CentreRight

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.

Who wants a comatose House of Commons?

At today's Prime Minister's Questions, the Speaker intervened time and again to silence the characteristic hustle and noise of parliament, and to cut off those -including the Prime Minister - he deemed to be speaking off topic. Aptly describing it as "the dullest PMQs of the year ... [p]erhaps for several years", Lloyd Evans over at Coffee House condemns John Bercow's increasing belligerence. This Speaker is obsessed with the notion that the public hates the sight of rowdy parliamentary debates, and clearly sees it as his job to prevent people having to meet with any such thing. Evans notes what it is that Bercow is putting at risk:

"One of the strange glories of the house is that it’s far too small to seat every MP. Popular debates, where eager members crowd into the cramped aisles, have the feverish hot-house mood of a cockfight or an illegal boxing match. Every head cranes forward to catch a glimpse of the action. This is healthy for politics. At its best the Commons can replicate the exhilarating unpredictability of a public meeting during a time of national crisis. And a PM who can command the chamber in full spate gains the respect of every side. The house is there to examine the mettle of its leaders under conditions of maximum stress. This means shouting. It means insults. Sometimes it means mayhem too. So be it. This is what politics is – civil war refined into rhetoric. We need to see it in its natural condition."

It's a great article, and well worth reading in full.

I worry about what our parliament will be like if the Speaker manages to get his way here. No one would object to a Speaker who intervened to ensure every question and answer is heard, but Bercow's interpretation of his role goes much further than his predecessors'.

The frequency and venom of Bercow's interventions suggests that in his ideal parliament, everyone would sit in silence as time and again a backbencher fires a quick question, and then the minister gives a quick answer. That's it.

People who said ridiculous things would no longer face sustained guffaws. Members would be prevented from devastating an argument by heckling - or from winning an argument by answering hecklers. Those who managed to capture the mood of the house would no longer be cheered loudly - nor, probably, allowed enough time or range in what they are permitted to discuss to capture that mood in the first place.

Does the public - does anyone - really want that kind of parliament? It doesn't sound much like the chamber of a vibrant democracy to me.

How close will it be on 6th May?

Quite sensibly, the bulk of the discussion of the coming election has focused on the vote share the two main parties can expect – and the size of the gap. But does the number of actual votes by which a party wins tell us anything?

The table below shows the number of votes by which the party with the most votes beat the second placed party in each election since the Second World War.

Unsurprisingly, we see differences in the millions in years of electoral landslides and much smaller differences for very close elections.

But just as striking is how difficult it is to spot consistent rules. Does a big victory in one election help in the election that follows? It certainly looks that way for 1945, 1979, 1983, 1987, 1997 and 2001, when the winning party won big – and went on to be re-elected a few years later. But the Conservative victory in 1992 was on a similar scale. It didn’t help much in 1997. It is also worth noting of 1945 that Labour's huge margin of victory did not lead to a long period in power.

Nor is examining narrow victories very telling for future elections. The parties that won by margins of about 1.5 million in 1950, 1959 and 1966 were defeated at the election that followed, but much narrower victories have set the scene for long periods in power. The Conservatives actually took 224,000 fewer votes than Labour in 1951, then governed for the next 13 years. Labour did poorly in 1964 and February 1974 but went on to win by much greater margins.

What will be the difference in 2010? If you're interested in making a guess, my employer is offering two cases of champagne to whoever guesses most accurately – with one case of champagne also going to the best guesses made in March and April. I’d like to see some of the winners be ConservativeHome regulars.

Do parties' ratings reliably track leaders' ratings?

If there is one belief that crosses all party lines, it's the notion that most voters are very responsive to the personalities of party leaders. From the obvious starting point that few voters take a detailed interest in policy, it is taken to follow that they will therefore be interested instead in matters of personality politics that direct impact upon almost no one. If the party leader is someone they would enjoy a beer with (or whatever the preferred metaphor may be) he's their man. The academic evidence for this notion is in fact extremely sparse - and it's interesting that two opinion polls in the last week would suggest the same.

YouGov's poll for the Sunday Times saw an increase of 17% on last month in David Cameron's personal approval rating. On Tuesday, MORI found Cameron's personal lead over Brown up 13% on last April, the previous time it asked the question. And yet ... the Conservative Party's ratings have not risen with the leader's ratings. YouGov puts the Conservatives on 41%, the same as last month. MORI puts the party on 42% - down 1% on last April.

Why wouldn't a party be dramatically more popular when its leader becomes dramatically more popular? Could it be that a leader's influence on his party's poll rating is more down to what he says and does on the real issues than the cynics like to think?

Why are political interviews written up this way?

Most people reading this will already be aware of the Total Politics interview with David Cameron. Today I finally got around to reading it in full, and something struck me about what makes it truly refreshing - a lack of ... well, pointless commentary. After a brief paragraph introducing the interview, the only text for the rest of the article is Iain Dale's brief questions and Cameron's answers.

Most interviews with politicians in the print media that I have read instead include long commentary between every phrase uttered by the interviewee, with the journalist explaining his thoughts on each answer, and what leads him to ask the next question:

"I do hope not!" he shoots back at this point. I am surprised at his candour. Does this abruptness help explain his failure to reach the top? As I look around his dark and spartan office, I see little sign of the human touch - his shelves bare but for an old dictionary and a pile of Hansards. How does he relax at home? Does he enjoy sport or comedies, I ask?

Does anyone prefer this stuff to a simple layout of the questions and answers? Does anyone actually care very much what the interviewer is thinking? Is it some journalists' egos that make so many of them write up interviews differently? Or is there some rule of journalism that demands the reader be walked through the entire discussion, rather than simply read a full account what was said without the intrusive narration? This reader does not need his hand held.

Frost/Nixon

Last night I caught an advance screening of the film Frost/Nixon - a two hour dramatisation of the famous interviews between Sir David Frost and President Nixon, shortly after the latter left office. Rather than pretend at any length to be a film critic, I will say that Universal Pictures - and the author of the original play - have unambiguously succeeded in turning the build-up, duration and aftermath of what was ultimately just an interview with a politician into an intelligent and truly gripping couple of hours.

But what of the film's politics and message? The liberal and anti-Nixon slant is obvious. This expresses itself in everything from the overwhelming focus on the Watergate scandal to the clear preference for telling Frost's story. Sir David Frost - played by a Michael Sheen who looks so uncannily like Tony Blair it was strange to see him in another role - features in almost every scene, while Nixon gets almost no screen time except in scenes with Frost. In portraying Nixon as a right-wing President with much to apologise for, much of the man's complexity, both personal and political, is lost. No one watching Frost/Nixon would guess, for example, that the latter had many critics to his right both for his foreign and his domestic policies.

The feebleness of the criticisms of the CSJ shows the strength of its arguments

It says something for the courage of anyone on the left that they bothered to post in response to the latest Centre for Social Justice publication. It's not as if a lack of other news left them no choice but to respond to an interim report by a Tory-linked think tank proposing various measures to support marriage, including more stringent divorce legislation and recognition of pre-nuptial agreements. So props to all mentioned below for bothering to comment and respond. That done with, why are they so wrong?

Let's start with the core point. Does marriage actually produce the virtues claimed of it, such as stability and myriad benefits for children? Even Mary Dejevsky, who has plenty of words of praise for Iain Duncan Smith and whose disagreements with the report are subtle, still feels inclined to ask: "Does marriage make a relationship more stable, or are those who marry predisposed to form stable relationships anyway, which is why they chose to marry?"

Liberal Conspiracy doesn't even bother with the rhetorical questioning, adopting straightforward ridicule:

"If you’re not married but you have a partner you may be more likely to slap a child or fraud the system in your quest for council flat Eldorado... IDS explains his ideas are based on statistics. They’re all saying cohabiting couples went from 10 per cent in 1988 to 25 per cent today. S***. That’s where all that knife crime and crack consumption comes from."

Brilliant stuff. I suppose someone could actually do an analysis of the family backgrounds of those convicted of knife and crack cocaine offences and see how many were in fact raised in the stable marriages the CSJ is hoping to promote. But what would be the point? Whatever the findings - and I doubt they'd reflect poorly on marriage - it's always possible for critics like this to find some noxious social trend not entirely explained by family breakdown and imply that those who worry about the fatherless family are suggesting that it is.

Reasons for getting rid of Labour: Foreign policy

It is difficult in a few hundred words to be fair and accurate in describing an entire government's foreign policy, but let me start by saying I like some of what this Labour government has done in foreign affairs. When it came to be tested, Britain proved her commitment to the Special Relationship in a way that shamed much of the rest of NATO.

But I look forward with hope to a government that will look at the world and our policies towards other countries with more respect for national sovereignty and with more conservatism.

Perhaps the greatest consistency shown in Britain's foreign policy since 1997 has been its lack of concern with the national interest. Look at the rhetoric and the reality of what have been our foreign policy priorities. From ethical arms sales to peace between Israel and Palestinians to combating global warming to advancing Europe as a superpower to democratising the Middle East, there has been precious little sense that advancing Britain's interests has been top priority. It's not so much that the goals themselves were unworthy. It's more that these are values others around the world will all share in and benefit from if achieved. But most other countries think of their own interests, rather than always making the general good the issue.

The policies that brought about baby P's life and death

The best commentary of the last week on Baby P has been amongst the most depressing. Yes, those who say such ghoulish horrors have and will always happen are half-right. But what they miss are the common themes tying such crimes together: broken and welfare-gorged families with incomes that would be envied by countless previous generations - and no real values at all. Sophie Heawood writes for The Independent on Sunday:

"It's what seems to be an underclass, a level of British society that is not just struggling with poverty – this is way beyond being poor – but often getting by with subnormal intelligence levels, living in a world with no professional aspirations whatsoever, for generations, where criminality is normality, with people who seem to have not just fallen through the net of literacy or personal improvement, but missed out on education or social development altogether.

"To many – to me, certainly – this is as unthinkable and remote as holidaying with a Russian oligarch.

"I suspect things are getting worse. A friend of mine has worked in child protection for 20 years and says that yes, there is a definite underclass, and that it has grown. Drugs are usually involved, pornography is normalised, anything goes. The family who passed around a teenage daughter with Down's syndrome as a sexual plaything, with visiting uncles happily running their hands up her thigh in front of my visiting friend. The heroin-addict mother whose five kids were all addicts too. The parents who threw the baby at the wall to stop it crying. The father whose child needed adopting, but didn't want his mum to know what a mess he was in, so he faked his mother's death rather than let social workers give the child to grandma. (She surfaced two years later, back from the dead, in search of her grandchild.) Then there was the man who raped his grandmother, then tried to commit suicide. Most of us struggle to imagine a world in which these acts are possible. And yet, it's here, living if not next door, then a few streets away."

"[It can be] be a loving act to tell somebody that their way of life is unacceptable, and that it must stop. Wrong is wrong."

The evil of baby P's abusers and murderers is rightly attributed to them alone. But the circumstances under which they and their kind were able to do so much evil did not happen only by chance.

After Obama, could it happen here? Yes, in 1868

I don't imagine too many CentreRight readers are losing sleep over Trevor Phillips' complaints that Britain's political system isn't fit for allowing an ethnic minority politician like Obama to rise to be Prime Minister. But it's worth highlighting Dizzy and Croydonian's excellent posts yesterday, which point out that bizarrely Phillips' figures for ethnic minority MPs don't even include people of Jewish ethnicity. If they did, the picture wouldn't be nearly as stark as Phillips paints it.

Which leads of course to the correct answer to all those why-oh-why liberal columnists asking worriedly since Obama' victory if "it could ever happen here" - 'it' being an ethnic minority rising to the very top of British politics?

Yes - in 1868.

Come to the G8 Youth Summit 2009! (Conservatives need not apply)

A friend emails to tell me he has been invited to fill in an application to be part of the UK Delegation at next year's G8 Youth Summit, which will be in Milan. The organisation's web site explains that "The students are recruited from top universities in the G8 countries", but what it makes no mention of is the obvious political element to its selections.

The application form is clearly looking for an indication of applicants' politics, with questions including:

Give an example of when you have had to stand your ground whilst remaining sensitive to another party’s feelings. How did you get your point across without angering or upsetting those you were working with?

What do you think the role of the G8 should be? Should we be ever moving towards a more internationalist atmosphere, or should nation states be protecting their own interests and citizens?

These questions would be fine if the organisation made strenous efforts to put together a carefully balanced selection panel. Instead ... well, I'll let the friend explain:

The facts on Palin, Africa and NAFTA

Rich Lowry does an admirable job setting the record straight.

Bush, Thatcher, Blair, Nixon

American blogger Matthew Yglesias, pondering Jeb Bush, had this striking observation:

"I wouldn’t count Bush out yet! After all, the last GOP ticket to win the Presidency without a Bush on the ballot was Nixon-Agnew in 1972."

Quite a staggering thought. But then again, when did we last win an election without Margaret Thatcher being party leader for the bulk of the preceding parliament? 1970.

And when did Labour last win without Tony Blair? 1974 (1966 if you want a decisive win).

And going back to America, when was the last GOP ticket to win the Presidency without a Bush or a Nixon on the ballot? 1928.

These names may be even more prominent in our history in decades to come, when lesser names are forgotten, than they are now.

Ten recent pundit predictions ...

I hope you've already had the chance to view my new blog, tracking the forecasts of pundits and bloggers. It launched yesterday with a small archive, and from now on, content will consist of predictions logged as they are made. Here are some of the forecasts we have logged so far, all made in recent weeks:

• William Rees-Mogg: Britain's Conservatives will inherit a crisis economy in 2010
• David Aaronovitch: Immigration could fall dramatically in the coming years
• Simon Jenkins: Those who now back laws against euthanasia will be seen as cruel
• Frank Luntz: Obama will be President; America faces a year like 1997 in Britain
• Irwin Stelzer: Problems are nowhere as severe as doomsayers claim; the international economic order will remain as it was
• Steve Richards: The dormant issue of Britain's membership of the euro will be waking soon
• Alan Watkins: The recession will be worse than early 1990s
• Polly Toynbee: The Keynes versus Hayek debate will dominate Britain's fate for years to come
• Mary Dejevsky: The odds of Scottish independence have lengthened almost to infinity
• Johann Hari: The Arctic will be free of ice by Summer 2013

Personally, I am finding this very interesting reading now, let alone a couple of years from now.

If you wish to help with this project, please post the relevant sentence(s) from any prediction you see in the most recent open thread on the pundit predictions blog (with a link to the article/post, please). It will then be added to the front page archive.

What says the BBC on the Spanish Civil War?

Alex, any chance of you leafing through again and posting a little on Spain's horrors in the late 1930s? Far be it for me to suggest the authors of these guides might be inclined to whitewash the crimes and would-be despotism of either side in Spain's Civil War ... but it would be nice to be reassured.

Pundit Predictions - the blog

Today I am launching a new blog, Pundit Predictions. As I explain in my introductory post, its aim is to log the forecasts of Britain pundits, bloggers and others on politics and elections, foreign affairs and economic trends. For years, some have noted with amusement or irritation that for newspaper columnists, there is no accountability: they can get it wrong time and again and see no consequences. At the least, such people's wrong calls - like theirs and others right calls - will now be highlighted.

At this stage, the blog is very much live and active and welcoming content - please do email me with predictions you spot and I'll happily put them up. But I am also interested in your suggestions on where to take this. I am not happy with the colour scheme I have right now, so that will change, but not just design - what do CentreRight readers think of the idea? Of how to go about it? Please take some time to visit the blog, take a look, and then leave your thoughts here.

Livingstone has more solutions for the financial crisis...

Ken Livingstone's Socialist Economic Bulletin is back with more answers to the economic crisis. Livingstone (or one of his blogging minions) begins by attacking Conservative plans to help small businesses. This is fine in principle, he writes, but the priority must be investment, which small businesses do less of.

It's actually a perfectly respectable view that investment packs the greatest economic punch, and can make the biggest difference in circumstances like these. That's why the Bush Administration cut taxes on investment after America fell into recession in early 2001. Ken Livingstone calls for cuts in capital gains tax? Alas not - nationalisation of parts of the construction industry and government 'investment' in major public works projects is more what he has in mind. Given that choice, I suspect measures to help small businesses stay solvent and keep people on will do far more economic good, short- and longer term.

Meanwhile, Ken (or one of his blogging minions) is celebrating an internet poll, currently showing 50% saying Karl Marx was right. I suppose that given how much drivel is now being spewed on this by every economically illiterate blowhard given a microphone, who can blame them? But one wonders how many of those who voted this way have plans to put their money where their mouth is and put their savings in socialist countries like Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Zimbabwe?

Once again, I refuse to believe that these ridiculous advocates of the planned economy have anything much to offer today. The IEA blog highlighted this week Argentina's unbelievable decision - hailed by socialist parties - to nationalise all the country's private pensions, worth 13% of GDP. I'm sure the government has plugged a revenue gap very effectively, but at the cost of twelve million people in Argentina losing their pensions. However modish it may currently be to say that the socialists were right all along, it's worth remembering that is what their policies always mean in practice: millions denied their liberty and their property. Who would prefer that to the risk of an occasional market crash?

What the data says about the pay gap

When it comes to the average wages of men and women, belief that irrational discrimination by employers causes a large pay gap is now entirely mainstream. This should be shocking, as the only way to justify this view is by relying on some extreme and often economically illiterate assumptions.*

It requires one to believe that not only do most employers prefer to pay more for men when they can get away with hiring women of equal skill for less, but that so few employers have making profit as their primary objective that competition does not punish those who do discriminate.

It means believing that equality of opportunity means equality of outcome. Almost everyone now accepts that if you give individuals a relatively level playing field on which to compete, they will achieve very different results. So why is it that when one finds a 'disproportionate' number of men in a certain profession, this is supposed to prove the opposite of a level playing field? Equality of opportunity and of outcomes are not synonymous - they are antonyms.

It means believing that if you get something noticeably different from equality of outcome, such as twice as many men in a particular job, that is de facto proof of discrimination. There are striking parallels with the way anti-Semites will seek out professions in which Jews are 'over-represented' to prove their own conspiracy theories: "x per cent of company directors are Jews! x per cent! That can't be based on merit - it must be some kind of old boy network"! The usual Kissingerian rules about the sex war never truly heating up because there is too much fraternisation with the enemy apply, and do mean we should continue to view the anti-Semite more worriedly, but the logic is the same.

Livingstone's plan for the economic crisis - nationalisation without compensation and taxing those earning a bit more than him

However grim this financial crisis may look, I really don't see any logical reason to believe that it suddenly vindicates the sort of flat-earth pseudo-economics most numerate people of all parties ditched years ago.

Many pundits disagree, though - Ken Livingstone is one. Fresh from graciously attributing his May defeat to racist voters ('racist' apparently encompassing everyone who reads the Daily Mail or votes UKIP), he has produced a new seven point plan for Britain's economy. No, don't laugh - it has now been published, presumably after careful peer review, in that prestigious and weighty economic journal Socialist Economic Bulletin ("A Bulletin of Socialist Economic Analysis published by Ken Livingstone").

It is worth noting in passing that Livingstone is no mere economist - he is also a historian and international relations scholar. He predicts in the same piece: "The US role as world’s sole economic superpower has ended. The US has become one very large power in the world among others such as European Union, China and India." Hmm.

Anyway, to the plan:

1. Nationalise some of the banks without compensation to shareholders
2. Relax lending to allow for easy credit (what could go wrong?)
3. The government should borrow, borrow, borrow, spend, spend, spend
4. A hike in income tax for those earning more than £150,000 a year (an odd cut off point, I thought - why is Ken so sympathetic to those earning a mere £125k or a trifling £140k? So I called the Mayor's Office to find out how much he was earning until May. Apparently the Mayor takes home £137,579 a year. Hmm.)
5. A windfall tax on energy companies
6. Scrap trident, scrap the new aircraft carriers, withdraw from Iraq
7. Tax 'gas guzzling' cars much more - in London and nationwide

What do you think? Are these the answers to Britain's economic woes?

UPDATE: Livingstone responds to one of the claims of this post, pointing out (correctly) that he only advocated nationalisation without compensation for banks that lose all their value (hence my 'some').

Gerald Kaufman's shame

The Labour MP Gerald Kaufman opposes an attack on Iran by Israel. One would hope, though, that the man could come up with a better way of doing so than rhetoric like this, from yesterday's Foreign Office Questions:

"It would be an attack on one of the nastiest regimes in the world by another of the nastiest regimes in the world."

To his credit, the Foreign Secretary disassociated himself from this remark. It's not so much the obtuse and disgraceful comparison between a brutal dictatorship and an established parliamentary democracy - although there is that. It's also a question of how much credibility anyone can have when discussing foreign affairs if they can consider a world of so many tyrants, kleptocrats and torturers - and then seriously maintain that Israel's government ranks among the world's nastiest.

Re: Peter Hitchens replies

I wonder what Peter Hitchens would make of those people inclined to sympathise profoundly with his piercing and insightful analysis of British society and Britain's ills - but find little to no value in his analysis of the Conservative Party.

Perhaps he would dismiss such people as hopelessly optimistic dupes if they plan to vote Conservative. But that would only show the extent to which Hitchens' own broader political outlook - which I'm sure millions will share - has to him become subordinate to his (anti-)partisan preferences.

There's nothing stopping people valuing what Hitchens says when he writes about poverty, about family life, marriage, divorce and decency and being sceptical when he turns his attention to the Tory Party - indeed, I recommend such an approach. But I wonder if we wouldn't all be wiser and better informed if he wrote more of the former and less of the latter.

I also wonder if this anger at the Conservative Party isn't preventing him from acknowledging even substantial - if partial - political victories. Peter Hitchens has been writing about Britain's broken society for over a decade, pointing to the way in which Roy Jenkins liberalism has led to the misery and demoralisation of so many, with grave consequences for us all. For most of this period, Hitchens' views were ignored or ridiculed. Look at the many scathing reviews when his masterful book The Abolition of Britain was released eight years ago to see how such arguments were generally treated until very recently.

Today's 'edgy' comedians are the most likely to hail establishment views

What a marvelous piece from Brendan O'Neill on Comment is Free:

So much political comedy these days upholds the cynical and even mainstream view rather than challenging it. It will be a nippy day in hell before anyone is surprised by something Rory Bremner says. His routine ("routine" being the operative word) reads like a list of the petty prejudices passed around the dinner party circuit of London N1. Used to love Tony Blair but now hates him: check. Thinks there should be a legal inquiry into Iraq: check. Reckons all politicians are liars and connivers: check. David Walliams' explanation for why he depicts so many grotesque people in Little Britain – incontinent old women, thick ugly chavs, etc – could have come straight from an internal Islington council memo: "We don't stereotype. We celebrate difference."

Marcus Brigstocke does stand-up routines on how global warming sceptics are evil and deluded, which, seriously, at a time when sceptics are publicly branded as "deniers" and serious commentators say they should be denied air-time, is about as fresh or challenging as making a joke about Thatch. What next, a comedy routine on how awful paedophiles are? As Antonia Quirke said recently in the New Statesman, Brigstocke, like so many other political comics and satirists of our time, "just assumes the audience will be complicit in the utterly bog-standard, unsurprising bit of wafty liberal observation that is coming out of his mouth."

Exactly. On the way to Birmingham last Friday, a friend and I turned on Radio 4 to hear the Lib Dem celebrity Sandi Toksvig (who?) present a news quiz programme in which no one wavered from this attitude. I was entirely unsurprised that if you put five liberal elite luvvies in front of a microphone, those would be the views you get. What is striking is the obvious belief that the views are politically subversive, and the smug assumption that they are shared by all.

Why the left ignores all data on the fatherless family

It's not often one sees in a web site's comments thread a piece so outstanding it really should be shared. But these words from Johnathan Singh as he takes on the Liberal Conspiracy crowd, really deserve a wider audience. Why, he asks, do so many on these lefties ignore "very clear evidence that, on average, even when all other social variables are held constant, children are badly harmed by being deprived of the kind of stable, (if often flawed) family arrangement that most of them enjoyed for, say the first two thirds of the 20th century"?

"[Y]ou don’t have to read any of it, and I doubt that any of you have or should wish to do so because it would call into question many of the shibboleths of liberal social policy for the last 50 or 60 years — beliefs that give you all a strong sense of moral superiority. Unless you have the courage to patiently consider this information which is often thoroughly detailed, you can quite easily continue as you are; insulting and swearing and changing the subject because no conservative is going to come onto Liberal Conspiracy and sustain a argument about family policy for more than a few days.

"Therefore you can always resort to explanations which are not quite as distressing to your pre-held beliefs eg. as long as there’s more public spending everything will be all right. Even if social welfare policies encourage the creation of Shannon Matthews-style households, how can conservatives object to more welfare spending to reduce the harm done to children in them? You see you never actually need to be held accountable for your opinions. Only the children need suffer, but better that they should suffer than you should have to alter your world-view.

"So you can continue to shout that it doesn’t matter if children either have no fathers, or different fathers every few years. If as UNICEF reports, Britain is the worst country in the western world in which to grow up as a child, well, it must be because of ‘relative poverty’. Always an excellent fall-back is placing the blame solely on Thatcher for creating a ‘culture of greed’ (which admittedly has some truth but stops you from looking deeper). What about the fact that 80% of children have a TV in their bedrooms, which is more than have a father present at home? Or that how in the midst of the 1930s depression was not a period of great ‘youth crime’ or crime of any kind? All these are questions that you would prefer not to answer."

Re: Pauline Neville-Jones and radical Islamism

Ben, thank you for highlighting these passages. A great message overall, but one paragraph I found striking:

"A couple of days ago on the BBC Today programme, a man with links to the extremist organisation Al-Mujaharoun said that it was ‘clearly stipulated in Muslim law that any kind of attack on [the Prophet’s] honour carries the death penalty’. Not true. Unacceptable. We all – Muslims and non-Muslims – must actively face down extremists."

I've no idea if this claim about Muslim law is or isn't correct (can someone in the comments demonstrate it?). But why is it even relevant to the point? The point is surely that killing cartoonists and the like is wrong whether Muslim law calls for it or not?

I noticed this same attitude at a Conference fringe meeting the other day - someone asked about the practice of burqas, speaking very critically of it, and adding that nowhere does the Koran actually advocate them. It was as if she felt her own arguments would be undermined if someone could point to a relevant passage from the Koran supporting burqas. But why? Why should non-Muslims want to bow to Islamic interpretations of law and ethics?

By all means we emphatically should encourage Muslims to make the case to their fellow believers that their faith allows for peaceful coexistence and liberal democratic values. But for Western politicians to rest any of their opposition to the unacceptable on claims about what is and isn't in the Islamic faith's holy books is very much a double-edged sword. It makes it much harder to oppose those things - like sharia law - that are obviously a major part of the religion. Let's base our opposition to murdering cartoonists on objective ethical principles and on the traditions and culture of our society. Such killings would be just as wrong even if they were "clearly stipulated in Muslim law".

P.S. Regarding the title to your post, Ben: isn't Islamism, in liberal democratic societies, radical by definition? To put it another way, is there such a thing as mainstream Islamism or moderate Islamism?

Ensuring Brown gets his fair share of the blame

Today's ComRes poll showing a small plurality of voters actually trusting Brown and Darling more than Cameron and Osborne on the matter of steering the economy through the current downturn perhaps can be attributed to the degree to which economic problems of recent weeks really have been mostly international - and obviously so.

The danger is that this becomes an all purpose Labour excuse for all of Britain's economic difficulties, and hammers home the need for Conservatives to highlight that Britain's economic problems have been building for many years, and owe so much to the current government. Some of the biggest events of recent weeks can rightly be attributed to international events. But structural and much longer-term problems with Britain's economy are rightly attributed to Gordon Brown.