Should it be a crime to deny the holocaust?

Let me, if I need to, put my cards firmly on the table. I despise the Nazis, hate and detest the policies which killed 6 million Jews and enslaved half of Europe. I think the people who deny such things are complete assholes. But does that make them criminals?

I am concerned that our obsession to rid the world of Nazi ideology and its apologists is leading to a form of tyranny on the other side of the spectrum.

Britain has been placed in the embarrassing position of being asked to hand over to Germany Dr Gerald Toben, who was detained at Heathrow Airport yesterday en route from the United States to Dubai. Britain, which does not recognise 'holocaust denial' as a crime, has been asked to commit Toben, born in Germany but a naturalised Australian, to German custody for publishing tracts which suggest the holocaust did not happen, a serious offence punishable by 5 years imprisonment in Germany. The problem Britain has is, that under European Union law, a member state is expected to automatically respect the wish of another in handing over wanted criminals.



There is considerable unease among all political parties here about the 'holocaust denial' offence and, although no one will say so publicly, there is a feeling that German sensitivity with regard to the Hitler years has led to legislation which breaches human rights, even if some of those right are considered obnoxious. The same can be said of Austria who recently locked up Dr David Irving, the Nazi sympathising historian, but who later released him back to Britain after considerable diplomatic pressure.



There is a point at which freedom of speech becomes incitement - and this has been argued here with regard to some of the actions by Muslim clerics, and, in the past, by some right wing fascist party sympathisers. But it is important to distinguish between someone inciting violence against a group or culture and someone who simply pours scorn and disbelief on accepted history. The genocide of the Jews is probably the single blackest stain on the 20th century and people who deny that it happened are deserving of the most severe condemnation and criticism.

But it seems to me that you defeat them by contempt, by proof, by argument - not by locking them up. By prosecuting and jailing them you create martyrs and give the impression you have something to fear and you lose, to some extent, the moral high ground. I say we let the likes of Toben and Irving free to preach their zany opinions and destroy what they say with irrefutable fact. That's the way a free society should prove its worth.

An embarrassing hiccup in the chain of responsibility

Yesterday Sir Ian Blair, Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, was effectively dismissed by Boris Johnson, the elected Mayor of London. Now I'm not going into whether it was right for Sir Ian to lose his job, but more what does this action herald for the future?



Chief Constables of the Met are appointed by the Home Secretary, after consultation with appropriate bodies to sound out views, but clearly the job is the Home Secretary's. Yesterday, the first thing the Home Secretary knew of Sir Ian's departure was when he told her, 'I have been effectively dismissed by the Mayor'.

What then happened was surprising in a way. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary who appointed Sir Ian, rather than becoming righteously indignant and swearing to come to his aid, tamely said 'Ah all right then - sorry to lose you' and let him go. Now it could be that she saw a major row between London's elected Conservative Mayor and a Labour Government as being more damaging than simply to allow Sir Ian to leave - but that would be somewhat cowardly, I think. An alternative option is that she silently heaved a sigh of relief because Johnson had done the dirty work for her - and that would be very cynical.



It is true that in the light of the Menezes shooting in 2005, the swirling accusations of racism around Sir Ian's head in his dealings with a senior Asian policeman and rumours of his planting contracts with friends, the Chief Constable was becoming something of a liability, even distrusted by his own senior officers.

But constitutionally, what has happened is rather disturbing. I am no friend of the Tories but I don't believe Johnson took the action simply to prove his own machismo. I do believe he thought the decision was the right one for the people of London. However he has highlighted a big hole in the area of appropriate responsibility. This situation could get worse if more elected Mayors become a feature of British towns and cities and there is a growing demand for local accountability.



Johnson has demanded that the actions of the Chief Constable should be the responsibility of the elected politicians of London, not the national politicians in Whitehall. Whether this will come to pass or not, a series of urgent steps needs to be taken to prevent a repetition of this. The role of Metropolitan Police chief is too important to be a political football and, in the short term at least, Government ministers and the London Mayor need to get together and agree a plan of action in the event of unhappiness by either party. These unilateral actions cannot continue or else good policemen, well qualified for the post, will have serious concerns about accepting it if the ability to do their job is handicapped by angry differences between Westminster and City Hall

Amid chaos maybe some old-fashioned lessons need to be learned

This week the western economic system is in a state of shock after the failure of the US Congress to sell the $700 billion rescue package for the US banks. What happens now is anybodies guess but the melt-down in America has been quite frightening.

The finger of blame can be pointed at the American banks which seem to have had precious little regulation to stop them behaving like a bunch of demented, very badly managed, casinos. The ridiculous gambles which have been taken in the 'sub prime' market make you blink with disbelief. But now the chickens have come home to roost and, after this, surely the world's financial institutions will be in for a giant shake up and lots more global regulation.



We have been encouraged, over the years, to live above our means - the 'live now, pay later' society - which surely has to be at the grass root of this current problem, fed by the avaricious greed of bankers who see the way to a fast buck in high interest repayments, but which sadly for them and for the worlds financial stability, have never come to fruition.

The British, though the minor partners in all this, have as part of the international banking community been part and parcel of all this mess. Packages of debt bought from American banks have turned into a poisoned chalice and banks here have either been bought up by others or nationalised..and there is no guarantee that the bottom has yet been reached.

It's a sobering thought that, less than twenty years ago, we had Building Societies in this country who had operated with great fiscal responsibility for over 100 years. Then, under the Conservatives, they were given the opportunity to 'de-mutualise', go private as banks and be quoted on the stock exchange. Amid popping champagne corks and smoked salmon lunches, most of the building societies took the thirty pieces of silver, cock-a-hoop that now they could do wonderful things with our money and get rich in the process. Well I've no doubt that a number of top executives did exactly that. But what happened to the former Building Societies. There are none of them left now. All failed, went under, were bought up by bigger banks. It was a disaster.

But there are Building Societies, like the Nationwide and the West Bromwich who decided not to take the attractive bait and are still in business, paying investors a reasonable, though not spectacular return, and selling houses to those who prove they have the ability to pay the loans back. Sensible, modest financial dealing.

The safest place in Europe to have a bank account at the moment is France. The French government has a strong tradition of bank regulation and their banks are not allowed to speculate more than a fraction of the banks assets on high risk ventures. Consequently, although they have been bitten like the rest of us, France has withstood the credit crunch much better than the US or UK and is reasonably sound. If you obtain a credit card from a French bank, it is simply an easy way of avoiding carrying cash. If you go overdrawn on it, your card is stopped. You don't spend what you haven't got in the bank. No air miles or gifts encouraging you to go thousands overdrawn on that dream holiday...just pure, down to earth, spend it only if you've got it.

It's a rule my old grandmother lived by for years and it makes a lot of sense. It's a dose of reality which seriously needs to be infused into our collective psyche and into the operation of the world's financial community...let's hope it's not too late!

American politicians insult the intelligence of their nation

It has been rumoured over the weekend that Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin may play a vital part in restoring the flagging campaign of Republican John McCain by....advancing the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter Bristol to ice hockey playing Levi Johnston to November 4th. It is confidently expected by Republican insiders that this will restore 'bounce' to the Republican campaign among the American electorate who, apparently, will be so agog with goo-goo salivating over such a cuddly happening that they will all rush out and vote Republican on election day.




The Republican campaign team clearly believes they understand the American national psyche in order to promote this stunt. Are these people serious? They are voting for the most powerful office on earth and they believe voters can be swung by the TV coverage of a pregnant teenager marrying a self-described 'fucking redneck' not much older and clearly twice as stupid. If they are right then the American mentality clearly is as dumb as many Europeans have long suspected.




I hope they are wrong. Mainly because I want an Obama victory but also because I don't want my dearly valued friends in the United States to be stuck with the label of mindless TV besotted idiots whose political choices hinge on the glamour of a teenage wedding, like something out of the worst of soap operas.

Reactions to this 'news' in Britain's 'The Times' have been predictable.

"American stupidity never ceases to amaze - it's quite perplexing to think someone would actually choose to vote for a candidate based on a teenage wedding. I'm very happy though - McCain has chosen a caricature as his VP. I look forward to Obama restoring sanity in Washington." was the reaction of a gentleman from Roskilde, Denmark, while someone local to me in Sutton Coldfield said 'America has become a huge car crash from a particularly dreadful B-Movie'

I hope they're wrong. I hope there are sufficient intelligent, well-balanced American voters who understand the seriousness of the choices they are making in November to vote sensibly, regardless of their choice, but on the policies of the candidates.

But a nagging voice keeps telling me that these party strategists would not come up with such ideas if they didn't believe they could work. And I am also reminded of an observation made many years ago and played up by Sarah Palin. 'America is a nation of small towns', the implication here being that the REAL America values good ol' boys, the family, sentiment and cares not a whit for the views of outsiders or for the machinations of big government. And it's that kind of mentality on which Palin and her backers are playing with this corny idea. She clearly believes it will galvanise 'small town America' behind 'ordinary folks'

Well of course, for a politician aspiring to national office that is a frightening and dangerous card to play. If those parochial values are still deeply rooted in the American psyche and, in fact, dominate it, it makes the nation into a big, cuddly giant which wants to be loved but is painfully ill equipped for the amount of power and responsibility it carries for the future of the world. And that is terrifying for the rest of us.

I desperately hope she is wrong. I desperately hope the American electorate is more mature and sophisticated than that. But there is a nervous tic in my stomach nevertheless!!

Not just disingenuous but nauseating

There are times when those who base their entire philosophy on religious conviction irritate me no end. There are other times, particularly when those convictions potentially put lives at risk unnecessarily, that they make me sick.

Just such an example occurred yesterday when the enlightened Governors of the Roman Catholic School St Monica's in Prestwich, Cheshire, refused to allow girls at the school to receive the new vaccination against the papillomavirus which is known to cause the most common form of cervical cancer. The governor who appears to have been behind this , one Monsignor Allen, claimed that the grounds for refusal were nothing to do with morality and all to do with genuine concerns for the health of the pupils with an untried vaccine.



What hogwash! Monsignor Allen has previously been on record suggesting that the vaccine would promote sexual promiscuity and immoral behaviour, but of course, he is sharp enough to spot that, were he to give that as a reason, he would be pilloried by the liberal press for suggesting that he would rather hang the risk of a painful death from cancer over the heads of young girls than do anything which might encourage them to have sex before marriage.

So he invents, on behalf of the governors, a saleable story...but who is going to believe it? They make me sick these people who haven't even got the guts to publicly defend their own ludicrous position and instead invent a cover story. How can an organisation stick its head in the sand and deny young girls the opportunity of a life free of a painful terminal illness simply because of the message they think it might send out. They are not only playing priests...they are playing God and it shows an incredible degree of stupidity. A woman can get cervical cancer as a result of sexual activity at any time, even within the sanctity of marriage so who are these people to legislate on the fate of young children?

It is as stupid and as cruel as to suggest that AIDS is a punishment from God for homosexuality. We have a human obligation to medically protect our children as best we can ..and this innoculation is a marvellous breakthrough.

OK so the girls can go to an NHS clinic and be vaccinated - nothing the school can do about that - but it's likely to have less of a take up than if the school is visited by the doctors. Meanwhile these holier than thou clerics go about their business with sanctimonious smugness convinced that they have deferred another sinful descent into the flesh pots of evil.

Its another bloody good reason for ensuring that every school in the country comes under the ultimate sanction of the Dept of Education and another bloody good reason for scrapping faith schools altogether.

Sugar and spice and ain't I nice?

Well I have just seen our beleagured Prime Minister giving the 'speech of his life' - or so some of the Labour faithful in the conference hall defined it - and I am left singularly unimpressed. It is almost impossible to see the man who appeared such a lion in the Commons when dealing with financial detail as Chancellor as the same guy who stands there on the podium spouting platitudes and grinning at every obligatory round of applause like a kid begging for approval on speech day.





I was hoping for a gritty speech which would open the eyes of doubters and show us a Gordon Brown who realised the image he had to dispel, and who would give us solid reasons to believe he was the man to lead Britain for another six years, dispatching his Tory and Labour critics alike.

Instead we got a mixture of schmaltz - which as done by Brown is excruciating - and appeals to our national loyalties - 'putting Britain first', 'I love MY country', 'I am proud to serve...' .....yeah yeah Gordon but you are in a hole. How are you going to dig yourself out?

Well in truth he didn't have a clue. In fact Brown has no Plan B. he can only deliver one type of speech and the only difference is the degree of passion he can summon to deliver it. There was a paucity of detail and a lot of sound bytes - something he said he scorned. There was some policy of a sort - but more the sort of scraps you throw to the dog. He promised that all cancer patients would now have free prescriptions. Well great but, although cancer is an emotive topic, there are other patients with long term illnesses who will feel slighted, not to mention that Scotland and Wales in this 'United Kingdom' of which Brown boasted so proudly, get free prescriptions anyway.

He talked of going to America and re-planning the global financial system - rather a grandiose claim which I fear he will not be able to live up to and which his critics will seize upon.

He attacked the Tories for not having policies to suit the current grave financial situation while never being able to shed the responsibility for being the steward of that situation in Britain for the last eleven years. It seems ridiculous to continue talking of being the architect of change when your government has been in power since 1997.

Basically he made, in my opinion, a fundamental mistake. He talked, in a mock modest style, of the situation being about 'you, the party and not me' Wrong Gordon. It was all about you. The Labour Party has been in power since 1997. We know what its priorities are. We know, for good or bad, how much dogma it has sacrificed and what it now believes in. What we needed was some clear sign that the man at the helm of that party could not only steer the country through the immediate troubled waters but had enough going for him to destroy his critics in the country and win the next General Election.

I was simply not convinced one iota by what I heard. It wasn't a bad Gordon Brown speech but then it hadn't a great deal to live up to. I think the Tories will be sharpened by the fact that he at least gave some areas of policy on which he believes Labour has the answers, old chestnuts though they were. But it seems that Gordon cannot rise to peaks. He has a plateau as a speaker and he has reached it. He is a doer. Nothing wrong with that but right now he needs to be a motivator and he simply is not.

I don't expect Labour fortunes to change much as a result of this keynote speech and, although it will give Gordon some breathing space, I think the gremlins will soon be back to haunt him.

I'll be prepared to wager now that someone else will be leading the Labour Party come the next General Election in 2010. Maybe Labour has another 12 months to decide whether to ditch their leader or not in order for a newcomer to get some mileage out of the job before facing the electorate. But I'll be very surprised if it's Brown's face shining down from those election posters come 2010.

The truth that dare not speak its name

On Saturday, in London, there was a march to demonstrate against the increase in knife crime and our Labour Government, ever on the ball, announced a new package of measures to deal with the gang culture behind the knife violence....some arbitrary sum of money to be spent on - wait for it - mentoring young people and providing youth activities. I'm surprised they didn't announce another anti-poverty fund - for poverty is the usual excuse, the gloss thrown over the government's hapless inability to stop the rising tide of knife crime.



Tony Blair put his finger on it in his last few weeks of office when he was no longer frightened of adverse publicity. He said: 'British society is not falling apart...what is happening is that a significant minority is becoming enmeshed in gangsta culture and we have to take steps to root that out.'

Initiatives to stop poverty, provide more youth clubs, provide mentors..all these things are so much cosmetic crap and do nothing to stop the problem.

What IS needed is for the police to be able to do their job free of worries about offending cultural sensitivities. We have a serious problem in some areas of the country but we have the means to solve it if we allow the police to do their job. And that means allowing them to concentrate on the areas of greatest risk. I don't want to offend anyone here but in areas where knife crime is highest the police should be allowed the right to stop and search..and that means anybody. Yes I realise there will be howls from the civil liberties people but I think this is too serious for personal or cultural sensitivities.

I have no doubt that there is racism in the police force, just as there is everywhere else. I also have no doubt, because it is proven by statistics that you have to rip out of the throats of authorities under the Freedom of Information Act that almost half the violent crime in the UK ..with gun or knife...is being committed by members of the black or asian population, who make up not quite 6% of the UK between them. This is not a statistic those in government want you to know and I can quite understand that if you have no means of solving the problem then simply to highlight it plays into the hands of those with right wing political aspirations.

But it is clear that we have a problem here with some black and asian youth and mentoring, counselling, anti poverty schemes which don't add up to a hill of beans...all these things are useless. There is clearly peer pressure in some inner city areas to join a gang and prove your worth with a weapon.

There needs to be action on several fronts. Sure there needs to be a social element of trying to rescue youngsters from a bad environment by various initiatives. But there needs to be solid and harsh practical action to get to grips with this problem too. I believe the police should have the right of stop and search, anywhere in the country, and anyone found with an offensive weapon of any sort should face an extremely severe penalty

The problem with knife crime is rife across inner cities, though London clearly has the biggest problem. The nation has had 38,000 reported knife crimes last year and five people a week are being stabbed to death in Britain.

We are not going to get to grips with this problem if we keep pussy-footing around, worrying about hurting cultural sensitivities. Even Trevor Phillips, head of the country's Race Relations Board, agreed with that. It is doing no one in Britain any good to continue to avoid the proverbial 'elephant in the room' and to continue pretending that knife crime is a general sign of Britain breaking down. It isn't. It's a symptom of a minority who don't believe that the social order of civilised behaviour is relevant to them and its a minority whose reputation is becoming disproportionate to its influence, thanks in part to hysterical press reporting.

But we do have a serious lethal problem and it is centred within certain communities. The police know this and MUST be given the freedom to act effectively to reduce these hideous statistics which are a blot on our reputation as a law abiding, relatively safe, place to live.