CentreRight

Fleet Street seeks a "Tory Euro Row" where none exists

There is absolutely no reason why yesterday's announcement on the EPP should - or will -  cause divisions inside the party on the subject of Europe.

But this hasn't stopped a number of my friends on Fleet Street desperately trying to create a good old "Tory Euro-row".

The Observer's Toby Helm, for example, has blogged that it "may lead to trouble with Ken Clarke".

And this morning's Daily Mail, of all papers, suggested that the move "risked creating a damaging divide".

What must be remembered is that David Cameron pledged to do this as part of the platform on which he stood for the party leadership in 2005, which - I seem to recall - he won with a rather convincing mandate of the party membership.

And whilst it has taken longer than some of us would have liked for him to get round to putting this promise into action, it has always been on his agenda - and Ken Clarke knew that when he joined the shadow cabinet the other week.

As far as I can tell, the only murmurings of public dissent on this have come from retiring MEPs who - with the greatest of respect - are hardly household names or representative of the views of the party at large.

---

6.30pm update: I have just received a statement from Ian Taylor MP, the chairman of the Conservative Group for Europe, in which he - whilst describing the announcement as "disappointing" - accepts that it was "no surprise".

Loss of local newspapers is bad for local democracy

Yesterday's decision by the Guardian Media Group to cut 95 jobs across its Surrey and Berkshire local papers and close two papers altogether should worry everyone concerned about local democracy (and not just me as one of the local MPs affected). So far more than 50 local papers have closed during the current downtrun. They are just the latest in a long line of media industry victims of the recession, but the implications are potentially more far reaching.

Local democracy is a shadow of what it should be in Britain, but for it to flourish local media is essential. How else will local electorates be able to choose their mayors in the cities a future Conservative government hopes will opt for direct elections? In the absence of a proper local TV sector in this country (one of the biggest failings of broadcasting policy) we totally depend on local radio and local newspapers. Both are in crisis. The former are hamstrung by cross ownership regulations set for the pre-internet era, and the latter have been crucified by the loss of classified advertising to websites like eBay.

What needs to happen? The only future for local papers is to be able to offer advertisers the best possible way of reaching locally-defined audiences. That means expanding beyond their traditional print bases to online, radio and TV. That in turn means looking at the media ownership regulations that often make this very hard.

Despite the urgency of the situation, the plight of local papers only got the briefest of mentions in the government's Digital Britain report. How many more will need to close before it sits up and takes note?

Knowledge, size and incentives, not chocolate

A Scottish family doctor will today call for a tax on chocolate at a medical conference north of the border. Without getting distracted by the cultural anomaly of a Scot asking to pay more, isn't this a gimmicky suggestion instead of answers to three far more fundamental questions?

One is that many people have no idea of the nutritional value of food and there is a dearth of knowledge about what constitutes a balanced diet. One of my patients once proudly told me about all the fruit she ate, but that was in between her main meals and on top of rich puddings! There's been talk of more 'food technology' in schools to educate kids - but how many of the new school builds have allowed for this.....?  And isn't it the parents who supply the fizzipops and crisps that they eat for breakfast as they walk to school?

Two is that we don't realise how many calories there are in the portions we have - and this is where he does have a point about chocolate, but check out pizza and wine and pies too - are we going to tax all of these [more?]. Surely it's about size of portion as there has been an American drift in the sizes of portions that we eat and a concurrent reduction in the distances we walk. Maybe there is too much public transport?

And thirdly, there has to be an incentive to eat less. It used to partly be the shame at being obese, being thought of as being greedy. Can we regain a sense of shame in a society that embraces relativism? What other incentives are there?

The Scottish doctor's suggestion is really a plea for help; chocolate tax isn't the answer but we have to come up with others.

Brown and the EU must be blamed for the increasing number of jobs going abroad

Gordon Brown and the European Union have decided to continue their policy of exporting jobs out of Europe. No reason was given, but previously they said that companies should pay their fair share of tax and that European workers deserve a high level of social protection. This results in fewer jobs and less tax revenue. Less is more for Brown and the EU.

Brit Insurance (a Lloyds of London insurer) announced yesterday that it will move its headquarters to the Netherlands. In 2007 BI paid £36 million in taxes and believes that the move to Holland will reduce its bill to £6 million.

Brown’s persistent haziness about his plans for companies’ foreign profits has disastrous effects. It is feared that a change in those tax rules will result in a dramatic rise in taxes.

Any reader disagree with Iain Martin?

"A quick counterfactual. What would have happened if a bunch of BNP scumbags attempted to picket outside a mosque in Luton? How long before they were told, quite rightly, to move along and failing that bundled into the back of a police van? About 30 seconds, I suggest."

Source.

Abolish the right not to be tortured

If a government believes that it creates a right, then it will also believe that it is entitled to modify that right.  This is how we should understand the shameful discussions of recent years over when it might be legally permissible to torture someone, to render someone to another country so he can be tortured, to deport someone to another country knowing that he might be tortured there, and when our courts should accept evidence obtained under torture.  Since New Labour believed that it created the right not to be tortured with the Human Rights Act, it also believes that it can modify that right.

The solution is not to create some new "British Bill of Rights", for the problem is not that there is something wrong with the details of the Human Rights Act.  The problem was the whole concept that it is for governments to create and modify the right not to be tortured.  Thus, the solution is to give up that idea - to abolish the right not to be tortured.

Insofar as it makes any sense to talk of our having "rights" not to be tortured, these are morally or divinely or naturally given.  They are not creations of governments, and governments cannot take them away or modify them.  As far as a government is concerned, the question is not "Do my citizens have a right not to be tortured?"  Rather, it is "Will I allow my citizens to be tortured, and if so, when?"  I should not have a government-given right not to be tortured.  Instead, I should have freedom from torture which begins as a state of nature and is not eroded by the government permitting anyone to torture me.

"I come to bury Brown"

My one-time CCHQ colleague Rupert Darwall has an article with this title in today's Wall Street Journal, and bury him he certainly does:

Mr. Brown's refusal to acknowledge what is now plain has propelled him to develop an alternative explanation which absolves him of responsibility. What is to blame, he says, is the absence of an international system of early warning signals (although he had a domestic warning system which he ignored) and a global banking regulator. This is the message he took to Washington last week, and it will form a centerpiece of next month's G-20 meeting in London.

Yet a moment's reflection shows that these proposals would have made the problems even worse. International synchronicity is deepening the global downturn. What need strengthening are the circuit breakers and fire walls provided by national regulation. But anyway, that is to miss the point of the exercise -- which is to use the presence of international leaders in London as stage props in Mr. Brown's narrative of self-exculpation.

Go read the whole thing.

Regulation and the financial crisis

Eamonn Butler recently wrote an article for the Times arguing that regulation's role in creating the financial crisis has been underappreciated.  Chris Dillow has responded arguing that, as banking crises have been a feature of economic life since the Industrial Revolution, this is a bit of a red herring.

The problem with the argument Chris puts forward is that he is conflating the relatively high frequency of banking crises around the world with the systemic stability of the British financial system.  While banking crises may be fairly commonplace the modern British financial system has actually been quite stable.  The last serious deposit bank failures were in 1878 when the City of Glasgow Bank and the West of England & South Wales District Bank failed.  That means there is an important question to be asked about why a system that has been quite stable for more than a hundred years has failed on such a spectacular scale; we can't just put the financial crisis down to the inherent instability of the system and do need to work out what went wrong.

That's where a report I wrote last year comes in.  It put forward a comprehensive account of how inept regulation and poor policy choices drove the financial crisis.

Public Health confidence booster

Everyone who reads these words has benefitted from the top two Public Health measures of all time: clean water and vaccination. While clean water is still de riguer, vaccine conspiracy theorists continue to threaten the health of the nation with spurious stories that simply reflect the need to blame something for poorly understood diseases. Yet the truth remains - millions of lives are saved every year through immunisation.

In 2020health's new report out today Not Immune: UK vaccination policy in a changing world we make the case for strengthening the role of the vaccine decision making body in the UK, the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation). Although the high profile that Andrew Lansley, shadow health secretary, has given to Public Health is superb, we disagree with the Conservative Party's suggestion that vaccine decisions should be moved to NICE [which assesses medicines and medical devices]. The complexity of decision making about vaccines, the fact that the JCVI covers the whole of the UK [whereas NICE just covers England and Wales] and the controversy surrounding some of NICE's decisions would, we felt, jeopardize the UK's successful immunisation programme.

However there is considerable room for improvement in the way the JCVI works regarding horizon scanning, speed, transparency, industry relations and cost-effective analysis. One of the most important changes would be to make the JCVI meetings public. Openness in health and science policy making, as well as the involvement of patient groups could only boost confidence in the decision making process. They shouldn't be immune from public scrutiny and we should for ever be grateful to Jenner and his milkmaids.

The UK banking system is past the worst

So says Allister Heath over at City AM (article not online).  I've linked to his work before but I thought this quite an eye-catching claim - so here's the article in full.

City banks have finally turned a corner

IT is not fashionable to say so but the UK banking system is past the worst. True, several institutions have been turned into pathetic state-owned zombies and the road ahead will be tough for all. But banking conditions are improving, the system has been stabilised, losses contained and some visibility restored. The outlook for the banking sector is far healthier than just six months ago, when it looked like the UK could be hit by several Lehman Brothers-style catastrophes. Such a doomsday scenario now fortunately seems remote.

The Miners' Strike

Anyone else sick of the very frequent, dewy-eyed coverage of the anniversary of the Miners' Strike on the BBC?  Entirely one-sided, pro-miner, anti-"scab", Thatcher-bashing guff set to Hovis-advertesque music.  Once again, we're being forced to subsidise our enemies.  To my mind, yet another reason to break that awful organisation up in the fullness of time...

On Capitalism

Capitalism is a system in which the providers of investment capital, the capitalists, are different people/companies from those that run/manage businesses.  That is its fundamental property.  (I focus here upon capitalism in its narrow investment sense, rather than upon the free markets that many consider the natural partner of capitalism.)

A private capitalist system (i.e. a system in which the capitalists are private citizens) is very attractive, for at least three kinds of reason:

• First, those that have money are not always those with the best ideas for how to use it.  Under a capitalist system, this does not prevent those with good ideas and talent from getting the opportunity they need.  If the provision of capital is diversified - if no one social group has control over the distribution of capital - as tends to happen under a private capitalist system, then a capitalist system is intrinsically the enemy of rigid class or caste structures.
• Second, under a private capitalist system most money tends to be invested depending on risk and return, rather than any other merit of projects.  This moral quasi-neutrality is a natural partner to a tolerant liberal society.
• Third, because those projects that will secure the highest returns can find investment capital under a capitalist system, risk-taking and innovation are facilitated.  This means that private capitalist economies tend to grow rapidly and evolve dynamically and richly (with a great variety of products and richness of ideas).

We are living in a parasite state which rewards us with sheer incompetence

By Douglas Carswell MP

The modern British state has many of the characteristics of a parasite; it grows and feeds off each of us.  Far from nurturing, it infantilises us and stifles society.

Ever more tax is collected from us to pay for the livelihoods of remote officials whose sole purpose is to tell us how to live our lives.  Tax is not simply too high, but at times seems designed to punish those who try to do the right thing.

Savers, taxed once on their income, must pay tax on their prudence.  Older folk, forced to pay for their long term care, find virtue penalised and a lifetime’s thrift ignored.  And after all that income tax, national insurance, road tax, VAT, license fee, petrol tax, what’s left over?  For many families, little more than pocket money.

Neither friend nor “facilitator”, what does the parasite state do for us in return?

Policy Exchange has been rebranded

Following the link from the piece written in the Local Government section by Policy Exchange's Ben Caldecott about litter this morning, I was taken to the Policy Exchange website, and notice that it has gone through something of a redesign.

Indeed, the organisation's logo has changed considerably, as is shown by the before (above) and after (below) images on the right hand side.

Gone are the thin orange letters (a geek out there will know which font it was) all of which were lower case and featured arrows on the 'x'; and they are replaced with bolder black lettering - capitalised - and adorned with a saltire to boot.

I rather like it.

Twittering

Peter Whittle and Nadine Dorries won't approve but I've been 'Twittering' now for just over two months. 

Twitter is, of course, full of a lot of people telling their mates that they've had too much to drink / are about to walk the dog / are looking fwd to fisn'n'chips for tea but it's not just personal trivia.

I use Twitter to alert 'followers' to interesting newslinks.  This is my latest update (on Barack Obama's foreign policy priorities):

The most useful things about Twittering are seeing other people's updates (MediaGuardian's feed is brilliant for following developments in the, er, media) and having an avenue to report things that don't merit a full ConHome post (or I haven't got time to blog) but are still worth communicating.

Most people seem to note my Tweets from the ConHome frontpage but please click here if you'd like to 'follow me' directly.

Fact and Fiction

Hackney, Sunday morning: two men flicking through the papers

-- What do you, ah, think about this Julie Myerson woman?

-- Who?

-- You know, this woman novelist, she's written a book about throwing her son out the house for taking skunk?

Friendly fire only helps the enemy

The front page of the New York Times has a profile of new Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele.

Its title: New Chairman Boos G.O.P. When He’s Not Cheerleading.

Here's a key paragraph:

"Most chairmen wave the party flag; Mr. Steele smiles and shreds it. A man of constantly colliding analogies, he compares Republicans to drunks in need of a 12-step program and to the mentally ill. He has insulted Rush Limbaugh and moderate Republican senators alike, and he has promised a “hip-hop makeover” that would attract even “one-armed midgets” to his party."

Earlier in the week Mr Steele appeared to agree with an interviewer who said last year's Republican Convention reminded him of a Nazi Party rally.

All this reminded me of Theresa May's "nasty party" remarks when she was our own party chairman.  Some modernising Tories have always wanted to declare war on their party.  Former leadership candidate Michael Portillo once wrote this:

"The Tory benches are full of repellent figures whose faces, demeanour and speech turn voters from the party. They have to be dealt with.  Cameron’s success will not be judged by whether he can lead a quiet life. It will be measured by the blood that he spills. If he is brutal enough, the silly questioning about his policies will go away."

Fortunately David Cameron ignored Mr Portillo's bloodthirsty advice.  David Cameron's success owes a lot to the fact that (with one or two rare exceptions) he has shunned attacks on his own ranks.  His fire has been rightly directed at Labour and his real opponents. 

Michael Steele should follow the Cameron rather than the Portillo model.  Attacking the Republican brand will not only exacerbate the brand's problem but will worse still, add disunity to the Republican Party's problems and all electorates hate fractious, disunited parties.

Sir Paul Judge's "Jury Team" is hardly Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party

Former Tory director general and ministerial adviser, Sir Paul Judge, has written in this morning's Sunday Times about Jury Team, the new political party he is launching.

Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show this morning he confirmed that he is no longer a member of he Conservative Party - although the Electoral Commission figures show that he donated £6,000 to the Conservatives as recently as October 10th last year.

The premise of this new party is that political parties are a bad thing, since the party machines and whips wield too much power.

As such, the slate of candidates he intends running for the European elections and future elections will all be Independents with no manifesto and no policies apart from a belief in "our principles of good governance".

Many of those principles are to be applauded, such as wider use of citizen's initiatives and selection of candidates by means of open primaries.

But the idea that political parties could disappear and a democratic country of more than 60 million people be governed by a hotch potch of random people with assorted views on absolutely everything is utterly unrealistic.

Even more absurd is the notion of running a "party list" of Independents at the European Parliament election.

Whilst that electoral system is far from ideal, Independent candidates surely should be by definition exactly that - independent individuals each fighting on their own ticket. Why would anyone vote for the Jury Team party list of candidates when the individuals on the list are all liable to have completely different and opposing views on the whole range of issues of the day?

When another former Conservative, well-heeled knight founded the Referendum Party, he had a very simple message on one policy which was easily articulated. As a result, Sir James Goldsmith successfully garnered hundreds of thousands of votes at the 1997 general election.

Excuse my scepticism, but I cannot see this project having anything like that kind of electoral impact.

The most expensive cocktail party in history

"The most expensive cocktail party in history" is how Michael Fallon rightly characterised the discussion between Gordon Brown and Sir Victor Blank, Chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, over drinks in September of last year.  It was at this cocktail party, just a few days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, that Brown strongly urged Blank to have Lloyds absorb HBOS (which was on the verge of collapse).  Brown dangled the carrot of waiving anti-competition law.  With Brown breathing down thier backs, Blank and his team spent less than a week looking at the books of HBOS, and were effectively left with little choice by the government.  It was a decision that would lead to its own collapse within months and, eventually, will contribute to the collapse of Brown's government.

Brown was the father of the tragedy at Lloyds - responsible for taking a relatively decent bank that avoided many of the policy mistakes of RBS and HBOS, and forcing it into a shot-gun marriage of death.  Lloyds too has now effectively collapsed with the government taking a majority stake of up to 77%.

The country's leading trade unionist is re-elected with the support of less than 5% of his comrades

News comes in this afternoon that Derek Simpson - the trade unionist who was revealed last weekend to have been staying at London's Waldorf Hilton hotel in a £399-a-night suite - has been re-elected Joint General Secretary of the Unite trade union.

In a four-way contest, he won by securing 38% of the vote, which is not much less than the percentage a general election-winning party usually gets.

But this was on a turnout of a mere 12%.

88% of Unite's eligible members could not be bothered to vote.

So next time Mr Simpson pops up on our TV screens, just remember that fewer than one in twenty of his members voted for him to "represent" them.

---

Sunday update: The full result is now up on the union's website and turnout was in fact 14.5%, menaing that Mr Simpson's mandate is in fact a whopping 5.48% of his members...

"Britain says open to talks with Lebanon's Hezbollah"

"Britain says open to talks with Lebanon's Hezbollah".

I wonder what message Hamas will take from this?

Could the next election be the end for the Labour Party?

In a spirit of idle weekend speculation, I offer you the following thought: Perhaps the Labour Party will never (say for at least two generations) win a British General Election again.

Quantitative easing - the practice

As widely reported, the Bank of England is intending, over the next three months, to purchase some £75bn of assets - mainly gilts - in an operation of quantitative easing (i.e. printing money).  The right-wing press and blogosphere seems highly disconcerted by this, even in some cases outright opposed.  I think it is right to be nervous about this policy, and I shall propose a refinement, but I support it nonetheless.

Talk of printing money (which is broadly the right way to describe what is happening) is liable to make us imagine that the Bank of England is increasing the money supply.  Consequently, of course, we suspect that that will lead to inflation.  Inflation may be a kind of solution to our woes - inflating away our debts - but (one might think) might the medicine not be worse than the disease?

Who has Ken Clarke branded an "idiot"?

Ken Clarke is well known for being a politician who tells it like it is and doesn't mince his words.

And he was on top form when interviewed by the Manchester Evening News during a visit to Bury yesterday.

You can watch a video of the interview here, during which he says (forty seconds in):

"The Bank [of England] is going in for quite drastic measures of an unprecedented kind, which some idiot has called quantitative easing."

But who exactly is he branding an "idiot"?

I'm not sure whether the phrase in question originated from someone at the BoE, the Treasury or Number Ten - but whoever it was, I doubt he'll be repeating the comment in the Commons. I fancy that "idiot" is still regarded as unparliamentary language.

Matthew Elliott's great work has only just begun

Yesterday evening the TaxPayers' Alliance celebrated its fifth anniversary.  I remember talking to Matthew Elliott when he was first raising money for the TPA.  I remember his excitement when the first thousands came in. Since then he, and a great team, have put the TPA into the elite of Britain's pressure groups.

Matthew has a rare combination of intellectual ability, ideological clarity and personal charm.  He could earn a fortune in the private sector.

I hope he won't be leaving for a private sector job any time soon.  The TPA is needed now more than ever.  The British economy can't afford higher taxation without risking a massive flight of brain and capital.  Yet, yet, yet the pressure, in 'Bankrupt Britain', for massive tax hikes in the coming years is going to be enormous. Even instinctively tax-cutting Tory MPs can't be relied upon once they become part of Whitehall spending ministries and advocates for their departments' mission and staff.

The TPA is the British taxpayers' best ally.  Matthew's team must continue to lead those of us who believe that the inflated level of public spending is the much greater problem and only when a government has embarked on a programme of public sector waste reduction and public service reform should there be higher taxes on already stressed-out families and businesses.  Tax rises are probably going to be necessary once we are out of recession but they can't be a first resort.

Matthew and his Chairman Andrew Alum have achieved a great deal in five years but their work has only just begun.