She koude of that art the olde daunce

OK, the Wife of Bath — we got that. Where are we going next?

Stop that! Stop it, immediately!

Mr Cameron says so!

in a television interview, the Prime Minister was apparently critical of using “Indian dance or whatever” as part of previously compulsory two-hour time slots for sport or PE in schools as he sought to justify scrapping the targets.

He told ITV1′s Daybreak that it was something “you and I probably wouldn’t think of as sport”.

Well, give the man credit. He has to find something prescriptive to come down hard upon, else he’d have to respond to lesser matters such as the Bank of England report or the yawning Trade Gap.

… a som-no-lent pos-ture

When Malcolm is vainly fighting the old ennui, is really, really bored, when he’s run out of slugs to salt or kittens to drown, he feels moved to visit and irritate the Tories at ConHome. Actually, he’s either too reasonable or simply not very good at it, because he’s currently scoring +60 approval points.

It’s the nearest he can get to re-enacting the legend of Albert Ramsbottom (which finally explains that enigmatic sub-header):

… straightway, the brave little feller,
Not showing a morsel of fear,
Took his stick with the horse’s head handle
And shoved it in Wallace’s ear.

Confronting the enemy within

The present exchange at ConHome hasn’t been so much about the “Olympic legacy”: that amounts to a couple years’ more digging, shoving and heaving, restoring the Hackney Marshes to their primeval swampiness.

No, it’s the usual Tory stand-by of union-bashing, in particular — because teachers are away on summer hols and not likely to answer back — NAS/UWT working to the laid-down rules. For the true visceral Tory it provides a therapeutic liberation of the inner authoritarian.

Consider some examples:

¶ … the last thing we want is to go back to a time when school sport was crippled by militant union leaders embarking on a damaging and irresponsible work to rule. Ed Miliband and Stephen Twigg must condemn their union allies for standing in the way of children who want to take part in sport after school.

¶ The teacher unions are full of lazy teachers and they don’t want their well paid occupations prejudiced by having to think about sport for their pupils. Until standards generally are improved in State school teaching primarily by the right to dismiss indolent teachers without reviews, I’m afraid things won’t improve.

¶ … make it part of school contracts with the State to explicitly timetable 2 hours’ sport each day, and include sport supervision in teachers’ contracts.

¶ I believe doing things you don’t necessarily like doing is what life, and especially working life, is all about – and it is good for youngsters to realise that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.

¶ Old-fashioned rigour has lost its place in our soft-touch, over-feminized society.

¶ Boris says schools should provide two hours of PE daily 

And, soon after half-time, hostilities were resumed:

¶ Schools should be competing against each other on a weekly/fortnightly basis, even if its [sic] out-of-hours. Ideally though football/rugby/limited over cricket should be played out in fron[t] of the whole school on occasion with the pupils roaring their school on.

Including the truly bizarre (or is this an outbreak of irony in a previously irony-free zone?)

¶ I do belieave there is a big,big,big, problem with the lack of anti E.U feelings among our top mismanagement of the top three parties.    [Even more sic]

Sweet reason

The sports-for-all enthusiasts do, of course, have a axe to grind, and it is right and proper that they should be at the grit-stone. Much of the time it isn’t any lack of willing by school staff. After all, the average secondary staffroom contains more than the average of “sporting Thirds”, rugger-buggers and similar hearties. Rather the difficulties come from:

1. Lack of provision (hollow laugh at the suggestion that all schools should be providing rowing and canoeing opportunities);
2. Sheer cost — the delegation of school budgets means that any off-site resources have to be bought and paid for, including the transport, insurance, bureaucracy … Hence, so much for swimming lessons.
3. The insuperable requirement of staffing the business. While a classroom situation may justify an adult-pupil ratio in the high 20s or even 30s (not applicable in the private sector, but naturally), that would never be acceptable in a swimming pool, near a water-course or a tide-way, at a climbing wall, adjacent to javelins, weights, discoi (a classical note there, Malcolm!) … in fact in most situations which are not “team sports”. Taking an excess of staff out of the classrooms means increased numbers in the classes not off-site at that time.
4. Therefore active resistance by managers and school-leaders, not because of any lack of willing, but in the main because they know the cost of [2] and [3] above and have to balance the books.

“How much is your claim worth?”

Even that merely scratches the surface:

• Put aside any mistaken notion that it’s all down to the all-purpose Jobsworth and his guardian Elf Ann Saftee.
• All those bureaucratic “risk-assessments” are, too often, a condition of insurance cover.
• Add in a recognition of litigious parents: if a school hasn’t already painfully dealt with some, they are an ever-present lurking threat.
• Don’t necessarily blame the parents for the “compensation culture”: day-time commercial television is underwritten by floods of advertising by ambulance-chasing lawyers.

Much of this could be by-passed were Secretary Gove and his Department to accept the role and duty of being insurers of last resort: they won’t, because it’s committing a bottomless purse. So why should school managers?

The quick and the dead unwilling

Many school-students are constitutionally opposed to all that physical stuff. Stuffing obligatory PE into a particular timetable slot has, let’s admit it, the faintest whiff of Mrs Squeers’ expense of flower of brimstone and molasses, just to purify them:

If the young man comes to be a teacher here, let him understand, at once, that we don’t want any foolery about the boys. They have the brimstone and treacle, partly because if they hadn’t something or other in the way of medicine they’d be always ailing and giving a world of trouble, and partly because it spoils their appetites and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner. So, it does them good and us good at the same time, and that’s fair enough I’m sure.’

Essentially Malcolm’s sticking-point is that nothing in schools — academic, vocational, recreational, creative — is allowed to be just for fun anymore. The be-all and end-all is that strictly utilitarian notion:

it does them good and us good at the same time, and that’s fair enough I’m sure.

What’s missing is any Corinthian spirit, any sense of ars gratis artis.

There’s likely to be more of the same, if Malcolm can be induced to apply himself. Meanwhile, he’s off back to ConHome for another prod and taunt.

Before he does so, he can’t help thinking Cameron is dead wrong about “Indian dance or whatever”. From personal experience he can testify that competition for the First XI or XV is as nothing to that among girls, especially those ethnic-minority groups who find organised games a proper downer, to be included in cheer-leading squads and dance troupes.

 

Nothing new here

Down towards the known roots of Malcolm’s family tree is the Man from Brabant — still one of his more visited postings. Further back there are indisputable Norman-French, Scots Grants and other undesirable aliens.

The Lady in Malcolm’s Life has an Ulster background; and happily, like many — if not most — of her ilk, records French Huguenot ancestry. Where would the linen industry have been without them?

The Redfellow Number One Daughter lives with her American brood in New York.

Malcolm is currently seventy-odd pages into David Miles’s beautifully-written The Tribes of Britain — still in the Neolithic, but he’ll get to the later immigrants in due course. The history of British imperialism, why so much of the map was that curious pinky-red, is another bit of the story.

All of which means he isn’t greatly impressed by the BBC’s Lucy Ash recognising that London is France’s sixth biggest city.

Just as Boston and Philadelphia  probably rank close behind Dublin as major Irish cities. And the English in Paris are none too difficult to find.

We migrant humans are the Bisto that lubricates the meat-and-potatoes of life. On which Galton and Simpson put as good a definition as any into the mouth of Antony Aloysius St John Hancock:

Hancock: (Sigh) I wish I hadn’t got up now. Your dinner wasn’t worth getting up for, I’ll tell you that for a start!

Hattie: Ah, well, I don’t know, I ate mine!

Hancock: That is neither here nor there. You also ate Bill’s and Sid’s and mine. I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about. Yours just sort of lies there and sets.

Hattie: That’s the goodness in it.

Hancock: That’s the ‘alf a pound of flour you put in it! Oh, dear! (Sigh) What a life!

If Mr Salmond dared extend his referendum to all the hemi-semi-demi Scots, he’d be getting very short shrift.

Jugged in a pint pot

First the magnificent Martin Rowson:

David Cameron is taking lessons from Los Angeles on how to deal with riots.

He should be taking note of a few numbers on the way. LA is the second largest city in the Union: population 3,800,000 or so. The local gaol was designed to hold 2,300: it actually contains going on twice that number. The same is the case across the whole State of California: as of mid-July 2011 143,493 were incarcerated in California’s 33 prisons: 9,629 are being accommodated in out-of-state premises as far flung as Mississippi and Michigan. It should go without saying that those inside are disproportionately Black and Hispanic.

Things are so bad the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed an order to reduce the over-crowding: California has got to release or remove 34,000 prisoners in the next couple of years.

Alexander Cockburn would not appear on Malcolm’s list of commentators of choice, but he has a point:

There isn’t a state in the union where cops aren’t perjuring themselves, using excessive force, targeting minorities. Those endless wars on crime and drugs have engendered not merely 2.3 million prisoners but a vindictive hysteria that pulses on the threshold of homicide in the bosoms of many of our uniformed law enforcers. Time and again one hears stories attesting to the fact that they are ready, at a moment’s notice or a slender pretext, to blow someone away, beat him to a pulp, throw him in the slammer, sew him up with police perjuries and snitch-driven charges, and try to toss him in a dungeon for a quarter-century or more.

The price for decades of this myth-making and cop boosterism? It’s summed up in the absurdity of the declaration of the US Supreme Court in 2000  that flight from a police officer constitutes sound reason for arrest. Actually, it constitutes plain commonsense.

Emergency laws, rushed through by panicked politicians, are always bad. It will take America many decades, if ever, to restore civil liberties and approach  crime rationally – and this will only come with courageous and inventive political leadership in the poor communities. Britons should study carefully the lessons of America’s 40-year swerve.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Simon Hoggart , for the Guardian, was clearly not impressed by yesterday’s rant-fest in the Commons. He neatly captured the inanity and insanity in three sparse mid-piece paragraphs:

In Salford, said Hazel Blears, the effect of seeing the police do nothing had been “devastating for public confidence”. Like claiming £13,000 too much in parliamentary expenses, perhaps.

Nadine Dorries wanted teargas to be used. Why not? And how about on-the-spot death penalties?

Kate Hoey asked what exactly a gang injunction was. The prime minister replied: “They can prevent people from doing particular things.” That’s what we need, stopping people from doing particular things, the rapscallions!

London by night …

It’s a fine album by Julie London, all the way back in 1958.

Curiously, it doesn’t include the eponymous song. But we’ll have the smokey Miss London here for the glam, and also because she could put out a good jazz vocal

The definitive version is, inevitably, by Frank. He’d previously recorded it for Capitol in 1950, with an arrangement by Axel Stordahl. Then, also in 1958, he and Billy May put it on the Come Fly With Me album:

London by night is a wonderful sight,
There is magic abroad in the air.
I’m often told that the streets turn into gold
When the moon shines on Circus and Square.

Deep in the dark that envelops the Park
There’s romance in each cigarette glow.
Down by the Thames, lights that sparkle like gems
Seem to wink at each girl and her beau.

Up comes the moon when the City’s asleep —
He’s not alone, for it seems
Somewhere up there stands an angel to keep her watch,
While each Londoner dreams.

My love and I saw the sun leave the sky,
Then we kissed in the fast-fading light.
Most people say they love London by day
But lovers love London by night.

The lyric is by Carroll Coates, who is (as far as Malcolm knows) still happily with us.

That’s all a world away from the grim realities of the last few nights.

Something happened

Fear is a strange thing. It can come in a sudden wave, usually as an after-effect of shock. That was the consequence of 7/7. You’ll still notice a certain wariness among London commuters on the Picadilly Line between King’s Cross and Russell Square, or on a number 30 bus in Tavistock Square.

Other times it just grow’d, like Topsy. That was the experience of yesterday, Tuesday 9th August, 2011.

By mid-day shop windows were being boarded. Already police patrols were being more obtrusive, and deliberately so. By mid afternoon the underground and bus services were unwontedly slackening off. The rush hour somehow didn’t quite happen.

The Pert Young Piece was despatched home from her south London office early. She was not unique. She had a theatre ticket for a performance that evening. She went (to no small edginess on her mother’s part).

In London, then, it was a very quiet evening — though Malcolm reckons that the BBC and Sky news feeds were heavily followed. It was not thus in the provinces: they had it rough. Riots in Gloucester?

The silly season

These last few days may well have been a decisive turning point in English politics.

Away daze

Blasted Boris, London’s comic cuts Mayor, has lived a charmed life, trading on his laddish, caddish image. He had to do a swift return from western Canada. His predictable “stunt” was to head down to Croydon — an outer London borough with the more sensational doings of the previous night. Then on to Wandsworth, the archetypal Tory London, where they think it’s a cute idea to charge kids to use the public parks.

The sub-text of that is the Tories took the Mayorality in 2008 on the votes of Outer London and the leafier suburbs.

And Boris was booed and mocked.

Theresa May has had a remarkably good ride as the ConDem Home Secretary. She has been, above all, the “safe pair of hands” which is the prerequisite for this most slippery of government hot potatoes. There is always a curiosity over “what happens if the PM falls under the bus” — it has been most instructive that May’s name has been mentioned as a possible successor. She, too, was out-of-the-country, and out-of-touch.

After Saturday’s disturbances, when events were largely based in Tottenham, it took the Home Office until midday on Sunday to put a taling head on TV. Sadly, the “duty minister” was Lynne Featherstone, fifth in the departmental pecking order. The best that can be said of her is that, as a LibDem ministerial appointment, she makes Nick Clegg look almost capable.

Theresa May was “not available” until yesterday, when she made a less than expert fumble at supporting the police. Since the Met Police are currently in a bit of a tizz, thanks to the walk-out by Commissioner Stephenson over the Murdoch payola etc, one might have expected the smack of firm government to be coming from elsewhere. Evidently it didn’t; and the lack of effort was well noticed. Theresa May is now tarnished goods. Once the temporary inter-party truce (and, with David Davis stalking the long grass, the intra-party truce) expires, she is in for a kicking. As they say, “there are questions to be answered”.

The juiciest moment was May being Boris Johnson’s support. As Tom Watson MP, as astute as ever, noted: after ninety seconds of Johnson on video, May was out-of-there.

The Big Cheese

Which brings us to the door of 10 Downing Street, and David Cameron’s overdue return from Tuscan socklessness (as right).

By general agreement Cameron does good talk; but is lackadaisical about the underpinings — the precise obverse of his immediate predecessor in the job. Peter Hoskins’s place-holder piece for the Spectator blog-site was highly instructive (and here is its entirety):

So far as its tone went, David Cameron’s statement just now was firm and unyielding. He did express his sympathy for the victims of the riots; the emergency services, the shopkeepers, the fearful. But the major emphasis was on bringing the culprits to book. His “clear message” for the perpetrators of this destruction was that “you will feel the full force of the law”. He preceded that by describing their actions as “criminality, pure and simple — and it has to be confronted and defeated”. There were no excuses nor prevarications, and rightly so.

As for the content, it seems that the government is eager to keep this a police matter, but to ramp it up nonetheless. “We need more,” said Cameron, which included “more police on the streets” and “more arrests”. He explained that there will be 16,000 officers parading London tonight, rather than the 6,000 there were yesterday. And he also confirmed that Parliament will be recalled, for one day, on Thursday. “We can stand together in condemnation of these crimes, we can stand together in determination to fix these communities,” he finished, before marching back into No.10.

Hardly a Churchillian effort, then. It has the sniff of the second Act of King Lear:

I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall — I will do such things, —
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

The emperor is not yet unclothed, but the missing socks are a start.

Back to Miss London

Née “Gayle Peck”. See: it’s how you tell ‘em. It also helps to make it in Hollywood by running an elevator.

She did some good stuff.

Above all, she made two useful marriages: first to Jack Webb (not just Dragnet, but also as a prototype for numerous media/crime fiction crossovers) and then (for Malcolm, the legendary) Bobby Troup —alongside whom she is buried.

And looked good — as right (especially to a wannabe, hormonal teen in the late ’50s).

That London by Night album was not her best.

Still, the dozen tracks had some pointers for our current thoughts:  Something I Dreamed Last Night (#7) was The Exciting Life (#10) for some. They were probably asserting Just the Way I Am (#5). Well, Sir (1), this Cloudy Morning (#12) , That’s not for Me (#2).

OK: try this:

Two flak-catchers and questions

Anyone who had lingering warm notions of Boris Johnson’s London mayorality would have them forcibly squelched today.

Mr Bumble of West London

Advance Richard Barnes, AM, third Deputy Mayor of London — Boris’s under-strapper’s under-strapper’s under-strapper — put up to answer questions about the Tottenham pogrom (see below). Just the person who gets left behind when everyone else, with any competence, is away from the action. He was, in a phrase, piss-poor weak. He bumbled. He stumbled:

• It was everybody else’s fault.
• The Police Complaints Commission had responsibilility (and Barnes, Boris and the London Authority have no responsibilities there, so O.K.) but the Met Police, no siree (and Barnes, Boris and the London Authority are can-carriers there).
• There was no precedent for such events— this we must assume, is a coded reference to the  different skin complexion of those involved in what happened, earlier this year, in Westminster and Oxford Street. A Mr Barnes responded, when prompted, “that was totally different”.
• There was no “intelligence” (how true, how very true).
• Rehousing the burned- and bombed-out? That’s the local Council, nothin’ to do with me, guv.
• Oh, and by the way, there’s “twitter” about a repeat performance this Sunday night. One can rest assured his advisers in Scotland Yard were glad to have that one out in the open.

So: the unanswered question #1: Where is said Boris?

Even by telephone or video-link from his Turkish beach, the travertine marble loggia of his Tuscan hide-away — or wherever — a comment would have almost been reassuring.

Be of good cheer, said the angel, for things could be worse.

And, lo! They did get worse.

There are no fewer than six ministers, including the usually-all-purpose Theresa May, at the Home Office:

• Angela Browning (number three) is minister of state for crime prevention and antisocial behaviour reduction — so might reasonably to thought to have a corner in this one. No: not her.
• Nick Herbert (number four) is minister of state for policing and criminal justice, so — most definitely — could be involved here. Not him, either.

Guess who’s name is in the frame, then?

Ms Featherhead of Highgate Village

Yes, indeed: Lynne Featherstone (number five), parliamentary under secretary of state for equalities and criminal information. The walking, mouthing proof that even in this lowest form of ministerial life there is dearth of any talent, except as bag-carrier to her betters.

There is a small unanswered question here, too: since Ms Featherstone was so assertive that she had been in contact with the fountainhead, Theresa May, why was the boss not available to take the interview? Both Barnes and Featherstone were obvious fill-gaps.

After all those years, and a “career” based on delivering lines prepared by others on the awfulness and inadequacies of Haringey Council, it must have hurt, hurt, hurt to have to acknowledge the existence and competence of Claire Kober as Leader of Haringey Council.

Community?

The word of the day:

Tottenham MP David Lammy said: “A community that was already hurting has had its heart ripped out.”

Nice one, Dave! Good to hear that you are so proud to have “lived in Tottenham all my life”. A poetic truth, at best: that would be omitting the boarding school at Peterborough, and the stint at Harvard Law. And, of course, the recent removal to more suitably bourgeois quarters. But still, it’s the thought that counts.

So, which “community”?

The usual mental connection for Tottenham is with the British-Caribbean community. And that, for sure, is the root of the present aggravation. The cause célèbre is, we are told, the shooting dead of:

Mark Duggan, 29, [who] was in a car being followed by police during a covert operation on Thursday.

But Duggan, a known offender from London’s notorious Broadwater Farm Estate, became aware that he was being followed and opened fire on the officers.

He shot the officer from Scotland Yard’s elite firearms squad CO19 in the side of his chest with a handgun.

One witness said the victim was an ‘elder’ from the Broadwater Farm Estate, a short distance away. The phrase is used to describe people who are well known and respected by residents.

But Tottenham, and Broadwater Farm, is not longer the “community” it once was.

There have been several subsequent waves of new arrivals, most recently Somalis and others. The British-Caribbean “community” is certainly not any longer the dominant one. Which may be the root “cause” of many simmering resentments. Moreover, where one the “Yardies” held sway, there is now considerable competition for the turf the wrong side of the law.

So: the unanswered question #2: Whose community?

Malcolm will be looking carefully to see whose shops, whose homes, and the ethnic origins of their owners, which were torched and looted last night. He does not expect to be greatly surprised.

____________________________________________________

Anyone lost by the title of this piece should refer to Tom Wolfe:

“Now I’m here to try to answer any questions I can,” he says, “but you have to understand that I’m only speaking as an individual, and so naturally none of my comments are binding, but I’ll answer any questions I can, and if I can’t answer them, I’ll do what I can to get the answers for you.”

And then it dawns on you, and you wonder why it took so long for you to realize it. This man is the flak catcher. His job is to catch the flak for the No. 1 man. He’s like the professional mourners you can hire in Chinatown. They have certified wailers, professional mourners, in Chinatown, and when your loved one dies, you can hire the professional mourners to wail at the funeral and show what a great loss to the community the departed is. In the same way this lifer is ready to catch whatever flak you’re sending up. It doesn’t matter what bureau they put him in. It’s all the same. Poverty, Japanese imports, valley fever, tomato-crop parity, partial disability, home loans, second-probate accounting, the Interstate 90 detour change order, lockouts, secondary boycotts,, G.I. alimony, the Pakistani quota, cinch mites, the Tularemic Loa loa, veterans’ dental benefits, workmen’s compensation, suspended excise rebates–whatever you’re angry about, it doesn’t matter he’s there to catch the flak. He’s a lifer.

Cults need clipping

However questionable the source, some arguments are indisputable.

At the wrong end of Saturday’s Times, in the Money section, Andrew Ellson (“Personal Finance Editor”) was making such a point under the headline:

Religious charities need more scrutiny

His point of departure was:

On the day of the Budget George Osborne proudly boasted that his policies to encourage philanthropy amounted to “the most radical and most generous reforms to charitable giving for more than 20 years”.

The package of measures he trumpeted included plans to make it easier to claim Gift Aid (tax relief) on charitable donations; a move likely to benefit charities by tens of millions of pounds each year. What he did not mention, however, is that feeble regulation of charities means that the taxpayer is subsidising some very dubious causes indeed.

A case in point is the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

The Times did over the UCKG last November, and is commendably following up a significant scandal. Here’s the gist of the accompanying news-item, credited to Mark Bridge:

Times Money’s investigation has found that the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) has claimed £7,709,797 in Gift Aid in the past eight years. Gift Aid is a government scheme that allows registered charities to claim back the income tax paid by supporters on donations. Changes to the Gift Aid rules announced in the Budget last week are likely to make it even easier for the church to claim a public subsidy despite the serious concerns raised about its conduct…

The Charities Aid Foundation says that about 40 per cent of UK donors use Gift Aid, but only 20 per cent of those give £10 or less. The Elim Church, a Pentecostal church with more than 500 UK branches, says that it recovers Gift Aid on about 40 per cent of donations. Many mainstream charities have lower rates. For example, Leonard Cheshire Disability recovers Gift Aid on 25 per cent of donations. A spokesman for the UCKG says: “We try to be as efficient as possible reclaiming Gift Aid in all eligible donations, strictly following HM Revenue & Customs guidelines.”

The accounts also reveal that the UCKG owns a large portfolio of freehold and leasehold property. In 2009-10, the church reported that it had £33,694,515 in fixed assets, despite having operated in the UK for only 16 years. Last year it spent three quarters of total donations on the purchase of more than £7 million of fixed assets. A spokesman for the church says: “We acquire properties because, unlike other churches, we have not had the chance to build a portfolio over a thousand years. We currently own 11 freehold properties, which were purchased over a 16-year period from 1995. We also work from a further 14 leasehold properties. All 25 properties operate as ‘Help Centres’.”

The church’s accounts also state that services collectively brought in £9,683,234 of donations, equivalent to £248,288 per congregation — more than ten times the amount raised by the Church of England.

Here is an issue that should not be held back from the general public, sequestered behind the rising cost of newsprint and a pay-wall. That is why Malcolm takes the liberty of dragging it therefrom.

Ellson waxes strong on the brutal point:

Last year Times Money found that this Pentecostal church, which has about 10,000 members in some of the poorest parts of the UK, was encouraging followers into debt or to sell everything they own so that they could donate more money to the church. Pastors even used weekly sessions that were supposed to help congregants with their financial troubles to elicit more donations. Disaffected worshippers told us how they had seen their family members brainwashed and driven into poverty because of the church. We also discovered that pastors were using false testimonies of miracle healings to encourage donations…

To make matters worse, the church has failed to explain adequately how it justifies claiming Gift Aid on 61 per cent of donations when on average only 40 per cent of donors use this tax break. When you operate in the poorest parts of the UK and a large proportion of your congregation are immigrants on low incomes, such a high “recovery rate” is surprising to say the least.

He concludes with a stunning comparison:

There is no obvious distinction between the operations of the Church of Scientology, which has been branded a cult and was denied charitable status by the commission, and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. If anything, the Church of Scientology is less insidious because it, at least, receives a significant chunk of its donations from wealthy benefactors and gullible celebrities, as opposed to dirt-poor immigrants.

Anyone who has any contact with the deprived (in every sense, materially and culturally) ethnic groups soon appreciates that much that is being “sold” them in the name of faith and religion is barely a step up from witch-craft.

Nor is it a matter of income and property holdings, of pastors boasting their wealth and luxury. There is also the grim matter of “education”. Almost invariably there is an “educational” arm to these sects, posturing that their provision “supplements” or “supplants” the “inadequate” state provision. Visit any industrial estate and such a “Saturday school” is likely to exist. The lists of  examination centres “approved” by the examination boards — many of which rarely enter any candidates, but display the certificate of  ”approval” as a mask of respectability — tell their own stories. Even Michael Gove has had to take a deep breath and pull back from his original intent to allow such types to run their “free” schools. Malcolm could have told him of that when he was first mooting the proposal.

We already have one thriving educational charity rip-off in Britain: the status of the public schools. All that does is diddle the VAT payments and such. When the poorest, most vulnerable in our society are being driven into penury and drudgery in the name of “faith”, it’s time to draw the line.

Well done, Ellson, Bridge and The Times.

Ethnic politics

Malcolm lives in the London Borough of Haringey, one of the population of some 217,000. His Ward is the most “white” of the Borough: 89% white and just 5% black. This, though, is not untypical of the west end of Haringey: Fortis Green Ward is 85/5; Highgate is 87/6; Crouch End is 85/6. These Wards are not typical of the Borough, which is 61/20, though no single Ward has a black population of more than 38% (against 48% white).

Even in those Wards were white voters are massively in the majority, black candidates get elected. One for whom Malcolm had some respect, even thought he was a Tory, was Blair Greaves.

Across the Borough, all Parties (just two at the present) and all races have been and are represented in the Council Chamber. British broadmindedness?

With that in mind, Malcolm found this on today’s New York Times Opinion Pages:

The Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act this week when it ruled that it does not require states to create so-called crossover districts. The regrettable 5-to-4 ruling overturns two of the act’s central goals: protecting minority voting rights and moving the nation toward a more colorblind future.

When North Carolina redrew its district lines in 2003, it created a district with a roughly 39 percent black voting-age population. In doing so, the line-drawers divided a county into two districts, something the state constitution prohibited. But the state argued that the Voting Rights Act required it to create the district, in which minorities would be a large part of the electorate though not a majority.

The county sued, arguing that the Voting Rights Act does not require the creation of districts in which minorities are less than 50 percent of the voting-age population. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion that controlled the outcome, stated that the act is concerned only with creating districts in which minorities are a majority.

Justice David Souter, in dissent, had the better argument. He noted that in practice crossover districts that are about 39 percent black have a reasonable chance of electing minorities, which makes the districts an effective method of increasing minority representation.

He also pointed out that if the act does not require the creation of crossover districts, it will encourage states instead to pack minorities into majority-minority districts. Discouraging the sort of districts in which blacks must join together with whites will polarize voting along racial lines.

That’s quite a complex piece of linguistic juggling, and Malcolm had to read it twice to get it straight. That could be because:

• the Alzheimer’s is kicking in;

or

• because the whole notion so alien to a mere Brit: Malcolm suspects if the Electoral Commission tried to do it here, there would be blood on the streets;

or

• because it is inconceivable that the mainstream political parties in Britain would not want to balance their tickets.
  

Whatever the outcome of future elections, national or local, the respectable British Parties will seriously endeavour to represent, and be seen to represent the whole community.

One aspect of the American experience, though, is even more peculiar than this emphasis on race.

Why be so anxious to have racially-distinguished voting districts, when, for example, the position of women is so discounted?

Consider:

A record number of women serve in the U.S. Congress. Currently, 13 women (10 Democrats and 3 Republicans) serve in the U.S. Senate, while 61 women (43 Democrats and 18 Republicans) hold seats in the House of Representatives. Four of the Senators and seven Representatives are serving their first terms in Congress.

Now, that’s 14% of the lower House, and 13% of the Senate.

In the USA, there are 5 million more women than men. The difference is even greater among those of voting age.