Wednesday, October 19, 2005

BRITISH FOOD FASCISTS TO JAIL PEOPLE OVER INCORRECT FOOD

Governors of schools that continue to serve junk food to children after it has been banned could be prosecuted and receive a criminal record, the Education Secretary suggested yesterday. Ruth Kelly said that when laws to ban poor-quality burgers and sausages come into force, those who do not take their duty seriously will be "open to the same sanctions as anyone else who breaks the law". Ms Kelly said she did not believe that there would be prosecutions because she was sure that schools and local authorities would want to provide healthy meals. But she said that governors would be held responsible for food standards and any breaches would be picked up by Ofsted inspectors. Ms Kelly said: "Governors will have a new duty and will be responsible for the food that is served in their schools. Ofsted is going to inspect to make sure that schools are taking this duty seriously. There will be a law in place that says they have to make these standards."

The approach was criticised as heavy handed by the Conservatives. David Cameron, the shadow education secretary, said: "It seems that Ruth Kelly is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. We support the ban on junk food and put this policy forward before the election, but this seems to go too far."

It also emerged yesterday that a new qualification for dinner ladies announced by Ms Kelly to bolster "crucial skills" does not involve any cooking or work in the kitchen. The course will take only six hours to complete and has no practical content. Drawn up by City and Guilds, the Award in Providing a Healthier School Meals Service teaches the elements that make up a balanced diet for children and the nutrient composition of different foods. It also teaches how to persuade children to choose healthier options though "marketing and merchandising". At the end of the course, dinner ladies will answer multiple choice questions to test their knowledge of nutritional guidelines. The country's 80,000 dinner ladies will be expected to go through the training. School caterers say, however, that the qualification will do little to address the problem of how to provide a healthy diet for 50p a meal or less.

In a survey by Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine, completed by a quarter of the Local Authority Caterers Association, representing about 10,000 schools, staff described the course as "college-based, vague and absent of kitchen craft". Neil Porter, the former chairman of the association, said: "It needs to be more hands-on and teach caterers how to make food more nutritious. There is too much emphasis on marketing." One respondent said: "People want knife skills, menu planning and standardised recipes across the authority." Another said: "We need to know how to prepare and cook vegetables properly, basic pastry work, vegetarian cookery and how to present food appealingly." The qualification, part of a œ280 million programme to improve school meals, was branded a gimmick by the Conservatives when it was announced.

In her speech to the Labour conference in Brighton, Ms Kelly pledged to ban junk food from school canteens and to bring in minimum nutritional standards for all school meals, including breakfast and after-school clubs, by next September. Crisps, chocolate and sugary drinks will also be banned from tuck shops and vending machines. The proposals, which will not come into force for another 12 months, follow the television chef Jamie Oliver's campaign to improve school meals.

A list of foods to be banned from school kitchens will be published this week when the School Meals Review Panel reports back. It is expected to include junk food with high levels of salt, sugar and fat. Some border-line products, such as chips, fresh cakes and baked doughnuts, are likely to escape the purge. But they may be limited to once or twice a week. Mary Creagh, the Labour MP for Wakefield who has been campaigning on school food, said she was delighted. "This is great news," she said. "At last we will have a national curriculum for children's bodies as well as a national curriculum for their minds."

Ms Creagh's Food Bill, which will be debated in Parliament next month, calls for compulsory nutrition classes for all children and for a ban on marketing and advertising junk food to children.

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WALKING NOW INCORRECT IN BRITAIN

But cycling is OK, of course

With her year-round tan, long blonde hair and designer clothes, Sally Cameron does not look like a threat to national security. But the 34-year-old property developer has joined the ranks of Britain's most unlikely terrorist suspects after being held for hours for trespassing on a cycle path.

Ms Cameron was being hailed yesterday as Scotland's answer to Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old heckler manhandled out of the Labour Party conference last month. She was arrested under the Terrorism Act for walking along a cycle path in the harbour area of Dundee.

Yesterday, after receiving a letter from the Tayside procurator fiscal's office informing her that she would not be prosecuted, Ms Cameron said: "It is utterly ridiculous that such an inoffensive person as myself should be subject to such heavy-handed treatment."

She was walking from her office in Dundee to her home in the suburb of Broughty Ferry when she was arrested under new anti-terrorist legislation and held for four hours. She said: "I've been walking to work every morning for months and months to keep fit. One day, I was told by a guard on the gate that I couldn't use the route any more because it was solely a cycle path and he said, if I was caught doing it again, I'd be arrested. "The next thing I knew, the harbour master had driven up behind me with a megaphone, saying, `You're trespassing, please turn back'. It was totally ridiculous. I started laughing and kept on walking. Cyclists going past were also laughing. "But then two police cars roared up beside me and cut me off, like a scene from Starsky and Hutch, and officers told me I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act. The harbour master was waffling on and (saying that), because of September 11, I would be arrested and charged."

Ms Cameron, who said that at one stage one of the officers asked her to stop laughing, described the incident as "like a scene from the movie Erin Brockovich, with all the dock workers cheering me and telling me to give them hell". She said: "I was told that the cycle path was for cyclists only, as if walkers and not cyclists were the only ones likely to plant bombs. There are no signs anywhere saying there are to be no pedestrians. "They took me to the police station and held me for several hours before charging me and releasing me."

She said that she was particularly galled by the letter from the procurator fiscal's office, which said that she would not be prosecuted even though "the evidence is sufficient to justify bringing you before the court on this criminal charge".

Keith Berry, the harbour master at Forth Ports Dundee, said yesterday that Ms Cameron had been seen as a "security risk". Speaking about the incident, which took place in May, he said: "We contacted the police in regards to this matter because the woman was in a secure area which forbids people walking. It was seen as a security risk. We were following guidelines in requirement with the port security plan set up by the Government."

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THE INCORRECTNESS OF MARYAM NAMAZIE

A week ago, at a reception in one of London's dowdier hotels, Maryam Namazie received a cheque and a certificate stating that she was Secularist of the Year 2005. The audience from the National Secular Society cheered, but no one else noticed. At first glance, the wider indifference wasn't surprising. Everyone is presenting everyone else with prizes these days - even journalists get them. If coverage was given to all award winners, there would be no space left in the papers for news. On top of that, secularism is still an eccentric cause. Despite the privileges of the established churches, this is one of the most irreligious countries on Earth. The bishops have power but no influence, and the notion that you need a tough-minded movement to combat religious influence still feels quaint. Like republicanism, secularism is an ideal which can enthuse the few while leaving the many cold.

The rise of the Christian right in the United States and the Islamic right everywhere, of faith schools and religious censorship is breaking down complacency. The 7 July bombings should have blown it to pieces. But the Ealing comedy caricature of a kind vicar, who may be a bit silly but remains intrinsically decent, is still most people's picture of the religious in England, not least because there is truth in it. (It's a different matter in Northern Ireland and on the west coast of Scotland, for obvious reasons.)

For all that, Maryam Namazie's obscurity remains baffling. She ought to be a liberal poster girl. Her life has been that of a feminist militant who fights the oppression of women wherever she finds it. She was born in Tehran, but had to flee with her family when the Iranian revolution brought the mullahs to power. After graduating in America, she went to work with the poor in the Sudan. When the Islamists seized control, she established an underground human rights network. Her cover was blown and she had to run once again. She's been a full-time campaigner for the rights of the Iranian diaspora, helping refugees across the world and banging on to anyone who will listen about the vileness of its treatment of women.

When an Iranian judge hanged a 16-year-old girl for having sex outside marriage - I mean literally hanged her; he put the noose round her neck himself - Namazie organised global protests. Her best rhetorical weapon is her description of the obsessiveness of theocracy. The law in Iran not only allows women to be stoned, she says, but it specifies the size of the stones to be used; they mustn't be too small in case it takes too long to kill her and the mob gets bored; but mustn't be too big either, in case she is dispatched immediately and the mob is denied the sado-sexual pleasure of seeing her suffer.

She's media-friendly and literate, not least because she runs the London-based International TV English whose programmes have a large following in the Middle East. Yet one of the most important feminists from the developing world has never been on Woman's Hour. I searched our huge cuttings database and could find only one mention of her in the national press over the past 10 years. Right-thinking, left-leaning people have backed away from Maryam Namazie because she is just as willing to tackle their tolerance of oppression as the oppressors themselves.

It was the decision of broad-minded politicians in Ottawa to allow Sharia courts in Canada which did it for her. They said if they were not established, the Muslim minority would be marginalised and to say otherwise was racism pure and simple. After years of hearing this postmodern twaddle, Namazie flipped. Why was it, she asked, that supposed liberals always give 'precedence to cultural and religious norms, however reactionary, over the human being and her rights'? Why was it that they always pretended that other cultures were sealed boxes without conflicts of their own and took 'the most reactionary segment of that community' as representative of the belief and culture of the whole.

In a ringing passage, which should be pinned to the noticeboards of every cultural studies faculty and Whitehall ministry, she declared that the problem with cultural relativism was that it endorsed the racism of low expectations. 'It promotes tolerance and respect for so-called minority opinions and beliefs, rather than respect for human beings. Human beings are worthy of the highest respect, but not all opinions and beliefs are worthy of respect and tolerance. There are some who believe in fascism, white supremacy, the inferiority of women. Must they be respected?'

Richard J Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, pointed out in Defence of History that if you take the relativist position to its conclusion and believe there's no such thing as truth and all cultures are equally valid, you have no weapons to fight the Holocaust denier or Ku Klux Klansmen.

Namazie is on the right side of the great intellectual struggle of our time between incompatible versions of liberalism. One follows the fine and necessary principle of tolerance, but ends up having to tolerate the oppression of women, say, or gays in foreign cultures while opposing misogyny and homophobia in its own. (Or 'liberalism for the liberals and cannibalism for the cannibals!' as philosopher Martin Hollis elegantly described the hypocrisy of the manoeuvre.) The alternative is to support universal human rights and believe that if the oppression of women is wrong, it is wrong everywhere.

The gulf between the two is unbridgeable. Although the argument is rarely put as baldly as I made it above, you can see it breaking out everywhere across the liberal-left. Trade union leaders stormed out of the anti-war movement when they discovered its leadership had nothing to say about the trade unionists who were demanding workers' rights in Iraq and being tortured and murdered by the 'insurgents' for their presumption.

Former supporters of Ken Livingstone reacted first with bewilderment and then steady contempt when he betrayed Arab liberals and embraced the Islamic religious right. The government's plans to ban the incitement of religious hatred have created an opposition which spans left and right and whose members have found they have more in common with each other than with people on 'their side'. As Namazie knows, the dispute can't stay in the background for much longer. There's an almighty smash-up coming and not before time.

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