Angry students expose worst-taught degrees

 

Jack Grimston

Course by course ratings from the government-funded National Student Survey 2008
 
BRITAIN'S worst-taught degree courses, including some at the country's top universities, have been revealed by research into students' attitudes.
 
Cuts in teaching hours and growing class sizes have created a new mood of militancy with protests spreading to campuses including Manchester and Sussex.
 
Last weekend, The Sunday Times reported the first big "tuition fee rebellion" by hundreds of students at Bristol.
Among the courses in the bottom 10% of the government's National Student Survey are engineering at Manchester and Glasgow, "other languages" at Sussex and psychology at Surrey. They are outranked by the vast majority of courses offered by post-1992 universities in the government research.
 
The figures show that 33 courses at the elite universities of the Russell Group and the 1994 Group are all ranked below 2,000 in the survey, which questioned more than 200,000 students on 2,175 courses.
 
Seven of the lowly ranked courses are taught at Bristol, five at Manchester and three at Edinburgh. The bottom courses in the country, however, are three social work degrees — at Swansea, Brunel and Royal Holloway, London, all of which receive satisfaction ratings of less than 50%.
 
Students complain that teaching time is being cut, classes are becoming bigger and postgraduate students are being used as a cheap alternative to lecturers to teach seminars — despite universities taking increasing amounts of money from undergraduates through fees.
 
Anna Fazackerley, head of education at the think tank Policy Exchange, said universities were guilty of concealing from students before they applied just how little teaching some of them would receive.
 
"The government should collect data about how many hours of teaching students receive, whether postgraduate students or professors are doing that teaching and how many students are being packed into classes," Fazackerley said. "This information is kept incredibly quiet, but parents and students have a right to know what they are paying for."
 
Last weekend, it emerged that hundreds of finance and economics students at Bristol had lodged a detailed complaint with grievances ranging from marking being done by fellow students to rising class sizes and cuts in exams from three hours to two.
 
The latest large-scale protests have broken out at Manchester, forcing the law school to drop a plan to reduce teaching time by one-third.
 
When undergraduates heard of the plan, they walked out of a lecture theatre and started to protest outside the offices of Alan Gilbert, the vice-chancellor, who has since ordered officials to reconsider.
 
Students have set up a Facebook group called Reclaim the Uni, which so far has more than 700 members. It asks: "Do you think the university treats you as a number on a computer and milks you like a glorified cash cow? Dissatisfied by the horrendous value for money? Not enough contact hours?"
 
Despite the victory in the law school, students are still worried that other courses could see cuts in teaching hours — for some modules in politics and economics, seminar time is due to be reduced from five hours to three. Politics at Manchester is already ranked 2,064th in the country.
 
Sarah Wakefield, 21, a former pupil of Durham Johnston comprehensive, who is studying politics, philosophy and economics at Manchester, said: "It is getting to the stage where people are saying, 'We might as well do an Open University degree.'
"We are only just getting clues about some of the cuts. . . Students see an increase in fees, but the quality of what we are getting is falling. It is something a lot of people are identifying with now."
 
Manchester is carrying out a review of all its teaching. A spokesman said any cuts in classes would be made up by increases in tutorials or other forms of teaching.
 
He admitted, however, that the university had had problems with teaching. "We have had instances of students saying they have not seen any academic for two years. That is not acceptable," he said.
 
"The vice-chancellor takes it more seriously than any other part of his agenda."
 
At Sussex, the university is pushing ahead with plans to shut its linguistics department and students are preparing to protest against possible cuts to teaching in other courses.
 
Laura Tazzioli, the president of the students' union at Sussex, said: "We have been told there will be cuts in associate tutors who do most of the seminar teaching. That covers most of the social sciences and humanities."
 
A spokesman for Sussex University said students would see no reduction in the number of hours' teaching they received.

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Green shoots and dud forecasts

 

By Samuel Brittan
Published: May 14 2009 22:13 | Last updated: May 14 2009 22:13
 

We have been told by that usual bringer of bad tidings, George Soros, that the "economic freefall" has stopped. The normally cautious president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, has identified a slowing down of the rate of decrease in gross domestic product and, in some cases, "already a picking up". The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development composite leading indicator shows at least a slight uptick. The admittedly highly erratic Easter UK retail sales figures show an actual increase and surveyors report more property inquiries. Financial commentators talk of "green shoots" and one of them has even suggested that the recession came to an end in April. So – Bank of England dissenting – everything is all right and we can get back to normal life.
 
Except that it isn't. It is perhaps unfair to cite the continuing horrifying rise in unemployment in so many countries. For that is admittedly a lagging indicator. A better reason for being suspicious is that so much of the new optimism is associated with a very recent recovery in equities. These lost up to half their value in the key US and UK markets, but have come less than a third of the way back since early March. Paul Samuelson once said that the stock market had predicted eight of the last five recessions. The same might be said of recoveries.
 
There is also a little matter of arithmetic. UK GDP is estimated to have fallen at an annualised rate of 7.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2009. So it is as well that the rate of decline is itself declining. A more specific factor is that a drop in stocks much amplifies any recession. As the Bank of England inflation bulletin explains: "De-stocking only reduces GDP growth if the fall in stock levels is larger than the fall in the previous period." When this no longer happens the recession looks less draconian; but it does not mean that it is over.
 
In fact, I have never shared the gloom-and-doom, end-of-capitalism attitude to the credit crunch. Injecting public funds into failing banks was not the best way to bolster demand and credit, especially as governments have relied upon these very same bankers to advise them. Critics on the left and right agree on this matter and are largely right. Nevertheless, governments and central banks have probably injected enough cash into the world economy to prevent the worst from occurring. Sound money commentators fret about the difficulties of withdrawing the stimuli in time. They should equally worry about the danger of withdrawing them too soon. One reason why US unemployment remained so high in the New Deal period is that a premature monetary tightening and attempt to balance the budget aggravated a new recession in 1937.
 
There has been much discussion about whether the present recession will be V-shaped, which is what national authorities would like; W-shaped, in which a modest recovery would be followed by a further downturn; or L-shaped, in which output stops falling but we crawl along at the bottom without getting back to normal trend growth. Having exhausted suitable letters of the alphabet, commentators talk of bath-shaped and hook-shaped recessions as well.
 
The truth is that we do not know. To me the most dispiriting aspect of current discussion is the way in which both governments and their critics still cling to national income forecasts, known in the trade as "NIF". The value of such forecasts is not to be judged by their average record over several years, but by whether they signal problems and opportunities in advance of turning points. Here their record is abysmal. At the beginning of 2007 both national and international mainstream forecasters looked ahead to a golden period of good growth with low inflation, oblivious to the credit crunch that was to hit us later the same year. This should have been the coup de grâce, but it was not. There is no solution in putting wide ranges of error on the predictions – what one economist called "giving them wings". New Bank of England charts show a range of between minus 2 per cent and plus 6 per cent for output growth in 2011 and 2012, which is honest but useless.
 
I recently heard a well-known forecaster say that the only valid question is which forecasters to go by and what methods they should use. Not so. New mathematical theories of chaos and complexity provide insights into why forecasting is so problematic but do not provide alternatives. We just have to accept that the future cannot be foreseen in the way many governments and businessmen would like.
 
Let me end with a simple illustration. The weather in summer in north-west Europe is known to be highly variable. Somebody going away for a fortnight in that part of the world would find it helpful to have a day-by-day prognosis of temperature, rainfall, sunshine, wind conditions and so on. But apart from the first day or two it cannot really be done. Rather then rely on long-term weather bureau predictions, it is safer to take an umbrella or raincoat and a warm pullover as well as sunglasses and a sunshade, even at the cost of slightly heavier luggage. Now apply this homely little story to economic policy.

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A head start for India’s next premier

 

 

By Aravind Adiga
Published: May 12 2009 20:01 | Last updated: May 12 2009 20:01
 

Visitors to India are dazzled by the chaos and unpredictability of life here, but those who observe its politics are bewildered by the opposite. Crises are visible from a distance and grow to size in full public view, yet still seem to catch the government by absolute surprise. We have to wait until May 16 – or perhaps even longer – to know whether India's next prime minister will be the incumbent, Manmohan Singh, or his Hindu nationalist rival, L.K. Advani, or someone from a smaller party. But this much is already clear: the new prime minister will almost certainly have to deal with four emergencies in the course of his term.
 
Emergency One: Terrorism is a part of daily life in India now, but at some point during the new prime minister's term there will be a spectacular strike – on a plane, temple, parliament or nuclear installation. When the strike takes place, it will be found that the local police did not have enough guns, walkie-talkies, training or manpower to fight back quickly. Co-ordination between local security agencies and elite commando forces in Delhi will prove to be poor. When the terrorists are overpowered, they will probably say that they received training and assistance from jihadists in Pakistan; they may even be Pakistani nationals.
 
The government will immediately threaten to attack Pakistan, then realise that it cannot do so without risking nuclear war, and finally beg the US to do something. Once it is clear that the government has failed on every front – military, tactical and diplomatic – against the terrorists, senior ministers will appear on television and promise that, next time, they will be prepared. They should start preparing right now.
 
Two: The extent to which the global recession has hurt India's economy has been masked by a government stimulus package. This spending has come at a cost – India's fiscal deficit has shot up – and cannot be sustained after the elections, yet few observers within the country seem worried. There are signs of a nascent recovery and Mr Singh recently sounded almost gung-ho when he said that his government could improve the economy in just 100 days of a new term.
 
International analysts worry about India's fiscal health and are much less sanguine about the country's prospects in the near future. Many young urban Indians have known nothing but a booming economy; the prospect of long-term unemployment could confuse and inflame them. Perhaps the economy will indeed return to robust growth. But the wise thing would be to prepare for a painful slowdown.
 
Three: In the past few weeks, the Naxals – Maoist guerrillas who operate in the desperately poor states of north and central India – have attacked a major aluminium mine, killed voters and policemen, and disrupted trains. The Naxal insurgency, which taps into the resentment of those left out or threatened by the economic boom, has grown steadily in the past five years. Yet most urban Indians still think of it as an obscure menace that is "out there" – far from the cities and towns.
 
This is likely to change. The emboldened guerillas look set to escalate their war against the Indian state in the months ahead. Attacks on industries, mines, police stations and trains are likely to rise; a spectacular strike that grabs national and international attention is on the cards. Understaffed local police and corrupt regional politicians will not be able to deal with the Naxals without significantly greater assistance from New Delhi.
 
Four: India's population continues to grow and demand for water – for irrigation, industrial and personal consumption – keeps mounting; yet no government has given enough thought to husbanding the country's water resources. Tensions over the use of water simmer across India. Sooner or later, they will explode. In the months after a bad monsoon, for example, there could be a flare-up between neighbouring regions over the use of a shared river; this could lead to strikes and protests that paralyse parts of the country.
 
There are, of course, many other emergencies that will confront the new prime minister – such as the children who die every day of malnutrition and the relentless spread of corruption – but these are not going to make the evening news, unless Danny Boyle is preparing a sequel to Slumdog Millionaire. But the four crises outlined here are likely to cause the next prime minister a few sleepless nights. He could make things easier on himself by planning for them right now.

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These men would've stopped Darwin

 

 

Science research in Britain is now all about turning knowledge into business, rather than the beauty of exploration

 

George Monbiot

 

Why is the Medical Research Council run by an arms manufacturer? Why is the Natural Environment Research Council run by the head of a construction company? Why is the chairman of a real estate firm in charge of higher education funding for England?
Because our universities are being turned into corporate research departments. No longer may they pursue knowledge for its own sake: the highest ambition to which they must aspire is finding better ways to make money.
 
Last month, unremarked by the media, a quiet intellectual revolution took place. The research councils, which provide 90% of the funding for acad­em­ic research, introduced a requirement for those seeking grants: they must describe the economic impact of the work they want to conduct. The councils define impact as the "demonstrable contribution" research can make to society and the economy. But how do you demonstrate the impact of blue skies research before it has been conducted?
 
The idea, the government says, is to transfer knowledge from the universities to industry, boosting the economy and helping to lift us out of recession. There's nothing wrong, in principle, with commercialising scientific discoveries. But imposing this condition on the pursuit of all knowledge does not enrich us; it impoverishes us, reducing the wonders of the universe to figures in an accountant's ledger.
 
Picture Charles Darwin trying to fill out his application form before embarking on the Beagle. "Explain how the research has the potential to impact on the nation's health, wealth or culture. For example: fostering global economic performance, and specifically the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom … What are the realistic time­scales for the benefits to be realised?" If Darwin had been dependent on a grant from a British research council, he would never have set sail.
 
The government insists that nothing fundamental has changed; that the Haldane principle, which states that the government should not interfere in research decisions, still holds. Only the research councils, ministers say, should decide what gets funded.
 
This is the sort of humbug newspaper proprietors use. Some of them insist that they never interfere in the decisions their editors make. But they appoint editors who share their views and know exactly what is expected of them. All the chairs of the five research councils funding science, and of the three higher education funding councils (which provide core funding for universities), are or were senior corporate executives. These men are overseen by the minister for science and innovation, Lord Drayson. Before he became a minister, Paul Drayson was chief executive of the pharmaceutical company PowderJect. He was involved in a controversy that many feel symbolises the absence of effective barriers between government and commerce.
 
On 30 November 2001 the ­British ­government decided to buy large ­quantities of a variant of the smallpox vaccine called the Lister strain. The only company that possessed enough was a firm called Bavarian Nordic. On 6 December 2001, Drayson was among a small group of businessmen who took breakfast with the then prime minister, Tony Blair. At about the same time Drayson gave a donation of £50,000 to Labour. Soon afterwards, government officials sought to buy the vaccine from Bavarian Nordic. They were told that they were too late: PowderJect had just bought the exclusive distribution rights for the UK. So the government had to buy it from Drayson's company. It paid PowderJect £32m: £20m more than PowderJect had paid Bavarian Nordic. The prime minister's office and Drayson both refused to answer questions about whether the Lister strain was discussed at the breakfast in Downing Street. It is not clear if Drayson was aware at that time of the government's decision to choose the Lister strain.
 
Drayson doubtless rubs along well with the chairman of the Medical Research Council, Sir John Chisholm. He founded a military software company before becoming head of the government's Defence Research Agency (DRA). He was in charge of turning it into the commercial company QinetiQ, through a privatisation process that was completed while Drayson was minister for defence procurement. During this process, Chisholm paid £129,000 for a stake in the company. The stake's value rose to £26m when QinetiQ was floated. A former managing director of the DRA described this as "greed of the highest order". Lord Gilbert, a former minister of defence procurement, remarked that "frankly the money made by the leading civil servants was obscene … They did not contribute anything to the turnaround of the company, it was the work of the research staff that made the difference." Chisholm remains chairman of QinetiQ. Is there anyone outside government who believes that these people should be overseeing scientific research in this country?
 
In March Drayson told the Royal Society that "the science budget is safe … there will be no retreat from pure ­science". A month later this promise was broken, when the budget transferred £106m from the research councils "to support key areas of economic potential": which means exchanges of staff and research with industry.
 
Science policy in the UK is now governed by the Sainsbury review, which the government says it will implement in full. It was written by the Labour donor, former science minister and former supermarket chief executive, Lord Sainsbury. The research councils, the review says, should "be measured against firm knowledge transfer targets" to show that they are turning enough science into business. They have been told to fund £120m of research in collaboration with industry. This has been topped up with £180m from the regional development agencies. The government is also spending £150m "to change the culture in universities: boosting the work they do with a whole range of businesses and increasing commercial activity". All this is another covert bailout, relieving companies of the need to fund their own research.

 
The economic impact summaries they now write ensure that all researchers will be aware that the business of universities is business. As the white paper points out, universities are already "providing incentives (for example promotion assessment)" to persuade researchers to engage with business. If your research doesn't make someone money, you're not likely to get very far.
Even judged by its own objectives, this policy makes no sense. The long-term health of the knowledge economy depends on blue skies research that answers only to itself: when scientists are free to pursue their passions they are more likely to make those serendipitous discoveries whose impacts on society and the economy are both vast and impossible to predict. Forced to collaborate with industry, they are more likely to pursue applications of existing knowledge than to seek to extend the frontiers of the known world.
 
Knowledge is not just about impacts. It is about wonder and insight and beauty. Much might never have an application, but it makes the world a richer place, in ways that the likes of Lord Drayson would struggle to perceive.

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Dear God, stop brainwashing children

 

Johann Hari: 

 

Worship is forced on 99 per cent of children without even asking what they think

 
Let us now put our hands together and pray. O God, we gather here today to ask you to free our schoolchildren from being forced to go through this charade every day. As you know, O Lord, because You see all, British law requires every schoolchild to participate in "an act of collective worship" every 24 hours. Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray – or pretend to.
 
If they refuse to bow their heads to You, they are punished. This happened to me, because I protested that there is no evidence whatsoever that You exist, and plenty of proof that shows the texts describing You are filled with falsehoods. When I pointed this out, I was told to stop being "blasphemous" and threatened with detention. "Shut up and pray," a teacher told me on one occasion. Are you proud, O Lord?
 
Forcing children to take part in religious worship every day is a law worthy of a theocracy, not a liberal democracy where 70 per cent of adults never attend a religious ceremony. That's why the Association of Teachers and Lecturers – one of the teachers' unions – has recently moved to ask the Government to stop forcing its members to take part in this practice.
 
Why does this anachronism persist in this blessedly irreligious country? For all their whining that they are "persecuted", the religious minority in Britain are in fact accorded remarkable privileges. They are given a bench-full of unelected positions in the legislature, protection from criticism in the law, and vast amounts of public money to indoctrinate children into their belief systems in every school in the land.
 
I can understand why the unelected, faltering religious institutions cling to this law so tightly. When it comes to "faith", if you don't get people young, you probably won't ever get them. Very few people are, as adults, persuaded of the idea that (say) a Messiah was born to a virgin and managed to bend the laws of physics, or that we should revere a man who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year-old girl. You can usually only persuade people of this when they are very young – a time when their critical and rational faculties have not yet been developed – and hope it becomes a rock in their psychological make-up they dare not pull out.
But why do the rest of us allow this fervent 5 per cent of the population to force the rest of our kids to follow their superstitions?
 
Parents can withdraw their children if they choose – but that often means separating the child in an embarrassing way from her friends and exposing them to criticisms from the school, so only 1 per cent do it. Most don't even know it is an option.
More importantly still, why is worship forced on 99 per cent of children without their own consent or even asking what they think?
 
As the author Richard Dawkins has pointed out many times, there are no "Christian children" or "Muslim children". I was classed as "Christian" because my mother is vaguely culturally Christian, although at every opportunity I protested that I didn't believe any of it. Children are not born with these beliefs, as they are born with a particular pigmentation or height or eye colour. Indeed, if you watch children being taught about religion, you will see most of them instinctively laugh and ask perfectly sensible sceptical questions that are swatted away – or punished – by religious instructors.
 
I am genuinely surprised that no moderate religious people have, to my knowledge, joined the campaign to stop this compelled prayer. What pleasure or pride can you possibly feel in knowing that children are compelled to worship your God? Why are you silent?
 
The prayer-enforcers offer a few arguments in their defence. At first, they claim it instils "moral values" in children. The scientist Gregory S Paul produced a detailed study in 2005 to find out if rates of murder and rape went up as levels of religion went down. He found the exact opposite. On detailed international comparisons, the more religious a country is, the more likely you are to be stabbed or raped there. There isn't necessarily a causal relationship – but it blasts a bloody hole in this claim.
 
Of course, if you actually followed the morality explicitly commanded by the Bible, Torah and Koran, you would kill adulterers, gay people, apostates, and disobedient children and be sent to prison. Thankfully, the vast majority of religious believers long since decided to disregard much of "God's word", because it is manifestly appalling, and read it metaphorically. But you have to strip away an awful lot of the texts as metaphor before you get to a few bland lessons about being nice to each other. Can't we get the lessons about niceness from somewhere else, without the bogus metaphysics and endless injunctions to kill our friends?
 
Once the morality defence dissolves, the religious switch tack, and claim that children indoctrinated into religion perform better academically. As "proof", they point to the fact that faith schools perform somewhat better on league tables. It's true – but look a little deeper.
 
There have been two detailed studies of this, by the conservative think tank Civitas, and the Welsh Assembly. They found faith schools get better results for one simple reason: they use selection to cream off highly motivated children of the wealthy and weed out difficult, poor or unmotivated students who would require more work. Once you take into account their "better" intakes, faith schools actually underperform academically by 5 per cent (and that's before you factor in all the other problems they cause).
 
I am absolutely not saying that schools should teach children to be atheists. No. Schools should take no position on religion. They should be neutral, and equip children with the thinking skills – asking for evidence, and knowing how to analyse it rationally – that will enable them to make up their own minds, when they wish, beyond the school gates. How can a religious person object to that, without admitting that open-minded, evidence-seeking adults would see through their claims in a second?
And so, O Lord, I ask you – and the British Government – to set our children free, at last, from being forced to worship You. Amen – and hallelujah.

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Fake Faith And Epic Crimes

 

 

By John Pilger

02 April 2009
Johnpilger.com

 

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes [sic] in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, "if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves".

 

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had "universal jurisdiction" statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against "ourselves", or "our" allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the west, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial, he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. The then home secretary, Jack Straw, let him escape back to Chile.

 

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W Bush with that of Pinochet. "Outside [the United States] there is no longer the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime," he said. "So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as 'former president George Bush' [but] as a current war criminal." For this reason, Bush's first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques for use in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, said: "We have clear evidence that Mr Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture."

 

The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing 600,000 peasants to death in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, said: "I take my daily orders from Dr Kissinger."

 

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions relating to Blair's wars. Spain's celebrated judge Baltasar Garzón, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W Bush, Blair and the former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq – "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history – a devastating attack on the rule of law" that had left the UN "in tatters". He said: "There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay."

 

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the west. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa – the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

 

Today, the unreported "good news" is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once-sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at a remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R L Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: "Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter . . . I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete."

 

Blair, too, is safe – but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing "an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges", according to the international law authority Richard Falk. He cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. At present, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for the former prime minister's prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, a former judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court, E W Thomas, wrote: "My predisposition was to believe that Mr Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate."

 

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli "peace prize" worth $1m. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long exposed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister – a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his "project" and crimes is an embarrassment, and preferably forgotten.

 

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer's former leading Blair fan, declared that "this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried". He demanded, "Did Blair never ask what was going on?" This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: "Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?" In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Saddam Hussein's "contribution to international terrorism" and his "frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction". Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a "point of principle" for Blair who, he later wrote, was "fated to be right". He lamented, "Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short."

 

In the subsequent six years, at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

 

Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour – in Australia, the original Murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the "mystical" Blair in the Guardian of more than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous grovelling to the Nazis: "I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them."

 

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as "a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion". She asked him: "What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability . . . [sic]?"

 

A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about "values". Doogue said to him that "it was the bifurcation about right and wrong, that's what I thought the British found really hard [sic]", to which Blair replied that "in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was". It was his classic lie, and it passed unchallenged.

 

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his "James Bond-ish Gulfstream" where she was privy to his "bionic energy levels". She wrote: "I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?" Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. "That is war, I'm afraid," said Blair, "and war is horrible." No counter came that Gaza was not a war, but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair's task "to prepare them for statehood". The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man "has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated". The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that "women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him".

 

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a "prayer breakfast" with President Obama, the yes-we-can man now launching more war.

 

"We pray," said Blair, "that in acting we do God's work and follow God's will."

 

To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair's "faith" represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation of the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part – or who, like Alastair Campbell, offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some – might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: "Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, four million refugees, countless maimings and traumas."

 

These are indeed extraordinary times.

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Life may not be fair, but that's still no excuse for an unjust society

 

• Will Hutton
• The Observer, Sunday 3 May 2009 

 

What's "fair"? Well, it's a concept that is horribly abused. Almost everybody seems to be complaining that they are the victims of some gross injustice, showing little sense of what fairness really means. It could be Michael Caine crying out that it's not fair that he has to pay a 50p tax rate to keep some layabout in bed. Or it could be working-class voters tempted to vote BNP because they are outraged so many immigrants allegedly have automatic access to schools, housing and hospitals for which they haven't paid. Oh, it's all so unfair.

 
To those who believe fairness is a liberal value, here it is being hijacked against progressive taxation on the one hand and reasonable immigration on the other. Meanwhile, the government is so blind to the popular ideal of fairness that it tried to stop Gurkhas who had fought for Britain from settling here.
 
What is fair is difficult territory. Too many on the left assume that preferences for more equity and proportionality are so widely shared that support for liberal policies is semi-automatic. Higher rates of income tax for the better-off, Harriet Harman's Equality Bill or making public services available to everyone on the basis of need are so self-evidently the right thing to do that the mass of popular opinion will rally to one's side.
 
But it doesn't - and it won't. Fairness can be used to justify any position on the political spectrum. One of the reasons the Labour party is facing a rout at the next general election is that it has not managed to build a consensus over what is fair. The gap has been filled by a cacophony of self-interested voices insisting that the dice are loaded against them, reinforcing the sense of a government that has run out of moral authority.
 
Fairness, I think, has four dimensions and none of them is automatically liberal-left territory. There is the fairness of equity, so embedded in our DNA that four-year-olds protest at the lack of justice in not being treated as well as their brothers and sisters. There is the fairness of need: I should be helped or compensated for the bad luck of life. So if I am born into a poor family, suffer heart disease or am thrown out my job through no fault of my own I deserve your support.
 
There is the fairness of efficiency and merit: I worked really hard to get this job and I do it well; it is only fair that I should be paid more than you. The economy needs me to be given that incentive because such an expenditure of effort needs to be fairly rewarded. Lastly, there is the fairness of proportionality: I can be paid more than you for doing the same job because I am more productive.
 
This is a political minefield and unless parties of the left walk carefully, they soon find that ideas of fairness are deployed against them. And New Labour has believed in the political value of ambiguity. Thus it can appease the tabloids without being accused of inconsistency. No leadership over what's fair has been offered nor serious thought put into how these dimensions of fairness might consistently be put into action.
 
Now the party and wider society are suffering the consequences. The BNP's position is that Britain should be for the British and British means being white. Even if it formally repudiates racism, its core philosophy is about identity politics, which it masks by appeals to fairness. It argues that economic migrants can access British public services instantly on the basis of need. Although some of the wilder stories are apocryphal, there are enough real instances of housing being allocated to new immigrant families and non-English speaking children making classrooms hard to manage and so on for a growing minority of working-class families to believe that the principle of proportionality is being abused. In other words, people should only be allowed to use and consume public services in proportion to what they've paid in, rather than enjoy the benefits the instant they settle here.
 
As former Labour minister Margaret Hodge says about potential BNP voters in her Dagenham constituency, what tempts them to vote far right is not racism, but unfairness. If economic migrants were welcomed but had to wait for a phased period before they could claim the full array of benefits, as Prospect editor David Goodhart has proposed, the excuse of unfair abuse would be lifted. All that would remain would be racism.
 
Meanwhile, Michael Caine should feel embarrassed about his remark. I am sure if he were asked whether it was fair for the rich to contribute more to the public purse in times of need, the fishmarket porter's son would answer yes, along with the overwhelming majority of Britons. In the same way, even BNP voters would endorse the overwhelming majority view that Gurkhas should have the right to live in Britain, complete with unqualified access to public services. That is the proportionate and equitable bargain, given their willingness to fight and die for Britain.
 
What provides the opening to Caine and the BNP is being able to jump, with too little challenge, to a different context in which one fairness principle can trump another. Keep out immigrants who haven't paid for public services! Proportionality trumps need. Similarly, Caine uses the fairness of merit to trump the fairness of need and proportionality. It is unfair for a hard-working, merit-worthy man like him to have to pay disproportionately more for layabouts who aren't really needy.
 
It is a view echoed by much of the right-of-centre press and by popular opinion. People hate cheats, even while they consistently vote in hypothetical tests in favour of assuring the disadvantaged a surprisingly high basic income. They will support the unemployed, but only if they are unemployed through no fault of their own.
 
To get out the trap, the left has to have a clear grip on the four fairness principles, argue for them and then make sure that policy and outcomes offer critics as little chance for one fairness principle to be used as an ace against others. For 12 years, the opportunity has gone begging. Blair did try to make access to benefits tougher for perceived cheats, but he never did it as part of a wider quest for fairness. Rather, it was sold as a social crackdown. Equally, he tried to toughen the rules on immigration, but not in the name of fairness, rather in the cause of keeping foreigners out to appease the right-of-centre press.
 
Brown is no more secure about fairness, for all his anxiety to present himself as its champion. If he understood the proportionality principle better, he would be more willing to clamp down on bankers' bonuses. Equally, if he understood how ready people are to pay for generous benefits as long as there is tough action on cheats, he could have reshaped the benefits system. And a politician who understood equity could never have made such a mistake over the Gurkhas.
 
There is a consensus on fairness waiting to be built. The majority of people believe in the principles of equity, proportionality and merit and are prepared to support the needy as long as they don't cheat their way to benefits. Get the story right and the British will back progressive taxation, universal benefits and even fair immigration and we would be quicker to see Michael Caine's arguments for what they really are - self-interested and delusional.

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