BAREFACED FEMINIST HYPOCRISY

It is a mark of the rapid decline of our security services that they no longer keep a file on Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary. Once upon a time she was under surveillance by MI5, but our secret agents have diverted their attentions to angry young Muslims and Hewitt has been left to pursue her mischief-making unwatched. This is a mistake. If MI5 won't do it, then it should devolve to the police or, failing that, the voluntary sector. In a spirit of civic duty I'll start the ball rolling.

Her former ministry, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), finally conceded last week that Hewitt had broken the Sex Discrimination Act by personally appointing a woman to the board of the South West Regional Development Agency when a man was the better candidate for the job. The people who interviewed Malcolm Hanney for the post insisted that he was "much the strongest candidate" and a "clear favourite". But Hewitt overruled their decision and appointed Christine Channon, a local councillor, instead. The interviewers had placed Channon third on their list.

Hanney sued, citing sexual discrimination, and won. The DTI now concedes that Hewitt broke the law - but its squirming in the face of this reverse has been a wonder to behold. Its spokesmen said that neither they, collectively, nor Hewitt had realised that they were in breach of the law - which is odd because the DTI is responsible for the Sex Discrimination Act.

Further, if there is a politician in the country who understands the Sex Discrimination Act, then it is Hewitt: it has been one of the many things she has agitated for almost since her emergence from the womb in a Canberra hospital 56 years ago.

Hewitt has spent her entire life agitating. When she left university she immediately started agitating on behalf of elderly people at Age Concern and then spread her wings and took on an unlimited agenda of agitation as general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties. Since then she has agitated at the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Commission on Social Justice. In her spare time she ran Neil Kinnock's press office, having previously been a hardline Bennite who denounced her fellow MPs for not voting for the swivel-eyed, pipe-smoking high priest of leftie agitation when he failed in his attempt to become Labour's deputy leader in 1981. Had they voted as Hewitt insisted, it is possible that we would not have a viable Labour party. Pat often gets it badly wrong. I voted for him too. I am also frequently wrong.

But has she apologised to Hanney? Has she hell. The permanent secretary at the DTI has apologised - but he didn't make the decision. My suspicion is that Hewitt didn't apologise because she isn't remotely sorry. Further, can this business about not understanding the Sex Discrimination Act be true? I suspect she would never concede that its introduction was intended to defend the corner of maltreated job applicants if they were foolish enough to be born with a penis. It was intended to be of benefit only to women. Remember, the National Council for Civil Liberties never defended the civil liberties of workers sacked for refusing to join trade unions. No way.

For Hewitt is a proponent of something with which you will all by now be familiar, that oxymoron "positive discrimination". Her commitment to this crude and often cruel instrument of nanny state social engineering has been steadfast and complete - and it still continues to this day. She has been agitating recently to extend all-women shortlists to candidates in council elections (the main opposition within the Labour party will come from black activists and agitators who fear that all-women shortlists disfavour candidates from an ethnic minority background). She recently exulted that "soon" less than a third of the British workforce would be white males under 45. She was especially delighted at the growing number of workers who were "transgendered". I haven't a clue what this means, but I suppose we should rejoice, too. If you work with transgendered colleagues, give them a pat on the back from me, please.

In fact her entire career seems to have been built on the notion that social change must be enforced on a country that is too stupid or prejudiced to embrace her ideology voluntarily - regardless of the injustice to the individual. Women refuse to enter politics not because they have better things to do but because of male oppression: "Women find the formal political environments very off-putting and I think that's understandable." Discrimination always works in one way: against the woman or against the ethnic minorities. It is not part of Hewitt's make-up to accept that there can often be another side to the argument.

The world is divided into two great hostile camps: the oppressor and the oppressed. So even when she breaks the law and with insufferable arrogance decides that one man's legitimate right to a job should be taken away from him, she is incapable of saying sorry. Because it's the law that's wrong, not Hewitt.

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THE INFANTILIZATION OF OUR CULTURE

Twenty years ago we used to laugh at children who were the product of experimental "progressive" schools or nurseries, or indeed the product of progressive, experimental parenting - no rules, no homework, no supervised diet, no chores, no bedtime, no potty training, no hairbrush, no pleases, no thank-yous. These children - everyone knew one, but probably not two - were in the minority. Now they have become the norm.

This is partly to do with the disastrous fact that many parents today are so insecure that they strive to be their small children's "best friend", rather than their parent, failing to grasp that you can have friends coming out of your ears, but you have only one mother and father, and that the two are not interchangeable. Such parents' reluctance to lay down the law has reached epidemic proportions. They cannot say "no", because then they risk unpopularity, a fate in their eyes worse than death.

This has the direst and most tiresome consequences: you go to dinner at someone's house and their children are rampaging about until 2am, making conversation impossible (for which privilege you are paying your babysitter œ7 an hour); you take a child a present and, if you're lucky, get a grunt instead of a thank you (thank-you notes seem to have died out altogether); you have people over for Sunday lunch and have to watch their children eating with their mouths wide open, if they deign to eat at all.

I was recently interrogated by a six-year-old about the specific ingredients, and their quantities, of a lamb stew. I was apparently the only person present that day who thought this was insane.

I know someone who cooks three different suppers for her three children every night, because they all fancy different things. Try pointing out that she's a working mother, not a short-order chef, and you get a lecture about how the little darlings' happiness is paramount.

This, like so much dubious parenting, has a great deal to do with working women's guilt. I do wish someone would explain that all the good that's done by going out to work, being intellectually stimulated and earning a living is completely undone if you're going to come home and behave like a particularly weedy throwback. An imaginary throwback, at that: women in the 1950s didn't cook three separate meals, or have no set bedtime, or no rules.

But what about the rest of us? Why do adults need to be told how to behave? "Don't indulge in nude stretches or contortions in gym changing rooms", Good Housekeeping's guide helpfully tells us. "Don't kiss anyone on the lips other than your partner", or indeed "ogle other men" in front of him. The magazine has a stolid middle-class middle-aged readership: I find the idea of it needing to be told not to bend over naked in public a bit alarming. If even the nice ladies who subscribe to Good Housekeeping need this information, what on earth does that say about the rest of us? That we are a nation of tragic oiks.

Forget not knowing which fork to use: we probably need to be reminded to use cutlery in the first place. In fact when it comes to manners the rude children have won us over: we're all toddlers now, throwing tantrums in public for all we're worth. We are tired and beginning to show off, as my sisters' horrible nanny used to say before briskly dispatching them to bed.

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