Woolsacked

After the defeat of AV, expect the next epic battle (and the next poisoned wooden spoon Cameron hands the Lib Dems) to be House of Lords reform.  At this point I’d better declare an interest as having worked there (as an erstwhile Hansard reporter).  Despite knowing the institution more intimately than I do any other, I don’t think I’ve written much about it before; this is because I find it quite difficult to make up my mind about what to do about the damn place.

Walter Bagehot famously quipped that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it”.  Having sat through several postprandial hours of a debate on ‘the benefits of the Segway personal transporter’, it’s hard to disagree.  It’s also hard, on the other hand, to keep one’s rational faculties clear when in the building and not be seduced by the awful, artificial and amusing work of Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry and its supremely confident Gothic (that is, explicitly non-Roman) assertion of British exceptionalism.  I find it takes a great effort, and I can’t be alone in this, to disregard the indisputable aesthetic and technical accomplishments of the age of empire when weighing up its social, economic and moral pros and cons; too easy, in other words, to use beauty as a proxy for truth, justice, virtue.  The whole place is a spectacular triumph of Victorian propaganda: the Soviet Union had its stirring anthem and its heroic art, the US has its sexy movies, and we had the Tudor rose and the portcullis.  In the little reporters’ corner of the chamber, with some anonymous lifer suggesting to half a dozen of his fellows how to decide the makeup of a committee to determine the composition of a working group to investigate the regulation of the makeup of the committee, the eyes are inevitably drawn by the carved lions and unicorns, by the heraldic oak panels of the four patron saints, and eventually by the dazzling gilded ceiling whose ornaments and chandeliers seem to melt off it like stalactites, and your distracted reporter, overcome by a sort of reactionary Stendhal syndrome, finds himself transported to his own Burkean Ambrosia.  (The Commons is much less ornate and perhaps cosier for it, but the most profound sensation to be had in the estate is to be alone at night in Westminster Hall, gazing up at the hammerbeam angels still keeping watch nine centuries on, and only dimly aware of the restless metropolis beyond the buttressed walls: on such occasions I always find myself communing with Bede and his sparrow.)  So perhaps Bagehot would have been more accurate to say that the cure is to go and listen to it, while keeping your eyes shut.

I digress.  The question is: what use does the place serve now, and how could it be improved?  Here the traditionalist and the radical democrat in me clash (a problem Orwell had all the time).  A few perceptions about the noble and not-so-noble Lords persist that are no longer quite accurate.  Only 88 of the old hereditaries — Wilde’s old unspeakables — remain.  The vast majority of the rest are life peers, appointed by various prime ministers; a few bishops are left (and are we really about to see a Conservative prime minister eject them?), and the law Lords have moved across the road to the Supreme Court.  A lot of these are former or failed politicians, but a great many are also those who’ve excelled in various non-political fields: the arts, law, media, sport, business, academia, war.  In this sense, at least, they could be considered more diverse than the Commons, which with every election becomes more and more the preserve of PPE Oxonians in their mid-40s from north London who have only ever worked in politics.  The Lords, unlike the Commons, still has plenty of endearingly amateurish speakers (whom I always hope to avoid having to report on) and endearingly unsmooth operators.  And despite Cameron’s additions, Labour still has more peers than the Tories.

The balance that needs to be struck is to combine the resilient independence of the incumbent Lords (who stood up to the previous government on, among other things, the chilling effects of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act) with a greater (that is, any) popular mandate.

It seems inevitable, with the defeat of the AV referendum, that the Lords will become proportionately elected before the Commons ever does.  There is one serious objection to this: that, by picking who appears on the lists and in what order, the party managers would retain or even strengthen control over this occasionally rebellious House.  The Lords aren’t so easily whipped now, but their replacement senators (most of them presumably seeking re-election) could well be.  Might the coalition, then, use this opportunity to strengthen the executive relative to parliament?  That would surely be the opposite of what we should hope for.

So the extent to which we should welcome reform really depends on what sort of PR is on offer.  If Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have complete control over the party lists, then what comes next might if anything be worse than what we have now.  But if the government is actually willing to give power away — perhaps in the form of multi-member STV wards, or even open primaries, as are now used to pick some Commons candidates — then the public will have more say than the politicians, and the reformed chamber will have more legitimacy than the one it replaces.  There is a great opportunity for something better, but we will have to wait and see whether we are given another stitchup instead.

Our zeal for reform shouldn’t lead us to assume that what is done in its name will necessarily be more truly democratic, rather than a pale imitation of the deeply dysfunctional Commons; instead, we have to hold the coalition to account and insist that the upper House becomes as democratic as it possibly can, and that it gives power away from politicians, both elected and appointed: on this occasion, we have to keep our eyes wide open.

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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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Speak softly and carry a big society

Bagehot this week gives a good summary of the Spirit Level debate.  As he points out, Singapore seems a grievous omission.  With a population the same size as Scotland’s and inequality if anything even higher than ours (though, it must be said, very few signs of excessive wealth or poverty) they have no social problems, and we have all of them.  Culture, especially social capital, seems at least as important as income distribution in determining social problems (by the way, that doesn’t necessarily count against immigration: Singapore is also much more ethnically diverse than us).  Equally, it seems odd to blame equality for high levels of suicide and alcoholism.  Mightn’t these be more to do with the grim northern latitudes on which the more equal societies happen to lie?

The debate should really be framed as: do the redistributive measures required to reduce income inequality (not that Gordon Brown even managed that) depress the economic growth that removes absolute poverty to such an extent that we oughtn’t bother?  I don’t think either side has this quite right: we freeborn Britishers are probably prepared to accept more taxation than is often supposed, provided we think we’re getting value for money.  (A lot of us, for this reason, arrive at a conservative position by default rather than by choice.)  Related to this is the extent to which communities and public space are squeezed by individualism on one side and statism on the other: somehow we have to rescue the community from the failing individual and the failed state, and redefine how we pay for public services in the process.

David Cameron grasps at this with his big society narrative, though very inarticulately.  That the phrase has become a synonym for “savage cuts” in the public mind suggests they haven’t thought it through properly; and if there’s no philosophy behind it, it’s hard to disagree with the public mind.  But it should be very simple…

State
Society
Community
Family
Individuals

We’re governed from the top and bottom of these inwards; what if we were governed from the centre outwards?

Bagehot, earlier, also suggested that David Miliband gets it; if so, he is alone in the Labour Party, bereft of this supposed “moral seriousness”.  For Labour, then, I propose an admission that an ever-bigger state won’t work: there has to be an ideal size, and they should tell us what they think it is.  They should rediscover their righteous anger about the five giant evils but admit that more and more bureaucracy has failed to solve them.  They should revisit the neglected small-c values of mutuals and co-operatives, which worked on the principle of cohesion without coercion.  And they should admit that they betrayed Keynes’ name by running a huge structural deficit in the boom times: which has only given their successors cover for the savage cuts.  Instead, work should be encouraged and progressive taxes (whatever that means) could be redistributed to aforementioned co-ops, social enterprises and charities, to see if they can do any better: it’s a pity that Labour’s scorched earth legacy means this couldn’t be run as a controlled experiment, even if the new government wanted to.  The left also has to stop resenting the idea of charities delivering public services as an attack on the state and the privileges of its workers, and start seeing it as a potential partner in fighting those social ills.

For the LibCons, my advice is to embrace localism and direct democracy, and trust people enough to give power away from Westminster and Whitehall: but don’t forget your roots in pessimism, which is the ultimate guard against utopian idealism.  As for the Tories in Scotland… surely it’s time to throw in the towel.  The Scottish Conservative and Unionist brand is clearly never going to recover from its status as Thatcher’s angels of death.  There’s still a deep strain of self-sufficient, relatively social conservative One Nationism in Scotland – even among many people who vote Labour or SNP – and this is potential fuel for a new centre-right movement.  At last this is being discussed openly.  The question Adam Smith’s heirs will have to face is whether to stick with the union, or – as probably seems a better route to achieving a competitive, small-state nation eventually – support Scottish independence, or at the very least full fiscal autonomy.  The next question is: entryism in the SNP, or a new party that, thanks to proportional representation in the parliament and councils, might just make an impact?

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I like to say I told you so

In 1945, in ‘Notes on Nationalism’, the great George Orwell wrote: “For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of all the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”

So it is with our LibCon coalition today.  For astrologers, read commentators like Mehdi Hassan and Polly Toynbee, who has somehow survived more mistakes than anyone and still persists with headlines like ‘David Laws’s life goal was to cast people out of work’.  The left now seems divided into a couple of camps.  The first and more open-minded of these, mainly Lib Dems, accept that New Labour had run its course and welcome the coalition’s policies on raising the lowest income tax threshold (redressing Brown’s assault on the poor when he removed the 10p tax band) and on reform of the voting system and the Houses of Commons and Lords.  The second lot, mostly Labour drones but also quite a few anti-Tory tactical Lib Dem voters, regard the whole thing as an epic betrayal and bleat that the ConDem government will again “rape the country” etc – oblivious, of course, to the fact that it was Brown’s mismanagement of the economy and the public finances that made the coming cuts a necessity.

Most of those in the second camp are disappointed because they bought into Cleggmania after the first TV leaders’ debate, when his natty line in putting his hands in his pockets, looking at the camera and remembering the audiences’ names led a remarkable number of people to regard him as an Obama-like insurgent, despite sharing Cameron’s charmed upbringing and career and leading a party that was as old and almost as soiled as the other two.  I say to this lot: why haven’t you been paying attention for the last three years?

As the Orange Book suggested before he was even an MP, Clegg is as much of an anti-statist liberal as Cameron is a socially liberal conservative.  (Likewise the sadly defenestrated David Laws, though Vince Cable can’t seem to make his mind up about which side he’s on, and is now behaving like more of a human being than his devotees gave him credit for.)  I suppose the legions of students who in the end failed to turn out for Clegg hadn’t read this book either.  The rape camp have desperately peddled the line that “there is a progressive majority in this country”.  I suppose it depends what you mean by “progressive” (though I wonder what Orwell would have thought of the word being claimed by Brown, Blair, Balls or either Miliband) but it’s a dubious claim: it’s very lazy, and I think insulting, to assume that the bulk of Lib Dems would see their party as some sort of slightly more competent offshoot of Labour, rather than representing a wholly separate tradition of liberty that the past 13 years have undermined.  Indeed, of all parties they seem closest to rejecting the left/right bifurcation.  Perhaps the “progressive majority” was less of a logical stretch under Paddy Ashdown or Charles Kennedy, but Clegg has undoubtedly moved his party away from the social democrats and nearer its pre-SDP radical liberal traditions, just as Cameron has moved his party from the ideological hard right to the pragmatic centre-right – which the tribal left has also done its best to ignore, though the tribal right has not.  (The obvious rejoinder to them is: if you can’t win a majority after 13 years of Labour government, a useless Scottish prime minister and the worst economic crisis since the ’30s, you never will again.)

If all that wasn’t enough of a hint, Clegg said during the campaign that he would open negotiations with the party with the biggest mandate from the electorate, which was never going to be Labour.  Many of those claiming to support a ‘new politics’ were horrified when he stuck to his word.  So anyone who thought Clegg would defy the arithmetic of seats, and prop up the government he has spent his leadership reviling and intellectually dismantling, was fooling himself.

I said in my last post before the election, “the figleaf of a deal with the Lib Dems would probably be the best result – for [the Tories] and us.”  I stick by that (albeit with reservations about power grabs like changing the rules on the dissolution of parliament).  A Tory prime minister will implement the best bits of Lib Dem thinking, and the Lib Dems will keep a check on the worst excesses of the machine that is historically our natural party of government.  Labour should go away and examine why they became so arrogantly removed from public sentiment, so captured by vested interests and so scared of democratic reform.  Part of the problem is that, instead of putting it that way, they will doubtless pay consultants to answer the question: “how did we fail to communicate our message to the C2s?”

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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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A history of violence

Reading the Guardian every day can be an exasperating experience.  Their output ranges from wildly popular grouch Charlie Brooker, to the BBC3ish rubbish of the Guide, to the Orwell-like reportage of Ian Jack, to dangerously misguided articles like this and this.  “Sent to jail for throwing a single bottle”, eh?  Quite right too.  But I’ve been left particularly unsettled by the tone of their recent reporting on the debate around crime and antisocial behaviour sparked by a few high profile cases.

I hope it goes without saying that I find the tabloid reporting of these issues distasteful; but the Guardian’s response can be just as bad.  Polly Toynbee, the liberal left’s standard bearer on that road that is paved with good intentions, speaks for the elite when she derides the “moral panic” whipped up by the Daily Mail and cynically latched onto by David Cameron.  This is classic Brownite politics: rather than confront what should be (and, tellingly, used to be) a non-partisan issue, turn it into a binary divide and blame the Tories for “talking down Britain”.  Both Labour and the Tories have recently been criticised for trying to make claims about crime going up / down: it’s almost impossible to judge objectively, and crime is perhaps the best example of the maxim “torture the statistics and they will confess”.  But murder and serious assaults are merely the top of a pyramid, built on immeasurable casual violence, built in turn on a general unquantifiable selfishness.  The Economist, in an article that might have been drafted in Downing Street, gives the dismal science a bad name by adjudicating on the basis of unreliable figures that only measure the tip of the problem.  Not for the first time, they’ve missed the point completely.

John Harris’s article in yesterday’s edition is the first honest thing the Guardian’s produced on the matter, and it’s gone a long way to restoring my faith in the paper.  (If you only read one link from this post, make it that one.)  He admits the problem exists, unlike Simon Jenkins who fumes against the “lynch mob” mentality.  If there is such a mentality out in the shires, it’s because public opinion on crime and punishment has become so divorced from the groupthink of the political class and the judiciary – and that’s not the public’s fault.  This division is dangerous for our democracy.  Sentencing policy should reflect harm caused, as should drugs policy: don’t make criminals of students munching magic mushrooms, do lock up heroin dealers for decades.

Fundamentally, the liberal left sees the criminal as a victim of society, whereas the people who have to live among criminals see themselves as the victims.  Many criminals certainly have been victims, but as Dominic Lawson points out, whenever they commit a crime they force someone else further down the pecking order than themselves.  To argue that the poorest and worst brought up will inevitably become criminals is fatalistic and factually incorrect, since most people who match that description don’t commit crimes.  We shouldn’t let individual criminals off the hook, then – but we should recognise the inevitability of crime in the dysfunctional, welfare-dependent and generally deprived parts of society.  Crime and antisocial behaviour are overwhelmingly worst for the poorest and most vulnerable in Britain: they, more than Guardian writers, need the protection of the state and the society that have so far (i.e. since before the Norman invasion) failed them.  As Lawson puts it:

“In polite circles it is not done to demand higher sentences for criminals; it is thought to be “barbaric” — and, worse, “populist”. It is true that pure vicarious rage for punishment is unattractive; it is also true that those who hate the whole idea of incarceration are motivated by an admirable intuitive sympathy for the underdog — which in their view of the world is represented by the man under lock and key. They find it almost impossible to understand that it is a similar sympathy for the underdog that inspires those of us who take the opposite view. For us the underdogs are the victims of crime — of those crimes that have taken place and those crimes that will assuredly happen when dangerous criminals are released early.”

The paper that produced the greatest writer of the twentieth century should follow him back to Wigan Pier, or back to their roots in Manchester: perhaps the day they moved to Farringdon was the day they stopped really caring about the downtrodden of the north.  Orwell, the Dickens of his time, uniquely spoke truth to power, to the poor and to everyone in between, and did so in language that was analytical but always clear and honest.  Proof of his genius is that, also uniquely, left and right both claim him as one of their own – and they’re both right, because he appeals to the better natures of both sides, the “what ifs” of the left and the “ah, buts” of the right.  The best writers challenge their natural audiences, as Peter Hitchens does on the right, railing against cars and consumerism in his Sunday sermons, and as George Monbiot has done on the left with his impressive attack on middle-class cocaine users.  With the exception of him, John Harris, Ian Jack and one or two others, today’s Guardianistas seem to prefer wallowing in complacency to challenging their own prejudices: the “what if” has become “so what”.  Perhaps this is because, deep down, they fear the other side have hit on a more fundamental truth: that decency, civility and even deference might be a greater protection to those at the bottom of the heap than the me-first permissiveness that the liberal left replaced them with.

The right argue that, since the overpaperworked police can’t be everywhere at once and are generally useless anyway, crime has flourished as the state has taken over the responsibilities of the community and the family.  The left argue that these social problems spread as stable manufacturing jobs gave way to the anxieties of neoliberalism (and are belatedly realising that immigration has helped the rich and hurt the poor).  Both sides have a point, but the solution can’t just be top-down – particularly if those at the top refuse even to acknowledge the problem.  “It was ever thus” might be true – I honestly have no idea – but either way it’s a nihilistic response.  As societies as varied as Singapore, Japan and Scandinavia show, crime can be minimised by an interventionist left / right mix of conservative social values and relative economic equality: but we have little appetite for either in Britain.  And while it’s easy to mock political correctness, its imposition has at least forced stupid white men to be a bit more civilised towards women, ethnic minorities and gays.  Now all we need is to extend the lengthy sentences for hate crimes against those groups to cover the rest of us.  When we do, the liberal left revolution will finally have been undone by its own contradictions.

Another totem of the liberal left is that (unlike themselves, who are more sophisticated) conservatives divide everyone into good and evil, with criminals necessarily in the latter camp.  I don’t think most criminals are evil: I think most criminals are rational.  With the exception of a few sociopaths, who are just as likely to rob your pension as burgle your house, most of us go about our lives by weighing up the pros and cons of various possible actions.  Criminals are no different: if it’s impossible to solve the causes of crime (and we should certainly try), we should at least give potential criminals greater disincentives against crime.  I expect that if I’d grown up on a sink estate I would correctly judge that I could get away with stealing things and would do so: but I wouldn’t extend that empathy for my parallel universe person to saying he / I shouldn’t be punished.

The BBC had a report this week about Muslim gangs taking over jails and punishing disrespectful prisoners.  Perhaps this, if nothing else, will give our indigenous underclass pause for thought.  Again, then, we see the conflict between the consequences of immigration and the decline of Christianity, and the liberal beliefs of those who have promoted immigration and sought to undermine Christianity.  There is zero chance of Britain being forced into a radical-conservative theocracy through the actions of a few hotheads with bombs strapped round their waists – there is some chance of Britain choosing to become a radical-conservative theocracy because much of the general population comes to actively welcome it.  For more on what that might look like, you’ll just have to wait for my forthcoming book.

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Heads in the sand

Happy new year, gentle readers.  In between recovering from the usual festive excesses, I’ve enjoyed incoming Tory MP Rory Stewart’s two-part film about T.E. Lawrence on BBC 2.  Stewart’s a bit of a force of nature himself, having walked across Afghanistan and governed an Iraqi province by the time he was about my age, speaking ten languages and now lecturing at Harvard – as Ian Dury put it, there ain’t half been some clever bastards.  He’s clearly styling himself as the New Lawrence, and with luck he’ll act as a wise, romantic corrective to the legions of braindead PR whores about to replace parliament’s last lot of braindead PR whores.  His point in the film is that Lawrence’s message about the Arabs – in a nutshell, don’t try to rule them – applies today, and that we should be deeply wary of liberal interventionist fantasies about changing the world by exporting our values with force.

The alternative view was put by Tony Blair at the Iraq Inquiry yesterday.  This seems to mark the end of Iraq as a political issue in Britain – our troops have left for Helmand, the worst of the chaos in the country is long gone, there will be no more inquiries, and after the general election it will all surely pass into history.  I’ll make this my first and last comment on the matter, then.

Like many who took Blair’s word for it at the time, I have had political egg on my face ever since.  We still haven’t had a convincing explanation for why nuanced intelligence reports, full of doubts and caveats, were transformed into sensational headlines about the singular threat posed by Saddam’s weapons.  We still don’t know why exactly we went to war – was it WMD, regime change, “regime change plus” in Michael Howard’s abstruse phrase, humanitarian reasons, defiance of the UN, oil?  Like the fall of Rome, there seem to be dozens of plausible reasons, none entirely convincing on their own.  I even remember Bruce Anderson arguing at the time that powerful nations were absolutely right to invade poorer ones to secure control of their resources.  You don’t hear much from him these days.  And we still don’t know why the coalition was so tragically unprepared for the aftermath of the war.  Whatever the reasons, Bush and Blair hadn’t been reading their Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  There ain’t half been some stupid bastards.

Each of the three main parties has tried to rewrite history.  Jack Straw, possibly the least ingenuous man ever to enter parliament, now claims to have had doubts at the time about the legality of the war, as if that lets him off the hook – if anything it makes him even more culpable.  The Tory line has become “if we knew then what we know now” – but do you believe Hague and chums would have done anything other than back America no matter what?  The Lib Dems absurdly claim they were against it the whole time.  Even the reliably cynical Peter Hitchens has fallen for this line, writing that Charles Kennedy “behaved with courage and honour over the Iraq war”.  He did nothing of the sort, so let’s set the record straight: the Lib Dem policy was to support the war in the event of a second UN Security Council resolution.  They would have gone along with it if the unelected hooligans in Beijing and Moscow had waved their assent.  Of all positions I still find this the hardest to respect.  It’s hypocritical too, since the Lib Dems cheerled the Kosovo war, which was a Nato assault on the closest ally of another member of the Security Council.  In that operation we blithely bombed a European capital, ostensibly to stop a bad guy expelling a few hundred thousand Muslims.  A fat lot of thanks we got.

Was the war in Iraq worth it, in the end?  Like the French Revolution, we could argue it’s still too early to say.  Of course it was nice to see Saddam and his henchmen meet the hangman, but I can’t honestly believe it was worth $3 trillion – about a hundred grand per Iraqi – not to mention the renewed power and untouchability it has given Iran, the debasement of democracy and dissent in Britain, and the further worldwide disgrace to our already pretty toxic brand.

I would be alone on the blogosphere if I didn’t offer a few predictions for 2010, so here goes.  Any talk of a hung parliament is just an excuse to fill the column inches: there will be a workable two-figure Tory majority.  It will soon become apparent that the rump of Tory backbenchers are well to the right of Cameron, and he will have far more problems from them than from the opposition parties (especially since Labour will be too busy with internal recriminations – if they want my advice they should elect a socially conservative economic populist, not that many fit the bill, but they’ll probably just go for one of the second-rate Blairites).  The PCP will agitate for a far harder line on tax and spending, and we must hope Cameron can steer the right course between the twin delusions of the current government, spending with no regard to the deficit, and his own nihilists who relish cutting for its own sake.  Similarly, I wouldn’t bet against an Australian Liberal-style split on climate change.  Speaking of which, this seems to be the last and most important issue still unaffected by political violence – after the failure of Copenhagen, might 2010 be the year environmentalist (or anti-environmentalist) direct action turns into assassinations and terrorist attacks?  If unprecedented economic growth and evenly spread prosperity in Germany in the 1970s could spawn the murderous Baader-Meinhof gang, what might our own combination of recession, inequality and environmental calamity produce?  As for the economy, I can’t quite decide whether the inevitable spending cuts and public sector layoffs after 6 May will give us a second dip, or whether the new prudence will restore market confidence enough to offset this.  But my hunch is that the reckoning is yet to come.

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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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Every Labour government runs out of power in the end

It’s one thing MPs getting caught with their pants down.  It’s quite another when they’re all getting caught with their willies in the till too.

Headlines as hilarious as this, coupled with the impending failure of Brown’s last gamble at the G20, all make a Tory victory more certain by the day.  No-one wants Labour to lose more than I do.  But there is one set of circumstances under which I would consider voting for them: to prevent a Tory landslide.

Look at the state of them now: led by a sociopath who (I can’t work out which) is either a reckless gambler betting everything on somehow bucking the recession, the markets and the rest of the world’s governments, or a saboteur deliberately wrecking the public finances to force the Tories into huge spending cuts.  He is surrounded by a cast of knaves who have, quite rationally, realised that they will be out of a job, and in many cases out of a seat, in a year and are focused on milking the public purse for all its worth while they can.  New Labour is morally, intellectually and electorally finished.  They are the economic inheritors of Thatcher, but twice as authoritarian.  Anyone who wants to see a strong centre-left in Britain should hope, if anything, for an immediate election to put them out of their misery.  Old Labour collapsed after being captured by one set of special interests (the doomed miners), and New Labour after various others (the City, the neocons, and the more bloated parts of the public sector).  It is best for everyone concerned if Labour has a short civil war and a long spell in opposition, and it will probably take eight or ten years for them to come up with a coherent set of ideas appealing enough to undo what they have squandered up to now.  For years the Tories wished they’d lost in 1992.

I am prepared to give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt: although it’s still not easy to divine specific policies, his apparent views on fiscal responsibility, the environment, education and civil liberties make him more appealing to me than any of Brown’s possible successors within Labour.  But I wonder, beneath the smooth brand management, whether his is still a (not the) nasty party.

The blogosphere, as a barometer of grassroots opinion, suggests they might be.  As new social media developed under a Labour government, it was natural that conservatives, in opposition, would make better use of its opportunities (taking their cue from the US, where the right dominated the internet, at least until Obama’s campaign, as a response to a supposedly liberal traditional media).  Most political blogs, with the exception of Political Betting, are depressingly partisan.  And although some right-wing bloggers, like Guido Fawkes, are an entertaining and sometimes informative alternative to newspapers bound by the developed world’s most restrictive libel laws, most of his commentors turn out to have predictable views on climate change, capital punishment, gays, etc.  It may be that it’s simply easier to be abusive and inflammatory when hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, and perhaps the Young Turks are still outnumbered by retrograde but fairly harmless Blue Rinsers, but we should judge a party by its base as much as its leadership.  A small Tory majority, or better still a Tory-Liberal deal in a hung parliament, held to account by a Labour opposition rediscovering some long-dormant decency, seems the least bad outcome.  One of these seems likeliest at the moment, and (given the systemic bias against the Tories) things will still have to get quite a lot worse (if that’s possible) for a landslide to be on the cards, and therefore for me to hold my nose and perversely vote Labour.

I suppose, though, that at least a rampant Tory right wouldn’t come up with anything like this.  What a perfect summary of this government’s philistinism and neophilia in one policy.  As if school leavers aren’t historically illiterate enough.  As if their attention spans aren’t short enough.  As if we don’t already have a surfeit of unemployable communications graduates.  What, having learned nothing at school, will these twits of tomorrow tweet about?  Jade Goody?

As if to prove the point, your faithful but bog standard comprehensive-educated correspondent has again ended up blogging about… blogs.

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CAP and trade

So the lame ducks and girly men are having a chinwag to save the world are they.  Well, here’s my $10,000,000,000,000′s worth.

It looks like George Osborne’s number’s up, not surprising given his ineptness at political tactics (see yachtgate) and economic strategy (see the Tories’ general befuddlement with the credit crunch).  If the best he can come up with is offering small firms a holiday from paying national insurance then he’s obviously not up to the job.  However – he was right to point out that by paying for tax cuts and even more public spending with even more public borrowing Brown is only leveraging our future by saddling future taxpayers with even more debt and wrecking the public finances (previously his one claim to competence) in the process.  It will be hilarious if Brown actually wins the next election and has to deal with the mess he’s now making.  It seems clear to me the Lib Dems’ policy (at least, this week’s Lib Dem policy) is the best way out: tax cuts for low and middle income earners (repeatedly screwed by Brown) funded not by borrowing on the never never but by scrapping useless white elephants (NPfIT, ID cards, the Olympic stadium and Trident spring to mind).  Surely this makes more sense than ego-massaging public works programmes or tinkering with NI and VAT.  Pushing this message would be a better use of Vince Cable’s time than scoring points off Osborne.

Monetary policy won’t solve this either.  Interest rates are very low already, it took six years before zero interest rates led to a Japanese recovery, and it was cheap money that got us into this mess in the first place.  Devaluing sterling might help a bit, but gains for manufacturers will be offset by pricier imports.

The really bold move now – the one thing Brown could do that would both kickstart the world economy and give him any plausible claim to being the sort of great moral statesman he thinks he is – would be to reform the terms of world trade.  Bush is right about protectionism, even though he’s an utter hypocrite, and this is my main concern about the incoming president.  Brown should take the lead and call for the scrapping of the Common Agricultural Policy, a grotesquely expensive, corrupt, inefficient and immoral system that starves third world farmers by shutting their products out of our markets and stunts their economies by dumping our heavily subsidised goods on them.  It would be wildly popular at home and would confuse the Tories even more, and put Brown one up over Sarkozy.  And it would help Africa more than decades of aid and debt relief.

In other news, I must warn you of a growing threat to an ancient culture with noble traditions.  Petty bureaucrats are using iniquitous legislation to stifle the rights of an endangered minority, and a grassroots campaign is underway to save these historic people’s way of life.  I speak, of course, of the Western Baths Club.  I estimate that 75% of my readership (i.e. the three of you who aren’t Murray) are not members of the Baths so I won’t bore you with the details but suffice it to say that use of the trapeze is being heavily restricted by spurious health and safety concerns.  In the thirteen or so years of my membership I have never heard of a serious accident on the high bars, yet officious officials have decreed that grown men practicing a minority sport are incapable of judging risk for themselves.  What an insult, and how symptomatic of our infantilised, litigious culture.  From magic mushrooms to smoking in private clubs to public protest to free speech to habeus corpus to trial by jury to investigative journalism to academic research to jumping off the rings at the shallow end, “best to ban it and be on the safe side” would be a fitting tagline for New Labour.  It should be their epitaph too.  Anyway, it looks like I might need a new hobby soon.  Perhaps I’ll take up blogging.

Speaking of which, I’d like to point out that this week’s Lexington is a rip-off of my last post, and not the other way round.

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