CentreRight

Filthy Finance Bill

This year's Finance Bill is published today.  It is 443 pages long.  There are 1,148 pages of Explanatory Notes.  It is another filthy tax bill from a Government dedicated to the great cause of complete bamboozlement.

This tax bill underlines the need for change.  Rather than an ever more complex tax system which makes us personally ever poorer and as a country ever less competitive we need simpler fairer taxes and to promote competitiveness and wealth.  This tax bill will make us weaker.  Britain should be stronger.

Ken Livingstone - more fiction

According to Paul Waugh at the Evening Standard Ken Livingstone is appealing to Lib Dem voters to put him as their second preference. As we know, second preference votes on 1st May could be crucial. However, Livingstone claims that in 2004

"he liked Simon Hughes so much that he recommended that Labour voters use their second preferences for the Libs."

There's a small problem with that - it isn't true. I attach here the actual advice that Ken Livingstone sent out in letters signed by him, to London postal voters. He said then "You have a second preference vote: you can cast this for another candidate or not use it". So, in fact, Livingstone preferred Simon Hughes as a second choice no more than Steve Norris, nor even the BNP candidate. I keep meticulous records of previous elections - every now and then, they come in very useful.

McCain: I detest war

A big speech from the Republican nominee on foreign policy last night.  It had a number of big themes:

1. He will be running a different kind of foreign policy to George W Bush in some key areas. He highlighted 100% opposition to inhumane treatment of detainees,  closure of Guantanamo and support for action against climate change including "a successor to the Kyoto Treaty [and] a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner".
2. More emphasis on working with democracies.  He wants Russia excluded from the 'G8' and Brazil and India brought inside it.  He reannounced his idea of a League of Democracies to rival the UN.
3. Horrendous violence would follow premature exit from Iraq.  After highlighting the gains made since the start of the surge he warned of the consequences of speedy withdrawal: "We have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq.  It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible, and premature withdrawal."
4. War is detestable.  The Vietnam war veteran began his speech with a very personal section about the horror of war:

"When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house in New London, Connecticut, and a Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.  My father immediately left for the submarine base where he was stationed.  I rarely saw him again for four years.  My grandfather, who commanded the fast carrier task force under Admiral Halsey, came home from the war exhausted from the burdens he had borne, and died the next day.  In Vietnam, where I formed the closest friendships of my life, some of those friends never came home to the country they loved so well.  I detest war.  It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description.  When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue.  The lives of a nation's finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war.  Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly.  Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war.  However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us."

Important reading on Islamism

Militant Islamism is an issue we all urgently need to get to grips with. I have written about it on this site several times before, as have others.

I simply wish to flag up to key articles in The Spectator recently, to help our understanding - the first by Fraser Nelson, the second by Charles Moore. Please read them both.

Sarkozy salutes Britain

"France hasn't forgotten, she will never forget that when she was almost annihilated, Britain was at her side.  She will never forget the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish blood mixed with the French blood in the mud of the trenches.  She will never forget the welcome the British people gave General de Gaulle and Free France.  She will never forget the heroic resistance of the British people without which all would have been lost.  She will never forget the fine young people who came from all over the British Empire and laid down their lives on the Normandy beaches and in the surrounding bocages.  As the last century's wars have shown: like two brothers, what the French people and the British people can accomplish together is far greater than what they can achieve separately."

Full text.

Are you an Inter-Con?

Over tea on Easter Monday, I was engaged in a discussion with a few friends who are Conservatives and are at the cutting edge of social justice. Some around the table were primarily focused on social justice at home, creatively addressing Britain's crisis of social breakdown. Their priority is what has correctly been called our "broken society" - family breakdown, drug abuse, anti-social behaviour, truancy, poor education standards, crime, and inner-city deprivation, all pieces of the same tattered jigsaw. Some of us around the table specialise in global justice - international human rights, challenging tyranny and championing democracy and freedom, and battling global poverty. Of course, we recognised that these were two sides of the same coin, and that all of us, whatever our chosen focus, care about both. We cannot pursue justice abroad and condone injustice at home; nor can we simply focus on our backyard, and ignore those further afield with far fewer resources to address their plight.

Why does the NUT choose the Easter weekend?

Although I have been taking a few days off over Easter, and have paid much less attention to news coverage than usual, the annual spectacle that is the NUT Easter Conference has inevitably managed to permeate my consciousness - this year it's been the Army that has provoked their wrath. Martin, I am pretty sure it's faith schools at least every other year, and open season on Academies all year round. By their enemies ye shall know them.

As Iain Dale says:

"The vast majority of NUT members are normal people doing an important and difficult job. What a shame they allow this sort of insulting, leftist, unpatriotic nonsense to be discussed in their name. Isn't it about time NUT members said 'enough is enough' and took their union back from the extremists who appear to control it nowadays?"

Is the timing of their conference - the Easter weekend every year - part of the problem?

NUT oppose new faith schools because...?

As well as opposing armed services recruitment visits to schools (see Peter Whittle's post), the NUT conference also adopted a policy document opposing all new faith schools. They allege that faith schools as a group hinder community cohesion.

But, If Anglican and Catholic faith schools really hinder community cohesion, why do so many Muslim and Hindu parents send their children to them in preference to the normal comprehensives the NUT want all children to be forced to attend...?

Some rights are best left to the realm of theory

You will be unsurprised to learn that I view the right to represent oneself in court as a fundamental one.  I imagine that we all do.  Nevertheless, here is a thoughtful and considered article over at the Times by Frances Gibb which sets out in glorious and painful detail exactly why one shouldn't.

Alan Milburn should join us

Reading the latest volumes of Tony Benn's Diaries, I was struck by suggestion from Benn that the Labour MP and former cabinet minister Alan Milburn should join the Conservative Party. In his entry for Saturday January 15 2005 Benn wrote:

"Alan Milburn was on at the Fabian Society Conference. I find the man absolutely impossible to watch, but he said New Labour has got to reform and reform and reform all the time, more New Labour; it will be very controversial but it's got to be done. It's just a programme for the Tory Party including the privatization of Housing Association houses. Milburn ought to join the Tory Party. He'd be a wonderful leader for them."

In that speech Milburn had said:

"A home is the biggest asset most people will ever own: given a choice, most people would choose to buy, not rent."

Re: Sins of omission - Why we do need an inquiry into the intelligence concerning Iraq

In this morning's ToryDiary, the Editors ask: "Should a call for an inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war really be the top priority of the Conservative Opposition?" 

In my view an inquiry into the "origins of the Iraq war" would be too limited in scope.  It seems very clear to me that the war itself was fought on a perfectly transparent basis that secured wide agreement - Saddam had messed us about and we weren't going to put up with it any more.

What there should be an inquiry into was how we came to believe (falsely) that Saddam had messed us about during the mid to late 1990s, and hence why we maintained sanctions on that country for so long.  This must be one of the worst intelligence failures in history, and surely merits an investigation.

If you say no, Editors, are you expecting anyone to support any wars in the future?

News from the front line of the Culture Wars

The NUT yesterday passed a resolution that 'teachers and schools should not be conduits for either dissemination of MoD propaganda or the recruitment of military personnel' , ie. that the armed forces should not be allowed to give careers advice in the classroom.

Depressing but not surprising. More disgusting, however, was the healthy round of applause received by one delegate who ranted that, if it were not to be misleading, recruitment material would have to say ' Join the Army and we will send you to carry out the imperialist occupation of other people's countries'. He accused the army of torture and murder into the bargain.

These are school teachers remember.

BBC 24 reported this last night. In a segment which seemed not to have even the pretence of impartiality, it dredged up 'a student' , who was interviewed from Leeds, to talk about how the RAF had misled him by offering up nothing but the good points about military service under the cover of an invitation to an RAF band concert at the school. The student's particular credentials for speaking where never given, and the anchor didn't even try to put anything other than anti-military questions to him.

This was compounded by an interview which followed with, presumably, a disinterested figure, a defence expert in Oxford, who defended the military. He then faced a barage of hostile questions from the co-anchor.   

The NUT, the BBC.  It's the Culture, stupid.

Mr Haw does it again

In a rare and welcome display of liberty from this most authoritarian of Governments, comes news that the Home Secretary/ Justice Department is to repeal restrictions from demonstrating outside Parliament.  First mooted in last Sunday's Observer, this was confirmed by Jack Straw yesterday.

Whilst Mr Brian Haw et al can be a bit extreme, and the green in Parliament Square does sometimes look like Central Park, New York, during the 1930s recession, it surely is a tribute to British democracy that such a demonstration is allowed.

The other Iraq

Amusing piece about Kurdistan. Worth the read. The world is a lot more complex and faceted than  newspaper headlines let on.

Its official: the woman lies

Hillary Clinton's key pitch in her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination has been that she has "experience".  Other than her botched attempt at Medicare reform which almost derailed her husband's first term it is hard to know what this experience is.  In recent weeks we have had her preposterous contention that she was instrumental in bringing peace to Northern Ireland. The problem is no one else involved in the process remembers her having any role other than visiting with Bill.  Now she has been exposed as telling porkies about a visit she and her daughter made to Bosnia. She talks of her experience of coming under sniper fire and running over the runway to her car.  The problem is that it is totally untrue.  Television crews from CBS were with her during the trip 12 years ago.  They have a fantastic 2min segment on the story HERE.   It’s well worth watching. So either Ms Clinton has serious memory problems or she is a complete liar.  Either way not good characteristics for a potential President of the United States.

Jack Straw's wadical weform

Despite the hype about "a new constitutional settlement", Jack Straw's plans to change the way executive power is exercised in Britain turned out this afternoon to be a superficial squib.

The draft Constitutional Renewal Bill would give Parliament a formal say over the deployment of troops.  In certain circumstances.  Sometimes.  Gosh.  MPs might decide what sort of protests might be held in Parliament Square.  Wow.  (Good to know those MPs willl at least hold sway over one part of Britain.)      

Westminster politics isn't working.  Angry voters recognise that the political Establishment is out of touch - and that the key decisions that affect their lives are taken by remote officials, not those they elect. 

Has Mr Straw offered to make the Quango State more accountable?  A right of initiative?  Recall?  Open primaries?....   Anything at all which might make the politicians more directly accountable to the people?  Nope. 

Instead he talks about holding elections on Saturdays, rather than Thursdays.

Hillary's worst week

"Even if she doesn't realise it", David Brooks claims in his New York Times column today, Hillary Clinton has "just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign".

Despite conventional wisdom - and Hillary's increasing opinion poll lead in advance of the 22nd April Pennsylvania primary - suggesting that her campaign is finally getting back on track after months of ineptitude and failure, Brooks' three key arguments as to why her campaign is effectively over are fundamentally sound.

1. Team Hillary may well have been almost giddy with excitement at the negative press generated by video footage of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright making allegedly anti-American remarks but his artful response to the controversy, a speech in which he addressed issues surrounding his faith and racial tensions in the United States, appears to have strengthened rather than damaged his campaign.  A poll conducted by CBS News shows that 71% of voters think Obama did "a good job explaining his relationship with Wright" with the number of people agreeing that Obama would "unite the country" increasing from 52% to 67% in the past month.  Nationwide polls show Obama continuing to hold a slim lead over Clinton.  Clearly, no lasting damage has been done.
2. Attempts to force a re-vote in the Hillary-friendly states of Michigan and Florida have stalled.  The Democratic National Committee has barred delegates from the two states from attending the Presidential nominating convention after violating the committee's rules on the timing of their primaries.  As a result of this, Hillary can kiss goodbye to securing the delegates of the country's 4th and 8th largest states.
3. Given that it is almost impossible for Hillary to win the nomination on the strength of primary votes even if she does win the remainder of the primaries by convincing margins, her campaign has become reliant on the support of ex-officio "superdelegates" (mainly party bosses, Senators and Congressmen).  As Brooks notes in his article, "superdelegates" have now coalesced around the view that "that the winner of the elected delegates should get the nomination". 

Give it up, Hillary.  It ain't going to happen.

You can view the whole piece here.

Sport seems to be the only thing uniting South Africans

"From 1948 there was white power, from 1994 black power, now in 2008, there is no power".

So said an elderly lady from Bloemfontein, reflecting on the electricity crisis that are causing blackouts on a daily basis. Underlying this humour there are deeper and darker feelings felt by many of the whites, whom I met in the Orange Free State, a former Afrikaner stronghold.

I have been shocked, surprised and deeply pained to hear the word 'kaffir' used very frequently during my stay here.  It was as if, as a Jewish person, someone had called me a f**king yid or used the term behind my back. 

When challenged on the use of this word, the white man and women's response is simple: "We have no rights any more. All our houses have to have iron bars, we can't even walk the dog at night for fear of being mugged, murdered or raped".

Certainly, it is true that crime is endemic and few whites will walk the streets in the evening.  Almost every house I have seen in a white neighbourhood - whether it be in Bloemfontein or Johannesburg is protected with barbed wire and bars on the windows. Every white I have spoken to thus far is touched by severe crime in some way whether it be themselves or their relatives and friends.

Not just broke - but squeezed too

Yesterday's launch of a campaign on the rising cost of living while our wages stutter shows how badly Labour has been handling the economy.  The cost of living report sets out brilliantly and relentlessly just how much the costs of necessities have gone up while the amount of money we have is going nowhere.

Why now after ten years of Labour?  It's been a game of two halves.  The first five years saw Labour benefit from the reforms we had put through to strengthen our growth rate as well as coinciding with the start of the rise of India and China which initially kept costs down.  The position has reversed in the last five years due to Labour's policies which tend to slow growth and the strengthening of India and China which adds to their demand ability to raise prices.  Labour is guilty because they lay down and basked while the sun shone instead of making hay.   It's a price we're all now paying. 

It will take some time for an incoming Conservative Government to sort out the mess. This is why, although I am a natural tax cutter, I think David Cameron is right to steer away from crowd pleasing promises. That said, the report does set out quite a few good ideas on what a Conservative Government would do to improve things.

Saddam killed many more, Mr Humphrys

One of the most important roles of the blogosphere is to fact check the mainstream media.

Con Coughlin does that to John Humphrys' claim on Radio 4 this morning that more Iraqis have died since the overthrow of Saddam than during his dictatorship.  Coughlin points out that something like one million people died under Saddam - six times as many more than have died since his overthrow.  (And let's not forget the role he played in releasing prisoners in order to stoke the insurgency).

What we'll never know - thankfully - is how many would have died if Saddam Hussein had been left in power and had started weaponising again.

Matthew Parris needs to pay more attention

Matthew Parris is feeling uninspired:

Where today is the bold advocacy, the impatience to persuade, the urgency of argument? Where are the shouts of “Here's how!”? It is as though the stage were set for some kind of theatrical climax, but peopled only with stage hands and the rattle and murmur of the scene-shift. Where are the leading actors, the big voices, the great thoughts?

Pictures of David Cameron in his kitchen, a family scene sweetly contrived to frame his thoughts on paternity leave, or whatever, and images of the passionless figure cut by Alistair Darling at the dispatch box, his grey stare charged with all the philosophical depth of a shop-window mannequin, stick in my mind. Are these the spirits of the political age?

Mr Parris's has half a point, the half that applies to Labour. But his portrayal of the Conservative platform deserves a robust response. Yes, David Cameron posed for a photo-opportunity. So what? His team are also busy producing in-depth policy proposals on issues of vital importance.

Political parties need whips to exist - and that will sometimes include whipping "conscience" matters

The question of whether the HFE bill should be subject to a whip, should be a free vote, or should involve a "conscience vote" (or abstention) has attracted quite a bit of interest on CentreRight - e.g. here, here, here and here.  Since everyone else is doing so, I thought I'd set out my own stall.

I disagree with those calling for almost everything to be a free vote.  Many matters central to policy will be conscience issues to someone.  Take UK membership of the euro.  One side might say it is a conscience issue for them to oppose - maintaining and advancing England's thousand year constitutional history is, they say, what politics is about.  Another side might declare that for them, Britain's joining the euro is a conscience matter - for to them politics is about finding ways to resolve political differences without war, and the European Union and Single European State are the only hope that war might be ended in Europe for good.

Defining an issue of conscience is really about freedom of religion

Regarding Samuel's post, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what exactly is an issue of conscience for MPs. I would suggest that any definition of an issue of conscience must be deeply rooted in our historic British belief in freedom of religion. Essentially an issue of conscience is one which conflicts with a central part of an individual MP’s worldview, whether that worldview is Christian, Secular Humanist, Islamic, Jewish or any other.

What is an issue of conscience will therefore vary according to an individual MPs worldview, because worldviews conflict with each other. For example, a vote on House of Lord’s reform that proposed retaining the role of bishops would be an issue of conscience for an MP with a Secular Humanist worldview – as the exclusion of religion from public life is a central belief of Secular Humanism. However, for such an MP the proposal to create human-animal hybrids would not be an issue of conscience in the same way. Yet it clearly would be for an MP holding to Christian or Jewish worldview, as the uniqueness of human beings is central to the Judeo-Christian worldview (which defines them as being uniquely made in the image of God).

Pakistani Muslims more tolerant of Easter than politically correct NHS bosses

Last year an NHS Trust decided to abolish Easter – including the traditional day off for staff. The Trust’s management claimed that recognising the Christian festival would insult Muslims and foreigners! The sad reality is that managers at Grampian NHS Trust should have been far more careful not to insult the 72% of the UK population who in the last census described themselves as ‘Christian’.

In contrast, during Easter in The Islamic Republic of Pakistan major national newspapers such as Pakistan Times and Dawn published articles about Easter explaining that Pakistan’s 3million+ Christian minority were celebrating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. To their credit, the Muslim editors of these newspapers publish such articles every Easter, despite the Qur’an denying that Jesus was even crucified.

My friends in Pakistan, both Muslim and Christian, would be shocked to hear that a government funded body in the UK had banned Easter celebrations. When will politically correct bandwagon followers finally get the message that most ordinary Muslims do not object to Christian festivals – not even in Pakistan. The only people who do object are a few radical Islamists who want to enforce their beliefs on the rest of us. But then – the PC brigade want to enforce their views on the rest of us too!

Demogoguery or intransigence?

As a parent of four teenage children I frequently say it is important to pick your battles carefully. Fight the wrong one and you will be humiliated. Difficult to decide which makes me more angry, the demagoguery of the Roman Catholic leaders or the intransigence of Gordon Brown. Cardinal Keith O'Brien talks of

"monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life", adding that it would allow experiments of "Frankenstein proportion”.

The ordinary Roman Catholic is not helpd by this sort of demagoguery, but then then Roman Catholic hierarchy is not renowned for being broad minded.

As a doctor, I know that current legislation on embryo research is nearly twenty years old and, for that reason alone, needs redrafting. I would not pretend it is an easy area ethically and, where ever the line is drawn, its impact will have a degree of arbitrariness leaving a handful of people on either side of the line unhappy. The line still needs to be drawn.

Free vote or not, many Labour Roman Catholics will not support the legislation whether or not Gordon Brown wave his big stick. On a free vote in the House of Commons the legislation will pass. He will get the legislation he wants. And, by allowing a free vote, we will see the House of Commons at its best, freely debating a difficult and challenging subject.