CentreRight

While Washington is in limbo ...

Among the more macabre online political bets that have been available for some time are spread bets on when America might attack Iran. Increasingly, foreign affairs commentators are suggesting than such an attack is more likely from Israel, whose interest in preventing Iran gaining nuclear weapons is even clearer. The Economist quotes John Bolton as he suggests one possible time-frame - November 2008 to January 2009:

"Israel may think the best time to attack would be during America’s presidential transition—too late to be accused of influencing the election and before needing a new president’s green light."

Pressing Boris to do more

When Ken Livingstone was Mayor of London there were a staggering 265 press officers employed altogether in the Greater London Authority. Boris Johnson has pledged to cut their numbers but progress appears to be slow. Staff in the Mayor of London's core press office have been reduced from 16 to 15, while the London Assembly press office has been cut back from 10 to eight.

The armies of press officers for TfL, the police and assorted agencies remain intact. "The Mayor has asked for a close examination of the GLA group to suggest where savings may be made without undermining the efficiency of the various organisations," a spokesman told me after a rather inefficient two week delay in responding.

"The First Deputy Mayor, Tim Parker, will take a close look at the findings when he takes up his position in July." Among those currently still at their posts is the head of the "Strategy" press office Joe Derrett who used to be the London Regional Press Officer for the Labour Party before going to spin for Ken Livingstone.

Can the NHS last another 60 years?

That's the question Newsnight is asking in tonight's programme.

"Not even 10 more years, however sentimental we feel. Society has moved on.  A bureaucratic, tax-based system inevitably leads to the old being subsidised by the increasingly overtaxed young. This is just not sustainable.” So says cancer specialist and advocate for reform Karol Sikora in yesterday's Observer (not on-line).

Generational equity is certainly part of the equation. We also need to add demographics, in particular baby boomers, care of older people, dementia, obesity, the costs of technology and treatment, consumerism and ever-increasing expectations into the mix. See here and here for more on all this.

The NHS is the Conservative Party's number one priority. So said the Party in last week's Green Paper, calling for a focus on outcomes (e.g. cancer survival rates) not process-driven outputs (e.g. waiting times) and smarter data collection. These are necessary reforms. But, whilst certainly not marginal, they don't really cut to the heart of it. The pressures are immense, and the NHS as it currently is structured is simply inadequate to cope with what is coming.

Yet the Party has made the strategic decision to take health quietly in the first term. Schools, welfare and family are its "reform priorities." We may say that health is our number one priority, but our radical energies are going to be directed elsewhere. There might be some political attraction in that for now, but we cannot simply park health and social care in the hope that all will be well. We may get away with it for a while. But, if we are going to spend any more than one term back in power, we will certainly need to use that first term to start making some fundamental changes to the way our health and social care services are organised. We shouldn't brush this aside as being about pointless re-organisations. We need to face up to this now, not wait until a 2014 or 2015 general election.

Let's take accountability for example. An unelected NHS Board won't increase accountability but reduce it. When resources are limited, priorities need to be identified and choices made. The only accountable way to do that is bring decisions as close as possible to the people who are affected by them: locally-elected health boards and vouchers, personalised budgets are the levers to make that happen.

"Privileged white men ... get a taste of their own medicine"

Cath Elliott, writing for the Guardian web site, was asked in a job interview 23 years ago if she planned to leave and have children. Now, she crows "quite frankly I really couldn't care less if privileged white men are about to get a taste of their own medicine" (before implausibly denying that Harman's so-called Equality Bill does just that).

How well those words capture the real ugliness of militant feminism and race-baiting. Of course, her then-interviewer almost certainly won't be adversely affected by this legislation. But righting wrongs and achieving justice for individuals is not the point - if it were, she would believe in colour-blind hiring. Instead, other "privileged white men" must serve as proxies for their sex and racial grouping, and "get a taste of their own medicine" as a penalty for past wrongs by others who have a Y chromosome and share their skin colour. She admits freely she doesn't care who they are - for her, being white and male is enough to make them suffer.

Challenging the campaign against the arms trade

In a healthy democracy like ours organisations like "Campaign Against Arms Trade" have the right to scrutinise government over their export policies. We in Parliament however have not done enough to scrutinise organizations like this one and seem to have taken their objectives for granted with very little probing. With this in mind I have arranged for a representative of this organisation to meet with me today to discuss their objectives and to hear some of my concerns about their actions.

Of course we are all united in our opposition to the exports of weapons of any kind to despotic regimes that brutalise their own people. Concerns would also be shared if British firms were exporting to very poor neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and Eritrea engaged in a very costly border dispute. As a member of the International Development Select committee I have concerns about some of the poorest countries spending vast sums on arms which in many cases they can ill afford.

There is however a huge difference in exporting weapons to a regime like Zimbabwe where the President is using foreign imported weapons to suppress his people and exporting tanks and aircraft to a stable democracy like the Czech Republic. Many countries that have recently joined NATO for the mutual security this organisations provides need to purchase new equipment to start to improve standards up to NATO levels. Does the Campaign Against Arms Trade object to such exports as well to fellow NATO partners? This is one question I will be putting to them today.

You must be (expletive deleted) joking

As they disintegrate at the polls, Labour is losing its collective mind. Lunatic policies, unworthy of a serious government party, are being introduced in almost every department; Harman's non-equality bill, Jacqui Smith's proposal to mark kids as troublemakers at the age of 5, and now this.

I wish to God I were joking, but senior examiners are being instructed to award a child points for writing "f--- off" on an examination paper. If they add an exclamation mark, they'll get more points. For using the correct punctuation.

Points for rudeness and thuggery. Does anybody want to argue with me that our qualifications are not being dumbed down? As a mother of three, I am so furious. Labour's slumping standards are a betrayal of our children. I'd like to suppose this story will be the nadir of Labour policy, but I have no such confidence. Paging Michael Gove; the Conservative mission must be to rescue a generation being left behind.

'Cheer up, we're winning the war on terror'

Gerard Baker was at his best in Friday's Times.  The newspaper's US editor made the case that we are winning the war on terror.  He highlighted (1) declining violence in Iraq; (2) the military defeat of the Taliban; (3) the fact that al-Qaeda are on the run; and (4) the sickening of Muslim opinion towards violence and terrorism.  Now would be precisely the wrong time to retreat - a position he mocks in his piece:

"The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier's dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!”

But, as Baker's article implies, the correct way of judging the progress of the war on terror is not now with seven years ago but between now and what might have been if, for example, the Taliban had been left in control of Afghanistan or Saddam had won his game of dare with the US/ UK/ UN.  Here are Gerry Baker's key words on Afghanistan:

"Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism. Consider the bigger picture. Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan's status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda.

In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been killed. It's true that Osama bin Laden's forces have been regrouping in the border areas of Pakistan but their ability to orchestrate mass terrorism there is severely attenuated. And there are encouraging signs that Pakistanis are starting to take to the offensive against them.

Next time you hear someone say that the war in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility ask them this: do they seriously think that if the US and its allies had not ousted the Taleban and sustained an offensive against them for six years that there would have been no more terrorist attacks in the West? What characterised Islamist terrorism before the Afghan war was increasing sophistication, boldness and terrifying efficiency. What has characterised the terrorist attacks in the past few years has been their crudeness, insignificance and a faintly comical ineptitude (remember Glasgow airport?)"

The cost of the war on terror has, of course, been huge.  For too many families it has been far too much.  Only today we lost another British soldier in Afghanistan today.  But the cost hasn't been in vain.

MP propriety: This tide of attack can't go on

It is very hard to become an MP unless you are a terribly nice person.  You need to persuade a set of terribly nice, self-sacrificing, public-spirited party officials to grant you a place on a candidates' list.  Then you need to get some very upright, hard-working people in a local constituency to select you to be their candidate.  Then you need to inspire some people who, if they weren't spending their time knocking on doors or delivering leaflets for you would be out on the board of the local museum, or being governors of a school, or arranging flowers for the church, or raising money for Oxfam.  There is an extended filtering process, and although it may perhaps be criticised as resulting in an overly high proportion of rather bland people, there is little real doubt that MPs are terribly nice.

Now in recent years there has been an all-but-continuous stream of attacks upon MPs.  They are alleged to be corrupt, taking bribes, fiddling their expenses, allowing conflicts of interest, defrauding the taxpayer.  Think of how many MPs names have come into the fray, and how senior the people alleged to be involved - including the former Prime Minister, the current Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, the leader of Scottish Labour, the Shadow Chancellor, the Conservative Party Chairman, and many others.

Now step back from all this for a moment, and ask yourself this question - Which is more plausible: that British MPs, despite being selected through many-layered processes and subjected to journalist scrutiny at a level none of the rest of us would welcome, are in fact involved in a grand-scale exercise in impropriety, that when one becomes an MP the first thing one does - regardless of how upright and noble one's life was before becoming an MP - is to "shove one's nose in the trough"?  Or is it more plausible that, in fact, MPs are no more corrupt than most people of similar wealth and upbringing (and perhaps less) but are the victims of a system of petty rules, smears and innuendo that would make any group of people look bad?

We have lost our culture of life

I am no prude, nor am I Victorian. I had always thought my views on morality were moderate - more conservative than some, but not extreme. I have always been sensibly pro-life - and pro-life in its broadest sense. I believe in a culture of life and human dignity.

For those reasons, I read this report, headlined Rise in teen abortions prompts calls for reform of sex education, in The Times on 20 June, with immense and almost indescribable sadness. Half of pregnancies among girls under 18, The Times reports, end in abortions. Children as young as five may be given sex education. Possibly even more disturbing, according to an article on the same page headlined 'The ones I worry about are those who have the baby', is the fact that girls as young as 12 are getting pregnant - and having abortions. John Parsons, a Lambeth gynaecologist, says he has lost track of the number of abortions he has carried out among 12 year-olds. In the space of one day, he carried out nine terminations - "normal", he says.

And then, it gets worse, with Caitlin Moran's piece headlined These girls deserve our gratitude for avoiding the worse option. She is almost correct when she writes:

Let's face it, the rise in teenage abortion is not the scandalous statistic here. It is, ultimately, the teenage pregnancies that are the problem. Why are these pregnancies occurring?

More to the point, why is Northern Rock active in Zimbabwe?

Today's Independent on Sunday piece on Conservative MPs' owning shares in companies like Tesco which happen to have business links with Zimbabwe appears trivial compared with the question I have been asking in Parliament for some months now: why is Northern Rock active in Zimbabwe?

When Northern Rock was nationalised, we were told it was a domestic operation. But their Guernsey subsidiary's website not only invites business from Zimbabwe, it even makes an exceptional case for it, as one of only three African countries they will take deposits from.

The Government refuses to telll us why or how much money is involved. Members of the Government like John Mann MP are quoted in the Independent story condemning Conservative MPs for their business links - if he is that enraged, maybe he might have a word with Alistair Darling as to why our new state-owned bank is going out of its way to do business in Zimbabwe, and why the Government won't answer any questions about it?

The Government wasn't even able to confirm to me that Northern Rock was compliant with the financial sanctions regime in place against leading members of the Mugabe regime, opening up the terrifying possibility that the Government-owned bank is providing off-shore tax-free financial services to members of the regime, a tax haven for their ill-gotten gains.

Harm done

The ability to sleep is once again defeating me, so I've taken solace in a cup of rubbish herbal tea and a perusal of tomorrow's/today's papers. Something jumped out as I read about the coming by-election in the Glasgow East seat, caused by the resignation of David Marshall MP. Mr Marshall (about whom I know nothing) told his party workers that he was stepping down on grounds of ill-health. That wasn't good enough for the government's spin doctors, who have let it be known - in unattributed briefings, of course - that "he could have been facing an investigation into his own parliamentary funding".

Do you think they've been stuck in default "Exterminate" mode for so long that they don't even realise when their name-blackening actually harms their own cause? From Rose Addis to Pam Warren and on (to David Kelly, of course, more than any other), those whose existence causes a problem for this government have had their reputations trashed through whispering, sibilant, dirty campaigns of innuendo and downright lies. Andy Burnham's crass fiction about David Davis and Shami Chakrabarti was bad enough, but at least he acted under a form of immoral logic (since the Labour Party lack the guts to fight the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, they may as well smear the likely victor ahead of time). Mr Burnham also had the decency, as he told his lies, to lift his dead-eyed gaze into the public sphere, rather than to rely on an off-the-record briefing. 

Mugabe: "Only God will remove me"

When I lead the intercessions in Church tomorrow (it's my turn on the rota), my prayer will be that God will take Mugabe at his word. God is not mocked.

An unusual but honourable decision

One of the things Gordon Brown has in common with John Major is that he is being bombarded by by-elections. We didn't have that many under Tony Blair - or at least it didn't feel like that. Possibly that was because the House of Commons had a fresh transfusion of younger blood in 1997, with the result that MPs generally were, for a while at least, in a better state of health.

But whatever the reason, if there be one at all, that's changing now. We are having a run of them. They are proving disastrous for Gordon Brown, battering him in terrible ways. The latest one, in Glasgow East, could be the worst yet. It could mark the death-knell. If Glasgow East isn't rock-solid for Labour and for Gordon Brown's Labour in particular, nowhere is. Yet even with a 13,507 majority it must be vulnerable to the Nationalists. Remember Govan in 1988.

But we should pause a moment and acknowledge that David Marshall has done a rare thing in politics. MPs don't often resign on grounds of ill-health, however impossible their condition makes it for them to represent their constituents in any meaningful way. Whether it's pressure from the Whips not to expose their Party to a costly and damaging by-election, a reluctance to give up the salary, or a simple refusal to admit what's going on with their health, the tendency is most often simply to carry on until they die or until the next general election.

Unless there's more to this than meets the eye, it would appear that David Marshall has decided not to follow the example of many before him. This by-election has come at a desperate moment for his party. But he has decided that his health makes it impossible for him to do his job properly. In wishing him a full recovery, he has done the right thing. Every constituency deserves a fully-functioning MP.

A future Conservative government needs to speak with both truth AND responsibility about Islam to avoid hate attacks on Muslims increasing

This week a white racist from the small Yorkshire town of Goole was convicted of plotting terrorist attacks aimed almost certainly at what are being euphemistically referred to as 'minority communities'. Also this week a white racist party came within 78 votes of securing 3rd place in the Henley by election, beating Labour by 177 votes. Given that neither Henley nor Goole are exactly multi-ethnic, the common factor is almost certainly a fear of radical Islam perversely twisted by white racist parties who want us all to believe that all Muslims are potential terrorists, a claim that is as untrue as it is dangerous.

However, both the conviction of a white supremacist of terrorist offences and the 3.5% vote gained by a racist party in the Henley by election, are at least in some measure a tragic legacy of the repeated public claims by both Labour  and Lib-Dem politicians that violence is a 'perversion' of Islam.

I have no doubt that such repeated comments by senior government ministers, including Jacqui Smith the Home Secretary and Hazel Blears the Communities Secretary are well intentioned. They doubtless see themselves as acting responsibly, aiming to avoid vigilante attacks on Muslims. But genuine responsibility needs to go hand in hand with truth.

The plight of Christians in Iraq

Robin Harris, a consultant director of Politeia and for many years an adviser to Lady Thatcher, has written an important piece for National Review Online on the plight of Christians in Iraq.

Robin makes a compelling case for the U.S., Brtain and the West to come to the aid of Iraq's Christian minority. The article is a must read for all who are concerned about the future of Christians in the country:

"America and her allies have now to decide whether they are prepared to see the imminent extinction of Iraq’s nearly-2,000-year-old Christian community. Such an outcome is not inevitable, but it would certainly be irreversible. If ever there were a test for the West’s - and America’s - Christian conscience, this is it."

In defence of Hug-A-Hoodie

Danny Kruger has written a defence of the infamous speech (read/watch) about youth crime that he wrote for David Cameron. A few paragraphs doesn't do his argument justice but this is the essence of it:

"This speech has gone down in Tory lore as a terrible blunder, but I am still rather proud of it. The nub of it was, that while we should certainly punish people who cross the line into criminality, on this side of the line we need ‘to show a lot more love’.

Love is a neglected crime-fighting device. But the need for it is powerfully proved in Felicity de Zulueta’s important book From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness. She argues that violence and hatred are not motive forces of their own: they are the terrible expression of wrecked relationships, of thwarted love."

He's completely right. The 'tough love' of punishment can be a blunt tool without the encouragement that  'soft love' brings, and saying so doesn't mean you're some kind of detached-from-reality, soft-on-crime, "Hello Sun" morally relativist liberal (ask Lord Tebbit). David Davis' line that "I also would like to hug a hoodie but for rather longer and harder" was guaranteed to go down well at Party Conference, but it's not the solution.

I'm a bit of a righteous have-a-go-hero when it comes to dealing with things like "the spit-filled mouth of the little rat-faced boy who punched me" that Danny described. But dealing with youths at that stage of waywardness is merely using a reactive stick, when a proactive carrot earlier on could have done the trick.

That's not to say there's no hope at that stage. There's always a hope if people are given a second chance. I happen to be going to a play on knife crime tonight (wearing one of my hoodies, in fact) performed by ex-cons and organised by the small charity Danny left David Cameron's office to run with his wife. It works as much by forming relationships between the charity workers and the convicts as by them applying themselves to the discipline of acting. Danny certainly practices what he preaches.

Re: One reason Labour may have come fifth

In comments on my last post, some say that they are relatively unperturbed by the Equality Bill. Only where candidates are equal in all respects will discrimination against men and white people be permitted, they argue - and even then it will be entirely voluntary.

But Andrew Lilico showed yesterday just how naive it is to think that the provisions of this bill allowing sex and racial discrimination will be genuinely voluntary. Recent history certainly backs up his point: just five years after it became legal for unmarried and same sex couples to adopt, it became illegal for religious institutions not to be willing to hand over children to couples unable to provide a mum and a dad.

Not wishing to gloat but...

...are you still "feeling good" this morning, Lord Ashdown?

One reason Labour may have come fifth

Peter Briffa notes that the BNP could not have hoped for better timing for the announcement of the mislabelled Equality Bill:

Not a good day for the one-eyed Scotsman. Beaten by the BNP. What is so encouraging about this is that they, as the current parlance has it, still "don't get it".

Getting the lovely Ms Harman to announce a policy of persecuting the indigenous white working class on the day of the vote was indeed a masterstroke. Hats off to the sisters!

Samir Shah forced to resign from BBC

Not.

Samir Shah, a non-exec director of the BBC, pointed out this week that while ethnic minorities were largely absent from the top ranks of the BBC, there was a tokenistic over-representation on screen.

Mr Shah said that politically-correct broadcasters often "over compensated" by bombarding programmes with black and Asian faces - so much so that "even ethnic minorities are slightly embarrassed by the plethora of brown faces they see on the screen".

"It's almost impossible these days to find a television news programme that doesn't have a black or Asian presenter as part of the team - even in areas of Britain where black and Asian faces are quite thin on the ground among the population as a whole," he told an audience at the Royal Television Society in London.

A planning inquiry

I hadn't paid as much attention to the new Planning Bill as I should have done, but Camilla Cavendish's article changed that this morning. See Jackie Ashley as well.

There's a genuine tension here: we all want better national infrastructure, until it starts being built on top of our own community. Securing local democracy v. streamlined planning processes that don't last for ever and over-enrich my former colleagues at the bar. By all accounts, it's a tension reflected on our front bench (see here and here).

Camilla Cavendish makes a compelling case that government indecision is at least as much a cause of delay as the current planning laws. Conservatives were absolutely right to oppose this Bill, which makes central government even more powerful and even less accountable. Planning is highly political, and should not be sub-contracted out to yet another Quango.

This would have been a good opportunity for the Party to show that it no longer automatically sides with Big Business, without picking an unnecessary tokenistic fight.  But we haven't made very much of this, possibly because of the internal disagreements that were apparently obvious quite literally on the front bench of the Chamber. If we are going to take a stand for local democracy, we need to be clear about what our own streamlining proposals are. If this Bill gets through the Lords, what changes will we make to it when we get back to government? And can our front benchers do some joined-up and accountable planning too, so that they manage to agree and then hold a public line?

League of Democracies

This will infuriate some of the "hug-a-bureaucrat" bloggers on this site, but I am going to say it anyway. There are several elephants in the room at the moment that we don't like to talk about. One is radical Islamism (the political agenda, as distinct from the religion of Islam which has many interpretations, some of which entirely peaceful and law-abiding and decent). I have written about that several times on this site. But another elephant in the room is the UN. And with both the rise of radical Islamism, and the disfunctional uselessness of the UN, if we continue to ignore them out of political correctness, one day both these elephants-in-the-room with either sit on us and squash us, or pick us up by the trunk and smash us against a wall. The first will do so aggressively; the latter unwittingly. Best to address the elephants now before their tusks grow too big.

It is the second elephant, the UN, that I concentrate on today. Ban Ki-moon is a limp figure who fails to inspire any confidence at all. At least with Kofi Annan one had some reassurance that he cared. Ban Ki-moon is becoming a joke. But to be fair, Ban Ki-moon is not the key problem. The UN is only as good as the sum of its parts. And China, Russia, the Asian nations and the African nations have for too long been at best pathetic and at worst complicit with some of the world's worst tyrannies: Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan in particular. The crisis in Zimbabwe shows this clearly. The crisis in Burma last month was an almost identical echo of the same plight. The Spectator sums it all up very well in an editorial this week.

An alternative to more Heathrow misery?

Matthew Sinclair questions the campaign against a third runway at Heathrow.  He says, rightly, that the proper question is whether there is a feasible alternative.  This is a vital issue not only to quality of life in London and Westwards (the flights literally disturb the Queen's peace), but to the future strength of the economy. The idea of the £13 Bn airport in the Thames estuary seems a bit dotty to many - and it would be such a big project there are concerns it will end up with cost over-runs and generally be a mess.

So let's have a debate.  Here's an idea I've been mulling. We move some of the excess business flight capacity from Heathrow to Gatwick.  We then move an equal amount of the holiday charter flights Gatwick does to Manston in East Kent.  "Manston?" I hear people say, going puce and choking on their cornflakes, "what a loony idea!" Maybe not.  With the fast link out of St Pancras to Ashford and re-signalling from Ashford to Manston it could be possible to get there in 45 minutes at a cost of around £500m. Manston has a runway long enough to take the concord. It's underused and, done sensitively, could be a welcome boost to the East Kent economy.

There.  I've stuck my neck out.  What do Centre Right readers think and what other alternatives might be possible and practical without breaking the bank?

I am running for President

"The Alex Deane phenomenon"

Bob Ayling

I'm not sure if I have a clear answer to the question of whether Heathrow should expand.  There is a reasonable case to be made that Heathrow itself might not be the ideal place to expand.  However, I have no sympathy whatsoever for hysterical and joyless campaigns against flying itself and am well convinced that more capacity in the region is necessary.  As such, the proper question is whether you have a feasible alternative in mind.  Vague speculation about new airports in Kent just isn't good enough.  No responsible conservative should make the same mistake Labour made over energy and road building; using green politics as an excuse for failing to confront difficult questions until a crisis is at hand.

The coalition opposing the new runway is an uncomfortable one.  It is split between those wanting new airport capacity elsewhere so they do not have to face aircraft noise and those who want to inconvenience people into taking fewer flights.  If the Conservatives oppose the runway they will have to, if they form a government, dissapoint one of the two groups who will either resent poor service and delays at the airport or accuse them of green heresy.  Opposing the third runway without a clear alternative, set out in advance, is risky.

What really worries me is the possibility that the party is taking Bob Ayling's opinion on the matter seriously:

"The Conservatives have moved more firmly against a third runway after the former BA chief, Bob Ayling, came out against the big increase in transfer passenger[s] for causing "Heathrow hassle"."

The man responsible for the disastrous 'dirty tricks' campaign against Virgin, the ethnic tailfins which infuriated British and North American customers alike and a failed merger with American Airlines.  He was then forced to resign as head of the company running Millenium Dome because of a poor performance controlling costs.  He's the private sector's answer to Sir John Gieve.