AH, THOSE REVOLTING STUDENTS

I come belatedly to the matter of the anti-tuition-fee demonstration, having passed a very busy and rather fraught ten days absorbed in other matters. Expressions of common sense, I maintain, know no sell-by date, however. How depressingly familiar was the reaction to the generally rather heartening expression of defiance that was the raison d’être of this march. All the politicians and pundits immediately weighed in with a sustained bleat about “the violence”. What violence? There was some damage but that’s not the same thing as violence.

On a typical Friday or Saturday night in many a British city, as much damage is routinely meted out to blameless town centres by drunks. Football derbies usually spark comparable damage and bloody internecine fights as well. Pop stars and other culturally important figures regularly turn over hotel suites without honourable members getting up on their hind legs and high horses.

You might scorn the language of the modern student, but I have a slide, taken after a 1968 demo, of a slogan spray-painted onto a public monument: "Fuck the Fuzz"

When fisticuffs break out at demos, the police certainly give as good as they get, as may be gauged by respective casualty figures. I would suggest that, over the last (say) half century, more civilians than police have lost their lives during street mêlées in Britain.

“The violence” is a convenient means by which the government can divert attention from what the demonstration was about. The suggestion is made that somehow the cause is rendered null by the “deplorable” behaviour of the marchers. The government found a second line of counter-attack with which to shrug off criticism in its scorn of Labour’s supposed lack of a coherent policy on financing higher education. It’s true that Ed Miliband – still away on paternity leave – has yet to reconcile a variety of views in the shadow cabinet but if there were any placards on the march aimed at Labour’s prevarications and procrastinations, I didn’t see them.

Demonstrators on the Millbank roof, from where the fire extinguisher was thrown

It’s doubly dreary but wholly par for the course that Labour spokespeople should obediently do the government’s work for it by just as loudly deploring “the violence”. If the Labour party sees any merit in identifying itself with the cause of universities that encourage the best brains to enrol and benefit all of society rather than supporting a system that beggars bright kids for years into the future and denies society the opportunity to make the best of its best talent, it should deploy more constructive arguments. Of course no sensible person advocates “violence” – and no legislator or would-be legislator can afford to do so – but the damage done to Tory HQ at Millbank was reparable and has doubtless been repaired by now. The damage that government is doing to the education system will take years to put right and is irreparable for the generations of students directly affected.

A triumphant demonstrator breaches the Tories' Millbank HQ

And what do Labour and the pundits – especially the latter – say to the argument that if a march passes off without incident, it fails to generate what Margaret Thatcher famously called “the oxygen of publicity”? Having a coherent argument, being earnest about it and carrying placards with pithy slogans doesn’t get you onto the television news or into the headlines. Trashing buildings does. It’s always a fine judgment whether breaking windows will achieve more gain in overall publicity for the cause than loss in alienation from the “violence”. What would Labour advise?

The idiot who chucked a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank onto police below is not the yardstick for measuring the merit of the demonstration. He’s lucky no one below was killed. But there was a highly pertinent letter about him in today’s Guardian: “The masked thug seen dropping a fire extinguisher from a rooftop near police below need not worry – surely, after investigations lasting more than a year, the CPS will go on to rule that there is no realistic prospect of a conviction. Or have I misunderstood the way these things work?”

Michael Gove and David Willetts: the government clearly equates education policy with good looks

Adjacent to this beautifully turned letter is another on a related topic: “So the policeman who injured a woman in a cell wins an appeal. It seems the door was to blame as usual”. This refers to the Melksham station sergeant who dragged a drunken woman across the floor of the station reception area and flung her into the cells. The appeal court judge said that he was satisfied that the cop “did not intend” to throw her into the cell. But the world has seen the incident on CCTV and can doubtless watch it time after time on YouTube; we know for sure that he intended to throw her into the cell. It wasn’t in any way inadvertent.

Tariq Ali was a star of civil disobedience in the days before celebrity culture

That the courts favour the police is not news. But it’s useful to be reminded occasionally that they favour the police so blatantly. I have been pondering the possibility of standing myself for election in one of these police commissioner roles that the government has decreed will come into being and be locally elected. I think I might be a good person to do such a job: I’d be both the force’s and the government’s worst nightmare, relentlessly unforgiving of police malfeasance and the investigation of it by favourable commissions and judges but equally unforgiving of governmental starvation of funds for the policing functions to be effectively carried through. The Melksham police, were I to be elected, would – lord help them – come under my purview. I would want that station sergeant publicly flogged.

Grosvenor Square 1968: they tried to control us with horses then but we came armed with marbles to roll under their hooves

During his recent trip to China. David Cameron revealingly suggested to local students that those of them aspiring to pursue their studies at British universities might find themselves financially penalised not quite as brutally as native students. It was instructive to see that his and his team’s constant wearing of Remembrance Day poppies while visiting a nation whose relationship with opium is, to put it delicately, complex was not the only heedless step that the PM took into a bear trap. Now that Cameron is safely home, the Home Office has revealed that a large part of its crude policy to cut the rate of immigration into Britain will be achieved by hugely stemming the rate of student visas issued to suitably qualified students from overseas. The coalition government is gathering a reputation across the world for speaking with a forked tongue. The young, who are the most concerned with the matters aired here, are the least likely to forgive such foolhardiness.

DUFFIED UP

What an astonishing and misdirected fuss. Gordon Brown, boldly canvassing on the streets of the Lib Dem-held marginal of Rochdale, is caught up in a conversation with Mrs Gillian Duffy who, the press informs us, is a “granny” and a “pensioner” as well as a life-long Labour supporter. It seems a genial enough encounter, at the end of which Mrs Duffy takes Brown’s hand in both of hers. There’s been a slightly sticky moment when she brings up the matter of East European immigrants and wants to know how the foreign students can be afforded, even though her own grandchildren will have such high tuition fees; it emerges later, when Gordon (who’s remembered this detail) asks how old her grandchildren are, that they are still only twelve and ten.

In the privacy of his car, Gordon immediately turns sour, unaware that his radio mic is still on his lapel and broadcasting. He clearly isn’t satisfied with how the encounter went, surrounded as it was by what he later calls a mêlée of press, and, as one is apt to do, he sprays his irritation around, landing some of it on the innocent head of Mrs Duffy, whom he characterises as a “sort of bigoted woman”.

"That was a disaster"

So far, so what? What all changes it and makes it into the greatest political crisis since Suez is that the broadcasters fall over each other to get the overheard grumbling onto air. Not long afterwards, Brown is sitting in a Radio 2 studio for a phone-in and Jeremy Vine takes palpable delight in playing back the recording to Gordon and the world while the PM crumples into a dejected heap. The pundits immediately wheel in, announcing that the general election is over and that Gordon Brown is dead, buried and erased from the official record. Meanwhile, Max Clifford is on the blower to Gillian Duffy, offering his services at very reasonable rates.

This is a farce. Everybody – Cameron, Clegg, the editors of newspapers and broadcasting news, Andrew Rawnsley, you and me – says things that are unguarded, loose, disobliging, unfair and that pass no test of scrutiny when we fondly imagine that we are talking in private. The supposed insult to Mrs Duffy was perpetrated not by the Prime Minister, whose words were intended for no one but those in his car, but by the editors who decided to transmit them to the world, in the spirit of little boys ogling an oblivious woman in a state of undress. I wish Gordon had had the smarts to seize on that as soon as Vine played his trump card, that he had pointed out angrily that he didn’t say what he said for public consumption and that, if he gets back into government, he will instruct MI5 to install recording devices in every office (not forgetting the club) at the BBC so that, whenever anything is said that is confidential, it can be released to the public.

Poor Brown looked so pole-axed that maybe there is yet some sympathy mileage in it, similar to that sparked by the campaign in The Sun to discredit him over his handwriting in a letter to the mother of a killed soldier. But feeling sorry for the man is not much of a basis for an election victory.

"He called me what?"

What I found much more telling and much more of concern was how, in their public conversation, Brown repeatedly tried to steer Mrs Duffy away from actual politics, trying to get her to agree that “it’s nice around here” (not as nice as Fife, Gordon) or asking about her family. I know he doesn’t have much in the way of people skills or small talk ease; indeed, it’s his authenticity and lack of a silver tongue that distinguishes him from the slick slipperiness of David Cameron. After rewarding the latter style in a similar mismatch between John Major and Tony Blair in 1997, you’d think the public would be conclusively wary of a snake-oil salesman this time around. But it doesn’t do to try to avoid discussing issues with voters. The nettle of European immigration has to be grasped, both in word and in deed. None of the leaders wants to grasp it for fear of seeming ... well, bigoted.

Something else I thought ill-judged was Brown’s demeanour after he had come to Mrs Duffy’s house to have a conversation with her, a conservation that I hope will remain private. Perhaps they got on very well, perhaps he found a form of words that satisfied her, perhaps she graciously accepted what I do not doubt was a heart-felt apology. Brown emerged grinning, perhaps with relief, perhaps because he had been charmed. But it made him seem as though he felt he had had a triumph and that looked all wrong.

"I'm a penitent sinner"

None of this amounts to a hill of beans, of course, but you’d think from the coverage that Brown had at least killed somebody with his bare hands. The other parties will have hugged themselves with glee but it would be a mistake for either of their leaders to try to capitalise on it in the leaders’ debate tonight. They know very well to mutter: “There but for the grace of god …”

There remains the larger matter of the morality, responsibility, taste and judgment of the media. How skewed our values have become when an innocent expression of candid frustration is universally condemned while underhand and treacherous opportunism passes unremarked. I think this heartless roasting of the Prime Minister is only one up from Rory Bremner’s stunt, four or five years ago, of contacting Margaret Beckett, then Foreign Secretary, and convincing her that he was really the then Chancellor, one Gordon Brown. I thought that hoax the lowest of the low but this ugly compromising of the PM is nearly as shabby.

And really, does this silly episode, blown out of all proportion, signify when set against our solemn responsibility to elect a new government?

TRUE GRIT of the SPLIT BRITS

What it means to be British is on the agenda yet again. Me, I’ve always viewed myself as a citizen of the world, though admittedly there are more than enough parts of the world of which I would not care to be a citizen. There may be some who consider our move nine years ago from London to the English West Country to be only one up from going to live overseas. But I can’t imagine emigrating for any reason, especially any of the usual ones – climate, cost of living, favourable tax levels. I remember friends of my parents selling up and moving to the Caribbean after the husband was told by his doctor that he would never survive another British winter. He died anyway and his widow was then stuck on an unfamiliar island, knowing no one, divorced from her own history.

Of course, the union of nations in which I live is an area of the world uniquely fraught with uncertainty (and even dispute) about its own nomenclature, long before we get onto what it “means” to live here. I am perfectly happy to describe myself as English and to announce that I live in England. (Tom Sutcliffe, the new chairman of Round Britain Quiz which returned to Radio 4 on Monday, told us that this week’s contest was between Scotland and the Midlands, and it occurred to me that he should have used the term “the English Midlands”, thereby avoiding any implication that Scotland is in some way a region of England – not, I think, a notion that would be readily embraced by Alex Salmond).

But few now are prepared to humour me on this point (about being English, I mean). When, while sitting on a plane, I fill in a landing card, I find that my answer to the identification of “country of residence” – England – gets crossed through by the cabin staff who substitute “UK”. This makes me want to ask for the card back so that I can alter my answer to the identification of “destination” from “USA” to “North America”.

In my childhood, our country was usually known as “Britain” or, if you wanted to swank a bit, “Great Britain”. Formally, “Britain” is a short form of the precise and correct identification of our united nations as “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, the term “Great Britain” specifically excluding that part of the island of Ireland that cedes to the House of Windsor as furnishing the Head of State. I rather deplore the standardization of “UK” as my homeland’s identity. It smacks too much both of the US and of the EU. It embraces the fact that we are still a monarchy (“Kingdom”) in a way that seems irrelevant and futile. It’s an ugly coinage too, suggesting a rhyme with “yuk” and worse. And we’re called Britons, the British, “Brits”, not Yookayians or Yukites.

The International Organization of Standardization designates us “GB” which is therefore what appears on, for instance, vehicular plates registered in Britain. The internet calls us, ipse dixit, “UK” and I’m not allowed (anywhere on the net, as far as I can see) to call where I live anything else. On the other hand, the Americans (who established most of the verbal conventions of the net) to a large extent refer to the whole of the UK as “England” (as in “the Queen of England”, “the Prime Minister of England”). Of course they also frequently say “America” when they mean “the USA” – as in the politician’s banker, “I love America!” – and (correctly, I’m sure) assume that no one will wonder why they should apparently so sweepingly embrace Canada, Panama and Bolivia.

So if I wanted to declare what it means to hold the nationality that I do – and indeed to say that I was “proud” to do so – I would first have to establish what I was calling my nation. Most people – Mexicans, say, or Mongolians or Malawians – don’t have this difficulty. Many people, however (if not particularly from those three countries), seem to want to come here and wrestle with this problem. And one of the motors of this debate about national identity is the delicate subject of immigration.

It ought to be possible to discuss immigration without buttocks being instantly clenched and battle lines drawn. The sociologist Robert Putnam has greatly assisted in the drawing of the teeth of this issue. Interviewed on The World at One today, he spoke of some of the findings of his rigorous study into multi-culturalism on both sides of the Atlantic, including the interesting conclusion that “the only two things that rise in more diverse communities are protest marches and watching telly”, that in every other way, neighbourhoods where there are mixed communities are not thriving as they ought in the west. His solution is not to put controls on immigration but to construct more centres where “people can learn to have an identity other than their racial identity”.

That Putnam is American greatly helps his argument to be accepted as rational here. Immigration into the States over the last 150 years has been proportionately far higher than into any European nation. Though almost all of them are ultimately immigrants, Americans have certainly not always been free of racism or xenophobia. The urgent need of a civil rights movement is only forty years old. That both Bush’s Secretaries of State have been black demonstrates how far that issue has been blunted by good sense all round.

But immigration is at present a fiery issue in the US, concerning both the waves of illegal workers into California and the remarkable influx of economic migrants from Asian and Arabic countries, to the extent that the demographic that determines that no presidential candidate can ignore the Jewish vote will soon be superseded by the need to attend to the Muslim and indeed to the anti-Israel votes.

The Muslim penetration of Britain has its own difficulties but the present flashpoint here is the immigration from the new member states of the EU. It amazes me that the European authorities cannot regulate this matter better. There are certainly concentrations in some British towns of Poles, Romanians, Slovenians and other eastern Europeans that have stirred long-buried prejudices. It’s not a prejudice to note, however, that these economic migrants have significantly taken over the kinds of jobs that students here need in order to keep themselves solvent while completing their studies. If the government will not regulate the level of EU immigration, it needs urgently to reconsider the matter of student grants before it produces a generation that is educated to the highest level but financially bankrupt. Moreover, there ought to be a presumption in any kind of local waiting list scheme that priority will be given to those who are demonstrably “local”, which is to say those (of whatever racial origin) who have lived all their lives in the community and whose families have done the same. Incomers – whether from city or country or abroad – ought not to expect that their particular economic imperatives necessarily carry any weight with the host community. I don’t think that is at any level a discriminatory argument.

There has been talk of the French building “another Sangatte” to accommodate those who gather near Calais in the hope of smuggling themselves across the Channel to seek income in Britain. I ask what I always asked when the original Sangatte operated: why don’t these guys want to settle in France? What is it about Britain that makes it the Shangri-La for economic migrants and asylum seekers? I’m trying to avoid the expression “soft touch” here, but if Britain and France are comparably liberal, civilized members of the EU, why do not all of these people, who have often travelled huge distances in appalling deprivation, throw their hats in the air with delight because they are already in a European country?

At the current European summit, Mr Blair is leaving behind a bad odour because he is refusing to sign up to most of the provisions of the “this-is-not-a-constitution” compromise prepared by Angela Merkel and supported by Nicolas Sarkozy. The EU President, Jose Manuel Barroso, made some pithy and pertinent comments about the British position. It is hard to see how we can continue to play a meaningful role in the European Union if we are to continue to refuse to accept any of those provisions that are designed to bind us together. Many people here doubt that Turkey ought to be allowed to join the EU because, it is feared, its Muslim “bias” would be called on as a reason for the country to be exempted from the observation of some of the Union’s rules. If Britain thinks itself too important to bow to the consensus, why should it expect quiescence from a newly European Turkey? It’s perfectly understandable that Blair, with his record on both world and domestic stages, would not be amenable to any degree of shared foreign policy or extended rule of law and justice from Luxembourg. That doesn’t make it a virtuous position.

But it is a curious union in which all the poor of the new member states aspire to residence in Britain and only Britain. Why not go to Finland or Belgium, Portugal or Greece? Here is a matter on which we really should sue for parity. Let all the existing member states do their bit and make their provisions just as enticing as ours. Why shouldn’t there be an Estonian enclave on the Algarve? And what should the Estonians do when they get to Faro? Why, what all immigrants should do: integrate, learn the language, tailor their own culture to the host culture. One of the greatest problems the British have with Muslims, both immigrant and native, is that their primary allegiance is so often expressed as being to Islam rather than to Britain. As St Ambrose counselled: “When in Rome, live as the Romans do”.

There are Muslims in Britain who advocate that Sharia law should take precedence over British law. In so doing, I would maintain, they forfeit any right to live here. I understand perfectly that, when in other countries, I am expected to observe the laws of those countries even as a tourist. As one who is, by his nature, an outlaw in certain areas of the world (being a homosexual), I am acutely conscious that local law is powerful. Some of those who come to Britain – and some of those born to people who have come to Britain – make the mistake of assuming that their own traditions and beliefs are due a special dispensation. They are not. So-called honour killings – murder in the name of supposed family honour – may be overlooked in some nations, but in Britain they should be and are treated as crimes of barbarians.

Moreover, the knighthood bestowed on Salman Rushdie is a domestic matter and no business of any Muslim country. These knee-jerk reactions from monumentally self-important people who have never seen – let alone read – a copy of The Satanic Verses should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve rather than kowtowed to as if they constitute due sensitivity. The so-called minister for religious affairs, who implied in the Pakistani parliament that the award would justify suicide attacks in Britain, should be hauled before an international court and tried for sedition. At the very least he should be relieved of his post, denied any influence over impressionable people and told to maintain a discreet silence for the rest of his days. If he had been a Hamas minister denouncing (say) Amos Oz, the Israelis would immediately have bombed the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The antics of football fans aside, we in Britain seem rather shy of proclaiming our nationality. Quite right too. The unthinking nationalism and factionalism that has riven so much of the world for so long is the last ingredient we need in our culture that has already taken on far too much of the global decline since the Second World War (see my book Common Sense, freely downloadable from the link in the right margin). So I still cleave to the notion of being, first and foremost, a citizen of the world. Perhaps if we all thought like that, we might help each other just a little more and shout witless slogans a little bit less.