Johann Hari

Almost unnoticed in the rich world, a trial for Crimes Against Humanity is taking place in the Hague. From a shiny modern courthouse, a medieval story is emerging – one where the poorest people in the world were invaded, raped and mutilated, just to seize some shiny stones for the richest people in the world to wear. The evidence and testimony at the trial of the former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor over the past few months has stretched beyond the court's tight remit to determine his own personal cruelty. Instead, the witnesses are finally revealing the inside story of the biggest diamond heist in history – one that killed 75,000 innocent people, crippled an entire country, and left a trail of blood that runs right to your local jewellery store.

This story begins and ends with diamonds. Sierra Leone is a tiny West African country blessed with four and a half million people and cursed with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of diamonds. As soon as the glistening chunks of carbon were discovered by the British imperial occupiers in the 1930s, they became a locus of conflict as the desperate locals swarmed with picks and hammers to chip away their own fraction of the fortune. By the 1950s, De Beers – who had been granted exclusive rights to exploit the diamonds by the British – were paying private companies to litter the country with landmines to keep the natives out.

But it was in the early 1990s that the most ambitious – and apocalyptic – plan to grab the diamonds was hatched. A man called Foday Sankoh was at its centre. He had once been a soldier in the Sierra Leonean army, but he was by then biding his time as a television cameraman. With several of his Liberian friends – including Sam Bockarie, a hairdresser and nightclub dancer – he decided to launch a wildly ambitious, wildly violent attempt to seize Sierra Leone's diamond fields and run them as a private criminal empire. He scrambled around for support from a string of dictators: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi provided training, while Liberia's Taylor provided arms and some of his own battalions.

With this, Sankoh raised a private militia, giving it the grand-sounding name of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). He clothed it with the bare minimum of revolutionary rhetoric, plagiarising a few phrases from Mao. This was enough to begin recruiting men from the ghettos of West Africa, promising them a job, food and "liberation". He decided to recruit children: a nine-year old with an AK47 was more use to him than a 40- year-old.

Everything was now in place to mount a "rebellion" – a de facto invasion – in eastern Sierra Leone, where the diamonds waited. The RUF's policy was simple, and summarised in the name that Sankoh gave to one of his military manoeuvres: Operation Kill Everything. The aim was to impose maximum terror on the civilian population immediately, to drive them out and make sure nobody ever tried to come back.

They soon developed a trademark tactic: they would chop off the hands of any civilian they stumbled across. Helen K was a typical young woman found by Human Rights Watch in the RUF's wake. She explained she had lost her two children after an RUF attack and had no idea where they were. "They captured me and said to lie on the floor," she said. "I was reluctant; they cut me on the neck with a machete. I was cut by a small boy. Then they put my hand on a stone and cut [it off]... I had to bury my own hand."

The child soldiers were hyped-up with drugs before being sent out to slay. Douglas Farah's account of the war, Blood from Stones, says: "One thing the children do remember vividly is the preparation for what they called 'mayhem days', sprees of killing and raping that lasted until the participants collapsed from exhaustion. They said they were given coloured pills, most likely amphetamines, and razor blade slits near their temples, where cocaine was put directly into their bloodstreams. The ensuing days were a blur."

It worked. Soon, two million people were homeless and the RUF had its diamonds.

And here is where we come in. The international diamond industry was waiting with its chequebook open. Charles Taylor was the middleman, taking a cut from the cutting. The diamonds were shipped via Liberia to Antwerp in Belgium, where they were snapped up by the diamond companies. A few saw a PR disaster looming – De Beers wouldn't touch them. But many others handed cash to the RUF, and the stones were soon on sale across Europe and the US.

Ian Smillie, a diamond expert who served on the UN panel investigating the pillage, explains: "There is no way the war could have happened the way it did, and carried on for 10 years, without rich Westerners buying the diamonds. The RUF had very little support anywhere. It had no tribal base in the country, it had no other governments supporting them apart from Taylor."

The RUF soon stepped up the supply, to the diamond industry's delight. It was a simple causal relationship: so rich Westerners could have a glistening choker, poor children were choked.

We are getting somewhat better at arresting state criminals: we got (albeit briefly) Slobodan Milosevic, Augusto Pinochet, and Charles Taylor, and in time we'll get Henry Kissinger, Robert Mugabe and more. But corporate criminals routinely get away with murder. Literally.

Taylor is alone in the dock. The diamond dealers who knowingly paid him for his services are free and fat on the profits. If you or I paid a known murderer to go and rob somebody for us, we'd go to prison. But if a corporation does it on a massive scale, there is no punishment. This is almost invariably the case with corporate human rights abuses: Union Carbide has paid no price for killing 5,000 people in Bhopal, Shell has paid no price for its role in the decimation of the Niger Delta, and on, and on.

The diamond industry has been allowed to act as though rape and mutilation are an acceptable part of its supply chain. Sure, it eventually developed a system for certifying diamonds as the slaughter was ending anyway (and even that is filled with holes). But for the hundreds of thousands of handless women like Helen K, diamonds are for ever. For them, at the very least, there needs now to be an international diamond tax, with the proceeds providing reparations for Sierra Leone, and the other countries raped for their diamonds: Angola and the Congo.

But we need more. If corporate criminals are not charged and jailed, they will carry on committing crimes against humanity. It is glorious to see Charles Taylor in the dock. But this should be merely the first sentence of justice for the people of Sierra Leone – and the victims of profit-driven slaughter everywhere.

[Apolgies to readers who've e-mailed in the past week. I'm in Bangladesh at the moment, spending a lot of time in brothels and on sinking islands. (That isn't as odds as it sounds: stay posted here and you'll find out why.) The internet connections here are like the UK's in 1997: the screen opens by inches, over half an hour. Anyway, I'm back on the 10th; normal service resumes then.]

Do you check every item you buy to make sure it is green and planet-friendly? Do you buy carbon offsets every time you fly? Stop. It is time to be honest: green consumerism is at best a draining distraction, and at worst a con. While the planet's fever gets worse by the week, we are guzzling down green-coloured placebos and calling it action. There is another way. Our reaction to global warming has gone in waves. First we were in blank denial: how can releasing an odourless, colourless gas change the climate so dramatically? Now we are in a phase of displacement: we assume we can shop our way out of global warming, by shovelling a few new lightbulbs and some carbon offsets into our shopping basket.

This is a self-harming delusion. It's hard to give a sense of the contrast today between the magnitude of our problem, and the weediness of our response so far. But the best way is offered by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen.

He explains that until 10,000 years ago, the planet's climate would fluctuate violently: sometimes it would veer by 12 degrees centigrade in just a decade. This meant it was impossible to develop agriculture. Crops couldn't be cultivated in this climatic chaos, so human beings were stuck as a tiny smattering of hunter-gatherers.

But then the climate settled down into safe parameters – and humans could settle down too. This period is called the Holocene, and it meant that for the first time, we could develop farming and cities. Everything we know as human civilisation is thanks to this unprecedented period of climatic stability.

Today, we are bringing this era to an end. By pumping vast amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere, we are creating a new era: the Anthropocene, in which man makes the weather. There is an imminent danger of it bursting beyond these safe parameters, and bringing about a return to the violent, volatile variations that prevented our ancestors from progressing beyond spears and sticks.

Those are the stakes. Every week, there is greater evidence that we are nudging further from our safety zone. The hottest year of the 20th century – 1947 – is now merely the average for the 21st century.

And what are we doing? Many good, well-intentioned people are beginning to grasp this problem – and then assuming green consumerism is the only answer to hand. They shop around for items that have not been freighted thousands of miles to make it to their supermarket shelves. They change their lightbulbs. They turn down the thermostat a few degrees. They make sure they buy products that don't sit on electricty-burning standby all day. They buy the more energy-efficient cars, and scorn SUV drivers.

I don't want to attack these people. They are an absolutely essential part of any solution. But we have to be honest. This is not even the beginning of a solution – and by pouring so much energy into it, we may actually be forestalling the real solution. I know a huge number of people who are sincerely worried about global warming, but they assume they have Done Their Bit through these shifted consumption patterns. The truth is: you haven't.

In reality, dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily .

It is not enough for you to change your bulbs. Everyone has to change their bulbs. It is not enough for you to eat less meat. Everyone has to eat less meat. It is not enough for you to fly less. Everyone has to fly less. (And yes, I hate these facts as much as you do. But I will hate the reality of runaway global warming even more.)

The only way we will get to the situation where we are all required by law to burn fewer greenhouse gases is if enough people pressure the government, demanding it. Green consumer choices often drain away people's political energies to do this. You have a limited amount of time to spend on any political cause. If you have an hour a week to dedicate to acting on global warming, and you spend it scouring the supermarket shelves for the product shipped the shortest distance, that time and energy is gone; you feel you've done what you can. Part of you might also assume: I've made these choices; other people will too; in time, we'll all be persuaded. But we don't have time.

There is a much better way for you to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Every minute you would have spent shopping around for a greener choice, you should spend volunteering for Greenpeace, or Friends of the Earth, or Plane Stupid, or the Campaign Against Climate Change. Every hundred-pound premium you would spend to buy a greener product, donate it to them instead. Why? Because by becoming part of this collective action – rather than by clinging to dispersed personal choices – you will help to change the law, so everyone will have to be greener, not just nice people like you.

It works. Green campaigners from Australia to Canada to Japan have successfully banned the old lightbulbs, so only the energy-saving lightbulbs are on offer there now. Green campaigners have prompted the Mayor of London to force SUV drivers to pay a punitive £6,000-a-year premium to drive through our city, forcing many of them to shift to greener cars. These are the first tiny steps towards banning – or massively restricting – the other technologies that are unleashing Weather of Mass Destruction.

Of course, some sincere and well-intentioned people have libertarian concerns about this approach at first glance. Why should we force people to choose the green option? Isn't it better to rely on persuasion and voluntary choice? But even the most hardcore libertarians agree that your personal liberty ends where you actively harm the liberty of another person. Greenhouse gas emissions are undeniably harming tens of millions of people – and endangering the ground on which all human liberty rests: a stable and safe climate.

Just as no libertarian would argue you should have the right to buy and fire a nuclear weapon, no libertarian should argue you have the right to burn unlimited greenhouse gases. Once confronted with this argument, the only people who cling to a libertarian defence of fossil fuels are people who take money from the fossil fuel industry itself, like Spiked Online. They have to scrape together any old excuse.

So enough with the placebos. Enough with the fake-libertarian excuses. As the climate that sustains human life unravels around us, we are long past the moment when we need real medicine – and the only one we have is hard government legislation.

This Friday, in the dusty corridors and echoing chambers of Westminster, a war for the Labour Party’s soul will commence. A swelling of over one hundred Labour MPs is poised to stage the biggest party rebellion since the Iraq war. They will be fighting over whether the weakest employees in Britain should be forced to work in an anxiety-soaked economy where they have no rights – and where every day they turn up for work could be their last.

There is a toxic loop-hole in British employment law, which 1.5 million people have been lassoed by. If I go to work for Joe Bloggs Ltd, after a short period I begin to acquire employment rights. I get sick-pay, holiday leave, and the right to not be arbitrarily dismissed from my job. But if I go to work for an employment agency that then places me in exactly the same job at Joes Bloggs Ltd, my employment rights never come. I can work there for twenty years and still be given no sick pay and no paid holidays, and be sacked in a second. They are financially trapped: they can’t get credit, never mind a mortgage.

What does this do to your head? Geoff Collins, a 57 year-old plumber who has worked for employment agencies in Southampton for over twenty years, explains: “You feel unsettled the whole time. You know that you can be laid off immediately with no notice at all. You know that if you get ill, you get nothing but the statutory sick pay of £75 a week paid by the government. You don’t get holiday pay or a pension or anything. It’s just a constant feeling of insecurity.”

The unfairness of this loop-hole in our law is symbolized by the experiences of Rebecca Ames, a 34-year old mum from Cornwall. For three-and-a-half years, she worked for a major telecoms company via an agency. At her desk, she sat in-between two directly-employed workers doing exactly the same job as her. They were on £20,000 a year with annual pay-rises. She was on £8500 with no pay rises. They had holiday pay and sick pay; she did not. They were given an hour’s break, at a time of their choosing; she was given half an hour’s break at 1pm sharp. They were given free parking spaces; she had to pay £4.50 a day for hers. She describes this to me as “the most demoralising and depressing period of my life. You were constantly reminded you were just an agency worker, a second-class citizen.”

More and more British workers are being shifted out onto agencies in a casualisation-carousel touring the country.

The people who are choked hardest by this loophole are recent Eastern European immigrants like Vicktor Klokcos, a young former peacekeeper in Bosnia. He signed up with an agency in Hungary who told he would make £7.50 an hour and have decent accommodation here in Britain. But when he stepped off the plane, he was driven overnight to a processing plant and told to start work cutting chicken thighs immediately.

Vicktor was then put in an unfurnished three-bedroom house with fourteen other people. It didn’t even have a fridge. For working ten hours a day, five days a week, he was paid £120. His agency-employers claimed to stay on the right side of the minimum wage by deducting from his pay-packet ‘charges’ like £8 a day for the minibus to and from the factory. The job ended when Vicktor caught a fever, and he was sacked. “I had better experiences in Bosnia during the war than here,” he says, with only a touch of hyperbole.

This unregulated agency work creates a pool of miserable, insecure people at the bottom of the wage-chain. We as taxpayers end up paying to mop up some of the stress through a swelling anti-depressant bill and tax credits. But now a coalition of Labour MPs – led by an excellent campaign from the trade union UNITE – intend to do better. They want to legally guarantee agency workers the same basic rights as the rest of us.

This shouldn’t be hard. The Labour government made a manifesto commitment to do precisely this back in 2005 – but in practice, they have tried to kill any attempt to deliver on it. At the European level, most governments are keen to introduce a law that would grant basic rights at six weeks – but Gordon Brown’s government has been frantically thwarting them.

Why? They won’t actually tell us, blocking any parliamentary debate on the matter. But they seem to have gobbled down the Confederation of Business and Industry (CBI) propaganda. The CBI has wheeled out their old threats about the minimum wage, which they claimed would “cost one million jobs.” (In fact, the number of people in employment rose to its highest level in British history after the minimum wage was brought in.) Today, in a dull-witted sequel, they say basic protections for agency workers would “cost 250,000 jobs.” Tell them that most agency work is in sectors that couldn’t be carried out off-shore – security guards, construction workers, catering – and they carry on anyway. Ask them how they calculated this oddly-round figure, and they hum and haw and say they’ll call you back.

Yet the fictitious threats of a tiny number of the super-rich still seem to outweigh the worries of a growing mass of struggling people like Geoff and Rebecca and Vicktor.

This Friday, the government will not be able to dodge the arguments any more. The Labour MP Andrew Miller is bringing a Private Member’s Bill to introduce equality for agency workers. Last year, the government tried to swat away a similar move – but now, nearly a third of the Parliamentary Labour Party is poised to rebel and force it to committee stage. (You can demand your MP turns out to support agency workers by calling 0207 219 3000).

So Gordon Brown has a choice. He can be dragged into a draining, demoralising row with his own party, which he may well lose – or he can make this a bright, populist dividing line between Labour and the Conservatives.

He could make job security an election issue, by offering the electorate two clashing models of how to deal with globalization. David Cameron is committed to racing-to-the-bottom with your rights by repealing swathes of basic employment protections – including rights for ten million part-time mums in marginal Middle England seats. In this Redwoodian world-view, every right is a “restriction” on the “freedom” of corporations: the weakest workers just have to live with the perma-stress.

By contrast, Labour can point out that in a (rightly) market-fuelled economy, no government can make your job totally secure – but Labour can make it liveable by laying out some humane rules and rights, and using the state to vigorously uphold them. This doesn’t fuel unemployment if it’s done properly: one of the most regulated countries in Europe – Sweden – has the lowest rate of joblessness.

The way Gordon Brown deals with contracted-out workers this week will answer a deeper question: has the Labour Party really contracted out its soul to the CBI?

You can e-mail comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or you can e-mail them just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

(I am away working on an article in Bangladesh do I might not reply for a while.)

You can read my article about the dire protections for workers in British factories here, my article about the rebellion by Britain's army of underpaid cleaners here, my article about why I wish we really did have a 'compensation culture' here, and my piece about other ways in which the Labour government has failed to protect us from corporate abuses here.

Steven Spielberg has finally decided he does not want to be part of a holocaust stamped "Made in China". It's an overdue decision – but one that could now begin an Olympic chain reaction to save the starved survivors in Darfur.

Many people will react to this news by asking – what does China have to do with an African genocide unfolding thousands of miles away from its mainland anyway? The answer is stark. China pays for the genocide. China arms the genocide. China obstructs all attempts to stop the genocide. Indeed, the genocidal Sudanese dictatorship is so enmeshed with the Chinese Communist dictatorship that it should be rebranded as Chudan – a pooled government with pooled responsibility.

When I stood last summer on the borders of Darfur, the hacked and broken people I met were victims of Chudan. Their catastrophe began in 2004, when the local Muslim population of Darfur finally grew sick of being neglected and ignored by the oil-rich National Islamic Front government in Khartoum. A few rebel groups began to rise up – and Khartoum reacted with deranged violence. They sent the Arab Janjaweed – "men on horseback" – to slay the uppity black population, so they could never shout out again.

Osman Ibrahim was one of the lucky ones. He's my age – 29 – and when we met, he was running for his life with his wife and four children. One morning a month before, Osman had been tending his crops in his village 30 miles away, when he heard the sound every black Darfuri dreads. It was the whirr of the Sudanese military's helicopters, followed by the approaching horses and machine-gun fire of the Janjaweed. "The helicopters bombed my house," Osman said, "and the Janjaweed started to kill everyone in the village."

He gathered his children and ran. If they had stayed, the Human Rights Watch reports suggest, his wife and children would have been gang-raped, and then they would have all been killed. Some 450,000 people like them have died so far, with more than 2.5 million more on the run.

The helicopter that blew up Osman's village, and the AK-47s that were used to slaughter his friends, were provided and paid for by China. Why? One word: oil. Since 1993, China has been scouring the earth for the few fossil fuels not seized and burned by Europe and America, and it found the friendliest pool of petrol in Sudan. They have ploughed $10bn of capital investment into Sudan's oilfields, and they snaffle 60 per cent of Sudan's petrol: more than 400,000 barrels a day.

What does Sudan get in return? Enough cash to pay for the slaughter – but that's only for starters. Since 1996, China has been Sudan's main supplier of weapons. On the international stage, China covers Sudan's back. Since the genocide began, the Chinese have been systematically obstructing any attempts at the UN to protect Darfur's civilians. China's special envoy, Liu Guijin, visited Darfur and declared, "I didn't see a desperate scenario of people dying of hunger." No, he said – he simply saw people "grateful" for China's "contribution".

Then the threats to disrupt the Olympics came – and they began to shift their tone. It was reported that China voted for a UN resolution authorising a force of 22,500 peacekeepers – but this was mere Sino-spin. In reality, they announced they would only vote for the UN resolution provided a clause was added. The UN must "invite the consent" of the genocidal regime in Khartoum before UN troops could be dispatched, they insisted. Khartoum has predictably refused to consent – so the peacekeeping mission seems to have died in its crib.

Yet if China threatened to turn off the tap on Sudan's economy, arms and international support, the dictatorship would almost certainly wind down the genocide rather than face implosion.

So can we make it happen? It's notoriously hard to pressure the Chinese dictatorship. They keep their population almost totally ignorant about Darfur, hidden away behind the Great Firewall of China – so internal anger on this issue is almost non-existent. That's why the Beijing Olympics are remarkably serendipitous, providing a rare pressure-point for the world's worried citizens.

Enter (and exit) Spielberg. He is a hefty international symbol, one the Chinese dictators cannot shrug off. But alone, he is nothing like enough. Luckily, for the Chinese coming-out party to go well, they need the guests to stick to the dress-code and the strict etiquette they lay down. All moral people should refuse to play along – not for symbolism, but because each pint of shame changes China's calculations. We will succeed in stopping the genocide when the Chinese dictatorship is more frightened of having its $50bn party ruined than of losing 400,000 barrels of Sudanese oil a day.

The best people to help us achieve this are our athletes. Before they are sportsmen, they are men. Before they are sportswomen, they are women. They have a responsibility to other men and women who are being raped and butchered, just for being black. If we learned anything from the 20th century, it is that "I was told to say nothing" is the weakest excuse of all.

So let them pledge to unfurl Darfuri flags from their podiums if they win. Let them promise to hold up pictures of burned Darfuri children. Let them talk about Darfur at every Olympic press conference. The Chinese Communists know they cannot black out every image: they will begin to panic.

Obscenely, the British Olympic Association (BOA) has tried to do the Communist Party's work for it. In the past week, it has attempted to ban all Olympic athletes competing under the Union Jack from even mentioning this holocaust, inserting a "gagging clause" about "politically sensitive subjects" into their contracts.

So far, only one outstanding athlete has refused to shut up about Darfur: the badminton player Richard Vaughan. More need to speak out, today. You can ask the chief executives of the BOA why they are trying to stop them at colin.moynihan@boa.org.uk and simon.clegg@boa.org.uk.

We can also pressure the advertisers. The Chinese are raking in tens of billions from European and American corporations desperate to be associated with the Olympics. The human rights group Dream For Darfur approached the major ones – Coca-Cola, Johnson and Johnson, Panasonic, Volkswagen and more – to ask them simply to speak out on Darfur. They refused. The campaigners called the report: "And now – not a word from our sponsors". If China thought they would lose this revenue, they could be panicked even more.

The first genocide of the 21st century is passing into the night, and the trail of blood runs right back to Beijing. The only question now is – do we want to throw an Olympic party slipping and sliding in the slaughter, or do we want to use this moment to protect Osman and his terrorised countrymen?

For five days now, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been chorusing: how do you solve a problem like Sharia? Ever since he suggested it is "unavoidable" – and desirable – for Britain to have Islamic courts ruling on Muslim family affairs, bashing the bishop has become a national sport. But this row shouldn't be just about the pitiful contortions of the head of a dying Church. Rowan Williams has shown us why the doctrine of multiculturalism needs to abandoned.

If you really believe that Britain is comprised of a smorgasbord of "cultures" that need to be preserved, promoted and respected as an end in itself, then this proposal is perfectly logical. Different cultures should have different courts, and rules, and schools.

We don't need to speculate about what these British sharia courts would look like. They already exist in some mosques across Britain, as voluntary enterprises. Last month, a plain, unsensationalist documentary called Divorce: Sharia Style looked at the judgements they hand down.

If a man wants a divorce, he simply has to say to his wife, "I divorce you" three times over three months. The wife has no right of appeal, and no right to ask for a reason. If a woman wants a divorce, by contrast, she has to humbly ask her husband. If he refuses, she must turn to a sharia court, and convince three Mullahs that her husband has behaved "unreasonably" – according to the rules laid out in a pre-modern text that recommends domestic violence if your wife gets uppity.

Irum Shazad, a 26-year-old British woman, travels from her battered women's refuge to a sharia court in East London. She explains that her husband was so abusive she slashed her wrists with a carving knife. The court tells her this was a sin, making her as bad as him. They tell her to go back to her husband. (They grant a divorce half a year later, after a dozen more "last chances" for him to abuse her.)

Then we meet Nasirin Iqbal, a 27-year-old Pakistani woman who was shipped to Britain five years ago to marry. Her husband, Imran, has kept her isolated, and she does not speak a word of English. "I came here thinking he'd treat me well," she says. "But he keeps hurting me. He brought me here to use me. I'm not an object.... Do I not have a heart?... He tells me I'm stuck with him, and under Islam he can treat me however he wants. 'I am a man, I can treat you how I want'."

We see how Imran torments her, announcing, "You are a reject. I didn't want to marry you." He takes a second wife in Pakistan, and texts her all day in front of Nasirin declaring his love. The sharia court issues a fatwa saying the marriage stands. She doesn't seem to know this isn't a court of law. "I can't ignore what they say," she cries. "You have to go with what they say."

These are the courts that Rowan Williams would give the stamp of British law. In his lecture, he worries that this could harm women – before serving up a theological gloop, saying that sharia could be reinterpreted in a way compatible with the rights of women. But if that happens, why would you need different courts? What would be the point?

The argument that women will only have to enter these courts if they freely choose to shows a near-total disconnection from the reality of Muslim women's lives. Most of the women who will be drawn into "consenting" are, like Nasirin, recent immigrants with little idea of their legal options. Then there are the threats of excommunication – or violence – from some families. As the Muslim feminist Irshad Manji puts it: "When it comes to contemporary sharia, choice is theory; intimidation is the reality."

These courts highlight in their purest form the problem with multiculturalism. It has become a feel-good doctrine mindlessly celebrating "difference", without looking at what that difference actually means.

Yet many people feel instinctively uncomfortable when we talk about ditching multiculturalism – for a good reason. The only alternative they are aware of is the old whiter-than-white monoculturalism. This view, voiced most clearly by Enoch Powell and Norman Tebbit, believes that if people are going to live together, they need to look and feel similar, and have a tightly prescribed shared identity. They argue that the number of newcomers should be small, and need to be pressured to assimilate to the 1950s norm of a suburban white family, fast.

Multiculturalism was formed with good intentions as a counter-reaction. But it has become a mirror-image of this old racism, treating Muslim women – and others – as so different that they do not deserve the same rights as the rest of us. As the European-Iranian feminist Azar Majedi puts it: "By creating different laws and judicial systems for each ethnic group, we are not fighting racism. In fact, we are institutionalising it."

When people talk about defending Muslim culture, ask them – which culture? The culture of Irum and Nasireen, or the culture of their abusive husbands? Multiculturalism patronisingly treats immigrants as homogenous blocks – when in fact they are as diffuse and dissenting as the rest of us. Would anybody lump me in with Richard Littlejohn and Nick Griffin as part of a "white community"?

There is a better way for the state to understand and regulate human differences, beyond the old oppositions of Tebbittry and multiculturalism. It is called liberalism. A liberal society allows an individual to do whatever he or she wants, provided it doesn't harm other people. You can choose to wear PVC hotpants or a veil. You can choose to spend all day praying, or all day mocking people who pray.

Where a multiculturalist prizes the rights of religious groups, a liberal favours the rights of the individual. So if you want to preach that the Archangel Gabriel revealed the word of God to an illiterate nomad two millennia ago, you can do it as much as you like. You can write books and hold rallies and make your case. What you cannot do is argue that since this angel supposedly said women are worth half of a man when it comes to inheritance, and that gay people should be killed, you can ditch the rules of liberalism and act on it.

The job of a liberal state is not to stamp The True National Essence on its citizens, nor to promote "difference" for its own sake. It is to uphold the equal rights of every individual – whether they are white men or Muslim women. It has one liberal culture, with freedoms used differently by different people.

So as well as scorning the Archbishop, we should thank him. He has helped to deliver the funeral rites for multiculturalism. With his matted beard and tortured hand-wringing to a desert-God, the Archbishop has unwittingly pointed us towards a vision of a better Britain – one that chooses proudly to be liberal.

For a decade now, Hollywood acting has been slowly, steadily poisoned by a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum. This week, I was watching the hypnotically horrible new Coen brothers movie, No Country For Old Men, and I couldn't shake off the sense there was something different, something thrilling and vivid, about the performances of all the lead actors: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin. It was only after half an hour of awe that I realised what it was. They can all move their faces.

Today, most actors in most movies have deliberately paralysed faces, incapable of registering anything. An ocean of Botox and collagen has been jabbed into the most famous faces on earth – leaving the audience feeling disconnected without knowing why.

Yet in this movie, the lines and crevices on the forehead of Tommy Lee Jones are as rugged as the Texas desert his sheriff character patrols. With imperceptibly tiny movements of these crags of skin, he can convey pain and panic and grief. Similarly, Javier Bardem's portrait of a blank-eyed psychopath works precisely because we can see that his sagging face is capable of more than blankness.

The majority of Hollywood stars are simply incapable of doing this. I don't just mean people like Melanie Griffiths, who have been left looking like Salvador Dali nightmare scenes; I mean the top-of-the-billing big stars who are still revered as greats. I'm thinking of one famous actress who claims that her face remains unlined because of the care she takes in looking after it. A decade ago, she was an impish, clever performer skipping towards greatness. Today, she has been jabbed and stabbed into a simulacrum of perfection – so her face can do nothing. It cannot register pleasure or pain; it can only remain in a frozen rictus, fitting for a performance in high-end adverts and no more.

Almost every American movie I see now contains a cast in the same poisoned state. Sure, Hollywood actresses have always altered their appearances: in the 1930s, several starlets swallowed tapeworm eggs to lose weight. But the procedures of the Nineties and Noughties are more disabling, in acting terms, than those of the past. In the 1940s, Rita Hayworth had a few minor cosmetic procedures: she had electrolysis on her hairline to give her a more exaggerated widow's peak. (The studio though it made her look "more exotic".) Marilyn Monroe had work on her chin-line. But they didn't do anything that would alter their abilities to move their faces – and act.

Botox is much more extreme for an actor. It doesn't just tighten or alter skin; it paralyses nerves. In Sarah Churchwell's brilliant book The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, there is a small story that shows how important the tiny, almost unreadable facial signals rendered impossible by Botox are to big screen acting. In the 1956 movie Bus Stop, Marilyn was cast opposite Don Murray, a much-garlanded stage actor breaking into the movies for the first time. When he shot scenes with her, he concluded that she was a dead, dismal actress, because she didn't seem to be doing anything in their scenes but standing there limply. Later, Dame Sybil Thorndike had exactly the same reaction.

But when they saw the rushes, they realised Marilyn was the only one among them who knew how to act for the camera: she had tiny, toned-down facial responses that were sure to melt the boy in the 22nd row.

If Marilyn had been Botoxed, she would have been turned into precisely the clothes-shop dummy Murray and Thorndike thought she was. Collagen is just as bad: if a face has puffed-up, immobile lips, its capacity for basic expression is largely gone. This is, I'm sure, one reason why British actresses have been doing so well at the Oscars for the past 10 years: they haven't been facially paralysed. Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and – this year, in the achingly sad Away From Her – Julie Christie have accepted the potential richness that comes from worry-lines and crows' feet. They use them. They know they suggest depth and richness and life.

Of course, this Botox-bind leaves actresses who are hitting the Hollywood-elderly of 40 in a cruel position. If they refuse to have the face done, they can't get cast. But if they have the face done, they can't act. They are trapped by our creepy desire to have any sign of ageing banished from our sight-lines, even on the cinema screen.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, "The greatest special effect is a close-up of the human face." Botox has stripped this effect from the movies – and left our films frozen.