Fight the powder

A couple of quick points about the elections: while I’m disappointed by the AV result (made inevitable by a campaign run by liberal leftists who took the ‘progressive majority’ as axiomatic and spoke only to other liberal leftists who were going to vote for it anyway), I am pleased about three things in particular.  First: the overdue collapse of the arrogant, cynical Tammany Hall machine that was the Scottish Labour Party.  Second: the failure of George Galloway to get elected (which has gone a long way towards restoring my faith in my home town).  Third: the collapse, even greater than the Lib Dems’, of the BNP in English local authorities.  Would it be opportunistic to suggest this is a welcome result of Cameron’s more populist stance on immigration and multiculturalism?

Naturally, if perhaps hypocritically, I will celebrate all of the above by stocking up on cheap booze while I still can.  That is one issue on which I hope moral conservatism will eventually trump big business conservatism.

I turn rather awkwardly to an unrelated issue which sort of fits that description: graffiti and its role in contemporary art.  Before I do so, have a read of these two pieces in City Journal which skewer a cruel form of decadence very eloquently.

The articles remind me of Orwell’s piece pondering why ‘if you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back’.  The difference is that rich people can throw whatever expensive crap they want at each other, but this new form of ‘art’ is an obviously hypocritical celebration of a destructive selfishness that exclusively harms the non-rich.

I have to confess to being slightly pleased that the Greens’ Martha Wardrop failed to get herself elected to the Scottish Parliament: purely because, as a councillor (see blogs passim on why multi-member single transferable voting is so great) she has been helpful and responsive in pestering the Council to clean up our own various neighbourhood works of low art, as well as other quotidia like litter.

What is it about graffiti that annoys me?  Perhaps the same things that make decadent people enjoy it: that it is a rejection of the rule of law.  A moment’s thought — and clearly the graffiti artists and their novelty-seeking propagandists have wasted very few moments on thinking — shows why this is a bad thing.  Leave aside the debate over the broken windows theory, and the practical problems of having street signs and public information notices covered in writing or paint.  The graffitist explicitly says: I don’t care about your private property, therefore I don’t care about your economic wellbeing.  From this it seems logical to infer that he is also saying, more subtly: I don’t care about your physical wellbeing, your safety or your health either.  In sum, the graffiti artist says: I don’t care about other people.

I make one or two exceptions for warranted and clever political statements: the enormous ‘ONE NATION UNDER CCTV’ painted on the side of a tall building in central London was impressive; but for every one example like this (and for every community mural, which are a far better use of young people’s artistic talent and of which there are several good examples, like the one beside Kelvinbridge Underground) there are a million annoying and disfiguring tags and scrawls.

I say private property, but more often than not the vandalism targets public property (usually postboxes, bins, etc) and has to be cleaned up at public expense, if it is at all.  Am I autistically out-of-touch, or do other people find it as incredible as I do that it needs to be explained to otherwise intelligent and educated people — the mainstream of the contemporary art world — why destruction of both public space and private property, and a general disrespect towards other people, and especially towards people in more deprived communities, is bad?

Perhaps the best response — an explicitly petty-bourgeois Marxist one — to the barbaric-decadent underclass-overclass axis, buggering those of us in between who still aspire to something better, would be to graffiti-bomb the museum, or the homes of its directors, and see how they like it.  I think it would be legitimate, in the spirit and tradition of situationist direct action against powerful elites, to call such an action a subversive work of art in itself.

It’s tempting to blame the excuse-making, poverty-blaming, bed-wetting liberal left for this, or perhaps that section of the left (these days best represented by Laurie Penny, who may or may not be a rightwing satirist) that romanticises violence and disorder on the streets (the right generally only romanticise violence in or against other countries).  But I suspect the egoism, and denial of delayed gratification, inherent in consumerism also have quite a lot to do with it.  The confluence of the two, I suggest, is at the heart of our modern anomie; hence my sympathy for the emerging Blue Labour school of thought that addresses both.

If the new SNP majority government can give minor offenders (eg those who do graffiti) community sentences that actually involve their removing this damage, that will probably be a better bet than sending them to prison.  Whether these community sentences actually do that, or become like ASBOs a laughable and easily ignored stunt, remains to be seen.

Finally, you may have noticed a while ago that, while Brown presented Obama with “an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet” (and got a set of region 1 DVDs in return!), Cameron, when it was his turn, gave Obama “a painting by a graffiti artist with three convictions for criminal damage”.  This suggests to me, unfortunately, that our prime minister has rather more in common with the curators of the LA Museum of Contemporary Art than with most of the rest of us.

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Thinking out of my box

I had an interesting conversation the other day on token Telegraph lefty Tom Chivers’ blog in response to his post on legalising drugs.  I put a question:

Hi. You put the case in favour of decriminalisation very well. For me the most persuasive aspect of it is to take the whole thing out of criminal hands — and, in the case of heroin users for instance, to reduce the possibilities of overdose, HIV infection, etc. These are all compelling arguments — but I still have a few quibbles before I can be entirely convinced…

Firstly, there’s a story on the BBC News website today reporting that drug use among under-15s in Scotland has halved in the last decade. You point to evidence of similar declines in Portugal since decriminalisation — but doesn’t the fact that this has happened here anyway, without legalisation, suggest that it would be wrong to say there’s a direct link between legalisation and declining use? Mightn’t Portugal’s decline have happened anyway, as it did here?

Secondly, the great George Monbiot wrote a piece a while ago which pointed out that “At present the trade in class A drugs is concentrated in the rich nations. If it were legalised, we could cope. The use of drugs is likely to rise, but governments could use the extra taxes to help people tackle addiction. But because the wholesale price would collapse with legalisation, these drugs would for the first time become widely available in poorer nations, which are easier for companies to exploit (as tobacco and alcohol firms have found) and which are less able to regulate, raise taxes or pick up the pieces. The widespread use of cocaine or heroin in the poor world could cause serious social problems.” How do you respond to the possibility (and it is just a possibility — I think Monbiot on the whole favours decriminalisation) that legalising drugs here might actually increase harm elsewhere?

Thirdly, as far as I can see, all of the evidence cited in favour of legalisation seems to come from countries with similar, broadly liberal systems of crime and punishment to ours. However, anyone who’s been to, say, Singapore or Japan will see that their drugs laws are far, far harsher than ours — and as far as I can see they also have lower levels of drug use than we do. I worry, then, that our evidence base is too narrow — that we are in danger of policybased evidencemaking, rather than the other way round. In this context it seems parochial to describe Britain’s drug laws as “fearsome”, given the possibility of far lengthier imprisonment or even execution for drug use in other countries.

As I say, I’m openminded on the matter, but I’d be grateful if you could address these points that are still troubling me. Thanks.

He responded:

Interesting points. The third seems to be dealt with by the WHO’s claim that there isn’t a statistical relationship between the harshness of drug laws and the level of drug use. The Portugal example may not show that drug use will go down, but it certainly shows that drug use hasn’t gone up, and I think we need good reasons to make things illegal, not the other way around. Also, there are the public health benefits.

Monbiot’s argument is the worrying one, and I do seriously take it on board. My suspicion, and it’s only a suspicion, is that more good will come from destroying the drug lords and failed states than harm will come from exploitation by drug companies. But I can’t back that up, and I do acknowledge that that is a serious concern.

I responded thusly:

Thanks for your reply. On the question of Portugal v Scotland, it is a major plus for your argument that drug use at least hasn’t gone up. However, you would agree with me that it would be unscientific to say that legalisation had caused drug use to fall.

I’m glad you point me in the direction of the WHO, because I really was looking for a study of the whole world, not just of likeminded Western democracies. I’ll have a proper look at it over the weekend. If their conclusion is as you say it is, that would go a long way towards answering my concerns.

I suspect you’re right about Monbiot’s point — and given the state of some parts of West Africa and Latin America, his worst case scenario could hardly be any worse than the status quo. As you say, though, we would need a further study to look into this. All of which goes to say that the evidence may well be supportive, but not conclusive — and neither could it be, given the amount of variables in such a huge and complicated question of social policy.

I should add that I can’t accept the Delingpolist libertarian argument for drug legalisation — I don’t believe Mill’s otherwise very useful ‘do what you want unless it harms other people’ applies, because the harm caused is too often not confined solely to the user, which would remain the case even under legalisation. Think of the increased capacity for aggression by cocaine users, or the misery caused to families of heroin addicts — it would be childish to argue that these users are only harming themselves, just as no-one argues that alcohol abuse only harms the drinker. In this regard illegal drugs are much more like alcohol than tobacco. You might say everyone should ‘do what they like’, presumably at least so long as they don’t harm others, but in this case the activity intrinsically raises the risk of harming others. Or do you hold that the right not to be harmed by others is outweighed by the infringement of the right to harm oneself? Anyway, while rejecting what seems a selfish and irresponsible libertarian argument, I can however, with these reservations, just about accept the utilitarian one. We should agree that taking drugs is intrinsically harmful, and not something we should view with neutrality — thus we should want to reduce that harm, and if legalisation can help with that, we should support it.

As well as correcting my sloppy, interchangeable use of decriminalisation and legalisation, I would now go further and say I find the libertarian position (on everything) ridiculous.  Anyone who pressgangs Mill, who was arguing against genuine political and religious tyranny, into service to justify acts of hedonism that are such a reliable source of harm needs to go back and read his On Liberty.  Nonetheless, I still find myself somewhere between the utilitarian and authoritarian positions, or as we might call them the realistic and romantic positions, unable to quite make up my dope-addled mind.  I’m much more convinced that cannabis, E, acid and mushrooms (which are class A, but whose only danger is from users self-defenestrating) should be legal, and that junkies should get their fix on the NHS rather than rob or whore, than I am that we should sell cocaine over the counter.  Perhaps the wisest policy would be to accept the least harmful drugs, make them less harmful still, and concentrate on trying one way or the other to reduce use of the most harmful ones: but imperfect outcomes for users are a price worth paying for reducing harm to others, which is why I’m all for methadone programmes and needle exchanges if they cut crime and disease transmission.

Note that I don’t say ‘rather than have to rob or whore’.  One aspect of the drugs debate I really can’t stand is the attempt to remove any possibility of individual autonomy from users.  We are all human—we are all capable of free will, of rational thought and reasonable behaviour—we all always have a choice not to harm ourselves or others, even if many of us fail to exercise it.  But moralising will get us nowhere: we have to accept that many, many people — the Delingpoles of this world — are selfish and will happily buy cocaine for fun of a weekend, even in the knowledge it causes death somewhere else in the world to some poor, anonymous black or brown person whose fate they couldn’t care less about.  We have to accept that and build policy around it.

I also think liberalisers should be a bit more honest about the current non-existence of the war on drugs, at least in Britain.  Go to Camden High St on a Friday night and watch the police drive up and down, ignoring crack deals in the hope of confining them to that neighbourhood.  As wars go, it’s not exactly Laurent Nkunda v the Interahamwe.  In many ways we are already nearer de facto decriminalisation than a war.

Of course, no discussion of drugs can now take place without the talk turning to alcohol, the drug to which we are almost all addicted, which brings me neatly onto the imminent Scottish election.  If you agree, as I do, with Elish Angiolini that cheap booze is at the root of many of our problems with health, crime and the economy (and, er, to a lesser extent education, though I fondly remember one or two pisshead teachers), and if you accept the simple fact that people adjust their behaviour in response to price incentives, then you will also agree that minimum pricing of alcohol is an overdue policy, and one which ought to be weighed when deciding how to vote.  The SNP tried to bring this in, and have said they will try again.  Naturally Labour are against it, probably only so that they can bring it in themselves in a bid to repeat the success of the smoking ban, which was about the only worthwhile thing they managed in office.  I’ve generally had quite a lot of time for Annabel Goldie — her support for the budget in return for policies like extra police officers was how opposition parties should behave, rather than opposing everything for the hell of it — but the Tories’ failure to support this move was very disappointing, and confirmed the charge that they will always be more on the side of big business than of the working class (also true of Labour).  Annabel may have a point about the other parties’ auctioneering of unaffordable policies, but as my mole in the SNP points out, ‘all of her supporters are rich anyway’, and she’s not immune to giveaways either.  For instance, I’m concerned about the removal of prescription charges — have a look at what’s happened to antibiotics to see why — but then, I can’t remember the last time I had to get a prescription, and would have been perfectly able to afford it anyway, so I accept that epidemiological worries are a luxury when medical and financial ones aren’t.  In a wider sense, I fail to see why the upwards transfer of wealth from overtaxed poor Scots to better-off pensioners and graduates is still classed as solidarity and social justice: but that is another abstract complaint, and there are some very quotidian matters to settle first.  Weighing the parties in the balance then, we find that they are all wanting, but that some are wanting more than others.

Which brings me not very neatly onto the AV referendum.  I’m a bit more excited about this than I am about the election, though I’m still at a loss as to why the voters should be considered too stupid to manage both on the same day: either they’re too stupid full stop, in which case we might as well pick a dictator and hope for the best, or they’re not.  Growing up in a city which at one point returned 71 Labour councillors to 79 seats, I was never much of a cheerleader for FPTP.  The oft-heard idea that it lets us ‘kick the bastards out’ is rubbish too: can you remember the last time we removed one party with a working majority at a general election and brought in the other with a working majority?  It hasn’t happened in my lifetime: in fact it happened only once in the 20th century (when Heath beat Wilson in 1970).  AV isn’t PR (my preference is for multi-member STV, which has given us a far fairer balance on the council), but it’s probably still an improvement, and a necessary first step if we are to break the stranglehold of the rotten two or three big parties.  Even with all this in mind I was swithering, until I read that Ken Clarke and John Prescott are against it and Nigel Farage, Phillip Blond and Caroline Lucas are for it.

It’s also more fun to rank candidates in order than to put a tick in a box.  It benefits not just those who support smaller parties, but those of us (most of us, now) who aren’t partisan.  Most of all, it benefits those of us who know which parties we hate more than we know which parties we like.  And if you’re still not sure, you can always hedge your bets and put a 1 next to yes and a 2 next to no.

So tell me, dear readers: do either of you have a strong opinion on drugs, the Scottish election or AV you’d like to share…?

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The king called up his jet fighters

A general consensus seems to have emerged in the middle ground of British politics in favour of the UN-approved coalition air attacks on Gaddafi’s forces.  Cameron, Clegg and Miliband took their positions on the frontbenches as moderates who wanted anything but another Iraq; events have turned them into multilateral hawks.  As a Young Turk I was sceptical of the idea that the thugs of Moscow, or the waxworks of Beijing, could confer legal or moral legitimacy on any military act; but the hatred the world felt towards the West for our bungled invasion of Iraq means that, if nothing else, it can no longer be in our national interest to act in the Arab world without Security Council approval.  Thankfully the new leaders of our warmongering political parties seem to have agreed.

There’s no need for me to repeat the arguments in favour of intervention: you’ll have read little else all week.  I’ll also leave aside Sarkozy’s Napoleonic motives, and the legitimate question of whether a US President is in breach of their Constitution by acting without Congressional approval (having dragged his heels for a fortnight, he can’t say he didn’t have enough time).  In this country (as, it seems, in the US) this is one of those issues that divide the centre-left and centre-right from the further left and further right.  On this position (unlike, say, the EU) I’m on the side of the centre, as it were.

On the left, we constantly hear the refrain: “What about Bahrain/Yemen/Saudi Arabia/Zimbabwe/North Korea/China?”  I would argue that just because it isn’t always practical to change the world doesn’t mean we never should.  Our policy should be one of liberal realism: deal with the world as it is but, without getting ahead of ourselves, try to make it more like what we would all like it to be when an obvious opportunity to do so presents itself (such as when a nearby dictator is hours away from completing a massacre).  But, of course, your leftist sees the world in binary terms, and rejects any possibility of incremental improvements: for him it must be all or nothing, and we must either use force against everyone or no-one.

Thinking he has thought of something very original that can’t possibly have occurred to you, he then retorts that the real reason we intervene in Libya, and not in the others, is to get our hands on its oil.  But why does it follow that just because a policy is in our national interest it must necessarily not be in the interests of the other party?  It doesn’t follow at all.  If we help the rebels to overthrow their dictators, thus helping them into power, one would hope that they would then return the favour in some way.  Everyone’s then happy, except the old regime and their pals in China/Russia/Germany/wherever.  What’s wrong with that?

On the right we see a different variant of this ‘splendid isolationism’.  Kelvin MacKenzie says on Question Time that “Libya is not worth one ounce of British blood”.  I would say that anyone joining our armed forces knows the risks perfectly well — and if they have a profound aversion to the idea of shedding their blood then perhaps they should consider an alternative career — and that preventing the torture and murder of large numbers of civilians is as good a use of their bravery and our resources as any.  Meanwhile Peter Hitchens writes that we should leave them to fight it out and make a deal with the winner.  For a man who argues that the Christian faith should be taught as truth in schools, this seems a pretty unchristian position (and, I am certain, not one that his, his brother’s and my hero Orwell would have taken).  He rightly admits his policy is “heartless”.

The left fall back on their two most feeble arguments; the right think compassion and the rule of law should stop at our borders.  Blair tried to draw Gaddafi in from the cold after he gave up his nuclear programme, but selling him the tools to brutalise Libyan citizens (I refuse to use the phrase ‘his own people’) was a step too far.  The SNP gave him back al-Megrahi while his appeal was pending; it may be that they did so for compassionate reasons, and it may well be that he was innocent, but thanks to Salmond and MacAskill we’ll never know.  So far, then, I prefer the new policy.

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Philosophers and zombies

As usual, in true Iranian fashion, I begin by whipping myself for not having blogged much of late.  For once I’ve had a decent excuse – I’ve been finishing writing my debut novel, The Donkey in Winter, a black tragicomedy set in a dystopian near-future Britain.  The action follows the dying days of a despotic buffoon in a failed state in the north-east of England as he tries to ward off the radical-conservative theocracy that has swept the rest of the country, and the fate of two ordinary lads who get caught up in the violence that follows.  It’s fair to say it builds on a few of the themes I’ve explored in this blog.  Let me know if you’d like a copy.

So to the election.  Here, then, are my thoughts on the various parties on offer…

Labour – I must be fair to them (for once) and try to put their record in the context of what Britain was like in 1997.  It wasn’t all bad, at first – the minimum wage, freedom of information, a more tolerant view of gay folk, a more peaceful Northern Ireland and even the Scottish Parliament turned out to be better policies than many people thought (less so the Millennium Dome).  The good people of Sierra Leone will be eternally grateful for Blair’s intervention there – but the bombs we dropped so liberally on Serbia were a dark presage of things to come.  In the second half of Blair’s decade, hugely increased public spending (much of it still not paid for, because of hazy PFI deals) plus very little in return equalled a bloated state; and mass immigration plus multiculturalism plus the war on Iraq equalled 7/7 – the day that, for me, will always define New Labour’s term in office.  Typically, Teflon Tony escaped just in time to let Gordon handle the credit crunch.  It’s easy to say the Tories would have done the same – perhaps, but the tripartite failure that was the Bank of England / Treasury / FSA was Brown’s doing, and the whole system was set up to ignore both the level of debt in the economy and the house price bubble that drove real inflation.  We will live with the consequences of Brown’s idiocy for a long time to come, and he’s not the man to get us out of the mess he made.

As you know, Brown’s only notable appearance in this election has been during the hilarious Bigotgate (hilarious at his expense, naturally).  The instant reaction on Twitter falls into three types: the ‘how dare he’ sort, the ‘we should stick up for immigrants’ sort, and the ‘but she IS a bigot’ sort.  The last of these shows that there is still a remarkably widespread kneejerk response that equates criticism of immigration with racism – particularly when it comes in an unsophisticated form from an uneducated pensioner, which ought to be precisely the criticism we should tolerate most.  Smearing those who disagree with you is bad enough; doing it to someone who fits that description is particularly shoddy: and the mindset is not encouraging for those of us who want to see a healthier, more cohesive society, to say the least.  The same mindset insults anyone raising fears about crime by suggesting that, if only they didn’t read the Daily Mail, they would realise crime is falling.

Peter Hitchens is fond of quoting Peter Mandelson on his blog: “round about the time you’re utterly sick of saying something is when you’re beginning to get your message across”.  So I will say again: above a certain level, racism will go up as immigration goes up.  When the woman on the Rochdale omnibus thinks immigration is unsustainably high, we’re faced with two solutions: deal with the issue, or deal with the woman.  Brown has shown which he prefers, though his hotheaded behaviour’s more excusable than that of his supporters, coolly trying to justify it.  When did it become so fashionable to sneer at the poor and uneducated, and what is tolerant or liberal about belittling someone who expresses an opinion you might dislike, in words you might not yourself have chosen?  The Labour Party stopped doing this (in public) a couple of years ago, belatedly grasping that excluding dissenting voices on immigration only helped the far right – but, as we’ve seen, many of their supporters still feel this way.  Those of us who worry about racism, and the possibility of its getting worse, should be troubled by that.  But perhaps this will be the election when the Gillian Duffies realise that the more they vote Labour, the less Labour care about them.

One misguided explanation for the rise of the BNP is that Labour haven’t done enough to explain the benefits of immigration to their traditional supporters (as is the conclusion of this otherwise very reasonable article).  But this presupposes that immigration has benefited them – it clearly hasn’t.  Not only has it undercut the wages of those at the bottom (and it’s easy to say ‘you can’t undercut the minimum wage’, but how many of the 1m+ illegal immigrants in Britain are on the minimum wage?), but, by giving them a permanent source of very cheap labour, it’s allowed the upper middle classes to sweep our 5m+ indigenous, permanently unemployed underclass under the carpet and keep them there.

So if, like me, you come from a middle class, liberal family, work in the public sector and have benefited from mass immigration, globalisation and neoliberalism, by all means vote for them – they’ll protect as many of our vested interests as they can get away with.  If you’re actually working class – forget it.  They clearly despise you.

Conservatives – for all that, I don’t blame anyone for being troubled by the idea of another Tory government: their past conduct always acts as a heavy warning against getting overexcited by Cameron’s One Nation talk.  Having said that, I still think he has the potential (backed by some first-rate One Nation thinkers like Michael Gove and David Willetts) to be a decent PM, in spite of colossal stupidity over Ashcroftgate – but this is not the best election to win.  None of the parties are being honest about the scale of the cuts to come – and I don’t blame them, because if any of them break the silence their popularity will plummet (as Clegg discovered when he spoke, in a flash of honesty, of “savage cuts”, and as Osborne did when he mentioned the “austerity” to come).  Voters this year claim to want to be told the truth – but, in truth, we can’t handle the truth.  For this reason, the figleaf of a deal with the Lib Dems would probably be the best result – for them and us.

Lib Dems – the surprise package of the election.  Nick Clegg – memorably dismissed by a fellow commentator before the debates as “making Wendy Alexander look like Cicero” – has managed to speak the fiery old Labour language of fairness, before it all got perverted by bureaucracy and statism.  Using ideas like localism for progressive ends – Brown’s aims through Cameron’s methods, if we’re being charitable – is an appealing thesis.  We need a decent, honest, social democratic centre left in Britain, but for 13 years have had a vicious, corrupt gang who, among many other things, lied us into an illegal war that debased our democracy and cost a million lives, bought every one of the City’s self-serving lies, and whose last act has reduced us to within an inch of national bankruptcy.  If you believe in liberal or social democratic politics you should want the party that has in times gone by been its main vehicle either to fail completely, or to devise a wiser philosophy in opposition.  Either way, you should vote Lib Dem instead of Labour.

There are still plenty of contradictions in the Lib Dem platform, and plenty to belie their line that they are not of “the old politics”.  For all their inspiring talk of local democracy, and giving power away from Whitehall, they’ve shown their own fear of democracy.  Their last manifesto promised a referendum on the European Constitution, which became a shameful abstention on a referendum on the almost identical Lisbon Treaty.  They reneged on this on the grounds that they would support a in/out referendum on our membership of the whole thing – then, when this was proposed in the House of Lords by a UKIP peer, quietly voted against it.  So, beware of their claims to be so different from the other two.

I mentioned immigration and its effect on our underclass, which I think are both the symptom and the cause of many of modern Britain’s problems.  The Lib Dem policy of taking everyone on up to £10k out of tax altogether is the best policy in the whole election, and by far the best way of incentivising work for those currently at the bottom of the heap.  Whether or not the effect would be cancelled out by an amnesty for illegal immigrants, as they also seem to want, is hard to say.

SNP – I actually think they’re doing a reasonable job of running Scotland (which, largely thanks to Annabel Goldie, who rather undermines her boss’s scaremongering, has become a good advert for hung parliaments), particularly on education, but find it hard not to be put off by Salmond’s Caesarian egomania.  His target of 20 seats seems as hyperbolic as ever.  If the Tories win, expect our canny FM to drive multiple wedges between us and them.  Whether or not you approve of this ultimately comes down to whether or not you want to break up the UK, but any argument in favour of unionism is massively outweighed by all the arguments against Labour.

UKIP – some appealing populist policies, and not just on the EU, but unfortunately they’ve thrown their lot in with the climate change denial lobby – and by that I don’t just mean a few dissenting engineers and geologists, but genuine headcases like Christopher Monckton.  Their yeomen base might not be too happy to discover the libertarian small print about drugs, the BBC and the NHS either.  Nigel Farage – who, ironically, is precisely how I picture a low-grade bank clerk if and when I think of one – could provide some of the best drama of the night if he beats the Brownnosing Speaker, but I wouldn’t want more than one MP dragging a Cameron government off to the unworkable right.

Greens – likeable people, uncorrupt and more intellectually coherent (though still socialist) than they used to be, and very good locally.  I still think they’re wrong about nuclear power, but I must apologise for smearing them in the past when I suggested they were on the EU gravy train – it seems that, like some of the more noble Lib Dems and unlike Labour, they have an idealistic view of Europe which doesn’t allow them to accept the institution as it currently stands.  It wouldn’t be a bad thing if one or two of them get in – especially as it might make more Labour support go in their direction in future.

BNP – see above.  If they do well, it won’t be Gillian Duffy’s fault – it’ll be Gordon Brown’s.

Assorted Communists, Trotskyites, Gallowayists, etc – a bit like the BNP, but with anti-Semitism instead of white racism.

In conclusion, my advice would be: anyone but Labour, except their offshoot party the BNP.  My constituency (Glasgow North) is Labour held, but 33rd on the Lib Dems’ target list, requiring a swing of 6%.  Albeit with the reservations listed above, they’ll be getting my tactical vote on Thursday.

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Carbon sinks

“If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a minister of housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.” - Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

I wrote recently about changes to make Scotland’s planning system more accountable to local communities.  It seems the rest of the UK is going in the other direction.  “Big business is enthusiastic”, which ought to tell us all we need to know, but “environmentalists are divided”.  Friends of the Earth are “cautiously in favour”: shame on them.  They are New Labour’s useful idiots.  They obviously take the view that a few more wind farms (forced through against local opposition) will make up for so many new coal power stations, nuclear power stations, motorway extensions and supermarkets.  They should read this illuminating book (thanks to John for bringing it to my attention) by Cambridge physicist David MacKay (now advising the government on environmental and energy matters, in a classic case of too little, too late): it makes clear that Britain’s current energy needs could only be met by domestic renewables if an area roughly the size of Wales were covered in wind farms.  It’s already easy to accuse greens of being more interested in totalitarian solutions than local democracy: now the charge has some truth behind it.

Which brings me to Climategate, the hacked emails from the University of East Angular’s Climatic Research Unit which hint at a cover-up by leading climatologists of data inconvenient to the anthropogenic global warming consensus.  Firstly, it’s no defence to say that the hackers acted illegally: this stuff is too important to be kept secret, and legitimate attempts to get hold of the data now circulating had been rebuffed.  But the tragedy that hasn’t been discussed is the extent to which the whole issue had already become politicised: if you’re leftwing it’s a fair bet you believe the world is warming up and that drastic action needs to be taken to limit our emissions, and if you’re rightwing you probably believe the science is at best 50:50 and the whole thing is a leftish plot to smash capitalism.  Scientific evidence shouldn’t be a matter of politicised opinion: it represents a failure of politicians, media and scientists that it’s come to this, and it depresses me how the issue has become just another battle in America’s ridiculous culture wars, increasingly exported to our own shores.  Examining the matter from first principles, why should there be any correlation between one’s views on the environment and one’s views on, say, gay rights or gun laws?  Why do atheists invariably support abortion and oppose the death penalty, with the reverse true of the religious?  Intelligent people should reject these false dichotomies and make their own minds up about each of these complex issues, rather than blindly labelling themselves ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ and falling into line.  Thankfully the peak oil debate hasn’t yet reached this stage, but it probably will: I wouldn’t bet on the “drill, baby, drill” mob ever being able to grasp concepts like the finite nature of geological resources.  Anyway, it’s now clear that each side of the global warming debate is guilty of gross distortion and omission.  I still think the bulk of the data supports the AGW view (and will continue to take my scientific advice from the likes of MacKay rather than rightwing bloggers), and I still support the precautionary principle, but in future I’ll be a little more sceptical of the idea that scientists themselves are immune to tribalism and dirty tricks.

In other news, the latest polling seems to back up my assertion that Scottish voters will reflexively get behind Labour when the prospect of a Conservative government rears its head, and that the SNP won’t make the major breakthroughs in Westminster they’re hoping for.  I’ll happily be proved wrong at Labour’s expense, but many people here still think like the old woman interviewed by the BBC on the night of the recent by-election in Glasgow North East (which Labour won with a Karzai-impressing 60% of the vote on a 33% turnout).  Asked whether Labour could ever do anything that would lose them her vote, she replied: “No, nothing, never.”  She went on to say that they were still “the working man’s party”.  Labour are the party of the poor only in the sense that it is in their interest to keep as many people as possible in poverty.  The SNP have a quite a job to change this mindset, but they could start by letting schools become more independent of local authorities: is it any wonder that Jordanhill, Scotland’s least council-dependent school, outperforms every other state-funded school in the country by about 10% on every measure?  And yet – suspending my usual bleak cynicism for one moment – there are some encouraging signs of other social changes.  If we are to have jail terms that reflect public will, supposedly less indiscipline in schools, and less tolerance of drink, driving and drink driving, might Scotland actually become… dare I say it… just ever so slightly more… civilised?

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Wrong side of the tracks

On the 10th anniversary of devolution, I find myself in agreement with a new poll on the Scottish Parliament, which suggests most Scots want Holyrood to have complete control over tax and spending but want Westminster to retain foreign and defence policy.  Like others who were suspicious at first, and initially felt vindicated by the fiasco of the building and the quality of its politicians, I’ve gradually shifted my position from seeing the Parliament as a threat to an opportunity.  To have power over income and expenditure – to spend only as much as we can collectively raise – would force Scotland into the fiscal maturity that’s eluded us so far.  At a time of general austerity, the private sector is squeezed to fund a public sector more extensive than the Iron Curtain’s.  Across the UK, state spending accounts for approximately 40% of the economy; in Argyll and Clyde, it is 76%.  No doubt Salmond understands this, but what’s become of his bonfire of the quangos?  And how can anyone who calls himself a socialist (as most people round here still do) accept a situation whereby, as in Glasgow, a third of the working age population don’t work, many of whom never have and never will?  The Soviets certainly wouldn’t have put up with that.  Only with fiscal independence – in this case, literally non-dependence – can we begin to tackle this tragic disgrace.

On the question of foreign and defence policy: I can see the argument for Scotland having a seat at the top table in Brussels, but joining the Euro would mean a net loss of independence and sovereignty.  As Rothschild said: “Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.”  If the SNP leadership changes its policy on this, I’d have a lot of thinking to do if and when the question of independence is ever put to a referendum.

As a Scotsman who travels to London for work every month, my ears pricked up when I heard that the government are removing National Express’ franchise and taking the East Coast Main Line back into public ownership, at least temporarily.  The service and punctuality on the line are pretty good, though it has become a lot more expensive since National Express took over from GNER.  This is because of the ridiculous system whereby companies outbid each other to win the right to run profitable lines, squeezing passengers to fund these bids to the government, whilst being subsidised by the government to run other lines at a loss, and to pay infrastructure fees to Network Rail, which is publicly owned anyway.  This is privatisation for its own sake, and the whole mess shows the folly of treating the railways like any other market.  The government has no business running telecoms companies or airlines, say, because private operators can offer consumers alternatives, but public services like train lines should remain public because, in most cases, they are the only way to get from one town to another without driving.  The expansion of car travel has been as much of a disaster for this country as the decline of rail travel: in the cost to our natural and built environment, the cost to our economy of utterly misallocated resources, and in the decline in social capital and cohesion.  Time for a radical government to reverse the situation: stop building new roads, start pricing road use, renationalise all the railway lines, and start reopening ones the butcher Beeching closed.

Before anyone points it out, I’m aware of the irony of calling for a smaller public sector to intervene and renationalise a large industry.  But as I’ve said before, we live in the worst of both worlds: the public sector is overmanned generally, and there are plenty of things the government are doing which they should stay out of, but plenty of things (like a truly integrated transport and environmental strategy) that they’re completely neglecting.

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Amazing disgrace

Regular readers will be pleased to learn I wasn’t executed for bringing drugs, or pirate DVDs, into Singapore.  I spent a couple of weeks in the weirdo socialist-consumerist city-state; and a few days in Malaysia, which boasts the world’s most laid-back Muslims, where we took a very rickety sleeper train through jungle highlands to reach the beautiful, secluded Perhentian Islands; a couple of days among the spectacular ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia; and a few days in Thailand, which is always one of the world’s most welcoming countries and, happily for us, refuses to involve foreigners in its domestic squabbles.  In other news, I’ve also been working on and off at the House of Lords, which is usually pretty soporific, but something newsworthy happens every 400 or so years.

Anyway, you’ll be relieved I’m back home just in time to share my thoughts on the forthcoming European Parliament elections.  As on various other issues, I am broadly Eurosceptic more for practical than ideological reasons.  The MPs’ expenses revelations which have provided so much entertainment lately are small bier compared to the high-speed Brussels gravy express.  The EU’s farming and fisheries policies (which take up the bulk of its budget) are well-documented catastrophes.  Almost everyone wants free trade with Europe, and almost everyone is glad we were able to offer former Soviet Bloc countries aid and trade in return for democracy and human rights, but almost no-one wants the political and legal superstructure that has come with it.  Amid the torrent of articles reminding us just how bad the 1970s were, and insisting there was no alternative to Thatcherism, bear in mind what a fraudulent failure her European policy was.  The rebate demand was a shoddy diversion from the evaporation of sovereignty, the acquiescence into ever greater union, which she did nothing to stop.

So, although the Conservative position on Europe might seem reasonable now, their record isn’t exactly trustworthy.  I certainly can’t vote in an EU election for any party so duplicitous (Labour) or dogmatic (the Lib Dems) as to oppose a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.  Neither am I sold on the Europhile SNP, who would have us quit sterling and join a currency run by a manufacturing giant with a completely different business cycle.  We would no longer have the option of inflating ourselves out of debt, of devaluing our currency to boost exports, or of realigning interest rates to boost demand or cool inflation.  Even if you take the nationalist view that these rules are dictated by London anyway, they are at least dictated for the needs of an economic cycle to which Scotland is inextricably attached.  This wouldn’t be the case in the Euro: how could Scotland, with low interest rates set by the EU, have avoided an Irish-style housing bubble and subsequent crash?  I’m not a doommonger about Scotland’s independent economic prospects generally (alternative energy has magically replaced oil overnight as our future source of great riches, but the case is much more convincing when applied to Scotland than to Britain as a whole), but on the currency question I’ve yet to be convinced.  In fact I’ve only very rarely heard anyone from the SNP defend the pro-Euro policy, so perhaps it’s something they’d rather not talk about.  Salmond was asked about it at a talk I went to recently, and replied that he had always favoured more monetary and fiscal stability.  But surely any stability would be greatly at the expense of flexibility.  Is there any debate on this within the SNP?  Is there a wing of the party which supports pegging to the pound, or having our own currency altogether?  If any SNP fans are reading, please educate me.

I’m slipping off topic: the Euro’s not on the agenda in this election.   Giving Labour a final boot in the balls before their crucifixion on the Appian Way out of Downing St next year is on the agenda, so the myriad smaller parties – UKIP, the Greens, No2EU – look like good protest votes to suit the new anti-politics mood.

The BNP aren’t a good protest vote: they’re the only party left that are even worse than New Labour.  Their constitution specifically prohibits anyone other than “indigenous Caucasians” from joining.  That they haven’t removed this clause, to break through as a mainstream anti-immigration party, shows what they really stand for.  As Nick Griffin said, “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lamp shades.  Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat.  I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”  He should really team up with the Islamic fundamentalists.  And what would his electorate make of him trashing the creation myths of WWII?  I’m all for free speech, but I’m more offended by crimes against history than I am by their censorship: so in the case of denying something as undeniable as the Holocaust, I’m inclined towards the (modern) German position.

Anyway, I can’t think of anything more irrational or inhuman than discriminating against individuals or groups on racial grounds, whether the old-fashioned way or by affirmative action.  It shouldn’t be a crime to judge people on the basis of their beliefs, such as that Muhammad ascended to Heaven with the archangel Gabriel from the Dome of the Rock on the back of a winged mare, or that man coexisted with dinosaurs in 4004 BC, or that gays and adulterers should be stoned to death, or that women should be neither seen nor heard, or that the Holocaust didn’t happen.  You can nail your colours to the mast, but not to your skin, as it were.  So voting for the BNP – and giving these knuckle-dragging thugs a seat in the European Parliament – will do nothing but strengthen the state-sponsored industry that exists to exaggerate the BNP’s threat.  See Peter Hitchens for fine expositions of why even right-wing little Englanders should reject the BNP.

Ideally I would like to vote for a party that combined Green views on the environment with UKIP views on immigration.  The two are perfectly related: I no more want to live on a concrete island of 70 million people than I do on a boiling world of 9 billion.  Liberal democratic capitalism can’t continue to grow much beyond the level of resource depletion we’ve now reached without destroying the planet, and human civilisation with it.  This century we’ll either have to reduce the scale on which our existing system operates or invent some new one.  Either way, population control globally and nationally seems a sensible place to start.  Unfortunately most on the right seem convinced that because lefties noticed global warming first the whole thing must be a lefty plot.  It isn’t, but a lot of right-wing commentators are doing their best to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The ‘green left’, meanwhile, don’t believe in things like national borders or cultural differences.  This is a pity, because their insistence (with the full support of the pro-business right) on mass immigration and cultural segregation has created, in Britain and Europe, a huge and growing section of society with archaic, extreme and in many cases medievally conservative views.  (I don’t know how many British Muslims they asked in this survey, but it’s telling that none of them thought homosexuality was morally acceptable.)  This probably wasn’t what they had in mind, wracked with postcolonial guilt forty years ago, but the road to Helmand is paved with good intentions.

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Veiled threat

A word about Osama Saeed.  He seemed pretty mild-mannered when we were fellow Politics tutorial students some years ago – in fact I hardly remember him saying a word – but is quite the firebrand today (and clearly more of a political success than any of his classmates).  Osama is the SNP’s candidate for Glasgow Central at the next election, and Labour and the Lib Dems have recently called for an inquiry into why Alex Salmond gave £400,000 of taxpayers’ money to his new outfit the Scottish Islamic Foundation – an endorsement of their plans for separate state-funded Muslim schools.  As well as his rapid rise in the SNP, Osama made his name as Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, widely seen as the British wing of the Hamas-supporting, gay-bashing, woman-stoning, caliphate-restoring Muslim Brotherhood.  Osama told Muslims in Dundee not to cooperate with the police and has dismissed the very idea of Islamic extremism in Scotland, while the SNP nicely killed two birds with one stone by criticising British Transport Police for its stop and search policies.  It seems the SNP are doing a pretty good job of emulating what Labour originally did in northern England – coopting the Muslim ‘community’ into patronage and block votes in return for favourable policies such as heavy restrictions on free speech in Britain, and now faith schools in Scotland.  Make of this trend what you will – I imagine you can guess my views about it.

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