BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, A first glimpse of life under Taliban rule - "How was I supposed to know it was out of date? I can't read he shouts. It is no good. His punishment for selling out of date food? Three nights in jail and a fine. It is an astonishing sight: the Taliban carrying out health and safety checks...
Here we first encountered the strange compromise that is allowing this place to function. Despite being deep in Taliban territory this school is still being funded and inspected by the national government in Kabul. The teachers say there are some small changes in the way these subjects are taught in school but from the time when these schools were burnt by the Taliban to now when Taliban encourage the running of these schools is a big step forward for these children here... but there are no classes for the girls in this district. Though he insists they are taught elsewhere...
There's been studies saying that the average Afghan is spending two months of their annual salary on bribes. Everybody you speak to complains about having to pay bribes to local police, how they can't get justice and can't get any cases listened to without paying huge amounts of money. So it's easy for the Taliban, they can come in and say we provide security, we will give you speedy justice and we will not charge this money"
Why is the CPS spinning rape stats? - "the conviction rate for rape actually fell by three per cent. This means that, of all the cases brought to court, fewer cases ended in conviction than in the previous year. Worryingly, this drop in the conviction rate is the second drop of three per cent in two years. It now stands at 57 per cent, which is the same as it was in 2008. In 2013, the CPS was celebrating increasing this rate from 57 per cent in 2008 to an ‘all-time high’. Now, the rate has reverted right back to where the CPS started. This means that while rape convictions have risen numerically, they have fallen proportionately. Looked at another way, there have been significantly more acquittals in the past 12 months than in previous years. This means more innocent people have been prosecuted for rape than ever before. It has become clear over recent years that the CPS simply spins statistics in order to suit its purposes... the CPS still used that three per cent fall to justify the implementation of a new rape-action plan, which involved challenging the persistent ‘rape myths’ that allegedly exist among the public and ensuring that more people are charged and convicted of rape. Now, when the conviction rate drops again, the CPS simply focuses on the total number of people convicted of rape, a figure that says nothing about the success of the CPS in performing its function – which is objectively and impartially to select cases for prosecution that it thinks are more likely than not to end in a conviction."
Feminism has consequences
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Freedom of Expression - "The real reason we want to ban things is because we find them distasteful. And there're lots of things. Remember that there're lots of inoffensive images and stories and books that can have terrible effects. I mean a great deal of violence against sex workers has been perpetrated in the name of religion or in the light of texts about, images of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And we're not going to ban images of the Mother of God because they've incited people to violence. If we're talking about cause and effect then beautiful things can produce monstrous effects...
[On Mein Kampf] Really it's about collective distaste. It masquerade sometimes as: if we don't publish this then we can prevent something bad happening but really it is the way that the modern German society choses to express its distaste and its distance from the past...
I did my PhD on Nietzsche. Nietzsche made me a Christian. Nietzsche had almost the opposite effect of what he intended, and that's what books can do"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Assisted Dying - "We have an old saying in the law, which is freedom in fetters. And what it means is that sometimes we have to restrict liberty in order to maintain the conditions that make liberty possible...
The rate of euthanasia in the Netherlands for example is increasing by 15% a year. It's estimated that a minimum 4% of all deaths in the Netherlands are by euthanasia... The current estimate is that twenty three percent of all deaths by euthanasia in the Netherlands is not in accordance with the law and in one study in Belgium they resurveyed doctors who had said that they'd done euthanasia and 32 percent of those who'd carried it out said they'd done so not in accordance with the law so those are the sorts of utilitarian risks and harms that legalizing this does. And that's very relevant to whether or not you should legalize it if you are a utilitarian...
Actually the whole you know evidence that suicide is contagious. There's all this stuff about suicide contagion. Marilyn Monroe kills herself and twelve percent rise in, you know my children are more likely to kill themselves by thirty percent. It doesn't just affect me"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Public v Private Life - "Some of the qualities that made Lloyd George a remarkable war leader were his extraordinary energy which may have had some connection with his sexual energy...
Such evidence as exists in the late 20th century at least rather suggests that the public don't care very much about bad misbehavior in that category. I mean Clinton seemed to be almost more popular after the Monica Lewinsky scandal...
[On the press keeping quiet about Kennedy's infidelities] Maybe the press were compliant because the age we're talking about and some of the people we've been mentioning like Lloyd George and Kennedy lived in the age of terrifyingly dangerous issues. We were all on the brink of war: nuclear threats of the Cuban missile crisis and so on. What one wants from a leader then is somebody who makes the right calls and the right decisions and if he's philandering on the side this may tell us something about his character but I think the public feel the professionalism and excellence of his judgment, especially on war and peace issues, is what really counts...
There's a sense in your attitude or view of politics. Which suggests that the only people worth having in politics are either saints or cynics. People who are too good to be true, we don't have those kinds of saints in the world. Or people so cynical that it doesn't mater they don't care what's exposed about them... it's better to have... a saint with poor political views or a sinner with good political views?...
They become erotic figures. I mean John Kennedy may have decided to sleep with a lot of women but a lot of women decided to sleep with John Kennedy. When Nelson arived in Naples in 1797 Emma Hamilton threw herself at his feet. She was a married woman. And they then went on and had a child. I mean I feel very pleased that the News of the World didn't exist in 1797 because Nelson would never have made it through to the Battle of Trafalgar and we would have lost the Napoleonic War... They have that energy which makes them risk takers but they also then attract temptation as it were because there are people who want to do extraordinary things with them...
I was reading a Member of Parliament's website today which doesn't mention which party he's from. It's got to the point where their politics is the least important thing of all they do...
The paucity of leadership and the lack of big issues is one of the reasons that's led to this focus on people's private lives"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Just War and Gaza - "I've spoken to many military officers. I've spoken to many politicians out here who are directing the current conflict. I've spoken to soldiers on the ground. I've spoken to pilots who've flown combat missions into Gaza. It's at the top of their list of concerns. I spoke to a pilot who told me he had to abort 17 missions in 1 day and I said isn't that frustrating? He said it's not frustrating because we aborted them because there were civilians and the last thing we want to do is kill innocent civilians. This is not an army that is after killing civilians. If it was as I said earlier there would be many many more thousands killed...
Author of After the Terror which was described as a moral defense of Palestinian terrorism. Do you think Hamas is morally right to try to kill Israelis?'
'Yes'
'Civilians as well as soldiers?'
'Yes'...
Asymmetric warfare does not justify asymmetric morality and you cannot start saying that it is fine to kill civilians in the way that Hamas have... They're inviting a pattern of warfare in which their civilians can, will inevitably be killed and that is negligent in my view. I think they have to find a way. Resistance does not always require violence, we know that...
If you could win the propaganda war then the other side's going to have to back off even if they've got right on their side because if you can get enough terrible TV pictures of children who are drawn into a crossfire and killed, then that is an argument of terrorism in effect...
I found it chilling that in the end what he was arguing was that grievance allows any behavior... Let's think for example about Eastern Ukraine. There are mutual grievances. And if we live in a world that says if my grievance is right then anything is justified in pursuit of that grievance then we are in a very dangerous world"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of the Imagination - "We're not talking about a decent society, we're talking about eradicating prejudice, which is a utopian program. It's impossible. And all utopian programs lead to totalitarianism and tyranny...
'You have an artistic work like Exhibit B. Produced by somebody who thinks they're making an Anti-racist artistic work exposing racial domination of slaves in the past. And it's called a racist play. There's a huge furore about it, there's a twitch on all the rest of it, and it's closed down. Artistic freedom is compromised massively by this atmosphere'
'Ultimately, thinking is the ultimate private sphere and that's what troubles me in trying to police thinking'"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, British Values - "I don't think that secular schools should be following their own curriculums. I am very much of the view that is the problem here is to do with academies and free schools which have been given far too much freedom to devise their curriculums. And in so doing they allow communities to devise their own conception of what they think is a good education. I think the state should have control over that because part of what gives us a common sense of solidarity and sense of who we are are the shared ideas, the shared debates that we have through education. And what we do through these schools is we stop people being able to have those shared discussions about the same kinds of topics...
There's this idea of people in Britain who hate British values and its culture. You know nihilistic, narrowly exclusionary, inward looking, not involving other people, contemptuous of the rule of law. You know not interested in free speech and so on... could I just suggest that maybe that problem is most widely expressed in academia rather than in the Koran. I mean all of the things I've just described are typical of what's happening at university campuses. As liberals I mean they hate British values, they hate British culture, they won't let you say that British history is this. They're completely obsessed with identity politics and free speech, don't even go there. They're banning everything...
According to a national report only thirty five percent of teachers actually felt confident in teaching in a multicultural school...
He and everybody else has missed what I consider to be one of most important points here which is that the issue to me is not about people living separate lives or segregated lives. I mean you know the ultra Orthodox Jewish community lives very segregated lives in America. The Amish live very segregated lives. These people don't concern anybody because they don't present any kind of threat to anybody. The problem we have is with certain strains within Islam which believe in colonizing British secular institutions like secular schools for values which are inimical to our own such as preaching hatred and intolerance and inequality. That's the problem that we have. It's not the segregation...
He thought the people who believe in Britishness most are ethnic minorities and working class people and people who believe in it least... middle class... university people and people who write for the Guardian"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Anonymity and sex offences - "In ten years' time after when you Google search my name it won't be about anything to do with anything that came out about the trial but it will all be about that I was accused of rape... The stigma I think is very much attached with the accusation of rape and sexual assault which for all sorts of reasons is set aside from almost anything else apart from murder...
I wonder why people like yourself insist on singling out sexual offenses of this kind of special treatment. I mean let's look at the conviction rate. It is simply not the case that the conviction rate is very low. The CPS report that you mentioned said that it was up to sixty three percent... at court stage and it's higher than the conviction rate for other serious offenses so what is all this nonsense about the conviction rate being low?... you're assuming that those reports are true. You're assuming that because a woman - let's assume it's a woman - makes a report of rape, therefore we must assume it's true and the defendant we must assume according to you must be guilty... you are assuming that men are guilty until proven innocent...
We shouldn't underestimate a very unpleasant intolerance that's emerged among some feminist campaigners who if you kind of query the statistics on rape cases, juries that get it wrong on victims and this has actually been studied by the DPP that they're victims of rape myths - i.e. they're not going along, you know that the juries are overly brainwashed by rape myths. That's why they keep getting the wrong verdict. And this is the kind of if you don't go along - so the reason I'm saying that is because I think that has made the whole thing more fraught. And I don't think it need be and I think that from a feminist or a kind of women's equality point of view, women want equality then we must accept that that extends to you know all walks of life and being open and public about identifying ourselves when we testify against someone who if our testimony can lose them their liberty...
If you have to be public in your pointing of the finger that changes things. I mean you know it's on the one hand there's a stigma associated with a false allegation. There's a terrible stigma of pointing a finger accusing someone of rape when they haven't. So I think it should all be out in the open and if you are going to falsely accuse let's see you and if you aren't falsely accused but you even get a not guilty in the court you shouldn't be embarrassed or ashamed"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Politics, personality and principle - "Politics can't be all about personality if only because the man a panel of historians judged to be the most significant British politician of the last century didn't have one. Clement Atlee was so shy he could barely bring himself to say good morning. He was famously described by George Orwell as a recently dead fish before it's had time to stiffen. Yet he ushered in the welfare state and started to dismantle the Empire with brisk, understated efficiency. All substance and no show as Margaret Thatcher the most unlikely of admirers put it...
If you look at opinion polls of the great British public oppressed by 'the system', they will say they want lower taxes and better public services. They will want cheaper energy and action on climate change. They will say they want the power to be decentralized but they want public services to be the same everywhere. Isn't part of the problem of our politics the unrealistic demands that we make on politicians?...
Elections are always fought in the middle ground. It's just that that middle ground changes. The middle ground that existed in the 1950s and 60s was much more comforting to social democrats and the middle round that existed in the nineties was much more comforting to free market liberals...
'She wanted more people because they were young or because they were women rather than because of their-'
''But you made a point I thought that actually that she kept away pretty well but you rather smartly suggested that she at one point that she was suggesting that women weren't quite up to the stressful demands of the vicious politics that she decried'
'Well yes I think there's a lot of winging comes, coming from women who subscribe to this, need for special treatment for women and, and blaming the system. The system must be wrong. And if we have lots more women the system will somehow magically change. And I think it's a very sort of tired argument. I thought we'd done away with it many years ago. And I do think that actually she should be saying to women: shape up and get on with it'"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Sex Education - "'I don't think that young people are hermetically sealed in the world without any stimuli other than those presented by the classroom. On the contrary I would suggest that sex education is the one area in which they will seek. It is the last bastion of protection if you like against some of the ills in the wider society'...
I am suggesting the relationship education is inappropriate and completely dangerous and for the reasons I've said and I think that the sex aspect of it is, it's quite dangerous because it's negative. But it also is quite, it's pretty clearly conformist you know. We all know what the good relationship according to the PSHE looks like. Now listen, go out with your mates, only the other night I was on an argument. I said they seem really happy, somebody said no they're not, he's very controlling. I said oh I don't know. We ended up with six of us having a row about whether this couple was happy or not... who knows what a good relationship is and how dare the state try and tell our kids...
There's something about childhood, something about play. Being able to say things without meaning it, having imagination. All those sorts of things that get encrouched upon by this doing things by numbers, official guide to relationships, that type of thing...
One place where we all think we obviously know is the issue of consent. But I'm actually very nervous about this when you actually read this stuff because it, first of all if we're talking about the legal definition of consent then you know introduce a law GCE. You know it's actually quite complicated in the law by the way, it's not quite straightforward, it sounds as though it's all very black and white. But when you heard the people sort of said consent and then they started saying people being pressurized... pressurized, that's what, that's how relationships start. Somebody usually doesn't know, somebody actually has to take the first step, put pressure on them... I'm just trying to have a human conversation about the clumsy ways that kids and young people and adults relate to each other when they're trying to form relationships. Now I think we're in danger of paralyzing young people by saying there's a yes and a no, there's a consent and if you do this it's wrong"
Women 'don't understand' fracking, leading scientist claims - "Women are opposed to fracking because they "don't understand" and follow their gut instinct rather than the facts, according to a leading female scientist. Averil Macdonald, the chairwoman of UK Onshore Oil and Gas, said that many women are concerned about fracking, yet often lack a scientific understand of the topic... Research has shown that men are nearly twice as likely to support fracking. Only 31.5 per cent of women believe that shale gas exploration should be allowed in the UK compared with 58 per cent of men... women are much less likely than men to know which fossil fuel is produced by fracking. Shale gas was correctly identified by 85 per cent of men but only 65 per cent of women. Prof Macdonald, who is a board member of Women in Science and Engineering, said that women were more likely to form opinions based on “feel” and “gut reaction”. Merely showing them more facts demonstrating that fracking was safe would not change their minds, she said. “Why are men persuaded? That’s because an awful lot of facts have been put forward,” she said. “[Men] will say, ‘fair enough, understand’. But women, for whatever reason, have not been persuaded by the facts. More facts are not going to make any difference."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Social Inclusion - "[On poor doors] 'Are you against classes on trains and planes?'
'Yeah. Yeah pretty much. I think that people shouldn't be valued by their ability to pay. I think there is much more interesting things about people than their ability to pay'...
'I think rich people have got a lot to learn from us'
'Okay, so you say that class hatred is a prejudice and its wrong is what you said earlier. But you have a class hatred of rich people'
'I don't have a class hatred of rich people'
'But everything that you have said just now shows that you put them in, you have a double standard towards them, you think they can benefit from mixing with poor people but you're not prepared to say that poor people can benefit from it in mixing with rich people. You think that rich people have, all the onus is on rich people to give to poor people. You have a prejudice against rich people. You are a living embodiment of class hatred'...
'When she refused to say that she could learn anything from rich people I just think that's a refuse to listen and I think that's a failure of the very sort of celebration of diversity that I would want to have about the other'
'She wasn't really a witness for integration because you know it her society we wouldn't need integration because we would all be of the same status anyway'... 'I mean if any if anybody said I know nothing at all about poor people they would be howled down and they would be stigmatized but she thought it was perfectly reasonable to say I know nothing about rich people'"