CentreRight

Henley

I did my first stint in the campaign this morning (Saturday). Let me give three early impressions.

* The campaign is well organised. Leaflets had been counted and bundled, maps and directions were supplied and the turnaround time was about five minutes (for Con Home readers who were asking, the leaflet included both a farewell from Boris and an introduction to John Howell).

*Support was good. As I arrived at the Thame campaign office,  I was met by the chairmen of Buckinghamshire County Council and Aylesbury Vale District Council (I thought I must be at one of my constituency civic services!). I saw people from a number of neighbouring seats and helpers had signed in from as far away as Cambridge and Torfaen.

*I was leafletting in John Howell's own county division of Dorchester-on-Thames. It was very encouraging to hand over a leaflet to someone weeding their garden and get the response "I know John. He'll definitely get my vote." Those who know John Howell best as their local representative seem to have a high opinion of him.

The mood is good but we must not be complacent. I know that our campaign offices in both Thame and Henley look forward to welcoming ConHome readers in their hordes.

Some Saturday reading

• British medic shoots suicide bomber, then saves him
• 31 000 scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming
• How determined bloggers exposed a so-called miracle cure for dyslexia
• The story of John Wesley's polygamous brother-in-law
• US foreign policy in idealistic, militarist mode has done well
• A French Muslim gets an annulment after finding his wife wasn't a virgin
• War is never going to be a politically correct pastime
• A homeless Japanese woman lived secretly out of a man's closet
• Galloway's picked up his favourite hobby - now he's suing The Bill
• The relationship between leftie liberal opera and state funding

Yes, prison is part of the solution

As the victims of street murders mount, the usual suspects interject to argue for sending even fewer violent criminals to prison. The Independent argues:

"While not patronising the public about the seriousness of knife crime in Britain, we must not resort to facile-sounding solutions that simply fill up prisons."

Notice how the simplicity of locking up dangerous people, that it is a response comprehensible to all is - yes, patronisingly - wielded as if it were a trump card that refutes the policy. By a kind of reverse Occam's Razor, 'People inside prison aren't a threat to people outside prison' is too straightforward and tautological to be acceptable as a response to violent crime.

Britain is better off outside the euro

It has been bizarre to hear eurofanatical journalists ringing up the European Foundation to ask why Britain is not joining the eurozone, now celebrating its tenth anniversary. I mean, I do not even know what solid information this is based on? Could be poor speculative journalistic guesswork, but there is no solid long-term economic reasoning behind it. Martin Wolf at the FT sounds as stumped as I am.

So, following on from my earlier piece, Martin Wolf puts forward a more cogent economic case for Britain being better off outside the euro:

… there is no evidence that being outside the eurozone has imposed a performance penalty upon the UK economy. Between the first quarter of 1999 and the first quarter of 2008, its economy expanded by 28 per cent, against 21 per cent in the eurozone as a whole and 16 per cent in Germany. As I noted this week ("Emu's second 10 years may be tougher", May 28), there is no evidence that Emu has improved the economic dynamism of its members. If anything, membership seems to have reduced the pressures for reform.

The proposition then is fundamentally an economic one: remaining outside the euro preserves the safety valve of currency flexibility, while losing nothing in aggregate economic performance. Being outside has not even hurt London's position as a financial centre.

Thumos

I'm still finding nuggets in Standpoint magazine's excellent first issue. Editor Dan Johnson has got a good little piece in the Counterpoints section about a concept that I hadn't heard of before called thumos: "a spiritedness and ferocity in defence of clan, tribe, city, or state".

It's a concept inspired by Plato and Aristotle and developed by Harvey Mansfield in this speech and Robert Kagan in this book. Johnson notes:

"Interestingly, the most characteristic modern example of thumos in action cited by Mansfield is actually a woman: Margaret Thatcher. But unless men — and it usually is men — preserve enough thumos to be prepared to die for their country, they become decadent and ultimately subservient. Without thumos, the West lacks the manly qualities that a civilisation requires to survive.

... Back in the Cold War, nobody talked about thumos. The omnipresent threat of mutually assured destruction did not leave much room for spirited temperaments at the helm. But the world since 2001 is learning the import­ance of sheer bloody-mindedness in seeing off a ferocious foe. Mansfield and Kagan are right: this is an old idea whose time has come. The answer to terror and tyranny may indeed be thumos."

Reviving thumos neatly sums up Standpoint's noble mission - a hugely important mission which I know we at ConservativeHome would heartily endorse.

Leave police and MPs' pay to politicians

Eric Pickles gave an excellent performance on the BBC's Question Time yesterday, but I disagree with him on one point. He said he found it degrading as an MP to vote on his own salary, that such a decision must be taken by someone other than MPs in future.

Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes made a similar point in last week's programme in relation to police pay. As an essential emergency service, police cannot strike for higher wages, so why not have an independent arbitrator decide what their salary should be, with the government obliged to follow its recommendations?

Radical, progressive civic conservatism

There's a piece worth reading in the Guardian today by Phillip Blond, an academic and author of a forthcoming book called Red Tory:

"The Blairite left and Thatcherite right have colluded in the production of an oligarchical market state that monopolises power and wealth. Indeed, both the public and the private sector are now governed by a centralised bureaucratic or moneyed elite that effectively disempowers everybody else. With more than 20% of private-sector employees working for venture capitalists and with virtually all life in the public sector dictated by the relationship between disengaged managers and centrally determined performance targets, the ordinary worker has been stripped of any transformative influence or social power."

He sees a lot of potential in the Conservative Party's focus on civil society -  deeming it much more significant than merely being the vacuous "sheep's clothing" that other writers for the Guardian see it as - and hopes it won't lack for ambition now that the Party has a comfortable poll lead.

McCain 270, Obama 268

That's the knife-edge result predicted by the Novak Report if such an election were to be held today, in a very interesting state-by-state analysis.

Re: Today's killer quote

Tim highlights an interesting quote from the Daily Mail report on a Civitas study released today on police priorities:

"Arresting or fining someone for a trifling offence - such as a child stealing a Mars bar - is a good way of hitting the target and pleasing the Home Office.  Amazingly, the chocolate theft ranks as highly as catching a killer."

This is a weighting problem.  The impossible question of how many murders to a shoplift needs to be answered in order to prioritise police resources.  Forcing the police to treat them all equally through a crude set of targets leads to the madness Civitas have identified.

Today's killer quote

 From a report in today's Daily Mail about a new report from Civitas:

"Arresting or fining someone for a trifling offence - such as a child stealing a Mars bar - is a good way of hitting the target and pleasing the Home Office.  Amazingly, the chocolate theft ranks as highly as catching a killer."

Reacting to the report, by Harriet Sergeant, David Davis told The Telegraph:

“This is a desperate but not surprising indictment of Labour’s red tape, target-driven culture which has distorted police priorities and undermined the relationship between the police and the public. At the same time, bureaucracy has tied officers to their desks and kept them off the streets.”

As early as 2001 Labour was warned about the fatal danger of targets.

How to defeat the Global Jihadists

In the first edition of the excellent new magazine Standpoint, edited by Daniel Johnson, Michael Burleigh has written a superb article in which he claims "Britain is sleepwalking" into Islamism and the terrorist threat. Below are some extracts, which I have highlighted and I have really nothing to add to them. You can read the full article here.  But some key extracts:

Many of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain, for example, still do not seem to fully appreciate the outrage that a finger-jabbing minority causes at home and abroad with each escalating demand for Islamist enclaves. Like perennial students, New Labour favours debate and dialogue, except when it involves matters of overriding concern to ordinary people, in which case Trevor Phillips is left to stick his head above the parapet. In dealing with the Muslim Council of Britain, the British Government unwittingly accepted as “commun­ity” interlocutors men who, in line with salafi-jihadi propaganda, blamed Islamist terrorism primarily on British foreign policy, while failing to condemn unequivocally suicide bombing outside the UK. Virtually nothing is being done to stem the flow of Wahabist money (and the attendant intolerant ideology) not only into mosques but university “Islamic studies” programmes, whose ideologically-slanted nature has been exposed in a report published last month by the Centre for Social Cohesion. The author, Anthony Glees, argues that pro-free speech arguments (and there is little free speech at all when it comes to Israel) are being used by the authorities to slip out of public responsibility towards taxpayers.

Black fightback against violent crime

A new generation of socially-conservative black leaders must lead the fightback against London's growing epidemic of knife and gun crime. In an excellent comment piece in today's Standard, Lindsay Johns praises Shaun Bailey, Tory parliamentary candidate for Hammersmith and new deputy mayor Ray Lewis for rejecting the left-wing orthodoxies that have particularly damaged hard-pressed urban communities:

Both Lewis's and Bailey's conservative stance on the underlying causes of knife crime - the glaring lack of positive black male role models, the abrogation of parental responsibility and working-class over-reliance on the "benefits culture" - embodies views that, more than ever, we should heed...

...Working with young people in Peckham has convinced me that the liberal "softly, softly" approach achieves little, save disappointment and disillusionment, and actually engenders the opposite of respect.

Sir Alex Ferguson owes it all to capitalism

Sir Alex Ferguson is a red through and through.  He's not only Mister Manchester United but also a consistent supporter of Labour.  A picture of him with Tamsin Dunwoody was posted in many windows of Crewe Labourites last week.

But why is he the most successful manager in Europe, if not the world?

And the answer isn't Cristiano Ronaldo (although his 42 goals helped).

The answer is capitalism.  That's the view of Daniel Freedman who has just posted these thoughts about Malcolm Glazer's contribution to Manchester United:

"Glazer may not understand soccer, but as a successful capitalist he sure understands investment. He knows that for his approximately $500 million investment to pay off, the club has to be a success. You don’t make money from a losing team. Glazer brought top players to the club, won trophies, and made his investment more valuable. Incidentally, Chelsea—the team that finished runner-up in the Premier League and in the Champions League to Manchester United—is also owned by a wealthy foreign capitalist. Maybe now soccer fans will realize that when a capitalist joins your team, everyone wins."

I can't disagree with Daniel but I'd nominate Rupert Murdoch as the real hero.  Sky TV's money has made English football the most exciting in the world.  Without Murdoch Sir Alex would never have been able to buy the talented team that graces Old Trafford.

Beyond parody

And, discussing the qualities of candidates in the Democratic contest for the party's candidacy for the Presidency, today's guest columnist over at The Guardian is........

Fidel Castro.

The EU is spending your money on anti-Israel NGOs

My colleague, Glyn Gaskarth, has written an extended post for the TaxPayers' Alliance blog discussing a report on EU funds supporting NGOs in Israel/Palestine.  The lack of control, transparency and accountability for the use of these funds is absolutely shocking and many of the groups receiving support are clearly out to bash Israel:

"The EU diplomatically supports a two state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict based on two democratic entities which have secure borders and are at peace with each other. An honourable objective we should all support. Given this objective it is strange that the EU funds groups diametrically opposed to this vision. NGOs which oppose a two state solution, advocate the abolition of Israel, equate Israeli Liberal Democracy with apartheid South Africa and advocate recognition of and engagement with Hamas receive EU grants. A report by NGO Monitor entitled “Europe’s Hidden Hand, EU Funding for Political NGOs in the Arab-Israeli Conflict" details (in as much depth as the public can access) who we are funding and what the groups advocate. Its findings are pretty shocking."

Boris's first blunder

It was all going so well. The Evening Standard today reports that Boris Johnson has abondoned his pledge for a statue of New Zealander Sir Keith Park on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

A written answer, in the name of Boris Johnson but plainly not written by him, says of the fourth plinth:  "I recognise that this revolving programme has proved very popular and I welcome the important contribution it has made in shaping public debate about contemporary art."

Very popular with whom? Not with Londoners who have just voted for a man who said he was going to replace it with a statue of Sir Keith Park.

Why the laughter stopped

'What's going on at Westminster (re Gordon Brown) barely qualifies as tragedy even in the dramatic sense, let alone on the human register,' writes Mary Riddell in today's Telegraph. 'For real tragedy, look elsewhere. Today's doomed youth are dying not in the trenches of the Somme but in the streets of Britain. Robert Knox, the young actor stabbed to death last weekend, was the 14th teenager fatally stabbed in the capital this year. They are not dying for their country, like (Wilfred) Owen's compatriots. Most are not even dying for their iPods. They are dying because they're in the wrong postcode, or the wrong gang, or on the wrong side of an argument about nothing. Their killers are often those for whom a knife in the heart means little more than a casual goodbye.'

Such are the fruits of the social and cultural revolution which happened during the post-war period.

Is Brown on dodgy ground?

A few weeks back, I asked Gordon Brown a question at PMQs. Given that Mr Brown claimed “he had no knowledge of the dodgy loans used to fund the 2005 election campaign”, and since “Lord Levy has revealed that the Prime Minister knew everything. “Is Lord Levy lying?”, I asked.

All I got was an awkward shuffle, then a dagger-stare, followed by a gruff “I knew nothing of these loans”.

Ummm…

Knowing how Brown sometimes uses evasive semantics, I've been reflecting on the precise meaning of those six words.

In one sense, Mr Brown's reply has to be technically correct.  By definition, there had to have been a time at which Mr Brown did indeed know nothing of the loans.  The issue is at what point did he become aware of the said loans? When did the “I know nothing” become an “I knew nothing”?

"Democracy, freedom, subsidiarity - federalism, the solution we've got!"

They're young, lyrically imaginative and enthusiastic for the European Project!

Lipdub Europe United par les Jeunes Européens - France
Uploaded by JeunesEuropeensFrance

This gave me rage blackouts.  I defy any Briton of good sense to watch it and not want to quote Nelson's advice to a midshipman aboard the Agamemnon.

P.S. If this has been posted by someone else already, and I missed it, then apologies.

The UN has failed: democracies should ignore it and act as needed

That's the case made by Rosemary Richter over at The Times.  It is a notion gathering impetus in the USA. 

Those in favour say that the UN is an inefficient organisation which lends false legitimacy to repressive regimes and has effectively collaborated with the worst of human activity by criminal bureaucratic delays and excuses.  What you believe to be right, they might say, does not become wrong because China says so.

Those against are often willing to concede that the UN is flawed, but point to the fact that at least there is a super-national organisation with some kind of moral legitimacy and weight, which can point to some successes, particularly in the humanitaran field - attempting to reform it, they would say, if far more productive - and acting outside its aegis like this will effectively destroy it.

What do you think?

Glorious Isolation

Zoe Williams, at Comment is Free, is confused by our lack of friends that might support a bid for Eurovision victory:

"But still, two questions: first and most obviously, why have we got nobody to vote for us? Everybody goes on about eastern Europe and their bloc voting, but this is not some ex-communist curiosity that we in the hyper-individualised west will never understand. Everyone has chums: the Scandinavians vote for one another; Cyprus votes for Greece; and Andorra, Portugal and Spain stick together."

Well, the answer's obvious, isn't it?  Humans are angry, tribal killer chimps.

Europe's other nation states aren't very stable.  Most have them have had their borders redrawn endlessly and have even ceased to exist several times pretty recently.  All sorts of people aren't in the nation they started out in and have tribal loyalties elsewhere.  Even when no one is being conquered a land border is far more porous than a watery one.  All this means that most European countries have human ties to others in their proximity.

We're just as tribal.  In fact, Anglos of one kind or another have been - for some centuries - the biggest, baddest tribe on the planet.  Not only do we keep our own borders steady (the last battle on our mainland was in 1746) but we also conquer the others and take their stuff.  However, we generally haven't taken territory in Europe (too high maintenance) but in the rest of the world.

If it wasn't Eurovision but Worldvision (World Vision might be peeved if it were set up) then our Anglo cousins and Commonwealth buddies would be in play.  We'd do fine.  The best evidence available suggests that we would do extremely well, that we are the world's favourite nation.

Our relationship with continental Europe has defined our history and frog-bashing has become a dull cliche best left behind.  However, there is no reason to get wound up in a fit of teenage self-consciousness just because the continentals won't vote for us at Eurovision.

Iran: A new cold war?

A report by a British army officer serving in Basra details how he discovered from multiple informants that Iran was funding the Jaish al-Mahdi - better known as the Mahdi army - to pay unemployed Shi'a men up to $300 each to kill British soldiers.

This is yet another indicator that Iran is fighting a proxy war against the West in Iraq and elsewhere.

Iran is seeking to become the leader of global Islam, despite being a predominantly Shi'a country. Her influence now extends from Afghanistan in the East to the Mediterranean region in the West:

• Iran has interfered both politically and militarily in Afghanistan for the last 25 years. One recent example of its attempt to extend its power base in Afghanistan is the madrassa (Islamic theological school) that it began building in southern Kabul a few years ago. Despite the Shi'a being a relatively small minority in Afghanistan, this enormous building is set to become the largest madrassa in Afghanistan.
• In the southern Mediterranean region, Iran now finances the radical Sunni Islamist group Hamas who are dedicated to the annihilation of the state of Israel and now control the Gaza strip.
• In the northern Mediterranean region, Hezbollah, founded and funded by Iran, has just militarily bullied its way into gaining a veto over the affairs of the Lebanese government.

It is only a question of time before Iran decides it is an 'opportune' time to to allow Hezbollah to launch the sort of attack against Israel that will lead to a significant Israeli military response.

Last time that happened, David Milliband, now foreign secretary, argued strongly in cabinet for Britain to call for an immediate ceasefire, effectively preventing Israel from dealing with Hezbollah. As I have argued before on Centre Right that decision will almost inevitably lead to another war between Hezbollah and Israel with even more loss of life. When that happens, Milliband, whether as foreign secretary or as leader of the Labour Party needs to take a much longer term and more realistic view of foreign affairs, particularly in relation to Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.

In the war against terror, whether in the form of a cold war with Iran or home grown suicide bombers, Britain needs a Churchill as its leader, not a Chamberlain.

Appeasement, whether of Hezbollah or its overlord Iran will only lead to even greater loss of life and more suffering by innocent people in the future.

"Look at Me"

I've reviewed Peter Whttle's new book Look at Me over on the Platform.  It is, IMHO, a devastating critique of modern self-obsession, and of the call of empty fame.  Read it.

Children at risk - from government failure

Extensive coverage on this morning's Today programme of the state of child protection in the UK, including an interview with the mother of Victoria Climbie, reviewing the impact of government action in response to the Laming Inquiry (into Victoria's death eight years ago).

Mme Climbie is - rightly - concerned that children are no safer now than they were before the Every Child Matters agenda was implemented. Placing the blame on local authorities, some of whom seem to be incapable of fulfilling basic child protection procedures, Mme Climbie - mistakenly although understandably - praises the Government for Every Child Matters.

What the Today programme neglected to consider, however, was the possibility that Every Child Matters has actually put more children at risk. By creating a responsibility to safeguard every child - rather than focusing on the most vulnerable - the government has diverted scarce resources, confused front line staff and - characteristically - generated more mindless bureaucracy.

This was dismayingly predictable and a subject on which I have writtten in the press and for the Centre for Policy Studies. I am not alone in taking this view, which is shared by many child health professionals,  and on which many of them are now actively lobbying.  There is a huge challenge here for the Conservatives, who will naturally be fearful of recommending yet more re-organisation of child protection but risk inheriting a deeply flawed system.

The European Journal: June issue (proof that euroscepticism is not dead)

In the prevailing economic turmoil of the credit crisis, the June issue of The European Journal has attempted to address some of the key issues within the UK, whilst making comparisons with problems within Europe and indeed the United States. John Redwood starts off by focusing on the independence and strength of the Bank of England: observing how the UK has mismanaged the credit crisis in comparison to the American authorities, he suggests that the Labour Government needs to recognise that the tripartite system which they set up has mishandled the Northern Rock crisis, and so we need to reinstate the Bank of England as the chief controller of commercial banks and the manager of money markets. Gordon Brown’s so called “reforms” for an “independent” Bank of England in the late 1990s greatly took away banking supervision and government debt management from the Bank of England.