So what’s the problem? Does Someone object to Dickens’ sentimental treatment of

So what’s the problem? Does Someone object to Dickens’ sentimental treatment of the Victorian working classes? Does it offend Somebody that Dickens has them ungrammatical and unable to distinguish a wee from a woubleyou? Condescending, is it? In violation of the human rights of crossing-sweepers?Ironic, that we who scorn Victorian bowdlerisation of Shakespeare routinely boil Dickens down to accommodate our queasier assumptions. We find ourselves stigmatising television for its grossness so often that we forget how dainty it can be when grossness is what’s called for. All the overt sex the sex-crazed can desire where no overt sex originally existed in Jane Austen and George Eliot, but only let a writer of another age upset our modern sensibilities in matters of gender, race or class, and we are out with our blue pencils. Answer “Nothing, I like it as it is” and you’re on the next plane home. As for those who wonder why a British Citizenship Test shouldn’t be applied to the self-disinheriting masses who happen to have been born here yet still inhabit, in a phrase from Bleak House, “the utter darkness of meaning” and themselves know nothing of Dickens, I confess I wonder likewise. Airlift them all to Borrioboola-Gha, I say – Borrioboola-Gha, as I don’t need to remind my readers, being Dickens’ bad-taste joke corner of Africa to which Mrs Jellyby, who has made a hellhole of her own home, directs her charitable energies.
Yes, the bad taste is something else missing from the BBC’s Bleak House.

Reduce it to a single question – “What is missing from the BBC’s new adaptation of Bleak House?” If you answer “Fog” you can stay six months If you answer “Apocalyptic indignation” you can stay a year If you answer “The English language” you can stay for ever. I have what I hope is a helpful suggestion for simplifying the new British Citizenship Test. “Why should we help Afghans or Iraqis or other Muslims when their own governments treat them like shit?” he asked “Why should we have to save them from their own people. Why do we have to treat them better?” I explain that it was us – we, the West – who armed the “mujahedin” to fight the Russians and then ignored Afghanistan when it collapsed into civil war, that we nurtured the Taliban via Saudi Arabia and Pakistan when we thought we could negotiate with them for a gas pipeline across Afghanistan, that the current US ambassador in Iraq – that other blood-drenched democratic success story – was once involved with the company Unocal, which negotiated with the Taliban over the pipeline route, that Karzai had also been working for Unocal. But the days of such humanity – if they ever existed in Britain – have run out.Next day, I am giving a lecture in the Belgian city of Antwerp when a man in the audience starts to berate me. So what am I to say to Mohamed as he sits hunched in the deep, soft armchair of my hotel room, clutching his poetry book and his sack of expired refugee papers, a mechanical engineer with a foreign language degree from a Ukrainian university who must now clear garbage from Dutch apartment blocks to earn money? I can’t help you, I say quietly I will write about you I will try to pump some compassion out of the authorities. But they wouldn’t accept that Karzai’s government includes many of the ‘mujahedin’ warlords who locked me up in prison They will do the same again.” Which is probably true.

But now Mohamed, his wife and three children – one of them born in Holland – wait for the police to take them to Schipol airport for the long journey back to their dangerous homeland.The ferocious murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh and the callous behaviour of his Muslim murderer – who announced in court that he felt no compassion for van Gogh’s family – has hardened Dutch government hearts just as the rioting in Clichy-sous-Bois has hardened those of Messrs Sarkozy and Chirac. They said that the Taliban had been defeated and that Afghanistan was now a ‘democracy’. Had the last of four court hearings into his case have dated his refugee status from the day he arrived in Holland rather than that of his first visit to Zevenaar in 2000 – which was delayed because the Dutch authorities were enjoying the week-long millennium celebrations – he would probably have qualified for permanent refugee status.”But the court dated my arrival from the delayed registration at Zevenaar and told me my family had to leave Holland. “They always came to see us in our flat and gave us food and invited us to their homes,” Mohamed said, producing a sad poem entitled Thank You for Everything in tribute to the Dutch people But fate struck Mohamed again. “I went straight to the police to tell them we were here,” Mohamed said “They were very good to us. They told us to register at Zevenaar as asylum-seekers, which we did.”He was housed in a small Dutch village where the local people treated the Afghan family with great kindness. Now he waited in fear for the policeman who would demand: “Your papers please.” A family friend, Hoji Abdul-Rahman, originally arranged for Mohamed and his family to flee Kabul for Jalalabad and then across the Afghan border to Pakistan where “Hoji” – an honorific title bestowed on those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca – obtained fake visas and passports that enabled them to fly to Holland.