Lurches to the Right
I didn't even realize there was a vacancy, but apparently UKIP have elected a new leader, in the form of Lord Pearson. On Channel 4 News he was coming out swinging on the "Islamicisation" of Britain, throwing some extra petrol on the flames with references to "Gender Apartheid". (Not without an element of truth, but not exactly the language of productive cultural dialogue, either.) Perhaps this was led by him having to admit to some Govesque muddling of his facts on the detail of this (he'd been lumping convertions and immigration in with "endogenous" demographic increases), but if it's indicative of a new tack on their part, it's more than a little alarming. Under Farage (who'd it turns out has resigned to concentrate having a pop at the Speaker) they maintained some sort of superficial gloss of being anti-EU on grounds of "civic nationalism", and some sort of "pro-business" argument against "eurocracy". (Kilroy's regime you'd have to just characterise as "lunatic grandstanding", as imprecise as that might be in policy terms.) They now planning on tacking away from that particular wing of British Conservatism, towards the outright Tory backwoodsmen, if not to say the BNP? Perhaps one can hope that this territory will get so crowded they'll trample all over each other.
Then there was an Unreported World documentary on "ultra-Orthodox" Judaism in Israel. There was footage of social workers being harassed in their own homes for "interfering" with Haredi families (i.e. applying child protection laws), and of women being forced -- or at least, persistently "cajoled" (this was with a film crew present, mind you) -- to quite literally sit at the back of the bus. And not any sort of "designated Orthodox bus", mind you -- this is the state-run public bus system.
And of course there are those Hizb ut-Tahrir "linked" schools in the UK. The facts about actual organisation links seem pretty murky, but we had some pretty lurid quotes from Farah Ahmed, one of the head teachers, to the general effect of "we must protect our children by systematically indoctrinating them against every single value and tenet of Western liberalism". Can anyone look at Northern Ireland and Scotland and tell me, with a straight face, that segregated "faith-based" education of pretty much any sort isn't a ludicrously bad idea? And that's "only" with different Christian denominations. Do England and Wales really want to create such a set of problems for themselves, essentially out of whole cloth? For the sake of supposedly motivating a bit more parental involvement, and slightly higher test scores?
Guess those circular firing squads are by no means an exclusively "progressive" phenomenon.
(Esler doing Newsnight, Wark doing N. Review, and Gove on both -- Scottish media mafia is in full flood, tonight.)
Then there was an Unreported World documentary on "ultra-Orthodox" Judaism in Israel. There was footage of social workers being harassed in their own homes for "interfering" with Haredi families (i.e. applying child protection laws), and of women being forced -- or at least, persistently "cajoled" (this was with a film crew present, mind you) -- to quite literally sit at the back of the bus. And not any sort of "designated Orthodox bus", mind you -- this is the state-run public bus system.
And of course there are those Hizb ut-Tahrir "linked" schools in the UK. The facts about actual organisation links seem pretty murky, but we had some pretty lurid quotes from Farah Ahmed, one of the head teachers, to the general effect of "we must protect our children by systematically indoctrinating them against every single value and tenet of Western liberalism". Can anyone look at Northern Ireland and Scotland and tell me, with a straight face, that segregated "faith-based" education of pretty much any sort isn't a ludicrously bad idea? And that's "only" with different Christian denominations. Do England and Wales really want to create such a set of problems for themselves, essentially out of whole cloth? For the sake of supposedly motivating a bit more parental involvement, and slightly higher test scores?
Guess those circular firing squads are by no means an exclusively "progressive" phenomenon.
(Esler doing Newsnight, Wark doing N. Review, and Gove on both -- Scottish media mafia is in full flood, tonight.)