CentreRight

Bestial reputations

Watching Michael Heseltine on Question Time the other week got me thinking. Which of New Labour's big beasts will still be around in ten years, not in power, but in a position of high public regard?

First of all, one needs to set some qualifying hurdles: Firstly, 'big beast' is not a synonym for 'statesman', a record of substance and achievement in office is not necessary, this is more about crude political clout – which is why John Prescott gets to play. Secondly, I'm going to limit this to New Labour's heyday, not to the current fag-end period in which hopes for future recovery are beginning to emerge – so no Milibands, Ballses etc just yet. Thirdly, I'm excluding the backroom boys and girls, this is for frontline politicians only – so no cronies, party workers or civil servants.

So given those rules, here's my bestial shortlist:

Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, John Prescott, Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett and the late Robin Cook. If one is feeling generous, one could extend the list to John Reid, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn.

Gordon Brown is not a failure

Let's get one thing straight:

Gordon Brown has not failed.

At least he hasn't failed to get his message across, which is "let the enterprise economy make money and let the centralised state spend it".

And he hasn't failed to put this message into action. The enterprise economy has made money and the centralised state has spent it.

The trouble is that centralised statism doesn't work, and never was going to work. It is an idea that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made their own and successfully tested to destruction.

That is why Gordon Brown is not a failure. You can't fail without having some sort of chance in the first place. To lose your way you have to have been on the right path to begin with.

New Labour did not fail. New Labour, quite simply, was wrong.

Something else Bendy Wendy didn't think through

As yet I have heard no convincing explaination as to why Wendy Alexander called for an early referendum on Scottish independence without consulting Gordon Brown.

A moment's thought would have told her that it would put the PM in an impossible position – something which many in the Labour Party would love to do to their leader, but surely not the devoted Wendy.

But there is another obvious flaw in her cunning plan: It would be foolish for any unionist politician to trigger a referendum campaign unless a 'no' vote was assured. In this regard, a campaign leader able to best Alex Salmond would be a minimum requirement.

So who would this campaign leader be? Well, the natural choice would be the leader of the largest unionist party, and right now that would be Bendy Wendy herself. Oh dear.

I hope the leaders of the other unionist parties are making it crystal clear to Scottish Labour that they can expect no cooperation of any sort until they find themselves a credible figurehead. This isn't just an internal Labour matter, the future of the union may depend upon it.

Who decided to downgrade cannabis in the first place?

Much has been made of the fact that the Government is upgrading the classification of cannabis against the advice of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs.

But just how reliable is the advice of the ACMD? From the way it is described in the media, you'd think it was an independent and unbiased group of experts qualified to sift through the scientific evidence on the impact of cannabis on physical and mental health. At the time that it initially recommended the downgrading of cannabis, I thought I'd check out exactly who had made the decision. This is what I found:

The ACMD has around 30 members at any one time, 28 of whom attended the meeting on the 25 January 2002 which agreed to recommend that cannabis be downgraded to a class C drug. Of these, at least 14 were leading figures in one or more of the following groups (all of which have pressed for a softening in the drug laws):

• DrugScope – Britain’s foremost pro-liberalisation pressure group

• The UK Harm Reduction Alliance – another pro-liberalisation pressure group, funded by George Soros

• The Methadone Alliance – Linked to the UKHRA, who want drugs not only liberalised but made available through the NHS

• Action on Hepatitis C – Another pro-liberalisation pressure group allied to UKHRA and Methadone Alliance

• The Runciman inquiry – An initiative of the leftwing Police Foundation, this was a high profile forerunner of the ACMD in recommending the downgrading of cannabis to a class C drug.

• The Association of Chief Police Officers – At the time, ACPO’s drug policy sub-committee has played a pivotal role in the campaign to downgrade the classification of cannabis.

There were no representatives from organisations opposed to the softening of the drug laws such as the National Drug Prevention Alliance or the Police Federation. Of the rest of the ACMD members, most worked for government drug enforcement or drug treatment services (many in senior positions of responsibility) leaving the ACMD in a poor position to advise on problems with the implementation of drugs policy. Very few of them were scientists.

As it happens, I'm highly sceptical as to whether drug classification makes a great deal of difference to the situation on the ground – not when the police are so reluctant to enforce the law on drug abuse and so many other 'minor' crimes. However, when the Government is seeking scientific advice it should get it from scientists not activists.

Easterhouse, Alabama

Slate has an interesting piece on John McCain's tour of America's "forgotten places":

McCain is planning to speak in inner cities, heavily African-American sections of the South, and poor sections of Appalachia. Most of his stops will be in areas where voters have traditionally supported Democrats... That no Republican nominee has done a tour like this before should signal that it's high-risk."

Will the risk pay-off?

Only if McCain's effort is sustained. If this tour looks like a stunt, then all the grand claims the McCain team is making for it—that the tour is driven by McCain's sense of duty and openness—will boomerang. As a candidate who wants to represent all the people, his aides say, he can't keep himself from going before all different kinds of people, even if it's a risk. But all that deep-convictions talk could easily come to look like a sham. McCain doesn't want to go out to prove he's the real thing only to end up looking like another phony.

When Iain Duncan Smith made his first visit to Easterhouse in Glasgow, the cynics expected it to be his last. In fact it marked the beginning of a sustained Conservative engagement with Britain's hardpressed communities. I hope that John McCain might be about to start something similar.

An outrageous proposition

James Forsyth perceives a possible glimmer of hope for Gordon Brown:

"The silver lining to the current spate of bad news stories for the Prime Minister is that expectations for Labour’s performance in the elections this week are now so low that if Labour just holds the London Mayoralty and the Tories fail to cross the 40 percent threshold, Brown will be boosted. Like Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, mere survival will be enough to win Brown good headlines."

However, James floats the notion that this would be "the worst result for Brown" because a drubbing would make him "confront his problems". Others go further, speculating that a drubbing would force Brown out of Office altogether.

Wishful thinking, in both cases. Gordon Brown isn't going to change his personality and Labour isn't going to change its leader. The former is impossible and the latter unthinkable before a general election. Brown's colleagues must surely realise that the idea of presenting the country with a second unelected Prime Minister in the space of year is unconscionable.

Re: Calling a spade a spade

Sam asks whether terms like 'Islamic terrorist', 'Islamofascist' or 'Islamist' can be replaced by "culturally sensitive" alternatives.

I think they can, but first of all let me say why I think they should be:

The terms 'Islamist' and 'Islamism' are unhelpful and confusing to most people. It is by no means obvious why the suffix '-ic' should apply to the religion, while the suffix '-ist' should apply to a violent political movement that takes the religion as its inspiration. I'd guess that most people are unsure or unaware of the distinction between the two. As a result, condemnation of 'Islamists' and 'Islamism' could well sound like a condemnation of Islam itself.

As it happens, 'Islamism' was once in common use as a name for Islam, and to this day we still use the '-ism' suffix for many other religions including Buddhism and Hinduism. I wonder what we would call a terrorist who claimed Buddhism as an inspiration – a Buddhistist?

So, on all sorts of levels, this is a flawed terminology and it should be dropped.

Brown on 26% without a recession

There's a lot of excitement over today's YouGov poll.

Even with all the usual caveats, 44% is an encouraging result for us and 26% is an abysmal rating for Labour.

It's worth noting that all this is happening in the absence of a recession. The economic mood may be darkening and the credit crunch biting hard, but so far growth rates remain positive, the latest unemployment count was down a bit and we've yet to see a bona fide crash in either the stock market or the housing market.

That doesn't mean that things won't be getting worse, of course. But here's my point: If Gordon Brown is doing this badly without a recession, what on earth would happen if, God forbid, the economy goes off a cliff?

Close encounters of the third way

Ben Brogan describes the strange logo on the side of Gordon Brown's charter jet to Washington:

That plane thing I mentioned? It's...interesting. We are flying on a Boeing 757 hired from Titan airways, of Stansted. It has a black stripe up the back with stars on it and what looks like a giant tangerine on the side but is in fact Saturn's moon.

Others have noted the remarkable similarity between the giant tangerine and the strange blob of make-up that recently appeared on Gordon Brown's forehead.

What can it all mean?

In the Spielberg classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of the most effective plot devices was the repeated appearance of a distinctive form, in this case the Devils Tower, in all sorts of unlikely locations.

Perhaps, they've finally come to take Gordon Brown home.

Re: The Independent and biofuels

Matthew Sinclair chastises me for something I did not say:

While I'm on the subject of environmentalists misunderstanding agricultural economics, Peter Franklin is completely wrong on food security which is largely a non-issue for Britain.  We produce a pretty large share of our own food at the moment compared to the norm since the abolition of the Corn Laws.

Yes, Britain does produce a large share of its own food, and in my post I agreed with David Cameron and Tim Yeo that we must keep it that way.

Matthew then implies that I think mass starvation is on the cards, when in fact all I argued was that we can't rely on cheap food imports:

In the First and Second World Wars, for all the "Dig for Britain" rhetoric we had little difficulty feeding our population - in fact, diet is thought to have improved.  Unless Peter really thinks there is going to be a greater challenge to our food supply than the U-Boats and economic demands of WW2 then there's little reason to worry about it.  Britain can feed itself easily enough if it really needs to.

As a crunchy con, I'm delighted to see Matthew endorse the home-grown, comparatively organic and relatively vegetarian diet of the war years, but I'd take issue with the idea that we had "little difficulty" feeding ourselves. Rationing represents more than a little difficulty, as does the disappearance of many kinds of food from the shops, as does the raising of an army of land girls!

The point is that food insecurity is a continuum – and that maintaining a substantial farming sector is the best way of ensuring that we don't experience very much of it.

Conservative foresight on food security

Food security. Who expected that old fear to show its gaunt face again?

Yet here it is back in the headlines, and not just on the international pages:

Now the shopping crunch: Food prices soar at fastest rate for 17 years

Families already struggling to cope with the credit crunch face huge increases in food bills because of global shortages. With the international cost of cereals up by almost half in a year, British meat and dairy products have soared in price. Costs are rising faster than at any time since 1991 and the average shopping bill is likely to go up by £600 a year.

It is an issue that David Cameron addressed in his speech to the NFU earlier this year, but Conservatives were on the case long before that.

Back in 2004, Tim Yeo made the following remarks to Party Conference:

"I believe farming and food production are strategically important. I worry about how much food we import and the risk of disruption to supply in today's uncertain world."

Speaking to the CPRE in 2005 he said:

"British food production is in decline. In the end that leads to a long-term threat to our food security.Do we really want to end up importing two-thirds of our food? Or three-quarters? Or four-fifths? ... How much of our land do we want to allow to go out of food production? When I put this question to Ministers, it was obvious they hadn't even thought about it."

There were always those who just didn't care about the decline of British farming, who thought we could rely on cheap imported food. Well, it's not so cheap now.

Note that this isn't a defence of the Common Agricultural Policy, which has had its own destructive effect on farming both in the UK and in the developing world.

Nor is food security the only emerging concern on which Conservatives have shown foresight. There was William Hague on immigration. Ann Widdecombe on the impact of cannabis use. Oliver Letwin on personal debt. David Davis on prison overcrowding. And let's not forget Margaret Thatcher on climate change.

Most of all Conservatives in the 1970s and 80s anticipated the enormous challenge of globalisation and, in government, prepared Britain accordingly.

I think what will destroy Gordon Brown and his reputation is the extent to which New Labour has failed to prepare Britain for the storms that are heading our way now.

Re: The BBC and global warming

While I agree with Alex Deane that ad hominem attacks on climate change contrarians are out of order, that doesn't mean that weaknesses in the contrarian position shouldn't be pointed out.

Alex references one of those weaknesses in his post:

I noted with interest that the "stunning and alarming footage" recently shown of ice breaking away from the ice shelf, came without any mention of the fact that the ice is thickening in other parts of Antartica. 

Thickening ice in the Antarctic interior is consistent with mainstream thinking on climate change. Higher temperatures increase the rate of evaporation, resulting in higher levels of precipitation and therefore more ice formation anywhere in the world with sub-zero temperatures.

Mean global temperatures could go up several degrees and still leave the Antarctic interior cold enough to thicken the ice sheet there. Obviously, the early warning signs will be, and have been, found at the coastal edges of the southern continent, hence the focus of scientific and media interest.

Britain for sale

Sam Leith has a spirited article in today's Telegraph on the al-Yamamah corruption inquiry.

Memorably dismissing the 'realpolitick' argument for dropping the inquiry as "piffle, poppycock and monkey nuts", he goes on to make a more substantial point:

"In the end, [the investigation] was stopped after an explicit threat to withdraw a big arms contract, and an implicit threat that "lives would be put at risk" were the Saudis to withdraw their co-operation with our counter-terrorism operations. That is to announce that we're willing to do business with people who promise to connive in the murder of our citizens unless they get their way. Nice."

I am sure that the world's more business-minded despots will have noted that Britain is not only willing to sell its armaments but its soul too.

The other victims of Gordon Brown's tax gimmick

Plenty of coverage for the impact of Gordon Brown's tax band fiddle on the poor.

However, it's not just the low paid who will suffer as a result of Gordon Brown's decision to abolish the 10% income tax band in order to reduce the standard rate to 20%.

The 22% to 20% change may have created the temporary illusion of a tax cut, but it simultaneously created a very real problem for Britain's charities thanks to the impact on Gift Aid tax relief.

The rate at which charities can reclaim Gift Aid on charitable donations is determined by the standard rate of income tax. Thus instead of reclaiming 28p for every pound given, charities can now only claim 25p, a fact which Gordon Brown was well aware of, but neglected to mention in his 2007 Budget speech or in the Red Book or in any budget-related documentation.

The outcry was such that, a year later, Alistair Darling was forced to offer three years' transitional relief, but after that Britain's charities will lose out to the tune of £100 million each and every year... and all for the sake of a budget day gimmick that did absolutely nothing to cut the overall tax burden.

Gordon Brown should hang his head in shame.

Laffer to join Brown's 'government of all the talents'

There's nothing on the newswires yet, but my sources inform me that Downing Street is about to announce the appointment of leading US economist Arthur B Laffer to a "senior ministerial position".

Details on the precise nature of the appointment are sketchy, but Alistair Darling has been seen leaving the Treasury carrying a cardboard box.

In his first reshuffle as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made a special point of recruiting Ministers and advisers from outside the usual circle, with Lord Malloch Brown and Baroness Williams among the appointments. 

It is thought that the soon-to-be Lord Laffer of Nashville will spearhead a radical shift in the Government's fiscal policy in an attempt to boost declining tax revenues.

Commenting earlier from his bunker, Tim Montgomerie said "it was only a matter of time before Gordon Brown outflanked us on taxation policy. This development confirms all my fears."

Terminal stupidity

Chris Dillow points out a rather fundamental flaw in the Terminal 5 management structure:

"Baggage handlers are obviously complements to a baggage handling system - one's useless without the other. And it's a basic principle of economics that complementary assets should be run by the same boss, to ensure that they work together. And yet BAA and BA have contrived to ignore this; BAA runs the system whilst BA provides the staff.

This is not a sophisticated principle."

Indeed not. But I wonder if this isn't part of an even bigger problem with the British culture of management: A refusal to consider systems as a working whole.

Britain in disgrace

Oh dear, I fear the Time magazine cover story on Britain's "unhappy, unloved and out of control" kids may be part of a wider Brit-bashing trend.

In the current issue of the libertarian journal Reason, Michael C Moynihan is less than impressed with the behaviour of British tourists:

"Last December, Ricky Hatton, a stout-chugging, ruddy-faced British boxer, was laid out on a Las Vegas canvas by the American welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather. The crowd of Union Jack–bedecked fans —“drunken dullards” and “boors,” according to The Daily Telegraph’s horrified sports correspondent—became so unruly that for the first time in its history, the MGM Grand casino shut down its archipelago of bars. Hatton’s troglodyte supporters achieved what was long considered impossible: They managed to class-down Vegas."

Moynihan calls on Americans to correct their "self-image as lesser Brits", noting that "Europeans, who ranked the English as the “world’s worst tourists” in a recent Expedia poll, have long ago disabused themselves of such stereotypes."

There are some who will see this sort of article as an insult. I think we should regard it as a wake-up call.

Matthew Parris needs to pay more attention

Matthew Parris is feeling uninspired:

Where today is the bold advocacy, the impatience to persuade, the urgency of argument? Where are the shouts of “Here's how!”? It is as though the stage were set for some kind of theatrical climax, but peopled only with stage hands and the rattle and murmur of the scene-shift. Where are the leading actors, the big voices, the great thoughts?

Pictures of David Cameron in his kitchen, a family scene sweetly contrived to frame his thoughts on paternity leave, or whatever, and images of the passionless figure cut by Alistair Darling at the dispatch box, his grey stare charged with all the philosophical depth of a shop-window mannequin, stick in my mind. Are these the spirits of the political age?

Mr Parris's has half a point, the half that applies to Labour. But his portrayal of the Conservative platform deserves a robust response. Yes, David Cameron posed for a photo-opportunity. So what? His team are also busy producing in-depth policy proposals on issues of vital importance.

Gorbachev the secret Christian

This extraordinary story sheds new light on the end of cold war.

Rod Dreher has more.

Happy Easter.

In defence of Barack Obama

The race row surrounding Barack Obama and his controversial pastor continues to dominate US politics. Tim links to a viral video that might cost the Senator a vote or two.

By way of balance, here's Mike Huckabee, who without condoning the Reverend Wright's rantings, offers some much needed perspective.

The Government can't be blamed for all our troubles

Tim Montgomerie sounds a trumpet call:

We need to forget the focus groups and the polling for just one minute and tell the truth about a nation that is in trouble.  Mr Cameron might be surprised at voters' reaction.  Our hunch is that the first politician to tell the British people 'how it really is' will form a bond with many millions of them.

I wholeheartedly agree . But are we really prepared to tell the whole truth about the trouble we're in? Because it isn't just the Government that's to blame.

For instance, who's to blame for economic instability? Who sold sold all those dodgy loans? Who built business models on the wholly unrealistic assumption that the credit boom would go on forever?

As for social breakdown, who pushed so much cheap drink at our young people? Who's getting rich from music, films and computer games of unprecedented violence and depravity?

If we try to blame big government for everything that's gone wrong, then our attempt to "tell the truth" won't ring true at all.

Race fixing

Another day, another Clinton-Obama race row.

The Geraldine Ferraro fracas follows high profile accusations from a Harvard professor that Hillary Clinton's red phone ad was racist:

"I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat."

It's easy to scoff at this sort of thing, but consider the context: The only way that Barack Obama can be denied the Democratic nomination is if the party establishment vetoes his clear lead in the delegate count and/or bends the rules in Clinton's favour – for instance by bending over backwards to undo the disqualification of the Florida and Michigan delegates.

Why would the Democrat bigwigs want to do such a thing? Simple: Hillary may yet be their best chance of beating John McCain. She turns out the vote in crucial swing states like Ohio and Florida, while Obama's lead is based on his strong performance in Republican states that are likely to stay that way come November.

But whatever the excuse, there can be no denying the sense of injustice that Obama supporters will feel if their man is somehow denied the nomination. If the Clintons can't win this fair and square they had better consider the consequences of winning by other means.

Free market rubbish

You'll never guess which bunch of interfering, eco-fascist lefties have just put out a pamphlet advocating pay-as-you-throw charges for refuse collection?

Yes, that's right, the Adam Smith Institute.

Flippin' tree huggers.

Re: Re: A response to Andrew Lilico (On the strengths and weaknesses of "Civic Conservatism")

Further to the debate on David Willetts' Oakeshott Lecture...

...the Willetts project is to offer a non-religious, though not anti-religious, account of civil society – what Mr Willetts also described as a "universal account of how we can sustain our institutions".

Personally, I don't think that as long as some people are religious and some are non-religious there can be a universal account of anything of any importance. Even within those two categories, different worldviews will lead people to different conclusions.

What we can hope for, however, is that enough people will be thinking along parallel lines for enough of the time to make for a reasonably coherent society. And therein lies the value of the Willetts project, a line of thought with the power to put secular liberalism on roughly the right track for at least part of the way.

But let's not forget what that track is parallel to.

David Cameron's Guardian live blog

Tom Chatfield over at First Drafts has this review.