CentreRight

Upgrading our Armed Forces

James Norman is a Research Fellow at Policy Exchange.

The concerns contained in Liam Fox’s now, very public, letter to the Prime Minister, about the ongoing Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), reflect the difficulties faced by one of the Government’s biggest spending departments and the herculean task that will have to be performed to reach an acceptable financial settlement.

As much as both Mr Fox and Mr Cameron, would no doubt like to insulate the Armed Forces from the very tough choices needed to reduce the budget deficit, the sums involved simply don’t allow it. As the National Audit Office noted in December, the MoD has a £36 billion black hole in its procurement budget – contracts having been signed without regard for where the money to pay for them is going to come from.

Defence reviews are difficult enough when the public finances are in the best possible state; let alone when the Government has to borrow £500 million a day. They require foresight and realism in equal measure – the last one, conducted under George Robertson, had to be rapidly updated just three years later after 9/11. So what solutions might the National Security Council adopt when they finalise the SDSR?

In Upgrading our Armed Forces, a report published today by Policy Exchange, two recently retired senior officers, Lt. Col. Richard Williams and Lt. Gen. Sir Graeme Lamb, identify the key challenges faced by the Armed Forces and lay out some possible solutions.

For example, a significant increase in the size and role played by the Reservists would allow the Armed Forces to unlock the whole of the nation’s military potential and free up regular troops currently trained to use tanks and artillery for operations abroad. In the UK our use of Reservists is far lower than in other Western countries. Just 19% of our Armed forces are Reservists, compared to 38% in Australia, 41% in Canada and 49% in the US.  

The report also considers whether the Armed Forces are sufficiently focused on fighting ‘information age’, rather than ‘industrial age’ wars; such as whether the MoD should be doing more to ensure that the basics of information warfare – like having sufficient bandwidth for operational commanders in Afghanistan and elsewhere to effectively manage all of their increasingly technologically advanced units – are in place or not. 

For the Armed Forces, the UK’s enormous deficit might well prove to be a trigger for real transformation- as opposed to the salami-slicing indecision of previous defence reviews.

Labour's back! (In the Unions' pockets)

“We’ve got our Party back!” proclaimed Lord Kinnock this morning, grinning manically as though he had set Labour off on some kind of hilarious boomerang adventure in April 1992 - swirling through some highly undesirable years of unprecedented electoral success - only to snap right back into his hands this week, as though it had never left. Welcome back, old boy!

Kinnock’s cri de coeur is a real double whammy: it offends the New Labour past (implying that the Party has been rescued from recent caretakers who are somehow alien to the movement; I'm sure they will all be thrilled) and, moreover, it stifles Labour's future (emphasising that the net effect of the leadership election has been to reverse, not to renew). Kinnock’s excitement reflects his characteristic misjudgment of the public, who found Labour most palatable when they weren’t “The Party” but were reaching further beyond. Eighteen years on and he still doesn’t “get it”.

But when you see Kinnock’s explanation for where this phrase comes from, the signs are worse still for Labour:

 "A trade union delegate leaned over and said 'Neil, we've got our party back'. I thought that was so accurate as an instantaneous response to the leader's speech."

The double-meaning appears to be lost on Kinnock. "We've got our party back" was not said by a long-in-the-tooth member warmly welcoming back Old Labour to the views of The Membership. It was said by a trade union delegate and thus appears rather to emphasise the Unions' new possessive rights over the leadership and the Party: "We've got our party back". Back in our pockets.  And well they have. After all, to paraphrase a headline close to Kinnock's heart, it was the Unions Wot Won It.

Tax competition between states is good

An Open Letter to John Christiansen, Director of the Tax Justice Network, from Roger Helmer MEP.

Dear John,

I heard your interview on the BBC World Service Radio this morning.  You were fulminating against the behaviour of multinational corporations who move their headquarters to favourable tax régimes.  You implied that this behaviour was damaging and immoral, and you urged, if not full international tax harmonisation, then at least international rules that would obstruct such relocation.  You argued that this behaviour denied revenue to national governments, and made us all poorer.

John, you described yourself as an economist, yet you fall straight into a first-year undergraduate economic error.  You assume that lower tax rates mean lower revenues.  In a static economy, this might be true, and indeed obvious.  But in a dynamic economy, economic actors are free to change their behaviour in response to tax incentives -- and they do.  As an economist, have you never heard of the Laffer Curve?  Don't you know that high tax rates inhibit growth and prosperity, and deter innovation, and entrepreneurship, and investment (including inward investment)?  And that high tax rates create a powerful incentive for avoidance or evasion?

Are you not familiar with the case histories?  In dozens of countries, over many decades, it's been demonstrated that lower tax rates will (counter-intuitively) actually raise total revenues.  When Ronald Reagan proposed reducing tax rates to increase revenues, it was a dubbed "Voodoo Economics".  But it worked.

The choice is, on the one hand, competitive taxes, growth, prosperity, investment, higher revenues and better living standards.  Or on the other, high tax rates, low growth, capital flight, emigration, relative poverty.  You seem to be on the side of high taxes and poverty.

You say on your web-site that Tax Havens create poverty.  No.  On the contrary, they serve a useful function in limiting the scope of other tax régimes to raise taxes too high, and in keeping them honest.

You describe tax competition between nations as "A Race to the Bottom".  No.  It's a race to growth and properity.  Here in the EU, MEPs love to talk about "Harmful Tax Competition".  But there is no harmful tax competition.  All tax competition is good.  All attempts at tax harmonisation are cartels operated by governments against the interests of citizens and tax-payers.

Best regards,

Roger Helmer MEP

The first duty of government

"We are agreed that the first duty of government is to safeguard our national security and support our troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere – and we will fulfil that duty." - David Cameron and Nick Clegg in their foreword to the Coaltion's programme for government.

This applies across government, even to the Treasury. It's necessary to remind ourselves of that, because of the way that the Strategic Defence and Security Review has been made subject to the Treasury's timetable this summer; it hasn't been allowed the time to be properly consultative or strategic. This is even more vital than would be usual given the utterly toxic nature of Labour's legacy in Defence.

One of the gravest charges made against Gordon Brown by the Conservatives was that as Chancellor he did not like the armed forces and saw no reason to make an effort to understand them, that on his watch the Treasury let down our armed forces in a time of wars. Combine that with Labour's failure to hold a full strategic defence review after 1998,whilst at the same time splurging on long-term contracts so that there are now unfunded defence liabilities of about £37 billion over the next ten years, and you get some measure of the mess the coalition has been left with. Clearing this up was bound to be hazardous.

To his credit, Goerge Osborne seemed to understand that in opposition and visted Afghanistan before the election. However it's far from clear that those good intentions have altogther successfully been carried into government.

It was to be expected that the review would pitch Army against Navy against Air Force, with defence contractors and backbench MPs of all parties joining in, and that the politics at that level would be hard-fought. However, with the extraordinary pressures that the coalition faces, it was vital that ministers stick together. That hasn't happened. Instead there have been briefings and black ops, some of them snidely personal. Personal calculation and animosity, rather than strategic consideration, seems to have been the order of the day, a recent example being last weekend's Sunday Times reporting that "Osborne's emmissaries" to the Liberal Democrat conference were briefing journalists against the Secretary of State for Defence. That's a dismaying return to Brownite tactics.

Liam Fox was entirely right to write as he did, and is justifiably appalled at the leak. It's ludicrous to say that this should not have been committed to paper: there's something badly wrong somewhere if the Secretary of State for Defence cannot write in confidence to the Prime Minister without it being leaked.

There are things the coalition can do to build public confidence in this process:

1. Extend the time allowed for the SDSR, allowing a contingency in the Comprehensive Spending Review if necessary
2. Set out, for public discussion, its vision of Britain's future global role and strategic interests, together with an analysis of the medium-term threats to our security (to the extent these are publishable)
3. Use the expertise of Parliament: the Defence Select Committee should hold public hearings; there should be a full day's debate in both Houses, attended in the Commons by the PM, DPM, and Chancellor as well as the Secretary of State
4. Ministers in all departments should demonstrate that they are approaching this in a collegiate spirit, with a shared recognition that their first duty is our security.

Comrades are confused about capitalism - they shouldn't be.

I listened to Comrade Milliband's tedious historical revisionism with interest: apparently New Old Labour are to become the party of enterprise and small business in order that wealth can be created and redistributed. With Comrade Milliband's remarks following so closely after Comrade Cable's denunciation of capitalism, I am reminded of Churchill:

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon. 

Comrades seem to understand that there is something wrong with capitalism, but they seem unable to say what it is.  Grotesque, long-since discredited Keynesianism, innuendo and ad hominem attacks fall somewhat short, in my view.

Let me try to explain, for if I find myself referring next week to Comrade Osborne's attack on unhampered social cooperation and his call for additional intervention, I shall wonder if we won the Cold War after all...

Allow me to explain with reference to systemic risk, what we want from a bank and regulation.

Systemic Risk

The brilliant intellectual edifice of Modern Financial Theory is founded on an incorrect assumption: market events do not obey a Gaussian distribution. Events which ought not to happen in the life of the Universe happen every decade or so. The point was made by Mandelbrot in the sixties, but passed over: see his The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets, Dowd and Hutchinson’s The Alchemists of Loss and Taleb’s The Black Swan for more detail.

The consequence of this error is that much of the debate regarding risk is on the wrong terrain. The failure of complex financial instruments intended to spread risk is a testament to the inadequacy of contemporary thinking. This must be revised but, at the very least, institutions should bear the cost of making this mistake.

The debate we ought to have is how we remove the apparatus of the state, which was predominantly responsible for turning local experiments into system-wide problems. Splitting investment and clearing banks is not the answer and the unintended consequences could well make the banking system even more volatile.

If we turn to the apparatus of the state in relation to banking, these are some of the problems we find:

• Central planning,
• Legal privilege including exclusion from general bankruptcy proceedings and otherwise unconventional application of the law of property and contract,
• Socialisation of the cost of failure, including deposit guarantees,
• Government monopoly of currency,
• A medium of exchange which is predominantly electronic bank credit combined with no effective restraint on the extension of credit by banks,
• A vast and inordinately complex system of regulations, not simple, effective law based on property rights and contract,
• Unsupervised, ad hoc intervention by governments in banking crises.

Crucially, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee attempts to “manage the economy” - the subjective choices and cooperative actions of millions of people - by controlling the rate of extension of bank credit. As with all central planning, this is bound to run into the Socialist Calculation Problem: even setting aside the inadequacy of so coarse a control, the necessary information to coordinate society centrally is simply not available.

Consider: 

• It is impossible to obtain, store and process the vast amount of practical information in the minds of different people. 
• Most of the necessary information is subjective, practical, tacit and non-verbal: it cannot be transmitted.
• Information which people have not yet discovered or created and which arises from the market process cannot be transmitted.
• Coercion — that is, regulation — prevents the discovery or creation of the necessary information.

Consequently, we find credit extended far in excess of real savings and the economy dis-coordinated through time as an inevitable result. Contemporary thinking around credit expansion and QE neglects their effects on the structure of the economy and the outcome is our present situation.

In banking and credit, the situation resembles that of the socialist countries of the former Eastern Bloc: central planning and legal privilege are endemic. It is therefore not surprising that we are living through the same inefficiency and failure which plagued command economies, ultimately causing their collapse.

What do we want from a bank?

We need three things from banks:

• A safe and efficient payments system.
• A mechanism for routing real savings into the hands of entrepreneurs, which is the only way to deliver sustainable economic progress.
• Other investment activity, including those activities necessary to meet consumers’ expectations for retail banking, such as interest rate swaps to provide fixed rate savings and loans.

We do not know the optimal size of a bank: that is something the market must decide. We should therefore reduce barriers to entry and allow all mergers. Consider microfinance: the entry costs to banking are low but the barriers are high. The proper role for politicians is to remove those barriers which hamper social cooperation in the market.

Similarly, regarding opening hours and other aspects of customer service, banks must be allowed to judge their customers' preferences and meet them accordingly in an unhampered market.

Finally, it is worth noting that the banks are simultaneously failing both savers and entrepreneurs. This is egregious.

Regulation

As my Cobden Centre colleague Gordon Kerr - a financial engineer - has not tired of pointing out (1,2,3), financial regulation is doomed to fail. For example, another of my City colleagues told me gleefully that they had figured out how to sidestep BASEL III over a weekend... All of these measures should be abolished: in the context of the problems sketched above, they are a waste of time and probably counterproductive.

It is good that bankers are intelligent, driven and innovative: they are merely operating a flawed system to their own advantage, which is to be expected. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal(£), explaining the present crony capitalism, it is the power of the state which has corrupted banking and consequently the entire economy. Persecuting bankers for the crisis is no more sensible than criticising farmers for the CAP.

Returning to Churchill, to restore the horse to health and repair a once sturdy wagon, we must introduce capitalism proper to the financial system. The answer is not more and more complex intervention by authority: it is simple, effective law based on property rights, contract and the principle that risks should be borne by those who may benefit from their rewards, not the taxpayer.

You can find ten plans which go in the right direction here. Comrades may be confused about capitalism, but they shouldn't be. 

See also

Riegel, The Right-Wing Socialists:

THERE ARE three classes of socialists: the left-wing, or Marxist, group, who believe that the government should own and control everything; the middle-of-the-road socialists, who believe the government should own and operate public utilities; and the right-wing socialists, who believe that the government should control only the monetary system.

The right-wing socialists are by far the most dangerous, because they are not known as socialists and call themselves capitalists, individualists, private enterprisers, etc. They even believe themselves to be anti-socialist and profess full faith in private enterprise. They are not only numerically the largest group of socialists but are also individually the most influential. Among them are the leading industrialists and mercantilists and bankers and statesmen.

The right wing socialists believe that with production and distribution facilities in the ownership and operation of private interests, and with monetary facilities in the hands of government, we can have free enterprise. They might as well believe that if a man owns an automobile, he need not worry about who or what controls the gas.

...

Scrap the Carbon Trust

I wrote over the weekend about the cost of quangos.  In that blog, I promised we would be campaigning for some of the bodies currently under review to be abolished in the run up to the Spending Review.

Today we're releasing the first of a series of letters calling for the worst wastes of money in the quango sector to be abolished.  In 2009/10 the Carbon Trust received nearly £118 million from the Department for Energy and Climate Change in its core grant.  Add in grants from other Government Departments and you get to a massive £156 million.

That money means handsome remuneration for staff.  It even means plans to expand into other countries, last year they advertised for a Head of Carbon Trust USA.  We would probably have more examples of waste but for the fact the Carbon Trust isn't covered by the Freedom of Information Act so we can't find out how they spend our money.

The Carbon Trust doesn't do much to achieve any concrete objective.  It doesn't address a real market failure, if large businesses (the ones the Carbon Trust works with) are able to save money by cutting their energy use then they will.  If they need advice, they can pay for it instead of the money coming out of the pockets of ordinary families.

There is more in the letter we have released this morning.

We'll be sending it to Chris Huhne.  And we are encouraging our supporters to contact him as well, urging him to scrap this huge waste of money.

Please do the same by e-mailing [email protected] or writing to him at:

Chris Huhne
Department of Energy and Climate Change
3 Whitehall Place
London
SW1A 2AW

Hopefully the Treasury and some of those sitting in the Star Chamber will listen too.

What kind of dad is that?

Ed Miliband's curious failure to register as the father of his first child is surprising in all sorts of ways.

"Too busy" is just not plausible -  we know this guy is ambitious, but no-one is so preoccupied with ascending the political ladder with that he can't find time to carry out this basic token of parental commitment. Or is he?

His partner Justine Thornton took the decision to register the birth alone-  yet presumably she was quite busy too, having recently given birth?

And it certainly throws a whole new light on the statistics about sole registration - previously assumed to be the preserve of single mothers wanting no further contact with the father of the child. Certainly that was the assumption underlying the 2009 Welfare Reform Act, passed by the government in which Ed Miliband served, which aimed to end the practice of sole registration. Requiring parents to register jointly unless "impossible, impractical or unreasonable",  the intention of the 2009 law was to promote the child’s best interests by ensuring that all fathers took responsibility for their offspring.

As Miliband's colleague Ed Balls explained at the time, putting your name on your child's birth certificate is an important part of that responsibility. Most of us assumed the legislation’s purpose was to stem the rise in welfare dependent mums and deadbeat dads. But maybe it was also about reminding career-obsessed left-wing politicians that there are some things in life for which "too busy" is not an acceptable excuse?

It's time for Charles Farr, Whitehall's top security adviser, to move on rapidly

By Paul Goodman

The Daily Telegraph reports that Charles Farr, Director-General of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, pledged support for an attempt by an extremist to enter Britain.

I've written previously about that extremist, Zakir Naik - whose website is commended by the group that carried out the Mumbai massacre.

Farr would have known before meeting Zaik's representatives that the new Government's policy is different from the old one's.  It seeks to target the causes of violence, not just the symptoms - that's to say, the extremist ideologies that help drive terrorist acts.  This is why Theresa May rightly decided to bar Naik from Britain.

The Telegraph's report is drawn from notes of the meeting made by Naik's representatives.  It's possible that they're over-stating their case.  But it's well known in Westminster and Whitehall that Farr doesn't always share the Government's view in relation to targeting extremism.

I've met Farr once.  He's very bright, extremely well briefed, and a testimony to the quality that the Civil Service can attract.  But in the eternal words of Margaret Thatcher: "Advisers advise, and Ministers decide."  It's time for Farr to move on rapidly.

Let me ask you that again

London's Southbank Centre has been refused Heritage Listing - for the third time in two decades.

Hurrah, I say - if listed, it would greatly diminish the chances of tearing down this Brutalist beast, crown jewel in the horrors of the Sixties, and starting again with something that doesn't look like the back of a Slovak swimming pool squatting eyesoreishly on prize territory by the Thames.

But regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the decision, why on earth is it being made, for the third time? And note that of course, when it suits, this is a one way process, and when it doesn't, it isn't: if the concrete bunkers had been listed, the re-evaluation to, er, "delist" the Centre wouldn't be opened for discussion until the answer changed, would it?

This is a discussion of wider public importance. It's akin to the Irish being asked to vote again on Lisbon. Why are some decisions judged by a (self-appointed) "elite" to be wrong, and required to be taken again?

I'm sure we'll see the Southbank Centre up for a fourth time 'ere long... 

Don't make Burma a partisan issue, David Miliband

Just before David Miliband's speech to the Labour Party conference, a very brave and inspiring young Burmese democracy campaigner whose father is in prison delivered an incredible speech. Wai Hnin Pwint Thon spoke passionately about her father, Ko Mya Aye, serving a 65 year prison term for pro-democracy activities. One of over 2,100 political prisoners in Burma, Wai Hnin's father is in poor health and is denied the medical treatment he desperately needs.

Wai Hnin spoke about the Burmese regime's sham elections, and said that they were designed to keep the regime in power. The only change there would be, she said, would be a change of clothing from military uniforms to civilian suits. She also spoke of the regime's continuing attacks on ethnic civilians in eastern Burma. She received a well-deserved standing ovation, led by Ed Miliband.

The Labour Party's decision to invite Wai Hnin to speak from the main platform at the conference at which they elected their new leader was a very welcome one, and is evidence that Burma is now an issue that is high on the agenda of all three major political parties. At last week's Liberal Democrat conference, the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats awarded Burma's detained Nobel Peace Prize winner and democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi honorary membership. And the Conservative Party has heard from Zoya Phan, International Co-ordinator at the Burma Campaign UK, from their main stage in 2006 and 2007. Burma is not a party-political issue in the UK - it is one which unites politicians of all parties, and rightly so.

Which is why David Miliband's remarks were so distasteful, inappropriate, profoundly ill-judged and just plain wrong. He accused the Conservatives of saying "not very much" on Burma. Excuse me?

In opposition, it was the Conservatives who for some years led the way in pushing Burma, at least until 2007. In addition to Zoya Phan's speeches to the Conservative Party Conference, David Cameron met another young activist from Burma, Charm Tong, in early 2006. William Hague shared a platform with Charm Tong, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission chose Burma as the subject for its very first hearing in 2006 and held a second Burma hearing at the beginning of this year, and when the Labour government dragged its feet over bringing Burma to the UN Security Council agenda, it was William Hague who pushed them to take action.

Several senior Conservative politicians have travelled to Burma and its borders, including the now Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell (who made an excellent youtube film about it) and the current Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow. Stephen Crabb is a passionate activist for Burma and chaired the All Party Parliamentary Group for Democracy in Burma. Nigel Evans slept in a tent outside Parliament alongside Burmese exiles in protest at the regime's suppression of democracy. So don't tell me Conservatives have nothing to say on Burma, David Miliband.

The Conservatives supported the establishment of a UN Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity before the Labour government, pushed for stronger targeted sanctions and called for increased humanitarian aid, including cross-border assistance to the ethnic peoples. When Zoya Phan's excellent book Little Daughter was published, William Hague spoke at the launch despite having just flown in from New York that day. I have been told that he read the entire book on the plane - surely a sign of commitment? When a debate on Burma took place in 2007 in the aftermath of the regime's brutal suppression of peaceful protests in Burma, William Hague insisted on opening for the Opposition, even though David Miliband was on paternity leave and his then junior minister Meg Munn was deputed to speak for the government.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister he did, to his credit, display a strong personal interest in Burma, and he gave the issue pro-active personal leadership. We are all grateful to him for that. Other Labour politicians have an outstanding record of commitment on Burma, particularly Glenys Kinnock. But for David Miliband to hijack the issue of Burma and try to score party political points is sour and opportunistic. He only acted on Burma as Foreign Secretary because Gordon Brown and William Hague were pushing him to do so.

Since becoming Prime Minister, David Cameron has given a clear commitment to continue Gordon Brown's work on Burma. Pledging support, not just friendship to the Burmese democracy movement, the Prime Minister has written an open letter to Aung San Suu Kyi promising to do "everything we can" to help them. When Burma was raised at Prime Minister's Questions, David Cameron said:

When I was in India I raised the issue of Burma with the Indian Government, because I think it is important that we talk to the neighbouring states of those countries and make sure that they are campaigning in the same way. ... we should be absolutely clear that the situation in Burma is an affront to humanity. Aung San Suu Kyi's continued detention is an outrage. She has spent 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest, and her example is deeply inspiring. All of us like to think that we give up something for democracy and politics; we do not. Compared with those people, we do nothing. They are an inspiration right across the world, and we should stand with them.

In contrast to David Miliband, I do not want to make this a partisan issue. I have worked closely with MPs of all parties on human rights issues and will go on doing so. I simply want to point out to Mr Miliband that his remarks were factually completely wrong and politically completely inappropriate. They showed a man who would use anything for personal political gain, even the suffering of the people of Burma and even having lost the leadership. Was he simply trying to outshine his younger brother who beat him in the leadership? If that is his mentality, he did not deserve to win the Labour leadership and we are all better off without him. Oh, and by the way, Wai Hnin is speaking at the Conservative Party conference next week, at a meeting organised by the Conservative Women's Organisation, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International. Would you like to come, David?

An open letter to NICE

Dear Sir/Madam/Other,

(Please excuse the ambiguity, but the civil service doesn’t know the number of transgender MPs, and I know this is a driving concern in certain sections of Government right now.)

Recent press reports show that your organisation is launching a report, endorsing money gifts to be handed out by the state to encourage people to get trim.

I can understand at a most basic level the logic in your thinking. You want people to look ship shape rather than the shape of a ship.

Currently, to continue the nautical theme, I am myself on a fairly even keel, with only a modicum of excess ballast. However, the inducements you are about to endorse run contrary to my own human rights, namely my right to get paid by the taxpayer for acting in my own self-interest too.

Having made a lifestyle choice freely in the past, it is obviously unfair for me to miss out on this state intervention in my pies. Of course, it is nonsensical for me to start eating in order to stop again; so under the principles already endorsed by for instance the Common Agricultural Policy, if you forward a giro to me straightaway, we can cut out the middle man, namely in this case the chocolate cake freezer of my local branch of Iceland.

Incidentally, I understand that grants have also been made available to help people stop smoking? I stopped smoking several years ago as I realised it was bad for me. The fact that I was on the Gauloises and the Belga was a bit of a pointer too. It would, of course, be very unhealthy of me to start it up again on a packet and a half a day, especially those nice ones I once got given at a reception at the Indonesian embassy which tasted of rainforest. If you could drop a line to the right people, I could do with that taxpayer money too.

I have heard about other schemes, like the juvenile offender who was sent to a Romanian bear sanctuary. I am not sure if this was a Michael Howard metaphor, and so am prepared to skip that one. But if there are other benefits on offer that reward my own freedom of choice, I should be delighted not to do all of them, for a price. Otherwise I’d be paying a subsidy on common sense.

Kind regards,

Lee Rotherham

Will Ed Miliband's "back story" impress voters?

Viewers of X-Factor will be familiar that contestants are not only judged on whether they can sing but also on their "back story" - their family and career background. I'm afraid it is a bit like that for politicians. It is not just about their policies and beliefs but also their background. David Cameron was attacked for having been to Eton. Margaret Thatcher attracted considerable interest when elected as Tory leader for being a woman and a grocer's daughter. John Major was the boy from Brixton. Gordon Brown the son of the manse.

What about Red Ed? He grow up in a big house in Primrose Hill, the son of a Marxist sociologist. He never had a real job - being fixed up with a post working for Tony Benn and then working for Gordon Brown. The only significant entry he gets in Tony Blair's memoirs was of Blair asking Brown not to mention a meeting to Ed - because Blair didn't trust Ed not to leak details to the press.

Some brotherly and friendly(ish) advice for Ed Miliband

Dear Ed,

Jolly well done on winning the leadership of the Labour Party.

Even I can see that it's a great achievement despite the fact that, as an evil Tory, I don't share your reverence for the Labour movement. I'm ashamed to admit I'm especially Philistine - I'll hear a Labourite waxing lyrical about the Party's concern for the common man and I'll think "What a load of self-serving cobblers," but then I'm boorish like that. I also have a tendency - which I know modern Labour abhors - to consider historical trends. They've rather put me off your lot too, what with the almost-but-not-really comical mishandling of the economy which has happened invariably under a Labour administration and, more recently, the flagrant lies and contempt for ordinary voters.

But I'm sure you will be different, Ed! How do I know this? Because you said so, incessantly, in your acceptance speech. I got the message loud and clear: change, change, change, change, we lost so we have to change, change, change, change. Powerful stuff. Dizzying.

In the spirit of co-operation (which is working rather well for your opponents - eek!) I thought I'd offer you some advice. It comes from a very lowly figure and not from a natural supporter, but I am a brother politico. Although I'm afraid I can't literally replace your brother. (Give him time Ed; he'll forgive and forget. Well, maybe. In fact you'd probably better dope him.) I can share some suggestions with you though!

Chris Mullin on Ed Miliband

By coincidence shortly before hearing that Red Ed was the new Labour leader I was reading about him in Chris Mullin's diaries Decline and Fall.

This is the entry for January 27 2009:

Members Lobby

As I was leaving thus evening Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Climate Change, bent my ear about tomorrow's vote on a third runway for Heathrow. 'The author of A Very British Coup wouldn't vote with the Tories would he?' I explained to young Ed, who despite his present eminence hasn't been with us all that long, that there is not a Tory lobby and a Labour one, but an Aye and a Noe lobby - and yes I would be voting for the Tory amendment since it reflected my views. He then attempted, ina tone that suggested exasperation,  to persuade me that the expansion was conditional on the toughest emission constraints in the world and they would be legally binding. To which I protested that the airlines would find a way round whatever constraints he saw fit to impose, as they had with all previous restrictions. Whereupon he walked off, shaking his head in disbelief at my naivety.

Northumbria Police decide Koran burning is illegal

Since the Rushdie affair more than 20 years ago, British Islamists have been campaigning to ban all criticism of Islam. This move has not been simply an emotional response to a deeply felt insult to their beliefs, but has been part of a wider agenda to introduce sharia into Britain. Their strategy to do this has been to increasingly align British law with sharia, either by a) pushing test cases through the courts; b) pushing for changes in parliamentary law; and c) lobbying for changes in the practices of public bodies such as the police.

Under sharia insulting the prophet is the most serious offence and carries a compulsory death sentence in countries such as Pakistan. An only slightly less serious offence is insulting or desecrating the Qur’an, which in Pakistan carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

Unfortunately Northumbria Police have just fallen hook, line and sinker for the "lets align British law with sharia" strategy by arresting six members of the English Defence League for burning copies of the Qur’an in a pub car park on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In a press release Northumbria Police stated that: "The arrests followed the burning of what are believed to have been two Korans in Gateshead on September 11". A police spokesman is also reported to have specifically stated that the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the YouTube video of their actions, but on suspicion of burning the Qur’an.

Let me say straight away that that this was both a foolish and an unnecessarily provocative act. The proposed Qur’an burning in the USA caused rioting over several days in Afghanistan, which resulted in several people receiving serious injuries. However, we are moving into very dangerous territory if the British police start to think that it is a criminal offence to burn a copy the Qur’an – or the Torah or the New Testament, however offensive those acts may be to the rest of us.

The actions of Northumbria Police have in fact played straight into the hands of the Islamists, who want to see any insult to the Qur’an made illegal in Britain precisely because it is one of the most serious offences in sharia.

Perversely, the overreaction of the police has also given a significant propaganda coup to racist groups. The police must realise that not only should they not be "making up the law" themselves on issues such as this, but that both Islamist and racist groups need the oxygen of publicity to survive – and that, unfortunately, is exactly what the police have just given to both groups.

However, what these misguided actions by the police do clearly demonstrate is that there is an urgent need for a root and branch review of how the police deal with incidents related to Islamism and protests – including those by racist groups – against it. Community relations will not be improved by the sort of naivety Northumbria Police have displayed in dealing with this incident, or the ensuing publicity they have given to racist groups.

The cost of quangos

Some eminently sensible people are a bit sceptical about the value of cutting quangos.  They look at the billions at stake in the debate over the welfare budget and the millions spent at the quangos seem a little immaterial.

There are a few reasons that this isn't the case.

The quango sector offers spending cuts that the public won't notice.  If the Sustainable Development Commission vanished tomorrow, then the next day Britain would continue to tick along quite nicely and no one would be too put out but the approximately fifty staff and their families.  By contrast, when cutting - say - benefit spending, the people receiving it will be upset if they face a tighter family budget than they did before. Any government looking to cut spending needs to take easy wins as well as addressing the big public sector budget.  Those millions add up.

Furthermore, the quangos centralise decision making and thereby get in the way of the fiscal decentralisation that could improve public sector efficiency and economic performance. In the report Wasting Lives I set out how most of an NHS Trust's spending is determined by central government quangos:

• Their decisions over which drugs to buy are expected to conform to guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
• IT expenditure is mostly handled by Connecting for Health which runs the National Programme for IT, the largest single information technology project in the world.
• Staff pay, the largest item of expenditure,62 is determined nationally by the NHS Pay Review Body.
• Amounts of funding are also set nationally according to a weighted capitation formula.

Finally, the quangos create work for themselves to justify their existence and lobby for changes in policy (often expanding their budget as a result). The Equalities and Human Rights Commission wrote in a three-year strategy document that:

“By 2012 the Commission wishes to have achieved the following key outcomes:

no regression in law from the levels of human rights protection and
mechanisms for enforcement under the Human Rights Act and other ratified
human rights treaties”

Why exactly should taxpayers who don't want the Human Rights Act and the ECHR that it enshrines have to pay for a campaign to keep both in place?

Slimming such bodies is never as effective as ending them. When pruned, no matter how severely, they'll always build their budgets again over time. Unless you cauterise the neck, the head always grows back.

The Sustainable Development Commission writes reports about why we don't need economic growth and otherwise does the same work as the New Economics Foundation but with £4 million in public money (incredibly, the NEF also gets taxpayers' money in grants).

It is great news that the Government are building a bonfire of the quangos. But they need to add a few more particularly egregious bodies currently under review to that fire. The TaxPayers' Alliance will be campaigning on a few particularly egregious examples - the Carbon Trust, Consumer Focus, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Office of the Children's Commissioner - over the next few weeks in the run up to the Spending Review.

Council tax snoopers are axed

Over on the Local Government page Harry Phibbs has covered the wider issues about today's news that council tax bands will not be re-evaluated in England. I want to take a moment to stress the privacy aspect of today's announcement.

Apart from the main announcement, which will save taxpayers up and down the country a fortune, Mr Pickles has announced an independent data audit of the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) aimed at protecting privacy and civil liberties as part of the Government's agenda of dismantling the "database state". Needless to say, Big Brother Watch welcomes this.

The VOA's inspectors assess properties' value for council tax purposes, and their collection of data on features of homes such as the number of bedrooms or bathrooms, whether it has a patio and whether it enjoys a nice view or is in a good neighbourhood, is seriously controversial - rightly so.

The VOA maintains that this doesn't/didn't matter as they've opted not to use their power to force entry to homes in order to fill their databanks with information about us. On the contrary - I do not believe that our privacy should be dependent on the goodwill - or the whim - of bureaucrats. Furthermore, it's unwarranted snooping whether or not the jobsworth actually crosses the threshold.

So - more power to your elbow, Mr Pickles.

(The obvious coda: I do hope that this announcement ultimately results in the appropriate action, not just yet another sounds-good-nothing-happens review)

Taking back the streets

Max Chambers is a Research Fellow in Policy Exchange's Crime and Justice Unit.

Taking Back the Streets, a series of reports published today by Her Majesty’s Police Inspectorate, should serve as a major wake-up call for police chiefs and those who are charged with holding them to account. The reports demonstrate that anti-social behaviour is often not seen as real police work and does not have the same status as 'crime' for the police. They show that although the public expects the police to take tough action to deal with anti-social behaviour, police forces across the country have consistently failed to take the issue seriously enough. Incredibly, as recently as January this year, a majority of forces did not even cite tackling anti-social behaviour as a priority issue. The police now regularly ‘grade-out’ so-called low priority calls, which means they do not get a police response – and many forces do not have systems which allow them to identify repeat victims such as Fiona Pilkington. How on earth did we get here, given record spending on the police and record numbers of police officers? 

As Policy Exchange argued in a report earlier this year, one of the reasons is the fact that the police have been performance-managed to death in the last decade. This has meant that the less quantifiable aspects of their job (patrolling, preventing, mediating, problem-solving – i.e. real policing) have become less attractive, and ASB has not been prioritised as a result. That’s partly why we’ve ended up with a completely ineffective response to anti-social behaviour (or criminality, as it used to be called) that largely involves council-issued warning letters and unenforceable ‘contracts’ designed to regulate behaviour.

However, it’s not just that central direction from the Home Office has disincentivised action to tackle anti-social behaviour. We have record numbers of police officers, yet because many officers are stuck in the police station, just 11 per cent of them are visible and available to deal with the crime on our streets. We have police authorities which claim to communicate community priorities to police forces, but the police appear to be routinely ignoring what people want. And we’ve had constant drives to improve public confidence in the police, yet the majority of victims of anti-social behaviour have little or no confidence in the police’s ability to deal with their problems. 

Although there is no magic bullet, we have consistently argued that strengthening police accountability – through directly-elected police and crime commissioners – would drive a radical change in policing culture. Replacing weak and invisible police authorities with a single individual with a strong mandate would make police forces and chiefs much more responsive to local concerns – especially anti-social behaviour. We all know that budget cuts are coming, but today’s reports also re-emphasise the need for public debate to move beyond the issue of how many police officers we have. The real question is what the police are actually doing. The public wants to see police officers out of their offices, out of their patrol cars and providing the kind of proactive, beat-based policing that would make a real difference to everyone’s quality of life.

A better read

As the fallout continues over the conference remarks by Chairman Vince, readers’ attention may profitably be drawn to another speech that was made around the same time.

President Klaus of the Czech Republic has been over in North America, and his latest forthright presentation can be found here. It’s a valuable if brief essay both on recent economic crises, as well as on competing models of European and global trade and integration. The macroenomics argument is succinctly put – don’t blame problems in the markets, on the markets. Cowley Street scriptwriters should take heed.

Adam Smith again gets a mention, though this time (to follow on from a point by Dan Hannan), the context is more accurately set. So if you are after a discourse to digest, on this occasion I suggest you slip the Cable and steer towards the further shore.

Why I'm baffled by High Speed 2

It grieves me to say it. It's well known that I'm a strong supporter of high speed rail, a fan of all things iron horse, but I have to say it: High Speed 2 is terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. It is to high speed rail what Heathrow is to air travel and what hospital food is to cuisine. Namely - it does the job but you don't need to be a genius to devise something better.

It thus comes as no surprise to me that the sixteen Conservative MPs whose constituencies it is set to slice through - four of them cabinet ministers and six more junior ministers - are angry. They're right to be angry, as are their constituents, particularly the owners of the 440 homes to be demolished to make way for the line. Looking at the route drawn up at huge taxpayer expense by HS2 Ltd you could be forgiven for thinking that the planners have simply drawn a wobbly line between two points, taking no account of the natural environment, existing infrastructure, homes or demand.

You'd also be forgiven for thinking that they have perhaps never travelled by train, as passenger convenience seems to be a low priority. You could even be as partisan as to suggest that the last Labour government who oversaw the planning deliberately targeted rural Conservative areas with their unimaginatively named controversy on wheels, though I of course would never do so... Whichever way you look at it however, HS2 - how I hate this trend of numbering rather than naming! - is in need of serious changes.

Part of the problem - and it's a problem with all parties sadly - is that politicians view railways as the answer to the wrong question. Maybe it's because gleaming new passenger trains in swish liveries and with plush seating and air conditioning are just so 'cool', the height of modernity, all sleek and stylish, and something they probably use themselves, but - with few exceptions - railways were not built for passengers. The railways were built for freight, freight was the mainstay of their income, and freight is the biggest opportunity for rail in the 21st Century. Railways are not the answer to long distance car use, they are the answer to road haulage.

It's not glamorous or photogenic, and it won't excite voters much, but if we're going to build a new railway network - and we must - the shipment of freight must be a bigger factor in design than high speed inter-city passenger travel between two distant places. Inter-city services in fact should come third in the list of design priorities after freight and commuters, both of which cause more strain on our transport infrastructure and are easier to crack as a business venture.

With this in mind it's not difficult to imagine a set of criteria from which to plot a route and to judge proposed routes. High Speed 2 should have maximum locations for road/rail interchanges, as used on the Channel Tunnel, allowing "roll on/off" freight; it should give the maximum number of towns access to the new line either through new stations or junctions with existing lines; it should minimise the route mileage constructed on green fields; and of course it must connect to High Speed 1 and Europe.

To quote a CGI meerkat, it's simples, which is why the proposed HS2 route so baffles me. Why does it not connect to HS1 at St Pancras? I know it's tempting to devise any reason to demolish the 1960s eyesore that is Euston Station - I will never forgive Macmillan for demolishing the original - but regeneration shouldn't trump good operations. Why has journey time between London and Birmingham been prioritised over reducing the journey time for more people by joining more towns to the line? Why has freight and the possibility of taking lorries off the roads been completely overlooked? And why does it slice through so much countryside?

I've tried to look positively on HS2, but I can't. It's a terrible plan for what should be a great railway. High Speed 2 can be a major improvement to our nation's transport infrastructure, but it should begin at St Pancras and run alongside the M1 and M6 - serving St Albans, Northampton, Coventry and Milton Keynes rather than just Birmingham - minimising environmental damage and allowing effective road/rail interchanges. To build any other route would be madness. Let us hope Phillip Hammond realises this.

Jo Grimond would have been a great addition to the coalition Government

The former Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond died in 1993. He would have been a great asset to the Government.

A flavour of his views can be read in Hansard.

Here he is in a debate on industrial investment in 1992:

I believe British industry bears an extraordinary burden in the form of our complex tax and accounting systems. For a brief period I belonged to an international organisation. It appears that foreign industry does not suffer from that handicap to the same extent. Again I urge the Government to simplify and reduce as far as possible the various taxes and other regulations which industry has to deal with.

Here he is in the same year taking a swipe at the EU:

Are we to be allowed to make our own regulations? Is he aware that I am informed that farm cheese made in Orkney cannot now be kept on wooden shelves? Shelves must be made of stainless steel. This, apparently, is a direction from Brussels. Surely this is the kind of matter which could be dealt with further down the democratic line, if it needs to be dealt with at all, rather than in Brussels.

Also lots of good stuff in praise of privatisation, competition and wider share ownership. He would have made a rather good Business Secretary.

Vandalising Tower Bridge

As often discussed on this site, it can be difficult to define what being a "conservative" (or a "Conservative") is. Indeed, as I write I realise that some readers will read this piece, think of the free market and capitalism, and think I'm off-beam. But in my humble opinion, one interesting and useful little litmus test might be - does this make you angry?

Tower Bridge Faces Future as 'Glorified Ad Hoarding' - The City says banners on famous landmark would be 'carefully chosen'

TOWER BRIDGE could be draped in advertising over Christmas if plans to sell space on the famous London icon get the go-ahead.

The 19th century bridge is one of the most recognised landmarks in London and traditionalists would likely protest at the idea of using it as a prop for ads.

But the people behind the proposal – The City of London Corporation – say that the scheme would be in good taste.

"The brand will be carefully chosen with preference going to Olympic sponsors and the brand will be tightly controlled," read a statement from the Corporation.

"There is no intention whatsoever that Tower Bridge becomes a glorified advertising hoarding. The City recognises and protects the bridge as a grade I listed building, a significant part of London's heritage and a global icon."

Behind the advert-plan lies what the Corporation calls a "one-off opportunity" in the form of scaffolding that is to surround the lower part of the bridge for essential painting work for three months this winter.

The idea is advert banners could be hung from the scaffolding.

Before the ads go up, the Corporation has to convince both neighbouring councils - Southwark and Lambeth – that it's a good idea.

Let's hope those Boroughs tell them where to stick it. And what exactly are we talking about? A little poster, perhaps? A small image decoratively done? Oh, no:

The official planning application to Southwark reads:

"Temporary advertising banner (12 weeks) attached to scaffolding shroud which will be erected to enable the painting works to be undertaken on the bascules (lifting sections of the Grade I listed bridge) both of which will measure approximately 39m long by 11 to 5.5m high each side."

Thirty-nine metres?!

Should you wish to express a view, the consultation process is open (until 6 October) here. Full piece here. Harrumph.

Patriots, not partisans

Max Wind-Cowie of Demos looks forward to Cameron's speech in Birmingham in two week's time.

Watching Nick Clegg's performance at yesterday's Lib Dem conference my mind began to wonder (surely I'm not alone in that regard).  I started to think about what David Cameron should say when it's his turn to appear, victorious, before his party faithful in two weeks time.

Of course, much of what Clegg said could easily have been delivered by Cameron - with the notable exceptions of his rather hysterical rail against school selection and his pointed references to 'our friends in Europe'.  The Labour bashing will go down better with true-blue Tories than it did with the Liberals, and the reality of our country's unsustainable debt became clear to us considerably sooner than it did to Cleggster, but the message was pretty much what we can also expect from the Prime Minister.  Labour dug us all into a hole; the coalition is tasked with digging us out.

And there are a myriad of successes that Cameron can point to.  From the abolition of the Audit Commission to the review of public sector pay, from welfare reform to the assault on NHS bureaucrats, the coalition has made astonishing progress in reshaping the British state to make it leaner and to remove its tentacles from aspects of day-to-day life where it has no proper place.  Progressive Conservatives are thrilled to see pay tariffs in the public sector on the agenda and pleased that free schools will be delivered in conjunction with a pupil premium to aid social mobility.  And Tories from all wings of our broad church should be thrilled to see the poorest workers lifted out of a pernicious tax system that has kept them in poverty and maintained an unnecessary dependency on Government generosity.

But, alongside listing the achievements of the Government, Cameron must acknowledge that this was not always the plan.  Clegg - along with other leading Lib Dems - is prone to presenting the Government as a pragmatic response to reality rather than a meeting of minds.  They accept, of course, that there are similarities but, as their collective response to Nick Boles' recent book demonstrates, they are more than keen to highlight the differences.  Whatever the truth of Clegg's motives in joining the Government, Cameron should not let him get away with claiming that this was a brave decision only on his party's part.  Team Tory could easily have avoided controversy and dilution of their policy agenda by going it alone as a minority administration.  It would have been tough, they would have struggled to pass vital legislation to reform the state or the tough measures needed to prevent bankruptcy, but it would have been tactically and politically sensible.  The other parties would have faced the choice of supporting a purist Conservative agenda or risk bringing the Government down, forcing another election and being punished at the polls.  Cameron could have re-fought the election in a year's time, on the demand to be allowed to finish the job. 

A true British hero - The man who broke into Auschwitz

Millions of men, women and children must have dreamed of escaping Auschwitz, to be anywhere but there, in the heart of darkness. But one extraordinary British prisoner of war, Denis Avey, dreamed of breaking in; to “know exactly what was happening there”, to record the names of the perpetrators and to save the lives of any that he could. 

The audacity and success of his plan, kept a secret for 65 years and recounted last night to a spellbound audience (including Iain Duncan Smith MP and Michael Gove MP) at the Holocaust Educational Trust Dinner in London, was a reminder that even when humanity was at its bleakest, its capacity for heroism remained boundless.

After a remarkable wartime career with the Desert Rats, surviving a sinking ship full of POWs as well as a year in an Italian prison camp, Avey found himself transferred to the notorious I. G. Farben Industrie factory near Auschwitz (the Buna Chemical Plant), which at its peak used over 80,000 slave labourers (including many prisoners of Auschwitz Concentration Camp) to produce synthetic oil and rubber for the Nazi war effort.

The British POWs who worked at the Plant would be instantly killed if they spoke to the “stripies” (the Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz), but Avey saw their unimaginable horrors on a daily basis: summary executions and mutilations, men who within weeks were reduced through hunger and exhaustion to a slow death, a baby beaten to death with an upturned pistol (“when I saw that, I died inside”). Avey remained stoic and silent as he had to, all the while conspiring with the other POWs to sabotage the chemical processes and metalwork that he was engaged with (“ooh we did them tremendous damage” he says with a twinkle). But on one occasion Avey’s stoic silence cracked as he yelled “untermensch” at an SS guard who he saw commit an unspeakable act of wickedness; for his insolence, he was struck with a pistol across his face and remains blinded in one eye.

“Some people became immune to it all,” said Avey, “but I just became angry”. His story thereafter is so incredible as to defy précis. Determined to witness the full horrors for himself, Avey hatched a meticulous plan to swap identities with a Dutch prisoner of Auschwitz. They swapped articles of clothing over many weeks, Avey shaved his hair off with a blunt razor, he carefully studied and copied the slouched bearing of the prisoners, and – somehow – he sneaked into Auschwitz on three occasions. "Conjecture is not a word in my vocabulary," says Avey, "I had to know. I wanted names".

Avey witnessed the inhumanity of the “selections” at Auschwitz Railway Station where people were parted from their loved ones and children, sent to gas chambers or to work with the pointing of a guard’s finger; he slept on the freezing wooden bunks with men and women howling and praying for deliverance; and, by the by, he slipped some cigarettes to a prisoner he befriended (Ernst Lobethal), invaluable tokens of exchange that he hoped would enable Ernst to survive on the cruel death marches across frozen central Europe.

Avey himself eventually escaped from a death march and he managed to survive and return to England. He sought out a lieutenant to explain what he had seen and learnt but he says the man’s eyes “glazed over” and, distressed that no one would believe his travails, Avey decided never to speak of it again.

It is our tremendous privilege that Avey finally began to recount his experiences seven years ago when invited to appear on BBC Derby to talk about war pensions. “It was cathartic really,” he says. The hosts were so taken aback at the tales they were hearing, Avey tells me that they cancelled the next two shows to allow him to carry on; now his life is to be recorded in a book called The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz. 

It was only once the BBC began to produce a documentary about Avey’s story that it was discovered that Ernst, the young Jewish prisoner whom Avey had befriended, had survived the death marches, having traded the Players cigarettes given to him by Avey to have his shoes re-soled. Ernst lived until 77years old in New York and before his death in 2002, he recorded the story of how a British POW he knew only as “Ginger” had saved his. When the BBC showed Avey the footage of Ernst - a "message from beyond the grave" - Avey just shook his head in silent disbelief before choking back the tears to say with characteristic understatement: “well, that’s bloody marvellous”.

Avey says he is embarrassed to be considered a hero and poignantly reflects on how he only acted on the ideals he had grown up with in rural Northern England. At 92 years old, he still travels around schools in deprived areas to teach children about his experiences and about the virtues of never turning a blind eye to acts of cruelty. We can only hope that the experience of meeting a man like Denis will inspire future generations to behave with similar courage and dignity. 

A Journey by Tony Blair

I had been looking forward to Tony Blair’s memoirs since he announced he was writing them, and I recalled what I’d read in Piers Morgan’s diaries.

“Aren’t all politicians’ memoirs boring?” Blair comments to his wife and to Morgan at one point. “Yours won’t be darling” she responds.

Cherie was right. I’ve read plenty of political memoirs and biographies and would recommend almost none. How often they read as no more than hundreds of pages of first person narrative journalism, “On 15th August I met with the Chancellor to settle the matter, although it took a brief tussle with the Home Secretary the next day to come to a final agreement. At the latter meeting, I made the case that …”

Blair’s fantastic new book is a shining exception. He begins by denying he is retrospective, but what makes A Journey outstanding is precisely how well he reflects on people and events. Not a deep thinker about politics and policy (of which far more in a moment), Blair is an intelligent man, able to draw plausible lessons from specific instances and elucidate them to the reader.

So Blair sets out, very persuasively, how those with strongly held views “can always spot whether someone is a true fellow believer or not”. He acknowledges his own selfishness – a quality that leapt out of many pages of his wife’s memoirs. He gives a wonderfully readable account of how he would agree to meet anyone who asked, know his staff to be an insuperable barrier to all but a few of them ever doing so. He mentions that even today, he feels a chill at 11.57am each Wednesday, anticipating Prime Ministers’ Questions. He writes perceptively about how drink can be a problematic crutch in ways that fall far short of alcoholism. He notes how political relationships can be destroyed irreparably the moment a subordinate realises the leader doubts he is up to the job that subordinate covets. He observes the failure of leftist intellectuals to put any value on aspiration. He devotes pages to putting himself in the shoes of Neville Chamberlain at Munich. He predicts the current Coalition will collapse if the No to AV campaign succeeds – and makes clear his opinion of Lib Dems is very much that of the typical Tory or Labour activist. This is a Prime Minister setting out what he thinks rather than narrating what he did. This is how politicians should write their memoirs.

To be clear, the lack of depth to Tony Blair’s political thought certainly hurt the country. But it does no harm to the book – indeed, by revealing Blair’s political outlook so baldly, A Journey goes a very long way towards explaining the man’s failures and disasters. Let’s get to the politics. Blair’s understanding of public opinion and of policy – which he lays bare - in many ways explains everything of any consequence that he did.

The curious thing about Blair’s view of the electorate is that early on he hits on the crucial starting point, extremely well established in political science: almost nobody is paying attention.

The single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh or harrumph or a raising of the eyebrows, before they go back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.

David Blunkett … once told me that even at the height of his fame as Home Secretary, people would approach him and say, ‘Seen you on telly, what do you do?’, or more bizarrely would see him with his guide dog and would know who he was but would say, ‘I never knew you were blind.'

This description surely fits with most people’s common sense and experience. More importantly, it is strongly supported by the evidence, such as a 2004 poll finding that about half the country did not know who Gordon Brown was.