Across the pond

On Wednesday evening I went into the kitchen to relax with an aperitif before dinner. It was anything but relaxing. I walked in to a real punch-up. A bunch of Rottweilers savaging a woman. It was Michael Buerk and his team from the Moral Maze on Radio Four. By comparison, facing the much maligned Jeremy Paxman is like dealing with a Labrador who is feeling a bit disgruntled.

The subject of the programme was Adoption pegged to Madonna’s adoption of an African child. But at the time at which I entered this scene the woman who was being savaged was Emily Buchanan, who has committed an even more serious crime. She has adopted not one, but two, children from a foreign culture. (Before I go on, I should, as is the modern fashion, declare a personal interest in this story. Emily is one of my ex-students at City University, radio journalism, class of 1982.)

The particular bone of contention when I came into the kitchen was about Emily’s efforts to integrate her children into the life which she and her husband lead, and at the same time to give the children a sense of their own genetic heritage. So she has enrolled them for Mandarin classes and is learning Mandarin herself.

The Rottweilers pounced on her. She was confusing the children about their personal identity. She was bringing them up by telling them they were different from her present family. At this point I trembled on the brink of incredulity. Have Buerk and his team forgotten what it is like in the school playground? It is not only the Duke of Edinburgh who thinks the Chinese are slit-eyed. Whatever Emily and her husband do at home, it is not going to prevent their children from suffering from the obvious fact that they are not like their parents in colour and other racial characteristics.

After Emily was released to lick her bruises the Rottweilers turned their attention to the final interviewee on the programme. This was a woman whose name I did not catch, who is the head of an organisation called Transnational Adoption. She is Asian, born in Hong Kong, but adopted many years ago, when nearly all children in British schools were white, by a white couple. She grew up being the only yellow child in a white school.

She was voicing her own personal experience of what effect this had on her. She is, as she said repeatedly in answer to questions, not unhappy with her lot, but she hankers at discovering who her genetic parents were. She was speaking from the opposite viewpoint of that of Emily, and arguing that it was better to pump money into the poorer areas of the world so that children could grow up in their own cultures.

She was submitted to the same Rottweiler treatment. She was told that her organisation, was an NGO financed by the western world. Claire Fox, one of the team, told her bluntly that she was hung up on a search for belonging. Why did she not get on with her life and stop whining? Why get caught up with the current fashion of tracing your ancestry? Why did she not grow up and treat this as an intellectual problem, not a personal problem?

Her reply was not listened to. As Emily’s reply was not listened to. The panel was too busy playing the adversarial role.

On Wednesday night I thought that the Moral Maze should be chopped. But since I am an old-fashioned journalist, before I wrote this blog, I listened to the whole programme on the BBC website. And the programme as a whole was nothing like as bad as the section I heard.

Surprisingly, Madonna had quite a sympathetic reception. None of the team repeated the vitriolic attacks made on her by sections of the media in the last week or two. The Rottweilering was reserved for the people who were actually in the studio. They should have known what they were letting themselves in for. Buerk says on the BBC website: ‘The Moral Maze does not make any concessions, either intellectually or to the politeness normal in current affairs broadcasting. The intellectual vigour allows us to indulge in abuse!’

So at end week I am not starting a campaign to have The Moral Maze chopped. But I do think that the team needs to consider whether it is not getting carrying away by its over reliance on the adversarial style of interviewing.

The adversarial approach is ideal for pricking the pomposity of politicians and anyone else (including bloggers) who enter the public domain pontificating. But what was absolutely clear to the listeners in my household is that the last two interviewees were victims. And that the programme could have ended much more satisfactorily if the panel had listened to what they had to say and then debated what that meant for this important, and highly contentious moral issue.

Emily Buchanan is a victim because she wanted a child and had had several miscarriages. She chose a personal way out of that dilemma by adopting Chinese children, because she also wanted to a baby rather than the older children available in Britain. She makes this clear in her book (From China with love.) and she kept saying it on the programme when she had a chance.

The final interviewee insisted that she was not unhappy with her lot but that she does feel that she does not have a secure sense of belonging because she does not have any means of finding out about her genetic parents. She has chosen a political way out of her personal dilemma by starting her organisation to urge the western world to spend more on helping the starving children of the world in their own countries.

In the last two interviewees the team had in the studio two people with first hand experience of both sides of the issue. The affluent white middle class mother and the impoverished Asian child from the third world. Despite this they had important points of agreement. The Asian woman told of her pain at being the only non-white child in her English school. And said how much better it would be in today’s Camden Town school, where there are many colours and nationalities in the class. She clearly approved of Buchanan’s conscious attempt to include as many Chinese as possible in her social circle.

This was a wonderful opportunity for The Moral Maze to end on intellectual note. Morality is not a black and white issue, it is about many shades of grey, and black, yellow and white.

One further point. In reflecting on this programme I realised that the team is all white middle class. They do have an intellectual balance. Buerck is the middle class journalist who was stirred by the poverty he reported on in Africa. Clifford Longley is another journalist, who is a Roman Catholic. But he has had an interest in other world religions since he was made religious affairs correspondent of The Times in 1967 by the editor, William Rees Mogg, another Roman Catholic. It was a break with Times tradition because church affairs had hitherto been written about by a Church of England clergyman. Mogg, however, gave Longley a clear brief. He was to write about all religions including Islam. Longley took his brief seriously and what he learnt still illuminates what he says.

Melanie Phillips is another journalist who made her name on the leftish Guardian but was converted in her mature years to Daily Mail values. If I got the voices right she did not participate in the Rottweilering but consistently emphasised her own belief that the most important thing was a loving family for the child.

Steven Rose is a scientist, a double first from Cambridge in biochemistry. He is now a distinguished professor with a reputation for scientific studies of how the brain works.

Claire Fox is another journalist. She has a far left background. I first came across her when she was the publisher of Living Marxism, who famously accused ITN of faking a report on Serbian atrocities. The subsequent libel suit from ITN bankrupted the magazine. Fox now runs the Institute of Ideas, ‘an agenda-setting organisation committed to forging a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint.’ Her editor at LM, Mick Hume, is now a columnist for The Times.

This year the Maze recruited another panellist, Michael Portillo, who does talk a lot of sense about moral and political issues. He is at least half Spanish.

Now I know the Maze is concerned to avoid ‘political correctness’. But surely on intellectual grounds there is case for having in multi-cultural Britain 2006 a panellist who is non-white. And a panellist who is Muslim.

That would give them a different perspective on a whole range of moral issues which are concerning the media every day. And it bring to this important programme the prespective of someone who knows how it feels, to be non-white or Muslim in Britain 2006.