The Daily Novel

Time: Saturday 3.15 PM. Scene: The path alongside the Parliament Hill Fields running track on Hampstead Heath. Characters: The men and children of the extended Jones family. (Granny and Mummy are having an after lunch rest.). Grandad is pushing Dulcie, just turned two, on her brand new tricycle. She has not yet got the knack of pedalling. But she can steer OK. I am well pleased.

Suddenly there is an exultant yell. Little Joe, all of four, zooms past on his sturdy blue mini-bike, father Lee running yards behind. He turns around and rides back. This time he pauses. ‘Grandad, I am riding without the stabilisers.’ Then, off he goes again. Riding up and down. The smile on his face getting broader and broader.

I am again well pleased. We now have another man in the family. I remember the day it happened to me. No stabilisers then. But I had learnt to ride with my father running behind holding the saddle until he judged I was ready to go it alone. I still get something of the same exultation when I zoom around London on my Yamaha scooter.

Time: Saturday 6.45. The kitchen in my house. Joe jumps up and says he wants to go home. Now. The conversation stops. But since it is more or less the right time for calling an end to this family get together minutes later we are all in the street loading up the car.

Joe, meanwhile, has ridden up to the top of the street. He comes zooming back downhill, speed increasing the further he goes. He steers around Granny’s clutching hands. Ignores her reasoning words. Up and down he goes while Dulcie is being strapped into the car seat. Now, it really is time to go. His father cries, ‘Joseph, come back here.’ Nevertheless it is another two turns before he is plucked from his bike and strapped into his car seat.

Leaving Grandad with words and images flooding his mind. Jeremy Clarkson pumping up the national adrenalin in prime television time. Omnipotent fantasies. William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. Repeated newspaper stories of teenage motor cyclists and car drivers bringing death and appalling injuries to themselves, their passengers and other users of the public highway.

Colin Bickley, the best diver in my class at school. I can still remember his lean brown body poised on the top board, then sweeping down in the perfect dive that produced only a ripple in the water. (Contrast: my own frequent belly flops.) I can still remember reading the story in the Wolverhampton Express & Star, when I learnt that he had killed himself, aged 17, by taking one dive too high.

The Greeks had a word for it. Icarus. But it also infects the female of the species. Flash forward to another superb high diver, the daughter of old friends of ours. Aged about 30 she hit the bottom of the pool and is now confined to a wheel chair.

I am thinking too much. Outside it is another very warm autumnal day. The Observer is lying unread on the doormat, the main headline screaming, ‘£3.68 trillion. The price of failing to act on climate change.’

I must do something before I am totally over-whelmed by all these negative thoughts. Oh, well. Just time to take the Yamaha for a spin in the country before lunch.

On Wednesday evening I went into the kitchen to relax with an aperitif before dinner. It was anything but relaxing. I walked in to a real punch-up. A bunch of Rottweilers savaging a woman. It was Michael Buerk and his team from the Moral Maze on Radio Four. By comparison, facing the much maligned Jeremy Paxman is like dealing with a Labrador who is feeling a bit disgruntled.

The subject of the programme was Adoption pegged to Madonna’s adoption of an African child. But at the time at which I entered this scene the woman who was being savaged was Emily Buchanan, who has committed an even more serious crime. She has adopted not one, but two, children from a foreign culture. (Before I go on, I should, as is the modern fashion, declare a personal interest in this story. Emily is one of my ex-students at City University, radio journalism, class of 1982.)

The particular bone of contention when I came into the kitchen was about Emily’s efforts to integrate her children into the life which she and her husband lead, and at the same time to give the children a sense of their own genetic heritage. So she has enrolled them for Mandarin classes and is learning Mandarin herself.

The Rottweilers pounced on her. She was confusing the children about their personal identity. She was bringing them up by telling them they were different from her present family. At this point I trembled on the brink of incredulity. Have Buerk and his team forgotten what it is like in the school playground? It is not only the Duke of Edinburgh who thinks the Chinese are slit-eyed. Whatever Emily and her husband do at home, it is not going to prevent their children from suffering from the obvious fact that they are not like their parents in colour and other racial characteristics.

After Emily was released to lick her bruises the Rottweilers turned their attention to the final interviewee on the programme. This was a woman whose name I did not catch, who is the head of an organisation called Transnational Adoption. She is Asian, born in Hong Kong, but adopted many years ago, when nearly all children in British schools were white, by a white couple. She grew up being the only yellow child in a white school.

She was voicing her own personal experience of what effect this had on her. She is, as she said repeatedly in answer to questions, not unhappy with her lot, but she hankers at discovering who her genetic parents were. She was speaking from the opposite viewpoint of that of Emily, and arguing that it was better to pump money into the poorer areas of the world so that children could grow up in their own cultures.

She was submitted to the same Rottweiler treatment. She was told that her organisation, was an NGO financed by the western world. Claire Fox, one of the team, told her bluntly that she was hung up on a search for belonging. Why did she not get on with her life and stop whining? Why get caught up with the current fashion of tracing your ancestry? Why did she not grow up and treat this as an intellectual problem, not a personal problem?

Her reply was not listened to. As Emily’s reply was not listened to. The panel was too busy playing the adversarial role.

On Wednesday night I thought that the Moral Maze should be chopped. But since I am an old-fashioned journalist, before I wrote this blog, I listened to the whole programme on the BBC website. And the programme as a whole was nothing like as bad as the section I heard.

Surprisingly, Madonna had quite a sympathetic reception. None of the team repeated the vitriolic attacks made on her by sections of the media in the last week or two. The Rottweilering was reserved for the people who were actually in the studio. They should have known what they were letting themselves in for. Buerk says on the BBC website: ‘The Moral Maze does not make any concessions, either intellectually or to the politeness normal in current affairs broadcasting. The intellectual vigour allows us to indulge in abuse!’

So at end week I am not starting a campaign to have The Moral Maze chopped. But I do think that the team needs to consider whether it is not getting carrying away by its over reliance on the adversarial style of interviewing.

The adversarial approach is ideal for pricking the pomposity of politicians and anyone else (including bloggers) who enter the public domain pontificating. But what was absolutely clear to the listeners in my household is that the last two interviewees were victims. And that the programme could have ended much more satisfactorily if the panel had listened to what they had to say and then debated what that meant for this important, and highly contentious moral issue.

Emily Buchanan is a victim because she wanted a child and had had several miscarriages. She chose a personal way out of that dilemma by adopting Chinese children, because she also wanted to a baby rather than the older children available in Britain. She makes this clear in her book (From China with love.) and she kept saying it on the programme when she had a chance.

The final interviewee insisted that she was not unhappy with her lot but that she does feel that she does not have a secure sense of belonging because she does not have any means of finding out about her genetic parents. She has chosen a political way out of her personal dilemma by starting her organisation to urge the western world to spend more on helping the starving children of the world in their own countries.

In the last two interviewees the team had in the studio two people with first hand experience of both sides of the issue. The affluent white middle class mother and the impoverished Asian child from the third world. Despite this they had important points of agreement. The Asian woman told of her pain at being the only non-white child in her English school. And said how much better it would be in today’s Camden Town school, where there are many colours and nationalities in the class. She clearly approved of Buchanan’s conscious attempt to include as many Chinese as possible in her social circle.

This was a wonderful opportunity for The Moral Maze to end on intellectual note. Morality is not a black and white issue, it is about many shades of grey, and black, yellow and white.

One further point. In reflecting on this programme I realised that the team is all white middle class. They do have an intellectual balance. Buerck is the middle class journalist who was stirred by the poverty he reported on in Africa. Clifford Longley is another journalist, who is a Roman Catholic. But he has had an interest in other world religions since he was made religious affairs correspondent of The Times in 1967 by the editor, William Rees Mogg, another Roman Catholic. It was a break with Times tradition because church affairs had hitherto been written about by a Church of England clergyman. Mogg, however, gave Longley a clear brief. He was to write about all religions including Islam. Longley took his brief seriously and what he learnt still illuminates what he says.

Melanie Phillips is another journalist who made her name on the leftish Guardian but was converted in her mature years to Daily Mail values. If I got the voices right she did not participate in the Rottweilering but consistently emphasised her own belief that the most important thing was a loving family for the child.

Steven Rose is a scientist, a double first from Cambridge in biochemistry. He is now a distinguished professor with a reputation for scientific studies of how the brain works.

Claire Fox is another journalist. She has a far left background. I first came across her when she was the publisher of Living Marxism, who famously accused ITN of faking a report on Serbian atrocities. The subsequent libel suit from ITN bankrupted the magazine. Fox now runs the Institute of Ideas, ‘an agenda-setting organisation committed to forging a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint.’ Her editor at LM, Mick Hume, is now a columnist for The Times.

This year the Maze recruited another panellist, Michael Portillo, who does talk a lot of sense about moral and political issues. He is at least half Spanish.

Now I know the Maze is concerned to avoid ‘political correctness’. But surely on intellectual grounds there is case for having in multi-cultural Britain 2006 a panellist who is non-white. And a panellist who is Muslim.

That would give them a different perspective on a whole range of moral issues which are concerning the media every day. And it bring to this important programme the prespective of someone who knows how it feels, to be non-white or Muslim in Britain 2006.

Yesterday was a bad day. Went over early to my youngest daughter’s flat to do a couple of simple jobs. Replace the string pull switch in her bathroom and fix the sticking mortice lock on her front door. Failed on both counts. Could not deal with the maze of wires over my head. Found that the lock was kaput. So had to find an electrician and get a new lock. Too fed up to write a blog.

Today started better. Went early with the electrician and I fitted the new lock while he did the bathroom light. We then both spent half an hour looking for the keys to the new lock which I had unaccountably lost. Gave up. But the electrician spotted them hanging from a branch of the potted plant as he was going out through the door.

While doing-it-myself I was writing today’s blog in my head. It was to be up-beat about something good happening in the world for once. Serge Lourie, the liberal democratic leader of Richmond upon Thames council, is planning some really effective sounding measures which he claims will reduce CO2 emissions by 15 per cent. He is proposing to up the annual cost of parking permits so that those with Jaguars and BMWs will pay three times the standard £100 for the privilege of parking on the street outside their house. And if they have more than one car per household they will have to pay 50 per cent more for any extra permits.

Wonderful, I thought, that in this age of increasing centralisation, Lourie is showing us that a local council leader can still make a difference. And what a contrast to the pussy-footed approach of both Bush and Blair to climate change realities.

By the time I sat down to the keyboard second thoughts were bubbling up. If my own council had introduced such a measure it might have made a difference in my street of nineteenth century terraced housing, where rich and poor have to park on the street.

Richmond is not like that. They have space and not only in Kew Gardens and Hampton Court. The affluent who own most of the worst offending cars mostly live in detached houses with large gardens and big front drives, many capable of taking three or four cars. So the only time the biggest offenders will need parking permits is when they give huge lunch parties during the working week.

I am now confident that Lourie’s 15 per cent figure is an ill-informed guess. Even to make a start at a proper estimate you would need to know who owned the worst offending cars and where they lived. To discover that would require a three-year fully funded research study. And, of course, even after doing that you would still be guessing about whether the extra £200 a year would really change the behaviour of those who were able to shell out £40,000 and upwards for their favoured cars.

Regretfully I am forced to conclude that this as one more example of the erosion of local government in Britain. Parking charges is one of the few revenue raising possibilities left to councils. Which is why there are two parking meter wardens patrolling my street every day. (For comparison it is worth reporting that it is several months since I saw a bobby on the beat in the whole neighbourhood, not just in my street.) The only certain difference this proposal will make is that it will increase Richmond council’s revenue from parking.

Which groups waste most NHS money?

Is it:

A. Smokers
B. Drinkers of alcohol
C. Those who eat too much food
D. NHS managers
E. Big companies
F. Politicians

This question is provoked by news of yet more discriminating measures against smokers. Health service authorities in Norfolk and North Staffordshire are refusing non-emergency operations, like hip-replacement, to smokers.

It is perfectly true that some smokers who die slowly of cancer use up a big chunk of health service money. However, other smokers die quite quickly, particularly those who have heart attacks, which are more likely amongst smokers. But in terms of the cost to the economy it does not follow that even those smokers who die slowly of a smoking related disease are costing the health service more. If they had given up and lived longer they would have eventually contacted other diseases which be expensive to treat.

Drinking too much is a much bigger killer than smoking. And it not only costs the NHS in treating the drinker, it creates a huge bill for those injured in accidents caused by drink driving and for those who are beaten up by drinkers whose aggressions have been released by alcohol.

Eating too much - and the latest study shows that British young people are nearly top of the world league in terms of obesity - also makes people vulnerable to all sorts of expensive to treat diseases, notably heart attacks. Almost certainly over-eating is a bigger drain on the health service. But of course it would be very difficult to prove statistically.

I hope this demonstrates the absurdity of economic case for discriminating against smokers, rather than heavy drinkers or excessive eaters. I could have easily expanded the list. What, for instance, is the cost to the national health service of the current fashion for extreme sports?

If we really want to reduce NHS spending I suggest that the best targets are:

Those health service managers who advocate this kind of thinking and who are eroding the Hippocratic oath which doctors subscribe to.

Those big companies which pedal the drinking culture, including those who own pubs which encourage binge drinking.

Those big companies (and small companies) who pedal the most fatty foods. And the biggest quantities of it. Pubs and restaurants throughout Britain serve far too much of the fattiest foods. Since I am a smoker, who does not need food for comfort, I frequently leave half on my plate.

Those politicians who encourage the climate of opinion which targets just one easy target, instead of the politically more dangerous option of challenging the conventional wisdom of the times.

But finally on behalf of all smokers I must point to the obscentity of the allegation that we are a drain on the economy. Quite apart from what I have said above, smokers contribute hugely through extra taxation to the NHS and all public services. My pack of Camels a day contributes £1,653 year to tax revenues at current rates of taxation. My lifetime consumption would have contributed about £88,000 at current tax rates.

The only global figures I could find quickly just now come from Forest, the smokers’ pressure group. They say that in 2003 the revenue from smoking was £7 billion against the NHS estimate for treating smoking related diseases which was £1.5 billion.

I rest my case, m’lud.

President Bush at his press conference yesterday, and Tony Blair, at his press conference last week, insisted that there were to be no immediate changes in Iraq policy. Both leaders were desparately trying to regain their authority in the face of the steady stream of evidence this month that they are losing all four wars they are fighting; the war to resist the Taliban in Afghanistan, the war to oust Saadam Hussein, the war against Hizbullah in Lebanon and the war against terror.

All four wars are failing because of the mistake made in 2003 when Bush decided to start bombing Iraq without waiting for the outcome of efforts in the United Nations to win support from as many countries as possible for action in Iraq. Blair, despite the strong opposition in his own party (including several members of his cabinet) gave his support.

That produced what will surely go down in history as one of the most astonishing contradictions ever. Two of the oldest democracies in the world joined together in attempting to impose democracy on a third country, by the use of the overwhelming military force possessed by the United States. Although the survey results which suggested that 600,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives thanks to Bush’s war have been queried, there is growing evidence from several sources that more civilians have been killed since 2003 than during the whole of Hussein’s rule. That is why increasingly American and British troops are regarded as invaders, rather than policemen.

In retrospect, the most critical event this month has been the intervention by the British Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, who called for a withdrawal from Iraq sooner rather than later. At his press conference last week Blair kept insisting that he agreed with everything that Sir Richard had said. In the same press conference he insisted that he had not changed his own position, insisting that our troops should remain until the job was done, even if that took several more years.

Two other British generals came out supporting his arguments. All three are still in office. The spokesman for the US forces in Baghdad, General William Caldwell, did not enter in to the political debate, but he made it quite clear that he thought the war was not being won.

In the press both The Economist in Britain and the Washington Post dealt raised the question as to whether we should withdraw. The clearest statement came from the Post. Their leader, and this from a paper which despite its liberal stance has been distinctly hesitant to oppose an American led war in which American lives are at risk.

The headline was: ‘Change course in Iraq. Bush must revise the US strategy.’

The definitive paragraph was:

‘The best option that has not yet been tried is a peace conference attended by all the Iraqi parties, as well as Iraq’s neighbors, the United Nations and other powers, such as the European Union and the Arab League. Similar conferences brokered the end of civil wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Congo. The United States and other outside powers cannot impose a solution, but they can press the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to make the deals they know are needed: on oil revenue; on an amnesty for insurgents and former Baathists; on the terms by which Iraq may be divided into federal regions.’

Immediate withdrawal, in the Post view, is not an option, because of danger of worse carnage and the damage that would do to America’s reputation. But, whatever they say in public, both Bush and Blair must be desparately looking for an exit strategy.

The exit strategy will have to be some kind of political solution. Because it has to satisfy the warring factions in Iraq, the democratic government in Lebanon, and it has to be a way forward that will keep the peace between the Israelis and the Arab nations in the middle east. Because the military solution has not only failed it has lost the support of most of the American and British electorate.

In America Bush will have to take account of that because the Democrats are clearly going to increase their strength in the mid-term elections on 7 November. In Britain, Blair has not yet had an effective challenge to his Iraq policies by other politicians. But there has been a squawk from the first cuckoo of autumn.

Clare Short, who as international development secretary in his cabinet, first tried to argue the case for an international and political solution and finally resigned from the cabinet some months after the Iraq war began. At the end of last week she went one step further and declared that she was no longer going to obey the Labour whip.

It was an invitation to the Labour leadership to make a martyr of her by expelling her from the party. That invitation has not yet been taken up. Nor is it likely to be. The electorate of the Labour Party will shortly be asked to exercise its democratic rights. Presently the leading contender is still Gordon Brown. He may have been helped by that section in David Blunkett’s memoirs, serialised last week, which report that he consistently opposed the Iraq war in cabinet. But his public pronouncements have frequently been more beligerant than those of Blair.

If he is going to win the leadership he will have to develop a coherent policy on what to do about the current debacle in Iraq.

(One of the little commented on features of the new Daily Telegraph is that it has a female motoring correspondent, Erin Baker, who has just passed her driving test on a Harley Davidson. Yesterday she wrote a column, ‘Which bike should I get, guys?’ This is my reply.)

Dear Erin

You’ve done it. Shown the men that you can master one of those over-long cumbersome Harley Davidsons. But now you are asking the wrong gender the wrong question.

Trust your own instincts. Motor cycling is not just about which brand you choose. And there is more than just motor cycling issues for you to consider. Think of the readers. You are one of the few prominent women on the new Daily Telegraph. Do you think women readers want you to ask the men to advise you about what to do with your life?

So I am not going to advise you. But I will tell you about the joys of motor cycling as I have experienced them myself.

My first bike was a 1928 Raleigh 250 cc motor cycle. (Yes. It is the same company which still makes the bicycles. They did not start making motor bikes until 1928. They stopped in 1929 because the gloomy buggers amongst the management said they should not try and establish a new product when the stock market was crashing around their ears.)

The 1928 Raleigh was quite as long as the Harley and probably heavier. It appeared to be made of iron. The saddle could have been made of steel. And it was quite a trial getting it into the shed by the side of my house. But it only set me back £15 so I was able to pay for it out of my own pocket money.

And it transformed my life. It gave me a skill that once learned is never forgotten. And it enabled me to combine a totally enjoyable personal indulgence with my work life. By the time I started my first job as a financial journalist I was riding a Lambretta 150 cc scooter. I could wear my motor cycle boots under my suit. And the scooter gave me sufficient protection from the rain that I rarely had to use the spare pair of trousers I kept at the office.

It enabled me to welcome the end of Fleet Street. I could get to Wapping and Canary Wharf in half the time it took my colleagues using cars or taxis. And one third of the time it took those using public transport. And I could get a view of the river on the way.

Today I ride a Yamaha 250 cc motor scooter. It does 90 miles an hour if I care to break the law. It can beat a Harley in getting away from the traffic lights if I am in a hurry. But I am not usually in a hurry. That is the advantage of having a motor cycle. You know you can always get there quickly even when the motor cars are gridlocked. The under-seat storage is so big that I can get a small laptop in, along with everything else I need.

But motor cycles need a powerful voice in the press. Ken Livingstone loves bicycles but he thinks motor bikes are just as bad as motor cars on pollution grounds so he is thinking of imposing the congestion charge on them. Worse still, although he is extending motor cycle lanes, he has not increased the number of motor cycle bays to take account of the increasing numbers using motor bikes to get to work. It is, for instance, almost impossible to find a free motor cycle space near to the House of Commons.

Finally, one piece of advice. Don’t grow your hair so that everyone on the road can see you are a woman. Riding the open road frees you, in the age of full face helmets, from the assumptions other people make about the different genders.

How do I know this, since I am not a woman? Because this temporary anonymity applies to age as well as to gender. I remember being stopped by a policeman for turning left against a ‘No left sign’ notice, partly obscured by the branches of a tree.

‘Take off your helmet.’, he ordered me peremptorily. When I hesitated, my anger rising, he said, ‘That’s an order’. I decided not to argue so I obeyed. I saw the astonishment in his eyes, when he was suddenly confronted by a bald head. He was speechless for a moment. Then, in quite a different tone of voice, he listened to what I had to say. He even called me, ‘Sir’.

So, mam, make your own decisions about that bike. And, above all, enjoy it.

Cheers

Robert Jones

But on the way decided to give my beloved Yamaha 250 cc scooter a trip to the country. In the time available it had to be Hertfordshire. As soon as I got on to the first long stretch on the A41 heading for Holborn I knew it was the right decision. I opened the throttle and the throbbing of the engine echoed through my body, vanishing he lingering depression.

As soon as I cross the Finchley Road I have a vista of the country in front of me. Make a mental note. Must keep an eye on John Prescott in case he tries to abolish it with his zeal for building houses. By the time I get near to Watford the exhiliartion has increased in tune with the rising volume of the voice of the engine.

Turn right into the empty lane leading to Letchmore Heath. I’m here at last. Suddenly the pond is right in front of me, decorated with several new families of geese and their young. Time to smoke my last fag. Sit on the bench and enjoy the long exhalation.

On the other side of the pond a young man in a red anorak is teaching his four-year-old son to ride a bike. I watch him as he holds the saddle while his son gradually increases his speed on the run down to the pond. His wife trots along behind. They repeat the trip two more times and I am waiting for that magic moment when the father removes his hand and the son realises that he can do it on his own.

It does not happen. The father decides that he is not quite ready for it. The bike is stored in the boot of their car parked on the other side of the pond and they start walking towards me, the three of them hand in hand. It is a perfect autumnal day, with the sun shining through wispy clouds and half the leaves on the trees already reddish brown.

When they arrive at my bench the illusion of tranquillity is shattered. The child between them looks happy enough. But the faces of the adults are full of strain and suppressed anger. Have they had a marital tiff? Or are they consumed with the strain of modern living? The man looks much older than he looked in the distance. Perhaps he has to work 16 hours a day in order to pay the mortgage on his house in the country.

They pass me and I spend a little more time drinking in the scene. Time for me to go. As I turn around I see them in the distance walking in the distance across an open field, still hand in hand. The illusion is restored. They look the ideal subjects for a cornflake commercial with appropriate music playing in the background.

Journalists, above all, should be careful about getting over-excited about requests that they ’spy’ on their colleagues and their students. Spying is part of the job. Inevitably, the journalist will from time to time discover people breaking the laws of the land, including amongst them the bosses of big companies. Inevitably, the journalist covering the IRA or the war against terrorism, will be meeting regularly with people who are the enemies of his country. Inevitably, foreign correspondents will have to consort with the enemy if they are going to do their job properly of reporting the views and feelings of those in the country in which they are working.

How the journalist deals with such matters cannot be governed by a set of rules. The issues cover many shades of grey. Some journalists think that journalists should refuse to be debriefed by the intelligence services when returning from certain foreign assignments, which used to be almost routine. I don’t take that view. But clearly the journalist needs to be very careful in what they say in such interviews. Even the finest journalists, notably George Orwell, sometimes reveal too much about colleagues and contacts.

So how much should we worry about the current furore arising from the leaked proposals from the Department of Education and Skills asking university staff on ‘Asian-looking’ or Muslim students and pass on details to Special Branch. This was the main Guardian front page story on Monday morning. Downing Street yesterday went into damage limitation mode, claiming they wanted university teachers to promote pluralism. Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary insisted that teachers were being asked to ‘monitor’ not spy. Weasel words. And coming from someone who is supportive of those faith schools who want to get exemption from the law against discriminating against gay students and teachers.

As with the row over the niqab, which is still rumbling, the underlying issues are the authoritarian streak of Blairism which leads some ministers to blindly go down a path which whips up the fears of middle England. The DES document is not just a matter of ill-chosen words by civil servants in the DES. It reflects profound worries about policies and pronouncements of ministers.

It is ministerial behaviour that produced the rare spectacle yesterday of complete unanimity between the education unions and the boss’s organisation, now called Universities UK. (This is the body which used to be called the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, renamed by one of the Thatcher governments.) Their President said: ‘there are dangers in targeting one particular group within our diverse communities of students and staff.’ The joint general secretary of the University and College Union, Paul Mackney, was even more emphatic: ‘We expressed concern that we were being sucked into a kind of Islamic McCarthyism which has major implications for academic freedom, civil liberties and the blurring of boundaries between the illegal and possibly undesirable.’

All this reminded me of one Friday evening at the start of the first Iraq war, when America and Britain responded robustly to Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Just after 6 PM my vice-chancellor suddenly appeared in my office and plonked himself down in the student chair. He had just returned from the monthly meeting of the then CVCP at which they had been urged to check up on any Iraqi students on campus. I had two, he told me.

I put his mind at rest. I told him that one of them was an Iraqi Kurd, who had refugee status because it was a danger for him to return to Iraq under the then regime. The other, a mature Ph D student, was a professor at the University of Baghdad with a distinguished record of challenging his own government on matters within his discipline.

Then, I said, that perhaps I should not have told him details of my students. I reminded him that when I came to City University in 1979 the first course I had to host was one teaching journalism to the warring factions of Southern Rhodesia, in preparation for full independence and the creation of Zimbabwe. Then we had in the classroom students who had been with Robert Mugabe in the bush and told graphic stories in the pub of strangling their opponents.

I reminded him further that we had hosted another summer course for the most extreme Muslim organisation of its time, which wanted to teach journalism skills to young Muslims. The course included an element of what I would call indoctrination from some of the Muslim teachers. But I had no problem on teaching on it. And some of the students on that course came back to City to do our one-year-MA in International Journalism and got a thorough grounding in the difficult job of journalism.

That conversation ended in complete agreement between myself and the vice-chancellor about how such matters should be handled.

But that was more than twenty years ago. Since then the old liberal assumptions about university education have been seriously eroded. The threat of terrorism is being used by the new authoritarians who believe in an old-fashioned top-down management that is quite inappropriate in a university. The university’s trade union now contains an equally authoritarian faction who want to compel university teachers to boycott Israeli universities because of Israeli government policies.

Quite as damaging as these trends are the emphasis on short-term financial considerations in deciding academic priorities. This includes prioritising vocational subjects which are championed in the hope of bringing economic benefits. Many universities are now facing waves of redundancies based on these new criteria.

It is now necessary to fight for values which used to be taken as read. Universities should be debating chambers. They should provide an opportunity for students to learn from their fellow students and the more cultural diversity there is in terms of ethnic origin and subjects studied the better.

There has been a lot of ‘news’ this week which I would like to have reported upon. This article takes several events together and considers what, taken as a whole, they tell us about the world in which we live. The fact that these events have happened at the same time is just co-incidence. But when considered together they represent a challenge to some prevailing basic assumptions.

Probably the most sensational story of the week was the one in the British Medical Journal which suggested that the Iraq war had resulted in the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis. This figure is more than ten times greater than any of the ‘official’ estimates. It was immediately dismissed by the White House although the Downing Street response was much more muted. The figure is an estimate made by teams of medical researchers who interviewed a sample of Iraqis asking how many people they knew had died. Such statistical analyses are subject to error. But even allowing for the biggest statistical margin of error the survey’s findings suggest deaths of more than 350,000.

The result was published, not in the capitalist press, but in the official journal of the British doctors. The research was conducted under the guidance of Johns Hopkins university, one of the most respected American universities. Furthermore, it showed a six fold increase in the number of deaths compared with a similar survey done by the same group in 2004. By the end the week officialdom had still not managed to demolish the story by publishing any definitive and reliable figures. If accurate the story means that roughly twice as many Iraqis have died than died during the Sadam Hussein regime, whose toppling was the trigger for the Iraq war. The deaths have resulted from civil war between rival Iraqi factions as well as the bombing and shooting by the armies of America and its allies. Even officialdom does not deny that three years after the war began the death toll is now bigger than it was in the first year.

The second most sensational story was delivered in Friday’s Daily Mail, a fully paid up member of the capitalist press. It was based on a long interview with the head of the British army, General Sir Richard Dannatt. He proposed that we should get out of Iraq soon or risk serious consequences for both British and Iraqi society. He said: ‘I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing around the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.’ And later: ‘As a foreigner you can be welcomed by being invited in a country, but we weren’t invited…………..The military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in.’

We will leave aside the issue as to whether the General should have said such things. (My wife said that in the olden days he would have been court-martialled and shot.) But by weekend he has neither resigned nor been fired.

Next item, which broke yesterday. The Oxfordshire coroner conducting the inquest into the death in Iraq of ITN correspondent, Terry Lloyd, ruled that by the standards of British law his killing was ‘unjustifiable homicide’. He found that the journalist had been killed by American bullets and that the Americans had not acted in self-defence. He wants the troops concerned to be charged with murder in the British courts.

Co-incidentally, further allegations about the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay emerged resulting in still more calls for its closure.

North Korea conducted a successful test nuclear explosion. By end week the United Nations was still arguing about what to do about it. But what is absolutely clear is that neither the UN, nor anyone else, will be able to stop the further growth in the size of the nuclear club. It is only a matter of time before Iran and other nations develop the expertise to make nuclear weapons.

Not on the front pages, but well covered inside, was the news that the American population is due to hit 300 million next week. The devil is in the detail not in the global figure. The reason American population is increasing more rapidly than the rest of the developed world is immigration, and particularly immigration from of Mexicans, who are categorised as Hispanics. It is now estimated that by 2050 the non-Hispanic white population will be down to 50 per cent; Hispanics will be 24 per cent, African Americans 14 per cent and Asians 8 per cent. We shall all have to get used the fact that increasingly America is not an Anglo-Saxon country.

Meanwhile the row over last week’s remarks whether Muslim women should be asked to take off the niqab ran all week. This morning Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, entered the fray with his views on the subject.

What does all this mean?

First, the contradictions in American and British policy over the war against Iraq and the war on terror are now abundantly clear. Although Bush was talking about staying in Iraq until 2008 he was whistling in denial of the opinion polls, which show that his wars are becomingly increasingly unpopular with the American public. Neither Bush nor Blair is credible in their assertions that the rise of Muslim fundamentalism is nothing to do with American and British war-like solutions.

In terms of personalities Blair is soon to depart the scene. It is by no means certain that there will be a smooth passage of power to Gordon Brown. The likelihood is that there will be quite a tough fight for the Labour leadership and that this fight might let in the Conservatives under their new leader, David Cameron, who had a good week, helped, rather than hindered, by the Labour MP who did a spoof satirical video on the internet inviting viewers to sleep with Cameron’s wife.

In America Bush is surely as crippled as Blairism is in Britain. The mid-term elections are likely to weaken him further. The ethnic changes in the American population will have political effects. Bush’s brand of right-wing Christian fundamentalism is unlikely ever again to result in a Republican majority. Republican attitudes and policies will have to change; otherwise the next American President will be a Democrat.

More speculatively global politics are undergoing their biggest change since the Berlin wall came down. Then communism was vanquished, the Soviet Union was broken up and American cultural imperialism was thought to have triumphed. No future American President will be able to act as the police chief of the world.

Unless, of course, the democratic process leads to someone as mad as Dr Strangelove getting the job.

British law lords yesterday yesterday struck a blow for serious investigative journalism. They overturned a judgment of the lower courts against the Wall Street Journal ruling that the media could once again use the ‘public interest’ defence when faced with libel actions by rich and powerful figures.

We should not celebrate too much, however. We have been here before. The British libel laws have been famously more restrictive than those in the US, where press freedom is underlined by the written constitution. The First Amendment gives every citizen, and the press, the right to express strong views about the behaviour of those in power. In Britain the dice has been heavily loaded against the press and any ordinary citizen who speaks out against those exercising power; including the whistle blowers who have the courage to reveal abuses of power in the big companies which employ them.

The British defamation law puts the onus of proof on the party making the allegation. That means the newspaper has to prove every allegation it makes. The allegedly injured party does not have to disprove what the newspaper has alleged. On the face of it this seems fair. It seems an extension of the legal principle that the accused is innocent until proved guilty.

In practice it has made it easy for the powerful to stifle serious investigative journalism even before it is published, through the use of injunctions. The powerful can employ the best lawyers to press their case. Even large media organisations, who have to answer to their shareholders for spending large sums of money, find it difficult to cope with such pressures.

The breakthrough came in 2001 when the law lords ruled in favour of the Sunday Times, who had made serious allegations of financial impropriety against the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds. The law lords then ruled that the newspaper did not have to prove every single allegation so long as it could show that it had acted responsibly and in good faith. One law lord set down a list of rules journalists should follow in such cases.

This proved unduly restrictive and made it easy for lawyers acting for the powerful to push the onus of proof back on the newspapers. In effect, newspapers had to show that they had got it right each step along the way of a time-consuming and difficult investigation. This is always difficult in serious investigative journalism, because newspapers never get hold of all the facts, and particularly in complex financial cases, the tactical advantage is always with the powerful person accused.

Co-incidentally, the present Irish prime minister is currently facing allegations of financial impropriety in his past, and is fighting to discredit them.

By contrast it is easy for newspapers to attack the powerless. For instance, the school teacher who touches a child, which can be interpreted as assault or sexual impropriety. They have neither the money nor the expertise to enlist the law on their side, so that newspapers can, and do, destroy their careers.

This kind of behaviour gets the press a bad name. And quite right too. But it also makes it easy for the powerful to pose as victims of a vindicative press.

As did Robert Maxwell, the late larger than life media tycoon, when two or three journalists, myself included began to investigate his business activities in the 1960s. During that battle Maxwell libelled me. He wrote a letter to Lord Thomson the proprietor of The Times accusing me of carrying out a ‘personal vendetta’ against him. As a direct result I was taken off the story.

I could have sued him myself. Except that no-one had told me that the letter existed. (I found it on The Times files years later when I was doing another piece of work for them.)

So yesterday’s judgment should be regarded as one small battle won. But the lesson for would-be investigative journalists is that the war is far from won. In Britain, unlike in Russia, the powerful do not kill you. But they can still make life pretty unpleasant.