No soft option in the fight against terror
Widdecombe
MUSLIM parents, joined by Christians, led a 300-strong protest outside a primary school against lessons on homosexuality and gender.
The school defends teaching such matters to young children with the tired old slogan “British values”.
British values should include freedom of religion, freedom of expression and the right of parents to decide when their offspring need to learn about sex.
One parent at the school has said his daughter had been asking questions which his wife did not know how to answer. The child is six.
What is being taught there has nothing to do with British values, which was a phrase used by David Cameron, above, to promote his own Notting Hill values.
The school is riding roughshod over the right of parents to teach their children their own values and their own religion.
Not long ago I was chatting to a headmaster of a Roman Catholic school who told me most of his pupils were Muslim.
He insisted on full mass and that every child was taught the faith. Good heavens, I exclaimed, why did they choose that school? He gave a one-word answer: morality.
Great value in parental guidance
A home loss for careless council
A LEGAL transaction once completed cannot be reneged upon, yes? If a man buys a property then it becomes his, yes? Well, no, not if you are Islington Council which claims it undervalued a flat sold in 2014 and is now demanding the owner pay the difference or have his property repossessed. Eh?
Despite a bedroom being very clearly on the plans the council says it managed to miss it. Well, whose fault is that?
If the buyer, Mr Zomparelli had misled the vendor that would be different but that did not happen. Some sloppy official slipped up.
Tough luck. We cannot change our minds years later about items we have sold, whether it be an old dress, an old car, a precious antique or a whole house.
Islington Council is smarting from its loss but it should acknowledge its own negligence and apologise to its ratepayer.
HORDES of barbarians. There is no other way to describe the terrible forces of Islamic State, who beheaded and crucified, raped and slaughtered thousands of innocent souls who happened to be in their path.They tore down historic monuments, having as little respect for beauty or wonder as they did for man, woman and beast.
The movement grew out of Al Qaeda which attacked the twin towers in America, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring 6,000 others. Killers such as Jihadi John gloried in videos showing him cutting off the heads of aid workers with a knife.
In more than 1,400 years since Islam began these terrorists have not progressed an inch in anything except technology. They are as savage as their furthest ancestors, as lacking in humanity as wild beasts, unable to appreciate literature, music, art or love.
Many of them will have grown up knowing no other norm and that is quite bad enough but their numbers also include those educated and brought up in civilised parts of the world with a quite different philosophy.
For them there can be no excuse and that group includes Shamima Begum, who ran off to become a jihadi bride and now whinges that she wants to return to Britain despite showing no repentance for the murderous ways to which she allied herself.
SHE knew before she went what IS did: the beheadings, the atrocities, the merciless persecution of dissenters, the throwing of homosexuals from high buildings, the use of women and children as human shields. Incredibly she says she was “OK with that” because it was consistent with the teachings of Islam. Britain should not raise a finger to help her. She managed to get out there on her own and it is only right she will not be allowed back in after being stripped of her British citizenship. She is not fit to be loose in society, let alone bring up a child.
The way we treat her will send a signal to others, who went to give succour to Islamic State.
A tough message may persuade others they do not want to come back but a soft one would have been merely an invitation to further atrocities and radicalisation. BARRISTER, Joanna Hardy, says the legal profession should abolish 9.30am listings because they get in the way of childcare and also care of the elderly. What time does she imagine humbler workers report for duty? Most of them would think 9.30am the very height of luxury. Just get up earlier, dear.
THEY SAY EVERY SECOND COUNTS... BUT NOT WHEN IT’S THERESA MAY
FIRST Jeremy Paxman from Newsnight, next David Dimbleby from Question Time, then John Humphrys from the Today Programme and now Andrew Neil from This Week.
People often ask me where all the serious politicians have gone. They have retired – like all the serious interviewers. Others, of course, will come along to take their place and the generation now in primary school will feel no more familiarity with the name David Dimbleby than the under sixties feel with the famous Richard Dimbleby.
As for politicians, who now remembers the great characters such as Gerald Nabarro or even the more recent Alan Clark? Future generations will probably give a similar blink at the mention of Boris Johnson or Dennis Skinner. Manny Shinwell? Who he?
The serious ones fare no better. Ian Macleod? Selwyn Lloyd? David Owen? Rab Butler? Of course it helps to have been Prime Minister but try the names Jim Callaghan or Alec Douglas-Home on the under forties. When I was on Pointless, only 39 out of a 100 people remembered that Gordon Brown ■
THERE are times when the rulebook should give way to common sense and the law be interpreted in its spirit not its letter.
If there is the smallest possibility that Ian Brady’s briefcases contain clues to the whereabouts of the undiscovered body of a child, then they should be opened forthwith.
The greater puzzle is why they weren’t searched during his lifetime.
Hinds should work this out
RECENTLY I wrote about the folly of universities being expected to ensure that black students got as good a degree as white students.
Now they are under attack again but this time for failing to admit enough poor white students.
Presumably that is because poor white students do not make the grades for entrance – and that is the fault of schools, not universities.
Why on earth doesn’t Education Secretary Damian Hinds say so? He went to grammar school and to Oxford. Surely he can work that out? had been a Labour PM and yet he was the most recent one.
Well at least Theresa May will always be known as the second woman Prime Minister, sighed a friend recently when sympathising with her troubles. So who was the second man in space? Who was the second man to run the four-minute mile? No, nor do I. Few legends survive their own lifetimes.