms commitment to identity cards". The impression given - Soviet style - is that the rollout is all going according to plan - indeed, better than expected. No suggestion of any rowing-back or loss of enthusiasm. Quite the reverse, in fact.

"The rollout of identity cards will be accelerated under new proposals set out today by Home Secretary Alan Johnson," it begins, "highlighting the benefits of identity cards to those who need them most."

In addition to Greater Manchester - vaunted earlier this year as a "beacon area" for the scheme by the much missed Jacqui Smith - "residents in locations across the northwest will be entitled to apply from early next year". Lucky them. We're then told that there will be a big push to encourage young people to sign up, and a hint that retailers will be asked to insist on seeing them. There's also a bizarre plan to issue the cards free to over-75s. Also: "the appointment of an independent Identity Commissioner will be made shortly." Great. Another unnecessary and overpaid quangocrat.

The Home Office, it would seem, no longer expects the mass of the population to be queuing up for the ID cards. Instead, they will be heavily targeted at young people, who may not need passports (though most will) and who, unlike their elders, have grown up taking for granted constant demands for ID.

What do I conclude from all this? First, the opponents of ID cards would seem to have won the political argument. The prospect of airline pilots boycotting the scheme has put paid to the discriminatory, and legally questionable, idea that people working in aviation should be compelled to place their details on a national register that is not designed with aviation in mind. The scheme has, moreover, become vulnerable in these recessionary times to objections on grounds of cost. Given that the ID register is apparently still going ahead there are still substantial savings to be made from scrapping it; but without the headline-grabbing element of compulsion opposition might be more difficult to sustain. That, at any rate, is what its proponents hope.

There have always been two impulses driving the ID system: the political (based on headline-grabbing claims that the cards will magically solve the problems of terrorism, organised crime, benefit fraud, etc), and the bureaucratic. The bureaucratic drive for ID registration comes from the perennial desire of governments to organise and control the population, a tendency that has always been vulnerable to IT companies proferring technical (and, of course, pricey) solutions. If the political case for ID cards has failed (though they are not, yet, deeply unpopular) the bureaucratic case remains; and the companies that stand to rake in the cash will even now be taking steps to cling on to their contracts and hopes of contracts.

Word is that Alan Johnson personally wanted rid of the scheme entirely, but Gordon Brown wouldn't let him. That's how the Conservatives are spinning it, anyway - althougth Johnson himself claimed that he was the scheme's greatest supporter. Mind you, he's also declared himself to be Gordon Brown's greatest supporter on numerous occasions, and we all know how seriously to treat that assertion. Brown is certainly an enthusiast for the database state in all its guises, from the ID register to the even more dangerous plans for "transformative government". It suits his centralising, statistic-accumulating, micro-managing style. But it's more likely officials in the Home Office who stymied any plans Johnson may have had to kick the scheme into touch. They have waited for too long to get their misanthropic paws on all that data to let it slip away from them now. No doubt they have high hopes on working a similar trick on the incoming Tory government.

For them, it has never been about ID cards anyway. Henry Porter helpfully draws our attention to what he calls a "dubious little paper" called Safeguarding Identity (pdf) published by the Home Office only last week. This, says Porter, "describes how the ID card and the transformational government scheme mesh together in one glorious structure where data about the individual passes between departments. That is the prize and why they will use any argument and spend any amount to achieve it." And indeed, paragraph 3.9 shows that, whatever the substance or subtext of today's announcement, the ideal of national ID registration remains for the moment unchanged:

3.9. It is proposed that, over time, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) will hold the minimum identity data set. This would make it possible for other Government departments to share this information...

And for that to come to pass, some form of compulsion will eventually be needed.

At present, "the state" doesn't know everything about you: different government departments each know different things that they need to know for different and particular purposes. I'd like it to stay that way. Of course, it makes things less efficient - but then efficiency is and always has been the enemy of freedom. Liberty lives in the gaps where the government can't quite see what's going on.

Although, needless to say, it isn't just about you and the state:

3.32. The vision for the NIS is that it will become an essential part of everyday life; underpinning interactions and transactions between individuals, public services and businesses and supporting people to protect their identity. The NIS will do this primarily through further ‘identity services’: the processes and tools with which people can prove or check identity.

3.34. The experience of other countries suggests that identity services need to be developed gradually, over time, with new functionality being added as the number of people enrolled grows and the appropriate technology develops further. It also shows that access to public sector services often comes first, but in the end it is both public and private sector applications that will drive utility.

Incidentally, there's nothing anywhere in the document that suggests that the plans might be affected by a change of government.

I note that the document contains a foreword by one Alan Johnson. "I fully endorse the actions set out in this strategy and look forward to supporting their delivery." Perhaps he doesn't really mean it.
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Review: A Useful Fiction

Adventures in British Democracy
by Patrick Hannan

(Seren Books, £9.99)

For a government often accused of shallowness, obsession with the media and a general lack of ambition or willingness to offend, New Labour has been extraordinarily transformative. Patrick Hannan is surely right to suggest that the past decade and a bit has seen a revolution in the governance of Britain unparallelled in centuries, with devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland raising profound questions about what "Britishness" is or ought to be (if anything). But, as he also notes, all this has happened without most people in England even noticing. Or if they do notice, they imagine that it has only minimal impact on their lives.

The "useful fiction" of the title is of course Britishness itself - though it may validly doubtful whether it is either useful or a fiction. It's certainly the case that politicians have only begun taliking seriously about Britishness as the British state has come close to breaking apart. Hannan is dismissive of the political cant that sees the basic British traits as being "tolerance and fair play", locating it instead in the nostalgia and fear peddled above all by the Daily Mail. In this he seems to fall into the very trap he warns about, of taking stereotype for reality. The quintessential Briton, in his view, turns out to be the Prince of Wales - an insight it's hard to disagree with, although in singling out the irrationalism of Charles' belief in alternative medicine he rather over-estimates the rationality to be found in most other countries. He also singles out the strange role Mohammed al Fayed has come to play in the popular imagination, at once "funny foreigner" and sinister interloper.

All this is good fun - but more serious questions arise, not least the status of England under the new dispensation. Few people seriously doubt that the Conservatives will win a majority of seats in England at the next election. In the event of a hung Parliament, though, Labour might attempt to cling on with Welsh and Scottish support - which would raise serious questions of legitimacy. On the other hand, if a Conservative government with few Scottish seats faced an SNP-led Scotland, the independence question would be brought to a head. Either way, it's hard to see the present set-up surviving.

Hannan points out that while the problem is usually construed in terms of England vs the Rest, in reality the biggest division is between the smug metropolitans of London and anyone whose misfortune it is to live outside the M25. As a long-time BBC man and expert on all things Welsh, Hannan is well placed to see the question from both sides of the fence. This book is more of a jaunt through the ironies of modern Britain rather than a coherent argument - which makes for an entertaining read ("a running commentary") if a slightly inconclusive one. He's a sharp observer and has some good stories to tell. On page 91, for example, on Gordon Brown's apparent transition from dull but competent Chancellor to failing Prime Minister: "I was told by someone who knew the government intimately that, in fact, he had been useless all along but at the Treasury his more able advisers had seen to it that he didn't get into trouble". And I enjoyed Hannan's tale of an encounter with Peter Hain, out of office following his failure properly to record campaign donations, which "felt as though I'd somehow stepped into a bereavement".

Understandably (given his BBC background) Hannan is alarmed by recent media developments - which have, among other things, left Scottish and (particularly) Welsh politics scandalously under-reported just as local politicians have begun to exercise real power. He isn't impressed by blogs, either, claiming that most are merely "a running commentary on life rather than a serious attempt to gather fresh information and analyse it" and that "the best of them come from people who are already writing for the newspapers or working for the BBC". Hmm. Perhaps I should send him some suggestions.

Available on Amazon Read the rest of this article

Atheist young pioneers?

To my mind, one of the most annoying clichés of our times is the claim that atheism has become a kind of ersatz religion, with secular "priests" - Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling - and doctrines as rigid as that of any religion. It usually goes along with the dismissal of leading non-believers as "fundamentalists" - which, apart from anything else, takes no account of the possibility that, for example, believers in natural selection might have perfectly good reasons - based on nothing more than the weight of scientific evidence - for believing what they believe. No, the mere strength of their conviction is enough to see them lumped in with the most bovine Creationist. And now, it seems, these blinkered rationalists are - gasp - coming for the kids. According to an editorial in yesterday's Sunday Times:

Richard Dawkins, champion of atheism and scourge of all things religious, has come up with a novel idea to wean our children away from God: summer camps for would-be little non-believers.

Untrue on all points. The summer camps being referred to are not Dawkins' idea; they are not novel - they have been running in the USA for more than a decade; they are not intended to "wean our children away from God" - a somewhat alarmist formulation - but to encourage them to think for themselves; and they are not "for would-be little non-believers".

In fact, all that has happened is that the author of The God Delusion has given his support and encouragement to the introduction from America of Camp Quest, in which children and teenagers are introduced to basic philosophical concepts as well as taking part in more traditional holiday activities such as canoeing. As Trina Hoakes puts it, "the purpose of the camp is to offer an alternative to religious summer camps where children can learn how to think rather than what to think". Summer camps are of course an American institution. My only acquaintance with them is from Addams Family Values - but if that film's satire of the suffocating cheeriness of such events is anywhere near the truth then Camp Quest looks like a most appealing alternative. Samantha Stein, a psychology graduate who is running the first such camp in Somerset next month, thought that British children should have the opportunity to take part.

According to Lois Rogers' report:

The emphasis on critical thinking is epitomised by a test called the Invisible Unicorn Challenge. Children will be told by camp leaders that the area around their tents is inhabited by two unicorns. The activities of these creatures, of which there will be no physical evidence, will be regularly discussed by organisers, yet the children will be asked to prove that the unicorns do not exist. Anyone who manages to prove this will win a £10 note - which features an image of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory - signed by Dawkins, a former professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

(Someone should warn the professor that it is actually illegal to deface banknotes.)

One of the parents who has signed their children up for the course, Crispian Jago (an IT consultant, wouldn't you know), is quoted as saying: “I’m very keen on not indoctrinating them with religion or creeds. I would rather equip them with the tools to learn how to think, not what to think.”

It's hard to square such a clear statement with the Sunday Times' assertion that it is "a summer camp for atheists". So far as I can see, it isn't even a summer camp for the children of atheist parents, as Hemant Mehta describes it - though no doubt many of the parents sending their children to it will be rationalists of some sort. It isn't just atheists who should know how to think; nor is it only atheists who would like their children to think for themselves. Any child, of whatever background, would benefit from having some of the cobwebs cleared from their minds.

It hardly amounts to an atheist boot camp, even if, as the report states, "the youngsters’ mornings will be spent debunking supernatural phenomena such as the formation of crop circles and telepathy". I can't imagine devout Muslim or Christian parents having a problem with their children discovering - as if they didn't know already - that crop circles are actually made by people. Nevertheless, Rogers manages to make the camp sound like a comically sinister indoctrination facility. "Give Richard Dawkins a child for a week’s summer camp and he will try to give you an atheist for life" she writes - although, as I read it, Dawkins won't even be there. (Perhaps he'll drop by. I do hope so.) She also claims that "Instead of singing Kumbiya and other campfire favourites, they will sit around the embers belting out 'Imagine there’s no heaven . . . and no religion too'". I've no idea if that's true or whether she made it up - but I strongly suspect the latter.

Despite his minimal involvement in the project, this is now, in journalistic shorthand, Richard Dawkins' personal plan for turning out a generation of Mini-Me atheists. Which caricature, needless to say, has provoked much hostile comment. The Telegraph had a "spokesman for the Church of England" who - clearly relying on what he had been told by the reporter - opined that "in his imitation of the type of youth events that religious groups have been running for years, Dawkins makes atheism look even more like the thing he is rallying against." Yes indeed. He'll probably be swinging God-free incense around next.

And here's the soppy Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent, objecting to the treatment of children by their parents as objects or accessories:

Within many religions, brainwashing starts young, so there is never a chance of dissent in later life. Four and five-year-olds are put into hijab these days, so they will never know anything else or ever rebel. Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews have become more ardently committed to the idea that the new generations have to be tightly watched and processed by their parents...

I completely agree, of course. As does Professor Dawkins.

What is just as worrying is that those who consider themselves to be modern rationalists are just as dogmatic and now going after the young. I hear Richard Dawkins is setting up a holiday summer camp to introduce eight to 17-year-olds to his fanatically held faith – atheism. If it were for 17 to 21-year-olds it would be fine. This seems to me no different from the religious zealots who want to get into susceptible, immature minds, raw material to be moulded by adults.

This is just hilarious - or it would be, if it weren't such a travesty. Does Yasmin seriously believe that anyone under seventeen is too young to learn how to think? Presumably not: she just hasn't bothered to find out the facts before squeezing out her indignation in print. As it happens, there's a whole chapter of The God Delusion devoted to the danger of indoctrinating children. Famously, Dawkins objects to applying religious labels to children: "a child is not a Christian child or a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents". He also writes:

I thank my own parents for taking the view that children should not be taught so much what to think as how to think. If, having been fairly and properly exposed to all the scientific evidence, they grow up and decide that the Bible is literally true or that the movements of the planets rule their lives, that is their privilege. The important point is that it is their privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it by force majeure. And this, of course, is especially important when we reflect that children become the parents of the next generation, in a position to pass on whatever indoctrination may have moulded them.

What the articles in the Times - and Yasmin Alibhai Brown's response to them - reflect is two common assumptions in the reporting of atheism: the pre-eminence of Richard Dawkins, and the assimilation of atheism to a religious belief. Of course Dawkins is Britain's, perhaps the world's, most visible atheist. But the author of The God Delusion is not some sort of atheist pope, personally directing the opinions and behaviour of non-believers everywhere - even if he occasionally gives the impression that he'd rather like to be. The latter fallacy - for there is clearly no such thing as an atheist "faith", and even humanism is a set of attitudes rather than a doctrinal position - has even been incorporated into law, as atheists are now protected against "religious discrimination".

The so-called "new atheists" - a better term would be "media atheists", since there's nothing whatever new in what they say - do not present the world with a coherent belief system. They merely share an opinion about the probable non-existence of a Supreme Being and (a rather different position) a dislike of organised religion. Of course, many atheists also believe in things - human responsibility, for example, or the scientific method, or that knowledge is better than ignorance. But they do not believe in such positive virtues in the same way that, for example, most Christians believe in the truth of the Resurrection. They believe that they are good, worthwhile things, or human achievements worth celebrating. The dynamic is fundamentally different from that of religious belief.

Nor do they believe in such things as atheists. It's perfectly possible to combine atheism with scepticism about science, pessimism about the human condition or even enthusiasm for religion as a mythic structure or mechanism of social control. Atheism is non-belief in God, period.

I'm not sure why atheism has come to be assimilated so much to religion. It may have something to do with the journalistic (and bureaucratic) desire to put things in neat little boxes, with atheism lumped in with religion for no better reason that both atheists and religious leaders have something to say about God. It may be one more consequence of the pernicious modern phenomenon of identity politics - which has led, for example, to the British Humanist Association claiming its share of the "faith" money doled out by the government. It may just be laziness, though.

I'm pleased to discover, via the BBC, that "after receiving hundreds of inquiries" the organisers of the camp are planning to expand the scheme beyond the original - and quickly sold-out - 24 places. Excellent. But why should kids have all the fun? There's at least as much need for thinking lessons among the adult population. Especially those that write for newspapers.
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