David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

Psst! Wanna see my crash pics? Very educational

Even the most compulsive side-taker should find it hard to choose between two such unattractive combatants as the Daily Mail and Channel 4. But let’s try.

The Mail said yesterday that Channel 4 intended to broadcast a Diana’s death documentary next week (only the 500th or so ever screened), which will – for the first time – use pictures of the nearly lifeless princess at the crash scene, being given oxygen by a French doctor. The Mail was cross, and it was easy to see why. As well as being tasteless, hurtful and intrusive, the use of such pictures would break an uninscribed British TV rule about what material relating to the recent death of public figures gets to be shown on screen.

By midday Channel 4’s commissioning editor had put himself about to reassure everyone that the Mail story was nonsense. The documentary was an important contribution to understanding the accident and therefore fulfilling the public service duty of knocking back the legion of conspiracy theories. And it absolutely didn’t show any dead Di pics. In the one snap being talked about the shape of the princess was tastefully blacked out (presumably leaving the doctor administering to empty space), so the Channel 4 man said that he thought more hurt would be caused by the Mail’s wrong story than anything appearing in the film.

Come paddle with me in the soupy Middle Sea

Consider first Margaret Hodge, the radical minister. Bravely breaking with decades of accepted practice and flaunting several taboos, Ms Hodge argued for a change to council housing rules to favour those who could be regarded as “indigenous” over those who could be classified as “new migrants”, regardless of actual housing need.

This was amazing stuff. The MP for Barking herself talked of how a “recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded, privately rented flat with the children suffering from asthma” would get priority over a family who might have lived in an area for “three generations”, and suggested that a “rebalancing” was needed. For me this created the wonderfully retro image of the asthmatic children having to stay put in the damp house by reason of their incorrect origins, while the perfectly healthy indigenous couple got in ahead of them on the housing list. All of which, according to Ms Hodge, would “promote understanding which leads to better tolerance and integration in our society” by making white people feel that life was less unfair. The asthmatic children’s response would presumably be for a future generation to cope with.

Consider second the miserable figure of David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, in making it overclear that the Cameron Tory party has no intention of returning to the pre-1970 system of 11-plus selection. The mild Mr Willetts immediately became the target of the most sustained bashing any Tory politician has received since Iain Duncan Smith. He had sold the soul of the Conservative Party – not to mention generations of bright but thwarted youngsters – for a mess of pottage, in this instance the illusion of electoral appeal to the centre ground.

A very modern melodrama and our shrine to Madeleine

Situated in the hills behind the ancient town of Ephesus in Turkey is the House of Mary. Near the small chapel on the site where the Virgin is supposed to have died, the olive trees are covered in strips of cloth tied there by people wanting intercession, either to make something happen, or to stop it. It’s likely that this custom dates back beyond the Christian era, through the worship of Diana, past that of the Artemis of Ephesus to the Anatolian goddess Hecate.

For more than a week now, if you visit the village of Rothley, just north of Leicester, you can see something almost identical. On the railings by the war memorial, on the four benches nearby, on the bus stop to Birstall, hundreds of yellow ribbons have been attached, accompanied by flowers, cards, children’s drawings, soft toys and, above all, images of Madeleine McCann. “Expect a miracle,” says a card depicting hands clasped in prayer and draped with a crucifix. More typical is: “Maddy, we didn’t even know you, but you are with us in our hearts.”

On a wet afternoon mothers with toddlers appear every few minutes, examine the offerings, read some of the messages and add their own ribbons or flowers. If a more photogenic group arrives, then the cameramen from Sky or ITN, whose satellite vans are parked a few feet away, will squeeze off a few minutes of pictures, as they do now for two mothers and their four young children. The reporters are in the café round the corner, sheltering from the tedium, a tedium broken by the once or twice--daily appearances of Madeleine’s great-uncle, Brian. Otherwise, there is the ten-day-old ritual of Valerie, the landlady from the Royal Oak, which overlooks the memorial, bringing out the ribbons for those who want them. Now she kneels down and empties a heartshaped basket of donations and refills it with votives. If this isn’t a shrine, then what is? The shrine of Little St Madeleine.

Don’t try and put the ration into immigration

Life is, thank God, full of incongruities. One of which is that many of those who write in to the comments part of the website complaining about too many foreigners coming to the United Kingdom then give their location as somewhere abroad.

The very first reader’s contribution to last week’s Aaronovitch-Parris debate on the Blair years, for example, asked simply, “What about immigration and the failure to control the borders?”, before signing off as “Mike, Sydney, Australia”. It is amazing how often Gwen from Spain and Don from the Dordogne take up mouse and keyboard to moan about people doing in the UK what they have so obviously done themselves in some other country.

Their unconscious message is: you, alien interloper; me, seeker after better life. Yet this blitheness in the face of an obvious contradiction doesn’t make Gwen and Don wrong.

A few weeks back I received a free pamphlet from one of the fustier right-wing think-tanks (the sort that campaigns constantly for fewer people to go to university), arguing that while Britain had absorbed previous waves of immigrants, this time the very existence of the UK was under threat. “Now our culture and our nation,” stated the author, “are in danger of fragmenting as large immigrant populations decline to integrate.” Back in 1905 the TUC had it wrong about the Jews and in ’68, one imagines, old Enoch was just foolin’ with his bloody Tiber. Today, according to the boffins at Civitas, it’s for real.

The bishop and the Islamist: a cautionary tale

I am a fan of modern British bishops, having never yet met one who I didn’t like. They tend to be good company, especially Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, who has (thank the Lord) survived a controversy involving a drinks party, someone else’s car and a collision with the pavement. Like Tom they all do good works uncomplainingly, and their job is a difficult one.

It is therefore possible, I suppose, that between public appearances and supervising diocesan affairs they don’t get much time for reading. Certainly the evidence of the past week suggests that no one at the Church of England has found the three or four hours necessary to complete a new book called The Islamist by Ed Husain. So, I hope their Right Revs will allow me to present them with this summary.

Husain is now in his early thirties, and was brought up in East London to religious but not doctrinaire parents. His book describes his youthful journey into Islamism – an ideology that sees Islam as being as much a total political force as a religious one – and back. Husain’s account is not sensationalist, tending more to understatement than to hyperbole. It is also a complete eye-opener.

Speccy and nerdish at school the 16-year-old Husain finds an identity in religion, and discovers an organisation – the Young Muslim Organisation UK – that is under the influence of the Jamaat-e-Islami, an organisation founded by a Pakistani journalist Abul Ala Mawdudi, whose many words include the sentiment that “only when power in society is in the hands of the believers and the righteous, can the objectives of Islam be realised”. Mawdudi’s sentiments are widely propagated in mainstream schools through books and projects funded by Saudi Arabia.

Don’ t spurn us – I don’ t want to be English

In the columnist’s world there is only one thing worse than having good people disagree with you, and that’s having dreadful people telling you how much they support your stance. True, when I wrote a disobliging piece about the Scottish National Party before Christmas, most of the criticism came from not-so-good folk who seemed to believe that the very act of a Londoner opining on Scottish politics was an act of colonialism. More unnerving, however, were those South Britons who wanted to reassure me that they too thought that the Scots were a bunch of pampered, subsidised megawhingers, whose departure would be no great loss.

It’s because I disagree so profoundly with this instinct that – on the day of the tercentenary of the Act of Union and in the week of possibly epochal elections to the Scottish Parliament – I want another go at this topic so that I can express two things: first how much I love Scotland and second how much I think the UK would be the poorer for its loss.

It is love, no matter how embarrassing it is to me to use the word. I realised it when I was appearing last week on the Scottish Newsnight programme alongside the journalist Iain Macwhirter. Twice in about a minute Macwhirter referred, pejoratively, to “Labour, coming across the Border” to do this, or to argue that. I pointed out to him that, in my experience, Labour had always existed within Scotland, and needed no border-crossing. “What I meant,” said Macwhirter, “was Blair and Brown coming across the Border.” And I thought, no you didn’t. What you were saying, Iain, was that you cannot now be something in Scotland and England simultaneously – now you have to choose. In other words, the “Border” that was once not even a metaphor, but just another and richer way of indicating Scotland and England, is now becoming a real thing. You on this side, me on this.