Modesty

I just saw Lauren Booth, who rather famously has converted to Islam, defend her move as to do chiefly with respect for women and modesty

Now, I shall try to keep this brief as I'm meant to be asleep, I am left wondering why is Islam the method of choice for this statement?

Is it the only way to be modest?

Of course not, if you can't beat the 'western' sexualisation of society and obsession with looks within yourself then what does that say about you? You have to join a religion to keep yourself away from western excess? Loads of people refuse to conform, I will not watch X Factor for example - and plenty of secular women I know have no time for make-up and being stereotypical bimbos, and yes, Booth did effectively imply that it was Islam that allowed women to be modest and taken seriously, which seems somewhat odd when there are plenty of secular women with respect out there

Is she really saying you can't be a non-conformist if you don't join a group of other non-conformists? Strikes me as being incredibly weak-willed, actually - nobody is forcing you to live by 'western' rules, it's fine if religion helps you keep focus, but that could be applied to any religion, notably the one she converted from

Catholicism does teach modesty - you are supposed to cover your knees and shoulders in a church, for example, and that rule is observed in more religious societies than ours, likewise, one look at the US will show you plenty of good Christian girls from the mid-west

So it strikes me as rather odd that she chose this as the major reasoning (at least in public) for her conversion - it says nothing of the faith, the theological heart of any religion, nothing about the afterlife, God etc, just a simple practice of dress - this to me, seems a rather shallow reason to convert to anything

You would, in fact, never even mention dress in relation to Catholicism, you'd be talking about views on abortion, marriage, sin, transubstantiation, Jesus or the afterlife - these sorts of issues don't even seem to be on her radar

She was already a religious person, and it seems she has adopted a practice from another because she likes it, has she really changed her underlying religious convictions or has she just added a veil to her pre-existing beliefs? It would be more impressive had she been an atheist turning to god

So in fact, I find myself agreeing with Peter Hitchens on something - this is fashion, she's thought long and hard about herself and her modesty, but seems to lack any theological conviction, I can't see any faith based reason for why she converted aside from she gets to feel empowered by some clothing - you don't even need a religion to be modest

However, we soon diverge as he seems to think it's a trend for 'English women to take the [veil]' that's showing there's a moral gap in our society that is being filled by Islam

Uhuh...seriously? Firstly, show me this trend outside of a few media types, because I haven't noticed a surge in veils round my way just yet

And secondly - she's a lifelong Christian (like her half-sis, of course) who has worked in Palestine and works for Islam TV and an Iranian TV channel - so she was already in the religious minority, and heavily exposed to her new religion, not one of us fornicating Satan-worshippers - there was no gap for her to fill, she was a believer before, and remains one now

The Mail have played up the rise of the white, female converts - but is this much different to conversion to Christianity? We don't know how many were even Christians to start off with, making it nothing to do with secular society at large, and conversions have always happened - people were doing it in the Victorian era

And I think they've missed (deliberately, of course) one glaringly obvious fact for why women outnumber men in the conversion stats - because they always outnumber us in religion! Women are something like four times as likely to be religious in this country (forgive me, it's late, so no checking), it is men that have driven the religious decline, and if men aren't shown to be jumping on this bandwagon then how can you say Islam is filling some sort of moral gap that we yearn for?

The answer is, you can't, and that's why they ignore it in their theories - if it's only about women then it's saying something about women, who have already been shown to be far more religious and superstitious in general, not society at large

The inevitable Chilcot post

I really didn't want to get too caught up in Chilcot but I ended up listening to Blair all day on the radio at work..it was pretty dull, let's be honest, but I have a pretty clear image in my mind that I wish to share

Firstly, it seems clear after Sept 11th that Blair and Bush wanted rid of Saddam, despite there being no credible link between the two (that remains a rather bizarre, unanswered connection) - Blair seems to have shifted to the 'regime change' argument the yanks supported since 1998

The British would never accept regime change as a legal argument, unlike the Americans, therefore there needed to be an actual threat - to the Americans the regime is a valid threat in itself, as a yank advisor just pointed out on Newsnight, but the British and the UN would disagree

So Blair felt justified in removing Saddam - this is what he said all day, but the fact remained that the argument presented to us was WMD, this turned out to be false - to me this is crucial, in fact it's the only point that matters

Yes, Blair has to make decisions, and frankly had he supported regime change and said that in 2002/3 then I wouldn't have a problem, but the fact is he used the threat of WMD as the main argument, not the great regime change he talks about now - he stood up in parliament and said '45 minutes' and that the intelligence was 'beyond doubt'

Again, if the intelligence was simply wrong and we were all mistaken, fair enough - but it turns out that intelligence was at the time 'patchy and sporadic', and when we combine that with the testimony of Hans Blix, who never finished the inspection, and the fact that nobody really seems to have been keen on this action but 'president' Blair it seems increasingly obvious that WMD was a crock, and the intelligence simply wasn't strong enough for Blair to use as an excuse - he wanted regime change, he used a false argument, written by Alastair Campbell, quickly exposed by Andrew Gilligan

That's the issue here - we were taken to war on false pretences, for Blair to constantly say now 'Saddam's gone, we're better off' is completely beside the point, that wasn't why Parliament was asked to go to war

The only question that needs asking is did he genuinely believe in that so-called 'sexed up' dossier, or were we being deliberately misled to suit his ends?

I'm afraid Chilcot will not determine this, I doubt anyone ever will, but I do hope this is the end of over seven years of infernal debate about this - we have a pretty clear picture that Blair acted almost alone in his support of the US, with little cabinet or legal support, nor very good intelligence, and it seems increasingly likely that Parliament was indeed misled to remove Saddam - that's probably the best we'll ever get from this, if you don't believe the ends justifies the means then you're argument cannot be dismissed as ravings, you were right - I hope people can accept a moral victory as I think it seems pretty clear to most of us that we were indeed lied to and that we've been right from the start

But you're dreaming if you want to see him punished

Religion...you think it's a fair fight and then you realise...

..That there's a perfectly reasonable reason why most of our PMs have been religious (or rather, Christian)

You see, this article in the Tablet assesses the religious motivations of all our post-war leaders - they even do us unbelievers the service of not including Churchill, who was a sceptic but nominally a Christian (as pretty much everyone born before the 1980s is)

Nice of them you think, sparing us the debate over Churchill's religious beliefs (particularly when you get those annoying 'Hitler and Stalin were atheist' lines)

They are taking a line that historians may well gloss over religious motivation of the most recent leaders, as few have dared to embrace religion in public, and that would be a bad thing apparently - well fortunately their case falls pretty flat when they get on to Major, who admitted in his memoirs that the church he never belonged to 'appealed' to him - whoop de doo - I'll leave it up to the future historians to assess how worthy that musing is for tying into his various policy decisions

Nope, this is really a thinly-veiled attempt to highlight that religion still is very, very, (hurumph) important in British life and that our leaders have been supportive of morality despite the social trend towards secularism

If anything Major is indicative of most Brits - baptised for no reason but tradition and raised secular, a few thoughts about something he had little experience of hardly qualifies him as a religious mind

Blair of course is the shining light - we all know he was religious, and somehow I don't think anyone will be glossing over that aspect of him (so again you wonder, why the worry?), although you might argue that catholic-convert Blair is hardly normal and one man does not indicate a trend, and with Major cut out it's looking like a pretty weak case

But what-ho - all I really felt I needed to say was that all you need to do is look at when our youngest Prime Minister was born - 1953, to see that current social trends have sod all to do with a man who was an adult by 1971 - as always, politics is a good thirty years behind 'society'

Give it twenty to thirty years and we get someone my age, born in the 80s and educated in the 90s and then you might see the shift - I think you'll be unlikely to find someone who was brought up remotely religious - most baby-boomers abandoned the religion of their parents, subsequently the rest of us didn't even get any forced down our throats and don't even have that piece of the brain that is a little child being brainwashed, in our heads

Cameron is of course, an official, worshipping Anglican - for what it's worth...

..The Camerons just so happened to have been going to the church allied to the CofE primary school where their little daughter was enrolled last year, for a mere three years - make of that what you will, Peter Hennessey

Is it obvious?

Looking over this report on the widening social gap which has been doing the rounds of late, I can't help feeling there's a very obvious answer to the issue

As an example, the report shows that doctors and lawyers who are in their late-30s today are drawn from a more affluent slice of society than their colleagues in their 50s.

Why should this be the case? Why should the gap be widening

At the risk of being labelled a Tory elitist I'm going to say this - Grammar schools anyone?

It does seem to be a noticeable trend that those educated during or prior to the 70s are from a wider section of society than those in their thirties - i.e. educated in the 80s - more or less consistent with the removal of Grammar schools

I don't claim this is the only factor, I am merely noticing a rather obvious correlation between the decline of Grammar schools and the increase in privilege in the professional classes - it may be nothing to do with it, but I think it's hard to ignore when it was such an important change in schooling

I can understand some of the arguments against them, even if I don't agree - but it's pretty clear that all forcing the poor and bright into comprehensives did was worsen their chances and left the opportunities to only the wealthy...the Grammar school system may not have been perfect but simply removing them made it worse if you ask me

I never got the chance to go to Grammar school, I only had the option of my two local comps - fortunately I was eligible for the Grammar school replacement - the Assisted Places Scheme, which basically gave those who would pass the 11+ a subsidised or free entry to independent schools

Had I been a year younger I would not have been eligible for this, because Tony Blair scrapped it because it was 'elitist' (this...from a Fettes man) - so I would have gone to one of those comps

Now I'm not knocking state education as a whole, there are many excellent comps - just none of them happened to be where I lived, I would've been sent to one of the underachieving pits where my local friends went, none of whom did A-levels or went to university, only one teacher was ever murdered though..

It does sound elitist, I admit - but the government are insistent on giving the poorest of us better chances, I don't see how forcing us to go to the local comps did that - unless of course the removal of both Grammar schools and the AP scheme meant that state education considerably improved - and I'm not aware that it did?

From the few socialists that I've met they seem to think that the complete removal of private schools and total use of state education would somehow create a better system - it's a pipedream, and the rich would still use their influence to play the postcode lottery, go abroad, or hire tutors - you can never remove the influence of the wealthy, unless we head down the communist route...

All that happened was the brightest were sent to the comps, while the richest got the best education - in principle maybe it was unfair to pay for the brightest to go to 'posh' schools, but the reality was it was a much more effective system than some grandiose dream about brilliant state education - all that has happened is the rich now get more opportunities while the rest of us form part of the mediocre average

Basically the government want more people from poor backgrounds to have the best they can achieve, i.e. on merit - and yet to classify people by their intelligence (a fairly big part of 'merit' if you ask me) is 'elitist' - seems a bit of a conundrum to me - they would rather just get more poor people in, regardless of talent, to fill their quotas - seems like another form of discrimination to me, just as bad as the rich paying for their kids achievements

Two things stand out to me: Firstly look at the last two Tory Prime Ministers: both Grammar school educated and with working-class origins, now compare that to the current Tory leader and his band of Eton educated cronies, from a demographic coincidentally educated mostly in the late 70s and 80s - maybe it's nothing to do with it, but I always find it quite a striking comparison (and I didn't even need to swing at Labour's last two)

Then, on a more personal note, and I can give no evidence of this, note my school's performance after my year group - it dipped considerably and the few long-term teachers I occasionally see whinge no end about falling standards - I accept that this may well be down to the growing class sizes in the school's pursuit of money, and also the fact that my teachers are old and naturally regard everything as being worse now - but I choose to see the decline as having a link to the removal of academic qualification and the allowing of all those whose parents merely pay up, in

I don't claim it's a valid study, I may well be wrong, but that's my life experience and I'll stick to it until otherwise proved

Hang on...didn't he quit?

Apparently Tony Blair will be our 'official' candidate for the formal position of 'EU president'

The point that nobody got a chance to vote on this issue, and even when the Irish did they were told to go back and do it again, is by-the-by here

But why does a man who willingly quit his elected position for no actual reason feel he should be the unelected president of the EU? 'I can't run a state...but I can run a super-state'

And why should I trust a man who was elected on a lie (I will serve a full third term...) - slippery bastard

And to top it all off sodding 'Mrs. unelectable Kinnock' is the one who announces it...I know politics has always been about jobs for the boys, but even the vague facade of democracy is just being sidelined by this lot

In related news, this is a clearly pro-government headline from the no.2 spot:

The government is expected to announce a scaled-down version of its grand plan to create up to 10 "eco towns".

Not at all condescending...