CentreRight

Why a London Mayor does not need a race adviser

Sometimes I am as amazed that there are so many conservative demands for perpetuating the old detrimental features of a Labour Government and so much support for a London Mayor with identical Livingstone policies which have run this country into the ground. Some of the people who run this City and advise Ken Livingstone would not be happy until the whole shop is run by the British Ayatollah. It is undemocratic.

Let us look at the Mayor’s appointment of a race adviser (whilst not forgetting these deplorable social cohesion programmes which actually destroy the cohesion of this nation). This has already been raised on ConservativeHome. Does London need one? Are we (we, being the British people) not all equal before the one law (the one law being UK law) – or do we need some leftie race adviser telling us that some groups, because of their race or colour, are entitled to different social rights and should be treated differently from another racial group?

The significance of starfish

If you've seen or read about today's PMQs you will know that Cameron got lots of laughs for revealing that David Muir's favourite book is called "The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations". This may seem like just an effective cheap shot but it's actually a very significant thing. The full title is "The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations" and this is Amazon's synopsis of it:

"If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off it's head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Some organisations are just as decentralised as starfish, with no control centre or grand strategy. Think of craigslist and the original Napster, run totally by their own customers. Or Alcoholics Anonymous, which has thrived for decades as a loose network of small groups. Or even al Qaeda, which is so hard to destroy because its cells function independently. "The Starfish and the Spider", based on groundbreaking research into decentralised organisations, proves that this type of leadership is primed to change the world. Major companies like eBay, IBM, Sun, and GE are starting to decentralise, with great results. Decentralisation isn't easy for people who are used to the classic chain of commence organisation."

So the book of choice of Brown's chief strategist is about, of all things, the power of decentralisation! This "starfish approach" is antithetical to Brown's approach but central to David Cameron's. Interesting.

Schools are in the frontline against community breakdown

In a much under-reported speech headteacher Martin Dunsford, addressing the Association of Schools and College Leaders annual conference, described schools as often the one moral framework in children's lives.

I think Mr Dunsford is on to something. At a time when communities have atomised and there is real and severe family breakdown, schools often serve as the last bastion of communities. When small shops have closed and when local faith institutions are poorly attended, the school remains the one institution in a community that brings people together - not just children, but parents too. If a child comes from a broken home then it is the school that will give that child order and structure, as well as a decent meal too. That is why the Government's surplus places rule is so wrong as it forces schools to close. We need more schools not less, however small, and particularly in our poorer communities.

I know that some will argue that it is the job of parents to provide a moral force for the children and not the state. But family breakdown will take years - if not generations to deal with - both through fundamental welfare reform and significant changes to how we deal with crime and disorder. Schools by contrast provide an immediate response to community breakdown which few other public policies can match.

More details of Mr Dunsford's speech can be found here.

Lies, damn lies and UK statistics

A short report in yesterday's FT gave me one of those "through the looking-glass" moments, and I read it again this morning in an attempt to clear my head. A new survey says that more than half of Britons think politicians interfere with official data. Who did the survey? Why, the Office for National Statistics. If the statistics are to be believed, we don't believe the statistics.

Let's pursue this existential conundrum for a moment to find out how the government is attempting to resolve this lack of trust (if such it is). By closing down the the Statistics Commission (set up by the Government in 2000 to restore trust in official statistics) and handing over its work to the UK Statistics Authority (set up by the Government eight years later to restore trust in official statistics). Are you reassured? nor am I.

For what it's worth, the latest survey finds that the least trusted statistics are those on hospital waiting lists. And there has been a fall in the numbers believing the Government's population data. No surprises there. The credibility gap between the public's day-to-day experience and Government claims is surely one of the biggest reasons for our overall lack of trust in politicians.

Whether a new Statistics Authority can begin to bridge this gap remains to be seen. I suppose we'll just have to wait for another ONS survey to to tell us...

Obama's grandmother is still alive

"I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Is this a fitting way to repay her love and sacrifice? Or is today her turn to cringe?

Today's speech worried me and I didn't know why. It was inspirational when I heard it. I spotted the platitudes when I read it. But we already knew that Obama and his team can do great-sounding speeches that satisfy a little less each time we hear them.

Using his grandmother in this way, without any need to do so, tells us something new about him, that is disquieting.

Hat Tip: The Corner

Related link: Watch six minute section of Barack Obama's race in America speech.

Poland to reject the Lisbon Treaty?

Both Der Spiegel and the FT are reporting today that Poland might reject the Lisbon Treaty (a.k.a. EU Constitution) due to the Kaczynski twins threatening to block it in Parliament (in this case Jaroslaw, where it needs a 2/3 majority to pass) and by withholding the Presidential signature (his twin brother Lech).

Fighting back, new Polish PM Donald Tusk is threatening to call a referendum to ratify it.

What does it all mean? I'm not sure, but there's danger for the Government here if the ratification process is delayed deep into 2009.

A small victory for the UK taxpayer as Northern Rock closes in Denmark

I have been banging on about Northern Rock's foreign subsidiaries for the past weeks, both here on CentreRight and in Parliament.

Today, Northern Rock Denmark has announced it will close.

Yesterday, Alistair Darling approached the European Commission to extend the Government's state aid to Northern Rock for a further period. The Chancellor may not have known that I got in there first, writing to Commissioner Kroes last week about the bank's anti-competitive practices in other EU countries.

The UK taxpayer should not be subsidising or guaranteeing high interest rates for savers in Denmark or Ireland, nor even in the UK for that matter. It's only a pity that we need to go to the European Commission to get this obvious point enforced, as our own Government refuses to act.

Barack Obama: Horrid or hollow?

Finally the press are doing their job and actually looking at what Barack Obama is about.  He's had a nauseatingly easy-ride of it so far, as celebrity endorsements and empty non-sequitur-filled speeches ('yes we can'?) showed an apparent lack of belief in anything but himself.

Now finally with the pastor issue we're getting somewhere.

Further to Tim's post below, can I strongly recommend that people listen to what Obama's mentor thinks about Israel and its connection to 9/11.  That's right - Mr Wright can reel-off this kind of terrorist-absolving, anti-Israeli, self-pitying, racism-stirring clap-trap to hundreds of congregants on numerous occasions and Barack Obama never knew anything of it?  Well, that leaves only two routes out for Barack Hussein.  Either he can admit that he knew this about his close friend.  Or he can keep maintaining that he never heard Wright say this stuff.  Which would imply to me that he didn't go to (or even near) his church all that much.  Which leaves Obama's whole 'born-again' routine looking more than ever like a campaign trick.  Who'd ever have thought that he'd turn out to be either horrid or hollow?

The pound has fallen more under Brown than it did after Black Wednesday

"The day before Black Wednesday (16 September 1992) the pound got you DM 2.78. After black Wednesday it was about 12% down, before falling to 14% down on 5 October - the low point of Black Wednesday which we have now surpassed.

Brown could argue that the real low point was long after black wednesday in March 1993. But looking at what happened after Black Wednesday makes the comparison worse. At the equivalent point nine months after black Wednesday the pound was back up to 2.49, or just over 10% down. It was the same after a year. 

On the other hand, If the current trend continues the pound will be down about 18-20% by Brown’s first anniversary. Brown's Black Wednesday may be happening more slowly compared to Lamont's - but it could be bigger."

See Open Europe's blog for more.

"The Wrong Reverend"

My friend Joe Loconte has a must-read piece on Barack Obama's priest on the Weekly Standard's website.  It contains two key arguments:

(1) Barack Obama's links to Rev Jeremiah Wright are very strong:

"Barack Obama has nourished--and been nourished by--a 20-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama calls Wright his spiritual "mentor" and the man whose "social gospel" drew him into the black church. He is the minister who married Obama, baptized his daughters, and prays with and counsels him at key moments of his political life. Obama absorbed hours of tapes of Wright's sermons while a law student at Harvard. When he settled in Chicago, he joined Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, where he has been an active, tithing member for over 17 years."

(2) A selection of quotations that the Republicans will use to destroy Senator Obama if they get the chance:

• "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied."
• "We put Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there."
• "America is still the number one killer in the world."
• "We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure the Third World people live in grinding poverty."
• "Racism is the American way."

Also see this video.

Barack Obama is giving a big speech on race today. It'll need to be good.

The value of polls can go down as well as up

Contrary post of the day: the massive poll leads recorded in recent days make me nervous. It's good to have a lead, of course, and despite protests from various quarters, Cameron has in fact always had one apart from Brown's honeymoon bounce. When the history of this failing, tired government is written, I hope it will record the important fact that ICM's poll of a 6% lead for us in fifty marginal seats came before Brown's Yellow Saturday moment; caused it, indeed, and was not merely an effect of it.

But....

Canada's Conservatives are also doing well...

Encouraging news from Canada. Four by-elections were held on Monday, all in constituencies won by the opposition Liberal party in the last election. The amazing thing was that they were seen, nearly universally, in the media, as a referendum on the weak Liberal leader Stephane Dion and not on the Conservative minority government, which has been getting weeks of bad press. First there was "NAFTAgate" where a Canadian leak may have influenced the Democratic primary in Ohio, and then allegations of dodgy financial dealings by the party.

Obama's troublesome priest

Are you following the story of Barack Obama's pastor?  The pastor who married Barack Obama and baptised his two daughters who also preached God damn America, spoke of the United States of KKK and insulted Israel.

Nothing has done more damage to the Illinois Senator's campaign than Pastor Wright's extremist views.  Toby Harnden has everything you need to know on his blog.

Quasi-revenue-neutral tax reform

Polls suggest that voters increasingly want lower taxes, even if that means lower spending.  Tax cuts are popular.  This poses quite a conundrum for politicians who aren't willing to take serious measures to control spending and have no room to borrow.

Revenue-neutral changes to the tax system seemed like the way out for a while but they are a political nightmare because the losers will hate you for it and the winners will prove fickle and ungrateful.

The new solution politicians appear to have hit upon is the quasi-revenue-neutral change.  The most politically successful example was the Conservative increasing of the Inheritance Tax threshold 'paid for' by a new flat rate charge to non-doms.  The secret is to find a change that is revenue neutral from the Treasury's point of view but a tax cut from the perspective of ordinary people.

Iraqis optimistic about Iraq

Americans aren't the only ones optimistic about Iraq. Sunnis, Shias and Kurds in Iraq are increasingly so about both the security situation and life in general (Okay, increasingly being the key word!).

Richard Perle's piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph is worth a gander as well:

"For a government fighting an unpopular war, five years is an eternity. In the sight of history, it's just a blink, far too short for considered judgment or a balanced accounting. But judges and accountants won't wait, so the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has renewed the debate about that action and its consequences - a debate dominated by the terrible costs, with almost no assessment of the benefits."

"Special relationship dies under Gordon Brown"

Quite a sad piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph about the decline in the special relationship between Britain and America.

The term "special relationship" is no longer in use at Britain's Washington Embassy.  One British diplomat told Sunday Telegraph journalist Tim Shipman that the term wasn't much of a career enhancer.

The new British Ambassador to the USA "frowns on the phrase".  Meanwhile Gordon Brown hasn't had dinner with America's Ambassador to Britain since becoming Prime Minister.

Gordon Brown (who hasn't spoken regularly to George W Bush) prefers to work with EU allies rather than focus on the transatlantic relationship.

The world is a safer, stronger place when Britain and America are close.  It will be a terrible tragedy if Brown's lack of interest in foreign affairs undermines important historical ties.

A camel in a watering hole (or West Wing's lesson for the day)

President Bartlett’s staffers managed pretty successfully to insulate themselves from meeting real voters (as opposed to focus groups and polling samples). But when Toby and Josh were left behind by the motorcade they found they had no choice.  They patronised and ignored the voters they encountered in equal measure,  until this man:

"It should be hard. I like that it's hard. Putting your daughter through college, that's - that's a man's job. A man's accomplishment. But it should be a little easier….Just a little easier. Because in that difference is... everything."

On a day like today, with a serious stock market crash, this conversation led to a change of policy – a new tax break.

The Conservative Party has learned from West Wing in the past. Over-burdened voters badly need it to do so again.

How to get taxes wrong: Portillo vs Hammond

Here are two errors:

• Promising tax cuts, when you don't know how to pay for them, and being reduced to promising to "cut fraud and waste" to make your numbers add up.  This was one of our many errors in 2001 and 2005.  I'll call this the "Portillo error"
• Promising not to cut taxes.  I'll call this the "Hammond error".

Both the Portillo and Hammond errors arise from coming at the problem in the wrong way.  Why must we make any promises about taxes for many years ahead?  Why are we talking about the matter in these terms at all?  What we should be talking about is what we want the state to do and what not to do, how we want to change what the state does and how it does it, and from there having an indication as to the spending implications.  Taxes are a residual of our policies, not the policies themselves.

Whilst we insist on focusing on the matter the Portillo/Hammond way around, whether urging tax cuts or no tax cuts, the public will believe that our thoughts are finance-driven, that our public service reforms are about reducing expenditure rather than improving services, that we are rich people for whom the consideration is "How much tax can I avoid paying to help the poor and yet still get elected?"  That is not a good place for us to be...

Boris now 12% ahead

According to a YouGov poll for today's Evening Standard.

• Boris 49%
• Livingstone 37%
• Brian Paddick 12%

It also shows Boris getting more second preference votes, 20%, than Livingstone, 17%.

Link: Previous YouGov poll had Boris Johnson 5% up.

The Government can't be blamed for all our troubles

Tim Montgomerie sounds a trumpet call:

We need to forget the focus groups and the polling for just one minute and tell the truth about a nation that is in trouble.  Mr Cameron might be surprised at voters' reaction.  Our hunch is that the first politician to tell the British people 'how it really is' will form a bond with many millions of them.

I wholeheartedly agree . But are we really prepared to tell the whole truth about the trouble we're in? Because it isn't just the Government that's to blame.

For instance, who's to blame for economic instability? Who sold sold all those dodgy loans? Who built business models on the wholly unrealistic assumption that the credit boom would go on forever?

As for social breakdown, who pushed so much cheap drink at our young people? Who's getting rich from music, films and computer games of unprecedented violence and depravity?

If we try to blame big government for everything that's gone wrong, then our attempt to "tell the truth" won't ring true at all.

Health Visitors inspire confidence

A Universal health visiting service was the Tories big announcement at their spring conference. The Department of Health's comprehensive Health Visitor's report 'Facing the Future' last summer talked about 'Progressive Universalism' - where those with the greatest need got the most help - which was the ethos of the Sure Start programme. That's fine, but what was tragic about the Government's response to this report was their shameless admission that whilst Health Visitor figures have dropped by 3% from 1997-2006, this was ok as 'children's services' ie children's centres had increased.

The whole aim of the Health Visitor is support for mother and baby in the home to build up the mother's confidence and independence, whereas the result of Children's Centres is state care for children and family dependence. In the deprived areas of south east London where I work, there is a permanent shortage of health visitors - up to 75% vacancy rates have been known. Yet money is pouring into the Centres which are perceived by many locals as free childcare, thus typifying the hand-out not hand-up mentality of the Left. 'Facing the Future' was an excellent report; the Government responded with warm words and sent Health Visitors away empty handed. The Conservative's announcement is to be welcomed!   

Universalist conservatism

While I am no apologist for the BBC I think that Conor Burns is being a little too aggresive in his attack on them for calling the victors of Iran's election "conservatives".  Conservatism can be understood as a passion for institutional stability - a wish to preserve something in an established order.  In that sense, a conservative in one country could favour free-markets and democratic governance and, in another, theocratic tyranny.  There is no universal conservatism and a conservative could be a man of good sense in England but not in Iran.

Hayek's critique of conservatism is rooted in this problem.  If your passion is for preserving then you concede the future to your enemies; if the fight is between conservatives and socialists you will move slowly to socialism.  That is why I think that conservatism needs liberalism (in the European sense of the word).

I think that the Iranian "conservatives", clearly defending an established order we would not want to defend, highlight a dilemma for all conservatives.  At what stage is there too little worth conserving?  At what stage do we concede that conservatism needs to be set to one side in favour of the more radical medicine of liberalism?

I set out the ideas in this post, in more detail, a while back on TCS Daily.

P.S.  All this doesn't mean that the BBC's article isn't sloppy.  Whether or not the Iranian election victors were 'conservative' or 'reformist' doesn't get at the crucial distinction among Iranian hardliners - clerics or soldiers?  The BBC's analysis is weak because they don't draw that distinction so can't properly analyse what the change means for Ahmadinejad.  That leads to false enigmas like this one: "However, many of the conservative winners are critics of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Whose money is it anyway?

"When the money’s piled up in the pot, then you give it away in tax cuts."

Give it away???

Give it back, would be more like it. Take less in the first place, even better. And as for what on earth is meant by "We put the money in the bank, we put it by and then we go back to the electorate...", why not allow taxpayers to pile the money up in their own pots? Or spend it if they want to.

It is, after all, their money that Philip Hammond was talking about.

Does anyone care what they think?

Over at the Daily Telegraph, Daniel Hannan has penned a characteristically witty piece regarding Angela Merkel's upcoming visit to Ireland to campaign for a "yes" vote on the European Constitution Treaty of Lisbon.  Merkel is rumoured to believe her visit to the country will help bolster support for the pro-Constitution lobby. 

This draws my mind back to a conversation between British Lib Dem Graham Watson MEP (Chairman of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) and the German socialist Martin Schultz MEP (Chairman of the Party of European Socialists) regarding the upcoming Italian elections relayed in the EU Observer last week:

Liberal leader Graham Watson said: "I should be down there right now, campaigning for Veltroni. I hope Martin Schultz will join me."

"I told Martin a while ago, 'We should go and do something in Italy,' and he said, 'Yup!'"

Does it not speak volumes for the hubris and profound sense of self-importance felt by European "leaders" that they believe their very presence on the campaign trail is, by default, beneficial to the candidate or cause they wish to support?  I can only see how finger-wagging rhetoric and condescending speeches from foreign leaders and obscure (outside of the European Parliament) MEPs can harm rather than strengthen any given political cause

Call me a cynic, but recent political history shows people most certainly do not like being told what to do.

The battle for the Democrat contest enters its WWI phase

It's not a particularly tasteful analogy but Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen at Politico are comparing the deadlocked race for the Democrat nomination to the First World War:

"The Democratic race has entered its World War I phase, a bloody fight between two adversaries making only the most incremental of gains. And there is no reason to think either side will emerge from the trenches anytime soon...

So on June 3, when South Dakota and Montana end the current voting calendar, the contours of the race aren't likely to be much different from what they are today.   That means 2 1/2 months of conference calls, attacks, counterattacks and millions of dollars spent, all to move the political needle just a few inches...

“The primary race is no longer about Democratic ideas or policy initiatives — it's about process, and that is the last thing you want your candidate talking about,” said another Democratic strategist and veteran of Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign. “This is increasingly in the hands of the superdelegates, whose minds can change on a daily basis. What started out as a better path to a faster nomination has resulted in a party without a nominee and a ticking clock.”"