Janet Daley: Like McCarthyism, America Will Soon Wake Up to Wokeism | Off Script

Oct 22, 2021 • Do not be fooled by the dominance of the woke movement; it is already running out of steam. In this week’s Off Script Janet Daley joins Steven Edginton to discuss America and Britain: what divides the two nations and what unites them.

This is a very interesting discussion. Janet Daley makes many interesting observations in it. I do not, however, agree with all she states. In particular, being an ardent Remainer, I have a totally different take on Brexit than she does. Nevertheless, I feel that many of Janet Daley’s insights are well worth listening to.

FYI, I was for many years a subscriber to The Telegraph; but I cancelled my subscription when the newspaper became anti-EU, pro-Brexit, and pro-Trump! That combination was simply too much for me to handle! However, when I was a subscriber, Janet Daley was one of my favourite contributors. – © Mark

Why the Migration Fiasco Spells Doom for Project Europe

THE TELEGRAPH: The influx of migrants has exposed the anti-democratic bias and the administrative uselessness of the EU

History offers up another of its ironies. The Soviet Union collapsed when great masses of people simply walked away from it. You may recall the blissful faces of those crowds who strolled peacefully into West Berlin, and then proceeded to tear down the wall which had imprisoned them for two generations. Now the European Union is about to collapse because great masses of people are walking into it: very little ecstasy this time, just lawless desperation. But by sheer numbers, their progression is as inexorable and politically destabilising as that miraculous exodus which brought down the great Communist empire without a shot being fired.

Forget the pantomime “negotiations” this weekend over an emergency brake – which can’t be used without prior universal agreement (rather like a fire alarm that can’t be activated without an international committee being convened), or the tortuous new wording of empty promises. That isn’t even a sideshow. It is deliberately deceptive nonsense. » | Janet Daley | Saturday, January 30, 2016

Janet Daley: It's Left-wing Prats Who Are Defending Our Freedoms

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The visit by national security agents to smash up computers at the Guardian newspaper is shocking, like something out of East Germany in the 1970s

A few weeks ago, a British national newspaper was visited by a detachment of national security agents who demanded that its computers and hard drives be destroyed. The security men then stood over its staff while they smashed their equipment to pieces. In the peace-time history of a free country, this incident is about as shocking as it gets. And yet, a remarkable consensus has grown up, including – I’m sorry to say – many on my side of the political fence, to the effect that this is no big deal.

The reasons that this scene – which looks, on the face of it, like something out of East Germany in the 1970s – is apparently perfectly acceptable seem to be: a) the data in the computers was a threat to the national security of this country and to that of our American allies; b) this information was stolen from the US government and published illegally by people who are narcissistic/eccentric/of dubious political judgment, and c) the newspaper in question was the Guardian, which is full of annoying Left-wing prats. Let’s consider these points in order of importance.

Taking a hammer to the hardware in the Guardian’s basement will make scarcely any difference to the dissemination of this data since duplicates reside in other locations around the globe. So presiding over the physical destruction of the newspaper’s property could only constitute a form of rather theatrical intimidation.

The official excuse for getting rid of the equipment – even though the data was known to exist elsewhere – was that the paper’s system might be insecure, so obliterating it meant that at least one source of potential leaks was eliminated. This would be far more credible if the National Security Agency (whose mass surveillance programme had been exposed) was as diligent in carrying out its prescribed function as it is in vindictively pursuing anyone who reports its unconstitutional activities to the world. Read on and comment » | Janet Daley | Saturday, August 24, 2013

My comment:

Guardianistas are defending our freedoms. Perhaps they don't call it The Guardian for nothing then.

PS: Excellent article by Janet Daley. – © Mark

This comment appears here too.

Barack Obama Is Trying to Make the US a More Socialist State
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The ideas the President outlined in the State of the Union are based on the very model that is causing the EU to implode.

What was it everybody used to say about the United States? Look at what’s happening over there and you will see our future. Whatever Americans are doing now, we will be catching up with them in another 10 years or so. In popular culture or political rhetoric, America led the fashion and we tagged along behind.

Well, so much for that. Barack Obama is now putting the United States squarely a decade behind Britain. Listening to the President’s State of the Union message last week was like a surreal visit to our own recent past: there were, almost word for word, all those interminable Gordon Brown Budgets that preached “fairness” while listing endless new ways in which central government would intervene in every form of economic activity.

Later, in a television interview, Mr Obama described his programme of using higher taxes on the wealthy to bankroll new government spending as “a recipe for a fair, sound approach to deficit reduction and rebuilding this country”. To which we who come from the future can only shout, “No o-o, go back! Don’t come down this road!”

As we try desperately to extricate ourselves from the consequences of that philosophy, which sounds so eminently reasonable (“giving everybody a fair share”, the President called it), we could tell America a thing or two – if it would only listen. Human beings are so much more complicated than this childlike conception of fairness assumes. When government takes away an ever larger proportion of the wealth which entrepreneurial activity creates and attempts to distribute it “fairly” (that is to say, evenly) throughout society in the form of welfare programmes and public spending projects, the effects are much, much more complex and perverse than a simple financial equation would suggest.

It is probably obvious that the people from whom the wealth is taken will become less willing to incur the risks that entrepreneurial investment involves – and so will produce less wealth, and thus less tax revenue. But more surprising, perhaps, are the damaging changes that take place in the beneficiaries of this “fairness” and the permanent effect this has on the balance of power between government and the people. Read on and comment » | Janet Daley | Saturday, January 28, 2012

Janet Daley: Is President Obama All Talk and No Action?

THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: The US President has produced little of substance to underpin his high-flown rhetoric about being willing to stand up for freedom, argues Janet Daley.

So what, after all that, are we to make of the great Obama-Cameron concord? What message exactly are we supposed to take from the speeches, the statements, the press conference and the ecstatic briefings? There was certainly an over-arching theme that no one was intended to miss: as a former US president might have put it, the torch has been passed to a new generation. These two national leaders who inherit the most effective alliance in modern history are significantly different from their immediate predecessors: we are not, repeat not, Bush and Blair, but that does not mean that we are about to funk the responsibilities which those men saw as defining their world role. So the question is: when the similarities are added up and the differences subtracted, what is the sum that remains? Is this really a revival of liberal interventionism, or a retreat from it that is being obscured by a lot of high-flown rhetoric?

The commitment to upholding the values of liberty and democratic freedoms as universal human rights was reiterated again and again in terms as unequivocal as any that the previous holders of their offices could have wished. No patronising cynicism about certain races and certain regions of the globe being insufficiently rational to cope with the modern idea of a free and liberal society. (George Bush and Tony Blair were the ghosts at the barbecue, you might say.)

Certainly, the moral obligation to spread the doctrine of democratic government and to support the efforts of any people who seek to liberate themselves from tyranny sounded uncannily like a revival of the Bush doctrine. It would be easy to conclude, as Amity Shlaes puts it in the current issue of Standpoint magazine, “…the reality is that we are all neo-cons now”.

But in fact there was nothing in Mr Obama’s comment that “the longing for freedom and human dignity is not English or American or Western – it is universal” that was the least bit contentious in American terms: the principle that all men are created equal and are born with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is written into the nation’s sacred founding documents. Read on and comment » | Janet Daley | Saturday, May 28, 2011

My comment:

Despite the rhetoric, the US is going to hell in a handbasket! The economy is in the tank, and Obama has little hope of doing anything meaningful to stop it disappearing into the abyss. Obama is a good-timer, a poseur, and is work-shy to boot. Instead of flitting here and flitting there, he should stay at home and do some real work for a change, in order to sort out the appalling mess that is the American economy.

Moreover, once upon a time, America was 'The Land of the Free.' Alas, no more! Everywhere you turn in the States these days there are restrictions. New York under Tyrant Bloomberg is the best example of how a people can lose its freedom to satisfy the prejudices of one physically-challenged dictator. To talk about America and freedom in the same breath when a smoker can't even light up in a park for fear of breaking the law (I write as a non-smoker), is absurd. Similar laws are being rolled out across the nation, from coast to coast. Then there are the restrictions on so many other things too.

And all this talk of democracy. Empty rhetoric when you don't have it yourself. In any case, the US is technically not a democracy; rather, it is a republic. The people have very little actual say in the day-to-day governance of their once great nation.

Dubya started spending the US into the ground; BHO's grand economic schemes and spendthrift ways have only accelerated the the process. With America's new-found propensity for over-governance, if the torch of freedom is not to be doused, then some other nation will have to take it and run with it. It's doubtful America will be able to keep it alight; Americans, it seems, have forgotten what freedom is. – © Mark

This comment also appears here

Janet Daley: Cameron Is Taking Us Back to the Feudal
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The party appears to have returned to the old model of gentry-led Conservatism , says Janet Daley.

There is an election coming. So the Prime Minister is touring the country trying to persuade Conservative voters in various states of disgruntlement and suspicion that they should support the party. He is hitting a number of refrains that are calculated to have that effect: we are doing what you know in your hearts needs to be done to the economy. We are bravely reforming welfare, education and health (whoops, no – maybe not health). And, rather startlingly, we are cracking down on immigration – or at least we are prepared to acknowledge that you have legitimate concerns about immigration.

But even in the midst of these various strands of more-or-less persuasive appeal there is an odd kind of vacuum – a hole where the central theme should be. The Conservatives may be doing quite a few things of which their supporters approve, most notably taking on what had seemed the intractable problems of welfare dependency and collapsing educational standards. But if people choose to vote Tory now it will be more a consequence of what the party seems to be getting done from one day to the next, than of what it is in itself. There is no longer a clear sense of basic common purpose – of fundamental driving principle – at the heart of Conservatism. Who the party speaks for, and what it stands for, is a matter of confusion and contradiction. This is not, as some apologists might claim, a simple re-assertion of pragmatism over ideology. Pragmatism is the doctrine of do-what-works but what counts as working is established on the basis of values: governments can only know when they have achieved something worthwhile if they have an idea of what is worth achieving.

If you are between the ages of, say, 30 and 45, you probably thought you had a fairly clear conception of what you were supporting when you voted for the Tories (or of what you hated when you voted against them). Since the 1980s, Conservatism had stood for free-market economics and self-improvement: the party had come to represent the striving, sometimes vulgar but always determined and hard-working, upwardly mobile classes. This provoked a revulsion on both the Left and the more traditional Right which was as much to do with snobbery as it was with political beliefs. Margaret Thatcher was dismissed as a “greengrocer’s daughter”, and her philosophy derided as “bourgeois triumphalism”. The Tory party had cast itself as the voice of the most productive, creative, energetic – and unfashionable – people in the country. Read on and comment » | Janet Daley | Saturday, April 16, 2011

My comment:

Nothing will ever change in this country, since snobbery is written in the Brits’ DNA. The class system is perpetuated by the monarchy, which, while its pageantry is charming and delightful to watch, its effect on society is toxic. Little people who think they are big simply because daddy was very rich and mummy was a lady-in-waiting! It’s a case of the best ‘jobs for the boys,’ and university places in the best universities, especially Oxbridge, are reserved for the aristocracy.

I used to feel very pro-monarchy and pro-establishment until I had a rude awakening and discovered what the establishment of this country was truly like.

To call this country a democracy is a joke indeed. This country is a plutocratic aristocracy. Closed to all that weren’t born in the right circles, scornful of achievement, and distrustful of true academic success. (The aristocracy, traditionally, never had to work for doctorates and higher degrees, because they had their status from birth.)

Until this country can be turned into a true meritocracy, there will never be true advancement, and the country will always be held back and chained to its feudal past.

Other successful countries in Europe cast off the spell of aristocracy long ago, and they embarked on the bourgeoisification of their countries, thereby shrinking the lower class and upper class, and giving everyone a fair chance in life by including them in the middle class. Not so, this country. In this country, successive governments have deliberately not embarked on bourgeoisification: the Labour Party wanted to keep the working classes down so as to keep them all in power; the Conservative Party wanted to keep the working classes down, too. That way they could hold on to the reins of power, and maintain a good, solid supply of cheap labour for the overlords.

This Coalition government, headed by the Caminicks, is run by the snobs for the snobs. They couldn’t give a damn about the ‘little people.’ If one hasn’t got gazillions, preferably inherited gazillions of course, then one doesn’t belong in their midst. It’s a public school, old-boy network. They’ll get ever richer, despite the austere times, but God help the rest of us! – © Mark

This comment also appears here

Why Don't We Love David Cameron?
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The Prime Minister is doing most things right, but he just can't capture the public's imagination, says Janet Daley.

David Cameron has succeeded in what has always seemed to be his chief political objective: he is not actively disliked by the majority of the population. In spite of being a Tory – and an Old Etonian – relatively few people hate him. Maybe this is as good as it gets.

But the great campaign to make Mr Cameron (and, by inference, his party) likeable – unthreatening, inoffensive, un-nasty – has an obverse side, which is now becoming clear. While almost none of the electorate violently detests him, nobody much loves him either. He is not repugnant – but neither is he inspirational. He is not malignant – but neither is he magnetic.

All of which may go some way to explain why, although many of his policies are getting a good press and some of them, such as welfare reform, are extremely popular, his party is still just level-pegging in the polls with Labour, whose state of disarray has reached embarrassing proportions. Even when the Cameron leadership is perceived to be going largely in the right direction, and doing quite brave things, it does not – as the saying goes – capture the public imagination. Listening to the Prime Minister speak arouses no passion in the collective breast of the nation. Why not? Read on and comment >>> Janet Daley | Saturday, November 27, 2010

Why don’t we love Cameron? That’s simple. He comes over as vain and conceited. He also comes over as weak and fawning. I detect no courage in this man. The country is in dire need of a real leader, one who is courageous and committed to maintaining freedom and true democracy. In Cameron, I fear we have someone who doesn’t seem to understand what is at stake; and someone who, even if he does, has no courage to stand up against that which is threatening our very survival. Cameron prefers to fiddle while Rome burns. The happiness index is more important to him. How banal! Further, he and Cleggover are turning their backs on Israel and sucking up to the Gulf Arabs. They have no principles. Mammon is their god. – © Mark

This comment also appears here.

The West Is Turning Against Big Government - But What Comes Next?
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The struggle to curtail the social democratic state could have ugly consequences, says Janet Daley.

There seems to be only one political argument of interest left in the Western democracies: how “big” should the state be, and what are the proper limits of its responsibilities? Abstract as it may sound, this question has had a quite startling impact on the everyday experience – and voting habits – of people in the most advanced countries of the world.

In the United States, the electorate’s considered answer to it has humiliated a president and swept an extraordinary number of neophytes – whose primary attraction was their loathing of government power – into the most powerful legislature in history. In Britain, it has become the dominant theme (in fact, the raison d’être) of a coalition between a Left-of-centre party and a Right-of-centre one, which has managed to achieve a remarkable degree of agreement on the need to reduce – or, at least, to examine rigorously – the role of government intervention in all areas of social life.

The dominant economies of Europe, too, are going through quite momentous re-examinations of the post-war philosophy which accepted the state as an unquestionable source of benevolence and all-pervasive social justice. And this massive reassessment of the role of government has not come about simply because of the economic crisis, and the terrifying degree of sovereign debt which it produced. The governments of what were the richest countries in the world may be broke, but what is interesting is their response to this: the plan is not to make themselves rich enough once again to do all the things that they used to do, but to rethink the whole enterprise so that government never again finds itself so extravagantly overextended.

On this side of the Atlantic, there is now a broad understanding that the social democratic project itself is unsustainable: that it has grown wildly beyond the principles of its inception and that the consequences of this are not only unaffordable, but positively damaging to national life and character. The US, bizarrely, is running at least 10 years behind in this process, having elected a government which chose to embark on the social democratic experiment at precisely the moment when its Western European inventors were despairing of it, and desperately trying to find politically palatable ways of winding it down.

The American people – being made of rather different stuff and having historical roots which incline them to be distrustful of government in any form – immediately rejected the whole idea. But in Britain, too, among real people (as opposed to ideological androids) there is a general sense that governments – even when they are elected by a mass franchise – become out of touch and out of control, and that something essential to human dignity and potential is under threat from their overweening interference. Read on and comment >>> Janet Daley | Saturday, November 06, 2010

Midterm Elections 2010: Prepare for a New American Revolution
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Popular rage against the elite could change the nature of US politics, says Janet Daley.

More than three centuries ago, the residents of America staged a rebellion against an oppressive ruler who taxed them unjustly, ignored their discontents and treated their longing for freedom with contempt. They are about to revisit that tradition this week, when their anger and exasperation sweep through Congress like avenging angels. This time the hated oppressor isn't a foreign colonial government, but their own professional political class.

In New York last week I was struck by the startling shift of mood since my last visit, during Barack Obama's first year in office. This phenomenon took varying forms, of course, depending on the political orientation of my interlocutor, but the underlying theme of despair and disgust was almost universal. Liberal Democrats (who hugely outnumber most other factions in that city) were despondent and disappointed with the collapse of Obama's popularity. A few of them (remarkably few, actually) were ready to blame this on a "Right-wing conspiracy" of vaguely racist motivation. But most of them were frankly critical of the strategic mistakes they believed the White House had made, and the baffling inability of their President to connect with the people in an engaging way. His shocking lack of emotional expression during last month's commemoration of 9/11 – a point of particular significance to New Yorkers – was remarked upon by a number of people I met.

There was a general sense that his personality was over-controlled and repressed, and that this was perhaps a function of his self-invention: the effect of having made a conscious choice to adopt an identity and a history (the Chicago black activist) which was unconnected to his real past. It occurred to me that, in an odd way, he was a Gatsby-like figure who had reinvented himself but whose new persona could be sustained only with a tremendous act of will. This psychological analysis seemed not unconnected to the political one, which revolved around his peculiar inability to sense what most Americans would regard as alienating and contrary to their own values and culture.

My Republican friends, perhaps surprisingly, were not gloating. They were too furious. But contrary to the superficial British assumption (heavily promoted by the BBC), they were not devoting their excoriation exclusively to the Obama Administration – or even to its clique of Congressional henchmen, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. That they were opposed to the Big State, European social democratic model of government which Obama had imported to Washington went almost without saying. But they were at least as angry with the leadership of their own party for having conceded far too much of the argument. Read on and comment >>> Janet Daley | Saturday, October 30, 2010

THE OBSERVER: The Tea Party: on the road with America's right-wing radicals – The Tea Party has dramatically changed US politics in just two years. As jobless figures and house repossessions soar, a growing number of anxious voters are warming to the Party's pledge - to make America great again. In the run-up to the midterm elections, Andrew Neil went on a whistlestop tour of the US to assess the mood of the nation >>> Andrew Neil | Sunday, October 31, 2010

CNBC's Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party

Janet Daley: US Liberal Media Stamps on Free Expression
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH – BLOGS – JANET DALEY: In New York last week everybody – and I mean everybody, not just the self-obsessed media crowd – was talking about the sacking of Juan Williams by National Public Radio. The significance of this saga seemed to encapsulate all the major points of contention in the political commentary wars which have become such a feature of American public life.

Mr Williams is an engaging, black liberal broadcaster who has been a pillar of NPR’s left-of-centre journalist tradition. In addition to the day job, he appeared regularly as a panellist on Fox News discussions, representing the left-liberal opposition to the channel’s more rightwing commentators. It is widely suspected that this established connection with Fox had something to do with the bizarre vindictiveness with which he was summarily dismissed by his bosses at NPR. Officially, Mr Williams’s sacking offence was to have declared (on a Fox News programme, as it happened) that he felt uneasy when he entered an airplane and encountered Muslims in tradtional religious dress.

That was it. He did not expand this comment into an anti-Islamic diatribe or make any hostile remarks about Muslims or their religious beliefs. But NPR felt that this was sufficient cause for terminating his employment (of many years’ standing) without further notice. Whereupon, virtually every sentient being of every political persuasion from Whoopi Goldberg on the left to Bill O’Reilly on the right, condemned NPR – whose knowledge of the constitutional right to free speech seemed surprisingly inadequate considering that it is exists by virtue of government subsidy - and Fox News immediately offered him a contract worth a reported $2 million. Read on and comment >>> Janet Daley | Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Related >>>

US Heads for Civil War Over Health Insurance
Tea Party Patriots demonstrate against healthcare reform. Photo: The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH – BLOGS – JANET DALEY: The Battle of Obama’s Healthcare is looking to go down in history as a major confrontation between the power of federal government and the self-determination of individual states. And that eternal tension between what used to be called state’s rights and the coercive inclinations of federal authority has been at the heart of the most momentous struggles in national history – not least the civil war which tested the strength of the Union to breaking point.

Barack Obama’s health reforms have been challenged by a startlingly successful rebellion in Missouri. A state ballot referendum on Proposition C which prohibited federal government from requiring people to buy health insurance or from penalising them if they did not, was carried by a majority of 71 per cent. (Making health insurance compulsory is one of the fundamental tenets of Obamacare.) The actual constitutional basis for this challenge may seem technical in British terms: it centres on the point that there should be no federal compulsion forcing people to engage in inter-state commerce (ie buying things across state lines). Read on and comment >>> Janet Daley | Wednesday, August 04, 2010

There'll Be Nowhere to Run from the New World Government
THE TELEGRAPH: 'Global' thinking won't necessarily solve the world's problems, says Janet Daley

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which "global" swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were "global crises" and "global challenges", the only possible resolution to which lay in "global solutions" necessitating "global agreements". Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a "global alliance" in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word "global", as in "global economic crisis", meant: "It's not my fault". To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of "global agreements" reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people. >>> Janet Daley | Saturday, December 19, 2009

Janet Daley: The Republicans Can Take Heart as Barack Obama Staggers to the Left
THE TELEGRAPH: The President's recent display of liberalism – and confusion – can only help the opposition, says Janet Daley.

Very odd things are happening under Obama’s administration, says Janet Daley. Photo of Presdient Obama courtesy of The Telegraph
The Republicans now believe they have a grip on what Barack Obama is about. At least for this week. The grip is subject to reappraisal because Mr Obama has developed a gift for reinventing himself with remarkable alacrity. One very senior commentator on the Right said to me, "First we had Candidate Obama, who was a liberal [ie Left wing]. Then we had President-Elect Obama, who was post-partisan and centrist. Now we have President Obama, who has reverted to being ultraliberal."

The question of who Mr Obama really is, and what he truly believes, underlies the growing list of Very Odd Things that seem to be happening under his administration. Among the most perplexing of these mysteries is why, when he went to such pains to assemble a huge and widely experienced team of White House economic advisers (even going to the lengths of parading them at a press conference before he took office) he then handed over the actual drafting of his economic policy to the old Democratic fixers in Congress. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, are now, for all intents and purposes, running the Obama recovery plan.

Even if you do not regard the former as a monster and the latter as pretty hopeless, one thing is for sure: bipartisan they are not. So there is nothing very centrist about the budget which they are hoping to push through under the banner of Obama's "change we can believe in". The result: this is a $3.6 trillion Pelosi budget, embodying most of the wish-list of liberal projects that the Left of the Democratic Party has been dreaming of for more than 20 years. Should we assume, then, that this is what Mr Obama always wanted? Or that he is simply out of his depth and being steamrollered by the formidable Democratic machine in Congress? >>> Janet Daley | Monday, March 16, 2009

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No, Janet, Geert’s Film Was NOT Ugly!
Banning any discussion about the nature of the Koran just plays into the hands of bigots and demagogues, argues Janet Daley.

I had just taken part in a television discussion on the coverage of the Gaza conflict and was now paired up with the driver provided by BBC Transport to take me home. Clearly identifiable from his beard and clothing as a practising Muslim, he led me courteously to his car. On the way back, we chatted about the traffic and the weather, before we got onto the problems of minicab drivers in the recession. I sympathised with the fact that he was finding it harder and harder to make a living: even coming into central London from where he lived (he mentioned a town well known for its fundamentalist Islamic community) was no solution because it used so much petrol. Cab drivers were, I said, always among the first to suffer in financial hard times.

At various points in our exchanges, he expressed curiosity about what I had been debating on the programme and I avoided answering, sensing that the subject might be inflammatory. But finally there was a direct question: what subject had I been discussing? So I told him. And what had I said about it, he asked.

So, as tactfully as I could, I told him. Which opened the floodgates. The problem could never be resolved, he said, because it was a battle between Muslims and Jews which meant that it was between, as he put it, "good and evil". The Jews in Israel, he said, did not follow the faith of Judaism, but of another religion called "Zionism". At this point, I intervened to point out, very gently, that I was Jewish and to suggest that Judaism and Zionism were not actually mutually exclusive. The More We Discuss Religious Differences the Safer We Will Be >>> Janet Daley | Sunday, February 15, 2009

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Janet Daley: Look Across the Pond for a Lesson in Listening to the People
THE TELEGRAPH: Having spent the past two weeks immersed in American politics (spiritually, not physically), I must try to readjust my eyes for the British domestic scene.

It is not just the difference in scale that is disconcerting - this is a small island, after all, not a continental superpower. It is the sense of a wholly different conception of the relationship between government and people.

After more than 40 years as an American expatriate living in Britain, I have not got over the shock of being in a democratic country where the governing class holds the views of ordinary people in such contempt: the priorities of the public - whether they are uncontrolled immigration, lack of appropriate punishment for criminals, or the outrageous cost of the basic necessities of modern life - can be disregarded or dismissed if the governing elite decides that they are wrong-headed or benighted.

There is almost no sense at all of the principle that underpins the US Constitution: that in a democracy, the will of the majority of the people is sacred.

What prevails in Britain is the received wisdom of the professional political club. And that includes not just those elected to Parliament but their entourages, their party machines and their media hangers-on. Of course, Washington has its insider cabals and its incestuous "inside the Beltway" culture. But no member of Congress who wishes to survive can afford to become as detached and disdainful of popular opinion as members of the British political class openly (and shamelessly) declare themselves to be.

It is a positive point of pride among politicians here to say that they bravely hold out against "populist" demands - which is to say that they wilfully ignore and deride the concerns of ordinary people because they are not sufficiently enlightened to be worthy of consideration. Look across the Pond for a Lesson in Listening to the People >>> By Janet Daley September 8, 2008

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