Independent on Sunday, 11 March 2012

It has become an internet sensation. Celebrities have rushed to offer support. The White House has congratulated the people who made it. Within a couple of days of  being posted on YouTube, around 50 million people had watched Kony 2012, a short film about an African rebel leader. And I’m wondering whether I’ve seen the same video as everyone else, because when I watched it I wanted to throw up.

There’s no doubt that Joseph Kony is a nasty piece of work. His ridiculous Lord’s Resistance Army was responsible for countless murders, rapes and mutilations in his home country, Uganda, and he should be tried for crimes against humanity. But Kony’s soldiers were driven out of Uganda six years ago, leaving the country to get on with the process of rehabilitating child soldiers and girls forced into prostitution. Kony is thought to be hiding in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of Congo – so remote, indeed, that he may have missed the fact that he’s been targeted by a parade of smug celebrities.

“Dear Joseph Kony, I’m Gonna help Make you FAMOUS!!!!”, Sean Combs (aka the rapper P Diddy) warned last week. Combs is so serious about “stopping” Kony that he’s mobilised millions of followers on Twitter, ordering them to retweet his message. Rihanna, too, has added her name to the roster of stars urging an end to the non-existent slaughter of children in Uganda. Famous people emoting in a cause they know nothing about is hardly novel, but the internet has dramatically increased opportunities to look naïve, or downright foolish.

The celebrities squaring up to Kony are responding not to facts but to the film’s saccharine tone and its unashamed narcissism. It’s all about feeling good in return for not doing very much, and the rest of us can share in the glow by wearing a wristband, buying a campaign kit, and putting up posters. The aim is to turn Kony into the world’s most wanted man, which will supposedly put pressure on the United States government and the Ugandan army, itself accused of human-rights abuses, to track him down. A more urgent case could be made for “stopping” a number of people still in power, including Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir – Kony’s main backer and an indicted war criminal – and President Assad of Syria.

The film was made by an American organisation called Invisible Children. Quite why its activists think they’re helping kids in Uganda by launching a celebrity wild goose chase is a matter for them. One of several significant facts not mentioned in the film is that their own government has refused to sign up to the International Criminal Court, which is the only body with the legal and moral authority to try notorious war criminals.

But the most astonishing thing about the campaign is its total insensitivity to questions of race, power and representation: the film demands that we look at a nasty black man, Kony, through the eyes of a winsome white child with blond curls who happens to be  the film-maker’s son. I’m not at all surprised it’s been greeted with anger and astonishment in Uganda.

Those who run Invisible Children have been accused of spending too much on administration and making films and not enough on helping children. But this is a morality tale for our times, showing what happens when well-meaning but utterly misguided people decide to utilise the power of the internet. Facts get lost, vanity goes viral – and a thuggish warlord trends on Twitter.

Independent on Sunday, 4 March 2012

Every now and then, a murder trial exposes a depth of human cruelty so profound that it cries out for an explanation. The torture and murder of 15-year-old Kristy Bamu, whose family was originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is one of those cases: how could such things happen in a tower block in east London? The pathologist who examined Kristy found 130 internal and external injuries. His elder sister, Magalie Bamu, 29, and her boyfriend, Eric Bikubi, 28, attacked the boy because they thought he was a witch. Three days ago, the pair were found guilty of murdering Kristy during a so-called “exorcism ceremony”.

There seems to have been an increase in this type of violence in the UK; the Metropolitan Police says it has investigated 83 cases of “faith-based” child abuse involving witchcraft in the past decade. One was the horrific torture and murder of eight year-old girl Victoria Climbié, from Ivory Coast, by her great-aunt and her boyfriend in 2000. Another was the case of Child B, an eight-year-old from Angola, whose torture by a woman believed to be her aunt and other adults was revealed in a child cruelty trial in 2005.

The involvement of kindoki or African forms of witchcraft in these cases has produced sensational headlines. Some black churches in London have been accused of carrying out “exorcisms”, legitimising the idea of demonic possession in the minds of their followers. But the most important fact about accusations of witchcraft, wherever they occur, is that they are a form of scapegoating.

Thousands of vulnerable adults, most of them women, were tortured and murdered in Europe at the height of the witch-hunting craze. In societies where sudden death from  illness was common, along with other calamities such as failed crops, credulous people looked for scapegoats. More often than not, they settled on women who were different in some way – unmarried or widowed, living alone or with animals for company. Accusations that they had cast spells, changed themselves into animals or were able to fly were common, and had lethal consequences. Now very similar accusations are being made against children and teenagers in the UK, and for similar reasons.

Within hours of arriving from Paris to spend Christmas in London, Kristy Bamu was accused of bringing kindoki into the flat his eldest sister shared with her boyfriend. Kristy and two other sisters, aged 11 and 20, were beaten, but the girls were spared after they “confessed” to being witches. Kristy was so frightened that he wet himself, which led to him being singled out for the prolonged torture that ended in his murder.

Victims of “faith-based” violence are usually the weakest members of a family, children or teenagers whose behaviour is perceived as different or difficult, and at the mercy of aunts, uncles, step-parents and boyfriends who have little or no affection for them. Among a few African families, living in cramped conditions and struggling financially, the temptation to find a scapegoat may be as real as it was in 15th-century Europe.

That doesn’t alter the fact that accusing a vulnerable family member of witchcraft is often the prelude to prolonged and sadistic child cruelty. That’s what these cases are really about: child abuse, cruel and unrepentant, in which the victims are demonised and then blamed for the injuries that are inflicted upon them.

Harry Hole seems ready to take any risk to catch an evil drug dealer in Jo Nesbo’s stark thriller

Sunday Times, 4 March 2012

One of the strongest selling points for any crime novelist is an instantly recognisable serial character. Agatha Christie’s Poirot is as famous as his creator, Ian Rankin made his name with Rebus and Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander occupies a unique place in contemporary crime fiction. Jo Nesbo’s Norwegian policeman, Harry Hole, is a recent discovery for most British readers but Nesbo’s novels are already selling in millions.

In the early novels, Hole was a police inspector in Oslo, and his personal problems — alcoholism and tortured relationships — seemed to go with the job. But Nesbo’s breakthrough novel, The Snowman, left him missing a finger and separated from the love of his life, Rakel. Nesbo never pretended that these events were anything but emotionally devastating for Hole; his last novel, The Leopard, had the detective leaving he police force and trying to obliterate his sorrows in Hong Kong.

Where The Leopard took Hole to Africa, in search of a killer who used a murder weapon of astonishing cruelty, Nesbo’s new novel, Phantom, sees him back in Oslo with the disfiguring scar he acquired in The Leopard. He is trying to find an elusive drug dealer who is wreaking havoc among the city’s addicts and his reason for returning to Oslo is personal: Rakel’s son, Oleg, now a teenage drifter, has been charged with the murder of another young addict.

According to the few police contacts still willing to talk to Hole, the young man’s guilt is pretty well established; the victim died in a squat used by Oleg, who had gunshot residue on his hands and left his DNA on the corpse. But Hole’s stubborn belief in the boy is the one thing he has to offer Rakel, and he sets about investigating the circumstances leading up to the murder with his usual tenacity. The dead boy sold drugs on the street, persuading addicts to switch to a new synthetic compound known as “violin”, and Hole is convinced he needs to find the drug baron who got him involved in the trade.

Nesbo is a powerful writer and there are some wrenching scenes. On a prison visit to Oleg, Hole finds a young man he barely recognises, who immediately begs him to muggle a dose of “violin” into his cell. The scenes between Hole and Rakel are equally fraught, making it clear she will do anything to get her son back and raising questions about the sincerity of her feelings for Hole. These are more complex emotions than are to be found in many crime novels, and there is a bleakness about them that suggests the plot is unlikely to offer much in the way of redemption.

Hole’s physical scars begin to seem trivial as he takes risk after risk, becoming so careless of his own safety that his life seems to hold little value for him. This is not merely another jaded detective, worn down by years on the job and reluctant to submit to authority, but a human being in the grip of an existential crisis. Hole is searching for a connection to a more innocent time, before his job impinged on others’ lives and, he believes, set the young Oleg on this disastrous course.

Consciously or not, Hole is looking for a reason to go on living. His pessimism pervades the novel, creating a fictional version of Oslo that’s unrelenting and melodramatic, but a bigger problem is the highly artificial device Nesbo adopts to maintain suspense. This is a series of passages in the voice of the murdered young man, a rambling final testament in which he teasingly reveals his character — and a corruption so ingrained that he was ready to sell his adoptive sister — as well as the truth about his relationship with Oleg.

As the novel approaches its climax, he also confirms the devastating truth that Hole has been edging towards. It’s been signalled for many pages and, despite a clever plot twist involving the identity of the drug baron, the final chapters deliver a punch that’s far from unexpected. Nesbo is brave to enter such stark emotional territory, but the novel cannot help but feel overburdened by the weight of Hole’s despair.

Translated by Don Bartlett

Hacked Off, Tuesday 28 February 2012

Sue Akers speaks with the flat, unemphatic delivery of someone whose job doesn’t usually involve addressing a public inquiry. On Monday morning, I was sitting in the area of the courtroom reserved for ‘core participants’ and I felt the atmosphere electrify as the Met’s deputy assistant commissioner started giving evidence before Lord Leveson. A ‘culture of illegal payments’ at the Sun’….a ‘network of corrupted officials’….clandestine payments amounting to thousands of pounds: Akers didn’t need oratorical flourishes to make her point.

As she spoke, other phrases came into my head. ‘The Sun is not a “swamp” that needs draining’….’its journalists are being treated like members of an organised crime gang’….’a huge operation driven by politicians threatens the very foundations of a free Press’. That was Trevor Kavanagh a couple of weeks ago, under a headline characterising the police investigation at the Sun as a ‘witch-hunt’ which had ‘put us behind ex- Soviet states on Press freedom’.

I wasn’t surprised that Kavanagh took this line. It’s been clear to me since the Leveson seminars in October last year that there are some very worried men (most of them are men) in the newspaper industry, and they come from a culture that believes the best form of defence is attack (hence Rupert Murdoch’s decision to bring forward the launch of his new Sunday paper last weekend). What astonished me about the Kavanagh piece was that anyone took it seriously.

Plenty of hard-headed journalists who normally ask for evidence accepted Kavanagh’s claims at face value, overlooking even his obvious howler about the News International investigation being ‘the biggest police operation in British criminal history’. (It isn’t. It doesn’t even come close.) Outrage spread: sources were being put at risk! Fifty-quid lunches were being treated as bribes! The cherished freedom of the British press was at stake!

What Akers described at the Leveson inquiry suggested a rather different picture. Rejecting claims that journalists were being investigated for buying the ‘odd drink or meal’ for public officials, she talked about ‘multiple payments’ which amounted to £80,000 in one instance (that’s a hell of a lot of lunches). She talked about a Sun journalist drawing more than £150,000 in cash over the years to pay sources, and the use of friends and relatives as conduits to disguise the source of the payments. She also said that journalists appeared to have been “well aware” that “what they were doing was unlawful”.

Akers quite rightly didn’t give names, and the individuals who’ve been arrested have th right to be regarded as innocent unless a court decides otherwise. But what’s emerging at Leveson is a picture of a newsroom which relied not on ‘whistle-blowers’ – who don’t need to be paid because they’re acting in the public interest – but corrupt public officials. And the stories acquired through these methods were not massive scandals but ‘salacious gossip’.

There have been other significant revelations this week, including an internal NI memo showing that Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks knew in 2006 that more than a hundred people had been targets of phone hacking. We’ve also learned that the police were aware in the same year that Glenn Mulcaire had the new identities and contact details of people in the witness protection programme, a leak that potentially put lives at risk.

A single rogue reporter at the News of the World. A rogue newsroom that had to be closed down. A witch-hunt at the Sun that threatens press freedom. None of the excuses have stood up to much scrutiny, and damaging revelations continue to pour out at Leveson. Can Murdoch’s spanking new Sun on Sunday survive its association with this tarnished brand?

Independent on Sunday, 26 February 2012

I’ve worked in shops. I’ve bagged doughnuts, stacked shelves and been sacked from a Saturday job in a boutique. What did I learn from this experience? That I’m good at mental arithmetic and hopeless at persuading women to buy clothes that don’t suit them. Oh, and that the boredom would have been intolerable without a pay packet at the end of the week.

Years after I’d given up shop work, a legal minimum wage seemed to me one of the flagship achievements of Tony Blair’s government. I felt like flipping two fingers at bosses who whined that they couldn’t afford it, as though labour costs came bottom of their priorities.

Then David Cameron’s government offered businesses a legal means of getting round the minimum wage. Dozens of high-street names signed up to provide a “work experience” scheme lasting up to eight weeks; they’d have thousands of young unemployed people providing free labour in their stores while the state paid them £53.45 a week in jobseekers’ allowance. No one seemed to mind that taxpayers were subsiding profitable companies such as Tesco – pre-tax profit £1.9bn in the six months to August last year – and T K Maxx.

Until a nationwide campaign against “workfare” took off, participating companies were getting up to 30 hours’ unpaid work from each individual who took part in the scheme – a weekly saving of more than £180 if they took on an unemployed 21-year-old. Anyone who left after a week risked losing benefits, undermining the Government’s claim that the scheme was entirely voluntary. Now, following a blizzard of bad publicity, T K Maxx, Argos, Superdrug, and Burger King have withdrawn from the scheme. Several charities have suspended their involvement, and Tesco has offered to pay anyone taking part.

The Prime Minister is furious. In a speech last week, he attacked “dangerous” anti-business hysteria and claims about “slave labour”, bringing along the Prince of Wales as a fine example of someone on a work experience scheme. Social commentators joined in, accusing opponents of being snobs who find the whole idea of working in a shop demeaning.

It’s hard to think of a more bone-headed accusation. It should be levelled at the companies that offer these “jobs”, preferring to have their shelves stacked and floors swept by people they’re too mean to pay. What dignity can there be in work when the business offering it values it so little? And then there’s the knock-on effect: why would a high-street store pay the minimum wage when the company next door is getting free labour, thanks to the Government?

We’re seeing a return to the notion of the “deserving poor”, who have to demonstrate that they’re worthy of State support through displays of meekness and deference. It’s an ideology that gets Tory MPs swooning, even though there’s little evidence that such  schemes work. Cameron told MPs last week that around half the people on work experience are “actually getting work” at the end of it, but the organisation Full Fact looked at the Government’s figures and concluded that there did not seem to be an “adequate basis” for the claim.

The Prime Minister may be getting carried away by his own rhetoric, announcing last week that business is “the most powerful force for social progress the world has ever known”. There speaks a man who’s never worked an eight-hour shift behind the counter in a cake shop.

Leveson Inquiry hears astonishing claim by former police chief

Tuesday 28 February 2012

A report critical of the way the Metropolitan Police handled rape cases in London was  ‘watered down’ to protect the force’s reputation, according to evidence given to the inquiry yesterday. Former deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick told the inquiry he was asked in 2005 by the then Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, to review how rape cases were investigated by the Metropolitan Police Service. ‘Performance was patchy and he wanted the best in the world’, Paddick says in his witness statement.

Paddick looked at a period between 2001/2 and 2004/5, which would have included the early crimes of the so-called black-cab rapist, John Worboys. Worboys was convicted of 12 rapes in 2009 but police believe he was attacking women as long ago as 2002, and that the total number of his victims may have been more than 100.

Paddick’s review revealed ‘serious shortcomings’ and made ‘strong recommendations’. Specifically, he says it showed a large increase in the number of rape allegations but a similar fall [my italics] in the percentage of allegations classified as rape by the police. He recommended ‘a consistently victim-centred approach’ to investigating rape allegations in London.

According to Paddick, the report caused alarm at the Met. His witness statement claims that senior officers were concerned about damage to the force’s reputation and he was ‘told to tone down’ the criticisms and ‘water-down the recommendations’. The final report looked at only two months in 2005 and ‘sidestepped any criticism’ of the force. Shortly afterwards, Paddick asked a Met press officer what she’d been asked to do with his report. Her job, she told him, was to make sure it got no coverage.

‘The service the MPS provided to rape victims was sacrificed in favour of the MPS’ reputation’, Paddick’s witness statement (now available on the Leveson Inquiry website) says bluntly.

The movement has been better at saying what it is against than at offering solution

The Independent, Thursday 23 February 2012

When I heard yesterday that another court had ruled  gainst the Occupy London protest outside St Paul’s cathedral, I had to think for a moment. After dominating headlines for weeks last autumn, the camp hasn’t been in the news much lately and I’d almost forgotten it was still there.

It isn’t that the economic crisis has gone away, but a raft of other stories has seized our attention, including much more ferocious protests against austerity measures in Greece. When some 20,000 homeless people are sleeping on the streets of Athens, the impact of a mostly voluntary encampment in another country – I know some homeless people are there as well – is inevitably reduced.

The Occupy London camp faces being dismantled after yesterday’s appeal court ruling that the protesters cannot challenge an earlier eviction order. I’m sure the protesters and their supporters are angry about the decision, but I’m not at all clear what would be achieved by remaining in situ. Despite the elevated rhetoric that accompanied the setting up of the camp, its main impact was always symbolic – and that’s lessening by the day.

To begin with, the presence of tents outside St Paul’s was new and striking, pitting makeshift structures against the backdrop of one of London’s most majestic buildings. Once the Church authorities got involved, it was possible to interpret the scene as a metaphor for the struggle between a species of homespun decency and the institutional power of the Church, even if that represented a diversion of energy away from the protesters’ original target, the City. But familiarity has its effect: in Exeter last month, I didn’t even notice the protest camp at the side of the cathedral until someone pointed it out.

The protesters outside St Paul’s say they’ve dealt with the sanitation problems that accompany such temporary living arrangements, although I expect some people who live and work in the area will be glad to see the camp go on those grounds alone. There will always be romantics who disregard such matters and believe the camp offers a devastating critique of greed and casino capitalism, but the political reality is less easy to decipher. I’ve even heard supporters of the Occupy movement credit it with getting the world talking about financial injustice, at a moment when news bulletins were already full of little else.

Occupy London struck a chord because it seized attention at a moment when popular anger towards bankers, politicians and financial institutions was white hot. The removal of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood was a belated acknowledgement of a public mood that has long wanted to see individuals suffer for the financial anxiety people currently feel, whether they fear losing their own jobs and or see school-leavers unable to find one. But such gestures are problematic, producing a spasm of satisfaction which quickly dissipates.

For many of its supporters, I suspect, Occupy London represented exactly that feeling that something was wrong and somebody ought to do something about it. It gave their anger and anxiety a focus, temporarily dispelling the powerlessness individuals feel in the middle of a huge financial crisis. I was struck by tweets from camps around the country which showed a sense of real community emerging; when people are fed up and broke, everyday life in a camp – setting up cleaning rotas, deciding what to eat, explaining the ropes to new members – has a very high feel-good factor.

The risk is that those activities become an end in themselves. A distrust of conventional politics means that cumbersome pseudo-democratic structures emerge, endowed with grand titles but slowing down decision-making in a way that would paralyse a functioning democracy. These utopian models might work for 30 people or 300, but they’re useless for countries where someone – preferably an elected representative – has to take decisions about more important matters than whose turn it is to collect the rubbish.

If the Occupy movement was willing to accept that its impact has been mainly symbolic, I wouldn’t have an argument with it. Last autumn, the protest outside St Paul’s captured a widespread sense of anger and provided images that cheered people up, as demonstrations and marches have been able to do since time immemorial. (I remember how cheerful I felt on the big march against the Iraq war in February 2003, and look where that ended up.) But it’s been much better at saying what it’s against than at coming up with practical solutions, and that’s one of several reasons why people have lost interest in it.

Direct action is a great way to grab headlines and popularise slogans, which Occupy did very successfully towards the end of last year. But direct action has its limits and, in this country, the movement came up against them some time ago. Other world events –a threatened default in Greece, carnage in Syria – have taken over the headlines, while a growing popular movement against the Government’s ill-conceived NHS reforms has come to the fore in the UK. One of the most important lessons in politics is knowing when to go graciously.

Independent on Sunday, 19 February 2012

Imagine that you’re at the dentist. You discuss the treatment, settle back in the chair, open your mouth – and the dentist announces she’s invited the local vicar to say prayers before proceeding. Wouldn’t that seem weird, not to say annoying and inappropriate? A dentist’s surgery is not a place of worship and neither is a council chamber, despite all the hot air that’s been generated in the past few days about the “right” of believers to hold prayers during council meetings.

Entertaining though it is to hear so many bad arguments – I think God needs someone else to do his PR, instead of relying on Eric Pickles, Baroness Warsi and the Daily Mail – this isn’t an argument about believers’ human rights. It’s about religious people expecting to hold on to privileges they can’t justify, except by saying they’ve enjoyed them since time immemorial. Are they seriously claiming Christianity is under threat  because a court ruled that prayers can’t be an agenda item at council meetings? Now Pickles claims he’s overturned the ruling. As the American satirist Jon Stewart said last week in a different context: “You’ve confused the war on your religion with not always getting everything you want.”

The thing about secularists – and some secularists are believers – is that we get the difference. The Bideford council case wasn’t about an atheist councillor demanding to assert his non-belief in front of religious colleagues, any more than I insist that the historic oppression of women should be part of the official business at any meeting I attend. (Now, there’s an idea….) It’s about the principle that civic space is secular, which means not having special rules for one set of beliefs.

Modern democracies are made up of millions of individuals who are entitled to believe what they like, as long as they obey the law and don’t discriminate against people they dislike. That’s been the central issue in a slew of legal cases brought by religious  organisations and individuals; in a not exactly shining example of Christian charity, the Roman Catholic Church has closed its adoption agencies in England rather than obey a law that says they can’t turn away prospective parents who happen to be gay. The head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, entered the debate last week, bluntly telling faith groups that provide public services that they can’t say they’re entitled to a different set of laws from everyone else.

Phillips compared Christians who don’t want to observe equality laws with Muslims who want to impose sharia, prompting a furious reaction. But the principle that secular law rumps religious belief is absolutely right; it’s a bulwark against religious intolerance, and sorely needed in a country where belief still enjoys far too many privileges. It’s bizarre that Christian prayers are still said at the start of Parliamentary business; there’s a daily stampede of peers arriving late in the House Lords, struggling to get a seat because they’ve waited until prayers are over. Are Christians really entitled to the best seats? And if Christianity is under attack, why are my taxes funding so many “faith” schools?

Whenever I hear the phrase “militant secularism”, I know that someone, somewhere, isn’t getting their own way. It means we’re moving towards a society which is less hierarchical, more open and tolerant, and where everyone has exactly the same rights. Now there’s something I’m militantly in favour of, like the very best chocolate and expensive shoes.

Independent on Sunday, 12 February 2012

It’s official: the BBC has a problem with older women. The director-general, Mark Thompson, has admitted as much, acknowledging that the BBC’s treatment of Strictly judge Arlene Phillips and former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly – she won an age discrimination case against the corporation – has damaged its image. There are “manifestly too few older women broadcasting on the BBC”, Thompson admitted. The only bit of that sentence I take issue with is the word “older”.

The BBC has a problem with women, full stop. In recent weeks Radio 4′s Today programme has come in for a pasting because so few of its interviewees are female. Four of its five regular presenters are men, and so are the presenters of Any Questions, Start the Week and Question Time. After the 2010 general election, I remember asking whether women broadcasters had succumbed en masse to a virus which kept them off air while their male colleagues talked themselves into a state of exhaustion.

To be fair, it isn’t just the BBC where women don’t have the visibility you would expect in the modern world. When Lord Leveson held seminars for senior journalists before his inquiry into the media got under way, I was astonished by how few women were present. So was a shadow minister, who asked me where they all were. But the BBC is publicly funded and we have a right to expect “a higher standard of fairness and open-mindedness in its treatment both of its broadcasters and its audiences”. Those are Thompson’s words, not mine, and I’d say the BBC is failing on both counts.

I’ve been appearing on BBC TV and radio for years. I’ve got used to being the only  oman – it’s happened to me on Start the Week and Question Time – and I’m also used to being heavily outnumbered by men. It doesn’t bother me much, but I know other women feel unnerved by the prospect of walking into a male-dominated environment. Nor is there any doubt in my mind that this gender imbalance affects the tone of programmes, which can be sneering and hostile. On last week’s Moral Maze on Radio 4, Michael Portillo began by insulting me and then talked over me each time I started  answering a question. It reminded me of an edition of Newsnight – hilariously, I’d been invited on to talk about religious intolerance – when an imam tried to shout me down.

The gender breakdown on Wednesday evening’s Moral Maze (it was repeated last night and is on iPlayer) was seven men and two women. On that bizarre edition of Newsnight, the other four guests were men: the imam, a bishop, a Muslim convert and someone from Christian Voice. In the event, the man from Christian Voice got stuck on a train (I assumed it was God’s will) and the final line-up was three against one. As well as having the best arguments, I was definitely wearing the best shoes.

As I once explained to Robin Cook, who was one of the best speakers of his generation, I am unusual in having a formal training in rhetoric. I grew up on Cicero, which isn’t a background many women can draw on when they find themselves in a BBC studio. But I don’t think they should have to, any more than I believe that this combative style of broadcasting appeals to female audiences. I’m not sure men like it much either, judging by the messages I got after the Moral Maze. So perhaps the real problem with the BBC is this: too few women, too many alpha males.

Prayers are not part of official council business, High Court rules

Friday 10 February 2012

Congratulations to the National Secular Society, which today won a lengthy battle to establish that prayers should not be part of a council’s official agenda. The NSS backed a councillor on Bideford Town Council in Devon, who did not want to leave the room after the full meeting started while prayers were said by a cleric.

No one is arguing that councillors who have religious beliefs cannot pray on their own or with other councillors before the meeting. Bideford Council was offered the option of removing prayers from the official agenda and giving councillors time to do that. It refused, and that is why the case went to the High Court.

This is not, as it is being portrayed in some quarters, an attack on Christians. It establishes an important principle, namely that religion is a private matter and has no place in the official business of a body elected to represent people of different faiths and none. I have argued for years that public space in this country should be secular, and that the secular principle protects believers, atheists and agnostics alike from oppressive behaviour.

Today’s judgement is welcome, and overdue. The process of turning this country into a modern, secular democracy goes on….

If you would like to read the judgement in full, you can find it here: http://www.secularism.org.uk/uploads/bideford-judgment-final.pdf

If you would like to know more about the work of the National Secular Society, which I support, you can use this link: www.secularism.org.uk