Charles Moore
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Listening to the Chilcot hearings, I notice the usage that various government departments are described as ‘customers’ for intelligence. The word is an example of the bastard Thatcherism which has afflicted the public service in the 21st century. In a similar way, permanent under-secretaries are called ‘chief executives’ now, with ‘bonuses’ to match. The language of commerce should be fundamentally different from that of government. If the Tories win they should re-establish the linguistic difference.
Much controversy surrounds the collection of government programmes called Prevent, which seek to counter the extremism which leads to terrorism. A House of Commons select committee is inquiring into it at present. Here is some evidence submitted to the committee: ‘We need to seriously consider [sic] the prevent agenda sitting within Cohesion and being more acceptable to general Social Cohesion rather than its current Counter Terrorism base. However there may need to be caution of the danger’s [sic] of this being too politicised if we adapt this format.’ Clearly some sort of meaning is struggling to get out here, but failing. ‘There has never been in any case in history to such effective mapping apart from the Martian era in American pre the second world war,’ the evidence goes on. Other bits are clearer — attacking the government over foreign policy, complaining that anti-extremism programmes are concerned with Islam, and protesting that Prevent engages with moderate Muslim groups such as Quilliam. At no point does this evidence admit that terrorism (unless it be ‘right-wing’) is a problem at all. Yet this evidence is submitted by the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP). Now it turns out that NAMP was not aware that its submission to a select committee would be public. Embarrassed, it has rushed out a statement that it does support Prevent after all. This incompetent and opinionated body has a formal role in many public programmes, including in Prevent itself. Yet why should there be a police organisation dedicated to a particular religion or race, except as a friendly, social institution with the same status as, say, a police rugby club? What would people think if a Catholic Police Association started to claim that Catholics were offended by police surveillance of dissident Republicans in Northern Ireland, or by Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands, or the fact that condom vending machines are widely available in pubs?
Last week’s Notes argued that drunkenness in city centres should not be dealt with by new laws, but by local leaders who understand the detail of the problem in their areas. Further support for what might be called the environmental approach comes from a forthcoming learned article by my wife in our parish news. She is concerned about the effects of electric light on wildlife. Rare bats become confused by too much artificial light, and birds, encouraged to sing by what they mistakenly believe to be dawn, become exhausted and disorientated. She suspects that human behavioural problems are also related to street-lighting: it disturbs sleep patterns, for example. She also points out that drunken people would not career around town centres singing, shouting and punching one another if they could not see what they were doing. Although we are now obsessed with reducing energy consumption, we seem to assume that our towns must be as bright as day all through the night. Bring back the blackout.
I must admit to feeling sorrow at the news that the colossal statue of Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbashi (father of the Turkmens) is to be removed from its glorious prominence in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. The statue, which is golden, shows Turkmenbashi, in suit and cloak, waving. It rotates, so that the leader always faces the sun. I have seen it, and also the mosque decorated with his thoughts, intermingled with texts from the Koran, the statue commemorating the city’s earthquake of 1948, showing his mother holding him, a golden child, above the destruction. They are wonders of the world, in a way. Niyazov died four years ago, and now his successors are trying cautiously to expunge his omnipresence. Of course they are right: he was a semi-lunatic (one of his quirks was to abolish all doctors outside the capital city: thousands died). But from the historical point of view, one must regret that the edifices of past rulers are expunged. After a few centuries have slipped by, the survival of the buildings makes them interesting even if their creators were monsters. Who thinks that Aztec temples should be razed because they were the scene of human sacrifice? Besides, Turkmenbashi had his good points. Whenever weather forecasters predicted wrongly, he sacked them.
Hunting recently, we had followed our ‘trail’ very closely for an hour and half when our apprentice whipper-in, aged 17, lost a shoe. His father is a farrier, so he rang him on his mobile phone, and suddenly, there his father was, shoeing the horse in the lane — a neat blend of old and new technology.
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